Gratitude, Mercy, St. Philothea – Father Pimen Vlad
6 October 2022
Death in Christ Is Freedom – Father Theologos
11 October 2022
If you have a cell phone or a computer (laptop or desktop), you should be interested in this material. Beyond that, there is constant concern about online tracking, the security of our data, population control, about chips, their injection through vaccines, etc.
All these topics as well as others are answered by Marius Voilă, a hacker with vast experience stemming from a long period of activity and from the renowned companies where he worked and still works.
For those interested, the LinkedIn page is here: https://nl.linkedin.com/in/mariusvoila
Note: Yes, Marius is a real hacker. Well-intentioned hackers exist. In jargon they are called “white hat” or “ethical hackers.”
Enjoy!
Dear ones, we are here with Marius Voilă, whom I love very much and have known for I don’t know how many years…
Marius Voilă: Many.
Father Theologos: Many, yes. Usually, I don’t introduce my guests or very briefly, at the moment I will introduce Marius a little more extensively than the others. Why? Because we are going to discuss with him a very serious problem and we have – you don’t see them, but we have around us a lot of worshippers who are interested in this problem. It is about the security problem, about the human factor problem, about the problem of human passions in cybersecurity, in cyber security. Marius you should know that for many years he is Linux sysadmin, Google security specialist, TomTom, eBay, RackSpace a lot of things. Yes, if you want to know much more about him look for him on the net and you will find him, please. It matters less. We’re not going to talk about technical things, we’re going to talk about spiritual things, things related to God and human passions in this world of computer science.
And now, brothers, unfortunately as I was discussing a little bit before with the boys, with the others, do not say that you have no connection with the world of informatics and security because if you have a cell phone you have a connection with informatics, you have a tangent with security without even knowing it. Without even knowing it. And the first question – I even have a laptop for the first time, I have a laptop, after Sorin Gadola, I have a laptop in which I gathered the questions from the boys, they are not hard questions or so on, but to clarify certain things that most of you do not know because of this, I presented Marius and to trust what he says that things are very serious.
And as the first question said, Marius, and I say this effectively as at confession, my thought is – I confess to you from a professional point of view, of course – I believe that the greatest vulnerability of a computer system I think is the human factor, that it is the dissatisfied man, the cleaning woman… Can you say something about that?
Marius Voilă: Yes, indeed, as in any system, as in a family, it is the person who can be problematic. Any system is built by man for man and finally in a company, in a cybernetic system, in an information system, any person who is not satisfied with his financial situation, with the job he has, with how the world behaves with him, can reveal things willingly or unwillingly.
Father Theologos: Yes…
Marius Voilă: Some people talk more than they need to talk, they have discussions over a beer, in a bar they talk about some strategies, for example, of their corporations because they think nobody hears them, they can always be listened to and then automatically there are leaks, as they are called…
Father Theologos: Leaks…
Marius Voilă: Information leaks from certain parts that are sometimes willful. For example, launching a certain mobile phone – someone loses a mobile phone in a bar, someone else finds it and it appears on the internet. And then there are the ones that are not willing, they are by mistake – as I said, a beer or a cleaning woman can be one of the biggest vulnerabilities in a company because she has access everywhere even if not many people give importance to this thing. She’s one of those employees you’d like to pay enough not to cause you problems. But at the same time, anyone can… even if it has a very low level of access. You see, Snowden was one of the technicians with not very high access to the NSA, and yet he managed to gather data that can cause quite a lot of harm. But at the same time, not just by paying them, you can help these people to be with you, but you can earn their trust.
Father Theologos: Trust and love. I mean, give them time…
Marius Voilă: As I said, like in a family.
Father Theologos: Yes, yes, as in a family, yes. Because why did I ask this question? Because, generally, people, in movies and so on, have the idea that so it’s the hacker who buttons and tries to…
Marius Voilă: There’s no such thing.
Father Theologos: Yes.
Marius Voilă: The hacker is not like in the movies. We don’t sit for 7000 seconds and break into a server. It doesn’t happen… It happens in six months, seven months, eight months, nine months of research itself… We look at code, we write code, we try vulnerabilities, and the biggest vulnerability in 99% of cases is humans.
Father Theologos: Man…
Marius Voilă: The computer has a cart of vulnerabilities, but the easiest and cheapest is the man. For example, cracking a password as small as it is – well nowadays we have the Cloud that helps us scale more – but if we were to use it locally, it costs a little more than going to ask three questions to someone or listening to a conversation between two women on the bus or, well, targeted, knowing that the person works there and you want to understand a little bit what the dynamics of the company are. In general, people talk, as I said, more than they have to. Just like me…
Father Theologos: Yes, I also believe that one of the main passions that hackers exploit is curiosity. Curiosity is the love of vainglory, of going to websites, of seeing, all that.
Marius Voilă: Or they are in some of the tests made three months ago…
Father Theologos: Penetration tests, that is, to enter a site…
Marius Voilă: Yes, companies hire you, respectively the company I work for hires us to find certain vulnerabilities at the information level, i.e. a laptop, a mobile phone, a fax machine – even faxes can be very smart and they have SSH (cryptographic network protocol that allows data to be transferred using a secure channel between network devices) – or personalities, People who are, as I said, the easiest to exploit. And then, for example, the head of IT, the head of security said that they are impenetrable – a false idea of security because there is no such thing. All you can do on the security side is to make it too expensive to be exploited. That is, to make your exploitation very expensive.
Father Theologos: That is, the result should not be worth the effort to enter…
Marius Voilă: It’s just like a house – no matter how many walls you have, someone will still jump them all if they really want to. The idea is to make it so expensive for it, to jump so many walls, to go through so many dogs, so many alarm systems, that it’s not worth the end result. Which also happens in security… Well, and the man said he was impenetrable… Because I’m just as proud as he is, I told him he was going to be the target. By chance I found his wife on Facebook, I saw that he really wanted to go on a vacation, he being a CISO (a man who deals with security in a company, at a fairly high level). In general, they are very busy people in large companies, that they have a lot of work to do. And then, I sent him a targeted email with a vacation offer in the area where his wife would have liked according to Facebook – thank you Facebook. A very targeted email, with an offer almost impossible to refuse as price, as timeline (= the time in which he could go on vacation). He clicked, some scripts appeared in his browser that stole his password from ID. In Windows, ID is the authentication system and in which to keep users. I took his password from the ID and automatically I was able to exploit the whole system. At the end a report is written, a minimum of 18 pages explaining how the vulnerability was exploited and at the end he made a big scandal that he was going to fire the person who….. I was very happy about this…
Father Theologos: She was his wife…
Marius Voilă: Not necessarily that I will be kicked out, that he will not kick me out, but the idea is that you calm the person down, you show him that he is not invulnerable and no one is invincible in this world.
Father Theologos: And that means that all these people who go to bad sites or sites that are that have offers too good to be true, very likely there are exploits behind them.
Marius Voilă: Generally, there are blind exploits. What does this mean? You are not targeted as a person, on the contrary, you become a proxy, meaning that someone somehow hides their identity – there is no such thing as hiding your identity completely on the internet unless… In security, you have to determine who is attacking you. If the attacker is a government, say goodbye to hiding your identity. Governments have unlimited resources and materials and people and plus there is another secret, it is a very big exploit, it’s called crowbar, meaning someone takes you from home, takes you somewhere and beats you…
Father Theologos: Oh, crowbar… I thought it was an acronym. The club.
Marius Voilă: He beats you until you have something to say and then, to hide your identity you have to go through several proxies like this and you will have Greece IP, then Romania IP and so on…
Father Theologos: You hide as if in an onion.
Marius Voilă: Exactly. And you will be part like the man who accidentally entered a more or less known site, you are exploited. This means – in order not to be exploited, keep your browser up to date, meaning whenever you see that there is an update, you don’t say you do it another time, it’s better to have it. The operating system the same. And try not to click on any crap you get in the mail.
Generally, if it’s an offer it’s too good to be true – it’s always like that: it’s too good to be true. And rather than being part of that, because legally you can be brought to court, you don’t end up in jail God forbid or any other craziness, but it can make your life a little hell for a week or two, for an exploiter or someone who exploited a government institution using proxies.
Father Theologos: Oh, so you… Being at home can use his computer or, washing machine or refrigerator, attack the government… This can happen.
Marius Voilă: It happened. There are a lot of DDoS attacks happening, some very well-known were those from Anonymous, a few years ago, encouraging users to install an application on their computer and they were part of a botnet (means a network of robots) that this application started and pinged. Ping is sending a number of packets, you send it, the computer works in this system: you send a packet. Just like people – Hey, George! Yes, John! The acknowledgement has been done and after that, the conversation begins. These packages keep that server busy, which means that it does not work normally.
Father Theologos: Yes, if they shout a million Hey, George!
Marius Voilă: There will be many Johns
Father Theologos: Yes, there will be many Johns and smoke will come out of…
Marius Voilă: Anonymus did this, people were aware of what they were doing because they installed the application, many in America ended up in prison because of it because the legislation in America is a bit different from Europe, but there are those who are not aware of this thing, meaning you do this without realizing it… Then there are crypto-miners, cryptocurrency mining is no longer so profitable, that is, how much electricity costs nowadays and how much electricity a rig consumes (a mining plant) is no longer so profitable and then using several laptops around the world it becomes profitable that you do not pay for electricity. And then crypto miners install certain crypto-miners – small, tiny applications – in your browser and your computer will start consuming a lot of resources. Many people not knowing what they are looking at…
Father Theologos: Yes, he sees the computer running and trafficking. And this comes from…
Marius Voilă: And people make money from this.
Father Theologos: Yes, and that comes from the fact that he browses websites for free (dodge).
Marius Voilă: Not necessarily free. The idea is, for example, how we use the system is because we also know, we wouldn’t click on something that is too good to be true, then you create that true beauty, you make it as real as possible.
Father Theologos: Oh, articles….
Marius Voilă: Some articles, some products for sale, which are or are not what they are. Generally at a price… For example, a product like let’s say these glasses cost 10 lei. You bought this product, it doesn’t hurt so much that you lost 10 lei, no matter how poor you are or no matter how rich you are, it’s not such a big problem. But during the time you checked out something downloaded, as an invoice in a pdf, you double-clicked to see that invoice and automatically something small was installed, a small script on your computer, you didn’t realize this and that’s it.
Father Theologos: And how can a person protect himself?
Marius Voilă: First of all, through attention. Generally, sites send invoices by mail, they do not appear in your browser… And through an antivirus, no matter how weak it is, it has the ability to detect the vast majority … Of course there are 0 days exploits, meaning there are exactly 0 days of repair on them, so when something occurs… Imagine a pipe where someone accidentally punches a hole in it and you have zero days to fix it, or else this valley floods. The same thing happens with vulnerability like this, developers have zero days to fix it, that exploitation is already on the internet and anyone can use it. There are those who call themselves script-kiddies, meaning little children who use other people’s scripts, there are those who exploit them for various benefits: money, crypto-currencies…
Father Theologos: Beyond script-kiddies there are also evil organizations, that is, there are also organizations…
Marius Voilă: Yes, Anonymus, but there are several organizations I will not call organizations that there are tens, hundreds, but…
Father Theologos: So I mean, cybercrime is something very serious. So there’s no more, I know how to say, that lone hacker… Okay, there is…
Marius Voilă: It never was a lone hacker.
Father Theologos: No?
Marius Voila: No.
Father Theologos: Usually through movies… And that’s how people have the idea…
Marius Voilă: It’s just like thieves. There is not necessarily a thief acting alone. In general, there needs to be more people doing this. That lone hacker is a romanticized image or more because of people’s frustration. Because cybernetics and cyber-attacks are not something very easy to identify precisely because it is so wide and varied the area that you cannot say that someone will attack you in that area. It’s going to be, someone’s going to attack you.
Father Theologos: From somewhere, we don’t know where.
Marius Voilă: And then people, I think, so this is my opinion, it’s not a definition or something, but for this being to believe that man is an isolated person, an asocial man, a man who is not able to socialize – on the contrary, a hacker is very capable of socializing, that’s why he is able to exploit the employees. Because only a person who knows a little bit of psychology, knows a little bit of human interaction can interact with a man and convince him to talk about some things you wouldn’t talk to a stranger. And then that would be proof that that lone hacker isn’t just a lone hacker… We are a company, for example, so we are not a thief.
Father Theologos: And these apps that are free, I know, on Android, how safe they are?
Marius Voilă: Most of them are safe, but there are still their clones. Those aren’t safe. Clones for example, you take the tiktok app, which everyone knows, it has millions of downloads and then there’s the app… well, I can’t say it exists, but I can create an app called tiktok, but instead of K it’s C – Ticctocc – I put the same sign, the same logo, and you can fool at least 30 users into clicking on this thing to install. It will have the same videos, it will download them from tiktok but they will do other things: reading emails, for example, card payments you can read. What good is all this information? Would you say why I’m interested? For example, a lot of people, I was talking to a lot of people, they were saying how does it help you that you know what I paid with the card last time? It helps me a lot because I can call the bank and say I forgot my login username and password, but I remember the last transactions I had. Which is very important and then the bank not in 100% of cases, but in 50% of cases it will give you the necessary information and that’s why the phone is a very dangerous tool (=instrument) in our pockets. I mean, it’s a weapon, so to speak.
Father Theologos: And tiktok, speaking of tiktok, doesn’t follow us?
Marius Voilă: There is no app that follows us… with various reasons, so not necessarily paranoid, evil reasons in which he wants to know what we are doing every second, but in general applications use this tracking system, Analytic is called, to see how the user interacts with that application: how he clicks on a certain video, what videos he watches more if he watches more comics or more I don’t know funny with animals or cats or with other follies to know what to target more to that user and ads to be targeted as much as possible. Of course there are also relatively malicious, more malicious apps, like tiktok that takes a little more data than it should take. Tiktok, for example, in China presents much more educational videos for young people. For example, it shows a lot, a lot, a lot of videos about how I don’t know what young man succeeded in life, doing I don’t know what investments. Whereas in the rest of the world it shows brain-dead movies – movies for mentally dead people, as it were.
Father Theologos: For frying the mind.
Marius Voilă: No, necessarily. I think people are already fried in their minds, meaning if you sit there and watch some videos where you don’t see a grimace on your face, then it’s clearly wrong. Then there are the applications that are totally malicious, that steal, as I said, emails, passwords, data, can read the keyboard – that’s why many banking applications create a keyboard in the application, just so that it cannot be read.
Father Theologos: Their keyboard. I understand that at one point, the FBI literally threw their keyboards out the window.
Marius Voilă: Yes, now the idea is, as I said, security does not exist because this world is constantly evolving like the world of war like everyone else, of medicine and these are always evolving. A keyboard, and like a hard drive, no matter how small or big it is, it emits a certain sound. The moment someone types, each key has a certain pitch. It’s like in music, you listen to music, Metallica, for example, will have a certain rhythm, Megadeth a certain rhythm, Guta has a certain rhythm, anyway, you understand that… And then it was discovered that certain keyboards, for example certain keyboards – Dell type – you can listen and identify which keys are typing, and then you can use that sound and emulate what that builder has done.
Father Theologos: I understand…
Marius Voilă: There is also the one if you are in a room opposite or at a relatively small distance with not much noise around, you can read the click on hard drives.
Father Theologos: Really?
Marius Voilă: The hard disk is like a pick-up, basically (= it is similar to a pick-up), well, I simplify a lot of how it works, but it’s such a board that writes data from the middle to the outside. It writes the data on it and it has an actual nail and the nail makes a certain noise at a certain frequency that can be identified, and you can kind of know what bit was written there. Don’t think it’s mega-easy. That’s why I’m telling you that a hacker isn’t like in the movies – that’s it, we stole their money and we go to the Bahamas and have fun. Not. It’s like I said: you listen to keyboards and learn to see. You’re going to take a keyboard home and start pressing A 30 billion times until you learn that sound and I’ll try to listen: A! Ok, so he pressed A, now he pressed M,… There’s a lot of research (=documentation).
Father Theologos: So even this level of dedication! Fantastic! Why? Because he thinks it’s worth it, how can I say the result?
Marius Voilă: So for ethical hackers (well-intentioned hackers, white hats), such as us, for example, the company I work for implicitly, ethical hacking means that we try to help you.
Father Theologos: I mean, so we’re hacking you, but we’re not hurting you.
Marius Voilă: But we don’t steal anything from you. We tell you that I hacked you through this method, this, this are obviously others, this is how you can fix the holes you have and so you can make my life harder, but there are others who are not very “ethical”
Father Theologos: Black hats.
Marius Voilă: Yes.
Father Theologos: Are you the white hats?
Marius Voilă: Kind of like that. That it’s snowing white and it’s snowing black, but again and that’s not all of them… For example, everyone praises Anonymus that, woe is me, how good he does, but Anonymus stole a lot of money from people’s banks just somewhat…
Father Theologos: So it is a romanticization of…
Marius Voilă: It’s this romanticization of hackers who do good because at some point he did a DDoS against I don’t know what pedophile or other crazy things and this idea was created that… Just as England is doing now, for example, other countries in Europe want to reduce encryption – SSL. You’ve seen every site you go into has https bla.com that’s encryption, which means that if I sit between this computer and look at the screen, I can see what it is. Now, with this encryption, I can only see some crap on the screen, I can’t figure out what’s going on exactly. Just as in England they started a very fighting procedure against SSL (Secure Sockets Layer – is a protocol for establishing secure links between computers on the network) because it says that also end-to-end encryption (a secure communication process that prevents third parties from accessing data transferred from one endpoint to another) of chat applications.
End-to-end encryption means that when I write a message, I encrypt myself with my key, that message. The moment they send it, the server where it arrives, for example, on Signal or others or WhatsApp… WhatsApp unfortunately isn’t it, but… Finally… When the information gets here, he doesn’t know what information it is. He receives a bulk (=volume) of information, he receives a ball of blahs that pass on and pass on. Because we know each other, we have our public keys, of course, and then the message is decrypted at the end, which means end-to-end encryption.
Father Theologos: I mean, there’s a safe tunnel between the two…
Marius Voilă: Yes. And then they said that in the fight against pedophiles we must destroy this encryption, for a very… It is true that it is a very difficult and sensitive area to discuss, but if we are to be realistic and pedophiles are very straight forward (=openly) … There was an example caught by a pedophile rig in Europe some time ago, using text messages, an app that everyone uses does not use encryption. SMS is like a handwritten letter without an envelope. No one caught them. So there’s no reason I didn’t get caught because of the SMS. It caught them because someone exposed it at some point, which shows once again that we don’t need to destroy encryption, we need to start tracking certain things…
Father Theologos: I understand…
Marius Voilă: But unfortunately people do not know, not being informed, because nobody stays to inform… Every country has these cyber people, let’s call them that, but nobody stays to inform people why and how to use certain things and because everyone thinks that a hacker, as many people I was talking to: “what do you do? Oh, you’re a hacker. Oh, you break banks.” I don’t break. If I broke banks, I probably wouldn’t be here, I’d be somewhere in the Bahamas, I’d have fun or not, I don’t know… There is not, like thieves, not necessarily all thieves are evil. For example, Mercedes or other companies hire a thief to break into his car to see where and how to improve the security system.
Father Theologos: Another question. Come on, on YouTube you still understand that there are ads, but WhatsApp for example or others do not have ads. These guys need some really serious servers. WhatsApp is free.
Marius Voilă: Nothing is free, nothing is free in this world. WhatsApp is currently owned by Facebook. If WhatsApp in the beginning when it was bought by Facebook was an independent company, now it is no longer an independent company and they have a very close connection with Facebook and a conversation can happen – that’s why I said that WhatsApp is not end-to-end encrypted, because it happened to me with my father some time ago and I had other friends, Then we started experimenting with this thing. We were discussing that we bought a country house in Romania, but I was working in the Netherlands, I bought a house in Romania… and my dad would hang around and talk about an axe on WhatsApp. Then, on Facebook, I found all kinds of ads with axes. I use Facebook. There’s nothing wrong with using certain tools for certain purposes, it’s bad about becoming addicted to them.
Father Theologos: I understand. So you mean that they actually use…
Marius Voilă: You are the product. The moment something is free, you are the product. Whether it’s…
Father Theologos: I mean, it’s a voice knowledge algorithm.
Marius Voilă: Voice recognition, recognition of certain words and then they give you ads on this topic and I understood that this is not only at WhatsApp, it is everywhere.
Marius Voilă: Yes. We live in a world where all the devices around us listen and we really like it because it’s very easy to say: hey, Alexa, look for me bread!/ hey, Siri, set the alarm for tomorrow morning at 7:30! Instead of pulling out your phone, write this thing. This convenience and ease of doing certain things has been created, but we forget that with these benefits come other problems just like with open windows and very loud discussions in the house can cause your neighbors to either cry or hear everything you talk about in the house.
There have been cases where, for example, Samsung TVs turned on the cameras during the night and filmed everything that happened in the house, remotely, and they were not exploited. Simply put, the firmware was pretty badly written. No, this stuff wasn’t malicious at first, it was just bugs – problems with that software – but the idea is that if the software can do this, anyone can control it remotely (= remotely).
Then there were Amazon’s Ring cameras. Amazon at one time was selling or still selling, some cameras are called Ring. They are like doorbells with video on them very small, very easy to mount, they use some wirelessly or you can use a UTB cable. They’re much cooler and more fun than that ordinary ding-dong doorbell and you can see on your phone when someone calls you. The problem is that these cameras, at one point, were using a default password (=default) and they were exploited from the internet where at one point even a hacker, I would call him script-kiddies, at this level I couldn’t call him a hacker, but anyway, he spoke through Alexa to people that I was filming you, I see your child at the moment and people somehow of course were scared of this thing. I saw that they fixed that problem and now it’s ok, how ok it will be until the next vulnerability God knows, but the point is that all this stuff tied to the cloud, you have no control (over it).
Father Theologos: Yes, and what happens when a government becomes malicious?
Marius Voilă: If a government is malicious, you don’t get away with cash. The only escape would be to move somewhere in the mountains, never go down, …
Father Theologos: Garden…
Marius Voilă: Not even, because if you are targeted, a garden would be very easy to see somewhere in the mountains, because you can’t find tomatoes anywhere on the mountains. You should become an ascetic monk in the wilderness somewhere in the mountains. So it doesn’t exist. It’s a myth that you can become invisible. Sure, Bourne Identity and 07 and 007 (agent 007) and other movie craziness have nothing to do with reality. You cannot become invisible. There are no hackers who have raised a firewall – you don’t raise a firewall… You turn it on, it’s an app that starts and handles certain things, so no.
Father Theologos: Oh, and so this topic of privacy on the Internet…
Marius Voila: There is no privacy on the Internet. It’s a choice what you do on the internet. For example, there are certain businesses, we are talking about artists, we are talking about certain fields of activity that need this advertisement on the Internet, they need to be there. Now there’s this: influencer – any 15-year-old can be an influencer. He’s not able to speak, he’s not able to… He wouldn’t be able to be an influencer, he doesn’t have life experience or anything, but he’s an influencer and he earns some money from it. But as an artist, for example, I don’t know Andra or anybody else, if it wasn’t on the internet, no matter how well she sang it would reach a small number of people relatively like we think of in the 80s when there was no internet and it was a little harder you had to buy a cassette tape or an LP or other craziness for that: Whereas now it’s simple: you’re on YouTube, they see you on YouTube, Andra is super I don’t know what, I downloaded an mp3…
Father Theologos: So the moment it is cut off from this platform, it actually collapses.
Marius Voilă: Yes, many collapse, many end up depressed, they end up with very ugly things, but again not everyone needs to be there and our life doesn’t have to compare to influencer x. Because influencer x, for example, many cases of influencers prostituting themselves in Saudi Arabia, star girls taking pictures with super cars Ferrari Lamborghini and for a fee what services they provided, were allowed to make some videos on tiktok or YouTube with a Lamborghini I don’t know which, I’m not good at cars., I don’t have a driving license. And then you can’t relate to that person. Or there’s a little kid, a guy now in Romania, about two or three younger, like this, who talk on tiktok and Facebook how they succeeded in life by doing, I don’t know what investments they earned, I don’t know how much money and now you can do the same. No!
You have to understand your situation, you have to understand where you are, where mentally you are. Are you ready to make a small investment, are you ready to lose everything at some point or not? Are you mentally strong enough to do this stuff or not? Not everyone is made to do business. I tried and I wasn’t capable of that, and it doesn’t mean everyone is, but we don’t have to compare. That’s why the Internet is problematic, because in real life we don’t compare so easily.
Father Theologos: Yes, speaking of which, so how dangerous is artificial intelligence, how do you see it?
Marius Voilă: Very dangerous. Deep down, the artificial intelligence is good, creates art, some paintings have been created that have just sold. A painting that I thought was painted by hand, but was painted by an AI. So it can do good stuff, but artificial intelligence creates deep-fakes. A deep-fake is: I take Putin’s face now, I create a YouTube video in which Putin talks let’s say about his dog, is a dog lover, and in that deep-fake his mouth moves differently than the sound of his voice, it’s something else by gathering a lot of words and creating phrases and I say, ok, tomorrow I’ll drop bombs on Romania, China and I don’t know what other country. It’s so realistic that it’s almost impossible to tell if it’s real or unreal. This is a deep-fake… or the patriarch or whoever you want. There are many cases on the internet at the moment where examples like this have been made.
Father Theologos: So clips of people who were put in their mouths words that they didn’t actually say.
Marius Voilă: Unfortunately yes and it’s very hard to figure out which is fake and which is real.
Father Theologos: God forbid, God forbid! And what happens when, for example, artificial intelligence manages a critical system: health, banking…
Marius Voilă: At the moment it would be very difficult for him to do this, but if he managed at some point to be so mature as to do this thing, I would say it is at least problematic, because artificial intelligence learns from the outside. IBM had an artificial intelligence project a few years ago that was used by students, PhD students to write their papers. Someone on Twitter found out what the handler is, the username of that robot/AI and what he is looking to learn and taught him to swear and there were a lot of PhD papers with swear words in them, but that wasn’t the biggest problem. The biggest problem was that after a couple of months the robot became very racist. Eventually they had to turn it off, restart it, but imagine yourself in a system where you don’t have the option to turn it off. For example, in a medical system where there is so much information about people… well, thank God that in Romania the medical system is still on paper, but in other countries where the medical system is very centralized, an AI gone crazy and, I don’t know, tweet about your venereal disease…
Father Theologos: What do you think about digital identity, the fact that it will be implemented, that everything we know about man will be in a single ID?
Marius Voilă: Now, it is and is not something extra. I mean, we currently have an assigned number called CNP, this number says everything about us: date of birth, sex, preferences, a lot of other things is much more centralized than we would like to believe. What does a digital identity do? It just takes this number and more data and puts it on a chip, meaning it makes it easy to scan like that for certain systems.
Father Theologos: We have already come a long way in this direction…
Marius Voilă: Yes, I honestly don’t know if I would be for or against this thing. I don’t think we’re in… In fact, I don’t think, I’m almost certain, that we’re not the phase where we’re implanting chips under our skin…
Father Theologos: Yes, that’s the point…
Marius Voilă: Yes, but passports are already electronic, they already have a CIP in them that has certain information on them, certain biometric data such as fingerprint. But in the end we cling so much about this identity, but we forget about the mobile phone that has either our face or our fingerprint in our pocket, it has all the data about us emails, texts, SMS, WhatsApps, pictures, everything, our whole life is on a phone…
Father Theologos: And in China they follow people to blood without chips without anything, that is…
Marius Voilă: Yes, through the video cameras. They have a very smart facial tracking system. This (social) banking system has been created based on how many loans (social credit) and it uses the face to follow you, so there is not necessarily a need for a CIP to do something to you. Now I understand that many parents had problems in the past with this, my personal opinion for example, many followed St. Paisios when he said don’t take the new ID cards, but he was referring to the Greeks when they took out the old bulletins that said whether you are Orthodox or not and replaced them with new ones in which nothing was written about… It had no connection, because the Greeks still don’t have chips on that piece of paper they use… I think
Father Theologos: No, they have. I don’t know on the ID, but on the passport there is CIP.
Marius Voilă: On the passport, yes. But it is also present back home (Romania) for some time. But I think the problem needs to be bigger about how much data we give away for free than, so to speak, this digital identity.
Father Theologos: Yes and intentions, what are the intentions? That’s where I think the big problem is.
Marius Voilă: Again, you will never know the intentions of a government, what a government wants with you, why it wants… It’s clear that he doesn’t want to lose you altogether because in the end the government lives on us, so to speak, if we pay taxes…
Father Theologos: And from your votes or economic or political. When I say votes – not necessarily political votes and that, but economic votes, meaning you pay taxes.
Marius Voilă: Now that a lot of work is being done on centralizing this stuff and relieving it more… It’s true, again, I wouldn’t want to say something bad or something good. I think, however, that we should hold on more about the fact that we do not have a digital medical system that would be much more useful. For example, moving from one GP to another, when you go to the other doctor to know everything about you the moment you entered there says: Yes ok you had this, this, this problem, not to ask you did you have this problem? I had or didn’t have I don’t remember being too young or stuff like that.
Father Theologos: And so the question is actually whether all this data falls into wrong hands.
Marius Voilă: In wrong hands it is not so easy to enter, I mean don’t imagine every person with a scanner can scan the ID card and take that data. Just like this madness was created during the pandemic, I had seen some videos on the net, I was super amazed, with people saying: I don’t want you to take my temperature because you scan my ID data.
Father Theologos: Or that if you’re vaccinated you get Bluetooth or things like that.
Marius Voilă: I mean, some aberrations have been reached in the sense that if we have reached that level of lack of logic and brain, I say we have other problems than having a CIP in the bulletin.
Father Theologos: You can be injected through an anti-covid vaccine or any other vaccines, a CIP…
Marius Voilă: No, I’m not at that level of miniaturization so high that we can do this thing. I wish it was at that level of miniaturization to have nanobots that would solve cancer and other craziness, but we’re not at that level.
Father Theologos: And I think that the main thing is not miniaturization, but is the antenna, that is…
Marius Voilă: The kind of communication, battery, miniaturization are many more that always connect.
Father Theologos: Not only transistors are… Because people say yes, I don’t get vaccinated, they put my chip in and they put my seal in.
Marius Voilă: Don’t get vaccinated for other reasons, but that’s not the reason. The seal finally, again…
Father Theologos: Your denial of Christ has nothing to do with…
Marius Voilă: I don’t know what CIP you have in you. I haven’t seen anywhere, I haven’t read much in the Bible to say I’m very knowledgeable, but I haven’t seen anything about chips there, not about Intel, not about AMDs, nothing.
Father Theologos: Not about RNA, right?
Marius Voilă: Good and it was interesting to see that certain parents who were fighting against CIPs have biometric passports that is, with CIP in them or a mobile phone and they do it on YouTube full of CIPS
Father Theologos: And the car has I don’t know how many chips in it, dozens…
Marius Voilă: Lack of knowledge, so to speak.
Father Theologos: Yes. A question like this from the audience that the boys said before: which is safer iOS or Android? Because there’s been a scandal now, I don’t know if you know, in the U.S. Senate about Facebook and all that iOS has raised its security level.
Marius Voilă: Yes and no. That was more because Apple moves quite a bit in the direction of ads quite a bit. Facebook is a competitor in this whole story and my personal opinion again, I don’t think it’s… I’m not necessarily in the topic as I said, my field is totally different from the business one, but I do it if I were, I would try to strangle as much as possible everyone who could kill my business. Apple, being a company that can afford to do that, is one of the largest companies in the world right now. In terms of security, Apple has the advantage of developing a single device, a single phone, a single hardware, a single OS.
Father Theologos: Everything is “in house” – in house, as they say.
Marius Voila: While Android is written by a company plus bits and pieces (open-source developers), but for thousands, millions of phones – it’s Samsung, LG, Huawei. Now Huawei has gone another way, a cart of phones, there is a lot that no one has heard of Oppo, OnePlus and other craziness. At the security level, iOS is safer, I’m talking about a lot of government institutions, so to speak, because they moved… The security chip is separate from the rest. How can a phone break? Clone the phone, put it on another device and make brute force.
Father Theologos: An emulator.
Marius Voilă: Yes, and you keep trying passwords until you hit that password. With iOS you can’t do this because the moment you take a clone without that chip it stops working, it gets deleted. Especially if you try more than 10 times. Well, it’s a feature that you need to enable, so it’s not enabled by default. If you try more than 10 times wanted brute force, you automatically delete everything from your phone, so you lose it and if it’s encrypted it’s all gone, that it deletes the encryption key and then without it even if you take the data, you take a handful of data that you don’t understand anything from.
So from that point of view it’s more secure, but again the moment you activated iCloud on it, its security ended, because at that moment the encryption key is saved in iCloud, which means that Apple has access to it, which means that a government institution that needs access to your phone, can ask Apple with a search warrant and it can say: Sir, give me X’s encryption key. Here’s the key, decrypt the phone and that’s it, it’s solved. If I don’t activate iCloud, if you keep it, especially since a new feature has now been activated… in Android there really was a problem recently with a case where in Android and iOS they have almost the same functions, it’s the fight against pedophiles because this is the new theme of the world.
Father Theologos: Yes, I understood the pretext…
Marius Voilă: Yes, and someone took a picture. His child (in America this happened) had an irritation or something, an irritation and a swelling somewhere around the genital area, he took the picture, he sent it to the doctor, as we were in a pandemic and we couldn’t move around so easily, he looked at the picture, the doctor said to wait a couple of days and if it didn’t recover, visit the doctor to see what happens. All well and good, the next day he woke up, his Google account closed, his Google Voice account closed, everything blocked, police announced, pedophilia case, because there was a picture on his phone of a child’s genital area.
Super-efficient system I would say, but at the same time problematic, because this whole story was taken out of context, being done by an automatic system. The automated system doesn’t understand contexts, it doesn’t understand situations, a person can look at the picture and say it doesn’t really seem like a pedophile thing to do this thing, plus it’s linked to an SMS that was sent to a doctor, it’s a little more complicated this relationship between objects.
Well, in the end, the man was found innocent, so to speak, but his Google account is still blocked, Google Voice is not yet unblocked and he has to go through certain systems… Well, iOS has the same thing, but only if you started uploading in iCloud, which is also Google on Android phones, you have the option to save in Google Drive all the photos you take if you have this thing enabled…
Again, it’s not in Europe yet, so don’t let people go crazy because that’s it, this stops, but it will also come to Europe and you wake up without an email address, you probably wake up with the police at the door at some point in a trivial situation – you took a picture with… Or you simply took a picture at the baptism that now in our country this is what happens, at baptism you take pictures in all positions of that child, the poor one. I don’t know if this is wrong or not and you get to the police station where you have to stay with the undersigned, Yes, an aberration, but you can get rid of this stuff by disabling these features and you got rid of it, it’s not a problem for now.
Father Theologos: But the lady, the 40-year-old woman, knows how to disable?
Marius Voilă: She doesn’t know because it’s much more comfortable to have everything saved in iCloud or Google Drive and when you changed your phone pac!, you have your pictures back and you haven’t lost anything. It’s much better and much more convenient. That’s why I say – I would focus more on what’s in my pocket, my phone, and what my phone does, than my ID has a CIP inside. That chip won’t have GPS in it, it won’t track you where you went, that you went to the Holy Mountain and stayed at Lacu and I don’t know where. No, it’s going to be a CIP that’s going to contain the data, your CNP, when you were born, when you have, I don’t know, the vaccines.
Father Theologos: Or just the CNP, which is the key to…
Marius Voilă: Maybe for the beginning they will have only these, maybe later more things will be added, but it’s this saying in English “Lets cross that bridge when we get there” not to go crazy now that it will happen, we burn our houses and move to the mountains… It’s not going to be a gig deal, the more we move to the mountains, the bigger the target will be on the mountains, so it’s not… And as I said, a simple trivial picture of a child’s bottom can get you to jail faster than a CIP ID.
Father Theologos: Yes, I believe that there is in the Church, I think, an exaggeration in certain …
Marius Voilă: Because it is not understood…
Father Theologos: There is no appropriate knowledge.
Marius Voilă: And if you remember that discussion we had at the beginning… So, as a context, I was an atheist for a long time of my life. Of course, like any man, a problem in life leads you next to God, as St. Paisios says, you sit next to an atheist on the plane and when it crashes you say: what big and beautiful crosses he makes…
I don’t know if you remember, I was reading at one point in the Old Testament and it said they weren’t allowed to eat pork and I was kind of annoyed by this, that wait a minute, we’re like Muslims, what do you mean? Am I not Orthodox? I was thinking a little higher than others… And I wanted to talk to the parent: Father, what’s the deal with this that I don’t understand, why aren’t we allowed to eat pork?
And the explanation was simple, I mean so simple that I was actually thinking, yes, but I’m really stupid that I didn’t think about it, it said: think about the context of that time; As we now have so many diseases in pigs, tests we do now… you go for the trichinella, you quickly do an analysis and after that you eat pork, you don’t eat before, then there were no trichinella tests, well, and then the laws came simple, than to say: “don’t eat the pig if it has x, y, z signs and anyway, man ate it anyway that, we are human… You better not eat it at all, it’s forbidden to do this. So the answer is simple, same thing here – the Church should not be in this field, that is, the Church is not…
Father Theologos: Yes, overnight there are specialists in…
Marius Voilă: Especially since it is sad to see it from people who, again, have their mobile phone in their pocket, biometric passport, travel by plane, by car, beautiful cars. So it’s not your domain, your domain is to deal with my soul, deal with it, not the physical… The physical… yes, okay, tell me to do prostrations, fasting, to do other things, but don’t tell me: sir, what watch do you have? Oh, it’s got CIP in him… Well, you also have a smart watch… And you put the “seal” on your hand, now what do you do?
Father Theologos: Yes, a whole story… Thank you very much, Marius, it’s very, very important and I think you need the necessary expertise, you need a little education in the Church. Because people are well-intentioned, they really want to save their souls, but I think it also takes a little expertise in certain areas, but not to arrogate to themselves, that is, not to say that I am an expert in the field by reading two or three posts on the net, I do not become …
Marius Voilă: You can’t… I’ve read three or four posts myself, but it doesn’t make me a priest. But unfortunately, it’s not necessarily the Church’s problem, the problem is global… In school, nobody teaches you, I don’t know…, how to get a loan in the bank and what it means when you grew up. You find out the hard way – you’ve taken out a loan in the bank and you find yourself in huge trouble. Just as well nobody teaches you that, ok, you installed that app on your phone and you hit there “I agree” without reading all the terms and conditions, without reading that you sold your kidney, for example, a joke, of course, but there may be this thing at some point… and someone can come after him…
Father Theologos: Yes, so it’s an education and I think at this hour really… And I think this is on a planetary level, meaning children and we are not educated to think critically, that is, to train in a certain area. And on the other hand, let’s not believe our thoughts – I mean, we’re specialists in absolutely every field, we’ve been specialists in vaccines, in CIPs, in war now, that is, overnight…
Eh, thank God, thank you very much, Marius. God bless you! Because, indeed, we need to clarify certain things and especially, folks, we need to know not to believe our thoughts, that we know certain problems and know that the problems are elsewhere and because of that let’s be a little humble, focus on prayer and listen to those who really know and – and this is another great pain of mine – not get stuck in our position the moment our position turns out to be wrong. I think that’s a big problem… Big problem. Thank you very much. For the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us. Amen.
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