I am a fan of author Warren Ellis. He writes comics like Doktor Sleepless which has some interesting information warfare themes along with mad science and you should all check it out. Doktor Sleepless incidentally, is where I stole the cool warning signs that grace my first couple of entries here. Warren Ellis is a strange, strange man. He has a very popular twitter account (over 300,000 followers) where he does the usual twitter things but in…

Sometimes I end up in conversations with people that leave me with an undeniable urge to prove my point, generally only to myself. Last April I had a conversation along these lines that left me writing a piece of "malware" that communicated via Twitter and since by the time I'd finished the conversation was no longer relevant and so I just let it sit there. Later last year I wrote a paper about Web 2.0…

There are a lot of bad websites out there and visiting one can do bad things to your network. There's plenty of technologies that try and detect bad pages and block or filter them but the problem is that they're imperfect. There are other solutions like whitetrash that only allow you to visit sites that are listed as good (whitetrash is awesome, go play with it). The problem is creating the list of what sites are…

whitetrash is a great web security companion for squid, it is great in many ways and I thought I'd throw a plug in for it here. Not only does it only allow people to visit approved sites it also lets the users (or the administrators) add sites to the approved list via a web form that you get automatically redirected to. As of 1.0 it also checks sites against the Google Safebrowsing API so that…

Earlier this year I wrote a paper about disinformation on Twitter, basically the potential for people to spread lies and shape opinion with Twitter. Like the EVE paper I've started polishing it before submitting it to a journal and though that I'd share my draft with you all. There's stuff about swine flu, the US economic stimulus package, plane crashes and terrorism! How can you not love it? Twitter as a Vector for Disinformation Abstract…

So last year I wrote a paper about EVE Online and the interesting things corporations do to each other. Recently I've been polishing it before submitting it to a journal and as a special blog-warming post I thought I'd post my current draft. If you read it, I'd be interested to know what you think. Information Operations in and around EVE Online Abstract Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMOs) provide a persistent virtual world…