06.02.12
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 9:28 am by George Smith
There’s never a day when some annoying nerd has a story to tell about his revolutionary app, social and smart, for changing the world. Always, they’re trivial solutions to minor annoyances or non-problems, just ways for the geek to make money siphoning cash from one established process to a new one owned by the tech revolutionary, or creative destroyer, or whatever.
All you have to do is wave an iPhone, mention “app” and “social,” and your inane idea is considered gold by the gullible.
From the wire, the “social bike,” empowered by iJunk:
[Ryan Rzepeki’s] new company, Social Bicycles, also called SoBi, will launch a pilot program “at the end of the summer??? in Buffalo and two unnamed West Coast cities soon after, Rzepecki says. It’s not just the model that he has going for him, it’s also the data.
‘I looked at the model in Europe, where there are big docking stations and kiosks,??? said Rzepecki. “It’s very expensive. I thought, what if they have smart bikes rather than smart bike racks????
It is that idea of a smart bike – and a mobile app to connect all those bikes – that is at the heart of Social Bicycles. Once you subscribe to the service, the app will tell where the closest sharable bike is …
“We definitely see the software, electronics and tracking package, working for other parts of transportation,??? said Rzepecki. “We’re Interested in looking at other modes. You don’t need a five ton steel cage to go a few miles.???
Never been to southern California, let alone Pasadena. Bicycling in large numbers is a total non-starter. Lotsa reasons: heat, traffic, culture, sweat, and the vague antipathy almost everyone holds for the few weaving fitness freak guys and gals in spandex and helmets on Saturday morning between Sierra Madre and eastern Pasadena near the high school.
Perhaps surprising to others, soCal has quite a few people who DO NOT have cars. Largely, they still do not gravitate to bikes. They use shoe leather and work in service near their homes. Or they use public transportation, albeit mediocre to poor.
Collect data from a potential fleet of such bikes? Who cares? Collecting data on vehicular traffic flow — that’s where action is.
And I’ll avoid the glaring distinctions between European city life and American, particularly in the hinterlands, even in college towns.
So go to Europe already. What’s with the pilot program in two “unnamed” West Coast cities stuff?
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06.01.12
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle at 1:36 pm by George Smith
Is there anyone who doesn’t see electromagnetic pulsing on television, in comic books or movie screens a couple times a week?
From the wire — no link:
New Regency has picked up The New West, an adaptation of a comic book written by Jimmy Palmiotti, with Len Wiseman now on board to produce …
Palmiotti, co-writer of DC Comics’ All-Star Western comic (art by Phil Noto), wrote the two-issue New West set in a near-future Los Angeles where an electromagnetic pulse bomb causes all technology to stop working. In this hostile environment, a disgraced former LAPD detective must rescue a kidnapped mayor with only a horse and a sword.
Unintentionally hilarious because no one would actually want to rescue the mayor of Los Angeles for much of any reason in southern California.
Phoned in rubbish by those in Hollywood who regard audiences as so many factory-caged chickens.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 12:40 pm by George Smith
Tim Cook and Apple appear to occasionally worry the reputation of the company has taken a hit. For all the sweat shop labor in China, legal global tax cheating and general arrogance.
So now DD sees company officials occasionally muttering about how they want to make it all up. They’ll look into labor abuse. We legally tax cheat because everyone else does it. And so on.
Today, it’s Tim Cook telling a gullible audience he’d like to make some iJunk completely in the US. Someday. But not today.
Because:
“The truth is the tool and die-maker skill in the U.S. began to go down in the late ’60s and early ’70s,??? Cook said. “How many tool-and-die makers do you know in the U.S. now? I could call a meeting and invite every tool-and-die maker in the United States and we wouldn’t fill this room.???
Not so in China, though. Said Cook, “In China you could fill a city with tool-and-die makers.???
Tim Cook was 10 in 1970.
So precocious, he knew the score then. Unskilled Americans, already going to shite.
It was all in China, just waiting to be tapped. We had nothin’ to do with sending it there. Nothin,’ I tell ya!
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Posted in Phlogiston, Rock 'n' Roll at 9:47 am by George Smith
Post a link to the UK’s ‘Bloody Nora,’ a ‘head-banging granny’ into pub heavy metal. But it was too lame.
Headbanging Grannies — apparently common on YouTube.
Which, do you think, is the best of the worst? There’s an official DD Blog No-Prize in it for you.
Gilbert Gottfried once hosted a cheap late night horror movie show. The best I can remember from it were his introductions to “Flesh-Eating Mothers.”
Did you know the full movie is on YouTube? So is Rabid Grannies.
There’s even a Granny Tranny fad. You were warned.
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Posted in Crazy Weapons, Cyberterrorism at 7:38 am by George Smith
Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the [Stuxnet] cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that.
From the New York Times. Google.
Earlier this week:
I’ve emphasized this is a good thing. Vigorous anti-virus company competition in the global industry makes finding and neutralizing state-designed viruses a business asset. So the social good on the Internet is served by messing up, terminating or exposing various aspects of cyberwar operations.
So making the paranoid mullahs more paranoid is good, eh?
In the Nineties I set out in my book Virus Creation Labs to tell some of the story of the anti-virus industry. As part of the job its programmers were keen to discover the identity of various virus-writers and they became good at it. Now they have hard news the US government, one of their clients, has been writing computer viruses they have to treat.
Finding some of the virus writers was easy work. The original hackers who wrote them often revealed themselves, anyway. They liked to brag about it. There was no thrill in the activity if people who knew about viruses didn’t know they were yours. Since there was no money in it back then it’s easy to grasp the motivation.
Sometimes it took more analysis of code on the part of the industry to narrow it down to one individual, perhaps unnamed but recognized as the writer.
With the US government now exposed as involved in virus-writing there are different pullers at work in exposing the perpetrators of the operation.
A company may depend a great deal on government contracts. So what to do, what to do, when malware inevitably crawls into non-target computers in non-designated-enemy nations and your analysts and coders have a good idea of who’s behind it?
You develop an antidote and distribute it to everyone. But do you spill the beans? You have a conflict of interest, moral and ethical hazard.
Doing the right thing might cost business.
Or if you’re a security company not in the US does it matter at all? You know who’s behind the attacks and you have a nice story to tell based on your pulling apart viruses. Lots of people might want to hear it.
Be the whistleblower.
Virus-writers, professional or amateur, criminal or state-operated, don’t operate in a vacuum. No matter how classified or expert they think they are, they make mistakes. The code is never perfect. As the complexity of an operation rises so does the potential for error.
Do the state’s virus writers go to anti-virus conventions? Do they chat it up with the industry as virus-writers from many many years ago did?
The anti-virus industry knows. Perhaps some have held their tongues even though they don’t wish to.
Is American virus-writing outsourced, in part or in toto, to arms developers or other small businesses doubling as cybersecurity vendors?
Questions, questions.
When I wrote Virus Creation Labs there was always a small but hard-headed segment of people in information technology (and the computer savvy public) who believed anti-virus companies wrote viruses to help their businesses.
There was never any evidence of it. In fact, it was a ludicrous idea as their was never a shortage in virus writing and distribution.
In the late Eighties a small operation of the US Army made an offer looking for virus-writers. It was met with opprobrium in the a-v industry as well as general computer security circles. Nothing appeared to come of it although the publisher of my book claimed he had worked for a US military operation in NATO on the production of viruses. (He wrote many viruses for all his books on the subject, too.)
There is much more money in virus-writing now. And there is no reason to believe the national security companies, particularly those with government contracts in defending against cyberwar, don’t also want to be in the offensive side of the business.
They do.
They would love to write malware for Uncle Sam for taxpayer moolah.
Some would view it as fun, too, just like the old timey amateur virus-writers.
And the opportunity for early sales pitching is there. The cyberwar hype machine has been operating for so long the pump is primed in national leaders who don’t delve very deeply into these things. Many believe all the wild claims about cyberwar. If someone offers them malware options in attacking an enemy they will take it. And now it is known they have done so.
So when your secret war using malware is no longer secret, what is to be done? Is malware just like lobbing tear gas rounds or random cluster bombs with made in some comoany in the USA clearly embossed on some of the parts, only much less violent and directly hazardous to civilians?
If political leaders openly speak about how cyberwar threats can put lives at risk in the US what’s the difference when we’re caught doing it to someone else? Shouldn’t the president appear to be more thoughtful in such affairs rather than someone giving the OK to fuck up trust on the Internet even more for the sake of going after a pariah country? Do you think it might have been better if someone not in government or the military or intelligence had explained to him how computer viruses work?
Will the worldwide computer security industry work to expose and defeat, say, US cyberwar operations even more vigorously just as it pursues botnets and the work of cybercriminals? Will they now begin to spill the beans when the trail leads right back to a western government office?
Will they let us know when they have suspicions that some employees who’ve either worked for them or become ‘friends’ appear to have advanced the next step of their career in state-sponsored virus-writing?
Will diminishing returns now be a part of state-sponsored virus-writing? That is, is the US government’s virus-writing operation impeded now that the cat’s out of the bag and everyone knows it’s doing it?
Or do people not care? Just another day of bad business as usual on the Internet. And so what if it was against Iran? They had it coming and it’s better than bombing.
And we always trust our guys, anyway. Not a chance of a reliability problem or a crazy Bruce Ivins among ’em.
Just don’t be in the wrong country or line of work. And if it splattered onto you in … Hungary? Well, ha-ha, oops! Sorry ’bout that. Couldn’t be helped. Contact the American consulate.
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