Decius wrote:

The U.S. military’s new Cyber Command is headquartered at Ft. Meade, Maryland, one of the military’s most secretive and secure facilities. Its mission is largely opaque, even inside the armed forces. But the there’s another mystery surrounding the emerging unit. It’s embedded in the Cyber Command logo.

On the logo’s inner gold ring is a code: 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a

hmmm 32 hexadecimal digits. MD5? Perhaps of the name + a salt, or their mission statement?

Whatever it is, perhaps WW knows ;-)

RE: Crack the Code in Cyber Command’s Logo | Danger Room | Wired.com

New Alkaline Trio album out. Yes, it is excellent.

Wikileaks, the controversial whistleblowing site that exposes secrets of governments and corporations, bootstrapped itself with a cache of documents obtained through an internet eavesdropping operation by one of its activists, according to a new profile of the organization’s founder.

... ... HOLY SHIT!

Sniffing TOR exit nodes is one of those things that everyone kind of knows is probagbly happening, maybe, somewhere, but no one really talks about it.

I'm not sure what I find more interesting: The fact that the "first big leak" Wikileaks got was from someone (possibly illegally) sniffing an exit node, or that they caught Chinese hackers using TOR to move around stolen data.

The New Yorker article did not indicate whether WikiLeaks continues to intercept data from the Tor network. Assange did not immediately return a call for comment from Threat Level.

haha. Of course they didn't.

Wikileaks Was Launched With Documents Intercepted From Tor | Threat Level | Wired.com

Of course, we know why he’s really there. He’s really there so that if the bridge is destroyed by terrorists, the authorities can appear on the television news and say they had taken all possible precautions. Plus, if you employ a security guard, then I should imagine that your insurance premiums are going to be significantly lower.

Office Security Guards == Security Theater.

The office sure looks safe with Wheezy and Dozy on the door

The IBM researcher, Tom Cross, notified Cisco of the issues back in December, and recommends revisions to the standard that will ensure that it is more secure by default. That might be helpful, but it still wouldn't deal with the problems posed by unpatched systems—Cross himself apparently recognizes that network administrators can be hesitant to risk the disruption of service that may come with updating major pieces of equipment.

Tom is on Ars Technica Today. Go Tom!

Cisco's wiretapping system open to exploit, says researcher

Why is it that Crisis Camps seem to smack of pretentiousness? "Look at me, I care about people because I used my Mac to build a python shim to a JSON API."

-These people don't have food or water.
-They make in a year what you spend on soy lattes a week.
-Python is something that eats their children

Stop thinking you know what these NGOs need (Surprise! It's not a technical solution!) Instead give them money so they can get what they know they need.

The pretentiousness comes in with the blatant "look at me doing this thing." Liveblogging and photos and the what not. If you spent 1/2 the time doing something meaningful that you spend documenting that you are doing something silly we would be in a much better place. I completely agree with Paul Carr's "Look at me looking at this" criticism.

I have a friend from college named Oscar. Oscar has, for the last 5 years, (possibly more) spent Thanksgiving and Christmas day working in homeless shelters. I have known Oscar for 10 years and he has never even alluded to this charity work. The only way I know about it is that his mom slipped up once in front of me and said something about if he'd be able to leave the shelter in time to meet up with us all for a movie.

Oscar is helping people and tells no one about it. Crisis Campers are all collectively masturbating Web 2.0 nonsense to feel good about themselves and then posting, Digg-ing, tweeting their geek pornography for all the world to see.

Distasteful.

When was the last time you scheduled a meeting and invited eight people instead of the three people who really needed to be there simply because you didn't want anyone to feel left out?

HP ASC was rife with this problem.

Now, we all know that communication is very important, and that many organizational problems are caused by a failure to communicate. Most people try to solve this problem by increasing the amount of communication: cc'ing everybody on an e-mail, having long meetings and inviting the whole staff, and asking for everyone's two cents before implementing a decision.

But communications costs add up faster than you think, especially on larger teams. What used to work with three people in a garage all talking to one another about everything just doesn't work when your head count reaches 10 or 20 people. Everybody who doesn't need to be in that meeting is killing productivity. Everybody who doesn't need to read that e-mail is distracted by it. At some point, overcommunicating just isn't efficient.

Exactly.

A Little Less Conversation

How big does a vendor need to be, or how much market penetration into a country's technology, military, and defense corporations can a vendor have, before they don't get to decide the time table for fixing a security vuln?

At what point does a security hole stop being a sexy software bug and starts being a national security threat?

When did international corporations start making foreign policy decisions far louder than a Nation State?

This is a crazy time.

But many of those tourists and business travellers are likely to be unaware of the strict zero-tolerance drugs policy in the UAE.

One man has even been jailed for possession of three poppy seeds left over from a bread roll he ate at Heathrow Airport.

If suspicious of a traveller, customs officials can use high-tech equipment to uncover even the slightest trace of drugs.

Do not go to Dubai.

Briton jailed for four years in Dubai after customs find cannabis weighing less than a grain of sugar under his shoe | Mail Online

This is the most misguided, uninformed, misdirect hating-the-man fueled piece of shit I have ever had the misfortune of reading, and I usually "like this kind of literature.

"How to drop out" == crap