Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your premise is pure fantasy. There was never a ticking time bomb scenario. And torque is NOT an effective means of extracting information. Everyone from Napoleon to Hitler to our own Military generals have aid as much. Here's a good article on the subject: http://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/no...
>And torque is NOT an effective means of extracting information. Then how do you explain this case in Germany where simply threatening torture resulted in the perpetrator divulging the location of his victim: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/world/kidnapping-has-germa...
An Offer to Sony from 2600
141–150 of 200 posts
Re: An Offer to Sony from 2600
#142I still have a hard time believing NK did this without any definitive evidence. Wasn't it last December that NK was sending fax messages to communicate with SK? Now they can download Terabytes from Sony without anyone noticing?
Re: An Offer to Sony from 2600
#143The last time people got this crazy about a hack, Kevin Mitnick was thrown in solitary confinement for months because they thought he could "whistle nuclear launch codes into prison telephones". 2600 made the documentary about it, Freedom Downtime, and I strongly recommend watching it if you never have. So what if North Korea did it (of course I'm skeptical of this, anyone with a computer can conduct the same activit…
And all Sony had to do was regularly back up, encrypt and delete the emails off their servers. This is the prime thing motivating their actions and driving their fear. And protect sensitive documents better but that seems secondary. Leaving an ever accumlating pile of embarassing communications for someone to steal and then extort you for is not a national security weakness.
Add that a narrative around this story is that the hackers "spear phished" an IT admin. This is incredibly difficult to defend against for any organization (seriously -- for all of the browbeating against Sony on here -- it's all so simple -- I would argue that there are zero organizations that would withstand a concerted, targeted attack. Most would fall in a day). Not only did they purportedly co-opt a privileged account, they then sat on it for months.
Over months they could have changed policies, retrieved backups, and on and on.
When blaming Sony, everyone needs to remember that Snowden, a Dell contractor working at the NSA with limited access, took the King's Ransom from what is assumed to be the pinnacle of computer security and awareness.
Re: An Offer to Sony from 2600
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your premise is pure fantasy. There was never a ticking time bomb scenario. And torque is NOT an effective means of extracting information. Everyone from Napoleon to Hitler to our own Military generals have aid as much. Here's a good article on the subject: http://www.theguardian.com/science/the-lay-scientist/2010/no...
>And torque is NOT an effective means of extracting information. Then how do you explain this case in Germany where simply threatening torture resulted in the perpetrator divulging the location of his victim: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/10/world/kidnapping-has-germa...
simply threatening torture
Torture would not have produced more useful results, and may have actually produced less useful results. Threatening it, on the other hand, seems to have worked.The issue with the CIA torture scandal is that you have a bunch of guys who may or may not know anything. These guys are interrogated, and, probably, disclose everything they know. Then, the higher ups at the CIA, acting on the authority of Cheney[1] and Bush[2] required that the guys being held—who may or may not know anything more or at all—be tortured to extract more information.
At this point, the guys being held who may or may not know anything are going to start telling their 'enhanced' interrogators anything they can in order to stop what's happening to them. It doesn't matter if it's real or fake.
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/09/dick-cheney-def... (and it's important to note that the Senate report on this subject revealed that torture had nothing to do with the discovery of bin Laden's location.)
[2] http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-bush-knew-about-cia-tortu...
Re: An Offer to Sony from 2600
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm sorry, but this simply flies in face of logic. it is absolutely morally wrong, but it certainly can be effective and has been used throughout history. usually, things that don't work don't last anywhere near that long. there are all sorts of reasons to oppose it, which of course I do, but saying it cannot be effective just isn't one of them.
"Logic" is not what you're using here. People thought the earth was flat for, well, a long time. Things that are false can last quite a while.
Like the idea that people thought the world was flat:
Re: An Offer to Sony from 2600
#146Paulo Coelho, world famous novelist, also made a neat offer: https://twitter.com/paulocoelho/status/545465796202606592
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/feb/01/paulo-coelho-re...
Re: An Offer to Sony from 2600
#147The last time people got this crazy about a hack, Kevin Mitnick was thrown in solitary confinement for months because they thought he could "whistle nuclear launch codes into prison telephones". 2600 made the documentary about it, Freedom Downtime, and I strongly recommend watching it if you never have. So what if North Korea did it (of course I'm skeptical of this, anyone with a computer can conduct the same activit…
It is a big deal actually. Sony and these movie theaters taught the world that US businesses are so risk averse that they will give into any threat - credible or not. The crazies will now come out of the woodwork. Not every business will give in, but the volume of threats and the disruption they cause will vastly increase.
A foreign dictator just told the US population that it isn't allowed to see a movie he doesn't like (false flag conspiracy theories aside - sometimes things are exactly what they appear to be). I am not sure how anyone can think this isn't a big deal worthy of presidential intervention.
Re: An Offer to Sony from 2600
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Now we want you never let the movie released, distributed or leaked in any form of, for instance, DVD or piracy. And we want everything related to the movie, including its trailers, as well as its full version down from any website hosting them immediately." If only we had passed SOPA and CISPA, we'd be so much safer right now.
If anything I think this shows how poorly the US Gov is prepared for cyber-warfare. The last decade was no cake walk, but the next decade will truly be eye opening. The FBI told Sony they didn't know if the theaters were safe. Seriously, WTF are we paying them for if they can't tell us, with absolute certainty, that our theaters are safe from terrorist attacks on Christmas. That's not very comforting... So what I'm h…
Are you kidding me? You expect that if the FBI can't say with absolute certainty that all 40K screens in the US are absolutely safe from terrorist attack on Christmas that they've somehow failed us?
They'd have failed us if they could state that with certainty, IMO. Because either they don't know what certainty means, or they'd have frivolously wasted such a massive amount of money securing a soft and nearly useless target. What's next? Food courts? Mall parking lots?
Society simply cannot afford to provide absolute certainty, nor would I want to live in a world where that was the goal. Imagine the surveillance effort and intrusion into your personal life that would be needed to prevent you from carrying out an attack at a time and place of your choosing that the media would call terrorism. Now multiply that by 300 million people. You'd likely need over half of the population to be trusted and in law enforcement and you still wouldn't have certainty...
Re: An Offer to Sony from 2600
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
i'm sorry, but this simply flies in face of logic. it is absolutely morally wrong, but it certainly can be effective and has been used throughout history. usually, things that don't work don't last anywhere near that long. there are all sorts of reasons to oppose it, which of course I do, but saying it cannot be effective just isn't one of them.
What?!?! When John McCain was tortured and was asked to give up the names of his squad mates, he gave the names of the front line of the green bay packers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_and_military_career_... Clearly torture is an effective way of getting useless information, you have no way to tell if the info is correct or not, and the prisoner has no incentive to give you the correct information. People…
(In the following, I'm trying to just discuss the technical aspects of this. When I ask if or suggest that something would be effective, it is not meant to imply that if torture can be made effective then it is OK to do it. The ineffectiveness of torture as currently practiced is just one argument against torture, and so if it can be made effective that still leaves the other anti-torture arguments intact).
Wouldn't this largely depend on what type of information you are trying to get and how much you already know? If you already have information that I know that you are not supposed to know, and I don't know you already have it, you can ask about that while interrogating me in addition to asking about whatever it is you are really trying to get. That should give you some feedback on whether or not I'm giving correct info.
Wouldn't it also depend on how many other people you are interrogating over the same subjects? If you are questioning me and several other people about a particular thing, and I make up something on the fly to get you to stop torturing me, my made up story might not be the same as the made up stories of other people, whereas the stories of the people who tell the truth will agree. Of course, we could all have been trained to expect to be interrogated over this, and all have consistent prepared lies to give. Your counter to that would be to try to capture and interrogate lower level people or people who were less directly involved so that they are less likely to have prepared stories to give.
I can believe that torture as currently practiced is almost always ineffective, but I suspect that this may be due to them relying on psychologists to figure out how to do it rather than bringing in engineers, scientists, and mathematicians and treating it as some kind of noisy and unreliable channel problem.
Re: An Offer to Sony from 2600
#150The last time people got this crazy about a hack, Kevin Mitnick was thrown in solitary confinement for months because they thought he could "whistle nuclear launch codes into prison telephones". 2600 made the documentary about it, Freedom Downtime, and I strongly recommend watching it if you never have. So what if North Korea did it (of course I'm skeptical of this, anyone with a computer can conduct the same activit…
>The CIA report threatens our legitimacy as a world power. The Sony hack just costs a corporation some money, maybe (free publicity FTW). Big. Deal. It is a big deal actually. Sony and these movie theaters taught the world that US businesses are so risk averse that they will give into any threat - credible or not. The crazies will now come out of the woodwork. Not every business will give in, but the volume of threat…