Category Archives: “hacking”

Stuxnet Redux, or, Computational Power, the State, and Propaganda (and Flame)

By David Golumbia | Published: June 11, 2012

We were first alerted to the existence of the Stuxnet worm in 2010, due to some interesting security breaches and reporting in the New York Times making it clear that a nation-state–by direct implication and what may have been deliberate misdirection at that time, Israel–must have been behind the worm. Soon after we were alerted […]

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Hack/2

By David Golumbia | Published: July 23, 2011

So in yesterday’s news we learned not only of much more hacking by and awareness of hacking on the part of News Corp (I doubt we’ve even scratched the surface–what I want to know is how widely dispersed these techniques are and where knowledge about them comes from, because they all impinge on national security […]

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Hack/1

By David Golumbia | Published: July 21, 2011

Today the Wall Street Journal gives us even more on hackers, under the title “Hackers Shift Attacks to Small Firms” (GEOFFREY A. FOWLER And BEN WORTHEN, July 21, 2011). They write: Hacking at small businesses “is a prolific problem,” says Dean Kinsman, a special agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s cyber division, which has […]

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More Harassment of Computing Heroes

By David Golumbia | Published: June 22, 2011

I almost can’t believe I’m reading this. Superhero outfit LulzSec is being arrested and detained and investigated by everyone from the FBI to Scotland Yard to Interpol. It’s a complete outrage, as all good humanities scholars working in New Media know. LulzSec is only trying to do good for society. Their political program is one […]

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Howard Roark 1, Mark Zuckerberg 0

By David Golumbia | Published: May 3, 2011

So if he says it will you believe it? i may have asked this question before, rhetorically. (No sign so far of him discussing how this tracks with his own promotion of the Facebook philosophy; see below.) http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/05/03/wikileaks-founder-assange-blasts-facebook-appalling-spying-machine/ WikiLeaks Founder Assange Blasts Facebook as ‘Most Appalling Spying Machine’ “Here we have the world’s most comprehensive […]

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Real Thoughts on WikiLeaks; or, How Howard Roark Became a Hero of the Left

By David Golumbia | Published: January 3, 2011

<rant name=”my real thoughts about wikileaks” sentiment=”please don’t hate me” causeofdelay=”trying not to get into flame war” >In recent interviews (e.g., with Time, Forbes, and The New Yorker), Julian Assange demonstrates repeatedly how little he knows about world politics, about the open-source information already available regarding the topics he claims to be “revealing,” or even […]

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Neoliberalism, Info-determinism, Expressive Absolutism

By David Golumbia | Published: January 23, 2010

One of the central and most symptomatic of computational slogans is “information wants to be free.” Like most computational ideologies, it’s willfully techno-determinist, almost vitalist, with regard to “what information does,” even if many who recite the slogan may find ways to construe it otherwise. Like many pieces of “wisdom” that circulate in the digital […]

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