February 2012
46 posts
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“A Whistleblower’s Open Letter to the Citizens of Canada
My name is Andrew...”
– Read the rest of the letter at: http://www.scribd.com/doc/79228736/Whistleblower-s-Open-Letter-to-Canadians
January 2012
111 posts
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A Comment on GPS and Smartphones
There are a great number of concerns around GPS chips being integrated into smartphones; surveillance, third-party tracking, and profiling (to say nothing of bad results!) are all issues that technologists ‘in the know’ warn of. I don’t want to talk about any of these issues.
No, I want to say this: of the smartphones that I’ve used in the past 6 months (iPhone 3GS,...
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Viruses stole City College of S.F. data for years →
The viral infestation detailed by the Chronicle is horrific in (at least) two ways: first, that data was leeched from university networks for year after year, and second that it’s only now - and perhaps by happenstance - that the IT staff were capable of detecting security breach. From the article:
a closer look revealed a far more nefarious situation, which had been lurking within the...
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American Internet Imperialism →
Think about this for a second: you are a good, law abiding citizen, and thus break no local laws. Your state has no reason to bring criminal charges against you. Your actions, however, are provisionally criminal in another jurisdiction. As a result, despite your actions being perfectly legal in your home nation you are threatened with extradition. This is not a theoretical position:
TVShack was...
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EMI Sues Irish Government →
Admittedly this is a few weeks old at this point, but it’s absurd that EMI is trying to sue the Irish government for access to a bill prior to its being introduced.
EMI is effectively confessing here that it’s upset that the government isn’t sharing the bill ahead of time with EMI or others in the industry. Again, the massive sense of entitlement of these guys is such that...
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How to hack a smartphone via radio →
anticapitalist:
Encryption keys on smartphones can be stolen via a technique using radio waves, says one of the world’s foremost crypto experts, Paul Kocher, whose firm Cryptography Research will demonstrate the hacking stunt with several types of smartphones at the upcoming RSA Conference in San Francisco next month.
“You tune to the right frequency,” says Kocher, who described the hacking...
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Should Microsoft Mandate a Windows Phone Hardware... →
testingdavid:
The audio controls stick to the lock-screen when the phone is locked, in the same screen location but always present to allow even quicker control and obviate the need to tap the volume rocker in order to play, pause or skip on the lock-screen. Interestingly, the “vibrate” or “ring + vibrate” button, which I call the mute switch, does not remain on the lock-screen, and requires...
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Videoconferencing Systems Laden With Security... →
From a piece in The New York Times, we learn that
Rapid7 discovered that hundreds of thousands of businesses were investing in top-quality videoconferencing units, but were setting them up on the cheap. At last count, companies spent an estimated $693 million on group videoconferencing from July to September of last year, according to Wainhouse Research.
The most popular units, sold...
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““Generally, things are not looking great with Google. I think that people...”
– Moxie Marlinspike, January 26, 2012
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How to Interpret the 5th Amendment? →
Declan McCullagh has an article on an important case in the US, where a federal judge has demanded a defendant decrypt a PGP-encrypted drive for the authorities. Case law in the area of decryption is unsettled, as McCullagh notes:
The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for at...
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parislemon: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things →
I agree with parislemon’s general take on the targeting of Apple and labour: Apple isn’t alone, and we can’t ignore the role of local government in (not) regulating the state of affairs at Foxconn (or other large manufacturing) plants. This said, language like the following in unacceptable and intentionally uncritical:
While this report brings such an issue to the forefront,...
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Weapons-Grade Data →
Cory Doctorow being brilliant in sprucing up the metaphor that personally identifiable data is like nuclear waste. While the metaphor isn’t new, Doctorow does a great job as only a novelist can.
Every gram - sorry, byte - of personal information these feckless data-packrats collect on us should be as carefully accounted for as our weapons-grade radioisotopes, because once the seals have...
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An Open Letter to Thorsten Heins →
I’ll let Mr. Vida explain, in his own words, why you should go and read his open letter:
Why listen to yet another open letter?
I helped build PlayBook. My team designed the PlayBook OS. We spent the better part of a year sequestered in secrecy working on what we believe to be a tablet OS experience at least as good as an iPad and, in many ways, better. We are immensely proud of our work...
The Must-Read Summary of Issues With the... →
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Will Android lead to RIM's Security 'Death Knell?' →
Bloom reports:
…[Graham Thompson, president of Ottawa-based Intrinsec Security Technologies] cautions that RIM’s plans to tap into the Android marketplace could place a serious security burdern on the beleaguered company. An Android adherent himself, he nevertheless says the potential for breaches with Android apps threatens the core of RIM’s business strategy.
“I don’t understand why an...
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Primer on GPG in Mac OS X →
Robert Sosinski has a good walkthrough of setting up GPG in OS X. Hopefully we’ll see some non-console-based instructions sometime in the near future to help those who are gun-shy when presented with a command prompt!
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Browsing on Your Mobile Should Not Disclose Your... →
In the past day or three, it’s come to light that O2 - a major mobile phone provider in the UK - made the very serious error of disclosing its users’ phone numbers in HTTP headers (i.e. the headers that are part of every single communication with a website). The researcher who discovered this - Lewis Peckover - has made available a site that will check whether your phone is disclosing...
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Required reading: company responses to accusations... →
fictionthatmatters:
Several articles detailed the sale of corporate technology to regimes in Syria, Libya, and other countries with repressive regimes. Here are the companies’ responses. They are very interesting, varying from pointing the finger, to shirking blame, to accepting responsibility and leaving the country altogether.
I agree: these are required (and illuminating) reading for those...
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The stranger danger: Exploring Surveillance,... →
A really terrific paper on social media and ‘stranger danger’. You should read it.
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Piracy as Saving History? →
I haven’t seen this argument before. It’s clever: stripping DRM (and/or transforming files to be cross-compatible with a variety of software readers) means that (in theory) those files will be accessible for longer periods of time, thus letting us preserve our (digital) history. From the article:
Piracy’s preserving effect, while little known, is actually nothing new. Through the...
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Raspberry Pi Powering XBMC and Airplay →
It’s incredible that a cheap ($25-35) piece of hardware is capable of powering a full power media console as well as integrating with Apple’s Airplay technology. Videos of both below:
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Surveillance by the URL Shortnners
Just a random thought/comment/observation: I just clicked on a link via a social media service and subsequently went through three different URL shorteners plus Google’s Feedproxy. That’s a hell of a lot of people monitoring my clicks!
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WatchYes, it’s over a year old and the iPad 2GS/3 is going to be out shortly. Nevertheless, it’s the first time I’ve seen this video and it makes me smirk.
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“The NSA was quite aware that many new network systems were being built rapidly...”
– R. Anderson. (2008). Security Engineering: Second Edition. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing Inc. Pp. 795.
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Email Leads to Hate (And the Dark Side?)
alexbalk:
There needs to be a term to describe the condition where you keep an email unread in your box because you’re not prepared to deal with it yet, but then you start to hate and resent the person who sent it because it is the only unread email in your box and it sits there silently accusing you with its boldedness. Or maybe I am the only sufferer of said disease.
I suffer from this...
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Management and RIM →
This is an incredibly mixed article on RIM, but one section in particular stood out to me as either bad reporting, incompetent journalism, or Apple fanboyism.
Success also bred hubris about RIM’s position in the market. By late 2009, it was clear that the iPhone and Android had redefined the smartphone, and that RIM needed to adapt. The company had to target consumers more aggressively, not just...
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Speedboast Now Costing Customers Money? →
Rogers’ SpeedBoost system temporarily increases the rate that data is transmitted to their customers in the earliest moments of downloading an item. This system is meant to get ‘bursty’ traffic to end-users faster that would otherwise occur, as well as initially buffer streaming video so that customers don’t suffer delays. It was initially couched as a free...
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Flexibility and Low Working Standards →
The New York Times has a piece that argues - though the narrative is highly forgiving - that the flexibility ‘demanded’ by contemporary technology firms (amongst others) can only manifest when you can outsource labor. The reason? In countries like China you can rouse 8,000 people out of their dorms in their walled factory-city and put them to work almost instantly. In China, the...
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Google to Internet: "Papers Please" →
I don’t dislike Google. Many of the company’s products are incredibly delightful to use. I support a fair amount of the company’s public advocacy work, though not all of it (caveat: the same could be said of almost all organizations I’m sympathetic towards). That said, I think think that their policy regard real names and pseudonyms if fucking absurd. As noted by Ars:
On...
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Blackberry Models Through Time
theblogofnoww:
850
857
957
5720
5810
6710
7200
7520
7100T
7100X
7130C
8100 (Pearl)
8120 (Pearl)
8220 Flip
8300
8320
8700
8520 Curve (Gemini)
8800
8900 Javelin
9000 Bold
9100 Pearl 3G
9300 Curve 3G
Curve 9350/9360/9370
9500 Storm
9550 Storm 2
9630 Tour
9650 Tour II
9700 Bold 2
9760 Style
9790 Bold
9800...
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TECHNICALLY CORRECT: RIM: Never Trust A Company... →
technicallycorrect:
Earlier today Joint-CEO’s Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis stepped down from their positions after 20 years in charge of Research In Motion (RIM), the producers of BlackBerry phones.
I’m a harsh critic of RIM, their phones are appalling in almost every regard comparative to their…
I disagree with the author’s 1, 2, 3, and 4 (of 5) points on the following...
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American Copyright Gone Power Mad
The fact that American copyright holders basically govern an arm of the US government that can, and is, shutting down website URLs at the TLD root is terrifying. That degree of power, however, looks like nothing compared to what happened in the recent MegaUpload takedowns. Consider the following:
The width and breadth of the global police action are simply massive, and are, quite justly,...
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Google Abandons Anonymous Accounts With New Signup... →
This is how you leverage a monopoly in one domain (search) to force yourself into other markets while strip-mining users’ privacy expectations. I’m so glad that Google is a ‘do no evil’ kind of company, and that they value users’ privacy.
The revamped Google account creation page adds some additional fields to the sign up form, including name and gender which are...
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iPads in the Classroom: A Sound Investment or... →
Klassen writes:
To outfit a student body of 700 students at current prices schools would need to spend approximately $350,000, and that’s just for the hardware. To outfit one particular class, say Chemistry, with the needed textbooks—at Apple’s quoted $15 per book price—would likely cost a little over $10,000, to outfit the entire school with every textbook they needed for every course would...
