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Computer Undergroud Digest Vol. 10 Issue 47
Computer underground Digest Sun Aug 30, 1998 Volume 10 : Issue 47
ISSN 1004-042X
Editor: Jim Thomas (cudigest@sun.soci.niu.edu)
News Editor: Gordon Meyer (gmeyer@sun.soci.niu.edu)
Archivist: Brendan Kehoe
Shadow Master: Stanton McCandlish
Shadow-Archivists: Dan Carosone / Paul Southworth
Ralph Sims / Jyrki Kuoppala
Ian Dickinson
Field Agent Extraordinaire: David Smith
Cu Digest Homepage: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest
CONTENTS, #10.47 (Sun, Aug 30, 1998)
File 1--Q&A Interview With Quark's Tim Gill
File 2--Open Letter to Senate Judiciary Committee (R. Forno)
File 3--Hacker snitches for FBI, escapes 60 year prison term
File 4--Register Now for ApacheCon '98 in San Francisco
File 5--Islands in the Clickstream. Life in Space. August 8, 1998
File 6--Cu Digest Header Info (unchanged since 25 Apr, 1998)
CuD ADMINISTRATIVE, EDITORIAL, AND SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION ApPEARS IN
THE CONCLUDING FILE AT THE END OF EACH ISSUE.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 20:07:32 -0700
From: David Batterson <davidbat@home.com>
Subject: File 1--Q&A Interview With Quark's Tim Gill
Quark Chairman Tim Gill Offers Input on Quark/Adobe Marriage Proposal
by David Batterson
Like Madonna fending off suitors, Adobe Systems, Inc. is not thrilled by a
proposal by Quark, Inc. to buy the company (in cash). You might say Adobe
considers that to be "Forbidden Love." Quark's Chairman, Tim Gill, offered
his own spin on this latest proposed software-firm marriage.
Q: What's the nature of your proposal, and what's it going to cost?
A: I should point out that it's just a proposal not an offer. We haven't
talked about a price, for example. Since we want this to be a friendly
transaction, we feel we need to have open, honest, non-hostile
discussions with the Adobe board before we can consider making an offer.
There are regulatory issues, for example, because the FTC almost
certainly would not want the same company controlling QuarkXPress and
PageMaker. How that is resolved as well as many other issues would
effect the price. Since Adobe's board has a fiduciary duty to maximize
the value for their shareholders, they should be keenly interested to
help us work out the issues.
Q: Is this serious, or are you raising a flag to see if anyone salutes?
A: We are utterly serious about this proposal. Recent declines in Adobe's
valuation have led to us making the proposal. We think they have some
good technologies and there are great synergies between our product
lines. And we think a business combination could lead to a
substantially more streamlined operation as well as some great
possibilities for future technologies.
Q: What is Adobe's official response?
A: At present, Adobe is not willing to have discussions with us. As of
Thursday evening [August 27], there has been no response to our letter of
August 25.
Q: How have you found the press coverage to be lately?
A: Some of the opinions are pretty funny. The Wall Street Journal article
[August 27] was interesting. However, the last paragraph implies that my
husband and I snowboard together. Well, they got the 12 years together
and the fact that I'm a snowboarding fanatic right, but Davol hates to
snowboard.
Q: We've seen antitrust policies of the Justice Dept. and FTC vary widely.
On the one hand, they've been extremely aggressive against Microsoft.
Meanwhile, telecommunications and bank mergers seem to sail through mostly
safe waters. Is this because the computer industry is relatively new, and
harder to grasp by regulators? Or does it have a higher profile, so it
becomes a more visible target?
A: Microsoft is, of course, a special case because of their extreme size
and dominance. But even when Adobe acquired Aldus a number of years
ago, they had to divest of FreeHand to pass regulatory muster. The
increased scrutiny of high tech companies comes because we're in such a
rapidly growing and competitive market. The concern that regulators
have is to make sure that the customers get the best products and
services, which can be helped by mergers, and yet maintain sufficient
competition, which can be hurt by mergers.
Q: Is the computer industry now basically like most other companies today,
i.e., acquire or BE acquired? What other mergers/takeovers do you see as
possible? Dell & Gateway? Autodesk & IMSI? Symantec & IBM? Mickey Mouse
& Bugs Bunny?
A: I don't think so. Certainly there is increased M&A activity in the
high-tech market. But companies still live or die based on the quality of
their products and their ability to market and sell. Most of them end
up dying rather than being acquired. As far as specific predictions, I
have an opinion only on Bugs and Mickey. Altogether, I think Bugs has a
much too gay esthetic for a merger with the Mouse to be successful.
When merging organizations, a cultural fit is very important.
Q: Why did Adobe stumble anyway?
A: Most of Adobe's products are good ones. However, they haven't really
made any effective moves into new market areas. And they have a major
problem in that their expenditures are much too high. For mature
products, marketing expenses should be minimized because word-of-mouth
is a more effective and cheaper marketing vehicle. One of the pluses
from some kind of business combination would be that I believe Quark has
a very good sense of how to control expenses.
Q: Was Adobe's merger with Aldus a good one? Why is Quark a better fit?
A: Of the many products Adobe acquired when they purchased Aldus, I believe
the only major one they are still selling is PageMaker. Perhaps this is
what Adobe intended all along. However, the publishing industry, by and
large, uses QuarkXPress, rather than PageMaker. Adobe's PhotoShop and
Illustrator, however, are great products. We think that a company that
had all three products would have a great opportunity to capitalize on
those strengths and do some things are are very beneficial for the
customers. In particular, there are ways that the links between those
products and the web and be strengthened. Web publishing is an
essential part of the strategy of most publishers, and yet it is
expensive and often doesn't have a revenue generating component. So,
anything we do to reduce costs in this area is important.
Q: Has the "proposal" to Adobe been accompanied by virtual (or Web-ordered)
flowers and a QuarkXPress-created greeting card?
A: No, but you can keep up with the latest info at www.quark.com/proposal.
After careful consideration we decided not to use the floral motif for
that page, though.
Q: Would Quark change the company logo to one with rainbow colors?
A: I think Apple has the trademark on rainbow colored logos for the
computer industry. However, I can assure you that should some new logo
be needed, whatever we do will be tasteful.
============
Article Copyright 1998 David Batterson. All rights reserved.
=============
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 11:48:04 -0400
From: "Richard Forno" <rforno@tiac.net>
Subject: File 2--Open Letter to Senate Judiciary Committee (R. Forno)
An Open Letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee and Other Interested
Parties:
Senator Hatch,
As a former House staffer I know this will most likely not be
routed to you directly but be handled by your staff. Regardless,
I appreciate the minute it will take to read this quick note
regarding your well-needed hearings on the Microsoft issue.
I would suggest that a future hearing include members of the
"general computing public" -- people who are not "CEOs or
Presidents" of Microsoft competitors who have a serious concern
about being forced to use Microsoft products out of unfair
business tactics by Microsoft. I for one am seriously
contemplating the purchase of a Macintosh as a home PC to be more
"flexible" and have a system "do" what I, not Microsoft, wants it
to do with whatever software I choose to use, not pressured to
use. Larry Ellison was right...a PC purchase these days is
reminiscent of a Soviet Supermarket. I just want my machine to
work the way I want it to. Heck, I just want it to be reliable!
Like many others, I have serious issue with the quality of
several Microsoft products. Most recently, the Navy's Aegis
cruiser USS Yorktown was towed back to port because its Windows
NT shipboard LAN crashed, the vessel lost propulsion, and other
critical systems went dark. As a former system administrator and
"power user" I have experienced similar situations with
substandard, bloated (or, to use Microsoft's term, "innovative"
software that is chock full of features I never use) Microsoft
software. After several years of this, I see such incidents not a
"bug" but a "feature" of the software.
What does this say for the security of the United States where
our combat forces, financial, government, and commercial
organizations are using software that -- unlike its UNIX
counterpart -- has never seen the "light of day" by a competent
peer review? Nobody knows for sure what secrets are buried in the
25 million-plus lines of code that makes up Windows NT operating
systems, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Internet Explorer, or any
Microsoft Product. In fact, Microsoft threatens to sue anyone for
"reverse engineering" such software for any reason! Our nation is
blindly falling to the Microsoft PR machine that preaches NT as a
reliable and secure operating system. There are several major
holes, bugs, flaws, technical issues, and emerging
vulnerabilities in an operating system that is running the
mission-critical systems of this country. Look at the PGP
encryption algorithm. A major reason for its worldwide acceptance
was due to the source code being evaluated by people around the
world and not the "good promise" that the algorithm was secure by
the manufacturer who never released it.
On the UNIX front, an organization can tailor the operating
system to exactly fit a set of requirements, and to "trim the
fat" from the system. Microsoft NT and other products, on the
other hand, do not allow you to easily "trim the fat" or
customize the package to fit a given set of requirements. We want
our software to work the way we want it, plain and simple.
Think about it -- how many commands or features does the average
MS Word user regularly use? Thirty? Fifty? Why can't we install
JUST what we need, not what the vendor "thinks" we need, and
"trim the fat" from our systems? Not only will we save disk
space but I guarantee our systems will work more smoothly that
way. Why do I see the Word 97 "Help Wizard" when I first run it,
if I chose not to install Help? Microsoft must think I need it, I
guess.
Today's hearings included testimony by Bob Glaser, CEO of Real
Networks, creator, innovator, and maker of the Real Audio/Video
streaming products. He claims that Real Audio is disabled by the
Microsoft Windows Media Player bundled with Windows software.
Others -- including myself -- claim similar issues with
non-Microsoft Internet browsers and e-mail packages being
"subverted" by Microsoft products. However, Microsoft claims
that its products do not disable third-party software and that
"users are free to chose any products they want to use" on their
systems. As a systems administrator, I found this particularly
frustrating, especially in the legislative environment I was
working in at the time. In fact, one incident involved a
Microsoft product replacing all file associations with files
created by a competitor's product with its own. Imagine my
surprise when I ran my product and got error messages!
If this is true, then, why must I, a devout Netscape Navigator
user, be forced to maintain the large Microsoft Internet Explorer
application on my Win98 system? For example, Win98/NT5 has the
Internet Explorer so deeply-embedded into the operating system
that removing it is next to impossible. Who in their right mind
needs to surf the web from within the Printer window? Does the
browser HAVE to be integrated into EVERY facet of the operating
system? I never use it, and would be very happy to remove it.
But try to remove such products without "breaking" the
system....it's next to impossible. Even if you remove it with the
Uninstall program, I have yet to see a single Microsoft program
COMPLETELY disappear from my system. If you doubt me, uninstall a
Microsoft product and then check out the \PROGRAM FILES
directory. You'll still see stuff there, and I am quite convinced
that the \WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory only grows over time, thus
becoming a "garbage disposal" for program snippets of
long-ago-uninstalled software. (If this wasn't the case, why are
there third-party Uninstall programs to pick up the garbage left
behind on the hard drive after an alleged "uninstall" was done?)
This is not making computing easier, as Microsoft says, only more
complex, and another reason why I am seriously looking at the
Macintosh line of products.
Finally, Microsoft has always claimed to be only a "software
company." Bill Gates says this time and again, even at the last
Senate hearing where he was in attendance, and such claims foster
an illusion of innocence by Microsoft to any wrongdoing. This
claim is mentioned as often as their new mantra of product
"innovation." If that is true, why did Microsoft develop
Carpoint, Expedia, Investor, Home Advisor, Start, Sidewalk, Game
Zone, or any of their other "non-software" offerings on the
Internet or TV? Why invest in Comcast, TCI, WebTV, and create
MSNBC? They aren't software products, are they? They are new
ventures and mediums that Microsoft is trying to corner just as
it did the current desktop market. This duplicity of Microsoft's
business focus is very misleading, and deserves further
investigation by the Senate and industry groups.
Senator, I thank you for your time. I look forward to your future
hearings on this very relevant topic that goes far beyond
business and social issues, and would appreciate the opportunity
to expand these remarks to your committee in the future. Please
feel free to contact me with any questions at rforno@tiac.net.
Best wishes,
Richard Forno. CIRP
Security Consultant
Washington, DC
------------------------------
From: "Jim Galasyn" <blackbox@BBOX.COM>
Subject: File 3--Hacker snitches for FBI, escapes 60 year prison term
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1998 19:13:17 -0700
Would you hire a hacker?
By Joseph C. Panettieri
August 12, 1998
Sm@rt Reseller
Some of the world's largest corporations hired Justin Petersen. So did the
FBI. In fact, in law-enforcement circles, he's known as Agent Steal, and
he's got a long list of technical skills and references that would make most
resellers drool.
Consider his most recent tour of duty, which includes developing intranets
and extranets for Cosmic Media, a Los Angeles-based Internet consulting firm
that has deployed secure electronic commerce sites for Digital Media and
other fledgling businesses. He has also launched his own 1,000 square-foot
computer center, which features two server rooms, a control room and an
earthquake resistant design.
Now, for the twist: Petersen, 37, is also a reformed hacker. Earlier this
decade he served time for breaking into several corporate networks, making
bomb threats and stealing money from a bank electronically. [His run from
justice.] "I imagine if I walked into a place and tried to get a regular
job, my record would be an issue," concedes Petersen, speaking from the Los
Angeles apartment he has called home since his release from prison last
year. "But I've known a couple of guys from Cosmic Media for a long time,
and I have other friends in the industry-including a Webmaster over at CNET.
Friends who are aware of my convictions support me and hire me.
"Hacking was a phase I went through," continues Petersen. "I learned what I
wanted to learn, and I got it out of my system. That phase of my life is
over."
FBI informant
As if Petersen's story wasn't outrageous enough, portions of his digital
crime spree actually were committed while he was working undercover for the
FBI, according to court documents obtained by Sm@rt Reseller. He also has
crossed paths with notorious Internet hacker Kevin Mitnick.
Reformed hacker Justin Petersen is working side-by-side with Web consultants
and resellers. Would you hire him? Add your comments to the bottom of this
page.
The FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice took Petersen's offenses quite
seriously. When Petersen pleaded guilty to several computer-related crimes
on March 27, 1995, the DOJ promptly issued a tersely worded press release
stating that he faced a "maximum sentence of 60 years in prison and $2
million in fines."
Today, that very same press release begs two troubling questions: How did
Petersen emerge from prison so quickly? And can he be trusted to work with
computers, the Internet and channel players?
To be sure, hackers increasingly are turning over new leafs as resellers and
security consultants. Says John Klein, president of Rent-A-Hacker
(www.rent-a-hacker.com), "I've seen my customers hire hackers. Sometimes an
18-year-old kid who lives on the Internet has more experience than a 30 year
old with a Master's [Degree] in computer science."
Still, hiring a young cyberpunk who knocked over a few Web sites is one
thing. But recruiting the likes of Agent Steal is in another class. Says Art
Brieva, chief technology officer at The PC Authority, a Plainview,
N.Y.-based reseller: "There are hackers who mess around with systems for the
pure challenge of it, and then there are hackers who have malicious intent.
I would tend to steer clear of the latter."
Quite a childhood
Petersen says he started wiretapping phone systems and hacking computers
when he was only 12. In his early years, he simply explored computer systems
rather than damage them. For more than a decade, he read about technology
and honed his hacking skills before breaking into TRW Inc.'s credit system
in 1989. Later that year, he and fellow cyberpunk Kevin Poulsen rigged
Pacific Bell's telecom network and seized a radio station's phone lines to
win a $10,000 call-in contest.
"Poulsen taught me a great deal about hacking," allows Petersen. "But I was
mostly self-taught. I bought lots of books and always read a lot about
computers."
Petersen, working with Poulsen, found a security hole in a Pacific Bell test
and maintenance system that made the radio station hack possible. Petersen
claims the duo could latch onto any phone line within Pacific Bell's
network, monitor it, ring it, dial out, and so on. Far from complicated, the
hack required a single PC and two phone lines (one for control via computer
and one to monitor). "Pacific Bell thought the system was secure, but they
shut it down after they discovered the weakness we exploited," Petersen
says.
After parting ways with Poulsen, Petersen fled to Texas in 1991 and was
arrested after being caught driving a stolen Porsche. A search of Petersen's
apartment by police uncovered more than a dozen fraudulent credit cards,
modems and a computer. Police suspected Petersen was using the PC to
illegally access TRW's credit system to obtain credit cards under several
aliases, according to court documents.
Rather than face full prosecution, Petersen's legal troubles took a dramatic
turn for the better in September 1991. According to court documents, a
Secret Service agent visited Petersen in a Texas jail several times and they
struck a stunning deal: In return for pleading guilty to various
computer-related crimes, Petersen agreed to work undercover for the FBI. He
was released and placed under the FBI's supervision in California.
Petersen's legal case also was transferred to California, and his sentencing
was delayed until his work for the FBI was completed, according to the court
documents.
Hunting hackers
The nature of Petersen's service for the FBI remains unclear at best.
Neither the FBI nor the Secret Service is willing to comment about
Petersen's case. For his part, Petersen claims the FBI rented him a
furnished apartment and gave him a salary, two computers, two modems and
phone lines to gather information about alleged hackers who may pose a
threat to the government.
In particular, Petersen and several attorneys close to his case say he
helped the FBI amass evidence against former buddy Poulsen, as well as
Mitnick and Lewis DePayne.
Poulsen is now free after serving time for rigging the 1989 radio contest
and facing a much more serious charge of international espionage. Mitnick
and DePayne await a Jan. 19, 1999, trial date for an alleged Internet crime
spree that Miramax, a major Hollywood movie studio, is transforming into a
motion picture.
As for Petersen, his work for the FBI continued until Oct. 22, 1993. On that
day, government officials met with Petersen and asked him if he had
committed additional computer-related crimes while working for the FBI.
According to court documents, Petersen panicked and fled the meeting. Like
Mitnick at the time, he was now a fugitive.
Petersen remained at large for more than a year. He surfaced again on Aug.
17, 1994, when he hacked Heller Financial Inc., a commercial financial
service provider in Glendale, Calif. Once inside Heller's network, Petersen
identified a line between two network switches that was accidentally left
unencrypted. Petersen used the weak link, which has since been corrected, to
transfer $150,000 from Heller's electronic vaults to an account at Union
Bank in Bellflower, Calif. Petersen made two bomb threats to Heller in an
effort to distract employees so they would not notice the transfer of funds,
according to court documents.
This is only a test
Petersen considered the first transfer a "test," and planned to return for
more cash a few weeks after the first transaction. But the FBI was searching
for him, and he was tracked down and arrested three weeks after hacking
Heller's network. In early 1995 he pleaded guilty to committing computer
wire fraud while a fugitive and didn't emerge from prison until April, 1997.
Petersen's time behind bars fell far short of the potential 60-year sentence
he faced. Some lawyers, including Mitnick's attorney, Donald Randolph,
consider Petersen's short sentence rather curious. Others are surprised that
Petersen is free to work with computers and the Internet. By contrast,
Mitnick is only allowed to use a non-networked PC when researching documents
related to his criminal case. Petersen faces no such restrictions.
Says alleged hacker DePayne, the co-defendant in Mitnick's case: "Petersen
hacked for profit then cooperated with the government. Poulsen didn't
cooperate with the Feds. I'd say that's why Justin [Petersen], rather than
Kevin [Poulsen], can now work with computers without any limitations."
Asst. U.S. Attorney David Schindler says Petersen is subject to a
"supervised release" and must "get approval" from a parole officer before
accepting high-technology jobs or any other work that may tempt fate.
Still, one question remains: How did Petersen circumvent the possible
60-year prison sentence mentioned in the 1995 DOJ press release? "That's a
question I'd love the government to answer," says attorney Richard Sherman,
who has defended Mitnick and currently represents DePayne.
Schindler says Petersen got time off for good behavior, and adds that the
DOJ's press release was a bit misleading.
Enjoying freedom
Petersen has certainly made the most of his early release. In recent months,
he has devoured technical manuals, and quickly gotten up to speed on
numerous technologies that gained popularity during his prison stay,
including Windows 95, Windows NT, Java and Internet development tools.
"I haven't been in any trouble since my release," he says (and attorney
Schindler confirms). "I'm concentrating on Web development and my NT skills,
and hope to launch an adult Web site down the road."
Petersen, by all accounts, is no longer using his hacker skills, but he
certainly doesn't hide his past. His personal Web site features legal
documents from his court case, interviews published in hacker publications,
as well as a few booby traps that could send some Web users running for
cover. (Because of the latter issue, Sm@rt Reseller has elected not to
publish Petersen's URL.) Until very recently, the Web site manipulated a
visitor's computer by launching nefarious Java applets. And his current
e-mail address pokes fun at one of his former victims, Pacific Bell.
It's unclear how long Petersen will continue working side-by-side with
channel players. Aside from launching his adult Web site, Petersen also is
promoting Los Angeles night clubs. But despite such demands on his time,
he's willing to continue lending local Web consultants a hand if the price
is right.
And there are certainly resellers interested in the likes of Petersen.
"Hackers are the best consultants out there," says Kevin Johnson, owner of
security consultancy and reseller Johnson & Associates. "I've got a guy
working for me who was a hacker, and he's very good at what he does."
Even one of Petersen's staunchest critics, attorney Sherman, defends
Petersen's right to work within the computer industry. Quips Sherman: "I
don't think anyone's right to use a computer should be taken away. But if
Justin hacks me, I'll kill him."
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 28 Aug 1998 13:34:37 -0700
From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@hyperreal.org>
Subject: File 4--Register Now for ApacheCon '98 in San Francisco
The Apache Group is proud to present ApacheCon, the first-ever
industry and technical conference for users and developers of the
Apache family of web server software. This conference takes place at
the Hilton Hotel and Towers in San Francisco, October 14th through the
16th, 1998.
http://www.apache.org/Conference1998/
We are very excited about this conference. This will be the first
time that the developer and user community will meet face to face on a
large scale, sharing information on topics ranging from configuration,
security, dynamic content engines, and more. We have a full track of
case studies, showing how Apache is being used on a wide range of web
sites. We also have invited various vendors of Apache-related
software to present their wares and hold birds-of-a-feather sessions
for their users, in addition to being on-hand in our exhibition hall
to answer your questions throughout the conference.
Why should you participate in ApacheCon? We will have keynote
presentations from John Gilmore of the EFF and Cygnus, author Bruce
Sterling, John Patrick from IBM, and David Filo from Yahoo. We'll
have technical sessions led by several members of the Apache Group, as
well as special presentations by other industry experts. The full
conference agenda can be found on the ApacheCon site at
<http://www.apache.org/Conference1998/>. We also have an *excellent*
party planned at the Exploratorium the night of the 15th.
All profits from the conference are going into a separate, independent
fund to be administered by the Apache Group core members for the
protection and evolution of the Apache family of server software. We
will need YOUR participation in the conference to help make this fund
a reality.
Register soon! ApacheCon registration is $995 until September 15th,
at which point it goes to $1295. There are also special deals on
hotel accomodations and airfare, which will no doubt run out quickly!
I hope to see you there.
Brian Behlendorf
Apache Group Member
http://www.apache.org/Conference1998/
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 11 Aug 1998 13:18:46 -0500
From: Richard Thieme <rthieme@thiemeworks.com>
Subject: File 5--Islands in the Clickstream. Life in Space. August 8, 1998
Islands in the Clickstream:
Life in Space
There was so much hullabaloo at Def Con VI! (the recent convention for
computer hackers, journalists, screen writers, producers, computer security
and insecurity experts, programmers, federal agents, local police and
sheriff's deputies, advertisers and marketers, hotel security guards,
undercover agents, refugees from raves, groupies, and endlessly curious
mind-hungry men and women of all sorts and conditions) - hullabaloo, that
is, about how hackers have morphed from evil geniuses into respectable men
and women operating at the highest levels of industry and commerce, the
military, and the intelligence community.
The basis for comparison, of course, is an image of hackers as whacked-out
loners hunched over glowing monitors late into the night, cackling like
Beavis or Butthead as they break into our bank accounts - an image created
and sustained by the media.
Well let's be real. Some do, some are. That's part of the scene, the
digital equivalent of growing up in Hell's Kitchen and living down these
mean digital streets. That, however, is not the essence of hacking.
Hacking is curiosity, playfulness, problem-solving, motivated by the
pleasure of browsing, following one's nose where others say it doesn't
belong, looking for a constellation in the seemingly random stars.
Following the luminous bread crumbs deep into the twilight forest. Building
an elusive, always-hypothetical whole that forms and dissolves and forms
again at every level of the fractal puzzle of life.
Hacking has its roots in Renaissance men like da Vinci and Machiavelli who
saw clearly and said what they saw.
But something else is happening too. As I looked out at the audience of the
Black Hat Briefings, I saw that the roles of journalists, specialists in
competitive intelligence, spies, even professional speakers like myself,
were converging, that roles in a digital world are as fluid as identities.
The skills of hackers and intelligence agents are the skills needed in the
virtualized worlds we are learning to inhabit.
We hear endlessly of convergence of form and structure in the wired world.
Every digital interface is an arbitrary distinction. Because we can
reconstitute bits in whatever form we like, deciding to call an interface a
PC, TV, or PDA is a job for marketing, not engineers.
But I'm talking about the convergence of roles. The digital world is
back-engineering us in its image. Because that world is interactive,
modular, and fluid, our lives are too. We don't even notice anymore that to
choose to present ourselves to the world is a choice.
At one extreme, identity hacking - stealing identifiers like numbers and
codes with which to gain access to the social and economic world or
creating a new identity from whole digital cloth in order to disappear and
surface in a new body - is a growing industry. But choices we take for
granted - changing jobs, religions, marital status, changing our names,
changing careers, changing who we essentially think we are - have become
part of consensus reality. Not so long ago, people who did that were
thought to be just plain nuts.
Once upon a time, the roles we were expected to fulfill were our destinies.
Unless external crises intervened, people were expected to stay in one
place, get a job and keep it, get married and stay married, be whatever
religion they were told they were (as if something else were even
thinkable), and live inside a single identity that was so much a fish in
water that it wasn't questioned.
Identity is a social construction of reality that's noticed only when the
external factors that shape it have changed.
The new consensus reality is reinforced by information sources from talk
shows to the Wall Street Journal. We can choose careers, another marriage,
another religion, another way of being ourselves, and we are everywhere
surrounded by helpful advice about how to do it.
In the digital world, sanity means having the resources and capacity to
know how to morph, changing presentations that are bridges between
constantly shifting external factors and our own developmental stages. This
is true for organizations as well as individuals.
The protean self, back-engineered from the structures of our information
technologies, thinks of life as a creative act. The ability to distinguish
who we are from our presentations, knowing how to use those presentations
to exercise power, build feedback loops of energy and information to
sustain us, that's a skill that used to belong to spies alone. Now it's
asked of everyone who wants to remain viable.
Hackers call it social engineering, learning how to look and sound a
particular way to elicit the information needed to build the Big Picture.
In business, it is often called competitive intelligence. Some just call
it "the way it is."
Every time I say, "the edge is the new center," I notice that the edge I
had in mind is no longer the edge. A new edge is emerging. Turn-around time
is about six months, not only for computers, but for viable constructions
of reality.
We work and live in space stations, docking in modular fashion, then we're
off again into space. That space is sheer possibility in which we create
literally from nothing. The pull of the future creates the irresistible
shapes of present possibilities with which we must comply. Every time we
break through to a new way of seeing things it feels momentous, but
breakthroughs are momentous for only a moment. Then they become
commonplace, the background noise of the next stage of our lives.
Evil genius hackers? Give me a break. The hackers who have their hands on
the throttles of power in the digital world were "kids" three years ago.
That's about as long as a current generation lasts. And civilization too is
ramping up toward a single point of convergence where identities are
arbitrary. What we call "our species" will soon be a wistful memory in the
molecular clusters of the progeny we design, an arbitrary distinction that
served us for a while before we morphed. A noun turned into a transitory
verb. Ice turned into a flowing river.
**********************************************************************
Islands in the Clickstream is a weekly column written by
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------------------------------
Date: Thu, 25 Apr 1998 22:51:01 CST
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