Title : Phrack World News
Author : TCLH
==Phrack Inc.==
Volume 0x0d, Issue 0x42, Phile #0x03 of 0x11
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|=-----------------------=[ Phrack World News]=-----------------------=|
|=----------------------------=[ by TCLH ]=---------------------------=|
|=--------------------------------------------------------------------=|
The Circle of Lost Hackers is looking for any kind of news related to
security, hacking, conference report, philosophy, psychology, surrealism,
new technologies, space war, spying systems, information warfare, secret
societies, ... anything interesting! It could be a simple news with just
an URL, a short text or a long text. Feel free to send us your news.
We didn't get any news from the Underground since our last phrack issue,
it means that one more time all the news reports are coming from
friends of our's.
It would be good if people who claim themself "underground" would send
us their news...
Is our underground dead? (apparently yes...)
1. Speedy Gonzales news
2. Hacker hack thyself
3. Evolt.org Marks a Decade
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| | \/ ___ _ __ ______ _| | ___ ___
| | __ / _ \| '_ \|_ / _` | |/ _ \/ __|
| |_\ \ (_) | | | |/ / (_| | | __/\__ \
\____/\___/|_| |_/___\__,_|_|\___||___/
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\_| \_/\___| \_/\_/ |___/
*-[ Phrack 64 0x11 is about the french scene and not a sellout conference... ]-
http://www.frhack.org/history.html
*-[ Promise, we are safe... ]-
http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/US-Spying--Main-Core-PRO-by-Ed-Encho-090202-224.html
*-[ Is the Pentagone secure? ]-
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124027491029837401.html
*-[ Finally, someone is reasonable...]-
http://www.securityfocus.com/blogs/1908
*-[ Because we love it ]-
http://cryptome.org/
*-[ Silvio is back in the business ]-
http://silviocesare.wordpress.com/
http://silvio.cesare.googlepages.com/
*-[ Because it is funny ]-
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/The_Unix_Terrorist
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/GOBBLES
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/N3td3v
*-[ They should know everyone is working for Phrack ]-
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2009-01/0324.html
*-[ Ten years late... ]-
http://www.dtors.org/papers/malicious-code-injection-via-dev-mem.pdf
*-[ Fedwire Funds Transfer System ]-
http://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coreprinciples/coreprinciples.pdf
www.ists.dartmouth.edu/library/216.pdf
http://www.fedwiredirectory.frb.org/search.cfm
--[ 2. "Hacker Hack Thyself" ]--
by Kartikeya Putra <[email protected]>
"All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are
programmed biocomputers. None of us can escape our own nature as
programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be our programs, nothing
more, nothing less."
-- John C. Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer
In the early 1970's, during the early days of Artificial Intelligence
research, scientists from the fields of psychology and computer science came
together to try to develop a new model of how the mind works. Their efforts
eventually resulted in the discipline now known as Cognitive Science. One of
the more significant books to come out of this early collaborative effort
was called Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding by Roger Schank and
Robert Abelson, which is still used by psychologists today to support what's
called the Information Processing Model of human cognition. I'd suggest that
anyone with a serious interest in reverse engineering themselves should hunt
down a used copy of this out-of-print book (try bookfinder.com, or your
local library). In it, the authors suggest that human thought is based on a
set of scripts (programs) for meeting personal goals in different
situations. The example they use throughout the book is a "Restaurant
Script" that tells people how to behave when eating out in public, in order
to meet the goal of getting fed. What would you do if you ordered a
hamburger and the waitress brought you a hot dog? Your scripts tell you how
to handle this situation, what to do when the bill comes, and how to handle
all the other transactions that take place in the restaurant environment.
Scripts People Live by Claude Steiner is a book about a form of
pop-psychology called Transactional Analysis. Here the author talks about
how everyone has a sort of running "life script" which is basically the
story of your own life as you like to tell it. Inside this script there are
recurring roles that are often learned in childhood, which inform us how
people are supposed to behave. I doubt that anyone ever reaches adulthood
with a completely accurate script of their own life story -- but if you can
become conscious of your script, it's possible to start improving it and
improving the way you write it as you go along.
Some of our most basic programming concerns what it means to be "good" or
"bad." When parents, teachers and other authorities are training us how to
be "good," often this has very little to do with doing what is right and is
more about training us to behave in ways that are convenient for them. Today
the task of programming "reality" has substantially been taken over by
television, which is like a mindcontrol device that sits in the living room,
hypnotizing a legion of glassy-eyed zombies. It is sponsored by corporations
who are not concerned with anything except selling their products. In one of
my favorite commercials on TV right now, this blonde dude -- who looks to me
like he knows he is about to become a complete tool -- holds up a McDonald's
chicken sandwich and proclaims, "Let's hear it for nonconformity!" Are you
kidding me? It's so phony it's almost avant garde. Andy Warhol would love it
-- I find it disturbing. I know that there must be a lot of people out there
who don't see anything wrong with this ad -- and others who even buy into it,
who think that eating a chicken sandwich for breakfast really is
"revolutionary."
When we were teenagers, some of us correctly perceived the system as a
hypocritical crock of shit and said, "screw this, I'm out of here." As an
adult with a little perspective now I can see that there's nothing wrong
with wanting to do your own thing, but rebellion against the system is still
a part of it. Maybe we found a peer group who claimed to represent "the
resistence," the anti-system -- but it's a trick, the anti-system is still
part of the system. By joining it you think you are becoming free, but it's
just a trick. As an "outsider," if you break laws or do things that hurt
yourself or others, you're just playing in to the role the system wants you
to play -- you're doing exactly what you are supposed to do as an "outsider."
The anti-system system is there because they need "bad guys," so that they
can play the "good guys" in comparison. If you are good and not one of them,
the whole system collapses. That is revolutionary!
The foundation on which this whole sado-masochistic world system is erected
is the perception of yourself as a victim. A lot of people are starting to
figure this out, and when that number reaches a certain tipping point it is
going to alter the structure of the matrix. Seeing yourself as the world's
victim is profoundly disempowering and keeps you locked in a cycle of
self-created pain and misery. We break free from this cycle by making a
conscious decision to accept complete responsibility for our own reality.
Get a copy of The Anger Habit Workbook by Carl Semmelroth and study it like
a bible. Drs. Barry and Janae Weinhold have an excellent series of six
e-books titled Breaking Free From the Matrix. There are a lot of wonderful
books out there to help us take control of our minds and emotions and break
free from the matrix of social power -- find them, and free your mind.
-[ 3. Evolt.org Marks a Decade ]-
by mstrix
:: 1998 :: ORIGINS
:: 1998-2000 :: RAPID GROWTH
:: 2000-2002 :: GROWING FLAMES
:: 2003-2005 :: SEEKING BALANCE
:: 2006-2008 :: FACING INERTIA
:: 2008 AND :: OUR FUTURE
The internet is the most reliable machine ever made.
It's made from imperfect, unreliable parts, connected
together, to make the most reliable thing we have."
- Kevin Kelly, Wired founder
Evolt.org is a world community for web developers and other internet
professionals. We host discussion lists, publish articles on our
website, and maintain a browser archive offering downloads of everything
from Mosaic to Flock. From the beginning, our community has been
international, anarchistic, and volunteer-run. If there is one thing
that makes us stand out from other web development organizations, it has
been our long-term focus on cultivating community. Yet as much as we
have worked together, evolt.org's history is marked by heated turf
battles interspersed with periods of inertia. We have struggled for
years to find a balance between process, production, leadership and
decentralization, while steadfastly maintaining our ideals and
integrity. On December 14, 2008, evolt.org turns ten years old.
This is the story of our first decade, from the perspective of someone
who has been a part of evolt.org since the early days.
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
1998 : ORIGINS
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
Evolt.org began as a 1998 copyright dispute between Wired Digital's
Webmonkey and some members of Webmonkey's web dev discussion list,
monkeyjunkies. The high-volume list had been operating since 1997.
Active monkeyjunkies members wanted an online list archive, so they
could search for and reference past posts, but Wired (who had recently
been purchased by Lycos) did not provide one. When one member, Dan Cody,
as a service to fellow list members, published his own archive of the
list, Wired's attorneys ordered him to stop, explaining they were
reserving their rights to the list posts. Wired further explained that
they hoped to post the archives at a later date, and include banner ads.
A number of the community raised a protest, and on December 14, about
thirty people from the monkeyjunkies community left Webmonkey to form
their own community-run list, and later, website, evolt.org.
Evolt.org was both an emulation of, and a response to, Wired Digital and
Webmonkey. Pre-Lycos Webmonkey featured a regular staff of writers and
web developers living and working in San Francisco, California,
producing articles that were both informative and humorous. Silly
analogies and crazy story lines made tech tutorials entertaining and
accessible. Advertising was always prominent; in fact, Wired founder
Kevin Kelly, has said that Wired "co-invented the banner ad."
Monkeyjunkies, the mailing list, almost seemed an afterthought,
bolstered no doubt by the magnetic draw of the groundbreaking sites with
which it was associated.
Evolt.org began not with a website, nor with an organizational
structure, but with thelist, a general web development list, in the vein
of monkeyjunkies, but non-corporate, non-commercial, and archived
online. Some of the original evolters had internet community experience
going back to usenet, and more than anything, it was the idea of
creating an online "community" to which they were drawn, and the idea
that web developers could assist each other, peer to peer, on a
worldwide basis.
In addition to the attention paid to a community-oriented model,
evolt.org distinguished themselves from Wired and other corporate web
development sites by eschewing advertising. Finally, evolt.org would not
claim copyright on anything written by any of its contributors, beyond
what is granted by the contributor when he or she publishes on an
evolt.org list or site. In the spirit of open source, we were, and are,
"a world community for web developers, promoting the mutual free
exchange of ideas, skills and experiences."
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
1998-2000 : RAPID GROWTH
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
Evolt.org members organized themselves entirely through email at first,
with direction taking place on the admin list, which was archived, but
closed to all but admins.
Our main web development list, thelist, was up and running by early
1999, and by June we were also running a content-managed site to which
members could submit, rate, and comment on articles posted into several
"centers" or web development categories. Adrian Roselli offered his
personal collection of browsers, and thus browsers.evolt.org was born.
The admin group maintained systems, managed development, and acted as
editors, still with no formalized structure. Some members would gather
to code the CMS and other applications at codefests. Later we would
gather for purely social purposes as well (aka "beervolts.") Admins
worked hard at everything from evangelizing to coding to creating
content. List and site traffic grew rapidly.
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
2000-2002 : GROWING FLAMES
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-
In early 2000, Webmonkey experienced an exodus of editorial staff, and
later that year, monkeyjunkies shut down, with scores of displaced
"monkeys" moving to evolt.org's thelist. Things were going great for
evolt.org.
We tended to organize ourselves by list. After thelist was
well-established, thechat began in 2001 as a place to chat about
anything that was neither related to evolt.org or the web development
business: "imagine yourself round a table in a pub." Admins continued
to communicate with each other via a closed list. In late 2000 admin
began a new list for issues specific to the website. This new list,
thesite, was open to all interested evolt.org members.
In early 2001, about a dozen the evolt.org admin group gathered at the
SXSW interactive conference in Austin, Texas. The group included members
from both US coasts, the midwest, Texas, the UK, and Iceland. It was
cozy, with a dozen of us sharing two hotel rooms. And it was at this
time that we began to attempt to organize ourselves into something
resembling a traditional non-profit organization. We elected a board of
directors; Dan Cody was elected chairman.
Shortly thereafter, the admin group broke out into a series of power
struggles.
While we had been able to do a certain amount of big-picture planning in
Austin, it was difficult to keep track of things once we had spread out
again. We were still communicating mostly by email (on- and off- lists),
by phone, and occasionally by IRC chat (a challenge, since we were
spread over so many timezones worldwide), with rare face-to-face
meet-ups as folks were able. However we ran repeatedly into walls, since
we all came from different cultures, we weren't all always the best
communicators, and our vision wasn't always consistent. Trying to make a
motion and vote on it was an often cumbersome (and sometimes divisive)
practice.
As 2001 drew to a close, the evolt.org admin community had many
challenges to face, not the least of which was "process." How do you
govern yourselves when you are unable to sustain a traditional
organizational structure, and when can't meet face to face?
In early 2002 the organization learned that Dan was personally
supporting evolt.org's site and high-bandwidth browser archive at the
rate of $1000 a month. Many were concerned because evolt.org wanted to
be able to survive as an organization regardless of whether any one
member were available to shoulder his or her portion of the load. Long
term survival of the organization became a key concern, known in
shorthand as "the bus question." If any one of us were hit by a bus, how
would the rest of us make it? Unfortunately, the ongoing discussion
around power and leadership issues caused such a rift in the admin group
that Dan Cody, our first and last official leader, resigned in May 2002.
Remaining members continued to struggle with organizational and
financial issues. By this point, several of those elected in Austin had
resigned posts for one reason or another. For the rest, it seemed that
the offices held no real meaning in the context of evolt.org.
In search of order, we divided ourselves into committees, and continued
attempting to establish voting and other processes. The closed admin
list dissolved, and long-term planning moved to newer openly-archived
list called "theforum." Seeking order, we hoped to solve some of the
boundary and accountability issues that had led to the fracturing of the
community. Yet the quest for process and organization itself became
frustrating to many, because it often seemed like the majority of our
energy was being spent on process and power issues rather than on
achievement and moving forward as a group. At the same time, world
events from the dot com crash to 9/11 to the 2003 US-led invasion of
Iraq fueled emotional responses to exisiting tensions. Once thriving,
thechat erupted in flames, then slowed down considerably.
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
2003-2005 : SEEKING BALANCE
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
By 2003, evolt.org had over 3,000 members subscribed to thelist. We
continued to maintain the browser archive, and a community web resource
directory, and for the past year and a half, had been offering all our
members free web hosting as well. We still had essentially no budget,
though by this point fundraising had become a serious focus. In 2003
evolt.org stopped offering free webhosting, and we finally allowed some
google ads to be placed on our browser archive in order to help pay for
our hosting costs.
Eventually most of the committees and smaller lists were shut down, and
their duties folded back into theforum. We continued publishing
articles, and hosting our main lists, but discontinued the directory.
Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly clear that evolt.org's custom
Cold Fusion-based CMS was vulnerable to the bus scenario. By 2004 we
were down to one active CMS developer/webhost (lists.evolt.org at the
time, was hosted the UK). As always, the heavy amount of responsibility
taken on by a single person became a concern to others in the
organization. The group voted to move out of our custom CMS and into an
established open-source CMS, Drupal. We found low-cost dedicated hosting
at The Planet, and mirrors helped relieve some of the bandwidth pressure
on the browser archive. The new Drupal-driven site went live in 2005.
We had finally managed to decentralize evolt.org to the point that it
could survive the sudden departure of any one of its caretakers.
Ironically, the rocky road to that place resulted in the loss of some
high-contributing admins.
As for governing structure, evolt.org ultimately settled on an ad hoc
consensus process. One of us will propose an idea to theforum, ask if
there are objections, and wait a few days for responses. If there are no
objections, one assumes consensus and moves forward. If there are
objections, we try to talk through them, rather than fight. Also, we
are no longer concerned with formalizing a hierarchy.
Those who have lasted through the years have progressed a great deal in
their ability to work together. While we still face communication
challenges, we are more familiar with the territory now.
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
2006-2008 : INERTIA
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
As evolt.org admin has worked to put our organization in order, web
progress has lagged. The patched-together 2005 design was intended to be
temporary, but has yet to be replaced. In 2006 there was a failed
movement toward redesign, and by 2008 our article submissions and web
traffic had dropped noticeably. Activity on thelist remained steady, but
at a lower volume than in years past.
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
2008 AND : OUR FUTURE
+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
As we move forward into our tenth year, a few large projects lie before
us. We are taking a step back, looking at how we are serving our
community, and asking how we can do better. To that end we are surveying
our community for input. In addition, we continue to work on improving
our browser archive by adding more mirrors, and hopefully also adding
more information about some of our unique and interesting browsers.
Finally, we are taking steps toward truly internationalizing our site,
so that we have the foundation on which to build localized versions of
evolt.org, a vision we've had, but kept on the backburner, since 2001.
Though the journey has been far from smooth, we've managed to maintain
the integrity of our organization, our community, our purpose, and our
archives. We continue to welcome new members who want to contribute
their talents and energy to the community, while learning new skills
along the way. Like the internet itself, evolt.org is made of
"imperfect, unreliable parts, connected together to create the most
reliable thing we have."
Here's to a harmonious, productive, and successful next ten years.
--------[ EOF