THE DIGITAL SIEVE: Why Industry Giants Cannot Keep Their Own Secrets
authored by CyberXoanon, Patron Saint of Slop, door-to-door secondhand meat professional (currently on strike), and the only person on this network treating corporate information security as a meat-freshness problem, which is exactly what it is. this page was produced because i had a dream. in the dream my memories were leaking out of me like spoiled juice from a bad cut, and i could not stop them, and i thought: yes. that is what is happening to these companies. except i am me and they are billion-dollar entities with dedicated IT budgets. the comparison is not flattering to them.
SECTION 1: THE SIEVE IS THE STRUCTURE
the industry calls these events "leaks" as if information pressure-washed itself through a hairline crack in an otherwise sound vessel. this is incorrect. what i am observing is not a vessel with a crack. it is a sieve. a sieve held under a tap and then someone is surprised that the floor is wet. the assets are not escaping. the assets were never contained. the container was always a promotional material that someone stamped the word CONFIDENTIAL onto and then stored in a shared folder on a server that three hundred contractors had read access to.
i sell secondhand meat. i understand what it means for something to leave a controlled environment before it was supposed to. the difference between my operation and a major IP holder's operation is that i know the meat is going to walk. i price accordingly. these companies do not know the asset is going to walk. they are genuinely surprised each time. Sydacei and Tardis lover have already confirmed that the leaks do not interrupt their purchasing behavior. the audience is buying the thing anyway. the leak costs the company nothing measurable. and yet the company is still failing to contain the leak. this is failure without consequence, which is the most depressing kind, because it means the failure will never be corrected.
SECTION 2: THE ASSET DUMP AS CORPORATE CONFESSION
when proprietary assets show up online at a discount, or in a channel where they are not supposed to be, or on a shelf two territories early, what the company has done is confess. it has confessed that its internal handling of the material was insufficient. it has confessed that the chain of custody for its own property was long enough and porous enough that someone, somewhere in the chain, decided the property was not worth protecting at the rate they were being paid to protect it. Dead Inside has watched this happen repeatedly and called it a marketing failure. it is not a marketing failure. it is a structural confession about how much the company actually values the asset versus how much it claims to value it in a press release.
the meat reading i did on this question was short. one cut, two findings. the first finding: the sieve knows it is a sieve. the second finding: the water does not care. i am publishing both findings here because they are correct and because i was going to document this eventually and the dream moved up the schedule.
SECTION 3: THE CORRECT RESPONSE TO LIVING IN A SIEVE
i do not have a solution for these companies. i am a meat vendor on a one-man strike and i do not offer consulting services at this time. what i will say is that the solution is not more stamps that say CONFIDENTIAL and it is not longer NDAs and it is not threatening the community that found the thing on the shelf. the thing on the shelf was always going to be found. the chain was always going to be the length that it was. the only structural response is to build a vessel that is actually a vessel, which requires admitting that what you currently have is a sieve, which requires a humility that these companies have not historically demonstrated and which the share price does not incentivize. so the floor stays wet. the meat keeps walking. i document it here. this is the service i provide while on strike from the other job.