Linked List: January 24, 2023

Tuesday, 24 January 2023

LastPass Breach Is Looking Worse 

Carly Page, reporting for TechCrunch:

The breach was first confirmed by LastPass on November 30. At the time, LastPass chief executive Karim Toubba said an “unauthorized party” had gained access to some customers’ information stored in a third-party cloud service shared by LastPass and GoTo. The attackers used information stolen from an earlier breach of LastPass systems in August to further compromise the companies’ shared cloud data. GoTo, which bought LastPass in 2015, said at the time that it was investigating the incident.

Now, almost two months later, GoTo said in an updated statement that the cyberattack impacted several of its products, including business communications tool Central; online meetings service Join.me; hosted VPN service Hamachi, and its Remotely Anywhere remote access tool.

GoTo said the intruders exfiltrated customers’ encrypted backups from these services — as well as the company’s encryption key for securing the data.

This breach now sounds like a company covering its ass. LastPass users should consider everything they stored in LastPass tainted.

WSJ: ‘Banks Plan Payment Wallet to Compete With PayPal, Apple Pay’ 

AnnaMaria Andriotis, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+, Archive.is):

Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and four other banks are working on a new product that will allow shoppers to pay at merchants’ online checkout with a wallet that will be linked to their debit and credit cards.

The digital wallet will be managed by Early Warning Services LLC, the bank-owned company that operates money-transfer service Zelle. The wallet, which doesn’t have a name yet, will operate separately from Zelle, EWS said.

One goal of the new service is to compete with third-party wallet operators such as PayPal Holdings Inc. and Apple Inc.’s Apple Pay, according to people familiar with the matter. Banks are worried about losing control of their customer relationships.

I bet this endeavor will see similar success as CurrentC. In fact, I suggest they name the product “BanksC”. I’m sure the homonymous artist would love to create a logo for them.

Ivory 1.0 for iOS 

Still “early access”, but as a decade-long Tweetbot user, it feels like home. $2/month or $15/year — prices that better reflect the value of this extraordinary app than Tweetbot’s did. And how great is this?

Dave Winer:

I went to ChatGPT and entered “Simple instructions about how to send email from a Node.js app?” What came back was absolutely perfect, none of the confusing crap and business models you see in online instructions in Google. I see why Google is worried. ;-)

No need for a winky there. The threat to Google is real. That type of search for a clearly-written one-line programming question used to produce excellent results from Google Search. For a number of years, though, search results for queries like that — both at Google and competing search engines — have been littered with junk generated by content farms. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack sometimes, combing through the query results for a proper solution.

Stack Overflow, of course, is very successful, and the whole point of it is providing a place to find good answers to programming questions. The problem with Google Search today isn’t specific to programming questions, but the general problem of answering how-to questions in any subject.

And look who’s coming — the most ruthlessly competitive company in computing history.