Word of the day: Froschmäusekrieg
Froschmäusekrieg: Literally, “war between the frogs and the mice”, a poem attributed to Homer (Batrachomyomachia), a satire about the pointlessness of war or feuding.
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December 2006
3 problems with electronic voting
From Avi Rubin’s “Voting: Low-Tech Is the Answer” (Business Week: 30 October 2006):
Unfortunately, there are three problems with electronic voting that have nothing to do with whether or not the system works as intended. They are transparency, recovery, and audit. …
Electronic voting is not transparent – it is not even translucent. There is no way to observe the counting of the votes publicly, and you can’t even tell if the votes are being recorded correctly. …
Now, what do we do if something goes very wrong during the election? What happens if the equipment fails or there is a power outage?
Let’s compare electronic voting machines to paper ballots. If an e-voting machine crashes, it is possible that the memory cards containing the votes could be corrupted. Something as unexpected as someone spilling coffee on the machine could cause it to fail.
There are dozens of ways one could imagine that an electronic voting machine could be rendered a paperweight. Imagine, for example, a widespread power outage on Election Day. How do you continue the election? What can you do to recover votes already cast? …
I don’t feel very good about the only copies of all of the votes in a precinct existing in electronic form on flash memory cards. … If we have paper ballots and the power goes out, we can get some flashlights and continue voting.
Electronic voting is vulnerable to all sorts of problems, many of which cannot be anticipated. For example, in Maryland’s September primary, voting systems were delivered to the precincts in Montgomery County without the smart cards needed to activate the votes. As a result, the polls opened hours late, and thousands of voters were affected.
There was no quick and easy recovery mechanism. It is true that the problem was due to human error, but that does not change the fact that there was no way to recover. Paper ballot systems are much less fragile and can withstand many of the unexpected problems that might arise on Election Day. …
Finally, and I believe most seriously, there is no way to independently audit a fully electronic voting system. While it is true that many of the machines keep multiple copies of the votes, these copies are not independent. If the machines are rigged, or if they suffer from unknown software bugs …, the election results might not reflect the votes that were cast, despite all of the copies of the votes being identical.
On the other hand, electronic counting of paper ballots can be audited by manually counting the paper and comparing the results to the electronic tally. It is imperative, in fact, that every software-based system be audited in a manner that is independent from the data that are the subject of the audit.
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USA owns 74% of IPv4 addresses
From Stephen Ornes’s “Map: What Does the Internet Look Like?” (Discover: October 2006):
The United States owns 74 percent of the 4 billion available Internet protocol (IP) addresses. China’s stake amounts to little more than that of an American university. Not surprisingly, China is championing the next wave of the Internet, which would accommodate 340 trillion trillion trillion IP addresses.
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Microsoft executive sets self up for hubristic fall
From Scott M. Fulton, III’s “Allchin Suggests Vista Won’t Need Antivirus” (BetaNews: 9 November 2006):
During a telephone conference with reporters yesterday, outgoing Microsoft co-president Jim Allchin, while touting the new security features of Windows Vista, which was released to manufacturing yesterday, told a reporter that the system’s new lockdown features are so capable and thorough that he was comfortable with his own seven-year-old son using Vista without antivirus software installed.
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The final moment of tragedy
From Northrop Frye’s “The Mythos of Autumn: Tragedy” (128):
The moment of discovery or ‘anagnorisis’, which comes at the end of the tragic plot, is not simply the knowledge by the hero of what has happened to him … but the recognition of the determined shape of the life he has created for himself, with an implicit comparison with the uncreated potential life he has forsaken.
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Ubuntu Edgy changes to fstab
I upgraded my Ubuntu Linux desktop today from Dapper to Edgy. It appears that in /etc/fstab, LABEL= no longer works, and you must now use UUID=.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=278652
So my fstab now looks like this, for instance (these are all external drives):
UUID=a3d8a126-a7fc-4994-9675-748ed62c3109 /media/music xfs rw,user,noauto 0 0 UUID=e6e83a83-7487-4f22-a7ac-42cb100dfe24 /media/music-copy reiserfs rw,user,noauto 0 0 UUID=99198c52-3f9e-4255-9326-7891a90223ac /media/temp reiserfs rw,user,noauto 0 0 UUID=e0e73b81-f432-4b9e-918c-595fbfb1ac93 /media/data ext3 rw,user,noauto 0 0 UUID=2296551a-1d7d-4aff-9aea-873121464c9a /media/data-copy ext3 rw,user,noauto 0 0 UUID=e04e7b7a-b429-4a0f-a458-6af0c120bb9b /media/music-rock xfs rw,user,noauto 0 0 UUID=af39f5e1-1554-4dac-be5c-1f5028ee9503 /media/music-rock-copy xfs rw,user,noauto 0 0
Edgy also converts any old fstab entries for /dev/hda1 and so on to the new UUID method as well.
For more on labels & uuid in fstab, see: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=283131
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Conversation with Robert
So a bunch of us are talking at the Central West End Linux User Group meeting. Somehow the topic of surgery during World War I comes up.
Robert: What was really bad was that those guys were operated on without any anaesthetic.
Me: Huh? Doctors had anaesthetic then.
Robert: They did? What?
Me: Ether.
Robert: Huh. How’d they deliver it?
Me: Ether bunnies!
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Take over a computer network with an iPod or USB stick
From Bruce Schneier’s “Hacking Computers Over USB” (Crypto-Gram: 15 June 2005):
From CSO Magazine:
“Plug an iPod or USB stick into a PC running Windows and the device can literally take over the machine and search for confidential documents, copy them back to the iPod or USB’s internal storage, and hide them as “deleted” files. Alternatively, the device can simply plant spyware, or even compromise the operating system. Two features that make this possible are the Windows AutoRun facility and the ability of peripherals to use something called direct memory access (DMA). The first attack vector you can and should plug; the second vector is the result of a design flaw that’s likely to be with us for many years to come.” …
Recently I’ve been seeing more and more written about this attack. The Spring 2006 issue of 2600 Magazine, for example, contains a short article called “iPod Sneakiness” (unfortunately, not online). The author suggests that you can innocently ask someone at an Internet cafe if you can plug your iPod into his computer to power it up — and then steal his passwords and critical files.
And about someone used this trick in a penetration test:
“We figured we would try something different by baiting the same employees that were on high alert. We gathered all the worthless vendor giveaway thumb drives collected over the years and imprinted them with our own special piece of software. I had one of my guys write a Trojan that, when run, would collect passwords, logins and machine-specific information from the user’s computer, and then email the findings back to us.
“The next hurdle we had was getting the USB drives in the hands of the credit union’s internal users. I made my way to the credit union at about 6 a.m. to make sure no employees saw us. I then proceeded to scatter the drives in the parking lot, smoking areas, and other areas employees frequented.
“Once I seeded the USB drives, I decided to grab some coffee and watch the employees show up for work. Surveillance of the facility was worth the time involved. It was really amusing to watch the reaction of the employees who found a USB drive. You know they plugged them into their computers the minute they got to their desks.
“I immediately called my guy that wrote the Trojan and asked if anything was received at his end. Slowly but surely info was being mailed back to him. I would have loved to be on the inside of the building watching as people started plugging the USB drives in, scouring through the planted image files, then unknowingly running our piece of software.”
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Spimes, objects trackable in space and time
From Bruce Sterling’s “Viridian Note 00459: Emerging Technology 2006” (The Viridian Design Movement: March 2006):
When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don’t want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial, governmental, academic or military…. Otherwise you are trying to freeze an emergent technology into the shape of today’s verbal descriptions. This prejudices people. It is bad attention economics. It limits their ability to find and understand the intrinsic advantages of the technology. …
If you look at today’s potent, influential computer technologies, say, Google, you’ve got something that looks Artificially Intelligent by the visionary standards of the 1960s. Google seems to “know” most everything about you and me, big brother: Google is like Colossus the Forbin Project. But Google is not designed or presented as a thinking machine. Google is not like Ask Jeeves or Microsoft Bob, which horribly pretend to think, and wouldn’t fool a five-year-old child. Google is a search engine. It’s a linking, ranking and sorting machine. …
Even if there’s like, Boolean logic going on here, this machine has got nothing to do with any actual thinking. This machine is clearly a big card shuffler. It’s a linker, a stacker and a sorter. …
In the past, they just didn’t get certain things. For instance:
1. the digital devices people carry around with them, such as laptops, media players, camera phones, PDAs.
2. wireless and wired local and global networks that serve people in various locations as they and their objects and possessions move about the world.
3. the global Internet and its socially-generated knowledge and Web-based, on-demand social applications.This is a new technosocial substrate. It’s not about intelligence, yet it can change our relationship with physical objects in the three-dimensional physical world. Not because it’s inside some box trying to be smart, but because it’s right out in the world with us, in our hands and pockets and laps, linking and tracking and ranking and sorting.
Doing this work, in, I think, six important ways:
1. with interactive chips, objects can be labelled with unique identity – electronic barcoding or arphids, a tag that you can mark, sort, rank and shuffle.
2. with local and precise positioning systems – geolocative systems, sorting out where you are and where things are.
3. with powerful search engines – auto-googling objects, more sorting and shuffling.
4. with cradle to cradle recycling – sustainability, transparent production, sorting and shuffling the garbage.Then there are two other new factors in the mix.
5. 3d virtual models of objects – virtual design – cad-cam, having things present as virtual objects in the network before they become physical objects.
6. rapid prototyping of objects – fabjects, blobjects, the ability to digitally manufacture real-world objects directly or almost directly from the digital plans.If objects had these six qualities, then people would interact with objects in an unprecedented way, a way so strange and different that we’d think about it better if this class of object had its own name. I call an object like this a “spime,” because an object like this is trackable in space and time. …
“Spimes are manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system. Spimes begin and end as data. They’re virtual objects first and actual objects second.” …
“The primary advantage of an Internet of Things is that I no longer inventory my possessions inside my own head. They’re inventoried through an automagical inventory voodoo, work done far beneath my notice by a host of machines. So I no longer to bother to remember where I put things. Or where I found them. Or how much they cost. And so forth. I just ask. Then I am told with instant real-time accuracy. …
It’s [spimes] turning into what Julian Bleecker calls a “Theory Object,” which is an idea which is not just a mental idea or a word, but a cloud of associated commentary and data, that can be passed around from mouse to mouse, and linked-to. Every time I go to an event like this, the word “spime” grows as a Theory Object. A Theory Object is a concept that’s accreting attention, and generating visible, searchable, rankable, trackable trails of attention. …
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Russian bot herders behind massive increase in spam
From Ryan Naraine’s “‘Pump-and-Dump’ Spam Surge Linked to Russian Bot Herders” (eWeek: 16 November 2006):
The recent surge in e-mail spam hawking penny stocks and penis enlargement pills is the handiwork of Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers.
Internet security researchers and law enforcement authorities have traced the operation to a well-organized hacking gang controlling a 70,000-strong peer-to-peer botnet seeded with the SpamThru Trojan. …
For starters, the Trojan comes with its own anti-virus scanner – a pirated copy of Kaspersky’s security software – that removes competing malware files from the hijacked machine. Once a Windows machine is infected, it becomes a peer in a peer-to-peer botnet controlled by a central server. If the control server is disabled by botnet hunters, the spammer simply has to control a single peer to retain control of all the bots and send instructions on the location of a new control server.
The bots are segmented into different server ports, determined by the variant of the Trojan installed, and further segmented into peer groups of no more than 512 bots. This allows the hackers to keep the overhead involved in exchanging information about other peers to a minimum, Stewart explained.
… the attackers are meticulous about keeping statistics on bot infections around the world.
For example, the SpamThru controller keeps statistics on the country of origin of all bots in the botnet. In all, computers in 166 countries are part of the botnet, with the United States accounting for more than half of the infections.
The botnet stats tracker even logs the version of Windows the infected client is running, down to the service pack level. One chart commandeered by Stewart showed that Windows XP SP2 … machines dominate the makeup of the botnet, a clear sign that the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system is falling prey to attacks.
Another sign of the complexity of the operation, Stewart found, was a database hacking component that signaled the ability of the spammers to target its pump-and-dump scams to victims most likely to be associated with stock trading.
Stewart said about 20 small investment and financial news sites have been breached for the express purpose of downloading user databases with e-mail addresses matched to names and other site registration data. On the bot herder’s control server, Stewart found a MySQL database dump of e-mail addresses associated with an online shop. …
The SpamThru spammer also controls lists of millions of e-mail addresses harvested from the hard drives of computers already in the botnet. …
“It’s a very enterprising operation and it’s interesting that they’re only doing pump-and-dump and penis enlargement spam. That’s probably because those are the most lucrative,” he added.
Even the spam messages come with a unique component. The messages are both text- and image-based and a lot of effort has been put into evading spam filters. For example, each SpamThru client works as its own spam engine, downloading a template containing the spam and random phrases to use as hash-busters, random “from” names, and a list of several hundred e-mail addresses to send to.
Stewart discovered that the image files in the templates are modified with every e-mail message sent, allowing the spammer to change the width and height. The image-based spam also includes random pixels at the bottom, specifically to defeat anti-spam technologies that reject mail based on a static image.
All SpamThru bots – the botnet controls about 73,000 infected clients – are also capable of using a list of proxy servers maintained by the controller to evade blacklisting of the bot IP addresses by anti-spam services. Stewart said this allows the Trojan to act as a “massive distributed engine for sending spam,” without the cost of maintaining static servers.
With a botnet of this size, the group is theoretically capable of sending a billion spam e-mails in a single day.
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