HUPOMNEMATA

A text from Wired magazine

Several portaits of virus writers(from the basement hacker type to the scientific researcher on AI or suit and tie entrepreneur)

by Julian Dibbell

“One computer virus writer in his early 20s lives on unemployment checks in a white, working-class exurb of New York City. He tends to spend a fair amount of his leisure time at the local videogame arcade playing Mortal Kombat II, and would prefer that you didn’t know his real name. But don’t let the slacker r/sum/ fool you: the only credential this expert needs is the pseudonym he goes by in the computer underground: Hellraiser.

Hellraiser is the founding member of the world-renowned virus-writers’ group Phalcon/Skism. He is also creator of 40Hex, an electronic zine whose lucid programming tips, hair-raising samples of ready-to-run viral code, and trash-talking scene reports have done more to inspire the creation of viruses in this country than just about anything since Robert Morris Jr.’s spectacularly malfunctional worm nearly brought down the Internet.
And as if all this weren’t enough, Hellraiser also comes equipped with the one accessory no self-respecting expert in this cantankerous field can do without – his very own pet definition of computer viruses. Unlike most such definitions, Hellraiser’s is neither very technical nor very polemical, and he doesn’t go out of his way to make it known. “Sure,” he’ll say, with a casual shrug, as if tossing you the most obvious fact in the world: “Viruses are the electronic form of graffiti.”

Which would probably seem obvious to you too, if you had Hellraiser’s personal history. For once upon his teenage prime, Hellraiser was also a hands-on expert in the more traditional forms of graffiti perfected by New York City youth in the 1980s. Going by the handle of Skism, he roamed the city streets and train yards with a can of spray paint at the ready and a Bronx-bred crew of fellow “writers” at his side, searching out the sweet spots in the transit system that would give his tag maximum exposure – the subway cars that carried his identity over the rails, the truck trailers that hauled it up and down the avenues, and the overpasses that announced it to the flow of travelers circulating underneath.

In other words, by the time Hellraiser went off to college and developed a serious interest in computers, he was already quite cozy with the notion of infiltrating other people’s technology to spread a little of himself as far and wide as possible. So when he discovered one day that his PC had come down with a nasty little digital infection, his first thought was not, as is often customary, to curse the “deviant hackers,” “sociopaths,” and “assholes” who had written the program, but to marvel at the possibilities this new infiltration technique had opened up. Street graffiti’s ability to scatter tokens of one’s identity across the landscape of an entire metropolis looked provincial in comparison. “With viruses,” Hellraiser remembers thinking, “you could get your name around the world.”

read on:
viruses are good for you …

We still have not seen the Matrix. But even The Register’s Security Focus journalist, Kevin Poulsen, seems to give credit to Trinity’s talent…

“A scene about two thirds of the way through the film finds Carrie-Anne Moss’s leather-clad superhacker setting her sights on a power grid computer, for plot reasons better left unrevealed.

But at exactly the point where audiences would normally be treated to a brightly-colored graphical cartoon of a computer intrusion, ala the 2001 Travolta vehicle Swordfish, or cheer as the protagonist skillfully summons a Web browser and fights valiantly through “404 Errors,” like the malnourished cyberpunk in this year’s “The Core,” something completely different happens: Trinity runs “Nmap.”

Probably the most widely-used freeware hacking tool, the real-life Nmap is a sophisticated port scanner that sends packets to a machine — or a network of machines — in an attempt to determine what services are running. An Nmap port scan is a common prelude to an intrusion attempt — a way of casing the joint, to find out if any vulnerable service are running.

That’s exactly how the fictional Trinity uses it. In a sequence that flashes on screen for a few scant seconds, the green phosphor text of Trinity’s computer clearly shows Nmap being run against the IP address 10.2.2.2, and finding an open port number 22, correctly identified as the SSH service used to log into computers remotely. ”

more on Trinity

Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling

The full book is online as a “literary freeware”.

“Crashing the System” was no longer “unprecedented” by late 1991. On the contrary, it no longer even seemed an oddity. By 1991, it was clear that all the policemen in the world could no longer “protect” the phone system from crashes. By far the worst crashes the system had ever had, had been inflicted, by the system, upon itself. And this time nobody was making cocksure statements that this was an anomaly, something that would never happen again. By 1991 the System’s defenders had met their nebulous Enemy, and the Enemy was – the System.

read on line

a nettime post from Bruce Sterling

Special Dispatch Series – No. 497
May 1, 2003 No.497
Nuclear Scientists in Iraq: Citizens Stole Uranium and Other Dangerous
Materials

The Qatari television station Al-Jazeera recently interviewed two Iraqi
scientists employed by Iraq’s Nuclear Energy Authority – Dr. Hamid
Al-Bahali, an expert in nuclear engineering and a graduate of the Moscow
Institute of Nuclear Engineering, and Dr. Muhammad Zeidan, a biology expert
and a graduate of Damascus and Baghdad Universities. The scientists
discussed the looting of the Nuclear Authority after the war. The following
are excerpts from the interview:

Dr. Al-Bahli: “I have been working at the Nuclear Authority since 1968, when
the doors opened to the use of atomic [energy] for peaceful purposes in
Iraq. We activated the first atomic reactor in Iraq in 1968, and within four
days we transferred radioactive isotopes to hospitals to treat various
illnesses. Since then, and up to 1990, we continued this type of work which
was absolutely for peaceful and humanitarian purposes…”

“As for nuclear weapons, Al-Tawitha, the main area that we will be talking
about, is free of weapons of mass destruction and as far as I know, nothing
was done there in this respect…”

“What happened in Iraq did not happen before anywhere else in the whole
world, and I hope will never happen again; there was anarchy. After hearing
that radioactive components were stolen, the employees of the Nuclear
Authority started informing people that the materials that were stolen were
indeed radioactive and should be returned. A person who has dirty
radioactive components is in danger. How is he going to behave? He may
behave in a way that would harm Iraq’s ecology and even [cause harm] outside
Iraq…”

“Tons of uranium known as yellow cakes were stored in barrels. This was a
phase in the production of uranium from crude components. There were also
other by-products from processing these materials. There were tens of tons
of radioactive waste. They were stored in barrels and their radioactivity
was not high as long as they were under supervision.”

“When order was disrupted, simple citizens – sorry to say – did not have
containers to store drinking water, so they stole those barrels, each one
containing 400 kilos of radioactive uranium. Some of them dumped the powder
on the ground in very large quantities, and others took the contaminated
barrels to their homes, and the barrels appeared in various areas. They
stored water in them, and had every intention of drinking from them or
[using] the barrels to sell milk.”
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Privatisation and ownership are key issues in the book, too?

Yes. I also postulate what is already happening: public space has been more or less given up for lost. Security is now a matter of gated communities. Instead of having people living in one place and commuting, which has now become too unsafe, in the book they’ve got the mall within the walls, like castles. Corporations want to prevent knowledge theft and raiding, because everything is now completely commercialised. That means the profit motive is the only motive. There is no more pure science, but if you’ve looked at a university recently you know that the people who get the grants are the people that large corporations think might be doing something useful for them. What you have mostly is people thieving from graduate students, as it were. The students do the work, the guy puts his name on it and collects the rewards, but not in my book. Things are better in some respects: if the students invent something, they get to collect on it, which makes them very inventive.

read the interview

hello Pierre,

Happy birthday
ceci est l entry body
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