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.
Beware if Jerry Jalava give you the finger. He may be trying to upload a virus into you!
… so it begins. Jerry Jalava was a hacker until a motorcycle accident last May caused him to lose a finger. He could have settled for a standard prosthetic replacement, or a “new” digit off a fresh corpse. He chose the prosthetic, but not a standard prosthetic. He wanted something more… 2GB more…
A 2GB drive is embedded in a silicone “fingertip” and features a USB interface, and has a Billix Linux distribution… and the move Freddy Got Fingered… on it. He’s a hacker… that should be enough explanation.
If only they knew…
Not quite cyborg. Jerry’s new finger-drive isn’t permanently attached to him, which is good for when he needs to replace or upgrade the drive, so the reports of a cyborg being born are still premature. There are even doubters already calling shenanigans on the photos (they must be looking at the “visualization” pics from Yanko Design). Still, this has to be the most cyberpunk idea to come over the fiber in some time. But it also leaves an important question still unanswered: Why?
One day, you will give birth to a freak of your own design.
‘Build-A-Bear’ but with babies. A fertility clinic in Los Angeles is giving prospective parents a chance to mod their babies via genetic manipulation. The technique, called preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), allows parents and doctors to screen out potential gene-borne diseases and other “defects,” but soon could be used to increase the chance of a baby to have certain “choice” attributes like height, hair color, and even IQ.
Such genetic screening has been around forever, but in a much more natural form (discovered by Charles Darwin). It was even discovered that you could “choose” the gender/sex of your offspring with a timing method. But with the mapping of the human genome and genetic screening, it is now possible to fine-tune the looks and abilities of your children.
Master race, anyone?
Gattica, here we come! Maybe. The idea of spawning a Frankenstein-baby may be scary or exciting, but it may not catch on due to some major problems to be worked out. First off, the PGD process does not guarantee success; It only increases the odds that a child will have selected traits. Secondly, they have to use in vitro fertilization which doesn’t always work. And at $18K US per attempt, you can only afford one attempt.
Then, you have to deal with all the “eugenics” issues that will inevitably arise. An assembly-line master race may not be possible just yet.
Of course, that can all change when the machines take over…
Julian’s Blogger profile shows he’s into technology, but has he come across something with a slogan he just pulled out of the ether?
Julian Togelius normally blogs about his work in artificial intelligence. However, on Monday 16-February-2009, he posted something that came to him completely out of the blue… or it got knocked loose from watching/reading/hearing about the currently in-progress Sweden vs. The Pirate Bay trial. It came to him in the form of a “slogan:”
NO PRIVACY WITHOUT PIRACY
Julian’s explanation:
The idea is that any method I’ve ever heard of for eradicating piracy, and indeed any conceivable method for doing so, build on also eradicating (or at least severely curtailing) privacy.
If you follow technology in the past few years, any anti-pirating tech has always come with anti-privacy issues whether it is DRM spyware or ISP wiretaps. In one simple slogan, Julian hopes to take the piracy-privacy connection to a new level, make people think more about the two, and possibly spread the word around viral-meme style.
So, is it an “All Your Base…” worthy battle cry, or something to be forgotten like Goatse and Tubgirl?
This post has been filed under Internet Find by Mr. Roboto.
The master does it again. With another running-longer-than-planned poll now in the books, you have once again chosen William Gibson, at least his book Neuromancer, as the most significant contribution to cyberpunk. You have claimed it to be more significant than Blade Runner, even more so than the creation of the word itself. Since most of you most likely started with Neuromancer, it almost seemed like a no-brainer has to how this would come out, though Blade Runner fans still might have something to say about it.
And now, for the next poll…
NOTHING!
That’s right. We’re going to give our polling machines a break, though I do have a couple of ideas for our next poll(s) (something music based), but I want to get a couple of music reviews in before posting. In the mean time, I’ll be checking out FOX’s new series Dollhouse and letting you know if it’s cyberpunk material or not. Plus, I want to get The Gene Generation viewed and reviewed this weekend before the Daytona 500 wrecks my plans.
This post has been filed under Poll Results by Mr. Roboto.
A burning question. Wired’s Daniel Roth asks the important question of what rights robot should have when they reach human levels of sentience. Something to get the philosophers, religious fruitcakes, and robot-rights activists to talk about:
This question is starting to get debated by robot designers and toymakers. With advanced robotics becoming cheaper and more commonplace, the challenge isn’t how we learn to accept robots—but whether we should care when they’re mistreated. And if we start caring about robot ethics, might we then go one insane step further and grant them rights?
Apparently Mr. Roth has already sided with the pro-human forces, mainly because of his dislike for the animatronic Elmo dolls, and a little kool-aid from Fisher-Price’s marketing Veep Gina Sirard:
Keep soul-searching to a minimum and recognize that you’re buying a product, pure and simple. “This is a toy,” Fisher-Price’s Sirard says. “There shouldn’t be any laws about how you use your toys.”
Of course, that’s what corporations, governments, slave owners, and dictators have been saying about people for centuries. They’re only toys now because the technology has not progressed to the point where robotic humanity is possible… but once it does…
THEN WHAT, MEATBOT?
To one man, it was an impromptu joke against religious fruitcakes (Click to see the story). Next time, it won’t be a laughing matter.
Given events in places like Auschwitz, the former Yugoslavia, Guantanamo, and the World Trade Center, I often wonder if humans deserve human rights. Maybe some competition from the machines may snap the species out of narcissistic slumber. Right now is the best time to recognize robot rights… otherwise…
“It sits there looking at me, and I don’t know what it is. This case has dealt with metaphysics, with questions best left to saints and philosophers. I am neither competent, nor qualified, to answer those. I’ve got to make a ruling – to try to speak to the future. Is Data a machine? Yes. Is he the property of Starfleet? No. We’ve all been dancing around the basic issue: does Data have a soul? I don’t know that he has. I don’t know that I have! But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself. It is the ruling of this court that Lieutenant Commander Data has the freedom to choose.”
- Captain Phillipa Louvois (Star Trek: The Next Generation “The Measure of a Man”)
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