Weekly Update 481

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Twelve years (and one day) since launching Have I Been Pwned, it’s now a service that Charlotte and I live and breathe every day. From the first thing every morning to the last thing each day, from holidays to birthdays, in sickness and in heal… wait a minute

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Why Does Have I Been Pwned Contain “Fake” Email Addresses?

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Normally, when someone sends feedback like this, I ignore it, but it happens often enough that it deserves an explainer, because the answer is really, really simple. So simple, in fact, that it should be evident to the likes of Bruce, who decided his misunderstanding deserved a 1-star Trustpilot review

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Weekly Update 480

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Well, I now have the answer to how Snapchat does age verification for under-16s: they give an underage kid the ability to change their date of birth, then do a facial scan to verify. The facial scan (a third party tells me…) allows someone well under 16 to pass it

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Weekly Update 479

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I gave up on the IoT water meter reader. Being technical and thinking you can solve everything with technology is both a blessing and a curse; dogged persistence has given me the life I have today, but it has also burned serious amounts of time because I never want to

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Weekly Update 478

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This week, it was an absolute privilege to be at Europol in The Hague, speaking about cyber offenders and at the InterCOP conference and spending time with some of the folks involved in the Operation Endgame actions. The latter in particular gave me a new sense of just how much

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Weekly Update 477

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What. A. Week. It wasn’t just the preceding weeks of technical pain as we tried to work out how to get this data loaded, it was all the subsequent queries we had to deal with too. Some of them are totally understandable, whilst others just resulted in endless

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2 Billion Email Addresses Were Exposed, and We Indexed Them All in Have I Been Pwned

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I hate hyperbolic news headlines about data breaches, but for the “2 Billion Email Addresses” headline to be hyperbolic, it’d need to be exaggerated or overstated – and it isn’t. It’s rounded up from the more precise number of 1,957,476,

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Weekly Update 476

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The 2 billion email address stealer log breach I talk about this week is almost ready to go at the time of writing. It’s been massively time-consuming, massively expensive (we turned the cloud up to 11) and enormously frustrating. I’ve written about why in the draft

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How We (Almost) Found Chromium’s Bug via Crash Reports to Report URI

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Tracking down bugs in software is a pain that all of us who write code must bear. When we’re talking about outright errors in a web page, you typically have something to get you started (such as output in the console), but that wasn’t the case

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Weekly Update 475

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It was the Synthient threat data that ate most of my time this week, and it continues to do so now, the weekend after recording this video. Data like this is equal parts enormously damaging to victims and frustratingly noisy to process. I have to be confident enough that it&

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