What's New in Our World?: Security and Synchronicity: Are You Safe on the Web? (1/20/12)
By Mark Lerner
Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors HAL.
HAL9000 Computer: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
(dialogue from the pioneering 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey)
Quick – while you are reading this sentence – how many windows and tabs do you have open on this computer? Did you just do any online banking with this same browser still open? That’s an absolute no-no that can expose your computer to all kinds of nefarious phishing expeditions by would-be hackers out to possibly steal your identity or a password to your wealth and savings. Enter the 24/7 realm of former star hacker, Jeff Moss – alias The Dark Tangent – a 41+ year-old who recently (2009) became a member of the Homeland Security Advisory Council and, even more recently (2011) became the chief security officer for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
I had never heard of multi-millionaire, Jeff Moss, until I bought a copy of Discover magazine’s January/February 2012 issue – featuring 100 “experiments, discoveries, and new ideas that changed the world” in 2011. Story #50, entitled The Net Watchman (a play on the phrase The Night Watchman), jumped out at me. In it there is a Q & A going on between the magazine editors and this new security guru, as they call him, Jeff Moss.
It turns out – and this is fascinating to visit online – that Jeff Moss (who had graduated from Gonzaga University with a degree in Criminal Justice) was a superb hacker who wound up creating the first DEF CON hackers’ convention in 1992 and then one-upped himself by adding the BLACK HAT conference in 1997, which serves annually as the security counterpart to DEF CON.” Moss became so influential through this work – selling off some of his business at one point for over $12 million – that the US government began sending NSA (National Security Agency) associates there to learn what’s going on in the hacker universe as well as to give their own lectures and intermingle. What’s intriguing is that these get-togethers all happen in Las Vegas and are cash-only events. In other words, no hacker in his or her right mind would ever consider going to a hotel and presenting a credit card (which could be tracked by god knows who out there in cyberspace).
Why This Information is Being Presented Now
Over the last Saturn cycle of 29 years – since President Reagan touted his laughed-at “Star Wars” space and atmospheric technology for shooting down enemy nukes and missiles in 1983, followed by the release of blockbuster high-tech movies like War Games (1984), Enemy of the State and Mercury Rising (1998), and The International (2009) – our modern love for and dependence on technological breakthroughs has been accelerating at a lightning pace. In fact, the term “Singularity” recently came into being in high-tech circles wherein it is presumed that computers and robots will make the intelligence leap beyond human thinking by around the year 2041 (ironically exactly one Saturn cycle from 2012).
Meanwhile, you have probably seen various commercials – put forward by Microsoft, in particular – where a very happy husband and wife are sending contents of articles, emails and maybe even banking information to “the cloud” for apparently safe and secure storage. To the cloud? When I first heard about this “cloud business,” I was astonished. We are already up to our eyebrows in a dizzying array of hi-tech devices, gadgets, gizmos and what-not – where very few of us have the technological know-how to run our own computers and set up all our software correctly – and now these multi-billion dollar technological corporations are creating an all-knowing and all-wise cloud above and beyond the seemingly ethereal, hard-to-fathom, and where-does-it-actually-exist world wide web.
Are they trying to re-invent God or Divinity only in the image of high-technology? It also sounds like the cloud concept is a kind of phantasmagorical Mount Olympus where geeks (and possibly harmful hackers) run wild as would-be super-gods and goddesses while us mortals down below – struggling with coordinating iPhones, tablets and laptops – are operating our devices without a clue about what’s going on “up there.”
Here are the first two sentences from the Wikipedia concerning Cloud Computing:
Cloud computing is a marketing term for technologies that provide computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. A parallel to this concept can be drawn with the electricity grid, wherein end-users consume power without needing to understand the component devices or infrastructure required to provide the service.
The picture shown in Wikipedia is equally alarming – in which devices like iPhones, tablets, laptops and servers are all encircling a cloud-like entity which contains words such as network, database, communication, compute, block storage, and – even more alarmingly – monitoring, finance and identity. (Note: Moss – being interviewed by Discover magazine – discusses this cloud computing realm as the next major security challenge coming up on the world’s horizon, and he is already worried about hackers breaking into the cloud and turning it into a nightmarish, high-tech Paradise Lost.)
The Macrocosm of the Solar System Reveals our Safety/Security Concerns in our Earthly Microcosm
If you have read my previous writing about the DAWN spacecraft currently taking photographs of the asteroid Vesta (deeply associated with safety and security matters across the board, as well the housing industry, insurance and the investment arena), you realize that what we are doing technologically, in an advanced way, by photographing the surface of Vesta, is attempting to figure out how to live more safe and secure lives on Earth and within the human community as we become more and more entrenched in the high-tech, cyberspace, global lifestyle.
Just as the Voyager II spacecraft flew by Uranus in 1986 and the space shuttle Challenger exploded at the same time, and then Voyager II flew by Neptune in 1989 and Communism began falling around the world, so, too, we are now capturing images of the key rock in outer space that rules over everything associated with safety and security, insurance, housing and investment. The astrological aphorism – attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the sage of Ancient Egypt – was “As Above, So Below,” or what’s true in the greater universe reflects its truth in the smaller universe. Clearly, that is happening now, in 2012, with the profusion of tablets, smart phones and a cloud that could easily darken our computer, high-tech skies if we are not on alert.
Warning Ahead in 2012 & 2013
In closing this time, what follows is a warning and a hope. First for the warning: he asteroid Vesta will return to its natal placement at 19+ degrees of Taurus in America’s birth chart from June 12 - 15, 2012, and the next inauguration of a president (January 20, 2013) takes place with a rising Moon (representing the public) at 19+ Taurus (exactly igniting our nation’s Vesta). This past summer in 2011, when DAWN actually went into orbit around Vesta, this key asteroid – ruling over all safety, security, insurance and investment issues – made a station and turned retrograde at the Summer Solstice in an exact square pattern to America’s natal Vesta. And it was during the three summer months that our national credit rating was diminished, political disagreements regarding the debt ceiling reached epic proportions in Congress, and international economic markets were shocked by the European Sovereign Debt Crisis that seemed to come out of nowhere.
To make matters more extreme, this June also starts a 7-fold Uranus-Pluto series of squares that will last until March 2015. These squares mimic a similar group that took place in the early 1930s – a time-period now known as The Great Depression. The fiscal nightmare that has engulfed so much of the world during the last few years has been called The Great Recession. The social media come up with these similar phrases because of the major, behind-the-scenes astrological cycles that are signaling the problem in the first place!
However, hope is figuratively and literally on the horizon since the DAWN mission to Vesta eventually this summer changes course as that spacecraft goes on to visit Ceres in 2015, the same year another technological space marvel called New Horizons will be visiting far-distant Pluto and its trio of moons. Thus, three years from now, if these space missions stay intact, we will be seeing photographs of the so-called dwarf planets Ceres (Mother Nature; productivity; agriculture; food and water) and Pluto (death-rebirth; the underworld; willpower, purpose and government; the super-rich and the 99%), and earthly lives will drastically change again. We will need to shift our focus away from safety/security breakdowns in cyberspace in order to restore a better climate to our home planet, and rid ourselves of pollution and global poisons. Even the purity, safety, security and abundance of our precious water supply may be a top issue – which is why the following quotation is a hopeful sign of what we may discover in our solar system in a couple of years:
Astronomers estimate that if Ceres were composed of 25 percent water, it may have more water than all the fresh water on Earth. Ceres' water, unlike Earth’s, is expected to be in the form of water ice located in its mantle. – NASA
Update
To show how serious the realm of hacking into websites is – with the goals of obtaining supposedly secure information affecting one’s identity and financial resources, or shutting down vital services – note what occurred during the January 14 - 15 weekend, just after this article was posted on Inner Sight. Zappos.com – a major shoe, hosiery and apparel company – reported that approximately 24 million client accounts were hacked into by an unknown source. Although Zappos then changed everyone’s passwords and contacted their clients (by email only, not by phone) – telling them to create new passwords – the scare was enormous and reminded so many people around the world that their addresses and credit card information might not be very safe and secure. Meanwhile, on the same day, hackers possibly connected to a Palestinian terrorist group overwhelmed the servers that sponsor and protect the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and El Al Airlines websites in Israel – forcing those websites to go down temporarily, a double cyber-terror hit that sent shockwaves throughout Israel. Get used to this kind of online criminality as it is a daily part of this new kind of technological warfare in the 21st century.
(©2012 by Mark Lerner and Great Bear Enterprises. All rights reserved.)
