==Phrack Inc.== Volume 0x0d, Issue 0x42, Phile #0x03 of 0x11 |=--------------------------------------------------------------------=| |=-----------------------=[ Phrack World News]=-----------------------=| |=----------------------------=[ by TCLH ]=---------------------------=| |=--------------------------------------------------------------------=| The Circle of Lost Hackers is looking for any kind of news related to security, hacking, conference report, philosophy, psychology, surrealism, new technologies, space war, spying systems, information warfare, secret societies, ... anything interesting! It could be a simple news with just an URL, a short text or a long text. Feel free to send us your news. We didn't get any news from the Underground since our last phrack issue, it means that one more time all the news reports are coming from friends of our's. It would be good if people who claim themself "underground" would send us their news... Is our underground dead? (apparently yes...) 1. Speedy Gonzales news 2. Hacker hack thyself 3. Evolt.org Marks a Decade -------------------------------------------- --[ 1. _____ _ / ___| | | \ `--. _ __ ___ ___ __| |_ _ `--. \ '_ \ / _ \/ _ \/ _` | | | | /\__/ / |_) | __/ __/ (_| | |_| | \____/| .__/ \___|\___|\__,_|\__, | | | __/ | |_| |___/ _____ _ | __ \ | | | | \/ ___ _ __ ______ _| | ___ ___ | | __ / _ \| '_ \|_ / _` | |/ _ \/ __| | |_\ \ (_) | | | |/ / (_| | | __/\__ \ \____/\___/|_| |_/___\__,_|_|\___||___/ _ _ | \ | | | \| | _____ _____ | . ` |/ _ \ \ /\ / / __| | |\ | __/\ V V /\__ \ \_| \_/\___| \_/\_/ |___/ *-[ Phrack 64 0x11 is about the french scene and not a sellout conference... ]- http://www.frhack.org/history.html *-[ Promise, we are safe... ]- http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/US-Spying--Main-Core-PRO-by-Ed-Encho-090202-224.html *-[ Is the Pentagone secure? ]- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124027491029837401.html *-[ Finally, someone is reasonable...]- http://www.securityfocus.com/blogs/1908 *-[ Because we love it ]- http://cryptome.org/ *-[ Silvio is back in the business ]- http://silviocesare.wordpress.com/ http://silvio.cesare.googlepages.com/ *-[ Because it is funny ]- http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/The_Unix_Terrorist http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/GOBBLES http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/N3td3v *-[ They should know everyone is working for Phrack ]- http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2009-01/0324.html *-[ Ten years late... ]- http://www.dtors.org/papers/malicious-code-injection-via-dev-mem.pdf *-[ Fedwire Funds Transfer System ]- http://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/coreprinciples/coreprinciples.pdf www.ists.dartmouth.edu/library/216.pdf http://www.fedwiredirectory.frb.org/search.cfm --[ 2. "Hacker Hack Thyself" ]-- by Kartikeya Putra "All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are programmed biocomputers. None of us can escape our own nature as programmable entities. Literally, each of us may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less." -- John C. Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer In the early 1970's, during the early days of Artificial Intelligence research, scientists from the fields of psychology and computer science came together to try to develop a new model of how the mind works. Their efforts eventually resulted in the discipline now known as Cognitive Science. One of the more significant books to come out of this early collaborative effort was called Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding by Roger Schank and Robert Abelson, which is still used by psychologists today to support what's called the Information Processing Model of human cognition. I'd suggest that anyone with a serious interest in reverse engineering themselves should hunt down a used copy of this out-of-print book (try bookfinder.com, or your local library). In it, the authors suggest that human thought is based on a set of scripts (programs) for meeting personal goals in different situations. The example they use throughout the book is a "Restaurant Script" that tells people how to behave when eating out in public, in order to meet the goal of getting fed. What would you do if you ordered a hamburger and the waitress brought you a hot dog? Your scripts tell you how to handle this situation, what to do when the bill comes, and how to handle all the other transactions that take place in the restaurant environment. Scripts People Live by Claude Steiner is a book about a form of pop-psychology called Transactional Analysis. Here the author talks about how everyone has a sort of running "life script" which is basically the story of your own life as you like to tell it. Inside this script there are recurring roles that are often learned in childhood, which inform us how people are supposed to behave. I doubt that anyone ever reaches adulthood with a completely accurate script of their own life story -- but if you can become conscious of your script, it's possible to start improving it and improving the way you write it as you go along. Some of our most basic programming concerns what it means to be "good" or "bad." When parents, teachers and other authorities are training us how to be "good," often this has very little to do with doing what is right and is more about training us to behave in ways that are convenient for them. Today the task of programming "reality" has substantially been taken over by television, which is like a mindcontrol device that sits in the living room, hypnotizing a legion of glassy-eyed zombies. It is sponsored by corporations who are not concerned with anything except selling their products. In one of my favorite commercials on TV right now, this blonde dude -- who looks to me like he knows he is about to become a complete tool -- holds up a McDonald's chicken sandwich and proclaims, "Let's hear it for nonconformity!" Are you kidding me? It's so phony it's almost avant garde. Andy Warhol would love it -- I find it disturbing. I know that there must be a lot of people out there who don't see anything wrong with this ad -- and others who even buy into it, who think that eating a chicken sandwich for breakfast really is "revolutionary." When we were teenagers, some of us correctly perceived the system as a hypocritical crock of shit and said, "screw this, I'm out of here." As an adult with a little perspective now I can see that there's nothing wrong with wanting to do your own thing, but rebellion against the system is still a part of it. Maybe we found a peer group who claimed to represent "the resistence," the anti-system -- but it's a trick, the anti-system is still part of the system. By joining it you think you are becoming free, but it's just a trick. As an "outsider," if you break laws or do things that hurt yourself or others, you're just playing in to the role the system wants you to play -- you're doing exactly what you are supposed to do as an "outsider." The anti-system system is there because they need "bad guys," so that they can play the "good guys" in comparison. If you are good and not one of them, the whole system collapses. That is revolutionary! The foundation on which this whole sado-masochistic world system is erected is the perception of yourself as a victim. A lot of people are starting to figure this out, and when that number reaches a certain tipping point it is going to alter the structure of the matrix. Seeing yourself as the world's victim is profoundly disempowering and keeps you locked in a cycle of self-created pain and misery. We break free from this cycle by making a conscious decision to accept complete responsibility for our own reality. Get a copy of The Anger Habit Workbook by Carl Semmelroth and study it like a bible. Drs. Barry and Janae Weinhold have an excellent series of six e-books titled Breaking Free From the Matrix. There are a lot of wonderful books out there to help us take control of our minds and emotions and break free from the matrix of social power -- find them, and free your mind. -[ 3. Evolt.org Marks a Decade ]- by mstrix :: 1998 :: ORIGINS :: 1998-2000 :: RAPID GROWTH :: 2000-2002 :: GROWING FLAMES :: 2003-2005 :: SEEKING BALANCE :: 2006-2008 :: FACING INERTIA :: 2008 AND :: OUR FUTURE The internet is the most reliable machine ever made. It's made from imperfect, unreliable parts, connected together, to make the most reliable thing we have." - Kevin Kelly, Wired founder Evolt.org is a world community for web developers and other internet professionals. We host discussion lists, publish articles on our website, and maintain a browser archive offering downloads of everything from Mosaic to Flock. From the beginning, our community has been international, anarchistic, and volunteer-run. If there is one thing that makes us stand out from other web development organizations, it has been our long-term focus on cultivating community. Yet as much as we have worked together, evolt.org's history is marked by heated turf battles interspersed with periods of inertia. We have struggled for years to find a balance between process, production, leadership and decentralization, while steadfastly maintaining our ideals and integrity. On December 14, 2008, evolt.org turns ten years old. This is the story of our first decade, from the perspective of someone who has been a part of evolt.org since the early days. +-+-+-+-+-+-+- 1998 : ORIGINS +-+-+-+-+-+-+- Evolt.org began as a 1998 copyright dispute between Wired Digital's Webmonkey and some members of Webmonkey's web dev discussion list, monkeyjunkies. The high-volume list had been operating since 1997. Active monkeyjunkies members wanted an online list archive, so they could search for and reference past posts, but Wired (who had recently been purchased by Lycos) did not provide one. When one member, Dan Cody, as a service to fellow list members, published his own archive of the list, Wired's attorneys ordered him to stop, explaining they were reserving their rights to the list posts. Wired further explained that they hoped to post the archives at a later date, and include banner ads. A number of the community raised a protest, and on December 14, about thirty people from the monkeyjunkies community left Webmonkey to form their own community-run list, and later, website, evolt.org. Evolt.org was both an emulation of, and a response to, Wired Digital and Webmonkey. Pre-Lycos Webmonkey featured a regular staff of writers and web developers living and working in San Francisco, California, producing articles that were both informative and humorous. Silly analogies and crazy story lines made tech tutorials entertaining and accessible. Advertising was always prominent; in fact, Wired founder Kevin Kelly, has said that Wired "co-invented the banner ad." Monkeyjunkies, the mailing list, almost seemed an afterthought, bolstered no doubt by the magnetic draw of the groundbreaking sites with which it was associated. Evolt.org began not with a website, nor with an organizational structure, but with thelist, a general web development list, in the vein of monkeyjunkies, but non-corporate, non-commercial, and archived online. Some of the original evolters had internet community experience going back to usenet, and more than anything, it was the idea of creating an online "community" to which they were drawn, and the idea that web developers could assist each other, peer to peer, on a worldwide basis. In addition to the attention paid to a community-oriented model, evolt.org distinguished themselves from Wired and other corporate web development sites by eschewing advertising. Finally, evolt.org would not claim copyright on anything written by any of its contributors, beyond what is granted by the contributor when he or she publishes on an evolt.org list or site. In the spirit of open source, we were, and are, "a world community for web developers, promoting the mutual free exchange of ideas, skills and experiences." +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- 1998-2000 : RAPID GROWTH +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- Evolt.org members organized themselves entirely through email at first, with direction taking place on the admin list, which was archived, but closed to all but admins. Our main web development list, thelist, was up and running by early 1999, and by June we were also running a content-managed site to which members could submit, rate, and comment on articles posted into several "centers" or web development categories. Adrian Roselli offered his personal collection of browsers, and thus browsers.evolt.org was born. The admin group maintained systems, managed development, and acted as editors, still with no formalized structure. Some members would gather to code the CMS and other applications at codefests. Later we would gather for purely social purposes as well (aka "beervolts.") Admins worked hard at everything from evangelizing to coding to creating content. List and site traffic grew rapidly. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- 2000-2002 : GROWING FLAMES +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+- In early 2000, Webmonkey experienced an exodus of editorial staff, and later that year, monkeyjunkies shut down, with scores of displaced "monkeys" moving to evolt.org's thelist. Things were going great for evolt.org. We tended to organize ourselves by list. After thelist was well-established, thechat began in 2001 as a place to chat about anything that was neither related to evolt.org or the web development business: "imagine yourself round a table in a pub." Admins continued to communicate with each other via a closed list. In late 2000 admin began a new list for issues specific to the website. This new list, thesite, was open to all interested evolt.org members. In early 2001, about a dozen the evolt.org admin group gathered at the SXSW interactive conference in Austin, Texas. The group included members from both US coasts, the midwest, Texas, the UK, and Iceland. It was cozy, with a dozen of us sharing two hotel rooms. And it was at this time that we began to attempt to organize ourselves into something resembling a traditional non-profit organization. We elected a board of directors; Dan Cody was elected chairman. Shortly thereafter, the admin group broke out into a series of power struggles. While we had been able to do a certain amount of big-picture planning in Austin, it was difficult to keep track of things once we had spread out again. We were still communicating mostly by email (on- and off- lists), by phone, and occasionally by IRC chat (a challenge, since we were spread over so many timezones worldwide), with rare face-to-face meet-ups as folks were able. However we ran repeatedly into walls, since we all came from different cultures, we weren't all always the best communicators, and our vision wasn't always consistent. Trying to make a motion and vote on it was an often cumbersome (and sometimes divisive) practice. As 2001 drew to a close, the evolt.org admin community had many challenges to face, not the least of which was "process." How do you govern yourselves when you are unable to sustain a traditional organizational structure, and when can't meet face to face? In early 2002 the organization learned that Dan was personally supporting evolt.org's site and high-bandwidth browser archive at the rate of $1000 a month. Many were concerned because evolt.org wanted to be able to survive as an organization regardless of whether any one member were available to shoulder his or her portion of the load. Long term survival of the organization became a key concern, known in shorthand as "the bus question." If any one of us were hit by a bus, how would the rest of us make it? Unfortunately, the ongoing discussion around power and leadership issues caused such a rift in the admin group that Dan Cody, our first and last official leader, resigned in May 2002. Remaining members continued to struggle with organizational and financial issues. By this point, several of those elected in Austin had resigned posts for one reason or another. For the rest, it seemed that the offices held no real meaning in the context of evolt.org. In search of order, we divided ourselves into committees, and continued attempting to establish voting and other processes. The closed admin list dissolved, and long-term planning moved to newer openly-archived list called "theforum." Seeking order, we hoped to solve some of the boundary and accountability issues that had led to the fracturing of the community. Yet the quest for process and organization itself became frustrating to many, because it often seemed like the majority of our energy was being spent on process and power issues rather than on achievement and moving forward as a group. At the same time, world events from the dot com crash to 9/11 to the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq fueled emotional responses to exisiting tensions. Once thriving, thechat erupted in flames, then slowed down considerably. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ 2003-2005 : SEEKING BALANCE +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ By 2003, evolt.org had over 3,000 members subscribed to thelist. We continued to maintain the browser archive, and a community web resource directory, and for the past year and a half, had been offering all our members free web hosting as well. We still had essentially no budget, though by this point fundraising had become a serious focus. In 2003 evolt.org stopped offering free webhosting, and we finally allowed some google ads to be placed on our browser archive in order to help pay for our hosting costs. Eventually most of the committees and smaller lists were shut down, and their duties folded back into theforum. We continued publishing articles, and hosting our main lists, but discontinued the directory. Meanwhile, it was becoming increasingly clear that evolt.org's custom Cold Fusion-based CMS was vulnerable to the bus scenario. By 2004 we were down to one active CMS developer/webhost (lists.evolt.org at the time, was hosted the UK). As always, the heavy amount of responsibility taken on by a single person became a concern to others in the organization. The group voted to move out of our custom CMS and into an established open-source CMS, Drupal. We found low-cost dedicated hosting at The Planet, and mirrors helped relieve some of the bandwidth pressure on the browser archive. The new Drupal-driven site went live in 2005. We had finally managed to decentralize evolt.org to the point that it could survive the sudden departure of any one of its caretakers. Ironically, the rocky road to that place resulted in the loss of some high-contributing admins. As for governing structure, evolt.org ultimately settled on an ad hoc consensus process. One of us will propose an idea to theforum, ask if there are objections, and wait a few days for responses. If there are no objections, one assumes consensus and moves forward. If there are objections, we try to talk through them, rather than fight. Also, we are no longer concerned with formalizing a hierarchy. Those who have lasted through the years have progressed a great deal in their ability to work together. While we still face communication challenges, we are more familiar with the territory now. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ 2006-2008 : INERTIA +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ As evolt.org admin has worked to put our organization in order, web progress has lagged. The patched-together 2005 design was intended to be temporary, but has yet to be replaced. In 2006 there was a failed movement toward redesign, and by 2008 our article submissions and web traffic had dropped noticeably. Activity on thelist remained steady, but at a lower volume than in years past. +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ 2008 AND : OUR FUTURE +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ As we move forward into our tenth year, a few large projects lie before us. We are taking a step back, looking at how we are serving our community, and asking how we can do better. To that end we are surveying our community for input. In addition, we continue to work on improving our browser archive by adding more mirrors, and hopefully also adding more information about some of our unique and interesting browsers. Finally, we are taking steps toward truly internationalizing our site, so that we have the foundation on which to build localized versions of evolt.org, a vision we've had, but kept on the backburner, since 2001. Though the journey has been far from smooth, we've managed to maintain the integrity of our organization, our community, our purpose, and our archives. We continue to welcome new members who want to contribute their talents and energy to the community, while learning new skills along the way. Like the internet itself, evolt.org is made of "imperfect, unreliable parts, connected together to create the most reliable thing we have." Here's to a harmonious, productive, and successful next ten years. --------[ EOF