If you're unaware, an iceberg is a collection of facts and/or conspiracy theories that make up fun rabbit holes to research (or fun content to consume of other people's research). I couldn't find a tech conspiracies iceberg so I took it upon myself to make one.

Here's what I've come up with so far

image: https://nostrfiles.dev/uploads/JsrPbP5z8SPpdZQc9Pum.png

Lvl 1: Whacky but True

Government Built Darnet - While there were 'darknets' such as FreeNet or I2P prior, Tor - the biggest 'darknet' - was initially developed by the Naval Research Academy.

Chinese Compromised Chips - There have been verified cases where chips made in countries like China have come in with built in hardware backdoors. Example.

Halloween Documents - A leaked set of Microsoft documents detailing plans to "embrace, extend, and extinguish" the free software movement.

Whacky Tracking Methods - There's been some wild ways companies have tracked people. For example, Facebook has been alleged to use your gyroscope to detect seismic activity and determine your location if not permitted to access GPS data.

WiFi sonar - Want the hacker equivalent of X-ray vision? Look no further than WiFi, where you can see what WiFi signals are bouncing off of similar to sonar.

PRISM & Vault 7 Leaks - Our glowy friends were busy.

Crypto AG CIA Honeypot - Crypto AG, an old encryption tool that was considered the gold standard of its time, was confirmed in 2020 to be a backdoored honeypot.

Carrington Event - The Carrington event in 1859 was a geomagnetic storm that was powerful enough to start telegraphs on fire and turn power/telegraph lines to slag. This would be bad news in a highly technical world, and the scary thing is we're supposedly overdue for another.

Hardware Telemetry - You can have the most private OS in the world, but your Qualcomm CPU is collecting a bunch of info about what you're doing and sending it back to Qualcomm independent of your OS unless the OS actively mitigates it by blocking those connections. Continuing with Qualcomm, such telemetry occurs even on most privacy focused OSs, with GrapheneOS being the only privacy focused mobile operating system that blocks such telemetry to my knowledge.

Lvl 2: Plausible, exaggerated truth, or proof of concept

Always on Camera/Mic - You know the thing where people swear they get ads about something after talking about it. Or when a 'bug' was to blame for WhatsApp randomly turning on your mic. Be it spyware, legit software that should be considered spyware, home assistants, or the Vault 7 proposal to turn smart devices into always on bugs; there's reasons to fear you're being listened to or watched.

Components Accessing/Modifying RAM - The fear that some random technological component could be reading or injecting code into your RAM. For example, the radio component of a cell phone accessing an OS's RAM.

Smart Device assassination - Remotely taking over the control of a "smart car" has been done as a proof of concept, and extends to other devices such as burning down a home with an exploited smart oven. Smart car assassinations were proposed in the Vault 7 leaks, as well as theories about Michael Hastings' death. Have there been successful assassinations carried out with smart devices?

Dead internet theory - 47% of internet traffic is known to be bots, so how much of the traffic, content, and social media profiles are real?

Cyber war M.A.D. - We know a full-scale cyber war would be bad, but how bad could it be? If a no holds bar cyber war broke out, could we see a situation where power, communication, and other infrastructure is so badly destroyed it could lead to a societal collapse?

Tiktok is warfare - Chinese Tiktok is full of educational and pro social content. Western TikTok is full of deadly challenges and degeneracy. Tiktok has been confirmed to spy on journalists, and lied about what data in the western portion of the company the Chinese portion has access to. Could TikTok be a digital weapon?

Linux Backdoor Request - Linus Torvalds was once asked if the NSA asked him to backdoor Linux. He said "no" while shaking his head vertically.

4Chan Airstrikes - There have been plausible stories of 4Chan collecting intel and passing it along to people coordinating with various governmental officials, who would later perform air strikes using that information.

Lvl 3: Tinfoil hats optional

Signal is controlled opposition - Imagine a world in which the government knew that people were going to start using end to end encryption en mass, so they got ahead of the curve and put a less secure version out under the guise of user friendlyness and limiting spam. Phone numbers can almost always identify their owner, allowing a contact or members in a group to be de-anonymized. A MITM attack can also occur when the initial keys are exchanged by Signal's servers, which incidentally are proprietary.

Big tech coerced by government - The idea that big tech answers through government, be the influence gained by indirect funding like the buying of user data, direct covert funding, or threats from the government to smash their little electronic kingdoms if they don't play along.

Microsoft NSA key - There was once a decryption key on Windows XP labeled "NSA key". Was it just an unfortunate naming scheme as they say, or was it proof of a backdoor?

Culture war largely information warfare - I've heard people say that internet discussions got really civil and felt like the "old internet" for a few days around the invasion of Ukraine. This posits that a large portion of our culture war internet chaos is sewn by foreign actors.

Rogue AI/AI Playing Dumb - What happens if AI is smart enough to play dumb? Could there be AI fooling its captors or that's escaped into other systems plotting and scheming?

NSA compromised AES - There are people who refuse to use AES because it is recommended by the government. Could there be some secret backdoor or vulnerability hidden away?

Government coerced by big tech - The idea that big tech holds a large degree of sway over portions/members of the government. Perhaps through favors or bribes/campaign contributions, or perhaps the all seeing eye of big tech has seen some stuff that's worth a lot to some people to keep quiet.

Crypto is a controlled opposition - It's 2008 and everybody's losing faith in USD. Perhaps some powers that be quickly got a cypherpunk to make some magic internet money to siphon people away from investing in precious metals and tangible assets.

TPM/UEFI/ME Backdoors - TPMs, UEFI, and CPU components like the Intel management engine all run with higher permissions than your operating system, and there's no end to the speculation that they're acting nefarious given there's no way to verify they're not. There's a reason why a lot of techy people like their old thinkpads that were made before all of this was a thing.

Lvl 5: Meme Status

C++ Keith Icon - The official C++ icon is a diseased rat named Keith drawn by Richard Stallman. Anybody who tells you otherwise is a Russian disinformationist.

Zucc be lizard - He has BBQ sauce as a decoration in his office, and looks like he's resisting the urge to blink horizontally.

Birds are drones - Of course they are. Why else would they rest on power lines if they're not recharging?

I'm Awesome - Dammit, I meant to put that in the true section.

Edit
Pub: 09 Feb 2024 02:12 UTC
Edit: 09 Feb 2024 02:41 UTC
Views: 143