] The idea was tested at a unique facility of the New
] Mexico Institute of Technology, the Langmuir laboratory.
] That lab, a center of lightning studies, was built on top
] of South Baldy Mountain near Soccorro, New Mexico, the
] location of frequent lightning strikes. By placing
] mineral samples where lightning would hit them, Dr.
] Wasilewski turned magnetite with appropriate crystalline
] structure into lodestones.

Some information on the NASA website about research into how lightning can create magnetized lodestones.

Lodestones and Lightning

] This site is dedicated to the quest for knowledge and
] wisdom, through science, mathematics, philosophy,
] invention, and technology.

This is the site of someone I met at Dragon*Con. It's a comprehensive list of sci-tech sites compiled by someone who is (IMHO) one of the genius physicist/mathematicians of our generation. Quite a bit of interesting stuff there.

The Science Realm: John's Virtual Sci-Tech Universe

] Now the blocklisters are being overwhelmed by Internet
] saboteurs who harness large numbers of computers to
] bombard their victims with vast amounts of junk data.

For the last couple months, spam-blocker sites such as Osirusoft, monkeys.com, Spamhaus and Spamcop have been under Distributed Denial of Service attacks by up to 10,000 computers at once. Two days ago, Osirusoft imploded, and shut itself down by blacklisting the entire internet, meaning many businesses who relied on Osirusoft's service became unable to receive any email, even if legitimate.

I've been hearing a lot of speculation lately as to whether these DDoS attacks might be related to the Blaster or Sobig worms. Some people say no, they're unrelated. Others say yes, and think that spammers may be behind the coordinated attacks, by hiring blackhat hackers to generate the attacks and create the worms. So this school of thought says that along with the attacks on the spam-blockers, that the worms are intended to create an army of hundreds of thousands of zombie computers, which may eventually be used to send out even more spam.

Another school of thought proposes that yes, the attacks may be coordinated, but for a different reason -- that the attacks on the anti-spam sites have been to restrict their spam-blocking effect so that the Sobig worm (which requires spam email to propagate itself) could spread more effectively.

Regardless of whether the DDoS attacks are connected to Sobig, what *is* the ultimate purpose of the Sobig worm? Is its "raison d'etre" simply to breed and propagate itself as fast and as far and wide as it can? Or is it just a very efficient delivery mechanism, recruiting hundreds of thousands of computers for some other yet-to-be-defined purpose, be it spam or an even more destructive attack in the future?

Or, might the intent even be a benign one -- a worm created to be *so* pervasive and annoying that even the non-tech home users in the world hear about it, and are finally encouraged to secure their systems? In other words, could it have been created as a way of "vaccinating" the internet and building up its immunity to help it withstand a potentially even more malicious virus in the future?

Stay tuned, as the story unfolds . . .

Saboteurs hit spam's blockers -- Could it be related to the Sobig Worm?

] Romanian researchers claim to have discovered a variant
] of the Sobig.F virus that looks to mail and domain name
] servers at Time Warner Telecom for information about how
] to modify its behavior.

New Sobig Variant May Be Circulating

] NSXDavid writes "Earlier today our site mysteriously
] ended up on Joe Jared's Osirusoft SPAM blacklist which is
] used by lots of antispam software (like SpamAssassin and
] sendmail). Since he is currently under a serious DDoS
] attack, there was no way to appeal this decision. We
] contacted Mr. Jared by phone who informed us that
] 'everyone needs to stop using Osirusoft and that he's
] going to be shutting the service down.' Then he says he's
] going to blacklist 'the world' (aka, ban *.*.*.*) to get
] his point across. Later on this evening, he apparently
] went ahead and did just that. Succumbing to lawsuits and
] DDoS, a once great blacklist is dead. SpamAssassin is
] removing it from their config in the next release (rc3)
] and email admins around the globe are reconfiguring their
] mail servers."

"NSXDavid" is at my own company, Simutronics. As a result of Osirusoft's actions, we are now having (even more) trouble getting emails through to our own customers. I can appreciate Osirusoft's frustration, but especially with the mess being caused by worms such as Sobig and Blaster, all Osirusoft seems to have done is just make an already bad situation even worse.

The Boston Globe called us this afternoon for an interview, and is writing a story as we speak. Stay tuned . . .

Slashdot | Osirusoft Blacklists The World

Update: Various photographers (some who wish to remain anonymous) have been sending me pictures of the Antipodes sculpture at the Hirshhorn.

For those who have been following the story in my blog, this sculpture was particularly intriguing because it appeared to have the complete text of the Kryptos sculpture upon it, *and* the complete text of the Cyrillic Projector, and an additional 20% or so of other ciphertext in both languages.

It was my hope that perhaps there was extra text on the English side which would shed a clue towards cracking Kryptos. As it turned out, there *is* some additional ciphertext on the Cyrillic side, which does not appear anywhere on the Cyrillic Projector. On the English side though, it is just a mix and repeat of the code sections that are already on the Kryptos sculpture.

It's still useful though, because it is reassuring to see that Part IV is exactly the same length on Antipodes, as it is on Kryptos. There'd been some speculation that Kryptos part IV might only be the first part of a lengthier code, with the rest of the ciphertext "sucked into the whirlpool", but Antipodes seems to show that this is not the case.

Pics are now online, along with some additional info about the sculpture. Big hugs and thanks to all you anonymous photographers out there! :)

Sanborn's Antipodes Sculpture

From Decius:
"This case documents a real world use of stegonography and digital cash which allowed a blackmailer to anonymously collect payment for his victim."

Blackmail & steganography

Partial Speaker List for PhreakNIC 7, coming up in Nashville in October 2003:

] Triax - Updates in Satellite Broadband Technologies
]
] Justin Troutman - Encryption Technologies
]
] Elonka - Something 90% of us can't understand, probably

LOL! I'm not sure who wrote that, but thank you. Higher praise from a hacker-con, I cannot hope to receive. ;)

Phreaknic7 Speaker List

Elonka wrote:
] More info about the fastest-spreading worm of all time, which
] enters a new phase today, trying to download unknown code to
] 20 specific home computers:

Turns out they may have failed here. From a post on Interesting People:

"All the experts were totally faked out. While everyone was concentrating
on getting the "magic 20" machines shut down, no one realized that
different copies of Sobig.f had different lists of servers to contact.

We put a block of udp port 8998 on our firewall this morning. We had 3
previously undetected infected machines on our network, each of which
tried to contact a different list of 20 machines. One of the lists
corresponds to the one that Sophos and others have published. The other
two lists have no addresses in common with the published list, or with
each other.

I wonder how many different sets of servers there were, how many
different variants of Sobig.f there were, and how many infected machines
now have some additional trojan, worm, or ddos code waiting for a
command to do something."

RE: New Phase of Sobig.F Set for 3 p.m. EST Friday 8/22/2003

] Do you ever wonder where that paper money in your pocket
] has been, or where it will go next? This is the place to
] find out.
]
] All you need to do is enter the denomination, series, and
] serial number of any US dollar bill, and your current USA
] ZIP or Canadian Post Code

Ever run across a dollar bill with the "http://www.wheresgeorge.com" URL on it? Be sure to enter in the bill's serial number to this database before you spend the bill somewhere else -- this site tracks the flow of certain marked bills around the world. Fun!

Where's George? - Currency Tracking