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Rejection Letter
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
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- mcguire 9y ago"ETERNALBLUE was part of a release of code that also gave us such interesting names as EDUCATEDSCHOLAR, ETERNALROMANCE, and ERRATICGOPHER. Oh to be a fly on the wall at the classified NSA committee meetings discussing the deployment of their weaponized ERRATIC GOPHER ..." Any one know what the E means in code names? There's a list somewhere, but I can't remember where now.
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- tgsovlerkhgsel 9y agoI read somewhere that codename "namespaces" (aka starting letters) are assigned to agencies, but not sure if that applies to this sort of codename.
- BugsJustFindMe 9y agoThis is fake, right? I'm pretty sure this is fake.
- avodonosov 9y agoOf course
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- T-A 9y agoYes, it's the latest installment in Stross's recurring theme that political events are stranger than fiction these days.
- saidajigumi 9y agoNo, it is not fake. The article is satire playing off of true real-world current events.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoIs it satirizing publishers? It seemed more like a device for mocking people who are unwilling to consider conspiracy theories, but... Somehow it didn't feel like satire to me. Can't put a finger on why.
- smacktoward 9y agoIt is satirizing current events. The joke is that the story of the WannaCrypt ransomware attack is so full of improbable developments that, if it had been written as fiction, no publisher would accept it. This has been another episode of the Hacker News Joke Explainer™
- JorgeGT 9y agoThat's the good thing about reality: it doesn't have to conform to plausible narrative norms.
- egypturnash 9y agoThe author of this is a professional fiction writer. He does a lot of near-future SF/F, often involving assorted spy agencies - some real, some fictional. He's made up a lot of crazy Secret Plots. All of the events described in this theoretical book proposal happened recently. So by imagining this book being rejected, Stross is essentially saying "truth is stranger than fiction". Which is an old truism, but we all need to be reminded of it now and then.
- acdha 9y agoThis is definitely a recurring theme for him, too – an incomplete summary of blog posts about the difficulty of writing near-future fiction: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/08/reality-is-broken-1.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/08/reality-... “... The TL:DR is that I have had to trash an entire draft of the next Laundry novel because I tried to satirize British politics, and British politics is beyond satire.” http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/psa-why-there-wont-be-a-third-.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/12/psa-why-... http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/sandbagged-by-the-near-future.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/05/sandbagg...
- montyboy_us 9y agoAbsolutely fabulous. Best part: "NSA hoard their knowledge of weaknesses in Microsoft Windows, a vitally important piece of their own nation's infrastructure, in case they'll come in handy againt some hypothetical future enemy. (I'm sorry, but this just won't wash; surely the good guys would prioritize protecting their own corporate infrastructure?" Yep - way too implausible, even for hacker fiction. Anyway, sounds like your book was Nostradamus-esque in depicting recent events. Maybe a bit too good :D
- vetinari 9y ago> I'm sorry, but this just won't wash; surely the good guys would prioritize protecting their own corporate infrastructure?" No, why would they? Not a single nation in the world is speaking with a united voice; there are groups with different interests. See Clinton vs Trump. Why would either of them help fix the infrastructure belonging to other's clan? Both of them would prefer the exploitable one at the other side.
- imron 9y ago> No, why would they? Because in the prequel, when a whistleblower leaked a trove of secrets regarding the NSA's global spying program, the outrage and backlash from the technical community led to the government issuing assurances that it would do just that.
- thwarted 9y ago(I'm sorry, but this just won't wash; surely the good guys would prioritize protecting their own corporate infrastructure?) Yeah, this is a great bit. Of course the good guys would would prioritize protecting their own infrastructure; one of the most important bits of this whole situation isn't about what the good guys would do, it's who is a good guy.
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- iiv 9y agoI usually like satire, but this felt too obvious. Subtlety is in my opinion a key part of good satire. Otherwise it feels too forced or too in-your-face. But as the specialist external reader said: "Stross can clearly write workmanlike, commercial prose". I can definitely agree with that!
- kbenson 9y agoHow do you satirize something subtly when the point is that real life is so outrageous that it beggars belief? I like subtle satire too, but that doesn't mean it works in every instance.
- pleboidal 9y agoInteresting, though, that the concepts expressed in this narrative, had they been written in 2010, and promptly rejected, might have provided all the more grist for the paranoia mill.
- jseliger 9y agoA funny allusion: "E. S. Blofeld, Editorial Director" likely refers to "Ernst Blofeld," a villain from the James Bond novels.
- JorgeGT 9y agoErnst Stavro Blofeld.
- gorhill 9y agoIf "Zero Day: The story of MS17-010" is meant to be an accurate report of facts regarding MS17-010, then there is at least one inaccuracy in it: > someone calling themselves "the Shadow Brokers" leaks a huge trove of classified NSA documents to WikiLeaks, who in turn dump it on the internet. Shadow Brokers didn't leak to Wikileaks. Shadow Brokers uploaded the trove of NSA documents to `mega.nz`, and someone else downloaded the trove to GitHub[1]. Wikileaks merely tweeted about this after it happened.[2] Correction: As per well-sourced Wikipedia article[3], this was not the `mega.nz` leak, this was another subsequent one. The main point still stand: Wikileaks has nothing to do with publishing the MS17-010 vulnerability. Would be nice to stop pushing the false narrative that Wikileaks was involved in that one NSA leak. [1] https://github.com/x0rz/EQGRP https://github.com/x0rz/EQGRP [2] https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/850783902616625152 https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/850783902616625152 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Brokers#Fifth_Leak:_.22Lost_in_Translation.22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Brokers#Fifth_Leak:...
- cxseven 9y agoAs someone who's somewhat neutral on the subject, it's amazing how much FUD I've noticed about Wikileaks.
- refulgentis 9y agoAnd not coincidentally, the NSA. :)
- TillE 9y agoIt's generally people with an agenda to downplay something they've published, often by insinuating without evidence that the documents have been faked. Wikileaks has problems, but they have a surprisingly good record for a small, amateur operation.
- celticninja 9y agoThey used to have a very good position as an independent source of data but they have started editorialising with their releases and they certainly seem to take some political positions regarding their releases, which calls into question their impartiality. I am still a fan but not as much as I used to be.
- ricardobeat 9y agoI still have vivid memories of, as a kid, stumbling upon this network of GeoCities pages about "Echelon" and how the US could read all of the worlds email and search for trigger words - and how absurd and tinfoil-hat-y it was made to sound by the rest of the internet. Having this memory absolutely changed the way I've been viewing NSA related leaks in the past few years.
- rinze 9y agoFor years, I added this header to my outgoing mail: > X-Echelon-header: Al-Qaeda bomb Bin Laden decrypt terror CIA Enfopol
- Kali909 9y agoThat's not really achieving much.
- jacquesm 9y agoFriendly of you to make it so easy to strip out.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoWe had a plan to send copies of our mail encrypted in an enigma cipher to a Mr. Liam Pukcab figuring that with the encryption and a foreign sounding recipient it would always be stored on a server somewhere.
- mirimir 9y agoI've been tempted to seed multi-GB torrents, comprising random data encrypted to long random passphrases, with intriguing names. Or maybe use LUKS-encrypted virtual disks.
- kobeya 9y agoWhy? What's the upside?
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- HONEST_ANNIE 9y ago"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense to the author. Truth doesn't have anybody to answer to." – S. John Ross
- simonw 9y agoI found this explanation pretty convincing as to why there was such a dumb kill switch embedded in the malware: "I believe they were trying to query an intentionally unregistered domain which would appear registered in certain sandbox environments, then once they see the domain responding, they know they’re in a sandbox the malware exits to prevent further analysis" From https://www.malwaretech.com/2017/05/how-to-accidentally-stop-a-global-cyber-attacks.html https://www.malwaretech.com/2017/05/how-to-accidentally-stop...
- bmon 9y agoDidn't it also have to respond to a http request though? Why not register the domain anyway and just leave it unhosted?
- zxcvb 9y agoThis is why you're not a great hacker / programmer or anything really. What about ISP's that return search pages for unknown domain names? Purely leaving it unhosted would not account for that scenario.
- csours 9y agoIn case anyone else was wondering if ETERNALBLUE was a code name from the Laundry Files, here's the list: http://thelaundryfiles.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Code_names http://thelaundryfiles.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Code_names
- Mtinie 9y agoHere's the list you will find ETERNALBLUE on: http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/p/nsas-tao-division-codewords.html?m=1 http://electrospaces.blogspot.com/p/nsas-tao-division-codewo...
- csours 9y agoCool. The list above is from a fictional series called "The Laundry Files" by Charles Stross, the same author as the linked Antipope article/story.
- gumby 9y ago> surely the good guys would prioritize protecting their own corporate infrastructure?" Let us not forget the used to be part of the NSA's mission. A part that was essentially abandoned early in the 21st century. For example, the NSA required mysterious changes to be made to the DES s-box; many assumed at the time (as did I) that the agency wanted to weaken security, but it turned out, to quote Bruce Schneier, "It took the academic community two decades to figure out that the NSA 'tweaks' actually improved the security of DES." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27s_involvement_in_the_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.2...
- tempodox 9y ago> ... However, instead of helping Microsoft fix them, we are supposed to believe that the NSA hoard their knowledge of weaknesses in Microsoft Windows ... > I'm sorry, this is just silly. This only goes to show that reality doesn't have to make sense to a literature critic. Only novels do.
- gumby 9y agoIt's astonishing that Brunner was not only prescient about this event in The Shockwave Rider, but also predicted sophisticated high-tech terroristic attacks in Stand on Zanzibar and The Sheep Look Up. If you haven't read this trio of dystopian novels (you can read them in any order) you really should. Still mind blowing today. (Admittedly he wrote them at a time, unlike today, when the US appeared to face an existential threat from terrorism. A threat that of course never materialized).
- ChuckMcM 9y agoOf the three "The Sheep Look Up" was the most interesting to me. Read that and then read Benford's "Timescape". You won't be able to sleep for at least a week :-)
- shalmanese 9y agoHe was an author who had a big influence on me as my screenname can attest.
- ComodoHacker 9y agoI must admit I agree with the publisher's review as a whole. What's the point in publishing a fiction hacked together so quickly that it can't withstand any artistic criticism? Or was it an experiment aiming to show that fiction and documentary are two very different genres? Well than it was successful.
- Mtinie 9y agoYou may be aware of this by now, but there was no publisher. This is a short form dramatization of the events leading up to yesterday's Wanna Crypt attack. The "criticism" was Stross imagining how absurd the truth of the whole situation played out and how if it was instead a work of fiction it wouldn't be well received for the reasons state in the work.
- 616c 9y agoIt is funny to me no one ever talks about Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals fame and now reigning engineer of Azure cloud systems wrote a novel about such doomsday scenarios before the trend in the last 5 years or so. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1250007305/ https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1250007305/ That he wrote premier system introspection tools for Windows makes me think he must have been privy to the complexity of such things by colleagues discretely long before DREAD and SDLC fruits were born out in the Vista/7 era.
- CamperBob2 9y agoAnd in a matter of hours, the new malware, known as Wanna Decryptor, infects the entire British National Health Service, a Spanish cellphone company, FedEx, and over a third of a million computers whose owners had lazily failed to enable automatic security updates from Microsoft. Besides the false association of TSB and Wikileaks that others have mentioned, I have a huge problem with this. Someone who gets kidnapped by pirates (The Shadow Brokers) while running from a press gang (Microsoft) is still a victim. Calling them "lazy" is an easy way to avoid the hard work of apportioning blame correctly. A hell of a lot of that blame goes to Microsoft themselves, for turning an important security update service into a marketing channel. Maybe Stross gets around to pointing that out, but I stopped reading there.
- wbillingsley 9y agoYou know that technical reviewer's past it. Thirty years ago he was planning world war three from bunkers underneath volcanos, and holding the world to ransom with diamond-encrusted lasers in space. Whereas last year all he could come up with was a grand scheme to become a multinational government IT contractor, while moonlighting a side business clearing derelict buildings for redevelopment.
- collinmanderson 9y ago> lazily failed to enable automatic security updates from Microsoft. I hope the author knows that this isn't true. You don't just "lazily" not enable automatic updates. It's highly intentional.