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Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

arstechnica.com

381–390 of 463 posts

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#381
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is that people make a stronger argument even when a weaker one would be sufficient?

Instead of comparing AI to any other tool, especially one closer to "useful with a computer", the common comparison is always a weapon of some kind. If the design of tools are neutral, one tool should do as well as another in this common comparison. But the useful application of tools is inherent in their design. If tools were neutral, as so many on this site claim, why is AI only ever compared to knives and hammers?…

Hammers are kind of just the prototypical tool, but I've definitely also seen comparisons to keyboards, paintbrushes, and traditional digital tools.

> why are they never used as the example when tools are allegedly neutral? That would be a stronger argument opposing AI regulation

The argument is strongest if pointing to tools that have larger potential impact yet are still widely considered neutral and not/loosely regulated.

"We should consider AI a neutral tool and not heavily regulate it because we do the same for drink coasters" is not convincing, because there's not all that much you can do with a coaster.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#382

I was always curious how come firing a person is a risk in the US culture. Outside of the US it's almost never done like that and a person fired is expected to be cooperative and probably even continue working for another two weeks. And not only expected - this is what actually happens.

The fuck would I keep working for if I get fired? Give me my severance if it exists and let me go home that day to start looking for another job. Don't waste my time for 2 weeks to make sure your business doesn't experience any hiccups. If I'm so important that you cannot run without my knowledge, maybe you shouldn't fire me?

That being said, burning everything down on your way out the door is absolutely not standard behavior in the US. Assholes are assholes though, no matter where they're from.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#383
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I know enough people who tried, to be able to tell you that it's not all roses over there. Some had to go back to being a corporate slave and some just continue grinding a barely viable business earning much less than they could at a large company

[deleted]

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>You should have tried to create a business or fulfill G-ds hopes for you when you had the chance Says who? What does God have to do with this topic? And why are you censoring the word God? >but you sold out and took the easy pay check. I didn't sell anything, nor was the paycheck easy, it was all hard honest work from school to university to put food on the table for my family. Why do I need to justify myself to you…

(hackeridiot12 may be Jewish - IME Jews often type "G-d" because spelling the deity's name in impermanent text is disrespectful. Bit odd from my perspective, but harmless :))

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#385
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terminating access and rotating passwords (if needed) while the person is in the meeting but has not yet found out they are being let go has been SOP for at least the last 20 years

Is this specific to US culture? And what about your work environment makes it such a risk? Where people are laid off here (Norway), they're still employed by law for 3 months. Most companies don't force you to work all that time, but it's pretty common to finish up your tasks, do offboarding etc for a few weeks. Never considered it an issue. Maybe it's a high trust society thing?

I have had this (garden leave) specified in contracts in Norway too - it's not strictly a requirement that you're allowed to serve out the full 3 months, but the default unless specified is 3 months. In the cases I had it in the contract, the contract generally framed it as if some other perk (like shares) served as consideration for giving my employer the right to put me on garden leave.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#386
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how it's never just one thing. In my region of the world a crackdown on street racing started a few years ago. It continued because each night the police stopped someone, there was at least one DUI and suspended license. Unsurprisingly those who disregard traffic rules tend to equally disregard other rules.

I'm not a big "lock them up" guy but seriously people don't seem to understand how hard it is to actually get the state to put and keep you in jail. You have to do really really bad things multiple times. The US prison population has been falling for over a decade now and part of that is everybody now faces pressure to not use incarceration as a first (or second or fifth) option

The USA has the biggest incarceration rate of any developed country.

If you say that it's hard to get the state to put you in jail, then the only way I can reconcile that with facts is that people in the USA commit crimes X10 times more than in other developed countries.

Do you think that's true?

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#387
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hashing passwords client-side is generally a bad idea, since it means that the hash effectively becomes the password. For example, if I have a database row that has the hash of the password and a bad-guy gets access to the database, they will get the hash. The benefit of a hash is that it is a one-way operation, I can't figure out the plaintext from the hash, so my account is safe. If the password is hashed on the cl…

You actually want to one-way passwords both client-side, for transport, and again server-side, for storage/comparison. Otherwise, there's a hole, between the end of the TLS connection and where the server-side encryption happens, where the password is in plain text. Think logs and load-balancers and proxies. While the client-side hashing doesn't help protect your site a lot (as you say, the hashed value the client se…

If you're worried about MITM in the TLS web connection between client and server, you already lost and no prevention method client side will work, because if you own the connection you can just give client malicious JS to extract the password when they enter it

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#388
post #379
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you had to find an article from three decades ago for an instance of killing with a keyboard is telling. All the others aren’t exactly that recent and are mostly isolated cases. Meanwhile, on gun related deaths, there are entire Wikipedia pages for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_mass_shootings_in_the... There are more mass shoot…

>The fact that you had to find an article from three decades ago for an instance of killing with a keyboard is telling Yeah, is telling that modern keyboards weight a lot less nowadays, and nobody would use one as a weapon to hit someone else. ;) The original IBM Model M was 2.3 Kg.

Thank you for the laugh, wasn’t expecting that. Though I have a modern external Apple keyboard, which is not that weighty but it is metal and fairly thin with sharp corners. It could do some damage.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a big "lock them up" guy but seriously people don't seem to understand how hard it is to actually get the state to put and keep you in jail. You have to do really really bad things multiple times. The US prison population has been falling for over a decade now and part of that is everybody now faces pressure to not use incarceration as a first (or second or fifth) option

The USA has the biggest incarceration rate of any developed country. If you say that it's hard to get the state to put you in jail, then the only way I can reconcile that with facts is that people in the USA commit crimes X10 times more than in other developed countries. Do you think that's true?

Oh absolutely. The level of antisocial behavior the US tolerates compared to multiple other countries (developed and developing) I've lived in is astounding.

Re: Twin brothers wipe 96 government databases minutes after being fired

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amateurs. My employer does mass layoffs by terminating access to everything except their email account at 3am, and then sending an email to the victim saying “you were let go at 3am”. Managers get to figure out who’s left on their team by pinging everyone when they learn about it at work.

If you're talking about Oracle, the large round previous to that they did had individual meetings with employee, manager, and HR. With so many layoffs it took a week+ to do, effectively torturing an entire set of employees who had no idea if they'd have a job by the end of the hour, let alone week. I'm not sure there's any good way to lay off large amounts of staff (besides not getting yourself into the situation in…

In much of Europe, if you're planning redundancies above a certain (low) number of employees, the employees / unions has a consultation right before layoffs start in order to be able to negotiate or consider other options...
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