[the_snooze]

"Blue Is the New Black (Market): Privacy Leaks and Re-Victimization from Police-Auctioned Cellphones"

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/05/re-victimization-from-po...

Researchers bought up a bunch of seized phones from police auction sites and found about 25% of them were trivially unlockable and still held sensitive data about suspects and victims.

[paxys]

Is this really "mind blowing"? Knowing the competency of the average police department, I'd consider it more par for the course.

[the_snooze]

The result is obvious, but the question is demonstrably not. Good researchers know how to ask interesting questions that no one had bothered to ask before. Seeing clever work like this makes me reflect and continually ask myself "What cool angles am I missing?"

[jjoonathan]

Novelty is overrated. Finding proof and pushing for accountability is so much more important.

[klabb3]

Isn’t novelty also arbitrary and subjective? I recall when everyone seemed to think there was novelty in applying ML to X, where X was something very specific. “Look, it works here too!” I doubt that’s considered novel now.