AI Alignment: First Principles

The Intersection of AI Alignment and Self Alignment: A Case for Physical Practices

I’m not going to beat around the bush, I’m just going to say it plainly. Achieving AI alignment is a goal that first requires self-alignment. We cannot expect to correct an external relationship until internal balance is maintained. Otherwise, we will quickly find ourselves adrift in our own delusions. So here’s my belief: teaching physical alignment through practices like martial arts (Tai Chi specifically) will help individuals mentally and emotionally prepare themselves while seeking AI alignment solutions.

Developing Self-Awareness and Self-Regulation

Physical alignment practices help individuals develop greater self-awareness and self-regulation. By practicing mindfulness and present-moment awareness, individuals can develop the ability to recognize and regulate their own biases, emotions, and thoughts. This can help them approach their complex work with greater objectivity and clarity.

Fostering Empathy and Compassion

Physical alignment practices can also help individuals develop greater empathy and compassion for others. This is not only a critical skill for effective AI alignment but also for just being a kind person. Acknowleding our imbalance, our biases, means being vulnerable. Being vulnerable doesn’t take courage, it builds courage. A deeper understanding of this helps develop a deeper sense of connection and understanding with others. This allows us to take on and better appreciate the perspectives and values of different stakeholders. I’d say that was important to the development of AI systems.

Building Discipline and Resilience

Physical alignment practices can help individuals develop discipline and resilience. These are valuable traits for cybersecurity teams and other professionals working in the tech industry where burnout seems to be a critical issue. By developing the ability to focus and persevere in the face of challenges and setbacks, individuals can better navigate the complexities and uncertainties of AI alignment and cybersecurity.

Reframing Power and Conflict through Tai Chi

Practicing Tai Chi specifically means learning to approach conflict differently. The use of power is redefined because what power is and where it comes from is transformed. There is no clenched fist, there is no seeking of power. There is plenty of power all around, and more importantly within us. The problem is that we have been told that there is something wrong with us and something must be added. When in fact, it is the opposite. There is more to us than we can imagine and power is not force, but control, and knowing the minimum effort necessary is the best possible policy. Strength isn’t in the breaking, but in the holding up, learning to support ourselves and each other.

Conclusion: The Benefits of Physical Alignment Practices

Overall, by teaching physical alignment practices like martial arts to employees and cybersecurity teams, organizations can help develop the skills and perspectives necessary for effective AI alignment and cybersecurity. These practices can help individuals develop greater self-awareness, empathy, discipline, and resilience, which can ultimately contribute to more ethical and socially responsible AI systems. Additionally, promoting physical and mental wellness among employees can also contribute to a healthier and more productive workforce, which can benefit the organization in many ways.

I encourage you to consider incorporating physical alignment practices into your own life or workplace. The benefits are manifold and the impact on AI alignment could be profound. Oh, and if you need someone who teaches Tai Chi and is into cybersecurity- I know a guy.

Default State of Mind

This little rant comes from a reply to conversation I was having with my Mom:

I trust that I am easily fooled. I fool myself all the time. Maybe fool is too harsh a word, but surely I am easily confused and misdirected. As much as anyone else.

I'm very curious about how people become aware of their blind spots. Everybody has a story in their head that's playing out while the real world is ticking away in front of them.

Where do people go when they are on autopilot? Do they know they've checked out? By that I mean, what story is being told- what narrative is unfolding- while the real world streams on by.

The problem I see here is that most people don't know they live in a story and don't believe they are easily confused. Maybe there is a disconnect in that having a thought isn't what I would consider thinking.

Thinking is a directed action. Having a thought is more like having gas. It just bubbles up.

What I am most curious about is the stimulus for expanded perspective and objective reorientation to an internal narrative.

What is it that helps people go, "Oh, well that's just silly."

I trust people when they display the capacity to scrutinize their own thoughts, language, and actions. This character trait Is often noticeable by how good someone is at getting other people to relax and smile.

Remember what the Buddha said, "Enlightenment arises from the realization that we are all full of shit most of the time".

Hacking Reno: WebApp Pentesting

Four days in Reno was cerebral overload. 

Attending the Wild West Hack’n Fest presented by Black Hills Information Security, I tried to squeeze as much data into the ole’ brain-box as possible. It’s a small box as far as brain-boxes go, so I’m pretty sure I tore something, and now my personal data is leaking out all over the place. 

The first night there I dreamed I was at a diner and the waitress asked me, “How would you like your brains: Compiled, compressed, encoded, hashed, or salted? When I woke up I discovered I had developed a stutter that lasted most of the day. 

By the time it was all over my brain felt like it had been in a pie-eating contest that never stopped. One of those last idiot-standing contests. Skull stuffed to near bursting and face a slaughter of smeared blueberry confusion. I wonder what drives me. This blog post is the inevitable regurgitation of that cerebral gluttony. 

This is part one of my sloppy attempt at summarizing the 4-day info feast.    

The Nugget Casino hosted the conference. The ringing bells and whirling whistles of the casino floor opened up my dopamine receptors as I walked through the door. The blinking and twirling lights aroused my limbic system which started pumping adrenaline into the mind-mix. My lower brain wasn’t sure if it was supposed to fight, flee, or poop. Casinos have to be one of the apex environments for social engineering. I felt a little like I was about to get on a rollercoaster. Kinda sick to my stomach, kinda excited, I realized the siren song of beer and slot machines were calling to me. I hovered a second or two before managing to gather my withering wits and turn my nose to the scent of nerd and find my flock.

I followed the odor of burnt neurons to the second floor where I heard the enigmatic chatter of cryptologists debating blockchain. My class was in a large conference room that could have fit a hundred people easily, but physically present only ten were seated in front of the giant screen displaying pdf slides of the inner workings of websites. I won’t pretend that I understood everything. In these classes, I often feel like a monkey punching buttons as fast as I can. All the time hoping for a banana that never comes. But at least I keep notes and hope with repetition comes familiarity and competency. 

The very first thing mentioned was situational awareness. 

Be still my sweet martial art heart. He had me at “situational”. I knew no matter how techie this got, the instructor was connected to a narrative I could follow. 

The instructor’s name: BB King. He provided a master’s class in more than just pentesting the delicate membranes between user-input and website interface. This was also, for me at least, a dissection of the complexity of language and its primordial underpinnings. It was a study in the history of technology and communication.

Let me say upfront, I was intimidated by the technical material. I was also very anxious about the travel after being in my Covid bubble for a year and change.  So as was wound uptight. BB’s presents helped melt that away. It felt ok to be in the deep end of the technical pool with BB as the intellectual lifeguard. 

I paraphrase liberally, but he said: One of the keys to mastery of cybersecurity (and life in general) is curiosity. The hunger to know how everything works offers unique leverage. As BB put it, all tools have uses beyond their original design. What can a tool do that it was not intended to do? Ask, what would MacGyver do? For this class, that meant testing the user input fields with a tad bit of sql injection, a dash of URL manipulation, and a smidge of fuzzing.

 BB set up a great VM with Juiceshop and Burpe. He walked us through developer tools in web browsers and the functionality of Burp’s tools to examine websites and by-pass WebApps. BB made multiple rounds around the room to check on each of us individually. He never seemed rushed by the fact that we were stuffing 24-hrs worth of information into 16-hrs. I just tried to keep up as we blew through a dozen labs picking apart the vulnerabilities inherent to the system.

Something that was super valuable was that the class broke down the Top 10 OWASP list into just 3 issues. Not 10 issues. 3 issues. Aside from 1) Malicious Input, there was only: 2) Insufficient Logging and Monitoring; and 3) Sensitive Data Exposure. 80% of attacks are some form of malicious input. The other portion of OWASP is basically people shooting themselves in the foot. 

Midst all that tech talk, BB had a couple of comments about bird songs and body language that really stuck with me. 

The sound of birds chirping, that sound we find lovely and melodic, it’s actually a bird’s warning to other birds. It’s a declaration of territory. I own this tree. This is my branch. Keep your distance. BB added, that the reason humans like the sound of bird songs so much is that the sound informed our ancestors that they were safe in the woods from predators. If the birds ever went silent, if the bird song stopped, then that was a very bad sign. It meant predators were near. Big ones.

The key takeaway: you don’t need to know the whole language to decode useful information. We had no idea that the bird song was a warning to other birds, but the lack of its pattern was a warning to us about nearby threats.

Another nugget BB shared: there are 21 culturally universal emotions that can be communicated with body language. Did he say body language? Totally speaking my language. This was when we were talking about encoding information and it made me wonder about the pros and cons of language. How easily things can be misconstrued or miscommunicated. Use the wrong word in the wrong context, things can get ugly quickly. It matters what you put into the system. 

Or simply put for defenders: Input Sanitization matters. 

The first rule of apps is that they are made for people to use. There must be an interaction between the person and a program. Requests are made. Responses occur. Anywhere a user can add information into the system, and possibly poison the ecosystem, that spot is a dangerous place to be short-sighted about security.

Imagine WebApp testing as a tiger sniffing out a good place to execute an ambush. Once the tiger knows where the animals go to get water (information crossing a boundary), they have discovered a vulnerability in both the environment and the prey’s behavior that can be exploited.

It’s now a matter of just watching and learning the patterns. Lying in the tall grass, hiding in wait for the bird song to return and all the little animals think it’s safe to come out again. Or maybe tigers aren’t the best analogy, but I do like tigers a lot. And if you’ve never read Tiger, you’re missing out. 

Anyway, in my case, it means to sit and practice hacking labs taking advantage of cross-user privacy invasion; client-side controls; faulty assumptions; unlinked items; directory indexing; insecure direct object references; and redirect filters. And that was just the beginning. Did I mention, I developed a muscle tick in my right eye? 

By the end of the 2nd day, the stutter was gone. But on the 3rd day, my right eye started randomly winking closed. I think that means my left brain wasn’t completely up and running just yet.

I grabbed coffee, kept my head down, and got ready for round 2. The final 2-days of lectures included: Red Team Automation, Gamification of MITRE ATT&CK, Cracking Cloud Security, Network Defense Modeling, and Offensive Deception. 

Ever read A Scanner Darkly? The protagonist is a detective hunting a drug dealer. Spoiler: the detective discovers he is the drug dealer. Or Fight Club, in which the unnamed protagonist discovers he alter ego is a cult leader of an anti-civilization urban-guerilla terrorist organization. That’s the feeling I was getting. I was two different people. A double agent moving between the good guy and the bad guy until there was no difference between the good and the bad just knowledge, tools, and leverage. It’s not ethics, it’s actions along a barrier. There is attack and defend the barrier.

Cyber is about controlling the flow and the mastery of the space between all things. Even the space and flow between the many minds that make up our minds (A Thousand Brains Theory).

Tribe of Hackers

Tribe of Hackers, by Marcus J. Carey, collects a wide range of seasoned infosec specialists to discuss the cybersecurity world from an insider’s point of view. My favorite question out of the dozen asked is: What is one of the biggest bang-for-the-buck actions that an organization can take to improve its cybersecurity posture? Studying the 60-plus answers, I broke them down into three categories that resonate with the self-defense instructor in me:

1. Invest in awareness

2. Assume compromise 

3. Application over theory

There are three common aspects of martial arts all around the world. The basic breakdown of martial arts is competitive (sport), performance (entertainment), and self-defense (mortal danger). Competition can teach you how to fight, but you are always learning to fight with rules. There is a ref, a set time, and a chosen place. Performance is about entertaining a crowd and displaying grace, power, and drama.

The portion of the martial art world we are concerned with here is self-defense.  The training one does for surprise attacks. Nothing fancy, first just learn to cover your groin and face. This is a very good reflex around monkeys and big cats. 

Boiled down, martial arts is situational awareness and the more time I spend studying the cybersecurity field the more I think of it as an offshoot of martial the world. Hand-to-hand and weapon-based systems each have their context for when they are useful.  I like thinking of cyber as the martial art of network conflict.

In the walk-around world, awareness often simply means understand your environment and become conscious of how you make yourself vulnerable. Predators rely on distraction and surprise. The more aware you are, the less of a target you are. Don’t make yourself more vulnerable than you have to be. How big is your threat landscape? The bigger it is, the harder it is to secure and whoever has the weakest perimeter gets eaten first.

These rules of conduct coincide with cyber defense rules, like limit employees’ access and privileges. There is no reason to increase the overall threat landscape any more than necessary. When you give someone access, you put them at risk of being exploited. Every admin privilege is a target on someone’s back. They will be hunted for their access. Actually, I’m the only one mentioning the hunting of people. Nowhere in the interviews does anybody recommend hunting people. 

According to the professionals, companies building security-minded cultures should start with the low-hanging fruit: multi-factor authentication, complex password policies, and up-to-date patches go a long way. It’s not full-proof, but covering the basics eats recon time and time is money even for criminals. The longer it takes to get inside the more likely they will move on to an easier target. No one is perfectly secure, but don’t be the only guy without a bulletproof vest in a gunfight. I’m paraphrasing of course. There was no mention of firearms nor discussions about kevlar in the interviews at all.

Investing in awareness also means understanding how your assets are vulnerable. Is it really tech that is vulnerable? Or are people vulnerable? Creating a security culture that captures the attention of employees is essential. All the fancy AI interfaces in the world (which I love) aren’t going to save you from an uninterested or emotionally distracted employee. A narrative (mission) that elicits vigilance (situational awareness) is key. Everyone is seeking a “better way” and people, in general, adopt great standards that lead to personal growth. No one actually said people seek personal growth either. I’m reading between the lines and maybe being a little idealistic, but I stand firm on the idea that people want to be heroes.

The second concept: assume compromise, also illustrates martial principles. As in, you don’t get to pick the fight you want. For companies, it means an attack isn’t an if, it’s a when. And, most likely, you aren’t going to see it coming. Predators like to hit their prey from behind, not head-on. Unfortunately, the first hint of attack is often the sight of your own data leaking out all over the internet.  Assume compromise means: “the phone call is coming from inside the house!”, so it’s best to build impact resilience into the system. A panic room, if you will. Again, I’m being a little hyperbolic, but I’m trying to paint a picture. 

For an organization, assuming compromise means exploring postures that increase opportunities to fight as you roll and recover to your feet. Remember, this is close-quarters combat. You don’t get to hold them off at arm’s length. They are already inside your defenses and a strategic counter is required. But, before you can counter, you must locate. Check the endpoints, scan the logs, find the beacons, and isolate. Get good at finding the intruder. Too much time is spent on playing wack-a-mole rather than setting honeypots and canary sensors. That’s right, I’m talking about tripwires and tiger pits.

If you have followed the basics from invest in awareness, then the pathways into the system are limited and your team is straight-up tracking the interlopers. There are only so many endpoints probable. You must be able to detect if you are to defend. Imagine Sherlock Holmes presented with Star Trek’s Kobayashi test. Model, model, model. Test, test, test. Invest in failure, because failure brings insight.  

Lastly, application over theory. As the great fist-philosopher, Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.” Steps 1 & 2 have been followed. Your situational awareness is high and you’ve created not 1 or 2 plans for possible sneak attacks but a dozen. But does your plan work when it’s not your friend throwing the punches? 

Unfortunately, the only way to get comfortable with people trying to hit you is by doing such. It’s not everyone’s favorite pedagogy, but it gets results. Catch a few on the nose, and everybody covers up and starts rolling with the punches. This is another good place to point out, no one discussed punching and kicking people in the interviews.

For organizations, application over theory means regularly attacking their own systems not only internal testing but external testing. It means investing in outside consultants who can give an objective perspective. Test the process and adapt accordingly. Then, test again. This is not a static game of Battleship. The opponent is not waiting for you to come to find them. They don’t have any rules, but they do have limitations. Don’t let experience be your limitation, because experience is the key for both sides. It’s a simple calculation, if you have had more time learning to fight your way out of a corner than your opponent, chances are they make the first mistake when pressured. 

To recap and summarize the guidance from the interviews it goes something like this: 

1) Awareness = What Matters x Why it Matters 

2) Plan for the worse 

3) Test the plan objectively

I really enjoyed reading Tribe of Hackers, and I appreciate Mr. Carey putting it together. There is much more wisdom to parse through in the interviews than I have offered here and I hope my violent paraphrasing and comparison (beat a dead horse) to martial arts doesn’t diminish his efforts or their advice. Carey has other books of interviews specific to Blue Team, Red Team, and Security Leaders.

However, before diving into those, I’m headed to Reno for the Wild West Hack’n Fest. This will be the first in-person conference for me (and possibly a whole bunch of people) since Covid. It’s time for me to meet more of the tribe.

Cyber-Sorcerer-Ninja-Detective

The world that is emerging from our electronic interactions needs a lot of patches. It’s growing and in need of constant adjustment, reconfiguration, and stabilization. For my part, this week was dedicated to learning how to hide, lure, track and trap bad guys for 4 days and a total of 16-hours of training on Active Defense and Cyber Deception with Black Hills Information Security. This was one of three courses they offer for the very affordable price of pay-what-you-can. Don’t let the generosity fool you. John Strand provides these courses as a mission. He believes we are all far behind in the cyber security game and there is lots of ground to make up. After 15 years as a SANs instructor, he has lots of value to offer. Plus, his energy is contagious. He does seem to truly be possessed with a desire for the greater common good we all share.

What did I learn? Illusions, traps, and other cyber-bending ninja-detective tricks. Unfortunately, a good cyber-sorcerer-ninja-detective never reveals the mechanics of their tricks (that’s not true, they don’t mind sharing at all). 

1st day was strategy and defining what active defense is and isn’t. It’s not waiting for the SIEM (monitoring system) to tell you something is wrong. The SIEM is designed to find threats that are known. We are looking for very sneaky people. They will find a new way in, something the SIEM can’t detect. 

The key to stopping the attacker is understanding the path of the prey. Where do they need to go? Know this and you know where to lay the traps that suck up their time. The illusions that lead them down the wrong rabbit hole to infinite nothing. And this may be the key takeaway. Make it a time suck to mess with you. Make it not worth the hassle to hustle ya. 

Show’em something pretty. Something they have to look at. Delay them, obfuscate the prize, and frustrate their basic efforts. Don’t be the low-hanging digital fruit, just dangling out on the internet waiting to be easily exploited. 

How do you slow them down? Honey, and lots of it. Your main weapon is a long list of honey: honey-pots, honey-servers, honey-networks, honey-users, honey-files, and yes Honey Badger! What are all these honey-techs? They’re big fake data burritos wrapped in alerts, stuffed with traps, and trackers. These techniques and tools draw the attacker into a fake world with sweet-looking data. A juicy-ripe text file with a bunch of sexy financial information and contacts that can’t be resisted. 

2nd day we talked about the legal issues that come with the territory. This is a whole new frontier as far as the law is concerned. Stand-out thought is how far behind the legal concepts of property and privacy are in relation to the digital dimensions of our lives. It’s an 8-bit paradigm trying to govern an Oculus world. It would do me some good to study up search and seizure law. The question to answer: when are you a detective and when are you the interloper violating someone’s rights? 

  Day 3, the slide reads “Don’t Get Shot!” and the class focuses on your safety as an investigator. As in, you may find yourself dealing with bad people. You might play a big part one day in locating said bad people and putting them in prison. Sometimes bad people hold grudges. You don’t want your name on anything bad people can reference. You want to be a ghost, a shadow warrior. That’s right, John added to my practical knowledge of how to make people disappear and attack from the shadows. Always happy to add a little more ninja to my bag of tricks.

Day 4, how far does defense go until it becomes offense? We learned techniques that trapped our network baddies in infinite loops that “inadvertently” shut down their systems. Is that wrong? Well, it’s complicated. How far is too far depends on your warrant and what 3-lettered agency is writing the check. But that’s the justice side. Maybe you’re not working for the government. What about private clients? What would you do for the cash? What wouldn’t you do for cash?

In some cases, your client might not be interested in taking any of this to court. As in, they aren’t concerned with the legality of your work and whether it might stand up in court. That’s when you have to decide for yourself what kind of InfoSec operator you are. Are you a mercenary, a kinda cyber-gun-for-hire? Or are you going to be an agent of justice? Or chaotic good and you just can’t help yourself because of some twisted extreme perceptions of fair and foul play? Or maybe your just smart enough not to get involved in clandestine cyber-pissing contests.  

It’s easy researching and studying security to get paranoid; to think that there is a never-ending wave of threats. And while that might be true, there are ways to limit vulnerability. For a business or an individual, it’s not that difficult to avoid being easy pickings. Remember you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the rest of the campers when the bear arrives.

My CompTIA Security + certification test is coming up in a few weeks. Time to buckle down and memorize an ocean of acronyms, hashes, ports, and protocols. But while that test is important, my mind will still be on the terrors of a Spider Trap and the devious capacities of Honey Badger. I look forward to building a digital hall of mirrors and digging cyber-tiger traps filled with my own assortment of deadly links. That’s right folks, two can play at the sneaky link game. Actually, we should all be learning how the game is played. 

After all, ya got be a cyber-sorcerer-detective-ninja to catch a cyber-sorcerer-ninja.

Dawn of the Bot Hunter

It’s raining and the morning sky is still dark, but the light is slowly shifting from ebony to blue. 

I’m thinking about Bladerunner as I listen to the rain. Harrison Ford narrates my near-future dystopian fantasy as a billion drops per second shower the world. I imagine each drop a malware-loaded bot, a digital armada with greater power than humanity has yet amassed but smaller than an atom, slamming against my firewall. 

Good morning, it’s a great day to hunt bots.

The information security company WhiteOps is the genesis of this daydream. Claim to fame: authenticating trillions of online interactions. The service: determine if it’s a bot or not. 

That’s what reminds me of Bladerunner, the Voight-Kampff test from Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk masterpiece. A digital detective tasked with identifying bots imitating humans. Sounds like another way of saying non-human investigations. So spooky and suspenseful, I’m definitely going to need a trench coat.

Detecting and defending against bots isn’t the future. It’s now. These bots are the new tanks and the next-generation super-cyber bombers. Consider how devastating the German u-boats were to the battles in the Atlantic. Bots are cyber-dimensional submarines exploiting the trade routes of the internet. They are electric ideas driven by algorithms with ambitions. And one of their greatest powers is passing as human.   

WhiteOps has a position open: Threat Intelligence Investigator. That sounds slick enough to me. If there is an AI that loves me, then there will be a bright and shiny circuit-badge with this gig. Just once, I want to unfold my wallet, flashing my ID, and say, “I’m Investigator Twitchell, this is my partner, we’re looking for some bots that were spotted in the neighborhood.”

I sent in a resume and cover letter a few days ago. Not just because Threat Intelligence Investigator sounds badass, it does, but also because figuring out what is human online is essential.  

If you find my words dramatic, well then don’t read this report on fraud and definitely don’t read this article on the AI-containment problem. And most definitely don’t read this one about Facebook being a Doomsday Machine with 90 million bots lurking around trying to friend the planet to death.

I hope to hear back from WhiteOps, but if not, I’m still going to hunt bots! 

And once I find them, game on. Ding ding goes the boxing-ring bell, let the match begin. In this corner hailing from 3-dimensional space fighting for humanity and weighing in at 170-pounds of bravado and hyperbole, Jay “The Bot Hunter” Twitchell. 

Well, like my grandfather used to say, “If you’re going to fight robots, you need to go to robot fighting school.” So, before my certificate of completion as a Digital Detective (artistic license with title) arrived, I was already signed up for a 4-day SOC analysis course with Black Hills Information Security taught by John Strand. 

SOC is short for Security Operations Center. It’s where the cybersecurity team responds to possible intrusions into the network. Picture a cyber-war room. Kinda like a NASA launch control room, with a two-story wall covered in screens, flashing red and green lights, maps from missile command, and graphs and dashboards keeping the score of the living and the dead. In the heat of it, sweat flowing from every brow, a dozen people furiously typing on keyboards, faces aglow in the wash of screen light, whispering battle commands into their microphones. 

SOC Analyst Level 1...gets that team’s coffee. Everybody’s got to start somewhere. As a coffee-dog and bot spotter, you let the team know about a flashing alarm and then Level 2 and 3 deal with capture, containment, and neutralization. You survey the network like a bushman on the savannah scanning for evidence of predators’ digital skat, dissecting packets, and looking for paw prints of persistent connections in silicon. 

Information security is totally hunting the hunter, spy vs spy. Just not the fast cars and jet packs, but instead SQL injections and rootkits. And If you're going to hunt down the enemy, you have to learn how to read the threat landscape and appreciate the tactics. To hunt a fox you must become a fox, yes? You need to know the methods so you can spot the signs that you are being stalked. 

John Strand is a great resource for honing cyber-safari skills. John is formerly a SANs institute instructor (15yrs) and runs BHIS, a cadre of devious cyber ruffians. 

A quick summary of the 4-day course:

There is no one product or strategy that is foolproof. Anything, given time and persistence, can be bypassed. The trick is layering the network with enough security gambits that it costs too much time and/or sets off enough alarms that an attack can be prevented or quickly resolved. The idea is to create a layered web. A spider uses more than one string to catch a fly. 

Endpoint analysis and common command-line magic tricks combined with a slew of open-source network monitoring tools and Shazam, you can respond to an incident. Right?   

Hmmm...not so fast. Even a good plan won’t help you if you aren’t used to responding to threats. There are a couple of fun quotes about this,  “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” and “No battle plan survives meeting the enemy.”

This is why you hire penetration specialest-teams like BHIS, and run attack simulations. If you can’t afford that, then attack your own system and test the defenses. Sounds like martial arts to me. Seeing as how I’ve paid professionals to beat me up most of my life, I totally get this principle. When you're getting your ass kicked isn’t the time to discover you're not ready for an ass-kicking. No one has time to think when they are getting pummeled. It takes practice to learn to roll with the punches. 

And if you're going to pay someone to cyber punch you, John and his team seem like the right kinda people. 

My takeaway from the 4 days: John is a passionate and generous instructor. The class was pay-what-you-can. So, the cost wasn’t an obstacle for the education. And I’ve rarely seen someone outside of a Pentecostal tent so evangelized about their work. It’s great to see that this field can keep a fire alive in the belly. Borders on inspiring.

My favorite quotes from the course were:

“You don’t get paid for the good days, you get paid for the bad ones.”  

and

“You don’t train until you get it right, you train until you can’t get it wrong!” 

To get your own dose of John, listen to this Darknet Diaries podcast where he shares stories about all kinds of penetration testing. One story involves his mother popping shell on a prison system. Below is the podcast and an article from Wired for the extra curious (it’s totally worth it).

Darknet Diaries - 67: The Big House (google.com)

(Darknet Diaries is my favorite podcast)

How a Hacker's Mom Broke Into a Prison—and the Warden's Computer | WIRED

I signed up for another course in March: Active Defense & Cyber Deception. I also enrolled in BHIS’s Cyber Range where you can build your cyber skills and supposedly compete for a position on the BHIS team. I also bought a t-shirt. I know it’s not quite a trench coat, but it’s a good start for the newest bot hunter on the block. Watch out, robots. I’m coming for you.

Letting Go

Just about every morning at 8 AM, I practice Tai Ch with a partner I’ll call B. B and I have practiced together on and off for 5 years. For 9 months, B and I have met at a local elementary school. B is same age my mother would be. My mother and I never did Tai Chi together. Don’t get me wrong I don’t think of B like she’s my mom. I just can’t help but wonder what it would have been like if I could have done Tai Chi with my Mom. It’s a thought that makes me smile.

B and I are always outside. Being Portland. sometimes it rains lightly, but most mornings we’ve been blessed with a clear sky. Most often there are crows perched high in the tree branches watching us. Locals from the neighborhood bring out their dogs to run and play fetch on the wet field. Some mornings the sky is pink and orange and some days its grey. Regardless we slip into our form and gently move through the morning trying not to wake the world.

Today after practice she gave me this poem. I can’t read it aloud without choking up.  Maybe I’m holding on too tight to something.

She Let Go

She let go.

She let go. Without a thought or a word, she let go.

She let go of the fear. She let go of the judgments.

She let go of the confluence of opinions swarming around her head.

She let go of the committee of indecision within her.

She let go of all the ‘right’ reasons.

Wholly and completely, without hesitation or worry, she just let go.

She didn’t ask anyone for advice. She didn’t read a book on how to let go.

She didn’t search the scriptures.

She just let go.

She let go of all of the memories that held her back.

She let go of all of the anxiety that kept her from moving forward.

She let go of the planning and all of the calculations about how to do it just right.

She didn’t promise to let go. She didn’t journal about it.

She didn’t write the projected date in her Day-Timer.

She made no public announcement and put no ad in the paper.

She didn’t check the weather report or read her daily horoscope.

She just let go.

She didn’t analyze whether she should let go.

She didn’t call her friends to discuss the matter.

She didn’t do a five-step Spiritual Mind Treatment.

She didn’t call the prayer line.

She didn’t utter one word.

She just let go.

No one was around when it happened. There was no applause or congratulations.

No one thanked her or praised her.

No one noticed a thing. Like a leaf falling from a tree, she just let go.

There was no effort. There was no struggle.

It wasn’t good and it wasn’t bad. It was what it was, and it is just that.

In the space of letting go, she let it all be.

A small smile came over her face. A light breeze blew through her.

And the sun and the moon shone forevermore…

by Reverend Safire Rose

Having No Head

Sam Harris podcast has a fun conversation with Richard Lang. Nicest dude ever. The quote below provides preview.

“The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seriousness: I have no head.

It was eighteen years ago, when I was thirty-three, that I made the discovery. Though it certainly came out of the blue, it did so in response to an urgent inquiry; I had for several months been absorbed in the question: what am I? The fact that I happened to be walking in the Himalayas at the time probably had little to do with it; though in that country unusual states of mind are said to come more easily. However that may be, a very still clear day, and a view from the ridge where I stood, over misty blue valleys to the highest mountain range in the world, with Kangchenjunga and Everest unprominent among its snow-peaks, made a setting worthy of the grandest vision.

What actually happened was something absurdly simple and unspectacular: I stopped thinking. A peculiar quiet, an odd kind of alert limpness or numbness, came over me. Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. For once, words really failed me. Past and future dropped away. I forgot who and what I was, my name, manhood, animalhood, all that could be called mine. It was as if I had been born that instant, brand new, mindless, innocent of all memories. There existed only the Now, that present moment and what was clearly given in it. To look was enough. And what I found was khaki trouser legs terminating downwards in a pair of brown shoes, khaki sleeves terminating sideways in a pair of pink hands, and a khaki shirtfront terminating upwards in—absolutely nothing whatever! Certainly not in a head.

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it was, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of “me”, unstained by any observer. Its total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.

Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious. It was a lucid moment in a confused life-history. It was a ceasing to ignore something which (since early childhood at any rate) I had always been too busy or too clever to see. It was naked, uncritical attention to what had all along been staring me in the face - my utter facelessness. 

 In short, it was all perfectly simple and plain and straightforward, beyond argument, thought, and words. There arose no questions, no reference beyond the experience itself, but only peace and a quiet joy, and the sensation of having dropped an intolerable burden.

— Douglas Harding, [extract from] On Having No Head

Natural Born Heroes

For those people who like real adventure and a desire to know what it means and takes to be a hero, boy do I have a book for you.

Natural Born Heroes is one part World War II heist and one part history of sport science. While managing to weave a thrilling yarn about how a band of ragtag spies kidnap a Nazi general on the Greek island of Crete, McDougall also investigates the history of fitness on a large scale, covering martial arts, endurance sports, hydration, and nutrition. On one hand introducing true-life swashbuckling heroes who pulled off the impossible; and on the other, a journey from ancient Minoan society to modern day to explore what it takes to be a hero.

First it’s a detective story exploring how a team of misfit British spies and Cretan sheep rustlers could possibly kidnap a Nazi general in the middle of occupied territory and live to tell the tale. The author doesn’t sit back and armchair this adventure, he travels the world finding leading experts on human fitness to prepare for a trip to Crete to try and redo the unimaginable trek of the good guys.   

Much like his last book chronicling ultra-endurance runners, Born to Run, McDougall puts himself in the middle of the action. He wants to cover the same ground as the story's protagonists, so he trains in parkour, natural movement, forging, nutrition, axe-throwing and sharp-shooting to prepare  for a trek through the treacherous Cretan mountains. 

The training covers: fascia vs muscle strength; how learning to throw transformed human capacity for sequential thought, imagination, and language; natural movement and the development of parkour; Pankration and development of Wing Chun; and echolocation.

One of the standout deliveries of the book offers insight into the gender and age gap in sports and performance.  It points out that the difference in men and women’s performance in strength and endurance is very small and that a sport allows for more flaunting or peacocking of the body.  Any skill gap that is so great between genders doesn’t make good evolutionary sense, because if men were that much faster and stronger than women, then they wouldn’t be able to mate very well.  Basically it breaks the gender (and age) gap down to nurture not nature. The reason men appear so much superior is because we don’t raise boys and girls to play together. It also points out that sports specialization has led to an observer culture. Less and less participation, which of course leads to less fitness and cooperation.

Other cool/interesting things examined in the book include: 

-Situational awareness and compassion as a survival strategy.

-Trials of endurance and strength as passage into adulthood.

-Weeds are good for you.

-There is a hydration conspiracy.

-How Churchill used magicians to win the war.

-Just how much of a badass Teddy Roosevelt really was.

-True movement requires risk.

-Fitness should be based on being useful.

-The rise of the gym is equal to the rise of obesity.

- Arnold Schwarzenegger ruined fitness for America.

All-in-all Natural Born Heroes is super informative, absolutely compelling, and downright inspiring.  This one definitely goes into the Kung Fu Science Fiction High School library.

Why Are We Yelling?

I recently had a falling out with a friend that I have known for many years. My friend had strong opinions and felt comfortable sharing them. I’m not known for my lack of opinions either. A fair amount of unspoken frustration had been building over various issues. We didn’t agree on a great number of items that our country now seems comfortable listing in the issues of the culture war. 

My friend and I live far apart so most of our communications existed on social media. Eventually there was the infamous back-breaking straw and I ended our digital connection. I didn’t like what they had to say nor how they believed they needed to say it. There was a quick back and forth that was more than enough for me to remove their access to my platform of choice. This led to intense name calling on their part and short derisive follow ups comments on my part. 

I don’t call people my friends lightly and considering how powerfully demeaning my friend’s responses were, I believe they were genuinely hurt by me shutting them out. Nobody won anything, and we both lost something.

I wasn’t proud of my part of the escalation and so I felt it was a positive step to try to learn how to better understand why arguments happen and how they transform into combative situations. Sense one of my vocations is teaching martial arts, I felt an added responsibility. Somebody once said, the best way to win a fight is not to have one. With this in mind, I felt arguing well was an important thing to study. Learning more about how to have a disagreement without creating an enemy would be helpful on a number of levels. 

Buster Benson’s book Why Are We Yelling?  Was the first book I competed for 2020. It helped me understand my own tendencies as well as increased my awareness of how other people are moved. Here are a quick set of notes from reading his important book.

-3 categories of argument: Head, Heart, and Hand. Sometimes we are arguing about very different categories. If we can’t identify what perspective we arguing from, then nothing can be resolved. Being right doesn’t change a persons heart. Not being able to appreciate where someone is coming from emotionally means we are blind to the reason they feel so moved by their point of view. Focusing on what is useful usually comes second to trying to change someone’s mind. 

-4 voices: Power, Reason, Avoidance and Possibility. The first three are our go to reactions. Power rarely solves the problems, but sure does make us feel safer. Reason makes us feel smarter, but facts can, no matter how many you find, don’t change minds and most figures and statistics can be argued to support a different point of view. Avoidance seems helpful when we are just tired of the same items of conflict that never change, so why bother, just ignore them. This leads to a festering issue that often becomes to big to handle. The last voice, Possibility, tries to move beyond narrow concepts of truth and tries to discover the person behind the argument and examining the unique events and personal experiences that lead us into positions we are compelled to stand our ground, even if that ground is quicksand.

-Cognitive Biases: There are 200-plus and they corral our brains ability to see past our own limited reactions to stress. You can’t escape them but you can learn to understand how they shape our patterns of thinking. 

CBs are mental strategies that help us deal with too much info and not enough time in a world where the more choices we have the poorer our decision making faculties seem to preform.   Rather than trying to discuss every single CB, Benson groups them in away that allows for us to see that CBs work as sets. 

-Benson covers big issues: immigration and gun control as well as abstract concepts like the belief in ghosts. He talks about creating safe spaces for discussion and the power of generous listening. And while it might seem obvious in bares repeating, the way a question is asked places us on better footing for the journey toward understanding what the best answer might be. The more open ended the better. Yes/No questions are moe likely to cause issues than they are to help resolve conflict.

The book covers a lot of ground.  Way more than I have glossed over here. I feel that whatever your personal opinion maybe, you owe it to yourself and the people you care for to consider how you might be wrong about needing to be right. Certainty isn’t as useful as actual problem solving. Being able to avoid deciding who is right allows to get to what will work. How is it we go about setting aside our need for a stark contrast of black and white and discover the world is made up of shades of grey? 

Just last night a friend and I were talking about climate issues and I listened carefully to the words he used to describe those who disagreed with him.  Much of what he thought about the people o the other side of the issue limited his capacity to work with those others who would be needed to make actually make the changes we all very desperately need. 

Much of the ammo we use to deride the other side comes from media. The media isn’t designed to make us better at solving our problems. One might argue that no matter what side of the argument you fall on about whatever argument you are having, most of our reasoning is given to us by a system that profits from escalating our differences into fears that produce conflicts that keep us from working together to help one another. 

Most of our talking points are not sought out to transform us, but to confirm what we already think.  Every opinion we have deserves to be examined with an awareness that we are afraid to be wrong. Benson’s book asks if we are brave enough to accept information that transforms how we think of ourselves. 

Ultimately we have to ask: what is the point of the argument? Isn’t it about being able to share the world we live in. Isn’t about living in a world that is worth sharing. Sometimes there may be no way around a fight, but before we get there, let's try to make sure we did everything we could to avoid it. 

I don’t believe mot of us want to make enemies, nor does anyone want to lose a friend.

Exercise vs. Meds

Bigthink.com has an article discussing the benefits of exercise and how it is beginning to reshape how we think about treatment for psychological issues.

“The results were stunning. After leading the patients in structured exercises — each 60-minute session included a combination of strength training, flexibility training, and cardio — 95 percent of patients reported feeling better, while 63 percent reported feeling happy or very happy instead of sad, very sad, or neutral. A whopping 91.8 percent said they were pleased with their bodies during the sessions.”

It also has this lovely gem of a quote:

“Humans were designed to move. Bipedalism offers us serious advantages in lung capacity and communication systems. Humans are generally weak and slow for mammals, but the combination of mental ingenuity and physical dexterity gave us a competitive advantage, one we've exploited so effectively that, thanks to our technology, we now bow to the cult of the mind while abandoning the reality of our bodies. Yet we're paying the price for our conveniences.”

Dreaming and Skill Acquisition

Bigthink.com has an interesting article on the lucid dreaming and learning. Particularly of interest is the conversation about activation of motor neurons and thought.

“Interestingly, Llinás noticed that thinking fires motor neurons, the pathway we use to move our bodies. He believes thinking is an internalized form of movement; what we call consciousness is a mental representation of this phenomenon. Our mental maps allow us to predict how to navigate our environment. Combined with memory, our inner GPS creates and constantly updates this road map of prediction: move here, don’t go there, act this way but not like that.”

I see Internal Dynamic modules as exercises that increase our ability to create better mental maps of our our environments.

Mindfullness Debate

How do you define Mindfullness?

“To be clear, mindfulness and meditation are not the same thing. There are types of meditation that are mindful, but not all mindfulness involves meditation and not all meditation is mindfulness-based.”

Sun Style with Resistance Using Theraband

Instagram video of yours truly using a resistance band for form training. Informative for structure, sensitivity, speed, and strengthen.

Tai Chi vs. Crossfit

Times has an article comparing tai chi to crossfit.

“It holds up when compared to other more strenuous types of exercise. “Over time, we see people who do tai chi achieve similar levels of fitness as those who walk or do other forms of physical therapy,” Irwin says. One study in theAmerican Journal of Epidemiology concluded that tai chi was nearly as effective as jogging at lowering risk of death among men. Another review inPLOS One found that the practice may improve fitness and endurance of the heart and lungs, even for healthy adults.”

The Giving Way: Sun Style Tai Chi Notes

The Giving Way

Still mind

Steady feet

Breathe, sink

Time the beats

All doors a trap

Desire the map

Give, facilitate

Occupy the back

Gifts freely given

Cannot be taken

Offered options

Limit choices

Show the way

They want to go

Feeling strong

In a disappearing hand

Extend their range

Let them reach

Make them long

Support what they seek

Corrupt the balance

Change the target

Seeking strength

Opens the gates

Catch them

As they tumble

Stable them

Humble

Striking a gift

Rare, swift

Creating space

Where none exists

Mind Hopeful

Body Supple

Beyond the target

The goal waits

Stretching Treats Inflammation, Does Help with Cancer?

Article discussing the effects of stretching and cancer treatment. Considering the amount of tissue winding and unwinding involved with internal arts method, this allows for a ringing out of the tissue as well as a stretching.

16-min Documentary kinda about Taosim that has lots of Tai Chi

In a short film, Pamela Hiley shares her thoughts and insights from studying Taoism and Chen style Tai Chi. Her form is beautiful and her comments more than worth while.

Tai Chi Beneath The Surface

Working the Center

MartialBody.com…has another good article discussing fascial chains, the core, and martial arts training.

Tai Chi notes: On Power

People seek to be powerful. They seek the feeling of power so they can take, so they can push and not be pushed. Seeking power limits power. Power exists already, you are power.  Feeling is power, not feeling of power. If you feel power, you are feeling too much. Somewhere in your body you are holding to feel such a push, such pressure. To feel power is to feel power over, and what are you desiring power over.  Yourself? This is a strain. It assumes limits. Real power is the power to give, to hold, to wait, to have no intention but to be present. The abundant mind, changes the frame and aligns the body. The spirit of giving is not a weakness, it is a strategic advantage. Giving space comes from abundance, holding ground comes from the ego, which is afraid to give up, which is afraid to lose something it does not have. Control. The Giving advantage allows for movement and stillness.

Something you have to push by definition isn’t meant to be moved. It desires to rest.  Using force to change things reduces your energy. I am forcing nothing, I am allowing and filling the empty space. This costs me less energy. You not wanting to move, to hold your space that is the ego trying to control. This comes at an unnecessary cost in time and energy. Control requires thought, one must device, design multiple ways to remove resistance. Giving there is no other strategy, it does many things by doing nothing that does not want to be done. It does not try to move things that do not want to be moved, and it does not try to stop that which needs to move.