481–490 of 1001 posts
I recall an aphorism that government is self-governed 90% by norms and 10% by law. I don’t know if American law is being violated but certainly it is alarming to observe from the outside when the norms are totally disregarded. The US looks unstable and untrustworthy.
> the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration To be honest, this is my first time hearing about The Com. Does anyone have any more reading on this? You'd think they'd use something more secure than Discord (which has 0 encryption) and Telegram which doesn'…
Discord is very popular with skiddies and real criminal organizations alike. It's got pretty basic KYC controls in place, meaning essentially anyone with just an email can sign up. It can be accessed from behind VPNs without any issues, so effectively it doesn't matter that it's not e2e encrypted. I feel that discord the company probably let's it slide because: 1. Moderation at scale is incredibly difficult. 2. They…
It has been a fairly common story, and part rumor, that intelligence agencies like to recruit young people active in the cyber criminal scene, and that the IT security industry also adapted this approach. They basically becomes part informer and part subject expert, especially since IT security expertise seems to be a difficult subject matter to teach in universities. When I studied IT security in university, about 1…
I say 90% of security is admin work where one has access to various stuff.
Then you have red teams, pentesters, consultants- that don’t have ever privileged access to anything. They should find flaws and pass recommendations to IT admins. If they hack anything at all - it has to be outlined in scope and strictly monitored. For both sides protection as if „hacking person” doesn’t get blame for something he did not touch by him but at the same time someone pulled off something nasty.
All I can think of when I hear about DOGE is Robert McNamara's Department of Defense, where the "Whiz Kids" from industry and academia were supposed to magically fix all sorts of problems with the military's bureaucracy. After all, they went to the right schools, and really, how hard could war-making be? We lost in Vietnam and there are people being born there with birth defects from Operation Ranch Hand to this day…
Can check out the current HN thread on healthcare if you want to see some who suffer from this diagnosis.
The reason security clearances are so important, and why people are so upset about randos going through so much sensitive government information, is that things like this can be used by adversaries to lean on these employees in the future. One of these kids might have worse skeletons in their closet. Given how well-known their names are, adversaries of the USA are likely combing through their own intelligence archive…
I am genuinely more concerned by Elon Musk himself having access then one of these with skeletons in the closet. USA adversaries are no more dangerous then USA is to itself.
Many former hackers have been hired by the government with TS clearances and it's ridiculous to compare teenage hacker groups to violent street gangs. I told an agency of previous hacking stuff and they were more concerned with me admitting to cheating on a math test at college lol.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I spent all day responding to the replies here, and then detaching them in order to save space at the top of the thread. But I just had a better idea. This is a stub comment so we have a single root to collapse the replies. This way (1) replies can stay close to their parent (the top comment) without flooding the screen with offtopicness; and (2) we can all re-experience the timeless truth of https://en.wikipedia.org…
What is the preferred approach for those of us who want fewer Trump/Musk-related posts? Other than, you know, participating in a flamewar.
There's no point giving Musk more money, power, and influence. He's now calling for the impeachment of judges because he thinks they're in his way:
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5134725-elon-musk-impe...
He wants any opposition or limit or restraint to him gone. Here's an interview with Kara Swisher about Musk's mentality that's worth watching:
All I can think of when I hear about DOGE is Robert McNamara's Department of Defense, where the "Whiz Kids" from industry and academia were supposed to magically fix all sorts of problems with the military's bureaucracy. After all, they went to the right schools, and really, how hard could war-making be? We lost in Vietnam and there are people being born there with birth defects from Operation Ranch Hand to this day…
> After all, they went to the right school The selection process here appears to have been the opposite of traditional credentialism
The concerns about things like Treasury data come up in the same context. If someone sues claiming that their data was used incorrectly, if the access was on an official system it will have logs and policies which could be used to show that the same appointee never accessed that data and wouldn’t have been able to send it outside. If the stories about things like personal devices or outside cloud services are true, that may no longer be easy or even possible and a lawsuit might be successful even if they didn’t actually share data with their old boss.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much of it is! Journalists are already using it to debunk some of Elon’s claims like the one they only 10% of USAID reached intended targets (which appears to be based on his complete misreading of a breakdown) The real question now is where is DOGE’s evidence of all of this corruption? There are massive claims of rampant corruption, such as calling the USAID corrupt to their core, but literally zero evidenced has be…
> where is DOGE’s evidence of all of this corruption? Presumably this was published by DOGE: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/at-usaid-wast... I encourage everyone to follow the links and determine the accuracy of the claims being made.
"The woke extravaganza in question was actually something called Dignity, a live-streamed set of performances from the US ambassador’s residence in the Phoenix Park in September 2022 that featured, among others, the American folk musician Rhiannon Giddens, the Italian instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, the singer-songwriter Mick Flannery and the fiddler Martin Hayes.
Having examined the evidence on YouTube, I regret to inform you that there is nothing about white fragility, queer theory or any of the other progressive shibboleths that have attained the same status in this White House that the dictatorship of the proletariat had for the un-American activities committee of the US House of Representatives in the late 1940s.
It is certainly true that the accompanying promotional bumf for the gig (which was sponsored by the well-known radical agitators Coca-Cola and PwC, among others) was full of the sort of platitudes that were so in vogue in the faraway days of the early 2020s.
“The Biden administration is committed to principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and access,” we were informed. “With this event we aim to highlight and celebrate the work that the embassy, the Irish Government and our partners are doing to advance DEI throughout Irish society. These ideals have long underpinned the strong relationship between both countries.”
Not any more."
https://www.paywallskip.com/article?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ir...
> the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration To be honest, this is my first time hearing about The Com. Does anyone have any more reading on this? You'd think they'd use something more secure than Discord (which has 0 encryption) and Telegram which doesn'…