07.09.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 12:39 pm by George Smith
Last week GlobalSecurity.Org was consulted by a reporter from the Associated Press on the Dark Seoul/Operation Troy report on recent cyberattacks in South Korea issued by McAfee. I looked it over and talked with her awhile over the subject.
Mostly, what I said — whether it ever gets published is immaterial at this point — was that it was a straightforward analysis on the use of malware to get into South Korean networks. The final component in it, code that “wiped” the master boot record seemed childish, something that was normal for virus-writers to put in their creations 20 years ago. (The AP piece that resulted is here. Martha Mendoza gave the McAfee report to GlobalSecurity and called me.)
In fact, naming conventions within the code — and the hacking group names cited in the McAfee report — were standard computer hacker and cyber-vandal stuff.
Typically, the news media has tried to make it into something a little more than what McAfee corporate was willing to put on paper in “Dissecting Operation Troy: Cyberespionage in South Korea.”
And this is easily illustrated by comparing excerpts from the McAfee report on Dark Seoul/Operation Troy with a sample story today, taken from the Washington Times.
The WaTimes:
Highly trained, well-funded and very persistent computer hackers have been seeking to steal secrets from U.S. and South Korean military networks for at least four years, according to new data released by security researchers.
The hackers have all the characteristics of state-sponsored cyberattackers, said Ryan Sherstobitoff of the computer security firm McAfee Inc.
“The people behind this are highly trained, well-funded and very persistent,??? Mr. Sherstobitoff said. “They’ve been targeting the networks for years.???
The hackers, who identified themselves as the “New Romantic Cyber Army,??? used crude attacks and aped the tactics and jargon of so-called “hacktivist??? groups, such as the anarchistic coalition Anonymous.
But behind the scenes, they were exploiting highly specialized and targeted cyberespionage tools to burrow into classified networks of the U.S. and South Korean military.
“The primary mission was to steal secret military data,??? Mr. Sherstobitoff said. “That’s been in the shadows until now.???
The Pentagon had no comment Monday.
The “very advanced, very sophisticated??? cybertools …
But what Ryan Sherstobitoff told the WaTimes isn’t what he and the two other McAfee employees whose names are on the report acturally write.
From its initial summary:
Our analysis of this attack—known first as Dark Seoul and now as Operation Troy—has revealed that in addition to the data losses of the MBR wiping, the incident was more than cybervandalism. An analysis of malware samples dating back to 2009 suggests the ongoing attacks on South Korean targets were actually the conclusion of a covert espionage campaign …
State sponsored or not, these attacks were crippling nonetheless. The overall tactics were not that sophisticated in comparison to what we have seen before. [Bold mine] The trend seems to be moving toward using the following techniques against targets:
• Stealing and holding data hostage and announcing the theft. Public news media have reported only that tens of thousands of computers had their MBRs wiped by the malware. But there is more to this story: The main group behind the attack claims that a vast amount of personal information has been stolen. This type of tactic is consistent with Anonymous operations and others that fall within the hacktivist category, in which they announce and leak portions of confidential information.
• Wiping the MBR to render systems unusable, creating an instant slowdown to operations within the target
An excerpt from the reports “Analysis” section:
What were the motives behind these attacks and why did the attackers chose certain targets? The attacks managed to create a significant disruption of ATM networks while denying access to funds. This wasn’t the first time that this type of attack—in which destructive malware wiped the systems belonging to a financial institution—has occurred in South Korea. In 2011 the same financial institution was hit with destructive malware that caused a denial of service.
The attackers left a calling card a day after the attacks in the form of a web pop-up message claiming that the NewRomanic Cyber Army Team was responsible and had leaked private information from several banks and media companies.
They also referenced destroying the data on a large number of machines (the MBR wiping) and left a message in the web pop-up identifying the group behind the attacks. The page title in Internet Explorer was “Hey, Everybody in Korea???????
The report goes on to explain the terminal part of the operation — by two groups which were probably the same (the second being named the Whois Hacking Crew) was preceded by a period of a couple of years in which south Korean networks had been penetrated by the same malware and related offshoots, the function of which was to scan hard disks for military subject files, zip them into an archive, and pipe them off to the intruders.
However, was this search a sophisticated one, as described by the media?
Not really, from the evidence in McAfee’s own report.
Here’s the germane material:
Drive scanning locates classified information on target systems and gives the attacker an overall idea of what these military networks have. The malware searches the root disk, counts the number of interesting files, and determines the level of that system’s importance to the attacker. The search criteria are primarily specific file extensions and keywords in document titles. The keywords are all military specific. Some refer to specific military units and programs that operate in South Korea.
[I’ve included a partial list of the search terms, which are elementary.
Really, anyone could come up with them and terms specific to South
Korea aren’t their in abundance, certainly nothing an outsider wouldn’t be expected to be aware of.
“Key Resolve drill,” for example, is just the name for a world publicized yearly joint exercise between the US and South Korea.]
Operation
Division
Corps
Brigade
Solidarity
Army
Navy
Battalion
Air force
U. S. Army
Joint Chiefs of Staff
Defense
Tactics
Password
North
Infantry
Key Resolve drill
Attack
Artillery
Engineer
One could conclude it would have been almost as specific to have just copied off the entire data volume of the disks.
The McAfee paper puts forward no proof the files grabbed using this search procedure were classified. Some may have been. Perhaps all were. Or maybe few or none. There is no way to make an estimate.
In the Associated Press’s piece on the matter, the McAfee researchers had this to say:
McAfee also said it listed only some of the keywords the malware searched for in its report. It said it withheld many other keywords that indicated the targeting of classified material, at the request of U.S. officials, due to the sensitivity of releasing specific names and programs.
“These included names of individuals, base locations, weapons systems and assets,” said Sherstobitoff.
Perhaps. Or maybe not.
US base locations, weapons systems, assets — even individuals (for example, commanders) are not secret in South Korea. Indeed, entire orders of battle and weapons systems are publicly available on the web. Rather notably, ahem, at GlobalSecurity.Org! For which I am a Senior Fellow! And which is a go to resource for thousands and thousands of American military men (civilian and enlisted) and those interested in global military affairs around the world!
Dear me, Ryan Sherstobitoff.
There is one matter worth noting, a critical difference between news reporting on Dark Seoul and the McAfee white paper on it.
The McAfee white paper, Shertobistoff et al, does not use the term “North Korea” even once.
More bluntly, McAfee corporate, being corporate, didn’t formally publish any explanation that “North Korea” was the responsible party.
It employs only the weasel-term, “state sponsored,” but did not — in print — even come down unequivocally on that.
In interviews, Sherstobitoff went well beyond what was actually published by McAfee, adding a variety of assertions and claims not put down on the digital paper.
Subsequently, every news piece came down with North Korea as the culprit.
“Was North Korea behind Operation Troy?” I was asked by the Associated Press.
I told the agency there was no way to tell from what what was in the report. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe a hacking gang. The wording included in the analysis, the destructive code “dropper” made it look childish and antique, like something virus writers did two decades back.
Whatever, I agreed with the assertion in the report that the tools and methods used, in the words of the McAfee authors, “were not that sophisticated in comparison to what we have seen before.”
From the Washington Times today:
Analysts say that the revelations about these attacks ought to prompt U.S. officials to reassess North Korea’s cybercapabilities.
Pyongyang’s hackers now must be rated “as good as Iran,??? said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity scholar at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“The Iranians moved up quickly,??? Mr. Lewis said, noting the recent spate of “denial of service??? attacks against U.S. banks laid at their door.
U.S. officials have said the greatest danger posed by cyberattacks is disruption of vital infrastructure, such as electric power transmission.
For the AP, Lewis was also quoted:
“I used to joke that it’s hard for the North Koreans to have a cyber army because they don’t have electricity, but it looks as if the regime has been investing heavily in this,” said Lewis.
If so, opinions would vary on whether this constitutes getting your money’s worth.
What actually happened during the North Korea imbroglio, though?
The Hermit Kingdom had a ritualized fit over the annual joint US/South Korean military exercise. It fueled it missiles, made silly videos, threatened that it would attack Guam, Hawaii or the west coast of America with a nuclear strike, shut down a joint business operation with South Korea and … and … and …
Nothing. The Hermit Kingdom’s ruler, the pudgy kid, had no cards to play.
But according to a news story, like many today, in the Washington Times, North Korea is punching above its weight (although never mentioned by McAfee) in cyberspace, as good as Iran.
Iran. Does it even matter?
Well, of course it matters to cybersecurity companies and the South Korean IT business workers who had to restore systems when master boot records were wiped, which would have taken time, but which was reversible.
The question unanswered is how critical was the loss of at least public (but not provably secret — although the latter is a very broad term — from) information, from Internet-connected military networks, but not classified networks, according to the South Korean military.
In summary, from the NewRomanic Cyber Army and keyword searches for “artillery,” “defense,” “secret” and “air force” to North Korea as a cyberpower, to “disruption of vital infrastructure, such as electric power transmission.”
In one thousand words or less. This is called putting your fingers on the scale.
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07.08.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 3:45 pm by George Smith
Teaser excerpts from Shit from WhiteManistan, a new Taschen coffee table art book on folk customs in America.
Plate 1: Sedition is Tradition Memorial Parade, July 4, Water Moccasin, NC.
Plate 2: Celebration gathering on news that a nuclear attack sub being refurbished in the nearby Norfolk navy yard was being renamed the John Wilkes Booth. (Lexington, VA.)
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07.07.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Shoeshine at 3:12 pm by George Smith
Nick Bilton, the New York Times tech journalist who gave the country Cody Wilson and the 3D-manufactured plastic gun fills up space today with the future urban paradise created by the self-driving car. It’s something only one of the privileged shoeshine boys of American tech plutocracy could write.
Self-driving cars will always be for the topmost in US society. As inequality continues to surge, unless they’re giving them away, they’ll never make a dent in southern California in what’s left of my lifetime. Indeed it’s laughable to posit that southern California’s great servant underclass would ever benefit from self-driving cars.
Do they even know about Google’s many vanity projects?
Bilton’s fantasy, excerpted:
As scientists and car companies forge ahead — many expect self-driving cars to become commonplace in the next decade — researchers, city planners and engineers are contemplating how city spaces could change if our cars start doing the driving for us. There are risks, of course: People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.
That city of the future could have narrower streets because parking spots would no longer be necessary. And the air would be cleaner because people would drive less. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 30 percent of driving in business districts is spent in a hunt for a parking spot, and the agency estimates that almost one billion miles of driving is wasted that way every year.
“What automation is going to allow is repurposing, both of spaces in cities, and of the car itself,??? said Ryan Calo, an assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law, who specializes in robotics and drones.
Harvard University researchers note that as much as one-third of the land in some cities is devoted to parking spots. Some city planners expect that the cost of homes will fall as more space will become available in cities. If parking on city streets is reduced and other vehicles on roadways become smaller, homes and offices will take up that space. Today’s big-box stores and shopping malls require immense areas for parking, but without those needs, they could move further into cities.
“People might be more open to a longer daily commute, leading to even more urban sprawl.”
It’s worth repeating, enough to make you fall from the chair in laughter if you’ve ever spent time in Los Angeles County and the Inland Empire.
Who, exactly, is on our soCal roads who doesn’t already do an excessive commute in a region that defines urban sprawl in the continental United States?
And Google and expensive self-driving cars for the upper class and their servants will fix it. Sure. Google will fix everything, just as it does now, only better.
Here’s what might fix it.
Mass unemployment, underemployment and inequality climbing inexorably higher. Potentially, there could be less cars on the roads because people won’t be able to afford to drive.
That will alleviate congestion and make inner-city parking easier for the haves.
One professor of “the Internet and society” at Stanford, Bryant Walker Smith, imagines his driver-less car becoming an extension of his home.
This next bit, on the other hand, is perfectly great. Escape from WhiteManistan can definitely see the overlords and minders this way in a decade or so:
“I could sleep in my driverless car, or have an exercise bike in the back of the car to work out on the way to work,??? he said. “My time spent in my car will essentially be very different.???
Your Personal Fitness Gym car, streaming smoothly along amidst the the hundreds of thousands of late models and junkers that must be kept going by the slave labor class.
Here’s a thought question.
What’s the future potential for class resentment in the servant class to boil over into vandalism and sabotage of self-driving cars? You still have to rub elbows, or bumpers, on those big freeways and cities, wizards of tomorrow.
Oh, the future’s brimming with promise
And the promise is heading our way
So keep your eyes on that shining horizon
Make way for tomorrow today!
Daring new devices will help us to succeed
Better tools for living will meet our every need
Incredible inventions through new technology
Extending life’s dimensions for all humanity!
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07.06.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 10:21 am by George Smith
A day old feature from the Toronto Star is here.
McAfee was in Canada for a seven-day shoot on a documentary of his life, “Who is McAfee?”
As well-publicized as he’s been it’s hard to imagine something of such short work winding up well-received.
However, McAfee is a good self-serving interview and tells the newspaper he is trying to carve out a new niche entertainment:
He plans to stick around for a year or so, working on his new “career??? in entertainment.
“The end product is something that hopefully might educate me or at least might validate my own opinion of myself,??? says McAfee. “I don’t mean opinion of good guy/bad guy, but opinion of what’s actually happening in life.
If he keeps making videos like the last, it could work well.
McAfee has acquired a new companion, a 30-year old stripper from Miami. The old young gals from Belize now left behind.
McAfee’s new flame was photographed for USA Today here.
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07.05.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Decline and Fall at 2:13 pm by George Smith
CAHY — or my abbreviation for Corporate America Hates You, its open hostility to people — is recognized as real. Awhile ago I wrote about it, in the economy of strangle:
In Sunday’s New York Times, a front page piece on how corporate America has shifted to staffing with part-time employees, to avoid benefits and the payment of wages:
While there have always been part time workers, especially in restaurants and retailers, employers today rely on them far more than before as they seek to cut costs and align staffing to customer traffic. The trend has frustrated millions of Americans … reducing their pay and benefits.
“We’re seeing more and more that the burden of market fluctuation is being shifted onto the workers, as opposed to the companies absorbing it themselves,??? said Carrie Gleason, the executive director of the Retail Action Project, an advocate for retail workers …
Here is seen the maximizing of profit by compressing wages and having government programs in the tattered safety net picking up the slack. This from corporate America, where the prevailing sentiment during the last four years is that socialism and entitlement has run rampant.
However, the kind of entitlement spending that allows corporate American to pay people so poorly that there aren’t yet food riots [because 48 million working people are compensated with a food stamp benefit] is apparently OK.
The answer isn’t near at hand.
It will be generational as the current climate of corporate predation can’t be changed, only slowly replaced.
And the only way it can be supplanted is through the strengthening of labor after decades of attack from the private sector. And law requiring that people must be paid a living wage.
At PBS today, a discussion on the inexorable decline of labor in the US, accelerated by “innovation” that does not achieve any social good.
The PBS piece explains how capital has stayed the same globally, but an explosion in labor availability and ease of using it, has radically reduced what people can earn.
The piece also dallies with what this means for the future and none of the prognostications are good.
Near the end of it, a couple statements stick out, both having to do with a recognition that social norms have changed and not in any good way. Destruction of union power and compensation became normalized and, increasingly, technology driven.
From PBS:
Gary Marcus, a psychologist at NYU: “I have a question for those of you here that are more optimistic about the future. What specifically do you think might be the future economic domains in which there might be large-scale employment? I’m not interested in the cases where there’s a cool new job that really, really smart people who read Wired magazine can do. What I am interested in are new occupations that hundreds of thousands of people could do, in game-changing ways like when the automobile industry once opened up.”
Thomas Kochan, MIT: “In terms of a market failure, it’s the reality that it’s not in the interests of any individual firm in the United States to try to solve the jobs problem. So, we’ve got to figure out a way to deal with that…and the only way that you solve this is by getting people and institutions and organizations to work together, to engage these issues collectively.
“It’s about an institutional failure over the last 30 years. With the decline of the labor movement, you’ve seen a lot of institutions go downhill equivalently. We don’t see the kind of dialogue, we don’t see the enforcement of our social norms and social policies that discipline corporations, and that really provided the kind of collective spreading of wage patterns and wage norms across the society.
“We’ve got to rebuild those, but we can’t try to rebuild them in an old-fashioned way. Now we’re in a more digital economy, a more knowledge-based economy, and we need to invent the new institutions that will cut across and aggregate these interests to address these challenges. We’ve got to get the education community working with business and employers, working with labor and civil society.
“I’m not a believer that technology is going to naturally eliminate jobs and cut income, but if we don’t do anything about it, if we just leave it, as we have, to individual market forces and to individual corporate actions and to individual technology innovations, then that’s probably where we are headed.”
Hanan Kolko, a labor lawyer: “Until this social norm of trying to crush unions and workers in general is changed, you’re going to have more and more instability for working people. And it’s a very bad thing for the economy, because at the end of the day, if there’s not enough aggregate demand, there’s not going to be enough people with money to buy the stuff to keep our economy going. This is a structural change in the social norms of our economy that makes me pessimistic about the future.”
Last week the blog addressed it in a response to an LA Times piece on “concierge apps,” or trivial technologies that exist to pit all-against-all in free-lance labor bidding wars, driving earning power downward for the sake of superfluous vanity work. (Paradoxically, while this was published the Times was going through another wave of layoffs brought on by a poor profit picture brought about by the digital sharing and content-is-free economy.)
These are technologies which do not increase the economic pie. They only fractionate it in favor of the holders of the technology and at the expense of low-wage workers who cannot defend themselves from it.
As far as innovation goes, it is not a future.
Specifically, we can talk about Uber, the Silicon Valley cab-summoning app that serves limousines and free-lance drivers to the top most and that part of the upper middle class which retains work as high-button servant labor.
Los Angeles sent Uber a “cease and desist” order to stop operations in the county and the company ignored it.
The LA Times piece provided precious little about the problem a company like Uber professes to solve using smartphone innovation.
That problem is claimed to be transportation dysfunction and lousy cab service.
First, transportation is hard in LA County because of its sheer size. It’s an automobile economy.
There is a need for shuttle service to airports. And, indeed, there is an effective network of shuttle companies. They work and anyone who has lived here a long time has come in contact with them.
Uber cannot improve upon it. The job remains the same whether summoned by smartphone app or through the old fashioned way of simply calling them by voice.
Shuttle drivers don’t get rich. They are not parasites who need cutting down by digital innovation. But what Uber purports to do in such things is just use technology to summon a swarm of free-lance workers to undercut business and undermine costs. This is not expansion of an economic pie.
It is the same with cab drivers. Do you know anyone who is one making as much money as a Silicon Valley tech company CEO?
So concierge apps be damned as progress. Parasitic apps for chiseling the cost of labor is a much better description.
Companies like Uber, or TaskRabbit, call themselves leaders in the emerging world (and here is another Orwellian tech industry term) of the sharing economy.
If it is so much about sharing, how come most in American society receive so little benefit?
The destruction of payment for recorded music was the first grand achievement of the sharing economy. Sean Parker, for example, one of the founders of Napster, is now wealthier than Croesus, so much so that when he’s pilloried for excess he shows everyone he really is that venal by writing about how his posh wedding was ruined.
More descriptive of the sharing economy, a White House economic advisor recently wrote a widely, ahem, shared essay on how the old pop music industry was gutted by technology, turned into a winner-take-all struggle in which only the biggest names thrive.
This was placed within the larger context of how inequality is very high in the US, and rising, as those with access to the means of the sharing economy employ it to take larger and larger pieces from an economic pie through divestment from fair compensation for labor. More gallingly, the Internet does not create fabulous opportunity because perceptions of popularity mean a lot when society is grossly unequal. In other words, algorithms that put something in the first page of results because of counts of various things make everything below the top few rungs displayed untenable.
Now you can surely say that Apple and iTunes store funneling digital music purchases through a country with a legal mechanism for tax evasion is innovation. And Google’s development of YouTube as a service that provides a great deal of free pirated music with the salve that by attaching a link to a copy of it at the iTunes store is certainly some kind of wee innovation. But you can also call such things parasitic or predatory.
Last, from the Guardian, “In the digital economy, we’ll soon all be working for free – and I refuse”:
[In] Jaron Lanier’s new book Who Owns The Future? … he argues: “Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be customers.” Lanier, a computer scientist and a musician, is rightly called a visionary because he sees what is happening, when everything is live-streamed but no one knows the name of the person who made the music any more. Content is free.
Governments play up the idea that a digital future creates jobs rather than eats them up. Culturally, there is now a fantasy world of start-ups and blogs and YouTube TV where a very few people manage to make money but most work simply for “experience”…
He describes a winner-takes-all world, with a tiny number of successful people and everyone else living on hope. “There is not a middle-class hump. It’s an all-or-nothing society.”
But the digital economy operates as a kind of sophisticated X Factor. Someone will make it, sure. For more than 15 seconds even, maybe. But most won’t. This is why Lanier says the internet may destroy the middle classes, the people who can’t outspend the elite. And without that middle group, we cannot maintain a democracy.
This is why it is easy to root for the downfall of Uber.
The California Public Utilities Commission could see that the company is not really tech innovation at all, that what urban parts of the state do not urgently need from a company like Uber and its rivals is more poorly paid free-lance cab and shuttle drivers. The place won’t fall if it never gains traction.
I can compare a world class innovation in the US, with the alleged world class innovation of free digital music content.
There are three electric guitars that are historic technology: The Fender Telecaster, the Fender Stratocaster, and the Gibson Les Paul. The three defined pop music around the world, the first two being invented by Leo Fender and co-workers in California.
Leo Fender did not invent the idea of an electric guitar. Technically, he was not even the first to bring one into market. But he was the first to produce a genuinely great iconic model that revolutionized that market.
The invention of the Telecaster and the Stratocaster electrified pop music creation in the United States. It created jobs, entire large industries. The pop music industry, from the Sixties to the Nineties, simply would not have existed as it did without Fender innovation and all the companies it did business with and competed against.
Electric guitars were not about fractionating the economy, using widgets to chisel labor costs downward, or make millions of people claw against each other for the privilege of almost-unpaid work. (Despite what you may have experienced in struggle for a major label contract.)
The coming of the electric guitar did not take everything the majority had and throw it in the trash for the profit of a small slice at the very top.
When you see terms like concierge app or the sharing economy, you should choke. They always mean a lot of people are about to lose big.
Corporate America Hates You — from the archives.
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07.04.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 5:47 am by George Smith
Or, shit WhiteManistan thinks.
It was obviously not as much fun being on the Union side.
From a USA Today piece on the re-enactment in Gettysburg, yesterday:
Kevin Farrar, a Confederate re-enactor from Lovettsville, Va., said it was “mind-boggling” to think of the mile-long march that Confederate troops endured under heavy fire. “It’s like the beaches of Normandy,” he said.
[Um, no, wrong on too many levels.]
No photo subject was more popular than a smartly dressed Gen. Robert E. Lee, played by Don Vanhart, a 58-year-old surgical technician from Maine, N.Y.
One noticeable feature of the recent faddy Gettysburg stories is that in interviewing the folk of WhiteManistan, they’re mostly only interested in talking about the South.
In reading Shelby Foote’s three volume history of it (I’m on the first book), the author states that after about the first six months, troops on either side which had been in battle were on equal footing.
This, counter to the common myth that the Confederate soldier, used to hunting more and “living outside,” was superior to “the pasty-faced mechanics” of the Union.
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07.03.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 11:12 am by George Smith
From the web:
???The 18 Best U.S. Cities for Bros???–comes courtesy of real estate website Estately, and puts Bethlehem at No. 17:
Bethlehem made the list primarily because a high school student there was hospitalized after suffering an allergic reaction from an overexposure of Axe Body Spray. However, oh little bro town of Bethlehem, you are much more than a toxic cloud of spray-on brodor. You are home to Lehigh University, a small school whose cultural life revolves around its fraternity scene, with a brolific 37% of male students in a fraternity. The lacrosse team was ranked 13th in the country last season and The Daily Beast considers it the #19 party school in America. Your caucasians are plentiful (65.4%), the marijuana abounds, and white baseball hats turned backwards can be seen all over campus.
Clueless. Lehigh wrestling is nationally famous.
“The most storied athletic program at Lehigh is its wrestling team,” reads Wiki.
And, of course, Dwayne Johnson is Bethlehem’s most famous son.
“The Rock will layeth the smackdown on your candy ass!”
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06.30.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 10:28 am by George Smith
The world is not a bag of nails for which the US national security megaplex is the hammer.
It is difficult to know when, if ever, that reality will be perceived in this country where it counts enough to make a difference.
From Der Spiegel, by way of the Guardian:
The German publication Der Spiegel reported that it had seen documents and slides from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden indicating that US agencies bugged the offices of the EU in Washington and at the United Nations in New York. They are also accused of directing an operation from Nato headquarters in Brussels to infiltrate the telephone and email networks at the EU’s Justus Lipsius building in the Belgian capital, the venue for EU summits and home of the European council.
Without citing sources, the magazine reported that more than five years ago security officers at the EU had noticed several missed calls apparently targeting the remote maintenance system in the building that were traced to NSA offices within the Nato compound in Brussels.
The impact of the Der Spiegel allegations may be felt more keenly in Germany than in Brussels. The magazine said Germany was the foremost target for the US surveillance programmes, categorising Washington’s key European ally alongside China, Iraq or Saudi Arabia in the intensity of the electronic snooping.
The US cannot and will not now ever be able to live down its exhausting campaign to make everyone believe that we were being spied on and probed in cyberspace, unfairly, by others.
Keys: Edward Snowden.
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06.29.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 5:18 pm by George Smith
The most odious story of the day, a feature at the LA Times on the use of smartphone apps and the social bazaar micro-job bidding businesses in southern California.
Mentioned the companies that are always mentioned, those that cater to the 1 percent and their high-button servants who run their lives off their smartphones. That means Uber and TaskRabbit, the latter company whose innovation is to make personal assistant work pay even less.
The technology is always the same. It’s merely a collection point where the haves can leverage an extremely lousy labor situation in the US, offering a bazaar in which people can bid against each other for the privilege of driving a snob to the airport, or picking up toothbrushes and toilet paper at the grocery store.
The Times story has Aaron and Adora Cheung of Homejoy who get the newspaper to swallow the idea that housecleaning services are too expensive in Los Angeles. They claim 40 dollars an hour, with their business slashing it to 20.
My experience living in southern California is a bit different. House cleaning isn’t expensive and much of the work is done by illegals, often at less than minimum wage.
So, again, the tech industry of business model of using digital collection to pit those who earn the least against each other in bidding wars to serve the upper middle class and above.
In addition, with many, you have the added joy of passing competence tests and background checks. Later, you can have the snobs pile up bad reviews on you for not working sufficiently well for minor sums.
“[Dawn McCoy, an actress and writer in the Wilshire district] has hired people to give her rides, hang photos and install kitchen cabinet knobs in her home, design her website, wait on guests at a party, put up and take down Christmas decorations and pick up food,” reads the piece. Because, you know, the handymen putting up ads on Craig’s List or still too damn expensive.
“Such start-ups are catching on with busy, tech-savvy consumers who want things done efficiently and cheaply,” it continues.
Yes, everyone knows — or they should, that well over half of the innovation coming out of the tech industry is in making use of the web to disempower and cheapen those who already make the least.
Think of these app labor operations as digital harpies, ripping off shreds of flesh from those who basically can’t leverage anything to keep the value of their labor from being undermined.
And if you’re do errand work for less than minimum there’s this pleasure: “For those worried about hiring a stranger they met on the Internet, the start-ups conduct background checks on hosts and task completers and strongly urge both sides to review each other after every transaction.”
The only good news is that the Los Angeles City Department of Transportation went after Uber and two similar app services, “accusing the ‘rogue taxi apps’ of illegally operating in the city without the proper permits and licenses and ordering them to stop picking up passengers.”
Do you know any traditional cab drivers who earn to much money and have it too easy?
Of course you do, hundreds. They deserve destruction at the hands of trivial job app programming. Don’t fear detest creative destruction, it’s making the place a better place to live (for the haves) at everyone else’s expense.
If you read the entire piece, which is here, you’ll notice there is not one instance in which the reporter mentions what the pricing for a specific “task” is other than 20/hr for “homecleaning,” of which the business takes an unspecified slice.
There is also not one instance of a “taskrabbit” — or job doer from any other of the services — interviewed, or an instance of anyone who might have found the services wanting.
Better editors wouldn’t have let it fly until it was more complete and not just a p.r. piece on the wonder of smartphone summoned cheap labor.
Note the crap re-branding name for these things — concierge apps.
Except these concierges get paid much much less than the old ones.
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06.28.13
Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, WhiteManistan at 1:52 pm by George Smith
It doesn’t believe in it.
Courtesy of Steven Aftergood at Secrecy blog, we can look at an excerpt from the recent Congressional Research Service report, “Science and Technology Issues in the 113th Congress,” here.
WhiteManistan has no use for science on most any subject because it always tends to be inconvenient to its crabbed world view.
And since WhiteManistan has paralyzed Congress by understanding how to stifle all change from a minority position, the Congressional Research Service is left in an odd position for this report.
Bluntly stated, there can be no legislation on climate change in the 113th Congress. There can be no debate in Congress any more than a person can have an intelligent conversation with the bottom of their shoe.
Nevertheless, the report diplomatically attempts to summarize what is known about climate change and how inharmonious opinion from WhiteManistan means for the legislative body.
“Debate on appropriate federal policies is fueled by differing levels of confidence among Members and the public … Few scientists dispute that the climate is changing … Over the long run, not addressing human contribution to the causes of climate fluctuations and their consequences could set up costly, even catastrophic risks and challenges,” it reads. “Most experts conclude from evidence and computer modeling that human activities have driven most of the global warming observed since the 1970s …”
This is as close as we could ever hope to get to a CRS report stating:
“The GOP is an extremist collection of anti-science douche-bags whose group actions prevent the country from moving forward on the problem of global warming.”
The President knows this, too. And this is why he signaled that he intended to undertake unilateral action on the issue this week.
WhiteManistan immediately reacted with cries on job destruction and government tyranny.
Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy blog, along with other recent CRS reports, is here.
This has been another in a now frequent series of postings discussing the security threat WhiteManistan poses to the future of Americans.
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