Wartime Software: Building Software when Speed Matters (Building Better Software Better Book 3)

The Fate of Cultural Property in Wartime: Why it Matters and What Should Be Done

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In a time in which Hitler was attempting to destroy a people and conquer many cultures, to show respect for the cultures and the symbols of others was to fight for the liberation of Europe in another, meaningful way. What's more, these objects do not belong solely to the people who cherish them. Stout argues that they also belong to "the heritage of mankind. As Irina Bokova, director-general of UNESCO, wrote in a article on the importance of preserving embattled states' cultural heritage, "this [the destruction in Syria] is a loss to all humanity.

Some cultural sites have an outstanding universal value—they belong to all and must be protected by all. We are not just talking about stones and building. This is about values, identities and belonging. In addition to the ethical foundations for protecting cultural property, there are several very practical arguments for the benefits of doing so. The loss of cultural property is not only a loss to the heritage of mankind, but also to the better understanding of that heritage. As Rodrigo Martin, a heritage expert monitoring the damage to Syria's sites, expressed it , "[t]he destruction of things that have not been studied is like burning pages in the book of history.

This limits our educational resources and collective knowledge of the past. The destruction or looting of sites and objects of cultural significance, especially when intentional, can create lasting resentments and obstacles to peace. As Bokova writes , "[d]estroying culture hurts societies for the long term….

They target culture because it strikes to the heart and because it has powerful media value in an increasingly connected world. We saw this in the wars in the former Yugoslavia, where libraries were often burned first. To protect cultural property is a way to avoid one more obstacle to peace. Even when cultural property losses are not linked to genocide, the issue of repatriating and restituting looted objects of cultural property remains expensive, contentious, and legally complex.

For example, amongst the "trophies of war" removed by the Soviet Union in World War II were books of important cultural value to Hungary. The books were not returned until , after years of negotiation. Similarly, reconstruction of cultural heritage sites, if even possible, is a long-term process that can be extremely controversial and expensive. Afghanistan's Bamiyan Buddhas, destroyed by the Taliban in , are a case in point.

In certain circumstances, the theft of cultural property can fuel further conflict. As Bogdanos writes , "things have become even more troubling—when tracking down terrorists, we now find antiquities…" Bogdanos notes that antiquities trafficking provides a source of funding for insurgents in Iraq, and one must be concerned that this trend could continue in other conflict zones. Since World War II, the world has seen modifications to military rules of engagement and the ratification of several legal instruments, all designed to protect cultural property, particularly in conflict.

The nature of state surveillance is changing, and "cyberwar" is becoming cheaper. Stuxnet, Fancy Bear, and WannaCry are some of the more infamous examples of state-sponsored hacking. But what happens when a nation state on a shoestring budget wants to run a global espionage campaign? And more importantly, what happens when they are stupid about it and get caught? This talk will discuss the changing nature of state surveillance, the details of a new state-sponsored malware campaign uncovered by EFF and Lookout, and what hackers can do to stop governments engaging in targeted digital surveillance.

Have you ever used old, pirated software and found it came with an "extra" introduction from the person who broke the copy protection? Have you ever watched a music video stored entirely in mere kilobytes of space? A two hour Demoscene screening will follow. Nearly everyone in the United States and Canada interacts with these agencies whose reputation is linked with Patty and Selma from The Simpsons. They are arbiters of identity in these countries without national IDs.

With continued geopolitical unrest among nuclear powers and the total ubiquity of electronics in every aspect of modern life, there is a concern over catastrophic events that could have the potential to disrupt and alter life as we know it. The threats of EMP electromagnetic pulse and CME coronal mass discharge are real and, should they occur, the results would impact the lives of millions. The physics behind these threats are analyzed, their effects and potential for damage estimated, and means to protect against them examined.

Additionally, the use of EMP as a weapon is analyzed from a strategic standpoint, and non-nuclear threats to the electrical grid considered. Anna Bernardi , Filippo Valsorda. Antonio Marzi died in , leaving behind dozens of encrypted notes and a partial key.

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There he transmitted detailed military-related dispatches in encrypted form. This was not modern cryptography, nor Enigma, but the kind that was doable on the field with pen and paper. Specifically, they used poem codes, as "Between Silk and Cyanide" tells us: Marzi sent the notes to an Italian professor and there they stayed undeciphered until Anna and Filippo obtained copies of the notes and exploited one of the mortal sins of cryptography, key reuse, to reconstruct the key. Armin Krauss independently decrypted the notes in the same year. A number of them were indecipherable due to encryption mistakes made in the field.

During the war, entire departments hacked away at these ciphertexts, but today computers make easy work of them. This talk will explore how they went from recognizing the code, to reconstructing the key partially thanks to little handwritten dots , to the contents of the notes. Every file has an end, every hard drive goes bad, and every carrier eventually drops.

What matters is what we do when these expected or unexpected ends arrive. Jason Scott of the Internet Archive and Archive Team talks about endings, near-misses, and confronting finite resources and energy in a variety of situations that demand infinite amounts of attention, effort, and meaning. Expect humor, sadness, overviews of moving day logistics and a hint of angel wings.

The ENIAC was dedicated on February 15, and became the testbed upon which people learned to build and program powerful digital computers. ENIAC was designed and built at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, using 18, vacuum tubes consuming , watts of power. This presentation will focus on how the ENIAC was conceived, designed, built, and worked; how it was used in different modes of operation; and the details of its internal operations.

This will be illustrated in real-time with a fully functional, interactive, and photorealistic ENIAC emulator created by the speaker. What can Enron tell us today? This talk will invite fresh perspective on how email has and has not changed since Can modern forensic methods find where any new email bodies are buried, even when scanning through the evidence of a previously closed case?

The presentation highlights some funny and poignant examples of how humans in business suits write to each other when planning mischief. Nearly two decades later, we revisit this trove to discover what modern tools can do with it. Yet a modern machine learning pipeline in can identify almost 50, previously unreported instances, including credit card numbers, bank accounts, and additional evidence that potentially harms the 99 percent of Enron employees who were never charged. At least one example of detectable malware is still included in the official Enron corpus called "Joke-StressRelief" along with other executables which continue to accompany each download.

This talk will further investigate whether by using email traffic alone, machine learning can predict all of the eventually charged persons of interest. It will discuss how Hadoop distributed processing on multiple, clustered virtual machines was deployed.

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More than 50 algorithms were analyzed for both accuracy 90 plus percent and execution times. In compliance with new June European privacy rules for explainable artificial intelligence, each algorithmic decision was reduced to human-understandable rules and rank order to define which email factors might prove most predictive to future fraud and conspiracy investigations.

IoT botnets are deployed heavily to perform nefarious activities by circumventing the integrity of the IoT device to launch sophisticated targeted or broad-based attacks. IoT botnets have enhanced the cybercrime operations to a great extent, thereby making it easier for the attackers to carry out unauthorized activities on the Internet. In this talk, Aditya will perform an empirical analysis to conduct a characteristic study of IoT botnets to understand the inherent design, architecture, and associated operations.

Code samples will be dissected to highlight the inherent nefarious operations performed by the IoT bots. The study covers analysis of multiple IoT botnet families. While state hacking is a powerful weapon for authoritarian regimes, it has an erosive effect on democratic states. Hacking is advantageous for authoritarian governments that need to retain domestic control, monitor and disturb dissent, attack aggressors, and project force internationally. State hacking is bad because it is deleterious to the legitimacy of the democratic state, the legal system, "ethical" capitalism, and the democratic process itself.

In this talk, the argument is presented that state hacking is bad for democratic elections, the integrity of the security services, transparency in government, privacy for the individual, the separation of public and private militaries, the judicial system, and the development of ethical cybersecurity practices. Such hacking is a short circuit in the rule of law and undermines the machinery of democracy.

State hacking is bad because it provides unparalleled advantage to rulemakers while delegitimizing the citizen led government. How can they do better and how can we incentivize them to move in the right direction? Ranking Digital Rights, a nonprofit research initiative, works with an international network of partners to set global standards for how companies in the information and communication technology sector should respect freedom of expression and privacy. Its annual corporate accountability index ranks 22 companies on a set of indicators evaluating how transparent companies are about their commitments and policies affecting human rights.

This talk will give an overview of how the corporate accountability index lays out a road map for companies to improve their human rights standards. Laura will provide highlights from the recently launched index, showing where companies are beginning to be more transparent about their practices - things like content moderation policies and practices for handling user information - and where there are still significant gaps in disclosure that leave users in the dark.

Across North America, passionate people help out at their community Free Geek or a similar organization to refurbish discarded computers and make them useful tools again for people who need them. In the process of this, people build community, gain skills, and help the planet.

Challenges to successful operations include ethical e-waste recycling practices, troubleshooting and repair, parts management, drive imaging, ensuring free and open-source software FOSS use, managing volunteers, organizational structure and governance, financial sustainability, and ensuring a balance between community needs and interests. Participants from Free Geek and similar organizations will discuss these challenges, with success stories and wrong turns, and how they manage to keep the doors open and lights on to serve the public good.

Part public service and part public art, Futel is keeping payphones alive by installing them in public locations and providing free telephone service, telephone-mediated art, and live human interaction. They feel that the constraints of the phone interface spur creativity, pay homage to a generation of creative hackers, and allow them to worm their way into the minds of large groups of people.

Now that we are finally living in the cyberpunk dystopia promised in the s, they are poised to seize this moment. You will learn what aspects of the project make it effective, and how they can be applied to other creative technological projects. Your student record is available to law enforcement, the military, and professional licensing boards - but do you know what it says about you?

This session covers the mechanics of how to request your record, how to handle some of the ways colleges have tried to wiggle out of turning those records over, and the process for disputing incorrect information including how to tell if those records are already in the possession of law enforcement. A session to critically analyze the figures of the hacker and the shaman, their ontological similarities and their journeys as travelers of their respective "black boxes" - the computational network in the case of the hacker and the human conscience in the case of the shaman.

This talk will delineate modes of direct action that would allow us to think about hacking as a way to overcome ruling knowledge paradigms. Do you have a cool talent or hack? Onstage hacks will be judged by a combination of panelists and audience. First place wins a valuable prize! The United States punishes computer crimes more severely than any of its western allies, often threatening to imprison digital dissidents for decades for crimes other countries would sanction with fines or probation.

Earlier this year, U. Using his ordeal as a case study, we can see how these extradition cases can have meaningful ramifications beyond a single defendant. How can we learn from these cases to protect others facing extradition? Can we turn a U. The Institute of Medicine estimates that up to , Americans are killed by preventable medical errors per year. Better patient monitoring, smart alarm systems, advanced treatment algorithms, and data analytics are key technologies that can help to reduce this number.

Attempts to build better systems run into common problems including the difficulty of integrating into existing workflows, manufacturer-specific silos, and a lack of data to help drive improvements. Solving these problems requires people who can connect things together in new and unlikely ways, holistically examine processes that involve both technology and human workflows, and find creative ways to get things done.

This talk will discuss why healthcare can be a difficult place to be an engineer, some possible reasons that clinicians may be unwilling to implement your perfectly reasonable solutions, and how a hacker mindset is essential for improving the safety and effectiveness of healthcare. Harley Geiger , Amie Stepanovich. The Internet of Things is expected to grow to more than billion devices by Unfortunately, the market has not incentivized strong security for most IoT products, and the legal and regulatory environments - not surprisingly - have not been able to keep pace with the technology.

This talk will detail the potential growth of the Internet of Things, focusing on the exploration of key legal and policy developments related to IoT security. Included will be updates on relevant court cases, legislative proposals, and regulatory activities.

Hip-hop is a world-class disruptor. It has transformed music, popular culture, fashion, business and advertising, creating and upending massive industries in its wake. This talk explores the enormous innovative potential that hip-hop music and culture continue to exert across multiple fields and disciplines, including science and technology, education, health and wellness, politics and activism, journalism, the fine arts, and There are a few people who claim to be the "father of the maker movement.

Growing up on the Commodore Amiga introduced Keith to the venerable Motorola processor. This talk will touch on topics like computer architecture and design, Verilog HDL, 68K assembly language, electronics, and more! Saint , Hook , Pete Tridish. Their presentation ranges from overcoming low budget logistical challenges and the FCC application process to convincing the U.

Content generation and copyright issues will be covered. The talk will also include a quick background on the pirate radio movement of the s, and how that spawned the legal LPFM service, which created thousands of legal LPFM stations. This will be a candid, detailed, step-by-step how-to attack chain walkthrough, explaining how and why the attacks work, and what steps can be taken to proactively defend against them.

Participants will walk away with highly actionable tasks to immediately take to work on Monday to not only bump their security posture up a distinctive notch with little to no hit on their budgets, but also inherently render future penetration tests more cost-effective by eliminating potential "cheap shots" that pentesters love to take. They will also, of course, walk away with the ability to become the domain admin of an average corporation from their couch in record time.

Your habits, hobbies, friends, family, location today, and for the past 17 years , activities, deepest thoughts, and desires are known, indexed, and analyzed. Dataveillance is now all-encompassing and the "small window into your soul" is now a barn door. Attack vectors now include photos, video, audio, self-installed wiretaps i. Drink a certain type of cola? Enjoy chunky peanut butter and own a cat? Live in a certain zip code? Subscribe to a certain magazine? Use a certain email domain?

Drink a certain kind of alcoholic beverage? Order certain combinations of pizza toppings? Drive a certain color car? Visit certain noteworthy for profilers locations? Data about these otherwise innocuous choices are now routinely merged and extrapolated into deep understanding of your personal characteristics and political beliefs, and are used to target you with information tailored to influence your emotions, actions, purchases and, especially, your vote.

While the world was falling in love with desktop 3D printers as a potential disruption to how consumer products might be created and manufactured in the home , a parallel transformation was taking place that shows no sign of stopping. It is time to cut through the bullshit and examine the revolution that actually took place! Experience case studies and research that speaks practically to how manufacturing, medicine, design, and enterprise use of the technology is accelerating the evolution of product and hardware design, transforming how we manufacture and package products, and how HOPE audiences can leverage pipelines and strategies they have mastered for other purposes web, IT, security to move forward their design and hardware.

Welcome to the "data center moment" for fabrication technology! It was up to the game cartridges to tell the NES what to think and how to behave. Cheating devices like the Game Genie worked by taking full advantage of that fact. These cheating devices, along with the fact of cartridges being mightier than the console, opens up unusual and creative gameplay options that can be utilized by a game developer. The design of these cartridges also allows for information to be discreetly concealed in unexpected ways. How do you inspire your kids to begin looking at things like a hacker?

When should you start? What should you do?

Eleven-year-old old hacker BiaSciLab and year-old Kousei will answer these questions and more as they set adults at ease with bringing their kids into the hacker world. They will explain how they started their journeys, where they are planning to go, and how to get there.

This talk will also have lots of great tips for adults starting out too. The Internet Society is an international, non-profit organization founded in to provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education, access, and policy.

Its mission is to promote the open development, evolution, and use of the Internet for the benefit of all people throughout the world. Their efforts and skills are directly responsible for the streaming and archiving of The Circle of HOPE, so please help support their efforts and consider starting a chapter in your community. Sandler , Molly de Blanc. A license represents a series of ethical, legal, and values decisions. Instead of proprietary "software" and "culture," you have "free software" and "free culture.

This talk will provide a historical and philosophical overview of just what it means for something to be free, why it matters, and what your responsibilities are in a world where our experiences, our selves, and our lives have become intellectual property that may not always belong to us. Our personal credit details have been stolen en masse.

Social media has been weaponized as a tool of cruel harassment. The democratic process has been undermined by the manipulation of online news and ads. Published memoirs, artworks, and geopolitical promulgations enshrined the supposed gallantry of the extermination of the Hereros.

German Southwest Africa and its other African colonies were set on a path to independence, albeit under close direct and indirect European tutelage. The loss of its colonies might have convinced many Germans that Africa was part of a dark past. Nearly half a million fearsome fighters, mainly from Senegal, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco — all generally referred to as Senegalese Tirailleurs regardless of their national origins — fought in the French Army in World War I.

At times, Africans comprised about 14 percent of the wartime French army. The Treaty of Versailles, in Article , stipulated that the Allies would occupy the Rhineland for fifteen years. In , French troops occupied this part of Western Germany. Between 20, and 40, of these occupying soldiers were Senegalese Tirailleurs — about half from Arab North Africa, and about half from central and interior Africa. The presence of African soldiers in authority caused hysteria in Germany and shock on both sides of the Atlantic.

Everywhere, fear gripped German society that its racial superiority would be poisoned by Negro blood. In the contentious presidential contest of , some supporters of Warren G. Occupation by African soldiers was seen among the German people as a further wound-salting French humiliation of German honor and prestige. Certainly, there were a number of rapes, but there were also consensual marriages as people mixed.

From these came a class of mixed-race Afro-Germans popularly called mulattos. Estimates vary widely, but many observers surmise some 20, mulattos, that is, Afro-Germans with legal German citizenship, were now amongst them. Eugenics was an early twentieth century American crusade to create a white, blond, blue-eyed, Germanic utopian society that would rise following the systematic elimination of all people of color or of unwanted mixed ancestry.

A famous founding document of the American movement was a German study, The Bastards of Rehoboth and the Problem of Miscegenation in Man, which claimed to document the corrupted moral and biological nature of black-white offspring. The author was German biologist and race scientist Eugen Fischer. He was stationed in colonial Southwest Africa, where he studied local Dutch-African families cited in the work. Propelled by abundant financing from the Carnegie Institution, Harriman Railroad fortune, and Rockefeller Foundation, eugenics ultimately led to the sterilization of some 60, Americans under laws in 27 states, as well as racial and ethnic incarceration.

Carnegie and Rockefeller poured millions of dollars into proliferating the pseudoscience in Germany after World War I. Average Germans everywhere embraced the American theories, elevating their visceral racial hatred into an entrenched university science with broad acceptance. The German and global public outcry against claimed biological and cultural debasement by French African troops finally got its way in May , when Paris announced its troops were almost entirely being transferred to the Mideast to fight the war against Arab nationalism in Syria.

But if in late , Germany once again thought its juncture with Africa was over, they were wrong. Thousands of French African soldiers returned in Germany struggled to pay its debt in cash and raw materials. German workers walked out on general strike. Berlin began printing worthless money to support the striking families — which led to the famous hyperinflation, where worthless cash was carted in wheelbarrows to buy bread.

They were determined to turn back the clock and achieve a racial and territorial triumph. Out of this mix came the Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler. Their nexus with Southwest Africa is less known. The Sturmabteilung — the Storm Troopers — wore brown shirts. Many early Nazis served in the Schutztruppe, the military units that had operated in Southwest Africa. Recalling German colonial grandeur, Nazi Storm Troopers purchased surplus Schutztruppe uniforms, light brown for service on the Kalahari Desert in the Southwest Africa realm.

Hermann Goering rose as one of the Nazi triumvirate, second only to Hitler. The elder Goering was among the first to confront the Herero. For decades, a main street in the Southwest African settlement immortalized his name — Heinrich Goering Street. Franz Ritter von Epp was an early leading figure of the Third Reich. He formed the Freikorps Epp in , which was one of the many street fighting units that evolved into the Nazis. Von Epp hired a young informant named Adolf Hitler. During special ceremonial meetings with leaders, such as Mussolini, von Epp was in photos next to Hitler or other ranking Nazis.

Who was von Epp? Von Epp was one of the earlier volunteer German fighters in the Schutztruppe that fought the Herero in Southwest Africa. He served as a company commander under von Trotha, and stayed on as concentration camps were established. Eugen Fischer was the Nazi doctor who helped pioneer murderous eugenics in the Third Reich. As director of the Rockefeller Foundation-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, Fischer steered racial pseudoscience into a war of extermination.

In , Fischer declared in a lecture: The Jew is such an alien and, therefore, when he wants to insinuate himself, he must be warded off. In saying this, I do not characterize every Jew as inferior, as Negroes are, and I do not underestimate the greatest enemy with whom we have to fight. The list of Southwest African soldiers, colonial overseers, and commercial settlers and their prominent involvement in the Nazi movement is long and odious.

Fischer had launched his career in race science with a study of interbreeding between the Nama and Dutch settlers. Working arduously in such concentration camps as Shark Island, Fischer ordered hundreds of executed inmates to be decapitated. Herero women were required to remove all flesh from the heads using shards of glass, to create clean skulls suitable for shipment. So celebrated were these skull shipments, a popular color postcard sporting a photograph of the packing process was published in Germany in commemoration of the ghastly endeavor.

A much shorter list of Nazi concepts and mechanisms carries a more than eerie relation to the Southwest Africa genocide. The Nazi conceptualization of untermenschen is often traced to the American eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard, a close colleague of Margaret Sanger and a director of her American Birth Control League, a forerunner organization of Planned Parenthood.

The Menace of the Under-man. Later, many historians thought this vocabulary triggered the German adoption. However, the racial view that Africans were actually not humans, but rather sub-humans first appears in German usage in Southwest Africa. One German in Southwest Africa wrote: African people were commonly thought of as talking monkeys by many eugenicists worldwide. The New York Times brushed off criticism by African American ministers of the day, stating in an editorial: The pygmies… are very low in the human scale, and the suggestion that Benga should be in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place… from which he could draw no advantage whatever.

The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date. The addition to German vocabulary of the term untermenschen as an intellectual fundamental did not arise in Berlin, but in Southwest Africa. Jews were dispatched to concentration camps across Europe in cattle cars. These trains were dubbed Transport.

For Germany, the process had happened once before — in Southwest Africa, to expedite the transfer of un-killed Hereros to be worked to death. The Third Reich established thousands of concentration camps and sub-camps where so many Jews were confined under inhuman conditions or were sent to be industrially killed. The German word for such sites was Konzentrationslager. In the last years of the nineteenth century, civilians in conflict were subjected to the same treatment. Deprived of food and transformed into staggering skeletons, more than , Cubans died.

Hence, for Germany, the linguistic and structural model of the Konzentrationslager originated not in the Nazi mind but in the Southwest African colony. For Germany, the process had happened once before. In Southwest Africa, to expedite the transfer of un-killed Hereros to be worked to death, the Germans loaded them into cattle cars.

Germany called those particular Herero transit trains Transport. It was uttered first in German by Georg Hartmann in Ironically, the first time Germans began using the term Rassenschande was in Southwest Africa when, in , they enacted never-before-seen regulations against intermarriage between Africans and Europeans. Back in Germany, during those colonial and Great War years, the African precedent was debated — and often lauded — in the Reichstag for implementation in the Fatherland. Once the Nazis came to power, however, precedents set in Southwest African were enacted in Germany.

During the Hitler years, hundreds of thousands of Jews and other enemies of the state were held in concentration camps. The card followed each inmate from site to site. IBM kept track of all the cards and numbers. In the popular mindset of Nazi-era Germans, the callous exploits of Southwest Africa were cherished recent memory. Popular trading cards included some for Southwest Africa. Historians of the period have noted that numerous bestsellers of the day offered Southwest African themes.

A plethora of popular movies stoked collective African memories, such as the minute Deutsches Land in Afrika, screened in and re-released in a shorter version under the title The Dream of Lost Colonies.

The Fate of Cultural Property in Wartime: Why it Matters and What Should Be Done

No wonder the image of a giant ape capturing a blonde in the international hit King Kong caused panic in some quarters of Germany. When Jesse Owens, grandson of a slave, triumphed over Aryan athletes, garnering a record four medals in the Olympic Games in Berlin, his victory was more than an Olympic feat — it was a prodigious defeat for the long-held German concept of racial hierarchy.

Once German Jews were exposed in their professions, they were summarily fired. They arrived in a nation still staggering under its Depression, and deeply veined with both the scourge of segregation and the sting of anti-Semitism. More than 50 German-Jewish academics relocated to a number of historically black colleges and universities, such as Howard University in Washington, D.

Refugee professors helped set the stage for the intellectual movement to come. His sociology student Ladner excelled and ultimately became a board member of the American Sociological Association as well as interim president of Howard University. As for Borinski, he is remembered for fighting Jim Crow all his years in Mississippi.

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