nettime's digestion on Thu, 20 Jun 2002 21:30:24 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> How We Made Our Own "Carnivore" [6x]



Table of Contents:

   How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"                                                 
     "clement Thomas" <ctgr@free.fr>                                                 

   Re: [thingist] How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"                                  
     Peter von Brandenburg <blackhawk@thing.net>                                     

   Re: <nettime> How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"                                   
     RSG <rsg@rhizome.org>                                                           

   Re: <nettime> How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"                                   
     Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>                                          

   Re: <nettime> "How We Made Our Own "Carnivore""                                 
     Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@transmediale.de>                                    



------------------------------

Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 17:18:18 +0200
From: "clement Thomas" <ctgr@free.fr>
Subject: How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"

rectificandoque !!

internet is invented in france by pavu.com and frederic Madre !!
and we farte the board with olive oil !

It is Marilyn Monroe who was invented in Hawai !
and 028 in Toulouse !

- --
OG

-------------

Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2002 12:44:57 -0400
From: Peter von Brandenburg <blackhawk@thing.net>
Subject: Re: [thingist] How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"

Visita
Interiora
Terrae
Rectificando
Invenies
Occultem
Lapidem


clement Thomas wrote:

> rectificandoque !!
>
> internet is invented in france by pavu.com and frederic Madre !!
> and we farte the board with olive oil !
>
> It is Marilyn Monroe who was invented in Hawai !
> and 028 in Toulouse !


------------------------------

Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 13:47:54 -0400
From: RSG <rsg@rhizome.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"


true, Metcalfe and Boggs's invention was called "Ethernet." but by
attributing Ethernet to them, you will miss why Ethernet was designed the
way it was. all the important innovations were Abramson's, particularly
his solution to the problem of packet collision. sourcing the Ethernet
technology in radio also explains why it is based on an open broadcast
model and hence can be sniffed.

Metcalfe & Boggs even cite Abramson's work in the introduction to their
1976 paper: "The Aloha Network at the University of Hawaii was originally
developed to apply packet radio techniques for communication between a
central computer and its terminals scattered among the Hawaiian
Islands..." (http://www.acm.org/classics/apr96/)

think before you fart.

- -RSG

http://rhizome.org/RSG


------------------------------

Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 11:03:16 -0700 (PDT)
From: Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"

> true, Metcalfe and Boggs's invention was called "Ethernet." but by
> attributing Ethernet to them, you will miss why Ethernet was designed
> the way it was. all the important innovations were Abramson's,
> particularly his solution to the problem of packet collision. sourcing
> the Ethernet technology in radio also explains why it is based on an
> open broadcast model and hence can be sniffed.

This is a bit off nettime topic ... it can be claimed for any bit moving
protocol that it descended from a previous older one. Technology learns
from it's history. I could enumarate tens of differences between ethernet
and Aloha - - whoever is interested in this should peek in, say,
Tannenbaum's Computer Networks. I could also prove that ATM is based on
switched ethernet. Or Sonet. And that ethernet itself is, in fact, morse
telegraph code with immaterial improvements.

So it's a matter of quantities and shades.

But no one today confuses ATM with ethernet and this is the first time I've
heard that Aloha and ethernet are essentially the same.

> think before you fart.

Au contraire, it was carefully premeditated.



=====
end
(of original message)

Y-a*h*o-o (yes, they scan for this) spam follows:


------------------------------

Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2002 18:52:18 +0200
From: Andreas Broeckmann <abroeck@transmediale.de>
Subject: Re: <nettime> "How We Made Our Own "Carnivore""

dear RSG,

>How We Made Our Own "Carnivore"

although sympathetic to the exercise in general, it is difficult to
understand why in this new text posted on the discussion forum *nettime*
(apparently written for the ars electronica book, given the rhetoric) you
address neither the critique of 'screen saver art' that has been raised
against the program's clients, nor discuss the technical analysis offered
by the Moscow-jury which, from what i understand as a techno-idiot and
reading against the grain, basically says that your Carnivore program
offers nothing new under the sun??

given the self-acclamation of your text, it would be interesting if you
also were to engage the criticism.

best regards,
- -a


CARNIVORE  by RSG  http://www.macros-center.ru/read_me/now/7/

Bosses currently use all kinds of elaborate software to spy on their
workers. Products like MailCensor (http://www.mailcensor.com) encourage
bosses to check for "unauthorized transmission of Email containing
confidential data" and "provide a safe and productive work environment for
employees, by filtering out offensive/inappropriate email from the
Internet."

On some networks, software can be installed by users to spy on their bosses
as well. Packet sniffers, used by systems administrators to diagnose
network problems, can often be used or modifed to do just that.  Some
packet-sniffing software is expensive, some free:

        http://www.tucows.com/, search on sniffer
        http://www.softpile.com/search.phtml?query=sniffer&pp=10&in=title

The trouble is, most of this software wouldn't be easy for a non-technical
user to convert into a tool for gathering useful information. Those
products that are easy to use for corporate spying tend to have pricetags
that are easy for bosses and companies to afford but not for employees.
Among currently available sniffing products, the jury likes Ethereal
(http://www.ethereal.com), a free, cross-platform diagnostic tool that can
be used fairly easily by employees to spy on their boss's e-mail,
websurfing and other network communications.

An upcoming version of Rhizome's Carnivore is planned to make it easier for
an art audience to get involved in corporate spying.  The jury hopes it
will do this.  Since Carnivore is open source software, other people with
the appropriate programming expertise can also write such modifications
themselves. For now, Carnivore only runs on specialized servers, and it
doesn't gather data in a human-readable form.

The relationship of Rhizome's Carnivore to the FBI's spying tool of the
same name seems to be a matter of concept and hipness-value, but it is not
explained and is not very obvious.



...
>The RSG Carnivore levels the playing field,
>recasting art and culture as a scene of multilateral conflict rather
>than unilateral domination. It opens the system up for collaboration
>within and between client artists. It uses code to engulf and modify the
>original FBI apparatus.
...
>The prospect of reverse-engineering the original FBI software was
>uninteresting to RSG. Crippled by legal and ethical limitations, the FBI
>software needed improvement not emulation. Thus CarnivorePE features
>exciting new functionality including artist-made diagnosic clients,
>remote access, full subject targetting, full data targetting, volume
>buffering, transport protocol filtering, and an open source software
>license. Reverse-engineering is not necessarily a simple mimetic
>process, but a mental upgrade as well. RSG has no desire to copy the FBI
>software and its many shortcomings. Instead, RSG longs to inject
>progressive politics back into a fundamentally destabilizing and
>transformative technology, packet sniffing. Our goal is to invent a new
>use for data surveillance that breaks out of the hero/terrorist dilemma
>and instead dreams about a future use for networked data.




------------------------------

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