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Spy v. Spy
An anonymous reader writes "MSNBC is reporting on a brewing battle between makers of spy software and anti-spy software. According to this article the makers of Spector and WinWhatWhere have added a feature to their new software that disables the popular anti-spy software Who's Watching Me."
http://cryptome.org/dirty-hope.htmm e.org/dirt-feedback.htm- author.htm
http://crypto
http://cryptome.org/dirt
http://cryptome.org/dirt-safrica.htm
It's just one more reason to remind everybody: Make sure your software is Patched, and up-to-date
That goes for all sides of the fence.
SM MBL-VIR looking 4 SIG 4 LTR. must be DDF, no 420, SD ok.
This isn't about AdAware and the advertising spyware that tracks your websurfing. This is keyboard and screen monitoring spyware used by law enforcement, corporate IS depts, and, as the article points out, suspicious spouses. Internet connectivity does give some remote monitoring features but the software probably logs locally too.
OS and JEDGAR
/jed'gr/), in honor of the former head of the FBI.
This story says a lot about the ITS ethos.
On the ITS system there was a program that allowed you to see what was being printed on someone else's terminal. It spied on the other guy's output by examining the insides of the monitor system. The output spy program was called OS. Throughout the rest of the computer science world (and at IBM too) OS means `operating system', but among old-time ITS hackers it almost always meant `output spy'.
OS could work because ITS purposely had very little in the way of `protection' that prevented one user from trespassing on another's areas. Fair is fair, however. There was another program that would automatically notify you if anyone started to spy on your output. It worked in exactly the same way, by looking at the insides of the operating system to see if anyone else was looking at the insides that had to do with your output. This `counterspy' program was called JEDGAR (a six-letterism pronounced as two syllables:
But there's more. JEDGAR would ask the user for `license to kill'. If the user said yes, then JEDGAR would actually gun the job of the luser who was spying. Unfortunately, people found that this made life too violent, especially when tourists learned about it. One of the systems hackers solved the problem by replacing JEDGAR with another program that only pretended to do its job. It took a long time to do this, because every copy of JEDGAR had to be patched. To this day no one knows how many people never figured out that JEDGAR had been defanged.
Interestingly, there is still a security module named JEDGAR alive as of late 1994 -- in the Unisys MCP for large systems. It is unknown to us whether the name is tribute or independent invention.
As for limited resources and interest, I don't believe either is true. The wide variety of resources listed at EPIC's site, and the variety of anti-spy products, seem to contradict that idea.
My Blog: http://nic.dreamhost.com/
This reminds me of the old computer program "Core Wars." My ancient history is horribly rusty, but this whole concept goes back to one of the East Coast heavyweights (MIT? Harvard?) where the programmers would write self-replicating code fragments and set them loose overnight. The code was designed to multiply itself and destroy any other code it found. The winner was the one with the most code at the end of the run.
It lives.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
I was one of the original authors and an original founder back in '98. We sold our shares in '99 and got out because of the way it was being marketed. The product was never intended to be a "Catch your cheating husband" type of product. It was intended to monitor your child's Internet experiences and protect them from pedophiles. Doug Fowler (dfowler@spectorsoft.com) was the guy that pushed this tactic of spying on your partner and your employees. We felt that monitoring another adult, without their knowledge, clearly violated their civil rights! They avoid lawsuits now by placing a disclaimer that you agree to inform the individual that you monitor. In reality, no one ever does.
It's a classic case of the marketing weenies convoluting a product to fit a malformed business model. There's MORE MONEY selling a product to catch your "cheating husband" than to protect your kids. It feed on paranoia.
The good news is most developers could spot this product on their machine. Keystrokes slow down, mystery files appear, etc. It leaves a small footprint, but it's still a footprint. Don't look for it (Spector) in Task Manager. It's hiding in another application.
The Computer Misuse Act makes it a criminal offence to alter the behaviour of a computer system without the permission of the owner.
The difficulty here is in getting it to court...
What do you think the basis of the law is? Opinion? Feelings? No. Laws are simply a community assessment of write and wrong. It's against the law to kill people, because the community is in agreement that this is wrong. In areas where there is controversy in the law, it's because we've codified something into the law as being either right or wrong, but a large, and vocal population strongly disagrees with the codification and wants to see it changed. Why do they want it changed? Becuase the law either says something is right, that they believe is wrong, or vice versa.
Take for example the DMCA. That codifies as wrong the ability to make copies of digital content (under certain circumstances). Why is /. so up arms about it? Because we believe that the DMCA wrongly restricts our freedoms. Freedoms granted by other laws already on the books. In other words, we think that law is wrong.
While the morality isn't the law, the law is meant to reflect the cumulative morality of those it governs.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.