November 2, 2010

What's left of the "Right/Left"-paradigm-believer in me was a little depressed as to how today's election results would play out.  For me, it's not so much the transfer of power (It's cyclical, and spiraling tighter..), it's the sheer obvious-ness of America's massive and collective Attention Deficit Disorder and catastrophic lack of fundamental and recent history, political, economic, and otherwise.  It's the dark, murky cynicism shown in the more aggressive of political ads, not only for the opponent, but towards the voting populace.  You will believe anything I say if the accompanying soundtrack is scary enough..  It's the chasm between what was promised and what (and in what form) was delivered.  I'm immersed and obsessed and disgusted by the entire process.

So I didn't watch.  I got a few updates from the net, watched Modern Family episodes, The Nanny Marathon, and surfed the net.  And I feel much more peaceful than I would have subjecting myself to the non-stop poison disguised as "political discorse" that dominates the MSM.  And, whatever the result, I didn't want tonight's results to remove focus from November's(and beyond) considerations.  According to many sources, the Shit Is Coming, possibly within one week.  Here are just a few..  "considerations" to file underneath the umbrella term "Global Tipping Point."

Earth changes:  Iceland and Indonesia(!!) getting ready to blow..  Literally. 

Stuxnet and the new cyber-warfare: 

From Urban Survival..  Coping: Fears of Stuxnet - the Anagram & Heysham /Italics:

Although we've covered the possibility that "Son of Stuxnet" could be the kind of problem that sets off our 'tipping point' next week, the prospect had actually been a ways down my list of 'suspects' since I hadn't previously spent much time figuring out what a massive disruption to the internet would do to everyday life.


But, upon inspection, the impacts of an attack, directed at key machine hardware in high level internet router equipment could be HUGE. And that's putting it mildly.

To start with, a colleague of mine - a high level academic - called on Monday to say that one of his colleagues who was one of the 'early draft picks' to be involved with the cybersecurity efforts against terrorism was a bit freaked out over the possibility.

"Seems that the design of the Stuxnet virus was really head and shoulders above what the cyber warfare people had been anticipating," he began. "This was a very sophisticated virus which would have taken dozens of people years to create..."

We chatted a bit more and I idly started to list some of the impacts of a Stux-type attack if it were directed against the whole internet via the high-level routers that are in place. 

*Finances would seize up. Not more online stock trading.
*No more ATM - few if any credit cards would work.
*AC power systems could fail because much of the admin traffic to run the SCADA systems transits the physical transport layers of 'the net'
*And along with that, much of the public switched telephone network would go down for the same reason - PSTN packets transit them, too.

Then there are wire transfers, orders for things like warehouse reorder levels and so on...

I stopped jotting down the impacts, because it was just the kind of thing that could account for a) Clif's "data gap" that we've been nattering on about for what, a year now? If you're new, the rickety time machine project which uses conversations on the whole of the internet (less emails and private traffic of course) to figure out likely futures - and sometimes, it's been really very much on target. Here next week, we come into what we expect, based on language shift, to be a huge 'tipping point' which will last at least under mid-January of 2011. It would also, b), account for the curious language shift around this 'tipping point' - really the only major one globally since 9/11, which is the first one we caught back in mid 2001.
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As usual, if I have any question about anything having to do with computers, I get on the phone to Clif and ask him for an assessment of Stuxnet - and his answers were anything but reassuring... a couple of notes and ponder points follow which I've written down best I can recall them from a guy who captured a chucnk of stuxnet and took it apart to see what's in it, using some of the old-school tools like the EXE to BIN converters that still run on W98 machines......

Stuxnet was a very complex piece of code. But complex not so much in the sense that it carried a lot of libraries on board, but because it was many 'open calls' deep in the code that were, best I can decrypt our conversation, designed to go out and look for local libraries and local devices.

These 'open calls' mean that Stuxnet could be looking for more than a single device class. Oh, sure, the Siemens PLC (programmable logic controllers) were the first device-specifics, but seems that the 'freak out' at the academic level is that there may be other devices on its shopping list.

The virus is huge as viruses go. Guys like Clif are mighty proud of being able to write compact code, and some of the versions of his Vortex Reader software (originally written for screen display of individual words - in flicker-fashion to provide for high speed reading - was extremely small - under 40 kilobytes. Stuxnet, by comparison is over a megabyte and it doesn't carry big libraries around.


This leads - at least to a programmer of some competence - to the idea that the libraries which are called by the sections of Stuxnet that haven't 'gone active' may have been previously 'positioned'.

Evidence that the Sun is becoming.. energetically unstable..

Again with all the fuckin' warlike behavior..

What if the US Dollar collapses and dies, almost overnight?

Not to mention food, water, and employment shortages..

Some of the woo-woo predictors include the webbots (radio interview through here), Timewave Zero (theory here), Bulgarian prophet Baba Vanga, the Federal Reserve, Astrological influences.. 

And then there's this nagging, persistent.. foreknowledge that these circumstances just..  can't..  remain..  the.. same.  It feels like we all have a ringside seat for the manifestation of the meeting of immovable object versus irresistable force..  And the results of that confrontation will alter all of us from here on out.  A feeling, but a very specific feeling, and I am definitely not alone in feeling this way..