Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemof | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be inclined to trust anything the FBI has to say on this, not because I have my tinfoil hat on, but within the context of the allegation they are an unreliable witness, so to speak.

The question is, are these UDIDs real? If so, then where did AntiSec get them from if not a compromised FBI laptop? If they'd hacked Apple or a carrier, surely they'd be quite as happy to crow about that as anything else.

I can understand the idea of pinning the leak on the FBI, I'm just unsure as to how plausible that is. They and their contractors have shown themselves leaky enough to not need any fabrication of evidence in the pursuit of lulz.

View on HN

We checked our app's push notification token database against the leaked list, and there are intersections (who we then notified). So I'm inclined to believe that the list is genuine.

However, the story as to how they got released and from where is anyone's guess at this point.

I made a word cloud of the leaked device names:

http://i.imgur.com/k6Cfb.jpg

I had to remove the words: iphone, ipad, ipod and DE as they overwhelmed the display.

Ha! I find myself almost disappointed mine isn't in there.

The "van" is striking; it's the Dutch version of the German "von". The fact that the former is larger than the latter indicates that the list contains more Dutch UDIDs than German, interesting.

Not necessarily, because "van" is much more common in Dutch names than "von" is in German names. (One reason for this is that "von" used to be restricted to German nobility, while there was no such restriction for "van", and as a result "von" is still relatively rare in German names.)

Additionally, "van" and "von" are possessive pronouns in Dutch and German respectively, which might explain why they are used (e.g. "iPod van Mike" means "Mike's iPod" — the owner may still be Dutch but "van" is not part of his name). Again I think this is relatively less common in German, where the genitive case could be used instead.

The frequency of van/von as part of last names is irrelevant because this is mostly about first names plus possessive markers. Dutch has genitive case on names as well (name + s), so I don't see why 'von' should be less frequent than 'van'.

Have you noticed the number of "steve jobs" in these device names ? :p

Reply from Jebus (who has been hellbanned):

    Would you mind sharing the library used to generate that cloud? It looks awesome

How does that hellban thing work? I wasn't notified, and that's a pity because I think I have made some valuable comments, and now I realize no one was able to read them? And probably will never try to contribute again since it's a waste of time and is not appreciated.

What was your earlier account? I can check if the comments or submissions are viewable.

Jebus

Sorry I didn't respond earlier. I walked away after posting that and didn't get back to hacker news.

I used the java IBM word cloud generator:

http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/IBM-Word-Cloud-Generat...

I couldn't find the exact project page. I used this as there were too many words to upload to wordle.

Total curiosity, as I'm in a vaguely similar situation: how did you choose to notify these people, and what did you tell them?

I couldn't find mine on the list, but I assume if a good number of people do then we can assume they're real.

My first suspicion was that they're faked with generic names attached just to get some press coverage.

Several people, both here on HN and elsewhere have confirmed that their UDID is on the list.

We should ask these people to post lists of their installed apps, maybe we can work out which app's list was leaked.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com