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May 02

Notes from the Roundtable on Addiction at the Philoctetes Center

http://philoctetes.org/Calendar/Addiction

Addiction:

“The whole world was my problem. Consumption solves problems. Became aware.”

As a psychologist basic approach is to be a good listener.
Techniques for motivational interviewing. Psychoanalyzing the stopping language (expressed idea of quitting, levels of sincerity).

Similarities, lack of self-esteem, lack of self, self psychology. Addictive people lack a sense of self. "I am less than ok." Establishing a safe place with patient and go from there. Medication is a component of the treatment. Sedatives for sleeping and blockers "medication is a blocker". But there is a problem with maintenance drugs because they are addictive themselves. Example - Methadone.

Effectiveness of therapy? Psychological therapy vs. pharmacological?

Controlled drinking approach is taken seriously outside of US. Alcohol abusers vs. alcohol dependant.

Long term abstinence. Only 30% success rate. But hard to asses because of relapse. Willpower changes.

If you are using it is impossible to address the problems that cause the use. Brain is hijacked on (by) the substance.

Stress and drugs can physically alter regions of the brain. Relapse occurs during stress. Biological triggers.

Certain levels of conscience. Rats are similar to humans.

Establish the possibility of choice. Obsessive wanting. Very Long term memories.

Place preference. The way to measure the memories. Looking for ways to disrupt memories. Blockers. Recall the memories. Proven in rats that forget completely. Via protein blockers that are very toxic and not used in humans. Principle is clear, memory disruption is possible. Very selective approach to memory recall, other memories are intact.  Once memories are retrieved they become fragile. Memory is in active state.

Habits. Habit is reinforced by repetition. Suggestion is substitution of a habit. Play sports instead of drinking. Creating new habits. Creating new pathways. Exercise is very effective for treating depression. “Is it good in practice?” “No, people don't want to exercise.”

How to use time that is available once addiction is interrupted? Exercise. Becoming awake, so that whatever you are interested will become very interesting.

Vague vs. known memories competing for your attention.

Rodent studies show that animal becomes impulsive. But with memory interruption, less impulsive to take a drug.

Complexity creates a challenge in recreating experiences in animals (compared to rats).

Love addiction, obsession. Love is not an addiction. Love is giving in or giving out. Love is a psychiatric.

Moderation should be advocated by culture. Moderation for yourself. The strength of memory.

Studying exercise. Addiction is a complex problem.

Weakening the memories. Networking in memories. Scripts need to be specific.

Very little data that supports psychoanalytic treatment is effective.

Attrition from treatment is great. (33% success rate)

Bioengineering techniques through viruses to replace regions of the brain.

Self regulation. Styles of personalities overcontroled and undercontroled. Undercontroled self regulation style.

 

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DESCRIPTION, PARTICIPANTS:

What is it that makes people powerless even when they know they are about to do something seriously dangerous to their health? An addict sweats through withdrawal, tries hard to stay sober and, perhaps, with persistence and years of commitment and effort, finally thinks he has succeeded. Then, one day, a strong memory comes back, perhaps because he is under particularly severe stress, and suddenly—relapse. If what drives a person to addiction is dependence on a drug and fear of withdrawal symptoms, why should relapses occur so after long after withdrawal? If addiction is about pleasure, why does someone embark down a path that will surely bring nothing but pain? One idea that ongoing research is working on is that addiction may be a form of ''extremely persistent or pathological memory." Thus, one novel therapeutic direction will be to replace old memories with new and different ones. This roundtable will address the perils of addiction, the contribution of memories to relapse, the persistence of addictive behavior and, finally, the experience of coming to terms with the struggle.

Cristina Alberini is Associate Professor of Neuroscience, Psychiatry, and Structural and Chemical Biology at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Her current research interest is in learning and memory.

Stephen Delafield received an M.S.Ed. from Hunter College, with a specialization in alcoholism counseling. For the past 15 years he has worked for a number of hospitals and agencies, including Beth Israel, the Abraham Residence, and currently The Parallax Center, a privately-run clinic for drug rehabilitation, where he provides both individual counseling and group therapy.

William Gottdiener is Director of the Addiction Studies Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York, where he is also tenured Associate Professor in the psychology department. He focuses his research on three topics: (a) the psychodynamics of addictive disorders; (b) effectiveness of psychological treatments for addictive disorders; and (c) clinical training in addictive disorders. Dr. Gottdiener is also the North American Associate Editor for the journal, Addiction Research and Theory. In addition to his academic work, he has a private practice in addiction psychology, providing individual psychotherapy, couples therapy, psychological testing, and clinical supervision. Gottdiener received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from The New School for Social Research and completed a postdoctoral substance abuse research fellowship that was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Scott Russo is Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. His research is focused on understanding how the brain adapts to stress and drugs to guide future behaviors that are relevant to addiction and depression. Dr. Russo obtained his PhD in psychology from CUNY Graduate Center and then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.



11:10 PM GMT  |  Read comments(14)

February 11

Notes from the roundtable "On Aggression" at the The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination
 
My loosely-coupled notes, mostly in a chronological order and represent a condense summary (typing on ipod touch)  from http://philoctetes.org/Calendar/On_Aggression/ Feb 7th, 2009
 
 
Types of aggression:
Bullying harassment, Domestic violence, Child abuse, Work place abuse, Intent to harass, etc.
Aggression doesn't require face to face interaction, for example Internet.
 
Aggression is a solution to a problem - how to stay safe.
 
Predictability of aggression?
People are not born aggressive.
Brain is plastic and always changing product of nature and nurture.
 
Genotype children. Observation of interaction with adversary.
Reduce risk factors. Intervention at an early age 2, 3, and 4. Attachment theory when kids are separated from parents. Affectionless criminal.
 
Cauldron of aggression could be uncovered at any time. Latent aggression waiting to come out.
Intergenerational violence, gene expression. Which genes are expressed and which are silent. Epigenetic. Plasticity. Turned on or off.
Environmental.
 
Cultural factor. Code of honor - book about males in the south.
Good to stand up for yourself versus not to do that. Give bike away to stay alive.
Cultural determinants where you are taught not to hit back.
Provocation and misinterpretation.

Boxing on decline but mixed martial arts' popularity is on the rise. Desensitized.
Brain development is not complete until early twenties. Connections are not completely formed.
Age of majority is different across the country. Puberty is a marker. Church defined the age of reason to be 7. Yet we are marrying later, going to school forever. Neurodevelopment - we make a lot of connections and later prune them away.
 
Poverty and guns. Immigration is part of the reason why New York is safe. 40% in New York are immigrants.
Middle class drives out criminals. Mayor Lindsay in the 60's.
Social contract to live together. Broken window theory.
 
Murder our murderers. We don't want to be reminded of our own aggressiveness.
Get the community around bully not to support the bully. Get them in oppositional stance. Raising conscience.
 
Most aggressive fights occur between women but nobody dies.
 
There are few innocent victims. "If you live a good life and pick good friends, statistaicaly you will be ok"
Swiss and Greece have high gun ownership and low crime, because there is no poverty.
Free will and determinism.
 
How can a community respond to aggressive leadership? How to prevent genocide.
Experiencing the submissiveness is fundamental part of growing up.
 
Testosterone. Castration doesn't help with aggression reduction after aggression is already a learned behavior.
Why so much violence that comes with religion? "Because god is a man. " ? It was the only answer given by the panel...?


6:19 PM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

April 28

Fight Bull


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February 18

Skype, notes on Security.
 
 
"at a conference last week in Cyprus, German officials said they had technology for intercepting and decrypting Skype phone calls, according to Anthony M. Rutkowski, vice president for regulatory affairs and standards for VeriSign, a company that offers security for Internet and phone operations." 5/22/06 New York Times
 
"According to an online report, Austrian officials with legal authority to tap VoIP phone communications have no problem listening in on Skype calls, which are encrypted as a standard part of Skype service”
 
"TELEPHONE COMPANIES LONG have worked with law enforcement to catch criminal conspirators using their networks. Stepped-up concern over security has put the heat on carriers to ensure they can meet mandates under the FCC's 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), requiring telecom service providers to support the ability of law enforcement agencies to conduct lawful, authorized electronic surveillance of call content and call data."
 
Carriers can face fines of $10,000 per day for each intercept request from a law enforcement agency they fail to comply with.
 
One company, VeriSign Inc., offers a one- stop, turnkey solution to help telecom carriers comply with CALEA. Announced last summer, NetDiscovery Services is positioned as an alternative to carriers procuring potentially costly new equipment or system upgrades and maintaining special security staff and facilities.
 
CALEA requires that carriers provision network elements for the intercept event, intercept the call content and data, deliver it directly to one or more law enforcement monitoring facilities in a standard format and provide secure records storage.
 
Using Verint Systems Inc.'s STAR-GATE, a solution that provides the means to access and deliver intercepted communications content and call data to law enforcement agencies, VeriSign offers a streamlined solution that meets the needs of wireline, wireless and cable telephony carriers.
 
Puri explains that once contracted by the carrier, VeriSign becomes the primary point of contact for law enforcement. "Once we receive the order through the carrier, we deal with it. It's completely hands off for the carrier."
 
Among the orders NetDiscovery processes are historical call records, pen registers or trap and trace (real-time call data as it occurs), as well as wire taps from both law enforcement and national security agencies.
 
The solution supports circuit switches and beginning this quarter it will support packet-based gear, such as soft switches. The company is working with Cisco Systems Inc. to support its soft switches, routers and gateways."
 
 
Technology:
 
 
 
 
 
 
"The history of encryption teaches us that how encryption technologies are used is more important that how secure it might be in theory." The Register 2/16/2009
 
_____________
 
These are cliff notes, chime in.


8:59 AM GMT  |  Read comments(0)

March 16

Statistical breakdown of the collected website defacements from the last few years

"Zone-H have recently posted the statistical breakdown of the collected website defacements from the last few years. Surprisingly, in 2007 more Linux servers suffered a successful attack than all versions of Windows, combined. Similarly, more Apache installations were successfully attacked than all IIS versions combined. A day after posting this data, Zone-H have questioned the appropriateness of continuing to operate the archive. Despite the valuable information that can be gleaned from the service, it may soon be lost to the world. The natural successor to the now-defunct Alldas archive of defaced websites, Zone-H's archive maintains records of over 2.6 million defaced sites but may be shut down due to the continuous accusations of impropriety leveled against them any time they disclose and mirror a reported defacement."

 

Every year, Zone-H publishes stats of registered attacks.
In the early months of Zone-H, we received an average of 2.500 notifications per month, last year this average jumped to 37.915 monthly attacks. In order to have better idea of the attacks number, during January 2007, 62.092 attacks were validated, and in the month of June - when a DDoS cyberwar in Russia paralyzed thousands of web sites, Zone-H included - we validated 17.797 defacements. The record occurred in the month of August 2006, with 130.645 registered attacks.

In the past the most attacked operating system was Windows, but many servers were migrated from Windows to Linux...
Therefore the attacks migrated as well, as Linux is now the most attacked operating system with 1.485.280 defacements against 815.119 in Windows systems (numbers calculated from 2000).


 
 

Attacks by month   Year 2005
 Year 2006   Year 2007 
 Jan  45.929  43.585   62.092 
 Feb  47.059  37.061  52.697
 Mar  41.175  38.630  54.842
 Apr  48.995  43.007  40.919
 May  41.735  86.135  41.410
 Jun  43.870  51.888  17.797
 Jul  41.469  95.461  56.763
 Aug  41.917  130.645  38.362
 Sep  31.853  69.643  29.236
 Oct  40.724  52.421  31.681
 Nov  35.000  50.940  31.925
 Dec  34.114  52.945  23.181
 Total  493.840
 752.361
 480.905



Special Attacks by month   Year 2005
 Year 2006
 Year 2007
 Jan  832  923
 863
 Feb  924
 517
 613
 Mar  755
 787
 656
 Apr  958
 682
 592
 May  903
 597
 349
 Jun  822
 821
 176
 Jul  1.607  1.746  715
 Aug  1.749
 1.187
 840
 Sep  799
 911
 717
 Oct  741
 849
 1.029
 Nov  591
 1.004
 763
 Dec  565
 890
 468
 Total  11.246  10.914  7.781
 
 Single attacks by month   Year 2005
 Year 2006   Year 2007 
 Jan  9.584  10.846   14.446 
 Feb  6.233  10.865  11.135
 Mar  8.128  14.625  13.324
 Apr  12.398  13.591  10.394
 May  8.950  14.397  9.870
 Jun  13.203  27.832  3.827
 Jul  11.384  24.167  14.537
 Aug  10.328  20.198  10.300
 Sep  8.667  16.589  8.954
 Oct  14.263  12.407  10.038
 Nov  10.627  11.679  8.384
 Dec  9.140  12.911  7.344
Total  122.905
 190.107  122.553


 Mass attacks by month   Year 2005
 Year 2006   Year 2007 
 Jan  36.345  32.739  47.646
 Feb  40.826  26.196  41.562
 Mar  33.047  24.005  41.518
 Apr  36.597  29.416  30.525
 May  32.785  71.738  31.540
 Jun  30.667  24.056  13.970
 Jul  30.085  71.294  42.226
 Aug  31.589  110.447  28.062
 Sep  23.186  53.054  20.282
 Oct  26.461  40.014  21.643
 Nov  24.373  39.261  23.541
 Dec  24.974  40.034  15.837
 Total  370.935
 562.254
 358.352



 Operational System   Year 2005   Year 2006   Year 2007 
 Linux  276.350  446.311  306.076
 Windows 2003  72.377  183.953  114.137
 Windows 2000  101.151  69.754  23.838
 FreeBSD  23.653  31.075  18.542
 Unknown
 2.834  3.802  9.314
 SolarisSunOS  6.193  9.797  5.226
 Windows NT/9x  5.921  4.023  1.204
 MacOSX  2.139  2.247  1.488
 Windows XP  498  393  323
 HP-UX  667  166  259
 AIX  367  101  124
 SCO UNIX  19  5  92
 Unix  7  134  79
 Tru64  54  25  40
 OpenBSD  21  13  39
 NetBSDOpenBSD  366  229  36
 IRIX  771  211  34
 BSDOS  498  49  26
 NovellNetware  30  24  9
 OpenServer  0  0  7
 OS390
 1  3  3
 MacOS  27  6  3
 OS2  9  9  2
 Compaq Tru64  23  13  1
 NetBSD  31  14  1
 Digital UNIX  2  3  1
 Windows .NET  10  1  1
 VM  1  0  0


 Webserver defaced  Year 2005
 Year 2006   Year 2007 
 Apache  308.281  486.294  319.439
 IIS/6.0  72.338  180.926  113.935
 IIS/5.0  99.616  66.304  23.664
 Unknown  4.974  8.805  16.741
 Zeus   1.059  506  1.972
 NOYB  0  1308  1.920
 IIS/4.0  5.846  3.952  1.149
 nginx   136  870  729
 IIS/5.1  540  412  308
 Rapidsite   158  110  244
 SonataServer
 4  557  178
 A-NETEK RobustWeb   4  4  92
 Zope   106  67  80
 LiteSpeed   3  150  65
 IdeaWebServer   50  191  60
 E-Neverland DataPalm   15  16  41
 lighttpd   25  33  37
 DinaHTTPd Server   52  89  36
 Boa   6  59  26
 SilverStream Server   36  40  20
 SAMBAR   0  18  17
 thttpd   8  29  15
 SunONE WebServer   165  670  12
 ConcentricHost-Ashurbanipal   18  12  11
 Lasso   18  26  11
 Cougar   1  21  10
 NetWare-Enterprise-Web-Server
 5  3  8
 Sun Java System Web Server 6.1   0  6  8
 GWS   2  4  8
 DataPalm   0  7  7
 Abyss   0  0  5
 OBEC-Web-Serv   0  13  5
 InfomexWebServer  2  14  4
 tigershark  54  9  4
 4D_WebSTAR_S  34  169  4
 IBM HTTP SERVER  7  17  4
 Jetty  0  0  4
 Netscape-Enterprise  37  21  4
 OmniHTTPd  7  3  4
 AOL server  28  15  3
 IIS/3.0  3  4  3
 exteNd Application Server   3  2  2
 RaidenHTTPD   5  5  2
 Resin   9  25  2
 Replica   1  0  2
 RRRPHP/9.4.2   1  0  2
 CoffeeMaker   0  0  1
 Hix Webserver   0  0  1
 KFWebserver   5  5  1
 NetCache   5  8  1
 Oracle AS   0  3  1
 WebLogic Server   27  27  1
 Xitami   7  16  1
 Zort Zirt Server  20  7  1
 Caudium  2
 3  0
 VHFFS  15  2  0
 Oracle  33  2
 0
 Roxen  87  2  0
 Lotus-Domino  6  5
 0
 Mistral  1  1  0
 Web Crossing  0
 1  0
 Netscape-FastTrack  0
 2
 0
 WebSphere Application Server  0  5
 0
 PWS  0  5
 0
 Netscape-Communications  0  1
 0


 
 Attack Method  Total 2005   Total 2006   Total 2007
 Attack against the administrator/user (password stealing/sniffing)
 48.006  207.323  141.660
 Shares misconfiguration   39.020  36.529  67.437  
 File Inclusion   118.395  148.082  61.011
 SQL Injection     
 36.253  47.212  35.407
 Access credentials through Man In the Middle attack   20.427  21.209  28.046
 Other Web Application bug   50.383  6.529  18.048
 FTP Server intrusion   58.945  55.611  17.023
 Web Server intrusion   38.975  30.059  13.405
 DNS attack through cache poisoning   7.541  9.131  9.747
 Other Server intrusion   1.4732  16.050  8.050
 DNS attack through social engineering   4.719  5.959  7.585
 URL Poisoning   2.897  7.988  6.931
 Web Server external module intrusion   8.487  17.290  6.690
 Remote administrative panel access through bruteforcing   2.738  4.988  6.607
 Rerouting after attacking the Firewall   988  4.308  6.127
 SSH Server intrusion   2.644  14.746  5.723
 RPC Server intrusion 
 1.821  5.793  5.516
 Rerouting after attacking the Router   1.520  4.867  5.257
 Remote service password guessing
 939  7.008  5.105
 Telnet Server intrusion   1.863  6.252  4.753
 Remote administrative panel access through password guessing   1.014  4416  4.753
 Remote administrative panel access through social engineering 
 780  5472  3.127
 Remote service password bruteforce   3.576  4018  3.125
 Mail Server intrusion   1.198  4195  1.315
Not available
 11.382  37243  9.724


 Attack Reason  Year 2005   Year 2006   Year 2007 
 I just want to be the best defacer    95.870  300.858  197.413
 Heh...just for fun!  179.234  175.241  95.664
 As a challenge   59.991  72.287  60.314
 Political reasons  61.068  77.350  31.073
 Patriotism  53.168  30.207
 28.307
 Revenge against that website  17.847  11.489  10.120
 Not available  26.662  84.929  58.014



Linux X Windows

 Year  Total defacements Linux (all distros)   Total defacements Windows (all versions) 
 2000  931  2.586
 2001  4.081  13.552
 2002  22.693  43.426
 2003  191.720  58.559
 2004  247.118  119.412
 2005  276.350  179.957
 2006  446.311  258.124
 2007  306.076  139.503
 Total  1.485.280  815.119


10:04 AM GMT  |  Read comments(0)