Ah, this is disappointing to see. I totally understand it from Troy's perspective: HIBP has obviously grown to a scale where it really doesn't make sense any more as a spare-time project. However,...
Ah, this is disappointing to see. I totally understand it from Troy's perspective: HIBP has obviously grown to a scale where it really doesn't make sense any more as a spare-time project.
However, having it get acquired by someone totally changes the dynamic, and means it has to become a business. Troy has his list of principles and says he wants to stay involved with it and so on, but all of that won't mean much after he sells to someone else and no longer has full control (or any control, depending on the details).
HIBP was also only able to reach this level of prominence and scale through some organizations donating bandwidth, capabilities, and even work sometimes because they recognized the value of the service and wanted to help. For example, Pwned Passwords uses a nice k-anonymity method for lookups that had Cloudflare involved, and I believe Cloudflare also basically donates a lot of the bandwidth/resources that HIBP uses to handle so many requests. If I was one of those organizations, I probably wouldn't be very impressed that my donations had been leveraged to increase the sale price. I'm curious if we'll see Cloudflare or some of the others pulling their support now.
What's KPMG and why might that be a bad thing? I'm fairly clueless to this whole sector, I only know Troy Hunt from his youtube videos back in the day.
What's KPMG and why might that be a bad thing? I'm fairly clueless to this whole sector, I only know Troy Hunt from his youtube videos back in the day.
Ah, this is disappointing to see. I totally understand it from Troy's perspective: HIBP has obviously grown to a scale where it really doesn't make sense any more as a spare-time project.
However, having it get acquired by someone totally changes the dynamic, and means it has to become a business. Troy has his list of principles and says he wants to stay involved with it and so on, but all of that won't mean much after he sells to someone else and no longer has full control (or any control, depending on the details).
HIBP was also only able to reach this level of prominence and scale through some organizations donating bandwidth, capabilities, and even work sometimes because they recognized the value of the service and wanted to help. For example, Pwned Passwords uses a nice k-anonymity method for lookups that had Cloudflare involved, and I believe Cloudflare also basically donates a lot of the bandwidth/resources that HIBP uses to handle so many requests. If I was one of those organizations, I probably wouldn't be very impressed that my donations had been leveraged to increase the sale price. I'm curious if we'll see Cloudflare or some of the others pulling their support now.
I kind of wish it would've been bought by Mozilla for Firefox Monitor, it would've aligned nicely.
I'm glad Troy is getting some of the burden off his shoulders, but a part of me can't help but feel skeptical that this is now a KPMG thing.
What's KPMG and why might that be a bad thing? I'm fairly clueless to this whole sector, I only know Troy Hunt from his youtube videos back in the day.
KPMG is one of the big four accounting firms which are all deeply involved with all large corporations across the globe.