Chinese hacking documents dump offers window into pervasive state surveillance | Hacker News Reader

Chinese hacking documents dump offers window into pervasive state surveillance

apnews.com

48 pointsbookofjoe11 comments

For folks who have personally gone through the leak, is there anything materially different from say, the 2016 NSA leaks that showed things like smart tv exploits and the like?

I typically assume all nation states will be up to something similar to eachother.

This is an interesting question and I wonder if you could feed the whole dump into an LLM like ChatGPT and have it give you a valid answer to your question. I’m gonna try it later. If anyone does have a manual or automated answer let us know!

Will miss things. I just gave a long ascii hex string(512 bytes) and told it to separate it into a uint16_t array for use in C and it forgot to add a word(16 bits) to the middle of the array.

I think US was not yet caught of clandestine influence operation, or?

The US was doing that the entire 20th century in dozens of countries so I assume we're still doing it.

I have to wonder whether there is ever a point that can be reached where people in general realise that any stuff one does online is at risk. Private info, finance, cash, sharing of personal information, health info, etc is all better done the old fashioned way - in person.

I personally don't mind doing things offline - eg literally going to a bank do de-risk.. but this becomes an impossibility if there are no banks to bank at.

Anyway, I really think 'real life' needs a revival, but this isn't in corporate interests. I can't see that this won't happen, as it seems that AI will render anything on screens a potential false representation and therefore as untrustworthy.

> I have to wonder whether there is ever a point that can be reached where people in general realise that any stuff one does online is at risk.

Anything you do offline is at risk too.

> Private info, finance, cash, sharing of personal information, health info, etc is all better done the old fashioned way - in person.

Finance is better done the old fashioned way? You think trading stocks where you send a check and then your broker sends you back a stock certificate is better? You think communication by smoke signal is better?

> Anyway, I really think 'real life' needs a revival, but this isn't in corporate interests.

What does it matter to 'corporate interests' when 'real life' is dominated by corporate interests as well?

You must think we should go back to batch programming with punch cards? Lets get rid of hospitals and go back to blood letting. Old fashioned medicine. It seems like you are saying something but you really are saying nothing.

> Anything you do offline is at risk too.

Of course! But it wasn't the case that thousands maybe millions of people could be compromised (or spied on by governments) in one go.

The trend towards online everything, is equivalent to putting all your eggs in one (huge) basket. Which is fine if that is your choice, for efficiency or whatever, but if it is the case that there are no alternative viable options but to accept a compromised state of privacy - ie that you have to take on a risk that you didn't take before as it is now not there - that seems a harsh step to force on people!

I absolutely get why governments and corporations are fine with eroding personal privacy for their benefit. I'm just surprised that people in general don't push back a little bit more. I only hope that ai erodes trust in these monoliths so much, that there is eventually some consideration given to privacy and its loss.

> But it wasn't the case that thousands maybe millions of people could be compromised (or spied on by governments) in one go.

And? Besides you being hysterical. What happens?

> The trend towards online everything, is equivalent to putting all your eggs in one (huge) basket.

And? What happens if the internet disappears today? Life goes on.

> but if it is the case that there are no alternative viable options but to accept a compromised state of privacy

For most of humanity, people lived without any right to privacy. You want old-fashioned right?

> I absolutely get why governments and corporations are fine with eroding personal privacy for their benefit.

Governments and corporations are run by people too.

> that there is eventually some consideration given to privacy and its loss.

There is more consideration for privacy today, especially in the online world, than in the real old-fashoined world.

How about you set the example and go offline for a bit? Get some air.

> > But it wasn't the case that thousands maybe millions of people could be compromised (or spied on by governments) in one go.

> And? Besides you being hysterical. What happens?

from the article:

> Among the apparent targets of tools provided by the impacted company, I-Soon: ethnicities and dissidents in parts of China that have seen significant anti-government protests, such as Hong Kong or the heavily Muslim region of Xinjiang in China’s far west.

> The documents show apparent I-Soon hacking of networks across Central and Southeast Asia, as well as Hong Kong and the self-ruled island of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory.

I think millions could be impacted. Perhaps nothing comes of it. Not hysterical though.

> There is more consideration for privacy today, especially in the online world, than in the real old-fashoined world.

Yes.. but its consideration about how to erode it, not how to respect it! The level of intrusion is off the scale, in comparison to the past - and, in general, we have only a blinkered idea of the fine grained details that are available to corporations and government agencies.

> How about you set the example and go offline for a bit? Get some air.

Childish, ok. No, you.

> I-Soon and Chinese police are investigating how the files were leaked

Well, I can tell you that. They were hacked by a competitor after loosing a goverment contract to i-soon.

I guess I'm on some kind of list now...

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