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Capital of Nasty Vol. 02 Issue 25
Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine
Volume II, Issue 25, Year AD MCMXCVII
Monday, June 23th, 1997
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"I had this dream that I was dead, but I came back to life.
You were at my funeral, so I walked up to you and I said 'so
Mr. Scientist, does this make you believe in spirituality?'"
- Davinder Sangha, the day after she tried to convince me about
re-incarnation.
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"Of course I read all [of CoN's] articles. Beats reading MSN!"
- Hammed Malik
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1. Reader's Letters
2. Everything You Didn't Want To Know About Internet
3. Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers
4. Washroom graffiti
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This week's Golden Testicle Web Award goes to:
Pasting Those Letters On Is So OLD Dear. Can I Get You A Heart While
I'm Up?:
- Want a real 'killer' font for that important letter? A
http://www.killerfonts.com/ Web site is selling downloadable TrueType
fonts made from the handwriting of actual killers like Jeffrey
Dahmer, the Zodiac killer, plus ordinary wierdos. Check out the
'blood' fonts.
- MarXidad
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1. Reader's Letters
From: Don Fitch
Date sent: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 03:26:54 -0400 (EDT)
To: leandro@capnasty.org
Subject: Re: CoN II.24
Hi, Leandro:
Coming by way of "science-fiction fandom fanzines", I've long been
accustomed to the idea of interactive response in the context of
amateur publications. If you didn't write at least an occasional
reasonably-intelligent Letter of Comment, in order to help keep
the discussions going and to indicate that you were following
things and appreciating what the editor/publisher was doing, you'd
soon be dropped from the mailing list.
'Zines don't seem to have nearly so much of this Interactive
aspect -- they're mostly more like soapbox orations, on-stage
performances, or presentations of a product (like mainstream
magazines), rather than an ongoing conversation or discussion
among friends, and don't necessarily have an audience composed
mostly of people who are comfortable handling complex ideas by
means of the written word, so they (and you) don't get much
feedback from their readers. I don't think that's necessarily
inherent in the 'Zine form, but it does seem to be the common
trend, and not easy to buck.
Thanks for telling us about Father Ross "Padre" Legere. I've not
attended a Catholic (or other religious) highschool, but have
heard enough to conclude that, whatever their other merits might
be, they're not a pleasant or rewarding environment for
independent-minded and creative people. I'm glad that you (and
other students at that school) had someone like Fr. Legere to
recognize and support talent and creativity even though these
characteristics _do_ sometimes threaten the established order of
things. It's good to see the efforts of such people acknowledged.
I must confess that, not being A Movie Person (the last movie I
saw was ET -- the week after it was first released (a friend was
visiting from Toronto, and really wanted to see a movie in
Hollywood, for some reason)), I tend to skim over the movie
reviews in CoN ... or rather, _try_ to skim lightly; they tend to
be perceptive critiques that are worth reading even though I'm not
interested in the movies that sparked them.
(I assume that this is understood when one writes a Letter of
Comment to a 'Zine or EZine, but just in case: This letter is
freeware/fanware, with permission granted to reproduce it in any
not-for-profit publication.)
Don Fitch
+++++++++
---[Editor's Response]---
Hello Don Fitch,
thank you for showing us that at least one person out there
bothers to read what we write and comment on our material. As you said,
CoN is more of a sopabox than an actual magazine and it's true. I find
myself cursing and whining about life most of the time and forcing my
weird opinions down everyone's throat. Considering as well that
sometimes putting stuff together each week it's hard causing me to
publish late because I don't have anything in particular to fill in the
empty spaces. Our own time is scarce as well, so when we do something
for CoN, it's either late at night or in a break from work. CoN is a
hobby, and we decided from the day we turned it from private (our own
personal zine) to public (get poor innocent people involved with it) that
it should stay as such.
By taking CoN as a hobby and not as something which is a task or
duty, we end up enjoying it much more. If it ever ceases to be fun and it
starts looking like a job CoN will automatically cease to exist. At the
moment the only reason CoN keeps on coming on your virtual mailbox is
because I am stubborn and I don't give up. I like the challenge of
writing something new each week and being able to send something out with
a deadline. I guess it is helping me growing and maintaining deadlines
and after all we have already passed the one year mark.
Surprisingly in the beginning we got quite a response, and articles
were not a problem. We recycled a few of the good ones from Volume 0
pubblications, and we also had a great collection of weird text-files
collected from the days when BBS were the only mean of electronic
communication for people that had just started High School. Also the
response from our readers (no more than a handful) at the time was great.
It seems however really hard to get noticed. The Internet has
too much noise, and even if I wanted CoN to be like some sort of big
family where everyone could talk and discuss with each other the topic,
it seems that the readers don't even acknowledge it. Now that summer
started and many university accounts get deactivated, I lost quite a
large number of readers and during our server problems, a few
unsubscribed.
I wrote to a e-zine that has 12,000 readers, called Inklings
(http://www.inklings.com). It's a zine which helps writers and provides
help for new zines (electronic or otherways). I wrote to the editor
Debbie Ridpath Ohi <ohi@inkspot.com>, and she was kind enough to suggest
to me where to go and look at. She also has a great webpage with lots of
information on where to advertise the zine, where to have the zine
reviewed, and so on. (http://www.inkspot.com/craft/newsletterinfo.html).
I am also thinking of going down to Speakers' Corner and advertise
my web-site there. Speakers' Corner is a small booth where you can sit
inside and the tv station (CityTv) for one dollar will tape about 4
minutes of your time. You can say whatever you want and then witness
what you said on the next Saturday, where they go on the air.
Another idea would be to make small posters (8' by 11') with info
about the magazine and the URL for people to subscribe to and then paste
it around all those Cybercafes and similar. Perhaps this will get me an
audience, although I am afraid of the kind =)
As for the movie reviews, it's part of our culture. We have what
we call "Movie Night in Canada" and it's an excuse to get together,
watch a movie and slaughter it. After that we all get together and
practice some cafe` terrorism, as described in one of our previous
issues.
Take care Don Fitch, and thank you for your criticism and
interest towards CoN.
Don Leo+
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2. Everything You Didn't Want To Know About Internet
(But Were Smart Enough Not To Ask).
by Bob Allisat
PART ONE
The Internet has experienced an explosion of sorts in the five (5)
years that I have experienced and been experienced by it, by them,
and all that. What has happened is a lot. Too much. Not enough. Way
too little way too late. Way too much way too early. Nada. Todos.
Shit. Heavan. Hell. Utopia. Bliss. Fuck all. Horror. It all. Fuck it all.
And I have survived to tell the tale. Which is saying everything
and nothing. But I won't get into that stream again. Here is:
everything you didn't want to know about the internet (but were
smart enough not to ask).
Cyber Cowboys
There is no freedom on this Internet thing you anus brain. The guy
(and it's invariably a guy) who plays with the machines is the one
who determines what you can or cannot say, do, feel, think or live.
If it doesn't pass his rectal exam he cuts you off, shuts yo down,
terminates your whatever and lives happily ever after tough shit
and fuck offs for you. Go ahead. Try. Express yourself. See how
long it is before your plug is pulled.
Between You And Me (and the wall of eyes)
There is no privacy on this medium you supid fuck. It's all public
knowledge from the (pant-pant) horny letter you mailed your lay to
the plans and schemes you exchange in business and annything else.
There are no linkless pages. Spiders do *not* respect anti-robo HTML.
No encryption method works. Every system is easily hacked into. The
whoel shebang - good, bad, ugly, beautiful and dull - is open spread
eagled for one and all to see, hear, read and (heavan forbid smell.
Even Braver New World
The Internet appears to be the means our civil liberties will be
eroded into non-existance. We have no privacy and no freedom. Our
ability to communicate in a law abiding manner is subject to
perpetual oversight. With the ever heightening technologization
of everyday life and the inevitable integration of it all into this
Internet mindset we are fucking well doomed as free citizens if
there ever was such a thing in the first pplace (debatable). Well
at least once upon a time we could disappear. Now? Good luck.
Cookies Forever
To be tracked from begining to end, to be codified, digitized,
every aspect of one's existance consumerized, to be numbered
and listed, delisted and classified, to be marked and demarked
and remarked, to be pursued when wealthy and rebuked when in
poverty, to be propositioned and solicited, to be brought into this
world and ushered out, to be reamed and roamed, to be watched
and to watch, to be fish bowled into exitance and pin holed out
of existance, to be internetized and reinternetized and deinternetized,
to never be alone, to never get the feeling no-one has been there,
to not to be is to be, to be is to not be, niether is that the question
nor the answer. Just the impossibility.
NetSex
Look it just isn't. No-one is who or what they say they are or
aren't. Except for (perhaps) me. Liars and bulshitters, guys scamming
as gals and gals laughing as guys and staulkers and perverts and
lonely mother fuckers and fatherfuckers, lying through their fuckless
teeth, lying through their whistling fucking noses, lying through their
crusty keyboards. Lying liars without existances.
More Than Ever Before
All the fucking empty passing of empty static organized into semi-
transparant shared voids when the sun is shining outside and the
wind is blowing and there is enough life left in the planet to just
enjoy oneself before it all gets concretized and you have to waste
your fucking end of days lives hunched over radiating monitors playing
games with fucking strangers who could care less about you. Grow up,
wake up, live life and fuck off.
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3. Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 14:17:01 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jim Thomas <jthomas@well.com>
Subject: File 5-- Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers
Cu Digest WWW site at:
URL: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/
Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers
by Steve Silberman
Source - WIRED News
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/story/4437.html
Copyright 1993-97 Wired Ventures, Inc. and affiliated companies
After 17 years in the hacker underground,
Christian Valor - well known among old-school hackers and phone
phreaks as "Se7en" - was convinced that most of what gets written in
the papers about computers and hacking is sensationalistic jive. For
years, Valor says, he sneered at reports of the incidence of child
pornography on the Net as
"exaggerated/over-hyped/fearmongered/bullshit."
Now making his living as a lecturer on computer security, Se7en claims
he combed the Net for child pornography for eight weeks last year
without finding a single image.
That changed a couple of weeks ago, he says, when a JPEG mailed by an
anonymous prankster sent him on an odyssey through a different kind of
underground: IRC chat rooms with names like #littlegirlsex, ftp
directories crammed with filenames like 6yoanal.jpg and 8&dad.jpg, and
newsgroups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen. The anonymous
file, he says, contained a "very graphic" image of a girl "no older
than 4 years old."
On 8 June, Se7en vowed on a hacker's mailing list to deliver a dose of
"genuine hacker terror" to those who upload and distribute such images
on the Net. The debate over his methods has stirred up tough questions
among his peers about civil liberties, property rights, and the ethics
of vigilante justice.
A declaration of war
What Se7en tapped into, he says, was a "very paranoid" network of
traders of preteen erotica. In his declaration of "public war" -
posted to a mailing list devoted to an annual hacker's convention
called DefCon - Se7en explains that the protocol on most child-porn
servers is to upload selections from your own stash, in exchange for
credits for more images.
What he saw on those servers made him physically sick, he says. "For
someone who took a virtual tour of the kiddie-porn world for only one
day," he writes, "I had the opportunity to fully max out an Iomega
100-MB Zip disc."
Se7en's plan to "eradicate" child-porn traders from the Net is
"advocating malicious, destructive hacking against these people." He
has enlisted the expertise of two fellow hackers for the first wave of
attacks, which are under way.
Se7en feels confident that legal authorities will look the other way
when the victims of hacks are child pornographers - and he claims that
a Secret Service agent told him so explicitly. Referring to a command
to wipe out a hard drive by remote access, Se7en boasted, "Who are
they going to run to? The police? 'They hacked my kiddie-porn server
and rm -rf'd my computer!' Right."
Se7en claims to have already "taken down" a "major player" - an
employee of Southwestern Bell who Se7en says was "posting ads all over
the place." Se7en told Wired News that he covertly watched the man's
activities for days, gathering evidence that he emailed to the
president of Southwestern Bell. Pseudonymous remailers like
hotmail.com and juno.com, Se7en insists, provide no security blanket
for traders against hackers uncovering their true identities by
cracking server logs. Se7en admits the process of gaining access to
the logs is time consuming, however. Even with three hackers on the
case, it "can take two or three days. We don't want to hit the wrong
person."
A couple of days after submitting message headers and logs to the
president and network administrators of Southwestern Bell, Se7en says,
he got a letter saying the employee was "no longer on the payroll."
The hacker search for acceptance
Se7en's declaration of war received support on the original mailing
list. "I am all for freedom of speech/expression," wrote one poster,
"but there are some things that are just wrong.... I feel a certain
moral obligation to the human race to do my part in cleaning up the
evil."
Federal crackdowns targeting child pornographers are ineffective, many
argued. In April, FBI director Louis Freeh testified to the Senate
that the bureau operation dubbed "Innocent Images" had gathered the
names of nearly 4,000 suspected child-porn traffickers into its
database. Freeh admitted, however, that only 83 of those cases
resulted in convictions. (The Washington Times reports that there have
also been two suicides.)
The director's plan? Ask for more federal money to fight the "dark
side of the Internet" - US$10 million.
Pitching in to assist the Feds just isn't the hacker way. As one
poster to the DefCon list put it, "The government can't enforce laws
on the Internet. We all know that. We can enforce laws on the
Internet. We all know that too."
The DefCon list was not a unanimous chorus of praise for Se7en's plan
to give the pornographers a taste of hacker terror, however. The most
vocal dissenter has been Declan McCullagh, Washington correspondent
for the Netly News. McCullagh is an outspoken champion of
constitutional rights, and a former hacker himself. He says he was
disturbed by hackers on the list affirming the validity of laws
against child porn that he condemns as blatantly unconstitutional.
"Few people seem to realize that the long-standing federal child-porn
law outlawed pictures of dancing girls wearing leotards," McCullagh
wrote - alluding to the conviction of Stephen Knox, a graduate student
sentenced to five years in prison for possession of three videotapes
of young girls in bathing suits. The camera, the US attorney general
pointed out, lingered on the girls' genitals, though they remained
clothed. "The sexual implications of certain modes of dress, posture,
or movement may readily put the genitals on exhibition in a lascivious
manner, without revealing them in a nude display," the Feds argued -
and won.
It's decisions like Knox v. US, and a law criminalizing completely
synthetic digital images "presented as" child porn, McCullagh says,
that are making the definition of child pornography unacceptably
broad: a "thought crime."
The menace of child porn is being exploited by "censor-happy"
legislators to "rein in this unruly cyberspace," McCullagh says. The
rush to revile child porn on the DefCon list, McCullagh told Wired
News, reminded him of the "loyalty oaths" of the McCarthy era.
"These are hackers in need of social acceptance," he says. "They've
been marginalized for so long, they want to be embraced for stamping
out a social evil." McCullagh knows his position is a difficult one to
put across to an audience of hackers. In arguing that hackers respect
the property rights of pornographers, and ponder the constitutionality
of the laws they're affirming, McCullagh says, "I'm trying to convince
hackers to respect the rule of law, when hacking systems is the
opposite of that."
But McCullagh is not alone. As the debate over Se7en's declaration
spread to the cypherpunks mailing list and alt.cypherpunks -
frequented by an older crowd than the DefCon list - others expressed
similar reservations over Se7en's plan.
"Basically, we're talking about a Dirty Harry attitude," one network
technician/cypherpunk told Wired News. Though he senses "real feeling"
behind Se7en's battle cry, he feels that the best way to deal with
pornographers is to "turn the police loose on them." Another
participant in the discussion says that while he condemns child porn
as "terrible, intrinsically a crime against innocence," he questions
the effectiveness of Se7en's strategy.
"Killing their computer isn't going to do anything," he says,
cautioning that the vigilante approach could be taken up by others.
"What happens if you have somebody who doesn't like abortion? At what
point are you supposed to be enforcing your personal beliefs?"
Raising the paranoia level
Se7en's loathing for aficionados of newsgroups like
alt.sex.pedophilia.swaps runs deeper than "belief." "I myself was
abused when I was a kid," Se7en told Wired News. "Luckily, I wasn't a
victim of child pornography, but I know what these kids are going
through."
With just a few hackers working independently to crack server logs,
sniff IP addresses, and sound the alarm to network administrators, he
says, "We can take out one or two people a week ... and get the
paranoia level up," so that "casual traders" will be frightened away
from IRC rooms like "#100%preteensexfuckpics."
It's not JPEGs of clothed ballerinas that raise his ire, Se7en says.
It's "the 4-year-olds being raped, the 6-year-old forced to have oral
sex with cum running down themselves." Such images, Se7en admits, are
very rare - even in online spaces dedicated to trading sexual imagery
of children.
"I know what I'm doing is wrong. I'm trampling on the rights of these
guys," he says. "But somewhere in the chain, someone is putting these
images on paper before they get uploaded. Your freedom ends when you
start hurting other people."
Copyright 1993-97 Wired Ventures, Inc. and affiliated companies
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4. Washroom graffiti
by Leandro
I was using the company's washroom the other day when I noticed a
strange graffiti on the wall(1). Since I was just standing there doing
what one does when standing in front of the toilet (in other words,
emptying my bladder), I try to figure out what it was. It looked like a
deformed 'M'. With careful examination, and thanks to the amazing
artistic skills I learned in Visual Arts OAC(2) I was able to determine
this was not just an ordinary 'M'.
Taking a stroll down Memory Lane(3): Bennett and I happened to
have the same Visual Arts OAC class. It was kind of a fun class,
especially since the hardest assignments was to draw. We had to make 6
drawings in the course of the year, examine them, evaluate them, and then
after picking one, discuss it in front of the class. Bennett and I found
that drawing comic strips (eventually nick-named "Conformist Lodge
Comix") was more interesting and exciting, than of a psychological
examination of our own art. It also helped us maintain our mental
stability with our teacher (Mr. Perusse), especially when he would start
complaining that males in art never had genitals. Said that, he opened
up a book and began 'perusing' over male genitals. "Forgive the pun" he
giggled.
But back to the drawing, since you are probably wondering how the
Hell does the above fit with the letter M in question: the drawing was a
rude (perhaps crude would be a better word) of two legs, knees bent, the
anus, the vagina, and two breasts. The breasts were attached to the
knees, while the vagina and the anus where two distorted holes. The
unknown author forgot to draw the feet. I think feet are crucial. How
is this thing supposed to walk? Anyway, I just don't understand this
type of graffiti people do in washrooms. What happened to the old style
of writing an historical phrase, or something funny? Ahhh, the days,
when stalls were stalls, and men were men.
(1) Wall, in lack of a better word. It's actually one of those panels
that separate washrooms, that can easily be knocked down with a well
placed kick.
(2) OAC: Ontario Academic Courses. Courses which are necessary if you
even remotely want to try to enter University. The Government of Ontario
has however cancelled this courses to cut down on costs. Any chance that
Ontarians had to actually learn something from High School has now been
decreased, while increasing the number of idiots that will be able to
apply to University. This in a sense is good, since it will make me look
like a genius.
(3) In Toronto, in the East End, between Dundas Avenue and Queen Street,
there is a short lane called, ironically, Memory Lane. I wasn't actually
strolling down there while writing this.
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