Hackers Testifying at the United States Senate, May 19, 1998 (L0pht Heavy Industries)

OK, I am pretty sick of this, so excuse me for blogging a post, but decades of this crap is getting to me: Ok some bad actors abuse your bad crappy gear to pwn & spy, but you, Cisco, help your government spy on everyone, including allies, I would call this karma, but the scale you are aiding and abetting the US Gov do it on does not even compare. Frankly, nobody should be using any closed source networking gear, packet switching infrastructure has become way to important to rely on $corp and $bs sales line they are pushing. I get that you, Cisco, hav nobody to talk to about how you are being abused to aid your own government, that is how National Security Letters work: * Some alphabet soup picks up a phone to the domestic espionage part of the FBI wanting something not legal as of then. * FBI prepares another production of the dog & pony rubberstamp show trial known as FISA. * A whole charade is put on * and in the end the applicant gets to write a letter dictating that $us_company, must do $whatever the heck they want. * Include a gag order * and a friendly threat of getting charged under the Espionage Act (which essentially means you are convicted; the trial is a formality as just about any evidence is inadmissible, on national security grounds, of course.). * Somehow not see the obviously parallel to a circle jerk * Simultaneously confusing me on how that is different from say. China's way of doing things, except more shady and secretive. Cisco, Microsoft and Juniper shoul

In Mr. Zatko's previous appearance before Congress* in 1998, he was addressed by his hacker nom-de-plume, Mudge. Perhaps they see fit to continue this practice. * ▶ this video

Joe Grand (aka "Kingpin") is the real deal. If anyone is not aware, Joe is one of the original members of the famous L0pht hacker group from the 90s [1], and testified in the historical US Senate hearing in 1998 [2][3] (as the youngest member, with just 22 at the time). Besides being a brilliant electric engineer, he's also a great storyteller. Worth checking some of his other reverse engineering videos on YT. [1] link [2] link [3] ▶ this video

They testified in front of the U.S. Senate in 1998. That's more than a footnote might do, in my opinion. ▶ this video

The reason behind 'the Web' resembling the mess unfortunately best exemplified by 'the Net' has a much simpler and trivial reason: We have globally networked local Networks of locally networkable Networks and most of us naively think that this Global Network of Local Networks networking Local Networks actually functions as a universally internetworking Internetwork of universally internetworkable Internetworks internetworking internetworkable Internetworks internetworking internetworkable Networks[([¹]1)], because we trust the people who've labeled both IPv4 and IPv6 as the "Internet Protocol" despite it not in any way, shape or form having the ability to perform what the people who came up with the concept of internetworking (no, NOT the ARPA people.) actually meant by the term.[2] As the simplest proof of this fact: We've almost reached 2020 and all of our 'solutions' for multi homing don't ACTUALLY work in a not-pants-on-head-dysfunctional despite the fact that we've faced that issue since, to quote Wikipedia, "In 1972, Tinker Air Force Base wanted connections to two different IMPs for redundancy. ARPANET designers realized that they couldn't support this feature because host addresses were the addresses of the IMP port number the host was connected to (borrowing from telephony)." Our 'Inter'net at the moment still resembles just a global network, aka just plain old phone calls, with extra steps. Which explains both the mess we call the WWW, and the global dominance of lar

Yeah, that's an amazing image. I thought it must be doctored... but in the intro to the recording of their testimony, the person speaking ("chairman"?) says: "Due to the sensitivity of the work done at the L0pht they'll be using their hacker names of Mudge, Weld, Brian Oblivion, Kingpin, Space Rogue, Tan, and Stefan." ▶ this video