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The Myth of the Superhacker
mlimber writes "University of Colorado Law School professor Paul Ohm, a specialist in computer crime law, criminal procedure, intellectual property, and information privacy, writes about the excessive fretting over the Superhacker (or Superuser, as Ohm calls him), who steals identities, software, and media and sows chaos with viruses etc., and how the fear of these powerful users inordinately shapes laws and policy related to privacy and digital rights."
There are no super hackers out there.
Disregard that, I suck cocks.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
The solution to super hackers is simple, hot women need to take one for the team and date some nerds, this way their not in their parents basement but our with a real live girl. Girls on the plus side you can walk all over them and get anything you want.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I just came from a meeting on this very topic. The thing I came away from this meeting is that the real fear is that the Superhacker works for you. Or worse yet, you let him go yesterday. O. M. G.
Just as with any other field or profession, hacking is getting more specialized. It's not that the "superhacker" does not exist, but that such an animal's existence is getting harder and harder to maintain merely because of the expanding skillset and knowledge it takes to be a "hack anything" hacker.
That said, a lot of exploits don't come from being a super techie hacker with the skillz to defeat any system through sheer programming ingenuity or brute force. A lot of them still come from social engineering... convincing foolish people to give you enough information that a middle manager could hack them using nothing more than a standard login.
Where the "superhacker" mainly exists is in the movies. The guy who can pull out his laptop at any given location and hack into any given location on demand and with no preparation or research into the target. He's the human equivalent of the gun that doesn't run out of bullets and hair that dries into a perfectly coiffed do within seconds of getting out of the water.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Actually that quote originally comes from the French poet Baudelaire in the 1864 short story "Le Joueur généreux." The Usual Suspects just popularized it.
It doesn't take much reasoning to show why this must be the case.
So why is Ohm resistant?
You're punctuation is wrong. You wrote:
Girls on the plus side you can walk all over them and get anything you want.
What you meant to write:
Girls (on the plus side), you can walk all over them and get anything you want.
It's not just the incompetent that think that way, I'd go so far as to say a vast majority of computer-interested people do. Which is more entertaining to read, and think about: Stealing the Network: How to Own a Continent, with its stories of master programmers writing the best rootkits ever made over the course of two weeks to install on the systems they're about to root with their 0days for the purpose of bouncing their traffic around the internet while they use IPv6 to get around firewalls on Japanese military computers as a test to find out if they're worthy to hack the computers of several African banks for a mysterious man named Knuth in conjunction with a phreak gaining access to an African telephone switch by use of a stolen cell phone so that Knuth can intercept the phone calls of an enemy while a third hacker, who happens to be a very attractive female drunk and recently returned from shagging a random good-looking but smart computer nerd she met at the club while on Ecstasy, uses steganography software to send a message across the globe to a chick she met a while back (who is also a good-looking female computer nerd), all this happening at the same time a 16-year-old college sophomore (with a hot, nerdy asian girlfriend) is pulling a sweet hack involving duct-taping a laptop to the back of a computer cabimet and using it to intercept all traffic to a lab computer for the purpose of concealing his SSN-stealing activities on the school's network so that Knuth can sufficiently conceal his identity for his trip to South America where he'll live comfortably off the interest for the rest of his life, free from any government oppression................ or a study showing that almost all botnets are built using one of two common worms?
People want something to aspire to, and the idea of the existence of a superhacker controlling every aspect of the internet at a moment's notice is pretty good at taking up brain space.
ResidntGeek
ROFL!
"Girls on the plus side you can walk all over them and get anything you want."
You may want to define where that comma should go, or else you're gonna have some angry plus-size girls after you!
So why is Ohm resistant?
Get out of here! Now!
This guy's the limit!
St. Augustine has a worthwhile point to make here.
He was dealing with a fundamental theological problem: how does a good God create a universe in which evil exists. He came up with a novel solution: it's all good, but evil chooses lesser goods over greater goods -- an concept closely akin to the modern economic concept of opportunity cost. You cannot have the capacity to choose without the capacity to choose the wrong thing; if you were forced to choose the right thing all the time then you wouldn't have free will. Therefore free will implies the existence of evil, which is not a thing in itself, but a deficit.
Dante sharpens Augustine's point in the Divine Comedy: evil is really the result of stubborn, even aggressive stupidity. As outlandish as the punishments that are meted out in the Inferno, they're all pretty much people getting unlimited quantities of whatever it was they pursued in life.
The Devil, then, doesn't need to exist; at least if he does he has no power of his own. There is no need to believe in the nearly all-powerful devil of neo-Christian folklore. The power of Satan, both biblically and by orthodox theology, lies in the stupidity and stubbornness of humanity. A near omnipotent Devil is not really any better off than a powerless but tricky one because (a) near omnipotence is not very useful when the other side is omnipotent and (b) it is impossible to spread evil (in the Augustinian sense) by the exercise of raw power.
Which brings us to the Superhacker. There is no need for a hacker to obtain near omnipotent technical skills. In any case people with extremely high levels of technical skills have better uses for them. Instead, a hacker exploits the stubbornness and stupidity of people who own computers. They won't pay competent people to manage them. They'll choose software for superficial convenience. In Augustinian terms they choose the lesser goods of short term cost savings and convenience over the greater good of security.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Hackers, terrorists, drug dealers, child molesters, communists:
Useful tools for the control of a fearful and gullible populace.
"My high school still has absolutely zero knowledge of some of the hacks I pulled, and they never will know."
FYI Andrew Matecha of Vancouver BC, there is enough information on your band's website and MySpace page to identify you and figure out which school you committed your crimes against. Not that I care, but you might want to think about that before you brag about illegal activity you've participated in.
Mod parent up!
Not only is he making a good point, but he did so with a single 1 paragraph-long sentence.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
IPv4 address is a 32-bit integer. Typical notation is in base-256, but you can use other bases.
E.g. on my machine:
ping 66.102.7.104
is equivalent to:
ping 1113982824
Similarly, 24.75.345.200 is actually this address:
PING 407656904 (24.76.89.200): 56 data bytes
Hackers
Ever had your credit rating trashed by someone who lifted your financial info through a crack of a third party system? Many thousands of people have.
Odds 1:10,000
worse is you bank with retarded banks.
terrorists
Are you alive? Many thousands of people are not. Another couple dozen just died in Algiers today, killed by the local franchise operators of the same group that has attacked embassies, a US naval vessel, the WTC, the Pentagon, bars, nightclubs, hundreds of markets and restaurants, etc. This month, they are on a new campaign to ambush and kill anyone who reports to work in rural Afghanistan to teach young women how to read. It's super duper, though, that you don't find the people in London, or Madrid, or Detroit that preach the warm-up act for the same crap to be any concern at all. That's comforting!
odds 1:1,000,000
worse if your brown and live in a poor nation
drug dealers
You cite drug dealers, and then complain about "control?" These bastards deliberately seek to make behavioral slaves of generations of their neighbors, and think nothing of the resulting waste of lives and all of the accompanying damage. You'd rather that Wal-Mart sold heroin? Have you ever met someone with their teeth rotting right out of their meth-cooked skull? What is it that encourages you to gloss over the people that seek to make money peddling meth to school kids, or pretend they don't exist?
1:2
But the majority are pot pushers who sell to your kids. Your kids use it like you used to use beer... or pot/lsd. The potential harm for most people is minor.
child molesters
Ever met someone who had their youth stolen by someone like that? Let's find you a few thousand of them, and then you can address them, explaining how the people who did it to them don't exist, or aren't really a problem, and should be allowed to keep doing it. I'm sure you'll be persuasive.
1:100,000
Although these sick bastards affect everyone around their victims, they aren't that numerous. Many people still lead okay lives afterwards with some issues about security and sex. It's not a very homogenous group either.
communists
Well, you've got me there. They only killed a few hundred million people in the last century, so that's not so bad.
0:1
Communism is an idea. What killed most of the people your refering to is mob justice, fear, racial hatred, green, xenophobia, and poor management. Communism is general is a useless idea that was never fully implemented by anyone, could never be so, and used liek religion to clobber people.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."