The breaching of Epik by the Anonymous hacker group has caused quite a stir in the political community, as Epik was responsible for hosting a number of conservative and far-right websites.
However, this daily dot report, if accurate (I’m not sitting through a four hour long video conference!), is really a bit of a jolt:
Epik CEO Rob Monster, who did not respond to requests for comment from the Daily Dot, would go on to hold a more than four hour long live video conference online to address the initial hack. The meeting would see Monster break out into prayer numerous times, make attempts to vanquish demons, and warn viewers that their hard drives could burst into flames due to “curses” placed on the hacked data.
Curses? Really?
A while back I talked about alternate models of reality, as in the competition between the dominant model of reason, and the alternate of, well, miracles. It appears to me that Rob Monster’s (RM) model of reality is not much like mine.
Why does this matter? Absent reports of hard drives magically bursting into flames, not only are the models divergent, it’s also clear that he and his team, because they do not have the same depth of understanding of reality as I prefer to have in people with whom I work. Rather than take security seriously, RM and his team place curses on data (pre- or post- hack … I have to ask, I really do). Hey, in their minds they may think they’re just as serious, or even more so, than I, but there’s an objective metric for this, isn’t there?
Objective reality.
Do the hard drives burst into flame when someone tries to illicitly use the data? Not that I’ve heard. Does proactive security work? Not only does my common-sense suggest it will, but so does the experience of security professionals. Not that it’s easy to do – it’s really not that easy – but it works.
So if I had the opportunity to use a service provided by RM and his team, even at a large discount, I would decline the opportunity. Alternate models of reality not only endanger lives, but also provide services inferior to that of those services based on other models of reality.
And social evolution will – eventually – remove or modify those inferior models.
