>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.
One of these days, all such skills might become handy, and I'm heartened that left-wing e-lists tend to be well stocked with not just lawyers & professors but computer programmers as well.
In case my remark above is ambiguous, I hasten to add that my knowledge of computer language is such that I won't be able to dream of manning a cyber-barricade.
Yoshie