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March 29, 2003
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The Search for Total Information
By now, you've heard all about Total Information Awareness, the Darpa program designed to jump-start new methods of knowledge gathering, integration, and prediction. It's one of our high tech answers to the terrorist menace of bin Laden and his many Osama wannabes. But if you know the simple facts about Total Information Awareness, you've also heard that the system itself is the real enemy.TIA is at the center of a media storm that started last summer, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation's online newsletter headlined an alert about the program: "how to build a police state." The EFF analysis became the standard line, and by November, even The New York Times had agreed that it was "a vast electronic dragnet." In February, Congress put the Pentagon on notice that it would not tolerate the surveillance of US citizens. Last I checked, there were 28,000 Web sites opining on TIA. The vibe? Overwhelmingly negative.
Frankly, the critics are missing the point.
TIA promises search engines that will consign Google to the Stone Age. TIA's dialog technology will listen to your words, then link you to a trove of data that makes today's Web look like the library of an illiterate.
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Saddam Hussein's Bunker Stands Tough
The German architect of one of Saddam Hussein's main bunkers in Baghdad said on Friday the Iraqi leader can survive anything short of a direct hit with a nuclear bomb if he stays within its four-feet-thick walls.
"It could withstand the shock wave of a nuclear bomb the size of the Hiroshima one detonating 250 meters away," said Karl Esser, a security consultant who designed the bunker underneath Saddam's main presidential palace in Baghdad.
U.S.-led troops will also find it hard to fight their way in through its three-ton Swiss-made doors, Esser told Reuters in an interview.
A retired Yugoslav army officer who helped build other bunkers for Saddam also told Reuters this week that the shelters were impenetrable and could survive an atomic bomb.
CNN reported on Friday that U.S. B-52 bombers dropped a two ton "bunker busting" bomb on the capital for the first time in the campaign.
The palace bunker can accommodate 50 people and has two escape tunnels, one leading 200 meters to the Tigris river.
It was built in 1982 and 1983 by German firm Boswau & Knauer, which merged into what is now the Walter Bau-AG building group.
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War Hack Attacks Tit For Tat
Pro-and-anti Iraq war protesters have been making their point by hacking into Web sites in a display of cyber activism, rather than with the traditional can of spray paint or placard.
Countless activists -- protesters or war hawks -- have the ability to hijack or cripple Web sites from the opposing camp, leaving in their wake a graveyard of busted and defaced links.
"This is the future of protest," said Roberto Preatoni, founder of Zone-H, an Estonian firm that monitors and records hacking attacks. Since the war in Iraq started last week, the firm has recorded over 20,000 website defacements.
The most notable victim was al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite TV network that angered many Western viewers earlier this week when it aired footage of dead British and American soldiers and of prisoners of war.
The Arabic-language site, www.aljazeera.net, flickered to life on Friday, but access to the English-language version remained impossible, the result of repeated hack attacks since Monday.
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Microsoft Says Palladium Fears Are Rumors And Speculation
Microsoft said criticisms of its Palladium security initiative are rumors and speculation about technology that won't even be ready to hit the market for years.
Palladium, whose formal name is Next Generation Secure Computing Base, is technology that Microsoft says will make computers trustworthy. It will use a security processor attached to a PC motherboard, along with a subsystem of the Windows operating system, called the Nexus, to allow users to create a highly secure virtual space to store sensitive data and run sensitive applications.
That's what Microsoft says. But critics suspect a hidden agenda to prevent PCs from running Linux and other competing operating systems, force application developers to pay fees to Microsoft to write Windows applications, and gain control over users' data.
Ross Anderson, a member of the computer science faculty member at the University of Cambridge, England, said that Palladium is Microsoft's plan to make it expensive for users to switch from Microsoft applications.
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DMCA critics decry state-level proposals
Critics of the federal Digital Millennium Copyright Act said Friday that they were disturbed by proposals for similar laws at the state level.
Quietly, opponents said, with few people paying close attention, state legislators are considering bills that would be even broader than the controversial DMCA, which restricts bypassing copy-protection measures.
The DMCA critics reacted with dismay this week after learning about the existence of the state bills when a lobbyist flagged one as disturbing, an industry source said. On Friday, library groups quickly dashed off a note to Arkansas and Colorado warning politicians there that their "proposed legislation is deeply flawed and should be rejected."
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Al-Jazeera Downed by the Pentagon?
For journalists inside the Al-Jazeera newsroom in Doha, Qatar, it was obvious who attacked their Web site this week.
The Arabic-language television network had just launched its English site and was publishing the first pictures of Iraq's prisoners of war on Tuesday when a barrage of junk messages crippled the site.
The attacks continued all week. One enterprising hacker even used fake Al-Jazeera letterhead to fool an Internet company into letting him redirect visitors away from Al-Jazeera to other locations such as porn sites and a page that displayed an American flag with the message: "God bless our troops!"
"One measure of the importance of those American PoW pictures and the images of the dead British soldiers is surely the sustained 'shock-and-awe' hacking campaign directed at aljazeera.net since the start of the war," Faisal Bodi, a senior editor for aljazeera.net, wrote in The Guardian newspaper yesterday. "As I write, the Al-Jazeera Web site has been down for three days and few here doubt that the provenance of the attack is the Pentagon."
But the idea that the U.S. military masterminded the hacker onslaught was treated with extreme skepticism on Internet message boards and among technical security experts yesterday.
Most observed that the attacks looked like the work of "script kiddies" - neophyte hackers using readily available software tools.
"These people are immature, inexperienced and naive," wrote one contributor to slashdot.org, a popular site that calls itself "news for nerds."
Al-Jazeera's biggest problems this week were caused by what are called "distributed denial of service" attacks. These flooded the site with up to 300 megabits (Mbps) of data per second, up from normal levels of 50 to 60 Mbps.
Traffic of that magnitude can be achieved by almost anyone with a few weeks of computer training, said Johannes Ullrich, chief technology officer at the Systems Administration Networking and Security Institute in Boston.
"It doesn't take the Pentagon to generate 300 Mbps," Mr. Ullrich said.
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