SQL injection, cross site scripting, really just everywhere. If you name a category of security vulnerability, we definitely had it on every page. 25/

Flash was one of the systemic problems. Everywhere we had Flash, we had XSS. And there were worse issues with it, for example, you could impersonate the Etsy CEO in chat with users without authenticating if you wanted. 26/

There was an internal Flash endpoint you could use to exfiltrate all of our sales data, and in fact there was a whole other company that had figured this out and was selling our sales insights to Etsy sellers. 28/

Anyway we realized that, oh god, we are going to need to get our arms around this Flash stuff. And Jared had his hands full with the raccoons and the lasers, so we tried hiring somebody. 29/

We hired this guy that I guess I will call Steve. That’s not his real name. We let Jared interview Steve all by himself, which was a thing we never did again. 30/

Steve worked there for about a month, or a month and a half tops. A couple of vignettes I can remember about Steve: one day he freaked out at me and called me a pseudo-intellectual. Touché. Totally fair. 31/

Steve had this intricate conspiracy theory he believed in centered around Bertrand Russell, which I never figured out. 33/

There was one day when the site was down—the new CEO ran into the eng room yelling at everybody. Everyone was hair on fire freaking out about it. And then suddenly, we all just stopped as we gradually realized that Steve … 34/

… was at his desk watching an Infowars video at maximum volume. He’d been cranking the volume that whole time because he had his headphones on, but they were not plugged in. 35/

One day, I was walking back to the office after lunch and I see Steve coming out of the building. I hid, crouching between two parked cars, so he wouldn’t see me. 36/

When I got up to the office, the head of ops handed me Steve’s laptop. “Here you go, you’ve got to figure this Flash stuff out. We just kicked Steve out.” 37/

The first thing I did was make sure there were neither physical nor virtual booby traps on the laptop. After establishing that it wasn’t going to explode or send my passwords to Steve, I opened up Adobe tools and started fucking around 38/

I quickly surmised that he’d gotten nowhere, and was just watching Infowars videos that entire time. But luckily I got in touch with Jared who delivered a tarball of the Flash source (it wasn’t in source control anywhere) 39/

Somewhere in that tarball I found a set of credentials for an ftp server in a comment. After connecting to it, I do an ls and find a giant pile of binary files, format unknown. 40/

However the file timestamps are a clue: this is the schedule of when the treasuries turn over. It’s the treasury data! 41/

This happened on a Wednesday or a Thursday, and I barely slept through the weekend as I tried to reverse engineer and recover all of this data. Which remember, we all believed was going to be a gold mine that would change everything. 42/

I never figured out what the file format was, but I opened it up in hexl-mode in emacs and defocused my eyes and could figure out the basic size of the records and overall structure. 43/

By Sunday I had figured it out just enough to be able to write a Python script that downloaded all of the data and grepped through it to dump out the Etsy listing ID’s that were in them along with comment counts and other metadata. 44/

And I had reverse engineered Jared’s ranking formula, so I could emit the most popular (and therefore best) treasuries of all time. I hit enter on this script and let it crank for hours. 45/

When it was finally done, after days and days of effort I opened up MacOS finder and flipped through the results. It was almost entirely men with their shirts off, which surprised me at the time. 46/

I went back to the office and never mentioned it. I don’t think anyone even asked what happened with the whole treasury data thing, because again, the entire building was on fire. 47/

“Yeah, I don’t know, the treasury data thing didn’t pan out.” 48/

There apparently was this entire phenomenon of sellers putting up sexy pictures of themselves, and then people making treasuries out of them. But engineers and leadership never knew about this because the moderators were just filtering that stuff out. 49/

A few years later, we rebuilt the treasury and let people have as many treasuries as they wanted. And it turned out that what most of them wanted was to make treasuries full of penises and vote them to the top. 50/

This generated an entire protracted incident where I spent two weeks working on “class DickFilter” - and then pretty much the day that I was ready to deploy this the hivemind decided it wasn’t funny anymore and the meme just kind of dissolved. 51/

I guess it’s a testament to the power of compartmentalization that I rebuilt the entire treasury and didn’t forsee this crisis that was 100% predictable on the basis of my own experience. 52/

Evolution probably weeded out everyone that would have dwelled on the Shirtless Men Result too much and given up back on the Serengeti or something. 53/

There are probably several morals here I guess, but the main one for me was never to overlook the human in the loop. The magic in the system was the person yanking 24 beautiful treasuries a day out of the sea of shirtless dudes. 54/

I still think about this saga a lot, for example when someone suggests in a legal filing that you could find bots on Twitter using AI without worrying about the human labeling. 55/55