Slashdot Mirror
Mapping The Net And Hunting Down Evil
DiviN writes: "An FT article headlined the Dark
Side of the Web talks about a company that started a while ago to compile a
complete map of the Web. Not only do they claim to have it, but moreover they
say that they can trace any file on the Internet, any attachment and any posting
in a newsgroup to it's origin."
He shows me more. Criminals - who have a peculiar habit of inputting all their deeds into PCs and handheld computers - often use software to erase such incriminating information. Modern techniques, however, such as the molecular analysis of a hard disc, can reveal much of what was "deleted".
.
;-)
This about that next time you delete something from your Palm! He is capturing the data you delete from your PDA! Also, is he implying does molecular analysis of every hard disc connected to the net!?
Finally, Whitelaw demonstrates steganography - the art of concealing text within more text. "Steganography is considered the third biggest threat to US security after biological and chemical attack," he says
His laptop shows a letter containing seemingly harmless text. But, once decoded, a very different meaning emerges: it is an order to carry out an assassination.
Doesn't he know about ssh!? Yeah..that's gotta be right up there with bio and chem attack.
After reading the article, some of the ideas have merit, and he may do them, but a lot sounds like a PHB who only knows what his marketing guys tell him.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
>About 40 broad categories of undesirable activity, including pornography, fraud, anarchism, "freaking", virus creation, promoting violence, cyber terrorism and hacking, have now been registered in forensic detail.
"Freaking" is "spreading the word" as a hippie. Oh yeah, so, SO, bAd. Or, I suppose, it could mean going insane.
I think they meant "Phreaking" which is tampering with the phone system.
This company must be pretty crappy if they can't even spell what they are looking for.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
This should be under Humor!
The Onion should do a piece on this... "Hoax receives millions of dollars from scared multinational corporation".
Fsck this hard drive! Although it probably won't work...
foo = bar/*myPtr;
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
Boeing gave them one meeleeon dollars <put pinky finger to mouth>!
Fsck this hard drive! Although it probably won't work...
foo = bar/*myPtr;
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
Every day millions UPON million dissapear and as many are created. And thats just the pages. The individual posts on each one of those pages is even MORE.
I think this company has made a bostful claim but couldn't back it up. They're hoping no one calls them on it.
It's not for everybody
What on the Internet is more evil than the alarming number (thousands!) of people hawking scams to technologically illiterate people? They should be protecting people from themselves!
Fsck this hard drive! Although it probably won't work...
foo = bar/*myPtr;
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
Its a quiet, boring Sunday, and I just can't let this go unchallenged. This is just an overimaginative press release, which has been popping up in the mainstream press for some time now, touting their 100% accurate mapping of "the dark side of the web". They have avoided the technical press, or else the editors of technical journals have bullshit filters in place and don't reprint this crap. The same phrases and anecdotes keep popping up in the same order, they probably have a PR person writing the articles for lazy journos, it happens.
... so-called "snuff", or murder, videos, the corporate server can be programmed to take a copy of the file for use as evidence in future prosecutions and then switch off power to that particular PC. Hey, they played the paedophile and snuff video card. How does their software detect this on client PCs? And how do you switch off power to a particular PC? Do you re-wire the whole building so that every outlet has a computer controlled breaker? Do they somehow disable the power switch on the employees computer to keep them from switching it back on?
on Thursday at the Loch Lomond Golf Club, Actis launched a muscular software program Yep, its a press release written as a story for the FT, who will reprint anything a PR agency hands them as long as it appears story-like.
You can find them at www.actis-technology.com, a company in existence since April of this year. They are a spin-off of buchananinternational.com which claim to have been around for quite a while. Their product is called 'Net Intelligence, apparently the apostrophe makes it trademarkable.
The actis software is essentially a proxy server, which funnels all email, web requests, and other selected traffic through their filters. They give you a list of sites, rated "bad" "not-so-bad" and "approved by Scottish wank^H^H^H^Hhackers", and then let you decide what to do for every alert the software spits at you. For a fee, if you want to track back a file picked up from usenet, they will search their dejanews clone database and tell you where it originally came from.
Check out some of their outrageous claims and mistakes in their press releases.
They spell phreaking as freaking. This disqualifies them from the start.
Consuming about 80 gigabytes of data an hour That means they have a 200 Mbps link at a minimum, and keep it 80% full 80% of the time. Thats a pretty big internet hog for europe, and I've never heard of them. Perhaps they spread that among several providers, but their website is colo at uk2net, running linux. But 80 Gig/hour is about 10 times what unfiltered usenet is producing.
"We found Stew in the PC section of a bookshop in Glasgow - the best place to find his sort, The last thing I want is disciplined minds." That should sell well to large corporations such as Boeing and the Home Office.
The team now has complete access to the world's newsgroups, where many viruses are initially posted and distributed, and to every image and every attachment. So they have a usenet server sucking up hundreds of publically accessible newsfeeds. I wonder how they compress all the spam messages that normally clog other servers? Maybe we can convince them to create a dejanews type service.
"Steganography is considered the third biggest threat to US security after biological and chemical attack" 97% of all statistics quoted by Whitelaw are pulled from his ass (I made that up, its obvious 100% are)
Criminals - who have a peculiar habit of inputting all their deeds into PCs and handheld computers - often use software to erase such incriminating information I don't know very many criminals, but most IT professionals I know don't ever input all their deeds into PCs. But criminals have discovered the trashcan in windoze 98, better sell recovery services at an outrageous price.
Unsuspecting companies are largely unaware that a great deal of the world's criminal communications are carried out using their own PCs So criminals the world over first break into companies computers in order to communicate. That's a pretty knowledgable crowd of criminals, better than the job market as a whole. And actis has defined what constitutes criminal communication, that must have been hard to take into account 178 nations, and thousands of individual jurisdictions in over 150 languages. And all that since April of this year. Wow!
Where serious crime emerges
On his laptop, Whitelaw shows me how to find manuals on bomb-making and sophisticated lock-picking techniques, complete with DIY diagrams. Yahoo, infoseek, altavista, google. Wow, this company has discovered a vast criminal conspiracy, known by the code word "search engines". By installing their proxy filter, they will block all access to these criminal sites.
This press release is too much to bear. It is pure bullshit, 100% bullshit, and nothing but bullshit. They have Yet Another Internet Filter to sell to companies and they have to make waves to keep their investors happy. Ignore this and get on with first nathalie portman posts or philosophical discussions on "free" vs. "free" software.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
A censor is "one who seeks to supervise the manners or morals of others." An intelligent, techno-savvy censor (or team of censors) is a force to be reckoned with. Just a thought.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
What gets me, is the uptight nature of these folks. Arghh... Here's a quote from BI's website: "Making the Internet Better for Business." Yup. That's exactly what we need!
That is precisely what we need. Something has to pay to build major internet backbones, broadband access, technology R&D. Your $20 a month ISP fees aren't going to pay for that entirely.
Half of me wants to do exactly what Actis is doing for my own nefarious purposes; the other half is scared by the fact that the people who have no business with the information are the ones who will, in the end, be the only ones with access to it.
0x0000
"The Internet is made of cats."
I suppose unissued credit card number would be one that poses as a valid number. You can't just write 16 random numbers but they have to have a correct checksum(was this the last number?). What the uses for this would be, I don't know. I'd suppose that nowadays everyone wanting a valid credit card number has the capability to actually authorize it before granting any services..
They've refused to use the technology to bend to the whims of certain oppressive governments, thus far.
IMO, that's worse than anything else they've done. Because they're saying what's oppressive and what's not. They've got this massive technology that can effectively ruin freedom on the internet, and they're deciding by themselves what's to be enforced and what isn't. Where do you draw the line? Pedophilia? Virii? Piracy? Hate speech? Who decides? Why do they get to decide? Just because they thought of it first?
The problem here is that all of this obviously immense power is weilded by an instutitution that isn't ultimately responsible to the people it monitors. Even if it were regulated by the government, the Internet isn't just one country and shouldn't be regulated by just one.
--
Things like this are what make me wish we could all just get together and rebuild.
.web. a net with a built in payment method so you wouldn't need a credit card but could still remain anonymous. would make micro payment easy. I think there really are a few billion inovations we could add that would make the net, or a new net a better place. and i'm not talking about internet II. something really different. suddenly I'm getting really off-topic think I'll go post to ASK.
its just this kind of crap thats making me wnat to start a new internet. something no coporation could get onto without a review by a council of geeks (for lack of a better term) that the goverment couldn't get into because it was a private web (not public like the net) but that would allow any user on should they agree that they are prepared for the chaos and don't expect someone to hold their hands. I'm certain a new net with some new technology ould simply rock. without all the banter about the net turning young boys hearts dark. You know when bush said that he forgot to mention that it turns more hearts into code than it does into darkness. I love vint cerf and tcp/ip but i'm willing to bet he could do something new or that anyone could. TCP/ip is how old? It would also be nice to have a series of open organizations that decide the direction of the new net. global elections of flks who would help determine things like TLDs. instead of having some government orgs decide when and if we get
-
Now let know how you plan to get rid of the hard drives from your ISP, data left to routers on your path, and all other carriers?
How the hell would they be able too keep track of all my postings if I can't myself...
;-)
--Kai
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
Idiots.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
I love this, too:
Whitelaw demonstrates steganography - the art of concealing text within more text
And all this time I thought steganography was much more complicated, and much more useful, than that. It's too bad I can't hide raw data in an audio file like I thought I could...
There is a similar project in the Internet Mapping Project, whcih some of you may remember. It has been going on for a while. Other interesting mapping and visualization projects are at The Stillman Projects and C5's 1:1.
The basic certification test is already there - you pay $1000 odd per month to get a T1. no money == no T1. by definition if you have that kind of money youre supposed to be smart. unfortunately companies often employ idiots and just plain lazy sysadmins who couldnt be bothered to secure systems. its also very difficult for an understaffed IT dept to manage thousands of systems with their associated security problems. now if only there was a simple way to upgrade the OSes automatically with trusted logs stored on a remote server when an exploit came out, we wouldnt have these problems.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
... is busy, hung, or dead!
:)
Tsk. Incompleat sigs. Tsk.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
now this is exactly the kind of commerial stuff big companies like ..
ignorance once again.
whenever you see bullshit like 'this company is one of the two only ones able to crack any password' or 'yeah we can see any file on the net..' please just STOP READING !
i wonder if the FT actually got money for this article.
There's an ad for a ThinkGeek "map of the internet" on the top of this page. Coincidence? I think not.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
could it be MI6?
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
"We are, not by choice, but by force, the Watchment on the world."
-- JFK's intended speech in Dallas, November 1963.
Who watches the Watchmen?
Who gets to take their map and decide what is good, and what is evil?
I know where I draw those lines, but I also know that my perception of those evils and goods are not the same as all other peoples.
I'm donating to the EFF again. Pretty soon it's going to be every week.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
It's nice to have a Franklin stove in the living room to toss drives and media into. :-)
--
Gleepy the Hen. More intelligent than the average hen.
As more people use it, more people will want a say in what is on it.
You seem to be confusing the medium with the content here. All the same basic rules already apply to web content as to hardcopy, starting with: "You can't say it's yours if someone else wrote it." I (and most other's on the web) don't dispute such old and well established laws as pertain to the written word.
In fact, I agree with most of your post. The rights of individuals do need to be protected, and regulation is often the only way in such a large system. But you show me where it says I have a say in what someone else puts in his or her books. In fact, the idea expressed in the above quote directly opposes one of the oldest and most cherished principals. Regulating internet content is akin to limiting what content is publishable in a newspaper, and no one that I know would stand for that.
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
Alot of sites use a keyword to bring up an add related to the topic.
Goto yahoo and do a search on cars. You'll probably get a car add... a search on OS's you'll probably end up with an add for Win2000 etc.
My Vote's On This Doofus
great comedy company.
Yes, we can map every piece of information on the internet. We can also tell you what your favorite sites are. Now dont bother writing us telling how you feel, we already know. See, we're the federal government...and we're listening.
echelon: its whats for dinner
"sex on tv is bad, you might fall off..."
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
It's like the crew that paints the Golden Gate Bridge. They start at one end, and when they finally reach the other end it's time to start over.
Pete
I wonder if we can use this to create a better Napster/Scour...
But it could be used for evil... RIAA could find out exactly where big MP3 sites start up. Lame!
Peace out.
I bet they didn't fully index my random link page.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
25% of 125 is not 100. (Dumbass.)
Pete
No, I didn't notice any cookies. Junkbuster filters them out for me.
Still, I'm going to start using PGP again.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
The porn-viewing public - which forms just 2.5 per cent of the database - cannot keep up: the number of sites is growing exponentially but the number of visitors to them only linearly, says Whitelaw.
Does this mean that the entire internet will soon be pr0n? That porn sites will outnumber the users hugely? Sounds like my kind of hell.
KTB:Lover, Poet, Artiste, Aesthete, Programmer.
There is no
truth is irrelevant, you will be edited to sound shocking/funny.
i can tell by your tone that you're the same person who has posted this to every other applicable thread -- i can just see you loading every story at -1, then Ctrl-F-ing and typing in "Gore" to find the newest offenders.
it's politics silly, what actually happens to actual people is not important.
after all, those who live by the media soundbyte-invective die by the media soundbyte-invective.
move on with your life.
---
the problem with teens is they're looking for certainties
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
Frightening prospect:
Big brother is a Scotsman
At least Stew seems cool
Really, no, I do. ...
'comon, man, act scared. I just told you I owned it. "I SEE ALL", see, didn't you here? You should give me money now
No, wait,
Hey KID!! stay away from that curtain, hey, HEY!!
Crap.
Please give me money anyway?
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>
Your either get an incredible article like this one or a Presidential candidate. Thanks.
A big joke that silly customers get taken in by. A company desperately seeking more and more information could be taken in by this.
One question that does come to mind is, given the constant state of flux that the internet is in, how long can information gathered be considered correct, and much of the internet could be mapped to what degree of accuracy.
-- Hob - Java Spectrum Emulator
If they do the classification only for purposes of throwing up rough statistics, fine. But if sites / information connected to a actual person leads to some sort of retribution from either companies/empolyers/ISPs or the law enforcement this becomes an issue of constitutional rights.
If these acts are even initially based on determinations of a private company, this should be banned. Making content illegal is the business of democratically elected bodies with constitutional safeguards.
try:
http://www.actis-technology.com
This is NOT an empty signature.
I'm not too sure about this. First, web sites are not all "news" sites. In some cases, they are entertainment sites. Entertainment is restricted to a certain degree (rating systems in movies, eg.). Second, I don't agree that newspapers have an unlimited range. If the newspaper decided to run a full page ad of ultra hard core pornography, I would assume that a local constabulary would step in. We (North America) do not live in a censorship-free society.
By the way, the very nature of society allows me, as an individual, a say in what other people do. It protects my individual rights. As an example, it is illegal to publish or distribute hate crime literature, or Holocaust denying literature. According to the "unregulated content" rule, this should be allowed, but our society (for me, Canada) has determined that we don't want this in our country, as it is an assault on our values and standards. As an OSS advocate (can't remember which one) put it, "Your right to swing your fist around ends where my face begins".
I agree with your idealogy that books should be completely uncesored. However, practically speaking, this just isn't the case. Virtually all media is censored in one form or another. If it bothers you to think that the government would censor these sources, look at it instead that they are self-censoring, and would not publish material that would cause them to lose business (media companies are notorious for profit margins). As a consumer, if my local newspaper started running full hard core pornography, I'd probably stop buying it (well, except for the odd one).
How much will these things slow the already slow internet, i already hate the slow connectionspeed to certain parts of the internet. Wow more WOMBAT.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
There's a road nearby here that is constantly under construction. It's about a two-mile stretch, but it's so busy, being a main throughway between two suburbs and the main city, and being the main road to the industrial parks, that it's heavily traveled by many trucks. It's always under construction so much, that the sign which was erected several years ago for "Road Construction Ahead" has a permanent pole, and is ruined from all the road salt and weathering. Still today, it's got a portion under construction. They'll never "complete" it.
Dragon Magic
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
OK, let's grant that the current people in charge are really good guys that won't let totalitarian regimes use their service. How long before this company is acquired by a corporation who has no social conscience and will sell the info to the highest bidder? Or a government with no hesitation about trading people's lives for better export treatment or other kinds of political deals?
I'm surprised that the hacker community hasn't already unloaded on these guys.
Tech Public Policy stuff
So the internet dies and these guys will be able to restore the WWW from tape for us. woohoo. I hope they are doing test restores as well. I wouldn't mind them restoring the old deja posts that were deleted and perhaps find that Britney Spears Sat Night Live appearance that i can never find when i remember to search for it.
The plural of computer mouse is mouses, mice or meece?
Wouldn't THESE guys now possess the largest collection of child pornography? Why are these guys NOT in Jail? Why are they not on trial?
Because they are the Good Guys(tm). Only the Bad Guys(tm) get in trouble for possessing mere information.
And that is where society crosses the line between justice and ritualized violence. Private possession of a picture hurts no one, yet society needs someone to hate. Society needs someone to disenfranchise. Salem had its witch trials, and now we have thought trials on similar pretenses. Any excuse to act against "weirdos," "freaks," or others who while not hurting people are otherwise a target of persecution. No one likes Humphry. Silly Bill of Rights, getting rid of him was much easier back in the 1600s. Lets see what he has on his computer... pictures of a nudist colony and an essay on terrorism. Right, throw this terrorist pedophile in jail.
Hurting children is bad and indefensible. Data laying idle on a harddrive hurts no one, at least in any rational sense.
Lets see.. I searched my logs for gdev.net (logged every host to it since inception) and.. Well lets just say altavista, google, and even lesser sites have hit my site, Ive seen nothing resembling a crawler and well lets just say they are conspicously absent from my weblogs.. period. Unless they hit it with a web client (seems unlikely....) (flitered out lynx, IE, netscape) and didnt see anything resembling a web crawler of theres.. I somehow seriously doubt their claims.. they are already missing one part of the net... no matter how small the *whole web* is always a false claim ;-P
Jeremy
p.s. dont lambast me for how unscientific or how much this does not prove.. i was just throwing it out ther efor fun
Jeremy
But not all inquiries are welcome. The government of Singapore asked if it could control web content; the Chinese authorities made a similar request. Whitelaw refused. Helping to track criminals was one thing; helping regimes find human rights activists quite another.
i would like to see the book where he draws the line between what is criminal and what isn't. I think that most of us would agree that child pornography is bad. This is pretty straight forward, but where does he draw the line on idealistic issues?
john
-- john
just take a dremel and grind the platters to dust.
john
-- john
Randall.
Property law should use #'EQ, not #'EQUAL.
Speaking of content... It seems like they spent a lot of effort just "cataloguing" porn. Man, what a job! Heck, if I got paid do do that, I'd never leave the office! I'd grow a beard, walk around in bare feet, and sleep under a desk.
Wait a minute....
Umm just a thought...
What about places using DHCP/dynamic addressing? Our university rotates our IP addies every so often to prevent us from having personal servers, but we can still run one if we use the name bound to our leases (I'd be someone.students.umr.edu, for example). How would they deal with these constantly rotating IPs? You could have a porn server on an IP, and all of the sudden instead have a Christian reading literature online. I bet that could be a real pain for them. If a government uses this to track, suddenly one of the nicest gals I know down the hall becomes a kiddie pronographer and gets arrested!
Of course, I don't know how many places rotate the IPs like we do.. Either way, it would make an incomplete map: They either have it mapped one way, or the other, but can't be dynamically mapping all of the IPs out there at once as to keep my computer name with my ip, and list me as the Pr0n surfing champ. (oh! oh! Do I win a trip to nationals in Hawaii? no? damn..) Just think about it, all sorts of potentials to make a mess here...
Ugh.
We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
I was also particularly struck about how he knows both what you erased from your hard drive, and what your next credit card number will be.
If you are modding me down because you disagree with me, use the "Flamebait" category, not the "Troll" one.
If the internet is a reality then by Gödel's second theorem it can not be completely described(mapped), right? Maybe the converse of this is true.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
sounds like they're archiving the web and news .... they do have signed copyright releases from all the authors right?
Several points made in the article give me the impression that the capabilities of the database are not as powerful as claimed.
:)
:) I'm also unsure how someone would "generate" the address of cardholders. That would be information contained in a database which would have to be "obtained". Its not information that is obtained within the number itself. As for "robbing" ATM machines. I'll give you 3 good ways to do it. Shouldersurf someone's PIN number, mug them, then drain their account, use a sledgehammer and blowtorch to extract the cash from the machine, or wait until someone draws some cash from it, and just steal it from them. I wouldn't consider any of these ways to be smart, but I certainly don't know of any other way to do it. Nor do I expect there to be any reliable information out there that would express such possibilities.
First are the statistics on pornography sites. Yes, most sites just harvest material from public sources and redistribute it. However, how exactly were they able to determine how many images are stored on membership pages? Porn sites are notoriously pay per view services. Useful statistics on the volume of data a porn site will hold will simply not be available unless memberships were purchased on every single site. I don't care if they said they dont' care how much it costs, I know for a fact they're not purchasing memberships on 20,000 porn sites each day.
How do they claim they can archive EVERY newsgroup on USENET? No newsserver serves EVERY newsgroup, as its a distributed network. Most of them offer 98% of the groups, but they'd be hard pressed to have EVERY single one of them.
Then there's the discussion about "hackers", followed immediately about information about bomb building, lock picking, and credit card numbers.
I'm also somewhat unsure what good a list of "unissued credit card numbers" would accomplish. If its unissued, then its useless, right? IT WON'T WORK. Here's an unissued credit card number: 4204 4502 5092 2942
There. I GUARANTEE you that NOBODY has this number. Its "unissued". Now I'm a hacker! Oh goody!
How is steganography considered to be the 3rd biggest threat? According to this article, its more dangerous than nuclear weapons. All it is is a form of encryption. I suppose if I can't read a message of yours its less dangerous than if I CAN read a message, but it turns out to be the wrong message. forget the fact that I shouldn't be reading your messages anyways. If someone wanted to send a message detailing an assassination attempt, its unlikely anyone would obtain it until after the deed had been attempted.
Now.. lets examine some lines of FUD:
Unsuspecting companies are largely unaware that a great deal of the world's criminal communications are carried out using their own PCs, notes Whitelaw.
Security experts are seriously worried about the threat of attacks on airport flight management computers, power systems, and hospital equipment, let alone stock markets such as Nasdaq.
Anyone notice a pattern here? Sounds like this is the same techniques that antivirus vendors spew out in an attempt to get people to buy their products. Your computers are just CRAWLING with viruses and you'll most likely die if you don't use our product. True, the above lines were a tad more subtle, but the issue is the same.
oh well.. something to think about
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
America is built on the strength of its corporations. The question is, what are corporations built on? The answer is operating systems. Ordinary operating systems. Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, Windows 2000 and Windows ME. Operating systems like yours. Operating systems like mine.
As I speak, there is a new and ominous danger facing our corporations. It is a danger facing every CEO, CTO and CIO. And only a handful of Americans even know it's out there.
It hides inside the computer of your co-worker, your bowling buddy, even your trusted family physician. It's sitting on your PTA board. It's waiting in the hallways of your neighborhood parish. It may even be watching your children as they sleep.
What menace am I speaking of? The greatest scourge of the twenty-first century. My friends, I'm talking about mutants.
The versions of Windows we all use have been replaced, with tragic consequences. There is a growing number of operating systems out there that are impure at their most basic level. They are not, technically speaking, Windows.
The threat that these operating systems pose to our way of doing business cannot be underestimated. It touches every facet of our daily jobs. And unless we take a stand now, our corporations will face an uncertain future where the rules of the game are not dictated by us. A world where no computer runs Windows: not your server, not your workstation, not even the proprietary architecture of your own laptop.
So who will save us? The listless bureaucracy that we call our government is asleep at the wheel. By failing to defend our "right to innovate", the President has neglected the first business of government -- protecting the rights and liberties of American corporations. Thus, we must take matters into our own hands.
That's why we've created the mutation advertisement: to inform our customers about the true nature of this mutant menace, and to give us a weapon in our battle for the preservation of our innovation rights. Only browse our web site to avoid propaganda for mutant operating systems. Use any and all resources at your disposal to disparage, discredit and belittle suspected mutant operating systems wherever you may hear of them.
Require the use of our operating systems now. Tomorrow, it will be too late.
--- Stolen from MutantWatch and mangled.
Kids, this is what happens when you have too many Slashdot stories open at once.
Don't do it!
Hey, nothing wrong with the bottom-up approach; that's what the mathematician would do.
:)
Either that, or they already "know" you're not a criminal, eh?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
These intellectual feats breed eccentrics. One Actis employee... blah blah blah blah... A second, a ruthless tracker of criminals known only as Stew, is unkempt, sleeps in the office overnight and pads about barefoot. "We found Stew in the PC section of a bookshop in Glasgow - the best place to find his sort," says Whitelaw. "The last thing I want is disciplined minds."
0h my g@wd, they f0und me!
Do not attempt to adjust your monitors. This is a streaming freedom bulletin. This message cannot* be traced, it cannot* be stopped, and it is the only** free voice left in the internet. How can you map the net with ASP, PL, PHP and scripts that create customized paging? If we have that technology to map all this then, please by all means, share the knowledge. * cannot means can ** only means among the many
Well, if your site isn't linked to, it isn't really part of the web.
-Splat
For example, this configuration would be completely untracable:
Tracing PC (SRC IP=ORIG) Router X(SRC IP=ORIG) ----traffic---- Interface 0 on Router B ------traffic-----NAT BOX with Fragmenting Routing capabilities running on LINUX(SRC IP=GFX)-----(traffic dests).Simply, what this means is that once the traffic reaches certain points, they won't be able to trace it back any further than that NAT Box.(network address translation box) The packet header has been altered and it is impossible to tell where the packet came from before it hit that box. So therefore, this thing is a joke and the internet is unstoppable.
Everything is but a number spoken by itself.
And this company doesnt just claim to map houses but their purpose and what is inside and where the nails came from. And the Internet mutates much faster than architecture. So yes, the claim is ridiculous.
They've got a big database which they fill with fingerprints from usenet porn, warez, and other questionable newsgroups. One of these fingerprints hows up on your workstation, a filemonitor detects it, and you're in trouble with the boss..
The password cracking thing is wholly unrelated to this stuff, as well as the harddrive forensics and all that other stuff, which has been around for decades.
They probably don't have to access all new porn sites, just wait for the porn to show up on usenet. The real question is how good the fingerprints are. You've got your birthday-paradox on the one hand, and mutating files and multi-generational copies on the other hand.. This post probably changes the fingerprint on this whole page, but it shouldn't. And if it doesn't, the fingerprint is probably the same as the fingerprint for cnn.com.
Impressed? Nah. Handy? Maybe.. Dunno.. If your employees are watching porn all day, you ought to notice, I mean, what are all your non-porn watching employees doing if you can't notice the difference in productivity?
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
I happen to care about these things, so:
Try Preservation Equipment (there is a US version but I can't remember it's name -- University-something...):
It's no good without the proper ink. Have a browser around on their site and get a copy of the catalogue (presumably from the US).
I'm just a happy customer...
Hi!
could it be.. the CIA
Muhahahah
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
If it is, i give it 2 months before microsoft acquires, and then we're in trouble.
Anyway I wouldn't trust them to find the noses on their faces, they are tracking porn sites to the tune of 20,000 a day, including the number of images available, and they are wasting their time hunting people that mess up outlook users?
~ppppppppö
Janet stands for Joint Academic NETwork, it's the backbone for British universities - the .ac.uk domain.
lets all create a new ipv6 internet and tunnel through the old one for access, should give them pause for thought anyway...
~ppppppppö
The reason why I posted this article was that I wanted to point out, that: -1- while people in the U.S. are yelling about privacy and the government may or may not listen the Net is international and foreign snoops can do as they please... -2- while the power of corporations in Europe is arguable less than their US' counterparts, it's usually enough that someone helps law enforcement once to get a 'card blanche' in the public eye -3- if the FT bothers to actually write about it, then there is likely to be more to it than meets the eye AND, MOST IMORTANTLY: -4- if a private company in Europe is attempting what they say they have already accomplished, what about companies [government organizations] in Australasia? Australia for one has no privacy rights in their constitution and no matter how much activists and officials hype, the government can pretty much do as they please [and are said to have done so for, you guessed it, the U.S.]
Mutations are a form of evolution, and who's to say that a penguin's swimming power, and pig's ears and an elephant's trunk would not be beneficial in one beast?
Just imaging the penguin that could swim over to the trough and feed itself peanuts through its nose!
javajawa# sleep
Meh
" ...to it's origin."
its. "it's" is the contraction of "it is." every single day with this s**t. jesus, malda (and the rest of you too), illiteracy is a huge gaping torpedo wound in your credibility. try just a little, huh?
8-P
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
yes yes, yet another bunch of cool barefoot good hackers fighting evil child porn distributing credit card stealing lock picking evil dudes.
/. , it really lowers the overall level of this otherwise worthy publication.
right, every kid they pick out of the trash and detox from acid is a genius. and no , no - *they* only watch child porn for research.
Please, try to avoid posting silly yellow newsman gobbledygook pr shit on
Australia (and I assume other countries) has a law, the freedon of information act, that requires a company to hand a copy of any information that they have of him or her. They are required to do this for a minimal fee. ie they are not allowed to refuse this request even if your not one of their regular clients. hmmm lets see, whats my password to that system? (they claim they can do this)
Oh ya, Internet is growing by thousands of hosts a day..
When I first read this comment, I thought "that's impossible, they must have meant lack of organization". But the article sure doesn't seem that way ...
The Internet, as we know it, can be seen as a new nation being formed. At first, in its earliest stages, it is chaotic, incoherent, and uncontrollable. As it gets larger, and more people join, the need for regulation will arise. Don't be too proud of this invention you've created - it will one day be subjected to the same regulatory world that we all live in.
There can be no question that the Internet will soon be regulated. All forms of media as we know it, in virtually all countries in the world, are regulated in one form or another. If tomorrow we woke up and books were gone, replaced by the Internet, you can be sure that it would be regulated pretty damn fast.
In any sufficiently large group of people, there is the need for regulation to promote order and protect the rights of the people in the group. In a very large group, there is a need for representation, as not all individuals can be directly involved in the regulation or decision making. Although this might not lead to one single entity (depending on how you define entity - it is definitely foreseeable that it will be one organization), it definitely will occur.
The phenomenon of the Internet is not larger than the people of the world. As more people use it, more people will want a say in what is on it. I don't see how that can be questioned.
All that remains is how it will be implemented.
Concerning "Steganography is considered the third biggest threat to US security after biological and chemical attack"
1) They left out nuclear attack.
2) Did anyone else notice that the article was littered with unlikely spelling mistakes? It seems to me that the Financial Times wouldn't let bad copy on to the internet, which makes me think - Maybe there's a message hidden in the article?
Which would make their claims about steganography seem pretty hypocritical/dumb.
Not only do they claim to have it, but moreover they say that they can trace any file on the Internet, any attachment and any posting in a newsgroup to it's origin.
So forward this story on to 100 of your friends and Bill Gates will give you $500 and a trip to Disney World!
Viv
-----------
I Use Napster. I use DeCSS. I buy over $1000 a year in CD/DVDs.
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
http://www.buchananinternational.com/news.htm Actually not new news.
I'm shaking in fear...all those people I dissed in the newsgroups will be able to trace me back to...the pool of dynamic ip addresses my isp doles out to their 6000 customers.
Eeek!
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
This creates an interesting dichotomy for me, half being "Oh my God, this is unethical and dangerous for society -- what if <insert conservative politician's name here, i.e. Bush or Gore> got his hands on this?!" And the other half being, "Wow, this is neat -- the crem de la crem of hackers, crackers, and other people I grew up worshipping doing something really impressive... how do I sign up?"
Second point:
To all the Slashdotters who say these people don't know what they're talking about, talk to Patrick Naughton, Kevin Mitnick, or the fabled Jaeger who was brought down by an astronomer with a few extra printers capturing all of the data going through the office... they'll tell you that people can and do track what's happening on the 'net.
These are a clever group of people, but they aren't doing this as outside observers -- the thing about recovering deleted data assumes that the machine has been seized. Being able to track the data means that they are inside your IT department, inside your ISP, inside your phone company. The FBI is good, but Carnivore is useless without ISP cooperation... and they get it. So too do lots of other people.
Don't think for a minute that you are smarter than the folks at Actis... maybe you are, but are you really smarter? How about the people who email you, or the people who run your ISP? Even if you don't make mistakes, there will be people who do, and then whoever is looking for you might find you.
You can never be too paranoid, only too arrogent.
--brian
They do have a web site its at Actis-Technology.com
Exactly what is this? A method to "frighten" or "scare" people? To "freak" them out? Or is the author just a lnguistic grunt who didn't pick up on the "ph" replacement?
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
I couldn't believe what I was reading, I've never seen so much bollox written in the same place with a straight typeface.
That article was an even worse work of fiction than the virus upload in independance day.
I was just thinking 'yeah, but suits would probably buy into stuff like that' (remembering one of my old bosses and his grasp of how it all worked) as I scrolled to the top of the page and saw it was posted by a source called the Financial Times. Suddenly the article made a bit more sense.
Hey, maybe someone wants a share price to go up : )
Somehow your message got logged and I am able to read it. Wow.
Fh
Sure, they might have mapped a whole lot. But you cannot scan all the new and existing domains and IP addresses (you'll need both, some IP's don't have a domain and other have multiple named based hosts) and check whether there are new services on any of those. Continuously.
Lots of good *and* bad spots are protected in one way or the other and I doubt they circumvented each and every of those protections.
Again, I will believe they mapped a large portion, but a claim to have it *all* is quite arrogant and shows the lack of a solid understanding of the Internet, really.
And tomorrow, it will all be obsolete. I can put a server up today at an IP and domain, then the next day ship it off to another state or country to give to someone else to host.
Or I can just decide that my FTP server needs to house jazz tunes tomorrow instead of the rap tunes today.
Who knows? The net changes that anyone who spent the time "mapping" it mapped it while it was changing, and after compiling the map, has realized that much of it is already outdated. Look at the search engines and how often a 404 creeps up, or even server not found.
No way they can know definitely attachments and files. It changes too fast too often.
Dragon Magic
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
They claim that they archive over 80GB an hour, and then talk about the content of porn sites, etc. Of course, how do they have access to all of these porn sites is another thing altogether - that must cost quite a lot for all of those memberships! The system appears to be some kind of massive search engine/archive similar to Alexa Internet except much more broad and with more sophisticated tracking and reporting capabilities. Although they decline to specify how, apparently they are able to compare images against each other, track texts, and do some massive queries to track back things like the Melissa virus to their first known wherabouts. They claim to have one of the largest databases in Europe, and to have found the perpetrator of the I Love You virus two days before the Feds. This really seems unlikely, and it would be nice to have some outside information, such as pictures, or results. How you can catalog and search this amount of data must really be a feat, considering their DB is larget than TerraServer and they aren't IBM or Microsoft, with billions to burn. Luckily, they can only "track" web pages and Usenet postings, so far, and they apparently classifiy it all by domain name and various other (unexplained) patterns.
The article claims that the company is one of only two who can crack passwords from clients or for criminal cases, or even from ex-employees who left companies and changed all the passwords. It may just be possible that they cracked passwords to get into all these porn sites. Or they could have just asked to be let in to inventory. Who knows?
Dragon Magic
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
"Do not adjust your web browser; we control the horizontal, we control the vertical..."
I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, I have google. And with google, I can find Deja News, Altavista, yahoo, etc., etc. And with those, I think I've got it fairly well covered.
Incidentally, how could you claim to map the whole web without violating the Robot Exclusion Principle? I guess you could have a staff of people collecting content, but that would take *way* too long.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
why is Slashdot posting this obvious gibberish? Of course they can't map the entire fucking internet. So why is it posted here? Just so we can refute it??
It's a battle out there. The battle between net net users' and programmers' desire to be anonymous and private, and their desire (especially the programmers) to log every damn thing that happens.
There seems to be a huge contradiction in the hacker mentality, on the one hand to collect endless log files, traces, data stores, id's, usernames, passwords, tags and the rest of it, and on the other hand to want to remain entirely private, safe behind their screen.
Personally I'd love to remove all the log files. No more http log files analysis. No more SMTP message-id's and paths in the headers. No more off the cuff usenet postings archived for the next n decades and cross referenced by the university userid of the the guy who posted it 6 years ago.
I don't see what's so good about archiving the Internet. It's like having a ten hour meeting where nothing gets decided but hey - we'll be able to see exactly what was said 10 years from now!
If you want it to last, print it out. On non-bleached paper. [Anyone who knows where you can buy unbleached long life printer paper please let me know...].
So, I'm all for Buchanan and it's sleuthing. I'm not convinced they can do all they said they can do, but hey, you leave enough log files lying around and sooner or later someone'll make a living reading through them.
You can't have your cake and eat it!
-----
Read 'Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace,' by Lawrence Lessig. The book discusses how the internet could be regulated. One of the ways discussed is the archecture of the internet, ie, protocals, standards, etc. It also discusses the role of 'Open Source,' programs, protocals, standards, etc, in relation to regulation. Worth a read.
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
I think they're a little too late. ThinkGeek created a map of the Internet last year. It can be found here .
If someone is to see everything on the web, they need to have access to watch over every insertion point to the internet. Also, to trace the PATH through the internet, they need to have access to every router that gets used. Somehow, I dont think that any company has this sort of access - except for maybe Cisco. (they seem to be everywhere) ;)
>> Now you'll have to go from 1 wipe to 10.... And then realise that wasn't the file you wanted to delete... skiy.
skiy. www.Smokedot.org Drug Info, Rights, Laws, and Discussion
To add to your comment... what "scares" me is this quote:
""We found Stew in the PC section of a bookshop in Glasgow - the best place to find his sort," says Whitelaw. "The last thing I want is disciplined minds." "
Yikes. This is a very naive statement... either misquoted by the FT journalist (not very hard... see the reference to "freaking" in the article) or spoken by Whitelaw in a fit of "gee-whizz are-we-not-great" euphoria that the FT was talking to him. The individuals at that company are assisting the police (I wonder what they helped the RUC out with) in prosecuting possible crimes.
I would guess that it would be an advantage to have disciplined minds involved therefore.
cheers
front
I was taking this article seriously until I hit this paragraph. Anyone making this kind of statement doesn't have his elevator going all the way to the top.
If It Looks Like Sh** and smells like sh** you aint gonna get me to eat it.These sound like bigger losers than that one
"security consultant"i think it had something to do with anti-online.guess time will tell if this sh** floats.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
To quote one of the great Slashdotter, Grey Fox: "someone had to put all that chaos there". How the heck can these people track any file and any post on the entire internet when it takes me (and I don't think I am alone on this) 3 or 4 days to remember where I put important documents on my computer?
Actually, maybe the opearative word is any , any doesn't mean all. Sure if someone wants to zero in one particular file or ip address or usenet poster, they can. But focusing on all of them? Impossible.
After all, having a map of the ocean doesn't mean you can swim across the Hudsons Bay.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
When he gets his way to have mandatory tracking of every user from the ISP level.
Finkployd
He has not only archived the whole internet, but he has classified it. His software knows which sites are naughty and which are nice--everywhere on the fucking World Wide Web. His services can prevent your company's computer resources from being used to promote violence, foster anarchy, or (especially apropos) commit fraud.
Unfortunately for you, his client list is currently closed, due to oversubscription, so he won't be able to sign you up this month. Damn the luck. Maybe he'll be able to squeeze you in when he checks Boeing's web site and finds out they only have 188,000 employees, so a lot of those '300,000 PC's' don't get turned on very often.
I don't know if you'll read this follow-up or even actually care to know this, but...
Goedel's theorem doesn't have anything to do with this situation. His theorem says that any system that starts with a set of axioms and laws and then uses these to prove theorems is inherently incomplete. Back around the turn of the century a mathematician named Hilbert proposed that the mathematics world should try to tie all mathematics together into a sort of "grand unified theory of mathematics", but a few years later Goedel's insight and subsequent theorem proved that this was impossible.
I don't know what level you are at in school, but if you are in college, check out classes from your local computer science department about the Theory of Computation. Turing theory is one of the topics in this class and is closely related to the Incompleteness Theorem.
Has anyone noticed the number of requests to write a cookie clicking on the link generates? I counted 18. I wouldn't piss on these folks if their hearts were on fire. I'm sorry I clicked.
----- "to a dog, every day is Saturday..."
I was just happy to have set ~/.netscape/cookies to 400, when I went to the story link, which I couldn't even (complet) read with my NS-Crashicator.
But it makes me kind of angry, I see more and more content control, just a few daysI got autogen.-mail from postmaster@some.local.gov.dep telling me that their mail server had rejected a newsletter coming from my side that contained the wrong word and was rejected. The newsletter was suscribed and we don't run a pOrn side!!! It was ASCII only...
Our politicans don't understand the net and their only answer is:
We don't understand it, it scares us, so we should control everything...:-(
Could be kind of startup that wants to take some peace of the cake....
Yours
Michael
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Add in random "gee whiz" quotes such as that it is possible to extract the data off an "erased" hard disk (which is entirely irrelevant to a discussion of Internet content) and steganography ("gee whiz, people can hide messages within inocuous text!) and we have the recipe for froth and bubble, self-promoting but of no actual value.
Did anyone else notice that out of the four instances of the word 'pornography' in the article, two of them had hyphens? There was "porno- graphy" and then another "porno- graphy". It seems unlikely that this was meant to be an end-of-line wordbreak, because both occurrances are in the middle of lines. Maybe their filter would only let two "pornography"'s get through?
--- Remove all references to mud-dwelling quadrupeds to email me.
to go have a look-see at the Actis web site (http://www.actis.ru/). Go to the English text. Give it a read. If this is all the better that they are able to translate (via software obviously) should we really be concerned? The best defense is good grammer. Further, bad grammer could be the 4th largest threat to national security.
Me thinks they need to be introduced to open source intelligence gathering.
Comparing files to detect duplicates isn't difficult. Compute the CRC32 of a file to get a 32-bit number which can be used as a key to identify it. It won't be unique; more than one file in a DB of this size will likely get the same #, now, combine this with the file size and you have a combination of two keys which will be almost unique; good enough. If a duplicate key and file size are found, then do a byte for byte compare between the two files. You now know whether or not they are duplicate. (the optimisation here is avoiding doing the byte for byte comparison with every file in the DB by only compaing the keys) As for tracking, get the webserver being scanned to give a directory listing and get the timestamp of the file. Then, check the file in question for duplicates using the method above. Look at all the duplicates and record the file in the DB. Using this alone you will not be able to determine exactly where the webmaster got the file from; it would be from one of the sites that already had the (duplicate) file at that time & date.
Finding files hidden using steganography would be next to impossible, it would involve looking at every media (image, sound, text) and searching for hidden messages. Impossibly huge problem for all files on the net, but possible for a few files.
We already know how hard cracking strong encryption is.
I would imagine that these guys had to make trade offs. Maintaining the above would require downloading every file on the net; impossible to keep it up to date. Lets let the networking gurus answer this: does a web or ftp server store a CRC or similar check to maintain file integrity during transfer? If so it would be possible do just download the CRC and not the whole file? If you could do this, as I stated before, the CRC combined with the file size could be pretty accurate in uniquely identifying the file; the chances of two different files generating the same keys are extremely low. This would mean that these guys would be able to maintain an almost accurate DB without having to download everything; just need to get the CRC and file size.
As stated before, this will not be able to break steganography. Steganography will hide anything almost COMPLETELY.
By fixing the webserver so it transmits false information, eg false timestamps, it would be possible to screw with the mapping process.
If falsifying info like this wouldn't break day to day http operations it would probably go a long way to screw a system like this.
Does this mean Bill Gates is really going to give me $1 Million like that email told me he would?
Taos
They might be able to find the first time that for example a jpg was posted to any web site or any newsgroup or anything else public. But simple private communication with encryption will not be seen nor will anyone using stuff like freedom.net or better - the cypherpunk / mixmaster remailers. If they monitored every entry/exit point into those networks like some believe the NSA does, then they might be able to track things to the source only because those networks have some weaknesses at this point to such a powerful observer.
Support the organizations that make up the Global Internet Liberty Campaign http://www.gilc.org/
HA HA!! You can't trace my 1337 A.C. bomb making schematics fr1st p0ster1ng!!!
Oh crap, forgot to check the little box..
*knock knock knock*
-----------
end communication
It sounds like they have a news feed, and are able to mine Usenet articles to try to determine the earliest signs of things like viruses. This is nice, but not particularly advanced information retrieval.
The other part is that they characterize sites/hosts' Web content. Identifying a porn site is not really that hard since most WANT you to know they're porn so you're (a) interested, and (b) ready to enter your credit card number.
From what I could see, the only interesting part is that they claim to have uncovered a kiddie porn ring by analyzing some sort of net traffic. This doesn't sound all that different than the firm that monitored Napster traffic to find ~300K Metallica fans^H^H^H^Hcriminals. As others have pointed out, monitoring the whole net is certifiably impossible to do except for targeted sites.
Bottom line: the article is inflammatory and doesn't separate out "real" feats of the company from fear, uncertainty and doubt. About par for the Financial Times, I guess.
P.S.: Anyone find a URL for Actis? (it's not actis.co.uk).
"Whatever happens to Actis, the completion of the map is prob-ably the first big step in the quest to control internet anarchy."
We need control on the internet?
They also cliam more than 20,000 porn sites are added a day, and these sites are all bad, but yet they have "A Map of the Interenet". Is this possible? What about the 20,000 sites added today? They found them already????
Many files eg JPG, PNG, etc have areas in which comments can be inserted. You could fill the comment areas and/or pad out the ends of files with a little /dev/random to alter the CRC and size. That would render such a DB as the one mentioned fairly useless for the puspose of determining a file's origin.
Just 'smack'? I thought it was blatantly obvious. I think we should ask the Slashdot team to delete this story, it stinks so much.
It's easy to tell if data is encrypted, which makes it easy for robots to at least track the data. if the data is hidden rather than encrypted then it's much harder, if not impossible for a robot to pick up. Have a quick think as to why this might be problem.........
...its just BS to scare people who have little knowledge of how the net works. Maybe if noone pays any attention to them they'll just go away.
They don't need to, all they need to do is map the traffic. If no one looks at your site then they won't know about it, if someone from the UK has then they might.
What if they are scanning traffic? usenet and HTTP. - They may well have the power if what they say about their history is true. That way they can filter out a lot of stuff they aren't interested in, and if they do have a map of all the 'bad' sites then they could log all traffic to and from those sites. Allowing for a certain amount of hype it sounds viable.
They can't have mapped the entire net and I've got logs to prove it.
How about these nice double and tripple homed hosts that generaly don't talk to their other network interface because its a backup?
The real solution to stopping this kind of snooping is have several connections and configure routers properly.
They were able to find out who it was. The second they did, they immediately erased all log files concerning him and deleted any directory files even mentioning him in passing. Then they programmmed their search engine to ignore any activity whatsoever from this user.
Finally, they sent him an email saying "keep up the good work."
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
After tracing the entire internet to its origins, they learned what savvy insiders, politicians, and geeks knew all along: It all started with Al Gore.
Claims like this smack only of bold leaps in self-promotion and hype. Considering the number of NEW devices connected to the internet on a daily basis, and the increasing number of sites using dynamically generated content, claims such as "we've mapped every byte on the internet" are insane.
At the heart of these new "Internet Private Investigator" type companies is a desire to develop methodology or technology that is marketable to law enforcement or private companies who have an interest in tracking users down for a number of legal reasons. Whether it's a hate group posting bomb schematics, or a geek programmer reposting DeCSS source code for for the five hundredth time, "THEY" would like to find you.
These companies fail to realize that the persons they are trying to track down, in many cases are better than those doing the tracking. When you have high school kids able to deface NASA web pages, sniff credit card numbers off a Fortune 500 company's server, hijack telnet and ftp sessions, IP spoof, and root clueless ISP's servers to use as jumping-off points, it makes it very easy to stay anonymous.
But if the company in question told investors they had developed technology that enabled them to catch idiots, it wouldn't sizzle, would it.
If the government required licencing for anyone able to purchase T1 or greater bandwidth, ala FCC licencing for radio stations - AND, pass a basic certification test verifying they understand essential, basic security measures for the OS they choose to employ, it would make the internet a much more secure (and accountable) place, and give higher professional creditability (and marketability) to the persons holding the licence.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
The quest to control internet anarchy is indeed frightening. When an entity wants to quash a viewpoint (or a group of people), all that is necessary is to declare them "dangerous". In most cases, that's not a stretch. The ideas that the powers that be want to control most often are just that; they're very dangerous to the powers that be. They threaten the status quo. Just now, it looks like they' re not doing anything terribly frightening. They've refused to use the technology to bend to the whims of certain oppressive governments, thus far. The question remains, though. Do you want any single entity to have the power to say what's "undesirable" on the internet?
--
Donating to the EFF now...
.sig: file not found
Jealous of the incredible parties described in all the '.com gone' stories, they have invented some system which has the sole purpose of seeming amazing to techno-morons, in the hopes of getting $40m so they can play in the "Who wants to blow a million or 20?" season finale.
I knew there was probably something like that around... but never seen it written anywhere yet.
:) ) cannot benefit from this.
:) heh.
Funny thing is, why when drive dies, (headcrash, not the PCB that burns out) it's such a pain in the ass to retreive data and we get "It's impossible to recover the data from it" but if you'd be a p0rn freak with disgusting tastes, and throw your drive against the wall and step over it just before the cops raid you, they could revive every single pixels of the shit you've leeched? Makes you wonder what purpose the technology serves, not that I am against taking these people down, but average joe that worked on a project without doing any backups (stupid I know, but the majority is "stupid" anyways
Now you'll have to go from 1 wipe to 10.... thank you for
making people more paranoid
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.