firehose

Two former Kaspersky employees have accused the company of faking malware to harm rival antivirus products. They would falsely classify legitimate files as malicious, tricking other antivirus companies that blindly copied Kaspersky's data into deleting them from their customers' computers.

In one technique, Kaspersky's engineers would take an important piece of software commonly found in PCs and inject bad code into it so that the file looked like it was infected, the ex-employees said. They would send the doctored file anonymously to VirusTotal.

Then, when competitors ran this doctored file through their virus detection engines, the file would be flagged as potentially malicious. If the doctored file looked close enough to the original, Kaspersky could fool rival companies into thinking the clean file was problematic as well.

[...]

The former Kaspersky employees said Microsoft was one of the rivals that were targeted because many smaller security companies followed the Redmond, Washington-based company's lead in detecting malicious files. They declined to give a detailed account of any specific attack.

Microsoft's antimalware research director, Dennis Batchelder, told Reuters in April that he recalled a time in March 2013 when many customers called to complain that a printer code had been deemed dangerous by its antivirus program and placed in "quarantine."

Batchelder said it took him roughly six hours to figure out that the printer code looked a lot like another piece of code that Microsoft had previously ruled malicious. Someone had taken a legitimate file and jammed a wad of bad code into it, he said. Because the normal printer code looked so much like the altered code, the antivirus program quarantined that as well.

Over the next few months, Batchelder's team found hundreds, and eventually thousands, of good files that had been altered to look bad.

Kaspersky denies it.

EDITED TO ADD (8/19): Here's an October 2013 presentation by Microsoft on the attacks.

Photographer Brian Maffit posted an amazing composite image on reddit that depicts a flock of hummingbirds swarming underneath the feeder. The “flock” was actually comprised of just a few birds over the course of a few hours whose ghosted images were reflected back using an angled glass mirror. The image was then further manipulated in Photoshop. Maffitt generously stated that he’ll be sharing a “how-to” on his blog.

If anyone is interested in the technical specs, this was shot with a Canon 5D Mk III at 1/4000/sec, f 5.6, using a Canon 100-400 zoom lens. Composited (obviously) in Photoshop, approximately 70 layers, with a final file size of 3600 px x 11,000 px. Also, these are Ruby-throated hummingbirds, mostly females and juveniles, shot in my backyard in New York State. …Look closely at the birds and you can see the “ghosting” associated with a glass mirror, which at an angle reflects each bird twice (once on the surface of the glass and once on the mirrored back). I was afraid that the artifacting would spoil the setup, but I ended up liking the results even with the double-image.

Maffit also posted a separate photo of a single hummingbird taken from a different angle.

photos by Brian Maffitt

via reddit

Anonymous activists just painted over the white Stonewall statues in Christopher Park with brown paint, and fitted them out with dresses and wigs. In an interview with Autostraddle, they said they did it in honor of Miss Major, a figurehead and icon in the trans community, and someone who helped lead much of the resistance.

They also wanted to have the memorial better reflect all the trans women of color who participated in (and led!) much of the action that night. It’s no secret that trans women of color have been facing erasure for quite some time now, having their accomplishments and achievements blotted out in favor of having white faces at the fore.

When asked specifically about why they did this, they had this to share:

We painted them because Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major, Storme DeLarverie and all the other Black and Brown people who led the movement deserve credit for their courage and strength. What we did was rectification, not vandalism. Those statues are bronze (brown) underneath the layer of white paint — the symbolism behind that is infuriating. I know that some people are going to be angry, but I’m not concerned with preserving bullshit art. I’m angry about the whitewashing of LGBTQ history.

It’s likely that as we speak, the statues are being cleaned off to be repainted white again. That symbolism doesn’t escape the activists (or anyone, really).

To the people who’ll end up repainting the sculptures: brown and black lacquer exists. Think about what it means to repaint the statues white, and then stop.

Head on over to Autostraddle to check out the full interview.

—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Overshare: The Links.net Story is a fascinating documentary by my friend Justin Hall (who is considered to be one of the first bloggers) about the story of how he has been sharing his personal life “in explicit detail” online since 1994 through his website Links.net. The documentary is free to watch online and there is also a “TMI edition” available for purchase via VHX with extra footage and outtakes.

overshare: the links.net story is a documentary about fumbling to foster intimacy between strangers online. Through interviews, analysis and graphic animations, I share my motivations, my joys and my sorrows from pioneering personal sharing for the 21st century. In 2004 the New York Times referred to me as “perhaps the founding father of personal weblogging.” I hope this documentary reveals that I was a privileged white male with access to technology who worked to invite as many people as possible to join him in co-creating an internet where we have a chance to honestly share of our humanity.

WordPress 4.3 “Billie” has been released and includes a number of improvements to the popular platform. The new version, named for jazz legend Billie Holiday, features easy menu editing in the customizer, simple formatting shortcuts to improve workflow, and a utility for generating stronger and more secure passwords.

images via WordPress

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Newsweek

Wichita Teen Suspected of Clinic Bomb Scare Was Applying to Be Pro-Choice ... Newsweek New details have emerged following the bomb scare at South Wind Women's Center in Wichita, Kansas on August 17. South Wind Women's Center. Filed Under: U.S.. Updated | Police in Wichita, Kansas, released new details about a bomb scare at an ... and more »

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Robot ‘Mom’ builds an evolving robot ‘family’. via NBC news

It’s always been something of a solace for humankind that robots can’t evolve like we can, but we may not retain that advantage for long. Researchers have demonstrated a sort of rudimentary artificial evolution: a robot that creates generations of smaller “baby” robots, evaluates them and selects the best to “live” on — just like Mother Nature.

The study was led by Fumiya Iida at the University of Cambridge. A “mother robot” assembled smaller robots by gluing together pieces, some of which were equipped with motors, in various configurations. It then observed how quickly the resulting “children” could move, and then kept the designs of the fastest ones and disassembled the rest. It then included this information when creating a new “generation” — either mutating the successful designs or integrating them into less successful ones.

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Seattle has always been prosperous. Now, it is expensive. The center of the blight is South Lake Union, for decades a low-rent neighborhood of warehouses and newspapers. Nearly three years ago, Amazon bought 11 buildings in the area, from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, for $1.16 billion; its objective is to build a “campus” in the image of Google’s, in Mountain View.

Efforts to this end have not been unsuccessful. South Lake Union used to be a dump. Now, as in Brooklyn (as in San Francisco, as in Portland, as in Austin), cubical buildings and yuppie boutiques have emerged from the carcass of industry. South Lake Union is no longer a neighborhood; it is a boomtown, in all the worst senses. Not since 1897 has such a gold rush so remade the Seattle waterfront. SLU’s gender ratios, makeshift culture, and inflated prices recall the Klondike. A cruel irony of tech is that it should free work from geographical constraints; “you can work anywhere,” goes the bromide. If only. In real life, wealth concentrates in faceless hubs more than ever before.

Boomtowns like SLU are an effort to keep tech employees inside a self-sustaining, non-intrusive bubble. This is little more than a libertarian myth. The bubble leaks and spreads blight in all directions. New condos blemish old neighborhoods more than they relieve pressure on their housing stock. Everything around South Lake Union has declined in culture and risen in price. To the east, Capitol Hill has endured a series of costly facelifts. Once our center of gay, musical, biker, bohemian, leftist, and anything-else culture, it now bears as little resemblance to its glory days as modern San Francisco does to the utopia of Hunter S. Thompson. To the west, Lower Queen Anne has aged into a boozy playground of brogrammers. To the south, Belltown offers a programmed imitation of “urban life,” with apartment towers and specialist groceries. A small part of Seattle has always aspired to be New York, and now it has gotten its wish. The frontier of condos pushes forward at the rate of a block a year. The blight’s growth is far faster. The “real Seattle” recedes at the same rate, just ahead of it: north of the Amazon Rainforest, Fremont and Wallingford await their spikes in rent, their hordes of vapid arrivistes.

Some friends and I recently searched for a house in Fremont and Wallingford. A year ago, per-capita rents for 4-bedroom houses in those neighborhoods ran as little as $500 a month. Now, it is impossible to find anything for less than $800 a month. The rent has skyrocketed, because of Amazon. The application process for decent housing is now more selective than Harvard. The shortage is acute. Across Seattle, rents have increased by double-digit figures in the last six months. Living alone is particularly punishing. Newcomers with little time or familiarity fare badly. Many of them will be software engineers.

The recent Times article reports that Amazon’s company motto is “I’m peculiar,” with its grimly funny echo of the old South’s name for slavery. The company buzzwords—“Hire and develop the best”; “Think big”—are nothing peculiar, but rather reminiscent of institutions like Enron or Bear Stearns.

Ironies like these are as lost on the worker bees as they are on their overlords. Self-conceptions become as shallow and lavish as a hi-res LCD screen. A friend observed that the problem is exacerbated by tech workers “thinking of themselves as a force for good.” The tragedy, as always with corporate life, is that the transplants really are bright people, the crème de la crème. But, by and large, it’s hard to imagine a group of geniuses less interesting, artistic, or culturally engaged, because they flock from across the globe to work for Amazon. What Amazon creates in ethnic diversity it more than takes away in socioeconomic diversity, making its supposed pluralism a skin-deep sham—to say nothing of its ideological uniformity.

The more people in the new Seattle are defined by their jobs, the less they talk about them. Seattleites used to take great interest in what they did, and have time to pursue outside curiosities. Both are less true now, thanks to the “convenience” of software. Anyone who has availed himself of this convenience (for example, through writing) knows working with computers is tedious and antisocial. A friend described his development job as “trying to instruct a small child who sucks at learning,” while reporting: “I have made no friends at work.” These “professional relationships” call to mind the “Seattle Freeze,” a phenomenon where people here pretend to be friendly but form only the most superficial of social connections. The cause is obvious: Wikipedia hilariously deadpans, “The rapid growth of Amazon and its accompanying influx of mostly young, male technology workers may be making the problem worse.” They don’t have time to be interested.
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“In a perverse way, Trump has restored a more pure democracy to this process. He’s taken the Beltway thinkfluencers out of the game and turned the presidency into a pure high-school-style popularity contest conducted entirely in the media. Everything we do is a consumer choice now, from picking our shoes to an online streaming platform to a presidential nominee. The irony, of course, is that when America finally wrested control of the political process from the backroom oligarchs, the very first place where we spent our newfound freedom and power was on the campaign of the world’s most unapologetic asshole. It may not seem funny now, because it’s happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder. America is ceasing to be a nation, and turning into a giant television show. And this Republican race is our first and most brutal casting call.”

- Inside the GOP Clown Car

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Last month was the warmest July on record globally, according to independent analyses by NASA, and by the Japan Meteorological Agency. With a significant El Niño likely to continue through the end of the year — and possibly peak as one of the strongest on record — it's looking ever more likely that calendar year 2015 will go down as the warmest on record, and possibly by a large margin. SEE ALSO: Latest El Niño Forecast: Expect It to Last Into Spring and Possibly Peak as One of the Str

In response to accusations of an abusive workplace environment, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos assured employees Tuesday that the company’s human resources staff was working 100 hours a week to address their complaints. “I’ve heard your grievances, and I promise that HR is toiling 16 hours a day, plus weekends, until the problem is solved,” read a company-wide email from Bezos, who promised that members of the human resources department would not be allowed to rest for a single second until allegations of a cruel, backstabbing office culture at Amazon were fully dealt with. “Nothing matters more to me than the well-being of our employees, and our HR staff will continue to work their fingers to the bone—not seeing their families or friends or anything at all outside their offices—for as long as it takes to make this right.” Bezos added that any employee not fully committed to ensuring a healthy work-life balance should look for a job elsewhere.

Saying that he was “horrified” by a New York Times article recounting callous behavior on the part of Amazon executives, company founder Jeff Bezos warned today that any employees found lacking in empathy would be instantly purged.

In an e-mail to all Amazon employees issued late Sunday evening, Bezos said that the company would begin grading its workers on empathy, and that the ten per cent found to be least empathic would be “immediately culled from the herd.”

To achieve this goal, Amazon said that it would introduce a new internal reporting system called EmpathyTrack, which will enable employees to secretly report on their colleagues’ lack of humanity.

The system will allow Amazon employees to grade their co-workers on a scale from a hundred (nicest) to zero (pure evil), resulting in empathy-based data that will be transmitted directly to Bezos.

Then, through a new program called Next Day Purging, any employee found lacking in empathy will be removed from the company within twenty-four hours of Bezos’s termination order.

“We can’t be the greatest retailer in the world unless we are also the kindest,” Bezos wrote in his e-mail. “So my message to all Amazonians is loud and clear: be kind or taste my wrath. Love, Jeff.”

i just,

The Connecticut Supreme Court rules that the death penalty “fails to comport with our abiding freedom from cruel and unusual punishment.”

In his extremely long and detailed essay “Star Wars Ring Theory”, Mike Klimo argues for a reexamination of the Star Wars prequel movies.

They are, he claims, not semi-competent jangles of garish noise and wooden acting, but in fact, incredibly sophisticated examples of modern mythmaking, and work with the original Star Wars movies to create an interwoven narrative web more complex than has ever been achieved in the history of cinema.

If you like Star Wars and wild theories, this is a great read. I don’t have much love for the prequel movies myself, but after reading Klimo’s essay, I can absolutely look at them with a deeper appreciation, recognizing that a very precise craftsmanship has gone into making them exactly…whatever they are.

Klimo claims in the essay that George Lucas, using “ring theory” (a storytelling concept that involves recurring motifs and patterns), has created in the six Star Wars movies a tightly woven narrative in which no detail is insignificant.

He supports this with examples of mirrored compositions, plot structures, story beats, and lines of dialogue from the various movies (I’ve used some of his juxtaposed images in this post). And seeing the evidence in living color, it’s hard to deny: a lot of thought went into making elements of the prequels reprise (foreshadow?) moments from the original trilogy.

I have some thoughts about the conclusions he reaches, though. I’ll let you go and read the essay, and then come back when you’re done, maybe next week sometime, and read the rest of this post.

Back? Okay. As I mentioned above, it’s clear that absolutely, unequivocally, there are moments and shots and entire sequences in the prequels that are designed to evoke counterpart moments and shots and sequences from the original trilogy.

Klimo’s argument is that this proves that all six movies are interlocking parts of a supremely orchestrated master saga…Which might make sense if the original ones weren’t made decades before the prequels, and if Lucas had himself directed all of the original movies.

What makes more sense to me is that, faced with the prospect of making prequel movies, and not wanting to screw it up, Lucas looked back at the original trilogy, and mined it.

In improv theater we have a technique: to make a mistake not look like a mistake, you simply repeat it. Then, it looks like it was a deliberate move all along.

By making movies that were, as close as he could manage, repetitions of motifs from the original movies, Lucas created the intricate interrelated structure that Klimo is so taken with — by filling in the missing pieces after the fact.

It’s kind of like a Rorchach test: it’s just a blob of ink, until you fold the paper in half. Once you mirror the pattern and start repeating things, every detail starts to look meaningful.

Some of the comments on the Ring Theory website point out a similar point: that no matter how intricate a structure the prequels can be shown to have, they’re still, to coin a phrase, semi-competent jangles of garish noise and wooden acting.

The response to this, in that comment thread at least, is that the prequels are meant to read as myths — “You don’t criticize the dialogue in the Bible, do you?” is a paraphrase of one comment.

To which I say: FAIR ENOUGH. Klimo claims to be at work on a follow-up article exploring this point in more depth.

But! I will also say this. I followed a link from Klimo’s article’s bibliography to an obscure journal of philosophy, which also features (besides the article that Klimo references) an article entitled “Nazi Germany: The Forces of Taurus, Scorpio and Capricorn”.

This article is exactly as impassioned and elaborate and detail-filled in the service of arguing the astrological links between the key figures and events of the Third Reich as Klimo’s article praising Lucas as the most sophisticated storyteller in the cinema history.

It’s like Chancellor Palpatine said: “It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove.”

[ Star Wars Ring Theory ]

Activists from the Black Lives Matter movement challenged Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton to answer for criminal justice policies pursued by her husband’s administration and for the legacy of white privilege -- but Clinton told them to look for ways to change policies rather than trying to "change hearts."

Clinton listened and at times agreed with five members of the newly influential group during a tense discussion last week on a video released Monday night. But she also rejected one questioner's assertion that she is personally or directly responsible for systemic mistreatment of black people.

“I’m not sure I agree with you,” Clinton says carefully when one questioner told her that policing and imprisonment policies were imposed even though “they were ripping apart families and actually causing death.”

Zoe Quinn is an independent game developer with a national reputation. She's a speaker in demand all over the country and she's an artist. But she became globally known last year for being a victim of extreme cyber bullying that became known as GamerGate, after creating a game that was at odds with the macho and often violent seam that runs through much of the gaming world. It's unfortunate, she told Vice magazine last year, "I don’t want to be known for being harassed."

The game, Depression Quest, was an interactive game that deals with the struggles of depression, which Quinn has suffered from since her teens. The game was originally released in February 14, 2013, but was pulled off the market due to backlash. 

Re-released last year, the free game is both popular and controversial; internet trolls (prompted by a blog written by an ex-boyfriend) have accused Quinn of trading sex for a positive review with a magazine writer, an accusation that lacked any proof. Calls were made to her father’s house calling her a “whore,” photos were sent to her with threats attached, posts urged her to commit suicide, and there were even online discussions about what murder weapons attendees might bring to her next event.

One year ago, she was “doxed,” a slang term for having your personal information—everything from home address, Social Security numbers, bank details—published on the internet so that trolls can harass the subject. Quinn was so threatened that she moved from Boston to Seattle, hoping for a reprieve. Wrote The Daily Dot: "Ultimately, it seems likely that the noise surrounding this incident will serve as yet another example of the ways in which gaming culture continues to be a threatening place for women."

Quinn is one of many victims in a stream of GamerGate outbreaks that have also targeted feminist blogger Anita Sarkeesian (death threats caused her to cancel a speech at Utah State University last year) and game developer Brianna Wu. 

Quinn will be speaking at TechFestNW this week about cybernetics, something she’s been working on since 2014, when she had a chip and magnet implanted in her hand so she can interact with Near Field Communication devices.  But GamerGate is never far behind, which is why she created Crash Override Network, a support group to help those who have been victimized by online harassment. Her latest move? A security fob worn around her neck allowing only personal access to her laptop.

Want to find out more about Quinn before seeing her at TechFest? Here’s an Aug. 17 live chat with The Seattle Times. Here’s a post about best practices regarding two-factor authentication when setting up stuff like email accounts. And watch her first video interview after the initial GamerGate backlash from late 2014.