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Programmer Conned CIA, Pentagon Into Buying Bogus Anti-Terror Code
- sli 17y agoGreat. Now programmers are going to be labeled as terrorists.
- DTrejo 17y agoCon Artist Programmer Conned CIA, Pentagon Into Buying Anti-Terror Code
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- pmorici 17y agoSounds like this guys problem was he was a salesman and not a programmer or computer scientist.
- raganwald 17y agoHey, remember that whole discussion about measuring the productivity of programmers through the amount of money someone is willing to pay for their "output?" Sounds like this guy was a very productive programmer.
- blhack 17y agoThis is crazy. This is embarrassing.’. . . I said, ‘Give us the algorithms that allowed you to come up with this stuff.’ They wouldn’t even do that. And I was screaming, ‘You gave these people fucking money?’ That pretty much sums it up perfectly. I think part of the problem that allows things like this to happen is that, to some people, computers are magic. They don't understand how they work and feeding Al Jazeera video feed through a computer program and having it spit out terrorist plots sounds almost feasible.
- pmorici 17y agoThe sad thing is that the people who are screaming "You gave these people fucking money" are likely in the minority and also likely often marginalized.
- lhuang 17y agoSome? Try most. People fear the unknown and sadly the world of technology and computers are still very much a black box for the vast majority of people on earth. My dad, ivy educated phd, still thinks that coding is like the movie hackers.
- beaker 17y agoHaving worked on many government and DoD contracts, I find this rather unsurprising. The phrase "tip of the iceberg" comes to mind..
- neurotech1 17y agoPart of the problem is a fairly large number of projects are theoretical research initially. What is more surprising is they didn't seem to apply a "peer review" to this. I find it very hard to believe that the DoD (NSA?) do not have sufficient highly talented programmers / analysts to review these programs. Another issue is that after 9/11, they were evaluating a larger number of possible solutions, In the hope that at least some of them produce viable results.
- lhuang 17y agoNot sure if you can really bucket this under "theoretical research." Theoretical research is at least grounded in logic and paper rationale. This case seems like a mix of equal parts ponzi scheme showmanship, conspiracy theory, and tech-illiterate paranoids. I don't even think this ever got to the hands of the NSA or people who have the technical proficiency to call bs (this in and of itself is surprising given the sheer stupidity of what this clown was trying to sell). If anything this fraud was faciliated by petty political and institutional bureaucratic jostling for relevance, power, and funding. Basically some tards, convinced that they're onto something big, hides it from everyone else because they don't want to share in the credit/fame. Not surprising given this is the US govt. Hell most corporations are like this too. What I find most troubling about all of this is that after 9/11 there was a such a stink about intra-department communication and cooperation. The argument being that if people simply talked more with one another lapses in security and plain dum-dum-ness would be greatly reduced if not eliminated outright. Fuck, Bush even created a whole department to do just this!
- neurotech1 17y agoI agree with all 3 of your points.
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- motters 17y agoA fool and his money are soon parted. This story made me laugh, because it's like a modern re-telling of the Hans Andersen story "The Emperor's New Clothes". The Emperor, in this case played by George Bush and company, are so eager to believe all sorts of paranoid fantasies, such as that evil-doers are broadcasting secret messages via TV, that when a charlatan comes along claiming that he can prove that their darkest nightmares are true they're keen to make sure he gets to work on the tailoring right away, with no expense spared!
- brown9-2 17y agoDo you really think that this kind of willingness-to-believe stops at "George Bush and company"? I mean can understand the hilarity of the situation, but seriously - this guy should be in jail.
- access_denied 17y ago> kind of willingness-to-believe stops at "George Bush We are willing to believe in change now, becuase we can.
- motters 17y agoNo it doesn't, and that's why the Hans Andersen story is so timeless. Foolishness in the form of being too quick to believe your own prejudices is, alas, a common failing.
- joshu 17y agoPlayboy?
- pvg 17y agoSure. Among interviewed subjects - Bertrand Russel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Albert Schweitzer, Nabokov, Dali, Martin Luther King, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frederico Fellini, Fidel Castro, Arnold Toynbee, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ralph Nader, William Buckley, Jr., Albert Speer, George McGovern, R. Buckminster Fuller, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Milton Freedman, Tennessee Williams, Walter Cronkite, Jimmy Carter, Edward Teller, William Shockley, Lech Walesa, Ansel Adams, Yasser Arafat, Carl Sagan, William Safire, Bill Gates, Salman Rushdie, Pope John Paul II. Ok, I made one of those up. But just one.
- dualogy 17y agoAyn Rand too, back in the 50s or 60s.
- CamperBob 17y agoI have that issue (March 1964). Authors and essayists/interviewees included Rand, Shel Silverstein, P. G. Wodehouse, J. Paul Getty, Arthur C. Clarke, Lenny Bruce, and the Greek humorist Apuleius. It's just plain jaw-dropping to see how much cultural deterioration we've undergone since then, going by a then-and-now comparison of the magazine's table of contents. Back in the day, when someone claimed they only read Playboy "for the articles," there was a good chance they weren't lying. It was well worth the 75-cent cover price.
- idlewords 17y agoIt's not cultural deterioration at all. It just happened that the first guy to put real production money into a skin magazine had serious intellectual pretensions. We're all better off for the nice interviews, but there's a reason they had to be bookended with lots and lots of porn for the project to be sustainable. Now that Playboy is a relic instead of the only game in town, they can no longer indulge such expensive tastes. It says nothing about the wider culture except that we've become more accepting of pornography.
- NathanKP 17y agoNow that is a twisted story.... By the way, I hate to say it but why is Playboy the trusted source in this article?
- pgbovine 17y agoi don't want to be 'that guy', but Playboy does publish legitimate articles (in the style of, say, Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair or GQ). at least in its early years, it was well-known (in part) for its left-leaning editorials and investigative articles wasn't it around 2004 that Playboy published a pretty high-profile interview with the Google founders right before their IPO, and there was some legal hiccups with the SEC due to what they disclosed in that interview?
- Slzr 17y agohappens all the time, you just need to find "Mr 10%"
- Slzr 17y agohappens all the time, you just need to find "Mr 10%"
- zhyder 17y agoAmong all the mistakes the US govt made due to post-9/11 paranoia (Iraq, Patriot Act...), this is comparatively a tiny one. Unsurprising.
- Groxx 17y agoThere's a remarkable amount of stupidity in the world when it comes to computers. Governments seem to attract a particularly high density of computer-illiterate people. I wish I could understand why, but it truly boggles my mind.
- rms 17y agoOriginal article: http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-man-who-conned-the-pentagon-dennis-montgomery/index.html?page=1 http://www.playboy.com/articles/the-man-who-conned-the-penta... SFW, in theory. And by that I mean there are no nipples until you click the Girls link at the top of the page.