Dark corners of the net

By Jane Wakefield Technology reporter

Hackers have come a long way since teenagers made code in their bedrooms

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Hackers are secretive, but they are also social. Many spend their spare time in chat rooms and forums discussing their latest targets, techniques and conquests. Eavesdropping on those conversations offers a fascinating insight into their motives.

Say hacker to someone and they are likely to trot out the usual aged clichés - geek, loner, bedroom-bound teenager.

Philosopher is unlikely to feature high on the list. But it seems the modern-day hacker spends a lot of time contemplating the meaning of life.

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• The Researcher: hunts for vulnerabilities in computer systems
• The Dealer: Rents botnets and takes out valuable information such as personal data
• The Farmer: Maintains the botnets
• Crime lord: Makes money from stolen data

"Each has a philosophy and they want to discuss it," says Noa Bar Yosef.

She ought to know. Her job with security firm Imperva involves hanging around in hacker forums trying to work out what motivates them.

It is a murky, idiosyncratic world where Ms Yosef admits she spends far too much time.

In one group she visits, members discuss the best reading matter for would-be thinkers.

"Start with Kierkegaard, then Nietzsche and after you've read Nietzsche, Sartre is the most logical choice".

Another poses a question about the practicalities of hacker life: "what kit would you take with you if you were on the run?"

A detailed reply soon appears:

Often, online conversations get personal.

"If they spend a lot of time discussing philosophy, that is nothing compared to the amount of time they devote to their love life, from tips on how to get a girlfriend to details about the next steps, through to chatting about being dumped," says Ms Bar Yosef.

They are also fond of religion as a topic. One hacker forum conducted a poll to find out the faith of its members.

Christians topped the poll with 29% of forum members claiming it was their religion of choice, 28% said they had no religion, 24% followed Islam, 4% were Hindus and 1.8% professed to be Buddhists.

Literature comes up regularly too.

Hackers like watching films about themselves

Hackers spend time swapping tips about their favourite books, with choices ranging from Stephen King and a guidebook entitled 'Galactic Rebellion for Dummies' to the handbook of disenchanted youth, Catcher in the Rye. There is also mention of John Milton's 17th century epic poem Paradise Lost.

And for those seeking movie recommendations, members are always keen to offer their top list of films about - you've guessed it - hacking.

Darker side

Beyond the frivolous, there is serious business being discussed in these forums.

For many, they are akin to university seminars - a place to brainstorm new ideas and update older techniques.

As hacking moves from an interest to a hobby to a vocation, sharing skills becomes increasingly important.

"They are a collaborative community," says Ms Bar Yosef.

"Think of the drug industry. A drug dealer couldn't possibly conduct all these activities alone and likewise an individual hacker finds cyber-accomplices a necessity."

A typical 'cyber mafia', she explains, includes a 'researcher' who hunts for vulnerabilities in systems, a 'farmer' who maintains the botnets (networks of computers taken over by malicious code and controlled externally), a 'dealer' who rents botnets and extracts valuable data from them and a 'crime lord' who finds ways of making money from the stolen information.

Often Ms Bar Yosef will see an upcoming security threat emerging as ideas are knocked around.

She cites the example of Osama bin Laden's killing. Immediately afterwards there was an upsurge in discussions about how to take advantage by creating fake videos of his death loaded with malware.

Dark places

How to hack Facebook

If the forums are any kind of measure, there is no shortage of recruits to the hacker cause. One popular group frequented by Ms Bar Yosef has 200,000 members.

The chat rooms that she can access tend to be the hacker-lite hangouts. Many of those members will be enthusiastic geeks or sometimes hactivists, keen to score points on corporations with minor website vandalism.

Those more heavily involved in the criminal underground tend to converse in locations that are not publicly accessible.

Making the leap from enthusiastic amateur to becoming part of a gang is alarmingly easy, says Ms Yosef.

Going to the dark side is a four step process, she explains.

"Start lurking in different underground hacking forums. Become an active participant in topics. Bring some 'proof' of what you've said - for example 'I'm posting for free five credentials to Paypal. Want more? Call me up!'. Earn a reputation and you're in."

Such is the level of insight that can be garnered from hacker forums that they regularly come under the watchful eye of law enforcement.

Spanish police this week arrested three suspected members of the Anonymous hacker group. Authorities revealed that they had trawled through more than 2,000,000 lines of log chats and web pages leading up to the arrests.

With the International Monetary Fund, Sony, Google, Lockheed Martin, RSA Security and Citibank just some of the diverse and high profile victims of security breaches in the last month, scrutiny of these electronic hangouts will only increase.

Source

How pasta became the world's favourite food

By Caroline McClatchey BBC News Magazine

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In today's Magazine

• What is a Bohemian Rhapsody?
• What's the appeal of music through a phone?
• 10 strange ways Tudors died
• Your Letters

Pasta has topped a global survey of the world's favourite foods. So how did the dish so closely associated with Italy become a staple of so many tables around the globe?

While not everyone knows the difference between farfalle, fettuccine and fusilli, many people have slurped over a bowl of spaghetti bolognese or tucked into a plate of lasagne.

Certainly in British households, spaghetti bolognese has been a regular feature of mealtimes since the 1960s. It's become a staple of children's diets, while a tuna-pasta-sweetcorn concoction can probably be credited with sustaining many students through their years at university.

But now a global survey by the charity Oxfam has named pasta as the world's most popular dish, ahead of meat, rice and pizza. As well as being popular in unsurprising European countries, pasta was one of the favourites in the Philippines, Guatemala, Brazil and South Africa.

And figures from the International Pasta Organisation show Venezuela is the second largest consumer of pasta, after Italy. Tunisia, Chile and Peru also feature in the top 10, while Mexicans, Argentineans and Bolivians all eat more pasta than the British.

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TOP FIVE WORLD PASTA CONSUMERS

• Italy - 26kg per head per year
• Venezuela - 12kg
• Tunisia - 11.7kg
• Greece - 10.4kg
• Switzerland - 9.7kg

Source: International Pasta Organisation, June 2010

Global sales figures reflect the world's love affair with pasta - they have risen from US$13bn (£8bn) in 2003 to US$16bn (£10bn) in 2010. The analysts at Datamonitor predict it will hit US$19bn (£12bn) by 2015, despite rising wheat costs.

Just in the UK, retail sales of dry and fresh pasta amounted to £53m in 1987. In 2009, the figure was £282m - include pasta-based ready meals and the value rises to £800m, says consumer research experts Mintel.

So how did pasta become so popular? It's because it is cheap, versatile and convenient, says Jim Winship, from the UK-based Pizza, Pasta and Italian Food Association. A sauce to go with it can be made from simple ingredients.

"You can create lots of different dishes with it. It tastes good and it's filling. It also has a long shelf life, so you can keep it in the larder until you need to put a meal together."

But that's only part of its success. Pasta is also relatively easy to mass produce and transport around the world, making it a popular product with food companies as well.

'Cultural phenomenon'

"It's always been an industrial product," says John Dickie, professor in Italian Studies at University College London and author of Delizia! A History of the Italians and their Food.

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“Start Quote

It's poor people's food. It's unsophisticated. It's the same as bread”

Giles Coren Food critic

"It is definitely one of the things that has contributed to its success - it's easy to transport and has a long shelf life. It has commercial genes."

Tim Lang, professor of food policy at City University London, says technological advances in the 19th Century allowed pasta to be produced on a big scale. But the Industrial Revolution did that for everything else, he adds, and the reason pasta had been particularly successful was because people liked it and the Italian way of life.

"It's a cultural phenomenon, not an industrial phenomenon," he says. "People like the Italian way of life and their simple, staple foods."

Pasta has always had a global aspect as its origins are not purely Italian, which is unsurprising considering it can be made with just wheat and water.

The Greeks and Romans had pasta-like foods but they tended to be baked, not boiled. Ancient China had dumplings, but it's a myth that the Venetian explorer Marco Polo returned from China with pasta in 1295.

The most accepted theory is that the Arab invasions of the 8th Century brought a dried noodle-like product to Sicily. This early pasta was made using flour from durum wheat, which Sicily specialised in. Under Italian law, dry pasta - or pasta secca - can only be made from this type of wheat, and the vast bulk of pasta is still made in Italy.

And despite being considered a cheap meal now it was the preserve of the rich in the very beginning, says Prof Dickie.

"We tend to think of pasta like potatoes but it has never been viewed as a bland staple. It's been associated with prestige - people used to buy votes with pasta."

'Overrated gloppy stuff'

The first reference to pasta in Italy was noted in 1154 and it was about an export factory in Sicily, he says.

He says its breakthrough as a common food came in Naples in the 1700s, when it was recognised as "a good way to feed a large part of the populace".

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TOP FIVE WORLD PASTA PRODUCERS

• Italy - 3.2m tonnes per year
• US - 2.6m
• Brazil - 1.3m
• Russia - 858,000
• Switzerland - 607,000

Source: International Pasta Organisation, June 2010

But pasta popularity outside of Italy really took off at the turn of the 20th Century with large-scale Italian immigration to the New World. This is when it started to become known as Italy's national dish, he says.

Italian restaurateur Antonio Carluccio said pasta may have a long history, but the Italians made it their own by eating it with tomatoes.

He says most pasta is spaghetti outside of Italy but there are actually 600 different types and shapes and each region cooks it differently. He says its appeal is in the taste and its nutritional value.

"It is pleasurable with a good sauce, but it should just be coated, otherwise you lose the taste of the pasta. It is a complex carbohydrate which releases all the goodness slowly and you feel satisfied for a long time.

"I don't know one person who doesn't like pasta. It is very similar to bread - both are made with flour and water and they both need an accompaniment."

He's clearly not met food critic and broadcaster Giles Coren, who described pasta as "overrated gloppy stuff" that appeals only to children.

"Ask a footballer what they can cook and they always say spaghetti. It is what you reach for when there is nothing else left in the larder. It's poor people's food and it's unsophisticated. It's the same as bread - you just boil it instead of putting it in the oven."

So as popular as it is, pasta hasn't conquered everyone in the world.

Source

Sterilisation: North Carolina grapples with legacy

By Daniel Nasaw BBC News, Washington

Ms Riddick, now 57, suffered decades of depression and illness

More than 60,000 Americans were sterilised, many against their will, as part of a eugenics movement that finished in 1979, aimed at keeping the poor and mentally ill from having children. Now, decades on, one state is considering compensation.

In 1968, Elaine Riddick was raped by a neighbour who threatened to kill her if she told what happened.

She was 13, the daughter of violent and abusive parents in the desperately poor country town of Winfall, in the US state of North Carolina.

While she was in hospital giving birth, the state violated her a second time, she says.

A social worker who had deemed her "feeble-minded" petitioned the state Eugenics Board to have her sterilised.

Officials coerced her illiterate grandmother into signing an "x" on an authorisation form. After performing a Caesarean section, doctors sterilised her "just like cutting a hog", she says.

"They killed my kids," Ms Riddick says. "They killed mine before they got to me. They stopped it."

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Sterilisation in the UK and Europe

While eugenics is now recognised as a pseudoscience - and after the Nazis, one with murderous consequences - it was once a respectable branch of the social sciences.

The term 'eugenics', meaning "good birth", was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, an English scientist who pushed the University College London to found a department to study the field.

Sir Winston Churchill once called for forced sterilisation of "the feeble-minded and insane classes".

While eugenic sterilisation never became official policy in the UK - in part due to opposition from the Catholic church - Finland, Norway, and Sweden adopted the sterilisation laws in the 1930s.

Between 1933 and 1945, more than 400,000 Germans were sterilised under Nazi "racial hygiene" laws, according to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Nearly four decades after the last person was sterilised under North Carolina's eugenics programme, a state task force is seeking the 2,900 victims of sterilisation officials estimate are still alive.

The group hopes to gather their stories and ultimately to recommend the state award them restitution. But with public coffers under severe pressure amid a flagging recovery, it is not clear the legislature will agree.

"I know I can't make it right but at least I can address it," said North Carolina state legislator Larry Womble. He hopes "to let the world know what a horrendous thing the government has perpetrated on these young boys and girls".

America's sterilisation movement was part of a broad effort to cleanse the country's population of characteristics and social groups deemed unwanted, an effort that included anti-race mixing and strict immigration quotas aimed at Eastern Europeans, Jews and Italians.

Beginning with Indiana in 1907, 32 states eventually passed laws allowing authorities to order the sterilisation of people deemed unfit to breed. The last programme ended in 1979.

The victims were criminals and juvenile delinquents, women deemed sexual deviants, homosexual men, poor people on welfare, people who were mentally ill or suffered from epilepsy. African Americans and Hispanic Americans were disproportionately targeted in some states.

'Coerced'

"In general it was the dispossessed of society," said Paul Lombardo, a historian and legal scholar at Georgia State University and editor of A Century of Eugenics in America.

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Sterilisation petitions

• An 18-year-old girl, separated from her husband who had "manifested anti-social behaviour"
• A black 25-year-old rape victim who showed "abnormal sexual tendencies"
• A 16-year-old girl who had earlier been committed to a state institution for "sexual delinquency" and whose aunt "signed consent"
• A white married mother of three, whose family had been "finally dependent for many years" and has "a history of inter-marriage with Indian and Negro"
• A 15-year girl deemed "feebleminded"; parents reportedly consented

North Carolina Eugenics Board, 25 October 1950

The laws were plainly coercive, scholars say, though some incorporated a veneer of consent - illiterate farmhands given forms to sign, institutional inmates told they would not be released with their bodies intact, poor parents told they would be denied public assistance if they did not approve the removal of a wayward daughter's fallopian tubes.

Motivating the laws, Prof Lombardo said, was indignation at the thought that people who had violated sexual mores would subsequently end up needing public assistance.

"We have in this country have always been extremely sensitive to notions of public stories of inappropriate sexuality," he said.

"We exercise that most dramatically when it comes to times in which we think we're spending individual tax money to support people who violate those social norms. It's our puritanical background, running up against our sense of individualism."

Supreme Court approval

The racial context was inescapable as well.

"The fewer black babies we have the better, that's what some people said," Prof Lombardo said. "'They're just going to end up on welfare.'"

The state eugenics board issued orders to sterilise poor North Carolinians with bureaucratic efficiency

Also implicated in American sterilisation laws was the classical eugenic notion that as with horses, authorities could use genetic principles to improve society through selective breeding.

In a 1927 US Supreme Court decision that upheld the laws, storied jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: "It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."

All told, scholars estimate more than 60,000 Americans were sterilised under eugenics laws in the 20th Century.

North Carolina's law stood out for the wide net it cast.

Telling their stories

Most states would only order sterilisation of institutional inmates or patients, North Carolina's allowed for people within the community - typically social workers - to petition the state to have someone sterilised.

Rep Womble says the eugenics programme "borders on genocide"

Of the 1,110 men and 6,418 women sterilised in North Carolina between 1929 and 1974, state health officials estimate about 2,900 could still be alive.

In the decade years several states have re-examined their forgotten legacies - prodded in some cases by newspaper investigations - and extended officially apologies.

North Carolina did so in 2003, but Mr Womble has continued to push for monetary compensation to the victims.

This month, a state task force created by his legislation will hold a public session at which with surviving victims are expected to tell their stories.

The group will eventually make a recommendation for compensation to the governor - $20,000 per person has been suggested.

But the state is facing a $2.5bn (£1.5bn) budget shortfall. The conservative Republicans in control of the state legislature are already poised to slash transport, healthcare and education funds, so it seems unlikely lawmakers will authorise as much as $58m in reparations.

Some illiterate patients signed an X on forms consenting to be sterilised

"My hope is that the state will recognise that there's never going to be a good time for compensation," says Charmaine Cooper, executive director of the Justice for Sterilization Victims Task Force, the state body.

Among those expected to testify is Ms Riddick, who now lives in Atlanta. She describes the prospect of a $20,000 payment as an insult.

"I am very angry," she says. "God said be fruitful and multiply. They did not only sin against me, they sinned against God."

Source

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Commentary

This is why social Darwinism is just pure evil.

To deny someone the right to life, to have kids and breed, but to just be human, because of traits you deem lacking, is absurd.

Had the shoes been on the other foot, maybe you would have been the one deemed lacking.

Eugenics was and is a policy of genocide for political purposes, as well as for personal gain. If people philosophically or even scientifically delve into the amazement that is life, they would never try to snuff it out.

Philosophers did not choose this murderous process that killed millions of people around the globe.

It was MILITARY LEADERS like hitler, Politicians, and the most unjust people on this earth that planned to do one simple thing, to take away the future of someone because they thought they had the right to control Life and Death.

This legacy of social Darwinism has left a stain on the 20th century that will never be wiped clean and it has affected every social class and every racial class.