Hacker News Reader

Comment by uh_uh | Hacker News Reader

Maybe we should do both.

I take an issue with the argument that bad actors can make their own tools. Bad actors can also build their own nuclear weapons, genetically engineer their own deadly diseases but there's certainly value in not making this any easier. If you take the time, money and effort away from bad actors by forcing them to reinvent the wheel, that's a good thing.

Granted, this logic can't be viably applied to most things, but there are projects where you can assume that most of the use-cases will be shady.

View on HN

Bad actors can't make nuclear or biological weapons unless they have incredible amounts of resources

Bad actors with a $150 laptop out of a dumpster and a free wifi connection CAN make cyberstalking tools in their spare time

Exactly! There’s a totally different bar to entry. Look at North Korea. I don’t think they rank highly as a concern with traditional kinetic warfare, but they have made themselves a major security concern even with scant resources because the bar to entry with cyber warfare is just that much lower.

> Granted, this logic can't be viably applied to most things,…

This specific thing, for example.

> ... but there are projects where you can assume that most of the use-cases will be shady.

An assumption is a poor basis for an argument. Even in the case where the assumption turns out to be correct, I don't buy this line of reasoning, because it would apply generally to security tools. Such reasoning also makes it far easier to attack things even where the assumption is known to be wrong (e.g. bittorrent).

That's silly. Cops are allowed to use their eyes. These platforms are the billboards they look at.

Tools like this are trivial to make and it's trivial to do it manually using Google. I don't see any point in getting angry about the existence of tools like that, as it's beyond anyone's power to stop people from doxxing each other.

I did something similar to this for a hackathon in university. Obviously not as sophisticated as this, but the concept is trivial. If you know enough about the command line to install it, you can build it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com