MonthOctober 2009

The Ultimate Lock Picker Hacks Pentagon, Beats Corporate Security for Fun and Profit

Our fellow diners begin to stare. Tobias doesn’t notice and wouldn’t care anyway. He’s as rumpled and wild as a nerdy grizzly bear. His place mat is covered in diagrams and sketched floor plans and scribbled arrows. His laugh fits him like a tinfoil hat. It goes on for a solid 20 seconds.

But Tobias isn’t crazy. Far from it. He’s a professional lock breaker, a man obsessively—perhaps compulsively—dedicated to cracking physical security systems. He doesn’t play games, he rarely sees movies, he doesn’t attend to plants or pets or, currently, a girlfriend. Tobias hacks locks. Then he teaches the public how to hack them, too. […]

Bumping is simple: Insert a filed-down key into a lock, then knock it with a hammer to momentarily pop the lock’s pins into an open position. Like the Bic pen technique for defeating the Kryptonite lock, it’s perfect for opportunistic bad guys; any idiot with a few tools and minimal skill can use it to open most cheap front-door locks worldwide. Though well-known in Europe, bumping was still relatively obscure in the US—until Tobias began introducing it at hacker conferences in 2004.

Not surprisingly, news of the imminent bumping epidemic was media catnip. Tobias was interviewed dozens of times for the kind of scare pieces that local newscasts wedge between weather and sports. It didn’t take much to imagine all the paranoid scenarios: Kids study Tobias’ online video, crack the lock off Dad’s Glock, and put holes in things that shouldn’t have them. Enterprising junkies embark on habit-feeding crime waves. Hotel rooms, no longer secure, become magnets for burglary and rape. High school truants walk the halls shimming combination locks off rows of lockers. Crime gangs use Tobias’ case study to copycat the 2003 Antwerp diamond heist, while tech terrorists simply co-opt the master list of Marc Weber Tobias problems to outwit America’s Keystone Kop-homeland security and generally blow stuff up. The world is unzipped. And our innocence—not to mention a good deal of our cash, jewelry, and portable electronics—is lost.

Tobias shrugged off such concerns, along with the hate mail. Scaring citizens to attention is part of his educational program. “Do you really think ignorance will keep you safe?” he asks. “Is it even an option?” But what did worry him was the growing anger among members of the Associated Locksmiths of America, the largest lock-industry trade group in the country.

Wired: The Ultimate Lock Picker Hacks Pentagon, Beats Corporate Security for Fun and Profit

U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon.

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.

Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

Danger Room: Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets

Elizabeth Prophet, 70, Church Founder, Is Dead

Elizabeth Clare Prophet, the retired leader of the Summit Lighthouse and the Church Universal and Triumphant, a New Age religion, who called on her followers in the late 1980s to prepare for nuclear Armageddon, died Thursday at her home in Bozeman, Mont. She was 70.

The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said her daughter Erin.

Mrs. Prophet took over the leadership of the Summit Lighthouse in 1973 on the death of her husband, Mark L. Prophet. He had founded the organization in 1958 to spread a message combining elements of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Theosophy.

New York Times: Elizabeth Prophet, 70, Church Founder, Is Dead

(Thanks Josh)

Cyclone of Slack pictures and video

ivan stang at the cyclone of slack in portland, or

power circus

The Cyclone of Slack has posted links to some media from the event. If you have more they’d love to know about it.

Cyclone of Slack: we want your pictures (videos, audios, whatever)

Eighth wonder of the world? The stunning temples secretly carved out below ground by ‘paranormal’ eccentric

Damnhur Hall of the Earth

Temples of Damanhur

Here, 100ft down and hidden from public view, lies an astonishing secret – one that has drawn comparisons with the fabled city of Atlantis and has been dubbed ‘the Eighth Wonder of the World’ by the Italian government.

For weaving their way underneath the hillside are nine ornate temples, on five levels, whose scale and opulence take the breath away.

Constructed like a three-dimensional book, narrating the history of humanity, they are linked by hundreds of metres of richly decorated tunnels and occupy almost 300,000 cubic feet – Big Ben is 15,000 cubic feet.

Daily Mail: Eighth wonder of the world? The stunning temples secretly carved out below ground by ‘paranormal’ eccentric

Read more about the occult commune and ecovillage Damanhur:

Wikipedia: Federation of Damanhur

Official Damanhur web site

(Thanks to Dr P Fenderson)

See also:

Christiania

Welsh Eco-Village

Obama administration issues new policy on medical marijuana

Holder has formalized the policy previously mentioned of ending federal drug raids against sick people:

The Obama administration delivered new guidance on medical marijuana to federal prosecutors Monday, signaling a broad policy shift that will mean fewer crackdowns against dispensaries and the people who use them.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. instructed government lawyers that in 14 states where medical marijuana use is legal, federal prosecutors should focus only on cases involving higher level drug traffickers or people who use the state laws as a cover story.

“It will not be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with serious illnesses or their caregivers who are complying with state laws on medical marijuana, but we will not tolerate drug traffickers who hide behind claims of compliance with state law to mask activities that are clearly illegal,” Holder said. “This balanced policy formalizes a sensible approach that the Department has been following since January: effectively focus our resources on serious drug traffickers while taking into account state and local laws.”

Washington Post: Obama administration issues new policy on medical marijuana

Matt Taibbi on naked short-selling

Here’s how naked short-selling works: Imagine you travel to a small foreign island on vacation. Instead of going to an exchange office in your hotel to turn your dollars into Island Rubles, the country instead gives you a small printing press and makes you a deal: Print as many Island Rubles as you like, then on the way out of the country you can settle your account. So you take your printing press, print out gigantic quantities of Rubles and start buying goods and services. Before long, the cash you’ve churned out floods the market, and the currency’s value plummets. Do this long enough and you’ll crack the currency entirely; the loaf of bread that cost the equivalent of one American dollar the day you arrived now costs less than a cent.

With prices completely depressed, you keep printing money and buy everything of value — homes, cars, priceless works of art. You then load it all into a cargo ship and head home. On the way out of the country, you have to settle your account with the currency office. But the Island Rubles you printed are now worthless, so it takes just a handful of U.S. dollars to settle your debt. Arriving home with your cargo ship, you sell all the island riches you bought at a discount and make a fortune.

This is the basic outline for how to seize the assets of a publicly traded company using counterfeit stock. What naked short-sellers do is sell large quantities of stock they don’t actually have, flooding the market with “phantom” shares that, just like those Island Rubles, depress a company’s share price by making the shares less scarce and therefore less valuable.

Rolling Stone: Wall Street’s Naked Swindle

SEC hires Goldman vice president for enforcement

Talk about putting wolves in charge of protecting sheep…

A former Goldman Sachs (GS.N) vice president has been named the chief operating officer of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division, the regulator said on Friday.

Adam Storch, who was a vice president in Goldman’s “business intelligence group,” will be responsible for managing projects and other operational aspects of the SEC’s enforcement division, the agency said.

Reuters: US SEC hires Goldman vice president for enforcement

Reenactment of the Process Church of the Final Judgment Processional

Sabbath Assembly reënactment: the Processional. Music by the Sabbath Assembly Band (Imaad Wasif, Jex Thoth, Kevin Rutmanis and David Christian).

In the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth is correct translation says academic

Professor Ellen van Wolde, a respected Old Testament scholar and author, claims the first sentence of Genesis “in the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth” is not a true translation of the Hebrew.

She claims she has carried out fresh textual analysis that suggests the writers of the great book never intended to suggest that God created the world — and in fact the Earth was already there when he created humans and animals.

Prof Van Wolde, 54, who will present a thesis on the subject at Radboud University in The Netherlands where she studies, said she had re-analysed the original Hebrew text and placed it in the context of the Bible as a whole, and in the context of other creation stories from ancient Mesopotamia.

She said she eventually concluded the Hebrew verb “bara”, which is used in the first sentence of the book of Genesis, does not mean “to create” but to “spatially separate”.

The first sentence should now read “in the beginning God separated the Heaven and the Earth”

Telegraph: God is not the Creator, claims academic

(via Satan a victim of bad PR, professor says

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