Almalieque wrote:
You would not have responded the way you initially did if you truly understood that NMAP could scan the entire Internet in one command.
Wait? What? First off, what the heck does that have to do with what I said? Secondly, I'm not even sure where to begin. Tell you what. You go run a full nmap scan on 0.0.0.0/32, then get back to me when it's done. If the forums are still running then, that is.
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The argument is that it is infeasible to ever have "all" or anything close to it.
I get that this is your argument. The problem is that your argument doesn't actually counter what I was talking about.
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Your solution is exactly what malicious actors do every day around the world.
Exactly. Which is why it's a good way to go if you want to hack into as many systems as possible. Let me also point out that you are obsessing on just one of several different methods I mentioned, somehow assuming that if the whole "use a self replicating hack" method can't hack into everything, that this means that there's no chance of anyone getting hacked. That's... bizarre.
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So now you're only focusing on people with poor security. Your massive data list is getting smaller and smaller.
Sigh. You have a very narrow attention span, don't you? There were *two* different points I was making:
Point 1. The government currently runs systems where they collect large amounts of arbitrary data and use it to perform pattern searches for various criteria, arguably to look for terrorists, but that could be used for anything (ie: abused). The phone metadata collection is one part of this. The stuff Snowden leaked about collecting data on social media is another. There are presumably others that haven't become public knowledge.
Point 2. While that first issue is problematic, it's not actually illegal. However, we need to be diligent to make sure that the government does not add "hacking into people's personal computers and pulling data off of them" to the datasets they may use for these kinds of searches. This would violate the 4th amendment and result in a reduction of our privacy.
Point 1 was about the utility to government to collect "everything" (if they could) because it would increase the amount of things they could search for, and the odds that they could find whatever they are looking for within the data. I never once suggested that it was possible to actually physically access "everything", but merely to say that the more data that can be used for such searches the better (from a "find bad guys" point of view).
Point 2 was purely about the potential violation of our privacy and the need to makes sure that our privately held data is not accessed in this manner. I never even remotely suggested that hacking into people's home computers would magically contain every single bit of data. I was talking about adding that "private" data to the "public" data they already have access to.
It's like you can't follow a conversation, but just pick out individual statements that are made, take them completely out of context, and then just kinda randomly vomit responses. It's strange.
No. This is incredibly annoying btw.
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A business will not ENTER a contract that goes against their bottom line. period.
And? You get that a contract generally involves the business getting paid in return for some service it provides, right? That doesn't "go against their bottom line". It's like you just completely ignored what I just wrote.
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History? Just look at the number of companies that fought against the Open Internet laws.
What... The... Hell.... does that have to do with government contracts? Nothing at all.
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You're not understanding the roles of titles when dealing with this. You can't just contract people to act on behalf of the FBI, CIA, etc. Even as a Soldier, I must be working directly under a certain title in order to do certain tasks. You're just making stuff up again.
Huh? Who do you think designed and built the rifles our soldiers use? Who do you think designed and built the ships our Navy sails? Who do you think designed and built every single tank, humvee, MRE, uniform, radio, tent, patch, and nail file that government employees (military or otherwise) use? Where do you think the software programs that our intelligence agencies use come from? Magic? You think that missiles are built by government employees? Or the guidance systems for those missiles? You think government employees develop nerve gasses, and chemicals, and bio weapons?
All of these things (yes, even the illegal ones) are done by civilian businesses contracted by our government. They are bound by incredibly tight NDAs with ridiculous legal penalties if they tell anyone what kinds of things they are working on. And yes, if/when the government wants to do something illegal, it's not hard at all to part out the pieces among a number of such contractors so that none of them see the big picture. More to the point, they do this with pretty much every secret project, whether the resulting use is legal or illegal, partly so that the act of parting the pieces out doesn't allow anyone to assume anything nefarious is going on and as a means of ensuring that if there is a security breach or someone leaks information, the whole project isn't compromised. It's a smart way to keep things secret, but also allows for any sort of illegal projects to be done as you might wish.
You're incredibly naive if you don't think this sort of thing is going on now, and has been all along.
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Honestly, you should write fiction novels.
Or, Oh I don't know. Live in an area with a lot of tech companies and a largish military presence? You can't possibly think that all those biotech companies are working on research for the good of mankind can you? Because the government really just has a great interest in pure research, right? And software development. They just want to help make better firewalls for people. I'm sure that's it!
What rock have you been living under? I'm not some crazy guy spouting conspiracy theories about the government, but I'm am a realist who accepts that our government does do a large amount of secret stuff some of which is technically illegal. Kinda has to. They key IMO isn't to rail about anything that might be being done, but to make sure that certain boundaries that we
really care about are not crossed. You seem to be insistent that either nothing illegal is being done at all, or everything that could be illegal is. Um... The real world tends to exist in the range between those extremes.