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Comment by sarciszewski | Hacker News Reader

Can we please stop decrying black hats without nuance? Because that whole "CMU is blackhat now" thing? That's not what happened here.

Selling exploits exclusively to assist the government is very much like a large swath of white hats.

What do you think Infragard is? It's Feds rubbing elbows with crooked pro-government technologists. But they're the white hats, remember.

At the end of the day, you only have green hats (the color of money), and people who don't wear hats at all. The black/white distinction has become meaningless.

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Surely selling to a government is at least grey hat? In my book, white hat never does offense. If you're creating an exploit that isn't proof of concept and that harms someone, you're not white hat anymore.

s/grey/green/ and I agree with you.

Do you know what your entire government is up to? Even if you sell it to the NSA, how do you know it won't end up in the hands of the DEA to spy on a large number of people just to find a couple of drug traffickers?

We don't know. We can't know.

There's nothing grey about that choice. They're the ones that call themselves white.

when the entity purchasing the exploits (the US government) is known to

* engage in human torture * practice extraordinary rendition to third world countries to circumvent due process * photograph prisoners naked * practice extra-judicial, aerial execution

then it's reasonable to call the hat black. that we used to think their hat was white is a testament to their power of deceipt, not an indication that the "hat system" has lost meaning.

I would argue that the hat color is from the perspective of "the public", and clearly the public is on the losing end of lost anonymity.

Wait, doing research for the purpose of helping others attack and/or imprison targets while getting paid for it is white hat now?

Or so say the self-proclaimed white hats. I hope my comment captured the intended stressed sarcasm adequately :/

Great article by Moxie, thanks for sharing.

> If I absolutely have to frame my choices as an either-or, I’ll choose power vs. people.

I would not have expected him to say that.

Why, what would you expect?

I think Moxie is saying that the choice is whether you work in support of centralized authority ("power"), or decentralized "people".

Ah shit I accidentally down voted instead of upvoting. :(

fixed.

Categorizing people and power as separate entities is the traditional political battle that has been going on forever. The people are the power, and the technology they have enables them to exercise that power. From this perspective, the battle is for access to better technology. What Moxie calls "power" should be ignored; they won't matter when technology outlasts them.

I didn't say black hat. I said black market. I think its morally as wrong as selling an exploit on the black market. That money has blood on it now. I'm not saying the researchers are black hat hackers. I just think that ethivslly they're walking a very dangerous path.

> It's sad that a university is going black hat.

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