Applied Cyberwar: Hardware Exploits
Oct 19 2023 Gabriel
Recently a rumor that the tragic Hamas attack was enabled by a potential lack of backdoors accessible by western / 5 Eyes intelligence. Despite this, I wouldn’t recommend rushing to order a Huwawei phone for privacy reasons. If my threat model called for investigating hardware attacks, simply changing providers would be insufficient to keep them at bay. Understanding hardware exploits requires a bit of understanding about how systems run, so let’s take advantage of this teachable moment.
Tools: the Good and the Bad
Jun 27 2023 Gabriel
If all you have is a hammer, suddenly every single thing starts to look like a nail. Hardly and tool itself is wholly evil or entirely good. Not only are the tools themselves important, how we use them matters quite a bit as well. This applies all the way from the entire software ecosystem, down to the hardware components themselves. The fundamental attributes of the tool will set the incentives for how they can be used, and how they are used creates incentives for how future tools will be made.
Principle: Hardware matters
Oct 05 2022 Gabriel
Back to Basics There are innumerable examples of average people being unable to explain how the modern conveniences of their life work. From creating food, energy, and products to what it takes to make them accessible, nearly everyone is quite ignorant about these things. In an age of such rapid transformation it is quite understandable if not predictable. When it comes to technology, almost everything is quite obscured for a person who doesn’t take the time to look.
IoT: The "Eye-on-Thee"
Jul 12 2022 Gabriel
The Internet of things (IoT) is not so much an agenda, but a consequence of cheap, ubiquitous technology. Much of the engineering, investment, and application has gone directly into making devices better at gathering information. This information is then fed to machine learning algorithms to further “optimize” society. This constant data-collection is not benign. There is an agenda to constantly push the boundaries of centralization and control. Most of the opportunities provided by the internet of things are asymmetrically advantageous to the technocracy.
Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my!
Mar 07 2022 Gabriel
Tools of the Technocracy: #3 Robots, IoT, Automation, Oh my! With big data as the brains, robots act as the eyes, ears, and fists of the technocracy. Ubiquitous 5G (and above) connectivity gives autonomous systems a massive advantage over human beings. Understand that there is more to these systems than meets the eye. There is an entire orchestra of coordinated systems and services that harmonize into incredibly powerful tools. These tools are only beginning to be weaponized against the public.