Plan network corrupt

and your family

Today we are cross-posting a recent essay on network corruption and ways in which you might choose to prepare. Today’s content is free to all readers.

“The prototypes of the programs you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs.” ~ William Gibson, Neuromancer, Anno Domini 1984

Not that long ago if you wanted to go on a long road trip you would get a map that included your destination. Today’s teens expect to have their phone on hands-free-mode and hear it give instructions about turning left at the next corner.

Not that long ago if you wanted a photograph you would use a camera with film. After you had used up the roll of film you would rewind it, take it out of the camera, and turn it over to a photo development lab. Some people had such labs in their homes or offices. Most had access to development labs by parcel post. After a while, film developing moved into big box stores for a while. Today’s teens expect to use a phone or tablet to take a photo. They won’t think taking a video is any more complex - few of us living can remember a time before video cassette recorders, though there was a time when they represented an innovation - about the same time that floating point battery operated handheld calculators made their appearance, quickly replacing desktop mechanical calculation machines.

What would your twenty-something friend do if her phone gave her instructions to her destination and they took her to an ambush? Most likely she would get ambushed. Drive right into the kill zone. The map software gives simple instructions and is obeyed because that’s how you get where you’re going. Why think of it as something hostile?

Artificial everything

There isn’t any such thing as artificial intelligence. Intelligence doesn’t arise from the adding and subtracting of ones and zeroes. However, there are such things as large language models and there are such things as machine learning algorithms. Moreover, things like audio, video, and photographs are possible to fake. The history of Hollywood going back to 1897 is the history of tricking the eye to believe that a series of still images projected rapidly (about 24 frames per second is fast enough so the motion seems continuous and not jerky) is actually showing a “moving” picture. Animation is the same technique with drawings or paintings. Stop motion animation uses models that are carefully modified between frames to show small amounts of change and appear to be moving.

Today you can quickly automate animated videos that appear to have tremendous “realism.” You don’t need dozens of guys with pens and transparent “cels” and background matte painters and talent. Today there is software for all of those things. Nor should you limit your thinking to cartoons. Entire press conferences can be created out of whole cloth. Here’s a friendly cat’s overview on the topic:

poe's law comes into full flower

The author who is not actually a cat (but is clever enough to suppose that a cat typing would not bother with the shift key to type capital letters) writes, in part, “there is an impending reality fracture coming. the ability to tell what is real and what is fugazy is already well past slippery and into ‘you haven’t got a prayer without specialized tools.’”

Everything that is connected has this prospect. Things that you think are reliable won’t be. Things that you trust will prove to be untrustworthy. You’ll see video that seems very convincing but is in fact not reflective of reality. As long as you don’t base any choices on the things you are shown, it might not matter very much.

But, that hasn’t been the case so far. The American people were lied into war in 1941. Yes, the attacks by the Japanese at Hawai’i, the Philippines, Batavia, Malaysia, and elsewhere were very real. But the context was false. Americans were told that the Japanese fleets travelled under radio silence. They did not. In 1999 the worksheets tracking the fleets by direction finding radio systems were declassified and published in the paperback book of Robert Stinnett’s Day of Deceit the following year. He was already writing the book based on declassified materials proving that the major Japanese naval codes had already been broken as early as the 10th month of 1940. FDR and Churchill knew exactly what to expect and refused to provide appropriate warnings for the military commanders facing these attacks - even to the point of allowing Kimmel and Short to face career destroying inquiries without letting on about the facts involved. FDR and Churchill wanted a lot of American, British, Malayan, Dutch, and Chinese civilians to be raped, murdered, pillaged, tortured, and enslaved by the Japanese military.

Why is there no video of the radar tracks of the aeroplanes of the 11th day of the 9th month of 2001? Why is there no video of an actual plane approaching the Pentagon? You see, quite a few important choices have been taken, and supported by tens of millions of people, based on the presentation of falsehoods. Spend even a few minutes searching on “crisis actor” and you may feel uncertainty about what is being shown on television.

Very recently a steel frame high rise building caught fire. Oddly, it didn’t collapse into its own footprint. For all 24 years since the events of that day, people have noticed that the crime scene was thoroughly destroyed in the aftermath. Extensive evidence of explosives used on the twin towers has been available in various amateur videos of the onset of the collapses. To this day nobody has a cogent explanation for how building 7 came down other than the audio of the owner saying, “pull it” and other compelling evidence that it was deliberately demolished for the insurance money.

It isn’t only a matter of not being able to trust mapping software apps and hoax stream media news stories. If you rely on networked systems you have to understand that the level of sophistication for making them corrupt has been increasing exponentially, following Moore’s law for many decades. The only aspect of this situation under your control now is the extent to which you rely on networked systems.

The cloud

If you don’t have a back up, you are relying on the people who store your files “in the cloud” to be honourable. Have you looked into these people? Mass murdering war profiteers. Child rapist visitors to Epstein island. Creepy guys who keep small herds of teenagers for blood transfusions. It seems likely that any trust in systems owned and operated by such people is misplaced.

What is “the cloud” or what is “cloud storage”? Simply put, it is other people’s computers.

And, it gets worse. There is now a huge demand for random access memory chips, as well as for computer processing chips. There are other authors here on Substack warning of the possibility that you won’t be able to afford the components to make your own laptop or desktop computer in the near future, so you won’t have any alternative but to store your files on someone else’s storage media and even use subscription-only office software to make calculations and write documents. Unless, like me, you’ve gotten used to using extremely dated hardware and software.

For my own part, I think the upgrade cycle is degrading. I don’t know why you want the very latest version of the software you use. Why don’t you simply use the software you have? Who benefits from selling you not only all new versions of everything but all new courses to train you to use the new things and all new certifications to “prove” that you know how to use the new things? Are any of these material acquisitions actually in your favour? Given the virtual nature of many of these things, are they even material acquisitions? I see you spending your hard earned money on stuff you don’t need to impress people you don’t like so you can … accomplish what, exactly? Colour in my outline with the marker pen “mystified.”

Funny money

You probably don’t read enough science fiction. Then again, it isn’t possible to read enough. Good science fiction novels are like potato chips, you can’t consume only one.

Long ago there was a computer centre where my dad would undertake certain kinds of complex mathematical calculations. Over the course of his post-war career there were quite a few such places, but one that I visited quite often was at the university of Kansas. It was in the context of that particular computer centre and its mag tape drives, dot matrix and daisy wheel printers, and various “mainframe” computers that I learned about funny money. Later I would have my own funny money accounts when I was provided certain kinds of limited access to the computer systems at Columbia university and at Rice university.

Funny money was a phrase we used to describe notional or artificial currency units that computer centres allocated to users to ration and manage access to limited and expensive computing resources. Now, sometimes those units were dollars and sometimes they weren’t. An individual might be a user, or a professor might have a collection of individual accounts all of which he had some measure of responsibility over, or an entire department might be a “user” from the perspective of the accounting system. How you got an amount to use depended on historical idiosyncrasies as well as the foibles of a few unusually task-focused people. Computer people had a reputation for not being especially good with interpersonal activities, and limiting how other people got to use memory storage, printers, really good printers, random access memory, queue priority, and central processing capabilities seems to have sent a few people into levels of dictatorial behaviour seldom seen outside slave camps.

In theory there was some good out of these accounting fictions. People of my personal acquaintance would come to me with four lines of code that did the work previously accomplished by twenty, and we would have a good time talking about other topics of interest. Who would imagine needing ten megabytes of storage for a personal computer? How would you live down the shame of such poor coding as to need that much storage? Those were my salad days, when I was green in judgement.

Of course, the value involved was not real money, even if it were accounted for in dollars and cents rather than some other, more purely fictitious units. You couldn’t withdraw this money. And if you knew where the digits were stored, you could change the allocations. Changing how much “funny money” your department got from the computer guys meant meetings and discussions and office politics, or it meant knowing where the bodies were buried, or it meant shenanigans. Even in those days there were academics who were world class shenanigators when it came to getting resources. There are science fiction stories that encompass some of the interesting experiences that were possible back when you only had a quarterly review (or in some places of legend, only an end of semester review) to account for actual usage against budgeted availability.

But now what do you have? Is the chequing account balance at your bank or credit union “real” money? Of course not. It is a computer generated value.

If the financial institution is reasonably honest, the charges shown in your “online account” are only those charges for which you’ve actually made a purchase. What do you do if your account is charged for something you don’t remember buying? What do you do if your account is charged for something your toddler bought when you didn’t know she had your credit card? What if there is a charge for a bank fee that you don’t think is applicable? Well, of course, you get to experience life as we knew it fifty years ago. You get to challenge the system while having essentially no power over the outcome. Maybe you get to make a case to an actual human being. But very often, especially nowadays, your concerns are glossed over by some automated “chat” interface or with an automated form email that would be reminiscent of the kind of form letters emitted by congress critters to “constituents” who ever bothered to write a letter asking for attention to a certain issue or a vote on a certain bill.

It gets worse. Your bank account can be frozen. Ask the trucker convoy participants what that was like. Some of them are here on Substack. What do you do if your financial services company turns all of your money over to the internal revenue disservice? That’s called “levying” your account. It doesn’t require a court order. It only requires a vindictive bureau rat, and, friend, are there any other kind?

Yes, I did hear some people “harrumph” in my mind’s ear when I mentioned relying on network automation systems. “Harrumph! I am not relying on network automation. I don’t have to worry.” Uh huh. Because trusted third parties holding notional balances in a digital accounting system, what’s that? Your credit union, your bank, your 401k, your retirement account, your money market account, every way in which you have meaningful contemporary access to money. Yeah, also your stock market trading account, huh? And do you bother with self-custody of your cryptocurrencies or is all that stored on some exchange operator account?

Do you watch films, at all? Because sometimes when I’m talking about science fiction people think I’m only making references to books by authors. “Live Free or Die Hard” is a science fiction film. (And unlike other episodes in the series, it is not a Christmas film.) The bad guy “Thomas Gabriel” calls up all of the financial accounts of the good guy, “John McClane,” and makes them go to zero. “Swordfish” is a science fiction film. The bad guy “Gabriel Shear” moves billions of dollars around offshore accounts, as if by magic. As someone who knows quite a lot about computer systems, financial services automation, multi-headed worms, and other hacking tech, I find such films amusing to the extent that they aren’t also tedious. But I do get a kick out of the character names. Stanley Jobson? Anyone? Bueller?

Strategies

You should stop watching television. You should especially not ever turn on a “smart” television because it is watching what you watch. And in some instances, watching you watching it. Smart tvs make a screen grab twice a second in the case of one of the major brands and several dozen times a second in the case of another, which data is sent back to the owner operators of that hardware. (You didn’t think that you owned your own smart television did you? Well, did you replace the operating system when you bought it? Then, no, you don’t. You’re a guest user.)

Way back in 2018 I noticed there was a big screen television sitting on a table in my living room. I had never plugged it in after moving into the place. So I gave it to a friend who sold it and bought gifts for her children at Christmas, paid a few bills, never looked at it either. Television programming is programming you. Maybe you should think about whether that’s something you want it to be doing.

You might want to log out of Facebook. There was a recent post on one of the Substacks that I read occasionally about how all the ad money from all the billion or so fake Facebook accounts was driving a certain level of viral-fame-seeking writing by certain kinds of liberal socialist writers. Quite a lot of these posts would show up in the ordinary feed of people who thought Facebook was how to keep in touch with friends and family. Of course, Facebook’s owners thought it was for making profits for the owners of Facebook. (Recall that Mark Zuckerberg thinks you are a fool for sharing personal information with him. His exact words are unfit for a family publication. “People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They ‘trust me’. Dumb f***s.”)

I don’t use Facebook. I don’t use LinkedIn. Twitter stifled my main account, the one that had 11,000 followers. So I don’t use that one. (I do have a Twitter where a few dozen people might see a link to one of my posts here. But I really don’t see the point.)

You should probably learn to use encrypted email. Actually using an email client that has embedded Gnu Privacy Guard encryption keys capability would be best. In the absence of that, something like Protonmail would work, assuming you can trust the Proton people.

There are encrypted messaging apps. Some of them involve your phone number. Those are not optimal. Others are based on your phone number but you can hide the number and use your choice of user name instead. Session messaging uses a hash code so it is not tied to an email address nor to a phone number, which seems better than the others. It happens to use the open source software that Signal is based on, but without the Signal servers, so though Session has voice and video capability there may not be enough servers in your area for good quality audio or video.

Yes, you can connect to apps using wifi so you aren’t necessarily dependent on the cell network. And that can be handy if you have a friend in Canada or in some other country and you have the affliction of poverty or just a really strong allergy to spending money on international long distance. Voice over IP works and generally doesn’t cost as much as paying your cell provider for international calling. A great many countries have a monopoly run by bureau rats that makes calling very expensive because everyone in the state hates mankind and wants everyone else to suffer.

You might want to make an effort to acquire analogue radio equipment. You might want to be skittish about how much network access you provide to your digital radio systems, and “software defined” radio equipment. You are very likely to want to have alternative communications strategies.

If you are able to build physical community groups around you, you should get that going now. If you already have a community action group, see what you can do to connect to other similar groups in your area and region. Trusting the network layer may become problematic, which means you’ll want to have other layers. Certain levels and layers of security can be spoofed, and the human interface is one of the ways that criminal hackers have always gained access. The “social spoof” is one. There are many others. The problems implicit in large language models for computer users are many and varied. You have entered an era when the cost of targeting someone with techniques to beguile them into believing falsehoods has become very low.

Psychological warfare

You might want to spend some time looking into who is involved in the psychological warfare activities of the major nation states. For example, Tulsi Gabbard has extensive credentials and experience in this area. And she’s now director of national intelligence, which sort of makes her the head puppet at the top of the deep state agencies. Who is the marionetteer pulling her strings? dunno

One of the things that ought to make you feel good is the fact that in order to push the Cantillon effects of the trillions of new dollars they created in 2020 and 2021 they implemented a huge propaganda festival to lie about a pandemic that was not seen by healthcare professionals of my acquaintance. Many billions of dollars were spent on the propaganda and many of us were impervious to it. After seeing what they did at Ruby Ridge and at Mount Carmel near Waco, I’ve been extremely sceptical about all aspects of hoax stream media for over 30 years.

All of the events since 1877 or thereabouts have been used in a propaganda war. You don’t think the Spanish actually blew up the USS Maine in Havana harbour do you? Why would they? You don’t think the Lusitania just happened into a German U-boat wolf pack (or two) after Churchill removed its destroyer escort, do you? You think the wealthy and politically connected opponents of the Federal Reserve and the income tax just happened to be on the Titanic when it was sent to the bottom of the sea? Huh. So, then, when the BATFE wanted to arrest David Koresh in early 1993

they could have done so at the gun range or the grocery store, and didn’t need to involve national guard helicopters and lies about a drug lab? Did the fbi hostage rescue team have special forces guys put a demolition charge on the top of the church vault to deliberately murder all the women and children hiding there? Were there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq other than the ones Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld sold them in the 1980s? How many of the people in power have been lying to you over the last century? All of them.

Maybe the trust in digital appearances we have lost is made up for by the friends we made along the way.