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GNU hackers discover HACIENDA government surveillance
- lotsofmangos 12y agoWe are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry: Showerbath of the Patriarchs Meat Cutting Machines Notre Dame Zoo Sports Pharmacy Martyrs Provisions Translucent Concrete Golden Touch Sawmill Center for Functional Recuperation Saint Anne Ambulance Café Fifth Avenue Prolonged Volunteers Street Family Boarding House in the Garden Hotel of Strangers Wild Street And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement center on the Quai des Orfèvres. The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Café. The Hotel of the Epoch. And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, fading in the last evenings of summer. Exploring Paris. And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/Chtcheglov.htm
- koenigdavidmj 12y ago...what?
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- ErikRogneby 12y agoI think a room full of monkeys wrote this.
- coldtea 12y agoFor one, it's obviously quite good literature, of the "manifesto" style favored by modernist movements. Second, it makes perfect sense. It describes things seen in strolling around a city (Paris in this case), listing funny street names and shop titles. Plus some references to older art and poetry movements (namely dada and surealism), regarding their promise of a "fuller life" etc. Not sure what it has to do with TFA, but surely not the work of a "room full of monkeys".
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- mpyne 12y agoCertainly not a room full of monkeys, but I'm having great difficulty trying to disprove the hypothesis that this wasn't just a Markov chain generator left to generate a few paragraphs.
- thibauts 12y agoIn any case I guess the revelance of said paragraphs depends on what the Markov chain generator had been fed. Leaves me wondering if we are or can be, at times (and when), Markov chain generators.
- coldtea 12y agoProbably it's just like with Perl code. Can look like line noise to someone uninitiated, but if you know the syntax, operators etc you see that it's not and what it does. For me, who know the surrelist and dadaist history references (and the place, so to speak, this text is coming from -- it's a plea from a bored existential youth for an "exciting" city and an exciting life) every line makes sense and has its place. What I mean is, it's not absurdist -- like some dadaist poetry. He picked his words to convey a specific message, and the references and metaphors work in this context.
- jonstewart 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Chtcheglov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Chtcheglov
- lotsofmangos 12y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CQLAhNlbfQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CQLAhNlbfQ
- ivain 12y agoAnd the original French version is here: http://debordiana.chez.com/francais/is1.htm#formulaire http://debordiana.chez.com/francais/is1.htm#formulaire
- bcoates 12y agoThis makes me wonder, how does the NSA choose their goofy codenames?
- thematt 12y agoI'm sure they have an app for that. Maybe more than one.
- contingencies 12y agoGreat post! Great link! What a writer! Some subsequent portions are really good: half a century earlier expression of Unabomber-style anti-technocratic sentiment imbued with the Parisian aesthetic. Dreams. Sunrise. Pre-brutalist architecture. Things society has almost forgotten, or banished to the Disneyland of yore... powered by travel selfies.
- sespindola 12y agoI somehow doubt that GCHQ geeks read anti-modernist manifestos. Depending on the age of the name pickers, I'd say they either went to the Hacienda nightclub at Manchester or saw 24 hours party people[1]. 1: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/
- lotsofmangos 12y agoTony Wilson read that manifesto. That is where the name comes from for his nightclub. Edit - and I wouldn't like to bet on what GCHQ geeks don't read. I suspect their reading is very wide.
- e40 12y agoDisturbingly, the HACIENDA system actually hijacks civilian computers to do some of its dirty work, allowing it to leach computing resources and cover its tracks. Yeah, that is disturbing, and it should be made illegal.
- ganeumann 12y agoI think it's already illegal.
- alex_duf 12y agoAgreed, it's just that there's no tribunal to bring the case to.
- hadoukenio 12y agoSo does it set a precedent that the humble citizen is able to do it without legal ramifications?
- deciplex 12y agoIn a sense, yes. There will be ramifications, of course, but they are entirely extralegal. It's best not to think of the Five Eyes as being nations of laws.
- joe_the_user 12y agoSeeing this intelligent if pessimistic post downvoted without comment makes me sad for Hacker's News.
- jonstewart 12y agoEach country probably had the others do the dirty work in their own country, a legal loophole.
- kordless 12y agoI think they don't care if it's illegal. They believe their actions are justified. The primary problem with that assumption is that they are the ones that justify it.
- ck2 12y agoGood luck port scanning ipv6 at random. I really hope all this some day is just some horrible chapter in a book that remembers how governments used to spy on their own citizens and how crazy that seems to everyone "now".
- aidenn0 12y agoIf you have access to a few routers, you could probably generate a good list of valid ipv6 addresses.
- MichaelGG 12y agoIsn't the local network block always at least a /64 or /80 or so? Thus even knowing which blocks are handed out means you still have an IPv4-Internet-sized task for each one.
- aidenn0 12y agoI was more thinking logging every ip that goes through the router; I think that which blocks are given out is public information.
- coldtea 12y agoGovernments are either kept honest by a vigilant population of actual citizens (instead of people only interested in their personal affairs) or are mostly a tool for the rich and powerful to maintain a favorable order. (The only third alternative to a government for the multitudes and a government for the rich is the direct rule of the rich and powerful without or with minimal government, as in the calls for "deregulation" which seldom favor the average Joe). () What the ancients of the Athenian democracy used to call "idiots". The word comes from "idiotis", the term for someone not caring to participate in public affairs and policy decisions -- and literaly means "private".
- innguest 12y ago> as in the calls for "deregulation" which seldom favor the average Joe Can you give an example of deregulation that doesn't favor the average Joe? I can't think of one.
- glenda 12y agoI can't really take much more of this... What is their goal?
- vaadu 12y agocontrol
- glenda 12y agoTo what end though? They already have quite a bit of control...
- paulannesley 12y agoNotice people with quite a bit of money don't cease money-making activities. They tend to increase them. Sometimes money and power are their own end goal.
- lotsofmangos 12y agoControl is controlled by a need to control: Control controls control. At least according to Burroughs.
- csandreasen 12y agoGathering foreign intelligence. It's not like their overarching mission is a huge secret. http://www.nsa.gov/about/mission/index.shtml http://www.nsa.gov/about/mission/index.shtml
- glenda 12y agoAt the expense of the sanity and security of those who the foreign intelligence is meant to protect? This is an obvious abuse with extreme existential consequences. Sort of reminds of this book I read as a kid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_(novel)#Plot_summary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momo_(novel)#Plot_summary
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- click170 12y agoIt bugs me that tap to zoom doesn't work on this site.
- canistr 12y agoIronically Jacob Appelbaum, allegedly an investigative journalist who reported this issue, is responsible for this project on GitHub that does exactly the same thing: https://github.com/ioerror/blockfinder https://github.com/ioerror/blockfinder
- codemac 12y agoI disagree. I don't see where blockfinder is actually reaching out and pinging servers to see what's up where. blockfinder seems to be downloading well known data sources as to where IPs are. The project the government is being accused of doing is essentially running a distributed nmap along with geo information.
- canistr 12y agoBut Blockfinder is returning a full list of IPs of which you could perform nmap scans upon. That's one step away from HACIENDA.
- mobiplayer 12y agoThis gets even worse. I've heard Jacob has a computer with Internet access. Now that's like two steps away only from HACIENDA. Terrifying.
- tikums 12y agoPlease, read the article that's referenced on GitHub: "He beckons me over to one of his eight computers and presses several keys, activating Blockfinder. In less than 30 seconds, the program lists all of the Internet Protocol address allocations in the world — potentially giving him access to every computer connected to the Internet. Appelbaum decides to home in on Burma, a small country with one of the world's most repressive regimes. He types in Burma's two-letter country code: "mm," for Myanmar. Blockfinder instantly starts to spit out every IP address in Burma. Blockfinder informs Appelbaum that there are 12,284 IP addresses allocated to Burma, all of them distributed by government-run Internet-service providers. In Burma, as in many countries outside the United States, Internet access runs through the state. Appelbaum taps some keys and attempts to connect to every computer system in Burma. Only 118 of them respond. "That means almost every network in Burma is blocked from the outside world," he says. "All but 118 of them." These 118 unfiltered computer systems could only belong to organizations and people to whom the government grants unfettered Internet access: trusted politicians, the upper echelons of state-run corporations, intelligence agencies. "Now this," Appelbaum says, "is the good part." He selects one of the 118 networks at random and tries to enter it. A window pops up asking for a password. Appelbaum throws back his head and screams with laughter — a gleeful, almost manic trill. The network runs on a router made by Cisco Systems and is riddled with vulnerabilities. Hacking into it will be trivial. It's impossible to know what's on the other side of the password. The prime minister's personal e-mail account? The network server of the secret police? The military junta's central command? Whatever it is, it could soon be at Appelbaum's fingertips."
- userbinator 12y agoI believe a civilian has portscanned the whole Internet before via the same thing: http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html http://internetcensus2012.bitbucket.org/paper.html I don't get all the fuss about portscanning is either - anything connected to the Internet will be subjected to packets sent to it because the Internet is public; if you don't want others, government or otherwise, to know that there's a machine present at an IP, then it should be your responsibility to configure it so it doesn't reply.
- papaf 12y agoThere was a lot of noise when the Heise story was released with people concentrating on the use of nmap and saying that using nmap is not shocking. For me the disturbing thing was the pipeline - nmap, fingerprint, identify weak systems and then compromise those systems. Those compromised systems are then used for further surveillance or attacks. Before the Heise story, I naively believed that this sort of automated attack was only done by organised crime.
- stalcottsmith 12y ago> Before the Heise story, I naively believed that this sort of automated attack was only done by organised crime You were correct.
- clayrab 12y agoWhy would they need to use a botnet for a simple portscan?