Wednesday, July 27, 2016

인터파크 해킹 사건, 그런데 아직도 정신을 차린 걸로 보이지 않는 이유

항상 느끼는 것이지만, 국내 웹 IT 환경은 뭔가 외국의 메인 스트림의 그것과 다르다. 다른 게, 국내 사이트마다 제각각인 게 아니라, 국내 사이트들끼리 서로서로 베낀 것처럼, 같은 방식으로 다르다. 마치 한 명의 한국인 마스터마인드가 있고 다른 한국인 엔지니어들이 그 사람으로부터 배워서 따라하는 게 아닌가 하는 생각이 들 정도이다.

Gmail을 보다가 심심해서 스팸 디렉터리를 클릭해 보았다. 목록에 보낸이 [인터파크] 제목 [개인정보 침해 사고 관련 안내드립니다.]라는 항목이 있었다. Gmail은 목록에서 본문의 앞 부분을 보여 주기 때문에 본문이 좀 보여야 하는데 제목만 있었다. 뭔가 싶어 열어 보았다. 외국의 대부분의 메일 서비스들은 보안을 위해 메일 본문에 들어가 있는 외부 이미지를 막는다. 이 메일은 달랑 외부 이미지 하나로만 구성되어서, 본문이 텅 비어 아무 것도 보이지 않았다. 스팸이 이런 짓거리를 많이 하는데, 아마 그래서 Gmail 필터가 스팸으로 분류한 게 아닌가 한다.

이미지 표시 버튼을 누르면 표시가 되는데, 스팸일 경우를 대비해, 실제 인터파크 해킹 사고가 있었나 구글을 검색해 보니 정말 있었다. 그래서 이미지를 표시 버튼을 눌러 보았다.

뭐 단순한 것이었다. 그냥 큰 제목으로 유출 안내 드린다고 적혀 있고, 플레인 텍스트로 몇 문단의 설명이 있었으며, 아래에는 유출 여부 조회한다는 큰 텍스트 버튼이 있었다. 이 정도면 텍스트로 해도 충분히 가능한 것인데, 액세서빌리티 무시하고, 보안도 무시하고, 본문을 통짜로 이미지로 만들어 외부 링크로 넣어 보냈다. 물론 보낸이를 증명할 수 있는 디지털 서명된 메일도 아니다.

본문 내용은 변명으로  보였다. 멍청한 직원 한 명의 실수로 악성 코드 첨부 파일을 실행해 개인 정보가 유출되었으면 그냥 그 사실을 전달할 것이지, "인터파크는 .. 개인정보관리체계 인증을 획득한 바 있고, 개인 정보 보호 및 보안에 많은 노력을 기울여 왔는데도..." 해킹을 당했다고 변명조로 설명하고 있었다. 개인정보관리체계 인증도 별 거 아닌 게 분명하군, 직원 한 명만 속이면 1000만 건이 뚫리는 시스템인데.

자, 그러면 이 메일의 핵심 문제는 뭔가... 개인정보 유출 조회 버튼이다. 누르면 HTTPS도 아니고 HTTP인 사이트로 연결되며, 유출 상태를 확인하기 위해 인터파크 ID/비밀 번호를 입력하라고 한다. 초대형 쇼핑몰 사이트이고, 아마 수 백 억 원 돈을 벌고 있을 텐데, 로그인하는 페이지에 몇 십 만 원 밖에 안 하는 EV 인증서도 못 다나? 해커들이 이런 식으로 메일을 보내 인터파크 계정 털기에 딱 좋다. 메일 주소를 admin@interpark.com으로 적어 보내는 것은 식은 죽 먹기이며 (실제 우편을 보낼 때 보내는 사람 주소를 아무렇게나 적을 수 있는 것과 똑같다), 본문에 버튼 추가해서, 인터파크 로그인 페이지처럼 생긴 사이트 만들어 주소는 대강 interparrk.com 뭐 이렇게 해 두면, 분명히 속아 넘어 가서 자신의 인터파크 ID/비밀 번호 넣는 사람이 나올 거다. 한국 대기업들이 전부 이런 식으로 메일을 보내니 사용자들이 이런 것에 익숙해져서 별 의심 없이 그렇게 행동하는 습관이 조장되는 것인데, 피해자가 나오면 사용자의 탓으로 돌리겠지.

요약하자면 인터파크 메일의 문제는

  • 본문을 통짜 이미지로 만들어 외부 링크로 넣어 보냄 (액세서빌리티 무시. 스팸으로 오인될 확률 증가. 많은 국내 대기업들도 똑같은 짓거리를 함).
  • 본문에 쓸데 없는 변명.
  • 본문에 사이트 로그인하는 버튼을 추가해 보냄 (피싱에 아주 좋음)
  • 버튼을 눌러 열린 로그인 페이지가 HTTP임 (피싱에 좋음)

외국 사이트들은 안 그런데, 정말 한국 사이트들은 왜 이럴까? 언제 쯤 빌어 먹을 ActiveX 보안 메일이 사라질까?


Tuesday, July 19, 2016

There is nothing mythically good about the human body.

I have just started watching the Galaxy Express 999. It is an old Japanese animation (broadcast in 1978), and it was famous in Korea. I think I watched several episodes of it when I was a kid, but I did not watch the entire series, so I have little memory of it. A lot of people mention this animation as if it has some deep philosophical meanings, so I decided to give it a try.

I have watched only the first two episodes so far. Basically, the story seems to be that a poor young boy travels to a distant planet where he can transform his body into a mechanical body for free. The show takes place in some year 2200s, where humans are basically divided into two groups: the rich and the poor. The rich class live on the surface and the rest of humans live underground. The rich class seems to live like today's normal middle class humans, but they have transformed their body into seemingly hideous mechanical body (think about the robot C-3PO from the Star Wars), and enjoy the disease-free eternal life. The poor class cannot afford the mechanical body and live in a situation that seem to be worse than that of today's Africa. A boy from the poor class and his mother try to escape to a city on the surface where they could get on a space train that will transfer them to a distant planet where they can get free mechanical bodies.

Now, some of the rich class enjoy hunting the poor class humans with guns as if they were animals, despite the fact that they both speak the same language. They killed the boy's mother and tried to make her as a stuffed animal. Do you think this is a probable future? I can hardly think it would be. Even today, most humans object to hunting and killing human-like animals such as gorillas or chimpanzees for fun. So, why would a society, that has so advanced that they can even transform human bodies would allow hunting and killing humans who even speak the same language? The author just probably wanted to make the future look gloomy and wanted to tell that there is something wrong with the mechanical bodies even though it was very unlikely.

I already get what the author is trying to say after watching just two episodes

In the second episode, the boy arrives at Mars. The people on Mars already have mechanical bodies but they are so unhappy for some unknown reason. An old man has only his one leg replaced with mechanical leg because he could not afford the full body transformation. At the end of the episode, the old man says something like this.
"Only my mechanical leg is healthy and the rest of my body is dying. Soon I will die. No one knows if it is the only good thing to living long. I now think that the best thing is to live naturally and to die naturally. People who could not die when they should have are miserable."
I have just watched like 2% of the show, but I think I can kind of predict what the whole story would be like. Something like "It is natural the way we are now, do not try to change!" Well, I disagree with the author completely. The author says as if there is something that has been decided by some superior being that we humans should not change. There is no such thing.

So, what is naturalanyway?

If you ask it to people 20,000 years ago, they would say that living naturally is roaming on bare foot all day long for some fruits or dead animal carcusses. They would say that dying naturally is either death by starvation or disease, or eaten by large predators such as lions. They did not have any medicines we have now. A simple wound could have killed them due to bacteria infection, and that was natural. See, no animals in the wild use antibiotics! Most humans probably could not live up to 30. This miserable way of living is probably the most natural thing in a sense, just like wild animals.

If you ask what natural for humans is to people 1000 years ago, they would say that living naturally is either working on a farm all day long. Death by simple disease that we can cure now would be a very natural death for them. The average human life expectancy was less than 60.

So what do you think is natural? Do you think it is natural that your body's immune system gets weak at the age round 80 and you die of complications from diseases? Don't you think it is just a quite arbitrary idea drown by what you happen to be accustomed to? Who decided dying at the age 80 is the natural way? We modern humans happen to live up to age 80 now, but that does not mean we should live up to only about 80. No one, and nothing has fixed that. People in the future who may have found cures for various disease that we cannot currently cure, may live up to 150 years and they would think it is natural for humans to live up to the age 150. There may even be some sort of philosophical novel about why it is natural to live up to the age 150 and it is unnatural to live longer than that.

Almost all medical practices are unnatural. Animals usually die when they get diseases after suffering horrible pains. Early humans also died like that. If you think it is so important to live and die naturally, why cure diseases? It is very arbitrary and annoying that people define what we currently can do to be natural, and what we currently cannot do unnatural.

Face it, humans bodies have so many problems

We are all covered with dust mites which are disgusting and may cause allergies. Parasitic worms are crawling and mating on the eyelashes of 80% of people. Toxoplasma gondii, the brain controlling parasites, live in the brains of 30% of people. And there are a lot of other parasites that even people in the developed countries harbor.

Even a single organ failure could be deadly. For example, no matter how smart you are, if your liver fails, your brain dies with it. What a loss.

Your beauty starts to fade at about age 40 as your skin gets loose and weak. Your eye gets dim and eventually you can hardly live without glasses. Your old body cannot defend itself against new influenzas, so you will have to be vaccinated each year.

A lot of time and efforts should be taken just to take care of your body. Sleeping takes 1/3 of your entire life, eating could take several hours a day if you prepare your own food. You like sleeping and eating? Good for you, but some people do not, but they have to do those anyway.

It is very annoying that most authors depict that humans bodies have some inherent greatness that cyborg bodies can never have. I think they are just dreaming. Sure, the early cyborgs should not be as good as human bodies. But that is as if when the first digital cameras came out, fans of analogue cameras were arguing that digital cameras might be convenient but their picture quality was so low, and would never be as good as that of analogue cameras. Technology improves faster over time. Now, digital cameras can take pictures as good as analogue cameras, and few people miss analogue cameras.

Cyborg bodies will be improving fast. If they become just as good as the humans bodies, I mean if your brain cannot feel any difference, and it never gets any disease, requires little of your maintenance so that you can spend your time on the things you love, what advantages would a biological human body have? 

Do you hate the idea that we humans live unnaturally long?

Are you like the old man in the second episode of Galaxy Express 999? Do you think it would be miserable not to be able to die naturally? No one will force you to live long. We will be just given of choices. Currently we die at about age 80 whether we would like to live longer or not. When we can transform our bodies to cyborgs, people who want to live long can live long, and people who want to die at age 80 will also be able to do so. After all, it is a cyborg body, it would be quick and painless to make it stop functioning than the biological human body.

So, what is so bad about we humans getting cyborg bodies, again?

Wednesday, July 06, 2016

Space Battleship Yamato sucked, except for the main theme

I happened to have a chance to hear the main theme of the Space Battleship Yamato (宇宙戦艦ヤマト). I liked the lyrics and melody of the part "必ずここへ帰って来ると手を振る人に笑顔で答え (Saying 'We shall return here no matter what' with a smile to the people who are waving their hands)". I kind of felt a sense of solemnity, sadness, sense of duty from that lyrics. I usually do not watch 'war' or 'battle' animations, because I do not like wars or battles, but this animation franchise had 4 series and several movies, according to Wikipedia. I thought it must have been good, otherwise how could there have been so many series, so I gave it a try and watched the first series.

In short, everything except the main theme sucked.

Technical nonsenses

Given that it was made in 1974 and it was not a space documentary, there still are some serious flaws. Why would anyone in 2199 use a battleship made in 1940's. They modified it, but it would have made far more sense if they built a new one from scratch. It would be as if building Windows 10 by modifying Windows 1.0 source code. To me, it seemed to be an excuse to link the mission with an old Japanese imperial ship that some old Japanese people have nostalgia for.

The crew members on Yamato which was near Pluto had real time video conversation with their family members on Earth. This is impossible. Pluto is 5 light hours away from the Earth. They cannot talk to each other in real time. Nothing can go faster than light, and so even the radio waves or any medium for communication can achieve real-time. More ridiculously, the ship somehow restored real-time communication with Earth when they were halfway to the Magellanic Cloud about 100,000 light years away from the Earth, and no one on the ship thought it strange.

How could the crews fix the outer damage of the ship in space, so quickly on the go? The damages were not even subtle. In one episode, almost the entire bottom half of the ship was damaged, but in the next episode it was fixed and good as new. Where do they get the parts and materials from? Space is vastly empty, it is not as if you can find an go to planets are here and there. Even if there happened to be some planets each time the ship got damages, materials would not be on the surface in lumps for you to extract. It is not StarCraft.

Annoying bible references

Analyser the robot said "It is said that humans got their life from God." No! We got it from evolution. Why a robot in the year 2199 would be still believing such nonsense? The last-surviving alien woman in Iscandar and a human male from the Earth fell in love. The protagonist solemnly announces, "they shall be the Adam and Eve for this planet." No, they are different species. They cannot reproduce. And even if they can, their descendants are still doomed. Whom will their children marry? Their siblings? Their parents? Even if they keep reproducing by marrying their siblings, the lack of genetic diversity would collapse the species. 

Stop being preachy

When they are the only ship that can save the entire humanity, and when they are already behind the schedule (if they do not meet the schedule, the entire humans will die), the protagonist decided to spend their time on rescuing some unknown alien animals. That is not realistic or even moral. That is like gambling on the lives of the entire human race. Yeah, I know the author wanted to tell 'all lives matter', but what kind of human in his right mind would actually do such a thing?

After accidentally destroying the entire planet of their enemy as a result of a battle, the protagonist was infuriated and shouted that those aliens were also living thing and they should have talked peace instead of war. Oh, please.

Sexism

Analyser the robot constantly harasses the only female crew, Yuki. It kept lifting up her skirt, exposing her white panties to the surrounding male crews. And most of the time, her response was screaming and running away in shame. Finally she reports this to the admiral, but the admiral murmurs that he prefers the way it is... And then suddenly the robot and girl were sent to a mission together. They met a dangerous situation, and the robot declares that it loves the girl and will protect her. And the girl kind of came to understand the robot's 'love'. This is probably what men would want women to think of their nasty sexual harrasments... 'love'.

When the ship was warping, all crew members faints, and their shapes were disintegrated into three colour components. But for the girl, Yuki, suddenly her clothing and her clothing alone disappeared and she became totally naked.  What kind of spatial warping effect only affects female clothings?

After two male crew members have had a fight over some stupid thing, they forget that they had a fight and cooperated to save the ship from an incoming enemy attack. Seeing this, the girl says something like "男同士っていいものね。(Males friendship is great)", as if two female friends would not cooperate in that kind of situation. Come to think of it, why is there only one female crew members in the first place.

The whole story was dull, predictable, or even insulting.

Why cannot a civilisation, which has the technology to navigate 200,000 light years alive, find a place to live near its own planet? There may not be 100% exactly hospitable planets around them, but they could terraform them. We humans, with our current modest technology are about to terraform Mars to live on it.

Why would a good alien send a message to the humans that tells humans to come to its planet (200,000 light years away from Earth) and get the radiation remover, and the technical instructions to build an engine for that? Wouldn't the alien just send the technical instructions for making that radiation remover, instead? Unless, the alien is evil (like Yahweh) and enjoying people suffering in the long and unpredictable journey.

I expected there could be some shocking revealer or twist when they arrive at Iscandar, since it was very predictable that the would succeed to get there. But nothing. They just got there, and carried the radiation remover, and then returned to Earth. 

When they arrived at Iscandar, the alien woman said there is another human from the Earth. I could immediately guessed that it would be the elder brother of the protagonist. But I thought, "Oh, come on! It's 200, 000 light years away." But it was his brother, all right. What kind of chance is that? And yeah, like a movie cliche, the alien woman was in love with that man.

As they were returning to the Earth, they had the final battle, and the girl, Yuki, died. I mean, died. There were also many other casualties. But the protagonist, who had fallen in love with her for some no obvious reasons, carries only her to the commanding bridge, to show her the Earth. I had a weird eerie feeling that she would be brought back to life, like, you know, fables where a kiss from the prince brings the princess back from death. And, like an insult, her hand just moved without any explanation, and she just 'woke up' from death. Why? How? 

The ending was just too simple and dull. It showed the ship reaching the Earth, and the narration said something like "They used the radiation remover to clean the Earth, and saved the humanity", and that was it. Just like that?