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Parent is correct, go look up Richard Steele, who heads something called Open Source Solutions (oss.net), and basically advocates that the U.S. spend a lot more time monitoring 'open source' info, instead of spending billions to get spy satellite imagery that tells us nothing about intent.

Interestingly, he has given some speeches at hacker conventions, such as at H2k2 and the Fifth HOPE. You can download his speeches if you follow the links.

I believe the press also uses the term "open source" to refer to a public statement.

It's pretty funny to see Slashdot types get upset over people "stealing" their terms, when those terms are actually older than their use of them... Do they realize that outside of Slashdot, terms like "developer" or "editor" mean totally different things from how we use them?

I have to second the Quirks and Quarks show, it is truly superb

The 2600 group has archives of their shows going back to 1986, there
is a great wealth of hacking and phreaking information under the title
'off the hook', http://www.2600.com/
You can also find other shows produced by Emanuel, like the 'Off The Wall'
and the 'Brain Damage'.

2600 also have organized few different hacker conferences (hope series)
and two most recent conferences have all of the audio online:

http://www.the-fifth-hope.org/hoop/5hope_speakers. khtml
conference from 2004, over 70 speakers, tons of listening material on
variety of topics like lockpicking, hacking, social engineering, spies
and even info on Romania's IT.. First Hope conference to which Kevin
Mitnick showed up to.

http://www.h2k2.net/panels.html
conference from 2002, everything online, also a great variety

http://www.h2k.net/panels.html
conference from 2000, not everything is in mp3 form

the author mentioned audio books, I am not sure what audiobooks he has
been listening to but there is alot of choice, you dont have to listen
to Robert Jordans another WoT 1000 page book, you can pick up an audio
book that satisfies your 'geekinees', here are books that I am waiting
at my library to take out and listen in my car:
- Bill Bryson - A Short History Of Nearly Everything
- Richard P Feynman - What Do You Care What Other People Think
- Richard Wolfson - Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution
- Stephne Hawking - Breif History of Time

Another thing that the person might look into are abridged books. I had
a chance to listen to the 'Time Machine' that was abridged down to two
hours. He could listen first part on the way to work, and second part
on the way back. It definitelly is different listening to a two hour
abridged book than listening to a 45hour unabridged book.

enjoy

--
/apz, Based on obituary notices: mean and unimportant people never die

But you're right: our priority is on folks who are physically present. They are, after all, the ones who make the conferences happen. (And, they get to have the most fun.)

Allow me to go the extra step you did not, and point out that the previous HOPE conference, H2K2, has the majority of panels online. So does the conference before it, H2K.

Using these two points, one can possibly plot a trend towards the current conference also making these panels available for download.

How about:

- panel discussions from the H2K2 conference.

- a college course on SF and Fantasy literature.

- the DV Guys focus on the art and tech of video production. (Terrible bumper music. Just suffer through it)

- The Teaching Company has some fantastic for-pay courses on CD and DVD.

- Lastly, I gotta mention The Infidel Guy. The focus is on atheism, so it's not for everyone, but there are some great interviews in the archives with people such as Massimo Pigliucci, Michael Shermer, Paul Kurtz, and Michio Kaku. Lots of contorversial and thought provoking talk on the subject of religion, philosophy, and science.

Hey guys, sorry for the repost! I know this is bad, no TERRIBLE netiquette. But it was attached to a story that only garnered 9 comments, but I really think that more people should know and think about this stuff. I hope the same thing doesn't happen to this story, or my name'll really be mud! :D



A couple of years ago at the last "HOPE" conference was the first time I heard of this idea of the "deep web". This year's shindig is happening July 9th through the 11th. I wonder if chosing those those dates was merely a coincidence this...

The topic was something called "Hacking National Security" in wchich the speaker, Robert Steele, first brought up this concept and mentioned what he described as a "deep web search engine" called Copernic. However, I've found that product (there is a free variant) basically queries a list of different search engines. This is not what I would consider a "deep web search" now that I have learned a little more about the term. But that was the first I'd heard of it.

Robert Steele can be forgiven for being a bit technically naive. Because his specialty is National Security and not technology. But he had a lot to say that was of salient interest to technology minded folks. Why else would he have had a panel discussion at a hacker conference?

What I learned from him is that search engines like google and others only are able to skim roughly 5% of the total content of the web. Everything underneath that 5% is the "Deep Web". This is what he claimed the global terror networks are using to communicate with each other. And, most alarmingly, that the NSA - Amerca's Information Processing branch of the government was COMPLETELY ill equiped, even ignorant of terror groups freely trafficking their plans on the web. Talk about our most "advanced" information processing governmental body! Note the lack of a CNAME entry in their DNS record! Don't forget the "www" now! yeesh! At any rate I read an interesting book about them way back in the 80s called The Puzzle Palace. But I'm sure it's way dated by now. I read it way back in 87. Did you know that they are roughly 3 times the size and girth of the CIA...and yet hardly any of the lay populace seems to have heard of them! I once dated a "know it all" (how do you ever learn anything if you already "know it all"?) bad-poetry, arty farty girlfriend who claimed that I was "making the whole thing up" when I tried explaining to her about the NSA! May I say again, "yeesh"? Literally COULD NOT convince her otherwise...I digress...

Now hold on a minute here! Just how dated would you suppose that book to have been? One of Robert Steele's pet peeves was the extreme datedness of NSA tecnology. Being a government agency (FLAGSHIP of intelligence agencies!) a good hunk of their computer technology dated back to the 70s. This was still the case as of 2002, mind you, and if I understood him correctly.

Now, another of his compaints was the lack of native speakers hired by the agency. That is, instead of hiring a native Pashto speaker, they will instead almost unerringly hire the "blond haired, blue eyed, cocky midwestern jock" (his words not mine)

A couple of years ago at the last "HOPE" conference (this year's is happening July 9-11, this summer) was the first time I heard of this idea of the "deep web".

The topic was something called "Hacking National Security" in wchich the speaker, Robert Steele, first brought up this concept and mentioned what he described as a "deep web search engine" called Copernic. However, I've found that product (there is a free variant) is basically queries a list of different search engines. This is not what I would consider a "deep web search" now that I have learned a little more about the term. But that was the first I'd heard of it.

Robert Steele can be forgiven for being a bit technically naive. Because his specialty is National Security and not technology. But he had a lot to say that was of salient interest to technology minded folks. Why else would he have had a panel discussion at a hacker conference?

What I learned from him is that search engines like google and others only are able to skim roughly 5% of the total content of the web. Everything underneath that 5% is the "Deep Web". This is what he claimed the global terror networks are using to communicate with each other. And, most alarmingly, that the NSA - Amerca's Information Processing branch of the government was COMPLETELY ill equiped, even ignorant of terror groups freely trafficking their plans on the web. Talk about our most "advanced" information processing governmental body! Note the lack of a CNAME entry in their DNS record! Don't forget the "www" now! yeesh! At any rate I read an interesting book about them way back in the 80s called The Puzzle Palace. But I'm sure it's way dated by now. I read it way back in 87. Did you know that they are roughly 3 times the size and girth of the CIA...and yet hardly any of the lay populace seems to have heard of them! I once dated a "know it all" (how do you ever learn anything if you already "know it all"?) bad-poetry, arty farty girlfriend who claimed that I was "making the whole thing up" when I tried explaining to her about the NSA! May I say again, "yeesh"? Literally COULD NOT convince her otherwise...I digress...

Now hold on a minute here! Just how dated would you suppose that book to have been? One of Robert Steele's pet peeves was the extreme datedness of NSA tecnology. Being a government agency (FLAGSHIP of intelligence agencies!) a good hunk of their computer technology dated back to the 70s. This was still the case as of 2002, mind you, and if I understood him correctly.

Now, another of his compaints was the lack of native speakers hired by the agency. That is, instead of hiring a native Pashto speaker, they will instead almost unerringly hire the "blond haired, blue eyed, cocky midwestern jock" (his words not mine) with a degree from an Ivy League school in linguistics who has a generalists knowledge. What's wrong with a young PHD in linguistics tending to these matters? According to Mr Steele that even the best generalists knowledge will not catch the flavor or nuance of language spoken on the terror sites. What's lost in the translation? Not much...if you don't count our National Security.

Also according to him, the "terrorist community" (I know that's an over-used term in this day and age...please try to bear with me, here) knows this and thrives doing so.

One major point of contention he had wa

A couple of years ago, I went to the H2k2 conference here in New York City. I saw a fascinating talk there where I first heard the term "deep web" and some of its ramifications for national security. National security was very much on our minds at the time being only roughly a mile and a half from what we call "Ground Zero" (never liked that term).

The guy giving the speech claimed that he was a retired FBI agent and seemed to have a great deal of insight into the inner workings of national intelligence. As pointed out in the article, the speaker made the same claim that search engines only gleaned about 1% of the total information on the web. He recommended a tool called Copernic (as well as one other one that I can't remember right now) that bills itself as a "deep web" search tool. But all it appears to do is assemble the results from a bunch of other search engines. I don't recall it ever returning anything significantly "deeper" than what your average google search can yield, however.

Back to the topic of national security, he made mention that terrorist communities are thriving on the fact that only 1% of the total amount of information on the web is readily accessible. All kinds of information that would be beneficial for the NSA to know is just plain inaccessible.

He also faulted the intelligence communities for hiring "blonde haired pretty boy" college graduates, fresh out of school to analyze data in foreign languages instead of hiring local speakers. A 4.0 linguistics student will still miss out on a lot of the nuance to a conversation that a native, say Pashto, speaker will clue right into. Of course, the argument could be made that at least the "loyalties" of an American college graduate are almost guaranteed to be in the right place you can't ignore that he/she will be blind to much of the subtext of a conversation in a foreign language.

A little offtopic, but more alarmingly a point was made about the lack of digitization in the NSA of intelligence documents. Meaning that an agent will typically risk life and limb gaining access to a piece of information, who will then pass that info to a "runner" who places it in an "orange envelope" to signify its classified status. Then that same orange envelope goes into a locked filing cabinet where a good 7 or 8 times out of 10 it never sees the light of day and no attempt is made to analyze it.

But such is the challenge of the modern age. We are drowning in all of the information to produce. Vannevar Bush addressed this issue with astounding clarity right after world war II.

Quoth the Doctor:

"There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers--conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial."

...and...

The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.

We are dealing with this problem (access to the information we produce) to a far greater extent than at any time in human history. The web, which was at one point designed and intended to be a more effective way to deal with and disseminate the oceans of data produce, has little more than square rigged ships to skim its surface.

Do virus writers really go to virus conventions? I'd think you'd find people like Ms Gordon, undercover FBI, wannabe 133t teenagers, and maybe a couple former virus writers out of jail and trying to find admiration.

the creator of kismet, dragorn, was one of the hosts of a great presentation at h2k2 last year called 'Fun With 802.11b'

you can get an mp3 of it here

I read a few articles on "stealing" proximity card data. It's aparently not very hard..

One proximity card that I use requires almost physical contact to the reader, which is appropriate for a doorway.. But another card I use (same building, same card type) to open the garage gate reads the card within about a foot of the reader. I roll my car slowly by, casually holding the card out, and it reads with no contact.

With the appropriate equipment, you can read data from just about anyone's card at a distance. How close do you have to be? People get kinda close in elevators, or you can just be polite, and be holding an outside door for them while they walk by your briefcase/laptop bag/purse. For that matter, I guess your reader could be in the brown paper bag that appears to hold your lunch.

H2K2 had a lecture on it. Here's the lecture description. in July of 2002

"Proximity Cards: How Secure Are They?

Sunday, 6 pm
Area "B"

They're used everywhere but they could be making you even more vulnerable to privacy invasion. Delchi has been working with proximity based card systems for two years and has developed a method of casually extracting data from proximity cards in a public environment. Riding in an elevator, subway, or just walking down the hall, a person can bump into you, say "excuse me," and walk away with the decoded information from the proximity card in your pocket. It could then be possible to build a device that can capture and replay these snippets of information on demand or to even brute force a proximity card system. This talk will focus on the vulnerabilities of the systems and show a low power working prototype. Alternatives will be discussed, as well as other vulnerable aspects of proximity based building and computer access systems."

I've read some design information on it also, but can't seem to find the links right now. I don't know what the options are for protection of proximity cards.. Keep them in a foil pouch?

At the H2k2 convention in New York City this weekend, two guys from HavenCo will be presenting. You can check out info for their panel discussion here

The listing:
The Ultimate Co-location Site
Sunday, 3 pm
Area "A"
Sealand was founded as a sovereign principality in 1967 in
international waters, six miles off the eastern shores of Britain. The
island fortress is conveniently situated from 65 to 100 miles from the
coasts of France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany. HavenCo has been
providing services since May 2000 and is fully operational, offering
the world's most secure managed servers in the world's only true free
market environment - the Principality of Sealand. Avi Freedman and
Ryan Lackey of HavenCo will talk about the challenges and potential
of this unique working environment and what it could mean to the
future of the net.

http://www.h2k2.net/ is about to happen in NYC. I wish I could afford to go (time and money probably don't permit). Listening at places like that can help in strange ways in the future...
JMR

Speaking ONLY for myself, as always.

Speaking of expos and conferences, I wonder if the folks at H2K2 would pull bullshit like this for their show? I know that this is kinda ranty and off topic, but DAMN!!! Jobs and Gates have build these behemoth companies that are flailing around like some giganticus-hydra-swamp-thing on meth. Fuck MacWorld and the PC Expo - go see a real conference and have some fun without being told HOW you're to have fun. No, I don't work for 2600. End of rant.

Ford Motor Company has officially and unconditionally conceded its complete, utter, and perpetual loss on the merits of the FORD v. 2600 "FuckGeneralMotors.com" case. Ford has dismissed its appeal to the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, meaning that Ford has completely given up all attempts to reverse the victory that 2600 Enterprises won on December 20, 2001. The mutually agreed dismissal papers were officially entered by the Sixth Circuit on June 27, 2002.

In the words of another FORD from Michigan -- former President Gerald Ford, "Our long national nightmare is over."

2600, which has given up nothing other than an extremely improbable claim for getting its attorneys' fees back from FORD, has expressly reserved the right to point "FuckGeneralMotors.com" anyplace whatsoever that 2600 pleases -- including at the FORD homepage -- at any time whatsoever, with or without notice.

Of course, the plan in March, 2001, when the lawsuit arose, was to point the address someplace more suitable than the FORD homepage, probably as soon as mid-April or early May, 2001. In other words, the lawsuit has actually delayed 2600's prior plans (several other domain names that were part of the same project have been re-pointed several times, while FuckGeneralMotors.com has remained pointed at FORD). Now that the lawsuit has been won, 2600 will be soliciting suggestions during the H2K2 conference, for the best place to point the Domain Name. Ultimately, this just proves how silly and counterproductive FORD's litigation strategy always has been from the beginning.

In December, 2001, Judge Robert Cleland of the Eastern District of Michigan, dismissed FORD's lawsuit in its entirety for "failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted" -- which means that even assuming every single allegation in FORD's pleadings to be true (but the allegations weren't all true), FORD still had no legal right whatsoever to prohibit 2600 from pointing FuckGeneralMotors.com at FORD's homepage.

Needless to say, FORD did not like that outcome. Neither did a lot of other intellectual property interests all over the world. Indeed, a google search will reveal a number of PowerPoint(tm) presentations published on the Web (e.g., http://austlii.edu.au/ hkitlaw/resources/Pun_IP.pdf) by various intellectual property lawyers, emphasizing that the decision is being appealed. Well, now it isn't.

The decision stands. It is published at 177 F. Supp. 2d 661. And it is binding precedent. The decision has even been cited by the Sixth Circuit already, in an interim order that was issued in the "TaubmanSucks" case handled by Paul Levy of Public Citizen. http://www.citizen.org/documents/TaubDecision-3-11 -02.pdf .

When FORD filed its appeal to the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in January, 2002, FORD sought to have the case reinstated so that FORD could take it to trial. 2600 filed a cross-appeal, solely on the issue of whether FORD should be required to reimburse 2600 for its legal bills (such fee awards, in cases under the Lanham Trademark Act, are not especially common and occur only in "exceptional" cases -- so the Sixth Circuit was likely to defer to Judge Cleland's decision to award 2600 its "costs" but not its attorneys' fees). 2600 still gets to take its "costs" back from FORD, and our lawyer is preparing to serve a deposition notice on Bill Ford, to gather the information necessary to garnish FORD's bank accounts, unless FORD cuts us a reimbursement check forthwith.

But the key point is that 2600's victory is permanent and FORD has voluntarily foregone any appeals. The savings, in terms of attorneys' fees, from our standpoint, are enormous.

H2K2, or the fourth Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference, takes place in NYC next July 12, 13, and 14 at the Hotel Pennsylvania. This year they're planning on having a little over four times as much space as last year to work with. Should be interesting.