This stuff looks old. There are versions for Solaris and SCO Unix.
Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
41–50 of 323 posts
Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
#42It's pretty fascinating to read the Shadow Broker's posts. They have to write something, since they can't just say "I work for Russia and we're reminding America that they're not invulnerable." So they have to come up with all sorts of contrived reasons about why they're doing this, complete with broken english to fool stylometry detection that walks the fine line between being believable and preposterous. Someone sp…
Why are you so certain they are Russian?
It's the popular thing to assume these days. It's also very insulting to Russian people in my opinion. But I guess it's ok to be prejudice towards some group of people but not others.
Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
#43I haven't read enough broken English to take a gander at what the native language is for the authors of that...manifesto. Anyone have a good guess? There's some pretty common mistakes throughout ("peoples" for people, "Americans' having" for "Americans have").
There's plenty of omitted articles (which is indicative of Slavic language speakers,) but at one point it devolves into a kind of caveman speak, so it's likely intentional.
Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
#44It's pretty fascinating to read the Shadow Broker's posts. They have to write something, since they can't just say "I work for Russia and we're reminding America that they're not invulnerable." So they have to come up with all sorts of contrived reasons about why they're doing this, complete with broken english to fool stylometry detection that walks the fine line between being believable and preposterous. Someone sp…
As a Russian myself, I can tell you with certainty that there are mistakes in that text that a Russian ESL speaker would never make, and verb tenses are a bit too good for an unskilled speaker. Due to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make. They're wrong.
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Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
#45Obviously, Perl is the NSA top language choice due to it's built in support for obfuscation and job security.
Sure.
It couldn't be because perl is installed by default on all of the target platforms. Practicality trumps conference talks when there's work to be done, even in the government.
Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
#46From the Medium post linked (https://medium.com/@shadowbrokerss/dont-forget-your-base-867...)
- Don’t care if you swapped wives with Mr Putin, double down on it, “Putin is not just my firend he is my BFF”.
- Don’t care if the election was hacked or rigged, celebrate it “so what if I did, what are you going to do about it”.
This has got to be a fake group trying to discredit Trump right? I don't like him or what he's doing, but surely surely his supporters don't subscribe to at least the latter view there?
Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
#47It's pretty fascinating to read the Shadow Broker's posts. They have to write something, since they can't just say "I work for Russia and we're reminding America that they're not invulnerable." So they have to come up with all sorts of contrived reasons about why they're doing this, complete with broken english to fool stylometry detection that walks the fine line between being believable and preposterous. Someone sp…
As a Russian myself, I can tell you with certainty that there are mistakes in that text that a Russian ESL speaker would never make, and verb tenses are a bit too good for an unskilled speaker. Due to the combination of these two factors, I bet this was written by a native English speaker who thinks he/she knows the mistakes a Russian would make. They're wrong.
Just seems like general obfuscation to me. It would be very weird for anyone to make assumptions about their identity based on broken english.
Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
#48From the Medium post linked ( https://medium.com/@shadowbrokerss/dont-forget-your-base-867... ) - Don’t care if you swapped wives with Mr Putin, double down on it, “Putin is not just my firend he is my BFF”. - Don’t care if the election was hacked or rigged, celebrate it “so what if I did, what are you going to do about it”. This has got to be a fake group trying to discredit Trump right? I don't like him or what he'…
> surely surely his supporters don't subscribe to at least the latter view there?
You must not have very many conservative friends on Facebook. "Russia didn't write the emails" has to be one of the most popular memes of the last 6 months.
Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
#49The content reads pretty clearly like a native English speaker imitating immature hacker-speak. It comes across as if it were written by a script-kiddy; that may be intentional.
Re: Snowden: NSA just lost control of its Top Secret arsenal of digital weapons
#50A lot of the scripts appear to have been written by the same person, or is that just me reading into it? They have a distinct comment style in both Python and Perl.
Also, a lot of the tools appear to instruct people to paste various things in to them. I find it unlikely that a single person wrote all the tooling for the NSA, but, who knows.