Hilarious security theater, My god, the dumb, it burns... Options

[Vigilant]

From here:
Security theater

"By this time, I think every arbitrator has wiped their hard drives and reinstalled their systems (or if they haven't, they should have, Jehochman is right that even top-of-the-line security software can miss things), so even a thorough forensic inspection of everyone's computer would be pointless."

Risker is so wrong on this, it's barely believable.

What has happened is that, if the leaker is a current ARBCOM member, they have buried all evidence (and even the possibility discussion) of of whomever was the real leaker.

"Oh no, I formatted my drive as Risker reccomended! No need to look here..."

One would think, that a group whose only product/project is an online database on a set of clustered servers would have true security professionals on staff before letting community volunteers have access, apparently unrestricted, to sensitive personal data.

Look at Sony, who was lax with hard security, and the extreme beatings that were administered in the press and blogs for their failure to safeguard customer data.

Shameful wikimedia foundation, just shameful.

[Ottava]

Something in the first post got me thinking: what is to keep the leaker from, say, dropping little hints to an Arbitrator that they might not like in order to try and get the paranoid to mob attack that individual? It would seem a perfect win - 1. expose ArbCom secrets, 2. embarrass the WMF, 3. get rid of an Arb, and 4. make everyone so paranoid that they are no longer able to operate effectively.

We don't really know the motivation behind getting the information or exposing it. The only way for the Arbitrators to combat the above would be to take a position of "who cares if it was exposed" and preempt future releases by putting up some info from the major cases not yet released. That would take the thunder out of a leaker. Instead, they seem to be falling into a situation that the first paragraph could take advantage of and really hurt some people.

This post has been edited by Ottava: Fri 8th July 2011, 8:24pm