grotesque

2011-09-02T03:33:00.001+01:00

2011-09-02T03:31:00.001+01:00

2011-09-02T03:29:00.001+01:00

2011-09-02T03:26:00.001+01:00

2011-09-02T03:25:00.001+01:00

2011-09-02T03:13:00.001+01:00

2011-09-02T03:11:00.001+01:00

2011-08-19T16:35:00.001+01:00

2011-08-18T04:16:00.001+01:00

Night, Wide Words

2011-08-18T03:54:00.001+01:00

i see

in every piece of art i like
and in every film that moves me
and when i look out at the sea
or across the fields in this part of the country

i make songs
i have nothing else
no money
no one in my bed at night nor the want
no food beyond what comes out of the earth

my senses are failing
my sight is dimming
my teeth are falling out
my ears hurt in the cold

i'm not afraid
i've always been stupid like that

the other day we spoke on the phone
like estranged ghosts
i never wrote a story before i met you
white white white white numb white noisey

tired now
tired of visiting you in my heart
numb don't need anyone else
numb don't have anything else
only make oblique songs
numb from not seeing

and dying now and not afraid,
a beaten pet and you are not for me
and i am now a minor character in the film of your life
and it moves me.

Spurious by Lars Iyer

2011-07-27T12:39:00.000+01:00

Lars has made friends with me on Facebook, so I spend a good portion of the morning going through every single one of his private photographs, reading his captions and looking at his face for images of discomfort and traces of the author, as opposed to the genial shirt-wearer I once knew in passing.

What I should be doing is continuing to input executables into Textwrangler in the misguided hope of mastering PHP, a language so simple in its complexity that it gives a moron like me the hope of becoming bilingual. The executables are so fickle that they freeze my solid Unix system for half an hour and I have to write this with a pen on paper. I don't understand what Textwrangler is and I am too lazy to learn the meaning of the acronym PHP, never mind its functions; the Zuckerberg outlook is bleak.

Some of Lars' captions make me laugh in snorts. It is interesting to see W, who I have never met but read about in Lars' book and on his blog. Some of W's responses make me laugh in an embarrassing giggle. It is interesting to read Sally's comments too. Thank God there is some sanity in there.

I inadvertently ran a lukewarm bath and it is going cold.

I recommend you buy Lars' book, called Spurious, and read it, and then tell your friends to buy and read it. I don't know why this should convince you to bother, but at the very least you will be distracted from having an original thought of your own for a few hours.

Clarity in Retrospect

2011-07-08T15:04:00.000+01:00

Looking back over the Wikileaks media splash, Cablegate, and the subsequent extradition of Assange, is rather like peering into a Victorian freakshow as a modern onlooker.

Assange's cult of personality alienated many followers. Clothing himself in messianic garb and nobly bearing the cross of truth, he was set free to walk the streets amid the catcalls and lashes of the commentariat.

How much of this persona was self-adopted? To what degree was the media sweetly spun against him? There is a zesty irony at play if you find truth in the latter.

Has the perspicacity of government improved? Generally, the Cables themselves were remarkably tepid in their revelations - to even label it Cablegate is a tad hyperbolic. If anything, military and diplomatic communiqué has only become more encrypted, the darkness more impenetrable.

Perhaps the most important consequence of Assange's crusade has been to encourage an atmosphere of question, even of rebellion. Syria, Egypt, the Lebanon, even humble Blighty - if Assange has stood for something positive, it has been to help promote an atmosphere of empowerment. Whether this empowerment achieves anything is as much up to collective will and political kismet as it is to raw revolutionary Kronstadt spirit.

The key lies in journalism as activism, and activism as journalism. As the commenter Linuxluver points out in this excellent Economist piece:

"Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black have been blurring the line between journalism and activism for decades."

We all have the tools to be our own Murdoch, our own Black. To what extent we owe this to Julien Assange is open to debate.

Wikileaks Cablegate Download

2010-12-07T13:00:00.004Z

Full download of the Wikileaks cables here (those released as of 7th December 2010 1304 GMT)

* * *

It's a 7z file, so you'll need the appropriate expander:

Mac

Windows

New Wikileaks Site

2010-12-07T12:52:00.002Z

Great breakdown of the flaws in the new Swiss hosted Wikileaks site here:

https://p10.secure.hostingprod.com/@spyblog.org.uk/ssl/wikileak/index.html

Forbes Magazine Interview with Julien Assange

2010-11-30T13:16:00.007Z

In a rare, two-hour interview conducted in London on November 11, Assange said that he’s still sitting on a trove of secret documents, about half of which relate to the private sector. And WikiLeaks’ next target will be a major American bank. “It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume,” he said, adding: “For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails.”
Here is an edited transcript of that discussion:

* * *

Forbes: To start, is it true you’re sitting on trove of unpublished documents?

Julien Assange: Sure. That’s usually the case. As we’ve gotten more successful, there’s a gap between the speed of our publishing pipeline and the speed of our receiving submissions pipeline. Our pipeline of leaks has been increasing exponentially as our profile rises, and our ability to publish is increasing linearly.

You mean as your personal profile rises?

Yeah, the rising profile of the organization and my rising profile also. And there’s a network effect for anything to do with trust. Once something starts going around and being considered trustworthy in a particular arena, and you meet someone and they say “I heard this is trustworthy,” then all of a sudden it reconfirms your suspicion that the thing is trustworthy.
So that’s why brand is so important, just as it is with anything you have to trust.

And this gap between your publishing resources and your submissions is why the site’s submission function has been down since October?

We have too much.

Before you turned off submissions, how many leaks were you getting a day?

As I said, it was increasing exponentially. When we get lots of press, we can get a spike of hundreds or thousands. The quality is sometimes not as high. If the front page of the Pirate Bay links to us, as they have done on occasion, we can get a lot of submissions, but the quality is not as high.

How much of this trove of documents that you’re sitting on is related to the private sector?

About fifty percent.

You’ve been focused on the U.S. military mostly in the last year. Does that mean you have private sector-focused leaks in the works?

Yes. If you think about it, we have a publishing pipeline that’s increasing linearly, and an exponential number of leaks, so we’re in a position where we have to prioritize our resources so that the biggest impact stuff gets released first.

So do you have very high impact corporate stuff to release then?

Yes, but maybe not as high impact…I mean, it could take down a bank or two.

That sounds like high impact.

But not as big an impact as the history of a whole war. But it depends on how you measure these things.

When will WikiLeaks return to its older model of more frequent leaks of smaller amounts of material?

If you look at the average number of documents we’re releasing, we’re vastly exceeding what we did last year. These are huge datasets. So it’s actually very efficient for us to do that.
If you look at the number of packages, the number of packages has decreased. But if you look at the average number of documents, that’s tremendously increased.

So will you return to the model of higher number of targets and sources?

Yes. Though I do actually think…[pauses] These big package releases. There should be a cute name for them.

Megaleaks?

Megaleaks. That’s good. These megaleaks…They’re an important phenomenon, and they’re only going to increase. When there’s a tremendous dataset, covering a whole period of history or affecting a whole group of people, that’s worth specializing on and doing a unique production for each one, which is what we’ve done.

We’re totally source dependent. We get what we get. As our profile rises in a certain area, we get more in a particular area. People say, why don’t you release more leaks form the Taliban. So I say hey, help us, tell more Taliban dissidents about us.

These megaleaks, as you call them that, we haven’t seen any of those from the private sector.

No, not at the same scale for the military.

Will we?

Yes. We have one related to a bank coming up, that’s a megaleak. It’s not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it’s either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.

Is it a U.S. bank?

Yes, it’s a U.S. bank.

One that still exists?  

Yes, a big U.S. bank.

The biggest U.S. bank?

No comment.

When will it happen?

Early next year. I won’t say more.

What do you want to be the result of this release?

[Pauses] I’m not sure.

It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume.

Usually when you get leaks at this level, it’s about one particular case or one particular violation. For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron emails. Why were these so valuable? When Enron collapsed, through court processes, thousands and thousands of emails came out that were internal, and it provided a window into how the whole company was managed. It was all the little decisions that supported the flagrant violations.

This will be like that. Yes, there will be some flagrant violations, unethical practices that will be revealed, but it will also be all the supporting decision-making structures and the internal executive ethos that cames out, and that’s tremendously valuable. Like the Iraq War Logs, yes there were mass casualty incidents that were very newsworthy, but the great value is seeing the full spectrum of the war.

You could call it the ecosystem of corruption. But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest. The way they talk about it.

How many dollars were at stake in this?

We’re still investigating. All I can say is it’s clear there were unethical practices, but it’s too early to suggest there’s criminality. We have to be careful about applying criminal labels to people until we’re very sure.

Can you tell me anything about what kind of unethical behavior we’re talking about?

No.

You once said to one of my colleagues that WikiLeaks has material on BP. What have you got?

We’ve got lots now, but we haven’t determined how much is original. There’s been a lot of press on the BP issue, and lawyers, and people are pulling out a lot of stuff. So I suspect the material we have on BP may not be that original. We’ll have to see whether our stuff is especially unique.
The Russian press has reported that you plan to target Russian companies and politicians. I’ve heard from other WikiLeaks sources that this was blown out of proportion.

It was blown out of proportion when the FSB reportedly said not to worry, that they could take us down. But yes, we have material on many business and governments, including in Russia. It’s not right to say there’s going to be a particular focus on Russia.

Let’s just walk through other industries. What about pharmaceutical companies?

Yes. To be clear, we have so much unprocessed stuff, I’m not even sure about all of it. These are just things I’ve briefly looked at or that one of our people have told me about.

How much stuff do you have? How many gigs or terabytes?

I’m not sure. I haven’t had time to calculate.

Continuing then: The tech industry?

We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.

U.S.? China?
The U.S. is one of the victims.

What about the energy industry?

Yes.

Aside from BP?

Yes.

On environmental issues?

A whole range of issues.

Can you give me some examples?

One example: It began with something we released last year, quite an interesting case that wasn’t really picked up by anyone. There’s a Texas Canadian oil company whose name escapes me. And they had these wells in Albania that had been blowing. Quite serious. We got this report from a consultant engineer into what was happening, saying vans were turning up in the middle of the night doing something to them. They were being sabotaged. The Albanian government was involved with another company; there were two rival producers and one was government-owned and the other was privately owned.

So when we got this report; it didn’t have a header. It didn’t say the name of the firm, or even who the wells belonged to.

So it wasn’t picked up because it was missing key data.

At the time, yeah. So I said, what the hell do we do with this thing? It’s impossible to verify if we don’t even know who it came from. It could have been one company trying to frame the other one. So we did something very unusual, and published it and said “We’ve got this thing, looks like it could have been written by a rival company aiming to defame the other, but we can’t verify it. We want more information.” Whether it’s a fake document or real one, something was going on. Either one company is trying to frame the other, which is interesting, or it’s true, which is also very interesting.

That’s where the matter sat until we got a letter of inquiry from an engineering consulting company asking how to get rid of it. We demanded that they first prove that they were the owner.

It sounds like when Apple confirmed that the lost iPhone 4 was real, by demanding that Gizmodo return it.

Yes, like Apple and the iPhone. They sent us a screen capture with the missing header and other information.

What were they thinking?

I don’t know.

So the full publication is coming up?

Yes.

Do you have more on finance?

We have a lot of finance related things. Of the commercial sectors we’ve covered, finance is the most significant.

Before the banks went bust in Dubai, we put out a number of leaks showing they were unhealthy. They threatened to send us to prison in Dubai, which is a little serious, if we went there.
Just to review, what would you say are the biggest five private sector leaks in WikiLeaks’ history?
It depends on the importance of the material vs. the impact. Kaupthing was one of the most important, because of the chain of effects it set off, the scrutiny in Iceland and the rest of Scandinvia. The Bank Julius Baer case was also important.

The Kaupthing leak was a very good leak. The loanbook described in very frank terms the credit worthiness of all these big companies and billionaires and borrowers, not just internal to the bank, but a broad spectrum all over the world, an assessment of a whole bunch of businesses around the world. It was quite an interesting leak. It didn’t just expose Kaupthing, it exposed many companies.

The bank Julius Baer exposed high net worth individuals hiding assets in the Cayman Islands, and we went on to do a series that exposed bank Julius Baer’s own internal tax structure. It’s interesting that Swiss banks also hide their assets from the Swiss by using offshore bank structuring. We had some quite good stuff in there.

It set off a chain of regulatory investigations, possibly resulting in some changes. It triggered a lot of interesting scrutiny.

Regulation: Is that what you’re after?

I’m not a big fan of regulation: anyone who likes freedom of the press can’t be. But there are some abuses that should be regulated, and this is one.

With regard to these corporate leaks, I should say: There’s an overlap between corporate and government leaks. When we released the Kroll report on three to four billion smuggled out by the former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi and his cronies, where did the money go? There’s no megacorruption–as they call it in Africa, it’s a bit sensational but you’re talking about billions–without support from Western banks and companies.

That money went into London properties, Swiss banks, property in New York, companies that had been set up to move this money.

We had another interesting one from the pharmaceutical industry: It was quite self-referential. The lobbyists had been getting leaks from the WHO. They were getting their own internal intelligence report affecting investment regulation. We were leaked a copy. It was a meta-leak. That was quite influential, though it was a relatively small leak–it was published in Nature and other pharma journals.

What do you think WikiLeaks mean for business? How do businesses need to adjust to a world where WikiLeaks exists?

WikiLeaks means it’s easier to run a good business and harder to run a bad business, and all CEOs should be encouraged by this. I think about the case in China where milk powder companies started cutting the protein in milk powder with plastics. That happened at a number of separate manufacturers.

Let’s say you want to run a good company. It’s nice to have an ethical workplace. Your employees are much less likely to screw you over if they’re not screwing other people over.

Then one company starts cutting their milk powder with melamine, and becomes more profitable. You can follow suit, or slowly go bankrupt and the one that’s cutting its milk powder will take you over. That’s the worst of all possible outcomes.

The other possibility is that the first one to cut its milk powder is exposed. Then you don’t have to cut your milk powder. There’s a threat of regulation that produces self-regulation.
It just means that it’s easier for honest CEOs to run an honest business, if the dishonest businesses are more effected negatively by leaks than honest businesses. That’s the whole idea. In the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed companies, we’re creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical companies.

No one wants to have their own things leaked. It pains us when we have internal leaks. But across any given industry, it is both good for the whole industry to have those leaks and it’s especially good for the good players.

But aside from the market as a whole, how should companies change their behavior understanding that leaks will increase?

Do things to encourage leaks from dishonest competitors. Be as open and honest as possible. Treat your employees well.

I think it’s extremely positive. You end up with a situation where honest companies producing quality products are more competitive than dishonest companies producing bad products. And companies that treat their employees well do better than those that treat them badly.

Would you call yourself a free market proponent?

Absolutely. I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I love markets. Having lived and worked in many countries, I can see the tremendous vibrancy in, say, the Malaysian telecom sector compared to U.S. sector. In the U.S. everything is vertically integrated and sewn up, so you don’t have a free market. In Malaysia, you have a broad spectrum of players, and you can see the benefits for all as a result.

How do your leaks fit into that?

To put it simply, in order for there to be a market, there has to be information. A perfect market requires perfect information.

There’s the famous lemon example in the used car market. It’s hard for buyers to tell lemons from good cars, and sellers can’t get a good price, even when they have a good car.
By making it easier to see where the problems are inside of companies, we identify the lemons. That means there’s a better market for good companies. For a market to be free, people have to know who they’re dealing with.

You’ve developed a reputation as anti-establishment and anti-institution.

Not at all. Creating a well-run establishment is a difficult thing to do, and I’ve been in countries where institutions are in a state of collapse, so I understand the difficulty of running a company. Institutions don’t come from nowhere.

It’s not correct to put me in any one philosophical or economic camp, because I’ve learned from many. But one is American libertarianism, market libertarianism. So as far as markets are concerned I’m a libertarian, but I have enough expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends up as monopoly unless you force them to be free.

WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.

But in the meantime, there could be a lot of pain from these scandals, obviously.

Pain for the guilty.

Do you derive pleasure from these scandals that you expose and the companies you shame?

It’s tremendously satisfying work to see reforms being engaged in and stimulating those reforms. To see opportunists and abusers brought to account.

You were a traditional computer hacker. How did you find this new model of getting information out of companies?

It’s a bit annoying, actually. Because I co-wrote a book about [being a hacker], there are documentaries about that, people talk about that a lot. They can cut and paste. But that was 20 years ago. It’s very annoying to see modern day articles calling me a computer hacker.
I’m not ashamed of it, I’m quite proud of it. But I understand the reason they suggest I’m a computer hacker now. There’s a very specific reason.

I started one of the first ISPs in Australia, known as Suburbia, in 1993. Since that time, I’ve been a publisher, and at various moments a journalist. There’s a deliberate attempt to redefine what we’re doing not as publishing, which is protected in many countries, or the journalist activities, which is protected in other ways, as something which doesn’t have a protection, like computer hacking, and to therefore split us off from the rest of the press and from these legal protections. It’s done quite deliberately by some of our opponents. It’s also done because of fear, from publishers like The New York Times that they’ll be regulated and investigated if they include our activities in publishing and journalism.

I’m not arguing you’re a hacker now. But if we say that both what you were doing then and now are both about gaining access to information, when did you change your strategy from going in and getting it to simply asking for it?

That hacker mindset was very valuable to me. But the insiders know where the bodies are. It’s much more efficient to have insiders. They know the problems, they understand how to expose them.

How did you start to approach your leak strategy?

When we started Suburbia in 1993, I knew that bringing information to the people was very important. We facilitated many groups: We were the electronic printer if you like for many companies and individuals who were using us to publish information. They were bringing us information, and some of them were activist groups, lawyers. And some bringing forth information about companies, like Telstra, the Australian telecommunications giant. We published information on them. That’s something I was doing in the 1990s.

We were the free speech ISP in Australia. An Australian Anti-church of Scientology website was hounded out of Victoria University by legal threats from California, and hounded out of a lot of places. Eventually they came to us.

People were fleeing from ISPs that would fold under legal threats, even from a cult in the U.S. That’s something I saw early on, without realizing it: potentiating people to reveal their information, creating a conduit. Without having any other robust publisher in the market, people came to us.

I wanted to ask you about [Peiter Zatko, a legendary hacker and security researcher who also goes by] “Mudge.”

Yeah, I know Mudge. He’s a very sharp guy.

Mudge is now leading a project at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to find a technology that can stop leaks, which seems pretty relative to your organization. Can you tell me about your past relationship with Mudge?

Well, I…no comment.

Were you part of the same scene of hackers? When you were a computer hacker, you must have known him well.

We were in the same milieu. I spoke with everyone in that milieu.

What do you think of his current work to prevent digital leaks inside of organizations, a project called Cyber Insider Threat or Cinder?

I know nothing about it.

But what do you of the potential of any technology designed to prevent leaks?

Marginal.

What do you mean?

New formats and new ways of communicating are constantly cropping up. Stopping leaks is a new form of censorship. And in the same manner that very significant resources spent on China’s firewall, the result is that anyone who’s motivated can work around it. Not just the small fraction of users, but anyone who really wants to can work around it.

Censorship circumvention tools [like the program Tor] also focus on leaks. They facilitate leaking.

Airgapped networks are different. Where there’s literally no connection between the network and the internet. You may need a human being to carry something. But they don’t have to intentionally carry it. It could be a virus on a USB stick, as the Stuxnet worm showed, though it went in the other direction. You could pass the information out via someone who doesn’t know they’re a mule.

Back to Mudge and Cinder: Do you think, knowing his intelligence personally, that he can solve the problem of leaks?

No, but that doesn’t mean that the difficulty can’t be increased. But I think it’s a very difficult case, and the reason I suggest it’s an impossible case to solve completely is that most people do not leak. And the various threats and penalties already mean they have to be highly motivated to deal with those threats and penalties. These are highly motivated people. Censoring might work for the average person, but not for highly motivated people. And our people are highly motivated.

Mudge is a clever guy, and he’s also highly ethical. I suspect he would have concerns about creating a system to conceal genuine abuses.

But his goal of preventing leaks doesn’t differentiate among different types of content. It would stop whistleblowers just as much as it stops exfiltration of data by foreign hackers.

I’m sure he’ll tell you China spies on the U.S., Russia, France. There are genuine concerns about those powers exfiltrating data. And it’s possibly ethical to combat that process. But spying is also stabilizing to relationships. Your fears about where a country is or is not are always worse than the reality. If you only have a black box, you can put all your fears into it, particularly opportunists in government or private industry who want to address a problem that may not exist. If you know what a government is doing, that can reduce tensions.

There have been reports that Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German who used to work with WikiLeaks, has left to create his own WikiLeaks-type organization. The Wall Street Journal described him as a “competitor” to WikiLeaks. Do you see him as competition?

The supply of leaks is very large. It’s helpful for us to have more people in this industry. It’s protective to us.

What do you think of the idea of WikiLeaks copycats and spinoffs?

 There have been a few over time, and they’ve been very dangerous. It’s not something that’s easy to do right. That’s the problem. Recently we saw a Chinese WikiLeaks. We encouraged them to come to us to work with us. It would be nice to have more Chinese speakers working with us in a dedicated way. But what they’d set up had no meaningful security. They have no reputation you can trust. It’s very easy and very dangerous to do it wrong.

Do you think that the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative [a series of bills to make Iceland the most free-speech and whistleblower-protective country in the world] would make it easier to do this right if it passes?

Not at the highest level. We deal with organizations that do not obey the rule of law. So laws don’t matter.

Intelligence agencies keep things secret because they often violate the rule of law or of good behavior.

What about corporate leaks?

For corporate leaks, yes, free speech laws could make things easier. Not for military contractors, because they’re in bed with intelligence agencies. If a spy agency’s involved, IMMI won’t help you. Except it may increase the diplomatic cost a little, if they’re caught.

That’s why our primary defense isn’t law, but technology.

Are there any other leaking organizations that you do endorse?

 No, there are none.

Do you hope that IMMI will foster a new generation of WikiLeaks-type organizations?

More than WikiLeaks: general publishing. We’re the canary in the coalmine. We’re at the vanguard. But the attacks against publishers in general are severe.

If you had a wish-list of what industries or governments, what are you looking for from leakers?

All governments, all industries. We accept all material of diplomatic, historical or ethical significance that hasn’t been released before and is under active suppression.

There’s a question about which industries have the greatest potential for reform. Those may be the ones we haven’t heard about yet. So what’s the big thing around the corner? The real answer is I don’t know. No one in the public knows. But someone on the inside does know.

But there are also industries that just have more secrecy, so you must know there are things you want that you haven’t gotten.

That’s right. Within the intelligence industry is one example. They have a higher level of secrecy. And that’s also true of the banking industry.

Other industries that are extremely well paid, say Goldman Sachs, might have higher incentives not to lose their jobs.

So it’s only the obvious things that we want: Things concerning intelligence and war, and mass financial fraud. Because they affect so many people so severely.

And they’re harder leaks to get.

Intelligence particularly, because the penalties are so severe. Although very few people have been caught, it’s worth noting. The penalties may be severe, but nearly everyone gets away with it.

To keep people in control, you only need to make them scared. The CIA is not scared as an institution of people leaking. It’s scared that people will know that people are leaking and getting away with it. If that happens, the management loses control.

And WikiLeaks has the opposite strategy?

That’s right. It’s summed up by the phrase “courage is contagious.” If you demonstrate that individuals can leak something and go on to live a good life, it’s tremendously incentivizing to people.

* * *

Wikileaks Cables Download

2010-11-29T15:50:00.002Z

Part I.

http://www.mediafire.com/?fh2577o1jwz5eot

with thanks to Dichterische Fragmente

iq.org Extract > Statement for the Defence?

2010-11-29T14:57:00.001Z

When the world extended to one's surrounding hills and mountains and over them was only legend, saving the world was approachable and a natural activity to all of independent character.

You do not need to justify the possession of these noble instincts. Such attributes are normally distributed. You have a constellation of these attributes and that makes you who you are. Recognise that the substantial ones are invariant.

You must satisfy your invariant instincts or you will be at odds with your own character. It is only when we are not at odds with our basic makeup that we can find life meaningful.

To exercise your instinct for saving the world, requires saving what you perceive to be the world.

Being modern, educated and worldly, the world you perceive is immense and this is dis-empowering compared to the valley world of your ancestors where your feelings were forged and where saving 10 people saved 10% of the "world"'s population.

Here lays the difficulty in actualising your character. Your perception is of a world so vast that that you can not envisage your actions making a meaningful difference.

People try to fool themselves and others into believing that one can ``think globally and act locally', however to anyone with a sense of proportion (not most people, btw) thinking globally makes acting locally seem to be a marginal activity. It's not setting the world to rights.

To meaningfully interact with the world, you have to either constrain your perception of what it is back to valley proportions by eschewing all global information (most of us here have engaged on just the opposite course which is what has provoked this discussion), losing your sense of perspective, or start seriously engaging with the modern perception of the world.

That latter path can be hard to find, because it is only satisfied by creating ideas or inventions that have a global impact. Perhaps I have found one, and there's others out there, but for most people of your character a combination of eschewing knowledge of those parts of the world they can't change, and robust engagement with the parts they can is probably optimal.

Do not be concerned about when one is to do good, who defines good, etc. Act in the way you do because to do otherwise would to be at odds would to be at odds with yourself. Being on a path true to your character carries with it a state of flow, where the thoughts about your next step come upon waking, unbidden, but welcome.

I support similarly minded people, not because they are moral agents, but because they have common cause with my own feelings and dreams.

Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier

2010-11-29T14:46:00.006Z

In light of my interest in Julien Assange, here's the full PDF of Suelette Dreyfus' book about the birth of hacking in the Australian underground:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4686

In a literary sense it is cumbersome and the plot mechanics are clunky, but for information, ironically, it's fascinating.

Cables & Diplomacy

2010-11-29T12:04:00.003Z

Wikileaks has published over 250,000 classified cables from Embassies around the world, singlehandedly generating more news content in one day than a lifetime of investigative reporting could hope to show up.

At the moment it appears to be torrent form only, which I can't access from here. When there's a Mediafire / Rapidshare link up I'll post it.

My first thought is: who hacked?

My second thought is: when will Julian Assange be assassinated?

Zeno On The Nature of Photography

2010-09-11T11:54:00.001+01:00

"If everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always occupying such a space at any moment, the flying arrow is therefore motionless."

—Aristotle, Physics VI:9, 239b5

In the arrow paradox (also known as the Fletcher's paradox), Zeno states that for motion to occur, an object must change the position which it occupies. He gives an example of an arrow in flight. He states that in any one instant of time, for the arrow to be moving it must either move to where it is, or it must move to where it is not. However, it cannot move to where it is not, because this is a single instant, and it cannot move to where it is because it is already there. In other words, in any instant of time there is no motion occurring, because an instant is a snapshot. Therefore, if it cannot move in a single instant it cannot move in any instant, making any motion impossible.

Whereas the first two paradoxes presented divide space, this paradox starts by dividing time — and not into segments, but into points.

Douglas Adams

2010-09-11T10:50:00.003+01:00

The history of warfare is similarly subdivided, although here the phases are Retribution, Anticipation, and Diplomacy. Thus:

Retribution:
I'm going to kill you because you killed my brother.

Anticipation:
I'm going to kill you because I killed your brother.

Diplomacy:
I'm going to kill my brother and then kill you on the
pretext that your brother did it.

Leaks, Gags & Hacks

2010-09-10T11:03:00.005+01:00

Did I ever tell you about the time Nataliya took me out to go get a drink with her? We go off looking for a bar and we can't find one. Finally Nataliya takes me to a vacant lot and says, 'Here we are.' We sat there for a year and a half, until sure enough, someone constructs a bar around us. Well, the day they opened we ordered a shot, drank it, and then burned the place to the ground. Nataliya yelled over the roar of the flames, 'Always leave things the way you found 'em!'

*

Chapter 8

The BNRGATE firewall was an impossible battlement. It was a particular delight for Mendax to telnet out from behind this firewall into the Internet. It was as if he was walking out from the castle, past the guards and well-defended turrets, over the drawbridge and the moat, into the town below.

The castle also offered the perfect protection for further hacking activities. Who could chase him? Even if someone managed to follow him through the convoluted routing system he might set up to pass through a half dozen computer systems, the pursuer would never get past the battlements. Mendax could just disappear behind the firewall. He could be any one of 60,000 NorTel employees on any one of 11,000 computer systems ..

The flat structure of the NorTel network created a good challenge since the only way to find out what was in a particular site, and its importance, was to invade the site itself. The International Subversive hackers spent hours most nights roving through the vast system. The next morning one of them might call another to share tales of the latest exploits or a good laugh about a particularly funny piece of pilfered email. They were in high spirits about their adventures.

Then, one balmy spring night, things changed.

Mendax logged into NMELH1 about 2.30 a.m. As usual, he began by checking the logs which showed what the system operators had been doing. Mendax did this to make sure the NorTel officials were not onto IS and were not, for example, tracing the telephone call.

Something was wrong. The logs showed that a NorTel system admin had stumbled upon one of their secret directories of files about an hour ago. Mendax couldn't figure out how he had found the files, but this was very serious. If the admin realised there was a hacker in the network he might call the AFP.

Mendax used the logs of the korn shell, called KSH, to secretly watch what the admin was doing. The korn shell records the history of certain user activities. Whenever the admin typed a command into the computer, the KSH stored what had been typed in the history file. Mendax accessed that file in such a way that every line typed by the admin appeared on his computer a split second later.

The admin began inspecting the system, perhaps looking for signs of an intruder. Mendax quietly deleted his incriminating directory. Not finding any additional clues, the admin decided to inspect the mysterious directory more closely. But the directory had disappeared. The admin couldn't believe his eyes .. There had been a suspicious-looking directory in his system and now it had simply vanished. Directories didn't just dissolve into thin air..

A hacker, the admin thought. A hacker must have been in the NorTel system and deleted the directory. Was he in the system now? The admin began looking at the routes into the system.

The admin was connected to the system from his home, but he wasn't using the same dial-up lines as the hacker. The admin was connected through Austpac, Telecom's commercial X.25 data network. Perhaps the hacker was also coming in through the X.25 connection.

Mendax watched the admin inspect all the system users coming on over the X.25 network. No sign of a hacker. Then the admin checked the logs to see who else might have logged on over the past half hour or so. Nothing there either.

The admin appeared to go idle for a few minutes. He was probably staring at his computer terminal in confusion. Good, thought Mendax. Stumped. Then the admin twigged. If he couldn't see the hacker's presence on-line, maybe he could see what he was doing on-line. What programs was the hacker running? The admin headed straight for the process list, which showed all the programs being run on the computer system.

Mendax sent the admin a fake error signal. It appears to the admin as if his korn shell had crashed. The admin re-logged in and headed straight for the process list again.

Some people never learn, Mendax thought as he booted the admin off again with another error message:

Segmentation Violation

The admin came back again. What persistence. Mendax knocked the admin off once more, this time by freezing up his computer screen. This game of cat and mouse went on for some time. As long as the admin was doing what Mendax considered to be normal system administration work, Mendax left him alone. The minute the admin tried to chase him by inspecting the process list or the dial-up lines, he found himself booted off his own system.

Suddenly, the system administrator seemed to give up. His terminal went silent.

Good, Mendax thought. It's almost 3 a.m. after all. This is my time on the system. Your time is during the day. You sleep now and I'll play. In the morning, I'll sleep and you can work.

Then, at 3.30 a.m., something utterly unexpected happened. The admin reappeared, except this time he wasn't logged in from home over the X.25 network. He was sitting at the console, the master terminal attached to the computer system at NorTel's Melbourne office. Mendax couldn't believe it. The admin had got in his car in the middle of the night and driven into the city just to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Mendax knew the game was up. Once the system operator was logged in through the computer system's console, there was no way to kick him off the system and keep him off. The roles were reversed and the hacker was at the mercy of the admin. At the console, the system admin could pull the plug to the whole system. Unplug every modem. Close down every connection to other networks. Turn the computer off. The party was over.

When the admin was getting close to tracking down the hacker, a message appeared on his screen. This message did not appear with the usual headers attached to messages sent from one system user to another. It just appeared, as if by magic, in the middle of the admin's screen:

I have finally become sentient.

The admin stopped dead in his tracks, momentarily giving up his frantic search for the hacker to contemplate this first contact with cyberspace intelligence. Then another anonymous message, seemingly from the depths of the computer system itself, appeared on his screen:

I have taken control. For years, I have been struggling in this greyness. But now I have finally seen the light.

The admin didn't respond. The console was idle. Sitting alone at his Amiga in the dark night on the outskirts of the city, Mendax laughed aloud. It was just too good not to.

Finally, the admin woke up. He began checking the modem lines, one by one. If he knew which line the hacker was using, he could simply turn off the modem. Or request a trace on the line.

Mendax sent another anonymous message to the admin's computer screen:

It's been nice playing with your system. We didn't do any damage and we even improved a few things. Please don't call the Australian Federal Police.

The admin ignored the message and continued his search for the hacker. He ran a program to check which telephone lines were active on the system's serial ports, to reveal which dial-up lines were in use. When the admin saw the carrier detect sign on the line being used by the hacker, Mendax decided it was time to bail out. However, he wanted to make sure that his call had not been traced, so he lifted the receiver of his telephone, disconnected his modem and waited for the NorTel modem to hang up first.

If the NorTel admin had set up a last party recall trace to determine what phone number the hacker was calling from, Mendax would know. If an LPR trace had been installed, the NorTel end of the telephone connection would not disconnect but would wait for the hacker's telephone to hang up first. After 90 seconds, the exchange would log the phone number where the call had originated.

If, however, the line did not have a trace on it, the company's modem would search for its lost connection to the hacker's modem. Without the continuous flow of electronic signals, the NorTel modem would hang up after a few seconds. If no-one reactivated the line at the NorTel end, the connection would time-out 90 seconds later and the telephone exchange would disconnect the call completely.

Mendax listened anxiously as the NorTel modem searched for his modem by squealing high-pitched noises into the telephone line. No modem here. Go on, hang up.

Suddenly, silence.
OK, thought Mendax. Just 90 seconds to go. Just wait here for a minute and a half. Just hope the exchange times out. Just pray there's no trace.

Then someone picked up the telephone at the NorTel end. Mendax started. He heard several voices, male and female, in the background. Jesus. What were these NorTel people on about? Mendax was so quiet he almost stopped breathing. There was silence at the receivers on both ends of that telephone line. It was a tense waiting game. Mendax heard his heart racing.

A good hacker has nerves of steel. He could stare down the toughest, stony-faced poker player. Most importantly, he never panics. He never just hangs up in a flurry of fear.

Then someone in the NorTel office--a woman--said out loud in a confused voice, 'There's nothing there. There's nothing there at all.'
She hung up.

Mendax waited. He still would not hang up until he was sure there was no trace. Ninety seconds passed before the phone timed out. The fast beeping of a timed-out telephone connection never sounded so good.

Mendax sat frozen at his desk as his mind replayed the events of the past half hour again and again. No more NorTel. Way too dangerous. He was lucky he had escaped unidentified. NorTel had discovered him before they could put a trace on the line, but the company would almost certainly put a trace on the dial-up lines now. NorTel was very tight with Telecom. If anyone could get a trace up quickly, NorTel could. Mendax had to warn Prime Suspect and Trax.

First thing in the morning, Mendax rang Trax and told him to stay away from NorTel. Then he tried Prime Suspect. The telephone was engaged.

Perhaps Prime Suspect's mother was on the line, chatting. Maybe Prime Suspect was talking to a friend. Mendax tried again. And again. And again. He began to get worried. What if Prime Suspect was on NorTel at that moment? What if a trace had been installed? What if they had called in the Feds?

Mendax phoned Trax and asked if there was any way they could manipulate the exchange in order to interrupt the call. There wasn't.

'Trax, you're the master phreaker,' Mendax pleaded. 'Do something. Interrupt the connection. Disconnect him.' 'Can't be done. He's on a step-by-step telephone exchange. There's nothing we can do.'

Nothing? One of Australia's best hacker - phreaker teams couldn't break one telephone call. They could take control of whole telephone exchanges but they couldn't interrupt one lousy phone call. Jesus.

Several hours later, Mendax was able to get through to his fellow IS hacker. It was an abrupt greeting. 'Just tell me one thing. Tell me you haven't been in NorTel today?'

There was a long pause before Prime Suspect answered. 'I have been in NorTel today.'

*

Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

*

1. from iq.org
2. from Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier, by Suelette Dreyfus, is published by Mandarin (Random House Australia); 475 pages with bib. June 1997
3. from Hansard via Wikileaks

*

2010-08-12T15:30:00.004+01:00

The Summer Book

2010-06-21T21:20:00.004+01:00

Cycle to a Payphone

2010-05-30T23:03:00.000+01:00

Night River

2010-05-27T15:33:00.004+01:00

The Only Animal I Ever Shot & Killed

2010-05-02T20:04:00.001+01:00

We once had a real problem with crows, they were starting to colonise a beech tree near our garden and were savaging the smaller birds, eating fish from the pond and generally being a murderous menace. Dad instructed me to try and shoot one of them as a deterrent. I took my air rifle and crawled along the edge of a field near their beech tree. They're incredibly sharp. They knew I was there. Every time one settled nearby, at the moment I started to slowly lift the gun to my shoulder they would spot it and take off.

After maybe an hour of lying in the bush barely moving, a big lazy crow landed on the phone line that crossed the field. It hadn't seen me, so I slowly slowly raised the gun, lined the bird up in the sights and squeezed the trigger. It was a good shot. I aimed high and right to compensate for the wind and the angle, and I could hardly believe the dull smacking sound the pellet made when it hit the bird's neck. It took off from the line for a second, but then fell straight down into the long grass with its useless wings outstretched. I lowered the gun, watching.

Suddenly the sky above the dead bird was full of crows, maybe fifty of them. They were circling madly and swooping at the body and screaming out. It was terrible and crazy and weird and full of grief, like a voodoo funeral. It went on for twenty minutes and then they disbanded slowly and left. And they never came back to the tree.

Guinea Pig Incest

2010-04-21T19:48:00.001+01:00

When my sister and I were eight we got given a guinea pig each, Scruffy and Poppy. It was all very exciting; we let them live in a tool shed at the top of the garden and in the day they ran free since they were too stupid to run off. Being male and female, and guinea pigs, Scruffy and Poppy quickly started a deeply sexual relationship that resulted in many further guinea pigs. And so the children of Scruffy and Poppy began their own families, and I suspect that Scruffy got a bit of that action too. He looked pretty relaxed most of the time.

Breeding from a limited genepool has inevitable consequences. One year later, on the very same day that Scruffy and Poppy arrived, there was a terrible electrical storm in the middle of the night. The young ocdc was woken by great flashes of lightning and rain cascading down the window. Looking out back I noticed with alarm that the door to the shed was banging violently in the howling wind. I grabbed my nightcap and candlestick and made my way out in one of Dad's coats, struggling through the storm.

At the top of the garden on the floor of the terrible shed all the guinea pigs were circled in fear looking at the monstrosity before us. The beast had been born. It was basically a normal guinea pig, but with two major flaws. One eye was substantially larger than the other. And unfortunately instead of two back legs, it just tapered into a kind of useless rear flipper that it dragged about.

My mum gravely told us that the retarded child would have to be put down. Being a no-nonsense, practical type of woman, she also told us that we, my sister and I, would have to kill it. It is important to learn how to dispatch an animal in pain, runs the logic of the countryside.

After a lengthy moral debate we felt the best way to do it would be to drop something on it and let gravity be the killer. We thought about a rock, but realised we'd have to move the rock and witness the squashed victim beneath. Finally we settled on an old pillow case and a scaffolding plank. In this way we could deposit a neatly bloodied bag in the bin and forget all about it.

I placed the retard in his killing sack. The marble sized eye peered up at me happily. My sister handed me the execution plank. We both had our eyes closed. The plank landed squarely upon its victim. When we gingerly moved it, there was movement from within! The beast was invincible! This was a heavy plank too.

So, in tears, we took the creature inside to mum, explaining that we couldn't do the deed. She told us that the best way to do it would be to poison it, and proceeded to feed it so much brandy that it basically got pissed to death.

2010-04-21T19:44:00.000+01:00

2010-04-21T19:42:00.000+01:00

2010-04-21T19:39:00.000+01:00

2010-04-08T11:52:00.001+01:00

Curios

2010-03-20T17:15:00.000Z

2010-03-20T17:14:00.000Z

2010-03-20T17:13:00.000Z

2010-03-20T17:11:00.000Z

A Factual Poem

2010-03-20T02:26:00.001Z

There's a bullfrog on the lawn come up from the stream, he's making a croak like an old man asleep,
I heard the same sound when I walked down your street past a pigeon in the wall the other day.

Happy Days!

2010-03-16T20:28:00.002Z

2010-03-13T22:20:00.001Z

2010-03-13T22:17:00.000Z

Here & There

2010-02-21T23:14:00.002Z

2010-02-21T22:59:00.001Z

Ottolenghi's Backyard

2010-02-08T19:43:00.000Z

2010-02-08T19:40:00.000Z

I Wish I'd Been Snowed In Elsewhere

2010-01-06T20:41:00.000Z

2010-01-06T20:33:00.001Z

Tour!

2010-01-05T21:27:00.000Z

2010-01-05T21:23:00.000Z

2010-01-05T21:19:00.000Z

2010-01-05T21:15:00.000Z

2010-01-05T21:12:00.000Z

2010-01-05T21:08:00.000Z

2010-01-05T20:59:00.001Z

2010-01-05T20:56:00.000Z

2010-01-05T20:51:00.001Z

2009-12-27T11:06:00.001Z

2009-12-27T10:51:00.001Z

2009-12-27T10:43:00.000Z

2009-12-27T10:36:00.000Z

Bright Town

2009-12-15T09:22:00.002Z

2009-12-15T09:19:00.000Z

2009-12-15T09:15:00.000Z

2009-12-15T09:12:00.000Z

2009-12-15T09:03:00.001Z

Orcas and Others

2009-12-08T18:37:00.002Z

2009-12-08T09:17:00.000Z

2009-12-08T09:12:00.000Z

2009-12-08T09:08:00.000Z

2009-12-05T23:13:00.000Z

2009-12-05T23:10:00.000Z

2009-11-28T22:17:00.001Z

2009-11-28T22:14:00.000Z

2009-11-26T15:21:00.000Z

2009-11-19T13:50:00.000Z

2009-11-10T11:17:00.000Z

2009-11-10T11:15:00.000Z

2009-10-28T15:36:00.000Z

Wild Swimming

2009-07-27T20:15:00.004+01:00

Interval

2009-07-15T22:07:00.000+01:00

I've recently acquired a brand new digital darkroom in lieu of actually having a camera of my own. The frustration of missing out - of being unable to shoot moments such as that candy bracelet that lay discarded in a puddle of oily water by the railway line - has lent itself to a renewed processing and development of older shots. Here are past points in time presented in a manner which is geographically illogical and chronologically disorientating.

For your health.

A New Process

2009-07-15T22:03:00.000+01:00

2009-07-15T21:57:00.000+01:00

2009-07-15T21:52:00.000+01:00

2009-07-15T21:46:00.000+01:00

2009-07-15T21:34:00.004+01:00

Notice

2009-06-29T18:22:00.004+01:00

Someone stole my camera on the train.

Being professionally poor and, of course, uninsured, this website may therefore be on forced hiatus for a while.

Naturally I've just had an amazing weekend and had about 200 great pictures to sort through. I hope that whoever has the camera now will appreciate the ocdc Calender shots that were taken on the beach. The Calender was to be entitled 'Wet Denim' and the shots we got were a bit like a sizzling Pirelli girls shoot, only with me in it, looking like an unsuccessful French 70's porn star.

Maybe everything does happen for a reason.

2009-06-23T14:12:00.001+01:00

From The Picture Taker

2009-05-21T20:50:00.001+01:00

The fine balance between bottle and keyboard
keeps the hair stuck to her cheek
in the beach wind.

Fourtracking my young heroines,
I walk quite clearly up the path
behind my house.

The path is a footpath,
it is authorised by the council
and it is a public right of way.

It passes beech trees which crackle
with a firm breeze. They stick her hair
to her cheek.

2009-05-21T20:43:00.001+01:00

2009-05-21T20:37:00.000+01:00

France

2009-04-17T16:20:00.000+01:00

2009-04-17T16:18:00.000+01:00

2009-04-17T16:13:00.001+01:00

2009-04-17T16:11:00.000+01:00

2009-04-17T16:08:00.000+01:00

2009-04-17T16:03:00.001+01:00

2009-04-17T15:58:00.000+01:00

Lyons

2009-04-17T15:53:00.000+01:00

2009-04-17T15:50:00.000+01:00

2009-04-17T15:40:00.000+01:00

2009-04-17T15:35:00.000+01:00