Nastic Gryzunova. Seine. Issue 77

Russian Magazine / Net-culture / Seine www.russ.ru/netcult/nevod/20000704.html

Seine. Issue 77 Nastic Gryzunova Publication date: July 4, 2000 Review of current online events and publications

As usual, good intentions led me to God knows where. The only result of serious and thoughtful attempts to somehow structure reality was complete confusion in my head and complete disorientation (which is generally my hallmark), as well as a whole lost week. As always, we try to continue as if nothing happened. Perhaps the word “news” should be legally prohibited from being used - at least for me personally.

Monday, June 26:
Ban on typewriter

For some reason, I can’t believe that Kevin Mitnick will be able to be a law-abiding citizen during the three years determined by the court. The logic of raising teenagers also works successfully for adults: if you are constantly expected to break the law, you will certainly break it - expectations must be met, man is a social animal. Something is wrong with the judiciary if this simple idea has not yet penetrated the heads of its representatives; however, these are problems of the judiciary, and it is not clear why these should be Mitnik’s problems.

On Monday, a court hearing was held at which Mitnik was explained that he was not only prohibited from using computers, software, modems, peripheral devices, laptops, mobile phones, television and in general any hardware that, at least theoretically, can be connected to computer networks - except for a regular telephone ; Mitnik's typewriter is also prohibited. The reason for the court ruling was Mitnik’s appeal. The editor of Brill's Content magazine, Stephen Brill, invited the former hacker to write a column as part of the Contentville project, which opened on July 5th. Since the issues of Mitnick’s employment in the next three years were separately stipulated in the court verdict, at this stage they are being decided not only by Mitnik, but also by the supervisor assigned to him, Larry Holly. Holly did not allow Mitnick into Contentville - as he had not previously allowed, for example, on the radio, where Mitnick was recently invited to participate in a program devoted to computer security issues. The fact that Mitnick, in any interview, announces his intention to propagate among readers the rejection of the practice of hacking computer systems, as well as the fact that the former hacker planned to type his manifestos on a typewriter, did not impress Holly. Neither did they make an impression on Judge Mariana Pfaelzer, who, with a shudder, recalled how much trouble Mitnik had previously caused the judicial system ( “At one time we couldn’t find Mr. Mitnick for a long time” ), confirmed the ban. True, as a consolation, she suggested that Mitnik explain to the supervisor the details regarding work in Contentville (from which, apparently, one should conclude that the supervisor was strictly instructed not to let his ward near the buttons; it is not known whether he sees the difference between the buttons of a computer keyboard and a typewriter). Mitnik gave the judicial system a good scare; It’s scary to think what will happen to her in February 2003, when the moratorium on Mitnick’s computer use finally ends.

Tuesday, June 27:
Oracle's long arms in a wastepaper basket

The hit of the week was, without any doubt, the ingenious story, called Trashgate by the authors of Wired News - and has been appearing under this name for two weeks now. It’s somehow not very convenient to remember a story that doubles as a farce, really, although this is precisely the case when this banality is appropriate.

Late in the evening of June 27, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison admitted that a year ago he hired private investigators from Investigative Group International (headed by Watergate trial participant Terry Lenzner) to investigate the circumstances of the Microsoft Corporation's activities hidden from the public - mainly, of course, related to antitrust litigation. Conversations that IGI detectives, on behalf of who knows who, were trying to buy the contents of wastepaper baskets from the offices of the Association for Competitive Technology, an ardent supporter of Microsoft, first began two weeks before Ellison's confession - then ACT President Jonathan Zack, very nervously, spoke about it in an interview with Wired News.

As detectives hired on behalf of Ellison found out, the head of Oracle reported on June 28 at corporate headquarters (at a press conference on a completely different subject), Microsoft Corporation funded several organizations, formally independent and expressing the opinions of representatives of the computer industry and the public, in order to these organizations supported Microsoft during the antitrust saga. The list of organizations directly named by Ellison included the aforementioned Association for Competitive Technology, as well as the Independent Institute (which, as the head of Oracle said, conducted bogus public opinion polls and issued bogus economic reports - "neither independent, nor institute" ) and the National Taxpayers Union ( "bought and paid for by two taxpayers - Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer" ).

Microsoft was quick to respond, saying in a brief statement on Wednesday that the allegations of bribery of public organizations are nonsense, and that Oracle also funds or supports organizations that have acted in recent years. against Microsoft - for example, ProComp, Progress and Freedom Foundation, Software and Information Industry Association and Computer & Communications Industry Association ( "we do not agree with their opinions or tactics, we respect their right to express their point of view" - this is Microsoft's untalented portrayal of correctness ).

As a result of this year-long detective work, no facts were found indicating that Microsoft violated the law; IGI also did nothing illegal by trying to buy trash from the offices. No one died, in short. Accordingly, it is unlikely that one of the acts of the play will involve prosecution by any aggrieved party of any other aggrieved party (although the ACT president did say something indignant about this in an interview with the BBC). Nevertheless, the scandal turned out to be quite full-fledged. As one might expect, the emphasis has shifted: the whistleblower provokes much more reproaches against him than the victim of the revelation. However, Larry Ellison can be pleased: during the year that IGI employees worked, enough information about Microsoft’s unpleasant gestures was leaked to the media at their suggestion, which, in fact, was the ultimate goal. In addition, Ellison himself, judging by the reports of the press conference, was - as always, however - simply brilliant (except for one moment when he could not clearly explain how personally he was aware of the investigation, and for some reason began to assert , that he had no idea that it was Lenzner’s company that was engaged in espionage). Of course, Gates did not accept Ellison's kind offer to examine the contents of the wastepaper baskets from the Oracle offices - which is a pity, a terrible pity.

Wednesday, June 28:
Demonstrative dissection of domain policy

From June 26 to 28, Moscow hosted an international conference organized by the Coalition for the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights (CIPR), where, among other things, the relationship between domain name registration and intellectual property rights was discussed in a separate session. This is a rather sensitive topic for the World Intellectual Property Organization; in Russia, the entire experience of interaction with domain name invaders comes down to two major lawsuits (proceedings in connection with the registration of the mosfilm.ru domain, won by the owners of the trademark, and the kodak.ru domain, lost by the owners of the trademark with amazing consistency). As a result, as far as can be understood from the summary compiled by RosNIIROS public relations consultant Kira Litvina (with the appearance of whom, it should be noted, the appearance of this monstrous organization became much closer to a human one), the whole action came down to attempts by Russian lawyers, under the supervision of Western colleagues, to at least do something to understand something about the problem. Apart from the idea of ​​resolving disputes regarding specific domain names in the Arbitration Court, the outcome was moderately disgusting.

Meanwhile, the Vedomosti newspaper reports, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov and the head of Rospatent Alexander Korchagin announced at the same conference that a reform of the legislation relating to trademarks was being prepared. In particular, “changes will be made to the rules for registering domain names” (which - one cannot help but find fault - now officially simply does not exist). The "first come - first served" principle regarding the registration of domains containing trademark names is planned to be abolished.

Thursday, June 29:
Interpol network hunt

“If we waited for laws to be passed, we would wait a very, very long time ,” said Interpol Secretary General Raymond Kendall and began solving international crime problems on his own, without waiting for governments to mature enough to legislate. As a representative of the Atomic Tangerine company said on Thursday ( “we know that this is an unusual name, but these are unusual times” ), Interpol, with the support of this company, is implementing a project in which all trustworthy companies (it is not clear how the degree of trustworthiness is determined, however ) information available to Interpol about hackers, online thefts, cases of fraud and other particularly unpleasant episodes for corporations is provided. A total of 178 police departments are involved in collecting this type of information. As a thank you for information support of this kind, Interpol receives from Atomic Tangerine network monitoring data carried out by this company (and the company is actually engaged in investment consulting). Self-regulation in action, by the way, is a typical example. Everything is very solid and correct: "Interpol's assistance can be extremely helpful in helping the private sector defend itself. At the same time, information held by some private companies can be very useful to government agencies," Kendall and Atomic Tangerine CEO Jonathan Fornaci said in a joint statement. And now a question from the gallery: what company would think of contacting Atomic Tangerine for consulting services after such an announcement?

Friday, June 30:
Publius: American Hide and Seek

A project has matured in the depths of the AT&T corporation, the fate of which is not very difficult to predict - accordingly, we take the opportunity to play Cassandra. Developers from AT&T Labs have presented a technology that allows users to maintain complete anonymity on the Internet - a project that could not be more relevant, given the recent desire to end user anonymity (representatives of the American recording industry, who have been hopelessly at war with Napster for more than six months, have been talking about this a lot and its users). The new development of AT&T Labs is called Publius - one of the pseudonyms under which in 1787-88. published by The Federalist - and is similar to the British Freenet, a distributed system that allows participants to work together to create a common environment in which it is very easy to get lost.

The general idea is simple: a file whose authorship is supposed to be hidden is broken into pieces, multiple copies of each piece are created, and then they are all sent separately over a network that includes a certain number of servers. In a certain location, encrypted data on how to assemble the file is stored - of course, the address where it is stored is encrypted with strong crypto. The authors themselves can change the file, but the system recognizes unauthorized access to the contents of the file. The system even allows you to prohibit the owner of the file from destroying it - if, for example, he is afraid that he may succumb to pressure from the authorities (an excellent way to store evidence, by the way).

Developments of the same series are dearly loved by users, but not welcomed by authorities and corporations. When the America Online division of Nullsoft unveiled its Gnutella project, an analogue of Napster, it took only a few days for AOL to close access to the files of the new development (however, Gnutella, which was developed on the basis of open source, had already spread across the Internet by that time, and since then has already existed separately from the developers). It is suspected that Publius will suffer the same fate; however, Publius is heavily dependent on AT&T Labs since its source code is not published. At the moment, the creators are trying to organize beta testing of the product.

Saturday, July 1:
There is a lot of pathos around network government

One of the background topics concerning global online life has recently been the elections to the board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - the first international elections, also taking place in cyberspace, which in theory should somehow influence what is happening on the Internet , as long as ICANN has so far been committed to sound internal regulation on the Internet. The five directors to be elected will represent five global regions - Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America. ICANN's board currently consists of 19 people, nine of whom were appointed in 1998 when the US government entered into an agreement with ICANN to control the domain space. Five of those nine will be elected in October. The actual elections are scheduled for the period from September 20 to October 1; So far, neither the procedure nor the details have been formulated, and will be formulated before August 20 by the joint efforts of those who are included in ICANN At Large Membership (which can be done before July 31). More or less clearly, procedural issues are planned to be resolved at the next ICANN meeting in Yokohama on July 13-17. Candidates are proposed by a special committee; In addition, any user can nominate himself.

Although it would seem that the idea is beautiful, and besides, all this is pathetically called “network government” (another), it would be strange to expect special and radical benefits from this initiative. Five council members out of nineteen are a hopeless minority. 25 thousand voters out of a possible 275 million users is simply ridiculous. On the other hand, really, it’s better to try this than to wait for governments to squeeze out yet another scanty piece of legislation and force everyone to march in line.

Sunday, July 2:
Hackers vs astronauts

On the night from Sunday to Monday, the BBC published information that in 1997, during the docking of the American shuttle Atlantis and the Russian Mir station, NASA computer systems monitoring the health of astronauts were hacked. As a result of the hack, NASA Inspector General Roberta Gross told the BBC, systems were so overloaded that communications between mission control, medical equipment and astronauts were interrupted. This situation created some threat to the lives of the astronauts; Communication with them was restored through the Mir station. On Monday, this information, however, was partially refuted by another NASA representative, Bob Jacobs: he confirmed the fact that computer systems were hacked at the time of docking, but said that, firstly, the flight control center did not lose contact with the astronauts for a second, and secondly , nothing threatened the lives of the astronauts, and thirdly, NASA never used the Mir station to communicate with them. In the event of such force majeure circumstances, NASA has several fallback options, but the very fact that systems were hacked at such a crucial moment is an illustration of how a violation of computer security can cause real harm to astronauts. Over the past year, hackers have attacked NASA systems about 500 thousand times, which is why NASA created its own cyber police unit.

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