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only way to become a great general and master the secrets of war.”!°° I sometimes fee] the same reading over stories of zero-day attacks, clever hacks like “rowhammer’ or the Tel Aviv heat hack. You can distill from each tale of a broken, once-secure systems an essential principle: The hackers rush always, relentlessly at the central core of a system. They aim to make it weird, to manipulate it madly from the inside out. Network power doesn’t merely come from that 10 million device-per- day spread of global connectivity, after all, it also comes from incredible concentration of power inside certain systems we all rely on: Chips, data bases, centralized and gatekept platforms. Control of such hubs and roots of our world can influence everything; little wonder they are such an appealing target. “The conventional belief that all nuclear systems are ‘air gapped’ is a myth,” the Russian security researcher Eugene Kaspersky has warned. The result: “There are three types of people: Scared to death. Opportunists. Don’t care.”151 This sense that the systems are so vulnerable if you can get to their hearts is what lures hackers ever deeper, into the code kernels where the most basic instructions are decided. That they can often make machines weird by using the device’s own code against them, like some sort of autoimmune disease, is only a marker of the particular perversity of the problem here. Security researchers call such holes “vulnerabilities” in a system, but of course they are much more than weak spots. They are potentially fatal. In a way, the hot rush to touch and tickle and maliciously use these already waiting cancers reveals to us the essential Seventh Sense secret of the Warez Dudes: Connection makes an object vulnerable, yes; but it can also reveal the possibility of total control, of the fundamental root mastery of a connected system. Such a hole, when it is exposed by connection and then corruption, can be complete in the scope of its damage, devastating. Lord Acton’s famous line that “Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” twists in this age to something like “Absolute access corrupts absolutely.” Connection makes total exploitation, total control, possible. Every new generation of connected technologies is breeding essential black boxes, complex (not merely complicated!) containers filled with algorithmic levers and code tools for digital work that can be understood by only a few people, and exploited and used effectively — for good or ill - by a still smaller group. “The greater the dependence on a technology the greater the need to study and expose its inner workings,” one group of radical digital activists has argued in The Critical Engineering Manifesto. 5 They mean that as we turn our safety, freedom, and health over to a world of devices and their makers, we must know what goes on inside the very heart of such systems. It’s not merely that everything is connected now; it’s 150 “Read over and over”: Napoleon, “Maxims” from Thomas Raphael Phillip, ed., Roots of Strategy: The 5 Greatest Military Classics of All Time, (Stackpole Books 1985) p 432 151 “There are three types:” Eugene Kaspersky Talk at the Press Club in Canberra, Australia (2013) 152 “The greater the dependence”: “The Critical Engineering Manifesto,” The Critical Engineering Working Group, Berlin, October 2011-2014. Available online 106 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018338

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Filename HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018338.jpg
File Size 0.0 KB
OCR Confidence 85.0%
Has Readable Text Yes
Text Length 3,400 characters
Indexed 2026-02-04T16:34:46.296723

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