This was a legitimate question. A big part of Buddhism is getting rid of all materialism. They aren't even allowed to cook their own food, and can only eat before noon!
You're also mixing different traditions here, that all have their own perspectives on what monks can and can't do.
Materialism in the Buddhist sense is about mental attachment. Desire (attachment) stems from the mind, not the object itself (attachment is not a property of the object), and different meditation practices have different techniques to work with that mental attachment. Reducing your possessions is a very effective strategy in reducing attachment--but it certainly doesn't do anything without developing mental renunciation simultaneously. I'm curious if this is an American or Western perspective on poverty--that poverty itself is somehow liberating.
In terms of email, there's nothing luddite about Tibetan Buddhism. Technology is embraced as another avenue for speech, which the mind can be attentive to.
I'm not sure each sect's restrictions but in Herzog's "lo and behold reveries of the connected world" it showed a group of Eastern monks using cellphone in the US
It would be nice to know what the actual attack here was. Was it really a DDOS? Did they take advantage of an out-of-date version of Wordpress to get access to the hosting account and cause some actual damage? Or did they just post a lot of spam?
And how on earth did "thousands of comments" lead to "about €3,000 ($3400) in various fees", unless the author seriously overpaid a security consultant?
So are there accounts of state sponsored DDoS followed by cracks that have been managed/diverted on Medium or is the article just saying journalists should use infrastructure and not self-host?
You know, HN was supposed to be this "no click-bait allowed" place, but it's almost exactly the opposite, everything here is clickbait and almost nothing on the front page is ever worth actually clicking and reading.
If you choose what you read carefully, it's still a great source. I find it a lot better during the quieter times on the weekends, and I use the number of comments on a post as a negative indicator when considering clicking on an article.
I'm subscribed on the HN page on Facebook so I see the front page articles on my feed. I always check the HN comments first before I decide to read the article. Saves a lot of time.
Just to note that the "a monk" he emailed is one most well-known monks in the world, so I'm really unsurprised that his communications are being monitored. Certainly not close to fame as the Dalai Lama, but he's well known if you read even a little about meditation, tibetan buddhism, or the science of meditation.
I'm confused ... the article starts with an account of the "hack" (although it seems to have actually been just comment spam) and then ends with a rant about WordPress and then a data analysis of the posts on Medium ... ?? ... am I missing something?
The problem is "Hence my interest in Medium." is a non sequitor. The story doesn't speak to whether Medium is better at repelling spam than standalone Wordpress or an alternative like tumblr, blogger, etc.
> The content left little doubt on the origin of the attack. I had sent an email to one of the most notorious opponents to the Chinese regime. It retaliated mercilessly.
Wait what?
Your blog becomes the target of common everyday run-of-the-mill comment spam, and you just immediately assume this is a State Sponsored attack? Please... you, and your blog are really not that important.
And we're supposed to just accept the Chinese government monitors all monk's email inboxes, and then launches attacks against anyone who dares email them? Ya right... If the Chinese government was going to go through that much hassle, why not just shut down or intercept/delete all inbound email coming to the monks? Or prevent the Monks from responding?
The much more plausible narrative is this blogger had an outdated Wordpress install, and some bots pwned his server in a completely unrelated scenario.
Checking his blog, he is indeed running an outdated Wordpress install (even after the attack!)[1].
So basically the fact is, two weeks after the author sent an email to this monk, his blog got spammed by comments in Chinese.
And the conclusion is his blog was hacked by the Chinese. Maybe there are some correlation here but it seems too quick to jump to the conclusion that the email caused the Chinese government hacked your blog?
Maybe it is because of something you posted on your blog rather than the email?
Him sending an email to the .np cctld has nothing to do with the hack he's talking about. More likely, his plain text email was intercepted 'on the wire' and would have been the same to whichever cctld he would have sent to.
> It turned out to be the most costly email I ever sent to anyone.
Not 100% applicable, but worth thinking about IMHO:
One dissident in the Soviet Union, I think Joseph Brodsky, said not to talk about the abuses that oppressors inflict on you. You only magnify their impact: They do those things to scare and intimidate, and every time you repeat the story you help them do it again, to an ever wider audience (who themselves will repeat it). Let their attempts to terrify their victims die, without an echo, in the room where they occur.
It's hard to oppress hundreds of millions or billions of people; you can't really control them all if they don't submit. Terror is a tool for keeping them in line.
(In fairness, it doesn't necessarily apply to this situation, and sometimes talking about things helps people organize, find support, and alert the world to the abuses. But how many people who read this story will now hesitate to help a critic of the Chinese government?)
39 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadYou're also mixing different traditions here, that all have their own perspectives on what monks can and can't do.
Materialism in the Buddhist sense is about mental attachment. Desire (attachment) stems from the mind, not the object itself (attachment is not a property of the object), and different meditation practices have different techniques to work with that mental attachment. Reducing your possessions is a very effective strategy in reducing attachment--but it certainly doesn't do anything without developing mental renunciation simultaneously. I'm curious if this is an American or Western perspective on poverty--that poverty itself is somehow liberating.
In terms of email, there's nothing luddite about Tibetan Buddhism. Technology is embraced as another avenue for speech, which the mind can be attentive to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMLnPeiwlR8
They also known driving Porsche, buying jewelry and more.
http://www.19lou.com/forum-269-thread-38651591-1-1.html
http://career.51youcai.com/yule/2011/0706/124927.html
http://news.thmz.com/col89/2012/04/2012-04-101102220.html
> blog was deluged with thousands of comments
> the target was the shared hard drive
It would be nice to know what the actual attack here was. Was it really a DDOS? Did they take advantage of an out-of-date version of Wordpress to get access to the hosting account and cause some actual damage? Or did they just post a lot of spam?
I would have liked to see some analysis on the prevalence of these attacks on blogs instead.
This is disappointing to say the least.
This is a Quartz and published-media-is-dying-and-desperate-for-pageviews problem.
As a publisher, the experience made me realize the potential in a service like the one from Ev Williams’s Medium.
1. Crap, my blog got hacked.
2. I'm a journalist not a cybersecurity expert. I need to outsource the task of keeping my blog secure.
3. Medium seems a promising candidate.
4. Actually, Medium looks pretty good. Let's look more closely at it.
Mattheiu Ricard has written a lot about the intersection of meditation and neuroscience, etc. Really fascinating stuff. Here's a TED talk he gave: https://www.ted.com/talks/matthieu_ricard_on_the_habits_of_h...
Wait what?
Your blog becomes the target of common everyday run-of-the-mill comment spam, and you just immediately assume this is a State Sponsored attack? Please... you, and your blog are really not that important.
And we're supposed to just accept the Chinese government monitors all monk's email inboxes, and then launches attacks against anyone who dares email them? Ya right... If the Chinese government was going to go through that much hassle, why not just shut down or intercept/delete all inbound email coming to the monks? Or prevent the Monks from responding?
The much more plausible narrative is this blogger had an outdated Wordpress install, and some bots pwned his server in a completely unrelated scenario.
Checking his blog, he is indeed running an outdated Wordpress install (even after the attack!)[1].
[1] http://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fmondaynote.com%2f
That's quite a leap.
And the conclusion is his blog was hacked by the Chinese. Maybe there are some correlation here but it seems too quick to jump to the conclusion that the email caused the Chinese government hacked your blog?
Maybe it is because of something you posted on your blog rather than the email?
Is this an ad?
Therefore I prefer not having the option to add custom features.
What?
Not 100% applicable, but worth thinking about IMHO:
One dissident in the Soviet Union, I think Joseph Brodsky, said not to talk about the abuses that oppressors inflict on you. You only magnify their impact: They do those things to scare and intimidate, and every time you repeat the story you help them do it again, to an ever wider audience (who themselves will repeat it). Let their attempts to terrify their victims die, without an echo, in the room where they occur.
It's hard to oppress hundreds of millions or billions of people; you can't really control them all if they don't submit. Terror is a tool for keeping them in line.
(In fairness, it doesn't necessarily apply to this situation, and sometimes talking about things helps people organize, find support, and alert the world to the abuses. But how many people who read this story will now hesitate to help a critic of the Chinese government?)