08.06.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 9:00 am by George Smith
I stopped writing about most incident and general computer security issues because there’s no longer any point to it. The stories of large breaches and new vulnerabilities come, often in multiples, every day.
News of it is of no practical use to the average person. It’s an endless river of excrement and a fact of life signifying nothing except the always on insecurity of the systems we are compelled to use every day.
So this is a bit of an exception. Hypocrisy? Yes, certainly. Guilty!
From the New York Times, a headline yesterday, of a small company that has determined Russian hackers have stolen passwords to 1.5 billion accounts:
A Russian crime ring has amassed the largest known collection of stolen Internet credentials, including 1.2 billion user name and password combinations and more than 500 million email addresses, security researchers say.
The records, discovered by Hold Security, a firm in Milwaukee, include confidential material gathered from 420,000 websites, including household names, and small Internet sites. Hold Security has a history of uncovering significant hacks …
[Mr. Alex Holden, the founder and chief information security officer of Hold Security], who is paid to consult on the security of corporate websites, decided to make details of the attack public this week to coincide with discussions at an industry conference and to let the many small sites he will not be able to contact know that they should look into the problem.
There is no reason to doubt it. But what is to be done with such a number? One and a half billion accounts, 500 million e-mail addresses.
It’s stupefying.
So is the expectation of a fix. It’s beyond that. There’s no way to deal with 1.5 billion potential compromised accounts. To think so is to believe you can change the weather.
Go to a computer security vendor conference and interest the Times in getting the word out and that will do it? Seriously? I bet Hold Security doesn’t even believe that.
So what do you do if you’re on the computer security news beat or a system host and you read this? Write yet another piece advising people of the great gravity of the problem/revelation and that they should change their passwords? Speak for the millionth time about closing vulnerabilities? Should you automate another script or widget to badger or force your clients and users with mostly inconsequential accounts into changing their passwords? Again?
It’s so obvious that works.
From the Big Book of Cynical and Supercilious Jokes:
How do we fix a billion and a half accounts with stolen credentials?
Easy, pay Keith Alexander a billion and a half dollars.
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08.02.14
Posted in Crazy Weapons, Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 11:48 am by George Smith
In twenty years of writing about computer and national security issues, I’ve never anyone from the top of the US military quite as grasping as former NSA director, Keith Alexander.
He’s redefined retiring from service at a whole new level.
And I know of no military men, or directors of any intelligence agency, to claim they’re going to be filing patents for security inventions after leaving their public sector jobs.
Yet here we go:
[Alexander, in an interview Monday, said he has developed] a new technology, based on a patented and “unique” approach to detecting malicious hackers and cyber-intruders that the retired Army general said he has invented, along with his business partners at IronNet Cybersecurity Inc., the company he co-founded after leaving the government and retiring from military service in March. But the technology is also directly informed by the years of experience Alexander has had tracking hackers, and the insights he gained from classified operations as the director of the NSA, which give him a rare competitive advantage over the many firms competing for a share of the cybersecurity market …
Alexander said he’ll file at least nine patents, and possibly more, for a system to detect so-called advanced persistent threats, or hackers who clandestinely burrow into a computer network in order to steal secrets or damage the network itself. It was those kinds of hackers who Alexander, when he was running the NSA, said were responsible for “the greatest transfer of wealth in American history” because they were routinely stealing trade secrets and competitive information from U.S. companies and giving it to their competitors, often in China.
Keith Alexander wants you to believe, along with all the other simpletons and sycophants in the natsec journalism business, that he’s so insightful, so inventive, that at night — or in off hours from the NSA, he came up with unique computer security concepts and inventions that he will now sell or lease to the private sector.
After years of building the biggest cyberwar machine in the world on the taxpayer dime, without any apparent oversight at all. And, of course, all while undermining the basic security of the internet, launching clandestine malware attacks on nations in the Middle East, hoarding computer security vulnerabilities and greasing a global clandestine market for the buying and selling of them.
In 1994, for Issues in Science & Technology, in a very old piece entitled Electronic Pearl Harbor, Not Likely, I wrote:
Another reason to be skeptical of the warnings about information warfare is that those who are most alarmed are often the people who will benefit from government spending to combat the threat. A primary author of a January 1997 Defense Science Board report on information warfare, which recommended an immediate $580-million investment in private sector R&D for hardware and software to implement computer security, was Duane Andrews, executive vice president of SAIC, a computer security vendor and supplier of information warfare consulting services.
Assessments of the threats to the nation’s computer security should not be furnished by the same firms and vendors who supply hardware, software, and consulting services to counter the “threat” to the government and the military. Instead, a true independent group should be set up to provide such assessments and evaluate the claims of computer security software and hardware vendors selling to the government and corporate America. The group must not be staffed by those who have financial ties to computer security firms. The staff must be compensated adequately so that it is not cherry-picked by the computer security industry.
In twenty years, Keith Alexander is now on top of a situation that is just the opposite.
He spent his career lecturing and warning of devastating cyberattacks on American infrastructure. Most notably, he insisted again and again that Chinese hackers were stealing so much from corporate America in the way of information and private intellectual property, it constituted the greatest transfer of wealth in history.
If you’ve been on food stamps, the unemployment line, or been otherwise damaged by the Great Recession, you may have missed it.
This is the picture: Grasping Keith Alexander spends his career publicly warning that America’s financial system was imperiled by cybewar, all while building the world’s biggest cyberwar apparatus. And now that he has retired he intends to sell his soon-to-be-patented computer security innovations to corporate America so that they can be shielded from the attacks he spent years telling them are coming and which have already allegedly stolen much of its intellectual wealth. (Which is presumably why they’re all doing legal foreign merger tricks to avoid the payment of tax owed the US govenrment. Which was protecting them, or trying to, in cyberspace.)
Although the Issues in Science and Technology article is a very accurate slice of history from two decades ago, much in Electronic Pearl Harbor, Not Likely is pretty dated, quaintly naive even, and no longer relevant to the computer security discussion. Virus hoaxes are no longer around. Malware production exploded. Computer virus production became professionalized and they’re now used as clandestine weapons of war.
I wrote that it would be hard to do such things. And it has been hard.
It takes government agencies like the NSA to develop things like Stuxnet. And the phenomenon took years to arrive but nevertheless, it has arrived.
But electronic Pearl Harbor never happened. Even though many still warn about it, first among them being Keith Alexander when he was director of the National Security Agency.
And the part about conflicts of interest and casting a skeptical eye upon those who do threat assessment and then seek to immediately gain financially from the impact of such assessments has not changed.
It’s become much worse and Keith Alexander is now the very best example of it.
Keep in mind, this is all part of the expansion of internet spying and its secret infrastructure, he supervised and which was exposed by Edward Snowden. And Alexander’s work has not made the internet more trustworthy.
Quite the contrary, Alexander is seen as primarily responsible for damaging the global reputation of the United States when it comes to acceptable conduct in cyberspace.
Alexander, justifiably, is and should be a pariah. And we dig our global pariahs in 2014. It’s a national character trait. So we should own up to it because we deserve the guy and his grasping.
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08.01.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Fiat money fear and loathers at 10:35 am by George Smith
A couple weeks back venture capitalist and Six Californias ass hat Tim Draper won a US government auction for 30,000 BitCoins.
From the blog:
Draper is planning to use his digital wealth, in partnership with a company called Vaurum, to finance bitcoin-exchange services in the developing world. At a press conference, he praised bitcoin’s ability to “provide liquidity and confidence to markets that have been hamstrung by weak currencies.??? He singled out Argentina and its out-of-control inflation.
This week Argentina defaulted on debt repayment of $1.5 billion to a group of hedge-fund bond holders on Wall Street. The hedge funders, which the Argentinian government refers to as “vultures,” refused to take a hair-cut on the debt owed them, a devaluation that all the rest of Argentina’s creditors had agreed to years ago. They pursued Argentina in American courts and won a ruling that Argentina owed them as per the original terms.
So this week, Argentina thumbed its nose at them, missing a debt service to all its bond credit holders.
From the New York Times:
The multiyear dispute reached a breaking point on Wednesday after Argentina missed a deadline on a scheduled interest payment to its regular bondholders. Argentina’s predicament has arisen from a ruling by a federal judge in the United States that it could not make its regular payments on bonds without also paying the hedge fund holdouts. Wednesday evening, a court-appointed mediator issued a statement declaring Argentina to be “imminently??? in default.
In 2001 Argentina also defaulted on world debt, a crisis that brought on economic crisis and runaway inflation. Inflation continues to a problem in Argentina, where citizens have developed a black market to dump pesos for American dollars.
Enter the idea that BitCoin would be a great substitute to the black market exchange US dollars.
Continuing, from the Times:
Many Argentines who saw the value of the peso spiral quickly and their savings vanish after the last default have not been caught off guard this time.
“These past years have taught us a strategy of how to save up money in a reliable way,??? Gustavo said.
For most Argentines, the currency of choice is the dollar, but they have to go through the black market to obtain it. “It is difficult or almost impossible to keep those savings safe in Argentina, because money loses value very quickly here,??? he added.
“I think that many people buy the argument that Argentina did not default, and buy into the hatred of the evil vultures,??? Barbara Kotschwar, a research fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told the Times.
The running narrative in the US and western press is that Argentina must repay its American “vultures” or suffer terrible unspecified consequences. Argentina is already unwelcome in global credit markets so it’s unclear what kind of revenge Wall Street could exact.
From the Economist:
Defaulting has helped no one: none of the bondholders will now be paid, Argentina looks like a pariah again, and its economy will remain starved of loans and investment.
Happily, much of the damage can still be undone. It is not too late to strike a deal with the hold-outs or back an ostensibly private effort to buy out their claims … More important, it would help to change perceptions of Argentina as a financial rogue state.”
Financial rogue state. Perish forbid American hedge-funders not receive their blood.
So an Argentine default that worsens conditions and causes more still more currency inflation would be helpful to those operating a BitCoin exchange in that country.
WinkDex has BitCoin at $600, trending downward a bit over the past couple weeks.
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07.30.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 1:44 pm by George Smith
Proposed “album” cover for Loud Folk Live, where “Jesus of America,” performed at the First Church of USA!USA! & Mammon in Pasadena, among others, will go.
Then I can post it on the net and no one will listen to it. Sounds at least as good as finding work in the Corporate Bund.
Also, because national and computer security coverage blows. Everybody lost that one. Game over.
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07.29.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 9:09 am by George Smith
Although humorous, yours truly does Mark better than Comedy Central’s bit.
In the “sermon” introducing “Jesus of America:”
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a poor man to get into the Kingdom of Heaven.
Here it is. Don’t be a jerk who only clicks content pre-approved for the Culture of Lickspittle, give it a listen.
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07.28.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 1:50 pm by George Smith
In the Culture of Lickspittle even the app economy takes no prisoners. It’s winner take all and the devil take everyone but the top 1.6 percent.
According to a comprehensive survey of app developers for Android and iOS, 98 percent off all developers earn less than $500/month. Many make virtually nothing at all.
The latter make up forty seven percent of all developers and are dubbed, straightforwardly, “have nothings” — because they make zip.
The report is here.
“The majority of app businesses are not sustainable at current revenue levels,” reads on “key insight.” “[Fifty percent] of iOS developers and 64% of Android developers are below the ‘app poverty line??? of $500 per app per month.”
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07.23.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 1:02 pm by George Smith
Proven by science quote of day (no link):
“Austrian researchers … found people feel crummy any time they’re on Facebook for too long, no matter what kind of stuff pops up.”
I wouldn’t leave all the glory to Facebook. Much of the 2014 web makes you feel crummy.
I started publishing on the net, an e-mail newsletter in 1990 or so. A bit later I started posting to a university site, NIU’s Critical Criminology Department server, when most people were still using the first browsers, even image-less, like Lynx. So it’s a legitimate observation.
Part of the feeling crummy phenomenon is the complete corporate takeover of all aspects of the web. This has given everyone an environment in which Google search is a winner-take-all proposition with only the illusion of millions of choices. The practical reality is that only the top half of the screen in the first page of results matters.
Much of everything else has devolved into pushes to buy things and ubiquitous, inescapable advertising. Most big newspaper sites are now like bad television, news magazines and the Los Angeles Times being a very good working examples.
The actual news text furnished by journalists makes up a minor part of what is sent to visitors/readers. The rest of the bandwidth is reserved for squirting even more HD advertising and idiotic video on whatever’s trending at you.
This brings us to viral content, a feel good buzzterm which really means manipulative trolling, much of it to make you subconsciously feel bad or inferior for not doing something or appreciating the wild and amusing miracles of the day. This, obviously, so the viral sites can net millions of users, what might be thought of as internet plankton, to lure venture capitalists into giving them millions in cash money while they attempt to come up with a way to monetize it more, the latter usually be selling still more HD advertising or by the not-so-subtle pushing of corporate services and products.
From the AP:
US Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen has a hot stock tip for you: stop throwing so much money at anything that calls itself a social network.
Specifically, the Fed thinks the “valuation metrics” for “smaller firms in the social media” sector “appear substantially stretched.” And it’s not hard to see why.
Yo, an app that only lets you send messages that say “yo,” just received $1 million in funding. Cynk, a nonexistent social network for buying friends online, somehow – fraudulently – got a $6 billion valuation despite having no assets and no revenue.
And now NBA star Carmelo Anthony is pivoting to a second career as a venture capitalist with his own seed fund. As he told the Wall Street Journal, he has “long been interested in technology.”
You should feel crummy after being exposed to the internet every day for hours. It just shows you haven’t gone insane.
I’ve commented before on how parasitic web engineering is for the average user. In my experience, most of the code delivered to you has only one purpose. It’s to tie up your machine while it squeezes whatever it can from your web presence and private data.
A good working example is SoundCloud. And you can do a little experiment to see what I mean.
Travel out to the link I posted a day or so ago (or if you don’t want to listen to Dick Destiny’s tune, choose another to your liking).
Set the tune to play and bring up the Task Manager on your PC. When I do this, using the latest edition of Mozilla-Firefox, I immediately see that Soundcloud starts executing so much code on the client side that it hogs most of the processing power. Mind you, this is only to stream MP3 audio, the actual file of which was only between four and five megabytes.
Now minimize the window.
Voila. The processor immediately drops back to a normal rate. So most of the activity SoundCloud sends to you has nothing to do with vending audio at all, it’s all on the video and miscellaneous end, junk parasitic code that torques the engine of your machine.
Browser extensions like NoScript and NotScript, the latter which I use, also illustrate the predatory nature of the web. When you start using them and look at what they’re blocking, you’re given a nice course in what the corporate web is doing to you.
In other words, you’re being worked over by grasping corporate web design, none of it for your benefit.
And from the Department of Speaking of Which
My hosting provider runs a script that can’t be turned off, one to collect web statistics for the benefit of, ahem, my alleged small business. It polls clients every few seconds.
Perhaps you have noticed it.
I have nothing to do with it and don’t use any statistics it provides. If you use a no-script extension on your browser, you’ll see it. Block it.
It will not affect the usability of the blog.
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07.21.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Ted Nugent, WhiteManistan at 7:09 pm by George Smith
WhiteManistan’s most public bigot, Ted Nugent, lost another gig today. This brings the total of cancellations this year to four, all as a result of Nugent’s infamous reputation as a purveyor of hate speech.
From the AP:
WORLEY, Idaho (AP) — A Native American tribe has canceled an Aug. 4 concert by Ted Nugent at its casino.
The Coeur d’Alene Tribe on Monday said that the cancellation of the concert at the casino in the northwest Idaho city of Worley was because of the rocker’s “racist and hate-filled remarks.”
The tribe says it booked Nugent without realizing he espoused “racist attitudes and views.” The tribe did not detail which of Nugent’s specific views it opposes.
The last sentence is hilarious. There’s so much hate speech from Nugent documented on the web it’s now an intelligence-insulting task to show it to people who don’t want to see it, anyway. Anyone who says they haven’t heard the worst of it is in the position of covering their backside.
Nugent has made his a big part of his business being a public hate-monger for WhiteManistan and the Tea Party. He should be made to own it completely.
He has the right to free speech. But in the world of entertainment, one can exert pressure on businesses, or concert venues, that book him. Bars, casinos, small theaters in the heartland and county fairs are not, primarily, venues for the spouting of all view points.
They’re entertainment businesses, period. And they must exist within the standards of the community they’re local to. And if people choose to tell them, again and again, that Ted Nugent does not fit even generously elastic community standards in a civil society and the business should either distance itself from him or risk paying a price for flouting such things for the sake of money, then that is a legitimate tactic.
It’s an unpleasant job to go over the long list of Nugent’s public statements and video captures. That doesn’t excuse anyone from corporate America in the music business from due diligence on it.
Want to buy the nationally famous hate-monger for a day? Live with the ill will, bad karma and potential bad result.
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Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll, The Corporate Bund at 2:45 pm by George Smith
Johnny Pantywaist performed live in Pasadena over the weekend.
You’ll surely enjoy the loud electric folk of the Dick Destiny Band, in this case the Modern Gothic tale of an attack on Rupert Murdoch by a clumsy man with a shave cream pie.
A psychedelic three minute diversion after another day of open hostility in the Corporate Bund.
You can throw a couple dollars for strong beer or guitar strings in the tip jar here at the bottom of the page, but are not obligated. Or if you are in the area you can as to come see up perform such ditties for free every week.
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07.18.14
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, The Corporate Bund at 4:08 pm by George Smith
We live in corporate Taxavoidination.
For the past two weeks, mainstream journalism has glommed onto covering US businesses moving swiftly to merge with foreign equivalents, specifically in countries where the economy is rigged to encourage legal corporate tax cheating by American businessmen. They’ve published so much the White House has been moved to ask for legislation, a request that hasn’t a chance of going anywhere, to stop it.
Two phrases keep cropping up, economic patriotism, and corporate patriotism, as in “why ain’t there any?”
Who would think there is such a thing living in this country for the last two or three decades? Who is surprised at its non-existence? Corporate patriotism? It’s to laugh, something to say with a sneer.
The article I’m about to excerpt and link to is entitled “America’s unrequited corporate love affair,” by Timothy Noah. It’s the latest in the official college of explainers’ discovery of the renouncement of status as American for tax purposes as the to do thing in the corporate fascist state.
But what’s this about unrequited love? Who loves big American corporations? How do they inspire love in us? Disgust, fear, contempt and anger seem far more common.
Are America’s corporations loved because they haven’t fired you yet, only increasing your workload by a third or even 100 percent without paying any more over the last ten years? Are they loved because they only filched twenty dollars from your bank account this week in administrative and courtesy fees rather than forty? Are they loved because they bankroll politicians who are climate change deniers which is better than bankrolling one who would try to cancel the food stamp program and make new law so that people who default on debt because they have been put out of work can be quickly put in jail?
Have you ever heard anyone say “I love [Big Pharmaceutical Company] or [Boeing] or [Verizon]”?
We do know the groupies of the world of Silicon Valley tech uber alles love Apple. But Apple doesn’t love them back. Apple hates everybody, except the financial instruments of Luxembourg and Ireland where it launders its money. It hates the people that assemble its phones so thoroughly they started committing suicide, then rioted. That’s a case of global corporate Stockholming, where the tormented are conditioned into a sick love for their tormentors.
The news piece is decent but not anything you haven’t seen commented on previously. In the last four years corporate tax avoidance through off-shoring maneuvers has so distorted the economic landscape of the country even the business news media can’t whitewash it.
From MSNBC:
Consider Heather Bresch, the daughter of Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and the chairman of generic drug maker Mylan, who announced plans this week to reincorporate in the Netherlands. “Until now, Ms. Bresch ran an unabashedly proud American company based in a Pittsburgh-area suburb,??? a July 14 New York Times story notes. In 2011, the Times points out, Esquire magazine named Bresch “Patriot of the Year??? for her prominent role in promoting the Food and Drug Administration Safety in Innovation Act, passed in 2012, which tightened regulations on imported drugs.
Why would a U.S. industry executive be deemed patriotic for advocating a law that, however worthy, improved her company’s competitive position against foreign imports? Try not to be distracted by that excellent question. The salient point is that Bresch had a family connection in Congress and made effective use of it. Now she’s thanking the U.S. government by repatriating her company to the Netherlands to dodge taxes.
Bresch told the Times that she doesn’t want to play the inversion game, but has to because Congress won’t lower corporate tax rates. In fact, Obama’s proposed tax reform plan, currently stalled in Congress, would lower the corporate rate from 35% to 28%, and 25% for manufacturers. But as Bresch told the Times, Mylan already pays an effective tax rate of 25%. Reincorporating in the Netherlands will lower that to 21%, and eventually to the high teens.
Speaking in defense of corporate fascism and predation over the land, a writer of entrepreneurial self-help books delivers this at Yahoo Finance:
So this might be a reasonable way to way to define economic patriotism: Pay what you owe and nothing more, while finding other ways to show support for your nation and your countryfolk. If you’re a businessperson who profits by operating in America, set up mentoring programs to help young people get ahead, or go out of your way to hire the underprivileged, or find some other way to give back.
This is bad writing on many levels. At the core, it’s intelligence-insulting and bald-faced deception.
Who expects American corporations to set up mentoring programs that aren’t excuses to wring free labor internships out of young people? And what, pray tell, does corporate America do to hire the underprivileged when the message for the last decade is that the labor pool is unskilled and too stupid to fulfill its needs?
The answer to that is simple and obvious. Corporate America hires the underpriviliged and everyone else at rates of pay that don’t add up to a living wage.
Anyway, only some weird and warped corporate boot-lick uses the word countryfolk in a piece aimed at arguing maintaining the corporate status quo is the patriotic thing.
“[If] you’re an ordinary voter, you can show your economic patriotism by demanding the government adopt policies that make America indisputably the best place to start and run a business, instead of a winded giant that seems unable to keep up with the rest of the world,” recommends Yahoo’s Rich Newman, author of Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success.
And the best way to make America a place to start and run a business is to always lower the corporate tax rate. It’s the best argument: If American corporations are engaged in massive tax avoidance and financial legal frauds which fail to serve even the slightest social good, change the rules so they pay even less.
Now do your patriotic duty and click up the number on Taxavoidination, either version. Don’t thumb your nose, now. I can tell.
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