An outfit called In-Q-Tel in Arlington, Virginia, founded in 1999, is known to be a semi-independent but private aspect of the US intelligence community which invests in tech companies that do things deemed strategically useful. Practically all of those things are on the cutting edge of commercial technology for the time. They say as much on their website, in case you're wondering if I've been listening to a little too much Coast to Coast AM lately. Their latest investment project is a most interesting one, a company called Visible Technologies which develop software to monitor social activities on the global …
Like many people today, I have a GPS (Global Positioning System) navigation system mounted semipermanantly in my car to help me get around when I'm out and about. Every once in a while, however, I find myself being asked a rather curious question to which I haven't really put together a rehearsed answer. That question is this: "If you're so consciencious about your privacy, why do you have a GPS unit in your car? Aren't you worried that you'll be tracked wherever you go by your GPS?"
The short and simple answer to that question is, "No, I'm not concerned …
If you're involved in the retrocomputing or PC history scenes, chances are you've heard of double-sided floppy disks that are formatted for one system on side A and another system on side B. For example, I've got a copy of the game Ninja which had the C-64 version of the game on one side and the Atari port on the other. At the time this was a pretty straightforward thing to do because drives only read one side of a disk at a time. A couple of weeks back, PC historian Trixter came across a highly unusual 5 1/4 …
George W. Bush, while at NSA headquarters yesterday, asked the US Congress to turn the NSA program that allows any and all communications to be monitored without a warrant into a law rather than letting the program expire in February of 2008. While this law does not give operatives carte blanche to break into a home and plant monitoring devices or copy data from computers (that's covered by another set of statutes entirely), it does mean that they can record and analyze telephone calls, e-mails, and other forms of communication without oversight or legal record. As to why he didn't …
RATs meaning remote access tools, that is. Malware that conceals itself in a system and lets someone on the outside with the right application and credentials connect and manipulate the system remotely. The classic such utility is Back Orifice by the Cult of the Dead Cow, and was probably the first of its kind which let you do such things as mess with the mouse cursor and typed text, flip the display upside down, access the webcam, and open or close the CD-ROM.
Back in 2003, the US Government formed a project called TIA - Total Information Awareness, with a logo that made about half of the country cringe in fear, anger, and disgust, and sparked off a firestorm in the news media because it constituted a major violation of the right to privacy of US citizens. The project was very publically shelved for the edification of the public, though it wasn't actually terminated.
'Remote access tool', that is - a little beastie (usually considered malware, though there are legit incarnations of this sort of software) that hides itself inside a workstation and lets someone connect remotely at any time and go through the system and silently monitor what the user is doing. Crackers have been using them for years for recon before an infiltration attempt, but only recently are the white hats finding uses for them. Such as watching what your kids are up to. Presenting Snoopstick, an all in one package for infecting someone's box with a RAT that lets you keep an …
Brad Willman, known to the underground as Omni-Potent, has stepped forward after three years of secretly stalking online pedophiles and tipping off law enforcement. His primary tool was a trojan horse that appeared to be an image file but was actually a remote access tool that he posted to child porn-related newsgroups on Usenet. People would download and double-click them, which silently installed the utility. He would monitor feeds from multiple installations of this utility for up to 16 hours every day, gathering evidence that he indexed, filed, and passed along to police, even against their orders. Time and again …
Another bill's been put into circulation that I think everyone should know about. Representative Lamar Smith of Texas has put forth legislation that would require every ISP to keep records of what their users do on the Net to assist. For every customer an ISP has, every IP address they are given, every DNS request they make, every outgoing connection, and every incoming connection attempt would be recorded and archived on the off chance that a subpoena came in. Failure to do so would mean fines and jail time for not complying with this proposed law. On top of that …
As part of my New Year's resolution to get in better shape I've started to work out twice a week, and discovered once again that my body isn't as young as I wish it was. It's been two days now, and most of the major muscle groups are firing off error messages as fast as they possibly can because they've put in a lot more duty time than they're accustomed to doing for a professional geek. I still can't walk without pain for long periods of time, and let me tell you, maneuvering in this state with a rather heavy …
