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Comment by jacooper | Hacker News Reader

Here is a more informative thread by haveibeenpwned's creator, Troy hunt.

https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/1566565409939427328

> Example: WeChat (Which is state owned)is within the same database as the TikTok DB (which claims not to give such information to their government).

that seems very material, for the US population and Bytedance's verbal commitment to the govt. At this point, it's obvious that data of US citizens (a large chunk underage) has been heavily shared with what is perceived as a rival state

As others have pointed out, this seems to be from a 3rd party service that integrates WeChat with TikTok.

It might not necessarily even be a direct integration. WeChat is often used as a primary means of communication within China -- it's comparable to the status of email in the US.

Literally “within the same database” is highly improbable as they are direct competitors just like Google and Microsoft are. On the other hand, countless companies will surely try to match user profiles across the apps, which sounds like a common practice everywhere.

This is one of the major problems with understanding how China operates. We view China through a Western lens, and just assume we are right - which has very bad policy outcomes. If you read a lot about how the CCP operates (I specify the CCP to differentiate the CCP running the PRC since 1949 from the ROC who fled to Taiwan), it is highly probable that those companies share the same database and have common state ties.

If you want data on this assertion research "capitalism with socialist characteristics." If you want the data straight from China read their 14th 5-year plan (I wish the US had these kinds of plans) translated by Georgetown University here [1]. China is very open about what they are doing in published writing.

If you want more information read "The World According to China" by Liz Economy. I can suggest about 10 other books too, but that book was published in 2022 and is the most relevant book I read. Unfortunately China's government from a Western lens is such a complex topic I can't simply link to one article about how China runs its economy and "private" organizations to prove my point. This complexity unfortunately leads to people making false assumptions about how China operates without the requisite knowledge - and then deciding how we should make policy decisions towards China.

[1] https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/china-14th-five-year...

Ok, we'll change to that from https://twitter.com/AggressiveCurl/status/156616119824850944.... Thanks!

Just spitballing, but this changing of source url reminds me of an idea I had a while back. In cases like this, where the url is changed from source, the old url should still be linked. Maybe as a sub title, or perhaps there should be a separate "changed" link on posts like this. The changed link could show title or url source changes.

The old url is linked in the url-changed comment. Sometimes there's a pinned topcomment with the old url or the url of a merged thread, if the url change is likely to really confuse.

I'm curious if anyone's been keeping track of title and url changes. HN's small enough that one could easily hold the data. Someone has a page showing recent title changes,[1] but without retention. In that thread is a link to a browser extension that does the same, but I can't tell if its scraping is client-side (probably) or if there's a server.

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617016

These kinds of edits, without edit history, seem ripe for abuse

How? And how would edit history realistically stop the admins who could modify the edit history?

One of the few times 'the blockchain' might be a sensible answer, silly as the premise of url or title attack is.

True, but blockchains only help if you have multiple copies of the chain. With one copy, there’s nothing stoping the owner from rewriting history. It’s why companies saying they’re “investing in blockchains” means nothing; DB replication/redundancy doesn’t stop a malicious owner.

So unless we’re all gonna start storing copies of HN’s database(s) on our home computers and phones, a blockchain won’t help stop abuse. Speaking of which, how big would said copies be?

It all boils down to the fact that dang, the admin who does the edits, has a history of doing these changes quite rarely and within reason, plus he always leaves comments when he does so. That approach awarded him some general trust, including mine.

> plus he always leaves comments when he does so

How do you know this?

It takes one scandal stemming from a hostile link change to take this sort of reputation down. Since all of that information is public, to paraphrase Linus, with enough eyes, all HN link changes are shallow.

Is it public? I don't see a history attached to posts.

He does do this, and based on reputation it's perfectly fine. But I'd personally prefer to see this as part of the api and UI.

Part of the issue is that it isn't that rare. I guess because I'm reading HN all the time these changes seem fairly frequent, despite overall submission volume. I also have the same trust.

> This is so far pretty inconclusive; some data matches production info, albeit publicly accessible info. Some data is junk, but it could be non-production or test data. It's a bit of a mixed bag so far.

The screenshots suggest that someone scraped public data from TikTok and then got hacked. Highly doubt any of this came directly from TikTok.

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