evilcultist
I’m sure the Salt Typhoon guys are watching this with interest.
The hilarity of all of this is that this week the US government started warning citizens to use these platforms now because even the backdoors that were created for law enforcement to monitor suspects have been compromised, and now the telephone networks are absolutely infested with foreign hackers and the cost and effort to get them out may be too high and take too long.
Lost in the noise of the story is that Salt Typhoon has proved that the decades of warnings by the internet security community were correct. No mandated secret or proprietary access to technology products is likely to remain undiscovered or used only by “the good guys” – and efforts to require them are likely to backfire.
So it’s somewhat ironic that one of the countermeasures recommended by the government to guard against Salt Typhoon spying is to use strongly encrypted services for phone calls and text messages – encryption capabilities that it has spent decades trying to undermine so that only “the good guys” can use it.
There’s an Atlantic article by Charlie Warzel that references it to try to make his comments seem flippant. The news is heavily trying to create or avoid a narrative on this.
“When Mangione was caught, he had with him a note or manifesto of sorts, less than 300 words long. Near the beginning, it offers the following: “This was fairly trivial.” The phrase is cold, detached, and haunting. It might merely be the garden-variety bravado of a gunman. But the sentence also conjures a possibility that is much harder to sit with (and for the internet to latch onto). Of all the possible outcomes available, the least shared, argued over, and considered is one that the shooter alludes to himself—that what feels to all of us like an era-defining event may ultimately be unremarkable in its brutality, in its inability to effect change, and in how quickly everyone moves on.”
I feel like either of these interpretations is way off the mark. The phrase is more likely him suggesting that it doesn’t take a lot of work or a sharp mind to pull it off, which would be a nightmare for anyone trying to keep it from happening again.
I like it, but only as an alternative to very good balancing with very slow power scaling. Unless I’m playing a superhero game, I don’t want to one-shot starting enemies once I’m higher level.
This is all tied to my preference for immersion above all and my tendency to fiddle around in a game pretending I’m playing a TTRPG rather than rushing to the end.
I wonder how the terrorism charge affects things. Are people going to stop saying they support him out of fear or disgust? Will other people (and/or the government) go after people that say they support him because they can claim they’re supporting a terrorist? Will people become less affected by the word “terrorist” because it’s being applied in this way?