Comment by vintermann
6 hours ago
I don't think it's orders as much as vibes. Some people have finely tuned senses for what they should do to be seen as one of the trustworthy ones, the ones that get it, the ones we could use in a more important job. And that trickles down: one of the things you do, is obviously to network with and boost people who look out for the same kind of political trustworthiness.
The ones at the top, assuming they're not asleep/drunk at the wheel/there at all, don't have to do much. The machine operates itself.
I mean, there's a lot of truth to this stuff: tech, and software, is extremely insecure, unknowably complex, and increasingly the most damaging avenue for an attack. I think the propaganda comes in when we point the finger at China, as if this isn't a problem in general.
Here in the US, all of our vehicles have SIM cards and they have for decades. They sent off God knows what data, to God knows who, and they remotely receive commands, too. Could you car be hacked? If it was, would you ever be able to find out? Both of those questions are not easy to answer.
Really, ALL of our tech works this way. That Android phone? It has countless binary blobs doing who-knows-what. It runs proprietary code at ring 0, and has access to the cellular bands. If it was compromised, you wouldn't know, especially if the attack was targeted. The people making the software and hardware are already "exploiting" it right now - mostly to gather data for advertising, ostensibly. But how do you know these systems are secure? We're talking millions of lines of C code, interfacing directly with the hardware, running at maximum privileges, written by people you don't know, which cannot be audited.