Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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From its start, Gmail conditioned us to trade privacy for free services (www.engadget.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I still remember being a young kid (11-12) and running a program to scan my local ISP in my small town (back then small ISPs could easily get government grants and become a monopoly) for insecure SMB servers or something. I suddenly got a flood of results like

/private/passwords.txt
/administrator/USD###-users.txt

All kinds of tasty things. Very excite. Then the results started pouring in by the thousands...

YOU-ARE-VIOLATING-CFAA
FBI-DOORBELL
FIRSTNAME-LASTNAME.EXE
PWN3D-LMAONOOB

Things like that. I immediately shut my computer down and that was probably the first time my dad saw me not eat for a day. Didn't ask why I wasn't sleeping much the week after that 😄

Also I Googled for the filenames and found nothing. So if you're the 50-70 year old who wrote that script and happen to see this, I'd love to get a message with the ISP name. They are in a number of small-medium size towns around my hometown now.