Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How the NSA Plans to Infect “Millions” of Computers with Malware

firstlook.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 182 posts

Re: How the NSA Plans to Infect “Millions” of Computers with Malware

#101

Post by Fuxy »

clarry wrote: post #80
Fuxy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As i said not impossible but at least we're not giving the NSA information about vulnerabilities months in advance of us fixing it. Where there's a will there's a way especially if you have billions of dollars in funding and the freedom to do so i just aim to make it as difficult as possible.

Is running Linux all you can do to make it as difficult as possible?

No obviously not.

There's a lot of things you can do to protect you privacy but it all starts with a good choice of OS and hardware.

If the foundation is compromised there's no point in anything else you do to protect your privacy.

Edit: Yes Arch it's not particularly security conscious I choose to compromise some security to stay on the bleeding edge now that could mean that I get some bad code sometimes but that also means that it gets fixed sooner too.

Having a rolling release system that you can mold to your needs is worth it for me.

Re: How the NSA Plans to Infect “Millions” of Computers with Malware

#102

Post by TrainedMonkey »

infinity0 wrote: post #65
gizmo686 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>for free How do you know r0h1n is doing this for free?

I don't, but it's a general good ethical principle to Assume Good Faith in the absence of other information. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:AGF

Recently I had been operating under "Assume it is being done, unless you can come up with a really good reason[0] of why it would not be done"

[0] Such as it is physically impossible or prohibitively expensive.

Re: How the NSA Plans to Infect “Millions” of Computers with Malware

#103

Post by saraid216 »

pjc50 wrote: post #96
eli wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offtopic, but I've always been surprised there wasn't more uproar over the passage of the Real ID Act. Basically a sneaky way to turn your state-issued driver license into a national ID card.

The tragic thing is that some of the Baltic states (eg Estonia) have shown nifty ways to make ID cards benefit the public, having keypairs on the card and application integration etc. But this is only useful IF we can trust the system won't be abused - which at the moment we really can't. In the west an ID system would be primarily used for making immigrants second class citizens and turning everyone into immigration…

This. There's a vicious cycle of government inefficiency, privacy advocacy, and all-around distrust that keeps happening over and over again, reinforcing memes and justifying a lot of backwards thinking.

Re: How the NSA Plans to Infect “Millions” of Computers with Malware

#104

Post by clarry »

Fuxy wrote: post #101
clarry wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is running Linux all you can do to make it as difficult as possible?

No obviously not. There's a lot of things you can do to protect you privacy but it all starts with a good choice of OS and hardware. If the foundation is compromised there's no point in anything else you do to protect your privacy. Edit: Yes Arch it's not particularly security conscious I choose to compromise some security to stay on the bleeding edge now that could mean that I get some bad code sometimes but that al…

I'm not trying to bash Arch, but it never looked like a particularly security-conscious or focused distro. To me it looked like it's about being cool and bleeding edge and Gentoo with binary packages... and I have a faint recollection of seeing some rather unimpressive packaging, though that was long time ago.

So it runs on i686 and amd64 only. How do you select "good" hardware?

Re: How the NSA Plans to Infect “Millions” of Computers with Malware

#105

Post by mattlutze »

infinity0 wrote: post #69
mattlutze wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this would be an extension of wiretapping, not soldiers taking residence forcefully in a home.

No. Malware is way more intrusive than wiretapping, it can affect your software. Implanting a chip into your brain to control your thoughts would be the extreme version of it.

"Way more" intrusive doesn't conflict with "extension". It's just a more spirited adjectival phrase.

Seems to be that what's described -- fake servers to watch traffic, turning on a mic to listen, turning on a camera to watch -- are all in spirit extensions of an intel agent sitting at an AT&T operator's switch and plugging into a line to listen to a conversation. Particularly that mic one.

My contention was simply that it doesn't track that malware on a computer is anything like a soldier demanding to use someone's home as a bunk house.

Re: How the NSA Plans to Infect “Millions” of Computers with Malware

#106

Post by Zigurd »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #34
bananas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firstly, your "founding fathers" - ha now there's a joke. Do you think anyone respects those amendments? Nope. If they thought that, you wouldn't be stocked up with weapons. And we all know how effective that technology is at ending all those pesky terrorists with their zip guns and IEDs...

And we all know how effective that technology is at ending all those pesky terrorists with their zip guns and IEDs... Those people have been indoctrinated since birth to see us as evil invaders. Some of their religions have baked in the idea that it's good to die in order to kill invaders. And we've sometimes acted like an evil invader. (See Blackwater atrocities, etc.) It's an invalid comparison because our populati…

Calling the people who have a beef against us for occupying their country "those people" and thinking they are in any deep way different from us is a big red flag for lack of understanding. That kind of thinking goes a long way toward explaining how we could blow a couple trillion dollars fighting people who haven't got a single aircraft, artillery piece, or armored vehicle.

Re: How the NSA Plans to Infect “Millions” of Computers with Malware

#107

Post by rhino369 »

bediger4000 wrote: post #100
pizza234 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the time when this was written, there was a clear distinction between times of peace and war. Nowadays, especially from the start of the "War on terror", this distinction has been artificially demolished; one of the consequences is that there is way more leverage to wark around laws (and to do many other nasty things).

I grant that funding for the War on Terror has taken place. But I also don't think that a real, formal declaration of war has been approved. So, is the USA at war or not? I suspect (but I'm only 52% certain) that we're not at war. The follow-on questions (after "are we at war or not?"): In what state are we? What are the legal ramifications of this half-at-war-state? Why hasn't the US Congress declared war since WW2?…

There is no requirement, either under the Constitution or under laws of war, for any sort of formal declaration. And, there as an "authorization of military force" against al Qaeda and the Taliban. There certainly isn't some magic I DECLARE WAR requirement.

> Why hasn't the US Congress declared war since WW2? Is there some consequence to declaring war or not declaring war that they're trying to avoid?

Its an outdated concept.

Re: How the NSA Plans to Infect “Millions” of Computers with Malware

#108

Post by insuffi »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #24
bananas wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more complicated than that. ----->[ good times ]---->[ hard times ] ---> [fascism] --\ ^ | \-------------------[revolution] Revolution merely starts the cycle again. We'll always end up with the KGB, Stasi, NSA, GCHQ, CIA etc so you have to deconstruct society regularly to flush it out. We're stuck in a pretty long loop at the moment just verging on hard times. Edit: the "good times" above is optional.

Luckily, our founding fathers built in a way to achieve the same effects as a revolution without any violence. If you were to start an armed insurrection, the government would be totally justified in ending you. Not a smart decision given today's level of technology. It was through sheer luck that the American revolution worked at all: the British commanders were so incredibly incompetent that they checkmated themsel…

I'm really, really trying not to be snarky or offensive here, but does anybody else think people using the phrase "founding fathers" sound like a part of a cult?

Re: How the NSA Plans to Infect “Millions” of Computers with Malware

#109

Post by lucastx »

tedks wrote: post #98
chroem wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too bad God doesn't approve of a networking stack.

This is exactly why God doesn't approve of a networking stack. Wake up, sheeple.

I feel guilty of upvoting a joke on HN.

My only comfort is knowing that this one will be buried, and this will be my punishment.

Post reply on HN