Schneier on Security

1&1~=Umm • April 2, 2019 7:37 AM

Yup it looks like it is a lot of work for a ‘free meal’.

But it’s not a ‘free meal’ at all.

Look at it from the other side, food in most restaurants is the least expensive part of the operation, you only have to look at the wine list prices to know where they try to make the most money.

They will see the cost of that meal as less than the postage and admin of getting the voucher to him. And way way less than they would otherwise have to pay for advertising via leaflets, local papers, hordings and the sides of busses. Knowing that the eyes on those going to that site are going to the site because they want to.

I would say the restaurants are getting a realy good deal out of his hard work, especially if he also leaves the staff a tip.

But it probably won’t last because fairly soon lots of people will do the same thing, and as he notes there is a budjet for advertising.

But whilst it’s going for him, I wish him the best at it, he’s earned it.

1&1~=Umm • April 3, 2019 9:43 AM

History of Hack(ing).

The original term technological meaning came from a University ‘model railway club’. Being a Uni of good repute technically the students were not your flat hat old boy types building dioramas. They were engineers in the making and the model trains were just an excuse to do ‘engineery stuff’ in the way of control systems, just as the first single chip microprocessors started to be available around 100USD…

The competative aspect ment that one heck of a lot of very clever tricks were used to get the most out of what was back then eye wateringly expensive hardware.

Much in the style of the NASA ‘Steely eyed missileman’ phrase used amongst peers they developed their own acknowledgments of skill over and above the norm and ‘good hack’ was one of them.

This term spread into the other electronics and microprocessor clubs and spread as common parlance.

Even when the ‘dark side’ activity started those involved in that scene did not call it hacking. The term ‘crack’ or ‘cracking’ for such activities did eventually arise.

Then a couple of decades later, as is often the case ‘Journalistic licence’ kicked it’s great ugly boot into things. They could not be bothered with the nicety of distinction, their intent was to find crime or what could be made to look like crime and dress it up to look to the likes of politicians as a ‘think of the children’ emotion tug to sell their product.

So in the great jounalistic tradition of the MSM, business as usual with what is now called ‘fake news’ if done by non journalists…

So what once was a complement amongst peers is now regarded by the general populous as something the equivalent of the ‘Red Scare’ all thanks to a few yellow news ‘hacks’ (meaning bad journalists in dictionaries). So there is a touch of irony involved.

For those that are old enough to remember the ‘Red Scares’ they gave us ‘The rise and fall of Senator Joseph McCarthy’ and all the evil that went with it.

To quote Wikipedia*,

“‘McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of subversion or treason without proper regard for evidence.'”

It goes on with,

“‘The term refers to U.S. senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) and has its origins in the period in the United States known as the Second Red Scare, lasting from the late 1940s through the 1950s. It was characterized by heightened political repression and a campaign spreading fear of Communist influence on American institutions and of espionage by Soviet agents.'”

Non of that could have happened without the yellow press hacks who drove it forward into public hysteria. Which is why we need to be aware of their games, because others can get badly hurt if not killed.

However bad as they were, in comparison to more honest journalists of the time, the yellow press hacks of yester-year appear to have had more integrity than many of the current journalists of what we now call the US MSM.

To quote an anonomous person,

“‘Same s41t different day, more of it.'”

• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism