“Watch again: President @Lagarde responds to criticism about negative interest rates and describes how they support companies and people in the eurozone
RIP Dan Kaminsky beloved Hacker
now…..
About DNS and the Internet
Minutes before Trump left office, millions of the Pentagon’s dormant IP addresses sprang to life. After decades of not using a huge chunk of the Internet, the Pentagon has given control of millions of computer addresses to a previously unknown company in an effort to identify possible cyber vulnerabilities and threats.
By Craig Timberg and Paul Sonne April 24, 2021
Lori Rozsa in Plantation, Fla., and Alice Crites contributed to this report.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/04/24/pentagon-internet-address-mystery/?itid=hp-top-table-main
While the world was distracted with President Donald Trump leaving office on Jan. 20, an obscure Florida company discreetly announced to the world’s computer networks a startling development: It now was managing a huge unused swath of the Internet that, for several decades, had been owned by the U.S. military.
What happened next was stranger still.
The company, Global Resource Systems LLC, kept adding to its zone of control. Soon it had claimed 56 million IP addresses owned by the Pentagon. Three months later, the total was nearly 175 million. That’s almost 6 percent of a coveted traditional section of Internet real estate — called IPv4 — where such large chunks are worth billions of dollars on the open market.
The entities controlling the largest swaths of the Internet generally are telecommunications giants whose names are familiar: AT&T, China Telecom, Verizon. But now at the top of the list was Global Resource Systems — a company founded only in September that has no publicly reported federal contracts and no obvious public-facing website.
As listed in records, the company’s address in Plantation, Fla., outside Fort Lauderdale, is a shared workspace in an office building that doesn’t show Global Resource Systems on its lobby directory. A receptionist at the shared workspace said Friday that she could provide no information about the company and asked a reporter to leave. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
The only announcement of Global Resources Systems’ management of Pentagon addresses happened in the obscure world of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) — the messaging system that tells Internet companies how to route traffic across the world. There, messages began to arrive telling network administrators that IP addresses assigned to the Pentagon but long dormant could now accept traffic — but it should be routed to Global Resource Systems.
Network administrators began speculating about perhaps the most dramatic shift in IP address space allotment since BGP was introduced in the 1980s.
“They are now announcing more address space than anything ever in the history of the Internet,” said Doug Madory, director of Internet analysis for Kentik, a network monitoring company, who was among those trying to figure out what was happening. He published a blog post on the mystery Saturday morning.
The long life of a quick ‘fix’: Internet protocol from 1989 leaves data vulnerable to hijackers
The theories were many. Did someone at the Defense Department sell off part of the military’s vast collection of sought-after IP addresses as Trump left office? Had the Pentagon finally acted on demands to unload the billions of dollars worth of IP address space the military has been sitting on, largely unused, for decades?
An answer, of sorts, came Friday.
The change is the handiwork of an elite Pentagon unit known as the Defense Digital Service, which reports directly to the secretary of defense. The DDS bills itself as a “SWAT team of nerds” tasked with solving emergency problems for the department and conducting experimental work to make big technological leaps for the military.
Created in 2015, the DDS operates a Silicon Valley-like office within the Pentagon. It has carried out a range of special projects in recent years, from developing a biometric app to help service members identify friendly and enemy forces on the battlefield to ensuring the encryption of emails Pentagon staff were exchanging about coronavirus vaccines with external parties.
Brett Goldstein, the DDS’s director, said in a statement that his unit had authorized a “pilot effort” publicizing the IP space owned by the Pentagon.
“This pilot will assess, evaluate and prevent unauthorized use of DoD IP address space,” Goldstein said. “Additionally, this pilot may identify potential vulnerabilities.”
Goldstein described the project as one of the Defense Department’s “many efforts focused on continually improving our cyber posture and defense in response to advanced persistent threats. We are partnering throughout DoD to ensure potential vulnerabilities are mitigated.”
The specifics of what the effort is trying to achieve remain unclear. The Defense Department declined to answer a number of questions about the project, and Pentagon officials declined to say why Goldstein’s unit had used a little-known Florida company to carry out the pilot effort rather than have the Defense Department itself “announce” the addresses through BGP messages — a far more routine approach.
What is clear, however, is the Global Resource Systems announcements directed a fire hose of Internet traffic toward the Defense Department addresses. Madory said his monitoring showed the broad movements of Internet traffic began immediately after the IP addresses were announced Jan. 20.
These hackers warned the Internet would become a security nightmare
Madory said such large amounts of data could provide several benefits for those in a position to collect and analyze it for threat intelligence and other purposes.
The data may provide information about how malicious actors operate online and could reveal exploitable weaknesses in computer systems. In addition, several Chinese companies use network numbering systems that resemble the U.S. military’s IP addresses in their internal systems, Madory said. By announcing the address space through Global Resource Systems, that could cause some of that information to be routed to systems controlled by the U.S. military.
The data could also include accidental misconfigurations that could be exploited or fixed, Madory said.
“If you have a very large amount of traffic, and someone knows how to go through it, you’ll find stuff,” Madory added.
The U.S. government spent billions on a system for detecting hacks. The Russians outsmarted it.
Russell Goemaere, a spokesman for the Defense Department, confirmed in a statement to The Washington Post that the Pentagon still owns all the IP address space and hadn’t sold any of it to a private party.
Dormant IP addresses can be hijacked and used for nefarious purposes, from disseminating spam to hacking into a computer system and downloading data, and the pilot program could allow the Defense Department to uncover if those activities are taking place using its addresses.
A person familiar with the pilot effort, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because the program isn’t public, said it is important for the Defense Department to have “visibility and transparency” into its various cyber resources, including IP addresses, and manage the addresses properly so they will be available if and when the Pentagon wants to use them.
“If you can’t see it, you can’t defend it,” the person said.
Don’t Be Evil By Erik Loomis Apr 25 2021
<https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2021/04/dont-be-evil-4>
I’ve written at length about how corporations have unmoored themselves from national law in the world of labor relations and environmental degradation, while those of us fighting this are left constrained by national law. What I haven’t written about at all is the other side of this coin, at the top end where companies hop around the globe to avoid paying taxes.
Google shifted more than $75.4 billion (€63 billion) in profits out of the Republic using the controversial “double-Irish” tax arrangement in 2019, the last year in which it used the loophole.
The technology giant availed of the tax arrangement to move the money out of Google Ireland Holdings Unlimited Company via interim dividends and other payments. This company was incorporated in Ireland but tax domiciled in Bermuda at the time of the transfer.
The move allowed Google Ireland Holdings to escape corporation tax both in the Republic and in the United States where its ultimate parent, Alphabet, is headquartered. The holding company reported a $13 billion pretax profit for 2019, which was effectively tax-free, the accounts show.
A year earlier, Google Ireland Holdings paid out dividends of €23 billion, having recorded turnover of $25.7 billion.
Google has used the double Irish loophole to funnel billions in global profits through Ireland and on to Bermuda, effectively putting them beyond the reach of US tax authorities.
Companies exploiting the double Irish put their intellectual property into an Irish-registered company that is controlled from a tax haven such as Bermuda.
[snip]
Welcome to the YOLO Economy
Burned out and flush with savings, some workers are quitting stable jobs in search of postpandemic adventure.
By Kevin Roose
Apr 22 2021
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/technology/welcome-to-the-yolo-economy.html>
Something strange is happening to the exhausted, type-A millennial workers of America. After a year spent hunched over their MacBooks, enduring back-to-back Zooms in between sourdough loaves and Peloton rides, they are flipping the carefully arranged chessboards of their lives and deciding to risk it all.
Some are abandoning cushy and stable jobs to start a new business, turn a side hustle into a full-time gig or finally work on that screenplay. Others are scoffing at their bosses’ return-to-office mandates and threatening to quit unless they’re allowed to work wherever and whenever they want.
They are emboldened by rising vaccination rates and a recovering job market. Their bank accounts, fattened by a year of stay-at-home savings and soaring asset prices, have increased their risk appetites. And while some of them are just changing jobs, others are stepping off the career treadmill altogether.
If this movement has a rallying cry, it’s “YOLO” — “you only live once,” an acronym popularized by the rapper Drake a decade ago and deployed by cheerful risk-takers ever since. The term is a meme among stock traders on Reddit, who use it when making irresponsible bets that sometimes pay off anyway. (This year’s GameStop trade was the archetypal YOLO.) More broadly, it has come to characterize the attitude that has captured a certain type of bored office worker in recent months.
To be clear: The pandemic is not over, and millions of Americans are still grieving the loss of jobs and loved ones. Not everyone can afford to throw caution to the wind. But for a growing number of people with financial cushions and in-demand skills, the dread and anxiety of the past year are giving way to a new kind of professional fearlessness.
I started hearing these stories this year when several acquaintances announced that they were quitting prestigious and high-paying jobs to pursue risky passion projects. Since then, a trickle of LinkedIn updates has turned into a torrent. I tweeted about it, and dozens of stories poured into my inboxes, all variations on the same basic theme: The pandemic changed my priorities, and I realized I didn’t have to live like this. <snip>
Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in
Flyover Country.
By B.J. Hollars. 2019. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press. 224 pages. ISBN: 978-1-4962-1560-4 (hard cover).
Reviewed by Eleanor Hasken-Wagner, Indiana University, Bloomington
(eh*****@*****na.edu).
B.J. Hollars’s Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and
the Weird in Flyover Country delicately bridges the gap between
academic and non-academic texts in the approach taken to otherworldly
phenomena. The book opens with a prologue that shares with the reader
Hollars’s introduction to the topic. It began in the classroom, with
a group of students challenging their instructor, Hollars, on the art
of the persuasive essay. In rebuttal, Hollars agreed to write his own
persuasive essay on Bigfoot’s existence. Hollars admits that the
endeavor was more difficult than he anticipated, and that he found
himself unintentionally including personal opinion in the essay. This
project led him to question: “How are we to validate
anything. . .while remaining hell-bent on invalidation?” (5). This
question eventually led him to the approach for this text, one that
he unknowingly aligned with a folkloristic approach. Rather than take
on the strange from a disbelieving standpoint, he engages with it
from a place of “curious inquiry” (5).
This vantage point, much like that of folklorists who complete
fieldwork or research in the bizarre, allows him to work closely with
the topics in this text without strong concern for the objective
truth behind the phenomena. Instead, Hollars looks closely at the
communities that experience these odd happenings and takes in their
experiences as they are shared with him. Importantly, for some of
phenomena he completes in-person fieldwork with investigators and
witnesses, and includes robust personal description of the areas
where sightings occurred (and photographs of them in some instances).
This, unsurprisingly, is where the text is the strongest.
Hollars organizes the phenomena into nine case files, with three case
files in each of the three sections: monsters, Martians, and the
weird. The case files open with a header that includes the name, the
scientific name, the location, description, field notes, witness
testimony, and conclusion. For casual readers, this information
serves as a good litmus test as to whether a particular chapter will
be of interest.
The first section, Monsters, includes the Beast of Bray Road, Oscar
the Turtle (also known as the Beast of Busco), and Mothman. The
strongest of these three case files is the first, which includes
fieldwork by Hollars and interviews with witnesses and researchers
who have been living with and studying this phenomena for years. Much
like the first case file, Oscar the Turtle includes details from
Hollars’s fieldwork in Churubusco, Indiana. Unfortunately, once the
reader gets to the chapter on Mothman, it becomes clear that the same
style of fieldwork was not undertaken by the author for every
chapter. Hollars defends the inclusion of the Mothman chapter as
midwestern due to the proximity to the Ohio border (Point Pleasant,
WV, sits on the Ohio River), but does not acknowledge or reference
the number of sightings that took place in Ohio, too. Unlike the
previous sections of the book, which include reflexive commentary on
the area and interactions with researchers and witnesses, this
chapter feels slightly underdone. One is left to wonder why one of
the other robust midwestern creatures was not included in this
section (Minerva Monster, Beast of Whitehall, Loveland Frogman, to
name a few Ohioan creatures).
The second section, Martians, includes Joe Simonton’s Space Pancakes,
the Minot Air Force Base Sighting, and the Val Johnson Incident.
These chapters are strong representations of UFOlogical research in
the ways that Hollars approaches the history of UFO research in the
United States. From discussions of UFO experiencers to the history of
Project Blue Book, a governmental effort to document and study UFOs
in the mid-twentieth century, these case files are particularly
fascinating to read.
The third and final section is a catchall of case files, labeled The
Weird, and includes: The Hodag, Project ELF, and the Kensington
Runestone. Fittingly labeled, this section of case files includes
governmental low-frequency waves (Project ELF) and mysteriously
buried stones that could alter the history of US colonization
(Kensington Runestone). The Kensington Runestone, the last entry in
the case files, is included last because it is not “nearly as sexy as
a werewolf” (175), but it does feature an unexplainable find in the
Nebraska fields. The addition of these weird, but not as tantalizing,
chapters reminds the reader of the vast nature of the unexplainable
— too often relegated to merely ghosts and monsters.
What will strike readers of this text about these case files is the
way that Hollars applies different explanations to each of these
strange phenomena. He tries different theories that suit the
descriptions of witnesses and researchers like trying on new shoes —
seeing which suit the testimony best — and then moving on to the
next. He does not settle on a single theory, but instead leaves the
case files open-ended, allowing readers to form their own conclusions
about the origin of the phenomena.
Midwestern Strange is most engaging due to Hollars’s casual yet
compelling writing style. He does not engage directly with academic
theory or perspectives, yet this text does not have the same feel as
other collections of the supernatural/bizarre. I believe this is in
large part due to Hollars’s engaging with the places, witnesses, and
researchers of the strange, rather than just using archival
documentation or other published works — giving the text a more
ethnographic feel. Likewise, the insertion of Hollars’s own
commentary questioning both belief and disbelief with respect to
these phenomena gives Midwestern Strange an inquisitive feel. Readers
are encouraged to suspend their own beliefs and consider an array of
explanations for the strange occurrences.
In conclusion, while this book is not strictly academic, I recommend
it to folklorists and scholars in adjacent fields for the way that
Hollars approaches the phenomena under consideration and also the
believers in these phenomena. Although not engaging directly with
folkloristic scholarship, the approach of the author feels
folkloristic. I recommend chapters from this book for classes in need
of case studies for discussion or further research, or for those in
need of background information for their own research into the
bizarre.