tech in changing society

Open sources turns software into a service industry

business, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Eric Steven Raymond’s “Problems in the Environment of Unix” (The Art of Unix Programming: 19 September 2003):

It’s not necessarily going to be an easy transition. Open source turns software into a service industry. Service-provider firms (think of medical and legal practices) can’t be scaled up by injecting more capital into them; those that try only scale up their fixed costs, overshoot their revenue base, and starve to death. The choices come down to singing for your supper (getting paid through tips and donations), running a corner shop (a small, low-overhead service business), or finding a wealthy patron (some large firm that needs to use and modify open-source software for its business purposes).

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Differences between Macintosh & Unix programmers

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From Eric Steven Raymond’s “Problems in the Environment of Unix” (The Art of Unix Programming: 19 September 2003):

Macintosh programmers are all about the user experience. They’re architects and decorators. They design from the outside in, asking first “What kind of interaction do we want to support?” and then building the application logic behind it to meet the demands of the user-interface design. This leads to programs that are very pretty and infrastructure that is weak and rickety. In one notorious example, as late as Release 9 the MacOS memory manager sometimes required the user to manually deallocate memory by manually chucking out exited but still-resident programs. Unix people are viscerally revolted by this kind of mal-design; they don’t understand how Macintosh people could live with it.

By contrast, Unix people are all about infrastructure. We are plumbers and stonemasons. We design from the inside out, building mighty engines to solve abstractly defined problems (like “How do we get reliable packet-stream delivery from point A to point B over unreliable hardware and links?”). We then wrap thin and often profoundly ugly interfaces around the engines. The commands date(1), find(1), and ed(1) are notorious examples, but there are hundreds of others. Macintosh people are viscerally revolted by this kind of mal-design; they don’t understand how Unix people can live with it. …

In many ways this kind of parochialism has served us well. We are the keepers of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Our software and our traditions dominate serious computing, the applications where 24/7 reliability and minimal downtime is a must. We really are extremely good at building solid infrastructure; not perfect by any means, but there is no other software technical culture that has anywhere close to our track record, and it is one to be proud of. …

To non-technical end users, the software we build tends to be either bewildering and incomprehensible, or clumsy and condescending, or both at the same time. Even when we try to do the user-friendliness thing as earnestly as possible, we’re woefully inconsistent at it. Many of the attitudes and reflexes we’ve inherited from old-school Unix are just wrong for the job. Even when we want to listen to and help Aunt Tillie, we don’t know how — we project our categories and our concerns onto her and give her ‘solutions’ that she finds as daunting as her problems.

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The first movie theater

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From Adam Goodheart’s “10 Days That Changed History” (The New York Times: 2 July 2006):

APRIL 16, 1902: The Movies

Motion pictures seemed destined to become a passing fad. Only a few years after Edison’s first crude newsreels were screened — mostly in penny arcades, alongside carnival games and other cheap attractions, the novelty had worn off, and Americans were flocking back to live vaudeville.

Then, in spring 1902, Thomas L. Tally opened his Electric Theater in Los Angeles, a radical new venture devoted to movies and other high-tech devices of the era, like audio recordings.

“Tally was the first person to offer a modern multimedia entertainment experience to the American public,” says the film historian Marc Wanamaker. Before long, his successful movie palace produced imitators nationally, which would become known as “nickelodeons.”

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The date Silicon Valley (& Intel) was born

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From Adam Goodheart’s “10 Days That Changed History” (The New York Times: 2 July 2006):

SEPT. 18, 1957: Revolt of the Nerds

Fed up with their boss, eight lab workers walked off the job on this day in Mountain View, Calif. Their employer, William Shockley, had decided not to continue research into silicon-based semiconductors; frustrated, they decided to undertake the work on their own. The researchers — who would become known as “the traitorous eight” — went on to invent the microprocessor (and to found Intel, among other companies). “Sept. 18 was the birth date of Silicon Valley, of the electronics industry and of the entire digital age,” says Mr. Shockley’s biographer, Joel Shurkin.

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DRM converts copyrights into trade secrets

business, law, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Mark Sableman’s “Copyright reformers pose tough questions” (St. Louis Journalism Review: June 2005):

It goes by the name “digital rights management” – the effort, already very successful, to give content owners the right to lock down their works technologically. It is what Washington University law professor Charles McManis has characterized as attaching absolute “trade secret” property-type rights to the content formerly subject to the copyright balance between private rights and public use.

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Macaulay in 1841 on the problems on the copyright monopoly

art, history, law, on writing, politics, tech in changing society / /

From Thomas Babington Macaulay’s “A Speech Delivered In The House Of Commons On The 5th Of February 1841” (Prime Palaver #4: 1 September 2001):

The question of copyright, Sir, like most questions of civil prudence, is neither black nor white, but grey. The system of copyright has great advantages and great disadvantages; and it is our business to ascertain what these are, and then to make an arrangement under which the advantages may be as far as possible secured, and the disadvantages as far as possible excluded. …

We have, then, only one resource left. We must betake ourselves to copyright, be the inconveniences of copyright what they may. Those inconveniences, in truth, are neither few nor small. Copyright is monopoly, and produces all the effects which the general voice of mankind attributes to monopoly. …

I believe, Sir, that I may with safety take it for granted that the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad. … Thus, then, stands the case. It is good that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good. …

For consider this; the evil effects of the monopoly are proportioned to the length of its duration. But the good effects for the sake of which we bear with the evil effects are by no means proportioned to the length of its duration. A monopoly of sixty years produces twice as much evil as a monopoly of thirty years, and thrice as much evil as a monopoly of twenty years. But it is by no means the fact that a posthumous monopoly of sixty years gives to an author thrice as much pleasure and thrice as strong a motive as a posthumous monopoly of twenty years. On the contrary, the difference is so small as to be hardly perceptible. We all know how faintly we are affected by the prospect of very distant advantages, even when they are advantages which we may reasonably hope that we shall ourselves enjoy. But an advantage that is to be enjoyed more than half a century after we are dead, by somebody, we know not by whom, perhaps by somebody unborn, by somebody utterly unconnected with us, is really no motive at all to action. …

Dr Johnson died fifty-six years ago. If the law were what my honourable and learned friend wishes to make it, somebody would now have the monopoly of Dr Johnson’s works. Who that somebody would be it is impossible to say; but we may venture to guess. I guess, then, that it would have been some bookseller, who was the assign of another bookseller, who was the grandson of a third bookseller, who had bought the copyright from Black Frank, the doctor’s servant and residuary legatee, in 1785 or 1786. Now, would the knowledge that this copyright would exist in 1841 have been a source of gratification to Johnson? Would it have stimulated his exertions? Would it have once drawn him out of his bed before noon? Would it have once cheered him under a fit of the spleen? Would it have induced him to give us one more allegory, one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal? I firmly believe not. I firmly believe that a hundred years ago, when he was writing our debates for the Gentleman’s Magazine, he would very much rather have had twopence to buy a plate of shin of beef at a cook’s shop underground. Considered as a reward to him, the difference between a twenty years’ and sixty years’ term of posthumous copyright would have been nothing or next to nothing. But is the difference nothing to us? I can buy Rasselas for sixpence; I might have had to give five shillings for it. I can buy the Dictionary, the entire genuine Dictionary, for two guineas, perhaps for less; I might have had to give five or six guineas for it. Do I grudge this to a man like Dr Johnson? Not at all. Show me that the prospect of this boon roused him to any vigorous effort, or sustained his spirits under depressing circumstances, and I am quite willing to pay the price of such an object, heavy as that price is. But what I do complain of is that my circumstances are to be worse, and Johnson’s none the better; that I am to give five pounds for what to him was not worth a farthing.

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Paradigm shifts explained

history, science, tech in changing society / /

From Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Imagining Abrupt Climate Change : Terraforming Earth” (Amazon Shorts: 31 July 2005):

… paradigm shifts are exciting moments in science’s ongoing project of self-improvement, making itself more accurately mapped to reality as it is discovered and teased out; this process of continual recalibration and improvement is one of the most admirable parts of science, which among other things is a most powerful and utopian set of mental habits; an attitude toward reality that I have no hesitation in labeling a kind of worship or devotion. And in this ongoing communal act of devotion, paradigm shifts are very good at revealing how science is conducted, in part because each one represents a little (or big) crisis of understanding.

As Thomas Kuhn described the process in his seminal book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, workers in the various branches of science build over time an interconnected construct of concepts and beliefs that allow them to interpret the data from their experiments, and fit them into a larger picture of the world that makes the best sense of the evidence at hand. What is hoped for is a picture that, if anyone else were to question it, and follow the train of reasoning and all the evidence used to support it, they too would agree with it. This is one of the ways science is interestingly utopian; it attempts to say things that everyone looking at the same evidence would agree to.

So, using this paradigm, always admitted to be a work in progress, scientists then conduct what Kuhn calls “normal science,” elucidating further aspects of reality by using the paradigm to structure their questions and their answers. Sometimes paradigms are useful for centuries; other times, for shorter periods. Then it often happens that scientists in the course of doing “normal science” begin to get evidence from the field that cannot be explained within the paradigm that has been established. At first such “anomalies” are regarded as suspect in themselves, precisely because they don’t fit the paradigm. They’re oddities, and something might be wrong with them as such. Thus they are ignored, or tossed aside, or viewed with suspicion, or in some other way bracketed off. Eventually, if enough of them pile up, and they seem similar in kind, or otherwise solid as observations, attempts might be made to explain them within the old paradigm, by tweaking or re-interpreting the paradigm itself, without actually throwing the paradigm out entirely.

For instance, when it was found that Newtonian laws of gravitation could not account for the speed of Mercury, which was moving a tiny bit faster than it ought to have been, even though Newton’s laws accounted for all the other planets extremely well, at first some astronomers suggested there might be another planet inside the orbit of Mercury, too close to the Sun for us to see. They even gave this potential planet a name, Vulcan; but they couldn’t see it, and calculations revealed that this hypothetical Vulcan still would not explain the discrepancy in Mercury’s motion. The discrepancy remained an anomaly, and was real enough and serious enough to cast the whole Newtonian paradigm into doubt among the small group of people who worried about it and wondered what could be causing it.

It was Einstein who then proposed that Mercury moved differently than predicted because spacetime itself curved around masses, and near the huge mass of the Sun the effect was large enough to be noticeable.

Whoah! This was a rather mind-bogglingly profound explanation for a little orbital discrepancy in Mercury; but Einstein also made a new prediction and suggested an experiment; if his explanation were correct, then light too would bend in the gravity well around the sun, and so the light of a star would appear from behind the sun a little bit before the astronomical tables said that it should. The proposed experiment presented some observational difficulties, but a few years later it was accomplished during a total eclipse of the sun, and the light of a certain star appeared before it ought to have by just the degree Einstein had predicted. And so Einstein’s concepts concerning spacetime began to be accepted and elaborated, eventually forming a big part of the paradigm known as the “standard model,” within which new kinds of “normal science” in physics and astronomy could be done. …

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The CIA’s ‘black sites’ hide terror suspects around the world

law, politics, security, tech in changing society / /

From Dana Priest’s “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons” (The Washington Post: 2 November 2005):

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country. …

Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad. …

Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency’s approach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay. …

It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA’s internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing. …

More than 100 suspected terrorists have been sent by the CIA into the covert system, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials and foreign sources. This figure, a rough estimate based on information from sources who said their knowledge of the numbers was incomplete, does not include prisoners picked up in Iraq.

The detainees break down roughly into two classes, the sources said.

About 30 are considered major terrorism suspects and have been held under the highest level of secrecy at black sites financed by the CIA and managed by agency personnel, including those in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, according to current and former intelligence officers and two other U.S. government officials. Two locations in this category — in Thailand and on the grounds of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay — were closed in 2003 and 2004, respectively.

A second tier — which these sources believe includes more than 70 detainees — is a group considered less important, with less direct involvement in terrorism and having limited intelligence value. These prisoners, some of whom were originally taken to black sites, are delivered to intelligence services in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Afghanistan and other countries, a process sometimes known as “rendition.” While the first-tier black sites are run by CIA officers, the jails in these countries are operated by the host nations, with CIA financial assistance and, sometimes, direction. …

The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being, said current and former and U.S. and foreign government and intelligence officials. …

Among the first steps was to figure out where the CIA could secretly hold the captives. One early idea was to keep them on ships in international waters, but that was discarded for security and logistics reasons.

CIA officers also searched for a setting like Alcatraz Island. They considered the virtually unvisited islands in Lake Kariba in Zambia, which were edged with craggy cliffs and covered in woods. But poor sanitary conditions could easily lead to fatal diseases, they decided, and besides, they wondered, could the Zambians be trusted with such a secret? …

The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was also the CIA’s substation and was first housed in an old brick factory outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officer allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death, according to four U.S. government officials. The CIA officer has not been charged in the death. …

The CIA program’s original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.

The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. “They’ve got many, many more who don’t reach any threshold,” one intelligence official said.

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What kinds of spam are effective?

security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Alex Mindlin’s “Seems Somebody Is Clicking on That Spam” (The New York Times: 3 July 2006):

Spam messages promoting pornography are 280 times as effective in getting recipients to click on them as messages advertising pharmacy drugs, which are the next most effective type of spam.

The third most successful variety is spam advertising Rolex watches, 0.0075 percent of which get clicked on, according to an analysis by CipherTrust, a large manufacturer of devices that protect networks from spam and viruses.

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NSA spying: Project Shamrock & Echelon

history, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Kim Zetter’s “The NSA is on the line — all of them” (Salon: 15 May 2006):

As fireworks showered New York Harbor [in 1976], the country was debating a three-decades-long agreement between Western Union and other telecommunications companies to surreptitiously supply the NSA, on a daily basis, with all telegrams sent to and from the United States. The similarity between that earlier program and the most recent one is remarkable, with one exception — the NSA now owns vastly improved technology to sift through and mine massive amounts of data it has collected in what is being described as the world’s single largest database of personal information. And, according to Aid, the mining goes far beyond our phone lines.

The controversy over Project Shamrock in 1976 ultimately led Congress to pass the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other privacy and communication laws designed to prevent commercial companies from working in cahoots with the government to conduct wholesale secret surveillance on their customers. But as stories revealed last week, those safeguards had little effect in preventing at least three telecommunications companies from repeating history. …

[Intelligence historian Matthew Aid] compared the agency’s current data mining to Project Shamrock and Echelon, the code name for an NSA computer system that for many years analyzed satellite communication signals outside the U.S., and generated its own controversy when critics claimed that in addition to eavesdropping on enemy communication, the satellites were eavesdropping on allies’ domestic phone and e-mail conversations. …

If you want some historical perspective look at Operation Shamrock, which collapsed in 1975 because [Rep.] Bella Abzug [D-NY] subpoenaed the heads of Western Union and the other telecommunications giants and put them in witness chairs, and they all admitted that they had cooperated with the NSA for the better part of 40 years by supplying cables and telegrams.

The newest system being added to the NSA infrastructure, by the way, is called Project Trailblazer, which was initiated in 2002 and which was supposed to go online about now but is fantastically over budget and way behind schedule. Trailblazer is designed to copy the new forms of telecommunications — fiber optic cable traffic, cellphone communication, BlackBerry and Internet e-mail traffic. …

Echelon, in fact, is nothing more than a VAX microcomputer that was manufactured in the early 1970s by Digital Equipment Corp., and was used at six satellite intercept stations [to filter and sort data collected from the satellites and distribute it to analysts]. The computer has long since been obsolete. Since 9/11, whatever plans in place to modernize Echelon have been put on hold. The NSA does in fact have a global intercept network, but they just call it the intercept collection infrastructure. They don’t have a code name or anything sexy to describe it, and it didn’t do domestic spying.

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OnStar: the numbers

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From PR Newswire’s “OnStar Achieves Another First as Winner of Good Housekeeping’s ‘Good Buy’ Award for Best Servic” (3 December 2004):

Each month on average, OnStar receives about 700 airbag notifications and 11,000 emergency assistance calls, which include 4,000 Good Samaritan calls for a variety of emergency situations. In addition, each month OnStar advisors respond to an average of 500 stolen vehicle location requests, 20,000 requests for roadside assistance, 36,000 remote door-unlock requests and 19,000 GM Goodwrench remote diagnostics requests.

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How to get 1 million MySpace friends

business, security, social software, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Nate Mook’s “Cross-Site Scripting Worm Hits MySpace” (Beta News: 13 October 2005):

One clever MySpace user looking to expand his buddy list recently figured out how to force others to become his friend, and ended up creating the first self-propagating cross-site scripting (XSS) worm. In less than 24 hours, “Samy” had amassed over 1 million friends on the popular online community.

How did Samy transcend his humble beginnings of only 73 friends to become a veritable global celebrity? The answer is a combination of XSS tricks and lax security in certain Web browsers.

First, by examining the restrictions put into place by MySpace, Samy discovered how to insert raw HTML into his user profile page. But MySpace stripped out the word “javascript” from any text, which would be needed to execute code.

With the help of Internet Explorer, Samy was able to break the word JavaScript into two lines and place script code within a Cascading Style Sheet tag.

The next step was to simply instruct the Web browser to load a MySpace URL that would automatically invite Samy as a friend, and later add him as a “hero” to the visitor’s own profile page. To do this without a user’s knowledge, the code utilized XMLHTTPRequest – a JavaScript object used in AJAX, or Web 2.0, applications such as Google Maps.

Taking the hack even further, Samy realized that he could simply insert the entire script into the visiting user’s profile, creating a replicating worm. “So if 5 people viewed my profile, that’s 5 new friends. If 5 people viewed each of their profiles, that’s 25 more new friends,” Samy explained.

It didn’t take long for friend requests to start rolling in – first in the hundreds, then thousands. By 9:30pm that night, requests topped one million and continued arriving at a rate of 1,000 every few seconds. Less than an hour later, MySpace was taken offline while the worm was removed from all user profiles.

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California’s wide-open educational software reveals personal info

education, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Nanette Asimov’s “Software glitch reveals private data for thousands of state’s students” (San Francisco Chronicle: 21 October 2005):

The personal information of tens of thousands of California children — including their names, state achievement test scores, identification numbers and status in gifted or special-needs programs — is open to public view through a security loophole in dozens of school districts statewide that use a popular education software system.

Teacher names and employee identification numbers are also visible to anyone logging onto the system, which is used locally by school districts including San Francisco, San Jose and Hayward.

The problem occurs when the districts issue a generic password to teachers using the system. Until the teacher changes to a unique password, anyone can type in a teacher’s user name and generic password and gain access to information about students that is supposed to be guarded as closely as the gold in Fort Knox. …

San Francisco administrators immediately shut down access to the service, called OARS — Online Assessment Reporting System — after a reporter phoned and said she had been able to access student information for all the children in two middle-school classes where the teachers had not yet changed their passwords. …

Most of the 96 districts statewide that use the system are in Southern California and the Central Valley. …

“We have confidence in the professionalism of our teachers” not to share their passwords, Bradshaw said.

But told how simple it was to gain access to the student records of any teacher who had not yet changed to a unique password, the administrators said they planned to make sure teachers did so.

“We will definitely monitor that,” Quinn said. “We don’t want anyone getting into student information.”

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The feeling of being watched causes greater honesty

commonplace book, security, tech in changing society / /

From “Big Brother eyes ‘boost honesty’” (BBC News: 28 June 2006):

The feeling of being watched makes people act more honestly, even if the eyes are not real, a study suggests.

A Newcastle University team monitored how much money people put in a canteen “honesty box” when buying a drink.

They found people put nearly three times as much in when a poster of a pair of eyes was put above the box than when the poster showed flowers.

The brain responds to images of eyes and faces and the poster may have given the feeling of being watched, they say. …

Dr Melissa Bateson, a behavioural biologist from Newcastle University and the lead author of the study, said: “We found that people paid 2.76 times as much money when we put a notice on the wall that featured a pair of eyes as opposed to when the image was of some flowers.”

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Microsoft: only way to deal with malware is to wipe the computer

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From Ryan Naraine’s “Microsoft Says Recovery from Malware Becoming Impossible” (eWeek: 4 April 2006):

In a rare discussion about the severity of the Windows malware scourge, a Microsoft security official said businesses should consider investing in an automated process to wipe hard drives and reinstall operating systems as a practical way to recover from malware infestation.

“When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit,” Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft, said in a presentation at the InfoSec World conference here.

Offensive rootkits, which are used hide malware programs and maintain an undetectable presence on an infected machine, have become the weapon of choice for virus and spyware writers and, because they often use kernel hooks to avoid detection, Danseglio said IT administrators may never know if all traces of a rootkit have been successfully removed.

He cited a recent instance where an unnamed branch of the U.S. government struggled with malware infestations on more than 2,000 client machines. “In that case, it was so severe that trying to recover was meaningless. They did not have an automated process to wipe and rebuild the systems, so it became a burden. They had to design a process real fast,” Danseglio added.

… “We’ve seen the self-healing malware that actually detects that you’re trying to get rid of it. You remove it, and the next time you look in that directory, it’s sitting there. It can simply reinstall itself,” he said.

“Detection is difficult, and remediation is often impossible,” Danseglio declared. “If it doesn’t crash your system or cause your system to freeze, how do you know it’s there? The answer is you just don’t know. Lots of times, you never see the infection occur in real time, and you don’t see the malware lingering or running in the background.”

… Danseglio said the success of social engineering attacks is a sign that the weakest link in malware defense is “human stupidity.”

“Social engineering is a very, very effective technique. We have statistics that show significant infection rates for the social engineering malware. Phishing is a major problem because there really is no patch for human stupidity,” he said.

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Why the color-coded threat alert system fails

politics, security, tech in changing society / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “Color-Coded Terrorist Threat Levels” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 January 2004):

The color-coded threat alerts issued by the Department of Homeland Security are useless today, but may become useful in the future. The U.S. military has a similar system; DEFCON 1-5 corresponds to the five threat alerts levels: Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, and Red. The difference is that the DEFCON system is tied to particular procedures; military units have specific actions they need to perform every time the DEFCON level goes up or down. The color-alert system, on the other hand, is not tied to any specific actions. People are left to worry, or are given nonsensical instructions to buy plastic sheeting and duct tape. Even local police departments and government organizations largely have no idea what to do when the threat level changes. The threat levels actually do more harm than good, by needlessly creating fear and confusion (which is an objective of terrorists) and anesthetizing people to future alerts and warnings. If the color-alert system became something better defined, so that people know exactly what caused the levels to change, what the change means, and what actions they need to take in the event of a change, then it could be useful. But even then, the real measure of effectiveness is in the implementation. Terrorist attacks are rare, and if the color-threat level changes willy-nilly with no obvious cause or effect, then people will simply stop paying attention. And the threat levels are publicly known, so any terrorist with a lick of sense will simply wait until the threat level goes down.”

Living under Orange reinforces this. It didn’t mean anything. Tom Ridge’s admonition that Americans “be alert, but go about their business” reinforces this; it’s nonsensical advice. I saw little that could be considered a good security trade-off, and a lot of draconian security measures and security theater.

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A big benefit of open source: better learning & teaching

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From Jon Udell’s “Open source education” (InfoWorld: 7 June 2006):

Open source software development, to a degree unmatched by any other modern profession, offers apprentices the opportunity to watch journeymen and masters at work, to interact with them, and to learn how they think, work, succeed, and fail. Transparency and accountability govern not only the production of source code but also the companion processes of design, specification, testing, maintenance, and evaluation. …

It’s typical of many professions to cultivate an aura of infallibility and monopoly control of information. Open source doesn’t work that way. There are prima donnas, to be sure, but the culture requires practitioners to show their cards, and it erodes information monopolies. Shared code is just the tip of the iceberg. Below the waterline, there’s a vast body of shared knowledge and tradition, grounded in what Tim O’Reilly calls an architecture of participation.

We’ve come to see open source as an economic innovation. Cooperative production of commodity infrastructure paves the way for competitive production of high-value products and services. Perhaps we’ll someday see open source as an educational innovation, too. Cooperative production of shared knowledge isn’t just a by-product. When apprentices, journeymen, and masters engage in a continuous cycle of learning and teaching, an old approach to education is made new again.

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‘Thomas Crown Affair! Thomas Crown Affair!’

commonplace book, security, tech in changing society / /

From Improv Everywhere’s “Missions: Best Buy” (23 April 2006):

Agent Slavinsky wrote in to suggest I get either a large group of people in blue polo shirts and khakis to enter a Best Buy or a group in red polo shirts and khakis to enter a Target. Wearing clothing almost identical to the store’s uniform, the agents would not claim to work at the store but would be friendly and helpful if anyone had a question. There aren’t any Targets in Manhattan, so I decided to go with the two-story Best Buy on 23rd Street. …

We met at Union Square North at 3:30 PM. Around 80 agents showed up, most them looking like wonderful Best Buy employees. …

The reaction from the employees was pretty typical as far as our missions go. The lower level employees laughed and got a kick out of it while the managers and security guards freaked out. …

Security guards and managers started talking to each other frantically on their walkie-talkies and headsets. “Thomas Crown Affair! Thomas Crown Affair!,” one employee shouted. They were worried that were using our fake uniforms to stage some type of elaborate heist. “I want every available employee out on the floor RIGHT NOW!”

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Checking papers does no good if the papers are forged

security, tech in changing society / /

From Bruce Schneier’s “News” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 April 2006):

Undercover investigators were able to smuggle radioactive materials into the U.S. It set off alarms at border checkpoints, but the smugglers had forged import licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, based on an image of the real document they found on the Internet. Unfortunately, the border agents had no way to confirm the validity of import licenses. I’ve written about this problem before, and it’s one I think will get worse in the future. Verification systems are often the weakest link of authentication. Improving authentication tokens won’t improve security unless the verification systems improve as well.

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Spy on no-good boss and lose your job

business, security, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Melissa Meagher’s “State Worker Spies on Boss, Loses His Job“:

For 22 years, [Vernon] Blake was a System Administrator for the Alabama Department of Transportation. It was a job he loved, with the exception of his supervisor. …

The running joke around the office? The boss blew off meetings and projects to play games on his computer. Cartoons secretly circled The Right of Way Bureau, jabbing at George Dobbs’ Solitaire habit. Dobbs is a 24-year veteran with the DOT and rakes in $67,000 a year. …

Without proof, Blake felt his accusations would get him nowhere. That’s when he turned to Win-Spy, a free version of spy ware, to tap his boss’s computer.

“My motive was to document well known behavior that already existed.”

For seven months, at random times of the day, the software captured pictures of Dobbs’ computer screen. …

Here’s what he found. Blake says less than 10% of his boss’s computer time, documented by Win-Spy, was spent working. Twenty-percent was spent checking the stock market. And 70% of what the spy ware recorded was the game of Solitaire. …

But DOT didn’t see it that way. When Blake showed them what he found, he was fired. His supervisor got a letter of reprimand, stating “It was brought to the Department’s attention you spent a significant amount of time playing video games… but your work ethic and production are above reproach.” …

It’s worth noting after Blake lost his job, DOT had all computer games, including Solitaire, removed from its system.

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