Self-explanatory. Vote for me — or at least play the song counter up. The idea of me potentially getting to antagonize an audience at a Warped tour stop should be quite amusing, even inspirational, to readers.
And if it’s not, why are you here, anyway?
Plus I can make the claim of being the only expert on national security and terrorism on the stages.
So click on my face and follow the instructions.
Update:We’re getting thrashed. It’s humiliating. C’mon, you know in your hearts this is orders of magnitude better than metalcore/punk rock bands like grains of sand on the beach.
Pester your friends.
Don’t you think the guy who wrote one of the first books on computer viruses, who shot down the US guv’mint on ricin in 2004, who blows away the crap about the power grid being knocked out by Anonymous, deserves a break? What has Internet support come to if it doesn’t work for all of us at least once?
Update II: Not quite as humiliating! We’re now a bit competitive in the average of the great bottom tier of bands who don’t have the resources to do click rigging and all the other things that make Internet ‘likes’ and popularity counts such reliable metrics of undiscovered talent.
So thank you and keep the pedal to the metal! Onward and upward forward!
Boy, imagine what would happen if the judges at Ernie Ball actually listened to all the tapes of bands posted to their cloud. Yeah, people always want to hear new stuff from the Internet. Their ears are always open, their eyes to the fields for the new and fresh stirring the underbrush.
The on-line buzz will uncover/discover … the 100,000th metalcore punk rock band in the land!
“The National Anthem is the best startlingly real and truthful electric folk rock song this year!” — Joe Morgansternly, The Weekly National Standard Journal & Politico Review
Yesterday’s cyberwar news revolved around a report issued by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.
The government commissioned Northrop Grumman to do the report.
Northrop Grumman is a big arms manufacturer and one part of its business model is now the selling of cybersecurity/cyberdefense contracting to the the US government.
For the last ten years, at least, the US government had regularly outsourced threat assessment to the defense and national security companies providing defense against the threats assessed.
It’s a terrible conflict of interest but it’s the way things are. Set in impervious stone, there is no way to change it.
The cynic could view it as just a practical dealing with the ways of the defense machine. If the government went to the trouble of hiring and paying its own people to do the job, they’d sooner rather than later wind up doing the same thing for a contractor, selling the product back to the government at not-so-cheap prices, anyway. The government has become a stop on the way to the private sector, a shop where you can arrange things so that when you hit corporate America, you know what buttons to massage and who to grease to get a share of the national spoil for your firm.
So why even bother with the pretense of having an in-between stage of allegedly independent employees doing it?
For what it is, it’s rather modest, particularly in comparison with the press spawned.
It spends a lot of print mapping the cybersecurity training and defense structures in the Chinese government, academia and the private sector, so far as they can be determined from the public record.
In this, readers see a simple mirroring of the government, private sector and academic interest in cybersecurity and the topic of cyberwar in the US. Nothing more, nothing less.
A final section of the report deals with security concerns over supply chains and alliances between Chinese state-sponsored businesses and the information technology industry in the US.
The report presents the problem of determining whether or not chip manufacturing, now almost all done in a distributed manner overseas. (The report calls it “fabless” manufacturing — the companies that are the suppliers and brand manufacturers now simply being fronts for ships which aggregate finished goods, parts and processes from all over the world.)
At this point in time, it’s impossible to secure. However, it’s also so complicated that there is no one person, or group of people, or central repository, that can map it. There are always people, or agencies, which insist they do. They’re almost always lying or exaggerating for their own purposes.
The complexity of this network defies securing. It also is problematical for those who, according to US suspicions, might wish to exploit to embed trojan horses and malicious products all over the US. More complexity seems to always breed more vulnerability. It also makes it so less and less people accurately grasp the entire picture, including experts.
Attackers can no more determine whether poisoned products will wind up in critical areas, or if they will wind up anywhere important at all, any more than defenders.
Easier to have someone on the inside of a very specific target, ready to add a contaminated device, perhaps ala Stuxnet.
And far easier to just try and get into network points from the web.
The Seattle Times published a piece that, like the rest of the news generated on the report, overstated it by sins of omission and commission.
For a decade or more, Chinese military officials have talked about conducting warfare in cyberspace, but in recent years they have progressed to testing attack capabilities during exercises, according to a congressional report to be released Thursday …
The Chinese military conducted an exercise in October involving “joint information offensive and defensive operations” and another in 2010 featuring attacks on communications command-and-control systems …
American officials have stated that the Chinese have penetrated the U.S. electric grid and that they have gained access to U.S. government and corporate networks.
In other words, the Chinese are running cybersecurity/cyberwar/penetration testing exercises in the same way the US has done, through the public and private sector, for many years.
As for the Seattle newspaper’s insertion of a sentence on the electrical grid, it’s stock sloppy repetition of received wisdoms and does not really reflect much that’s actually in the Northrop Grumman report. The arms manufacturers analysts make only one mention of the US power grid and taking it down through cyberwar.
One Chinese technical report — that’s one — is cited as having discussed the topic. And there is none of the usual theorizing and empty claims about what could be done to the power grid. It’s a bit of a contrast with the usual way the subject is handled.
In this it shows a slightly refreshing break from the usual official cant on the matter. A small favor, perhaps.
Ben Folds, a man so downright great he’ll bear burdens like an ass, is musical director on William Shatner’s Has Been. He’s the right fellow to take the colostomy bagful of Singing Shat and search it for gold. On the scale of Singing Shat, Has Been ranks above the Shakespeare rap in Free Enterprise, but below “Mr. Tambourine Man,” where he first found much fool in himself, to the world’s pleasure and increase in laughter. Other reviewers have insisted it is Singing Shat’s best, furnishing praise like “the original William Hung, only with straight teeth” and ” ‘Has Been’ strives to make an ugly deed look fair.”
Notably accompanying Singing Shat is Henry Rollins, the man with wits in his belly and guts in his head, exhibiting it all for “I Can’t Get Behind That.” With Rollins and Folds, Garson Foos, leader of Shout, obviously has hopes Singing Shat will please fans of intelligent alternative rock, or at least idiot-worshippers to whom Bill is an idol.
Propped up in public by the best sustenance pharmacy provides, Osbourne assumes the guise of a vigorous man. Made a celebrity for being a shaking wretch on TV, Osbourne now has the gall to pretend otherwise, speaking of ambushing a robber and making available a commemorative box set in his spare time.
It’s recommended that the collection be pushed into a slit latrine and covered with lime. Prince of Darkness contains live renditions and demos of ho-hum heavy metal “classics” and cover versions (examples: “All the Young Dudes,” “For What It’s Worth”) that only those who received copies for promotion needed to hear.
What’s called for instead is a CD of Ozzy truth, call it Die Fledermaus. Translated as “The Bat,” Osbourne’s fictitious CD would open with “Harsh Solution,” a diatribe at being manacled at the Alamo for drunk-in-public urination. ZZ Top-esque is the lyric: “How could those coppers be so unkind to arrest me for [pissing] while blind.”
The head goth’s music is autobiographical. “You Won’t Be Coming Home” deals with the more than twice-told tales of Osbourne’s attacks on his wife while demented from drugs and strong drink. The centerpiece of the CD is the title cut, a mini-rock opera. Beginning with “No More Tears, Sad Dove,” Osbourne sings about the unreasonable hysteria following his first famous solo career event. “Die Bat!” continues, recounting the misery that resulted after the singer bit the dead head off one of those things, too. The mini-opera closes with “Killer Injection,” a metal bolero of misery on the abdominal inoculations one gets for rabies after eating unprepared fledermaus. All appropriate for playing spot-the-walker, wheelchair, and oxygen on the sides of the stage at Ozzfest.
Everyone knows the incredible danger the world would face if irrational theocrats controlled a nuclear arsenal, (except for the thirty-two percent who support Rick Santorum.) …
The candidates instead prefer the more hawkish, “All Painful Death Options Are On The Table Of Flaming Hellfire With The Fork Of Vengence For Your Eye” policy.
At Secrecy blog Steve Aftergood has posted the testimony of William McRaven, overall commander of global US Special Operations.
Appearing before the Senate Armed Services committee, McRaven emitted statements that with only a little translation, perfectly encapsulate the American strategy of Bombing Paupers.
As Al Qaeda and other extremist organizations attempt to franchise their ideology and violence globally, we will likely remain engaged against violent extremist networks for the foreseeable future.
Newspeak translation: We now operate under a mandate to attack trivial collections of people who we deem to be potentially annoying in the destitute places of the world from now until whenever.
“The direct approach is characterized by technologically-enabled small-unit precision lethality, focused intelligence, and interagency cooperation integrated on a digitally-networked battlefield…. Extreme in risk, precise in execution and able to deliver a high payoff, the impacts of the direct approach are immediate, visible to the public and have had tremendous effects on our enemies’ networks throughout the decade,” reads another bit from the testimony at Secrecy blog.
Put another way, it’s the focused application of killing technology and wealth against those who have none, a bottom global class with different skin color and religion which cannot threaten the country’s existence but inclusive of some miscellaneous bad people. None of whom we can abide. And all because of one very bad day a decade ago.
Without Montrose, no Van Halen as that band emerged in ’77.
I still have most of his albums.
Never repeating himself, Ronnie Montrose was certainly not a man who needed social approval in the way of a big audience to stay energized.
As a result he made albums that were all over the place. Montrose, the band, was pure hard rock. As it neared the end of Montrose’s patience with it, a more electric keyboard sound dominated until the man axed the singer and wrote an all instrumental record.
By the Eighties, Montrose was back into the rock band format in Gamma, a quartet which — surprisingly — again provided a vehicle for art and synth work as much as the thick dominating Les Paul riff-tone for which he became known.
Always exciting, Montrose’s power chords were hand grenades and over the course of the Seventies and Eighties I saw him on the big stage about half a dozen times.
The most memorable show was one at the Tower in ’77 or ’78 in support of his Open Fire solo album.
The show was audacious in 1978, particularly for rock audiences used to the classic format with a frontman/lead singer.
Montrose wasn’t working jazz and there was only one band given a get-out-of-jail free card to perform fusion for the rock crowd and that was the Mahavishnu Orchestra.
Still, Open Fire was a fair album. It actually made a much better show, though.
Back then Montrose was sandwiched between Journey, the headliner, and Van Halen in support of its debut album.
Eddie van Halen was a tough act to follow. Ronnie Montrose handled it with aplomb. He was every bit at the same level of heavyweight guitar playing as the younger star.
Here’s some film from the Open Fire tour.
Today, it still entertains with many things.
You have the fruity rockstar clothes of the late Seventies, the power guitar coupled to a bit of an arty take on some things Emerson, Lake & Palmer, an antagonizing mountain of synths and keyboards piled onstage, and the fact that it probably did a lot to inspire emerging punk rockers who were rebelling against everything like it.
Over the weekend some snob at The Atlantic went Tom Friedman, marveling at the alleged innovation of the Presto, an app to rid restaurants of people who already earn crap.
The young Presto innovator, Rajat Suri, takes the Atlantic writer to a restaurant with the machine installed.
Called Calafia, it’s in the nation’s high button district, where all the most brilliant are, Palo Alto.
It’s where even food has been innovated upward, the writer letting us know the restaurant is the creation of “Google employee 53,” who also peddles his Food 2.0 cook book there.
[You’re] retracing the footsteps of giants. Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt were once spotted talking shop there. Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg all frequent the place …
“I love a quail egg, so I agree to order that,” informs the writer, Alexis Madrigal. Now they don’t offer that at Bobby’s on El Molino!
Rajat Suri’s innovation turns the restaurant into a glorified automat.
Like so many innovative things from America in 2012, it does it by being disruptive technology, antagonizing newspeak for stuff that reduces or eliminates the wages of people who already earn very little, using programming to transfer what’s left of the spoil to people who already make a very good living.
Technology, in other words, to squeeze blood from stones for the benefit of the so-called much-betters.
From the Atlantic piece:
“It costs about a dollar a day per table, it can even go lower depending on if you have sponsors involved because all the alcohol companies want to get involved,” Suri says. “For that, they get about $6 a day per tablet in increased sales. That’s extra desserts, appetizers, drinks. They get about another $5 in extra table turns. If you can fit in one more table per night, that’s worth a lot of money. And some restaurants, though not Calafia, get about $4, $5 extra because they choose to save labor.”
… And, if the restaurants choose to cut some employees because they have an automated ordering system, that trims a bunch of costs, too.
The minimum wage is apparently too high in Palo Alto, according to Suri, the Presto’s maker: “In San Francisco, the cost of labor is $10 an hour, the highest in the country for staff … So if you can reduce 10 percent of your staff, it’s just a huge win.”
A huge win.
Those who retain their low-paying jobs will be better off, the man claims. This is because he claims people tip “better” through the machine. It also needs to be mentioned lots of places don’t actually pay even minimum wage to waiter staff.
Vendor claims, ah, always anchored in the bedrock of fact, never in the land of conveniently made-up shit.
“I don’t want people losing their jobs of because of something like this,” one lady customer tells the Atlantic’s journalist.
“It is impossible to ignore that this technology threatens a job class, which through its flexibility and unusual hours, has supported many people trying to pull themselves up through school or a creative career,” concedes Madrigal.
A less polite way of putting it is to call the Presto yet another trivial piece of app technology that enables those who have it to make money through wiping their feet on a class of those who always have bad things done to them. And calling it progress.
One similar attempt at this, except on a much larger scale, was the push to get self-checkout into supermarkets, the idea being that checkout staff could be reduced on the backs of shoppers.
It’s been in Pasadena at a couple stores — Albertsons, Whole Foods — and hasn’t been particularly successful. A lot of people don’t like to use them and, consequently, there has been no obvious impact on employment.
Plus, people still use cash money, which renders them not so useful, particularly at a run of the mill place like Albertsons.
The idea that hackers — now to mean Anonymous, the Chinese, or any other alleged enemy of the US anywhere in the world, can turn out the lights from the Internet is pervasive.
There isn’t a week that passes without some media outlet publishing a story or running a televised news segment mentioning it.
All this despite any extraordinary evidence in support of the extraordinary claims.
It is a claim abused by government and corporate security men using arguments from authority.
The power grid can be taken down because many important people say so. And the more people say so, the more true it must be.
However, a recent Government Accounting Office report entitled Cybersecurity — Challenges in Securing the Modernized Electricity Grid — shows the threadbare quality of the argument. For such an important issue — and we can agree that turning off the nation’s power by trivially flicking some software switches a world away is a serious matter — the report is a mere 19 pages long.
This is because the report has nothing, well, to report.
When it gets to delivering examples of blackouts caused by cyberattack it has none. Actually, it tries to use one, now part of our techno-mythology, and I’ll get to it in a minute.
Since the report can offer no examples it cites a couple instances of malware at energy facilities, not particularly remarkable news.
Another example offered by GAO is the Slammer worm, a widespread malware infection that was also found disabling a “safety monitoring system” at Davis-Besse, an idled nuclear power plant in 2003.
Moreover, in 2008, the Central Intelligence Agency reported that malicious activities against IT systems and networks have caused disruption of electrical power capabilities in multiple regions overseas, including a case that resulted in a multi-city power outage.
The attribution is the White House’s brief Cyberspace Policy Review, published in 2009.
CIA reports malicious activities against information technology systems have caused the disruption of electrical power in multiple regions overseas, including a case that resulted in a multi-city power outage.
It is footnoted. However, the footnote does not attribute the CIA. Instead it points to a seller of computer security training, SANS, which announced this remarkable bit of hearsay at a security vendor conference in 2008.
Also note the GAO report does not put the White House reports claim in quotation marks. It just cut and pastes it, dropping it directly into the GAO text as if composed anew.
In any case, that single claim — although now passed through many authorities who simply repeat it over and over like dogma — has never come with any reasonable substantiating evidence.
Instead, it has simply been used in an argument that relies on the maxim that if bullshit is repeated often enough it eventually transforms into not-bullshit, no matter how scant the evidence.
It’s nature is that of a myth or a rumor.
In mulling it over it’s worth taking some time to consider an old myth — a hoax, actually, from antique America, one involving the story of the Cardiff Giant.
Unlike the claim about shutting down the power in faraway places, the Cardiff giant actually existed. It was stone sculpture, unearthed at some farm in upstate New York, taken by many as a fossilized example of a race of giants that had once walked the land.
Andrew D. White, the first president and founder of Cornell, wrote about the Cardiff hoax in his autobiography and the parts relevant to this discussion are here.
Wrote White:
Entering, we saw a large pit or grave, and, at the bottom of it, perhaps five feet below the surface, an enormous figure, apparently of Onondaga gray limestone. It was a stone giant, with massive features, the whole body nude, the limbs contracted as if in agony. It had a color as if it had lain long in the earth, and over its surface were minute punctures, like pores. An especial appearance of great age was given it by deep grooves and channels in its under side, apparently worn by the water which flowed in streams through the earth and along the rock on which the figure rested. Lying in its grave, with the subdued light from the roof of the tent falling upon it, and with the limbs contorted as if in a death struggle, it produced a most weird effect. An air of great solemnity pervaded the place. Visitors hardly spoke above a whisper.
Coming out, I asked some questions, and was told that the farmer who lived there had discovered the figure when digging a well. Being asked my opinion, my answer was that the whole matter was undoubtedly a hoax …
Like the story about the power being offed in faraway lands, the Cardiff
giant inspired great enthusiasms in those convinced of its reality.
“The current of belief ran more and more strongly, and soon embraced a large number of really thoughtful people,” wrote White.
“I met them at their hotel and discussed with them the subject which so interested us all, urging them especially to be cautious and stating that a mistake might prove very injurious to the reputation of the regents, and to the proper standing of scientific men and methods in the state, that if the matter should turn out to be a fraud, and such eminent authorities should be found to have committed themselves to it, there would be a guffaw from one end of the country to the other at the expense of the men intrusted by the State with its scientific and educational interests …”
White’s essay on the nature of the Cardiff Giant and his observations on the belief in it make for absorbing reading, particularly in light of how various received wisdoms are accepted as stark truth in America today — a century and a half later.
It seems we haven’t gotten very far beyond the rubes in our modern techno-society:
At no period of my life have I ever been more discouraged as regards the possibility of making right reason prevail among men.
As a refrain to every argument there seemed to go jeering and sneering through my brain Schiller’s famous line:
“Against stupidity the gods themselves fight in vain.”
There was evidently a “joy in believing” in the marvel, and this was increased by the peculiarly American superstition that the correctness of a belief is decided by the number of people who can be induced to adopt it–that truth is a matter of majorities. The current of credulity seemed irresistible.
The Cardiff Giant, it should be noted, was far more substantial than the story about offing the lights in a faraway place. At least you could examine it.
“If you’re talking about terrorism in the real world where you want to blow up a dam or do some destruction, you can potentially do that remotely through a cyber attack??? — another modern Cardiff Giant believer, from last week
A former Elvis impersonator from Maine who reportedly drove a stolen car from Augusta to Florida is charged with threatening police there with a weapon of mass destruction.
Michael James Conley, 64, of Waterville told the Miami Herald he was suffering from diabetes Monday when he told police in Fort Pierce, Fla., that a small vial he was holding was loaded with the lethal toxin ricin.
Conley was charged with possession of a hoax weapon of mass destruction, resisting an officer without violence and conspiring to deal stolen property. He was subsequently charged with contempt of court. Conley was being held at the St. Lucie County jail in lieu of $115,000 bail.
Conley’s son, Michael Harootian-Hughes, 28, who was in the hotel room at the time of the standoff and reportedly made the oatmeal that helped his father, also was charged with possession of a hoax weapon of mass destruction. He was being held in the same jail in lieu of $20,000 cash bail.
Yes, possession of a hoax weapon of mass destruction is against the law. In Conley’s case, it was salt. The news story also discusses his more famous criminal record, one involving murder conviction, later overturned.
During his interview at the jail, Michael Conley initially said he made up the word “Ricin.??? However, he finally said he heard the name during a television broadcast about terrorists in the Mideast.
The end-of-the-week ludicrous quote worth citation comes out of the RSA Security Conference, held this week in San Francisco.
The conference is full of corporate computer security big names — and a lot of total nobodies grasping at straws. It’s famous for good exaggeration and hand-waving claims made just for the sake of publicity.
SCADA systems used in industrial facilities could represent a target for cyberterrorist attacks. “If you’re talking about terrorism in the real world where you want to blow up a dam or do some destruction, you can potentially do that remotely through a cyber attack,” Geide said. The technology required to do this already exists, he said.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Not arguments from pseudo-authority at vendor conferences.
Panel discussions piled fearmongering upon fearmongering. Of the more egregious examples: One RSA panel discussion about trojans, malware and targeted hacks included a slide featuring a month-old online ad for a hitman’s services. The hitman offered to “eliminate someone while keeping above suspicion??? within 30 days for $9,133. It’s still not entirely clear what this had to do with trojans, or cyberattacks, but it was scary nonetheless.
“Professional contract killings at prices you can afford,” it reads. “Let our team of experienced contract killers make a bold statement on your behalf.”
Also on hand, the standard US government rep, in this case Ashton Carter, a man with an undistinguished career as a reliable water-bearer of concerned-sounding comment or weather vane for whichever way the winds blows in defense policy:
[Ashton Carter] expressed concern that neither governments nor the private sector are yet taking security sufficiently seriously.
“Cyber will overtake terrorism as the persistent gnawing kind of threat and danger.
He … said the [Pentagon’s] strategy would aim to defend both classified and unclassified networks, create technology using the DoD’s “weight and resources” and distribute it to law enforcement agencies.
