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12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

http://www.eviloverlord.com/li...

12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

The recommended detonation count is 117.

I guess their team of advisors is incomplete:

http://www.eviloverlord.com/li...

"12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation."

And:

"60. My five-year-old child advisor will also be asked to decipher any code I am thinking of using. If he breaks the code in under 30 seconds, it will not be used. Note: this also applies to passwords."

Perhaps Microsoft doesn't consider itself evil? Lots of people no longer do. At least they followed rule 32 in this case.

That sounds like an extract from a great team management manual.

They had better cover Peter's Evil Overlord List or your career is as doomed as all that came before it.

What would the Evil Overlord say?

http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

I'd still have had them arrested immediately, because "I thought they were harmless activists and besides everyone knows it takes a two-tonne weapon to crack a containment vessel" sounds pretty lame after your nuclear plant gets cracked by a shiny new man-portable version.

It sounds like the kind of thing that should be in the Evil Overlord List, actually. #11 and #24 seem applicable.

When picking out a location for your secret base for world domination, use a regular volcano, NOT a skull shaped one. It's much easier to get away with it.

Evil Overlord FAIL.

"171. I will not locate a base in a volcano, cave, or any other location where it would be ridiculously easy to bypass security by rappelling down from above."

Rule #12: One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation. -- http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

When I am evil overlord:

http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

That 1984 commercial gets more ironic by the moment.

Think different.

Wow, is the site really gone? Wait, here are the new club rules:
http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

He's so right. He references the Turkey City Lexicon, which lists most of the things that make bad SF. Also worth reading is the Evil Overlord List. (" 2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through." "56. My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice." "67. No matter how many shorts we have in the system, my guards will be instructed to treat every surveillance camera malfunction as a full-scale emergency.")

There are some other annoying cliches in SF. One is copying historical battles. The Defense of Roarke's Drift has shown up in at least four SF novels. (Nobody ever seems to do the Defense of Duffer's Drift.) Star Wars space battles are copied from WWI biplane battles, where nobody can hit targets consistently, even at short range. There's also the embarrassing fact that, historically, heroism hasn't decided many major battles. (Roman saying: "The Legion is not composed of heroes. Heroes are what the Legion kills.") Military SF no longer reflects this, because the WWII generation, which learned that the hard way, has died off.

David Weber does battles better, but his stuff requires too much exposition for most people. His latest book in the Honor Harrington series consists mostly of transcripts of meetings, setting up the political background for the next book.

Stross himself has his moments. The Merchant's War series starts out as fantasy, but slowly, book by book, moves into hard fiction and then politics. In the last book out so far, a character modelled on Dick Cheney has dealt with a threat from a castle in an alternate universe by having his people blow up the castle with a nuclear weapon.

Evil Overlord List #15: I will never employ any device with a digital countdown. If I find that such a device is absolutely unavoidable, I will set it to activate when the counter reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into operation.

http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

Anonymous routing is extremely difficult to accomplish on the Internet (cf. Tor), but that's actually the second-level problem. I'm much more concerned about physical access. How does the "educated urbanite" get bandwidth? I mean, from the physical level up?

Here are my possible scenarios, with problems I see in them:

• An anonymous citizen with DSL-like broadband. Trivially easy to find, block, put into jail since PPPoE is usually used and with authentication. If the gov doesn't want to cut of the Internet entirely (and why not? who would stop them?), they could only open port 80 and block any first TCP segments that don't start with GET/POST/PUT.
• An anonymous citizen with a modem. They are a bit trickier since they can dial internationally. But still, the gov probably owns the telcom, they log international calls meticulously, anyone with > 1 call per week is immediately a suspect, simply eavesdrop them to confirm data transfer and jail them.
• A double-agent / conspirator; a government worker with normal access but on the side of the dissenters. Very, very tricky if not at the very top of the chain - has admin access to equipment, can delete logs. Again, if the gov doesn't cut landlines physically, there are enough countermeasures: 1) the trivially simple allow-and-monitor-port-80 game 2) if you must for some unknown reasons allow your employees all ports (why would you?), you can still do protocol inspection (though this is not as simple).
• An individual with a satellite link. How many are they? The dishes don't have to be big so they're reasonably easy to hide, but what percentage of the population can have those? The owners can probably establish local pockets of access, but if it's wired, you can't spread much and if it's wireless, ether sniffers at 2.4 GHz are cheap and the grunts that comb the city don't need training to use them.

I guess it all depends on what level of access is enough. If a twitter-like message once a week is enough, there could be reasonable safety. But if I were an Evil Overlord, I would concentrate more on the physical access, and a good deny-all-allow-some firewall policy for backup. Of course, we could assume that the Iranian government is simply too ignorant to realize those measures can be implemented.

What technologies can be used that can't be blocked by other technologies or physical access?

*poke* It's a red herring. Check his safety deposit box... trust me on this. I know...

And ignore ***all*** these silly, stupid suggestions. :)

Congratulations! You are well on your way to becoming a fine Evil Overlord. However, I highly recommend you read this helpful manual before you go any further with your plans.

13 - All slain enemies will be cremated, or at least have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them, not left for dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal.

I see that you have read Peter's Evil Overlord List http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

That's why all villains should continuously assess their strengths and weaknesses. You don't want to go down like this.
(The list)

Dude, that's rule 24. And in this case, death was pretty much instantaneous.

Clearly, as an evil overlord, it would behoove me to have this brilliant architect build my impenetrable lair!

Hmm, your list could be a nice fit next to the Evil Overlord list.

No he does not. He means http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html this one.

Darn it... Now my evil plan actually will be foiled by a 5-year-old.

Yep, positive current. We generate some positrons and feed them into a a matter-antimatter reaction chamber. That's what is actually needed to power these, uh, tiny things. We didn't think it could be done until Geordi inverted the warp field and hooked up a mini-deflector dish to each of the flying cellophane wrapp... ah, 'robots'.

Now all we need to do is make these things able to carry a payload of some decription without collapsing under the strain... They should do someday in some form, but this early stage is needed.

(Yep, I read some parodies recently.)

Speaking as an Evil Genius with standards, and one who's read the Warhol Worm paper, I'd say any "decent" botnet doesn't take orders from just any old Bill, Fred, or Otto who wanders by waving an executable at it. A "decent" bot wouldn't run code handed to it unless the executable was cryptographically signed with a private key matching the public key it knows belongs to its One True Beloved Master.

So, all of your plans should work just fine... once you determine how to recover a GPG private key of the 4096-bit keypair needed to sign the RUNME code, using the public key taken from the sample bot.

HANGE. (Have A Nice Geologic Epoch.)

(Note: I have better projects to occupy my Evil Genius than botnets.)

I'm in full agreement with you, and highly interested in the MMOG - or a true MMORPG and have similar ideas of my own, though perhaps more socially-minded.

And for some reason I want to say that your link above may be a copy of the original Evil Overlord list, though I don't know how often they update even though they say they're still taking submissions. I think the other lists aggregated on the sff page have homes elsewhere too, but I'm too lazy to substantiate that claim right now.

8-PP

As an aspiring Evil Overlord I must now renounce Google. If I'm ever going to destroy the earth I'm afraid I cannot continue to support them.

Why don't you give credit to the person who actually made the list? It's at http://www.eviloverlord.com/.

5. Stormtroopers being professional soldiers would take careful aim, set up snipers, etc thus all gun fights end with the good guys dying and quickly.

The Top 100 Things I'd Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord

#56: "My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice."

I'm sure I've read a dozen comics and seen a dozen movies where that was the plot. Just shows that Samson should have read the Evil Overlord's List ;)

Evil Overlord list of things to do:

5) The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.

- http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

There is a _reason_ why there are so many Star Wars references in the Evil Overlords list :-)

http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html

If that's the case, then The List says that SCO should be put to death immediately anyway.

I'm thinking that it's time to write to my state and federal congressmen to get California's Security Breach Information Act (S.B. 1386) amended into state or national law. That way when this shit happens I can find out if any of my info is at risk.

When will these idiot companies start taking security seriously instead of being idiots about it? Time to take a page out of the "If I were an Evil Overlord List": One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation. and My five-year-old child advisor will also be asked to decipher any code I am thinking of using. If he breaks the code in under 30 seconds, it will not be used. Note: this also applies to passwords. Source

On a side note, all this stuff just keeps reminding me about the No Networked Systems requirement in BattleStar Galactica.

...the US wasn't being paranoid when they implemented the USA Patriot act -- it was simply a police-state power grab.

They're black - instantly cool but probably a problem to spot your mate when his dark face shield is closed

Bingo.

Many of the arguments for outsourcing have nothing to do with the cost of programming talent:

• Escape from Government regulation. (Pension rules, overtime rules, health & safety rules)
• Escape from corporate oversight. (Stockholders, board of directors, top corporate managemnt)
• Not having to deal directly with programmers, who tend to be ornery cusses.

There are corresponding non-monetary downsides, of course:

• Loss of control. (Your supplier delivers a piece of crap. Now what?)
• Loss of oversight. (Your supplier sells your data to the Russian mafia. Now what?)
• Loss of capability. (You fired all the programmers. Now who's going to answer your questions? You're stuck with your outsource, who probably comes from a culture of Tell The Boss What He Wants To Hear.)

And, of course

• Evil Overlord rule #179: I will not outsource core functions.

I suspect that when the dust settles, we'll find that outsourcing makes sense for some projects and not others, just like anything else.

Syndrome violates rules 1, 6, 13, 17, 27, 58, 60, 70, 74, 84, and 96. And he's supposed to be intelligent.

When you become an evil overlord

Or maybe you might remember Ruby Ridge or Waco. Or maybe you might remember some of the excesses since 9/11. Was this a good bust or bad one? It looks more like a good one. Don't automatically think that they are the evil jackbooted minions of the evil overlord. Nor should you automatically presume that they are the good guys.

There are several Funny-modded posts pointing out that the 2020 suit looks like a Darth Vader costume. Hell, even the mil spokesman describes it as "ominous". Nobody seems to see this as a drawback. The damn things look evil.

A lot of planning nowadays assumes that the most likely conflict scenarios involving US forces are so-called "fourth-generation wars", where cultural perceptions and media strategy are as important as hardware. The intifada is still the textbook example. Those kids weren't throwing stones because they didn't have access to guns. They were throwing stones because stones against tanks makes a great video-bite for the media.

So: on the "imperial" side we have legions of anonymous mooks in hulking black armour and face-concealing visors. Backed up by horrifying robotic killing machines. On the "rebel" side we have rag-tag, lightly-armed folk in nice earth-hued organic-looking clothing. Got that? Now put it on a TV screen. Regardless of your political views on a given conflict, there is a huge amount of cultural programming that leads Western viewers to root for the rebels. (Non-Western viewers generally don't need much convincing.)

Another, more worrying aspect: there is a lot of experimental and real-world evidence to show that the willingness of troops, police etc to commit atrocities is strongly correlated with their anonymity. Visors and even sunglasses increase the likelihood; big bold nametags reduce it. Anything that makes eye-contact difficult also makes it harder to win the trust of any locals you have to deal with.

And haven't these people even read the Evil Overlord List? It's item #1 for crying out loud!

For tips about how to lay out your evil lair and run your evil empire when you become an evil overlord, based on mistakes many previous evil overlords have made in the past, including this one (man-sized ventilation shafts), see Peter's Evil Overlord List .

Perhaps this is what you were thinking of? It's not a book, but it has been one of the most useful and practical pieces of writing I've ever read.

No, but only because everybody who tried it didn't read the Evil Overlord list.

"Finally, to keep my subjects permanently locked in a mindless trance, I will provide each of them with free unlimited Internet access."

Are you sure?
100 on the Evil Overlord list is "Finally, to keep my subjects permanently locked in a mindless trance, I will provide each of them with free unlimited Internet access."

IMarv