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[Strife26]

I am more concerned for the citizens of Saudi Arabia.

It isn't like the US hasn't funded totalitarian regimes that abuse their power and abuse their people before.

Yeah, like Saudi Arabia.

[EnigmaticHat]

You know, I said this about Obama its only fair to say it about Trump.  What he did in this case was awful but its only status quo.  Still going to complain, but not going to pretend this is anything unique to Trump.  The only thing I'd say that's unique to Trump is that he's blatantly untrustworthy to handle the Syria sabre rattling, I'd much prefer an even hand for that.

I feel like our current Middle East policy could be described as borrowing money to get out of debt.  Fund Islamic extremists to counter the soviets, Islamic extremists do 9/11 so we attack Iraq to restore our image, Iraqi remnants make ISIS.  And the Russians are still in the Middle East.  We solve our problems by doing the same things that created our problems.  Then again our government's economic policy is literally to borrow money to pay off our debt, so maybe I'm expecting more than they're capable of...

[martinuzz]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies-espionage.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Damn, seems CIA lost all it's spies in CHina a few years ago. CIA unsure if due to Chinese mole or hack.

[EnigmaticHat]

I remember when we found out that China had built a giant network of compromised computers all over the world (this was years ago).  I've always wondered if I'll live to see governments declassify information about their electronic warfare agencies; right now its all very hush hush.  Its always interesting to see what the CIA did but at least we know generally what the CIA and other intelligence agencies are like.  Electronic warfare post internet is uncharted.  Surely the US government does employ hackers for intelligence and military purposes, but how many?  How much do they cost?  Where do they work?  What's their objectives and methods?  How have we stacked up against other big powers?  Were we on the defensive or the offensive?  It'll probably be 30+ years until we get to hear any of this from the governments themselves.  To be clear I'm not talking about governments vs private citizens.  I mean what does it look like when governments quietly try to infiltrate each other's computers over the internet.

The kind of sad thing is that what Russia did this election is *classic* hacking.  Brute force attacks and viruses and stuff like that, "real" hacking, is hacking yes.  But so is calling customer support and pretending you lost your PIN.  Crawling the web for election related news articles and then making sure the first comment on every one is anti-Hillary, that's pretty much the same concept.  Its a low tech, low cost way to hack Google.  Worse, to hijack the message of news articles themselves.  But since most people don't understand what small time hackers are like, they think that the election hack doesn't resemble "real" hacking.  Real life hacking ain't Neuromancer and people would be wise to realize that.

[alway]

Related, Time recently published this article on it: http://time.com/4783932/inside-russia-social-media-war-america/

[EnigmaticHat]

This makes me hate FB for having the most awful algorithms.  They hosted so many shitty news sites that would never have been linked on any other major social media network.  The FB feed is pure cancer right now; click on the same kind of thing 3 times, and suddenly your entire feed is that one thing and then ads.  Plus FB (probably to make up for its ads having a reputation for being much worse than Google at actually finding interested costumers) allows you to target your ads *way* too granularly.  There was a guy who used single targeted ads to play a prank on his paranoid friend, it went on for months and ended up costing like $3.  Absolutely idiotic, the only reason FB is still alive is because they're so inherently hard to replace.

I mean obviously that's not my first thought on the article.  My first thought is that's worse than I thought and terrifying.  I sincerely hope democracy doesn't turn into countries flinging propoganda at each other from across oceans.  The only consolation is that the effected demographics seem to be the less tech savvy ones?  So maybe this will turn into like banner ads where eventually most people can ignore most targeted propaganda and the world's marketers have to think of some other trick.

[Reelya]

It's not really the fault of algorithms, I saw a ted talk with an interesting take on the whole Russian cyber-ops thing, a lot of what they've been targeting is not only digital weaknesses, it's meat puppet weaknesses. People's minds are much more hackable than devices and can't easily be patched to the latest version. We're so caught up in securing hardware that we forget to think about the big picture of the human space, which is where the real battle is.

Basically, you take an idea you want to spread, and you attach it to an idea that people want to hear, in a way that makes it so you can't remove the payload without breaking the meme. Then meatspace will spread the idea for you. Algorithms and rankings are secondary to that, there will always be ways to exploit crowds of people.

[sluissa]

TL;DR: It's generally going to be easier to wait for someone to open the door for you than to try to pick the lock.

[Cruxador]

Incidentally, the biggest* part of what we're talking about now is what was called "memetics" in back in the days when cyberpunk was about the future. It's also heavily used for marketing. The other part is what has been known as a con for much longer. Calling it hacking isn't exactly wrong, but it's less specific and is, in my opinion, expanding the term to cover more than it meaningfully ought to. Though if we're being purist about things, a brute force attack isn't really a hack either.

*in relation to how much it impacted the election

[sluissa]

Incidentally, the biggest* part of what we're talking about now is what was called "memetics" in back in the days when cyberpunk was about the future. It's also heavily used for marketing. The other part is what has been known as a con for much longer. Calling it hacking isn't exactly wrong, but it's less specific and is, in my opinion, expanding the term to cover more than it meaningfully ought to. Though if we're being purist about things, a brute force attack isn't really a hack either.

*in relation to how much it impacted the election

If we're being purist, all this would fall under the heading of "cracking" (malicious) rather than "hacking" (for curiosity's sake)... Let's not argue language purity... it never goes anywhere good.

[SalmonGod]

I still use the word memetics in that sense, and I often forget that most people don't understand what the word really means.  It's one of the most important concepts to understand in the modern world, in my opinion.  Or even beyond the modern world if you remove the social context, since the fundamental laws of the universe are mostly rooted in the travel and evolution of information.

[martinuzz]

Heh, tourists aren't too happy with Trump's visit to Israel. To ensure the safety of Trump's visit to the Wailing Wall, the Old City of Jerusalem has been completely sealed off from the public. Hotel guests staying in the area were ordered to leave their hotels early in the morning, and are not allowed to return until late in the evening. Yesterday they had already been ordered to keep the windows and curtains of their hotel rooms closed and not look outside.
So though luck for tourists who came to see the Old City today. Nothing to see here, move along.

Dayum, Israeli security services are not about doing half work.

[Neonivek]

I actually find it interesting that one reason they are funding Saudi Arabia is for a POSSIBLE war with Iran

[Max™]

So uh... this is weird, right?

Like, seriously?


You wanna talk harnessing the power of memes, lads, there you go.

[Cruxador]

What even is that orb?

Also that Saudi looks so much like a caricature of a jew there. His PR people should tell him not to hunch his shoulders.