Slashdot Mirror

http://cryptogon.com/?p=1588

For more details...

...to major.

let's take a quick stroll down memoryhole lane shall we?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/23/sentient_worlds/

http://www.simulexinc.com/

just who do you think has all that info in a tight little package? a simulation with that many nodes running a very sophisticated 'world environment'.

right now on the front page of Drudge Report' 11/05/2007 2050 pst
http://tinyurl.com/2ghvhm 'Poll finds nearly 80 percent of U.S. adults go online'

let's add a few more bits to the mix (no pun intended ;) )

ATT invents surveillance programming language
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/att-invents-pro.html

Qwest exec not allowed to reveal classified documents in court re:civilian intercepts w/o warrant
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/tech/article/0,2777,DRMN_23910_5719566,00.html

an interesting summary statement.
http://cryptogon.com/?p=877

please pass the tinfoil, and yes, my html skills are few. however, like the slashdotter far above said 'we all have our skill sets'.

It may be less Anonymous (although it was recently discovered that a group of Tor nodes in the Washington DC area were routing large amounts of the public Tor network http://cryptogon.com/?p=624)

We're working on giving you the option of public mix-in, along with optimized route selection.

This essay takes the paranoia all the way, but, as it turns out, maybe not far enough...

The Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity

http://cryptogon.com/?p=624

All of the stuff that you do with your "normal" online persona, you know, online banking, checking email, discussion groups, etc: You can't do any of that. The second you associate a user profile on a server with your behavior, you're back to square one. The Matrix has you. You would have to create what the intelligence business calls a "legend" for your new anonymous online life. You may only access this persona using these extreme communications security protocols. Obviously, you can't create an agent X persona via your anonymous connection and then log into some site using that profile on your home cable modem connection. To borrow another bit of jargon from the people who do this for real, full time, you must practice "compartmentalization."

Colin Powell... a former U.S. Army Four Star General, U.S. Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff happens to go into quiet, semi-retirement working for the venture capital firm responsible for funding the company that is building the "Holy Grail" of energy storage devices, based on technology patented by Standard Oil Company in 1966...

Tell me another one:

http://cryptogon.com/2006_09_17_blogarchive.html#1 15906089199373074

My wife and I had to get this on our roof, and you don't want to know what it's costing us and what we're getting in return for all that money. Sorry, I just don't want to talk about it because it's so disturbing. The machine I left behind in the U.S. is on a 7Mbit/sec cable modem circuit!!! AHHHHHHHHHH!!!

The alternative here was dialup at about 13 kbits/sec.:

http://cryptogon.com/2006_08_20_blogarchive.html#1 15642162872991388

New Zealand is a beautiful place in so many ways. Internet access, however, is a disaster. The recent bust up of Telecom NZ by the government won't change things in rural areas for the forseeable future. Even in the cities, broadband services are slow and the download caps make the offerings seem like jokes by developed world standards.

I'm not sure how that applies to impeachment, but if Bush does get impeached and removed from office, I certainly hope they go after Cheney, also. In this little axis of evil, he's one of the worst. Definitely worse than Bush. Bush is a sock puppet (Forgive him, Archie. He doesn't know what he's doing --Edith Bunker, talking about Nixon). Cheney has a bit more control. I consider him, and Rumsfeld to be amongst the worst living criminals on the planet. Right up there with Saddam.

Bird Flu Scam: Donald H. Rumsfeld - Former Chairman of Gilead Sciences

Related: Bird Flu "Pandemic" Antidote: Wash Hands

Related: Spain: Bird Flu Sparking Human Epidemic Is 'Science Fiction'

Related: STRATFOR on Bird Flu: Calm Down

I wrote this a few months ago. .gov and .mil have found it interesting:

http://cryptogon.com/docs/pirate_insurgency.html

-Kevin

Oi. There were a couple things I just have trouble ignoring...

I don't consider myself ignorant, and while most ignorant people don't consider themselves ignorant, I have had a fairly solid education with extra history and politics classes thrown in. I wasn't born rich and had to work up to and through college so I'm either the dumbest clod on the planet or I actually learned something about working hard to put food on the table. So that covers political, historical, and financial ignorance.

Almost by definition, you can't know you are not ignorant or naive. If there's something you don't know, well, you don't know, do you? Political awareness and a well-informed view of the candidates is not something they teach you in school. If a couple of politics classes are your basis for claiming non-ignorance, you may have just disproved your own point. The first step to reducing ignorance is to realize you have it, and will always have it. And to avoid the problems it causes, you've got to spend your life questioning, searching for unfamiliar ideas, and thinking the unthinkable.

I know I'm terribly ignorant. And though I try constantly to change that, my search has not led me to many answers. However, I've found something more valuable than answers -- good questions. The best I can ever hope for is to find progressively better questions.

On a sidenote: I'd like to thank everyone from moveon.org that went out of their way to skew the exit polls.

I'd like to thank the folks at Diebold for giving the world some idea just how broken and corrupt some of our voting systems are. The CEO of Diebold, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. And then, curiously, the results were significantly different than the exit polls. For some background, the leaked Diebold internal memos reveal a great deal of error and corruption in their company and products. Hell, someone even taught a chimpanzee how to falsify voting records on Diebold machines. Doesn't that bring up some good questions?

Self-interested, amoral, callous and deceitful, a corporation's operational principles make it anti-social. It breaches social and legal standards to get its way even while it mimics the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. It suffers no guilt. Diagnosis: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a psychopath.

Link to story.

This is a temporary mirror of the complete set of documents. Hopefully, this will seed the material to other permanent mirrors.

Two zip files, 11.6MB and 8.2MB:
RFID Confidential Documents

Those of you who actually took the time to read my essay, "Cyberwar: How Terrorists Could Defeat the U.S., and Why They Won't," (requires Acrobat 5, not 4.) might get chill running up your backs when you read this. I'm still sticking to my original thesis, however: The Internet won't be brought down by terrorists because corporations and governments need it, and the terrorists serve the interests of corporations and governments. Regardless, I hope this DNS attack isn't a prelude to a bigger operation. Note how they say that it just ran for an hour and then stopped! Note this story, which detailed the creation of attack zombies with P2P capabilities, allowing them to be targetted at will. Also note that a top infrastructure protection analyst was just killed by the Maryland area sniper! And within a couple of days we see the largest DDOS attack on root DNS systems ever!? (Long Pause) Keep a sharp eye out for weirdness, folks, something BIG might be coming down:

Here's what I wrote back on September 14, 2002:

Maybe the terrorists start taking out some or all of the thirteen root domain name server systems (I think there are still 13) or interrupting communications to those root servers [today's DDOS incident]. (Thankfully, a couple of these systems are located in places that have people with guns guarding them.) These root servers are used by thousands of other lower level domain name systems and receive about 300 million requests per day.

Domain name systems are used to translate human readable URLs, like www.cryptogon.com into machine usable IP addresses like 209.115.132.59. There is much concern about the root DNS systems. Many articles on this topic are easily accessible. Much of the concern, however, is focused on hackers DOSsing the root servers. Again, this misses the point.

What is the physical security like at the non-military root DNS facilities?

I've driven by one of the buildings hundreds of times because I used to live near it. It looks just like any other small office building. How long would this place hold up against a few armed terrorists who were willing to die TO BRING DOWN A ROOT DNS NODE? Think about it. The same goes for the data centers mentioned previously. Surely these places should have armed security. But even if they did, are they prepared to stop terrorists who have no intention of ever getting out alive?

Here's what just happened:

The heart of the Internet sustained its largest and most sophisticated attack ever, starting late Monday, according to officials at key online backbone organizations.

Around 5:00 p.m. EDT on Monday, a "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attack struck the 13 "root servers" that provide the primary roadmap for almost all Internet communications. Despite the scale of the attack, which lasted about an hour, Internet users worldwide were largely unaffected, experts said.

FBI officials would not speculate on who might have planned or carried out the attack.

David Wray, a spokesman for the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), said the bureau is "aware of the reports and looking into it."

DDOS attacks overwhelm networks with an onslaught of data until they cannot be used. According to security experts, the incident probably was the result of multiple attacks, in which attackers concentrate the power of many computers against a single network to prevent it from operating.

"This was the largest and most complex DDOS attack ever against the root server system," said a source at one of the organizations responsible for operating the root servers.

Those of you who actually took the time to read my essay, "Cyberwar: How Terrorists Could Defeat the U.S., and Why They Won't," (requires Acrobat 5, not 4.) might get chill running up your backs when you read this. I'm still sticking to my original thesis, however: The Internet won't be brought down by terrorists because corporations and governments need it, and the terrorists serve the interests of corporations and governments. Regardless, I hope this DNS attack isn't a prelude to a bigger operation. Note how they say that it just ran for an hour and then stopped! Note this story, which detailed the creation of attack zombies with P2P capabilities, allowing them to be targetted at will. Also note that a top infrastructure protection analyst was just killed by the Maryland area sniper! And within a couple of days we see the largest DDOS attack on root DNS systems ever!? (Long Pause) Keep a sharp eye out for weirdness, folks, something BIG might be coming down:

Here's what I wrote back on September 14, 2002:

Maybe the terrorists start taking out some or all of the thirteen root domain name server systems (I think there are still 13) or interrupting communications to those root servers [today's DDOS incident]. (Thankfully, a couple of these systems are located in places that have people with guns guarding them.) These root servers are used by thousands of other lower level domain name systems and receive about 300 million requests per day.

Domain name systems are used to translate human readable URLs, like www.cryptogon.com into machine usable IP addresses like 209.115.132.59. There is much concern about the root DNS systems. Many articles on this topic are easily accessible. Much of the concern, however, is focused on hackers DOSsing the root servers. Again, this misses the point.

What is the physical security like at the non-military root DNS facilities?

I've driven by one of the buildings hundreds of times because I used to live near it. It looks just like any other small office building. How long would this place hold up against a few armed terrorists who were willing to die TO BRING DOWN A ROOT DNS NODE? Think about it. The same goes for the data centers mentioned previously. Surely these places should have armed security. But even if they did, are they prepared to stop terrorists who have no intention of ever getting out alive?

Here's what just happened:

The heart of the Internet sustained its largest and most sophisticated attack ever, starting late Monday, according to officials at key online backbone organizations.

Around 5:00 p.m. EDT on Monday, a "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attack struck the 13 "root servers" that provide the primary roadmap for almost all Internet communications. Despite the scale of the attack, which lasted about an hour, Internet users worldwide were largely unaffected, experts said.

FBI officials would not speculate on who might have planned or carried out the attack.

David Wray, a spokesman for the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), said the bureau is "aware of the reports and looking into it."

DDOS attacks overwhelm networks with an onslaught of data until they cannot be used. According to security experts, the incident probably was the result of multiple attacks, in which attackers concentrate the power of many computers against a single network to prevent it from operating.

"This was the largest and most complex DDOS attack ever against the root server system," said a source at one of the organizations responsible for operating the root servers.

Those of you who actually took the time to read my essay, "Cyberwar: How Terrorists Could Defeat the U.S., and Why They Won't," (requires Acrobat 5, not 4.) might get chill running up your backs when you read this. I'm still sticking to my original thesis, however: The Internet won't be brought down by terrorists because corporations and governments need it, and the terrorists serve the interests of corporations and governments. Regardless, I hope this DNS attack isn't a prelude to a bigger operation. Note how they say that it just ran for an hour and then stopped! Note this story, which detailed the creation of attack zombies with P2P capabilities, allowing them to be targetted at will. Also note that a top infrastructure protection analyst was just killed by the Maryland area sniper! And within a couple of days we see the largest DDOS attack on root DNS systems ever!? (Long Pause) Keep a sharp eye out for weirdness, folks, something BIG might be coming down:

Here's what I wrote back on September 14, 2002:

Maybe the terrorists start taking out some or all of the thirteen root domain name server systems (I think there are still 13) or interrupting communications to those root servers [today's DDOS incident]. (Thankfully, a couple of these systems are located in places that have people with guns guarding them.) These root servers are used by thousands of other lower level domain name systems and receive about 300 million requests per day.

Domain name systems are used to translate human readable URLs, like www.cryptogon.com into machine usable IP addresses like 209.115.132.59. There is much concern about the root DNS systems. Many articles on this topic are easily accessible. Much of the concern, however, is focused on hackers DOSsing the root servers. Again, this misses the point.

What is the physical security like at the non-military root DNS facilities?

I've driven by one of the buildings hundreds of times because I used to live near it. It looks just like any other small office building. How long would this place hold up against a few armed terrorists who were willing to die TO BRING DOWN A ROOT DNS NODE? Think about it. The same goes for the data centers mentioned previously. Surely these places should have armed security. But even if they did, are they prepared to stop terrorists who have no intention of ever getting out alive?

Here's what just happened:

The heart of the Internet sustained its largest and most sophisticated attack ever, starting late Monday, according to officials at key online backbone organizations.

Around 5:00 p.m. EDT on Monday, a "distributed denial of service" (DDOS) attack struck the 13 "root servers" that provide the primary roadmap for almost all Internet communications. Despite the scale of the attack, which lasted about an hour, Internet users worldwide were largely unaffected, experts said.

FBI officials would not speculate on who might have planned or carried out the attack.

David Wray, a spokesman for the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), said the bureau is "aware of the reports and looking into it."

DDOS attacks overwhelm networks with an onslaught of data until they cannot be used. According to security experts, the incident probably was the result of multiple attacks, in which attackers concentrate the power of many computers against a single network to prevent it from operating.

"This was the largest and most complex DDOS attack ever against the root server system," said a source at one of the organizations responsible for operating the root servers.

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that the government is making an active attempt to read peoples' minds. The good news is that it's never going to work---if the description in this article is any indication of how they're going to go about it.

How could I possibly know it's not going to work? Well, let's just say I worked for a company that burned up millions of dollars attempting to do something FAR less ambitious than these bozos at NASA have set out to do. We were using essentially the same techniques as described in the article, with one incredible difference. THE NASA THING IS NOT GOING TO TOUCH YOU. BAA HAAA HAAAAA! I nearly broke a rib when I read they're going to gather the EEG signals---I have to steady myself from laughing so hard as I type---without placing a "cap" on the subject. Wait, can you hear that? It's the sound of my former co-workers laughing their asses off. What is the NASA team going to do *I'm still chuckling*, have every airline passenger step inside a Faraday cage packed with room temperature, superconductive sensors built by little gnomes at Area 51!?

We've been there, we've tried this....well, minus the full body Faraday cage and extraterrestrial sensors. That is, we had the luxury of actually using a standard EEG headset to collect the data. And it was still difficult to JUST GET QUALITY DATA. EEG is the biggest pain in the ass to work with. Ask ANYONE who's ever dealt with it.

Well, say NASA can wave a magic wand and somehow collect the data, then what? Predict high order human behaviors and thought processes by analyzing EEG with some other special herbs and spices thrown in for good measure? It may sound good on paper, but I'm here to tell ya: It's bullsh*t. No, it's double bullsh*t. Two years and millions of dollars later, I'll tell you what we got: Snake Eyes. Nothing. Jack. Nil. And I can assure you that we weren't going for anything remotely as hard as this NASA thing. We had lots of PhDs, freaks, nerds, experts, etc. It didn't matter. The feds would have a better chance of getting at the intent of an individual if they would let a circus macaque run loose in the terminal, randomly identifying "terrorists" in the crowd!

In case you think I'm kidding about all of this, that's me in the pictures. Pic1 Pic2 Pic3

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that the government is making an active attempt to read peoples' minds. The good news is that it's never going to work---if the description in this article is any indication of how they're going to go about it.

How could I possibly know it's not going to work? Well, let's just say I worked for a company that burned up millions of dollars attempting to do something FAR less ambitious than these bozos at NASA have set out to do. We were using essentially the same techniques as described in the article, with one incredible difference. THE NASA THING IS NOT GOING TO TOUCH YOU. BAA HAAA HAAAAA! I nearly broke a rib when I read they're going to gather the EEG signals---I have to steady myself from laughing so hard as I type---without placing a "cap" on the subject. Wait, can you hear that? It's the sound of my former co-workers laughing their asses off. What is the NASA team going to do *I'm still chuckling*, have every airline passenger step inside a Faraday cage packed with room temperature, superconductive sensors built by little gnomes at Area 51!?

We've been there, we've tried this....well, minus the full body Faraday cage and extraterrestrial sensors. That is, we had the luxury of actually using a standard EEG headset to collect the data. And it was still difficult to JUST GET QUALITY DATA. EEG is the biggest pain in the ass to work with. Ask ANYONE who's ever dealt with it.

Well, say NASA can wave a magic wand and somehow collect the data, then what? Predict high order human behaviors and thought processes by analyzing EEG with some other special herbs and spices thrown in for good measure? It may sound good on paper, but I'm here to tell ya: It's bullsh*t. No, it's double bullsh*t. Two years and millions of dollars later, I'll tell you what we got: Snake Eyes. Nothing. Jack. Nil. And I can assure you that we weren't going for anything remotely as hard as this NASA thing. We had lots of PhDs, freaks, nerds, experts, etc. It didn't matter. The feds would have a better chance of getting at the intent of an individual if they would let a circus macaque run loose in the terminal, randomly identifying "terrorists" in the crowd!

In case you think I'm kidding about all of this, that's me in the pictures. Pic1 Pic2 Pic3

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that the government is making an active attempt to read peoples' minds. The good news is that it's never going to work---if the description in this article is any indication of how they're going to go about it.

How could I possibly know it's not going to work? Well, let's just say I worked for a company that burned up millions of dollars attempting to do something FAR less ambitious than these bozos at NASA have set out to do. We were using essentially the same techniques as described in the article, with one incredible difference. THE NASA THING IS NOT GOING TO TOUCH YOU. BAA HAAA HAAAAA! I nearly broke a rib when I read they're going to gather the EEG signals---I have to steady myself from laughing so hard as I type---without placing a "cap" on the subject. Wait, can you hear that? It's the sound of my former co-workers laughing their asses off. What is the NASA team going to do *I'm still chuckling*, have every airline passenger step inside a Faraday cage packed with room temperature, superconductive sensors built by little gnomes at Area 51!?

We've been there, we've tried this....well, minus the full body Faraday cage and extraterrestrial sensors. That is, we had the luxury of actually using a standard EEG headset to collect the data. And it was still difficult to JUST GET QUALITY DATA. EEG is the biggest pain in the ass to work with. Ask ANYONE who's ever dealt with it.

Well, say NASA can wave a magic wand and somehow collect the data, then what? Predict high order human behaviors and thought processes by analyzing EEG with some other special herbs and spices thrown in for good measure? It may sound good on paper, but I'm here to tell ya: It's bullsh*t. No, it's double bullsh*t. Two years and millions of dollars later, I'll tell you what we got: Snake Eyes. Nothing. Jack. Nil. And I can assure you that we weren't going for anything remotely as hard as this NASA thing. We had lots of PhDs, freaks, nerds, experts, etc. It didn't matter. The feds would have a better chance of getting at the intent of an individual if they would let a circus macaque run loose in the terminal, randomly identifying "terrorists" in the crowd!

In case you think I'm kidding about all of this, that's me in the pictures. Pic1 Pic2 Pic3