Archive

Links for 17 October 2008:

Published
by
marc
on 19 October 2008
in links
. 0 Comments

Links for the week of 17 October 2008:

  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Live
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

Project Grey Goose report released

Published
by
marc
on 16 October 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Accompanying the recent military action on the ground in Georgia was a cyber campaign that took down many government sites and generally impeded the dissemenation of information throughout the country. Shortly after things cooled down in Georgia, a collection of security researchers in and around the intelligence community got together under the banner of “Project Grey Goose” in an attempt to see if open source information, particularly through semantic analysis of Russian hacker forums, could be used to unmask those responsible. The team drew widely from the community:

  • Lewis Shepherd - former CTO, Defense Intelligence Agency; CTO, Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments
  • Bob Gourley - former CTO, Defense Intelligence Agency; founder, Crucial Point LLC, a technology research and advisory firm
  • Matt Devost - former Senior INFOSEC Engineer at SAIC; Security Consultant to foreign governments and corporations; President, Total Intelligence Solutions
  • Preston Werntz - Project Manager, Newbrook Solutions, currently engaged at DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis
  • Derek Plansky - former Director, Lexis-Nexis Risk and Information Analytics Group; President, Informatic Ideas Consulting
  • Andrew Conway - former analyst performing classified work for a three letter agency analyzing leadership emergence in covert networks; currently a Ph.D candidate in Politics, NYU
  • Jeremy Baldwin - Analytic Tradecraft Developer, The Analysis Corporation [source]

Following 56 days of investigation the group has published its findings [pdf] [intelfusion blog]. The conclusions?

  • We assess with high confidence that the Russian government will likely continue its practice of distancing itself from the Russian nationalistic hacker community thus gaining deniability while passively supporting and enjoying the strategic benefits of their actions.
  • We assess with high confidence that nationalistic Russian hackers are likely adaptive adversaries engaged in aggressively finding more efficient ways to disable networks.
  • We judge with moderate confidence that a journeyman-apprentice relationship will continue to be the training model used by nationalistic Russian hackers.
  • We estimate with moderate confidence that hacker forums engaged in training Russian cyber warriors will continue to evolve their feedback loop which effectively becomes their Cyber Kill Chain.
    • After analyzing over 200 posts in the Xakep.ru and StopGeorgia.ru forums, as well as Georgian network server data, Grey Goose analysts were able to discern a cyber kill chain which is comprised of the following steps:
    • 1) Encourage novices through patriotic imagery and rhetoric to get involved in the cyber war against Georgia
      2) Publish a target list of Georgian government Web sites which have been tested for access from Russian and Lithuanian IP addresses.
      3) Discuss and select one of several different types of malware to use against the target Web site.
      4) Launch the attack
      5) Evaluate the results (optional step)
  • We assess with high confidence that all visitors to Russian hacker forums which originate from U.S. IP addresses will be monitored.
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Live
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

Links for 11 October 2008:

Published
by
marc
on 12 October 2008
in links
. 0 Comments

Links for the week of 11 October 2008:

  • Kent’s Imperative: Intelligence and financial crisis, historical edition - “The system of mutual espionage and rivalry which exists amongst joint-stock banks is another source of security to the public. That a system of espionage exists upon every joint-stock bank, at least in Scotland. by their sister banks, who exchange notes and checks with them, must be admitted, after what took place with regard to a joint-stock bank establishment in the west of Scotland.
  • 20 Useful Visualization Libraries : A Beautiful WWW -
  • YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. - Catch up on your Favorite MacGyver Moments. Watch Full Episodes Now!
  • Welcome to the Chemical-Biological Warfare Exposures Site - The Department of Defense (DoD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) play distinct roles in dealing with chemical and biological (CB) exposures. DoD identifies and validates veteran’s exposure to CB agents (What was he exposed to? When and Where was he exposed?) and provides the names of these individuals along with their exposure information to the VA. The VA then notifies individuals of their potential exposure, provides treatment, if necessary, for these individuals and adjudicates any claim for compensation.
  • BibliOdyssey: Early Microscopes -
  • U.S. Geological Survey Photographic Library -
  • Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker’s Library -
  • Antonie Pannekoek - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Pannekoek studied mathematics and physics in Leiden from 1891. Even before he went to college he was interested in astronomy and studied the variability of Polaris. He published his first article, On the Necessity of Further Researches on the Milky Way, as a student. Some years after he had finished his study he started work at the Leidse Sterrewacht (Leiden observatory), where he wrote his thesis.After reading Edward Bellamy’s Equality, Pannekoek became a convinced socialist and started studying Karl Marx’s theories.
  • How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar. - By Evgeny Morozov - Slate Magazine - My experiment also might shed some light on why the recent cyberwar has been so hard to pin down and why no group in particular has claimed responsibility. Paranoid that the Kremlin’s hand is everywhere, we risk underestimating the great patriotic rage of many ordinary Russians, who, having been fed too much government propaganda in the last few days, are convinced that they need to crash Georgian Web sites. Many Russians undoubtedly went online to learn how to make mischief, as I did. Within an hour, they, too, could become cyberwarriors.
  • Big Brother Is Listening - The Atlantic (April 2006) - The NSA has the ability to eavesdrop on your communications—landlines, cell phones, e-mails, BlackBerry messages, Internet searches, and more—with ease. What happens when the technology of espionage outstrips the law’s ability to protect ordinary citizens from it?by James Bamford
  • Defense Tech: JIMMY CARTER: SUPER SPY? - The rumors are that the Navy’s newest nuclear sub, the USS Jimmy Carter, has been designed for spywork, with a “special capability… to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on the communications passing through them,” according to the AP.
  • Sense Networks - How many people are going out at night? Locally or to
    destinations? By income level? Did the financial district come
    in early this morning?
  • Curt Herzstark and his Pocket Calculator CURTA -
  • Leyden jar - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - The Leyden jar is a simple device that “stores” static electricity in large amounts. It was invented in 1745 by Pieter van Musschenbroek (1692–1761), in Leiden, The Netherlands. It was the original form of the capacitor. The Leyden jar was used to conduct many early experiments in electricity, and its discovery was of fundamental importance in the study of electricity.
  • India’s first virtual porn star. | MetaFilter - Savita Bhabhi is India’s First Virtual Pornstar (NSFW). A sexy, buxom, and lusty almond-eyed femme fatale, Savita, bearing the title ‘bhabhi’ which means ’sister-in-law’ indicating that she’s married, is the quintessential Indian male porn fantasy ‘toon. Launched in March this year, the web site has proven to be a hit, incorporating South Asian themes such as sleeping with the servant boy; with a cousin; and, of course, the boys playing cricket next door.
  • Personal History: The Madness of Spies: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker - The Madness of Spies A Secret Service secret by John Le Carré
  • Colliding-beam accelerators — will they reveal the ultimate particles? -
  • Quantum Hacking group - Quantum cryptography is a method of secure communication using qubits. Such communication can be proved by the rules of quantum mechanics to be, in theory, completely secure. That is, any attempt of eavesdropping will be caught. We consider practical implementations of quantum cryptography. First, we play the role of an eavesdropper and try to hack a variety of quantum cryptosystems by taking advantage of non-ideal behavior of the equipment. Then, we suggest countermeasures, either practically by modifying the setups, or theoretically by modifying the way of communicating. This makes future cryptosystems harder to crack, ultimately approaching the goal of absolute security.
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Live
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

Links for 5 October 2008:

Published
by
marc
on 5 October 2008
in links
. 0 Comments

Links for the week of 5 October 2008:

  • The Tilt-Shift Miniature Fake Technique in Photoshop CS: A Simple How-To -
  • 23 Personal Tools to Learn More About Yourself | FlowingData - Applications spring up every month that let people track, monitor, and analyze their habits and behaviors in hopes of gaining a better understanding about themselves and their surroundings.
  • Leif Bloomquist’s Commodore 64 Telnet BBS - n a moment of nostalgic geekiness, I decided to set up a Bulletin Board System (BBS) on my Commodore 64 again - after 15 years! However, I wanted to avoid long distance charges for any callers, and the need for a second phone line.
  • Privoxy Frequently Asked Questions - Privoxy is a non-caching web proxy with advanced filtering capabilities for enhancing privacy, modifying web page data, managing HTTP cookies, controlling access, and removing ads, banners, pop-ups and other obnoxious Internet junk. Privoxy has a flexible configuration and can be customized to suit individual needs and tastes. Privoxy has application for both stand-alone systems and multi-user networks.
  • Darik’s Boot And Nuke | Hard Drive Disk Wipe - Darik’s Boot and Nuke (”DBAN”) is a self-contained boot disk that securely wipes the hard disks of most computers. DBAN will automatically and completely delete the contents of any hard disk that it can detect, which makes it an appropriate utility for bulk or emergency data destruction.
  • Mystery surrounds hijacked Iranian ship - The Long War Journal - Within days, pirates who had boarded the ship developed strange health complications, skin burns and loss of hair. Independent sources tell The Long War Journal that a number of pirates have also died.
  • Vote 2008 - The Takeaway - Track the Electoral College vote predictions - Aggregates many of the major media sources’, including Intrade, perdictions about each state. It does so in a nicely designed grid.
  • SydLexia.com - Are You Afraid of the Dark: The Tale of the Pinball Wizard -
  • Technology Review: Wireless at Fiber Speeds - the team was able to send a 10.6-gigabit-per-second signal between antennas 800 meters apart. And more recently, the researchers demonstrated a 20-gigabit-per-second signal in the lab
  • AnandTech - The LCD Thread -
  • SCADA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - SCADA is the abbreviation for Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. It generally refers to an industrial control system: a computer system monitoring and controlling a process. The process can be industrial, infrastructure or facility based
  • Virtual Worlds Forum Europe, conference and expo, London, 6-8 October 2008 -
  • English Russia » Moscow Zoo at 1920 -
  • Monitoring System of Belgrade Water Supply - Belgrade water supply was founded 115 years ago and over the years, it constantly expanded its capacity, following the demographic and industrial city growth. During this period, the number of Belgrade citizens increased 25 times, while the quantity of fabricated water increased 110 times. The 90’s crisis stopped all the development projects. It most affected the application of modern solutions in areas of water monitoring, fabrication control, distribution and quality.
  • The Atlas of the Real World - Telegraph - The Atlas of the Real World uses software to depict the nations of the world, not by their physical size, but by their demographic importance on a range of subjects. Here, we select a series of travel- and news-related maps.
  • Pentagon Wants Cyberwar Range to ‘Replicate Human Behavior and Frailties’ (Updated) | Danger Room from Wired.com - Congress has ordered the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, to put together a National Cyber Range, as part of a massive (and massively secret) $30 billion, government-wide effort better prep for battle online. The project is now considered a top priority for the Agency. And to make sure the facility is as true-to-life as possible, Darpa wants the contractors running the Range to be able to “replicate realistic human behavior on nodes,” a request for proposals, released today, reveals.
  • Sustainable Cities: A new global database | Sustainable Cities - Sustainable Cities™ collects and disseminates knowledge on cases and initiatives from cities all over the world. You will find descriptions to create better public transport, to optimize waste management, to reduce energy consumption, to manage waste water better and use the cleaned water to create new recreational activities for citizens in cities, and many, many other initiatives.
  • DoS attack reveals (yet another) crack in net’s core • The Register - The bug in the transmission control protocol (TCP) affords attackers a wealth of new ways to carry out denials of service on equipment at the heart of data centers and other sensitive points on the internet. The new class of attack is especially severe because it can be carried out using very little bandwidth and has the ability to paralyze a server or router even after the flood of malicious data has stopped.
  • Pictured: Inside the £800m Dubai hotel boasting a £13,000-a-night suite and dolphins flown in from the South Pacific | Mail Online - It’s the latest word in Gulf excess - a sprawling £800million resort boasting a £13,000-a-night suite and dolphins flown in from the South Pacific, all atop a palm tree-shaped island.
  • the hacker’s choice - THC - GSM CRACKERS & PASSPORT SPOOFERS ——- THC is a non-commercial group of computer experts focusing on practical and theoretical computer security. The group holds a broad expertise in analysis, design and development of security solutions, ranging from efficient network surveillance scanners to kernel modules for operating systems.
  • Ning. Create your own social network for anything. - Name Your Social Network
  • https://www.myaoc.org/eweb/DynamicPage.aspx?Site=CROWS2&WebKey=ecfde565-811d-4760-9d8a-f8f62135cacb - The name “Old Crows” emerged from the first large-scale use of Electronic Warfare during the WWII Battle of Britain and the US and allied bombing raids over Europe. The Allied Radar Countermeasure operators used the code name “Ravens” and employed receivers and transmitters to monitor and jam threat frequencies. Military jargon later changed “Ravens” to “Crows.”With origins in WWII, Electronic Warfare has been, and remains, a critical enabling capability in military operations in peace and war. With the evolution of digital/computer technology, Electronic Warfare (EW), Information Operations (IO), and related disciplines are increasingly necessary to achieve knowledge superiority, strategic and tactical dominance, and asset protection in both offensive and defensive operations. Information Operations include those actions taken to influence, effect, or defend information, information systems, and decision-making.
  • CASOS: Home | CASOS - CASOS brings together computer science, dynamic network analysis and the empirical study of complex socio-technical systems. Computational and social network techniques are combined to develop a better understanding of the fundamental principles of organizing, coordinating, managing and destabilizing systems of intelligent adaptive agents (human and artificial) engaged in real tasks at the team, organizational or social level.
  • CCSA - Cyber Conflict Studies Association - Welcome to the Cyber Conflict Studies Association (CCSA) website. CCSA is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization dedicated to promoting and leading a diversified research agenda in the field of cyber conflict.
  • ModLab - ENTER TERMINATOR - This project introduces a new challenge problem: designing robotic systems to recover after disassembly from high-energy events and a first implemented solution of a simplified problem.
  • Thwarting NSA Traffic Analysis -
  • Darpa Budget -
  • DARPA 2009 Budget - Danger Room -
  • Pentagon’s Mind-Reading Computers Replicate | Danger Room from Wired.com - Augmented Cognition relies on the idea that people have more than one kind of working memory, and more than one kind of attention; there are separate slots in the mind for things written, things heard and things seen. By monitoring how taxed those areas of the brain are, it should be possible to change a computer’s display to compensate
  • DARPA: Fake Brains, ASAP - According to DARPA’s recently-released budget, the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program isn’t set to being until the next fiscal year.
  • Möbius transformations revealed - the beauty of Möbius transformations and shows how moving to a higher dimension reveals their essential unity.
  • 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge - he articles linked on this page describe the accomplishments of the creative and gifted scientists, artists, and others who put the winning entries together
  • Number of cell phone subscribers to hit 4 billion this year, UN says - The ITU emphasized the need to carefully interpret data. A 61 per cent penetration rate does not mean in reality that every other person in the world is using a mobile phone; rather, the statistics reflect the number of subscriptions, not people. Double counting could occur if people have multiple cellular subscriptions, while some could be sharing their phone with others.
  • Friend or Foe? Crows Never Forget a Face, It Seems - NYTimes.com - Though Dr. Marzluff’s is the first formal study of human face recognition in wild birds, his preliminary findings confirm the suspicions of many other researchers who have observed similar abilities in crows, ravens, gulls and other species.
  • Insomnia – Victorian style - Vol. 21, Part 10 ( October 2008) - We owe much to Charles Dickens’ insomnia. Sleepless, he would tread the streets of London and encounter the inspirations for many of his novels and conceive of the tortured minds of various characters. On returning to his northwards-pointing bed he would sleep exactly in the middle, placing his arms out and checking that his hands were equidistant from the bed’s edge. Away from home he would realign the bed accordingly, which is why he always carried a compass; and he had to be facing north before he could write, as this would foster his creativity.
  • OpenSpime - OpenSpime is a project of WideTag, Inc., a technology infrastructure company providing innovative solutions for an Open Internet of Things.
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Live
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

Links for 28 September 2008:

Published
by
marc
on 28 September 2008
in links
. 0 Comments

Links for 28 September 2008:

  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Live
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

On rogues of the high seas and the hunt for bounty

Published
by
marc
on 27 September 2008
in Uncategorized
. 1 Comment

Marvelously fluttering around the margins of the mediascape during the past few days has been news of a hijacking by a group of Somali pirates of some heavy old world war-fighting technology. Piracy on the high seas is certainly something that excites the imagination filled with tales from yesteryear’s maritime literature and folk stories told before bed. However, knowledge of the sort of gritty reality of modern piracy is, like many of the unpleasant things in life, curiously absent from that font of common sense that we all draw from.

The Strait of Malaca, pictured above, accounts for approximately 40% of annual maritime piracy

Interestingly, the International Maratime Bureau, part of the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) Commercial Crimes Services, maintains an international piracy monitoring center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In this role they investigate incidents of piracy and armed robbery at sea and in port, publish weekly reports of piracy incidents, and maintain a google mashup of attacks (as pictured above).

However, to discover a bit of greater resolution when it comes to the sorts of statistics that one finds meticulously maintained by the IMB, one would suerly not be doing themselves a disservice to consider the person of one F. Max Hardberger ((really quite a marvelous name)). Hardberger, through his ‘asset recovery’ firm Vessel Extractions , is one of a special breed of repo men that work for ship owners and insurance companies to recover hijacked ships:

If a repossession is requested, Hardberger and his team quietly enter the country involved. They seek out friendly officials and trusted local contacts such as ship agents who tend to a vessel’s logistical needs in port.

“You need to pick up clues about the ship and what is said in the bars, at the ship chandlers and in the local whorehouses,” Hardberger said. “Crews are not that sophisticated and talk about their orders and departure times. You can really keep track of a vessel this way.”

Hardberger said he does not carry a firearm, though he has hired bodyguards, as he did with the Aztec Express. Stealth and trickery are the preferred methods. [link to entire LA Times profile of Hardberger]

While Hardberger and others like him place an exiciting and romantic inflection on piracy through his fantastic adventures, it is also interesting to consider what an account from the crew of a hijacked ship would look like:

Everything seemed fine that spring afternoon as Captain Ken Blyth watched over the loading of his ship in Singapore. He was skippering the Petro Ranger, a medium-size tanker with a $1.5 million cargo of jet fuel and diesel oil bound for Ho Chi Minh City. It was a three-day turnaround…When the Petro Ranger finally slipped its berth, it was just another cargo vessel amid the daily parade that makes Singapore the busiest port in the world. Not far outside the harbor is the Horsburgh Lighthouse, the last outpost of domestic law. From Horsburgh on, you pass into the only true frontier of the 21st century: international waters — the no-man’s land of the new world economy. Not technically owned or patrolled by anyone, these waters are the last place on earth where you are truly alone.[Link]

However, if one does actually steal a ship and wants to disappear without a trace, this following video may be of some interest

  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Live
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

On the Kodak Instamatic 800 Camera

Published
by
marc
on 24 September 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

This past weekend, at a flea market, I came across a Kodak Instamatic 800 manufactured in 1964. From the aspect of design and material culture, I rather liked the aesthetic packaging that the camera came in. There was something very classic, very tasteful and not at all kitschy about it. So, I thought I would post scans here. The Instamatic was a huge product for Kodak during the 1960s. They sold over 50 million of them, and it was arguably The Camera that popularized amateur photography as a fixture of healthy, modern middle class life.

Thinking about the manufactured objects of life more generally, Edward Burtynsky [a photographer I posted about earlier] is working with the Long Now Foundation to put together an exhibit of contemporary material culture. Not so much the stuff one would find in the design section of a contemporary art musuem, but surely some of that, but more so the sorts of things that one would expect to find doing an archeological dig of mid-century America. Burtynsky gives a 5 minute presentation on it with many a slide.

[higher resolution]

[higher resolution]

[higher resolution]

  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Live
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

J. Craig Venter on booting up a chromosome

Published
by
marc
on 23 September 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

J. Craig Venter is a highly prominent synthetic biologist and entrepreneur whose research into the human genome and cellular biology has placed him as one of the main public faces of this rapidly unfolding field.

I just recently came upon www.fora.tv which, for any of those who do not know it, really promises to tickle the fancy, and to kill the time. It seems that they have done a very good job positioning themselves as a major repository of lectures and intellectual discussions by forging content relationships with universities, think tanks, public forums and cultural institutions.

That said, I found Fora by way of this presentation (see below) given by Craig Venter about the recent history and future trends of synthetic biology. For those who may have missed it, we are rapidly approaching the moment when, entirely novel forms of life can be designed on a computer and brought to life through a combination of DNA sequencers and other laboratory techniques. This has doubtlessly started to cause much in the way of both ethical concern and concern for the possibility of garage biohackers designing all sorts of killer bugs.

The exciting part was we took this piece of DNA and inserted into the bacteria E. coli and what had happened was E. coli recognized this as a piece of software and started making viral particles. And true to form in nature when the viral particles were released from the cell.  They turned around and killed the bacteria that had made it.  So, this is a process that we see all the time in nature.  I was just speaking to oil executives and I said they clearly understood that process.  But this was pretty exciting: just taking a piece of DNA and having it activated, making viral particles. So we view this as the software actually building its own hardware. This is an important concept as we’re trying to go forward in this field, that even most people that are working in this area have not truly grasped the implications of this, that we don’t have to design life from scratch.  We just have to design the software appropriately. [link to the presentation video - many of the latter chapters are of particular interest]

  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Live
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

Links for 21 September 2008:

Published
by
marc
on 22 September 2008
in links
. 0 Comments

Links for 21 September 2008:

  • Chinese hacker “Milk Rebellion” - As the scandal over melamine laced food products widens, Chinese hackers seem to be taking up the cause to punish guilty corporations.
  • Five Thoughts On The Popularity Of Steampunk - On the most basic, most appealing social level, steampunk is a way to masculinize romance. That is to say: Steampunk takes something stereotypically feminine that most boys hate — Victorian lace and frills and tea and crumpets — and says, “Hey, how about some robots with that?” It’s like the Dance Dance Revolution of nerd culture: now we all have something we can play together!
  • 20 Most Incredible Desert Oases [pics] | Environmental Graffiti - 20 Most Incredible Desert Oases [pics]
  • DARPA Archives - Past DARPA Programs
  • Verner Panton -
  • Printing a Book - Video runs through entire production process of book printing. Produced by Encyclopedia Britannica in 1947
  • Revision3 - MediaDefender, a copyright hitsquad attacks, Revision 3
  • Video of a guy who makes his own vacuum tubes - Boing Boing -
  • Main Page - IGEM07 - 4 teams from around the world spent their summer engineering novel biological machines using and creating BioBrick standard biological parts
  • Oil Rocks - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - The Oil Rocks lies 45-50 km offshore on the Caspian Sea and extracts oil from the shallow water portion of the Absheron geological trend. The most distinctive feature of the Oil Rocks is that it is actually a functional city with a population of about 5,000 and over 200 km of streets built on piles of dirt and landfill. Most of the inhabitants work on shifts; a week on Oil Rocks followed by a week on the shore. The small city includes shops, school and a library. After almost 60 years the Oil Rocks is still quite unusual as Azerbaijan’s first and largest oil platform.The facility is poorly maintained, with miles of roads now submerged beneath the sea. Around some worker’s dormitories, the waterline now stands at the second-floor windows.
  • Grytviken - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia -
  • STATEWATCH - monitoring the state and civil liberties in Europe -
  • U.N. agency eyes curbs on Internet anonymity | Politics and Law - CNET News - A United Nations agency is quietly drafting technical standards, proposed by the Chinese government, to define methods of tracing the original source of Internet communications and potentially curbing the ability of users to remain anonymous.The U.S. National Security Agency is also participating in the “IP Traceback” drafting group, named Q6/17, which is meeting next week in Geneva to work on the traceback proposal. Members of Q6/17 have declined to release key documents, and meetings are closed to the public.
  • Tech sabotage during the Cold War - The result was the most monumental nonnuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space. At the White House, we received warning from our infrared satellites of some bizarre event in the middle of Soviet nowhere. NORAD feared a missile liftoff from a place where no rockets were known to be based. Or perhaps it was a detonation of a small nuclear device. The Air Force chief of intelligence rated it at 3 kilotons, but he was puzzled by the silence of the Vela satellites. They had detected no electromagnetic pulse, characteristic of nuclear detonations. Before these conflicting indicators could turn into an international crisis, Gus Weiss came down the hall to tell his fellow NSC staffers not to worry. It took him another 20 years to tell me why.
  • What a Botnet Looks Like - CSO Online - Security and Risk - Researcher David Vorel mapped interconnected, bot-infected IP addresses and created this geometric representation; CSO contributor Scott Berinato annotated the map and added interactive controls so you can zoom in and explore botnets’ inner workings.
  • Shadowserver Foundation - Main - HomePage - Established in 2004, The Shadowserver Foundation gathers intelligence on the darker side of the internet. We are comprised of volunteer security professionals from around the world. Our mission is to understand and help put a stop to high stakes cybercrime in the information age.
  • Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Blogs - The Social Science Research Council is now developing a series of blogs, organized around various topics of interest and edited by experts in their respective fields. We hope the blogs will create new opportunities for discussion, debate, analysis, and networking among social scientists and interested readers.
  • Moroccan hacker arrested for web virus launch (Magharebia.com) - The pair is believed to responsible for unleashing the worm that disrupted computer operations in mid-August at several large news organisations, including The Associated Press, ABC, CNN, and The New York Times.
  • The BioBricks Foundation - Using BioBrick™ standard biological parts, a synthetic biologist or biological engineer can already, to some extent, program living organisms in the same way a computer scientist can program a computer.
  • MayDay! MayDay! Ruskies reinvent cyber crime - Researchers have unearthed two previously undetected botnets that exhibit sophisticated new capabilities that could significantly advance the dark art of cyber crime.
  • Tracking down the Ron Paul spam botnet | Channel Register - More specifically, he’s uncovered new information about “Reactor Mailer,” the sophisticated piece of spamware used by Ukrainians to send the Ron Paul messages to more than 162 million addresses.
  • New technique sees into tissue at greater depth, resolution - By coupling a kicked-up version of microscopy with miniscule particles of gold, Duke University scientists are now able to peer so deep into living tissue that they can see molecules interacting.
  • Slashdot | Best Reference Site For Each Programming Language? -
  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Live
  • E-mail this story to a friend!

An elegy thought over the carrion of a nighthawk

Published
by
marc
on 20 September 2008
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

This was really such a startling picture to come across. The F-117 Nighthawk was certainly for me, and I think at least for many boys growing up around the collapse of the Soviet Union, the quintisential icon of the infinite possibility of American military technology. It was The Stealth Fighter, invisible, invincible, built of a super high tech material that would absorb radar and make the whole plane look no bigger than a sparrow upon an enemy’s screen. It was super top secret, and even knowing about it gave one the sense of some how being included in all of that intrigue and magic. But, if WE know about THIS, can you just imagine all the things they are not telling us? They must even more fantastic things, maybe even X-Files and secret UFO technology. They did, after all, develop and test it at Area 51.

But now here it is. Torn apart by an ordinary Caterpillar excavator, reduced to a formless tangle of industrial material, like one saw in the pictures dispatched from New Orleans, or South Ossetia. Giving up the ghost, the spell is broke, the charm is flown. There was so much promise in you, oh Nighthawk. Yours was a special place, a harbinger from the coast, signaling the floods would soon recede and Eden would be reclaimed. But as they have stripped you of your feathers, we too must go naked for a season.

[link]

  • Digg
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Live
  • E-mail this story to a friend!