Two Sides

Someone is saying there are two models of innovation. Some people say innovation is simply an investment, and that anybody can do it with enough money. Others say it is simply difficult, that good ideas are merely rare and it's just hard to innovate.

They're both wrong.

Where Does Innovation Come From?

Innovation comes from creativity and focus. Creativity is the willingness to try different ideas and map them onto what you are working on. Focus is the ability to turn away even great ideas in order to develop a clear, simple, easy-to-use product. This approach produces iconic results that are valid for the market because it's obvious what their benefits are. This is the fearless approach.

If you have the right mindset, this technique is not as difficult as it looks. But your typical fat corporate entity operates based on fear: the fear of failure, the fear of being fired because you are a renegade, the fear of trying new things because if it ain't broke, don't fix it. In such a world, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down quick.

That's not my world, and I have great sympathy for people who live in that world yet still want to break out and be creative. But consider where they might be working.

Large corporate environments are afraid to take the creative angle on a product. They will stick with what works, and if they are not successful this often means slavishly copying what is already successful. They are afraid of trying something new.

Large corporations operate according to a time-tested investment technique: diversity. The more diverse the investment, the lower the chance of failure. Once again, this is a fear-based choice.

This technique is fundamentally incompatible with focus because you want to diversify your product portfolio, like Sony, which makes thousands of products. Their motivation is to satisfy each market individually to achieve 100% penetration into their marketplaces: there's a product for everybody.

Unfortunately, this technique can't really work. When you aren't focused on a small number of products, you unintentionally water down the quality of each one. Pretty soon nobody wants your products because their design is diluted, their user experience is lowest-common-denominator, and their quality is simply insufficient.

But let's take the flip-side of the argument: the focused, iconic result doesn't always prevail. In order to make this approach work, you have to do almost everything right. The product must necessarily have a really important hook, a life-changing aspect to it.

Once in a Generation

Game-changing ideas seem to come only once per generation. Like a bolt from the blue they make people think differently about their world. They transform daily life, business, and even relationships.

When the iPhone came out, I compared it with holding the future in your hands. It is true that before the iPhone, almost all smartphone devices employed a small screen and had a keyboard. The idea of using a touchscreen device in everyday life was suddenly upon us.

Some say that all information should be free. That technology is free and that once something can be demonstrated, it becomes fair game for everyone. Some say that music, books, movies must all be free.

They are wrong.

All of these forms of content and invention take time and effort to develop. They are the result of sweat from the brows of many good people. A writer of a book generally believes that their content is their own and that they should in fact be paid for their contributions to the art.

But like the baker who gives away the tasty samples so you will go get more, sometimes the artist will release one of their works in a form that can be shared. But that doesn't mean that all their works should be shared as well.

The same is true of the intellectual property that makes advances in technology.

How To Compete?

The best way to compete with innovation is to innovate. Show your best. All ideas don't have to look the same.

But to do that, you have to be able to support both innovation and focus. This means that you will have to start doing things in a very different way. This means the very structure of your corporation must be different. The very way of developing must change.

Personally, I'm don't really believe that most corporations are up to the task.

You will have to rebuild your corporation from the ground up, step by step. Each incorrect layer might be a mistake, so you should be very careful how you do this.

But, make no mistake, it can be done. For instance, Microsoft has shown that the iconic iPhone interface is not the only valid interface. It can be countered by using good ideas and taking a chance. Being fearless. But Microsoft, with its Windows-based corporate mentality, has a long way to go!

Hackers, Part 5: Gauss

You are going to love this. The era of state-supported cyber-espionage using highly modular virus platforms is here.

There is a highly modular virus out there! This virus platform (which by the way is the new way of thinking about viruses) can install new modules on demand. It is descended from Stuxnet, Flame, and Duqu. As you might have read, Flame is able to access local networks, fit itself into a thumb drive to move from computer to computer, list and extract interesting data, and communicate that data back to the host. It can categorize and store within sequestered networks, waiting for a moment when it gets carried out by hand aboard a thumb drive, and when the command-in-control (CIC) host is once again available. When the CIC hosts get shut down (as they always are) then it can wait for the new CIC host to handshake, and resume working just as it would always do.

Oh, and it is resident on quite a few computers in the middle east that run Windows 7, XP, Vista, and other 32-bit versions of Windows. It has several known MD5 certificates as well.

The new virus is called Gauss, named after Karl Friedrich Gauss, a prodigy mathematician and progenitor of so many new ideas I can't even list them. It has modules named after other mathematicians, such as Godel and Lagrange.

I am a math nerd from way back, and this strikes an interesting chord with me.

Endless Speculation

The Gauss virus is intended, it seems, to extract information from those using Lebanese banks. My bet is that it is simply used in intelligence gathering. They want to harvest the information off somebody's computer from afar. This is because of the nature of the modules that the virus has in it, so it probably is the right answer.

But what does the creator of this virus need this information?

I can't help but notice that this seems to come at a critical time in the Syrian civil war. The Iranians want to keep Assad in power it and, controlling Hezbollah, they also control Lebanon. Lovely!

Point 1: Lebanon is right next door to Syria, and all those Lebanese politicians were assassinated (remember Hariri?) in secret plots hatched out of Iranian ally and puppet, Syria. Point 2: Lebanese commerce is a great way to get weapons and supplies into Syria. Without making it look like Iran is doing that. Point 3: Iran will need to have people and politicians in place when and if Assad falls. So, follow the money.

Anyway, point made. The authors of this virus, likely either Israel or the US, are interested in the region. Hell, if I were them, I would be too!

Oh, perhaps it is simply aimed at Iranian money men as part of a coordinated attack. Still, timing-wise it might be of interest to some nation-state interested in how supplies and weapons are being continually supplied to Syria. But why not fly them in? Hmm.

So, what kind of new modules does this virus have?

Gauss

This appears to be interested in the browser. So much online banking happens through secure browser interfaces. This module installs browser cookies and special plugins that likely co-opt the security of the browser so information can be intercepted more easily.

It looks for cookies. What cookies is it interested in? The ones associated with banking, of course! It needs to know that the user is also a client of one of several banks. These include Lebanese bank keywords like bankofbeirut, blombank, byblosbank, citibank, fransabank, and creditlibanais. Oh, it is also interested in PayPal, Mastercard, Eurocard, Visa, American Express, Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, gmail, hotmail, eBay, and maktoob.

It is quite clever, loading the IE browser history and then extracting passwords and text fields from cached pages. Jeez! Does that work? Shame on you Microsoft!

Lagrange

This curious module installs a new Palida Narrow TrueType font, for what purpose is currently unknown! It appears to be a perfectly good font. Hmm.

Godel or Kurt

This module cleverly infects USB drives with the data-stealing module. This is how the virus works its way into sequestered networks. Sequestered networks are separate from the internet by virtue of physical discontinuity. So the virus has a special form that lives there and can migrate its data back through thumb drives to the outside world. Quite ingenious!

To infect the thumb drives, it puts a desktop.ini file in that exploits the LNK vulnerability. This data is in target.lnk, in the same directory.

It also searches for malware-detecting products and exits if they are present. This could be the best way to prevent it from propagating. It also doesn't work on Windows 7 Service Pack 1.

The Most Interesting Part

There is speculation that the Gauss virus contains a "warhead" that only deploys when the virus becomes embedded in a specific computer that is not connected with the internet. They can't tell what it is, because it's encrypted and the analyzers (Kaspersky Labs) don't know the key. This is serious voodoo.

Paper

I have a piece of paper on my desk, and it is white, 8.5" by 11", letter size. I have a pen in my hand, and I draw on the paper in clean crisp lines. Oops, that line was wrong, so I can zoom in within the paper, using a reverse-pinch, and correct the line using more pen strokes. I can dropper white or black from the paper to draw in white or black for correction.

But, if I really don't like that line, I can undo it and try again. All on what appears to be a regular piece of paper!

Wait, this is just like a paint app on an iPad!

Yes, this is how paper will be in the future: just a plain piece of paper. Plus.

The drawing can be finished and cleaned up and then saved using an extremely simple interface. Touching the paper with my finger brings up this interface. Touching the paper with the pen allows me to draw.

When I bring up the interface, I can save the drawing. Into the cloud.

Smaller and Smaller

How did this come to be? Simple: miniaturization.

I think the computer concept, stemming from WW II and afterwards, is the transformative concept of our lifetimes. The web, though amazingly useful, is just an offshoot of computing; it's a natural consequence. We have seen computers go from house-sized monstrosities during the war to room-sized beasts during the 50s and 60s to refrigerator-sized cabinets with front-panel switch-based consoles in the 70s to TV-sized personal computers in the 80s to portable laptops in the 90s to handheld items in the 2000s to wearable items in the 2010s.

It's perfectly clear to me where this is going.

Computers are going to be embedded in everyday objects in our lifetime. When I was born, computers were room-sized and required punched cards to communicate with them. When I die, computers will be embedded in everything and will require but a word or a touch to make them do what we require.

Gadgetizing Ordinary Objects

In the future, the world I live in has objects with their own ability to compute, like modern gadgets, but they are impossibly thin, apparently lacking a power source, and can transmit and receive effortlessly through the ether into the cloud. So, let's summarize what they need in order to be a full-functioning gadget:

1. computation - a processor or a distributed system of computation
2. imaging - the ability to change its appearance, at least on the surface
3. sensing - the ability to respond to touch, light, sound, movement, location
4. transmission/reception - the ability to communicate with the Internet
5. storage - the ability to maintain local data
6. power - perhaps the tiny size means the light shining on the object will be enough to power it

You know what? I don't need as many pieces of paper as I used to. This saves trees, which grow outside all over because we are no longer chopping them down except to control overgrowth. Even paper used to wrap boxes rarely exists, because the outsides of boxes also act this way.

The same paper can be used to read the local new feed or to check the weather. But, unlike a newspaper, it is updated in real time. I can even look at the satellite image.

It becomes clear that the "internet of things" is necessary to make this vision happen.

Yet To Do

It's amazing to think so, but most of this magic already works on an iPad. The only conceptual leaps that need to be made are these:

1. the display becomes a microscopically-thin layer, reflecting light rather than producing it
2. the computation, sensing, transmission, and reception must use organic, paper-thin processors
3. touch interfaces must learn to discern between fingers and pen-points
4. the paper powers itself, using capacitance or perhaps with a paper-thin power source

In 1, like existing eInk and ePaper solutions used in eBooks, power is only used to change the inherent color of a spot on the paper. Normally, power doesn't get used at all when the display is stable and unchanging. In 2, the smaller they processors are, the less power they will use. We can already envision computation at the atomic level, and also in quantum computers. In 4, maybe the light you see the paper with can power the device (a fraction of the light gets absorbed by the paper, particularly where you have drawn black).

Why Change People When We Can Change Objects

Now go through this scenario with any object you are familiar with. Why couldn't it be done using computing, imaging, sensing, transmission, storage, power, etc. ?

Things like undo, automatic save and recall, global communication, and information retrieval become the magic that is added to real-world objects. It's like a do-what-I-mean world.

But what might be different from a current iPad? Turning your image. Imagine turning your image using current applications like Painter. You can turn it using space-option to adjust the angle of the paper you are drawing onto so your pen strokes can be at ergonomic angles.

But with a paper computing device, you just turn the paper!

The ergonomics of paper use are exactly like those of existing paper, which solves some problems right off the bat.

Also imagine that you lay the paper on something and it can copy exactly what is underneath it. It's like a chameleon.

So objects like paper become more useful in the future. And we are just the same people, but we are enabled to be do so much more than we can do now. And the problems of ergonomics can be solved in the way they have already been solved: with the objects we use in everyday life.

Any solution that doesn't require the human being to change can be accepted. The easier it is, the more likely it will be accepted. The closer to the way it's already done in a non-technological way, the more likely it is that anybody can use it.

Solutions that do require the human to change, like implants, connectors, ways to "jack into" the matrix seem to me to lead to a very dystopian future. But remember there are those who are disabled and who will probably need a better way to communicate, touch, talk, hear, or see.

Hmm. I Never Thought Of That!

Cameras are interesting to make into a paper-thin format. Maybe there are some physics limitations that make this unlikely. When eyes get small, they become like fly's eyes. Perhaps some answer is to be found in mimicking that technology.

Low-power transmission is a real unknown. There may be a massive problem with not having enough power unless some resonance-based ultra-low-power transmission trick gets discovered. Perhaps there are enough devices nearby that only low-power transmission needs to be done. Maybe the desk can sense the paper, or the clipboard has a good transceiver.

And if (a fraction of) the light being used to view the device is not enough to power it? Hmm. Let's take a step back. How much power is really needed to change the state of the paper at a spot? Perhaps less power than is needed to deposit plenty of graphite atoms on the surface: the friction of contact may supply enough energy to operate the paper device. There are plenty of other sources of energy: piezoelectrics from movement, torsion, and tip pressure on the paper, heat from your hand, inductive power, the magnetic field of the earth, etc.

Still, I think that computing is becoming ubiquitous, and that one of the inevitable products of this in the future is the gadgetization of everyday objects.

Twists And Turns

Our lives are like roads. By analogy, the features of a road can be likened to different aspects of our lives. This analogy can be useful, because it can help you produce a framework for understanding what happens to you and to others.

Curves

Curves in a road are required by the local terrain to keep the road smooth enough for you to continue to navigate it properly. In our lives, the local terrain becomes the external forces that mould and shape our lives, constraining our path. Such things as our family, our mentors, the schools we went to, the jobs we worked, the people we loved, the successes we had, and the crises we went through qualify as external forces. They are a bit automatic, since they don't affect the linearity of the road (in the sequential sense that the next part of the road naturally follows what preceded). A tornado that destroys your home is a terrible thing, but if you survive, you rebuild or move and life goes on.

Hills

Hills in a road, where steepness is increased, require you to use more energy to continue at the same pace. Life, on the other hand, can get more difficult for you if you break a leg. Then you may have to work twice as hard to get where you are going. Periods of economic austerity, requiring you to work two jobs at once, or a period when you go to school at the same time as working a job are good examples of such difficulties. Even when you have a baby and you get awakened at all hours of the night can make life more difficult in the short term. Not that it isn't wonderful!

Turns

When you take a turn at a fork in the road, you are making a decision in what would otherwise be an unchanging linear path. In our lives, such a decision, through causality, might completely affect what follows just as taking that turn on the road might very well alter your destination.

Decisions are the turns of our lives.

When you decide to take that job in another city, requiring a move, you have made a life-altering decision. If you take the job, then you might be turning left. If you don't take the job, then perhaps you are going straight.

If a decision is forced, then it is really more like a curve in the road. There is no opportunity to turn. Or if there is a turn there, perhaps it is blocked with those orange cones.

But, like on the road, we find that, in life, doing the hard thing can sometimes produce better results than simply taking the easy path.

All Roads Lead to Rome

There are certainly reasons to believe that not all decisions will completely alter what follows. This is because, often, all roads lead to the same place. It's just that they arrive there by a different path. And this is not an insignificant aspect of life.

Overpasses

Sometimes you must pass over another road, or under. In life, sometimes things happen externally that don't affect you, like a vacation that everybody else went on. They just pass you by. Sometimes it seems that there's no point to an overpass, but it does help to address the problem of crossings. In life, things can happen in parallel that might ordinarily affect each other through sequestering. Perhaps these are more like lanes in a road.

Twists

Still, largely, roads are embedded in the plane: the surface of the earth is locally a planar topology, though globally it wraps around. When a turn becomes too complicated to embed in the plane (like a road normally is), it becomes a twist. This is akin to what happens when everything in your life turns upside-down. Nothing makes sense. You lose your bearings.

But also, on a road, there can be unnecessary complications: the right lane turns left and the left lane turns right. This is sometimes forced by the multi-level nature of roads, or by the requirements of a turning radius.

You see, unnecessary complications do happen and they are a consequence of things getting too complicated to treat in a simple way. Perhaps they are the result of bad planning. But, as they say, in a battle the plan is the first casualty.

The topology of life is an unrelenting problem and things can get hopelessly tangled up so they can't be separated. We have talked about knots and weaving, fabric and rings, but the humble road is such a good analogy for life, because of its sequentiality. There is something calming about driving a nice straight road. In a similar sense, life seems to be at its best when it is simple.

It's best not to have too many twists in your life. It seems that breakdowns occur when life gets too complicated.

But life does not always comply with our wishes for simplicity.

Roads have another feature: the dead end. This is a place where the road can go no further, at least, in this direction. In life this is simply death, of course.

Me, I think I'll drive onto the ferry and find more road!

Curiosity

Someone once said that curiosity killed the cat. But that's really giving a bad reputation to a key form of behavior that has distinguished humankind ever since the invention of fire. And, it turns out, one of the main ingredients of creativity is curiosity.

You see, in order to put things together that normally might not go together and create something new and distinctive, one has to be curious about lots of things. Becoming a semi-expert in several fields is the domain of the generalist, the polymath, the renaissance person.

Let's consider an example: quantum physics always interested me because there is quite a similarity to group theory in the modeling of bosons and hadrons and their decomposition into quarks. Learning about one can help in understanding the other. And, well, number theory has a lot in common with group theory as well.

Companies

But companies can't really consist of a lot of polymaths. So a company does the next best thing and it puts together lots of people who are experts in their fields. And then it binds them to a task that keeps them concentrating on the company's goals. High-level executives should probably be polymaths, though, because they will have to know a little bit about all the technologies within their domain in order to do a good job. And they will have to put them together into the proper path for the company. They make the goals that the experts within the company relentlessly pursue. They see the value of research, albeit limited, within areas that might be immensely profitable in the long term.

What to be Curious About

Now let's discuss one of the ramifications of curiosity for business: top-down management can only work when the top person is curious and willing to consider lots of things. Though, this doesn't mean you have to boil the ocean to find the next greatest thing. But it does mean that you have to at least pursue the things you may find that bear on your goals, even when they seem to be unrelated. The trick is deciding which of them to prune away, and how quickly to do that.

What is there to be curious about these days? Well, this is the domain of the futurist. Which future technologies will bear on your business? If you are running an automotive business, then the mechanics and synergy of hybrid drives is one area to be curious about. And to have active research into. But if you are thinking even farther ahead, you should be very curious about all-electric vehicles and technologies that bear on them. This would include batteries, supercapacitors, fuel cells, new low-power processors and their use in distributed control techniques, the inclusion of camera technology and object-recongnition technology.

Redundancy vs. Simplicity

When you build a car or a gadget or even a company, the most important thing is that it should not break down and thus fail to achieve its intended use. This means you have to be curious about techniques for redundancy (because parts break down and so you can use multiple parts to support and back up each other to achieve a higher mean time between failures) and simplicity (because the fewer parts something has, the less there is to go wrong, and the more reliable it will be). And you should be curious about how these two contrasting principals trade off against each other. But this also means you have to fight a battle at two fronts: making things more reliable and making parts more simple by combining them.

Consumables

In the modern day, minimization of the use of consumables becomes a priority. In the ecological sense, this means using fewer things that can't be recycled. In the energy sense, this means having devices use less power to achieve their intended uses. Executives should be curious about these things because they are becoming increasingly important. For the auto executive, this comes from the increasing rarity of fossil fuels, and the implications for their rising costs. For the gadget executive, this comes from the trend towards mobile computing, and the subsequent use of batteries.

Energy becomes a consumable in both cases. But, within the discipline of batteries, we are learning more quickly in the gadget world than we are in the automotive world, I think. This has spawned techniques in distributed processing and custom chip design.

Modeling: Vision and Execution

It is important to be curious about the modeling of things. Let's consider a real-life model for a business and how that has led to immense success.

It was once said to me (I was a CEO at the time, and this was said by another CEO) that a company cannot be both a hardware company and a software company simultaneously: it was a recipe for failure. Well, Apple has proven this maxim to be utterly false. One side of Apple is curious about the vision of the coolest, easiest devices. The other side of Apple is curious about how best to manufacture them to meet inevitable user demand: it's all about vision and execution.

Apple's model of creating the coolest hardware along with the easiest-to-use software is a winning solution. This took decades of work, though, to prove it: Steve Jobs operated with conviction and so he has been proven right.

And this model appears to be right because it is true that the greatest profit can be extracted when you do this. Yet, and this is massively important, this model is not sustainable unless you perfect your ability to execute. And Steve knew this, which is undoubtedly why he hired Tim Cook. Tim has brought the science of supply chain management, manufacturing, and sales to a high art through his superlative logistics expertise. This is not something easily accomplished.

Not Being Curious

The downside of not being curious is that your products will be quickly obsoleted by those companies that have leaders that are curious. And apparently it doesn't matter how much money you have. If you are not curious enough to figure out the model, the technologies, and thus the mechanics of disruption, then you yourself become disrupted by an opponent with the ability to execute.

Vision counts. When you lack the innate curiosity to form a vision, you lose.

Hackers, Part 4: Flame

Remember World War II? Well I don't, because I wasn't alive then! But seriously there is a story or two from WWII that caught my attention a few years ago. In particular, the story of Bletchley Park, of the Enigma cipher and of the mathematicians that broke the code. This heroic story was repeated in several places simultaneously, like the Hawaii-based group that helped break the Japanese Naval cipher JN-25, resulting in a decisive victory at the Battle of Midway. And they were in turn aided by Dutch and British groups.

It was the code breakers at Bletchley Park that pioneered progress in computers, with Claude Shannon and Alan Turing. Often only a nation-state has vast resources and is willing to do the research and gather the best people to make that progress. A similar thing happened at Los Alamos with the Manhattan Project, only on a much larger scale, and in a different field.

With hacking, a similar thing happens. Though individual hackers are very resourceful, the majority of their capabilities builds on the shoulders of others. The zero-day exploits are available on the web. The tools for hacking are available on warez sites. Capture one virus and disassemble it, then modify it. No, individuals rarely are the sharp point on the spear of progress in the really hard problems. They may make discoveries, but not usually the breakthroughs. It has been the nation-state that usually makes that progress and funds the research. The US has a very secret organization based in Fort Meade, Maryland that does this research in signals gathering and code breaking, called the NSA. While long ago this used to jokingly called No Such Agency, today it is simply known as the National Security Agency.

An Impressive Attack

With the Flame virus, the successor to the Stuxnet virus, a very interesting thing happened. The virus posed as a Windows update to be installed, and contained a rogue Microsoft certificate authority. To create this, the virus' creators had to mount a successful attack on the venerable MD5 hash algorithm. This attack allowed them to generate a collision, a file that generates the same hash code as the original plain text.

Such an attack is somewhat time-consuming, and depends upon generating a prefix (called a chosen prefix) that two files have in common. Then the rest of the two files (their suffixes) are adjusted so that they generate the same hash code. This is only part of the attack. Then it becomes clear that, to forge a certificate authority, it is necessary to guess the prefix of the certificate (which Microsoft has probably made it easy to do by generating them in sequential order) and then it is just a matter of having the right amount of computer time to perform a suffix search.

This could be months of computer time, or years, depending on how sophisticated the suffix-generation algorithm is.

This sounds like a world-class attack, not really possible without the resources of a nation state. In the case of Flame, this nation state is the United States. And thus it is highly likely that the NSA has something to do with Flame.

When I heard this, actually I was thinking way to go US. Why? Because I was tired of hearing of all the cyberwar attacks from China and Russia. I was tired of thinking that we were way behind in the US. It looks like both Stuxnet and Flame were the joint product of the US and Israel. If we are on the attack, then we are also on the defensive and that's a good thing.

But there is an inherent danger in the technology of Stuxnet and Flame: it becomes public.

One of the main techniques of the individual hacker, as I mentioned before, is the modification of an existing virus to create a new one. This has already been done with Stuxnet, and soon with Flame. This will cause a serious acceleration of hackers' capabilities. Even in other nation-states.

In particular, it is possible that MD5 is now completely insecure, which will be a real problem for business.

Of course, the other possibility was that Microsoft actually helped the agency responsible for this hack. And actually, I think it may be even more likely that this is true than it might possibly be true that a serious breach of MD5 has occurred. Hmm.

Which one it is remains to be seen.

And you thought that was the interesting part? Well, there are plenty of interesting parts to the Flame virus. In particular, its goals.

Goals

This Flame virus (also known as Skywiper) is intended to infect machines in Iran and gather intelligence. Which it does by hijacking Windows 7 server. And it did this by forging the authority certificate so it could masquerade as a certified Microsoft update to Windows 7 server. Flame has been in the wild since October 2010.

How It Functions

This impressive virus, contained in an executable called Flamer.A commandeers machines on the network and installs various modules for intelligence gathering. They are organized into at least 39 modules, many of them written in LUA. Another incredible analysis of Flamer.A. The known and understood modules are listed below. It makes interesting reading for any student of computer security.

Autorun_infector

This creates the autorun.inf file. This spoofs sutorun.ini, which causes an insertable medium to automatically run. This is commonly used in installers to make it totally automatic.

Beetlejuice

This component uses a bluetooth card, if one exists, in the infected machine to discover any bluetooth devices like phones and other gadgets. Turns the computer into a discoverable bluetooth device so other devices will interact with it.

Boost

Compiles a list of files that appear to be of interest to Flame's creators. This module leaks whole files, like CAD (.dwg) and pictures (.jpg).

Boot_DLL_loader

This is a configuration module, and it contains the list of modules that can be run on this particular infected computer.

Flask

This module extracts local information from the computer that profiles it and its user. Stuff like the names and serial numbers of the volumes, the name of the computer, a list of applications installed, open TCP/IP connections, DNS servers used, files and history from Internet Explorer, contact lists, and even whether the user has a mobile phone. The data is assembled and encrypted using RC4 and also an additional base64 algorithm of unspecified nature. The product data is sent over HTTP in a compressed form.

Jimmy

Looks for documents with extensions like .doc, .docx, .xls, .ppt, etc. and assembles and encrypts them for delivery.

Euphoria

This creates a special desktop.ini and target.lnk file, useful as a clever way of launching Flame automatically when the machine starts up.

Frog

This component actively infects computers within the local network. It uses backdoor accounts named "HelpAssistant", created by Limbo.

Gadget

This component is the one that acts like a legal Windows update server.

Gator

This component connects with the command and control server. In other words, it reports back to its masters. It sends all the collected data back. The data is stored in a database named StorageProducts. The product is the leaked data, of course. In Flame's sophisticated approach, data is graded by desirability. Documents (collected by Jimmy) have highest desirability, CAD drawing files are in the middle, and JPEG files (collected by Boost) are at the bottom. If the database gets filled with leaked pictures, they will get thrown out and replaced by more valuable documents.

In restricted networks, a clever technique is used. When the virus spreads, a message is kept which indicates which computers can connect with the command and control server. The data transmission then happens via USB sticks, which get infected by the Euphoria component. When a computer sees a USB thumb drive, and it can connect with the command and control server, then it reads and sends the data collected on the restricted network computer.

All server communication is done in encrypted form so it can't be detected easily.

In an amazing twist, this module can also download new modules from the command and control server, which keeps the virus current, particularly when new threats are noticed or when bugs have been found and fixed.

Headache

This module contains a configuration that customizes the particular personality of the attack against the infected computer and its network.

Infectmedia

This component decides which is the best method for infecting media, such as USB thumb drives, with Flame for the purposes of propagation. This includes the possibility of using the Autorun mechanism, or the Euphoria mechanism. Also, the stolen data (the contents of a StorageProducts database) that is stored on the USB drive is in a file called dot ("."). This particular name looks like the current directory to Windows and this simple trick ensures that it can't be opened or displayed!

Limbo

This creates new accounts in the other machines in the network with the innocuous name "HelpAssistant" if possible and if the right privileges are available to the module. These become backdoors.

Microbe

This component records audio from built-in microphones. It examines all the multimedia devices and selects the appropriate recording device.

Munch

This component provides the binary certificate of a Windows server. An HTTP server which responds to /view.php and /wpad.dat (Web Proxy Autodiscovery) requests. So this basically helps to fool the DNS search for a Windows update server.

Rear Window

This is a spying component.

Many spying capabilities have been detected in Flame. For example, it installed keystroke recording malware, took pictures with the computers' webcams, accessed machines' microphones to intercept Skype conversations, make screen captures, and it even used Bluetooth to access local cellphones and extract contacts!

Security

This module detects processes and programs that might be harmful to Flame. This is used to pause Flame when the processes are around, to avoid detection of things like a wholesale directory search.

Snack

This module pays close attention to the network traffic. It logs NetBIOS Name Service (NBNS) packets, which helps the virus to determine which computers can be spread to. Sometimes this module only runs when Munch is run.

Spotter

This contains all the scanning modules. Network scanning, file system scanning, multimedia device scanning, etc.

Suicide

This component removes the virus from the infected computer when the command and control server gives the word. Flame maintains a stealthy profile by cleaning up after itself.

Telemetry

This is the keystroke logging component.

Transport

This contains all the ability to replicate the virus. Copying the files, packaging them into an auto-installing file, etc. The ability to change filename and extension of each transported file is a clever part of this module.

Weasel

This module prepares a list of all the files on the infected computer. It is careful to pause whenever a process runs that might be looking for a suspicious search of the entire computer's file system, as determined by Security.

Winding River

Life is a winding river flowing through the events of our life and the river's course, its bends, and forks are like the decisions we make and also the ones we are compelled to make by external forces outside our control.

You see, metaphor is a very powerful method of depiction, indeed.

The presentation of symbols in illustration is a natural method, and it is used in more drawings than I can count. It has been used in paintings since the medium was invented. I suppose initial paintings were quite literal: pictures of animals that were hunted and the tribe and their weapons. But one iconic form appears: the outline of a human hand. This is the artist's signature and simple metaphor for "I painted this", usually done in berry juice. The hand is a symbol, a relic, of the artist himself or herself.

In a recent blog entry, Back to Drawing, I introduced a concept sketch of a banner which, laden with symbology, was a metaphor for a singular event. In this post, I present two more banners that also further the concept of metaphor in illustration.

Here is the first banner, the winding river. In the sky are the Pleiades, also known as the seven sisters (although eight are shown: what do you make of that?).

I have used a digital woodcut technique for this banner, as it is my style of late, and I also employed a technique of colored chiaroscuro for suggesting distance.

The river cuts deep channels through the rock, suggesting that, downstream, greater and greater effects are made as the river gains volume from the tributaries and momentum from its rush from the mountains. In this way our works gain momentum and have greater and greater effects through the course of our lives.

My symbolic suggestion is that the stars have some influence on the path of the river, and thus of life. The seven sisters are known for their ability to impart divine knowledge and wisdom. The wisdom that governs our works.

A river's flow is known and set, and rarely changes over the course of a hundred years. The lay of the land it flows through will determine its course, like the situation our lives occur in and also the examples set for us which can influence our own acts in life.

But sometimes a river meets a point where the terrain shifts suddenly, and the course is altered in an abrupt free fall. This is the subject of the second banner.

Ah, the waterfall. When something comes down as a result of the force of gravity, it always reminds me of an avalanche. Because I have survived one.

This notion of a river rushing and going over the edge is a powerful one. I have shown the waterfall with the steps leading up to it: a dangerous and tenuous set of stairs leading to the top. At the top, are railings so you can see the rushing river as it plunges.

It reminds me of Vernal falls in Yosemite. I have been to the top and I have seen the rushing river. The rock slopes to the river are a channel cut deep, with slopes that make them quite dangerous. Since the rock is wet, they can be slippery and people have been known to circumvent the railing so they could be photographed in a dangerous position, and then subsequently fall into the rushing river where they were simply and hopelessly carried over the edge to fall over 300 feet to their inevitable death.

The waterfall is the symbol of life out of control. Events which you cannot control force your life into a specific direction. The path seems implacable, cut deeply into rock. The forces that drag you along are unstoppable.

I have placed the moon in the dark sky to light the scene.

Using the digital woodcut technique, I employ lines of black against white or white against black. Then I sculpt them into channels that taper, by working from one end in white and the other end in black.

Here is a close-up of the first banner, done at a high resolution.

I find it interesting to create three-dimensional forms using this kind of shading. I then employ a gel layer to add the color. Usually its just a color-by-numbers kind of approach, using Digital Airbrush. But this time, I used Just Add Water to create a continuum of color in the river, and also in the hills in the foreground. It does resemble scratchboard-watercolor, a favorite look.

The gel layer allows me to rework the color without affecting the black-and-white shading layer, of course.

Actually one layer you don't see is the sketch layer that lays underneath. It contains the original sketch, which I shade over to create the image.

Here is the sketch for the Pleiades banner. My sketch is a rough indication of what I want, but I worked on a layer directly on top of the sketch to flesh out the banner.

As you can see, the river might have been drawn as a winding road, but I thought a river to be better because of the inevitable draw of gravity as the metaphorical force of destiny on our lives.

I added the small tributary (shown in the close-up above) as another allusion to the metaphor of decisions and their effect on the course of causality.

Someday, I might put a tassel onto the banner.

Oh, and I forgot my chop marks! ;-)