OK, maybe not Vlad personally, but clearly he ordered it personally, so I’m sat here with a Russian infection running riot through my lungs and blood and brain, fucking commie blood cells…
I used to work on the backbone, and I’ve been online since the days of the BBS, long before the “internet”, so I may not be a Andressen or McNealy or Cerf or Gates, but I’m not a fucking idiot either, and it is possible for me to speak on certain aspects of IT where the differences between my knowledge and all the knowledge out there is very very small indeed.
When it comes to hacking you can spy on routers and traffic and packets all you want, until the boys kick the door in and catch the operator at the (perferably still operating and online) computers, you’re not *certain* you have your man.
You may still not have “your man”, just a lowly footsoldier or freelancer, but at least you do have what you have with the guy you have and the computers there.
The next level of certaintly down from that is like talking about the next level of speed down from stall speed with an aircraft, you can’t be 99.999% certain, you can’t fly at 99.999% of stall speed, and you can’t be 99.999% not pregnant.
Sure, when it comes to IT you can make all sorts of assumptions, but in an engineering / scientific sense they are utterly worthless until / unless proven by kicking the door in and catching the hacker / cracker / wacker in the act and catching his computers all running and data intact.
So the level below 100% sure it was a wookie hack is 0% sure it was a wookie hack, all the traceroutes and whois and fingering and command line querying in the world don’t mean shit, it could all be smoke and mirrors, even accessing a router you could be getting lied to by a shell.
Every backbone router in the UK already lies in just this way, they all conceal the existence and interference and footprint of the data slurping “black boxes” that record all packet headers and more besides.
Think on that. Deeply.
We have created a perfect system of data society, where it is now impossible to verify any data as being genuine, a team of true investigative journalists *could* in theory dig up the story of me being a lying violent nasty heroin addicted rapist and child abuser who was a sexual risk to his own children, only a few of the peripheral players are dead, so it would still be possible to interview almost everyone in depth and paint a picture of what really happened back then, and then when you find this “truth” how are you going to disseminate it? What organ of the media or data comms are you proposing? How will you get the story out?
Who is going to pay for it too?
Thing is, with age and experience, I have come to realise one thing, an dit should keep you up at night, and that thing is that all our leaders and movers and shakers and people of influence, and I have been unfortunate enough to meet a few of them, are no more intelligent than the average school leaver, they are as thick as shit, invariably the “fiercly intelligent” ones have one pet subject on which they can spout at length, but not debate of have their actual knowledge questioned or put to the test.
None of this should scare you, what should scare you is their absolute belief that they are RIGHT.
Intellectually there is no differnence between Junker / LaGarde / Cameroon / May / Mutti Merkel and your average sand nigger suicide bomber, sure one may believe in keynsian monetary policy and the other may believe in the prophet, but they both BELIEVE, *absolutely*, that they are right, and everyone else is wrong.
The biochemical systems in the brains are the same.
To question is heresy.
The engineering / scientific method is heresy.
It is a tribute to the effectiveness of the human genome that despite this defiance of all fact, we have become the most sucessful species on the planet by far, with little or not need to rely on scientific and engineering truths, we can safely ignore 99.9% of truth and fact and *still* dominate the planet.
Lemmings.
Not *all* of them rush over the cliff to suicide to ease the population.
Those that do, boy, are they *right*
