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posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 20 2019, @12:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-in-your-base dept.

A hacker may have accessed Stack Overflow user data for over a week in a hack that went undetected for an extended period of time. The Stack Overflow breach in May 2019 was described as a 'severe breach' of its production systems which may have exposed data including IP address, names, or emails for a small number of users by a user who managed to grant themselves privileged access. Affected users, which may number around 250, will be contacted by Stack Overflow to alert them of the breach. The company announced the breach on its blog as soon as they became aware of the issue.

[Ed Note - Stack Overflow originally stated that there was no evidence of the hacker accessing user data. They revised that statement on Friday.]


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by pkrasimirov on Monday May 20 2019, @02:03PM (4 children)

    by pkrasimirov (3358) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 20 2019, @02:03PM (#845512)

    Culture problem you say...

    Culture!

    There are people who answer questions on Stack Overflow.

    There are people who ask questions on Stack Overflow.

    There are people who google questions and read Stack Overflow.

    And then there are some who google and copy from Stack Overflow without reading, much less trying to understand.

    The bottom of this list are those who copy from the question and then "ask a colleague to help". Meaning they hand you their mouse and keyboard and wait for you to do their work while careful not to give any opinion or make a statement. Note the managers are fine with this as long as the job is 1. (reportedly) done and 2. in time.

    Not sure which exactly culture you are talking about.

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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday May 20 2019, @03:33PM (1 child)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 20 2019, @03:33PM (#845536) Journal

    then there's people who google your post and copy it wholesale into a python script to fix an issue.

    Wait, what the fuck's a "syntax error"?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @03:53PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @03:53PM (#845542)

    The culture of the group responsible for the site architecture of a place where supposedly people knowledgeable about IT congregate yet that site managed to give up credentials such that their "IT Experts Site" was pwned and identity theft occurred. So are you a moron or are you deliberately going off topic trying to make this a whatabout?

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @11:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @11:26PM (#845668)

    Since Stack Overflow has literally millions of questions on tens of thousands of programming subjects, I suspect it has hit project maturity. This is a good thing! Unfortunately it comes with a lot of baggage.

    I think you're right about the culture issue. It does come down to roughly the categories you mention. Reputation is probably roughly divided in the order of the groups you refer to. Thus, the moderation tools available to each group are provided in the same scale. This means answerers have far more weight than questioners. Another side-effect is new users get far less reputation now simply because everything is slowing down.

    There's no easy answer to their issues, but the problem still remains the approximate of: Do you support the quality of the site over everything else, or do you support inclusiveness over everything else?

    It's really not an easy answer in my opinion, and I say that as someone who's given dozens of answers on Stack Overflow. On the one hand, I've been annoyed that questions I've worked to answer were deleted because they really was terrible and/or off topic. That was a learning process for me on how the site works. It helped me to learn I should not polish turds.

    However, the most rewarding thing for me is answering questions. I've felt incredibly rewarded helping someone solve a problem they're working on that nobody else could answer. The imaginary internet points are nothing compared to helping someone solve an issue that is so complex or massive that nothing short of making their own solution will do. Those are the types of questions I look for. They are uncommon, but they're out there. They're honest problems, not homework problems. Stack Overflow is still the best place for that kind of question and I think that's why they are still important.

    It's nowhere near the same purpose as SoylentNews, but I think their mission is just as valuable.