VnutZ's Articles, Page 1 of 43

You don’t often hear about the Exorcists of the Vatican, but recently Father Gabriel Amorth began pointing his finger. He’s been the chief Exorcist of the church for the past 25 years with more than 70,000 cases of possession under his belt. He insinuates the Devil having infiltrated into the Vatican with evidence being internal violence, pedophilia and other cover-ups. Amorth further goes on to describe the film The Exorcist as exaggerated, but an otherwise exact representation of the possessions he has encountered where he says all sorts of things spew forth from the victims, “Anything can come out of their mouths – finger-length pieces of iron, but also rose petals.” Naturally, his comments have not sat well with the Vatican.

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The 2010 Oscars have come and gone and the outcomes were interesting. Many people were surprised when The Hurt Locker destroyed Avatar. It was viewed as a breakthrough for women as director Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director as her film went on to more awards like Best Picture. Therein lies the question.

It goes without saying that Hollywood needs to add flair and story in order to entertain the masses, that’s understood. But often times, accurate or not, the common man’s understanding of history becomes the portrayal from Hollywood. Such classics as Platoon or Saving Private Ryan come to mind as becoming the de facto image people associate in their minds to the war experience. The IAVA (Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America) was mentioned by Newsweek for its take on the accuracy of The Hurt Locker’s portrayal of EOD and service in Iraq. By and large, the movie was well received as one of the best movies showing the Iraq experience, but there are always quirks that create a small snub. IAVA mentions the inattention to minor details like not using appropriate ranks as something simple enough that its research oversight is rather inexcusable for what the movie intended to be. And while its understood that flair was added to the role of EOD, the movie’s usage of them for purposes beyond EOD and the portrayal of other military elements such as FOB guards was simply wrong. For the many OmniNerds that have been deployed to the Middle East, what do you think about Hollywood’s versions of Iraq on celluloid?

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So the other day, I came out of the movie theater and checked my iPhone to see what I missed while being entertained by Alice in Wonderland. In my AKO mail was a curious looking message about North Korea having tested a missile with a nuclear detonation in Okinawa, Japan. The message indicated alerts being made for pending mobilization of military units. WTF?

Office of the Director of National Intelligence
INTELLIGENCE BULLETIN
UNCLASSIFIED//FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY

(U//FOUO) DPRK has carried out nuclear missile attack on Japan

06 March 2010

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The intent to defend America’s IT infrastructure is quite old, but often even new initiatives are so mired in secrecy that nothing ends up happening. Recently, the Obama administration declassified pieces of the Bush era Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative which was an effort to make sweeping changes to America’s security posture. A subsequent congressional review of the declassified portion concluded that while the plan had areas of significant merit, the declassified pieces presented various characteristics that were at odds with itself and along with hindrances to the development of solutions. For instance, the findings state the program was too secret for its own good (essentially nobody could work on it since nobody knew about it) and that R&D should be centrally managed by a specialized agency such as DARPA rather than parceled out piecemeal to competing academic environments.

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I remember when cheating was easy to identify. Hidden answers for a test? Cheating. Copying another’s work (without citing)? Cheating. Working beyond time constraints? Cheating. So what is it these days that seems to make so many people justify the act? Perhaps its just the “I’m Special” generation not wanting to have anything negative associated with their persona. Maybe the Internet has made the concept of share and share alike just part of culture. Or it could be status quo and this is simply the modern evolution of yesterday’s cheater.

There was a blog about cheating in computer science at Stanford that I found somewhat applicable. The students described their motivation to cheat was that with code, it’s easy to copy and paste plus they felt the liberal arts had an unfair GPA advantage with their subjective grading. As an added twist, the students knew their professor, Eric Roberts, ran their assignments through a lexical analysis tool devised to detect plagiarism between current code and past code. These students clearly had to make the decision not only to cheat but to cheat and beat the system.

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So in recent news, the United States was ‘p0wned’ by itself during a virtual cyber-attack exercise. The outcome more or less showed we have quite a journey ahead of us to properly prepare politically … and technically. The latter is mentioned not so much in that our CNO (Computer Network Operations) is in question but rather the vulnerabilities to require us to have a CNO response in the first place. Mitre and SANS together have assembled the 2010 enumeration of common weaknesses in programming, a list that seems to change very little over the years showing how systemic many of the problems really are. For example, the list is still peppered with buffer overruns, improper bounding and type overflows amongst a slew of web vulnerabilities.

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A Washington DC area non-profit organization known as the Bipartisan Policy Center recently hosted an exercise called Cyber ShockWave. Developed by Michael Hayden (former director of the NSA and CIA), it intended to allow participants to experience a simulated, nation-wide cyber attack to role-play how the US might respond. Notable folks such as Michael Chertoff, John Negroponte, Fran Townsend and Joe Lockhart participated, indicative that the role players were experienced in the positions and not amateur think-tank employees speculating. As was likely predicted whenever political talking heads put their minds together, the US failed. In a nutshell, the attack began with malware on the cellular network through widespread phishing followed by the loss of some pipelines and eventually the east coast power grid. While the exercise showed a failure of America’s public capabilities, it was successful in opening eyes regarding how an adherence to existing authorities, jurisdictions and policies were the equivalent of American stepping all over its poncho while running at full speed, a glorious Washington DC faceplant. Amongst the questions raised were:

• whether private communications companies would even comply with government requests to use their infrastructure in defensive and offensive ways

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So in recent times, the Lower Merion School District or Pennsylvania issued Apple laptops to its high school students. What nobody knew, was the laptops came installed with software for remotely (and covertly) enabling the built-in webcams for monitoring student behavior. The matter came to light when the vice principal disciplined one student using a photo from the webcam showing activity at from their residence. Naturally this stirred all sorts of privacy controversy which led to the superintendent issuing a response stating the technology was intended to be used for recovering stolen school property in the event of a loss. Everything is winding into a class action lawsuit with both sides vigorously defending their positions. In the meantime, a federal judge has ordered the school to cease and desist all use of the remote monitoring software until a decision is made while the FBI conducts its investigation.

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So in the past couple of months, Google rolled out some new web products like Google Wave and Google Buzz. As far as Wave is concerned, there was a brief discussion earlier questioning it as fantastic or failure shortly before AnonBCA announced it as one of the top innovations of 2009. I remember reading about Wave scoring well amongst the D&D crowd for allowing them to play virtually through the software, but otherwise haven’t heard about it since. What about Buzz? I saw a few Buzzes show up in my Gmail account within the first two days of its existence and the embedded nature has made it already track on a good majority of my contacts. But that product, too, seems to have crickets chirping loudly in the hallway as not a bit of activity has transpired in it. What do you think, has Google failed completely or are these tools just misunderstood?

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Adobe Photoshop, the capital flagship software of image editing, turns twenty years old this month. Over the past two decades, the program has risen to the top of the field with it’s numerous features allowing photographers to do just about anything to an image. It’s drawback is a steep learning curve and focus on delivering tools and features as opposed to an intuitive workflow for novices, which has lead to “light” versions of the product like Photoshop Elements. On the other hand, there is the freeware product known as the Gimp which has been around since roughly 1996. It’s a tool that offers almost everything found in Photoshop which despite it’s $0 pricetag has kept it from gaining significant ground against it’s $400 rival. The want of professional for certain features notwithstanding, the Gimp also gets blamed for having an awful interface of spawned windows strewn about the screen, which allegedly will be replaced with a new UI in the next rendition. What do you use for your photo editing?

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Porsche is renowned for producing awesome sports cars. For the next LeMans 24 Hour Race, Porsche has a concept 911 GT3 that takes a novel approach to using electric motors. Unlike normal hybrids that switch back and forth between electric motors and gasoline engines, the Porsche design keeps it’s standard 480hp engine running full bore the entire time. This 911 uses it’s electric motors (mounted at the front wheels) for a six second boost by adding up to 160 extra horses during acceleration. As far as the driver is concerned, pressing a steering wheel button engages the electric boost in much the same fashion as if a nitrous-oxide boost were being activated. Unlike NoS, the special 911 GT3 recharges a 40K RPM flywheel during braking, allowing the boost to be used over and over again.

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The identity of espionage agents is a closely guarded secret for any country’s clandestine service. Look no further than the Scooter-Libby CIA leak on one of it’s agents for the political embarrassment and loss of an intelligence asset. That’s not to say that many countries’ counter-intelligence programs don’t know who the spies are; often times there just isn’t any solid proof through which the spies can be captured or forced out through the consulate.

Enter facial recognition software. The technology has been around for quite awhile, but the revolution really occurs when its cheap enough to put everywhere. Most point and shoot cameras now include facial recognition technology to facilitate bad photographers focusing on the wrong subjects. Beyond recognizing a face is matching that face. One major milestone was the usage of facial recognition against every spectator passing through turnstiles at a major sporting event many years ago. But back to expanding its ubiquitous scope, common software is able to match subjects like Apple’s iPhoto ’09. And there are more projects to include Coca Cola’s Facial Profiler which matches faces to find “your clone” in an archive user submitted photos linked to FaceBook.

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The First Ladies of the White House have always been involved with some sort of personal campaign for the improvement of our nation and Michelle Obama is no exception. She has taken the banner for fighting obesity in America’s youth. Michelle quoted in a Larry King interview that, “There are more and more kids with type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure today than ever before. Things we used to see only in adults” and looking at statistics shows up to a third of American children are either overweight or completely obese. Furthermore, a fact check from the CDC (Center for Disease Control & Prevention) shows medical spending for obesity at $147 billion which accounted for 9.1% of billing.

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Botnets are always evolving in the cat and mouse game against security and detection tools. One Russian botnet known as SpyEye is going a step further in a move akin to the old assembly language game Core War. Only this time, instead of residing within a single system’s RAM, this fight for existence spans the Internet as SpyEye attempts to kill off its rival, the larger Zeus botnet. Before it completely removes the Zeus botnet from an infected host, SpyEye also attempts to hijack the communications Zeus sends back to its control center which permits the SpyEye owners to pilfer the same credentials without having to create the functionality. Criminals can purchase a time share on the SpyEye botnet for as little as $500.

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So I was just browsing around the web the other day when a random headline in an RSS feed caught my eye. It was about a legal case between Rick Strandlof, the ACLU and the government. In a nutshell, this guy was arrested after being exposed for faking his survival of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and being a disabled vet after surviving a roadside IED in Iraq. He was using these claims to found and operate the Colorado Veterans Alliance, an organization that questionably funneled donations for wounded vets to Strandlof. One of the peculiar twists to his story is that he used his false resume (which included being a Naval Academy graduate) to pitch an anti-war message at rallies and actually raise positive awareness for actual disabled vets. Fellow [real] veterans that he worked with said, “It seems like his heart was in the right place. He was a really hard worker. He did a lot of good by raising a lot of awareness, but then you find out that he’s a fraud.”

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