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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

This is the most interesting Hacking Team revelation yet.

First, a production UEFI bootkit! Yahoo! That's a milestone.

Second, fiddling with Bitcoin wallets. Between the bootkit and the Bitcoin fiddling, Hacking Team is just a small step away from a Zeus Botnet. That is, HT is hanging ten on the precipice of crime, it looks like.

Third, this line from HT CEO David Vincenzetti:

a modification of the actual Bitcoiin [sic], something different, fully traceable and supported by clearing houses and the global financial system as a whole might have a future.

If truly Vincenzetti's viewpoint, that line demonstrates a slide to authoritarianism. According to accounts, Vincenzetti was an early privacy advocate. A cypherpunk wouldn't be able to speak the phrase "fully traceable" except as an insult.

Are we seeing the result of money corrupting, or are authoritarian world views the inevitable result of working in the defense industrial complex?

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Vincenzetti ends several emails with clear neo-fascist slogans ("Boia chi molla" etc). Some circles in the Italian hacking scene have long had right-wing connotations.

> are authoritarian world views the inevitable result of working in the defense industrial complex?

Is this even a question? If your livelihood depended on selling batons, you'd be extremely supportive of the police, wouldn't you?

There's involvement and then there's commitment, as the pig said to the chicken about breakfast.

I'm wondering if merely getting a job programming for a defense company leads to a moral slide into authoritarianism. You know, suppose you're doing sysadmin for HT - is that enough to start warping your view of the world?

Also there's the involvement in actions just short of creating a banking-credential-stealing botnet. False BGP announcements, sniffing for bitcoin credentials and stuff is the domain of Russian and Romanian "Bad Guys". How on earth can an employee justify doing that sort of thing?

is that enough to start warping your view of the world

That's certainly how cognitive dissidence works. People will do great mental gymnastics to avoid seeing themselves as one of the bad guys.

while I think "cognitive dissonance" is the phrase you were looking for, you just came up with a great punk band name.

Also "cognitive dissidents", which sounds the same but is a noun and thus maybe better for a band name. Both already have hits on Google. :)

"Cognitive Dissidents" was used in William Gibson's novel Neuromancer. :)

glcd.bandcamp

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" -Upton Sinclair

Besides Vincenzetti being an idiot for other reasons, the idea of a traceable bitcoin isn't as bad as you make it.

Imagine if we had such a system managed by the central banks of governments in addition to their paper fiat, together with a law that makes its usage mandatory for _companies_ over a certain size.

There would be no more banks in the loop to hide shady practices, and no more room for big corporations to avoid taxes and money laundry from illegal activity, no more splitting of companies into subdivisions so that a small mailbox on some island makes billions while the rest is officially broke.

The general population would still retain their anonymous paper (which is actually anonymous, not pseudonymous like bitcoin) and if you're too lazy to do your tax report on paper and give a shit about somebody else knowing about your transactions (because lets face it, people give all their data to credit-card companies and payback bonus point systems already) you can use the digital fiat too.

no more room for big corporations to avoid taxes and money laundry from illegal activity, no more splitting of companies into subdivisions so that a small mailbox on some island makes billions while the rest is officially broke.

That is sadly wishful thinking.

These practices are well known and carried out in the open today.

Isn't it actually written to the EFI system partition on disk rather than flashed into the MB?

brain washing works very well, just look at this: http://defcon.ws/

You do realize that's a joke, right? It's not real.

Directly from the source:

I did not know that this is an open source website. How did you hack this informations?

view source

facepalm

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