This is the sense I’m familiar with, and that occurred to me.
Centralization, Collectivism, Purges, Cultural Revolution, Year Zero - that sort of thing.
Hitler
This, because I have it drummed into my head from the three or four information security training courses I have to take at work every year.
This is the correct answer.
euthananasia, lobotomies, social stratification, this time, the list varies with context though, both in order and in content
now to read the thread and see what others said
Looks like if you are liberal you think of it as a term the ultra right use to demonize “government”.
If you’re a right winger, you think of it as a term to describe “government” aka Death Squads just around the corner.
If you’re an IT person you have a very specific definition which isn’t either of those.
I love how many people have no idea what the term means but assume it must be that <group I hate> uses the term to denounce <thing I like>
I work in IT. I also think it just means getting ignorant inside people to release valuable information by malicious actors posing as someone else like outside vendors. I have had it happen to me and I just told them the completely wrong information to waste their time and reported it to our security groups. Everyone is trained against it but it works much better on some than others.
Why try a dictionary attack when you can just call the dumbest person you can find to just give you all the passwords because a printer supposedly has a deadly virus that has to be fixed right away and it will require all the information possible to fix?
Some of the most infamous hackers in history were quite good at it and used it as a primary strategy. They probably would have done better just doing regular sales. At least that would have been legal but they liked the challenge.
This.
I think of the hard left using political correctness to try and change society in ways which might be… let’s be polite and say “disruptive” to the good order of things.
It’s pretty much the same set of skills that have been used by confidence tricksters of many genres since way before computers existed.
My response was “conservatives” for the same reason.
(I didn’t read Martin’s post before this response but that’s a good illustration of what I thought about.)
Without reading thread, I thought of “ways that cultures (through government-run or -mandated tools like taxes) encourage their citizens toward certain behaviors deemed beneficial for individuals and society.”
“Sure as I know anything I know this, they will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten, they’ll swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more running. I aim to misbehave**.”**
Another IT guy chiming in, so it’s all about exploiting people to gain access to computers and networks.
Not just the “This is Paul from IT, can I get some information from you?”, but leaving flash drives in employee traffic areas with the near certainty that someone is going to plug it into a workstation and install the embedded keylogger or other malware.