Surveillance & Society: the fully peer-reviewed transdisciplinary online surveillance studies journal.

This seems like an interesting publication, but: five years on ... why have I never heard of it? (Perhaps because it's mostly a UK publication, with one US-based editor, Torin Monahan, at Arizona State, where they have a School of Justice & Social Inquiry.) Although the description for his course opens with "How are surveillance technologies altering social life in post-9/11 worlds?", the syllabus spends a lot of time on Foucault, Baudrillard, etc. It also spends time on Paul Virilio, Steve Mann, RTMark, "Minority Report" and "Gattaca", but little of this is "post-9/11".

I am curious about how this journal fits into the literature. The editorial board is all academic; this sets it apart from, say, Studies in Intelligence, where authors tend to be practitioners/professionals (though not just of "surveillance").

I only recognize a few authors published here, like Steve Wright (2) and Steve Mann (2, 3).

To see whether this publication is getting cited elsewhere, I asked Google Scholar. Things are being cited (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, ... [ Read More (0.5k in body) ]

Surveillance & Society Homepage

Katie Hafner puts Virgil on the front page of the Sunday New York Times.

The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor’s network. The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.

WikiScanner is the work of Virgil Griffith, 24, a cognitive scientist who is a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. Mr. Griffith, who spent two weeks this summer writing the software for the site, said he got interested in creating such a tool last year after hearing of members of Congress who were editing their own entries.

Mr. Griffith said he “was expecting a few people to get nailed pretty hard” after his service became public. “The yield, in terms of public relations disasters, is about what I expected.”

Mr. Griffith, who also likes to refer to himself as a “disruptive technologist,” said he was certain any more examples of self-interested editing would come out in the next few weeks, “because the data set is just so huge.”

Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits

Those damned camera phones.

What kind of nihilistic monsters see a benefit to murdering and maiming hundreds of innocent men, women and children?

Women were killed at market; children were buried as clay and mud houses collapsed.

Entire neighborhoods were flattened.

Scores of families were obliterated in the attack, which wiped out a market and a bus station.

"We've always said al-Qaeda would try to carry out sensational attacks this month in particular," said Petraeus.

Petraeus and Crocker have the reputation of being independent-minded and frank. But at a time like this, such qualities are not primarily what the White House wants.

Faced with what looks from afar like a Hobbesian war of all against all, if not a descent into hell itself, the normal instinct of human beings to exercise their moral faculties grows numb.

Poor families in the Yazidi community often crowd as many as 30 people in one home.

Rescuers dug through the rubble throughout Wednesday in scenes reminiscent of an earthquake zone. Bodies covered by blankets were laid in the street.

"I'm calling on the government and the officials to remove those bodies and bury them because they will cause diseases that could be worse than the results of the explosions themselves," he said.

"We are thirsty. We have had no water for days."

"Families are now wandering in the wilderness."

"We've transitioned through to a clean-up phase."

"We didn't hear them calling out for help until moments before a bulldozer would have killed them as it cleared the rubble." The freed youngsters began running through the streets begging for food and water.

Many believe that the suicide blasts were the culmination o... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Susan Landau plants a flag now, so she can say "I told you so" in the years to come.

This change looks reasonable at first, but it could create huge long-term security risks for the United States.

Grant the NSA what it wants, and within 10 years the United States will be vulnerable to attacks from hackers across the globe, as well as the militaries of China, Russia and other nations.

Such threats are not theoretical.

... In simplifying wiretapping for US intelligence, we provide a target for foreign intelligence agencies and possibly rogue hackers.

In its effort to provide policymakers with immediate intelligence, the NSA forgot the critical information security aspect of its mission.

You might consider this a follow-up to the article from Sunday.

A Gateway for Hackers | Susan Landau | Washington Post

I am digging this right now.

Oh No concocts 30 brand new beats, continuing Stones Throw's acclaimed series of instrumental hip-hop albums (following J Dilla Donuts and Madlib's Beat Konducta). For this latest Oxperiment, Oxnard, CA-based Dr. No researches raw and rare psych from Turkey, Lebanon, Greece and Italy to formulate his antidote to wack samples and played-out loops.

All Music Guide calls it "a kind of warm, nearly-poppy, guitar-filled trip into Middle Eastern chants, tight bass grooves, and drums that hover beneath the surface."

They go on:

Dr. No's Oxperiment is a beat album, that much is sure, but it's more than that, it's more than music for the obsessed crate digger. It's rich and vibrant, like a marketplace, crates of oranges and nuts and olives sitting in the shade, the sound of vendors hacking their wares, everything necessary to the proceedings around it, a perfectly orchestrated expedition into an exotic landscape that somehow, at the same time, feels very, very familiar, all of which makes the record an exciting and very satisfying listen.

Oh No: Dr. No's Oxperiment

I can't wait to see Cramer get worked up over this. ("I'm too old ... I know too many almond growers, too many pumpkin growers, ...")

Not long ago, I found myself sitting at the edge of a field with a bear and thirty or forty thousand very angry bees. The bear was there because of the bees. The bees were there because of me, and why I was there was a question I found myself unable to answer precisely.

"One bear will teach another bear, and then that bear will do it," he said.

When he called for questions, the discussion quickly turned to bears. Practically everyone had a story to tell. Ordinary fences, it was agreed, were useless, and even electric ones could be breached [*]. One man said that he draped his electric fence with bacon; this enticed the bear to stick his nose against the wires and get zapped. Another recommended driving nails through plywood, then laying the plywood around the hive, nail-side up.

“It definitely keeps the bears out,” he said of the arrangement.

“It’s not too good for the inspector who steps on a nail,” the inspector said.

“Get a tetanus shot,” a second man suggested.

Think of the watermelons:

The honeybees seemed to be suffering not so much from any particular ailment as from just about every ailment.

It was as if an insect version of AIDS were sweeping through the hives.

Decius is vindicated! Rattle is wrong again! :)

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" is working like a charm!
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: [uncomprehendingly] Thanks, honey.

From the NRC report mentioned in the article:

“Pollinator decline is one form of global change that actually does have credible potential to alter the shape and structure of the terrestrial world.”

See recent coverage in Science News.

Also: the magic method of Dr. Lipkin's team is metagenomics ("the greatest [scientific] opportunity since the invention of the microscope"), which has been recommended previously.

Stung: Bees, Bears, Climate Change, Mass Extinction, and Economic Collapse -- Oh My!

In response to w1ld's post, "Jim Cramer Blows a Head Gasket", Decius asked:

Why didn't he blow a head gasket a couple years ago when this bubble started?

In a word: self-interest.

Here is why:

Until a few weeks ago, life on Wall Street was as good as it gets, with a nearly 5-year-old bull market, takeover deals galore, record profits and jaw-dropping bonuses. America's financial princes once again lived up to their image as Masters of the Universe.

But after a market upheaval that has hit like a bad case of whiplash, the fear on the Street is that the good times are coming to an abrupt halt.

You heard Cramer calling for the Fed to "relieve the pressure" ...

Some of these firms have been stuck with billions of dollars in risky debt used to finance corporate buyouts because investors have been unwilling to assume the loans.

... what he really wants is for investors to start buying these loans again, so that the firms who find them so profitable can keep selling them.

Coming back to the "why not three years ago" question for a bit of reflection:

The financial industry has endured many a bust following a boom, but today's looming troubles stand out because Wall Street was doing so well and the reversal was so quick.

"There are people who have gotten used to the lifestyle that comes along with the boom years, and some of those people are going to be in for a rude awakening."

Woes hitting Wall Street pocketbooks

Multinational corporations have foreign policies, and the "home" country doesn't necessarily get special treatment:

In an effort to curb distrust, in 2003 Microsoft signed a pact with China, Russia, the United Kingdom, NATO and other nations to let them see the Windows source code.

A few thoughts:

1) Possession of source code has limited defensive value unless you actually build your software from that source. Based on press reports the agreement does not facilitate local compilation.
2) Is it really feasible for a third party to audit the Vista source? The people involved seem to think so, or are at least making a show of it. I am dubious.
3) The utility of this 'pact' would seem to be substantially offensive.

Consider:

Microsoft has reportedly signed a new government security program source code agreement with China Information Technology Security Certification Center, allowing CNITSEC and other approved institutions to look over the source code and relevant technical data of Microsoft's products, including Windows Vista ,so as to improve their evaluation on the security of Microsoft products. The agreement is an important part of the MOU signed between National Development and Reform Commission and Microsoft in April 2006.

Microsoft's Government Security Program helps government departments and international organizations evaluate the security of Microsoft products. CNITSEC previously signed an agreement with Microsoft on security source code in February 2003 and was authorized to check over the company's major source code and technical data.

From 2003:

According to sources at the software company, China is the eighteenth nation to sign such an agreement to view Microsoft's proprietary source code.

Surely the number has grown since then.

Craig Mundie's doublespeak:

This program is an integral element of our efforts to help address the unique security requirements of governments.

Microsoft Forges 'Pact' With Cyberwarriors Worldwide

This is the Google project that was presented at WOOT.

Flayer is a Valgrind tool which provides bit-precise dynamic taint analysis of input to a target application. In addition, it allows this flow to be altered irrespective of content through the modification of conditional jump (if clauses) and function call behavior.

In addition, a small, Python wrapper library, LibFlayer, is included. It provides an easy interface for automation.

This is a proof of concept implementation, but it is fully functional. Please check it out!

flayer - Taint analysis and flow alteration tool