Chronicling the depravities of the State.
Today is a sad day. Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47, is now in Valhala forging weapons for the einherjar:
The inventor of the Kalashnikov assault rifle, Mikhail Kalashnikov, has died aged 94, Russian TV reports.
The BBC has posted an obituary. I really don’t have much else. I plan to remember him by taking shot of vodka in his honor tonight and taking my AK pattern rifle to the range this weekend.
Our species came very close to losing the most important documents in human history. I’m talking about the writings of Malaclypse the Younger, the founder of the most important religion in human history, Discordianism. Fortunately disaster has been averted and these writings were not only saved but posted online:
Groucho Gandhi writes, “‘Crackpot Historian’ Adam Gorightly (the current Keeper of the Sacred Chao) saved the archives of Discordian co-founder Greg “Malaclypse the Younger” Hill from the literal dustbin of history by swooping up the Hill archives as they were about to be tossed in the dumpster. Srsly!
“Why is this important? Greg Hill (thru Discordianism) created the first proto-zine, The Principia Discordia, and the precursor to the Creative Commons licensing scheme, first known as KopyLeft, All Rites Reversed. Now Adam Gorightly is taking the Discordian Archives and releasing them.”
These works are graciously posted on Historia Discordia. As a Discordian Pope I urge you to go forth and read. Or don’t. Whatever you do it’s cool.
When people first become interested in computer security they have a habit of downloading and using tools before they understand how they work. This is a major mistake as a Harvard University student recently learned when he attempted to use Tor to make an anonymous bomb threat:
A Harvard student was charged Tuesday with making a hoax bomb threat just so he could get out of a final exam.
Eldo Kim, 20, of Cambridge, Mass., was scheduled for a hearing Wednesday in U.S. District Court. He could face as long as five years in prison, three years of supervised release and a $250,000 fine if convicted of communicating the bomb threat that cleared four large buildings Monday.
[…]
Kim took several steps to hide his identity, but in the end, it was the WiFi that got him, the FBI said.
Kim said he sent his messages using a temporary, anonymous email account routed through the worldwide anonymizing network Tor, according to the affidavit.
So far, so good. But to get to Tor, he had to go through Harvard’s wireless network — and university technicians were able to detect that it was Kim who was trying to get to Tor, according to the affidavit.
Had Mr. Kim invested 15 minutes of reading time on Tor he would have learned that Tor doesn’t attempt to conceal the fact that you’re using Tor. Anybody monitoring the network you’re using can detect that you have a connection to the Tor network. With that knowledge in hand Mr. Kim would have been able to understand that being one of the few, if not the only, Tor users on the campus Wi-Fi would be a red flag when the campus received a bomb threat sent over Tor. This is especially true when his Tor connection times closely correlate to the time the bomb threat was sent.
So today’s lesson is this: make sure you fully understand the workings of any tools you use to enhance your security. Failing to do so will leave you vulnerable and often no better, and sometimes even worse, then you would have been if you hadn’t used the tool at all.
I try not to focus too much on individual politicians unless they’ve done something especially egregious. It wouldn’t matter to me who occupied the White House, I would oppose that person. But I find it amusing how Obama has gone from the beloved celebrity to an irritant in the eyes of the public. This continuously dwindling public imagine isn’t surprising considering the number of scandals that has befallen his administration. From Fast and Furious to the ongoing National Security Agency (NSA) fiasco we have seen Obama receive and ever growing slew of negative publicity. What makes this downfall even more entertaining is the constant attempts by Obama to divert peoples’ attention.
Obama met with the higher ups of several major technology companies. During this meeting the representatives of the technology companies had to prevent Obama from diverting the meeting topic from the NSA fiasco to the Healthcare.gov fiasco:
The top leaders from the world’s biggest technology companies pressed their case for reform of the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance operations at a meeting with President Obama on Tuesday, resisting attempts by the White House to portray the encounter as a wide-ranging discussion of broader priorities.
Senior executives from the companies whose bosses were present at the meeting said they were determined to keep the discussion focused on the NSA, despite the White House declaring in advance that it would focus on ways of improving the functionality of the troubled health insurance website, healthcare.gov, among other matters.
I have no love for the leaders of the present technology companies either. From my point of view most of them are merely lower level oligarchs in the great state/industry marriage. But it’s entertaining to watch the lower tier oligarchs rebel against the upper tier oligarchs. The NSA fiasco has cause users to question most major technology companies, which threatens profits. If there’s one thing the lower oligarchs won’t stand for it’s the potential to lose profits. Such a threat is enough to get them to become restless and even go against the desires of higher oligarchs. In this instance the lower oligarchs weren’t willing to let the upper oligarchs sweep the NSA fiasco under the table.
Remember the propaganda released shortly after 9/11? We were told that the terrorists attacked us because they hated us for our freedom. It was such bullshit that I was surprised that so many people lapped it up. But they didn’t hate us for our freedoms then and they don’t hate us for our freedoms now. They hate us because of shit like this:
(Reuters) – Fifteen people on their way to a wedding in Yemen were killed in an air strike after their party was mistaken for an al Qaeda convoy, local security officials said on Thursday.
The officials did not identify the plane in the strike in central al-Bayda province, but tribal and local media sources said that it was a drone.
“An air strike missed its target and hit a wedding car convoy, ten people were killed immediately and another five who were injured died after being admitted to the hospital,” one security official said.
Five more people were injured, the officials said.
European countries and the United States have been fucking over the Middle East for over a ages. It’s pretty easy for anybody with a pair of eyes and a few neurons to see why so many people in the Middle East hate the United States. Bombing operations like this will only make the situation worse.
For many people their dream job would be one that paid them to play video games. It used to be that play testing and playing in professional gaming leagues were the only careers that fulfilled such dreams. But now there’s another employer willing to pay employees to hammer at keyboards and mice in virtual worlds: the National Security Agency (NSA):
To the National Security Agency analyst writing a briefing to his superiors, the situation was clear: their current surveillance efforts were lacking something. The agency’s impressive arsenal of cable taps and sophisticated hacking attacks was not enough. What it really needed was a horde of undercover Orcs.
That vision of spycraft sparked a concerted drive by the NSA and its UK sister agency GCHQ to infiltrate the massive communities playing online games, according to secret documents disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
[…]
The agencies, the documents show, have built mass-collection capabilities against the Xbox Live console network, which boasts more than 48 million players. Real-life agents have been deployed into virtual realms, from those Orc hordes in World of Warcraft to the human avatars of Second Life. There were attempts, too, to recruit potential informants from the games’ tech-friendly users.
There you have it ladies and gentlemen. If you want to get paid to play video games just sign up with the NSA or the Government Communications Headquarters (GHCQ). Both of those agencies are willing to fork over hard stolen tax dollars to agents willing to subject themselves to the rigors of sitting in a chair and operating a keyboard and mouse (I know that also describes programming but playing video games for a living is probably more fun).
I wonder how long it will take the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to take up this strategy. Imagine agents running around Minecraft servers trying to recruit players to take TNT blocks and blow up bridges and buildings. After the deed is done the FBI can get a warrant to reveal the player’s Internet protocol (IP) address, contact the internet service provider (ISP) that controls that address to discover the user’s name and address, and arrest the user for virtual terrorism. It would give a much needed boost to the agency’s terrorist arrest numbers.
This type of news is why I encourage people to enable two-factor authentication on whatever accounts they have that support it:
The massive data breach was a result of keylogging software maliciously installed on an untold number of computers around the world, researchers at cybersecurity firm Trustwave said. The virus was capturing log-in credentials for key websites over the past month and sending those usernames and passwords to a server controlled by the hackers.
All in all some 318,000 Facebook, 70,000 GMail, and 22,000 Twitter passwords were part of the heist. All three of these sites allow users to enable one time passwords for two-factor authentication. Facebook and GMail both use Google Authenticator, which ties to an application on your phone. The application has a token that generates a new six digit password every 30 seconds. When you log into either of these sites you will be asked to enter the current six digit password before you’re allowed access to your account. What makes such a system useful is that you need access to your phone in order to log in, just having the password alone won’t grant access. Twitter uses it’s own system that ties to the Twitter smartphone app. When you attempt to log into your Twitter account a notification is sent to your phone and you have to authorize the log in from there. Once again it requires your phone in addition to your password to successfully log in.
It’s not always clear when your password has been compromised. Hackers have gained access to use password from website databases before. When such breaches are discovered most websites reset all their users’ passwords. But until the breach is discovered anybody with the list of passwords can log into the accounts that appear in that list, unless those users have enabled two-factor authentication.
Apparently not enough people were being murdered in the Middle East by America’s fleet of remotely controlled bomb droppers. The Pentagon has loosened restrictions in regards to avoiding civilian casualties when using drones to bomb the shit out of somebody:
The Pentagon has loosened its guidelines on avoiding civilian casualties during drone strikes, modifying instructions from requiring military personnel to “ensure” civilians are not targeted to encouraging service members to “avoid targeting” civilians.
In addition, instructions now tell commanders that collateral damage “must not be excessive” in relation to mission goals, according to Public Intelligence, a nonprofit research group that analyzed the military’s directives on drone strikes.
I’m sure the people in the Middle East will finally understand how hard the United States is working to bring them freedom and democracy.
I often mention my desire to escape the United States. There are only two things I can see for the future of this country: economic collapse and an all pervasive police state. When these two things are finalized I want to be watching from afar. Central America and East Asia are two possible destinations I’m considering. Another possibility, the one currently at the top of my list, is Iceland.
Iceland has a lot going for it. The island nation has a history of statelessness, an anarchist as the mayor of its capital city, the wherewithal to strike against the bankers that caused its financial crisis, the fortitude to stand up for whistle blowers, and the balls to tell agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) to get the fuck out.
In addition to all of those things Iceland, unlike the United States, also has a police force that isn’t bat shit insane:
Icelandic police have shot dead a man who was firing a shotgun in his apartment in the early hours of Monday.
It is the first time someone has been killed in an armed police operation in Iceland, officials say.
That’s right, yesterday marked the first time that armed Icelandic police officers killed a person. I don’t think there’s an individual state within the United States that has made it an entire year without its police officers killing somebody. Iceland’s history of focusing on arbitration over brute force continues to shine through even though its stateless era ended almost a millennium ago.
Security is an interest of mine. Most of my time spent studying security is focused on computer security but physical security is something that also interests me. What needs more physical security than nuclear missiles? Apparently a lot of things because the security on the United States’ nuclear arsenal was downright pathetic:
Today I found out that during the height of the Cold War, the US military put such an emphasis on a rapid response to an attack on American soil, that to minimize any foreseeable delay in launching a nuclear missile, for nearly two decades they intentionally set the launch codes at every silo in the US to 8 zeroes.
[…]
However, though the devices were supposed to be fitted on every nuclear missile after JFK issued his memorandum, the military continually dragged its heels on the matter. In fact, it was noted that a full 20 years after JFK had order PALs be fitted to every nuclear device, half of the missiles in Europe were still protected by simple mechanical locks. Most that did have the new system in place weren’t even activated until 1977.
Those in the U.S. that had been fitted with the devices, such as ones in the Minuteman Silos, were installed under the close scrutiny of Robert McNamara, JFK’s Secretary of Defence. However, The Strategic Air Command greatly resented McNamara’s presence and almost as soon as he left, the code to launch the missile’s, all 50 of them, was set to 00000000.
I usually admire that reality often imitates comedy but not when it comes to nuclear weapons:
The fact that the United States was more concerned about being able to easily kick off the apocalypse than preventing it speaks volumes.