I work at a place that also has "draw the owl" as a kind of corporate culture joke? It's funny at small scale when everything is uncertain, but when you grow to a thousand employees it kind of turns into an embarrassment.
We have kind of moved away from it officially AFAICT so now it's more of an inside joke that old-timers use to assert dominance
I've seen this talk, the person in question wrote stalkerware and acknowledged it would be used for abusing women. The title is misleading, the EFF isn't "publicly shaming individuals", they're talking about one case where someone wrote highly unethical software.
He wrote a R.A.T. There are lots of R.A.T.s out there and this is nothing out of the ordinary. It's a common research project. People decided to take issue with the fact that it has a webcam capture feature, like any other modern RAT, and blew it way out of proportion.
His software isn't targeting stalking women. You can use Facebook to abuse women too if you want.
I remember that the EFF used to defend programmers freedom against the government's arguments that hacking tools / exploits could be misused and should be regulated.
What happened? This seems like a total reversal of position.
EFF threw grugq and every exploit developer under the bus way back in 2011 or 2012 when they literally made up a quote attributed to grugq where they claimed he said "the only reason I don't sell exploits to the Middle East is that they don't pay enough".
He had to clarify his position stating which governments he sold exploits to and why (basically only Five Eyes).
TBH, the infosec industry is full of (vipers) people posturing, trying to protect their secret knowledge and exert control over who has what capabilities (just like traditional government spies do). The author's mistake was open sourcing his RAT and putting it on GitHub.
Yes Sr's. In "Hack me if you can" "Hackeame si puedes"
Documentary @DarkCoderSc says that he think Darkcomet can
used for script kiddies (hackers) for spy friends and
GIRLFRIENDS for fun and not for cyberwarfare or spy.
The person who made the tweet claiming the author said that (and is also on stage) that he is asking for clarification on is the EFF's Director of Cybersecurity herself too.
> [...] they're talking about one case where someone wrote highly unethical software.
It is worse. Oxygen, a chemical substance, is used by highly immoral human beings, such as Kim Jong-un, to breathe, and continue living and causing havoc on the oppressed North Koreans. These immoral human beings are also eating and drinking. Cars are used to kill people as well. iFixit toolsets could also be used for this purpose. CPUs and other hardware are being used to exploit Chinese citizens via GFW and cameras. Meanwhile, evil girlfriends can abuse RATs to spy on their boyfriends as well.
Instead of these ridiculous narratives we need to look at
1) The main purpose of a tool.
2) The relative abuse of the tool, or collateral damage, and the impact of such abuse and damage.
Which is why the above examples, and OpenSSH Server as well, are each bad examples.
It is a lot more difficult, to be nuanced. I'd like to learn more about the exact software, and where it was advertised back in the days (2012 apparently). Was it legitimately used?
Actually I have been using as a drop in replacement of RDP back in the days and it was pretty decent, bad people will misuse all kind of tools but especially the ones that facilitate their crimes (see also Tor)
Automatically pairing people by gender is pretty weird IMO. As a trans woman I have to find my own roommate or find an organizer to intervene and explain my life story to them.
The choice works for 99% of people, and it’s always very clearly stated. If you have any problem with the default choice, I am sure the organizers will do their best to accommodate your request.
The same holds for special dietary requests, special assistance, people arriving late or leaving earlier, people traveling with partners, with children, etc...
I don’t want to be rude, but please just realize that usually the defaults try to accommodate as many persons as possible, and then there’s always the possibility to ask.
Do you have any better solution? I would be interesting in hearing what you think!
As someone who has this flexibility, it's expensive and not that fun to go work in a hotel in a strange city for a couple weeks. I'd rather have a week off to ignore work and immerse myself
As someone who chronically ideates about suicide (but has never attempted), things like VR rock climbing and (real life) bungee jumping have just made me scared of jumping. But it doesn't make me not want to die, it just makes me want to do it a better way that's less scary
I wish you the best. I don't believe there is any psychological condition worse than wanting to die. Even excruciating physical pain at worst can drive you to that point.
I hope you can learn from these experiences, that your will to live or at least your survival instinct has not gone away, even during such episodes, but was merely drowned out by an irrational mechanism.
There's absolutely a movement for people to keep house cats inside because they maul grounded bats and other small animals they don't intend to eat. They're also at risk of getting hit by cars, eaten by coyotes, etc.
I would say the statistics would probably support your comment (besides the binary "nobody" and "only"), despite its obvious sarcasm. But that wasn't really my point. I had no intent to criticize certain classes. My point was that software people should get over the exceptionalism.
Given the rate of climate change and how little we're doing, trying to make 10000 year institutions seems foolish. We can't even manage the institutions we have now.
Because of short term thinking. Nobody cares about what will happen beyond the next election cycle, the next quarter, the next iPhone release. A bit more long-term thinking would not hurt anybody.
No one is objecting to 20-100 year thinking and even then planning is hard if you look back 100 years and see what has changed. I would be very happy if these people were putting their time and money into solving problems on this scale like the Gates foundation etc. This is just a sci-fi hobby.
My point stands. Uber has been a public company for all of 5 hours now, and their stock is a few dollars less per share than it opened, and everybody is freaking out and wondering what it all means.
It's not about planning out 10,000 years, or even 100; it's something more abstract than that. What will your legacy be? Your family's legacy? Your country's? Humanity's? I don't have any personal connection to somebody who will be alive 1000 years from now, or even 200, but I still don't want to leave them a dead, depleted planet.
Is the clock a bit frivolous? Sure. But it's not about the clock. The clock is merely a symbol, that we have considered our place in history, that we recognize we are part of something larger, and we want to be good stewards of our future.
Fair enough, if you think mere symbolism is more important than putting the money ($42M) towards tangable things like childhood education which has an actual 70 year impact. Having so much time and money to spend on symbolism is pretty obnoxious when there are actual long term issues we can actually solve for real people.
Wait so you stopped being vegan to ... protest the fact that some vegans are self-righteous? Do you also drive a V8 to protest the fact that some people with Teslas are smug?
It was more of a realization that those people placed far too much importance on their individual "purity", and their distance from the "impure" masses than effecting any systematic change.
When you think of the entire chain of supply and logistics involved in running the modern world, you are inexorably meshed with the world of evil and the "impure". As I said, it does far more good for ethical entities to take rein of this thrashing beast than to posture purity. You might even have to be cunning, brutal, and cold to ward off those who simply don't give a damn. Especially the psychopathic and sociopathic agents.
This is all a ton of pontification without arriving at any sort if logical conclusion. You used to be vegan but stopped because you didn't feel like you could enact change with your diet? Weak .
Of course. It'd be dumb to think you have any direct effect when you're inmeshed in an "impure" network.
The world doesn't exist to provide a nice solution set where you can have the conveniences of modern living without the massive externalities of war (to secure and maintain logistical routes) and pollution. To be quite honest, I think the world is inherently a tragedy to those who seek to do only "good".
Helping potential moral agents, aka your "neighbors" (physical or spiritual), with better leverage in the social ape rat race has more impact. You strive to throw off the worse leaders of men and install the better leaders of men.
I was going to go on but forgive me for balking out of a lengthy explanation that isn't structured yet. It's been a while since someone has challenged my stance like that and my intuitons need more editing, so to speak.
Look at it this way: if you're going to lead an illegal insurrection to overthrow what you think is a tyranical government, why do you care what the gun laws are?
You need to have guns to begin with to start the insurrection. In 1971, Pakistan started to massacre Bangladeshis as a result of an election in what was then east Pakistan. Civilians started an insurrection, using among other things stolen guns. This is where an already-armed populace would have come in handy.
A necessary precondition for a tyrannical government is a power imbalance between the people and the government. Allowing citizens to own arms that are in the same league as what the government uses prevents this.
So, civilians owning tanks? Predator drones? Attack helicopters? Cruise missiles? Fighter jets? Biological or chemical weapons?
We don't live in a world where the people and the government can reasonably expect to have symmetrical physical warfare capabilities. This argument is irrelevant today.
The only area where the exists any form of symmetry would be cyber weapons, not physical.
Defending against other individuals is still a viable argument, and is the only reason I think we need to be careful about how far we go with regards to gun control, but that has some tight limits and I think we can find more effective solutions than guns if we put some effort into it and take it seriously.
> So, civilians owning tanks? Predator drones? Attack helicopters? Cruise missiles? Fighter jets? Biological or chemical weapons?
We don't need any of that stuff to keep the balance. Iraq, Afganistan, and Vietnam are proof of this. Insurgencies are extremely effective against our military. The only real requirement for them to exist is a sufficient quantity of small arms, and maybe some improvised explosives. The argument is still very much relevant. What's happening in Venezuela right now would not be possible without having first disarmed the populace.
>Exactly, one can always rely on the general population to illegally stockpile guns and ammunition, just in case.
I probably shouldn't reply to an obvious troll account but... yes.
That is exactly how revolutions happen throughout the world - with weapons procured through the black market or otherwise illegal means. It's only the US which insists that a right to revolution be legally defined and protected by the very government its people theoretically intends to revolt against... and yet even with the Second Amendment, domestic terrorism and revolt against the government is still illegal in the US.
I mean, snark all you want modest_sarcasm, but facts are facts. The right of revolution doesn't depend on legal access to firearms, and the evidence of that is... literally every revolution since the advent of firearms.
And Americans have started enough such revolutions around the world that they should have figured this out by now.
We have kind of moved away from it officially AFAICT so now it's more of an inside joke that old-timers use to assert dominance