 |
More Dox will be added as i receive them
if u would like to contribute, plz do not hesitate
|
 |
 |
 |
|
2. Fear and trembling in Las Vegas
"Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." Those are the last words of the movie Chinatown, just before the police lieutenant shouts orders to the crowd that they should clear the streets so the body of an innocent woman, murdered by the Los Angeles police, can be removed.
Chinatown, with Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes, is a fine film: it defines an era (the 30s in the United States) and a genre - film noir. Film noir is a unique way to frame reality, a vision of a world corrupt to the core in which, nevertheless, it is still possible (as author Raymond Chandler said of the heroes of the best detective novels) to be: a man of honour. Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.
Chinatown also defines life in the virtual world that consensual hallucination we have come to call "cyberspace". The virtual world is a simulation of the "real world". The "real world" is a symbolic construction too, a set of nested structures that, as we peel them away over the course of our lives, reveals more and more complexity and ambiguity. The real world is Chinatown, and computer hackers — properly understood — know this better than anyone,
There are several themes in Chinatown, but two are particularly appropriate here:
People in power are in seamless collusion. They take care of one another. They don't always play fair. And sooner or later, we discover that "we" are "they". A veteran police detective told me this about people in power: "There's one thing they all fear — politicians, industrialists, corporate executives—and that's exposure. They simply do not want anyone to look too closely or shine too bright a light on their activities".
I grew up in Chicago, known for its political machine and cash-on-the-counter way of doing business. I earned money for my education working with the powerful Daley political machine. In exchange for patronage Jobs — supervising playgrounds, hauling garbage — I worked with a precinct captain and alderman.
My job was to do what I was told. I paid attention to how people behaved in the real world. I learned that nothing is simple, that people act instinctively out of self-interest, and that nobody competes in the arena of real life with clean hands.
I remember sitting in a restaurant in a seedy neighborhood in Chicago, listening to a conversation in the next booth. Two dubious characters were upset that a mutual friend faced a long prison term. They looked and sounded different to the "respectable" people with whom [had grown up in an affluent part of town.
As ! grew up, however, I learned how my friends' fathers really made money. Many of their activities were disclosed in the newspaper. They distributed pornography before it was legal, manufactured and sold illegal gambling equipment, distributed vending machines and juke bones to bars that had to take them or face the consequences
I learned that a real estate tycoon had been a bootlegger during prohibition, and the brother of the man in the penthouse upstairs had died in Miami Beach in a hail of bullets.
For me it was an awakening: I saw that the members of the power structures in the city — business, government, the religious hierarchy, and the syndicate or Mafia — were indistinguishable, a partnership that of necessity included everyone who wanted to do business. Conscious or unconscious, collusion was the price of the ticket that got you into the stadium; whether players on the field or spectators in the stands, we were all players, one way or another. Chicago is South Africa, South Africa is Chinatown, and Chinatown is the world.
There is no moral high ground. We all wear masks, but under that mask is... Chinatown.
You never really know what's going on in Chinatown. The police in Chinatown, according to Jake Gittes, were told to do "as little as possible" because things that happened on the street were die visible consequences of strings pulled behind he scenes. If you looked to often behind the curtain as Gittes did — you were taught a painful lesson.
We often don't understand what we're looking at on the Internet. As one hacker recently mailed in response to someone's fears of a virus that did not and could not exist: "No information on the World Wide Web is any good unless you can either verify it yourself or it's backed up by an authority you trust". The same is true in life. Misinformation in the virtual world is an art.
After an article I wrote for an English magazine about detective work on the Internet appeared, I received a call from a global PR firm in London. They asked if I wanted to conduct "brand defense" for them on the World Wide Web. What is brand defense? If one of our clients is attacked, they explained, their Internet squad goes into action. "Sleepers" (spies inserted into a community and told to wait until they receive orders) in Usenet groups and listserv lists create distractions, invent controversies; Web sites (on both sides of the question) go into high gear, using splashy graphics and clever text to distort the conversation. Persons working for the client pretend to be disinterested so they can spread propaganda.
It reminded me of the time my Democratic Party precinct captain asked if I wanted to be a precinct captain. ''Are you retiring?" I asked. "01 course not! "he laughed. "You'd be the Republican precinct captain. Then we'd have all our bases covered".
The illusions of cyberspace arc seductive. Every keystroke leaves a luminous track in the melting snow that can be seen with the equivalent of night-vision goggles.
I lacking means tracking—and counter-tracking— and covering your tracks in the virtual world. Hacking means knowing how to follow the flow of electrons to its source and understand on every level of abstraction — from source code to switches and routers to high level words and images - what is really happening. Hackers are unwilling to do as little as possible. Hackers are need-to-know machines driven by a passion to connect disparate data into meaningful patterns. Hackers are the online detectives of the virtual world.
You don't get to be a hacker overnight. The devil is in the details. Real hackers get good by endless trial and error, falling into success again and again. Thomas Edison, inventor of the electric light, invented a hundred filaments that didn't work before he found one that did. He knew that every failure brought him closer to his goal.
Listen to the words of "Rogue Agent" setting someone straight on an Internet mailing list: "You want to create hackers? Don't tell them how to do this or that. Show them how to discover it for themselves. Those who have the innate drive will dive in and learn by trial and error. Those who don't, comfortable to stay within the bounds of their safe little lives, fall by the wayside. There's no knowledge so sweet as that which you've discovered on your own".
In Chinatown, a character tries to stop Jake Gittes' prying by cutting his nose. He tells Gittes that "curiosity killed the cat". Isn't it ironic that curiosity, the defining character- istic of an intelligent or organization exploits its environment, has been prohibited by folk wisdom everywhere?
The endless curiosity of hackers is regulated by a higher code that may not even have a name but which defines the human spirit at its best. The Hacker's Code is an affirmation of life itself, life that wants to know, and grow, and extend itself throughout the "space" of the universe. The hackers' refusal to accept conventional wisdom and boundaries is a way to align energies with the life-giving passion of heretics everywhere. And these days, that's what's needed to survive.
Robert Calvin, the grand patriarch of Motorola, says, "every significant decision that changes the direction of a company is a minority decision, whatever is the intuitive presumption- where everyone agrees 'Yeah, that's right' — will almost surely he wrong". Motorola has succeeded by fostering an environment in which creativity thrives. It has institutionalized an openness to heresy because it knows that wisdom always arrives at the edge of things, on the horizons of our lives, and when it first shoves up — like a comet or) the distant edges of the solar system — it's faint and seen by only a few.
But those few know where to look. Alien Hynek, an astronomer connected with the U.S. Air Force investigation of UFOs, was struck by the "strangeness" of UFO reports, the cognitive dissonance that characterizes all experiences that don't fit into our orthodox belief systems. He pointed out that all the old photographic plates in observatories had images of Pluto on them, but until Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto, no one saw it because they didn't know where to look.
The best computer consultants live on the creative edge of things. They are path-finders, guides for those who have always lived at the orthodox center but who find today that the center is constantly shifting, man dating that they learn new behaviors, skills in order to be effective. In order to live on the edge. The edge is the new center. The center of a web is wherever we arc.
When I looked out over the audience at DefCon IV, the hackers' convention recently, I saw an assembly of the most brilliant and most unusual people I had ever seen in one room. It was exhilarating, and I felt as if I had come home.
There in that room, for a few hours or a few days, we did not have to explain anything We knew who we were and what drove u~ in our different ways to want to connect the dots of data into meaningful patterns. We know we build on quicksand, but building is too much fun to give up. We know we leave tracks, but going is so much more energizing than staying home. We know that curiosity can get your nose slit, but then we'll invent new ways to smell.
Computer programmers write software applications that are doomed to be as obsolete as wire recordings or programs created for an IBM XT. The infrastructures built by our engineers are equally doomed.
Whether a virtual world of digital bits or a physical world of concrete and steel, our civilization is just a Big Toy that we build and use up at the same time. The fun of the game is to know it's a game, and winning is just willingness to play.
To say that when we engage with one another in cyberspace we are "hacking Chinatown" is a way of saving it's more important to ask questions than to find answers. We don't expect final answers. But the questions must be asked. We refuse to do as little as possible because we want to know.
Asking questions is how human beings create opportunities for dignity and selftransfendence; it is how we prepare ourselves to leave this island earth and enter a trans-galactic web of life more diverse and alien than anything we have encountered. Asking questions that uncover the truth is our way of refusing to consent to illusions and delusions, our way of insisting that we can do it better if we stay up later, collaborate with each other in networks with no names, and lose ourselves in the quest for knowledge and self-mastery. This is how proud, lonely men and women, illuminated in the darkness by their glowing monitors, become heroes in their own dramas as they wander the twisting streets of cyberspace and their own lives.
Even in Chinatown, Jake. Even in Chinatown.
|
2. Fear and Trembling in Las Vegas
It was recently my privilege to deliver a keynote address at DefCon IV. An annual convention of computer hackers, crackers and telephone phreakers held every summer in the desert gambling town of Las Vegas, Nevada. Daytime temperatures near 120 degrees ensured that casual curiosity seekers would be at a minimum. In heat that can fry an egg on the pavement, you had better WANT to be there
It was a surprise, then, when, eight hundred people showed up - nearly double the expected attendance. It was an exciting convention, with good presentations and brilliant hallway conversations, but above all else, I remember most the ubiquity of FEAR: that collection of hackers inspired more fear and anxiety in the management of our hotel than anything I had ever seen. They were afraid that every one of their systems would be hacked and taken down and acted accordingly. I felt as if we were rioters in the street and they were the state police. After the first night, for example, hotel personnel waited until three in the morning to install tiny security cameras in the ceilings of our meeting rooms. They already had security cameras everywhere else, including the elevators. (I am told it's great sport for the security personnel at Las Vegas hotels to exchange tapes of the spiciest elevator antics). Numerous news crews came from mainstream sources, representing television news programs and on-line networks like C | Span. Every single one was thrown out of the convention, their videotape confiscated. (Fortunately this move was anticipated and blank tapes were substituted for interview tapes.)
The hotel personnel enforced the rules — to a fault. Granted, young hackers have a reputation for long sleepless nights fuelled by caffeine and other stimulants; still, the concern shown about self-indulgence was more than parental. My favorite souvenir photo shows a 52-year-old man being "carded" (checked for identification to be sure he's over 21) in order to enter a hotel restaurant where alcohol was served! What is it about computer hackers that provoke such fear? It begins with the popular image of hackers as "evil geniuses", invading our boardrooms and bedrooms at will. That image began in the USA with the movie "War Games", and in fact the writer of that screenplay, Larry Lasker, was at the convention, paying close attention to the latest trends and taking notes. But Lasker is the first to admit that alienated teenagers hunched over glowing screens in the dark as they launch assaults on military systems are not the whole story. There were plenty of security experts at DefCon, plus intelligence agents, professional engineers, and thriving businessmen. In fact, some of the most successful people in the high tech world learned the nuts and bolts of computing by exploring the wired world of networked computers on their own.
One of my favorite images is a group of young people in a ring around their portable computers, swapping insights, learning from one another. I imagined their teachers trying to "motivate" them in school. They did not need to be motivated; they were need-to-know machines on a roll, willing to do anything to learn how computer systems work. All the teachers needed to do was get out of the way. Hackers want to know how things work and will do what they have to do to learn what they need to learn. Real hackers are distinguished not by isolation or antisocial tendencies, but by their hunger for knowledge. Hackers do not accept conventional explanations; they want to know, see, feel things for themselves. The only way to do that is to enter our complex systems of information technology and look around.
Leonardo Da Vinci was a hacker. He refused to limit his exploration of the universe to the constraints of "the known world." He refused to limit his imagination. He did not ask permission before challenging conventional wisdom. This is why Bill Gates of Microsoft just paid a fortune for some of the drawings and notes of that master hacker. Are hackers criminals? The short answer is no, not necessarily. Hackers distinguish between real hackers and crackers, or criminal hackers.
Crackers use hacking skills to commit fraud, destroy or steal intellectual property, and vandalize the information systems of governments and businesses. Things do get a little vague, though. On the highest levels of international diplomacy, it is difficult to distinguish not only hackers but crackers as well from government agents. France has admitted bugging first class seats on transatlantic Air France flights to glean important economic information. Germany and Japan are masters at "competitive business intelligence" as is the government of the United States, and no doubt the South African government. Governments routinely use electronic means, including computer hacking, to spy and pry into the economic secrets of friend and foe alike. As I told the assembled hackers, it is not hacker behavior that constitutes a threat. Work for the right government agency or the right corporation and you can do everything you dream with the latest tools. It is your perceived allegiance that constitutes a threat, especially when that allegiance is believed to be to a code or hacker ethic that transcends patriotic loyalty.
In the global arena, information warfare has succeeded the Cold War. In the global marketplace, a marketplace characterized by increasingly semi-permeable national boundaries, information is ammunition. This marketplace is appropriately likened in the United States to the frontier of the "Wild West" because there is often no legal authority to which to appeal when one has been wronged. One is forced to take the law into one's own hands. Here's a small example of how that happens. A man I know routinely uses the Internet to do business with companies in other countries. He uses the Internet to locate prospects, then research their needs and deliver an information-based product, One of his clients had accepted his work, but the cheque to pay for it — the only non-electronic piece of the transaction — never arrived. He sent Email again and again. He telephoned and telephoned. Every promise of payment was followed by inaction. Finally he decided to use the Internet itself.
The Internet had enabled him to deal with foreign businesses as if national boundaries did not exist. Perhaps it could also be a medium for the redress of his grievance. He sent one more Email. He explained that he networked with companies all over the world that used the services of his client. He often was asked for examples of the pitfalls of the virtual marketplace and needed an example of what happened when a business violated the trust which made such commerce possible. He said he had found his example. In addition, he would post on a Web site the details of the transaction, including audio tapes of their telephone conversations, and also use the full resources of the Internet to inform others who might be interested. He received a cheque four days later.
Information that is linked and accessible is the source of power in the wired world. Those who know how to find it, use it, and relate it to other data in meaningful ways have a lever under the rock of reality that can literally move mountains. The irrational fear and anxiety caused by hackers convening in Las Vegas is related to a more sober, rational fear. A new world has suddenly emerged and those who know how to thrive in it will bear projections of power out of all proportion to their real power. But that should not prevent us from understanding where the real sources of their power originate.
In a global marketplace in which information is currency and knowledge capital, every organization will function much like an independent country. Intelligence and counterintelligence is no longer a luxury. Proprietary information must be protected; what others know about your business must be actively managed. One reason South Africa is at the forefront of political and economic thinking about the future of Africa in general is the successful management of perception of its promise and possibilities.
Hackers are feared because their powers have been excessively magnified by the media. But their knowledge of how the technological infrastructure works is real power. Hacking is another name for the creative exploration of the complex systems of information with which we now live in a symbiotic relationship. Hacking skills — including a commitment to the pursuit of knowledge, endless curiosity, a yearning to understand complexity among chaos, an ability to discern patterns from bits of disparate data — are essential to the well-being of organizations that intend to remain competitive.
Competitive business intelligence should be an introductory course at every business school. If schools do not adapt to the demands of the wired world, the trend toward learning outside of traditional educational structures will accelerate. Today in the United States more and more companies are going beyond support for ongoing education; they are developing their own universities to educate workers, because too many schools are teaching people how to live in the past, not the present. And most certainly not the future. Hackers are not one-dimensional cartoon figures. They are complex human beings. They may play late at night on the glowing electronic grid called the Internet, but most hackers hold good jobs in security, intelligence, and high tech businesses. "Tiger teams" of hackers often work collaboratively with government and business to identify holes in their networks and secure their systems. The teams for which I have served as an intermediary are composed of talented, multi-faceted individuals using their skills in a beneficial way. New structures of life, whether structures of perception, values, or socio-economic systems, always emerge on the boundaries. Those who live at the center seldom see them coining because their behaviors reinforce their beliefs in "things as they are". Those who are marginal and heretical, who refuse to accept conventional wisdom, learn first the ways of thinking and behaving appropriate to new, emergent structures of life.
After World War I, the English and French prepared for the next war as if it would be fought like the last. Victory made them complacent. Germany, on the other hand, was limited by the Treaty of Versailles to small numbers of tanks. Airplanes — which some did not even see as weapons of war — were also limited. Few thought of the uses of radio on the battlefield. The Germans combined their scarce resources — tanks, planes, and radio — to invent the blitzkrieg. A new word was needed because the emergent reality it described, born of the hunger of desperation and defeat, had not existed 'till then. It is difficult for a man with a full belly to understand the problems of a man who is hungry.
The imperatives of the wired world demand that we withdraw our projections of inordinate power and look at the emergent reality of computer hackers with a clear gaze. We need to see what is right in front of our eyes. They are showing us skills that will be essential in the trans-planetary culture of the next century. We need pathfinders and scouts when we move into new territory. Hackers who know the terrain make good guides. Make partners of those you fear and you will discover how to leverage the knowledge that is their power to your mutual advantage.
|
Copyright held by
Viral Inc, 1999
This page created by VRLINC
Copyright of respective documents in here held by author