http://pressthink.org/
http://www.onstrat.com/osint/
http://www.study4cyberpeace.com/
http://www.sebastian-kautz.com/
http://www.eurotreaties.com/maastrichtec.pdf
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Spoof attacks, MITM and outdated certificates
On the subject of network ethics, we often want to ask how fraudulent digital fingerprints may manifest themselves over a particular domain. Whether you are using Chrome, Internet Explorer or Firefox, it is very easy to access the SSL certificates you have access to. As it turns out, the layer is not so secure.
The investigation started when I got onto campus this morning and decided to check the key chain on the Windows 7 machines in the library. A quick Google search turned up (using the keywords "fraudulent certificates") a few articles on spoofs, phishing and man in the middle (MITM) attacks over outdated certificate authorities. While some Tom can (and do) access information over web sockets between Alice and Bob's computers, we must keep in mind that most of these certificate authorities over SSL were instantiated in the 21st century. You can usually find certificates from Mozilla, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Other typical objects in the key chain usually come from international telecommunication networks, like Turkish and Dutch roots.
Typical adopters of web browsers will never give these objects much thought, they just kind of run in the background as artifacts of SOCKS routing. It is a matter of course that an attacker would use the path of least resistance and spoof or else forge a digital fingerprint for malicious means using what, prima facie, look like trusted certificates.
Although the latest documentation says that browser updates usually circumvent attacks on outdated or fraudulent authorities, it seems like it may not be the case after all. Attacks have been cited in 2011 onward by sources worldwide (a quick Google will turn up thousands of results). At the cost of bashing Microsoft (which is not the intent), the interesting case is that you usually do not find such digital fingerprints on even what figures like RMS call "spyware operating systems" (like Ubuntu). Indeed, a quick look at my home network does not turn up any fraudulent or else outdated certificate authorities.
Now, a colleague did make mention of some back-doors like this back when we were studying at the University of Calgary Health Sciences department, and it seems to have been patched, but IT in general here seems to allow for more than just MITM attacks - often unwittingly. Dangers of unauthenticated or non-secure SSL channels could be a 'black hat' digital signature, which implicates unknowing end users as perpetrators - not victims - of MITM or spoofs, and also allows prying eyes to look into your email. As an example, we trust our service providers to keep our banking information secured. I can say that my bank account information has been left as a starred item on Gmail since 2010 or so and there have been no worries. What does cause worry is when geographic metadata itself releases malicious digital fingerprints into cyberspace, particularly as a University student, and the next thing you know some police choppers are flying over an entire sub-net to investigate what is believed to be bad traffic.
The investigation started when I got onto campus this morning and decided to check the key chain on the Windows 7 machines in the library. A quick Google search turned up (using the keywords "fraudulent certificates") a few articles on spoofs, phishing and man in the middle (MITM) attacks over outdated certificate authorities. While some Tom can (and do) access information over web sockets between Alice and Bob's computers, we must keep in mind that most of these certificate authorities over SSL were instantiated in the 21st century. You can usually find certificates from Mozilla, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Other typical objects in the key chain usually come from international telecommunication networks, like Turkish and Dutch roots.
Typical adopters of web browsers will never give these objects much thought, they just kind of run in the background as artifacts of SOCKS routing. It is a matter of course that an attacker would use the path of least resistance and spoof or else forge a digital fingerprint for malicious means using what, prima facie, look like trusted certificates.
Although the latest documentation says that browser updates usually circumvent attacks on outdated or fraudulent authorities, it seems like it may not be the case after all. Attacks have been cited in 2011 onward by sources worldwide (a quick Google will turn up thousands of results). At the cost of bashing Microsoft (which is not the intent), the interesting case is that you usually do not find such digital fingerprints on even what figures like RMS call "spyware operating systems" (like Ubuntu). Indeed, a quick look at my home network does not turn up any fraudulent or else outdated certificate authorities.
Now, a colleague did make mention of some back-doors like this back when we were studying at the University of Calgary Health Sciences department, and it seems to have been patched, but IT in general here seems to allow for more than just MITM attacks - often unwittingly. Dangers of unauthenticated or non-secure SSL channels could be a 'black hat' digital signature, which implicates unknowing end users as perpetrators - not victims - of MITM or spoofs, and also allows prying eyes to look into your email. As an example, we trust our service providers to keep our banking information secured. I can say that my bank account information has been left as a starred item on Gmail since 2010 or so and there have been no worries. What does cause worry is when geographic metadata itself releases malicious digital fingerprints into cyberspace, particularly as a University student, and the next thing you know some police choppers are flying over an entire sub-net to investigate what is believed to be bad traffic.
Monday, September 2, 2013
Core/Operator Design Pattern
define Core:
Collection of libraries constituting the [modular] components that compose the software/hardware abstraction layer. Size N for object(libraries) is "very large".
define Operator:
A user-agent, real or simulated, that enacts the effect of maximizing symbolic links and symmetry at the operating system level through the use of software developer kits and formal logic.
0. (Core ^ Operator) is a unity
1. A unity defines new work closures in software life-cycles
Collection of libraries constituting the [modular] components that compose the software/hardware abstraction layer. Size N for object(libraries) is "very large".
define Operator:
A user-agent, real or simulated, that enacts the effect of maximizing symbolic links and symmetry at the operating system level through the use of software developer kits and formal logic.
0. (Core ^ Operator) is a unity
1. A unity defines new work closures in software life-cycles
Information and No Original Research
The nature of information, whether on the Internet or the "real world" has been very obviously well-characterized as "increasing without limit", denoted by our favourite function: the exponential. With the saturation of information versus the lack of interested academics, we can only get out of this slump of having no original research by generating new questions from preexisting data sets. There is a running joke in the programmers community: "grids, grids and more grids". Indeed, the mathematical structure of the grid and matrix are timeless. Euclid and the pre-Socratics solved very interested properties in maths using these kind of structures.
Rather than coming up with new programming languages and frameworks, give your Data Structures and Algorithms textbook some love and read the first three chapters or so. You'll find everything you need to solve interesting statistical problems to be pre-installed with your GNU/Linux minimal build or else your Windows/Apple machine.
Rather than coming up with new programming languages and frameworks, give your Data Structures and Algorithms textbook some love and read the first three chapters or so. You'll find everything you need to solve interesting statistical problems to be pre-installed with your GNU/Linux minimal build or else your Windows/Apple machine.
Time Distortion and Learning in Virtual Realities
In the film The Matrix, Morpheus and other red-pillers tell us about how being plugged in longer than others seems to change our sense of reality, personalities and perceptions. Indeed, if you were to ask the regular net user since the inception of IRC and those who have successfully run a business on the Internet, they might tell you "it's all about the timing". In a place where mathematical logic rules and propositions inherit their futures from the study of vector fields, we have to ask ourselves the point at which imagination and reality begin to break down. At the cost of sounding like a hipster, the plugging in process seems to change the time scale at which our minds manage to process and learn new information and the rate at which it acquires knowledge.
Just like the "slumdogs" in India managed to learn biotechnology in two weeks with one computer connected to the Internet, we now see a boundary re-emerging in which humans are melding with the neo-agora and decentralized economics: the boundary of choice. Perhaps this is what Captain Picard meant when he was discussing how economies worked in his future:
We... handle our money systems differently here.
Just like the "slumdogs" in India managed to learn biotechnology in two weeks with one computer connected to the Internet, we now see a boundary re-emerging in which humans are melding with the neo-agora and decentralized economics: the boundary of choice. Perhaps this is what Captain Picard meant when he was discussing how economies worked in his future:
We... handle our money systems differently here.
Hashes per second versus Cryptocoin Output
If you look at a typical mining pool for cryptocurrencies, you will notice that most of them contain a "Hall of Fame" segment. Upon closer inspection, you may notice that some people clock in at some absurd number like 140954085 mhash/second and get x number of some cryptocoin (let's say it's 100 BTC). One row down, you may see some user who clocks in at 43948 mhash/second is getting 10 or 20 more BTC than the user getting x number of BTC. Statistically, this means that there is little to no correlation.
The race for building the "best miners" seems to have been a rat race instead of one to the finish line. Save your cash and read the documentation. The transmission protocols used in cryptocurrencies are based on the same ones used for your favourite BitTorrent client and relies on open connectivity to the network. Hash computations aren't going to solve any quicker when the original algorithm by Satoshi was meant to actually be a self-evolving blockchain.
The race for building the "best miners" seems to have been a rat race instead of one to the finish line. Save your cash and read the documentation. The transmission protocols used in cryptocurrencies are based on the same ones used for your favourite BitTorrent client and relies on open connectivity to the network. Hash computations aren't going to solve any quicker when the original algorithm by Satoshi was meant to actually be a self-evolving blockchain.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
ANDREI: MUSINGS - THE PIOUS ATHEISTS
"Our atheists are pious people. If in the so-called feudal times we held everything as a fief from God, in the liberal period the same feudal relation exists with man." - Max Stirner, "The Ego and its Own," 1844
"'Good' without God." This is the present moralistic battlecry of the new wave of amateur-scientist, pseudo-intellectual atheists. Prominently described as "atheistkult" by detractors -- both religious and otherwise -- such individuals are fueled by an addiction to YouTube videos with poor production values, a library of atheist+ rhetoric masquerading as haphazard philosophy by Dawkins and Hitchens. These same individuals are known to parrot Nietzsche's most infamous saying that "God is dead." They readily, and perhaps even rightly, openly mock the idea that one need a deity to preserve some sort of moral code. However, paradoxically, they still play the game of the theists -- of the religious. Some even go as far as to claim moral superiority based solely on their more "intellectual" morality.
Such individuals find themselves stuck playing the theists' game -- and losing. God is not dead to them -- God has only dropped its false skin mask. Its persona is gone, but the concept remains. A metaphysical dictation. A "right" or "wrong" that is objective. This is, of course, not a new thing. Objectivists for years have proposed an atheistic objective morality in the sense of a rationalization that will always rise to a "moral" act, done in one's "rational self-interest."
Of course, even amongst Objectivists there is never much agreement in supposed life-boat situations where a single outcome is the inherently moral one. Act as they might that they have found a perfect ethical system, the schisms within Ayn Rand's circles and the vitriol spat back and forth between newsletters of Objectivist-influenced thinkers should demonstrate that the system is every bit as subjective as any other system of morality.
Scientific attempts at hammering down morality are even less convincing than the logically rigged debates of metaethical philosophers. Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development, based on the work of developmental psychologist Piaget, offer only a window into one possible framework of reasoning. The inherent criticism is that Kohlberb gave justification for such reasoning after the fact; it is only "good" because he said it was. This criticism so too applies to the circular argumentation of moral universalists. No matter how rigged the game or invocations are based on boolean logic, "good" and "bad" are eternally subjective without an outside, prototypical force.
It stands to say that this metaphysical, prototypical force is represented by some as God, by others as axiomatic ways of thinking. It does not, of course, take someone with a doctoral degree in philosophy to see that, if examined critically, the axiom is no more -- perhaps even less! -- convincing than the deity. It is an inherently losing game, then, to act as a moralist atheist -- or moralist, for that matter. A "moral" does not exist in a tangible, material fashion -- it is an idea, based on the subjective norms of the society and the values of the individual. What is "good" is what is pleasing, what is "evil" is what is not. This is an independent statement of what may or may not be harmful for society as a whole. To claim otherwise is to be as faithful as their Jehova-worshiping kin.
"Good" is a misnomer.
"'Good' without God." This is the present moralistic battlecry of the new wave of amateur-scientist, pseudo-intellectual atheists. Prominently described as "atheistkult" by detractors -- both religious and otherwise -- such individuals are fueled by an addiction to YouTube videos with poor production values, a library of atheist+ rhetoric masquerading as haphazard philosophy by Dawkins and Hitchens. These same individuals are known to parrot Nietzsche's most infamous saying that "God is dead." They readily, and perhaps even rightly, openly mock the idea that one need a deity to preserve some sort of moral code. However, paradoxically, they still play the game of the theists -- of the religious. Some even go as far as to claim moral superiority based solely on their more "intellectual" morality.
Such individuals find themselves stuck playing the theists' game -- and losing. God is not dead to them -- God has only dropped its false skin mask. Its persona is gone, but the concept remains. A metaphysical dictation. A "right" or "wrong" that is objective. This is, of course, not a new thing. Objectivists for years have proposed an atheistic objective morality in the sense of a rationalization that will always rise to a "moral" act, done in one's "rational self-interest."
Of course, even amongst Objectivists there is never much agreement in supposed life-boat situations where a single outcome is the inherently moral one. Act as they might that they have found a perfect ethical system, the schisms within Ayn Rand's circles and the vitriol spat back and forth between newsletters of Objectivist-influenced thinkers should demonstrate that the system is every bit as subjective as any other system of morality.
Scientific attempts at hammering down morality are even less convincing than the logically rigged debates of metaethical philosophers. Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development, based on the work of developmental psychologist Piaget, offer only a window into one possible framework of reasoning. The inherent criticism is that Kohlberb gave justification for such reasoning after the fact; it is only "good" because he said it was. This criticism so too applies to the circular argumentation of moral universalists. No matter how rigged the game or invocations are based on boolean logic, "good" and "bad" are eternally subjective without an outside, prototypical force.
It stands to say that this metaphysical, prototypical force is represented by some as God, by others as axiomatic ways of thinking. It does not, of course, take someone with a doctoral degree in philosophy to see that, if examined critically, the axiom is no more -- perhaps even less! -- convincing than the deity. It is an inherently losing game, then, to act as a moralist atheist -- or moralist, for that matter. A "moral" does not exist in a tangible, material fashion -- it is an idea, based on the subjective norms of the society and the values of the individual. What is "good" is what is pleasing, what is "evil" is what is not. This is an independent statement of what may or may not be harmful for society as a whole. To claim otherwise is to be as faithful as their Jehova-worshiping kin.
"Good" is a misnomer.
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