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gtcode

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"Ok, he's listening now. Henry."

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It's easier than ever for people to moonlight as a spy and get away with it. You'll probably only get caught if your adversary has the means and motivation to counter.

Most people in civilian/domestic situations are unable to defend themselves. Thus, amateurs get away with spying more easily. They can work alone more easily and have a wider variety of commodity spying tools.

It's not technically incorrect to say there is manipulation in the US markets, but comparing bitcoin exchanges to US exchanges is a bit laughable.

The US Federal Reserve has (had) what amount(ed) to a printing press, associated with "working groups" a.k.a. PPT. However, major US exchanges themselves, whether stock, futures, etc., are far more regulated and mature compared to a bitcoin exchange. The manipulation to which you're referring is far more indirect.

Bitcoin topped out as soon as the futures went live. Massive contango on a regulated futures market may have been a factor in "reeling in" price. The spot market is so thin that it didn't seem to take much open interest in the futs to whip the underlying.

It's conceivable that some spot exchanges are or were still from 2017 to now, either malicious and/or incompetent, which would facilitate the continuation of such behavior, likely by more players than one or two.

In the US, one can fill out a police report, but that doesn't mean that the police will opt to press charges. If one contacts the police to report a crime, they still need probable cause to press charges.

As for witch hunts, folks do get burned in the digital age, whether as result of posts on a public twitter feed, or worse yet in some cases, privately via other social media channels or other (digital) communication mechanisms. Publicly outing someone or a group is perhaps a last resort, but necessary in some cases.

In the meantime, a high level of technical proficiency is needed to defend against monolithic personal computing environments that are hostile by design.

* Assume personal computing environment is hostile

* Use an external firewall and have a whitelist-only policy

* Use an external NIDS

* Physically disable all hard-connected non-wired interconnectivity

Monitors and keyboards ("I leave message here on service but you do not call") still leak, of course, but this is a good start, and most people need to be concerned with practical attacks that could be carried out over the internet.

New Year's 2018 resolutions: 1) Review backup policy including backup testing procedures 2) Implement personal digital security measures

I've often thought that the current mentality of a "convenient" monolithic personal computing environment (whether an iPhone, laptop, or PC) doesn't properly assess threats.

When broadband internet first became popular in my area growing up, it was acceptable practice (and recommended by ISP's) to simply plug your non-firewall'ed DSL modem ethernet directly into your computer. It truly was unprotected sex in the worst possible way. Perhaps the next evolution will fundamentally reconsider personal computing design from a security-first perspective.

Do any modern day entities (governments, corporations, other) perform ostensibly mild versions of such psychological experimentation, possibly at scale, or with the intention of scaling?

This occurred decades after an ancestor of mine was PM of Canada, thankfully.

This is disheartening to hear. One can only imagine the number of sufferers who have become estranged from loved ones because of similar circumstances. It's not difficult to understand why the loved ones had to cut them out, either. And, of course, since the sufferer ends up estranged from family and loved ones, their situation can more readily snowball into further isolation, self-destruction and increased probability of suicide.

I had edited/removed the comment for a reason, so your revival of it via inaccurate takeaway isn't particularly appreciated.

In light of the responses, I re-considered whether it was best to keep such information here, but you've simply made things more difficult for me with a false representation of a removed post, that I cannot remove and to which I do not wish to respond.

It was my mistake for deciding to share what was posted here, but it would have been common courtesy to let it go (and not revive the comment in interpretive form), since it was removed by me. You could have contacted me privately to discuss further, as a courtesy to me.

No, that's not true, the argument for a backdoor isn't purely technical. LE's perspective is almost certainly predicated on a universal (amongst the good) desire to reduce suffering. This part is downplayed or ignored.

Can you prove that there is no such thing as a "perfect" backdoor? Can you show that the existence of a skeleton key introduces risk beyond losing the key? Has this been formally proven?

That might be a good starting point, and I apologize if my understanding is wrong, but can't one build a skeleton key into encryption that cannot be broken with any greater likelihood than otherwise would be possible by compromising the encryption itself? If the surface area of attack is doubled at most, that seems a viable trade-off. Yes, it's potentially a huge SPOF if designed sub-optimally (I'd suspect that there is a way to build something akin to a one-time use set of segregated skeleton keys), but that risk needs management like all risks.

(redact)

Agree 100% about carefully considering consequences of crafting a skeleton key into our most prized technologies. The tech community, at least the most vocal subset in these parts, can keep pushing back against LE's cries for such a key, and it's clear there is merit to such an argument. It just seems to be somewhat provincial from a neutral perspective, however.

Taken from the "other side", it does not seem universally true that generally deployed strong, unbreakable encryption built into "secure" general-purpose commodity hardware is in the best interests of humanity going forward. It seems to be an open question. It was nice to see rational/objective/neutral discourse on HN in the past that considered all sides. But, such a universal perspective seems to be missing of late, and the more recent parochial attitude seems a natural form of pushback, given the current chaos. Hopefully good comes of this.

"Snow Dawg" is currently partaking in thoughtful discussion arguing against NSA's policies on his twitter, if anyone is interested.

Amazon is, based on my direct experience, on the list of companies partaking in some level of social shenanigans against US citizens, not completely dissimilar from folks who have overtaken content here on HN, and have done so on reddit in the past.

Seattle is a place full of extraordinarily smart individuals, and the probability that some non-empty subset of those extraordinarily smart individuals partake in sociopathic projects expressed through (and/or enabled by) technology approaches one.

This isn't necessarily related to Jeff Bezos, however.

Facebook is a mixed bag as far as being a model of good behavior on many things. The company is founded on irresponsible social principles. For how long did general internal employees have access to users' private data? This is no longer the case, though, correct? Sorry to get OT.

Maybe these libs are well-vetted, after all. My mistake. Thanks for the info.