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Comment by chrisper | Hacker News Reader

You know how when you watch movies and because you know so much about tech you can tell that most of the stuff done in movies regarding hacking etc is bullshit and not real.

Now I have a lack in knowledge of biology at this level, but can someone maybe explain to me how all those disease mass extinction movies cannot be real? I feel like my lack of knowledge here causes my concerns when reading stuff like this article.

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Thing is, some of the stuff I used to laugh at as bullshit can be done now.

Use the enhance feature to magically unblur images to clarity? I've seen ML demos of stuff like that.

Giant realtime database of all phone calls meta data and recordings? Realtime facial/license plate recognition search of millions of people/cars? Not so funny anymore.

Tracking peoples movements in realtime. Sure just cary this phone wherever you go.

Realtime overhead imagery of an entire city? There's a company that flies drones around that lets them rewind the movements of all cars in the city throughout the day...

Magic black box that can decrypt all encryption? Sure, funny only if you overlook underhanded C planted by the NSA.

Hacking into industrial machinery and power systems?

Having millions of computers all under your control to launch attacks?

This was all funny Hollywood BS and conspiracy theories two decades ago. Elaborate animated "hacking" scenes are still funny but what they accomplish is possible.

Yup. Watch_Dogs-style hacking of CCTV cameras? As the other story on HN's frontpage today will tell you (and so will any experience with Shodan), it's totally doable in theory - the only practical reason this doesn't happen is that every camera is broken in a different way, and as a protagonist, to hack them in a field-actionable way, you'd have to have a hundred people in your tech support staff, who manually engage appropriate exploits based on your requests.

You'd be surprised by how many of them use the exact same tech, rebranded. For many of them, everything about the server is the same (HTTP headers, directory structure, default logins, etc) but they'll display a different logo and maybe some different CSS.

Maybe the problem is that my sample size isn't large enough, but I've only encountered about a dozen widely used DVR servers that are actually unique tech instead of rebranding.

I mean that's basically all hacker suites in a nutshell isn't it? A big collection of various tools and exploits for various problems, utilizing the right exploit for the right problem. That's the big thing in Watch_Dogs, you have a pretty big hacker group working together to find exploits and then bundling it together into a suite that the main character can control from his phone. I'm sure with the proper scripting and metadata you can make a DB of CCTV exploits for various popular brands and automatically apply that exploit on the target based off it's brand. It's just a matter of doing all that work.

One aspect such movies almost always get wrong is ease of protection: With only modest countermeasures (face coverings, washing hands, ventilating rooms etc), you can drastically cut down the rate of transmission. A scientist with advanced equipment and knowledge getting infected is extremely unlikely. In the real world it happens, but only to 0.x%, and only to hospital staff spending weeks with thousands of infected people, under often sub-optimal conditions.

It's completely possible to go years without catching a cold if you're willing to devote maybe 10% of your time and a little money to it, and avoid certain situation. We just don't bother because getting a cold isn't (usually) that terrible.

> It's completely possible to go years without catching a cold if you're willing to devote maybe 10% of your time and a little money to it, and avoid certain situation

You picked my curiousity! What do you have in mind?

Ebola is one such virus. In terms of evolution these viruses tend to burn out by killing the host. Evolutionary pressures push viruses towards symbiotic equilibrium. Thus in the worst case scenario there will be survivors who are immune or the virus or the virus will burn out until the only strain left does not harm humans. The later was the case with ebola.

It sure killed a LOT of people in the process though, so I wouldn't say that that's quite so reassuring.

Counter-intuitively the speedy kill is actually what makes Ebola comparatively safe, if the victims would live longer they would infect far more others though even in death there is plenty of risk in handling the bodies during burial, especially in remote locations.

I understand that - I'm just pointing out that while Ebola perhaps isn't putting humans at extinction risk, it's still not good by any measure. We (I) don't want anything remotely like it lying around at anyone's disposal.

Yeah, but we're definitely safe from an extinction level event.

You had to go there, didn't you? You just had to say it. When we're all dead in a week, I'm blaming you.

If anything Ebola is too lethal. It tends to burn out locally before it can spread far from its originating point though if someone should immediately travel after becoming infected it could spread to a new location. But in the majority of the cases so far it has burned out before it could spread to a new village, though the largest outbreak to date claimed in excess of 10,000 lives and spread quite far.

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-31982078

All it will take for Ebola to be a truly massive killer is a small mutation that would reduce immediate mortality or that would increase the incubation time. Either one of those would greatly increase the number of people that a single outbreak would affect. I'd rather not have to live through that.

You can just move to Madagascar and close the ports.

Except http://www.who.int/csr/don/15-november-2017-plague-madagasca...

I guess GP was referring to the game Plague Inc.

More like Pandemic 2, but yes. These games have a winning strategy of infecting Madagascar first and spreading before the ports are closed.

If ebola were to incubate in pigeons and only prove lethal to humans, that could be more widespread.

> In terms of evolution these viruses tend to burn out by killing the host.

I learned two things playing that 'Pandemic' flash game a few years back:

1) don't evolve deadly characteristics until you've infected as many people as possible (to get around ebola's issue you pointed out)

2) Madagascar is the place to be in the event of a global epidemic

Madagascare is currently one of the only places on the planet having bubonic plague.

Glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I'm also glad that I'm aware to some extent of how what I don't know might obscure my judgement - I think a lot of people don't get exposed to the amount of cross-discipline junctures in knowledge that people in tech do.

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