Perilocity

Syria and Yemen: 29 November 2012

At 10:30 AM GMT yesterday, 29 November 2012, routing to Yemen suddenly changed from London to Dubai through FLAG to New York to Dubai through ETISALAT, as shown in the animation here and detailed in the PerilWatch from InternetPerils. That timing closely matched the 10:26 AM GMT Syrian disconnect time reported by Renesys. This is very reminiscent of Mubarak disconnecting Egypt 22:30 GMT 20 January 2011. This tactic didn't help Mubarak's regime in Egypt, and it probably won't help Assad's regime in Syria; rather the opposite: people don't like their Internet being turned off. And it tends to cause the international community to rally around the rebels.

-jsq

John Quarterman on Mapping Spam and Politics (audio)

At a meeting on a completely different subject, I was interviewed about SpamRankings.net. Here's the audio, and here's the blurb they supplied:

John S. Quarterman, long time Internet denizen, wrote one of the seminal books about networking prior to the commercialization of the Internet. He co-founded the first Internet consulting firm in Texas (TIC) in 1986, and co-founded one of the first ISPs in Austin (Zilker Internet Park, since sold to Jump Point). He was a founder of TISPA, the Texas ISP Association. Quarterman was born and raised in Lowndes County, where he married his wife Gretchen. They live on the same land where he grew up, and participate in local community and government.

Quarterman took some time during Georgia River Network's Weekend for Rivers to speak with the Nonprofit Snapshot about spam-mapping and small town politics.

More about Elinor Ostrom's Nobel-prize-winning work on organizing the commons, and how that applies to SpamRankings.net.

The water organization has since been incorporated as the Georgia non-profit WWALS Watershed Coalition:

WWALS is an advocacy organization working for watershed conservation of the Willacoochee, Withlacoochee, Alapaha, and Little River Systems watershed in south Georgia and north Florida through awareness, environmental monitoring, and citizen advocacy.

-jsq

eCrime Summit in Prague 25-27 April 2012

These ecrime meetings are always interesting and useful. -jsq

Press release of 29 March:

Containing the Global Cybercrime Threat is Focus of Counter eCrime Operations Summit (CeCOS VI) in Prague, April 25-27

CeCOS VI, in Prague, Czech Republic, to focus on harmonizing operational issues, cybercrime data exchange, and industrial policies to strengthen and unify the global counter-ecrime effort.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—The 6th annual Counter eCrime Operations Summit (CeCOS VI) will convene in Prague, Czech Republic, April 25-27, 2012, as the APWG gathers global leaders from the financial services, technology, government, law enforcement, communications sectors, and research centers to define common goals and harmonize resources to strengthen the global counter-cybercrime effort.

CeCOS VI Prague will review the development of response systems and resources available to counter-cybercrime managers and forensic professionals from around the world.

Specific goals of this high-level, multi-national conference are to identify common forensic needs, in terms of the data, tools, and communications protocols required to harmonize cybercrime response across borders and between private sector financial and industrial sector responders and public sector policy professionals and law enforcement.

Key presentations will include:

Davos discovers cyber attacks

Cyber attacks made the Davos Top 5 Global Risks in Terms of Likelihood. Davos, the annual conclave of the hyper-rich and famously elected, has also discovered Severe income disparity and Water supply crisis, so maybe they're becoming more realistic.

However, in Figure 17 on page 25 they've got Cyber attacks as an origin risk, along with Massive incident of data fraud or theft and Massive digital misinformation. I think they're missing the point, which is the real origin risk is poor infosec, and the origin of that is vendors like MSFT knowingly shipping systems with design flaws and people and organizations running them while hiding such problems.

Interesting comment on page 26:

Coal company reputation

Good news from the SEC for a change! They're requiring coal plant operators to report health and safety violations, including fatalities, within a few days of occurence.

FuelFix posted from AP on 23 December 2011, SEC requiring coal firms to report safety problems

Earlier this week, the SEC announced new rules that require mining companies to start reporting any fatalities and all major health and safety violations, mine by mine, in their quarterly and annual financial reports. The filings are mandated in the wide-ranging Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which Congress passed to try to increase corporate accountability.

The rules take effect 30 days after publication in the Federal Register. They require companies to report within four days any “significant and substantial” violations, citations, flagrant violations and imminent-danger orders issued by the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration.

Coal operators must also include the dollar value of proposed fines, whether the company has been or may be designated a pattern violator by MSHA, and any pending cases with the Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission.

What problem does this reporting solve? As the article points out:

Egypt Returns

Egypt returned to the Internet about 09:30 GMT today (2 February 2011). This sudden return after being as suddenly disconnected one week ago (27 January 2011) is obviously not due to ordinary causes such as congestion, cable cut, or router failure. This political disconnection of an entire country does not seem to have helped the regime responsible for it; quite the opposite.

-jsq

Our Friend Unfairly Maligned in London's Court

Many of you are concerned as am I about our friend who has been hauled into court in London and unfairly maligned for the "crime" of distributing some government communications that he got from an anonymous source. I know our friend also has been a bit playful out of wedlock, and even had a son that way, but I don't see what that has to do with the matter at hand.

Our friend represented his agency in the matter of procuring and forwarding the communications "as a public act, dealing with the public correspondence of public men." His accusers were having none of it:

Into what companies will the fabricator of this iniquity hereafter go with an unembarrassed face, or with any semblance of the honest intrepidity of virtue? Men will watch him with a jealous eye &em; they will hide their papers from him, and lock up their escritoires. Having hitherto aspired after fame by his writings, he will henceforth esteem it a libel to be called a man of letters...

His accusers made him out to be a vindictive destroyer of public confidence. He had "forfeited all the respect of societies and of men" and was not a gentleman, rather a common thief.

I am happy to hear our friend has been released by the court in London, although two days later he was fired from his job as deputy postmaster general of North America.

Further Hardin Debunking

Regarding Perry's comment to the previous post, the point is that the specific example on which Hardin based his thesis, the one everyone cites in support of it, is not borne out by the evidence, not that he presented any evidence for it in the first place.

Further, that it's not a tragedy in the sense Hardin meant: that of a Greek tragedy in which a flaw of character inevitably leads to the demise of the protagonist. Individuals are not inevitably disposed to claw out their own at the expense of everyone else. Sometimes people realize that there really is such a thing as the common good; that benefiting everyone benefits themselves.

Yes, I know about the Sahara and the Sahel; I've been there; I've seen the goats gnawing away at everything.

The solution is not state central planning: you cite Chinese lakes; I'll cite the Aral Sea.

The solution is also not privatization of the commons: look at the wildfires in the U.S. west exacerbated by subdivisions built in forests.

Solutions that work seem to involve combinations of innovation, education, and especially cooperation. Like this one:

In the late 1970s, when the problems of desertification, combined with population growth, drought and grinding poverty in West Africa first began to get sustained global attention, the prognosis was mostly gloom and doom. And as has been well documented, foreign aid has been less than successful in improving matters. In Yahenga, Reij and Fabore note, efforts to modernize agriculture through large-scale mechanized operations usually failed, for a variety of reasons. The spread of zai hole planting spearheaded by Sawadogo was mostly carried out by the local farmers themselves, with limited support from the government or foreign donors. Those with access to labor dug the holes, and used local sources of organic manure to fill them.

A tree grows in the Sahel, Andrew Leonard, How the World Works, Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006 11:22 PDT

The "free market" isn't enough. Cooperation on scales from local to global is also needed. And it does happen, despite Garrett Hardin's myth that it can't.

-jsq

NSL: Internet Archive Exposes Lack of Security in National Security Letters

The Internet Archive has for a decade been a cornerstone of the Internet, and the FBI was foolish to try to break it:

The FBI has withdrawn an illegal National Security Letter seeking information from an online library and has lifted a gag order that until Wednesday prevented any discussion of the information request.

Lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation helped the Internet Archive push back against what they say was an overly broad and unlawful request for information on one of its users. The FBI issued its National Security Letter in November, but ACLU, EFF and Archive officials were precluded from discussing it with anyone because of a gag order they say was unconstitutional.

After nearly five months of haggling, the FBI eventually withdrew its NSL, which requested personal information about at least one user of the Internet Archive. Founded in 1996, the archive is recognized as a library by the state of California, and its collections include billions of Web records, documents, music and movies.

— Watchdogs prompt FBI to withdraw 'unconstitutional' National Security Letter, Nick Juliano, therawstory, Published: Wednesday May 7, 2008

The article goes on to say that the FBI has issued 200,000 National Security Letters, that almost none of those NSL have been challenged, yet every single time someone has challenged an NSL in court, the FBI has withdrawn it.

How do these NSL represent "Security"?

In any case, National Security Letters were authorized by the mis-named Patriot Act. Brewster Kahle has shown us how a real patriot acts:

OK Leaks Tens of Thousands of SSNs for Years

You'd think they'd know better:

One of the cardinal rules of computer programming is to never trust your input. This holds especially true when your input comes from users, and even more so when it comes from the anonymous, general public. Apparently, the developers at Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections slept through that day in computer science class, and even managed to skip all of Common Sense 101. You see, not only did they trust anonymous user input on their public-facing website, but they blindly executed it and displayed whatever came back.

The result of this negligently bad coding has some rather serious consequences: the names, addresses, and social security numbers of tens of thousands of Oklahoma residents were made available to the general public for a period of at least three years.

— Oklahoma Leaks Tens of Thousands of Social Security Numbers, Other Sensitive Data, by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles, The Daily WTF, 2008-04-15

But the best part is what it took to get the state to fix it: