My Own Private Vigilante Botnet

My Own Private Vigilante Botnet
Number	95
Broadcast Date	April 7, 2013
Episode Length	1:17:00
Hosts	Andrew Mayne, Brian Brushwood, Justin Robert Young

Brian and Justin are brought to the gates of a mysterious cavern. Is it the literal gate to hell? How far would Andrew go for science? We discover the horrifying outer limits. What would you do with your own vigilante botnet? It’s all part of a new Weird Things podcast.

Contents

Justin Robert Young is Turkish Reed Richards

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Pluto's Gate

Andrew proposes a scenario in which he, Brian and Justin are exploring a cave in Turkey. Inside they find some ruins that date back to Ancient Greek times. Using some type of electricity powered devices, the guys are able to digitally reconstruct some of the structures that once existed inside the cave. There is a stone pool, a temple and also the gate to Hell.

The place is called "Pluto's Gate" (Pluto was the god of the underworld) and it was written "This space is full of a vapor so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the ground. Any animal that passes inside meets instant death." Back in ancient Greece, guys would throw all sorts of animals into this cave to see if they would die; they did. The only people that were able to enter the gate were eunuchs. This lead to a discussion about how the hosts would react if they were suddenly castrated without their permission.

Semi-Ethical Research

An anonymous hacker wanted to see how vulnerable IPv4 addresses are. To do this, he created a botnet to see how many vulnerabilities he could find. He was able to take over 420,000 devices and found millions of vulnerabilities. He said that he didn't make any permanent changes to the infected devices and didn't do anything that took up a bunch of processes. Clearly, what he did was illegal, however he didn't really do anything malicious. The guys talked a bit about the legality and morality behind these kinds of actions.

Andrew then asked what Brian and Justin would do if they had 420,000 computers at their disposal. Brian goes through a list of distributed computing projects that they could use to help further some sort of research with their half-million computers.

Andrew then proposes a scenario in which there is a self-aware botnet that occasionally strikes out against people or groups that it doesn't like.

Picks

Brian

• Inside Scientology

Justin

• The Great Gatsby audiobook with Tim Robbins

Andrew

• War of the Worlds

Great Quotes

• Andrew - "Hmm they found something German in Argentina. Interesting."

Sponsors

• Area 1851

Links

• Podcast Link

Preceded by: "The Mystery of Monkey Island"

My Own Private Vigilante Botnet

Followed by: "Sweet, Suffocating Wave of Death"