Wow, @Dang has a crazy hectic job these days; I haven't been on YC most of the Summer as I was focused on revisiting this very issue and I have never seen so many irrelevant posts--was the signal to noise ratio always this bad on YC or did we get a ton of inane chat bots all of a sudden? Either way keep up the good job, mods.
A reminder: many are pushing for this for the sole purpose in cashing in the froth from a over-heated stock market doing no amount of due diligence or looking to the Infrastructure's many pork project with headlong abandon instead of focusing on the actual Industry's needs. It's also a highlight and remind why Theranos is in the media, too.
Anyhow, after taking the summer to focus on what pressing upgrades Ag appears to need after the Supply Chain and labour disruptions during and after COVID I came to the conclusion that automation, while effective and remarkably capable of delivering many advantages to a myriad of existing issues, alone isn't the turn-key panacea it's made out to be by the supposed AI techno-utopians financing, investing and building these products.
And when looking at how efficient it is deploying a ransomware attack and bricking a poorly protected system came to mind, why do physical attacks when a decent vector (like Ransomware) will have a really good ROI without the risk. And COVID exposed just how poorly designed these systems are everything from how bad they are at keeping people safe, to the logistical challenges from farm to processor, what was missed in the discussion was operational security.
Ironically, I thought COVID would have made the resources come pouring in from all the money that flooded the system, but I suppose updating centralized, archaic infrastructure and practices that leak info everywhere was too practical a use to do with resources?
Still, this is another nail in the coffin of the centralized architecture that most of Ag is built on.
I understand people's immediate response is to question the IT support team's competence and wag fingers for not having backups (this doesn't apply to the Co-OP in the title who was agile enough to route around it) for such a common event these days. And while that's a valid position to have, it's entirely shortsighted: it's more like people didn't realize that the OPSEC component of the equation in automating more processes in the system was much more important than the actual deployment of said solutions.
Maybe it's just my innate paranoia since the advent of IoT or the ever increasing intrusiveness of enabling everything to be connected to the Internet and requiring more and more of your data, but it's clear the analog World's methods are at direct odds with the digital one's in more ways than we thought and a total overhaul of the system is required.
I was a big advocate of IBM's food safety program [0], mainly because they had the resources to expend in trying to figure how Blockchains could solve many of these issues, which is why I joined. They had a lot of support from Megacorps, too, so you cannot imagine my dismay when they sought to simply re-invent the same problems with regards to OPSEC with centralized private ledgers, and closed-blockchains that simply recreated the same issues they were trying to solve.
Decentralization has become a buzzword for many in this space, but for it's biggest advocates like myself we haven't even scratched the surface when trying to make people understand how critically vulnerable these systems are until it's too late and this will happen again.
How they've concluded it was 'Russian hackers' notwithstanding, these kind of exploits are cheap, quick to deploy and have a high ROI, they will continue to happen more often.
In many ways I'm reminded of why I used to say in 2013, when I started to take infosec and opsec serious that the Somali pirates had better invested some of the funds into devs because the age of risk tolerance for hi-jacking tankers was coming to an end when you could make way more money deploying a ransom-ware attack or some other hidden exploit. Everything from Stuxnet, to Heart bleed, to Vault7 made it clear that this how provate or nation states were going going to attack one another.
The Voodoo Boys narrative in Cyberpunk2077 was an apt metaphor of what I envisioned could occur if left unchecked, where displaced and downtrodden Haitian refugees are left to use exploits to make-ends-meet in a Society that has marginalized them to the outer fringes of Society and live in an escapable poverty, violence and lawlessness. I'm glad to say we aren't there yet, but this Cyberpunk trope has been a recurring theme for a reason.
It isn't that clear to me that the "breaking into computer systems" definition even initially started out separate from the building things definition. My impression from what I've read, is that there was one hacker community with some members interested in breaking into systems for some harmless fun and others more interested in other aspects. Over time, the breaking into systems folks became increasingly less harmless and drifted away from the rest of the community
Breaking into computer systems certainly can be "a playful use of the intellect" or "a feat the world experts in a field thought to be impossible", so it certainly can be hacking. Designing pesticides can be science, too (my second example), and certainly nothing prevents freethinkers from employing child labor (my third example)—there might even be a causal link if the local Church is prohibiting child labor. And if you're brewing up some pesticides, you might look up to scientists and think you're a scientist, even if you're really not.
But hopefully you can see that it would be appalling to write an article entitled "Is Science the Next Threat to Our Food Supply?" about a pesticide disaster, saying, "Scientists sprayed pesticides on a farm, poisoning hundreds of people who ate the food;" and that this article isn't talking about anything you or I would recognize as "hacking" or "hackers". At the point where you're extorting ransom there's nothing playful about it anymore, and it's very likely that the vulnerabilities being exploited were already known.
By virtue of self-identifying as "a hacker", or at least a would-be hacker, you are getting into the line of fire. So you should stand up against it.
Those aren't the only definitions of hacking. "Breaking into computer systems" is also a definition of hacking, and it has been for decades. That isn't because of some deliberate slight against other sorts of hackers, but rather because initially there wasn't a distinction the different kinds of hackers: they were all members of the same community. The fact that the computer criminal element that forked off the wider hacker community ended up getting the most attention is certainly unfortunate, but I don't see why it should be interpreted as an attack against the others.
Yes, it's true that people have used the word in a derogatory sense for decades. It should be interpreted as an attack against us because in fact it hurts us, whatever the intent: by repurposing our terms of praise into a term representing people's darkest nightmares about those who know things they don't, they encourage people to confuse us with those nightmares. How often do you think kids get punished in school for browsing this very website?
Changing a definition of a word is a big ask. As wbazant wrote, hacking has originally started as describing computer crime. The scales for what was considered computer crime has shifted quite a bit in addition to the term itself expanding. Many of us deal with this by inferring what is meant by context.
I've been surrounded by hackers, and none of them caught legal or social flack for being called a hacker in public. I also don't see people getting turned off from doing computer security or other computer work because of hacking being used to describe computer crime.
>As wbazant wrote, hacking has originally started as describing computer crime.
no they said it has been used for a while now, not was originally used. The problem is that both uses have existed concurrently and it can be annoying to people who believe themselves to be a member of the non-criminal set of hackers. It can also be annoying when you can't tell from context what it should mean, I guess being on HN I kept thinking - but it should be "Is Agriculture the next struggle for Hacking?" because I didn't think the criminal usage would prevail here.
Many Jewish people in Hungary, Germany, and Poland could say the same in 01880 and even in 01920: "I've been surrounded by Jews, and none of them caught legal or social flack for being called a Jew in public." Don't say I didn't warn you.
I'm not clear what "hacking has originally started as describing computer crime" is supposed to mean, but "hacking" in the sense of "finding clever ways to surpass what was thought to be possible" goes back to the 01960s, while its "computer crime" meaning was created by journalists and then Hollywood in the 01980s, after Steven Levy's book "Hackers". They did this because they despised and distrusted the kind of people described in the book, us, and projected their greatest fears about computers onto us.
It's not impossible to get people to stop using a group identity term in a derogatory sense. "Gay" is, perhaps, commonly used in US high schools to mean "contemptible", and "jew" in some parts of the US is still used to mean "negotiate an unfair business deal", but no US newspaper would dare to use either term that way today.
If we value our lives, we need to force them to treat "hacker" in the same way.
Hmm, that still seems like a silly practice. The custom today isn't 4 digit years anyway; it's whatever number of digits you need and no more. For example, we say Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, not AD 0079. We'll naturally switch to 5-digit years in the year 10000 that way without needing to put a leading 0 on every year in the meantime. And 5 digits seems arbitrary anyway: what happens in the year 100000?
breaking into systems folks became increasingly less harmless and drifted away
The criminal types were never part of the hacker community. Someone who sends spam or deploys ransomware is motivated by profit, not curiosity or playfulness.
There are still plenty of breaking into systems people in the hacker community. They work in cryptanalysis, security research, penetration testing, etc. You can find them at their traditional conferences such as Defcon, Blackhat, and Chaos Communication Congress.
The website you are posting this on is called "hacker news", which as far as I can tell does not refer to the computer crime meaning.
So when posting on HN clarifying what you mean by that word seems very reasonable.
Context. Sometimes requires reading more than title (which on HN is supposed to be verbatim). I do get the agitation. I have it as well with 'crypto'. But we need to acknowledge trends/hypes influence our language.
You very well may be Jewish, I’m certainly not speaking for all Jews here, but as a Jewish hacker (in your preferred sense) I find the comparison you’re drawing and victimhood status you’re claiming (as a hacker) here both absurd and offensive.
Basically nobody calls themselves hackers in the old positive sense. The current title of Hacker News is nearly a fossil word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_word
As you're well aware, the "basically nobody" you're dismissing includes many of the founders of the most important tech companies and social movements today, plus the guy who built the website you're posting this on.
More to the point, though, if a prosecutor starts investigating you for "hacking" because you linked to your own website from your profile on this website (with records in archive.org going back to 01999, including your legal name, your wedding photos, etc., alongside a link to the "Hack The Planet" weblog and statements about things you've said on here), the fact that you protest that you "don't call yourself a hacker" won't cut much ice.
"Hackers" as a class are being blamed for a pandemic of extortion that is seriously endangering the society you live in, much like "communists" in the early 20th century, though in that case it was a pandemic of violently overthrowing governments. You may be too young to have lived through that but you can read about it.
No, because people hate and fear hackers, because they are confused; the derogatory usage of the term "hacker" propagates that confusion and fear, but it is not the only cause of it. Here's the clearest-cut case of a friend of mine who died for that reason: https://archive.org/details/TheInternetsOwnBoyTheStoryOfAaro...
There are a couple of other cases, but they are less clear-cut. Nobody made documentaries about them. Many more are likely on the way.
Tbf, I learned "hacking" as the word for illegal (cyber) activity long before I've seen it used for "hacking stuff together".
How long have you been privy to Internet or programmer culture? 'Hacker' as a positive term has been around a lot longer than 'hacker' as a pejorative one.
Back in the '80s, a hacker utilised technology to interesting ends. A cracker (akin to a safe-cracker) broke into things and did damage.
As but one datum point, Steven Levy's book Hackers came out in 1984:
