The accused was sentenced to 5 years of hard labor already for possession of 13 grams of marijuana, but getting caught for hacking a billboard in Moscow has only added to his time. He said he was a bored tradesman who was just trying to have some fun with computers.

All together, Blinnikov, 41, is going to spend six years behind bars, as he is currently serving another sentence for selling drugs in his home town.

He was already under investigation for selling marijuana when he decided to share a video from his personal collection with the world by downloading it on an unprotected computer he had gained access to through the Internet.

His defense seems to have some major holes (pun not intended). He argued that he did not know his explicit video would be widely distributed, but at the same time he claims to have had control enough to engineer a very specific time for it to be displayed.

Igor Blinnikov, pictured above, uploaded a 15-minute long pornographic video on the server of an advertising company one night last year and claims he did it “just for fun” and didn’t expected it to be broadcasted on billboards on the capital’s Garden Ring.

“I made it at night deliberately, at midday, so children wouldn’t see it. You should never corrupt children!” he told LifeNews.

Interesting defense. He will save the children by posting pornographic videos on billboards only at certain times of night.

Russian hacks seem to be in the news lately for defacement using sexual imagery. It reminds me of the artists who were charged recently by Russian federal agencies with anti-discrimination laws.

The Federal Security Service (FSB), in a darkly sarcastic twist of logic, assigned themselves status as a group and then claimed they were being discriminated against by protest art. The FSB, who have replaced the KGB, were faced with a 65 metre tall phallic image called “Dick captured by KGB” on the Liteyny Bridge, which spans the Neva in St. Petersburg. When it was raised it faced FSB Headquarters.

I just dug up an old paper (01/08/2005) but still a good one called “Shadow Walker: Raising The Bar For Windows Rootkit Detection”. It suggests malware provide a randomly faked view of memory to a system/scanner without revealing any of its own code.

…imagine a rootkit that makes no effort to change its superficial
appearance, yet is capable of fundamentally altering a detectors view of an
arbitrary region of memory. When the detector attempts to read any region
of memory modified by the rootkit, it sees a ‘normal’, unaltered view of
memory. Only the rootkit sees the true, altered view of memory. Such a
rootkit is clearly capable of compromising all of the primary detection
methodologies to varying degrees.

The authors’ propose a better way for malware to hide than polymorphism is to lie; binary code change camouflage to evade scanners was said to be more difficult than just generating fake replies. Now it seems so commonplace as to be obvious to manipulate memory, and even incorporated into regular development, but back then it was Phrackworthy.

The title is misleading, I admit, but it’s how the BBC describes research into which birds reject a cuckoo egg from their nest and why. Maybe, like me, you were expecting an update to Clifford Stoll’s famous book. Alas, it’s actually about real cuckoos and how they adapt to risk.

Cuckoos have target hosts. For example, a cuckoo that lays eggs in a redstart nest lays a blue egg. To the human eye, this is identical to the redstart egg.

However, the cuckoo that targets a dunnock nest lays a white egg with brown speckling, visibly different from the dunnock’s immaculately blue egg. Yet despite this obvious colour mismatch, dunnocks readily accept the foreign eggs, whereas redstarts are much more likely to eject the cuckoo’s egg.

The researchers give a couple theories for why a dunnock would put their own egg at risk (if a cuckoo egg hatches first the chick ejects the other eggs) instead of immediately rejecting the cuckoo’s egg.

Researchers think that naive hosts, like the dunnock, are still at early stages of the evolutionary arms race and; “they accept alien eggs, because they have not yet evolved defences against parasitism,” explains Ms Stoddard.

“Another’ hypothesis is that tolerating cuckoo eggs may be the most stable strategy for some hosts.”

So, for birds that do not often suffer cuckoo invasions, the overall “cost” of mistakenly ejecting their own eggs might be higher than the cost of tolerating the occasional parasite.

It sounds like they are either really dumb and unaware or…really smart and totally aware of the risks. That sure narrows it down.

I am now curious about the rate of a dunnock “mistakenly ejecting their own eggs”. If a dunnock is able to tell there is a difference and wants to eject the cuckoo egg (as the eggs are so different) then what causes a mistake? Clumsy footwork? I mean, if a cuckoo chick can tell the difference and eject the other eggs…

Al Jazeera has two stories that are unrelated but probably should be juxtaposed. First, the story of US soldiers who killed unarmed civilians in Afghanistan.

Morlock told the judge, Lieutenant Colonel Kwasi Hawks, that he and the other soldiers began plotting to murder unarmed Afghans in late 2009. To make the killings appear justified, the soldiers planned to plant weapons near the victims’ bodies, Morlock said.

Asked by the judge what his intent was, Morlock replied, “The plan was to kill people.”

“Did everybody know, `We’re killing people who are completely innocent’?” the judge asked.

“Generally, yes, sir, everyone knew,” Morlock replied.

Morlock is the first of five soldiers from the 5th Stryker Brigade to be court-martialed — something his lawyer Geoffrey Nathan characterised as an advantage.

“The first up gets the best deal,” Nathan said by phone Tuesday, noting that even under the maximum sentence, Morlock would serve no more than eight years before becoming eligible for parole.

No solitary confinement requirement? And that brings me to the second story called “Cruel and Usual”; there has been a huge increase in solitary confinement for prisoners in America.

The spectre of Bradley Manning lying naked and alone in a tiny cell at the Quantico Marine Base, less than 50 miles from Washington, DC, conjures up images of an American Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, where isolation and deprivation have been raised to the level of torture.

In fact, the accused Wikileaker, now in his tenth month of solitary confinement, is far from alone in his plight. Every day in the US, tens of thousands of prisoners languish in “the hole”.

[…]

Over the past 30 years, their numbers have increased even faster than the US’ explosive incarceration rate; between 1995 and 2000, the growth rate for prisoners housed in isolation was 40 per cent, as compared to 28 per cent for the prison population in general, according to Human Rights Watch.

Likewise, no one can state with any consistency what these prisoners have done to warrant being placed in solitary confinement or what their isolation is supposed to accomplish.

As it stands, prisoners can be thrown into the hole for rule violations that range from attacking a guard or a fellow inmate to having banned reading materials or too many postage stamps.

In doling out months or even years in solitary, the warden and prison staff usually serve as prosecutor, judge and jury, and unsurprisingly they often abuse that power. The cases are shocking and they abound.

Compare and contrast. Manning is being given exceptionally harsh treatment, arguably tortured, which is said to be not terribly uncommon in the American prison system. Will Morlock thus end up in conditions as severe as Manning and, if so, how long will it take? Or could Morlock make an early parole and serve under eight years for his premeditated murder of unarmed civilians?