We get there on the 31st, early, so there can be napping and re-adjusting. Then dinner at some swank digs and, if we can stay awake for it, fireworks at the Eiffel Tower for midnight. I mean, come on. Then a walk-about on the 1st, museums and such on the 2nd-4th, and home on the 5th. Here’s a map showing likely points of interest, but I welcome any suggestions. Keep in mind, we’re more interested in trying to see a few things with some depth, as opposed to doing drive-bys of the entire city. I heard someone brag once about “doing” Musee du Louvre in 45 minutes. That’s… well, that’s dumb.

photo by Ian Britton

A few days ago, the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) finally accepted that security problems should be solved, not suppressed. In August, three student researchers from MIT were going to present a paper at DEFCON (the tech / hacker convention) which outlined vulnerabilities in the magnetic stripe swipe card system that MBTA uses to handle fares in the “T” subway in Boston. Despite the fact that the students were going to leave out certain key information so that their work couldn’t be easily duplicated, MBTA filed for a restraining order, saying that disclosure of the flaws, before it has a chance to fix them, will cause irreparable harm to the transit system. (See more here.) The DEFCON talk was cancelled, and eventually they brought a lawsuit to permanently stop the release of information. Finally, they announced that they were dismissing their lawsuit and had agreed, instead, to work with the students to improve security in their Automated Fare Collection System.

Cory Doctorow coined Schneier’s Law in his DRM talk at Microsoft in 2006:

“Any person can invent a security system so clever that he or she can’t imagine a way of breaking it.” This means that the only experimental methodology for discovering if you’ve made mistakes in your cipher is to tell all the smart people you can about it and ask them to think of ways to break it. Without this critical step, you’ll eventually end up living in a fool’s paradise, where your attacker has broken your cipher ages ago and is quietly decrypting all her intercepts of your messages, snickering at you.”

Clearly, MBTA was trying to stay in that “fool’s paradise,” but somehow or other they clued in to the reality of the situation. Good on them; I just hope that there isn’t some behind-the-scenes deal that’s quietly screwing the students who did the yeoman’s work of advancing the security of MBTA’s system.

(I know, I said no more EFF posts this year, but I’m not begging for money this time…)

The Star Wars Holiday Special has been legendary from the moment it aired in 1978. I don’t know what the other competitors are, but it has to be in the running for worst television program ever, “variety” category. Those of us of a certain age have dim recollections of seeing it; it was never re-aired so you had to catch it that night. For a long time I thought I had a mistaken memory of it, but as I became integrated into the Geek tribe in my 20s the lore was revealed to me that it did exist, but was not to be spoken of for fear of rape goblins. Or something.

Cut to the chase: it has long been circulated as a VHS bootleg. Well, I hadn’t thought of it in a few years so it never dawned on me that, just maybe, the digital age has affected its limited availability.

Well, yes.

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The sound kicks in shortly; that intro is a “recent” addition. Merry Christmas!

That being said, EFF has a new page up that’s a) cute and b) effectively (hur hur) describes what they’ve been up to for the past year. Please do check it out, and if it tugs at you at all, consider joining EFF or making a donation. The internet you save could be your own.

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My first motivation is to share this really great preview from Lily Allen’s upcoming album, “It’s Not Me, It’s You”,  although it’s now slated for release in February of 2009 soooo.. boo. Despite not being the likely target demographic (36YO suburban white male) I absolutely adore her first album, xxxxx , but kinda had her chalked up to a typical sophomore slump. If this track is any indication, it turns out I was full of shit. I’m genuinely looking forward to this - yum!

(Added later…:)

DEAR LORD! For being the hoity-toity blog platform of choice, embedding video in Wordpress is a frickin’ pain. Seriously, it’s not that it’s super-hard, but when YouTube et al provide simple embed code next to their videos it shouldn’t be hours and a plug-in later before it works. That thing I said before? I’m considering, I’m considering…

Not really, mom. Put the phone down.

And so do you. At least, I hope you think so, because EFF needs your help. To quote a recent email I received, “[d]ue to the tough economic times we are all experiencing (and maybe folks with spare cash to spend on activism feeling tapped out after the election), EFF is not getting the usual end-of-the-tax-year donation love.” As a result, this non-profit organization that, to the best of my knowledge, never charges their clients for representation, is coming up short. Trust me on this, there are a lot of top-flight lawyers at EFF that are working waaaaaaaaaay below their market value because they believe in what they’re doing, but they (and EFF as an entity) still have bills to pay.

Please consider becoming a member of EFF. You can become a member here and get cool swag to boot, or just buy yourself some cool swag here. My personal favorites include the metal Bill of Rights card to set off airport security (”fun” fact: nobody will tell you under what law you’re being searched at the airport. It’s a secret. Now read the 4th Amendment.) and the mini LED flashlight specially designed to reveal the hidden tracking dots produced by laser printers. Whether you buy stuff or not, though, you really do owe it to yourself (as someone savvy enough to, at a minimum, read this blog) to help support this vital organization. Join EFF!

Bonus for reading this far: I’ll blog more about this later, but read Cory Doctorow’s latest collection of essays (c)ontent, about some of these very things, for free! Cory releases his books under a Creative Commons license, so this is a legal download of the entire book. Some % of you will buy it, of course, which is the point. I say “bonus,” but it’s not like he’s doing this just for me - it’s just something I figure you don’t know about.

In October of 2004, a Secret Service sting centered around the website shadowcrew.com (no link because it’s now a generic parked domain) led to the arrest of 28 people involved in identity theft, credit card scamming and the like, and created a cascade effect that shuttered most of the other sites that facilitated trade in this kind of information. From the wreckage, DarkMarket.ws arose to fill the void. Known for its zeal in scrutinizing users to filter out narcs, the site had a solid reputation as a 1st rate den of thieves.

Inevitably, jealous competitors tried to knock them down a peg. In 2006, Max Ray Butler (a “security consultant” who turned to the darkside) claimed that he had infiltrated the darkmarket server and discovered that the site’s lead administrator, “Master Splyntr” was logging in from an FBI location in Pittsburgh. This was typical of the jousting between competing sites; Butler was later arrested for cyber crimes and darkmarket grew to be more popular than ever.

As it turns out, Butler was 100% right.

On September 16th, 2008, Master Splyntr announced that DarkMarket would be shutting down on October 4th. “[R]ecent events have proven that even in our best efforts to expel and deactivate the accounts of suspected LE [law enforcement], reporters, and security agents, it is obvious that we haven’t been entirely successful,” Splyntr wrote in a message on the site.”It is apparent that this forum … is attracting too much attention from a lot of the world services (agents of FBI, SS, and Interpol). I guess it was only time before this would happen. It is very unfortunate that we have come to this situation, because … we have established DM as the premier English speaking forum for conducting business. Such is life. When you are on top, people try to bring you down.” (Thanks, Wired!) A lot of reasons seemed to be the cause at the time, most notably the then- recent arrest of a Turkish hacker named Cha0 who was also a DarkMarket admin.

In fact, DarkMarket was taken down in preparation for a coordinated series of raids that resulted in the arrest of 56 people worldwide. Yep. “Master Splyntr” is actually J. Keith Mularski, a senior cybercrime agent based at the National Cyber Forensics Training Alliance in… wait for it… Pittsburgh. Shortly after the site went dark (hur hur hur…) the arrests began. You can read more about this story here and here. I’m just amazed, really. My quasi sister-in-law, a lawyer who knows more than a thing or two about the state of cyber affairs in the world, dismisses conspiracy theories with the compelling-sounding argument “when has the government ever pulled off anything secret?” But really, we wouldn’t know most of the time, would we? And after all, they pulled this off, brilliantly.

Since then, spam traffic has been cut by 65%. *pauses for reader to stop dancing around like Snoopy* I had, in fact, noticed a slight lessening, but my filters are already pretty good. I’m curious if any of you felt this before you knew it?

According to this article at the freakonomics blog, spam costs U.S. companies (alone!) $33 billion a year in lost productivity and, according to this study (it’s a pdf, beware!), likely generates far far less revenue than that for spammers. If ever there was a parasite, spam is it. Granted, given the relative inexpense of running botnets vs. the revenue achieved, it’s likely that someone will rise up and take McColo’s place. Still, it’s nice to know that the white hats out there are learning how to shoot back.

Oddly enough, I picked this book up almost two years ago on a lark; Lewis’ more recent books (Moneyball
and The Blind Side, both economics/sports books) had been enjoyable reads, so I snagged his first book, used, on a lark. It turns out that his first career out of college was in finance, and so his first book was a memoir-ish look back at his time at Salomon Brothers, just in time to see it spiral into its death throes.

The middle of the book is an amazing primer on how and why mortgage-derived bonds were created, as well as a couple of ways that they could completely screw you. (While a collapse precisely like the current one doesn’t take place, the situation is clearly predicted by Lewis’ description.) Essentially, mortgages represented an unpleasant investment opportunity for the simple reason that you didn’t know when you’d get your money back; early repayments of mortgages are common, so your 30 year mortage-based security could actually get paid back before you want it to; this does not make financial planners happy.

Then Lewie Ranieri came along. Under his guidance, Salomon created securities that… well, that did a lot of different things: split interest payments from principal payments, guaranteed first (or middle, or last) repayment, and so on. The market boomed, Salomon Brother got filthy rich, and then the inevitable infighting and decline.

Michael Lewis is an excellent writer, with a good sense of what makes a good story. I highly recommend Liar’s Poker if you’d like to see point A of the trip we’re currently on.

• learned about Wordpress-mu
• installed Wordpress-mu
• navigated the transition of the one-blog-many-authors model to the many-niche-blogs-feeding-an-uber-blog model
• tried to market Ray’s great economics posts while, simultaneously, learning how to market Ray’s great economic posts.

The good news is that each of those topics will yield interesting (I think) blog posts in the future. The bad news is that, to date, none of them have. At least not from me. Now, each of the bloggers whose advice I respect warn not to post “apology” posts, and I’m not going to do a big song and dance. Just sayin’, my head’s been elsewhere. Hopefully, you’ve been reading Ray’s excellent posts, and you’ll enjoy what we’ve got coming up.