Adam indulges with a Beatles rewrite

It was twenty years ago today
Sgt. Morris taught the worms to play
They’ve been going in and out of style
But they’re guaranteed to last a while
So may I introduce to you…
the bug you’ve known for all these years
Sgt. Morris Lonely worm club band

Cute.

Danny McPherson takes a different approach to explain the changes in 20 years since the Morris Worm.

…new network applications being developed can’t work on new ports or employ new IP-based transport protocols, so they’ve got to piggyback on existing “open” ones (e.g., IPSEC v. TLS). The nearing exhaustion of IPv4 address space, and the adoption of IPv6, which is not bits-on-the-wire compatible, only exacerbates the transparency problem…

Try saying that three times fast. In other words, I think he means to say that the implicit trust is gone. The Internet touches more people today with many more complex relationships and so they need a more closed/protective mode to begin with.

The San Jose Mercury News suggests police are dealing with professional criminals in a jewelry heist:

Someone forced entry into an adjoining business that did not have an alarm and then broke into the jewelry store by smashing through a common wall, [Los Altos police Detective Sgt. John] Korges said.

He said that, due to the amount of labor the burglary required, it appears more than one person was involved.

Once in the jewelry store, the suspect or suspects used commercial-grade tools to penetrate the safe, taking between $350,000 and $400,000 of loose precious stones and jewelry left for service and repair.

It reads like there are no leads yet other than it was someone who knew what they were doing with the safe.

Now that fingerprinting has come under pressure for being unreliable and often the cause of false convictions, a new generation of technology is emerging to take its place. Take for example Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, which promises to find terrorists by reading their brain waves:

How do we determine if a person is a terrorist or spy? There is a new technology, that for the first time, allows us to measure scientifically if specific information is stored in a person’s brain. Brain Fingerprinting technology can determine the presence or absence of specific information, such as terrorist training and associations.

Here is the key to the new technology:

One fundamental difference between a terrorist and an innocent suspect is that the terrorist has detailed knowledge of terrorist activities and an innocent person does not. A terrorist has either committed a crime, received training in terrorism or worked with others in planning terrorist attacks. The innocent suspect does not have this type of information stored in his brain.

The fundamental problem with this is that the person being scanned has to have advance knowledge. When it comes to many terrorist cells, especially suicide bombers, the perpetrators could know little or nothing at all before the day of their mission. Also, this system seems to depend on the operators having the right pattern to match with terrorist information within a suspect’s brain.

That brings us back to the need for detailed intelligence of the terrorists and arrest of their inside planners, at which point the technology only provides a marginal gain, no? My guess is that someone will try to use this in the opposite scenario with mixed or even unjust results — trying to build a case for conviction on information that is unreliable by claiming infallibility in the technology.

What will a Brain Fingerprint look like when we watch news about terrorist plots, or read spy novels? Will it mark us as indistinguishable from someone planning or actively engaged in a terrorist plot? How would Tom Clancy’s Brain Fingerprint look?