business

Three top botnets

business, security / /

From Kelly Jackson Higgins’ “The World’s Biggest Botnets” (Dark Reading: 9 November 2007):

You know about the Storm Trojan, which is spread by the world’s largest botnet. But what you may not know is there’s now a new peer-to-peer based botnet emerging that could blow Storm away.

“We’re investigating a new peer-to-peer botnet that may wind up rivaling Storm in size and sophistication,” says Tripp Cox, vice president of engineering for startup Damballa, which tracks botnet command and control infrastructures. “We can’t say much more about it, but we can tell it’s distinct from Storm.”

…

Researchers estimate that there are thousands of botnets in operation today, but only a handful stand out by their sheer size and pervasiveness. Although size gives a botnet muscle and breadth, it can also make it too conspicuous, which is why botnets like Storm fluctuate in size and are constantly finding new ways to cover their tracks to avoid detection. Researchers have different head counts for different botnets, with Storm by far the largest (for now, anyway).

Damballa says its top three botnets are Storm, with 230,000 active members per 24 hour period; Rbot, an IRC-based botnet with 40,000 active members per 24 hour period; and Bobax, an HTTP-based botnet with 24,000 active members per 24 hour period, according to the company.

…

1. Storm

Size: 230,000 active members per 24 hour period

Type: peer-to-peer

Purpose: Spam, DDOS

Malware: Trojan.Peacomm (aka Nuwar)

Few researchers can agree on Storm’s actual size — while Damballa says its over 200,000 bots, Trend Micro says its more like 40,000 to 100,000 today. But all researchers say that Storm is a whole new brand of botnet. First, it uses encrypted decentralized, peer-to-peer communication, unlike the traditional centralized IRC model. That makes it tough to kill because you can’t necessarily shut down its command and control machines. And intercepting Storm’s traffic requires cracking the encrypted data.

…

Storm also uses fast-flux, a round-robin method where infected bot machines (typically home computers) serve as proxies or hosts for malicious Websites. These are constantly rotated, changing their DNS records to prevent their discovery by researchers, ISPs, or law enforcement. And researchers say it’s tough to tell how the command and control communication structure is set up behind the P2P botnet. “Nobody knows how the mother ships are generating their C&C,” Trend Micro’s Ferguson says.

Storm uses a complex combination of malware called Peacomm that includes a worm, rootkit, spam relay, and Trojan.

…

But researchers don’t know — or can’t say — who exactly is behind Storm, except that it’s likely a fairly small, tightly knit group with a clear business plan. “All roads lead back to Russia,” Trend Micro’s Ferguson says.

“Storm is only thing now that keeps me awake at night and busy,” he says. “It’s professionalized crimeware… They have young, talented programmers apparently. And they write tools to do administrative [tracking], as well as writing cryptographic routines… and another will handle social engineering, and another will write the Trojan downloader, and another is writing the rootkit.”

…

Rbot

Size: 40,000 active members per 24 hour period

Type: IRC

Purpose: DDOS, spam, malicious operations

Malware: Windows worm

Rbot is basically an old-school IRC botnet that uses the Rbot malware kit. It isn’t likely to ever reach Storm size because IRC botnets just can’t scale accordingly. “An IRC server has to be a beefy machine to support anything anywhere close to the size of Peacomm/Storm,” Damballa’s Cox says.

…

It can disable antivirus software, too. Rbot’s underlying malware uses a backdoor to gain control of the infected machine, installing keyloggers, viruses, and even stealing files from the machine, as well as the usual spam and DDOS attacks.

…

Bobax

Size: 24,000 active members per 24 hour period

Type: HTTP

Purpose: Spam

Malware: Mass-mailing worm

…

Bobax is specifically for spamming, Cox says, and uses the stealthier HTTP for sending instructions to its bots on who and what to spam. …

According to Symantec, Bobax bores open a back door and downloads files onto the infected machine, and lowers its security settings. It spreads via a buffer overflow vulnerability in Windows, and inserts the spam code into the IE browser so that each time the browser runs, the virus is activated. And Bobax also does some reconnaissance to ensure that its spam runs are efficient: It can do bandwidth and network analysis to determine just how much spam it can send, according to Damballa. “Thus [they] are able to tailor their spamming so as not to tax the network, which helps them avoid detection,” according to company research.

Even more frightening, though, is that some Bobax variants can block access to antivirus and security vendor Websites, a new trend in Website exploitation.

Three top botnets Read More »

Largest botnet as of 2006: 1.5 M machines

business, security / /

From Gregg Keizer’s “Dutch Botnet Bigger Than Expected” (InformationWeek: 21 October 2005):

Dutch prosecutors who last month arrested a trio of young men for creating a large botnet allegedly used to extort a U.S. company, steal identities, and distribute spyware now say they bagged bigger prey: a botnet of 1.5 million machines.

According to Wim de Bruin, a spokesman for the Public Prosecution Service (Openbaar Ministerie, or OM), when investigators at GOVCERT.NL, the Netherlands’ Computer Emergency Response Team, and several Internet service providers began dismantling the botnet, they discovered it consisted of about 1.5 million compromised computers, 15 times the 100,000 PCs first thought.

…

The three suspects, ages 19, 22, and 27, were arrested Oct. 6 …

The trio supposedly used the Toxbot Trojan horse to infect the vast number of machines, easily the largest controlled by arrested attackers.

Largest botnet as of 2006: 1.5 M machines Read More »

Why botnet operators do it: profit, politics, & prestige

business, security / /

From Clive Akass’ “Storm worm ‘making millions a day’” (Personal Computer World: 11 February 2008):

The people behind the Storm worm are making millions of pounds a day by using it to generate revenue, according to IBM’s principal web security strategist.

Joshua Corman, of IBM Internet Security Systems, said that in the past it had been assumed that web security attacks were essential ego driven. But now attackers fell in three camps.

‘I call them my three Ps, profit, politics and prestige,’ he said during a debate at a NetEvents forum in Barcelona.

The Storm worm, which had been around about a year, had been a tremendous financial success because it created a botnet of compromised machines that could be used to launch profitable spam attacks.

Not only do the criminals get money simply for sending out the spam in much more quantity than could be sent by a single machine but they get a cut of any business done off the spam.

Why botnet operators do it: profit, politics, & prestige Read More »

Srizbi, Bobax, & Storm – the rankings

business, security / /

From Gregg Keizer’s “RSA – Top botnets control 1M hijacked computers” (Computerworld: 4 October 2008):

Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, presented his survey at the RSA Conference, which opened Monday in San Francisco. The survey ranked the top 11 botnets that send spam; by extrapolating their size, Stewart estimated the bots on his list control just over a million machines and are capable of flooding the Internet with more than 100 billion spam messages every day.

The botnet at the top of the chart is Srizbi. According to Stewart, this botnet — which also goes by the names “Cbeplay” and “Exchanger” — has an estimated 315,000 bots and can blast out 60 billion messages a day.

While it may not have gotten the publicity that Storm has during the last year, it’s built around a much more substantial collection of hijacked computers, said Stewart. In comparison, Storm’s botnet counts just 85,000 machines, only 35,000 of which are set up to send spam. Storm, in fact, is No. 5 on Stewart’s list.

“Storm is pretty insignificant at this point,” said Stewart. “It got all this attention, so Microsoft added it to its malicious software detection tool [in September 2007], and that’s removed hundreds of thousands of compromised PCs from the botnet.”

The second-largest botnet is “Bobax,” which boasts an estimated 185,000 hacked systems in its collection. Able to spam approximately nine billion messages a day, Bobax has been around for some time, but recently has been in the news again, albeit under one of its several aliases.

Srizbi, Bobax, & Storm – the rankings Read More »

1/4 of all Internet computers part of a botnet?

business, security / /

From Nate Anderson’s “Vint Cerf: one quarter of all computers part of a botnet” (Ars Technica: 25 January 2007):

The BBC’s Tim Weber, who was in the audience of an Internet panel featuring Vint Cerf, Michael Dell, John Markoff of the New York Times, and Jon Zittrain of Oxford, came away most impressed by the botnet statistics. Cerf told his listeners that approximately 600 million computers are connected to the Internet, and that 150 million of them might be participants in a botnet—nearly all of them unwilling victims. Weber remarks that “in most cases the owners of these computers have not the slightest idea what their little beige friend in the study is up to.”

…

In September 2006, security research firm Arbor Networks announced that it was now seeing botnet-based denial of service attacks capable of generating an astonishing 10-20Gbps of junk data. The company notes that when major attacks of this sort began, ISPs often do exactly what the attacker wants them to do: take the target site offline.

1/4 of all Internet computers part of a botnet? Read More »

Prices for various services and software in the underground

business, security / /

From Tom Espiner’s “Cracking open the cybercrime economy” (CNET News: 14 December 2007):

“Over the years, the criminal elements, the ones who are making money, making millions out of all this online crime, are just getting stronger and stronger. I don’t think we are really winning this war.”

As director of antivirus research for F-Secure, you might expect Mikko Hypponen to overplay the seriousness of the situation. But according to the Finnish company, during 2007 the number of samples of malicious code on its database doubled, having taken 20 years to reach the size it was at the beginning of this year.

…

“From Trojan creation sites out of Germany and the Eastern bloc, you can purchase kits and support for malware in yearly contracts,” said [David Marcus, security research manager at McAfee Avert Labs]. “They present themselves as a cottage industry which sells tools or creation kits. It’s hard to tell if it’s a conspiracy or a bunch of autonomous individuals who are good at covering their tracks.”

…

Joe Telafici, director of operations at McAfee’s Avert Labs, said Storm is continuing to evolve. “We’ve seen periodic activity from Storm indicating that it is still actively being maintained. They have actually ripped out core pieces of functionality to modify the obfuscation mechanisms that weren’t working any more. Most people keep changing the wrapper until it gets by (security software)–these guys changed the functionality.”

…

Peter Gutmann, a security researcher at the University of Auckland, says in a report that malicious software via the affiliate model–in which someone pays others to infect users with spyware and Trojans–has become more prevalent in 2007.

The affiliate model was pioneered by the iframedollars.biz site in 2005, which paid Webmasters 6 cents per infected site. Since then, this has been extended to a “vast number of adware affiliates,” according to Gutmann. For example, one adware supplier pays 30 cents for each install in the United States, 20 cents in Canada, 10 cents in the United Kingdom, and 1 or 2 cents elsewhere.

Hackers also piggyback malicious software on legitimate software. According to Gutmann, versions of coolwebsearch co-install a mail zombie and a keystroke logger, while some peer-to-peer and file-sharing applications come with bundled adware and spyware.

…

In March, the price quoted on malware sites for the Gozi Trojan, which steals data and sends it to hackers in an encrypted form, was between $1,000 and $2,000 for the basic version. Buyers could purchase add-on services at varying prices starting at $20.

In the 2007 black economy, everything can be outsourced, according to Gutmann. A scammer can buy hosts for a phishing site, buy spam services to lure victims, buy drops to send the money to, and pay a cashier to cash out the accounts. …

Antidetection vendors sell services to malicious-software and botnet vendors, who sell stolen credit card data to middlemen. Those middlemen then sell that information to fraudsters who deal in stolen credit card data and pay a premium for verifiably active accounts. “The money seems to be in the middlemen,” Gutmann says.

One example of this is the Gozi Trojan. According to reports, the malware was available this summer as a service from iFrameBiz and stat482.com, who bought the Trojan from the HangUp team, a group of Russian hackers. The Trojan server was managed by 76service.com, and hosted by the Russian Business Network, which security vendors allege offered “bullet-proof” hosting for phishing sites and other illicit operations.

According to Gutmann, there are many independent malicious-software developers selling their wares online. Private releases can be tailored to individual clients, while vendors offer support services, often bundling antidetection. For example, the private edition of Hav-rat version 1.2, a Trojan written by hacker Havalito, is advertised as being completely undetectable by antivirus companies. If it does get detected then it will be replaced with a new copy that again is supposedly undetectable.

Hackers can buy denial-of-service attacks for $100 per day, while spammers can buy CDs with harvested e-mail addresses. Spammers can also send mail via spam brokers, handled via online forums such as specialham.com and spamforum.biz. In this environment, $1 buys 1,000 to 5,000 credits, while $1,000 buys 10,000 compromised PCs. Credit is deducted when the spam is accepted by the target mail server. The brokers handle spam distribution via open proxies, relays and compromised PCs, while the sending is usually done from the client’s PC using broker-provided software and control information.

…

Carders, who mainly deal in stolen credit card details, openly publish prices, or engage in private negotiations to decide the price, with some sources giving bulk discounts for larger purchases. The rate for credit card details is approximately $1 for all the details down to the Card Verification Value (CVV); $10 for details with CVV linked to a Social Security number; and $50 for a full bank account.

Prices for various services and software in the underground Read More »

Criminals working together to improve their tools

business, security / /

From Dan Goodin’s “Crimeware giants form botnet tag team” (The Register: 5 September 2008):

The Rock Phish gang – one of the net’s most notorious phishing outfits – has teamed up with another criminal heavyweight called Asprox in overhauling its network with state-of-the-art technology, according to researchers from RSA.

Over the past five months, Rock Phishers have painstakingly refurbished their infrastructure, introducing several sophisticated crimeware packages that get silently installed on the PCs of its victims. One of those programs makes infected machines part of a fast-flux botnet that adds reliability and resiliency to the Rock Phish network.

…

Based in Europe, the Rock Phish group is a criminal collective that has been targeting banks and other financial institutions since 2004. According to RSA, they are responsible for half of the worldwide phishing attacks and have siphoned tens of millions of dollars from individuals’ bank accounts. The group got its name from a now discontinued quirk in which the phishers used directory paths that contained the word “rock.”

The first sign the group was expanding operations came in April, when it introduced a trojan known alternately as Zeus or WSNPOEM, which steals sensitive financial information in transit from a victim’s machine to a bank. Shortly afterward, the gang added more crimeware, including a custom-made botnet client that was spread, among other means, using the Neosploit infection kit.

…

Soon, additional signs appeared pointing to a partnership between Rock Phishers and Asprox. Most notably, the command and control server for the custom Rock Phish crimeware had exactly the same directory structure of many of the Asprox servers, leading RSA researchers to believe Rock Phish and Asprox attacks were using at least one common server. …

RSA researchers also noticed that a decrease in phishing attacks hosted on Rock Phishers’ old servers coincided with never-before-seen phishing attacks used on the Asprox botnet.

…

In this case, Rock Phishers seem to be betting that the spoofed pages used in their phishing attacks will remain up longer using fast-flux technology from Asprox.

“It just shows that these guys know each other and are willing to provide services to each other,” said Joe Stewart, a researcher at SecureWorks who has spent years tracking Asprox and groups that use fast-flux botnets. “This goes on in the underground all the time.”

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Old botnets dead; new botnets coming

business, security / /

From Joel Hruska’s “Meet Son of Storm, Srizbi 2.0: next-gen botnets come online” (Ars Technica: 15 January 2009):

First the good news: SecureWorks reports that Storm is dead, Bobax/Kraken is moribund, and both Srizbi and Rustock were heavily damaged by the McColo takedown; Srizbi is now all but silent, while Rustock remains viable. That’s three significant botnets taken out and one damaged in a single year; cue (genuine) applause.

The bad news kicks in further down the page with a fresh list of botnets what need to be watched. Rustock and Mega-D (also known as Ozdok) are still alive and kicking, while newcomers Xarvester and Waledac could cause serious problems in 2009. Xarvester, according to Marshal may be an updated form of Srizbi; the two share a number of common features, including:

* HTTP command and control over nonstandard ports
* Encrypted template files contain several files needed for spamming
* Bots don’t need to do their own DNS lookups to send spam
* Config files have similar format and data
* Uploads Minidump crash file

Old botnets dead; new botnets coming Read More »

A definition of cloud computing

business, technology / /

From Darryl K. Taft’s “Predictions for the Cloud in 2009” (eWeek: 29 December 2008):

[Peter] Coffee, who is now director of platform research at Salesforce.com, said, “I’m currently using a simple reference model for what a ‘cloud computing’ initiative should try to provide. I’m borrowing from the famous Zero-One-Infinity rule, canonically defined in The Jargon File…”

He continued, “It seems to me that a serious effort at delivering cloud benefits pursues the following ideals—perhaps never quite reaching them, but clearly having them as goals within theoretical possibility: Zero—On-premise[s] infrastructure, acquisition cost, adoption cost and support cost. One—Coherent software environment—not a ‘stack’ of multiple products from different providers. This avoids the chaos of uncoordinated release cycles or deferred upgrades. Infinity—Scalability in response to changing need, integratability/interoperability with legacy assets and other services, and customizability/programmability from data, through logic, up into the user interface without compromising robust multitenancy.”

A definition of cloud computing Read More »

Social networks can be used to manipulate affinity groups

business, law, religion, security, tech in changing society / /

From Ronald A. Cass’ “Madoff Exploited the Jews” (The Wall Street Journal: 18 December 2008):

Steven Spielberg. Elie Wiesel. Mort Zuckerman. Frank Lautenberg. Yeshiva University. As I read the list of people and enterprises reportedly bilked to the tune of $50 billion by Bernard Madoff, I recalled a childhood in which my father received bad news by asking first, “Was it a Jew?” My father coupled sensitivity to anti-Semitism with special sympathy for other Jews. In contrast, Mr. Madoff, it seems, targeted other Jews, drawing them in at least in some measure because of a shared faith.

The Madoff tale is striking in part because it is like stealing from family. Yet frauds that prey on people who share bonds of religion or ethnicity, who travel in the same circles, are quite common. Two years ago the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a warning about “affinity fraud.” The SEC ticked off a series of examples of schemes that were directed at members of a community: Armenian-Americans, Baptist Church members, Jehovah’s Witnesses, African-American church groups, Korean-Americans. In each case, the perpetrator relied on the fact that being from the same community provided a reason to trust the sales pitch, to believe it was plausible that someone from the same background would give you a deal that, if offered by someone without such ties, would sound too good to be true.

The sense of common heritage, of community, also makes it less seemly to ask hard questions. Pressing a fellow parishioner or club member for hard information is like demanding receipts from your aunt — it just doesn’t feel right. Hucksters know that, they play on it, and they count on our trust to make their confidence games work.

The level of affinity and of trust may be especially high among Jews. The Holocaust and generations of anti-Semitic laws and practices around the world made reliance on other Jews, and care for them, a survival instinct. As a result, Jews are often an easy target both for fund-raising appeals and fraud. But affinity plays a role in many groups, making members more trusting of appeals within the group.

Social networks can be used to manipulate affinity groups Read More »

DIY genetic engineering

business, education, science, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Marcus Wohlsen’s “Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home” (AP: 25 December 2008):

Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself.

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.

In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.

…

Many of these amateurs may have studied biology in college but have no advanced degrees and are not earning a living in the biotechnology field. Some proudly call themselves “biohackers” — innovators who push technological boundaries and put the spread of knowledge before profits.

In Cambridge, Mass., a group called DIYbio is setting up a community lab where the public could use chemicals and lab equipment, including a used freezer, scored for free off Craigslist, that drops to 80 degrees below zero, the temperature needed to keep many kinds of bacteria alive.

…

Patterson, the computer programmer, wants to insert the gene for fluorescence into yogurt bacteria, applying techniques developed in the 1970s.

She learned about genetic engineering by reading scientific papers and getting tips from online forums. She ordered jellyfish DNA for a green fluorescent protein from a biological supply company for less than $100. And she built her own lab equipment, including a gel electrophoresis chamber, or DNA analyzer, which she constructed for less than $25, versus more than $200 for a low-end off-the-shelf model.

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Many layers of cloud computing, or just one?

business, tech in changing society, technology / /

From Nicholas Carr’s “Further musings on the network effect and the cloud” (Rough Type: 27 October 2008):

I think O’Reilly did a nice job of identifying the different layers of the cloud computing business – infrastructure, development platform, applications – and I think he’s right that they’ll have different economic and competitive characteristics. One thing we don’t know yet, though, is whether those layers will in the long run exist as separate industry sectors or whether they’ll collapse into a single supply model. In other words, will the infrastructure suppliers also come to dominate the supply of apps? Google and Microsoft are obviously trying to play across all three layers, while Amazon so far seems content to focus on the infrastructure business and Salesforce is expanding from the apps layer to the development platform layer. The degree to which the layers remain, or don’t remain, discrete business sectors will play a huge role in determining the ultimate shape, economics, and degree of consolidation in cloud computing.

Let me end on a speculative note: There’s one layer in the cloud that O’Reilly failed to mention, and that layer is actually on top of the application layer. It’s what I’ll call the device layer – encompassing all the various appliances people will use to tap the cloud – and it may ultimately come to be the most interesting layer. A hundred years ago, when Tesla, Westinghouse, Insull, and others were building the cloud of that time – the electric grid – companies viewed the effort in terms of the inputs to their business: in particular, the power they needed to run the machines that produced the goods they sold. But the real revolutionary aspect of the electric grid was not the way it changed business inputs – though that was indeed dramatic – but the way it changed business outputs. After the grid was built, we saw an avalanche of new products outfitted with electric cords, many of which were inconceivable before the grid’s arrival. The real fortunes were made by those companies that thought most creatively about the devices that consumers would plug into the grid. Today, we’re already seeing hints of the device layer – of the cloud as output rather than input. Look at the way, for instance, that the little old iPod has shaped the digital music cloud.

Many layers of cloud computing, or just one? Read More »

Business models for software

business, technology / /

From Brian D’s “The benefits of a monthly recurring revenue model in tough economic times” (37 Signals: 18 December 2008):

At 37signals we sell our web-based products using the monthly subscription model. We also give people a 30-day free trial up front before we bill them for their first month.

We think this model works best all the time, but we believe it works especially well in tough times. When times get tough people obviously look to spend less, but understanding how they spend less has a lot to do with which business models work better than others.

There are lots of business models for software. Here are a few of the most popular:

* Freeware
* Freeware, ad supported
* One-off pay up front, get upgrades free
* One-off pay up front, pay for upgrades
* Subscription (recurring annual)
* Subscription (recurring monthly)

Business models for software Read More »

How the Storm botnet defeats anti-virus programs

business, security, tech in changing society / /

From Lisa Vaas’ “Storm Worm Botnet Lobotomizing Anti-Virus Programs” (eWeek: 24 October 2007):

According to an Oct. 22 posting by Sophos analyst Richard Cohen, the Storm botnet – Sophos calls it Dorf, and its also known as Ecard malware – is dropping files that call a routine that gets Windows to tell it every time a new process is started. The malware checks the process file name against an internal list and kills the ones that match – sometimes. But Storm has taken a new twist: It now would rather leave processes running and just patch entry points of loading processes that might pose a threat to it. Then, when processes such as anti-virus programs run, they simply return a value of 0.

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The strategy means that users wont be alarmed by their anti-virus software not running. Even more ominously, the technique is designed to fool NAC (network access control) systems, which bar insecure clients from registering on a network by checking to see whether a client is running anti-virus software and whether its patched.

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Its the latest evidence of why Storm is “the scariest and most substantial threat” security researchers have ever seen, he said. Storm is patient, its resilient, its adaptive in that it can defeat anti-virus products in multiple ways (programmatically, it changes its signature every 30 minutes), its invisible because it comes with a rootkit built in and hides at the kernel level, and its clever enough to change every few weeks.

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Hence the hush-hush nature of research around Storm. Corman said he can tell us that its now accurately pegged at 6 million, but he cant tell us who came up with the figure, or how. Besides retribution, Storms ability to morph means that those who know how to watch it are jealously guarding their techniques. “None of the researchers wanted me to say anything about it,” Corman said. “They’re afraid of retaliation. They fear that if we disclose their unique means of finding information on Storm,” the botnet herder will change tactics yet again and the window into Storm will slam shut.

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But we’ve always done it this way …

business, politics / /

From James Bennett’s “Let’s talk about Python 3.0” (The B-List: 5 December 2008):

There’s an old joke, so old that I don’t even know for certain where it originated, that’s often used to explain why big corporations do things the way they do. It involves some monkeys, a cage, a banana and a fire hose.

You build a nice big room-sized cage, and in one end of it you put five monkeys. In the other end you put the banana. Then you stand by with the fire hose. Sooner or later one of the monkeys is going to go after the banana, and when it does you turn on the fire hose and spray the other monkeys with it. Replace the banana if needed, then repeat the process. Monkeys are pretty smart, so they’ll figure this out pretty quickly: “If anybody goes for the banana, the rest of us get the hose.” Soon they’ll attack any member of their group who tries to go to the banana.

Once this happens, you take one monkey out of the cage and bring in a new one. The new monkey will come in, try to make friends, then probably go for the banana. And the other monkeys, knowing what this means, will attack him to stop you from using the hose on them. Eventually the new monkey will get the message, and will even start joining in on the attack if somebody else goes for the banana. Once this happens, take another of the original monkeys out of the cage and bring in another new monkey.

After repeating this a few times, there will come a moment when none of the monkeys in the cage have ever been sprayed by the fire hose; in fact, they’ll never even have seen the hose. But they’ll attack any monkey who goes to get the banana. If the monkeys could speak English, and if you could ask them why they attack anyone who goes for the banana, their answer would almost certainly be: “Well, I don’t really know, but that’s how we’ve always done things around here.”

This is a startlingly good analogy for the way lots of corporations do things: once a particular process is entrenched (and especially after a couple rounds of employee turnover), there’s nobody left who remembers why the company does things this way. There’s nobody who stops to think about whether this is still a good way to do things, or whether it was even a good idea way back at the beginning. The process continues through nothing more than inertia, and anyone who suggests a change is likely to end up viciously attacked by monkeys.

But this is also a really good analogy for the way a lot of software works: a function or a class or a library was written, once upon a time, and maybe at the time it was a good idea. Maybe now it’s not such a good idea, and actually causes more problems than it solves, but hey, that’s the way we’ve always done things around here, and who are you to suggest a change? Should I go get the fire hose?

But we’ve always done it this way … Read More »

One group files 99.9% of all complaints about TV content

business, language & literature, law, politics, tech in changing society / /

From Christopher M. Fairman’s “Fuck” (bepress Legal Series: 7 March 2006):

The PTC [Parents Television Council] is a perfect example of the way word taboo is perpetuated. The group’s own irrational word fetish – which they try to then impose on others – fuels unhealthy attitudes toward sex that then furthers the taboo status of the word. See supra notes 119-121 and accompanying text (describing this taboo effect). The PTC has even created a pull-down, web-based form that allows people to file an instant complaint with the FCC about specific broadcasts, apparently without regard to whether you actually saw the program or not. See, e.g., FCC Indecency Complaint Form, https://www.parentstv.org/ptc/action/sweeps/main.asp (last visited Feb. 10, 2006) (allowing instant complaints to be filed against episodes of NCIS, Family Guy, and/or The Vibe Awards). This squeaky wheel of a special interest group literally dominates FCC complaints. Consider this data. In 2003, the PTC was responsible for filing 99.86% of all indecency complaints. In 2004, the figure was up to 99.9%.

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CopyBot copies all sorts of items in Second Life

art, business, history, security, tech in changing society / /

From Glyn Moody’s “The duplicitous inhabitants of Second Life” (The Guardian: 23 November 2006):

What would happen to business and society if you could easily make a copy of anything – not just MP3s and DVDs, but clothes, chairs and even houses? That may not be a problem most of us will have to confront for a while yet, but the 1.5m residents of the virtual world Second Life are already grappling with this issue.

A new program called CopyBot allows Second Life users to duplicate repeatedly certain elements of any object in the vicinity – and sometimes all of it. That’s awkward in a world where such virtual goods can be sold for real money. When CopyBot first appeared, some retailers in Second Life shut up shop, convinced that their virtual goods were about to be endlessly copied and rendered worthless. Others protested, and suggested that in the absence of scarcity, Second Life’s economy would collapse.

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Instead of sending a flow of pictures of the virtual world to the user as a series of pixels – something that would be impractical to calculate – the information would be transmitted as a list of basic shapes that were re-created on the user’s PC. For example, a virtual house might be a cuboid with rectangles representing windows and doors, cylinders for the chimney stacks etc.

This meant the local world could be sent in great detail very compactly, but also that the software on the user’s machine had all the information for making a copy of any nearby object. It’s like the web: in order to display a page, the browser receives not an image of the page, but all the underlying HTML code to generate that page, which also means that the HTML of any web page can be copied perfectly. Thus CopyBot – written by a group called libsecondlife as part of an open-source project to create Second Life applications – or something like it was bound to appear one day.

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Liberating the economy has led to a boom in creativity, just as Rosedale hoped. It is in constant expansion as people buy virtual land, and every day more than $500,000 (£263,000) is spent buying virtual objects. But the downside is that unwanted copying is potentially a threat to the substantial businesses selling virtual goods that have been built up, and a concern for the real-life companies such as IBM, Adidas and Nissan which are beginning to enter Second Life.

Just as it is probably not feasible to stop “grey goo” – the Second Life equivalent of spam, which takes the form of self- replicating objects malicious “griefers” use to gum up the main servers – so it is probably technically impossible to stop copying. Fortunately, not all aspects of an object can be duplicated. To create complex items – such as a virtual car that can be driven – you use a special programming language to code their realistic behaviour. CopyBot cannot duplicate these programs because they are never passed to the user, but run on the Linden Lab’s computers.

As for the elements that you can copy, such as shape and texture, Rosedale explains: “What we’re going to do is add a lot of attribution. You’ll be able to easily see when an object or texture was first created,” – and hence if something is a later copy.

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Online criminals pay the most for bank account details

business, security / /

From The Economist‘s “The price of online robbery” (24 November 2008):

Bank details are the most popular single item for sale by online fraudsters, according to a new report by Symantec, an internet-security firm. They are also the priciest, perhaps because the average account for which details are offered has a balance of nearly $40,000. Sales of details of credit cards make up some 30% of all goods and services on offer on “underground” servers, and nearly 60% of their value. Cards without security codes (or CVV2 numbers) are harder to exploit, and are usually cheaper.

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