New world hack

You've probably heard of the Bilderberg Group, which is an annual conference of a couple of hundred  "political elite, experts from industry, finance, academia, and the media" named after the first place they met (back in 1954), the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeek, Netherlands.

They're also thought by some to be synonymous with, or at least a subcategory of, the Illuminati, and as such, the Bilderbergs are the evil, ultra-intelligent ruling elite of the New World Order who are controlling everything that goes on in all of the world's major governments, and who are so super-top-secret that they have a Wikipedia page saying where and when their next meeting is going to be held.  

Which is why I choked on my coffee yesterday morning when I read that the Bilderberg Group's site had been hacked, and a cryptic message left behind that has the conspiracy theorists experiencing multiple orgasms.  The message is the usual "we know who you are, you won't get away with this" kind of stuff, except for the fact that it has odd capitalization scattered throughout the message, leading the aforementioned so-and-sos hopping about making excited little squeaking noises about how it contains a secret encoded message.

The Hotel de Bilderberg, Oosterbeek, Netherlands [image courtesy of photographer Michiel M. Minderhoud and the Wikimedia Commons]

You can read the entire thing at the link posted in the preceding paragraph, but here's an excerpt so you can get the flavor:

Dear Bilderberg mEmBers, From NoW(), each OnE of you have 1 year (365 days) to truly work in faVor of HumaNs and not youR private interests
Each TopIc you disCuss or work you achieve thRough YoUr uber privAte meetinGs should from now benefit WORlD population and not X or Y groUp of people
OtHerWIse, we will FinD you and we Will hAck you
MiNd the cuRrent situation: We conTrol your expensive connected cars, we control your connecteD house security devices, we control your daughter laptop, we control your wife’s mobile,
we tape YoUR seCret meetings, we reAD your emaiLs, we control your faVoriTe eScort girl smartWatch, we ARe inside your beLoved banks and we Are reading YoUr assets
You wont be safe anywhere near electricty anyMore
We WiLL watch yOu, from NoW on you got to WoRk for Us, Humanity, the People

So that's pretty threatening, especially the part about controlling their favorite girl escorts.  You have to wonder how they'll do that.  Are the girl escorts remote-controlled robots?  Or do they have neural implants, so that when the Bilderberg members are in (as it were) mid-escort, the girls will suddenly start cackling in a maniacal fashion and demand passwords to their beLoved banks or they won't finish escorting them, leaving them in escortus interruptus?

But it's the potential for an encoded message that really has the conspiracy world humming.  One possible decoding of the message is included at the above website, which apparently involves conversion of the capitalized letters to hexadecimal and dividing by 3,600,000 and looking at it with your eyes squinched up, and gives you a latitude and longitude that's pretty close to the North Pole.

Which is incredibly significant, because before this, the location of the North Pole has been a highly-classified secret.  Just think of what would happen if WikiLeaks got a hold of this information, and put together the location of the North Pole with Pizzagate.  There would be massive uprisings.  Major world governments would fall.  Donald Trump would write several self-congratulatory tweets about it.

It would be, in a word, chaos.

So anyhow.  The whole thing is impressive mainly because of the fact that the Bilderberg website is probably pretty heavily protected, and the fact that hackers got into it is a little scary.  I mean, just think about it.  If they could do that, they could probably hack the sites of the Republican and Democratic National Conventions.  And think of what effect that could have.

But as far as the message, I'm not convinced it contains anything of interest.  It will, however, give the conspiracy theorists something to worry at, which with luck will keep them out of trouble for a while.  And who knows?  Maybe it will induce the Bilderbergs to turn their attention to humanity's needs rather than personal gain.  Not a Bad oUtcome, You GOtta admit, RegarDless Of your opiNionS aBOut the ethics Of hacKS.

Hack attack payback

In the past couple of weeks, the media has been buzzing about the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment, in which a great deal of information that the corporation would consider sensitive -- executive salaries, emails between high-ranking employees, and copies of unreleased films -- were released online.  The hackers call themselves "the Guardians of Peace," but no one seems to know who they are.

And of course, there's nothing like a complete lack of information to make everyone start to claim that they know the whole story.

The most popular theory is that the Guardians of Peace are operatives from North Korea, who did this as revenge for the planned release of Sony's bromance film The Interview, which is about a couple of guys who are hired to assassinate Kim Jong-Un.  North Korea, for its part, has disavowed all responsibility for the hack, with Kim Jong-Un adding, "And if you don't act more respectfully, we'll do it again."

In all seriousness, though, it struck me as odd that the North Koreans could pull this off.  They're not exactly a technological powerhouse.  Just a couple of days ago the entire country lost its internet connectivity, possibly because a squirrel farted in Pyongyang and damaged their only working router.  The United States, for its part, has disavowed all responsibility for the act, with a CIA spokesperson adding, "And if you don't act more respectfully, we'll do it again."

The speculation doesn't end there, of course.  It's now being theorized that Sony hacked themselves as a PR move.  After the alleged North Korean connection, Sony pulled The Interview, but has decided that it will re-release it to various independent theaters.  This has elevated the movie from what would probably have been a fairly forgettable film into something that suddenly everyone wants to see, fueling accusations that Sony engineered the hack to boost the movie's ticket sales.

Myself, I think this is ridiculous.  Why would Sony release sensitive information just to push one bad movie to make more money?  Security is a huge deal in the movie industry, and it seems ludicrous to think that they'd jeopardize their reputation for protecting their employees and investments for the sake of one silly movie.  The limited release is unlikely to make much money as compared to showings in major theater chains, although it does afford me the opportunity to reaffirm my own decision not to see the movie.

Then, of course, we have the "Thanks, Obama" crew, who is claiming that Obama engineered the hack himself, with the assistance of the NSA, to make North Korea look bad.  Because apparently the North Koreans weren't doing a stellar enough job of that all by themselves.

The upshot of it all is that we still have no idea who the Guardians of Peace are.  They may have had something to do with North Korea; they may be some kind of independent troublemakers, on the lines of Anonymous; or they may be something else entirely.  At the moment, we have no real data to go on, so that's the best that we can say.

The lack of hard information won't silence the speculation, of course.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  These people love it when they have no evidence, because that leaves them free to attribute events to whatever their favorite bête noire is.  On the plus side, though, it has prompted people to start a campaign to make Kim Jong-Un look ridiculous:

So whatever else you say about the hack, it did have at least one positive outcome.  Not that anyone in North Korea will be likely to see it, unless they do something about those flatulent squirrels.