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Besides taking the "civil liberty" angle, I'm trying to get to the "witchcraft" angle. As Arthur C Clarke puts it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indi

Besides taking the "civil liberty" angle, I'm trying to get to the "witchcraft" angle. As Arthur C Clarke puts it, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Here is my corollary: "Any sufficiently technical expert is indistinguishable from a witch". People fear magic they don't understand, and distrust those who wield that magic. Things that seem reasonable to technical geeks seem illegal to the non-technical. Excellent insight.

rayiner 14y ago
No, it's wild self aggrandizement.
- JayNeely 14y ago
  Why do you think so?
  - rayiner 14y ago
    He's basically saying "I'm being persecuted because I'm so much smarter than everyone else they can't possibly understand me, and people attack what they don't understand."
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      Is really such an unlikely reality? The general public is quite ignorant about technical matters. This becomes evident when, just as a trivial example, you complain about technical inaccuracies in a hollywood movie. You'll immediately be told in no unclear terms that the general public neither knows nor cares. People attacking that which they do not understand is just as old as recorded history. I'll take that phenomenon as just an axiom of human behaviour.
      - dpark 14y ago
        > the general public neither knows nor cares. Exactly. The general public does not care about tedious technical things you can do. Nor should they. Spoofing your MAC address simply isn't interesting to other people. > People attacking that which they do not understand is just as old as recorded history. I'll take that phenomenon as just an axiom of human behaviour. This is sad cynicism. In general, people don't just arbitrarily attack things they don't understand. And people certainly don't attack things they don't care about. You kind of have to care about something in order to put in the effort to attack it.
        jlgreco 14y ago
        People certainly care about hacking, why do you think it is in the movies so much? What people don't care about is an accurate portrayal of hacking. The problem occurs when people are trying to make ethical calls in a context outside of hollywood movies. Any string of technobable sounds insidious to them; writers (quite reasonably) use this to their advantage to reduce the amount of research they need to do, but prosecutors also use it to their advantage. > You kind of have to care about something in order to put in the effort to attack it. Yeah, and that something they care about is "ze evil haxxors". They care about a topic they have absolutely no technical insight into.
        dpark 14y ago
        You're conflating a number of separate issues. Sure, people care about "hacking". That doesn't mean that the general public automatically attacks anyone accused of hacking. More to the point, is there some evidence that the general public considers MAC spoofing to be hacking? Most people don't know what MAC spoofing is, and don't care. Sure, if you can convince someone that MAC spoofing is hacking, then you might be able to convince them to care, but first you have to convince them that it's hacking. > Any string of technobable sounds insidious to them; writers (quite reasonably) use this to their advantage to reduce the amount of research they need to do, but prosecutors also use it to their advantage. Any string of technobabble sounds like technobabble to the average person. It makes no sense to them, by design. That doesn't mean they automatically consider it evil or hacking. Writers use this to their advantage because they know they can assign whatever meaning they want to the technobabble by using appropriate framing. Now a prosecutor might well stand up and spout a bunch of technobabble and then say "that's hacking". The defense needs to stand up and explain why that's stupid. A prosecutor in a medical malpractice trial could also stand up and describe a heart bypass surgery using medical terms and then announce that the doctor is clearly responsible for the patient's death. It would be pure medical babble to the typical jury, and without accurate context, the jury could indeed be led to believe that the doctors actions were negligent or even malicious, despite them being standard procedure. The defense needs to step up and provide context for those terms that the jury doesn't understand. (The judge also needs to step up and not allow the prosecution to intentionally mislead.) The jury here isn't attacking the doctor, though. They're making a judgement based on the information they are provided.
      - rayiner 14y ago
        Maybe or maybe not, but jumping to that conclusion without any other evidence is certainly self-aggrandizing.
        jlgreco 14y ago
        There is plenty of evidence for both aspects of his statement for him to say it with confidence in public discourse. We he saying something that you don't disagree with, I doubt you would be demanding a higher grade of evidence.
    - tedunangst 14y ago
      The ol' Hans Reiser defense. I'm too smart to get caught if I were guilty, but you caught me, therefore I must be innocent.
  - dpark 14y ago
    Probably because the implication of that little blurb was that the author is so advanced technically that laypersons see him as magic. Clarke's quote isn't "anything you don't understand looks like magic". Spoofing a MAC address is not especially advanced. It certainly doesn't look like magic. And people who spoof their MAC addresses don't look like witches. The "witchhunt" -> "advanced technology looks like magic" connection had the potential to be interesting, but I don't think it worked out well. And I agree with rayiner that it came off as self-aggrandizing more than anything else.
    - john_b 14y ago
      To average jury members, who likely wouldn't know what a MAC address was prior to a potential trial, spoofing a MAC address might seem quite sophisticated, actually.
      - dpark 14y ago
        I get your point, and the level of perceived sophistication probably comes down to how well the concept is explained. (At its heart, it's just changing a number. But it could look pretty complex if explained in terms of Python scripts and system services and such.) Of course, there's also still a rather large gap between something seeming sophisticated and that thing seeming to be magic.
simmons 14y ago
The "witch" comment reminded me of the shift in the term "hacker" to refer to criminal behavior. A lot of people distrust cleverness. I've always suspected that if another term was adopted for positive hacking, such as "tinkerer", it too would be shifted to have a negative or criminal connotation. It was frustrating that in high school, whenever any computer shenanigans went down, I would always be the one who was automatically called to the principal's office. And some of those times, I wasn't even the one responsible. ;)

rayiner 14y ago

No, it's wild self aggrandizement.

JayNeely 14y ago
Why do you think so?
- rayiner 14y ago
  He's basically saying "I'm being persecuted because I'm so much smarter than everyone else they can't possibly understand me, and people attack what they don't understand."
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Is really such an unlikely reality? The general public is quite ignorant about technical matters. This becomes evident when, just as a trivial example, you complain about technical inaccuracies in a hollywood movie. You'll immediately be told in no unclear terms that the general public neither knows nor cares. People attacking that which they do not understand is just as old as recorded history. I'll take that phenomenon as just an axiom of human behaviour.
    - dpark 14y ago
      > the general public neither knows nor cares. Exactly. The general public does not care about tedious technical things you can do. Nor should they. Spoofing your MAC address simply isn't interesting to other people. > People attacking that which they do not understand is just as old as recorded history. I'll take that phenomenon as just an axiom of human behaviour. This is sad cynicism. In general, people don't just arbitrarily attack things they don't understand. And people certainly don't attack things they don't care about. You kind of have to care about something in order to put in the effort to attack it.
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        People certainly care about hacking, why do you think it is in the movies so much? What people don't care about is an accurate portrayal of hacking. The problem occurs when people are trying to make ethical calls in a context outside of hollywood movies. Any string of technobable sounds insidious to them; writers (quite reasonably) use this to their advantage to reduce the amount of research they need to do, but prosecutors also use it to their advantage. > You kind of have to care about something in order to put in the effort to attack it. Yeah, and that something they care about is "ze evil haxxors". They care about a topic they have absolutely no technical insight into.
        dpark 14y ago
        You're conflating a number of separate issues. Sure, people care about "hacking". That doesn't mean that the general public automatically attacks anyone accused of hacking. More to the point, is there some evidence that the general public considers MAC spoofing to be hacking? Most people don't know what MAC spoofing is, and don't care. Sure, if you can convince someone that MAC spoofing is hacking, then you might be able to convince them to care, but first you have to convince them that it's hacking. > Any string of technobable sounds insidious to them; writers (quite reasonably) use this to their advantage to reduce the amount of research they need to do, but prosecutors also use it to their advantage. Any string of technobabble sounds like technobabble to the average person. It makes no sense to them, by design. That doesn't mean they automatically consider it evil or hacking. Writers use this to their advantage because they know they can assign whatever meaning they want to the technobabble by using appropriate framing. Now a prosecutor might well stand up and spout a bunch of technobabble and then say "that's hacking". The defense needs to stand up and explain why that's stupid. A prosecutor in a medical malpractice trial could also stand up and describe a heart bypass surgery using medical terms and then announce that the doctor is clearly responsible for the patient's death. It would be pure medical babble to the typical jury, and without accurate context, the jury could indeed be led to believe that the doctors actions were negligent or even malicious, despite them being standard procedure. The defense needs to step up and provide context for those terms that the jury doesn't understand. (The judge also needs to step up and not allow the prosecution to intentionally mislead.) The jury here isn't attacking the doctor, though. They're making a judgement based on the information they are provided.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      Maybe or maybe not, but jumping to that conclusion without any other evidence is certainly self-aggrandizing.
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        There is plenty of evidence for both aspects of his statement for him to say it with confidence in public discourse. We he saying something that you don't disagree with, I doubt you would be demanding a higher grade of evidence.
  - tedunangst 14y ago
    The ol' Hans Reiser defense. I'm too smart to get caught if I were guilty, but you caught me, therefore I must be innocent.
- dpark 14y ago
  Probably because the implication of that little blurb was that the author is so advanced technically that laypersons see him as magic. Clarke's quote isn't "anything you don't understand looks like magic". Spoofing a MAC address is not especially advanced. It certainly doesn't look like magic. And people who spoof their MAC addresses don't look like witches. The "witchhunt" -> "advanced technology looks like magic" connection had the potential to be interesting, but I don't think it worked out well. And I agree with rayiner that it came off as self-aggrandizing more than anything else.
  - john_b 14y ago
    To average jury members, who likely wouldn't know what a MAC address was prior to a potential trial, spoofing a MAC address might seem quite sophisticated, actually.
    - dpark 14y ago
      I get your point, and the level of perceived sophistication probably comes down to how well the concept is explained. (At its heart, it's just changing a number. But it could look pretty complex if explained in terms of Python scripts and system services and such.) Of course, there's also still a rather large gap between something seeming sophisticated and that thing seeming to be magic.

simmons 14y ago

The "witch" comment reminded me of the shift in the term "hacker" to refer to criminal behavior. A lot of people distrust cleverness. I've always suspected that if another term was adopted for positive hacking, such as "tinkerer", it too would be shifted to have a negative or criminal connotation. It was frustrating that in high school, whenever any computer shenanigans went down, I would always be the one who was automatically called to the principal's office. And some of those times, I wasn't even the one responsible. ;)