ianf • November 8, 2015 11:59 AM

@ Grauhut (cc: Justin, Banana Sunday, qwertty)

“If you insist in an IT security world war III scenario i give you one …”

I do not insist on anything, positively hope that I can live out my days not under world war/local siege conditions.

However, the probability theory, which is the only basis for my philosophy, says that there are bigger chances that “it” be of an unexpected, than of expected/ feared for nature. E. g. perhaps beginning with an overture of that kind, before it all goes tits up on the beach.

ianf • November 8, 2015 2:04 PM

@ In the Shadow of a Murder of Ravens

“@ ianf: Studied Russia quite a bit and never once recall coming across that. And, I was going to ask for a source for that.”

Strange world we live in, nobody tells us everything! It’s not Russia (Russia—what?) you should be studying in this context, but the volatile 80s in Lebanon.

However, ask, and ye shall receive. I recalled this being somehow connected (in my mind, not necessarily in reality) with the kidnapping of Terry Waite, so, after a bit of digging, found the most likely source—Guardian 1986—in which I must have read it (remembered most of it correctly, only it wasn’t in prevention). Funny thing I don’t think I was in England then, and this was in my pre-Internet days, so I should have recalled the paper mirage (I used to cut out interesting stories and put them in—now several—shoe boxes, now forgotten for posterity in the attic). Maybe I read it in some library?

Anywho, here’s the syndicated copy of that dispatch: “KGB Reportedly Gave Arab Terrorists a Taste of Brutality to Free Diplomats“. Los Angeles Times (The Guardian). January 7, 1986

Background: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanon_hostage_crisis

“Russia engaged in a lot of very sketchy activity, including arming middle eastern and irish terrorists. But, we have records of these things.”

Have or have not. This has the sound of a locally-mounted tooth-for-tooth operation, the Russians certainly had the guts for it. Who knows what was reported upstreams, who approved it, and what of that survived until the FSB archives were closed again?

BTW. what do “your” archives say about the 1963 defection of Kim Philby from Beirut? I once looked for it in Venona cables, wasn’t there. On the other hand not much to report either.

ianf • November 8, 2015 6:19 PM

@ Gerard van Vooren,
                                     you ask because you don’t know, or are you just expressing displeasure with threads of no interest to you? If the latter, congratulations on mastering the classic debate sabotaging technique in mere 13 words (I counted). Perhaps had you listed the non-nonsense threads, then I, for one, could use them as a yardstick to judge my submissions’ conformance to your high standards.

@ Nick P is “thinking my next step toward productivity might be to write that filter program that strips names of users’ choosing.”

Yes please, what every blog ought to have by default, ability to suppress named posters AND also to fold-in those threads that are of no interest to, to begin with, Gerard van Voreen.

ianf • November 8, 2015 7:21 PM

@ Figureitout, humming terminal

There was a discussion here recently of some sort of encrypted packet radio over RF ad-hoc mesh network transmitter/ forwarder project underway, but am not sure what became of it

—Yes I’m working on something like that, remote sensing network.

I meant: discussion of some 3rd party hardware IP-over-RF combo possibly on Kickstarter? I thought you’d remember that project. Your goals sound ambitious, but I can but note that you’re preoccupied with anti-tampering and other minute security aspects of what I understand continues to be vaporware (no offense intended, but how else should one call what sounds like a permanently unfinished project?)

ps. remember our brouhaha from a few weeks ago over the boundary of competence/incompetence (which you took as a full frontal attack on your ditto)? Just found out who first defined the first in terms of knowing one’s [originally: rhetorical] limits & thus where the second begun: the original brain geek Socrates (as recorded for posterity by Plato, because Socrates was all talk no write).

ianf • November 9, 2015 6:22 AM

@ Jacob

[GCHQ, etc] suspected a bomb… by finding evidence in “communication chatter” ex post facto. This is notable especially since the chatter comes from a group high on the US/UK group A terrorist list.

We’ll never know the sequence of their post-facto “arousal of suspicions,” so let’s just state what we do know: they never found any chatter-needles in their haystacks. Which they HAD TO collect because the paid by the taxpayer infrastructure already was in place. Which will compound the very problem in the future. It’s like the Mount Everest: you climb it for no discernible reason again and again and again BECAUSE IT IS THERE.

As I wrote earlier, data haystacks are only good for forensics, not for extraction of advance intel for staving off coming misdeeds. Whether that represents good value for the money is not for me to say, but Alexander Nekrassov (below) begged to differ.

“Side Note: The Russians, according to news reports, were not aware of that “chatter”. I expect them to substantially increase their effort to globally tap comm channels from now on.

Maybe, maybe not. For one, Russia has plenty of its own Islamist and “slant-eye” foes to surveil, and so, if it decided to double up its efforts in “GCHQ-overlapping” spheres of interest, it would soon find itself in the same hoover-up-everything-know-nothing seat. So I don’t see them wholesale tapping into undersea cables etc., even though they seem to have stepped up the chicken game in mapping these sea-bed networks lately.

An example: recently an explosive submersible drone has been found in the Baltic, entangled in moorings of the NordStream Russia-to-Germany gas pipeline (the flow has now been stopped). No origin was named so presumably it was Russian “of the type used to destroy unexploded mines.” Whether that was a towed fish that got away, a Russian trial balloon to test Swedish Navy’s vigilance, or something else, I do not know.

Back to listening to chatter: in this weekend’s BBC Dateline London[*], the (obviously Putin’s tube) Russian journalist Aleksander Nekrassov went bolshie on this Western, primarily the USA’s, dependence on ELINT, lack of HUMINT, and propensity for wrecking havoc in Libya, Iraq, Syria, where in the end they’ll have to “put the boots on the ground” to fix it anyway. When Russia’s own Afghanistan adventure was brought up, “it was not of Russia’s doing, but of the Poliburo’s, a wholly different regime” (unlike the present democratic one, wink-wink). Then the host recalled how, at the last Gorbatjov summit in 1988, a Russian general told him via an interpreter, that the Western countries, USA and Russia, will have to cooperate to defeat Islamic fundamentalism—in 1988! which made an impression on then very young journalist Gavin Esler.

That, however, was not the money shot of the table talk, but the look on Nekrassov’s face when told in passing by The Sunday Telegraph’s Janet Daley that there was one remaining superpower and one has-been ;-))

[^*] Dateline London: “Foreign correspondents currently posted to London look at events in the UK through outsiders’ eyes, and at how the issues of the week are being tackled around the world.”

ianf • November 9, 2015 8:10 AM

@ Figureitout, humming terminal

there was the Proxyham thing…

Think that was the one I had in mind, and which @humming terminal ought to be told about up front, given what ultimately happened to it (I may not understand all the tech angles and implications, but I can connect…the…dots between the thes and ands there),

RE: permanently unfinished project […] just want to find holes first. That’s kinda the point too if you understand the threat I’m targeting. There should never be a static target, always needs to be changing in non-trivial ways. Keeps attacker in recon stage which is the riskiest stage of discovery.

Listen, as a potential end user of your (for want of a succinct moniker) Arduino-based super-duper eternally guaranteed secure better mousetrap it is not my job to understand the threats you are targeting, but your job to define AND present these threats and proposed remedies in unambiguous enough fashion for others to understand instantly. Instead, when explaining things, you constantly get bogged down in the minutiae of the nitty-gritty that are of no interest to future end users (assuming there ever will be any besides yourself). You need to start at the other end, write down the threat scenarios that you want to eliminate, then narrow down the scope from there… not your present, the other way around. In clear terms, you need to begin at a similar level to those DIY Proxyham instructions. (And don’t you now dare writing me a treatise on where that project sucks, and where yours will surpass it, as you are itching to do!)

I warned you earlier of becoming a Mr. Casubon, which literary metaphor you appear not to have gotten. Said gentleman from George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” is a stereotype of an independent scholar who’s so focused on his unattainable quest for… something, that he never produces anything while dying in the process. A sterile, if intellectually self-stimulating, existence. Keep that in mind.

ianf • November 10, 2015 6:41 AM

Ragbag off The Guardian from Friday last until today, guaranteed OT. Long but good, may be nonsense (Gerard van Vooren avert your eyes).

Donald Rumsfeld
‘He’s getting up in years’: Rumsfeld says Bush Sr wrong in criticism of son’s aides
Bush Jr ‘made his own decisions’ says former defense secretary, who is labelled arrogant and damaging to president in new biography of George HW Bush

He doesn’t say!

George HW Bush |
George Bush Sr book reveals a more dangerous Dick Cheney than anyone knew
Destiny and Power shows a VP with more authority than almost all his predecessors, making plain Bush Jr’s administration could have been even worse

GHWB making amends prior to exit to Hell

Robots |
Robot revolution: rise of ‘thinking’ machines could exacerbate inequality
Global economy will be transformed over next 20 years at risk of growing inequality, say analysts

US foreign policy |
Russia is putting world peace at risk, says Pentagon chief Ash Carter
The Kremlin’s ‘challenging activities’ and nuclear sabre-rattling are ‘disturbing’, the defense secretary says, adding a warning about the rise of China

Russia is—then to a greater degree, so is the USA

Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months
In November 2012, Salvador Alvarenga went fishing off the coast of Mexico. Two days later, a storm hit and he made a desperate SOS. It was the last anyone heard from him – for 438 days. This is his story

A story of future seagull feed overcoming the odds

PRIVACY | Opinion
Privacy is starting to seem like a very 20th-century anomaly. David Shariatmadari
For most of human history, people lived with little or no expectation of a private life. So the new normal, where everyone knows your business, is perhaps not so new – but the golden age of privacy afforded us some important things

Technology sector | The Observer
Artificial intelligence: ‘Homo sapiens will be split into a handful of gods and the rest of us’
A new report suggests that the marriage of AI and robotics could replace so many jobs that the era of mass employment could come to an end

Where are the Luddites where we need them? Future grassroots mass-hacking hobby: sabotaging robotic production lines, so human repairmen and engineers are kept busy. Methodology once employed by glazers.

Josh Ostrovsky: ‘The internet is like a giant weird orgy’
Instagram superstar, comic, rapper … and plagiarist, too? Meet Josh Ostrovsky, aka the Fat Jew. Words by Jon Ronson

Never heard of, never will listen to

Google |
Alphabet and Facebook develop rival secret drone plans
The tech giants are racing to provide internet access from unmanned aircraft flying higher than passenger jets, having quietly registered new drone designs

Exactly what we all need, Zuck, Sergey and Larry’s constant drones well above our heads hand-in-glove with the NSA

SCIENCE |
Academics land £2m prizes at Zuckerberg-backed ‘science Oscars’
British researcher John Hardy among those to win a Breakthrough prize at ceremony hosted by Seth MacFarlane in the US

Whoever knows this geezer, get on the blower now, tell ‘im it’s privacy blood money, and he shouldn’t be taking it.

Netherlands |
Undelivered letters shed light on 17th-century society
Thousands of pieces of correspondence, many still unopened, were stored away by Dutch postmaster and are now being examined by academics

Analog trumps digital. No such undelivered letters luck for XXIII century researchers – all went to /dev/null. On the other hand, there’s them aircraft hangars full of data haystacks—good luck with that

SURVEILLANCE | Opinion |
This snooper’s charter makes George Orwell look lacking in vision. Heather Brooke
The new surveillance bill renders the citizen transparent to the state, putting every one of us under suspicion. It would serve a tyranny well

Incidentally, a SERIOUS QUESTION: is it fair to say that the Brits owe that Snooper’s Charter directly to Edward Snowden?

Human Rights Act | Opinion |
We will all suffer in Michael Gove’s war on Europe’s judges. Zoe Williams
The idea apparently mooted by the justice secretary that a British bill of rights would be a replacement for the Human Rights Act is a fiction

That’s unfair: given that specifically the British people represent an elevated class of humanity, they ought to have a refined bill of rights, even if that’s wrong otherwise

Art and design |
Army for hire: the artist employing ghost soldiers to invade Facebook
In resurrecting an 18th-century mercenary army, Constant Dullaart has found a novel way to skewer the social media empire

Take that, Zuck!: He’s hiring a ghost army of 18th-century soldiers to attack the most mighty empire of today. His online art intervention, called The Possibility of an Army, will expose the ease with which fake identities can be created online. He has enlisted people to open Facebook accounts with the names of mercenary soldiers hired by Britain in the American war of independence. He is literally creating a fake army of dead men.

Theatre |
Olivia Williams: ‘I’ve never been cast as a silly little woman before’
Banned in 1907, but still sharply topical… A man too pure for politics given an unexpected leadership role. A Tory government drafting as its patsy a politician unschooled in the compromises of power. Until the stage addresses the stories of Corbyn and Clegg directly, we’ll just have to make do with Harley Granville Barker’s Waste, the first National Theatre production of which opens on 10 November. Its star talks sex, idealism and backstage briefings from Neil Kinnock

Any actress who portrayed Cherie Blair proxy on film AND lived to tell the tale deserves respect and warrants our attention.

Encryption |
Tech firms warn snooper’s charter could end strong encryption in Britain
The IP bill gives the government the power to demand tech companies weaken their encryption, say industry representatives – despite promises to the contrary

Japan Shortcuts |
The Tokyo hotel where guests can curl up with 1,700 good books
Book and Bed is a Japanese hotel that’s taking a very novel approach to hospitality

Anyone who ever heard of the Tumbleweed Hotel @ 37, Rue de Bûcherie in Paris, will recognize this as an instance of monetization of the concept. Perhaps the Shakespeare & Co. ought to charge then a franchising fee.

ianf • November 10, 2015 11:07 AM

@ Where Eagles Fly – you make a bold philosophical (if not merely sophist) claim

[…] “As shamed as Snowden made power brokers in the US, the shame was was shared with Britain through Glenn Greenwald. How so many so powerful were brought so low, how they must have grinded their teeth in frustration. And by but two men whom they so despise.”

Well, much as I want to believe it, I simply don’t see it. What I mean by that is I’ll believe it when I see Gen. Hayden et al & his SO FAR ANONYMOUS British GCHQ heads (and those allied of similar other nations’ domestic snooping services) standing in line at 8:00 AM sharp at the Jobs Centre together with that days’ prison releasees, and assorted housewives wishing to escape the drudgery of housewifery. While being interviewed by Breakfast TV on their prospects in today’s tight jobs market.

ianf • November 10, 2015 1:59 PM

@ Clive

is it fair to say that the Brits owe that Snooper’s Charter directly to Edward Snowden?

It depends on what you mean, by directly and owe…

Originally I wrote ‘owe’ in quotation marks, but then decided enough this implied… something. Owe as in “as a consequence of Snowden’s pointing out existence of a de-facto INFORMAL/ SECRET Snooper’s Charter, which the services claim as a necessity—yet thus far have not attempted to formalize.” This precise and unambiguous enough explanation without shade of a doubt for you?

In theory the “snoopers charter” is an update to the law in the same way that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) and it’s amendments were.

That is it, –supposedly– takes out the ambiguity of what can and can not legally be done and by whom and under what circumstances.

Fair enough, that’s basically what Ed Snowden said to BBC Panorama Peter Taylor in Moscow not that long ago, that if the services say they need it, “why don’t they formalize it, and then in conditions of public debate?” Which is what’s happening. In a sense Ed is guilty of not letting the sleeping dogs lie, for which we, the nations of Sleeping Beauties, should be grateful.

PS. you’re a hard customer, Clive Robinson. I have unfinished replies to you going back several weeks, some of which I’ll have to finish because they take up IMPORTANT THINGS that are dear to my blood pump organ.

ianf • November 10, 2015 11:18 PM

When one gets a promotional offer from the well-known Internet bookstore which one earlier anonymously has searched for (but never ordered) a specific title, then one knows that the disappearing game that one has contemplated has effectively been lost before it even begun.

Are you looking for something in our Reference Books store? If so, you might be interested in these items.

How to Be Invisible: Protect Your Home, Your Children, Your Assets…
J. J. Luna | £16.61

Soldier of Fortune Guide to How to Disappear and Never Be Found
Barry Davies | £11.99

The Little Black Book Of Skip Tracing: Creating Pretext, Mastering… | £3.81

cc: BoppingAround, Nick P.

ianf • November 12, 2015 3:33 AM

Pursuant to earlier news, this winged comment:

[…] “the government published a draft bill to enable it to track citizens’ internet use. The novelist Robert Harris wondered how these kind of powers would have struck us just 40 years ago: “Theresa May’s proposal (is) quite staggering. Imagine if in the 70s, to fight the IRA, MI5 had demanded to know every shop visited, book read, inquiry made.””

From The Guardian’s Comment is free lament “Privacy is starting to seem like a very 20th-century anomaly” written by one David Shariatmadari – who should know better than to advertise his alternative, yet more oppressive, system to protect women’s privacy by full-body cloaking in burkas.

ianf • November 12, 2015 5:25 AM

“Ex-NSA Bill Binney did a Reddit IAmA. Lots of goodies there!”

Quite. E.g. when asked about “some other whistleblowers that you respect and honor for doing what they did,” (answer: “Jesselyn Radack, Tom Drake, Kirk Wiebe, John Kiriakou, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Jeffrey Stirling, Russ Tice”)
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3sf8xx/im_bill_binney_former_nsa_tech_director_worked/cwwoqt5

… and the reasons why Edward Snowden was not listed among these his honorees.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3sf8xx/im_bill_binney_former_nsa_tech_director_worked/cwx0vsp

[i read the reddit so you only have to geddit]

ianf • November 15, 2015 8:50 AM

In Internet time an age ago Clive Robinson asked “Re: the intel on the Russian Metrojet 9268 aircraft”:

[… there is rather more to the data haystack issue than just forensics …] Which begs the question why GCHQ or others in the know revealed the information about the supposed “chatter”… what did they hope to gain by releasing the information?

First of all: did you see any dispatches direct from GCHQ/ equiv./ or Whitehall sources that stated there was some “chatter” to take notice of—if only after the fact—in the first place? All I heard on 3 nations’ cable and other news were unattributed inferences that the decision to stop the UK flights to Sinaï etc. was reached on such a basis. So I for one do not know what’s been discovered exactly, and the GCHQ isn’t keen to set the record straight. They may have informed the 10, and the press office cobbled together something on that basis without clear indication as to what “it” might have been: Internet chatter, cell phone intercepts, landline traffic or the Crystal Ball.

[earlier] “I suspect that it would not take much to make many people in Russia think the West withheld the information for political reasons, as relations are currently at quite a low point over the Ukraine and Syria.”

Nothing as dramatic would be needed for whipping up anti-Western dysphoria in Russia, that’s Always Ready To Feel Being Plotted Against By Enemies… it’s what they have to content themselves with in lieu of being a superpower. But I think, that in MJ9286’s case, the authorities are back-pedaling quite a bit (no state representative attended the funerals of victims in St. Petersburg), because of the unfortunate analogy to the shooting down of the MH17 by “freedom fighters” in Eastern Ukraïne. At the same time, evacuated Russian vacationers are/ were offered (not known exactly by whom in Russia) the option of continuing their vacation in Turkey, rather than coming straight home (acc. to RT, and unlike the evacuated Brits from Sinaï.)

“It will be interesting to see what actual forensic evidence comes out as to the physical origins of the explosives, detonation mechanism and container of the bomb. Much as it did with Lockerbie.”

Forensic proof is no consolation to lives wasted, if this time Russian lives only. It’s mostly an investigative artefact after the fact.

ianf • December 10, 2015 12:14 PM

@ Jason Richardson-White, I’ve finally read (well… skimmed) your world-remaking NewAge-y diatribe.

Long story short: TL;DR. If you want to awaken interest for some ideal of yours, learn to be brief, do not put off readers by your meandering yet anally hierarchical reasoning. Put up an abstract first (“A concept of how to change human nature in the span of 100 years“), then you can gradually expand it until the reader falls asleep.

A caveat: I know of no large-time-scale human project of the past 2000+ years that succeeded. In the last 250 years, since the beginning of the Industrial age, anything over the length of a 10-15-year plan risks petering out due to changed circumstances. The 1000-year Dritten Reich with some industrial and pathologically ideological muscle behind it lasted 12 years. Soviet communism 71 years, most of it due to pure inertia. Even the most self-contained Eastern dynasties of past epoques kept changing course every 60-80 years or so (possibly due to the “Young Turk” syndrome, grown up rulers’ grandchildren generation needing to appear diametrically different from past elites). What you (seemingly) talk about is a kind of accelerated mental terraforming, for which our slowly evolved genus is badly equipped.

That’s it. Better find other things to occupy your mind, devise choreography for fighting windmills of La Mancha with StarWars light sabers or something.

PS. Ray Kurzweil is a genius but also a kook. You have been warned.