Five Links #041

Nuclear spectrums; Anonymity is over

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When annoying the [Nuclear armed sovereign state] is success..

How’s this bloke?!

North Korea’s cyber army made the mistake of probing or perhaps successfully hacking his computer systems, and so in retaliation he wages a one-man hacktivism crusade against the North Korean Government. And by all reports he’s doing pretty well.

I can’t muster up the motivation to write a sternly worded letter - this guy plays at another level.

But responsibility for North Korea's ongoing internet outages doesn't lie with US Cyber Command or any other state-sponsored hacking agency. In fact, it was the work of one American man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alienmovies and eating spicy corn snacks—and periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country.

and

He acknowledges that his attacks amount to no more than “tearing down government banners or defacing buildings,” as he puts it. But he also says that his hacking has so far focused on testing and probing to find vulnerabilities. He now intends to try actually hacking into North Korean systems, he says, to steal information and share it with experts. At the same time, he's hoping to recruit more hacktivists to his cause with a dark website he launched Monday called the FUNK Project—i.e. “FU North Korea”—in the hopes of generating more collective firepower. 

North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet | WIRED

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Thinking in spectrums..

Tim Urban @waitbutwhy

Politics encourages us to see the world as monolithic groups of people in conflict with one another. But empathy comes from remembering the top and bottom of this tower—that there's a lot we all have in common, and a lot about every other person we can never fully understand.

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If it’s free, you are the product..

Although I’ve succumbed to the idea that in today’s internet environment we accept that we will give up a little anonymity for the convenience of cheaper access and smoother interactions, it’s still scary when the operators of those advertising and market research worlds show how their professional sausage gets made.

(via @swodinsky)

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Non-fungible Conspiracies..

NFTs are dumb. Or at least, this latest ‘NFT-industry’ is dumb.

And this article suggests that, not only is it dumb to think we’re all going to get rich ‘investing’ in digital ownership rights to ASCII art, but it’s a bit of a pre-meditated scam as well.

I find the world of NFT-flogging celebrities fascinating, both because of the visceral, skin-crawling embarrassment I feel when I see people like Fallon and Hilton half-heartedly try to express enthusiasm for their expensive new Twitter avatars, and also because it gives me the sense that there is something going on behind the scenes here that I am not quite privy to. Where does a person like Paris Hilton or Eminem even hear about “bored apes”? Who is recommending that they buy one? Is this really the best thing any of them can think to do with their money and fame?

If you pay attention to both the Hollywood trades and the crypto press, and smoke enough weed, you can begin to pick out the contours of an expanding, interconnected, celebrity-based web3 financial-cultural complex: Did you know, for example, that Jimmy Fallon is represented by CAA, which is an investor in the NFT marketplace OpenSea, and which recently signed a deal to represent the NFT collector 0xb1, who owns NFTs from Bored Ape Yacht Club and World of Women? Did you know that another CAA client, Ashton Kutcher1, is also an investor in OpenSea, through his company Sound Ventures? Or that Kutcher will be starring in a Netflix romcom called Your Place or Mine with Reese Witherspoon, the most prominent owner of World of Women NFTs, who also happens to be married to a CAA agent? Or that the people behind World of Womenand Bored Ape Yacht Club are both represented by Kutcher's partner in Sound Ventures, the music manager Guy Oseary? Did you know that Oseary's other major venture these days is pearpop, a platform for connecting Tiktok influencers to celebrities for collaborations — a platform used by none other than Paris Hilton?

Mapping the celebrity NFT complex

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I can see my house from there..

The subscriber base to this newsletter is about 50 / 50 split between Perth folk and international folk. So I’m not sure how this link is going to go.

But here, for the Perth people - how cool is this video of some dude doing a virtual fly-over of our CBD?

And for the international people - how cool is this video of some dude doing a virtual fly-over of the city in which I live?

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For the first 35 issues or so there were these two subscribers that would immediately like (you can tap the heart button below to ‘like’ the post) every issue like two minutes after it was sent out. These were either my first two true superfans, or they were automated bots. In any event, one of them has disappeared. I do hope you’re ok, Mr fishwrap2020-bot.

If you enjoyed any of these links, the best way you can help me is by forwarding this email on to a friend. They can browse past issues and subscribe at this link. 

- Bennett

bennettgreen.com

Cover Photo by Sergi Viladesau on Unsplash