Tag Archive for 'globalcapitalism'

The economics of a botnet

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on 14 November 2008
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Schneier on Security linked to an excellent paper on the economics of spam. Interestingly, the authors were able to infiltrate the Storm worm network and monitored its doings in the course of their study.

After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%. Of these, all but one were for male-enhancement products and the average purchase price was close to $100. Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88 — a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period or $140 per day for periods when the campaign was active. However, our study interposed on only a small fraction of the overall Storm network — we estimate roughly 1.5 percent based on the fraction of worker bots we proxy. Thus, the total daily revenue attributable to Storm’s pharmacy campaign is likely closer to $7000 (or $9500 during periods of campaign activity). By the same logic, we estimate that Storm self-propagation campaigns can produce between 3500 and 8500 new bots per day.Under the assumption that our measurements are representative over time (an admittedly dangerous assumption when dealing with such small samples), we can extrapolate that, were it sent continuously at the same rate, Storm-generated pharmaceutical spam would produce roughly 3.5 million dollars of revenue in a year. This number could be even higher if spam-advertised pharmacies experience repeat business. A bit less than “millions of dollars every day,” but certainly a healthy enterprise.

Of course, the authors point out that it’s dangerous to make these sorts of generalizations:

We would be the first to admit that these results represent a single data point and are not necessarily representative of spam as a whole. Different campaigns, using different tactics and marketing different products will undoubtedly produce different outcomes. Indeed, we caution strongly against researchers using the conversion rates we have measured for these Storm-based campaigns to justify assumptions in any other context. [link]

Along what dimension is cyberspace?

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on 23 October 2008
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In 2001, Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin published an Atlas of Cyberspace, described by Vint Cerf as “explor[ing] a remarkable universe of visual representations of the Internet’s diversity, structure and content.” The atlas locates cyberspace along many dimensions: geographic maps of core fiber optic back bones, logical maps of network organization and hierarchy, social maps showing the relationships between individual users in virtual worlds, hierarchy trees of web page design, world maps from 3-d shooters, etc. While some of the visualizations, designed to shock and awe through their graphical sophistication, have become curious artifacts in their own right, almost like a first generation iPod, harkening back to simpler times, the book itself promises not to disappoint. The good news is that it has been re-released under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded here. There is a 20MB low-res version and a 200+MB high-res version.

Arpanet’s geographical configuration, 1975

Submarine fiber optic cables in the Caribbean

“Great Circle” map designed as a bit of marketing ephemera for the Cable and Wireless Company, showing the global connectivity of its telecommunications network, with Britain centered representing its position as “hub of the world”, 1945

The huge and dense mesh of connections shows the social geography of LambdaMOO, a multi-user dimension, by mapping how over half of the 4,800 or so players related to each other. LambdaMOO was a well-established and well-known virtual environment created at Xerox PARC in 1990. The map was created using social statistics gathered by Cobot, a software agent that “lived” in LambdaMOO, sitting in the “living room” and observing the social interactions of players. 2000

Discrete circuits; or, Trojan architecture

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marc
on 23 October 2008
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IEEE Spectrum published an article this past May about the growing concern within defense circles about the loss of oversight along the military hardware supply chain. With many of the semiconductor components manufactured in the People’s Republic of China, rumors and fears of maliciously implanted “backdoors” abound:

According to a U.S. defense contractor who spoke on condition of anonymity, a “European chip maker” recently built into its microprocessors a kill switch that could be accessed remotely. French defense contractors have used the chips in military equipment, the contractor told IEEE Spectrum. If in the future the equipment fell into hostile hands, “the French wanted a way to disable that circuit,” he said. Spectrum could not confirm this account independently, but spirited discussion about it among researchers and another defense contractor last summer at a military research conference reveals a lot about the fever dreams plaguing the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD)…

Vetting a chip with a hidden agenda can’t be all that tough, right? Wrong. Although commercial chip makers routinely and exhaustively test chips with hundreds of millions of logic gates, they can’t afford to inspect everything. So instead they focus on how well the chip performs specific functions. For a microprocessor destined for use in a cellphone, for instance, the chip maker will check to see whether all the phone’s various functions work. Any extraneous circuitry that doesn’t interfere with the chip’s normal functions won’t show up in these tests…

Nor can chip makers afford to test every chip. From a batch of thousands, technicians select a single chip for physical inspection, assuming that the manufacturing process has yielded essentially identical devices. They then laboriously grind away a thin layer of the chip, put the chip into a scanning electron microscope, and then take a picture of it, repeating the process until every layer of the chip has been imaged. Even here, spotting a tiny discrepancy amid a chip’s many layers and millions or billions of transistors is a fantastically difficult task, and the chip is destroyed in the process…

The Pentagon is now caught in a bind. It likes the cheap, cutting-edge devices emerging from commercial foundries and the regular leaps in IC performance the commercial sector is known for. But with those improvements comes the potential for sabotage. “The economy is globalized, but defense is not globalized,” says Coleman. “How do you reconcile the two?” [link]

With respect to recent news pertaining to electronic security and surveillance see also:

Dreaming of the future at 11km per second

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marc
on 22 October 2008
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India launched its first unmanned moon mission on Wednesday following in the footsteps of rival China, as the emerging Asian power celebrated its space ambitions and scientific prowess.

Chandrayaan-1 (Moon vehicle), a cuboid spacecraft built by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) blasted off from a southern Indian space centre shortly after dawn in a boost for the country’s ambitions to gain more global space business.

The project cost $79m, considerably less than the Chinese and Japanese probes in 2007 and ISRO says the moon mission will pave the way for India to claim a bigger chunk of the global space business.

The mission is also expected to carry out a detailed survey of the moon to look for precious metals and water.

Fresh on the steps of the confidence that comes to any nation that can launch a few thousand pounds of metal faster than the 11km/s velocity needed to escape the earth’s gravitational pull on towards the moon is the Indian culture industry. To be released this summer is what seems to be a Bollywood take on the intense, high budget, the future is now Hollywood sci-fi film.

But what would even the most Doc Brown, cyberpunk metropolis be with out an appropriate measure of dance sequences? (Answer? something to be rewritten with more song and dance sequences)

On rogues of the high seas and the hunt for bounty

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marc
on 27 September 2008
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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

The bottom of the barrel, or a brief anatomy of an oil well

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marc
on 19 September 2008
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It was not until the fantastic rise in energy prices of the last several years (remember: a decade ago a barrel of crude was less than $15) that companies that do oil exploration and production (E&P) began a serious consideration of extracting the very low grade bitumen (essentially the most expensive part of a barrel of oil to refine, and directly the stuff that holds the stones together in asphalt). When prices looked as if they were heading straight for $100, and even more so when it looked like they were heading straight for $200, companies began investing heavily in the Canadian province of Alberta, which is estimated to hold 1.7 trillion barrels of oil, according to government sources. However, the recent turn around in the direction of oil prices, combined with the banking crisis which is (1) making it difficult to put together financing for exploration projects and (2) creating concerns that the slowing economy will push oil below $70, the price that determines profitability for these projects, has cast the future in doubt. All of that said, the physical process by which oil is extracted from the ground is quite interesting and something that is as mysterious as the magic smoke inside an ipod to most people. So for your edification, take a look at the diagram below:

The above image, taken from an investor presentation given by Petrobank, an E&P company working in Alberta, shows the basic anatomy of a well site.

  • The vertical well sections are drilled about 1.5km on average, although they could get as deep as 3-4km
  • Once the drill reaches the oil sand deposits, the direction will be changed so that the well will continue horizontally. This is done because the seam containing the oil sand is relatively shallow and the more surface the well can make contact with, the more production that will follow.
  • Once the actual hole of the well is drilled, it is shored up with a high pressure casing that maintains the structural stability of the well.
  • Following this, the casing is fractured in many places using explosives. This has the double effect of loosening up the surrounding sand formations, allowing the oil to flow more easily, as well as providing more entry points for oil to flow into the casing.
  • On the surface, the pump jack helps create the pressure required to extract the heavy bitumen from the ground