Fighting the automation paradox || Deployment θα κάνουμε φωνάζοντας "αέρα"
“Journalists cannot simply pour gasoline into the street and pretend they bear no responsibility for the inevitable explosion”, —Judea Pearl
Ευτυχώς δεν είμαστε όλοι (οι Ολυμπιακοί) ίδιοι.
Υ.Γ. /* some stupid with a flare gun burned the place to the ground */
With everybody and his dog prepending cyber- to almost everywhere, declaring the cyberspace as a new war dimension (the first four being earth, sea, air and space) abusing and overusing terms like cyberwar, cyberdefense, cyber-infrastructure it is a good idea to return to the basics, like the very definition of the cyberspace. Luckily in his 1992 “Hacker Crackdown” introduction, Bruce Sterling came to assist us, long before a definition for the wider public was needed:
A science fiction writer coined the useful term “cyberspace” in 1982, but the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about a hundred and thirty years old. Cyberspace is the “place” where a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person’s phone, in some other city. THE PLACE BETWEEN the phones. The indefinite place OUT THERE, where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate.
Although it is not exactly “real,” “cyberspace” is a genuine place. Things happen there that have very genuine consequences. This “place” is not “real,” but it is serious, it is earnest. Tens of thousands of people have dedicated their lives to it, to the public service of public communication by wire and electronics.
Even if you have no interest in reading about Operation Sundevil, the introduction of the book is a very informative essay on cyberspace that stands on its own.
Read Next: Proposal for cyber war rules of engagement.
I think I read the text version of “The Social Organization of the Computer Underground” sometime between 1993 and 1995. Recently I found out that the author has written an anniversary edition with a new introduction to the text (plus PDF and ePub versions).
While information in the text is dated (it was published in 1989) it is still a useful reading for those who wish to understand just a little deeper what went on (and some of what goes on) in the Digital Underground. Even better the introduction offers a methodology on how to do this the right way. I still consider it mandatory reading. My best part of the text is how the following typology from Best and Luckenbill’s 1982 “Organizing Deviance” is used to describe the Computer Underground:
| Form of Organization | Mutual Association | Mutual Participation | Division of Labor | Extended Organization |
| Loners | no | no | no | no |
| Colleagues | yes | no | no | no |
| Peers | yes | yes | no | no |
| Mobs | yes | yes | yes | no |
| Formal Organizations | yes | yes | yes | yes |
I think that people who will read the text will agree that the above typology most probably stands even today. Formal organizations for example do not appear in Meyer’s study, however these days almost every nation is investing in building a cyberwarfare capability (and this is not an “overground” operation).
It is a pity, I think, that such a work cannot be repeated today. If it could, it could provide us with some glimpse into modern cybercrime networks and even espionage (industrial or national) ones. But then again one can hope that there exists the sociologist who will prove me wrong.
PS: Revisiting the text I was reminded of the Cu Digest to which I was a subscriber for quite some time.
Update: Reading the description about the Anonymous group behind the HBGary hacks, I kind of appreciate the above table even more:
“Anonymous is a diverse bunch: though they tend to be younger rather than older, their age group spans decades. Some may still be in school, but many others are gainfully employed office-workers, software developers, or IT support technicians, among other things. With that diversity in age and experience comes a diversity of expertise and ability.”
Expressed by John F. Sowa:
Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X.
(ref)
After reading my “Installing Exchange 2010 SP1 on a Windows 2008 R2 – A typical installation” post, @nzaharioudakis responded:
Got lost already. #Zimbra would end up in 40-50 min including a fresh OS install. Thnx 4 noticing
I asked Nikos whether he could write up a similar Zimbra guide. And so he did!
– How to install Zimbra with Operating System in less than an hour ..
Thank you Nikos.
The complexity of Exchange makes even the typical setup a long (and laborious if done for the first time) task. But with a little bit of help from “Exchange 2010 – A practical approach” (thank you XLA for this), a bit of guesswork and the installer of Exchange itself these are the steps that worked for me:
Thanks to Catastrophic Failure, for a set of notes that I’ve kept from a course she’s given on the subject reduced my installation time.
If you have any questions / suggestions that will help refine this document, please do so in the comments.
An alternate take:
Due to an 8007EE2 windows update error, I performed the following steps:
… θα βρεις έναν Έλληνα. Ο Δημήτρης Στάικος, φίλος από τα παλιά, ένα έτος μεγαλύτερος και hacker extraordinaire, αντιπρόεδρος του 1394 Trade Association (Firewire για όποιον δεν τα πάει καλά με τα νούμερα).
Because it can be memorized and works reasonably well:
unsigned long
hash(unsigned char *str)
{
unsigned long hash = 5381;
int c;
while (c = *str++)
hash = ((hash << 5) + hash) + c; /* hash * 33 + c */
return hash;
}
All one needs to remember is a single line and a number. For years SuperFastHash had been my first choice but the Non-Cryptographic Hash Function Zoo analysis changed this.
[via]
Απλά εξαιρετικό. Αδερφή ευχαριστούμε για τα εισητήρια.
Υ.Γ. Ο Πατερέλης πρέπει να είναι ο άνθρωπος που ζει τη μουσική περισσότερο από οποιονδήποτε. Όπως είπε και η γυναίκα μου “τρώει νότες”.
Managing organized complexity 