*Well, it's a sensibility. Now it's drawing to a close. There will be a book, and I hope there aren't too many gruesome and lethal devices in the museum gift shop.
http://designandviolence.moma.org/authors/
The whole Design and Violence website
http://designandviolence.moma.org
Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus (Patrick Clair), By Lev Manovich from the Design and Violence website (link)
Patrick Clair’s motion infographic Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus thoughtfully unpacks, animates, and visualizes the inner workings of the elusive malware that has been dubbed “the first weapon made entirely of code.” Prof. Lev Manovich responds.
Digital Attack Map (Google Ideas) By Gabriella Coleman from the Design and Violence website (link)
The patterns and flows might reveal broad geopolitical realities. At this point in time, Africa is rarely the target destination for DDoS attacks. A net positive, one might think—until considering that this happy state of affairs is predicated on digital desolation, an entrenched artifact of colonial underdevelopment. Russia, North America, much of Western Europe, and China, on the other hand, are constantly assailed. We can observe that geopolitical power is a magnet for conflict.
UK government quietly rewrites hacking laws to give GCHQ immunity | Ars Technica | May 2015 (link)
The UK government has quietly passed new legislation that exempts GCHQ, police, and other intelligence officers from prosecution for hacking into computers and mobile phones. While major or controversial legislative changes usually go through normal parliamentary process (i.e. democratic debate) before being passed into law, in this case an amendment to the Computer Misuse Act was snuck in under the radar as secondary legislation. According to Privacy International, "It appears no regulators, commissioners responsible for overseeing the intelligence agencies, the Information Commissioner's Office, industry, NGOs or the public were notified or consulted about the proposed legislative changes... There was no public debate."
How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down | Quinn Norton | Wired | July 2012 (link)
The possibility that Anonymous might be telling the truth—that it couldn’t be shut down by jailing or flipping or bribing key participants—was why it became such a terrifying force to powerful institutions worldwide, from governments to corporations to nonprofits. Its wild string of brilliant hacks and protests seemed impossible in the absence of some kind of defined organization. To hear the group and its defenders talk, the leaderless nature of Anonymous makes it a mystical, almost supernatural force, impossible not just to stop but to even comprehend. Anons were, they liked to claim, united as one and divided by zero—undefined and indefinable.
Molly Sauter interviewed about her book The Coming Swarm: DDOS, Hactivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet | MIT Center for Civic Media | October 2014 (link)
In activism you talk about the ladder of engagement, which starts with signing a petition and then move toward a attending a lecture or march, and then volunteering and then traveling to participate. DDOS opens that door to online civil disobedience action with a low level of commitment and technical knowledge. And in that way it's very useful.
Hacking of MIT website marks first anniversary of Aaron Swartz's death | Technology | The Guardian | January 2014 (link)
At the time of his death, Swartz was facing trial over charges of hacking arising from the downloading of millions of documents from the online research group JSTOR. He faced up to 50 years in prison.
A Declaration of Cyber-War | Michael Joseph Gross | Vanity Fair | April 2011 (link)
Last summer, the world’s top software-security experts were panicked by the discovery of a drone-like computer virus, radically different from and far more sophisticated than any they’d seen. The race was on to figure out its payload, its purpose, and who was behind it. As the world now knows, the Stuxnet worm appears to have attacked Iran’s nuclear program. And, as Michael Joseph Gross reports, while its source remains something of a mystery, Stuxnet is the new face of 21st-century warfare: invisible, anonymous, and devastating.
Suite of Sophisticated Nation-State Attack Tools Found With Connection to Stuxnet | Kim Zetter | Wired | February 2015 (link)
For nearly a year, the researchers have been gradually collecting components that belong to several highly sophisticated digital spy platforms that they say have been in use and development since 2001, possibly even as early as 1996, based on when some command servers for the malware were registered.
Lawrence Lessig | Code Is Law: On Liberty in Cyberspace | Harvard Magazine | Jan-Feb 200 (link)
Every age has its potential regulator, its threat to liberty. Ours is the age of cyberspace. It, too, has a regulator. This regulator is code—the software and hardware that make cyberspace as it is. This code, or architecture, sets the terms on which life in cyberspace is experienced. It determines how easy it is to protect privacy, or how easy it is to censor speech. It determines whether access to information is general or whether information is zoned. It affects who sees what, or what is monitored. In a host of ways that one cannot begin to see unless one begins to understand the nature of this code, the code of cyberspace regulates.
How a grad student trying to build the first botnet brought the Internet to its knees | The Washington Post | November 2013 (link) AND The Cornell Commission: On Morris and the Worm | Communications of the ACM | June 1989 (link)
On November 3, 1988, people woke up to find someone had released a malevolent computer program on a fledgling computer network. By morning, thousands of computers had become clogged with numerous copies of a computer "worm," a program that spread from computer to computer much like a biological infection. It took days of effort by hundreds of systems administrators to clean up the mess, and the Internet community spent weeks analyzing what had happened and how to make sure it didn't happen again. A graduate student named Robert Morris was unmasked as the culprit behind the worm.
Owner of Anonymous Hackers-for-Hire Site Steps Forward | Matthew Goldstein | New York Times | May 2015 (link)
He calls himself an ethical hacker who helps companies and individuals fight back against the bad guys operating online. But behind the scenes, Mr. Tendell, a Colorado resident and a decorated Iraq War veteran, started a new website called Hacker’s List that allows people to anonymously post bids to hire a hacker. Many users have sought to find someone to steal an email password, break into a Facebook account or change a school grade.
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