Talk:1808: Hacking

Some explanations for title text:

• a list of millions of prime factors: trivial to produce and useless without knowing the problem they're from
• a 0-day Tamagotchi exploit: sounds not very useful, unless modern Tamagotchis have internet connection
• and a technique for getting gcc and bash to execute arbitrary code: unlike other applications, these two programs (especially when used together) are specifically created to let user execute arbitrary code 141.101.80.106 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

-- Internet connected tamagotchis you say? http://spritesmods.com/?art=tamasingularity -- 141.101.76.202 06:42, 8 March 2017 (UTC) --

Expanded the details; I know Tamagotchi hacking is a thing, but I'll leave it to someone who actually knows about it to decide whether it's worth mentioning in the page. Also, "a list of millions of prime factors" could just as well be called "a list of millions of prime numbers", which sounds much less important, but I couldn't think of a brief way to mention that. 162.158.78.4 09:53, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

The television-show "Zondag met Lubach" (Sunday with Lubach) has prior to the elections in the Netherlands launched the Kamergotchi-app. In this app you have to cuddle and feed your partyleader to keep him/her alive. The party leader is randomly chosen. In the last episode of the show the results from the app were compared with the polls. Surely the CIA and the Russians would like to hack this Tamagotchi-clone. Vince 10:27, 8 March 2017 (UTC) 141.101.105.174 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

- I think the joke regarding the "millions or prime factors" is that "millions" sounds like a lot, but it is in fact a very small set that can be easily computed, and even more easily downloaded. It is also useless for cracking any modern encryption. Bigprimes.net has a downloadable list of the first 1.4 billion primes; the 1.4 billionth prime (32416190071) is a 40-bit number, which is only useful for factoring 80-bit products at best. The CIA would likely need (and probably do have) at least a trillion primes pre-computed. Sysin (talk) 10:53, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Say, this was the first header on the WSJ today! That's right, Jacky720 just signed this (talk | contribs) 10:54, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

I think the 0 day tamagotchi exploit might be a pun on 0 day exploits as explained above and the fact that tamigotchis use an ingame time mechanic. So a 0 day tamigotchi exploit might allow you to do something special with or to your tamigotchi while it is still and egg. 172.68.2.28 12:56, 8 March 2017 (UTC)-

I think you're actually allowed to have an e-mail address like john dot [email protected] - but a lot of programs will be greatly confused by it. That is not really a comment on the comic. Also, I once read someone's research which reported that spam list users simply delete obfuscated addresses, and particularly if "spam" appears in the address; for them, if not for the TLAs, to do more is pointless. So by all means set your real address to [email protected]. Although you may have to change your names and sex. Robert Carnegie [email protected]!:-) 141.101.107.108 15:47, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

A list of one prime from each of the million most important RSA keys could accurately, if understatedly, be described as "a list of a million prime factors". If people realize what it is it would break the web. So it depends on which primes: the first million, meh; a million random primes; yawn; a million carefully chosen primes, yowza! The last two would not be obviously different unless you did some fairly minimal work. A prime the CIA classifies could be interesting. Or they could be messing with us.--162.158.62.21 15:52, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

I can't resist pointing out that anything that has a speaker also has a microphone. So a network connected tamagotchi, which is presumably capable of playing sounds, could also be used as a bug, despite being a "low-end device" ☺ 162.158.78.130 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I don't think you can turn a speaker into a microphone using only software, you have to reconnect wires. Also the sound card must already have hardware for audio input. --162.158.92.34 14:59, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

If the gcc/bash thing was actually a reference to ShellShock or some other real problem, then its inclusion wouldn't be funny... 162.158.74.51 19:18, 8 March 2017 (UTC)