After reading TFA I'm still not seeing how this is supposed to detect unknown malware. As far as I can see it would decide that a new install of any kind was a virus.
Sure if you know every program which is supposed to be installed and none of them do wierd things in memory(a big if) then you might be able to spot when some kind of change has been made but if you can do that then you have a situation where you might as well just re-image the machine from ROM every now and then.
I'm still thinking stenography over commonly used channels is still the least conspicuous way. I've spent the last few months working on a project that looks for manipulations in images and while it is possible to spot that some kind of stenographic message has been hidden in an image it's essentially impossible to differentiate between stenography and light manipulation(such as with photoshop or any tool which can blur/sharpen an image). At the very least they'd need a bank of computers the size of the moon to scan every image going in and out of the country for that kind of thing and the false positive rate.... well...
Now given that the NSA has enough cryptographers to run rings around anything I can think of off the top of my head. At the very least I imagine they'd have a better system than logging on to a special website.
The military of a foreign government, with whom we have had less than cordial relations for at least 30 years, hacked some websites. They claimed they were US spy websites. They then proceeded to round up a bunch of people they didn't like and called them spies.
I'd call this business as usual in *insert oppressive nation*.
I'd question why the hell the Intel community would use open websites and specifically open websites which keep logs or in other way keep lists of all operatives. The NSA has more cryptographers working for them than any other body on earth and you think they couldn't come up with a decent deniable, secure stenography scheme?
If you want to let someone communicate securely from inside hostile territory you don't give them a login to ultraspies.com and let the local government see their unusual connection to that site every week.
You hide your encrypted messages stenographically inside some lolcat pictures on some happy little facebook channel for people who love knitting. (assuming you can find your arse with both hands and there is always the chance that the NSA and CIA can't manage that).
I'd say there's not much chance that the people arrested are any kind of real spies.
Re:Because US was using twitter as a weapon...?
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Iran Hacks US Spy Sites
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There is no cyberwar but there is certainly a PR war.
Any serious spies are going to communicate through some deniable,encrypted,stenographic channel so my money is on these poor fuckers being genuine human rights activists who are just going to be called spies and shot.
Doesn't really matter, they could have been CIA fronts of they could have been genuine human rights stuff. Either way the activists identified(or possibly spies) are going to be shot as traitors or spies.
Part of the thing with the TV stations was that they refused to carry Chavez's vanity hour each week.(think like the queens speech only every single week with extra crazy)
According to the story the website was calling for the VIOLENT overthrow of the government.
Some users on the forum posted rumours that some ministers had been assassinated. The website is generally opposed though. yes. how many times a week do we see someone on slashdot saying something along the lines of "yar, we shouldn't stand for them imposing X on us!!! REBEL!!! etc"
Since when has it been ok for Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan to do much worse?
One thing is to use your freedom of speech to oppose the government and another is to push for a coup, that is what those tv companies did. Even in the USA, if you publicly express your desire to kill the president you could end with a visit from the US Secret Service, and you could bet that if a TV station repeatedly called for the overthrow of Bush on his time or Obama now, they would end with their broadcasting license revoked by the FCC.
Glenn Beck seems to still be ok and he calls for secession and rejects the governments authority. Bachmann hasn't been arrested despite her belief that Washington is "enemy territory".
In any case the website in question did none of those things: some forum users posted a rumor that some ministers had been assassinated. That isn't calling for the overthrow of the country or the murder of chavez.
It does seem to be a theme that any media outlet that opposed Chavez ends up exposed to a constant steam of audits and legal challenges. Just doing a quick comparison between a few pro-chavez TV stations and ones which oppose him the opposition seem to have a lot more shit thrown at them or perhaps the pro Chavez stations just don't get so much attention in the media.
I guess there's one way to test if the law is fairly applied: make similar posts on Venezuelan forums referencing opposing parties and see if they get attacked in the same manner.
It surprises me a little in a way. i find installing things using a package manager in linux far simpler than installing something in windows but they need to capitalise on that more.
huh. Interesting how the moderation system has gone here. I provided a link that provided additional information not mentioned in TFA(although it didn't survive slashdots parser: here it is again:http://tinyurl.com/yjvbp6m) and somehow that makes me a troll...
It seems slashdots normal pro free speech theme falls apart when it comes to anything to do with Chavez.
Chávez demanded sanctions against Globovisión, calling station director Alberto Federico Ravell "a crazy man with a cannon".This action was criticized by two officials who monitor freedom of speech, Frank La Rue of the United Nations and Catalina Botero of the OAS.
Censorship comes in many many forms. You can burn all the books that say something you don't like. You can kill people who express opposing opinions. You can shut down media which disagree with you. You can prevent people who oppose you from being able to express their opinions to anything but a minority of the population.
China knows very well that their firewall can be bypassed easily but the goal isn't to prevent 100% of the population from hearing things they don't like, 90% is good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't detect zero days.
It's just a proposed mechanism for spotting something which is trying to hide itself in ram.
After reading TFA I'm still not seeing how this is supposed to detect unknown malware.
As far as I can see it would decide that a new install of any kind was a virus.
Sure if you know every program which is supposed to be installed and none of them do wierd things in memory(a big if) then you might be able to spot when some kind of change has been made but if you can do that then you have a situation where you might as well just re-image the machine from ROM every now and then.
I don't see any amazing new ideas in TFA
ya. coming up with a reliable virus detection scheme for unknown viruses is pretty much in the same area as the halting problem.
Even detecting polymorphic viruses has been proven to be NP complete.
I stand corrected.
Cheers
Or would you call Western countries economical stranglehold on poorer countries for "economical war"?
That one really has a lot more claim to the title "war" than someone cracking a database server or two.
I'm still thinking stenography over commonly used channels is still the least conspicuous way.
I've spent the last few months working on a project that looks for manipulations in images and while it is possible to spot that some kind of stenographic message has been hidden in an image it's essentially impossible to differentiate between stenography and light manipulation(such as with photoshop or any tool which can blur/sharpen an image).
At the very least they'd need a bank of computers the size of the moon to scan every image going in and out of the country for that kind of thing and the false positive rate.... well...
Now given that the NSA has enough cryptographers to run rings around anything I can think of off the top of my head. At the very least I imagine they'd have a better system than logging on to a special website.
The military of a foreign government, with whom we have had less than cordial relations for at least 30 years, hacked some websites.
They claimed they were US spy websites.
They then proceeded to round up a bunch of people they didn't like and called them spies.
I'd call this business as usual in *insert oppressive nation*.
I'd question why the hell the Intel community would use open websites and specifically open websites which keep logs or in other way keep lists of all operatives.
The NSA has more cryptographers working for them than any other body on earth and you think they couldn't come up with a decent deniable, secure stenography scheme?
If you want to let someone communicate securely from inside hostile territory you don't give them a login to ultraspies.com and let the local government see their unusual connection to that site every week.
You hide your encrypted messages stenographically inside some lolcat pictures on some happy little facebook channel for people who love knitting.
(assuming you can find your arse with both hands and there is always the chance that the NSA and CIA can't manage that).
I'd say there's not much chance that the people arrested are any kind of real spies.
There is no cyberwar but there is certainly a PR war.
Any serious spies are going to communicate through some deniable,encrypted,stenographic channel so my money is on these poor fuckers being genuine human rights activists who are just going to be called spies and shot.
Doesn't really matter, they could have been CIA fronts of they could have been genuine human rights stuff.
Either way the activists identified(or possibly spies) are going to be shot as traitors or spies.
This still isn't a "cyberwar" this is just iran arresting human rights activists and calling them spies/traitor with a thin justification.
Anything governments try is still lost in the noise http://www.attrition.org/mirror/attrition/
Part of the thing with the TV stations was that they refused to carry Chavez's vanity hour each week.(think like the queens speech only every single week with extra crazy)
According to the story the website was calling for the VIOLENT overthrow of the government.
Some users on the forum posted rumours that some ministers had been assassinated.
The website is generally opposed though. yes.
how many times a week do we see someone on slashdot saying something along the lines of "yar, we shouldn't stand for them imposing X on us!!! REBEL!!! etc"
Since when has it been ok for Saudi Arabia or Uzbekistan to do much worse?
One thing is to use your freedom of speech to oppose the government and another is to push for a coup, that is what those tv companies did. Even in the USA, if you publicly express your desire to kill the president you could end with a visit from the US Secret Service, and you could bet that if a TV station repeatedly called for the overthrow of Bush on his time or Obama now, they would end with their broadcasting license revoked by the FCC.
Glenn Beck seems to still be ok and he calls for secession and rejects the governments authority.
Bachmann hasn't been arrested despite her belief that Washington is "enemy territory".
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/200904140032
In any case the website in question did none of those things: some forum users posted a rumor that some ministers had been assassinated.
That isn't calling for the overthrow of the country or the murder of chavez.
Is there any transcript available?
It does seem to be a theme that any media outlet that opposed Chavez ends up exposed to a constant steam of audits and legal challenges.
Just doing a quick comparison between a few pro-chavez TV stations and ones which oppose him the opposition seem to have a lot more shit thrown at them or perhaps the pro Chavez stations just don't get so much attention in the media.
I guess there's one way to test if the law is fairly applied: make similar posts on Venezuelan forums referencing opposing parties and see if they get attacked in the same manner.
It surprises me a little in a way.
i find installing things using a package manager in linux far simpler than installing something in windows but they need to capitalise on that more.
huh.
Interesting how the moderation system has gone here.
I provided a link that provided additional information not mentioned in TFA(although it didn't survive slashdots parser: here it is again:http://tinyurl.com/yjvbp6m) and somehow that makes me a troll...
It seems slashdots normal pro free speech theme falls apart when it comes to anything to do with Chavez.
http://forums.whyweprotest.net/292-freedom-expression/hugo-chavez-want-internet-filter-venezuela-63547/
Chavez does want a mandatory firewall or nationwide filter.
"The Internet cannot be something open where anything is said and done."
All of these are examples of bad situations which don't make another bad situation any better.
I'm against censorship in my own country.
I'm against censorship in China.
I'm against censorship in Venezuela.
naming examples of other things which I consider reprehensible does not make what chavez is doing any less reprehensible.
So why don't you do just that???
No country democratic or not is going to let a major communication channel support sedition through blatant misinformation.
There is a difference between opposing a government with facts and opinions and opposing it by lying to people.
The continued existence of fox news says different.
I'd wonder why the SS would come out to inverview me even then.
If it wasn't a bomb threat I can't see it really happeneing.
Now here's the thing:
The claims TFA is about were not front page news, they were not headlines on the site.
They were rumors posted by a couple of forum users.
No weight.
No authority.
Now the site as a whole is generally opposed to chavez so they're being prosecuted because some of their users posted something false.
the part where he brings legal sanctions against the owners of an online forum because a couple of users posted a rumour.
No, you say he censors every dissenting opinion. I say he does not.
You can say whatever you like but reality disagrees.
He very clearly does censor dissenting opinion.
That's what this whole article is about.
But sure.
dismiss me as a troll since you don't seem to want to face the real world.
you mean Globovision?
Chávez demanded sanctions against Globovisión, calling station director Alberto Federico Ravell "a crazy man with a cannon".This action was criticized by two officials who monitor freedom of speech, Frank La Rue of the United Nations and Catalina Botero of the OAS.
don't worry.
Chavez wants rid of them too.
And you keep ignoring reality.
Censorship comes in many many forms.
You can burn all the books that say something you don't like.
You can kill people who express opposing opinions.
You can shut down media which disagree with you.
You can prevent people who oppose you from being able to express their opinions to anything but a minority of the population.
China knows very well that their firewall can be bypassed easily but the goal isn't to prevent 100% of the population from hearing things they don't like, 90% is good enough.