Genius Now » Geopolitics

Pump And Dump’ Botnet Scheme

Greg — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 07:02:05 +0000

Authorities said a group used hacking, spam, and malware to artificially inflate securities prices and then sell shares at a profit.

“According to the indictment, Rad and Bragg used the botnets — designed to evade anti-spam controls — to blast millions of emails to people touting the stocks… further hacked into the brokerage accounts of unsuspecting third parties, liquidated the existing holdings, and used the balance to trade in a particular stock…prearranged trades to make it look like there was an active market for the stock”

Feds Bust Stock ‘Pump And Dump’ Botnet Scheme — InformationWeek

No related posts.

Strategy and Stresses

Greg — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 20:52:57 +0000

Good strategists are a limited commodity. Brilliant strategists are extremely rare. Working successfully in a model with poorer predictive capabilities requires a greater degree of fluid brilliance than working with a good model. Open Source Warfare is a better predictive model than those currently used in the government. In the quest for effective action, the balance is in favor of NGNs (Non-Governmental Networks).

Given these factors, the more discrete NGN activity, the greater the probability that US activity will fail in one or more theaters. If the NGN activities are truly discrete, US attempts to understand what is going on without understanding how that is possible will tend towards increasingly bad decisions across the board.

Aristide is back in Haiti, elections are happening, cholera is spreading, and no one knows what’s next. If the US persists in seeing him as a threat, the overseas arm of the empire will need to consume intel and strategic resources. We’re clearly stretched for talent on that level now.

The Bahrain intervention is going badly, as predicted. This will increase pressure on Washington, as well as increasing pressure on oil and relations with the Saudis. This is not likely to end well for the US, and again will stretch the talent even further.

One of the things revealed by the HBGary WikiLeak is the asymmetry of costs associated with cyberwarfare. NGNs have the advantage of the Bazaar of Violence, while nations have the disadvantage of internal security costs. These costs are reflected not only in dollar amounts, but in terms of talent available.

Libya opens another direct front for the US. Gaddafi is done, and he’s beginning to feel it. Given that he’s built a great deal of his offensive on mercenaries, expect them to melt away in a prolonged struggle as his ability to pay them is strangled. It looks like he thinks his only possibility is to win now, but regime change is on the way. We’re stretching our talent a bit more.

And so on.

No related posts.

Another take on nations and states

admin — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:41:47 +0000

Jeff Jarvis on Google as a state. I personally agree it’s closer to a nation, but as with most other things getting lumped into that argument, it’s new wine in old bottles – we have a really hard time realizing that non-nation and non-state actors are the fastest growing world powers.

I note how Zeit Online calls Google a quasi-state — in a post under the headline “The Google Republic” — and Fallows says Google “broke diplomatic relations with China” as if Google were a nation.

via The rise of the interest-state « BuzzMachine.

No related posts.

Planet of Slums

admin — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:51:46 +0000

This is an important book on an important topic. While one may disagree with some of his conclusions as to “why”, the data and overall picture is bleak. And as both natural disasters and warfare continue to displace millions of people every year, it will continue to get worse. Already over one billion people live in slums – and that figure will double over the next decade. And although we in the US have a relatively small (under 6 percent of the urban population) percentage in urban slums, in absolute terms it is still more than many of the poorer countries have.

From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neo-liberal theory.

via Planet of Slums.

No related posts.

Carlos Slim goes environmental

admin — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 21:18:14 +0000

Note the second paragraph quoted – that’s a rational analysis. Odd we don’t see more of that here. But if we did, it wouldn’t be news, eh?

“I believe that looking after the environment will be one of the big generators of jobs in the future,” Slim said on a beach on Mexico’s Caribbean island of Cozumel at the launch of the alliance.

“Whether there’s a crisis or not, the cost of looking after the environment and reducing risks is more advisable than not doing anything,” Slim said….

The selected regions for the project are the Gulf of California, the Chihuahuan desert, the Mesoamerican Reef, Oaxaca, the Monarch Butterfly Region and Chiapas, including the Lacandona Forests and El Triunfo reserve.

via Billionaire Slim launches $100 mln Mexico green project – Yahoo! News.

No related posts.

Social Tech for Social Change

admin — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:14:37 +0000

Social Actions is an open source database of actions people can take on any issue. The actions in our database are aggregated from across the social web and include everything from volunteer opportunities to micro credit loans.

We encourage social tech programmers to develop web applications that intelligently distribute the actions in our database across the websites, social networks, and mobile phones that millions of people use every day. The overarching goal of our work is to make the web more action-oriented, or in other words, to make it easier for people to make a difference.

via About Us | Social Actions.

No related posts.