Monthly Archives: January 2016

cURL and libcurl, Open Source, Technology

“Subject: Urgent Warning”

103 Comments

Back in December I got a desperate email from this person. A woman who said her Instagram had been hacked and since she found my contact info in the app she mailed me and asked for help. I of course replied and said that I have nothing to do with her being hacked but I also have nothing to do with Instagram other than that they use software I’ve written.

Today she writes back. Clearly not convinced I told the truth before, and now she strikes back with more “evidence” of my wrongdoings.

Dear Daniel,

I had emailed you a couple months ago about my “screen dumps” aka screenshots and asked for your help with restoring my Instagram account since it had been hacked, my photos changed, and your name was included in the coding. You claimed to have no involvement whatsoever in developing a third party app for Instagram and could not help me salvage my original Instagram photos, pre-hacked, despite Instagram serving as my Photography portfolio and my career is a Photographer.

Since you weren’t aware that your name was attached to Instagram related hacking code, I thought you might want to know, in case you weren’t already aware, that your name is also included in Spotify terms and conditions. I came across this information using my Spotify which has also been hacked into and would love your help hacking out of Spotify. Also, I have yet to figure out how to unhack the hackers from my Instagram so if you change your mind and want to restore my Instagram to its original form as well as help me secure my account from future privacy breaches, I’d be extremely grateful. As you know, changing my passwords did nothing to resolve the problem. Please keep in mind that Facebook owns Instagram and these are big companies that you likely don’t want to have a trail of evidence that you are a part of an Instagram and Spotify hacking ring. Also, Spotify is a major partner of Spotify so you are likely familiar with the coding for all of these illegally developed third party apps. I’d be grateful for your help fixing this error immediately.

Thank you,

[name redacted]

P.S. Please see attached screen dump for a screen shot of your contact info included in Spotify (or what more likely seems to be a hacked Spotify developed illegally by a third party).

Spotify credits screenshot

Here’s the Instagram screenshot she sent me in a previous email:

Instagram credits screenshot

I’ve tried to respond with calm and clear reasonable logic and technical details on why she’s seeing my name there. That clearly failed. What do I try next?

Mozilla, Work

Two years of Mozilla

1 Comment

Today marks my two year anniversary of being employed by one of the greatest companies I’m aware of.

I get to work with open source all day, every day. I get to work for a company that isn’t driven by handing over profits to its owners for some sort of return on investment. I get to work on curl as part of my job. I get to work with internetworking, which is awesomely fun, hard, thrilling and hair-tearing all at once. I get to work with protocol standards like within the IETF and my employer can let me go to meetings. In the struggle for good, against evil and for the users of the world, I think I’m on the right side. For users, for privacy, for openness, for inclusiveness. I feel I’m a mozillian now.

So what did I achieve during my first two years with the dinosaur logo company? Not nearly enough of what I’ve wanted or possibly initially thought I would. I’ve faced a lot of tough bugs and hard challenges and I’ve landed and backed out changes all through-out this period. But I like to think that it is a net gain and even when running head first into a wall, that can be educational and we can learn from it and then when we take a few steps back and race forwards again we can use that knowledge and make better decision for the future.

Future you say? Yeah, I’m heading on in the same style, without raising my focus point very much and continuously looking for my next thing very close in time. I grab issues to work on with as little foresight as possible but I completely assume they will continue to be tough nuts to crack and there will be new networking issues to conquer going forward as well. I’ll keep working on open source, open standards and a better internet for users. I really enjoy working for Mozilla!

Mozilla dinosaur head logo

cURL and libcurl, Mail

Tales from my inbox, part++

3 Comments

“Josh” sent me an email. Pardon the language here but I decided to show the mail body unaltered:

From: Josh Yanez <a gmail address>
Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2016 22:27:13 -0800
To: daniel
Subject: Hey fucker

I got all your fucking info either you turn yourself in or ill show it to the police. You think I'm playing try me I got all your stupid little coding too.

Sent from my iPhone

This generates so many questions

  1. I’ve had threats mailed to be before (even done over phone) so this is far from the first time. The few times I’ve bothered to actually try to understand what these people are hallucinating about, it usually turns out that they’ve discovered that someone has hacked them or targeted them in some sort of attack and curl was used and I am the main author so I’m the bad guy.
  2. He has all my “info” and my “stupid little coding too” ? What “coding” could that be? What is all my info?
  3. Is this just a spam somehow that wants me to reply? It is directed to me only and I’ve not heard of anyone else who got a mail similar to this.
  4. The lovely “Sent from my iPhone” signature is sort of hilarious too after such an offensive message.

Very aware this could just as well suck me into a deep and dark hole of sadness, I was just too curious to resist so I responded. Unfortunately I didn’t get anything further back so the story thus ends here, a bit abrupt. 🙁