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Comment by shittyadmin | Hacker News Reader

What do you think about Tor? Bittorrent? Bitcoin? How about things like IDA Pro? Many pretty amazing technologies have pretty destructive popular if not primary uses.

I feel these tools are worth having on their own and it seems widely accepted at this point that the tools themselves aren't at fault for their user's actions, even if those actions are the most popular use of the tools.

Personally I'm much more concerned about the ethical actions of internet advertisers and social media giants - those who are making direct ethical decisions that impact their users privacy and access to information.

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Tor, Bittorrent, Bitcoin and IDA Pro are all fascinating technology. Guns are also fascinating technology. The world has gun control, but not software control. I agree with your parent comment that we need to stop letting dangerous knowledge and (even worse) ready-to-use tools be spread openly.

As far as I know, at least Hex-Rays screens customers very carefully before selling IDA Pro.

The world very much DOES have software control. There are whole sets of countries that cannot use certain versions of SSL and other popular encryption tools because of software export controls. Yes, the governments of these places can still get access, but they can also buy weapons ect on the black market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography

Attempting to control such a thing would be even more frivolous than the War on Drugs, governments ability to control things is quite limited without taking extremely draconian measures. We don't need a War on Software.

Your stance against so called "dangerous knowledge" worries me - would you encourage banning books about cryptography and software development?

How exactly are you going to stop the spread of knowledge? Has there ever been an example of that which worked?

Your examples are technologies for decentralizing power. Those have very clear up and downsides (more freedom, but less enforcement).

These technologies are to the detriment of enforcement. Because enforcement is far from a universal good, these technologies are far from a universal bad. Contrast this with faceswapping, where the upside is far less clear. Same goes for e.g. Stuxnet. It is a beautiful piece of technology, but not really a force for good given that it is widely available.

What about torture devices or biological weapons or even something like Cambridge Analytica's analysis products?

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