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Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

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Re: Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

#181

Post by tpmoney »

alabastervlog wrote: post #127
tpmoney wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls I feel this is largely a consequence of decades of overwrought hyperventilating about all things politics and a lot of crying wolf. Every republican candidate has been the ne…

The thing is, there has been a wolf. It's now eating us, and the time to stop it is gone. But sure, it's the fault of the people who correctly told you there was a wolf, and that it's been coming closer and looking hungrier and hungrier since the '70s.

You seem to have missed the point. For one, I’m not telling you this is a good thing or that this is how it ought to be. For two, even in the fable the wolf was real in the end. The problem is, the wolf wasn’t real the last time, or the time before that. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. You can quibble over whether prior politicians were heralds of the wolf or not, but that wasn’t the message. The message was that the wolf was at the gates. And when no wolf materialized, people grew resistant to the idea of the cries ever having meaning. So now we have a wolf, and the problem we are facing is that the people who we need to convince that the wolf is real have no reason at all to believe us until their sheep are being eaten by a wolf in front of them. So how do you convince someone that has no incentive to believe you that this time you’re telling the truth? That’s the problem to be solved. Everything else is just a side show.

Re: Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

#182

Post by K0balt »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #40
derriz wrote: post #21

It seems that the idea that someone could be motivated simply by having integrity, valuing honesty and pride in simply "doing their job" correctly is so alien to the current US administration that they see political motives everywhere and in everyone's actions. The fact that people with such a cynical and amoral worldview wield so much power not only in US but globally and are willing to wield that power in capriciou…

> But what is more horrifying for me is that apparently this administration remains representative of a large section of the US population - with seemingly unshakeable approval by between 40% and 50% of the US adult population according to polls. It’s possible that percentage counts dissatisfaction with the previous administration more than approval for the current one. That is, it might just count people wanting any…

It is disheartening to me to observe that the thing that broke the once proud USA, the final straw, the thing that disenfranchised hundreds of millions of people and made them rabid and reactionary (on both sides of the rage algorithm) was a black man in the white house and women on the presidential ballot. The retrograde prejudices so deeply ingrained in the country’s memome that we are still in the throes of an anaphylactic reaction to an acute melatonin allergy.

It doesn’t help that many of us (yes , I mean us, the technorati, the readers and contributors of this vaunted forum) actively and even knowingly participated in making poisonous systems, pocket prohistamines, amplifiers of fears and antagonists of rational thought.

We decry the world we have wrested from decency with our own tender, uncalloused hands, our minds sharpened to create beautiful weapons of mass confusion, elegant and brutal in their viral carapaces, eager to dissolve into the psyche of any unfortunate enough to fall into their dopamine sweetened viciousness.

We created this. Not the politicians, there have always been irrational, brutish, would be populists and morons in suits. That is not new. People with money willing to pay people to build or do malignant things, that is also an ancient malady that society has evolved to bear. We. We made the mind-killers. We, with our cleverness and desire for perfect symmetry manufactured social PCP, and now we are witnessing the fruits of our careless, avaricious labors, shocked and in denial of the damage we have done.

In our defense, we didn’t know. No one had built anything on our idea machines that hooked into the flesh of the human psyche like that before, and at first we didn’t even understand what we were building. But later in the fall, we knew better.

Our algorithms, nanowire sharp in their efficiency, honed to amplify fear and rage while suppressing rational thought, no, those were not made in ignorance, neither in malice, but more in a playful curiosity. The same playful curiosity that made the atom bomb, but at least the physicists could foresee and conceptualize the demon they would create. In contrast, we the technorati are still reeling with surprise and denial, not able to understand the beast that we have conjured from the depths of the human psyche.

We know there is a problem, we know that social media is not helping… so what do we do? We make lame attempts to make new social media platforms, lower in poison, filtered cigarettes. Precision strategic weapons of mass destruction. Low-fat butter.

We need to look in the mirror and get to work figuring how to fix what we broke. The future of humanity is at stake, and we are directly responsible for, knowingly or not, the situation our children are facing.

Re: Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

#183

Post by mkleczek »

mapt wrote: post #104

Per yesterday's whistleblower, DOGE is apparently exfiltrating confidential NLRB data en masse while explicitly seeking to leave no logs of them doing so, followed immediately by login attempts to those systems using the same freshly created credentials from Russian IPs. I think we can presume the same pattern with IRS, Census, GSA, OPM, etc that just have not had whistleblower-inclined people in the right place to o…

Looks like we all have to start believing unbelievable: agent Krasnov is real and the tip of an iceberg. Honestly I can't see any other rational explanation of what's happening.

Re: Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

#184

Post by krapp »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #170
krapp wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A system is what it does, not what the spec says it should do, and "Christianity" is what Christians do. American Evangelicals and Trump supporters are no less Christian than Catholics during the Crusades and Inquisition. That is the system.

I would say that the "system" of organised religion is very broken and goes against the teachings of Jesus. As far as I can tell, Trump is probably the closest figure to the anti-christ in terms of his greed and lack of charity. Personally, I don't think that the organised Catholic church was about following Jesus' teachings, but more about consolidating wealth and power. It's disingenuous to call it "Christianity" i…

Jesus was a Jew preaching within a framework of Judaism which he clearly believed in and claimed authority from.

That framework rejected him, and I can sympathize with arguments that the system of "Christianity" that developed was not the system he intended, but I don't think it would be accurate to describe Jesus as anti-system per se.

Either way, any definition of Christianity that excludes Catholicism or any other organized sect doesn't seem useful.

It's like people defining Capitalism to require pure free markets, just so they can say the US or British Empires never really engaged in Capitalism. It just seems like an exercise in semantics.

Re: Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

#185

Post by danaris »

fooList wrote: post #160
danaris wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's bullshit. Requiring Congress to get involved every time a regulatory agency needs to adapt to new circumstances or new technology would leave us at the mercy of unscrupulous corporations who can and will "move fast and break things." No; Congress relinquished their power when Congressional Republicans chose to become "the party of No" and just prevent anything from happening under Obama. That's when execut…

It sounded like you were going to disagree, but then I think you arrived at the same place more or less. Congress, on net, isn’t doing what it needs to be doing. Is that not a critical problem? If the executive who takes up that slack is Trump, suddenly people notice what a problem it is. But, it is not about Trump specifically, but rather an ongoing and systemic issue with our two party system, and it will predictab…

I was emphatically disagreeing with their first sentence. The idea that Congress shouldn't be delegating its power to regulatory agencies was a fringe one until very recently, with the obviously-corrupt SCOTUS ruling ending Chevron deference.

Delegating power to regulatory agencies also has nearly nothing to do with Congress's recent gridlock and ineffectiveness, or the spate of executive orders that has prompted.

Re: Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

#186

Post by mindslight »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #134
few wrote: post #73

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addr... https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/04/fact-sheet-pr... >Krebs ... falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen This quote coming from "whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets" is pretty wild. This seems to be retribution, plain and simple.

> This seems to be retribution, plain and simple. It's hardly surprising as it's almost the defining feature of Trump - pettiness and revenge minded. (though strangely, he hasn't publicly insulted his Pennsylvania would-be-assassin, but luckily his ear has healed remarkably well and so maybe he feels no need to do so)

When someone demonstrates actual power, he backs down and cowers. It's why he always ends up doing awkward submissive gestures when interacting with foreign autocrats. No real confidence, all bluster.

Re: Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

#187

Post by awnird »

jonahbenton wrote: post #8

The silence from cybersec, with a couple of exceptions, about DOGE is stunning to me. Not this story but what I thought the headline referred to.

Have you considered that almost every worker in tech, indeed almost every American, supports what's happening?

Re: Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

#189

Post by alabastervlog »

tpmoney wrote: post #181
alabastervlog wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, there has been a wolf. It's now eating us, and the time to stop it is gone. But sure, it's the fault of the people who correctly told you there was a wolf, and that it's been coming closer and looking hungrier and hungrier since the '70s.

You seem to have missed the point. For one, I’m not telling you this is a good thing or that this is how it ought to be. For two, even in the fable the wolf was real in the end. The problem is, the wolf wasn’t real the last time, or the time before that. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. You can quibble over whether prior politicians were heralds of the wolf or not, but that wasn’t the message. The me…

> So how do you convince someone that has no incentive to believe you that this time you’re telling the truth?

Irrelevant, it's too late. We can only hope for enough economic turmoil, fast enough, that it triggers mass riots.

Re: Deafening Silence from the Cybersecurity Industry

#190

Post by tpmoney »

alabastervlog wrote: post #189
tpmoney wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have missed the point. For one, I’m not telling you this is a good thing or that this is how it ought to be. For two, even in the fable the wolf was real in the end. The problem is, the wolf wasn’t real the last time, or the time before that. Or the time before that. Or the time before that. You can quibble over whether prior politicians were heralds of the wolf or not, but that wasn’t the message. The me…

> So how do you convince someone that has no incentive to believe you that this time you’re telling the truth? Irrelevant, it's too late. We can only hope for enough economic turmoil, fast enough, that it triggers mass riots.

So then like I said, the sheep will be eaten. One then must hope they aren’t on the menu, and suddenly the “deafening silence” of various people makes a lot of sense. If the only answer is to wait until enough sheep are eaten for the village to finally get its act together, most people aren’t going to volunteer to be one of the sheep sacrificed.
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