This...Is...Spyware!!!

From (The Customer Is) Not Always Right and a hug to codecattx:

This…Is…Spyware!

Electronics Store | Texas, USA

Customer: “Hi, my son says that I have spartans on my laptop and I should bring it to you guys.”

Me: “…Ma’am? Spartans?”

Customer: “Yes, I called my son at school and told him that screens keep popping up all the time, and he said that I have spartans.”

Me: “Oh! You mean trojans! That’s a possibility; let me run this analyzer on your laptop real quick and we’ll see what’s going on.”

Customer: “Young man, my son is in college and he says it has spartans. You just stand here in a little uniform and make minimum wage. I think my son knows what he is talking about.”

Me: “You’re right ma’am. I was hoping to run a diagnostic and find out that it wasn’t spartans, but just by looking at the login screen, I can tell that you probably have about 300 of the little guys running around.”

Customer: “300?! Is that bad?”

Me: “It’s horrible. They cram themselves into a bottleneck and kill wave after wave of data, until there is a wall of dead programs blocking any more traffic through your computer.”

Customer: “Oh, that just figures. I’m going to go buy a new computer.”

Me: “Ok, ma’am, I think that would be best.”

My Bet: Best Buy, west of The Parks Mall, Arlington. Son goes to TT or A&M.

Bush's "Legacy"

More Cold War Cloak-n-Dagger SIGINT History

American Cryptology during the Cold War, 1945-1989, by Thomas R. Johnson: documents 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

In response to a declassification request by the National Security Archive, the secretive National Security Agency has declassified large portions of a four-part "top-secret Umbra" study, American Cryptology during the Cold War. Despite major redactions, this history discloses much new information about the agency's history and the role of SIGINT and communications intelligence (COMINT) during the Cold War. Researched and written by NSA historian Thomas Johnson, the three parts released so far provide a frank assessment of the history of the Agency and its forerunners, warts-and-all.

U.S. COMSEC History from 1973

From Bruce Schneier/Governmentattic:

Freshly declassified and a rather interesting read:

A History of U.S. Communications Security (Volumes I and II, 1973)
David G. Boak Lectures, National Security Agency (NSA) (PDF)

I like the informal style of the document, it's an easy read, even if one is not an intelligence buff. In the first volume, all but the first and last chapters are redacted (what is left is an introduction and TEMPEST). The second volume is more intact, and has some history DES, and a view on public key cryptography before affordable general computers. Certainly other things of which I don't realize the significance...

Some of the redactions may be easily guessable, I fancy "iron curtain", "embassy", and later "Russia" on page 97. Why do they even bother? This would be a good exercise for some student to write a program doing a dictionary attack on the text using the properties of the used font.

Our Russian "Friends"

I know people have been wondering about the random/phantom Russians with cyrillic alphabet journals friending them.

Here is some info from someone who has done the digging:

http://nympholept.livejournal.com/tag/russian+bots

Short version: they are robots, you should report them to lj abuse under 'other' problems, and title your message "Russian bots". lj has been working on excluding them: all but one of mine are now dead - but has not yet got them all.

Do not friend them back.

There are actual genuine Russian LJs but they typically differ from the bot LJs by actually having posted content.