Ray Kurzweil was asked in a silicon.com interview, will machines ever have souls?

He dismissed the soul as mere "consciousness."

Endless (thus far) theological argument finessed, he danced blithely onward to assert that consciousness is the result of emergent complexity, and that given sufficient complexity, consciousness will emerge in machine systems.

Tuesday the Christian Science Monitor offered other nonprofit, church-sponsored newspapers one business and publication path from death on paper to digital survival on the Web.

The Monitor announced that in April, 2009, it will save millions in printing/circulation costs by becoming the first national newspaper to discard daily print publication in favor of continuously updated online publication.

From Wal-Mart we learn that recession is no time to slow retail technology spending.

Bill Collins of DecisionPoint Media Insights writes that with Wal-Mart in-store TV deployed starting a decade ago, Gen 2.0 of the Wal-Mart Smart Network is on the way.

Already quietly deployed in some form to 40 Wal-Mart stores, Collins says the minimum Gen 2.0 in-store TV features are:

1. Bring screens down to eye level.
2. Build screens into endcaps, fixtures and shelving.
3. Abandon the 2001-2002 "hang and bang" model where flat screens are hung nilly-willy around the store, mostly in locations that are difficult for shoppers to see.
4. Control audio so that the soundtrack of these networks is welcomed by shoppers and store employees alike.
5. Pack merchandise around the screens and speakers, so that the sound-and-motion media serves a useful purpose for both marketing and merchandising just as conventional Point-of-Purchase displays do.

The details may not be available until November. Whatever those prove to be, Collins made no mention of the kind cellphone-aware, twitteresque customer interaction so dear to my fellow Social Network Systems developers.

But I know Collins is aware of the potential.

If Wal-Mart doesn't implement it, someone bidding for a competitive edge against them is, IMHO, sure to try. Such is the fight for retail survival.

When @MarsPhoenix tweeted that the "chunks of bright stuff" it was watching had "Sublimated!" and so had to be water ice, I could hear my elder son. He was saying, "Dad, I tried to tell you."

His convictions about extraterrestrial life have been somewhat prescientific, but now George Rankin and I can be of one mind as we await the inevitable news of (probably microbial) life on Mars.

You all know that GR's passion for the extraterrestrial has me buying alien abduction lamps for him and for his brother Jack.

Yes, that is a plaything, and this is real.

Below is an animated ".gif" from NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University showing the sublimation of ice to water vapor in the trench dug on Mars by Phoenix:

I'm not sure my sons know that their Frink and Hinnant great grandfathers and I had long, happy debates over the likelihood and prospective nature of extraterrestrial life. On Mars, where none of the three of us expected to find abandoned cities, and elsewhere.

I told them, too, the way George Rankin told me, and they were exactly as patient with me as I have been with my sons.

Now I yearn to have my sons and their Frink and Hinnant great grandfathers here with me to celebrate as Phoenix spins generations of scientific dreamstuff into the fabric of well-verified realities.

If my occasional fits of Web-surfing fumble fingers began dumping me summarily on pages of ads and self-proclaimed "search options," I would't put up with it.

Those pages are an imposition. The Domain Name System disruption they involve breaks some Internet services because it returns a live URL when it should return " NXDOMAIN." And they can be dangerous. To protect myself, I would:

First, find the opt out button for that ads&searches page, if there were one, and opt out.

Second, make a reasonable effort to learn whose page it was. Those pages are usually a "service" your Internet Services Provider misnames "typo correction," and clearly identified in some way as theirs.

Third, complain to my ISP. If they were identifiably the sponsor of the misservice, I would protest. Otherwise, I would report it as an error. It may be worse than that. As noted by Danny McPherson, director of security research for Arbor Networks, there several ways DNS can be used against you. Whatever the cause, be sure your ISP knows network kidnapping is unacceptable to you.

Fourth, having lost confidence in the Domain Name System provider who blighted my day, I would surf to OpenDNS, create an account, register my network and turn off typo correction. "Typo correction" is one name for that browser-kidnapping misservice, and at OpenDNS you can quite reliably turn it off.

As I write, I find no evidence that Time Warner is still disrupting the network in this way, although they did experiment with it and could still be doing so in areas I have not probed.

Earthlink, Comcast, Verizon and a long list of others apparently are, however, and OpenDNS is the most readily applied solution I have found to both stop the browser kidnapping and avoid the potential dangers it poses.

If you register and search among the users, you will find me there.

Imagine a world in which the phone is always answered. Yet no one says "wrong number" when it is, and where every answering voice strives to be whomever you might have called.

It isn't hell.

It is a fully realized vision of the Web according to Comcast, Earthlink, Verizon and the other Internet Service Providers who are working to reroute every Web surfing URL mistake (at the foundation a wrong number) to pages of profitable advertising.

Earthlink has had the British company Barefruit doing this profitable work for them since 2006. I wonder what they were thinking. Network security researcher Dan Kaminsky of IOActive found and last week demonstrated a sweepingly dangerous security bug in their live code (they've fixed it). It was the kind of security hole which can see your personal resources fly irretrievably away down the data pipe.

The award for best impersonation of intended destinations goes, thus far, to the Internet domain registrar Network Solutions Inc. On April 8, TechKrunch and GotGame caught Network Solutions injecting unmapped subdomains into the domains users had tried for and missed -- not all domains, but domains among those hosted by Network Solutions.

It appears to my non-lawyer eyes to have been perfectly legal. In fact it was customer-approved by a passage in the contract for hosting services, althought it created for a while an illustrative faux GotGame page which embodied what Kaminsky [PPT slides] called the "Times Square effect:"

When you see Times Square in a movie, that's not Times Square. All ads have been replaced, because there's no contractual obligation not to replace them

Perfectly outrageous too then, fulfilling in small the nightmare of wrong numbers which answer and skillfully impersonate whomever we intended to call.

The corporations involved refer to each arrangement as "a service," as though it really were and none of us would think otherwise.

Paul Vixie, one of the creators of the technologies at stake here, put a pin right in that odd balloon recently in a comment to the DNS Operations mail group:

I think the issue there is more that Earthlink has deployed a totally annoying system that's slow, has no way to opt-out (short of making users change their DNS) and generally doesn't work. Not even to mention that it offers users no benefits. ... What's most surprising to me is that Earthlink of all ISPs is doing this. Maybe they are just trying to prove why users need network neutrality (groan, I know).

Assuming we are loathe to live in a world where wrong numbers incessantly mislead us into useless interaction, and may expose us to daunting security risks, we do have to speak up.

People sometimes run for president in part to make worthwhile reforms sought by their supporters.

Isn't this one of those reforms?

Let's ask.

The editor of an ecclesiastical newspaper was up past midnight in Israel a few months ago, trying to post an Editor's Journal blog.

Here in Raleigh I watched through an encrypted shell connection as his blog server smoothly delivered services to users somewhere, while on the same machine a Firefox browser misinformed me that the site was down. On a second machine, my Wireshark network analyzer argued that the "site-down" messages were coming from what presented itself as one of a major ISP's Domain Name System servers -- not from the Southern Connections blog server.

Everaldo Coelho and YellowIcon

GNU Lesser General Public License

Domain Name System (DNS) servers translate human-friendly names like southernconnections.com, which we can remember and use, into numerical Internet addresses like 207.243.70.226, which are required by the machines which drive Internet services.

Hoping to duck around what to my eye was a species DNS blockage, I fed Firefox a carefully crafted mixture of numerical internet address and text, only to be dumped onto a page of ads. Whereupon I turned to the Wireshark machine and we dug out the owner of the ad page's domain name -- a British company called Barefruit.

That's when I began growling at myself about ISP techs who misconfigure DNS manipulation software.

EarthLink, for example, has used Barefruit since August of 2006 to return Web pages full of search terms and advertising when a DNS server can't the Web page a Web surfer asked for. Usually because a case of fumble fingers on the keyboard misspelled something. That practice has a lot of ugly names, like typosquatting.

This process of creating on the fly a subdomain of an Internet domain someone else owns, and displaying ads there, is said to make Earthlink, Quest and other ISPs a lot of money. Whether that's something they should be doing is a legal and political issue. I think not, and will explore why another time.

There is also an abundance of associated legal issues which are out of my realm, but my encounters with the live process in the wild have taught me that it's not a tame technology, and can be quite aggressive. Without pointing at any particular vendor, more aggressive than it is probably intended to be.

This time, the editor was losing sleep in Israel, trying to post a blog to the Editor's Journal, and I wanted to find some configuration of my own which had provoked the beast. One I could change and send the beasat away. Being at fault myself was fine, as long as I could solve the problem.

I knew there was nothing amiss in my DNS tables (though I reviewed and tested them again to be sure). Every DNS table I set up has the protective "wildcard" entry which purveyors of this service say offers immunity.

Of course I explored use of a variety of DNS servers, finding none that were both guaranteed to quiet the issue and likely to be of use in Israel.

So I scoured the blog configuration and source code for anything that could emit the illusion of a DNS error or like provocation, and changed nothing which talked to the network. Nor did I change anything else about the messages Southern Connections' servers were emitting.

Yet the problem went away, albeit too late to make the editor's time in Israel more pleasant. It left like some nocturnal predator, padding off for inscrutable reasons to another hunting ground.

I hadn't caused or fixed it. Until Saturday when learned from Wired's Threat Level blog of Seattle network security analyst Dan Kaminsky's recent work, I wasn't sure understood it correctly.

Kaminsky showed that dozens of ISP's like and including Earthlink are using Barefruit or other, similar technologies to mount advertising on what are by some standard "unused" subdomains of live, legitimate Web presences, that security-threatening javascript was involved and other issues are in play.

Let me illustrate. For these purposes, journal.example.com is a subdomain of example.com. The "journal" subdomain is "unused" if it isn't properly recorded in the DNS tables of example.com's owners. As a result, when a DNS server is asked about journal.example.com, unless that wildcard entry I mentioned earlier is present , the DNS server answers "NXDOMAIN."

That means "no such domain" and according to those involved, that "NXDOMAIN" message is the trigger which deploys ad-rich subdomain pages to some unfortunate Web user.

Unless the editor is in Israel losing sleep, trying to post a blog entry his Web strategy requires him to publish. Then in keeping with Murphy's Law, a well-known subdomain can be interfered with in various and perhaps technologically subtle ways which amount to denial of service.

When it goes awry like that, it is expensive for companies like mine. It means sleepless nights for those of us who put our clients first, and for our clients. It is disruptive for consumers of Internet services in ways network neutrality would prevent . And in this case, as Kaminsky explained and demonstrated, the hijacking also deployed pages which were flawed in ways that endangered those who received them.

Kaminsky, who is well-known for his part in the Sony rootkit incident, was I think right to suggest that even viewed solely from a security standpoint, the process makes securing client domains problematic. It thereby threatens us all. One domain and a time.

Stumbled sword drawn into Darknet looking for the latest word on Kraken and got the sad news that proud OS X has been beheaded at a Vancouver digital security conference.

CanSecWest runs a contest called Pwn2Own which offers prize money for hacking into either a Windows, a Linux or a Mac machine, respectively, each running its latest/greatest operating system which is patched to the max.

Incredulous, I stormed over to TAW, where they told me:

Once the second-day rules went into effect for the Pwn2Own competition, allowing browser or email exploits to be used, it didn't take more than a few minutes for Charlie Miller, Jake Honoroff and Mark Daniel from ISE to get their 0day vulnerability to work on the target MacBook Air; they walk away with the laptop and the $10,000 prize.

Safari, which Apple modestly dubs "Apple's powerful Web browser," was the hole in Leopard's armor.

Of course Miller is a Mac user who apart from the money believes his efforts will make the Mac still stronger. Vulnerabilities are, after all, immediately turned over to the Zero Day Initiative and kept under wraps while vendors notified so that they can protect their customers.

Mac was first to fall last year too. I love Macs. Even if they do have more unpatched holes in their armor for longer periods of time than Windows machines. So say Swiss academic researchers.

Sigh ... . (Sheaths sword. Storms off looking for Kraken.)

Please indulge in a convulsion of virtuous Tar Heel technophilia, and sign up to do volunteer work at Wikipedia.

The North Carolina entry needs your down home, "where the weak grow strong and the strong grow great," help.

At the head of the entry is an October, 2007, note which reads "This article needs additional citations for verification."

If you require a return-on-investment rationalization, by volunteering and working hard you will almost inevitably learning something about both wiki and the workings of wiki communities.

You may even reach some business-applicable conclusions about how to apply those emerging skills to your advantage.

You may be the target of emailed spyware Easter Eggs variously posing as images from a National Geographic article by Tolstoy Ilia, imitating a "UNPO Statement of solidarity" or otherwise masquerading as useful documents.

      Ei Spirale

Public Domain

Pro-human rights groups and individuals, especially those sympathetic with the anti-China protests in Tibet, are under cyberfire from targeted, sophisticated spyware, which is being systematically altered to evade protective software.

The malware is a feat of social and software engineering which appear to be aimed at stealing not only the usual passwords, but also the activities and identities of participants in the targeted networks.

Their social engineering techniques include:

• Messages about a well-known but unnamed individual or group, with an attachment named after the individual or group, and thus inviting action.
• Superficially valid messages which are well-researched and as a result are generally believable throughout.
• Attachments which are also well-crafted and, for example, actually open as .pdf documents while also installing a keylogger. The keylogger thereafter forwards everything typed on the machine to a Chinese server.

In addition to logging and forwarding key strokes, they're collecting and forwarding passwords and other data. According to the MacAfee Avert Labs Blog those include:

• Microsoft Windows Version
• Windows Environment Strings
• MAC address
• List of the active processes, their PPID and PID
• Outlook Passwords
• Hotmail Passwords
• Deleted Outlook Account passwords
• IE Password-Protected sites passwords
• MSN Explorer Signup passwords
• IE AutoComplete Passwords
• IE Auto Complete Fields
• Cached passwords

The goal of this attacks is not vandalism, but spying.

As the author of an remarkably well-detailed F-Secure Weblog entry put it:

Somebody is trying to use pro-Tibet themed emails to infect computers of the members of pro-Tibet groups (in order to) to spy on their actions.

The identity of the attacker or attackers has apparently not been established, although Computer World reports that the FBI is investigating a possible China connection to the related Save Darfur Coalition site breakin earlier this week.

It is in fact important not to rush to a conclusion, lest we waste resources and even make new enemies defending ourselves against the wrong foe. And the available data does not appear to identify the culprit, even by defensible implication.

Greg Walton, who provides IT support for Tibetans and researches Chinese computer espionage at the University of Sunderland in the United Kingdom, put it to Information Week this way:

These attacks are sophisticated. We can only speculate where they're coming from. We can say the control servers are based in China. But these servers can just be stepping stones.

The origin of the attacks matters less than being sure you are well-protected from them. Ordinary anti-virus software is of questionable value against this foe, assuming they continue to manipulate the signature of their malware and adjust their attacks as targets harden themselves.

Yet the email-attached files must be opened by someone in order to install themselves. Sound security practice forbids opening email attachments that are not both expected and clearly identified as originating from a trusted source.

Analysis of this malware in this case clearly says that when these attacks have succeeded, it is because sound policy has either not be followed or was not implemented.

So this is a good time to review security policies and make sure everyone in your network of trust understands and adheres to them.

Attacks like these first surfaced more than half a decade ago, with the attacks since becoming steadily more sophisticated. Even if you have thus far dodged the bullet, chance favors the prepared mind (individual, organization and network). Prepare, for they will come for you good time.