[Noisebridge-discuss] win scratch-off lotteries: an easier, more reliable way

[Sai]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 06:07, Patrick Keys <citizenkeys at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dumpster-diving is a very well-recognized form of hacking.

I disagree. It's a recognized form of information gathering, which in
turn might be part of a hack (like this one).

Diving just to find stuff you can sell? That's being a resourceful
homeless person, sure. It's not hacking, though, any more than
dumpster-diving for food is.

> Also, any form of gaming a system for personal benefit, whether its finding
> the algorithm for lottery tickets or where to score free winning tickets,
> generally seems to qualify as hacking.

Um, actually, no. We're not trying to do it for personal benefit, and
in fact I would strongly object to that.

The hacking part is trying to figure out how/if the system is broken,
period, neutral to outcomes.

What one does with that knowledge is a moral decision. I'm only
willing to participate in this with people who agree that the correct
course of action if a flaw is discovered is responsible disclosure -
test to be sure it's a real flaw, tell the affected vendors/gov'ts,
give them 30 days to fix, tell the world.

You seem to have an odd conception of what "hacking" is, from my POV.

However, Griffin has a good point in that diving may be useful for
finding lots of empties,, which are in turn data that could be fed in
for analysis.

FWIW I also am inclined to guess that he's right that any partial
information exposure to make a better "hook" is quite probably done in
a way that leaks entropy. It's hard to do that kind of working within
constraints well - hard enough that it's pretty much the foundation of
an entire genre of puzzles (a popular one: sudoku).

- Sai