Hacker Researchers publish a book of subversive content

Brand Killer Robots reveal::

We thought it would be a good idea to write and release a satirical Ebook which attacks the conspiratorial franchise known as...

"The Matrix".

This book offers a working example of how a brand can be devalued by using subversive materials. "The Matrix" franchise was chosen because it is in itself a subversive construct.

Here is the editorial review:

The book that was written to expose the evil-minded absurdity fueling the MATRIX. A Virtual Construct unveiled to the world under the guise of setting humanity free, when all along designed to enslave us all with the notion that we are all powerless in the face of an all-consuming, yet faceless enemy. Making us easy prey for the biggest con-men of all - Our own inner fear demons! See the lie through the eyes of a group of teen hackers. “White hats” involved in a struggle against the all powerful global syndicate of “Black hats”. Learn the ways of a new type of hacker.

The Illusion Shattering Matrix Hacker!

For more - or to purchase the book go to http://www.lulu.com/content/972702

To read more about "The Matrix" go to http://www.davidicke.com/

Persuasive Technology Warfare : A premeditated attack on consumer Mindshare? You bet!

Human Killer Robots reveal::
Throughout the 80's and 90's technology vendors poured billions of dollars into research projects aimed at building new markets and leveraging existing ones through the application of new high-tech software products. They employed 100's of psychologists, technology gurus, security experts & marketing strategists to design strategies to entrench consumers in their products, via innovative, integrated, empowering, technology programmes. These strategies were forged against the political backdrop of a battle to dominate the international computer market. Whosoever controlled the perspective of the consumer, had a strong position in the marketplace upon which an even stronger position could be built. Vendors knew that to engage the consumer they would first need to get their attention, through effective viral marketing campaigns. They understood that they would need to produce highly persuasive devices to captivate their audience, by introducing alluring features in their products. Ultimately they knew that in order for the consumer to be permanently possessed, they would have to target them through ever more powerful persuasive propoganda strategies.

During this period "Systems Innovators" were instrumental in designing exploitative strategies for all of the major technology vendors. Today, these people can be found reconstituting billion dollar psychological warfare strategies designed to influence the consumers purchasing decisions and repackaging them for any type of organisation wishing to exploit their marketplace via the strategic application of information technology. You don't need to be a member of the techno-elite to benefit from their investment over the past 3 decades. You just need to understand how to weave these strategies into your own investments in technology deployment.

If you want to win the strategic battle in your particular marketplace and remain competitive, then you need to think like a "Systems Innovator" and apply technology with the intent and motivation of "an elite guerilla unit, priming their weapon systems for all out strategic and tactical warfare".

Strategic intent or All out Persuasive Warfare?

Rapid and tactical deployment of small technology increments which are highly adaptable and which fit into an over-arching, all-encompassing architecture. Paul Strassman (Director U.S DOD).

Read more about persuasive technology at http://captology.stanford.edu/

The Propoganda Myth :: Its just Marketing by another name?

Brand Killer Robots reveal::

Our learned colleagues at the Confidential Resource have raised the spectre of that nasty thing we all call Propoganda. They offer a definition:

Propaganda may be defined as the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.

Having worked for quite a few top brands and not so top brands we have to say that this definition fits very neatly with the intentions, expectations and strategies of todays brand managers, marketers and executive management team.

It seems that Propoganda (at least by defintion) is indisguishable from todays marketing pratices to capture, alter and entrench the consumers behaviour in a product.

Propoganda is just Marketing by another name. The answer as a consumer is to base your purchasing decisions on what you know deep down to be right. Don't listen to your head. It is a programmed receiver of propoganda.

Cognitive Hacking : Targeting subconcious Minds : What it can do to investor relations?

Brand Killer Robots reveal::

Ok, here is some more real truth about the subversive security threat that we face in the here and now. Written in 2002 this enlightening article by some of the folks at Dartmouth College is one of the first papers on security intelligence to reach a wide audience. In essence, this paper proposes a model of subversive behaviour which begins by manipulating a users perception and finishes by taking advantage of the users response in order to carry out an attack. Cybenko and colleagues seemingly promote 'Cognitive Hacking' as a new label for a more sophisticated type of information security classification. One that combines conventional forms of technological attack with social engineering and intelligence tradecraft practices to form a new kind of subversive warfare, entitled 'Cognitive Hacking'. Whilst the paper outlines admirably the concepts involved, it does however fail to offer a broad enough solution in the form of effective counter-measures.

The article starts...

On August 25 2000, Stockholders were stunned by news that Emulex, a server and storage provider, was revising its earnings from $0.25 per share gain to $0.15 loss and that it was lowering it's reported net earnings from the previous quarter as well. The press release, which business news services like Dow Jones, Bloomberg and CBS Marketwatch were distributing, went on to state that CEO Paul Folino had resigned and that the company was under SEC investigation. Within 16 minutes, Emulex shares had plummeted from their previous days close of approximately $104 per share to $43.

Only none of it was true.

The full article by the folks at Dartmouth College is available here http://www.ists.dartmouth.edu/library/chb0802.pdf

Are Websites for Whistleblowers "Imagination without reason or worse still - imagination without foundation?"

Brand Killer Robots reveal::

We understand that a court decision against Wikileaks, a website for whistleblowers to publish information exposing unethical practices, has been reversed. The website at http://www.wikileaks.org/ says of itself:

Wikileaks is developing an uncensorable Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. Our primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations. We aim for maximum political impact. Our interface is identical to Wikipedia and usable by all types of people. We have received over 1.2 million documents so far from dissident communities and anonymous sources.

We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies. All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information. Historically that information has been costly - in terms of human life and human rights. But with technological advances - the internet, and cryptography - the risks of conveying important information can be lowered.

Whilst we can see the reasons behind Wikileaks mission, we believe that the foundation upon which this crusade is undertaken to be on very shaky ground indeed. Any intelligence analyst worth their sort knows that there is as much disinformation on the Internet as there is information. So how can you tell the difference?

So to do they know that systems and accompanying data can be subverted such that information originated from one source can be altered to look like it came from another source. More concerning is the question of the real motives behind this whistleblower agenda. Just who are the people behind the scenes at Wikileaks anyway?

No one questions the need for greater transparency amongst government institutions and the commercial world. What we do question is how you go about it.

At the very least, Wikileaks.org could disrupt the internal communications department of the worlds leading organisations for a time. At the very worst, websites such as Wikileaks could damage real investigations into political and commercial criminality.

We ask "Are Websites for Whistleblowers "Imagination without reason or worse still - imagination without foundation?"

Counter-propoganda method being tested on disruptive websites

Brand Killer Robots reveal::

"Swarm" is a new methodology for counter-propoganda which is being tested on various deliberately disruptive websites around the Internet. The communications methodology has been extremely successful in terms of the number of responses to a provocative article within a forum thread and the volume of views that the associated pages get.

In one particular news forum on a conspiracy site, posts stayed in the top 2% for over 3 weeks, receiving over 300 responses and 5,000 views. The second highest next to the top news item which was a story of horrendous proportions - that seemed to keep this supposedly enlightened audience very interested indeed.

Average number of visitors to the news forum was about 100 per day out of a total average of 250 per day.

"Swarm" was designed to disrupt apathetic and potentially dangerous channels of communications on the internet, through indirect lines of controlled provocative conversation.

If you would like more information on "Swarm", email Stephen, the designer at intrench@gmail.com.

Reduce Noise Pollution:: Kill the me, me and me factor?

Brand Killer Robots reveals::

This woman comes around my house sometimes and whilst i'm tending to this blog, i listen to her talking to my wife in the kitchen. Actually i don't hear her so much, as listen to her constantly drone on about me, me and me.

My husband this, my husband that, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. Did you hear about so and so who just broke up with so and so? Guess what i heard the other day????

As my wife carefully tries to interject to recover some semblance of balanced conversation, her words are finished off for her and the woman steers the conversation back to me, me and me again!

By the time she is finished i'm absolutely warn out and frustrated by the fact i haven't been able to concentrate on what i want to do i.e "Think about me, my readers and my blog". God knows how my wife must feel - although i do know she always breathes a sigh of relief when the woman eventually decides she has had enough of telling my wife about herself, presumeably ambling off in search of a new equally accomodating victim.

My point here is that i liken this experience to many of the numerous encounters in business. Take for example the submission of business plans for seeking investment process, or the recruitment agency process, or the patent application process, book publishing or the selling your house process. All these processes tend to get drowned in the noise of me, me and me. So many self-interested parties talking (or not talking) different languages, adds to the noise of me, me and me.

In this arena, only the most agressive or luckiest wins - but this is not necessarily for the best.

The result, the right people don't always get to the right people.

We at BKR call for a language that reduces the me, me and me noise factor - in order to get to a commercial world where there is a more balanced conversation.

In order for this to be effective though, institutions must actively support an agenda to establish a new (non-me,me and me) protocol.

Those who dare.... wins!!!

Technological Entrenchment for Hungry Players!

Brand Killer Robots reveal::

It wasn't enough for them to be the best video games test house in the country. It wasn't enough for them to be the first to market. The first to sign contracts with the biggest mobile network providers in the world. It wasn't sufficient to have the most committed staff and be expanding at the rate of 100 new staff per year.

But they weren't happy with that. Something told them there was more to this movement than had already been achieved. They thought.......... surely there must be more to it than that?

And so it was, they came to realise that the impact they had already made in the market must be turned into permenant "entrenched positions", by utilising predatory marketing strategies.

So they created atomic technological contexts within which their clients and partners were encouraged to become fixed parts of their test management process - and so it was after many years of investment they managed to raise the barriers for new entrants to take them on and make it much more difficult for their clients to switch to the competition.

When you hunt your prey down, you don't ever allow them to get away - and you certaintly never allow your competition to feed on the prize.

Email Intelligence Analysis: Identifying untruthful communication patterns

Brand Killer Robots reveal::

It isn't what people say that reveals their true intentions. It's the way they say things or more especially - the way they don't say things - that tells the story. Its' reading the stuff that they don't respond to, that is the real tell-tale sign.

I went to see this guy about work some time ago when i wasn't well. His organisation is set-up with the sole purpose of helping people back to work. We had a very nice chat and after weeks of throwing every idea at him, of how we could work together, i began to see a pattern emerge in his communication.

He started off really keen to meet me and take on board my ideas. Then as my own excitement built, he would then stop emailing me or responding to my calls. Then once i'd run out of steam calling or emailing and some time had elasped; he would suddenly call up all excitedly and the game was back on again. Only to stop responding again when i was back in his face again. And so it went on.

Now one could rationalise that this Managing Director was so busy and perhaps so disorganised that he had a legitimate case for being so eratic. But my view was that he must be playing some kind of game. Playing a sinister game with someone who was ill. Someone who was vulnerable at that time and potentially open to exploitative tactics such as "now you see it - now you don't".

He had taken me from a belief in humanity to doubting its very integrity again.

Had it not been for the fact that he had told me that he had a criminal background as a fraudster i would have probably found myself going around the bend.

I just hope that he doesn't misrepresent his organisation in similar ways in the future.

Internet Trolls : Provocative Communications - How far should moderators go to defend your brand?

Brand Killer Robots reveal::

Last week we put a post up on the BBC 606 website that went something like this. If Alonso wins Formula 1 and it is clear that the whole thing was rigged, then we will never, ever watch F1 again.

It came straight from the heart. We felt that the FIA were fiddling around in issues that had absolutely nothing to do with them and were if anything designed to discredit Mclaren even further and threatened to tarnish the sport entirely, rather than reinforce confidence and trust.

So when we got the response back from BBC moderators that our post was rejected on grounds of criteria set by the BBC, it made us feel like we were a bunch of Internet Trolls. Here is the definition.

As defined by Wiki 15.10.07

An Internet troll, or simply troll in Internet slang is someone who intentionally posts controversial or contrary messages in an on-line community such as an on-line discussion forum with the intention of baiting users into an argumentative response.

It is true, we are anything other than non-controversial. Always have been, always will be - A BIT. But come on guys! What kind of moderation is this? Especially as our post was a response to a seemingly provocative debate, along side debates such as "Mosley, are you a Hypocrite?".

But as with many message board services, we don't have a right of reply to the moderator, we just have to shut up or change our post to something that is acceptable.

Suffice to say, we erased our presence from all of the message boards, including 606 and then went a little crazy later on and dumped our entire BBC membership in the trashcan.

Advice being to monitor member posts over a period of time in order to determine if they have are behaving as trolls, rather than determining intent on the basis of one fairly innocuous post.

Executive Silence: making brands a target in the future?

Brand Killer Robots reveal:

How many times have you written a very nice email to someone, who totally ignores it and you know they did? You might have been offering some advice, or helping them in some other way. Hell, you might have just been saying "Hello".

What does it feel like to be ignored? What does it feel like to know that you said something to someone - and they simply ignored you, like you were nothing, nobody and nowhere. How does it feel - Mr crappy, nobody?

Do you want to go back to them and tell them how you feel? What would you say? How would they respond?

"Wait", you might say!!!!!..... "what would happen if i got it all wrong? Perhaps they're on holiday or perhaps their email system went down and my message was lost so they never saw it"!

"Ok, so i'll send the same email again and wait for a response". "Perhaps this time i'll set the message for a read receipt so i know that they got it this time". "Well, what if they got the first message and are just thinking about a response and i sent another email with a read receipt". "Perhaps they're going to think twice about responding at all". "So perhaps i'll wait another week and then send my email without a read receipt request, then think about what to do after that ".

So you wait a week and don't hear back so you send a message again without a read receipt. You wait two more weeks, don't hear back so you send the email with a read receipt attached. You never get a read receipt back. Right you think, "they got the messages and they were so ugly toward me, they couldn't be bothered to respond and they tried to cover it up by not even answering my request for a read receipt".

"Something has happened here to our relationship". "Why don't they respond?" "Why are they being so mean to me?" "This is a direct attack on who i am!" "They want to bring me to my knees!" "They have all the power now and i have none!". "I thought they were my friend".

"What am i going to do to get back at them?" "What can i do now?"

"Whatever it is i do, i'm going to make sure I break their silence".

Conspiracy Theorists: A Threat to your people and your brand

Brand Killer Robots reveal::

Yes the truth is out. We're all going to die! Lady Diana was killed by Lizards, who were left behind by the martians who built the pyramids - and David Icke is going to be the next President of America, with Michael Moore playing deputy Pres.

For the vast majority of people, the rational mind will process such creative paranoia and place it in the memory bank marked "fiction". But for those who are the most vulnerable in our society this concoction of facts mixed with fabrication can become very real. In fact there are people out there who are so much in need of an escapism fix, they actually believe every conspiracy that is spun out of the squal.

This is not so much a problem when confined to healthy hobbies, such as collecting memoribilia built on a conspiratorial franchise such as "the Matrix", or when you head off for a weekend in the woods to reenact, a fictional battle - such as King Arthur. Where the problem really lies is where your staff begin to blur the lines of workplace reality with rampant fantasy.

We recall the story where an employee who was a Matrix fan decided that the management team of the day were in fact Lizards, dressed in human attire. Had his problem remained an issue of perspective nothing untoward would have happened. Trouble was his behaviour began to become greatly more hostile than was appropriate, until one day he finally went ballistic and shot half of his colleagues dead.

Whether you believe this, that or the other - matters not. What does matter is your mental health.

Such content should be accompanied by a Government Health Warning. Approach with care. This content can seriously damage your health - and perhaps that of others.

Keep it real guys!

Digging up Personal Reputations on the Net

Brand Killer Robots reveal::

Some years ago we heard of this guy who used his power and influence as a lawyer to leverage his position in the property markets, ie. you might think you were contacting him for some legal representation, only for the guy to turn into a real estate agent or an investment consultant who wants you to sell him your house.This guy had more heads than Hydra, the more that got severed, the more would appear. You never quite knew which hat he had on and what is more, he was a real pain in the ars*.Anyway, to cut a long story short, sometime in 2003 one of his clients made a complaint about him to the U.S legal authority and he was brought to book for using unscrupulous tactics and weazle words to tie the poor woman in knots. Had he not been so sure of himself he might have gotten away with a slap on the wrist, but by then this lawyer was so sure of his himself that he began to attack the whole of the legal fraternity. He used his words to implicate as many people as possible, he used his words to uncover the smells in every corner of the law, finally attacking the highest of legal representatives in the land. His reward - total disbarment from practicing as lawyer. Not a problem he thought, i'll set-up as a real estate agent. No one will find out what happened.

Few months later his legal career obituary was published in full and popped up on the forum of his website.

EWHISPERS threaten to corrode brand messages in the 21st Century

Brand Killer Robots reveal::
As any editor or advertising guru can tell you. 'Context is King.'

If i whispered to you "do you know, this guy over here is gay", you'd probably say "oh is he - good for him". If i whispered the same thing to you, but in a different context, you'd probably think the same thing - but, would you say the same thing? If the context he used was, "I'm your boss, you rely on me and you are surrounded by the same kind of people as me", when he said it, you'd have probably said "oh - that must be difficult for him" or if you were really submissive you might have thought one thing, then said something else like "not sure he fits in here".

Whilst all the time trying to defend your true feelings, you try make a compromise with those of the crooked mindset. Just so you avoid coming into conflict with the very thing you despise.

Power and Prejudice! In compromising in this situation - you dilute your brand - you dilute YOU!

Brands that allow others to whisper stories in their name, whether online or offline, could be conveying some very corrosive images to consumers indeed.
Brands must take steps to protect themselves from being associated with subversive whispers that with the proliferation of the Internet could occur in any context, at any time, from any where in the world.

Media brands attacked over 'climate porn'

BBC News website
A new report was published on 19th September by the IPPR on climate change and the lessons we can learn for encouraging public action. The original 2006 BBC news article read like this. Apocalyptic visions of climate change used by newspapers, environmental groups and the UK government amount to "climate porn", a think-tank says.
The report from the Labour-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) says over-use of alarming images is a "counsel of despair".
It says they make people feel helpless and says the use of cataclysmic imagery is partly commercially motivated.
However, newspapers have defended their coverage of a "crucial issue".

The IPPR report also criticises the reporting of individual climate-friendly acts as "mundane, domestic and uncompelling".
"The climate change discourse in the UK today looks confusing, contradictory and chaotic," says the report, entitled Warm Words.
"It seems likely that the overarching message for the lay public is that in fact, nobody really knows."
For more on this report see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5236482.stm
To read the full report see: http://www.ippr.org/publicationsandreports/publication.asp?id=561

Virgil hands the power of the Wiki over to the CIA

When I heard on the grapevine what Virgil Griffith had achieved with the Wiki Scanner my first thought was - what a cool idea. I even went to the trouble of telling him so.
But then i got to thinking. Was it really a great feat of engineering? Did he really expose organisational intent, or was it just some over zealous corporate ladder climbing types - or even a bunch of hackers who broke into a network and edited some carefully selected Wiki pages?In fact i began to realise that the whole revelation was as bad as alerting the world about other kinds of threat, like blowing up planes using toothpaste. There are two real outcomes of what Virgil did. Firstly, he created the conditions where every unethical computer hacker and its cat can now get back at the big brother monster by digging up dirt, which may or may not be true - yet hard to refute. Secondly and more importantly. Virgil has single-handedly alerted unethical organisations that they can be traced, making the likelihood of covert Wiki edits much more likely in the future. What he did is to say to organisations - here is a much better and safer route for you to edit Wiki pages (or any other site pages). Do it, but do it from outside your network.
Shame on you Virgil. Sometimes things are better left unsaid.

See Who's Editing Wikipedia Now - Diebold Polling

Wired Aug 07

On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 paragraphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an entire section critical of the company's machines. While anonymous, such changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits.
In this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining service launched Monday traces millions of Wikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and for the first time puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investigations of specific allegations.

for more: http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/wiki_tracker?currentPage=all

Howard row over Wikipedia edits

BBC - 24th Aug 07
Staff in the Australian prime minister's department have been accused of editing potentially damaging entries in online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.
According to the Sydney Morning Herald, workers made 126 edits on subjects which included government immigration policy and Treasurer Peter Costello.
The details came from a new website which can track those who make edits.
Wikipedia Scanner has shown that staff at the CIA, the Vatican and the BBC among others have also made changes.
For more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6961575.stm

Wikipedia 'shows CIA page edits'

By Jonathan Fildes Science and technology reporter, BBC News
An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organisations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.
Wikipedia Scanner allegedly shows that workers on the agency's computers made edits to the page of Iran's president.
It also purportedly shows that the Vatican has edited entries about Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. The tool, developed by US researchers, trawls a list of 5.3m edits and matches them to the net address of the editor. Meet the designer at http://www.virgil.gr/

Scientists invent GREEN food that cooks itself! Fact or Internet Fiction?

Brand Killer Robots reveal:

A group of scientists in a Florida have claimed they have invented a low energy polymer which once injected into food, cooks it from the inside. Apparently six of the scientists dined on a three course meal at the weekend which was cooked entirely by using the cunning formula. The scientists intend to launch a website soon where they will sell 100 polymer pellets for $5.00. Their site will feature a full length video of how a sausage can be cooked in 10 minutes, once injected with a polymer pellet. This patented technology has enormous applications in other areas of science, not to mention potential reduction in green house gases when consumers stop using ovens, barbecues and microwaves.

Now that's real innovation!