L0pht in Transition
Most of the ’90s hacking group the L0pht - Mudge, Space Rogue, Weld Pond and others - have emerged in legitimate roles. Was their work ultimately boon or bane for security?
▻http://www.csoonline.com/article/2121870/network-security/lopht-in-transition.html
Brian Oblivion. Kingpin [Joe Grand]. Mudge [Peiter Zatko]. Space Rogue . Stefan von Neumann. Tan. Weld Pond [Chris Wysopal]. That’s how the hacker group called the L0pht appeared before the Senate Subcommittee on Government Cybersecurity on May 19, 1998. They said, among other things [before the Congress of the United States] that they could take down the Internet in 30 minutes.
[...]
“Back then, the companies would pretend [vulnerabilities] weren’t real,” says Bruce Schneier, the noted cryptographer and CTO of BT Counterpane. Schneier says the L0pht’s ability to build tools like L0phtCrack forced vendors to address security problems. “That’s the reason we have more secure software today. If it wasn’t for that, Microsoft would still be belittling, insulting and suing researchers,” he says.
[...]
that merger [with security consulting firm “@Stake”] announced Jan. 10, 2000, marked the symbolic end of the L0pht. Over the next few years, its members were fired or drifted away, and @Stake itself was gobbled up by Symantec in 2004. The only member of the L0pht still there is Nash. The transition was particularly difficult for Zatko, who spent six months on disability and left @Stake after just two years.
The 1998 L0pth testimony before the US Senate:
Transcript of that testimony:
▻http://www.spacerogue.net/wordpress/?p=602
In reality, all we really are, is just Curious. For, well over the past decade, the seven of us have independently learned and worked in the fields of satellites communication, cryptography, operating systems’ design and implementation, computer network security, electronics and telecommunications.
To other learning process, we’ve made few waves with some large companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Novell, and Sun Microsystems. At the same time, the top hackers, and the top legitimate cryptographers, and computer security professionals pay us visits when they are in town, just to see what we’re currently working on.. so we kind of figured we must be doing something right.
[...]
Senator Thomson: (15’30")
I am informed that, you think that within 30 minutes the seven of you could make the internet unusable for the entire nation, is that correct?
Mudge: That’s correct. Actually one of us with just a few packets. We’ve told a few agencies about this, it’s kinda funny because we think that this is something that the various government agency should be actively going after, we know that the Department of Defense at very large, investigation into what’s known as denial of service attacks against the infrastructure
[...]
Kingpin: (22’36") I just want to add one thing to that, in the point of liability, the car manufactures will be and are held liable if something goes wrong in a product. If something goes wrong in one of the ten thousand cars, and it explodes they will be held liable. If something breaks in the software the companies aren’t held liable and they feel, why?
More about @Stake
This is a cached version of the original March 2000 article in BusinessWeek.
A Short, Strange Trip from Hackers to Entrepreneurs
▻https://hackerfall.com/story/a-short-strange-trip-from-hackers-to-entrepreneurs
▻https://web.archive.org/web/20160325230929/http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/0003/ep000302.htm
L’avenir du travail : tout était déjà dit et annoncé dès septembre 1995 - Chroniques du Yéti
▻http://yetiblog.org/index.php?post/1823
Du 27 septembre 1995 au 1er octobre 1995, à San Francisco, le grand hôtel Fairmont accueille 500 membres de l’élite mondiale : chefs d’État, hommes politiques, dirigeants d’entreprises multinationales, universitaires, chercheurs, etc.
Cette réunion du Fairmont se déroule dans le cadre de la fondation de Mikhaïl Gorbatchev. Elle a une grande importance historique. Elle fait intervenir Mikhaïl Gorbatchev, George Bush père, George Schultz, Margaret Thatcher, Ted Turner de l’entreprise CNN, John Gage de l’entreprise Sun Microsystems, ainsi que des dizaines d’autres personnalités de tous les continents. Elle a pour thème “l’avenir du travail”.
▻https://blogs.mediapart.fr/jocegaly/blog/050615/zibig-et-le-tittytainement-ou-quand-les-cons-se-mettent-penser?ongle
]]>Reaching for Silicon Valley [At the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta — sur fond de contentieux et de chips]
NYTimes.com - Nick Wingfield 16/11/13
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/technology/reaching-for-silicon-valley.html?pagewanted=all
At Stanford, in the heart of #Silicon_Valley, academic research with an eye toward private industry — that “quasi-Wild West way” — is a way of life.
No other university has been associated with so many big tech giants created by former students and faculty members— companies including Google, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. A study conducted last year by two Stanford professors estimated that nearly 40,000 active companies generating annual revenue of $2.7 trillion can trace their roots in some way to #Stanford.
▻http://engineering.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Stanford_Innovation_Survey_Executive_Summary_Oct2012_3.pdf
The university’s affiliation with so many of these spin-outs, as they are known, is lucrative as well as legendary. Stanford has earned about $337 million just from licensing to Google its search algorithm, which was developed while the company’s co-founders were in graduate school.
One of Stanford’s closest rivals in creating spin-outs has been the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which played a role in the creation of Akamai, iRobot and the E Ink Corporation. Many other schools with respected computer engineering programs, including Cornell and the University of Washington, are all doing more to copy Stanford’s success in commercializing technologies, which can benefit the schools through #patent licensing fees, alumni donations and the cachet that attracts future generations of students.
Aux #Etats-Unis, les liens entre #université et #startups sont étroits. Une certaine culture de l’#entreprenariat qui fait naître des #tech_companies, ce qui ne va pas sans #conflits_d'intérêts. De là à la #silicon_army...
]]>Bioengineers Build Open Source Language for Programming Cells | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
▻http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/04/bio-fab-open-source-language
According to Endy, this notion began with a group of students from Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco a half decade ago, and he’s now calling for a commercial company to recreate Sun Microsystems’ Java vision in the biological world. It’s worth noting, however, that this vision never really came to fruition — and that Sun Microsystems is no more.
Nonetheless, this is what Endy is shooting for — right down to Sun’s embrace of open source software. The BIOFAB language will be freely available to anyone, and it will be a collaborative project.
La biologie de synthèse est effectivement une manière de reprendre ce qui a échoué en informatique et de l’appliquer au vivant, en espérant un miracle, justement parce qu’il s’agit de vivant.
]]>Aujourd’hui le nanomonde #17 | Pièces et main d’œuvre
►http://www.piecesetmaindoeuvre.com/spip.php?page=resume&id_article=381
Le présent a-t-il besoin de nous ? En avril 2000, voici des âges de cela, le chercheur Bill Joy, co-fondateur de Sun Microsystems, publiait dans Wired, mensuel américain le plus technolâtre du monde, une mise en garde intitulée « Why the future doesn’t need us ». Il pointait les risques d’emballement et d’autoréplication en particulier dans les bio et nanotechnologies, mais aussi l’évincement accéléré de l’homme par un système d’automatisation générale, dit de « planète intelligente ». Ce futur est déjà notre présent et nous sommes ici à l’endroit idéal, dans la technopole, pour l’exposer. Outre leurs multiples applications industrielles, les technologies convergentes (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) rendent possible le pilotage cybernétique du monde, des masses et des individus, grâce aux puces RFID. L’asservissement se conjugue avec l’évincement. La société de contrainte s’implante dans les cerveaux grâce aux nano-électrodes de Clinatec. L’industrie solaire prend son essor grâce aux capteurs nanostructurés de Soitec et du CEA-Léti. La biologie de synthèse, la fabrique du « vivant artificiel », est soutenue par Geneviève Fioraso, ministre de la Recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur, celle-là même qui depuis vingt ans, avec ses partenaires de l’écosystème local, a propulsé Minatec et tous les projets techno-industriels grenoblois. Ces projets, célébrés dans les rapports de Jean-Louis Beffa, grand patron du CAC40, et de Christian Blanc, préfet et grand patron d’entreprises (...)
]]>Le nouveau M de LAMP : MariaDB
►http://www.clever-age.com/veille/blog/le-nouveau-m-de-lamp-mariadb.html
MySQL est un Système de Gestion de Base de Données apparu en 1995 qui est devenu en quelques années un des plus utilisés dans le monde. En 2008, l’entreprise MySQL AB éditrice de MySQL est rachetée par Sun Microsystems, qui se fait racheter un an plus tard par Oracle.
Michael Widenius, aussi connu sous le pseudonyme de Monty, est le principal auteur de la première version de MySQL, et est le fondateur de MySQL AB. Il a quitté Sun Microsystems afin d’assurer la disponibilité d’une version gratuite et stable de son bébé.
C’est ainsi qu’est né MariaDB, un projet sous licence GPLv2 se basant sur MySQL, qui se veut être très stable, plus robuste, plus performant, et surtout 100% compatible avec ce dernier.
La présentation et les discussions lors de cette soirée nous ont appris que des sites à fort trafic utilisent d’ores et déjà MariaDB en production : pap.fr, Pixmania, Paybox, … et d’autres entreprises tels que Viadeo l’utilisent pour leur BI.
Toutes ces applications qui ont migré de MySQL vers MariaDB ont gagné en performance. Pixmania serait passé de 50 serveurs MySQL à seulement 10 MariaDB, avec très certainement d’autres optimisations, mais nous n’avons pas pu avoir plus d’informations.
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