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Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

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Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#111

Post by sillysaurus3 »

golergka wrote: post #106
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I was hoping someone would raise this point. Someone was once interviewing pg, and asked him "Why did you start a company?" His answer was "to avoid poverty." He said it flippantly and almost without giving it much thought. People's feathers got ruffled at the notion that someone in his position could possibly have to worry about poverty. But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your…

> But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your brain. You are not allowed to say what you know (NDA). You're not allowed to compete, in many places. You have much less autonomy than you'd like to believe. The employer owns your brain if you voluntarily sold it. Same goes about NDA. Personally, I have negotiated about NDAs and non-competes several times in my career, changing the contract…

No one owes you food, shelter, medical attention or any other products of labor of other people. You can either work for it, or choose not to. This is what justice looks like.

It's worth internalizing this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU

As technology specializes us, humans will become as obsolete as the horse. This is inevitable. Humans are not horses, but many may as well be.

This is an offensive thought, but it doesn't change its truthiness. What will the workhorses do? You saw what happens when coal miners become upset.

This will only worsen over time.

You do owe people food, shelter, medical attention, and everything else. People are alive. They are people. You owe them as much as you owe your parents. We're all connected.

Except for one minor nit: this logic doesn't scale. No one can possibly care about others that much. So it will be "interesting" to see what happens.

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#112

Post by hi41 »

>Beşikçi said it was due to a single line of code, which created a window "one pixel high, one pixel wide" — essentially invisible to the human eye — to Bylock.net.

Kindly, could someone please explain what kind of hacking attack this is and how it works? Did this window create a browser cookie for Bylock?

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#113

Post by pc86 »

thrillgore wrote: post #102
ythn wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Guns don't kill people, people do" "Code doesn't cause people to be arrested, people do" True in both cases, but also true in both cases that guns/code are used as enablers of the evil deeds.

Firearms are designed to kill or disable another party. Software has no use case besides what a developer gives it. That's a pretty significant difference in design!

There are plenty of firearms whose only purpose is to put tiny holes in paper at varying distances.

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#114

Post by danso »

thriftwy wrote: post #110
danso wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the government policy is ultimately what causes people to be jailed, you don’t think it’s important to focus on how technology uniquely exacerbates the problem by making it scalable? This is one of the few tech headlines that mention number of LOC that is basically and technically accurate. It does seem that a single — and trivial — line of code has led to the tragicomical punishment of thousands of innocent ci…

In the same vein they could just be jailing actual (or hypothetical) Bylock users' friends and friends of friends (and relatives and relatives of relatives). This is both similarly idiotic, doesn't depends on technology at all and have been done through history.

Sure -- and in fact, that's what the government appeared to successfully do in 2015-16, initially [0]. The OP's revelation is that at some point, the government's dragnet became ridiculously loose. So whether you believe the government is justified in cracking down on the purported treasonous group, it appears they've become so overzealous and incompetent that they (the gov't) have been easily tricked by their targets.

It's important to note how trivial this "hack". Maybe some shortsighted people will simply think this is a lesson of government incompetence. But other people -- including some gov't supporters quoted in the article -- may realize that this is a symptom of a government that has gone too far.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/03/turkey-co...

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#115

Post by cgriswald »

simonh wrote: post #63
Banthum wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America has a high ratio. To call it 'worst' is a value judgment and not an objective statement, any more than saying the abortion or divorce rate is better or worse.

Failed attempt at a ‘technical’ correction. I think it’s reasonable to say that the highest incarceration rate is the worst rate, regardless of the reasons. Whether it’s due to an excessively harsh system, high rates of damaging criminality, whatever it is, they’re all bad whatever they are. Surely the ideal number of wrongly convicted people, and the ideal number of legitimately convicted people, and the ideal numbe…

I don't think I agree, and I think your examples do not support your point.

In the case of the number of legitimately convicted people, you seem to think zero is the ideal. In a sense, I think we can probably all agree. But what we really want is the number of people committing crimes to be zero. If it is not zero, then surely the ideal number of people legitimately convicted is equal to the number of people who have committed crimes. If it is not, then we are saying we want people who have committed crimes to walk free. So in this sense, "worst" is, in fact, a judgment.

But "everyone" agreeing doesn't even mean something isn't a judgment. There is no objective "worst". And in the case of divorce, you're wrong. Divorce has been hugely beneficial for women's equality, and my own personal divorce was definitely not a tragedy.

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#116

Post by benmmurphy »

why did the gulenists use bylock when they could have used whatsapp or signal? it looks like they are getting rounded up because their use of an obscure app has become a strong signal that they are gulenists. though, signal might have had similar problems. not sure how popular it is in turkey.

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#117

Post by jasonkostempski »

segmondy wrote: post #35

This is the creepiest thing I've ever read. As a teen, I was absolutely sure the Internet would liberate us all never saw it being a weapon of oppression as much as it has become. :-(

Everything is a weapon in the right (wrong?) hands. People want to keep weapons from their perceived enemies. Until there's a weapon only "good" can wield, nothing will liberate us all :/

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#118

Post by danso »

boosting6889 wrote: post #94
danso wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. People are apparently being jailed for having accessed or simply pinged a forbidden IP/server -- which seemingly could be caused by receiving an email with a hidden img tag, or visiting a website with a hidden iframe.

It happens in the US too. Any site could have 1x1 iframes loaded with nude pictures of people under 18. If your IP happens to be caught up in their investigation, your computers will get seized, they’ll see you accessed the forbidden pages, and you’re basically done for, especially if you can’t afford a good attorney. Nobody is giving an accused pedophile the benefit of the doubt.

I'd agree that the U.S. law enforcement probably takes a "better safe than sorry" approach to suspicions involving child porn and terrorism, but I think there's a big difference between what's happened in the U.S. vs what appears to happen in Turkey.

Turkey's situation, as described by the OP, is so interesting because it describes the scenario you envision -- in which a government really did go for a sweeping "take no prisoners" approach, in the dumbest way possible using Internet access data.

But FBI sweeps of child porn suspects seem to be very targeted -- e.g. tracing IPs of people who participate in known illegal sites or honeypots: https://www.wired.com/2014/08/operation-torpedo/

Having visited bad sites/URLs/IPs/searches may be used as circumstantial evidence. But Turkey seems to have used the pinging of an IP as the primary way of both finding suspects and the primary evidence for jailing people. I can't think of many similar situations like that in U.S. law. In fact, with child porn, you see courts making the distinction between seeing child porn (i.e. inadverdently) and intentionally seeking it out:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/blogs/sideshow/viewing-child-porn...

https://www.olemiss.edu/depts/ncjrl/pdf/cp%20But%20Your%20Ho...

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#119

Post by golergka »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #111
golergka wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your brain. You are not allowed to say what you know (NDA). You're not allowed to compete, in many places. You have much less autonomy than you'd like to believe. The employer owns your brain if you voluntarily sold it. Same goes about NDA. Personally, I have negotiated about NDAs and non-competes several times in my career, changing the contract…

No one owes you food, shelter, medical attention or any other products of labor of other people. You can either work for it, or choose not to. This is what justice looks like. It's worth internalizing this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU As technology specializes us, humans will become as obsolete as the horse. This is inevitable. Humans are not horses, but many may as well be. This is an offensive…

> This is an offensive thought, but it doesn't change its truthiness. What will the workhorses do? You saw what happens when coal miners become upset.

Die out, hopefully.

> You do owe people food, shelter, medical attention, and everything else. People are alive. They are people. You owe them as much as you owe your parents. We're all connected.

Uhm, no. I don't owe anything to anyone unless I took it upon myself as a voluntarily obligation. I don't have any sympathy for other people just for their sake of being people - it's not that much of an achievement, really.

Re: Thousands of Turks accused of using Bylock app despite never having used it

#120

Post by Quarrelsome »

philipov wrote: post #55
Quarrelsome wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one problem at a time.

Yes, precisely. And the first problem can be eliminating tacit acknowledgement of the legitimacy of oppressive governments.

No need to bring all of your moral judgement into everything. Would you treat a wounded criminal or would their criminality effect your ability to treat them?

One problem at a time.

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