cult of the Dead cow July 4th Res.

Kelley Walker kwalker2 at gte.net
Thu Jul 5 19:12:41 PDT 2001


At 02:06 PM 7/5/01 -0500, Carrol Cox wrote:
>In its present form this manifesto sounds vaguely similar to Lear's
>"I'll do such things, I know not what, that all the world shall
>tremble." It might have been better had they waited until some of their
>vaguely promised technology had been created, rather than emulating MS
>by threatening the world with vaporware.
>
>Carrol

heh. you think they should be explicit about what they might do? (not that i think CDC are deities or that i'd put my priorities where they do). look what happened to chuck0 when he was merely ambiguous?!

i wouldn't want you to download anything EVER from anywhere because it might just contain some vaporware created by CDC: back orifice.

were i to, say, send you a "gift" attachment with BO hidden inside it, I could run your computer from 1500 or 15,000 miles away. it already has a sniffer that will let me record every stroke you make. if you have a web cam or a microphone, i can record you and get a peek at you as you type away. you will _never_ know unless you periodically check. i can install a sniffer that will recover your passwords (those asterisks leave traces!). since you log into a uni (and others log in to their employer's) the cracker can gain access to that network in any number of ways--mainly by pretending to be you until he can pretend to be a sysadmin.

odd? who would want to do this? far-fetched? nope. Microsoft got hacked last year in a similar way. A telecommuting software programmer apparently downloaded a Trojaned zip file. Yes, this was someone supposedly technologically astute--who is supposed to know that you shouldn't execute attachments so readily.

then, of course, hackers created a variant of napster called Peek-a-Booty. it will let people directly access the hard drives of other users where they can store that banned material: videos, recordings, e-books, documents, etc.

warez crackers can break just about anything a software maker has tried to keep out of the hands of those who didn't pay for it. i saw a crack the other day for a piece of software that goes for $2500.

given all that we actually know about what good hackers and kiddie crackers can do, i think that it's fairly safe to say that they'll break technologies designed to keep information from people and that doing so isn't just empty vaporware threats. CDC's intentions--i don't have much of an opinion--but i wouldn't dismiss the possibilities of information warfare.



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