Houston 2600 — Computer security, hacking, coding and mayhem

This is probably another dumb marketing scheme, but it looks like viral inseminators have been sneaking around this URL for a Boards of Canada promotion. Unlike most of these, however, it involves some actual hackery content…

The code contains this hint:

               ______________________________
              /                              \
             /                                \
            /                                  \
           /                                    \
          /                                      \
         /                                        \
        /                                          \
       /                                            \
      /                                              \
     /                                                \
    /                                                  \
   /                                                    \
  /                                                      \
 /                                                        \
/   ------ / ------ / ------ / ------ / XXXXXX / ------    \
\                                                          /
 \                                                        /
  \                                                      /
   \                                                    /
    \                                                  /
     \                                                /
      \                                              /
       \                                            /
        \                                          /
         \                                        /
          \                                      /
           \                                    /
            \                                  /
             \                                /
              \______________________________/

Which may correspond to this promotional release, which in turn may reference this John Cage compositional idea.

Any ideas? I know nothing about this ‘Boards of Canada’ band (except the soundtracks from Until the Light Takes Us) but I have to admit a quickening of the pulse at an OpenVMS prompt.

Houston 2600/HAQR Meeting

Join computer enthusiasts to talk about programming, operating systems, computer security topics, hacking and geek culture.

Directions

1. Take Post Oak South past Westheimer.
2. Turn right on Hidalgo.
3. Turn right on McCue.
4. On your left is a parking garage. Turn left into the first entrance to the parking garage.
5. Inside the parking garage, you will take a right and go up to the second floor. At the top of the building, turn left, and then turn left again, to follow the perimeter of the building. Signs will indicate you are heading to Nordstroms.
6. Park near the elevators, and go inside. About 10m inside and to your right is Ninfa’s Express. You want the sit-down area, which is closer to the door than the takeout that faces into the mall.

Inside map:
http://www.simon.com/mall/the-galleria/map

Houston 2600/HAQR Meeting

Join computer enthusiasts to talk about programming, operating systems, computer security topics, hacking and geek culture.

Directions

1. Take Post Oak South past Westheimer.
2. Turn right on Hidalgo.
3. Turn right on McCue.
4. On your left is a parking garage. Turn left into the first entrance to the parking garage.
5. Inside the parking garage, you will take a right and go up to the second floor. At the top of the building, turn left, and then turn left again, to follow the perimeter of the building. Signs will indicate you are heading to Nordstroms.
6. Park near the elevators, and go inside. About 10m inside and to your right is Ninfa’s Express. You want the sit-down area, which is closer to the door than the takeout that faces into the mall.

Inside map:
http://www.simon.com/mall/the-galleria/map

Houston 2600/HAQR Meeting

Join computer enthusiasts to talk about programming, operating systems, computer security topics, hacking and geek culture.

Directions

1. Take Post Oak South past Westheimer.
2. Turn right on Hidalgo.
3. Turn right on McCue.
4. On your left is a parking garage. Turn left into the first entrance to the parking garage.
5. Inside the parking garage, you will take a right and go up to the second floor. At the top of the building, turn left, and then turn left again, to follow the perimeter of the building. Signs will indicate you are heading to Nordstroms.
6. Park near the elevators, and go inside. About 10m inside and to your right is Ninfa’s Express. You want the sit-down area, which is closer to the door than the takeout that faces into the mall.

Inside map:
http://www.simon.com/mall/the-galleria/map

View Larger Map

Coordinates to parking garage: N 29 44.163 W 95 27.758.

After the meeting, HAQR will meet at Agora Coffee at 1712 Westheimer Houston, TX 77098-1612.

About HAQR

The American Nihilist Underground Society spreads nihilism through design, art, pranks, and hacking. Its technology arm, the Houston Area Quorum for Recidivism (HAQR), encourage learning philosophical frameworks through design-oriented thinking.

http://www.anus.com/tribes/haqr/
http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/ANUS/

About 2600

2600 connects people with technology in unorthodox ways. An organization for hackers, it has branched into the hobby of thinking like a hacker to use technology beyond its stated categorical purpose to achieve exceptional results.

http://www.2600.com/
http://www.hou2600.org/

As documented on /., six months ago I de-installed the Adobe Flash^TM player on all my browsers.

This provoked some shock and incredulity from others. After all, Flash has been an essential content interpreter for over a decade. It filled the gap between an underdeveloped JavaScript and the need for media content like animation, video and so on.

It also fit a nice political niche. It allowed browser manufacturers to avoid the complexities of developing their own standards while fighting the browser wars. It gave the HTML5 committee (and their many interpretations among developers) time to come to maturity.

But along the way, it also went bad. Most crashes and security holes come through Flash, if you’re using a non-IE browser (if you’re using IE, expect the four-line highway that is ActiveX to help you find the security compromises you apparently crave).

Furthermore, Flash is based on technology that was unstable from the beginning. It began its life as a combination between animation software and Macromedia Director, which was already known for its instability. Since then, features have been added, piling complexity and mystery code into an already bloated runtime.

Six months after dropping the bar on Adobe Flash, I have to report a mixed bag of results — but no regrets. That is, I am blocked from some content and a few websites, but these are generally things I can work around. On the other hand, I’ve had near-zero browser crashes and absolutely zero security incidents.

Things I miss: most YouTube videos are Flash-based (although often if you find them embedded on a page, YouTube will provide an HTML5 version on the fly). HTML5 playback in addition is smoother than FLV videos ever were. There are fewer glitches, slowdowns, jitters and so forth.

Every now and then I encounter a website which requires Flash to proceed. Almost all of these are entertainment-based, and about half provide an HTML version of the site for us non-conformists. I have not missed anything vital, although I’ve missed a few internet memes. C’est la vie.

The most amazing thing is that I love my browsers again. I use FireFox, Opera, Chrome and IE simultaneously to get a view of my sites in different operating environments. I’m fond of FireFox and Opera, although Chrome is too “overly obsessive girlfriend” (OAG) for my tastes.

With Flash, I was experiencing 3-6 really big blowups per week across the browsers. I’d have just enough windows open to be pushing my luck, then click one more thing and whammo, the whole thing would shut down. FireFox has great crash recovery so it wasn’t usually a problem, but a few times, I lost everything I had open.

Since that time, I’ve had none. I seem to recall one browser crash during the last six months, and that may have been aided by simply excessive JavaScript load. Since I started keeping track of crashes out of curiosity, I’ve logged none, and my usage has not been less but perhaps more intense than usual.

It’s great to trust a browser again. I miss out on some videos and joke sites, but in exchange, I don’t have to have my nerves constantly on edge waiting for the next digital mushroom cloud. On the whole, I’m glad to be Flash-less and will never go back.

My hope is that as HTML5 evolves and FireFox moves to include H.264 video support again, fewer people will need the outdated and unstable entity that is Adobe Flash.

Although this sounds like a jihad against Adobe, it isn’t. I use and enjoy their other products. While I have doubts about their habit of seemingly outsourcing vital older technologies to bloated B-teams, many of their products are top-notch.

However, I think it’s time for me — and the web — to move on. Adobe Flash belongs in a niche created by the late 1990s browser wars, and now that these are mostly over, it’s time for Flash to go away. Try it. Your peace of mind and desktop stability will thank me.

Bob Way has a great post up about his brainstorm for a file-sharing system that technically does not include the actual data it shares, but can reconstruct it from a relative measurement of it, which is stored.

This is much like coming up with a mold for a part and using relative vectors to describe it, so that when needed, it can be re-created using some seed data and thus used to create the part in question.

Whether or not this is legal is well beyond me, and probably beyond our legal system. There’s a good argument that it is, since whether the data is stored or not, there’s a method of reconstructing it.

However, this is something the courts should have to test their mettle against:

The one-time pad’s magic was a close kin to the XOR swap’s. Both worked by temporarily storing, not the data itself, but a mathematical distance between two chunks of data. It was like broadcasting your location by saying “I’m 5 miles North.” By itself that phrase is valueless. Unless the receiver knows exactly where you measured from, he has zero hope of finding where you measured to.

“Everywhere is 5 miles North of someplace.”

It was a curious thought that kept the silly smile on my face a little longer…

Not only is the phrase useless because it contains no meaning. It’s multi-useless because it’s tells so little about so many things! I’m 5 miles north of Houston. You’re 5 miles north of LA.

“Whose data is infringing who?” I thought to myself.

Thing were even worse for the Houston and LA files. Millions of people simultaneously referenced those each for their own reasons. They certainly couldn’t be claimed by any particular individual.

Houston + 5 miles North = Me
Houston + 10 miles East = Jack
LA + 5 miles North = You
LA + 10 miles East = Steve

“There! Closed the loop.” Four locations encoded between four multiply-used data points. With no data attributable to only a single location.

Sure I’d lost the “one-time” nature of a pad cipher—but I wasn’t ciphering! This system would be used to find meaning, not to hide it. – “Old Moth, New Flame”, by Bob Way

It’s an insightful attempt to get around the problem of someone else’s data being at stake. The bigger question is how society’s going to fund all the software development, music and movies, etc. that we want if everyone pirates them.

Perhaps one answer is to violate a taboo and suggest that people aren’t equal, and some should have piracy rights, or at least extended academic curiosity rights. But then the madding crowd will clamor for that to be a “civil right” as well.

Most programming is a variant of “cut and paste” programming. You find the archetype you’re looking for, adapt it, and then paste it into the program from a mixture of sample code and blog posts. It works; you move on.

Some programmers are even more experienced. Their pattern recognition and Pavlovian syntax response is all in their heads. They see a situation, and dump code from their fingers in response.

Others even have a way of looking at the whole project, making it an assessment of how the code should be shaped, and putting it together. Their syntax is on the level of the shape of the overall program.

The problem with each of these method is that they’re limited role. The programmer is the only one involved in how the project works; the major architectural factors unique to the project are removed; and, it’s difficult for others to participate.

Leslie Lamport wrote a powerful suggestion for architectural and collaborative (with client interests) software design, as opposed to reflexive syntax generation by pattern recognition:

Most programmers regard anything that doesn’t generate code to be a waste of time. Thinking doesn’t generate code, and writing code without thinking is a recipe for bad code. Before we start to write any piece of code, we should understand what that code is supposed to do…

I recently modified some code I hadn’t written to add one tiny feature to a program. Doing that required understanding an interface. It took me over a day with a debugger to find out what I needed to know about the interface — something that would have taken five minutes with a spec. To avoid introducing bugs, I had to understand the consequences of every change I made. The absence of specs made that extremely difficult. Not wanting to find and read thousands of lines of code that might be affected, I spent days figuring out how to change as little of the existing code as possible. In the end, it took me over a week to add or modify 180 lines of code. And this was for a very minor change to the program….

These days, the few programs I write are more like bungalows than skyscrapers. I usually specify each method, and most methods are so simple that they can be specified in a sentence or two. Sometimes figuring out exactly what a method should do requires thought, and its spec may be a paragraph or even a couple of pages. I use a simple rule: The spec should say everything one needs to know in order to use the method. After the code has been written and debugged, no one should ever have to read it. – “Why We Need Specs,” by Leslie Lamport, Wired

Lamport is one of the foundational thinkers in the field of distributed systems. He works for Microsoft Research and has contributed to fields tangential to philosophy with his notion of the temporal logic of actions (TLA).

Books are knowledge hacking. They are also social engineering. The very best writers invent philosophies that circumvent existing restrictions and get us closer to the mysteries of the universe, its order and our own minds.

The Houston Indie Book Festival is hosted by Gulf Coast and the Menil Community Arts Festival through a collaboration with The Menil Collection and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.

The 2013 festival will be on Saturday, April 20 from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at Menil Park. The event is completely free and open to the public, and features a variety of nationally-distributed literary journals alongside new and used booksellers, publishers, small presses, literary organizations, and writers. You can sign up to learn more and the festival by joining HIBF on Facebook and Twitter, or you can contact indiebookfest@gmail.com if your organization is interested is exhibiting at the festival.

View Larger Map

Houston 2600/HAQR Meeting

Join computer enthusiasts to talk about programming, operating systems, computer security topics, hacking and geek culture.

Directions

1. Take Post Oak South past Westheimer.
2. Turn right on Hidalgo.
3. Turn right on McCue.
4. On your left is a parking garage. Turn left into the first entrance to the parking garage.
5. Inside the parking garage, you will take a right and go up to the second floor. At the top of the building, turn left, and then turn left again, to follow the perimeter of the building. Signs will indicate you are heading to Nordstroms.
6. Park near the elevators, and go inside. About 10m inside and to your right is Ninfa’s Express. You want the sit-down area, which is closer to the door than the takeout that faces into the mall.

Inside map:
http://www.simon.com/mall/MallDirectoryPrint.aspx?id=805

Coordinates to parking garage: N 29 44.163 W 95 27.758.

After the meeting, HAQR will meet in the Borders in Galleria III.

About HAQR

The American Nihilist Underground Society spreads nihilism through design, art, pranks, and hacking. Its technology arm, the Houston Area Quorum for Recidivism (HAQR), encourage learning philosophical frameworks through design-oriented thinking.

http://www.anus.com/tribes/haqr/
http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/ANUS/

About 2600

2600 connects people with technology in unorthodox ways. An organization for hackers, it has branched into the hobby of thinking like a hacker to use technology beyond its stated categorical purpose to achieve exceptional results.

http://www.2600.com/
http://www.hou2600.org/

Houston 2600/HAQR Meeting

Join computer enthusiasts to talk about programming, operating systems, computer security topics, hacking and geek culture.

Directions

1. Take Post Oak South past Westheimer.
2. Turn right on Hidalgo.
3. Turn right on McCue.
4. On your left is a parking garage. Turn left into the first entrance to the parking garage.
5. Inside the parking garage, you will take a right and go up to the second floor. At the top of the building, turn left, and then turn left again, to follow the perimeter of the building. Signs will indicate you are heading to Nordstroms.
6. Park near the elevators, and go inside. About 10m inside and to your right is Ninfa’s Express. You want the sit-down area, which is closer to the door than the takeout that faces into the mall.

Inside map:
http://www.simon.com/mall/MallDirectoryPrint.aspx?id=805

Coordinates to parking garage: N 29 44.163 W 95 27.758.

After the meeting, HAQR will meet in the Borders in Galleria III.

About HAQR

The American Nihilist Underground Society spreads nihilism through design, art, pranks, and hacking. Its technology arm, the Houston Area Quorum for Recidivism (HAQR), encourage learning philosophical frameworks through design-oriented thinking.

http://www.anus.com/tribes/haqr/
http://www.textfiles.com/magazines/ANUS/

About 2600

2600 connects people with technology in unorthodox ways. An organization for hackers, it has branched into the hobby of thinking like a hacker to use technology beyond its stated categorical purpose to achieve exceptional results.

http://www.2600.com/
http://www.hou2600.org/