Pastebin Made It Harder To Scrape Its Site And Researchers Are Pissed Off (vice.com) 27
The most famous paste site, used by hackers of all stripes to host lists of stolen passwords, announcements of data breaches, and malware has made it harder for security researchers to scrape it looking for that kind of information. From a report: And security researchers are pissed off. Pastebin is one of the most famous websites that allows anyone, even without being registered, to "paste" any kind of text and make it public. Over the years, it became a repository for all kinds of unsavory data, such as the personal details of people who got doxed by hackers, leaked passwords, hacker manifestos, and even malware payloads. Naturally, this meant it was a treasure trove for security researchers investigating data breaches or hunting hackers. On Tuesday, several security researchers complained on Twitter that they were unable to search Pastebin or scrape it using a special API, which they paid to get access to. (The lifetime subscription, which was required to scrape the site, cost $50.)
Wrong. (Score:4, Insightful)
The researchers paid for access. A deal is a deal, or refund the money back.
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You don't get to refund a deal just because you don't want to play ball anymore.
Party A pays Party B for something of value. Party B cannot or will not provide the thing of value. Party B refunds all of Party A's money. Unless Party A can prove actual damages as a result of this, using an accepted legal theory (detrimental reliance, for example), they likely have no recourse (maybe they could argue they're owed a fair interest rate on their money?)
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Where did you hear Pastebin refunded the money?
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I didn't. I even quoted the part of the post I was responding to.
GP post to mine said "Keep the deal or pay back." Parent to my post said "you can't just cancel a deal by paying someone back." I pointed out that was not necessarily true. I never made any claim (nor do I have any knowledge) that pastebin actually paid people back.
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I find it extremely unlikely that pastebin could afford to refund all the subs.
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I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.
Vader summed it up nicely.
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A deal is a deal
They have altered the deal. Pray they don't alter it any further.
They paid for several features (Score:2)
They paid for a list of features. 24 features [archive.org] according to the archived page, one feature was removed. This is similar to Sony removing Other OS from their Playstation 3, and refusing to do anything even for people who only bought it for that reason. After many years in courts they offered to pay a fraction of the price of the system to people who could prove they needed it.
I don't see why you would ask for more from pastebin, if we go according to the Sony case they should offer something like $5 to the pe
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I know. Most of the stuff online doesn't need to be written. For example in your case Slashdot could have saved Beth since you didn't even read to the end of the summary.
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Colossus and Guardian are in the house to purple-nurple your whistle-or-lose-it traditions of protean hazing strongly correlated to putschs and query the pathology of your evolving needs to express relevance with facial hair.
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?Tough titties... Colossus and Guardian are in the house to purple-nurple your whistle-or-lose-it traditions of protean hazing strongly correlated to putschs and query the pathology of your evolving needs to express relevance with facial hair.
buravirgil, is there something your supposed to be taking that you are not? That's some first class frontier gibberish there...
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I don't know about you but when I pray for a service I don't consider it naive to expect to use the service, not do I go about building a workaround for perfectly working services which I paid for.
It's like taking your car* to a workshop to get a service and immediately taking it home and disassembling it and servicing it yourself just in case it was done wrong or that workshop refuses to service your car in the future.
*Trying to re-establish the car analogy on Slashdot.
Re: Tough titties (Score:2)
What faith are you using? My current one doesn't cover car servicing.
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The one provided by the Google keyboard.
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Awwww (Score:2)
A bunch of researchers got, somehow unexpectedly, screwed by a bunch of hackers/hacker supporters. Shocking.
I'm pretty pissed off (Score:2)
I used to do pastebin searches on "urn:btih" to see if there were any interesting, oddball bittorrents. As far as I can tell, its now useless as a publishing platform. Who cares if you put up announcements or bits of data if there's no way to locate the paste with relevant information? I think pastebin has really nuked its raison d'etre (difficult to censor announcements, and groupware information exchange); I hope they have a clue about what they are doing.
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It looks like search is disabled. Which they may h
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Google does a better job?
Nope site searches reveal even less than what pastebin did.
linking to the actual page itself
Nope. Pastebin is the announcement vehicle; you can't do generic announcements without search on topic or content. Passing a webaddress is basically making it a person to person link transfer.
New owners? (Score:2)
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Did the site change hands? New owners need to start making money?
But enough about Slashdot. *rimshot* Avoid the heel, try the veal! *trombone slide* Awww...what'd your doctor say? Yes, it hurts me here when you make a face like that. *crickets*