ransomware

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pages: 392 words: 114,189

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime by Renee Dudley, Daniel Golden

2021 United States Capitol attack, Amazon Web Services, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, Hacker News, heat death of the universe, information security, late fees, lockdown, Menlo Park, Minecraft, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Picturephone, pirate software, publish or perish, ransomware, Richard Feynman, Ross Ulbricht, seminal paper, smart meter, social distancing, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, Timothy McVeigh, union organizing, War on Poverty, Y2K, zero day

See Renee Dudley, “The Extortion Economy: How Insurance Companies Are Fueling a Rise in Ransomware Attacks,” ProPublica, August 27, 2019, propublica.org/article/the-extortion-economy-how-insurance-companies-are-fueling-a-rise-in-ransomware-attacks. with 775 ransomware incidents: Information about Beazley comes from a panel discussion on Day 2 of the FBI Cyber Division Ransomware Summit, September 2020. as many as six: Renee Dudley, “Like Voldemort, Ransomware Is Too Scary to Be Named,” ProPublica, December 23, 2019, propublica.org/article/like-voldemort-ransomware-is-too-scary-to-be-named. “far fetched”: “Ransomware Sentiment After a Summer of Headlines,” Coveware, October 8, 2019, coveware.com/blog/ransomware-debate-rages-on.

Pentagon PGA of America Phelps, Mark Phelps, Ron Phelps, Shawn Dillard phishing Phobos Pierce, Chris Pinhasi, Zohar pirated software Pistole, John Plutarch Polyanin, Yevgeniy Popp, Joseph Popp’s Concordance to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (Popp) Popular Evolution (Popp) presidential election of 2020 prime numbers private keys ProPublica ProtonMail Proven Data Recovery pseudorandom number generators public keys Pugh, Catherine Putin, Vladimir Quanta Computer Radamant Ragnar Locker random numbers RansomNoteCleaner ransomware ransomware-as-a-service ransomware gangs Ransomware Hunting Team; formation of ransomware insurance ransomware negotiation and payment Ransomware Summits Rapid Recorded Future Reedy River oil spill REvil Ripley, Terri Rivero López, Marc Rivest, Ron Rivlin, Geoffrey RobbinHood RSA Ruppersberger, C. A. “Dutch” Russia; Ukraine invaded by Ryan, Christine Ryuk SAC Capital Advisors Safford, Ariz.

Garmin: Sergiu Gatlan, “Garmin Outage Caused by Confirmed WastedLocker Ransomware Attack,” BleepingComputer, July 24, 2020, bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/garmin-outage-caused-by-confirmed-wastedlocker-ransomware-attack/. “Now that Macaw Locker”: Lawrence Abrams, “Evil Corp Demands $40 Million in New Macaw Ransomware Attacks,” BleepingComputer, October 21, 2021, bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/evil-corp-demands-40-million-in-new-macaw-ransomware-attacks/. BleepingComputer’s domain name: Lawrence Abrams, “Maze Ransomware Says Computer Type Determines Ransom Amount,” BleepingComputer, May 31, 2019, bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/maze-ransomware-says-computer-type-determines-ransom-amount/.


pages: 494 words: 121,217

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

Yet at the same time, neither Chainalysis nor any other blockchain analysis firm seemed able to solve the growing ransomware epidemic. The company could point to occasional wins: In the case of the ransomware group NetWalker, Chainalysis had helped the FBI trace and seize half a million dollars of ransoms. The bureau had arrested a Canadian man who worked as one of NetWalker’s “affiliates”—a kind of partner who rents and deploys its ransomware in exchange for a cut of profits. But a single half-million-dollar seizure and one arrest represented only the tiniest disruption of the nine-figure annual ransomware economy. In fact, Gronager himself conceded that Chainalysis has no silver bullet for ransomware investigations.

The blockchain analysis firm Elliptic, a Chainalysis competitor, quickly published a blog post that showed how Colonial’s extortion payoff had been collected in a wallet that had already received fifty-seven other payments over just the previous two months, all presumably the fruits of DarkSide’s ransomware. In fact, another $4.4 million payment from the German chemical firm Brenntag—another DarkSide ransomware victim—had gone into the same wallet just days after Colonial’s. In all, the wallet had amassed $17.5 million. And it was only one of several such caches of payoffs tied to a single group, which was itself merely one out of dozens of ransomware gangs. Just days after Colonial and Brenntag, it was revealed that the insurance company CNA Financial had paid a staggering $40 million to another cybercriminal group called Phoenix CryptoLocker that was holding its IT systems hostage.

Just days after Colonial and Brenntag, it was revealed that the insurance company CNA Financial had paid a staggering $40 million to another cybercriminal group called Phoenix CryptoLocker that was holding its IT systems hostage. Chainalysis, too, was tracking the ransomware economy as it exploded beyond a silent, digital epidemic into a full-blown—if sporadic and unevenly distributed—societal crisis. In 2020, Chainalysis’s staff had tracked no less than $350 million in total ransomware payments. Ransomware payouts in 2021 looked to be on pace to break that record. And even as companies like Chainalysis and Elliptic followed the path of those ransoms, often in exacting detail, the scourge was only growing.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

For an early account, see Kaspersky, “More than 75 Percent of Crypto Ransomware in 2016 Came from Russian-Speaking Cybercriminal Underground,” February 14, 2017, usa.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/2017_more-than-75-of-crypto-ransomware-in-2016-came-from-the-russian-speaking-cybercriminal-underground. Of note, Russian ransomware authors behind the “Sigrun” Ransomware family offered to decrypt data belonging to Russian Victims for free. Alex Svirid, a security researcher, first tweeted this observation in May 31, 2018. A Malwarebytes security researcher replied with emails between a Russian ransomware author and two victims—one in the United States, the other in Russia—proving Svirid’s point. See Lawrence Abrams, “Sigrun Ransomware Author Decrypting Russian Victims for Free,” Bleeping Computer, June 1, 2018.

For a technical analysis of how ransomware authors search for and avoid computers with Russian keyboards, see SecureWorks, Revil Sodinokibi Ransomware. For a contemporaneous account, I relied on interviews with researchers at CrowdStrike in 2019 and 2020. For data on ransomware payouts, I found estimates varied widely. An FBI analysis of Bitcoin wallets and ransom notes found that between October 2013 and November 2019, $144,350,000 was paid in Bitcoins to ransomware authors. That was the conservative estimate. In 2020, an Emsisoft analysis of some 450,000 incidents projected that ransomware demands could exceed $1.4 billion in 2020 in the United States alone.

As for the total cost to businesses—ransom payout plus downtime—Emsisoft estimated the total cost of ransomware attacks in the U.S. exceeded $9 billion. See Emsisoft, “Report: Cost of Ransomware in 2020. A Country-by-Country Analysis,” February 11, 2020. For a fascinating account of the rise in ransomware payouts and attacks, and the role of the cyber insurance industry in encouraging victims to pay up, see Renee Dudley, “The Extortion Economy: How Insurance Companies are Fueling the Rise in Ransomware Attacks,” ProPublica, August 27, 2019. The suspected links between the ransomware hitting American towns and cities and threats to U.S. election infrastructure is based on more than a dozen interviews I conducted with American officials and private researchers throughout 2019 and 2020.


pages: 309 words: 54,839

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts by David Gerard

altcoin, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, Californian Ideology, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Dr. Strangelove, drug harm reduction, Dunning–Kruger effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extropian, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, Flash crash, Fractional reserve banking, functional programming, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, margin call, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, operational security, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Satoshi Nakamoto, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, slashdot, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Later payment schemes included e-Gold or Liberty Reserve, premium rate SMS messages or international phone calls, or buying particular medicines on a particular website.205 The 2011 “police virus” pretended to be from the local police force and demanded payment by credit card.206 The 2013 “FBI MoneyPak” ransomware demanded payment via online money transfer services MoneyPak or Ukash. CryptoLocker, the first ransomware to use Bitcoin (though you could also pay by Moneypak or Ukash), showed up in September 2013. It was hugely successful, taking about $3 million, and spawned many imitators. Security professionals I spoke to say that the reason for the explosion in ransomware from about 2015 on is not Bitcoin (as media reports often claim), but the ready availability of ransomware builders in malware kits from the hacker underground since that time – so that any script-kiddie can use a kit to make their own ransomware.

[206] “Why the police virus was so effective”. PC Advisor, 26 February 2013. [207] “New Ransomware Study Explores ‘Customer Journey’ of Getting Your Files Back”. F-Secure, 18 July 2016. [208] “Ransomware risk could cripple British businesses with many not ready, while others stockpiling bitcoins to pay up”. Citrix (press release), June 2016. [209] Chris Mayers. “Ransomware in the UK: One year on”. Citrix blog, 6 June 2017. Citrix give the questions and sample selection criteria in the comments. [210] “Incidents of Ransomware on the Rise: Protect Yourself and Your Organization”. FBI, 29 April 2016.

In May 2017, AlphaBay, the largest darknet market, started offering Ethereum as an option204 – because Bitcoin was failing to serve its primary consumer use case. Ransomware Ransomware combines computer malware, encryption and anonymous payment systems. Malicious software spreads through email spam or exploiting computer security holes; it encrypts the files on your Windows PC and any shared folders it can access, and a message pops up telling you to send Bitcoins to the hacker’s address (usually an address per victim) to get the key to unlock your system before the deadline of a few days. Bitcoin is now the payment channel of choice, but ransomware existed for decades before Bitcoin. The first extortion malware was the “AIDS Trojan” or “PC Cyborg Trojan” in 1989, which would hide in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file on a DOS PC and, the ninetieth time it was run, encrypt all filenames on the disk and demand you send $189 to a post office box in Panama.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

docid=2010-071400-3123-99. 71In 2017, the global shipping giant Maersk: Iain Thomson (28 Jun 2017), “Everything you need to know about the Petya, er, NotPetya nasty trashing PCs worldwide,” Register, https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/28/petya_notpetya_ransomware. Josh Fruhlinger (17 Oct 2017), “Petya ransomware and NotPetya: What you need to know now,” CSO, https://www.csoonline.com/article/3233210/ransomware/petya-ransomware-and-notpetya-malware-what-you-need-to-know-now.html. Nicholas Weaver (28 Jun 2017), “Thoughts on the NotPetya ransomware attack,” Lawfare, https://lawfareblog.com/thoughts-notpetya-ransomware-attack. Ellen Nakashima (12 Jan 2018), “Russian military was behind ‘Notpetya’ cyberattack in Ukraine, CIA concludes,” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-military-was-behind-notpetya-cyberattack-in-ukraine-cia-concludes/2018/01/12/048d8506-f7ca-11e7-b34a-b85626af34ef_story.html. 71when Iran attacked the Saudi: Nicole Perlroth (23 Oct 2012), “In cyberattack on Saudi firm, U.S. sees Iran firing back,” New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/24/business/global/cyberattack-on-saudi-oil-firm-disquiets-us.html. 71when North Korea used WannaCry: David E.

journalCode=isec. 73“I think both China and the United States”: Gideon Rachman (5 Jan 2017), “Axis of power,” New World, BBC Radio 4, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b086tfbh. 73“We have better cyber rocks to throw”: This quote is attributed to several people, but this is the earliest citation I could find: Fred Kaplan (12 Dec 2016), “How the U.S. could respond to Russia’s hacking,” Slate, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2016/12/the_u_s_response_to_russia_s_hacking_has_consequences_for_the_future_of.html. 74In early 2018, the Indiana hospital Hancock Health: Charlie Osborne (17 Jan 2018), “US hospital pays $55,000 to hackers after ransomware attack,” ZDNet, http://www.zdnet.com/article/us-hospital-pays-55000-to-ransomware-operators. 74Ransomware is increasingly common: Brian Krebs (16 Sep 2016), “Ransomware getting more targeted, expensive,” Krebs on Security, https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/ransomware-getting-more-targeted-expensive. 74Kaspersky Lab reported: Kaspersky Lab (28 Nov 2016), “Story of the year: The ransomware revolution,” Kaspersky Security Bulletin 2016, https://media.kaspersky.com/en/business-security/kaspersky-story-of-the-year-ransomware-revolution.pdf. 74Symantec found that average ransom amounts: Symantec Corporation (19 Jul 2016), “Ransomware and businesses 2016,” https://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/security_response/whitepapers/ISTR2016_Ransomware_and_Businesses.pdf.

Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/is-your-refrigerator-really-part-of-a-massive-spam-sending-botnet. 76Attackers have bricked IoT devices: Pierluigi Paganini (12 Apr 2017), “The rise of the IoT botnet: Beyond the Mirai bot,” InfoSec Institute, http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/rise-iot-botnet-beyond-mirai-bot. 76Dick Cheney’s heart defibrillator: Dana Ford (24 Aug 2013), “Cheney’s defibrillator was modified to prevent hacking,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/20/us/dick-cheney-gupta-interview/index.html. 76In 2017, a man sent a tweet: David Kravets (17 Mar 2017), “Man accused of sending a seizure-inducing tweet charged with cyberstalking,” Ars Technica, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/man-arrested-for-allegedly-sending-newsweek-writer-a-seizure-inducing-tweet. 77Also in 2017, WikiLeaks published information: Steve Overly (8 Mar 2017), “What we know about car hacking, the CIA and those WikiLeaks claims,” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/03/08/what-we-know-about-car-hacking-the-cia-and-those-wikileaks-claims. 77Hackers have demonstrated ransomware: Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai (7 Aug 2016), “Hackers make the first-ever ransomware for smart thermostats,” Vice Motherboard, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/aekj9j/Internet-of-things-ransomware-smart-thermostat. 77In 2017, an Austrian hotel: David Z. Morris (29 Jan 2017), “Hackers hijack hotel’s smart locks, demand ransom,” Fortune, http://fortune.com/2017/01/29/hackers-hijack-hotels-smart-locks. 77In 2017, the NotPetya ransomware: Russell Brandom (12 May 2017), “UK hospitals hit with massive ransomware attack,” Verge, https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/12/15630354/nhs-hospitals-ransomware-hack-wannacry-bitcoin.


pages: 363 words: 105,039

Sandworm: A New Era of Cyberwar and the Hunt for the Kremlin's Most Dangerous Hackers by Andy Greenberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, air gap, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, Citizen Lab, clean water, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, false flag, global supply chain, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, machine readable, Mikhail Gorbachev, no-fly zone, open borders, pirate software, pre–internet, profit motive, ransomware, RFID, speech recognition, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, tech worker, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

Hutchins reacted in a way that perhaps no one ever before in history has reacted to seeing his computer paralyzed with ransomware: He leaped up from his chair and jumped around his bedroom, overtaken with joy. * * * ■ The goal of WannaCry’s creators remains a mystery. Were they seeking to make as much money as possible from their supercharged ransomware scheme? Or merely to inflict maximal global chaos? Either way, building a kill switch into their malware seemed like a strangely sloppy act of self-sabotage.*1 The WannaCry programmers had been careless in other ways, too. The payment mechanism built into their code was, effectively, useless: Unlike better-designed ransomware, WannaCry had no automated system for distributing decryption keys to victims who had paid, or even keeping track of who had paid and who hadn’t.

Researchers at Kaspersky noted that the new malware’s code somewhat resembled a piece of criminal ransomware called Petya that had been circulating since early 2016. Like that older ransomware, when this specimen infected a new machine, it immediately set about encrypting the computer’s so-called master file table—the part of a computer’s operating system that keeps track of the location of data in storage. It also encrypted every file on the machine individually; the effect was like a vandal who first puts a library’s card catalog through a shredder, then moves on to methodically pulp its books, stack by stack. But the new ransomware was distinguished from that earlier criminal code by crucial modifications—hence its name.

Researchers were calling the new ransomware WannaCry: Jakub Křoustek, “WannaCry Ransomware That Infected Telefonica and NHS Hospitals Is Spreading Aggressively, with over 50,000 Attacks So Far Today,” Avast (blog), May 12, 2017, blog.avast.com, archived at bit.ly/2FXxbRz. Thousands of people had their doctors’: Amyas Morse, “Investigation: WannaCry Cyber Attack and the NHS,” U.K. National Audit Office, Oct. 24, 2017, www.nao.org.uk. The Spanish telecommunications firm: Agamoni Ghosh and India Ashok, “WannaCry: List of Major Companies and Networks Hit by Ransomware Around the Globe,” International Business Times, May 16, 2017, www.ibtimes.co.uk.


pages: 443 words: 116,832

The Hacker and the State: Cyber Attacks and the New Normal of Geopolitics by Ben Buchanan

active measures, air gap, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, kremlinology, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Nate Silver, operational security, post-truth, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, technoutopianism, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, zero day

In effect, by registering the domain name, Hutchins had activated a secret and likely unintentional kill switch that stopped the worm’s spread.28 As a result, the North Koreans’ first major ransomware experiment—from premature spread to ignominious end—inflicted at least $4 billion in damages but ultimately brought in only a pittance for the regime.29 This initial failure did not keep the North Koreans down for long or deter them from using ransomware in the future. By October 2017, they were ready to try again. This time, their plan was different: they would deploy ransomware not to get money directly, but instead as cover for an operation like the one they performed in Bangladesh.

For a good technical analysis of NotPetya, see Anton Cherepanov, “Analysis of TeleBots’ Cunning Backdoor,” ESET, July 4, 2017; David Maynor, Aleksandar Nikolic, Matt Olney, and Yves Younan, “The MeDoc Connection,” Threatsource [Cisco Talos newsletter], July 5, 2017; Microsoft Defender ATP Research Team, “New Ransomware, Old Techniques: Petya Adds Worm Capabilities,” Microsoft Security blog, June 27, 2017; Karan Sood and Shaun Hurley, “NotPetya Technical Analysis—A Triple Threat: File Encryption, MFT Encryption, Credential Theft,” CrowdStrike, June 29, 2017; Symantic Security Response, “Petya Ransomware Outbreak: Here’s What You Need to Know,” Symantec blog, October 24, 2017. 9. It did not launch this attack if antivirus from Symantec, Norton, or Kaspersky was present. Microsoft Defender ATP Research Team, “New Ransomware, Old Techniques: Petya Adds Worm Capabilities,” 8–9. 10.

While traditionally spies would have sought to copy the data stored within big organizations, like many modern profit-motivated criminals, the North Koreans were not after secrets. They instead deployed a technique known as ransomware, in which hackers encrypt the hard drive of their target computer and delete any backups. The decryption key remains unknown to the target. If the target does not have a surviving backup of the data, the only way to recover the information is to pay the hackers a ransom in return for the decryption key. Given the value of the data, institutions are often willing to do this. In February of 2017, North Korean hackers started testing the early stages of their new ransomware. They infected a single organization, still unknown, in which the code spread quickly to around a hundred computers.


pages: 409 words: 112,055

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

Although Bitcoin was supposed to be a safe way of doing business because it involved a publicly viewable blockchain record, it has actually turned out to be easy to use it to hide money flows. Bitcoin is the coin of the realm when it comes to ransomware, allegedly very difficult to trace. Faramarz Savandi and Mohammad Mansouri knew how to do it. The two Iranians wrote their own version of ransomware software and it became known as the SamSam kit. The two men hit about two hundred networks in the United States over two years and collected more than $6 million in Bitcoin. The damage that their ransomware did to networks was estimated at $30 million. Among their victims were numerous hospitals and medical facilities (MedStar Georgetown, Kansas Heart Hospital, Hollywood Presbyterian, LabCorps), and city governments and agencies (Atlanta, Newark, the Port of San Diego).

Andy Ozment, a former White House and Homeland Security official, has provocatively proposed that ransomware may be one of the more useful regulatory mechanisms we’ve got, essentially imposing fines on companies that have not invested in basic cybersecurity. It is a compelling argument, but we think it is time to remove the incentive for cyber criminals to use ransomware by having a government law or regulation that bans paying the ransom or institutes a fine in addition to whatever ransom is paid. Ransomware is funneling billions of dollars to the underground economy. As DEF CON cofounder Jeff Moss has pointed out, even if most of those billions of dollars go to buying Maseratis and leather jackets in Moscow suburbs, the remaining millions are going to buying more and better capabilities, expanding teams, and attracting more criminal groups to the business.

If a hacker’s goal is to steal information, hold a company’s data hostage for payment (ransomware), permanently delete all the software from the devices on a network (wiper), or flood a network to the point where it cannot operate (a distributed denial-of-service attack, or DDoS), the cost of such an attack against a poorly defended network is shockingly low. Indeed, there are websites on the so-called dark web where hackers sell those attack tools. Remote access tools (RATs) can sell for as little as five hundred dollars. A kit to engage in ransomware could be available for a thousand dollars. These tools will likely not get you into the network of Bank of America or Citibank, but most networks are less well defended than they are.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

What if WannaCry’s designers wanted to ensure that they could turn off the malware before Monday morning, so they could avoid causing too much disruption in China or North Korea itself? Finally, there was something fishy about the ransomware message and approach used by WannaCry. As our security experts noted, North Korea had used ransomware before, but their tradecraft had been different. They had selected high-value targets such as banks and demanded large sums of money in a discreet way. Indiscriminate demands to pay three hundred dollars to unlock a machine represented a departure, to say the least. What if the whole ransomware approach was just a cover to throw the press and public off the real message, which was intended to be more discreetly understood by US and allied officials?

Back to note reference 2. Kim Zetter, “Sony Got Hacked Hard: What We Know and Don’t Know So Far,” Wired, December 3, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/12/sony-hack-what-we-know/. Back to note reference 3. Bill Chappell, “WannaCry Ransomware: What We Know Monday,” NPR, May 15, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/15/528451534/wannacry-ransomware-what-we-know-monday. Back to note reference 4. Nicole Perlroth and David E. Sanger, “Hackers Hit Dozens of Countries Exploiting Stolen N.S.A. Tool,” New York Times, May 12, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/12/world/europe/uk-national-health-service-cyberattack.html.

Broad, “North Korean Missile Launch Fails, and a Show of Strength Fizzles,” New York Times, April 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/15/world/asia/north-korea-missiles-pyongyang-kim-jong-un.html. Back to note reference 9. Lily Hay Newman, “How an Accidental ‘Kill Switch’ Slowed Friday’s Massive Ransomware Attack,” Wired, May 13, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/05/accidental-kill-switch-slowed-fridays-massive-ransomware-attack/. Back to note reference 10. Andy Greenberg, “The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History,” Wired, August 22, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/.


pages: 434 words: 77,974

Mastering Blockchain: Unlocking the Power of Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts by Lorne Lantz, Daniel Cawrey

air gap, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, call centre, capital controls, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, currency peg, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, global reserve currency, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Kubernetes, litecoin, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, margin call, MITM: man-in-the-middle, multilevel marketing, Network effects, offshore financial centre, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, Steve Wozniak, tulip mania, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vitalik Buterin, web application, WebSocket, WikiLeaks

After changing Coburn’s DNS settings and putting up a clone EtherDelta site, the hackers were able to steal at least $800,000 worth of cryptocurrency from one user. CryptoLocker and Ransomware CryptoLocker was an early and well-known variant of what is known as ransomware. Launched in 2013, this attack targeted Windows computers and spread via email attachments. It contained a Trojan virus that would lock up the user’s files using cryptography. In order to release the files, CryptoLocker demanded payment via vouchers or bitcoin. It infected over 250,000 computers and demanded an average payout of $300. Tracing Bitcoin addresses shows that CryptoLocker has been able to obtain millions from locked-out users. Ransomware has spread and proliferated since.

Byzantine agreement, Other Concepts for Consensus Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement, RippleHotStuff algorithm, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains C Cardano, Blockchains to Watch Casper algorithm (proof-of-stake), Ethereum Scaling CCXT (CryptoCurrency eXchange Trading Library), Open Source Trading Tech cell phone porting attacks, Security Fundamentals central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), Central Bank Digital Currencies centralizationcaused by proof-of-work consensus on Bitcoin, Ripple and Stellar decentralization versus, Decentralization Versus Centralization distributed versus centralized versus decentralized systems, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralized-Bitcoin Predecessors Libra's centralization challenge, Novi centralized exchanges, Decentralized Exchange Contracts, The Role of Exchanges, Jurisdictiondecentralized exchanges versus, Decentralized Versus Centralized Exchanges-Scalabilitycustody and counterparty risk, Custody and counterparty risk exchange rate, Exchange rate infrastructure, Infrastructure Know Your Customer (KYC) rules, Know your customer scalability, Scalability token listing, Token listing infrastructure differences from decentralized exchanges, Decentralized Exchange Contracts CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission), FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation Chainalysis, Analytics channels (Lightning), Lightning Chaum, David, DigiCash Chia, Alternative methods Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), partnership with Royal Mint, The Royal Mint China, central bank cryptocurrency, China Coburn, Zachary, Skirting the Laws Coin ATM Radar website, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin Coinbase, Wallet Types: Custodial Versus Noncustodial, Custody Coinbase Pro, ExchangesAPI example, BTC/USD ticker call, Exchange APIs and Trading Bots arbitrage trading on, Arbitrage Trading-Float Configuration 3 custody solutions, robust, Counterparty Risk example order book, Slippage coinbase transaction, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks, The Coinbase TransactionBitcoin Genesis block, Achieving Consensus Coincheck, Coincheck CoinDesk, Information coins, DigiCash Coinye, More Altcoin Experiments cold storage wallets, Counterparty Risk cold wallets, Wallet Type Variations collisions, cryptographic hashes and, Hashes colored coins, NXT, Colored Coins and Tokens Commodity Exchange Act (CEA), Wash Trading Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation conferences on blockchain industry, Information confidential assets, Liquid confirmations, Confirmations confirmed transactions, Transactionsconfirmed by miner, Transaction life cycle confirmed by network on Bitcoin, Transaction life cycle consensus, Consensus-Alternative methodsAvalanche mechanism, Avalanche in Bitcoin network, Compelling Components-Generating transactions Corda, Corda consensus in decentralized systems, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralized Libra mechanism for, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains, How the Libra Protocol Works other concepts for, Other Concepts for Consensus proof-of-stake, Proof-of-Stake-Proof-of-Stake proof-of-work, Proof-of-Work-Confirmationsblock discovery, Block discovery confirmations by miners of block to include in blockchain, Confirmations mining process on Bitcoin, The mining process transaction life cycle, Transaction life cycle SCP protocol, Stellar XRP Consensus Protocol, Ripple ConsenSys, ConsenSysTruffle Suite tools for smart contracts, Authoring a smart contract contentious hard forks, Understanding Forks-Replay attacksreplay attacks vulnerability, Replay attacks Corda, Corda-Corda languageconsensus, Corda consensus how it works, How Corda works ledger, Corda ledger network, The Corda network programming language, Corda language Counterparty blockchain, Counterparty counterparty risk, Counterparty Riskon centralized versus decentralized exchanges, Custody and counterparty risk reduced, on decentralized exchanges, Decentralized Exchange Contracts cross-shard communication complexity, Other Altchain Solutions crypto laundering, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering-The Evolution of Crypto Launderinghow funds are laundered, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering cryptocurrencies, Cryptocurrency Fundamentals-Summaryadditional, Mastercoin introducing notion of, Mastercoin and Smart Contracts backing DAI multi-collateral token, DAI and blockchain, leading to new platforms for the web, Web 3.0 blockchain systems and unit of account, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks consensus, Consensus-Alternative methodsother concepts for, Other Concepts for Consensus proof-of-stake, Proof-of-Stake-Proof-of-Stake proof-of-work, Proof-of-Work-Confirmations cryptographic hashes, Hashes-Custody: Who Holds the Keys custody, Custody: Who Holds the Keys-Security Fundamentals ICOs or fundraising for projects, Use Cases: ICOs illegal uses of, Catch Me If You Can methods of buying and selling, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin mining, Mining-Block Generation privacy-focused, Privacy-Focused Cryptocurrencies public and private keys in systems, Public and Private Keys in Cryptocurrency Systems-Public and Private Keys in Cryptocurrency Systems regulatory bodies in the US, FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation security, Security Fundamentals-Recovery Seed stablecoins based on, Crypto-Based Stablecoins-Tether stakeholders in ecosystem, Stakeholders-Informationanalytics services, Analytics brokerages, Brokerages custody solutions, Custody exchanges, Exchanges information services, Information theft from ownersexchange hacks, Exchange Hacks-NiceHash other hacks, Other Hacks-Summary transactions in, Transactions-Bitcoin Transaction Security UTXO model for Bitcoin transactions, The UTXO Model-The UTXO Model cryptocurrency ATMs, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin CryptoCurrency eXchange Trading Library (CCXT), Open Source Trading Tech cryptographyBitcoin's use on transactions, Introducing the Timestamp Server cryptographic hashes, Hashes-Custody: Who Holds the Keys ECDSA encryption, signing and verifying transactions, Signing and Validating Transactions enabling proof-of-work on Hashcash, Hashcash public/private key, Bitcoin's use of, Public/private key cryptography-Generating keys use by DigiCash, DigiCash CryptoKitties, ERC-721-ERC-777causing scaling problems on Ethereum, Challenges in Developing Dapps digital cats as nonfungible tokens, Fungible and Nonfungible Tokens CryptoLocker and ransomware, CryptoLocker and Ransomware CryptoNote protocol, Monero currencies, exchanges for, Exchanges(see also exchanges) custodial wallets, Wallet Types: Custodial Versus Noncustodial(see also wallets) custody, Custody: Who Holds the Keys-Security Fundamentalscounterparty risk with exchanges, Counterparty Risk, Custody and counterparty risk crypto custody solutions, Custody custody providers, Counterparty Risk cyberbucks, DigiCash D DAGs (directed acyclic graphs), DAGs DAI stablecoin, DAIsavings rates for, Savings Dai, Wei, B-Money DAML, DAML DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations), Decentralized Autonomous Organizations-Other Ethereum forks, Important DefinitionsThe DAO project on Ethereum, Initial Coin Offerings dapps (see decentralized applications) Dash, Dash database management systems (DBMSs), Databases and Ledgers databasesbackend/database differences between centralized exchanges and Uniswap, Infrastructure and ledgers, Databases and Ledgers decentralizationversus centralization, Decentralization Versus Centralization decentralizing the web, Web 3.0 distributed versus centralized versus decentralized systems, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralized-Bitcoin Predecessors decentralized applications (dapps), Ether and Gas, Decentralized Applications (Dapps)-Challenges in Developing Dappsbuilding decentralized web frameworks, Web 3.0 challenges in developing, Challenges in Developing Dapps Corda, Corda language running on top of a blockchain, Deploying and Executing Smart Contracts in Ethereum use cases, Use Cases decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), Decentralized Autonomous Organizations-Other Ethereum forks, Important DefinitionsThe DAO project on Ethereum, Initial Coin Offerings decentralized exchange contracts, Decentralized Exchange Contracts-Summary decentralized exchanges, The Role of Exchanges, Decentralized Exchanges-Scalabilityversus centralized exchanges, Decentralized Versus Centralized Exchanges-Scalabilitycustody and counterparty risk, Custody and counterparty risk exchange rate, Exchange rate infrastructure, Infrastructure Know Your Customer (KYC) rules, Know your customer scalability, Scalability token listing, Token listing decentralized finance (DeFi), Decentralizing Finance and the Web-Derivativesflash loans, Flash Loans-The Fulcrum Exploitcreating the flash loan smart contract, Creating a Flash Loan Contract-Deploying the Contract deploying the contract, Deploying the Contract executing a loan, Executing a Flash Loan-Executing a Flash Loan Fulcrum attack, The Fulcrum Exploit important definitions, Important Definitions privacy and information security, Privacy-Ring Signaturesring signatures, Ring Signatures Zcash, Zcash zero-knowledge proof, Zero-Knowledge Proof zk-SNARKs, zk-SNARKs redistribution of trust, Redistribution of Trust-Naming Servicesidentity and dangers of hacking, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking naming services, Naming Services services, DeFi Services-Derivativesderivatives, Derivatives lending, Lending savings, Savings stablecoins, Stablecoins-KYC and pseudonymity traditional versus decentralized financial system, Decentralizing Finance DeFI Pulse website, DeFi Services delegated proof-of-stake, Alternative methods deposit contracts, Ethereum Scaling depth charts, Depth Chartssell wall on, Whales derivatives, Derivativesin decentralized finance, Derivatives derivatives exchanges, The Role of Exchanges desktop wallets, Wallet Type Variations DEXes (see decentralized exchanges; exchanges) dictionary attacks on passwords, Zero-Knowledge Proof difficulty of discovering valid block hash, Block discovery DigiCash, DigiCash digital bonds, Banking digital money, Bitcoin Predecessors(see also cryptocurrencies) creation of, in B-Money, B-Money use of hashing to limit double spend, Hashcash digital signaturesmultisignature system, Hash Time Locked Contracts, Lightning Schnorr algorithm, Privacy signing transactions, Signing and Validating Transactions Digix, Digix directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), DAGs disintermediation, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking distributed ledger technology (DLT), Databases and Ledgers distributed systems, Decentralized Applications (Dapps)Bitcoin, Compelling Components distributed versus centralized versus decentralized systems, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralized-Bitcoin Predecessors Dogecoin, More Altcoin Experiments Domain Name System (DNS), decentralized version of, Altcoins dot-com crash, Tulip Mania or the internet?

Gox-Bitfinex multisignature wallet contracts, Multisignature Contracts-Multisignature Contracts N Namecoin, Altcoins naming services, Naming Services network hash rate, Block discovery networkscentralized versus decentralized versus distributed design, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralized Corda, The Corda networknodes having visibility into transactions, Corda ledger DAG design, DAGs Libra's centralization challenge, Novi transactions confirmed by network on Bitcoin, Transaction life cycle New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation NiceHash, NiceHash Nightfall blockchain, Nightfall nodes, Distributed Versus Centralized Versus Decentralizedin Avalance consensus mechanism, Avalanche Libra, validator and full nodes, How the Libra Protocol Works Lightning, Lightning nodes and wallets in proof-of-stake networks, Proof-of-Stake nonces, The mining processin block discovery on Bitcoin, The mining process running out of nonce space or overflow, The mining process in Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, The Whitepaper noncustodial wallets, Wallet Types: Custodial Versus Noncustodial(see also wallets) nonfungible tokens, Fungible and Nonfungible TokensERC-721 standard for, ERC-721 Nothing-at-Stake problem, Proof-of-Stake Novi wallet, Novi NuBits, NuBits NXT blockchain, NXT O oligarchical model dominating the web, Web 3.0 Omni Core, Understanding Omni Layerlimitations of, Deploying and Executing Smart Contracts in Ethereum Omni Layer, Understanding Omni Layer-Adding custom logicadding custom logical operations to Bitcoin, Adding custom logic-Adding custom logic how it works, How Omni Layer works limitations of, Deploying and Executing Smart Contracts in Ethereum technical stack, overview of, Understanding Omni Layer Tether project built on, Tether opcodes, Gas and Pricing Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model, The More Things Change operating system platform (EOS), Blockchains to Watch operators, ERC-777, ERC-1155 Optimistic Rollups, Other Altchain Solutions, Lightning nodes and wallets options, Derivatives OP_RETURN field, Adding custom logictranslation of metadata in, Adding custom logic Oracle, Blockchain Platform, Blockchain as a Service oracles, Important Definitionsmanipulation in Fulcrum attack, The Fulcrum Exploit order books, Order Booksthin, slippages and, Slippage over-the-counter (OTC) market, Slippage P paper wallets, Wallet Type Variations Parity, Parity Parity hack (2017), Parity participants, Participants passwordssecurity vulnerabilities, Zero-Knowledge Proof Thinbus Secure Remote Password protocol, Zero-Knowledge Proof pay-to-play, Tools for fundamental analysis payment channels, Lightningnode dropping or losing connection to, Lightning nodes and wallets opening by sending funding transaction, Funding transactions withdrawing funds from, Off-chain transactions payment systemsLibra, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains permissioned ledger uses of blockchain, Payments physical cash versus digital, Electronic Systems and Trust Permacoin, Alternative methods permissioned ledger uses of blockchain, Permissioned Ledger Uses-Paymentsbanking, Banking central bank digital currencies, Central Bank Digital Currencies gaming, Gaming health care, Health Care Internet of Things, Internet of Things IT systems, IT payments systems, Payments permissioned ledgers, Databases and Ledgers permissionless ledgers, Databases and Ledgers person-to-person trading of cryptocurrency, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin phishing attacks, Security Fundamentals Plasma implementation of sidechains, Other Altchain Solutions Ponzi schemes in cryptocurrency, Skirting the Laws PotCoin, More Altcoin Experiments precompilation of zk-SNARKs, zk-SNARKs preminingissues with, Litecoin premined altcoin, Ixcoin, Altcoins prices (gas), Gas and Pricing Primecoin, Altcoins privacyand censorship resistance with dapps, Use Cases Ethereum-based privacy implementations, Ethereum-Based Privacy Implementations future developments in blockchains, Privacy information security in decentralizing finance and the web, Privacy-Ring Signaturesring signatures, Ring Signatures Zcash, Zcash zero-knowledge proof, Zero-Knowledge Proof zk-SNARKs, zk-SNARKs insufficient anonymity on Bitcoin, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering paired with scalability, Mimblewimble blockchain protocol, Mimblewimble, Beam, and Grin privacy-focused blockchains, PrivacyMonero, Blockchains to Watch-How Monero Works Zcash, Zcash privacy-focused cryptocurrencies, Privacy-Focused CryptocurrenciesDash, Dash Monero, Monero Zcash, Zcash private blockchain networks, Privacy private blockchains, The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance private keys, Public/private key cryptography(see also public/private key cryptography) products/services, buying or selling, Evolution of the Price of Bitcoin proof-of-history, Alternative methods proof-of-stake, Proof-of-Stake-Proof-of-StakeByzantine fault-tolerant algorithm, HotStuff, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains Casper algorithm in Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum Scaling proof-of-stake velocity, More Altcoin Experiments proof-of-storage, Alternative methods proof-of-work, Block Generation, Proof-of-Work-Confirmationsbit gold's client puzzle function type, Bit Gold block discovery, Block discovery confirmations by miners of blocks to include in blockchain, Confirmations criticisms of, Proof-of-Stake, Ripple and Stellar CryptoNote protocol, Monero Ethereum's Ethash protocol, Ethereum: Taking Mastercoin to the Next Level longest chain rule, The mining process mining process for block discovery on Bitcoin, The mining process mining process on Bitcoin, The mining process in Satoshi Nakamoto's whitepaper, The Whitepaper transaction life cycle, Transaction life cycle use by B-Money, B-Money use by Hashcash, Hashcash X11 ASIC-resistant, Dash protocols, Electronic Systems and Trust pseudonimity, KYC rules and, KYC and pseudonymity public keys, Public/private key cryptography(see also public/private key cryptography) public/private key cryptographyBitcoin's use of, Public/private key cryptography examples of public and private keys, Naming Services generating keys, Generating keys private key storage for digital wallets, Authoring a smart contract private keys for wallets, Private Keys public and private keys in cryptocurrency systems, Public and Private Keys in Cryptocurrency Systems-Public and Private Keys in Cryptocurrency Systems unauthorized access to private key, Bitcoin Transaction Security use in controlling access to personal information, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking pull transactions, Bitcoin Transaction Security, ERC-777 push transactions, Bitcoin Transaction Security, ERC-777 Q Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB), Blockchain as a Service Quorum blockchain, Quorum, JPMorgan R ransomware, CryptoLocker and, CryptoLocker and Ransomware rate limiting, Exchange Risk, Rate Limiting real estate transactions, using tokens on a blockchain, Tokens on the Ethereum Platform recovery seed, Recovery Seed recursive call vulnerability, Forking Ethereum and the creation of Ethereum Classic regulationof cryptocurrency exchanges, Jurisdiction FATF and the Travel Rule, The FATF and the Travel Rule FinCEN guidance and beginnings of, FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation-FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation regulatory challenges in cryptocurrency market, Regulatory Challenges-Basic Mistakes regulatory issues with ICOs, Tokenize Everything regulatory arbitrage, Avoiding Scrutiny: Regulatory Arbitrage-Crypto-Based StablecoinsICOs as example of, Initial Coin Offerings relational databases, Databases and Ledgers replay attacks, Replay attacksprotecting against, on Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, The Ethereum Classic Fork replication systems, Databases and Ledgers REST APIsEthereum network, Interacting with Code WebSocket versus, REST Versus WebSocket ring confidential transactions, Blockchains to Watch, How Monero Works ring signatures, Monero, Ring Signatures, Blockchains to Watchhiding public address of sender on Monero, How Monero Works Ripple, Other Concepts for Consensus, Rippleblock times, Float Configuration 2 Robinhood mobile app, Brokerages Rollups, Zero Knowledge (ZK) and Optimistic, Other Altchain Solutions, Lightning nodes and wallets Royal Mint, The Royal Mint S Santander, blockchain-issued bonds, Banking SAP, Blockchain as a Service, Blockchain as a Service satoshi, Gas and Pricing Satoshi Nakamotobitcoin address related to, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering efforts to establish identity of, Storing Data in a Chain of Blocks identity, guesses at, Bahamas Satoshi's Vision group (Bitcoin SV), The Bitcoin Cash Fork whitepaper, The Whitepaper savings services (DeFi), Savings scalabilitycentralized versus decentralized exchanges, Scalability discontent over Bitcoin network's scaling, The Bitcoin Cash Fork EOS solution to blockchain issues, Tokenize Everything privacy paired with, Mimblewimble blockchain potocol, Mimblewimble, Beam, and Grin Scalable Transparent ARguments of Knowledge (STARKs), STARKs scaling blockchains, Scaling Blockchains-Other Altchain Solutions, The Scaling Problem-Ethereum ScalingAvalanche consensus mechanism, Avalanche DAG network design, DAGs Ethereum, Ethereum Scaling-Ethereum Scaling Lightning solution, Lightning, Lightning-Lightning nodes and wallets Liquid multisignature wallet, Liquid other altchain solutions, Other Altchain Solutions SegWit, SegWit sharding, Sharding sidechains, Sidechains STARKs, STARKs Schnorr algorithm, Privacy Scott, Mark, Skirting the Laws SCP consensus protocol, Stellar scripted money, Improving Bitcoin’s Limited Functionality Scrypt mining, Altcoins, Litecoin Secret Network, Privacy securitiestokens proposed in ICOs, Different Token Types unregistered securities offerings, Skirting the Laws Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), FinCEN Guidance and the Beginning of Regulation securityBitcoin transaction security, Bitcoin Transaction Security custody infrastructure for exchanges, Counterparty Risk detection of blockchain tampering with Merkle roots, The Merkle Root early vulnerability on Bitcoin, An Early Vulnerability exchanges taking care of private keys, Counterparty Risk flash loans exploiting vulnerabilities in DeFi platforms, The Fulcrum Exploit fundamentals for cryptocurrencies, Security Fundamentals-Recovery Seed identity and dangers of hacking, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking information security in decentralizing finance and the web, Privacy Lightning Network vulnerabilities, Lightning proof-of-stake consensus algorithm, criticisms of, Proof-of-Stake recursive call vulnerability, Forking Ethereum and the creation of Ethereum Classic replay attacks vulnerability, Replay attacks, The Ethereum Classic Fork sharding, vulnerabilities with, Other Altchain Solutions theft of cryptocurrencies in exchange hacks, Exchange Hacks-NiceHash theft of cryptocurrencies in other hacks, Other Hacks-Summary transaction malleability vulnerability, Lightning nodes and wallets security token offerings (STOs), Different Token Types security tokens, Token Economics seeds (recovery), Recovery Seedstorage of, Authoring a smart contract SegWit (Segregated Witness), SegWit, Lightning nodes and wallets self-sovereign identity, Identity and the Dangers of Hacking SHA-256 hash algorithm, Introducing the Timestamp Server, Hashes SHA256 and RIPEMD160 functions, Generating keys shadow market for disinformation, Tools for fundamental analysis sharding, Other Altchain Solutions, Shardingin Ethereum 2.0, Ethereum Scaling Shavers, Trendon, Skirting the Laws Shrem, Charlie, Skirting the Laws sidechains, Other Altchain Solutions, SidechainsLiquid technology and, Liquid Optimistic Rollups and, Lightning nodes and wallets Silk Road, Catch Me If You Cancriminal investigation tracking bitcoin address to operator, The Evolution of Crypto Laundering provision of bitcoin to users without KYC/AML, Skirting the Laws SIM swapping, SIM Swapping-SIM Swapping Singapore, regulatory arbitrage, Singapore single-shard takeover attacks, Other Altchain Solutions slashing algorithms, Proof-of-Stake slippage, Slippage smart contracts, Mastercoin and Smart ContractsDAML language for distributed applications, DAML for decentralized exchanges, Decentralized Exchange Contracts, Custody and counterparty risk deploying and executing in Ethereum, Deploying and Executing Smart Contracts in Ethereum-Interacting with Codeauthoring a smart contract, Authoring a smart contract deployment, Deploying a smart contract-Deploying a smart contract Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), The Ethereum Virtual Machine executing a smart contract, Executing a smart contract gas and pricing, Gas and Pricing interacting with a smart contract, Interacting with a smart contract programmatically interacting with Ethereum, Interacting with Code reading a smart contract, Reading a smart contract writing a smart contract, Writing a smart contract deployment for dapps, Challenges in Developing Dapps EOS platform, Blockchains to Watch ERC-20 compliantevents supported by, ERC-20 example of, ERC-20-ERC-20 methods implemented, ERC-20 ERC-compliant, library of, Decentralized Exchange Contracts flash loanscreating the contract, Creating a Flash Loan Contract-Deploying the Contract deploying the contract, Deploying the Contract manipulation of oracles in Fulcrum attack, The Fulcrum Exploit steps in process, Flash Loans Libra support for, Borrowing from Existing Blockchains Omni Layer providing, Understanding Omni Layer publicly viewable record of method call to Uniswap smart contract, Custody and counterparty risk-Exchange rate sending tokens to via push and pull transactions, ERC-777 third-party auditors of, Fungible and Nonfungible Tokens Uniswap contract viewable on Ethereum, Infrastructure social media, campaigns to influence cryptocurrencies, Tools for fundamental analysis soft forks, Understanding Forks software development, changes from use of cryptcurrency and blockchain, Web 3.0 software forks, Understanding Forks software wallets, Wallets Solidcoin, Altcoins Solidity language, Authoring a smart contract South Korean exchanges, Regulatory Challenges speculation in cryptocurrency, Market Infrastructure, Tulip Mania or the internet?


pages: 247 words: 60,543

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

I am no expert, but I imagine that, among other things, they learned to make sure they had security patches installed on their computers and backups of their data … but I digress. Let us return to the issue of ransoms. This ransomware would not be much good if the attacker could only be paid in cheques or via bank transfers, which is why ransomware and cryptocurrency are a package. These ransomware datanappers are not the only criminal users of this new digital dosh, either. Apparently, the police have seen an ‘explosion in the use of digital currency by criminals who are strolling into cafés, newsagents and corner shops to dump their ill-gotten gains in virtual currency ATMs’ (Camber and Greenwood 2017).

The use of an immutable public ledger to store criminal transactions does not seem like much of a use case to me, but, as the figures show, the underbelly are indeed using it. This was highlighted in the well-publicized ransomware attack on Travelex at the beginning of 2020. This resulted in my bank, Barclays, as well as other high-street banks, including HSBC, Virgin and Tesco Bank, all of which rely on Travelex for their foreign exchange (FX) services, being unable to offer online FX services or process orders for foreign currency for some weeks. Travelex, having left critical security weaknesses unpatched in its Pulse Secure virtual private network (VPN) servers for eight months, was infected with a ransomware virus that encrypted the company’s data. The attackers demanded a $6 million payment in Bitcoin to decrypt it.16 The scale of the damage here may have been unusual, but this type of attack is not.

You can see what is going to happen next: the exchange will be required to identify who owns the stolen coins, and the owner will be the subject of legal action to recover them. This owner might be entirely oblivious as to the origin of the coins, might say they had no idea the Bitcoins they bought were the proceeds of a ransomware attack and might ask to keep them. That, however, is not how property law works. Even if you come to possess stolen property accidentally, a judge can still force you to give it back to the rightful owner. Smart criminals might use mixers and such trickery to obfuscate the origin of Bitcoins and thus confound law enforcement, but the coins and transactions remain on that public ledger, which anyone can look at.


pages: 1,380 words: 190,710

Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems by Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Ana Oprea, Piotr Lewandowski, Adam Stubblefield

air gap, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, bash_history, behavioural economics, business continuity plan, business logic, business process, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, continuous integration, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, database schema, Debian, defense in depth, DevOps, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, fear of failure, general-purpose programming language, Google Chrome, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, information security, Internet of things, Kubernetes, load shedding, margin call, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, NSO Group, nudge theory, operational security, performance metric, pull request, ransomware, reproducible builds, revision control, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, self-driving car, single source of truth, Skype, slashdot, software as a service, source of truth, SQL injection, Stuxnet, the long tail, Turing test, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Valgrind, web application, Y2K, zero day

So that these compromises don’t require manual intervention from a human responder, the security team establishes a mechanism to automatically wipe and replace compromised cloud test instances. In this case, a ransomware worm would also not require much forensics or incident response attention. Although Organization 2 doesn’t prevent the ransomware from executing (as in Organization 1’s case), Organization 2’s automated mitigation tools can contain the risk. Organization 3 has fewer layered defenses and limited visibility into whether its systems are compromised. The organization is at much greater risk of the ransomware spreading across its network and may not be able to respond quickly. In this case, a large number of business-critical systems may be affected if the worm spreads, and the organization will be severely impacted, requiring significant technical resources to rebuild the compromised networks and systems.

Three criminal actors in China had this exact idea in 2014–2015 and made a few million dollars by stealing sensitive information from unsuspecting law firms. In the past 10 years, attackers have also realized that victims will hand over money when their sensitive data is threatened. Ransomware is software that holds a system or its information hostage (usually by encrypting it) until the victim makes a payment to the attacker. Commonly, attackers infect victim machines with this software (which is often packaged and sold to attackers as a toolkit) by exploiting vulnerabilities, by packaging the ransomware with legitimate software, or by tricking the user into installing it themselves. Criminal activity does not always manifest as overt attempts to steal money.

The response to an incident will depend on the type of environment where the incident happened, the state of the organization’s preventative controls, and the sophistication of its response program. Consider how three organizations might respond to the same threat—a ransomware attack: Organization 1 has a mature security process and layered defenses, including a restriction that permits only cryptographically signed and approved software to execute. In this environment, it’s highly unlikely that well-known ransomware can infect a machine or spread throughout the network. If it does, the detection system raises an alert, and someone investigates. Because of the mature processes and layered defenses, a single engineer can handle the issue: they can check to make sure no suspicious activity has occurred beyond the attempted malware execution, and resolve the issue using a standard process.


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Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

Selena Larson, “The Hacks That Left Us Exposed in 2017,” CNN Tech, December 20, 2017, www.money.cnn.com/2017/12/18/technology/biggest-cyberattacks-of-the-year/index.html. 33. Patrick Howell O’Neill, “NotPetya Ransomware Cost Merck More Than $310 Million,” Cyberscoop, October 27, 2017, www.cyberscoop.com/notpetya-ransomware-cost-merck-310-million/. 34. Warwick Ashford, “NotPetya Attack Cost up to £15m, Says UK Ad Agency WPP,” ComputerWeekly.com, September 25, 2017, www.computerweekly.com/news/450426854/NotPetya-attack-cost-up-to-15m-says-UK-ad-agency-WPP. 35. Charlie Osborne, “NotPetya Ransomware Forced Maersk to Reinstall 4000 Servers, 45000 PCs,” ZDNet.com, January 26, 2018, www.zdnet.com/article/maersk-forced-to-reinstall-4000-servers-45000-pcs-due-to-notpetya-attack/. 36.

In October 2013, Slavik’s group began deploying malware known as CryptoLocker, a form of ransomware that encrypted the files on an infected machine and forced its owner to pay a small fee, say $300 to $500, to unlock the files. It quickly became a favorite tool of the cybercrime ring, in part because it helped transform deadweight into profit. The trouble with building a massive botnet focused on high-level financial fraud, it turns out, is that most zombie computers don’t connect to fat corporate accounts; Slavik and his associates found themselves with tens of thousands of mostly idle zombie machines. Though ransomware didn’t yield huge amounts, it afforded the criminals a way to monetize those otherwise worthless infected computers—and the dollar amounts involved were generally low enough that victims either didn’t complain to the police or law enforcement wouldn’t do anything about it.

Though ransomware didn’t yield huge amounts, it afforded the criminals a way to monetize those otherwise worthless infected computers—and the dollar amounts involved were generally low enough that victims either didn’t complain to the police or law enforcement wouldn’t do anything about it. The concept of ransomware had been around since the 1990s, but CryptoLocker took it mainstream. Typically arriving on a victim’s machine under the cover of an unassuming email attachment, the Business Club’s ransomware used strong encryption and forced victims to pay using Bitcoin. It was embarrassing and inconvenient, but many relented. The Swansea, Massachusetts, police department grumpily ponied up $750 to get back one of its computers in November 2013; the virus “is so complicated and successful that you have to buy these Bitcoins, which we had never heard of,” Swansea Police Lieutenant Gregory Ryan told his local newspaper.


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Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door by Brian Krebs

barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, cashless society, defense in depth, Donald Trump, drop ship, employer provided health coverage, independent contractor, information security, John Markoff, mutually assured destruction, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, pirate software, placebo effect, ransomware, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stuxnet, the payments system, transaction costs, web application

But in its place, a far more insidious threat has taken hold: ransomware. Much like scareware, ransomware is most often distributed via hacked or malicious sites that exploit browser vulnerabilities. Typically, these scams impersonate the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI (or the equivalent federal investigative authority in the victim’s country) and try to frighten people into paying fines to avoid prosecution for supposedly downloading child pornography and pirated content. Ransomware locks the victim’s PC until he either pays the ransom or finds a way to remove the malware. Increasingly, ransomware attacks encrypt all of the files on the victim’s PC, holding them for ransom until victims pay up.

Victims are then told to send the attackers the voucher code or card number that allows the bad guys to redeem the information for cash. “I don’t think it’s an accident that we’ve seen ransomware rise as it’s become harder for these partnerka programs to find a continuous supply of banks to help them process cards for scareware payments,” Savage said. “You have a bunch of people who are used to making good money for whom fake antivirus software and scareware have become problematic and for whom pharma is not really an option. There’s a void in the ecosystem where people can make money. It’s not at all an accident that these ransomware schemes essentially are bypassing traditional payment schemes.” The past few years have also witnessed a noticeable change in the ways that botmasters are using the resources at their disposal.

“Much like the Inuit Eskimos made sure to use every piece of the whale, we’re seeing an evolution now where botmasters are carefully mining infected systems and monetizing the data they can find,” Savage said. “The mantra these days seems to be, ‘Why leave any unused resources on the table’?” While some are using ransomware and data harvesting, Savage said, many other former affiliates and managers of failed scareware, pharma, and pirated software partnerkas are casting about for the next big thing. “It’s a period of innovation, and people clearly are looking around for another sweet spot that’s as good as pharma, which made more money more reliably than anything else out there,” he said.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Schwartz, “Malware Toolkits Generate Majority of Online Attacks,” Dark Reading, Jan. 18, 2011. 95 To unlock their computers: David Wismer, “Hand-to-Hand Combat with the Insidious ‘FBI MoneyPak Ransomware Virus,’ ” Forbes, Feb. 6, 2013. 96 Thus users in the U.K.: EnigmaSoftware, “Abu Dhabi Police GHQ Ransomware.” 97 Another, even more pernicious: Mark Ward, “Crooks ‘Seek Ransomware Making Kit,’ ” BBC News, Dec. 10, 2013. 98 Nearly 250,000 individuals: Dave Jeffers, “Crime Pays Very Well: CryptoLocker Grosses up to $30 Million in Ransom,” PCWorld, Dec. 20, 2013. 99 Automated ransomware tools: Dennis Fisher, “Device-Locking Ransomware Moves to Android,” ThreatPost, May 7, 2014. 100 The police lieutenant: Violet Blue, “CryptoLocker’s Crimewave: A Trail of Millions in Laundered Bitcoin,” ZDNet, Dec. 22, 2013; Bree Sison, “Swansea Police Pay Ransom After Computer System Was Hacked,” CBS Boston, Nov. 18, 2013.

Akin to threatening “if you ever want to see your files alive again,” these ransomware programs gladly accept payment in Bitcoin. The message to these victims was no idle threat. Whereas previous ransomware might trick users by temporarily hiding their files, CryptoLocker actually uses strong 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard cryptography to lock user files so that they become irrecoverable. Nearly 250,000 individuals and businesses around the world have suffered at the hands of CryptoLocker, earning an estimated $30 million for its developer. Automated ransomware tools have even migrated to mobile phones, affecting Android handset users in certain countries.

Paying the $49 fee was the only way to regain access to their own computers and data (a deluxe version with unlimited tech support was available for $79). So what exactly was this pioneering software product Innovative Marketing had created? It was called crimeware, a whole new product category within the software industry—software that commits crime. Crimeware, sometimes called scareware, ransomware, or rogue antivirus, is nothing more than a malicious computer program that plays on a user’s fear of virus infection. We’ve all been trained to be on the lookout for antivirus alerts and to run our security software when a problem is detected. Thus it seemed entirely logical that when System Defender’s critical system pop-up message appeared on the screens of users around the world, the best and commonsense course of action was to click on the “remove all threats” button.


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Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Grouping malware with excrement, vomit, bad breath, pus-filled boils, garbage, rotting flesh, rats, roaches, maggots, and bodily disfigurement makes a scary thing even scarier. All that said, I don’t mean to minimize the harm or the risk of hacking. In 2021, Colonial Pipeline, which runs the largest refined oil pipeline system in the United States, was hit by a ransomware attack that led to fuel stoppages for several days and a spike in gasoline prices. Ransomware has also been the scourge of local governments, hospitals, and schools. Indeed, this book is filled with examples of targeted and harmful cyberattacks. This is why cybersecurity professionals are essential to any modern business. Nevertheless, these professionals are often overworked, and many are also underpaid.

Law enforcement can also force exchanges to exclude these actors from their platforms. Indeed, the United States has started to sanction cryptocurrency exchanges for laundering ransomware proceeds. The Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the cryptocurrency exchange SUEX a sanctioned entity. U.S. citizens and financial institutions are generally banned from doing business with sanctioned entities. OFAC also warned U.S. entities that they can be sanctioned if they pay ransomware to sanctioned entities, even if they are unaware that the entities are sanctioned. Liability As Shoshana Zuboff has argued, we live in the age of “surveillance capitalism.”

“greatest threat”: Steve Morgan, “IBM’s CEO on Hackers: ‘Cyber Crime Is the Greatest Threat to Every Company in the World,’” Forbes, November 24, 2015, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevemorgan/2015/11/24/ibms-ceo-on-hackers-cyber-crime-is-the-greatest-threat-to-every-company-in-the-world/?sh=2776a87973f0. ransomware attack on my publisher’s: Carly Page, “US Publisher Macmillan Confirms Cyberattack Forced Systems Offline,” TechCrunch, July 1, 2022, https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/01/publisher-macmillan-ransomware. SolarWinds: Ellen Nakashima and Craig Timberg, “Russian Government Spies Are Behind a Broad Hacking Campaign That Has Breached US Agencies and a Top Cyber Firm,” The Washington Post, December 13, 2020.


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Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

The stakes of cyberattacks can be enormous, as the WannaCry malware of 2017 showed. It was a piece of “ransomware”: Once it infected a computer, it encrypted all the contents so the owner couldn’t read or use them. Then it popped up a neatly designed little text box explaining that “We guarantee that you can recover all your files safely and easily. But you have not so enough time.” The language was cheery, if a bit stilted—possibly the result of a Chinese speaker writing in English, some suspect. And the interface was quite slick. The overall goal of ransomware, these days, is to seem as professional as possible; some even have helplines to assist the victims in figuring out how to acquire Bitcoin, the main currency for paying ransoms.

security experts suspected: “Cyber Attack Hits 200,000 in at Least 150 Countries: Europol,” Reuters, May 14, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-attack-europol/cyber-attack-hits-200000-in-at-least-150-countries-europol-idUSKCN18A0FX; Julia Carrie Wong and Olivia Solon, “Massive Ransomware Cyber-attack Hits Nearly 100 Countries around the World,” Guardian, May 12, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/12/global-cyber-attack-ransomware-nsa-uk-nhs; Thomas P. Bossert, “It’s Official: North Korea Is Behind WannaCry,” Wall Street Journal, December 18, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/its-official-north-korea-is-behind-wannacry-1513642537.

It had an effect, even better than he expected: It stopped WannaCry in its tracks. It turns out the URL worked like a “kill switch.” Once it existed, every copy of WannaCry shut down. “It was all over in a few minutes,” he tells me, marveling at the speed of its crash. Possibly the malware authors had included a kill switch in case they lost control of their spread of the ransomware—“in case shit got too bad,” as Hutchins says dryly. But either way, he had prevented a mammoth amount of damage. He’d shut down WannaCry before much of the US turned on its computers and opened for business, which likely meant billions saved. Pretty soon, Hutchins was a global celebrity, with newspapers feting him as the white-hat hacker who “accidentally” saved the world.


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Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

Nearly 100,000 computer systems fell prey to NotPetya, including systems in both Ukraine and Russia, throughout Europe and North America, and as far away as Australia. WannaCry and NotPetya—indeed, most of the most damaging cyberattacks we’ve seen in the past few years—are both examples of what’s called ransomware, a cunning malware that encrypts digital files and demands a ransom to unlock them. Often the attacker tricks human targets into infecting their own computer systems by enticing them to open an infected attachment or click on a malicious link. Ransomware attacks are so successful that they have grown faster than any other cybercrime in the last five years, rising from an estimated $350 million in damage costs in 2015 to $1 billion in 2016 and $5 billion in 2017.

Ransomware attacks are so successful that they have grown faster than any other cybercrime in the last five years, rising from an estimated $350 million in damage costs in 2015 to $1 billion in 2016 and $5 billion in 2017. We are not stopping the problem. Cybersecurity Ventures, a global cybersecurity researcher, predicts that global ransomware damage costs will exceed $11.5 billion annually by 2019. Successful ransomware attackers target soft targets, those with inferior security and the most to lose if their computer systems are locked away. Small and medium-sized businesses in the health-care, technology, energy, and banking sectors are often primary targets. These attacks can break a company. According to a 2017 IBM and Ponemon Institute study, the average cost of a data breach is $3.62 million.

More than 150 countries desperately fought the attack, but resistance was futile. The malware leapt across borders at the speed of thought, worming its way through businesses and government agencies, wreaking havoc in banks and universities, shutting down airports and bringing hospitals to a standstill. After infecting a Windows computer, the WannaCry ransomware worm encrypted files on the hard drive, making them impossible to access, then demanded a ransom payment in order to decrypt them. WannaCry was so deadly in part because it relied on some of the best hacking tools that exist—tools that were created by the US government. As espionage has evolved, American spy agencies have evolved with it.


pages: 295 words: 84,843

There's a War Going on but No One Can See It by Huib Modderkolk

AltaVista, ASML, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, call centre, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Google Chrome, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine translation, millennium bug, NSO Group, ransomware, Skype, smart meter, speech recognition, Stuxnet, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

His speciality is financial fraud: stealing bank data from computers and using it to empty accounts. One of his first victims was the major Dutch bank ABN Amro. Many thousands of other institutions followed, from a Massachusetts police department to hospitals, as well as hundreds of random individuals whom he extorted online using ransomware. Bogachev isn’t just a crafty hacker, he’s an exceptionally savvy entrepreneur with his own criminal empire, who invests his stolen millions in property here in Anapa. His power and connections have made him an attractive partner for Russian security services, and his knowledge and skills have made him a valuable asset.

The culprit is an unknown virus, later to be christened ‘NotPetya’. Ruthlessly it strikes in France, India, Great Britain, Poland, Germany, damaging systems all over the world. ‘Companies worldwide paralysed,’ headlines Holland’s RTL Nieuws. ‘What is it and how can it be stopped?’ asks the Guardian in Britain. ‘A global ransomware attack,’ opens the Dutch national nightly newscast. On the scene in Rotterdam’s port, a reporter confirms that not a single European country has been spared. ‘Do we know anything yet about where this virus came from?’ the newscaster asks. ‘No,’ answers the reporter, APM’s blue cranes motionless in the background.

Monitors across whole departments went black. One by one, in rapid succession. Workers who saw it happen and frantically ran around unplugging machines were too late. It was that fast. Rebooting was pointless. The computers were locked and unresponsive. The message that popped up on tens of thousands of monitors indicated ransomware. For $300, people’s files would be restored, the attackers said. But as those who transferred the money swiftly discovered, they weren’t. Their computers systems had been shattered. If I wanted to work out what happened in the Port of Rotterdam, I’d have to pin down the origin of the global breakdown first.


pages: 444 words: 117,770

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

Thousands of scheduled procedures, ranging from cancer appointments to elective surgeries, had to be canceled. Panicked care teams reverted to manual stopgaps, using paper notes and personal phones. The Royal London Hospital shuttered its emergency department, with patients left lying on gurneys outside the operating theaters. The NHS had been hit by a ransomware attack. It was called WannaCry, and its scale was immense. Ransomware works by compromising a system to encrypt and thus lock down access to key files and capabilities. Cyberattackers typically demand a ransom in exchange for liberating a captive system. The NHS wasn’t WannaCry’s only target. Exploiting a vulnerability in older Microsoft systems, hackers had found a way to grind swaths of the digital world to a halt, including organizations like Deutsche Bahn, Telefónica, FedEx, Hitachi, even the Chinese Ministry of Public Security.

., “A Retrospective Impact Analysis of the WannaCry Cyberattack on the NHS,” NPJ Digital Medicine, Oct. 2, 2019, www.nature.com/​articles/​s41746-019-0161-6, for more. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT WannaCry tricked some users Mike Azzara, “What Is WannaCry Ransomware and How Does It Work?,” Mimecast, May 5, 2021, www.mimecast.com/​blog/​all-you-need-to-know-about-wannacry-ransomware. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The ensuing damage cost Andy Greenberg, “The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History,” Wired, Aug. 22, 2018, www.wired.com/​story/​notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world.

It is then weaponized, turned against the core fabric of the contemporary state: health services, transport and power infrastructures, essential businesses in global communications and logistics. In other words, thanks to a basic failure of containment, a global superpower became a victim of its own powerful and supposedly secure technology. This is uncontained asymmetry in action. * * * — Luckily, the ransomware attacks described above relied on conventional cyberweapons. Luckily, inasmuch as they did not rely on the features of the coming wave. Their power and potential were limited. The nation-state was scratched and bruised, but it wasn’t fundamentally undermined. Yet it is a matter of when, not if, the next attack will occur, and next time we may not be so lucky.


pages: 305 words: 93,091

The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data by Kevin Mitnick, Mikko Hypponen, Robert Vamosi

4chan, big-box store, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, connected car, crowdsourcing, data science, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, Firefox, Google Chrome, Google Earth, incognito mode, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, off-the-grid, operational security, pattern recognition, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, Tesla Model S, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

In some cases the encrypted files contain personally identifiable information such as Social Security numbers, which may qualify the attack as a data breach and thus incur more costs. Although the key to unlock the files can always be purchased for a flat fee of $500 to $1000, those who are infected typically try other means—such as breaking the encryption themselves—to remove the ransomware. That’s what Simone’s mother tried. When she finally called her daughter, they were almost out of time. Almost everyone who tries to break the ransomware encryption fails. The encryption is really strong and requires more powerful computers and more time to break it than most people have at their disposal. So the victims usually pay. According to Simone, the Dickson County, Tennessee, sheriff’s office paid in November 2014 a Cryptowall ransom to unlock 72,000 autopsy reports, witness statements, crime scene photographs, and other documents.

Throughout the Times piece, Simone reminds readers that they should never pay the ransom—yet she did just that in the end. In fact the FBI now advises people whose computers are infected with ransomware to simply pay up. Joseph Bonavolonta, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s cyber and counterintelligence program in Boston, said, “To be honest, we often advise people just to pay the ransom.” He said not even the FBI is able to crack the ultrasecure encryption used by the ransomware authors, and he added that because so many people have paid the attackers, the $500 cost has remained fairly consistent over the years.17 The FBI later came out to say it’s up to the individual companies to decide whether to pay or contact other security professionals.

What if you did interact with a phisher and as a result lost all the data—all the personal photographs and private documents—on your infected PC or mobile device? That’s what happened to author Alina Simone’s mother. Writing in the New York Times, Simone described what it was like for her mother—who was not technologically inclined—to be up against a sophisticated enemy who was using something called ransomware.15 In 2014 a wave of extortionist malware hit the Internet, targeting individuals and corporations alike. Cryptowall is one example: it encrypts your entire hard drive, locking you out of every file until you pay the attacker to give you the key to unlock your files. Unless you have a full backup, the contents of your traditional PC or Android device will be inaccessible until you pay the ransom.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

But the uses towards which those populations (and all next-generation users, for that matter) are putting digital technologies are sometimes quite surprising, and different than what the original designers intended. Human ingenuity can reveal itself in many unexpected ways. The internet gave us access to libraries and hobby boards, but also gave criminal enterprises low-risk opportunities for new types of global malfeasance, like spam, phishing schemes, and (more recently) ransomware and robocalls. Early in the internet’s history, many assumed the technology would hamstring dictators and despots, and, to be sure, it has created some control issues for them. But it’s also created opportunities for older practices to flourish, such as the way “kompromat” (Russian for “compromising material used for blackmail and extortion”) has taken on new life in post-Soviet social media.

Interdependence runs deep — even closed-off North Korea depends on the internet for illicitly acquired revenues.18 And so most of the offensive action (even among otherwise sworn adversaries) takes place just below the threshold of armed conflict.19 Subversion, psychological operations, extortion (through ransomware), and digitally produced propaganda are where the real action is to be found — less violent, to be sure, but no less destructive of the health of the global communications sphere. The entire ecosystem requires enormous energy to power, and that in turn implicates all of the various components of the global energy grid: power stations, transmission systems, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, coal-fired power plants, and others.

Researchers at the cybersecurity firm IBM X-Force spotted a rash of malware-laden emails sent to Japanese citizens early in the virus’s spread, and warned that more was to come.90 Summing up the neuroses of our collective social media condition, the researchers concluded that “unfortunately, it is quite common for threat actors to exploit basic human emotions such as fear — especially if a global event has already caused terror and panic.” As if on cue, it wasn’t long before health agencies, humanitarian organizations, and hospitals worldwide were blitzed with ransomware, digital espionage attacks, and phishing schemes.91 Exhausted individuals working in the threat intelligence and cyberdefence industries with whom I spoke said the rash of attacks was like nothing they’d ever experienced before. Social media companies responded to the “infodemic” in typically mixed and slightly confused fashion.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

This is a good thing for individual freedom but a bad thing for law enforcement agencies, who find their scope of work increasing all the time – and who are often helpless to respond. The more connected we are, the more vulnerable we are. A Russian can now steal your money without leaving his bunker in Volgograd. If I were so inclined (I’m not) I could turn on my anonymous Tor browser, jump onto the dark net, fire some ransomware into the world, and wait for bitcoin ransom payments from the unsuspecting internet users who had clicked on my malicious link. None of this requires much in the way of skill or know-how.5 And yet successful prosecution for cybercrime is negligible. There’s barely a thing our police can do about Russian hackers.

But they will also be vulnerable, because the security standards for these ‘IoT’ devices are notoriously bad. There have already been high-profile examples of cardiac devices, cars, a baby monitor and home webcams being hacked. This will get very personal. It won’t be long, for example, before your smart coffee machine will be hacked with ransomware – and you are asked to pay a small ransom just to regain access to your morning caffeine. Every day it gets a little simpler to be a cybercriminal. Earlier this year it was reported that there is now easily available code called AutoSploit that automatically searches for vulnerable IoT devices.

(The calculation is actually incorrect: when I asked him, May explained that Cyphernomicon was only a first draft, and that he’d never got round to checking it as carefully as he would have liked.) 4 As explained in Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain by David Gerard (CreateSpace, 2017), Szabo has studied law, and seems to take quite a cautious approach to this issue, unlike others. 5 Kelly Murnane, ‘Ransomware as a Service Being Offered for $39 on the Dark Net’, www.forbes.com, 15 July 2016. 6 See Gerard, Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain for an excellent discussion of this issue. 7 Annie Nova, ‘“Wild west” days are over for cryptocurrencies, as IRS steps up enforcement’, www.cnbc.com, 17 January 2018. 8 ‘A Simple Guide to Safely and Effectively Tumbling (Mixing) Bitcoin’, https://darknetmarkets.org, 10 July 2015.


pages: 394 words: 117,982

The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

active measures, air gap, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, computer age, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, fake news, Google Chrome, Google Earth, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, RAND corporation, ransomware, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, zero day

There were reports that the automatic radiation monitors at the old Chernobyl nuclear plant couldn’t operate because the computers that controlled them went offline. Some Ukrainian broadcasters briefly went off the air; when they came back, they still could not report the news because their computer systems were frozen by what appeared to be a ransomware notice. Ukraine had suffered cyberattacks before. But not like this one. The unfolding offensive seemed targeted at virtually every business in the country, both large and small—from the television stations to the software houses to any mom-and-pop shops that used credit cards. Computer users throughout the country all saw the same broken-English message pop onto their screens.

It can hold large swaths of nation-state infrastructure and private-sector infrastructure at risk. It’s a source of income.” At an earlier time, North Korea counterfeited crude $100 bills to finance the country’s operations. That grew more difficult as the United States made the currency harder and harder to copy. But ransomware, digital bank heists, and hacks of South Korea’s fledgling Bitcoin exchanges all made up for the loss of the counterfeiting business. Today the North may be the first state to use cybercrime to finance its state operations. Bangladesh was hardly the only victim, and not even the first. In 2015 there was an intrusion into the Philippines, then the Tien Phong Bank in Vietnam.

It was a standard piece of the TAO’s toolbox because it exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows servers—an operating system so widely used that it allowed the malware to spread across millions of computer networks. No one had seen anything like it in nearly a decade, since a computer worm called “Conficker” went wild. In this case, the North Korean hackers married the NSA’s tool to a new form of ransomware, which locks computers and makes their data inaccessible—unless the user pays for an electronic key. The attack was spread via a basic phishing email, similar to the one used by Russian hackers in the attacks on the Democratic National Committee and other targets in 2016. It contained an encrypted, compressed file that evaded most virus-detection software.


pages: 326 words: 91,532

The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Leibbrandt, Natasha de Teran

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global pandemic, global reserve currency, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Irish bank strikes, Julian Assange, large denomination, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine readable, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Network effects, Northern Rock, off grid, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-industrial society, printed gun, QR code, RAND corporation, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Rishi Sunak, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, tech billionaire, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, you are the product

Maybe that’s because insufficient assets are available in crypto form; the communities that they could solve for are too small or too disparate to reach; or the problems smart contracts purport to solve aren’t big enough or don’t actually exist. The latter may well be the case for ransomware. The many hospitals hit by ransomware during the Covid-19 outbreak paid up, trusting the crooks. The crooks, perhaps sensitive to the fact that their business model rests on their reputation for responding to ransom payments, reportedly unlocked the systems. In Ethereum the contracts are submitted as code and automatically executed or enforced.

The idea is that these contracts are irrevocable: a party cannot withhold payment once the conditions for payment are fulfilled. An important (potential) application is delivery versus payment for securities. If both money and securities were ‘tokenised’ and transferable through crypto technology, then smart contracts could ensure that the transactions take place only if both tokens are transferred. Ransomware would seem to be an ideal application for these contracts. The crooks encrypt your files and decrypt them only if you transfer the ransom amount in Bitcoin. How do you trust the hackers to actually decrypt your files once you have transferred the money? It would seem quite feasible to put both the Bitcoin payment and the private key needed to decrypt the files in a smart contract so that they are exchanged simultaneously.

Gox 200 N N26 158, 159 National Automated Clearing House Association (NACHA) 119 National Association of Estate Agents 128 National Audit Office, UK 23 National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) 233 near field communication (NFC) controller 223–4, 225 neo-banks 158–9 Netflix 165 Netherlands 32, 58, 67, 99, 172, 179, 234, 260, 266 netting systems, bank 122–3 network effects and payment systems 68–72, 221 New Payments Platform (NPP) 83 New York State Department of Financial Services (NYSDFS) 259 New York’s District Attorney’s Office 259 Nicaraguan rebels 64–5 Noriega, General 64 North Korea 30, 108, 112–14, 141, 249, 250, 262 North, Oliver 64–5, 66 nostro and vostro accounts 141 O Obama, Barack 243, 244 Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), US 249–50, 252, 253, 255, 259 Omni channel 197 one-click shopping 171–2 online payments 50–1, 137–8, 171–2, 174 open banking/Open Banking, UK 86, 180, 182–3, 223 Operation Socialist, GCHQ’s 234 overdrafts 18, 92, 98–9, 183 overspending and frictionless payments 170, 171, 173 P Pakistan 143 Papua New Guinea 8 parity code checks 65–6 Parry, Dorothea and Forrest 47 path dependence 71–2, 78 pattern detection 109–10 payday loan merchants 99 paying to pay 97–101 Payment Accounts Directive, EU 265–6 payment data, use of 178–85 payment initiation service providers (PISP) 181 Payment Services Directive (PSD) 240 Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2) 83, 86, 180–3, 223, 240 payment stripping 259 payment trails/following the money 255–64 PayPal 3–4, 19, 51–2, 70, 144, 161, 163, 175, 178, 202, 204, 206, 216, 269 Penywaun, Wales 3 People’s Bank of China (PBoC) 100, 211 personal identification numbers (PINs) 49, 109 Petrobras 234 Philippines 113 phishing 110, 112 PIN-debit payments 49, 50, 57, 58, 69 Plaid 181 plastic credit cards, first 41 Pockit 37–8 point-of-sale borrowing 174–5 point of sale (POS) terminals 48, 49, 76, 216 Polish central bank 12 Pornhub 4 Portugal 172 pre-paid cards 37–8, 53, 74, 78, 158 Prelec, Drazen 173 price-comparison sites 89 Principia Mathematica (B. Russell) 4 printing money 34 private keys see public-private key encryption Promontory 257 public-private key encryption 16, 189–91, 195, 200, 214, 215 Puerto Rico 36–7 Punjab National Bank (PNB) 115 Q QR codes 75, 76, 84 QuadrigaCX 200 Qualcomm 226, 271 R railway design 68, 71 Ransomware 195 Rato, Rodrigo 262 Reagan, Ronald 65 real-time gross settlement (RTGS) 126–30, 240 Red Cross 150 red envelope tradition, Chinese 76 Red Packet digital gift 77 Reed, John 220 refugees and immigrants 265, 266 regulation authorities, financial 135, 156, 179, 184, 198, 208, 212, 217, 223–4, 225–6, 229, 230–6, 237–42, 265, 267, 268, 271–2, 273 Ren Zhengfei 251 Reserve Bank of India 86 retail payment flows 120, 122 retail payment instruments 18 retailer lawsuit against card networks, US 56–7 revaluation of currency 30 Revolut 89, 158, 159 Rickards, Jim 31 Ripple/XRP 197–8, 199 risk, payment 15–16, 19, 108, 112–16, 121, 122, 214 robbery, bank 107–8, 112–16 Rogen, Seth 112 Romania 172 Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) 150 Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) 131 Russell, Bertrand 4 Russia 25, 89, 243, 253–4 Russian Central Bank 256–7 S Safaricom 74 Safeway 56 Sampo Bank 256, 257 sanctions 144, 213, 243, 244–5, 246, 249, 250–1, 252, 253, 254, 258, 266, 270 Sandinista National Liberation Front 65 Sands, Peter 28 Saxo 159 Scandinavia 67 Schneider, Ralph 40 Schuijff, Arnout 165 screen-scrapers 181–2 scrip 170, 219–20 Sears 56 Second World War 7–8, 12, 249 secondary sanctions, US 250, 253 Securities and Exchange Commission, US 198 securities market 132, 140, 247 semi-open payment systems 222 settlement risk 15–16 shopping channels 50 Shor, Ilan 261 shorting 188 Siemiatkowski, Sebastian 174 Signature cards 49–50, 57, 58, 69 Simmons, Matty 40 Simple 159 Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) 60, 240 Single Euro Payments Regulation 98 Singles Day, China 76 size and methods, payment 120–1, 217, 272 small economies 5–6 smart contracts 194–6, 198–9 smuggling 27 Snowden, Edward 234 social media 110, 119, 179, 206 social media fraud 110 Sofort 180–1, 183 ‘soft’ credit checks 175 Sony Pictures 112 Soros, George 226 sort codes, bank 65–6 South Korea 112 sovereign gold coins 203 Soviet bloc countries, former 24–5, 257 Space Shuttle 71 Spain 81, 261–2 spear-phishing 110 Special Drawing Right (SDR), IMF’s 202 Specially Designated Nationals (SDNs) 250, 251, 252 spies, government 233–4 Spotify 202, 225 Spring Festival Gala, CCT’s 77 Square 155, 162–3, 164–5, 216, 269 Sri Lanka 113 stablecoins 196, 201 Standard Chartered 258–9, 260, 270 standing orders 82 Starling 158 Stephenson, George 68, 71 STET (Systèmes Technologiques d’Échange et de Traitement) 119 Stiftung Warentest 89 stimulus package payments, US 66 store of value, Libra as 206 store of value, money 202 Stripe 15, 162, 163–5, 216 sub-prime mortgages 132 Sun 119 Sunak, Rishi 35 Swartz, Lana 177 Sweden 32–3, 35–6, 58, 172 Swift network 102, 111, 113 114, 115, 140, 141–2, 147, 220, 222, 233–4 Swiss bank accounts 66 Switzerland 23, 67, 201, 260 Syria 266 T tabu 8 TARGET 86, 240–1 Target (US retailer) 109 TARGET2 241 TARGET2 Securities 241 targeted markets 179 tax evasion 27, 29, 258, 260 telegraphs 141 telex 141 Tencent 76, 77 Tenpay 73, 75, 76, 78–9, 85, 100, 161, 178, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222, 235, 270–1 terrorism 232–3, 250, 266 Tether (THT) 196–7, 199 Tez payment app 185 theft risk, payment gateways as 15–16, 108, 112–16, 121 three-corner model 174 Three Mobile 119 TIBER-EU 233 tokens – temporary digital identifiers 109, 189–90, 191, 195, 196, 205, 214 TOR (The Onion Router) 199 TransferWise 89, 146, 216, 241 Transport for London 11 travel shops 90 tribal societies, early 9 truck systems 219–20 Truman, Harry S. 249 Trump, Donald 115, 229, 243–5 tulip bulbs 6 Tumpel-Gugerell, Gertrude 241 Twitter 155 U Uber 82–3, 165, 169, 202 Ubiquity Networks 110–11 UBS 260 UFC-Que Choisir 89 unbanked people 6–7, 38, 212 underground/criminal economy 25, 27–8, 29–30, 199–200 see also financial crime; illegal activities; money-laundering ‘unicorn’ start-ups 146 Unified Payment Interface (UPI) 82–5, 182, 271 Union Pay 55, 59 unit of account, money as 202–4 United Kingdom cheques 117 credit card debt 101 decline of cash 32, 36 digital IDs 270 Faster Payments Service (FPS) 82, 83, 84, 86 GCHQ – National Cyber Security Centre 233 GCHQ – spies 234 HM Treasury 86 INSTEX transactions 245 JCPOA 243 United Kingdom (continued) neo-banks 158 Payment Systems Regulator 237 prepaid cards 37–8 Truck Act (1831) 220 United States of America $100 dollar bills 23, 24, 108 bank fines and financial crime 258–60, 270 checking accounts 91 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 65, 149, 264 Congress 57 credit card debt 45, 100 Currency Education Program (CEP) 25 Department of Homeland Security 232–3 Department of State 267 dollars as global reserve currency 246–7, 252 dollars circulating abroad 24–5, 30 domestic securities market 247 Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) 220 Federal Reserve 12, 36, 37, 113–14, 131, 232, 259 free banking era (1837–63) 208 international power of the dollar 246–54 JCPOA 243–4, 252, 254 National Security Agency (NSA) 114, 233, 234, 255 National Security Council (NSC) 64–5, 244, 264 Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) 249–50, 252, 253, 255, 259 open banking 182 paying to pay 97, 101 regulation agencies 231–2 removal of access to WeChat app 270–1 sanctions 213, 243, 244–5, 246, 249, 250–1, 252, 253, 254, 258–9, 270 Securities and Exchange Commission 198 State Department 3–4 Treasury 9, 248, 249–50, 255, 260, 265 use of cheques/checks 63, 117 utility coins 193 V V-pay 58 van der Does, Pieter 165 van Hall, Walraven 7–8 Venezuela 213 Venmo 177 venture capital money 157 Verifone 48 Verizon 130–1 Vestager, Margrethe 224, 225–6 VHS vs Betamax 71, 221 Visa 3–4, 41, 42, 47, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56, 57–9, 90, 102, 161, 162, 174, 201–2, 204, 223, 269 Visa Europe 58–9 Visa Inc. 58–9 W Wal-Mart 56, 57 Watergate scandal 255 WeChat Pay app 270–1, 229 Weidmann, Jens 28 Western Union 144, 216 WhatsApp 184, 202 Which?


pages: 348 words: 97,277

The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Paul Vigna, Michael J. Casey

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Blythe Masters, business process, buy and hold, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, circular economy, cloud computing, computer age, computerized trading, conceptual framework, content marketing, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, global supply chain, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, informal economy, information security, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, linked data, litecoin, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, market clearing, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, off grid, pets.com, post-truth, prediction markets, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, Project Xanadu, ransomware, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, social web, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, Ted Nelson, the market place, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, web of trust, work culture , zero-sum game

A 2016 cyber-attack on insurer Anthem Health: Anna Wilde Mathews, “Anthem: Hacked Database Included 78.8 Million People,” The Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/anthem-hacked-database-included-78-8-million-people-1424807364. the so-called WannaCry ransom attacks: Ian Scherr, “WannaCry Ransomware: Everything You Need to Know,” CNET, May 19, 2017, https://www.cnet.com/news/wannacry-wannacrypt-uiwix-ransomware-everything-you-need-to-know/. That’s why initiatives like MedRec: Ariel Ekblaw and Asaf Azaria, “MedRec: Medical Data Management on the Blockchain,” PubPub, September 19, 2016, https://www.pubpub.org/pub/medrec. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman: Thomas Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) In The Age of Cryptocurrency, we reported: Paul Vigna and Michael J.

Without true privacy, unhindered open economic access and social interaction will remain a pipe dream, privacy advocates say, since unwanted public exposure limits people’s capacity to engage in free expression and free commerce. That’s why various programmers are designing digital currencies that are less traceable. You might ask, why shouldn’t we be able to catch those odious ransomware hackers when they cash out for dollars? Well, for one thing, the forever-recorded block history of a specific coin’s brushes with the law can undermine its value relative to another. As Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, founder of a new cryptocurrency called Zcash, explains, it’s all about ensuring a currency’s “fungibility”—the principle that “if you’re going to pay someone with something, and you have two of them, it doesn’t matter which one you give them.”

The tech sector has spent a lot of time discussing its promise to help the financially excluded (including those excluded from the tech sector itself). Nine years on, though, adoption of the digital currency by people outside of the tech sector remains low. Part of the problem is that cryptocurrencies continue to sustain a reputation among the general public for criminality. This was intensified by the massive “WannaCry” ransomware attacks of 2017 in which attackers broke into hospitals’ and other institutions’ databases, encrypted their vital files, and then extorted payments in bitcoin to have the data decrypted. (In response to the calls to ban bitcoin that inevitably arose in the wake of this episode, we like to point out that far more illegal activity and money laundering occurs in dollar notes, which are much harder to trace than bitcoin transactions.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

Computers were locking up, and then restarting with a locked screen saying the system’s contents had been encrypted – and would be kept locked unless a payment of $300 in Bitcoin (the anonymous online currency) was made within three days. After three days, the price would double. After seven, the data would be irretrievably deleted for ever. This is a type of attack known as ransomware, named because it holds your computer and data hostage in hope of a quick profit if you pay up. But something about this attack was wrong: ransomware is best targeted at home users, who lack backups and easy access to IT support, and who need their data. This attack, though, appeared targeted at major corporate networks – and it was spreading alarmingly fast, to targets with nothing in common.

I reported some of its revelations, with independent corroboration, here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jamesball/us-hacked-into-irans-critical-civilian-infrastructure-for-ma 13https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2018-09-13/bureau-wins-case-to-defend-press-freedom-at-the-european-court-of-human-rights 14https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/24/nsa-surveillance-world-leaders-calls 15As with other stories, they did agree to redact certain specific details (for example, particular models of software, or company names, when specific reasons were given). 16The Guardian version of this story can be viewed here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-gchq-encryption-codes-security 17This was helpfully tweeted by the BBC’s technology editor, Rory Cellan-Jones: https://twitter.com/ruskin147/status/1096327971131088896/photo/1 18The following account of WannaCry is based on interviews with the Symantec staff in the chapter, my own reporting from the time (https://www.buzzfeed.com/jamesball/heres-why-its-unlikely-the-nhs-was-deliberately-targeted-in, https://www.buzzfeed.com/jamesball/gchq-is-facing-questions-over-last-weeks-ransomware-attack, https://www.buzzfeed.com/jamesball/a-highly-critical-report-says-the-nhs-was-hit-by-the), and some details from this later Washington Post report: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-set-to-declare-north-korea-carried-out-massive-wannacry-cyber-attack/2017/12/18/509deb1c-e446-11e7-a65d-1ac0fd7f097e_story.html?


pages: 301 words: 85,126

AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together by Nick Polson, James Scott

Abraham Wald, Air France Flight 447, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, business cycle, Cepheid variable, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Edward Charles Pickering, Elon Musk, epigenetics, fake news, Flash crash, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Higgs boson, index fund, information security, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, late fees, low earth orbit, Lyft, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mass incarceration, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Moravec's paradox, more computing power than Apollo, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, North Sea oil, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, speech recognition, statistical model, survivorship bias, systems thinking, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional

You can even find them on any new phone that runs iOS or Android—where, for example, they’re used to analyze which autocorrect suggestions you overrule in text messages, while simultaneously keeping the messages themselves encrypted and secure. Then there’s the issue of hacking. Hacking already plagues hospitals: if you recall the big ransomware attacks of 2017 (like WannaCry), you may also recall that hospitals were disproportionately hit. These hospitals probably weren’t doing anything AI-related with their data, but that kind of activity would hardly have entailed a higher security risk than what was already present. Hospitals should obviously plug their existing information-security holes—probably, as many experts suggest, by moving to some kind of cloud-based infrastructure run by a firm who thinks about security full time.

politics prediction rules contraception and deep learning and evaluation of Google Translate and Great Andromeda Nebula and image recognition and massive data and massive models and as models natural language processing and neural networks and overfitting problem training the model trial and error strategy Price, Richard principle of least squares privacy ProPublica Quetelet, Adolphe rage to conclude bias ransomware Reagan, Ronald recommender systems health care and large-scale legacy of Netflix See also suggestion engines Rees, Mina Reinhart, Alex robot cars Bayes’s rule and introspection and extrapolation (dead reckoning) LIDA image of a highway LIDAR (light detection and ranging sensor) SLAM problem (simultaneous localization and mapping) and Waymo robotics Bayes’s rule and in China revolution of SLAM problem (simultaneous localization and mapping) search for USS Scorpion and Stanford Cart Theseus (life-size autonomous mouse) See also robot cars Rose, Pete Royal Mint coin clipping Great Recoinage (1696) Newton, Isaac and Trial of the Pyx Russell, Alexander Wilson S&P 500 Salesforce Sapir, Edward Sarandos, Ted SAT (standardized test) Scherwitzl, Raoul Schlesinger, Karl Schuschnigg, Kurt Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission (World War II) sci-fi AI anxiety and robots self-driving cars.

See USS Scorpion suggestion engines bright side of dark side of as “doppelgänger software” targeted marketing and See also recommender systems super-utilizer survivorship bias 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) Takats, Zoltan Tandem Teller, Edward Tencent Tesla Thrun, Sebastian Tiatros (PTSD-centered social network) toilet paper theft Trial of the Pyx Trump, Donald Tufte, Edward Uber Ulam, Stanislaw UNIVAC USS Scorpion bow section prior beliefs and search for USS Scorpion Varroa mites Vassar College von Neumann, John Wald, Abraham early years and education member of Statistical Research Group (Columbia) sequential sampling survivability recommendations for aircraft in United States Wallis, W. Allen WannaCry (ransomware attack) waterfall diagram Watson (IBM supercomputer) Waymo (autonomous-car company) WeChat word vectors word2vec model (Google) World War I World War II Battle of the Bulge Bayesian search and Hopper, Grace, and Schweinfurt-Regensburg mission (World War II) Statistical Research Group (Columbia) and Wald’s survivability recommendations for aircraft Yormark, Brett YouTube Zillow ABOUT THE AUTHORS NICK POLSON is professor of Econometrics and Statistics at the Chicago Booth School of Business.


pages: 296 words: 86,610

The Bitcoin Guidebook: How to Obtain, Invest, and Spend the World's First Decentralized Cryptocurrency by Ian Demartino

3D printing, AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, buy low sell high, capital controls, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, forensic accounting, global village, GnuPG, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, initial coin offering, Jacob Appelbaum, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, litecoin, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Oculus Rift, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, printed gun, QR code, ransomware, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, Skype, smart contracts, Steven Levy, the medium is the message, underbanked, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

The malware—this particular form is known as “ransomware”—cryptographically encrypts a victim’s files, focusing on things it deems important, such as documents and photographs. It then demands payment in Bitcoin for the key to unlock the files. The software usually includes a timer counting down, with the threat that if it reaches zero, the price to unlock the files will increase. According to security blogs, more often than not, victims who pay the ransom fail to get their files unlocked. There are some sites that use already-discovered passwords to attempt an unlock for free but the ransomware itself remains practically unbreakable.

The experience of trawling the Deep Web is somewhat akin to traveling the Internet before Google made it easy. The freedom that comes with true anonymity is powerful and results in both good and bad, and that isn’t going away anytime soon. Bitcoin’s ties to criminal activity aren’t limited to the Deep Web. Bitcoin is playing an increasingly large role in malware, ransomware, and gray-market services. Online gambling was an early and obvious use for Bitcoin and that trend has continued unabated since the first dice sites hit the Internet. Today, nearly any event can be bet on using Bitcoin and nearly every casino game is available. There are even peer-to-peer betting sites that allow you to wager on the outcome of custom events—from the results of a presidential election to the next time a celebrity will be arrested to whether it is going to rain in Las Vegas tomorrow.


pages: 587 words: 117,894

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

It becomes a security issue when and if someone tries to exploit the lack of availability in some way. An attacker could do this either by depriving users of a system that they depend on (such as how the loss of GPS would hamper military units in a conflict) or by merely threatening the loss of a system, known as a “ransomware” attack. Examples of such ransoms range from small-scale hacks on individual bank accounts all the way to global blackmail attempts against gambling websites before major sporting events like the World Cup and Super Bowl. Beyond this classic CIA triangle of security, we believe it is important to add another property: resilience.

Most losses, however, are indirect, through missed sales and diluted brand value for the companies that followed the rules. Many cybercrimes target businesses more directly. We explore one particularly widespread type, trade secret and intellectual property theft, later. But companies can also be harmed directly through extortion attacks. This is the category that uses the type of ransomware attacks we read about earlier. The victim has to weigh the potential cost of fighting a well-organized attack versus paying off the potential attacker. Websites with time-dependent business models, such as seasonal sales, are particularly vulnerable. One study reported that, “In 2008, online casinos were threatened with just such an [extortion] attack, timed to disrupt their accepting wagers for the Super Bowl unless the attackers were paid 40,000 dollars.”

phishing: An attempt to fool the user into voluntarily supplying credentials, such as a password or bank account number, often by spoofed e-mails or fake web pages. “Spear phishing” attacks are customized to target specific individuals. protocol: A set of formats and rules that defines how communications can be exchanged. pwn: Hacker term meaning to “own,” or take control of, a rival’s systems and networks. ransomware: A type of malware that restricts access to a target and demands payment to return regular service. red-team: To examine and/or simulate an attack on oneself, in order to identify and close vulnerabilities before an adversary can do so. Often performed by “white hat” hackers. RickRolling: The Internet meme of tricking someone into watching a horribly addictive music video by 1980s singer Rick Astley.


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

It’s the most high-profile case yet of cyber-extortion using software known as ransomware. The attack on Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center effectively knocked it offline. As a result, patients had to be diverted to other hospitals, medical records were kept using pen and paper, and staff resorted to communicating by fax. The attackers demanded 9,000 bitcoins—around $3.6 million. After a two-week stand-off, the hospital yesterday paid out $17,000 … “Ransomware has really exploded in the last couple of years,” says Steve Santorelli, a former UK police detective who now works for Team Cymru, a threat intelligence firm based in Florida. One ransomware package, CryptoLocker 3.0, is thought to have earned attackers $325 million in 2015 alone.

Hartman, David Harvard Business Review Harvey, Hal Hautman, Pete Hautman family Hawaii Hazeltine National Golf Club HBO health care HealthPartners Heifetz, Ronald “Hello” (song) help desks Henderson, Simon Henry, Buck Hessel, Andrew Hewitt, Brad Hewlett Packard Enterprise high-frequency trading Hillel, Rabbi HipChat Hiroshima, atomic bombing of history: Eurocentric view of; inflection points in, see inflection points; McNeill’s view of HistoryofInformation.com Hitler, Adolf Hmong people Hoffman, Reid Hoffmann-Ostenhof, Georg Hollande, François Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, ransomware attack on Holmstrom, Carl Holocaust Holocene epoch; planetary boundaries of Holt, Bill Honduras Hong Kong Horn, Michael hospitality industry, supernova and House of Representatives, U.S., Homeland Security Committee of Huffington Post Hughes Aircraft human adaptability, in age of accelerations human capital; investment in human networks, see intelligent algorithms Human Resources Development Ministry, India Human Rights Campaign humans: godlike powers of; tribalism of humiliation: adaptability and; as geopolitical emotion Humphrey, Hubert H.

planetary boundaries PlayStation 3 Pleistocene epoch pluralism Pluralism Project politics: bipartisanship in; compromise in; disruption in; dogmatism in; money in; polarization in; trust and; see also geopolitics politics, innovation in; adaptability and; diversity and; entrepreneurial mindset in; federal-local balance in; Mother Nature as mentor for; need for organization in; ownership in; “races to the top” in; resilience in; specific reforms in pollution Pol Pot polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) Popular Science population growth; climate change and; political instability and; poverty and; in weak states Population Institute poverty; advances in connectivity and; chickens and; global flows and; population growth and power of flows power of machines power of many; Mother Nature and; supernova and; see also population growth power of one; ethics and; supernova and Prabhu, Krish prairie, as complex ecosystem Present at the Creation (Acheson) Preston-Werner, Tom Prickett, Glenn privacy, big data and Private Photo Vault Production and Operations Management Society Conference (2014) productivity, supernova and Profil Progressive Policy Institute progressivism; economic growth and Prohibition Project Dreamcatcher Project Syndicate public spaces Putin, Vladimir Putnam, Robert Quad Qualcomm; maintenance workers at Qualcomm pdQ 1900 Quednau, Rachel Queen Rania Teacher Academy Quiz Bowl (TV show) QuoteInvestigator.com (QI) racism rain forests Rain Room ransomware Rattray, Ben ReadWrite.com Reagan, Ronald Real Time Talent Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) regulation, technological change and Regulatory Improvement Commission (proposed) Reilly Tar & Chemical Corporation Rejoiner.com relationships, human, connectivity and Republican Party, Republicans: climate change denial by; dogmatism of; implosion of; liberal; polycultural heritage of resilience; in Mother Nature; ownership and; political innovation and retailing: big data and; supernova and Reuters ride-sharing Rifai, Salim al- Ringwald, Alexis Rise and Fall of American Growth, The (Gordon) Rise of the West, The (McNeill) “Rising Menace from Disintegrating Yemen, The” (Henderson) Roberts, Keith robotics “Robots Are Coming, The” (Lanchester) Rockström, Johan Rodríguez, Chi Chi rogue states Rosenstein, Wendi Zelkin Royal Ontario Museum Rugby World Cup (1995) Ruh, Bill Russ, Pam Russell, Richard B.


pages: 329 words: 99,504

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie, Jacob Silverman

algorithmic trading, asset allocation, bank run, barriers to entry, Ben McKenzie, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", blockchain, capital controls, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, data science, distributed ledger, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, Glass-Steagall Act, high net worth, housing crisis, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Jacob Silverman, Jane Street, low interest rates, Lyft, margin call, meme stock, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, offshore financial centre, operational security, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, prediction markets, proprietary trading, pushing on a string, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Bankman-Fried, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uber lyft, underbanked, vertical integration, zero-sum game

“Censorship resistance” became a mantra in crypto circles—money that was private, free from any surveillance or control by the state. Free, too, from any public safeguards. Financial freedom came to mean a kind of financial anarchy. Criminals could use crypto to avoid taxes, sanctions, launder money, and collect profits from ransomware. A deluge of cryptocurrencies appeared, not just Ethereum but hundreds and then thousands of others, with the wave cresting during the so-called Initial Coin Offering (ICO) boom of 2017–18. Much like the dot-com IPO boom of an earlier era, it seemed like every day there was another ICO, with many projects hardly different from their peers except on the level of branding.

Even if Tether was being used by some good people—if only because they had no better options—Tether could just as easily be used by the bad guys. Once you had gotten your money into the crypto ecosystem, moving it instantaneously and globally at parity to the US dollar was an enormously attractive feature. What was stopping Tether from being used for money laundering, tax evasion, sanctions evasion, or ransomware? Viewed through the prism of the fraud triangle, all of the requisite pieces seemed to fall into place when it came to Tether. They had the need, the opportunity, and the rationalization. But of course, Jacob and I could not prove they had committed crimes, and that was not our job. We weren’t prosecutors.

° ° ° One sunny morning, Jacob and I went to visit a source of ours in a leafy Maryland town not far from D.C. John Reed Stark, the now-retired chief of the SEC Office of Internet Enforcement, welcomed us with the ebullience of a contented suburban dad. Stark left government in 2009 to become a private-sector consultant, working on issues ranging from ransomware to regulation. He is also helping to train the next generation of regulators; John is a senior lecturer of law at Duke University. An affable, fifty-something guy who seems ready to have a chat about whatever you’d like, Stark was the kind of person you’d want as a neighbor. Relentlessly friendly and community-minded, he came bearing a strong moral code.


pages: 215 words: 59,188

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down by Tom Standage

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, blood diamond, business logic, corporate governance, CRISPR, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, failed state, financial independence, gender pay gap, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job-hopping, Julian Assange, life extension, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mega-rich, megacity, Minecraft, mobile money, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, post-truth, price mechanism, private spaceflight, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, ransomware, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South China Sea, speech recognition, stem cell, supply-chain management, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, zoonotic diseases

Phishing e-mails, which try to persuade users to enter sensitive details such as banking passwords into fake (but convincing-looking) websites, can be very profitable, because the data they harvest can allow their controllers to loot bank accounts or go on buying sprees with stolen credit-card information. Malicious attachments can subvert a user’s machine, perhaps recruiting it into a “botnet”, a horde of compromised machines that can be rented out to attackers to knock websites offline. And then there is “ransomware”, in which a malicious program encrypts all the files on the victim’s computer, then displays instructions demanding payment to unscramble them. All this is made possible by giant lists of e-mail addresses that are bought, sold and swapped between spammers. Those, in turn, are generated from leaks, hacks, guesswork and addresses collected from users of shady websites and subsequently sold on.

For more explainers and charts from The Economist, visit economist.com Index A Africa child marriage 84 democracy 40 gay and lesbian rights 73, 74 Guinea 32 mobile phones 175–6 see also individual countries agriculture 121–2 Aguiar, Mark 169 air pollution 143–4 air travel and drones 187–8 flight delays 38–9 Akitu (festival) 233 alcohol beer consumption 105–6 consumption in Britain 48, 101–2 craft breweries 97–8 drink-driving 179–80 wine glasses 101–2 Alexa (voice assistant) 225 Algeria food subsidies 31 gay and lesbian rights 73 All I Want for Christmas Is You (Carey) 243 alphabet 217–18 Alternative for Germany (AfD) 223, 224 Alzheimer’s disease 140 Amazon (company) 225 America see United States and 227–8 Angola 73, 74 animals blood transfusions 139–40 dog meat 91–2 gene drives 153–4 size and velocity 163–4 and water pollution 149–50 wolves 161–2 Arctic 147–8 Argentina gay and lesbian rights 73 lemons 95–6 lithium 17–18 Ariel, Barak 191 Arizona 85 arms trade 19–20 Asia belt and road initiative 117–18 high-net-worth individuals 53 wheat consumption 109–10 see also individual countries Assange, Julian 81–3 asteroids 185–6 augmented reality (AR) 181–2 August 239–40 Australia avocados 89 forests 145 inheritance tax 119 lithium 17, 18 shark attacks 201–2 autonomous vehicles (AVs) 177–8 Autor, David 79 avocados 89–90 B Babylonians 233 Baltimore 99 Bangladesh 156 bank notes 133–4 Bateman, Tim 48 beer consumption 105–6 craft breweries 97–8 Beijing air pollution 143–4 dogs 92 belt and road initiative 117–18 betting 209–10 Bier, Ethan 153 Bils, Mark 169 birds and aircraft 187 guinea fowl 32–3 birth rates Europe 81–3 United States 79–80 black money 133–4 Black Power 34, 35 Blade Runner 208 blood transfusions 139–40 board games 199–200 body cameras 191–2 Boko Haram 5, 15–16 Bolivia 17–18 Bollettieri, Nick 197 bookmakers 209–10 Borra, Cristina 75 Bosnia 221–2 brain computers 167–8 Brazil beer consumption 105, 106 Christmas music 243, 244 end-of-life care 141–2 gay and lesbian rights 73 murder rate 45, 46 shark attacks 202 breweries 97–8 Brexit, and car colours 49–50 brides bride price 5 diamonds 13–14 Britain alcohol consumption 101–2 car colours 49–50 Christmas music 244 cigarette sales 23–4 craft breweries 98 crime 47–8 Easter 238 gay population 70–72 housing material 8 inheritance tax 119 Irish immigration 235 life expectancy 125 manufacturing jobs 131 national identity 223–4 new-year resolutions 234 police body cameras 191 sexual harassment 67, 68, 69 sperm donation 61 see also Scotland Brookings Institution 21 Browning, Martin 75 bubonic plague 157–8 Bush, George W. 119 C cables, undersea 193–4 California and Argentine lemons 95, 96 avocados 90 cameras 191–2 Canada diamonds 13 drones 188 lithium 17 national identity 223–4 capitalism, and birth rates 81–2 Carey, Mariah 243 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 21 cars colours 49–50 self-driving 177–8 Caruana, Fabiano 206 Charles, Kerwin 169 cheetahs 163, 164 chess 205–6 Chetty, Raj 113 Chicago 100 children birth rates 79–80, 81–3 child marriage 84–5 in China 56–7 crime 47–8 and gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 obesity 93–4 Chile gay and lesbian rights 73 lithium 17–18 China air pollution 143–5 arms sales 19–20 avocados 89 beer consumption 105 belt and road initiative 117–18 childhood obesity 93 construction 7 dog meat 91–2 dragon children 56–7 flight delays 38–9 foreign waste 159–60 lithium 17 rice consumption 109–10 Choi, Roy 99 Christian, Cornelius 26 Christianity Easter 237–8 new year 233–4 Christmas 246–7 music 243–5 cigarettes affordability 151–2 black market 23–4 cities, murder rates 44–6 Citizen Kane 207 citrus wars 95–6 civil wars 5 Clarke, Arthur C. 183 Coase, Ronald 127, 128 cocaine 44 cochlear implants 167 Cohen, Jake 203 Colen, Liesbeth 106 colleges, US 113–14 Colombia 45 colours, cars 49–50 commodities 123–4 companies 127–8 computers augmented reality 181–2 brain computers 167–8 emojis 215–16 and languages 225–6 spam e-mail 189–90 Connecticut 85 Connors, Jimmy 197 contracts 127–8 Costa Rica 89 couples career and family perception gap 77–8 housework 75–6 see also marriage cows 149–50 craft breweries 97–8 crime and avocados 89–90 and dog meat 91–2 murder rates 44–6 young Britons 47–8 CRISPR-Cas9 153 Croatia 222 Croato-Serbian 221–2 D Daily-Diamond, Christopher 9–10 Davis, Mark 216 De Beers 13–14 death 141–2 death taxes 119–20 democracy 40–41 Deng Xiaoping 117 Denmark career and family perception gap 78 gender pay gap 135–6 sex reassignment 65 Denver 99 Devon 72 diamonds 13–14, 124 digitally remastering 207–8 Discovery Channel 163–4 diseases 157–8 dog meat 91–2 Dorn, David 79 Dr Strangelove 207 dragon children 56–7 drink see alcohol drink-driving 179–80 driverless cars 177–8 drones and aircraft 187–8 and sharks 201 drugs cocaine trafficking 44 young Britons 48 D’Souza, Kiran 187 E e-mail 189–90 earnings, gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 Easter 237–8 economy and birth rates 79–80, 81–2 and car colours 49–50 and witch-hunting 25–6 education and American rich 113–14 dragon children 56–7 Egal, Muhammad Haji Ibrahim 40–41 Egypt gay and lesbian rights 73 marriage 5 new-year resolutions 233 El Paso 100 El Salvador 44, 45 emojis 215–16 employment gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 and gender perception gap 77–8 job tenure 129–30 in manufacturing 131–2 video games and unemployment 169–70 English language letter names 217–18 Papua New Guinea 219 environment air pollution 143–4 Arctic sea ice 147–8 and food packaging 103–4 waste 159–60 water pollution 149–50 Equatorial Guinea 32 Eritrea 40 Ethiopia 40 Europe craft breweries 97–8 summer holidays 239–40 see also individual countries Everson, Michael 216 exorcism 36–7 F Facebook augmented reality 182 undersea cables 193 FANUC 171, 172 Federer, Roger 197 feminism, and birth rates 81–2 fertility rates see birth rates festivals Christmas 246–7 Christmas music 243–5 new-year 233–4 Feuillet, Catherine 108 films 207–8 firms 127–8 5G 173–4 flight delays 38–9 Florida and Argentine lemons 95 child marriage 85 Foley, William 220 food avocados and crime 89–90 dog meat 91–2 lemons 95–6 wheat consumption 109–10 wheat genome 107–8 food packaging 103–4 food trucks 99–100 football clubs 211–12 football transfers 203–4 forests 145–6, 162 Fountains of Paradise, The (Clarke) 183 fracking 79–80 France career and family perception gap 78 Christmas music 244 exorcism 36–7 gender-inclusive language 229–30 job tenure 130 sex reassignment 66 sexual harassment 68–9 witch-hunting 26, 27 wolves 161–2 G gambling 209–10 games, and unemployment 169–70 Gandhi, Mahatma 155 gang members 34–5 Gantz, Valentino 153 gas 124 gay population 70–72 gay rights, attitudes to 73–4 gender sex reassignment 65–6 see also men; women gender equality and birth rates 81–2 in language 229–30 gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 gene drives 153–4 Genghis Khan 42 genome, wheat 107–8 ger districts 42–3 Germany beer consumption 105 job tenure 130 national identity 223–4 sexual harassment 68, 69 vocational training 132 witch-hunting 26, 27 Ghana 73 gig economy 128, 130 glasses, wine glasses 101–2 Goddard, Ceri 72 Google 193 Graduate, The 207 Greece forests 145 national identity 223–4 sex reassignment 65 smoking ban 152 Gregg, Christine 9–10 grunting 197–8 Guatemala 45 Guinea 32 guinea fowl 32–3 guinea pig 32 Guinea-Bissau 32 Guo Peng 91–2 Guyana 32 H Haiti 5 Hale, Sarah Josepha 242 Hanson, Gordon 79 Hawaii ’Oumuamua 185 porn consumption 63–4 health child obesity 93–4 life expectancy 125–6 plague 157–8 and sanitation 155 high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) 53 Hiri Motu 219 holidays Easter 237–8 St Patrick’s Day 235–6 summer holidays 239–40 Thanksgiving 241–2 HoloLens 181–2 homicide 44–6 homosexuality attitudes to 73–4 UK 70–72 Honduras 44, 45 Hong Kong 56 housework 75–6, 77–8 Hudson, Valerie 5 Hungary 223–4 Hurst, Erik 169 I ice 147–8 Ikolo, Prince Anthony 199 India bank notes 133–4 inheritance tax 119 languages 219 rice consumption 109 sand mafia 7 sanitation problems 155–6 Indonesia polygamy and civil war 5 rice consumption 109–10 inheritance taxes 119–20 interest rates 51–2 interpunct 229–30 Ireland aitch 218 forests 145 St Patrick’s Day 235–6 same-sex marriage 73 sex reassignment 65 Italy birth rate 82 end of life care 141–2 forests 145 job tenure 130 life expectancy 126 J Jacob, Nitya 156 Jamaica 45 Japan 141–2 Jighere, Wellington 199 job tenure 129–30 jobs see employment Johnson, Bryan 168 junk mail 189 K Kazakhstan 6 Kearney, Melissa 79–80 Kennedy, John F. 12 Kenya democracy 40 mobile-money systems 176 Kiribati 7 Kleven, Henrik 135–6 knots 9–10 Kohler, Timothy 121 Kyrgyzstan 6 L laces 9–10 Lagos 199 Landais, Camille 135–6 languages and computers 225–6 gender-inclusive 229–30 letter names 217–18 and national identity 223–4 Papua New Guinea 219–20 Serbo-Croatian 221–2 Unicode 215 World Bank writing style 227–8 Latimer, Hugh 246 Leeson, Peter 26 leisure board games in Nigeria 199–200 chess 205–6 gambling 209–10 video games and unemployment 169–70 see also festivals; holidays lemons 95–6 letter names 217–18 Libya 31 life expectancy 125–6 Lincoln, Abraham 242 lithium 17–18 London 71, 72 longevity 125–6 Lozère 161–2 Lucas, George 208 M McEnroe, John 197 McGregor, Andrew 204 machine learning 225–6 Macri, Mauricio 95, 96 Macron, Emmanuel 143 Madagascar 158 Madison, James 242 MagicLeap 182 Maine 216 Malaysia 56 Maldives 7 Mali 31 Malta 65 Manchester United 211–12 manufacturing jobs 131–2 robots 171–2 summer holidays 239 Maori 34–5 marriage child marriage 84–5 polygamy 5–6 same-sex relationships 73–4 see also couples Marteau, Theresa 101–2 Marx, Karl 123 Maryland 85 Massachusetts child marriage 85 Christmas 246 Matfess, Hilary 5, 15 meat dog meat 91–2 packaging 103–4 mega-rich 53 men career and family 77–8 housework 75–6 job tenure 129–30 life expectancy 125 polygamy 5–6 sexual harassment by 67–9 video games and unemployment 169 Mexico avocados 89, 90 gay and lesbian rights 73 murder rate 44, 45 microbreweries 97–8 Microsoft HoloLens 181–2 undersea cables 193 migration, and birth rates 81–3 mining diamonds 13–14 sand 7–8 mobile phones Africa 175–6 5G 173–4 Mocan, Naci 56–7 Mongolia 42–3 Mongrel Mob 34 Monopoly (board game) 199, 200 Monty Python and the Holy Grail 25 Moore, Clement Clarke 247 Moretti, Franco 228 Morocco 7 Moscato, Philippe 36 movies 207–8 Mozambique 73 murder rates 44–6 music, Christmas 243–5 Musk, Elon 168 Myanmar 118 N Nadal, Rafael 197 national identity 223–4 natural gas 124 Netherlands gender 66 national identity 223–4 neurostimulators 167 New Jersey 85 New Mexico 157–8 New York (state), child marriage 85 New York City drink-driving 179–80 food trucks 99–100 New Zealand avocados 89 gang members 34–5 gene drives 154 water pollution 149–50 new-year resolutions 233–4 Neymar 203, 204 Nigeria board games 199–200 Boko Haram 5, 15–16 population 54–5 Nissenbaum, Stephen 247 Northern Ireland 218 Norway Christmas music 243 inheritance tax 119 life expectancy 125, 126 sex reassignment 65 Nucci, Alessandra 36 O obesity 93–4 oceans see seas Odimegwu, Festus 54 O’Reilly, Oliver 9–10 Ortiz de Retez, Yñigo 32 Oster, Emily 25–6 ostriches 163, 164 ’Oumuamua 185–6 P packaging 103–4 Pakistan 5 Palombi, Francis 161 Papua New Guinea languages 219–20 name 32 Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) 203 Passover 237 pasta 31 pay, gender pay gap 115–16, 135–6 Peck, Jessica Lynn 179–80 Pennsylvania 85 Peru 90 Pestre, Dominique 228 Pew Research Centre 22 Phelps, Michael 163–4 Philippe, Édouard 230 phishing 189 Phoenix, Arizona 177 Pilgrims 241 plague 157–8 Plastic China 159 police, body cameras 191–2 pollution air pollution 143–4 water pollution 149–50 polygamy 5–6 pornography and Britain’s gay population 70–72 and Hawaii missile alert 63–4 Portugal 145 Puerto Rico 45 punctuation marks 229–30 Q Qatar 19 R ransomware 190 Ravenscroft, George 101 Real Madrid 211 religious observance and birth rates 81–2 and Christmas music 244 remastering 207–8 Reynolds, Andrew 70 Rhodes, Cecil 13 rice 109–10 rich high-net-worth individuals 53 US 113–14 ride-hailing apps and drink-driving 179–80 see also Uber RIWI 73–4 robotaxis 177–8 robots 171–2 Rogers, Dan 240 Romania birth rate 81 life expectancy 125 Romans 233 Romer, Paul 227–8 Ross, Hana 23 Royal United Services Institute 21 Russ, Jacob 26 Russia arms sales 20 beer consumption 105, 106 fertility rate 81 Rwanda 40 S Sahara 31 St Louis 205–6 St Patrick’s Day 235–6 salt, in seas 11–12 same-sex relationships 73–4 San Antonio 100 sand 7–8 sanitation 155–6 Saudi Arabia 19 Scotland, witch-hunting 25–6, 27 Scott, Keith Lamont 191 Scrabble (board game) 199 seas Arctic sea ice 147–8 salty 11–12 undersea cables 193–4 secularism, and birth rates 81–2 Seles, Monica 197 self-driving cars 177–8 Serbia 222 Serbo-Croatian 221–2 Sevilla, Almudena 75 sex reassignment 65–6 sexual harassment 67–9, 230 Sharapova, Maria 197 sharks deterring attacks 201–2 racing humans 163–4 shipping 148 shoelaces 9–10 Silk Road 117–18 Singapore dragon children 56 land reclamation 7, 8 rice consumption 110 single people, housework 75–6 Sinquefeld, Rex 205 smart glasses 181–2 Smith, Adam 127 smoking black market for cigarettes 23–4 efforts to curb 151–2 smuggling 31 Sogaard, Jakob 135–6 Somalia 40 Somaliland 40–41 South Africa childhood obesity 93 diamonds 13 gay and lesbian rights 73 murder rate 45, 46 South Korea arms sales 20 rice consumption 110 South Sudan failed state 40 polygamy 5 space elevators 183–4 spaghetti 31 Spain forests 145 gay and lesbian rights 73 job tenure 130 spam e-mail 189–90 sperm banks 61–2 sport football clubs 211–12 football transfers 203–4 grunting in tennis 197–8 Sri Lanka 118 Star Wars 208 sterilisation 65–6 Strasbourg 26 submarine cables 193–4 Sudan 40 suicide-bombers 15–16 summer holidays 239–40 Sutton Trust 22 Sweden Christmas music 243, 244 gay and lesbian rights 73 homophobia 70 inheritance tax 119 overpayment of taxes 51–2 sex reassignment 65 sexual harassment 67–8 Swinnen, Johan 106 Switzerland sex reassignment 65 witch-hunting 26, 27 T Taiwan dog meat 91 dragon children 56 Tamil Tigers 15 Tanzania 40 taxes death taxes 119–20 Sweden 51–2 taxis robotaxis 177–8 see also ride-hailing apps tennis players, grunting 197–8 terrorism 15–16 Texas 85 Thailand 110 Thanksgiving 241–2 think-tanks 21–2 Tianjin 143–4 toilets 155–6 Tok Pisin 219, 220 transgender people 65–6 Trump, Donald 223 Argentine lemons 95, 96 estate tax 119 and gender pay gap 115 and manufacturing jobs 131, 132 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin 183 Turkey 151 turkeys 33 Turkmenistan 6 U Uber 128 and drink-driving 179–80 Uganda 40 Ulaanbaatar 42–3 Uljarevic, Daliborka 221 undersea cables 193–4 unemployment 169–70 Unicode 215–16 United Arab Emirates and Somaliland 41 weapons purchases 19 United Kingdom see Britain United States and Argentine lemons 95–6 arms sales 19 beer consumption 105 chess 205–6 child marriage 84–5 Christmas 246–7 Christmas music 243, 244 drink-driving 179–80 drones 187–8 end of life care 141–2 estate tax 119 fertility rates 79–80 food trucks 99–100 forests 145 gay and lesbian rights 73 getting rich 113–14 Hawaiian porn consumption 63–4 job tenure 129–30 letter names 218 lithium 17 manufacturing jobs 131–2 murder rate 45, 46 national identity 223–4 new-year resolutions 234 plague 157–8 police body cameras 191–2 polygamy 6 robotaxis 177 robots 171–2 St Patrick’s Day 235–6 sexual harassment 67, 68 sperm banks 61–2 Thanksgiving 241–2 video games and unemployment 169–70 wealth inequality 121 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) see drones V video games 169–70 Vietnam weapons purchases 19 wheat consumption 110 Virginia 85 virtual reality (VR) 181, 182 Visit from St Nicholas, A (Moore) 247 W Wang Yi 117 Warner, Jason 15 wars 5 Washington, George 242 Washington DC, food trucks 99 waste 159–60 water pollution 149–50 wealth getting rich in America 113–14 high-net-worth individuals 53 inequality 120, 121–2 weather, and Christmas music 243–5 Weinstein, Harvey 67, 69 Weryk, Rob 185 wheat consumption 109–10 genome 107–8 Wilson, Riley 79–80 wine glasses 101–2 Winslow, Edward 241 wireless technology 173–4 witch-hunting 25–7 wolves 161–2 women birth rates 79–80, 81–3 bride price 5 career and family 77–8 child marriage 84–5 housework 75–6 job tenure 129–30 life expectancy 125 pay gap 115–16 sexual harassment of 67–9 suicide-bombers 15–16 World Bank 227–8 World Health Organisation (WHO) and smoking 151–2 transsexualism 65 X Xi Jinping 117–18 Y young people crime 47–8 job tenure 129–30 video games and unemployment 169–70 Yu, Han 56–7 Yulin 91 yurts 42–3 Z Zubelli, Rita 239


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The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking by Saifedean Ammous

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, bank run, banks create money, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, conceptual framework, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, delayed gratification, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Elisha Otis, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, high net worth, initial coin offering, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, iterative process, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, price stability, profit motive, QR code, quantum cryptography, ransomware, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, secular stagnation, smart contracts, special drawing rights, Stanford marshmallow experiment, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Walter Mischel, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game

It is not a tool to be feared, but one to be embraced as an integral part of a peaceful and prosperous future. One high‐profile type of crime that has indeed utilized Bitcoin heavily is ransomware: a method of unauthorized access to computers that encrypts the victims' files and only releases them if the victim makes a payment to the recipient, usually in Bitcoin. While such forms of crime were around before Bitcoin, they have become more convenient to carry out since Bitcoin's invention. This is arguably the best example of Bitcoin facilitating crime. Yet one can simply understand that these ransomware crimes are being built around taking advantage of lax computer security. A company that can have its entire computer system locked up by anonymous hackers demanding a few thousand dollars in Bitcoin has far bigger problems than these hackers.

A company that can have its entire computer system locked up by anonymous hackers demanding a few thousand dollars in Bitcoin has far bigger problems than these hackers. The incentive for the hackers may be in the thousands of dollars, but the incentive for the firm's competitors, clients, and suppliers for gaining access to this data can be much higher. In effect, what Bitcoin ransomware has allowed is the detection and exposition of computer security flaws. This process is leading firms to take better security precautions, and causing computer security to grow as an industry. In other words, Bitcoin allows for the monetizing of the computer security market. While hackers can initially benefit from this, in the long run, productive businesses will command the best security resources.


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

no suspicion: Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections (McLean, VA:U.S. National Intelligence Council, 2021), https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ICA-declass-16MAR21.pdf. ransomware attacks: Ellen Nakashima and Jay Greene, “Hospitals being hit in coordinated, targeted ransomware attack from Russian-speaking criminals,” Washington Post, October 29, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/hospitals-being-hit-in-coordinated-targeted-ransomware-attack-from-russian-speaking-criminals/2020/10/28/e6e48c38-196e-11eb-befb-8864259bd2d8_story.html. penetrate U.S. governmental systems: David E. Sanger, “Russian Hackers Broke into Federal Agencies, U.S.

There was little left for him to do: the now former American president was a divisive element in U.S. politics in his own right, not just supported by the traditional Republican Party voter base but also standing at the forefront of a reactionary, increasingly violent populist movement. Still, Putin could not resist doing something to stir the pot and draw attention. In the weeks before the election, criminal groups attributed to Russia had launched ransomware attacks on a handful of hospital systems across the United States. In December 2020, private cybersecurity firms and the U.S. government also revealed that the Russian security services had launched an extensive, sophisticated, and successful attack to penetrate U.S. governmental systems and databases.


Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

In both the Boeing and Fukushima accidents, I see it: the single sensor breaking, or water coming over the top of the seawalls. Future Dangers The future is here. Numerous ransomware attacks have already occurred. Common hacks have disabled corporations, schools, hospitals, and municipal governments. The hackers break into a computer system and encrypt all its files, compromising a company’s ability to access billing, deliveries to customers, payrolls, hospital records, car registrations, and many other vital systems. To get their files back, corporations or towns pay a ransom fee. These hackers are in it for the money. Two of the biggest such ransomware attacks were at Colonial Pipeline and JBS Foods. The Colonial hack shut down fuel distribution to the East Coast.

., 39 Mars rover, 92–93, 193, 197 Massachusetts General Hospital, 31 Massey University (New Zealand), 259 Masuda, Naohiro, 225–26, 228 mathematics, 28 abstract approach to, 61–63 geniuses in, 179–81 and learning chess, 61 and music, 32, 187 real-world approach to, 56–58, 60–62 requirements for, 56–59 and screening out students, 56–69 studies on, 74–75 testing in, 59, 62–65 those who are poor in, 63–64, 67, 74–75 those who excel at, 35–37, 40, 69–70, 74, 78, 114 See also algebra; spatial visualizers Mather, Jennifer, 267 Max Planck Institute, 265–66 McCormick, Cyrus, 87 McGarrigle, James, 60 Mead, Margaret, 20 meat-processing plants, 218 and animal research, 199 equipment used in, 3–5, 130, 133 internships/jobs in, 114, 118 and object visualizers, 91, 130 protecting animals at, 206 ransomware attack on, 228 mechanical devices, 11 mechanical inventions, 6, 37, 50, 85–96, 105–6, 126–27 mechanical thinkers, 157 medical profession, 9, 52, 63, 96, 108–9 memory. See visual: memory Men, Weiwei, 189 Mendel, Gregor, 166 mental illness, 82, 124 mentors, 66, 128, 158–59, 173, 190, 277 Merle’s Door (Kerasote), 271 Merrimack Valley, Massachusetts, 209–10 metalworkers, 37, 91–92, 96, 129, 175 Michelangelo, 156, 172–74, 190–91 Michigan Tech University, 117 Microsoft, 104–5, 124, 148, 164, 180–81 Millennium Tower (San Francisco), 208–9 Miller, Greg, 187 mirror self-recognition (MSR), 257–59, 266 Mishkin, Mortimer, 26 Mitchell, Charles E., 86 Mitchell, Kevin J., 168–69 Modern Practice of the Electric Telegraph (Pope), 158 Montaigne, Michel de, 241, 259 Moore, Curt, 162–63 Moore, Debra, 78 Morris, Edmund, 157 Mottron, Laurent, 12–13, 43, 66–67, 79–80 MRIs, 23–25, 27, 30, 40, 90, 169–70, 187, 200, 251, 263 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 119 music and the brain, 29–30, 169, 187–88, 266 complementary minds and, 150–51 geniuses and, 36, 108, 156, 171, 187, 189 and MRI brain scan, 169 and people with disabilities, 83, 101 public schools and, 51, 53 and visual thinkers, 7, 32, 45, 149–50, 187 Musk, Elon, 183, 190–91 on having Asperger’s, 35, 181–82 childhood of, 35, 182 as college dropout, 70, 124 and hiring workers, 103–4 running own companies, 103–4, 138 as visual thinker, 138–39, 182, 277 Musk, Maye, 182 My Octopus Teacher (film), 267 N NASA, 105, 139 Mars rover and, 92–93 sending chimps into space, 260–61 space program of, 137–38, 193–94 spacesuit collaboration at, 143–45 visual thinkers and, 194 women working at, 69 Nasar, Sylvia, 160 Nash, John, 160–61 Nasmyth, Kim, 46–47 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 63 National Association of Colleges and Employers, 117 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 67 National Education Association, 51 National Institute of Mental Health, 26 National Parent Teacher Association, 51 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 210 Native Americans, 73, 128, 240 Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act, 210 Nature, 66–67, 141, 152, 232 Navigating Autism (Grandin and Moore), 78–79 Nazi Germany, 82 Netherlands, 4–5, 95, 200, 257 Netscape, 103–4 neurodiverse people, 119, 174 hiring as workers, 7, 103–7 as object visualizers, 79 neurodiversity, 124, 193 and animals, 164–65 and autism, 80, 164 concept of, 99–100, 159–65 geniuses and, 6, 36, 67, 156, 191 new emphasis on, 102 as term, 159–60 Neuroscience of Creativity, The (Abraham), 185 NeuroTribes (Silberman), 164 neurotypical people, 20, 35, 66, 78–80, 102, 170, 185–86 New Civil Engineer, 209 New York Times, The, 40, 52–53, 58–59, 63–64, 71–73, 79, 149, 162, 211, 217 New York Times Magazine, The, 217 New Yorker, The, 18, 47, 137, 176 Newman, M.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The explosion in online communication and commerce is creating more opportunities for cybercrime. Moore’s law of the annual doubling of processing power doubles the power of fraudsters and thieves—“Moore’s Outlaws”1—not to mention spammers, identity thieves, phishers, spies, zombie farmers, hackers, cyberbullies, and datanappers—criminals who unleash ransomware to hold data hostage—the list goes on. IN SEARCH OF THE TRUST PROTOCOL As early as 1981, inventors were attempting to solve the Internet’s problems of privacy, security, and inclusion with cryptography. No matter how they reengineered the process, there were always leaks because third parties were involved.

Back’s method required e-mailers to provide proof of work when sending the message. It in effect stamped “special delivery” on an e-mail to signal the message’s importance to its sender. “This message is so critical that I’ve spent all this energy in sending it to you.” It increases the costs of sending spam, malware, and ransomware. Anyone can download the bitcoin protocol for free and maintain a copy of the blockchain. It leverages bootstrapping, a technique for uploading the program onto a volunteer’s computer or mobile device through a few simple instructions that set the rest of the program in motion. It’s fully distributed across a volunteer network like BitTorrent, a shared database of intellectual property that resides on tens of thousands of computers worldwide.

Security Principle: Safety measures are embedded in the network with no single point of failure, and they provide not only confidentiality, but also authenticity and nonrepudiation to all activity. Anyone who wants to participate must use cryptography—opting out is not an option—and the consequences of reckless behavior are isolated to the person who behaved recklessly. Problem to Be Solved: Hacking, identity theft, fraud, cyberbullying, phishing, spam, malware, ransomware—all of these undermine the security of the individual in society. The first era of the Internet, rather than bringing transparency and impairing violations, seems to have done little to increase security of persons, institutions, and economic activity. The average Internet user often has to rely on flimsy passwords to protect e-mail and online accounts because service providers or employers insist on nothing stronger.


pages: 330 words: 83,319

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder by Sean McFate

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, drone strike, escalation ladder, European colonialism, failed state, fake news, false flag, hive mind, index fund, invisible hand, John Markoff, joint-stock company, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, nuclear taboo, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, private military company, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technoutopianism, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Westphalian system, yellow journalism, Yom Kippur War, zero day, zero-sum game

If hackers are choosing targets, and they know that one company has a hack back company behind it and another does not, they select the softer target. Also known as active defense, this practice is currently illegal in many countries, including the United States, but some are questioning this wisdom, since the National Security Agency offers scant protection for nongovernment entities. For example, the WannaCry ransomware attack in 2017 infected more than 230,000 computers in over 150 countries. Victims included the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, Spain’s Telefónica, Germany’s Deutsche Bahn, and US companies like Federal Express. If countries cannot protect their people and organizations from cyberattacks, then why not allow them to protect themselves?

., 41–42 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, 220–21 Trinquier, Roger, 95 Triple Canopy, 131, 136 “Troll Factory,” 201–3 Trolls, 111, 214 Truman, Harry, 2, 79 Trump, Donald, 46, 70, 130, 158, 159, 167, 168, 202 Turkey, 162–63 Turkistan Islamic Party, 135–36 Twelfth Legion, 84–86 Ukraine, Orange Revolution, 112–13, 215 Ukrainian conflict, 64, 134–35, 195–98, 199–200, 203, 245 UkrTransNafta, 135 Unconventional wars, 28 number of, 35–36, 36 redefining war, 179–85 use of term, 29 Uniform Code of Military Justice, 101–2 United Arab Emirates, 134, 140 United Fruit Company, 208–9, 211 United Nations (UN), 3, 9, 32, 81, 139 Law of the Sea, 68 outsourcing peacekeeping, 280–81n peacekeeping missions, 2, 8, 32, 136, 146, 148, 153 Unrestricted Warfare (Qiao and Wang), 65 US Agency for International Development (USAID), 41–42 “Utility of force,” 106–8 Utopia (More), 127 Uzbekistan, 135, 153 “Vanishing point of law,” 139 Varangian Guard, 127 Velvet regime change, 112–13 Vercingetorix, 126 Vespasian, 86 Victory, 219–40 choosing weapon of war, 229–31 developing war artists, 237–40 February Revolution, 219–21 myth of bifurcated, 232–33, 235 secret to winning, 221–23 “tactization” of strategy, 233–37 use of term, 221–22 Vietnam War and, 223–29 Vietnam War, 1, 96, 122, 211, 223–29, 232–33 Wagner Group, 132, 133, 134 Wall Street, 165–66 WannaCry ransomware attack, 137–38 War algorithm, 50–51 War and peace, 59–82 exploding heads, 70–74 grand strategy, 74–82 nonwar wars, 64–70 South China Sea incident of 2017, 59–63 War artists, 237–40, 247 War colleges, 235–40 War dogs, 121–25 Warfare, 4, 6 war vs., 27–28 War futurists, 11–17 Billy Mitchell, 17–19, 20 Cassandra’s Curse, 20 false prophets, 12–17 identifying, 20–22 Warlords, 147–48, 149, 156–57, 182, 193 War of Eight Saints, 26–27 War on Drugs, 175, 176 Warrior-diplomats, 41 “War termination,” 246 War without states.


pages: 339 words: 92,785

I, Warbot: The Dawn of Artificially Intelligent Conflict by Kenneth Payne

Abraham Maslow, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boston Dynamics, classic study, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, functional programming, Geoffrey Hinton, Google X / Alphabet X, Internet of things, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, language acquisition, loss aversion, machine translation, military-industrial complex, move 37, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear taboo, nuclear winter, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, RAND corporation, ransomware, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological determinism, TED Talk, theory of mind, TikTok, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Von Neumann architecture, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Questions of attribution feature prominently in the debate about cyber warfare. How do you know who has attacked you? But attribution seems not to be the conundrum that many suppose—if high quality investigative reporters can glean insights as to who was responsible for an attack (the US and Israel for Stuxnet; North Korea for the WannaCry ransomware), then the extensive resources of state security apparatus will often be able to do likewise. The Mueller inquiry into foreign interference in the 2016 US Presidential election provided an insight into these formidable capabilities, as US investigators indicted a number of Russian nationals on charges of hacking American computers.

A-10 Warthog abacuses Abbottabad, Pakistan Able Archer (1983) acoustic decoys acoustic torpedoes Adams, Douglas Aegis combat system Aerostatic Corps affective empathy Affecto Afghanistan agency aircraft see also dogfighting; drones aircraft carriers algorithms algorithm creation Alpha biases choreography deep fakes DeepMind, see DeepMind emotion recognition F-117 Nighthawk facial recognition genetic selection imagery analysis meta-learning natural language processing object recognition predictive policing alien hand syndrome Aliens (1986 film) Alpha AlphaGo Altered Carbon (television series) Amazon Amnesty International amygdala Andropov, Yuri Anduril Ghost anti-personnel mines ants Apple Aristotle armour arms races Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Arnalds, Ólafur ARPA Art of War, The (Sun Tzu) art Artificial Intelligence agency and architecture autonomy and as ‘brittle’ connectionism definition of decision-making technology expert systems and feedback loops fuzzy logic innateness intelligence analysis meta-learning as ‘narrow’ needle-in-a-haystack problems neural networks reinforcement learning ‘strong AI’ symbolic logic and unsupervised learning ‘winters’ artificial neural networks Ashby, William Ross Asimov, Isaac Asperger syndrome Astute class boats Atari Breakout (1976) Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) Space Invaders (1978) Athens ATLAS robots augmented intelligence Austin Powers (1997 film) Australia authoritarianism autonomous vehicles see also drones autonomy B-21 Raider B-52 Stratofortress B2 Spirit Baby X BAE Systems Baghdad, Iraq Baidu balloons ban, campaigns for Banks, Iain Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Fleurus (1794) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) batwing design BBN Beautiful Mind, A (2001 film) beetles Bell Laboratories Bengio, Yoshua Berlin Crisis (1961) biases big data Bin Laden, Osama binary code biological weapons biotechnology bipolarity bits Black Lives Matter Black Mirror (television series) Blade Runner (1982 film) Blade Runner 2049 (2017 film) Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire blindness Blunt, Emily board games, see under games boats Boden, Margaret bodies Boeing MQ-25 Stingray Orca submarines Boolean logic Boston Dynamics Bostrom, Nick Boyd, John brain amygdala bodies and chunking dopamine emotion and genetic engineering and language and mind merge and morality and plasticity prediction and subroutines umwelts and Breakout (1976 game) breathing control brittleness brute force Buck Rogers (television series) Campaign against Killer Robots Carlsen, Magnus Carnegie Mellon University Casino Royale (2006 film) Castro, Fidel cat detector centaur combination Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) centre of gravity chaff Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Chauvet cave, France chemical weapons Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) chess centaur teams combinatorial explosion and creativity in Deep Blue game theory and MuZero as toy universe chicken (game) chimeras chimpanzees China aircraft carriers Baidu COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) D-21 in genetic engineering in GJ-11 Sharp Sword nuclear weapons surveillance in Thucydides trap and US Navy drone seizure (2016) China Lake, California Chomsky, Noam choreography chunking Cicero civilians Clarke, Arthur Charles von Clausewitz, Carl on character on culmination on defence on genius on grammar of war on materiel on nature on poker on willpower on wrestling codebreaking cognitive empathy Cold War (1947–9) arms race Berlin Crisis (1961) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) F-117 Nighthawk Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) joint action Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons research and SR-71 Blackbird U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN Cole, August combinatorial creativity combinatorial explosion combined arms common sense computers creativity cyber security games graphics processing unit (GPU) mice Moore’s Law symbolic logic viruses VRYAN confirmation bias connectionism consequentialism conservatism Convention on Conventional Weapons ConvNets copying Cormorant cortical interfaces cost-benefit analysis counterfactual regret minimization counterinsurgency doctrine courageous restraint COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) creativity combinatorial exploratory genetic engineering and mental disorders and transformational criminal law CRISPR, crows Cruise, Thomas Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culmination Culture novels (Banks) cyber security cybernetics cyborgs Cyc cystic fibrosis D-21 drones Damasio, Antonio dance DARPA autonomous vehicle research battlespace manager codebreaking research cortical interface research cyborg beetle Deep Green expert system programme funding game theory research LongShot programme Mayhem Ng’s helicopter Shakey understanding and reason research unmanned aerial combat research Dartmouth workshop (1956) Dassault data DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) dead hand system decision-making technology Deep Blue deep fakes Deep Green DeepMind AlphaGo Atari playing meta-learning research MuZero object recognition research Quake III competition (2019) deep networks defence industrial complex Defence Innovation Unit Defence Science and Technology Laboratory defence delayed gratification demons deontological approach depth charges Dionysus DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) dodos dogfighting Alpha domains dot-matrix tongue Dota II (2013 game) double effect drones Cormorant D-21 GJ-11 Sharp Sword Global Hawk Gorgon Stare kamikaze loitering munitions nEUROn operators Predator Reaper reconnaissance RQ-170 Sentinel S-70 Okhotnik surveillance swarms Taranis wingman role X-37 X-47b dual use technology Eagleman, David early warning systems Echelon economics Edge of Tomorrow (2014 film) Eisenhower, Dwight Ellsberg, Daniel embodied cognition emotion empathy encryption entropy environmental niches epilepsy epistemic community escalation ethics Asimov’s rules brain and consequentialism deep brain stimulation and deontological approach facial recognition and genetic engineering and golden rule honour hunter-gatherer bands and identity just war post-conflict reciprocity regulation surveillance and European Union (EU) Ex Machina (2014 film) expert systems exploratory creativity extra limbs Eye in the Sky (2015 film) F-105 Thunderchief F-117 Nighthawk F-16 Fighting Falcon F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning F/A-18 Hornet Facebook facial recognition feedback loops fighting power fire and forget firmware 5G cellular networks flow fog of war Ford forever wars FOXP2 gene Frahm, Nils frame problem France Fukushima nuclear disaster (2011) Future of Life Institute fuzzy logic gait recognition game theory games Breakout (1976) chess, see chess chicken Dota II (2013) Go, see Go Montezuma’s Revenge (1984) poker Quake III (1999) Space Invaders (1978) StarCraft II (2010) toy universes zero sum games gannets ‘garbage in, garbage out’ Garland, Alexander Gates, William ‘Bill’ Gattaca (1997 film) Gavotti, Giulio Geertz, Clifford generalised intelligence measure Generative Adversarial Networks genetic engineering genetic selection algorithms genetically modified crops genius Germany Berlin Crisis (1961) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Russian hacking operation (2015) World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Ghost in the Shell (comic book) GJ-11 Sharp Sword Gladwell, Malcolm Global Hawk drone global positioning system (GPS) global workspace Go (game) AlphaGo Gödel, Kurt von Goethe, Johann golden rule golf Good Judgment Project Google BERT Brain codebreaking research DeepMind, see DeepMind Project Maven (2017–) Gordievsky, Oleg Gorgon Stare GPT series grammar of war Grand Challenge aerial combat autonomous vehicles codebreaking graphics processing unit (GPU) Greece, ancient grooming standard Groundhog Day (1993 film) groupthink guerilla warfare Gulf War First (1990–91) Second (2003–11) hacking hallucinogenic drugs handwriting recognition haptic vest hardware Harpy Hawke, Ethan Hawking, Stephen heat-seeking missiles Hebrew Testament helicopters Hellfire missiles Her (2013 film) Hero-30 loitering munitions Heron Systems Hinton, Geoffrey Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) HIV (human immunodeficiency viruses) Hoffman, Frank ‘Holeshot’ (Cole) Hollywood homeostasis Homer homosexuality Hongdu GJ-11 Sharp Sword honour Hughes human in the loop human resources human-machine teaming art cyborgs emotion games King Midas problem prediction strategy hunter-gatherer bands Huntingdon’s disease Hurricane fighter aircraft hydraulics hypersonic engines I Robot (Asimov) IARPA IBM identity Iliad (Homer) image analysis image recognition cat detector imagination Improbotics nformation dominance information warfare innateness intelligence analysts International Atomic Energy Agency International Criminal Court international humanitarian law internet of things Internet IQ (intelligence quotient) Iran Aegis attack (1988) Iraq War (1980–88) nuclear weapons Stuxnet attack (2010) Iraq Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) Iran War (1980–88) Iron Dome Israel Italo-Turkish War (1911–12) Jaguar Land Rover Japan jazz JDAM (joint directed attack munition) Jeopardy Jobs, Steven Johansson, Scarlett Johnson, Lyndon Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) de Jomini, Antoine jus ad bellum jus in bello jus post bellum just war Kalibr cruise missiles kamikaze drones Kasparov, Garry Kellogg Briand Pact (1928) Kennedy, John Fitzgerald KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti) Khrushchev, Nikita kill chain King Midas problem Kissinger, Henry Kittyhawk Knight Rider (television series) know your enemy know yourself Korean War (1950–53) Kratos XQ-58 Valkyrie Kubrick, Stanley Kumar, Vijay Kuwait language connectionism and genetic engineering and natural language processing pattern recognition and semantic webs translation universal grammar Law, Jude LeCun, Yann Lenat, Douglas Les, Jason Libratus lip reading Litvinenko, Alexander locked-in patients Lockheed dogfighting trials F-117 Nighthawk F-22 Raptor F-35 Lightning SR-71 Blackbird logic loitering munitions LongShot programme Lord of the Rings (2001–3 film trilogy) LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) Luftwaffe madman theory Main Battle Tanks malum in se Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marcus, Gary Maslow, Abraham Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Matrix, The (1999 film) Mayhem McCulloch, Warren McGregor, Wayne McNamara, Robert McNaughton, John Me109 fighter aircraft medical field memory Merkel, Angela Microsoft military industrial complex Mill, John Stuart Milrem mimicry mind merge mind-shifting minimax regret strategy Minority Report (2002 film) Minsky, Marvin Miramar air base, San Diego missiles Aegis combat system agency and anti-missile gunnery heat-seeking Hellfire missiles intercontinental Kalibr cruise missiles nuclear warheads Patriot missile interceptor Pershing II missiles Scud missiles Tomahawk cruise missiles V1 rockets V2 rockets mission command mixed strategy Montezuma’s Revenge (1984 game) Moore’s Law mosaic warfare Mueller inquiry (2017–19) music Musk, Elon Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) MuZero Nagel, Thomas Napoleon I, Emperor of the French Napoleonic France (1804–15) narrowness Nash equilibrium Nash, John National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Security Agency (NSA) National War College natural language processing natural selection Nature navigation computers Nazi Germany (1933–45) needle-in-a-haystack problems Netflix network enabled warfare von Neumann, John neural networks neurodiversity nEUROn drone neuroplasticity Ng, Andrew Nixon, Richard normal accident theory North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) North Korea nuclear weapons Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) dead hand system early warning systems F-105 Thunderchief and game theory and Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Manhattan Project (1942–6) missiles Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) second strike capability submarines and VRYAN and in WarGames (1983 film) Nuremburg Trials (1945–6) Obama, Barack object recognition Observe Orient Decide and Act (OODA) offence-defence balance Office for Naval Research Olympic Games On War (Clausewitz), see Clausewitz, Carl OpenAI optogenetics Orca submarines Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) pain Pakistan Palantir Palmer, Arnold Pandemonium Panoramic Research Papert, Seymour Parkinson’s disease Patriot missile interceptors pattern recognition Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) Pentagon autonomous vehicle research codebreaking research computer mouse development Deep Green Defence Innovation Unit Ellsberg leaks (1971) expert system programme funding ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story intelligence analysts Project Maven (2017–) Shakey unmanned aerial combat research Vietnam War (1955–75) perceptrons Perdix Pershing II missiles Petrov, Stanislav Phalanx system phrenology pilot’s associate Pitts, Walter platform neutrality Pluribus poker policing polygeneity Portsmouth, Hampshire Portuguese Man o’ War post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Predator drones prediction centaur teams ‘garbage in, garbage out’ story policing toy universes VRYAN Prescience principles of war prisoners Project Improbable Project Maven (2017–) prosthetic arms proximity fuses Prussia (1701–1918) psychology psychopathy punishment Putin, Vladimir Pyeongchang Olympics (2018) Qinetiq Quake III (1999 game) radar Rafael RAND Corporation rational actor model Rawls, John Re:member (Arnalds) Ready Player One (Cline) Reagan, Ronald Reaper drones reciprocal punishment reciprocity reconnaissance regulation ban, campaigns for defection self-regulation reinforcement learning remotely piloted air vehicles (RPAVs) revenge porn revolution in military affairs Rid, Thomas Robinson, William Heath Robocop (1987 film) Robotics Challenge robots Asimov’s rules ATLAS Boston Dynamics homeostatic Shakey symbolic logic and Rome Air Defense Center Rome, ancient Rosenblatt, Frank Royal Air Force (RAF) Royal Navy RQ-170 Sentinel Russell, Stuart Russian Federation German hacking operation (2015) Litvinenko murder (2006) S-70 Okhotnik Skripal poisoning (2018) Ukraine War (2014–) US election interference (2016) S-70 Okhotnik SAGE Said and Done’ (Frahm) satellite navigation satellites Saudi Arabia Schelling, Thomas schizophrenia Schwartz, Jack Sea Hunter security dilemma Sedol, Lee self-actualisation self-awareness self-driving cars Selfridge, Oliver semantic webs Shakey Shanahan, Murray Shannon, Claude Shogi Silicon Valley Simon, Herbert Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) singularity Siri situational awareness situationalist intelligence Skripal, Sergei and Yulia Slaughterbots (2017 video) Slovic, Paul smartphones Smith, Willard social environments software Sophia Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The (Goethe) South China Sea Soviet Union (1922–91) aircraft Berlin Crisis (1961) Chernobyl nuclear disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War collapse (1991) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) early warning systems Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) Korean War (1950–53) nuclear weapons radar technology U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) VRYAN World War II (1939–45) Space Invaders (1978 game) SpaceX Sparta Spike Firefly loitering munitions Spitfire fighter aircraft Spotify Stanford University Stanley Star Trek (television series) StarCraft II (2010 game) stealth strategic bombing strategic computing programme strategic culture Strategy Robot strategy Strava Stuxnet sub-units submarines acoustic decoys nuclear Orca South China Sea incident (2016) subroutines Sukhoi Sun Tzu superforecasting surveillance swarms symbolic logic synaesthesia synthetic operation environment Syria Taliban tanks Taranis drone technological determinism Tempest Terminator franchise Tesla Tetlock, Philip theory of mind Threshold Logic Unit Thucydides TikTok Tomahawk cruise missiles tongue Top Gun (1986 film) Top Gun: Maverick (2021 film) torpedoes toy universes trade-offs transformational creativity translation Trivers, Robert Trump, Donald tumours Turing, Alan Twitter 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Type-X Robotic Combat Vehicle U2 incident (1960) Uber Uexküll, Jacob Ukraine ultraviolet light spectrum umwelts uncanny valley unidentified flying objects (UFOs) United Kingdom AI weapons policy armed force, size of Battle of Britain (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Cold War (1947–9) COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) DeepMind, see DeepMind F-35 programme fighting power human rights legislation in Litvinenko murder (2006) nuclear weapons principles of war Project Improbable Qinetiq radar technology Royal Air Force Royal Navy Skripal poisoning (2018) swarm research wingman concept World War I (1914–18) United Nations United States Afghanistan War (2001–14) Air Force Army Research Lab Army Signal Corps Battle of Midway (1942) Berlin Crisis (1961) Bin Laden assassination (2011) Black Lives Matter protests (2020) centaur team research Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (1986) Cold War (1947–9), see Cold War COVID-19 pandemic (2019–21) Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) culture cyber security DARPA, see DARPA Defense Department drones early warning systems F-35 programme Gulf War I (1990–91) Gulf War II (2003–11) IARPA Iran Air shoot-down (1988) Korean War (1950–53) Manhattan Project (1942–6) Marines Mueller inquiry (2017–19) National Security Agency National War College Navy nuclear weapons Office for Naval Research Patriot missile interceptor Pearl Harbor attack (1941) Pentagon, see Pentagon Project Maven (2017–) Rome Air Defense Center Silicon Valley strategic computing programme U2 incident (1960) Vienna Summit (1961) Vietnam War (1955–75) universal grammar Universal Schelling Machine (USM) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), see drones unsupervised learning utilitarianism UVision V1 rockets V2 rockets Vacanti mouse Valkyries Van Gogh, Vincent Vietnam War (1955–75) Vigen, Tyler Vincennes, USS voice assistants VRYAN Wall-e (2008 film) WannaCry ransomware War College, see National War College WarGames (1983 film) warrior ethos Watson weapon systems WhatsApp Wiener, Norbert Wikipedia wingman role Wittgenstein, Ludwig World War I (1914–18) World War II (1939–45) Battle of Britain (1940) Battle of Midway (1942) Battle of Sedan (1940) Bletchley Park codebreaking Blitz (1940–41) Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (1945) Pearl Harbor attack (1941) radar technology V1 rockets V2 rockets VRYAN and Wrangham, Richard Wright brothers WS-43 loitering munitions Wuhan, China X-37 drone X-drone X-rays YouTube zero sum games


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

Some of the hacks we hear about today are reasonably funny, like when a ‘smart’ toilet was reprogrammed to fire jets of water onto the backside of its unfortunate user.56 Others, however, are more sinister, like the ‘smart’ doll that could be reprogrammed to listen and speak to the toddler playing with it.57 Still others are deeply troubling: in 2016, ‘ransomware’ held hostage people’s medical records until insurance companies paid $20 million.58 The scale of the problem is serious. A study of ‘critical infrastructure companies’ in 2014 revealed that in the previous year nearly 70 per cent of them had suffered at least one security breach leading to the loss of confidential information OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 30/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Freedom and the Supercharged State 183 or disruption of operations.

32 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Index Jie, Ke 32 job applicants 266–7, 268 Jobs, Steve 314 Johnson, Bobby 399 Johnson, Steve 427 Jones, Steve 388 Jøsang, Audun 423 Jouppi, Norm 375 judicial system 102 Jury Theorem 224 justice algorithmic injustice 279–94 civil 259 concept 74–5, 76 conceptual analysis 81 criminal 259 as desert 260–1 as dessert 261, 262 distributive 257–70, 274, 278 and equality, difference between 259 fairness principle 353 property 313–41 in recognition 260, 271–8 social see social justice technological unemployment 295–312 Justinian, Emperor 202 Kahane, Guy 434 Kant, Immanuel 186, 272, 406 Karrahalios, Karrie 433 Kasparov, Garry 31, 36, 373 Kassarnig,Valentin 372 Keen, Andrew 376 Kelion, Leo 413 Kellmereit, Daniel 380 Kelly, Kevin 20, 21, 370, 373, 374, 375, 430 Kelly, Rick 384, 385 Kelly III, John E. 386, 388 Kelsen, Hans 103, 392 Kennedy, John F. 164, 188, 347 Kennedy, Robert F. 256 Keurig 116 Khatchadourian, Raffi 52, 382 503 Khomami, Nadia 397 Al-Khw­ār izmī, Abd’Abdallah Muhammad ibn Mūsā 94 Kim, Mark 376 King, Martin Luther 6, 180, 257, 360, 404 Kirchner, Lauren 403 Kirobo Mini 55 Kitchin, Rob 376, 377, 380, 381, 387, 388, 391, 404 Klaas, Brian 408 Kleinman, Zoe 383 Knockel, Jeffrey 399 Koch brothers 230 Kolhatkar, Sheelah 367, 423 Kollanyi, Bence 413 Korea 20 Kotler, Steven 374, 435 Krasodomski-Jones, Alex 412 Kurzweil, Ray 38, 366, 374, 436 Kymlicka, Will 418 labour market 303 Lai, Richard 386 Lampos,Vasileios 393 Landemore, Hélène 408, 411, 416 Laney, Doug 431 Langbort, Cedric 433 language importance to politics 16–17, 19 limits of 10–11 political concepts 76–80 public and private power 157 Lanier, Jaron 367, 374, 384, 400, 416, 419, 428, 431, 435 Data Deal 338 human enhancement 363 network effect 321 Silicon Valley startups 6–7 Wiki Democracy 246 Lant, Karla 376 Laouris,Yiannis 435 Large Hadron Collider 65 Larkin,Yelena 427 Larson, Jeff 403, 422 Larson, Selena 370, 421 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 504 Index law adaptive 107–10 AI Democracy 253 AI systems 31 code-ified 110–12, 245 digital 100–14 dissent 179–80 enforcement 101–7 intellectual property 332 justice in recognition 274–5 oral cultures 111–12 rule of 115 self-enforcing 101–3 supercharged state 171–2 wise restraints 185–6 written 111, 112 Lawrence, Neil 374, 388, 427 Leftwich, Adrian 389 Lenin,Vladimir Ilyich 21, 153, 370 Leonardo Da Vinci 28 Lessig, Lawrence 391, 392, 394, 420, 433 code as law 96 cyberspace as a place 97 free software 359 law enforcement through force 104, 105 privatization of force 100, 117 Leta Jones, Meg 138, 397, 432 Levellers 215–16 Levy, Steven 404 Lewis, Michael 428 liberal democracy 216–17, 246, 254 liberal-democratic principle of legitimacy 350 liberalism 77, 350 liberty 3, 10, 23, 346 concept 74–5, 76 conceptual analysis 81 contextual analysis 84 Deliberative Democracy 234 and democracy 207–8, 222, 225, 249 digital 205–7 digital dissent 179–84 digital liberation 168–71 harm principle 195–205 human enhancement 363 nature of politics 74 price mechanism 270 and private power 189–94 supercharged state 171–9 and the tech firm 188–208 transparency regulation 355 types 164–8 wise restraints 184–6 see also freedom Library of Congress 56 life-logs 63 Lincoln, Abraham 89, 210, 231, 323 Linn, Allison 398 Linux 243–4, 245, 333 Lipińska,Veronika 435 lip-reading 30 liquid democracy 242 Lively, J. 409 Livingston, James 425 Livy 216 loans, and distributive justice 267, 268 Locke, John 216, 246, 301, 323, 429 loomio.org 234 Lopatto, Elizabeth 434 lottery, work distribution via 304 Loveluck, Benjamin 378 Luca, Michael 423 luck egalitarianism 262, 307 Luddites 13 Lukes, Steven 390–1, 395, 398 Luxemburg, Rosa 348, 432 Lynch, Jack 384 Machiavelli, Niccolò 188, 217, 406, 409 machine learning 34–7, 266 algorithmic injustice 293 commons 332 data-based injustice 282 Data Democracy 248 data’s economic importance 317 distributive justice 267 future of code 98 group membership fallacy 284 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Index increasingly quantified society 61 liberty and private power 191 political campaigning 220 predictions 139, 173, 175 productive technologies 316 rule-based injustice 284 MacKinnon, Rebecca 396 Madison, James 216, 241, 369, 415 MagicLeap 59 Maistre, Joseph de 101 make-work 304 manipulation 93, 122 code 96, 97 digital liberation 170–1 harm principle 200 Mannheim, Karl 78, 390 Manyika, James 424 Mao, Huina 416 Marconi, Guglielmo 21 marginalization 273 Margretts, Helen 410 market system, and distributive justice 264–5 Markoff, John 400, 413 Martinez, Peter 413 Marx, Karl 367, 390, 398, 415, 417, 424, 425, 429, 434, 436 Communist Manifesto 326–7, 362 Direct Democracy 240–1 future of political ideas 86 justice 258 perception-control 144 on philosophers 7 political concepts 78 property 324, 326–7 sorcerer 366 workers 295, 298, 301, 307 Mason, Paul 374 Massachusetts Institute of Technology see MIT Mattu, Surya 403 Maxim, Hiram 20 Mayer-Schönberger,Viktor 387, 388, 395, 397, 427, 433 data 62, 65 forgetting versus remembering 137 505 Mayr, Otto 14, 368 McAfee, Andrew 374, 382, 390, 393, 427, 431 capital 315, 316, 334 McChesney, Robert W. 400, 427 McDermott, Daniel 390 McGinnis, John O. 416 McKinsey 295, 299 Mearian, Lucas 386 MedEthEx 108 medicine 3D printing 56–7 AI systems 31, 32, 108–9, 113 digital law 112–13 increasingly integrated technology 51, 54, 56–7 ransomware 182 robotics 54 technological unemployment 300 Medium 183 memory 136–8 Merchant, Brian 430 merit, and distributive justice 261 Mesthene, Emmanuel G. 368 metadata 63 Metcalfe’s Law 320 Metz, Cade 372, 373, 374, 375, 380 Metz, Rachel 407 Michaely, Roni 427 Microsoft acquisitions 318 chips 40 commons 332 concentration of tech industry 318, 320 Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism 191 HoloLens 59 patents 315 speech-recognition AI system 30 Tay 37, 346 might is right 349 military AI systems 31 brain–computer interfaces 48 sensors 50 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS 506 Index Mill, James 195 Mill, John Stuart 367, 403, 406–7, 411, 414, 415 change, need for 3 Deliberative Democracy 234 democracy 223 freedom of speech, constraints on 237 harm principle 196, 198, 199, 203 liberty 195–6, 201, 203 liquid democracy 242 normative analysis 83 predictions 173 upbringing 195 Miller, David 435 Mills, Laurence 418 Milton, John 124, 167, 395 minstrel accounts 232 Mirani, Leo 396 Miremadi, Mehdi 424 Misra, Tanvi 377 MIT affective computing 53 bomb-detecting spinach 50–1 Senseable City Lab 50 Technology Review Custom 427 temporary tattoos for smartphone control 51 Mitchell, Margaret 403 Mitchell, William J. 183, 376, 405 Mizokami, Kyle 379 Moley 407 Momentum Machines 299 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de 358, 433 Moore, Gordon 39, 374 Moore’s Law 39–40, 41 morality AI Democracy 253 automation of 176–7 Data Democracy 249–50 Direct Democracy 240 fragmented 204, 231 harm principle 200–5 justice in distribution 261 see also ethics Moravec’s paradox 54, 382 More, Max 402, 434 Morgan, J.

A. 389 Pokémon Go 58 political campaigning 219–20 political concepts 74–80 political hacking 180–2 political speeches 31, 360–1 political theory 80–5 conceptual analysis 81–3, 84–5 contextual analysis 84–5 future of 84–5 normative analysis 83–5 promise of 9–11 politicians Direct Democracy 240–1, 243 technocratic 251 politics definition 74 nature of 70–4 of politics 72 post-truth 230–1, 237 of prediction 172–6 task of 346 of tech firms 156–9 Popper, Ben 381 Portugal 50 post-politics 362–6 post-truth politics 230–1, 237 Potts, Amanda 422 power 3, 10, 22–3, 89, 345–6 code as 95–7, 154–5 concept 75, 76 conceptual analysis 81 definition 92 digital technology 94–8 faces of 92–3 force 100–21 and liberty 189–94 nature of 90–2 nature of politics 74 perception-control 142–52 private 153–60, 189–94 public 153–60 range of 91–2, 158 scrutiny 122–41 separation of powers 358–9 and significance 92, 158 stability of 92, 158 structural regulation 356, 357–9 supercharged state 347–8 tech firms 348–54 pragmatism 349 predictability of behaviour 127, 138–9 prediction Data Democracy 250 politics of 172–6 totalitarianism 177 predictive policing 174, 176 predictive sentencing 174, 176 preliterate societies 111–12 Preotiuc, Daniel 393 pricing mechanism 269–70, 286 Prince, Matthew 414 Princeton Review 286 printing technology 3D printing 56–7, 178, 329 4D printing 57 Gutenberg’s press 20, 62–3 prioritarians 260 Pritchard, Tom 405 Private Property Paradigm 323–7, 336 privatization of force 100, 114–19 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 28/05/18, SPi РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS Index productive technologies 316–17 state ownership 329 taxation 328 profit, rights of 330–1 Promobot 55–6 property 313–41 capital 314–17 concentration of 318–22 concept 77, 78 conceptual analysis 82–3 future 327 new paradigm 327–40 Private Property Paradigm 323–7 types of 324 Wealth Cyclone 322–3 ProPublica 174 Proteus Biomedical 51 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 232 proxy votes 242 public utilities, similarity of tech firms to 157–8 Qin dynasty 131 quantum computers 40 Quantum Dot Cellular Automata (QDCA) technology 41 race/racism data-based injustice 282 neutrality fallacy 288, 289, 290 recidivism prediction 174 rule-based injustice 283, 285 Radicati Group Inc. 387 Ralph Lauren 44 ranking, digital 276–8 algorithmic injustice 289–90 ransomware 182 rateability of life 139–40, 277 rational ignorance, problem of 241 Ratner, Paul 383 Rawls, John 389, 404, 417, 419, 432 justice 257, 258, 262–3 political hacking 181 political theory 9 reality, fragmented 229–31, 237 real property 324 509 recognition, algorithms of 260, 275–8 Reddit 77 regulation of tech firms 350–1, 354–9 reinforcement learning (AI) 35 Remnick, David 367, 412 representative democracy 218, 240, 248 republican freedom 167–8, 184 and democracy 222 and private power 191 wise restraints 185 Republican Party (US) 229 reputation.com 290 reputation systems 289–90 resources, limited 365 responsibility, individual 346–7 Reuters 405 revolution concept 77, 78 Richards, Thomas 369 Rieff, David 397 right to explanation 354 usufructuary 330–1 to work 304–5, 307 Riley v.


pages: 328 words: 96,678

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them by Nouriel Roubini

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, 9 dash line, AI winter, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, failed state, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, game design, geopolitical risk, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, GPS: selective availability, green transition, Greensill Capital, Greenspan put, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge worker, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, margin call, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meme stock, Michael Milken, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Mustafa Suleyman, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, negative equity, Nick Bostrom, non-fungible token, non-tariff barriers, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, paradox of thrift, pets.com, Phillips curve, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price mechanism, price stability, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, reshoring, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, Second Machine Age, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

On the production side, positive supply shocks occur when productivity gets a sharp boost from favorable changes in technology, labor supply, or regulation. Recall the internet’s impact on efficiency in the workplace. Conversely, sudden drop-offs in production cause negative aggregate supply shocks—such as the ransomware attacks that shut down major US suppliers of oil and beef in 2021 or more severely the Russian invasion of Ukraine that spiked a wide range of commodity prices. Anyone old enough to remember lines at gas pumps during the 1970s knows what a global oil-supply shock looks like. Even the COVID-19 crisis was a combination of a negative demand and supply shock as we shut down economic activity to stop the spread of the virus.

Unlike regulated banks that cater to customers with a weak grasp of their portfolios, purveyors of cryptocurrencies furnish almost no protections. If private keys are forgotten, lost, hacked, or stolen, crypto wealth can vanish with no way to recover it. Because decentralized transactions evade monitoring, the market lures unsavory activities like money laundering, tax evasion, human trafficking, terrorism, criminal financing, and ransomware attacks. Digital “stablecoins” supposedly pegged one-to-one to the dollar or other fiat currencies are also suspect. If they are backed by risky assets, tumbling market value can trigger runs that rattle the crypto market and far beyond. In 2008, few assets seemed safer than money market securities with net asset value anchored to parity.


pages: 444 words: 118,393

The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece by Ron Jeffries

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, bitcoin, business cycle, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, call centre, cloud computing, continuous integration, Conway's law, creative destruction, dark matter, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, Firefox, Hacker News, industrial robot, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, load shedding, loose coupling, machine readable, Mars Rover, microservices, Minecraft, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, OSI model, peer-to-peer lending, platform as a service, power law, ransomware, revision control, Ruby on Rails, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software is eating the world, source of truth, SQL injection, systems thinking, text mining, time value of money, transaction costs, Turing machine, two-pizza team, web application, zero day

Chapter 11 Security Poor security practices can damage your organization and many others. Your company may suffer direct losses from fraud or extortion. That damage gets multiplied by the cost of remediation, customer compensation, regulatory fines, and lost reputation. Individuals will lose their jobs, up to and including the CEO.[50] In 2017, the “WannaCry” ransomware affected more than 70 countries. It hit office computers, subway displays, and hospitals. The UK’s National Health Service got hit particularly hard, causing X-ray sessions to be canceled, stroke centers to close, and surgeries to be postponed. It put lives at risk.[51] In an epic game of one-upmanship, Equifax revealed in 2017 that 145.5 million US consumers’ identities had been stolen.[52] And Yahoo!

Follow the trail from here into the rich and scary world of CVEs,[72] CWEs,[73] and CERTs.[74] This finishes our slow zoom out from the physical substrate—copper, silicon, and iron oxide—all the way to systemic considerations. In the next part, we will look at the moment of truth: deployment! Footnotes [50] http://wapo.st/1juGxSu [51] https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2017/05/wannacry-and-ransomware-impact-on-patient-care-could-cause-fatalities [52] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equifax#May.E2.80.93July_2017_security_breach [53] http://www.outsideonline.com/2186526/nut-job [54] http://www.owasp.org [55] http://bobby-tables.com [56] http://www.owasp.org/index.php/SQL_Injection_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet [57] https://www.owasp.org/index.php/XML_External_Entity_(XXE)_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet [58] http://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Java_Encoder_Project [59] http://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_(Cross_Site_Scripting)_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet [60] http://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/22.html [61] http://www.mongodb.com/blog/post/how-to-avoid-a-malicious-attack-that-ransoms-your-data [62] http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Password_Storage_Cheat_Sheet [63] http://docs.aws.amazon.com/kms/latest/developerguide/concepts.html [64] http://www.vaultproject.io [65] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-west-first-party-cookies-06 [66] http://caniuse.com/#feat=same-site-cookie-attribute [67] http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Cross-Site_Request_Forgery_(CSRF)_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet [68] https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5638 [69] https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Dependency_Check [70] https://www.versioneye.com/ [71] http://www.tripwire.com [72] http://cve.mitre.org [73] https://cwe.mitre.org/index.html [74] http://www.cert.org Copyright © 2018, The Pragmatic Bookshelf.


pages: 151 words: 39,757

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

4chan, Abraham Maslow, basic income, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, context collapse, corporate governance, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Milgram experiment, move fast and break things, Network effects, peak TV, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, theory of mind, WikiLeaks, you are the product, zero-sum game

An interesting detail that came out a year after the election is that Facebook had offered both the Clinton and Trump campaigns onsite teams to help them maximize their use of the platform, but only Trump’s campaign accepted the offer.18 Maybe if Clinton had agreed to have Facebook employees in her office, she would have won. The election was so close that any little thing that moved the needle in her direction could have tipped the result. Facebook and other BUMMER companies are becoming the ransomware of human attention. They have such a hold on so much of so many people’s attention for so much of each day that they are gatekeepers to brains. The situation reminds me of the medieval practice of indulgences, in which the Catholic Church of the time would sometimes demand money for a soul to enter heaven.


pages: 200 words: 47,378

The Internet of Money by Andreas M. Antonopoulos

AltaVista, altcoin, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, Dogecoin, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial exclusion, global reserve currency, information security, litecoin, London Interbank Offered Rate, Marc Andreessen, Oculus Rift, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, QR code, ransomware, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, the medium is the message, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, underbanked, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

"Let’s take three radically disruptive technologies and mash them together. Bitcoin. Uber. Self-driving cars. What happens when you mash the three together? The self-owning car." I can guarantee you that one of the first distributed autonomous corporations is going to be a fully autonomous, artificial-intelligence-based ransomware virus that will go out and rob people online of their bitcoin, and use that money to evolve itself to pay for better programming, to buy hosting, and to spread. That’s one vision of the future. Another vision of the future is a digital autonomous charity. Imagine a system that takes donations from people, and using those donations it monitors social media like Twitter and Facebook.


pages: 175 words: 54,755

Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving by Jason Torchinsky

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, interchangeable parts, job automation, Philippa Foot, ransomware, self-driving car, sensor fusion, side project, Tesla Model S, trolley problem, urban sprawl

A hacker who can compromise a given robotic vehicle could, as you can imagine, cause a hell of a lot of trouble if they gain access to even a subset of the car’s systems involved in driving. Steering, throttle, or braking control, or even just the ability to impair or impede the usual flow of commands, could have devastating consequences. Cars could also be hacked in less dramatic ways, like spreading ransomware-like viruses from car to car that hobble the vehicles’ capabilities unless money is paid. Every shitty thing that hackers or malware has managed to do to personal computers could happen to robotic vehicles, because, fundamentally, they’re just computers. I think, in general, most security systems will be enough to avoid disaster, in much the same way that, for the most part, our networks of computers and phones and spy cams and internet-­connected refrigerators generally work.


pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

‘NSA and GCHQ Target Tor Network That Protects Anonymity of Web Users’, Guardian, 4 October 2013 16. ‘Why the NSA’s Attacks on the Internet Must Be Made Public’, Guardian, 4 October 2013 17. In May 2017 it was reported that one leaked NSA tool, an exploit of Microsoft Windows called EternalBlue, had been used to rapidly spread a ransomware variant called WannaCry across the world. The ransomware hit UK hospitals hard, with multiple sources reporting closures of entire wards. (Forbes, 12 May 2017; Thomas Fox-Brewster) 18. The respective homes of MI6, MI5 and GCHQ. 19. ‘The Detention of David Miranda Was an Unlawful Use of the Terrorism Act’, Guardian, 21 August 2013 20.


Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery by Andrew Greenway,Ben Terrett,Mike Bracken,Tom Loosemore

Airbnb, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, butterfly effect, call centre, chief data officer, choice architecture, cognitive dissonance, cryptocurrency, data science, Diane Coyle, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, G4S, hype cycle, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, loose coupling, M-Pesa, machine readable, megaproject, minimum viable product, nudge unit, performance metric, ransomware, robotic process automation, Silicon Valley, social web, The future is already here, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, work culture

Maybe your IT has not been able to pay your employees on time, as happened in Canada, where 80,000 officials were paid the incorrect amount thanks to an IBM system failure.20 Maybe the world has realised you’ve spent many millions on a new IT system that doesn’t appear to work, like the Centrelink debt recovery system in Australia, referred to the government ombudsman after creating what a senior politician described as ‘summer from hell for thousands of people who have done absolutely nothing wrong’.21 Maybe your flagship policy has hit the rocks, as the UK’s Universal Credit did in 2013, forcing the department to write off at least £130 million of IT.22 Maybe you’ve been hit by ransomware, as 40 NHS trusts were by the Wannacry attack in May 2017, and been forced to cancel 6,900 appointments.23 Maybe your biggest new website crashed, like healthcare.gov in the US, forcing the president to attend a White House Rose Garden press conference to apologise. Maybe people are angry, as they were with British Airways when a new IT system crashed worldwide for the sixth time in a year, causing more than 1,000 flights to be delayed or cancelled.24 Maybe people are disadvantaged, disenchanted or at personal risk as a result of your organisation’s failure, as happened to almost the entire population of Sweden in July 2017 when it emerged that an outsourcing deal between the Swedish Transport Agency and IBM Sweden had led to a data leak affecting almost every citizen, including security and military personnel.25 You may be thinking that the tried and tested response to this crisis is inadequate.


Demystifying Smart Cities by Anders Lisdorf

3D printing, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bike sharing, bitcoin, business intelligence, business logic, business process, chief data officer, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion pricing, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, digital rights, digital twin, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Google Glasses, hydroponic farming, income inequality, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Large Hadron Collider, Masdar, microservices, Minecraft, OSI model, platform as a service, pneumatic tube, ransomware, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, self-driving car, smart cities, smart meter, software as a service, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

Availability refers to the extent to which data can be accessed and not just suddenly disappear. It is defined as “Ensuring timely and reliable access to and use of information...” (FISMA). A loss of availability is the disruption of access to or use of information or an information system. This was what happened with the WannaCry ransomware attacks. In this case, the virus infects the affected computers and encrypts the file drives. Entire networks had all their files encrypted, rendering them unavailable until a ransom was paid to the perpetrator who would then make the files available again. Mitigation tactics These are different types of security risks that smart city solutions face.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

It took less than a day to realize the same-day service was a fiasco as fully 10 percent of the company’s transactions came back as fraudulent, costing Coinbase both cash and bitcoin. The team wryly referred to the problem as “friendly fraud.” The team also had to grapple with the uncomfortable fact that some of their customers treated the company as their personal money-laundering agent for a host of crimes. These included ransomware operators who would lock up the computers of companies, cities, and schools and only unlock them once the victims had paid a ransom in bitcoin. Once crooks had collected their ransoms, a site like Coinbase offered an excellent place to turn those bitcoin into US dollars. Coinbase was hardly the first company to be an unwitting agent to money laundering.


pages: 296 words: 78,631

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Hannah Fry

23andMe, 3D printing, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, chief data officer, computer vision, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Chrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, ransomware, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, selection bias, self-driving car, Shai Danziger, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, sparse data, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, systematic bias, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, trolley problem, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web of trust, William Langewiesche, you are the product

The patients themselves were never asked for their consent, never given an opt-out, never even told they were to be part of the study.47 It’s worth adding that Google was forbidden to use the information in any other part of its business. And – in fairness – it does have a much better track record on data security than the NHS, whose hospitals were brought to a standstill by a North Korean ransomware computer virus in 2017.48 But even so, there is something rather troubling about an already incredibly powerful, world-leading technology company having access to that kind of information about you as an individual. Problems with privacy Let’s be honest, Google isn’t exactly short of private, even intimate information on each of us.


pages: 352 words: 80,030

The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World by Peter Frankopan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, cashless society, clean water, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, F. W. de Klerk, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, global supply chain, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, land reform, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Meghnad Desai, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, purchasing power parity, ransomware, Rubik’s Cube, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, trade route, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, urban planning, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Indeed, in April 2018, the US Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre issued a formal alert about Russian state-sponsored attempts to target hardware that controls internet traffic.67 Nevertheless, like other countries, Russia has experience of having to deal with ransomware and with hacks on its banking system, mobile telephony and government agencies, which it is keen to avoid or prevent in the future.68 In the west, one of the most important contemporary questions concerns the monetisation of data – and about the legality and ethics of corporations like Facebook gathering and deploying information about users and even about users’ friends and contacts who are not on social networks.


pages: 303 words: 81,071

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

But a few days trawling dark web message boards and code depositories when he’d got back to Bristol and he’d pieced together some clues, some snippets of code alongside the hysterical conspiracy theories and excited exclamations. The consensus seemed to be it was of military or intelligence agency origin, and regardless of where it had come from there was no doubting it was meant to be a weapon. Rush had seen countless ransomware tools come and go over the decades, viruses designed to seize and infect systems, to paralyze them until their desperate, money-hemorrhaging users coughed up the requested bitcoins to get their data and businesses back. But this was different. There wasn’t even any pretense of making money here, no attempt to inform or give warning to users.


pages: 302 words: 85,877

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Andy Rubin, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, commoditize, corporate governance, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, Google Chrome, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Naomi Klein, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, pirate software, pre–internet, Ralph Nader, ransomware, Richard Stallman, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

Most of the information came from late 2013, after Edward Snowden had left the agency, meaning that there was another mole, or a hack of agency hardware, or a careless employee who had been hacked. Shadow Brokers kept going for months. Some of the tricks it disclosed were then used by others, including the presumed North Korean distributors of badly crafted ransomware called WannaCry, which shuttered hospitals and other facilities around the planet in 2017. Eventually, two NSA employees were charged with bringing classified files home. At least one of them had been running Kaspersky antivirus on his personal computer. That was cause for special concern, because the Israelis had broken into Kaspersky’s networks in 2015.


pages: 304 words: 80,143

The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines by William Davidow, Michael Malone

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, holacracy, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, license plate recognition, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, QWERTY keyboard, ransomware, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, Snapchat, speech recognition, streetcar suburb, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, trade route, Turing test, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, zero day, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Bots can be used to recruit thousands of online devices to flood targeted websites with so many messages that they are overwhelmed and can no longer service customers. Companies from Airbnb and Amazon to Starbucks, Twitter, Visa, and Zillow have been victims of these “denial of service” attacks. Then there are ransomware attacks, in which viruses seize control of computers and encrypt user files unless the user is willing to pay a ransom in a cryptocurrency. In some cases, malware can direct the system to shut down and erase itself, or, as in the case of Stuxnet, speed up until it destroys itself. Cyber weapons can disrupt or shut down power grids and communication, transportation, and financial networks, and bring commercial operations to a standstill.


pages: 309 words: 79,414

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

Available at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36284447. 33Raphael Satter, ‘Inside Story: How Russians Hacked the Democrats’ Emails’, Associated Press, 4 November 2017. Available at https://www.apnews.com/dea73efc01594839957c3c9a6c962b8a. 34Megha Mohan, ‘Macron Leaks: anatomy of a hack’, BBC Trending, 9 May 2017. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-39845105. 35‘NHS “could have prevented” Wannacry ransomware attack’, BBC, 27 October 2017. Available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-41753022. 36Chris Ratcliffe, ‘Hacker who stopped WannaCry charged with writing banking malware’, Wired, 3 August 2017. Available at https://www.wired.com/story/wannacry-malwaretech-arrest. 37Greg Otto, ‘Marcus Hutchins pleads guilty to two counts related to Kronos banking malware’, Cyber-scoop, 19 April 2010.


pages: 329 words: 95,309

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

McAfee Labs researchers recently debated the leading threats for the coming year and show that it’s only going to get worse: “Hacking as a Service”: Anonymous sellers and buyers in underground forums exchange malware kits and development services for money The decline of online hacktivists Anonymous, to be replaced by more politically committed or extremist groups Nation states and armies will be more frequent sources and victims of cyberthreats Large-scale attacks like Stuxnet, an attack on Iranian nuclear plants, will increasingly attempt to destroy infrastructure, rather than make money Mobile worms on victims’ machines that buy malicious apps and steal via tap-and-pay NFC Malware that blocks security updates to mobile phones Mobile phone ransomware “kits” that allow criminals without programming skills to extort payments Covert and persistent attacks deep within and beneath Windows Rapid development of ways to attack Windows 8 and HTML5 A further narrowing of Zeus-like targeted attacks using the Citadel Trojan, making it very difficult for security products to counter Malware that renews a connection even after a botnet has been taken down, allowing infections to grow again The “snowshoe” spamming of legitimate products from many IP addresses, spreading out the sources and keeping the unwelcome messages flowing SMS spam from infected phones.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Putting data in central repositories solved hackers’ hardest problem for them: It told them which data were important and where they were, putting the entire Internet at risk. Google mobilized “an all-star hacker swat team” to strike back at dark-side hackers. An entire industry of security firms emerged to protect the user data honeypots by reacting to outbreaks of viruses, grand data thefts, denial-of-service attacks, malware, malvertisments, phishing schemes, ransomware, and other mischief. Each Internet fiefdom responded by foisting on its customers a flurry of security busywork that did nothing to improve security and got worse every year by every measure. “Security” programs merely let butterfingered data holders tell the courts that they were doing all they could, pointing to their enormous expenditures on such programs.


pages: 419 words: 102,488

Chaos Engineering: System Resiliency in Practice by Casey Rosenthal, Nora Jones

Amazon Web Services, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, blockchain, business continuity plan, business intelligence, business logic, business process, cloud computing, cognitive load, complexity theory, continuous integration, cyber-physical system, database schema, DevOps, fail fast, fault tolerance, hindsight bias, human-factors engineering, information security, Kanban, Kubernetes, leftpad, linear programming, loose coupling, microservices, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no silver bullet, node package manager, operational security, OSI model, pull request, ransomware, risk tolerance, scientific management, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, software as a service, statistical model, systems thinking, the scientific method, value engineering, WebSocket

According to a story that reflects on the sophistication of cybercriminals, the BBC reported:5 Attacks like that do happen. But more often than not, the hackers and cybercriminals hitting the headlines aren’t doing anything magical. In fact, they’re often just wily opportunists–like all criminals. The reality is that the vast majority of malicious code such as viruses, malware, ransomware, and the like habitually take advantage of low-hanging fruit. This can take the form of weak passwords, default passwords, outdated software, unencrypted data, weak security measures in systems, and most of all they take advantage of unsuspecting humans’ lack of understanding of how the complex system in front of them actually functions.


pages: 337 words: 96,666

Practical Doomsday: A User's Guide to the End of the World by Michal Zalewski

accounting loophole / creative accounting, AI winter, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, bank run, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carrington event, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decentralized internet, deep learning, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, dumpster diving, failed state, fiat currency, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Haber-Bosch Process, housing crisis, index fund, indoor plumbing, information security, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, John Bogle, large denomination, lifestyle creep, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, Modern Monetary Theory, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral panic, non-fungible token, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, passive investing, peak oil, planetary scale, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, Savings and loan crisis, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, supervolcano, systems thinking, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Tunguska event, underbanked, urban sprawl, Wall-E, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Of course, with the thousands of decisions we make on trust every year, even the most attentive among us might eventually get it wrong. To prevent mishaps from becoming life-altering disasters, it’s wise to regularly back up all important documents to an offline medium, perhaps a thumb drive plugged into the USB port and then stowed away when done. The habit is particularly important given the rise in ransomware: a class of attacks where the scammer convinces the victim to download a malicious program, and then encrypts all files on the computer, demanding payment in exchange for the decryption key. To prevent blackmail or identity theft, it might also be best to keep extremely sensitive documents solely in “cold” storage, and not keep copies on anything connected to the internet.


pages: 368 words: 102,379

Pandemic, Inc.: Chasing the Capitalists and Thieves Who Got Rich While We Got Sick by J. David McSwane

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, commoditize, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, global pandemic, global supply chain, Internet Archive, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, obamacare, open economy, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, ransomware, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Bannon, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, uber lyft, Y2K

Many traced back to dense clusters in Florida, Nebraska, Virginia, and New Jersey. After talking with unsuspecting people whose information was used to apply for the loans, the reporters found connections. In New Jersey, several people they called had hired the same financial accounting firm, which had notified its clients of a ransomware attack in which hackers obtained Social Security numbers and other financial information. Seeing the common ties between the addresses of the phony farms, it appeared they may have been the result of synthetic identity theft, in which bits of personal information like birth dates, home addresses, and Social Security numbers can be stitched together by criminals to make a fake credit profile.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

.), 73 linear value chains, 101 LinkedIn, 26, 110, 121, 237, 238 Linkos Group, 197 Linux OS, 242 Lipsey, Richard, 45 lithium-ion batteries, 40, 51 lithium, 170 localism, 11, 166–90, 252, 255 log files, 227 logarithmic scales, 20 logic gates, 18 logistic curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 London, England, 180, 181, 183 London Underground, 133–4 looms, 157 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 Lotus Development Corporation, 99 Luddites, 125, 253 Lufa Farms, 171–2 Luminate, 240 lump of labour fallacy, 139 Lusaka, Zambia, 15 Lyft, 146, 148 machine learning, 31–4, 54, 58, 88, 127, 129, 143 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 223 Maersk, 197, 199, 211 malaria, 253 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shootdown (2014), 199 Malta, 114 Malthus, Thomas, 72–3 malware, 197 Man with the Golden Gun, The (1974 film), 37 manufacturing, 10, 39, 42–4, 46, 166–7, 175–9 additive, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 automation and, 130 re-localisation, 175–9 subtractive, 42–3 market saturation, 25–8, 51, 52 market share, 93–6, 111 Marshall, Alfred, 97 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 18, 147, 202, 238 Mastercard, 98 May, Theresa, 183 Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, 189 McCarthy, John, 31 McKinsey, 76, 94 McMaster University, 178 measles, 246 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 media literacy, 211–12 meningitis, 246 Mexico, 202 microorganisms, 42, 46, 69 Microsoft, 16–17, 65, 84–5, 88, 98–9, 100, 105, 108, 122, 221 Bing, 107 cloud computing, 85 data collection, 228 Excel, 99 internet and, 84–5, 100 network effect and, 99 Office software, 98–9, 110, 152 Windows, 85, 98–9 Workplace Productivity scores, 152 Mill, John Stuart, 193 miniaturisation, 34–5 minimum wage, 147, 161 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225, 247–8 mobile phones, 76, 121 see also smartphones; telecom companies Moderna, 245, 247 Moixa, 174 Mondelez, 197, 211 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 44 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24, 218, 255 Monopoly (board game), 82 Montreal, Quebec, 171 mood detection systems, 152 Moore, Gordon, 19, 48 Moore’s Law, 19–22, 26, 28–9, 31, 34, 63, 64, 74 artificial intelligence and, 32, 33–4 Kodak and, 83 price and, 41–2, 51, 68–9 as social fact, 29, 49 superstar companies and, 95 time, relationship with, 48–9 Moravec, Hans, 131 Moravec’s paradox, 131–2 Motorola, 76 Mount Mercy College, Cork, 57 Mozilla Firefox, 242 Mumbai, India, 181 mumps, 246 muskets, 54–5 MySpace, 26–7 Nadella, Satya, 85 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206–7 napalm, 216 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 56 Natanz nuclear site, Iran, 196 National Health Service (NHS), 87 nationalism, 168, 186 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 191, 213 Netflix, 104, 107, 109, 136, 137, 138, 139, 151, 248 Netherlands, 103 Netscape Communicator, 6 networks, 58–62 network effects, 96–101, 106, 110, 121, 223 neural networks, 32–4 neutral, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 new wars, 194 New York City, New York, 180, 183 New York Times, 3, 125, 190, 228 New Zealand, 188, 236 Newton, Isaac, 20 Nigeria, 103, 145, 182, 254 Niinistö, Sauli, 212 Nike, 102 nitrogen fertilizers, 35 Nixon, Richard, 25, 114 Nobel Prize, 64, 74, 241 Nokia, 120 non-state actors, 194, 213 North Korea, 198 North Macedonia, 200–201 Norway, 173, 216 NotPetya malware, 197, 199–200, 211, 213 Novell, 98 Noyce, Robert, 19 NSO Group, 214 nuclear weapons, 193, 195–6, 212, 237 Nuremberg Trials (1945–6), 208 O’Reilly, Tim, 107 O’Sullivan, Laura, 57–8, 60 Obama, Barack, 205, 214, 225 Ocado, 137 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 239 Oculus, 117 oDesk, 144 Ofcom, 8 Ofoto, 84 Ogburn, William, 85 oil industry, 172, 250 Houthi drone attacks (2019), 206 OAPEC crisis (1973–4), 37, 258 Shamoon attack (2012), 198 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 Olduvai, Tanzania, 42 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 open-source software, 242 Openreach, 123 Operation Opera (1981), 195–6, 209 opium, 38 Orange, 121 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 119, 167 Osborne Computer Corporation, 16 Osborne, Michael, 129 Osirak nuclear reactor, Iraq, 195–6, 209 Ostrom, Elinor, 241 Oxford University, 129, 134, 203, 226 pace of change, 3 pagers, 87 Pakistan, 145, 205 palladium, 170 PalmPilot, 173 panopticon, 152 Paris, France, 181, 183 path dependence, 86 PayPal, 98, 110 PC clones, 17 PeerIndex, 8, 201, 237 Pegasus, 214 PeoplePerHour, 144 PepsiCo, 93 Perez, Carlota, 46–7 pernicious polarization, 232 perpetual motion, 95, 106, 107, 182 Petersen, Michael Bang, 75 Phan Thi Kim Phuc, 216–17, 224, 225 pharmaceutical industry, 6, 93, 250 phase transitions, 4 Philippines, 186, 203 Phillips Exeter Academy, 150 phishing scams, 211 Phoenix, Arizona, 134 photolithography, 19 Pigou, Arthur Cecil, 97 Piketty, Thomas, 160 Ping An Good Doctor, 103, 250 Pix Moving, 166, 169, 175 PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê), 206 Planet Labs, 69 platforms, 101–3, 219 PlayStation, 86 plough, 157 Polanyi, Michael, 133 polarisation, 231–4 polio, 246 population, 72–3 Portify, 162 Postel, Jon, 55 Postings, Robert, 233 Predator drones, 205, 206 preprints, 59–60 price gouging, 93 price of technology, 22, 68–9 computing, 68–9, 191, 249 cyber-weapons, 191–2 drones, 192 genome sequencing, 41–2, 252 renewable energy, 39–40, 250 printing press, 45 public sphere, 218, 221, 223 Pulitzer Prize, 216 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 al-Qaeda, 205, 210–11 Qatar, 198 quantum computing, 35 quantum physics, 29 quarantines, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 R&D (research and development), 67–8, 113, 118 racial bias, 231 racism, 225, 231, 234 radicalisation pathways, 233 radiologists, 126 Raford, Noah, 43 Raz, Ze’ev, 195, 209 RB, 197 re-localisation, 11, 166–90, 253, 255 conflict and, 189, 193, 194, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 64, 163 religion, 6, 82, 83 resilience, 257 reskilling, 159–60 responsibility gap, 209 Restrepo, Pascual, 139 Reuters, 8, 56, 132 revolutions, 87 Ricardo, David, 169–70, 177 rights, 240–41 Rise of the Robots, The (Ford), 125 Rittenhouse, Kyle, 224 Roche, 67 Rockefeller, John, 93 Rohingyas, 224 Rome, ancient, 180 Rose, Carol, 243 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 56 Rule of Law, 82 running shoes, 102, 175–6 Russell, Stuart, 31, 118 Russian Federation, 122 disinformation campaigns, 203 Estonia cyberattacks (2007), 190–91, 200 Finland, relations with, 212 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206 nuclear weapons, 237 Ukraine cyberattacks (2017), 197, 199–200 US election interference (2016), 217 Yandex, 122 S-curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 al-Sahhaf, Muhammad Saeed, 201 Salesforce, 108–9 Saliba, Samer, 184 salt, 114 Samsung, 93, 228 San Francisco, California, 181 Sandel, Michael, 218 Sanders, Bernard, 163 Sandworm, 197, 199–200, 211 Santander, 95 Sasson, Steve, 83 satellites, 56–7, 69 Saturday Night Fever (1977 soundtrack), 72 Saudi Arabia, 108, 178, 198, 203, 206 Schmidt, Eric, 5 Schwarz Gruppe, 67 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 129 self-driving vehicles, 78, 134–5, 141 semiconductors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 Shamoon virus, 198 Shanghai, China, 56 Shannon, Claude, 18 Sharp, 16 Shenzhen, Guangdong, 182 shipping containers, 61–2, 63 shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 Siemens, 196 silicon chips, see chips Silicon Valley, 5, 7, 15, 24, 65, 110, 129, 223 Sinai Peninsula, 195 Sinclair ZX81, 15, 17, 21, 36 Singapore, 56 Singles’ Day, 48 Singularity University, 5 SixDegrees, 26 Skydio R1 drone, 208 smartphones, 22, 26, 46, 47–8, 65, 86, 88, 105, 111, 222 Smith, Adam, 169–70 sneakers, 102, 175–6 Snow, Charles Percy, 7 social credit systems, 230 social media, 26–8 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228 interoperability, 121, 237–8 market saturation, 25–8 misinformation on, 192, 201–4, 217, 247–8 network effect, 98, 223 polarisation and, 231–4 software as a service, 109 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 SolarWinds, 200 Solberg, Erna, 216 South Africa, 170 South Korea, 188, 198, 202 Southey, Robert, 80 sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Soviet Union (1922–91), 185, 190, 194, 212 Spain, 170, 188 Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20), 75 Speedfactory, Ansbach, 176 Spire, 69 Spotify, 69 Sputnik 1 orbit (1957), 64, 83 stagflation, 63 Standard and Poor, 104 Standard Oil, 93–4 standardisation, 54–7, 61, 62 Stanford University, 32, 58 Star Wars franchise, 99 state-sized companies, 11, 67 see also superstar companies states, 82 stirrups, 44 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 208 Stockton, California, 160 strategic snowflakes, 211 stress tests, 237 Stuxnet, 196, 214 Sudan, 183 superstar companies, 10, 11, 67, 94–124, 218–26, 252, 255 blitzscaling, 110 collective bargaining and, 163 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 innovation and, 117–18 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156 interoperability and, 120–22, 237–9 monopolies, 114–24, 218 network effect, 96–101, 121 platform model, 101–3, 219 taxation of, 118–19 vertical expansion, 112–13 workplace cultures, 151 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252 surveillance, 152–3, 158 Surviving AI (Chace), 129 Sutskever, Ilya, 32 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 Syria, 186 Taiwan, 181, 212 Talkspace, 144 Tallinn, Estonia, 190 Tang, Audrey, 212 Tanzania, 42, 183 TaskRabbit, 144 Tasmania, Australia, 197 taxation, 10, 63, 96, 118–19 gig economy and, 146 superstar companies and, 118–19 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 150, 152, 153, 154 Tel Aviv, Israel, 181 telecom companies, 122–3 Tencent, 65, 104, 108, 122 territorial sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Tesco, 67, 93 Tesla, 69, 78, 113 Thailand, 176, 203 Thatcher, Margaret, 64, 163 Thelen, Kathleen, 87 Thiel, Peter, 110–11 3D printing, see additive manufacturing TikTok, 28, 69, 159–60, 219 Tisné, Martin, 240 Tomahawk missiles, 207 Toyota, 95 trade networks, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175 trade unions, see collective bargaining Trading Places (1983 film), 132 Tragedy of the Commons, The (Hardin), 241 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 transparency, 236 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 199 TRS-80, 16 Trump, Donald, 79, 119, 166, 201, 225, 237 Tufekci, Zeynep, 233 Turing, Alan, 18, 22 Turkey, 102, 176, 186, 198, 202, 206, 231 Tversky, Amos, 74 23andMe, 229–30 Twilio, 151 Twitch, 225 Twitter, 65, 201, 202, 219, 223, 225, 237 two cultures, 7, 8 Uber, 69, 94, 102, 103, 106, 142, 144, 145 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 engineering jobs, 156 London ban (2019), 183, 188 London protest (2016), 153 pay at, 147, 156 satisfaction levels at, 146 Uber BV v Aslam (2021), 148 UiPath, 130 Ukraine, 197, 199 Unilever, 153 Union of Concerned Scientists, 56 unions, see collective bargaining United Arab Emirates, 43, 198, 250 United Autoworkers Union, 162 United Kingdom BBC, 87 Biobank, 242 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 203 DDT in, 253 digital minilateralism, 188 drone technology in, 207 flashing of headlights in, 83 Golden Triangle, 170 Google and, 116 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81 Luddite rebellion (1811–16), 125, 253 misinformation in, 203, 204 National Cyber Force, 200 NHS, 87 self-employment in, 148 telecom companies in, 123 Thatcher government (1979–90), 64, 163 United Nations, 87, 88, 188 United States antitrust law in, 114 automation in, 127 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 China, relations with, 166 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 202–4 Cyber Command, 200, 210 DDT in, 253 drone technology in, 205, 214 economists in, 63 HIPA Act (1996), 230 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 manufacturing in, 130 misinformation in, 202–4 mobile phones in, 76 nuclear weapons, 237 Obama administration (2009–17), 205, 214 polarisation in, 232 presidential election (2016), 199, 201, 217 presidential election (2020), 202–3 Reagan administration (1981–9), 64, 163 self-employment in, 148 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 shipping containers in, 61 shopping in, 48 solar energy research, 37 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 taxation in, 63, 119 Trump administration (2017–21), 79, 119, 166, 168, 201, 225, 237 Vietnam War (1955–75), 216 War on Terror (2001–), 205 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 universal service obligation, 122 University of Cambridge, 127, 188 University of Chicago, 63 University of Colorado, 73 University of Delaware, 55 University of Oxford, 129, 134, 203, 226 University of Southern California, 55 unwritten rules, 82 Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 194 UpWork, 145–6 USB (Universal Serial Bus), 51 Ut, Nick, 216 utility providers, 122–3 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 Vail, Theodore, 100 value-free, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 Veles, North Macedonia, 200–201 Véliz, Carissa, 226 Venezuela, 75 venture capitalists, 117 vertical expansion, 112–13, 116 vertical farms, 171–2, 251 video games, 86 Vietnam, 61, 175, 216 Virological, 245 Visa, 98 VisiCalc, 99 Vodafone, 121 Vogels, Werner, 68 Wag! 144 WAIS, 100 Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, 43 Wall Street Journal, 120 Wall Street traders, 132–3 Walmart, 67, 94, 95 WannaCry ransomware, 200 War on Terror (2001–), 205 war, see conflict Warren, Elizabeth, 163 water pumps, 54 Waters, Gregory, 233 wearable devices, 158, 251 WebCrawler, 106 WeChat, 28 Weimar Germany (1918–33), 75 West, Geoffrey, 93, 182 Westfield Group, 102 Wharton School of Business, 183 WhatsApp, 28, 117, 164, 219, 224 wheels, 44–5 Wi-Fi, 151 Wikipedia, 60, 99, 144, 243 will.i.am, 239 Willocks, Leslie, 139 wind power, 39–40, 52 winner-takes-all markets, 10, 100, 106, 110–11, 123, 238 Wohlers, Terry, 44 Wookieepedia, 99 word processors, 99 World Bank, 82, 167 World Data Organization, 187 World Economic Forum, 139, 159, 167, 184 World Energy Outlook, 77 World Health Organization (WHO), 82, 136, 167, 203 World is Flat, The (Friedman), 167 World Trade Organization (WTO), 187 World War II (1939–45), 87, 258 Wright, Orville and Wilbur, 64 Wright, Theodore, 49–50, 51 Wright’s Law, 49–53, 176, 249 X, 114 Yahoo!


When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

An AGI may or may not be friendly to humans. We have dealt with intelligent animals though. Some, like dogs, treat us like their lords and masters. Others, like crocodiles, treat us like food. How humanity might be threatened Corporate http://www.spywareremove.com/how-to-protect-computer-against-ransomware-scams.html How could software running on passive computers possibly pose any real threat to humanity? All a computer can do is process and communicate information. If a computer becomes too annoying then surely it could simply be turned off. Computers already control our lives to an incredible extent.


pages: 562 words: 153,825

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, active measures, air gap, Anton Chekhov, Big Tech, bitcoin, Cass Sunstein, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, Debian, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, evil maid attack, financial independence, Firefox, GnuPG, Google Hangouts, housing justice, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Laura Poitras, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, off-the-grid, operational security, planetary scale, private military company, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Robert Gordon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, seminal paper, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, standardized shipping container, Steven Levy, TED Talk, telepresence, the long tail, undersea cable, Wayback Machine, web of trust, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Having advertised a way to get in touch anonymously, I expected to receive malware as well as submissions from internet trolls and conspiracy theorists. I got my share of all of those, alongside valuable reporting tips. Most of the malware was run of the mill. Someone would send a standard phishing link, hoping to steal my online credentials, or a ransomware package that, if I clicked the wrong thing, would lock up my files and demand payment to unlock them. I do not, ever, run executable files or scripts that arrive by email, so these were not a big concern. One day, however, a more interesting exploit showed up. The sender tried to make it attractive, disguising the file as a leaked presentation on surveillance.


pages: 1,318 words: 403,894

Reamde by Neal Stephenson

air freight, airport security, autism spectrum disorder, book value, crowdsourcing, digital map, drone strike, Google Earth, industrial robot, informal economy, Jones Act, large denomination, megacity, messenger bag, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, ransomware, restrictive zoning, scientific management, side project, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, South China Sea, SQL injection, the built environment, the scientific method, young professional

Wallace demanded. Upstairs, Zula was already reading about how it was possible. “It’s not just possible, it’s actually pretty easy, once your system has been rooted by a trojan,” Peter said. “This isn’t the first. People have been making malware that does this for a few years now. There’s a word for it: ‘ransomware.’” “I’ve never heard of it.” “It is hard to turn this kind of virus into a profitable operation,” Peter said, “because there has to be a financial transaction: the payment of the ransom. And that can be traced.” “I see,” Wallace said. “So if you’re in the malware business, there are easier ways to make money.”

Convince me of this,” Ivanov pleaded. “Make me believe.” ZULA TALKED FOR an hour. She explained the nature and history of computer viruses. Talked about the particular subclass of viruses that encrypted hard drives and held their contents for ransom. About the difficulties of making money from ransomware. Explained the innovation that the unknown, anonymous creators of the REAMDE virus had apparently come up with. Ivanov had never heard of massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, so she told him all about their history, their technology, their sociology, their growth as a major sector of the entertainment industry.