Capital of Nasty Electronic Magazine Volume II, Issue 25, Year AD MCMXCVII Monday, June 23th, 1997 ------------------------------------------- "I had this dream that I was dead, but I came back to life. You were at my funeral, so I walked up to you and I said 'so Mr. Scientist, does this make you believe in spirituality?'" - Davinder Sangha, the day after she tried to convince me about re-incarnation. ------------------------------------------- "Of course I read all [of CoN's] articles. Beats reading MSN!" - Hammed Malik ------------------------------------------- 1. Reader's Letters 2. Everything You Didn't Want To Know About Internet 3. Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers 4. Washroom graffiti ------------------------------------------- This week's Golden Testicle Web Award goes to: Pasting Those Letters On Is So OLD Dear. Can I Get You A Heart While I'm Up?: - Want a real 'killer' font for that important letter? A http://www.killerfonts.com/ Web site is selling downloadable TrueType fonts made from the handwriting of actual killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, the Zodiac killer, plus ordinary wierdos. Check out the 'blood' fonts. - MarXidad ------------------------------------------- 1. Reader's Letters From: Don Fitch Date sent: Mon, 23 Jun 1997 03:26:54 -0400 (EDT) To: leandro@capnasty.org Subject: Re: CoN II.24 Hi, Leandro: Coming by way of "science-fiction fandom fanzines", I've long been accustomed to the idea of interactive response in the context of amateur publications. If you didn't write at least an occasional reasonably-intelligent Letter of Comment, in order to help keep the discussions going and to indicate that you were following things and appreciating what the editor/publisher was doing, you'd soon be dropped from the mailing list. 'Zines don't seem to have nearly so much of this Interactive aspect -- they're mostly more like soapbox orations, on-stage performances, or presentations of a product (like mainstream magazines), rather than an ongoing conversation or discussion among friends, and don't necessarily have an audience composed mostly of people who are comfortable handling complex ideas by means of the written word, so they (and you) don't get much feedback from their readers. I don't think that's necessarily inherent in the 'Zine form, but it does seem to be the common trend, and not easy to buck. Thanks for telling us about Father Ross "Padre" Legere. I've not attended a Catholic (or other religious) highschool, but have heard enough to conclude that, whatever their other merits might be, they're not a pleasant or rewarding environment for independent-minded and creative people. I'm glad that you (and other students at that school) had someone like Fr. Legere to recognize and support talent and creativity even though these characteristics _do_ sometimes threaten the established order of things. It's good to see the efforts of such people acknowledged. I must confess that, not being A Movie Person (the last movie I saw was ET -- the week after it was first released (a friend was visiting from Toronto, and really wanted to see a movie in Hollywood, for some reason)), I tend to skim over the movie reviews in CoN ... or rather, _try_ to skim lightly; they tend to be perceptive critiques that are worth reading even though I'm not interested in the movies that sparked them. (I assume that this is understood when one writes a Letter of Comment to a 'Zine or EZine, but just in case: This letter is freeware/fanware, with permission granted to reproduce it in any not-for-profit publication.) Don Fitch +++++++++ ---[Editor's Response]--- Hello Don Fitch, thank you for showing us that at least one person out there bothers to read what we write and comment on our material. As you said, CoN is more of a sopabox than an actual magazine and it's true. I find myself cursing and whining about life most of the time and forcing my weird opinions down everyone's throat. Considering as well that sometimes putting stuff together each week it's hard causing me to publish late because I don't have anything in particular to fill in the empty spaces. Our own time is scarce as well, so when we do something for CoN, it's either late at night or in a break from work. CoN is a hobby, and we decided from the day we turned it from private (our own personal zine) to public (get poor innocent people involved with it) that it should stay as such. By taking CoN as a hobby and not as something which is a task or duty, we end up enjoying it much more. If it ever ceases to be fun and it starts looking like a job CoN will automatically cease to exist. At the moment the only reason CoN keeps on coming on your virtual mailbox is because I am stubborn and I don't give up. I like the challenge of writing something new each week and being able to send something out with a deadline. I guess it is helping me growing and maintaining deadlines and after all we have already passed the one year mark. Surprisingly in the beginning we got quite a response, and articles were not a problem. We recycled a few of the good ones from Volume 0 pubblications, and we also had a great collection of weird text-files collected from the days when BBS were the only mean of electronic communication for people that had just started High School. Also the response from our readers (no more than a handful) at the time was great. It seems however really hard to get noticed. The Internet has too much noise, and even if I wanted CoN to be like some sort of big family where everyone could talk and discuss with each other the topic, it seems that the readers don't even acknowledge it. Now that summer started and many university accounts get deactivated, I lost quite a large number of readers and during our server problems, a few unsubscribed. I wrote to a e-zine that has 12,000 readers, called Inklings (http://www.inklings.com). It's a zine which helps writers and provides help for new zines (electronic or otherways). I wrote to the editor Debbie Ridpath Ohi , and she was kind enough to suggest to me where to go and look at. She also has a great webpage with lots of information on where to advertise the zine, where to have the zine reviewed, and so on. (http://www.inkspot.com/craft/newsletterinfo.html). I am also thinking of going down to Speakers' Corner and advertise my web-site there. Speakers' Corner is a small booth where you can sit inside and the tv station (CityTv) for one dollar will tape about 4 minutes of your time. You can say whatever you want and then witness what you said on the next Saturday, where they go on the air. Another idea would be to make small posters (8' by 11') with info about the magazine and the URL for people to subscribe to and then paste it around all those Cybercafes and similar. Perhaps this will get me an audience, although I am afraid of the kind =) As for the movie reviews, it's part of our culture. We have what we call "Movie Night in Canada" and it's an excuse to get together, watch a movie and slaughter it. After that we all get together and practice some cafe` terrorism, as described in one of our previous issues. Take care Don Fitch, and thank you for your criticism and interest towards CoN. Don Leo+ ------------------------------------------- 2. Everything You Didn't Want To Know About Internet (But Were Smart Enough Not To Ask). by Bob Allisat PART ONE The Internet has experienced an explosion of sorts in the five (5) years that I have experienced and been experienced by it, by them, and all that. What has happened is a lot. Too much. Not enough. Way too little way too late. Way too much way too early. Nada. Todos. Shit. Heavan. Hell. Utopia. Bliss. Fuck all. Horror. It all. Fuck it all. And I have survived to tell the tale. Which is saying everything and nothing. But I won't get into that stream again. Here is: everything you didn't want to know about the internet (but were smart enough not to ask). Cyber Cowboys There is no freedom on this Internet thing you anus brain. The guy (and it's invariably a guy) who plays with the machines is the one who determines what you can or cannot say, do, feel, think or live. If it doesn't pass his rectal exam he cuts you off, shuts yo down, terminates your whatever and lives happily ever after tough shit and fuck offs for you. Go ahead. Try. Express yourself. See how long it is before your plug is pulled. Between You And Me (and the wall of eyes) There is no privacy on this medium you supid fuck. It's all public knowledge from the (pant-pant) horny letter you mailed your lay to the plans and schemes you exchange in business and annything else. There are no linkless pages. Spiders do *not* respect anti-robo HTML. No encryption method works. Every system is easily hacked into. The whoel shebang - good, bad, ugly, beautiful and dull - is open spread eagled for one and all to see, hear, read and (heavan forbid smell. Even Braver New World The Internet appears to be the means our civil liberties will be eroded into non-existance. We have no privacy and no freedom. Our ability to communicate in a law abiding manner is subject to perpetual oversight. With the ever heightening technologization of everyday life and the inevitable integration of it all into this Internet mindset we are fucking well doomed as free citizens if there ever was such a thing in the first pplace (debatable). Well at least once upon a time we could disappear. Now? Good luck. Cookies Forever To be tracked from begining to end, to be codified, digitized, every aspect of one's existance consumerized, to be numbered and listed, delisted and classified, to be marked and demarked and remarked, to be pursued when wealthy and rebuked when in poverty, to be propositioned and solicited, to be brought into this world and ushered out, to be reamed and roamed, to be watched and to watch, to be fish bowled into exitance and pin holed out of existance, to be internetized and reinternetized and deinternetized, to never be alone, to never get the feeling no-one has been there, to not to be is to be, to be is to not be, niether is that the question nor the answer. Just the impossibility. NetSex Look it just isn't. No-one is who or what they say they are or aren't. Except for (perhaps) me. Liars and bulshitters, guys scamming as gals and gals laughing as guys and staulkers and perverts and lonely mother fuckers and fatherfuckers, lying through their fuckless teeth, lying through their whistling fucking noses, lying through their crusty keyboards. Lying liars without existances. More Than Ever Before All the fucking empty passing of empty static organized into semi- transparant shared voids when the sun is shining outside and the wind is blowing and there is enough life left in the planet to just enjoy oneself before it all gets concretized and you have to waste your fucking end of days lives hunched over radiating monitors playing games with fucking strangers who could care less about you. Grow up, wake up, live life and fuck off. ------------------------------------------- 3. Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 14:17:01 -0700 (PDT) From: Jim Thomas Subject: File 5-- Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers Cu Digest WWW site at: URL: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~cudigest/ Hacker Vows 'Terror' for Child Pornographers by Steve Silberman Source - WIRED News http://www.wired.com/news/culture/story/4437.html Copyright 1993-97 Wired Ventures, Inc. and affiliated companies After 17 years in the hacker underground, Christian Valor - well known among old-school hackers and phone phreaks as "Se7en" - was convinced that most of what gets written in the papers about computers and hacking is sensationalistic jive. For years, Valor says, he sneered at reports of the incidence of child pornography on the Net as "exaggerated/over-hyped/fearmongered/bullshit." Now making his living as a lecturer on computer security, Se7en claims he combed the Net for child pornography for eight weeks last year without finding a single image. That changed a couple of weeks ago, he says, when a JPEG mailed by an anonymous prankster sent him on an odyssey through a different kind of underground: IRC chat rooms with names like #littlegirlsex, ftp directories crammed with filenames like 6yoanal.jpg and 8&dad.jpg, and newsgroups like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.pre-teen. The anonymous file, he says, contained a "very graphic" image of a girl "no older than 4 years old." On 8 June, Se7en vowed on a hacker's mailing list to deliver a dose of "genuine hacker terror" to those who upload and distribute such images on the Net. The debate over his methods has stirred up tough questions among his peers about civil liberties, property rights, and the ethics of vigilante justice. A declaration of war What Se7en tapped into, he says, was a "very paranoid" network of traders of preteen erotica. In his declaration of "public war" - posted to a mailing list devoted to an annual hacker's convention called DefCon - Se7en explains that the protocol on most child-porn servers is to upload selections from your own stash, in exchange for credits for more images. What he saw on those servers made him physically sick, he says. "For someone who took a virtual tour of the kiddie-porn world for only one day," he writes, "I had the opportunity to fully max out an Iomega 100-MB Zip disc." Se7en's plan to "eradicate" child-porn traders from the Net is "advocating malicious, destructive hacking against these people." He has enlisted the expertise of two fellow hackers for the first wave of attacks, which are under way. Se7en feels confident that legal authorities will look the other way when the victims of hacks are child pornographers - and he claims that a Secret Service agent told him so explicitly. Referring to a command to wipe out a hard drive by remote access, Se7en boasted, "Who are they going to run to? The police? 'They hacked my kiddie-porn server and rm -rf'd my computer!' Right." Se7en claims to have already "taken down" a "major player" - an employee of Southwestern Bell who Se7en says was "posting ads all over the place." Se7en told Wired News that he covertly watched the man's activities for days, gathering evidence that he emailed to the president of Southwestern Bell. Pseudonymous remailers like hotmail.com and juno.com, Se7en insists, provide no security blanket for traders against hackers uncovering their true identities by cracking server logs. Se7en admits the process of gaining access to the logs is time consuming, however. Even with three hackers on the case, it "can take two or three days. We don't want to hit the wrong person." A couple of days after submitting message headers and logs to the president and network administrators of Southwestern Bell, Se7en says, he got a letter saying the employee was "no longer on the payroll." The hacker search for acceptance Se7en's declaration of war received support on the original mailing list. "I am all for freedom of speech/expression," wrote one poster, "but there are some things that are just wrong.... I feel a certain moral obligation to the human race to do my part in cleaning up the evil." Federal crackdowns targeting child pornographers are ineffective, many argued. In April, FBI director Louis Freeh testified to the Senate that the bureau operation dubbed "Innocent Images" had gathered the names of nearly 4,000 suspected child-porn traffickers into its database. Freeh admitted, however, that only 83 of those cases resulted in convictions. (The Washington Times reports that there have also been two suicides.) The director's plan? Ask for more federal money to fight the "dark side of the Internet" - US$10 million. Pitching in to assist the Feds just isn't the hacker way. As one poster to the DefCon list put it, "The government can't enforce laws on the Internet. We all know that. We can enforce laws on the Internet. We all know that too." The DefCon list was not a unanimous chorus of praise for Se7en's plan to give the pornographers a taste of hacker terror, however. The most vocal dissenter has been Declan McCullagh, Washington correspondent for the Netly News. McCullagh is an outspoken champion of constitutional rights, and a former hacker himself. He says he was disturbed by hackers on the list affirming the validity of laws against child porn that he condemns as blatantly unconstitutional. "Few people seem to realize that the long-standing federal child-porn law outlawed pictures of dancing girls wearing leotards," McCullagh wrote - alluding to the conviction of Stephen Knox, a graduate student sentenced to five years in prison for possession of three videotapes of young girls in bathing suits. The camera, the US attorney general pointed out, lingered on the girls' genitals, though they remained clothed. "The sexual implications of certain modes of dress, posture, or movement may readily put the genitals on exhibition in a lascivious manner, without revealing them in a nude display," the Feds argued - and won. It's decisions like Knox v. US, and a law criminalizing completely synthetic digital images "presented as" child porn, McCullagh says, that are making the definition of child pornography unacceptably broad: a "thought crime." The menace of child porn is being exploited by "censor-happy" legislators to "rein in this unruly cyberspace," McCullagh says. The rush to revile child porn on the DefCon list, McCullagh told Wired News, reminded him of the "loyalty oaths" of the McCarthy era. "These are hackers in need of social acceptance," he says. "They've been marginalized for so long, they want to be embraced for stamping out a social evil." McCullagh knows his position is a difficult one to put across to an audience of hackers. In arguing that hackers respect the property rights of pornographers, and ponder the constitutionality of the laws they're affirming, McCullagh says, "I'm trying to convince hackers to respect the rule of law, when hacking systems is the opposite of that." But McCullagh is not alone. As the debate over Se7en's declaration spread to the cypherpunks mailing list and alt.cypherpunks - frequented by an older crowd than the DefCon list - others expressed similar reservations over Se7en's plan. "Basically, we're talking about a Dirty Harry attitude," one network technician/cypherpunk told Wired News. Though he senses "real feeling" behind Se7en's battle cry, he feels that the best way to deal with pornographers is to "turn the police loose on them." Another participant in the discussion says that while he condemns child porn as "terrible, intrinsically a crime against innocence," he questions the effectiveness of Se7en's strategy. "Killing their computer isn't going to do anything," he says, cautioning that the vigilante approach could be taken up by others. "What happens if you have somebody who doesn't like abortion? At what point are you supposed to be enforcing your personal beliefs?" Raising the paranoia level Se7en's loathing for aficionados of newsgroups like alt.sex.pedophilia.swaps runs deeper than "belief." "I myself was abused when I was a kid," Se7en told Wired News. "Luckily, I wasn't a victim of child pornography, but I know what these kids are going through." With just a few hackers working independently to crack server logs, sniff IP addresses, and sound the alarm to network administrators, he says, "We can take out one or two people a week ... and get the paranoia level up," so that "casual traders" will be frightened away from IRC rooms like "#100%preteensexfuckpics." It's not JPEGs of clothed ballerinas that raise his ire, Se7en says. It's "the 4-year-olds being raped, the 6-year-old forced to have oral sex with cum running down themselves." Such images, Se7en admits, are very rare - even in online spaces dedicated to trading sexual imagery of children. "I know what I'm doing is wrong. I'm trampling on the rights of these guys," he says. "But somewhere in the chain, someone is putting these images on paper before they get uploaded. Your freedom ends when you start hurting other people." Copyright 1993-97 Wired Ventures, Inc. and affiliated companies ------------------------------------------- 4. Washroom graffiti by Leandro I was using the company's washroom the other day when I noticed a strange graffiti on the wall(1). Since I was just standing there doing what one does when standing in front of the toilet (in other words, emptying my bladder), I try to figure out what it was. It looked like a deformed 'M'. With careful examination, and thanks to the amazing artistic skills I learned in Visual Arts OAC(2) I was able to determine this was not just an ordinary 'M'. Taking a stroll down Memory Lane(3): Bennett and I happened to have the same Visual Arts OAC class. It was kind of a fun class, especially since the hardest assignments was to draw. We had to make 6 drawings in the course of the year, examine them, evaluate them, and then after picking one, discuss it in front of the class. Bennett and I found that drawing comic strips (eventually nick-named "Conformist Lodge Comix") was more interesting and exciting, than of a psychological examination of our own art. It also helped us maintain our mental stability with our teacher (Mr. Perusse), especially when he would start complaining that males in art never had genitals. Said that, he opened up a book and began 'perusing' over male genitals. "Forgive the pun" he giggled. But back to the drawing, since you are probably wondering how the Hell does the above fit with the letter M in question: the drawing was a rude (perhaps crude would be a better word) of two legs, knees bent, the anus, the vagina, and two breasts. The breasts were attached to the knees, while the vagina and the anus where two distorted holes. The unknown author forgot to draw the feet. I think feet are crucial. How is this thing supposed to walk? Anyway, I just don't understand this type of graffiti people do in washrooms. What happened to the old style of writing an historical phrase, or something funny? Ahhh, the days, when stalls were stalls, and men were men. (1) Wall, in lack of a better word. It's actually one of those panels that separate washrooms, that can easily be knocked down with a well placed kick. (2) OAC: Ontario Academic Courses. Courses which are necessary if you even remotely want to try to enter University. The Government of Ontario has however cancelled this courses to cut down on costs. Any chance that Ontarians had to actually learn something from High School has now been decreased, while increasing the number of idiots that will be able to apply to University. This in a sense is good, since it will make me look like a genius. (3) In Toronto, in the East End, between Dundas Avenue and Queen Street, there is a short lane called, ironically, Memory Lane. I wasn't actually strolling down there while writing this. -------------------------------------------