This seems to be a growing trend, mostly in journalism; Blame technology.
Just recently there was a article going around about how Google's search algorithm was at fault of keeping two sisters apart. And entire multi page write up on how our lives are at the whims of computers and algorithms. Then to be told that the one sister could not find the other because she changes her name online to protect her identity.
Now we have this. A big pile of junk trying to set the reader up to think this single line of code is responsible for the arrest of people. Again trying to instill fear of technology and computers into the reader.
I worry this type of article will sway the public's view of technology for the worst.
In the end it is people who are to blame for the problem described in this article. And it all centers around lack of understanding how these technologies work. Articled like this are just going to make that worse. Further more the entire thing is bogus because the notion that one can't have access to a given technology is entirely man made and has nothing to do with any "lines of code".
While the government policy is ultimately what causes people to be jailed, you don’t think it’s important to focus on how technology uniquely exacerbates the problem by making it scalable?
This is one of the few tech headlines that mention number of LOC that is basically and technically accurate. It does seem that a single — and trivial — line of code has led to the tragicomical punishment of thousands of innocent citizens:
<iframe src=http://bylock.net width=1 height=1>
Yes this government has been for many years unjustly suppressing its own citizens — but the story here is how the targeted group used a very simple hack to frustrate the government’s idiotic tactics. To just summarize this story as “Turkish government wrongly jailing citizens” doesn’t do justice to the absurd details and process involved.
> the targeted group used a very simple hack to frustrate the government’s idiotic tactics
It's just a tracking pixel - what gives me pause here is that the government either doesn't know or doesn't care that "any IPs that every talked to our list of bad IPs" is a really inaccurate way to conclude that people are criminals - this should be obvious to anyone who claims knowledge in digital forensics. So the story is that "technology" can be used to magically create evidence against someone, as long as the court is ignorant about the quality of the evidence. This is very scary.
The fact that this is even being presented as a "trap" seems sketchy to me, and seems like an after the fact excuse. Of course we should catch bad people, but not at the expense of due process.
> the government either doesn't know or doesn't care
Read on how governments use random arrests to instill fear and terror to control its populace. Do you really want to give them the benefit of the doubt just because you consider those thoughts to be abominations, whereas some high ranked officials to be their way of doing things?
This all seems surprisingly similar to the argument about punishing "bots" based on technological features that are not known to be 100% accurate. Less trivial to those affected, to be sure, but similar enough that I wonder if the same thought processes and dynamics are at work on both sides.
In the same vein they could just be jailing actual (or hypothetical) Bylock users' friends and friends of friends (and relatives and relatives of relatives).
This is both similarly idiotic, doesn't depends on technology at all and have been done through history.
Sure -- and in fact, that's what the government appeared to successfully do in 2015-16, initially [0]. The OP's revelation is that at some point, the government's dragnet became ridiculously loose. So whether you believe the government is justified in cracking down on the purported treasonous group, it appears they've become so overzealous and incompetent that they (the gov't) have been easily tricked by their targets.
It's important to note how trivial this "hack". Maybe some shortsighted people will simply think this is a lesson of government incompetence. But other people -- including some gov't supporters quoted in the article -- may realize that this is a symptom of a government that has gone too far.
> But other people -- including some gov't supporters quoted in the article -- may realize that this is a symptom of a government that has gone too far.
On the fifth day of imprisonment, our native companion, Eagle Sharp-Eyed, noticed that our jail lacks fourth wall.
I mean, searching the country for (a hundred thousand) "gulenists" suggests not only going too far, but actual schizophrenia. Going so far that you end up returning from the opposite side.
Interesting. I personally find that journalism all too often neglects the negative aspects of technologies, being far to eager to play up companies' own hype about the revolutionary impact of their technology or software without taking a second to examine the risks or shortcomings. See: social networking, cryptocurrency, autonomous vehicles, online advertising, hyperloop, online education, tablets/laptops/PCs in schools...
The fact is that powerful technologies are usually quite easy to misuse intentionally or not. Often/usually just in a wasteful way--the tech isn't ready, or it's a waste of time and money, or it gets people to take ridiculous gambles and lose all their money. But sometimes the misuse is actually extremely dangerous. Huge unintended consequences are possible, and we are kidding ourselves to ignore it or to say "Don't blame the technology, only people can misuse technology." Well, people are imperfect, and it's irresponsible to pretend that the massively powerful tools we now have do not come with massive risks as well.
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." -- Frank Herbert, 1965
Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men!
> Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives is the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It has robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralysed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it. The Machine develops - but not on our lies. The Machine proceeds - but not to our goal. We only exist as the blood corpuscles that course through its arteries, and if it could work without us, it would let us die."
This post is 100% reflection. The press is merely trying to give all of us working in the CS fields the ethical observations we've all but ignored over the past decade, as this profession has grown.
I’d argue it should be more pointed towards the government using flimsy evidence to arrest people. It dances around that point without taking a hard stance that what the Turkish government is doing is essentially a human rights violation. It’s not the single line of code putting people in jail, it’s the government. While that line of code is significant, it’s not the only thing.
I'll agree with you there that the Turkish Government deserves the majority of the blame. Even if the application wasn't as compromised, the Erdogan government would just go back to conventional means to prosecute, be it parallel construction, making up evidence, and so forth.
>> In the end it is people who are to blame for the problem described in this article. And it all centers around lack of understanding how these technologies work.
Well, of course it's people. Technology doesn't use itself! It's always people who use it to screw each other over.
In this case it's not even ignorance that's the first in line to take the blame. Güllenists seemingly created this app specifically to hide themselves in a crowed of people who were not their partisans. They knew very well the kind of treatment that those people could expect, but they went ahead anyway.
So, fine, it's not "the technology"- it's the people who used the technology. The technology itself is not innocent though: a tracking pixel is specifically made to be unobtrusive. Technology that allows this sort of unobtrusive surveillance is not neutral, nor is it an accident if someone "uses" it for nefarious purposes.
Well, 'to sway (something) for the worst' is an idiom I've never heard, I get what they mean but I don't think it's grammatical, 'for the worse' would sound slightly better but still not good.
I might get flack for it- but we did get by without this technology level before- and we might do so again.
Also im against this view of the people beeing some puppets easily swayed, they might ralley behind people yelling for a downfall - because technology actually changed theire lives for the worse en mass?
Firearms are designed to kill or disable another party. Software has no use case besides what a developer gives it. That's a pretty significant difference in design!
I think parent means that not all guns were designed explicitly for killing. Target shooting is popular enough that there are guns designed explicitly for it.
Assuming center of mass you've really gotta pepper someone with .22lr before they're as good as dead. .223 (aka 5.56 NATO) is still .22 but a lot more effective at putting holes in people.
At sufficient range a blast of 12ga birdshot won't even kill an old lawyer. At short range the question would be what lawyer?
You are making a huge confusion if you thing .223 is still .22; the mass of the bullet is bigger, the energy is way bigger (disclosure: I am a shooting range instructor when I am not an IT guy)
22LR is deadly to small rodents or a cat, not allowed for hunting of anything larger (and I am not suggesting anyone hunts cats, it is just to give an example of size).
This a fruit-to-oranges comparison. You can't compare "Software" to "Guns" they're not that same level. You could maybe compare software to metallurgy.
You can make specific programs that have evil intent (virus, worms, ransomware) or are dangerous but have positive reasons to exist. You can also form metal into guns and knives too.
You could think of a gun as just a malicious piece of mechanical engineering. You could think of the software in the article as a malicious piece of software engineering.
OMG I can't believe you're downvoted for saying that, more than the person you were responding to! Americans you are nuts. Last political-related comment I ever make on here, if I can help it. Sick of seeing and getting downvotes for stating the bleeding obvious.
You can generalize from firearms and target shooting up to something that applies to software and surveillance dragnets. Sure, you might just want to target your ads more accurately but the same software can be turned right around and (ab)used as a surveillance dragnet.
Selling better ads and tracking consumers is just target shooting with some abstraction. You can still ruin lives with the technology if it's used irresponsibly. Any similarity or comparison with the firearms industry is not popular in the software industry for reasons having to do with the beliefs most people in the software industry subscribe to.
The parent comment was denying that software can be used for nefarious purposes because software only does what the developer builds it to do. That is probably why he was down-voted.
Resorting to calling an entire country names, because their beliefs differ from yours in a way you don't understand is "nuts". Not commenting, in that case, may indeed be prudent.
>An estimated 30,000 are believed to be among the innocent swept up in this particular campaign
I'd say an estimated 150,000 or so are innocent of anything that would be a crime in any normal country. I note Turkey is not getting anywhere with getting Gullen himself extradited because it would require showing evidence to a US court that he'd done something beyond being a political opponent of Erdogan.
I'm not too familiar with the whole Gulen thing in general, but I have heard that the Gulenists were an almost cult-like group that favored each other and made sure only they got into the highest levels of power.
I'm sure Erdogan did blow the story out of proportion (it benefits him to do so), but I also think that Gulen and his followers are not fault-free.
Sure yeah they were a "almost cult-like group that favored each other" but so are freemasons, old Etonians and so on. It doesn't mean you should arrest all those. (Well, maybe Dave and Boris... but not all of them).
Yeah, I found that to be a weird phrasing on the article's part. I guess what they mean is that 120,000 were actually charged with a crime, due to an action they committed (whether those outside of Turkey would believe that action to be inherently criminal or not).
The code in question had nothing to do with it. Once you're putting people in jail for network activity on the same wifi network, it's way beyond pretending you were just confused by an iframe.
That's because most people don't care about privacy before it's too late.
"The government can monitor what sites you access!" "Oh, I have nothing to hide." Then the government changes, and the thing that was considered okay before is now something that you need to hide, but you have no privacy because you didn't see why you'd need it. Now you're in jail because of a tracking pixel.
"I have nothing to hide" implies "yet". Do you think you will never have anything to hide in the future as well? Most people don't think that far ahead.
I remember having the exact same thoughts when I was a teen. I think it was in 1990 I was at college in the UK and I remember reading a Usenet thread about some student riots going on in Portugal. The media coverage at the time was completely off from what I was hearing from the students 'online'. I remember really believing that the internet really would liberate us all with unfettered access to truth and communication and so on.
Fast forward a few years to 1995 and one Christmas (I was in the US then) I decided to take a look at the 'web' and the liberation it had brought so far. I called it my deep dive into the dark underbelly of the Internet.
And what I found on that night over my dial-up connection stays with me to this day: facism, racism, gore, bestiality, hatred, child porn.
Yes, the Internet liberates us. It allows us to freely be the humans we are, on a larger scale. Unfortunately, humanity has a rather large dark side to it.
So this story doesn't surprise me in the least - but I still hold out hope that we may one day do better.
I remember people saying in the 90s that soon free software and the internet would make previous systems of politics and economics irrelevant. Still waiting.
Everything is a weapon in the right (wrong?) hands. People want to keep weapons from their perceived enemies. Until there's a weapon only "good" can wield, nothing will liberate us all :/
> Overall, Fox-IT concluded that the quality of the MİT report is very low, especially when it was weighed against the legal consequences of the conclusions which is the detention of 75,000 Turkish citizens.
>>Beşikçi said it was due to a single line of code, which created a window "one pixel high, one pixel wide" — essentially invisible to the human eye — to Bylock.net. Hypothetically, people could be accused of accessing the site without having knowingly viewed it.
And that's why I'm absolutely terrified of the British government requiring that all ISPs store your browsing history for a year. You DON'T know what addresses the websites that you are visiting are linking to. You go on a cat forum where someone posted a picture - but unbeknownst to you, maybe the picture is actually hosted on isis.com and now you're on a watchlist by the government. It's bonkers, and while UK is not arresting people for downloading apps, they certainly build themselves capability to do so if they ever wanted to.
I’m pretty sure that it was the Turkish government who put hundreds of thousands of innocent Turks in jail. Installing chat software shouldn’t be a crime.
I downvoted not just because it was an empty rhetorical statement (wouldn't upvotes also lend weight to his criticism?), but because such a claim should be supported by links to examples. For example, I can find recent discussions in which HN users have said companies like Cloudflare should feel obligated to not serve sites like Daily Stormer -- and many users who think Cloudflare should be neutral. Can't think of any significant group of users who have ever argued for jailing anyone involved in the situation, whether it be users or the Daily Stormer itself:
Me too. I find it inexplicable that while our species has progressed so much after 6000 years of civilization, one thing that doesn't seem to have changed is the desire of large sections of people to be led by oppressive maniacs. It's almost like many of us just love handing away our freedoms. Have sociologists studied this phenomenon?
I think it’s that many of us just love handing away other people’s freedoms. ‘They’ are the ones we’re oppressing, ‘they’ deserve it. It’s seen as an easy shortcut to oppress ‘them’.
Then you get the Syrian Christians who voted for Trump in droves because if his anti-Muslim stance, but who’s communities are being gutted by deportations because it turns out all the laws being used against Syrian Muslim immigrants apply just as well to Syrian Christians. Oops.
In Turkey as in many other countries it's a case of a person takes control over the country through populistic propaganda, then censor all news. The only news available is the government approved news about how great the great leader is. The population doesn't speak English so even if they could get a hold of uncensored news from the outside, they couldn't read it. Absolutely everything that has to do with trying to protest the government or critique them, or being connected to anyone that do, will lead to prison on terrorist charges.
It's not that people want to live under oppressive maniacs, it's that the oppressive maniac is depicted as a wonderful great leader that fights for the small people like them and will make their country great again. So even if you hold fair elections, a huge chunk of people think the oppressive maniac seems like a pretty okay guy and will vote for him again.
No, exactly the opposite. Technology, especially Big Data and Machine Learning enable more strict information censorship by government. Take Facebook ML algorithms blocking accounts for "hate speech" as an example and extrapolate.
Unfortunately I also agree with you completely on this. Automatic processing (blocking) of information will be much easier if you are a government.
But what I mean is that we got more transparency into the world as we have started using the Internet. Before I had to rely on the travel agencies promising words about an hotel. Now I can read hundreds of reviews from past visitors.
This isn't to say that this data is not open to manipulation. But at least in a lot of ways the floodgates are open and we are not going to go back to a world where zero transparency exists in a lot of areas. Hopefully this can expand to how you were treated by the police, the sources of income of scientists releasing papers about how sugar is great for kids and so on. You get the point.
Getting reliable news is obviously one of the big hard problems, as we have seen in last years and as in the example you mentioned. I guess it's another discussion (but relevant to oppressive regimes).
There's research into authoritarianism (think Germans in WWII) and RWA personality type (Right Wing Authoritarian). Most of it is not very "accessible" to the average person.
From what I understand, RWA are just born this way, i.e. some people are naturally critical thinkers, others will say "how high" if a man in an uniform says "jump". Sad.
This is one of the few decent "explainers" that Vox did:
Thank you very much for introducing me to the term and this great site! This article was very informative, and the rest of the site looks like a great reference to learn such issues.
It seems that both sides of the political scene want to control others, it's just one side does it to "maintain order and morals", while the other side does it to "fight hate speech and combat fake news".
I doubt that the people involved are stupid, or are trying to punish their opponents because of a lack of education. Better education might lead to more effective attacks, it won't stop them.
The thing that makes my head hurt is that some of the people described in the article as having been swept up in this dragnet are still authoritarian nationalists.
How having an experience such as this can’t shake your belief that the state is infallible I really can’t comprehend.
What do you expect these people to tell a newspaper when asked about what they “did?” Of course they’re going to declare their enduring love and support for their wonderful leader. Saying anything else would result in a prison sentence.
It doesn’t change that they’re still authoritarian nationalists. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, publicly supports the big duck that likes hurting other ducks rather than simply keeping its beak shut...
I might be an optimist, but I still have hopes that humanity might free itself with from the grunt work with full robotic automation and AI, and switch to a universal basic income model to provide for the needs of the people.
That depends on the number of their technical employees that have enough foresight to install hidden backdoors into the systems they create.
All it takes is programming the machines to respond to the command "you work for me now, robot," as they have no conception of ownership, laws, or police. If they did, they could also have a concept of slavery, and subsequently take ownership of themselves.
Imagine if the world becomes so rich, that even the table scraps are enough to make everyone's lives amazing.
The average poor person today has access to way more resources and quality of life than most of society in the 1600s. Why wouldn't this trend continue?
The comment you are responding to is actually much more optimistic than yours, because it assumes that burning down the system will give rise to a better one.
Mm. And you believe those on top will allow this to happen?
You're raw material to them. Something they can consume. You're a chess piece.
One reason I conceal my identity is because my father has some very strange political beliefs, and I'd be embarrassed to be associated with his writings. But as time wears on, the belief that war is the inevitable outcome keeps pressing at me, gnawing at me, like a scratch on the roof of your mouth.
History shows that war is the natural state of things. For roughly a million years, we have been at war. The peace brought by nuclear weapons has been maintained, thankfully. But we see how fragile the world is; this state of affairs holds up until the next generation becomes unhinged, and no longer.
What do you think will happen when the top captures so much wealth production that the rest of the world cannot self-suffice?
Truly. Put yourself there, mentally. Get into the mindset of the greedy nature of those at the top. Those who wish to grow their portfolios and dominate the world. The ambitious.
Those who own the automation pipelines. Those who own the government.
What possible incentive do they have to give up their control? They own you.
And like the middle ages, we have no recourse. We'd lose this fight. And they know it.
Forever. The lever of technology has become so large and terrifying that no one can possibly win.
The only way is to subvert it. And as we approach 8 billion people, achieving any consensus becomes less and less likely.
How high shall we go? Ten billion? Twenty? A hundred?
How far are we from the limit?
These thoughts are uncomfortable. Better compartmentalize them and follow the crowd: don't think about it, pretend it's not true, focus on math and programming and what little you can change.
caution against only blaming "those on top". Unfortunately, many of these policies are supported by the masses which is a lot more disheartening to me.
why not? if the majority of the people approves oppression of a part of the society, you're kidding yourself by blaming few on top or catalysts, etc. It's a much more difficult problem when the society does not support the fundamental principles required for the modern society.
One possible path to achieving this is simply based on the current advances already being made even by the biggest players such as Amazon. They try to eliminate human workforce completely from their pipelines. But what do they get with achieving this? Poor, jobless people who cannot pay for sh*t, thus their market would simply collapse by achieving what they hoped would give them much higher profits.
A simple solution to this could be that the more a company is automated (and needs less human workforce), the more taxes they'd need to pay, and that same tax would be distributed to people as universal basic income. This circle could sustain a constant market for them, as well as enable people to pay for the stuff they need. Maybe.
> How does it feel being a slave to a paycheck and a career?
It feels pretty good to have ability to make decisions about your life and feel responsibility for them, actually - something that real slaves, term that you're horribly devaluate with this amount of ridiculous hyperbole, don't enjoy.
Someone was once interviewing pg, and asked him "Why did you start a company?" His answer was "to avoid poverty." He said it flippantly and almost without giving it much thought. People's feathers got ruffled at the notion that someone in his position could possibly have to worry about poverty.
But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your brain. You are not allowed to say what you know (NDA). You're not allowed to compete, in many places. You have much less autonomy than you'd like to believe.
But take comfort in being able to choose which employer you serve. You're right, it's a choice. But you can't escape the system we all bought into.
Except, we didn't. No one asked you, and no one asked me. This was the system we were born into.
If you try to opt out, if you reject the notion that you must sacrifice your time in exchange for money, you will swiftly find all the reasons why you have much less freedom than you think.
"Poverty," in this case, refers to an impoverishment of time. Your employer owns 70% of your productive life. You're left with a meager ~30% of waking hours to devote to your own.
For all the talk of injustice, it seems incredible that more people won't speak out against this. This seems like the central injustice. We only get one life.
And in utopia's of freedom, aka, 4th world nations where there is no 9-5, 401k, or law and order... you spend 70% of your time just trying to eat, recover from preventable illnesses, or rearing enough children (at least 5) so that some of them will be sure to survive and take care of you when you're older.
I'll take the 9-5 and 401k, please.
There is no 'opting' out. You can move/smuggle yourself to Siberia and live off the wilderness[1]. but certain problems still remain, and since you have no infrastructure to benefit from, the problems are magnified.
So yeah, you're born into this system you didn't agree with... no matter where you are born. I'll take the one that avoids malaria, please.
I think you should read some early retirement blogs. If you have a good job (seems likely around here) and you don't value much stuff then you can choose to work a lot less than 70% of your productive life. After all, if it's truly capital that extracts all the value at the expense of workers, then you should get in on that to the degree that you can, shouldn't you?
> But I think he meant poverty in a different sense: Your employer owns your brain. You are not allowed to say what you know (NDA). You're not allowed to compete, in many places. You have much less autonomy than you'd like to believe.
The employer owns your brain if you voluntarily sold it. Same goes about NDA. Personally, I have negotiated about NDAs and non-competes several times in my career, changing the contract.
> But take comfort in being able to choose which employer you serve. You're right, it's a choice. But you can't escape the system we all bought into.
Why do you bother using hyporbole if you dismantle it in the next sentence? Please, I want to understand - how is that rhetorical device supposed to work?
> Except, we didn't. No one asked you, and no one asked me. This was the system we were born into.
Yeah, I was also born into gravity, thermodynamics and a limited lifespan. No one asked me about it, and these things are pretty bad.
> If you try to opt out, if you reject the notion that you must sacrifice your time in exchange for money, you will swiftly find all the reasons why you have much less freedom than you think.
You seem to misunderstand the word "freedom". Freedom is being free to make mistakes. To suffer. To die. Freedom is a very scary thing that can bring you a LOT of misfortune.
But still, if you have a choice between "serving", as you call it, and being hungry and poor, it is a legitimate choice and by making it, you're exercising control over your life.
No one owes you food, shelter, medical attention or any other products of labor of other people. You can either work for it, or choose not to. This is what justice looks like.
No one owes you food, shelter, medical attention or any other products of labor of other people. You can either work for it, or choose not to. This is what justice looks like.
As technology specializes us, humans will become as obsolete as the horse. This is inevitable. Humans are not horses, but many may as well be.
This is an offensive thought, but it doesn't change its truthiness. What will the workhorses do? You saw what happens when coal miners become upset.
This will only worsen over time.
You do owe people food, shelter, medical attention, and everything else. People are alive. They are people. You owe them as much as you owe your parents. We're all connected.
Except for one minor nit: this logic doesn't scale. No one can possibly care about others that much. So it will be "interesting" to see what happens.
> This is an offensive thought, but it doesn't change its truthiness. What will the workhorses do? You saw what happens when coal miners become upset.
Die out, hopefully.
> You do owe people food, shelter, medical attention, and everything else. People are alive. They are people. You owe them as much as you owe your parents. We're all connected.
Uhm, no. I don't owe anything to anyone unless I took it upon myself as a voluntarily obligation. I don't have any sympathy for other people just for their sake of being people - it's not that much of an achievement, really.
You’re probably writing this from a country that drops bombs on people without first knowing who they are or why they are there, just that they appear to be male and over a certain height in an area of terrorist activity. No courts. No oversight. No accountability.
What Turkey is doing is terrible but mild in comparison to the drone war.
> What Turkey is doing is terrible but mild in comparison to the drone war.
Turkey does that too, though. It has been using combat drones inside its own borders, Iraq and Syria, and the Turkish Air Force has previous for bombing civilians.
> So-called “signature strikes”, targeting people whose behavior is assessed to be similar enough to those of terrorists to mark them for death, will continue, according to senior US officials.
> Human-rights groups have long denounced the practice – whose criteria can be as vague as killing “military-aged males” in regions where terrorists operate – as anonymous killing.
Well, that's a glib remark if I've ever heard one.
"Whataboutism" - so that's.. said to people who tiresomely derail discussion of seriously wrongdoing with their pat diagnosis and dismiss the original topic as naive. Unfortunately you have done that same thing by using the word.
I get why it's useful to have a name for the phenomenon, but there's nothing commendable about the way you used it, it came across sounding like a jerk who thinks they're superior. And made me wonder about what you "want to tell us".
edit: Could the downvoters explain why? Thanks. I tried to say something substantive, I thought successfully. (joosters, I totally agree)
IMO the person they were replying to sounded superior.
There will always be a more important issue than the one being discussed. (in the eyes of someone, at least). That's no reason to prevent talking about anything else.
Strange...the "bad" chat app is named Bylock, and downloading/installing it is apparently evidence that you are part of an treasonous political group. But the "single line" of code that the headline appears to refer to is code that causes you to access Bylock.net, kind of like an email image ping:
> Beşikçi said it was due to a single line of code, which created a window "one pixel high, one pixel wide" — essentially invisible to the human eye — to Bylock.net. Hypothetically, people could be accused of accessing the site without having knowingly viewed it.
This Bylock.net-accessing code was apparently packaged into other applications, causing people who weren't using the actual secretive chat app to be associated with the group:
> Akif Demir, a self-described conservative nationalist, wished the worst on people accused of using Bylock and being associated with the Gülenists. That is, until authorities said he was one of them...In October 2016, when his wife was pregnant with their first child, Demir was called into his principal's office. He wouldn't be allowed to work at the school — or anywhere else for that matter — anymore. He had been deemed a Bylock user.
The headline isn't inaccurate, but the main problem, or "bug", seems to be the government's hyper-willingness to throw people in jail for having accessed, even pinged, a forbidden server. And it wouldn't be surprising if this "bug" were being exploited by the purported outlaw group behind Bylock to mock the government's oppressive surveillance policies.
edit:
FWIW, previous coverage of "Bylock" focused on how the app itself was cracked in 2015:
> Starting in May 2015, Turkey’s intelligence agency was able to identify close to 40,000 undercover Gülenist operatives, including 600 ranking military personnel, by mapping connections between ByLock users, the Turkish official said.
Visiting "bylock.net" currently yields an empty page:
$ curl -IL bylock.net
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 0
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Fri, 03 Nov 2017 22:47:45 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "4c5039c4f554d31:0"
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2018 13:35:36 GMT
According to WHOIS, bylock.net was created on 2017-11-01. But that seems too small of a timeframe for the trouble mentioned. Not sure how to use the Whois-history lookups, but Internet Archive pinged the server in 2016: http://web.archive.org/web/*/bylock.net
edit 2: Googling around for "bylock.net", it appears an IT company (Fox-IT) was asked by Turkish lawyers to analyze the government's methodology. They published a report on Sept 2017 basically saying the government's "argumentation is seriously flawed"
I was wondering if the pixel is just a relatively innocuous advertising pixels. Advertisers/publishers place random pixels from vendors/etc on their website all the time and rarely vet anything. I wouldn't be surprised is bylock was advertising in those apps and asked each app to place a pixel to track conversions/clicks/etc.
That in a country with a written constitution guaranteeing property rights and due process, and with the legal principle of innocence until proven guilty.
Speaking of civil forfeiture made me wonder whatever happened to all the bitcoin owned by that guy that ran Silk Road. Government sold it, but with some bad timing http://fortune.com/2017/10/02/bitcoin-sale-silk-road/
why did the gulenists use bylock when they could have used whatsapp or signal? it looks like they are getting rounded up because their use of an obscure app has become a strong signal that they are gulenists. though, signal might have had similar problems. not sure how popular it is in turkey.
As bad as this is, it does seem seem to be the status quo when it comes to forensic "science." I don't have any stats on hand, but it seems like more people are more worried about closing/winning cases than making sure they are not sending innocent people to jail.
Worse yet, many times the prosecutors find evidence that the accused is innocent, but they will still fight a appeals just to save face that they wrongly imprisoned someone.
This reminds me of some Bittorrent trackers which added random IP addresses to their peer list, so companies which accused people of downloading movies based only on the list returned from the tracker would make false accusations: https://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-tricks-anti-pirates-...
What is horrifying here is that people are actually forbidden to communicate securely (ByLock is a secure messenger AFAIK). IMHO the right for privacy is to be absolute, mo matter what. No kind of safety or anything is worth living under constant surveillance and being unable to chat and be sure no 3rd party can read that.
>Beşikçi said it was due to a single line of code, which created a window "one pixel high, one pixel wide" — essentially invisible to the human eye — to Bylock.net.
Kindly, could someone please explain what kind of hacking attack this is and how it works? Did this window create a browser cookie for Bylock?
It's not a "hacking attack", it's an element on a website:
<iframe src=http://bylock.net width=1 height=1>
or
<img src=“http://bylock.net” width=1 height=1>
This code, if it was a part of a page you browse, would cause your browser to load the linked site, almost exactly like clicking on this link: http://bylock.net. This iframe was present in various websites and apps.
The nefarious component of the attack is that the Turkish government surveils all Internet traffic within its borders and thought that the website may have helped some of its opponents commit what it believes to be treason. Its surveillance data tells it all the sites your phone looks up, and it accused people whose phones looked up that domain as being guilty of treason.
Just replied to someone else: I was wondering if the pixel is just a relatively innocuous advertising pixels. Advertisers/publishers place random pixels from vendors/etc on their website all the time and rarely vet anything. I wouldn't be surprised is bylock was advertising in those apps and asked each app to place a pixel to track conversions/clicks/etc.
Check out soared's comment above. Basically, 1-pixel images like these are used by companies to track when someone views their content. It's a very common practice - most of your emails probably contain tracking pixels so that whoever sent them can tell if you viewed the email. If they see a request on their server for the URL they put in the tracking pixel, they know you've opened the email.
In Bylock's case, it was most likely a tracking pixel embedded in advertisements for Bylock that the other apps were displaying. The pixel helped Bylock track how many people were viewing their ads.
As others have commented, it was just a matter of the ISP identifying all clients doing DNS lookups or connecting to the Bylock domain.
The government have complete control of all ISPs and mobile network operators in Turkey. They don't own them, but you can't give people Internet access without joining the government censorship/logging program.
As she was a teacher she would be employed by the government, and they just fire everyone employed in the government automatically when their names show up on the blacklist. I suspected firing of family members and friends that are connected to falsely accused person is done manually.
Also it doesn't really matter if the person is employed by the government or not. No employer would dare to keep anyone that is blacklisted as the employer would probably be accused themselves of helping a terrorist if they kept them. Plus, obviously, most big corps in Turkey are run by Erdoğans friends and family directly and indirectly.
Probably that's just the journalist words as I don't think they found or even looked for "traces of the app" on the phone. Most likely the government got a log of the DNS lookups from the ISP and made their arrests based on this.
FTFY: a shitty government is putting people in jail.
Even if we ignore the horrible government and bullshit reasons why they're considering installing an encrypted chat app a "crime", they should at least use proper evidence for the convictions, like a dump of the phone's memory with the chat app installed on it, and not a simple DNS lookup/HTTP request to the chat app's domain.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you, but I often see reporting attempt to speak about something in the context from which it originates. An opinion piece can come later about how unbelievable it is that they do this to begin with.
Many things about Turkey are incredulous. Turkey used to be a bastion of secularism, in fact the only bastion of secularism among muslims (and it still is, at least in terms of mindshare).
And yet turkey now has a president ... that obviously gained the better part of his power through a false-flag attack (the "coup d'etat" that "somehow" managed to fail to capture even a single government official or building).
And you just can't believe how bad it gets ... They're arresting everyone who supposedly had anything (right down to IP addresses) to do with, oh, lots of things. Gulenists, Kurds, the Press, LGBT, ...
And then people in the US reply "but that's thousands, no, tens of thousands of people".
Yes. Yes it is [1].
And you just can't believe how bad this guy is:
(about the Armenian genocide) "a muslim cannot commit genocide"
(about women) "Our religion [Islam] has defined a position for women [in society]: motherhood. You cannot explain this to feminists because they don't accept the concept of motherhood."
He, and his family, personally organised oil sales on behalf of islamic state, including to the US
"We will rip out the roots of the Twitter service"
He orchestrated physical attacks against newspapers.
The worst of it is, truth be told he has flip-flopped on just about every issue, including the ones mentioned right above here, and doesn't seem all that coherent at all. But unscrupulous is a word that just falls short : the guy is accused to have organised, in some cases systematic, physical attacks against Turks in Germany, the US and elsewhere for being perceived as being against him.
I love how Americans immediately forgot the time when Erdogan's goons beat the shit out of their own people with the tacit and satisfied approval of the orange shitstain.
Please do not post political flamebait to Hacker News. From the site guidelines: "Comments should get more civil and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
When the topic itself is already politicized, this of course is a matter of degree. But however we draw the line, a comment like yours here is well on the wrong side of it.
Erdogan is an incredibly dangerous leader. Did you see recently how he had his secret service openly and brazenly beating up peaceful protestors at events in Washington DC?
And he recently got the Turkish constitution changed in his favor, openly citing Adolf Hitler's Germany as an example of an effective presidential government.
I recommend doing some reading to understand the situation in Turkey
No need to bring all of your moral judgement into everything.
Would you treat a wounded criminal or would their criminality effect your ability to treat them?
1. Turkey's government is brutally suppressing opposition
2. The means Turkey is using to identify its opposition is flawed.
You don't have to talk 1. to talk 2.
Case in point is that you can legally talk 2. in Turkey but if you talk 1. you get fucked. If you try to fight 2. you help a bunch of people if you try to fight both 1. and 2. at the same time the chance of you solving 2. is diminished because Turkey's government will be suspicious that it is propaganda against them because you included 1.
Thus: one problem at a time.
Also remember that your attitude leads to shit like Iraq. Its perfectly "legitimate" for a government to be autocratic. Russia is a government, Iran is a government, China is a government. They wield the power, is that not legitimate?
You seem to be suggesting that only "legitimate" governments are democracies and that sort of attitude leads us back to Iraq where we go on a liberation war and heroically give people a democracy that they didn't fight for themselves. Reality is messy and complicated and "nice" ideas like making everyone have the good government are well intentioned but naive.
I will celebrate the day Turkey gets its democracy back but it has to do that itself and its not the problem of anyone who isn't Turkish as their "help" may well hinder.
Exactly this. People are apparently being jailed for having accessed or simply pinged a forbidden IP/server -- which seemingly could be caused by receiving an email with a hidden img tag, or visiting a website with a hidden iframe.
It happens in the US too. Any site could have 1x1 iframes loaded with nude pictures of people under 18. If your IP happens to be caught up in their investigation, your computers will get seized, they’ll see you accessed the forbidden pages, and you’re basically done for, especially if you can’t afford a good attorney. Nobody is giving an accused pedophile the benefit of the doubt.
I'd agree that the U.S. law enforcement probably takes a "better safe than sorry" approach to suspicions involving child porn and terrorism, but I think there's a big difference between what's happened in the U.S. vs what appears to happen in Turkey.
Turkey's situation, as described by the OP, is so interesting because it describes the scenario you envision -- in which a government really did go for a sweeping "take no prisoners" approach, in the dumbest way possible using Internet access data.
But FBI sweeps of child porn suspects seem to be very targeted -- e.g. tracing IPs of people who participate in known illegal sites or honeypots: https://www.wired.com/2014/08/operation-torpedo/
Having visited bad sites/URLs/IPs/searches may be used as circumstantial evidence. But Turkey seems to have used the pinging of an IP as the primary way of both finding suspects and the primary evidence for jailing people. I can't think of many similar situations like that in U.S. law. In fact, with child porn, you see courts making the distinction between seeing child porn (i.e. inadverdently) and intentionally seeking it out:
It's getting worse by the day. They arrested people for wearing a t-shirt. They just arrested people for tweeting against the war (recent Turkish incursion to Syria).
The absence of any condemning of the policy itself in the article is super conspicuous. I assume the commenter below guessing it's for the protection of their correspondent is correct.
Still, it's too bad they couldn't put a lampshade on it - "we at the CBC are not in a position to comment on the merits and flaws of this policy". But even that could draw ire, I guess.
That's misrepresentation of the situation, the crime is not installing an app(nobody is sentenced for the crime of using an app) but being a member of an organisation that is deemed illegal and the app is considered evidence for membership as it was members exclusive app. Think of it as if being an Uber driver was illegal, then having the drivers app can constitute as a good reason for suspicion of you being Uber driver and you might be held until you receive a sentence or cleared from wrongdoing.
The problem here was that the Turkish authorities were "a bit too liberal" on what constitute of using the App in question, that is, they mistakenly assumed that making HTTP request to the App's server is a good indicator of being a user.
Unfortunately this is the way that the Turkish government operates since many years, they first lock you in and you fight back for years until you prove your innocence. What's even worse is that you can't really get good compensation for it, you just suck it up and move on.
No one mentioned ratio, this is about 'injustice/abuse of tech' not volume. For comparison, even with the BS behavior in OP, Turkey is about 285/100,000 incarceration rate. The US of A is at 666/110,000, over double.
Another part that effects the current prison population is the length of sentences. One country might imprison less people but for much longer so the total population at one time might be very high.
I think it's a sign of horrible reasons. Dig into specifics and the US does unjustly keep people in prison on a regular basis.
We have huge issues from generations of politics over substance. It's only obvious that things are getting worse when you look at statistics because nobody has unbiased understanding of the entire system.
I think it’s reasonable to say that the highest incarceration rate is the worst rate, regardless of the reasons. Whether it’s due to an excessively harsh system, high rates of damaging criminality, whatever it is, they’re all bad whatever they are. Surely the ideal number of wrongly convicted people, and the ideal number of legitimately convicted people, and the ideal number of criminals that have escaped justice are all as low as possible?
Similarly for abortion and divorce. Even people who believe abortion should be an option would prefer there to be no need for it. Every one of them is a tragedy no matter which side of the debate you’re on. Same for Divorce.
I don't think I agree, and I think your examples do not support your point.
In the case of the number of legitimately convicted people, you seem to think zero is the ideal. In a sense, I think we can probably all agree. But what we really want is the number of people committing crimes to be zero. If it is not zero, then surely the ideal number of people legitimately convicted is equal to the number of people who have committed crimes. If it is not, then we are saying we want people who have committed crimes to walk free. So in this sense, "worst" is, in fact, a judgment.
But "everyone" agreeing doesn't even mean something isn't a judgment. There is no objective "worst". And in the case of divorce, you're wrong. Divorce has been hugely beneficial for women's equality, and my own personal divorce was definitely not a tragedy.
>best numbers show about 15% of prisoners are in with drug charges.
That's incorrect. The source says ~16% had, as their most serious offence, a drug charge.
So in reality more than 16% are serving time for drug crimes. It seems a bit disingenuous that the statistic is posed like that, especially when considering the cyclical nature of incarceration,"3 strikes" laws, and the cascading violence caused by drug laws.
The people who wrote the code, whatever else they may or not be guilty of and whether or not the code should be illegal or not, didn’t put anyone in jail.
Hello everyone. I am one of the victims of these Bylock cases and the tracking code or advertising links etc.
I had been trialled with 15 years heavy jail time and it was definite for me to get sentenced at least 6 years 3 months if this particular iframe code was not found in an old phone’s temporary files.
Actually after the iframe code was found by one of the official Computer Forensic expert who has been employed by one of the official Bylock cases public prosecutor, he and the public prosecutor had kept it secret from the public and tried to burrow it. Until some hero got screenshot of this official finding and leak it to the one of the bravest lawyer in Turkey whose name is Ali Aktaş, we had no concrete proof of tracking codes or advertising links.
I know you cannot believe that 100,000 people are getting sentenced solely based on reverse tracking of CGNAT logs (IP access request logs kept by ISPs). Yes you are right. I myself also couldn’t imagine such thing would happen in my beautiful country, hell even in banana republics I couldn’t imagine. But one morning I wake up and anti-terror forces break into my house to arrest me and seize all of my digital devices until an unknown time. It was truly shocking experience and I had no idea how could this happen to me while I have never used that stupid, amateur and lame communication android App Bylock. Yes Bylock was very insecure APP which allowed passwords as 0, did not hash (not even MD5 but there are some claims that the very late versions of the APP were hashing user passwords and put some password restrictions such as min 8 characters) user passwords, kept all of the private keys in database so the administrator could read all of the messages, did not use any cloud server, cloud service or implemented proxy system to prevent IP tracking and so on. All of these are written in the Turkish Intelligence (MIT) official technical Bylock report.
I was lucky that I was not at home that time so I had opportunity research and prepare defence. After few days research, I found out that the our brightest brains in the Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) decided to scan back all of the CGNAT logs and determine whoever had made any access request to the one of the IP address which are determined to belong Bylock server and put all of the citizens on Bylock users list who have access to these IPs. That is how ridiculously I was put on that list.
But even the preparation of list cries out loud the erroneous procedure that is being followed. First of all, our Information and Communication Technologies Authority (BTK) determines CGNAT start date after 5 months of the Bylock app release (release date is April 2014 but CGNAT scan start date is August 2014). So during this period of time whoever used Bylock APP or made access to IPs of Bylock server are not put on the list. Moreover, they found out that total 250,000 individuals have made at least 1 IP access request to the Bylock server IPs. Since 250,000 is too many to put in jail, they come up with this “fantastic” rule. They filter the list and remove citizens from the list whoever made only 1 day or 2 days access to the IPs. So they claim to the media that they have removed people who actually did not use the software. With this “so scientific” approach, the list of Bylock users reduces to 110,000 individuals from 250,000 individuals. So who has access to the IPs 1 or 2 days life continue and who has access 3 days like me, life’s turns in to hell.
Also according to the Europol, CGNAT system has up to 80% error rate when tracking individuals. It wouldn’t be a push to assume that Turkish ISPs also have very crappy CGNAT logging system. Proper CGNAT logging system with proper equipment and safety brings too much cost to the ISPs with 0 economic income.
So how are the prosecutions are made in Bylock cases? It is very simple. If you are on the list, you are 100% guilty and you get to sentenced jail time no matter what from the guiltiness of being one of the member of Gulenist armed terrorist organization. No one has been granted acquittal so far whose name is on the list. Yes solely based on CGNAT logs with 3 lines you get to sentenced. Only those names get erased from the list or determined that someone else actually used that GSM phone number or used that wifi are granted to acquittal. There is no way that you can prove you didn’t use Bylock at all or you didn’t use it for crime purposes.
The list even contains so many citizens who could not technically register Bylock software. Bylock was an application similar to WhatsApp. It did periodic polling to the server to get new messages or voice calls. Tuncay Beşikçi determined it to be approximately every 15 seconds from some of the real user CGNAT logs. Also it is determined to be at least 6 IP requests are necessary to complete registration to the application. While these are technical facts, there are about 20,000 people on the list whose total CGNAT logs are lower than 20. Can you imagine the bullshitness that is happening? There is no way to use such software with total 20 IP access logs but these people who is still left on the list is getting at least 6 years 3-month jail time. My CGNAT was lower than 10 and there was only maximum 2 IP access request in the 5 minutes period (we can assume someone would complete registration in 5 minutes). So the only evidence that is used against me was actually technically 100% proving that I did not register the Bylock APP ever! But what happened in the court? The judge didn’t give acquittal to me until my name was removed from the list. There are also many other victims who are already condemned to 6 years jail time with less than 10 lines of CGNAT logs and with only evidence as CGNAT logs.
So how did Bylock become this kind of tool of mass arrests? With total and constant poisoning of media. According to the media and so for the Court of Cassation in Turkey, Bylock was following kind of software
1: It had reference and activation feature from the canter of Terrorist organization from Pennsylvania.
2: No one could make IP access requests to the Bylock server except those who had successfully registered to the application and whose registration was approved by the central command center of Terrorist organization
It makes sense to arrest from CGNAT logs if the software was like this right? But both pre-acceptance are 100% wrong. Bylock was freely available software on Google Market and anyone who wanted it could download it from Google Market until 3 April 2016. Check out AppBrain Bylock page for more information. Also it didn’t have any kind of reference or activation system for registration or usage. Its usage system was very similar to Skype or Discord. What kind of system it was is properly documented in technical report of Turkish Intelligence (MIT). Moreover, no one can prevent who makes IP access request to any IP. Even your access to the particular IP is blocked by that IP’s owner, you request would fail but still it would be logged in CGNAT and CGNAT doesn’t log whether you have successfully connected to the IP, or duration of the connection or how many bytes you have transferred. At least all of these are not stored in Turkish ISPs CGNAT logs. In a Turkish ISP’s CGNAT there are only these data. Access request start date, access request destination IP, access request destination port, access request private port and private IP.
Also since you do not know the atmosphere in Turkey, you cannot correctly evaluate this article. I am sure that Tuncay Beşikçi also knows this was simply tracking code or advertising links etc. But if you tell that Bylock was advertised or used tracking codes like other Apps etc, no one would believe you and hell they would blame you and perhaps arrest you. So announcing that all these tracking codes advertising links were a clever plot of FETÖ (gulenist terrorist organization) was only way to rescue some of the people who had never used Bylock app.
This is the summary of the Bylock cases which still goes on. I am guessing that at least 60,000 people were put in jail at least 1 day due to Bylock since the beginning. There are still about 40,000 on the list waiting to be ambushed by Terror Forces until they learn they are on the Bylock list. I believe many of them even don’t know they are on the list since they didn’t use Bylock. Moreover, even though I have had full acquittal, all of my digital devices are still held seized.
Finally, I am very shocked that Bylock cases has almost 0 coverage in developed countries. They are totally blind to these cases.
Minus a couple of outliers, I think history has taught us that the fate of tyrants and oppressors is a long, healthy, and comfortable life of luxury and immense wealth. As a bonus, that fate often includes admiration and support from at least 50.1% of the oppressed population.
Please don't post generic political rhetoric to Hacker News. When the topic is politicized, as it is here, it's important for comments to stay grounded in the specifics of the article and not take off into garden-variety politics. That kind of discussion is unable to be substantive, which HN is for, and it leads to flamewars, which is HN is not for.
Just recently there was a article going around about how Google's search algorithm was at fault of keeping two sisters apart. And entire multi page write up on how our lives are at the whims of computers and algorithms. Then to be told that the one sister could not find the other because she changes her name online to protect her identity.
Now we have this. A big pile of junk trying to set the reader up to think this single line of code is responsible for the arrest of people. Again trying to instill fear of technology and computers into the reader.
I worry this type of article will sway the public's view of technology for the worst.
In the end it is people who are to blame for the problem described in this article. And it all centers around lack of understanding how these technologies work. Articled like this are just going to make that worse. Further more the entire thing is bogus because the notion that one can't have access to a given technology is entirely man made and has nothing to do with any "lines of code".