8 ms·

Is Hacking the Next Struggle for Agriculture?

53 points by rmason 5y ago

sekura 5y ago
https://mobile.twitter.com/uuallan/status/1439944417142468610 https://mobile.twitter.com/uuallan/status/143994441714246861...
kragen 5y ago
It is really not okay that this publication is equating "hacking" with crime and breaking security. It's a form of bigotry that's going to send a lot of innocent people to prison, or worse, because they do things like post on a site called "Hacker News". Imagine if they had entitled an article, "Is Science the Next Threat to Our Food Supply?" when reporting on a pesticide disaster, then in the body of the article described how "scientists sprayed pesticides on a farm, poisoning hundreds of people who ate the food." Or, "Is Freethinking the Next Threat to Our Children?" describing how "freethinkers employed children to work in their factories, maiming many of them." Mark my words. If you're reading this, you're a target of this hatemongering. Friends of mine have already died as a result of it.
- wbazant 5y ago
  I think the word "hacking" has been used to describe computer crime for a while now. Too bad for the other kinds of hackers I guess!
  - kragen 5y ago
    The word "Jew" has been used to describe loan-sharking for quite a while, too, but I will never declare, "Too bad for the other kinds of Jews I guess!"—because at times the result has been very bad for them indeed. As it will be for us. There are three major differences between these cases: 1. Bigotry against Jewish people goes back 1500 to 3000 years, although during much of that time other words, like "Israelite", were used; the Judeans were only a small part of ancient Israel. The word "hacker", by contrast, only goes back 55 or 60 years, and this sort of pejorative news article about "hackers" only goes back 35 years; although in earlier times sometimes other words were used to mean the same thing, such as "longhair", "philosopher", "freethinker", "egghead", or (as in the case of the great hacker Galileo) "heretic". During the Christianization of England a common term was "wicca", meaning roughly "shaman" or "wise man", which is the origin of our modern English word "witch"—the original word had two gendered versions, and the feminization of the role goes back to the time of Malleus Maleficarum, a book so misogynistic I thought modern feminists were exaggerating until I read it. 2. A "hacker" is not just someone who believes in the value system of hackerdom; it is someone who exemplifies it. The Jewish equivalent is "Tzadik", the title originally given to the mythical figure Joseph, or "Ḥasīd". The Christian equivalent might be "saint". The Rambam said, "One whose merit surpasses his iniquity is a tzadik." 3. The Jewish people are not only a community of believers in a value system, like hackers and aspiring hackers, but also an ethnicity. To some extent you can stop being a hacker, but as in the case of converting from Judaism, that may not be enough to get you untied from the stake. It is probably not a coincidence that many of the greatest hackers have been Jewish; the two value systems have a lot in common.
    - jerf 5y ago
      Who is "us"? Basically nobody calls themselves hackers in the old positive sense. The current title of Hacker News is nearly a fossil word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word
      - kragen 5y ago
        As you're well aware, the "basically nobody" you're dismissing includes many of the founders of the most important tech companies and social movements today, plus the guy who built the website you're posting this on. More to the point, though, if a prosecutor starts investigating you for "hacking" because you linked to your own website from your profile on this website (with records in archive.org going back to 01999, including your legal name, your wedding photos, etc., alongside a link to the "Hack The Planet" weblog and statements about things you've said on here), the fact that you protest that you "don't call yourself a hacker" won't cut much ice. "Hackers" as a class are being blamed for a pandemic of extortion that is seriously endangering the society you live in, much like "communists" in the early 20th century, though in that case it was a pandemic of violently overthrowing governments. You may be too young to have lived through that but you can read about it.
        Aicy 5y ago
        No one is going to be arrested for being associated with the word hacker alone with no accompanying crime Unless you can find any evidence of this happening you're just being ridiculous.
    - wk_end 5y ago
      You very well may be Jewish, I’m certainly not speaking for all Jews here, but as a Jewish hacker (in your preferred sense) I find the comparison you’re drawing and victimhood status you’re claiming (as a hacker) here both absurd and offensive.
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    It isn't that clear to me that the "breaking into computer systems" definition even initially started out separate from the building things definition. My impression from what I've read, is that there was one hacker community with some members interested in breaking into systems for some harmless fun and others more interested in other aspects. Over time, the breaking into systems folks became increasingly less harmless and drifted away from the rest of the community
    - kragen 5y ago
      Breaking into computer systems certainly can be "a playful use of the intellect" or "a feat the world experts in a field thought to be impossible", so it certainly can be hacking. Designing pesticides can be science, too (my second example), and certainly nothing prevents freethinkers from employing child labor (my third example)—there might even be a causal link if the local Church is prohibiting child labor. And if you're brewing up some pesticides, you might look up to scientists and think you're a scientist, even if you're really not. But hopefully you can see that it would be appalling to write an article entitled "Is Science the Next Threat to Our Food Supply?" about a pesticide disaster, saying, "Scientists sprayed pesticides on a farm, poisoning hundreds of people who ate the food;" and that this article isn't talking about anything you or I would recognize as "hacking" or "hackers". At the point where you're extorting ransom there's nothing playful about it anymore, and it's very likely that the vulnerabilities being exploited were already known. By virtue of self-identifying as "a hacker", or at least a would-be hacker, you are getting into the line of fire. So you should stand up against it.
      - Kiboneu 5y ago
        Changing a definition of a word is a big ask. As wbazant wrote, hacking has originally started as describing computer crime. The scales for what was considered computer crime has shifted quite a bit in addition to the term itself expanding. Many of us deal with this by inferring what is meant by context. I've been surrounded by hackers, and none of them caught legal or social flack for being called a hacker in public. I also don't see people getting turned off from doing computer security or other computer work because of hacking being used to describe computer crime.
  - diffeomorphism 5y ago
    The website you are posting this on is called "hacker news", which as far as I can tell does not refer to the computer crime meaning. So when posting on HN clarifying what you mean by that word seems very reasonable.
    - Fnoord 5y ago
      Context. Sometimes requires reading more than title (which on HN is supposed to be verbatim). I do get the agitation. I have it as well with 'crypto'. But we need to acknowledge trends/hypes influence our language.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Tronno 5y ago
  Friends of yours have died because the word "hacking" has multiple meanings? That's a pretty bold claim. Care to share any details about these deaths?
  - kragen 5y ago
    No, because people hate and fear hackers, because they are confused; the derogatory usage of the term "hacker" propagates that confusion and fear, but it is not the only cause of it. Here's the clearest-cut case of a friend of mine who died for that reason: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaro... There are a couple of other cases, but they are less clear-cut. Nobody made documentaries about them. Many more are likely on the way.
- bserge 5y ago
  Tbf, I learned "hacking" as the word for illegal (cyber) activity long before I've seen it used for "hacking stuff together".
  - conz 5y ago
    Tbf, I learned "hacking" as the word for illegal (cyber) activity long before I've seen it used for "hacking stuff together". How long have you been privy to Internet or programmer culture? 'Hacker' as a positive term has been around a lot longer than 'hacker' as a pejorative one. Back in the '80s, a hacker utilised technology to interesting ends. A cracker (akin to a safe-cracker) broke into things and did damage. As but one datum point, Steven Levy's book Hackers came out in 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute... EDIT: Typo.
    - Aicy 5y ago
      Language changes. It's the 2020s not 1980s. Wait until you learn how people use the word "phone" now to describe a small general purpose computer.
      - conz 5y ago
        Language changes. It's the 2020s not 1980s. Language may change, but language changes which cause 'damage' need to be resisted. There's too much that's positively aligned with the word 'hacker' to let those who without clue ruin the word for everyone else.
        Aicy 5y ago
        I would say it's more worth your time to adapt to the change and use the new lingo. For example I see the term "ethical hacker" used quite often, especially for security professionals, and it's held in high esteem.
szundi 5y ago
…or for anything??
aaron695 5y ago
> agweek.com > Is Hacking the Next Struggle for Agriculture? It's great industries are talking about this internally. > the co-op found work-arounds to keep operating The answer is it's certainly not an infrastructure issue. Almost no hacking effects infrastructure. Either the attacker is lied about (it was internal) or exaggerated. (Unless you are Iran and everyone's favourite IT punching bag, they got Wipers cool again, the Bad Luck Brian of the hacking world) Ransomware is costing all companies money. But so is using outdated and shitty software / processes. "The organization also disabled its soil-mapping platform as a precautionary measure" Sounds interesting. Their site still seems down - http://www.newcoop.com/ http://www.newcoop.com/
Melting_Harps 5y ago
Wow, @Dang has a crazy hectic job these days; I haven't been on YC most of the Summer as I was focused on revisiting this very issue and I have never seen so many irrelevant posts--was the signal to noise ratio always this bad on YC or did we get a ton of inane chat bots all of a sudden? Either way keep up the good job, mods. A reminder: many are pushing for this for the sole purpose in cashing in the froth from a over-heated stock market doing no amount of due diligence or looking to the Infrastructure's many pork project with headlong abandon instead of focusing on the actual Industry's needs. It's also a highlight and remind why Theranos is in the media, too. Anyhow, after taking the summer to focus on what pressing upgrades Ag appears to need after the Supply Chain and labour disruptions during and after COVID I came to the conclusion that automation, while effective and remarkably capable of delivering many advantages to a myriad of existing issues, alone isn't the turn-key panacea it's made out to be by the supposed AI techno-utopians financing, investing and building these products. And when looking at how efficient it is deploying a ransomware attack and bricking a poorly protected system came to mind, why do physical attacks when a decent vector (like Ransomware) will have a really good ROI without the risk. And COVID exposed just how poorly designed these systems are everything from how bad they are at keeping people safe, to the logistical challenges from farm to processor, what was missed in the discussion was operational security. Ironically, I thought COVID would have made the resources come pouring in from all the money that flooded the system, but I suppose updating centralized, archaic infrastructure and practices that leak info everywhere was too practical a use to do with resources? Still, this is another nail in the coffin of the centralized architecture that most of Ag is built on. I understand people's immediate response is to question the IT support team's competence and wag fingers for not having backups (this doesn't apply to the Co-OP in the title who was agile enough to route around it) for such a common event these days. And while that's a valid position to have, it's entirely shortsighted: it's more like people didn't realize that the OPSEC component of the equation in automating more processes in the system was much more important than the actual deployment of said solutions. Maybe it's just my innate paranoia since the advent of IoT or the ever increasing intrusiveness of enabling everything to be connected to the Internet and requiring more and more of your data, but it's clear the analog World's methods are at direct odds with the digital one's in more ways than we thought and a total overhaul of the system is required. I was a big advocate of IBM's food safety program [0], mainly because they had the resources to expend in trying to figure how Blockchains could solve many of these issues, which is why I joined. They had a lot of support from Megacorps, too, so you cannot imagine my dismay when they sought to simply re-invent the same problems with regards to OPSEC with centralized private ledgers, and closed-blockchains that simply recreated the same issues they were trying to solve. Decentralization has become a buzzword for many in this space, but for it's biggest advocates like myself we haven't even scratched the surface when trying to make people understand how critically vulnerable these systems are until it's too late and this will happen again. How they've concluded it was 'Russian hackers' notwithstanding, these kind of exploits are cheap, quick to deploy and have a high ROI, they will continue to happen more often. In many ways I'm reminded of why I used to say in 2013, when I started to take infosec and opsec serious that the Somali pirates had better invested some of the funds into devs because the age of risk tolerance for hi-jacking tankers was coming to an end when you could make way more money deploying a ransom-ware attack or some other hidden exploit. Everything from Stuxnet, to Heart bleed, to Vault7 made it clear that this how provate or nation states were going going to attack one another. The Voodoo Boys narrative in Cyberpunk2077 was an apt metaphor of what I envisioned could occur if left unchecked, where displaced and downtrodden Haitian refugees are left to use exploits to make-ends-meet in a Society that has marginalized them to the outer fringes of Society and live in an escapable poverty, violence and lawlessness. I'm glad to say we aren't there yet, but this Cyberpunk trope has been a recurring theme for a reason. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV0KXBxSoio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV0KXBxSoio

53 points by rmason 5y ago

https://mobile.twitter.com/uuallan/status/1439944417142468610 https://mobile.twitter.com/uuallan/status/143994441714246861...

kragen 5y ago

It is really not okay that this publication is equating "hacking" with crime and breaking security. It's a form of bigotry that's going to send a lot of innocent people to prison, or worse, because they do things like post on a site called "Hacker News". Imagine if they had entitled an article, "Is Science the Next Threat to Our Food Supply?" when reporting on a pesticide disaster, then in the body of the article described how "scientists sprayed pesticides on a farm, poisoning hundreds of people who ate the food." Or, "Is Freethinking the Next Threat to Our Children?" describing how "freethinkers employed children to work in their factories, maiming many of them." Mark my words. If you're reading this, you're a target of this hatemongering. Friends of mine have already died as a result of it.

wbazant 5y ago
I think the word "hacking" has been used to describe computer crime for a while now. Too bad for the other kinds of hackers I guess!
- kragen 5y ago
  The word "Jew" has been used to describe loan-sharking for quite a while, too, but I will never declare, "Too bad for the other kinds of Jews I guess!"—because at times the result has been very bad for them indeed. As it will be for us. There are three major differences between these cases: 1. Bigotry against Jewish people goes back 1500 to 3000 years, although during much of that time other words, like "Israelite", were used; the Judeans were only a small part of ancient Israel. The word "hacker", by contrast, only goes back 55 or 60 years, and this sort of pejorative news article about "hackers" only goes back 35 years; although in earlier times sometimes other words were used to mean the same thing, such as "longhair", "philosopher", "freethinker", "egghead", or (as in the case of the great hacker Galileo) "heretic". During the Christianization of England a common term was "wicca", meaning roughly "shaman" or "wise man", which is the origin of our modern English word "witch"—the original word had two gendered versions, and the feminization of the role goes back to the time of Malleus Maleficarum, a book so misogynistic I thought modern feminists were exaggerating until I read it. 2. A "hacker" is not just someone who believes in the value system of hackerdom; it is someone who exemplifies it. The Jewish equivalent is "Tzadik", the title originally given to the mythical figure Joseph, or "Ḥasīd". The Christian equivalent might be "saint". The Rambam said, "One whose merit surpasses his iniquity is a tzadik." 3. The Jewish people are not only a community of believers in a value system, like hackers and aspiring hackers, but also an ethnicity. To some extent you can stop being a hacker, but as in the case of converting from Judaism, that may not be enough to get you untied from the stake. It is probably not a coincidence that many of the greatest hackers have been Jewish; the two value systems have a lot in common.
  - jerf 5y ago
    Who is "us"? Basically nobody calls themselves hackers in the old positive sense. The current title of Hacker News is nearly a fossil word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word
    - kragen 5y ago
      As you're well aware, the "basically nobody" you're dismissing includes many of the founders of the most important tech companies and social movements today, plus the guy who built the website you're posting this on. More to the point, though, if a prosecutor starts investigating you for "hacking" because you linked to your own website from your profile on this website (with records in archive.org going back to 01999, including your legal name, your wedding photos, etc., alongside a link to the "Hack The Planet" weblog and statements about things you've said on here), the fact that you protest that you "don't call yourself a hacker" won't cut much ice. "Hackers" as a class are being blamed for a pandemic of extortion that is seriously endangering the society you live in, much like "communists" in the early 20th century, though in that case it was a pandemic of violently overthrowing governments. You may be too young to have lived through that but you can read about it.
      - Aicy 5y ago
        No one is going to be arrested for being associated with the word hacker alone with no accompanying crime Unless you can find any evidence of this happening you're just being ridiculous.
  - wk_end 5y ago
    You very well may be Jewish, I’m certainly not speaking for all Jews here, but as a Jewish hacker (in your preferred sense) I find the comparison you’re drawing and victimhood status you’re claiming (as a hacker) here both absurd and offensive.
- seoaeu 5y ago
  It isn't that clear to me that the "breaking into computer systems" definition even initially started out separate from the building things definition. My impression from what I've read, is that there was one hacker community with some members interested in breaking into systems for some harmless fun and others more interested in other aspects. Over time, the breaking into systems folks became increasingly less harmless and drifted away from the rest of the community
  - kragen 5y ago
    Breaking into computer systems certainly can be "a playful use of the intellect" or "a feat the world experts in a field thought to be impossible", so it certainly can be hacking. Designing pesticides can be science, too (my second example), and certainly nothing prevents freethinkers from employing child labor (my third example)—there might even be a causal link if the local Church is prohibiting child labor. And if you're brewing up some pesticides, you might look up to scientists and think you're a scientist, even if you're really not. But hopefully you can see that it would be appalling to write an article entitled "Is Science the Next Threat to Our Food Supply?" about a pesticide disaster, saying, "Scientists sprayed pesticides on a farm, poisoning hundreds of people who ate the food;" and that this article isn't talking about anything you or I would recognize as "hacking" or "hackers". At the point where you're extorting ransom there's nothing playful about it anymore, and it's very likely that the vulnerabilities being exploited were already known. By virtue of self-identifying as "a hacker", or at least a would-be hacker, you are getting into the line of fire. So you should stand up against it.
    - Kiboneu 5y ago
      Changing a definition of a word is a big ask. As wbazant wrote, hacking has originally started as describing computer crime. The scales for what was considered computer crime has shifted quite a bit in addition to the term itself expanding. Many of us deal with this by inferring what is meant by context. I've been surrounded by hackers, and none of them caught legal or social flack for being called a hacker in public. I also don't see people getting turned off from doing computer security or other computer work because of hacking being used to describe computer crime.
- diffeomorphism 5y ago
  The website you are posting this on is called "hacker news", which as far as I can tell does not refer to the computer crime meaning. So when posting on HN clarifying what you mean by that word seems very reasonable.
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    Context. Sometimes requires reading more than title (which on HN is supposed to be verbatim). I do get the agitation. I have it as well with 'crypto'. But we need to acknowledge trends/hypes influence our language.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Tronno 5y ago
Friends of yours have died because the word "hacking" has multiple meanings? That's a pretty bold claim. Care to share any details about these deaths?
- kragen 5y ago
  No, because people hate and fear hackers, because they are confused; the derogatory usage of the term "hacker" propagates that confusion and fear, but it is not the only cause of it. Here's the clearest-cut case of a friend of mine who died for that reason: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaronSwartz https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaro... There are a couple of other cases, but they are less clear-cut. Nobody made documentaries about them. Many more are likely on the way.
bserge 5y ago
Tbf, I learned "hacking" as the word for illegal (cyber) activity long before I've seen it used for "hacking stuff together".
- conz 5y ago
  Tbf, I learned "hacking" as the word for illegal (cyber) activity long before I've seen it used for "hacking stuff together". How long have you been privy to Internet or programmer culture? 'Hacker' as a positive term has been around a lot longer than 'hacker' as a pejorative one. Back in the '80s, a hacker utilised technology to interesting ends. A cracker (akin to a safe-cracker) broke into things and did damage. As but one datum point, Steven Levy's book Hackers came out in 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute... EDIT: Typo.
  - Aicy 5y ago
    Language changes. It's the 2020s not 1980s. Wait until you learn how people use the word "phone" now to describe a small general purpose computer.
    - conz 5y ago
      Language changes. It's the 2020s not 1980s. Language may change, but language changes which cause 'damage' need to be resisted. There's too much that's positively aligned with the word 'hacker' to let those who without clue ruin the word for everyone else.
      - Aicy 5y ago
        I would say it's more worth your time to adapt to the change and use the new lingo. For example I see the term "ethical hacker" used quite often, especially for security professionals, and it's held in high esteem.

szundi 5y ago

…or for anything??

aaron695 5y ago

> agweek.com > Is Hacking the Next Struggle for Agriculture? It's great industries are talking about this internally. > the co-op found work-arounds to keep operating The answer is it's certainly not an infrastructure issue. Almost no hacking effects infrastructure. Either the attacker is lied about (it was internal) or exaggerated. (Unless you are Iran and everyone's favourite IT punching bag, they got Wipers cool again, the Bad Luck Brian of the hacking world) Ransomware is costing all companies money. But so is using outdated and shitty software / processes. "The organization also disabled its soil-mapping platform as a precautionary measure" Sounds interesting. Their site still seems down - http://www.newcoop.com/ http://www.newcoop.com/

Melting_Harps 5y ago

Wow, @Dang has a crazy hectic job these days; I haven't been on YC most of the Summer as I was focused on revisiting this very issue and I have never seen so many irrelevant posts--was the signal to noise ratio always this bad on YC or did we get a ton of inane chat bots all of a sudden? Either way keep up the good job, mods. A reminder: many are pushing for this for the sole purpose in cashing in the froth from a over-heated stock market doing no amount of due diligence or looking to the Infrastructure's many pork project with headlong abandon instead of focusing on the actual Industry's needs. It's also a highlight and remind why Theranos is in the media, too. Anyhow, after taking the summer to focus on what pressing upgrades Ag appears to need after the Supply Chain and labour disruptions during and after COVID I came to the conclusion that automation, while effective and remarkably capable of delivering many advantages to a myriad of existing issues, alone isn't the turn-key panacea it's made out to be by the supposed AI techno-utopians financing, investing and building these products. And when looking at how efficient it is deploying a ransomware attack and bricking a poorly protected system came to mind, why do physical attacks when a decent vector (like Ransomware) will have a really good ROI without the risk. And COVID exposed just how poorly designed these systems are everything from how bad they are at keeping people safe, to the logistical challenges from farm to processor, what was missed in the discussion was operational security. Ironically, I thought COVID would have made the resources come pouring in from all the money that flooded the system, but I suppose updating centralized, archaic infrastructure and practices that leak info everywhere was too practical a use to do with resources? Still, this is another nail in the coffin of the centralized architecture that most of Ag is built on. I understand people's immediate response is to question the IT support team's competence and wag fingers for not having backups (this doesn't apply to the Co-OP in the title who was agile enough to route around it) for such a common event these days. And while that's a valid position to have, it's entirely shortsighted: it's more like people didn't realize that the OPSEC component of the equation in automating more processes in the system was much more important than the actual deployment of said solutions. Maybe it's just my innate paranoia since the advent of IoT or the ever increasing intrusiveness of enabling everything to be connected to the Internet and requiring more and more of your data, but it's clear the analog World's methods are at direct odds with the digital one's in more ways than we thought and a total overhaul of the system is required. I was a big advocate of IBM's food safety program [0], mainly because they had the resources to expend in trying to figure how Blockchains could solve many of these issues, which is why I joined. They had a lot of support from Megacorps, too, so you cannot imagine my dismay when they sought to simply re-invent the same problems with regards to OPSEC with centralized private ledgers, and closed-blockchains that simply recreated the same issues they were trying to solve. Decentralization has become a buzzword for many in this space, but for it's biggest advocates like myself we haven't even scratched the surface when trying to make people understand how critically vulnerable these systems are until it's too late and this will happen again. How they've concluded it was 'Russian hackers' notwithstanding, these kind of exploits are cheap, quick to deploy and have a high ROI, they will continue to happen more often. In many ways I'm reminded of why I used to say in 2013, when I started to take infosec and opsec serious that the Somali pirates had better invested some of the funds into devs because the age of risk tolerance for hi-jacking tankers was coming to an end when you could make way more money deploying a ransom-ware attack or some other hidden exploit. Everything from Stuxnet, to Heart bleed, to Vault7 made it clear that this how provate or nation states were going going to attack one another. The Voodoo Boys narrative in Cyberpunk2077 was an apt metaphor of what I envisioned could occur if left unchecked, where displaced and downtrodden Haitian refugees are left to use exploits to make-ends-meet in a Society that has marginalized them to the outer fringes of Society and live in an escapable poverty, violence and lawlessness. I'm glad to say we aren't there yet, but this Cyberpunk trope has been a recurring theme for a reason. 0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV0KXBxSoio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SV0KXBxSoio