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halinflorida ago

Most computer hacking is actually done by various governments and NGOs and its attributed to young people but that's a lie and the media willingly repeats the lie because they are in on the conspiracy. I'm a computer programmer, by the way. These break ins, hacks, and exploits are done so as to leave either an open backdoor, a bot, or ad/spyware. And those spyware apps are part of the surveillance network. Every place you move your laptop, it reports in. Criminals of course can't be found but the government is watching you and I for being a political threat.

ioillusion ago

Also a programmer; yes, it's almost always from the inside or by organizations with a budget.

halinflorida ago

One day, in my computer science courses as an adult who returned to school in middle age, I had a wife and home and wanted to study from home. I got a copy of Linux (less than a 1.0 kernel--Slackware C. 1992) and I had to set up ppp to tie into the mainframe but I made a mistake and got into someone else's account. Wow I thought. This is fun. So I started a little bit of white hat hacking. I explored entering open ports using telnet and some hand code. I knew AP codes and recorded macros while getting in and then tried lots of people with the same macros. I thought it was harmless fun but soon I stumbled into an account and the guy was actually doing "security" work and he claimed it was for one of our secret government intelligence agencies. I started to take it more seriously because I knew this was getting risky. I started reading this guy's material and I realized he was an agent doing the kind of work that later became known "astroturfing." Now we see that all the time but it was unheard of back then. So when I see "shills" on social media, I know most of it because I read the instruction manuals that told how to do it.

ioillusion ago

Wow, amazing to think they were already doing it back then. I used to fish around back then too, so many things were just left open. I was in high school at the time, so the hope was always in stumbling on to one of the district systems plugged into a modem.

My first real full-time job was writing interfaces for maps on mobile devices, primitive stuff to today's standards. Even then though, coordinate information told us where someone shopped, ate, worked, how fast they drove, if anything changed in their life.

I've also seen the way some of the "shilling" works from the inside. Some companies will find an online presence, like a blogger, that fits their beliefs and just hire them on. The relationship is kept secret of course. Vote manipulation and opinion steering is typically outsourced and related to the traffic sold back to advertisers on host site. The strangest thing though, are the shills that don't know they're shills. They're college interns hired because the company already knows they'll say the right things (not really sure how that process works). But I remember we had a whole floor of them at one of the companies I worked - mostly unpaid too.

TwitterBannedIt ago

They been doing it since ROME.