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https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/14/silly_police_infosec_parental_advice_poster/
The UK's National Crime Agency has publicly distanced itself from a poster urging parents to call police if their child has installed Kali Linux, Tor or – brace yourself – Discord.
Issued by the West Midlands Regional Organised Crime Unit (WMROCU) via local area councils, the poster in question lists a slack handful of common infosec tools – as well as some that clearly have nothing to do with computer security.
Should your child install Kali Linux, virtual machines (the image on the poster looks like Virtualbox) or internet privacy tool Tor, West Midlands Police wants to know immediately. And if – Heaven forfend – your sprog installs Metasploit to learn how to secure code, uses free chat service for gamers Discord, or gets a Wi-Fi Pineapple for research, you may as well report straight to your nearest prison and abandon your tainted offspring forever.
Here is a link to the poster in question.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 15 2020, @08:15PM
But wait, instead of emotionally reacting let's just see where would it lead us and should anything be done with it. Such meme "hacking==bad" is conveyed all over again recently over the media. It's not about cracking, it's not even computer-related hacking, it's about all hacking, all tings around. Like "just follow these stupid and nonsense orders and get a cookie, citizen".
Let's consider cars. In some countries even a decade ago I could build my own car, ride it here and there with inspection, pass the tests that it won't fall apart and get a license/registration document. I could modify my own car too. Now cars are "locked" - you cannot modify them because you would violate some laws, and rolling with DIY cars on "official" roads leads driver to jail. In many cars it is forbidden to even try to understand how the machine operates!
The same thing is going with computers and the Internet now. The Internet is now under a complete control of a few centralized companies, and let's not delude ourselves that users can do something which is not allowed by these companies - it is not possible as these companies have a network effect on their side. This is now a new TV, but with option to see what consumers do so they won't switch channel when the ads start. To visualize it better, the Internet started as a "sandbox" game under a rudimentary governing, and now it's a complete linear thing dependent on a few entities who wants to maximize their gains on it while keeping users in illusion that's still the "sandbox". While in the first variant hacking is the driving force giving inventions and making systems better, in the second it has the opposite effect - especially if it's done the "open source" way so the governing kamarilla would not get their slice. Thus the companies want their cattle to follow the line and not try to make shortcuts or increase effectiveness without paying them.
People never wanted Internet neutrality. I asked lots of them, even these who started first BBS relays and the Internet nodes in my country, and they all wanted no Internet neutrality. It was only needed to ask the proper question like "Would you like website x not to be included in your monthly transfer in mobile Internet?". A similar way people wanted to backdoor their computers and take the control from them by W3C's EME. However, there is a minority of people who do not want and they may even try to build some hardware. So push the "hacking==bad" all time! Until people agree to ban all hardware modifications!
Modifying hardware (and software) would be quickly considered illegal and every hardware already has means to detect it in form of unique identifiers, supervisors like "ME" (Intel confessed it, but not directly - by censoring Purism's attempts to document it) and backdoor systems like "UEFI". Or in means of software reporting themselves from all over the world with spyi... pardon, update checking mechanisms.
So should we really do anything with it? Or abandon messing with systems in favor of corporate feeding plants? It looks like it's a pure consequence of what Internet users want - a closed, government-cared and not our network, hardware and services. That's what is expected by users: Modifications should never be made as this would make corporation gains lower. A few manipulations and we'll even feel guilty for it!