This began a few years ago, and yes you're right, it is organized crime. The biggest involvement that I've seen has been in the form of organized crime in Russia, although there are smaller players in Romania, Turkey and Greece (and of course scattered all over the globe, but these groups seem most active and collaborative in nature). Russian organized crime in particular has been involved in spam zombies for years now, and they're also involved quite heavily in child pornography rings around the world, and I would suspect plenty of other lovely things like that.
It's a big issue with a lot of factors at play, and the organized crime aspect has been on my mind a lot for the past few months as kind of a mental exercise, but I haven't really sat down and thought it all through yet. There's *something* to it but I just can't put it in words yet.
Damn! Your url had a typo in it. Well, I'm guessing it was supposed to be http://www.governmentsecurity.org/ anyway.
So what are the trends coming from romanian hackers and middle-eastern hackers? I'm guessing the Romanians are pretty much in line with the Russians. But I've seen more activity coming from the middle-east in the past couple months. What are they primarily doing? Just trying to play havoc because of current political motivations?
You've pretty much nailed the other countries/regions from what I've seen myself, I'm curious as to your take on some others though.
That's a common misconception. The militaries of today have changed very little from the militaries of a thousand years ago except in terms of their reliance upon high technology. During the Gulf War we stopped using million dollar missiles to destroy anti-aircraft and other high tech weapons and replaced those attacks with snipers firing $6 bullets.
The achilles heal of all high tech weapons is that they need not be obliterated to be rendered useless. They only need to be broken. Once this takes place, the military battleground takes on most of the same characteristics and strategies of ages past. It becomes a numbers and strategy game. Granted there would still be untold bloodshed, but that's been a fact of war since the dawn of time.
At 90 years old, your grandfather may be old enough to remember when these drugs WERE legal in the U.S., or at the very least, to have been raised by those who remember it.
It should be noted that "Beware of dog" signs on your property are a serious legal liability in the United States should you happen to own a dog and it ever attack someone. Lawyers say you're actually better off without having the signs if you actually do have a dog, because having such a sign implies that you are aware of the possibility that the dog may pose a danger and you can be charged with criminal negligence in many states because of it.
What I used to have were a few window stickers on my car that I got from police friends. Things that suggest an affiliation or friendliness with the local police departments or other law enforcement agencies. Mine were for supporters of Colorado State Troopers and the NRA.
Personally I think the law enforcement ones are a little more effective, because I've had a few friends with just the NRA stickers on their cars have their cars broken into on several occassions. I suspect maybe the criminals are hoping to find firearms to steal.
Best of that type, if you could get any, might be to try and find some kind of federal law enforcement stickers. FBI or U.S. Martial Service would probably be the best deterent of that type.
My personal stats are: 1-3 legit emails per day, ~250 spams per day (although that's been dropping somewhat recently, no idea why). I'd say the numbers probably aren't all that far off.
I'm pretty sure Sony makes some SDDS capable home equipment in their high-end lines, I think I've even seen them in stores before. I don't recall ever seeing any content for them however. I bet you can find it in Japan.
There are actually a lot of programs for people in your position. They aren't advertised well. NPR did a program on them about a year ago, although I don't recall the details. Try googling for healthcare coverage on npr.org (by adding site:npr.org to your google search) and see what links it turns up.
No doubt it'll be a bit of work, but not so painful as enduring the kind of injuries you sustained and having to cough up $80 grand on top of that.
Best of luck to you. Most likely you'll have several months of enjoying things like oxycotton and other narcotics while you learn to walk again.:\
And this from a company making three billion dollars a month. How is it then, that a bunch of ragtag volunteers put together a more secure OS than a company which can spend a billion dollars a month on development?
Is it because the old political addage about throwing money at a problem is true?
Money doesn't solve problems. Effective leadership and hard work solves problems. Indeed it would seem that many times, money poses a hurdle to effective leadership and hard work.
You're thinking in yesterday's terms. The viruses of old would wipe out hard drives and cause data loss.
The viruses and trojans of today delivery the more harmful payload. There is money to be made in spam (hard to believe, but never the less true), there is money to be made in phishing, there is money to be made in orchestrating DDoS attacks against your competition, and this is the payload being delivered in todays viruses. And by not doing anything outwardly visible to end-users other than some slow-down that they may or may not notice, it goes undetected for weeks or months which extends each infection's useful life and allows those responsible for spreading them to maximize their benefits.
Viruses of today are the tools of organized crime around the world. The days of the "innocent" wipe out your hard drive virus are gone.
Trust in technology, computers and the internet are slowly being lost because of all the scams going around, all the exploits, all the spy-ware, and all the viruses that make them possible. With this loss of trust, comes the demise of the technology economy that has made Microsoft the incredibly successful business that they are today. This is the crux of the reason that Microsoft is having to focus on security in their products.
I have Internet Explorer on my computer, and I keep it patched against known exploits. This does not mean that I use it.
What is revealed in the article is simply that he HAS Firefox on his computer, and being a competent security manager, he keeps his software patched against known exploits where possible. This doesn't mean that he USES Firefox as his browser, simply that he has it installed.
Probably it's not too uncommon for any company to have in their posession the products of their largest competitors. I know several companies who do this regularly. It's part of keeping up with current market demands. Microsoft personel wouldn't be doing their job if they weren't aware of what their competition is doing, indeed their success would seem to indicate that they are KEENLY aware of what their competition is up to (Internet Explorer notwithstanding).
This was available all the way back in Windows 95 days as well via a system administration tool on the Windows 95 CDROM (in a folder labelled administration tools or something like that ironically) called poledit (Policy Editor). It's existed since Windows file-sharing began. Of course you're right that it isn't obvious, it would involve reading a lot of documentation to know it existed.
that might be the start of a new trend. monday while watching the olympics, we were unable to see the scores and other information NBC broadcast at the bottom of the screen due to our local affiliate broadcasting their own information over the same portion of the screen. he emailed the program director of our local affiliate and amazingly enough, the next night our local affiliate had altered their information so as not to interfere with the coverage..and my roommate received a reply the next day saying how common it is for people to complain, but how rare it is that they actually complain to someone who can do something about it, and thanked him for his feedback.
amazing! (not really, but from the way people talk now days, you'd think it is)
why is it that when you can hack into something running linux, it's cool. but when you can hack into something running windows it's a huge security flaw and microsoft is evil?
ok, actually i think it's cool too but isn't it a little "funny" how being able to hack into a windows machine is a "bad thing(tm)" and hacking into a linux machine is considered a cool feature by geeks? that should make windows *REALLY* cool.:D
From the article: To top it off, Epson added an image sensor unit that can capture and transmit aerial images via a Bluetooth wireless connection to a monitor on land, and they also devised two LED lamps that can be controlled as a means of signaling.
Now if only we guarded our rights and freedoms with such fervor... those being the only things more important than the Statue of Liberty qua what the U.S. symbolizes to the world.
I don't know about where you live, but in both Colorado and Arizona, when you sign up for an insurance policy (and each year thereafter) you are required to disclose both the number of miles you have to drive between work and home, and the approximate number of miles driven annually.
This is because the insurance companies do in fact adjust your premiums based upon the number of miles you drive.
You might call a few insurance companies and inquire regarding this. Ask if your premiums would be higher if you got a job driving cross-country for a living, or as a local courier using your own vehicle. You might be surprised... or maybe just lucky.
I'd say this is already standard practice in child abuse investigations. Given that this sort of "technology" was already shown in use as far back as Bladerunner. And if it isn't a standard part of investigations, I must ask why not? Even I've thought of it as a potentially useful tool.
And just for completeness, why would analyzing reflections in eyes be the only thing used? There are generally LOTS of reflective surfaces in images. I would think analyzing ANY of them would be common practice in a serious investigation like that.
Have you ever been to Las Vegas? the security cameras in the casinos there has been able to cleary read serial numbers on money for over 15 years. This is from quite some distance too, it isn't just cameras that are mounted on the tables.
This stuff exists. It's expensive and not many people will have it (at least at first), but some will and I think it's a safe bet they won't always have our best interests at heart. Just look at the ways the anti-terrorism legislation are already being abused. Why is it a stretch to believe that this sort of technology couldn't be as well?
Think about this scenario: you're in a store holding your cell phone trying to remember someone's phone number that you didn't store yet. Your eyes are fixated somewhere that you have no awareness of. Your phone (like all phones with decent features now) has a camera in it (guilty i say!). Your eyes happen to be staring at some 14 year old girl who's looking at clothes on a rack. The federal government, in their ever-present "but what about the children?!" fashion, have recently updated the child pornography laws such that staring at young people is borderline behaviour, and holding a "camera" in your hand while doing so is probable cause. Guess what, now you're a sex offender!
Sure, that's a very paranoid view, and one that I would hope would never occur... but would you really put it past our government? Under the *CURRENT* laws, even if you simply receive an unsolicited spam with an image of an adult that *resembles* an underage person...you're guilty of possession of child pornography. Is it that much of a stretch?
...Dolby Digital is an encoding/compression method for multi-channel audio, it has nothing to do with generating the original source audio. Nor does it have anything to do with calculating audio effects such as position, reflection, or occlusion which is what Creative's EAX (and previously, Aureal's A3D) is all about.
As for its being an accepted standard (for gaming), there is no sense using up processing time compressing and encoding multi-channel audio into a Dolby Digital stream when you can simply output the digital audio as a raw PCM stream which most digital audio decoders are capable of handling directly. It would only be of use for pre-rendered cut scenes/FMV where all the audio would be the same each time.
Slashdot Mirror
This began a few years ago, and yes you're right, it is organized crime. The biggest involvement that I've seen has been in the form of organized crime in Russia, although there are smaller players in Romania, Turkey and Greece (and of course scattered all over the globe, but these groups seem most active and collaborative in nature). Russian organized crime in particular has been involved in spam zombies for years now, and they're also involved quite heavily in child pornography rings around the world, and I would suspect plenty of other lovely things like that.
It's a big issue with a lot of factors at play, and the organized crime aspect has been on my mind a lot for the past few months as kind of a mental exercise, but I haven't really sat down and thought it all through yet. There's *something* to it but I just can't put it in words yet.
Damn! Your url had a typo in it. Well, I'm guessing it was supposed to be http://www.governmentsecurity.org/ anyway.
So what are the trends coming from romanian hackers and middle-eastern hackers? I'm guessing the Romanians are pretty much in line with the Russians. But I've seen more activity coming from the middle-east in the past couple months. What are they primarily doing? Just trying to play havoc because of current political motivations?
You've pretty much nailed the other countries/regions from what I've seen myself, I'm curious as to your take on some others though.
If we can just convince enough companies of this, then they'll all get off the internet and let us get back to USING it for things!
That's a common misconception. The militaries of today have changed very little from the militaries of a thousand years ago except in terms of their reliance upon high technology. During the Gulf War we stopped using million dollar missiles to destroy anti-aircraft and other high tech weapons and replaced those attacks with snipers firing $6 bullets.
The achilles heal of all high tech weapons is that they need not be obliterated to be rendered useless. They only need to be broken. Once this takes place, the military battleground takes on most of the same characteristics and strategies of ages past. It becomes a numbers and strategy game. Granted there would still be untold bloodshed, but that's been a fact of war since the dawn of time.
At 90 years old, your grandfather may be old enough to remember when these drugs WERE legal in the U.S., or at the very least, to have been raised by those who remember it.
It should be noted that "Beware of dog" signs on your property are a serious legal liability in the United States should you happen to own a dog and it ever attack someone. Lawyers say you're actually better off without having the signs if you actually do have a dog, because having such a sign implies that you are aware of the possibility that the dog may pose a danger and you can be charged with criminal negligence in many states because of it.
What I used to have were a few window stickers on my car that I got from police friends. Things that suggest an affiliation or friendliness with the local police departments or other law enforcement agencies. Mine were for supporters of Colorado State Troopers and the NRA.
Personally I think the law enforcement ones are a little more effective, because I've had a few friends with just the NRA stickers on their cars have their cars broken into on several occassions. I suspect maybe the criminals are hoping to find firearms to steal.
Best of that type, if you could get any, might be to try and find some kind of federal law enforcement stickers. FBI or U.S. Martial Service would probably be the best deterent of that type.
My personal stats are: 1-3 legit emails per day, ~250 spams per day (although that's been dropping somewhat recently, no idea why). I'd say the numbers probably aren't all that far off.
I'm pretty sure Sony makes some SDDS capable home equipment in their high-end lines, I think I've even seen them in stores before. I don't recall ever seeing any content for them however. I bet you can find it in Japan.
Doesn't that actually take effect next year? (at least in the USA)
There are actually a lot of programs for people in your position. They aren't advertised well. NPR did a program on them about a year ago, although I don't recall the details. Try googling for healthcare coverage on npr.org (by adding site:npr.org to your google search) and see what links it turns up.
:\
No doubt it'll be a bit of work, but not so painful as enduring the kind of injuries you sustained and having to cough up $80 grand on top of that.
Best of luck to you. Most likely you'll have several months of enjoying things like oxycotton and other narcotics while you learn to walk again.
And this from a company making three billion dollars a month. How is it then, that a bunch of ragtag volunteers put together a more secure OS than a company which can spend a billion dollars a month on development?
Is it because the old political addage about throwing money at a problem is true?
Money doesn't solve problems. Effective leadership and hard work solves problems. Indeed it would seem that many times, money poses a hurdle to effective leadership and hard work.
You're thinking in yesterday's terms. The viruses of old would wipe out hard drives and cause data loss.
The viruses and trojans of today delivery the more harmful payload. There is money to be made in spam (hard to believe, but never the less true), there is money to be made in phishing, there is money to be made in orchestrating DDoS attacks against your competition, and this is the payload being delivered in todays viruses. And by not doing anything outwardly visible to end-users other than some slow-down that they may or may not notice, it goes undetected for weeks or months which extends each infection's useful life and allows those responsible for spreading them to maximize their benefits.
Viruses of today are the tools of organized crime around the world. The days of the "innocent" wipe out your hard drive virus are gone.
Trust in technology, computers and the internet are slowly being lost because of all the scams going around, all the exploits, all the spy-ware, and all the viruses that make them possible. With this loss of trust, comes the demise of the technology economy that has made Microsoft the incredibly successful business that they are today. This is the crux of the reason that Microsoft is having to focus on security in their products.
I have Internet Explorer on my computer, and I keep it patched against known exploits. This does not mean that I use it.
What is revealed in the article is simply that he HAS Firefox on his computer, and being a competent security manager, he keeps his software patched against known exploits where possible. This doesn't mean that he USES Firefox as his browser, simply that he has it installed.
Probably it's not too uncommon for any company to have in their posession the products of their largest competitors. I know several companies who do this regularly. It's part of keeping up with current market demands. Microsoft personel wouldn't be doing their job if they weren't aware of what their competition is doing, indeed their success would seem to indicate that they are KEENLY aware of what their competition is up to (Internet Explorer notwithstanding).
This was available all the way back in Windows 95 days as well via a system administration tool on the Windows 95 CDROM (in a folder labelled administration tools or something like that ironically) called poledit (Policy Editor). It's existed since Windows file-sharing began. Of course you're right that it isn't obvious, it would involve reading a lot of documentation to know it existed.
that might be the start of a new trend. monday while watching the olympics, we were unable to see the scores and other information NBC broadcast at the bottom of the screen due to our local affiliate broadcasting their own information over the same portion of the screen. he emailed the program director of our local affiliate and amazingly enough, the next night our local affiliate had altered their information so as not to interfere with the coverage..and my roommate received a reply the next day saying how common it is for people to complain, but how rare it is that they actually complain to someone who can do something about it, and thanked him for his feedback.
amazing! (not really, but from the way people talk now days, you'd think it is)
why is it that when you can hack into something running linux, it's cool. but when you can hack into something running windows it's a huge security flaw and microsoft is evil?
:D
ok, actually i think it's cool too but isn't it a little "funny" how being able to hack into a windows machine is a "bad thing(tm)" and hacking into a linux machine is considered a cool feature by geeks? that should make windows *REALLY* cool.
From the article:
:D
To top it off, Epson added an image sensor unit that can capture and transmit aerial images via a Bluetooth wireless connection to a monitor on land, and they also devised two LED lamps that can be controlled as a means of signaling.
Perverts around the world are happy!
Now if only we guarded our rights and freedoms with such fervor... those being the only things more important than the Statue of Liberty qua what the U.S. symbolizes to the world.
I don't know about where you live, but in both Colorado and Arizona, when you sign up for an insurance policy (and each year thereafter) you are required to disclose both the number of miles you have to drive between work and home, and the approximate number of miles driven annually.
This is because the insurance companies do in fact adjust your premiums based upon the number of miles you drive.
You might call a few insurance companies and inquire regarding this. Ask if your premiums would be higher if you got a job driving cross-country for a living, or as a local courier using your own vehicle. You might be surprised... or maybe just lucky.
back-slashdotted? omg!! a windows user!!
I'd say this is already standard practice in child abuse investigations. Given that this sort of "technology" was already shown in use as far back as Bladerunner. And if it isn't a standard part of investigations, I must ask why not? Even I've thought of it as a potentially useful tool.
And just for completeness, why would analyzing reflections in eyes be the only thing used? There are generally LOTS of reflective surfaces in images. I would think analyzing ANY of them would be common practice in a serious investigation like that.
Have you ever been to Las Vegas? the security cameras in the casinos there has been able to cleary read serial numbers on money for over 15 years. This is from quite some distance too, it isn't just cameras that are mounted on the tables.
This stuff exists. It's expensive and not many people will have it (at least at first), but some will and I think it's a safe bet they won't always have our best interests at heart. Just look at the ways the anti-terrorism legislation are already being abused. Why is it a stretch to believe that this sort of technology couldn't be as well?
Think about this scenario: you're in a store holding your cell phone trying to remember someone's phone number that you didn't store yet. Your eyes are fixated somewhere that you have no awareness of. Your phone (like all phones with decent features now) has a camera in it (guilty i say!). Your eyes happen to be staring at some 14 year old girl who's looking at clothes on a rack. The federal government, in their ever-present "but what about the children?!" fashion, have recently updated the child pornography laws such that staring at young people is borderline behaviour, and holding a "camera" in your hand while doing so is probable cause. Guess what, now you're a sex offender!
Sure, that's a very paranoid view, and one that I would hope would never occur... but would you really put it past our government? Under the *CURRENT* laws, even if you simply receive an unsolicited spam with an image of an adult that *resembles* an underage person...you're guilty of possession of child pornography. Is it that much of a stretch?
Isn't Masaru Emoto the guy featured in What The Bleep?
We gave mice mad cow disease! Yay!
This is the first step, I'm sure, to giving it to politicians.
Well I mean really, how much difference *is* there between a mouse and a rat?
...Dolby Digital is an encoding/compression method for multi-channel audio, it has nothing to do with generating the original source audio. Nor does it have anything to do with calculating audio effects such as position, reflection, or occlusion which is what Creative's EAX (and previously, Aureal's A3D) is all about.
As for its being an accepted standard (for gaming), there is no sense using up processing time compressing and encoding multi-channel audio into a Dolby Digital stream when you can simply output the digital audio as a raw PCM stream which most digital audio decoders are capable of handling directly. It would only be of use for pre-rendered cut scenes/FMV where all the audio would be the same each time.