From the desk of the Acting CEO:

Its been a hectic few days here. Due to having to juggle several balls at once, I have not commented on this situation as much as I would like to. Due to how it could affect others, and the gravity of the situation, it is also necessary that I be careful with what I say.

Due to time constraints, I have not been able to put together a formal press announcement as I would have liked. In fact, this might not be the worst of times to mention two positions Industrial Memetics would like to fill:

CFO - We need someone to secure funding and manage our finances. Do not attempt to contact us unless you are serious about and capable of doing both. Experience working with technology companies and an understanding of the internet media and internet security space is required.

Corporate Communications / Business Development - Handle PR functions. Be able to take, arrange, and express information such as that in this message and turn it into press releases, and communicate it to interested parties and the press. Responsible for maintaining relationships with vendors and partners. Must be able to author basic HTML, be skilled at document creation, and have experience with negotiation teams as both a member and a leader.

Both positions have a starting pay rate of zero. I can be contacted by email at nick @at@ nicklevay.net.

Ciscopocalypse Press Release Notes
- Industrial Memetics Circles The Wagons
* Events
--- Tom Cross has stepped down as the CEO of Industrial Memetics in order to avoid any conflicts of interest surrounding the Cisco/ISS/Lynn situation.
--- Nick Levay has taken over management of Industrial Memetics as the Acting CEO.
--- A number of Industrial Memetics projects have been put on hold.

* Positions
--- Industrial Memetics strongly supports Mike Lynn.
--- Industrial Memetics has no desire to become involved in litigation.

* Disclosure
--- Industrial Memetics offered Mike Lynn a position on July 4, 2005.
---- Mike Lynn to date has not accepted.
---- While Industrial Memetics was aware of Mike's research, no information or details were ever shared.
--- Industrial Memetics is in severe need of a round of funding.
---- Baseline is two million dollars
--- Industrial Memetics finical situation will in no way impact MemeStreams website operations, unless we experience a traffic increase of several orders of magnitude.

* Talking Points - The great battles at the dawn of this millennium center around culture.
--- In the global struggle against violent extremism, we must defeat the dangerous fundamentalist elements of middle-eastern culture.
--- In the global struggle for security, we must defeat the dangerous and broken elements of our own security cultu... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Press Release 4/31/2005 - Industrial Memetics Circles the Wagons

The EFF should support Mike Lynn in his defense against ISS and Cisco. If security researchers are not protected as Whistleblowers when they uncover major flaws, our critical communication infrastructure will be at serious risk. These are the Good Guys.

Mike has taken on enormous personal risk to do the right thing. So far, the general impression in the blogs is that he is doing the right thing. The mainstream media coverage has been good as well. This is a departure from the past, and a good one at that. The headlines contain words like "Whistleblower" and "Coverup"..

It is quite ironic that Cisco & ISS are taking the "Intellectual Property" tactic. Just to add some irony to it, here is a a post of Mike Lynn here on MemeStreams proving CherryOS stole OSS code from the PearPC project:

just incase anyone didn't believe them already here goes the analysis (I do this sort of thing for a living) first off CherryOS.exe is what we call in the security industry "packed", that means that they have taken a compiled binary and run it through an obfuscator to make it hard to reverse engineer (or at least with hard if all you're doing is strings)...this is common for virus writers, worm writers, 31337 bot net kiddies, and on the legitimate side, game developers do this a lot...its not very common among the commercial (or free) legitimate software market (mostly because it doesn't work and doesn't do any good) so, the easiest way to defeat the packing is simply to let it start up (this one has several annoying checks for debuggers so its easiest to just attach after its loaded)...

the eula for this thing says its a violation to reverse engineer it, but if you do disassemble it you find they never had the rights to license it in the first place, so I don't feel worried to put this here...

I think I have made it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that CherryOS.exe, shipped as the core of cherryos is nothing but a recompiled version of PearPC...it has at most minor changes, most to strip attribution, hide the theft, or remove debugging output...

The only way we can fault Mike's research is with petty things like not consistently using upper case letters in his posts. The technical end of his work is flawless.

Both Cisco and ISS are attempting to spin Mike's research and make it look incomplete, but the truth of the matter is he demo'ed his technique in front of a room of people, and no one has found fault with it.

If this tactic continues, it will approach a very transparent form of character assassination. It will backfire on Cisco.

In the field of Security Research, Whistleblowing has always been a controversial issue. It is not a black and white thing. This article at CNET covers a number of the issues with disclosure of security problems that often come up. If you compare the ideas expressed in the article with what Mike actually did, you should come away thinking that Mike handled this ethically.

Mike Lynn is a Whistleblower, he should be protected

iGuy is your iPod's new best friend! He provides protection and fun for you and your iPod. Pose his arms- sit him down in the dock, and trust that his rubberized body and screen protector will keep your iPod safe.

This came through the channel and I felt like sharing

ThinkGeek :: iGuy

Brushing off threats of legal action and a broad effort to delete his presentation from conference materials, a security expert told Black Hat attendees on Wednesday that attackers can broadly compromise Cisco routers.

Mike has a number of good quotes in this story:

"I feel I had to do what's right for the country and the national infrastructure," he said. "It has been confirmed that bad people are working on this (compromising IOS). The right thing to do here is to make sure that everyone knows that it's vulnerable."

Lynn outlined a way to take control of an IOS-based router, using a buffer overflow or a heap overflow, two types of memory vulnerabilities. He demonstrated the attack using a vulnerability that Cisco fixed in April. While that flaw is patched, he stressed that the attack can be used with any new buffer overrun or heap overflow, adding that running code on a router is a serious threat.

"When you attack a host machine, you gain control of that machine--when you control a router, you gain control of the network," Lynn said.

During his presentation, Lynn outlined an eight step process using any known, but unpatched flaw, to compromise a Cisco IOS-based router. While he did not publish any vulnerabilities, Lynn said that finding new flaws would not be hard.

"People aren't looking at this because they don't think gaining control of a router is doable, but there are a lot of bugs to find," he said.

In a presentation that had all the hallmarks of good theater, Lynn stated several times that the information that he was presenting would likely result in legal action against him.

"What I just did means that I'm about to get sued by Cisco and ISS," Lynn said, joking later that he may be "in Guantanamo" by the end of the week.

However, Lynn argued that the seriousness of the attack left him no choice but to let people know the existence of the weakness in the software. Cisco plans in the future to abstract the architecture of the router operating system in the future, which could have a side effect of making a single attack work against all routers. Rather then knowing the various memory addresses, or offsets, needed to compromise systems, a single offset could work, Lynn said.

"What politicians are talking about when they talk about the Digital Pearl Harbor is a network worm," he said. "That's what we could see in the future, if this isn't fixed."

SecurityFocus | Researcher breaks ranks to out Cisco router weakness

Even more of Abaddon being up to no good.

Abaddon, still up to no good.

This case describes the physiological maturation from ages 21 to 28 yr of the bicyclist who has now become the six-time [sic] consecutive Grand Champion of the Tour de France, at ages 27–32 yr.

Physiological study of Lance Armstrong before, during and after cancer. I didn't realize how freaking young he was when he got diagnosed...25?! Men, get thee to a proctologist!

An interesting factoid about Lance is that his resting heartrate is around 33 beats per minute. Which means, when watching TV, the rest of us flabby people are pulling in around 95-110 while his heart's beating every other second.

There's also an interesting summary article at Wired about what the power stat on the previous website means. The guy's just amazing.

-janelane, dreamily

Improved muscular efficiency displayed as Tour de France champion matures -- Coyle 98 (6): 2191 -- Journal of Applied Physiology

There is no simpler way of letting the emergency services know who to contact should you be involved in an accident than by using ICE.

This is a cool concept

ICE - In Case of Emergency

Lance Armstrong closed out his amazing career with a seventh consecutive Tour de France victory

One hand on his handlebars, the other holding a flute of champagne, Armstrong toasted his teammates as he pedaled into Paris to collect his crown.

His sixth win last year already set a record, putting Armstrong ahead of four other riders -- Frenchmen Jacques Anquetil and Bernard Hinault, Belgian Eddy Merckx and Spaniard Miguel Indurain -- who all won five Tours.

Armstrong's new record of seven wins confirmed him as one of the greatest cyclists ever, and capped a career where he came back from cancer to dominate cycling's most prestigious and taxing race.

Lance Armstrong wins seventh consecutive and last Tour de France

A STRONG earthquake registering 5.7 on the Richter scale shook Tokyo and its vicinity today, lightly injuring five people, swaying buildings in the heart of the capital and disrupting transport.

The earthquake struck at 4.35pm (5.35pm AEST) with its epicentre in the Boso peninsula of Chiba prefecture just outside of the capital at a depth of 90 kilometres underground.

Earthquake shakes Tokyo

Julian Beever is an English artist who is famous for his art on the pavements of England, France, Germany, USA, Australia and Belgium. It's peculiarity? Beever gives his drawings an anamorphosis view, his images are drawn in such a way which gives them three dimensionality when viewing from the correct angle.

It really is pretty amazing.

3D street drawings. Too cool!