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Submitted by courtnee in status updates - 08.24.10 - 12:00 am

Testing update from my phone

Submitted by courtnee in public - 08.10.10 - 12:14 pm

A hackers life.

http://nationalgeographicassignmentblog.com/2010/08/06/the-hackers-life-my-weekend-at-defcon/

Submitted by courtnee in public - 08.09.10 - 2:24 pm

Fun top story this week! http://www.hackernews.com/2010/08/08/hnncast-2010-08-06/

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Submitted by courtnee in status updates - 07.28.10 - 11:08 am

It is the end of an era. I am packing zero corsets for Defcon.

Submitted by courtnee in public - 07.27.10 - 12:33 pm

Sooo ready for Vegas. :D I’ll be massaging at DC. Check the forums for info. https://forum.defcon.org/showthread.php?p=114714

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Submitted by courtnee in status updates - 07.18.10 - 1:40 pm

There is something delightfully exhilarating in catching someone who’s tried to pull a little something over on me. I’ll bet it’s the hacker/PI background. Sooo satisfying. I see ALL. Mwuahahah! … Mwuahahah!!!

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Submitted by courtnee in events - 07.17.10 - 3:32 pm

Artful Touch will be at DEFCON

Las Vegas, July 30-Aug1

To the excitement of all DEFCON goers, it’s official, Jessica and I will be offering massage in the contest room at DEFCON this year. Please help spread the word, and some buzz about it!

https://forum.defcon.org/showthread.php?p=114714

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Submitted by courtnee in status updates - 06.25.10 - 2:02 pm

Anyone getting a 4 want to give me their 3* iPhone? I’d like to conduct an experiment.

Submitted by courtnee in public - 05.29.10 - 1:52 pm

Hot damn. It’s really nice to know a bit of code.

Submitted by courtnee in public - 05.24.10 - 11:28 pm

HNN Youtube playlist!

Looks like Tan decided it would be fun to post all my HNN spots on youtube all by their lonesome. You should totally check ‘em out, some of them are pretty effin entertaining.

What’s that you say? My favorites? So glad you asked!

These are the episodes I found particularly amusing to create.

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Submitted by courtnee in status updates - 05.23.10 - 12:30 am

YES!!!! YEEES!!! IT WORKS!!! IT FUCKING WORKS!!! AHAHAHAHA!1!!! AHahaAHAha!!!!

Submitted by courtnee in status updates - 05.22.10 - 4:54 pm

I hate you, PHP!! Why is my array empty?! WHY?!! AAggh!! AAAGGH!!

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Submitted by courtnee in status updates - 05.22.10 - 2:39 pm

Yay! Informative error messages! Finally! It helps to actually call the functions you create. *Headdesk*

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Submitted by courtnee in status updates - 05.20.10 - 12:21 pm

LOL’d multiple times while recording HNN spots this morning. Such a fun gig. It’s good to be back.

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Submitted by courtnee in status updates - 05.18.10 - 10:57 pm

is trying to code, and as usual, it’s a fucking train wreck. When will I ever learn.

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 05.17.10 - 11:03 am

A step to reclaiming your Facebook privacy.

Concerned about your privacy on Facebook? Well, join the club really. You wanna just stick it right to Facebook every time they sneak some new privacy violating “feature” and open up your shit without telling you, yeah? But it’s hard to leave all those people and all that connectivity behind. Hell, when I was in Europe, things would have been a lot harder when I got stranded had a friend of a friend not been suggested by someone on Facebook.

ReclaimPrivacy.org has a handy scanner service to use as another tool in protecting your information from spilling out when Facebook rocks the TOS boat. All you have to do is log into facebook, and from that window/tab click on a bookmarked website. A tool then scans your profile for holes and lets you know what’s open and what isn’t. The tool is periodically updated and you can track the progress on twitter.

Basically, Facebook has gotten so insecure and unstable as far as what information you share and when, someone felt the need to essentially create an online anti-virus to let you know when you’re vulnerable. How charming. And ingenious!

Personally, I scrub my FB profile every month or so, and just delete everything. That’s my sanity check in multiple ways, including not getting terribly attached to the content that’s hosted under an abysmal terms of service. I came to that conclusion after a lot of grumping and bellyaching about how Facebook chooses to behave in regards to my privacy. But, really, it’s useful to me, and I’ve largely gotten over being emotional about their steady decline and continued violations.

I never had things like my personal phone number and such in my profile, but it would be nice to be able to include them with confidence, as I only friend people I actually know and want to be in contact with. I doubt I will ever do that, but the point remains the same – In order to trust Facebook enough to make it useful, I’ve greatly altered my use of the site. I don’t even use lists as filters because at any moment, Zuck can decide he wants everyone to see everything I’ve written and boom, it’s done without any notification to me.

Now we have a new tool that may be the watchdog that everyone has been hoping for, at least until Diaspora gets off the ground and we can ditch Facebook altogether. You’ll still probably want to check your settings manually every so often (or when your friends start passing along “FACEBOOK HAS DONE IT AGAIN!” status messages), and who knows how long Facebook will allow ReclaimPrivacy.org servers to connect. I think I can hear Zucks asshole puckering from here, actually. But, at the very least, it’s comforting that people are doing something transparent and open source to effect the problem of privacy on Facebook. Something other than bitching about Facebook.. on Facebook, that is.

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 05.15.10 - 9:14 am

Nathan Myhrvold: Could this laser zap malaria?

TED Talks Nathan Myhrvold and team’s latest inventions — as brilliant as they are bold — remind us that the world needs wild creativity to tackle big problems like malaria

My friends Pablos Holman and 3ric Johanson on TED (with props to TED alumni friends Josh Klein and Greg Bennick)! I’m really thrilled to know such kickass people doing such kickass stuff!
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Submitted by courtnee in public - 05.01.10 - 12:24 pm

Class War For Idiots

April 28, 2010

fatcat-banker-1

This article first appeared in The New York Press.

There was a strange moment last week during President Obama’s speech at Cooper Union. There he was, groveling before a cast of Wall Street villains including Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein, begging them to “Look into your heart!” like John Turturro’s character in Miller’s Crossing…when out of the blue, the POTUS dropped this bombshell: “The only people who ought to fear the kind of oversight and transparency that we’re proposing are those whose conduct will fail this scrutiny.”

The Big Secret, of course, is that every living creature within a 100-mile radius of Cooper Union would fail “this scrutiny”—or that scrutiny, or any scrutiny, period. Not just in a 100-mile radius, but wherever there are still signs of economic life beating in these 50 United States, the mere whiff of scrutiny would work like nerve gas on what’s left of the economy. Because in the 21st century, fraud is as American as baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet Volts—fraud’s all we got left, Doc. Scare off the fraud with Obama’s “scrutiny,” and the entire pyramid scheme collapses in a heap of smoldering savings accounts.

That’s how an acquaintance of mine, a partner in a private equity firm, put it: “Whoever pops this fraud bubble is going to have to escape on the next flight out, faster than the Bin Laden Bunch fled Kentucky in their chartered jets after 9/11.”

And that’s why this SEC suit accusing Goldman Sachs of fraud is really just a negotiating bluff to give Obama’s people some leverage—or it’s supposed to be, anyway—according to the PE guy. He dismissed all the speculation that the fraud investigations would turn on other obvious villains like Deutsche, Merrill, Paulson & Co., the Rahm Emmanuel-linked Magnetar and so on.

“You don’t get it, Ames. Even Khuzami, the SEC guy in charge of the Goldman case, is a fraud; the fucker was Deutsche’s general counsel when they pulled the same CDO scam as Goldman. You have no idea how deep this goes.”

And it’s clear that a lot more people here are aware of how fundamentally rotten things are but they’re not willing to face the big fraudonomics bummer yet, preferring instead to stick with specific accusations.

My position on this was, “Good, throw the book at those crooks too, I don’t see what the problem is here.”

This was exactly what I argued a week ago, during a verbal slapfight with that acquaintance of mine. We were making a scene in a Midtown yuppie restaurant, arguing over just how much damage Wall Street had caused, and what to do about it.

His position was indefensible, and he knew it, so he switched tactics:

“OK Ames, which bankers would you throw the book at? Because you’re arguing that they’re all guilty. So which ones do you go after? Two of them? Three? Half of them?”

“Every last one of them. Lock ’em up in one of their private prisons.”

“Not gonna happen, Che.”

Che? Me? Listen, Scarface, I’m about law and order. Don’t any of you PE degenerates believe in that anymore?”

“OK, here’s the deal, Che. I’m going to walk you through this nice and slow so that even an agave-sweetened hippie like you can understand this. Stick with me, this is gonna be a little complicated. Ready?”

And so he began:

“Let’s say the government decides one day, ‘You know, we oughta listen to Che here, let’s throw the book at every firm and every executive that our people can make a case against. Because you know, gosh, it’s all about rule of law and blind justice, just like Che says.’ OK, so now this means indicting just about every serious player in finance, so they take down Goldman Sachs, they take down Citigroup, JP Morgan, BofA… and they also serve all the big funds who are at least as guilty, if not more. So they shut down Pimco, Blackrock, Citadel… maybe they indict Geithner and Summers, haul in some of Bush’s crooks… right?”

“Too bad they don’t serve popcorn here, this is getting good.”

“OK, now guess what you’ve just done? You’ve just caused the markets to completely tank. Remember what happened after the Lehman collapse? Remember how popular that made every politician in Washington? Still wondering why they coughed up a trillion bucks? They were scared for their lives; that’s why they voted for that bailout. You’d have done the same goddamn thing. But if we go after everyone guilty of fraud and theft, the market crash this country would see would make 2008 look like Sesame Street. Open that can of worms labeled ‘Fraud’ and the whole fucking economy collapses. You may as well prosecute people for masturbating. No one will know where the fraud investigation stops and who will be charged next—everyone will try to cash out, and the markets will tank to zero. And guess what happens when the markets tank to zero? Every fucking American with a retirement plan, or an investment portfolio, or a 401k—every state pension plan in the country, every teacher’s pension fund, every fireman’s pension—every last one of them will be wiped out. That’s what the Lehman collapse taught us.”

“Us? It didn’t teach us anything but that this country is run by maniacs.”

banker asshole exiledonline.com

“Jesus H. Christ, Ames– you’re even more clueless than the idiots who managed the Lehman collapse. I mean, didn’t everyone get it how badly those idiots screwed up with Lehman? It was the biggest screw-up this hemisphere has ever seen. You had Secretary Paulson and Fed Chief Bernanke scratching their asses not knowing what to do, so then they go, ‘OK, we’re supposed to be a free market economy, and we’re supposed to be the Republicans—let’s try something different for a change since nothing else is working. Let’s go out on a limb and actually give this “free market” thing a whirl. Who knows? Maybe the “free market” really works the way we always say it does. Nothing else seems to work, let’s let the free market decide Lehman’s fate. Maybe corporate-socialism isn’t the answer.’ So they hung Lehman out in the free-market, and BAM! The. Shit. Hit. The. Fan. No shit, dudes—the free market is for suckers, didn’t your daddy teach you idiots that? Not only did Lehman collapse—everything collapsed; confidence in the entire system collapsed. And here’s what I’m trying to explain to simpletons like you: Our economy is just a confidence game. Don’t ask me how it got this way, don’t care.”

I tried saying something insulting to him, but he just talked right over me, lurching forward baring his laser-whitened teeth.

“I’m sure you have the answer, you and Ron Paul and all the other pot-smoking libertarian do-gooders have it all figured out. But what I’m saying is, no confidence means end of the confidence game. That’s what Lehman showed. Every single player in finance suddenly had to face the fundamental problem—this whole fucking economy is built on fraud and lies and garbage. So when Lehman collapsed, every single player panicked, going, ‘If Lehman was nothing but a Ponzi scheme—and I know what I’m running is a Ponzi scheme—holy shit, that means everyone else is running a Ponzi scheme too! Run for the exits!’ No one trusted anyone else, everyone pulled out, and the entire global economy collapsed just like that. And that meant your parents, my parents, every teacher, every fireman, every person in the country going into retirement, every price on every asset—wiped out.

“And here’s what I’m trying to get you to understand: In the grown-up world, when an entire country’s savings accounts are wiped out because of some do-gooder and his law books and his Thomas Jefferson ‘What about free and fair markets?’ crap, that is a big problem—people don’t give a fuck about Jefferson and ‘free and fair markets,’ they just want their savings to be worth something. And people are right: Jefferson was an imbecile. He should have been a folk singer, not a Founding fucking Father. But that’s another issue that’s over your head—the point is, the guy who destroys this economy because it’s ‘the right thing to do’ will have to flee for his life, and whatever president or political party was in power when that decision was made will be out of power for the next 200 years. That’s why Washington panicked and passed ‘the bailout,’ they didn’t want to be the fools whom all the Ponzi victims blame for tanking the Ponzi scheme, so they broke the glass and pumped up a newer, bigger Ponzi scheme. It was an expensive 14 trillion dollar lesson in, ‘Stay the fuck away from free-market experiments, assholes!’ How naive are you people to actually believe that ‘free market’ crap? The problem is when people in power are stupid enough to listen to guys like you: all the do-gooder libertarians and the do-gooder free-market Republicans who forgot that they’re supposed to lie. Hello!”

“Libertarian, me? Since when was I ever a libertarian?”

“That’s my point: Fools like you don’t even know who you are anymore. They forgot that they’re supposed to lie about all that libertarian free-market shit, keep it far the fuck out of policy. But instead of just lying about free-markets while secretly propping up Lehman, the idiots actually tried pulling off a ‘free-market’ miracle, and we had to pay $14 trillion just to find out what I could have told them for no fee at all, which is: ‘Hey, assholes, you’re supposed to be hypocrites, OK? You’re supposed to be two-faced free-market liars, not libertarian Quakers! You’re not supposed to believe in anything—your job is to get up in front of the public and lie about free markets and the rest. Period.’

“That’s it, how fucking hard is it? Look, watch my face: Say one thing out of one side… and do the other out of the other side. Got that? Let everyone else whine and cry about, ‘Ooh, that’s not fair, ooh, that’s a bailout, that’s socialism, that’s corruption.’ That’s what losers do—they whine. You, for example, Che—you whine all the time, and look at you… Can you pay the bill for this meal? Is there a libertarian on earth who can afford to buy a decent meal in Manhattan? And now, look at me: I’m a hypocrite. Hell yes I am! I lie every day of my life, I lie to myself in my sleep. Hell, I’m lying to you right now, in fact I don’t even know what the fuck I’m saying anymore because I’m so used to lying. And yet—who’s the guy with the black card? Who’s the one who’s going to pick up the check tonight? Guys with power, guys like me, we lie. You got that? ‘Lie’ as in ‘My Lai’ the massacre—as in, ‘My Lai you long time, me so free-markety.’ You distract the dumbshits with free-market B.S. because hey, for whatever reason, that’s what the public likes to hear, it doesn’t really matter what lie you feed them so long as it’s the lie that puts them in a trance. And then behind the scenes, you do the very opposite: You fix the game, you cover up this problem here with those funds there, you move shit around, you skim budgets and you subsidize the system, you cover up the bad shit and once in a while throw a has-been to the wolves to keep the public entertained—that’s the way the system works, and anyone who’s an adult understands that. And everyone who doesn’t understand that can go form an online libertarian chat group and complain with all their little libertarian friends about free markets and Jekyll Island and ‘Wahhh! It’s not not fair, waahhhh!’”

“What’s with the libertarian accusation?”

“It’s just that you all sound the same to me. Libertarians, hippies—is there really a difference? You all whine alike: ‘It’s not fair, man! Ooh! You can’t do that, it’s fraud, it’s corruption, ooh no!’ Or: ‘It’s the income inequality, man; Goldman Sachs controls us all man; it’s socialism for the rich; it’s all too scary for my retarded 5-year-old libertarian brain!’ Seriously, anytime I meet libertarians like you—”

“Listen—I’m not a fucking libertarian, OK? I want free handouts. How clear do I have to make this? Me—handouts. Me—Big Government. I want to collectivize your productive cash, because I am a resentful parasite. Are you capable of processing a single word of what I’m saying to you, Spaz?”

“Uh-huh, sure, whatever. Here’s the thing: I think it’s great that you and your friends memorized Road to Serfdom in between Star Trek episodes—no really, I’m happy for you. Yeah, we’re all so proud. But here’s the thing: We grown-ups are really, really busy now trying to sort out the free-market mess you made with that Lehman move of yours. Yeah, so why don’t you run along to your libertarian chat rooms and have your little debates about Jekyll Island and the gold standard, because it really means a lot to us. And report back to me as soon as you have it all figured out, m’kay? Just get the fuck out of my face and leave the adults alone.”

It got a lot more vicious and personal than this, but when our verbal slap-fight ended—and he paid the bill—I thought about what he said, and it made a lot more sense. Fraud has become so endemic in this country that it’s woven its way into America’s DNA, forming a symbiotic relationship that can’t be undone without killing off the host. [See below: Fraudonomics: 10 Fun Fraud Facts] If they push it just a little too hard, the entire American economy could crash, asset values could tank, and that means tens of millions of extremely pissed off retirees and Baby Boomers. As the Wall Streeter put it: “Whoever is responsible for bursting this latest bubble by exposing all the fraud—and tanking all the markets—will not only be out of power for at least a generation, but they’ll all have to get radical reconstructive surgery on their faces and seek political asylum somewhere remote. No one wants to be that guy, and that’s why it’s not going to happen.”

That may be true, but all bubbles do eventually burst, all Ponzi schemes do collapse for good at some point. The only question is when. For those of us not on the verge of retiring, the sooner we have this day of reckoning and get it over with, the better.

*      *     *

Fraudonomics: 10 Fun Fraud Facts

Love your bank exiledonline.com

Ever since I got kicked out of Russia and forced back home, I’ve been collecting all kinds of news articles about fraud, in a document file titled “America Is Russia.” Here’s a little taste of the wonderful world of American Fraud:

1). Accounting Fraud: Last year, America’s leading banks were insolvent. They had tens or hundreds of billions in losses on their books, and the only way to wipe those losses out would be to either a) own up to the mess, raise enormous amounts of money on top of all the bailout money; or b) get out a big fat eraser, and wipe those losses off the books as if they never existed. The first option was nice and all, but a real hassle. So Geithner and Larry Summers chose Door Number Two: Accounting Fraud. They forced the FASB to accept a rule-change in the accounting methodology called “mark-to-model” which let banks decide how much their assets were worth, rather than letting the markets decide. So if for example a BofA owned a complex security called “Orion Butt Fungus” that was worth 5 pesos on the open market, but BofA was too broke to go out and raise 5 pesos to cover that loss, under the new accounting rules, the government told BofA that rather than pricing “Orion Butt Fungus” at what the market will actually pay for it, why not first ask, “How much would BofA like ‘Orion Butt Fungus’ to be worth, in a perfect world?’” If BofA answers, “Doyee, gee I dunno, how about $500 million?” then under the “mark-to-model” accounting rules, BofA could now value “Orion Butt Fungus” at $500 million, and voila! Their problems are over. That wasn’t so hard, was it? Suddenly, BofA looks like it knows how to pick winners! And no one’s going to second-guess them, because everyone else is mark-to-modeling their “Orion Butt Fungi” too! The end result: under the old rules, BofA would have had to raise money just to cover its debts, sort of like you and me have to do, and that’s just a lot of money going to waste. But now that its portfolio is so profitable, BofA has a much easier time raising money, which it uses to pay ginormous bonuses to its executives.

2). Big Pharma Fraud. Remember that scene early in Fight Club, when Edward Norton explained his job, when it was more profitable to let a car defect go and pay whatever lawsuit settlements come from the deaths, and when it’s better to recall the cars because the number of deaths will result in too many lawsuits? This is humanitarian do-gooder stuff compared to the savage real-world fraud-for-profit model that drives America’s drug companies. It’s really simple and it goes like this: the more fraud a drug company commits, so long as it’s off-the-scale fraud with the most horrible consequences for the victims, the drug company’s profits always outdo the criminal fines and lawsuits by factors of 20, 30, 100… It’s as simple as that. Because the billion in penalties here or the two billion in class action lawsuit settlements there are always far less than the tens of billions you earn from pushing harmful drugs on unsuspecting idiots. To wit: Between May 2004 and March 2010, a handful of top drug companies like Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers paid over $7 billion in criminal penalties for bribing doctors to prescribe drugs for unapproved uses, with sometimes deadly consequences. However, as a Bloomberg report noted, the fines are always a fraction of the profits—Pfizer alone paid almost $3 billion in criminal fines since 2004, yet that was just one percent of their total revenues; Eli Lilly got busted bribing doctors to prescribe a schizophrenia drug, Zyprexa, to elderly patients suffering from dementia, even though company-run clinical trials showed an alarming death rate of 31 people out of 1,184 participants (double the placebo rate). Whatever—the market for elderly dementia patients meant billions in extra revenues. So Eli Lilly continued pushing Zyprexa on the elderly for another four years until it the Feds busted them. Eli Lilly got hit with $1.42 billion fine, but that was peanuts compared to the $36 billion it earned on Zyprexa sales from 2000-2008. To make it happen, the drug companies buy off all the checks and balances: lawsuits revealed the enormous bribes they pay to doctors, and even America’s medical journals are so corrupted by drug company influence that they’re no longer reliable as much more than hidden advertisements, according to a recent UCSF study. Medical journals are 5 times more likely to publish “positive” drug reviews than negative reviews, and one-quarter of all clinical trials are never published at all, leading doctors to prescribe drugs assuming they have all the information. The result: prescription drugs kill one American every five minutes …while Americans pay more for drugs than anyone in the world, spending a total of $12 billion on drugs in 1980 to spending $291 billion in 2008—a 1,700% increase. America is ranked only 17th in the world in life expectancy.

3). Alan Greenspan: Fraudonomics Maestro. America’s central banker from 1987-2006 once told a do-gooder regulator not to fuck with the bankers’ fraud schemes, because in Greenspan’s mind, fraud was not a crime and didn’t need to be regulated. Then Greenspan forced the regulator, Brooksley Born, to resign. Just in time for his next and final act as Central Bank chief: from 2001-2004, Greenspan pumped up the biggest housing bubble in human history by holding rates down to nothing, while touring the country promoting the glories of subprime and Alt-A mortgages. Then in late 2005, when the bubble was ready to burst, Greenspan tendered his resignation and switched over to the other side, signing lucrative contracts with three investment firms all of which bet big against gullible American homeowners, and reaped billions. First, Greenspan signed up to work for Deutsche Bank, which is being sued for securities fraud for selling an Abacus-like CDO to a Warren Buffett-owned bank, M&T; Greenspan also worked for Pimco, which earned $2 billion in a single day in September 2008, when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were nationalized with Greenspan’s lobbying help; and lastly, Greenspan went to work for Paulson & Co., the hedge fund that raked in $1 billion off the same Abacus CDO deal that brought the SEC fraud suit against Goldman Sachs. It’s an unusually perfect record for Greenspan, given his atrocious forecasting record at the Fed. It recalls the old Greenspan circa 1984-5, when he worked as a lobbyist for Charles Keating trying to push regulators off his back and vouching on the record for Keating’s character…Keating was eventually jailed for fraud in the worst savings and loan collapse of all.

4). Municipal Debt Fraud. America’s $2.8 trillion municipal bond market is rife with fraud of the sort you’d expect in an emerging tinpot economy: opacity rather than transparency, plenty of corruption and kickbacks, resulting in decimated budgets and services cutbacks in communities across the country. The problem all stems from way the bonds are issued these days: instead of holding open tenders, nearly all are the result of backroom deals. Back in 1970, only 15 percent of municipal bond contracts were awarded through no-bid contracts; last year, 85% of muni bond deals were assigned in no-bid, non-transparent agreements of the sort that made Halliburton rich in Iraq. Studies show that no-bid bonds invariably cost municipalities more than bonds resulting from open tenders. So far, fraud and corruption charges have been leveled against state employees and city councilors in Florida, New York, New Mexico, Alabama and California, to name a few. Muni bond defaults soared from just $348 million in 2007 to $7.4 billion in 2008—that’s an increase of 20 times– with growing numbers of cities, counties and states on the verge of bankruptcy. And here’s the real kicker: the biggest bailed-out banks and funds stand to make huge profits again if California’s state and city bonds fail–meaning they make big fees selling the bonds in corrupt deals, then they bet against the bonds buying CDS derivatives. Right now Wall Street has a $27 billion bet against the California bonds they helped to sell–and you better believe Wall Street will use every trick in the book to push California into bankruptcy and make those CDS bets pay off big. In fact just last year, the big banks made $1 billion in fees by selling off Obama-stimulus-backed Build America Bonds which were basically a way of massively overpaying bankrupt banks to lined up bankrupt cities and states with skittish investors to fund corrupt projects–like the San Francisco Bay Bridge modernization, which went from $1.8 billion to $13.6 billion, $8 billion just in interest. Good news is that Wall Street is making tons of money, which is always something to cheer–and of course, the bill is all being charged to regular car-driving suckers, who pay a $5 toll today to cross the bridge, up from $2 in 2003.

5). Journalism fraud. The Washington Post got caught whoring out their venerable editorial staff to corporate lobbyists for anywhere from $25,000 to $250,000 a date, depending on the access. The Atlantic Monthly admitted to TalkingPointsMemo that it routinely sold access to its editorial staff for cash. As for business journalism, all sorts of articles and studies have asked the obvious question: “How did every mainstream business outlet miss the financial collapse of 2008?” Among all the self-flagellating mea-kinda-culpas, you won’t find the word “fraud” in their answer. Speaking of business journalism and fraud, The Business Insider, one of the top business news blogs, published a pair of articles defending Goldman Sachs against the SEC fraud charges. The author of the articles defending Goldman Sachs is Business Insider’s co-founder and editor, Henry Blodget. In 2003, Blodget himself was charged with securities fraud by the SEC for repeatedly misleading clients into buying stocks of companies that in private emails Blodget referred to as “piece of shit.” Under the terms of Blodget’s settlement with the SEC, he agreed to a lifetime ban from the securities industry, and he paid $4 million in fines and disgorgements. Since he is not barred from the world of business journalism, Blodget was able to post an article last Friday headlined: “HOLD EVERYTHING: The SEC’s Fraud Case Against Goldman Seems VERY Weak.”

6). Fraudonomics K-12. If you want your kid to grow up to succeed in a fraud-based economy, you need to teach him the ABC’s of cheating starting at a young age. This is one area where America’s schools aren’t failing their students. Cheating is so rampant in schools that nowadays if the student doesn’t cheat on his exam, chances are his teacher or administrator will cheat on his test for him. One in five elementary schools in Georgia are currently being investigated for tampering with the students’ standardized test scores—although suspicious patterns of erasing and remarking answers showed up in half of the state’s elementary schools. In California, as many as two-thirds of its public schools admitted to fudging its students’ standardized test scores. A survey of graduate school students found that 53 percent of business school grad students admitted to cheating, more than any other grad school discipline. Overall, up to 98 percent of college students today admit to cheating, compared to just 20 percent who cheated in 1940.

7). Boardroom Fraud. Corporate America’s boardrooms are stacked up these days in tight, intertwined relationships that turn public companies into crime scenes, plundering money from unsuspecting shareholders and divvying up the loot among the directors and top executives. In 2008, Chesapeake Energy’s stock price collapsed from $74 per share to $9.84, wiping out $33 billion in shareholder value. The CEO, Aubrey McClendon, gambled and lost 94% of his stock in the company on a margin call, personally losing about $2 billion. So what did the board of directors do? They voted to award McClendon $112 million for 2008, the highest of any CEO in America. Shareholders were outraged, calling it a “bailout,” and several pension funds tried suing Chesapeake, but the courts in Oklahoma blocked the lawsuits. That’s because Aubrey McClendon is sort of the George Bush of Oklahoma—a spoiled fuck-up with a rich and powerful granddaddy—Robert Kerr, former governor and senator, and founder of Kerr-McGee—meaning plenty of VIP connections for the loser grandkid. So on Chesapeake’s board, you had Aubrey’s cousin, Breene Kerr; Frank Keating, Republican ex-governor of Oklahoma whose son Chip (and Chip’s wife) works for Chesapeake; Don Nickles, Republican ex-Senator of Oklahoma who co-funded with Aubrey the Republican anti-gay marriage campaign in 2004; Richard Davidson, the former head of Union Pacific, whose corrupt board of directors (which included the head of the US Chamber of Commerce) lavished Davidson with tens of millions in bonuses and a $2.7 million per year pension when he retired… Now multiply a board of directors like this by the sum total of “Corporate America” and you get…a corrupt, tin-pot corporate culture masquerading as a civilized First World corporate culture. That’s us. (You can read about this problem in an excellent new book Money For Nothing: How The Failure of Corporate Boards is Ruining American Business and Costing Us Trillions.)

8). Corrupt credit rating agencies. The only way big institutional investors like pension funds could justify buying a piece of the Orion Butt Fungus CDO pie was if ratings agencies like S&P or Moody’s gave it a top-notch seal of approval: AAA rated, with a little star on the forehead for good behavior. And in the world of fraudonomics, good behavior looks like this email from a Standard & Poor ratings analyst in December 2006:

“Rating agencies continue to create an even bigger monster _ the CDO market. Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.”

The happy ending to this story is that a huge percentage of thieving scum like this emailer saw their hopes become reality: they got wealthy and retired before the CDO market crashed in a trillion-plus dollar heap of shit. And if they didn’t retire, even better—because bonuses in 2009 were soaring, thanks to the always-gullible American taxpayer.

9). Regulatory Fraud: In the OTS, OCC, Fed, pension benefit guaranty agency and of course the SEC, where whistleblowers were routinely ignored because the regulators were too busy painting their monitors while surfing sites like www.fuck-my-wife.com.

  • 10). Judicial Fraud: Juvenile court judges in Pennsylvania took millions of dollars in kickbacks from privately run prisons in exchange for sentencing thousands of innocent kids to juvenile prison terms. Chronic on-the-bench masturbation is running rampant: an Oklahoma judge was accused of using a penis pump on the bench, while nearby in Texas, a Harris County judge masturbated and ejaculated on a defendant’s hand. Speaking of Texas, the entire juvenile prison system there was turned into a sex abuse racket involving Texas state officials–over 750 official complaints about prison administrators molesting or raping underaged inmates in all 13 juvenile facilities had been officially logged between 2000 and 2007.

  • The list goes on and on. Hell, even our literature was corrupted with fraud: James Frey’s addiction “memoir” A Million Little Pieces turned out to be A Million Pieces of Bullshit, the biggest literary fraud of our time. Fooled readers sued, Oprah chewed him out and Frey is now a bestelling “fiction” author. Frey was just one literary con-artist among many, recounting fake tales of street prostitution, being raised by wolves, even fake Holocaust memoirs (read John Dolan’s article about literary frauds).

This is just scratching the surface, but you get the point. We’re way past the point of redemption. No wonder everyone’s dreaming of a violent apocalypse to wipe the slate clean, and take us away to another plane where everything would be better. Anything but this.

Mark Ames is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine.

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Submitted by courtnee in status updates - 04.22.10 - 11:51 pm

I wonder how the makeup industry is changing in film with the advent of the ridiculously invasive HD cameras
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Submitted by courtnee in status updates - 04.17.10 - 12:01 am

Neecam has had the same backend since 1995
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Submitted by courtnee in public - 03.26.10 - 12:31 am

Back to my r00ts

Every few weeks, I tend to experience a span of multiple days where I am incredibly creative in some project, or type of projects. They usually involve very few people, and are generally things I can accomplish basically alone.

It’s the time in my life where I simply have no tolerance for petty bullshit, especially what I deem to be other peoples, and I am absorbed into my work. Often that manifests in photographs, or knitting 7 scarves in 4 days, or painting something large. Last month I made my self a wig. In recent years, I’ve learned to allow witnesses. Still, though, I like small amounts of interaction at best when I’m doing this stuff.

This month, I’ve delved back into my roots.

Inspired by a link I posted on twitter recently about going google free, I started playing with sup on neevita.net, which is a debian box. Sup itself is too beta for my skills. I generally need a fair bit of documentation and example code to make anything I think up happen. Plus, I don’t know ruby. But I’ll surely be keeping an eye on it, mainly for the labeling/tags.

Alpine/Pine, however, is well on its way. I remembered pine to be pretty limiting back in the day, and stopped using it entirely in 2005. But it turns out, I can basically make Alpine do everything gMail showed me that I want – Coloring (aka, labeling) based on message origin, sending from multiple email addresses, default reply From address being the address the mail was sent to, archiving, and even threaded conversations. And if I want it to be like gMail, saving my replies to the thread, all I have to do is save my sent mail to my inbox. Boom.

In fact, when I thought to store my sent mail and incoming mail in the same place, I came up with what I consider to be an even more elegant approach to threading; I started deleting the source mail when I reply, since my sent message goes to my inbox and I like to include the original messages in replies anyway. Then I told Alpine to mark my sent message as read, and created filters to color the sent mails from my email addresses as well as incoming. Boom.

So now, I am using my proper email, and I am bidding gmail and their information hoarding ways aidu. It’s back to a simple life for me. Now if only the stupid IMAP app on my Helio Ocean didn’t force outgoing mail creds like a dumb bitch, I could check it on the go and actually reply to people. Let’s face it, though – it’s not like I’m ever long without computer access.

But what about gTalk? How on earth can I survive without that? Welp, Mcabber is working just dandy. This is what my gTalk looks like now. Just try to tell me that’s not fucking sexy. Just try.

While I was at it, I pilfered a small shell script to update my twitter from linux command line. Additionally, I’m checking facebook and twitter through links (formerly lynx, I would imagine) and loading the mobile sites, so it’s about the same as when I check from my phone. Except fucking COOLER. :)

All of this is wrapped lovingly in a screen session, which I have updated to show the window names and date and time in a status bar at the bottom of the screen. I even left it in .mil time, so I can work on my arithmetic whenever I have to check the time. How.. dangerous.

I had forgotten how fun, creative, and satisfying it is to configure applications on linux. Just making a gTalk buddies name turn yellow when they set away is a small, glorious victory. I don’t know what makes unhashing and editing a line in an .rc file so much more satisfying than clicking a radio button, but it really, really is. Every once in a while, it’s nice to spend a day (ok.. two.) tweaking things and learning/relearning cool stuff. Not to mention how much I enjoy fresh starts and change.

I was actually pretty surprised how quickly I re-adapted to key bindings and shortcuts. I guess you can take the girl out of the slack, but you can’t take the slack out of the girl.

As always, many continued thanks to Llarian, my admin, for dealing with lots of stuff I’d rather not.

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Submitted by courtnee in status updates - 03.18.10 - 10:39 am

Geek? We prefer the term “Intellectual Bad Ass”.

Submitted by courtnee in public - 03.12.10 - 9:05 pm

Windows 7 doesn’t like my DVD/CDRW

Win7 only sees my CD/DVD in safe mode. I tried the UpperFilter/LowerFilter registry fix which did not work. Help?

Update: What ended up working was to go into Dev Manager, uninstall all my IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, and restart. Seems to have fixed the problem.

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 02.10.10 - 10:35 pm

SQUIRREL!

I am in a good mood today…

squirrel

I wanted to give him a little staff or something to hold, or maybe even a flag, but eh.. I didn’t wanna spend that much time. Laughing my fool ass off at that grumpy looking little crotchmoat.

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 12.26.09 - 8:36 pm

Bye bye, Facebook...

Dear friends,

I have very much enjoyed the interactions and access I’ve had with the people I am close to in my life by using Facebook, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to connect with them all in such a way. I will miss the interaction and ease of having so many people in the same place at once online.

Due to privacy concerns, I am no longer maintaining a personal profile on Facebook. A bit more detailed information is included in the comments of this post.

People who have utilized my fan page and personal Facebook profile are highly encouraged to subscribe to the Neevita Mailing List, which I will keep up to date in light of taking a step back from corporate owned social media as a means of community.

Thanks so much for your support. If you find a good alternative, let me know and I’ll follow you.
-nee

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 12.01.09 - 10:40 am

Night Zero

A photographic novel of the post-apocalypse

http://www.nightzero.com/
Just stumbled upon this after a friend posted some pictures of himself in it, and I’m not sure how I’ve gone so long without knowing about it. What a fun concept, it must be really rewarding to work on a project like that. Congrats to Dan!
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Submitted by courtnee in public - 11.30.09 - 11:28 pm

Unlock your Sherlock

They finally released the project I worked on last month. I am one of the waitresses, very background. There’s a few shots of me but they’re so fast, it’s not really worth the effort to try and find me. Glad to have been a part of such a nice looking product. Have fun!

Unlock Your Sherlock — A Modern Mystery Revealed

www.unlockyoursherlock.msn.com
You are invited to solve a modern mystery which will require the skills of a classic detective. Fortunately, you’ll have at your disposal the same uncanny observational skills as the great Sherlock Holmes

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 11.26.09 - 5:03 am

Widdling the social

I recently trimmed down my social networking presence and deleted a few accounts I don’t utilize anymore. I am no longer on livejournal or myspace. They were largely only reposts of stuff here for quite some time. I have RSS feeds and members only posts here, if interested in automatic injection. Cheers.

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 11.09.09 - 2:52 pm

Lego – http://xkcd.com/659/

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 09.30.09 - 12:07 pm

Installing a Husband

My dad sent this along to me, I thought it was pretty spiffy.

—-                                                                           
                                                                            
 Dear Tech Support,                                                        
                                                                           
 Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and I noticed a    
 distinct slowdown in the overall system performance, particularly in the  
 flower and jewellery applications, which operated flawlessly under        
 Boyfriend 5.0.                                                            
                                                                           
 In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as
 Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, and then installed undesirable    
 programs such as NBA 5.0, NFL 3.0 and Golf Clubs 4.1.                     
                                                                           
 Conversation 8.0 no longer runs, and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the 
 system.                                                                   
                                                                           
 Please note that I have tried running Nagging 5.3 to fix these problems,  
 but to no avail.                                                          
                                                                           
 What can I do?                                                            
                                                                           
 Signed,                                                                   
                                                                           
 Desperate                                                                 
 ________________________________________                                  
                                                                           
 DEAR DESPERATE,                                                           
                                                                           
 First, keep in mind, Boyfriend 5.0 is an Entertainment Package, while     
 Husband 1.0 is an operating system.                                       
                                                                           
 Please enter command: ithoughtyoulovedme.html and try to download Tears   
 6.2 and do not forget to install the Guilt 3.0 update. If that application
 works as designed, Husband 1.0 should then automatically run the          
 applications Jewelry 2.0 and Flowers 3.5.                                 
                                                                           
 However, remember, overuse of the above application can cause Husband 1.0 
 to default to Grumpy Silence 2.5, Happy Hour 7.0 or Beer 6.1. Please note 
 that Beer 6. 1 is a very bad program that will download the Farting and   
 Snoring Loudly Beta.                                                      
                                                                           
 Whatever you do, DO NOT under any circumstances install Mother-In-Law 1.0 
 (it runs a virus in the background that will eventually seize control of  
 all your system resources.)                                               
                                                                           
 In addition, please do not attempt to reinstall the Boyfriend 5.0 program.
 These are unsupported applications and will crash Husband 1.0.            
                                                                           
 In summary, Husband 1.0 is a great program, but it does have limited      
 memory and cannot learn new applications quickly. You might consider      
 buying additional software to improve memory and performance. We recommend
 Cooking 3.0 and Hot Lingerie 7.7.                                         
                                                                           
 Tech Support

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 08.30.09 - 12:16 am

Hacker News Network has a new Reporter

http://www.hackernews.com/?p=303

Send feedback and story ideas to courtnee@hackernews.com

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 08.28.09 - 8:55 pm

Another crafty day!

hnn Woke up at 8 to an email, got an idea, spent an hour and a half.. and viola! The elusive and mythical HNN t-shirt, courtesy of my Singer Quantum – not meant to embroider.. but, who is?

And then the rest of the day, I installed some dreads I’ve been making on Becky, and watched a lot of movies. Big Fish, Son of Rambo, Lucky Number Sleven, The Three Amigos and Snatch.  We also drank way too much tequila. Anyway – PICTURES..

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 07.16.09 - 1:46 am

Ah, nostalgia..

I feel fortunate and full today. I am going to DEFCON this year. I just received my itinerary from whitetras and it’s official. I’m bringing someone important to me to show him vegas for the first time.

I first went in 1995, when I was 15 and neck deep in linux, drugs and Marlboro Reds, and I’d recently discovered this thing called the web, and frequently picked fights about Slackware being superior to RedHat. I recall, during a recent move, finally throwing away my Slackware 2.7 CD which I had been keeping for posterity.

I went to defcon religiously for a time, my entire social network of people living inside a computer. I didn’t know most of their real names. I spent night after late night online tinkering, listening to music for the jilted generation (come to think of it, I think someone I talked to used ‘jilted’ as a handle..) and waiting for the next defcon, so I could see all these people in person again – and hardly remember most of it.

When I got a little older, I started playing with music, and joined mp3.com in 1997. The internet was still like the wild west and we were changing everything. My hacker friends helped me choose my juno 106 (thanks tfish) and hooked me up with equipment to make recording easier (tip of the hat to you whiteknight). After I created my first original song in 1999, on the floor of my living room, juno fresh out of its shipping box, paid for with my job breaking software at Microsoft, I started making a little money with CD sales and streams on mp3.com.

I was interviewed with ABCNews for an article on female hackers, and later about my music being online, based on a recommendation from Jeff Moss, assuring the reporter (Sascha, another person I’ve kept in touch with) I was definitely not a scene whore. I’m not sure how accurate that assurance was, but it sure felt good at the time. I still boast that Jeff pierced my navel, under mild duress in my studio apartment, sometime in 1999. That sounds pretty scene whorish to me, but who am I to say. Maybe we were just, you know.. friends.

Countless things have happened since my first defcon, and my introduction to the hacker community. My first website complete with a blue satin background and ripped off animated fire gifs was created in 1995, hosting a splattering of terrible teenage poetry. In 1997, Lars from the IRC channel #suicide sent me a black and white quickcam, and the neecam was put online, one of the first webcams during the era of Jennicam and Anacam, both of which were more popular, active and racy.

I’ve occasionally contemplated what my life would have been like had I never discovered the internet and been part of a revolution. I can’t fathom it. I can’t fathom how I could have possibly found another pool of socially awkward, skinny, pale, wide-eyed geniuses to have sloppy, dysfunctional teenage relationships with either. One of many reasons I am very thankful that my life turned out how it did.

I happened upon this awesome article about some of my friends. The L0pht is a fine example of what’s happened with this culture of misfits and criminals, but this is something that’s happened all over the landscape we built 10 years ago and long before that. I remember writing a rant about the difference between the hackers, my friends, and the script kids that were getting all the bad press, writing worms and breaking websites for attention. The hackers meant for what’s described in this article to happen from the beginning. They were out to change the world.

LOpht in Transition
04/01/2007
Michael Fitzgerald/CSO

http://www.csoonline.com/read/040107/fea_lopht.html

Brian Oblivion. Kingpin. Mudge. Space Rogue. Stefan von Neumann. Tan. Weld Pond. That’s how the hacker group called the L0pht appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Government Cybersecurity on May 19, 1998. They said, among other things, that they could take down the Internet in 30 minutes. The senators listened closely and afterward praised them effusively.

It was a landmark moment for hackers, shunned, derided and loathed by the technology industry. And it was a landmark for the L0pht too. Though the group was already known for its vulnerability disclosures, for the Hacker News Network, for tools like the hash cracking tool L0phtCrack, now “everybody [in the hacking community] wanted to be the L0pht,” remembers Jeff Moss, founder of the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences.

Not bad for a group that got its start when someone’s wife said it was time to get his computers out of the bathtub.

The L0pht shaped the way disclosures are handled and helped force vendors like Microsoft to change the way they address software security flaws. There’s no question, either, that by raising the visibility of security problems, the group spurred companies to begin paying more attention to security. “You knew you’d better rattle your own doorknobs before the hackers did,” says John Pescatore, a longtime information security analyst at Gartner.

Some think, though, that visibility has hurt software security. “They were the Led Zeppelin of gray hat hacking,” says Marcus Ranum, who is credited with creating the first commercial firewall product and is now CSO at Tenable Network Security. “By releasing gray hat tools and techniques they were able to get a tremendous amount of attention. And they opened the floodgates for all the bottom feeders that followed them.”

Ironically, it was Ranum himself who helped give the L0pht credibility. As CEO of NFR, which made software to find intruders on corporate networks, Ranum used the L0pht’s vulnerability research to strengthen his product, and hired the L0pht both to do a code review and to write modules for his product, giving the group a legitimate corporate client to tout. He says he considers the L0pht members his friends and says they are “great guys.” But he thinks those who have followed them find vulnerabilities almost as a way to blackmail corporations. He blames the L0pht, saying, “They have changed the industry for the worse.”

Nothing in the L0pht’s emergence from Boston’s bulletin board community in 1992 suggested it would achieve any more notoriety than other hacker collectives of the day. Brian Oblivion, a hacker with strong interests in radio communications, founded the group. Oblivion declined to be interviewed for this article, saying via Space Rogue that he was too busy. Chris Wysopal, who joined the L0pht in late 1992 as Weld Pond (a handle chosen by pointing at random at a map of the Boston area, because the bulletin board The Works forbade members to use real names), says that Oblivion “had so many computers in the bathroom that his wife couldn’t use it anymore.” She gave the group space in the South End artist’s loft where she made hats. And for several years, the L0pht was just a place for Oblivion and his friends to hang out after work and store their growing collection of computing equipment.

Among those friends were Space Rogue and a teenage hacker and skateboarder named Joe Grand, who went by the handle Kingpin (named for the bolt that runs through the truck, or axle, of a skateboard).

Grand calls from the road. He’s often on the road, literally—he is a triathlete good enough to have a sponsor. He’s 31 now and runs his own San Diego design shop, Grand Idea Studio, which has designed RFID and GPS modules for Parallax, an in-game videocamera for Gamecaster, and his best design yet, a video game accessory that he has licensed but can’t talk about.

Grand, an electrical engineer, has also written two books on hardware hacking and is a technical adviser to Make magazine. If all goes well with a pilot he’s recently shot, this fall we’ll see him on an engineering show on the Discovery Channel. Yet he’s nostalgic about the L0pht.

“I’m having a really hard time with realizing that I’m twice as old as when I joined the L0pht,” he says. “We did so many great things—what can I do to top that?”

The L0pht originally built a network so they could play Doom against each other. But they got more serious in 1994 and 1995, shedding some members and adding others with specific technical skills that complemented the group. They moved to a larger space in Watertown, Mass.

Excepting Grand, who was still in high school, all of the L0pht held various day jobs, often working together at places like Comp­USA, Massachusetts General Hospital or BBN Technologies, the fabled research lab (Weld Pond, Brian Oblivion, Mudge and Silicosis all worked there at some point). They kept their identities hidden, in part to keep their day jobs. Everyone in the hacking community knew Dan Farmer had been fired from his job for releasing the Satan network analyzer. But the group wanted to turn the L0pht into a day job.

The charismatic, long-tressed Peiter “Mudge” Zatko had emerged as the group’s public face, if not its de facto leader. He developed, along with Wysopal, L0phtCrack, a tool that revealed weak passwords. Released in 1997, it’s still available on some websites today. “Back then, the companies would pretend [vulnerabilities] weren’t real,” says Bruce Schneier, the noted cryptographer and CTO of BT Counterpane. Schneier says the L0pht’s ability to build tools like L0phtCrack forced vendors to address security problems. “That’s the reason we have more secure software today. If it wasn’t for that, Microsoft would still be belittling, insulting and suing researchers,” he says.

By late 1998, the L0pht was actively trying to attract venture capital and turn itself into a real business—it had pushed out Stefan von Neumann and a couple of other short-lived members, and hired Christien Rioux (known as Dildog) and Paul Nash (known as Silicosis) to support L0phtCrack and do custom work for companies like NFR. The L0pht was not the first group of hackers to offer professional services or tools, but even in the giddy late 1990s, hackers still had an unsavory reputation. Finally, @stake, a security consulting firm, came to the group with $10 million in VC money and told the L0pht it could continue its research. The members voted to join it.

Even so, that merger, announced Jan. 10, 2000, marked the symbolic end of the L0pht. Over the next few years, its members were fired or drifted away, and @stake itself was gobbled up by Symantec in 2004. The only member of the L0pht still there is Nash. The transition was particularly difficult for Zatko, who spent six months on disability and left @stake after just two years.

Today, Zatko’s office at BBN is a rest area for sundry things. There’s a dead computer on a chair, and a working circa-1940s polygraph machine on a table. In a corner are two fishing rods and an antenna, part of an impromptu communications experiment. There’s a guitar signed by one-time porn stars Barbara Dare and Jamie Summers. A bound copy of the L0pht’s testimony in front of the Senate is on a shelf. On one wall hangs a picture of him with President Bill Clinton and Vinton Cerf, in which Zatko’s light brown hair is still rock-star length. It’s short now, parted in the middle. He has a goatee and wears glasses. He’s sore from a boxing workout the night before, a reminder that he’s in his late 30s.

Zatko says he can’t talk about what he does at BBN, other than to say it’s security-related and for some unmentionable three-lettered government agencies. He also says he returned to BBN, which employed him in the 1990s, before the L0pht was his job, in part because BBN told him there could be no publicity about the projects he was working on. “That was attractive as hell,” he says.

But Zatko can’t seem to stay out of the spotlight. He is the obvious model for “Soxster,” one of the main characters in former cyberczar Richard A. Clarke’s new novel, Breakpoint (the L0pht itself appears as “the Dugout”). And he acknowledges that he still “wants to make a dent in the universe,” the old motto of the L0pht.

After an hour of talking about the L0pht, Zatko suggests a tour of the older parts of the BBN laboratory in Cambridge, dating from when it was an acoustics consultancy. He shows off the silent room, the amplification room, the sonar tank, the place where it developed Boomerang—a technology being used in Iraq to help find snipers—and he talks about how much he likes the variety of the cool ideas BBN pursues.

“Originally, the L0pht was meant as a microcosm of here,” he says, with a wistful expression.

The spirit of the L0pht lives on most directly at Veracode, the security software company started by Wysopal and Rioux after they left Symantec in 2005. The company launched at the RSA Security Conference in February.

Wysopal post-L0pht helped codify responsible disclosure policies and establish the Organization of Internet Safety, and while starting Veracode he also managed to be lead author of The Art of Software Security Testing, published in December 2006.

Wysopal, at a rangy 6 foot 2 inches, was the tallest member of the L0pht and the oldest (he’s now 41). Rioux (whose handle Dildog was the original name Dilbert creator Scott Adams gave to Dogbert) was the shortest and youngest (now 29).

In early January, sitting in the conference room at Veracode, the two play Click-and-Clack about their time at the L0pht, and the purpose of Veracode, which in a real sense extends the L0pht’s mission: to make software more secure, in this case by offering a Web-based service that automatically checks software for security flaws, via a clever—and patented—technique for data flow modeling and modeling control flow analysis developed by Rioux.

Told of Ranum’s comments, Rioux makes a slight grimace. “The days are over when we should be flinging mud over the Internet about vulnerabilities,” he says.

Veracode has pulled in $19.5 million in capital from Polaris Venture Partners, Atlas Venture and .406 Ventures. While it has competitors, such as Coverity, Fortify and Ounce Labs, Veracode’s approach is “a cool spin” on existing security technology, according to Gartner’s Pescatore.

Both Wysopal and Rioux believe Veracode is ready to sharply reduce the world’s total number of software vulnerabilities.

The L0pht, then, are all now unquestionably legitimate, and their evolution serves as a metaphor for the security business, which is now mainstream. Companies like Microsoft and Oracle have developed methods to take care of vulnerabilities, and the L0pht deserves some credit for that turn of events. While the disclosure wars are again raging, thanks to bug-a-day campaigns and other ploys by the hackers of today, the L0pht’s overall impact on corporate security has been positive, say many, including Howard Schmidt, who knew the L0pht both in his role as a computer forensics investigator at the Air Force and as CSO at Microsoft.

Still, some vendors continue to try to shove security issues under the rug, and there is no question that more of the Internet is under attack today than ever before. So what of that?

Peter Neumann (no relation to the L0pht’s Stefan von Neumann) is 74 and still a principal scientist at SRI, working on security issues. He also testified before the Senate subcommittee on that day in May 1998. He says security vulnerabilities are a part of a much bigger set of problems that have existed for 40 years and probably will exist 40 years from now. But he chuckles when asked about the L0pht, saying, “They were pointing out that the emperor has no clothes on, and nobody wants to hear that, but they did it in a tasteful way that made people listen. They made a difference.”

I’m so very proud of my friends, and feel fortunate today to have had these people in my life as examples. Hell, just today I discovered a hacker friend of mine, Josh Klein (who I met after handles weren’t quite so important to ones safety, so I don’t know his) was not only the speaker in a TED talk, some of the most amazing presentations on the planet, but was in Oprah fucking magazine talking about his passions and experiments. My peeps are DOING something.

I, too, am out there doing my part to make a dent in the universe. I support a company I believe in as I make my base living to earn the stable springboard life situation I’ve built to do my more risky work. I’ve found a way to channel my compulsion to express and tell vivid stories, and the skills I’ve picked up along the way, toward a non-profit that matters. I have done some meaningful things, and I am growing, expanding, discovering new routes and possibilities nearly every day. I’ve come a long way from the girl who was found passed out under a van before defcon 6 had even started.

For a time, I wondered if my life choices, and the people I spent time with, were the reason I seemed so fucked up and constantly struggling. I wonder 15 years later, if they’re a part of the reason that, right now, I’m not.

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 06.03.09 - 1:26 pm

Yay for fresh starts!

Hm. Well then.

Apparently, my E:\ drive was not actually located on my external hard drive, as I have assumed. Rather, it was on the drive I partitioned and re-installed XP on last night.

My E:\ drive was the datastore which has housed all my source files for my music, images, and video projects for the last two years. A large fraction of the good pictures I’ve taken are on neevita, though the original high quality images of my self photography are now gone.

As for the music and video – I don’t know how much I care to recall at this particular moment how very little of it ever ventured from my drive. I’m sure it will come up over time as I think about things I want and discover they are gone.

Seems rather silly, that the data I’ve been worried about losing if my drives ever failed (or I wiped them out), are the 150 gigs of replacable mp3′s I have.

I suppose one of the fortunate aspects of this, aside from having a clean slate which I do rather enjoy, is how the experience has shown me what kind of relationship I’ve developed with my artwork.

Bummer. Thankfully, I will make more.

Additionally, my potential moving costs now include an external terabyte, which I’ve been putting off for a day too long it seems, to back up what I have left and hopefully prevent this from happening again any time soon. I’m offering all paintings currently for sale at a 25% discount, INCLUDING COMMISSIONS. http://neevita.net/artist/art-for-sale

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 04.24.09 - 10:55 pm

Samorost the sequel!

A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I played a little flash game called samorost. I’d never seen something so well made in flash. I fell in love with it, and at the time, I wrote the author and asked if he wanted me to mirror his game on phuqed. He agreed, and I suspect I may be one of the few people who has the original game in its entirety besides the creators.

I ran across my copy of it recently, and thought I might want to put it back up – But thankfully, it’s not only alive and well on the web, but has a SEQUEL on top of it! Rad!!

http://amanita-design.net/samorost-1/

http://amanita-design.net/samorost-2/

Memories, anyone?

(P.S. Some may appreciate knowing that the $5 full version of the sequel has a $3.50 sircharge, making it closer to a $10 game than $5)

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 04.16.09 - 11:15 am

Livejournal accounts converted on neevita!

I went through and converted all livejournal user accounts on neevita today. If you logged in before with username@livejournal.com, your account is now just username, with everything set the same as before, including your password.

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Submitted by courtnee in public - 05.22.08 - 12:24 pm

Emily Gould - Exposed in the New York Times Magazine

I momentarily considered posting in response to the article on the NYT site, But my days of putting myself in the middle of shit like that are quite behind me. I have my space carved out here, (where I post rather occasionally now) and a few other satellite networking footholds, and that’s about the gist of it anymore.

I’ve a lot of mixed thoughts and associated feelings about what I’m absorbing from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25internet-t.html?ex=1369195200&en=fa6fdbbd3d7d5adf&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

If not being drawn in by it, I can easily look past the gratuitous length and self-absorbed narcissism, (which I, being as I am, don’t see as much of a ‘bad’ thing anyway) to get at the bigger picture of its cultural and personal relevance. I believe Emilys cautionary tale is bravely presented, well written, and is worthy of an attentive forum.

I find myself comparing notes. Being thankful that I had a head start, before blogging was blogging and fuel for media companies. I started nearly 10 years before Emily did, spewing my guts and soul online as self-medication. Nothing in my life was too sacred to put on my site and allow to be picked apart, scrutinized, and more often, encouraged or supported by whoever decided to read it. As I evolved, I did similar things with my music and artwork. And eventually, I recognized my patterns and have taken steps to balance my life which have proven beneficial and quite rewarding.

After reading about Emily, I am again pleased that at one time I held the ideal that I would not ‘sell my soul’ or jump onto the emerging opportunity to make money off my journaling. How that young idealism served me in avoiding many of the pitfalls she fell into surfaces now and again as I live my life.

I’ve also found a somewhat sickening comfort in her story. I was not alone in my obsessive, often self-abusive use of my web site as a downright brutal form of therapy. Maybe my history, and the culture I come from, is not as weird and alien as.. well, it felt, at the time. Maybe I’m not such a freak afterall. I wanted to reach out to her, commiserate with her, advise her, learn from her. Thank her.

Emilys story is a candid look into a social phenomenon that is fascinating and in some ways inspiring, and also quite alarming and concerning. It’s a way of life that’s painful and scary, largely because it’s so misunderstood and scrutinized by the people outside of it.

Aside from being impressed and intrigued by anothers beautifully written saga, these responses I’m processing from the content of her immense article are rather familiar. They have been tumbled around a lot throughout my years. The masturbation is fun, but it’s not the meaty juicy cut I tend to crave nowadays.

My big “AHA!” takeaway from the piece is the reader comments. So many generalized, reactionary, hypocritical statements about my “Generation” being nothing but a whining bag of fuckheads, sitting on their computers jerking off and saying mean shit to one another instead of doing something ‘meaningful’ with their lives.

Such a majority defining Emilys story about the realities of our social development as drivel, unimportant, a waste of their time, is saddening to me. I think it’s furthering the isolation, tendency to invert, and social disconnection of people who are growing up in similar situations and turning increasingly to their blogs instead of real life. The number of people publishing their privates is growing.

In reading these comments, many from portions of our society that would not have read about Emily if it were published in a more specialized place, I’m beginning to understand why it was a brilliant move to put her on the front page of a New York Times Publication. Like we really need more tragic death and war stories, more conformity, more consumerism, more capitalism.. evidence of the very dehumanizing shit that helped fuel the arrival of people with struggles like Emily has.

The want for attention, validation, to feel valued somehow, to contribute, and to be heard, is human. It’s not just Emily attempting to get those things by sharing her thoughts in her blogs. The isolated-yet-public (and instantaneous) method of blogging sure is easier to notice than someone who quietly volunteers at a soup kitchen in order to feel valued and important. Or someone who secretly beats the shit out of their kids behind closed doors to feel respected. But let’s get real people. It’s all the same basic stuff.

I think Emily has made mistakes while seeking the attention she desires, many of which have been hurtful to herself as well as her loved ones. Her progression is obvious, as is her intelligence and sensitivity. It’s clear that she’s learning and prioritizing, finding her way. The woman was 24 when she took the high profile, high stress job at Gawker in 2006. She was a kid for christ sake, and in many respects got eaten alive. She reacted by defending herself, gulped down the resulting shitstorm, and overcame.

When I first wrote about this, after reading so many all-too-familiar “what a bunch of self absorbed shit” comments in response to Emily, I was mindful of writing about me in response. The parallels between Emily Gould and the previous incarnation of myself are quite obvious. If you know about phuqed.org, I probably don’t have to mention much else.

This isn’t as uncommon as some would like to presume. It’s a culture that’s surfacing. Just like the geek/hacker community eventually surfaced to build your ipods, lock down your POP3 servers, and trick out your PDA’s. Just like the underground, unknown music community surfaced after that to collaborate with one another online, making music available to more people by building really ugly myspace pages (http://myspace.com/notapplicableinfo, foo!).

And it’s being capitalized on, just like those movements were. Brilliant, young, impressionable people are getting ground up by the corporate machine in that process. Again. Always. There is a power in sharing your experience with others. I know it well and so does Emily. So, here. Take it.

This is the third culture wave I’ve ridden along with, and watched crash full force into our society. It’s my opinion that someone choosing to post some flippant remark about how having a blog won’t make Emily special in response to the kind of social commentary and insight Emily provided, has one hell of a wake up call on the way.

At least, I sure hope a wake up call is on the way. For the sake of this generation … raised by many of the people now scowling at Emily in disgust and hypocritically telling us all about it.

Good job there, fellas.

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Submitted by courtnee in members only - 08.23.00 - 1:12 am

Ahh, coding..

after almost a month of coding by motherfucking
HAND, the entire photos section is now
updated with the new formats. what a fucking pain in the ass. it
looks damn neat, though. there were too many variations in the code
with different widths for how many thumbnails and shit to bother
writing a script to do it.. and i mean, part of the fun of making
this site is doing it all by hand. fun. yeah. anyway, its finally
fucking done, so go look at it.

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