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Why the Girl Scouts Are Learning to Pick Locks and Hack Computers
- ddingus 8y agoAwesome.
- ddingus 8y agoWell, seeing as how that was not taken well... Growing up, I had an uncle teach me lock picking. Each one opened came with a story, and some new thing he would share. Those girls will likely see the world a bit differently, and yes. Awesome.
- guard0g 8y agoApplaud the Girl Scouts for helping girls build skills for the 21st century!
- defkev 8y agoWhat "skills" exactly? Burglary and cyber crime?
- RHSeeger 8y agoMy family recently moved and, during the move, our file cabinet was accidentally locked. The key was lost years ago. Being able to pick the lock came in handy. Not all skills that CAN be used for illegal purposes WILL be used for illegal purposes.
- wand3r 8y agoThis is part of a larger ethos of curiosity about how things work and building, modifying and demystifying tools used everyday; e.g hacker culture. I don’t think it is particularly fair to reduce skills like this, or frankly exploration of skills like this on private property, to one negative and narrow usecase.
- defkev 8y agoThen teach them how to build a lock, not to pick it. Teach them to build a secure infrastructure, not how to hack into one. Your "ethos of curiosity" is mostly practiced by not-so-ethical criminals in prison, where they teach other prisoners their "skills" Whats next? Teach them to forge documents for identity theft?
- travmatt 8y agoI can’t tell if you’re a really bad troll or a really bad teacher.
- nmca 8y agoTo be fair, if the goal was to craft a comment that would clash most egregiously with hacker culture, your man hasn't done too bad.
- lb1lf 8y ago-To stay within this narrow example - how is one supposed to build a better lock if one doesn’t know how current ones can be defeated? I see this as a brilliant move to foster the kind of curiosity which IMHO is essential to be a good engineer; as an added bonus, it teaches them from an early age that systems can be defeated. That goes a long way towards curing the blind faith in the security of, say, one’s cloud storage...
- defkev 8y agoYou are skipping all the actual useful stuff and teach them right away how to exploit them. A good locksmith certainly is good at lock picking because of the amount of locks he has build/fixed already. Just like a good Sys/DevOp is a good hacker because of the thousands of hours he has put into building, maintaining and hardening his systems. These skills are not _taught_ but _learned_ on the side from experience by actually working in these fields.
- mbreese 8y agoHow exactly do you propose learning how to build a lock without learning about how to exploit their weaknesses? The point isn’t to learn how to pick a lock. It’s about learning how things work.
- greenhatman 8y agoWanting to become a hacker is what got me into programming. Never became a hacker. Now do software dev for a living.
- hermitdev 8y agoI was a cracker in my early to mid teens. Never malicious, just exploratory. Owned my HS network and college networks. Had a moment when I realized how much I was in for if I was caught, and then just walked away, cold Turkey. Do financial software engineering now. Only crack myself now.
- reshie 8y agojust to add to what others pointed out. it's only criminal in its unlawful usesses. locksmith and pen testing are things. in these activities there is usually a understanding and knowledge of how the thing works.
- dang 8y agoThis comment breaks the site guidelines. They ask: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." They also ask: "Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow those rules when posting here, so we can all avoid boring flamewars.
- ohjeez 8y agoThis really makes me happy. When I was in Girl Scouts in the 1960s, we were taught to cook. I guess that was how they prepared us for our then-expected roles in life. Even when I went to Girl Scout Camp (as I did from age 7 to 12), the outdoor skills we were encouraged to learn were watered-down versions of what boys learned. I canoed across lakes, where my husband canoed in wilderness areas on 10-day trips.
- watwut 8y agoWell, boy scouts were started as attempt to make boys more prepared for war time and based on army activities - to teach them being right kind of boy from that point of view. No such motivation for girl scouts, more like attempt to make something proper feminine and still kind of similar.
- mac01021 8y agoIt sounds like what I did at Boy Scout Camp in the 1990s more closely resembled your Girl Scout Camp experience 30 years prior.
- kleiba 8y agoWell, despite this being HN, I'd still argue that for most people, knowing how to cook is a more valuable skill to have than knowing how to pick a lock.
- xyzzyz 8y agoProbably, but there are plenty opportunities to learn to cook, but not many to learn lockpicking. Moreover, the argument “don’t teach skill X because skill Y is more useful on average” leads to silly consequences — it entails that you should never learn any advanced or obscure skills, which is absurd. Cooking is also more useful than programming, and yet you can make good money and have fun writing code. The point here is that learning is not exclusive, you can learn both to cook and to pick locks.
- toast0 8y agoI think being a locksmith earns more than most cooks (although certainly less than high end chefs). Opening locks without keys is a big part of locksmithing.
- black6 8y agoMuch, much better turn for the free-labor cookie-selling machine the Girl Scouts has become over the past decade ($0.60/box back to the troop, and available year round...).
- flyingcoder 8y agoWell, $.60/box goes to that specific troop (15%) but $2.50/box (50%) goes to that local troop’s organization, so in my area that would be the Northern California’s Girlscout Organization
- foolrush 8y agoSo happy to see someone else flag this horrible abuse. I would rather donate the cost of a case of cookies to the Guides than support the free labour, but of course the policy forbids such donations. I would think many other people would be happy to offer a 5$ donation direct to the Guides rather than line the pockets of a corporate parasite.
- mmt 8y agoAt least here in the US, it's quite easy to donate directly to a local chapter (as well as higher levels of the organization). I've done it. Is that not the case where you are? Or is the problem that you're trying to support a specific troop or want to support a specific individual, and that's forbidden? Do you have a link to something documenting the prohibition you've encountered?
- thatcat 8y agoThey don't solicit donations, they sell cookies for no personal gain instead. Sure you can go out of your way to donate - but they aren't asking for that. If Girl Scouts want to use children as labor they should pay them the commission, then ask the children for donations. If this isn't a form of forced labor they would make the same amount.
- foolrush 8y agoWhen the girls are doing their rounds, I don't believe you are able to donate directly as an "instead of" option. That is, instead of cookies, a donation box, which would clearly state _all_ proceeds would be going to support the local troop. It is also quite shameful that the distribution of funds isn't clearly indicated when the girls are funding. I suspect more people would donate directly instead of the cookies if they saw the distribution ratios. Here, I believe the Guides take 3.00$ of the 5.00$, with a mere 1.00$ going to the girl in question. I would prefer to simply give 100% of the 5.00$ to the local troop that the girl is supporting, and in turn support five girls in her troop for the same donation amount.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bayesian_horse 8y agoProbably people have to check their cookie boxes for listening devices now...
- test6554 8y agoIf they learn to make poison and stealth, then I can finally roll a rogue class.
- burntrelish1273 8y agoStart small: assassin merit badge.
- flatfilefan 8y agoBecause there’s a large gender skew in prison population?
- mhh__ 8y agoAnd because it's cool? Not a girl, but I was a scout and if we were seriously learning lock picking then the number of people going would have skyrocketed.