February 2012
46 posts
4 tags
“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...
