Back in 1984, a lonely, weird kid calling himself Grandmaster Ratte' formed a hacker group in Lubbock, Texas. called the Cult of the Dead Cow, a name inspired by a nearby slaughterhouse. In the decades to come, cDc would become one of the dominant forces on the BBS scene and then the internet — endlessly inventive, funny and prankish, savvy and clever, and sometimes reckless and foolish — like punk-rock on a floppy disk.

Investigative tech journalist Joseph Menn's (previously) next book is a history of the Cult of the Dead Cow (previously) the legendary hacker/prankster group that is considered to be "America's oldest hacking group."

The new NBC show "Kidnapped" refers to the Cult of the Dead Cow and Back Orifice during a character's explanation of "1337."

Link to video clip. (thanks, Oxblood Ruffin!)

Cult of the Dead Cow's "Peekabooty" browser project promises to get around gov't and corporate censorship attempts. Link

The Distributed Denial of Secrets Twitter account has published links to terabytes of data identified as raw data from the Cayman National Bank and Trust; Phineas Fisher (previously), the public-interest hacker(s) behind the Hacking Team breach, is credited with the leak.

The Cyber Independent Testing Lab is a security measurement company founded by Mudge Zadko (previously), late of the Cult of the Dead Cow and l0pht Heavy Industries and the NSA's Tailored Access Operations Group; it has a unique method for assessing the security of devices derived from methods developed by Mudge at the NSA.

When last we met the Four Thieves Vinegar collective — a group of anarchist scientists who combine free/open chemistry with open source hardware in response to shkrelic gouging by pharma companies — they were announcing the epipencil, a $30 DIY alternative to the Epipen, Mylan's poster-child for price-gouging and profiteering on human misery.

Emmanuel Goldstein from 2600 Magazine sez, "As part of a massive archiving project, 2600 Magazine is releasing all of the remastered videos from the second Hackers On Planet Earth conference – Beyond HOPE in 1997. Last month, videos from the first HOPE conference back in 1994 were put online. — Read the rest

Pemdasi sez, "Peiter Zatko, aka mudge, a former member of both the Cult of the Dead Cow and l0pht now works for DARPA and wants to give out short term DARPA contracts to places like hackerspaces to find solutions to cybersecurity concerns. — Read the rest

Oxblood Ruffin shares word that Cult of the Dead Cow just launched a large-scale scanner project, Goolag.org:

SECURITY ADVISORY: The following program may screw a large Internet search engine and make the Web a safer place.

LUBBOCK, TX, February 20th – Today CULT OF THE DEAD COW (cDc), the world's most attractive hacker group, announced the release of Goolag Scanner, a Web auditing tool.

Over at News.com, Declan McCullagh has been following a recent court case that offers a rare peek into how some fed agents conduct digital investigations when a suspect uses encryptionFirst, break into the suspect's home or workplace, then implant keystroke-logging software on their computer, then step back and spy. — Read the rest

Snip from an opinion piece posted by Oxblood Ruffin at Cult of the Dead Cow's website:

When content filtering targets a race of people for purely political
reasons, and an American company provides the technology to enable that
filtering, then it's time to shame the enablers.

Myles Long from Cult of the Dead Cow writes,

Ninja Strike Force member Lady Ada has posted a design for a self-tuning, microprocessor controlled, wide band RF jammer.

Lady Ada (who is, omg, a girl! not knitting, but hacking hardware!) — Read the rest

* WEAR: hardware, horsie, farm, jungle, and dinosaur jewelry by Nicola Vruwink of Los Angeles. (thanks Luke Burbank)

* EAT/SLEEP: "Bib sheets" you sleep in. When you wake up, tie them around your neck for in-bed noshing. — Read the rest

Tech luminaries, big Silicon Valley companies, and Nepalese sherpas are heading to a community Wi-Fi hoedown this October in the Himalayan foothill town of Dharamshala, India. The agenda: connect the developing world with cheap, wireless mesh networks. I filed a report today for Wired News, after visiting the summit organizers in India:

In October, the Tibetan Technology Center will host the Air Jaldi Summit for wireless community developers from around the world.

I filed a story and photos for Wired News today on the innovative tech underpinnings of a community wireless project I visited recently in Dharamshala, India. Snip:

Across the border from Chinese-occupied Tibet, the tech infrastructure in this high mountain village is a mess.

The hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow has created Offensive Computing, a malware repository site, inviting security researchers and others to upload infectious software of all description, and maintaining a database that any new piece of badware can be compared against. — Read the rest

ScatterChat is a new hactivist program from the Cult of the Dead Cow. It's an anonymous chat program that combines gaim, an open source encrypted chat protocol, with TOR, an open source "onion router" that disguises the origin and destination of packets, so that no one can know what you're chatting, nor whom you're chatting with. — Read the rest

Snip from Cult of the Dead Cow's postmortem analysis of today's Capitol Hill hearings on the ethical responsibilities of US tech firms in China. Most notably, the cDc hackers coin a new term for Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Yahoo: The Gang of Four. — Read the rest

(Click on images for larger-size). Hacker and free speech activist Oxblood Ruffin says,

Today at 11AM in Dharamsala, India, the local chapter of The Students For A Free Tibet joined a global protest against Google. Nowhere is Google's evil more keenly felt than in Dharamsala.