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

NSA Owns Everything (2015)

blog.thinkst.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 265 posts

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#111

Post by sumtechguy »

neolog wrote: post #91
feralimal wrote: post #76

The Snowden stuff was the event that shook me to my core. I was a happy technologist till then, thinking that such was the nature of life and progress simply was unfolding in front of me. However, the way the event was covered by the media - told a different story. The media focussed on the man rather than the info he provided, so the conversation was 'where was he?', 'where was his girlfriend?', etc - that told me e…

I found this comment so shocking I went and read your post history and I'm really interested how this view arises. Can I ask your background that made you think this way?

I 'follow' these theories. Most are junk. Most have a hinge-pin of a idea that if pulled out the whole thing collapses. The supporting evidence is usually designed to make that idea stronger. I use the a modified mythbusters classification of them. 'busted', 'unlikely', 'plausible', 'confirmed'. I have never heard the snoweden is a totally made up generated person before. Other than he is a CIA actor theory. That just means I am not an expert on this. But it could be 'sorta plausible'. NSA is probably a good generation ahead of most of the world tech wise. They have the compute power for it and the brain power for it. So a deepfake from them is 'plausible'. But I lean towards unlikely in that case. As what we see from deepfakes is kind of weird and strange. Some bit of him 'popping' is probably a camera roll shutter thing. He seems like he is a guy who did something, because what he saw was bad. When something jumps from 'busted' over to the 'confirmed' category that is when you can raise an eyebrow. That happens very rarely. The 2016 email dumps of Hillary did that in a few cases. Which was surprising.

As to how you can end up 'there'. Well it mostly depends on what news feeds you let into your life, and do not go into them with a health dose of deep skepticism. Youtube can get a bit stuck on particular things as its alg feeds on engagement. Watch 1 video from someone and you have kind of exhausted your other threads of thought in their system and it will go hog wild and show you a different class of stuff if it is not on their 'do not show this to people list'. Remember ML/AI is basically very fancy cubic spline fitting across many nodes with some calculus thrown in and N stages. But if you end up between two points you can get strange results. But a computer does not know a garbage result from a good one. So it gives it to you with a 90% confidence.

If something jumps categories some people like that idea. They like the idea they can say 'Ive know about that for years'. I think it also gives comfort to them if they can not make sense of an idea. But my jedi mind skills are weak so I can not read minds :)

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#112

Post by LMYahooTFY »

jacquesm wrote: post #104

The difference between a theory, a conspiracy theory and the truth are best described by varying levels of evidence. A theory is not currently accepted as the truth, but it might be the truth. A conspiracy theory is something that has been proven to be untrue, but people still believe it and pass it on. The truth is the internally consistent and fact supported state of the world as it was and as it is. There were man…

>All it took was one person willing to burn their career to provide the proof.

This is wrong. It took a LOT more than that. It took one man forgoing his life and liberty, and a group of people endangering theirs to assist him. Snowdon is not going to get his life nor his liberty back, ever.

It took multiple institutions dedicated to publishing the truth to actually bring the news to a wide audience, and it didn't end without a degree of betrayal.

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#113

Post by AtlasBarfed »

amiga_500 wrote: post #110
jacquesm wrote: post #104

The difference between a theory, a conspiracy theory and the truth are best described by varying levels of evidence. A theory is not currently accepted as the truth, but it might be the truth. A conspiracy theory is something that has been proven to be untrue, but people still believe it and pass it on. The truth is the internally consistent and fact supported state of the world as it was and as it is. There were man…

> All it took was one person willing to burn their career to provide the proof. So many of the below posts are about all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories (most of them vastly overreach the competence of the USA), but this part hits the nail. USA's problem is the culture. The idea that if each person pursues their own self-interest it will amount, in aggregate, to the best possible outcome - this is totally flawed.…

[flagged]

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#114

Post by amiga_500 »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #112
jacquesm wrote: post #104

The difference between a theory, a conspiracy theory and the truth are best described by varying levels of evidence. A theory is not currently accepted as the truth, but it might be the truth. A conspiracy theory is something that has been proven to be untrue, but people still believe it and pass it on. The truth is the internally consistent and fact supported state of the world as it was and as it is. There were man…

>All it took was one person willing to burn their career to provide the proof. This is wrong. It took a LOT more than that. It took one man forgoing his life and liberty , and a group of people endangering theirs to assist him. Snowdon is not going to get his life nor his liberty back, ever. It took multiple institutions dedicated to publishing the truth to actually bring the news to a wide audience, and it didn't en…

I think he understated it, and your "wrong" is too strong. The main point is people had to actually step up, and when Snowden did this, we had some truth for a bit.

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#115

Post by DickingAround »

amiga_500 wrote: post #110
jacquesm wrote: post #104

The difference between a theory, a conspiracy theory and the truth are best described by varying levels of evidence. A theory is not currently accepted as the truth, but it might be the truth. A conspiracy theory is something that has been proven to be untrue, but people still believe it and pass it on. The truth is the internally consistent and fact supported state of the world as it was and as it is. There were man…

> All it took was one person willing to burn their career to provide the proof. So many of the below posts are about all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories (most of them vastly overreach the competence of the USA), but this part hits the nail. USA's problem is the culture. The idea that if each person pursues their own self-interest it will amount, in aggregate, to the best possible outcome - this is totally flawed.…

I do not agree with the idea that individualism is overall more of a negative for the American people than a positive. There is a long history of American's doing things differently or ignoring their detractors to go on to invent and build radically great things. For example, the long history of inventions from America; powered flight, internet, transistor, electrical light, etc.

Corruption can be the result of individualism, but it only takes a small number of individualistic and immoral people to leverage all the selfless people into giving up their freedom and material assets (i.e. dictators around the world). I don't know how to solve that, but it seems far too simple to say "America has corruption because of individualism" when America appears to be pretty mid-grade or slightly better than average in terms of corruption (https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi#)

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#116

Post by DickingAround »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #113
amiga_500 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All it took was one person willing to burn their career to provide the proof. So many of the below posts are about all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories (most of them vastly overreach the competence of the USA), but this part hits the nail. USA's problem is the culture. The idea that if each person pursues their own self-interest it will amount, in aggregate, to the best possible outcome - this is totally flawed.…

[flagged]

This is a straw man and does not actually argue the point or clarify the topic.

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#117

Post by jermier »

feralimal wrote: post #76

The Snowden stuff was the event that shook me to my core. I was a happy technologist till then, thinking that such was the nature of life and progress simply was unfolding in front of me. However, the way the event was covered by the media - told a different story. The media focussed on the man rather than the info he provided, so the conversation was 'where was he?', 'where was his girlfriend?', etc - that told me e…

> things like bits of his glasses disappearing indicate that he could be CGI

So you're essentially saying the revelations were a false flag operation? I considered that possibility, but Snowden's background is well researched and the first thing media outlets look at before publishing their findings. The Guardian probably thoroughly doxed him before publishing anything. And in interviews he comes across as sincere and genuinely politically passionate. There's no way someone could fake all that. Snowden is the real deal.

If the NSA wanted to showcase their 'box of tricks' then they would have other ways of doing that like fake leaks that have a bunch of decoy material to confuse their enemies; not the real/actual tooling that is used to surveil (as that would be stupid). They would release plausible-looking material that advertises their capability, but be scant on the details and mechanics of the tooling itself.

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#118

Post by amiga_500 »

DickingAround wrote: post #115
amiga_500 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All it took was one person willing to burn their career to provide the proof. So many of the below posts are about all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories (most of them vastly overreach the competence of the USA), but this part hits the nail. USA's problem is the culture. The idea that if each person pursues their own self-interest it will amount, in aggregate, to the best possible outcome - this is totally flawed.…

I do not agree with the idea that individualism is overall more of a negative for the American people than a positive. There is a long history of American's doing things differently or ignoring their detractors to go on to invent and build radically great things. For example, the long history of inventions from America; powered flight, internet, transistor, electrical light, etc. Corruption can be the result of indiv…

That corruption index is an absolute joke.

The UK is massively corrupt. Guess what? They made it legal. Problem solved, let the money laundering and arms sales flow.

Using their measures is the opposite of individualism. This is the USA, a thin cloak of individualism that directs unthinking behaviour. Individuals seeking their own gain without really understanding the currents they swim in, which allows them to believe they are acting within a reasonable framework. Doubtless I'll be told there is no absolute truth and that it's not for me to say, which is also part of the same framework that allows clearly immoral behaviour to proceed.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/roberto-savi...

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#119

Post by sanderjd »

amiga_500 wrote: post #110
jacquesm wrote: post #104

The difference between a theory, a conspiracy theory and the truth are best described by varying levels of evidence. A theory is not currently accepted as the truth, but it might be the truth. A conspiracy theory is something that has been proven to be untrue, but people still believe it and pass it on. The truth is the internally consistent and fact supported state of the world as it was and as it is. There were man…

> All it took was one person willing to burn their career to provide the proof. So many of the below posts are about all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories (most of them vastly overreach the competence of the USA), but this part hits the nail. USA's problem is the culture. The idea that if each person pursues their own self-interest it will amount, in aggregate, to the best possible outcome - this is totally flawed.…

I happen to be reading a biography of Alexander Hamilton right now and I think Washington was pretty disappointed in the people of his own time too. And the members of each faction thought the members of the other factions were "un-American" (though I don't think they had that term). The founding era was not a golden age, there's always been a battle for control of our culture.

Re: NSA Owns Everything (2015)

#120

Post by boring_twenties »

numpad0 wrote: post #28
Thorrez wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Libreboot? Doesn't that allow booting x86 without binary blobs?

They still need some parts of blobs to configure/initialize the system and that “some” now means full MINIX kernel along its userland

That's not correct, Libreboot does not work on those systems that require any part of the ME to boot.

You might be thinking of me_cleaner[1], which removes most but not all of the ME blobs. This is unrelated to Libreboot though, it works on newer systems and is not needed when using Libreboot because the latter gets rid of the (very early versions of) the ME completely.

[1] https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner

Post reply on HN