Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 400 posts

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#361

Post by toast0 »

Brakenshire wrote: post #205
toast0 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government can't exactly ban chemistry textbooks, can it? Anyway, for this type of censorship to be effective to prevent dissemination of knowledge, it would need to happen before distribution, and prior restraint is generally considered unconstitutional in the US, except in matters of national security. National security could likely include planned troop movements and nuclear weapons manufacturing procedures (a…

There's a pretty big difference between a chemistry textbook on the one hand, and a step by step layman's guide on how to make a bomb, avoid detection and so on on the other. And then of course beyond that you can go into progressively more dangerous weapons. Would a guide to building IED's with shaped explosives fall under the protections, for instance? I was just watching a documentary yesterday about Iran taught t…

The I in IED stands for improvised. I'm sure there's better or worse ones, but put some stuff that goes boom in a tight container is a pretty good start.

If your society is held together by a lack of available knowledge on how to blow stuff up (or take other dangerous actions), I don't expect it will be held together for very long. Motivated people can figure this out pretty quickly.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#362

Post by textfiles »

VectorLock wrote: post #214
js2 wrote: post #46

He named his BBS "TacoLand". He should definitely play up this angle...maybe campaign on a taco cart on every corner. I know people who will vote for him for that alone. This piece is a disaster. It's an excerpt from a soon to be released book, it's light on facts about O'Rourke and is at least equally about Cult of the Dead Cow, it's trying to make things sound more nefarious than they were, and it's playing the gui…

Heres a TextFile listing his old BBS number if it is TacoLand: http://www.textfiles.com/groups/CDC/cDc-0080.txt Also whats up with textfiles.com having so many broken links on Google? So much for that whole "Archive Team" angle.

What are you talking about?

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#363

Post by jandrese »

burfog wrote: post #348
jandrese wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can look up his textfiles if you want to see what was on the BBS.

He wrote this: https://web.archive.org/web/20041214030544/http://www.cultde... That at least somewhat supports my interpretation. I was thinking more along the lines of image files.

That he was an edgy teenager? Yeah.

Image files back in the 80s weren't super common because everybody was on slow dialup and had crappy CGA graphics. There was a fair bit of risque ANSI crawls from groups like ACID and ICE, but they were usually too artistic to be considered just porn.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#364

Post by SamReidHughes »

philwelch wrote: post #309
Brakenshire wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be about incitement, do that apply to technical documentation? As described above, instructions to build a nuclear bomb, to take an extreme example, are restricted, but surely not on that basis.

I should probably disclaim at this point that I'm not a lawyer, let alone a constitutional law scholar. I'm also not a physicist. Here's some instructions to build a nuclear bomb, right off the top of my head: 1. Take a mass of U-235 about half the critical mass of U-235 and shape it into a rod. 2. Take another equal mass of U-235 and form it into a hollow cylinder, into which the rod will fit. DO NOT PUT THE MASSES…

They actually didn't do it that way. The rod was held in place, and the hollow cylinder got fired towards it.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#365

Post by djur »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #342
djur wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "system" did the DNC have to allow "rigging"? How did it work? Who operated it? What evidence is there that it existed, much less that it was used?

Here is enough background information [0] [1] [2] [3] quoted directly from people involved that should get you started. Unless Warren, Brazile, DWS and others are all wrong with their statements about it. [0] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/donna-brazile-i-found-proof... [1] https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/02/politics/elizabeth-warren-dnc... [2] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-b... [3] https:/…

Neither Brazile, Warren, nor any of the leaked DNC emails provide even the slightest bit of evidence that any voting process was manipulated, any vote totals falsified, or anything else of that nature. They also do not show any evidence of any kind of adverse action against Clinton's opponents. There is a compelling argument that DNC staff were too partial to Clinton, who they viewed as the presumptive nominee. There is also evidence of animus against the Sanders campaign, although that animus must be viewed in the context that the Sanders campaign had previously _sued_ the DNC.

Party organizations involved in the primary process need to avoid even the appearance of favoritism. The DNC under DWS failed in this, and it also demonstrated other forms of unprofessionalism (such as passing around credit card information in unencrypted email!). Cleaning house was necessary. Furthermore, superdelegates had been a controversial issue in the last two contested nomination contest, and were clearly perceived by a substantial number of party supporters as undemocratic. Reforming them was also necessary. But none of that changes the fact that there is no evidence of any form of rigging of the nomination process.

If it's obvious there was some sort of corrupt manipulation of the process, it should be possible to point to at least one single state where there is evidence of electoral manipulation.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#366

Post by philipkglass »

Brakenshire wrote: post #71
Fej wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's in the UK. Such a law would run afoul of the First Amendment in the US.

Do texts that contain bomb-making information really fall under the first amendment in the US?

Yes. In fact you'll find the better ones on the shelves of technical libraries [1], both in the US and in other English-speaking countries.

Introductory:

The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives by Tenney L. Davis.

Advanced:

Chemistry and Technology of Explosives by Tadeusz Urbanski (English translation by M. Jurecki).

Encyclopedic:

Encyclopedia of Explosives and Related Items by Basil T. Federoff.

Advanced applications of explosives, toward the destruction of materiel and human beings:

Tactical Missile Warheads by Joseph Carleone.

When I was an undergraduate I even found a book about nerve gas on the shelves -- Some aspects of the chemistry and toxic action of organic compounds containing phosphorus and fluorine by Bernard Charles Saunders. Dig into the citations and you find a further wealth of detail, papers now universally accessible through sci-hub.

The main obstacle to making effective bombs isn't restrictions on information. It's that most people inclined to violence [2] can't or won't teach themselves something new even if given a wealth of high quality literature to do it with.

[1] And on Amazon and Library Genesis.

[2] Most non-violent people too have trouble with learning on their own. People who keep learning new things may overestimate how common that ability is in general.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#367

Post by VectorLock »

textfiles wrote: post #362
VectorLock wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heres a TextFile listing his old BBS number if it is TacoLand: http://www.textfiles.com/groups/CDC/cDc-0080.txt Also whats up with textfiles.com having so many broken links on Google? So much for that whole "Archive Team" angle.

What are you talking about?

I can't even connect to textfiles.com at all right now.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#368

Post by VectorLock »

textfiles wrote: post #362
VectorLock wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heres a TextFile listing his old BBS number if it is TacoLand: http://www.textfiles.com/groups/CDC/cDc-0080.txt Also whats up with textfiles.com having so many broken links on Google? So much for that whole "Archive Team" angle.

What are you talking about?

http://bbslist.textfiles.com/ -> COLLECTED COPIES OF BBS LISTS -> 404

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#369

Post by philwelch »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #364
philwelch wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should probably disclaim at this point that I'm not a lawyer, let alone a constitutional law scholar. I'm also not a physicist. Here's some instructions to build a nuclear bomb, right off the top of my head: 1. Take a mass of U-235 about half the critical mass of U-235 and shape it into a rod. 2. Take another equal mass of U-235 and form it into a hollow cylinder, into which the rod will fit. DO NOT PUT THE MASSES…

They actually didn't do it that way. The rod was held in place, and the hollow cylinder got fired towards it.

My way would work too! Although...yes, that actually makes a lot more sense.

Re: Beto O'Rourke's membership in America's oldest hacking group

#370

Post by bitxbitxbitcoin »

txcwpalpha wrote: post #124
dmos62 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> historically hackers have been phenomenally bad people to give any kind of real power to Do you have any examples?

Paul Leroux comes to mind. It also really depends on who you consider to be a "hacker". To some people, Zuckerberg fits the description (though he is a different type of hacker, moreso the "hacker" of "Hacker News"), and I think most would agree he would be a terrible politician.

Was Leroux given power or did he take it, though? I'd posit that there may be differences between hackers that are given power and "power hungry" hackers that crave/seek/take power. There are then further differences between those power hungry hackers that only operate legally and those that are willing to do illegal things. I guess I'm just trying to say that Beto doesn't seem to be trying to take power the way that Leroux did so the comparison may not be as valid.
Post reply on HN