> and this young guy gets murdered for no reason and not even robbed?
im sure you're an expert on crime but it is not in fact ridiculous that when a robbery is botched and someone gets shot they won't steal anything because you want to run immediately. you're sheltered.
What makes you think that? The Russian government just poisoned another opposition thinker, these things are not beyond the pale. North Korea hired a couple of pretty girls to kill a renegade brother or somesuch in public. China has disappeared people over just a few wrong words
If I were in that position I'd make sure I have at least a couple bodyguards, and good ones at that
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Spoon-fed propaganda does that to people. It’s easy to fall into a black or white binary “good” vs “evil” trap, which clouds peoples judgement and makes them overlook the nuances that are in every dispute.
> photography was an art, and photos were generally manipulated, sometimes heavily , sometimes to remove people etc.
Except this was time consuming and couldn't be done automatically in an undetectable way.
> human societies have survived without video evidence since forever
Stupid argument, we've also survived war since forever, except now a war between nuclear powers would be devastating in a way war historically wasn't. It will absolutely not be the same as it was before photos and videos.
i was assured by the cybersecurity experts of hacker news that REALLY this was all a mastermind ploy to steal and sell twitter DMs. who would they sell them to? doesn't matter! what information of actual value is sent through twitter DMs? doesn't matter! we did it, hacker news.
I feel like it would have been relatively trivial to make decent 7-9 figures depending on your initial leverage just by manipulating some key accounts.
Ie: short Tesla, musks account says solar roof delays, firmware error has started bricking cars, self driving is 10 years away, delivery numbers going to fall well short
Trump (surprised they didn’t hit that) - no new stimulus for unemployed, CORPORATE WELFARE MUST STOP, I WILL NOT BE RESPONSIBLE FOR MASSIVE DEFICITS, then pick a couple small cap companies that are going to receive massive boosts like the Kodak thing.
Tim Cook: Apple sales flagging, iPhone production issues due to supply chain issues
Take a bit of timing to get it right and be able to walk away from the markets relatively untraced (market trade interrogation is a useful way to trace inside information so hard to do in a way that leaves no trace but if you know you can perform your hack at leisure you can set up the initial trades well forward, wait for the market and some other external condition to walk into your ambush and then pounce
Even setting up your trades in advance, there's no way you're going to make a billion dollars doing that kind of thing without being noticed. Millions, maybe (although maybe not), but certainly not hundreds of millions. Unless you already have hundreds of millions to work with, but then you're probably not a 17-year-old hacker.
Best case he'd probably have a few tens of thousands in capital, and he gets one shot at it. In order to get the kind of leverage needed, he'd need to use short term options and/or move penny stocks. Either one of those would paint a giant target on him.
Kanye West and Elon Musk have absolutely nothing of value in their DMs. Anything you could do with access to Musk's DMs you could do better just by tweeting as Musk.
Why do you dismiss hypothetical questions out of hand, without evidence? Can one prove a negative or disprove a counterfactual statement? I just don’t know why you think that you must be right, as the actions of the hackers indicate otherwise. It’s hard to tell what is intent and what is misdirection when it comes to hacks of this nature, all the same.
> Hitchens has phrased the razor in writing as "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
> Exfiltrating DMs seems like it's going to accomplish just about as much, if not more.
Nobody is communicating anything valuable over Twitter. This is such a ridiculous point that people bring up all the time. Scandalous relationships? Most of that will be on true messenger applications. Business deals? Business email. Many more mainstream prominent people don't even run their own account.
It's not that everyone is so security-minded, it's just that Twitter is an extremely inconvenient way to maintain personal relationships.
> I think the Bitcoin scam was also the perfect innocuous cover story
There is almost no value in DMs. Funny seeing HN speculate about these elite hackers selling them as if there's any market for them, let alone one that would pay $100k+.
> Nobody is communicating anything valuable over Twitter. This is such a ridiculous point that people bring up all the time. Scandalous relationships? Most of that will be on true messenger applications. Business deals? Business email. Many more mainstream prominent people don't even run their own account.
GP was talking about the 2016 election, where Julian Assange and Roger Stone literally communicated strategies, for how to coordinate if the FBI came down on Assange for the leaks, via Twitter DMs. Many things going on with no Signal, PGP, etc.
Just wondering, how do you prove the authenticity of the DMs if they have no cryptographic signatures? I'd be very hard. Even is some are authentic, some messages could be altered / planted, there is no way you could trust screenshots too.
> On 4 October, 2016, Mr Stone tweeted: “Payload coming. #Lockthemup.”
It was clear publicly that Stone had a very inappropriate relationship with Wikileaks. What would you do, attempt to extort Stone for more than $100k and hope he pays? Leak little more than was publicly known?
No, if you were a bad actor looking to cause chaos for a target, you would gather all such things and release it. Either way, that example disproves your claim that nothing sensitive would be discussed of Twitter DM's.
I don't mean this in any kind of condescending way, but I honestly think you might be in a bubble. If I was only looking at my immediate friend group, I would think the same way, as none of them use Twitter DMs at all. However, I recently met up with some old acquaintances from high school, and they use Twitter DMs and Instagram DMs as one of their main methods of communication.
Yes, introductions get made on Twitter, "slide into the DMs" does not mean that you're trying to conduct a three year romantic relationship on it. Usually people are going to get off it, and onto a real messenger application, even if they just want sex.
Again, I think you're in a bubble. I have met large groups of people that do exactly that.
It's also worth mentioning that it's very common for companies and celebrities to use Twitter DMs as a sort of "customer support" where they specifically ask people to send them private information via DM. I've seen tweets from utility companies where they say "Please send us a DM with your account number and we will look into your issue" [0], for example. There's the possibility for valuable information there.
I communicate with (counts) 4 people regular over Instagram DM. These are people I know IRL, people I have other means of messaging. For me, and from what I can tell some of my friends as well, I’m constantly switching between messaging apps for even the same person. If JS posted an Instagram story and I want to talk about it, then I just start the conversation in Instagram and this turns into a continuation of our conversation elsewhere. If I want to ask someone if they want to get food my first instinct is to open Messages/SMS but if I’ve recently (like same day) chatted with them over Facebook Messenger then I just open that app instead. I couldn’t give a damn which app I use because it’s all the same to me.
Edit: The person I would consider my “best friend” we chat 100% over Instagram DM. This is a person that I can invite myself over for dinner to, that’s how close we are in case you feel like assuming we must not be good friends if we don’t just call each other or whatever. Another of my good friends, we switch between iMessages and WhatsApp I’d say 50/50, just depending on if I’m already in WhatsApp talking to someone else and decide to message her too or not.
99.9% of the email hacks was uninteresting. 0.1% was nothingburger. That wouldn’t stop it from dominating in the media, especially with a trickle feed strategy. Google the whole ‘Spirit Cooking’ thing as a good example. Completely nothing. 0% interesting. Stupid enough to be idle Twitter DM chat. Did it hit the media just before the election and blow up? Yup.
Before that they'll use simpler methods. Twitter and Reddit have all the categories you'd ever need. And they won't get blocked / filtered for technical reasons.
Fair enough, I thought about changing `can` to `may` but I forgot it wouldn't fly on HN ^^.
> Research into associations between use or non-use of condoms and consumption of pornography among adolescents varies. Some studies found that the use of pornography was associated with non-condom use for both gay (Arrington-Sanders et al., 2015) and heterosexual (Braun-Courville & Rojas, 2009; Luder et al., 2011) male adolescents, yet was not the case for female adolescents (Luder et al., 2011). One study from the Netherlands, which asked adolescents about their sexual practices and pornography use repeatedly over time, did not find an association between pornography use and condomless sex (Peter & Valkenburg, 2011c). These associations may differ depending on the content of pornographies they consume, particularly between gay and heterosexual male adolescents, as gay pornography has a much higher rate of condom use (condomless sex represents a substantial minority of gay pornographies) than heterosexual pornography (condomless sex is the overwhelming majority of content). In addition, the relative cultural context of sexuality education and condom use is also important here (i.e., in the Netherlands sexuality education is more comprehensive and attentive to issues of gender and consent in general than in Australia, see Bell, 2009).
I let you follow the trails from there, just stay away from netnanny like and sexual addicts support websites as they are promoting a very specific agenda and framing things in a certain way.
So your evidence for the "lasting consequences" of pornography is that there are some studies indicating a correlation to a reduction in condom usage. This indicates to me a need for better sex education.
This doesn't justify the ominous phrase "some long lasting consequences".
We should acknowledge it's not a widely studied field, especially as exposing minors to hardcode pornography is not legal in most places. Having any evidence of studied effect is already pretty good in my book.
Outside of this specific question, current pornography landscape is already controversial regarding its effect on society regarding exploitation of the actors, gender bias projection affecting a range of fields including rape trials.
If adults can be ill affected by current porn production, is it a stretch to apply the same conclusion to children ? I'd argue it should at least be vetted as appropriate, the criteria for that being left to the parents.
If porn had no consequences then there wouldn't be a need for better sex education.
If you disagree with the fact that not using a condom can have long lasting consequences (as in getting pregnant or getting an std) then I don't think we should debate the subject any longer.
> If porn had no consequences then there wouldn't be a need for better sex education.
This is ridiculous. We'd need comprehensive sex education whether or not anyone watches porn. Before porn was trivially available online, teenagers still had plenty of sex. Sexual consent was still widely misunderstood too (and still is).
Of course pregnancy is a long lasting consequence, but if it is addressed by a program we need even without porn, it's irrelevant to porn.
> Exposure (regular or casual) to porn at a young age has some long lasting consequences.
If all you had in mind was condom usage and pregnancy, this is a bizarre choice of phrasing.
> This is ridiculous. We'd need comprehensive sex education whether or not anyone watches porn.
I don't follow. Of course sex ed is need and I believe it should be updated to take porn into account (if it's not already there).
> If all you had in mind was condom usage and pregnancy, this is a bizarre choice of phrasing.
Of course not, but I can't go around citing every publications or experts under the sun that points to cultural changes and implications on the children's upbringing.
Now I believe the debate is wrongly framed from the beginning. Children aren't teenagers, some culture have varying definitions for children, teenagers, adults, etc. and “porn” is way too generic (softcore, bdsm, gonzo, mutilation, etc.) to encompass the whole situation. Saying it's fine for children to watch porn won't fly when you hear about some kind of porn some people are consuming.
AFAIC I believe parents should take care to protect children from porn watching/accident, explain things sooner than previous generations (this is a change brought in by the total availability of porn content) did. There should be a mention in sex education about porn and how and why it paints some very specific sexual intercourse behaviour in specific ways and why it's not necessarily what's expected from a partner, etc.
I do agree and believe a government filter won't have any meaningful impact though.
Social bullshit around private life is much more destructive there. I once bought an antiseptic and the cashier gave me a weird look. Guess why. Because as an antiseptic one of its uses was treatment of STDs and the cashier obviously knew it.
I think the burden of proof should be the other way around. The desire for sex is one of the most fundamental instincts that we have. Who can really say that their first sexual encounters don't stick with them for life? Internet porn is a radical shift in how young people are experiencing sex during important developmental years. Why wouldn't it have a long lasting effect?
No, there have been claims for decades about the harms of pornography. There should be enough evidence for detractors against pornography consumption to use. The burden is proof is on them.
