28
Oct
2021
Oct
2021
Searching for "hacker"
02
Dec
2020
Dec
2020
Hamlet on the HoloDeck
Murray, J. H. (1997). Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace. Free Press.
Since 1992 I have been teaching a course on how to write electronics section. My students include freshman, writing majors, and media lab graduate students.
As I watch the yearly growth in ingenuity among my students, I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, one who is half hacker, half bard. The spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellspring Safari time, causing the in animate circuits to sync with ever more individualized and quirky voices; the spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here in about we mean to one another.
p. 12 A New Medium of Storytelling
p. 18 Aldous Huxley Brave New World
(more on it here https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=huxley)
(more on it here https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=huxley)
Set 600 years from now, describes a society that science has dehumanized by eliminating love, parenthood, and the family in favor of generating engineering, test tube delivery, and state indoctrination. Books are banned, and science has come up with a substitute form of storytelling to delete the masses.
p. 20 Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451
p. 22 this accounts of a digital dystopia but eroticize and demonize the computer. Cyberpunks surfers are like Cowboys on the new frontier motorcycle hoodlums with a joystick in their hand instead of a motorcycle between their legs. They are outlaw pirates on an endless voyage of exploration throughout the virtual world riding and plundering among the invisible data hoards of the world in many states by the stronger pirate parents who reach in and reprogram their minds.
p. 22 William Gibson Neurmancer
p. 28 The Harbinger on the the Holodeck
The technical in economic cultivation of this freestyle new medium of communication has led to several new varieties of narrative entertainment. This new storytelling formats very from the shoot them up video game in the virtual dungeons of Internet role-playing games to the post modern literary hypertext. This wide range of narrative art holds the promise of a new medium of expression that is S varied SD printed book or the movie picture.
Books printed before 1501 or cold incunabula; the word is derived from the Latin for swaddling clothes and is used to indicate that this books are the work of a technology still in its infancy.
The garish video games in tangled websites of the current digital environment or part of a similar period of technical evolution, part of a similar struggle for the conventions of coherent communication.
The garish video games in tangled websites of the current digital environment or part of a similar period of technical evolution, part of a similar struggle for the conventions of coherent communication.
p. 29 now, in the incunabular days of the narrative computer. We can see how 20th century novels, films, and please have been steadily pushing against the boundaries of linear storytelling. We therefore have to start our survey of the harbingers of the holiday back with a look at multiform stories, that is, linear narrative straining against the boundary of pre-digital media like a two dimensional picture trying to burst of its frame.
p. 30 The multiform story
Frank Capra’s It’s a wonderful life
Frank Capra’s It’s a wonderful life
p. 34 Robert Zemeskis Back to the Future
p. 35 Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day
Multi forms stories often reflect different points of view of the same event. p. 37 Kurosawa Rashomon, the same crime is narrated by four different people: a rape victim; her husband, who is murdered; the bandit who attacked them; and a bystander.
Multi forms stories often reflect different points of view of the same event. p. 37 Kurosawa Rashomon, the same crime is narrated by four different people: a rape victim; her husband, who is murdered; the bandit who attacked them; and a bystander.
p. 37 Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars
p. 37 Multi form narrative attempts to give a simultaneous form to this possibilities, to allow us to hold in our minds at the same time multiple contradictory alternatives.
p. 38 active audience
When the writer expands the story to include multiple possibilities, the reader assumes a more active role.
p. 40 although television viewers have long been accused of being less active engaged in readers or theatergoers, research on thin culture provides considerable evidence that viewers actively appropriate the stories of their favorite series. In addition to sharing critical commentary and gossip, fans create their own stories by taking characters and situations from the series and developing them in ways closer to their own concerns.
p. 42 role playing games or theatrical in a non-traditional but thrilling way. Players are both actors and audience for one another, and events the purple tree often have the media seat of personal experience.
p. 43 Live theater has been incorporating the same qualities of spontaneity and audience involvement for some time.
p. 43 MUDs have allowed distant players on the Internet to share a common virtual space in which they can chat with one another in real time. A the social psychologist Sherry Turkle has persuasively demonstrated, mods are intensely “evocative” environments for fantasy play that allow people to create and sustain elaborate fictional personas.
p. 44 movies three dimensions
p. 51 dramatic storytelling in electronic games
p. 55 story webs
p. 59 computer scientist as storytellers
p. 65 Chapter 3 From Additive to Expressive Form
beyond multimedia
Sept 28, 1895 Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat Station
Sept 28, 1895 Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat Station
p. 66 photoplays
p. 67 one of the lessons we can learn from the history of film is that additive formulations like photo play or the contemporary catshall ‘multimedia” or a sign that the medium is in an early stage of development and it is still depending on the format derived from earlier technologies instead of exploiting its own expressive power. Today the derivative mindset is apparent in the conception of cyber space is the place to view “pages” of print or “clips” of moving video end of cedar rooms is offering “extended books.”
p. 60 ELIZA, 1966 Joseph Weizenbaum
p. 71 the four essential properties of digital environments
Digital environments are procedural
Digital environments are participatory
Digital environments are spacial
Digital environments are encyclopedic
p. 90 Digital structures of complexity
p. 95 part to the aesthetics of the medium
chapter 4 immersion
definition
The experience of being transported to an elaborate please simulator please it’s pleasurable in itself regarding of the fantasy contact. we Refer to this experience as immersion. Immersion is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different is water is from air, that takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus.
p/ 99 entering the enchanted place
my note: ghost in the machine
The computer itself, even without any fantasy content, is an enchanted object. Sometimes it can act like an autonomous, animate being, sensing it’s environment in carrying out internally generated processes, yet it can also seem like an extension of our own consciousness, capturing our words through the keyboard in displaying them on the screen as fast as we can thank them.
The computer itself, even without any fantasy content, is an enchanted object. Sometimes it can act like an autonomous, animate being, sensing it’s environment in carrying out internally generated processes, yet it can also seem like an extension of our own consciousness, capturing our words through the keyboard in displaying them on the screen as fast as we can thank them.
p. 110 the active creation of belief
In digital environments we have new opportunities to practice this active creation of belief. For instance, in an interactive video program set in Paris that may research group designed in the 1980s for language learners, we included a working telephone, represented by a photograph of a phone who’s keypad could be clicked on .
p. 112 structuring participation with a mask .
p. 119 regulating arousal According to Winnicott, “the pleasurable element in playing Carris whit eight employee Kasian that the instructional a razzle is not excessive”; that is, the object of the imaginary world should not be too enticing, scary, or real let the immersive trance be broken. This is true in any medium. If a horror movie is too frightening, we cover our eyes or turn away from the screen.
p. 126 chapter Agency
Agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices. We expect to feel agency on the computer when we double click on a file and seat open before us or when we enter numbers in a spreadsheet and see the totals readjust. However, we do not usually expect to experience agency within a narrative environment.
p. 129 the pleasures of navigation
One form of agency not dependent on the game structure yet characteristic of digital environment is spatial navigation. The ability to move through virtual landscapes can be pleasurable in itself, independent of the content of the spaces.
p. 130 the story of the maze
the adventure maze embodies a classic fair-tale narrative of danger and salvation. as a format for electronic narrative, the maze is a more active version of the immersive visit (chapter 4).
p. 134 Giving Shape to Anxiety
p. 137 The Journey Story and the Pleasure of Problem Solving
p. 140 Games into Stories
p. 142 Games as Symbolic Dramas
14
Nov
2020
Nov
2020
Soviet Union Internet domain
TIL that the Soviet Union was issued a top-level internet domain just before its 1991 collapse. The domain was never deactivated and has since become a haven for cybercriminals due to its lack of regulation. from r/todayilearned
Tons of Hackers Are Hanging Out in Old Soviet Cyberspace
https://gizmodo.com/tons-of-hackers-are-hanging-out-in-old-soviet-cyberspac-510829003
Until recently, the .su domain has been the home of weird, but legitimate sites. But when the administrators for Russia’s .ru got a little more strict about what they would and wouldn’t allow, scammers and hackers alike began to migrate to the out-dated .su, which saw its population of sites double in 2011, and again in 2012.
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Old Soviet Union domain name attracts cybercriminal interest
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/old-soviet-union-domain-name-attracts-cybercriminal-interest
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more on the Internet in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=Internet
14
Aug
2020
Aug
2020
phony social media agitation
categories: social media
a historic report last week from the nation’s top boss of counterintelligence.
the need for the United States to order the closure of the Chinese government’s consulate in Houston.
metaphor for this aspect of the spy game: a layer cake.
There’s a layer of activity that is visible to all — the actions or comments of public figures, or statements made via official channels.
Then there’s a clandestine layer that is usually visible only to another clandestine service: the work of spies being watched by other spies.
Counterintelligence officials watching Chinese intelligence activities in Houston, for example, knew the consulate was a base for efforts to steal intellectual property or recruit potential agents
And there’s at least a third layer about which the official statements raised questions: the work of spies who are operating without being detected.
The challenges of election security include its incredible breadth — every county in the United States is a potential target — and vast depth, from the prospect of cyberattacks on voter systems, to the theft of information that can then be released to embarrass a target, to the ongoing and messy war on social media over disinformation and political agitation.
Witnesses have told Congress that when Facebook and Twitter made it more difficult to create and use fake accounts to spread disinformation and amplify controversy, Russia and China began to rely more on open channels.
In 2016, Russian influencemongers posed as fake Americans and engaged with them as though they were responding to the same election alongside one another. Russian operatives even used Facebook to organize real-world campaign events across the United States.
But RT’s account on Twitter or China’s foreign ministry representatives aren’t pretending to do anything but serve as voices for Moscow or Beijing.
the offer of a $10 million bounty for information about threats to the election.
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more on trolls in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=troll
02
May
2020
May
2020
fake net neutrality comments
categories: Digital literacy
Judge orders FCC to hand over IP addresses linked to fake net neutrality comments. from r/technology
Judge Orders FCC to Hand Over IP Addresses Linked to Fake Net Neutrality Comments
The Times’ lawsuit follows reporting by Gizmodo that exposed multiple attempts by the FCC to manufacture stories about hackers attacking its comment system. In reality, the Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) crashed, both in 2015 and 2017, after Last Week Tonight host John Oliver instructed millions of his viewers to flood the agency with pro-net neutrality comments.
For over a year, the FCC claimed to have proof that distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were behind the comment system issues. In August 2018, however, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai finally admitted that wasn’t true. After an inspector general report found no evidence of an attack, Pai sought to pin the blame on his staff—and, for some reason, former President Barack Obama.
Pai stated in an agency memo in 2018 that it was a “fact” that Russian accounts were behind the half-million comments. His attorneys, meanwhile, were arguing the exact opposite in court.
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more on net neutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=net+neutrality
04
Oct
2019
Oct
2019
SIM jacker
categories: information technology, technology literacy
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more on hackers in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=hacker
10
Feb
2019
Feb
2019
learn blockchain by building one
Learn Blockchains by Building One
The fastest way to learn how Blockchains work is to build one
Daniel van Flymen Sept 24, 2017
https://hackernoon.com/learn-blockchains-by-building-one-117428612f46
Remember that a blockchain is an immutable, sequential chain of records called Blocks. They can contain transactions, files or any data you like, really. But the important thing is that they’re chained together using hashes.
If you aren’t sure what a hash is, here’s an explanation.
reading and writing some basic Python, as well as have some understanding of how HTTP requests work, since we’ll be talking to our Blockchain over HTTP.
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more on blockchain in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=blockchain
30
Jan
2019
Jan
2019
Protect Student Data
Six Ways to Protect Student Data and Prevent Cyberattacks
By Ricky Doyle Dec 10, 2018
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-12-10-six-ways-to-protect-student-data-and-prevent-cyberattacks
School administrators and IT staff can be super-vigilant, but the hackers are getting better and better at sneaking through security.
the most common cybersecurity threats, and how can school staff avoid them?
Eavesdropping / Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) Attacks
What they are: It’s likely that you sometimes use a school laptop or mobile device to gain internet access via Wi-Fi networks in public places like coffee shops or airports. If so, be aware that there may be hackers eavesdropping to try and gain entry to any two-party exchange you make so they can filter and steal data.
How to avoid them: Always use a school-verified SIM card, dongle or VPN(virtual private network) to access the internet in public places.
Social Engineering Attacks
According to Verizon’s 2018 Breach Investigations report, 92 percent of malware is delivered via email, often referred to as social engineering attacks. The aim is to interact with the user and influence and manipulate their actions to gain access to systems and install harmful software. Malware uses various guises. Here are some of the most common:
1. Phishing emails
2. Baiting attacks
3. Quid pro quo requests
4. Pretexting attacks
5. Contact with a ‘compromised’ website
09
Jan
2019
Jan
2019
Germany under cyberattack
categories: announcement
After massive cyber attack, Germany’s security apparatus struggles to answer questions
Nicholas Waller JANUARY 9, 2019
Investigators traced the man through digital tracks he left on the internet, as well as by speaking to witnesses, including another unnamed 19-year-old man that the hacker had communicated with via an encrypted messaging service. The hacker, who used the pseudonyms “G0t” and “Orbit”, was arrested on January 6 after investigators searched his home.
“Bad passwords were one of the reasons he had it so easy,” Seehofer said. “I was shocked at how simple most passwords were: ‘ILoveYou’, ‘1,2,3’. A whole array of really simple things.”
The latest incident comes just over a month after German security officials detected a major cyber attack against the email accounts of German lawmakers, as well as the military, and several German embassies by a Russian hacker group with ties to Moscow’s military intelligence wing, the GRU.
That attack occurred less than a year after the BfV, Germany’s intelligence service, said the Russian government was behind a cyberattack on German computer networks that was discovered in December 2017 and was also linked to the same hacker group that carried out the November 2018 breach.
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more on cybersecrurity in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cybersecurity
05
Dec
2018
Dec
2018
Blockchain next election
Blockchain Disciples Have a New Goal: Running Our Next Election
Amid vote-hacking fears, election officials are jumping on the crypto bandwagon — but cybersecurity experts are sounding an alarm
At democracy’s heart lies a set of paradoxes: a delicate interplay of identity and anonymity, secrecy and transparency. To be sure you are eligible to vote and that you do so only once, the authorities need to know who you are. But when it comes time for you to mark a ballot, the government must guarantee your privacy and anonymity. After the fact, it also needs to provide some means for a third party to audit the election, while also preventing you from obtaining definitive proof of your choice, which could lead to vote selling or coercion.
Building a system that accomplishes all this at once — and does so securely — is challenging enough in the physical world. It’s even harder online, as the recent revelation that Russian intelligence operatives compromised voting systems in multiple states makes clear.
In the decade since the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto published an infamous white paper outlining the idea behind bitcoin, a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” based on a mathematical “consensus mechanism,” more than 1,500 new cryptocurrencies have come into being.
definition: Nathan Heller in the New Yorker, in which he compares the blockchain to a scarf knit with a single ball of yarn. “It’s impossible to remove part of the fabric, or to substitute a swatch, without leaving some trace,” Heller wrote. Typically, blockchains are created by a set of stakeholders working to achieve consensus at every step, so it might be even more apt to picture a knitting collective creating that single scarf together, moving forward only when a majority agrees that a given knot is acceptable.
Unlike bitcoin, a public blockchain powered by thousands of miners around the world, most voting systems, including Votem’s, employ what’s known as a “permissioned ledger,” in which a handful of approved groups (political parties, election observers, government entities) would be allowed to validate the transactions.
there’s the issue of targeted denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, in which a hacker directs so much traffic at a server that it’s overwhelmed and ceases to function.
Although a distributed ledger itself would likely withstand such an attack, the rest of the system — from voters’ personal devices to the many servers a vote would pass through on its way to the blockchain — would remain vulnerable.
there’s the so-called penetration attack, like the University of Michigan incursion, in which an adversary gains control of a server and deliberately alters the outcome of an election.
Although a distributed ledger itself would likely withstand such an attack, the rest of the system — from voters’ personal devices to the many servers a vote would pass through on its way to the blockchain — would remain vulnerable.
there’s the so-called penetration attack, like the University of Michigan incursion, in which an adversary gains control of a server and deliberately alters the outcome of an election.
While it’s true that information recorded on a blockchain cannot be changed, a determined hacker might well find another way to disrupt the process. Bitcoin itself has never been hacked, for instance, but numerous bitcoin “wallets” have been, resulting in billions of dollars in losses. In early June 2018, a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange was penetrated, causing the value of bitcoin to tumble and resulting in a loss of $42 billion in market value. So although recording the vote tally on a blockchain introduces a new obstacle to penetration attacks, it still leaves holes elsewhere in the system — like putting a new lock on your front door but leaving your basement windows open.
A blockchain is only as valuable as the data stored on it. And whereas traditional paper ballots preserve an indelible record of the actual intent of each voter, digital votes “don’t produce an original hard-copy record of any kind,”
In the end, democracy always depends on a certain leap of faith, and faith can never be reduced to a mathematical formula. The Economist Intelligence Unit regularly ranks the world’s most democratic counties. In 2017, the United States came in 21st place, after Uruguay and Malta. Meanwhile, it’s now widely believed that John F. Kennedy owed his 1960 win to election tampering in Chicago. The Supreme Court decision granting the presidency to George W. Bush rather than calling a do-over — despite Al Gore’s popular-vote win — still seems iffy. Significant doubts remain about the 2016 presidential race.
While little doubt remains that Russia favored Trump in the 2016 election, the Kremlin’s primary target appears to have been our trust in the system itself. So if the blockchain’s trendy allure can bolster trust in American democracy, maybe that’s a net positive for our national security. If someone manages to hack the system, hopefully they’ll do so quietly. Apologies to George Orwell, but sometimes ignorance really is strength.
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more on blockchain in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=blockchain