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Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is

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Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is

#211

Post by jessaustin »

linkregister wrote: post #185
dmix wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book '@War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex' by Shane Harris from The Daily Beast is very good and talks about the obsessions with offensive weapons. And the embarrassingly bad defensive posture the US has via policy failure (ie: focusing on private-public info sharing deals that do nothing, instead of real defence) and inter-agency fighting. https://www.amazon.com/War-Rise-Military-Internet-Complex/dp.…

> focusing on private-public info sharing deals that do nothing, instead of real defence Can you elaborate? I haven't been exposed to any ideas that address this without compromising civil liberties. That is, "real defence" sounds like the government monitoring internet connections to my company for malicious activity. I don't think that's good for business. I might be thinking a little close-minded about it though.…

It's been a couple of years since I read @War, but ISTR it described interactions between public officials and private industry that were explicitly more about politics and marketing than they were about security or risk management. E.g., NSA set up public-private dialogues with tiered access, then tantalized executives with off-the-record-but-in-a-meeting-also-attended-by-other-companies reports of server pwnage, to motivate them to sign up for the next, more stringent tier of cooperation. If the idea really were to improve security, the same information could have been distributed in truly private fashion. Also, NSA could acknowledge that private security firms are generally more helpful to companies than NSA is, and simply transfer their knowledge, when appropriate, directly to one or more NSA-vetted firms. The public actions of TLAs described in that book were far too entrepreneurial, in the sense that they didn't care what they did or what effect that had, so long as they were in the middle of everything to demonstrate their budgetary importance.

Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is

#212

Post by rsync »

wepple wrote: post #41
eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for summarizing that. As others have commented, I wish Snowden would simply blog about this sort of thing. Twitter is frustrating to digest for any insightful commentary that is on the longer side.

if we're lucky, twitter will do what they did with the hashtag and other things when they realised their users needs were 'inventing' new features. The 1/n 2/n n/n tweets is a huge indicator of a feature need. Of course, that's going to dilute their original value proposition of short direct messages.

Oh By Codes[1] are 4096 characters long and can be used, inside a tweet, as a tweet expander. No URL/link necessary.

[1] https://0x.co

edit: well, not everyone knows what an Oh By Code is yet, so for now I suppose the link format is best, but eventually, just the code itself will suffice ...

Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is

#213

Post by a3n »

wepple wrote: post #41
eeeeeeeeeeeee wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for summarizing that. As others have commented, I wish Snowden would simply blog about this sort of thing. Twitter is frustrating to digest for any insightful commentary that is on the longer side.

if we're lucky, twitter will do what they did with the hashtag and other things when they realised their users needs were 'inventing' new features. The 1/n 2/n n/n tweets is a huge indicator of a feature need. Of course, that's going to dilute their original value proposition of short direct messages.

> value proposition of short direct messages.

"Value proposition" or stubbornly clinging to something that users do their best to work around?

Why not just cut to the chase and make this thing essentially broadcast email, or more generally yet another blogging platform?

Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is

#214

Post by placeybordeaux »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #111
then_you_wink wrote: post #85

I posted about this in a different thread with a different throwaway, because I had suspicions that Snowden knew about the whole EG auction thing anyways. The writing has been on the walls. This is why there is so much hype over what appears at a first glance to be an obvious scam, because there is a lot of potential for civilians to learn a lot about how state-sponsored hacking actually operates. It's very different…

I wish you didn't use throwaways so I could follow your posts. I assume you're the blink person from the other post. It sounds like you're someone who knows a little more than average about what's happening.

Yeah I'd totally follow this writer's stuff. Too bad...

Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is

#215

Post by leephillips »

mschuster91 wrote: post #190
leephillips wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is that? On both TweetDeck and the normal Twitter page, when I click a link the target opens in a new page; nothing embedded.

It's on Twitter for Android, which falls back to the system webview (on my old-ish phone, IIRC Chrome v30), when you don't have Chrome installed.

Oh yeah, I hate that. I suppose there is a good client for Twitter on Android, but I haven't found it yet.

Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is

#216

Post by linkregister »

jessaustin wrote: post #211
linkregister wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> focusing on private-public info sharing deals that do nothing, instead of real defence Can you elaborate? I haven't been exposed to any ideas that address this without compromising civil liberties. That is, "real defence" sounds like the government monitoring internet connections to my company for malicious activity. I don't think that's good for business. I might be thinking a little close-minded about it though.…

It's been a couple of years since I read @War , but ISTR it described interactions between public officials and private industry that were explicitly more about politics and marketing than they were about security or risk management. E.g., NSA set up public-private dialogues with tiered access, then tantalized executives with off-the-record-but-in-a-meeting-also-attended-by-other-companies reports of server pwnage, t…

Thanks! It appears that the real problem is in the supremely suboptimal execution of a potentially acceptable vision.

Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is

#217

Post by msane »

matt_wulfeck wrote: post #209
msane wrote: post #182

There are a lot of little gems in the wording of the auction message. ( http://pastebin.com/raw/JBcipKBL ) If it is Russia there will be some content that only the US gov will understand. I wonder which portions those would be. The "message to wealthy elites" portion of the auction message is also interesting. "Do you feel in charge?" in quotes suggests a reference with a pretty relevant top hit ( https://www.google.…

It's ridiculously written to the point of being a parody at guessing who did it. That's my takeaway.

Attribution security is the meta-message. Perhaps that's the best attribution.

It could be someone else taking advantage of the timing but that is definitely the intended frame.

"Better than stuxnet" is also quite the claim.

Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is

#218

Post by reubenmorais »

chatmasta wrote: post #104
reubenmorais wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you care about this, but when you post screenshots of text, make sure you also provide a transcription, or you'll be excluding visually impaired users from accessing your content.

The whole point is you can't, because Twitter only allows 140 characters.

Twitter allows you to provide a caption for images now that gets inserted with the proper accessibility tags.

Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is

#219

Post by nickpsecurity »

Kristine1975 wrote: post #159
chatmasta wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's a question of a lesser of two evils - tweetstorms or one screenshot - which do you prefer? Consider also the fact that when people share a tweetstorm, they may even take a screenshot of it.

What about http://pastebin.com or http://www.twitlonger.com (latter requires sign-in, though)?

Mine are Pastebin'd. Works fine for most writing.

Re: Snowden: Hack of an NSA server is not unprecedented, publication of the take is

#220

Post by mschuster91 »

leephillips wrote: post #215
mschuster91 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's on Twitter for Android, which falls back to the system webview (on my old-ish phone, IIRC Chrome v30), when you don't have Chrome installed.

Oh yeah, I hate that. I suppose there is a good client for Twitter on Android, but I haven't found it yet.

I'm writing one with pure HTML5 (Cordova) actually. Too bad it needs either a Cordova container, or a server backend as a proxy, because Twitter sends out fairly restrictive CORS headers.

If you don't want to wait until it's ready, I recommend tweecha - or install Google Chrome from the Play Store, that should make Twitter automatically use the Chrome webview instead.

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