71–80 of 86 posts
This scenario is closer to what happened to Robert Morris. Apparently the worm wasn't intended to be malicious, unlike the actions of Matthew Keys.
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I've been idly working on an essay for... I don't know, 5 years now? about how computers and the Internet catalyze harm, by shielding people who cause harm from the impact of their action, and by making harmful actions practically indistinguishable from benign ones --- "click this button and 'like' someone on Facebook, click this other button and help DDoS someone whose politics you disagree with". I have some sympat…
"I don't have the right words yet for it, as you can see; I'll probably still be mulling it 5 years from now." I call it the Turing Chaos; intrinsic to computer science is that a single bit flip can completely and utterly change how a system works... and this is not a trivial observation, it is actually a deep and profound observation about the difference between the "cyber"world and the physical world that has perva…
This article makes an important point about the brokenness of CFAA sentencing, but it (or Wired's editors) do the point a disservice by making an absolutely hyperbolic claim. The "War On Drugs" has imprisoned literally millions of people, and done so in a fashion that is both racist (minorities are far more likely to be imprisoned for a drug offense) and classist (wealthy defendants are unlikely to be imprisoned for…
I think he caused a lot more damage than temporarily defacing a newspaper's website.
What is a reasonable punishment?
Everyone has an opinion. What's yours?
This article makes an important point about the brokenness of CFAA sentencing, but it (or Wired's editors) do the point a disservice by making an absolutely hyperbolic claim. The "War On Drugs" has imprisoned literally millions of people, and done so in a fashion that is both racist (minorities are far more likely to be imprisoned for a drug offense) and classist (wealthy defendants are unlikely to be imprisoned for…
In that sense, it seems like a good idea to be on the lookout for the next incarnation of the war on drugs/war on terror/red scare/etc. so we can do something about it before it gains momentum. Hyperbole may not be the best tactic to accomplish this, but I suppose it beats being ignored by everyone when you have an important point to make.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been idly working on an essay for... I don't know, 5 years now? about how computers and the Internet catalyze harm, by shielding people who cause harm from the impact of their action, and by making harmful actions practically indistinguishable from benign ones --- "click this button and 'like' someone on Facebook, click this other button and help DDoS someone whose politics you disagree with". I have some sympat…
I don't see that as an internet thing, its about long distance control, or remote control. Its the same thing when people say its easy for politicians to send troops to war, or when a soldier controls a drone. They don't directly witness the outcome. The internet is just a more efficient, wider spread, easier to access example of it. Maybe also, its the same sort of thing as common folk committing minor insurance fra…
There is only one possible sane answer, and in this hypothetical it is quite pronounced - assume the Internet is full of malicious noise, and fully blame the person who hooked the missile up to a web page. Anything else is an exercise in responsibility laundering.
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Oh fucking christ, I am not having the conversation in two places at once: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7110399 My comparison between Hacker Panic to the War on Terror is not meant to imply that a few teenagers getting sent to prison for decades is equivalent in any respect to raining missiles down on wedding parties. It is a statement about the motivation of the people driving it. It isn't motivated by fear…
To see the War on Terror as chiefly about domestic power grabs and pointless expenditures is the prerogative of US tax payers and US citizens, but it's also a pretty narrow point of view. If you're going to make coarse, meaningless comparisons and only after that narrowing it down with qualifications, I guess the original article was right. Hacker Panic is the new War on Drugs. Except for all the ways it is not, of c…
Eagerly awaiting your thoughtful analysis.
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The article goes off the rails with this sentence: "As a country and a criminal justice system, we’ve been down this road of excessive punishment before: with drugs." There's no particularly strong connection between computer crimes and drug crimes. As you point out, the comparison is hyperbole, and ignores the deep racial, cultural, and class conflicts at the heart of the drug war. None of those things are really ap…
I've been idly working on an essay for... I don't know, 5 years now? about how computers and the Internet catalyze harm, by shielding people who cause harm from the impact of their action, and by making harmful actions practically indistinguishable from benign ones --- "click this button and 'like' someone on Facebook, click this other button and help DDoS someone whose politics you disagree with". I have some sympat…
In general distance from a victim shields people from experiencing the impact of their actions. My late grandfather was an artillerist on the Soviet side in World War 2: he talked about how soldiers would vomit, fall ill, and cry after visibly killing enemy soldiers for the first time with short-range handheld arms (i.e., grenades, rifles, submachine guns, bayonets, or pistols). Yet, himself, when shelling remote positions with full understanding the shells -- in addition to killing much larger groups of enemy soldiers than bullets -- may have also killed civilians (which for most of the war generally meant Soviet or other allied civilians).
This isn't about moral rationalization -- obviously resisting Nazis and winning World War II was a good thing -- but emotional reaction. To get back on topic, what I think happens here isn't someone thinking that somehow committing one crime electronically vs. physically is less severe; it's that one's disgust with what they're doing is less, which makes a various rationalizations (whether correct or incorrect) for one's actions easier to accept.
> I don't know what you do about the guy who fed his admin credentials to Anonymous to help them deface a newspaper.
I am trying to draw a comparison here with someone either letting an unauthorized person enter the printing rooms of a newspaper (and as a result something other than a newspaper was printed and delivered). Yet that isn't quite right: someone with physical access to printing room of a newspaper could have done even greater damage.
Another comparison could be with a newspaper boy agreeing to deliver a sarcastic parody of a paper in place of the actual paper. Yet that too isn't quite right, as it's far easier for the newspaper to recover promptly, and the damage is localized.
All of those things are hard to answer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see that as an internet thing, its about long distance control, or remote control. Its the same thing when people say its easy for politicians to send troops to war, or when a soldier controls a drone. They don't directly witness the outcome. The internet is just a more efficient, wider spread, easier to access example of it. Maybe also, its the same sort of thing as common folk committing minor insurance fra…
Web crawlers? People still figuring it's part of some game? Broken browsers? Nukerolling? There is only one possible sane answer, and in this hypothetical it is quite pronounced - assume the Internet is full of malicious noise, and fully blame the person who hooked the missile up to a web page . Anything else is an exercise in responsibility laundering.
Spot on.
The noise doesn't even have to be composed of malicious people to be malicious itself; the potential bartier is very low here. In this case I can easily imagine one drunk /b/tard posting in on 4chan because "hey, it has nukes on it", and then someone else thinking "hey, it's on 4chan so it must be troll, lemme hook it up to my DDoS bot and see what happens".
Boom, gone a city of 30M, vanished in the flash of pure randomness.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been idly working on an essay for... I don't know, 5 years now? about how computers and the Internet catalyze harm, by shielding people who cause harm from the impact of their action, and by making harmful actions practically indistinguishable from benign ones --- "click this button and 'like' someone on Facebook, click this other button and help DDoS someone whose politics you disagree with". I have some sympat…
Just wait until someone tells a robot to go out and gather carbon compounds.
Could someone please help me understand how can changing a headline on some websites cause five-figures damages? Honest question, really. Every time I see articles about computer vandalism or hacking I see these big numbers and don't understand how they are calculated.