Daniel Miessler's Blog, page 74

I’m Still Mad About Game of Thrones

The reason I didn’t write this earlier is because I’m ashamed to be writing about a TV show at all.

There will be spoilers.

But I liked Game of Thrones, and I cared about it for nearly a decade. So I guess it makes sense that it left a mark.

So I guess—first things first—why am I mad?

Is it because the last season or two were bad? Sure, I guess that’s the easy path. The last season sucked, and they ruined everything. That’s a way to be done with it.

Except it’s not. That doesn’t explain why this is still a splinter in my soul.

Let’s look at the deeper reasons. And let’s start with a capture of what went wrong.

It was too easy to defeat the night king
It was too easy to defeat the whitewalkers
Not nearly enough people died to make it a big deal in the final battle
Many characters didn’t proper treatment, e.g., Cersei should have had a death that matched her life

Those are bad, but the real problem was Daenerys.

This is the reason I’m still mad about this goddamn show.

I’m mad that they messed up her character. And I’m mad that they didn’t realize they did it.

I keep hearing defenses from the TV show producers, and from GRRM, saying that the seeds were laid all along. That we should have seen it. That it went exactly as planned, according to a meticulous plan of character development.

Well, you know what? You’re right. You did show that she could go bad. You did show that she had it in her the whole time. And it was realistic.

But so what. Fuck you anyway. And here’s why.

You turned a character—loved by hundreds of millions of people around the world—into fucking Hitler.

And not a little bit, either. Like actual Hitler.

Uniforms. Mass death. Planned control of the world. The subjugation of any who resist. All of it.

People fucking named their kids Daenerys. She was a feminist icon. She was a goddamn hero.

She represented the light with darkness. She represented breaking away from destiny and being better than what we were supposed to be. What others thought we would be.

But no, you had to honor the original idea and honor all those seeds you planted along the way. You had to see the full tree be born as it was planned from the beginning.

I get that nobody planned on it being as big as it was. And I get that it’s hard to change course on a story and production like that.

But damn.

Once you saw that the entire world wanted this girl to break the chain—to be better—to overcome. You could have found a better way. Hell, I could have. And hundreds of people actually did.

There were tons of lines where she went a little bad—and like Kamakasi’d her dragon into Cersei’s tower killing them both—or some other dramatic ending. She didn’t have to exit as a saint.

But Hitler?

That’s your answer?

Turn the one fucking beacon of hope—built over 10 years—into a genocidal murderer?

And then, to make the thing even worse, you mess up the execution on top of it.

Suddenly the whitewalkers aren’t so bad after all. All the Dothraki die in an episode, but then turn out to be just fine. And so many characters get abysmal resolutions (Jaime, Brienne, etc.)

What we lost wasn’t just a show. What we lost was hope that a show could actually be as good as it promised.

That’s the part that bothers me.

It was a crime against hope.

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Comparing Offensive Security Tooling and Gun Control

A debate recently flared up on Twitter around creating and sharing high-quality Offensive Security Tools, such as Empire. Richard Bejtlich came out against, saying that OST tools were doing more harm than good.

“We believe that Powershell and Empire framework will remain a major threat vector employed by APTs, malware authors, and Red Teams.” SO WHY ARE YOU UPDATING IT? You are improving capabilities you explicitly say are *used by bad guys.* Scottie, beam me up from this bizarro world. https://t.co/3Pnrrel5DA

— Richard Bejtlich (@taosecurity) December 23, 2019

I was about to reply to him pointing out that OST are how Red Teams are able to convince Blue Teams that they need to take the situation seriously. But Amit Serper had just made the same point.

Because that's the only way everyone moves forward. The red team's purpose is to improve the blue team. If APTs won't use PSEmpire they'll create something unknown for themselves (which they often do). Keep sharing knowledge ➡️ keep getting better. https://t.co/G2Gtdwt2pT

— Amit Serper (@0xAmit) December 23, 2019

I thought that was the end of it, but then Andrew Thompson showed up and dropped a blog post of his that sent my brain into Cognitive Dissonance Level 7—which is a good sign that an opportunity for learning may be in the area.

OFFSEC as a discipline serves the interests of security. Offensive Security Tools (OSTs) aid OFFSEC in serving the interests of security. OST release on the public internet is not the best way to do it. More in my blog: https://t.co/xplmbJs1Px

— Andrew Thompson (@QW5kcmV3) December 23, 2019

Then I started chatting with my friend Joel Parish, and he mentioned something interesting. He said the whole conversation made him revisit his ideas about gun control. And I was like, “What? How does it…oh.”

So that’s why I’m writing this—to compare the two. And specifically to ask and answer the question of how one can be generally pro-gun control and pro-OST at the same time.

When I say guns I mean reasonable guns.

I think the best place to start is by acknowledging for both guns and OST that there is both positive and negative. It’s hard to argue against a handgun or shotgun for home defense, or for Nmap or Burp for protecting your own assets.

I think the disagreement lies at the extremes where one or more thresholds are reached, and those thresholds can be of multiple types.

Proliferation: some tipping point of too many guns
Power: people having access to AK-47s and body armor
Indefensibility: armor-piercing rounds, undetectable construction materials

I’ve written about similar tradeoffs in regard to gun control, and what they taught me then was that weapons don’t exist without context.

This reminds me of what I just learned about genetics, actually, which is basically that it’s useless to talk about what a gene does without knowing the environment it’s in.

For guns, I think it’s possible to have an environment where having a gun in the house is better for that homeowner, and better for society. And the same goes for concealed carry law.

But, crucially, there’s a multi-variate threshold beyond which adding additional guns becomes bad and/or where removing guns becomes good.

This is all a matter of data.

This is a big assumption, and one of the reasons the gun control debate is so squishy.

Assuming a community can agree what good and bad mean, and we can measure the variables that we’re testing against, e.g., current crime rate, average age of males, education level, current number of guns, etc., we should be able to adjust variables and observe changes. Or we can look at multiple communities where those variables are naturally different.

But each society should have some ideal number and type of guns based on these shared goals and variables.

As I talked about in that piece on gun control, you could have a situation where the local criminals are robbing people and businesses with impunity using handguns, and they’re doing so because they know their targets are not allowed to carry them.

Adding a concealed carry law and doing an advertising campaign around lawful gun owners fighting back could massively reduce gun crime in that environment, which is a position that many seem unwilling to consider.

But once you inject more guns into the population, you still have young men, and you still have alcohol, and you still have accidents. So while a certain type of harm might have decreased, you might have significantly increased the number of kids being hurt with those same pistols at home, or random fights resulting in shootouts. Just because the guns were there when they weren’t before.

Right, so let’s transition to OST.

It seems to me that the crucial point is whether the presence of the offensive tool adds to the defense of the population. And similar to guns, it seems like this happens in two main ways.

Raising awareness and visibility
Improving resilience via benign exposure to real-world TTPs and compromise

But both of these require that you actually benefit from them happening to you.

If you can make a tangible change by learning about a TTP, then the OST that made that happen was helpful. If you can make a tangible change that improves defense against the same TTPs after being battered, then it was helpful to take the whoopin.

I think—and I’m not sure this is correct—that the argument being made by Richard and others is that some of the tools are so good that you can’t realistically defend against them.

If awareness doesn’t help you, and getting owned by the Red Team doesn’t help you—then why are we doing it?

Maybe the tools are so good that any defenses erected become negligible upon the next attack. Or maybe it’s theoretically possible to defend against them, but most people don’t have security teams, so the point is moot.

I think those are the two main points being conflated and/or argued in this debate.

Is the state of security so bad that more OST is like dropping off guns in a bad neighborhood? Where you know you’re only going to produce more victims, and not more deterrent or resilience?

Or is the state of OST tools so good that more OST is like releasing plans to an undetectable poison that you can make in your kitchen, and that can kill tens of thousands with a thimble full.

If one or both of those is true—and to the extent that they are—I absolutely see the point. Those are some of the same reasons that people are pro-gun-control.

Me personally, I’m all about understanding the environment that the weapons are being introduced into. Having data on it. And therefore knowing how your stimuli will affect outcomes.

35% of orgs, WITH A CIO, have ZERO cybersecurity staff, per 2018 Gartner global study of 3,160 orgs with CIOs. What do you think the stat is for those without CIOs? Probably also zero. Twitter infosec is the top 10%, at best, arguing with each other. https://t.co/TXD8G2oJRJ

— Richard Bejtlich (@taosecurity) December 23, 2019

Richard is talking about how few companies actually have any legitimate defenses, and the percentage that can defend against a decent Red Team is way less than 65%, so that seems to be driving his position.

I can’t say I disagree with that.

I had a crazy idea this morning that I don't actually believe, but thought would be a great book idea.

What if all this local municipality hacking and ransomware was part of a government resilience exercise?

Don’t want to patch? Cool. Prepare to be shut down.

— ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ (@DanielMiessler) December 16, 2019

But I also said recently on Twitter that it would be super interesting if all these city ransomware cases were actually a Federal government Red Team exercise designed to do tough love resilience training.

In other words, if you can’t survive this then you’re not going to survive what China, Russia, and Iran are about to throw.

Summary

So here’s where I think I stand on this.

We shouldn’t try to ban OST as an alternative to doing the hard work of hardening.

OST can do good and can do harm.
How much of each you’re getting depends on multiple environmental factors.
If it’s possible to learn from OST and get better as an organization, city, or country, I lean heavily towards MORE OST.
Where it is completely impossible to learn and improve from OST, or where the OST is so advanced that it makes learning/improvement pointless, I am willing to have a conversation about controlling it.

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How Absurdism Applies in Everyday Life

I think Absurdism, coined by Albert Camus, is one of our most powerful and practical philosophical concepts. It’s often defined as:

It’s the conflict itself, not either of the two sides that are conflicting.

The conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and meaning in life, and the human inability to find any in a purposeless, meaningless or chaotic and irrational universe.

Wikipedia

That’s the traditional definition, but I see Absurdism in so much more of life.

I see Absurdism in a broader sense. I see it as any existential conflict between the human condition and reality. But let’s start with the canonical version.

The Meaning of Life: Humans seem to be wired to require (and perpetually search for) an ultimate meaning of life, but based on our current understanding of the universe, none exists. It’s Absurd because of the conflict between our need for this meaning, and the fact that it may not exist.

This is the classic one—the one that he created the word for. And it is perhaps the deepest and most consequential one. But many other examples are appearing as we continue to learn about the universe.

Free Will: Humans seem to be wired to believe that we have free choice (my explanation here), but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence for justification of this belief in science. It’s Absurd because of the conflict between our intuition and our practical need for this belief, and the fact that it may not exist.

The free will debate pulls one right into a related question, which is, “Why do anything?” If free will doesn’t exist, what does it even mean to say things like, “I want to be a better person.”, or, “I need to do better next time.”

If the world is just stumbling along—randomly or not—according to laws of physics, then we can’t actually influence anything. Given this view, staying in bed and eating Crunch Berries becomes a remarkably logical way of conducting oneself. After all, it was either going to happen anyway, or it wasn’t.

So, really, why do anything? In my framing, this a deeply Absurdist question.

Ambition and the Desire for Improvement: Humans seem to be wired to believe that we can and should try to improve ourselves and our surroundings, but in a mechanistic world (random or otherwise), it doesn’t actually matter what you do. This question is Absurd because of the conflict between self-improvement—and a desire to do good in the world—being some of the most important reasons that humans have to exist, and the issue that if free will is an illusion then we’re all just taking credit for the universe unfolding as it was going to anyway.

Right, so, the search for meaning and the reason to do anything at all. Those are big.

But so is love.

Love: Humans seem to be wired to believe that love is an essential and beautiful part of our existence, but in a world where evolution crafted our brains to be rewarded by certain chemicals, it starts to look like the entire thing is an illusion. Squirt, squirt. And we can largely already replicate the feeling with drugs. This issue is Absurd because of the conflict between love being a fundamental value and goal of all humanity, and the fact that it appears to be a clever hack by evolution to allow us to survive, cooperate, and reproduce.

And the same goes for any pleasure, in any activity. If you look closely enough, there’s most likely an evolutionary reason that your body is rewarding you for doing that thing.

The crash and the rebirth

Ok, great, so where does that leave us?

It doesn’t look like there’s any ultimate meaning to the universe
We don’t actually have free will, so we’re not actually making any decisions
It doesn’t actually matter if we try to be better than yesterday, since we either were going to or we weren’t anyway
And love and pleasure are just evolutionary tricks embedded in our brains to make sure we try to pass on the best genes

Wonderful.

And why the hell am I even writing this? Isn’t this all horribly depressing?

No. It’s glorious. It’s gloriously Absurd.

This is the bottom. This is accepting reality for what it is, and it’s essential if we want to be serious citizens of this universe.

Coffee vs. Absurdism

Bertrand Russell had it right when he said:

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Bertrand Russell

Ah! But love is an illusion created by evolution!

Sure, technically true, but it doesn’t matter. Here’s the entire point of Absurdism as it applies to all these dimensions mentioned above.

We are human
This is the only reality we have
Our human experience is incongruent with that reality

The universe. Physics. Biology. Evolution. Neuroscience. Quantum Physics. These all provide models of our underlying reality.

But that isn’t the same as human experience. Humans weren’t designed to understand our underlying reality. We were designed to compete and succeed in the context of survival and reproduction.

So rather than seeing quarks and particles and neurons, we see choices, emotions, and relationships. Rather than seeing forces, and masses, and valence electrons, we see love, and ambition, and sacrifice.

We’re operating at a different layer, because we were built by evolution.

And that’s ok.

The key is to simply understand how different these two things are. We’re like tastebuds stuck to the bottom of a chair leg on Mars, and we’re being asked to analyze the subtle wavelengths of light coming from a star we cannot even see, halfway across the universe.

Meaning comes from struggle

That’s what’s Absurd about the whole thing. Our hardware and software aren’t meant to interact with reality directly. They’re meant to interact with other players in this game of Survive and Reproduce.

And now we’ve played the game so well that we’ve evolved far enough to see the other world. The real world. And we’ve started to notice the discrepancies between the two.

So what?

Does this really change anything about the human world?

Who says we can’t have both?

Is time with a dear friend any less sweet? Is Ice Cream any less wonderous? Are coffee and sex and laughter in some way diminished?

They are not.

The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.

Bertrand Russell

To me Russell’s guidance applies perfectly to our situation.

We can simultaneously enjoy the beauty of our human experience and use our newfound knowledge of the truth to understand it, and to enhance it even further.

We may be unable to find universal meaning in the universe. Trying to better yourself may be an illusion running inside the mind of an advanced ape. And love may be a chemical reaction designed to control our behavior.

But the good things in this human life are not diminished by the contrived or atomic nature of their substrate. No explanation of biology or physics can remove the magic of a smile, of kindness, or of love.

These two perspectives—the human and the absolute—are colliding. And that collision produces many instances of the Absurd. But it’s ok.

Learning about the underlying truth should not make our human interface any less enjoyable.

Embrace it (love), and study it (knowledge).

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Unsupervised Learning: No. 207

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American Tech Workers Need to Choose Between Helping Our Military vs. Enabling China’s Dystopia

I’ve been watching a slow-motion trainwreck within the young tech community.

There are also many protests related to equality in the workplace, but that’s a separate topic.

A significant number of young, woke tech workers have decided to start opposing the big corporations they work for based on moral grounds. There was the Google worker opposition to the Maven project, there have been numerous pushbacks against Amazon regarding facial recognition, and there are lots of other examples.

These are actually good things. Usually.

It’s heartening to know that our young people have a healthy moral immune system. And it’s good that big tech is being challenged to some degree by those that work for them. This is all healthy.

The problem is when protesters don’t understand the repercussions of their protests, or the alternatives that their success could make a reality.

We all know the dangers of big tech going Full Capitalist with weapon technology. And we can extend that to Surveillance Technology. Those are bad things, and like I said—it’s good that we are aware enough to oppose that.

The problem is that we’re not the only country in the world. If we were, I’d be protesting right along with everyone else. But China and Russia are also on the board with us, and they’re not listening to their woke constituents. They don’t even have any, becasue they put them in prison.

China, in particular, is a problem.

China is doing multiple things simultaneously that constitute a threat to the world as a whole.

They’re acquiring AI technology as quickly as possible to make them the leaders in weapons and surveillance. Source
They’re flagrantly stealing the world’s technology and research from wherever they can, and not just in the US. Source
They’re actively (and proudly) building a surveillance state tied to a population control mechanism, commonly referred to as their Social Credit system. Source
They’re building a comprehensive and strategic database of compromised systems and people in the US, for use in future conflicts. Source
They’re actively influencing the entire world, using both propaganda and direct political force, to legitimize and solidify their plan worldwide. Source
They’re basically colonizing Africa. Source

Basically, China is becoming hyper-aggressive. And they’re playing an extremely long strategic game to build, steal, and buy complete control over as much as possible in the world.

That part seems clear from watching the situation closely for the last couple of decades, and reading a number of books on the country. But I’m not a China expert, and the experts disagree on what their longterm goal is.

Some say they really just want to control the world so that they’re no longer at the whims of external forces. Which is understandable. We do have to remember that what they went through with Mao, and in WWII was extraordinarily traumatic, and it can push a country to overreact.

So I’m not coming from an anti-China perspective. They have a plan and they’re carrying it out.

The issue is that they’re playing extremely dirty in doing so. And the society they’re building within their country—and now basically trying to export out to the rest of the world—is not a society that anyone in the West wants.

Least of all the woke people protesting American tech companies that help the government.

Ask someone from mainland China how things are regarding:

The treatment of women compared to men
The treatment of Black people
The treatment of non-Chinese or non-White people in general
Their approach to freedom of speech
Their approach to privacy

It’s a complete dystopia.

But not like ours. The US is plenty messed up—as we all know.

The difference is that the US is messed up and stupid, and disorganized, with tons of different groups pulling in different directions.

In China they don’t have a dystopia on accident. It’s engineered. It’s on purpose. It’s precisely what the government wants, and precisely what they’re building.

They’re proud of it. That’s the difference.

So, what we have is a rising superpower basically trying to build the world’s worst government, in broad daylight.

They’re hacking, stealing, colonizing, and otherwise doing anything they can to step on the heads of their competitors (US, Europe, Russia) in order to get what they want.

And the more influence they get around the world, the more of the effects of their government we’ll see there as well. Like me not being sure how smart it is to write this post, for example.

Then you have our government people. Our military people. People in DC. Older people in tech, like Jeff Bezos. And they’re saying that tech needs to help our goverment compete in the world.

Sure, you can assume that he’s just trying to make money, because he’s the anti-Christ. But maybe—just maybe—he’s onto something.

Maybe the choice isn’t between our tech companies doing gross stuff and our tech companies not doing gross stuff.

Maybe it’s a choice between our tech companies helping our government do gross stuff, or China coming in and doing it instead.

That’s a possibility that we of The Woke need to consider when we protest.

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The Wonderful Ads of WIRED

I’ve been a reader of WIRED for a decent while, and my current subscription gives me both digital access and physical, dead-tree instances.

I was speeding through my backlog just now and was struck by how many ads there were.

My favorite book on this cocktail is called Spent.

Then, given how much I’ve read about advertising and psychology (and its link to evolutionary biology) I became super curious about the types of ads I was seeing.

The commercials on your favorite show are designed for you, not some fictional other.

Basically, who are these people that read this magazine?

Wait, no—who am I?

Here’s what I found:

Arc’Teryx outdoor apparel

Onelink smart home tech
Google Pixel
Lexus
GQ
Blue Moon
SAS analytics
Fidelity
Dobel Tequila
Armani cologne
Google Pixel

HISCOX business insurance
LG Signature washing machines
Antica vermouth
Natural American Spirit tobacco
Geico

Isn’t this just a tech-focused version of GQ?

Zzzquil Stress Less and Sleep
Lego
The North Face
Jim Beam
Boss Cologne
Bullet Bourbon

CB2 Furniture
GQ
Sotheby’s
Seiko


Analysis

Well, I don’t really have any analysis, other than to acknowledge that advertising speaks truth.

That’s around 26 ads, by the way. It reminded me a lot of reading Cosmo, actually, which I do whenever I come across one. The ads are the magazine content, and the articles are little more than bait.

Anyway, we of the WIRED demo are evidently into gadgets, alcohol, cologne, and outdoor activities.

Sounds right.

GQ should just buy the magazine and call it GQ-Tech.

The question is whether magazines like this create this reality, or simply cater to it. My guess is the latter.

Humans are silly little gene-mechs.

Notes


More about gene mechs here and here.

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Unsupervised Learning: No. 206 (Member Edition)

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The Wonder of Entropy

I find entropy fascinating—especially the relationship between it and information.

I just read this book about Claude Shannon, who invented information theory, and it basically unified everything I’d known about it previously.

Here’s how I’d capture my current understanding:

Entropy is basically a measure of disorder
For the universe, the ultimate disorder is heat death, meaning there are no patterns at all in the atoms of the universe. It’s cold chaos.
Information is the opposite of disorder and chaos. It has patterns that convey something to the receiver.
The more organized something is, the more predictable it is—because when you make a move it limits the moves you can make next according to the rules you’re using For example, writing “xyl” severely limits what you can write next to construct a valid English word.

This is why entropy is used in computer security.

When we say something has high entropy, it means it is highly chaotic. That it doesn’t contain discernable patterns. And ultimately—that it’s relatively unpredictable.

Like Heat Death.

If you were floating around in a post-heat-death universe, and you looked at a stream of atoms in any direction, you would see a completely unpredictable sequence. And that’s quite opposite from looking at a stream of atoms within a star, or a planet, or even in a dust particle. Those atoms are organized.

The other related facet of this is the concept of surprise. Information should be high in surprise, because it’s telling you something you don’t know. And you can’t know what’s going to be said based on what was said before.

So if someone says, “I regret to inform you, but we were unable to…”, we have low entropy in the series “I regret to inform” because we are almost guaranteed to receive a “you” after that. But we don’t know what comes after the “unable to”, so that’s information.

I’m not an expert on this, but it seems each scale and segment of a message can have its own entropy, e.g., within a word, within a sentence, within a paragraph, or within a book. Maximum entropy is maximum surprise, since the next bit is completely unpredictable.

I find this relationship between entropy, patterns, and surprise both remarkable and fascinating.

Anyway.

Whether it’s the decomposition of a living creature, the return of a solar system to the state of stardust, or the creation of a pseudo-random string to be used in a security context, the core principle of entropy is disorder and unpredictability.

Summary


Entropy is a measure of, or motion towards, disorder.
The more chaotic something is the less predictable it is.
Surprise is the opposite of predictability.
Information can be measured in surprise, i.e., the amount of data conveyed that wasn’t expected.
Entropy in computer security is about producing sequences that have little to no discernible pattern, i.e., that are unpredictable.

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The Difference Between System V and SystemD

One of the most fundamental distinctions in modern Linux systems is whether they use SystemV or Systemd. Here are the main differences between the two.

SystemV is older, and goes all the way back to original Unix.
SystemD is the new system that many distros are moving to.
SystemD was designed to provide faster booting, better dependency management, and much more.
SystemD handles startup processes through .service files.
SystemV handles startup processes through shell scripts in /etc/init*.


Indicators


If you’re starting and stopping things using systemctl restart sshd, etc, you’re on a SystemD system.
If you’re starting and stopping things using /etc/init.d/sshd start, etc, you’re on a SystemV system.


Which distros use which?

Many older versions of SystemD distros were SystemV.

Here’s an incomplete but hopefully useful breakdown of which distros are on which system.

Systemd: Amazon Linux, Red Hat Enterprise, CentOS, Fedora, Debian/Ubuntu/Mint

SystemV: Gentoo, Alpine, Slackware, Linux from Scratch

Notes


There are other startup systems as well, such as Upstart and BSD.

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