Watching the Chaos Computer Club talks makes me more optimistic about a cyberpunk future.
Because yeah, I’m sure companies will try to do all the horrible cyberpunk shit they can… But now I know for sure that there will be a bunch of brilliant dedicated hackers there to fight them at every turn.
These are the people who figured out how a company was putting GPS-bombs in their trains, who figured out how to steal the encryption keys from Nintendo consoles by glitching the power connector, and figured out that some other hackers were hacking their phones though a web page of a red triangle and the took apart the hack so hard that they discovered the hackers doxxed their own email addresses on accident in the hack.
So yeah I’m sure cyberpunk shit will happen, like your new roboeyes are adding advertisements to the world where there any… But I’m sure there’ll be a web page where some trans woman has figured out how to root your eyes and install adblock and sideload doom.
Your prosthetic legs got repo’d when you lost your job, but thankfully all those surplus Gen 2 legs can be reused now because someone figured out how to port Linux to them so they don’t run the now-discontinued firmware.
Yeah the government is rolling out that facial recognition system to every lamppost but we figured out how to crash them by wearing QR code makeup that reads “rm -rf /”
It’ll be weird and a pain but don’t worry. We’ll get through. Hackers will ensure it.
Cyberpunk: “in the future, the minute you’re late on a rent payment, your front door will lock you out!”
Actual hackers: oh my god, electronic locks are so insecure. Try tapping them with a rubber mallet here, or placing a magnet here. They’ve got a camera to spot you doing this? Bet you that camera is wifi. Jam the 2.4ghz spectrum or use a mac-spoofing attack to shove it off the network. And hey, no one trusts batteries to last forever: basically every electronic lock has a physical lock as backup… Do you know how easy it is to lock pick this shit? Here, this 5$ tool and 30 minutes practice and any front door lock is trivial to bypass. Hell, with this bumpkey you can open most of them with no experience and just a 5 second instruction: insert key, turn slightly, whack here hard. Done, it’s unlocked.
I haven’t paid rent on a place in a year and I can still use the app on my phone to unlock the building door. And to top it off: the leasing office had written notice I was terminating the lease.
Disregarding that, I’ve used the following things to defeat door locks powered by electronic badge / finger print readers:
1) Two plastic knives
2) An 8.5" x 11" piece of white printer paper
There’s more electronic locks now yeah, but they have not gotten BETTER in 20 years.