03.29.13
The Duchy of Grand Fenwick attacks
The Duchy of Grand Fenwick, aka the Republic of CyberBunker, was said to have attacked SpamHaus and the Internet this week. And most people missed it except for the New York Times and Ars Technica.
I’ve repeated it countless times. Ten years ago the mainstream press just unilaterally quit doing its job on security matters. Serious journalism and critical thinking, as opposed to propagandizing and stenography, simply blew away and was never replaced.
It’s a theme I’ve carped on for years, going all the way back to anti-virus king John McAfee’s manipulations on the Michelangelo virus in 1992.
From the Guardian, on the great cyberwar everyone missed, which I only saw because of Frank at Pine View Farm:
This is the danger of the “dark age of journalism”, as it has been called. The training of the old Reuters reporter is replaced by one of political and corporate collusion. The separation between newsrooms and public relations agencies growing ever thinner as reporters rush to fill space at all costs, regardless of truth.
Even after she’d written the piece in the New York Times, tech reporter Nicole Perlroth tweeted how she was still getting targeted by corporate PRs to cover the “story”: “Hi Nicole, News is just breaking on the biggest cyber-attack in history. Are you planning on covering?”
The collapse of journalism combined with complex, fast-changing technology offers a wealth of opportunity for propagandists. In the soil of ignorance, fear can easily be sown. So it is with cyberwarfare.
The writer, Heather Brooke, probably didn’t have the space to get deep into the rise of web shoeshine news publishing, the fact that sensation, exaggeration and corporate tech fictions and trivialities are about all they exist for.
In charge at CyberBunker is Sven Olaf Kamphuis, who styles himself the ‘Minister of Telecommunications and Foreign Affairs’ of the ‘Republic CyberBunker’ …
Within its 15ft reinforced concrete walls are 175,000 cubic feet of office space, airlocks, a 750KW diesel generator, fuel reserves and a 2,500-gallon freshwater tank.
Its inhabitants can allegedly survive for ten years without assistance from the outside world.
CyberBunker’s website claims: ‘Dutch authorities and the police have made several attempts to enter the bunker by force. None of these attempts were successful.’