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Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

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Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#491

Post by culi »

caust1c wrote: post #475
culi wrote: post #454

> the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration To be honest, this is my first time hearing about The Com. Does anyone have any more reading on this? You'd think they'd use something more secure than Discord (which has 0 encryption) and Telegram which doesn'…

Discord is very popular with skiddies and real criminal organizations alike. It's got pretty basic KYC controls in place, meaning essentially anyone with just an email can sign up. It can be accessed from behind VPNs without any issues, so effectively it doesn't matter that it's not e2e encrypted. I feel that discord the company probably let's it slide because: 1. Moderation at scale is incredibly difficult. 2. They…

I've been mistakenly banned from Discord before and I know from experience that pretty much any low level mod has a complete and readibly accessible history of all of my posts across all servers complete with timestamps and IP addresses

I'm also pretty sure phone number are required for sign up

I think your second point is the more likely explanation. Any other platform that would've hosted this many communities dedicated to drugs, cybercrime, etc would definitely have faced serious legal challenges. It seems much more likely that feds find it a useful platform to keep around

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#492

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

MisoRamen wrote: post #341
ineptech wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's more worrying is whether the access can realistically be revoked. As a general rule, when a security even rises to the level of root access to internal systems, you don't even try to remove them - you just rebuild the affected VMs from scratch because it's the only way to be sure the attacker didn't leave anything behind. For the systems we're talking about, payment processing stuff at Treasury and Social Secu…

How does someone even clean up this mess? One of the DOGE kids may have just cloned every repo and then connect the machine to public internet because they need to fed it to an AI to figure out how things work. We can only assume the worst and that foreign adversaries may already be combing the code line by line. What will happen when PIIs of every individual with dealings with the Treasury gets leaked? Then there is…

I like how you are 100% convinced that this “a mess” and “we can only assume the worst” and that PII is compromised, etc.

What actual facts do you have for anything?

I understand why the media is mad, why NGOs, and why liberal politicians are mad, I get why foreign countries are mad.

I’m interested in fraud and abuse, regardless of who does it. So if Musk’s team finds it, great, if they get caught committing it and have to deal with that, also great.

But right now we know there is something broken. Instead of being mad about that, you are angry about hypotheticals that have not happened.

Why is that?

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#493

Post by ketlag »

default-kramer wrote: post #287
Aurornis wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of it is! Journalists are already using it to debunk some of Elon’s claims like the one they only 10% of USAID reached intended targets (which appears to be based on his complete misreading of a breakdown) The real question now is where is DOGE’s evidence of all of this corruption? There are massive claims of rampant corruption, such as calling the USAID corrupt to their core, but literally zero evidenced has be…

> where is DOGE’s evidence of all of this corruption? Presumably this was published by DOGE: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/at-usaid-wast... I encourage everyone to follow the links and determine the accuracy of the claims being made.

Are you being serious. All this stuff has been going on for decades, and the data has been public for years. If you think this is corruption, not an argument I'm trying to have (a lot of it is fwiw,) then wait till you see what these guys have planned haha.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#494

Post by sensanaty »

default-kramer wrote: post #287
Aurornis wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of it is! Journalists are already using it to debunk some of Elon’s claims like the one they only 10% of USAID reached intended targets (which appears to be based on his complete misreading of a breakdown) The real question now is where is DOGE’s evidence of all of this corruption? There are massive claims of rampant corruption, such as calling the USAID corrupt to their core, but literally zero evidenced has be…

> where is DOGE’s evidence of all of this corruption? Presumably this was published by DOGE: https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/02/at-usaid-wast... I encourage everyone to follow the links and determine the accuracy of the claims being made.

The white house is citing... Breitbart and the daily mail?

The real kicker is the daily mail "articles" don't have a single solitary source of their own that they link to or even mention.

Truly incredible times we live in.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#495

Post by Aeolun »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #385
9283409232 wrote: post #106

The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending?

> The question no one asking is why Elon is sending a team of teenage programmers and not a team of financial auditors if he really wanted to cut government spending? If it's working, why would it matter? The most curious thing in all these discussions is that the elephant in the room is never addressed: they already found on hundreds of billions of pure fraud and funding for extremely dubious endeavors. But nobody t…

> DOGE keeps exposing, day after day, actual attacks on democracy, where US taxpayers dollar were used to fund a leftist agenda

That’s… normal? Just because you don’t like a leftist agenda doesn’t mean it’s an attack on democracy. You might be surprised to hear that those leftist presidents were actually democratically elected. Much like, as much as it pains me to say it, Trump.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#496

Post by bbqfog »

jdross wrote: post #185

I realized I’m treading in extremely hostile waters here, but the stories I hear from folks working in DOGE are closer to “I spend 8am to 2am with the leaders of department X going through all contracts and outflows and identifying what is important versus wasteful given a target of saving $X million per day, and there are some great people in this department who really know what’s been going on and it’s been great t…

The people working in DOGE are the absolutely last people on earth I would trust to tell me what was going on. Just assume they have copies of all sensitive data they've encountered and that data has already been spread via them getting hacked, bribed, just posting it to brag...

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#497

Post by Aeolun »

borski wrote: post #309
braza wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> team of teenage Maybe it's a question of wording, but I would agree if the word were "inexperienced" instead of teenage (in reality, they are young adults). I have no horse in this DOGE race and all the discussions, but I find this "reverse ageism" (for lack of a better term) quite sad, 'cause it does not sound condescending but infantilizes youth and hides one of the biggest elephants in the room in the modern wor…

You’re not wrong, but there is also wisdom in age. I’m 37 now, and got in plenty of similar trouble when I was 16-22, simply because my brain literally was not fully developed yet. My impulse control was worse, my consideration of consequences was much less existent, and so on. I think the reaction is more about wanting some older adults in the room as well, not about having no younger adults in the room. Younger peo…

I do find that knocking them down to find out why they were necessary is often a lot more efficient. Even at 37 that hasn’t really changed. But that’s a lot easier to justify when the impact of that decision is a bunch of process interruption at worst.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#498

Post by jodrellblank »

SoftTalker wrote: post #353
amazingamazing wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reporting on this is terrible. There are also senior (in age and experience) people, but much of the focus is on the youngins for obvious reasons. Musk also believes (either arrogance, or true belief) that much of this stuff can be figured out from first principals without much need of traditional experts.

Well he has done pretty well with that belief so far. Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink…

Curiously both Tesla and SpaceX benefit enormously from government spending[1] to the tune of almost $5Bn of taxpayer money. And then Tesla paid zero income tax last year[2] and none in 2021 either[3]. And now Musk is taking the position that the government spends too much taxpayer's money and needs to be torn down.

Musk also did very well by plainly lying (which I would call market manipulation) about Tesla products; the Cybertruck video where Musk claimed it was faster than a Porsche while towing a Porsche was a lie[4]. A 2016 video demonstrating self-driving was faked[5]. Musk's statements about what the Tesla Semi can do were not just generous marketing, they are impossible[6], claiming 500 miles range and PepsiCo reports they can't even carry a load of Lay's potato chips for 500 miles and on heavier loads they can only travel 100 miles. Faked self parking videos, faked SolarCity videos, faked Optimus humanoid robot videos, faked CyberTruck towing an F150 video[7]. The Optimus robots at the October 2024 event were remote controled and remote-voiced by humans[8]. They walk like Honda Asimo robots walked 25 years ago but they're being spun like they are Boston Dynamics killers. Musk's talk of tentacle arms to recharge Teslas never turned into anything (though BYD in China has had public automated electric-car battery-swap stations for years now). Musk's talk of full self driving first promised, what, 2017? turned out to be misleading with cars not even having the hardware to do a good job of it. Musk's early plans for completely automated Model 3 factory faded very quickly with them reverting to humans in marquees.

Yes Musk has done pretty well with investors letting him get away with a lot of broken promises and taxpayers letting him get away with a lot of subsidies and customers letting him get away with a lot of shoddy products. Lucky for him the Tesla engineers were competent true believers(tm) and delivered decent Model 3 and Model Y but that should only give them a similar valuation to other car companies, shouldn't it?

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...

[2] https://itep.org/tesla-reported-zero-federal-income-tax-in-2...

[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/10/investing/elon-musk-tesla...

[4] https://www.insidehook.com/autos/no-one-exposes-elon-musk-li...

[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-faked-video-in-2016-pr...

[6] https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-semi-gets-debunked-...

[7] https://dawnproject.com/teslas-history-of-faking-demonstrati...

[8] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/13/24269131/tesla-optimus-r...

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#499

Post by impulser_ »

culi wrote: post #454

> the DOGE teen is a former denizen of ‘The Com,’ an archipelago of Discord and Telegram chat channels that function as a kind of distributed cybercriminal social network for facilitating instant collaboration To be honest, this is my first time hearing about The Com. Does anyone have any more reading on this? You'd think they'd use something more secure than Discord (which has 0 encryption) and Telegram which doesn'…

The Com is just a general term for crime communities on the Internet. Its not a specific group. The Com includes groups that commit crimes stretching from cybercrime to literally the worst crimes you can think of and the vast majority of this is done on Discord and Telegram.

You can go down a really dark rabbit hole if you really dig deep into some of these groups within The Com.

This is where the worst of the worst spend all their time.

Re: Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'

#500

Post by micromacrofoot »

davesque wrote: post #344

Seems safe to assume that the DOGE kids probably scored copies of the data they had access to even if that access was or will be revoked, especially considering that some of them have a history of data theft as mentioned in the article.

almost without a doubt, you'd have to be unwaveringly upright to enter a vault of treasure and not cram some gold into your pockets
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