Synopsis: With Terminator: Salvation coming this Thursday, it’s time I got my review circuits ready by doing a short review of a short movie, Maya. I found this short while searching for cyberpunk music on YouTube. A vid for a song called “Organics (Slowmotion Mix)” by Evil’s Toy had a link to MetaCafe and Maya. Note: The version embedded and reviewed here is the Final Cut version.
The film starts out with Maya, decked-out in some near-future laser-tag gear, stalking a structure with some guards. She manages to take out one guard, but winds up getting shot dead, only to awaken back in reality… or what we think is reality. From there, we witness Maya “reawakening” with different outcomes, like a dream within a dream. [Obligatory “Yo, Dawg!” goes here]
While the philosophical use of VR is nothing new, this piece does make the best of its ten minutes of low-budget cyberpunk. It certainly fills a need for a shot of cyberpunk when you need more than a music video but you don’t have the appetite for a feature-length film.
BONUS TRACKS:
Here’s the video that lead me to Maya. Lady-bots and gentle-borgs, I give you German EBM band Evil’s Toy with “Organics (Slowmotion Mix).” Enjoy!
Friend invitation extended to John Connor. Depending on how you feel about robots, this is either a major step forward or a sign of the apocalypse. A month-long experiment is going to be run on Facebook where a robot, complete with a profile, will be used to see if humans are willing to make friends with the machine. The experiment is being run by Nikolaos Mavridis and the United Arab Emirates University’s Interactive Robots and Media Laboratory (IRML), which explains the bot’s name and appearance. Details can be found on the IRML website and a paper is available (PDF) from arXiv.org.
Technical difficulties. Of course, to make friends with Ibn, you need to be registered with Facebook, then find the right Ibn Sina to befriend. I’ve made an attempt to register to see if this is for real, but something is fubar with their registration system. Maybe others are trying to make friends with the robot as well. I’ll keep trying and let you know if it ends well, or if we give birth to Skynet.
Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, Pirate Bay admins, were found guilty of contributing to copyright violations. Their funder, Carl Lundström, was also convicted. Click the pic for the story from Wired
The judgment hammer comes down. For the admins of The Pirate Bay, the hammer came down hard. Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde, and Carl Lundström have been found guilty of “contributory copyright infringement” and sentenced to a year in jail each and fined 30 million kronor, or $3.6 million US. The content syndicates were applauding the decision with their one free hand:
“Today’s ruling sends an important signal that online criminals who show such blatant disregard for the rights of others will be fully prosecuted under the law,” said Mark Esper, a vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“We welcome the court’s decision today because The Pirate Bay is a source of immense damage to the creative industries in Sweden and internationally,” said Dan Glickman, chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. “This is an important decision for rights-holders, underlining their right to have their creative works protected against illegal exploitation and to be fairly rewarded for their endeavors. This decision will help to support the continued investment in talent and in new online services, and the creation of new films and television shows for enjoyment by audiences around the world.”
Knocked down, but not kicked offline. While Hollywood may have hoped that the verdict will mean the plug would be pulled on TPB’s servers, the Bay crew have expressed their continued defiance in their blog:
So, the dice courts judgement is here. It was lol to read and hear, crazy verdict.
But as in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow. That’s the only thing hollywood ever taught us.
Even on their press conference video, their defiance of the verdict is made clear:
(From BBC News) “It’s serious to actually be found guilty and get jail time. It’s really serious. And that’s a bit weird,” Sunde said.
“It’s so bizarre that we were convicted at all and it’s even more bizarre that we were [convicted] as a team. The court said we were organised. I can’t get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you’re going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.
“We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.”
A Pyrrhic victory. If the content syndicates believe this verdict will end file sharing they need to drink more coffee. Their win is already having the opposite effect, as TorrentFreak is reporting an increase in membership of Sweden’s Pirate Party, who view the trial as a political battle:
(BBC News) - Rickard Falkvinge, leader of The Pirate Party - which is trying to reform laws around copyright and patents in the digital age - told the BBC that the verdict was “a gross injustice”.
“This wasn’t a criminal trial, it was a political trial. It is just gross beyond description that you can jail four people for providing infrastructure.
“There is a lot of anger in Sweden right now. File-sharing is an institution here and while I can’t encourage people to break copyright law, I’m not following it and I don’t agree with it.
“Today’s events make file-sharing a hot political issue and we’re going to take this to the European Parliament.”
I actually think this a win-win situation for The Pirate Bay. If they’re convicted, they’ll be martyrs and the “piracy” movement will continue working for what they believe in, even more strongly. If they win, the signal to the public is that file sharing isn’t illegal and The Pirate Bay will basically have achieved its goal.
The recording companies and networks’ arguments for copyright do not ring true. Their fight is NOT about protecting the quality and integrity of the original works nor is it to ensure the ORIGINAL CREATOR is properly compensated because neither is the case.
It IS about control of virtually every single bit of information and entertainment. Their current argument could easily be made for news and information shows, educational shows and documentaries.
BREAKING UPDATE (23-Apr-09): We know that the verdict wasn’t the final word in the Pirate Bay case, but now there’s word all over the net that the trial itself may be invalid all along. The problem? The judge who rendered the verdict and sentences:
Wired - One of the four men convicted in The Pirate Bay trial is seeking to have his guilty verdict thrown out after learning that the judge in the trial is a member of two pro-copyright groups, including one whose membership includes entertainment industry representatives who argued in the case.
Stockholm district court judge, Tomas Norström told a Swedish newspaper that his previously-undisclosed entanglements with the copyright groups did not constitute a conflict of interest.
O RLY?
TorrentFreak - Today, an event on Swedish national radio SR threw everything into doubt - and it’s barely believable, like something straight out of Hollywood.
The copyright industry likes to have the outcome of processes clear before engaging them so it’s perhaps unsurprising that SR today revealed that the judge Tomas Norström is in league with it on many fronts. The judge has several engagements - together with the prosecution lawyers for the movie and music industries.
Swedish Association of Copyright (SFU) - The judge Tomas Norström is a member of this discussion forum that holds seminars, debates and releases the Nordic Intellectual Property Law Review. Other members of this outfit? Henrik Pontén (Swedish Anti-Piracy Bureau), Monique Wadsted (movie industry lawyer) and Peter Danowsky (IFPI) - the latter is also a member of the board of the association.
Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property (SFIR) - The judge Tomas Norström sits on the board of this association that works for stronger copyright laws. Last year they held the Nordic Championships in Intellectual Property Rights Process Strategies.
.SE (The Internet Infrastructure Foundation) - Tomas Norström works for the foundation that oversees the .se name domain and advises on domain name disputes. His colleague at the foundation? Monique Wadsted. Wadsted says she’s never met Norström although they have worked together.
A Wall Street Journal report claims that spies have planted malware in America’s power grid systems with the possible intent of mass disruption of key infrastructures like electricity and communications. The timing couldn’t be better with a recent introduction of a bill that would allow President Barack Obama the “authority” to kill the Internet.
An electrical botnet?
(Wall Street Journal) - Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials.
The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven’t sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.
That’s the claim made in today’s (08-Apr-09) Wall Street Journal, but events going at least one month back is casting some serious doubts on those claims, IMO anyway. While it’s possible for foreign malware to be present in key systems, it seems more like the real threat is domestic.
Here’s the timeline so far. Take it with a grain of salt if you must, and accept the hypertension:
Department of Homeland Security Cyber Chief quits due to NSA hostile takeover (09-Mar-09)
Wired - Rod Beckstrom was head of National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), but quit over what he felt was pressure from the NSA to take over US cybersecurity. More information can be found here and here.
Beckstrom also expressed a concern over the NSA’s attempt to consolidate its power:
In his resignation letter, Beckstrom said the NSA is trying to move the NCSC to its base at Ft. Meade in Maryland, a move he opposes on grounds that it would concentrate too much authority in one place.
“The issue is that we have a federated government, decentralized for a reason,” Beckstrom told Forbes. “Our founding fathers never believed that power should be concentrated in one place. And what today is more powerful than information?”
Fat Cat Rockefeller says “The Internet Should Never Have Existed” (20-Mar-09)
YouTube via Prison Planet via C-Span 2.
WARNING: The contents of this video may make you want to vomit, laugh until you shit bricks, or shoot Rockefeller. Cyberpunk Review will not be held responsible for your physical and mental state of mind if you watch. Viewer discretion is advised:
Actually, Rockefeller doesn’t say the net should have never existed; Another congress-critter makes that implication.
“Cybersecurity Bill” would allow President Obama to shut down the Internet (02-Apr-09)
NetworkWorld - On April 1, a proposal legislation was introduced to the Senate that would allow Obama wide powers to shut down the Internet, or at least take control over it during times of “cybersecurity emergency.” Here’s the direct link to the PDF of the proposed legislation if you want to read it. The bill was introduced by none other than Senator John Rockefeller (see video above).
Salute the False Flag. A year ago, the CIA claimed hackers hacked foreign utilities. Those “claims” have yet to be backed up by actual press reports. But that claim was probably forged to get additional powers to spy.
Wired’s Kevin Poulsen puts the screws to the Wall Street Journal and the NSA in this brief op-ed piece.
Sadly, this new installment doesn’t contain the kind of juicy details that made the previous one so easy to debunk. In fact, it contains almost no details at all. The attacks are “pervasive,” and yet not a single utility company is named as a victim. Even better, the blackout-triggering malware hasn’t been spotted by the companies — which explains perfectly why this is the first we’ve heard of it. Only America’s intelligence community has seen the code. They could show us, but then they’d have to kill us.
…
It’s an unusually opportune time for this revelation, since the NSA is at this very moment jockeying to take over cyber security from DHS, which lacks the wholesale warrantless-wiretapping capabilities needed to detect Chinese hackers. What a lucky coincidence of timing that this exciting, if uncheckable, story should emerge now.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
UPDATE: Fiber Cables Cut in Silicon Valley, Reward Being Offered. (10-Apr-09)
There’s already speculation that the work was done by the Communications Workers of America, a union that’s negotiating a new contract with AT&T:
Special News Bureau - AT&T is in the middle of acrimonious negotiations with the Communications Workers of America, whose members have been working without a contract since just before midnight Saturday and are on standby mode for a potential strike.
A new website, 409truth.com is already calling the sabotage a false-flag attack; AT&T cut the cables to frame the union. They may have the right idea, but name the wrong targets.
Two stories this week show how the merging of science and technology is making the singularity closer to reality as two automated research projects in experimentation comes up with the identical discovery; Humans are obsolete.
Just kidding! Here’s what they DID discover:
Physics discovered by computer program.
(Wired) Cornell University researchers have created a program that can find relationships in large amounts of data. It sounds like simple data processing, but it is not:
The Cornell program came up with an formula describing the physics of a two-part pendulum. It did in a day what some of the most brilliant physicist minds took centuries to do. AND without any knowledge of physics or geometry!
This is only an example of what the researchers are hoping to do with such programs: To help human scientists analyze infinitely large data sets.
“One of the biggest problems in science today is moving forward and finding the underlying principles in areas where there is lots and lots of data, but there’s a theoretical gap. We don’t know how things work,” said Hod Lipson, the Cornell University computational researcher who co-wrote the program. “I think this is going to be an important tool.”
Condensing rules from raw data has long been considered the province of human intuition, not machine intelligence. It could foreshadow an age in which scientists and programs work as equals to decipher datasets too complex for human analysis.
Then again, if what’s going on in the UK is any indication, the human factor may be taken out of science all together.
Dr. Adam-Bot makes discoveries with yeast
“Normal robots just do what you tell them, but ADAM is different, because it can hypothesize and try to solve a problem itself.” - Ross King, of Aberystwyth University in Wales, U.K.
(Nat-Geo)(Science Daily) (and practically everywhere by now) What has to be the first ever “robot scientist,” Adam, has discovered new knowledge about baker’s yeast. Not exactly earth-shaking discoveries, but the fact that the totally automated Adam made these discoveries by itself is big news.
(From Nat-Geo) First ADAM was given a crash course in biology, including everything that is already known about baker’s yeast.
ADAM quickly set to work, formulating and testing 20 different hypotheses. The robot eventually identified the genes that code for enzymes involved in yeast metabolism—a scientific first for a robot.
Using independent experiments, King and his colleagues were able to verify ADAM’s results.
King’s reason for creating Adam is to help scientists in their research:
(From Science Daily) “Because biological organisms are so complex it is important that the details of biological experiments are recorded in great detail. This is difficult and irksome for human scientists, but easy for Robot Scientists.”
King already has plans for another robot scientist, Eve, that will be devoted to researching drugs for tropical diseases. As for possibly replacing human scientists outright, “While robots are better at coordinating thousands of experiments, humans are better are seeing the big picture and planning the overall experiment.”
It looks like the NSA(T&T) has some competition in the domestic spying game… and they may be targets themselves.
The Biggest Brother. While the UK is well on its way to being a security-surveillance police-state, and America’s plans are apparently “on hold” for now, it would seem hard to imagine another nation attempting to lay claim to the “Big Brother” title. But China has been doing just that, according to a recently released report from researchers at the University of Toronto. A ten-month investigation has turned up some 1300 infected systems worldwide, including high-value government computers like those of the exiled Tibetan government and the Dali Lama. A full report can be downloaded from here.
Vulnerability detected between keyboard and chair. The way the infection was spread sounds typical: e-mails were sent with a trojan attached, the user unwittingly opens the attachment and infects his system, and the infected system uploads sensitive files to China and spreads even more e-mails where the user unwittingly opens the attachment…
What happens after the initial infection:
“The GhostNet system directs infected computers to download a Trojan (horse) known as ghOst RAT that allows attackers to gain complete, real-time control,” the authors write in Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network.
“Our investigation reveals that GhostNet is capable of taking full control of infected computers, including searching and downloading specific files, and covertly operating attached devices, including microphones and web cameras.”
The Dalai Lama expresses how he feels about China’s regime
Other Ghosts on The Net? While the Ghostnet is concentrated more on Asia, there’s a possibility that American systems have also been infected, though no reports about such infections have surfaced… yet.
Americans being spied on by foreign nations may not be new, but The Student Operated Press raises concerns about the US cybersecurity scheme, and even worse, that a post-9/11 paranoia-infected Department of Homeland (in)Security has its own Ghostnet:
Robert Paul Reyes (S.O.P.):
I hope that the CIA is taking serious precautions to safeguard our military and intelligence computer systems. I`m confident that they are running their own GhostNet operations to keep track of our many enemies throughout the world.
But what I fear the most is that the Department of Homeland Security has a GhostNet operation to keep track of Americans. Under the guise of fighting terrorism the Bush administration wiretapped the phones of Americans without obtaining a warrant from the courts.
What Ghostnet is about may be scary, but it’s small fries compared the what Conficker may have to offer…
A familiar story. Every so often I do random web searches for some of my favorite songs/moves/etc. When I used Yahoo! to look for info on Queensryche’s classic track “NM 156,” I decided to use the opening line “machines have no conscience.” The very first result was this page; A bit of science fiction verse. Not exactly what I was looking for, but as I read it I had the feeling that I was reading some cyberpunk poetry… and what could very well be a story from the Terminator universe set in the future.
It Could Be An “Album.” The poem is divided into seven parts that tell a story of one person’s fight against the “Metal Gods,” the machines of the future:
1. Machines Have No Conscience
2. Metal Gods
3. Revolution
4. Terminate 156
5. My Mission
6. Next Action
7. Stand Proud
As you read, you might get the feeling of deja vu. Not because of the storyline itself, but some of the lines come straight from Queensryche (Sadistical lists them as one of his favorite bands).
I have to give him cred, Sadistical has put together a short but sweet verse that could very well become a concept album given the right music and musicians.
This post has been filed under Internet Find by Mr. Roboto.
Information longs to be free. Setting it free, that’s the tough part.
March Madness. When WikiLeaks first started as a “whistle-blowing” site not long ago, they knew they would be in for some major fights in their quest to to get the truth out in the form of leaked documents. Somehow, despite lawsuit-happy suits, government thugs, and technical glitches, they managed to survive and even thrive to get privileged insider information out. But March 2009 is becoming a major test for the sunshine site because of lists of “banned” sites that they posted.
Things actually started last December when they published Denmark’s secret censorship site list, which includes some 3863 sites as of February 2009, with some legitimate sites being caught in the anti-child porn hysteria.
The list is generated without judicial or public oversight and is kept secret by the ISPs using it. Unaccountability is intrinsic to such a secret censorship system.
…
The list has been leaked because cases such as Thailand and Finland demonstrate that once a secret censorship system is established for pornographic content the same system can rapidly expand to cover other material, including political material, at the worst possible moment — when government needs reform.
On March 18, they published Norway’s blacklist for the same reason. Then Australia chimed in, and things started getting nasty…
Down Under Lowdown. Australia is preparing its own Internet “filtering” scam… scheme… whatever, and already the dingo-do is hitting the fans. The Australian Communications and Media Authority, or ACMA, said that it would fine anyone who hyperlinked to a banned site $11K/day. They threatened the host of an Internet forum with the fine for a link to a US anti-abortion site (link) to flex their muscles, then added WikiLeaks to their blacklist. WikiLeaks then published the ACMA’s blacklist (Latest version).
Things started to get personal Australia’s Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Steven Conroy, threaten to go after WikiLeaks and their source. WikiLeaks’ response:
“Under the Swedish Constitution’s Press Freedom Act, the right of a confidential press source to anonymity is protected, and criminal penalties apply to anyone acting to breach that right.
Wikileaks source documents are received in Sweden and published from Sweden so as to derive maximum benefit from this legal protection. Should the Senator or anyone else attempt to discover our source we will refer the matter to the Constitutional Police for prosecution, and, if necessary, ask that the Senator and anyone else involved be extradited to face justice for breaching fundamental rights.”
Senator Conroy may wish to consider the position of the South African Competition Commission, which decided to cancel its own high profile leak investigation in January after being advised of the legal ramifications of interfering with Sunshine Press sources.
For the record, WikiLeaks is based in Stockholm.
Gestapo Tactics. Given the leaks of the censorship blacklists so far, it seems that the German police raid of the home of the WikiLeaks.de domain owner is more than just a coincidence. “Distribution of pornography”… “Discovery of evidence” … Rrrrriiiiiggggghhhhhttttt! You can see the documents about the raid here.
This may only be the beginning of a war against WikiLeaks. We’ll keep you advised of any major developments to come… assuming Cyberpunk Review hasn’t been added to some super-secret NSAT&T/RIAA/MPAA/UN blacklist…
This post has been filed under Internet Find by Mr. Roboto.
You may want to get Right Said Fred, a mag-pulse rifle, and/or your best robo-babe pickup lines ready.
The latest sex-bot struts her stuff. Only Japan can come up with a bot beauty ready to walk the catwalk. While America wastes robot-tech on wars for world domination, Japan puts the tech to better use with helpful robots. Judging by the latest, the HRP-4C fashion robot, they’re doing it right.
From Straits Times:
The girlie-faced humanoid with slightly oversized eyes, a tiny nose and a shoulder length hair-do boasts 42 motion motors programmed to mimic the movements of flesh-and-blood fashion models.
‘Hello everybody, I am cybernetic human HRP-4C,’ said the futuristic fashionista, opening her media premiere at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology outside Tokyo.
The fashion-bot is 158 centimetres tall, the average height of Japanese women aged 19 to 29, but weighs in at a waif-like 43 kilograms - including batteries. She has a manga-inspired human face but a silver metallic body.
Her official fashion show debut will be on March 23 in Tokyo. Afterward, she’s expected to go on the market for $200K US each, primarily for the entertainment industries.
A case of first-time jitters? HRP’s debut wasn’t the smoothest, as she kept looking surprised and stunned as the cameras clicked away, confusing her sound sensors. On the plus side, she wasn’t an ED-209. This problem should be fixed by her debut.
The BBC News’ program CLICK built a botnet to show what damage they can do.
You got spammed! We’ve had to deal with it, spam in our emails, and while filtering has gotten better at removing the crap, the spammers have devised even more powerful ways of insuring that your inbox chokes. The most sinister of them all is the botnet, innocent home computers that have been infected to make remote use possible.
This week, the BBC’s tech news program Click built their own botnet of 22,000 computers to perform two tasks. First, they had the net spam a couple of email addresses they set up for the test. Next, they use the net to launch a DDoS attach on a security site owned by Prevx.
The results: The inboxes choked while the site ground to a halt.
Is this even LEGAL? To build the botnet, the BBC posed as “customers” to purchase the software that infects computers to make the botnet. That would seem to be no different than an undercover agent looking to gather evidence of hacking, only the BBC didn’t need a warrant. The attack on the Prevx was done with the company’s approval on a backup site. This would like a “test” for a tiger-team to see if they are able to do a bigger hack. Companies hire hackers (”white hats”) to regularly test their security, or ethical hackers will do so while leaving messages of possible weaknesses.
What the BBC did may border on journalism and legality, but they do had a good reason for doing this:
A lot of the debate has been about whether we did the right thing digging into the murky world of hackers and organised cybercrime. In seeking to demonstrate the threat, had we put ourselves in the position of those we wanted to expose?
That’s always a good question. After all, we could have simply described what we believe happens and given some warning advice, couldn’t we? We’ve done this in the past. So have many others…
But hacking has gone professional. Today, your PC can be doing bad things to other people without you even knowing. It’s a major growth area for organised crime: it’s global, and very local to all of us who work, communicate and play on the world wide web.
So we felt that there was the strongest public interest in not just describing what malware can do, but actually showing it in action. A real demonstration of the power of today’s botnets - to infect, disrupt and damage our digital lives - is the most powerful way to alert our audiences to the dangers that they face. It’s a wake-up call to switch on that firewall and improve our security on the internet.
We think that what we did was a first for broadcast journalism. We were amazed by the ease of use of the botnet, and the power of its disruptive capacity.
They have since disabled the botnet.
Was this power trip really necessary? People will question whether the BBC’s use of a botnet was required, but there’s no question that there will always be security holes in the system. Linux and Windows users have known this, and OS X users will soon learn this lesson the hard way.
Remember: No amount of software patching will ever close the security hole between the keyboard and the chair.
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