The Globe and Mail is supposed to be Canada's respectable national newspaper. Yet recent reading experiences of mine seem to be proving that theory wrong.

  Yesterday I checked its tech section and found a couple of disturbing articles. The section itself is standard corporate media, promoting the web as a commercial vehicle only. Unless you are hawking a new gadget or business web site or are a CEO making 600 million a year, you are not likely to appear in it. Of course I am used to that. But it is harder to get used to the crazy political views the Globe is pushing.

  In an article about the music industry dispute via Napster, their featured columnist Michael Lewis tells us that Napster is just a pretender in its role as an enemy of the capitalist free market. The real villain is a file-sharing program called Gnutella - a larger part of that threat being the hundreds of open source programmers who work on it.

  Recently at friend's I was forced to watch a new version of Godzilla. Now, after reading the Globe, I know that Gnutella is the real world enemy. According to the article it is the greatest threat to the free market system and our way of life since Soviet Socialism collapsed. Gnutella programmers are especially frightening because they are part of a movement and do not see themselves as businessmen.

  So is Gnutella really going to destroy the world? Well let me tell you that the answer is no. I would say that the mega-corporations ruling the earth of 2000 are the greatest threat to the free market that ever existed - they are the real Godzillas. It wouldn't be the end at all if what they call our way of life and free market went down like the Titanic.

  Under the current system, the best that is to be expected of 99.9 percent of us is that we consume the products of global corporations and fawn over the celebrity class of superstars that push those products. As they enrich themselves we remain on the shores of serfdom living in the happy delusion they have provided us. If Gnutella really does sink that big superstar Titanic, we won't be on board. We'll be off somewhere on that shore where they abandoned us years ago.

  You'll be there and I'll be there. And if champagne still exists in that end-time world, I plan on toasting the big ship's demise. Not because I enjoy destruction, but because I enjoy the idea of the mindless masses regaining the earth that has been taken from them.

  The next article in the Globe that disturbed me was one called a Personal View - Don't hire DefCon hackers by Victor Keong, a cyber security expert.

  Keong warns us about shabby hackers that don't obey dress codes and pose a general threat to the corporate earth. Keong opens saying, "From all over the world, they make the annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas. They have names such as Mudge, Null and Dark Tangent. Tattooed, pierced, tie-dyed and ready to brag, they wear motorcycle boots, leather and even kilts in the hot July desert sun."

  What Keong doesn't tell his readers is the truth about hackers. Hackers were considered hardworking and respectable computer folk for years. And they still are that. What has changed is that nowadays the media tags every online criminal with the name hacker. The people they are really referring to are crackers not hackers. Crackers like to bypass security in computer systems.

  The upshot of Keong's article is job discrimination. Keong calls on employers not to hire hackers. And if anything makes Keong's sort of crap journalism worse, it is that people like him have been having great success in recent years. Not in getting hackers fired but in getting service providers and net companies to fire scads of employees that dress in an alternative fashion.

  So the Globe will have you out of a job, but there's no need to worry. Just check their section on poverty and you'll see why. Nearly all of this year they've been featuring a piece online by John Stackhouse, who went onto the streets posing as a panhandler. Stackhouse has discovered that these homeless sorts are really all rich, loaded down with bags of panhander's gold. An El Dorado he calls it.

  And you'll be rich, too. After the Globe convinces your boss to fire you. You'll just have to spend it fast 'cause Gnutella is gonna stomp on the world.

If you want to write a Letter to the Editor of Globe Tech regarding the article above - go to
http://www.globetechnology.com/site/letter.html
--------
 

Here are the articles from the Globe that inspired Gnutella Replaces Godzilla in Corporate Media
*Reposted in the Public Interest.

Napster lawsuit reveals politics of the Web

MICHAEL LEWIS
Bloomberg News
Tuesday, August 8, 2000

Paris -- Even lovers of free music should feel grateful that the
music industry had the nerve to sue Napster Inc. The lawsuit
has been a great clarifying political event. It has flushed to the
surface all sorts of opinions and attitudes that normally are
permitted to remain lurking in the depths.

As everyone now suddenly knows, Napster is a service that
helps people to help themselves to music on-line. A visit to
http://www.napster.com has many advantages over a trip to
the record store, but the main one is that you don't have to pay
for it. You just download whatever songs you want, gratis, and
burn them onto your own compact discs.

People -- especially young people with more computer skills
than cash -- like this idea. In the past six months American
college students have made Napster the fastest-growing
Internet service ever. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company says
20 million different users have visited its Web site, and, for
once, claims made by an Internet company about the number of
people who use it sound almost true. Earlier this summer a
single band, Metallica, was able to identify more than 300,000
people who had used Napster to pirate its music.

That was a great moment in rock 'n' roll history. Nowhere is it
written that the noisiest musicians shouldn't love money and
free markets as much as anyone else. But up until now a lot of
people have pretended that they didn't. Until Metallica filed suit
to protect its bank accounts from its fans, the fans could at
least pretend that the musicians shared their cacophonous
alienation with the material world. Now they can't.

Even more interesting is the way the lawsuit has flushed to the
surface the politics of the Internet. It is not, as is often
assumed, uniformly libertarian and anarchic and hostile to the
establishment. The people who own and run Napster may
facilitate the theft of intellectual property, and undermine the
music market, but they do so with the intention of building a
business and getting rich. Napster hasn't made its first dollar,
but its new venture capitalists, Hummer Winblad Venture
Partners in San Francisco, have valued the new company at
almost $70-million (U.S.).

Among the many beliefs implied by the $15-million invested by
Hummer Winblad is a respect for intellectual property rights. No
one sinks a dime into Napster if they believe the name
"Napster" and the software that goes along with it can and
should be stolen as easily as a college freshman can now steal
the collected works of Metallica.

And so the Napster revolt is a hypocritical revolt; beneath it is
not the spirit of revolution but a welter of conventional political
beliefs. The leaders of this revolt are not hollering "Up the
establishment!" but "Give us a seat at the table!" Indeed, when
it landed in legal trouble, Napster abandoned the usual
bomb-throwing rhetoric and offered as defence that it actually
helped the music industry. The company tried to show that its
service actually inspired people to buy more music. On the eve
of the decision, Napster called for a "buy-cott," urging its users
to ignore the reasons they used Napster in the first place and to
run out and buy many CDs.

We all know characters such as Napster from the movies: the
shifty dry goods merchant who makes a killing selling supplies
to bandits, but who himself expects to be protected by the
sheriff when the bandits ride into town. He is easy to despise,
and so no one minds when he is murdered in the middle of the
second act.

But that's far from the end of the story. If Napster gets shut
down or sold off -- and I bet one or the other will happen --
there's another group of geeks with another set of political
attitudes waiting to replace it. The best known of these is called
Gnutella.

Gnutella is a piece of software circulated freely on the Internet
that enables its users to find and record music on each other's
personal computers without a server, or even a central listing
service such as Napster. Technically, this software is far more
seditious than Napster's, as it is almost impossible to shut
down. A network that has no corporate home and constantly
morphs offers no target for the law.

The software that drives Gnutella has been written collectively
by several hundred programmers working in their spare time.
These people clearly do not see themselves as businessmen;
they don't expect to be paid; all they want is to turn the world
on its head. "Gnutella's not a company," one of them told The
New York Times last month. "It's a movement."

And it is. It -- and things like it -- represent the greatest threat
to free markets since socialism collapsed. Gnutella doesn't
undermine property rights by the by; it does so as its main goal.
And there isn't a trace of hypocrisy in the geeks who write the
software. Their own disinterest in making a profit from their
creations lends moral force to their argument that musicians and
music companies have made enough money already.

These are people you can respect, even if you hate what they
are doing. And that makes them a bit unnerving, in a way that
Napster never was. Napster pretends to be a threat to the way
we live now. Gnutella actually is.
==========

Don't hire DefCon hackers

VICTOR KEONG

Tuesday, August 8, 2000

From all over the world, they make the annual pilgrimage to Las
Vegas. They have names such as Mudge, Null and Dark Tangent.
Tattooed, pierced, tie-dyed and ready to brag, they wear
motorcycle boots, leather and even kilts in the hot July desert
sun.

They are, by far, the smartest group of misfits you will ever
encounter. Some of them have IQs that can boil water, others
have technical and programming skills that can put almost any
system administrator to shame, and if you run a computer
network, they can be your worst nightmare. Welcome to DefCon
8.0.

For all their ability, though, businesses should be wary of
succumbing to the temptation of hiring the enemy to guard their
systems, as there are better options available.

The most unconventional of conventions, DefCon 8.0 was the
annual meeting ground for dozens of the computer
underground's most elite and notorious hackers. Driven by a
belief that information should be freely available to all, they
spend their time creating devious and elegant methods of
cracking computer security. Any barrier to the free access of
information is a challenge. And they take the challenge
seriously. As in previous DefCon gatherings, the hacking
community flushed out significant system vulnerabilities and
exploit methods.

Some say hackers believe that as much system vulnerability
information as possible should be disclosed in hopes that
responsible users will employ it to protect their companies from
being attacked. But are their technological feats more
self-serving? The counterargument is that many disclosures of
security holes are "rock-throwing" incidents done by companies
or individuals to attack dominant vendors such as Microsoft
Corp., or for the purposes of self-promotion, financial gain or
ego gratification.

Often, such disclosures give not-so-skilled malicious attackers
(dubbed "script kiddies") point-and-click tools that they can use
to easily take down Web sites.

Keeping up with the latest hacking exploits and system
vulnerabilities can be a daunting task for a business's already
overworked system administrators. Most information technology
departments are currently faced with the challenge of managing
the staffing and processes required for establishing and
maintaining the security posture for large enterprise networks.

A very important aspect of this activity is the overall security
monitoring and advisory management function. This requires
technically skilled staff who need to be focused on the technical
details of implementing and managing network security.

Fortunately, testing for security vulnerabilities isn't limited to
the black leather-wearing crowd with The Matrix-inspired
nicknames. There are safer, mainstream alternatives. A
continuing, qualified security advisory service is what
corporations should look for from consulting firms. Dedicated
technical resources will focus on identifying and qualifying
serious, relevant network vulnerabilities as opposed to
hacker-driven noise.

Keeping up with the best of the computer underground may not
require a visit to the tattoo artist just yet.
cg8routs,0,BYADVAN Victor Keong is a senior manager in the
secure e-business group at Deloitte & Touche, and is the firm's
global leader for network attack and penetration services.
cg8routs,0,BYADVAN Report on Business welcomes Personal
View submissions. Submit to pnowak@globeandmail.ca.
==================