Read moreNasa has confirmed that laptops carried to the ISS in July were infected with a virus known as Gammima.AG.
The worm was first detected on Earth in August 2007 and lurks on infected machines waiting to steal login names for popular online games.
Nasa said it was not the first time computer viruses had travelled into space and it was investigating how the machines were infected.*** so what popular online games are the astronauts playing on the space internet?
cyberpunk chaos
Late last month Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, the 31-year-old creative technologist for Goldsmith College’s Interaction Research Studio at the University of London, released what he’s calling ‘Disarming Corruptor,’ a piece of free software designed to distort 3D-printable blueprints such that only another user with the app and the knowledge of a certain key combination can reverse the distortion and print the object. That means any controversial file–say, a figurine based on Mickey Mouse or another copyrighted or patented shape, or the 3D-printable gun created earlier this year known as the Liberator–could be ‘encrypted’ and made available on a public repository for 3D-printing blueprints like the popular site Thingiverse without tipping off those who would try to remove the file.
Read moreRead moreThe Russian press reports that local officials intercepted a shipment from China that contained home appliances with “spy” microchips capable of spreading malware to wi-fi enabled devices within 200 meters. Tea kettles were apparently the chief culprit.
Specific details of the dodgy shipments remain shady. It’s unclear, for example, if the chips were installed by the Chinese or by cyber criminals en route to Russia. It’s also unclear how Russian authorities spotted the contraband in the first place, although one report claims that the weight of some shipments were slightly off. Finally, the extent of the fiasco is also unclear, though limited press coverage suggests that it’s contained to a small shipment in St. Petersburg.
Read moreCyberCity has its own train network, a hospital, a bank, a military complex, and a coffee shop complete with–and this is crucial to the exercise at hand–free Wi-Fi. The town is virtually populated by 15,000 people, each with their own data records and electronic hospital files. Much of the model town literally came from a hobby shop, but the technology and systems that make it run are modeled on the real world. The power grid components, for example, are the same ones you’d find in an actual city. “It is lighting tiny little lights inside tiny little buildings,” Skoudis says, “but it’s the same technology with the same vulnerabilities.”
The model has five cameras mounted around it, feeding a live video stream for students who will run through cyber-attack missions from remote locations (this is, Skoudis adds, more like what will happen in the real world, anyway, as officials try to defuse problems caused over networks from thousands of miles away). Scenarios controlled over computers will play out on the board in this tiny town.
It was never really about “the terrorists”. It was not even about civil unrest. It was always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by citizens – it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you.
Read more "It was never really about “the terrorists”. It was not even about civil unrest. It was always about this moment, when vast crimes might be uncovered by citizens – it was always, that is to say, meant to be about you."Naomi Wolf, Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy – New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent, for the Guardian, December 29, 2012.
WikiLeaks published an assessment report from the Homeland Security Department (DHS) on the Occupy movement that was put together in October 2011. The assessment was attached to a Stratfor email, one of five million or so emails the organization obtained and has been releasing since February 27, 2012. Via.
See also, Honoré Daumier, Tiens peuple, tiens bon peuple, en veux-tu en voilà!
I’m pretty much reposting/tweeting this piece wherever I find it. Because she’s right.
CRIMINAL WISDOM: TWITTER STALKER
From Wired’s The 8 Craziest Job Openings in the Military-Industrial Complex:
Security firm Archimedes Global wants a “Cyber Counterterrorism Persona Targeting Analyst.” The title sounds great at parties, for one. But basically, it comes down to stalking people on Twitter. Aside from using…
CRIMINAL WISDOM: TWITTER STALKER
Read more "CRIMINAL WISDOM: TWITTER STALKER"
In a workshop Friday at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York, a German hacker and security consultant who goes by the name “Ray” demonstrated a looming problem for handcuff makers hoping to restrict the distribution of the keys that open their cuffs: With plastic copies he cheaply produced with a laser-cutter and a 3D printer, he was able to open handcuffs built by the German firm Bonowi and the English manufacturer Chubb, both of which attempt to control the distribution of their keys to keep them exclusively in the hands of authorized buyers such as law enforcement.
Over the weekend, a lockpick vendor at the HOPE conference was already selling dozens of the plexiglass Chubb keys for a mere $4 each. Ray says he plans to upload the CAD files for the Chubb key to the 3D-printing Web platform Thingiverse after the annual lockpicking conference LockCon later this week.
from Hacker Opens High Security Handcuffs With 3D-Printed And Laser-Cut Keys – Forbes
Read moreRead moreThis is the political side of the New Aesthetic, which the discourse of the New Aesthetic has been dancing around since it became a topic of discussion. The New Aesthetic isn’t so much a thing of itself, as the combined sense of oddness that we feel when we discover technology warping or mutating the shape of the world. The New Aesthetic is an aesthetic tag, which James Bridle began attaching to clipped photos and text blocks that demonstrated this warp. The difficulty of confronting the political side of the New Aesthetic is that there is no ideology of it, no state flag or political line to toe. The political side of the New Aesthetic is that politics is everywhere, and anything can be equally political if deployed correctly, depending on who deploys it, and what their next-stage goals are. There is no rubric to assess this politics, no official spokesperson. There is only the vast multitude of instances of links between nodes, whether they are flying missiles, retweeted propaganda, philosophy texts, or the faces of self-Instagrammed soldiers.
And of course, James Bridle is on top of this, only just this past week launching Dronestagram, a Tumblr/Twitter/New Aesthetic/New Politic something, which posts aerial photos of the locations of US drone strikes from throughout the post-national terrain of that war-machine. So very similar to the IDF’s Youtube videos, the effect is entirely different, as it seeks not to brag or threaten, but to document and exhibit.
But could Dronestagram be co-opted by the State? What would be the effect of the IDF’s Twitter account retweeting Dronestagram? What if the president retweeted it? What if Al-Qaeda did? Who does the uncanniness of the New Aesthetic/New Politic work for? Who owns these aspects of the war-machine?
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 