[HN Gopher] 38C3: Illegal Instructions
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38C3: Illegal Instructions
Author : type0
Score : 410 points
Date : 2024-12-29 04:54 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (media.ccc.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (media.ccc.de)
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| If anybody that runs the website is here, may I suggest the
| ability to filter/sort the talks by language? Several of the
| talks are given in a language I'm not fluent in, and not all
| contain translations.
| userbinator wrote:
| It's a .de site, for a German conference.
| eru wrote:
| Though being able to filter out talks by language might still
| be useful, because there are enough non-German talks to make
| that worthwhile. (Also for people who only speak, say, German
| and Polish, and might not want to bother with the English
| talks.)
| ktallett wrote:
| They have translation both from deutsch to English and
| English to Deutsch, therefore filtering would make no
| difference.
| seethedeaduu wrote:
| I don't see how this is related
| jagrsw wrote:
| US conferneces don't bother with that aspect. Why should we
| put the onus on everyone else?
| dakiol wrote:
| It's about the field (computers, software). Not about the
| country. As a non english nor german native speaker, I
| appreciate English text/audio as much as possible in any
| situation.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| I am not sure which "we" you are referring to, but CCC
| puts quite some effort in dubbing and subtitles (while
| those can take more time to publish)
| atoav wrote:
| You are aware that a German hacker conference taking place
| in Germany wouldn't have to make _anything_ at all in
| English if they didn 't like to?
|
| The fact they do that is nice, but I am not aware US hacker
| conferences offer translations into other languages.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| As someone who went to CCC more than once, it's a very
| international conference. Everything official related to the
| conference is in English (or bilingual). Some talks are in
| German, but a large majority is in English (at least this is
| how I remember it). Anyway the point is that the organisers
| care about non- german speakers, so it's not an unreasonable
| request.
| anyfoo wrote:
| The CCC conference is widely regarded in the US, and has
| significant relevance there.
| leipert wrote:
| A lot of the talks are actually dubbed in English and French
| (and sometimes in other languages).
|
| Edit: the dubbing (like everything at the conference) is done
| by volunteers.
|
| You can also contribute the language filtering yourself:
| https://github.com/voc/voctoweb
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Addition: At least last year, they would often reupload
| videos with more languages later on. So if the talk you are
| interested in is not available in a language you speak, check
| back later.
| moogly wrote:
| Are subtitled versions coming too, or perhaps just
| transcripts?
| 7bit wrote:
| And how many articles are non-english exactly? One of a
| thousand? Just leave the page and move on with your life.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Talks, not articles, and it's a significant fraction (less
| than half, more than 10%, I'd guess). What doesn't help is
| that sometimes the title could be partially and completely in
| English even for talks that are in German (e.g. due to
| referencing technical terms or memes).
| ramon156 wrote:
| Yeah! How dare they suggest something that would make it
| easier for them to consume their media! Weirdos...
| esclear wrote:
| As a general rule, there should be translations DE <-> EN for
| all talks.
|
| The team is working very hard to make this happen. Still, they
| are all volunteers.
| jansan wrote:
| I know that I am old-fashioned, but I find it slightly disturbing
| that there is this outstanding talk showing vulnerabilities of
| the German power grid, and on the other side they seem to
| encourage exactly this kind of attacks on the power
| infrastructure in the opening ceremony (
| https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-opening-ceremony#t=1140 ).
| fragmede wrote:
| that talk is being discussed on
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535622
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| not really disturbing, but rather expected. The price of
| freedom is disobedience. Here a headline from 2018 by The
| Guardian about RisingUp and Extincion-Rebellion:
|
| > _' We have a duty to act': hundreds ready to go to jail over
| climate crisis This article is more than 6 years old_
|
| > _Rowan Williams backs call for mass civil disobedience 'to
| bypass the government's inaction and defend life itself'_
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| People here are more fond of the obedience side of things, it
| seems.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| I am, personally. If everyone ignored the rules and laws,
| we wouldn't have much of a society.
| maeil wrote:
| If everyone had abided by rules and laws, the US would
| still have hard segregation laws, etc.
| tremon wrote:
| If everyone had abided by rules and laws, the US wouldn't
| exist as a country.
| fl0id wrote:
| Yeah, and rules and laws are never just, just because of
| their nature. Like dictators have laws... incompetent
| governments have laws... so law itself is a bad argument
| to follow it and a lot of socio-legal literature actually
| recognizes that social processes and to some degree
| social contracts that can include the exact opposite of
| the law are often at least as important.
| perching_aix wrote:
| On it's own this doesn't justify neither the abolishment
| of law nor its disregarding at-scale. That said, nor do I
| think anyone was actually going for that angle here, so I
| think we're getting side-tracked.
| perching_aix wrote:
| How do you know that?
| athrowaway3z wrote:
| >Only a Sith deals in absolutes
|
| Even cliche children stories know your reasoning is
| ridiculous at best.
| perching_aix wrote:
| I don't think they're "dealing in absolutes" nearly as
| much as you might be perceiving that they do.
|
| It's further ironic for you to mention this in a thread
| that was kicked off with this:
|
| > The price of freedom is disobedience.
|
| (a statement heavily dealing in absolutes)
| salawat wrote:
| Not the case. Freedom is orthogonal to legality. To
| exercise freedom is to fundamentally admit the
| possibility of disobedience within any sort of rules
| based framework.
| perching_aix wrote:
| What is not the case?
| luckylion wrote:
| You can disagree with him, but it's a good idea to have
| read Kant when forming an opinion on those types of
| things.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHqDEMrqTjE ("DEF CON 32
| - Counter Deception: Defending Yourself in a World Full
| of Lies - Tom Cross, Greg Conti")
|
| "At their best, hackers lift their heads up above the
| masses to see how the world actually works, not how it
| purports to work, and then take action to make the world
| a better place."
|
| https://paulgraham.com/founders.html
|
| > 4. Naughtiness: Though the most successful founders are
| usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam
| in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good.
| Morally, they care about getting the big questions right,
| but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use
| the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in
| breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality
| may be redundant though; it may be implied by
| imagination.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_(Dungeons_%26_Dra
| gon...
|
| > A chaotic good character does whatever is necessary to
| bring about change for the better, disdains bureaucratic
| organizations that get in the way of social improvement,
| and places a high value on personal freedom, not only for
| oneself but for others as well. Chaotic good characters
| usually intend to do the right thing, but their methods
| are generally disorganized and often out of sync with the
| rest of society.
|
| If you're here, you're likely not just smart, but your
| brain likely works in a way where you can rapidly
| deconstruct a system or build a mental model of one up,
| understanding how and where all of the parts must operate
| for the system to function. Many rules matter, but some
| don't; you are outcome oriented while operating within
| the system you exist in. You are willing to operate
| outside of the system when the situation dictates.
|
| "Hacker" is an interesting term, but overloaded from both
| a historical and persona perspective. I propose "Adaptive
| Strategist," "Outcome Engineer," or "Creative Resolver"
| to better describe this type of human. Someone highly
| capable, adaptable, and with the fortitude and grit to
| grind toward success in a morally directional manner.
| luckylion wrote:
| > Morally, they care about getting the big questions
| right, but not about observing proprieties.
|
| That's how you end up with price-collusion-as-a-service
| for landlords to price-gouge. When you don't define "the
| big questions", every evil can just be something naughty
| and you can explain it away by saying that the person has
| "the big questions" in mind, and not these small ones. Is
| anyone surprised that most startups that "just ignore the
| small things" also ignore the big ones once they are big?
|
| > Someone highly capable, adaptable, and with the
| fortitude and grit to grind toward success in a morally
| directional manner.
|
| What do you mean by "morally directional"? What do you
| call a person with the same abilities and traits but
| concern for ethics? Are they not a hacker?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I would argue that your example of tech driven price
| collusion is unethical and a symptom of bad people
| implementing technology for bad purposes.
|
| By "morally directional" I mean fundamentally a good
| person. Ethics are mostly easy imho although there are
| edge cases that are tricky or aggressively debatable due
| to nuance.
| luckylion wrote:
| I agree that it's unethical, my point was that it's easy
| to say that it is the price for innovation and in the end
| if the innovation is large enough, the unethical action
| is fine ("they solved world hunger and brought us world
| peace, and you complain about a little bit of initial
| price gouging?"), and who knows what good intention they
| might have (probably none, but it's good PR to pretend).
|
| Do you consider 'hacker' to be tied to some ethical
| concept? Makes it a difficult definition to work with
| because you and I will draw the line of "justified by the
| intentions" (e.g. invading privacy of 1, 100, 1m to draw
| attention to some big issue) in a different place, and on
| top of that a hacker will stop being a hacker when they
| overstep the line?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The below resources touch on some ethical considerations,
| but are certainly not all inclusive. It is, imho, a
| living concept and dynamic. Are there good or bad
| Hackers? Or Hackers (and how their brain operates) just
| humans who do good or bad things? Do you stop thinking
| and being such a way when you cross a line?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic#The_hacker_eth
| ics
|
| https://archive.org/details/TheHackerEthicAndTheSpiritOfT
| heI...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| performative disobedience, particular in an age of mass
| social media is the opposite of a change agent, it's a
| spectacle and the other side of the coin of the status quo,
| both of which usually feed on each other. Deleuze saw that
| very early:
|
| " _The social machine's limit is not attrition, but rather
| its misfirings; it can operate only by fits and starts, by
| grinding and breaking down, in spasms of minor explosions.
| The dysfunctions are an essential component of its very
| ability to function, which is not the least important
| aspect of the system of cruelty. The death of a social
| machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a
| dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit
| of feeding on the controversies they give rise to, on the
| crises they provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on
| the infernal operations they regenerate.[...] No one has
| ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down,
| the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the
| American way._ "
| aftbit wrote:
| Its the old question, chaos or stability? The bird or the
| cage? Freedom and justified fear, or stifling safety?
| Usually the young and disaffected are more on the side of
| chaos, with more to gain and less to lose, while the old
| and powerful prefer stability for the opposite reason.
| this_user wrote:
| We have several groups like that in Germany, one of which
| became quite prominent for repeatedly blocking roads and
| other actions like that. On balance, they have probably done
| more harm than good by infuriating people and turning their
| attention away from the actual issue of climate change
| towards a discussion of the actions of these groups which
| have found very little support overall.
| franga2000 wrote:
| What do you mean by "exactly these kinds of attacks"? Besides
| both mentioning power infrastructure, they are completely
| different things.
|
| One is "hey, terrorists or enemy states could destroy our
| entire grid, we'd all be fucked if this happened, here's what
| needs to be done to protect ourselves", the other is "hey,
| these powerful groups are destroying the planet for personal
| gain, do you think it might be justified to sabotage the tools
| they use to do that?"
|
| Mass outages harm the public, sabotaging fossil fuel
| infrastrusture protects it. Even if the methods of the grid
| talk were applicable to such sabotage, which they really
| aren't, I don't see how hosting both of these discussions is a
| bad thing.
| the-lazy-guy wrote:
| Sabotaging any infrastracture harms people. Transitioning to
| clean energy can be (and is being) sped up by actual peaceful
| actions.
|
| The second talk is especially ridiculous when the speaker
| suggests to sabotage datacenters, because they use a lot of
| resources. I guess it is part of the "degrowth" ideology,
| which I find deeply flawed.
| maeil wrote:
| > Sabotaging any infrastracture harms people. Transitioning
| to clean energy can be (and is being) sped up by actual
| peaceful actions.
|
| It's entirely arbitrary to propose that only "peaceful" (an
| inherently relative term depending on your personal belief
| system) action can speed this up, while non-peaceful action
| cannot, that this property is a necessary requirement.
|
| Unless of course your definition of "peaceful" is "thing
| that speeds up this transition". Would be pretty different
| from the average definition of the word, though.
| perching_aix wrote:
| They didn't say anything about peacefulness being a
| requirement to speeding up a transition to clean energy.
|
| They also didn't say that it's the peacefulness aspect of
| the ongoing peaceful changes that is accelerating
| transition.
|
| You're trying to outreason an opinion, and not only that,
| but you're also attempting to do so by putting words into
| their mouth. Please reconsider.
|
| Debating the unspecified nature of a word isn't exactly
| the most productive thing in the world either. The vast,
| vast majority of natural language is that way. Kind of a
| pivotal feature of natural languages really.
| cyberax wrote:
| > It's entirely arbitrary to propose that only "peaceful"
| (an inherently relative term depending on your personal
| belief system) action can speed this up, while non-
| peaceful action cannot, that this property is a necessary
| requirement.
|
| Do a mental experiment, flip around the sides. Is it OK
| to propose for oil executives to sabotage the lives of
| ecological activists with violence? Perhaps, burn their
| houses, deface the headquarters, that kind of thing?
| wongarsu wrote:
| Peaceful actions also harm people. Any transition to clean
| energy harms at least some people (for example executives
| and share holders of oil companies). The more important
| question is if the benefit outweighs the harm, and if the
| harm stays below some threshold of "unjustifiable harm".
|
| I don't see how infrastructure is somehow special in this.
| perching_aix wrote:
| This is true for change in general.
|
| To that end, the obvious answer to the person in that
| opening ceremony is "if people had further picture of the
| impact" [1].
|
| Justice is in the eye of the beholder. The way they can
| make people sympathize with their intents of sabotage is
| by providing a justification, and enabling people to
| provide themselves one of their own. Otherwise, people
| will work with what they have, and what they have is
| mostly just their moral standards.
|
| Evidently, the thread starter's moral standards do not
| condone this. Mine don't either. The way one can change
| this is by providing more information that would enable
| us to change our minds. This isn't really what's
| happening so far (although neither sides are
| communicating in a way that would make an open ended
| discussion of this super viable).
|
| [1] and have that picture be such that it supports their
| conclusion. Note how this doesn't mean that picture must
| be:
|
| - truthful
|
| - balanced
|
| - reasonable
|
| And provided all parties are aware of this, they'll be
| more critical and suspecting of the other. For good
| reasons, I'd say.
| petrusnonius wrote:
| That's quite naive consequentialism.
| wongarsu wrote:
| It is a bit reductionist, but so is "don't harm
| infrastructure". Infrastructure can be harmful, just like
| anything else.
|
| And in the end most criticisms about consequentialism are
| either about how to retroactively declare something moral
| or immoral (which is irrelevant for deciding the best
| path now without future knowledge) or are qualms with one
| particular way of weighing harm vs benefit. I'm perfectly
| fine with considering third order effects in the
| calculation, and an action that saves a life but errodes
| society is not necessarily "good" since the ultimate harm
| may outweigh the benefit. In fact it's this very kind of
| reasoning about higher-order-effects that would lead you
| to the conclusion that sabotage could be justified in
| some cases
| jansan wrote:
| > sabotaging fossil fuel infrastrusture protects it.
|
| Oh, is it that simple, really? Or does it come with a lot of
| unintended consequences, fueling conflict and paving the way
| for a more suppressive government?
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| It's _very_ simple to take an absolutist moralistic stance
| like this if the people hit by those consequences are
| thousands of miles away.
| maeil wrote:
| You've probably realized, but this can be said the exact
| same way for both sides of the equation (see: location of
| worst victims of global warming).
| littlestymaar wrote:
| CCC stands for " _Chaos_ computer club" after all.
| bekantan wrote:
| Joscha Bach's talk: https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-self-models-of-
| loving-grace
| aberoham wrote:
| This talk was one of the best so far, highly recommended.
| mckirk wrote:
| They are among the highlights for me every year. Just the
| right amount of brain melting information density.
| chb wrote:
| That was a mind-expanding 45-minute talk. Than you for
| highlighting it.
| uipfjp wrote:
| FreeFire
| ugjka wrote:
| The first talks had some audio issues, hope they got it fixed
| eptcyka wrote:
| What happened with the newag talk?
| Trellmor wrote:
| You can watch it here https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-we-ve-not-
| been-trained-for-this-...
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