The U.S. military action in Iraq has stirred up computer virus writers and malicious hackers, who have apparently decided to vent by defacing websites and releasing e-mail worms that prey on people's fears and curiosity.
Antagonists and activists based in the United States, Europe and the Middle East are engaged in their own form of war games. Some are vandalizing websites, particularly government sites, scrawling scornful cybergraffiti or urging people to "make love not war." Full Story
The Way We Were
I've been a fan of Wired Magazine since issue number 1. Many think the collection of striped magazine covers that are still displayed on one of my bookshelves should be discarded, but I won't budge. This issue marks Wired's 10th anniversary and there is a great recap of the past ten years and the excellent articles the magazine has produced.
"What a dull, distressing decade it promised to be. San Francisco was taking the early '90s hard. The city had always been a boomtown, and now, in the aftermath of recession and the Gulf War, it languished in the stale atmosphere of a boomtown in distress. There had been a drought for five years, and the sidewalks were lined with sickly trees.
The old revolutionary spirit was hard to discern. Two decades after most of the flower children had vanished, their slogans were derided as antiquated wishful thinking. And things were not so fresh on the other side of the political spectrum, either. The anticommunist crusaders and free-market fundamentalists who triumphed in the age of Reagan were desperate for new battles. The Soviet Union was dead. Capitalism had won. What was left to fight about?
There was no point in looking for inspiration overseas. Europe was scratching its head over what to do with all those poor countries east of the ex-Iron Curtain, and the Japanese were still searching for the bottom after their bubble economy burst." Full Story
Ghosts of the Abyss
Jame's Cameron is releasing a new movie within the next month called Ghosts of the Abyss. I had an opportunity to meet Cameron at his production company Lightstorm Entertainment last month and got a once in a lifetime opportunity to see him review and comment on this film in the Lightstorm screening room. Cameron makes a habit of pushing the bounds of technology and film and this film is no different. The 3D technology in this film is very impressive. It isn't some animated feature that has been generated in 3D, it is the representation of real actors and film sequences in three dimensions. The combination of this technolgoy IMAX will create a very unique experience. Check it out and see if it is playing near you.
As a side note, this movie has nothing to do with Cameron's science fiction film The Abyss. Ghosts of the Abyss is about an underwater expedition to the Titantic. The Abyss, which is now over 15 years old, remains one of the best science fiction movies of all time. It is about the discovery of an unknown life-form at the bottom of the ocean and is one of the few movies that can point to a plot line where a single text message saves the world.
Sterling Speaks
I had the occassion to eat and drink with Bruce Sterling several years ago, so whenever I read something like this, I can picture him delivering with the typical Sterling zest:
"Let me put this to you straight: cyberspace has
become a slum. It's a diseased slum, festering with
Microsoft Outlook viruses. The viruses turn people into
unwilling, unwitting agents of corruption and destruction.
If you dare to use Microsoft's web products, which are so
easily and cruelly sabotaged, then you run a gruesome,
unconscionable risk of doing horrible virus damage to your
best friends and your closest collaborators. You can give
AIDs or herpes to the people who choose to have sex with
you, but you can give Klez.E to people you don't even
know. That is a pretty far cry from the antiseptic
Euclidean vistas of virtual reality. Cyberspace in 2002
is a high-tech low-life slum straight out of William
Gibson's NEUROMANCER. That's a great book, but the people
who have to live in that book are pretty damn far from
happy." Full Speech
Chinese Espionage
3DGeo Development, a Silicon Valley company, had its first scrape with trade secret theft several years ago when a visiting PetroChina employee was collared trying to hack into its computer system. Then last year a second visiting PetroChina employee was caught trying to download 3DGeo's source code, the foundation for its proprietary seismic imaging software. Full Story
Iraqi Cyberwar: an Ageless Joke
Did U.S. infowar commandos smuggle a deadly computer virus into Iraq inside a printer? Of course not. So why does it keep getting reported? Full Story
William Gibson Blog
Blogging has momentum. William Gibson is on-line and operating a blog that gets updated daily. It provides for great reading from one of my favorite authors of all time. If you haven't had a chance to check out his latest book "Pattern Recognition", I highly recommend it. Just today, he posted the following information regarding the ending of Neuromancer. It was interesting to read his take on it, and I was encouraged to discover that my interpretation of the ending, developed over ten years ago, was in-line with his. He writes:
"And his voice the cry of a bird
Unknown,
3Jane answering in song, three
notes, high and pure.
A true name.
Anyone daydreaming of a feature film of NEUROMANCER might want to pause to ponder just how the hell one might go about depicting this climax (and it is the climax) on the screen.
As to what the word is, well, I never considered it to be a word, really, though 3Jane, teasingly, calls it one. It is in fact three notes, something akin to birdcall. The key to the cipher, that is, is revealed as being purely tonal, musical, rather than linguistic. Case's cry, a species of primal scream, the voicing of the emotionality he's been walled off from throughout the narrative (and his life), torn finally from the core of his being, is what actually forces 3Jane to give up the key. Call and response, of some kind. Hearing him, she can't help herself. When she taunts him (Take your word, thief.) she's in fact daring him, and assuming he can't -- just as she was, a moment before, daring Molly to kill her." Gibson Blog
The Simulation Argument
In 1994, I wrote a paper that looked at issues relating to virtual reality and philosophy. One of my main arguments was that true pervasive virtual reality, where the user couldn't distinguish or remember the real world, was closely aligned to concepts of Hinduism. Since then, we had several movies on the topic, including the Matrix and the 13th floor and now there is an academic web site dedicated to the issue. The web site intro says:
"This website features scholarly investigations into the idea that you might currently be literally living in a computer simulation on a computer built by some advanced civilization. Films like The Matrix and novels like Greg Egan's Permutation City have explored the idea that we might be living in virtual reality. But what evidence is there for or against this hypothesis? And what are its implications?"Visit the site
Pakistan Creates Cyber Crime Wing
A Pakistani security agency has launched a special wing to combat cyber crimes in part because the country had to rely on U.S. investigators to trace e-mails sent by the kidnappers of American journalist Daniel Pearl a year ago. "The purpose of establishing the National Response Center for Cyber Crimes is to stop misuse of the Internet and trace those involved in cyber-related crimes," Iftikhar Ahmad, spokesman for Pakistan's Interior Ministry, told the Associated Press on Wednesday. Full Story
This is an interesting story. In the end, a combination of technology and hard cash lead to KSM's arrest. Note the part of the story that indicates that KSM used as many as 10 cell phones to communicate. The story....
The electronic surveillance network Echelon played a key role in the capture of the alleged September 11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it was reported yesterday - as did a $27m (£18m) payment to an "al-Qaida foot soldier", who may be planning to relocate to Britain. Full Story