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No! We need more "web3 nonsense" like this. This is the closest the internet has felt to the cyberpunk dreams of the 90s. Outlaw Hackers exploiting bugs in auto
by dagw 4y ago
No! We need more "web3 nonsense" like this. This is the closest the internet has felt to the cyberpunk dreams of the 90s. Outlaw Hackers exploiting bugs in automated smart contract to hijack cryptocurrency is the future Gibson promised us.
- wishfish 4y agoTrue, but it's funny how all these hijinks seemed so cool in the books. Jacking in while in a grimy Tokyo nightclub as your friend, the assassin with razorblades, watches your back. But in reality, it's just all so pathetic. Sometimes I feel like a cyberpunk fan in 1988 found a monkey's paw. Made a wish that it would all come true. And it did, but in a much more banal & sad way than the fan would have thought possible.
- rchaud 4y agoReplace the Tokyo nightclub with an air-conditioned military intelligence office in Pyongyang, where crypto is flooding in via ransomware payments and web3 exploits. That's the reality and it would still be quite sensational....as a Tom Clancy novel.
- woodruffw 4y agoDo you have evidence that North Korea makes up any significant amount of "Web3" exploits? From my vantage point, it seems to be mostly bored twentysomethings.
- danielvf 4y agoI don't think this one was North Korea. And yes, most aren't. North Korean cryptocurrency hacks are a bit distinctive. Rather than finding logical bugs in contracts, they tend to use traditional spearphishing / social eng to get targeted people to run malware which they try to pivot to stealing keys / access credentials. Then after a hack, most crypto hackers try to obfuscate and store their stole coins on chain somewhere. North Korea already has a large and practiced money laundering network, so after a hack the money immediately starts going to hundreds of different places in the real world, perhaps to mules or to faked accounts in Southeast Asia.
- Nitramp 4y agohttps://www.cisa.gov/uscert/ncas/alerts/aa22-187a https://www.cisa.gov/uscert/ncas/alerts/aa22-187a Google: "North Korea Ransomware"
- woodruffw 4y agoWhere's the connection? Ransomware is the other side of the equation: using things like bitcoin to launder money. That's substantially different from exploiting cryptocurrencies.
- kelseyfrog 4y agoThat could just as easily be a chapter in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon.
- hilbertseries 4y agoI remember how disappointing the duos attack on dyn was several years ago. Science fiction had finally come true, peoples fridges and toasters had been turned into weapons. Become part of a bot net and checks notes took down some websites for a couple hours.
- AceJohnny2 4y ago> And it did, but in a much more banal & sad way "The future is already here, just unevenly distributed" and boring
- lostmsu 4y agoMatches my view of cyberpunk as comic books of sci-fi.
- powerhour 4y agoI don't remember Gibson but I wonder if we can get to the point that outlaw hackers limit damage to the wealthy and send "refunds" to the exploited. That would be worth celebrating.
- cynusx 4y agoLike communism, that idealism fails on the part where the one stealing a lot of money (or appropriating it in communism for the greater good) has to actually give it back to somebody that is not himself
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rchaud 4y agoThat would be the part at which these books go from sci-fi to straight up fantasy.
- Ekaros 4y agoI would say that anyone who have enough time and money to investing in crypto is by definition wealthy.
- jeffgreco 4y agoI wish that were true. The Celsius and Voyager fallout has shown otherwise: https://blog.mollywhite.net/celsius-letters/ https://blog.mollywhite.net/celsius-letters/ https://blog.mollywhite.net/voyager-letters/ https://blog.mollywhite.net/voyager-letters/
- Ekaros 4y agoOnly read voyager letters, but those sums listed point towards people being very wealthy. I could see point if we were talking of hundreds, but we are talking of sums of over hundred of thousand. Which to me is very wealthy on global scale at least.
- rchaud 4y agoThe numbers talked about in crypto exploits are in the hundreds of millions, if not billions. I would have thoughts the 'cyberpunks' chasing these would be completely outnumbered by state-backed information warfare groups.
- dagw 4y agoI would have thoughts the 'cyberpunks' chasing these would be completely outnumbered by state-backed information warfare groups. Maybe they are... Perhaps this is the new way the CIA is financing their off the books activities.
- atlasunshrugged 4y agoIt's been the way the N. Koreans have been for a while! https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/30/business/north-korea-crypto-hack.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/30/business/north-korea-cryp...
- ufmace 4y agoYou know, it'd be really funny if the CIA had figured out a way to hack crypto etc to make extra money to finance black ops and had successfully managed to blame it all on North Korea.
- shreyshnaccount 4y agothe real fun of "cyberpunk" is supposed to be open source hardware, modular phones, cyber decks, laptops with six folding displays, ipads with gpio pins and its not a step closer to reality. sad. :( instead we get this web3 nonsense. hate it.
- outworlder 4y ago> open source hardware Is it really supposed to be open-source? A common cyberpunk trope is that mega corporate conglomerates own verything. Cyberdecks are modified and reverse-engineered, yes. But generally come from a mega corp.
- dagw 4y agomodular phones, cyber decks, laptops with six folding displays, ipads with gpio pins We have all that, although most of it from smaller Chines manufacturers. More than that we do have truly open source hardware, you can download schematics for almost anything, modify and design your own chips and circuits based on open designs, dream up your own hardware, and if know the right people in Shenzhen you can email it all to them and they'll build it for you. The reason so few people take advantage of any of this is that it didn't turn out to be that useful.
- shreyshnaccount 4y agothat, and also that this is all incredibly low level stuff. there's not hot swappable modules, but base components. also its very expensive and only makes sense in bulk to get them from China.
- arpa 4y agoAnd this is why we live in a boring, most stupid dystopia with bullshit tech. People exchange the walk in part in the war for a lead role in a cage, and it's rarely a lead role, too. I guess that's what you get if your paperclip optimizer is geared towards manufacturing consumption. It's just very sad to see all the potential just ... wasted.
- 4y ago
- radicaldreamer 4y agoPeople are losing their life savings and families are being set back a decade or more, but the aesthetic sure is cool!
- arpa 4y agoSomething something stupid games something something stupid prizes.
- shreyshnaccount 4y agothat song sounds good tho. but the lyrics are sad. huh, an apt comparision in more than one way
- qbasic_forever 4y agoYou do realize that much of the 'cyberpunk dream' science fiction of the 90's was actually harshly critical satire and dystopia of what the world would look like when technocrats and technology rule people, right? Like you realize William Gibson books and such aren't just cyberspace opera/Stars Wars in VR... it's showing the real suffering that was possible when you blindly trust technology to rule society. Gibson is honestly a bit of a luddite in his mistrust of technology.
- lokar 4y agoThis has long been obvious to everyone except the tech crowd who worship it as an ideal. Ironic.
- fsckboy 4y agoI don't agree that cyberpunk was critical or satirical of technology, any more than film noir detective stories are critical satires of telephones, guns, and automobiles or the gritty parts of town; that's just a setting and some props, they're stories of human nature.
- jollybean 4y agoThat's a great point actually. So long as people aren't running around with too much bad money.