Reporters were echoing big companies, which preferred to blame their misfortunes on evil geniuses instead of their own poor engineering choices. (Location 481)
“You can start out as ‘fuck the man,’ but then you become the man, and you start to see things in a different light.” (Location 505)
“Cyberspace allows everyone the freedom to coexist without harming anyone else’s world-view or belief system,” (Location 544)
“If you’re smart enough to use a computer and seek out the cDc, then you should be smart enough not to screw around with something like a bomb recipe that is full of spelling and grammatical errors. If the author can’t spell or punctuate properly, what the fuck makes you think he can describe how to build a bomb that won’t kill you?” (Location 964)
The group was probing the press the same way it poked at software, and it gradually realized that the greatest threat to security was the poor distribution of true information. (Location 983)
The most dramatic claim they made during the testimony was that they could take down the internet in thirty minutes through a problem they had found in the internet’s routing procedure, Border Gateway Protocol. (Location 1199)
The computer handed off too much control to outside programs that were not signed digitally, or otherwise attested to as authentic, by Microsoft or the vendors of those programs. (Location 1218)
well. When the group made jokes only other hackers got, it gave it street credibility and simultaneously impressed the outsiders, who realized cDc resonated with real hackers more than the people in suits did. (Location 1263)
“If we fall for our own hype, that’s the same pathetic retard bullshit that useless rock stars and movie stars fall for, when they ‘can’t handle the pressure’ and get some debilitating drug habit or become assholes, ’cause they don’t understand their role in a system.” (Location 1266)
The big companies ignored problems unless they were exposed so badly that customers threatened to leave, which was rare for a monopoly like Microsoft. The security industry was not fixing things because the fundamental problems ran deeper than software: it was about business models, corporate power, and legal limitations. And the government was oblivious, slow-moving, or bought off, especially outside of the military. (Location 1345)
Because every program of any size has critical flaws that can be leveraged by an attacker, greater complexity aided hackers and handicapped defenders. But the software suppliers lacked the incentives that drove ordinary manufacturers to make safer products. The software companies had convinced the courts that product-liability laws did not apply to them. Technically, they licensed their products instead of selling them, and they forced users to waive the right to sue at the moment of installation. (Location 1674)
People who score too high on morals tests are rejected by intelligence services, he said, because a conscientious whistle-blower is even more dangerous than an enemy mole. (Location 1841)
“Security and privacy is a great field for women, because there is a lot of moral reasoning, and you are in it because you want to protect people, and that should be something that resonates with not just straight white men.” (Location 2380)
“What I’ve come to realize is that personality matters 100% more than skills for this stuff. (Location 2418)
The internet’s inventors built it on trust and it got loose in its test version, before Vint Cerf and his team could come up with reliable security. It still ran that way. (Location 2648)
One lesson from the Cult of the Dead Cow’s remarkable story is that those who develop a personal ethical code and stick to it in unfamiliar places can accomplish amazing things. (Location 3189)
Rather than thinking about the world as binary, good or evil, Song said he found it helpful to think of the matrix in the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, with one axis running from good to evil and another one running from lawful to chaotic. (Location 3217)
powerful machines become, the sharper human ethics have to be. If the combination of mindless, profit-seeking algorithms, dedicated geopolitical adversaries, and corrupt US opportunists over the past few years has taught us anything, it is that serious applied thinking is a form of critical infrastructure. The best hackers are masters of applied thinking, and we cannot afford to ignore them. Likewise, they should not ignore us. We need more good in the world. If it can’t be lawful, then let it be chaotic. (Location 3247)
