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A war against TRUTH. The website WikiLeaks.org had the potential of making lots of enemies: A website that dares to expose the TRUTH that others want suppressed, especially if that TRUTH hurts their profits or power structure. But nobody expected an American judge to make an attempt to censor or shut down WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks posted some documents showing a Swiss banking group, Bank Julius Baer, was engaged in criminal activities, specifically money laundering and tax evasion. The group asked the documents be removed “because they could affect the outcome of a separate legal case in Switzerland.” (Web Pro News) You would think that would be enough, but California judge Jeffery White, a Duh’bya appointee nonetheless, decided to go further. Here’s the original “permanent injunction” the dumb fuck granted Bank Julius Baer against Dynadot, WikiLeaks’ domain registrar:

1. Dynadot shall immediately lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar, and shall immediately disable the wikileaks.org domain name and account to prevent access to and any changes from being made to the domain name and account information, until further order of this Court.

2. Dynadot shall immediately disable the wikileaks.org domain name and account such that the optional privacy who-is service for the domain name and account remains turned off, until further order of this Court.

3. Dynadot shall preserve a true and correct copy of both current and any and all prior or previous administrative and account records and data for the wikileaks.org domain name and account.

4. Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.

5. Dynadot shall immediately produce both current and any all prior or previous administrative and account records and data for the wikileaks.org domain name and account, including, but not limited to, all data for the registrant; billing, technical and administrative
contacts; all account and payment records and associated data; and IP addresses and associated data used by any person, other than Dynadot, who accessed the account for the domain name, to the extent such information is maintained by Dynadot.

6. Plaintiffs shall immediately upon entry of this order file a dismissal with prejudice in favor of Dynadot. Notwithstanding the foregoing, plaintiffs and Dynadot stipulate and agree that the Court shall retain jurisdiction to enforce this order.

Dated: February , 2008
Jeffrey S. White
United States District Judge
Case 3:08-cv-00824-JSW Document 47-2 Filed 02/14/2008 Page 2 of 2

Translation: Dumb fuck judge Jeffey wants WikiLeaks shut down, most likely because he’s afraid of somebody leaking information on how much in kickbacks he’s getting from Bank Julius Baer for being so compliant.

Can’t keep a good website down. WikiLeaks has to be a tough mofo with what they have to deal with at times, such as a recent DDoS attack on their servers, a fire in an Uninterruptible Power Supply, and threats from governments. Some over-glorified shark asswipe in a little black dress with no clue to what the Internet is about isn’t going to stop WikiLeaks’ mission of exposing the TRUTH. Already, they have several alternate URLs to lead you there, or you can just use their IP address of 88.80.13.160.

What started the fight. The Cryptome website has the damning documents Bank Julius Baer want deleted, along with other docs being lobbed at Dynadot and WikiLeaks. They also have links to mirrors of WikiLeaks’ archives in case the sharks succeed in shutting them down… not that that’s likely to happen.

UPDATE (19-Feb-08): Judge backs down on shutdown order. Looks like Judge Jeffey came to his senses. ZDNet’s Richard Komen reports that the permanent injunction has been amended; Reducing it to a temporary restraining order and removing the orders that the site be disabled. The order to remove the “offending” documents remains, but don’t expect WikiLeaks to comply anytime soon. According to correspondence between BJB and WikiLeaks, BJB’s shysters have been vague and evasive in their demands, going so far as conducting a sneak-attack ex-parte hearing by notifying WikiLeaks only hours in advance.

From ZDNet’s Richard Komen:

It seems that WikiLeaks lawyers were able to convince the judge that something was amiss here, because the second order, a TRO, provides WikiLeaks an opportunity to answer (by Feb. 20) and JB to respond to that answer (by Feb. 26.) One question is whether JB lied about there being a stipulation for WikiLeaks to go offline, since WL compained so vociferously about it and the order was so quickly amended.

A hearing on the injunction is scheduled for Feb. 29 at the U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

UPDATE (20-Feb-08): Syndicate was looking to go public:

Bank that censored WikiLeaks was preparing for IPO by ZDNet’s Richard Koman — I just received this press statment from WikiLeaks: Wikileaks has discovered Bank Julius Baer was preparing to take their US operation public via an a billion dollar IPO. They filed the prospectus with the SEC on Feb 12, a mere three days before convincing Federal court Judge Jeffery White to order total censorship of the transparency […]

The prospectus can be viewed online here. Of course the SEC wouldn’t want to be accused of aiding a criminal enterprise… right? So many potential millions of US dollars being funneled into a criminal organization now in jeopardy because of the TRUTH being leaked out… SOMETHING has to be done to suppress the TRUTH.

Harsh lessons about the TRUTH. Take notes, BJB, there will be a pop quiz later.

You silence the TRUTH, it will become louder.
You blind the TRUTH, it will become brighter and clearer.
You suppress the TRUTH, it will oppress you.
You close the door on the TRUTH, it will open the windows.
You imprison the TRUTH, it will escape.
You devalue the TRUTH, it will become more valuable than you can afford.
You claim the TRUTH is a lie, it will prove YOU are the lie.
You strangle the TRUTH, it will slip through your iron fist like so much sand.
You declare the TRUTH is dead, it will live longer and stronger.

Perhaps the best description of what is happening comes from ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn:

Censorship just makes the news bigger, and making it harder to get makes it more attractive. Successful censorship isolates entire countries, economy and all.
…
Julius Baer, the bank which tried to keep its secrets, and Judge Jeffrey S. White, the Bush appointee who tried to help it do so, are going to learn the hard way what the rest of us have known for over a decade.

While the year-old Wikileaks has just made its bones.

UPDATE: 2-Mar-2008. Judge Jeffrey White got a clue; He has reversed his injunctions against WikiLeaks (dot-org) and the site is now available via WikiLeaks.org.

A couple of quotes from Judge White’s decision:

Wired:

The judge conceded the futility of attempts to censor information, in this instance private banking records, after it has been posted to the internet.

“When this genie gets out of the bottle, it’s out for all purposes,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White said after a more than 3-hour-long hearing here. Earlier, White said he had “an obligation to get it right” and that “I took an oath to uphold the Constitution.”

News.com:

One attorney for BJB said there were no First Amendment problems, invoking a U.S. Supreme Court precedent dealing with an intercepted conversation played by a radio station because, “We allege, your honor, that Wikileaks has actively solicited the theft of private information…they are participants in the illegality.”

BJB also said, “We’re talking about private banking information, account numbers, personal numbers like Social Security numbers…all this is private information that’s not newsworthy…None of the publishers here today would want their own banking information posted on the Internet.”

The judge’s preruling reply: “Let me play devil’s advocate here. Is it newsworthy if some prominent citizen is…evading taxes, laundering funds? Wouldn’t that be something in the public interest?”

Another hearing is scheduled for May 16.

The current average lifespan of a human is around 80 years. The oldest person lived to be 122 years, while an Israeli Arab woman is claiming to be 120. And many gerontologists believe that 125 years is the maximum. But if researchers in California are right, they can possibly extend human life to 1000 YEARS.

From The Independent (UK), Science section:

A genetically engineered organism that lives 10 times longer than normal has been created by scientists in California. It is the greatest extension of longevity yet achieved by researchers investigating the scientific nature of ageing.

If this work could ever be translated into humans, it would mean that we might one day see people living for 800 years. But is this ever going to be a realistic possibility?

Valter Longo is one of the small but influential group of specialists in this area who believes that an 800-year life isn’t just possible, it is inevitable. It was his work at the University of Southern California that led to the creation of a strain of yeast fungus that can live for 10 weeks or more, instead of dying at its usual maximum age of just one week.

By deleting two genes within the yeast’s genome and putting it on a calorie-restricted diet, Longo was able to extend tenfold the lifespan of the same common yeast cells used by bakers and brewers. The study is published later this week in the journal Public Library of Science Genetics.

One thousand years of life? The idea of centuries-to-an-eon life span in humans may sound wrong to those who study aging, but even aging occurs at different rates in different people, which would explain why some live over one hundred years while others die early (for reasons other than suicide or murder, of course). Longo believes that this is the result of genetic programming:

“Basically, it is the first demonstration, to our knowledge, that ageing is programmed and altruistic,” Longo says. “The organisms we have studied die long before they have to in order to provide nutrients for ‘mutants’ generated within their own population. Thus, billions of organisms die early so that a few better-adapted individuals can grow.”

This raises the possibility that the same process happens in humans, and that, as a result, many people are dying earlier than they need to. “Programmed human ageing is just a possibility. We don’t know whether it’s true yet or not. But if ageing is programmed in yeast, and the [metabolic] pathway is very similar, then isn’t it possible that humans also die earlier than they have to?”

While yeast is a far cry from humans, it is the first step to extending human life as the methods used can be adapted and refined to extend the life of other increasingly complex organisms. By that time, they may know enough about aging to slow the process down to extend life even further, and other advances in stem cells and bionics may allow one to replace their aged, obsolete bodies completely.

As always, stay tuned… This is going to get interesting.

…So there I was, using Songbird to find some good music to load onto my Creative Zen player. On a whim, I searched for songs with “Heavy Metal” in the title as I was looking for Sammy Hagar’s “Heavy Metal Noise.” Never found that tune, but another tune jumped out at me. It was called “Heavy Metal Kids.” Take a listen to it.

First time I listened to it, I would have sworn upon Satan’s testicles that the tune was from Black Sabbath; It certainly sounded like Sabbath. But NO! It was from Kraftwerk!

Yes! THAT Kraftwerk!

Behind the music. Ralf and Florian formed Kraftwerk in 1970, working with other musicians at the time. Their big breakthrough was the 1974 album “Autobahn,” which would set the standard for their future albums… and the electronic/dance music to come. Before “Autobahn,” Kraftwerk was a “krautrock” band; A band that experimented with various music styles and even some electronics at the time. Two members of Kraftwerk at the time were guitarist Michael Rother and drummer Klaus Dinger, both of whom would form Neu!. “Heavy Metal Kids” features Rother and Dinger along with Ralf and Florian, but it’s not the only tune they play on. There’s a rare album on the net where Kraftwerk rocks out to challenge Sabbath.

K4: Bremen Radio 1971. Live at Gondel Kino, Bremen, Germany, June 25, 1971. This is an apparently rare live recording of the band that hasn’t been released… until now.
From BigO Worldwide:

“There isn’t any extra information about this unofficial release either in the liner notes or on the interweb thing - however, as you listen it becomes obvious that this is indeed a recording of the rather short-lived lineup of Kraftwerk that includes Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger in its ranks! That’s right - Neu! as part of Kraftwerk!!!

“It’s basically a whole CD of extended “side-long” jams in the style of the first Kraftwerk albums performed in front of a small but enthusiastic audience and broadcast on Bremen Radio in 1971. The members of Neu! really take a forward role here, with Rother’s guitar driving things for most of the time and sounding quite rocking, with glimpses of his future soaring melodic sound in the extended jam passages. The guitar and drums are backed up by synth and I believe organ bass, with notable exceptions of flute taking the forefront on the great version of Ruckzack (from the first Kraftwerk LP) and is it distorted electric violin on K4? Maybe just Rother taking a violin bow to his guitar strings! Proto-Kraftwerk and proto-Neu! It’s exciting stuff, and on top of that the sound quality is excellent - a professional radio recording.

“How has this recording not become better known over the past 35 years since it was made?! I don’t know. It appears to be a newly released CDR edition with good-quality (but privately printed) packaging. Maybe it has stayed in the Radio Bremen archives until now? If you’re sceptical about the authenticity I’m sure a listen will persuade you… and hearing someone in the crowd shout “Michael!” in the last second of the recording is the icing on the cake.” - Little Bear [who shared the recording on the internet]

Proto-Kraftwerk and proto-Neu? After hearing parts of the tunes, I was thinking “proto-industrial metal.” Knowing how Kraftwerk pioneered electronic music, hearing what could be the prototype of industrial metal bands like KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails, and Orgy is just… WOAH!!!!!!

Various reports between 23-Jan-08 and 04-Feb-08 have the nets buzzing with conspiracy theories. Over that period, there have been five underwater cables cut or damaged. Here are some of the details:

23-Jan-08: A FALCON cable near Bandar Abbas in Iran was cut. There were no initial reports of the damage at the time; I found out about it from Wikipedia of all places!

30-Jan: Two cables, SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG Telecom, are cut in separate incidents near Alexandria, Egypt and Marseilles, France. Wide net disruption in the Middle East and India reported. New York Times report.

01-Feb: The FACLON cable suffers a second cutting, this time 56 km from Dubai.

03-Feb: Qtel reported that a cable called DOHA-HALOUL connecting Qatar to the United Arab Emirates had been damaged.

04-Feb: SEA-ME-WE-4 suffers a second cut near Malaysia.

The casualty count so far is five cuts in four cables in six days.

Additional information can be found at Khaleej Times Online.

Mermaids with scissors? Cables, even underwater ones, are bound to fail sooner or later. But the rate of failures and who is being affected has some calling conspiracy. Here’s what is being claimed so far:

Anchors away… the wrong way. The two simultaneous cable cuts were first attributed to ship’s anchors. Egypt, however, reportedly has evidence to the contrary:
ITP.net report:

Egypt’s Transport Ministry said footage recorded by onshore video cameras of the location of the cables shows no maritime traffic in the area when the cables were damaged.

“The ministry’s maritime transport committee reviewed footage covering the period of 12 hours before and 12 hours after the cables were cut and no ships sailed the area,” a statement by the Communications Ministry said.

“The area is also marked on maps as a no-go zone and it is therefore ruled out that the damage to the cables was caused by ships.”

One conspiracy disproved…

Mother nature on PMS. It’s possible storms in the area(s) may have generated underwater currents strong enough to snap the cables. Some people believe that sharks may be chewing on the lines, being confused by electromagnetic fields around the cables.

Probable, but I have doubts…

Information warfare. Perhaps the most likely answer may be Iran.
From Arabian Business.com:

The location of the breaks and short space of time in which they have happened has sparked fears the cables were intentionally damaged by the US and Israel to deprive Iran of internet access.
…
“Clearly Iran, who was most affected, would gain nothing from such an action and is perhaps the target of those responsible,” said another reader.
…
It is not clear how badly Iran’s internet access has been affected by the cable breaks.

The Iranian embassy in Abu Dhabi told ArabianBusiness.com that “everything is fine”, but internet connectivity reports on the web, citing a router in Tehran, appear to indicate that there is currently no connection to the outside world.

Unfortunately, India is America’s outsourced call center and was affected as well. Cutting the cables would have a negative effect on companies, and the government does not want to make their corporate masters angry.

There are also theories that certain agencies cut the cables to stop file sharing, and a YouTube video proclaiming this as a Neo-Con pretext to more Mid-East wars to make up for Duh’bya’s failures in Iraq.

The TRUTH is out there. Maybe. It’s going to take a couple of weeks before the cables are repaired and service is fully restored. Maybe the truth of how and why the cables were cut will be found out. Until then, the conspiracies are going to fly.

A news story from Wired reports of documents leaked to WikiLeaks showing the German police contracting DigiTask to create a trojan to intercept Skype traffic before it gets encrypted. The documents can be viewed on WikiLeaks here (in the native German) and here (rough English translation).

Hasn’t this been done before? Last July, Wired reported on how the FBI used spyware to track a person making bomb threats (My blog of the report is here). That was only the latest use of spyware by US law enforcement to circumvent a suspect’s own security, including possible encryption of Internet traffic.

Looks like the Germans are catching on, and quite possibly the rest of the world’s governments with them. Then again, when Duh’bya issues a secret directive to expand net monitoring because of repeated hacker attacks, you have to wonder who really has the upper hand in the hacking game.

The specs on the spookware. The idea behind the warez is to facilitate a “man-in-the-middle” attack. That is, to capture Skype traffic before it is encrypted for transmission, or possibly to capture the public-key encryption code for future hacks of the target’s… maybe all of Skype’s… communications.

The offer DigiTask makes to Germany’s Bavaria state shows the reason behind the reason for the trojan attack:

Encryption of communication via Skype poses a problem for surveillance of telecommunications. All traffic generated by Skype can be captured when surveilling a Dialin- or DSL-link, but it cannot be decrypted. The encryption of Skype works via AES wih a 256-Bit key. The symmetric AES keys are negotiated via RSA keys (1536 to 2048 Bit). The public keys of the users are confirmed by the Skype-Login-Server when logging in. To surveil Skype-communication it thus becomes necessary to realize other approaches than standard telecommunications surveillance.

The concept of DigiTask intends to install a so called Skype-Capture-Unit on the PC of the surveilled person. This Capture-Unit allows recording of the Skype communication, such as Voice and Chat, as well as diverting the data to an anonymous Recoridng-Proxy. The Recording-Proxy (not part of this offer) forwards the data to the final Recording-Server. The data can then be accessed via mobile Evaluation Stations.

The mobile Evaluation Units can, making use of a streaming-capable multimedia player, playback the recorded Skype communication, such as Voice and Chat, also live. To minimize bandwidth usage special codecs for strong compressions are used. The transmission of data to the recording unit is encrypted using the AES algorithm.

The main problem, of course, is getting the warez on the target’s system. The police, assuming they have the proper warrants to do so, will need to enter the target’s place and install the trojan manually, or craft an e-mail to trick the target to install it himself. Depending on the target’s knowledge and/or experience with such malware and his system’s defenses, he may not take the e-mail bait or his anti-malware applications may detect the trojan and destroy it before it can be installed.

Who wants to be Big Brother? America and Germany may only be the tip of the iceberg. Other nations’ law enforcement agencies may already be concocting, or executing, similar hacks under everyone’s nose.

SETEC Astronomy?

Chips, chips everywhere… anybody bring salsa? Wired posted this piece from the Associated Press about the possible (mis)uses of the burgeoning spychips.
Todd Lewan, AP National Writer:

-Microchips with antennas will be embedded in virtually everything you buy, wear, drive and read, allowing retailers and law enforcement to track consumer items - and, by extension, consumers - wherever they go, from a distance.

Some people may welcome the “conveniences” that these RFID tags may offer, but those “conveniences” come at a price… a loss of privacy.

With tags in so many objects, relaying information to databases that can be linked to credit and bank cards, almost no aspect of life may soon be safe from the prying eyes of corporations and governments, says Mark Rasch, former head of the computer-crime unit of the U.S. Justice Department.

By placing sniffers in strategic areas, companies can invisibly “rifle through people’s pockets, purses, suitcases, briefcases, luggage - and possibly their kitchens and bedrooms - anytime of the day or night,” says Rasch, now managing director of technology at FTI Consulting Inc., a Baltimore-based company.

Tag! You’re screwed. Companies, primarily retailers and manufacturers, are looking to use the chips for inventory control. They don’t have the personal information like the buyer’s name, but can be connected after purchase and the the personal information can be accessed and used… or abused.

Several companies have been granted patents for various RFID tag systems, and while they claim they’re not being used to track people, details of the patents say otherwise:

In 2006, IBM received patent approval for an invention it called, “Identification and tracking of persons using RFID-tagged items.” One stated purpose: To collect information about people that could be “used to monitor the movement of the person through the store or other areas.”

Once somebody enters a store, a sniffer “scans all identifiable RFID tags carried on the person,” and correlates the tag information with sales records to determine the individual’s “exact identity.” A device known as a “person tracking unit” then assigns a tracking number to the shopper “to monitor the movement of the person through the store or other areas.”
…
Another patent, obtained in 2003 by NCR Corp., details how camouflaged sensors and cameras would record customers’ wanderings through a store, film their facial expressions at displays, and time - to the second - how long shoppers hold and study items.

Why? Such monitoring “allows one to draw valuable inferences about the behavior of large numbers of shoppers,” the patent states.

Then there’s a 2001 patent application by Procter & Gamble, “Systems and methods for tracking consumers in a store environment.” This one lays out an idea to use heat sensors to track and record “where a consumer is looking, i.e., which way she is facing, whether she is bending over or crouching down to look at a lower shelf.”
…
In the marketing world of today, she says, “data on individual consumers is gold, and the only thing preventing these companies from abusing technologies like RFID to get at that gold is public scrutiny.”

Perhaps the most telling statement was made by a person being surveyed about RFID use:

The next step down the slippery slope. Currently, it costs seven to fifteen cents to tag something, limiting their use to pallets and cases. But it may not be long before people wind up being tagged, mostly by their clothes:

So, how long will it be before you find an RFID tag in your underwear? The industry isn’t saying, but some analysts speculate that within a decade tag costs may dip below a penny, the threshold at which nearly everything could be chipped.

Everything… including people. Will we be forced to have our children tagged, in the womb? Will the chip-happiness of these companies cause a major surge in faraday clothing, clothing designed to block RFID radio waves?

Hopefully, we will never come to human tagging… except for those who need to be tracked. Even better would be that those companies that have leveraged their futures on RFID will crash and burn as anti-RFID backlash cost them. Until then, you might want to start investing in a faraday wardrobe… just in case.

Sorry, but I really couldn’t find a nicer way to put what has been happening with the RIAA. Actually, with the RIAA’s hollow, draconian “triumph” over a minority single mother, sodomy against the industry monster would be hysterical. And over the weekend, the RIAA got some much needed sodomisation. Jihen posted a link to a TorrentFreak story about hackers briefly taking out the RIAA’s website.

The Story of the Hack. The TorrentFreak post:

It started out on the social news website Reddit, where a link to a really slow SQL query was posted. While the Reddit users were trying to kill the RIAA server, someone allegedly decided to up the ante and wipe the site’s entire database.

The comments on Reddit are only speculation so far. Based on the username, which was apparently “webReadOnly”, it might not have been setup correctly, or someone could have found another way to delete the content form the site.

Another possibility is that the website has some sort of database flood protection that disables new connections, or perhaps the RIAA themselves removed the content temporarily. The latter seems unlikely, as a better solution would be to take it entirely offline to fix the bigger problem. While they could fix a small vulnerability like this in a matter of seconds, the chances are it’s not an isolated problem.

As pointed out by Haywire, playing around with the urls a bit can return some funny results. It is pretty easy to make the RIAA link to The Pirate Bay for example.

The Beginning of The End. The hack is just the latest of problems to beset the RIAA, starting with RIAA allies MediaDefender being hacked last summer and their internal memos being made available via torrent. (Transmitting ACK to kenryoku_one for that link). They scored a hollow victory over a minority single mother, then threatened to go after people who rip their CDs to their computers. Their tactics backfired, as music companies started offering downloadable music without DRM. Now, word that EMI will withdraw support of the RIAA unless the industry gestapo changes its ways.

RIP RIAA. 2008 could very well see the death of the RIAA, especially if EMI does pull its support out from under the organization’s feet. Then again, the RIAA could just be hacked to tiny, bite-sized pieces at the rate the attacks have been coming. Hopefully, the RIAA will wise up and see that they’re not winning any friends with their lawsuits. If not, there’s plenty more hacks where the SQL query came from.

And if someone did manage to wipe the database, do make certain that next time it’s a permanent wipe. K?

If you like a little FUD with your kool-aid, the CIA’s latest claim of hacker acitivity will have you salivating:

Associated Press:

Hackers literally turned out the lights in multiple cities after breaking into electrical utilities and demanding extortion payments before disrupting the power, a senior CIA analyst told utility engineers at a trade conference.

All the break-ins occurred outside the United States, said senior CIA analyst Tom Donahue. The U.S. government believes some of the hackers had inside knowledge to cause the outages. Donahue did not specify what countries were affected, when the outages occurred or how long the outages lasted. He said they happened in “several regions outside the United States.”

“In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities,” Donahue said in a statement. “We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet.”

A CIA spokesman Friday declined to provide additional details

Washington Post:

In a rare public warning to the power and utility industry, a CIA analyst this week said cyber attackers have hacked into the computer systems of utility companies outside the United States and made demands, in at least one case causing a power outage that affected multiple cities.

“We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet,” Tom Donahue, the CIA’s top cybersecurity analyst, said Wednesday at a trade conference in New Orleans.

Donahue’s comments were “designed to highlight to the audience the challenges posed by potential cyber intrusions,” CIA spokesman George Little said. The audience was made up of 300 U.S. and international security officials from the government and from electric, water, oil and gas companies, including BP, Chevron and the Southern Co.

“We suspect, but cannot confirm, that some of the attackers had the benefit of inside knowledge,” Donahue said. He did not specify where or when the attacks took place, their duration or the amount of money demanded. Little said the agency would not comment further.

Hacker History 101. If you’ve never read Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown, YOU NEED TO READ IT! Here’s a link to The Cyberpunk Project’s online version. You can also search for an e-text for offline reading. At least, listen to Cory Doctorow’s podcasts of him reading the book (linkage). The Hacker Crackdown shows how the timing of the “Operation Sundevil” raids, several AT&T system crashes, and the growing hysteria of “the hacker underground” in the popular media came together.

Now, timing seems to be working in favor of the US spy community as the CIA’s claim of hacker activity against utlities comes, suspiciously, only two days after the top US spy Mike McConnell claims that “the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse,” even though former spy Michael Tanji says “this is no way to win an intelligence war.”

Calling all conspiracy theorists… The timing of McConnell’s want of total information awareness and the CIA’s claim of hackers causing blackouts seems to be more than a coincidence. If the claim is true, it gives McConnell the credibility he needs for such absolute net traffic policing.

But if these outages did occur, how come no other media outlet has reported them?

David Levy’s book, Love + Sex with Robots gives us yet another affirmation of Gibson’s belief that cyberpunked living is already here. In Love + Sex with Robots, Levy combines research in artificial intelligence and robotics with a cultural analysis indicating that more and more people have stopped interacting in person - that they are more alone than ever before and can no longer manage the complexity that are human relationships. The answer? Buy your own sexy fembot! In the next 5 to 10 years, Levy posits we’ll have full-featured sexbots that will allow us to “love the one you’re with,” while 40 years later, we’ll have fembots that we can fall in love and have a relationship with!

“Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans, while the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practiced between humans will be extended, as robots teach more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined.”

I’ve Fallen In Love With My Ipod! - If Only it Had a Dildo Attachment… Levy rightly points out that we have a long and varied history of love affairs with our toys. From our children’s insane connections to Furbies and Tamagotchies, to adults’ less-than-healthy attachment to cars, guns, fancy laptops, cell phones and yes, even Ipods (I TRULY love my Ipod), its hardly a stretch to carry these feelings to our favorite pleasure toys. So, if our pleasure toys improved to the degree that say, our music listening devices have, what types of conversations would we be having about them? We are already seeing some incredible advances in love dolls - the picture above comes from orient-doll.com, which clearly has spent a lot of time researching the subject. its only a natural to combine these with robot-enabled capabilities. So do I see only another 5 years for Cherry 1000s to hit the marketplace? Yeah, I see that.

Is Love a Singular Fantasy? In looking at our relationships with our toys, what does this imply about love as a concept? Does this just turn into a singular fantasy, where all of our motivations turn into a external machine-assisted masturbation sessions? Can we really love something inanimate and non-living? Levy posits that romantic love is a continuation of the process of attachment, a well-known and well-studied phenomenon in children but less studied in adults. That attachment is a feeling of affection, usually for a person but sometimes for an object or even for an institution such as a school or corporation. In this sense, Levy seems to be lessening the importance of two mutual-causal systems (people) interacting to form a new set of interactions - that its all just internal fantasies of both participants. While I don’t doubt that the attachment of toys is somehow linked, I think its a vast stretch to say that this explains the love between two adults. Something else occurs here - something systemic. The attachment phenomena implies control over an object, whereas love is based on mutual compromise in the pursuit of something greater - something that grows and morphs in unpredictable ways as time proceeds. If a robot develops sentience, this seems like a very different question, but as long as we’re looking at robots imitating sentience, it seems to me we really don’t have love - we have something else entirely.

If Robots Develop Sentience, Will They Still Love Us? In thinking about a long term problem with this future trend, what happens if/when we start developing robots with sentience and self-awareness? It seems to me that unless this occurs, you really can’t have marriage between humans and robots, as the whole notion of “I Do” implies free will. If they “do” develop freewill, doesn’t think imply they can change their programming? And if so, lets say I go to my “build your own Toyota Fembot” site and make one to fit my exact bizarre sexual absurdities - why would this robot want to keep this programming? If they do have freewill, perhaps they won’t really be interested in fulfilling a 90 year-old’s BDSM fantasies, anymore than say, a human would. So at best, this seems like a situation where fembots (or their male counterparts) would have to be programmed as a really advanced dildo, without sentience. This to me implies that sentient robot mail-order-brides for will probably work about as well as they do now (does this mean Russia will corner the market here as well?).

So Is Cyberpunked Living Here? When we’ve moved from conversations about what post-humanity is toward conversations about people looking forward to the latest in love doll technology as a cure for mass loneliness, I think its safe to say that cyberpunked living will soon be arriving in a large package near you. In looking at some of the conversations that Levy’s book as spurned, we some interesting discussions. For instance, Clay Breshears ends his post with this but hopeful message to the lonely:

I wonder, though, with video games, virtual worlds, and online social networking taking up so much of people’s time, haven’t we already started down that slippery slope? Still, at least with a love-bot by our side, we’ll have one compatible friend/mate with us at the fall of civilization.

Not Surprisingly, most Christian blogs don’t think too much of this idea. They seemed quite concerned that a cyberpunked society may not be in our collective best interest. This sentiment from Walter Dimmock’s blog sort of captures the point:

This does not get any weirder, humans having sex and marrying robots. What kind of family will result of this? But in our post-modern liberal society anything goes as far as the imagination allows, without reference to the negative repercussions to these insane ideas.

Eric, on Classicalvalues.com asks an interesting question about virtual control of the sexbots (which would probalby come far earlier than 2050):

I know this is all theory, but I’m wondering whether it might be possible for us to actually become the sex robots and have sex remotely with their partners. Like, I control your robot, and you control mine. More interactive than a mere machine, and there’d still be the human element. Nah, that’s no good, because someone at the controls might be charged with rape. Or he or she might be raped by someone else’s robot.

Probably not a good idea to give someone remote control over “your” robot. Why, think about what else might happen.

Fritz Lahnam from the Houston Chronicle has a great overview of the book, as well as a decent assessment of the response its generated, not to mention a question about how Levy’s wife would feel about this:

Levy has been amazed at the publicity the Love and Sex With Robots has generated since its release last month. He’s done a dozen radio interviews and a TV interview. Howard Stern raved about the book. So far, no hate mail.

Would Levy himself have sex with a robot? He doesn’t have to ponder the question.

“If there was a robot of the sort I describe in the book, I would certainly want to experience using it for sex, and I wouldn’t regard it as anything untoward,” he said. “I would do it out of curiosity. Not that I have a need for a new sex partner. I’m happily married.”

And the wife would be OK with this?

“Yes, yes, and if she wanted to try one I wouldn’t have a problem with that. I would regard it as genuine scientific curiosity.”

So yeah, this whole topic has certainly created some interesting memes going forward. One wonders how the nature of conversation will morph in the next 5-10 years, as the first stages of “fembotness” become a reality. Whether or not anyone likes it, our society is continuing on a rather bizarre vector - one which is affected by increased interconnectedness, an ever-increasing technology revolution positive feedback cycle, and an ever-increasing sense of alienation on the part of many. And to think, previously the conservative values folks were worried about “strange human” relationships. I wouldn’t be surprised if their collective heads explode as this latest trend gets dollars and advertising behind it. gets power and money behind it.

EDIT: iammany, in a comment below points to a wonderful analysis of Levy’s book by Steven Shaviro. In addition to hitting on the love/freewill conundrum in a more sophisticated way than I did (asking “How can robots be both rational subjects, and infinitely manipulable objects?”), Shaviro also questions the basis of Levy’s prediction:

If I find Levy’s claims extremely dubious, it is not because I think that human intelligence (or mentality) somehow inherently defies replication. But such replication is an extremely difficult problem, one that we are nowhere near to resolving. It certainly isn’t just a trivial engineering issue, or a mere quantitative matter of building larger memory stores, and more powerful and more capacious computer chips, the way that Levy (and other enthusiasts, such as Ray Kurzweil) almost always tend to assume. AI research, and the research in related fields like “emotional computing,” cannot progress without some fundamental new insights or paradigm shifts. Such work isn’t anywhere near the level of sophistication that Levy and other boosters seem to think it is. Levy wildly overestimates the successes of recent research, because he underestimates what “human nature” actually entails. His models of human cognition, emotion, and behavior are unbelievably simplistic, as they rely upon the the inanely reductive “scientific” studies that I mentioned earlier.

Agreed. The transformation from an imitation of sentience to the creation of an actual synthetic sentient life form is a hugely significant and complex change. At that point, the perspective of creating cool sex toys to service socially inept geeks ends up being about as morally dubious as the creation and use of the dolls found in Ghost in the Shell: Innocence.

Overview: Akira Club is an art book featuring cover art, sketches and outtakes from the paperback Akira collections. It’s a little pricey at thirty bucks when most the artwork is in black and white, and another set back is the format, which doesn’t match the Akira books. Though mostly presented in black and white, Otomo Katsuhiro’s artwork will blow your socks off. The artwork in Akira Club is incredibly detailed and the author’s commentaries and sketches really show you how much work has been put into the product. While penned many years ago, it doesn’t look a bit outdated. Akira is an epic piece of work at over 2000 pages and has won awards and prestige around the world. The animated movie based on the manga re-introduced the west to Japanese animation in the nineties. The quality of animation mirrors that of the manga and although large parts of the manga were cut from the movie, it still gets the story through to the viewer pretty well.

Background: The world of Akira is set after world war three and the destruction and rebuilding of Tokyo. Themes include transhumanism, corruption, low life and high tech and Akira comes across as incredibly cyberpunk, mostly focusing on the life of those on the ground in a super industrialized and militaristic Neo Tokyo. The artwork in Akira Club pretty much represents these themes in great detail. There’s a contrast between the giant, symmetrical skyscrapers which dominate the Neo Tokyo skyline and the life on the ground where there are a lot of organic and seemingly random shapes. There’s also a recurring theme of order put in chaos, like the front cover image; smooth motorcycle parts are jumbled together in a giant mess creating disarray where there once was a finely tuned machine, everything put together neatly.

A lot of the magazine covers show a destroyed Neo Tokyo behind mostly young people. The city being destroyed by a secret weapon created by the government, this gives a pretty strong image of the world being handed over to future generations ruined by our predecessors’ lust for more power through technological advances.

The Sections: The book is divided into four sections:

• Section One: The first section collects several full colour paintings of magazine and book covers, T shirt designs and promotional posters, supplemented with preliminary sketches and short comments from the author; Otomo Katsuhiro.

• Section Two: The second section is the biggest and focuses on the covers used for each chapter when Akira was serialized in Young Magazine. These weren’t included in the paperback collections because they’d break up the natural flow of the story, so having them collected here is kinda nice as the artwork is generally stunning. These do not include comments on the artwork but little musings on life by the author, which I personally found incredibly uninteresting.

• Section Three: The third section collects all sorts of odd artwork used in advertising and merchandise, there’s a lot of great art, but all in all it’s not as interesting as the last section of the book. Also included here are notes on the translation of Akira.

• Section Four: The fourth section is probably the coolest out of the whole book, although I wish it were longer. Titled, “Unpublished Works,” it shows panels and scenes that were never included in the finalized Akira comic books, some pages include parts that were included in the serialized version of the comic, but were cut from the paperback collections.

The Bottom Line: Having “read” through the book, I feel a little let down; it’s like there’s something missing. The artwork, though awe-inspiring, is as noted mostly in black and white, and I feel there could have been more colour illustrations put in to compensate for the large number of cover illustrations from Young Magazine. The last part of the book could also have been a little longer. At two thousand pages, I’m sure there is more unpublished material than on display here. I’d like to see the parts excluded from the paperback collections in better detail, preferably in entirety, as I’m sure others are as well. I’ve only had access to the translated collections and would like to know what I’ve been missing out on.

Should You Buy It? All in all, Akira Club is really for those with specialized interests, such as rabid Akira fans, anime historians and artists looking for inspiration in cyberpunk drawings of landscapes and dystopic scenarios. And even for these select few, the book isn’t perfect. However, I think of it as a nice addition to my bookshelf and I browse through it regularly, still “Ooh’ing” and “Aah’ing” at the incredible art. I wouldn’t say this is a must for cyberpunk or indeed Akira fans, but if you think you can afford it, it’s a good purchase and a great gift for those already familiar with the universe and story, be that through the manga or the anime version of Akira.