Quite a while after it was released I finally took the time to look over the latest issue of Phrack, and there was an article that caught my attention. Namely The Hacker’s Renaissance: A Manifesto Reborn. For quite some time I’ve been thinking about the meaning of words like hacker and hacking. Is a hacker inherently a bad guy? If so, what does that say about an ethical hacker? How have this identity shifted over time? ...
In this world of AI, no-one can miss the discussions about “vibe coding”. What that means is a the use of AI to write code to develop a product quickly, and the author doesn’t even need to know how to write code. This opens up so many possibilities, as long as the code has a high quality. I won’t dig deeply into the quality of the code produced by AI today, but for now I wouldn’t trust code written by AI to be run in production without rigorous code review and testing. However, if we assume that AI in the future would be of a quality high enough to be run, what would the impact be on Developers? I would argue that this is not a new problem, but a new version of an old problem. ...
Lately there has been an increase in discussions about the use of end-to-end encryption for consumers. The most blatant attack on privacy I have read about is the so-called EU Chat Control. But there are other regulations as well, such as the UK Online Safety Bill. Chat Control (EU) Let’s begin with the European Union, and what is usually called Chat Control. This regulation aims to protect children from abuse by forcing both hosting and communications services to reduce the risk of the service being used for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) by ...
It has recently been reported by The Guardian that Saudi Arabia has taken serious steps to influence the information available at Wikipedia. The investigations began after two volunteers at Wikipedia were put in jail for “swaying public opinion” and “violating public morals.” Since then Saudi Arabia seems to have stepped up their efforts to influence the public view. An internal investigation at Wikimedia showed that all of their administrators in the country were government agents. Since Wikipedia relies on their volunteers to maintain the information on the site, they have had to create a structure of trust to ensure the quality of the information. The Saudi Arabian agents had managed to raise to the level of administrators, whom are authorized to edit or delete contents, as well as blocking lower level users edits from being published. ...
In todays internet based world, phishing has become a great nuisance. We all know about the emails trying to trick the receiver to perform an action that is to the senders gain. This could be to install malware, send money, or something else. Either way, this is just the newest variant of the con (aka confidence game) to trick someone for gains. After reading The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova I got to thinking. Where goes the line between a con and business? ...