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Does this strike anyone else as a bit careless and/or reckless? Lets think about this... You are a citizen of North Korea and one of these USB or DVDs lands on
by systematical 13y ago
Does this strike anyone else as a bit careless and/or reckless? Lets think about this...
You are a citizen of North Korea and one of these USB or DVDs lands on your property (and you don't even know its there). A police officer happens to see it and picks it up. A day later you are arrested and thrown in jail for being an enemy of the state. Who else gets arrested with you? Your friends? Your family? Co-workers?
So given the potential harm this could cause is it worth it? Whats the ROI on this? This weather balloon filled with propaganda could be the equivalent of a Drone raid gone bad on some poor individuals life.
P.s. You didn't "hack" shit. Stop misusing that word please.
- higherpurpose 13y agoThe "ROI"? Really? Some people want to risk their lives if it means progress for everyone else. What was the ROI for Snowden?
- zhemao 13y agoEven when conducting a selfless act, you still want your action to accomplish some goal. Snowden's goal was that the American public would know about the government's activities. This group's goal, presumably, is to give North Koreans information about the outside world. It is an open question whether the balloons are actually reaching anyone.
- markdown 13y ago> P.s. You didn't "hack" shit. Stop misusing that word please. In fact, they didn't even do shit. Unless I missed something, the title is completely false. They had an idea, but were prevented from executing it by the South Korean government.
- joyeuse6701 13y agoYeah, what's up with that title? How disappointing.
- jpatokal 13y agoThey've been doing this for years. This particular launch was stopped, many others have succeeded. Whether they're making a perceptible impact is, of course, a question mark, but given the extent to which the DPRK fulminates against them, at least they're viewed as a threat. http://www.seoulusa.org/balloons/ http://www.seoulusa.org/balloons/
- ChuckMcM 13y agoI believe you misread the article, it talks of a 'current' activity which was successful "after our previous launch attempt was thwarted by South Korean police forces." They did indeed get their balloons off. It is entirely unclear to me how far north though you can expect such a balloon to go given the prevailing air currents.
- tptacek 13y agoPBS Frontline has footage of them doing it.
- ddeck 13y agoThe documentary referred to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7067402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7067402
- dmtzz 13y agojust signed in to say the exact thing.. why is everyone using the the term "hack" for every expression? It's really annoying and cringing..
- forgottenpass 13y ago>why is everyone using the the term "hack" for every expression? It makes your thing sound cool even if it has none of the things that gave word "hack" the cachet it has. It's a watered down, mailable enough descriptor that you can stick it on anything. See: 99+% of "hack"ing on "hacker" news.
- windsurfer 13y agohack 1 (hk) v. hacked, hack·ing, hacks 3 b. To gain access to (a computer file or network) illegally or without authorization: hacked the firm's personnel database. I'd say they gained access to North Korea without authorization. This is hacking.
- joyeuse6701 13y agoNope, reread article.
- markdown 13y ago"Tonight at 9, a damning report on the impact of Mexican hackers on American jobs" - Fox News
- Crito 13y agoBy that logic, John Dillinger hacked banks.
- grrowl 13y agoI hacked the bus to get to work this morning. 2014: The year of everything being "hacked"
- coolnow 13y ago2013 was strife with pointless "hacking" of X.
- eli 13y agoIt also means this: http://hacks.mit.edu/misc/faq.html http://hacks.mit.edu/misc/faq.html
- verroq 13y agoUntil they dumped North Korea's database on pastebin.com and there's a service out that helps North Koreans check if their details were compromised. It's not hacked.
- 13y ago
- MrZongle2 13y ago"Does this strike anyone else as a bit careless and/or reckless?" Yes. Better to let all those people remain in Hell with no hope for a better tomorrow. "You are a citizen of North Korea and one of these USB or DVDs lands on your property (and you don't even know its there)." Citizens of North Korea -- and not the State -- own property?
- Crito 13y ago> Citizens of North Korea -- and not the State -- own property? Semantics. They undoubtedly live in dwellings surrounded by land that would be associated with them. A jailed criminal does not legally own his cell, but he does "own" responsibility for anything that happens to it or is found in it. This said, the people that are doing this undoubtedly have a better understanding of the situation and the potential consequences of their actions than we do.
- jedmeyers 13y agoHow exactly those balloons helped the people of NK to not remain in Hell?
- freshfunk 13y agoThere's no freedom of information in the country. They subverted this by cleverly sending technology and information by using low-tech means. Sounds like a hack to me.
- gcb0 13y agoJust like in the US, everyone in north korea is guilty of a crime already. if the police officer decides to enforce the law on some citizen randomly, it is not because of the new irrelevant crime, the citizen was already guilty of something else that could have been used to punish him. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement
- sliverstorm 13y agoDoes this strike anyone else as a bit careless and/or reckless? Considering the people doing this are supposedly all DPRK defectors, they probably have a much better idea of the risks & consequences than you or I, so I won't pretend to know better than them.
- hyperbovine 13y agoBut you've just eliminated 97% of the internet!
- anonymfus 13y agoMay be better idea would be to use some indirect, steganography like methods. Imagine the book which looks like official Kim Jong-il biography but starting with some page has his real biography and other information. Imagine the book which looks like official school physics book, but with additional paragraphs about rationality methods (are korean translations of lesswrong sequences exist?).
- rz2k 13y agoThe book Every Man Dies Alone[1] by Hans Fallada deals with a very similar subject. At the height of the Nazi Party's political power in Germany, an elderly couple left postcards to be found in public spaces with subversive messages like, "Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too, he will not stop till he has brought sorrow to every home in the world." They're eventually tracked down and executed after two years and hundreds of postcards, and the question remains whether their campaign had any effect. Evidence of just how monolithic the regime was, comes from the percentage that were immediately turned into the authorities being something like 95%. On one hand the postcards absolutely terrified the people who found them, but on the other, when a society is in a state where everyone is informing on each other, they may have been the rarest of moments when anyone who doubted the regime would have seen any proof that they were not alone. I doubt that the DPRK regime could control the entire population without a relatively high level of acquiescence and even complicity of the people it is controlling. It's probably similar to how organized crime survived in communities by convincing people it was better than unorganized crime, or by building up the mythos of it having something to do with honor. In other words they have an information monopoly, because they are certain that small challenges to the official narrative do propose a real threat. [1] some reviews: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/Schillinger-t... http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Every-Man-Dies-Alone-by-Hans-Fallada-3296158.php http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Every-Man-Dies-Alone-by-... http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/07/hans-fallada-alone-berlin-rereading http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/07/hans-fallada-al...
- XorNot 13y agoActually it's mostly that the people they control are starving (and now, addicted to meth as well). The narrative that the North Koreans are fanatical followers of the regime is basically Americanized fiction. The reality is that they're regular people who fear for their lives. The problem with a lot of western commentators on regimes they think should just overthrow the government, is they think they'd do that, but haven't had to. It's one thing to say it, it's another thing to run unarmed into machine gun fire hoping to suicide bomb a barracks so others will have a chance to arm themselves.
- verroq 13y agoWell clearly they need to send more balloons. So everyone gets arrested.
- noonespecial 13y agoThey don't need reasons to arrest anyone they want at any time. They just do. The reason gets made up later, if at all.
- Toenex 13y agoSurely even the North Korean Government won't object to a USB drive full of kitten pictures. Or are they sending an unrepresentative sample of the internet? :)