The Guardian Looks At Hacking Team's Client List, Internal Communications 35
There are lots of small but interesting news bits to take from the data dump made available by Wikileaks of internal documents from the Italian security firm Hacking Team, such as that a police unit investigating major crimes in Florida, according to some of the leaked emails, was interested in purchasing some of the company's surveillance technology. The Guardian has taken a longer look at the company's business and tactics, and outlines many of their actual and potential clients, in particular their government customers, and skewers Hacking Team's claims "that it does not sell to repressive regimes."
Shades of Blue Coat.
Shades of Blue Coat.
does not sell to repressive regimes (Score:4, Insightful)
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which do not pay.
Thanks - now added to my new book "Things they don't tell you in Business Skool" (A Thousand and One Bleeding Obvious Things Managers should Know). Please post your banking details and I'll be pleased to deposit your contributors fee (tried earlier but I seem to have the wrong password).
Re: does not sell to repressive regimes (Score:1)
swoosh....
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I'd actually buy that book, that's absolutely brilliant. A 1001 might be too many, maybe 101 unless your book is going to be huge. Still, this might be a best seller if done in a comedic way.
Don't tell anyone - but market research showed bigger numbers sell better, and buyers never read more than the first ten pages as they only want to display it on their bookshelf. There's only 20 tips in the book - the rest of the pages are random quotes from Drucker written by a spam bot.
Stay tuned to Oprah for next weeks big release. I'll be bundling the first 100 copies with the new "Super Managers Shorts" - they come with a "Power Memory Aid" (that's a small tag in the front of the underpants with your n
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If they were worth what they charge they would be able to get their payments whether the client liked it or not.
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Friedrich Nietzsche would disagree.
Considering I've only read a few of his works, I don't profess to have his depth of knowledge in matters philosophical; however, to quote him badly "All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
Ethics has always been a function of knowledge. As knowledge changes, ethics change. One tries to do assign items into right and wrong, but to a knowledgeable person something that seems wrong mi
Re: Profiting from other people's crimes (Score:2)
If you believe in democracy
congrats - you've just made a great argument against it. Maybe one in 10,000 people will bother reading those papers.
Nietzsche had some interesting observations, but nobody pretends he was a rigorous philosopher. Morals are fixed by rules of mutual agreement and are thus invariant even as ethics shimmies to fit current trends. There's not going to be a time when rape, murder, and pillage are morally acceptable even though 'modern' ethicists will tell you it's OK if men with go
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If I understand the paragraph you are "quoting" correctly, (and properly interpreting that you probably read a translation)...
Nietzsche here seems to be saying, in a very long winded way, "Might makes right". I can't quite tell whether or not he was being sarcastic, but from your paraphrase I believe he was. Or rather, it appears that he was being cynical enough to be saying "History is written by the victors, and they will define what will be remembered as the right action." I assume that this was clear
Re:Profiting from other people's crimes (Score:5, Insightful)
>why is it acceptable for Guardian to profit from their crime without even a condemnation?
Because there's nothing wrong with profiting from a crime, by using it as the basis of an article, a book, or a movie.
News Corp were profiting from their own crimes - crime they instigated, knew about, conspired to hide, and didn't do anything to stop.
Re:Profiting from other people's crimes (Score:5, Insightful)
The News Corp hacks, for the most part, were voicemail intercepts on celebrities, crime victims, and their families, used to provide a front-row seat on assorted emotionally moving(and big selling), but effectively mere gossip, stories. The Guardian is taking advantage of the availability of somebody else's hack(that, unlike News Corp, they didn't pay somebody to do) to write an informational piece about a vendor of surveillance technology with a troubling and controversial human rights record. The substance of their story is both a glimpse into how the ugly side of security research works; and specific investigative journalism concerning the discrepancies between what Hacking Team has claimed about their export practices; and what their actual export practices are.
Again, if you adhere to a purely legalist position, and all hacks are illegal and therefore wrong; then there really isn't much to talk about, that's the end of the line. If, however, you concede that there is, at times, a compelling argument in favor of bringing to light things that certain people would rather keep hidden; you can't really expect that such sunshine efforts are going to have the luxury of just interviewing their subjects and receiving a straight answer. Most of the world's decent malfeasance is clandestine, for obvious reasons, so whenever it comes to light that isn't going to be because the people committing it wanted it to.
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I don't see much difference in this distinction. Had News Corp "merely" relied on the likes of Guccifer [wikipedia.org] — would it have been Ok then? Legally it, probably, would've been, but ethically? Hiring a guccifer is the next step down, of course, but I don't think, it is a major step...
People do this sort of thing for "fame and glory". By providing them with both, Guardian is, effectively
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By this logic, it is Ok to kill soldiers (even if you aren't at war with their country) — and profit from discussing, what the killings revealed.
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Maybe the dead soldiers government may have something to say about it, but then they probably have something to say about people hacking them illegally too (regardless of what your government thinks).
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Live by the sword...
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Why is it acceptable for the your local news paper or TV news program to profit? You don't think reports on crimes are a good portion of what sell news papers and draws viewers to programs that sell ad time? "If it bleeds it leads" they at least used to say in the industry. On some level we have to allow the news agencies to be economically viable or we won't have them. We still need these organizations and the investigative reporting the provide to have a functioning democracy. Internet bloggers alone
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Is that how primitive your thinking is? That it's about teams? What are you, 16 years old?
Anyone including Republicans who break the LAW on a massive scale belong in prison, not in the white house.
Cant defense lawyers start using this as an excuse (Score:2, Insightful)
With the prevalence of systems being broken into by companies, law enforcement, automated systems, etc... Couldn't a person rightfully claim that whatever is on their computer could have been put there by someone else? If 10,000 people had a key to my house, I don't think I could claim that I have full control over it, why couldn't a criminal defendant claim the same thing? I think it is "beyond a reasonable doubt" that someone else may have full control over your computer.
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A few years back someone successfully defending a child pornography related charge because malware on their PC created sufficient doubt regarding the provenance of the images.
I think it is "beyond a reasonable doubt" that someone else may have full control over your computer.
I don't think that's the case. However, forensic analysis of the computer and discovery of actual malware (rather than the strong likelihood of it) probably should suffice to create reasonable doubt.
Of course, if the evidence is an email from you to the terrorist group, or a video of you raping the victim, or account details of multipl