4 ms·
Is there any positive ethical aspect of this tool?
by neiman 7y ago
Is there any positive ethical aspect of this tool?
- ArnoVW 7y agoEliminating information dissymmetry, by showing to the rest of the world what -given the simplicity- undoubtedly many other people have already found out (but have kept for themselves).
- notduncansmith 7y agoFor that to hold reasonable ethical weight, you’d need to spread wide awareness of this tool. I’d say you qualify for that if, for example, you were to run this bot in some kind of “warning mode” that would join unprotected groups and let participants know of their danger.
- riter 7y agoFair point. At the very least it highlights the security model of OSS in general.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 22c 7y agoSure, drawing attention to the weaknesses of Telegram. Similar discussion from previous HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776327 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776327
- diffeomorphism 7y agoSo what is the weakness here? It just seems to say public channels can be read by anyone, duh.
- ShorsHammer 7y agoDepends who you think should be able to bomb people based on metadata I guess. It's all relative.
- jhabdas 7y ago> We Kill People Based on Metadata Former head of the National Security Agency Gen. Michael Hayden
- yoavm 7y agoNot a fan of Telegram, but as far I understand this only let's you scrape messages from public channels. People shouldn't really expect anything else when you write a message on a group with 100s of other people
- DavideNL 7y agoExactly, and this tool even joins the channel. I mean what else do you expect, it's not a surprise that anyone who joins a channel can read the messages.
- riter 7y agoNot untrue. And its one ngnix ec2 instance away from silently changing it from anyone who joins a channel to read the message to the world indexing all those messages.
- walrus01 7y agoExposing fundamental architectural flaws of Telegram?
- kome 7y agoI mean, it's a bot. Like a search engine bot. It works only for public groups or if it's allowed in a group... I don't see any negative ethical aspect to be honest.
- riter 7y agoThe easiest negative ethical aspect I would point out is in chat apps like discord or TG we have a reasonable expectation of privacy that is not necessarily implicit in the APIs. It could be one ec2 free-tier instance away from making all that information indexable.
- hnarn 7y agoThe README clearly states: >Potential Business Applications: >Sock puppeteering to overthrow a despotic regime >Brand monitoring and sentiment analysis >Shilling cryptocurrency at a moments notice for financial gain >Influencing sentiment on topical issues >Getting in on price action early >Running analysis of a telegram channel While some of them are arguably unethical, some of them are almost certainly not.
- riter 7y agoSome of these applications were intended to be tongue in cheek and point out ethical applications were up to the imagination.
- DagAgren 7y agoKeeping an eye on cryptocurrency scammer channels?
- BickNowstrom 7y agoGathering intelligence on - and data from - bad actors. Do a search for "site:telegram.me" including a keyword from any illegal activity, such as carding, and you'll find hundreds of channels with interesting behavior.