Reaonsable and useful coverage, shows great promise. Ideal would be a collaborative deal with the Association for Intelligence Officers (AFIO) to have it all in one place.
Sample postings, along with clips “News You May Have Missed” all focused on government secret intelligence and counterintelligence that are NOT covered by Phi Beta Iota.
The huge cultural misunderstandings between Western forces and the Afghan people make it unlikely any counterinsurgency mission in the countryside will succeed.
By Gilles Dorronsoro
In the countryside, Westerners are essentially perceived as corrupt and threatening to traditional Afghan or Muslim values. Contrary to our self-perception, the villagers see the foreigners as the main providers of insecurity. The presence of coalition troops means IEDs, ambushes and airstrikes, and consequently a higher probability of being killed, maimed or robbed of a livelihood. Any incident quickly reinforces the divide between locals and outsiders, and the Afghan media provide extensive and graphic coverage of botched airstrikes and injured civilians. Continue reading “Journal: Strategic Analysis & Culture Matter”
2007 Abstract: Haggle is a layerless networking architecture for mobile devices. It is motivated by the infrastructure dependence of applications such as email and web browing, even in situations where infrastructure is not necessary to accomplish the end user goal, e.g. when the destination is reachable by ad hoc neighborhood communication. In this paper we present details of Haggle's architecture, and of the prototype implementation which allows existing email and web applications to become infrastructure-independent, as we show with an experimental evaluation. [Emphasis added.]
A vulnerability in a Time Warner cable modem and Wi-Fi router deployed to 65,000 customers would allow a hacker to remotely access the device’s administrative menu over the internet, and potentially change the settings to intercept traffic, according to a blogger who discovered the issue.
Time Warner acknowledged the problem to Threat Level on Tuesday, and says it’s in the process of testing replacement firmware code from the router manufacturer, which it plans to push out to customers soon.
All of this means that a hacker who wanted to target a specific router and change its settings could access a customer’s admin panel from anywhere on the net through a web browser, log in with the master password, and then start tinkering. Among the possibilities, the intruder could alter the router’s DNS settings — for example, to redirect the customer’s browser to malicious websites — or change the Wi-Fi settings to open the user’s home network to the neighbors.
Sequoia Voting Systems has inadvertently released the SQL (Structured Query Language) code for its voting databases. The existence of such code appears to violate Federal voting law. Read the announcement after the jump, just as received on the Open Voting Consortium mailing list earlier today.
The Linux “strings” command was able to peel it apart. Nedit was able to digest 800meg text files. What was revealed was thousands of lines of MS-SQL source code that appears to control or at least influence the logical flow of the election, in violation of a bunch of clauses in the FEC voting system rulebook banning interpreted code, machine modified code and mandating hash checks of voting system code.
I've got it all organized for commentary and download in wiki form at:
Phi Beta Iota: This started as a short list for the various college and university engineering students that have dialed in, but as we got into it, it became more of a “situational awareness” inventory pulling together both technical “solutions” none of which have been integrated yet, and analytic “requirements” none of which have been satisfied yet.
$75 billion a year for secret intelligence, and we still do not have an analytic desktop toolkit, all-source geospatially and historically and cultural astute back office processing, or global reach to all humans, all minds, all the time. Sucks for us. Let's see what the Smart Mob can do….
We specifically invite suggestions in the Comments for removing items from this list, or for adding items from within this website or from any other website. This is now a work zone. Steele is available to visit any engineering workshop and especially those working on bottom-up clouds like Swarm DPL (transparently scalable distributed programming language).
KEY POINT: Design is not just about physical structures, but about relationships as well as ideas. Will Durant has a great deal to say about this in Philosophy and the Social Problem.
KEY POINT: Information is the means by which we harmonize understanding of the threats, sustainable consensus on how to handle the threats, and implementaition plans, programs, and budgets across the twelve core policy areas. THIS ALLOWS both vertical and horizonal harmonization within the four levels of governments (local, state or province, national, and regional or global).
Earth is an information system within a larger Cosmic information system. We are coming off a millenium of information pathologies. Now is the time to pay careful attention to Ackoff and Fuller and get right things right.
