It is no secret that big companies still uses email as their main collaborative tool. And this habit won’t change any time soon. Changing the office culture and the habits of maybe hundreds of employees may take years. But technology has moved on, and so should we. One step at a time. There are smarter and more time efficient technologies available today such as the enterprise wiki and we should all embrace it.
It was the broken water pump heard ’round the world.
Cyberwar watchers took notice this month when a leaked intelligence memo claimed Russian hackers had remotely destroyed a water pump at an Illinois utility. The report spawned dozens of sensational stories characterizing it as the first-ever reported destruction of U.S. infrastructure by a hacker. Some described it as America’s very own Stuxnet attack.
Except, it turns out, it wasn’t. Within a week of the report’s release, DHS bluntly contradicted the memo, saying that it could find no evidence that a hack occurred. In truth, the water pump simply burned out, as pumps are wont to do, and a government-funded intelligence center incorrectly linked the failure to an internet connection from a Russian IP address months earlier.
Following SCADA water utility ‘hack', is the reporting system in need of re-thinking?
By Ellen Messmer | Network World US | Published: 16:01, 02 December 2011
The flap over the reported water utility hack in Illinois begs the question: Is the reporting system that the US has set up to identify cyberattacks on critical infrastructure broken and in need of re-thinking?
Israel's hawks are VERY close to manufacturing a full scale war with Iran. On Monday the 28th of November, it used special operations forces (referred to below as the “Hand of God”) to blow up a portion of an Iranian Nuclear facility near Isfahan (confirmed by satellite imagery). This follows on the heels of another explosion at Tehran facility that killed an Iranian general.
What's even more worrisome is that Israeli hawks are actively claiming responsibility for this sabotage (from the Times of London):
Dan Meridor. the Israeli Intelligence Minister, said: “There are countries who impose economic sanctions and there are countries who act in other ways in dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat.”
Major-General Giora Eiland, Israel's former director of national security, told Israel's army radio that the Isfahan blast was no accident. “There aren't many coincidences, and when there are so many events there is probably some sort of guiding hand, though perhaps it's the hand of God”
A former Israeli intelligence official cited at least two other explosions [that we haven't heard about] that have “successfully neutralised” Iranian bases associated with the Shahab-3, the medium-range missile that could be adapted to carry a nuclear warhead. “This is something everyone in the West wanted to see happen,” he added.
Ok, let's put this into perspective:
These claims are blood in the water. Israel's hawks see Iran as an existential threat to Israel. They WANT a war with Iran. This is an attempt to make that war happen.
The US, from President Obama on down, are incapable of reigning Israel in. Israeli hawks are now operating open loop (without restraint).
Iran's anger at these attacks, demonstrated by an attack on the UK embassy in Tehran, is just the start. Who knows what they will do next? Iran's hawks are likely frothing at the mouth too.
What does this mean? A war with Iran would:
Cause an immediate energy shock. Oil prices shooting through $200 + a barrel. Lost production from Iran, Iraq, and most of the monarchies. A potential loss of 6-10 m barrels a day?
Global depression deepens. Prices over $150 cause immediate recessions. Higher than that, who knows? Usually, a slow down in economic activity reduces demand, however with peak oil (we hit the max the world could produce a couple of years ago) and lost production from the Middle East, that price could remain high even in the face of a deep, deep economic depression.
Networked Resilient Communities. Nobody is going to save you. You need to prepare by building or moving to a resilient community that produces most of the energy and food it needs to survive.
Regular readers know that ever since 2009, well before the confidence destroying flash crash of May 2010, Zero Hedge had been advocating that regular retail investors shun the equity market in its entirety as it is anything but “fair and efficient” in which frontrunning for a select few is legal, in which insider trading is permitted for politicians and is masked as “expert networks” for others, in which the government itself leaks information to a hand-picked elite of the wealthiest investors, in which investment banks send out their “huddle” top picks to “whale” accounts before everyone else gets access, in which hedge funds form “clubs” and collude in moving the market, in which millisecond algorithms make instantaneous decisions which regular investors can never hope to beat, in which daily record volatility triggers sell limits virtually assuring daytrading losses, and where the bid/ask spreads for all but the choicest few make the prospect of breaking even, let alone winning, quite daunting. In short: a rigged casino.
The simple thought first occurred to me while visiting Serbia earlier this year. As I walked in front of the country's parliament, I recalled Steve York's docu-mentary, “Bringing Down a Dictator.” In one particular scene, a large crowd assembles in front of the Serbian parliament chanting for the resignation of Slobodan Milosevic. Soon after, they storm the building and find thousands of election ballots rigged in the despot's favor. I then thought of Tahrir Square and how more than a million protestors had assembled there to demand that Hosni Mubarak step down. There was one obvious place for protestors to assemble in Cairo durin g the recent revolts. The word Tahrir means “liberation” in Arabic. That's what I call free advertising and framing par excellence.
These scenes play out over and over across the history of revolutions and popular resistance movements. In many ways, state architecture that is meant to project power and authority can just as easily be magnets and mobilization mechanisms for popular dissent; a hardware hack turned against it's coders. A Trojan Horse of sorts in the computing sense of the word.
Phi Beta Iota: Understanding cognitive dissonance between a public and a regime (or between troops / officers and their corrupt chain of command) is not a competency of the national intelligence communities or their political “clients.” What is so sad is that this is the PRECISE competency needed to avoid an all-consuming revolution.
The Chinese have called it their “Underground Great Wall” — a vast network of tunnels designed to hide their country’s increasingly sophisticated missile and nuclear arsenal.
For the past three years, a small band of obsessively dedicated students at Georgetown University has called it something else: homework.
Phi Beta Iota: The ability of students to excel in relations to spies is not knew, even with hard targets such as China. For decades this web site and its antecedents have been saying “Do not send a spy where a schoolboy can go.” HOWEVER, in this specific case, with China as the target and the Pentagon budget on the line, there is a very high probability that the students are unwitting dupes in an illegal PSYOP being used to create an unethical justification for an ideological and political build-up against China, while protecting the bloated and extraordinarily corrupt Pentagon budget from the mandatory reductions agreed to in relation to the crisis at hand. Bottom line: the students have earned an A but the integrity of this endeavor is suspect.
