Consider the fact that he probably was running windows. Consider the fact that he probably cannot read or write code himself. Consider the fact that he was stupid enough to leave the computer with his coins connected to the internet and to not encrypt or lock it down in some way.
He did this to himself because he trusted nameless faceless programmers with $500,000.
The USSR had plenty of mathemeticians and computer scientists and engineers. They just didn't have many good jobs for them outside of making military hardware, which is economically unproductive.
Anyone can acquire tools. If that were all it took to pull off a successful hack then yes everybody would be doing it but it depends on the nature of the hack.
Hacking a website, DDOSing, anyone can do. Actually infiltrating the entire network, not anyone can do this. This requires a team of somewhat skilled hackers.
And not any programmer can be a hacker either. There are millions of programmers and anyone can learn to be a programmer, but you cannot learn to be a hacker, you need a talent for it.
Way back in the 90s, when people could deface a website and get slapped on the wrist. Hack a dozen corporations and not be investigated.
Now you do any hacking at all, and you get investigated and locked up by the FBI. It's definitely not the golden age. It's the age where hacking is as stupid as selling drugs used to be in the 80s.
How are we supposed to even try to compete when politicians are doing everything they can to decrease overall competitiveness? They wont pay for education so that the brightest minds can actually learn the necessary knowledge whatever it is. They wont pay to build infrastructure to actually take advantage of those bright minds. They wont pass a competitive budget to fund it all because they don't want to raise taxes.
So basically politicians are arguing about who will pay the Chinese and how. They aren't even trying to compete with the Chinese. The reason is because the USA has already been internally conquered. There wont be any competitive coldwar. If the USA wanted to truly compete then they'd start with making college free for all American citizens. Suddenly you'd have more engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, and whatever else is needed. Secondly the USA could just draft whoever they need from the private sector. If there is some brilliant mathematician, or some brilliant hacker in IRC, nothing stops the US government from simply creating a cyber militia or cyber corps and drafting them into it. The selective service provides a legal basis, as does the Constitution.
So there really is no excuse for this other than general political incompetence. The weakness is in the law making policy making part of the system. The military does a great job defending the system overall. The law enforcement do a great job enforcing the laws overall and locking people up. The courts do a great job distributing justice. The only real weakness seems to be that our laws are fucking stupid, irrational, dumb. We pass laws which criminalize the majority of our own citizens, and then we end up having to enforce those laws locking ourselves up. Then we wonder why we aren't as competitive as we could have been.
On top of that we don't even try to build anything. We won't use the government to invest in infrastructure and the government wont use it's muscle to infect the private sector and make it invest in infrastructure. We can't or wont defend civil liberties so that citizens would actually feel like there is a country worth saving, and then we wonder why nobody is defending the country?
Form a goddamn militia if it's a cyber war. Draft a few million cyber soldiers into it. Pay them, give them jobs, give them an education, give them healthcare and other benefits, and let them work from home/telecommute and I guarantee most Americans will take that offer if the pay is in the same range as the private sector or even if it's a bit less. But as it's going now, the government is treating it like a cyber security law enforcement problem. They are saying a new war docrtine has to be created? So create the doctrine and present that to Slashdot. Then utilitze a draft, and I think if they wanted to they could have a million cyber soldiers within a year just by drafting them.
The government is taking something simple (at least on the surface), and making it over complicated. If you look at history, when nations were threatened they drafted their best, and they pit their best against the other nations best. But right now our nation probably wouldn't even be willing to fund the initiative.
This is a completely false analogy. Mozilla, Google, and TippingPoint have bounty programs to buy *bugs* (not exploits) that have not been previously disclosed. This program is looking for *exploits* for bugs that have already been made public. While there's a huge difference in the amount of effort required to develop reliable exploit code versus simply identifying a vulnerability, the fact that the bugs are already public significantly decreases the value these exploits could fetch on alternative markets. Considering it's all in the name of community effort and everything will be released under a BSD license, it seems like this is supposed to be a way to reward contributors who might have written these exploits anyway and be just enough to convince potential contributors to pitch in, rather than a true "pay people for their work" scenario.
Nah, they are just doing this because they can get most of the code written by kids in India somewhere where $100 means something.
$1337 is enough money to buy a brand new computer. It's enough money to pay rent for a month. That's the kind of money that would make me invest the time.
And of course they need a system of determining who is working on what and some sort of reservation system. If I agree to write code, I don't want anyone else writing the same code. Anyway it's a start, and I hope more companies and websites start offering these kinds of bounties. They won't have any problem finding people looking to write exploit code in this economy.
Anonymous might have some of the right goals, some of the same goals, but their way of going about it, by breaking domestic laws, is just fucking stupid.
I do not look at Anonymous as 'the good guys'. I look at them as a natural reaction to a system that is seemingly out of control and increasingly unwilling to govern itself according to the rule of law. Frequently the results are ugly, messy and morally ambiguous. Sometimes I cheer and cringe at the same time.
My point was that these same government agencies that promote these goals are a part of a government that suppresses the very freedoms they seek to promote abroad. A government that frequently is the oblique target of attack by a group that frequently has the same goals the government claims to have.
I think groups working with these government agencies face a lack of credibility similar to the lack of credibility they would acquire if they openly worked with Anonymous.
Outing people, which is what Anon does a significant portion of the time, and putting private business in the media, is not the most effective way to increase libety. In fact it would result in a crackdown and decrease in liberty. And it will result in too many innocent peoples lives being destroyed for dumb reasons.
If Anon wants a cyber war against the US gov that is on them, but they should leave civilians alone.
They must have a phemonenal amount of personal info on people based on web search alone, never mind everything else they do.
Some Google engineers must have the ability (if not necessarily permission) to track the porn surfing habits of the vast majority of the world's internet surfers. Think how many powerful people that they could blackmail with this information.
Don't fuck with Google...
If Anon hacked Google they'd have the dirt to blackmail the entire internet. They'd know who was researching how to kill their husband. They'd know who thinks what and who watches what porn.
This is why your Google password should be at least 100 characters long, random, and impossible to remember.
They are telling people to go and destroy peoples lives. Telling them to log into their Facebook accounts and tell their families about their porn habit?
So if a guy or girl is secretly going to gay porn sites, and his or her parents are religious, what kind of damage could that do?
Since none of us know just how many porn passwords they have cracked, along with Facebook accounts. We do not know whether or not for example some Anon somewhere cracked our most sick perverted teen porn password, and also has our Facebook to tell our family.
Seriously, this sort of stuff can cause suicides. Remember that gay kid who committed suicide over something similar?
Anonymous might have some of the right goals, some of the same goals, but their way of going about it, by breaking domestic laws, is just fucking stupid.
If they wanted to focus on writing software to promote freedom from oppression I would be able to support them, but when they do some hacks they cross the line.
Such as outing Hal Turner. What good did that accomplish? DDOSing websites? What good does that accomplish?
And a vast majority of the time the individuals who do these stupid hacks on stupid targets, don't take into account that they could accomplish more against terrible regimes by working with corporations and governments than by going to war with them all.
If someone wants to be involved in human rights based software development it would probably be wise of them not to associate with anonymous. Start something else, or join something less associated with blackhat criminal activity.
it's not that it wouldn't work in the USA, it's more that most people in the USA wouldn't know what to do with it.
A lot of technology is relatively secure on paper, but without training in how to use that technology it's pointless. In general also the internet isn't being shut down across the USA. If that were happening then you'd see just how effectively the technology is.
In this case most of the technology they are relying on requires US satellite or cellphone towers. The enemy can decrypt the cellphone messages, jam the signal, etc but this is expensive and not energy efficient for the majority of regimes. In the USA they'd just jam or shut off the cellphone networks and radio signals making all electronic communication useless, but they wont do this unless Martial Law is declared.
Slashdot Mirror
It very well might be illegal in the US but what law makes it illegal?
Consider the fact that he probably was running windows. Consider the fact that he probably cannot read or write code himself. Consider the fact that he was stupid enough to leave the computer with his coins connected to the internet and to not encrypt or lock it down in some way.
He did this to himself because he trusted nameless faceless programmers with $500,000.
Discs aren't fast anymore. Solid state drives/cartridges are cheap now, and much much faster.
The USSR had plenty of mathemeticians and computer scientists and engineers. They just didn't have many good jobs for them outside of making military hardware, which is economically unproductive.
What about software?
Anyone can acquire tools. If that were all it took to pull off a successful hack then yes everybody would be doing it but it depends on the nature of the hack.
Hacking a website, DDOSing, anyone can do. Actually infiltrating the entire network, not anyone can do this. This requires a team of somewhat skilled hackers.
And not any programmer can be a hacker either. There are millions of programmers and anyone can learn to be a programmer, but you cannot learn to be a hacker, you need a talent for it.
Way back in the 90s, when people could deface a website and get slapped on the wrist. Hack a dozen corporations and not be investigated.
Now you do any hacking at all, and you get investigated and locked up by the FBI. It's definitely not the golden age. It's the age where hacking is as stupid as selling drugs used to be in the 80s.
How are we supposed to even try to compete when politicians are doing everything they can to decrease overall competitiveness?
They wont pay for education so that the brightest minds can actually learn the necessary knowledge whatever it is.
They wont pay to build infrastructure to actually take advantage of those bright minds.
They wont pass a competitive budget to fund it all because they don't want to raise taxes.
So basically politicians are arguing about who will pay the Chinese and how. They aren't even trying to compete with the Chinese. The reason is because the USA has already been internally conquered. There wont be any competitive coldwar. If the USA wanted to truly compete then they'd start with making college free for all American citizens. Suddenly you'd have more engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, and whatever else is needed. Secondly the USA could just draft whoever they need from the private sector. If there is some brilliant mathematician, or some brilliant hacker in IRC, nothing stops the US government from simply creating a cyber militia or cyber corps and drafting them into it. The selective service provides a legal basis, as does the Constitution.
So there really is no excuse for this other than general political incompetence. The weakness is in the law making policy making part of the system. The military does a great job defending the system overall. The law enforcement do a great job enforcing the laws overall and locking people up. The courts do a great job distributing justice. The only real weakness seems to be that our laws are fucking stupid, irrational, dumb. We pass laws which criminalize the majority of our own citizens, and then we end up having to enforce those laws locking ourselves up. Then we wonder why we aren't as competitive as we could have been.
On top of that we don't even try to build anything. We won't use the government to invest in infrastructure and the government wont use it's muscle to infect the private sector and make it invest in infrastructure. We can't or wont defend civil liberties so that citizens would actually feel like there is a country worth saving, and then we wonder why nobody is defending the country?
Form a goddamn militia if it's a cyber war. Draft a few million cyber soldiers into it. Pay them, give them jobs, give them an education, give them healthcare and other benefits, and let them work from home/telecommute and I guarantee most Americans will take that offer if the pay is in the same range as the private sector or even if it's a bit less. But as it's going now, the government is treating it like a cyber security law enforcement problem. They are saying a new war docrtine has to be created? So create the doctrine and present that to Slashdot. Then utilitze a draft, and I think if they wanted to they could have a million cyber soldiers within a year just by drafting them.
The government is taking something simple (at least on the surface), and making it over complicated. If you look at history, when nations were threatened they drafted their best, and they pit their best against the other nations best. But right now our nation probably wouldn't even be willing to fund the initiative.
This is a completely false analogy. Mozilla, Google, and TippingPoint have bounty programs to buy *bugs* (not exploits) that have not been previously disclosed. This program is looking for *exploits* for bugs that have already been made public. While there's a huge difference in the amount of effort required to develop reliable exploit code versus simply identifying a vulnerability, the fact that the bugs are already public significantly decreases the value these exploits could fetch on alternative markets. Considering it's all in the name of community effort and everything will be released under a BSD license, it seems like this is supposed to be a way to reward contributors who might have written these exploits anyway and be just enough to convince potential contributors to pitch in, rather than a true "pay people for their work" scenario.
Nah, they are just doing this because they can get most of the code written by kids in India somewhere where $100 means something.
is it illegal to write an exploit?
The problem with Bitcoin is it's the only game in town.
The other problem is it's not backed by anything. How do we really know bitcoins exist and aren't a scam?
That is actually a very good idea.
Definitely good. Most of this exploit code looks trivial to write, just time consuming.
The more money they put up to allow people to make money, the more people they'll have writing exploit code.
$1337 is enough money to buy a brand new computer. It's enough money to pay rent for a month. That's the kind of money that would make me invest the time.
And of course they need a system of determining who is working on what and some sort of reservation system. If I agree to write code, I don't want anyone else writing the same code. Anyway it's a start, and I hope more companies and websites start offering these kinds of bounties. They won't have any problem finding people looking to write exploit code in this economy.
If they are only paying $100 to write the code, that's just cheap.
When the bounties reach $1000, and there are plenty of bounties to choose from that could work.
If the price is right, I and others might take them up on their offer.
$500 isn't enough money. I can't even buy a decent computer with that.
They need to offer at least $1000, and if it's an exploit that has to be exactly what they are looking for then it should be several thousand.
Wikileaks is protecting Bradley Manning?
It's unclear at this time whether or not Wikileaks can protect it's sources.
Anonymous might have some of the right goals, some of the same goals, but their way of going about it, by breaking domestic laws, is just fucking stupid.
I do not look at Anonymous as 'the good guys'. I look at them as a natural reaction to a system that is seemingly out of control and increasingly unwilling to govern itself according to the rule of law. Frequently the results are ugly, messy and morally ambiguous. Sometimes I cheer and cringe at the same time.
My point was that these same government agencies that promote these goals are a part of a government that suppresses the very freedoms they seek to promote abroad. A government that frequently is the oblique target of attack by a group that frequently has the same goals the government claims to have.
I think groups working with these government agencies face a lack of credibility similar to the lack of credibility they would acquire if they openly worked with Anonymous.
Outing people, which is what Anon does a significant portion of the time, and putting private business in the media, is not the most effective way to increase libety. In fact it would result in a crackdown and decrease in liberty. And it will result in too many innocent peoples lives being destroyed for dumb reasons.
If Anon wants a cyber war against the US gov that is on them, but they should leave civilians alone.
They must have a phemonenal amount of personal info on people based on web search alone, never mind everything else they do.
Some Google engineers must have the ability (if not necessarily permission) to track the porn surfing habits of the vast majority of the world's internet surfers. Think how many powerful people that they could blackmail with this information.
Don't fuck with Google ...
If Anon hacked Google they'd have the dirt to blackmail the entire internet. They'd know who was researching how to kill their husband. They'd know who thinks what and who watches what porn.
This is why your Google password should be at least 100 characters long, random, and impossible to remember.
They are telling people to go and destroy peoples lives.
Telling them to log into their Facebook accounts and tell their families about their porn habit?
So if a guy or girl is secretly going to gay porn sites, and his or her parents are religious, what kind of damage could that do?
Since none of us know just how many porn passwords they have cracked, along with Facebook accounts. We do not know whether or not for example some Anon somewhere cracked our most sick perverted teen porn password, and also has our Facebook to tell our family.
Seriously, this sort of stuff can cause suicides. Remember that gay kid who committed suicide over something similar?
What is the purpose of the threat to tell peoples families about the porn they look at?
This is looking like a blackmail mechanism. Similar to "we got ur noods, don't worry we won't show mom and dad"
Anonymous might have some of the right goals, some of the same goals, but their way of going about it, by breaking domestic laws, is just fucking stupid.
If they wanted to focus on writing software to promote freedom from oppression I would be able to support them, but when they do some hacks they cross the line.
Such as outing Hal Turner. What good did that accomplish?
DDOSing websites? What good does that accomplish?
And a vast majority of the time the individuals who do these stupid hacks on stupid targets, don't take into account that they could accomplish more against terrible regimes by working with corporations and governments than by going to war with them all.
If someone wants to be involved in human rights based software development it would probably be wise of them not to associate with anonymous. Start something else, or join something less associated with blackhat criminal activity.
You are online to say what you are saying so the answer is yes.
it's not that it wouldn't work in the USA, it's more that most people in the USA wouldn't know what to do with it.
A lot of technology is relatively secure on paper, but without training in how to use that technology it's pointless. In general also the internet isn't being shut down across the USA. If that were happening then you'd see just how effectively the technology is.
In this case most of the technology they are relying on requires US satellite or cellphone towers. The enemy can decrypt the cellphone messages, jam the signal, etc but this is expensive and not energy efficient for the majority of regimes. In the USA they'd just jam or shut off the cellphone networks and radio signals making all electronic communication useless, but they wont do this unless Martial Law is declared.
So now all the stuff they are discussing building, will be countered.
This is why this type of work shouldn't be in the media and why people working on these types of projects should not talk to the media.
What good does it do to put in the new york times all the technical details?