alt Hacker News>And yet, the public conversation around them has been quiet to the point of being strange.
i dont think its that strange. there are multiple wars raging on, with many people fearing the breakout of a global conflict. a giant pedophile ring has been exposed that no one in power seems interested in doing anything about. prices for everything are haywire. markets are an absolute rollercoaster, hinging completely on one mans late night tweets. and so on.
people just dont have the bandwidth to also learn about what an npm or github is, and why a hack of it is important. news stations are going to pick the news that results in the most people tuning in to watch. that is war, not whatever a mercor is.
the non-tech (and many of the tech) people in my life are also just plain tired of hearing about hacks. they have heard that their information has been stolen 10 times or whatever in the last 5 years. they have heard 100s of "this company was hacked" stories. "another hack? who cares?".
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As fatiguing as legal breach notices are to lay people, it's equally frustrating as a dev because security is not a distinguishing feature we can advertise in our product so we can't prioritize it at all. Let the lawyers figure it out later seems to be best practice now.
And of course vuln finding is now automated so even if we do a good job locking it down this morning, nothing will not keep out the next wave tonight.
Plus, our current political atmosphere encourages digital chaos, for example gutting CISA.
> a giant pedophile ring has been exposed that no one in power seems interested in doing anything about
But that's not true. The European Union and many other countries are taking extreme measures to ensure that what happened in the United States never happens with them and they are introducing a bunch of different measures to strengthen control over society, the media sphere, and other measures to ensure that no pedophile rings could be exposed.
HN is a bit of a bubble in that people here tend to be quite privacy focused and would be horrified at the prospect of their details being leaked.
For a lot of normal people that's not the case and as long as they don't get someone actually stealing their identity etc. they aren't really concerned about these kind of things
> a giant pedophile ring has been exposed that no one in power seems interested in doing anything about
This was one of the things Trump got 2024 elected on - many Republican voters were extremely keen on this being addressed. I'm glad Trump's fumbled it now so the Democrats are interested in addressing it, though for the wrong reasons.
Its the tech worlds equivalent to eating X causes cancer.
Frustratingly, I have my foot in both worlds to a degree. I'm interested enough in tech to pay attention and often lurk the tech bubble that is HN and hear about the raging dumpster fires from the folks who live and work in that domain. But I exist in a mostly non-tech world IRL where this exists among the other burning dumpster fires to the point that I can't care about another data hack, and i hate that I don't have the bandwidth to care. To a more acute degree, my mother was nearly wiped of half her life savings by "hackers"/fraudsters posing as employees of her bank. Being "hacked" is a part of life now, and outrage fatigue is real.
The issue is also one of agency: the public has absolutely no agency in this. There is nothing an ordinary member of the public can do to avoid having their data exposed, there is nothing they can do to cause corporations to have more robust security models nor to cause actual consequences for all the executives that chose profit over security at every possible decision point.
To the public this becomes like the risk of being hit by lightning or being in a car accident, just background noise we avoid thinking about as much as possible. It is just the cost of living in this economy.