in this desolate post-internet world of 2012, will the people truly sit back and let much of the functionality of the most important communications device conceived be taken away from them so easily?

considering recent attacks on prominent internet companies, we must take into the consideration the possibility that attacks like these may eventually be applied in tandem with physical capture of the server sites. eventually, digital revolutionaries would not be able to settle for havoc caused by a few days disturbance of services, and would up the ante to the physical realm.

also, while much of the world could feasibly move to a new set of restrictions on the internet, many third world countries with developing infrastructures would still be allowing free exchange of information. we even have examples of countries with extremely strict internet guidelines making the internet widely available. many cubans, preceding the rule of raul castro, routinely downloaded popular blog posts to usb drives and shared the text outside of the internet, making the data available to many.

it seems appropriate for digital revolutionaries to be making this change. surely, if the us government thinks it will soon be a major problem, you know everyone else must be on top of this too. i am desperately curious about that aspect of it. the us government is usually pretty outdated in the way it views technology, and this stark and realistic assessment of the evolution of the digital revolution is out of character. it makes me wonder if underground digital revolutionaries are more prominent than i thought already. considering the effectiveness of many terrorist cells and individual spies, there is the possibility that there are groups out there.

of course, kevin mitnick was caught. and he has considered to be one of the most difficult to track hackers ever. if tracking technologies are even more sophisticated now than ever, do we even really stand a chance against the burgeoning police state?

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school (”you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (”you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ‘51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts.”

Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure–prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors–scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. “Control” is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

II. Logic

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn’t necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it’s because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything–the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it’s because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest–the flock and each of its animals–but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay “priest.”) In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society–not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines–levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker’s familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It’s a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner–state or private power–but coded figures–deformable and transformable–of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.

III. Program

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position–licit or illicit–and effects a universal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of “substitution,” at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the “corporation” at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine “without doctor or patient” that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation–as they say–but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a “dividual” material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

L’autre journal, Nr. I, Mai 1990.

defcon has been happening for 14 years. i mean, that mainstream media is on top of things.

now, every year, defcon founder jeff moss plays a game called “spot the fed” to out the federal agents in the crowd there to learn about current security strategy. well, this year he changed it to “spot the undercover reporter.”

watch the video to see it play out.

an article on this in wired.

One of the things I hate most about digital projects — and there’s a lot to hate about new media — is that it encourages people to spend money.

nomediakings.org is useful for many reasons. it artfully and skillfully helps you understand some of the best DIY ways to bind books, animate, manage sound, and run your own server.

beyond its obvious usefulness, whats also interesting to note is the underlying philosophy behind the lessons taught.
one doesnt need to give in to the urge to spend money on a project. the more hard physical labor youre willing to put into a project, the less money youll have to spend. if you use your networking skills, you can get access to equipment you need to accomplish your project (whatever it may be) without spending money on that equipment.

in a way, this seems like something basic that we should all be aware of as it is. but often we are still pulled in by the idea that we need money to do projects which require jobs but those jobs take up the time we would have spent on our projects….

reminds me of this conversation in flight of the conchords.

for the first time, complete, in easy to read (and copy) html

We decided to try Psiphon out and see what it is like.

The installation is simple, but not self-explanatory. After the installation is over, the program does not open up, nor are you instructed on what to do now that this has happened, and there is no readme file readily available to explain either. The Psiphon website does provide a forum with more information.

Other than needing to set up port forwarding (which you are warned you’ll need to be able to do when the download begins), the program sets itself up from the start. As long as you’ve got the default port, 443, open, you will be able to let people log in. It doesn’t have any explanation of how to set up port forwarding, but neither does any online service that needs it these days. Perhaps we will write an article on that in the near future.

Now, Psiphon is just host software. The international user who is using the server as a surfing tool does not need to install Psiphon. They will just need to log into your computer as a host. So they will type https://yourIP:443/login/ (“yourIP” being your physical IP address number in xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx format.) into their address bar and they will find a login screen.

The host manager window. (Ignore Chuck’s mac skinned winxp machine)

The setup options.

This is where things got confusing for us. We understand that this program is supposed to help those people in need, but this essentially requires that you know those people in need personally, because it requires you to set up your own usernames and passwords.

Perhaps you could visit a few Chinese national forums and drop a line, but we would think that would be helpful in getting your IP banned from the country as well if too many people find out about it.

Also, they’re using your bandwidth as a browser, and some of them may get trigger happy. So maybe it is a good thing the only people that can get on are people you have spoken to personally.
—-

Chris logged into my computer to see how the interface worked for the casual browser using a Psiphon server. We had an interesting occurence. We found our first site that doesn’t work this with this: Infoshop.org. As of yet, we have no idea why. We intend to find out.

In this set of screenshots, please click on the thumbnail to see a larger version of each graphic.

The Psiphon log in screen.

The main browser window for Psiphon.

Error with infoshop…

digg works…
—-

Overall, we’d say that Psiphon definitely aims high and scores high. It needs a little work to be a little more user friendly (Basically in just explaining what you’re doing. Like we said, it essentially sets itself up.), and probably a little code work to make sure you can access all of the web.

Nevertheless, for the future of an uncensored internet, this could be a solid first step.

today they launched the most massive darknet ever conceived.

Relakks provides services to help individuals to assure the security and integrity of their information. Relakks’ responsibility stems from the strong Swedish tradition of protecting the integrity of private life and all forms of communication between individuals.

Relakks – broadband Swedish style!

from the press release:

Today, the Swedish Pirate Party launched a new Internet service that lets anybody send and receive files and information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged. In technical terms, such a network is called a “darknet”. The service allows people to use an untraceable address in the darknet, where they cannot be personally identified.

“There are many legitimate reasons to want to be completely anonymous on the Internet,” says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. “If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check. The right to exchange information in private is fundamental to the democratic society. Without a safe and convenient way of accessing the Internet anonymously, this right is rendered null and void.”

EDIT: apparently some people dont like the dark and would prefer someone left the lights on. they call it a “bright-net.” ill get more info on it soon.

for a more detailed analysis, please visit www.toool.nl

this can be executed even from a guest account.

jeremy also theorizes (based on this information on the AT command) that this could also be done on any local network, making it possible to highjack a server and install your own backdoor.

here is my version of how to make this happen (so you dont have to listen to limp bizkit for three god damned minutes.).
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1. once logged into a winxp machine, run the command prompt (start menu > run… > cmd).

2. in the command prompt, type this code:

at hh:mm* /interactive “cmd.exe”

*this is a representation of time (hours and minutes). set this time to be at least a minute ahead of the time it actually is on the winxp clock. also remember that it registers as a 24 hour clock in the command prompt, not a 12 hour clock. so 8:22 would be 20:22. thus, the real command would look like this:

at 20:22 /interactive “cmd.exe”

3. once the new command prompt pops up when the time you set passes, close the command prompt you typed the code in originally.

4. press control+alt+delete. this brings up the security console. choose “task manager.”

(at this point, arguably, a better way to activate task manager would probably be to right click on the windows taskbar and choose ‘task manager’ from the menu that appears.)

5. in task manager, choose the “processes” tab. in the process tab, find “explorer.exe”.

6. once found, highlight explorer.exe and then click the “end process” button.

7. at this point, explorer should shut down, and the only thing left running will be your command prompt window.

8. this command prompt window will default start in the directory C:\windows\system32\ . type “cd ..” to drop into the lower directoy (the base windows directory.)

9. once in the C:\windows\ directory type “explorer.exe” . this will run explorer once again, and windows will spring to life around you.

10. once back in the OS, check what user you are logged in as. if done correctly, you will see that you are no longer whatever account you logged in as, you are now SYSTEM.

11. do whatever the fuck you want. reset the admin password if you feel like it. you are the god of fuck to this computer now.
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EDIT: Jeremy says:

Well, a smart sysadmin… one) wouldn’t be a MS sysadmin and two) would set stringent permissions on the AT command.
Because this has been open since NT 4.0.
But… Circuit City on the other hand.

EDIT #2: here is another gem from jeremy. a link to a nice and fast windows password cracker.