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[Mephisto]

Boy, software people sure do like judging other software people based on how much of their free time they devote to their employers.

[Cthulhu]

That's a good point, if I was a developer for parler I probably wouldn't be inclined to do a very good job.

[nenjin]

Flagging deleted posts as deleted instead of actually hard deleting them was once standard practice in software design.

This is how we do it at my job. Granted, we're doing inventory management not social media. But we never delete anything. We just flag it as deleted.

The tables have been turned for a long, long time.

I'm not trying to minimize how shitty that was and is, but I don't think they're of the same scope and scale.

[MorleyDev]

This is how we do it at my job. Granted, we're doing inventory management not social media. But we never delete anything. We just flag it as deleted.

I'm specifically talking about personal/user information. A persons deleted posts would fall under that category. GDPR and similar emerging means you legally can't/shouldn't keep user data longer than it is needed to fulfil it's purpose and need to have the ability to forcefully delete it if requested by a user. Business information that is needed to be kept indefinitely for auditing purposes is a different story.

Boy, software people sure do like judging other software people based on how much of their free time they devote to their employers.

It's a craft. When I work on personal projects and try out new tools and techniques and learn the things that keep me ahead of the curve, I'm not giving free time to my employer. I'm developing my skills at my craft. My current employer pays me to put time in my craft towards them during certain hours.

And from an employee perspective, if you want to have a good chance to get the best next employer, you need to keep up with the changing times and standards. If you wanna be where you are forever, then you're going to be there until the business fails or they are forced to advance and you have a massive amount of pain and annoyance to catch up.

[martinuzz]

I would be quite amused if some coppers knelt for the Trumpists.

it took me a bit to realize you were talking about cops, I was thinking why would copper creatures care about Trump!

The origin of the word cop (or, originally 'copper') apparently comes from the copper buttons the english police force wore on their uniforms back in the days

[Starver]

That's not uncommon in API design and is something I've even built into APIs I'd created before because... yeah, sometimes you want to recover data that was "deleted."  Not sure how that meshes with privacy laws these days though.

I once had a stint of 'all but Sysop' on a BBS, because I wasn't as busy IRL as the actual Sysop/board-coder and was amongst the more active of the existing Moderators.

Messages on the wrong sub-board could be moved by moderators with a suitable jurisdiction (or the author), with explanatory message, and one of the places they could be moved was "Limbo", a write-only (even to moderators) board for anything deemed not in any way redeemable (everything from low quality - something I fell foul of on more than one occasion - to approaching/actual illegality - I think I avoided this issue - as well as personal regret). And so, for a while, I could read what was there (though Limbo had a move-to-delete option, IIRC, so no doubt there were things that never survived to be seen by me), and of course I could have de-Limboed things.

To lack an equivalent feature (i.e. a last resort of a complete /dev/nul 'destination' only) would be more problematic than having it for management reasons, including author-'deleted' items, because errors (or maliciousness by A.N.Other having gained access to your login) always happen.

This was well before the Windows Recycle Bin (though Mac's trashcan was certainly already a thing) and UNDELETE in DOS was the closest most people had to reversibility of such things (didn't work if you'd RDed the directory it had been in) unless you got into Norton or precursor tools.  But even these days, or 'especially' given the vapourish and sometimes literally cloudlike nature of data, there's a dichotomy in security in that users expect both that nobody should access things that they don't want accessed (by anyone, ever) and that if they lose access to things they never meant to lose that there's a practical way to get it back. The fuzzy buffer between the two can only be maintained by a User Service Level Agreement that those who can bridge either gap between publishable and remnant data may and will only do so upon sufficient (without being impossibly onorous) 'permission' to do so.

Unless you're specifically designing a transient-only storage/viewing system (for one of several possible/combinable reasons specifically to address provider and user experiences), the clientele must accept this (certainly must have 'signed' the many pages of legal mumbo jumbo that says as such).

I'm not surprised that any amount of information is there. Unless they do as much as anon.penet.fi's final act to save its users from the rabid scientologists, purposefully or otherwise, it'll stay available for the right circumstances.

And allowing that archived data to be retrieved by clients is a different matter completely, and definitely shows some negligence on their part.

Hooo yeah... That was a booboo (for someone). Not necessarily the person who enabled it, if they had that intention.

But at least it's entertaining to hear about. I've not got my ear as close to the black/grey/white-hat hackers as I once did. And I suspect these were 'shiny' black-hats, actually glowing with righteousness in the right light.

[Lord Shonus]

HOLY FUCK


Big, if true.

[MrRoboto75]

The wheels on the repub bus go thump thump thump

[Vector]

I mean, yes, we do need Trump gone, but we also need structural changes so that "Trump but young & sexy" or "Trump but young & Evangelical Christian" or whatever can't step into the power vacuum.

[Telgin]

I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's difficult to envision what those changes would look like exactly.

In a way, I think that this was always bound to happen so long as the presidential election was a popularity contest.  It's only just recently that information access has made it so likely to go awry like this.

I'd be perfectly fine with making the position require more than just popularity, but we're getting into constitutional amendment territory there, so it'll never happen.

[da_nang]

Legal analysis time.

---

HOLY FUCK


Big, if true.

Here we go. Where's my popcorn?

[Micro102]

HOLY FUCK


Big, if true.

Meh. No point in wasting time thinking about what a bad faith actor will do. Assume the worst.

[Rolan7]

Exactly.  I'm terrified of Pence in particular, though the possibilities are endless.  Imagine a more charismatic or just baseline competent fascist stepping up to the plate.  Trump essentially blundered through a paper wall that everyone assumed was sturdy, revealing just how vulnerable our democracy is.

[delphonso]

Also, Obama set up confidence in the presidency and the system in a way that allowed Trump to mercilessly twist it. Fox News and co spent the Obama years radicalizing the right.

Pelosi and Biden's "best" would set up the same thing, but with a reorganized right this time.

I also don't think the Dems can get away with another lesser-of-two picks as it is clear people actually want improvements to their QoL over balanced budgets and empty promises. These next 4 years need to see a drastic change to the Dems or they will die off completely, potentially quite violently at the hands of White Nationalists.

[MorleyDev]

I've seen it argued that because America never truly felt the sting of WW2 in the same way as Europe, that facism never truly came armed and persistent to their shores, they never were pushed as a nation to supress the far right and or felt that pressure to set up the same standards of press and welfare and legal tools to supress it that European countries did. Instead, they ran headfirst into the Cold War in which they demonised those very tools because they were demonizing an extreme example of those tools, and elevanted many tools convenient to the purposes of the far right.