Beyound the reach of the terrorist organisations? We have already seen pretty sophisticated operations by relatively small crime organizations (like exploiting pseudorandom generators in casino slot machines). There's an established black market for exploits. I think writing an end-to-end encryption app is not much more difficult compared to this. What's more, it will even be perfectly legal in many countries, meaning you could legally hire professionals to do the job. Terrorist organisations won't need to esablish a development office in SV to write the app, they will only need to know how to use Tor and wire money to the app producer. Which isn't such a huge competence to ask for.
Plus, they don't have to write it. They could just 'pivot' from an existing open source messenger.
If all you do is pushing the buttons of the slot machine in the right order with the right timing, that's hardly a crime —and I don't care about court judgements to the contrary. If a slot machine has a crappy pseudo random number generator, they're just asking for it. I'd rather sue the slot machine's maker for providing a machine that's not fit for its intended purpose.
You provided it as an example of "organized crime", and doing so heavily suggests that it is wrong.
We tend to conflate "wrong" and "unlawful", and for good reason: the law is supposed to prevent wrong things from being committed. There are exceptions however, and this is one of them. I'd rather use another example if possible.
Speaking of moral issues, cheating on casino is pretty much off limits on my personal moral compass. That the attack was possible within the normal mode of operation does not make it less of a fraud. Imagine if the casino would reverse-engineer a slot machine and find a way to abuse it within the normal mode of operation, making odds (even more) in their favor. That would be fraud, plain and simple, and I don't see why a player should be held to a different standard.
You are absolutely right, not everything unlawful is wrong. But I fail to see which benefit we as a society would have by allowing exploitation of technical deficiencies in slot machines for profit. It is a crime and it is wrong in my book.
The rules for slot machines are ostensibly very simple. As long as you're only pushing the buttons that are supposed to be pushed without deteriorating them, you are acting within the rules of the slot machine, and as such cannot cheat.
The presence of hidden rules such as "don't push the buttons in this particular order and timing", or "don't push the buttons in a way that reliably causes you to win", are just silly and unfair. Especially considering casinos are exploiting gamblers' minds in the first place. Don't like slot machine exploiters? Fix your slot machines.
Likewise for counting cards: the player is merely acting upon information naturally gathered buy observation and play. Asking players not to act upon such information is intrusive —and unheard of in competitive play. Don't like card counters? Invest in a continuous shuffling machine.
"you're only pushing the buttons" except they were not only pushing a button, they were also recording sequences and sending them abroad for analysis.
But as you directly say that exploiting the flaws of a slot machine is not cheating and that it's fair, I guess I won't be able to persuade you otherwise.
Either you meant something along the lines of "that shouldn't be a crime" or you're essentially saying "it's not crime even though it is a crime" - which doesn't make terribly much sense.
Anyone have a link about this story? I'm curious to read about it.
Sure that can go wrong as anything can, but it's far from rolling your own crypto and makes things a lot easier.
It's not. You can use existing software, reuse existing protocols, and stick to safe languages as much as possible. Even implementing your own crypto isn't all that difficult¹. I have written my own crypto library², and I can almost recommend it for production use.
[1]: http://loup-vaillant.fr/articles/rolling-your-own-crypto
Are you suggesting gpg has been backdoored? A simple wrapper around gpg is not-beyond terrorist organisations.
Of course it's utterly trivial to make a one-time-pad cryptosystem, and more practical in 2017 than ever. So what if the keylength must match the message length, my phone has a 32gb uSD. That's a lot of text messages.
If we outlaw encryption, then only outlaws will have encryption.
That's not an issue. Writing solid encryption software is very difficult on its own. You will hear "do not roll your own crypto" all the time from security experts. We don't live in a James Bond universe and it's beyond the reach of terrorist organisations.