plope0726 wrote:Concerning the possibility of the site being shut down...lets look at a scenario, Some comes and asks "Hey can i lrn to make virus?" then someone like the user "a" says "ya man here a prog for powerful virus" ....soon a new virus alert is out and the search is on for where it originated... they track it to the first users computer, from there they see that he is a member of hacker.org. after searching the site for evidence, they find the post about making a virus and the post giving him the virus. This likely would lead to further investigation of the hacker.org website. If you know anything about the PATRIOT act you will know that under it the Fed can do just about anything they want. Even if they find no further evidence on the site that may pose a risk of further problems from it, they can still opt to shut the shut the site down, atleast in the US because someone has already used this site to cause problems. Further more if this were too occur it would likely lead to an investigation of members of the site, and with records that the site contains, believe me they could find most of us. Now, this scenario may not be likely but could happen. Just like the odds of a person breaking into your home in an upper-scale neighborhood may not be likely, that doesn't mean you don;t take the precautions to reduce the risk of your home being broken into. I'm not so much concerned with the site being shutdown as i am with the possibility of being investigated for stupid nonsense.
Well I can partially understand your concerns about the site being shut down (again I think this should the admins problem and newbie cracker posts should either be responded with just a single link to a Hacker HOWTO or they should be deleted immediately), but what I wonder about is your paranoia of getting problems and arrested. You know you have not done anything illegal. Thus, you simply can't get arrested. How you should, when there is nothing in the law against you? "Being active on the same platform than a criminal person" - is that a reason for getting in jail? Hell no.
Even if the utopic and paranoid scenario happened and they would search ALL the members here in hacker.org. Well fine, they should have fun while doing it. They can do what they want they just can't punish people for something they haven't done. I have to say I don't live in the US but if the law is *really* that bad that people will get arrested for doing nothing against the law then you people living there are really poor - I would move to another country as soon as possible
plope0726 wrote:As far as being on the botpuzzles and challenge forum...well the botpuzzles don;t interest me much and ifI'm having trouble with a challenge I usually turn to my trusty friend Google, from there I tend to find the answer.
Google? GOOGLE? Dude, are you really serious? I talk about challenges, not quizzes about simple facts you can lookup in a encyclopedia - challenges where you invest much time, think about efficient algorithms and write complex programs to solve your problems. There are indeed certain challenges which *can* be solved alone by research in the internet, but what's the point in that? That's absolutely boring, those "challenges" are more like a test if there is no bot is behind the account.
Maybe that is the reason why you're not that interested in challenges, they've just been to easy and you couldn't improve your skills. You should definitely give them a try again! There will come more interesting ones (keyword: HVM) which are really exciting.
plope0726 wrote:As far as completion of the challenges, i do them when I can, I go to school (University) full time and work so unlike many of the kids on here, I do not have a lot of liesure time to work on that stuff.
It's very strange then that you DO have the time to write dozens of posts in this subforum, most by responding to crackers. That's really the point where I wonder what are your motivations are to be around here, if neither the challenges nor the botpuzzles are interesting for you. So the only interesting subforum left is full of crackers and your only activity here is to fight against the black-hats, which doesn't improve any skill.
plope0726 wrote:If someone is posting a question saying "How do i hack ATM machines" , that IS illegal , not maybe. If someone is asking how to crack a facebook. myspace, or other web account, that is illegal. If someone is asking to be shown how to make and spread a virus, that IS illegal. there is no maybe here with these questions, they are all asking to be shown how to perform an illegal act.
Pure Bullshit. Just by asking/speaking about a criminal act you can't get punished. Just one example - you maybe have heard of a famous port scanning tool called nmap and it's author Fyodor (if not, take a look at insecure.org). This guy's written a book with all the details about this port scanner, including some example attacks and explaining all the details. That's definitely knowledge you could use to be criminal. Now tell me why he is still not in jail?
Show me one single case where a person was just arrested by asking how to do something criminal. Good luck on searching - I'm very curious what your friend google says this time.
You see that there's a huge difference between saying and doing, don't you?
Besides that, I have to admit I'm technically interested in hacking ATMs too. Why not, how should it ever be wrong wanting to know something? Even when you learn about cryptography it is actually knowledge to something evil if you want so because it gives you unterstanding how it works.
And going to university you should know that "security by obscurity" is always a bad thing. Instead of fearing some bad guys doing criminal acts people should better learn from these bad guys and think about how security can be improved!
Again you're claiming that people can be punished for something they haven't done - very strange sense of justice
If someone gives them that information and they go out and do it, that IS illegal, and they can be held responsible for the actions of the person they gave the information to.
In THAT point I agree, of course. But again, if any other idiot on the board gave a newbie information, you won't get punished.
plope0726 wrote:As far as intelligent conversations in here...There might be more if people weren't here asking "how i hack ATM" . It's also hard to have an "intelligent" conversation with someone who does not know how to speak.
I agree here, too. There should be more admins here deleting senseless newbie posts regularly.
@paradox: I definitely won't read all your posts because I've got better things to do, but of course I believe you. That "feeling like an experienced hacker" was just an assumption of me because I really wonder what's the sense in being here on hacker.org when neither challenges nor board puzzles are interesting. This seems so absurd to me that the only thing I can think of which is motivating is strengthening the ego by ranting with newbies and felling proud to be something like a hacker. Sorry but I can't see any other reason. Have you REALLY learned something useful so far in this forum here? I doubt it.
"What DO we have in common?" You maybe await a highly complex definition including all possible stuff, but I keep it simple: curiosity, fun to explore technical stuff related to computers, being fascinated by mathematical/logical problems and being even more fascinated by solving them (either by hand or by a computer program).