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For over 15 years I have
been writing about the potential of the Internet to bring good or evil to our
world. No doubt there are countless
functions the cyber space universe can supply for the good of mankind.
Scientific and medical
research both benefit from it with the ability to share data and speed up the
processing of information. It has been
instrumental in the evolution of capitalism
by dramatically changing the way people do business and get information.
Book publishers have been
decimated by the Internet impact on book sales with e-books now able to instantly deliver books to your
home or office at far less cost than you going to the nearest book store and
fighting the crowds.
In music new artists
abound on the Internet free of the shackles of the music publishers, the control
of the producers and with the elimination of bribes paid to radio stations to only
put certain artists in their playlist who are under contract to powerful record
labels.
Both the fields of book
and music publishing are in serious trouble, but maybe they earned it by trying
to spoon feed the public certain authors and artists while refusing to take any
risk on new artists in need of help thus strangling the heart and soul of
American music, it's essential creative energy and powerful will to take risks
and push the envelope.
The digital revolution is
also extending it's tentacles into the movie and television business and once
again is serving as an instigator of long overdue change to yet another
industry that was growing irrelevant with it's risk aversion and obsession of
control of artists, scripts and productions.
Thanks to our virtual
world on the Internet books, records and movies are now available to us from
old and new artists, every day there are new productions that actually have
meaningful stories, coherent lyrics and happy endings that can have a lot of
impact on the quality of life and attitude of people.
Of course in their last
gasps of life the old guard are dumping junk on the market still using their worn out formulas
of success to avoid risk, in other words, a propensity to simply copy the last
successful movie and flood the market with multiple sequels is failing them at
last. With the Internet people now have
the power to make choices for themselves and find the independent artists and
companies long shunned by mainstream producers.
Beyond that there are many
educational and informational benefits from the Internet.
But there are also dark
sides to the Internet that have opened the floodgates to the demons who prey on
the weaknesses and perversions which afflict a great many of our people.
About ten years ago I
discovered an international prostitution ring operating on a popular social
site. After documenting how it worked, I
was able to contact some of the actual prostitutes and interview them.
They told how they were
recruited throughout Europe and were sent to
major European cities, usually for a period of a few months, where they would
rendezvous with the clients. They were very
high end, meeting in the best hotels and given the most expensive clothes and
chauffeured limousines.
Every few months they were rotated to another major city to avoid detection by local and international police. But they owed a lot of
money to their "sponsors" and in fact were nothing but high-end sex
slaves. So I turned my information over
to the owner of the Internet social service.
What a dumb thing to do.
Terrified (I guess) that I
was going to post a news release accusing them of moral bankruptcy or something,
instead of a thanks I got threats to sue me, sue me until I was bankrupt since
they had billions and I was just a lowly reporter. Some good did result as the highly sophisticated prostitution ring vanished from the Internet, no doubt resurfacing in some other location but no longer part of a mainstream social site..
To this day the Internet
is used for every illegal and immoral purpose possible from child molestation
to prostitution, pirating to pimping.
Then there is the DarkNet, that sinister and mysterious no man's land in
cyber space where good intentions are swallowed up by evil results. You should learn more about the DarkNet.
Finally, there is the
world of cyber security where honesty and disclosure long ago vanished from the
scene.
The culmination of Dark
Force power manifests in cyber security where virtually everyone lies, or is
required to lie, by the governments, private contractors and individual hackers
involved in raping your rights to privacy and freedom.
I got to see this world
from the inside out and rest assured what goes on in this arena most likely
exceeds your wildest imagination.
Without a doubt the entire world was pretty much hacked over a decade
ago and ever since competing interests from big and small countries and companies alike have been
building profiles on you.
Every time I hear
President Obama condemn China
for hacking US top secret
files I think of how many years the US has been hacking everyone else's
top secret files in the world. No one is
without guilt when it comes to stealing records from other sovereign nations.
The bizarre NSA scandal
dominating world news right now is the inevitable result of a lust for power
and obsession with stealing information by governments, and powerful
corporations.
One by one it seems our
revered institutions are falling because they got a little too greedy and
decided they were above the law. Just
look at the rash of illegal activity revealed recently in the fields of
housing, financial speculation, energy pricing, international banking ad
infinitum.
We need to pay a lot more
attention to the administration and management of the virtual world. It certainly serves some mighty beneficial
purposes but it also serves some rather sinister masters and the Internet,
unfortunately, is totally oblivious to characteristics like knowing right from
wrong, knowing the value of children or young girls being forced into sexual
slavery and perversion.
It certainly does not have
the capacity to tell the truth as it has no basis for truth or lies. And it has no empathy or compassion for people
for there is no emotional sensitivity in virtual space. In terms of a mathematical algorithm it is free of bias, prejudice, and discrimination because it is also free of morality, ethics and oversight.
Be informed and beware.
The following was
published by The Telegraph from the United Kingdom.
We present the ten most famous
hackers
1. Kevin Mitnick
Probably the most famous hacker
of his generation, Mitnick has been described by the US Department of Justice
as "the most wanted computer criminal in United States history." The
self-styled 'hacker poster boy' allegedly hacked into the computer systems of
some of the world's top technology and telecommunications companies including
Nokia, Fujitsu and Motorola. After a highly publicised pursuit by the FBI,
Mitnick was arrested in 1995 and after confessing to several charges as part of
a plea-bargain agreement, he served a five year prison sentence. He was
released on parole in 2000 and today runs a computer security consultancy. He
didn't refer to his hacking activities as 'hacking' and instead called them
'social engineering'.
2. Kevin Poulson
Poulson first gained notoriety by
hacking into the phone lines of Los Angeles radio station KIIS-FM, ensuring he
would be the 102nd caller and thus the winner of a competition the station was
running in which the prize was a Porsche. Under the hacker alias Dark Dante, he
also reactivated old Yellow Page escort telephone numbers for an acquaintance
that then ran a virtual escort agency. The authorities began pursuing Poulson
in earnest after he hacked into a federal investigation database. Poulson even
appeared on the US
television Unsolved Mysteries as a fugitive – although all the 1-800 phone
lines for the program mysteriously crashed. Since his release from prison,
Poulson has reinvented himself as a journalist.
3. Adrian Lamo
Adrian Lamo was named 'the
homeless hacker' for his penchant for using coffee shops,
libraries and internet cafés as his bases for hacking. Most of his illicit
activities involved breaking into computer networks and then reporting on their
vulnerabilities to the companies that owned them. Lamo's biggest claim to fame
came when he broke into the intranet of the New York Times and added his name
to their database of experts. He also used the paper's LexisNexis account to
gain access to the confidential details of high-profile subjects. Lamo
currently works as a journalist.
4. Stephen Wozniak
Famous for being the co-founder
of Apple, Stephen "Woz" Wozniak began his 'white-hat' hacking career
with 'phone phreaking' – slang for bypassing the phone system. While studying
at the University of California he made devices for his friends called 'blue
boxes' that allowed them to make free long distance phone calls. Wozniak
allegedly used one such device to call the Pope. He later dropped out of
university after he began work on an idea for a computer. He formed Apple
Computer with his friend Steve Jobs and the rest, as they say, is history.
5. Loyd Blankenship
Also known as The Mentor,
Blankenship was a member of a couple of hacker elite groups in the 1980s –
notably the Legion Of Doom, who battled for supremacy online against the
Masters Of Deception. However, his biggest claim to fame is that he is the
author of the Hacker Manifesto (The Conscience of a Hacker), which he wrote
after he was arrested in 1986. The Manifesto states that a hacker's only crime
is curiosity and is looked at as not only a moral guide by hackers up to today,
but also a cornerstone of hacker philosophy. It was reprinted in Phrack
magazine and even made its way into the 1995 film Hackers, which starred
Angelina Jolie.
6. Michael Calce
Calce gained notoriety when he was
just 15 years old by hacking into some of the largest commercial websites in
the world. On Valentine's Day in 2000, using the hacker alias MafiaBoy, Calce
launched a series of denial-of-service attacks across 75 computers in 52
networks, which affected sites such as eBay, Amazon and Yahoo. He was arrested
after he was noticed boasting about his hack in online chat rooms. He was
received a sentence of eight months of "open custody," one year of
probation, restricted use of the internet, and a small fine.
7. Robert Tappan Morris
In November of 1988 a computer
virus, which was later traced to Cornell
University, infected
around 6,000 major Unix machines, slowing them down to the point of being
unusable and causing millions of dollars in damage. Whether this virus was the
first of its type is debatable. What is public record, however, is that its
creator, Robert Tappan Morris, became the first person to be convicted under
the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Morris said his 'worm' virus wasn't intended
to damage anything and was instead released to gauge the size of the internet.
This assertion didn't help him, however, and he was sentenced to three years
probation, 4000 hours of community service and a hefty fine. A computer disk
containing the source code for the Morris Worm remains on display at the Boston
Museum of Science to this day.
8. The Masters Of
Deception
The Masters Of Deception (MoD)
were a New York-based group of elite hackers who targeted US phone
systems in the mid to late 80s. A splinter group from the Legion Of Doom (LoD),
they became a target for the authorities after they broke into AT&T's
computer system. The group was eventually brought to heel in 1992 with many of
its members receiving jail or suspended sentences.
9. David L. Smith
Smith is the author of the
notorious Melissa worm virus, which was the first successful email-aware virus
distributed in the Usenet discussion group alt. sex. The virus original form
was sent via email. Smith was arrested and later sentenced to jail for causing
over $80 million worth of damage.
10. Sven Jaschan
Jaschan was found guilty of
writing the Netsky and Sasser worms in 2004 while he was still a teenager. The
viruses were found to be responsible for 70 per cent of all the malware seen
spreading over the internet at the time. Jaschan received a suspended sentence
and three years probation for his crimes. He was also hired by a security
company.
CPT Editor's Note: If the bad guys (China, etc.) do all the hacking why are all or
most all of the world's top ten hackers from America? And isn't it true that the best of all hackers are the ones who don't get caught?
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