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Disqus Bug Deanonymizes Commenters
alphatel writes "The Swedish company Resarchgruppen has discovered a flaw in the Disqus commenting system, enabling them to identify Disqus users by their e-mail addresses. The crack was done in cooperation with the Bonnier Group tabloid Expressen, in order to reveal politicians commenting on Swedish hate speech-sites."
Expressen could have just disabled Disqus on their own site and they would have full access to IPs and e-mails of users commenting on their hatespeech site.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Exactly.
I've always used my real name when commenting, or (in the case of places like Slashdot) made it easy to find my real name. For decades now. There are a couple posts on Usenet I'm embarrassed about (for example, I got my signs reversed trying to explain the link between electricity, magnetism, and Relativity once) but nothing I would be uncomfortable if a prospective employer saw, or appearing on the front page of the newpaper.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
One company being able to build up a collection your comments and opinions across multiple websites.... Thank goodness I only comment on Slahsdot
Bear in mind, most of the people the world haven't structured their lives to understanding technology. They may like technology, they may be technology groupies, but they probably haven't really contemplated the ramifications of technology or how it can be used differently than their preconceived notions. They probably don't necessarily get that databases can be cross-referenced so easily or that unless they're willing to go through a specific amount of work each and every time they want to obfuscate their identities, it's likely that someone can figure out who they are.
Another thing to remember, it's never really been possible to be truly anonymous when saying something in text. In the days when the printing press was the preferred way, one still had to have trusted people to help print and distribute the words. In early electronic days when dialup was king, there were always phone records and one had to have accounts on bulletin boards, and systems like fidonet kept origination records. In the days of Usenet, messages could at least be tracked back to a newsserver of origin, and assuming that records were kept, the ISP information could be found and then the subscriber account could be identified.
Nowadays, unless the person wants to take the special laptop that's only used for this purpose, with a special add-on wifi adapter, go park next to a public wifi hotspot and use that public connection, being sure to store the equipment far enough away from themselves when not using it for plausible deniability, there's really isn't true anonymity. If one wants to truly remain anonymous, one generally has to not say anything. That's the tradeoff, true anonymity comes at the price of nonparticipation.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I'm pretty sure some people will have a problem with your wholesale slaughter in Viet Nam.
Those who don't will surely disapprove of you shamelessly displaying your big blue dong all over the internet.
Foxnews.com uses Disqus, although im not certain the merit of pin-pointing racists, xenophobes and homophobes in america. people like Rick Santorum and Steve King can and do go around bashing gays and muslims respectively with little social repercussion. Pamela Geller basically makes a career out of muslim bashing. Alaskas Don Young refers to south american and central american immigrants exclusively as wetbacks in his commentary on radio stations, and a sizeable number of our southern politicians have been card-carrying members of the KKK.
yet freedom of speech gets a good stretch here in america when its true definition was essentially political. In america, the first amendment guarantees your vocal objection to the agricultural policy of tom vilchek cannot result in riot police kicking in your door at 4 in the morning and beating you with riot batons in the street for your dissenting opinion. the freedom of religion granted us the right to organize against the government at a social level, as to deject the church in its occupation as a station of the government was in england considered nearly treasonous.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Part of the problem is the fact that Europe has been trying to block free speech on it.
I am not supporting racist or care for their ideals. But blocking out hate speech is more dangerous then trying to stop it.
Why?
Because the hate speech goes underground, where there is no sense of the scope of the problem. So the government doesn't understand how big the problem is and unable to do an appropriate protection of the hated groups.
Secondly there isn't a counter dialog going on to discredit the hate logic. So people get this feed of hate in private and told that it is taboo, so they keep it quite, however there isn't anyone pointing out the flaw in their reasoning. So they can create more people who hate.
Free speech is necessary, however it isn't safe or easy.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Disqus has been blocked at my firewall for some time.
Not because of this, but because I was seeing it on so damned many sites it's not funny. Which means I didn't trust it to be anything good for me.
There's so much shit on the internet these days that if you're not using cookie/script/beacon blockers you're just handing over your information to a company for profit.
I believe every hacker on the planet should be working to release the private details of every company executive (and their families) involved in this stuff. If our personal information is a commodity, then don't act like yours is any different. Assholes.
Much like Zuckerfuck fiercely protects his privacy while undermining ours, you don't get to choose that your privacy is more important than mine.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Demonstrating to the public in general that there is little or no anonymity is much more important than any political agenda. Why leave things 'up' so that specialists can fish around?
Lots of sites I frequent use it and it's a *terrible* UI model for browsing and commenting on forums. It's slow, has a clunky UI, lacks features, and even WORSE they scrub comments religiously if you even remotely criticize the parent site or any of its prinicipals. I'm assuming Disqus is presenting hosts with a ridiculously cheap package for anyone to think it's a good idea.
Unless it's another Total Information Awareness tool and they don't *care* about how usable it is...
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Morals of the story:
don't leak hashes.
Salt the data before hashing
Don't trust any website to value your anonymity over their profits.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I'm willing to take the risk, and I was two decades ago, too. So far, it's paid off. I haven't had too much trouble finding places to work with a minimum of BS. I wasn't terrified when Google put Usenet online - but then, I'd always been polite when expressing my thoughts. If someone wants anonymity so they can be the "asshole", I find I have limited sympathy.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Since it's trivial to engage in that sort of 'Hate Speech' anonymously, it's probably cranks and even opposition figures posting that crap to pollute the otherwise reasonable opinions being expressed on said forums. People who oppose free speech can easily pollute a forum with crap they have no belief in whatsoever.
Since when did Advocacy become a crime? I'd rather have people advocating the things you listed right out in plain view, easy to identify, and avoid. Otherwise you end up with the Fever Swamp phenomenon. Granted, they're likely cowards who would never express said views in public.
You make an erroneous assumption that people that have a certain strong view and based on emotions can easily be convinced to sway sides by mere logic and facts. You can't. In fact, they use the "facts" to support their own view and disregard of facts contradicting them. Also, they seek more facts and views supporting what they already believe in. It is called information bias and is nothing new, just seems to have become worse and worse lately.
But seriously, who uses a real email address to register anywhere?
In this case, members of the Swedish racist party "Sverigedemokraterna". They are trying to paint a picture of them selves as "not racist" and "merely anti-imigration", and the party leadership has adopted a policy of excluding anyone who makes racist statements openly. The "avpixlat" site was officially not associated with the party, but it was an open secret that this was where they vented their true opinions anonymously.
Now the hackers have a list hundreds of names linked to incredibly racist quotes that they will presumably publish one at a time in order to do maximum damage to the party before the elections next year.
In Europe we have an increasing problem with racism and hate speech, especially on anonymous internet forums.
Which is appropriately countered with more speech.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Don't tell US what kind of children we should have! We'll choose whatever the hell we want! Some of us actually love our little mutants.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
No the point isn't as much about convincing the people with the strong views, but to people who didn't have a particular view already.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Discus is bad for site owners, it gives an external entity control over their sites comments and therefore content.
I see more webpages outsourcing to Discus, probably because managing comments on webpages is a huge timepit and that is just moderating posts. There is also all the "mechanics" of keeping the lists going. But outsourcing leads to other issues (one of many we all argue about on /.), one is loss of capability and control (i.e. counterfeit chips or backdoors in manufactured systems from China).
mfwright@batnet.com