Author: Coffee

What Makes A Hacker Happy

Reading Time: 11 minutes

What Makes A Hacker Happy

I’ve written about hackers (crackers) in the past, but thought it was time to do it again.

As always, I find myself having to clear the air about what is a “hacker” and what is a “cracker.” (https://verygood.coffee/hacker-vs-cracker-whats-the-difference/)

It seems that on a daily basis, we hear the term “hacker” from the talking heads in the major media outlets, always squawking about it, but for the life of anyone that knows, it just makes us shake our heads in disbelief about the dumming-down of society.

A Hacker:

Hacking Hardware

Is someone that “hacks,” as in “cuts” traces on a circuit board to get the psychical hardware to do something that is out of the normal operating parameters that the design engineers had envisioned.

A Cracker:

Is someone that attempts to break computer code or tunnel through other systems in order to attempt to break into another system by looking for vulnerabilities that the software developers did not anticipate, or were rushed to produce code on a tight schedule, so the final code produced was sloppy.

For this writing though, we’re going to stick with the term “hacker” just to make everyone that has problems grasping the concept feel at ease.

Hacking is a diverse and often misunderstood activity, which has the potential to be used for both ethical and malicious purposes. Those who engage in hacking activities, known as hackers, often view themselves as taking on the role of an independent researcher, with the aim of uncovering potential security flaws or weaknesses in a network or system.

As such, hacking can range from helping to improve the security and efficiency of a system, to using the data within it to unlawfully obtain financial or personal information. For hackers to feel that their activities are ethical and to be truly satisfied with their work, there are certain criteria which must be met.

The first, and arguably most important, consideration is the motivations behind their actions. A hacker should always strive to act in the best interests of the system; to identify and repair existing security vulnerabilities and to improve the overall security and reliability of the network. Any actions taken for personal gain, or to maliciously damage or delete data, should be avoided.

Secondly, the hacker should be open and honest about their activities, and never attempt to hide their actions; this is important to maintain trust in the hacker community and to ensure that the system owner is aware of any potential security issues which have been identified.

Finally, it is important to understand the potential legal implications of any activity which could be deemed illegal, and to always stay within the confines of the law. This includes understanding the laws of the jurisdictions in which the hacker is working, and whether the system owner has given permission for the activity to take place. Hackers who meet these criteria are likely to find that they can truly be happy and satisfied with their work, having acted ethically and responsibly with the potential to make a real difference in improving the security of networks and systems.

They are also likely to gain the respect of their peers and the wider community, as well as a sense of purpose. As such, hackers should always strive to act ethically, for both their own satisfaction and the benefit of their work.

Technology and happiness have long been intertwined, and as technology advances, our ability to be content with our lives continues to grow. With each new gadget that hits the market, hackers find new ways to express their creativity, enhancing the quality of their lives and those around them.

How new gadgets are helping hackers smile and stay satisfied. The origin of hacking dates back to the 1960’s, when the first computers were being developed. Since then, hackers have been finding creative ways to use technology to solve problems, build relationships and improve their lives.

Today, hackers are presented with an ever-growing array of tools and technologies to work with, giving them access to a world of potential. From virtual reality to artificial intelligence, hackers now have the power to create powerful and engaging experiences that have never been seen before.

The arrival of new gadgets gives hackers an opportunity to express their creativity and make their dreams a reality. Whether they are developing an app, creating a website, or programming a robot, hackers can find the tools they need to get the job done. New technology also provides an avenue for hackers to connect with like-minded individuals, allowing them to share ideas and collaborate on projects.

The latest technology gives hackers an unprecedented level of control over their environment. Gadgets such as virtual reality headsets can allow hackers to explore new worlds, while connected home devices can improve the comfort and convenience of their living spaces. With the help of technology, hackers can make their lives more efficient, and enjoyable.

At its core, hacking is about creativity and problem solving. By giving hackers access to the latest technology, manufacturers are giving hackers the tools they need to be creative and stay satisfied. Through the combination of creativity, technology, and determination, hackers are able to create amazing experiences that make them and those around them smile.

The art of problem-solving can be exceptionally rewarding and stimulating for anyone, from art projects to building slot cars, hence, breaking into a networks should feel somewhat the same, while viewed as challenging and sometimes illegal, is an activity that can provide immense satisfaction and joy.

When tackling a problem, the first step is to determine what is actually trying to be accomplished. Knowing what needs to be done will help outline a plan of attack, which should include the tools and techniques that will be used to achieve the desired result. Careful planning will help in the evaluation of the expected outcome and determine the most efficient and effective way to accomplish the goal.

Once the goal and plan are established, the next step is to start attacking the problem. This will involve using the methods outlined in the plan of attack. It will also involve troubleshooting and problem-solving to determine the best solutions to any issues that arise. As each stage is completed, it will become easier to determine if the desired result is being achieved.

Finally, once the goal has been accomplished, the joy of problem-solving can be experienced. Breaking into networks can be – more often times, it’s viewed as a job and not as an exhilarating experience – for those who have the skill and knowledge to complete the task.

It can also be a sense of immense satisfaction in knowing that the problem has been solved. Whether the goal is to gain access to a network, to learn new techniques, or to simply enjoy the challenge of problem-solving, the art of problem-solving can be immensely rewarding.

Hackers are a unique breed of individuals who derive their thrills and satisfaction from the challenge of breaking into a computer system’s security. While the motivations and methods of hackers may vary, the underlying source of their pleasure is the same: the challenge of outsmarting an entire system. Psychologically, it is the same mentality as any common criminal believing that they are smarter than someone else.

Hacking is a demanding process that requires an intimate knowledge of computers, networks, cryptography, IP addressing schemes and software. It is the combination of these skills that allows a hacker to gain access to a system. The hacker must identify the vulnerabilities of the system, find the correct way to exploit them, and then gain access to the system’s data and resources.

One of the major motivations for hackers is the challenge of outsmarting the system. Hackers enjoy the challenge of finding a way to break into a system and gain access to its resources and data. The thrill of the hunt is something that hackers find stimulating and satisfying. Another motivation for hackers is the consequences of their success. Many hackers view a successful hack as a form of recognition – look at me – for their skills and ingenuity. They take pride in exposing the vulnerability of a system and in being one of the few people to possess the knowledge and skills to successfully break into a system.

Finally, some hackers enjoy the challenge of staying one step ahead of the security measures put in place by the system’s administrators. Many hackers relish the challenge of figuring out the latest security measure and then figuring out how to exploit it. This “cat and mouse” game is another source of satisfaction for many hackers.

In keeping it short, one of the most motivational reasons a hacker does what they do is because they have been outcast by society.

For this example, we’ll use the name Maksim. Suppose Maksim goes to work for an IT company, but feels he is treated poorly. Is it the company or is it Maksim that is to blame. Often times, it’s the employee that is to blame. As everyone knows, when you are hired to work at a company, you are hired to do a specific task the way the company has outlined it to be done by you and not by your daydreaming imagination.

This rejection has left Maksim feeling disenfranchised and feeling like he needs to avenge his now previous employer.

This happens more times that most realize and is one of the many reasons – beside the lure of large ransom payouts – why a person gets involved with hacking.

There’s just one problem. Network – or any company for that matter – shareholders do not like headaches, neither do law enforcement.

Some hackers feel that they are impervious by where they live and feel that they will never have to face a courtroom.

It’s a life changing shock for them when they do.

Human Trafficking – The Hush Hush

Reading Time: 14 minutes

After consulting with the team about this, and it being a subject that is out of the norm for us to write about, we decided to dive into an otherwise controversial subject.

Human trafficking is as old as the ages itself, meaning that it has been around since the beginning of time, and yet to this day, continues at a rampant pace that is astounding for anyone that has read about it in anyway or in any of the headlines.

It is estimated that over a billion people have been trafficked, with the global average income from human trafficking exceeding far north of $200 billion per year.

Unfortunately, 94% of the cases involving human trafficking are never brought to light. That is what this writing hopes to bring forth; why is it not in the news on a daily basis?

One might think “well I saw the news about Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell – to which the “client list” has yet to be revealed – ex-USA gymnastics coach John Geddert, as well as Canadian clothing designer Peter Nygard.”

Epstein died in a prison by hanging in a cell that had nothing for him to hang himself with, Maxwell is currently serving a 20 year sentence in FCI Tallahassee, Geddert committed suicide in 2021 in Detroit and Nygard has been in custody since December of 2020 where he faces a number of charges in Canada as well as in the US and has agreed to be extradited, if he makes it that long as he is 81 years old.

In the grand scheme of this and all such things life, that is merely a drop in the bucket of a vast world-wide problem that persist by the thousands on a daily basis.

In Southeast Asia and the Middle East, it is an astounding problem that authorities combat on a daily basis – by all means, this does not exclude the USA – from traffickers that are looking for easy prey.

The most common way traffickers are able to lure-in their victims is social media. Facebook alone has is one of the highest recruiting rates of all of them. Many times, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been brought before the US Congress to answer the question of WTF! and why is this going on, on your network?

At one point, it became so absurd that Apple’s CEO Tim Cook threatened to remove and disable the Facebook app over the lack of care and/or response from Zuckerberg.

So why exactly is it so easy to lure the unsuspecting victims and what happens to the ones that make it to their meeting place?

The answer is also as old as time itself. Humans are humans.

In countries that have low wages and living conditions, it’s easy to figure out that the number one reason is money.

In Southeast Asia, there is also the distinction that separates it from most of the western countries’ culture. In Southeast Asia, children grow up in households that usually consist of 3-4 siblings. Those siblings are not only very thankful for everything that their parents have done to make their lives as best as possible, but they are born into a life of “I must show my parents my worth,” as well as “I must give back to my parents.”

This thought process produces a high level of social stress amongst their peers as well as self inflicted stress. That kind of stress creates large amounts of depression, coupled with the feeling of being worthless while dealing with the self inflicted pressure of wanting to show the family that you are capable.

All of this combined creates a huge vulnerability of the victim.

In the USA, a vast majority of trafficked victims are recruited, drugged and set out on the street as sex slaves. The ten US states with the highest level of trafficked victims are:

Mississippi – 6.32 per 100k
Nevada – 5.77 per 100k
District of Columbia – 5.73 per 100k
Missouri – 4.30 per 100k
Nebraska – 3.60 per 100k
California – 3.32 per 100k
Florida – 3.30 per 100k
Arkansas – 3.26 per 100k
Texas – 3.25 per 100k
Oregon – 3.19 per 100k

In Southeast Asia, the victims are recruited to work in scam call centers, (boiler rooms as they used to called) Chinese owned casinos, some are made sex slaves or house keepers or are trafficked even further to the middle east as house keepers/sex slaves. Sadly, a lot of them are found chopped-up in old freezers. Not a pleasant way to go.

So how is it so easy for these traffickers to get their victims to be where they want them to be?

Despite the constant capturing of intended victims at airports as they attempt to leave their home country with fake and/or altered documents that the traffickers give to them – usually right out front of the airport, there are still vast amounts of landscape and not enough boarder patrol personnel to cover that landscape.

Geography has helped Thailand and Vietnam compete for a large share of investment flowing out of China. But it has also thrown a wrench in their plans as trafficking persists along Southeast Asia’s porous borders, especially in their shared neighbor Cambodia.

In its latest Trafficking in Persons report, the US State Department downgraded Vietnam and Cambodia to its bottom tier and put Indonesia on a watch list. Governments fearful of losing US investment and economic aid are typically motivated to aim for the first or second tiers. At risk of falling into the third tier, Thailand spent the past year improving agency coordination and prosecuting officials complicit in human trafficking.

“Whenever the US talks about this, there will be feedback to the Thai government and they want to work harder,” said Jaruwat Jinmonca, vice president of Immanuel Foundation, an anti-trafficking NGO based in Chiang Mai. “If the ranking’s too low, the government will speed up their work.”

While this is a noble thought, what about when the ranking is high? Why wait till your ranking tanks to do something about it. This is the other problem that the vulnerable face as they enter into a life of hell that they know nothing about till it’s to late, finding themselves in the thick of things.

So how does a trafficked victim get out of the mess that they got themselves into? The answer in simple terms is: It’s not pretty.

I’ve read thousands of recounts from trafficked victims that have made their way home and it usually happens from paying off their captors and running like hell till they can get help from the police or an embassy. Ging, 26, borrowed money to pay her way out of a trafficked labor camp in Poipet, Cambodia.

“The law in each country is different,” said Surachate Hakparn, assistant commissioner in charge of anti-trafficking for the Royal Thai Police. “We can help people who were trafficked into Thailand more easily than getting Thais back from overseas.”

As corporate interest in environmental, social and governance issues grows, developed countries have been monitoring human rights violations. In the US, a law that allows for import injunctions on products made with forced labor has been in effect since 2016. The European Union is expected to announce a similar ban this year.

“Business and human rights issues are recognized as a common challenge among developed countries,” said Susumu Tanaka, senior economist and leader of the business and human rights unit of the Japan External Trade Organization. As long as cases of human trafficking continue to exist, “those countries will have to consider the possibility of being left out of the global supply chain.”

In Thailand, trafficking of migrants from Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia is rampant in sectors such as agriculture, food processing, fishing, tourism and entertainment. A major step forward was enforcing rules against forced labor as anti-trafficking laws. Prosecutions and convictions slowed last year, which police attribute to the COVID-19 pandemic, but investigations increased from 133 in 2020 to 188 in 2021, and are expected to double this year.

Surachate’s division received a 73 million-baht ($2 million) budget this fiscal year to address migrant labor and human trafficking. This was part of the Royal Thai Police’s 32.8 billion baht annual budget, and allocations for anti-trafficking efforts to other agencies.

In downgrading Vietnam in the TIP report, the US said the country didn’t do enough to identify and help victims, while convictions of traffickers declined for five straight years. The report said some officials allegedly facilitated forced labor in Saudi Arabia, while others allegedly harassed accusers in efforts to silence them.

Vietnam said the report “contained certain inaccurate information that has not fully reflected its increased efforts,” including the enforcement of a law on guest workers, protecting children online and cooperating internationally on safe migration.

“Vietnam has been following with keen attention the situation pertaining to domestic and cross-border human trafficking, so as to come up with suitable countermeasures,” said Le Thi Thu Hang, a foreign ministry spokeswoman.

Remember Ging from earlier? The one that paid her way out. She shows us a job posting in a Facebook page run by traffickers. The page has more than 18,000 followers.

Victims have reported that they witnessed patrols on both sides of the Thai-Cambodian border accepting bribes from traffickers for safe passage. Syndicate bosses would brag to victims about how much they paid the police for each head, the victims said.

Corruption also helps explain the situation in Sihanoukville, Cambodia which has a special economic zone, in which around 100 casinos and numerous property developments are financed and operated by Chinese businessmen. Victims could easily find where they were held on a map. Large compounds with high walls and barbed wire, containing dormitories and casinos. These are often in or near urban centers, as they require high-speed internet to conduct financial scams and traffic more people.

It should be noted that it is illegal for a Cambodian citizen to gamble at a casinos, while it is legal for foreigners to gamble, as well, most, if not all of the casinos have large floor space dedicated to on-line gambling.

“In the past, trafficking was done person to person. But online, you can trick a hundred people at the same time,” said Surachate. Cambodia National Police spokesman Chhay Kim Khoeun said in December that the force is committed to its crackdown on groups kidnapping workers.

In Vietnam, the ads beckoning people to work overseas are as diverse as the destination countries, from Facebook posts and handwritten posters near the woods of Dalat touting Kuwait to printed banners for Japan on a narrow road outside Hanoi.

Some that have chanced it end up being tricked into slave labor. Nam Thuy says it was a steamed bun laced with sedatives that did him in.

In May, facing an avalanche of medical bills, he decided on a last resort. Selling an organ. Thuy told us that he jumped into a vehicle with strangers thinking they’d broker the procedure. On the drive, he ate the bun, only to wake up hours later on the road to Cambodia, where he remained for months.

He and dozens of other Vietnamese were forced to adopt fake online identities to con people, he said. With a target of about $4,000, he used chats to get people to invest in fraudulent get-rich-quick schemes.

“If you didn’t meet the target, they shocked you, beat you or let you starve,” he said.

More people became vulnerable to exploitation during the pandemic and have been trafficked to a greater variety of places, but “the root cause is still poverty,” said Nguyen Tra My, an anti-trafficking officer at Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation, which rescues Vietnamese trapped in China. “The trafficking landscape changed,” she said.

Namtip, the 15-year-old, thought she was signing up for a summer job between school terms to help her grandmother with expenses. It didn’t work out that way in the end.

Sua, who was desperate for work after losing his job at a bank during the height of the pandemic, was trafficked to a casino in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. “The amount of money they were offering should have been a red flag,” he said. “It was too much.”

Sua now works with the Pavena Foundation for Children and Women, a nonprofit group for trafficked and abused women and children. Part of his work is encouraging victims to provide testimony to the police as most fear being charged for illegal acts committed forcibly, or for crossing borders illegally.

“If any country is weak on trafficking, we need to have some kind of sanction,” said Pavena Hongsakul, a former Thai politician who runs her eponymous foundation.

In the US, there are dozens of foundations that are supposed to be there for trafficking victims, but in reality, almost all of them are non-profit 501(c)(3) corporations. This brings on another problem that is rarely, if ever talked about. The profit of a non-profit. As anyone knows, non-profits are big business, with the CEO’s of those non-profits making insane amounts of money. Case in point would be Goodwill. The CEO received total compensation of $1,188,733.00

So when will this all end?

Not likely ever.

As long as humans have emotions and there is money involved, you can best bet that human trafficking will continue at a pace that far exceeds the amount of people needed to stop it.

Can You Plan A Vacation For Me?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

As my readers know, I like to play with technology to find out what it can and cannot do.

With the advent of ChatGPT and other AI formations, I find it interesting to have discussions with them – or would it be “it” – to get an idea of what they were taught or what is it that they think is the information that they need in order to survive the boardroom axe.

As most know by now, AI is just a giant collection of information that has been scrapped from web sites, search engines, etc.

Note to webmasters: Next time you hear or someone tells you that you have pilferage information on your site, remind them that they have been doing the same for more years than you have and that it would be wise for them to just shut up.

In today’s line of thought, instead of going to a travel agency website to plan/book a vacation, I though I would turn to AI to see if it could actually plan a vacation for me, unfortunately, the result was unassuming at best and more along the lines of just a waste of time.

So my question to “the machine” this time was “ChatGPT Can You Plan A Vacation For Me?”

As you can see, the response was more like an out of touch company trying to sell me something that I would have no interest in.

ChatGPT is an innovative new technology that can help you plan your next vacation. It is a chatbot powered by natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) that can provide personalized travel recommendations based on your conversation.

ChatGPT acts as a virtual travel agent, engaging in a conversation with you about your upcoming vacation. By asking questions about destinations, activities, and budget, it can provide tailored advice and suggestions for where to go and what to do. It can even suggest accommodations and restaurants based on the answers you provide.

ChatGPT is designed to make the planning process quicker and easier. It can save you time by quickly filtering through available travel options and helping you narrow down your choices.

Through its natural language understanding, it can also make more accurate suggestions than a standard search engine. All you have to do is start a conversation with it by telling it your destination, type of vacation, and budget. From there, it can provide personalized recommendations and advice based on what you tell it. ChatGPT can help you plan your next vacation with confidence.

With its intuitive conversation interface and personalized recommendations, you can quickly find the best options for your budget and needs. Plus, its AI-backed technology ensures that you always get the best advice and recommendations for your next trip.