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Jeremiah Cornelius (137)

Jeremiah Cornelius
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http://cheunderground.com/blog/
"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in . . . to kind of catapult the propaganda."
--George W. Bush, May 24, 2005


"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
--Philip K. Dick


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--Arthur Dent


"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
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Journal of Jeremiah Cornelius (137)

Air Force Aims for 'Full Control' of 'Any and All' Computers

[ #202904 ]
Thursday May 15, @12:26PM
Security

Noah Shachtman on Wired.com's Danger Room reports that Monday, the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB introduced a two-year, $11 million effort to put together hardware and software tools for "Dominant Cyber Offensive Engagement." "Of interest are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root level access," a request for proposals notes, "to both fixed (PC) or mobile computing platforms... any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware." This isn't just some computer science study, mind you; "research efforts under this program are expected to result in complete functional capabilities."
The Air Force has already announced their desire to manage an offensive BotNet, comprised of unwitting participatory computers. How long before they slip a root kit on you?


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  • Only if they get past my OpenBSD firewall.... ;-) Is this even legal?
    • The Air Force is under the authority of the Commander in Chief. It's not illegal if the President does it.

      Firewall? How naive!

      They will get rootkits on every DVD made, and in the nVidia firmware, and in the Flash from your Amazon shopping page, and...

      This is what their money can buy.

      • On all platforms? Sparc, x86, PPC? On every OS? Linux, the BSDs, HaikuOS and the odd people that still use decade old Amigas? ;-) And all the combinations thereof? Infecting all machines is a very bold statement.

        • Yes. But you must necessarily limit your self to this platform.

          I am having trouble building the new Firefox on my SGI Indigo 2 4400. :-(
        • Linux, the BSDs, HaikuOS and the odd people that still use decade old Amigas? ;-)

          I'd like to think I influnced your inclusion of Amiga at the end there;-) I agree with you that the technological hurdles are pretty staggering, but I am also somewhat disturbed that they would even think it is a good idea to do it.

          • Yes, absolutely! ;-) Because if I could and knew where to put it, I'd take your Amiga anyday. How I lusted for them back in the day.
  • ..and people catch them at it, all over the world air force dudes will be pariahs, all of them, guilt by association. I would expect other national governments to take proactive measures, let alone who knows how many cyber vigilante actions. Heck, they might even get the WTO into the scene, if all sorts of people are worried about getting rooted. There's a lot of billionaires and their businesses in the world, a lot of amateur and professional hacksters, governments that would like to avoid being compromise

  • So, how are they going to do this with code that anyone can recompile and patch with known-good compilers?

    I think they've been flying too high w/o an 02 mask.

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