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Comment Re: Obvious (Score 2) 97

Actually I said it quite a bit, working on software that generated HTML for a variety of different browsers and devices. Resorted to WINE sometimes, but it was incredibly flaky at the time. I care a lot less now, but suspect there are probably developers out there for whom it would be useful still.

Comment Re:That's OK. (Score 1) 122

Yeah, that and the companies who don't want to do "military applications" can just do pure research. Pure, ivory-tower research... which the DoD can just pay someone else to integrate into an actual weapon system. It's not like a machine learning algorithm knows or cares to what use it's put, once it is out there.

Dumb posturing; I also wonder if these people have considered what a world dominated by Chinese and Russian military AI will look like, and what effect it would have... I am not sure it would be the best of all possible worlds, exactly.

Comment You've Been H1B'd! (Score 1) 358

An employer that is trying to keep their H1B employees has to post the position so an "American can have an opportunity" at the job. They use crazy job requirements so they can plausibly meet the regulatory requirements of using H1B labor and then document the job posting, keep a bunch of resumes/CVs noting on each they don't fit some requirement that is actually meaningless.

Tons of positions on job sites are H1B spam. The more implausible the requirements, the more likely it's an H1B compliance posting.

Comment Wrong. Stop Rewriting History. (Score 3, Informative) 146

Parent blames "Congress" when in fact, the financial regulators were deregulating banking. Congress did their part. Guess who was driving the deregulation? Banks.

Parent also has a rudimentary understanding of the problem that's fundamentally wrong in so many ways no one would read the wall of text..

Comment Re:Loss of revenue (Score 1) 176

I doubt this has been lost on the DefCon organizers. Presumably they think that they'd lose more attendance by moving to Europe than by having people who can't safely travel to the US just not come, or attend/present via videoconference or something. And I suspect that's probably true -- very few people (in my experience) go to DefCon or similar conferences on their own dime; you go on your employer's money. And getting your employer to comp you a few hundred bucks for a flight to Vegas and a shitty hotel room (Vegas hotel rooms are notoriously cheap) is a heck of a lot easier than getting a company to cough up for a transatlantic ticket, hotel in Europe, etc. As long as the majority of the attendees are in the US, this is where the conferences are going to be.

But coming here if you're involved in cybercrime is probably, uh, not a very smart idea. That Hutchins came at all suggests to me that he didn't know that the FBI was onto his alleged previous (pre-Wannacry) activities; the alternative is that he's dumb, and he doesn't seem dumb. (Though a fair number of very smart people are also arrogant and don't give other people credit for being able to figure things out, so that's also an option, I suppose.)

There is a legitimate question as to whether there should be some sort of cyber amnesty program, though, given the number of mostly-legitimate "security researchers" who have shady backgrounds but seem to have moved on from them. I've got some mixed feelings on that. On one hand, getting blackhats and their knowledge out into the open so vulns can be remediated and the network in general made more robust is a Good Thing. But I don't know if it outweighs the message it would send, which is that you can basically play Computer Mafioso when you're young and then retire to a nice, secure, respectable position as "security researcher" without the threat of your prior activities coming back to bite you. That's not really how things work in the non-IT world; if you spend your 20s working for the Mob, and then retire to a respectable profession, that respectability is unlikely to protect you from getting a knock on your door sometime later, depending on the statue of limitations, for stuff you did earlier. Might make a judge or jury go easier on you, but it's not an ironclad defense.

Comment Re:No good deed goes unpunished (Score 1) 176

I think it's more like "one good deed today doesn't get you off the hook for the bad deed you did last week".

In other words, if you're a blackhat who happens to take down another blackhat, that doesn't buy you a get-out-of-jail-free card that you can play when other things you may have done in the past surface.

Or at least, not to an extent that stops you from getting indicted. It might play pretty well in court if the whole thing actually goes to trial, I'd imagine. Can't hurt anyway.

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