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Aurornis
mingus88
Can you imagine co-opting a trusted and secure (and free) bit of software and just making it worse at seemingly every turn?
And charging for it?!
I’m not sure what is more embarrassing: to be the company or to be a user.
miki123211
This is why Signal is so opposed to third-party apps (or forks) that connect to their service.
If you want to keep the branding of Signal being the secure app, you need to make sure that all Signal users are actually using a secure version of Signal.
If an insecure fork (like this one) becomes too popular, most groups will have at least one member using it, and then the security is gone.
pchristensen
That was Apple's same reasoning for shutting down that iMessage client app. These leaks seem to justify their concerns.
xorcist
If your product is a strong brand then that would make total sense.
I believe the main criticism against Signal is that they should focus on getting widespread traction of secure messaging, and that perhaps the brand can be a relatively distant concern.
calvinmorrison
That doesn't seem to be a problem for protocols and having a single implementation can lead to bugs that defy spec yet cause no issues obviously.
hypeatei
Why would the company be embarrassed? The users (i.e. high level U.S. officials) did no due diligence. Of course a private company is going to take the easiest and cheapest route. If it goes bad, just shut down and spin up a new entity.
Some speculate this was intentional intelligence gathering by the Israelis which is plausible too.
n2d4
> Some speculate this was intentional intelligence gathering by the Israelis which is plausible too.
How does this make sense? If they were gathering data, why would they add a public download? Surely the Israeli officials would not want foreign powers to access this?
Per Hanlon's razor, I don't think this is attributable to anything other than incompetence.
aucisson_masque
The Israeli would have made it secure so only them can access the data because knowing someone else's secret is worth something only when it's still a secret, if china, Russia and everyone can read the log of the American government it's worth nothing.
dylan604
>Some speculate this was intentional intelligence gathering by the Israelis which is plausible too.
Which does not bode well for the customers' counter intelligence abilities
donnachangstein
> The users (i.e. high level U.S. officials) did no due diligence.
But why would they? It's not their job. They have massive IT staff supporting them. "High level U.S. officials" are just executives; the pointy-haired bosses to the pointy-haired boss. Only difference is these wear little decorative pins over their breast pocket.
Every Fortune 500 company has dedicated IT staff for execs; someone you can call 24/7 and say "my shit's broke" and they respond "we just overnighted you a new phone".
These people couldn't even install an app on their MDM-controlled device, now the narrative has become we expect them to be making low-level IT decisions too?
Next week we'll be scrutinizing Pete Hegseth's lack of thoughts on rotating backup tapes.
bigbacaloa
[dead]
kube-system
The changes to the application are intentional by all parties because message archiving was required by law.
brookst
Sure, but they were not required to be done incompetently and insecurely.
_kb
Well, I suppose technically this /heapdump endpoint does satisfy that archive requirement.
undefined
yapyap
User for sure
HenryBemis
(read with sarcastic tone) But hey, this is a 'lite' version or a 'red' version (icon is red) or a 'purple' version (icon is purple), so I am cooler that then others that have the standard.
I haven't used WhatsApp for 'a very long time' as I have exited the FB ecosystem, but back in the day I remember seeing "lite" or "WhatsApp+" or other variations of the software. I wouldn't be surprised that those "lite" or "+" come with baggage.
BearOso
> They’re also not saying how much actual message content they have because the 410GB of heap dumps makes for a bigger headline number.
That's very important to say. I went through one of these massive data dumps recently and it was literally all cached operating system package updates and routine logs. Nothing at all of interest.
It's easy to cut the size on a heap dump. When it's not done it seems sketchy. But it could be a 512GB dump and already pruned, so I could be wrong.
harrall
Most of the the heap dump will be filled with stuff like java.util.String!blahjava.util.ArrayList!
Though the heap dump would have messages in flight at the time. It's obviously not as useful if you are just trying to grab messages for a specific person.
Frankly the most useful part might be any in-memory secret keys, which could be useful for breaking deeper into the system.
undefined
aorloff
Plenty of info from a live heap dump if you know what you are doing.
But these guys are only interested in "journalists" not people who spent decades digging into ad server heap dumps
barbazoo
Aren’t those Israeli software companies all supposed to be top notch, ex Mossad, yadda yadda? Doesn’t sound like it.
I hope the message dump is juicy.
msy
And SBF of FTX fame was ex-Jane St so obviously was a serious finance professional. This is why using past employers as a shorthand for capability is unwise.
sillystu04
In fairness, FTX had a profitable bankruptcy [1]. So it's still better to be scammed by Jane Street alumni than to be scammed by the usual alumni of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan etc
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-15/ftx-bankr...
gruez
I thought Israel has mandatory military service, so ex-mossad or ex-military signals intelligence doesn't really say much? Presumably they're directing people based on their skill set, so you'd expect most hackers to end up in mossad for their mandatory service.
kennywinker
> Presumably they're directing people based on their skill set
Big presumption.
If I were israeli, there’s no way in hell anybody with half a brain would want me near their spy agency.
When a gov is committing a genocide, their decisions are based on control and fear, not getting the best out of people.
Edit: downvote all you want. Israel is still committing a genocide. No hospitals left standing. Killing aid workers, journalists, and doctors. A million people on the brink of starvation. Literally salting the earth to prevent crops from being grown. That is war crimes, ghettoization, and genocide.
viraptor
That's not a great generalisation for the whole country. How many ex Mossad people interested in doing actual implementation in tech companies do you think there are? It's like "aren't those US software companies all supposed to be top notch, ex NSA yadda yadda?"
conradev
They do start a lot of tech companies specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200#Companies_founded_by...
The US only has voluntary military service, so the dynamics are different
lysp
The CEO/Founder of TeleMessage Guy Levit was the head of the Planning and Development Department of an elite technical unit in the Intelligence Corps of the IDF according to bio.
oceanplexian
One problem that smart people tend to make is in thinking that being really smart in one area is generalizable to all others. Just because they're good at AppSec doesn't mean they're good at networking or operating a webserver.
ripley12
I agree with this. It's surprising how often I encounter people with that belief, because I was disabused of it very early on in my career; this industry is chockablock with people who are brilliant in 1 area and deficient in others.
czl
Aka "halo effect"
karn97
That sounds more like a stupid person than smart lol
rsynnott
I'm not sure why you'd expect intelligence agency types to be particularly good at engineering, tbh.
rainworld
Spooks in general like to project a veneer of competence, downright invincibility. Entertainment media, journalists, experts play a big role in this. And by and large it works.
It’s especially true for spooks of a certain entity. Also, it’s easy to confuse brazenness, being protected from consequences, and usually downplayed or secret Western complicity with competence.
keeda
I'm not sure about this case, but maybe the assumption here is that these are people from a technical branch of Mossad, such as Unit 8200, which does SIGINT. I've interviewed 3 of them for your typical Big Tech SWE position, and to a candidate, they were very strong engineers. I never got to work with them, however, because they always got better counteroffers...
ExoticPearTree
> Aren’t those Israeli software companies all supposed to be top notch, ex Mossad, yadda yadda?
Working with a few companies like these, I can tell you that the marketing is top-notch, and very aggressive. The products not so. Most get better with time.
underdeserver
"All supposed to be".
This is a country of 10 million people, a rather heterogeneous one at that. There are going to be better and worse companies.
H8crilA
They are top notch - at working for profit and for the interests of their country.
jfim
Sounds like someone had a Java app and mistakenly exposed all of the JMX endpoints over HTTP. It's not the default configuration, and likely done out of carelessness.
pigbearpig
From the Wired article, it may not have even been a mistake, depending on the version of Spring Boot.
"Spring Boot Actuator. “Up until version 1.5 (released in 2017), the /heapdump endpoint was configured as publicly exposed and accessible without authentication by default."
davedx
This sounds utterly insane. Is Actuator a standard part of Spring Boot or is it an optional package of some kind?
teekert
Imaging putting up a firewall to mitigate this, then docker compose helpfully opening the ports for you. Security comes in layers.
formerly_proven
This was also part of the exploit chain in the "Volksdaten" incident.
0xbadcafebee
Or intentionally. There could be an APM agent which just lets you run heap dumps any time you want, or they enabled heap-dump-on-crash, or had a heap dump shutdown hook, etc. There's a lot of ways to trigger dumps. If we're talking about a full dump, and the apps were using most of the memory allocated to their container/VM/etc, 410GB is actually not that many dumps (we're probably talking uncompressed). At 4GB/dump, that's around 100, over possibly several years.
I just wonder where they were storing them all? At one place I worked, we jiggered up an auto shutdown dump that then automatically copied the compressed dump to an S3 bucket (it was an ephemeral container with no persistent storage). Wonder if they got in through excessive cloud storage policies and this was just the easiest way to exfiltrate data without full access to a DB.
trebligdivad
Is this a heapdump of servers or of clients? I can imagine that might have been intended as a place for crashing clients to log
kleton
TeleMessage is most likely an intelligence asset, and a burned one now that Trump's people stopped using it. A fake hack is the safest way for the agency responsible to leak the messages collected.
aorloff
and provide a plausible reason for the shutdown
kbouck
if a heap dump is a copy of all the bytes in memory, then wouldn't "thousands of heap dumps" likely be larger than 410GB?
napkin math:
410GB/1000 dumps = 410MB per dump?
410GB/2000 dumps = 205MB per dumpdiggan
Might be filtered somewhat, like extracted all ASCII text then compile that into the dump, rather than just the raw dump files.
Edit: reading the description on the dump again, seems exactly what they did:
> Some of the archived data includes plaintext messages while other portions only include metadata, including sender and recipient information, timestamps, and group names. To facilitate research, Distributed Denial of Secrets has extracted the text from the original heap dumps.
coolcase
Kubernetes pods?
gregorvand
TeleMessage CEO LinkedIn bio - reads like a terrible AI hatchet job:
"At the helm of TeleMessage, my leadership is defined by strategic innovation and a steadfast commitment to advancing telecommunications solutions. With a focus on SaaS products, our team has successfully navigated the industry's evolution, ensuring that we remain at the forefront of technological advancements. My role encompasses not only the oversight of our direction but also the cultivation of a culture that values ethical standards and collaborative success.
Our achievements are anchored in a proven track record of delivering results and solving complex problems with efficiency. Spearheading business development and marketing initiatives, we have established a reputation for excellence within the telecom sector. The acquisition of TeleMessage by Smarsh in 2024 stands as a testament to our team's dedication and my leadership in driving growth and fostering a united vision."
notpushkin
This just reads like a terrible LinkedIn-speak to me.
walrus01
Sufficiently advanced human written linkedin-speak is indistinguishable from a barely coherent chatgpt 3.5 that's been instructed to speak in business buzzwords.
teekert
Hahaha, I was thinking the exact same thing! I can imagine myself reading this 10 years ago and think: Wow this guy is on top of his CV game, how concise and elegant. But now, everybody has this ultra condensed LinkedIn speak, it has become so cringe, so meaningless.
CGMthrowaway
Overly polished language, abstract phrasing, and a focus on generalities over specifics.
ulrikrasmussen
"I'm a CEO. We're SaaS. I'm a CEO."
aubanel
Don't be too harsh, he added "we're telecom" somewhere
bigbacaloa
[dead]
greyface-
It's been weeks since the initial TeleMessage revelation... has the Signal Foundation responded in any way to the news? They condemn open source third-party clients and threaten trademark litigation when people use the "Signal" name in interop projects. Meanwhile, total silence when a defense contractor does the same thing.
ethersteeds
The charitable answer is that organizations across US society are currently all trying to be very still and quiet and not do anything to provoke a vindictive assault by this administration.
The less charitable one is that Moxie was the opinionated and uncompromising core of the Signal Foundation and has been removed from the board and completely vanished from the public eye. What it stands for now is a touch less clear.
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe
Meredith Whittaker seems kinda fearless though
decimalenough
Signal has done nothing wrong here. There's nothing they could meaningfully say that would do anything except draw heat from people looking for a scapegoat.
This mess is entirely the fault of Telemessage and the people who chose to use it for top-secret comms.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t
Remember Signal FOSS fork that got cease and desisted?
How is Molly doing these days? Is there an alternative server you could selfhost?
Anamon
I recall Whittaker talking about it in an interview, mainly complaining about how mainstream media kept referring to Signal as an "insecure messenger" when that was not at all the issue. Can't seem to find that interview now, though.
Probably not much they could do, because I'm sure that's why TeleMessage didn't call their app "Signal", but "SGNL".
asdffdasy
I'm annoyed by moxie vs fdroid as the next guy, but this is way above his desire to make a buck from his honest work.
this is about an overseas elite who profited from US war aid for decades holding the US presidency by the balls, and everyone think this is just incopetence.
think for a second, if any other administration was using a telephone or a communication software made by a never heard before company overseas, would you think it was just incompetence? why these traitors clowns get a pass?
troyvit
> if any other administration was using a telephone or a communication software made by a never heard before company overseas, would you think it was just incompetence?
One interesting thing I saw in the original article was that the US was using TeleMessage since February 2023. If that's true, it means we have two administrations who are responsible for this choice.
bstsb
very true, but i don't imagine the previous administration was discussing tactical plans on said modified client
TheRealPomax
Protecting your name is perfectly fine. You're allowed to make a fork of Firefox, you just can't call it Firefox or use any of Mozilla's branding. You're allowed to fork the open source part of VS Code, you just can't call it that or use Microsoft's branding. etc. etc. - you're free to do with open source whatever the license allows, but you're not allowed to use the original name or branding because you have zero rights to those unless the license explicitly stipulates how the name may be used by forks (like how tons of folks use the "Linux" name, and all of them do so with explicit written permission from the Linux foundation, as they own that name as a trademark)
baobun
That's not the issue here. VSCode and FireFox are false equivalents. Even if you'd rebrand the fork, Signal forbids non-official clients/builds from connecting to their servers. Enforcement has been selective but the last official word AFAIK is that you are not allowed to fork, rebrand, and distribute a client which alllows you to chat with Signal users.
Mozilla still allows you to install and download add-ons and use other Mozilla services like VPN and Relay from your LibreWolf build.
TheRealPomax
Two wrote a two-part complaint, one part about clients, and the other part about Signal going after people using the Signal name. My comment was only about that second part (hence why it starts the way it starts).
th0ma5
You're making me wonder if Signal is the customer of the third party and not the government.
namdnay
However bad their Signal fork was, at least it was legal. What's crazy is that this very company was also selling a cracked WhatsApp, which is a whole different kettle of fish... and people were buying it! real corporations and governments were buying this crap - it's insane
https://smarsh.my.salesforce.com/sfc/p/#30000001FgxH/a/Pb000...
n2d4
Why would that be illegal? In the Beeper case, the DOJ has not been sympathetic to companies attempting to ban third-party messaging clients of proprietary protocols [0] — is WhatsApp different?
The WhatsApp archiver, from what I can tell, seems to install a patch on the user's WhatsApp installation. Probably a security nightmare, sure, but I don't think it would be illegal.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/21/doj-calls-out-apple-for-br...
namdnay
They are actually distributing a rebuilt client binary, complete with the Meta branding. That’s a clear breach of both the licensing of the software (I’m pretty sure it’s not open source) as well as the trademarks of Meta
It’s not the same thing as providing a compatible app with their own branding
pid-1
> and people were buying it! real corporations and governments were buying this crap - it's insane
Anedote: in Wall Street, Global Relay and TeleMessage are the major players when it comes to achieving communication for compliance.
asdffdasy
before that wallstreet ran on yahoo messenger! they only stopped because new yahoo brand owners didn't understood the value of this and shut it down because there weren't enough teens signing up.
jfritsch1984
We‘re doing something way less critical at my job. But we have two pentests per year by external companies. How on earth is this level of incompetence even legal.
mmooss
Because software engineering is not taken seriously as engineering. What liability is there, for example?
namdnay
I don't think it was. Apparently they faked their SOC2 as well
eskibars
It's not
lubesGordi
'Heapdump' is a term I learned from debugging android applications 15 years ago. Its just a snapshot of the java processes memory. Its going to contain plaintext. Now why those heaps are available at an open http endpoint is another matter, and is the interesting point. I'm guessing the client code had that endpoint hardcoded somewhere or they saw a request to it. I'm not seeing how they could know anything about the back end or how the messages are stored from this. Did I miss something?
trallnag
The observability endpoints have defaults in Sprint Boot and are usually not customized. So if you know the path to the API, you also know the path to the heap dump endpoint
JohnMakin
It's just /actuator/heapdump and usually isn't hard to find. It's off by default in more modern versions but used to be default enabled.
willmarquis
Exposing unauthenticated /heapdump endpoints in production is a rookie mistake-especially for a service handling sensitive government comms. The presence of MD5 hashes and legacy tech like JSP just adds to the picture of poor security hygiene. This breach is a textbook case of why defense-in-depth and regular audits are non-negotiable.
Traubenfuchs
Don't hate on JSP.
Java Server Pages is now Jakarta Server Pages, part of Java EE (Jakarta EE) and it's latest version 11 was released just a year ago. Spring Framework 7 will be released by the end of 2025 and be based on it. Tomcat 11 is already based on it as well.
And all of this is based on the thriving Java ecosystem.
Version 12 is under development.
If they kept their stuff updated, nothing about this is legacy. It just declined in popularity.
You can build insecure trash and expose unprotected endpoints with next.js, or whatever is currently considered state of the art, as well.
undefined
WatchDog
Great example to use whenever legislators want to ban or add backdoors to e2e encryption.
udev4096
The title is outright wrong and should be criticized for spreading false information. They have NOT published anything, it's only for "researchers", which is a way of saying "we will write false title of this article just so we can get a lot of attention"
0xbadcafebee
> Because the data is sensitive and full of PII, DDoSecrets is only sharing it with journalists and researchers.
Yeah I'm normally a big proponent of responsible disclosure, but in this case, I think the more painful, damaging leak is required.
Firstly, autocrats, fascists & oligarchs don't care that much if you hack them. They will just keep using these tools (or another one just like it) ignoring the correct procedure their government already wants them to use. The citizens of affected nations need to be made angry by their leaders' failure to do their jobs correctly, and that's only gonna happen when there are consequences for their actions. Their incompetence put their nations at risk, and now it's clear they have failed to keep their intel safe. They have failed hard, let them fail hard.
Second, journalists and researchers have almost completely lost their power. In a non-democratic world (we're nearly there, just give them a little more time), when a journalist exposes corruption or incompetency, that journalist/researcher is simply silenced by the government. Silence the journalists and nobody knows what's going on so oppression can continue unchecked. Every person who gets silenced has a greater chilling effect on the whole society; nobody wants to be next. This is how authoritarians gain power. Oppression with no resistance or consequence legitimizes the oppression.
If we were just talking about typical corporate incompetence re: security, and the only thing at stake is a single stock or individuals' data, I would say disclose responsibly. But when it comes to stopping autocracy, the gloves have to come off. They sure as shit aren't gonna play by any rules, so neither should we.
3036e4
They don't need to "silence journalists", since a large number of people were duped to think real truth comes from random anonymous accounts on social media or from some charismatic political influencer they follow. It doesn't matter what leaks are exposed when it can just be handwaved as "fake news" and enough voters will buy that.
megous
Journalists being a "check on the government" is a tale for the gullible. That's why there doesn't need to be any silencing of them. Glory to the exceptions, of course.
Ray20
>It doesn't matter what leaks are exposed when it can just be handwaved as "fake news" and enough voters will buy that.
Especially in conditions when you don't have to lie at that.
It's not because voters are so gullible that they are ready to believe any word of a charismatic leader. The loss of trust to the mainstream media and to the scientific community is a natural phenomenon in environment when they only tell lies to push their political agenda.
CobrastanJorji
> The citizens of affected nations need to be made angry by their leaders' failure to do their jobs correctly, and that's only gonna happen when there are consequences for their actions.
This is a really dangerous line of thinking. It's the line of thought that slides forwards to "I love America so much, but to save America I have to get Americans to really feel the pain, and to do that I need to <horrible violence> to them to wake them up and make them see how things are bad."
Hurting people in order to make them see how they are being hurt is almost never the right call.
fumeux_fume
This is a really dangerous line of thinking. It's the line of thought that slides forwards to "I love America so much, but to save America I have lie and cover up the truth of the <horrible violence> being done to them so they'll never see how bad things have gotten."
Lying to people in order to make them never see how they are being hurt is almost never the right call.
scheeseman486
You're describing accelerationism and while the ethics behind it are iffy at best, history contends that it does work to help spur revolution.
CobrastanJorji
Lots of shitty, evil things work really well. Most people don't do evil just because they love evil. They do it because it works best.
Lying, propaganda, and shooting a bunch of people are also really effective techniques to spur revolution, but that doesn't mean they're good ideas.
Yizahi
If we really think about the issue, then it is clear that 99.99% of the government information can be public with zero consequences to the citizens. I'm guessing the only few exceptions are active military ops, active spy ops and ways to access secure systems (passwords etc.). Everything else is more or less safe. Embarrassing to the politicians, but safe.
vharuck
You need to account for the risk of blackmail, persecution, and embarrassment (e.g., evidence of infidelity, refugee status, medical condition). Most of the time, citizens have the right to keep secrets or lie.
rtpg
I feel like it's valuable to not flatten the context here. We are talking about leaking texts by the Trump admin (and I guess some law enforcement agencies using this?).
There is a lot of daylight between dropping a bunch of texts for government officials and committing horrible violence against people as a whole! These are not the same thing! One could be good/fine while the other is bad!
Having said that I would worry for a WikiLeaks-style "oh now this random person's info is out there because it was in one of these e-mails".
I just want to see the gossip
oivey
That quote does not say anything about citizens inflicting pain on others. That’s such a strange way to read it. It’s saying to vote shitty leaders out. I’m not sure what you think any other possible alternative there could be.
TechDebtDevin
What if you're hurting people to prevent them from hurting people...
afavour
> The citizens of affected nations need to be made angry by their leaders' failure to do their jobs correctly, and that's only gonna happen when there are consequences for their actions.
The consequences likely wouldn’t be felt by those leaders though. Who knows what info is in those logs about informants, agents etc etc. Leak it openly and they’re dead.
protocolture
Completely agree.
We had the Cabinet Leaks in Aus https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-31/cabinet-files-reveal-...
The national broadcaster picked 2 things to report on, then gave the rest of it back to the government.
The act of helping cover this shit up likely changed the course of politics in this country for decades. Theres likely stuff in that cabinet that was well in the public interest and needed disclosure.
Signalgate or whatever is likely the same. And I dont care which party it harms or whatever. It seems relevant that people should have more information, not less considering everything that is happening.
bob_theslob646
Isn't it against the law in the United States to use outside channels for government communications? Wasn't this the whole scandal about Clinton? Please correct me if I am wrong.
afavour
Amazingly the app is on the governments list of approved apps. The scandal is what they’re discussing on there: highly sensitive information you normally go to very secure channels to talk about.
rtpg
My understanding is that it was added fairly recently at that, and already this has happened. This must be a record time in "change of policy leading to the most embarassing result". Only a couple of months!
ensignavenger
According to the article: "TeleMessage has been used by the federal government since at least February 2023"
I don't know if that use was authorized or not.
ok123456
This is a pitfall of having an approved software list (whitelist).
Malfeasance or misfeasance could include flat-out spyware versions of software, often made available in internal "software stores," instead of legitimate software distributed from the developer or through official channels.
floam
The app exists to comply with the regulations, was my understanding.
FerretFred
Based on pure guesswork I'd say that you higher up the person, the less the rules apply.
undefined
Yizahi
I love when politicians, lobbying for the backdooring all communication software are getting pwned in the same way. Too bad they lack either brain cells or basic human empathy to make a connection between these events.
diggan
> Too bad they lack either brain cells or basic human empathy to make a connection between these events.
I think that's giving them too much benefits. They know what they're doing, it's clear they want "security for me, but not for you", and claiming they're too dumb to know exactly what they're doing is playing it exactly like how they want it.
Yizahi
Yeah, that the "lacking empathy part". Most of them are sociopaths and psychopaths, in the medical sense. They only want power for themselves at any cost to others.
halfmatthalfcat
I don’t think it’s that extreme. They probably view themselves as the arbiters of society and are inherently granted more privilege than a normal citizen. Paternalistic more than sociopathic. Issue is our parents, while have the benefit of experience, don’t know shit about shit really. Especially when it comes to tech.
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So one of their servers had a /heapdump endpoint that publicly served a heap dump of the server? This whole saga is out of control.
This group didn’t really “publish” anything, though. They’re offering access to journalists through a request form. They’re also not saying how much actual message content they have because the 410GB of heap dumps makes for a bigger headline number.