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  • The somewhat snide answer to this is that… this is what git already is! Git has built in tools for submitting patches via email — a federated service. It’s actually what git was built for.

    https://git-send-email.io

    Of course, GitHub and stuff can be a pretty nice interface on top of git and provides features on top of git itself… but for small projects like the Linux kernel it’s perfectly acceptable :).

    Websites like GitHub are obviously a lot more approachable, though, especially since I feel like a lot of people kind of grew up with the gmail web interface or something similar and aren’t used to dealing with mailing lists for this kind of stuff (myself included, honestly).

    But to be honest… what are we really getting out of federation for something like GitHub? Like… it’s basically just single sign on with extra steps? I guess you can build alternate clients with the protocol for PRs and issues and stuff? But git itself is already pretty distributed, so I feel like there’s not much to do there tbh.

  • Unaudited and unfettered database access is much less common. Sure, it happens, but it is rare - especially for something at the scale (& attractiveness to hackers) of Instagram. And yes, an audit trail doesn’t mean your manager will be immediately alerted, and there are people who won’t think of the audit trail and go snooping in prod anyway - so it is possible, but I just don’t think it’s very probable ¯(ツ)_/¯

    It's hard to say what Instagram does behind closed doors, so who knows. Having write access to the production database is almost certainly in the hands of a select few, but it's not unexpected for developers to have read access / access to a replicated database for testing, and to help compile reports that more business-focused individuals in the company might be interested in, or just to understand the impact certain changes they might introduce could have. I wouldn't entirely be surprised if companies like Instagram that deal with more sensitive data are a little more careful about what every random developer has access to, but I also wouldn't be surprised if there were a decent number of people with this level of access, and I would probably be more surprised if they were watched carefully than if they weren't. Regardless, in some sense I don't think it's particularly relevant -- you should assume that your DMs on platforms like Instagram and Twitter and whatever are accessible to people working on those platforms, so I think the concerns that the original comment here brings up are perfectly valid, even if it happens to not be the case in this particular instance. This is certainly a company secret for MANY companies, e.g.:

    I think it's worth being aware. I'm pretty sure the average person doesn't really think about this and just assumes their DMs are completely private, or maybe it's seen by Facebook or Google in some automated way for advertising... But it is also possible for employees to do problematic things, or for the information to be leaked if the service is compromised. I really don't think the average person really realizes that it's probably just sitting as plain text in a database and can be read pretty trivially if you have access to it.

    And a moderation tool for direct messages?

    Yeah, absolutely? You have a user sending questionable messages to people / potential spam, you check the rest of their history for more context. That sounds perfectly sensible to me.

    Which are E2E encrypted? That doesn’t make much sense to me. What moderation function would a “list of people they have DMed in the last 2 years” serve? I guess it could be used to determine if somebody has been harassing someone else - but the block feature exists, why would it reach a moderator in the first place?

    I don't use Instagram, so I'm not super aware of this particular case. It looks like the e2e encrypted chats are a very recent feature (seems like September 2022? Looks like it also wasn't a feature at some point in 2021), so it's possible this supposed incident happened prior to that feature rolled out, and it's unclear to me if it's the default? Either way, the feature seems recent enough that it might not be relevant to the original situation. It would make a difference in the future, though!

    If they're truly end-to-end encrypted then, sure, there probably wouldn't be too much use for moderation tools specifically to keep track of the metadata, but it might be useful to help determine if somebody is harassing / spamming people en mass (plus that seems like real good data for advertising). It looks like they do have some moderation tools for encrypted messages:

    https://help.instagram.com/753893408640265?helpref=faq_content

    But it sounds like it's intentional from a user (i.e., when they report a DM it will send the message + some context to Instagram that Instagram otherwise wouldn't be able to read). Who knows if there's anything about metadata.

    Bit of a tangent, but of course end-to-end encryption can also only go so far. You still trust Instagram about these claims, and you trust that they implement it correctly. I'd probably believe them, but there's a lot of places to play tricks on users, especially when you don't know what code they're running on your device. It may not be particularly hard for them to push an update that tells them what your private keys are, for instance, and there's often some security sacrifices for convenience (maybe your phone will automatically share encryption keys with a new browser login so you can read your message archive or something).

    Occam’s razor is in favour of the girlfriend getting the info the old fashioned way - snooping on the OP’s phone

    I would agree with this regardless, of course :). There's plenty of ways to glean this information without a rogue Instagram employee behind the scenes.

  • Ehhhhh... Having database access like this is fairly common, and it's very plausible that a nice tool exists for this for moderation purposes. I'm not saying this actually happened, but it's at least plausible, and frankly you should assume that this is happening behind the scenes at every company. It might be rare, and you might ultimately conclude that it's worth the risk, but it's probably good to consider (especially if you're in any way connected to an employee at such a company).

  • It’s really depressing that you can’t just build good things that people need / like because it’s not always profitable to do so. Any time money gets into the conversation it becomes a nightmare. Every bit of a project just becomes this battle for the lowest bidder and lowest quality possible to achieve a minimum viable product in a way that leads to technical debt and an unsustainable code base.

  • So… Are you just unaware of fruits, vegetables, and legumes, haha? In my opinion there’s a huge amount of food that fits all three categories. One of the best example of cheap, delicious, healthy, and easy is beans and rice, spiced up however you like.

  • It's kind of funny because I'd put NixOS on a complete newbies computer for sure, and recommend it to an expert... But I'm less sure if I'd tell a random mid-intermediate Linux user to switch.

    Like if Grandma wants Linux on their computer to do some internet browsing for some reason... I'd absolutely put NixOS on it because it's easy to manage the system for them... But somebody who is a little familiar with Linux already might be more confused about the differences. It's kind of the ultimate beginner distro and the ultimate power-user distro, but a bit awkward between those extremes, haha.