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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

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walrus01

More on Black Cube, NSO group, and Citizen Lab:

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/99/

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/100/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/world/black-cube-nso-citi...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/insider/hacking-nso-surve...

https://citizenlab.ca/2021/09/forcedentry-nso-group-imessage...

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To be honest, it sounds like an extraordinarily interesting field to work in:

"This is a one-of-a-kind opportunity for someone who lives and breathes spying and espionage to become part of a world where wild fantasies of undercover operations become reality. If you think you have what it takes, we want to hear from you."

Unfortunately their opportunity is out of reach, as I'm not in the UK nor Israel -- and they're not specifically seeking technical skills, per se.

Drug dealing involves all the same risks without the moral detritus.

Sorta depends on the drug, the drugs that you can make real money selling tend to ruin peoples lives.

Volume of “good drugs” can offset this, but addiction with high margins is the best model for making money. Fentanyl analogs are LSD dose size, not expensive, highly physically addictive and very deadly done without proper dosing.

Not really, heroin has been laced with fentanyl analogs and even things it doesn’t synergize like in cocaine causing random deaths by knowingly selling (pre)cut chemicals isn’t morally neutral.

Devil’s advocate: great; If you’re high up in the heroin supply chain or simply secure your own source, you can save countless lives that would have been lost to fentanyl hotspots. Everyone says that legalization would be safer due to known purity, and you could label your bags with an ingredients panel showing their exact contents and purity levels.

What I actually think: Unfortunately if the casino and alcohol industries make 90% of their money from addicts I’m afraid the hard narcotics industry is even worse still. Traffic good drugs only if you have strong pro-social morals and want to sleep easy.

That’s assuming it doesn’t get cut along the way, and it doesn’t already destroy lives or cause overdose on its own.

It’s hard to see it as a moral matter, like all business it’s just sales. Knowing purity doesn’t prevent the OxyContin issues these are just dangerous drugs that are addictive to a lot of people and there is a non zero chance it’ll kill someone. Psychedelics can trigger schizophrenia and mushrooms are unpredictable, but the assumption is that it’ll give people insight. Alcohol is the most used date rape drug, so legalization and standardization isn’t even a solution except for its safety in the case of methanol.

Technology is known to be highly addictive as well.

Are you quite certain you don't work in public relations for NSO or a similar firm? This is suspicious and weird.

“Hacking is cool” in longform isn’t eyebrow raising to me.

From the guidelines[0]:

> Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

As @GhettoComputers said: GP is just saying “hacking is fun”

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

on further examination and since the account is brand-new/created for the purpose of just that one comment, I may have fallen for a satirical example of such.

Neuromancer becoming reality. Unfortunately, it was a dystopian future.

Uh.. Do you know that NSO group is widely suspected in helping authoritarian governments to target journalists?

Widely suspected is nothing but speculation, and intelligence agencies aren’t exactly moral. Apple cooperates with China, but do people care when they buy their products?

You’re going to have to give the names of the journalists targeted and the country instead of vague suspicions that you say are wide.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/18/nso-spyware-us...

Does the fact that some people take moral issue with the actions of a single company mean that the work done in that entire field can't be interesting? There's a reason people watch spy movies and why lots of little kids pretend to be special agents and spies when they're playing in the back yard. It's interesting to a lot of people.

Reverse engineering and staying in IDA all day long is pretty boring

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