I know how it was done now. Confirmed with both the hacker and Apple. It wasn’t password related. They got in via Apple tech support and some clever social engineering that let them bypass security questions.
Mat Honan explains how his iCloud password was obtained. Humans, always the weak link.
Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!
An observation by Yanis Varoufakis that has often struck me as well.
Yanis Varoufakis, Valve’s in-house economist, analyzes Valve’s non-management structure. Here’s a link to my earlier post on Valve’s approach to management.
Alistair Croll’s post about Big Data and civil rights is important, but I don’t think he has it exactly right. The article does a good job of explaining how Big Data differs from data warehousing as it was traditionally done. It also illustrates how Big Data can be misused as a vector of discrimination, violating people’s civil rights.
While Big Data may enable people to discriminate in innovative new ways, or to make better guesses about who to discriminate against. However, I don’t think this is necessarily a new civil rights challenge. Discrimination against protected groups is already illegal, at least in the United States. In fact, at least when it comes to employment law and housing, the doctrine of disparate impact also applies. It holds that you can be liable for discrimination even if your practices are not intentionally discriminatory, if those practices have a disproportionately adverse effect on members of a protected group.
It is not the use of Big Data to implement discriminatory practices but rather the discrimination itself that is the fundamental problem. The challenge in fighting discrimination is what it always was, proving the discrimination in the first place. In the era of Big Data, the data and algorithms provide a more concrete paper trail than the unspoken, unrecorded discrimination that still occurs every day.
Mat Honan: Yes, I was hacked. Hard.
Hopefully he’ll post a thorough post-mortem when he gets back on his feet. Did the attackers really brute force his iCloud password? How did they get his Twitter password? Would using Google’s two-factor authentication have prevented them from resetting his Google password? Scary stuff.
How many bugs and wasted CPU cycles and instances of human frustration (not to mention bad design) have resulted from that one small shortcut about 40 years ago?
Keep that in mind next time you want to cut a corner in your code.
Unix pioneer Rob Pike explains how dot files originated from a mistake. Most interesting thing I read today.
Source Sans Pro is Adobe’s first open source type family
The font looks great. I’m somewhat amused that Adobe has chosen to host the project on Sourceforge rather than Github. I’m pretty sad that the monospace version isn’t available yet.
dablooms – an open source, scalable, counting bloom filter library
A good introduction to probabilistic data structures and how they can be put to practical use.
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Mat Honan explains more about how he was hacked
How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
Mat Honan’s latest piece on being hacked. The important lesson here is in the explanation of how interlocking relationships between your accounts can make your online accounts much more vulnerable.