I find hacking fascinating. Because I know a great deal about computers at the very lowest level, people often think that I know a lot about hacking. I really don’t. Over my life, I’ve found this or that bit of information. Of course, it was always because someone had made a change to a major piece of software because it had previously had some security hole. But the ways people find to circumvent security are often amazingly clever. If I had many lives to lead, I would dedicate one of them to understanding all this stuff. Unfortunately, I don’t and there are too many other things to do with my time.

Recently, I’ve been very interested in this Sony hack. The hack itself doesn’t seem all that interesting. Over three years ago, Sony was the victim of a major hack — the so called PlayStation Network outage. At that time, Sony decided that it really had to get serious security. But it would seem that they never did. I think it is rather typical of film companies (games are just an extension of film) where nothing really matters but what they do. “We don’t need no stinkin’ security experts!”

What bothers me is why everyone is so convinced this is an attack from North Korea. When I first saw the note the perpetrators sent, I was skeptical, “We will clearly show it to you at the very time and places ‘The Interview’ be shown, including the premiere, how bitter fate those who seek fun in terror should be doomed to.” Really?! I suppose it is possible. But it reads more like a really racist SNL skit than what hackers would write.

I’m not alone in wondering about this. Michael Hiltzik has written a couple of articles highlighting some of the dissent. It isn’t that anyone is saying that North Korea didn’t do it. It is just that the information we have thus far doesn’t indicate that they did. Instead, it looks like the US government just wants it to be North Korea and the perpetrators want it to appear as though it is North Korea, and so everyone assumes it is North Korea. But other than that, there really is nothing.

Hacker Grugq makes an excellent point that laying this on North Korea is incredibly convenient, Lets Blame Our Perennial Adversary! He points out that we know how North Korea does this kind of stuff, and this is very different. “This is a media blitz campaign by a group that is steeped in Internet culture and knows how to play to it. They can manipulate it to maximum effect. This is definitely far more sophisticated than the usual rhetoric from North Korea.” And Jericho lays out a detailed case that nothing anyone has said comes anywhere near to convincing us that this was North Korea, Anatomy of a NYT Piece on the Sony Hack and Attribution. (Leave it to a hacker to do a better job capitalizing headlines than The Washington Post.)

In Hiltzik’s newest article yesterday, he talked to security expert Marc Rogers, who noted that the key element of the indictment is that the same tools used in this attack were used in two previous attacks. But no one has ever shown that those attacks were by North Korea. He wrote, “Lastly, it’s pretty weak in my books to claim that the newest piece of malware is the act of a nation state because other possible related pieces of malware were rumored to be the work of a nation state.”

Further, the FBI claimed that IP addresses of the hackers used were known to be used by North Korea. But that’s just silly. To start, hackers almost never attack from their own machines. Or rather, there is a Darwinian aspect here: hackers who attack from their own machines get arrested. Dr Krypt3ia took on the whole issue in some depth, FAUXTRIBUTION?

There are a couple of things to keep in mind. One is that the hacker community hates the government and so they will be skeptical of anything the FBI says. The other is that no one is saying that the attack was not from North Korea. It is just that the information that the FBI has made available does not make the case. And given that we know the FBI and the CIA are more than willing to tell the government whatever it wants to hear, we need to question this. Of course we won’t. The United States has never found the truth necessary when a falsehood was so nice to believe.

One of the reasons that I stopped being a libertarian was that I was tired of being a spoiler. The truth was that I always preferred liberal policy. So even though I was a hardcore libertarian in 1992 and voted for Andre Marrou, I was thrilled that Bill Clinton was elected. But it was more than that. With all the high minded theory of libertarianism, I often found myself at odds with practical alternatives. In this country, the question is usually whether there will be modest improvements for regular people from Democratic policy, or distinctly negative consequences from Republican policy. Being a libertarian on the sidelines is just pathetic, “I have the best idea! Listen to me!” It doesn’t help that libertarians basically never have the best ideas.

This came to mind this morning as I read Timothy B Lee over at Vox, Everyone Is Focused on the Wrong Issue in the Net Neutrality Debate. In general, I like Lee. He is a smart libertarian wonk who usually has good things to say on issues of intellectual property. And what he says regarding net neutrality is smart and largely true. But it takes a position that allows things to stay exactly the way they are: broken.

During the Bush administration, the FCC classified internet service providers (ISPs) as content providers rather than infrastructure providers. This means there are very few regulations on them. Of course, this decision turned reality on its head. I’m using AT&T for my ISP right now. It is providing infrastructure, not content. The content between me at home and the Frankly Curious server sits on top of that. Or think of it this way: would you pay for internet service if the only thing that was on it was AT&T and Comcast? But I think we all know why the FCC decided that ISPs were content services: it gave more power to the ISPs.

Millions of us have been pushing to have ISPs reclassified as infrastructure providers — so it would be thought of as a utility. This has the advantage that you almost certainly do think of your ISP as a utility. You certainly don’t think of it the way you think of Twitter. But conservatives hate this idea. They claim that this will interfere with innovation. I’ll tell you: when someone starts talking about “innovation,” you really need to hide your wallet. This is the same reason we are told we must have pharmaceutical patents: to maintain all the innovation in the field of erectile dysfunction drugs.

Of course, innovation works both ways. My current start-up depends upon having lots of internet bandwidth. And I’m not alone. If start-ups have to go making bandwidth deals with the ISPs, that’s going to cripple innovation. And there’s more, as Lee noted:

What’s more, net neutrality seems to be working great in the Netherlands. But remember: the “innovation” claim is just an excuse to allow powerful people to maintain that power. The only reason we might win this fight is because there are powerful people like Netflix on our side.

Lee understands all this, but he poo poos the idea that reclassifying is a good idea. He claims it is a “huge distraction.” And why is that? Because what we really need is a new classification that is tailored for the internet: sort of a hybrid between the two existing categories. But the fact is that this is absolutely, positively not going to happen. So do nothing? Well, that seems to be where he comes down. And that is the entirely typical result of libertarian thought: since we can’t have our preferred “perfect” solution, let’s do nothing.

But changing the classification of ISPs back to what it was would be an improvement. I’m all for Lee trying to get Congress to come up with something new. But it doesn’t “distract” from that to go ahead with the reclassification today.

A big problem with Vox has always been that it is one of the ugliest websites ever. I don’t know whose idea it was to go with yellow and white. And then there is the big image layout that screams to the reader, “Space is cheap; graphic designers are expensive!” But to top off everything else, Vox apparently thinks that its content is so valuable that the vast majority of its front page should be dedicated to an advertisement.

Doubtless Ezra Klein and company are correct. And there is something to be said for one really big ad on the front page rather than than literally dozens of ads using a megabyte of bandwidth on every page of Washington Monthly. Although we will have to wait and see. I’m sure advertisement clutter will be a growing phenomenon on Vox. Still, the “British Petroleum Owns This Site” opening is a bit much.

You see, it is set up to look like Vox itself — except, of course, BP has enough money to afford graphic designers and so the ad doesn’t look as awful as the rest of Vox — they were constrained by having once decided on a nice corporate color. It provides the typical Vox four-column layout. And each explains great things that BP is doing for Alaska, Louisiana, Texas, and the whole United States of America. I feel all warm inside knowing that BP — formerly British Petroleum, formerly Iraq Petroleum Company, formerly Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, formerly the British Empire™, nowa multinational corporation — is out there looking after the interests of ordinary Americans like myself.

It’s sad though. Vox is part of Vox Media, the brainchild of liberal icons Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas. It doesn’t matter who you are, it seems, we all shill for our corporate overlords. You want to read about how foreign corporations are subverting American Democracy? Sure thing! But first, let’s take up your entire screen to explain to you that BP is just looking out for the land of the free and the home of the brave! Oil spill?! You say there was an oil spill?!

That’s the kind of ad I’d like to see on Vox. But I guess when it comes right down to it, we liberals are a bunch of whores. Speaking of which, I’d really appreciate it if you bought your Amazon stuff through this Frankly Curious link. And yes, I do expect a little credit for not taking up your whole screen for that bit of whoring.

I just heard that Matt Taibbi has left First Look Media. It is sad because the magazine he was creating, Racket, sounded like it would be a lot of fun, “His vision was a hard-hitting, satirical magazine in the style of the old Spy that would employ Taibbi’s facility for merciless ridicule, humor, and parody to attack Wall Street and the corporate world.” And apparently, First Look was completely behind that vision. The problem was a clash of cultures that I thought was very funny.

According to the big guns at The Intercept (also a First Look Media publication), it was, “A collision between the First Look executives, who by and large come from a highly structured Silicon Valley corporate environment, and the fiercely independent journalists who view corporate cultures and management-speak with disdain.” I’m really struck by this because this is correct, but the Silicon Valley folks don’t think it is. They think of themselves as incredibly open-minded. They think that all that matters is getting the work done and being skilled. My experience in Silicon Valley is that these firms are more ossified than the stodgiest of corporate behemoths of the past.

I discussed this last year, Unstable Weirdos and Business Success. Businesses do not like brilliant and creative people. They want “team members” and people who don’t upset things. The reason that the business community spends so much time talking about “innovation” and “disruption” is because they don’t actually do these things. Their fascination with the concepts is indicative of their desire to harness them without being affected by them. They want, for example, an employee who will work until two in the morning — but not if that means he won’t be clean-shaven at his desk at nine each morning.

So I can well imagine that Taibbi and First Look was always a questionable idea. For one thing, Taibbi does not strike me as the management kind of guy. He seems more like the kind of person who is completely useless as a leader and a follower. Those two attributes tend to go together. People have the wrong idea about leaders. Great leaders are normally great followers because they accept the idea of hierarchy. But truly idiosyncratic people are usually hopeless as leaders because they have no use for hierarchy. So if First Look really wanted to work with Taibbi, it should have set up a kind of “round table” where he was first among equals.

It’s funny that this is more or less what happened at The Intercept where Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill are running the show with John Cook as editor-in-chief. And even they admit in the article that they had problems of this sort with First Look Media. In fact, Cook and Taibbi seem to have been going through a lot of the same stuff, including a three-month hiring freeze last April — a strange move for a magazine that is being built. (The Intercept launched two months earlier, so it wasn’t quite as big a deal for Cook.) But this was apparently worked out. And then came another decision that strikes me as totally Silicon Valley and very funny:

Let me translate: “We don’t know what to do so we are throwing out a bunch of jargon to justify taking control away from the people doing the work; the hope is that things will somehow work out.” So eventually, First Look Media used an employee complaint (that is widely disputed) about Taibbi yelling at a worker to fire him.

The article — written by Greenwald, Poitras, Scahill, and Cook — took pains to say that they were all happy at The Intercept. But the whole thing doesn’t speak well of the enterprise. I’m sure that as long as The Intercept is growing and profitable, there will be no problem. But fundamentally, it will be treated the way that all media companies are treated. Clearly, the brand is “speaking truth to power.” I’m not sure how profitable that will be. And that is all that matters in Silicon Valley, just as surely as it is in the clothes hanger industry. The only thing that is different is that the people in Silicon Valley are so deluded they think they are different.