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by Dedime 406 days ago
People keep talking about having been hacked, but it's honestly baffling to me.

I'm 28. I started using computers on a regular basis when I was ~9 years old, playing RuneScape. Since then, I've spend probably 10s of thousands of hours on the internet - downloading torrents, signing up for sketchy Russian websites, doing online banking, testing experimental software downloaded over HTTP from a .xyz domain. I graduated high school, went to a technical college for compsci, graduated, worked in helpdesk, desktop support, IT management, and more recently DevOps. I develop software using all sorts of package managers, and used hundreds of thousands of unvetted software packages that arrived as dependencies.

Not once have I, or anyone I've been responsible for, been hacked. No crypto, no viruses, nothing. What the heck are you guys doing getting your Android phones hacked???? Like I only use a modicum of common sense these days, but I guess I've just been lucky and have been the odd one out. I still enjoy reading HN arrivals about security though, so maybe I just have always been slightly more security conscience?

In any case, this is just a stream of consciousness / gut feeling comment. Don't put too much weight into it, I haven't.

1 comments

The way in which getting hacked works these days is that you as the user will never know. They will just silently exfil your data, and also use you to get to others. You will be none the wiser.
If it's so secret that nobody will ever find out, then I'm okay with it.

On the other hand, it's true that some people find out their credit score is trash right before buying a house, or that their name is involved in terrorism when applying for a visa, etc.

You should not be okay with it because they will most definitely use it to exert power over you. They are not professors or space aliens that are doing it for academic curiosity. It can be the government that wants to lock up someone, either now or in the future, or anyone that wants to steal your hard-earned crypto. It is not okay. These days they will also pass it through their AI, and potentially also use it to tune their AI.
> If it's so secret that nobody will ever find out, then I'm okay with it.

The original argument was that one would never know.

One would never know until one loses their crypto, or one has the government hurting one's freedoms, possibly even using parallel reconstruction, or one gets blackmailed. If one doesn't know that their phone could've been hacked, one will be left wondering what happened.