I know a fair number of security folks who were in the phreaking and early security hacking scenes

Part of my misspent youth

Sneakers created more hackers than the movie Hackers, and I stand by that

#setecastronomy

@amy @ohhecate Two of my favorite movies. Bravo.

#HackThePlanet
#SetecAstronomy

I went for a short walk to try and delay my impending cardiac arrest, and made the mistake of listening to a podcast about how fucked up our security apparatus is and worse, our system of secrecy. Makes me want to crawl in a hole.

I don’t want to know more info. I want to know less. Give me the blue pill. Put me back in the Matrix. Uncle.

#SetecAstronomy #TooManySecrets
https://youtu.be/qicghSVOm0A

@kevinbowrin You know, I never got bored of that when I was doing support for *nix based web hosting, and it never gets old at home. LIVE YOUR BEST LIFE!

#SetecAstronomy

@mattblaze You know that I would find this a fun read. It also underscores what I am discovering about the difficulty of translating cryptographic terms into the modern, digital age.
Ex. (and I'm not meaning to pick on you): to describe a Casar Cipher you state "This scheme isn't very secure. In fact, in cryptographic terms, it's not really even encryption, because there's no secret variable that prevents unauthorized people from decoding the messages. It's just an encoding."

It is, in fact, a form of encryption, specifically a substitution cipher (as in the name) and not encoding at all.
Encryption - a generic, catch-all, inclusive term for cryptographic systems, namely enciphering or encoding.
Cipher - a form of cryptographic encryption that generally treats the message on a character by character basis. There are two forms - substitution (trading letters and/or symbols for the underlying plaintext) and transposition (simply jumbling the order of the plaintext message in some reversible fashion)
Code - codes offer some form of substitution, but what makes it different is that it involves words or phrases and typically reduces them to a word or symbol.

Note: Neither of these types of cryptographic systems involve a "secret variable" (or, simply "key"). The earliest definition of "key" that I have found refers to the settings and positions of the moving parts of a cryptographic machine (like the wheels of an Enigma machine). Somewhere along the line (still researching) the term became more synonymous to the random bits that get applied to plaintext in order to render it "secret".

I'm not sure any of this matters other than to preserve the history of cryptography but I'd like to think that terms and meanings matter.

#SETECASTRONOMY

I can see why the Hackers vs. Sneakers movie debate is so strong.

I can also see why they both have such a significant passion around each of them.

Let me hash it out - tell me if you agree.

Hackers.

This brings those that were on that side of the scene back to nostalgia. The times of phone phreaking and dialers, undocumented phone numbers, accessing local known BBS and unknown wardialed places. Hanging out with friends, raves and parties, the outcasts in their own clique of "don't care" who thinks things.

Was it elaborate over stated visuals fore dialing up into computers? Far Fetched a bit in the hacking with ease of doing things like credit card canceling and people who were very much alive but now deceased.

Yes - of course it was. However from that time were people that closed their eyes and would hope that traveling through the telco wires and connecting to the computers would look like that if they could extend themselves into the systems they were connecting to.

Sneakers.

This is for the grown-ups, that were already on the other side of the Phone Phreaks, the ones learning how to defend and break up the dial ins, the calls and the mischief. The ones who were already in the system wishing they could "go home again" and be the same. The Sneakers team has a mission, ethics, discussions on right and wrong. Attacking and defending and working for the way that benefits humanity and safety.

The Sneakers are now, what once were the Hackers. They are past the mischief, the causing trouble, and using that knowledge to defend and do what is right for the world order of security and ethics because they were once the Hackers.

#Movies #HackerMovies #HackingIsNotACrime #StoryTime #NetworkSecurity #Cyber #CyberCrime #CyberSecurity #2600 #OffTheHook #CerealKiller #Whistler #Sneakers #Hackers #SetecAstronomy

IBM unveiled a 433-qubit quantum processor today.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ibm-quantum-computer-osprey

Gidney and Ekerå (2021) reckoned a 2048 bit RSA integer could be factored in 8 hours with 20,000,000 qubits. Any advances on that?
https://quantum-journal.org/papers/q-2021-04-15-433/

#quantumComputing #SetecAstronomy