Sony is trying to turn gamers against anonymous and at the same time trying to hype the situation up to get law enforcement to put more resources on it.
The identity of the hackers are secrets. The zero day exploits of the hackers is secret. The tactics of the hackers are varied and in many cases also secret. But When you work as an employee for a company everything is transparent to the adversary.
The adversary knows what kind of firewall you use, what OS you use, what software you use, who you hired to protect the network, what their capabilities are or aren't, but they also know as a corporation you are limited to the profit motive.
So shutting down the network isn't the worst. The worst is creating as much or as great a loss in money as possible. Deleting information isn't as bad as copying intellectual property, source code, or something like this.
And like I said before it's probably Sony blaming it on Anonymous, that doesn't mean it actually is Anonymous.
I'm on a 100Mbit connection, and so are many people. Latency is not the issue here.
Sure it can be a slight problem, but the original Starcraft did not have these region locks. Let the customer decide between dealing with potential latency issues or the region lock. I hate the concept of region locking, it makes no sense and defeats the purpose of internet gaming.
Sony also knows that turning gamers against Anonymous is a strong tactical advantage in the war against Anonymous. It's probably the only card they have to play.
We cannot put it past Sony to deliberately shut down the network and pin the blame on Anonymous.
It depends on the nature of the group. Anonymous is a politically oriented cyber intelligence organization. They aren't after money, if they were they'd be working for corporations.
They hacked HBGaryFederal and they leaked gigs of emails. If they can do this then they are no longer an organization that can't do anything. They've done something.
If you look at the purpose and objectives held by both organizations they are very compatible and very similar. Anonymous takes direct action while Wikileaks typically was more of an intelligence organization. Julian Assange now being in jail has changed the role of Anonymous. Anonymous is now becoming a true intelligence organization rather than just a political direct action organization. Anonymous proved this when they leaked the HBGaryFederal emails. This is a move we would have expected from Wikileaks. Anonymous is now in the leaking business.
Anonymous is now in the intelligence business because once you start the domino effect and trigger the cyber war it doesn't end until you either win it, or all your members are in prison. So now they don't have much of a choice but to create a network of informants and this requires they build a more traditional intelligence network.
If you think I don't know what I'm talking about. Check back here a few months from now. It's obvious you don't keep track of Anonymous and probably haven't read much about them.
It doesn't work like that. Assuming both sides are highly competent, securing something is a fundamentally harder problem than breaking in. To break in, you only need to figure out one vulnerability. To secure something, you need to make sure every component - as big as a data center and as small as every single instruction sent to the CPUs - in your system, is invulnerable. Hiring hackers would only help if the engineering team is highly incompetent to start with (like, they aren't even aware of basic things like why strcpy() to a fixed buffer can be a very bad idea).
You are underestimating the power of social engineers. If you have someones dox, if you have their social security number for example, and this someone happens to be either an employee for a rival corporation, within your own corporation, or anywhere else, it's very easy to build an intelligence file to find all their human vulnerabilities. Now if you want to see how vulnerable an entire corporation is, who is in charge of protecting the secret information or passwords or whatever? How psychologically stable as those people? If you have an intelligence file on every important employee within an organization, and you know which ones happen to be psychologically unstable, vulnerable to certain kinds of social engineering, etc, then you can probe the network for human weaknesses.
Which ones are most likely to write their passwords down and throw them in the trash? Which ones are most likely to go to an online dating service and meet a girl or guy? Knowing who is single, knowing who has what psychological disorder, knowing who cheats on their wife or husband, knowing anything which can be leveraged to compromise them. It's no different than in politics where politicians get targeted and corrupted over time, when enough eyes are on an employee then its only a matter of time before the employee does something which can put them in a compromised blackmailable position.
Once in that position then they have to choose between losing their wife/husband or losing their job. Once again blackmail, extortion, or outright social engineering where they think the boss told them to give the password, is usually all that is required to hack human networks. If you are trying to always hack it by technical means then yeah you'll have to hope there is some bug in the system but if you want to guarantee success you have to hack through all means, technical and social.
If Anonymous and Wikileaks don't represent cyberwarfare then there is no such thing as cyberwarfare.
Did Anonymous declare war? Yes. Does Anonymous conduct operations? Yes. Does Anonymous break the laws? Yes. Does Anonymous have the capability to disrupt the economy? Yes. Does Anonymous have a political objective? Yes.
And of course Anonymous has opposition groups who are also willing to break the laws and conduct operations to stop them. So if they aren't what you'd consider cyber warriors, and if this isn't a cyber war between Anonymous and their enemies, what would you call it?
A new kind of organization. I would say Anonymous is a cyber intelligence organization, not just a collection of jerks.
If you don't take them seriously or look at them as a joke then you won't have a clue about whats coming next. Anonymous is going the direction WIkileaks went. This means they will build comprehensive intel files (dox) on Sony employees and on the employees of target corporations. This means they just use the internet, it does not mean Anonymous is strictly an internet organization.
And it's a full fledged cyberwar with sides. You will have the commercial hackers who hack for corporations, and you'll have the hacktivists who hack for Anonymous. On top of this you'll also have informants for both groups. So if you side against Anonymous or against Sony, either or both sides will know about it. So at this time the best way to look at whats going on if you want to be smart about it is from a neutral stance. Don't diminish Anonymous unless you want to be targeted by Anonymous, and don't diminish Sony unless you want to be targeted by their hackers.
Remember Anonymous is also trying to take on the Koch Bros. They aren't going to be able to do that overnight as the Koch Bros have an intel network of their own of greater sophistication and funding. What Anonymous lacks is funding, a lot of the hard detective like work requires hiring private investigators. This is something Anonymous probably wont be able to afford unless private investigators volunteer their services to their operations or are extorted in some way into doing it.
But in the long term Anonymous is growing stronger at an exponential rate. Their only flaw at this moment in time is their relative inexperience and their silly tactics at times. They go from brilliant tactics at some points in time (such as hacking the email server at HBGaryFederal), to really dumb tactics like DDOSing Sony and taking down webpages. They don't seem to have strong leadership or a set methodology of objectives to pursue.
The situation is really obvious right now to anyone who is somewhat street smart. What is going on is the opening of a much wider cyberwar. Anonymous has now made corporations into their main target. As far as Sony goes I'm not really a fan of Sony, and I'm not a fan of most corporations. But Anonymous needs to understand just exactly what they are doing.This is war between Anonymous and Sony.
I've read on several websites that Anonymous plans to target employees next. If this is true it would represent a new phase in cyberwarfare but is actually a very normal set of circumstances when we are talking about standard conventional warfare.
In information warfare, secrets are useful. So they'll probably start by getting dox on some low level employees in critical positions. Then they'll leverage these initial dox to launch a private investigation to find dirt on Sony employees much like what opposition research is to politics. Once enough dirt is found to compromise the employee or the employee is set up or driven to compromise themselves, the employee will be in a position to be blackmailed or made into a puppet for Anonymous. The same process that intelligence agencies would use to entrap or coerce a target into giving up secret information, which then gets leveraged for more secret information and so on.
So what has to be understood here is that Sony is no real match for Anonymous. Anonymous may represent a sort of cyber intelligence group in the same way that Wikileaks is. And I think if they focused on corporations most people hate or cant stand, or are mad at, they'll probably have the support of the people. But they should not target the PSN servers. The gamers are not a demographic Anonymous wants to turn against them.
Also Anonymous should not expect Sony to take this lying down. Sony and others will begin hiring hackers and forming their own intelligence networks specifically to hunt and compromise Anonymous members. For that reason I think it's legitimate to consider this a real cyber war and not just a bunch of script kiddies doing pranks online. Anonymous has crossed the line into being a serious group in the same way Wikileaks has.
I don't agree with everything Anonymous has done, but in many cases such as taking on foreign dictators or going up against Sony, I actually think these were brave moves. The tactics on the other hand such as denial of service is the wrong tactic. And of course they are playing with fire going up against Sony, but it's still a brave move. They clearly have heart and aren't a bunch of know nothing script kiddies. Anonymous is serious.
Walmart is not known for having quality food. Why is it so difficult to find a delivery service for quality food but so easy to find a delivery service from Stop and Shop or Walmart?
Any secret police, intelligence agency or local undercover cop can set up a VPN and claim it's safe for "pirates".
It would be a smart way to encourage large groups of individuals to commit piracy and other crimes over a completely and thoroughly monitored network. The police will have an easy job getting search warrants and making cases and when it's time to conduct their customary stings and raids they'll sync them for maximum affect on the file sharing community.
Unlike certain other companies, when the community speaks Google listens. The community has spoken and it was clear all along that the community wanted to save Google Video not so much for the legacy interface but the actual content.
As long as the content is transferred over to YouTube there wont be a problem. But a lot of content is only available on Google Video. To just erase years worth of content is just stupid. This could have been solved by just transitioning or transferring the content over in the first place.
I think we need a system for hardcore gamers. I also don't think $400 is that bad anymore. It depends on what the device can do. We spend $400 on Ipads and Ipods. The money would be worth it is Nintendo's product is more of a power gaming computer.
My concern is upgradability. I want the system to be modular. So that ram or the graphics can be upgraded. It might change the nature of consoles but consoles are going to become obsolete now that they cannot keep up with PC in the graphics dept.
Solid State carts and a lot of ram would do a lot of help. Having a much faster graphics chipset would also do a lot.
I think as far as the main CPU goes, it is very unlikely that the current generation of CPU's are being fully utilized. For physics these CPU's are helpful, and perhaps for sophisticated AI, but if games are streamed from a server somewhere it changes the need for that.
Astroturfing. Look at the moderating.
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Certain comments getting rated down, other comments getting rated up, and not any of it based on any reason other than subjective preference.
Re:Organic vs processed (toxic) sugar.
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Fructose goes to the liver. This is why it doesn't burn off immediately like sucrose. So fructose is worse than sucrose. High fructose corn syrup is the worst form of fructose because it keeps insulin levels high for a long period of time, it prevents the body from burning fat as well.
Re:High fructose corn syrup is slow acting poison.
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
I never said I agreed with the entire article.
Fructose is processed like a toxin, that is true.
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 1
And I do not advocating drinking too much juice or eating too much fructose. Fructose gets processed by the liver and because of how its processed it goes directly to fat cells. It's very difficult to burn it off, and it generally high calories.
That being said you have to weigh the risks vs the benefits of the vitamins in the fruit, vs the amount of fructose you consume.
Honestly it would be better to take fruit vitamins of powdered fruit without any fructose or sugar, than to drink actual juice and get the fructose which the body generally does not need and will waste or convert to fat.
Organic vs processed (toxic) sugar.
on
Is Sugar Toxic?
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I'm telling people not to eat processed sugar. Fruit is organic sugar. The sugar in fruit is not the sugar in breakfast cereal. Processed sugar is a slow acting poison. Organic sugar in small amounts is like salt in small amounts.
The problem is processed sugar has replaced organic sugar. So when we talk about sugar now, we are talking about high fructose corn syrup because that is the most common form of sugar in the American diet.
Slashdot Mirror
AnonOps says it's not an official Anon operation. http://www.anonnews.org/?p=press&a=item&i=848
This means it could be anybody or nobody.
Sony is trying to turn gamers against anonymous and at the same time trying to hype the situation up to get law enforcement to put more resources on it.
The identity of the hackers are secrets. The zero day exploits of the hackers is secret. The tactics of the hackers are varied and in many cases also secret. But When you work as an employee for a company everything is transparent to the adversary.
The adversary knows what kind of firewall you use, what OS you use, what software you use, who you hired to protect the network, what their capabilities are or aren't, but they also know as a corporation you are limited to the profit motive.
So shutting down the network isn't the worst. The worst is creating as much or as great a loss in money as possible. Deleting information isn't as bad as copying intellectual property, source code, or something like this.
And like I said before it's probably Sony blaming it on Anonymous, that doesn't mean it actually is Anonymous.
I'm on a 100Mbit connection, and so are many people. Latency is not the issue here.
Sure it can be a slight problem, but the original Starcraft did not have these region locks. Let the customer decide between dealing with potential latency issues or the region lock. I hate the concept of region locking, it makes no sense and defeats the purpose of internet gaming.
Sony also knows that turning gamers against Anonymous is a strong tactical advantage in the war against Anonymous. It's probably the only card they have to play.
We cannot put it past Sony to deliberately shut down the network and pin the blame on Anonymous.
It depends on the nature of the group. Anonymous is a politically oriented cyber intelligence organization. They aren't after money, if they were they'd be working for corporations.
With their dumb region locking and extremely anti-gamer policies.
Blizzard needs to get rid of region locks.
They hacked HBGaryFederal and they leaked gigs of emails. If they can do this then they are no longer an organization that can't do anything. They've done something.
If you look at the purpose and objectives held by both organizations they are very compatible and very similar. Anonymous takes direct action while Wikileaks typically was more of an intelligence organization. Julian Assange now being in jail has changed the role of Anonymous. Anonymous is now becoming a true intelligence organization rather than just a political direct action organization. Anonymous proved this when they leaked the HBGaryFederal emails. This is a move we would have expected from Wikileaks. Anonymous is now in the leaking business.
Anonymous is now in the intelligence business because once you start the domino effect and trigger the cyber war it doesn't end until you either win it, or all your members are in prison. So now they don't have much of a choice but to create a network of informants and this requires they build a more traditional intelligence network.
If you think I don't know what I'm talking about. Check back here a few months from now. It's obvious you don't keep track of Anonymous and probably haven't read much about them.
It doesn't work like that. Assuming both sides are highly competent, securing something is a fundamentally harder problem than breaking in. To break in, you only need to figure out one vulnerability. To secure something, you need to make sure every component - as big as a data center and as small as every single instruction sent to the CPUs - in your system, is invulnerable. Hiring hackers would only help if the engineering team is highly incompetent to start with (like, they aren't even aware of basic things like why strcpy() to a fixed buffer can be a very bad idea).
You are underestimating the power of social engineers. If you have someones dox, if you have their social security number for example, and this someone happens to be either an employee for a rival corporation, within your own corporation, or anywhere else, it's very easy to build an intelligence file to find all their human vulnerabilities. Now if you want to see how vulnerable an entire corporation is, who is in charge of protecting the secret information or passwords or whatever? How psychologically stable as those people? If you have an intelligence file on every important employee within an organization, and you know which ones happen to be psychologically unstable, vulnerable to certain kinds of social engineering, etc, then you can probe the network for human weaknesses.
Which ones are most likely to write their passwords down and throw them in the trash? Which ones are most likely to go to an online dating service and meet a girl or guy? Knowing who is single, knowing who has what psychological disorder, knowing who cheats on their wife or husband, knowing anything which can be leveraged to compromise them. It's no different than in politics where politicians get targeted and corrupted over time, when enough eyes are on an employee then its only a matter of time before the employee does something which can put them in a compromised blackmailable position.
Once in that position then they have to choose between losing their wife/husband or losing their job. Once again blackmail, extortion, or outright social engineering where they think the boss told them to give the password, is usually all that is required to hack human networks. If you are trying to always hack it by technical means then yeah you'll have to hope there is some bug in the system but if you want to guarantee success you have to hack through all means, technical and social.
Watch the video or maintain your ignorance on the subject.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NhTfOL9_HBE
If Anonymous and Wikileaks don't represent cyberwarfare then there is no such thing as cyberwarfare.
Did Anonymous declare war? Yes.
Does Anonymous conduct operations? Yes.
Does Anonymous break the laws? Yes.
Does Anonymous have the capability to disrupt the economy? Yes.
Does Anonymous have a political objective? Yes.
And of course Anonymous has opposition groups who are also willing to break the laws and conduct operations to stop them. So if they aren't what you'd consider cyber warriors, and if this isn't a cyber war between Anonymous and their enemies, what would you call it?
A new kind of organization. I would say Anonymous is a cyber intelligence organization, not just a collection of jerks.
If you don't take them seriously or look at them as a joke then you won't have a clue about whats coming next. Anonymous is going the direction WIkileaks went. This means they will build comprehensive intel files (dox) on Sony employees and on the employees of target corporations. This means they just use the internet, it does not mean Anonymous is strictly an internet organization.
http://playstationlifestyle.net/2011/04/04/anonymous-gets-serious-attacks-sony-employees/
And it's a full fledged cyberwar with sides. You will have the commercial hackers who hack for corporations, and you'll have the hacktivists who hack for Anonymous. On top of this you'll also have informants for both groups. So if you side against Anonymous or against Sony, either or both sides will know about it. So at this time the best way to look at whats going on if you want to be smart about it is from a neutral stance. Don't diminish Anonymous unless you want to be targeted by Anonymous, and don't diminish Sony unless you want to be targeted by their hackers.
Remember Anonymous is also trying to take on the Koch Bros. They aren't going to be able to do that overnight as the Koch Bros have an intel network of their own of greater sophistication and funding. What Anonymous lacks is funding, a lot of the hard detective like work requires hiring private investigators. This is something Anonymous probably wont be able to afford unless private investigators volunteer their services to their operations or are extorted in some way into doing it.
But in the long term Anonymous is growing stronger at an exponential rate. Their only flaw at this moment in time is their relative inexperience and their silly tactics at times. They go from brilliant tactics at some points in time (such as hacking the email server at HBGaryFederal), to really dumb tactics like DDOSing Sony and taking down webpages. They don't seem to have strong leadership or a set methodology of objectives to pursue.
The situation is really obvious right now to anyone who is somewhat street smart. What is going on is the opening of a much wider cyberwar. Anonymous has now made corporations into their main target. As far as Sony goes I'm not really a fan of Sony, and I'm not a fan of most corporations. But Anonymous needs to understand just exactly what they are doing .This is war between Anonymous and Sony.
I've read on several websites that Anonymous plans to target employees next. If this is true it would represent a new phase in cyberwarfare but is actually a very normal set of circumstances when we are talking about standard conventional warfare.
In information warfare, secrets are useful. So they'll probably start by getting dox on some low level employees in critical positions. Then they'll leverage these initial dox to launch a private investigation to find dirt on Sony employees much like what opposition research is to politics. Once enough dirt is found to compromise the employee or the employee is set up or driven to compromise themselves, the employee will be in a position to be blackmailed or made into a puppet for Anonymous. The same process that intelligence agencies would use to entrap or coerce a target into giving up secret information, which then gets leveraged for more secret information and so on.
So what has to be understood here is that Sony is no real match for Anonymous. Anonymous may represent a sort of cyber intelligence group in the same way that Wikileaks is. And I think if they focused on corporations most people hate or cant stand, or are mad at, they'll probably have the support of the people. But they should not target the PSN servers. The gamers are not a demographic Anonymous wants to turn against them.
Also Anonymous should not expect Sony to take this lying down. Sony and others will begin hiring hackers and forming their own intelligence networks specifically to hunt and compromise Anonymous members. For that reason I think it's legitimate to consider this a real cyber war and not just a bunch of script kiddies doing pranks online. Anonymous has crossed the line into being a serious group in the same way Wikileaks has.
I don't agree with everything Anonymous has done, but in many cases such as taking on foreign dictators or going up against Sony, I actually think these were brave moves. The tactics on the other hand such as denial of service is the wrong tactic. And of course they are playing with fire going up against Sony, but it's still a brave move. They clearly have heart and aren't a bunch of know nothing script kiddies. Anonymous is serious.
Walmart is not known for having quality food. Why is it so difficult to find a delivery service for quality food but so easy to find a delivery service from Stop and Shop or Walmart?
Any secret police, intelligence agency or local undercover cop can set up a VPN and claim it's safe for "pirates".
It would be a smart way to encourage large groups of individuals to commit piracy and other crimes over a completely and thoroughly monitored network. The police will have an easy job getting search warrants and making cases and when it's time to conduct their customary stings and raids they'll sync them for maximum affect on the file sharing community.
Nothing could have diminished faith in the cloud more than to delete years worth of content overnight from the cloud.
It was a dumb idea to even discuss deleting it forever when Google wants us to trust them to host the data forever.
God is good.
Unlike certain other companies, when the community speaks Google listens. The community has spoken and it was clear all along that the community wanted to save Google Video not so much for the legacy interface but the actual content.
As long as the content is transferred over to YouTube there wont be a problem. But a lot of content is only available on Google Video. To just erase years worth of content is just stupid. This could have been solved by just transitioning or transferring the content over in the first place.
I think we need a system for hardcore gamers. I also don't think $400 is that bad anymore. It depends on what the device can do. We spend $400 on Ipads and Ipods. The money would be worth it is Nintendo's product is more of a power gaming computer.
My concern is upgradability. I want the system to be modular. So that ram or the graphics can be upgraded. It might change the nature of consoles but consoles are going to become obsolete now that they cannot keep up with PC in the graphics dept.
Solid State carts and a lot of ram would do a lot of help. Having a much faster graphics chipset would also do a lot.
I think as far as the main CPU goes, it is very unlikely that the current generation of CPU's are being fully utilized. For physics these CPU's are helpful, and perhaps for sophisticated AI, but if games are streamed from a server somewhere it changes the need for that.
When are we going to get YouTube in 3d?
Certain comments getting rated down, other comments getting rated up, and not any of it based on any reason other than subjective preference.
Fructose goes to the liver. This is why it doesn't burn off immediately like sucrose.
So fructose is worse than sucrose. High fructose corn syrup is the worst form of fructose because it keeps insulin levels high for a long period of time, it prevents the body from burning fat as well.
I never said I agreed with the entire article.
And I do not advocating drinking too much juice or eating too much fructose. Fructose gets processed by the liver and because of how its processed it goes directly to fat cells. It's very difficult to burn it off, and it generally high calories.
That being said you have to weigh the risks vs the benefits of the vitamins in the fruit, vs the amount of fructose you consume.
Honestly it would be better to take fruit vitamins of powdered fruit without any fructose or sugar, than to drink actual juice and get the fructose which the body generally does not need and will waste or convert to fat.
I'm telling people not to eat processed sugar. Fruit is organic sugar. The sugar in fruit is not the sugar in breakfast cereal. Processed sugar is a slow acting poison. Organic sugar in small amounts is like salt in small amounts.
The problem is processed sugar has replaced organic sugar. So when we talk about sugar now, we are talking about high fructose corn syrup because that is the most common form of sugar in the American diet.