While I believe that the city should share the schema, and that the city is effectively argues for security through obscurity, I disagree with the main premise of the article: that knowing SQL schema doesn't help the attacker.
If I understand the argument of the author here:
> Attackers like me use SQL injection attacks to recover SQL schemas. The schema is the product of an attack, not one of its predicates
The author appears to imply that once the vulnerability is found, the schema can be recovered anyway. It is not always the case. It is perfectly viable to find a SQL injection that would allow to fetch some data from the table that is being queried, but not from any other table, including `information_schema` or similar. If all the signal you get from the vunlerability is also "query failed" or "query succeeded, here's the data", knowing the schema makes it much easier to exploit.
> the problem is that every computer system connected to the Internet is being attacked every minute of every day
If you specifically log failed DB queries, than for all the possible injections that such 24/7 attacks would find you have already patched them. The log would then be not deafening until someone stumbles on the actual injection (that, for example, only exists for logged in users, and thus is not found by bots), in which case you have time to see it and patch before the attacker finds a way to actually utilize it.
Knowing schema both expedites their ability to take advantage of the vulnerability, but also increases their chances of probing the injection without triggering the query failure to begin with.
> that knowing SQL schema doesn't help the attacker.
Knowing the name of the service helps the attacker, knowing the name of government officials working at city hall helps attackers, knowing the legal description of what a parking ticket is helps attackers. If you are sued and decide you want to hack the government knowing the details of the suit against you helps you in your attack.
The barrier is not “any helpful information must be censored” the barrier is “don’t disclose passwords or code that would divulge backdoors” a schema cannot be that.
I'm not an attacker, just a boring old software dev. If there's an SQL Injection I'd say all bets are off re: schema.
That said I've definitely worked on applications where knowing the schema could help you exfill data in the absence of a full injection. The most obvious being a query that's constructed based on url parameters, where the parameters aren't whitelisted.
So I actually do agree that the schema could potentially be of marginal benefit to the attacker.
I can't imagine how the schema would reveal SQL injection holes. Maybe other holes, though. Any poor choices for PKs, dumb use of MD5 computed fields, insecure random, misuse of NULL, weird uniqueness constraints (this also ties back to NULLs), vulnerable extensions, wrong timestamp type, too-small integer type, varchar limits, predictable index speed...
> I can't imagine how the schema would reveal SQL injection holes.
It wouldn't. I'm just assuming that the thrust of the hypothetical negligence accusation was "The schema is useless unless you have SQL injection holes. So give us the schema or admit you are negligent!" But you're correct that there are other justifications one could make to keep the schema secret.
The schema can provide an insight into what the application developer was thinking when writing the code, which in turn can direct an attacker towards tricky corners where mistakes might have been made.
This is the city government here. The people arguing the case didnt write the code and dont have time to look through all their code but one thing they do know is that it was written by monkeys. They probably have some level of reason to believe their are SQL injections available in the code.
However his comment assumes monetisation is selling the bug; (tptacek deeply understands the market for bugs). However I would have thought monetisation could be by scanning as many YouTube users as possible for their email addresses: and then selling that limited database to a threat actor. You'd start the scan with estimated high value anonymous users. Only Google can guess how many emails would have been captured before some telemetry kicked off a successful security audit. The value of that list could possibly well exceed $10000. Kinda depends on who is doxxed and who wants to pay for the dox.
It's hard to know what the reputational cost to Google would be for doxxing popular anonymous accounts. I'm guessing video is not so often anonymous so influencers are generally not unknown?
I'm guessing trying to blackmail Google wouldn't work (once you show Google an account that is doxxed, they would look at telemetry logs or perhaps increase telemetry). I wonder if you could introduce enough noise and time delay to avoid Google reverse-engineering the vulnerability? Or how long before a security audit of code would find the vulnerability?
Certainly I can see some governments paying good money to dox anonymous videos that those governments dislike. The Saudis have money! You could likely get different government security departments to bid against each other... Thousands seems doable per dox? The value would likely decrease as you dox more.
If you specifically log failed database queries, where "failure" means "indicative of SQL injection", then nothing you can do with the schema is going to reduce the signal in that feed --- even a single SQL syntax error would be worth following up on. No, I don't think your logic holds.
I don't understand your logic. Knowledge of the schema can give an attacker an edge because they now know the exact column names to probe. Whether these probes get logged is irrelevant; even if it makes the system more vulnerable for an instant, it's still more vulnerable.
Even if logging failed queries is your metric, then knowledge of column names would make it more likely for an attacker to craft correct queries, which would not get logged, thus making your logs less useful than if the attacker had to guess at column names and, in so doing, incur failed queries.
To probe for what? How does knowledge of a column name make it easier for me to discern whether a SQL injection vulnerability exists? I've spent a lot of time in my career probing for SQL injection, and I can't remember an instance where my stimulus/response setup involved the table names.
SQL injection is a property of a SQL query, not of the schema itself. To have a meaningful chance of blind-one-shotting a query, getting a TRUE/FALSE answer about susceptibility without ever generating a SQL syntax error, I would need to see the queries themselves.
Knowledge of the column names doesn't give you insight into whether a vulnerability exists. It gives you insight into what you can do with a vulnerability, should it exist. For example, if you want to set your account balance to $1 million, you'd need to know the column name in order to generate a valid query. Without advance knowledge of the column name, your job becomes harder.
SQL injection will give you the entire schema anyway. It doesn't help if someone tells you the col names beforehand. I'm more wondering about non-SQL-injection vulns.
SQL injection isnt just an ssh tunnel to the database. If the line you've injected isnt a select and the backend never fetches it how does the injection give you the column names?
Wait, this is known as a blind SQLi, and it's not so blind. You can still use timing to get the info you need one bit at a time. This may be slow, but it's doable without triggering any DB errors, so you have time.
Yeah, it's a cool trick and not obvious. I think when I said SQL injection gets you the schema, I was recalling some faint old memory from a security course without remembering why this is doable.
> How does knowledge of a column name make it easier for me to discern whether a SQL injection vulnerability exists?
It doesn't. It just means that as soon as you find one, you can immediately begin crafting valid queries instead of randomly guessing table names and columns, therefore not setting off the "DB query failed" alert.
EDIT: I guess this is the part I missed:
> To have a meaningful chance of blind-one-shotting a query, getting a TRUE/FALSE answer about susceptibility without ever generating a SQL syntax error, I would need to see the queries themselves.
Really? I guess I have to take your word for it because I've never attempted it, but I would have thought that in some (horribly broken) systems `bobby tables' or 1=1 --` would have a very reasonable chance of detecting SQL injection without alerting anyone.
Right, and that's what you use to find the vulnerability. But imagine you've found the vulnerability and now you want to use it to update all of your parking tickets as paid. Without the schema, this is going to be quite tricky and will generate a lot of failed SQL. With the schema, you might be able to do it on your first try.
Is there not any SQLi vulnerability in practice that doesn't allow such an information recovery? That is, is the schema-recovery step so foolproof that it can always be performed on any target form? GP is suggesting that this may be difficult, depending on the kind of signal that gets returned from the form.
In my entire experience as a software security practitioner, which at the time of my testimony encompassed some hundreds of assessments of SQL-backed websites, the availability of a schema has never impacted my ability to exploit a SQL injection. It's not my job as an expert witness, nor Matt's job as a plaintiff, to invent improbable scenarios where security could hinge on schema availability. The court (all of them, in fact) found that testimony dispositive, so I'm happy to leave the issue there.
"Blind" SQLi is a thing, but even in the real-life example I could find, it wasn't exactly blind. They could still use the timing to get one bit of info at a time and discern the email addresses. https://www.invokesec.com/2025/01/13/a-real-world-example-of...
It's hard to imagine a case where you can't even get info based on timing. But it requires more effort and knowledge to exploit this.
I don’t think that’s a very common setup but perhaps I’m just exposing my own ignorance. Just consider the popularity of ORMs. They explicitly load the schema into the application in many cases.
Not just that, but perhaps the app is smart enough to lock you out the second it detects an attempt to gather the schema, e.g. by logging and automatically responding to a query that displays the schema. Then you have to look for other ways in (another IP, etc.). But if you know the schema in advance, you have a better chance of a one-shot injection that accomplishes your malicious goal.
In other words, advance knowledge of the schema may make it easier to act maliciously.
> nothing you can do with the schema is going to reduce the signal in that feed --- even a single SQL syntax error would be worth following up on
Syntax errors coming from your web application mean there is a page somewhere with a bugged feature, or perhaps the whole page is broken. Of course that's worth following up on?
Edit: maybe I should add a concrete example. I semi-regularly look at the apache error logs for some of my hobby projects (mainly I check when I'm working on it anyway and notice another preexisting bug). I've found broken pages based on that and either fixed them or at least silenced the issue if it was an outdated script or page anyway. Professionals might handle this more professionally, or less because it's about money and not just making good software, idk
> Syntax errors coming from your web application mean there is a page somewhere with a bugged feature, or perhaps the whole page is broken. Of course that's worth following up on?
This is a government system, with apps probably built by lowest-bid contractors.
I imagine most of us would be horrified by the volume of everyday failed queries from deployed apps.
Can be, but I'm not sure it's worth investigating whether a particular deployment has such a specific monitoring system before being able to do a FOIA. The schema is marginally relevant for attacks at best (with heavy emphasis on just how marginal it is) and that's no barrier to releasing it
> "query failed" or "query succeeded, here's the data"
Blind SQL injection is a type where no error is produced, but some subtle signal can indicate success or failure. The most interesting one that I know about is where the presence of a successful injection was a normal looking response that was one byte longer than an unsuccessful injection. This was used to not only figure out the schema, but to fully exfiltrate the entire database.
There is nothing in the log on the server that indicates an error.
Most of the relatively introductory SQL injection exercises that I taught proceed without any knowledge of the schema.
Not just with SQLi, but I've managed to statistically proof "information" with timing attacks.
Where if you join another table (by e.g. requesting extra info in a graphql query) the response goes from ms to s or even m. Indicating the size of the joined table.
Or where I could change a "?sort[updated_at]=desc" to a "?sort[password_hash]" through trial-and-error and suddenly see the response time drop from ms to seconds (in this case finding columns that exist but aren't indexed).
Even if the response content is exactly the same, we know things exist, are big, not indexed, or simply present, by timing the attack.
A famous one is obviously the timing trick to find out that an email is in the system because "user = user.find(email) && user.password_matches(password)" short cirquits if the email does not exist but spends significant time on hashing the password for matching it. A big lot of backends and apps make this mistake.
That's where the court's technical distinction between the words: "could" and "would", is important. It appears they have reduced the distinction to a risk assessment which is more objective than opining wildly!
For example: I've just re-wired a three gang light switch. I verified power on with my multimeter (test the meter), cut the power and then retested all the circuits to make sure I had got it right.
It turns out that switch three is on a separate ring main. Cool I didn't get to test my body's ability to take a whopper of a shock. In the UK it is common to have upstairs and downstairs rings for light circuits. Our kitchen has quite a few lights in it so it got a separate ring as well. Anyway there are quite a lot of wires in there because all of them are two way switches. Oh and I am allowed to work on them because of the switch location - not kitchen and not bathroom, ie a low risk location
I noted down the connections, and took them all out. I put Wagos over the flying ends to make them safe, turned the power back on and got on with the job in hand.
I then cut the power (both circuits) checked again with my Fluke. Oh bollocks ... enable power, test the Fluke and then cut power again and recheck the circuits.
Now I re-terminated all the connections. There was plenty of additional wire so I decided to cut and re-strip the conductors, to make sure that I avoided potential failures due to "work hardening" from the inevitable pushing and pulling and "gentle" forcing into position. Once all the conductors were screwed down I pulled on them fairly forcefully to make sure they wont fall out.
I screwed down the switch face plate and restored power. Its a brushed metal finish switch so I did test it was not live, because I'm careful. I tested the functionality ie all three switch circuits (three) from all the switches (six).
So, given that description is it possible that the connectors might fall out in the future and short on say, the metal back box. Of course it is possible. It could happen but would it happen?
You could postulate all sorts of scenarios. Perhaps I may be careful but I might be cack handed and forgetful and got something wrong anyway and a wire might still drop out. Now we are at the point of whataboutery! and that wont wash.
The would/could distinction is a powerful one and it is analogous to how we do risk assessments.
I'm certainly not saying you are wrong in your assessment but I think you are fiddling with details to conjure up a "could" and not a "would". I agree that knowing the schema would assist a hacking attempt but would it make a successful crack more likely - no I don't think so. It is a classic case of obscurity despite security but a rather more complicated one than putting the ssh daemon on port 2222.
Would help a lot if somewhere at the very top it explained what tree calculus is (may be extend the animation of the addition example to first show what the t is)
It took me a while on the website to understand what it was all about. As it is it looks more like a website for a functional programming language.
...but if it's no longer restricted to the visual cortex and they can extract the kind of horrific imagery as in the movie, I don't really want to see it.
I really like this film, especially with my photography hat on. A lot of the imagery taken from the mind of the serial killer is actually based on surrealist art, and some of the cinematography is superb, e.g. the sequences filmed in the Namibian desert
Tarsem Singh's next movie The Fall is visually similar (though in another genre), so watch it too if you didn't already: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460791/
From the aesthetic/cinematography side of things, it did stick with me for a long time; I haven't re-watched it since the early naughties and I do remember lots of scenes. It is just hard to take in that some people might experience a similar internal imagery and the very slight possibility exists that they also act upon it.
I saw that episode and I hated it precisely because it didn't really explore the idea. There was this profound, interesting, thought provoking premise which it completely relegated to the background in favor of an unchallenging police procedural.
I suppose it would depend on whether the claims in the video have been substantiated, e.g., by the intelligence community. A video talking about Russian interference via targeted facebook ads would be fine.
On the other hand, a video claiming Russian agents infiltrated thousands of voting centers with sleeper agents should probably not get through the filter.
Though as with any content filters, there will be edge cases, false positives, false negatives, etc. that will all pose a problem.
This is the fundamental problem of common user spaces on the web these days: a failure to impose standards will often result in a toxic environment. Yet attempting to impose standards is something of an arms-race game of whack-a-mole.
I think HN only manages the balance somewhat decently because the users themselves are also highly interested in productive conversation and mostly downvote -> dead comments that are likely to provoke flaming instead of discourse.
If you're hosting a party, it's not only your right to determine what kinds of behavior and conversations are allowed and not allowed, it's your duty to do so.
YouTube gets to decide what's on their platform. As an organization, they have decided that the election fraud stuff is not only false, but harmful. That's not only their right, it's their duty.
GoFundMe deplatformed Matt Braynard when he tried to raise money for the voter fraud research. He didn't even assert that the fraud happened or not and they still kicked him off for what they've said is "disinformation".
Historically in the US there have been only a handful of cases where voter fraud overturned an election, and it was in small elections with very narrow margins. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, the likes of which will not happen in a GoFundMe. The effort was meant to sow distrust and repeat the weaponized cynicism.
But if you insist, Matt Braynard managed to raise the money on some other platform and he did found enough potentially illegal votes to swing some states. Mainly people who moved out of state and things like that. So here are your facts.
He says he's found evidence. All he's posted that I can find is a 42min long video I can't be bothered watching properly, but skipping through it his methodology seems to rely on surveying people now and comparing to voting records. This - of course - isn't "finding potentially illegal votes".
But maybe I missed something. I do think it's interesting that his Twitter profile says he's releasing "data and reports" a week from Nov 24, and there is nothing.
It's also interesting how much of his video is about asking for donations......
Surveying people was just one thing that he did. He also matched the voters with NCOA database, that could indicate that people from other states voted and things like that.
One of the people they've surveyed was Nahshon Garrett:
As much as I'd love to have the actual data myself, I don't think he's going to just post it publicly. He started the project to verify whether the lists of supposedly dead voters that were floating around the web were real. The thing is that people who were posting them were all almost immediately banned for doxxing. So unfortunately, he will only give you the actual data if you're someone trustworthy, so a lawyer, politician, journalist or something like that. His research is included as evidence in some of the ongoing court cases.
From what I've seen a lot of people have said that he might just be a grifter. I personally don't care, since I never donate to anything like that, but if you're considered about this, he posted the expenses on twitter. I believe a lot of money went to the call centers.
And look, it very well might be, that it's literally nothing. But this type of research is realistically as best as you can possibly get. What would confirm whether it's true or not is the state or the feds doing an investigation, but they don't seem to be interested in doing anything. But one way or another, removing his fundraiser was a complete bullshit.
> One of the people they've surveyed was Nahshon Garrett
Yeah so here's the affidavit he has signed[1]. There's no evidence at all that he voted in AZ, only that his voter registration record was active, and his affidavit doesn't claim he voted or that he found that he voted, only that Braynard's organisation claims he did.
If you listen carefully to the interview, the story is the same there. When she asks what kind of vote it was he says "oh I don't know - I think it was an early vote or a provisional vote or something". He hasn't checked!
Braynard claims that he voted. But there is nothing verifying that at all that this is the case, and Braynard couldn't verify this independently. (I just checked - you need your Voter ID and/or SSN).
> As much as I'd love to have the actual data myself, I don't think he's going to just post it publicly. He started the project to verify whether the lists of supposedly dead voters that were floating around the web were real. The thing is that people who were posting them were all almost immediately banned for doxxing.
This is a BS excuse. He hasn't lodged it in any court cases, his page says he will post it but he hasn't.
One of the reasons everyone is so annoyed about this is because of this shitty grifter wrecking democracy to make a few bucks for themselves.
> What would confirm whether it's true or not is the state or the feds doing an investigation, but they don't seem to be interested in doing anything.
This of course is complete nonsense. There have been vast numbers of state and federal investigations into every alleged piece of fraud. But there is nothing there, especially not on the scale claimed.
> But one way or another, removing his fundraiser was a complete bullshit.
It really wasn't. He was raising money by alleging fraud occurred and he was going to blow the lid on it all.
Carefully trying to work around their restrictions by pretending it was "just in case" - when the President of the United States is making these claims - is clearly bad faith.
> This is a BS excuse. He hasn't lodged it in any court cases, his page says he will post it but he hasn't.
Well, I saw with my own eyes that people were banned for posting the information like that, so that's why I believe it.
I'm not familiar with US law, so tell me, if you'd have some kind of sensitive data, can you decide that you will only present the data straight to the judge or should every relevant piece of information be included right away? Just to entertain the idea.
Looking on the bright side, I guess that we hopefully won't have to wait too long to find out what's bullshit and what's not.
No, him using that as an excuse is the BS. If he could actually prove anything - instead of it just being yet more allegations - would be explosive, and being "banned" (by who exactly) wouldn't matter.
> I'm not familiar with US law, so tell me, if you'd have some kind of sensitive data, can you decide that you will only present the data straight to the judge or should every relevant piece of information be included right away? Just to entertain the idea.
Of course, there are plenty of closed court methods of doing this.
> I guess that we hopefully won't have to wait too long to find out what's bullshit and what's not.
Unfortunately this isn't true. It's already 100% clear what is bullshit, but some people keep claiming otherwise, and will continue to do so for the next 4 years at least.
Put it like this: is there anything that would convince you that these claims are all BS? I mean - Trump appointed judges keep throwing the claims out of court. - what more do you need?
I already believe that at least 90-95% of those claims are BS, and no one had to convince me to believe anything. However, considering the fact how many people seriously consider Trump to be the next Hitler, there is no doubt in my mind that someone for sure did try to cheat is some way. Another question is whether there was enough of it to change the outcome and to that - I have no idea.
The most damning thing for me is preventing poll observers from challenging the ballots. This fact alone makes the election illegitimate, as far as I am considered. Poll observers should be there to ensure that there is no fraud in the first place, and without that it's really hard to figure out what happened. If the poll observers were allowed to do their job, I don't think I could complain about anything.
Regarding the judges throwing them out, this is my understanding of the situation: First, people are claiming that Trump lost 60 or however many lawsuits. That's just not true, his team haven't filed anywhere close that number.of lawsuits. Second, the evidence wasn't yet presented, allegedly because the courts didn't gave them the chance to do so yet. But I guess it's possible that it's just propaganda from the Trump side, so I have no idea on this one either.
And could you please look again at that Nahshon Garrett affidavit, exhibit 2? Doesn't that mean that "he" in fact did voted in AZ?
> The most damning thing for me is preventing poll observers from challenging the ballots.
Citation please.
The closest that occurred was that when Republicans tried to put more observers in place than was the agreed number (the number has to be equal between Democrat, Republican and Independent observers) they weren't allowed.
> Regarding the judges throwing them out, this is my understanding of the situation: First, people are claiming that Trump lost 60 or however many lawsuits. That's just not true, his team haven't filed anywhere close that number.of lawsuits.
Well he does keep changing who "his team" is. But the all the Guilliani lawsuits have been thrown out, and all the ones he has tweeted about have been.
> Second, the evidence wasn't yet presented, allegedly because the courts didn't gave them the chance to do so yet.
Citation needed. The cases I've read (and yes I've checked because of people like who do the fake lazy "oh I don't know but I've heard..") say the evidence doesn't support the claims.
Here's a typical judgement against the claims:
One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption, such that this Court would have no option but to regrettably grant the proposed injunctive relief despite the impact it would have on such a large group of citizens. That has not happened. Instead, this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.
Here is what I am basing the poll observers not being able to challenge the ballots claim on. From the day one, a lot of people from all over the place have been alleging the following thing. They weren't able to come any closer than at least 6ft, and if they tried to challenge a ballot, the poll workers would basically scream at them and call 911 or the security. The story is consistent among everyone who've been saying that and the video evidence supports that. The claim has been also repeated on various hearings. I wish I had time to go through all of the thousands of pages of court documents and point you to exact claims, but I unfortunately I have a work too, so if you're interested in that, you'd have to find it on your own. Giuliani said that they have it on sworn affidavits and I don't really have any reason to suspect that this is not the case. You can probably find the actual affidavits on the same court cases that Braynard is a part of.
Here is one of the videos of poll observers being forced to stay at the 20ft distance. Keep in mind that there are 3 or 4 rows of tables, 20ft is just from the first row.
Here is the leaked audio from the Detroit poll worker training. Normally it could be dismissed as it has the "conspiracy theory" vibe to it and is hard to watch, but since the story is consistent with the claims above, I found it to be believable. I don't know why people do this kind of thing instead of just posting a full, unedited audio, but whatever. I believe there is also an interview with the dude behind the leak on a Youtube channel called "Rekieta Law", if you're interested, but I haven't personally listened to it.
> Well he does keep changing who "his team" is. But the all the Giuliani lawsuits have been thrown out, and all the ones he has tweeted about have been.
That might be true, but the vast majority of the lawsuits had nothing to do with Giuliani.
> Citation needed. The cases I've read (and yes I've checked because of people like who do the fake lazy "oh I don't know but I've heard..") say the evidence doesn't support the claims.
Let me correct myself, my understanding is that the Trump team waited a long time to file the lawsuits with actual evidence. Their first lawsuits weren't even alleging any sort of fraud or irregularities, but to allow the poll observers within a 6ft distance when challenging the ballots and things like that. Can't speak to why were they waiting so long.
> Unfortunately this isn't true. It's already 100% clear what is bullshit, but some people keep claiming otherwise, and will continue to do so for the next 4 years at least.
Going back to your previous comment, as far as it would be indeed very annoying, I don't think that it's a fair criticism, since we've all heard the Russia collusion allegations for the previous four years. I'm not saying that you specifically are guilty of this, but still, you can't criticize someone for doing that if you did the same thing.
Regarding the Nahshon Garrett affidavit, I searched for the `Your ballot was signature verified and counted` string on twitter, and it seems like it means that your vote was indeed counted, so it seems that what Braynard says might actually be true. Which brings me to the same question that you've initially asked me: is there anything that would convince you that some of these claims are true?
> is there anything that would convince you that some of these claims are true?
Oh yes of course. From what I can see, it looks like Nahshon Garrett is either lying or someone else voted for him. I think it's mostly likely he's lying, but maybe otherwise.
But I don't think that is any evidence of systematic fraud at all.
> since we've all heard the Russia collusion allegations for the previous four years.
Yes, and as I'm sure you realize, these allegations have been found true. Russia did act in 2016 to support Trump, people in Trump's circle worked with Russian agents etc. The best that can be said was that Trump was unwitting ( which I actually think is likely) and that his people working with the Russians didn't realize what they were doing (in general I think this is also likely).
If Nahshon Garrett is lying then he is going to prison for perjury.
The only thing that I remember from back when I was still paying attention to this is that they've worked with Russian businessmen or journalists or whatever. And that Russia bought some facebook ads. And if you're concerned about this type of thing then apparently the FBI is now looking into the Bidens regarding their dealings with Ukraine and China, because of the things that they found on his Hunter's laptop, which by the way, media and social media did a complete blackout on.
Do whatever you want, but the caveat with that is that according to him, the journalists didn't even bothered to ask him about his actual findings, so don't expect the articles to be unbiased.
Just because you and they repeat it doesn't make it true. If he had findings, that is the news, and if no outlet is publishing them, they must not warrant attention.
That's cool, but he started the campaign on November 6 and they kicked him out the next day. He didn't say anywhere that the fraud happened or not. He was just raising money for the research.
Will they let people raise money to see if theft of a bank is feasible, or to design business models for heroin dealers? They're not robbing banks or selling heroin... Where does your argument even end? It doesn't matter because it is a private platform, and if they smell BS they are free to get rid of it.
What are you even talking about? You can't compare teaching people how to sell heroin or rob a bank and conducting a research. What I take issue with is that they kicked him out for something that he did not do.
He was part of the Trump campaign in 2016 and from the 3rd to the 6th he interacted with various Twitter accounts that fueled the conspiracy and his fundraising was clearly attracting an audience who read between the lines.
GoFundMe is in their right to believe there was dog-whistling.
"Even just a few matches would be indicative of a much more substantial voter fraud operation" said by a Trump supporter who get's the support from a majority of misinformation spreaders when he opens the GoFundMe:
I often see in twitter bios disclaimers like "opinions are my own" and "retweets are not endorsement". I'm guessing people should now start putting a new disclaimer, them simply being retweeted by someone else doesn't mean that they have anything to do with that person.
If your audience reacts to content like it's a dog-whistle, maybe don't be surprised when you're banned?
Talking about "investigating voter fraud" when Trump was claiming voter fraud with no evidence and then getting retweeted by supporters who already had made up their mind isn't helping GoFundMe determine they are not faced with a dishonest actor.
Agreed about disclaimers: Why not go with a disclaimer that says "The president's claims are currently unfounded and have no legal merit and could endanger trust in our democratic process. Some of my analysis could reveal the impact of COVID-19 deaths in some districts or active voter suppression in some states". Enough to tune out misinfo sharers and be a bit more honest about what most analysts predicted would happen.
Actually yes, I would be surprised, because it would be completely fucked, excuse my language. Punishing someone on the basis of other people's reaction is just one step away from collective responsibility, and that's what happens during wars and occupations. A lot of innocent people were murdered because of reasoning like that.
I might have sounded a little bit too dramatic considering the fact that the tweets in question didn't even say anything bad, but whatever. Also, "dog-whistles", lol. You're clearly just making stuff up at this point. Braynard didn't do anything wrong and removing his fundraiser from GoFundMe was baseless and unfair.
Speech is dependent on context and audience. I realize there are some basic concepts around speech we don't seem to share.
Your argument that anyone can write anything no matter context or audience reactions and face no consequences is baffling. I guess no one was ever murdered because of that...
A Trump political operative is expected to have taken some level of history and political science classes though. GoFundMe probably thought he had a better understanding of the impact and context of his online discourse than a libertarian college drop-out might argue.
This is not speech, it's just a fundraiser for research. And Braynard already achieved his goals, he did the research that he wanted and the results are included in lawsuits as evidence. Deplatforming him, if anything, only gave him more exposure. GoFundMe was wrong about their decision, end of story.
You keep misrepresenting what I'm saying. Please stop. The claim was that evidence is not being suppressed and I've presented that the research of the subject is being deplatformed. In your attempt to undermine this simple fact you had to go as far as to make up conspiracy theories about "dog-whistling". It doesn't make any sense.
In retrospect, using the term "deplatforming" reveals to me you are not equipped to debate about this. His fundraising was removed but he wasn't banned from GoFundMe or any other fundraising. You seem to dismiss dog-whistling as a term but happily employ the wrong words.
I was discussing the framework and tools the people at social platforms are currently employing to decide weather they are being weaponized. I thought the discussion would start around the finer details of online moderation and operating these tasks at scale. You see evidence being suppressed, I see an overwhelmed company in the middle of its country's political crisis being asked to manage a surge in new bad-faith actors.
I've provided plenty evidence myself that they had elements to confirm his behavior could be interpreted as being linked to disinformation campaigns. Maybe they were wrong but I disagree with your take that this Trump advisor can't wrap his head around why GoFundMe believed it.
Publicly Matt Braynard showed no attempt at understanding what he could change to be accepted and leaned hard into this removal to galvanize extra-donations on another platform.
In the end, the circumstantial evidence he uncovered turns out not to be admissible in court or is improperly used by the Trump campaign (given their constant lost legal challenges). It must sting, especially when he see's all the grift around those legal battles.
No, I'm not dismissing dog-whistling as a term. What I'm saying is that this is not the case here and you're making it up as a desperate attempt to rationalize what GoFundMe have done.
Bring the evidence to the court? It's funny how the side claiming there was fraud apparently has trucks full of evidence and affidavits on news channels and social media, but when it comes to an actual courtroom, where lying has real consequences, suddenly, they don't claim "fraud" anymore and they don't have any real evidence.
Who would you have it be? The government? A committee? Honestly, a private company making the decision seems like the least problematic of all options. You're free to "vote them out of office" with your dollars if you wish.
The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which concluded there existed close ties between Russian nationals, and possibly Russian intelligence, and the Trump campaign.
"Special counsel Robert Mueller did not find evidence that President Trump's campaign conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election, according to a summary of findings submitted to Congress"
Impressive, a throwaway account that uses the very controversial summary that Barr wrote quickly before the report was released and without Mueller's re-reading.
Here's the follow up from NPR where Mueller later distanced himself from this obviously misleading summary: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/30/718883130/mueller-complained-...
There's at least two accounts trying to conflate the Mueller investigation with the Senate Committee. It's kind of amazing how ... clearly identical their arguments are.
Yeah. In a thread where the debate is about "people being able to form their opinions on their own" it seems like they really like to depend on spoon-fed talking points.
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
Unfortunately it has to be a throwaway because these kinds of facts might as well be thought crimes here.
Once again, you're not linking to a source document that explicitly presents evidence. In fact there are clearly more than a hundred pages about Trump and Russians engaging in activity around the 2016 campaign.
You link to a partisan Senator who, by the way contributed to the Donald Trump campaign, says he found no-evidence.
The thought crime here is leaning into the weasel-word of "collusion" when it isn't clearly defined by Rubio or even the report or "Russian government" to cop out of the deep involvement of ex-spies and oligarchs out of Russia.
>Once again, you're not linking to a source document that explicitly presents evidence.
This is the exact document that Rubio is referencing in his press release I linked above. The evidence presented explicitly presents no evidence of Trump colluding.
>You link to a partisan Senator
Rubio was the head chair of the investigation, not some random senator.
>The thought crime here is leaning into the weasel-word of "collusion" when it isn't clearly defined by Rubio
Facts and legal definitions are not "weasel-words".
Your linked source just proves the following statement:
"We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
You can continue to believe fake news, but that doesn't make it reality.
Collusion in the context of election campaigns has no legal definition. If I'm the one who believes in fake news I wonder why you're the one sourcing your beliefs from controversial and disavowed summaries and partisan actors.
>I wonder why you're the one sourcing your beliefs from controversial and disavowed summaries and partisan actors.
NPR, official press releases from the chairs of senate intelligence committees, etc. have not been disavowed and the facts agree with me.
Again, if you stop believing fake news and actually read what has been linked above, you will find that:
“Over the last three years, the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a bipartisan and thorough investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and undermine our democracy. We interviewed over 200 witnesses and reviewed over one million pages of documents. No probe into this matter has been more exhaustive."
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
I've read your links but somehow it feels you haven't read mine as they offer later rebuttals to your sources.
You may insist that Rubio said something about the report is an official source but his words are contradicted by the report itself.
But ok I'll concede your following point that relies on "collusion" and "government" : the report didn't find "evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
You are not addressing the central point of the SIC volume 5 report: Trump and his campaign engaged in criminal and unethical activity with Russian ex-spies, agents run by Russia and oligarchs.
>I've read your links but somehow it feels you haven't read mine as they offer later rebuttals to your sources.
They offer no rebuttals, they only strengthen and agree with my points.
>You may insist that Rubio said something about the report is an official source but his words are contradicted by the report itself.
Except they're not. Rubio is the head chair of the committee that drafted the report. The report agreed with him.
>You are not addressing the central point of the SIC volume 5 report: Trump and his campaign engaged in criminal and unethical activity with Russian ex-spies, agents run by Russia and oligarchs.
Funny how various US courts of law disagree with you and Rubio. The information the SIC vol.5 regroups was used to convict quite a few of Trump's campaign associates.
> Not for anything related to collision or election fraud.
Manafort was charged with crimes not related to Russian collusion in hopes of getting him to flip on Trump. It was working too, which is how Mueller’s team learned Manafort was feeding internal campaign to a Russian Intel officer, while Russia was waging a psyops campaign against American voters. This strikes at the heart of the collusion claims.
That was until Trump started dangling the idea of a pardon and Manafort clammed up.
The link I provided was not referring to the Mueller investigation.
In August, of this year, the a US Senate Committee on Intelligence found that the Trump campaign colluded with Russian nationals, and possibly Russian intelligence.
"The committee's findings are a more in-depth look at the interference than Mueller's investigation, but the findings run parallel to the conclusions of Mueller's probe, which found overwhelming evidence of Russia's efforts to interfere in the election through disinformation and cyber campaigns but a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election."
Your own source literally disproves what you're claiming.
I'll say it again, from your source:
"lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election."
Yes, that quote says that the Mueller investigation failed.
However, the article is _about the Senate Committee_. This is a different thing than the Mueller investigation, and it succeeded where Mueller failed.
FTA:
> Among the probe's newest revelations is that Konstantin V. Kilimnik, an associate of Manafort's, was a "Russian intelligence officer." Manafort's contacts also posed a “grave counterintelligence threat,” according to the report.
> "Manafort worked with Kilimnik starting in 2016 on narratives that sought to undermine evidence that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election," the report added.
> "At nearly 1,000 pages, Volume 5 stands as the most comprehensive examination of ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign to date — a breathtaking level of contacts between Trump officials and Russian government operatives that is a very real counterintelligence threat to our elections," Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the panel's vice chairman, added in a statement.
>Yes, that quote says that the Mueller investigation failed.
It says nothing of the sort, it actually agrees with the Mueller investigation, and only adds to its legitimacy.
Nothing that you quoted points towards collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. There were contacts with Russians from both the DNC and RNP, but once again:
> a lack of sufficient evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin to impact the outcome of the 2016 election.
Lack of evidence that Trump conspired. There is no collusion.
In stating they ran parallel they meant that they're investigating the same offences at the same time. It ran parallel, but did not collaborate with, the Mueller investigation. It found more evidence and drew stronger conclusions.
“We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election."
Similarly, Google quality is in big part due to invaluable information of what URLs were clicked for what queries.
If duckduckgo had access to that information, their quality would've been way higher, and there's no reason I as a user shall not be able to give access to the information I generated for Google to another service.
The advise I give to all the YC companies is: prepare for the investor day as much as you prepare to the demo day.
The investor day can save you a lot of time fundraising later if you close few people on the spot, so make sure to be ready for a 20 minutes session with a longer coherent pitch and answers to the common questions.
In my batch (W17) the investor say was completely deemphasized for some reason, and many companies came unprepared, myself included
If I understand the argument of the author here:
> Attackers like me use SQL injection attacks to recover SQL schemas. The schema is the product of an attack, not one of its predicates
The author appears to imply that once the vulnerability is found, the schema can be recovered anyway. It is not always the case. It is perfectly viable to find a SQL injection that would allow to fetch some data from the table that is being queried, but not from any other table, including `information_schema` or similar. If all the signal you get from the vunlerability is also "query failed" or "query succeeded, here's the data", knowing the schema makes it much easier to exploit.
> the problem is that every computer system connected to the Internet is being attacked every minute of every day
If you specifically log failed DB queries, than for all the possible injections that such 24/7 attacks would find you have already patched them. The log would then be not deafening until someone stumbles on the actual injection (that, for example, only exists for logged in users, and thus is not found by bots), in which case you have time to see it and patch before the attacker finds a way to actually utilize it.
Knowing schema both expedites their ability to take advantage of the vulnerability, but also increases their chances of probing the injection without triggering the query failure to begin with.
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