It's interesting how Tony Abbott, the former Australian prime minister, was genuinely interested in understanding the technology behind the hack.

It reminded me of a nice anecdote from Chris Miller's book Chip War.

When former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was deciding whether to ban Huawei from the country's 5G network, he "bought himself a 474-page-book titled a Comprehensive Guide to 5G Security to study the topic so that he could ask better questions of his tech experts."

Nice to see politicians getting into infosec, I guess?

> For security reasons, we try to change our Prime Minister every six months, and to never use the same Prime Minister on multiple websites.

Made me laugh.

> Okay so I didn’t tell the spoon thing to Tony Abbott, but I did tell him what I always told my mum, which was: “Mum you just gotta press all the buttons, to find out what they do” > > He was like “Oh, you just learn by trial and error”. Exactly!

This resonates with me. I've quite often heard people say something like "I think I broke it", when they've done nothing of the sort with their computer. There's a general fear or worry that some (a lot of?) people have that if they don't use their computer with care, they'll ruin something.

Of course, you can ruin things, but that willingness to experiment is how I suspect many of us got good at these things. Trying, experimenting, breaking, and then fixing.

Pretty fun read. PNR / reservation / confirmation numbers are a pretty interesting method for allowing quick changes. Obviously sharing them is ill-advised. However, how is the general, non-technical layperson supposed to know any better?

That's a lot of words to say that someone posted their booking details online so you could log in and see their phone number.

No time was wasted in dedicating 30mins of my life to reading this. I bloody enjoyed that haha

Not quite the same level as this, but I had a coworker a long time ago that used to leave sensitive travel information out in the open frequently. After a few times of changing their rental car reservation from a corporate-compliant small car over to a minivan or 12 person passenger van, they came to understand not to leak sensitive data.

Previous Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24488224

The blogpost itself is a really entertaining read.

What a fantastic read. Thanks for posting this!

When Alex did this post live at a conference once it was even better I thought https://youtu.be/somze2DW7vs

Maybe I'm becoming a curmudgeon but this type of writing is annoying. So much prose, so many attempts at humour, all to say you entered someones booking# and last name on the airlines website.

Great writing. Really enjoyed it. And it is crazy how much extra data some companies put in their HTML even if not even used (seen this before in other industries)

(2020)

Lots of previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24488224

It’s a good article, so far, but I mean, it’s a novella. Unfortunately, I don’t have 60-90 minutes to read through the entirety of it.

He was lucky to get Booking reference number from Baggage receipt which otherwise would have been impossible

I’ve read this before. I’ve read other posts by this guy. I’ve seen this guy talk. I absolutely cannot stand the self-involved writing style. I love comedic, casual writing and speaking. This however is just trying too hard. You’ve gotta be really funny to put this much weight on the jokes, and this guy just doesn’t meet that high bar. It comes across as very cringey.

You should click the top-right 'hard mode' checkbox.

Omg

> he since-deleted Instagram post showing the boarding pass and baggage receipt. The caption reads “coming back home from japan looking forward to seeing everyone! climate change isn’t real ok byeee”

literally fake news article. what a world we are living in. The original instagram text is even visible. Author should be ashamed of himself