Saturday, January 14, 2006

Getting GM up and fighting


Gregg Bresner has some ideas for the American automotive industry: how it can both recover from its catastrophic slide and help fight the war on terror.

Friday, January 13, 2006

Google to control all TV Advertising?


Fascinating speculation by Robert X. Cringely on the future of Google in the world of IPTV. The telcos and cable companies are probably quiverying in fear contemplating a world where Google controls all marketing data. And for good reason. Just ignore the yelling (capital letters). It's still worth a long, careful read.

VIRTUALLY EVERY TV AD IS WASTED ON PEOPLE WHO AREN'T REAL PROSPECTS...

Google is going to let the telco and cable companies burn their capital building out IP-TV, knowing that Google will still be the only game in town for the crux of the whole thing: the ability to show every viewer the specific ads that companies will pay the most to show him at that specific moment. What Google wants to do with these trailers is SERVE EVERY TV COMMERCIAL ON THE PLANET because only they will be able to do it efficiently. Only they will have the database that converts those IP addresses into sales leads...

...You're puttering in your home office around 6pm when you hear your wife call out from the living room where she's watching CNN. She says she'd rather not cook tonight -- how about going out for Italian and a movie? You Google movie showtimes and restaurants, print out a list of what's playing, and a map to Antonio's, and walk out into the living room just as Wolf Blitzer is throwing to commercial...

Guess what the commercials are? Yep -- nothing but movie and local restaurant ads, with special "code words" to give at the box office and restaurant for steep discounts, good that night only. And it seems a new Italian place just opened up in town, and their commercial is hammering away at a recent review they got that said that they're so much better than that cheesy Antonio's dump it's not even funny. And it's half-off for new customers, tonight only!

...Google will cut a deal with every network to customize their ad spots for every viewer. For a small cut of their ad revenues, Google will handle all customization costs, hardware and software. The networks will all go along because the customized ads will be so much more profitable that it would make no sense for any network to refuse.


In a similar vein, check out ordering pizza in the year 2010. Funny and terrifying.

Introduction to Reverse Engineering Software

Mike Perry and Nasko Oskov have published on online book on reverse engineering. If you've ever wondered how existing programs are analyzed (e.g., one software vendor checking out another's algorithms by analyzing the binaries), this is a good place to start.

Note that in some venues, the act of reverse-engineering may be illegal (see DMCA).

read more | digg story

Thursday, January 12, 2006

Funny and scary: Ordering pizza in 2010

Just check it out.

read more | digg story

Hundreds of Interesting Google Maps Locations


If you've ever wondered what Niagara Falls, Neverland Ranch, and the St. Louis Arch look like from space, wonder no more. For your exclusive viewing pleasure, i-hacked has assembled a list of Hundreds of Interesting Google Maps Locations. And, no, you can't see Michael Jackson from space.

Oh, the humanity


The indispensible James Taranto notes that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is going broke:

"The [PA], the largest employer in the territories, is facing a fiscal crisis that could result, as early as next month, in it being unable to pay the salaries of its 130,000-plus officials and security staff, Nigel Roberts, the World Bank's man in the West Bank and Gaza Strip," tells Ha'aretz:

The five years he has spent in the World Bank's offices in the A-Ram neighborhood, on the northern border of Jerusalem, have been the worst years for the Palestinians and their Israeli neighbors since the occupation. Roberts warns that if all of the parties involved do not act more courageously, the worst of all may be yet to come. He says he is returning to the World Bank's headquarters in Washington, D.C. with major concerns.

To put it simply: The PA is on the verge of functional bankruptcy.


So an organization whose leaders are devoted to feathering their own nests and to committing violence against the only country in the region that has a functioning economy is in bad financial shape. Imagine that.

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

H&R Block Direct Mail: Oops!


There are reports that H&R Block inadvertently (or, perhaps, vertently -- is that a word?) released customer social-security numbers on direct-mail address labels:

For a small group of former clients, the company inadvertently included some personal information in the mailing label. Embedded within the more than 40-character source code were the nine digits of the recipient’s Social Security Number (SSN)...


I may be just a simple blogger, but that doesn't sound so good.

H&R Block embeds SSNs in mailing labels

Hilarious Hijinks at the Alito Hearing


It's Schumer versus Alito, as annotated by Captain Ed (hat tip: PoliPundit):

After holding up his Robert Byrd™ mini-Constitution, Schumer demanded several times whether he still believes as he wrote in his 1985 memo that he doesn’t think abortion has Constitutional protection. Alito demurred each time, saying that he would have to weigh each case in light of its facts and its reliance on precedence. Like the bad lawyer he has proven himself to be, Schumer asked one question too many:

Q: Does the Constitution protect free speech?

A: Yes, Senator, the First Amendment protects free speech.

Q. Well, why can you give me a straight answer on that issue but not give me a straight answer on abortion?

A. Because the text of the Constitution explicitly includes the term “free speech".

Case closed. It’s like watching the Washington Generals play the Harlem Globetrotters.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

The "Exploding Car" Phishing scam


Photo
Phishing email as seen in Gmail (image courtesy BadBlue)

The image at right illustrates a relatively new type of phishing scam that's making the rounds. What ever you do, don't try and click on the hyperlink (well, okay, you can click on the one pictured at right -- it's harmless -- but don't try to click on a real link).

Trying to display that image, tempting though it may be ("hey, Clem, it's a splodin' car!"), may install a malicious trojan on your machine. And we don't want that, do we?

So: how can simply displaying a picture cause such catastrophic damage? Typically, vulnerabilities in the rendering algorithms are at fault. For example, Trojan.Moo is malware that exploits Microsoft's GDI+ library (and, specifically, its JPEG renderer) to wedge an executable payload onto a target PC.

It's fascinating to watch reports of how these vulnerabilities get discovered and then increasingly exploited. Trojan.Moo had a typical genesis:

First, someone determined that a corrupted JPEG image could cause an application to crash. That turned into a denial-of-service exploit.

Next, someone else was able to kick off a local command shell to execute some pre-canned commands. No remote access was present, however.

The third generation expanded the hack: just hours after the prior version was released, another person claimed that they gotten TCP/IP access through the command-shell for the purpose of remote access.

The final generation went whole-hog: reports indicate that when GDI+ attempts to render the JPEG , it first connects to a malicious external FTP site. It then downloads a 2MB payload and installs a complete Trojan service. In addition, it installs radmin.com, which could permit a remote user to take control of the machine (e.g., think a malicious version of VNC or Terminal Services). Reportedly, the trojan also downloads a suite of hacker tools including netcat, nmap, etc.

The recently disclosed Microsoft WMF bugs are another example of parsing and rendering algorithms gone wild. These vulnerabilities manifest themselves in particularly vicious "zero-day" exploits: hackers can attack defenseless users, who have no patches or virus definitions.

So... word to the wise. Don't bother clicking on fun-looking links from unknown sources. That is, not unless you really want some cybercrook in a foreign land watching you logon to your brokerage and banking services.

The E-Bomb: Weapon of Electrical Mass Destruction


The Maxwell Airforce Base website has a fascinating -- and somewhat terrifying -- description of an Electromagnetic Bomb (or "E-Bomb"). What's an E-Bomb?

E-Bombs can, over a wide area, destroy all unshielded electrical and electronic equipment; computers, radios, and radar receivers are particularly vulnerable. This equipment, if not suitable hardened against electromagnetism, can be "electrically destroyed."

Electromagnetic weapons... open up less conventional alternatives for the conduct of a strategic campaign, which derive from their ability to inflict significant material damage without inflicting visible collateral damage and loss of life. Western governments have been traditionally reluctant to commit to strategic campaigns, as the expectation of a lengthy and costly battle, with mass media coverage of its highly visible results, will quickly produce domestic political pressure to cease the conflict.

An alternative is a Strategy of Graduated Response (SGR). In this strategy, an opponent who threatens escalation to a full scale war is preemptively attacked with electromagnetic weapons, to gain command of the electromagnetic spectrum and command of the air. Selective attacks with electromagnetic weapons may then be applied against chosen strategic targets, to force concession. Should these fail to produce results, more targets may be disabled by electromagnetic attack. Escalation would be sustained and graduated, to produce steadily increasing pressure to concede the dispute. Air and sea blockade are complementary means via which pressure may be applied...

...Another situation where electromagnetic bombs may find useful application is in dealing with governments which actively implement a policy of state sponsored terrorism or info-terrorism, or alternately choose to conduct a sustained low intensity land warfare campaign...

...high value targets such as R&D and production sites for Weapons of Mass Destruction (nuclear, biological, chemical) and many vital economic sites, such as petrochemical production facilities, are critically dependent upon high technology electronic equipment. The proliferation of WMD into developing nations has been greatly assisted by the availability of high quality test and measurement equipment commercially available from First World nations, as well as modern electronic process control equipment. Selectively destroying such equipment can not only paralyse R&D effort, but also significantly impair revenue generating production effort. A Middle Eastern nation sponsoring terrorism will use oil revenue to support such activity. Crippling its primary source of revenue without widespread environmental pollution may be an effective and politically acceptable punitive measure....


Read: The Electromagnetic Bomb - a Weapon of Electrical Mass Destruction and More on how E-Bombs Work.

Monday, January 09, 2006

A peek into movie theater economics


I can't say I've ever been happy paying the hucksters at our local movie theater for any of their outlandishly priced food and beverage items. Four bucks for a large diet coke? Five bucks for a big bucket of popcorn (hold the artificial, butter-flavored grease, please...)?

Am I just cheap... or crazy-like-a-fox thrifty?

For the answer to that... and other compelling questions, check out Ars Technica's rectascopic peek into movie theater economics.

77 million baby boomers


Robert J. Samuelson, writing in the Washington Post, warns of the impending disaster represented by the suite of current U.S. entitlement programs. His op-ed, entitled "Our Entitlement Paralysis," is a must-read.

...By 2030, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid may cost 15 percent of national income -- almost double their level in 2000 and equal to 75 percent of today's federal budget. Left alone, these programs would require massive tax increases, cause immense deficits or crowd out other important government programs. We also know of at least partial solutions: curb costs by slowly raising eligibility ages and cutting benefits for wealthier recipients.

Still, we fiddle...


And there's plenty of blame to go 'round:

The responsibility for this failure is widespread: among liberals, who like massive government programs; among conservatives, who fantasize about "free market" alternatives to Social Security and Medicare; among pundits and "experts," who speak of the "entitlement crisis" in meaningless generalities or incomprehensible technicalities...


Still, it would be nice to have an opposition party capable of rational problem-solving, rather than irrational obstructionism. One can dare to dream, after all.

Travels with Cheney


The Weekly Standard's Steve Hayes published a lengthy article this week describing his journeys with Dick Cheney (hat tip: PowerLine) during recent tours of Iraq, Afhanistan, and Pakistan. It includes Cheney's vehement denunciation of the Mediacrats -- without naming names -- and their inherent inability to take this war seriously:

There's a temptation for people to sit around and say, well, gee, [9/11] was just a one-off affair, they didn't really mean it. Bottom line is, we've been very active and very aggressive defending the nation and using the tools at our disposal to do that. That ranges from everything to going into Afghanistan and closing down the terrorist camps, rounding up al Qaeda wherever we can find them in the world, to an active robust intelligence program, putting out rewards, the capture of bad guys, and the Patriot Act...Either we're serious about fighting the war on terror or we're not. Either we believe that there are individuals out there doing everything they can to try to launch more attacks, to try to get ever deadlier weapons to use against [us], or we don't. The president and I believe very deeply that there's a hell of a threat, that it's there for anybody who wants to look at it. And that our obligation and responsibility, given our job, is to do everything in our power to defeat the terrorists. And that's exactly what we're doing.


All the more reason that the mediacrats must be kept from the levers of governmental power. They have seen the classified intelligence left unrevealed to the general public. They have seen the reports that represent "a hell of a threat." Yet they continue their partisan backbiting and chicanery, risking everything this country holds dear in a series of constipated attempts to regain political power.

Their unseriousness about the war is represented by Jay Rockefeller, who would rather secrete a note in a safe rather than confront the Attorney General regarding NSA international wiretaps. Or Harry Reid, who gloats that the Democrats have "killed" the Patriot Act. Or Howard Dean, who actively roots against victory in Iraq.

If the Democrats were constructive in their opposition - offering plans and methods for success (on Medicare, Social Security, the War on Terror, anything!) rather than obstructionism, they'd have a heck of a lot better shot in 2006. Today, however, they're the party that stands for one thing: hatred of Bush. And that's not enough to win elections.

Sunday, January 08, 2006

Make Your Own Flame Thrower

Enough of those feminine home-improvement projects! This inventor is either a candidate for an early death -- courtesy of a Darwin Award-winning accident -- or a freaking genius.


read more | digg story

Saturday, January 07, 2006

The Future of News? Not Quite Yet.


The best example of a Web 2.0 technology news and discussion site is, without question, Digg. The power of Digg -- and the reason it has quickly supplanted Slashdot for many -- is its user-focused approach. Users submit content and their votes promote stories to the "front page." There's no big-brother editors to worry about... the collective audience is the editing mechanism.

For some time, other sites have tried to translate the same concept to general news. The idea being, of course, that a powerful, democratic medium might just be able to replace The New York Times or Fox News (at least online).

NowPublic was one of the first to attempt the feat (unsuccessfully, in my mind, because of its somewhat ugly and cluttered interface - if a story has no image associated with it, hey, don't paint a blank box on the page!). Now SolutionWatch has given us a preview of NewsVine, which uses "Web 2.0" technologies in a manner similar to Digg.

A simple example of Web 2.0 (also known as AJaX and, yes, I despise both terms) is the link that a user clicks on to "digg" a story. The page doesn't refresh when this occurs... just the vote-count image changes using a brief, neat animation.

Anyhow, here's the central problem that these news sites will encounter...

Many news stories have a political "spin" to them. Most would agree that the NY Times generally spins its coverage to the left. Likewise, consensus would indicate Fox News generally spins coverage to the right.

My sister and her family (I don't want to call them left-wing moonbats, but...) wouldn't watch Fox News on a bet. I, on the other hand, know every tie Bill O'Reilly (famed host of Fox's O'Reilly Factor) owns.

Unless this site elegantly handles the war between left- and right-leaning users, they’ll completely lose one side or the other. Thus, half of its potential audience will feel disenfranchised and disappear right off the bat.

A potential solution might be to require users to "register" as right, left, or centrist. The pages would therefore, by default, show the right-side of the news or the left-side, depending upon the user. Votes would be counted accordingly. Of course, any user could switch views to see what the "other side" looks like.

But unless NewsVine and its competitors handle this problem, my take is that it won't come close to living up to its potential.

Friday, January 06, 2006

Google: Using open source in mission critical applications

Sleepycat just posted a case study on how Google uses the Berkeley DB High Availability (HA) database engine for the storage and retrieval of user data and for replication for Google accounts. It's a great success story for open source (and Sleepycat) when the world's premier online service uses it.

read more | digg story

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Making Phishers Solve the Captcha Problem (Updated)



Excel web sharing - spreadsheet collaboration over the Internet made easy with BadBlueThe more I read about Bank of America's solution to the phishing problem, the more I believe it susceptible to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. The Wall Street Journal described BofA's system, called SiteKey (or PassMark), a few months ago in some detail. The BofA site describes it as well.

As I understand it, if you haven't signed into SiteKey before, you will get a randomly selected challenge question. Once you've answered the challenge successfully, a secure cookie is deposited on your PC. Subsequent authentications from that PC will force you to view a pre-selected image that will confirm you're signing into Bank of America, rather than a spammer's zombie machine in Taiwan.

Sidebar: isn't it odd that when you go the Bank of America site, you immediately note that the page is presented in cleartext ("http://"), not SSL ("https://). The first step to combat phishers is to provide an SSL connection... first time, every time. Customers need to get used to expecting a secure connection on every BofA page.

Yes, their sign-in operation itself is secure. I just think it a tad bizarre that every page isn't secure as well. Just for the customer's peace of mind.


As far as I can tell, there's no way for SiteKey to distinguish a malicious, zombie PC from a user's virgin computer. The zombie PC could present a false BofA store-front to the victim and proxy login information from the user to the bank and any resulting pages and images from the bank to the victim. This would be a classic Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack and SiteKey does not appear to be a valid defense against this sort of assault.

Step 4 of the BofA SiteKey page even states the following:

If we don't recognize your computer:
We will ask you one of your secret SiteKey Confirmation Questions.

After you answer your question correctly, we will show you your SiteKey.


Sounds like it's completely susceptible to a man-in-the-middle: the classic phisher's false store-front. Users flush their caches and/or lose their cookies all the time. A user therefore wouldn't be at all surprised to answer their confirmation questions. That's why a MITM attack against SiteKey is so logical. After reading this description, I believe banks have to make it much, much tougher on the false-storefront operators.

I believe you've got to make phishers solve the captcha problem.

Photo
A Blogger Captcha

You know captchas: they're the odd-looking images representing stretched or melted alphanumeric text that can (presumably) be read by humans, but not malicious bots.

The example at right is the kind of captcha that Google's Blogger service employs. Blogging and eail services require captchas in order to prevent spambots from signing up for their free services for mass-advertising and mass-emailing campaigns.

The challenge for systems like SiteKey is to create a captcha-like problem for phishers. I think I have the seeds of just such a solution. The idea is to make a man-in-the-middle attack bloody difficult by requiring a graphical blending operation that could only be performed by a human. And, even then, only using time-consuming photo editing software.

Educating Users

But the first order of business is education. A financial institution must educate its users to expect an "anti-fraud" checklist on the sign-in page. This checklist can be used by the customer to determine whether a bank site is the real thing... or a false phisher's storefront. The education step can be achieved through a snail-mail campaign, ATM marketing literature, and similar public relations efforts. Once customers expect the anti-fraud checklist, the next action in the campaign is to:

Squeeze the man-in-the-middle

The concept is simple. Force the man-in-the-middle (MITM) to present information specific to both the client and the server. The information must be blended -- in an image (JPG or GIF) -- using a consistent appearance for it to appear legitimate. After the user has entered a sign-in name, the anti-fraud checklist page depicted above, should appear.

The key element of the page is the GIF or JPEG image, dynamically created like a captcha, which would consist of three checklist items depicted at the top of this article.

Photo
The MITM gets squeezed by changing fonts

Why is this checklist so difficult for a MITM to present?

Checklist item #2

In a normal situation (with no MITM involved), the bank's server should be able to deduce the client's general location through IP-address-to-location mapping like that provided by Geobytes.

If the MITM is screen-scraping item #2, it will have the location of the phisher's MITM machine, not the client's real PC. For the MITM to present the correct location data, it will have to use an IP-address-to-geographic-location mapping algorithm and deduce the real user's location on its own. It must then render that -- with the server-side information provided by the financial institution -- using a consistent typeface, background color, and blending pattern.

Checklist item #3

The server has non-sensitive information about the customer (e.g., a check number that recently cleared, the last four digits of the customer's home phone-number, the customer's ZIP code, etc.) that can be presented on the page. This is called a "shared secret" that only the customer and the bank should know.

And for the MITM to retrieve the shared secret, it will have to screen-scrape checklist item #3 from the image the bank has presented. It must now attempt to merge it with checklist item #2, which it must generate on its own...

Captcha problem

Once the MITM has generated the real customer's location (item #2 - remember, it can't screen-scrape item #2!) and then screen-scraped the bank's shared secret (the item #3 part of the image), it must now blend the information graphically so that it all looks legitimate. That's the captcha.

Each time the bank site appears, its fonts are randomly changed, the font sizes are changed, the colors and patterns are changed... Everything that the real financial institution would use to present the checklist is generated randomly, but entirely consistently. A MITM attempting to proxy the information from the server -- and generate the client's location properly -- must somehow merge that information in a graphic that looks consistent to the end-user.

Without some serious artificial intelligence, the MITM is trapped having to solve a classic captcha-style problem. And I, for one, thinks that's a hard row to hoe for the phishers.
 

An Unremarkable Declaration of War, Part III


The Guardian, a leading British newspaper, was given a top secret, 55-page intelligence assessment dated July 1 2005 that describes Iran's quest for nuclear weapons (hat tip: Hugh Hewitt). The report was gleaned from British, French, German, and Belgian intelligence agencies and was used to brief the heads of European governments on the dangers represented by the Mullahs.

The Iranian government has been successfully scouring Europe for the sophisticated equipment needed to develop a nuclear bomb, according to the latest western intelligence assessment of the country's weapons programmes.

Scientists in Tehran are also shopping for parts for a ballistic missile capable of reaching Europe, with "import requests and acquisitions ... registered almost daily", the report seen by the Guardian concludes.


Let's do the math: Nuclear weapons. Long-range missiles. Radical leadership that has promised to create a world without the US, Britain and Israel. Leadership that further believes the end of the world is coming within the next two years.

Perhaps the reports from Germany's Der Spiegel do have merit (though it would seem operational security would be a heck of a lot better than this). In their article entitled, "Is Washington Planning a Military Strike?", reporters note:

[A] string of visits by high-profile US politicians to Turkey and surrounding reports are drawing new attention to the issue. In recent weeks, the number of American and NATO security officials heading to Ankara has increased dramatically. Within a matter of only days, the FBI chief, then the CIA chief and, most recently, NATO General Secretary Jaap De Hoop Scheffer visited the Turkish capital. During her visit to Europe earlier this month, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice also traveled to Turkey after a stopover in Berlin.


Whether it's the US, Britain or Israel, one can only hope that the Mullahs' desires for Armageddon are quashed soon. Very, very soon.

Click here for Part I of An Unremarkable Declaration of War

Click here for Part II of An Unremarkable Declaration of War

Iraq and Al Qaeda - Details begin to Emerge


Newsweek -- certainly no ally of the Bush administration -- just posted slides from a classified 2002 Pentagon briefing that outlined Iraq's cooperation with Al Qaeda in the years prior to 9/11. Though plenty of sections are redacted, note the key findings:

  • More than a decade of numerous contacts

  • Multiple areas of cooperation

  • Shared anti-US goals and common bellicose rhetoric - unique in calling for killing of Americans and praising 9/11

  • Shared interest and pursuit of WMD

  • Some indications of possible Iraqi coordination with Al Qaida specifically related to 9/11

  • Relationship would be compartmented by both sides; closely guarded secret; indications of excellent operational security by both parties


  • Read the whole thing™. Next thing you know, we'll find out Iraq had WMDs.

    Shhh... no one tell Pelosi, Kennedy or Schumer.

    Wednesday, January 04, 2006

    The Dilemma of the 9/11 Conspiracists


    It's amazing to me that a few otherwise reasonable people still believe that 9/11 was a grand plot by the U.S. Government. According to this alternate universe club, 9/11 was intentionally fomented by the U.S. to incite a war for the Saudis or to boost Halliburton's stock price, take your pick.

    Let's not mention the first World Trade Center attack, Bali, Beslan, London, Madrid or any of the other venues of extremist attacks.

    Here's the real dilemma for the 9/11 conspiracists. They're primarily the same Left-bank eccentrics who think George W. Bush can barely tie his own shoes. Yet they've also depicted him as Grand Wizard of a neocon cabal, which was capable of orchestrating the greatest, most complicated coverup in history. A 9/11 conspiracy would make the grassy knoll version of the Kennedy assassination look like an impromptu puppet show run by nine year-olds.

    Now, recalibrate this with President Clinton, depicted as infinitely brighter than W, who was unable to keep his dalliances with an intern off the front pages.

    Not to worry: The engineers at Popular Mechanics have spent a great deal of time debunking all of the 9/11 myths:

    To investigate 16 of the most prevalent claims made by conspiracy theorists, POPULAR MECHANICS assembled a team of nine researchers and reporters who, together with PM editors, consulted more than 70 professionals in fields that form the core content of this magazine, including aviation, engineering and the military.

    In the end, we were able to debunk each of these assertions with hard evidence and a healthy dose of common sense. We learned that a few theories are based on something as innocent as a reporting error on that chaotic day. Others are the byproducts of cynical imaginations that aim to inject suspicion and animosity into public debate. Only by confronting such poisonous claims with irrefutable facts can we understand what really happened on a day that is forever seared into world history...