Yes, I saw these various reports, and cackled with progressive glee each time.
I know one of the moron's business partners from back in the old days. He always seemed like a pretty good guy, and indeed he waded in to Anonymous's irc and said, basically "we're sorry our business partner's a dick, but nice job. Can you please not dump my mailspool?", which seems to have been effective.
I also know the one of the dudes (Jacob Applebaum) who they were planning to smear. He's smart, and... well, he's a true believer, for sure. I bet he knows the HBGary dude (whose handle I can't remember for the life of me) too. Small world!
Also I know more stuff about people and other people that I can't really talk about here. Fascinating, right?
Another good article on the topic.
Another good linking job from Sifu Tweety.
The sides of his face totally look different.
Do read the Ars Technica article; it's inspiring.
I read it, but I'm not feeling inspired. What am I missing?
I would cackle with unholy glee if Anonymous took down the COC and pulled its inner workings into the light. Those guys are EVIL.
6: I assumed it was the thoroughness to which the dude was hoisted by his own petard that was inspiring to BEN.
Anonymous isn't going to take down the chamber of commerce. This is hackers dicking around with other hackerish types. It just happens to be a moment where hackers dicking around with other hackers has broader relevance.
This is hackers dicking around with other hackerish types
Really? One can't help getting the impression that this Aaron guy's hackerish type–cred can't ever have been all that high.
13: no, I don't think. But his business partner is definitely a product of the scene, and he was enough in the world to show up on irc and go to blackhat and so on; by "hackerish" types I sort of meant "people who profess knowledge of and/or immersion in the computer underground", which doesn't necessarily mean anybody who anybody ever knew or respected before they started a company.
Rove, Wallenberg, Assange and AOW and HBGary Federal
FDL. I can't even begin to summarize. A taste:
Attorney General Eric Holder worked for Lehman Brothers and understands the importance, financially and psychologically, of a return on an investment. Hillary and Holder get Julian Assange. Jacob Wallenberg/Investor AB get a massive NASDAQ OMX purchase approved and a seat on the board of NASDAQ, along with the merger of ABB and Baldor.
Just fucking guillotines already.
My hopes were raised by 7 and dashed by 10.* Things happen so fast on the Internet.
*This sentence is available for recycling on a dating thread.
Is "inspiring" the new word for "unreadable"?
I'm pretty curious whether Barr's list of names was at all correct. I once did this data mining exercise, and I had a ton of false positives. Fortunately, the bad guys were marked with big X's in the database, so you'd know when you found one.
18: The Ars Technica article reprints some comments from the programmer Barr was working with that express doubts they have anything real both to Barr and others in the company. Barr describes him as much better at math but dismisses him in favor of his gut, and apparently has failed to show any mathematical models.
Palantir Technologies? I hate these people just for their name.
19: Yeah, I like this bit:
Barr: Noooo....its about probabilty based on frequency...c'mon ur way smarter at math than me.
Coder: Right, which is why i know your numbers are too small to draw the conclusion but you don't want to accept it. Your probability based on frequency right now is a gut feeling. Gut feelings are usually wrong.
Barr: [redacted]
That Barr guy sounds real sharp...
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2 Vicodin + 1 Flexeril + inhaling fumes from PVC cement = hella spacy ... but at least the shower drain works now.
||>
That Barr guy sounds real sharp...
I like that the programmer at one point underpants gnomes his plans. Sure poking a hornet's nest will bring excitement, but.
23: You're supposed to use the purple stuff before you use the glue stuff. Vicodin won't help make a good joint.
24: that log is hilarious. "So, uh, you work with us, you idiot?"
I guarantee Barr got the idea from that facebook gaydar study. What a dumbass.
Vicodin won't help make a good joint.
I beg to differ.
This is hackers dicking around with other hackerish types. It just happens to be a moment where hackers dicking around with other hackers has broader relevance.
But isn't that broader relevance, you know, the future? Isn't Julian Assange a hacker type? Egyptian revolutionaries using the net to share info and getting tracked by national intelligence, etc.?
The dirty tricks planned by the CoC sounded potentially significant. Interesting to think that Watergate started as this same kind of dirty trick that a hacker would do today, stealing info to blackmail/discredit somebody. Compromising someone's electronic life carries massive potential today for everything from spying on them to blackmailing them to bankrupting them.
I have a little theory that the web was mostly empowering over its first 10-15 years, as it gave individual users an advantage over the government which was slow to catch up. But it could end up empowering the government over individuals in the long run. Think how much someone like Hoover would have looooved a system where everyone in society had all personal communications + all finances permanently stored and remotely accessible. It could end up as an authoritarians wet dream.
25: Vicodin won't help make a good joint.
That's just what a narc would say.
But isn't that broader relevance, you know, the future? Isn't Julian Assange a hacker type? Egyptian revolutionaries using the net to share info and getting tracked by national intelligence, etc.?
Meh. It's the present, more like, and it has been the past. Hackers have been in the news? Okay. I'm glad the news has caught up, which they periodically do.
Those fumes are making you slow, Nat.
Is "inspiring" the new word for "unreadable"?
Did you really think it was unreadable? I'm reading it now and would have to disagree.
19: Yeah, I'd be surprised if Barr's list of names was more than half correct. On the other hand, if it did contain a couple of hits, and he gave it to the FBI, it could still have done something.
Palantir Technologies? I hate these people just for their name.
Then you'd better not watch their marketing videos. "Let's run that through Palantir!"
But isn't that broader relevance, you know, the future? Isn't Julian Assange a hacker type? Egyptian revolutionaries using the net to share info and getting tracked by national intelligence, etc.?
What the internet has been best at for Egypt is keeping the rest of the world's attention on it, but the protests themselves didn't need internet to get organised. Let's not forget Al-Jazeera either.
Hacking has been going on as long as there have been computer networks to hack, but of course when you put more important data on them, hacking becomes more important too. Back then, the best you could get was an AT&T operating manual...
Is 17 confusing the article with the linked-therein chat log? Because it's the only interpretation that makes sense to me.
It could end up as an authoritarians wet dream.
Yes, and your point is?
Palantir Technologies? I hate these people just for their name.
If I were starting any kind of network-based business I wouldn't call it after a network whose single most memorable feature is that it was easily hacked into by the most evil being in the universe.
38: But what if that's who you're trying to sell it to?
The network remained secure for two and a half ages of the world. And it was compromised by massive armed intervention.
All I can see on their home page is two hands, withering in flames.
Any network that can be compromised completely and irrevocably by the physical capture of one terminal is ridiculously insecure. Feanor may have been a great hardware guy but he knew nothing about proper network architecture.
Is nowhere on the internet safe from the baneful influence of those smelly misogynists from the Eagle and Child?
(I don't know for sure they were smelly. They were Oxford dons of a certain age, so it's a reasonable working hypothesis.)
Palantir, aside from the annoyingly stupid name, has been annoying me for over a month. They have plastered the Pentagon Metro station with advertising. Theirs are the only ads there and it is dull. The ads are even pasted onto the floor. There is one that made me laugh, it says, Palantir, let your data take a ride. Seems to be the opposite of the rest of the security theme.
Is nowhere on the internet safe from the baneful influence of those smelly misogynists from the Eagle and Child?
Well, no. It's the internet. It wasn't built by people who liked Joyce and Woolf.
I tried to read Joyce and couldn't make it. As soon as I put the book down, I felt better.
42: Feanor may have been a great hardware guy but he knew nothing about proper network architecture.
The palantir were *not* certified for use in a fallen world like Middle Earth. Check the requirements doco. Fucking Elendil and his scope creep.
Moi? Eärnil could have moved the fucking thing sometime before the fall of Minas Ithil. Basic precautions were followed in m day.
Putting the middle earth stuff aside, I'm having a hard time figuring out how and why this stuff matters and just what the "hacker" angle is. As reported by ThinkProgress, the planned attack by the CoC is sleazy and likely illegal, but it seems like fairly standard ratfuckng that could have been planned and implemented without turning on a computer. It also sounds like Hunton and Williams just got a proposal from these guys and didn't do much with it, but who knows.
The "hackers dicking with other hackers" seems like it could be significant, but it's hard to figure out what if any the broader significance is. And Palantir looks like it is basically a data-mining company that works with US gov't databases.
As soon as I put the book down, I felt better.
You could squash a lot of bugs with a big book like that.
50: I tried Dubliners thinking that it woud be a gentle introduction.
49.1: well, the hacker angle comes in because Anonymous are hackers (more or less) and HBGary (the parent company, not HBGary Federal necessarily) was founded by a former hacker. Does this have any broader significance for anything outside of the specifics of this (entertaining) feud? Meh, don't really think so.
Except, I guess, that it points out that there are boatloads of none-too-smart none-too-fully-assed "security consultants" bouncing around DC floating stupid schemes like this to a receptive audience of other DC halfwits.
53: There's no software fix for that.
there are boatloads of none-too-smart none-too-fully-assed "security consultants" bouncing around DC floating stupid schemes like this to a receptive audience of other DC halfwits.
Truer this way... but smile when you say that bucko.
53 seems both true and a way for the Tweety household to get rich.
57: meh. If I wanted to go down that path I would have done it years ago.
But yes, many of my friends have gotten rich, although they are generally also pretty smart.
There was no planned attack by the CoC in the documents at in the linked articles. There was a pitch to a law firm employed by the CoC, and no evidence that the pitch was successful. Themis are obviously nasty people, and the CoC is certainly interested in hobbling their perceived enemies (hence the solicitation), but what's actually in the hands of ThinProgress is a proposal by Themis aimed at getting hired by CoC. FTA: "We don't know if the proposal was accepted after Phase 1 was completed."
Also 53 is absolutely correct. I interviewed with such an outfit after my postdoc. The place reeked of arrogance and incompetence, and it was unambiguously clear that the CEO had gotten the contract I was being interviewed to work on due to political connections. He all but said as much.
Not that I'm advocating this at all, but if I were an activist hacker the first place I'd try to invade would be the networks of large law firms, since both (a) that's where the bodies are likely to be buried b/c of privilege reasons (which is why H&W gets involved in this kind of thing) and (b) law firms are generally technologically incompetent.
36: I just meant that it's fairly poorly written and needlessly dragged out. Just because you can keep quoting from the material you got, doesn't mean you have to do it so often. The reporter got an interesting story and tried to make it more interesting without having the writing ability to pull it off.
I suppose it got better after the first page, but I got to "afoot", saw that there were two more pages, and figured I'd learned all I needed.
61-2: Ah, okay. Thanks for clarifying. I actually had the same reaction ("oh, there's two more pages? really?"), but I'm a sucker for reading dialogue.
They have plastered the Pentagon Metro station with advertising. Theirs are the only ads there and it is dull.
I kind of like that NYC's subway is chock full of movie advertisements. I'm never so informed about what's currently in theaters as I am after a trip to New York.
|| Mr. Tweety, could you email me? Thanks! |>
|| Mr. Tweety, could you email me? Thanks! |>
Um. There's no need to email me twice.
Anyone still interested? via Agonist
Barr Emails 4th company?
Scares me enough I won't type the company name.
"Endgame Systems"?
You have got to be kidding me.
neb, I wish you hadn't done that. You did notice the location?
Although I thought E**** also referred to that ultimate NatSec Dod catastrophe plan that makes martial law look trivial
It's the wesbsite of some Irish software developer, as far as I can tell, and it redirects to some Russian domain.
Endgame Systems. Endgame Systems. Endgame Systems. Boo!
Well Jesus Rob even I knew not to write their name three times.
Scares me enough I won't type the company name.
All I said was, "That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah."
72:Jesus. Irish & Russian?
I don't know you people. I have never been here.
73, 74: I think you have to be looking in a mirror, and say it five times.
My God, a press release reposted on TechCrunch. THEY HAVE VENTURE CAPITAL FUNDING!! Run aw
Malware detection! My god, that does make martial law look trivial!
Really interesting follow-up on what the hell Aaron Barr's problem was.