Dana Blankenhorn

The Real Cybersecurity Problem is Identity

The White House has endorsed a draconian “cybersecurity” plan now making its way through Congress.

It would essentially say all your clicks belong to us. Police would have carte blanche to seize domains, decrypt files, and run roughshod over citizens in the name of catching bad guys who are hiding behind proxy servers in the Ukraine or some other such place.

All this would be unnecessary if so-called Internet advocates had accepted a very basic truth that our Meat Space ancestors knew well.

Privacy and security are the same thing. Both depend on identity.

Open Source Did Not Save Microsoft From U.S.

A lot of experts are weighing in on the end of the government's anti-trust case against Microsoft, many of them saying it was open source that stayed the government's hand.

I think they're wrong.

It was the case itself that stayed Microsoft's hand.

Anyone who hasn't been under antitrust scrutiny doesn't know what it's about. The launch of a case requires the hiring of all sorts of lawyers, both inside and outside the gates, whose job it becomes to look over the shoulders of the business and say "no."

No, you can't do that. No, you can't say that. No, you can't write that.

Before Accusing Anonymous, Sony, Some Proof Please

Sony's claim that the online advocacy group Anonymous hacked its Playstation 3 network, enabling the theft of personal data from millions of users, has been laughed away by the group.

For once we didn't do it, states a blog post at Anonops, which has in the past been a reliable port into the group's actual aims and claims.The post was linked from the Anonops Twitter feed, which also called Sony incompetent.

The charge by Sony, which is based in Japan but now run by an Australian, former CBS head Howard Stringer, is made under the signature of Kazuo Hirai, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sony Computer Entertainment America. In support of testimony to a U.S. House subcommittee, it states "We discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of our Sony Online Entertainment servers named “Anonymous” with the words 'We are Legion.'"

The only other bit of "evidence" Sony offered is that, so far, no credit card transactions have been consummated with any of the compromised data. Anonymous is known for attacks with political rather than financial motives.

Since the data theft on April 26, Sony has revealed that it didn't protect user passwords with encryption, only with a simple hash. 

Here's why I believe Anonymous didn't do it, but why it's in a world of trouble nevertheless:

Soft on Crime

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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For decades Republicans have bashed Democrats with the idea that they're “soft on crime.”

It worked. America now has a bigger percentage of its people in jail, or under the direct control of courts, than any other country. We execute more people than China (far more), and our police have many tools that violate the spirit, if not the actual language, of the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th and 8^th amendments.

(NOTE: The execution numbers actually favor China, although our incarceration rates are still highest on an absolute and per-capita basis.)

Despite what anyone in the media may tell you, street crime is down.  Total crimes peaked in 1991. They're now down by nearly a third, even though we have 70 million more people, even despite the terrible economy.

The War on Street Crime has been won.

But there has been a wave of much bigger crimes throughout our society. These are crimes conducted by business, often with just a pen. The economic crash of 2008 was caused by such crimes. Everyone suffered from it – except for the criminals.

The Investment Banking Bubble

Peter Thiel is an ass. 

Like Mark Cuban, who made his money selling a bogus proposition called Broadcast.com to Yahoo during the Internet bubble, Thiel is a guy who got lucky and thus thinks this makes him both a genius and your lord. (In his case he sold as the bubble popped, something I urged at A-Clue.com even before he did it.)

Thiel's latest nonsense is that higher education is the new bubble. Which is silly. Because American college education is the world's gold standard.

It costs billions to build just one Rice or Stanford. And you can't scale it. That's why the world's elite all has one goal for their kids – to get them through an American college. The French Ecoles, Britain's elite colleges, the trial-by-examination hotspots of Germany, China and India, none provide the opportunity even a Texas A&M in Kingsville does to a Third World elitist.

Now it's true there are anomalies. The education at Harvard isn't really better than that at Rice, not really much better than at the University of Texas. What sets it apart are the fact that admission tells someone they're smart, which is a continuing boost to self-confidence, and then there are the networking opportunities. The “Old Boys” network is real, America is not really a meritocracy.

Still, the value-for-money my son is getting at Georgia State University far exceeds what he would get at Rice right now, especially if he were paying full tuition (which admittedly hardly anyone does). A B.A., by itself, isn't worth what it was 35 years ago. Now it's just the price of admission. What matters isn't where you start but where you finish. The President didn't start at Harvard. He started at Occidental College in California.

If Peter Thiel wants to see a real bubble, of course, I got one for him.

What the Sourceforge Attack Means to You

Open source has grown up.

A few years ago, when I was getting my feet wet on the open source beat, open source could claim “security through obscurity.”  Desktop Linux was a joke, many open source projects had only a few hundred or few thousand users, everyone knew the big illegal opportunities lay in compromising Microsoft software and systems.

That's not true any longer. Consider the recent directed attack against Sourceforge a wake-up call.

Now, don't get me wrong. Microsoft remains a target. “Patch Tuesday” is an important date on every sysadmin's calendar. It comes as regular as happy hour. (Call it unhappy hour.) But open source is also a rich target environment for evil-doers. For good reasons.

• There's more open source out there than ever before. Linux' market share is ginormous.
• Who needs “desktop Linux” when you have Android? Holy market share.
• Many open source sysadmins just aren't careful.

This last may be most important.

Black Duck has long been concerned with open source security. It's why they bought Spikesource  last year. The sad fact is many companies which use open source don't update their software as they should. If you're running old code, it's far more likely to be insecure, to have unpatched vulnerabilities bad guys can exploit.

And there are lots of bad guys out there.

What a Real Cyberwar Looks Like

Ever since the Web was spun people have been buzzing about the idea of "cyberwar."

I have been among them. Over the last 15 years I have tracked online battles over East Timor, over Lebanon and Israel, over China and Chechnya. Every major conflict comes with a cyber-component these days.

But most are cyber in nature. Oh noes, you can't get to a particular site. Or maybe your connection goes away for a while. Pinpricks.

Real cyberwar doesn't just take place in cyberspace. Real cyberwar takes place in meat space, and is a concentrated effort by government to enforce local law on a global scale.

When Chinese or Iranian bloggers are arrested and put in jail to rot, that's cyberwar. When it becomes a crime to pass on valuable information, or to have it on a server, that's cyberwar.

Cyberwar has come to America.

The New War on Crime

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 28 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Lately I've grown as angry as the gang at Firedoglake.

It happens whenever I turn on CNBC, or read any business newspaper. There is an assumption that the Obama Administration is "anti-business," "proven" when gazillionaires like Jaime Dimon (right) switch financial support to Republicans because of the FinReg bill.

I think most Americans believe Jaime Dimon and his Wall Street pals should be pounding rocks with Bernie Madoff, not pontificating on TV, and certainly not deciding who our leaders should be. I think most feel the same way about BP chairman Tony Heyward.

I think they're right.

Regulation is not "anti-business." Regulation is crime prevention. A properly-regulated market does not "stifle innovation." It is not "socialism." Imagine Las Vegas without casino regulation. That's today's Wall Street.

A center of the conservative ideology that has ruled this country for a generation is that a law that keeps you from destroying someone with a gun must be rigorously enforced, while one that keeps you from doing the same thing with a pen hurts the economy.

A central tenet of conservative tactics is that you attack someone at their strength, or what they think is their strength.

I think we're on to A Clue here.

Convenient Enemes

The way you push back against what seem like heavy odds is to find a convenient enemy. (The painting is called Fisherman, by Roland Heath. From his blog, with permission.)

I've been one. It's no fun being a convenient enemy. But the convenient enemy gets no sympathy, and can be used to bulldoze through what seem like impossible problems.

More important, a President can use convenient enemies to make a larger point, and win that point, so that opponents who once appeared all-powerful become amenable to compromise or can be bulldozed.

In this President's case, his two biggest problems right now involve financial reform and energy reform. He is fortunate in that history has given him two very convenient enemies, Goldman Sachs on the one hand and Don Blankenship on the other.

I'll explain.

Republicans are re-running their health care strategy with financial reform. That is they're united in opposition, not just to a specific set of proposals but to the idea that anything can be done while Democrats are in power. The same is true with climate change legislation.

With health care, the President had to compromise-and-compromise with his entire party -- even the most rigidly opposed -- in order to get a bill passed over that opposition.

This time he's going to use the convenient enemies. He's going to win through because convenient enemies work both in Congress and before voters. No one wants to stand with the convenient enemies when voters go to the polls -- you're likely to be hung alongside them.

The Robocall Campaign

Last year the election was everywhere.

Even though Georgia was considered a backwater, a reliable red state filled with Angry White Men, there was enormous excitement. Both parties worked hard, yard signs were everywhere, there were rallies and people making phone calls.

Not this year. Atlanta just had its mayoral election and no one I knew cared. It's not just that a run-off was expected. There was a total lack of yard signs, few people talked about it, and I felt undecided almost before walking into the booth.

Instead of buying TV ads or hiring people to canvass, all the campaigns this year relied on robocalls, recorded messages that seemed to come from every area code around (and some that do not exist) but were in fact tapes with happy voices telling us who they were and who they were voting for.

Which is another thing about the campaign that struck me. All the calls were upbeat, relentlessly so. I wasn't told who to vote against. I was told "I'm someone you should trust and here is who to vote for."

The result was sad because turnout was low and real issues were not discussed. Everyone was rattling about crime, but the crime rate is not that high. There have been some spectacular incidents, acts of desperation by young, bored, pathetic people. But the gangs are in the suburbs now.

The real problem with Atlanta is that we pretend to be a great city but we are in fact a small one. There are just 500,000 people here, even with gentrification. We're like Tucson or Portland, but for decades we've pretended to be Philadelphia or Chicago, because we're at the center of a metro area that has grown to 6.6 million people. The efforts of Cobb and Gwinnett Counties to wrest control of the center from Atlanta have brought them Atlanta's poor, its crime and congestion. Government leaders there ignore the rot, and fearful whites move even further-out -- to Henry County in the South, Paulding County in the northwest, Cherokee County and Forsyth County to the north. They're as ignorant as they always were, so the problems will follow them there.

Good riddance, I say.