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<div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">IMHO, I think was good that he didn't say how he got SSN. Being associated with a university with major CS department, there are likely a lot of ideas that are not available to every wanna be hacker. <br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false"><br></div><div dir="ltr" data-setdir="false">Some time circa 1990, I was given the advise to not put anything on a public network computer that you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the Mercury News. Meanwhile, the Mercury is not likely to "print" a story about food for CABAL.<br></div><div><br></div>
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On Saturday, April 4, 2020, 2:59:13 PM PDT, Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com> wrote:
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<div>Quoting Paul Zander (<a shape="rect" href="mailto:paulz@ieee.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">paulz@ieee.org</a>):<br clear="none"><br clear="none">> Meanwhile, I stumbled on this Ted Talk on YouTube about a future<br clear="none">> without secretes. Around 4:00 he talks about taking a photo of a<br clear="none">> person, using FB to name the person ... and then using more public<br clear="none">> info to display the name, DOB and SSN of the person on a cellphone. <br clear="none">> <br clear="none">> <a shape="rect" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_pqhMO3ZSY" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_pqhMO3ZSY</a><br clear="none"><br clear="none">It's a good talk. I notice he glosses over the troublesome question of<br clear="none">how he programmatically determines a (living) stranger's Social Security<br clear="none">number without hiring a private detective to use unethical back-channel<br clear="none">contacts to do so. I frankly doubt that part of his talk.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">One of the points he makes in passing (by implication) is that most<br clear="none">people carelessly breach their own privacy continually, including by<br clear="none">what information about themselves they gush onto the public Internet.<br clear="none">Personally, starting many decades ago, I started not only erring on the<br clear="none">side of reticence but also seeding out a modest amount of deliberately <br clear="none">misleading information about myself. <br clear="none"><br clear="none">One source of inspiration for my doing the latter was Patrick McGoohan's <br clear="none">iconic 1967 ITV programme 'The Prisoner', where he plays a British<br clear="none">secret agent kept in a whimsical-looking seaside town with pervasive<br clear="none">surveillance to pry certain secrets out of him. In episode 11, 'It's<br clear="none">Your Funeral', he and other ex-secret agents are mentioned to<br clear="none">have a pastime of monkeywrenching the town administration through<br clear="none">'jamming', revealing to the surveillance deliberately wrong but<br clear="none">tantalising information to send them on wild goose-chases. To quote the<br clear="none">Wikipedia article:<br clear="none"><br clear="none"> This episode refers to "jamming" and "jammers", i.e. constant hoax<br clear="none"> attempts to keep the authorities busy. The Situationist International<br clear="none"> referred to some of its activities as being like "radio jamming" in<br clear="none"> 1968, the year after the episode was aired. Negativland claims to have<br clear="none"> invented the phrase "culture/cultural jamming" in 1984 to describe<br clear="none"> billboard alteration. "It's your Funeral" is perhaps one of the earliest<br clear="none"> uses of the term jamming in a political context.<br clear="none"><br clear="none">It's about time for a 'The Prisoner' re-watch. Wildly creative,<br clear="none">maddeningly non-straightforward, sometimes hilariously off-target (e.g.,<br clear="none">the episode about the computer), occasionally very prophetic -- and with<br clear="none">some 1960s feet-of-clay aspects, e.g., more than a whiff of misogyny<br clear="none">that also afflicted other iconic British series such as 'The Avengers'.<div class="ydpbec7a910yqt5099152951" id="ydpbec7a910yqtfd33651"><br clear="none"><br clear="none"><br clear="none"><br clear="none"><br clear="none">_______________________________________________<br clear="none">conspire mailing list<br clear="none"><a shape="rect" href="mailto:conspire@linuxmafia.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">conspire@linuxmafia.com</a><br clear="none"><a shape="rect" href="http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://linuxmafia.com/mailman/listinfo/conspire</a><br clear="none"></div></div>
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