In this hypothetical scenario you have a zero day exploit that allows you to install or run some arbitrary code on essentially every desktop and phone/tablet (it is current year after all) out there on the internet (or just behind a LAN). As it is not 1990 any more this "malware" is not going to display a silly message, it is not going to brick the computer and for the sake of this it is not going to harvest data. You are however not just going to silently patch the hole or disclose it responsibly. We have seen things of broadly similar scope in the past ( http://census2012.sourceforge.net/paper.html ) but hopefully it is not too out there for a discussion -- we can have the nanotech is a thing and everybody in the world gets a copy of my mind one later.
For those not familiar with chaotic good then the tabletop RPG dungeons and dragons has an alignment system but it is used as a framing device outside it a lot these days. In this case chaotic good is beings that seek to improve things (though we are not above having some fun here) but don't necessarily care to do it within the strict confines of the law, though in computer hacker parlance then grey hat might be a better term.
For the sake of this even if everybody had a supercomputer (or three) you are never going to factor every number for the purpose of primes or keys on a modern device so no key brute forcing keys as it won't work in anything like a reasonable timeframe. By similar token consider it a fairly normal patch and whatnot routine so you have about 30 days until major fixes pour out and take effect, though maybe a bit faster if you do something really fun. Because magic then corporate and states secrets I will downplay here but do it if you must -- you have a chance to address everybody in the world to some extent and you choose to waste it on that?
Also as you do it then you can get ahead of the curve with a nice report/analysis of what has been done which might convince people to leave your changes active if they are beneficial and don't carry the I like the effects but as my machine was potentially messed with... mystery problem.
I am dreadfully uninspired right now so I would probably install a nicely tweaked adblock on everything. Make it fairly invisible too, but hopefully not so invisible that it is detectable (you can't do a worldwide uninstall of just if you are going to take adblock from people that installed it legitimately and you can't otherwise tell). If necessary a worldwide changeover to firefox or something could also be part of that. Some would wonder how much the online economy would tank as part of this but I would count this under no great loss when all is said and done.
Some other possibilities I cooked up that some others might care to expand and run with, or jog some ideas in their mind.
Maybe you are a person of taste. It would not be too hard to simultaneously broadcast a song or three in a worldwide disco, though time zones might be an issue. Sitting here I am struggling to narrow down the song choice (that might have to be its own thread actually). Alternatively everybody in the world might want to see some porn simulcast.
If the whole world would not appreciate a disco maybe the whole world could be a disco -- simultaneous pictures, audio and maybe location might tip over into evil but an option in this.
While you are not going to factor most keys in time and mining bitcoins or the like would be too evil/black hat for our purposes here you do still have a beowulf cluster the likes of which the world has never seen before. Something good could be done with that. Do you have any maths/science/medicine that such a computer resource would likely do well at? Alternatively would such an amount of resources be able to recreate something else that is currently highly expensive but would now be free?
A popular black hat attack on gambling websites is to note that unless they have 100% uptime they lose money and thus a "pay us or that little ddos earlier today will only be the start of it". A DDOS might be a bit extreme but you could probably bring several social media companies to their knees (personally I would go for a make it unusable rather than make it offline -- is down is one thing but slow as sin but still possibly get something is far better). Would you rid the world of the facebook and twitter viruses for 30 days and see what kind of recovery rates get made?
By similar token the idea that people are moving away from user run servers in chat programs to corporation level closed source affairs terrifies me. Such a hack if executed properly could force something of a changeover to something other than nonsense like discord, skype and whatsapp. On a lesser scale I would disable read receipts/"is currently replying" everywhere I could just to see what happened as a result
Would you take out the likes of Steam somehow? Paypal? Amazon? Youtube? Because magic then redirecting youtube to bitchute would not ddos bitchute per se (or it would be done randomly enough at small levels)... so is there a redirect you would do like that?
If corporations are not your thing then there could be some serious damage done to nation states of dubious merit -- that is a serious mesh network combined with something like TOR if you wanted it to be. Find some choice documents in relevant languages about human rights, abuses of power and whatever else (organised religions might get a little knock in this) and stuff will go down as a result of ignorance and surveillance capabilities decreasing.
Maybe everybody gets a copy of libreoffice? Or flip it on its head and give everybody a pirated version of MS office?
OS level changeovers of some form?
Some might install anti virus on every machine and do a bit of a cleanup to in turn rid the world of a botnet or three.
Do you have any simplified applications that would be better served by swapping to full fat? If nobody used a webmail frontend any more an instead full fat email client?
The simultaneous worldwide disco would be cool but at the same time you could convincingly distribute a decent collection of books, video, music, games/ROMs and such to basically everybody.
As phones are part of this then you could possibly be the hero that if not eliminates then seriously seriously reduces vertical video syndrome.
I am not sure what kind of fun you would be able to have with password security but you could try to ensure different passwords were used for different sites.
Plenty of options for such things out there, this is just a few.
What then do you do? You can do more than one if you want but trying to pick what to do rather than "all of the above" or "here are my problems with computing right now, sort them all"
For those not familiar with chaotic good then the tabletop RPG dungeons and dragons has an alignment system but it is used as a framing device outside it a lot these days. In this case chaotic good is beings that seek to improve things (though we are not above having some fun here) but don't necessarily care to do it within the strict confines of the law, though in computer hacker parlance then grey hat might be a better term.
For the sake of this even if everybody had a supercomputer (or three) you are never going to factor every number for the purpose of primes or keys on a modern device so no key brute forcing keys as it won't work in anything like a reasonable timeframe. By similar token consider it a fairly normal patch and whatnot routine so you have about 30 days until major fixes pour out and take effect, though maybe a bit faster if you do something really fun. Because magic then corporate and states secrets I will downplay here but do it if you must -- you have a chance to address everybody in the world to some extent and you choose to waste it on that?
Also as you do it then you can get ahead of the curve with a nice report/analysis of what has been done which might convince people to leave your changes active if they are beneficial and don't carry the I like the effects but as my machine was potentially messed with... mystery problem.
I am dreadfully uninspired right now so I would probably install a nicely tweaked adblock on everything. Make it fairly invisible too, but hopefully not so invisible that it is detectable (you can't do a worldwide uninstall of just if you are going to take adblock from people that installed it legitimately and you can't otherwise tell). If necessary a worldwide changeover to firefox or something could also be part of that. Some would wonder how much the online economy would tank as part of this but I would count this under no great loss when all is said and done.
Some other possibilities I cooked up that some others might care to expand and run with, or jog some ideas in their mind.
Maybe you are a person of taste. It would not be too hard to simultaneously broadcast a song or three in a worldwide disco, though time zones might be an issue. Sitting here I am struggling to narrow down the song choice (that might have to be its own thread actually). Alternatively everybody in the world might want to see some porn simulcast.
If the whole world would not appreciate a disco maybe the whole world could be a disco -- simultaneous pictures, audio and maybe location might tip over into evil but an option in this.
While you are not going to factor most keys in time and mining bitcoins or the like would be too evil/black hat for our purposes here you do still have a beowulf cluster the likes of which the world has never seen before. Something good could be done with that. Do you have any maths/science/medicine that such a computer resource would likely do well at? Alternatively would such an amount of resources be able to recreate something else that is currently highly expensive but would now be free?
A popular black hat attack on gambling websites is to note that unless they have 100% uptime they lose money and thus a "pay us or that little ddos earlier today will only be the start of it". A DDOS might be a bit extreme but you could probably bring several social media companies to their knees (personally I would go for a make it unusable rather than make it offline -- is down is one thing but slow as sin but still possibly get something is far better). Would you rid the world of the facebook and twitter viruses for 30 days and see what kind of recovery rates get made?
By similar token the idea that people are moving away from user run servers in chat programs to corporation level closed source affairs terrifies me. Such a hack if executed properly could force something of a changeover to something other than nonsense like discord, skype and whatsapp. On a lesser scale I would disable read receipts/"is currently replying" everywhere I could just to see what happened as a result
Would you take out the likes of Steam somehow? Paypal? Amazon? Youtube? Because magic then redirecting youtube to bitchute would not ddos bitchute per se (or it would be done randomly enough at small levels)... so is there a redirect you would do like that?
If corporations are not your thing then there could be some serious damage done to nation states of dubious merit -- that is a serious mesh network combined with something like TOR if you wanted it to be. Find some choice documents in relevant languages about human rights, abuses of power and whatever else (organised religions might get a little knock in this) and stuff will go down as a result of ignorance and surveillance capabilities decreasing.
Maybe everybody gets a copy of libreoffice? Or flip it on its head and give everybody a pirated version of MS office?
OS level changeovers of some form?
Some might install anti virus on every machine and do a bit of a cleanup to in turn rid the world of a botnet or three.
Do you have any simplified applications that would be better served by swapping to full fat? If nobody used a webmail frontend any more an instead full fat email client?
The simultaneous worldwide disco would be cool but at the same time you could convincingly distribute a decent collection of books, video, music, games/ROMs and such to basically everybody.
As phones are part of this then you could possibly be the hero that if not eliminates then seriously seriously reduces vertical video syndrome.
I am not sure what kind of fun you would be able to have with password security but you could try to ensure different passwords were used for different sites.
Plenty of options for such things out there, this is just a few.
What then do you do? You can do more than one if you want but trying to pick what to do rather than "all of the above" or "here are my problems with computing right now, sort them all"
