4 ms·

Reminds me of an apocryphal story (can't find a reference but it appears to be reasonable): FCC was investigating the sale of illegal tv satellite descrambers

by spc476 9y ago

Reminds me of an apocryphal story (can't find a reference but it appears to be reasonable): FCC was investigating the sale of illegal tv satellite descrambers when they confiscated a unit. Upon investigation, it was found to have been manufactured by IBM! Further investigation revealed it was manufactured at a secure IBM facility used for top-secret ("need-to-know", etc.) type projects. The manager responsible had split the work up such that no single employee there knew what they were building (because they didn't need to know---they just knew enough to do their bit). I know it's not the same, but this reminds me of that story.

mehrdadn 9y ago
[Edit: sorry, never mind. Thanks for the story!]
- spc476 9y ago
  Unfortunately no. I spent several minutes trying to find a link, but could not find one. That's why I labeled it apocryphal.
tmuir 9y ago
On an only slightly different topic, about 15 years ago, there was a pretty healthy community of people distributing the circuit boards and accompanying software to program DirectTV smart cards. These would unlock all of the channels that "Dave was already beaming at everyone's house anyway", according to the in group parlance used to absolve oneself of such things. A decent part of that conversation seemed to center around how it seemed highly unlikely that the whole hack was even possible without insider information leading to the development of the tool in the first place. Fifteen years later, knowing what hacks have been at least claimed to have been pulled off through social engineering, I think the more important take away is that we need to stop portraying the worst case of hacking as a masked man executing some bond villain style hack, because it is fundamentally recommending a terrible heuristic. It by definition casts aside all of the incompetence that is equally likely to cause harm, and in the case of sheer volume, the far more likely scenario to occur.

by spc476 9y ago

mehrdadn 9y ago

[Edit: sorry, never mind. Thanks for the story!]

spc476 9y ago
Unfortunately no. I spent several minutes trying to find a link, but could not find one. That's why I labeled it apocryphal.

tmuir 9y ago

On an only slightly different topic, about 15 years ago, there was a pretty healthy community of people distributing the circuit boards and accompanying software to program DirectTV smart cards. These would unlock all of the channels that "Dave was already beaming at everyone's house anyway", according to the in group parlance used to absolve oneself of such things. A decent part of that conversation seemed to center around how it seemed highly unlikely that the whole hack was even possible without insider information leading to the development of the tool in the first place. Fifteen years later, knowing what hacks have been at least claimed to have been pulled off through social engineering, I think the more important take away is that we need to stop portraying the worst case of hacking as a masked man executing some bond villain style hack, because it is fundamentally recommending a terrible heuristic. It by definition casts aside all of the incompetence that is equally likely to cause harm, and in the case of sheer volume, the far more likely scenario to occur.