The Power of a Million Little Things

The short lifetime of information technology has seen humanity leap years forward into the future. With the help of computer pioneers like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Linux Torvalds, Bill Gates, and Ian Murdock, computers have launched us into an age where the rudimentary, repetitive, and mundane tasks can be automated with the power of machines. As these computers became more advanced, they became exponentially faster while simultaneously becoming physically smaller over time. Portable laptops are now being surpassed in number by smartphones and tablets; Servers can be out-performed by home-brew computer systems, and entire homes can be remotely controlled with a $30 Raspberry Pi and a little creativity.

Once a humble link between two college computers hundreds of miles apart, the internet is now a super-massive network of veins and arteries that span the globe, pumping precious data through the countless devices that dot its millions of branches and crossroads.

After fifty years since its birth, the Internet is no longer limited to just datacenters forwarding traffic from one place to another. It is now an Internet of Things. Every routing and gateway device that exists has the ability to pass traffic to its intended destination seamlessly in cooperation with its neighbors, and as the number of devices grows, so do the speeds at which this information travels. To us, it is indistinguishable from instantaneous.

This computer revolution has given humanity a new means of communication and information sharing that has led to an incredible understanding and a desire to cooperate with the world. Thanks to the advent of social media and mobile applications powered by smartphones, information and news is a mere click, tap and a swipe away. It has always been the intention of free-thinkers and advocates of the open-source communities that information, the internet, technology, and knowledge should always be easily and readily accessible to everyone. Thanks to the Internet of Things, that time is now.

What has become known in many circles as “the hacker ethic” explains that people with knowledge and understanding of technology have a responsibility to use their knowledge for the good of the world. According to Steven Levy, it operates on its basic principles of information sharing, openness, decentralization, free access to computers, and world improvement. Linus Torvalds, who created the Linux kernel in 1991, dared to think that all of this power deserved to be shared freely with the world. It is rather poetic that the free and open internet uses Linux now more than any other operating system in the world.

So much of the internet has come to be dominated by the sheer number of things that exist on it. As it should be, it is largely owned by the people who use it. Even in countries where internet access is heavily censored, there is The Onion Router (TOR) to help their citizens to break through that veil of censorship. TOR also operates in tandem with the internet of things to tunnel traffic through many devices called ‘nodes’ that protect and anonymize the user to allow them to access the greater internet, and not just what their government restricts them to.

               The internet of things has already done much to make the internet more free and accessible to everyone. It has taken ownership of it from corporate organizations and placed it in the hands of the world. It has freed us from censorship. It delivers anything and everything we want to know instantly. Yet for all it is now, it has only just begun.



Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
http://www.internetsociety.org/internet/what-internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet
http://www.netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/cerf-how-inet.html
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/

The American IP Mapping Horror Story

The Taylor-Vogelman family, owners of the Vogelman Farm just outside of Wichita, Kansas, have been the victims of internet harassment for well over a decade. They have had their homes assaulted and damaged, received very insidious threats both by mail and through digital media, been raided by the FBI and federal marshals, visited by the IRS, and a large number of additional emergency services responding to suicide threats, child abuse and endangerment, runaway children, identity theft and credit fraud.

The owner, Joyce Vogelman, is actually described by locals as a very kind, ordinary person who is neither a criminal, fraud, tax evader, nor suicidal. So why is this woman cursed by all of this grief?

IP Mapping

Treatise on Hacker Ethics

The modern understanding of computer science is a constantly mutating beast. The individuals who have been driving the Information Age's technological innovation are known as "hackers." Most people understand hacker to refer to someone who breaks into computers and commits data-theft, but this is a gross misconception that I intend to ebb and erode away, slowly, like waves over a rock. 

Back in the 1990s, the word "Hacker" became a very scary word you would often find on the news in the United States. World governments, having only just begun to understand the implications of a unified world that was interconnected in the spiderweb of wires that was the internet, were struggling to keep up with the sharp minds of individuals who made it their life-mission to study, understand, manipulate, and master the art of computer science. In 1960, Massachusetts Institute of Technology students of computer science called those among them who could manipulate code and programs to do incredible, unfathomable things hackers. It meant they could read code like a children's book, understand it, create, modify, and manipulate it to do whatever they wanted or something for which it was not intended.

The Tesla Gigafactory: Powering the Renewable Future

Elon Musk has been in the business of changing the world for many years now. Since his founding project, PayPal, the internet banking system that changed world currency transaction forever, he has built several successful enterprises with the goal of creating a cleaner, sustainable Earth. Solar City, his lease-to-own self-pay solar energy solution for home owners, and Tesla Motors, his incredible all-electric powered, exotic car company, have completely changed the face of what an eco-economic industry looks like.

This latest project Musk is calling "The Gigafactory" is seeking to eliminate the worry for necessary battery power for the foreseeable future for Tesla Motors. Because of the all-electric, high-power design of the Tesla cars, efficient, high-powered batteries are going to be essential and in high-demand. However, in an effort to satisfy that demand, Tesla is creating a self-sufficient super-factory that will produce these highly efficient, powerful batteries at extremely low-cost using only renewable, solar energy.

The Science of Password Cracking

A lot of ordinary computer users understand what a password is. It protects their sensitive data, and it is all they need to get access to a majority of accounts. It is that all-important word that will allow them to access their significant other's Facebook profile while they're away to make sure they haven't been cheating, and the pin number or pattern to their phone that betrays them access to their deepest, darkest secrets.

Not surprisingly, many people will resort to anything to gain access to someone's personal data, when properly motivated. All manner of excuses crop up as to why they are exonerated from any crime or guilt for doing so.

"I know he's cheating" or "I'm only doing it for a prank. I'm not hurting anybody."

Honestly, these are the cheapest, weakest excuses for invading someone's privacy. First of all, if you need to resort to betraying someone's privacy to determine whether you should trust them or not, you should already know by now that you have your answer. If you can't trust your significant other to be faithful, and they can't trust you to keep your nose out of their business, why are you with that person in the first place?

Now that that little slap in the head is over with...let's get on with this the real meat of this article.

Anonymous Reveals the 'Priorities' of the Trump Campaign in an Unexpected Way

Earlier this week, the Anonymous group posted a video in response to Donald Trump's campaign.

It is important to note that Anonymous is a very decentralized group that operates very freely and independently of any singular objective or governance. Nevertheless, it seems determined toward the same goal of ensuring the continued freedom of people across the world by attacking what they perceive as evil any way they can. Typically their methods involve Denial of Service to websites and organizations, or hacking centralized networks to achieve an end; however, this time, this was not the case.

On March 17, 2016, Anonymous announced that it had released private information on Donald Trump including his social security and personal cell phone numbers, as a means of inciting individuals to 'investigate' his campaign and past. The video also warns viewers that they are solely responsible for their actions in regards to what they do with the information.

Hacking your School

Intro

I'm assuming that you came to this thread looking for a tutorial on how to hack your school network. I'll start by introducing myself. I go by the pseudonym True Demon, and I'm a somewhat recognizable name in the hacker community. I've written a a book and several white-papers on the subject of computer security and penetration testing. On the outside, I am an IT and security consultant with five years of career experience and ten total years studying the art of computer intrusion. I have a modest collection of certifications, have worked as a network administrator, network design architect, network engineer, security analyst, penetration tester, and have managed both Windows and Linux servers.

One of my first jobs as a network administrator was as the Network Admin for a local school district near my home town. It boasted over 800 students and approximately 1,200 networked devices including wi-fi infrastructure, Windows 2008 and Linux Novell servers (state of the art, at the time), and the usual computers, student laptops, tablets, lab computers, thin-clients, and all types of other cool stuff.

Disecting The Hacker Manifesto

Conscience of a Hacker is an essay written by Lloyd Blankenship in 1986 under the pseudonym The Mentor. The Mentor was a member of the original hacker group known as the Legion of Doom, which was well known and is still one of the most recognized hacker groups in history.

Widely considered the most influential piece of literature on the hacker subculture, Conscience of a Hacker, which later became known as The Hacker's Manifesto, was written while Blankenship was serving a prison term and was published by the popular Phrack e-zine "Volume 7, Issue 3." The Hacker's Manifesto has made numerous appearances in several literature pieces and movies, including the movie Hackers (1995). It has been copy-pasted into numerous articles, white-papers, forum postings, boards, and all manner of internet publications.

But what does it really say?

Hacker Evolution: Explaining the hacker subculture

Enter Our World

There is a lot of mystery and mystique surrounding the origin of hackers both in history and their modern development. How do hackers get started? What kind of person does it take to become one? Where do they go to learn? Why do they do it?

This easily and frequently asked question is a difficult one to answer. The kind of person that becomes enthralled with the idea of bending the power of the computational engine to their whim is easy to find, but rarely do you encounter one with the right mindset who is determined enough to pursue the skills necessary to do it. Unlike the movies make it seem, hacking is not easy, it is not theatrical or dramatic, and it certainly isn't done by Hugh Jackman with a few bottles of wine and 8 randomly arranged computer monitors.

Hacking
 --the combined understanding of computer science, networking and hardware for the purpose of testing, subverting and bypassing electronic security--

 is an art-form that takes years of dedicated study and the patience of a saint.

Those looking to become masters of the trade of computer intrusion are in for a very long, frustrating journey, but a rewarding one, if dedicated to seeing it to the end.