Cold War
The Cold War was a period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union with its satellite states, the United States with its allies after World War II. A common historiography of the conflict begins between 1946, the year U. S. diplomat George F. Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow cemented a U. S. foreign policy of containment of Soviet expansionism threatening strategically vital regions, the Truman Doctrine of 1947, ending between the Revolutions of 1989, which ended communism in Eastern Europe, the 1991 collapse of the USSR, when nations of the Soviet Union abolished communism and restored their independence. The term "cold" is used because there was no large-scale fighting directly between the two sides, but they each supported major regional conflicts known as proxy wars; the conflict split the temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany and its allies, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences. The capitalist West was led by the United States, a federal republic with a two-party presidential system, as well as the other First World nations of the Western Bloc that were liberal democratic with a free press and independent organizations, but were economically and politically entwined with a network of banana republics and other authoritarian regimes, most of which were the Western Bloc's former colonies.
Some major Cold War frontlines such as Indochina and the Congo were still Western colonies in 1947. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, was a self-proclaimed Marxist–Leninist state led by its Communist Party, which in turn was dominated by a totalitarian leader with different titles over time, a small committee called the Politburo; the Party controlled the state, the press, the military, the economy, many organizations throughout the Second World, including the Warsaw Pact and other satellites, funded communist parties around the world, sometimes in competition with communist China following the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s. The two worlds were fighting for dominance in low-developed regions known as the Third World. In time, a neutral bloc arose in these regions with the Non-Aligned Movement, which sought good relations with both sides. Notwithstanding isolated incidents of air-to-air dogfights and shoot-downs, the two superpowers never engaged directly in full-scale armed combat. However, both were armed in preparation for a possible all-out nuclear world war.
Each side had a nuclear strategy that discouraged an attack by the other side, on the basis that such an attack would lead to the total destruction of the attacker—the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Aside from the development of the two sides' nuclear arsenals, their deployment of conventional military forces, the struggle for dominance was expressed via proxy wars around the globe, psychological warfare, massive propaganda campaigns and espionage, far-reaching embargoes, rivalry at sports events, technological competitions such as the Space Race; the first phase of the Cold War began in the first two years after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The USSR consolidated its control over the states of the Eastern Bloc, while the United States began a strategy of global containment to challenge Soviet power, extending military and financial aid to the countries of Western Europe and creating the NATO alliance; the Berlin Blockade was the first major crisis of the Cold War. With the victory of the Communist side in the Chinese Civil War and the outbreak of the Korean War, the conflict expanded.
The USSR and the US competed for influence in Latin America and the decolonizing states of Africa and Asia. The Soviets suppressed the Hungarian Revolution of 1956; the expansion and escalation sparked more crises, such as the Suez Crisis, the Berlin Crisis of 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the closest the two sides came to nuclear war. Meanwhile, an international peace movement took root and grew among citizens around the world, first in Japan from 1954, when people became concerned about nuclear weapons testing, but soon in Europe and the US; the peace movement, in particular the anti-nuclear movement, gained pace and popularity from the late 1950s and early 1960s, continued to grow through the'70s and'80s with large protest marches and various non-parliamentary activism opposing war and calling for global nuclear disarmament. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, a new phase began that saw the Sino-Soviet split complicate relations within the Communist sphere, while US allies France, demonstrated greater independence of action.
The USSR crushed the 1968 Prague Spring liberalization program in Czechoslovakia, while the US experienced internal turmoil from the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, which ended with the defeat of the US-backed Republic of Vietnam, prompting further adjustments. By the 1970s, both sides had become interested in making allowances in order to create a more stable and predictable international system, ushering in a period of détente that saw Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the US opening relations with the People's Republic of China as a strategic counterweight to the Soviet Union. Détente collapsed at the end of the decade with the beginning of the Soviet–Afghan War in 1979; the early 1980s were another period of elevated tension, with the Soviet downing of KAL Flight 007 and the "Able Archer" NATO military exercises, both in 1983. The United States increased diplomatic and economic pressures on the Soviet Union, at a time when the communist state was suffering from economic stag
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
Security hacker
A security hacker is someone who seeks to breach defenses and exploit weaknesses in a computer system or network. Hackers may be motivated by a multitude of reasons, such as profit, information gathering, recreation, or to evaluate system weaknesses to assist in formulating defenses against potential hackers; the subculture that has evolved around hackers is referred to as the computer underground. There is a longstanding controversy about the term's true meaning. In this controversy, the term hacker is reclaimed by computer programmers who argue that it refers to someone with an advanced understanding of computers and computer networks, that cracker is the more appropriate term for those who break into computers, whether computer criminal or computer security expert. A 2014 article concluded that "... the black-hat meaning still prevails among the general public". In computer security, a hacker is someone who focuses on security mechanisms of computer and network systems. While including those who endeavor to strengthen such mechanisms, it is more used by the mass media and popular culture to refer to those who seek access despite these security measures.
That is, the media portrays the'hacker' as a villain. Parts of the subculture see their aim in correcting security problems and use the word in a positive sense. White hat is the name given to ethical computer hackers. White hats are becoming a necessary part of the information security field, they operate under a code, which acknowledges that breaking into other people's computers is bad, but that discovering and exploiting security mechanisms and breaking into computers is still an interesting activity that can be done ethically and legally. Accordingly, the term bears strong connotations that are favorable or pejorative, depending on the context; the subculture around such hackers is termed network hacker subculture, hacker scene, or computer underground. It developed in the context of phreaking during the 1960s and the microcomputer BBS scene of the 1980s, it is implicated with 2600: the alt.2600 newsgroup. In 1980, an article in the August issue of Psychology Today used the term "hacker" in its title: "The Hacker Papers".
It was an excerpt from a Stanford Bulletin Board discussion on the addictive nature of computer use. In the 1982 film Tron, Kevin Flynn describes his intentions to break into ENCOM's computer system, saying "I've been doing a little hacking here". CLU is the software. By 1983, hacking in the sense of breaking computer security had been in use as computer jargon, but there was no public awareness about such activities. However, the release of the film WarGames that year, featuring a computer intrusion into NORAD, raised the public belief that computer security hackers could be a threat to national security; this concern became real when, in the same year, a gang of teenage hackers in Milwaukee, known as The 414s, broke into computer systems throughout the United States and Canada, including those of Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Security Pacific Bank. The case grew media attention, 17-year-old Neal Patrick emerged as the spokesman for the gang, including a cover story in Newsweek entitled "Beware: Hackers at play", with Patrick's photograph on the cover.
The Newsweek article appears to be the first use of the word hacker by the mainstream media in the pejorative sense. Pressured by media coverage, congressman Dan Glickman called for an investigation and began work on new laws against computer hacking. Neal Patrick testified before the U. S. House of Representatives on September 26, 1983, about the dangers of computer hacking, six bills concerning computer crime were introduced in the House that year; as a result of these laws against computer criminality, white hat, grey hat and black hat hackers try to distinguish themselves from each other, depending on the legality of their activities. These moral conflicts are expressed in The Mentor's "The Hacker Manifesto", published 1986 in Phrack. Use of the term hacker meaning computer criminal was advanced by the title "Stalking the Wily Hacker", an article by Clifford Stoll in the May 1988 issue of the Communications of the ACM; that year, the release by Robert Tappan Morris, Jr. of the so-called Morris worm provoked the popular media to spread this usage.
The popularity of Stoll's book The Cuckoo's Egg, published one year further entrenched the term in the public's consciousness. Several subgroups of the computer underground with different attitudes use different terms to demarcate themselves from each other, or try to exclude some specific group with whom they do not agree. Eric S. Raymond, author of The New Hacker's Dictionary, advocates that members of the computer underground should be called crackers. Yet, those people see themselves as hackers and try to include the views of Raymond in what they see as a wider hacker culture, a view that Raymond has harshly rejected. Instead of a hacker/cracker dichotomy, they emphasize a spectrum of different categories, such as white hat, grey hat, black hat and script kiddie. In contrast to Raymond, they reserve the term cracker for more malicious activity. According to Ralph D. Clifford, a cracker or cracking is to "gain unauthorized access to a computer in order to commit another crime such as destroying information contained in that system".
These subgroups may be defined by the legal status of their activities. A white hat hacker breaks security for non-malicious reasons, either to test their own security system, perform penetration tests, or vulnerability assessments for a
John Markoff
John Gregory Markoff is a journalist best known for his work at The New York Times, a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick. Markoff was born in Oakland and grew up in Palo Alto, California, he graduated from Whitman College, Walla Walla, with a B. A. in Sociology in 1971. Additionally he received an M. A. in sociology from the University of Oregon in 1976. After leaving graduate school, he returned to California where he began writing for Pacific News Service, an alternative news syndicate based in San Francisco, he freelanced for a number of publications including Mother Jones and Saturday Review. In 1981 he became part of the original staff of the computer industry weekly InfoWorld. In 1984 he became an editor at Byte Magazine and in 1985 he left to become a reporter in the business section of the San Francisco Examiner, where he wrote about Silicon Valley. In 1988 he moved to New York to write for the business section of the New York Times. In November 1988 he reported that Robert Tappan Morris, son of National Security Agency cryptographer Robert Morris, was the author of what would become known as the Internet worm.
In December 1993 he wrote an early article about the World Wide Web, referring to it as a "map to the buried treasures of the Information Age." On July 4, 1994 he wrote an article about Kevin Mitnick, a fugitive from a number of law enforcement agencies. He wrote several more pieces detailing Mitnick's capture. Markoff co-wrote, with Tsutomu Shimomura, the book Takedown about the chase; the book became a film, released direct to video in the United States. Markoff's writing about Mitnick was the subject of criticism by Mitnick supporters and unaffiliated parties who maintained that Markoff's accounts exaggerated or invented Mitnick's activities and successes. Markoff stood by his reporting in several responses; the film went much further, with Markoff himself stating to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2000, "I thought it was a fundamentally dishonest movie." Markoff was accused by Jonathan Littman of journalistic impropriety and of over-hyping Mitnick's actual crimes. Littman published a more sympathetic account of Mitnick's time as a fugitive in his own book on the incident, The Fugitive Game.
Further controversy came over the release of the movie Takedown, with Littman alleging that portions of the film were taken from his book The Fugitive Game without permission. Markoff's involvement with Mitnick is covered in the documentary Freedom Downtime, in which an interview is conducted with Markoff, unable to elaborate on the veracity of Mitnick's charges. After Mitnick, Markoff continued to write about technology, focusing at times on wireless networking, writing early stories about non-line-of-sight broadband wireless, phased-array antennas, multiple-in, multiple-out antenna systems to enhance Wi-Fi, he covered Jim Gillogly's 1999 break of the first three sections of the CIA's Kryptos cipher, writes about semiconductors and supercomputers as well. He wrote the first two articles describing Admiral John Poindexter's return to government and the creation of the Total Information Awareness project, he shared the 2005 Gerald Loeb Award in the Deadline Writing category for the story "End of an Era".
In 2009 he moved from the Business/Tech section of the New York Times to the Science section. Markoff contributed to the New York Times staff entry that received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting; the series of 10 articles explored the business practices of other technology companies. He retired from his full-time position with the New York Times on December 1, 2016, he continues to work as a freelance journalist for the Times and other organizations and volunteers at the Computer History Museum. Markoff is interviewed in Do You Trust This Computer?, a 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence. The High Cost of High Tech ISBN 0-06-039045-X Hafner, Katie. Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-68322-5. Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw ISBN 0-7868-6210-6 What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry ISBN 0-670-03382-0 A robot network seeks to enlist your computer: New York Times Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots Interview with John Markoff about What the Dormouse Said, April 13, 2006 The Secret History of Hacking, a 2001 documentary film featuring Markoff.
Recent and archival news by John Markoff of The New York Times. John Markoff radio interview on Tech Nation TED Talks: John Markoff on newspapers at TED in 2007
Integrated Authority File
The Integrated Authority File or GND is an international authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from catalogues. It is used for documentation in libraries and also by archives and museums; the GND is managed by the German National Library in cooperation with various regional library networks in German-speaking Europe and other partners. The GND falls under the Creative Commons Zero licence; the GND specification provides a hierarchy of high-level entities and sub-classes, useful in library classification, an approach to unambiguous identification of single elements. It comprises an ontology intended for knowledge representation in the semantic web, available in the RDF format; the Integrated Authority File became operational in April 2012 and integrates the content of the following authority files, which have since been discontinued: Name Authority File Corporate Bodies Authority File Subject Headings Authority File Uniform Title File of the Deutsches Musikarchiv At the time of its introduction on 5 April 2012, the GND held 9,493,860 files, including 2,650,000 personalised names.
There are seven main types of GND entities: LIBRIS Virtual International Authority File Information pages about the GND from the German National Library Search via OGND Bereitstellung des ersten GND-Grundbestandes DNB, 19 April 2012 From Authority Control to Linked Authority Data Presentation given by Reinhold Heuvelmann to the ALA MARC Formats Interest Group, June 2012
KGB
The KGB, translated in English as Committee for State Security, was the main security agency for the Soviet Union from 1954 until its break-up in 1991. As a direct successor of preceding agencies such as Cheka, NKGB, NKVD and MGB, the committee was attached to the Council of Ministers, it was the chief government agency of "union-republican jurisdiction", acting as internal security and secret police. Similar agencies were constituted in each of the republics of the Soviet Union aside from Russia, consisted of many ministries, state committees and state commissions; the agency was a military service governed by army laws and regulations, in the same fashion as the Soviet Army or MVD Internal Troops. While most of the KGB archives remain classified, two online documentary sources are available, its main functions were foreign intelligence, counter-intelligence, operative-investigatory activities, guarding the State Border of the USSR, guarding the leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Soviet Government and ensuring of government communications as well as combating nationalism and anti-Soviet activities.
In 1991, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the KGB was split into the Federal Security Service and the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. After breaking away from Georgia in the early 1990s with Russian help, the self-proclaimed Republic of South Ossetia established its own KGB. A Time magazine article in 1983 reported that the KGB was the world's most effective information-gathering organization, it operated legal and illegal espionage residencies in target countries where a legal resident gathered intelligence while based at the Soviet embassy or consulate, and, if caught, was protected from prosecution by diplomatic immunity. At best, the compromised spy was either returned to the Soviet Union or was declared persona non grata and expelled by the government of the target country; the illegal resident spied, unprotected by diplomatic immunity, worked independently of Soviet diplomatic and trade missions. In its early history, the KGB valued illegal spies more than legal spies, because illegal spies infiltrated their targets with greater ease.
The KGB residency executed four types of espionage: political, military-strategic, disinformation, effected with "active measures", counter-intelligence and security, scientific–technological intelligence. The KGB classified its spies as controllers; the false-identity or legend assumed by a USSR-born illegal spy was elaborate, using the life of either a "live double" or a "dead double". The agent substantiated his or her legend by living it in a foreign country, before emigrating to the target country, thus the sending of US-bound illegal residents via the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada. Tradecraft included stealing and photographing documents, code-names, contacts and dead letter boxes, working as a "friend of the cause" or as agents provocateurs, who would infiltrate the target group to sow dissension, influence policy, arrange kidnappings and assassinations. Mindful of ambitious spy chiefs—and after deposing Premier Nikita Khrushchev—Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and the CPSU knew to manage the next over-ambitious KGB Chairman, Aleksandr Shelepin, who facilitated Brezhnev's palace coup d'état against Khrushchev in 1964.
With political reassignments, Shelepin protégé Vladimir Semichastny was sacked as KGB Chairman, Shelepin himself was demoted from chairman of the Committee of Party and State Control to Trade Union Council chairman. In the 1980s, the glasnost liberalisation of Soviet society provoked KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov to lead the August 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev; the thwarted coup d'état ended the KGB on 6 November 1991. The KGB's main successors are the FSB and the SVR; the GRU recruited the ideological agent Julian Wadleigh, who became a State Department diplomat in 1936. The NKVD's first US operation was establishing the legal residency of Boris Bazarov and the illegal residency of Iskhak Akhmerov in 1934. Throughout, the Communist Party USA and its General Secretary Earl Browder, helped NKVD recruit Americans, working in government and industry. Other important, low-level and high-level ideological agents were the diplomats Laurence Duggan and Michael Whitney Straight in the State Department, the statistician Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, the economist Lauchlin Currie, the "Silvermaster Group", headed by statistician Greg Silvermaster, in the Farm Security Administration and the Board of Economic Warfare.
Moreover, when Whittaker Chambers Alger Hiss's courier, approached the Roosevelt Government—to identify the Soviet spies Duggan and others—he was ignored. Hence, during the Second World War —at the Tehran and Potsdam conferences—Big Three Ally Joseph Stalin of the USSR, was better informed about the war affairs of his US and UK allies than they were about his. Soviet espionage was at its most successful in collecting scientific and technological intelligence about advan
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
The Illuminatus! Trilogy is a series of three novels by American writers Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, first published in 1975; the trilogy is a satirical, science fiction-influenced adventure story. The narrative switches between third- and first-person perspectives in a nonlinear narrative, it is thematically dense, covering topics like counterculture and Discordianism. The trilogy comprises three parts which contain five books and appendices: The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, Leviathan; the parts were first published as three separate volumes starting in September 1975. In 1984 they were published as an omnibus edition and are now more reprinted in the latter form. In 1986 the trilogy won the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, designed to honor libertarian science fiction; the authors went on to write several works, both fiction and nonfiction, that dealt further with the themes of the trilogy, but they did not write any direct sequels. Illuminatus! has been adapted for the stage and has influenced several modern writers and games-makers.
The popularity of the word "fnord" and the 23 enigma can both be attributed to the trilogy. The plot meanders between the thoughts and inner voices and imagined, of its many characters—ranging from a squirrel to a New York City detective to an artificial intelligence—as well as through time, sometimes in mid-sentence. Much of the back story is explained via dialogue between characters, who recount unreliable mutually contradictory, versions of their supposed histories. There are parts in the book in which the narrative reviews and jokingly deconstructs the work itself; the trilogy's story begins with an investigation by two New York City detectives into the bombing of Confrontation, a leftist magazine, the disappearance of its editor, Joe Malik. Discovering the magazine's investigation into the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. the two follow a trail of memos that suggest the involvement of powerful secret societies. They become drawn into a web of conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, the magazine's reporter, George Dorn—having been turned loose without support deep in right-wing Mad Dog, Texas—is arrested for drug possession. He is jailed and physically threatened, at one point hallucinating about his own execution; the prison is bombed and he is rescued by the Discordians, led by the enigmatic Hagbard Celine, captain of a golden submarine. Hagbard represents the Discordians in their eternal battle against the Illuminati, the conspiratorial organization that secretly controls the world, he finances his operations by smuggling illicit substances. The plot meanders around the globe to such locations as Las Vegas; the evil scheme uncovered late in the tale is an attempt to immanentize the eschaton, a secret scheme of the American Medical Association, an evil rock band, to bring about a mass human sacrifice, the purpose of, the release of enough "life-energy" to give eternal life to a select group of initiates, including Adolf Hitler. The AMA are four siblings; the identity of the fifth remains unknown for much of the trilogy.
The first European "Woodstock" festival, held at Ingolstadt, Bavaria, is the chosen location for the sacrifice of the unwary victims, via the reawakening of hibernating Nazi battalions from the bottom of nearby Lake Totenkopf. The plot is foiled when, with the help of a 50-foot-tall incarnation of the goddess Eris, the four members of the AMA are killed: Wilhelm is killed by the monstrous alien being Yog-Sothoth, Wolfgang is shot by John Dillinger, Winifred is drowned by porpoises, Werner is trapped in a sinking car; the major protagonists, now gathered together on board the submarine, are menaced by the Leviathan, a giant, pyramid-shaped single-cell sea monster, growing in size for hundreds of millions of years. The over-the-top nature of this encounter leads some of the characters to question whether they are characters in a book; this metafictional note is swiftly rejected. The threat is neutralized by offering up their onboard computer as something for the creature to communicate with to ease its loneliness.
Hagbard managed to defeat the Illuminati Primi and went to Alpha Centauri in 1999. Carmel - a pimp living in Las Vegas Freeman Hagbard Celine - leader of the Discordians and a central protagonist in The Illuminatus! Trilogy George Dorn - reporter for Confrontation Saul Goodman - New York City detective Rebecca Murphy Goodman - Saul Goodman's wife Howard - a dolphin Joe Malik - editor of Confrontation Mao Tsu-Hsi - Illuminati recruiter Simon Moon - anarchist Barney Muldoon - New York City detective Tarantella Serpentine - an Illuminati-trained prostitute Markoff Chaney - a midget on a cross country mission to spread chaos Fission Chips - a British secret age
