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I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

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Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So would you be alright with your son/daughter choosing their romantic partner as a 50 yr old pedophile, drug dealer, and/or avid supporter of whichever religion or cause you find the most perverse and destructive to humanity?

Obviously, no one should be OK with their child dating someone that is a pedophile. That is obviously child abuse, and call the authorities. I*m not about to let a child be abused, and I find this particular question a strange place to go, since it does seem to be a slippery slope argument. The only real way a parent would know if someone is a drug dealer is if the parent does drugs, or if their friends have bought o…

For the first part your statement was

> parents cannot govern friends and romantic partners.

With absolutely no qualifiers. Unfortunately there are pro-pedophilia people out there, and some are quite public about it (for instance, Richard Stallman at one point). So I think it's important if you take that stance you clarify.

For the second part let's say that there is no question about it (maybe they were convicted). What if they are a violent person? Are you willing to let your child potentially harm themselves or others by being in the influence of violent people?

Lastly you misunderstood what I was saying. From your comment I assume you are against xenophobia and racism (rightly so). What if your child wanted to spend time with another child who openly hated black people or Jewish people?

What I'm saying is as a parent you do have a duty to take care of your child. You should prevent them from being hurt and hurting others. You need to instill in them moral values that make them a good person. If you do not have any power to say, prevent them from spending time with soemone who openly hurts them, then they aren't going to listen to you. They have to learn some things through experience, but other things would hurt them on such a great level that it could be permanently damaging. Yea they might not like it, but when you are a child you don't always have the mental capacity or experience to make all of these decisions logically. True love for someone is not always pretty, it sometimes involves telling them "no" to protect them.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, no one should be OK with their child dating someone that is a pedophile. That is obviously child abuse, and call the authorities. I*m not about to let a child be abused, and I find this particular question a strange place to go, since it does seem to be a slippery slope argument. The only real way a parent would know if someone is a drug dealer is if the parent does drugs, or if their friends have bought o…

For the first part your statement was > parents cannot govern friends and romantic partners. With absolutely no qualifiers. Unfortunately there are pro-pedophilia people out there, and some are quite public about it (for instance, Richard Stallman at one point). So I think it's important if you take that stance you clarify. For the second part let's say that there is no question about it (maybe they were convicted).…

I can agree some parents take this power too far and abuse it, but saying they should not have this power at all is not right.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#283
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once made a purchase of multiple items where the cashier scanned the items, put them in a bag, charged me a total and I paid it. Only sometime later I found out they missed a $100 item. Did I steal something? Did the cashier give me something for free? Who is responsible? What if I didn't notice the $100 charge absent from the bill? What if I was charged twice as much? What if I told the cashier and they did nothin…

In smaller stores (fast food restaurants for sure), when the cash doesn’t balance, the employees pay the difference i think. does it hurt walmart or does it hurt the employees in that case?

Who is at fault for that harm? The customer? The employee? The employer? Regulators? Society??

I'm not even sure this is relevant. We're not talking about a cashier returning too much change. In this scenario, there is nothing to not balance. The item wasn't scanned, isn't on a receipt, was simply given away. The balance in the till is still correct.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#284
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It completely ruined my respect for authority figures. It looks like they realised they were out of their depth and found someone who could help. Were they wrong to trust you? Edit: I may have misunderstood your post. Did you mean: A. The principal and the music teacher asked you to help out a few times because they knew you were skilled B. You were always the first suspect when anything went wrong I understood it a…

There's the educational, constructive "Hey lokimedes I hear you're pretty good with this computer stuff want to come and help me while I solve a problem?", then there's the not so educational and not so constructive "Hey lokimedes, I hear you're pretty good at this, want to solve this problem for us?". The "admin" person calling you for the former? Pretty cool. The principal calling you to their office for the latter…

It's not just the words though, here. Being called to the principal's office is an exceptional occasion. If they were called to the office that many times, they'd see through the words and recognise that the adults were out of their depth and that's why they were being called.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Costco still has issues of resolving discounts on a return. I won't state the bug explicitly but I had a conversation with them about how they refunded me a significant amount I never paid on a large purchase and showed them the delta via receipts. Local management was appreciative but didn't seem to have an idea of how to proceed to make things right. Ultimately they said my account would be flagged as owing the dif…

"I tried to do the right thing but ultimately it ends up being their responsibility to handle it when the customer is standing right in front of them showing their loss of revenue." I bought some lions mane mushrooms from a grocery store, which cost $10-12 per lbs. The cashier rang them up as "regular" (button) mushrooms at $2 per lbs. I pointed out the mistake and she tried to correct it but chose the button mushroo…

Lions Mane is incredible. Crazy to me that it’s not more widely recognized for what it is.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#286
post #60
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't change a thing, just LOLed and told someone > Oh well, 2 week suspension God damn, these idiot school people have no fucking clue that someone who points out a security flaw to you without inflicting any harm is actually doing something good, and that behavior should be encouraged and rewarded .

BRB, preparing my YC S22 application: "BugBakeSale" "We're bug bounties for America's school districts: HackerOne for the K12 market. The product is free if you let our corporate partners, who also fund the bounties, recruit the winners."

This is actually an awesome idea, because everyone wins. Well, except school districts who have more work. ;) I hope someone creates this.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#287
post #87
post #27

My FBI file was for hacking into my school district's AS/400 that handled my school's attendance and grading system. Somehow using a public IP address with no access restrictions allowed a clear telnet path in from home. Compounding username and passwords that were all the same for every employee. I didn't change a thing, just LOLed and told someone. Bad mistake. This was the late 90s. Oh well, 2 week suspension and…

Good times indeed. I got into similar mischief, but my school didn't really mind. I got a slap on the wrist, because they were to prestigious to court negative attention. Then I got into similar shit in college. I reported it and got lucky again. The guy in charge of their cybersecurity program invited me to take his class which was all master's students and phd candidates as a freshman. I would have bombed as it was…

I’ve been on the other end of this dynamic. It’s really incredible what you can accomplish by providing someone with a passing grade.

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#288
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a good way to explain my discomfort with online tracking. Machines categorising you based on your behaviour, without your knowledge nor your consent. It's not so bad when it serves you ads (unless it sells alcohol to alcoholics), but there's no telling what similar algorithms would say about you in the hands of a rogue government. They can find vulnerable people, people who hate certain people [0], peop…

I hold that we still have not imagined (not even in science fiction) the horrors totalitarian governments are now capable of in a fully-networked, computer-brokered society.

Like implementing social credit score and aloowing people activities based on it? Oh wait...

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#289
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a beautiful song by Vienna Teng called The Hymn of Acxiom[1][2] that covers this nicely. It's in the form of a hymn sung by the data collecting machine itself. It starts off like a message of love and reassurance, but the reassurance unravels as it goes on, until finally we reach the double meaning of it all: "Embrace you for all you’re/your worth" Somebody hears you You know that inside Someone is learning t…

This is one of the strangest and most amazing art pieces I've experienced. Perfectly captures our time, both in technology used to produce the song and the meaning of all the words

[deleted]

Re: I got an FBI record at age 11 from dabbling in cryptography (2015)

#290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in high school from 2007 to 2011. Half of it in rural Alabama, the other half in the Bay. Even being in the tech capital of the world, the school administration's views on technology and information access were so backwards. Our school basically didn't allow accessing any websites that weren't on some allowlist. Teachers had accounts to bypass the content filter. We had a game design class that happened after s…

Similar time period, I used portable Firefox and then Chrome on a thumb drive to bypass our content filter. I actually find this surprising in retrospect, but I'd guess they were using Content Advisor on Internet Explorer[1]. I carefully guarded my secret. [1] this pdf appears to lend credence to that idea(no affiliation). https://www.kvcc.edu/pdfs/MyItLab/myitlab_BestPractices_Home...

If I were smarter, I probably would have learned about proxy servers. I was tantalizingly close as is. I had set up port forwarding on our home router and a dyndns account to access my (Linux) desktop via ssh. I'm almost surprised it took me another few years to bump into SOCKS proxies. I already had 99% of the setup, just not the final step. Oh well I guess.

Our school was Windows land as well. They blocked execution of certain programs by some policy in Windows explorer in Windows XP (they had never adopted Vista, and 7 was still "too new"). Funny thing was, if you knew the path to them, you could just point Firefox or Chrome at a file:// URI and run it out of your downloads directory. Oops.

There was also that time I got detention for riding my bike in the school parking lot. Which was dumb, because I always showed up 30+ minutes before any cars did because I made a deal with the sculpting teacher that I wouldn't have to do sculpting if I showed up early to class and learned about the chemistry of clay glazes along with helping him mix them for class, which was honestly far more interesting to me.

Our AP Chemistry teacher was a nuclear engineering postdoc from MIT who spent her entire career helping clean up after US military nuclear accidents.

High school was a weird time. It just boggles my mind still to this day to have a school staffed by some wonderfully brilliant teachers and have an administration that seemed to lived in fear of a student body who dared learn something or learn from someone they didn't approve of.

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