Bruce Schneier and Jason Sigger, usually sensible sources, both mock a study by some thinktank or other which raises the supposed possibility of hackers “using the Internet to start a nuclear war”. As they both point out, the possibility of anyone getting access to the actual command and control firing chain with metasploit is so…
Read More police and thievesWired reviews a book on the media of the Middle East, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday. Well, even pirates have press spokesmen these days. It sounds like it could be interesting, but it strikes me that this piece by Tom Griffin about trolls sponsored by various Middle Eastern actors…
Read More twitbook: book of twitsBecause we’ve set up the bureaucracy for it. Laugh! as the people responsible for the new US Cyber Command try to work out what it’s for. As far as I can see, it duplicates all or part of NSA, DISA, CIA, DHS, NIST, and the services’ signals commands and electronics materiel agencies. It is true…
Read More there’d better be such a thing as “cyberwar”Quite ridiculous microtale about the head of MI6’s wife being on Facebook. But what’s this, from Patrick Mercer MP? The Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, who chairs the counter-terrorism sub-committee, said the mistake had left the Sawers family “extremely vulnerable”. Referring to Miliband’s suggestion that the incident was not significant, Mercer said: “If that is the…
Read More did you know Twitter stimulates Shatner’s bassoon?Arbor Networks has a great post with data on Iranian Internet censorship. As well as the deliberate transit shortage, they seem to be targeting specific protocols, notably SSH, the secure shell protocol one uses to administer servers and also quite often to provide a VPN tunnel. This isn’t surprising, really, but it is depressing; practically…
Read More spamWe keep hearing that the Iranian government, or at least one of the competing centres of power within it, is trying to jam satellite TV downlinks and harassing the owners of satellite dishes. The BBC World Service and Al-Jazeera have reportedly both been targeted, specifically as they both use one of the HotBird satellites over…
Read More satellite’s gone, way up to Mars…People are talking about using “cyberwar” to assist the Iranian opposition. Let’s put some of our new cyber-warfare capabilities to the test, quietly and covertly of course, to disrupt Tehran’s ability to shut off the flow of information to Iranians and between them This makes no sense at all, even less sense than “cyberwar” usually…
Read More what is cyberwar?A magic moment in the history of troll; it may never come again. OK, so you know the climate-change denier talking point about global warming supposedly “stopping” in the last ten years. It’s a classic example of how to lie with numbers; you just choose the bit of the data series that suits you and…
Read More Climate change denier redefines the number 10This is interesting; the US Army in Afghanistan has an official Twitter account. The interesting thing is the explanation: If prevailing wisdom about “population-centric” counterinsurgency holds, why is the U.S. military using Twitter to post body counts? Apparently, it’s about maintaining the support of the population back at home. In a must-read article, Michael Phillips…
Read More twittering the home frontAn idea, seeing as no-one is very interested in ORGANISE and it looks like I’ll have to learn erlang to make any impact on it. Observation 1: The price of voice telephony is falling fast. Mobile operators provide some truly huge bundles of minutes, and there’s Skype and Co.Observation 2: Political campaigns of all kinds…
Read More don’t leave me hanging on the telephone