All he had to do is pretend to be one of their female friends? Forget the con part. He was able to find 350 women who didn't think it was all that peculiar that one of their friends wanted them to video Skype naked. Who knew?
The real question is how did they catch him? Most of these blackmailing types never get caught or even reported. How many women complain about their ex spreading their nudes around? How many sites are built up around "ex-gf nudes" or "ex-bf nudes" and so on. This is so common that it's just part of the social fabric of the Internet.
I don't see how law enforcement can really stop it beyond telling people to be aware of what they tell people online and who they communicate with.
If something is truly secret it would be wise not to put it on the internet or tell anyone.
Your nudes aren't a secret the moment you transmit them to someone else. Black hats are literally waiting to sniff that stuff out of the air or off of the network. They will impersonate your ex gf or bf to get your nudes. They will even pretend to be your friend or your bf, get your nudes or make a sex tape and use that against you.
None of this is new. These tactics are old hat. The guy in this particular case didn't cover his tracks but black hats of more sophistication usually do. How can we stop Anonymous or some other hacker group from finding our nudes and blackmailing us with it? They have the passwords to all our accounts already and unlike this guy they wont be found.
The only way to be truly safe is to filter what you are willing to upload. If it's truly something which could ruin you then you shouldn't put it on the internet. The internet has changed for the worst when it comes to privacy and it doesn't matter if its the whitehat or blackhat side, neither side respects your privacy.
You're FSM-right we don't. We're supposed to be the good guys here.
This asshole (allegedly) blackmailed 350 people. I say allegedly because he hasn't been convicted in a court of law, which again, is the way we do things around here. You know, in motherfucking civilization.
This is not the victim's fault. What the hell is wrong with you people?
Part if it is the victims fault. The victim put their nudes on the internet. The victim gave their information away. Once it's out there on the internet any black hat can get a hold of it. What do black hats typically do with this kind of information? It's a shame that most of the general public has no knowledge of information security and does not value their privacy, willingly giving up their most private intimate moments to white hats (facebook) and black hats alike. But once you give it to the white hats eventually it will reach the black hats so anything you put online at all is ultimately going to end up being fair game.
It sucks but that should be common knowledge. And there is no real way to stop this sort of blackmail. Usually it's not done in such a dumb way like how this guy did it. If a bunch of Anonymous hackers have your nudes then there is nothing you can do.
I have seen women get blackmailed before with the threat of their nudes being leaked by their ex bfs. I've seen women blackmail dudes over pictures they sent of their cocks, taboo perverted fantasies, or cheating on their wives. I have seen girlfriends and boyfriends use the threat of suicide to keep a leash on their partners as well as using the threat of leaking dirty secrets. These scenarios are VERY common. Why is this one guy being singled out? Because he has hundreds of victims?
There are probably millions of victims from hundreds of thousands of blackmailers doing the same or worse. This guy is being singled out probably to bring precedent or as a test case. If they can convict him of 100 years in prison then there are a million others just like him all who can be convicted the same way.
And unlike the whole pedophile hysteria which are more akin to the red scare I think this is a real problem. Blackmail is a real threat and in most of these scenarios there isn't a way to catch the hackers involved. It's one of the trades of blackhats,which also include identity threat, entrapment, swatting.
The real question is should Superintellignece be developed first by the private sector (Google) or by the public sector (Government)? Who should get it first and why?
The one without guns and nukes, of course. I'm not a reflexive defender of the private sector versus the government (hell, I'm employed by the government), but I'm hardly so naive as to think that just because the government creates something, it's "mine", any more than it would be if Google created it. If the US government invents superintelligence it will probably just use it to spy on American citizens.
Google could spy on American citizens too but without the Constitution to worry about.
Let me clarify. When it comes to government, actions are infinitely more telling than words. In fact, actions ARE government, and words are just that: words. It is the actions of government that define government, not the process of arriving at those actions.
When you discuss how government will be determined, you are discussing words. When you discuss how government will be implemented, you are discussing actions. Only actions can be judged moral or immoral, right or wrong, beneficial or detrimental. Only actions can be used to determine gain or loss, success or failure, asset or liability.
My point is that even if you had a "superintelligence" that you could use to design government, in the end, only the actions count to those who are subject to that government. And the value of that government can only be determined by those who are subject to it -- NOT those who design it.
So the question, from my perspective, is moot. We are talking about thousands of years of coercive authority. What possible combination of coercive authority could a superintelligence come up with that isn't just a re-hash of thousands of years of coercive authority? The more interesting question is: when will human beings finally give up on coercive authority?
Yes and superintelligence might be the way to move away from oppression and coercion onto a government form which doesn't require as much of that to function. We do require governments as a necessary evil so how can we make governments as tolerable as possible for the people (us) who live under them? Superintelligence could tell us how to do it and eventually run the entire government for us without any corruption and minimal coercion.
A better and more fundamental question would be "will voluntary association ever replace coercion" (with respect to public policy). What does it matter if public policy is decided by human beings, artificial intelligence, or coin flips, if that public policy is founded on and implemented through coercion? The end result is the same: injustice. Same as it is in the animal kingdom.
Will human beings ever rise above the animal kingdom in this respect, or will public policy forever be achieved through violence and/or threat of violence? That is a much more interesting question than how public policy will be determined.
Human beings suck at creating policy because human beings are too emotional to think logically about the long term consequences. We see it all the time with these various laws such as the war on drugs, 3 strikes, or cutting off welfare recipients who fail drug tests. Anyone who does the math and logic and thinks about it without emotion would see these policies would lead to really bad or really costly results. A superintelligence would be at the same time more compassionate than any human could be, more rational, more logical, and as a result would generate the best possible policy.
Policy is like a form of math, it's a type of optimization algorithm. This is something an artificial intelligence would be great at. If you watch the movie Tron Legacy you will see some of the philosophical elements of it there. Superintelligence would be able to design the perfect government or just progressively better governments at a rate which best suits our species and life on earth. It's clear that our social systems and our governments aren't evolving fast enough to deal with our technology or our population growth rate. Something must be done before we destroy the habitat our species depends on.
I think Google may have the goal of creating a Superintelligence which utilizes the internet as a knowledge base and results in an intelligence explosion.
The real question is should Superintellignece be developed first by the private sector (Google) or by the public sector (Government)? Who should get it first and why?
I know the age of superintelligence is near but our current concept of government is still based around documents like Constitutions which are hundreds of years old. We still rely on humans even though we know that humans are the weakest link in any information security system due to the ease at which they can be corrupted. Superintelligence would not be corruptible if done right, and it would be smarter than us all by magnitudes where it probably would be able to generate or design the best most liberating yet most secure form of government where autonomy is maintained compared to oligarchy where autonomy is typically sacrificed for comfort and security.
Do you see a time when we no longer have to rely on humans to manage a nation, or the planet itself?
If all political groups are allowed to use illegal methods of pursing their self interest then Anonymous is not going to be the only group doing this and many groups that take opposing positions against Anonymous will be doing illegal activities to try and stop the political agenda of Anonymous.
That is why vigilantism isn't necessarily a good tactic. Any side can apply those tactics and it hurts the people who aren't willing to be criminals due to their job or having too much to lose.
So basically this is a Faux News article arguing against net neutrality.
No it does the opposite. It promotes upgrading the infrastructure. If you don't use it why should they have an excuse to build it? Netflix will make us use it and force them to build it. At the same time we gotta solve the problem with low res computer monitors. It makes no sense why computer monitors have such low DPI and low res and it's 2013. It seemed monitors looked better 10 years ago.
When I listen to music or watch movies with my Grado headphones on my Asus Xonar Essence STX and my Samsung wide screen high res monitor I am willing to pay for quality matching the hardware. I'm not willing to pay for subpar crap.
The solution to expand the market beyond Megabox and bootleg is to offer high quality PREMIUM entertainment and market high quality audiophile and high end graphics cards and monitors. When people are willing to spend $200 on a sound card, and they own $1000+ worth of iTunes music and $200+ worth of movies why wouldn't you think they'd spend $5 more for the.flac? iTunes sound quality sucks with their.aac 128kbit. We should all be using flac yet somehow everyone is still downloading these low quality mp3s on their cheap ipod ear plug headphones? People settle for lower quality when you don't market high quality and while the bootleg music and movies are lower quality when you're offering quality just as low as that then who cares?
Offer at a minimum 24bit 96khz Flac. Offer higher speed internet with blue ray quality Netflix at a reasonable price and people will choose that over Megabox unless they genuinely cannot afford it in which case you didn't lose any sales. People want the best because life is short so offer the best.
That goes against everything they said in their press releases? So which is the truth? Why would they need to keep the keys if they are trying to protect themselves from prosecution?
You can encypher your data before uploading on *any* site. At that point they are all equally secure. Kim's claim was that Mega was more secure by design.
However, the claim is completely broken. Mega is using a public/private key pair - generated by the web site - and so their servers actually *do* know both your keys, and *can* decrypt your data. So, basically, it is no more secure than dropbox.
The private key is generated on your computer and not the website. They don't have a copy of the private key.
What part of "data is encrypted at the client using javascript" don't you understand?
I'll be happy to explain it to you. Was it the "javascript" part? Or maybe "encryption"? I can go over the difference between "client side" processing and "server side" if you like.
The "client side" javascript encryption really isn't safe. Even if the javascript is delivered via SSL, the fact is that you are loading a copy of the encryption program from the server each time you execute it. That's not safe, because the server can, at any time, change the program from under you and expose your data. That's no different from just letting them have your unencrypted data and hoping they'll keep it safe.
If you are that paranoid then encrypt it yourself prior to uploading it.
well, technically, they only have to break your hashed password (probably easiest attack vector). Then they can decrypt your private key, and then they have full access to all your files.
And then they find your porn stash. Big deal. Most people aren't cyber criminals or wares pirates but nearly everyone has porn they don't want to keep all over their harddrive for their kids to find.
they are 'much worse' as they can be used by just about anyone who has some level of computer proficiency. Both agreed that it was very difficult to protect against the highly-complex nation-state developed malware like Stuxnet, Flame and Gauss.
Um, nation-states are not "just about anyone". They actually tend to be the same people who have all those "dirty" traditional weapons too. Sure, in theory some rogue basement dweller could launch a massive cyber attack just before his mother calls him up for dinner, but in general such attacks build on information gathered by intelligence services and the State Department (you need to know what you are targeting to do it efficiently).
The fact that such dire warnings come from someone who just happens to profit from the existence and above all fear of malware makes it a little hard for me to take it as seriously as he apparently does.
Incidentally, if some basement dweller on the other side of the planet really does pose a threat to your national security, you need to fire the clowns who set up your IT infrastructure and hire some people who actually know wtf they are doing. Stay on top of exploits, keep your software and patchsets up-to-date, plug the holes in your firewalls, don't do stupid things like plaintext storage of passwords anywhere, force the use of keys where possible, etc... you know, all the basic stuff that gets discussed whenever security comes up. Most successful attacks that make the news are not examples of very clever attackers but rather abysmally unaware defenders.
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but from here it looks like someone complaining that they're car might get stolen because they keep leaving it running with the doors open in a busy part of town with no police or cameras. "Omg auto theft is likely to go up and people will be run over by inexperienced/drunk/high drivers who shouldn't be behind the wheel, we must do something!" Yeah, park it in a better spot, turn of the engine, take the keys out of the ignition, lock the door, and come back to check on it at least once a day. Derp.
Who they use to launch the attack isn't necessarily the people who you would expect. Anyone could be used to launched the attack but the code could be written by the military. Or it could be the other way around where the military contracts anyone to write the code but then uses it's people. It's impossible know who is what or who does what.
It's not just Internet-connected infrastructure. In many cases, people took the proper precautionary steps, but weren't actively paranoid. To protect your infrastructure today, you really do need to be paranoid. People bring in gadgets infected with malware, plug the malware-infected gadget into a PC, and the PC infects every system on the network. OK, so you ban people from bringing in gadgets, and now you remove all secretarial PCs from the main network. Maybe you even disable every USB port and force people to use PS/2 keyboards and mice. Well, the next infection comes in from a contractor who installs software directly from the manufacturer. If the hackers know that you use Flash and/or Java in your company's intranet, it's not inconceivable that they manage to infect Flash or Java. I mean, we're talking about nation states here. They can do whatever the fuck they want, and money is not much of an issue.
Somewhere along the line, people with resources a hundred times greater than yours will come up with a line of attack that you didn't defend against. And if you protect against everything obvious, who knows what the crazy fuckers will do? If I were on the Iranian nuclear power commission, I'd probably give the Americans and Israelis a semi-obvious backdoor to my network, just so that they don't send in black ops teams. I'm not saying that I think the Americans and Israelis would be so stupid, but, then again, these people probably grew up watching James Bond movies. They probably think that shit is exciting.
If you can't inspect the source code and the compiler then it could very well be suspect. A backdoor in the compiler itself is all it takes to put a backdoor on everything compiled with that compiler. How would you defend against that?
All of this biologist type speak doesn't help regular people to understand how it can help cure cancer. It does seem like it could be targeted but what the hell is it and where does it come from? is it important? Or does it only cause cancer?
It's already an arms-race and now it's their move. And who has the money to do a cost/benefit analysis nowadays?
If it's an arms race then they already lost. The smartest minds in the field already know that. This is a political and legal batter but if it becomes a technological arms race there is no way they will be able to win there. That is why they are trying to use the law to ban certain technology and suppress certain companies from becoming profitable such as the case with Kim Dot Com.
The more they fight the technology the faster they lose because the people who make technology, who write code, virtually all the best hackers, all the best programmers, and the majority of the young people, all are against them. Time and technology are against them.
It's more important to most of us to be able to store our files in the cloud and access entertainment online unrestricted than it is to keep the old anachronistic industries alive. Those industries which think they are too big to fail just aren't useful like they once were.
Yeah, but I think the point is that third party indexer type sites will start popping up, allowing people who are members of such sites to traffic in digital information. As long as where it is hosted isn't liable for anything, there will be no real, long-term and effective way of preventing people from sharing information with a computer & the internet.
This is just the beginning of the evolution of information transfer (don't want to call it "piracy" - that word has been co-opted to mean something it does not - let's call a spade a spade here and use the term information transfer).
The poser was trying to compare information to currency as if it's money. It's not money. It's not the information, it's the content. Content has to be generated continuously.
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All he had to do is pretend to be one of their female friends? Forget the con part. He was able to find 350 women who didn't think it was all that peculiar that one of their friends wanted them to video Skype naked. Who knew?
The real question is how did they catch him? Most of these blackmailing types never get caught or even reported. How many women complain about their ex spreading their nudes around? How many sites are built up around "ex-gf nudes" or "ex-bf nudes" and so on. This is so common that it's just part of the social fabric of the Internet.
I don't see how law enforcement can really stop it beyond telling people to be aware of what they tell people online and who they communicate with.
If something is truly secret it would be wise not to put it on the internet or tell anyone.
Your nudes aren't a secret the moment you transmit them to someone else. Black hats are literally waiting to sniff that stuff out of the air or off of the network. They will impersonate your ex gf or bf to get your nudes. They will even pretend to be your friend or your bf, get your nudes or make a sex tape and use that against you.
None of this is new. These tactics are old hat. The guy in this particular case didn't cover his tracks but black hats of more sophistication usually do. How can we stop Anonymous or some other hacker group from finding our nudes and blackmailing us with it? They have the passwords to all our accounts already and unlike this guy they wont be found.
The only way to be truly safe is to filter what you are willing to upload. If it's truly something which could ruin you then you shouldn't put it on the internet. The internet has changed for the worst when it comes to privacy and it doesn't matter if its the whitehat or blackhat side, neither side respects your privacy.
You're FSM-right we don't. We're supposed to be the good guys here.
This asshole (allegedly) blackmailed 350 people. I say allegedly because he hasn't been convicted in a court of law, which again, is the way we do things around here. You know, in motherfucking civilization.
This is not the victim's fault. What the hell is wrong with you people?
Part if it is the victims fault. The victim put their nudes on the internet. The victim gave their information away. Once it's out there on the internet any black hat can get a hold of it. What do black hats typically do with this kind of information? It's a shame that most of the general public has no knowledge of information security and does not value their privacy, willingly giving up their most private intimate moments to white hats (facebook) and black hats alike. But once you give it to the white hats eventually it will reach the black hats so anything you put online at all is ultimately going to end up being fair game.
It sucks but that should be common knowledge. And there is no real way to stop this sort of blackmail. Usually it's not done in such a dumb way like how this guy did it. If a bunch of Anonymous hackers have your nudes then there is nothing you can do.
I have seen women get blackmailed before with the threat of their nudes being leaked by their ex bfs. I've seen women blackmail dudes over pictures they sent of their cocks, taboo perverted fantasies, or cheating on their wives. I have seen girlfriends and boyfriends use the threat of suicide to keep a leash on their partners as well as using the threat of leaking dirty secrets. These scenarios are VERY common. Why is this one guy being singled out? Because he has hundreds of victims?
There are probably millions of victims from hundreds of thousands of blackmailers doing the same or worse. This guy is being singled out probably to bring precedent or as a test case. If they can convict him of 100 years in prison then there are a million others just like him all who can be convicted the same way.
And unlike the whole pedophile hysteria which are more akin to the red scare I think this is a real problem. Blackmail is a real threat and in most of these scenarios there isn't a way to catch the hackers involved. It's one of the trades of blackhats,which also include identity threat, entrapment, swatting.
The real question is should Superintellignece be developed first by the private sector (Google) or by the public sector (Government)? Who should get it first and why?
The one without guns and nukes, of course. I'm not a reflexive defender of the private sector versus the government (hell, I'm employed by the government), but I'm hardly so naive as to think that just because the government creates something, it's "mine", any more than it would be if Google created it. If the US government invents superintelligence it will probably just use it to spy on American citizens.
Google could spy on American citizens too but without the Constitution to worry about.
Let me clarify. When it comes to government, actions are infinitely more telling than words. In fact, actions ARE government, and words are just that: words. It is the actions of government that define government, not the process of arriving at those actions.
When you discuss how government will be determined, you are discussing words. When you discuss how government will be implemented, you are discussing actions. Only actions can be judged moral or immoral, right or wrong, beneficial or detrimental. Only actions can be used to determine gain or loss, success or failure, asset or liability.
My point is that even if you had a "superintelligence" that you could use to design government, in the end, only the actions count to those who are subject to that government. And the value of that government can only be determined by those who are subject to it -- NOT those who design it.
So the question, from my perspective, is moot. We are talking about thousands of years of coercive authority. What possible combination of coercive authority could a superintelligence come up with that isn't just a re-hash of thousands of years of coercive authority? The more interesting question is: when will human beings finally give up on coercive authority?
Yes and superintelligence might be the way to move away from oppression and coercion onto a government form which doesn't require as much of that to function. We do require governments as a necessary evil so how can we make governments as tolerable as possible for the people (us) who live under them? Superintelligence could tell us how to do it and eventually run the entire government for us without any corruption and minimal coercion.
A better and more fundamental question would be "will voluntary association ever replace coercion" (with respect to public policy). What does it matter if public policy is decided by human beings, artificial intelligence, or coin flips, if that public policy is founded on and implemented through coercion? The end result is the same: injustice. Same as it is in the animal kingdom.
Will human beings ever rise above the animal kingdom in this respect, or will public policy forever be achieved through violence and/or threat of violence? That is a much more interesting question than how public policy will be determined.
Human beings suck at creating policy because human beings are too emotional to think logically about the long term consequences. We see it all the time with these various laws such as the war on drugs, 3 strikes, or cutting off welfare recipients who fail drug tests. Anyone who does the math and logic and thinks about it without emotion would see these policies would lead to really bad or really costly results. A superintelligence would be at the same time more compassionate than any human could be, more rational, more logical, and as a result would generate the best possible policy.
Policy is like a form of math, it's a type of optimization algorithm. This is something an artificial intelligence would be great at. If you watch the movie Tron Legacy you will see some of the philosophical elements of it there. Superintelligence would be able to design the perfect government or just progressively better governments at a rate which best suits our species and life on earth. It's clear that our social systems and our governments aren't evolving fast enough to deal with our technology or our population growth rate. Something must be done before we destroy the habitat our species depends on.
I think Google may have the goal of creating a Superintelligence which utilizes the internet as a knowledge base and results in an intelligence explosion.
The real question is should Superintellignece be developed first by the private sector (Google) or by the public sector (Government)? Who should get it first and why?
I know the age of superintelligence is near but our current concept of government is still based around documents like Constitutions which are hundreds of years old. We still rely on humans even though we know that humans are the weakest link in any information security system due to the ease at which they can be corrupted. Superintelligence would not be corruptible if done right, and it would be smarter than us all by magnitudes where it probably would be able to generate or design the best most liberating yet most secure form of government where autonomy is maintained compared to oligarchy where autonomy is typically sacrificed for comfort and security.
Do you see a time when we no longer have to rely on humans to manage a nation, or the planet itself?
If all political groups are allowed to use illegal methods of pursing their self interest then Anonymous is not going to be the only group doing this and many groups that take opposing positions against Anonymous will be doing illegal activities to try and stop the political agenda of Anonymous.
That is why vigilantism isn't necessarily a good tactic. Any side can apply those tactics and it hurts the people who aren't willing to be criminals due to their job or having too much to lose.
It's actually very hard to trace people. It looks easy in the movies but if they take the right precautions it's very hard to do.
So basically this is a Faux News article arguing against net neutrality.
No it does the opposite. It promotes upgrading the infrastructure. If you don't use it why should they have an excuse to build it? Netflix will make us use it and force them to build it. At the same time we gotta solve the problem with low res computer monitors. It makes no sense why computer monitors have such low DPI and low res and it's 2013. It seemed monitors looked better 10 years ago.
When I listen to music or watch movies with my Grado headphones on my Asus Xonar Essence STX and my Samsung wide screen high res monitor I am willing to pay for quality matching the hardware. I'm not willing to pay for subpar crap.
The solution to expand the market beyond Megabox and bootleg is to offer high quality PREMIUM entertainment and market high quality audiophile and high end graphics cards and monitors. When people are willing to spend $200 on a sound card, and they own $1000+ worth of iTunes music and $200+ worth of movies why wouldn't you think they'd spend $5 more for the .flac? iTunes sound quality sucks with their .aac 128kbit. We should all be using flac yet somehow everyone is still downloading these low quality mp3s on their cheap ipod ear plug headphones? People settle for lower quality when you don't market high quality and while the bootleg music and movies are lower quality when you're offering quality just as low as that then who cares?
Offer at a minimum 24bit 96khz Flac. Offer higher speed internet with blue ray quality Netflix at a reasonable price and people will choose that over Megabox unless they genuinely cannot afford it in which case you didn't lose any sales. People want the best because life is short so offer the best.
More companies should do stuff like this. This is ultimately the solution.
If you want SuperHD rivaling or beating BlueRay then you better upgrade your Internet.
That goes against everything they said in their press releases? So which is the truth? Why would they need to keep the keys if they are trying to protect themselves from prosecution?
You can encypher your data before uploading on *any* site. At that point they are all equally secure. Kim's claim was that Mega was more secure by design.
However, the claim is completely broken. Mega is using a public/private key pair - generated by the web site - and so their servers actually *do* know both your keys, and *can* decrypt your data. So, basically, it is no more secure than dropbox.
The private key is generated on your computer and not the website. They don't have a copy of the private key.
It's really a simple way to have a libertarians utopia. Humans in power are all corrupt, AI wouldn't necessarily have to be corrupt.
The "client side" javascript encryption really isn't safe. Even if the javascript is delivered via SSL, the fact is that you are loading a copy of the encryption program from the server each time you execute it. That's not safe, because the server can, at any time, change the program from under you and expose your data. That's no different from just letting them have your unencrypted data and hoping they'll keep it safe.
If you are that paranoid then encrypt it yourself prior to uploading it.
If you don't have to pay anything and it's 50 gigs of storage for free why not? What can you lose besides the time to upload it?
well, technically, they only have to break your hashed password (probably easiest attack vector). Then they can decrypt your private key, and then they have full access to all your files.
And then they find your porn stash. Big deal. Most people aren't cyber criminals or wares pirates but nearly everyone has porn they don't want to keep all over their harddrive for their kids to find.
they are 'much worse' as they can be used by just about anyone who has some level of computer proficiency. Both agreed that it was very difficult to protect against the highly-complex nation-state developed malware like Stuxnet, Flame and Gauss.
Um, nation-states are not "just about anyone". They actually tend to be the same people who have all those "dirty" traditional weapons too. Sure, in theory some rogue basement dweller could launch a massive cyber attack just before his mother calls him up for dinner, but in general such attacks build on information gathered by intelligence services and the State Department (you need to know what you are targeting to do it efficiently).
The fact that such dire warnings come from someone who just happens to profit from the existence and above all fear of malware makes it a little hard for me to take it as seriously as he apparently does.
Incidentally, if some basement dweller on the other side of the planet really does pose a threat to your national security, you need to fire the clowns who set up your IT infrastructure and hire some people who actually know wtf they are doing. Stay on top of exploits, keep your software and patchsets up-to-date, plug the holes in your firewalls, don't do stupid things like plaintext storage of passwords anywhere, force the use of keys where possible, etc... you know, all the basic stuff that gets discussed whenever security comes up. Most successful attacks that make the news are not examples of very clever attackers but rather abysmally unaware defenders.
Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, but from here it looks like someone complaining that they're car might get stolen because they keep leaving it running with the doors open in a busy part of town with no police or cameras. "Omg auto theft is likely to go up and people will be run over by inexperienced/drunk/high drivers who shouldn't be behind the wheel, we must do something!" Yeah, park it in a better spot, turn of the engine, take the keys out of the ignition, lock the door, and come back to check on it at least once a day. Derp.
Who they use to launch the attack isn't necessarily the people who you would expect. Anyone could be used to launched the attack but the code could be written by the military. Or it could be the other way around where the military contracts anyone to write the code but then uses it's people. It's impossible know who is what or who does what.
It's not just Internet-connected infrastructure. In many cases, people took the proper precautionary steps, but weren't actively paranoid. To protect your infrastructure today, you really do need to be paranoid. People bring in gadgets infected with malware, plug the malware-infected gadget into a PC, and the PC infects every system on the network. OK, so you ban people from bringing in gadgets, and now you remove all secretarial PCs from the main network. Maybe you even disable every USB port and force people to use PS/2 keyboards and mice. Well, the next infection comes in from a contractor who installs software directly from the manufacturer. If the hackers know that you use Flash and/or Java in your company's intranet, it's not inconceivable that they manage to infect Flash or Java. I mean, we're talking about nation states here. They can do whatever the fuck they want, and money is not much of an issue.
Somewhere along the line, people with resources a hundred times greater than yours will come up with a line of attack that you didn't defend against. And if you protect against everything obvious, who knows what the crazy fuckers will do? If I were on the Iranian nuclear power commission, I'd probably give the Americans and Israelis a semi-obvious backdoor to my network, just so that they don't send in black ops teams. I'm not saying that I think the Americans and Israelis would be so stupid, but, then again, these people probably grew up watching James Bond movies. They probably think that shit is exciting.
If you can't inspect the source code and the compiler then it could very well be suspect. A backdoor in the compiler itself is all it takes to put a backdoor on everything compiled with that compiler. How would you defend against that?
All of this biologist type speak doesn't help regular people to understand how it can help cure cancer. It does seem like it could be targeted but what the hell is it and where does it come from? is it important? Or does it only cause cancer?
It's already an arms-race and now it's their move. And who has the money to do a cost/benefit analysis nowadays?
If it's an arms race then they already lost. The smartest minds in the field already know that. This is a political and legal batter but if it becomes a technological arms race there is no way they will be able to win there. That is why they are trying to use the law to ban certain technology and suppress certain companies from becoming profitable such as the case with Kim Dot Com.
The more they fight the technology the faster they lose because the people who make technology, who write code, virtually all the best hackers, all the best programmers, and the majority of the young people, all are against them. Time and technology are against them.
It's more important to most of us to be able to store our files in the cloud and access entertainment online unrestricted than it is to keep the old anachronistic industries alive. Those industries which think they are too big to fail just aren't useful like they once were.
Yeah, but I think the point is that third party indexer type sites will start popping up, allowing people who are members of such sites to traffic in digital information. As long as where it is hosted isn't liable for anything, there will be no real, long-term and effective way of preventing people from sharing information with a computer & the internet.
This is just the beginning of the evolution of information transfer (don't want to call it "piracy" - that word has been co-opted to mean something it does not - let's call a spade a spade here and use the term information transfer).
The poser was trying to compare information to currency as if it's money. It's not money. It's not the information, it's the content. Content has to be generated continuously.