March 11, 2012
Gotcha journalism is a term used to describe methods of interviewing which are designed to entrap interviewees into making statements which are damaging or discreditable to their cause, character, integrity, or reputation. The aim is to make film or sound recordings of the interview which can be selectively edited, compiled, and broadcast or published to show the subject in an unfavourable light.
Methods include misrepresenting the topic of the interview, then switching to an embarrassing subject, leading the interviewee to commit to a certain answer, and confronting them with prepared material designed to contradict or discredit that position, repeatedly baiting the interviewee to befuddle them and get their guard down to elicit an embarrassing response. Another technique is for the interviewer to remain silent after something the subject has said, which often leads the subject to say something to fill the silence. Gotcha journalism is often designed to keep the interviewee on the defensive by, for example, being required to explain some of their own statements taken out of context thus effectively preventing the interviewee from discussing their own agenda for the interview.
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March 9, 2012
Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) is an open source network stress testing and denial-of-service attack application. LOIC was initially developed by Praetox Technologies, but was later released into the public domain, and now is hosted on several open source platforms. It’s named after a fictitious weapon from the ‘Command & Conquer’ series of video games.
The software has inspired the creation of an independent JavaScript version, enabling a DoS from a web browser. LOIC performs a DoS attack (or when used by multiple individuals, a DDoS attack) on a target site by flooding the server with TCP packets or UDP packets with the intention of disrupting the service of a particular host. People have used LOIC to join voluntary botnets. LOIC attacks are easily identified in system logs, and the attack can be tracked down to the individual users IP address.
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March 9, 2012
Topiary, real name Jake Davis, is a hacker and self-described ‘Simple prankster turned swank garden hedge. Worked with Anonymous, LulzSec, and other such paragons of intense cyber victory.’ He is an associate of the Internet group Anonymous, which have publicly claimed various online attacks, including hacking HBGary, Westboro Baptist Church, and Gawker. They have also claimed responsibility for the defacing of government websites in countries such as Zimbabwe, Syria, Tunisia, Ireland, and Egypt. 18-year Jake Davis was arrested in Scotland in 2011.
Police confiscated a Dell laptop and a 100-gigabyte hard drive that had 16 different virtual machines. The hard drive also contained details relating to an attack on Sony and hundreds of thousands of email addresses and passwords were found on the computer. A London court released Davis on bail under the conditions that he live under curfew with his mother and have no access to the Internet. His lawyer stated that, while his client did help publicize LulzSec and Anonymous attacks, he lacks the technical skills to have been anything but a sympathizer. After his arrest, Anonymous launched a ‘Free Topiary’ campaign.
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March 9, 2012
The Jester (th3j35t3r) is a computer vigilante who describes himself as a grey hat ‘hacktivist.’ He claimed responsibility for attacks on WikiLeaks, 4chan, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Islamist websites. He claims to be acting out of American patriotism. The Jester uses a denial-of-service (DoS) tool known as ‘XerXeS,’ that he claims to have developed.
One of The Jester’s habits is to tweet ‘TANGO DOWN’ on Twitter whenever he successfully takes down a website. The Jester had stated that he was a former soldier and had served in Afghanistan and elsewhere.The Jester claims to have originally developed his DoS script as a means to test and harden servers. After learning from an article that Jihadists were using the Internet to recruit and coordinate terror cells, The Jester resolved to disrupting online communications between Jihadists. He weaponized his script and created a front-end known as ‘XerXeS’ in order to solve the script’s usability problems.
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March 9, 2012
Sabu, real name Hector Xavier Monsegur (b. 1983), is an American computer hacker and the founder of the hacking group LulzSec. LulzSec intervened in the affairs of organizations such as News Corporation, Stratfor, British and American law enforcement bodies, and Irish political party Fine Gael.
Sabu later turned informant for the FBI, working with the agency for over ten months to aid them in identifying other hackers from Lulzsec and related groups. His online handle is a reference to a professional wrestler. Monsegur was based out of a housing project on the lower east side of Manhattan while operating as Sabu; he is currently in a witness protection program.
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March 8, 2012
Utne Reader [ut-nee] is an American bimonthly magazine, which collects and reprints articles on politics, culture, and the environment from generally alternative media sources, including journals, newsletters, weeklies, zines, music, and DVDs. In addition, the magazine’s writers and editors contribute books, film, and music reviews and original articles which tend to focus on emerging cultural trends. The magazine’s website produces ten blogs covering politics, environment, media, spirituality, science and technology, great writing, and the arts.
The magazine was founded in 1984 by Eric Utne and Nina Rothschild Utne. Utne Reader was part of the salon movement of the 1980s, devoted to debate on the issues of the day, and was an early source of coverage of the mythopoetic men’s movement when it surfaced in the early 1990s. Every year, the magazine gives out its Utne Independent Press Awards, which honor alternative and independent magazines from around the world. Past winners include the ‘Wilson Quarterly,’ ‘In These Times,’ ‘Virginia Quarterly Review,’ and ‘High Country News.’
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March 7, 2012
Joseph Kony (b.1964) is a Ugandan guerrilla group leader, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a group engaged in a violent campaign to establish theocratic government based on the Ten Commandments throughout Uganda. The LRA say that spirits have been sent to communicate this mission directly to Kony. Directed by Kony, the LRA have also spread to parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. It has abducted and forced an estimated 66,000 children to fight for them, and has also forced the internal displacement of over 2,000,000 people since its rebellion began in 1986.
Kony received a surge of attention in early March 2012 with the release of ‘Kony 2012,’ a thirty minute documentary, was made by filmaker Jason Russell for the campaign group Invisible Children Inc.
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March 6, 2012
In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself. The phrase appears to have been first used in 1992, in ‘On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones,’ a paper by Pete Worden about NASA’s bureaucracy.
It has come to be used as a metaphor for any similar system, particularly in contexts such as the War on Terror and the military-industrial complex.
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March 6, 2012
Poetic justice is a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character’s own conduct. English drama critic Thomas Rymer coined the phrase in ‘The Tragedies of the Last Age Considere’d’ (1678) to describe how a work should inspire proper moral behavior in its audience by illustrating the triumph of good over evil.
The demand for poetic justice is consistent in Classical authorities and shows up in Horace, Plutarch, and Quintillian, so Rymer’s phrasing is a reflection of a commonplace. Philip Sidney, in ‘Defense of Poetry,’ argued that poetic justice was, in fact, the reason that fiction should be allowed in a civilized nation.
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March 6, 2012
A buzzword (also fashion word and vogue word) is a term of art, salesmanship, politics, or technical jargon that is used in the media and wider society outside of its originally narrow technical context. Buzzwords differ from jargon in that jargon is esoteric but precisely defined terminology used for ease of communication between specialists in a given field, whereas a buzzword (which often develops from the appropriation of technical jargon) is often used in a more general way. Buzzwords are used as a form of thought-control via intentional vagueness.
In management, by stating organization goals with opaque words of unclear meaning; their positive connotations prevent questioning of intent, especially when many buzzwords are used. they also are used to inflate the trivial to something of importance and stature, to impress a judge or an examiner by seeming to know a topic, by name-dropping it, or to camouflage chit-chat while saying nothing. Examples include: ‘Going forward,’ ‘Leverage,’ ‘Long tail,’ ‘Next generation,’ ‘Paradigm,’ and ‘Incentivize.’
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March 5, 2012
In political jargon, useful idiot is a pejorative term used to describe people perceived as propagandists for a cause whose goals they do not understand, who are used cynically by the leaders of the cause. The term was originally used to describe Soviet sympathizers in Western countries. The implication is that although the people in question naively thought of themselves as an ally of the Soviet Union, they were actually held in contempt and were being used.
The use of the term in political discourse has since been extended to other propagandists, especially those who are seen to unwittingly support a malignant cause which they naively believe to be a force for good. The earliest known usage in Western media is in a 1948 article in the social-democratic Italian paper ‘L’Umanita’ – as cited in a ‘New York Times’ article on Italian politics of the same year. Despite often being attributed to Lenin, in 1987, Grant Harris, senior reference librarian at the Library of Congress, declared that ‘We have not been able to identify this phrase among [Lenin’s] published works.’
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March 5, 2012
The urban survival syndrome in United States jurisprudence, can be used either as a defense of justification or of excuse. The first case using the defense was the 1994 Fort Worth, Texas murder trial of Daimion Osby. The use of the ‘urban survival syndrome’ as a defense to criminal charges followed the success of the battered woman syndrome defense in State v. Kelly (1984), which was based on the acceptance that the presence of such a syndrome may cause the defendant, a victim of domestic violence, to reasonably believe she was in peril and was therefore justified in using deadly force, given the circumstances.
According to the defense, an individual experiencing the daily life of racial segregation and violence common in many inner cities in the United States causes a subjective state equivalent to that caused by survival in a violent battleground of war. As such it leads to a condition similar to a syndrome already recognized in both psychological and psychiatric practices, that is, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
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