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I once reported superadmin user/pass committed to github at a major YC backed background check company I worked at and everyone tried to make it seem like it was my fault.
I had just started working there and found it in the first week.
Anyway, had to show that it was committed by their main Staff engineer 2 years before I even worked there. For 2 years everyone's background check data in the United States that went through this thing - millions per year - thousands of Uber drivers, DoorDash, etc. all were viewable with no clearance. Anyone including overseas contractors, new hires, etc. could just login and check anyone's criminal history.
Reporting it was a disaster. They all tried to cover their asses, this huge drama and hand waving started. They tried to blame anyone and everyone. Eventually it was just AWS fault somehow (it wasn't, the Staff engineer was a dumbass, he committed it to a ruby seed file).
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I digress, the CTO didn't respond because he was more worried about how it would make him look. This industry is dead - the wrong people work in it.
I explained to him how the EC2 instances would assume the role that already had the permission and it took so long to convince him.
Needless to say, we had to explain lots of basic security and networking concepts to him, which he wouldn't believe until given live demos of basic things like public versus private IP addresses in AWS.
At these types of startups, developers will find themselves in some debate about the time complexity of a click handler (which is debounced anyway).
Meanwhile Joe CEO is like "HAY GUYS" -drops db-
"CAN U FIX IT BY MONDAY"
The main problem is that the IT industry for a loooooooong time "self-regulated" itself, the only areas that did have regulation had it come in externally (i.e. automotive, aeronautic, astronauts and maritime). Only in the last years, GDPR + insurances forced a bit of change and accountability, but still, it's far removed from the standards that company owners, workers and planners are held to in construction (licensed engineers), legal or medical practice. Mess up there and everything can happen from fines over a license suspension to a permanent removal, or even jail time.
In contrast, mess stuff up as a CTO and you'll probably be "asked" to voluntarily depart in exchange for a nice golden parachute.
We effectively have that kind of gatekeeping now with the University degree and University recruiting pipelines (all other candidates are "external" and illegally deprioritized but it's somehow allowed).
The CTO shouldn't have to pay, the company should. And then maybe they will be incentivized to hire somebody who knows what they're doing.
Licensing just gatekeeps it more to even more dumbass people with connections getting good roles. It should be more merit based to avoid this kind of thing. People who have done it a thousand times should get that job, not some dumb kid who just got out of school.
Well it works. Aviation for example is incredibly safe if you think about it, and mostly because the governments worldwide joined forces and introduced an amount of safety regulations everywhere that sounds insane until you remember that these rules were literally written in blood. And similarly, losing your life or getting injured on a modern ship is a pretty rare thing to happen (either as employee or passenger) if you contrast it with the situation just five decades or so ago.
> We effectively have that kind of gatekeeping now with the University degree and University recruiting pipelines (all other candidates are "external" and illegally deprioritized but it's somehow allowed).
Degree mills aren't the kind of gatekeeping I'm talking about. If you screw up, you still can go to another company and continue screwing up there, which also means there is barely any incentive to hold education institutions accountable to deliver good education. In the regulated trades however? Screw up enough and you're out for good.
> Licensing just gatekeeps it more to even more dumbass people with connections getting good roles. It should be more merit based to avoid this kind of thing.
Trades licensing is merit based.
But they try to play it off as though this were public data:
> Public sharing settings across AI and SaaS products have surfaced similar findings in recent months. Anthropic addressed exposed public artifacts across Claude and its MCP ecosystem via Google Search.
Also, interesting, they are SOC2 compliant [1], proving again that SOC2 is meaningless/useless.
[1] https://tldv.io/features/security-commitment/
Just email the CTO about it ;)
I wonder how many companies realise these new devices that appear as "headsets" are now funnelling their meetings into these new AI companies who are more worried about the World Cup then security.
The solution (theoretically) is a purely local note taker, but I haven't found one that's any good. Tried meetily and others in the same vein, including briefly rolling my own. The breakdown in the pipeline seems to be reliable local diarization and speaker identification; even if the transcription is good, when speakers aren't accurately identified and speech isn't well grouped, there's no rescuing it in the summary step.
It's a hard problem I've been working away on for a while now. It's far from perfect but every step brings it a bit closer.
But man is it ugly.
I think clearly the _leader_ in the space is granola, but I'm just not going to use a cloud provider for this.
Drafts have anything like that?
Especially with a low bar to entry like what is essentially AI-backed transcription-as-a-service, I'm not sure 90% is high enough. There will be 100 companies offering essentially the same thing and it's unfortunately the responsibility of the customer to find the one written by someone who doesn't have a parsnip where their brain should be.
And even if, a later "is this ready for release" will probably surface such obvious issues.
I do not think LLMs are the problem here. Today, they are most likely more competent than whoever set this up.
Why could he not speak to HIS ceo himself instead of asking Bob to
oof
Wasn't a dating app exposed this year with same negligence or firebase security?
But this is lazy / "move fast" software engineering. They mention all of these certifications, I think they should be stripped of them for a year because of a failure to respond / act.
Also, shame on the CEO for not making this an emergency and confirming it was fixed by the end of the day.
then kick the can for 6 months?
We might be able to check the meeting minutes and get the answer?
Another similar incident that happened recently was 4TB/40,000 contractors voice + government ID + selfie leaked .. https://oravys.com/blog/mercor-breach-2026
PS: To demonstrate how this can be exploited with real time voice changers i.e. a voice phishing simulator .. we also built a free tool that shows this attack combined with someones voice ..
https://www.callstrike.ai/voice-phishing-simulator (Voice Phishing Simulator)
https://www.callstrike.ai/deepfake-security-training (Deepfake Video Simulator)
It’s obviously a heavily restricted PoC, but it helps demonstrate the attack path in practice.
Leaked selfies? Do you mean ID photos?
If this person is doing his best to do the right thing, there are probably other people who know about this vulnerability and are using it without telling anyone.
Edit - Are you capable of answering my actual question or was that the best you could do?
And who knows? Maybe someone competent whose company is a client will see that list and say, “hey, boss, I was on HN today, and…”
And these customers absolute lack of technical due diligence, on this nth example, of move fast and break things...makes them deserve what they are getting.
> [...] Buried at the bottom, a single line: "If you have discovered a privacy or security issue that we should address, please always let us know at privacy@tldv.io. Our security team will respond within 24 hours." I emailed the CTO directly. Six months. No response. [...]
This is near the disclosure schedule