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What prevents metaphorical Trojan-infected copies of Photoshop from ending up in a science piracy site?
by eloisius 5y ago
What prevents metaphorical Trojan-infected copies of Photoshop from ending up in a science piracy site?
- valyagolev 5y agoIt's actually fun to entertain the possibility. How would you exploit this? It could be just replaced cryptographic constants in key papers... But it could also be some random psychological "discoveries" for the people to quote. A couple of "10-hour shifts considered very good" here and there, and the society will be completely brought to waste by the middle-managers unable to stop quoting them.
- givepause 5y agoThey only host PDFs and EPUBs, so there's no software involved.
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoBoth the PDF and EPUB formats allow embedding programs within them. The risk of malware is remote but real.
- eloisius 5y agoWhile I think it’s incorrect to assume PDFs cannot be exploited, I’m using computer viruses as a metaphor. What if a legit chemistry paper was tampered with such that the procedure creates and explosively releases a nerve agent and a cheap grad student that didn’t pay for the legal copy unknowingly follows it?
- JetSpiegel 5y ago> What if a legit chemistry paper was tampered with such that the procedure creates and explosively releases a nerve agent and a cheap grad student that didn’t pay for the legal copy unknowingly follows it? That grad student is visited by representatives from the military-industrial complex and is quickly drafted to doing that again. Imagine creating nerve agents by accident, what a breakthrough!