JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Judge Bean

Senior Member
Messages
1,257
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Originally posted by HuntTech+Oct 17 2004, 07:24 AM--><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteBegin-StarLord@Oct 11 2004, 02:59 PM
I would not expect a Govt based system to use windows based equipment. Windows is full of security problems.? I would wager that 35 to 45 % of their programs are REM statements rather than actual language.? Linux or Unix a open source programing, strangely is way safer.? Then there is Apple. a very safe system. Could you respect someone that left their IP alone that showed a .gov in the address?

This is incorrect. A vast majority of government 'equipment', i.e. workstations, are Windows based systems. However, a lot of DNS servers and routers are not. You'll find a mixture of UNIX, Windows, and even FreeBSD as edge servers for DNS and such. At the desktop, you'll find Windows. Linux is not considered 'ready-for-Primetime' and as such it has not been rolled out on a large scale. In some 'scientific labs', Linux is used.

Windows source code is hardly wasted space nor '35 to 45 %' REM statements. (LOL! ' REM statements '.. give me a break.) I am involved in the 'Shared Source Initiative' and I have seen a large portion of the Microsoft Windows source code for W2k3 and XP and I currently test for them on Longhorn.
Apple isn't all that safe... check the statistics at CERT for how many reported issues there are for each O/S... they're all vulnerable and the comparisons are pretty upsetting. It's more a matter of how many eyes are looking at breaking the system. Apple has maybe 3% to 6% of the marketplace... hardly a tasty target for cracking.

I would expect that kind of rhetoric at Slashdot... not here, though.

To answer Paul's question, *most* government (military is what I am most familiar with as of late) users are indeed proxied like crazy and there is a huge amount of monitoring. However, you'd be surprised how little of them are actually spoofed or obfuscated to the outside world. Perhaps it is a manpower issue as even the best systems require wetware (people) to audit what's going on.

Now... if I were to don my 'paranoia cap', I would say that some of the 'three-letter agencies' out there indeed obfuscate and spoof. The last network of that type that I was able to have some 'drive time' on was at the beginning of this year and they did some nifty things.
Some of the three-letter agency folks do work through off-site networks and you'll find that they appear in logs or stats pages as home users on networks like Comcast, Verizon, etc. The Department of Navy has some very interesting toys and pride themselves on the networks that they build. Their security and counter-cyberterrorism folks are young, smart, and work all hours... but you probably won't see them show up in logs... or easily recognize it. Regular military and government? Yep, they show up.

I do web hosting as a revenue stream for my business and my girlfriend sells 'Middle Eastern Belly Dance' supplies at her website (on my servers)... hmmm... I wonder why all those .mil and .gov IP addresses show up there? LOL! Methinks 'Middle Eastern' might have caught their attention... especially since I do some government contracting... but then again, if it were really serious, I doubt that the generic government addresses would be what I should worry about... :)
[/b][/quote]

I'm not sure that I understand all of this except the bellydancing part, but does this mean that the government has the ability to monitor but there's too much to monitor; or that it's too lazy or incompetent to monitor all that it might want to? Either way, I'm happy, but it looks as though the "threeletter" people prefer us to try to guess if they're watching-- the idea gives them power.
 

StarLord

Senior Member
Messages
3,187
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Hunttech,

If I am not mistaken, I did leave a spot for an expert such as Jedi. Its good that you post. Have you heard of Bugtraq? I have been watching their posts "in house" for quite sometime. Funny, they seem to think that Microsoft software is one of the worst just because of the way it's written.

Don't shoot the messenger as I did not claim to be a expert in programing. Using the term REM statement and the % of them still in the program was my limited way of stating that MS was notorious for not fixing their buginfested programs on time and even when folks went back for updates it made problems worse. On top of that the delay in time from when Bugtraq would release the problem publicly to when MS actually responded. Again, it's just something I witnessed. Bugtraq / Security Focus I think it is.

Perhaps I misunderstood your post, but it was my limited understanding that Microsoft was notorious for not allowing others to see their programing in an "open source" type setting where they let other people that do not work for them have access to it.

Feel free to go to their site and go back througd their discoveries and exploit logs.

The real question for you as an expert, do you think a 5100 would survive a Strong Electro Magnetic Field? Large Enough to move a Vehicle and Equipment + person Twice?
 

HuntTech

Junior Member
Messages
28
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Originally posted by StarLord@Oct 18 2004, 04:20 PM
Hunttech,

If I am not mistaken, I did leave a spot for an expert such as Jedi. Its good that you post. Have you heard of Bugtraq? ?I have been watching their posts \"in house\" for quite sometime. Funny, they seem to think that Microsoft software is one of the worst just because of the way it's written.

Don't shoot the messenger as I did not claim to be a expert in programing. Using the term REM statement and the % of them still in the program was my limited way of stating that MS was notorious for not fixing their buginfested programs on time and even when folks went back for updates it made problems worse. On top of that the delay in time from when Bugtraq would release the problem publicly to when MS actually responded. Again, it's just something I witnessed. Bugtraq / Security Focus I think it is.

Perhaps I misunderstood your post, but it was my limited understanding that Microsoft was notorious for not allowing others to see their programing in an \"open source\" type setting where they let other people that do not work for them have access to it.

Feel free to go to their site and go back througd their discoveries and exploit logs.

The real question for you as an expert, do you think a 5100 would survive a Strong Electro Magnetic Field? Large Enough to move a Vehicle and Equipment + person Twice?

I am very familiar with BugTraq. I don't think this is the forum for arguing pro or con Microsoft and it was my mistake for posting as such. Network and host security is a primary focus of my company and what I am hired to do. I take the stance that *none* of the operating systems are safe out of the box and must be tweaked and maintained by professionals... no matter what vendor published the operating system. IMHO, one must look at the problem that way and not be an O/S Evangelist of any sort. I stick to the 'What do you have and what do we need to do to fix it?' mentality.

Microsoft is a business that has a right to keep its software code private. However, they do provide source in their 'shared source initiative' and they do not adhere (as of yet) to the 'open source community' due to problems with the interpretation of the GPL or GNU license models if implemented into their current software models. Plus, when they attempted to post code recently on an open source forum (SourceForge), they were harshly criticized for doing so by the slashdotters and such as if it was the end of the world. :) I think that litmus test told them that the market wasn't ready for them to do anything like that. Anyway... enough of that. Sorry if I spoke out of turn when you intended Jedi to speak.

Do I think a 5100 series IBM would survive that kind of EMF... one large enough to move a vehicle and a person? No. CMOS components (even some TTL ones) have a large input impedence. A large EMF field would indeed expose the components to enough current that by Ohm's law the resultant voltage (E = I*R, where E is the resultant voltage from multiplying the current by the resistance or impedence.) would probably be enough to destroy the internal P-N junctions of the semiconductors. Hence, diodes and transistors would fail. Back then, the Peak Reverse Voltage of the P-N junctions would have been fairly low... maybe like 200 PIV. Doesn't take much current when applied to a very large input impedence to meet that rating. Remember, at the time the 5100 was designed, we were'nt only talking about semiconductors... there were still a bunch on discrete components to drive the devices... single transistors and diodes... I think they would have a high rate of failure after exposure to a large enough EMF.

Here's a link that it kind of en pointe... The TEMPEST problem is more closely related to my thoughts above, but the general EMP discourse also applies.

USACE - Engineering and Design - Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) and Tempest Protection for Facilities

Again, sorry for contributing to the off-topic discussion.
 

Razimus

New Member
Messages
11
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Nice work virtualgirl, hey Darby has announced that the JT foundation has been closed, any info on this?

Also if anyone knows any Williams / Titor foundation connections can you post them please? thanks.
 

HuntTech

Junior Member
Messages
28
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Originally posted by Paul J. Lyon@Oct 18 2004, 03:59 PM
I'm not sure that I understand all of this except the bellydancing part, but does this mean that the government has the ability to monitor but there's too much to monitor; or that it's too lazy or incompetent to monitor all that it might want to?? Either way, I'm happy, but it looks as though the \"threeletter\" people prefer us to try to guess if they're watching-- the idea gives them power.


Paul,
I think it is a two-fold problem for them. It is my opinion that the admins that do the monitoring, or at least drill down traffic logs when a bell or whistle goes off, are not trained very well (at the worker-bee level) and have a lot of data to weed through. There is a lot of automation to tip off admins, but the next step requires human intervention. If you have government folks using government computing resources at all hours of the day, that means there are a lot of data packets to sniff... Of course, that's the 'outgoing traffic' argument; meaning users on their networks going to the outside world.

As far as 'reaching into outside networks' for an investigation or to keep a finger on the pulse of things that they consider suspect, I would say it is a staffing issue. The closest analog I can draw for this is the amount of un-translated communications from the Middle East. A big pile of data and not enough people to parse the information.

It has been my observation that since the DHS came into being that there are more focused attempts at reaching out and monitoring. But even those efforts can be construed as 'lazy' and 'incompetent' because there isn't much usable data from those crews. (IMHO, of course... ) I say 'lazy' and 'incompetent' because I have an example.

Early on in the 'War on Terrorism' an online porn merchant in Maryland (I think - near Ocean City) used his usual methods of hijacking domains and actually wanted to hand a domain that was actively used by terrorist networks over to the government as a 'gift' to be used as a tool. Before his hijack attempt, he copied all of the content he could before he changed the registration info and assumed ownership. That way, his newly hosted site of the same domain name looked and felt exactly like the old one. His gamble was that most people visiting wouldn't know the difference and they would potentially post juicy information for us to use.

Why did I tell you this? He made repeated calls to intelligence agencies to give them this gift and actually pleaded for them to pay attention. He met with resistance and came to the conclusion (after many conversations) that they didn't even understand what he did for them nor what they could do with it. The final straw was that he was told to give it back because what he did was not legal. (Technically, at the time it was... the laws for registering domains that expired was really fuzzy and untested in court.)

So, in my opinion, there are some efforts being made to do the kind of snooping that we're discussing, but I would doubt the effectiveness. Furthermore, I would think that their collective foci would be on other subject matter.... but then again... :)

(sorry for being long-winded. I'll try to dig up the article about this guy. It drove techies like me nuts!)

<edit>

I found a short link to the guy's story at Wired. Here's the link:

How Al-Qaida Site Was Hijacked

The local news here was talking to the guy a lot. This story doesn't talk much about what he and the FBI discussed. He talked much more freely about their inability to handle what he was explaining to them in those other news reports.

</edit>
 

Judge Bean

Senior Member
Messages
1,257
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

I see and begin to understand. But the method I thought was used was to tag certain "hot" words or phrases (e.g., "Area 51") and investigate the surrounding material for leads. In this way, you can program your work to scan without having to weed through massive material.

In our case, if the government had any interest, they would have "time travel" and "Titor" in their list of buzzwords, and easily locate and monitor us. A secondary scanning list might include "civil war" and "Omaha."
 

Qflux

New Member
Messages
12
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

? Nice work virtualgirl, hey Darby has announced that the JT foundation has been closed, any info on this? Also if anyone knows any Williams / Titor foundation connections can you post them please? thanks.

Raz - Where are you finding this stuff? Part of the problem seems to be people going off half-cocked with information that isn't true. Please post the link where you found this. I followed Darby's link and it says just the opposite!
 

Judge Bean

Senior Member
Messages
1,257
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Haber updated the Titor Foundation registration yesterday. Maybe he's keeping an eye on what we're saying, and noticed we noticed that it'd lapsed.
 

Razimus

New Member
Messages
11
JT Foundation/Oliver Williams Research

Originally posted by Qflux@Oct 19 2004, 08:56 AM
Raz - Where are you finding this stuff? Part of the problem seems to be people going off half-cocked with information that isn't true. Please post the link where you found this. I followed Darby's link and it says just the opposite!

Umm.. Qflux I see you are stalking me at these forums also, fluxy-poo, is your purpose in life to try to point out all the things I say and make them look wrong? The interest you have in my posts is far too suspicuous, I suspect you are in fact one of the members of the Titor Foundation, why else would you be mad at me for no reason?

Just to update everyone here, this guy Qflux joined the TimeTravelInstitute forum
he has posted 5 or 6 posts there, EVERY single one of his posts are replies to MY posts, and every one of them is an attack on me. Out of nowhere he joins the forum obviously motivated for the one purpose of posting negative things about me, that is suspicious. The only people I have really insulted have been 'John Titor' and possibly 'Oliver Williams' and 'The John Titor Foundation'. Because I'm trying to prove the whole this is a hoax. Only one of those people would have been offended at my comments, which is why I suspect he is one of them.

Maybe he's simply the step-child of one of them who has been hired to annoy me, anyway, about your lame question poo-flu, I posted this info before Darby noticed he was incorrect, the url is here:

http://www.anomalies.net/cgi-bin/bbs/ultim...ic;f=9;t=001456

Which you know about by now, since when do I have to source every shred of useless info?
 

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