Fire Hydrant of Freedom

Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Science, Culture, & Humanities => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2007, 06:58:29 AM

Title: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 02, 2007, 06:58:29 AM

The Coming Exaflood
By BRET SWANSON
January 20, 2007; Page A11

Today there is much praise for YouTube, MySpace, blogs and all the other democratic digital technologies that are allowing you and me to transform media and commerce. But these infant Internet applications are at risk, thanks to the regulatory implications of "network neutrality." Proponents of this concept -- including Democratic Reps. John Dingell and John Conyers, and Sen. Daniel Inouye, who have ascended to key committee chairs -- are obsessed with divvying up the existing network, but oblivious to the need to build more capacity.

To understand, let's take a step back. In 1999, Yahoo acquired Broadcast.com for $5 billion. Broadcast.com had little revenue, and although its intent was to stream sports and entertainment video to consumers over the Internet, two-thirds of its sales at the time came from hosting corporate video conferences. Yahoo absorbed the start-up -- and little more was heard of Broadcast.com or Yahoo's video ambitions.

Seven years later, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. Like Broadcast.com, YouTube so far has not enjoyed large revenues. But it is streaming massive amounts of video to all corners of the globe. The difference: Broadcast.com failed because there were almost no broadband connections to homes and businesses. Today, we have hundreds of millions of links world-wide capable of transmitting passable video clips.

Why did that come about? At the Telecosm conference last October, Stanford professor Larry Lessig asserted that the previous federal Internet policy of open access neutrality was the chief enabler of success on the net. "ecause of that neutrality," Mr. Lessig insisted, "the explosion of innovation and the applications and content layer happened. Now . . . the legal basis supporting net neutrality has been erased by the FCC."

In fact, Mr. Lessig has it backward. Broadcast.com failed precisely because the FCC's "neutral" telecom price controls and sharing mandates effectively prohibited investments in broadband networks and crashed thousands of Silicon Valley business plans and dot-com dreams. Hoping to create "competition" out of thin air, the Clinton-Gore FCC forced telecom providers to lease their wires and switches at below-market rates. By guaranteeing a negative rate of return on infrastructure investments, the FCC destroyed incentives to build new broadband networks -- the kind that might have allowed Broadcast.com to flourish.

By 2000, the U.S. had fewer than five million consumer "broadband" links, averaging 500 kilobits per second. Over the past two years, the reverse has been true. As the FCC has relaxed or eliminated regulations, broadband investment and download speeds have surged -- we now enjoy almost 50 million broadband links, averaging some three megabits per second. Internet video succeeded in the form of YouTube. But that "explosion of innovation" at the "applications and content layer" was not feasible without tens of billions of dollars of optics, chips and disks deployed around the world. YouTube at the edge cannot happen without bandwidth in the core.

Messrs. Lessig, Dingell and Conyers, and Google, now want to repeat all the investment-killing mistakes of the late 1990s, in the form of new legislation and FCC regulation to ensure "net neutrality." This ignores the experience of the recent past -- and worse, the needs of the future.

Think of this. Each year the original content on the world's radio, cable and broadcast television channels adds up to about 75 petabytes of data -- or, 10 to the 15th power. If current estimates are correct, the two-year-old YouTube streams that much data in about three months. But a shift to high-definition video clips by YouTube users would flood the Internet with enough data to more than double the traffic of the entire cybersphere. And YouTube is just one company with one application that is itself only in its infancy. Given the growth of video cameras around the world, we could soon produce five exabytes of amateur video annually. Upgrades to high-definition will in time increase that number by another order of magnitude to some 50 exabytes or more, or 10 times the Internet's current yearly traffic.

We will increasingly share these videos with the world. And even if we do not share them, we will back them up at remote data storage facilities. I just began using a service called Mozy that each night at 3 a.m. automatically scans and backs up the gigabytes worth of documents and photos on my PCs. My home computers are now mirrored at a data center in Utah. One way or another, these videos will thus traverse the net at least once, and possibly, in the case of a YouTube hit, hundreds of thousands of times.

There's more. Advances in digital medical imaging will soon slice your brain 1,024 ways with resolution of less than half a millimeter and produce multigigabyte files. A technician puts your anatomy on a DVD and you send your body onto the Internet for analysis by a radiologist in Mumbai. You skip doctor visits, stay home and have him come to you with a remote video diagnosis. Add another 10 exabytes or more of Internet data traffic. Then there's what George Gilder calls the "global sensorium," the coming network of digital surveillance cameras, RFID tags and other sensors, sprawling across every home, highway, hybrid, high-rise, high-school, etc. All this data will be collected, analyzed and transmitted. Oh, and how about video conferencing? Each year we generate some 20 exabytes of data via telephone. As these audio conversations gradually shift to video, putting further severe strains on the network, we could multiply the 20 exabytes by a factor of 100 or more.

Today's networks are not remotely prepared to handle this exaflood.

Wall Street will finance new telco and cable fiber optic projects, but only with some reasonable hope of a profit. And that is what net neutrality could squelch. Google, for example, has guaranteed $900 million in advertising revenue to MySpace and paid Dell $1 billion to install Google search boxes on its computers; YouTube partnered with Verizon Wireless; MySpace signed its own content deal with Cingular. But these kinds of preferential partnerships, where content and conduit are integrated to varying degrees -- and which are ubiquitous in almost every industry -- could be outlawed under net neutrality.

Ironically, the condition that net neutrality seeks to ban -- discrimination or favoritism of content on the Internet -- is only necessary in narrowband networks. When resources are scarce, the highest bidder can exclude the others. But with real broadband networks, capacity is abundant and discrimination unnecessary. Net neutrality's rules, price controls and litigation would prevent broadband networks from being built, limit the amount of available bandwidth and thus encourage the zero-sum discrimination supposedly deplored.

Without many tens of billions of dollars worth of new fiber optic networks, thousands of new business plans in communications, medicine, education, security, remote sensing, computing, the military and every mundane task that could soon move to the Internet will be frustrated. All the innovations on the edge will die. Only an explosion of risky network investment and new network technology can accommodate these millions of ideas.

Mr. Swanson is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and contributing editor at the Gilder Technology Report.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 03, 2007, 04:18:07 AM

Viacom Tells YouTube: Hands Off
NY Times
By GERALDINE FABRIKANT and SAUL HANSELL
Published: February 3, 2007
In a sign of the growing tension between old-line media and the new Internet behemoths, Viacom, the parent company of MTV and Comedy Central, demanded yesterday that YouTube, the video-sharing Web site owned by Google, remove more than 100,000 clips of its programming.

“The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central, a Viacom unit, is popular with young viewers, and clips from it appear frequently on YouTube.
Viacom, along with other major media companies, including the News Corporation and NBC Universal, has become increasingly frustrated with YouTube as it has amassed a vast library of copyrighted clips, placed on the site by its users.

While such companies regularly ask YouTube to remove their material, Viacom’s demand, which it disclosed in a statement circulated by e-mail, was the most militant and public move of its kind so far.

As it has with the similar request from other companies, Google removed the Viacom clips from the YouTube site yesterday.

The dispute underscored the tense dance that major media companies are doing with Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion last October. Google hopes to strike deals that will give it the rights to mainstream programming and also wipe away its potential liability for any violations of copyright law by YouTube so far.

Despite intense negotiations in recent months, Google has not been able to announce any such deals with media companies. YouTube is supported by advertising, but in most cases it does not share that revenue with copyright holders.

Viacom is particularly unhappy because so many of its shows, like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” a YouTube favorite, appeal to the young audiences who visit the site.

“We cannot continue to let them profit from our programming,” Philippe P. Dauman, Viacom’s chief executive, said in an interview. Mr. Dauman said that Viacom had been in discussions with Google for months, but that Google kept delaying and did not make what Viacom saw as a serious offer.

David Eun, a vice president for content partnerships at Google, said that his company had been “very serious” about the talks, but that the companies could not agree on financial terms. “We put in a lot of time to figure out what would be a mutually beneficial deal,” he said.

A Viacom spokesman said the company had repeatedly asked YouTube to filter out its programming automatically, but that Google had not responded.

“They choose not to filter out copyrighted content, “ said the spokesman, Carl D. Folta. He added that the company apparently had the technology to filter out pornography and hateful material, which is rarely seen on YouTube.

Chad Hurley, the co-founder and chief executive of YouTube, said the company was still working on its filtering technology. He said it had agreed to use it to identify and possibly remove copyrighted material from Warner Music, and it would discuss a similar arrangement with Viacom as part of a broader deal.

Mr. Folta said he found that stand unacceptable. “They are saying we will only protect your content if you do a deal with us — if not, we will steal it.”

Whether YouTube is stealing content by serving up clips of copyrighted programs is very much up for debate. Like most big Internet companies, Google says it is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, so long as it removes material whenever a copyright owner requests it.

John G. Palfrey Jr. , the executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, said Google may well be able to use this defense, but “I don’t think the law is entirely clear.” And if Google loses, “the damages could get astronomically high,” he said.

Viacom’s move comes at a time when it and other media companies have contemplated creating a service to rival YouTube. There have been off-again-on-again negotiations among a variety of companies, including the News Corporation, NBC Universal and the Walt Disney Company.

Viacom’s cable networks, meanwhile, are increasingly putting clips from their programs on their own Web sites and selling advertising on them.

In the face of uncertainty, media companies have taken different approaches to YouTube. For the last year, NBC Universal has demanded that the site remove most clips of its material, other than a small set provided by NBC itself. Others, like CBS, have largely allowed their content to remain on YouTube. CBS has struck a deal to provide some clips to YouTube and share in the advertising revenue associated with it.

It was not clear yesterday how Viacom’s demand might affect the rest of the industry and whether other media companies would follow suit.

Andrew Butcher, a spokesman for the News Corporation, which owns the Fox television network and the social networking site MySpace, said his company supported Viacom’s move. “They’ve got every right to protect their content in whatever way they deem appropriate,” Mr. Butcher said. “So far we’ve been dealing with YouTube and others on a case-by-case basis.”

Reports have been circulating in the industry that Google had offered to pay $100 million a year for the use of Viacom’s programming.

Mr. Dauman of Viacom denied there had been a deal on the table. He said Viacom “never had any kind of an agreement with Google that it could say yes to,” adding: “There was not enough to be a detailed offer. They have shown no sense of urgency to enter into an agreement with anyone.”

Some analysts said the removal demand was simply a business tactic on Viacom’s part.

“This is a negotiating strategy to get paid, and I think both sides need a middle ground,” said Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “Both sides have clear needs in this negotiation. What they are arguing about is price.”

Viacom’s demand was “a risk worth taking,” Mr. Nathanson said. He and others pointed out that the music industry was once afraid to take a similarly aggressive stance when its product appeared on the Napster music-sharing service. “If content is available free and it is tolerated, it erodes your core business,” Mr. Nathanson said.

But others said the move could hurt Viacom if young YouTube users become angry when they upload clips to the site and realize that Viacom is insisting that they be removed. Yesterday, Google tried to position Viacom’s move as hostile toward YouTube users.

“The biggest feeling we have right now is regret that Viacom may miss out on the chance to interact with the YouTube community,” Mr. Eun said.

The effort to integrate old and new media has made some inroads. Just a few months ago, Viacom and Google were cozying up so successfully that Viacom struck a deal to have Google distribute clips from its shows on its Google Video service. The deal included an arrangement for the two companies to share revenue from adjacent advertising. Mr. Dauman characterized that deal yesterday as an “experiment.”

Richard Siklos contributed reporting.

Next Article in Technology (2 of 29) »

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2007, 10:23:13 AM

Broadband Breakout
February 16, 2007; Page A14
"I love the free market, but the fact is more concentration means less competition, and these markets are less free than they should be. And this Commission is about regulation -- regulators. I always worry a little when I hear regulators shy away from regulation talk."

-- Senator Byron Dorgan (D., North Dakota) addressing members
of the Federal Communications Commission at a recent hearing.

If you're wondering where the new Democratic majority in Congress is inclined to steer telecom policy, look no further than Mr. Dorgan's comment above. Note how he pays lip service to free markets while ultimately favoring more regulation for its own sake.

But more regulation is the last thing today's telecom industry needs, at least if empirical evidence is any indication. As FCC Chairman Kevin Martin reported at a Senate hearing earlier this month, the industry is now taking risks in a way it hasn't since the tech bubble burst six years ago.

"In 2006, the S&P 500 telecommunications sector was the strongest performing sector, up 32% over the previous year," said Mr. Martin. "Markets and companies are investing again, job creation in the industry is high, and in almost all cases, vigorous competition -- resulting from free-market deregulatory policies -- has provided the consumer with more, better and cheaper services to choose from."

Much of this growth has been fueled by increased broadband deployment, which makes high-speed Internet services possible. The latest government data show that broadband connections increased by 26% in the first six months of 2006 and by 52% for the full year ending in June 2006.

Also noteworthy, notes telecom analyst Scott Cleland of the Precursor Group, is that of the 11 million broadband additions in the first half of last year, 15% were cable modems, 23% were digital-subscriber lines (DSL) and 58% were of the wireless variety. Between June 2005 and June 2006, wireless broadband subscriptions grew to 11 million from 380,000.

This gives the lie to claims that some sort of cable/DSL duopoly has hampered competition among broadband providers and limited consumer options. That's the charge of those who want "network neutrality" rules that would allow the government to dictate what companies like Verizon and AT&T can charge users of their networks. But the reality is that the telecom industry has taken advantage of this deregulatory environment to provide consumers with more choices at lower prices. Verizon's capital investments since 2000 exceed $100 billion, and such competitors as Cingular, T-Mobile and Sprint are following suit. So are the cable companies.

It's also worth noting that the deregulatory telecom policies pushed by Mr. Martin and his immediate predecessor, Michael Powell, have accompanied a wave of mergers -- SBC/AT&T, Sprint/Nextel, Verizon/MCI, AT&T/BellSouth. Most of these marriages were opposed by consumer groups and other fans of regulation on the grounds that they would lead to fewer choices and higher costs. In fact, these combinations have created economies of scale, and customers are clearly better off.

The result has been more high-speed connections, along with greater economic productivity, but also an array of new services. The popular video-sharing Web site YouTube is barely two years old. And it wouldn't exist today but for the fact that there's enough broadband capacity to allow millions of people to view videos over the Web.

Increased broadband demand has also been good news for Internet hardware companies like Cisco and Juniper, where annual sales are up by nearly 50%. A Journal report this week notes that "North American telecom companies are projected to spend $70 billion on new infrastructure this year," which is up 67% from 2003.

And prices are falling, by the way. Between February 2004 and December 2005, the average monthly cost for home broadband fell nearly 8%. For DSL subscribers, it fell nearly 20%. Which means that consumers are benefiting from new services and different pricing packages, as well as getting better deals.

The one sure way to stop these trends is by bogging down industry players with regulations or price controls that raise the risk that these mammoth investments will never pay off. Yet that seems to be the goal of Senator Dorgan and other Democrats such as Representative Ed Markey, another "Net neutrality" cheerleader, who is planning his own hearings. Consumers will end up paying for such policies in fewer choices and higher prices.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on March 01, 2007, 11:14:45 AM

I thought this was interesting..

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9011283

Reverse hacker wins $4.3M in suit against Sandia Labs
Shawn Carpenter used his own hacking techniques to probe outside breach


February 14, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Shawn Carpenter, a network security analyst at Sandia National Laboratories who was fired in January 2005 for his independent probe of a network security breach at the agency, has been awarded $4.3 million by a New Mexico jury for wrongful termination.

In announcing its decision yesterday, the jury also awarded Carpenter $350,000 for emotional distress and more than $36,000 for lost wages, benefits and other costs.

A spokesman from Sandia expressed "disappointment" with the verdict and said the lab will consider whether to appeal it or not.

The highly publicized case involved Carpenter's investigation of a network break-in at Sandia in 2003.

After initially telling superiors about the incident, Carpenter launched an independent, months-long investigation during which he used hacking techniques of his own to eventually trace the attacks back to a Chinese cyberespionage group. The group, called Titan Rain by federal authorities, was believed responsible for carrying out similar attacks against a large number of U.S. government, military and commercial interests.

Carpenter shared information from his investigation, initially with individuals at the Army Counterintelligence Group and later with the FBI.

When Sandia officials learned of the investigation and of his sharing information with the FBI and other outside agencies, they terminated him for inappropriate use of confidential information that he had gathered in his role as a network security manager for the laboratory.

Yesterday's verdict is a "vindication of his decision to do the right thing and turn over the information he obtained to the proper federal authorities in the interests of national security," said Philip Davis, one of the attorneys who represented Carpenter in his lawsuit.

The verdict highlights "the jury's belief that Shawn Carpenter is a patriot and did what he did to protect the national interest," Davis said. "That was more important than Sandia's own interest in taking care of itself."

The size of the punitive damages at $4.3 million is more than twice of what was sought and sends an "unambiguous message that national security comes first," he said.

Ira Winkler, an independent security consultant and author of Spies Among Us who has also written for Computerworld, said the verdict was "incredibly justified. Frankly, I think people [at Sandia] should go to jail" for ignoring some of the security issues that Carpenter was trying to highlight with his investigation.

After Carpenter's termination, the investigations into the Titan Rain group appear to have gone nowhere, said Winkler, a former National Security Agency analyst. He added that while the Carpenter award is welcome, it would ultimately be paid with taxpayer money.

"This whole thing is costing them nothing," Winkler said. "Whatever legal fees they are running up is just being passed back to the U.S. government," he said.

--------------------------------------------------------

Some other interesting sites:

http://www.zone-h.org/


http://it.slashdot.org/

Title: Re: Download and Burn Movies.... Legallly
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on March 04, 2007, 08:41:14 PM

http://it.slashdot.org/it/07/03/04/0935224.shtml

Download And Burn Movies Available Soon
Posted by Zonk on Sunday March 04, @06:15AM
from the oh-css-is-there-nothing-you-can't-do dept.
    An anonymous reader writes
"According to an article from PC World, a source close to the CSS Managed Recording forum said that technology which allows movies to be downloaded and burned to blank DVDs, using the same content-protection system as commercial discs, received official approval on Thursday. 'The technology will require discs that are slightly different from the conventional DVD-Rs found in shops today. The burned discs will be compatible with the vast majority of consumer DVD players ... Despite Thursday's approval, services that allow consumers to legally download and burn movies in their own homes are unlikely to appear quickly. The DVD CCA said it will be initially restricted to professional uses. These might include kiosks in retail stores where consumers can purchase and burn discs in a controlled environment.'"

Title: --Storm Virus Showcases Failure of Anti Virus Technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on March 06, 2007, 03:13:38 PM

 --Storm Virus Showcases Failure of Anti Virus Technology
(5 March 2007)
By using more than 54,000 slightly different variants, the storm worm Trojan horse successfully used small changes to evade most anti virus products.  This is a technique now used by most current and relevant malware.  It demonstrates the futility of counting on anti virus software for protection.

http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11446?ref=rss

Stormy weather for malware defenses
Robert Lemos, SecurityFocus 2007-03-05

When the Storm Worm swept through the Internet in mid-January, the program's writers took a brute force approach to evading antivirus defenses: They created a massive number of slightly different copies of the program and released them all at the same time.

 

“ Signatures are still needed but the amount of malware that is being produced and the speed with which it changes means that you need a lot of researchers. ”

Alex Shipp, security researcher, MessageLabs On January 18, the day the misnamed program--a Trojan horse, not a worm--first appeared, more than 350 different variants were released, according to report penned by security firm CommTouch Software. Four days later, the number of slightly-different versions jumped to more than 7,300. By the end of January, more than 54,000 variants had hit the Internet, the report (PDF) stated, each one spammed out by computers previously compromised by the program.

"Virus writers' goals have changed," Amir Lev, CEO of CommTouch, said in an e-mail interview with SecurityFocus. "They are doing 'good' business now. They do not focus on finding vulnerabilities in Microsoft and other products, they look for 'vulnerabilities' (in) the AV (antivirus) systems."

The technique is effective. While antivirus program's pattern recognition algorithms, frequently referred to as heuristics, may have stopped a large fraction of the variants, creating signatures to catch all the versions takes time. Response to a new variant--including developing, testing and distributing a signatures--takes hours at a minimum. Responding to thousands can take much longer.

During a January interview, one McAfee researcher underscored the headaches caused by the Storm Worm.

"Every day, it has been a new set of subject lines and new tactics to get people to open these," Allysa Myers, virus research engineer for security software maker McAfee, said in an interview with SecurityFocus. "They have had mass seedings of new variants every day this week."

The program highlights a number of changes in the techniques used by criminal Internet groups. The Storm Worm spreads in fairly large, but controlled, bursts of e-mail through previously compromised computers. Each burst typically sends out a custom variant, trying to infect systems before the user updates their antivirus definitions. The program compromises systems by luring their users into opening the attachments of messages with subject lines regarding current news events, including violent storms in Europe--a characteristic that led to the program's naming.

While some other programs have used a similar tactics, the Storm Worm's focus on propagation through sheer permutation carries the trend to a new level. The technique exploits a weakness, not in the software, but in the system. Analyzing malicious code requires, for the most part, human researchers, and the coders hope to overwhelm the human component long enough to compromise as many systems as needed.

"Signatures are still needed but the amount of malware that is being produced and the speed with which it changes means that you need a lot of researchers," said Alex Shipp, a researcher for e-mail security provider MessageLabs.

Other firms have witnessed the trend first hand. In 2006, antivirus firm Kaspersky Lab added 80,000 virus-pattern records to its product, roughly doubling the number added in 2005, said Eugene Kaspersky, the co-founder and head of research and development for antivirus firm.

"This is a competition where the antivirus companies, I fear, are not in a good position," Kaspersky said.

The Storm Worm is all about creating massive networks of compromised computers that can be controlled by a single group or individual. The networks, known as bot nets, don't need to be large to be useful. A bot net of several thousand computers is more than enough to mount a severe denial-of-service attack or send out a digital deluge of stock spam--common uses for the networks--and, of course, send out more copies of the Trojan horse. (This aspect of the Storm Worm is the subject of the first part of this two-part series.)

"The guys are very aggressive with the variants, and that has defeated the more simplistic AV engines out there," said Jose Nazario, senior security researcher for Arbor Networks.

The Storm Worm is likely responsible for creating a bot net that contains more than 20,000 computers and perhaps as many as 100,000, Nazario said. Other evidence appears to indicate that there is more than one Storm Worm-related bot net.

The spread of the Storm Worm has forced antivirus firms to create better defenses to automatically block such threats, rather than depend on simple heuristics or signatures.

Unlike previous malicious code, such as mass-mailing computer viruses, the Storm Worm is not a program that spreads aggressively on its own. Rather, the Trojan horse awaits orders from a central command post to send out the next round of variants. The control has made the program, if not stealthy, then more difficult to stop. The bursts of new variants make a quick response even more important, and the fact that the variants do not exploit a single vulnerability, but users' trust, make them more difficult to stop.

"Vulnerability-based exploits only require a single, or at most a few, signatures," said Vince Hwang, group product manager for security response at Symantec, the owner of SecurityFocus. "The ones that rely on user interaction are definitely a challenge. It is all social engineering."

Other attacks, known as targeted Trojan horses, exploit a related issue to dodge antivirus defenses. By sending out malicious code to an extremely small number of victims--often fewer than 10 specific individuals--the malicious software attempts to sneak under defenders' radar. Underscoring the less-is-more tactic, programs--such as the Storm Worm and targeted Trojan horses--have not made the monthly top-10 lists of security firms' most pervasive threats. On MessageLabs latest top-10 list, for example, Netsky, MyDoom, and Bagle--viruses that are almost two years old--command six of the 10 slots.

For both variant-heavy threats such as the Storm Worm and sneaky targeted Trojan horses, blocking the threat immediately requires technology that does not need to know about the attack, or its pattern, beforehand. And self-propagation, the hallmark of computer viruses, is no longer an adequate indicator of bad behavior.

"For over a year now, viruses are not viruses," said CommTouch's Lev. "There are no more epidemics. Instead, they (spammers) use bot nets to send spam and then more malware."

Perhaps the most significant technology under development at various antivirus firms is typically referred to as behavior blocking. The technique identifies malicious programs by what actions they take, not by the code that makes them up.

The defense is actually a blast from the past. Antivirus firms and early developers played with the approach more than a decade ago. Gatekeeper for the Mac, created by Chris Johnson in the early 1990s, detected malicious code by noting suspicious actions. Personal firewalls attempt to block malicious programs from communicating out to the Internet.

Several antivirus firms--including Sophos, F-Secure and Grisoft--are building next-generation behavior analysis into their products. The modern technique creates a virtual sandbox for any program run on the system and monitors the behavior of the program until a determination can be made of whether the code is malicious or benign.

"If you are seeing something that is obviously poking its head into things that it shouldn't be, then we can shut it down," said Larry Bridwell, vice president of communications for antivirus firm Grisoft.

Unlike the simple techniques in the past that generally decided whether a program was malicious based on a single action, the latest techniques allow a program to run longer, reducing false alarms.

"What did it take for behavioral analysis to work?" said Bridwell. "Big processors, big memory and big bandwidth. And we didn't have that before."

While viruses make up a smaller portion of threats each year--about 10 percent of what Grisoft sees are viruses, said Bridwell--don't expect the term "antivirus" to go away. Grisoft attempted to sell a product as anti-malware and consumers panned it on the name alone.

"To some analysts, some press and every user, it doesn't matter what the program does, it's antivirus," Bridwell said.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 11, 2007, 07:43:49 AM

Perhaps I'm stretching the term "related technology" but I didn't know where else to put this and it didn't deserve its own thread:
=============

Tired of getting recorded messages?  This site gives 500 contact numbers and instructions as to how to get a live human for customer service.
 
http://www.gethuman.com/us/

 

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on March 19, 2007, 03:23:58 PM

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-6168456.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=zdnn

U.S. networks pumped out the highest percentage of attacks during the second half of last year, with China running a distant second, according to a report released Monday by security firm Symantec.

The U.S. accounted for 31 percent of malicious activity originating from computer networks, while 10 percent came from China and 7 percent from Germany, Symantec said in its Internet Security Threat Report.

The company also found that 51 percent of all known servers used by attackers to buy or sell stolen personal information, such as credit card or bank account numbers, are located in the U.S.

U.S.-based credit cards, with accompanying verification numbers, were found to be selling for $1 to $6 each on these servers. But a more thorough roundup of personal-identification data--including a person's birthdate and banking, credit card and government-issued identification numbers--fetched $14 to $18, the report noted.

Internet thieves increasingly are turning to Trojan-horse software, which can load keylogging software onto unsuspecting victims' computers. The software is able to harvest people's log-in names and passwords to various accounts and can glean other sensitive information people type into their computers.

Trojans accounted for 45 percent of the top 50 malicious code samples collected by Symantec during the second half of last year, up from 23 percent in the previous six months. Symantec noted that that significant jump further reflects a movement away from mass-mailing worms--programs that spread software viruses and clog networks.

Phishing, an attempt by attackers to trick people into revealing personal or financial information, largely occurs during the weekday, the report noted. Many phishing attacks begin with an e-mail that appears to be from a legitimate source but in fact contains a malicious attachment or includes a link to a malicious Web site. During the second half of the year, a daily average of 961 phishing e-mails were sent to people on weekdays; 27 percent fewer phishing messages were sent out on weekends.

Title: SANS Security Tip of the Day
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on March 20, 2007, 02:38:45 PM

SANS Security Tip of the Day

Tip: People Forget, Computers Don't      
In 2003, the British Government published a report on Iraq's security and intelligence organizations.  Then a Cambridge University lecturer discovered that much of the document was copied from three different articles, one written by a graduate student.  How did he know? The document contained a listing of the last 10 edits, even showing the names of the people who worked on the file. Hidden data can often be found within Microsoft Office documents particularly Word.  Whenever you exchange documents with clients, either convert them to PDF format
(WYSIWYG) or else run them through Microsoft's Hidden Data Removal tool.

For more info, and to download Microsoft's Hidden Data Removal tool, see http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=144e54ed-d43e-42ca-bc7b-5446d34e5360&displaylang=en.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 03, 2007, 07:14:15 PM

http://emsectechnologies.com/press_releases/press1.php

excerpt...

EM-SEC Technologies Announces Successful Test of
Wireless-Blocking “Paint”
EM-SEC Coating Creates an “Electromagnetic Fortress” that Safeguards Businesses and Government Facilities from Wireless Attacks
Hampton, VA – March 14, 2007

This was an exclusive operation to test the effects of utilizing the EM-SEC Coating System as a viable solution to enabling the safe and secure operation of wireless networks within the confines of an architectural enclosure. The EM-SEC Coating System used for these tests is a series of water-based shielding products that restrict the passage of airborne RF (Radio Frequency) signals. The EM-SEC Coating was initially developed to aid the U.S. Government and Military in shielding operation centers in order to safeguard mission critical information against threats to national and homeland security. These tests revealed that EM-SEC Coating can now successfully be utilized by corporate and private companies.
__________________

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on April 12, 2007, 03:56:56 PM

In regards to the above post, the Army is beginning or have been changing their views on information warfare for some time now.  I attended a briefing and basicly vulnerabilities that are caused by "dumb" mistakes are taken seriously and viewed the same as leaving the door to the arms room open. Information Security is turning into a hotspot. 

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1. Security Myths
Myth: I don't have to worry about identity theft because I never buy anything online using my credit card.
Truth: Not so, says, the 2006 Identity Fraud Survey Report, released by the Council of Better Business Bureaus and Javelin Strategy & Research.
Most personal information compromises--90 percent--take place through traditional offline channels and not via the Internet. Lost or stolen wallets, checkbooks, or credit cards continue to be the primary source of personal information theft (30%). Almost half (47%) of all identity theft is perpetrated by friends, neighbors, in-home employees, family members or relatives--someone known to the victim.  Persons 65 years and older have the lowest rate of identity fraud (2.3%).  The majority of victims are between the ages of 35 and 44, and within that group, the average amount of the fraud  is $9,435 per incident.
More information: http://www.bbbonline.org/IDTheft/safetyQuiz.asp

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on April 13, 2007, 03:43:33 PM

As it goes to show, you can harden the exterior all you want but most threats come from within.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   


--Navy Computer Sabotage Draws One-Year Prison Sentence (April 5, 2007) A former government contractor has been sentenced to one year in prison for sabotaging Navy computers after his company's bid for another project was not accepted.  Richard F. Sylvestre has pleaded guilty to one count of damaging protected computers; he could have faced up to 10 years in prison.  Sylvestre's company at the time, Ares Systems, had a contract to maintain computers for the Navy's 6th Fleet in Naples, Italy.  Sylvestre admitted to placing malicious code on the Navy computers.  The computers were used to help submarines navigate and
avoid collisions with undersea hazards and other submarines.   Sylvestre
has also been ordered to pay a fine of US $10,000 and will serve three years probation following his release from prison.  He has repaid the Navy US $25,000 for damages.
http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=122352&ran=199274
[Editor's Note (Northcutt): [Editor's Comment (Northcutt): It is important to memorize a few stories like this one, and share them with others, because most organizations do not give enough attention to the insider threat. It is natural to want to trust your own people. Richard has had access to DoD systems since at least year 2000 as the link below shows, so you have to wonder what else he has done to reduce the security of our nation's computers:
http://www.defenselink.mil/contracts/contract.aspx?contractid=1808

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 13, 2007, 05:03:51 PM

One year seems rather mild to me based upon the presentation of the facts in this piece.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 13, 2007, 07:45:51 PM

The Wireless Wars
By GEORGE GILDER
April 13, 2007; Page A13

The 10-year war mounted by EU bureaucrats and Europe's communications giants against America's leading wireless technology innovator, Qualcomm, is now reaching a climax. On Monday, Nokia refused to renew licenses on next generation technology following EU ally Broadcom's suit at the International Trade Commission to bar import of cellphones containing Qualcomm chips from factories in Taiwan.

A decade ago, with its single, unifying cellphone standard known as GSM, Europe led the world in mobile communications. But threatened by Qualcomm's CDMA breakthrough, the Europeans launched a ferocious political and PR offensive, hoping to scare off potential customers of the young American firm. The technology was all hype, they said; it "violated the laws of physics."

When Qualcomm proved them wrong and its mobile technology deployed across the U.S. and Korea, Europe went to plan B. They excluded the Americans from the standards process for third-generation, or 3G, technology, battled in the courts, and mandated their "new" system for all of Europe. But in fact, the new European and Japanese standard, called Wideband CDMA, was essentially a copy of the American CDMA system.

 
We've come a long way.
With the new mobile system flourishing -- accommodating many times more voice callers and beating the previous generation in security, dropped calls and data -- everyone finally admitted that the American company had a lock on the fundamental technologies. The Europeans and Japanese licensed the American technology, CDMA and its sibling WCDMA, assuring that it would be the future of wireless mobile communications, an industry now selling a billion handsets a year.

Today, however, with those 3G licenses coming up for renewal and a fourth generation of wireless in sight, Europe is once again pushing the political levers to control the future -- this time with the unwitting assistance of the U.S. government. Although their immediate target is U.S. dominance in cellphone technology, a collateral victim would be the U.S. broadband economy.

Until recently, the obscure International Trade Commission played a minor role in the enforcement of patents. But with a Supreme Court ruling in 2006 making it more difficult for patent holders to win federal court injunctions against violators, complainants can now turn to the ITC. Unfortunately, complainants can also use an intellectual-property dispute as a cover for enmeshing competitors in the protectionist mazes of international trade law.

And that is what's happened to Qualcomm, the titan of U.S. intellectual property in wireless, with close to 5,700 patents on the next generation of cellphones and wireless data systems around the globe. Attempting to upend the San Diego titan's well-earned dominance are Broadcom and its European "Gang of Six" sponsors.

At a recent ITC public hearing, Broadcom CEO Scott MacGregor declared that the U.S. wireless telecom system would function better if it completely capitulated to the European standard. The Broadcom campaign began in May 2001 when it purchased, from an obscure bar-code and RFID company called Intermec, a set of three flimsy patents that they are now attempting to use to block the importation of all Qualcomm wireless data chips incorporating its (Qualcomm's) state-of-the-art data system called EV-DO.

EV-DO chips not only make mobile voice-over-IP possible, but they also allow cellphones to function more like multimedia computers, carrying eight to 10 times more data than previous technology. At the ITC public hearing, Verizon Vice President Richard Lynch noted that without EV-DO, "handsets go back to being voice and text."

Not coincidentally, Qualcomm recently announced an upgrade to EV-DO that permits transmissions at up to 9.3 megabits a second, a broadband service faster than U.S. wireline services and fast enough to permit mobile TV and streaming music with simultaneous voice and VoIP calling.

The Broadcom action is part of a campaign, reaching from Seoul through Brussels and cropping up in courts from New Jersey to California, to bring down Verizon's and Sprint's aggressive expansion programs for their EV-DO networks. The EU has its sights set on Qualcomm: The Eurocrats contend that with 20% of global market share in cell-phone technology, Qualcomm is a monopolist, guilty of the sin of inventing new systems needed for successful mobile Internet data access.

At stake in the litigation is who will control the next two phases of wireless technology -- 3G and 4G. Nokia's action on licenses is part of this coordinated attack.

However, with no commercially available alternatives to the Qualcomm EV-DO chips that Broadcom wants to block, the administrative law judge who considered Broadcom's claims noted that a "significant financial burden" falling on third parties, including handset manufacturers, wireless carriers and consumers, "weighed heavily" against categorical exclusion of cellphones containing the chips, which would take at least two years to replace.

And there's the rub. Wireless has become the largest source of profits for nearly all major telcos; and a paralysis on the wireless front would reverberate throughout the American broadband economy.

Verizon's mobile phones, for example, are about two-and-a-half times more profitable than its wireline phones. For the most recent quarter, Verizon Wireless profits were $804 million, while wireline profits were $393 million. AT&T affirmed the strategic importance of wireless last year when it acquired BellSouth for $67 billion. All analysts agreed AT&T's chief interest in BellSouth was the remaining 40% ownership of Cingular, the nation's largest mobile carrier with 54 million customers. And EV-DO's own strategic importance was manifest in the Sprint-Nextel merger. According to Sprint executive Bill Elliott, the ability to migrate Nextel customers to Sprint's EV-DO network "was one of the key reasons for the $35 billion merger."

In the past, U.S. telcos used wireline phone revenues to fund their wireless expansion; now they use revenues from wireless to fund fiber-to-the-home. It is profit from its wireless network, for example, that allows Verizon to maintain its stock price and attract the capital to sustain its ambitious $23 billion program of fiber deployments expected to reach 18 million households over the next four years. Any major setback at Verizon wireless would thus likely halt Verizon fiber.

Similarly, profits from the Qualcomm-based technology used by Cingular (now AT&T Wireless) for next generation systems will be critical to fund AT&T's ambitious Project Lightspeed broadband rollout.

Broadcom's attempt to close down Qualcomm on the basis of some flimsy patents on power-management techniques seems preposterous. The entire Qualcomm system, going back two decades, depends on an exquisite dance of exhaustively patented automatic gain controls and instant power regulation. But by the magic of injunctive relief at the ITC you can shut down the entire U.S. broadband industry in favor of European rivals.

With nearly all chips made or packaged overseas, the entire U.S. information economy now depends on ersatz "imports" based on designs and innovations that nearly all originate in the U.S. and generate profits here. The bottom line: Foreign governments can manipulate U.S. companies to favor their own industrial policies by pressing protectionist buttons at the ITC, putting much of U.S. broadband, wired and wireless, into sleep mode.

Is it not the ultimate irony that this new ITC authority is based on an obscure provision of that protectionist grim reaper, the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930? Surely the president and Congress can act to remove this new U.S. vulnerability -- one that springs from laws and regulations based on an obsolete vision of segregated national economies shipping products across the seas in clipper ships in exchange for transfers of gold.

Mr. Gilder is a founder of the Discovery Institute and the Gilder Technology Fund. Both Broadcom and Qualcomm are on his Gilder Technology Report list of favored companies.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on April 24, 2007, 01:30:44 PM

TOP OF THE NEWS

 --Contract Employee Arrested for Computer Sabotage at CA Power Facility (April 20 & 21, 2007) A California man has been arrested for allegedly interfering with computers at the California Independent System Operator (Cal-ISO) agency, which "controls the state's power transmission lines and runs its energy trading markets." Lonnie Charles Denison's "security access was suspended at the request of his employer based on an employee dispute." The allegation is that when his attempt at a remote cyber intrusion failed, Denison gained physical access to the facility with his card key; apparently not all access had been suspended.  Once inside the facility, Denison allegedly broke the glass protecting an emergency power cut-off station and pushed the button, causing much of the data center to shut down.  Cal-ISO was unable to access the energy trading market, but the power transmission grid was unaffected.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/20/terrorists_among_us_flee_flee/print.html
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-grid21apr21,1,5633750.story?coll=la-headlines-technology (http://tp://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-grid21apr21,1,5633750.story?coll=la-headlines-technology)
[Editor's Note (Skoudis): Here's a great opportunity for us all to emphasize to management the importance of removing access credentials thoroughly from systems at employee termination.  It also highlights the need for removing such access from both the physical and computer/network assets.  I treasure stories like this, which help us all to illustrate to management the importance of certain critical security actions so we can get the management attention and resources we need to do our jobs right.
(Schultz): This is a really scary "lesson learned" that illustrates just how many types of access must be considered when user access is supposed to be revoked. The fact that this incident occurred in the electric power arena is very significant because the convergence problem between logical and physically access security in this arena has been a lingering, serious, and unresolved issue for years. ]

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on May 02, 2007, 04:31:48 PM

Im not quite sure if this belongs in here, I thought I would just share it with those who like to tinker with to the creation of video / audio.
I like to play with video editing and was thinking about purchasing a MAC for video editing, their product Final Cut Pro www.apple.com/finalcutpro/ (http://www.apple.com/finalcutpro/) is regarded as the best or at least one of the best for video editing. Anyway... long story short in my search of products I found

(http://ubuntustudio.org/screenshot.png)

http://ubuntustudio.org/

Althought it is not out yet but soon..... very soon!

Oh yeah... Ubuntu is a Linux OS which means it is FREEEEEEEEEEE  :mrgreen:

Title: Intellectual Property theft
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 03, 2007, 08:59:35 AM

The tenor of this piece is vintage NY Slimes, but it does report something of interest to those who seek to protect their intellectual property.
============================

In Web Uproar, Antipiracy Code Spreads Wildly
       
By BRAD STONE
Published: May 3, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO, May 2 — There is open revolt on the Web.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times
Does encryption of media files unfairly limit consumer freedom?

Sophisticated Internet users have banded together over the last two days to publish and widely distribute a secret code used by the technology and movie industries to prevent piracy of high-definition movies.

The broader distribution of the code may not pose a serious threat to the studios, because it requires some technical expertise and specialized software to use it to defeat the copy protection on Blu-ray and HD DVD discs. But its relentless spread has already become a lesson in mob power on the Internet and the futility of censorship in the digital world.

An online uproar came in response to a series of cease-and-desist letters from lawyers for a group of companies that use the copy protection system, demanding that the code be removed from several Web sites.

Rather than wiping out the code — a string of 32 digits and letters in a specialized counting system — the legal notices sparked its proliferation on Web sites, in chat rooms, inside cleverly doctored digital photographs and on user-submitted news sites like Digg.com.

“It’s a perfect example of how a lawyer’s involvement can turn a little story into a huge story,” said Fred von Lohmann, a staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. “Now that they started sending threatening letters, the Internet has turned the number into the latest celebrity. It is now guaranteed eternal fame.”

The number is being enshrined in some creative ways. Keith Burgon, a 24-year-old musician in Goldens Bridge, N.Y., grabbed his acoustic guitar on Tuesday and improvised a melody while soulfully singing the code. He posted the song to YouTube, where it was played more than 45,000 times.

“I thought it was a source of comedy that they were trying so futilely to quell the spread of this number,” Mr. Burgon said. “The ironic thing is, because they tried to quiet it down it’s the most famous number on the Internet.”

During his work break on Tuesday, James Bertelson, an engineer in Vancouver, Wash., joined the movement and created a Web page featuring nothing but the number, obscured in an encrypted format that only insiders could appreciate. He then submitted his page to Digg, a news site where users vote on what is important. Despite its sparse offerings, his submission received nearly 5,000 votes and was propelled onto Digg’s main page.

“For most people this is about freedom of speech, and an industry that thinks that just because it has high-priced lawyers it has the final say,” Mr. Bertelson said.

Messages left for those lawyers and the trade organization they represent, the Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator, which controls the encryption system known as A.A.C.S., were not answered. In an e-mail message, a representative for the group said only that it “is looking into the matter and has no further comment at this time.”

The organization is backed by technology companies like I.B.M., Intel, Microsoft and Sony and movie studios like Disney and Warner Brothers, which is owned by Time Warner.

The secret code actually stopped being a secret in February, when a hacker ferreted it out of his movie-playing software and posted it on a Web bulletin board. From there it spread through the network of technology news sites and blogs.

Last month, lawyers for the trade group began sending out cease-and-desist letters, claiming that Web pages carrying the code violated its intellectual property rights under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Letters were sent to Google, which runs a blog network at blogspot.com, and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The campaign to remove the number from circulation went largely unnoticed until news of the letters hit Digg. The 25-employee company in San Francisco, acting on the advice of its lawyers, removed posting submissions about the secret number from its database earlier this week, then explained the move to its readers on Tuesday afternoon.

The removals were seen by many Digg users as a capitulation to corporate interests and an assault on free speech. Some also said that the trade group that promotes the HD-DVD format, which uses A.A.C.S. protection, had advertised on a weekly Digg-related video podcast.

On Tuesday afternoon and into the evening, stories about or including the code swamped Digg’s main page, which the company says gets 16 million readers each month. At 9 p.m. West Coast time, the company surrendered to mob sentiment.

“You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company,” wrote Kevin Rose, Digg’s founder, in a blog post. “We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.” If Digg loses, he wrote, “at least we died trying.”

Jay Adelson, Digg’s chief executive, said in an interview that the site was disregarding the advice of its lawyers. “We just decided that it is more important to stand by our users,” he said. Regarding the company’s exposure to lawsuits he said, “we are just going to prepare and do our best.”

The conflict spilled over to Wikipedia, where administrators had to restrict editing on some entries to keep contributors from repeatedly posting the code.

The episode recalls earlier acts of online rebellion against the encryption that protects media files from piracy. Some people believe that such systems unfairly limit their freedom to listen to music and watch movies on whatever devices they choose.

In 1999, hackers created a program called DeCSS that broke the software protecting standard DVDs and posted it on the hacker site 2600.com. The Motion Picture Association of America sued, and Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, citing the 1998 digital copyright act, sided with the movie industry.

The DVD code disappeared from the 2600 site, but nevertheless resurfaced in playful haiku, on T-shirts and even in a movie in which the code scrolled across the screen like the introductory crawl in “Star Wars.”

In both cases, the users who joined the revolt and published the codes may be exposing themselves to legal risk. Chris Sprigman, an associate professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, said that under the digital copyright act, propagating even parts of techniques intended to circumvent copyright was illegal.

However, with thousands of Internet users now impudently breaking the law, Mr. Sprigman said that the entertainment and technology industries would have no realistic way to pursue a legal remedy. “It’s a gigantic can of worms they’ve opened, and now it will be awfully hard to do anything with lawsuits,” he said.

NY Times

Title: Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on May 08, 2007, 05:51:06 PM

From Wired

Army Squeezes Soldier Blogs, Maybe to Death

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/05/army_bloggers

The U.S. Army has ordered soldiers to stop posting to blogs or sending personal e-mail messages, without first clearing the content with a superior officer, Wired News has learned. The directive, issued April 19, is the sharpest restriction on troops' online activities since the start of the Iraq war. And it could mean the end of military blogs, observers say.

Military officials have been wrestling for years with how to handle troops who publish blogs. Officers have weighed the need for wartime discretion against the opportunities for the public to personally connect with some of the most effective advocates for the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq -- the troops themselves. The secret-keepers have generally won the argument, and the once-permissive atmosphere has slowly grown more tightly regulated. Soldier-bloggers have dropped offline as a result.

The new rules (.pdf) obtained by Wired News require a commander be consulted before every blog update.

"This is the final nail in the coffin for combat blogging," said retired paratrooper Matthew Burden, editor of The Blog of War anthology. "No more military bloggers writing about their experiences in the combat zone. This is the best PR the military has -- it's most honest voice out of the war zone. And it's being silenced."

Army Regulation 530--1: Operations Security (OPSEC) (.pdf) restricts more than just blogs, however. Previous editions of the rules asked Army personnel to "consult with their immediate supervisor" before posting a document "that might contain sensitive and/or critical information in a public forum." The new version, in contrast, requires "an OPSEC review prior to publishing" anything -- from "web log (blog) postings" to comments on internet message boards, from resumes to letters home.

Failure to do so, the document adds, could result in a court-martial, or "administrative, disciplinary, contractual, or criminal action."

Despite the absolutist language, the guidelines' author, Major Ray Ceralde, said there is some leeway in enforcement of the rules. "It is not practical to check all communication, especially private communication," he noted in an e-mail. "Some units may require that soldiers register their blog with the unit for identification purposes with occasional spot checks after an initial review. Other units may require a review before every posting."

But with the regulations drawn so tightly, "many commanders will feel like they have no choice but to forbid their soldiers from blogging -- or even using e-mail," said Jeff Nuding, who won the bronze star for his service in Iraq. "If I'm a commander, and think that any slip-up gets me screwed, I'm making it easy: No blogs," added Nuding, writer of the "pro-victory" Dadmanly site. "I think this means the end of my blogging."

Active-duty troops aren't the only ones affected by the new guidelines. Civilians working for the military, Army contractors -- even soldiers' families -- are all subject to the directive as well.

But, while the regulations may apply to a broad swath of people, not everybody affected can actually read them. In a Kafka-esque turn, the guidelines are kept on the military's restricted Army Knowledge Online intranet. Many Army contractors -- and many family members -- don't have access to the site. Even those able to get in are finding their access is blocked to that particular file.

"Even though it is supposedly rewritten to include rules for contractors (i.e., me) I am not allowed to download it," e-mails Perry Jeffries, an Iraq war veteran now working as a contractor to the Armed Services Blood Program.

The U.S. military -- all militaries -- have long been concerned about their personnel inadvertently letting sensitive information out. Troops' mail was read and censored throughout World War II; back home, government posters warned citizens "careless talk kills."

Military blogs, or milblogs, as they're known in service-member circles, only make the potential for mischief worse. On a website, anyone, including foreign intelligence agents, can stop by and look for information.

"All that stuff we used to get around a bar and say to each other -- well, now because we're publishing it in open forums, now it's intel," said milblogger and retired Army officer John Donovan.

Passing on classified data -- real secrets -- is already a serious military crime. The new regulations (and their author) take an unusually expansive view of what kind of unclassified information a foe might find useful. In an article published by the official Army News Service, Maj. Ceralde "described how the Pentagon parking lot had more parked cars than usual on the evening of Jan. 16, 1991, and how pizza parlors noticed a significant increase of pizza to the Pentagon.... These observations are indicators, unclassified information available to all … that Operation Desert Storm (was about to) beg(i)n."

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on May 15, 2007, 02:25:08 PM

 --Google Research Finds 10 Percent of Web Pages Hold Malware (May 11, 2007) According to research from Google, 10 percent of web pages contain malicious code.  Google closely analyzed 4.5 million web pages over the course of a year and found that approximately ten percent, or 450,000, had the capability of installing malware without users' knowledge.  An additional 700,000 pages are believed to be infected with code that could harm users' computers.  The company says it has "started an effort to identify all web pages in the Internet that could be malicious."
Most entice users to visit the dangerous pages through tempting offers, and exploit holes in Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) to install themselves on users' computers.  Google also examined the vectors used by attackers to infect these web pages; most malicious code was located in elements beyond the control of website owners, such as banner advertisements and widgets.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6645895.stm

http://www.usenix.org/events/hotbots07/tech/full_papers/provos/provos.pdf

[Editor's Note (Skoudis): This is a very good piece of research, and contributes significantly to our understanding the malware threat better.  I recommend that you read it.  Also, it shows that today's Internet is a cesspool of malware.  Using mainstream browsers with patches that often follow weeks after exploits are in the wild is an increasingly dangerous proposition.]

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 02, 2007, 06:51:50 AM

NY Times Editorial
A Cyberblockade in Estonia
           
 
Published: June 2, 2007
The small but technologically adept nation of Estonia has raised an alarm that should be heard around the wired world. Last month it weathered what some describe as the first real war in cyberspace when its government and much of its commerce nearly shut down for days because of an orchestrated Internet assault.

The assault on Estonia’s virtual society began in April after authorities moved a real bronze statue of a Soviet soldier from a central park in Tallinn to a military graveyard farther from the center of the city. For many Estonians, the statue was another reminder of Soviet invaders who took over their homes at Stalin’s orders. But Russians and Estonians of Russian descent immediately took to the streets to protest. The statue’s move was, for them, a sign of disrespect for Soviets who battled the Nazis in World War II.

The rioting and looting in Tallinn turned out to be nothing compared to what began happening to Estonia’s computers. Waves of unwanted data quickly clogged the Web sites of the government, businesses and several newspapers, shutting down one branch of their computer network after another. One minister described it as a kind of electronic blockade, like having the nation’s ports all shut to the sea. Estonian authorities charged that the data flood came on orders from the Kremlin. President Vladimir Putin’s government has denied any involvement.

In recent years, governments, businesses and individuals have focused on ways to keep hackers or destructive viruses from stealing or destroying sensitive information. But Estonia should put the computer-dependent world on full notice that there can be many offensive forms of information warfare and figuring out how to stop it — and ultimately who is behind it — is essential to all of our security.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on June 08, 2007, 06:11:14 PM

This is cool!

Cars Create Wireless Network

June 8, 2007 —Hotspots. GPS. Internet-enabled phones. The world is going wireless. And a group of researchers are extending the concept to the car, turning automobiles into network nodes that can receive and send signals to others nearby.

As car after car enters the mobile network (some eventually drop out of range), drivers can download multimedia — including movies, images and songs — or get real-time information about traffic.

"Say you are driving and a car that is three miles in front of you spots an icy spot on the road. It can trigger back a signal saying, 'Look, there is an icy road,'" said Giovanni Pau, research scientist at the University of California's Network Research Lab in Los Angeles, which is led by Mario Gerla.

Follow the URL to read more..
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/06/08/carnetwork_tec.html?category=technology&guid=20070608130030

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 08, 2007, 09:53:23 PM

"drivers can download multimedia — including movies, images and songs"

Ummm, , , , Call me old-fashioned, I'd rather they watch the road than a movie.

Title: Re: Ok this is creepy...
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on June 20, 2007, 05:22:35 PM

Im not sure if this belongs in this thread but I wasnt sure on where to put it but I do think it is interesting enough to share...

http://www.thenewstribune.com/front/topphoto/story/91460.html

A horror movie come to lifeThree Fircrest families receive death threats via cell phone. Even when the phones are off. Even when they get new phones.

SEAN ROBINSON; The News Tribune Published: June 20th, 2007 06:15 AM

 
 Enlarge image Alison Yin/The News TribuneHeather Kuykendall and her daughter, Courtney, 16, display the cell phones they’ve abandoned in an attempt to cut off a stream of threatening messages from mysterious harassers. Courtney started receiving the calls in February. Other families have gotten them, too. Investigators suspect it’s an elaborate hoax.
 
Maybe it’s just a long-running prank, but the reign of terror endured by three Fircrest families buries the needle on the creepy meter.
For four months, the Kuykendalls, the Prices and the McKays say, they’ve been harassed and threatened by mysterious cell phone stalkers who track their every move and occasionally lurk by their homes late at night, screaming and banging on walls.

Police can’t seem to stop them. The late-night visitors vanish before officers arrive. The families say investigators have a hard time believing the stalkers can control cell phones without touching them and suspect an elaborate hoax. Complaints to their phone companies do no good – the families say they’ve been told what the stalkers are doing is impossible.

It doesn’t feel impossible to Heather Kuykendall and her sister, Darci Price, who’ve saved and recorded scores of threatening voice mails, uttered in throaty, juvenile rasps stolen from bad horror films.

Price and Kuykendall have given the callers a name: “Restricted.” That’s the word that shows up on their caller ID windows: on the land lines at home, and on every one of their cell phones.

Their messages, left at all hours, threaten death – to the families, their children and their pets.

“They tell us that they see us,” Kuykendall said Tuesday. “They tell us that they know everything we’re doing.”

It’s gotten so bad the sisters’ parents have offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who identifies the culprits.

The stalkers know what the family is eating, when adults leave the house, when they go to baseball games. They know the color of shirt Courtney Kuykendall, 16, is wearing. When Heather Kuykendall recently installed a new lock on the door of the house, she got a voice mail. During an interview with The News Tribune on Tuesday, she played the recording.

The stalkers taunted her, telling her they knew the code. In another message, they threatened shootings at the schools Kuykendall’s children attend.

“I’m warning you,” one guttural message says. “Don’t send them to school. If you do, say goodbye.”

Somehow, the callers have gained control of the family cell phones, Price and Kuykendall say. Messages received by the sisters include snatches of conversation overheard on cell-phone mikes, replayed and transmitted via voice mail. Phone records show many of the messages coming from Courtney’s phone, even when she’s not using it – even when it’s turned off.

Price and Kuykendall say the stalkers knew when they visited Fircrest police and sent a voice-mail message that included a portion of their conversation with a detective.

The harassment seems to center on Courtney, but it extends to her parents, her aunt Darcy and Courtney’s friends, including Taylor McKay, who lives across the street in Fircrest. Her mother, Andrea McKay, has received messages similar to those left at the Kuykendall household and cell phone bills approaching $1,000 for one month. She described one recent call: She was slicing limes in the kitchen. The stalkers left a message, saying they preferred lemons.

“Taylor and Courtney seem to be the hub of the harassment, and different people have branched off from there,” Andrea McKay said. “I don’t know how they’re doing it. They were able to get Taylor’s phone number through Courtney’s phone, and every contact was exposed.”

McKay, a teacher in the Peninsula School District, said she and Taylor recently explained the threats to the principal at Gig Harbor High School, which Taylor attends. A Gig Harbor police officer sat in on the conversation, she said.

While the four people talked, Taylor’s and Andrea’s phones, which were switched off, sat on a table. While mother and daughter spoke, Taylor’s phone switched on and sent a text message to her mother’s phone, Andrea said.

The Kuykendalls and Prices report similar experiences. Richard Price, Darcy’s husband, is a 26-year military officer, assigned to McChord Air Force Base. On a recent trip to the base, the stalkers sent him a message.

“McChord needs us,” the voice said.

Mari Manley, 16, one of Courtney’s close friends, is another victim of the harassment. She tried to avoid the calls by ignoring her phone. Late one night, she heard the phone making an unfamiliar noise. Her ringtone had changed.

“Answer your phone,” a guttural voice said. Manley saved the ringtone, and played it during an interview Tuesday.

The families and their friends have adopted a new routine: They block the cameras on their phones with tape. They take out the batteries to stop the calls. The Prices and Kuykendalls returned all their corrupted phones to their wireless company and replaced them with new ones. The threatening messages kept coming.

Fircrest Police Chief John Cheesman is familiar with the case and knows the families. His department is working the case with the Tacoma Police Department and the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office, he said. The agencies filed a search warrant for the phone records, but they didn’t reveal much. Many of the calls and text messages trace back to Courtney’s phone, which the family believes has been electronically hijacked.

Cell phone technology allows remote monitoring of calls, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. Known as a “roving bug,” it works whether a phone is on or off. FBI agents tracking organized crime have used it to monitor meetings among mobsters. Global positioning systems, installed in many cell phones, also make it possible to pinpoint a phone’s location within a few feet.

According to James M. Atkinson, a Massachusetts-based expert in counterintelligence who has advised the U.S. Congress on security issues, it’s not that hard to take remote control of a wireless phone. “You do not have to have a strong technical background for someone to do this,” he said Tuesday. “They probably have a technically gifted kid who probably is in their neighborhood.”

Courtney Kuykendall says she has no idea who the stalkers are, though she knows police are suspicious. She believes someone followed her at school – a man in a hooded sweatshirt with a beard.

“They’re accusing my daughter of threatening her own family,” Heather Kuykendall said.

“Why would I do that?” Courtney said. “Why would I do that to people I care about? Why would I harass my own family?”

Title: Maybe this explains it
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2007, 05:30:27 PM

I found this @ wired.com

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/phreakers.html?pg=3&topic=phreakers&topic_set=

It is a 4 page article

They've Got Your Number …
… your text messages and address book, and a way to bug your calls. Why spam, scams, and viruses are coming soon to a phone near you.

It's a beautiful afternoon in Shepherd's Bush, a bustling neighborhood on the outskirts of London, and Adam Laurie is feeling peckish. Heading out of the office, he's about to pick up more than a sandwich. As he walks, he'll be probing every cell phone that comes within range of a hidden antenna he has connected to the laptop in his bag. We stroll past a park near the Tube station, then wander into a supermarket. Laurie contemplates which sort of crisps to buy while his laptop quietly scans the 2.4-GHz frequency range used by Bluetooth devices, probing the cell phones nestled in other shoppers' pockets and purses.

Laurie, 42, the CSO of boutique security firm the Bunker, isn't going to mess with anyone's phone, although he could: With just a few tweaks to the scanning program his computer is running, Laurie could be crashing cell phones all around him, cutting a little swath of telecommunications destruction down the deli aisle. But today Laurie is just gathering data. We are counting how many phones he can hack using Bluetooth, a wireless protocol for syncing cell phones with headsets, computers, and other devices.

We review the results of the expedition in a nearby pub. In the 17 minutes we wandered around, Laurie's computer picked up signals from 39 phones. He peers at his monitor for a while. "It takes only 15 seconds to suck down somebody's address book, so we could have had a lot of those," he says at last. "And at least five of these phones were vulnerable to an attack."

The "attack" Laurie mentions so casually could mean almost anything - a person using another person's cell to make long distance calls or changing every phone number in his address book or even bugging his conversations. There are, he says, "a whole range of new powers" available to the intrepid phone marauder, including nasty viral attacks. A benign Bluetooth worm has already been discovered circulating in Singapore, and Laurie thinks future variants could be something really scary. Especially vulnerable are Europeans who use their mobile phone to make micropayments - small purchases that show up as charges on cell phone bills. A malicious virus maker bent on a get-rich-quick scheme could take advantage of this feature by issuing "reverse SMS" orders.

Bluetooth security has become a pressing issue in Europe, where the technology is ubiquitous. The problem will migrate to American shores as the protocol catches on here, too. But in the long run, Bluetooth vulnerabilities are manageable: Handset manufacturers can rewrite faulty implementations, and cell phone users will learn to be more careful. A far bigger security nightmare for the US is Internet telephony, which is fast being adopted for large corporations and is available to consumers through many broadband providers. Voice over IP is, by design, hacker-friendly. No enterprising criminals have dreamed up a million-dollar scam exploiting VoIP technology yet. But when they do, it likely won't be something a simple patch can fix.

Bluetooth hacking is technically very different from VoIP hacking, but they're both surging for the same basic reason. Increasingly, telephones have become indistinguishable from computers, which makes them more useful, but also more vulnerable. VoIP, which routes calls over the Internet, gives users the power to port their phone number anywhere, package voice messages into MP3s and receive them as emails, and make cheap international calls. Yet VoIP, like Bluetooth, exposes your telephone to the same ills that regularly befall a desktop box - worms, spam, crashes.

"It's not like we've fixed the vulnerabilities on computers," says security expert Bruce Schneier, author of Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World. "The phone network used to get its security from being closed, but VoIP phones will be just as bad as computers."

Many of today's hacks work because the traditional phone system was built on the premise that only large, monopolistic phone companies would be using it, and they would all play by the same rules. But the network isn't the telcos' private sandbox anymore; it can be manipulated and controlled by anybody who understands basic computer networking. The people who know this best are a new generation of phone hackers - aka phreakers - who aren't interested in following the rules. They're busy ripping apart the latest phones to discover what can make them turn against their owners. As the phone companies and handset makers lumber along, we can only hope that the phreaks in white hats figure out some fixes before the blackhats move in for the kill.

Laurie, whose laptop is now packed with information from vulnerable cell phones in the Shepherd's Bush, has become infamous in Britain for conducting a similar experiment in the House of Parliament, where he had the opportunity (which he didn't take) to copy the address books and calendars of several prominent politicians. That excursion resulted in a mandate that all Bluetooth devices be turned off in the House of Parliament.

As the inventor of "bluesnarfing," a hack that uses Bluetooth to peek at data stored on cell phones, Laurie is dedicated to publicizing the danger of a wide-open Bluetooth connection. A bluesnarf attack can identify an unprotected phone and copy its entire address book, calendar, photos, and any other information that happens to be inside. Using a bluesnarf program, a phreak can also crash any phone within range by using Bluetooth to broadcast what Laurie calls "a corrupted message."

Bluesnarf was born after Laurie scrutinized the code running some Bluetooth headsets his staff was using. He wasn't happy with what he found. "Gaping security holes," he says with a frown. Rebuffed by the cell phone companies to which he reported the problems, he conceived of bluesnarf as a publicity stunt, a tool that would dramatize the danger of owning these phones.

Compounding Bluetooth's technical vulnerabilities are problems with the way people use it. Most folks leave Bluetooth on all the time, often because they don't bother to learn how to turn it off. Even tech-savvy types tend to keep their connections open. "People have heard about 'toothing,' where strangers send each other flirtatious messages via Bluetooth," he says. Hoping to get toothed, they risk an entirely different kind of penetration.

The risk doesn't end with snarfing. Another way to use Bluetooth to hijack a phone completely is bluebugging, and Laurie gives me a quick demo. He runs the bluebug software on his laptop, and it quickly locates an Ericsson t610 phone he's set on the table between us (not all phones can be bluebugged, but this model can). His computer connects to the phone and takes it over, remotely. Tapping the keyboard, Laurie sends the t610 a command to ring up the phone on his belt. It bleeps. He answers. We've got a bluebug.

Invented by Austrian researcher Martin Herfurt earlier this year, bluebugging is the perfect weapon for corporate spies. Let's say you and I are competing for a big contract with an oil company. I want to hear everything that happens in your meeting with the VP of Massive Oil Inc., so I hire a blackhat phreak to take over your cell phone. Once he's bluebugged it, I tell him to have your mobile call mine. The phone that's sitting in your jacket pocket is now picking up everything you and the VP say during your conversation, and I can hear the prices you're quoting as clear as a bell on my own phone. "A cell phone is the ultimate well-engineered bugging device," Laurie says.

Unlike bluesnarfers, who need only some gear and know-how, the bluebugger first has to get your cell phone to pair with his computer, establishing a "trusted" data link. Laurie explains one crafty way to make this happen. "You just say, 'Gee, that's a cool phone, can I see it?'Punch a few buttons to establish the pairing, and hand it back." As soon as the pairing is complete, the bluebugger can commandeer every aspect of the phone. He can initiate calls, send SMS messages, even overwrite the address book and contacts list.

Laurie's revelation is disturbing, but the fact that phreakers need to approach and interact with their intended targets significantly cuts down on the number of victims. Yet British security consultant Ollie Whitehouse, whose Bluetooth-hunting program Redfang has made him a celebrity among phreakers, describes another a way to bluebug - a method that doesn't demand the eavesdropper come into physical contact with the target's phone. In this case, the trick is to sniff the data traffic traveling to and from a Bluetooth phone when it's pairing with another device, like a headset. Armed with this information, an attacker can bluebug the phone by pretending to be the trusted device with which it regularly networks.

Cell phone companies argue that bluesnarfing and bluebugging are minor threats because Bluetooth is designed to work only over short distances, 20 feet or less, requiring attackers to be close to their targets.

Enter the Bluetooth sniper rifle. Made from $200 worth of off-the-shelf parts, the sniper is a Bluetooth antenna optimized for long-distance use. It can send and receive faint signals at more than a thousand yards. With the sniper - or a wireless weapon like it - bluesnarfers and bluebuggers no longer have to be in the same room as their targets. "By smashing any notion that distance is an issue," says 24-year-old inventor Jon Hering, a student at the University of Southern California, "we showed that bluebugging is a real-world threat."

Surely the phone companies must be doing something to protect us from all this. Keith Nowak, a spokesperson at Nokia, suggests "just turning off Bluetooth - or switching into hidden mode."

Whitehouse laughs at that advice. Redfang, his signature phreak tool, is specifically designed to find Bluetooth devices in hidden mode. And given that so few people actually do turn off Bluetooth, their phones are susceptible to countless hacks - ones that Hering's sniper rifle could launch from half a mile away.

The Default Radio boys, rock stars in the phreak underground, are onstage at DefCon, the venerable hacker conference that's sort of a cross between the Ozzfest mosh pit and an after-hours party for NSA agents. Wearing baseball caps, T-shirts, and baggy jeans, the boys are doing a live version of their phreak-friendly streaming-audio talk show. The long table in front of them is covered with telephone equipment and computers.

Title: Maybe this explains it- part 2
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 21, 2007, 05:31:57 PM

A Defaulter using the nom de phreak Lucky225 steps up to the mike. With a phone tucked between his ear and shoulder and the keyboard under his fingers, he looks like a cross between a DJ and a telephone line repairman.

Lucky regales the audience with a tale about his favorite VoIP hack: He can make a VoIP phone display whatever caller ID number he chooses. To prove his point, he tells us he can impersonate "Jenny," the girl from the pop song by Tommy Tutone.

Earsplitting static issues from the speakers, and suddenly we hear a thunderous dial tone. Lucky has routed his VoIP phone through the sound system. He dials MCI's caller ID readback line, a service that identifies whatever number you're calling from. A robotic voice slowly intones Lucky's number: "eight-six-seven-five" - the crowd erupts, screams of laughter mingling with groans - "three-zero-nine."

Having demonstrated his power over caller ID, Lucky proceeds to tell the phreak-packed auditorium how he spoofed the number. Turns out the whole thing is a social hack. A few days before, he called his service provider, Vonage, and told them he wanted to port all his cell phone calls to the Internet phone connected to his computer. His cell number is 867 5309, he lied, and Vonage believed him. Now it's rerouting all calls made to Jenny on the Vonage network to Lucky.

Naturally, Vonage also set the caller ID on Lucky's VoIP phone to Jenny's number - so any time he dials out, it looks like he's calling from 867 5309. A lot of systems depend on receiving accurate caller ID - credit card-activation lines, voicemail systems, even 911. So being able to control what a called party sees after you dial can be a potent weapon. Armed with your caller ID, an identity thief could order a new ATM card, activate it over the phone, and use it to empty your bank account. And, given that many voicemail boxes will play their contents to any phone with the right caller ID, you could be opening up your private life to anyone with a Vonage phone.

After the show, I ask Lucky why he got into the phreak scene. "Well," Lucky deadpans, sketching out plans for a network of cans and rubber bands, "I wanted to start this elastic-based phone system " He's a prankster, but with a purpose - to make clear to the public that VoIP is a privacy nightmare. "Yup," he concludes, still pondering voice over elastic, "I think this tin can shit is really going to take off."

Steve Wozniak, the Apple computer pioneer whose phreak days began in the 1970s, says pranks are what it's all about. "Those of us who have the phreaker mentality see playing with the world as fun, but in these times it's hard for people to see us as harmless."

Maybe so, but Vonage doesn't seem too concerned. When I contact the company later to find out whether they know about Lucky's caller ID trick and what they are doing to stop it, executive VP Louis Holder admits they're not doing anything. "We allow people to do what he did," Holder says. "We give people a temporary phone number before we verify it with the phone company, and verification takes a couple of weeks. Somebody could pick the White House number and pretend to be the president."

Today's phreaks have the power to crash the phone system - but they also have the power to rebuild it. Lucky's joke about creating his own network out of tin cans and rubber bands isn't that far from the truth. Slestak, Da Beave, and GiD are the crew behind Florida-based Telephreak.org, a free VoIP service that they've built to run on a roll-your-own, open source private branch exchange (PBX) system called Asterisk.

Typically used by businesses, a PBX consists of computers that route calls between what amounts to a phone intranet and the public telephone system. A company using a PBX might pay for 100 lines that service 500 employees, linking callers to the outside world, voicemail, or conferences by dynamically connecting phone calls using whichever landlines are open. In the past, all these connections would be managed by the phone company or a proprietary, closed black box in the server room. But with Asterisk, there's no need for the phone company to manage your lines anymore. You can do it yourself.

The Telephreak crew has created its own private phone company for themselves and their friends - one that never sends a bill. Dial an access line to check voicemail, create conference calls, forward calls to other phones, even get a new number. And never pay a cent.

Currently, there are several hundred voicemail accounts, and the system can handle a hundred simultaneous calls. Although the Telephreak crew has to pay for connectivity to Ma Bell, the amount is so negligible that they're willing to eat the money. It's a small price to pay for freedom.

I'm talking to them on a Telephreak conference call, and the sound is a little fuzzy. Beave, identifiable by his slight southern twang, tells me he's working on ironing out the bugs. It's a little strange to know someone is manipulating your phone connection while talking to you. Suddenly, the sound is perfect. We've been rerouted. Slestak's voice comes in loud and clear: "My connection to you guys right now is going across a cordless phone with a box to the server, then to Telephreak. My dial tone is coming from the West Coast."

One of the best things about building your own PBX is that you can do what Slestak calls "chemistry experiments" with the phone system. Some PBX phreakers, like Telediablo, even provide a caller ID spoofing service: With it, there's no need to lie to Vonage - you simply call up Telediablo's PBX, plug in the number you want to use as your caller ID, then dial the party you want to trick. When I try out his little hack, I pick the number 666 6666. Next, I key in a nearby friend's number. It rings. My friend shows me his caller ID window: Now I feel like a phreak. Instead of displaying my number, his phone is displaying the devil's digits.

There are other PBX tricks - like caller ID unmasking, which can sometimes reveal the actual phone number of a caller, regardless of whether they've paid to have their number blocked. So if you think you're anonymous on the telephone system, think again.

Probably the most unsettling discovery made by whitehat phreakers is that VoIP providers and wireless companies are willing to peddle phones and services that they know perfectly well are vulnerable to all kinds of attacks. After several months of bad publicity in the UK, where Laurie and Whitehouse are based, the cell phone companies are responding. Nokia and Sony Ericsson have issued patches, and Motorola says that its security flaws have been fixed in the newer models. And upstart VoIP provider Skype is marketing built-in encryption. Meanwhile, the Bluetooth Consortium - a group of industry leaders, including Nokia and Sony Ericsson, whose products incorporate Bluetooth - focused explicitly on security at its UnPlugFest in Germany last month. At the meeting, security experts (including Laurie) rated each company's phones in terms of their resistance to common attacks. Still, nobody is tracking bluesnarf or bluebug attacks to measure the extent of the problem - nobody but the whitehat phreaks themselves.

Whitehouse has written a program he calls Sweet Tooth that can detect the signature radio signals sent by bluesnarfers. Modeled on honeypot programs that law enforcement and security analysts use to detect hackers on the Internet, Sweet Tooth could provide accurate statistics on how prevalent bluesnarf attacks really are. The program is ready for action, says Whitehouse. The question now is whether law enforcement and the phone companies will actually deploy it, however. Ignoring the problem is not going to make it better - especially because phone hacking is only going to get easier.

Bluetooth phreaking is just the beginning. The holes will get patched, but the problem won't go away, because all the tools that hackers have spent decades developing will now be repurposed to hijack your phone. Next-generation handsets will have three entry points for the blackhats: If a snarfer can't suck down your data with Bluetooth, he'll try your Wi-Fi port, and if that doesn't work, infrared.

"I guess that's the price you pay for convergence," Whitehouse says.

The Great Cell Phone Robbery

How security flaws in today's mobile phones could add up to tomorrow's perfect crime.

Step 1: Approach
A virus-spreader enters Heathrow Airport toting a briefcase with a laptop and an external antenna. The rig can sniff Bluetooth signals from up to 20 feet away - and with just a bit of hacking, it can be modified to send and receive signals over much greater distances.

Step 2: Discover
Using a program like bluesnarf, the laptop automatically finds Bluetooth phones with firmware vulnerable to remote takeover. This process is completed in less than 15 seconds.

Step 3: Take over
The laptop sends a program to all the vulnerable phones. Disguised as a game or a marketing promotion, the program is really a Trojan horse hiding a nasty virus. Once the user launches it, the virus hijacks the phone's operating system, taking over basic functions like dialing and messaging.

Step 4: Propagate
The target phone is now infected, and it reacts by broadcasting the virus to other vulnerable Bluetooth phones within 20 feet. Within minutes, thousands of phones can be infected.

Step 5: Steal
Commandeering the phones' SMS system, the virus uses a popular European micropayment system called reverse SMS to transfer 10 euros from each phone to a temporary account in Estonia. The virus requests the transfer and stays in control until it can confirm the order. The account is closed long before any user sees the charge reflected on the monthly bill.

Annalee Newitz (annalee@techsploitation.com), a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote about dating optimizers in issue 12.06.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 24, 2007, 04:57:35 AM

Broadband Baloney
By ROBERT M. MCDOWELL
July 24, 2007; Page A15

American consumers are poised to reap a windfall of benefits from a new wave of broadband deployment. But you would never know it by the rhetoric of those who would have us believe that the nation is falling behind, indeed in free fall.

Looming over the horizon are heavy-handed government mandates setting arbitrary standards, speeds and build-out requirements that could favor some technologies over others, raise prices and degrade service. This would be a mistaken road to take -- although it would hardly be the first time in history that alarmists have ignored cold, hard facts in pursuit of bad policy.

 
Exhibit A for the alarmists are statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD says the U.S. has dropped from 12th in the world in broadband subscribers per 100 residents to 15th.

The OECD's methodology is seriously flawed, however. According to an analysis by the Phoenix Center, if all OECD countries including the U.S. enjoyed 100% broadband penetration -- with all homes and businesses being connected -- our rank would fall to 20th. The U.S. would be deemed a relative failure because the OECD methodology measures broadband connections per capita, putting countries with larger household sizes at a statistical disadvantage.

The OECD also overlooks that the U.S. is the largest broadband market in the world, with over 65 million subscribers -- more than twice the number of America's closest competitor. We got there because of our superior household adoption rates. According to several recent surveys, the average percentage of U.S. households taking broadband is about 42%; the EU average is 23%.

Furthermore, the OECD does not weigh a country's geographic size relative to its population density, which matters because more consumers may live farther from the pipes. Only one country above the U.S. on the OECD list (Canada) stretches from one end of a continent to another like we do. Only one country above us on this list is at least 75% rural, like the U.S. In fact, 13 of the 14 countries that the OECD ranks higher are significantly smaller than the U.S.

And if we compare many of our states individually with some countries that are allegedly beating us in the broadband race, we are actually winning. Forty-three American states have a higher household broadband adoption rate than all but five EU countries. Even large rural western states such as Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and both Dakotas exhibit much stronger household broadband adoption rates than France or Britain. Even if we use the OECD's flawed methodology, New Jersey has a higher penetration rate than fourth-ranked Korea. Alaska is more broadband-saturated than France.

The OECD conclusions really unravel when we look at wireless services, especially Wi-Fi. One-third of the world's Wi-Fi hot spots are in the U.S., but Wi-Fi is not included in the OECD study unless it is used in a so-called "fixed wireless" setting. I can't recall ever seeing any fixed wireless users cemented into a coffee shop, airport or college campus. Most American Wi-Fi users do so with personal portable devices. It is difficult to determine how many wireless broadband users are online at any given moment, since they may not qualify as "subscribers" to anyone's service.

In short, the OECD data do not include all of the ways Americans can make high-speed connections to the Internet, therefore omitting millions of American broadband users. Europe, with its more regulatory approach, may actually end up being the laggard because of latent weaknesses in its broadband market. It lacks adequate competition among alternative broadband platforms to spur the faster speeds that consumers and an ever-expanding Internet will require.

Europe also suffers from a dearth of robust competition from cable modem and fiber. Cable penetration is only about 21% of households. In the U.S., cable is available to 94% of all households. Also, the U.S. is home to the world's fastest fiber-to-home market, with a 99% annual growth rate in subscribers compared with a relatively anemic 13% growth rate in Europe.

In fact, the European Competitive Telecommunications Association reported last fall that Europe is experiencing a significant slowdown in the annual growth rate of broadband subscriptions, falling to 14% from 23% annual growth. Growth stalled in a number of countries, including Denmark and Belgium (4% in each country). And France -- a relative star -- exhibited just 10% growth. Yet all of these nations are "ahead" of us on the much-talked-about OECD chart.

Here in the U.S., the country that is allegedly "falling behind," broadband adoption is accelerating. Government studies confirm that America's broadband growth rate has jumped from 32% per year to 52%. With new numbers expected shortly, we anticipate a continued positive trend. Criticisms of our definition of "broadband" being too lax are already irrelevant as over 50 million subscribers are in the 1.5 to 3.0 megabits-per-second "fast lane."

Our flexible and deregulatory broadband policies provide opportunities for American entrepreneurs to construct new delivery platforms enabling them to pull ahead of our international competitors. For instance, newly auctioned spectrum for advanced wireless services will spark unparalleled growth and innovation.

Soon, we will auction even more spectrum in the broadcast TV bands to spur more broadband competition. In addition, we are in the midst of testing powerful new technologies to use in spectrum located in the "white spaces" between broadcast TV channels.

This is all wonderful news for our future. In a competitive market, consumer demand compels businesses to innovate. History has proven that, just when we think we are going to "run out" of spectrum, some brilliant entrepreneur finds a way to use the airwaves more efficiently.

By some estimates, since Marconi's first radio transmission 110 years ago spectrum capacity has doubled every two and a half years, while the cost of delivering information over wireless platforms has dropped by half every 42 months.

When the Internet was just used for email and static websites, dial-up services satisfied consumer demand. But when Napster came along, we saw a huge spike in cable modem and DSL take-up rates -- necessary tools in the art of stealing music. (Please obtain your music legally!)

Today, video applications are tugging hard on America's broadband infrastructure. YouTube alone uses as much bandwidth today as the entire Internet did in 2000. Not surprisingly, our broadband adoption rate continues to increase concurrently with the proliferation of this latest "killer app."

Consumers don't buy fat pipes for their own sake; they buy applications and content that require fat pipes. As consumer demand for more bandwidth-intensive applications and content increases, so does the incentive for network owners to provide more bandwidth. While America is on the right track, we can and will do more. We are creating more competition through the construction of new delivery platforms. We are clearing away unnecessary regulatory underbrush that may inhibit investment needed to fund more competition. We are also creating an atmosphere of regulatory certainty and parity.

When it comes to broadband policy, let's put aside flawed studies and rankings, and reject the road of regulatory stagnation. In the next few years, we will witness a tremendous explosion of entrepreneurial brilliance in the broadband market, if the government doesn't micromanage. Belief in entrepreneurs and a light regulatory touch is the right broadband policy for America.

Mr. McDowell is a commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 25, 2007, 10:58:07 AM

-iPhone Vulnerability Lets Attackers Take Control (July 23, 207) A trio of individuals has contacted Apple Computer regarding a flaw they discovered in the iPhone that could be exploited to take control of the device.  The three recommended a patch for the flaw and noted that the phone has strong security measures, but "once [they] managed to find a hole, [they] were in complete control."  One of the three plans to present additional information about the vulnerability at a conference at the beginning of August.  Once in control, attackers could use the phone to make calls, access data on the phone, or even use it as a bugging device. The flaw can be exploited through malicious sites or a man-in-the-middle attack; users need to be tricked into accessing a malicious wireless access point.  The three also observed that "all processes of interest run with administrative privileges.  This implies that a compromise of any application gives an attacker full access to the device."
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/technology/23iphone.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9027560&source=rss_topic17
[Editor's Note (Pescatore): This may not sound like an enterprise worry, but it is pretty easy to connect the iPhone  to corporate email systems.
You know that it will creep into use by your employees regardless of policy that says "Don't." Like all immature software, more vulnerabilities will continue to be found - Apple needs to provide enterprise support features so that vulnerability management and data protection can be extended to the iPhone.]

Title: voice recognition article
Post by: ccp on August 11, 2007, 07:45:29 PM

Voice recognition accuracy is up to 95% and 99% with slight adjustments.  170 plus words a minute!

http://www.livescience.com/technology/070716_speech_recognition.html

Title: Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on August 17, 2007, 01:58:46 PM

http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/08/milbloggers

Army Reports Brass, Not Bloggers, Breach Security
By Noah Shachtman  08.17.07 | 2:00 AM
For years, the military has been warning that soldiers' blogs could pose a security threat by leaking sensitive wartime information. But a series of online audits, conducted by the Army, suggests that official Defense Department websites post material far more potentially harmful than anything found on a individual's blog.

The audits, performed by the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell between January 2006 and January 2007, found at least 1,813 violations of operational security policy on 878 official military websites. In contrast, the 10-man, Manassas, Virginia, unit discovered 28 breaches, at most, on 594 individual blogs during the same period.

The results were obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, after the digital rights group filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act.

"It's clear that official Army websites are the real security problem, not blogs," said EFF staff attorney Marcia Hofmann. "Bloggers, on the whole, have been very careful and conscientious. It's a pretty major disparity."

The findings stand in stark contrast to Army statements about the risks that blogs pose.

"Some soldiers continue to post sensitive information to internet websites and blogs," then-Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker wrote in a 2005 memo. "Such OPSEC (operational security) violations needlessly place lives at risk." That same year, commanders in Iraq ordered (.pdf) troops to register their blogs "with the unit chain of command."

Originally formed in 2002 to police official Defense Department websites (.mil), the Army Web Risk Assessment Cell, or AWRAC, expanded its mission in 2005. A handful of military bloggers, including then-Spec. Colby Buzzell, were seen as providing too many details of firefights in Iraq. Buzzell, for one, was banned from patrols and confined to base after one such incident, and AWRAC began looking for others like him on blogs and .com sites.

But AWRAC hunted for more than overly vivid battle descriptions. It scoured pages for all kinds of information: personal data, like home addresses and Social Security numbers; restricted and classified documents; even pictures of weapons. When these violations were found, AWRAC contacted the webmaster or blog editor, and asked that they change their sites.

"Big Brother is not watching you, but 10 members of a Virginia National Guard unit might be," an official Army news story warned bloggers.

Within the Army, some worried that the blog-monitoring had compromised AWRAC's original goal.

"My suspicion ... is that the AWRAC's attention is being diverted by the new mission of reviewing all the Army blogs," reads an e-mail (.pdf) from the office of the Army Chief Information Officer obtained in EFF's FOIA lawsuit. "In the past they did a good job of detecting and correcting (website policy compliance) violations, but that is currently not the case."

On one blog, AWRAC found photos showing bomb damage to a Humvee; on another, a description of a mountain near a base in Afghanistan; on a third, a video about "morale concerning incoming mortar." AWRAC discovered a secret presentation on the official, unclassified Army Knowledge Online network. It found a map of an Army training center in Texas on a second .mil site. A "colonel's wife's maiden name" was caught on a third.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 14, 2007, 11:07:20 PM

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070913112659.htm

Scientists Use 'Dark Web' To Snag Extremists And Terrorists Online

Science Daily — Terrorists and extremists have set up shop on the Internet, using it to recruit new members, spread propaganda and plan attacks across the world. The size and scope of these dark corners of the Web are vast and disturbing. But in a non-descript building in Tucson, a team of computational scientists are using the cutting-edge technology and novel new approaches to track their moves online, providing an invaluable tool in the global war on terror.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies, Hsinchun Chen and his Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona have created the Dark Web project, which aims to systematically collect and analyze all terrorist-generated content on the Web.
This is no small undertaking. The speed, ubiquity, and potential anonymity of Internet media--email, web sites, and Internet forums--make them ideal communication channels for militant groups and terrorist organizations. As a result, terrorists groups and their followers have created a vast presence on the Internet. A recent report estimates that there are more than 5,000 Web sites created and maintained by known international terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgencies, and many home-grown terrorist cells in Europe. Many of these sites are produced in multiple languages and can be hidden within innocuous-looking Web sites.
Because of its vital role in coordinating terror activities, analyzing Web content has become increasingly important to the intelligence agencies and research communities that monitor these groups, yet the sheer amount of material to be analyzed is so great that it can quickly overwhelm traditional methods of monitoring and surveillance.
This is where the Dark Web project comes in. Using advanced techniques such as Web spidering, link analysis, content analysis, authorship analysis, sentiment analysis and multimedia analysis, Chen and his team can find, catalogue and analyze extremist activities online. According to Chen, scenarios involving vast amounts of information and data points are ideal challenges for computational scientists, who use the power of advanced computers and applications to find patterns and connections where humans can not.
One of the tools developed by Dark Web is a technique called Writeprint, which automatically extracts thousands of multilingual, structural, and semantic features to determine who is creating 'anonymous' content online. Writeprint can look at a posting on an online bulletin board, for example, and compare it with writings found elsewhere on the Internet. By analyzing these certain features, it can determine with more than 95 percent accuracy if the author has produced other content in the past. The system can then alert analysts when the same author produces new content, as well as where on the Internet the content is being copied, linked to or discussed.
Dark Web also uses complex tracking software called Web spiders to search discussion threads and other content to find the corners of the Internet where terrorist activities are taking place. But according to Chen, sometimes the terrorists fight back.
"They can put booby-traps in their Web forums," Chen explains, "and the spider can bring back viruses to our machines." This online cat-and-mouse game means Dark Web must be constantly vigilant against these and other counter-measures deployed by the terrorists.
Despite the risks, Dark Web is producing tangible results in the global war on terror. The project team recently completed a study of online stories and videos designed to help train terrorists in how to build improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Understanding what information is being spread about IED methods and where in the world it is being downloaded can improve countermeasures that are developed to thwart them.
Dark Web is also a major research testbed for understanding the propaganda, ideology, communication, fundraising, command and control, and recruitment and training of terrorist groups. The Dark Web team has used the tools at their disposal to explore the content and impact of materials relating to "virtual imams" on the Internet, as well as terrorist training and weapons manuals.
Dark Web's capabilities are also being used to study the online presence of extremist groups and other social movement organizations. Chen sees applications for this Web mining approach for other academic fields.
"What we are doing is using this to study societal change," Chen says. "Evidence of this change is appearing online, and computational science can help other disciplines better understand this change."

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by National Science Foundation.

Title: Microsoft's new search engine
Post by: ccp on September 26, 2007, 04:20:06 PM

I tried using it for a hobby I used to like and the search does seem superior to previous engines insofar as it was more relevant to my querie.  Apparantly this site was leaked by a MSFT before the initial launch next week:

http://www.live.com/?searchonly=true&mkt=en-US

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 16, 2007, 01:54:49 PM

Technology Wants To Be Free

 

Kevin Kelly, The Technium (11/14/07):  Last February during a break at the most recent TED conference I was speaking to Chris Anderson, current editor in chief at Wired about his planned next book, called FREE. Nearly 10 years ago I had written a chapter in my thin New Rules for the New Economy book that focused on the role of the free and the economics of plentitude. I called that chapter “Follow the Free.” Almost nothing I’ve written has been as misunderstood as this short chapter. I’ve not had a Q+A session since then without this question coming up: “You say we should embrace the free. How can everything be free?”

The truth is that the concept of the free is easily misunderstood. Thus I applaud Chris’ brilliance in devoting a whole book to unraveling the mess. There’s much to be said about it, and even then we’ll just be at the beginning of understanding what free means. I originally thought I was done with the subject 10 years ago, but the continual questions, as well as the continual evolution of the commons, new social dynamics, new technological disruptions, and further research in the decade since have surfaced some new ideas. In particular I’ve concluded the free is deeply entwined into the very foundation of technology. I was sharing some of those emerging half-baked thoughts with Chris in the lobby of TED. Since that conversation I’ve discovered that the tie between technology and the free goes even further than I thought. My current conclusion can be summarized simply: Technology wants to be free…

 

George Gilder once noted there was a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop in miniaturization of technology. Smaller chips ran cooler, which allowed them to run faster, which allowed them to run cooler, which allowed them to be made smaller. And so on. There is a similar self-reinforcing positive feedback loop in the free-ization of technology. Nearly-free goods permit waste and experimentation, which breed new options for that good, which increase its abundance and lower its price, which generate more new options, which permit further novelty. And so on. These loops work on each other, compounding the effects between techniques and goods, and supercharging the  entire ecology of technologies with an unstoppable momentum towards the free and  towards unleashing new capabilities and possibilities.

The odd thing about free technology is that the “free as in beer” part is actually a distraction. As I have argued elsewhere (see my 2002 New York Times Magazine article on the future of music for example) the great attraction of “free” music is only partially that it does not cost anything. The chief importance of free music (and other free things) is held in the second English meaning of the word: free as in “freedom.” Free music is more than piracy because the freedom in the free digital downloads suddenly allowed music lovers to do all kinds of things with this music that they had longed to do but were unable to do before things were “free.” The “free” in digital music meant the audience could unbundled it from albums, sample it, create their own playlists, embed it, share it with love, bend it, graph it in colors, twist it, mash it, carry it, squeeze it, and enliven it with new ideas. The free-ization made it liquid and ‘free” to interact with other media. In the context of this freedom, the questionable legality of its free-ness was secondary. It didn’t really matter because music had been liberated by the free, almost made into a new media.

Technology wants to be free, as in free beer, because as it become free it also increases freedom. The inherent talents, capabilities and benefits of a technology cannot be released until it is almost free. The drive toward the free unleashes the constraints on each species in the technium, allowing it to interact with as many other species of technology as is possible, engendering new hybrids and deeper ecologies of tools, and permitting human users more choices and freedoms of use. As a technology grows in abundance and cheapness, it is more likely to find its appropriate niche which it can sustain itself and support other technologies in commodity mode. As technology heads toward the free it unleashes the only lasting thing it can: options and possibilities.

Read on:
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/11/technology_want.php

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 22, 2008, 04:41:34 PM

Unleashing the 'Exaflood'
By BRET SWANSON and GEORGE GILDER
February 22, 2008; Page A15

Two decades ago, Sun Microsystems prophesied: "The network is the computer." Today, BitTorrent video and 3D graphics flood the Internet, Apple iPhones tap the Net's computing power, and PC-king Microsoft pursues Net-centric Yahoo. Sun's mantra has become reality.

But as the Internet booms and moves to the center of the global economic sphere, it draws proportional attention from politicians and regulators. In Congress and at the FCC, legislators and lawyers think they can manage overflowing Net traffic and commerce better than the network companies themselves. Next week, the FCC is meeting en banc at Harvard Law School to consider two petitions that seek to ban network "traffic management." The meeting's host, Rep. Ed Markey, has renewed his pursuit of a far-reaching Internet regulatory regime known as "net neutrality."

These regulatory efforts overlook a fundamental shift: An upsurge of technological change and a rising tide of new forms of data are deeply transforming the Internet's capabilities and uses.

The first phase of the Net was the original Arpanet research project that connected a few, and then a few thousand, scientists. The second phase brought the Internet to the masses, with the advent of the World Wide Web, the graphical browser and email in the mid-1990s. Internet traffic boomed 100-fold between 1994 and 1996. In the third phase of Net evolution, network architecture and commercial business plans reflect the dominance of rich video and interactive media traffic.

The third wave is now swelling into an exaflood, or torrent, of Internet and Internet Protocol (IP) traffic. There's YouTube, IPTV, high-definition images and "cloud computing" -- in which individuals and businesses use the centralized computing resources of Google and IBM data centers, instead of the local computing resources of their own PCs or office systems. Not to mention the ubiquitous mobile camera.

To give you an idea of the scope, an exabyte (a one-quintillion byte unit of information or computer storage) is 50,000 times larger than a digitized Library of Congress. By the end of 2006, annual U.S. Internet traffic was around 10 exabytes.

As new fiber-optic wireline and 3G wireless networks from AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cox and Cogent bring us real broadband for the first time, the nature and volume of Net traffic is changing dramatically. By mid-2007, Microsoft Video Calling was generating as many bytes as the entire Internet in 1997.

Cisco's newest video-conferencing system requires 15 megabits per second in each direction. A one-hour conference call could thus produce 13.5 gigabytes, which is more than a high-definition movie. Just 75 of these Cisco conference calls would equal the entire Internet traffic of the year 1990.

Netflix, which is gradually moving from the post office to the Net, last year shipped 1.8 million DVDs every day. If converted to high definition, Netflix would have mailed 5.8 exabytes of motion pictures, or almost half the size of the entire U.S. Internet of 2007.

Building on rapid advances in Nvidia and ATI graphics processors, one 3D multiplayer game (such as Second Life or World of Warcraft) with one million users could generate more than an exabyte per year of network traffic, or almost a tenth of last year's U.S. Internet volume.

In a new Discovery Institute report, we estimate that, by 2015, U.S. IP traffic will reach an annual total of 1,000 exabytes, or one million million billion bytes. The U.S. Internet will thus be 50 times larger by 2015, equal to 50 million Libraries of Congress. This will require some $100 billion in new Internet infrastructure in the U.S. over the next five years.

We need a dramatic expansion in raw capacity, or bandwidth, and also fine-grained traffic management capabilities to ensure robust service for increasingly demanding consumers. But none of this can happen if we regulate complex network traffic engineering and experimental business plans.

All networks use some form of traffic management, whether crude or complex. As our colleague Ken Ferree notes, every industry, from grocery store "express lines" to "singles" ski-lift lines, attempts to shape and manage demand. Today's communications networks buffer, label, parse, schedule, prioritize, route, switch, modify, replicate, police and meter the bits flowing through their links and nodes. New pricing schemes that charge per byte consumed might also help to manage supply and demand on the Internet.

The petitions under consideration at the FCC and in the Markey net neutrality bill would set an entirely new course for U.S. broadband policy, marking every network bit and byte for inspection, regulation and possible litigation. Every price, partnership, advertisement and experimental business plan on the Net would have to look to Washington for permission. Many would be banned. Wall Street will not deploy the needed $100 billion in risk capital if Mr. Markey, digital traffic cop, insists on policing every intersection of the Internet.

Capacious, big-bandwidth networks will transcend many of today's specific complaints. As raw capacity expands, more and more applications and users can peacefully coexist. But inevitably, sophisticated network users with innovative applications will find creative ways to push the boundaries of capacity on certain network links, and some bits will be shuffled and queued.

The network is now a global computer made up of hardware, software and human minds. But this new, fast-changing and highly organic computer is no more easily regulated than were the circuits, storage, memory and protocols of a mainframe or PC. Leaving it to Washington agencies and committees to engineer the exaflood would be an act of unimaginable folly.

Mr. Swanson is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Global Innovation at The Progress & Freedom Foundation. Mr. Gilder is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.

See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.

Title: Internet is blazingly slow compared to new technology
Post by: ccp on April 06, 2008, 09:51:43 AM

I wonder what Gilder says.  I wonder if my hugely disastrous holding level three (which is going the way of another one of "gg's" great picks globalstar) has a place with this:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3689881.ece

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: DougMacG on April 06, 2008, 11:33:59 AM

Nice read, CCP on superfast internet, and good questions.  I don't know about specific companies, but Gilder was onto something all along regarding exploding data traffic and network capacities.  The phonyness was to take his big picture thinking and try to frame it as an investment newsletter just because those are the only newsletters that sell.  Those companies needed to make continuing huge investments without corresponding cash flows and profits.  It's true that the net will increase its data flow exponentially, but I doubt it's true that we will be willing to pay exponentially more for that capability.

Because I have been nearly 99% in real estate and because I was working in fiber optics and followed developments in real time, I intentionally accepted the high risk - high potential rewards offered by these companies with all my available funds prior to the tech stock crash, and lost it all. It only seemed like major losses because of the paper successes before crashing.  Oh well. I'm still trying to sort out the lessons.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on April 24, 2008, 10:39:18 AM

Just an FYI:

http://news.zdnet.com/2424-1009_22-198647.html (http://news.zdnet.com/2424-1009_22-198647.html)

By Vivian Yeo, ZDNet Asia, News.com
Posted on ZDNet News: Apr 23, 2008 10:50:41 AM

Web threats have risen significantly in the first quarter of 2008, with one Web page being infected every five seconds, according to a new report from security vendor Sophos.

Released Wednesday, Sophos said in its Security Threat Report that an average of over 15,000 Web pages were compromised daily between January and March.

In contrast, the daily average for the entire 2007 was about 6,000, or one infected Web page every 14 seconds.

About 79 percent of compromised Web pages tracked this year belong to legitimate Web sites, Sophos reported. The company noted that the Web sites of Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and even security vendors, have fallen prey to malware attacks.

In addition, there has been a rise in spam-related Web pages--a daily average of 23,300 such pages were tracked during the first three months of 2008. This is equivalent to one spam Web page being discovered every three seconds.

Threats circulated via e-mail, on the other hand, appeared to have cooled off during the first quarter of this year.

According to Sophos, only one in 2,500 e-mail messages contained malware--40 percent fewer than 2007, where one in 909 e-mail messages were infected.

Slightly over 92 percent of all e-mail monitored by Sophos between January and March this year were spam messages. The security vendor analyzes millions of new messages on a daily basis.

The United States remains the top contributor of spam, followed by Russia, Turkey, China including Hong Kong, and Brazil.

Title: Tribes of the internet
Post by: rachelg on November 11, 2008, 05:05:19 PM

I   have been reading  Nicholas Carr's book The Big Switch and  I think it has really insightful commentary on our society
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/12/tribes_of_the_i_1.php


It's only natural to think that a revolutionary communications technology like the internet will help break down barriers between people and bring the world closer together. But that's not the only scenario, or even the most likely one. The internet turns everything, from knowledge-gathering to community-building, into a series of tiny transactions - clicks - that are simple in isolation yet extraordinarily complicated in the aggregate. Research shows that very small biases, when magnified through thousands or millions or billions of choices, can turn into profound schisms. There's reason to believe, or at least to fear, that this effect, inherent in large networks, may end up turning the internet into a polarizing force rather than a unifying one.

In a 1971 article titled "Dynamic Models of Segregation," Thomas Schelling, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for economics, offered a fascinating reappraisal of the segregation of communities along racial lines, illustrating the way biases are magnified through a kind of network effect. If asked what lies behind racial segregation, most of us would likely point to prejudice and discrimination. But Schelling, through a simple experiment, showed that extreme segregation may have a much more innocent cause. Mark Buchanan summarized Schelling's findings in his 2002 book Nexus:

    Schelling began by imagining a society in which most people truly wish to live in balanced and racially integrated communities, with just one minor stipulation: most people would prefer not to end up living in a neighborhood in which they would be in the extreme minority. A white man might have black friends and colleagues and might be happy to live in a predominantly black neighborhood. Just the same, he might prefer not to be one of the only white people living there. This attitude is hardly racist and may indeed be one that many people - black, white, Hispanic, Chinese, or what have you - share. People naturally enjoy living among others with similar tastes, backgrounds, and values.

    Nevertheless, innocent individual preferences of this sort can have startling effects, as Schelling discovered by drawing a grid of squares on a piece of paper and playing an illuminating game. On his grid, he first placed at random an equal number of black and white pieces, to depict an integrated society of two races mingling uniformly. He then supposed that every piece would prefer not to live in a minority of less than, say, 30 percent. So, taking one piece at a time, Schelling checked to see if less than 30 percent of its neighbors were of the same color, and if this was the case, he let that piece migrate to the nearest open square. He then repeated this procedure over and over until finally no piece lived in a local minority of less than 30 percent. To his surprise, Schelling discovered that at this point the black and white pieces not only had become less uniformly mixed but also had come to live in entirely distinct enclaves. In other words, the slight preference of the individual to avoid an extreme minority has the paradoxical but inexorable effect of obliterating mixed communities altogether.

Buchanan sums up the lesson of Schelling's experiment: "Social realities are fashioned not only by the desires of people but also by the action of blind and more or less mechanical forces - in this case forces that can amplify slight and seemingly harmless personal preferences into dramatic and troubling consequences." (You can download a piece of Windows-only software to perform the Schelling experiment yourself.) In the real world, with its mortgages and schools and jobs and moving vans, the "mechanical forces" of segregation move fairly slowly; there are brakes on the speed with which we pull up stakes and change where we live. In internet communities, there are no such constraints. Making a community-defining decision is as simple as clicking on a link - adding a feed to your blog reader, say, or a friend to your social network. Given the presence of a slight bias to be connected to people similar to ourselves, the segregation effect would thus tend to happen much faster - and with even more extreme consequences - on the internet.

This is all theoretical, of course, but it's easy to see how it follows logically from Schelling's findings. And there is other evidence that the Internet may end up being a polarizing force. In a recent academic paper, called "Global Village or Cyber-Balkans? Modeling and Measuring the Integration of Electronic Communities," Eric Brynjolfsson, of MIT, and Marshall Van Alstyne, of Boston University, describe the results of a model that measured how individuals' online choices influence community affiliation. "Although the conventional wisdom has stressed the integrating effects of [internet] technology," they write, in introducing their study, "we examine critically the claim that a global village is the inexorable result of increased connectivity and develop a suite of formal measures to address this question."

They note that, because there are limits to how much information we can process and how many people we can communicate with (we have "bounded rationality," to use the academic jargon), we naturally have to use filters to screen out ideas and contacts. On the internet, these filters are becoming ever more sophisticated, which means we can focus our attention - and our communities - ever more precisely. "Our analysis," Brynjolfsson and Van Alstyne write, "suggests that automatic search tools and filters that route communications among people based on their views, reputations, past statements or personal characteristics are not necessarily benign in their effects." Diversity in the physical world "can give way to virtual homogeneity as specialized communities coalesce across geographic boundaries."

They stress that "balkanization" is not the only possible result of filtering. "On the other hand," they write, "preferences for broader knowledge, or even randomized information, can also be indulged. In the presence of [information technology], a taste for diverse interaction leads to greater integration – underscoring how the technology serves mainly to amplify individual preferences. IT does not predetermine one outcome." Nevertheless, they write that their model indicates, in an echo of Schelling's findings, that "other factors being equal, all that is required to reduce integration in most cases is that preferred interactions are more focused than existing interactions." If, in other words, we have even a small inclination to prefer like-minded views and people, we will tend toward creating balkanized online communities.

Such fragmentation of association tends to lead to an ever-greater polarization of thinking, which in turn can erode civic cohesiveness, as the authors explain:

    With the customized access and search capabilities of IT, individuals can focus their attention on career interests, music and entertainment that already match their defined profiles, and they can arrange to read only news and analysis that align with their preferences. Individuals empowered to screen out material that does not conform to their existing preferences may form virtual cliques, insulate themselves from opposing points of view, and reinforce their biases. Authors of collaborative filtering technology have long recognized its ability to both foster tribalism as well as a global village.

    Indulging these preferences can have the perverse effect of intensifying and hardening pre-existing biases. Thus people who oppose free trade are likely, after talking to one another, to oppose it more fiercely; people who fear gun control appear, after discussion, more likely to take action; and juries that want to send a message seem, after deliberation, to set higher damage awards. The reasons include information cascades and oversampled arguments. In one, an accumulating, and unchallenged, body of evidence leads members to adopt group views in lieu of their own. In the other, members of a limited argument pool are unwilling or unable to construct persuasive counterarguments that would lead to more balanced views. The effect is not merely a tendency for members to conform to the group average but a radicalization in which this average moves toward extremes.

    Increasing the number of information sources available may worsen this effect, as may increasing the attention paid to these information sources ... Internet users can seek out interactions with like-minded individuals who have similar values and thus become less likely to trust important decisions to people whose values differ from their own. This voluntary balkanization and the loss of shared experiences and values may be harmful to the structure of democratic societies as well as decentralized organizations.

It's too early in the history of the internet to know whether this disturbing scenario will come to pass, a point that the authors emphasize. But we need only look at, say, the tendency toward extremism - and distrust of those holding opposing views - among the most popular political bloggers to get a sense of how balkanization and polarization can emerge in online communities. Brynjolfsson and Van Alstyne end on this note: "We can, and should, explicitly consider what we value as we shape the nature of our networks and infrastructure - with no illusions that a greater sense of community will inexorably result." Personally, I'm even more fatalistic. I'm not sure we'll be able to influence the progression of internet communities by tinkering with "our networks and infrastructure." What will happen will happen. It's written in our clicks.

Posted by nick at December 23, 2005 09:58 AM

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 11, 2008, 10:13:21 PM

Rachel:

That was a fascinating read.  Thank you.

Marc

Title: Why 'Anonymous' Data Sometimes Isn't
Post by: rachelg on November 18, 2008, 06:22:57 PM

Marc-- You are welcome!

I found some of this research disturbing because  DOB, Gender and Location are regularly  requested when you register for forums

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2007/12/securitymatters_1213

Last year, Netflix published 10 million movie rankings by 500,000 customers, as part of a challenge for people to come up with better recommendation systems than the one the company was using. The data was anonymized by removing personal details and replacing names with random numbers, to protect the privacy of the recommenders.

Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, de-anonymized some of the Netflix data by comparing rankings and timestamps with public information in the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb.

Their research (.pdf) illustrates some inherent security problems with anonymous data, but first it's important to explain what they did and did not do.

They did not reverse the anonymity of the entire Netflix dataset. What they did was reverse the anonymity of the Netflix dataset for those sampled users who also entered some movie rankings, under their own names, in the IMDb. (While IMDb's records are public, crawling the site to get them is against the IMDb's terms of service, so the researchers used a representative few to prove their algorithm.)

The point of the research was to demonstrate how little information is required to de-anonymize information in the Netflix dataset.

On one hand, isn't that sort of obvious? The risks of anonymous databases have been written about before, such as in this 2001 paper published in an IEEE journal (.pdf). The researchers working with the anonymous Netflix data didn't painstakingly figure out people's identities -- as others did with the AOL search database last year -- they just compared it with an already identified subset of similar data: a standard data-mining technique.

But as opportunities for this kind of analysis pop up more frequently, lots of anonymous data could end up at risk.

Someone with access to an anonymous dataset of telephone records, for example, might partially de-anonymize it by correlating it with a catalog merchants' telephone order database. Or Amazon's online book reviews could be the key to partially de-anonymizing a public database of credit card purchases, or a larger database of anonymous book reviews.

Google, with its database of users' internet searches, could easily de-anonymize a public database of internet purchases, or zero in on searches of medical terms to de-anonymize a public health database. Merchants who maintain detailed customer and purchase information could use their data to partially de-anonymize any large search engine's data, if it were released in an anonymized form. A data broker holding databases of several companies might be able to de-anonymize most of the records in those databases.

What the University of Texas researchers demonstrate is that this process isn't hard, and doesn't require a lot of data. It turns out that if you eliminate the top 100 movies everyone watches, our movie-watching habits are all pretty individual. This would certainly hold true for our book reading habits, our internet shopping habits, our telephone habits and our web searching habits.

The obvious countermeasures for this are, sadly, inadequate. Netflix could have randomized its dataset by removing a subset of the data, changing the timestamps or adding deliberate errors into the unique ID numbers it used to replace the names. It turns out, though, that this only makes the problem slightly harder. Narayanan's and Shmatikov's de-anonymization algorithm is surprisingly robust, and works with partial data, data that has been perturbed, even data with errors in it.

With only eight movie ratings (of which two may be completely wrong), and dates that may be up to two weeks in error, they can uniquely identify 99 percent of the records in the dataset. After that, all they need is a little bit of identifiable data: from the IMDb, from your blog, from anywhere. The moral is that it takes only a small named database for someone to pry the anonymity off a much larger anonymous database.

Other research reaches the same conclusion. Using public anonymous data from the 1990 census, Latanya Sweeney found that 87 percent of the population in the United States, 216 million of 248 million, could likely be uniquely identified by their five-digit ZIP code, combined with their gender and date of birth. About half of the U.S. population is likely identifiable by gender, date of birth and the city, town or municipality in which the person resides. Expanding the geographic scope to an entire county reduces that to a still-significant 18 percent. "In general," the researchers wrote, "few characteristics are needed to uniquely identify a person."

Stanford University researchers (.pdf) reported similar results using 2000 census data. It turns out that date of birth, which (unlike birthday month and day alone) sorts people into thousands of different buckets, is incredibly valuable in disambiguating people.

This has profound implications for releasing anonymous data. On one hand, anonymous data is an enormous boon for researchers -- AOL did a good thing when it released its anonymous dataset for research purposes, and it's sad that the CTO resigned and an entire research team was fired after the public outcry. Large anonymous databases of medical data are enormously valuable to society: for large-scale pharmacology studies, long-term follow-up studies and so on. Even anonymous telephone data makes for fascinating research.

On the other hand, in the age of wholesale surveillance, where everyone collects data on us all the time, anonymization is very fragile and riskier than it initially seems.

Like everything else in security, anonymity systems shouldn't be fielded before being subjected to adversarial attacks. We all know that it's folly to implement a cryptographic system before it's rigorously attacked; why should we expect anonymity systems to be any different? And, like everything else in security, anonymity is a trade-off. There are benefits, and there are corresponding risks.

Narayanan and Shmatikov are currently working on developing algorithms and techniques that enable the secure release of anonymous datasets like Netflix's. That's a research result we can all benefit from.

Title: The Future of Ephemeral Conversation
Post by: rachelg on November 26, 2008, 05:45:00 PM

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/11/the_future_of_e.html
The Future of Ephemeral Conversation

When he becomes president, Barack Obama will have to give up his BlackBerry. Aides are concerned that his unofficial conversations would become part of the presidential record, subject to subpoena and eventually made public as part of the country's historical record.

This reality of the information age might be particularly stark for the president, but it's no less true for all of us. Conversation used to be ephemeral. Whether face-to-face or by phone, we could be reasonably sure that what we said disappeared as soon as we said it. Organized crime bosses worried about phone taps and room bugs, but that was the exception. Privacy was just assumed.

This has changed. We chat in e-mail, over SMS and IM, and on social networking websites like Facebook, MySpace, and LiveJournal. We blog and we Twitter. These conversations -- with friends, lovers, colleagues, members of our cabinet -- are not ephemeral; they leave their own electronic trails.

We know this intellectually, but we haven't truly internalized it. We type on, engrossed in conversation, forgetting we're being recorded and those recordings might come back to haunt us later.

Oliver North learned this, way back in 1987, when messages he thought he had deleted were saved by the White House PROFS system, and then subpoenaed in the Iran-Contra affair. Bill Gates learned this in 1998 when his conversational e-mails were provided to opposing counsel as part of the antitrust litigation discovery process. Mark Foley learned this in 2006 when his instant messages were saved and made public by the underage men he talked to. Paris Hilton learned this in 2005 when her cell phone account was hacked, and Sarah Palin learned it earlier this year when her Yahoo e-mail account was hacked. Someone in George W. Bush's administration learned this, and millions of e-mails went mysteriously and conveniently missing.

Ephemeral conversation is dying.

Cardinal Richelieu famously said, :If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." When all our ephemeral conversations can be saved for later examination, different rules have to apply. Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a Blackberry, are not official pronouncements. Discussions in a meeting, whether held in a boardroom or a chat room, are not the same as answers at a press conference. And privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our basic humanity.

We can't turn back technology; electronic communications are here to stay and even our voice conversations are threatened. But as technology makes our conversations less ephemeral, we need laws to step in and safeguard ephemeral conversation. We need a comprehensive data privacy law, protecting our data and communications regardless of where it is stored or how it is processed. We need laws forcing companies to keep it private and delete it as soon as it is no longer needed. Laws requiring ISPs to store e-mails and other personal communications are exactly what we don't need.

Rules pertaining to government need to be different, because of the power differential. Subjecting the president's communications to eventual public review increases liberty because it reduces the government's power with respect to the people. Subjecting our communications to government review decreases liberty because it reduces our power with respect to the government. The president, as well as other members of government, need some ability to converse ephemerally -- just as they're allowed to have unrecorded meetings and phone calls -- but more of their actions need to be subject to public scrutiny.

But laws can only go so far. Law or no law, when something is made public it's too late. And many of us like having complete records of all our e-mail at our fingertips; it's like our offline brains.

In the end, this is cultural.

The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll. We're now witnessing one aspect of that generation gap: the younger generation chats digitally, and the older generation treats those chats as written correspondence. Until our CEOs blog, our Congressmen Twitter, and our world leaders send each other LOLcats – until we have a Presidential election where both candidates have a complete history on social networking sites from before they were teenagers– we aren't fully an information age society.

When everyone leaves a public digital trail of their personal thoughts since birth, no one will think twice about it being there. Obama might be on the younger side of the generation gap, but the rules he's operating under were written by the older side. It will take another generation before society's tolerance for digital ephemera changes.

This essay previously appeared on The Wall Street Journal website (not the print newspaper), and is an update of something I wrote previously

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: ccp on December 02, 2008, 07:34:13 AM

I wonder why if he is so sure it is the press and he knows who it is he doesn't peess charges.  I suspect he doesn't know for sure or he doesn't have proof like he claims.  I have known for years that the entertainment industry puts tracking devices on vehicles.  I have been tracked and it is obvious they have a GPS devise or some other device somewhere.  Try finding it.  For all I know they simply bribe someone at the dealership to put it in somewhere while my car is getting repairs.

If cowell had proof of who it was he would be pressing charges for what is jail time offense. 


*** Simon Cowell's lawyers warn press about harassmentBen Dowell
guardian.co.uk, Monday December 1 2008 14.14 GMT
Article history
 
Simon Cowell: photographers and journalists have been told not to pursue the reality show judge. Photograph: Stewart Cook/Rex Features

Lawyers acting for The X Factor judge Simon Cowell have warned UK newspapers not to harass their client after a tracking device was allegedly found attached to his Rolls Royce last week.

Law firm Carter-Ruck sent the warning letter to national newspapers on Friday after consulting with the presenter's publicist, Max Clifford, who told MediaGuardian.co.uk that "enough is enough".

According to Clifford, the letter pointed out that the use of a tracking device is illegal and could lead to prosecution.

He added that the identity of the journalist who allegedly attached the device is known to him and the individual concerned has been approached.

"We now who he is and we have marked his card and told him to never do anything like that again," Clifford said.

"We have always played the game and we are not precious but this is way beyond anything acceptable. So Carter-Ruck has sent a letter out to everybody warning them about this and making clear that it is unacceptable," he added.

"Simon has been putting up with this for seven years, with people approaching him at all hours and we know that we have got to have working relationships with the papers but within acceptable boundaries."

The letter also asked photographers and journalists not to pursue Cowell, place him under surveillance or photograph him in places where he has a reasonable expectation of privacy, including leaving or entering his home, Clifford said.

Asked if his client was upset about the alleged intrusion, Clifford added: "Simon is not getting stressed and not making a big drama about it but you know the game and he knows the game."***

Title: Re: Twitter
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on March 06, 2009, 02:18:26 AM

Anyone use twitter?

********************************************************************************************************************
What is twitter?
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can send and receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS (receive only), or through applications such as Tweetie, Twitterrific, and Feedalizr. The service is free to use over the web, but using SMS may incur phone services provider fees.
********************************************************************************************************************

Twitter is huge, my GF has been using this for a while initially i thought it was .. well. Stupid but now Im a user. LOL. 

Many people use it even celebrities, news stations and the president.

A variety people use it to connect and share information.



This is a guest post by Straight to the Bar's Scott Bird. Strength, Nutrition and Conditioning on Twitter.

Just joined twitter and wondering what to do, who to follow? Here are just a few strength athletes, nutritionists and serious fitness enthusiasts to add to your list. To follow any of them, simply open the link in a new tab and click the 'follow' button near the top of the page. If you'd like to add someone that we've missed (whether it's you, or just someone you enjoy reading), leave a note in the comments. The more the merrier. NB : if you're looking for somewhere to start, (and to find out more about the people on this list), why not tune in to the weekly twitterchats on Straight to the Bar. Each Wednesday, a top strength athlete or coach will be available online for an hour of serious questioning. Great chance to chat about strength training.
Grip training

    * Jedd 'Napalm' Johnson, Napalm's Corner, twitter.com/JeddJohnson (http://twitter.com/JeddJohnson)
    * Bill Long, Body by Long, twitter.com/bodybylong (http://twitter.com/bodybylong)
    * Steve McGranahan, World's Strongest Redneck, twitter.com/wsredneck (http://twitter.com/wsredneck)
    * Jim 'Smitty' Smith, Diesel Crew, twitter.com/JimSmithCSCS (http://twitter.com/JimSmithCSCS)

Strongman

    * Mike 'The Machine' Bruce, The Machine, twitter.com/MikeMachine (http://twitter.com/MikeMachine)
    * Joe Hashey, Synergy Athletics, twitter.com/jhashey (http://twitter.com/jhashey)
    * Elliott Hulse, Hulse Strength, twitter.com/ElliottHulse (http://twitter.com/ElliottHulse)
    * Ryan Pitts, Strongergrip, twitter.com/strongergrip (http://twitter.com/strongergrip)
    * Zach Even-Esh, Underground Strength Show, twitter.com/ZEvenEsh (http://twitter.com/ZEvenEsh)

Powerlifting

    * Critical Bench, Critical Bench, twitter.com/criticalbench (http://twitter.com/criticalbench)
    * Ashley Roberts, Hardcore Strength Coach, twitter.com/ashleyroberts (http://twitter.com/ashleyroberts)
    * Dave Tate, EliteFTS, twitter.com/UnderTheBar (http://twitter.com/UnderTheBar)

Conditioning

    * Matt Furey, Matt Furey Uncensored, twitter.com/MatthewFurey (http://twitter.com/MatthewFurey)
    * Fight Geek, Fight Geek, twitter.com/thefightgeek (http://twitter.com/thefightgeek)
    * Josh Henkin, Sandbag Fitness Systems, twitter.com/JoshHenkin (http://twitter.com/JoshHenkin)
    * Adam Steer, Better is Better, twitter.com/coachsteer (http://twitter.com/coachsteer)
    * Pamela MacElree, Pamela MacElree, twitter.com/PamelaMacElree (http://twitter.com/PamelaMacElree)

Diet and Nutrition

    * Craig Ballantyne, Turbulence Training, twitter.com/craigballantyne (http://twitter.com/craigballantyne)
    * Rocco Castellano, Ask Rocco, twitter.com/askrocco (http://twitter.com/askrocco)
    * Rob Cooper, Former Fat Guy, twitter.com/formerfatguy (http://twitter.com/formerfatguy)
    * Girlwith Noname, Girlwith Noname, twitter.com/girlwithnoname (http://witter.com/girlwithnoname)
    * Mike Rousell, Naked Nutrition Network, twitter.com/mikeroussell (http://twitter.com/mikeroussell)
    * Melanie Thomassian, Dietriffic, twitter.com/dietriffic (http://twitter.com/dietriffic)

Sports

    * Kraig Becker, The Adventure Blog, twitter.com/kungfujedi (http://twitter.com/kungfujedi)
    * Steve Blethyn, Steve Blethyn, twitter.com/sblethyn (http://twitter.com/sblethyn)
    * Ryan Magin, Ryan Magin, twitter.com/RyanMagin (http://twitter.com/RyanMagin)

Bodybuilding

    * Steve Shaw, Muscle and Brawn, twitter.com/MuscleandBrawn (http://twitter.com/MuscleandBrawn)
    * Steve, Project Swole, twitter.com/projectswole (http://twitter.com/projectswole)

General Fitness

    * Renee, Skwigg.com, twitter.com/skwigg (http://twitter.com/skwigg)
    * Denis Kanygin, Workout IQ, twitter.com/workoutiq (http://twitter.com/workoutiq)
    * Vic Magary, Gym Junkies, twitter.com/GymJunkies (http://twitter.com/GymJunkies)
    * Mike Stehle, New Jersey CrossFit, twitter.com/njkettlebells (http://twitter.com/njkettlebells)
    * Kelly Swindell, Fitness Chick, twitter.com/fitnesschick (http://twitter.com/fitnesschick)
    * Charlie Wall, Purple Fitness, twitter.com/purplefitness (http://twitter.com/purplefitness)

Scott Bird is the editor of strength-training site Straight to the Bar, and all-around fitness enthusiast. When he's not in the kitchen stuffing his face, he can generally be found engaging in cruel and unusual punishment in the backyard.




http://www.thefightgeek.org/2009/03/strength-nutrition-conditioning-on-twitter.html

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on March 06, 2009, 02:25:57 AM

Another use of Twitter and iPhone.  This is actually pretty cool, when the power went out on the island of Oahu many people still had use of their iPhone and so we twittered. Checkit out - http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23hipower (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23hipower)

Anyway, we have added extra batteries to our emergency preparedness kit for the iPhone.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10186631-2.html (http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10186631-2.html)

Twitter and iPhone help find lost skier
by Caroline McCarthy

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In a bittersweet conclusion, a missing skier in the Swiss Alps was rescued with the help of Twitter and an iPhone, but it appears that his fellow skiing companion was found deceased after the two were separated from the rest of their group.

Tracking Twitter search for the term "verbier" (the region of the Alps where the two went missing) has brought much of the news together.

Blogger Robin Blandford of ByteSurgery.com rounded up some of the messages: one member of the ski trip Twittered that two members of the group were missing, and another posted a tweet requesting the cell phone numbers of the missing skiers to attempt to contact them. From what it looks like, the GPS coordinates of their iPhones were used to pinpoint their location, but when one of them was found alive, he had become separated from his companion.

The Swiss news source Le Nouvelliste reported on Tuesday that, unfortunately, the second skier had been found deceased.

Blandford updated his blog post to say that the two skiers worked for a start-up called Dolphin Music, and that a number of other tech entrepreneurs were in the same British ski group.

UPDATE at 8:53 a.m. PST: We have more information, and in English now, thanks to the U.K.-based Evening Standard. The two missing skiers were actually on snowboards, and have been identified as Jason Tavaria and Rob Williams, the 29-year-old co-founders of Dolphin Music.

Tavaria was found alive after he was located with GPS on his iPhone, but Williams was found dead, and according to the Evening Standard, had fallen about 66 feet and landed on rocks.

Blizzard conditions at Verbier had made the search and rescue process difficult.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on March 06, 2009, 02:29:02 AM

Yet another use for Twitter:

 Twitterfall: A New Twitter Tool for Journalists
Posted by Paul Bradshaw at 12:21 PM on Mar. 2, 2009
A new Twitter interface application, Twitterfall, has been around for a month now. If you're a journalist, this is a must-see -- for about 10 minutes. Then it becomes a must-use.

Yes, this is yet another Twitter interface. But: This is Twitter on crack ... on roller skates ... in a jumpsuit.

Here's what Twitterfall does:

    * Scanning. You can choose to watch everyone's tweets go by, or log in to watch only the tweets of those you follow. Thanks to Comet technology, Twitterfall has an especially fast search service. You can alter the speed from 0.3 tweets per second to a mind-scrambling 10 tweets per second.

    * Keyword tracking. You can see the most popular terms of the moment, and just follow tweets containing those keywords (including hashtags). Or you can enter your own search term (as on the Web-based Twitter service Monitter) to track tweets mentioning it. You can combine keywords, too.

    * Geo-filtering. You can enter a location to narrow down your display to tweets from that location that also mention keywords you choose (again as with Monitter). The words Mumbai and Chengdu come to mind.

    * Basic usability. Unlike Monitter, you can use Twitterfall to post tweets yourself, reply to tweets and mark tweets as favorites. Just hovering over a tweet pauses the whole thing. You can also follow a user with one click -- a feature some popular clients like Tweetdeck lack. You can filter by language and choose to exclude retweets. You can save favorite searches. And you can customize the appearance of the interface, including the font size.

This is quite simply the best-designed Twitter interface I've ever seen -- and I have seen a lot of them.

If they ever create a mobile version of it (and it does sort of work on an iPod Touch/iPhone) I'll probably explode.

The fact that it was made by two students in York, U.K. also pleases me no end. You've just saved me 30 minutes every week convincing newspaper editors where the value lies in using Twitter, so thank you.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2009, 06:06:29 AM

 :? :? :?

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Chad on March 06, 2009, 07:43:26 AM

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2009, 06:06:29 AM

:? :? :?

See reply #41 above for more info on Twiitter, Guro Crafty.

I have question about Twitter for anyone who uses it. Can you have the tweets forwarded to your phone as txt msgs? There are a few I'd like to follow but I don't sit at a computer all day. Since I have unltd msg, I thought it would be a good way to use twitter.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2009, 08:46:16 AM

Fcuk!!!  Another gaddammed technology to vampire life!!!  :x :x :x :-P :lol:

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on March 06, 2009, 09:22:39 AM

Quote from: Chad on March 06, 2009, 07:43:26 AM

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2009, 06:06:29 AM

:? :? :?

See reply #41 above for more info on Twiitter, Guro Crafty.

I have question about Twitter for anyone who uses it. Can you have the tweets forwarded to your phone as txt msgs? There are a few I'd like to follow but I don't sit at a computer all day. Since I have unltd msg, I thought it would be a good way to use twitter.

Yes, If you are a member you can set it up send you txt messages.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on March 06, 2009, 09:24:15 AM

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on March 06, 2009, 08:46:16 AM

Fcuk!!!  Another gaddammed technology to vampire life!!!  :x :x :x :-P :lol:

True.  The cool thing about it that during the power outage earlier this year, people were twittering what was going on in their area as well as what time power was restored to each part of the island.

Title: Twitter Explained
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on March 06, 2009, 10:00:11 PM

This ought to clear things up:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=219519&title=twitter-frenzy (http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=219519&title=twitter-frenzy)

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 07, 2009, 03:43:12 AM

I thought so  :roll: :lol:

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 09, 2009, 11:10:56 AM

One of my favorite strips, on twitter:

http://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2009/02/15/

Title: How the Kindle will change the world
Post by: rachelg on March 28, 2009, 07:35:45 AM

The big idea
Book End
How the Kindle will change the world.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Saturday, March 21, 2009, at 9:27

I'm doing my best not to become a Kindle bore. When I catch myself evangelizing to someone who couldn't care less about the marvels of the 2.0 version of Amazon's reading machine—I can take a whole library on vacation! Adjust the type size! Peruse the morning paper without getting out of bed!—I pause and remember my boyhood friend Scott H., who loved showing off the capabilities of his state of-the-art stereo but had only four records because he wasn't really that into music.

So apologies in advance if I'm irksomely enthusiastic about my cool new literature delivery system. Like the early PCs, the Kindle 2 is a primitive tool. Like the Rocket e-book of 1999 (524 titles available!), it will surely draw chuckles a decade hence for its black-and-white display, its lack of built-in lighting, and the robotic intonation of the text-to-voice feature. But however the technology and marketplace evolve, Jeff Bezos has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution. The Kindle 2 signals that after a happy, 550-year union, reading and printing are getting separated. It tells us that printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.

Though the PC and the Internet taught us all to read on screens, they have not actually improved the experience of reading. I remember Bill Gates, in Slate's Microsoft years, mentioning in an interview that he read our webzine printed out—a tribute that underscored an inherent flaw. For all their advantages in creating and distributing texts, screens have compromised, rather than enhanced, the feeling of being transported into a writer's imaginative universe. You can't curl up with a laptop. Until now, Gutenberg's invention had yet to be surpassed as the best available technology for reading at length or for pleasure.

The Kindle is not better than a printed book in all situations. You wouldn't want to read an art book, or a picture book to your children on one, or take one into the tub (please). But for the past few weeks, I've done most of my recreational reading on the Kindle—David Grann's adventure yarn The Lost City of Z, Marilynne Robinson's novel Home, Slate, The New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the New York Times—and can honestly say I prefer it to inked paper. It provides a fundamentally better experience—and will surely produce a radically better one with coming iterations.

The notion that physical books are ending their lifecycle is upsetting to people who hold them to be synonymous with literature and terrifying to those who make their living within the existing structures of publishing. As an editor and a lover of books, I sympathize. But why should a civilization that reads electronically be any less literate than one that harvests trees to do so? And why should a transition away from the printed page lessen our appreciation and love for printed books? Hardbacks these days are disposable vessels, printed on ever crappier paper with bindings that skew and crack. In a world where we do most of our serious reading on screens, books may again thrive as expressions of craft and design. Their decline as useful objects may allow them to flourish as design objects.

As to the fate of book publishers, there's less reason to be optimistic. Amazon, which is selling most new books at a loss to get everyone hooked on the Kindle, will eventually want to make money on them. The publishers will be squeezed at best and disintermediated at worst. Amazon is already publishing Stephen King. In the future, it could become the only publisher a best-selling author needs. In a world without the high fixed costs of printing and distribution, as the distance between writers and their audiences shrinks, what essential service will Random House and Simon & Schuster provide? If the answer is primarily cultural arbitration and editing, the publishing behemoths might dwindle while a much lighter weight model of publishing—clever kids working from coffee shops in Brooklyn—emerges.

What we should worry about is that the system supports the creation of literature, if grudgingly. There's a risk that what replaces it won't allow as many writers to make as good a living. But there's also a chance it could allow more writers to make a better living. For newspaper journalism, the future looks bleak at the moment. As the economic model for daily reporting collapses, we're losing the support structure for large-scale newsgathering. At the same time, the Internet has radically expanded the potential audience of every journalist while bringing a new freedom to experiment and innovate. When it comes to literature, I'm optimistic that electronic reading will bring more good than harm. New modes of communication will spur new forms while breathing life into old ones. Reading without paper might make literature more urgent and accessible than it was before the technological revolution, just like Gutenberg did.

A version of this article appears in this week's issue of Newsweek.
Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2214243/

( I am occasionally at dinner parties where I am a good 30 plus years younger  than  almost all of the rest of the people.  I end up being the point person for the  you kids and you technology are ruining the word comments . We took out the tower records. We are killing the print  newspapers.  It is true but I like digital music and digital newspapers so much better. However,  if we end taking out book stores and even publishers I am going to feel really bad.  I love my Kindle though.  I actually try not to talk to much about it because it never pays to be a first adapter and  it will be better and cheaper soon. I actually have the Kindle one not two.   I  was once in a  doctor's office  and  didn't  like  what I was reading and bought a new book.  It was sort of amazing when I thought about if afterwords.   Most Classics are free or extremely reasonable.  I have been reading  a lot  more non-fiction since I bought it.  I am not going to carry around an actually  800 page non-fiction book  plus  dictionary.   For fiction I still like actual books  better because they are more more physical pleasing  and you do have some eye strain with the kindle.   However I was reading  an 800 page hardcover fiction book{ Breaking Dawn don't be impressed} and I kept getting uncomfortable because the weight distribution kept changing. It is easy to get spoiled.)

edited to add a titel

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on March 29, 2009, 05:16:16 AM

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5996253.ece (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5996253.ece)

A cyber spy network operated from China hacked into classified documents on government and private computers in 103 countries, internet researchers have revealed.

The spy system, which investigators dubbed GhostNet, compromised 1,295 machines at Nato and in foreign affairs ministries, embassies, banks and news organisations across the world, as well as computers used by the Dalai Lama and Tibetan exiles.

The work of Information Warfare Monitor (IWM) investigators focused initially on allegations of Chinese cyber espionage against the Tibetan exile community but led to a much wider network of compromised machines.
Related Links

    * Spy chiefs fear Chinese cyber attack

    * Councils rapped as spy requests surge

    * Big Brother only wants to help you

IWM said that, while its analysis pointed to China as the main source of the network, it had not been able conclusively to identify the hackers. The IWM is composed of researchers from an Ottawa-based think tank, SecDev Group, and the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies.

The researchers found that more than 1,295 computers had been affected at the ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan. They also discovered hacked systems in the embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan.

The remote spying operation is thought to be the most extensive yet uncovered in the political world and is estimated to be invading more than a dozen new computers a week. Other infected computers were found at Deloitte & Touche in New York.

The IWM report said: "GhostNet represents a network of compromised computers resident in high-value political, economic, and media locations spread across numerous countries worldwide. At the time of writing, these organisations are almost certainly oblivious to the compromised situation in which they find themselves. The computers of diplomats, military attachés, private assistants, secretaries to Prime Ministers, journalists and others are under the concealed control of unknown assailant(s)."

It added: "In Dharamsala [the headquarters of the Tibetan government in exile] and elsewhere, we have witnessed machines being profiled and sensitive documents being removed. At our laboratory, we have analysed our own infected 'honey pot' computer and discovered that the capabilities of GhostNet are potent and wide-ranging.

"Almost certainly, documents are being removed without the targets’ knowledge, keystrokes logged, web cameras are being silently triggered, and audio inputs surreptitiously activated."

Once the hackers infiltrated the systems, they gained control using malware – software they had installed on the compromised computers – and sent and received data from them, the researchers said. The investigation concluded that Tibetan computer systems were compromised by multiple infections that gave attackers unprecedented access to potentially sensitive information, including documents from the private office of the Dalai Lama.

The investigators went to India, Europe and North America to collect evidence about the infected systems used by Tibetan exiles. It was in the second stage of the inquiry, when they were analysing the data, that they uncovered the network of compromised computers.

The IWM report said in its summary: "The GhostNet system directs infected computers to download a Trojan known as Ghost Rat that allows attackers to gain complete, real-time control. These instances of Ghost Rat are consistently controlled from commercial internet access accounts located on the island of Hainan, in the People’s Republic of China."

The researchers said GhostNet was spread using classic malware techniques. "Contextually relevant emails are sent to specific targets with attached documents that are packed with exploit code and Trojan horse programmes designed to take advantage of vulnerabilities in software installed on the target’s computer.

"Once compromised, files located on infected computers may be mined for contact information, and used to spread malware through e-mail and document attachments that appear to come from legitimate sources, and contain legitimate documents and messages."

Greg Walton, the editor of IWM, said: "Regardless of who or what is ultimately in control of GhostNet, it is the capabilities of exploitation, and the strategic intelligence that can be harvested from it, which matters most. Indeed, although the Achilles’ heel of the GhostNet system allowed us to monitor and document its far-reaching network of infiltration, we can safely hypothesise that it is neither the first nor the only one of its kind."

Two researchers at Cambridge University who worked on the part of the investigation related to the Tibetans are releasing their own report. In an online abstract for The Snooping Dragon: Social Malware Surveillance of the Tibetan Movement, Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson wrote that while malware attacks are not new, these attacks should be noted for their ability to collect "actionable intelligence for use by the police and security services of a repressive state, with potentially fatal consequences for those exposed".

Title: More on Cloud Computing fom Google
Post by: rachelg on May 03, 2009, 07:37:08 AM

Google  obviously has an incentive  to view  the future of  Cloud Computing as rosy.


http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/04/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about.html


What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing
 
Tuesday, April 28, 2009 at 9:55 AM
Recently, McKinsey & Company published a study on cloud computing as part of a symposium for The Uptime Institute, an organization dedicated to supporting the enterprise data center industry. We share McKinsey's interest in helping the IT industry better understand cloud computing, so we'd like to join the conversation Appirio and others have started about the role of cloud computing for large enterprises.


There's quite a bit of talk these days about corporations building a "private cloud" with concepts like virtualization, and there can be significant benefits to this approach. But those advantages are amplified greatly when customers use applications in the scalable datacenters provided by companies like Google, Amazon, Salesforce.com and soon, Microsoft. In this model, customers can leverage hardware infrastructure, distributed software infrastructure, and applications that are built for the cloud, and let us run it for them. This offers them much lower cost applications, and removes the IT maintenance burden that can cripple many organizations today. It also allows customers to deliver innovation to their end users much more rapidly.

We thought we'd provide some insight into what we mean when we say cloud computing, and how its advantages in cost and innovation continue to attract hundreds of thousands of companies of all sizes -- from 2nd Wind Exercise Equipment to Genentech. We created our cloud by building an optimized system from the ground up: starting with low-cost hardware, adding reliable software infrastructure that scales, offering innovative applications, and working every day to improve the whole system. While the McKinsey study only considered the hardware cost savings of the cloud, there is tremendous customer benefit in all of these areas.

Hardware infrastructure
It starts with components. We serve tens of millions of users, so we've had to build infrastructure that scales and can run extremely efficiently to support that load. Consider three areas of data center design: server design, energy efficiency, and scale of operations.

In the virtualization approach of private data centers, a company takes a server and subdivides it into many servers to increase efficiency. We do the opposite by taking a large set of low cost commodity systems and tying them together into one large supercomputer. We strip down our servers to the bare essentials, so that we're not paying for components that we don't need. For example, we produce servers without video graphics chips that aren't needed in this environment.

Additionally, enterprise hardware components are designed to be very reliable, but they can never be 100% reliable, so enterprises spend a lot of time and money on maintenance. In contrast, we expect the hardware to fail, and design for reliability in the software such that, when the hardware does fail, customers are just shifted to another server. This allows us to further lower the cost of our servers by using commodity parts and on-board storage. We also design the systems for easy repair such that, if a part fails, we can quickly bring the server back into service.

Traditionally, companies have focused on using large, highly reliable hardware to run databases and large backend systems, but there is a significant cost impact to that strategy. For example, a 4 CPU quad-core system with 600 GB of high end SCSI storage and 16GB of memory is 8 times more expensive than a system 1/4 its size with less expensive SATA storage. This is because the price of the components increase exponentially as the hardware gets larger and more reliable. By building the reliability into the software, we're able to use a much lower cost hardware platform but still maintain the same reliability to customers.

Beyond server design, we do everything possible to make our servers and data centers as efficient as possible from an energy and cooling perspective. Consider how we designed our data centers for energy efficiency. Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is an industry-standard metric for measuring the efficiency of a data center. We recently shared that the average PUE for our data centers is now better than the state-of-the-art 2011 data center PUE prediction by the EPA. In other words, we beat the EPA's best case estimates three years early, and we achieved this result without the use of exotic infrastructure solutions thought necessary in the EPA report. And we're doing that at every level of the stack: from server utilization to networking.

Finally, we operate at scale, and that drives economies of scale. Just by managing thousands of servers together and making them homogeneous, we're able to cut down on our administrative costs dramatically and pool resources of many types. This benefits end users by enabling us to offer low prices.

But, most importantly for our customers, we manage this entire infrastructure such that they don't have to. According to Gartner, a typical IT department spends 80% of their budget keeping the lights on, and this hampers their ability to drive change and growth in their business. The reality is that most businesses don't gain a competitive advantage from maintaining their own data centers. We take on that burden and make it our core business so that our customers don't have to.


Software Infrastructure

While most discussions of cloud computing and data center design take place at the hardware level, we offer a set of scalable services that customers would otherwise have to maintain themselves in a virtualization model. For example, if a company wanted to implement a typical three tier system in the cloud using virtualization, they would have to build, install, and maintain software to run the database, app server, and web server. This would require them to spend time and money to acquire the licenses, maintain system uptime, and implement patches.

In contrast, with a service like Google App Engine, customers get access to the same scalable application server and database that Google uses for its own applications. This means customers don't have to worry about purchasing, installing, maintaining, and scaling their own databases and app servers. All a customer has to do is deploy code, and we take care of the rest. You only pay for what you need, and, with App Engine's free quota, you often don't pay anything at all.

A great example of software infrastructure that scales is the recent online town hall meeting held by President Obama. The White House was able to instantly scale its database to support more than 100,000 questions and in excess of 3.5 million votes, without worrying about usage spikes that typically would be tough to manage. Because of the cloud, there was no need to provision extra servers to handle the increased demand or forecast demand ahead of time.

Applications
Beyond the underlying hardware and software design, what attracts many customers to the cloud is application outsourcing.

There is limited value to running an Exchange Server in a virtual machine in the cloud. That server was never designed for the cloud, so you don't get additional scale. You'd also need to continue to maintain and monitor the mail server yourself, so the labor savings are marginal. But with cloud-based applications like Gmail, we take care of all of the hassle for you. We keep the application up and running, and have designed it to scale easily. All of this provides an application that is roughly less than 1/3 the cost of a privately hosted mail system, has 100x the typical storage, and innovates much faster.


Innovation
While the cost advantages of cloud computing can be great, there's another advantage that in many ways is more important: the rapid pace of innovation. IT systems are typically slow to evolve. In the virtualization model, businesses still need to run packaged software and endure the associated burden. They only receive major feature enhancements every 2-3 years, and in the meantime they have to endure the monthly patch cycle and painful system-wide upgrades. In our model, we can deliver innovation quickly without IT admins needing to manage upgrades themselves. For example, with Google Apps, we delivered more than 60 new features over the last year with only optional admin intervention.

The era of delayed gratification is over – the Internet allows innovations to be delivered as a constant flow that incorporates user needs, offers faster cycles for IT, and enables integration with systems that were not previously possible. This makes major upgrades a thing of the past, and gives the customer greater and greater value for their money.

As companies weigh private data centers vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps

Title: Broadband without Internet ain't worth squat
Post by: rachelg on May 03, 2009, 11:30:45 AM

Doug,
I stiill owe you a response to some of your comments in the Polical Economics thread  and this doesn't really answer them but I thought this was interesting.

http://isen.com/blog/2009/04/broadband-without-internet-ain-worth.html


 
Broadband without Internet ain't worth squat
Broadband without Internet ain't worth squat
by David S. Isenberg
keynote address delivered at
Broadband Properties Summit 4/28/09

We communications professionals risk forgetting why the
networks we build and run are valuable. We forget what we're
connecting to what. We get so close to the ducts and splices
and boxes and protocols that we lose the big picture.

Somewhere in the back of our mind, we know that we're
building something big and new and fundamental. We know, at
some level, there's more than business and economics at
stake.

This talk is a 30,000-foot view of why our work is important.
I'm going to argue that the Internet is the main value
creator here - not our ability to digitize everything, not
high speed networking, not massive storage - the Internet.
With this perspective, maybe you'll you go back to work with
a slight attitude adjustment, and maybe one or two concrete
things to do.

In the big picture, We're building interconnectedness. We're
connecting every person on this planet with every other
person. We're creating new ways to share experience. We're
building new ways for buyers to find sellers, for
manufacturers to find raw materials, for innovators to rub up
against new ideas. We're creating a new means to distribute
our small planet's limited resources.

Let's take a step back from the ducts and splices and boxes
and protocols. Let's go on an armchair voyage in the opposite
direction -- to a strange land . . . to right here, right
now, but without the Internet.

In this world we have all the technology of today, but no
Internet Protocol, that is, there's no packet protocol that
all proprietary networks can understand.

In this alternate reality, every form of information can be
digitized, BUT there's not necessarily a connection between
all this information and all the users and services that
might discover it and use it to their advantage.

This was the world envisioned by the movie, The President's
Analyst, where The Phone Company secretly ran the world. It's
from 1967, the same year that Larry Roberts published the
original ArpaNet spec.



Roll Clip
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUa3np4CKC4&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fisen.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F04%2Fbroadband-without-internet-ain-worth.html&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
In a world without the Internet, it's not clear that we'd
actually have a thought transducer in our brain. But if we
did, I'd bet we couldn't program it ourselves. I'd bet we
couldn't shut it off. I'd bet we couldn't decide who could
receive its signal and who could not.

What WOULD we have?

We would have super-clear telephony. We'd have cable TV with
lots and lots of channels. We'd have lower op-ex and higher
def. We'd probably have some kind of telephone-to-TV
integration so we could order from Dominos while we watched
Gunsmoke. Our cell phones would make really, really good
phone calls . . . and we'd have another half-dozen bungled
attempts to convince us that picturephones were the next
great leap forward.

Surprisingly, we might not have email. The first generation
of Internet Researchers only discovered human-to-human email
in 1972 - the subsequent growth of "People-to-People"
applications was a big surprise to them. Now, without email,
there there'd be no reason to invent the Blackberry or the
iPhone. Without the Internet, it would be a voice, voice,
voice, voice world.

This voice, voice, voice would be expensive. Without the
Internet - specifically without Voice over IP -- we'd still
be paying fifteen cents a minute for long distance, because
VocalTec would not have commercialized VOIP, Vonage and Skype
wouldn't exist, and even the major telcos would not have used
VOIP to destroy the international settlement system.

Data service? Think ISDN. Actually, think about a dozen
different so-called Integrated Services Networks, each with
its own access and login, with no good way for one to connect
to another. Metcalfe's Law would suggest there'd be orders of
magnitude less traffic overall.

Would we have Search? Perhaps. Imagine what Encyclopedia
Britannica On Line would look like in a non-Wikipedia world .
. . at a buck a lookup.

Digital photography? Perhaps . . . but medium would be paper
and the biggest company would be Kodak.

What about Amazon? EBay? YouTube? Weather.com? Google Maps?
Travelocity? Yahoo Finance? iTunes? Twitter? Facebook?
CraigsList? Blogging? On-Line Banking?

We wouldn't even have Web sites. Sure we could probably buy
some kind of proprietary on-line presence, but it would be so
expensive that only GE, GM and GQ could afford it, and so
inaccessible they probably wouldn't want to pay.

Web 2.0 - the ability of a single computer to reach across
the Internet in a dozen different directions at once to build
an customized web page on the fly - would be worse than
unavailable, it would be unthinkable.

But it's not all bad. Without the Internet, we would still
get our news from newspapers, the corner bookstore would
still be down on the corner, the Post Office would be
thriving, your friendly travel agent would still be booking
your trips, Dan Rather would still be on TV, perverts would
still get their sick pix in inconvenient plain brown
wrappers, and the NSA would not know the books I bought at
Amazon or who I email with.

Tough. We lost a lot of skilled leather-smiths when they
invented the horseless carriage. We'll find ways to deal with
the Internet's changes too.

Without the Internet, the minor improvements in telephony and
TV certainly would not drive the buildout of a whole new
infrastructure. The best way to do telephony would still be
twisted pair. The best way to do Cable TV would be coax.

Now I'm a huge Fiber to the Home enthusiast! But I'm also
part of the Reality Based Community. So let's face it, even
WITH the Internet, including Verizon's amazingly ambitious
FIOS buildout, the business case for fiber is so weak that 97
percent of US homes still aren't on fiber. We are still in
"Law of Small Numbers" territory. The Internet is the only
thing standing between our limited success and abject
failure.

Notice, I have not yet, until now, used the word BROADBAND.

But before I talk about broadband, I want to talk about
Synechdoche. Synecdoche is when you say, "The Clock" but you
mean Time. Synecdoche is when you say, "Eyeballs," but you
mean The Customer's Attention. Synecdoche is when you say,
Dallas, but you mean, "The Mavericks."

Most of the time Broadband is synecdoche. When we say,
"Broadband," most of the time we mean, "High Speed
Connections to the Internet."

I repeat, Most of the time when we say Broadband we mean High
Speed Connections to the Internet. Broadband is synecdoche.

Without the Internet, "Broadband" is just another incremental
improvement. It makes telephony and TV better. It makes the
Internet better too. But the key driver of all the killer
apps we know and love is the Internet, not Broadband. And, of
course, the Internet is enabled by lots of technologies -
computers, storage, software, audio compression, video
display technology, AND high-speed wired and wireless
networking.

Now, Broadband is a very important enabler. The United States
has slower, more expensive connections to the Internet than
much of the developed world. And that's embarrassing to me as
a US citizen.

Imagine if a quirk of US policy caused us to have dimmer
displays. That would be a quick fix, unless the display
terminal industry demanded that we disable the Internet in
other ways before it gave us brighter displays. Or insisted
"all your screens are belong to us."

High-speed transmission does not, by itself, turn the wheel
of creative destruction so central to the capitalist process.
The Internet does that. Broadband, by itself, does not fuel
the rise of new companies and the destruction of old ones.
The Internet does that. Broadband by itself is not
disruptive; the Internet is.

The Internet derives its disruptive quality from a very
special property: IT IS PUBLIC. The core of the Internet is a
body of simple, public agreements, called RFCs, that specify
the structure of the Internet Protocol packet. These public
agreements don't need to be ratified or officially approved -
they just need to be widely adopted and used.

The Internet's component technologies - routing, storage,
transmission, etc. - can be improved in private. But the
Internet Protocol itself is hurt by private changes, because
its very strength is its public-ness.

Because it is public, device makers, application makers,
content providers and network providers can make stuff that
works together. The result is completely unprecedented;
instead of a special-purpose network - with telephone wires
on telephone poles that connect telephones to telephone
switches, or a cable network that connects TVs to content -
we have the Internet, a network that connects any application
- love letters, music lessons, credit card payments, doctor's
appointments, fantasy games - to any network - wired,
wireless, twisted pair, coax, fiber, wi-fi, 3G, smoke
signals, carrier pigeon, you name it. Automatically, no extra
services needed. It just works.

This allows several emergent miracles.

First, the Internet grows naturally at its edges, without a
master plan. Anybody can connect their own network, as long
as the connection follows the public spec. Anybody with their
own network can improve it -- in private if they wish, as
long as they follow the public agreement that is the
Internet, the result grows the Internet.

Another miracle: The Internet let's us innovate without
asking anybody's permission. Got an idea? Put it on the
Internet, send it to your friends. Maybe they'll send it to
their friends.

Another miracle: It's a market-discovery machine. Text
messaging wasn't new in 1972. What surprised the Internet
Researchers was email's popularity. Today a band that plays
Parisian cafe music can discover its audience in Japan and
Louisiana and Rio.

It's worth summarizing. The miracles of the Internet -
any-app over any infrastructure,
growth without central planning,
innovation without permission,
and market discovery.
If the Internet Protocol lost its public nature, we'd risk
shutting these miracles off.

One of the public agreements about the Internet Protocol lays
out a process for changing the agreements. If somebody
changes their part of the Internet in private, they put the
Internet's miracles at risk. Comcast tried to do that by
blocking BitTorrent. Fortunately, we persuaded Comcast to
stop. If it had continued, it would have put a whole family
of Internet applications at risk, not only for Comcast
Internet customers, but also for everybody who interacts with
Comcast's customers.

The whole fight over Network Neutrality is about preserving
what's valuable about the Internet - its public-ness.

The Internet threatens the telephone business and the cable
TV business. So of course there's a huge propaganda battle
around the Internet.

The propaganda says Network Neutrality is about treating
every packet exactly the same, but the Internet has never
done that. The propaganda says that Network Neutrality is
about regulating the Internet, but we know that the Internet
exists thanks to the government's ArpaNet, and subsequent
wise government regulation.

Look who's calling for regulation anyway! The only reason
telcos and cablecos exist is that there's a whole body of
franchises and tariffs and licenses and FCCs and PUCs keeping
them in business.

Cut through the propaganda. Network Neutrality is about
preserving the public definition of the Internet Protocol,
the structure of the Internet packet, and the way it is
processed. If there are reasons to change the Internet
Protocol, we can do it in public - that's part of the
Internet too.

It's the Internet, smart people. Your property already has
telephone and TV. So does everybody else's. Broadband without
the Internet isn't worth squat. You're building those fast
connections to The Internet.

So please remember that the essence of the Internet is a body
of public agreements. Anti-Network Neutrality attacks on the
public nature of the Internet are attacks on the value of the
infrastructure improvements you've made to your property. So
you can't be neutral on Network Neutrality. Take a stand.

If you install advanced technology that makes your property
more valuable, you deserve your just rewards. But the
potential of the Internet is much, much bigger than your
property.

Like other great Americans on whose shoulders I stand, I have
a dream. In my dream the Internet becomes so capable that I
am able to be with you as intimately as I am right now
without leaving my home in Connecticut.

In my dream the Internet becomes so good that we think of the
people in Accra or Baghdad or Caracas much as we think of the
people of Albuquerque, Boston and Chicago, as "us" not
"them.".

In my dream, the climate change problem will be solved thanks
to trillions of smart vehicles, heaters and air conditioners
connected to the Internet to mediate real-time auctions for
energy, carbon credits, and transportation facilities.

In my dream, we discover that one of the two billion who live
on less than dollar a day is so smart as to be another
Einstein, that another is so compassionate as to be another
Gandhi, that another is so charismatic as to be another
Mandella . . . and we will can comment on their blog,
subscribe to their flickr stream and follow their twitter
tweets.

But I also have a nightmare . . .

In my nightmare, the telephone company has convinced us that
it needs to monitor every Internet transaction, so it can --
quote-unquote -- manage -- what it calls "my pipes".

Maybe it says it needs to stop terrorism, or protect the
children, or pay copyright holders. Maybe there's a genuine
emergency -- a pandemic or a nuclear attack or a 9.0
earthquake.

In my nightmare, whatever the excuse -- or the precipitating
real-world event -- once the telephone company gains the
ability to know which apps are generating which packets, it
begins charging more for applications we value more.

In my nightmare, once the telephone company has some
applications that generate more revenues because they're
subject to management -- and others that don't -- the former
get all the newest, shiniest, fastest network upgrades, while
the latter languish in what soon becomes Yesterday's Network.

In my nightmare, new innovations that need the newest fastest
network, but don't yet have a revenue stream, are consigned
to second-class service. Or they're subject to lengthy
engineering studies and other barriers that keep them off the
market. In other words, in my nightmare, all but the most
mundane innovation dies

So it's up to you. When you make high-speed networks part of
your real estate, if you insist that these connect to the
REAL Internet, the un-mediated, un-filtered publicly defined
Internet, you're part of a global miracle that's much bigger
than your property. Please ask yourself what's valuable in
the long run, and act accordingly.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: DougMacG on May 03, 2009, 12:55:19 PM

Very interesting read Rachel, Isenberg is very thought provoking. 

Small point of clarification, when he says 97% of the homes still don't have fiber, I think he means they don't have fiber all the way to the home.  Pretty close to 100% of our communications other than face to face run mostly over fiber.  Cell towers and WiFi, even dial up internet over ordinary telephone lines lead into fiber lines that would not work the way they do, or facebook or cloud computing,  if not for the capital investments that someone made in the 'ducts and spices'.  Also an aside, Google would not locate new facilities near the wind farms in Iowa if not for the fiber optic buildout that cost billions in private, capital investments.

Title: GPS satellites to begin failing?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 20, 2009, 03:05:42 AM

Network of satellites could begin to fail as early as 2010

It has become one of the staples of modern, hi-tech life: using satellite navigation tools built into your car or mobile phone to find your way from A to B. But experts have warned that the system may be close to breakdown.

US government officials are concerned that the quality of the Global Positioning System (GPS) could begin to deteriorate as early as next year, resulting in regular blackouts and failures – or even dishing out inaccurate directions to millions of people worldwide.

The warning centres on the network of GPS satellites that constantly orbit the planet and beam signals back to the ground that help pinpoint your position on the Earth's surface.

The satellites are overseen by the US Air Force, which has maintained the GPS network since the early 1990s. According to a study by the US government accountability office (GAO), mismanagement and a lack of investment means that some of the crucial GPS satellites could begin to fail as early as next year.

"It is uncertain whether the Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to maintain current GPS service without interruption," said the report, presented to Congress. "If not, some military operations and some civilian users could be adversely affected."

The report says that Air Force officials have failed to execute the necessary steps to keep the system running smoothly.

Although it is currently spending nearly $2bn (£1.3bn) to bring the 20-year-old system up to date, the GAO – which is the equivalent of Britain's National Audit Office – says that delays and overspending are putting the entire system in jeopardy.

"In recent years, the Air Force has struggled to successfully build GPS satellites within cost and schedule goals," said the report. "It encountered significant technical problems … [and] struggled with a different contractor."

The first replacement GPS satellite was due to launch at the beginning of 2007, but has been delayed several times and is now scheduled to go into orbit in November this year – almost three years late.

The impact on ordinary users could be significant, with millions of satnav users potential victims of bad directions or failed services. There would also be similar side effects on the military, which uses GPS for mapping, reconnaissance and for tracking hostile targets.

Some suggest that it could also have an impact on the proliferation of so-called location applications on mobile handsets – just as applications on the iPhone and other GPS-enabled smartphones are starting to get more popular.

Tom Coates, the head of Yahoo's Fire Eagle system – which lets users share their location data from their mobile – said he was sceptical that US officials would let the system fall into total disrepair because it was important to so many people and companies.

"I'd be surprised if anyone in the US government was actually OK with letting it fail – it's too useful," he told the Guardian.

"It sounds like something that could be very serious in a whole range of areas if it were to actually happen. It probably wouldn't damage many locative services applications now, but potentially it would retard their development and mainstreaming if it were to come to pass."

The failings of GPS could also play into the hands of other countries – including opening the door to Galileo, the European-funded attempt to rival America's satellite navigation system, which is scheduled to start rolling out later next year.

Russia, India and China have developed their own satellite navigation technologies that are currently being expanded.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/19/gps-close-to-breakdown

Title: Amazing gaming technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 08, 2009, 05:28:42 AM

Amazing gaming technology:

http://dvice.com/archives/2009/06/microsoft-unvei-1.php

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-09-lionhead-milo/50015

Title: Red China's Green Dam
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on June 08, 2009, 12:59:03 PM

China demands new PCs carry spyware
Posted by Richard Koman @ June 8, 2009 @ 8:38 AM


There comes a time when despite the allure of the market, Western industry should band together and turn its back on China. A time when the computer and Internet industry realizes that the censorship-and-repression tax the government is intent on levying is too high a price to pay.

Is this, at long last, that moment? Well, it’s doubtful. But it should be.

Starting July 1, computers sold in China must include government-provided spyware that blocks pornography and political dissent from Chinese citizens’ view, The New York Times reports, following up a Wall Street Journal report.

Called “Green Dam” — green being a foil to the yellow smut of pornography — the software is designed to filter out sexually explicit images and words, according to the company that designed it. Computer experts, however, warn that once installed, the software could be directed to block all manner of content or allow the government to monitor Internet use and collect personal information.

PC makers are said to be irritated with the new rules but presumably not enough to buck the government. The major irritation seems to be that July 1 isn’t enough time to add the software to massive production lines.

Beyond the nettlesome issue of abetting government censorship, they said six weeks was not enough time to shift production on such a large scale. “Many of us are going to take it in the neck with this mandate,” said one executive. “It has put people into five-alarm mode.”

Still executives met with the U.S. Embassy to express displeasure. If they’re serious, though, they need to do this, says Rebecca McKinnon:

Provide the software on disk rather than pre-installed.
Include clear information to the user about what the software does, the nature and range of content it filters, how the user’s personal information is collected and transmitted, where it is stored and who has access to it.

Explain what the software does differently from existing parental controls already included in the operating system.
Include further information about any further vulnerabilities the software contains which could open the user’s computer to attack or snooping.
Provide clear instructions on how to deactivate or uninstall the software along with the installation guidelines.
It’s pretty clear that’s not how China wants this to go down. This little anecdote from the Times says it all.

On Monday, Green Dam’s own website offered a hint of discontent over the filtering software. On the bulletin board section of the site, several users complained that pornographic images slipped through or that their computers had become painfully slow. “It seems pretty lousy so far,” read one posting. “It’s not very powerful, I can’t surf the Internet normally and it’s affecting the operation of other software.”

By Monday night, however, most of the comments had been deleted.

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=4906

Title: Re: Amazing gaming technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on June 15, 2009, 03:06:01 PM

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on June 08, 2009, 05:28:42 AM

Amazing gaming technology:

http://dvice.com/archives/2009/06/microsoft-unvei-1.php

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-09-lionhead-milo/50015

Very interesting! I'm sure it will have more useful applications than just "games"   I suppose we are getting closer to Star Trek's Holo Deck.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on June 17, 2009, 12:38:41 AM

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/taking-to-the-streets-and-tweets-in-tehran/ (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/taking-to-the-streets-and-tweets-in-tehran/)

Taking to the Streets — and Tweets — in Tehran
By Nathan Hodge   June 13, 2009  |  3:34 pm  |  Categories: Info War, Rogue States
Iranians are taking to the streets to protest the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. While Ahmadinejad’s rivals claimed widespread electoral fraud — and appealed for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, to intervene. Khamenei, however, appeared on state television today to congratulate Ahmadinejad on his victory.

It appears the authorities may have blocked text messaging, a key organizing tool of opposition candidates like Mir Hossein Mousavi. Twitter users reported that SMS service had gone offline just before polls opened.

Game over? Not quite. Iranians have organized protests in Tehran, and some demonstrators are using social media to post video and updates. Here’s a recent YouTube post:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XQ7Vf-bVY[/youtube]

The National Iranian American Council in Washington is liveblogging the election, and they have translations of some of the Farsi Twitter streams. Check it out.

Title: WSJ
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 03, 2009, 07:21:29 AM

So it turns out that Google's enthusiasm for government-imposed "net neutrality" is qualified. The Internet giant wants cumbersome network management rules applied to everyone—except Google.

Google is one of the industry's most vocal advocates of regulating Internet service providers. It wants to prevent companies like Verizon and AT&T from managing their broadband networks in a way that is optimal for most users, but perhaps not for Google. In order to protect its business model, which involves the use of Internet pipes owned by these other companies (and potential competitors), Google wants broadband networks open to all content without restrictions, even if that means a relatively small number of video streamers and other bandwidth hogs could cause congestion for everyone else.

"Just as telephone companies are not permitted to tell consumers who they can call or what they can say," explains Google on its Web site, "broadband carriers should not be allowed to use their market power to control activity online."

Of late, however, Google is flouting its own net neutrality principles. According to recent media reports, Google Voice, the company's new phone service, is systematically blocking calls to phone numbers in some rural areas. Under so-called intercarrier compensation regulations, phone companies pay high fees to rural operators to connect phone calls. By blocking calls that its competitors are forced by law to connect, Google is saving money. It's also violating the nondiscrimination principle that underlies its net neutrality lobbying.

Citing these news reports, AT&T engaged in a little payback late last week by sending a letter to the Federal Communications Commission calling on regulators to force Google to "play by the same rules as its competitors." Google says that Google Voice is not a traditional phone company and should not be regulated as such. The reality is that Google wants to gain a competitive advantage by providing phone service without having to adhere to the same rules as its rivals.

Our own view is that the rules requiring traditional phone companies to connect these calls should be scrapped for everyone rather than extended to Google. In today's telecom marketplace, where the overwhelming majority of phone customers have multiple carriers to choose from, these regulations are obsolete. But Google has set itself up for this political blowback.

Last week FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski proposed new rules for regulating Internet operators and gave assurances that "this is not about government regulation of the Internet." But this dispute highlights the regulatory creep that net neutrality mandates make inevitable. Content providers like Google want to dabble in the phone business, while the phone companies want to sell services and applications.

The coming convergence will make it increasingly difficult to distinguish among providers of broadband pipes, network services and applications. Once net neutrality is unleashed, it's hard to see how anything connected with the Internet will be safe from regulation

Title: WSJ: Even here BO appeases
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 03, 2009, 07:31:54 AM

second post of the day

By JEREMY RABKIN AND JEFFREY EISENACH
There's a lot of concern out there right now about America's world leadership—facing down Iran's nuclear program, bracing NATO's commitment in Afghanistan, maintaining free trade. Here's something else to worry about: Has the Obama administration just given up U.S. responsibility for protecting the Internet?

What makes it possible for users to connect with all the different Web sites on the Internet is the system that allocates a unique electronic address to each site. The addresses are organized within larger entities called top-level domains—".com," ".edu," ".gov" and so on. Overseeing this arrangement is a relatively obscure entity, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Without the effective oversight of ICANN, the Internet as we know it would not exist, billions of dollars of online commerce and intellectual property would be at risk, and various forms of mass censorship could become the norm.

Since its establishment in 1998, ICANN has operated under a formal contract with the U.S. Department of Commerce, which stipulated the duties and limits that the U.S. government expected ICANN to respect. The Commerce Department did not provide much active oversight, although the need to renew this contract, called the Joint Project Agreement (JPA), helped keep ICANN policies within reasonable bounds. That's why last spring, when the Commerce Department asked for comment on ending the JPA, the U.S. business community opposed the idea.

But the U.S. government's role in ICANN has long been a source of complaint from foreign nations. United Nations conferences have repeatedly voiced concerns about "domination of the Internet by one power" and suggested that management of the system should be handed off to the International Telecommunications Union—a U.N. agency dominated by developing countries. The European Union has urged a different scheme in which a G-12 of advanced countries would manage the Internet.

The Obama administration has declined to endorse such alternatives. Instead it has replaced the latest JPA, which expired Sept. 30, with a vaguely worded "Affirmation of Commitments." In it, ICANN promises to be a good manager of the Internet, and the Commerce Department promises—well, not much of anything. The U.S. will participate in a Governmental Advisory Committee along with some three dozen other nations but claims no greater authority than any other country on the committee, whose recommendations are not binding on ICANN in any case.

An ICANN cut loose from U.S. government oversight will not, for that reason, be free from political pressures. One source of pressure will come from disputes about expanding top-level domain names. For example, would a ".xxx" domain help to isolate pornographic sites in a unique (and blockable) special area, or would it encourage censorship in other domains by suggesting that offensive images only appear there? Should we have ".food" or ".toys" along with ".com" domains? If we do, as the Justice Department warned last year in a letter to Commerce, companies that have invested huge sums to protect their trademarks under ".com" will have to fight for protection of their names in the new domains. Yet strangely, there is not a word in the new plan about protecting trademark rights or other intellectual property interests that might be threatened by new ICANN policies.

Even more disturbing is the prospect that foreign countries will pressure ICANN to impose Internet controls that facilitate their own censorship schemes. Countries like China and Iran already block Web sites they regard as politically objectionable. Islamic nations insist that the proper understanding of international human-rights treaties requires suppression of "Islamophobic" content on the Internet. Will ICANN be better situated to resist such pressures now that it no longer has a formal contract with the U.S. government?

It may be that the Obama administration expects to exert a steadying hand on ICANN in indirect or covert ways. Or here too it may have calculated that winning applause from other nations now is worth taking serious risks in the long run.

Mr. Rabkin is professor of law at George Mason University. Mr. Eisenach is an adjunct law professor at George Mason and chairman of Empiris LLC, which does consulting work for Verisign, an Internet registry.

Title: Swanson:
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 05, 2009, 06:03:26 AM

By BRET SWANSON
On Sept. 25, AT&T accused Google of violating the very "net neutrality" principles the world's dominant search company has righteously sought for others.

Net neutrality conjures the benign notion of an open and fair Web, where all applications and data packets are treated equally. Net reality is much more complicated. Google says it doesn't have to abide by rules meant for telecom companies. But with the Internet obliterating such distinctions, this defense exposes net neutrality's inherent flaws.

The controversy involves Google Voice, a new service that rings all of a user's phone lines simultaneously and provides other conference-calling and voice-mail features. Like myriad digital applications, the service is possible because the Web and phone lines have in many ways converged. Google can thus offer "free" services over the world's vast, expensive broadband networks.

Google thinks net neutrality should regulate only traditional phone and cable companies. Phone carriers have long been ordered to connect all calls. And open Internet principles agreed to by all sides in 2005 offer similar guidance for the Web: no blocking of Web sites or applications.

But Google Voice does not connect all calls. It blocks access, for example, to some rural areas and conferencing services that would impose heavier interconnection fees on Google. AT&T thus charged Google with cherry-picking. Why, AT&T asks, can Google exploit expensive communications networks when it's profitable but refuse neutral service to all customers when it's not?

This row unmasks something far more important than Google's hypocrisy: the deep structural flaws of net neutrality itself. Last week, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski outlined a more expansive and legally binding regime. He would not only codify existing nonblocking principles but would also add a highly controversial "nondiscrimination" rule. This regulation could expand bureaucratic oversight to every bit, switch and business plan on the Internet.

Basic technologies, like packet prioritization (voice calls first, spam second), could be banned. So could many business plans based on robust and differentiated services. This regime could send all routing algorithms and network services into courtrooms for the next decade.

Despite the brutal economic downturn, Internet-sector growth has been solid. From the Amazon Kindle and 85,000 iPhone "apps" to Hulu video and broadband health care, Web innovation flourishes. Mr. Genachowski heartily acknowledges these happy industry facts but then pivots to assert the Web is at a "crossroads" and only the FCC can choose the right path.

The events of the last half-decade prove otherwise. Since 2004, bandwidth per capita in the U.S. grew to three megabits per second from just 262 kilobits per second, and monthly Internet traffic increased to two billion gigabytes from 170 million gigabytes—both tenfold leaps.

No sector has boomed more than wireless. Yet Mr. Genachowski wants to extend his new regulations to the most technically complicated and bandwidth-constrained realm—mobile networks and devices.

In 2004, Wi-Fi was embryonic, the Motorola Razr was the hot phone, the BlackBerry was a CEO's email device, and Apple's most recognizable product was an orange-sicle laptop. But then the industry turned upside-down in a flurry of dynamism. Both Motorola and Palm plummeted in popularity and only now are attempting real comebacks. BlackBerry and Apple vaulted to smart-phone supremacy from out of nowhere, Nokia became the world's largest camera company, and a new wireless reading device rekindled Amazon's fortunes.

Wireless carriers invested $100 billion in just the past three years, and the U.S. vaulted past Europe in fast 3G mobile networks. Americans enjoy mobile voice prices 60% cheaper than foreign peers. And the once closed mobile ecosystem is more open, modular and dynamic than ever.

All this occurred without net neutrality regulation.

My research suggests that U.S. Internet traffic will continue to rise 50% annually through 2015. Cisco estimates wireless data traffic will rise 131% per year through 2013. Hundreds of billions of dollars in fiber optics, data centers, and fourth-generation mobile networks will be needed. But if network service providers can't design their own networks, offer creative services, or make fair business transactions with vendors, will they invest these massive sums to meet (and drive) demand?

Some question the network companies' expensive and risky plans, asking if the customers will come. But one thing's for sure: If you don't build it, they can't come.

If net neutrality applies neutrally to all players in the Web ecosystem, then it would regulate every component and entrepreneur in a vast and unknowable future. If neutrality applies selectively (oxymoron alert) to only one sliver of the network, then it is merely a political tool of one set of companies to cripple its competitors.

At a time of continued national economic peril, the last thing we need is a new heavy hand weighing down our most promising high-growth sector. Better to maintain the existing open-Web principles and let the Internet evolve.

Mr. Swanson is president of the technology research and strategy firm Entropy Economics LLC.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Dog Howie on October 05, 2009, 05:02:35 PM

As the owner of a small (40+ employee) internet content delivery company I have been following the "in and outs" of the net-neutrality discussions for about a year now. I have an obligation to deliver light-speed data to my users. The idea that I will have to compete for packet preferences is EXTREMELY discouraging. But I believe it is to be inevitable and, in fact, it is already here. They won't call it packet preferences, they will call it different service levels. Our web-facing servers are collocated at several geographic locations and each location we own and control our boxes, BUT I definitely budget more bandwidth dollars for colos that are on main backbones of service. Other collocation structures are located further  down the line and are cheaper. And then there are others cheaper than that, and other MORE expensive and truly faster that the ones I use. So whether it is backbone connectivity or preferential packet treatments, the free market, I "hate to say it" is always the best route. I "hate to say it" because it means more bandwidth dollars for better(faster) service... but then again there WILL be competition and THAT is the key. I don't believe there should be regulation or even informal agreements SO LONG AS there is open competition and reasonable effective legislation that deals with monopolies. Now we could debate the effectiveness of such legislation in the past but bottom line is that is HAS worked (albeit with aggressive corporate opposition). I do not believe that the concept has changed.... free markets with some sort of protection from monopolies.

Title: Where Does the Value get Added?
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on October 20, 2009, 10:39:38 AM

Internet Companies’ Bogus Plea for Regulation

Posted by Jim Harper

Some of the most prominent Internet companies sent a letter yesterday asking for protection from market forces. Among them: Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter.

A Washington Post story summarizes their concerns: “[W]ithout a strong anti-discrimination policy, companies like theirs may not get a fair shot on the Internet because carriers could decide to block them from ever reaching consumers.”

No ISP could block access to these popular services and survive, of course. What they could do is try to charge the most popular services a higher tariff to get their services through. Thus, weep the helpless, multi-billion-dollar Internet behemoths, we need a “fair shot”!

Plain and simple, these companies want regulation to ensure that ISPs can’t capture a larger share of the profits that the Internet generates. They want it all for themselves. Phrased another way, the goal is to create a subsidy for content creators by blocking ISPs from getting a piece of the action.

It’s all very reminiscent of disputes between coal mines and railroads. The coal mines “produced the coal” and believed that the profitability of the coal-energy ecosystem should accrue only to themselves, with railroads earning the barest minimum. But where is it written that digging coal out of the ground is what creates the value, and getting it where it’s used creates none? Transport may be as valuable as “production” of both commodities and content. The market should decide, not the industry with the best lobbyists.

What happens if ISPs can’t capture the value of providing transport? Of course, less investment flows to transport and we have less of it. Consumers will have to pay more of their dollars out of pocket for broadband, while Facebook’s boy CEO draws an excessive salary from atop a pile of overpriced stock holdings. The irony is thick when opponents of high executive compensation support “net neutrality” regulation.

Another reason why these Internet companies’ concerns are bogus is their size and popularity. They have a direct line to consumers and more than enough capability to convince consumers that any given ISP is wrongly degrading access to their services. As Tim Lee pointed out in his excellent paper, “The Durable Internet,” ownership of a network service does not equate to control. ISPs can be quickly reined in by the public, as has already happened.

A “net neutrality” subsidy for small start-up services is also unnecessary: They have no profits to share with ISPs. What about mid-size services—heading to profitability, but not there yet? Can ISPs choke them off? Absolutely not.

Large, established companies are not known for being ahead of trends, for one thing, and the anti-authoritarian culture of the Internet is the perfect place to play “beleaguered upstart” against the giant, evil ISP. There could be no greater PR gift than for a small service to have access to it degraded by an ISP.

The Internet companies’ plea for regulation is bogus, and these companies are losing their way. The leadership of these companies should fire their government relations staffs, disband their contrived advocacy organization, and get back to innovating and competing.

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/10/20/internet-companies-bogus-plea-for-regulation/

Title: Ariz. court rules records law covers 'metadata'
Post by: rachelg on November 05, 2009, 06:13:20 PM

Ariz. court rules records law covers 'metadata'

    * By PAUL DAVENPORT, Associated Press Writer - Thu Oct 29, 2009 6:38PM EDT
    * Add articles about technology to your My Yahoo! add to My Yahoo!

 

 
PHOENIX -


Hidden data embedded in electronic public records must be disclosed under Arizona's public records law, the state Supreme Court said Thursday in a groundbreaking ruling that attracted interest from media and government organizations.

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision, which overturned lower court rulings, is believed to be the first by a state supreme court on whether a public records law applies to so-called "metadata."

"This is at the cutting edge -- it's the law trying to catch up with technology," said David R. Merkel, a lawyer for a municipalities group that urged the justices to rule that metadata doesn't have to be disclosed.

Metadata can show how and when a document was created or revised and by whom. The information isn't visible when a document is printed on paper nor does it appear on screen in normal settings.

The Arizona ruling came in a case involving a demoted Phoenix police officer's request for data embedded in notes written by a supervisor. The officer got a printed copy but said he wanted the metadata to see whether the supervisor backdated the notes to before the demotion.

"It would be illogical, and contrary to the policy of openness underlying the public records law, to conclude that public entities can withhold information embedded in an electronic document, such as the date of creation, while they would be required to produce the same information if it were written manually on a paper public records," Justice Scott Bales wrote.

Disclosing metadata shouldn't be overly burdensome on public entities, Bales wrote.

Arizona's law generally requires governmental entities to release public records, but they don't have to create them to meet a request.

A Washington state appellate court ruled last year that metadata in e-mail received by a city's deputy mayor was a public record. Unlike Arizona's law, the Washington law specifically says the data is subject to disclosure. That case is pending before the Washington Supreme Court.

The League of Arizona Cities and Towns and other governmental entities filed briefs citing burdens of complying with requests for metadata and urging the justices to uphold a Court of Appeals ruling.

Meanwhile, media organizations, including The Associated Press, cited the media's watchdog role and asked the court to rule that the public records law applies to metadata.

The Arizona decision likely will have a "persuasive effect" on other states' courts, said Dan Barr, an attorney who filed a brief on behalf of the Society of Professional Journalists and other media organizations. 

"If there's metadata in there, that's public record," he said.

The ruling also means requested electronic records must be provided in that form rather than paper printouts, which makes them difficult and costly to search, Barr said.    :-)

The opinion said some metadata, like other public records, could be withheld for privacy or other reasons.

Title: Sunlight is the best disinfectant
Post by: rachelg on November 05, 2009, 06:14:56 PM

Justice Louis Brandeis  “Sunlight is the best disinfectant”

http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/about/
About the Sunlight Foundation
The Best of Disinfectants...
The Sunlight Foundation was co-founded in 2006 by Washington, DC businessman and lawyer Michael Klein and longtime Washington public interest advocate Ellen Miller with the non-partisan mission of using the revolutionary power of the Internet to make information about Congress and the federal government more meaningfully accessible to citizens. Through our projects and grant-making, Sunlight serves as a catalyst for greater political transparency and to foster more openness and accountability in government. Sunlight’s ultimate goal is to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their elected officials and to foster public trust in government. We are unique in that technology and the power of the Internet are at the core of every one of our efforts.

Our work is committed to helping citizens, bloggers and journalists be their own best government watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency. Since our founding in the spring of 2006, we have assembled and funded an array of web-based databases and tools including OpenCongress.org, FedSpending.org, OpenSecrets.org, EarmarkWatch.org and LOUISdb.org. These sites make millions of bits of information available online about the members of Congress, their staff, legislation, federal spending and lobbyists.

By facilitating the creation of new databases, and the maintenance and expansion of pre-existing ones, along with the application of technologies that free data from its silos, we have liberated gigabytes of important political data from basements, paper, .pdfs and other non-searchable and non-mashable formats. These efforts, combined with our own distributed investigative research projects, community-based engagement with Congress to bridge its technological gaps and lobbying to demand changes in how and what the government makes publicly available online, have created an unprecedented demand for more: more information, more transparency and more easy-to-use tools.

Underlying all of Sunlight’s efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the conduct of lawmakers and the public’s confidence in government.

Title: Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization
Post by: rachelg on November 17, 2009, 07:33:32 PM

Http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/11/local-bookstores-social-hubs-and-mutualization/

Local Bookstores, Social Hubs, and Mutualization
November 17th, 2009

Last month, the American Booksellers Association published an open letter to the Justice Department, asking Justice to investigate Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon after they lowered prices of best-selling books to under $10. The threat, the ABA says, is dire: “If left unchecked, these predatory pricing policies will devastate not only the book industry, but our collective ability to maintain a society where the widest range of ideas are always made available to the public, and will allow the few remaining mega booksellers to raise prices to consumers unchecked.”

Got that? Lower prices will lead to higher prices, and cheap books threaten to reduce the range of ideas in circulation. And don’t just take the ABA’s word for it. They also quote John Grisham’s agent and the owner of a book store, who both agree that cheap books are a horrible no-good very bad thing. So bad, in fact, that the Department of Justice must get involved, to shield the public from the scourge of affordable reading. (Just for the record, the ABA is also foursquare against ebooks being sold more cheaply than paper books, and thinks maybe Justice should look into that too.)

There may have been some Golden Age of Lobbying, where this kind of hysteria would have had led to public alarm. By now, though, the form is so debauched there’s probably a Word macro for describing competition as a Looming Threat To The Republic. (or The Children, or Civilization Itself. Depends on your audience.)

It’s not surprising that the ABA would write stuff like this — it’s their job to make self-interested claims. What is surprising is that there are members of the urban cognoscenti who still believe these arguments, arguments that made some sense twenty years ago, but have long since stopped doing so.

* * *

Twenty years ago, when we had Barnes and Noble but no Amazon, there was all kinds of literature, from 2600 to Love & Rockets, from Heather Has Two Mommies to Duplex Planet, that survived mainly in the independent ecosystem, but whose host bookstores also needed to sell enough Stephen King or M. Scott Peck to stay open. Fifteen years ago, when use of the web was still a minority pursuit, online bookselling changed this game, but hadn’t yet ended it. Even ten years ago, when more than half of U.S. adults had already become internet users, there were still many book lovers not online. Though the value of bookstores in supporting variety had shrunk, it was still there.

Those days are over. Internet use is as widespread as cable TV, and an internet user in rural Utah has access to more books than a citizen of Greenwich Village had before the web. Millions more books. Like record stores and video rental places, physical bookstores simply can’t compete for breadth of offering and, also like the social changes around music and moving images, the internet is strengthening rather than weakening the ability of niches and sub-cultures to see themselves reflected in long-form writing.

The internet also moderates the competitive threat, because the competition is only a click away. Amazon lists millions of books, but so does eBay, and publishers like O’Reilly or McGraw-Hill or Alyson can sell directly to the reader. If you had to choose between buying books only offline or only online, the choice that maximizes the number of ideas in circulation is unambiguously clear. Even if all but a dozen online booksellers were to vanish, there would still be more places to buy books on the web than there are bookstores in the average American city today.

* * *

Despite the spectacular breadth of available books created by online book sellers, many lovers of bookstores echo the ABA’s “Access to literature is at stake!” argument. In my experience, people make this argument for one of three reasons.

This first is that some people simply dislike change. For this group, the conviction that the world is getting worse merely attaches to whatever seems to be changing. These people will be complaining about kids today and their baggy pants and their online bookstores ’til the day they die.

A second group genuinely believes it’s still the 1990s somewhere. They imagine that the only outlets for books between Midtown and the Mission are Wal-Mart and Barnes and Noble, that few people in Nebraska have ever heard of Amazon, that countless avid readers have money for books but don’t own a computer. This group believes, in other words, that book buying is a widespread activity while internet access is for elites, the opposite of the actual case.

A third group, though, is making the ‘access to literature’ argument without much real commitment to its truth or falsehood, because they aren’t actually worried about access to literature, they are worried about bookstores in and of themselves. This is a form of Burkean conservatism, in which the value built up over centuries in the existence of bookstores should be preserved, even though their previous function as the principal link between writers and readers is being displaced.

This sort of commitment to bookstores is a normative argument, an argument about how things ought to be. It is also an argument that might succeed, as long as it re-imagines what bookstores are for and how they are supported, rather than merely hoping that if enough nice people seem really concerned, the flow of time will reverse.

* * *

The local bookstore creates all kinds of value for its community, whether its hosting community bulletin boards, putting rocking chairs in the kids section, hosting book readings, or putting benches out in front of the store. Local writers, harried parents, couples on dates, all get value from a store’s existence as a inviting physical location, value separate from its existence as a transactional warehouse for books.

The store doesn’t get paid for this value. It gets paid for selling books. That ecosystem works — when it works — as long as the people sitting in those rocking chairs buy enough books, on average, to cover the added cost of having the chairs in the first place. The blows to that model have been coming for some time, from big box retailers stocking best sellers to online sales (especially second-hand sales) to the spread of ebooks to, now, price wars.

Online bookselling improves on many of the core functions of a bookstore, not just price and breadth of available books, but ways of searching for books, and of getting recommendations and context. On the other hand, the functions least readily replicated on the internet — providing real space in a physical location occupied by living, breathing people — have always been treated as side effects, value created by the stores and captured by the community, but not priced directly into the transactions.

If the money from selling books falls below a certain threshold, the stores will cut back on something — hours, staff, rocking chairs — and their overall value will fall, meaning marginally fewer patrons and sales, threatening still more cutbacks. There may be a future in which they offer less value and make less money in some new and stable equilibrium, but beneath a certain threshold, the only remaining equilibrium is Everything Must Go. Given the margins for local bookstores, many of them are near that threshold today.

All of this makes it clear what local bookstores will have to do if the profits or revenues of the core transaction fall too far: collect revenue for the side-effects.

The most famous version of this is bookstore-as-coffeeshop, where the revenues from coffee subsidize the lingering over books and vice-versa, but other ways of generating revenue are possible. Reservable space for book clubs, writers rooms, or study carrels; membership with buy-back options for a second-hand book market run out of the same space; certain shopping hours reserved for members or donors; use of volunteer labor, like a food coop; sponsorships from the people or businesses in the neighborhood most interested in the social value of the store and most interested in being known as local machers.

The core idea is to appeal to that small subset of customers who think of bookstores as their “third place”, alongside home and work. These people care about the store’s existence in physical (and therefore social) space; the goal would be to generate enough revenue from them to make the difference between red and black ink, and to make the new bargain not just acceptable but desirable for all parties. A small collection of patron saints who helped keep a local bookstore open could be cheaply smothered in appreciation by the culture they help support.

* * *

Treating the old side-effects as the new core value would in many cases require non-profit status. This would push small stores who tried it towards the NPR model, with a mix of endowment, sponsorship, and donations, a choice that might be anathema to the current owners. However, the history of businesses that traffic in physical delivery of media has been grim these last few years. (This is the story of your local record store, RIP.)

Any change from a commercial to a cooperative model of support would also probably have to be accompanied by a renegotiation of commercial leases. Street level commerce seems to be undergoing some of the same changes urban warehouses and lofts went through in the 1960s and waterfront property went through in the 1990s, where the muscular old jobs of making, storing, and transporting goods receded, leaving those spaces open for colonization as dwellings.

In the current case, the spread of electronic commerce for everything from music to groceries is part of the increase in empty store fronts on shopping streets, leaving a series of Citi branches, ATT outlets, and Starbucks that repeat at regular intervals, like scenery in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Even when the current recession ends, it’s hard to imagine vibrant re-population of most of the empty commercial spaces, and it’s easy to imagine scenarios in which commercial districts suffer more: consolidation among pharmacy chains, an uptick in electronic banking, the end of our love affair with frozen yogurt, any of these could keep many street level spaces empty, whatever happens to the larger economy.

If commercial space does follow the warehouse-and-loft pattern, then we’ll need to find ways to re-purpose those spaces. Unlike lofts, however, street level living has never been a big draw, but turning those spaces into mixed commercial-and-communal use may offer a viable alternative.

This also comes with the standard disclaimer that it may not work. The gap between the money needed to stave off foreclosure and the money available from local beneficiaries may not match up in any configuration. Vehement declarations of support for local bookstores may turn out be mere snobbishness masquerading as commitment. The transition of revenue from “transactional warehouse” to “social hub” may be too fitful to create the needed continuity. Landlords may prefer to hold empty spaces at nominally high rents than re-price. And so on.

All of which is to say that trying to save local bookstores from otherwise predictably fatal competition by turning some customers into members, patrons, or donors is an observably crazy idea. However, if the sober-minded alternative is waiting for the Justice Department to anoint the American Booksellers Association as a kind of OPEC for ink, even crazy ideas may be worth a try.

Title: Your Movements Speak for Themselves: Space-Time Travel Data is Analytic Super-Fo
Post by: rachelg on November 18, 2009, 04:32:55 AM

BBG had posted something similiar but I think it is an important enough issue to post multiple articles on.
http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2009/08/your-movements-speak-for-themselves-spacetime-travel-data-is-analytic-superfood.htm

Your Movements Speak for Themselves: Space-Time Travel Data is Analytic Super-Food!

It doesn’t matter who you say you are!  Where you are (space), when you’re there (time), and your movements over time (travel) are closer to the truth.

I’ve seen a lot of data in my life, and I’d like to think I have a decent grip on what can be accomplished with data and analytics.  However, I recently stumbled upon some facts that have radically reshaped my understanding of the world we are living in.  What I thought was years away is already here! Our toes are dangling over the edge of a very different future.

Now, before you get all worked up, remember: You have helped create this, most folks love this, and most will continue to eat this up despite the obvious consequences.

Mobile devices in America are generating something like 600 billion geo-spatially tagged transactions per day.  Every call, text message, email and data transfer handled by your mobile device creates a transaction with your space-time coordinate (to roughly 60 meters accuracy if there are three cell towers in range), whether you have GPS or not.  Got a Blackberry?  Every few minutes, it sends a heartbeat, creating a transaction whether you are using the phone or not.  If the device is GPS-enabled and you’re using a location-based service your location is accurate to somewhere between 10 and 30 meters.  Using Wi-Fi?  It is accurate below10 meters.

Fancy.

It should be no surprise that all this data lives in the coffers of the cell providers.  Lots of people know that.  What is new, at least to me, is that this data is being provided to third parties that are leveraging specially designed analytics to make sense of our space-time-travel data.

With the data out and specialized analytics emerging, this infant industry is already doing some pretty amazing work. Your space-time-travel data makes where you live and where you work self-evident, and it reveals your most frequent, periodic, infrequent and rare destinations.

The data reveals the number of co-workers that join you Thursdays after work for a beer, and roughly where you all go. It knows where these same co-workers call home, and just exactly what kind of neighborhood they come from (e.g., average income, average home price) … information certainly useful to attentive direct marketing folks.

Large space-time data sets combined with advanced analytics enable a degree of understanding, discovery, and prediction that may be hard for many people to fully appreciate. Better prediction means a more efficient enterprise and nifty consumer services.

Cellular companies are now receiving essential insight about their customers (e.g., to better understand and predict customer churn).  Major retailers can now better understand changes in consumer behavior (e.g., how far their customers are traveling on average this month compared to previous months).  Consumers are benefiting by getting real-time traffic information so they can avoid congested roads.  (I have a colleague that thinks he is saving two to four hours a week in commute time due to this service!)

Tip o’ the iceberg.

I can barely get my mind around the ramifications. My concept about what comes next shifts almost daily now.  A government not so keen on free speech could use such data to see a crowd converging towards a protest site and respond before the swarm takes form –  detected and preempted, this protest never happens.  Or worse, it could be used to understand and then undermine any political opponent.

A stalker might be questioned just days after he starts and before his victim is personally aware of it – detection previously beyond human capacity.  Maybe it’s not a crime in this case, and it turns out to be just a private investigator with poor tradecraft hired by a suspicious husband.

Such a surveillance intensive future is inevitable, irreversible and as I have said before here … irresistible.

Why?  Companies must be competitive to survive and consumers have quite the appetite for almost anything that optimizes their life, especially if it’s cheap or free.  For example:

Tuesday afternoon your [free] Gmail account advises you that your buddy Ken is going to be 15 minutes late to the pool hall this coming Thursday, unless he leaves work 15 minutes early … which he has only done twice in seven years.  Brilliant!

Your Starbucks drink of choice (a grande vanilla soy latte in my case) is handed to you the instant you pull up, and you did not call ahead nor did they ask.  Priceless!

When powerful analytics commingle space-time-travel data with tertiary data, the world we live in will fundamentally change.  Organizations and citizens alike will operate with substantially more efficiency.  There will be less carbon emissions, increased longevity, and fewer deaths.

I think people should know about this imminent new age we are marching into.

[Theatrical pause.  Breathe.]

Now I’m going to step back and address some questions you may have, using the good news/bad news format.

Good news: The space-time-travel collected by the cellular network carriers is de-identified when provided to these third parties for privacy reasons in that it does not include your name, address, phone number, etc.; rather, unique identifiers are assigned to transactions from the same device so that trends can be measured.

Bad news: If you were to provide your home, work and one other address (e.g., gym, school) in most cases, with just these data points, you are re-identified.  With just a few days of space-time-travel activity, your top three or four more frequently visited destinations become self-evident, and without a whole hell of a lot of effort you could be re-identified through a tertiary data set like a credit header.

Good news: There is so much data being produced, a lot of transactions are tossed aside, are sampled and summarized to make the computational effort feasible.  Historical data also falls off the back of the wagon (ages off the system) rather quickly.

Bad news: The competitive nature of this emerging business model will likely require these organizations to make more sense of more data faster.  Cloud computing and new classes of algorithms will make it possible to keep more transaction detail, keep it longer, and commingle it with other large and very interesting secondary data sets (e.g., phone books and property records).

Good news: So far there are only a handful of companies already entrusted with this data.

Bad news.  It may not be good news that only a few companies do this.  If only one company can monitor the consumer foot traffic of all Nordstrom stores in near real time,  this would be an unfair advantage in terms of predetermining its financial condition before anyone else.  As I learned from countless conversations with my friends at the ACLU, very powerful tools in the hands of a few is not often a good idea without one hell of a lot of oversight and accountability. And even then, this is no panacea.

Good news: Some of the organizations holding space-time-travel data are fully aware of the privacy consequences and are offering consumers the ability to opt-out – meaning, if they get a transaction about you it will be permanently removed from the system and all future correlation.

Bad news: If by chance a snapshot of sufficient detail had been sold off to another party before the opt-out request, then the toothpaste is out of the tube.  Data tends to replicate, more about this here.

Good news: Not any old mom and pop operation can get into this business.

Bad news: That won’t be true for long.  Suppose an aspiring entrepreneur makes a compelling proposition to a number of parties holding space-time-travel data.  Anticipating free analytics and a cut of the future action, the parties work a deal. For computing power this entrepreneur simply hops onto Amazon’s EC2 cloud and partners with a data aggregator to get some tertiary data and what do they have?  An ultra-sexy prediction engine.

Good news: People tend to appreciate location-based services, which is why they are opting in.

Bad news: Sensitive information about people is no longer under their own control.  As well, a number of well held secrets (e.g., your hideout) evaporate overnight.

Good news: If you want to escape the consequences of having your space-time-travel being graphed by others, here are some options that come to mind:

    (a) Stop using mobile devices;

    (b) Use multiple devices e.g., use one device only at work, and only a land line at home – all mobile devices being off at all other times (never moving around with a device on) – being sure these mobile devices are registered to someone other than you – and if you need to use some kind of device while on the move or at other locations. see (c) below;

    (c) Unregistered, cash-purchased, disposable devices – used once then discarded (or recycled!) – although in some cases you can use the device a few times, but you better let some fancy software (which I may have to invent) advise you what is safe usage and what is not.

    (d) If you can figure out locations on earth where only one cell tower exists (and you are not moving between towers and never using GPS or Wi-Fi) you will probably live safely under the radar – unless you are a way bad mofo and others know it, in which case, you are ‘going down’ anyway because there are more tricks (expensive) which will be levied against you.

Bad news: Few are willing to be this inconvenienced.  And if only a handful of innocent, clean living folks go to this same effort that the bad guys MUST employ … well crap, that in itself may be considered by some to be signal.

Net Net: My guess is most consumers don’t fully realize how their space-time-travel data is accumulating and congealing.  I hope consumers come to appreciate how all of these nice conveniences of life are delivered. And I hope they will continue to enjoy these while they make better informed decisions, especially with respect to their privacy.

However, without a feedback loop consumers may never fully appreciate what can be gleaned from their space-time-travel trail. Therefore, one way to enlighten the consumer would involve holders of space-time-travel data to permit an owner of a mobile device the ability to also see what they can see:

    (a) The top 10 places you spend the most time (e.g., 1. a home address, 2. a work address, 3. a secondary work facility address, 4. your kids school address, 5. your gym address, and so on);

    (b) The top three most predictable places you will be at a specific time when on the move (e.g., Vegas on the 215 freeway passing the Rainbow exit on Thursdays 6:07 - 6:21pm -- 57% of the time);

    (c) The first name and first letter of the last name of the top 20 people that you regularly meet-up with (turns out to be wife, kids, best friends, and co-workers – and hopefully in that order!)

    (d) The best three predictions of where you will be for more than one hour (in one place) over the next month, not counting home or work.

I think Google’s Android and Latitude products might be able to move on something like this first.  It would then be cool if other holders of space-time-travel data followed.

On the subject of privacy and civil liberties consequences, privacy by design is essential.  And for those of you with ideas in the area of policy or technology, I would be most appreciative if you would share these thoughts with me … sooner rather than later.

I will continue sharing perspectives about these ideas and the apparent consequences with my many friends in the privacy community, the defense/intelligence community, and media.  (Surprisingly, their feedback so far has been quite similar.)  I am also speaking with the organizations amassing and analyzing this space-time-travel data to learn more about what is possible.  From the perspective of the analytic engines I create, this space-time-travel data looks like “super foodl

Title: The State of User Tracking and the Impossibility of Anonymizing Data
Post by: rachelg on November 18, 2009, 04:35:12 AM

http://www.messagingnews.com/onmessage/ben-gross/state-user-tracking-and-impossibility-anonymizing-data
The State of User Tracking and the Impossibility of Anonymizing Data
By Ben Gross

What we think is reasonable, commonplace, or even possible in terms of protecting or violating online privacy shifts constantly. Recent developments in tools and techniques for tracking online behavior and identifying individuals from supposedly anonymized data sets should cause us to reevaluate what is possible.

Katherine McKinley of iSEC Partners published a detailed analysis of how popular browsers and browser extensions handle cookies and other methods of local data storage used for tracking users in her December, 2008 paper Cleaning Up after Cookies (PDF). McKinley tested the ability for browsers and extensions to clear the private data as well as “private browsing” features. She found that most browsers attempted to clear previous stored private data, but often left some data accessible. She found that Adobe Flash did not attempt to remove this data and in fact stored it in such a way that it circumvented most privacy protections offered by browsers. iSEC Partners created an online version of the test used in the article to allow individuals to test their own configurations. It is available atBreadcrumbs Tracker.

The August, 2009 paper Flash Cookies and Privacy by Ashkan Soltani and Shannon Canty and Quentin Mayo and Lauren Thomas and Chris Jay Hoofnagle at UC Berkeley focuses directly on the privacy issues related to Flash Cookies. The authors survey the top 100 web sites according to QuantCast in July of 2009 and found that more than half of them used Flash cookies. The authors note that unlike standard HTTP cookies, Flash cookies do not have an expiration date and are stored in a different location on the file system that is harder to find. Most cookie management tools will not delete these type of cookies and they remain in place even when private browsing mode in enabled. The authors found that Flash cookies were frequently employed to track users that had explicitly attempted to prevent cookie tracking by using the Flash cookie to regenerate a HTTP cookie that had been deleted.

Most significant online services employ multiple tracking services for analytics, performance monitoring, and usability analysis. The most common technique is to include additional JavaScript in the user’s webpage for tracking. The paper On the Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information Via Online Social Networks presented at the ACM Workshop on Online Social Networks by Balachander Krishnamurthy and Craig Wills describes the techniques used by advertising firms and social networks services to track users and the types of information they release. The authors studied information leakage from twelve online social networks. They found that the bulk of user information is released through HTTP headers and third-party cookies.

In his post Netflix’s Impending (But Still Avoidable) Multi-Million Dollar Privacy Blunder on the Freedom to Tinker blog, Paul Ohm discusses his 2009 publication Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization in the context of the announcement of the second Netflix prize for improving the accuracy of Netflix predictions. Ohm argues that it is not possible to anonymize the data and that it is irresponsible and possibly illegal to release it. Netflix released a half a million anonymized subscriber records for analysis in the original contest. The one million dollar prize offered resulted in significant numbers of researchers competing for the one million dollar prize and understandably gained quite a bit of notoriety.

Soon after the Netflix records were released, researchers Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov proved they were able to identify individual subscribers by combining the data with other databases with their publication Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets (PDF) presented at the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy that describes How to Break Anonymity of the Netflix Prize Dataset. Narayanan and Shmatikov continued their work on de-anonymizing social networks such as Twitter in De-Anonymizing Social Networks (PDF) (paper FAQ) a paper presented at the 2009 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. Ohm, reminds the readers about the scandal that occurred in 2006 when AOL researchers Greg Pass, Abdur Chowdhury, and Cayley Torgeson presented their paper A Picture of Search at the first International Conference on Scalable Information Systems. The authors released an anonymized dataset they analyzed in the paper that included more than six hundred thousand AOL users. Some users in the data were subsequently identified.

Carnegie Mellon University professor Latanya Sweeney is widely referenced as the source for much of the current work on de-anonymizing data sets. Her paper All the Data on All The People(only abstract is publicly available) published in 2000, showed that it was possible identify individuals in US Census data using only a small number of variables. The paper argues that it is possible to identify almost 90% of the US population using only full date of birth, gender, and ZIP code.

Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross (no relation) presented their research on Predicting Social Security Numbers from Public Data show that it is possible to effectively automate the process of predicting an individual’s Social Security Numbers (SSN) for significant portions of the population using public information. They show that the information used to create predictions is easily harvested from social networking sites, voter registration records, and commercial databases. Aquiusti and Gross argue that we must reconsider our policies around the use of SSNs as the numbers are commonly used for authentication and are commonly abused by identity thieves.

Title: Your Morning Commute is Unique: On the Anonymity of Home/Work Location Pairs
Post by: rachelg on November 18, 2009, 04:36:59 AM

http://33bits.org/2009/05/13/your-morning-commute-is-unique-on-the-anonymity-of-homework-location-pairs/

Your Morning Commute is Unique: On the Anonymity of Home/Work Location Pairs

Philippe Golle and Kurt Partridge of PARC have a cute paper (pdf) on the anonymity of geo-location data. They analyze data from the U.S. Census and show that for the average person, knowing their approximate home and work locations — to a block level — identifies them uniquely.

Even if we look at the much coarser granularity of a census tract — tracts correspond roughly to ZIP codes; there are on average 1,500 people per census tract — for the average person, there are only around 20 other people who share the same home and work location. There’s more: 5% of people are uniquely identified by their home and work locations even if it is known only at the census tract level. One reason for this is that people who live and work in very different areas (say, different counties) are much more easily identifiable, as one might expect.

The paper is timely, because Location Based Services  are proliferating rapidly. To understand the privacy threats, we need to ask the two usual questions:

   1. who has access to anonymized location data?
   2. how can they get access to auxiliary data linking people to location pairs, which they can then use to carry out re-identification?

The authors don’t say much about these questions, but that’s probably because there are too many possibilities to list! In this post I will examine a few.

GPS navigation. This is the most obvious application that comes to mind, and probably the most privacy-sensitive: there have been many controversies around tracking of vehicle movements, such as NYC cab drivers threatening to strike. The privacy goal is to keep the location trail of the user/vehicle unknown even to the service provider — unlike in the context of social networks, people often don’t even trust the service provider. There are several papers on anonymizing GPS-related queries, but there doesn’t seem to be much you can do to hide the origin and destination except via charmingly unrealistic cryptographic protocols.

The accuracy of GPS is a few tens or few hundreds of feet, which is the same order of magnitude as a city block. So your daily commute is pretty much unique. If you took a (GPS-enabled) cab home from work at a certain time, there’s a good chance the trip can be tied to you. If you made a detour to stop somewhere, the location of your stop can probably be determined. This is true even if there is no record tying you to a specific vehicle.

ScreenshotLocation based social networking. Pretty soon, every smartphone will be capable of running applications that transmit location data to web services. Google Latitude and Loopt are two of the major players in this space, providing some very nifty social networking functionality on top of location awareness. It is quite tempting for service providers to outsource research/data-mining by sharing de-identified data. I don’t know if anything of the sort is being done yet, but I think it is clear that de-identification would offer very little privacy protection in this context. If a pair of locations is uniquely identifying, a trail is emphatically so.

The same threat also applies to data being subpoena’d, so data retention policies need to take into consideration the uselessness of anonymizing location data.

I don’t know if cellular carriers themselves collect a location trail from phones as a matter of course. Any idea?

Plain old web browsing. Every website worth the name identifies you with a cookie, whether you log in or not. So if you browse the web from a laptop or mobile phone from both home and work, your home and work IP addresses can be tied together based on the cookie. There are a number of free or paid databases for turning IP addresses into geographical locations. These are generally accurate up to the city level, but beyond that the accuracy is shaky.

A more accurate location fix can be obtained by IDing WiFi access points. This is a curious technological marvel that is not widely known. Skyhook, Inc. has spent years wardriving the country (and abroad) to map out the MAC addresses of wireless routers. Given the MAC address of an access point, their database can tell you where it is located. There are browser add-ons that query Skyhook’s database and determine the user’s current location. Note that you don’t have to be browsing wirelessly — all you need is at least one WiFi access point within range. This information can then be transmitted to websites which can provide location-based functionality; Opera, in particular, has teamed up with Skyhook and is “looking forward to a future where geolocation data is as assumed part of the browsing experience.” The protocol by which the browser communicates geolocation to the website is being standardized by the W3C.

The good news from the privacy standpoint is that the accurate geolocation technologies like the Skyhook plug-in (and a competing offering that is part of Google Gears) require user consent. However, I anticipate that once the plug-ins become common, websites will entice users to enable access by (correctly) pointing out that their location can only be determined to within a few hundred meters, and users will leave themselves vulnerable to inference attacks that make use of location pairs rather than individual locations.

Image metadata. An increasing number of cameras these days have (GPS-based) geotagging built-in and enabled by default. Even more awesome is the Eye-Fi card, which automatically uploads pictures you snap to Flickr (or any of dozens of other image sharing websites you can pick from) by connecting to available WiFi access points nearby. Some versions of the card do automatic geotagging in addition.

If you regularly post pseudonymously to (say) Flickr, then the geolocations of your pictures will probably reveal prominent clusters around the places you frequent, including your home and work. This can be combined with auxiliary data to tie the pictures to your identity.

Now let us turn to the other major question: what are the sources of auxiliary data that might link location pairs to identities? The easiest approach is probably to buy data from Acxiom, or another provider of direct-marketing address lists. Knowing approximate home and work locations, all that the attacker needs to do is to obtain data corresponding to both neighborhoods and do a “join,” i.e, find the (hopefully) unique common individual. This should be easy with Axciom, which lets you filter the list by  “DMA code, census tract, state, MSA code, congressional district, census block group, county, ZIP code, ZIP range, radius, multi-location radius, carrier route, CBSA (whatever that is), area code, and phone prefix.”

Google and Facebook also know my home and work addresses, because I gave them that information. I expect that other major social networking sites also have such information on tens of millions of users. When one of these sites is the adversary — such as when you’re trying to browse anonymously — the adversary already has access to the auxiliary data. Google’s power in this context is amplified by the fact that they own DoubleClick, which lets them tie together your browsing activity on any number of different websites that are tracked by DoubleClick cookies.

Finally, while I’ve talked about image data being the target of de-anonymization, it may equally well be used as the auxiliary information that links a location pair to an identity — a non-anonymous Flickr account with sufficiently many geotagged photos probably reveals an identifiable user’s home and work locations. (Some attack techniques that I describe on this blog, such as crawling image metadata from Flickr to reveal people’s home and work locations, are computationally expensive to carry out on a large scale but not algorithmically hard; such attacks, as can be expected, will rapidly become more feasible with time.)

devicesSummary. A number of devices in our daily lives transmit our physical location to service providers whom we don’t necessarily trust, and who keep might keep this data around or transmit it to third parties we don’t know about. The average user simply doesn’t have the patience to analyze and understand the privacy implications, making anonymity a misleadingly simple way to assuage their concerns. Unfortunately, anonymity breaks down very quickly when more than one location is associated with a person, as is usually the case.

Title: Anti H1B Sites Ordered Offline
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 28, 2009, 08:08:46 PM

Sites that take issue with H1B guest worker visas have been sued for libel and ordered offline. Methinks this might prove a blueprint for folks who seek to stifle internet viewpoints they disagree with:

Court orders three H-1B sites disabled
Judge's ruling to shut down three opposition sites is part of Apex libel lawsuit
Patrick Thibodeau
 

December 28, 2009 (Computerworld) A New Jersey judge has ordered the shutdown of three H-1B opposition Web sites and seeks information about the identity of anonymous posters.

On Dec. 23, Middlesex County Superior Court Judge James Hurley ordered firms that register domains and provide hosting services -- GoDaddy Inc., Network Solutions, Comcast Cable Communications Inc. and DiscountASP.Net, to disable the three sites, ITgrunt.com, Endh1b.com, and Guestworkerfraud.com. Facebook Inc. was also ordered to disable ITgrunt's Facebook page.

DiscountASP.Net said it has disabled Endh1b.com after it received the order from the New Jersey Superior Court. The order did not request any account information, only that the company "...immediately shut down and disable the website www.endh1b.com until further order of this court..," a spokesman said in an email. Facebook said it received the document Monday.

GoDaddy is complying with the order and has suspended the web hosting for ITgrunt.com, said Laurie Anderson. GoDaddy disputes manager, domain services.

The web site Endh1b.com is registered but not hosted at Go Daddy, Anderson added in an e-mail. "Both domain names have been placed on registrar lock due to the pending litigation. When Go Daddy receives a court order, it is standard procedure to comply," she said.

Hurley's order was made in response to a libel lawsuit filed by IT services and consulting firm Apex Technology Group Inc., based in Edison, N.J. against the three Web sites opposing the H-1B visa program.

The issue is creating a stir among H-1B opponents working in IT-related jobs who fear their posts could result in the loss of their jobs.

Two of the sites, itgrunt.com and endh1b.com, were offline this morning, but guestworkerfraud.com remained operating.

The company is seeking the identity of a person who posted an Apex employment agreement on Docstoc.com, that has since been removed. A link to the document and comments critical of it has been posted on a variety of Web sites, including at least one in India, on Desicrunch.com. The comment broadly alleges that employees will find it difficult to leave Apex because of its contract terms.

Apex, in one legal filing, said the allegations by the anonymous posters are false and defamatory, and were hurting the company. In the filing, Apex said it "has had three consultants refuse to report for employment" as a result postings, according to legal documents.

Apex said it is also seeking "contact details of the individual who posted this legal agreement without permission since we are the copyright owner of the legal document."

Accoring to court documents, a writer responding to admin@endh1b.com wrote that the site has "not posted a legal agreement and don't have the contact details of anyone of our contributors. We will also protect the privacy of any members of our community."

Patrick Papalia, an attorney representing Apex, said that the company has already identified an employee who left the initial comment. But he said the issue goes well beyond the agreement and involves threatening and racist comments against company officials, as well as ongoing allegations that it is engaging in illegal activities. "Apex has an outstanding reputation in the information technology field," he said.

John Miano, who heads the Programmers Guild and is also an attorney, and who one represented one the parties involved in the dispute, said it is "rather chilling" to have a court in New Jersey ordering the shutdown of Web sites operated by people with no connection to New Jersey.

The operator of ITgrunt.com deferred questions to Donna Conroy, who heads Bright Future Jobs, an activist organization on the H-1B issue, who detailed her concerns about it in a post on her site.

In an email, she said, "I'm astonished that an American judge would force American web sites to rat on American workers who wouldn't snitch on an Indian H-1B. If this order stands, it will rob the security every American expects when they post complaints anonymously or express their opinions on-line. It will create a credible threat that Americans could face retaliation from any current or former employer."

The operator of Guestworkerfraud.com linked to ITgrunt.com's blog entry and said he added some comments of his own. He doesn't allow comments on this site. He has since removed the entry concerning Apex. He says he won't let the New Jersey judge "run the Internet and silence free speech by shutting down the whole site. Hence, my site is still up." He asked that his name not be used, in response to an email.

The ISPs and registrars were contacted. ITgrunt operates a page on Facebook. A company spokesman said it has not been formally served. The other companies didn't respond by press time.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142806/Court_orders_three_H_1B_sites_disabled?taxonomyId=10&pageNumber=2

Title: MS Lingo
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on December 31, 2009, 03:29:38 PM

Secret language
by Joel Spolsky
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Microsoft Careers: “If you’re looking for a new role where you’ll focus on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for KT and Steve B in ‘Compete’, build a complete left to right understanding of the subsidiary, have a large amount of executive exposure, build and manage the activities of a v-team of 13 district Linux& Open Office Compete Leads, and develop a broad set of marketing skills and report to a management team committed to development and recognized for high WHI this is the position for you!”

This is ironic, to use the Alanis Morissette meaning of the word [NSFW video].

The whole reason Microsoft even needs a v-team of 13, um, “V DASHES” to compete against Open Office is that they’ve become so insular that their job postings are full of incomprehensible jargon and acronyms which nobody outside the company can understand. With 93,000 employees, nobody ever talks to anyone outside the company, so it's no surprise they've become a bizarre borg of "KT", "Steve B", "v-team", "high WHI," CSI, GM, BG, BMO (bowel movements?) and whatnot.

When I worked at Microsoft almost two decades ago we made fun of IBM for having a different word for everything. Everybody said, "Hard Drive," IBM said "Fixed Disk." Everybody said, "PC," IBM said "Workstation." IBM must have had whole departments of people just to FACT CHECK the pages in their manuals which said, "This page intentionally left blank."

Now when you talk to anyone who has been at Microsoft for more than a week you can’t understand a word they’re saying. Which is OK, you can never understand geeks. But at Microsoft you can’t even understand the marketing people, and, what’s worse, they don’t seem to know that they’re speaking in their own special language, understood only to them.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/12/30.html

Title: Enabling Espionage Against Us
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on January 26, 2010, 03:13:01 PM

U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google
cnn | 23 Jan 2010 | Bruce Schneier


U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Google says hackers from China got into its Gmail system
Bruce Schneier says hackers exploited feature put into system at behest of U.S. government
When governments get access to private communications, they invite abuse, he says
Government surveillance and control of Internet is flourishing, he says
Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World." Read more of his writing at www.schneier.com.

Google made headlines when it went public with the fact that Chinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, in a politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The news here isn't that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or that their attempts are technically sophisticated -- we knew that already -- it's that the U.S. government inadvertently aided the hackers.
In order to comply with government search warrants on user data, Google created a backdoor access system into Gmail accounts. This feature is what the Chinese hackers exploited to gain access.
Google's system isn't unique. Democratic governments around the world -- in Sweden, Canada and the UK, for example -- are rushing to pass laws giving their police new powers of Internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell.
Many are also passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain information on their customers. In the U.S., the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act required phone companies to facilitate FBI eavesdropping, and since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems with the help of those phone companies.
Systems like these invite misuse: criminal appropriation, government abuse and stretching by everyone possible to apply to situations that are applicable only by the most tortuous logic. The FBI illegally wiretapped the phones of Americans, often falsely invoking terrorism emergencies, 3,500 times between 2002 and 2006 without a warrant. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.

Official misuses are bad enough, but it's the unofficial uses that worry me more. Any surveillance and control system must itself be secured. An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don't.
China's hackers subverted the access system Google put in place to comply with U.S. intercept orders. Why does anyone think criminals won't be able to use the same system to steal bank account and credit card information, use it to launch other attacks or turn it into a massive spam-sending network? Why does anyone think that only authorized law enforcement can mine collected Internet data or eavesdrop on phone and IM conversations?
These risks are not merely theoretical. After September 11, the NSA built a surveillance infrastructure to eavesdrop on telephone calls and e-mails within the U.S. Although procedural rules stated that only non-Americans and international phone calls were to be listened to, actual practice didn't match those rules. NSA analysts collected more data than they were authorized to and used the system to spy on wives, girlfriends and notables such as President Clinton.
But that's not the most serious misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure. In Greece, between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government: the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice.
Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone's products and enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn't one of those governments, but someone still unknown -- A rival political party? Organized crime? Foreign intelligence? -- figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on.
And surveillance infrastructure can be exported, which also aids totalitarianism around the world. Western companies like Siemens and Nokia built Iran's surveillance. U.S. companies helped build China's electronic police state. Just last year, Twitter's anonymity saved the lives of Iranian dissidents, anonymity that many governments want to eliminate.
In the aftermath of Google's announcement, some members of Congress are reviving a bill banning U.S. tech companies from working with governments that digitally spy on their citizens. Presumably, those legislators don't understand that their own government is on the list.
This problem isn't going away. Every year brings more Internet censorship and control, not just in countries like China and Iran but in the U.S., the U.K., Canada and other free countries, egged on by both law enforcement trying to catch terrorists, child pornographers and other criminals and by media companies trying to stop file sharers.
The problem is that such control makes us all less safe. Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in. And it's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Bruce Schneier.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hacking/index.html

Title: FCC loses on Net Neutrality
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 06, 2010, 09:21:13 AM

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Tue, April 06, 2010 -- 11:23 AM ET
-----

Court Rules Against F.C.C. in 'Net Neutrality' Case

A federal appeals court has ruled that the Federal
Communications Commission lacks the authority to require
broadband providers to give equal treatment to all Internet
traffic flowing over their networks.

Tuesday's ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia is a big victory for the Comcast
Corporation, the nation's largest cable company. It had
challenged the F.C.C.'s authority to impose so called "net
neutrality" obligations.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com?emc=na

Title: Zombie Bureaucrats end run court decision
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 06, 2010, 06:34:57 AM

Endrunning the recent court decision?
======
By AMY SCHATZ
WASHINGTON—In a move that will stoke a battle over the future of the Internet, the federal government plans to propose regulating broadband lines under decades-old rules designed for traditional phone networks.

The decision, by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, is likely to trigger a vigorous lobbying battle, arraying big phone and cable companies and their allies on Capitol Hill against Silicon Valley giants and consumer advocates.

Breaking a deadlock within his agency, Mr. Genachowski is expected Thursday to outline his plan for regulating broadband lines. He wants to adopt "net neutrality" rules that require Internet providers like Comcast Corp. and AT&T Inc. to treat all traffic equally, and not to slow or block access to websites.

The decision has been eagerly awaited since a federal appeals court ruling last month cast doubt on the FCC's authority over broadband lines, throwing into question Mr. Genachowski's proposal to set new rules for how Internet traffic is managed. The court ruled the FCC had overstepped when it cited Comcast in 2008 for slowing some customers' Internet traffic.

In a nod to such concerns, the FCC said in a statement that Mr. Genachowski wouldn't apply the full brunt of existing phone regulations to Internet lines and that he would set "meaningful boundaries to guard against regulatory overreach."

Some senior Democratic lawmakers provided Mr. Genachowski with political cover for his decision Wednesday, suggesting they wouldn't be opposed to the FCC taking the re-regulation route towards net neutrality protections.



"The Commission should consider all viable options," wrote Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, W.V.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, and Rep. Henry Waxman (D, Calif.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in a letter.

At stake is how far the FCC can go to dictate the way Internet providers manage traffic on their multibillion-dollar networks. For the past decade or so, the FCC has maintained a mostly hands-off approach to Internet regulation.  Internet giants like Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc., which want to offer more Web video and other high-bandwidth services, have called for stronger action by the FCC to assure free access to websites.  Cable and telecommunications executives have warned that using land-line phone rules to govern their management of Internet traffic would lead them to cut billions of capital expenditure for their networks, slash jobs and go to court to fight the rules.

Consumer groups hailed the decision Wednesday, an abrupt change from recent days, when they'd bombarded the FCC chairman with emails and phone calls imploring him to fight phone and cable companies lobbyists.

"On the surface it looks like a win for Internet companies," said Rebecca Arbogast, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus. "A lot will depend on the details of how this gets implemented."

Mr. Genachowski's proposal will have to go through a modified inquiry and rule-making process that will likely take months of public comment. But Ms. Arbogast said the rule is likely to be passed since it has the support of the two other Democratic commissioners. 

President Barack Obama vowed during his campaign to support regulation to promote so-called net neutrality, and received significant campaign contributions from Silicon Valley. Mr. Genachowski, a Harvard Law School buddy of the president, proposed new net neutrality rules as his first major action as FCC chairman.

Telecom executives say privately that limits on their ability to change pricing would make it harder to convince shareholders that the returns from spending billions of dollars on improving a network are worth the cost.  Carriers fear further regulation could handcuff their ability to cope with the growing demand put on their networks by the explosion in Internet and wireless data traffic. In particular, they worry that the FCC will require them to share their networks with rivals at government-regulated rates.

Mike McCurry, former press secretary for President Bill Clinton and co-chair of the Arts + Labs Coalition, an industry group representing technology companies, telecom companies and content providers, said the FCC needs to assert some authority to back up the general net neutrality principles it outlined in 2005.

"The question is how heavy a hand will the regulatory touch be," he said. "We don't know yet, so the devil is in the details. The network operators have to be able to treat some traffic on the Internet different than other traffic—most people agree that web video is different than an email to grandma. You have to discriminate in some fashion."

UBS analyst John Hodulik said the cable companies and carriers were likely to fight this in court "for years" and could accelerate their plans to wind down investment in their broadband networks.

"You could have regulators involved in every facet of providing Internet over time. How wholesale and prices are set, how networks are interconnected and requirements that they lease out portions of their network," he said.

Title: Wireless networks = public networks
Post by: ccp on May 15, 2010, 07:23:28 AM

There is no question they did this purposely.  This is all the new corporate crime going on.  And no one is looking, no one is doing anything about it.  They pay people to snoop like this  They have been doing this to Katherine and I for years and we can't stop it.  Everything is wireless or wireless capable now.  You get this stuff sold to you as though it is some sort of upgrade.  "Oh we will throw this in there too...."

They often hire ex cons to do this.  MSFT does it all the time. They have departments that do this. This is by and away how the entertainment industry gets their material - by watching others and stealing it.

Until the gov. gets serious and enforces laws and puts people away - this kind of stuff will continue to grow.

****TECHNOLOGY MAY 14, 2010, 7:54 P.M. ET Google Says It Mistakenly Collected Data on Web Usage By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
Google Inc. said an internal investigation has discovered that the roving vans the company uses to create its online mapping services were mistakenly collecting data about websites people were visiting over wireless networks.

The Internet giant said it would stop collecting Wi-Fi data from its StreetView vans, which workers drive to capture street images and to locate Wi-Fi networks. The company said it would dispose of the data it had accidentally collected.

Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research for Google, wrote in a blog post that the company uncovered the mistake while responding to a German data-protection agency's request for it to audit the Wi-Fi data, amid mounting concerns that Google's practices violated users' privacy.

The camera of a German Google Street View car looms over the car next to the Google logo at the Google stand at the CeBIT Technology Fair on March 3, 2010 in Hannover, Germany.
Journal Community
Vote: From an end to online sales of Nexus One to privacy concerns over StreetView's WiFi surveys, will the setbacks hurt Google's momentum? Google had previously said it was collecting the location of Wi-Fi hot spots from its StreetView vehicles, but not the information being transmitted over those networks by users.

"It's now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products," wrote Mr. Eustace. "We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake."

Google said it has been collecting and keeping the data since around 2007. At that time, the team building the software to gather the location of Wi-Fi hot spots mistakenly included some experimental software that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast Wi-Fi data.

"It is another example of the how the company hasn't effectively grappled with the massive amount of information it collects," said Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Experience WSJ professional Editors' Deep Dive: Google, Others Struggle With PrivacyTR DAILY
Privacy Can Exist With Innovation, Symposium Speakers SayDow Jones News Service
Facebook Bolsters D.C. PresenceComputerworld (Australia)
Privacy groups target Google Street ViewAccess thousands of business sources not available on the free web. Learn More Due to the mistake, Google could have collected information about which websites people were accessing, from online videos they were watching to emails they were sending.

But Google would only have collected data if the website and the Wi-Fi connection weren't secured. Many major websites that carry personal information, such as financial-services sites, are encrypted so no data from such services were collected, a Google spokesman said. Mr. Eustace wrote that Google only had "fragments" of data, since its cars were on the move.

Google uses the Wi-Fi data to improve its location-based services. By having a database of Wi-Fi hot spots, Google can identify a mobile user's approximate location based on cell towers and Wi-Fi access points that are visible to their device. A Google spokesman said the company would continue to offer those products.

The disclosure comes as Google's collection of Wi-Fi data—along with other real-life imagery it uses in its mapping services—have come under intense scrutiny from some privacy advocates, specifically in Europe. In April, Google moved to defend the service and what it collects in a lengthy blog post in which it said it did not collect or store payload data.

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved****

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: ccp on July 09, 2010, 10:28:29 AM

Make no mistake about it this is no mistake.
This is rampant.  If organized crime does this to Katherine and myself in the music business which is rampantly all stealing of other people's property then one knows it is rampant on Wall Street, Washington, politics, the entire entertainment business, media business, as well as all levels of criminals from the low level computer literate street thugs up to the top of the IT businesses including MSFT, APPLE, Google and probably most of the rest of them.
The executives of Google must be held crimnally liable.  But they won't.  They have too much money.

****Friday, 9 July 2010 09:26 UK
Google's Street View 'snoops' on Congress members 
By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley 

Ms Harman's home was one of five where the wifi network was tested
Google's popular Street View project may have collected personal information of members of Congress, including some involved in national security issues.

The claim was made by leading advocacy group, Consumer Watchdog which wants Congress to hold hearings into what data Google's Street View possesses.

Google admitted it mistakenly collected information, transmitted over unsecured wireless networks, as its cars filmed locations for mapping purposes.

Google said the problem began in 2006.

The issue came to light when German authorities asked to audit the data.

The search giant said the snippets could include parts of an email, text, photograph, or even the website someone might be viewing.

"We think the Google Wi-Spy effort is one of the biggest wire tapping scandals in US history," John Simpson of Consumer Watchdog told BBC News.

Drive-by spying

The group conducted an experiment to highlight the vulnerability some users expose themselves to by retracing the same routes, used by Street View cars, to detect unencrypted or open networks.


 
The Street View car takes photos for the service
This practice is often described as "drive-by spying" and is favoured by criminals who trawl the streets to find houses or businesses using unencrypted wifi, so they can steal financial information.

Google has stressed all along that someone would need to be using the network as their cars passed by and that the in-car wifi equipment automatically changes channels roughly five times a second.

Consumer Watchdog focused on a number of high profile politicians whose homes appear on Google's Street View maps.

It found that Congresswoman Jane Harman, who heads the intelligence sub committee for the House's Homeland Security Committee, has an open home network that could have leaked out vital information that could have been picked up by Street View vehicles.

Ms Harman's office has not responded to calls for comment on the issue. Consumer Watch said it did not collect any information but did pinpoint where unsecure networks could be found.

"Our purpose was to show that members of Congress are targets just as much as every other citizen in the land" said Mr Simpson.

'Concerns'

The experiment found that a further four residences it checked had vulnerable networks in the vicinity that may belong to members of Congress.

This included the home of Congressman Henry Waxman, chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over internet issues.

 
The ability to tap into open networks is a major security issue
His office told BBC News that "Chairman Waxman has previously raised concerns about Google" which were contained in a letter sent to company chief executive Eric Schmidt in May.

At that time, Mr Waxman said the Committee was "interested in the nature of this data collection, the underlying technology your fleet of Street View cars employed, the use of the information collected, and the impact it could have on consumer privacy".

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, CCIA, said the tactics used by Consumer Watchdog left a lot to be desired.

"What Consumer Watchdog did was not a useful contribution to what could and should be a broader online privacy debate," said CCIA president Ed Black.

"They detected unsecured wifi networks that anyone, including neighbours, can pick up. It proves nothing about what, if anything, a person or company like Google might have done to intercept and record data."

'Major progress'

Consumer Watchdog wants Congress to hold hearings on the issue and ensure that Google boss Mr Schmidt be made to testify under oath.

In a statement, Google wrote "as we've said before, it was a mistake for us to include code in our software that collected payload data, but we believe we did nothing illegal. We're continuing to work with the relevant authorities to answer their questions and concerns".

That includes German authorities who said it was still waiting to receive a copy of data gathered by the Street View cars.

The office of Johannes Caspar, the head of the Hamburg Data Protection Authority, told the BBC that a deadline set for earlier this week was extended at Google's request because of the recent 4th of July national holiday.****

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 09, 2010, 12:59:22 PM

Tangent:  Jane Harman is my Congresswoman.

Title: Estimated cost to outsource cracking your router password or encrypted zip file.
Post by: rachelg on August 03, 2010, 07:34:49 PM

Estimated cost to outsource cracking your router password or encrypted zip file. $17. http://bit.ly/axq4tx

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 04, 2010, 06:12:32 AM

My 17 year old son provides tech support at his high school (through a program that also has him working a 40K job over the summer. I was flipping freaking burgers at his age). They have a dual wireless network at his school, with one network for the general public, and the other supposedly secure for teachers and admin. The technology staff member my son reports to didn't think the password for the second network was particularly secure, and asked my son to prove so by cracking it. The project excited my kid, he wired up several PCs he'd ported to LINUX to try to brute force it, and then also set about trying to sniff it with a utility he'd found that he put on the iTouch he'd jailbroken. Took him about a week to crack it, but he did via a combination of techniques.

If a 17 year old can do this stuff out of spare parts he cobbled together and hacked, imagine what a dedicated hacker with the latest and greatest could do.

Title: A savvy friend comments
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 18, 2010, 06:31:32 AM

People in North America are no longer using digital cable to view programming.   With a Roku, Playstation or Xbox, as long as you don’t have to watch cable system programming when the programs are first shown, you can actually cut your cable or satellite bill significantly.

Cisco invested heavily in the cable set top box (STB) model when it acquired Scientific Atlanta.  But everything including TV signals are moving to Ethernet packets.  Google and Apple TV are also examples of this trend.  NetFlix has survived and prospered because it recognized this phenomenon long before Blockbuster.  In its last earnings call, CSCO revealed that its North American sales to MSO’s (multiple system operators) declined 30%.

IMO, the recession here has accelerated the convergence of the Internet with TV as people look to cut fixed monthly household expenses.

I believe that in this decade, Apple and Google/Amazon will supplant the major MSO’s as the prime source of video programming to the home and to the wireless device such as the iPad.  If AAPL has any major vulnerability in this environment, it is its walled garden approach to providing programming versus a more open source at Google/Amazon.  In many respects, AAPL reminds me on AOL at its peak 15-20 years ago.


And don’t dismiss wireless as a strong competitor to cable.  The new 4G LTE systems that are nearing implementation can provide very robust download speeds for Ethernet packets.  LTE has won the battle with WiMax as the most widely adopted worldwide standard for 4G.  Why do you think that Verizon is selling iPads now?  In 1-2 years, in the more densely populated areas of North America, it may be more efficient to access the internet directly by wireless.  This also attacks Cisco’s Linksys division because direct wireless access obviates the need for a WiFi router.

 

Anyway, this article prompted me to share these thoughts.  I now watch almost half of my video over the internet.  How much video do you now watch over the internet?

 

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a3986a1c-f28c-11df-a2f3-00144feab49a.html#ixzz15dYSiZDL

Viewers pull plug on US cable television
By Matthew Garrahan in Los Angeles

Published: November 17 2010 21:31 | Last updated: November 17 2010 21:31

The number of people subscribing to US cable television services has suffered its biggest decline in 30 years as younger, tech-savvy viewers lead an exodus to web-based operations, such as Hulu and Netflix.

The total number of subscribers to TV services provided by cable, satellite and telco operators fell by 119,000 in the third quarter, compared with a gain of 346,000 in the third quarter of 2009, according to SNL Kagan, a research company.
Although television services offered by telecoms and satellite providers added subscribers over the period, cable operators were hard hit, with subscriber numbers falling by 741,000 – the largest decline in 30 years.

The figures suggest that “cord-cutting” – one of the pay-television industry’s biggest fears – is becoming a reality as viewers drift to web-based platforms.

Online TV services are stepping up their efforts to reach new viewers and become profitable: Hulu, which is owned by News Corp, Walt Disney and NBC Universal, has slashed the cost of its online subscription service by 20 per cent to $7.99 per month and offers a vast array of film and TV programming.

Jason Kilar, Hulu’s chief executive, has maintained that Hulu, which is exploring an initial public offering, complements pay-television services.

Yet the data suggest that the growth of Hulu and Netflix, the DVD subscription company which began testing a $7.99 per month streaming-only service last month, has become problematic for cable operators.

Ian Olgeirson, senior analyst at SNL Kagan, said it was becoming “increasingly difficult” to dismiss the impact of web-based services on the pay-TV industry, “particularly after seeing declines during the period of the year that tends to produce the largest subscriber gains due to seasonal shifts back to television viewing and subscription packages”.

Hulu’s revenues are increasing sharply: the company is projected to generate more than $240m in 2010, up from $108m in 2009. It has extended the number of devices that can access its subscription service to include Sony’s PlayStation 3 console and will add internet-connected devices, including Vizio, LG Electronics and Panasonic Blu-ray players, in the next few months.

Devices such as Apple’s iPad also appear to be accelerating the move away from traditional multichannel television.

Research from The Diffusion Group, a technology research company, found that more than a third of iPad users were likely to cancel their pay-TV subscriptions in the next six months.

The cable industry has launched a vigorous defence against cord-cutting: companies such as Comcast, which has agreed to buy NBC Universal, are backing “TV Everywhere”, which gives subscribers access to channels and programming online, and via their cable box.

 

 

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Vicbowling on December 10, 2010, 11:51:22 AM

Sort of along the line of twitter is the possibility to watch your home through your home security systems (http://www.alarm.com/) if you use an android phone. There is an android app that allows you to keep an eye on things at home, or wherever, while you're away. I think that's a pretty cool idea. Tiny Cam Monitor Free is one app: http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.alexvas.dvr

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: G M on December 10, 2010, 12:01:37 PM

Keep in mind those same cameras could be used to monitor you and verify when you are away from home.

Title: Only getting worse
Post by: ccp on December 11, 2010, 10:21:13 AM

It is impossible to secure anything electronic.  Impossible.

And not only via internet.  Everything is going wireless.  Everything is being connected.  And with that everything can be accessed.

In our house we are not wireless or connected to internet though we are still being hacked through our home because the wiring has been rigged.

I read article in Scientific American.  It was about how electronic components are made all over the world and shipped around from one fab to another where the final product is put together.  In the article it explains how the chips are so small, so complex, the circuits so confusing that NO ONE could possibly figure it all out.  Even one sitting in an FBI lab.  There is no question espionage whether state sponsored, criminally sponsored or some jerk like Assange could embed into the hardware chips that could sit in wait for years before they start spying and sending out information or someone who is bribed get it off the computer device.  It used to be the final electronic devices were made at one fab so at least there could be some control some oversight.   Now with devices made from parts from many countries there is zero chance for quality assurance with regards to security.  Only an idiot could imagine the Chinese are not giving us parts with "gifts" buried deep inside.


With regards to my own experience I have spoken on message boards for years how no matter what we do we cannot stop the cyberthieves who are well funded, well connected, some dedicated hackers some PHDs (John Joseph Leeson - Central Florida computer Phd.).  Indeed the music industry is flooded with computer geeks.   Disney, Sony, Dreamworks have all done many songs with Katherine' stolen lyrics.  For God's sake these companies invent the devices we use.  Anyone think for one second people connected to them cannot figure out how to steal data?

There is NO hope of stopping this.  Forget it.  One thing for certain is the laws are too slow and will liely never be harsh enough.  We need to make punishment for such crimes as severe as possible.  Assange should certainly be facing life in prison or the death penalty.  We need to make examples of the very very few people who commit these acts and who get actually do get caught.  We do need a branch of the military dedicated to this.  We also need to beef up our law enforcement in this area. 

Forgive me my fellow law enforcement officers but I would rather see them be retrained in computers and continue working till 65 helping with this area.  Forget early retirement but pay for training give a good raise.  We need you to fight the stuff going on right under our noses

Title: WSJ: John Fund on "Net Neutrality"?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 22, 2010, 06:00:21 AM

By JOHN FUND
The Federal Communications Commission's new "net neutrality" rules, passed on a partisan 3-2 vote yesterday, represent a huge win for a slick lobbying campaign run by liberal activist groups and foundations. The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility.

There's little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic. Over 300 House and Senate members have signed a letter opposing FCC Internet regulation, and there will undoubtedly be even less support in the next Congress.

Yet President Obama, long an ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April that the agency doesn't have the power to enforce net neutrality. He is seeking to impose his will on the Internet through the executive branch. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a former law school friend of Mr. Obama, has worked closely with the White House on the issue. Official visitor logs show he's had at least 11 personal meetings with the president.

More
Internet Gets New Rules
Opinion: The FCC's Threat to Internet Freedom
Video: What Net Neutrality Really Means
.The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that "any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself." Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been "taken out of context." He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was "hesitant to say I'm not a Marxist."

For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski's press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC's chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.

Free Press has been funded by a network of liberal foundations that helped the lobby invent the purported problem that net neutrality is supposed to solve. They then fashioned a political strategy similar to the one employed by activists behind the political speech restrictions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill. The methods of that earlier campaign were discussed in 2004 by Sean Treglia, a former program officer for the Pew Charitable Trusts, during a talk at the University of Southern California. Far from being the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, Mr. Treglia noted, the campaign-finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by foundations like Pew.

"The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot," he told his audience. He noted that "If Congress thought this was a Pew effort, it'd be worthless." A study by the Political Money Line, a nonpartisan website dealing with issues of campaign funding, found that of the $140 million spent to directly promote campaign-finance reform in the last decade, $123 million came from eight liberal foundations.

View Full Image

Martin Kozlowski
 .After McCain-Feingold passed, several of the foundations involved in the effort began shifting their attention to "media reform"—a movement to impose government controls on Internet companies somewhat related to the long-defunct "Fairness Doctrine" that used to regulate TV and radio companies. In a 2005 interview with the progressive website Buzzflash, Mr. McChesney said that campaign-finance reform advocate Josh Silver approached him and "said let's get to work on getting popular involvement in media policy making." Together the two founded Free Press.

Free Press and allied groups such as MoveOn.org quickly got funding. Of the eight major foundations that provided the vast bulk of money for campaign-finance reform, six became major funders of the media-reform movement. (They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers's Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.) Free Press today has 40 staffers and an annual budget of $4 million.

These wealthy funders pay for more than publicity and conferences. In 2009, Free Press commissioned a poll, released by the Harmony Institute, on net neutrality. Harmony reported that "more than 50% of the public argued that, as a private resource, the Internet should not be regulated by the federal government." The poll went on to say that since "currently the public likes the way the Internet works . . . messaging should target supporters by asking them to act vigilantly" to prevent a "centrally controlled Internet."

To that end, Free Press and other groups helped manufacture "research" on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an "independent review of existing information" for the agency in order to "lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making."

Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit. Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.

The Berkman Center's FCC- commissioned report, "Next Generation Connectivity," wound up being funded in large part by the Ford and MacArthur foundations. So some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.

The FCC's "National Broadband Plan," released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.

So the "media reform" movement paid for research that backed its views, paid activists to promote the research, saw its allies installed in the FCC and other key agencies, and paid for the FCC research that evaluated the research they had already paid for. Now they have their policy. That's quite a coup.

Mr. Fund is a columnist for WSJ.com.

Title: BO wants you to have an internet ID
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 08, 2011, 02:21:05 PM

President Obama is putting plans in motion to give the Commerce Department authority to create an Internet ID for all Americans, a White House official told CNET.com.

White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt told the website it is "the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government" to centralize efforts toward creating an "identity ecosystem" for the Internet.

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace is currently being drafted by the Obama administration and will be released by the president in a few months.

"We are not talking about a national ID card. We are not talking about a government-controlled system. What we are talking about is enhancing online security and privacy, and reducing and perhaps even eliminating the need to memorize a dozen passwords, through creation and use of more trusted digital identities," Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said at an event Friday at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, according to CNET.com.

Locke added that the Commerce Department will be setting up a national program office to work on this project.

The move has raised eyebrows about privacy issues.

"The government cannot create that identity infrastructure," Jim Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology told the website. "If I tried to, I wouldn't be trusted."

Schmidt stresses that anonymity will remain on the Internet, saying there's no chance that "a centralized database will emerge."

Title: Egypt shuts down the Internet
Post by: bigdog on January 29, 2011, 03:08:24 AM

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/The-day-part-of-the-Internet-apf-1092937415.html?x=0

 (AP) -- About a half-hour past midnight Friday morning in Egypt, the Internet went dead.

Title: Sent by a not always reliable internet friend
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2011, 10:01:02 AM

I am clueless in these things.  Any comments from the more cyber-literate amongst us?

    Does your government have an Internet kill-switch? Read our guide to
    Guerrilla Networking and be prepared for when the lines get cut.


      By Patrick Miller, David Daw

Jan 28, 2011 3:50 PM

These days, no popular movement goes without an Internet presence of
some kind, whether it's organizing on Facebook or spreading the word
through Twitter. And as we've seen in Egypt
</article/218052/egypt_expands_communications_blackout.html>, that means
that your Internet connection can be the first to go. Whether you're
trying to check in with your family, contact your friends, or simply
spread the word, here are a few ways to build some basic network
connectivity when you can't rely on your cellular or landline Internet
connections.


    Do-It-Yourself Internet With Ad-Hoc Wi-Fi

Even if you've managed to find an Internet connection for yourself, it
won't be that helpful in reaching out to your fellow locals if they
can't get online to find you. If you're trying to coordinate a group of
people in your area and can't rely on an Internet connection, cell
phones, or SMS, your best bet could be a wireless mesh network
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network> of
sorts--essentially, a distributed network of wireless networking devices
that can all find each other and communicate with each other. Even if
none of those devices have a working Internet connection, they can still
find each other, which, if your network covers the city you're in, might
be all you need. At the moment, wireless mesh networking isn't really
anywhere close to market-ready, though we have seen an implementation of
the 802.11s draft standard, which extends the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard to
include wireless mesh networking, in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO
laptop </article/140931/first_look_olpcs_xo_laptop.html>.

However, a prepared guerrilla networker with a handful of PCs could make
good use of Daihinia <http://daihinia.com/> ($25, 30-day free trial), an
app that piggybacks on your Wi-Fi adapter driver to turn your normal
ad-hoc Wi-Fi network into a multihop ad-hoc network (disclaimer: we
haven't tried this ourselves yet), meaning that instead of requiring
each device on the network to be within range of the original access
point, you simply need to be within range of a device on the network
that has Daihinia installed, effectively allowing you to add a wireless
mesh layer to your ad-hoc network.

Advanced freedom fighters can set up a portal Web page on their network
that explains the way the setup works, with Daihinia instructions and a
local download link so they can spread the network even further. Lastly,
just add a Bonjour-compatible chat client like Pidgin
<http://pidgin.im/> or iChat, and you'll be able to talk to your
neighbors across the city without needing an Internet connection.


    Back to Basics

Remember when you stashed your old modems in the closet because you
thought you might need them some day? In the event of a total
communications blackout--as we're seeing in Egypt, for example--you'll
be glad you did. Older and simpler tools, like dial-up Internet or even
ham radio, could still work, since these "abandoned" tech avenues aren't
being policed nearly as hard.

In order to get around the total shutdown of all of the ISPs within
Egypt, several international ISPs are offering dial-up access to the
Internet to get protesters online, since phone service is still
operational. It's slow, but it still works--the hard part is getting the
access numbers without an Internet connection to find them.

Unfortunately, such dial-up numbers can also be fairly easily shut down
by the Egyptian government, so you could also try returning to FidoNet
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet>--a distributed networking system
for BBSes that was popular in the 1980s. FidoNet is limited to sending
only simple text messages, and it's slow, but it has two virtues: Users
connect asynchronously, so the network traffic is harder to track, and
any user can act as the server, which means that even if the government
shuts down one number in the network, another one can quickly pop up to
take its place.

You could also take inspiration from groups that are working to create
an ad-hoc communications network into and out of Egypt using Ham Radio
<http://werebuild.eu/wiki/Egypt/Main_Page#Hamradio>, since the signals
are rarely tracked and extremely hard to shut down or block. Most of
these efforts are still getting off the ground, but hackers are already
cobbling together ways to make it a viable form of communication into
and out of the country.


    Always Be Prepared

In the land of no Internet connection, the man with dial-up is king.
Here are a few gadgets that you could use to prepare for the day they
cut the lines.

Given enough time and preparation, your ham radio networks could even be
adapted into your own ad-hoc network using Packet Radio
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio>, a radio communications
protocol that you can use to create simple long-distance wireless
networks to transfer text and other messages between computers. Packet
Radio is rather slow and not particularly popular (don't try to stream
any videos with this, now), but it's exactly the kind of networking
device that would fly under the radar.

In response to the crisis in Egypt, nerds everywhere have risen to call
for new and exciting tools for use in the next government-mandated
shutdown. Bre Pettis, founder of the hackerspace NYC Resistor
<http://www.nycresistor.com/> and creator of the Makerbot
<http://www.makerbot.com/> 3D printer, has called for "Apps for the
Appocalypse
<http://www.brepettis.com/blog/2011/1/28/apps-for-the-appocolypse.html>," including
a quick and easy way to set up chats on a local network so you can talk
with your friends and neighbors in an emergency even without access to
the Internet. If his comments are any indication, Appocalypse apps may
be headed your way soon.

Tons of cool tech are also just waiting to be retrofitted for these
purposes. David Dart's Pirate Box <http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox>
is a one-step local network in a box originally conceived for file
sharing and local P2P purposes, but it wouldn't take much work to adapt
the Pirate Box as a local networking tool able to communicate with other
pirate boxes to form a compact, mobile set of local networks in the
event of an Internet shutdown.

Whether you're in Egypt or Eagle Rock, you rely on your Internet access
to stay in touch with friends and family, get your news, and find
information you need. (And read PCWorld, of course.) Hopefully with
these apps, tools, and techniques, you won't have to worry about
anyone--even your government--keeping you from doing just that.

/Patrick Miller hopes he isn't first against the wall when the
revolution comes. Find him on Twitter
<http://www.twitter.com/pattheflip>or Facebook
<http://www.facebook.com/pages/Patrick-Miller/182003891816882>--if you
have a working Internet connection, anyway. /

/David Daw is an accidental expert in ad-hoc networks since his
apartment gets no cell reception. Find him on Twitter
<http://twitter.com/#%21/DavidHDaw/> or send him a ham radio signal. /

http://www.pcworld.com/printable/article/id,218155/printable.html
/
/

--
We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once. --
Calvin Coolidge

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Vicbowling on February 01, 2011, 12:06:42 PM

That's actually pretty intimidating - the thought that even our anatomies are going to be reduced to computer data and easily transmitted wirelessly. It is the inevitable future and some sinking feeling I have says that this is probably how our grandparents felt with our generation's emerging technology.

association management software (http://www.alinity.com/)

Title: GPS and picture posting
Post by: bigdog on February 02, 2011, 01:20:59 PM

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/video?id=7621105&syndicate=syndicate&section

Title: Stratfor: Social Media
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 03, 2011, 05:29:18 AM

Social Media as a Tool for Protest
February 3, 2011


By Marko Papic and Sean Noonan

Internet services were reportedly restored in Egypt on Feb. 2 after being completely shut down for two days. Egyptian authorities unplugged the last Internet service provider (ISP) still operating Jan. 31 amidst ongoing protests across the country. The other four providers in Egypt — Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr — were shut down as the crisis boiled over on Jan. 27. Commentators immediately assumed this was a response to the organizational capabilities of social media websites that Cairo could not completely block from public access.

The role of social media in protests and revolutions has garnered considerable media attention in recent years. Current conventional wisdom has it that social networks have made regime change easier to organize and execute. An underlying assumption is that social media is making it more difficult to sustain an authoritarian regime — even for hardened autocracies like Iran and Myanmar — which could usher in a new wave of democratization around the globe. In a Jan. 27 YouTube interview, U.S. President Barack Obama went as far as to compare social networking to universal liberties such as freedom of speech.

Social media alone, however, do not instigate revolutions. They are no more responsible for the recent unrest in Tunisia and Egypt than cassette-tape recordings of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini speeches were responsible for the 1979 revolution in Iran. Social media are tools that allow revolutionary groups to lower the costs of participation, organization, recruitment and training. But like any tool, social media have inherent weaknesses and strengths, and their effectiveness depends on how effectively leaders use them and how accessible they are to people who know how to use them.


How to Use Social Media

The situations in Tunisia and Egypt have both seen an increased use of social networking media such as Facebook and Twitter to help organize, communicate and ultimately initiate civil-disobedience campaigns and street actions. The Iranian “Green Revolution” in 2009 was closely followed by the Western media via YouTube and Twitter, and the latter even gave Moldova’s 2009 revolution its moniker, the “Twitter Revolution.”

Foreign observers — and particularly the media — are mesmerized by the ability to track events and cover diverse locations, perspectives and demographics in real time. But a revolution is far more than what we see and hear on the Internet — it requires organization, funding and mass appeal. Social media no doubt offer advantages in disseminating messages quickly and broadly, but they also are vulnerable to government counter-protest tactics (more on these below). And while the effectiveness of the tool depends on the quality of a movement’s leadership, a dependence on social media can actually prevent good leadership from developing.

The key for any protest movement is to inspire and motivate individuals to go from the comfort of their homes to the chaos of the streets and face off against the government. Social media allow organizers to involve like-minded people in a movement at a very low cost, but they do not necessarily make these people move. Instead of attending meetings, workshops and rallies, un-committed individuals can join a Facebook group or follow a Twitter feed at home, which gives them some measure of anonymity (though authorities can easily track IP addresses) but does not necessarily motivate them to physically hit the streets and provide fuel for a revolution. At the end of the day, for a social media-driven protest movement to be successful, it has to translate social media membership into street action.

The Internet allows a revolutionary core to widely spread not just its ideological message but also its training program and operational plan. This can be done by e-mail, but social media broaden the exposure and increase its speed increases, with networks of friends and associates sharing the information instantly. YouTube videos explaining a movement’s core principles and tactics allow cadres to transmit important information to dispersed followers without having to travel. (This is safer and more cost effective for a movement struggling to find funding and stay under the radar, but the level of training it can provide is limited. Some things are difficult to learn by video, which presents the same problems for protest organizers as those confronted by grassroots jihadists, who must rely largely on the Internet for communication.) Social media can also allow a movement to be far more nimble about choosing its day of action and, when that day comes, to spread the action order like wildfire. Instead of organizing campaigns around fixed dates, protest movements can reach hundreds of thousands of adherents with a single Facebook post or Twitter feed, launching a massive call to action in seconds.

With lower organizational and communications costs, a movement can depend less on outside funding, which also allows it to create the perception of being a purely indigenous movement (without foreign supporters) and one with wide appeal. According to the event’s Facebook page, the April 6 Movement in Egypt had some 89,250 people claiming attendance at a Jan. 28 protest when, in fact, a much smaller number of protestors were actually there according to STRATFOR’s estimates. The April 6 Movement is made up of the minority of Egyptians who have Internet access, which the OpenNet Initiative estimated in August 2009 to be 15.4 percent of the population. While this is ahead of most African countries, it is behind most Middle Eastern countries. Internet penetration rates in countries like Iran and Qatar are around 35 percent, still a minority of the population. Eventually, a successful revolutionary movement has to appeal to the middle class, the working class, retirees and rural segments of the population, groups that are unlikely to have Internet access in most developing countries. Otherwise, a movement could quickly find itself unable to control the revolutionary forces it unleashed or being accused by the regime of being an unrepresentative fringe movement. This may have been the same problem that Iranian protestors experienced in 2009.

Not only must protest organizers expand their base beyond Internet users, they must also be able to work around government disruption. Following the Internet shutdown in Egypt, protesters were able to distribute hard-copy tactical pamphlets and use faxes and landline telephones for communications. Ingenuity and leadership quickly become more important than social media when the government begins to use counter-protest tactics, which are well developed even in the most closed countries.


Countering Social Media

Like any other tool, social media have their drawbacks. Lowering the costs of communication also diminishes operational security. Facebook messages can be open for all to see, and even private messages can be viewed by authorities through search warrants in more open countries or pressure on the Internet social media firms in more closed ones. Indeed, social media can quickly turn into a valuable intelligence-collection tool. A reliance on social media can also be exploited by a regime willing to cut the country off from Internet or domestic text messaging networks altogether, as has been the case in Egypt.

The capability of governments to monitor and counteract social media developed alongside the capability of their intelligence services. In order to obtain an operating license in any country, social networking websites have to come to some sort of agreement with the government. In many countries, this involves getting access to user data, locations and network information. Facebook profiles, for example, can be a boon for government intelligence collectors, who can use updates and photos to pinpoint movement locations and activities and identify connections among various individuals, some of whom may be suspect for various activities. (Facebook has received funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, and many Western intelligence services have start-up budgets to develop Internet technologies that will enable even deeper mining of Internet-user data.)

In using social media, the tradeoff for protest leaders is that they must expose themselves to disseminate their message to the masses (although there are ways to mask IP addresses and avoid government monitoring, such as by using proxy servers). Keeping track of every individual who visits a protest organization’s website page may be beyond the capabilities of many security services, depending on a site’s popularity, but a medium designed to reach the masses is open to everyone. In Egypt, almost 40 leaders of the April 6 Movement were arrested early on in the protests, and this may have been possible by identifying and locating them through their Internet activities, particularly through their various Facebook pages.

Indeed, one of the first organizers of the April 6 Movement became known in Egypt as “Facebook Girl” following her arrest in Cairo on April 6, 2008. The movement was originally organized to support a labor protest that day in Mahalla, and organizer Esraa Abdel Fattah Ahmed Rashid found Facebook a convenient way to organize demonstrations from the safety of her home. Her release from prison was an emotional event broadcast on Egyptian TV, which depicted her and her mother crying and hugging. Rashid was then expelled from the group and no longer knows the password for accessing the April 6 Facebook page. One fellow organizer called her “chicken” for saying she would not have organized the protest if she had thought she would be arrested. Rashid’s story is a good example of the challenges posed by using social media as a tool for mobilizing a protest. It is easy to “like” something or someone on Facebook, but it is much harder to organize a protest on the street where some participants will likely be arrested, injured or killed.

Beyond monitoring movement websites, governments can also shut them down. This has been common in Iran and China during times of social unrest. But blocking access to a particular website cannot stop tech-savvy Internet users employing virtual private networks or other technologies to access unbanned IP addresses outside the country in order to access banned sites. In response to this problem, China shut down Internet access to all of Xinjiang Autonomous Region, the location of ethnic Uighur riots in July 2009. More recently, Egypt followed the same tactic for the entire country. Like many countries, Egypt has contracts with Internet service providers that allow the government to turn the Internet off or, when service providers are state-owned, to make life difficult for Internet-based organizers.

Regimes can also use social media for their own purposes. One counter-protest tactic is to spread disinformation, whether it is to scare away protestors or lure them all to one location where anti-riot police lie in wait. We have not yet witnessed such a government “ambush” tactic, but its use is inevitable in the age of Internet anonymity. Government agents in many countries have become quite proficient at trolling the Internet in search of pedophiles and wannabe terrorists. (Of course, such tactics can be used by both sides. During the Iranian protests in 2009, many foreign-based Green Movement supporters spread disinformation over Twitter to mislead foreign observers.)

The most effective way for the government to use social media is to monitor what protest organizers are telling their adherents either directly over the Internet or by inserting an informant into the group, counteracting the protestors wherever and whenever they assemble. Authorities monitoring protests at World Trade Organization and G-8 meetings as well as the Republican and Democratic national conventions in the United States have used this successfully. Over the past two years in Egypt, the April 6 Movement has found the police ready and waiting at every protest location. Only in recent weeks has popular support grown to the point where the movement has presented a serious challenge to the security services.

One of the biggest challenges for security services is to keep up with the rapidly changing Internet. In Iran, the regime quickly shut down Facebook but not Twitter, not realizing the latter’s capabilities. If social media are presenting a demonstrable threat to governments, it could become vital for security services to continually refine and update plans for disrupting new Internet technology.


Quality of Leadership vs. Cost of Participation

There is no denying that social media represent an important tool for protest movements to effectively mobilize their adherents and communicate their message. As noted above, however, the effectiveness of the tool depends on its user, and an overreliance can become a serious detriment.

One way it can hurt a movement is in the evolution of its leadership. To lead a protest movement effectively, an organization’s leadership has to venture outside of cyberspace. It has to learn what it means to face off against a regime’s counterintelligence capabilities in more than just the virtual world. By holding workshops and mingling among the populace, the core leadership of a movement learns the different strategies that work best with different social strata and how to appeal to a broad audience. Essentially, leaders of a movement that exploits the use of social media must take the same risks as those of groups that lack such networking capability. The convenience and partial anonymity of social media can decrease the motivation of a leader to get outside and make things happen.

Moreover, a leadership grounded in physical reality is one that constructs and sticks to a concerted plan of action. The problem with social media is that they subvert the leadership of a movement while opening it to a broader membership. This means that a call for action may spread like wildfire before a movement is sufficiently prepared, which can put its survival in danger. In many ways, the Iranian Green Revolution is a perfect example of this. The call for action brought a self-selected group of largely educated urban youth to protest in the streets, where the regime cracked down harshly on a movement it believed was not broad enough to constitute a real threat.

A leadership too reliant on social media can also become isolated from alternative political movements with which it may share the common goal of regime change. This is especially the case when other movements are not “youth movements” and therefore are not as tech savvy. This can create serious problems once the revolution is successful and an interim government needs to be created. The Serbian Otpor (Resistance) movement was successful in the 2000 Serbian democratic revolution precisely because it managed to bring together a disparate opposition of pro-Western and nationalist forces. But to facilitate such coalition building, leaders have to step away from computers and cell phones and into factories, rice paddies and watering holes they normally would never want to enter. This is difficult to do during a revolution, when things are in flux and public suspicion is high, especially of those who claim to be leading a revolution.

Even when a media-savvy leader has a clear plan, he or she may not be successful. For instance, Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister of Thailand and telecommunications magnate, has used his skills to hold video conference calls with stadiums full of supporters, and launched two massive waves of protests involving some 100,000 supporters against the Thai government in April 2009 and April and May 2010, yet he still has not succeeded in taking power. He remains a disembodied voice, capable of rocking the boat but incapable of taking its helm.


Simply a Convenience

Shutting down the Internet did not reduce the numbers of Egyptian protesters in the streets. In fact, the protests only grew bigger as websites were shut down and the Internet was turned off. If the right conditions exist a revolution can occur, and social media do not seem to change that. Just because an Internet-based group exists does not make it popular or a threat. There are Facebook groups, YouTube videos and Twitter posts about everything, but that does not make them popular. A neo-Nazi skinhead posting from his mother’s basement in Illinois is not going to start a revolution in the United States, no matter how many Internet posts he makes or what he says. The climate must be ripe for revolution, due to problems like inflation, deflation, food shortages, corruption and oppression, and the population must be motivated to mobilize. Representing a new medium with dangers as well as benefits, social media do not create protest movements; they only allow members of such movements to communicate more easily.

Other technologies like short-wave radio, which can also be used to communicate and mobilize, have been available to protestors and revolutionaries for a long time. In reality, so has the Internet, which is the fundamental technological development that allows for quick and widespread communications. The popularity of social media, one of many outgrowths of the Internet, may actually be isolated to international media observation from afar. We can now watch protest developments in real time, instead of after all the reports have been filed and printed in the next day’s newspaper or broadcast on the nightly news. Western perceptions are often easily swayed by English-speaking, media-savvy protestors who may be only a small fraction of a country’s population. This is further magnified in authoritarian countries where Western media have no choice but to turn to Twitter and YouTube to report on the crisis, thus increasing the perceived importance of social media.

In the Middle East, where Internet penetration is below 35 percent (with the exception of Israel), if a movement grows large enough to effect change it will have been joined through word of mouth, not through social networking. Still, the expansion of Internet connectivity does create new challenges for domestic leaders who have proved more than capable of controlling older forms of communication. This is not an insurmountable challenge, as China has shown, but even in China’s case there is growing anxiety about the ability of Internet users to evade controls and spread forbidden information.

Social media represent only one tool among many for an opposition group to employ. Protest movements are rarely successful if led from somebody’s basement in a virtual arena. Their leaders must have charisma and street smarts, just like leaders of any organization. A revolutionary group cannot rely on its most tech-savvy leaders to ultimately launch a successful revolution any more than a business can depend on the IT department to sell its product. It is part of the overall strategy, but it cannot be the sole strategy.

Title: I've got a better name
Post by: G M on February 10, 2011, 02:31:25 PM

Skynet

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12400647

Robots could soon have an equivalent of the internet and Wikipedia.

European scientists have embarked on a project to let robots share and store what they discover about the world.

Called RoboEarth it will be a place that robots can upload data to when they master a task, and ask for help in carrying out new ones.

Researchers behind it hope it will allow robots to come into service more quickly, armed with a growing library of knowledge about their human masters.

Title: NYT: How Mubarak shut down Egypt's internet
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 16, 2011, 05:16:12 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/technology/16internet.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha22

Title: Net neutrality. Good,Bad,Ugly
Post by: ccp on February 22, 2011, 10:01:16 AM

After reading this article and now understand the reasoning for "net neutrality".

From Scientific American:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=keep-the-internet-fair

Keep the Internet Fair
The government's net neutrality compromise fell flat. Here's a simple fix

By The Editors  | March 3, 2011 | 6
 
The island of Key Biscayne, Fla., sits in the Atlantic Ocean 10 miles southeast of Miami. Its 10,000 residents depend on the Rickenbacker Causeway, a four-mile-long toll bridge connecting the island to the mainland, for all their supplies. Right now all vehicles passing through must pay a set toll—$1.50 for cars, $9.00 for three-axle cargo trucks, and so on. But what would happen if a bridge owner decided to charge a toll based not on the size of a vehicle but on the cargo it was carrying? He could let his brother’s lumber-supply company through for free and make its chief competitor pay through the nose. He could force the Winn-Dixie grocery store to double its prices, pushing area residents to local restaurants. In short, the bridge owner would have the power to control everything that the residents of Key Biscayne have access to.

This is the essence of the widely discussed but little understood concept of “net neutrality.” The bridge, in this case, represents the lines that carry the Internet to your home computer or smart phone. So far Internet service providers have for the most part treated all content equally. The worry is that, sensing a business opportunity, they might strike deals with certain content providers to deliver faster access for a fee or to block some information entirely. The worry isn’t completely theoretical; Comcast recently told the company that delivers Netflix streaming videos that it needed to pay up if it wanted to access Comcast’s customers. (Lost on no one was the fact that Netflix directly competes with Comcast’s own video-on-demand service.)

To make matters worse, most Americans have only one choice of high-speed broadband provider; the most fortunate have two. Unhappy subscribers cannot just leave and get their Internet elsewhere. This effective monopoly leaves consumers with little protection from a provider that has the means to filter everything that they can buy, watch and read.

Internet service providers contend that they must retain the flexibility to manage their networks in the way they see fit—slowing or blocking some high-bandwidth applications to ensure reliable service for all. Network management is a serious concern, but it must not become a cover for policies that censor any content displeasing to the corporate gatekeeper. The Federal Communications Commission approved a rule last December that was intended to ensure equal treatment of content providers. Yet while the FCC rule prohibits “unreasonable” discrimination of network traffic, it fails to spell out what unreasonable behavior entails. The ruling is vague in ways that only a Washington, D.C., lawyer could love; the only certainty it gives is of the tens of thousands of billable hours to be spent arguing over the meaning of “unreasonable” in federal court.

The fix, however, is simple. As the FCC goes about enforcing this ban on so-called unreasonable policies, it should clarify that the only kind of unreasonable discrimination is discrimination against particular applications.

What would this mean in practice? Instead of the “all you can eat” data plans of today, Internet service providers could sell customers access by the gigabyte. They could limit performance at peak times of the day to help balance network load or offer superfast plans at higher prices.

Internet service providers would not, however, be able to determine which applications go fast and which go slow. They would not be able to reach a deal with Facebook to speed up that site’s page loads while slowing down LinkedIn. They could not put Skype calls through a bottleneck or throttle back all video-streaming sites, because these are all judgments based on application. This clarification gives Internet service providers the leeway they need to maintain healthy networks, as well as plenty of incentive to invest in advanced network infrastructure for those customers willing to pay for ultrahigh-speed service. But it takes away the power of Internet service providers to choose winners and losers. We can accept that a bridge owner can charge vehicles based on their size—$1.50 for cars, $9.00 for three-axle cargo trucks—but a democratic society can’t abide discrimination based on content.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 22, 2011, 11:54:22 AM

CCP:  That is very interesting.  I consider changing my position on this subject.

Title: radical community organizer meets with companies that control flow on internet
Post by: ccp on February 24, 2011, 12:57:59 PM

Supposedly the meeting is for job creation.  That said, Obama meeting with Google owners, CEOs etc should raise eyebrows and questions.  This is all the more reason net neutrality may very well be a good idea.  Do we really want the most radical guy in the WH we have ever had meeting with those who can control the flow of information, and commerce and all communication on the internet without some sort of controls or regulation?  Very thought provoking.

*****Hosted by      Back to Google NewsObama meets with heads of Facebook, Apple, Google to discuss job creation
By Darlene Superville (CP) – 6 days ago

WOODSIDE, Calif. — President Barack Obama assembled some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley to confer on jobs and innovation, trying to get leaders from companies like Google and Apple behind his push to keep spending on high-tech initiatives even as Republicans are out to slash the budget.

Wunderkind Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, and Steve Jobs, the Apple founder and CEO who announced last month that he was taking his third medical leave, were among a dozen business leaders who met with Obama in California Thursday evening. Also attending were the heads of Twitter, Yahoo!, NetFlix and Oracle, and the president of Stanford University.

The dinner at the home of John and Ann Doerr in the San Francisco Bay area was closed to the media. Doerr, a partner at the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, attended the meeting.

Obama wants to spend billions on clean energy, education, high-speed Internet and other programs even as his new budget proposal calls for a five-year freeze on domestic spending in certain other areas. The approach is getting a frosty reception from newly empowered Republicans on Capitol Hill, who are pushing steep cuts to a wide range of programs and balking at new spending.

The president argues that targeted spending, including education initiatives aimed at producing a more sophisticated workforce, is crucial for job creation and future U.S. competitiveness with other nations. A stamp of approval from the Silicon Valley's leading innovators and job creators could help.

At the same time, the president's meeting Thursday extends outreach to the business community that he's embarked upon since Democrats suffered steep losses in the November midterm elections. With unemployment stuck at 9 per cent, Obama has been pleading with corporate America to hire.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said Thursday that the high-tech sector has been "a model, really, for that kind of economic activity that we want to see in other cutting-edge industries in the U.S. where jobs can be created in America and kept in America, and that's what he wants to talk about."

After his stop in California, Obama was planning to tour Intel Corp.'s semiconductor manufacturing facility in Hillsboro, Ore., on Friday with CEO Paul Otellini. Otellini, who was among a group of CEOs who met privately with Obama in December, has criticized Obama's policies as creating uncertainty for business.

Obama has left Washington weekly since his Jan. 25 State of the Union to highlight his plans to boost education, innovation and infrastructure. Education is this week's theme.

Obama last visited California and Oregon, both states he won easily in 2008, during a four-state swing in October.

___

AP White House Correspondent Ben Feller and Associated Press writers Julie Pace and Erica Werner contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2011 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Title: Republicans are wrong on net neutrality
Post by: ccp on March 11, 2011, 09:01:20 AM

I think the ability for Google to manipulate rather than just provide information is a great cause of concern.   Don't think they aren't doing it and don't think they are going to admit it.  "Net neutrality" doesn't stifle business it just makes it fair. 

*** 'We will closely examine allegations raised by' Google competitors, said Herb Kohl.
By MIKE ZAPLER | 3/10/11 6:00 PM EST
Media consolidation, net neutrality and Google's dominance in Internet search are among the issues the Senate's leading legislator on antitrust issues plans to scrutinize in the months ahead.

Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), who heads the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights, listed those issues as priorities in an announcement Thursday outlining his top concerns for the 112th Congress.
Kohl specifically called out Google as a potential cause for concern. The senator in December urged the Justice Department to conduct a "careful review" of the search giant's attempted acquisition of travel search software firm ITA.

"In recent years, the dominance over Internet search of the world’s largest search engine, Google, has increased and Google has increasingly sought to acquire e-commerce sites in myriad businesses," Kohl said in a news release.

"In this regard, we will closely examine allegations raised by e-commerce websites that compete with Google that they are being treated unfairly in search ranking, and in their ability to purchase search advertising,” Kohl continued. “We also will continue to closely examine the impact of further acquisitions in this sector."

The emergence of online video — and barriers providers face reaching consumers over broadband Internet lines — will also be a focus of the subcommittee. He said the panel will also track Comcast's integration with NBC Universal and whether conditions on the deal attached by regulators are being met.

"Internet video holds the promise of providing consumers, for the first time, an alternative to expensive pay TV subscriptions and the ability to purchase only the programming they want," Kohl said.

The panel will look at “challenges that video programmers face in distributing their programming over the Internet, challenges that online video distributors face in obtaining programming, and whether Internet service providers are placing undue barriers to the video delivered over the Internet,” Kohl said in the release.

In addition, he said, the panel is going to explore adherence to “the merger conditions imposed on the Comcast/NBC Universal merger to ensure that these conditions are being properly applied to foster competition, including competition from new forms of Internet delivery of video content."

Kohl has also trained his sights on the high-speed broadband market.

"Maintaining competitive choices in this industry is crucial to consumers and the health of the national economy," he wrote. "We will also examine the issue of network neutrality principles and monitor whether consumers continue to have the freedom to access the Internet content they wish without interference from their internet service provider."

The tech and telecom sector is just one area among many the senator has his eye on. He also plans to focus attention on competition issues surrounding the freight railroad, prescription drugs, energy and agriculture markets, among others.
 


Party: IndependentReply #4
Mar. 11, 2011 - 12:10 AM ESTI'm concerned that Obama want's an internet kill switch. I'm concerned that Google was involved in the "Alliance of Youth Summit" in 2008,2009,and 2010 teaching young revolutionaries how to organize to overthrow their governments using the internet, networking, media, facebook, twitter. One Google executive surfaced in Egypt and has been credited with the overthrow of Mubarak. That concerns me that Obama is meddling in foreign affairs and he is not smart enough to forsee unintended consequences.
Party: ConservativeReply #5
Mar. 11, 2011 - 3:11 AM ESTROEg and Cheetosareus you stole the thoughts right out of my mind. If anything about Google needs to be investigated it's their strange political relationships with Democratic operatives. Along with GE they make Halliburton look like little league.
Mar. 11, 2011 - 5:55 AM ESTHERBIE - I am so glad u r there to make sure `google' isn't monopolizing the internet. hey, jerk my committee is going to investigate you and the all political hacks who pass legislation which favors certain industries protecting them from competition - you what it's called - CRONYISM! BTW HERBIE, DO U FIND IT CHALLENGING WEARING `2’ FACES?
Mar. 11, 2011 - 6:52 AM ESTThe US has to be the only country in the world that boasts of a devotion to capitalism and the little guy making it, and once he does taxes the daylights out of him, sues him for making a product so popular that it becomes 'a monopoly' and breaks up his company so he can't compete to the fullness of his ability against his competitors.


And why is it the 'progressives' who always seem to be the ones squelching success in business?***

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: DougMacG on March 11, 2011, 10:06:32 AM

Google deserves scrutiny for its business practices as it becomes nearly a monopoly and the article makes good points about the possibility of unfair practices.  They need to walk a straight line on that.  That is a separate issue from the idea that the government should control the internet - 'net nuetrality'. 

Google's competitors have google-envy.  Bing / Microsoft was caught up recently stealing google search results if not their algorithms.

I'm no fan of google's politics but the fact is Google built a better mousetrap right when we needed it, doing what previously wasn't possible.  Their email is impressive too, and many other products, mostly free to use.  They succeeded, so now we are supposed to take that away.  We went through this with Microsoft just 10 years ago.  The Clinton DOJ charged them and a judge declared they had a monopoly.  He based the product category to include price - in other words it was determined that no one else sold all those capabilities for so low a price, thus the consumer is harmed - by the low cost provider.  :?  Wrong, the consumer was harmed by the slow, inept overpriced competitors not holding the leader to real competition.  Likewise, Google searches and email and many other innovations are free to use, and that harms us.(?)  Others need to make their innovations.  Sometimes that takes a decade for someone else to drive a new innovation through the market to fill a void we don't even know.   These innovations sprang from the idea that, if successful, they would be able to eek out a revenue stream from the traffic they generate for a pretty long time, and maybe even take a profit from their entrepreneurial risk and investment.

If Google (or Comcast etc.) is blocking someone else's ability to open their own site and offer their own searches and products on the internet with their own technology, code, algorithms, then that is another matter.  Anyone can buy placement on google searches, they are called sponsored links.  There has never been a better time for anyone to open n 'e-commerce site' or a better opportunity for a 'video programmer to distribute their programming over the Internet'. The Senator is pandering.  Like Microsoft did before them, Google has made every other business on the planet more efficient and productive.  Someone ask the Senator how that content would be distributednow without the pioneering work of these other companies building out the network that they ride on.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: ccp on March 11, 2011, 11:05:40 AM

Doug,

I don't know if you saw this post above.  If not please review as it applies to "net neutrality".  I think it makes some good points.  The general idea of the government regulating or having control over the internet is not attractive at face value but the idea of letting private companies controlling the internet gates without some oversight is also unattractive.  This article sums up the threat.  I've learned the hard way how our lives can be more and more controlled as we continue this descent (or ascent for some) into endless electronmagnetic interconnectedness:

  The post titled above:   Net neutrality. Good,Bad,Ugly

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: DougMacG on March 11, 2011, 12:03:44 PM

Thank you CCP, I read it and I disagree. For example, "most Americans have only one choice of high-speed broadband provider".  I don't believe that.  I have only used my cell carrier for internet since the day that became availaible.  It works almost everywhere and they have competitors.  They paid for their buildout of towers and the network.  They run their network and I have the right to switch carriers.  If they collude, that is anti-trust, already illegal.  I have never given a dime to the monopoly cable carrier, but they also compete with the 'monopoly' phone company DSL and other options, and we are out in the very outskirts of a metro.  In the City of Minneapolis, they have City of Minneapolis WiFi.  For some reason, inside the city you don't see other wifi networks. Government internet makes me think of Tunisian shutdowns and China censorship, not the rampant innovations that used to come out of silicon valley.

For me, oversight? - yes. Government in charge (other than fighting off things like unfair business practices) - no.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: ccp on March 12, 2011, 07:59:53 AM

"For me, oversight? - yes. Government in charge (other than fighting off things like unfair business practices) - no."

Yes I agree.  But correct me if I am wrong, the Repubs are not advocating any oversight.  It is the same as a lawless wild west.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: DougMacG on March 12, 2011, 11:47:20 AM

I will look further into that.  For now, I am only conjuring up positive images of freedom and individualism from the wild west with maybe one sheriff and one deputy right there in the town, and negative images of the way things work now in Washington with lobbyists and staffers writing legislation for subcommittee hearings where 6th term incumbents can grandstand their pandering, backed by full federal enforcement across all the nation regardless of how bad the laws are.  The goal used to be fiber to the home, now it is TSA to the home. I personally prefer the glory years of Silicon Valley running wild, when venture capitalists were winning and losing, but kicking ass technology-wise on all the state run economies in the world.

It is common for bureaucrats and regulators to lag behind innovation, and Republicans hardly need to lead the charge into taking down successful private businesses.  As you point out, the Dems in congress and the Marxist panderers in the administration are already all over it.  Very hard to get in front of them though I suspect McCain and Lindsay Graham may try to elbow in.

I don't follow the argument that Netflix with access to movies should ride free and protected on someone else's investment.  If you force that in, you certainly lose unlimited low cost data plans for the rest of us. The alternative is allow the carriers to innovate data packet handling to accommodate all the increasing data intensive applications that their consumers are demanding.  The government forced in how I already lost my low cost health plan to new rules coming to protect me, just like free checking disappears with stricter rules on bank service charges.  When and where is it that regulators ever got it right?

What I have seen so far with carriers and content providers is that the companies with the best product and price points are winning market share. That scares a certain number of people who don't know freedom based capitalism.

What is the content that others are noticeably denied? My FREE browser and $15 unlimited data plan goes to any website in the world, as far as I know, a little slower than cable.  My email has been free from the beginning and is better than ever.  My searches are free and unlimited.  Meanwhile, my home phone had a 60% tax on it the day I dropped it. 1000% oversight brought horrible service. My government water bill has more taxes than water in it.  Alternatives are prohibited even though I am surrounded by water, from above, below and with a lake in 360 degrees. 

The premise of the article is that consumers have no choice, there is only one toll bridge - no other way over the river.  Implied is that no amount of innovation, investment or market competition will ever change that... without ... trumpet fanfare... new rules, new regulators and new agencies.  I'm sorry but that is patently false IMHO.

All these people who hate their cable company should try canceling it - while its still legal to do that.  Otherwise look at the wealth of entertainment and information that flows through it and appreciate it. 
 
I can easily shop verizon, comcast, anything else and switch carriers right through a sprint connection.  No one is blocking anything.  If they make the content that I want hard to get, I can switch.  The false monopoly argument assumes that internet has to come through the only set of wires to your home, ignoring that you maybe have 3 sets of wires to your house and everything is rapidly moving to wireless.  My daughter's internet is through the neighbor's wifi.  Hog their bandwidth and out she goes.  With government internet, that arrangement would be highly illegal instead of neighborly and charitable.  Where you have only one carrier is likely where some government program forced it in, rather than letting free people choose where they want to live based (partly) on services available.

To me, it is conceptual. There is nothing wrong that I think government would run better.  IMO it is the exact same situation as health care. You can always point to something wrong, but most of that is already  illegal.  None of that logically leads to the other extreme, put big government in charge of making the most difficult healthcare decisions or controlling every aspect internal network data packet prioritization, billing and everything else.  It just doesn't make things better.

The static assumption, just like health care, is that private innovation is done, now regulate the apparatus (that was built by private companies with private investments) to make sure everything is distributed evenly, fairly and miserably. It is self- fulfilling. When the regulatory industry takes over, they will be right - the innovation is done.  They only know how to completely discard the principles of free enterprise and risk-based capitalism that made all this possible in the first place.

Title: WSJ: Damage to cables slowing traffic
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 14, 2011, 11:02:37 AM

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704893604576199952421569210.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: DougMacG on March 16, 2011, 07:32:29 AM

I was pleased to see that my Sen. Al Franken agrees with me that Net Neutrality is to the internet what PelosiObamaCare is to healthcare, capped with criminal penalties.

The analysis at the bottom yesterday by Ed Morrisey of Hot Air (and Townhall Northern Alliance Radio) is about the same as mine.  The customer is the cable internet subscriber, not the content provider.  If the highly demanded App is NetFlix and the download time is unacceptable or blocked, people will go elsewhere.  Is grocery store required to sell a fresh orange or a bottle of soy sauce? No, but they would get very tired of people asking why something isn't available and go elsewhere.  Our economic system of choice works better than the centrally dictated model.  The beauty is that the worse the service is at the pseudo-monopoly, the more room they leave for alternatives will emerge.
---------------------------------
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/03/15/conyers-obamacare-a-platform-for-government-takeover-of-health-care/

Senator Al Franken says that the charge that Net Neutrality amounts to a government takeover of the Internet is just as silly as claiming ObamaCare to be a government takeover of health care.  And just to prove how Net Neutrality doesn’t amount to a government takeover, Franken wants government to respond to violations of Net Neutrality rules with criminal prosecution:

    Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) plans to introduce a bill that would make net neutrality violations a crime.

    The Justice Department cannot take enforcement actions against cable and phone companies who block websites, according to experts and congressional Democrats.

    Franken said in a speech at the South by Southwest conference on Monday that he is planning legislation that would amend antitrust laws to “call violations of net neutrality out for what they are: anti-competitive actions by powerful media conglomerates that represent violations of our anti-trust laws.”

Huh?  Internet companies act in a competitive market; they have to compete for consumers, albeit in some cases in restricted markets.  Wireless carriers, however, have a robustly competitive environment, and even the wired industry usually has two or three options for consumers in most cases.  If one carrier starts blocking websites, consumers will vote with their feet and go to the provider who doesn’t restrict access to them.

It’s amazing to see how Franken can argue that Net Neutrality laws don’t mean a government takeover of the Internet and then demand that people who don’t play along get prosecuted for it.

Title: Forbes interviews Gilder
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 01, 2011, 07:29:31 PM

http://blogs.forbes.com/steveforbes/2011/02/14/steve-forbes-interview-gilder-on-tech-innovation/
 
Steve Forbes Interview: Gilder On Tech Innovation
Feb. 14 2011 - 12:42 am | 3,108 views | 0 recommendations | 0 comments
By STEVE FORBES
Introduction

Our guest this week is George Gilder, Chairman of Gilder Technology Group, which sponsors Gilder Telecosm Forum, a Web-based conference related to his longtime publication Gilder Technology Report.

Gilder is a member of the board of directors of Wave Systems Corp. and chairman of that company’s executive committee.  He is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Seattle and has been a contributing writer for FORBES since 1981.

A noted author, Gilder earned a bachelor’s degree at Harvard University and was later a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy Institute of Politics.


Click through to watch the video of Steve Forbes’ interview with tech guru George Gilder.

Broadband Miracle


Steve Forbes: Good to have you with us, George. With all this pessimism around, at least give us one good thing that’s happened in the last ten years. You’ve talked about the broadband miracle, where we went from way behind to surging ahead.


Gilder: Well, we sure did. The irony about it is this broadband miracle that’s happened in the United States over the last five years or so was totally unanticipated by the people who wanted massive government programs to lay fiber to every remote farmhouse.

Instead we had a 553-fold increase in wireless bandwidth deployed over this period — completely unexpected — that thrust the U.S. into the world lead again in communications. It shows these upside surprises that are the essence of capital creativity. Creativity always comes as a surprise to us. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t need it and socialism would work. You could plan these great new technologies.


Forbes: As Bell once thought it could do.



Gilder: That 553-fold increase in wireless broadband, nobody imagined really. I mean, it startled me with its speed and overwhelming impact.


Forbes: Well, pat yourself on the back — you called them teleputers years ago. Now we call them smartphones, tablets, iPads. Explain it.


Gilder: I always said that your computer would not be a desktop machine; it would be as mobile as your watch, as personal as your wallet. It would recognize streets. It would recognize speech. It would navigate streets. It might not do windows, but it would do doors and it would, in general, open doors to your future. And these teleputers are really the force that is driving this massive global roll out of wireless bandwidth, which was pioneered in the United States.


Bell’s Law and Moore’s Law


Forbes: Now, before we get to all the things that stand in the way of reaching the true harvest of all of this, explain some of the areas of great creativity. Let’s start with a thing called cloud computing, which I guess you’ve pointed out as Bell’s corollary to Moore’s Law.


Gilder: Yeah. As Gordon Bell, who was one of the great figures of digital equipment and is now at Microsoft, propounded Bell’s Law, which is sort of a corollary of Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law is that the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months or so.

And he projected this into Bell’s Law, which is every ten years you got a 100-fold increase in computing capabilities. And this enables and requires a fundamental change in computer architectures. And we’re seeing it today in the rise of cloud computing.

As Eric Schmidt said, when the back plane of your computer runs more slowly than the network, the computer hollows out and distributes itself across the network. And that’s essentially what is underway today, where the actual computing is almost never done or rarely done in the device that you have in your hand or on your desk.

Fiber Speed


Forbes: Or in even the software. Now, some would say that’s centralization, which the French tried to do years ago, you remember that. But you see it as profoundly different.


Gilder: You still have a lot of processing power. The teleputer has more processing power than whole IBM mainframes that attempted to centralize computing in the past. Computing is more widely distributed than ever before in history. But nonetheless, a lot of the computing is not done where you happen to be. It’s done at the optimal point.

So what it means is that computing power gravitates to its optimal point geographically. And that’s the advent of cloud computing. And it’s resulted in an efflorescence of creativity and computer architectures because everything now has to run at fiber speed, that is, at the speed of fiber optics, which is the speed of light.

And so all the various devices in the entire computer universe have to be upgraded to fiber speed functionality. And that is the transformation that’s currently underway in the world economy — the upgrade to fiber speed. And it’s really my paradigm which I use as an investor to decide where to put my money and my customers’ money.

Special Offer:  Long before Facebook, George Gilder started a  money-making social network for technology investors and entrepreneurs: Gilder Telecosm Forum.  Members learned about ARM Holdings, Cirrus Logic, Triquint Semiconductor and CREE long before the masses found out and made huge profits.  Click here to visit and find out what to do with CREE and EZchip.


Forbes: So what are some of the companies that you feel are in the forefront of this transformation?



Gilder: Well, there are several in Israel because Israel’s really genius under the gun. That is a very productive environment. EZChip is one. EZChip is a wonderful company that’s completely in the fiber speed paradigm. In the United States, there’s a company called NetLogic, which raises the fiber speed paradigm from just switching packets across the network to actual deep packet inspection.

They have knowledge processors that are crucial in this development of deep packet inspection, which entails looking at the contents of packets at millions of packets a second and collectively trillions of packets a second. This is a major frontier in the world computer industry and there are a number of companies that do it.

But I always look for the chips that embody the crucial functionality rather than the various systems that are developed around those chips, because they change from year to year. But if you get a real edge in the production of the chips, as NetLogic does and EZChip does, you can get an enduring creation of value.

Click through to watch the video of Steve Forbes’ interview with tech guru George Gilder.


Israel And The US Economy


Forbes: Now, you’ve made the point, as a handful of others have, that knowledge is about the past, entrepreneurship is about the future. Even looking at the world today in terms of foreign policy: You say “Middle East” — people think oil. You’ve made the point that Israel, with its brains and what it’s doing in high technology, is really a functional part of the U.S. economy, which is where the real value is.


Gilder: Well, it’s just wonderful that Israel has become a new Silicon Valley just as our own Silicon Valley gets paled over by green goo. Israel is moving to the forefront in developing new technologies that are based on fundamental advances. And these technologies instantly propagate to the United States. So, Israel is a substitute for a somewhat temporarily declining Silicon Valley.



Forbes: So it’s sort of like a baseball team. It’s our farm system.


Gilder: Yeah, it’s our farm system. And it’s just been great. Israel is the key asset in the Middle East. This idea that oil, a fungible element that can be sold anywhere, is comparable to the genius of the Jewish people in Israel is just an absurdity.

Israel is where it’s at in the Middle East. And the leading edge of the U.S. economy today is in Israel, surprisingly enough. I was surprised to discover it, but in the last five years I’ve been increasingly turning to Israel for my new companies.


Telegraph To Teleconference


Forbes: Before we get to what’s made Silicon Valley, as you call it, a valley of green goo and some other obstacles, let’s hit on a couple of the other areas where you see enormous creativity. Interactive video, video teleconferencing and the like. You feel that it’s just exploded in terms of technology.


Gilder: Well, this is absolutely crucial. And this will require another transformation of the existing Internet as great as the transformation from the telegraph to the public switch telephone network 50 years ago or more. That created this great public switch telephone network that could deal with voice — the telegraph system could not deal with voice.

Now, we have this vast data-oriented Internet that hast to be upgraded to do interactive, full-motion, even 3-D video. And that’s a transformation like the transformation to voice. It will require a new network, a completely interactive fiber-speed network. That’s why I’m focusing on fiber speed technologies and the new architectures, new computer architectures that are indispensable to achieve this level of performance.


Forbes: And what are the companies you think are in the forefront there?


Gilder: Well, cloud computing — the immediate field is moving up to layer five, which is sessions. It’s called sessions. And to conduct voice or video sessions across the network in real time, you need to be able to interact between all sorts of different kinds of networks.

And this requires entities called session border controllers, which I think resemble routers in their impact. In previous eras the router dealt with all the different networks at layer three, but now it has to be real time, so it’s as if the whole router infrastructure has to be upgraded to layer five.

And companies like Acme Packet and Audio Codes — which is another Israeli one, and there are lots of others — that are doing that. Then that entails deep packet inspection, because if you’re doing all these things, all different networks across the world, you want to know what the content is of the various packets that are coming to you to make sure they aren’t part of some cyber attack or whatever. That’s why I like these companies that do deep packet inspection, including NetLogic. And Cavium also does chips for that purpose. These chips are going to be increasingly in demand as time passes.

Nanotechnology


Forbes: Now, another area of creativity you’ve referenced in the past is one that you’ve pointed out has a lot of hype but now really seems to be perhaps coming into its own, nanotechnology.


Gilder: Well, nanotechnology was full of hype at a time when they said, “Oh, we’ve got carbon nanotubes. They’re 100 times stronger than steel and they have all these wonderful characteristics. And we’ll use them to make memory cells or new kinds of transistors.”

In other words, they were trying to retrofit this radically new capability into the old digital computer model. The fact is, nanotubes do all kinds of unique things and they won’t prevail until those unique potentialities are explored. And the one that I’ve invested in myself, a company called Seldon Technologies  up in Windsor, Vermont, uses carbon nanotubes to make a straw that you can stick into a septic tank and drink potable water out of it.



Forbes: Is this your NanoMesh straw?


Gilder: The NanoMesh straw. And that’s made with tunable carbon nanotubes. So you can actually change the filtration function that you want to perform in these nanotubes. There are tens of thousands of these devices going to the American military now.


Forbes: So they work.


Gilder: Yeah, they work. And they’re also beloved of NASA because they think it’s the only way they’re going to be able to filter lunar dust. And that’s going to be a big market one of these days. They named Seldon as one of the 50 best technologies, supported by NASA. Nanotubes are beginning to emerge as a really crucial technology and it’s exciting to see it. You’ve been predicting it for decades.


Forbes: I have the hair to show it, too. Now, another area you liked in nanotechnology is building and construction materials. You pointed out that if you’re concerned about global warming, well this is right up their alley.


Gilder: Well, I’m not concerned about global warming.


Forbes: Neither am I. But those worriers can embrace this technology, positive technology.



Gilder: Yeah, this is a positive technology. The one I invested in was called iCrete. And actually Gary Winnick was a leading investor and leader of iCrete, which makes concrete that’s ten times stronger. It enabled the Freedom Tower to get off the ground.

It’s beloved of Frank Gehry. It’s a new way to make concrete that is a fundamentally different chemical binding that yields concrete that’s ten times more durable and more cost effective and thus uses less energy usage in making a building of a particular strength.

Security In The Clouds


Forbes: Now, going back for a moment to cloud computing. Nothing comes without challenges. How about security? How do we keep the hackers at bay since there’s a lot of valuable stuff in the clouds now?


Gilder: Well, I, myself, have been on the board of a company for a long time called Wave Systems that I love. But I really shouldn’t be touting my own company.


Forbes: Why not? As long as it’s full disclosure, the police won’t arrest you.


Gilder: Okay. You never know these days.



Forbes: That’s true.


Gilder: But anyway, they use something called a trusted platform module that is in every computer or every high-end computer and increasingly spreading throughout all of the computer world. And this is appropriate to distributed computing where. Now the firewall is just an obstacle to computing. It doesn’t increase security, it just provides a new focus for attack because the people have left the building.

It’s the end of the LAN. I’ve been talking about LAN’s end for a long time. The local area network is now a planetary utility and that requires that security migrate to the edge. And the way to do that is through trusted platform modules and that’s what Wave uses.



Forbes: So the good guys can stay ahead.


Gilder: Yeah.


Forbes: Now, you mentioned deep packet — that gets this whole area of regulation, the FCC. What do they want to do with deep packet technology?


Gilder: Well, a lot of people are afraid that deep packet inspection is a threat to privacy. And this is just mischievousness. Deep packet inspection is absolutely critical to our technology and the advance of digital technology, because you can’t really have cloud computing, you can’t have video teleconferencing, you can’t do any of the new promise of broadband without having ways to differentiate among different packets and repudiating all ideas of network neutrality.

You’ve got to treat each packet differently, the way it deserves to be treated. And you’ve got to kick out the criminal packets and cyber warfare packets. And so deep packet inspection is not only crucial commercially, it’s also crucial militarily.

Our great advantage as a country is that we have technology that’s developed commercially and is used by customers all over the place. And thus it can move down the learning curve faster and actually create capabilities which at the high end are useful for defense.

Edward Teller told me, and I’ll never forget it, he made the point way back 30 years ago when I interviewed him. He said that democratic countries have no advantage over totalitarian countries in secret classified defense projects. After the Second World War, the Soviet Union even outperformed the U.S. for a while. They sent up Sputnik first and developed or copied our nuclear technology readily.

Secret projects are not the source of America’s leadership. It was the computer industry and the semiconductors and the software and the proliferating efflorescent private commercial technology that gave the U.S. the world lead in defense and which is the heart of America’s defense advantage today, which is information technologies and pattern recognition technologies. It’s the same with Israel, and that’s why our two countries are so interdependent.


Forbes: Now, talking about regulation, what’s with the FCC? Now the FTC is threatening to get its claws in the Internet. Is it just the bureaucratic imperative of something’s there, you must control it?



Gilder: Yeah. Yeah, it’s just really horrible, this effort to fixate on an existing technology that is changing more rapidly than perhaps ever before in history. I’m describing this transformation from a world essentially of telegraphs, the current Internet, to a world of video teleconferencing, which requires a whole series of fiber-speed breakthroughs that have to exploit the best possible business plans at the front end or they’re going to fail.

For the FCC to intervene and try to manipulate the industry and impose various rules on it that restrict what might be profitable and successful plans that can sustain a new economy, like this new wireless breakout that’s happening today, is just perverse.


Bridge To The 19th Century


Forbes: You’ve referred to many venture capitalists in California and elsewhere as welfare pimps, loony-bin politicians. What in the world has happened? First — as we were discussing before we did the taping — in terms of mistaking Moore’s Law for what you can do with solar panels and energy, and then we’ll get to this addition to government subsidies.


Gilder: Yeah, well, you know, venture capital is absolutely central to the future of the American economy. It’s radically less than 1% of total GDP and yet the companies it supports currently comprise close to 20% of GDP, maybe more now.

It’s just catalytic seminal capital that’s absolutely crucial. And that’s why the worst development in the United States, in my view, in the last few years and at least on the private side, is venture capitalists becoming poverty pimps.

They aren’t any longer generating new wealth. They’re angling to get part of your wealth and my wealth to support their green dreams of medieval energy sources like windmills. I mean, you can’t parody this return to the Middle Ages looking for new technologies. This is what always happens. The government props up the past in the name of progress. The trains – we’re supposed to go back to old train technology of 50 years ago and create a new train network, and people have actually imagined that people will abandon their cars to take trains everywhere.

It’s not that there isn’t a profitable train industry, but the idea that the government needs, today, to make a major new investment in the name of progress and trains or in solar power or in windmills is a parody of creative destruction of Schumpeterian capitalism



Forbes: I call it a bridge to the 19th century.


Gilder: A bridge to the 19th century, that’s right.


Forbes: And then solar panels, the problem there is even though it’s portrayed as futuristic, as you say you cannot get a doubling every 18 months.


Gilder: No. No, I mean solar panels are useful in many niches and solar energy is valuable, but as a replacement to the grid or a replacement for the massive amounts of power needed to fuel electric cars or whatever it is, it’s just a joke. Solar panels are based on the incident sunlight that hits photo detectors. And their size is governed by the wavelengths of sunlight, not by the imagination of engineers who are contriving ever more miniaturized transistors down the Moore’s Law learning curve.

CFOs Know Nothing


Forbes: Finally, a favorite saying of yours, you quote Peter Drucker that CEOs and CFOs, the myth is that they actually know what is happening to their companies. Explain.


Gilder: Well, Peter Drucker is a great genius who has made many wonderful contributions to Forbes and to Forbes conferences. And the last Forbes conference, a CEO conference, he almost fell off the stage. He was really precarious and everybody was just terrified that he was going to be interrogated.

And then finally he pulled himself together and said, “I have only one thing to tell you CEOs. No one, and I mean no one, in your company knows less about your business than your CFO, your chief financial officer.” And what he’s conveying is that businesses are really governed not by what’s going on inside, but the future of them is determined by two groups, customers and investors who are outside the company.

And they can change their minds in an instant. The idea that CEOs and CFOs, by pouring through the financials, can project the future and know what’s happening in the minds of these forces beyond their walls, is quixotic. They don’t know.

That’s why, again, it’s this illusion that the surprises of capitalism can be captured in some computer model or some socialist plan. They can’t. It’s the upside surprises that Peter Drucker said signify the big opportunities. And the other great Drucker statement is, “Don’t solve problems. That plunges you into the past. Pursue opportunities.”

That’s the key entrepreneurial role, pursuing opportunities, which often leaves the problems behind by transforming the whole landscape as wireless broadband did. People thought wireless broadband was a contradiction in terms and it may end up being the dominant form of broadband.



Forbes: So as in the old days, instead of worrying about horse manure in the cities, invent the automobile.


Gilder: That’s right.


Forbes: George, thank you very much.


Gilder: Well, thank you. It’s been great, as always.

Click through to watch the video of Steve Forbes’ interview with tech guru George Gilder.

Title: Who listens to him anymore?
Post by: ccp on April 02, 2011, 10:58:11 AM

"Gilder: That 553-fold increase in wireless broadband, nobody imagined really. I mean, it startled me with its speed and overwhelming impact.
Forbes: Well, pat yourself on the back — you called them teleputers years ago. Now we call them smartphones, tablets, iPads."

Well nobody INCLUDING Gilder imagined.  I recall he was big on fiber as being where the giant explosion will be.
He certainly did predict the world altering affects of the internet no doubt.

He is still pushing EZchip?

Cree was never (up to 2001) one of his telecom picks.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 02, 2011, 04:09:41 PM

My memory agrees with yours, though IIRC it was discussed on the Gilder forum.  BTW I have what is for me a large position in CREE now.  I am up about 80%.

Here's Tricky Dog's comments on the Gilder interview:
==========================
Interesting - nice to know Gilder has not lost all his glitter.

Re: cloud computing - he sounds like his cloud knowledge is a bit shallow - or he was speaking in shallow terms for easy comprehension.  Cloud computing is a difficult transition to grasp well.  Just came back from Cloud Connect in San Jose last month myself.  Happy to give you an update in person - too lengthy to send an email missive.

His emphasis on DPI (deep packet inspection) is challenged - there are certainly opportunities but they are not going to be dominant.  The incredible increase in traffic won't allow for DPI to keep up, no matter how good the chips are. 

And then there's the rubbish about net neutrality ... he apparently has investments in companies down in the networking layer (e.g. DPI).  Silly boy - the network was commoditized a long time ago.  The whole issue with providers whining about net neutrality is because they missed the bus and want the monopoly back on their old business.  The services layer is where the action is (e.g. cloud computing) and exploiting the crap out of the network is just leeching because you don't have a service play.  Gilder is being two-faced when he criticizes the government and goes on about a bridge to the 19th century......

More later.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology, Gilder, wireless, net 'neutrality'
Post by: DougMacG on April 03, 2011, 03:17:09 PM

Gilder missed the WiFi component of wireless but was all over Qualcomm from the beginning for having the technology to transfer data over wireless.  The smartphone was something Gilder has described almost since Get Smart called Agent 99 on the world's first cell phone.  When your business is predicting the future, being wrong or partly wrong is part of the experience.  (Don't buy the stocks.)

Time will tell what role these deep packet inspections will play.  I am surprised that it is possible to read packets at all at the speed of light, and then 'route' them.  

Net Neutrality looks like the full employment act for trial lawyers to me - aren't they already fully employed?  A law I assume that would state simply that no packets shall face discrimination.  A consumer's netflicks download has to go in its entirety ahead of a bank robbery hostage situation in process message, if his10 films were requested before shots were fired at the bank.  I don't think it will it will ever be all non-priortized traffic.  Instead implementation will look more like ObamaCare with a 1000 exemptions right out of the gate, and politicians and bureaucrats can decide for us what are our priorities and who has lobbied the hardest.  Do we want spam for example to flow through undiscriminated? Child porn, nuclear secrets, intentional attacks on competitor's websites?  Of course not, but who will decide?  And at what speed? I am trying to visualize the Federal Department of Internet with traffic cops at each speed of light rolling stop viewing the network providers routing choices on the fly and writing tickets for breaking a law with a thousand exemptions that prohibits one particular choice that a provider made.  Seems to me that innovation ends when government takes charge.

The argument I am hearing is that government needs to step in because a potential problem could occur in the future.  Implied is that - luckily - no potential downside or unintended consequence will ever come with a whole new department of federal regulations inspecting our everything.  I don't buy it.  I would like to first learn of one function of government that innovated faster, for the consumer, than the history so far of the private sector-based broadband internet buildout.

 

Title: Internet regulation - Net Neutrality, WSJ
Post by: DougMacG on April 15, 2011, 08:37:29 PM

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704529204576257153583865300.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

Net Neutrality Override
The House votes to stop the FCC's Internet power grab.

The Obama Administration continues to ignore court decisions on Internet regulation and use agencies like the Federal Communications Commission to circumvent Congress. We're happy to see House Republicans vote to overrule this behavior.

Two days before Christmas, the FCC issued "net neutrality" rules on a partisan 3-2 vote that restrict how Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon can manage their network traffic and serve customers. The regulation is a favorite of big Web content companies and Naderite consumerists who want more political sway over the Internet.

James Gattuso of the Heritage Foundation on White House efforts to regulate the Web.

Congress has never given the FCC authority to regulate the Internet, which is why the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the agency last year when it tried to enforce net neutrality rules against Comcast. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski nonetheless pressed ahead, despite the absence of any market failure or consumer harm that might justify new rules.

Last week the House voted 240 to 179 to reverse the rule-making. Representative Greg Walden of Oregon introduced the measure under the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to overturn agency rules with a simple majority in the House and Senate.

On the House floor, Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton said the FCC had "overstepped its authority and is attempting to seize control of one of the nation's greatest technological success stories." He's right. By the FCC's own reckoning, 95% of the country has access to broadband, and inside of a decade the number of Internet users has grown to 200 million from eight million. Meanwhile, prices are falling and choices are expanding. Almost no mobile applications were available to consumers in 2007. Today there are more than a half-million, and they're growing at an annual rate of 92%.

The resolution now moves to the Senate, where only 51 votes are needed. But President Obama has promised to veto the measure if it reaches his desk, and 67 Senate votes would be needed to override the veto. Whether enough Democrats would vote with the GOP to do that is an open question, though we wouldn't dismiss the possibility of some bipartisan support given the number of Senate Democrats up for re-election next year.

The exercise is still useful in reminding the White House that the Constitution delegates lawmaking to Congress, not political appointees at the FCC. It also might have a chastening effect on the Administration, which has turned to rule-making agencies like the FCC and the Environmental Protection Agency to push an agenda that it can't get through Congress.

Mr. Obama insists that he's focused on economic growth and innovation. He could do that goal a favor by letting Congress override his politically-driven FCC.

Title: Sino-American Cyber Security
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on May 06, 2011, 09:59:47 AM

Could likely be posted more than one place:

China and Cybersecurity: Trojan Chips and U.S.–Chinese Relations
Published on May 5, 2011 by Dean Cheng and Derek Scissors, Ph.D. WEBMEMO #3242

One subject of the third round of the U.S.–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue will be cybersecurity. Part of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s proposed Strategic Security Dialogue, it reflects the growing prominence of cybersecurity in Sino-American strategic relations.   

The concerns include computer network exploitation and computer network attacks, but also tampering with the physical infrastructure of communications and computer networks. Vulnerabilities could be introduced in the course of manufacturing equipment or created through purchase of malignant or counterfeit goods. Recent experience highlights these problems.
Such possibilities have brought calls for trade barriers, ranging from random entry-point inspections of various types of goods and equipment (e.g., chips and routers) to prohibition of some imports (e.g., communications hardware), especially from a major manufacturer, the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The trade proposals tend to be vague because the cyber threat itself, while real, is vaguely presented. While an ill-defined threat certainly bears watching, it does not justify protectionism. Cybersecurity is largely classified, but trade is not, and trade policy cannot be held hostage to cybersecurity unless specific dangers are put forward.
What Is the Threat?
A longstanding fear has been that cyber attacks against the U.S. might result in disruptions to power, banking, and communications systems at a critical moment. The cyber attacks on Estonia and Georgia, which disrupted commerce and communications, raise the specter that the U.S. might undergo the equivalent of a cyber Pearl Harbor. Efforts by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to improve verification capabilities highlight the limitations of current computer engineering skills in, for example, diagnosing cyber intrusions. Initial studies on the Trusted Integrated Circuit program, seeking to create a secure supply chain, were requested in 2007. As of late 2010, DARPA was still seeking new research proposals for determining whether a given chip was reliable, and whether it had been maliciously modified, as part of the Integrity and Reliability of Integrated Circuits (IRIS) program.[1]
A more recent worry is vulnerabilities “hardwired” into the physical infrastructure of the Internet. In the last several years, the FBI has warned that counterfeit computer parts and systems may be widespread.
This can manifest itself in two ways: fake parts and systems, which may fail at dangerously higher rates, or contaminated systems that might incorporate hardwired backdoors and other security problems, allowing a foreign power to subvert a system.[2] Similar problems have been identified by American allies; the U.K. has identified counterfeit parts entering into its military supply chain.
Much cyber-related attention has been focused on the PRC. China is reportedly the source of many of the hacking efforts directed at U.S. military and security computer networks. Chinese computer infiltration has reputedly obtained access to such sensitive programs as F-35 design information. Such efforts as Titan Rain, Ghostnet, and others have reportedly attacked U.S. and other nations’ information systems systematically and have infiltrated email servers and networks around the world. One example is the “Shadow network,” which affected “social networking websites, webmail providers, free hosting providers and services from some of the largest companies.”[3] Many have been traced back to the PRC—but attribution to any specific Chinese entity is extremely difficult.
A growing concern is that China can exploit its position as one of the world’s largest producers of computer chips, motherboards, and other physical parts of the Internet to affect American and allied infrastructure. China has apparently already demonstrated an ability to tamper with Domain Name System (DNS) servers based in China, “effectively poisoning all DNS servers on the route.”[4]
The fear is that they could now affect foreign-based routers. In this regard, the issue of Chinese counterfeit parts is compounded by uncertainty about whether fake parts are being introduced as part of a concerted intelligence campaign or simply the result of profiteering by local contractors.
Public Information Is Lacking
The arcane nature of the threat enhances uncertainty. Understanding the workings of computer viruses, patches, and the vulnerabilities of routers or microchips is difficult. Comprehending the intricacies of global supply chains and tracing the ultimate source of sub-systems and components can be equally difficult. Former NSA and CIA Director General Michael Hayden writes that “Rarely has something been so important and so talked about with less clarity and less apparent understanding.”[5]
Several studies highlight some of the myriad vulnerabilities.
The 2005 Defense Science Board Task Force on High Performance Microchip Supply identified the growing security problem of microchips being manufactured (and more and more often designed) outside the United States.
The 2007 Defense Science Board Task Force on Mission Impact of Foreign Influence on DOD Software noted that software frequently incorporates pieces of code from a variety of sources, any of which might be a point of vulnerability.
The 2008 National Defense Industrial Association’s handbook “Engineering for System Assurance” provides a comprehensive overview of system assurance, which in turn highlights how difficult it can be to achieve it.
Over-classification is also a problem. General Hayden notes that much of the information on cyber threats is “overprotected.” Greg Garcia, head of the Bush Administration’s efforts on cybersecurity, has similarly noted that “there was too much classified…Too much was kept secret.”[6]
Leave Trade Alone
The ambiguity on the security side actually clarifies the trade side. If the cyber threat is understood only tenuously, testing imported goods for cyber threats will be inadequate to identify compromised equipment. With ineffective testing, banning some importers would not be worthwhile. In a global economy, equipment will simply be re-routed. The U.S. does not have the resources necessary to track the true source of goods when dangerous items cannot be easily discovered—and discovery may even be impossible.
If the threat was well understood but national security argued against the disclosure of vital information, this at least suggests that the danger from trade is secondary to other dangers. America retains the option, of course, of simply restricting trade on national security grounds without disclosing its reasons. This would be unwise.
One drawback of restricting trade would be the costs incurred by the U.S. in terms of spending on import inspections and the loss of availability of certain goods. The defense community is often not well-positioned to anticipate the extent of these economic costs. People will not relinquish scarce resources voluntarily when the gains from doing so are not spelled out.
The second drawback is the reaction of American trade partners. American exports already suffer from undocumented national security justifications for protectionism. Were the U.S. to introduce a new set of potentially sweeping restrictions based on hidden national security requirements, the global trade environment would immediately and sharply deteriorate. Costs would be far higher than indicated by looking at American actions alone.
Balancing Economic and Security Responsibilities
Security. For policymakers and the public to properly comprehend the magnitude of the problem, the Department of Defense must be as transparent as possible. Some material will be classified. But the trade-off between security classification and the ability to promptly and adequately respond to a threat should be weighted more heavily to the transparency side than it is at present.
Trade. The Department of Commerce and United States Trade Representative should restrict trade only in accordance with what can be defended publicly and systematically. Introduction of ad hoc trade restrictions that claim a classified basis will harm the American economy.
For now, it is unreasonable to impose considerable economic costs for the sake of a serious but vaguely presented threat.
Dean Cheng is Research Fellow in Chinese Political and Security Affairs and Derek Scissors, Ph.D., is Research Fellow in Asia Economic Policy in the Asian Studies Center at The Heritage Foundation.

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2011/05/China-and-Cyber-Security-Trojan-Chips-and-US-Chinese-Relations

Title: Chinese hacking; chains of evidence
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 17, 2011, 11:26:02 AM

WikiLeaks cable about Chinese hacking of U.S. networks:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/wikileaks_cable.html

Increasingly, chains of evidence include software steps.  It's not just
the RIAA suing people -- and getting it wrong -- based on automatic
systems to detect and identify file sharers.  It's forensic programs
used to collect and analyze data from computers and smart phones.  It's
audit logs saved and stored by ISPs and websites.  It's location data
from cell phones.  It's e-mails and IMs and comments posted to social
networking sites.  It's tallies from digital voting machines.  It's
images and meta-data from surveillance cameras.  The list goes on and
on.  We in the security field know the risks associated with trusting
digital data, but this evidence is routinely assumed by courts to be
accurate.  Sergey Bratus is starting to look at this problem.  His
paper, written with Ashlyn Lembree and Anna Shubina, is "Software on the
Witness Stand: What Should it Take for Us to Trust it?."
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2011/04/software_as_evi.html

Title: economist article on tech
Post by: ccp on June 13, 2011, 09:36:10 AM

According to Schmidt it is google, facebook, apple and amazon:

****Microsoft
Middle-aged blues
The software giant is grappling with a mid-life crisis
Jun 9th 2011 | SAN FRANCISCO | from the print edition
 
COMPARED with IBM, Microsoft is a mere stripling. Founded in 1975, it rose swiftly to dominate the world of personal computing with its Windows operating system and Office suite of word-processing and other productivity tools. But the company is now showing some worrying signs of middle-age fatigue. In particular, it is struggling to find a growth strategy that will enthuse disgruntled shareholders.

Grumbles are understandable. Since Steve Ballmer took over from Bill Gates as chief executive in 2000, Microsoft’s share price has languished and the company has lost its reputation as a tech trend-setter. It has been left behind in hot areas such as search and social networking by younger companies, some of which love to thumb their noses at their older rival. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, recently proclaimed that leadership in the tech world had passed from Microsoft and others to a “Gang of Four” fast-growing, consumer-oriented businesses: Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook.

Few would quibble with that. The question is: what, if anything, can Microsoft do to change it? In at least some respects, the company appears to be suffering from similar ailments to those that laid IBM low before Lou Gerstner was hired in 1993 to get it back on its feet. These include arrogance bred of dominance of a particular area—mainframe computers at IBM, personal computers at Microsoft—and internal fiefs that hamper swift change. For instance, the division that champions cloud computing must deal with one that is the cheerleader for Windows, which is likely to want computing to stay on desktops for as long as possible to maximise its own revenues.

Related topics
IBM
Microsoft
As IBM’s experience shows, rejuvenation in the tech world is possible. And some observers see encouraging glimmers of progress at Microsoft. Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester, a research firm, reckons that Windows 8, a forthcoming version of Microsoft’s operating system, could be a serious competitor to Google’s Android on tablet computers if the company can get it to market next year. Microsoft is also in far better shape financially than IBM was at its nadir, so it can afford to splash out on acquisitions such as its recent $8.5 billion purchase of Skype, an internet-phone and video-calling service.

That bet and an alliance with Nokia in mobile phones (putting the phone version of Windows into the big but troubled Finnish firm’s devices) show that Microsoft is trying to bulk up in promising areas. Yet sceptics worry that such initiatives are not the product of an overarching strategic vision, but are instead tactical moves designed to placate critics who fear Microsoft is drifting downwards. David Einhorn, a prominent hedge-fund manager whose fund holds shares in Microsoft, has publicly called for a change at the top of the firm, arguing that Mr Ballmer is “stuck in the past”. So far, the company’s board, chaired by Mr Gates, has backed its chief executive. But if IBM’s history is a guide, Microsoft may yet end up jettisoning its leader.****

Title: economist jury still out on google
Post by: ccp on June 13, 2011, 09:39:52 AM

According to economist the jury is still out on google and oracle:

****IBM's centenary
The test of time
Which of today’s technology giants might still be standing tall a century after their founding?
Jun 9th 2011 | from the print edition
 
IT IS not, by any means, the world’s oldest company. There are Japanese hotels dating back to the 8th century, German breweries that hail from the 11th and an Italian bank with roots in the 15th. What is unusual about IBM, which celebrates its 100th birthday next week, is that it has been so successful for so long in the fast-moving field of technology. How has it done it?

IBM’s secret is that it is built around an idea that transcends any particular product or technology. Its strategy is to package technology for use by businesses. At first this meant making punch-card tabulators, but IBM moved on to magnetic-tape systems, mainframes, PCs, and most recently services and consulting. Building a company around an idea, rather than a specific technology, makes it easier to adapt when industry “platform shifts” occur (see article).

True, IBM’s longevity is also due, in part, to dumb luck. It almost came unstuck early on because its bosses were hesitant to abandon punch cards. And it had a near-death experience in 1993 before Lou Gerstner realised that the best way to package technology for use by businesses was to focus on services. An elegant organising idea is no use if a company cannot come up with good products or services, or if it has clueless bosses. But on the basis of this simple formula—that a company should focus on an idea, rather than a technology—which of today’s young tech giants look best placed to live to 100?

The most obvious example is Apple (founded in 1976). Like IBM, it had a near-death experience in the 1990s, and it is dangerously dependent on its founder, Steve Jobs. But it has a powerful organising idea: take the latest technology, package it in a simple, elegant form and sell it at a premium price. Apple has done this with personal computers, music players, smartphones and tablet computers, and is now moving into cloud-based services (see article). Each time it has grabbed an existing technology and produced an easier-to-use and prettier version than anyone else. This approach can be applied to whatever technology is flavour of the month: Apple has already shifted from PCs to mobile devices.

The animating idea of Amazon (founded in 1994) is to make it easy for people to buy stuff. It began by doing this for books, but has since applied the same idea to other products: music, groceries, mobile apps, even computing power and storage, which it sells on tap. The Kindle may resemble an e-reader, but it is just as much a portable bookstore. As new things come along, Amazon will make it easy for you to buy them. Similarly, the aim of Facebook (2004) is to help people share stuff with friends easily. This idea can be extended to almost anything on almost any platform.

Consider, by contrast, three product-based firms. Dell (founded in 1984) made its name building PCs more efficiently than anyone else and selling them direct to consumers. That model does not neatly transfer to other products. Cisco Systems (also 1984) makes internet routers. It has diversified into other areas, such as videoconferencing, but chiefly because it thought this would increase demand for routers. Microsoft (1975) is hugely dependent on Windows, which is its answer to everything. But software for a PC may not be the best choice to run inside a phone or a car. All these firms are wedded to specific products, not deeper philosophies, and are having trouble navigating technological shifts.

Other giants are still struggling to move beyond their core technologies. Oracle (1977) was originally a database company, which peddled databases as the answer to all its clients’ problems. But in the past decade it has moved into other corporate software, and hardware too. Now it aims to provide entire computing systems. Google (1998) knows the importance of an idea. “Organising the world’s information and making it universally accessible” is its motto, and it is putting that into practice on mobile devices through its Android software, which is spreading fast. But Google is still heavily dependent on a single product—internet search and related advertising.

Good to be elegant, better to be old

The upshot: Apple, Amazon and Facebook look like good long-term bets. Dell, Cisco and Microsoft do not. The jury is out on Oracle and Google. See you in 2111—provided, that is, that The Economist (founded in 1843, with the idea of explaining the world to its readers) is still around too.****

Title: Beer can wi-fi
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 11, 2011, 02:16:05 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUYGb2JtQYA

Title: Cybercommand opposes UN role
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on October 21, 2011, 01:54:39 PM

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/oct/20/cybercommand-chief-opposes-un-net-control/

Cybercommand chief opposes U.N. net control
‘Government survivability’ issue

BALTIMORE — The commander of the U.S. Cyber Command said Thursday that he does not favor giving the United Nations the power to regulate the Internet.

Some regulations are needed to protect critical networks that control electrical power, banking, transportation and other key elements of society, Army Gen. Keith Alexander, who is also director of the National Security Agency, said after a speech to a security conference.

But asked whether the U.N. should have a regulation role, Gen. Alexander said: “No. I’m not for regulating, per se. I’m concerned about it, and this is a tough question. I would say, generally speaking, I’m not into that portion of regulating as you would espouse.”

Last month, Russia, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan submitted a resolution to the U.N. General Assembly calling for giving individual states the right to control the Internet. The resolution, submitted Sept. 14, calls for “an international code of conduct for information security.”

It requests “international deliberations within the United Nations framework on such an international code, with the aim of achieving the earliest possible consensus on international norms and rules guiding the behavior of states in the information space.”

China tightly controls the Internet through a cybersecurity police force estimated to be more than 10,000 people who monitor Internet users and websites.

Russia’s authoritarian government has taken steps in recent years to curb Internet freedoms. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan also are authoritarian regimes that seek to control Internet use.

Gen. Alexander said that, rather than seeking U.N. regulation, individual countries “first need to step up and say, ‘Look, how do we do this without regulating it?’ “

The four-star general suggested bolstering Internet security by using “cloud” technology, which uses remote computer servers for applications and data storage. Other new technologies that permit greater visibility of cyberthreats on networks also can be used to improve security, he said.

“I do think that there may be some things for critical infrastructure and government networks that we’re going to have to direct out to the government,” Gen. Alexander said. “These are things that you must do to secure your networks for government survivability.”

Additionally, security cooperation between nations can be improved, he said.

“But for my grandchildren and my daughters out there, they have a great time on the network,” he said. “I would not want somebody to say you cannot let your 2-year-old grab the iPad and launch [an application].”

As for future considerations, Gen. Alexander said U.S. policymakers are discussing whether U.S. firms should be required to divulge information about cyber-attacks.

Additionally, he said: “I think down the road we have to figure out how do we ensure that your platforms do not create a public hazard, but I’m not sure I would put that in regulation.”

In a speech to the Information Systems Security Association conference, Gen. Alexander said U.S. development of the Internet brought tremendous benefits and “tremendous vulnerabilities” that can be exploited by hackers, criminals and nation states.

U.S. corporations were victims of cyber-attacks, including Google, Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton, and some have lost valuable intellectual property through cybertheft and espionage.

The threat is increasing as the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers increases.

“Here’s what concerns me: What we’re seeing is destructive [digital] payloads coming out, payloads that can make a blue screen of death, that can stop your operating system, your router or peripheral devices,” Gen. Alexander said.

Mobile devices increase the problem by “orders of magnitude” because of the lack of security built up over the past decade for desktop devices, he said.

Both are connected to networks, “and the issues we are going to see are huge,” Gen. Alexander said.

Shawn Henry, FBI executive assistant director for cyber-issues and a conference speaker, said a better network architecture is needed to identify cybercriminals who can operate anonymously.

Mr. Henry also called for better “assurance” for Internet communications to prevent someone from breaking into links that control key infrastructure. For example, computer communications between a technician remotely directing an electrical facility need better security, he said.

“The Internet was developed with protocols allowing for anonymity and there are legitimate reasons for wanting it that way,” Mr. Henry said. “But for those critical uses of the Internet where intrusion is entirely unacceptable and we must be able to identify the users, market-driven factors may prompt the private sector to explore solutions and alternate architectures to meet those needs.”

“We need a more secure architecture that allows for absolute attribution,” he said. “Threats are continuing to increase and we cannot constantly play defense.”

Title: Linked-in scams?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 12, 2011, 12:41:23 PM

This from a trusted friend:
==============================

Recently I decided to make a couple of moves to test the integrity of the LinkedIn system vis-a-vis Internet scammers.
 
This morning I received a LinkedIn invitation from an associate, asking me to join his network. The appearance of the e-mail is exactly what one would expect a LinkedIn communication to look like. However, the red flags of oddness immediately cropped up:
1.   I am already, and have been for five months, connected to this associate on LinkedIn.
2.   The request came in to an e-mail address that is NOT the one I currently use for LinkedIn purposes. I deliberately changed the LinkedIn account e-mail address late last week as part of an integrity test (due to my suspicions that LinkedIn was connected to another ongoing e-mail scam effort) . If this associate (even if it were a legitimate invitation for the very first time) had used the LinkedIn system to send me an invitation, it would not have come in to the e-mail account that it did. It would have come in to the account I switched over to late last week.  As did a legitimate invitataion earlier this morning.
3.   When I access my LinkedIn account, and this is, perhaps, the most significant red flag, there is no invitation activity from this individual this morning. The only LinkedIn activity from him was the July 2011 invitation request, and several other messages during the past five months.
4.   This invitation from this morning came in addressed to my fist initial. My first initial is what would appear on the e-mail account that the invitation came in on. The requesting associate has never, and would never, address me just by my first initial. All his comms to me have been by my first name. The reason this “invitation” came in to my first initial was because the sender does not know my full first name because neither the e-mail address nor the name on the e-mail account provides that information.
There is no doubt in my mind that this is a well developed scam, the goal of which is to get me to click on the link provided in the body of the e-mail.
 
I am particularly attuned to the possibility of LinkedIn e-mail scams because several weeks ago I received an official looking “LinkedIn” invitation request from somebody I have never heard of, and it came into an e-mail account and name which there is not even an existing LinkedIn account for anybody to send an invitation to.
 
The moral of this saga is to be wary of the e-mails you receive. No matter how “official” they may look, think a moment before automatically clicking any links inside such an e-mail.
 
You don't need to be paranoid; you do need to NOT be oblivious.

Title: Your New Year’s Resolution–Pick Better Passwords
Post by: Rachel on December 29, 2011, 08:52:53 AM

Your New Year’s Resolution–Pick Better Passwords

by Ben Gross
http://bengross.com/your-new-years-resolution-pick-better-passwords/
As we near the end of 2011, I can’t help but think this is the year I had the most trouble telling the difference between actual news stories and pieces from “America’s Finest News Source”, The Onion. As I write this article, details are still unfolding from the data breach at the well-known private intelligence firm Stratfor.

According to reports, hackers found a weakly protected database of usernames and passwords and an unencrypted database of credit card information. The hackers proceeded to use credit cards in the database to make donations to charitable organizations. Just because any story can use a bit more absurdity, there were claims and counter claims of whether or not the attack was associated with Anonymous, the discerning hackers first choice of affiliation.

According to Identity Finder, the Stratfor database contained approximately 44,000 hashed passwords in the database, roughly half of which have already been exposed. Unfortunately, another 20,000 or passwords on pastebin would not even be newsworthy, if it were not for the notoriety of Stratfor. Note: if you think you might have been on the list of compromised accounts in the Stratfor database, you can check at Dazzlepod.

There is plenty of blame to go around. First, Stratfor stored user passwords as basic unsalted MD5 hashes, which is simply irresponsible. There are widely available and generally well-regarded solutions for storing passwords such as bcrypt, which is nicely summarized in Coda Hale’s How To Safely Store A Password. Secondly, and more importantly, storing customer’s credit cards in clear text is unconscionable. Never mind the question about why on earth they were storing CCVs in their database, which is never OK.

Given the recent attacks against Sony, Gawker, HBGary Federal, and Infragard Atlanta, one could reasonably expect that Stratfor would pay more attention to the operational security side given their business.

To put the Stratfor hack in a more global context, the 2011 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report aggregates data from Verizon RISK, the U.S. Secret Service and the Dutch High Tech Crime Unit. DataLossDB Statistics collected data from open sources including news reports, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, and public records. These reports give a more nuanced breakdown of the types of breaches and data exposed across many industries.

As much as it pains me to blame the victim, a great many of the subscribers to Stratfor’s service, clearly could and should have picked better passwords. According to Stratfor Confidential Customer’s passwords analysis, we could start with the 418 users who picked “stratfor” as their password or even the 71 users who picked “123456.” The database was full of weak passwords, which was why the clear text of nearly half the passwords followed in a post shortly after the original password hashes appeared online.

In Data Evaporation and the Security of Recycled Accounts, I described how passwords for email accounts are frequently the weak link in the security chain. It is common for sites to allow users to reset their passwords to the email address listed on the account. This means that a compromised email account may be the only method an attacker needs to gain access to other accounts.

In my dissertation interviews, I talked with people about how they managed their accounts and passwords. Many of my interviewees told me they effectively had 2–3 passwords they used for most accounts with some minor variations due to password complexity rules. The interviewees frequently reported using a set of low, medium, and high security passwords. Unfortunately, the email accounts were often given the low security passwords.

It pains me to think how many of the customers in Stratfor’s database likely reuse the same password on multiple sites. In Measuring password re-use empirically, Joseph Bonneau analyzed the overlap between rootkit.com and gawker.com passwords in addition to other studies and found a wide-spread ranging from 10% to 50% overlap. Even with 10% overlap, there are significant benefits from leveraging one exploited password database to compromise another. As always, XKCD keeps track of the pulse of the internet and has informative comics for both Password Reuse and Password Strength.

Realistically, it’s getting to the point where unless you have a pretty fantastic password, if your password is in a database of poorly hashed passwords then someone with a bit of time can discover it. Why is that you might ask? Whitepixel the purveyors of fine open source GPU accelerated password hashing software report that it currently achieves 33.1 billion password/sec on 4 x AMD Radeon HD 5970 for MD5 hashes. This is fast enough to make rainbow tables (pre-computed hashes for a dictionary attack) much less compelling. If the attacker has any additional personal information this significantly increases the chance of a successful attack since so many people use bits of personal information in their passwords. Bruce Schneier describes commercial software that exploits personal information when attempting compromise password hashes in Secure Passwords Keep You Safer.

In general, unless your password or pass phrase is quite long you are far better off with a long randomly generated string that you manage with a password manager. There are many good options including my personal favorite 1Password, LastPass, RoboForm, or the open source projects PwdHash or Password Safe. PasswordCard is a nice alternative if you would prefer a solution you can always carry with you that does not require any dependencies besides what you can carry in your wallet.

Unfortunately, none of the password managers are magic. You will still have to deal with a depressingly large number of services that force you to choose poor passwords with arbitrary restrictions. Troy Hunt names some offenders in the Who’s who of bad password practices – banks, airlines and more. Still, if you simply use a password manager and different password with each service, you will dramatically limit any potential damage, as an attacker cannot reuse your password on another service.

Title: SOPA is bad for the US Economy
Post by: Rachel on December 29, 2011, 09:03:06 AM

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/83348232/-- Video unable to imbed



http://theokok.posterous.com/sopapipa-the-internet-is-being-censored

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 29, 2011, 10:22:54 PM

So, what is to be done about sites that steal people's work? :x :x :x

Title: Y2K12 failure in Denver?
Post by: bigdog on January 01, 2012, 04:52:47 PM

http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/01/9878326-chaos-as-guests-locked-out-of-rooms-at-denver-hotel

Title: SOPA and related legislation
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 18, 2012, 07:05:22 PM

Bringing the conversation over to here from Homeland Security and American Freedom:

I note that my man Glenn Beck opposes the current bills and here's this email which I received today:

=====================


By now, you are no doubt aware that several websites have either gone
totally or partially "dark" today in protest of the
pernicious internet legislation that will be coming to a vote next
week.  Wikipedia and Google are just two of the websites which are
protesting in this manner.

And while you may have not paid much attention to this story, you need
to know that the "muzzle the web" legislation these sites are
protesting could also affect your ability to get gun-related
information on websites like GOA's.

The reason is that S. 968 could, in its final form, allow the Brady
Campaign to partially shut down our GOA website and our organization
(plus many other pro-gun websites) with a series of factually accurate,
but legally frivolous complaints.

The Senate bill and its House counterpart have accurately been called
"a direct attack on the underpinnings of the web."

True, many of the most serious "gun problems" are in the
House counterpart.  But the reality is this:  We are within a few votes
of killing the whole concept next week in the Senate with only 41
Senate votes.

But if we allow the so-called "anti-piracy" bill to go
forward on the HOPE that the worst provisions will not make it into the
final version --- and we fail to eliminate them --- the bill may be
unstoppable.

Here are the "gun problems," as we see them:

Section 103(b)(1) of H.R. 3261 allows any "holder of an
intellectual property right" to demand that PayPal and other
payment and advertising services stop providing services to
organizations like ours, thereby shutting off our income.

How would they do this?  Perhaps by arguing that we were stealing their
intellectual property by quoting their lying misrepresentations in our
alerts.

Is this legally frivolous?  Sure it is.  But the Brady Campaign is the
King of Frivolous Complaints:

* Remember when the Brady Campaign asked the Federal Election
Commission in 2007 to shut down GOA's ability to post its candidate
ratings on the Internet?  They claimed that we were in violation of the
McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Act.  Thankfully, the FEC ruled
in GOA's favor, thus enabling us to continue posting candidate ratings
without restraint.

* Remember when the Brady Campaign got 36 state and local jurisdictions
to bring frivolous lawsuits against gun manufacturers --- not in the
expectation of winning, but to drain the resources of the manufacturers
in order to halt the manufacture of guns in America?

This "muzzle the web" legislation will throw the doors open
to even more frivolous complaints.  Could we defend ourselves?  Yes, we
could.  We could file a counter notification under section 103(b)(5)
and spend years defending ourselves.  But the one thing we did learn
during the 36 frivolous lawsuits is that the anti-gun forces in America
have very deep pockets.

And the other problem is that, under section 104, our Internet
providers would be insulated from liability for shutting us down.  But
they would receive no comparable insulation from legal liability if
they refused to cut us off.

The Senate version, S. 968, has been amended, at the behest of Iowa
Senator Chuck Grassley and others, to provide many protections which
were not in its initial form.

Under section 3, the Attorney General would go to court and would have
to claim that, because of a hyperlink to an offending site, we were
"primarily" engaged in the theft of intellectual property.

We would feel a lot better about these protections if the Attorney
General were not Eric Holder, a ruthless ideologue who has demonstrated
that he will go to any lengths to destroy the Second Amendment.

So the bottom line is this:  H.R. 3261 and S. 968
would potentially empower the Brady Campaign and Eric Holder to go
after our Internet site.  To do so, they would have to make the same
frivolous arguments and engage in the same lawless activity that they
have done so often in the past.

But --- given that we're within a few votes of snuffing out that risk
by killing the bill in the Senate --- we believe it's the better course
of action to do so.

ACTION:  Contact your Senators.  Ask them to vote against S. 968, every
chance they get.

Title: SOPA infographic
Post by: bigdog on January 18, 2012, 07:42:02 PM

Moving to this thread:


http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html

A serious question, Guro: Is there a chance that if SOPA were passed, could www.dogbrothers.com be blacked given the number of links and quotes, etc. posted on the forum from other web sites?  Based on my understanding of the law, the critics (at least) seem to think this type of issue is a possibility. 

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 18, 2012, 08:26:27 PM

I would submit that this forum comes nowhere close to meeting the criterion of being "dedicated to piracy", contrast various sites I have seen dedicated to theft.   That said, the GOA piece on what the Brady folks have tried to get away with gives pause, and Glenn Beck certainly has credibility with me as well.

This is not to say that much/most of the opposition comes from folks who simply wish to keep stealing and that piracy is not a real problem.

I have no problem acknowledging that considerable drafting issues remain for this legislation to become worthy of passage.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: bigdog on January 18, 2012, 08:35:07 PM

Thank you for a thoughtful reply.  And, while I am opposed to SOPA, I do agree with this: "much/most of the opposition comes from folks who simply wish to keep stealing and that piracy is not a real problem."

Title: Knock, knock, it’s the future
Post by: Rachel on January 19, 2012, 07:26:22 AM

Knock, knock, it’s the future (Building 59)
by seth godin
Why not ban digital cameras?
http://www.thedominoproject.com/2012/01/knock-knock-its-the-future-building-59.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheDominoProject+%28News+from+The+Domino+Project%29

Kodak declared bankruptcy this week. Legislation to ban digital cameras could have saved this company, a “jobs creator,” pillar of the community and long-time wonderful brand. One wonders why they didn’t make the effort? Would you have lobbied for that bill?

A friend tells a story about Kodak. Apparently, they had 59 buildings on the site that made film. As the film business started to shrink, the obvious thing for Kodak to do was to shrink as well, to reduce overhead, to become more nimble. The CEO said, “look out at those buildings and answer this question for me: How many steps are involved in making film?”

The answer, of course, was 59. Slowly shrinking wasn’t an option. The overhang was too large, it was going to take a leap, not a gradual series of steps. And that’s why the future is uncomfortable for most successful industrialists, including those in the media business.

It’s interesting to note that the only people who are in favor of SOPA and PIPA are people who are paid to be in favor of it. And creators (authors like me and Clay Shirky and Scott Adams) aren’t. While the folks at the “Copyright Alliance” pretend to be looking out for the interests of independent filmmakers and authors, the fact is that the only paying members of their lobbying group seem to be big corporations, corporations that aren’t worried about creators, they’re worried about profits. Given a choice between a great film and a profitable one, they’d pick the profitable one every time. Given the choice between paying net profits to creators and adjusting the accounting…

Anyway, back to the future:

The leap to a new structure is painful for successful industries precisely because they’re successful. In book publishing, the carefully constructed system of agents, advances, copyeditors, printers, scarcity, distributors, sales calls, bestseller lists, returns and lunches is threatened by the new regime of the long tail, zero marginal cost and ebook readers with a central choke point. The problem with getting from one place to another is that you need to shut down building 59, and it’s hard to do that while the old model is still working, at least a little bit.

Just about all the people who lost their jobs in Rochester meant well and worked hard and did their jobs well. They need to blame the senior management of Kodak, the ones who were afraid of the future and hoped it would go away. There are more pictures being taken more often by more people than ever before–Kodak leadership couldn’t deal with their overhang and was so in love with their success that they insisted the world change in their favor, as opposed to embracing the future that was sure to arrive.

Please understand that the destruction of the music business had no impact at all on the amount of music available, and little that I can see on the quality of that music either. Musicians just want to make music, thanks very much, and they’ll find a way to make a living gigging in order to do so. The destruction of the film business in Rochester is going to have very little impact on people’s ability to take photos. The destruction of the New York publishing establishment will make me sad, and they/we should hustle, but it’s not going to have much impact on the number of books that are written.

Before we rush to the most draconian solution we can think of to save the status quo, I think it’s worth considering what the function of the threatened industry is, and whether we can achieve that function more directly now that the future is arriving.

Check out this short TED video from Clay Shirky. Especially the first minute, the middle 90 seconds and the last one as well.

http://www.ted.com/talks/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 19, 2012, 08:02:39 AM

"While the folks at the “Copyright Alliance” pretend to be looking out for the interests of independent filmmakers and authors, the fact is that the only paying members of their lobbying group seem to be big corporations, corporations that aren’t worried about creators, they’re worried about profits. Given a choice between a great film and a profitable one, they’d pick the profitable one every time. Given the choice between paying net profits to creators and adjusting the accounting…"

I disagree with this.  It profoundly misses the fact that property rights and profit are good.

I'm willing to entertain the notion that there may be serious unintended side effects and it remains to be seen whether the drafting of the legislation can address these concerns or not, but I am not willing to agree to the additional assertion that people SHOULD be able to steal my work.

Like our Constitution, I believe in copyright. 

Do you?

Why or why not?

The simple fact is that there are sites dedicated to making people's work e.g. martial arts instructional DVDs, downloadable for free.   Your TED guy talks about reversing the presumption of innocent until proven guilty, but in the real world what is someone to do when the site is completely anonymous and located both nowhere and everywhere?  As a matter of legislative drafting I'd have no problem with having two different courses of legal remedy.   For a site that is run by identifiable persons (legal or corporate) then the usual legal framework remains.   For those which seek to anonymously steal, well then the legal route of what is effectively a TRO (temporary restraining order) seems rather reasonable to me.

Title: WSJ Hackers for hire or rent
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 23, 2012, 07:55:05 AM

By CASSELL BRYAN-LOW

Sitting in his Los Angeles home, Kuwaiti billionaire Bassam Alghanim received an alarming call from a business associate: Hundreds of his personal emails were posted online for anyone to see.
 
Mr. Alghanim checked and found it to be true, according to a person familiar with the matter. The emails included information on his personal finances, legal affairs, even his pharmacy bills, this person said.
 






Enlarge Image




Reuters
Kuwaiti billionaire Kutayba Alghanim, above, allegedly commissioned hackers to copy emails of his brother, Bassam.
.
That led to another surprise. Mr. Alghanim discovered the person who had allegedly commissioned the hackers was his own brother, with whom he is fighting over how to divide up billions of dollars of joint assets. Mr. Alghanim's lawyers allege in court filings that the brother hired investigators to illegally access his email with the help of Chinese hackers. Cost to hire the hackers: about $400.
 
Although the brothers' feud involves big money, documents filed in two civil cases in September 2009 suggests just how simple and affordable online espionage has become. Computer forensic specialists say some hackers-for-hire openly market themselves online. "It's not hard to find hackers," says Mikko Hyppönen of computer-security firm F-Secure Corp.
 
One such site, hiretohack.net, advertises online services including being able to "crack" passwords for major email services in less than 48 hours. It says it charges a minimum of $150, depending on the email provider, the password's complexity and the urgency of the job. The site describes itself as a group of technology students based in Europe, U.S. and Asia.

Hiretohack.net's claims couldn't immediately be verified, and the group didn't respond to a request for comment.



Reuters
Bassam Alghanim
.
Mischel Kwon, who runs a security-consulting firm and is the former director of the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a government organization known as US-CERT, says the hacker-for-hire industry is well established. Some are one- or two-person outfits, but there are also larger "organized crime" groups," she said. She and other specialists note that it is also easy to find tools online that assist in hacking into someone's email.
 
The issue of hacking and online espionage has gained prominence recently. In December, The Wall Street Journal reported that hackers in China breached the computer defenses of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A month earlier, a Paris court fined French energy giant Électricité de France SA €1.5 million, or about $1.9 million, for directing an investigator to hack into the computers of environmental group Greenpeace in 2006. In the U.K., authorities are investigating allegations of hacking by News Corp.'s recently closed tabloid, News of the World. News Corp., which has said it is cooperating with police, also owns The Wall Street Journal.
 
China appears to be a source of a significant proportion of attacks. In an October 2011 report to Congress, the U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive said that U.S. economic information and technology are targeted by industry and government from dozens of countries but that attackers based in China "are the world's most active and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage."
 
A U.K. government report took a shot at putting numbers to the problem last year: It estimated that computer-related industrial espionage cost U.K. businesses about £7.6 billion, or about $11.8 billion, annually in loss of information that could hurt a company's chances of winning open tenders, and loss of merger-related information. Cyber intellectual-property theft cost business an additional £9.2 billion annually, it estimated.
 
The problem is under-measured because many victims are reluctant to report attacks to protect their reputation. The Alghanims' dispute, however, provides a rare look at detailed hacking allegations.

The spat between the two brothers involves the divvying up of a sprawling business empire originally founded by their father. The brothers, Kutayba and Bassam, 66 years old and 60, respectively, are both U.S.-educated Kuwaiti citizens.
 






Enlarge Image




.
The allegations of email hacking are detailed in litigation filed by Bassam in the U.K. and the U.S. According to his court filings, his older brother, Kutayba Alghanim, along with the brother's son and the company's chief legal officer, allegedly stole thousands of pages of emails over more than a year.

Bassam's lawyer said his client "was horrified to discover the privacy of his email accounts had been compromised."
 
A lawyer representing Kutayba and his son declined to comment on the hacking allegations or make the men available for comment. A lawyer representing the son's chief legal officer declined to comment. In the U.S. lawsuit—the one in which the three men are named as defendants—none has addressed the hacking allegations. The three men aren't named as defendants in the U.K. action.
 
Bassam is based in Los Angeles, while Kutayba and his son primarily live in Kuwait but maintain residences in the U.S., including a 16,000-square-foot Manhattan mansion and a 48-acre Long Island estate, according to Bassam's legal filings. Their fight has included a U.K. High Court civil case and a separate civil case in U.S. Federal Court in New York.
 
In the U.K., a judge recently concluded that the two defendants in that case, both British investigators, arranged the hacking. In that October decision, Justice Peter Smith also said the evidence showed that the hacking was carried out at the direction of Kutayba, his son and the chief legal officer, although they weren't defendants in that case.
 
"It is clear, on the evidence I have," that the trio orchestrated the computer hacking, Mr. Smith said in his ruling.
 
In the U.S. civil case, Kutayba, his son and the legal officer are named as defendants. Documents filed in federal court in New York allege the three directed the hacking and violated federal and state laws including computer misuse.
 
One of the two private investigators admitted to the U.K. court that he had hacked Bassam's email and said he did it at the orders of the second investigator. After the first investigator began cooperating with Bassam's lawyers, the legal action against him was stayed. The second investigator denied hacking; the judge found him in breach of civil laws on privacy and confidence.
 
Kutayba's legal filings argue that his brother is trying to avoid earlier agreements requiring their asset-split dispute to be handled by a Kuwaiti arbitrator. "Bassam has done everything in his power to avoid his obligations, including his obligation to arbitrate," Kutayba said in U.S. court filings.

In November in New York, the judge stayed the U.S. case pending a ruling by a Kuwait arbitrator on the dispute.
 
The two brothers were once close—they used to share homes in New York, Los Angeles and Kuwait, according to a person familiar with the matter. But they fell out a few years ago, according to Bassam's U.S. filings. One source of tension was an effort by Kutayba to promote his eldest son, Omar Alghanim, as heir to the family business, a person familiar with the matter said. Omar is a former Morgan Stanley analyst and founding shareholder of New York merger firm Perella Weinberg Partners LP.
 
Omar currently is chief executive of the family company, Alghanim Industries, a conglomerate that distributes electronics, among other things. The company's chief legal officer is Waleed Moubarak, the man who is alleged, along with Kutayba and his son, to have commissioned the hacking. Mr. Moubarak didn't respond to a request for comment.
 
Unable to reconcile, the brothers decided to divide their jointly held assets. Included is Alghanim Industries and other businesses; a stake in Kuwait's Gulf Bank; residential properties in New York, London, Los Angeles, Kuwait and elsewhere; a $450 million portfolio; and $100 million in art, according to Bassam's U.S. and U.K. court filings.
 
The two continued to feud even after signing a March 2008 memorandum of understanding, according to U.S. court filings by both. That memorandum, included in Kutayba's filings, describes a 60:40 ownership split between Kutayba and Bassam, respectively, of their Kuwait-based assets and an even split of overseas assets.

As the dispute escalated, Kutayba and his associates turned to Steven McIntyre, a private investigator near London, according to documents filed in the U.K. court by Bassam and Mr. McIntyre. Mr. McIntyre, in turn, enlisted the help of Timothy Zimmer, a forensic investigator and then-colleague, and in mid-2008 asked him to gain access to Bassam's two personal email accounts, according to a witness statement by Mr. Zimmer in U.K. court.
 
A lawyer who represented Mr. McIntyre during the U.K. proceedings declined to comment. Mr. McIntyre didn't respond to requests seeking comment.
 
In his witness statement, Mr. Zimmer said he contacted an organization called Invisible Hacking Group, which he had previously used for security-testing of web-based email accounts.
 
Little is known about IHG. Mr. Zimmer, in his witness statement, said IHG instructed him to send payment to Chengdu, a city in China. The legal filings don't indicate how Mr. Zimmer and IHG first came in contact.
 
Today, IHG doesn't appear to have an online presence, although there are a few message-board posts from 2004 under that name offering computer-monitoring services for a few hundred dollars a month. "Do you want to know what your business competitors are doing online everyday?" the message reads. An email sent to an address in the message bounced back.
 
According to Mr. Zimmer's statement, the IHG service worked like this: It requested the target person's email address, the names of friends or colleagues, and examples of topics that interest them. The hackers would then send an email to the target that sounded as if it came from an acquaintance, but which actually installed malicious software on the target's computer. The software would let the hackers capture the target's email password.
 
Mr. Zimmer forwarded Bassam's email addresses to IHG, according to his witness statement. IHG then sent him the passwords to Bassam's email accounts, for which he paid £256 (about $400) to the China address, he said.
 
Using the passwords, Mr. Zimmer printed Bassam's emails—filling eight ring binders—and gave them to Mr. McIntyre, according to Mr. Zimmer's statement. Mr. McIntyre initially personally delivered them to Omar, Kutayba's son, first on his yacht moored at the Italian island of Capri and then, via a colleague, on his yacht in Sardinia, according to Bassam's U.K. and U.S. filings.
 
To make the process of obtaining the emails more efficient, the investigators set up a password-protected website, jackshome.info, to which they uploaded copies of the emails, Bassam's U.K. and U.S. court filings allege.

Bassam alleges that his brother and his associates accessed thousands of pages of emails, according to the U.K. and U.S. court filings. The private investigators received more than $200,000 for their alleged hacking services over 13 months, according to Bassam's U.S. filings.

The operation was tripped up in August 2009 when one of Bassam's advisers found some of the emails online, according to U.K. filings. Because of a glitch, documents uploaded to the password-protected website were actually accessible via Google search, the filings said.
 
In September 2009, Mr. Zimmer and Mr. McIntyre's colleague flew to New York to explain what went wrong to Omar and Mr. Moubarak, Mr. Zimmer said in his witness statement. The men gathered in a suite at the luxury Carlyle Hotel. Omar, who "was getting very worked up," according to Mr. Zimmer's statement, said in the meeting that not only did he want to get back into Bassam's email accounts but he also wanted access to the email of another family member close to Bassam.

In his U.K. witness statement, Mr. Zimmer admitted he hacked Bassam's emails and said Mr. McIntyre instructed him to do so.

Mr. McIntyre disputed the hacking allegations in a letter to the court, but said he couldn't afford to attend court. According to the October judgment, Mr. McIntyre said he was "too ill and too distressed, too oppressed" to attend. The judge hasn't yet ruled on whether Mr. McIntyre will have to pay damages.

Title: NY Times: OPEN better than SOPA
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 29, 2012, 04:22:15 AM

Beyond SOPA
Published: January 28, 2012
 
We welcomed the collapse this month of two flawed bills to prevent online piracy, bills that could have stifled speech and undermined Internet safety. But piracy by Web sites in countries like Russia and China, which offer high-quality bootleg copies of movies and music, is a real problem for the nation’s creative industries. And there is legislation that could curb the operation of rogue Web sites without threatening legitimate expression.

The Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, sponsored by Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Darrell Issa, offers a straightforward and transparent approach to the problem. Content owners could ask the International Trade Commission to investigate whether a foreign Web site was dedicated to piracy. The Web site would be able to rebut the claim. If the commission ruled for the copyright holder, it could direct payment firms like Visa and PayPal and advertising networks like Google’s to stop doing business with the Web site.

The bill addresses concerns of copyright holders that the process would be too slow to match the pirates’ speed. It would allow them to request temporary restraining orders when there is urgency to, say, stop a Russian Web site from illegally streaming the Super Bowl. That Web site would still have a chance to respond, but it would have to move more quickly to make its case.

The OPEN Act also avoids some of the pitfalls of the previous bills. The legislation backed by movie studios and record labels would have penalized Web sites accused of the vague crimes of enabling or assisting piracy. OPEN would penalize only Web sites dedicated “willfully and primarily” to the infringement of copyrights or trademarks, a well-established standard used in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent domestic piracy.

OPEN would not give copyright holders the authority to direct payment processors and ad networks to stop doing business with a given Web site: that would have opened a door for abuse. And the Justice Department would not be able to “disappear” rogue Web sites by tinkering with their addresses — a provision too much like hacking, which worried safety experts.

By giving the International Trade Commission sole authority to determine infringement, OPEN would also prevent copyright holders from shopping around for sympathetic courts, making the process more consistent and less likely to spark trade conflicts and retaliatory moves.

The new bill may not be perfect; some Web sites that aid or abet pirates may avoid punishment. But it gives copyright holders powerful new tools to protect themselves. And it goes a long way toward addressing the concerns of Internet companies, protecting legitimate expression on the Web from overzealous content owners. The two sides need to move beyond their resentments and push for its passage.

Title: What Wikipedia won't tell you
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 08, 2012, 07:36:30 AM

THE digital tsunami that swept over the Capitol last month, forcing Congress to set aside legislation to combat the online piracy of American music, movies, books and other creative works, raised questions about how the democratic process functions in the digital age.

Policy makers had recognized a constitutional (and economic) imperative to protect American property from theft, to shield consumers from counterfeit products and fraud, and to combat foreign criminals who exploit technology to steal American ingenuity and jobs. They knew that music sales in the United States are less than half of what they were in 1999, when the file-sharing site Napster emerged, and that direct employment in the industry had fallen by more than half since then, to less than 10,000. They studied the problem in all its dimensions, through multiple hearings.

While no legislation is perfect, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (or PIPA) was carefully devised, with nearly unanimous bipartisan support in the Senate, and its House counterpart, the Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA), was based on existing statutes and Supreme Court precedents. But at the 11th hour, a flood of e-mails and phone calls to Congress stopped the legislation in its tracks. Was this the result of democracy, or demagoguery?

Misinformation may be a dirty trick, but it works. Consider, for example, the claim that SOPA and PIPA were “censorship,” a loaded and inflammatory term designed to evoke images of crackdowns on pro-democracy Web sites by China or Iran. Since when is it censorship to shut down an operation that an American court, upon a thorough review of evidence, has determined to be illegal? When the police close down a store fencing stolen goods, it isn’t censorship, but when those stolen goods are fenced online, it is? Wikipedia, Google and others manufactured controversy by unfairly equating SOPA with censorship. They also argued misleadingly that the bills would have required Web sites to “monitor” what their users upload, conveniently ignoring provisions like the “No Duty to Monitor” section.

The hyperbolic mistruths, presented on the home pages of some of the world’s most popular Web sites, amounted to an abuse of trust and a misuse of power. When Wikipedia and Google purport to be neutral sources of information, but then exploit their stature to present information that is not only not neutral but affirmatively incomplete and misleading, they are duping their users into accepting as truth what are merely self-serving political declarations.

As it happens, the television networks that actively supported SOPA and PIPA didn’t take advantage of their broadcast credibility to press their case. That’s partly because “old media” draws a line between “news” and “editorial.” Apparently, Wikipedia and Google don’t recognize the ethical boundary between the neutral reporting of information and the presentation of editorial opinion as fact.

The violation of neutrality is a patent hypocrisy: these companies have long argued that Internet service providers (telecommunications and cable companies) had to be regulated under the doctrine of “net neutrality” because of their power as owners of the Internet pipes. But what the Google and Wikipedia blackout showed is that it’s the platforms that exercise the real power. Get enough of them to espouse Silicon Valley’s perspective, and tens of millions of Americans will get a one-sided view of whatever the issue may be, drowning out the other side.

The conventional wisdom is that the defeat of these bills shows the power of the digital commons. Sure, anybody could click on a link or tweet in outrage — but how many knew what they were supporting or opposing? Would they have cast their clicks if they knew they were supporting foreign criminals selling counterfeit pharmaceuticals to Americans? Was it SOPA they were opposed to, or censorship?

No doubt, some genuinely wanted to protect Americans against theft but were sincerely concerned about how the language in the bill might be interpreted. But others may simply believe that online music, books and movies should be free. And how many of those e-mails were from the same people who attacked the Web sites of the Department of Justice, the Motion Picture Association of America, my organization and others as retribution for the seizure of Megaupload, an international digital piracy operation? Indeed, it’s hackers like the group Anonymous that engage in real censorship when they stifle the speech of those with whom they disagree.

Perhaps this is naïve, but I’d like to believe that the companies that opposed SOPA and PIPA will now feel some responsibility to help come up with constructive alternatives. Virtually every opponent acknowledged that the problem of counterfeiting and piracy is real and damaging. It is no longer acceptable just to say no. The diversionary bill that they drafted, the OPEN Act, would do little to stop the illegal behavior and would not establish a workable framework, standards or remedies.

It has become clear that, at this point, neither SOPA, PIPA nor OPEN is a viable answer. We need to take a step back to seek fresh ideas and new approaches. The “Copyright Alert” program, a voluntary effort by the entertainment industries and leading Internet service providers to notify users whose accounts are being used for wrongful downloading over peer-to-peer networks, shows that respectful fact-based conversations can lead to progress.

We all share the goal of a safe and legal Internet. We need reason, not rhetoric, in discussing how to achieve it.

Cary H. Sherman is chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, which represents music labels.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: ccp on February 08, 2012, 02:10:09 PM

"the Recording Industry Association of America"

The pot calling the kettle black.

What a joke.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: prentice crawford on February 16, 2012, 10:49:30 PM

....FBI could take down Internet for millions on March 8
By Andrew Couts | Digital Trends – 12 hrs ago....EmailNew: Now the email button gives you a quick and easy way to start a conversation.

Share18Print......
The Federal Bureau of Investigation may soon be forced to shut down a number of key Domain Name System (DNS) servers, which would cut Internet access for millions of Web users around the world, reports BetaBeat. The DNS servers were installed by the FBI last year, in an effort to stop the spread of a piece of malware known as DNSCharger Trojan. But the court order that allowed the set up of the replacement servers expires on March 8.

In November of last year, authorities arrested six men in Estonia for the creation and spread of DNSCharger, which reconfigures infected computers’ Internet settings, and re-routes users to websites that contain malware, or other illegal sites. DNSCharger also blocks access to websites that might offer solutions for how to rid the computer of its worm, and often comes bundled with other types of malicious software.

By the time the FBI stepped in, DNSCharger had taken over computers in more than 100 countries, including half-a-million computers in the US alone. To help eradicate the widespread malware, the FBI replaced infected servers with new, clean servers, which gave companies and individuals with infected computers time to clean DNSCharger off their machines.

Unfortunately, DNSCharger is still running on computers “at half of the Fortune 500 companies,” and at “27 out of 55 major government entities,” reports cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs. These computers rely on the FBI-installed DNS servers to access the Web. But if the court order is not extended, the FBI will be legally required to remove the clean servers, which would cut off the Internet for users still infected with DNSCharger.

Companies or other agencies that are unsure whether their systems are infected with DNSCharger can get free assistance here. And private users can find out if they are infected using instructions provided here.

[Image via Maxim Tupikov/Shutterstock]

This article was originally posted on Digital Trends

More from Digital Trends

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Minority Report is real: FBI wants to use social networks to prevent future crime

                                           P.C.

..

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 18, 2012, 10:30:03 PM

Ummmm , , , just how freaked out should I be?!?

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: G M on February 19, 2012, 01:14:53 PM

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on February 18, 2012, 10:30:03 PM

Ummmm , , , just how freaked out should I be?!?

Not all all.

Title: Target Knew a High School Girl Was Pregnant
Post by: bigdog on February 19, 2012, 05:45:11 PM

Who or what knows you better than you know yourself?

http://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-school-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-parents/

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 19, 2012, 08:47:29 PM

GM:  I love ya man, but you carry little weight with me on this particular sort of thing  :lol:

BD:  That would also belong on the Privacy thread.

Title: UN looking to take over internet
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 21, 2012, 09:11:50 AM

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204792404577229074023195322.html?mod=opinion_newsreel

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on March 26, 2012, 09:25:57 PM

Information Security and the OODA Loop

The Information Security OODA Loop - The Introduction
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Following-the-White-Rabbit/The-Information-Security-OODA-Loop-The-Introduction/ba-p/5589775

The Information Security OODA Loop - Observe
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Following-the-White-Rabbit/The-Information-Security-OODA-Loop-Observe/ba-p/5590935

The Information Security OODA Loop - Orient
http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Following-the-White-Rabbit/The-Information-Security-OODA-Loop-Orient/ba-p/5592749

Title: Anonymous to attack internet this weekend?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 31, 2012, 06:11:55 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/31/technology/with-advance-warning-bracing-for-attack-on-internet-by-anonymous.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120331

Title: Re: Anonymous to attack internet this weekend?
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on April 02, 2012, 05:58:36 PM

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on March 31, 2012, 06:11:55 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/31/technology/with-advance-warning-bracing-for-attack-on-internet-by-anonymous.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120331

http://isc.sans.edu/diary.html?storyid=12868

In the comments section someone stated:

The original threat to take down the Internet DNS-system was posted here:

http://pastebin.com/NKbnh8q8

In the above pastebin-post, the following is stated:

Quote

"download link in #opGlobalBlackout"

If you entered the Anonymous IRC-network at the time this was posted, the topic of channel opGlobalBlackout was: Official Press Release: http://pastebin.com/yK79Tsgq

As you can see, the "Press Release" tells potential Anonymous-members to stop waging war, that peace is the way to go, to stop DDoS-attacks. This is another words an "anti-op" designed to get potential anonymous-recruits to think about what they are doing.

There never was an operation. There was only an anti-operation, designed to get people to think.
posted by Rogers, Sun Apr 01 2012, 13:23

Title: Mistakes People Make that Lead to Security Breaches
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on April 10, 2012, 12:48:08 AM

The Five Worst Security Mistakes End Users Make

Failing to install anti-virus, keep its signatures up to date, and apply it to all files.

Opening unsolicited e-mail attachments without verifying their source and checking their content first, or executing games or screen savers or other programs from untrusted sources.

Failing to install security patches-especially for Microsoft Office, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Netscape.

Not making and testing backups.

Being connected to more than one network such as wireless and a physical Ethernet or using a modem while connected through a local area network.

http://www.sans.org/security-resources/mistakes.php?ref=3816

Title: Cyber Warfare: The next Cold War
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on April 10, 2012, 10:37:00 PM

http://www.scmagazine.com/cyber-warfare-the-next-cold-war/article/232568/


Instead of military assaults, today's adversaries hire coders to create attacks that can run autonomously for years, says Stephen Lawton.
History books tell us that the Cold War ended in roughly 1991 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. But, today's security practitioners say the Cold War has simply morphed from a threat of armed conflict among major world powers into a battle of computer-savvy “troops” fighting from the comfort of offices.

Instead of countries spending billions of dollars to create new weapons, supply massive armies and spend millions of dollars (or rubles, francs or yuan) fighting conventional attacks against political, economic, religious or commercial foes, today's adversaries hire code-writers to create attacks that can run autonomously for years with little or no human intervention. By repurposing code to spawn new attacks, the cost of cyber warfare can be a fraction of the cost of a conventional war.
While China and Russia generally are considered by industry experts to be the leaders in state-sponsored cyber attacks against the United States, they are not the only countries to have sophisticated espionage infrastructures in place, says Richard Bejtlich, chief security officer at Alexandria, Va.-based Mandiant. Other nations with sophisticated capabilities include North Korea, Iran, France, Israel and, of course, the United States.

North Korea, Bejtlich says, uses technology against its neighbor, South Korea, and to make political statements against the West, generally resulting in attacks against the United States, he says. Iran primarily uses its cyber weaponry to suppress internal dissidents.

In the past, he says, U.S. politicians spoke in general terms about cyber attacks, choosing not to name those believed to be responsible. That all changed late last year when the Office of the National Counter Intelligence Executive released a report, “Foreign Spies Stealing U.S. Economic Secrets in Cyber space,” which specifically identified China and Russia as key participants. However, the report also said U.S. allies are actively involved.
“Certain allies and other countries that enjoy broad access to U.S. government agencies and the private sector conduct economic espionage to acquire sensitive U.S. information and technologies,” the report states. “Some of these states have advanced cyber capabilities.”

It cited four factors that will shape the cyber environment over the next three to five years. These are: A technological shift, including the use of smartphones, laptops and other internet-connected devices; an economic shift that changes the way corporations, government agencies and other organizations share storage, computing, networking and application resources; a cultural shift in the U.S. workforce, where younger employees mix personal and professional activities; and a geopolitical shift as globalization of the supply chain and worker access increase the ability for malicious individuals to compromise the integrity and security of computing devices.
Jared Carstensen, manager of enterprise risk services at Deloitte in Dublin, Ireland, likes to differentiate between cyber crime and cyber espionage because the end goals differ significantly. For an attack to be considered a cyber crime, he says, the adversary does so for financial gain. This typically includes attacks designed to obtain credit card or bank data. Cyber espionage, on the other hand, is designed to steal intellectual property, and/or disable or attack critical infrastructure. It often is performed for political purposes.


Spying has been around since the dawn of man, Carstensen says. Early tribes snooped on other tribes to learn where they found food. Today's sleuths also are looking for the same competitive advantage over their enemies – and even their allies.
In some countries, such as North Korea, students believed to have a propensity for math or technology are trained at an early age as cyber warriors. These academies provide the students with respectability and good pay. In China, for example, the Communist Party codified cyber warfare in 2010, and President Hu Jintao deemed cyber war a priority. Author and retired U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. William Hagestad says in an upcoming book that China bases its policies on the Art of War, Sun Tzu's doctrine written around 500 B.C., one of whose tenets is: Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. Chinese officials, however, regularly deny they are involved in any cyber spying efforts.

In the United States, the military is also shifting its war strategy to further prioritize cyber efforts. The soldiers who pilot military drones over Pakistan and Afghanistan actually sit in control rooms at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. This, Carstensen says, is not unlike cyber attackers who might work out of a hotel to conduct assaults.

However, the level of expertise of foreign cyber attackers varies widely from so-called script-kiddies, who download exploit software that is widely available on the internet, to experienced computer engineers who have either religious or political reasons for staging actions.

Some of these attacks are advanced persistent threats (APTs) that are designed to enter a computer system and perhaps sit dormant for a period of time. The intrusions are designed not to be noticed.

This tactic varies significantly from those of hacktivists, who attack websites with the expressed purpose of drawing attention to the site being breached. Some groups, such as Anonymous and LulzSec, have claimed credit for damage to sites they have compromised.

Unlike hacktivists, cyber spies are so concerned about flying under the radar that once they successfully enter a target system, they actually  install security patches to ensure that other attackers are unable to access the system using the same vulnerability, says Daniel Teal, founder and chief technology officer of Austin, Texas-based CoreTrace and a former officer at the Air Force Information Warfare Center (AFIWC). By installing fixes, he says, the attacker will have the compromised systems all to themselves and will not have to worry about a sloppy rival alerting the IT manager that there has been a breach.
Admins might actually see their network performance improve while the attacker ensures that others are unable to infect the environment, Teal says. Because the attacker does not want to draw attention, they simply can leave a back door open so that the malware payload is not accidentally identified by the target network.

Toney Jennings, CEO of CoreTrace, adds that companies might have the equivalent of a “cyber atomic bomb” in the server that “is not doing anything bad today.” That bomb could be set off by an intruder at a later date, well after the initial breach took place. Additionally, he says companies purchasing mission-critical hardware should spot check the “guts” of the new systems, including all device drivers, for malicious code before putting them into production.
Most hardware and software today is developed outside U.S controls, so ensuring it is safe is a good business practice. “It's a valid bit of paranoia,” Jennings says.

Underscoring this concern, an FBI presentation last year detailed how counterfeit Cisco Systems networking equipment originating in China – including network routers, switches, gigabit interface converters and WAN interface cards – was being sold in the United States. “Operation Cisco Raider” resulted in the recovery of 3,500 pirated network devices valued at $3.5 million, James Finch, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division, has said.

Teal says he once discovered, by accident, a malicious device driver for a keyboard he purchased for his daughter's computer. The driver was sending personal information off his home network. He contacted the system manufacturer, Hewlett-Packard, and discovered that the kernel driver was written by a third party. Further investigations by Teal and HP determined that the manufacturer was sending data off the network simply to ensure an internet connection – a task that easily could have been accomplished by sending random data bits without using personal information.

When Bejtlich was the director of incident response at General Electric, the company had an estimated half-million computers, and no shortage of defensive technologies and staff. Even still, he says, with the full resources of a sophisticated IT team and a corporate leader who recognized the need for IT security, the company still was unable to maintain 100 percent effectiveness against intruders or persistent threats.


And now, mobile and cloud
Mandiant's Bejtlich says that despite the best intentions of CISOs and IT staffs, it is nearly impossible to keep a network of a 1,000 or more endpoints safe from outside attacks.

Today, Bejtlich says, IT staffs need to address not only the needs of a company's primary computer systems, but also non-standard systems, such as smartphones and other mobile devices. While cyber espionage is normally thought of as an attack against a large computer system, many corporate executives and engineers have confidential data on their devices that might be useful to attackers.

Companies that believe they are too small or insignificant to be targeted are wrong, and do not necessarily understand how and why attacks work, says Erin Nealy Cox, managing director and deputy general counsel at Stroz Friedberg LLC and a former federal prosecutor and assistant U.S. attorney. While technology firms are obvious targets for attackers after intellectual property, small companies may be considered stepping stones.

Cox says security education is essential in companies of all sizes. Large organizations with established policies and procedures need to educate their employees on a regular basis not only about sound computing practices, but also about data and office security policies. For example, she says employees need to be reminded not to insert thumb drives they find in the parking lot or those handed to them at a trade show into a company computer. Such devices could be plants with malware on them.
“Typically,” she says, “security comes at the price of convenience.”

Even data security companies can fall prey to sophisticated attacks, she says. Within the past year, there have been several online raids on companies that specialize in data security. The reasons for the success vary, she says, but it generally falls into the category of an exploit that was allowed because someone was not paying attention to details. It might have been faulty website code or a misconfigured network, but generally the vulnerabilities could have been caught.

Scott Crawford, research director for security and risk management at Enterprise Management Associates, with corporate headquarters in Boulder, Colo., agrees that companies of all sizes could be targets. While smaller entities might not provide the breadth of information that a multinational corporation offers, it still could have secrets worth stealing, he says.
Crawford views this kind of cyber theft, be it from a state-sponsored or industrial source, to be similar to espionage conducted during the Cold War. There could be value in stealing information, he says, but “you don't want to kill the market.” One purpose for this type of espionage is to build a country's or company's own ability to compete against existing players in the field.

If it costs $50 million to develop a product, but only $2 million to steal it, some will opt for the less costly approach. This is particularly true for emerging nations that might have technical resources, but are not necessarily competitive enough to develop their own intellectual property.

Defense is all about managing a company's or a country's risk, Crawford says. Some organizations look for fast fixes to potential weaknesses without fully understanding their risk profile or the impact of their actions. A layered approach to security is necessary.

Crawford also blames guidance or regulations that do not match the threat. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), for example, is prescriptive and specifies to security officers how to maintain compliance, but this is only a point in time, he says. A company's compliance “can be passé or irrelevant” immediately after passing the audit. 

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 11, 2012, 07:28:22 AM

Good article!

May I ask you to post it at http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=1586.0 as well?  Thank you.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on April 13, 2012, 02:14:09 AM

http://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/20779-Social-Media-Security-Basics-An-Infographic.html

Social networking has quickly become a major medium for communications for both individuals and organizations, but the platforms that allow the development of online personae are not without their own inherent risks.

The team over at security provider Veracode has produced an interesting and informative infographic examining the social media security basics everyone who has ventured into the online world of networking should embrace.

Follow the link above to view the complete article.

Title: Cridex
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on April 15, 2012, 06:11:10 PM

Just an FYI: "we" have been seeing alot of fake emails here at work, luckily they are blocked and deleted but normal home users don't have the same protections in place.

Cridex Trojan breaks CAPTCHA, targets Facebook, Twitter users
http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=5570732773137715208&gid=2305411&type=member&item=92660407&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Fbitcyber%2Ewordpress%2Ecom%2F2012%2F02%2F02%2Fcridex-trojan-breaks-captcha-targets-facebook-twitter-users%2F&urlhash=9JPw&goback=%2Egde_2305411_member_92660407



The Cridex Trojan Targets 137 Financial Organizations in One Go
http://labs.m86security.com/2012/03/the-cridex-trojan-targets-137-financial-organizations-in-one-go/

Title: WSJ: UN wants to run internet
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 26, 2012, 01:59:45 AM

The U.N., Internet Regulator?
Private governance has the flexibility and competence needed to keep the Internet dynamic and free..Article Comments more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».Email Print Save ↓ More .
.smaller Larger  By ANDREA RENDA
Mayan prophecy predicts that the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012, but Internet users should be more worried about what will happen just a few weeks before. The World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) meets in Dubai Dec. 3-14 to consider proposals that would grant authority for Internet governance to the United Nations and impose new regulations on Web traffic. If adopted, these proposals could upend the Web as we know it, undermining it as an engine for growth and dynamism for the world.

Since 1988, the Internet has been governed by private bodies. Icann, which manages domain names under the rather benevolent oversight of the U.S., is fully devoted to multiple-stakeholder participation. Government representatives only sit on an "advisory committee," while business and civil society shape the rules.

However, recent events (such as the controversial creation of a dedicated .xxx domain for adult content and Icann's plan to expand top-level domains) have created concerns among national governments—even those, such as the U.S. and the European Union, that remain fully committed to protecting the multiple-stakeholder model.

Hence the ideas for reform that other governments have put forth before the WCIT. India, Brazil and South Africa have proposed a new committee within the U.N. dedicated to Internet-related issues. This committee would oversee Icann and other nongovernmental bodies, bringing the Internet under tighter intergovernmental control but not leading to anything more than "recommendations."

China and Russia, meanwhile, have proposed a voluntary international code of conduct for information security, which arguably would serve those governments' desire to place the Internet under international regulatory control while preserving other countries' ability to opt out of undesirable agreements.

Striking a balance between these ideas and the status quo won't be easy. It is difficult to imagine a U.N.-led body that could manage the Internet effectively. Private regulation has the flexibility and competence that is needed in this field. Moreover, the Internet has become a formidable ally of democracy, often against the will of repressive governments. Placing it under government control might lead at once to inefficiencies and enhanced risk of political censorship. Why fix what isn't broken?

On the other hand, the Internet is far from perfect even if it isn't broken, and challenges are emerging with growing frequency. The Icann-led expansion of the top-level domains risks further jeopardizing the enforcement of intellectual-property rights in cyberspace, trademarks in particular. Internet freedom is increasingly being sacrificed at the altar of copyright enforcement; laws like PIPA and SOPA in the U.S., as well as similar laws in other countries and the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, post stop signs everywhere in cyberspace.

Privacy and security are also at risk due to a lack of adequate legal tools and coordination mechanisms, most of which would be intergovernmental and global. Some governments are very active in Internet censorship, and there is currently now way of holding these authorities accountable.

And while more than half of Internet users are located in Asia, the U.S. still has exclusivity over the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and the root zone file, the list of all top-level domains in the Internet. Non-U.S. companies, including EU-based ones, cannot compete to become the managers of these critical resources.

There seems to be no practical or desirable alternative to a multiple-stakeholder model when it comes to the technical regulations that govern the Internet. However, Icann can be made more transparent and accountable, and its Government Advisory Committee more representative and perhaps more powerful. This would address some of the concerns expressed by national governments, who fear that they are not sufficiently involved in the operation of such a critical resource for society and the economy.

National governments should also enhance their cooperation in a number of fields, including media pluralism, fundamental rights and cybersecurity. The task of preserving and promoting diverse, independent Web media could be given to Unesco rather than a brand-new U.N. committee. Internet free speech is a matter for human-rights law: The European Court of Justice recently ruled that filtering and monitoring end-users can lead to a violation of their fundamental right to communication.

And on Web security, a global public-private partnership should be launched to increase data collection, government cooperation and mutual trust in organizing the response to new cyber threats.

More transparency and accountability for private organizations, rather than more governmental control, can help the Internet continue to grow as a resource for the whole world. More geographically balanced governance can easily co-exist with a free Internet. It would also help unmask those governments that dress their desire to limit free speech as a plea for global governance.

The economic and social advancement generated by the Internet has been and will continue to be key to the rapid development we have seen in many of the countries raising legitimate concerns. Striking the right balance will be key when the WCIT convenes in December. Assuming the Mayan prophecy is wrong, of course.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: DougMacG on April 26, 2012, 06:41:54 AM

Some say the part of the constitution that doesn't allowusto be governed by the UN is contained in the first three words, We The People.

We would not be subject to their jurisdiction if we had left the group the first time we found out they do not act in our interest.

Title: Mom's Facebook photo pops up on porn, dating sites
Post by: bigdog on April 30, 2012, 02:43:56 PM

http://digitallife.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/30/11471856-moms-facebook-photo-pops-up-on-porn-dating-sites?lite

Rahim, it seems, is the victim of photo-jacking — the exploitation of photos scraped from Facebook and other Internet outlets. And Rahim isn't the only victim of image exploitation. The Straits Times reports there are at least two other women in Singapore whose social media photos showed up on the same sites where Rahim's picture appeared.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 04, 2012, 09:19:16 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/us/politics/study-finds-concerns-on-readiness-for-cyberattacks.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120504

Title: Five Concerns Surrounding Pinterest
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on May 10, 2012, 04:35:40 PM

Source: http://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/21268-Five-Concerns-Surrounding-Pinterest.html

Thursday, May 10, 2012
Contributed By:
Allan Pratt, MBA


By now, everyone has heard the news that Pinterest has surpassed all other social media sites and has earned the coveted spot of “number three” in terms of users behind Facebook and Twitter.

While LinkedIn and YouTube fell in the standings, Pinterest has adopted a loyal following – and especially amazing – while still in beta phase by invitation only.

According to a comScore study, the number of Pinterest users that visit the site daily has increased by 145% since the beginning of 2012.

But, before you join the Pinterest party, there are some things to keep in mind.

First, here is Pinterest’s mission in the company’s own words: “Our goal is to connect everyone in the world through the things they find interesting. We think that a favorite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people.

With millions of new pins added every week, Pinterest is connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests.”

NO PRIVACY SETTINGS

While Pinterest’s appeal is its visual-oriented content comprised of photos, images, illustrations, videos – some with links and some without – don’t get so caught up with creating categories, or in Pinterest speak, boards, that you upload personal photos with family members, personal cars, and your house or apartment with identifying details like numbers and street signs.

At the current time, there are no privacy settings similar to Facebook or Google Plus, and boards cannot be made private, similar to customized Facebook lists or customized Google Plus circles. The bottom line is that anyone with Internet access can view your boards.

COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT

Since the site is in beta phase, copyright and trademark police are not swimming around the site, therefore, all users must be on their best behavior about using images. Give credit if an image or link is not yours – be a respectable member of the Pinterest world.

ABOUT YOU

There is a bio section at the top of each page next to your profile photo. Don’t leave this section blank in your haste to set up your account, but don’t be overly-wordy either.

While users will learn about you from your boards and pins, everyone wants to read a quick sentence or two about you. Also, you can share your website URL, your Facebook URL, and/or your Twitter URL.

SHARING CONTENT WITH FACEBOOK AND TWITTER

Currently, you can log in to Pinterest with your Facebook or Twitter passwords. While this allows for shared content on both major sites, you can add details about your pins (in Pinterest speak, an image added on Pinterest) to Facebook and Twitter, this sharing of passwords may not be the best idea.

Consider a safer alternative – although not a quicker option – use a unique password for Pinterest, and if you want to share content on the other sites, enter the details by logging into either Facebook or Twitter separately.

COMMENTS

You can make comments about any pin. You have more than 140 characters (reference to Twitter), and everyone will be able to read your comments. Remember, similar to texts or emails, the comment could be misinterpreted, and your sense of humor may not be understood by all. So be polite, courteous, and friendly. And if you like a pin, you can always click the “like” button.

If you keep these concerns in mind, you can and will have limitless fun with Pinterest. I have become a fan and invite you to check out my Pinterest page at http://pinterest.com/tips4tech. If you'd like an invitation, comment below, and I’ll send you one.

Allan Pratt, an infosec consultant, represents the alignment of marketing, management, and technology. With an MBA Degree and four CompTIA certs in hardware, software, networking, and security, Allan translates tech issues into everyday language that is easily understandable by all business units. Expertise includes installation and maintenance of hardware, software, peripherals, printers, and wireless networking; development and implementation of integration and security plans; project management; and development of technical marketing and web strategies in the IT industry. Follow Allan on Twitter and on Facebook.

Cross-Posted from Tips4Tech

Title: Free Tools for Improving Online Security
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on May 30, 2012, 10:20:28 PM

If you follow the link, you can read the article with the links embedded to the free products that are mentioned.

SRC: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/223572

Many small-business owners fall below what some people call the “security poverty line." Bootstrapping entrepreneurs can be especially vulnerable to hackers because they don’t have the money or personnel to buy, install and maintain the fancy security products large companies take for granted.

On the hunt for easy pickings, hackers are attacking these security-poor businesses, typically with indiscriminate, automated assaults that could be stopped by basic security tools and computer hygiene. Seven in 10 of the cyber break-ins analyzed in Verizon’s 2012 Data Breach Investigations Report occurred at organizations with 100 employees or less.

The good news is that it can be surprisingly easy and inexpensive to mount a quality defense on a budget. We spoke with Grady Summers, a vice president at Mandiant Corp., an Alexandria, Va.-based information-security firm, and former chief information security officer at General Electric Co., to assemble a list of easy-to-use, free tools that any company -- including those without a technology staff -- can use to create a comprehensive security program to protect its network, computers and data.

While no security program is perfect, applying these free tools can defend against the most common attacks. “A small business with a part-time IT person could probably do this in a day," Summers says.


Defend your network.
Most of the threats to company networks come over the Web, Summers says. He recommends using filtering software to block dangerous websites, including “phishing” sites designed to trick unwitting employees into falling for a scam or infect their computers with malware.

San Francisco-based OpenDNS offers a free, cloud-based Web filtering product that can protect a single PC or mobile device, or an entire network, from known phishing sites. OpenDNS’s paid services offer more security features and the ability to block porn and other sites companies may not want people to access while in the office.

Related: How to Avoid One of the Biggest Email Hacking Threats

To find any weak spots on your network, run a scan. Lumension Security of Scottsdale, Ariz., offers a free vulnerability scanner for checking networks of 25 or fewer computers. It can identify software vulnerabilities and misconfigurations that could put you at risk.

Also, scan your website for security vulnerabilities. Hackers often break into customer databases by striking company websites or hack sites to plant malware that will infect visitors. Qualys, a Redwood Shores, Calif., security company, offers FreeScan, a free tool for detecting security vulnerabilities in Web applications and finding malware infections and threats in websites. Users are limited to five free scans.

If you have a capable in-house technology staff, you also may want to consider using Security Onion, a compilation of free tools for intrusion detection and network monitoring.

Related: 7 Tips for Upgrading IT Security

Secure your computers.
Protecting computers on your network starts with firewalls and antivirus software. Free basic firewalls now come with Windows and Mac computers, so make sure they’re turned on. Antivirus protection will require a download.

Among the most popular free antivirus programs is one from AVG. Another is Microsoft's free basic security product Microsoft Security Essentials. It's made for consumers and businesses with 10 PCs or fewer. And firewall giant Check Point Software of Redwood City, Calif., has a free security suite that includes antivirus and a ZoneAlarm firewall that monitors traffic leaving your computer, as well as standard inbound traffic. In addition, U.K.-based Sophos offers free antivirus software for Macs.

Eliminate security vulnerabilities by applying the free fixes software makers regularly issue. To make that easy, use automatic update features for Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and other products you use. Windows users can make sure all their programs are current by using the free tool FileHippo.

Related: Three Low-Cost Ways to Keep Data Safe When Traveling for Business

Protect your data.
Full disk encryption software can make company and customer data on your devices unreadable to unauthorized people. Free open-source software TrueCrypt is available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines and can be used to secure data on thumb drives and other storage devices. For Mac, Apple offers free full disk encryption dubbed FileVault2 to users with the Lion operating system.

If you have particularly sensitive information, Summers recommends creating a special encrypted area for that data with its own password. You can create this sort of encrypted “volume” with TrueCrypt and a similar Apple feature.

Also back up the data on your computers in case of loss, theft or damage. With Mozy, you can backup two gigs of data for free offsite and encrypted in Mozy’s data centers.

Title: No, #Anonymous can't DDoS the root DNS servers
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on May 30, 2012, 10:37:20 PM

http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2012/02/no-anonymous-cant-ddos-root-dns-servers.html

It's easier to read the article at the Blog then cut and paste.

Title: Anonymous Plans To Take Down The Internet? We're Being Trolled
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on May 30, 2012, 10:40:15 PM

Originally posted - 2/16/2012 @ 8:01AM

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/02/16/anonymous-plans-to-take-down-the-internet-were-being-trolled/


Exactly six weeks from today, Anonymous will pull off its greatest and most destructive stunt of all time: Taking down the 13 servers that act as the core address book for everything from the Web to email, essentially blacking out the Internet in a protest of copyright law and Wall Street greed.

Or far more likely, six weeks and one day from today, the hackers will announce via a very-much-still-working Internet that it was all a highly provocative April Fool’s joke, another example of the dare-you-to-react trolling that Anonymous has refined to an art form.

Earlier this week, the loose movement of hackers announced in an online statement a new collective action it’s calling “Operation Global Blackout.” On March 31, it says it plans to attack the thirteen root Domain Name Service (DNS) servers that act as the Internet’s authority on how domain names (like Google.com) are translated to the IP addresses (like 74.125.157.99) of the computers that host those sites and mail servers. If Anonymous can successfully take those root servers down for long enough, DNS could cease to function, and the Web would become at least temporarily inaccessible for most users.

“To protest [the Stop Online Piracy Act], Wallstreet, our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun, On March 31, anonymous will shut the Internet down,” reads the statement. “Remember, this is a protest, we are not trying to ‘kill’ the Internet, we are only temporarily shutting it down where it hurts the most…It may only lasts one hour, maybe more, maybe even a few days. No matter what, it will be global. It will be known.”

But the security industry’s DNS gurus say it’s not time to start downloading your backup archive of Icanhazcheezburger just yet. Rob Graham, a researcher for the security consultancy Errata Security, lists in a blog post a slew of reasons why Anonymous’ DNS attack plan won’t work. Anonymous plans to use a technique it’s calling Reflective DNS Amplification to flood the root servers with spoofed requests from the lower-level DNS servers that look to the root servers for updates. But the thirteen DNS root servers, which are hosted variously by the Pentagon, Verisign, ICANN, Maryland University, NASA and others, each use different policies and hardware, and would each respond to that technique differently, Graham says.

“A technique that might take out one of them likely won’t affect the other twelve. To have a serious shot at taking out all 13, a hacker would have to test out attacks on each one,” he writes. “But, the owners of the systems would notice the effectiveness of the attacks, and start mitigating them before the coordinate attack against all 13 could be launched.”

Moreover, there are actually many more than 13 physical servers acting as the DNS root system. A load-balancing system called Anycast means that as many as thousands of computers share the load of those servers. Taking them all out will be extremely difficult, says Graham. And since most DNS servers cache the information they receive from the root servers for as long as a day, the root servers would have to be kept offline for many hours to have any effect on users.

By announcing its attack so far in advance, Anonymous has given the administrators of the DNS system plenty of time to prepare for the attack and react as it occurs, adds Dan Kaminsky, a well-known researcher who found and helped fix a major flaw in DNS in 2008.  ”Most denial of service attacks aren’t proceeded by a warning,” he says. “I’ve talked to various network engineers who are responsible for keeping these servers up, and they’re aware of the threat. They have resources already in place. Anyway, [Anonymous'] disclosure is appreciated.”

Anonymous isn’t the first to try to take down DNS–in fact, it seems to happen every five years or so. In 2002, a similar denial of service attack hit the DNS root servers. A portion of the 13 were taken offline, but without visible results for users. In 2007, a pair of attacks on the root servers struck back-to-back, affecting six servers and taking two offline. But the other servers’ load-balancing technology stood up to the attacks.

All of this isn’t to say Anonymous has no chance of taking out DNS for any period of time–only that it’s extremely unlikely. It’s far more probable, says Kaminsky, that the announcement of  ”Operation Global Blackout” is simply the kind of highly provocative, attention-grabbing stunt that often characterizes Anonymous’ actions. “It doesn’t go unnoticed that Anonymous is talking about this the day before April Fool’s,” he says.

He compares the hackers’ announcement to the flurry of attention around the Conficker Worm, which infected 10 million computers in 2009  and was widely reported to be set to launch some sort of attack on the Internet on April 1st of that year. The fact that Anonymous chose nearly the same date may be more than a coincidence. “When you set a deadline, the press gets all ‘doomsday is coming,’ and that’s more disruptive than any actual outage,” says Kaminsky. “Anonymous doesn’t need to do anything on March thirty-first. The mere threat is enough to keep people talking about them and what they represent.”

Title: Robert, your thoughts on this?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2012, 09:14:04 AM

http://www.dickmorris.com/stop-un-internet-regulation-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/

Title: Re: Robert, your thoughts on this?
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on June 02, 2012, 12:27:33 PM

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on May 31, 2012, 09:14:04 AM

http://www.dickmorris.com/stop-un-internet-regulation-dick-morris-tv-lunch-alert/

That would be ugly and I hope it wouldn't happen.

That's kind of funny stating that Russia and China want it to happen, most of the malware seems to be coming from them...

Malware writers from China and Russia show the greatest interest in malicious programs for Android.
http://bot24.blogspot.com/2012/05/malware-writers-from-china-and-russia.html



US law-makers unite to prevent UN from regulating internet
http://technologyspectator.com.au/industry/internet/us-law-makers-unite-prevent-un-regulating-internet


Pentagon opposes UN regulation of the Internet
http://www.tgdaily.com/security-features/59195-pentagon-opposes-un-regulation-of-the-internet

Title: IAD's Latest Security Guide Helps Customers Protect Home Networks
Post by: C-Kumu Dog on June 07, 2012, 01:07:21 AM

The Information Assurance Directorate (IAD) at NSA recently released a new technical guide entitled, Best Practices for Securing a Home Network. This is one of many guidance documents IAD freely provides to customers outlining practical tips for improving the security of all kinds of applications, operating systems, routers, databases and more. IAD has been providing unclassified security guidance to customers for over ten years. This guidance could not be timelier in light of the increasing threats to U.S. government networks. This latest guide will go a long way in helping our customers protect both their public and private networks. Click here to view the Guide.

Link to guide:
https://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/factsheets/Best_Practices_Datasheets.pdf

Title: Fahrenheit 451: Did Bradbury’s Dystopia Come True?
Post by: bigdog on June 07, 2012, 08:40:15 AM

http://mashable.com/2012/06/06/fahrenheit-451-dystopia/

The nature of science fiction has always been thus: no matter how far ahead authors try to think, they are always trapped in their own times. Elements of their books will invariably look dated from the moment they are published.

Ray Bradbury, who died in Los Angeles Wednesday at the grand old age of 91, was as susceptible to this as any other grand master of the genre. Read his 1953 classic of future firemen who burn books, Fahrenheit 451, and you’ll run into plenty of quaint details. Firemen smoking tobacco pipes, lit with “chemical matches.” Cheesy ads for “Denham’s Dentrifice.” 1950s lingo such as “swell”.

But brush those quirks aside, and what you’re left with is one of the most shockingly prescient dystopias ever written — a far more accurate portrayal of our present problems than 1984 or anything in the works of Philip K Dick.

The most important thing to know about Fahrenheit 451 is that it is explicitly not about government censorship. (Bradbury was so firm on this point he once walked out of a UCLA class when his students tried to insist it was so.)

The firemen aren’t burning books on the orders of some shadowy Big Brother. They’re doing it, protagonist Guy Montag is told, because society as a whole turned away from the scary cacophony of knowledge, from the terror of differing opinions and the burden of having to choose between them, from deep and troubling thoughts.

We turned away from literature and towards vapid reality television and radio shows, the book says. We spurned any kind of poetry (Montag’s wife Millie slams Matthew Arnold’s classic Dover Beach as depressing and “disgusting”) and preferred to listen to the noise of our cars as they speed across the landscape at 100 mph.

Even when Guy wants to read his stolen books, he can’t, because the ubiquitous ads drown out his thoughts.

Any of this starting to sound familiar?

Guy and Millie Montag are disconnected by technology. They can’t talk in bed at night because Millie is listening to her “audio seashells” (headphones, basically).

She participates in a reality show with an on-screen “family”, begging her husband for more wall-sized TV screens to complete the experience. The “family” bicker and shout, but there’s very little plot to their show.

Millie can’t even remember how she and Guy met, ten years earlier. That’s some pretty advanced ADD — years before ADD was even defined as a condition.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the background, there’s a longstanding war going on with another unnamed nation; a war that hardly any of the population is paying attention to. They’re much more interested in watching a high-tech police force hunt down criminals live on TV.

Add it all up, and it’s a pretty convincing picture of the 21st century’s dark side. No, our firemen don’t burn books. But if you take that as a metaphor for a fast-paced society that increasingly ignores books, that simply doesn’t have the bandwidth for them — it completes a scarily accurate portrait.

So you want to honor Bradbury’s memory? Read a novel. Read poetry. Read something that disagrees with your viewpoint; heck, read something that disagrees with itself.

But whatever you do, don’t get too hung up on the format. On combustible paper or on a tablet, a novel is a novel. Bradbury may hardly have been the world’s biggest tech geek, but he did eventually allow Fahrenheit 451 to be released as an e-book.

On his website, you can watch videos of the writer explaining that technology, that the world of the Internet, is not inherently at fault; it’s how we use them that counts.

So use them wisely. Focus. Take off your audio seashells. Turn off that reality show. Build our desire for knowledge; don’t burn it.

Title: POTH: Clues for the clueless
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 18, 2012, 12:26:04 PM

Tech tips
http://www.wisebread.com/25-awesome-websites-to-help-you-get-a-job?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wisebread+%28Wise+Bread%29
 STATE OF THE ART
Ins and Outs of Using Gadgetry
By DAVID POGUE
Published: May 18, 2011

Every time a reader asks me a basic question, struggles with a computer or lets a cellphone keep ringing at a performance, I have the same thought: There ought to be a license to use technology.

To reduce blur with an iPhone, frame the shot with your finger already on the button, then snap the photo by lifting off the screen instead of tapping it.
 
Using a special app to scan a QR code — quick response bar codes -- with an iPhone’s or Android phone’s camera will translate it into an ad or take you to a related Web page.


I’m not trying to insult America’s clueless; exactly the opposite, in fact. How is the average person supposed to know the essentials of their phones, cameras and computers? There’s no government leaflet, no mandatory middle-school class, no state agency that teaches you some core curriculum. Instead, we muddle along, picking up scattershot techniques as we go. We wind up with enormous holes in our knowledge.

This week, for example, a reader asked me about those weird, square, pixelated black-and-white bar codes that are cropping up on billboards, movie posters, signs, magazine ads and business cards. Nobody ever bothered to explain them. (They’re QR codes — quick response bar codes. You can scan them with your iPhone’s or Android phone’s camera, using a special app that translates it into an ad or takes you to a related Web page.)

That interaction made me realize that it’s time to publish the first installment of what should be the Big Book of Basic Technology Knowledge — the prerequisite for using electronics in today’s society. Some may seem basic, but you’ll probably find at least a couple of “I didn’t know thats!” among them.

Cellphones

¶ Searching for a signal scarfs up battery juice appallingly quickly. Turn your phone off, or put it into Airplane Mode, before you travel out of cellphone range — for example, on a plane or, for AT&T users, Manhattan and San Francisco.

¶ When you need the phone number, address or directions for any commercial establishment, call 800-BING-411 for an amazingly good voice-activated agent. (Thank you, Microsoft.)

¶ You can skip the inane 15-second voice-mail instructions when leaving a message (“To page this person, press 5”) — if you know your friend’s cellphone carrier. If it’s Verizon, press * to cut directly to the beep. AT&T or Sprint, press 1. T-Mobile, press #. (Better yet: Do the world a favor and add this trick to your own greeting: “To cut to the beep, press 1.”)

¶ If you travel overseas, you may return to a smartphone bill for $5,000 or more, thanks to the staggering international Internet fees. (You might not even know your phone is online — if it checks e-mail every 15 minutes, for example.) Despite many well-publicized horror stories, some people still don’t realize they should call the cellphone company before traveling to buy a special temporary overseas plan.

Cameras

¶ The half-press trick eliminates the frustrating delay when you press a pocket camera’s shutter button. Frame your shot, then half-press the shutter button. The camera beeps when it has locked focus — and that’s the time-consuming part. When pushed the rest of the way down, you snap the picture instantly. No lag.

¶ Your flash is useless if the subject is more than about eight feet away. Turn it off. (This means you, concertgoers and football fans.)

¶ If you erase photos from your memory card accidentally, you can still recover them if you haven’t used the card since. For about $30, you can download memory-card recovery programs; Google “memory card recovery” to find them.

App Phones

¶ On the iPhone, the camera doesn’t snap the photo until you release the on-screen shutter button. That’s good to know if you want a steady, blur-free shot. Frame the shot with your finger on the button, then snap the photo by lifting off the screen instead of tapping it.

¶ On iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Palm/H.P. phones, tap the Space bar twice at the end of a sentence. You get a period, a space and a capitalized next letter, without hunting for punctuation keys.

¶ Also on those phones, you can type dont, wont, youre, didnt and so on. The phone adds the apostrophe to those automatically. (But you’ll have to learn the difference between it’s and its.)

¶ On a BlackBerry, hold a letter key down to capitalize it.

The Web

¶ You can press Alt+D to highlight the Address bar at the top of your Web browser. Without touching the mouse, type the site name you want.

¶ You don’t have to type “http://www” into your Web browser. Just type “nytimes.com” or “dilbert.com,” for example. In Safari or Firefox, you can even omit the “.com.” In Internet Explorer, you can press Ctrl+Enter to add “.com,” or Ctrl+Shift+Enter for “.org.”

¶ You can tap the Space bar to scroll down by one screenful. Add the Shift key to scroll back up again. (You can also hit the Page Up/Page Down keys, if you have them.)

¶ When you’re filling an order form, you don’t have to slide six miles down the pop-up menu to choose your state. Instead, type the first letter to select it without the mouse. (If you get the wrong state, press the same key again. For example, press C once for California, again for Colorado and a third time for Connecticut.)

¶ When you get an error message — in a program, on your smartphone, on your tablet — search it on Google. You’ll find out what it means instantly.

¶ If you’re trying to paste some ridiculously long Web address where it would be confusing to read (or impossible to fit, as on Twitter), visit a site like Tinyurl.com or Bit.ly. These free sites convert long addresses into very compact ones.

Editing Text

¶ You can double-click a word to highlight it. (You don’t have to drag the mouse across it, in other words.) You can triple-click a word to select the entire paragraph.

¶ When you see highlighted text — in your word processor, for example, or in a Web browser address bar — you don’t have to delete it first. Just start typing.

¶ Sick of how Word automatically creates clickable links, boldface words, indented bulleted or numbered lists and other formatting as you type?
The on/off switches for these features exist, but they’re well hidden. In Word 2010 (Windows), open the File menu; click Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect Options, then AutoFormat Options. On the Mac (Word 2011), open the Tools menu; click AutoCorrect, then AutoFormat As You Type.

Mac Specials

¶ When you buy something online, don’t waste paper by printing the confirmation page. Instead, choose Print, and from the PDF pop-up menu, choose “Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder.” You get a beautiful PDF copy stashed in Documents, in a folder called Web Receipts.

¶ You can view most documents without opening a program to do it. At the desktop, highlight the icon and then tap the Space bar — a fantastic way to preview photos, but also great for Office documents, PDF files, movies, sounds and so on.

¶ Press Command-Delete to put a highlighted icon into the Trash.

Windows Specials

¶ When you want to send a file to someone, right-click its icon; from the shortcut menu, choose Send to Mail Recipient. Windows thoughtfully creates an outgoing e-mail message with the file attached. (If it’s a photo, Windows even offers to let you shrink them down to reasonable e-mailable size.)

¶ Ever wonder about the Windows-logo key? It sets off a host of useful functions: press it with F for Find, with D to see the desktop with all windows hidden, with L to lock the screen while you wander off to get coffee, and so on.

¶ You don’t have to pay for antivirus and anti-spyware software, year after year. Microsoft offers a perfectly good free security program.

All right, there’s a start. There are more waiting for you atnytimes.com/pogue.
Here’s hoping that your tech knowledge is just a little less sketchy.
E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

Title: computers can learn: Google labs!
Post by: bigdog on June 26, 2012, 04:22:54 AM

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/26/technology/in-a-big-network-of-computers-evidence-of-machine-learning.html?_r=1&hp


Presented with 10 million digital images found in YouTube videos, what did Google’s brain do? What millions of humans do with YouTube: looked for cats.

The neural network taught itself to recognize cats, which is actually no frivolous activity. This week the researchers will present the results of their work at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Google scientists and programmers will note that while it is hardly news that the Internet is full of cat videos, the simulation nevertheless surprised them. It performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items.

Title: Louis CK
Post by: bigdog on June 27, 2012, 11:17:53 AM

This is fan-damn-tastic:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk&feature=youtube_gdata_player[/youtube]

Title: Email addresses hacked
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 13, 2012, 07:07:33 AM

From a not always reliable source

Yahoo email addresses were hacked.  Gmail, MSN, Hotmail, Comcast and AOL accounts have also been hacked.  Here's the article with the link to check if your email address was one of those posted online with the password.
http://mashable.com/2012/07/12/yahoo-voices-hacked/

Title: Hornig & Daley: Big Data
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2012, 05:28:54 PM

Some of you might recall George Gilder's notion of "storewidth" - the need for massive storage to house all the data that his glowing efflorescence of globe-circling light would require. The article below asks the consequent question.
D.

Is Big Data the Next Billion-Dollar Technology Industry?
By Doug Hornig and Alex Daley
Casey Extraordinary Technology

It is not news that our capacity to gather and store immense amounts of data has grown by leaps and bounds. A few years ago, it was unthinkable for a free email account to offer more than 10 or 20 megabytes of storage. Today, one stores thousands of times that amount. But that's barely scratching the surface compared to the truly massive data collection projects now under way.

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is slated to come online in 2016. When it's operational, estimates are that it will acquire knowledge of our universe at the rate of 140 terabytes of data every five days, or better than 10 petabytes a year - that's 10,000,000,000,000,000 bytes per year, or more data than in every book ever written accruing about every two days. And who knows how much info the Large Hadron Collider will be spewing out by then? In 2010 alone, the LHC gathered 13 petabytes' worth. And then there's Google, processing in the neighborhood of 24 petabytes. Per day.

Only a few years ago, a gigabyte (one billion bytes) was thought to be a lot of data. Now it's nothing. Even home hard drives can store a terabyte (one trillion) these days. The commercial and governmental sectors regularly handle petabytes (quadrillion), while researchers routinely chat about the looming frontiers: exabytes (quintillion), zettabytes (sextillion), and yottabytes (septillion). It has not been necessary to name the next one after that. Yet.

But it's not just the Googles and NASAs of the world that are dealing with that kind of data. Virtually every Fortune 500 company in the world has a massive data warehouse where it's accumulated millions of documents and billions of data records from inventory systems, ecommerce systems, and marketing-analytics software.

You bump up against this kind of massive data collection every time you swipe your credit card at Walmart. The retail giant processes more than a million transactions just like yours every hour and dumps the results into a database that currently contains more than 2.5 petabytes of data. That's equivalent to all the information contained in all the books in the Library of Congress about 170 times over.

These increasingly large mounds of data have begun to befuddle even the geekiest members of those organizations.
Our ability to collect massive amounts of data continues to grow at an exponential rate. But the more we collect, the harder it becomes to derive anything meaningful from it. After all, what on earth do youdo with all this stuff? How do you sort it? How do you search it? How do you analyze it so that something useful comes out the other end? That's the problem facing developers for whom the traditional tools of database management are powerless in the face of such an onslaught. Data stores have far outgrown our ability to keep the data neat, clean, and tidy, and hence easy to analyze. What we have now is a mess of varying types of data - with moving definitions, inconsistent implementations, even the equivalent of digital freeform - that needs to be analyzed at a massive scale. It's a problem both of size and complexity.
Which brings us face to face with the hottest tech buzz words of 2012: Big Data.

Supersized Us

The idea that data can be supersized is, of course, not new. But what is new is a convergence of technologies that deal with it in some efficient, innovative, and highly creative ways. Though Big Data is a market that's still in its infancy, it is consuming increasingly large chunks of the nation's overall IT budget. How much actually is being spent depends on how you define the term; hard numbers are impossible to come by. Conservative estimates claim we're headed to somewhere between $20 and $55 billion by 2015. Out at the high end, Pat Gelsinger, COO of data-storage giant EMC, claims that it is already a $70-billion market - and growing at 15-20% per year.

Take your pick. But regardless, it's small wonder that venture capitalists are falling all over themselves to throw money at this tech. Accel Partners launched a $100 million Big Data fund last November, and IA Ventures initiated its $105-million IAVS Fund II in February. Even American Express has ponied up $100 million to create a fund to invest in the sector.
Down in Washington, DC, the White House has predictably jumped into the fray, with an announcement on March 29 that it was committing $200 million to develop new technologies to manipulate and manage Big Data in the areas of science, national security, health, energy, and education.

John Holdren, director of the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy, paid lip service to the private sector, saying that while it "will take the lead on big data, we believe that the government can play an important role, funding big data research, launching a big data workforce, and using big data approaches to make progress on key national challenges."
At the same time, The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will be placing a new focus on big data.

According to IT Lab Director Chuck Romine, NIST will be increasing its work on standards, interoperability, reliability, and usability of big data technologies, and predicts that the agency will "have a lot of impact on the big data question."

CRM = customer resource management

ERP = enterprise resource planning

ETL = extract, transform, and load

HDFS = Hadoop distributed file system for Big Data

SQL = a programming language for managing relational databases

NoSQL = not just SQL

NGDW = next generation data warehouse
    kjlkjlk

No shocker, the Department of Defense is also already hip-deep in the sector, planning to spend about $250 million annually - including $60 million committed to new research projects - on Big Data. And of course you know that DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has to have its finger in the pie. It's hard at work on the XDATA program, a $100-million effort over four years to "develop computational techniques and software tools for sifting through large structured and unstructured data sets."

If much of this seems a bit fuzzy, here's an easy way of thinking about it: Suppose you own the mineral rights to a square mile of the earth. In this particular spot, there were gold nuggets lying on the surface and a good deal more accessible gold just below ground, and you've mined all of that. Your operation thus far is analogous to the stripping of chunks of useful information from the available data using traditional methods.

But suppose there is a lot more gold buried deeper down. You can get it out and do so cost-effectively, but in order to accomplish that you have to sink mine shafts deep into the earth and then off at various angles to track the veins of precious-metal-bearing rock (the deepest mine on earth is in South Africa, and it plunges two miles down). That's a much more complex operation, and extracting gold under those conditions is very like pulling one small but exceedingly useful bit of information out of a mountain-sized conglomeration of otherwise-useless Big Data.

So how do you do it?

You do it with an array of new, exciting, and rapidly evolving tools. But in order to understand the process, you'll first have to learn the meaning of some acronyms and terms you may not yet be familiar with. Sorry about that.
With these in mind, we can now interpret this diagram, courtesy of Wikibon, which lays out the traditional flow of information within a commercial enterprise:
 
Here you can see that data generated by three different departments - customer resource management, enterprise resource planning, and finance - are funneled into a processor that extractsthe relevant material, transforms it into a useful format (like a spreadsheet), and loads it into a central storage area, the relational database warehouse. From there, it can be made available to whichever end user wants or needs it, either someone within-house or an external customer.

Enter the Elephant

The old system works fine within certain parameters. But in many ways, it's becoming Stone-Age stuff, because: The raw amount of input must not be too large; it must be structured in a way that is easy to process (traditionally, in rows and columns); and the desired output must not be too complex. Heretofore, as businesses were interested mainly in such things as generating accurate financial statements and tracking customer accounts, this was all that was needed.
However, potential input that could be of value to a company has increased exponentially in volume and variety, as well as in the speed at which it is created. Social media, as we all know, have exploded. 700 million Facebook denizens, a quarter of a billion Twitter users, 150 million public bloggers - all these and more are churning out content that is being captured and stored. Meanwhile, 5 billion mobile-phone owners are having their calls, texts, IMs, and locations logged. Online transactions of all different kinds are conducted by the billions every day. And there are networked devices and sensors all over the place, streaming information.

This amounts to a gargantuan haystack. And what is more, much of this haystack consists of material that is only semi-structured, if not completely unstructured, making it impossible for traditional processing systems to handle. So if you're combing the hay, looking for the golden needle - let's say, two widely separated but marginally related data points that can be combined in a meaningful whole for you - you won't be able to find it without a faster and more practical method of getting to the object of your search. You must be able to maneuver through Big Data.

Some IT pros could see this coming, and so they invented - ta dah - a little elephant:
 
Apache.org

Hadoop was originally created by Doug Cutting at Yahoo! and was inspired by MapReduce, a tool for indexing the Web that was developed by Google. The basic concept was simple: Instead of poking at the haystack with a single, big computer, Hadoop relies on a series of nodes running massively parallel processing (MPP) techniques. In other words, it employs clusters of the smaller, less-expensive machines known as "commodity hardware" - whose components are common and unspecialized - and uses them to break up Big Data into numerous parts that can be analyzed simultaneously.

That takes care of the volume problem and eliminates the data-ingesting choke point caused by reliance on a single, large-box processor. Hadoop clusters can scale up to the petabyte and even exabyte level.

But there's also that other obstacle - namely, that Big Data comes in semi- or unstructured forms that are resistant to traditional analytical tools. Hadoop solves this problem by creating a default file storage known as the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). HDFS is specially tailored to store data that aren't amenable to organization into the neatly structured rows and columns of relational databases.

After the node clusters have been loaded, queries can be written to the system, usually in Java. Instead of returning relevant data to be worked on in some central processor, Hadoop causes the analysis to occur at each node simultaneously. There is also redundancy, so that if one node fails, another preserves the data.

The MapReduce part of Hadoop then goes to work according to its two functions. "Map" divides the query into parts and parallel processes it at the node level. "Reduce" aggregates the results and delivers them to the inquirer.

After processing is completed, the resulting information can be transferred into existing relational databases, data warehouses, or other traditional IT systems, where analysts can further refine them. Queries can be written in SQL - a language with which more programmers are familiar - and converted into MapReduce.

One of the beauties of Hadoop - now a project of the Apache Software Foundation - is that it is open source. Thus, it's always unfinished. It evolves, with hundreds of contributors continuously working to improve the core technology.

Now trust us, the above explanation is pared down to just the barest of bones of this transformational tech. If you're of a seriously geeky bent (want to play in your very own Hadoop sandbox? - you can: the download is free) or are simply masochistic, you can pursue the subject down a labyrinth that'll force you to learn about a bewildering array of Hadoop subtools with such colorful names as Hive, Pig, Flume, Oozie, Avro, Mahout, Sqoop, and Big Top. Help yourself.

Numerous small startups have, well, started up in order to vend their own Hadoop distributions, along with different levels of proprietary customization. Cloudera is the leader at the moment, as its big-name personnel lineup includes Hadoop creator Cutting and data scientist Jeff Hammerbacher from Facebook. Alternatively, there is Hortonworks, which also emerged from Yahoo! and went commercial last November. MapR is another name to watch. Unfortunately, the innovators remain private, and there are no pure-investment plays as yet in this space.

It isn't simply about finding that golden needle in the haystack, either. The rise of Hadoop has enabled users to answer questions no one previously would have thought to ask. Author Jeff Kelly, writing onWikibon, offers this outstanding example (emphasis ours):

"ocial networking data [can be] mined to determine which customers pose the most influence over others inside social networks. This helps enterprises determine which are their 'most important' customers, who are not always those that buy the most products or spend the most but those that tend to influence the buying behavior of others the most."
Brilliant - and now possible.

Hadoop is, as noted, not the be-all and end-all of Big-Data manipulation. Another technology, called the "next generation data warehouse" (NGDW), has emerged. NGDWs are similar to MPP systems that can work at the tera- and sometimes petabyte level. But they also have the ability to provide near-real-time results to complex SQL queries. That's a feature lacking in Hadoop, which achieves its efficiencies by operating in batch-processing mode.

The two are somewhat more complementary than competitive, and results produced by Hadoop can be ported to NGDWs, where they can be integrated with more structured data for further analysis. Unsurprisingly, some vendors have appeared that offer bundled versions of the different technologies.

For their part, rest assured that the major players aren't idling their engines on the sidelines while all of this races past. Some examples: IBM has entered the space in a big way, offering its own Hadoop platform; Big Blue also recently acquired a leading NGDW, as did HP; Oracle has a Big-Data appliance that joins Hadoop from Cloudera with its own NoSQL programming tools; EMC scooped up Hadoop vendor Greenplum; Amazon employs Hadoop in its Elastic MapReduce cloud; and Microsoft will support Hadoop on its Azure cloud.

And then there's government. In addition to the executive-branch projects mentioned earlier, there is also the rather creepy, new, $2-billion NSA facility being built in Utah. Though its purpose is top secret, what is known is that it's being designed with the capability of storing and analyzing the electronic footprint - voice, email, Web searches, financial transactions, and more - of every citizen in the US. Big Data indeed.

The New Big World

From retail to finance to government to health care - where an estimated $200 billion a year could be saved by the judicious use of Big Data - this technology is game-changing. Not necessarily for the better, as the superspy facility may portend.
And even outside the NSA, there are any number of serious implications to deal with. Issues related to privacy, security, intellectual property, liability, and much more will need to be addressed in a Big-Data world.

We'd better get down to it, because this tech is coming right at us - and it is not stoppable.

In fact, the only thing slowing it at all is a shortage of expertise. It's happened so fast that the data scientists with the proper skill sets are in extremely short supply - a situation that is projected to get worse before it gets better. Management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. predicts that by 2018, "the United States alone could face a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with deep analytical skills, as well as [a further shortage of] 1.5 million managers and analysts with the know-how to use the analysis of big data to make effective decisions."

If you know any bright young kids with the right turn of mind, this is definitely one direction in which to steer them.
The opportunity exists not just for aspiring information-miners. Just as the relational database - which started as a set of theoretical papers by a frustrated IBM engineer fed up with the current status quo in the field - has grown from academic experiments and open-source projects into a multibillion-dollar-per-year industry with players like Microsoft and Oracle and IBM, so too is Big Data in the beginning of a rapid growth curve. From today's small companies and hobby projects will come major enterprises. Stories like MySQL - an open-source project acquired by Sun Microsystems for $1 billion in 2008 - are coming in Big Data.

Title: WSJ: DOJ seizes illegal download websites
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 23, 2012, 06:10:47 AM

In A First, DOJ Seizes Illegal Phone App Download Websites.
By Chad Bray

iStockPut down the mobile phone app and step away from your computer.

The U.S. Department of Justice, in a first for the agency, said Tuesday it shut three Websites that allegedly catered to customers seeking illegal copies of copyrighted apps for the Android-based mobile devices and seized the domain names: applanet.net, appbucket.net and snappzmarket.com.

The seizures are the latest in an ongoing effort by DOJ to target piracy on the Internet. In recent years, the Justice Department has moved to seize a variety of websites offering illegal copies of big-budget movies and other content.

On Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney General Lanny Breuer said combating piracy of copyrighted works remains a “top priority” for DOJ’s Criminal Division.

As part of the operation, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents downloaded thousands of copies of popular mobile device apps from online markets suspected of distributing copies of those apps without permission from software developers who would normally sell them for a fee, the Justice Department said.

In many cases, the servers storing the apps were hosted overseas, DOJ said. French and Dutch law enforcement were among the international agencies who coordinated with U.S. officials in the operation.

“Criminal copyright laws apply to apps for cell phones and tablets, just as they do to other software, music and writings,” said Sally Quillian Yates, the U.S. attorney in Atlanta, which sought the seizure orders. “These laws protect and encourage the hard work and ingenuity of software developers entering this growing and important part of our economy.”

Representatives for the seized websites couldn’t immediately be located for comment Wednesday.

Title: WSJ: Winning the internet arms race
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 24, 2012, 06:26:18 AM

Winning the Internet Arms Race
The threat to cyber freedom is growing, and countering it takes action—not rhetoric..
Article Comments (3) more in Opinion | Find New $LINKTEXTFIND$ ».
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By CRAIG A. NEWMAN
In the days since three feminist punk-rockers in Russia were sentenced to prison terms for protesting against Vladimir Putin, Western leaders have denounced the government's actions. The Pussy Riot trial was a particularly egregious effort to stifle dissent. But democratic leaders are failing to connect the episode to what is clearly a growing, world-wide attack on free speech, particularly on the Internet.

Recognizing the threat that online speech represents to their illegitimate regimes, dictators around the world have intensified their fight against communications technology. Many of these efforts are clandestine, but not always.

Russia, China, North Korea and a host of other countries are seeking to advance their repressive agendas at the United Nations' inaugural World Conference on International Telecommunications, set for December in Dubai.

These countries are pushing for the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations treaty organization, to expand its mandate to include "regulation" of the Internet. This expansion would allow dictators to advocate treaty changes that could have the effect of legitimizing their censorship efforts.

One provision that will be considered at the conference would permit a country to limit unrestricted Internet access if international telecommunications services are used to interfere with its "internal affairs." Such language, if adopted, would give repressive regimes a broad, and U.N.-sanctioned, excuse to clamp down on free speech.

Whatever the outcome in Dubai, one thing is clear: The struggle for Internet freedom requires more action—especially to support new technologies and applications—and less rhetoric.

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Supporters of the Russian punk band 'Pussy Riot' protest in front of the Russian embassy in Warsaw on August 17.
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The well intended but empty words of democratic leaders and the failed diplomacy of bureaucrats are doing little to curtail Internet suppression. Just weeks ago, for example, the U.N. passed a resolution affirming Internet freedom as a basic human right. But the resolution, signed by China and other nations that routinely censor the Internet, was nonbinding and unlikely to change a thing.

Meanwhile, as the West goes through the diplomatic motions, activists are fighting bare-knuckles on the cyber streets—using technology to open the doors of free dialogue. Their effort deserves the direct support of the U.S. and other democratic countries.

The building blocks to sustain this movement are already in place. Nongovernmental organizations such as Advancing Human Rights now use Internet technology as a primary weapon. These veteran activists have decided that the best way around a dictator's iron fist is the Internet.

One of the activists' new tools: the "Internet in a suitcase." With help from the U.S. State Department and the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, developers built a small unit that can circumvent Internet restrictions. Using everyday materials that can be smuggled into contested regions, the suitcase provides dissidents with independent Internet access. The first field deployment of such technology was reportedly in Afghanistan as early as 2006, when a shadow digital network was created to allow uncensored and unrestricted cellphone and Internet service.

At an even more basic level, activists are being supported by smartphone applications, including a "panic button" that allows users to instantly wipe clean their mobile devices and send alerts to associates. With the critical importance of mobile communications, this technology gives users the confidence they can communicate sensitive information without incriminating themselves or their allies if their equipment is confiscated. With just a keystroke, dissidents can prevent information from falling into the wrong hands, and warn others of pending danger.

But the ultimate impact of these and other tech solutions will depend on how fully they are supported. As Assistant Secretary of State Michael Posner acknowledged in 2011, repressive regimes and democratic dissidents are essentially locked in a technological arms race.

It will take time, money and partnerships to win the race. The public and private sectors have provided modest financial and technical support. But now is the time for peace- and freedom-loving organizations of all kinds to step forward with sustained funding and other assistance for communications technologies that empower citizens.

Every human-rights movement hinges on a moment when the focus shifts away from words toward action. The fight for Internet freedom has reached just such a pivotal moment.

Mr. Newman, an attorney with Richards Kibbe & Orbe LLP, is CEO of the Freedom2Connect Foundation, a Washington-based nonprofit established to promote Internet freedom through the use of technology.

Title: Epic Amazon and Apple Security Flaws
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 14, 2012, 03:13:51 PM

Part 1: How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
Mat Honan

In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

In many ways, this was all my fault. My accounts were daisy-chained together. Getting into Amazon let my hackers get into my Apple ID account, which helped them get into Gmail, which gave them access to Twitter. Had I used two-factor authentication for my Google account, it’s possible that none of this would have happened, because their ultimate goal was always to take over my Twitter account and wreak havoc. Lulz.

Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn’t have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.

Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them.

But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.

This isn’t just my problem. Since Friday, Aug. 3, when hackers broke into my accounts, I’ve heard from other users who were compromised in the same way, at least one of whom was targeted by the same group.

Moreover, if your computers aren’t already cloud-connected devices, they will be soon. Apple is working hard to get all of its customers to use iCloud. Google’s entire operating system is cloud-based. And Windows 8, the most cloud-centric operating system yet, will hit desktops by the tens of millions in the coming year. My experience leads me to believe that cloud-based systems need fundamentally different security measures. Password-based security mechanisms — which can be cracked, reset, and socially engineered — no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing.

I realized something was wrong at about 5 p.m. on Friday. I was playing with my daughter when my iPhone suddenly powered down. I was expecting a call, so I went to plug it back in.

It then rebooted to the setup screen. This was irritating, but I wasn’t concerned. I assumed it was a software glitch. And, my phone automatically backs up every night. I just assumed it would be a pain in the ass, and nothing more. I entered my iCloud login to restore, and it wasn’t accepted. Again, I was irritated, but not alarmed.
I went to connect the iPhone to my computer and restore from that backup — which I had just happened to do the other day. When I opened my laptop, an iCal message popped up telling me that my Gmail account information was wrong. Then the screen went gray, and asked for a four-digit PIN.

I didn’t have a four-digit PIN.

By now, I knew something was very, very wrong. For the first time it occurred to me that I was being hacked. Unsure of exactly what was happening, I unplugged my router and cable modem, turned off the Mac Mini we use as an entertainment center, grabbed my wife’s phone, and called AppleCare, the company’s tech support service, and spoke with a rep for the next hour and a half.

It wasn’t the first call they had had that day about my account. In fact, I later found out that a call had been placed just a little more than a half an hour before my own. But the Apple rep didn’t bother to tell me about the first call concerning my account, despite the 90 minutes I spent on the phone with tech support. Nor would Apple tech support ever tell me about the first call voluntarily — it only shared this information after I asked about it. And I only knew about the first call because a hacker told me he had made the call himself.

At 4:33 p.m., according to Apple’s tech support records, someone called AppleCare claiming to be me. Apple says the caller reported that he couldn’t get into his Me.com e-mail — which, of course was my Me.com e-mail.

In response, Apple issued a temporary password. It did this despite the caller’s inability to answer security questions I had set up. And it did this after the hacker supplied only two pieces of information that anyone with an internet connection and a phone can discover.

At 4:50 p.m., a password reset confirmation arrived in my inbox. I don’t really use my me.com e-mail, and rarely check it. But even if I did, I might not have noticed the message because the hackers immediately sent it to the trash. They then were able to follow the link in that e-mail to permanently reset my AppleID password.

At 4:52 p.m., a Gmail password recovery e-mail arrived in my me.com mailbox. Two minutes later, another e-mail arrived notifying me that my Google account password had changed.

At 5:02 p.m., they reset my Twitter password. At 5:00 they used iCloud’s “Find My” tool to remotely wipe my iPhone. At 5:01 they remotely wiped my iPad. At 5:05 they remotely wiped my MacBook. Around this same time, they deleted my Google account. At 5:10, I placed the call to AppleCare. At 5:12 the attackers posted a message to my account on Twitter taking credit for the hack.

By wiping my MacBook and deleting my Google account, they now not only had the ability to control my account, but were able to prevent me from regaining access. And crazily, in ways that I don’t and never will understand, those deletions were just collateral damage. My MacBook data — including those irreplaceable pictures of my family, of my child’s first year and relatives who have now passed from this life — weren’t the target. Nor were the eight years of messages in my Gmail account. The target was always Twitter. My MacBook data was torched simply to prevent me from getting back in.

Lulz.

I spent an hour and a half talking to AppleCare. One of the reasons it took me so long to get anything resolved with Apple during my initial phone call was because I couldn’t answer the security questions it had on file for me. It turned out there’s a good reason for that. Perhaps an hour or so into the call, the Apple representative on the line said “Mr. Herman, I….”

“Wait. What did you call me?”

“Mr. Herman?”

“My name is Honan.”

Apple had been looking at the wrong account all along. Because of that, I couldn’t answer my security questions. And because of that, it asked me an alternate set of questions that it said would let tech support let me into my me.com account: a billing address and the last four digits of my credit card. (Of course, when I gave them those, it was no use, because tech support had misheard my last name.)

It turns out, a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card number are the only two pieces of information anyone needs to get into your iCloud account. Once supplied, Apple will issue a temporary password, and that password grants access to iCloud.

Apple tech support confirmed to me twice over the weekend that all you need to access someone’s AppleID is the associated e-mail address, a credit card number, the billing address, and the last four digits of a credit card on file. I was very clear about this. During my second tech support call to AppleCare, the representative confirmed this to me. “That’s really all you have to have to verify something with us,” he said.

We talked to Apple directly about its security policy, and company spokesperson Natalie Kerris told Wired, “Apple takes customer privacy seriously and requires multiple forms of verification before resetting an Apple ID password. In this particular case, the customer’s data was compromised by a person who had acquired personal information about the customer. In addition, we found that our own internal policies were not followed completely. We are reviewing all of our processes for resetting account passwords to ensure our customers’ data is protected.”

On Monday, Wired tried to verify the hackers’ access technique by performing it on a different account. We were successful. This means, ultimately, all you need in addition to someone’s e-mail address are those two easily acquired pieces of information: a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card on file. Here’s the story of how the hackers got them.

On the night of the hack, I tried to make sense of the ruin that was my digital life. My Google account was nuked, my Twitter account was suspended, my phone was in a useless state of restore, and (for obvious reasons) I was highly paranoid about using my Apple email account for communication.

I decided to set up a new Twitter account until my old one could be restored, just to let people know what was happening. I logged into Tumblr and posted an account of how I thought the takedown occurred. At this point, I was assuming that my seven-digit alphanumeric AppleID password had been hacked by brute force. In the comments (and, oh, the comments) others guessed that hackers had used some sort of keystroke logger. At the end of the post, I linked to my new Twitter account.

And then, one of my hackers @ messaged me. He would later identify himself as Phobia. I followed him. He followed me back.

We started a dialogue via Twitter direct messaging that later continued via e-mail and AIM. Phobia was able to reveal enough detail about the hack and my compromised accounts that it became clear he was, at the very least, a party to how it went down. I agreed not to press charges, and in return he laid out exactly how the hack worked. But first, he wanted to clear something up:

“didnt guess ur password or use bruteforce. i have my own guide on how to secure emails.”

I asked him why. Was I targeted specifically? Was this just to get to Gizmodo’s Twitter account? No, Phobia said they hadn’t even been aware that my account was linked to Gizmodo’s, that the Gizmodo linkage was just gravy. He said the hack was simply a grab for my three-character Twitter handle. That’s all they wanted. They just wanted to take it, and fuck shit up, and watch it burn. It wasn’t personal.

“I honestly didn’t have any heat towards you before this. i just liked your username like I said before” he told me via Twitter Direct Message.

After coming across my account, the hackers did some background research. My Twitter account linked to my personal website, where they found my Gmail address. Guessing that this was also the e-mail address I used for Twitter, Phobia went to Google’s account recovery page. He didn’t even have to actually attempt a recovery. This was just a recon mission.

Because I didn’t have Google’s two-factor authentication turned on, when Phobia entered my Gmail address, he could view the alternate e-mail I had set up for account recovery. Google partially obscures that information, starring out many characters, but there were enough characters available, m••••n@me.com. Jackpot.

This was how the hack progressed. If I had some other account aside from an Apple e-mail address, or had used two-factor authentication for Gmail, everything would have stopped here. But using that Apple-run me.com e-mail account as a backup meant told the hacker I had an AppleID account, which meant I was vulnerable to being hacked.

“You honestly can get into any email associated with apple,” Phobia claimed in an e-mail. And while it’s work, that seems to be largely true.

Since he already had the e-mail, all he needed was my billing address and the last four digits of my credit card number to have Apple’s tech support issue him the keys to my account.

So how did he get this vital information? He began with the easy one. He got the billing address by doing a whois search on my personal web domain. If someone doesn’t have a domain, you can also look up his or her information on Spokeo, WhitePages, and PeopleSmart.

Getting a credit card number is tricker, but it also relies on taking advantage of a company’s back-end systems. Phobia says that a partner performed this part of the hack, but described the technique to us, which we were able to verify via our own tech support phone calls. It’s remarkably easy — so easy that Wired was able to duplicate the exploit twice in minutes.

First you call Amazon and tell them you are the account holder, and want to add a credit card number to the account. All you need is the name on the account, an associated e-mail address, and the billing address. Amazon then allows you to input a new credit card. (Wired used a bogus credit card number from a website that generates fake card numbers that conform with the industry’s published self-check algorithm.) Then you hang up.

Next you call back, and tell Amazon that you’ve lost access to your account. Upon providing a name, billing address, and the new credit card number you gave the company on the prior call, Amazon will allow you to add a new e-mail address to the account. From here, you go to the Amazon website, and send a password reset to the new e-mail account. This allows you to see all the credit cards on file for the account — not the complete numbers, just the last four digits. But, as we know, Apple only needs those last four digits. We asked Amazon to comment on its security policy, but didn’t have anything to share by press time.

And it’s also worth noting that one wouldn’t have to call Amazon to pull this off. Your pizza guy could do the same thing, for example. If you have an AppleID, every time you call Pizza Hut, you’ve giving the 16-year-old on the other end of the line all he needs to take over your entire digital life.

And so, with my name, address, and the last four digits of my credit card number in hand, Phobia called AppleCare, and my digital life was laid waste. Yet still I was actually quite fortunate.

They could have used my e-mail accounts to gain access to my online banking, or financial services. They could have used them to contact other people, and socially engineer them as well. As Ed Bott pointed out on TWiT.tv, my years as a technology journalist have put some very influential people in my address book. They could have been victimized too.

Instead, the hackers just wanted to embarrass me, have some fun at my expense, and enrage my followers on Twitter by trolling.

I had done some pretty stupid things. Things you shouldn’t do.

I should have been regularly backing up my MacBook. Because I wasn’t doing that, if all the photos from the first year and a half of my daughter’s life are ultimately lost, I will have only myself to blame. I shouldn’t have daisy-chained two such vital accounts — my Google and my iCloud account — together. I shouldn’t have used the same e-mail prefix across multiple accounts — mhonan@gmail.com, mhonan@me.com, and mhonan@wired.com. And I should have had a recovery address that’s only used for recovery without being tied to core services.

But, mostly, I shouldn’t have used Find My Mac. Find My iPhone has been a brilliant Apple service. If you lose your iPhone, or have it stolen, the service lets you see where it is on a map. The New York Times’ David Pogue recovered his lost iPhone just last week thanks to the service. And so, when Apple introduced Find My Mac in the update to its Lion operating system last year, I added that to my iCloud options too.

After all, as a reporter, often on the go, my laptop is my most important tool.

But as a friend pointed out to me, while that service makes sense for phones (which are quite likely to be lost) it makes less sense for computers. You are almost certainly more likely to have your computer accessed remotely than physically. And even worse is the way Find My Mac is implemented.

When you perform a remote hard drive wipe on Find my Mac, the system asks you to create a four-digit PIN so that the process can be reversed. But here’s the thing: If someone else performs that wipe — someone who gained access to your iCloud account through malicious means — there’s no way for you to enter that PIN.

A better way to have this set up would be to require a second method of authentication when Find My Mac is initially set up. If this were the case, someone who was able to get into an iCloud account wouldn’t be able to remotely wipe devices with malicious intent. It would also mean that you could potentially have a way to stop a remote wipe in progress.

But that’s not how it works. And Apple would not comment as to whether stronger authentification is being considered.

As of Monday, both of these exploits used by the hackers were still functioning. Wired was able to duplicate them. Apple says its internal tech support processes weren’t followed, and this is how my account was compromised. However, this contradicts what AppleCare told me twice that weekend. If that is, in fact, the case — that I was the victim of Apple not following its own internal processes — then the problem is widespread.

I asked Phobia why he did this to me. His answer wasn’t satisfying. He says he likes to publicize security exploits, so companies will fix them. He says it’s the same reason he told me how it was done. He claims his partner in the attack was the person who wiped my MacBook. Phobia expressed remorse for this, and says he would have stopped it had he known.

“yea i really am a nice guy idk why i do some of the things i do,” he told me via AIM. “idk my goal is to get it out there to other people so eventually every1 can over come hackers”

I asked specifically about the photos of my little girl, which are, to me, the greatest tragedy in all this. Unless I can recover those photos via data recovery services, they are gone forever. On AIM, I asked him if he was sorry for doing that. Phobia replied, “even though i wasnt the one that did it i feel sorry about that. Thats alot of memories im only 19 but if my parents lost and the footage of me and pics i would be beyond sad and im sure they would be too.”

But let’s say he did know, and failed to stop it. Hell, for the sake of argument, let’s say he did it. Let’s say he pulled the trigger. The weird thing is, I’m not even especially angry at Phobia, or his partner in the attack. I’m mostly mad at myself. I’m mad as hell for not backing up my data. I’m sad, and shocked, and feel that I am ultimately to blame for that loss.

But I’m also upset that this ecosystem that I’ve placed so much of my trust in has let me down so thoroughly. I’m angry that Amazon makes it so remarkably easy to allow someone into your account, which has obvious financial consequences. And then there’s Apple. I bought into the Apple account system originally to buy songs at 99 cents a pop, and over the years that same ID has evolved into a single point of entry that controls my phones, tablets, computers and data-driven life. With this AppleID, someone can make thousands of dollars of purchases in an instant, or do damage at a cost that you can’t put a price on.

Part 2: How I Resurrected My Digital Life After an Epic Hacking

When my data died, it was the cloud that killed it. The triggers hackers used to break into my accounts and delete my files were all cloud-based services — iCloud, Google, and Amazon. Some pundits have latched onto this detail to indict our era of cloud computing. Yet just as the cloud enabled my disaster, so too was it my salvation.
Yes, you can die by the cloud. But you can live by it too. Here’s how I regained my digital life after it was taken away from me.

When hackers broke into my iCloud account and wiped my devices, my first assumption was that someone had broken into my local network. So the first thing I did was shut down the internet and turn off all of my other machines. I wanted those assholes out of my house. But that also meant I had no way to send or receive data.

AppleCare’s phone support was useless. The 90 fruitless minutes I spent on the phone accomplished nothing at all to regain control of my AppleID. Nor did a follow-up help to stop the remote wipe taking over my MacBook Air. I had to get online. So to reconstruct my life, I started off by going next door, where I borrowed my neighbor’s computer to use their internet.

Ultimately, I was able to get back into my iCloud account by resetting the password online. Once I did, I began restoring my iPhone and iPad from iCloud backups. The phone took seven hours to restore. The iPad took even longer. I could use neither during this time.

From my wife’s phone, I called my bank and completely changed my logins. Then I set about checking online to see which other accounts might have been compromised. By now I felt safe turning on our own home internet and using one of my other computers to check these accounts. But I hit an immediate problem: I didn’t know any of my passwords.

I’m a heavy 1Password user. I use it for everything. That means most of my passwords are long, alphanumeric strings of gibberish with random symbols. It’s on my iPhone, iPad and Macbook. It syncs up across all those devices because I store the keychain in the cloud on Dropbox. Update a password on my phone, and the file is saved on Dropbox, where my computer will pull it down later, and vice versa.

But I didn’t have it on any of our other systems. So now I couldn’t get to my keychain. And so I was stuck in a catch-22. My Dropbox password was itself a 1password-generated litany of nonsense. Without access to Dropbox, I couldn’t get my keychain. Without my keychain, I couldn’t get into Dropbox.

And then I remembered that I had also used Dropbox previously on my wife’s machine. Had I stored the password there?

Five hours after the hack started, still locked out of everything, I flipped open the lid of her computer, and nervously powered it up. And there it was: my Dropbox. And in it, my 1Password keychain, the gateway to my digital life.

It was time to get cranking. I set up a new Twitter account. And then, with my now-found password manager, I logged into Tumblr.

Here’s the thing: I probably got my stuff back faster than you would have. I’ve been a technology journalist for more than a dozen years, and in that time I’ve made lots and lots of contacts. Meanwhile, my Tumblr post spread like warm butter across the piping hot English muffin of the internet.

A lot of people saw the post, some of whom were executives or engineers at Google and Twitter. I still had to go through official channels, but they pointed me to the right place to start the recovery process on both of those services. On Friday night, I filled out forms on both sites (Google’s is here, Twitter’s is here) to try to reclaim my accounts.
Someone else saw my posts on that night too: my hacker.

I had posited that the hackers had gotten in via brute forcing my 7-digit password. This caused my hacker, Phobia, to respond to me. No, he bragged, brute force wasn’t involved. They got it right from AppleCare, he said via a Twitter DM. I still didn’t know how that worked, exactly, but this piece of information led me to start digging.
As it turned out, breaking into Apple accounts was ridiculously easy. On Saturday, when I fully understood just how Phobia and his partner had gotten in (and how easily it could happen again), I made a distressed phone call to Apple to ask that the company lock everything down, and issue no more password resets.

It was on this call that I confirmed someone else had called in about my account at 4:33 p.m. the previous day — someone who I now knew to be Phobia. Chandler McDonald, the tech who helped me on that call, was the first person at Apple to take what was happening really seriously, and was one of only two positive experiences I had with Apple that weekend (or since). McDonald reassured me that he was going to get my account locked down, and promised to call me the next day. And he did. I’m still grateful.

Also on Friday night, I began the process of restoring my Google account. Because I couldn’t send a backup to my now non-functioning phone, I had to fill out some forms online that asked me questions about my account usage that, presumably, only I would know. For example, I was asked to name the five people I e-mailed the most.
On Saturday morning, I received an automated e-mail from Google asking me to go online and define even more personal information. This time, I was asked for things like the names of folders in my Gmail account, and the dates on which I had set up various other Google accounts, like Google Docs. It was a little flummoxing, and I wasn’t sure I knew the answers to these questions. But I tried, and I guess I got the answers right.

That same day, while still waiting for access to my Google account, I was having another Google-related problem that was keeping me from being able to use my phone. Although the restore from backup was complete, and I could use over-the-air data to access internet services, it would not send or receive calls. At first I couldn’t understand why, and then realized it was because I had linked my number to Google Voice.

Since Google has integrated sign-ons across all accounts, not only was my Gmail nuked, but so was every other associated Google service as well. That meant my Google Voice number was dead. And because I (obviously) couldn’t log into Google Voice, I couldn’t opt to disconnect it from my phone. I called Sprint and asked the tech support rep there to do it for me. Done.

Almost immediately, my phone lit up with text messages from concerned friends, wanting to let me know I’d been hacked.

Thanks guys, I know. I know.

Just before noon on Saturday, my Google account was restored. Given what I’ve subsequently learned about how long it has taken others to do the same, I think that had my case not been escalated, this process could have taken 48 hours or more. Yes, I went through the normal steps, and had to prove I was who I claimed to be, but the process was likely faster for me than it would be for most.

Once in my inbox, I saw how remarkably little the intruders had done. They had torched the joint just after getting a password reset on Twitter. I went through and checked all my mail filters and settings to make sure new messages wouldn’t be also copied to someone else without my knowledge, and systematically revoked every single app and website I’d authorized to connect to my Google account.

Saturday night, after verifying my Wired e-mail address and exchanging several e-mails with tech support, I got back into my Twitter account too. It was in ruins. There were racist and anti-gay tweets all over the place, as well as taunting remarks aimed at other hackers, and other users. At first I left these up, just as documentation, but then went in and deleted the worst of them.

That night, I stayed up late, direct-messaging Phobia on Twitter.

Sunday afternoon, I found myself at the Apple Store in San Francisco’s worst mall. I was, to say the least, cranky. Although I’d called on a Friday night, the first appointment I could get was at 1 p.m. on Sunday. By 1:20 p.m., I was talking to an Apple genius named Max. He was awesome. He’d heard of my case.

He told me that while Apple couldn’t recover my data, it could probably stop the wipe from progressing further. There was the 4-digit PIN that needed to be entered, as well as a firmware-level password, and I had neither. I told him all I cared about was preserving my data. He scurried away with my machine.

And indeed, Monday afternoon, Max called to let me know that they had been able to reset the firmware password. They couldn’t crack the PIN, but he said I should be able to pull whatever data existed on there off. Good news. I began researching data-recovery firms.

Getting data back from a SSD drive, like the one in my MacBook Air, is considerably trickier than recovering it from a standard HDD for all kinds of reasons — from the way SSDs reallocate data, to the lack of a physical platter, to hardware-level encryption keys. I wasn’t about to attempt to recover it myself. Max, my guy at the Apple Store, had suggested that I call DriveSavers. Several other people I know and respect, like TWiT’s Leo Laporte, whose show I appeared on that weekend, told me the same thing.

And so, on Friday, exactly one week after my system was wiped, I sent my Mac away to Novato to see what could be recovered from the drive hackers had wiped.

In a nutshell, here’s what happens when you take your machine to DriveSavers (and we’ll have a full rundown on this later). First, they remove your drive from the machine and put it in a custom adapter. From there they use a proprietary method to image your system and copy that data to a secure “slicked” disk so there’s no chance of data contamination. This is done extremely rapidly so that the original drive doesn’t have to be powered up for very long.

Next they put the original drive aside to preserve it, and then begin working off the copy to see what’s on there. In some cases, like mine, there are no more files or directory structures to pore over. So they scour the drives looking at raw hex data. When you see this in action, it looks a lot like The Matrix, with rows and rows of random numbers and characters scrolling up a screen, faster than your eyes can focus on.

Except, that’s not what they saw on mine.

When Drivesavers began looking at my machine, the first 6GB of data held a clean install of Mac OS X. And after that, all they saw was row after row after row of zeroes. That data had been zeroed out. Overwritten. No recovery.

And then numbers. That beautiful hex data started rolling across the screen. Yes, 25 percent of my drive was gone and beyond repair. But the remaining 75 percent? Hope for life. DriveSavers called me to come look at what they had found, and my wife and I drove up there on Wednesday morning.

My data came back to me on an external hard drive, organized by file types. The thing I cared most about, above all else, was my photo library. And there, in a folder full of JPGs, was photo after photo after photo that I had feared were gone forever. Subfolders were organized by the year, month and day files were created. I went immediately to the folder that bore the date my daughter was born. They were there. Everything was there. We were floored. I nearly cried.

I am an over-sharer. But the things most intimate in life, I tend to keep private. And so although I have posted picture after picture to Flickr, Facebook and Instagram, the stuff that was really important — the stuff that maybe even was most important — has always been mine alone. It lived nowhere but on my hard drive.

Some of the photos were ancient artifacts that traveled with me from machine to machine with each upgrade cycle. In fact, much of the data was far older than the last device it was stored on. Most of those older images had been backed up to an external hard drive. And some of the newer ones were safe on PhotoStream, one of Apple’s iCloud services. But most of the shots that I had taken with my camera over the past 20 months since I last backed up were lost forever. And here they were again, recovered. Reborn. It was gorgeous.

I didn’t get everything back. DriveSavers was only looking for the things I specifically requested. I’ve lost all my applications, for example, as well as long-established preferences and settings that have been moving from machine to machine with me. But that’s OK. I can live without them. I can buy them again. Whatever. Besides, sometimes it’s nice to start with a clean slate, and I spent yesterday installing a new, clean operating system on my MacBook Air.

The bottom line is that I have all my photos and all the home movies I’ve shot. Every one of them. And seemingly all of my most important documents as well. That felt like a miracle.

The bill for all this? $1,690. Data doesn’t come cheap.

I’ve been asked again and again what I’ve learned, and what I now do differently. I’m still figuring some of that out.

I’m certainly a backup believer now. When you control your data locally, and have it stored redundantly, no one can take it from you. Not permanently, at least. I’ve now got a local and online backup solution, and I’m about to add a second off-site backup into that mix. That means I’ll have four copies of everything important to me. Overkill? Probably. But I’m once bitten.

And then there’s the cloud. I’m a bigger believer in cloud services than ever before. Because I use Rdio, not iTunes, I had all my music right away. Because I use Evernote to take reporting notes, everything that I was currently working on still existed. Dropbox and 1Password re-opened every door for me in a way that would have been impossible if I were just storing passwords locally via my browser.

But I’m also a security convert.

It’s shameful that Apple has asked its users to put so much trust in its cloud services, and not put better security mechanisms in place to protect them. AppleIDs are too easily reset, which effectively makes iCloud a data security nightmare. I’ve had person after person after person report similar instances to me, some providing documentation showing how easily their Apple accounts were compromised.

And due to Apple’s opacity, I have no way of knowing if things have improved. Apple has refused to tell me in what ways its policies weren’t followed “completely” in my case. Despite being an Apple user for nearly 20 years and having generally positive feelings toward the company, I no longer trust it to do the right thing in terms of protecting my data. I’ve turned off its Find My services and won’t turn them back on.

Amazon also had a glaring security flaw, and although it has fixed that exploit, the flaw’s mere existence should serve as a warning to all of us about all of our other accounts. We don’t often know what’s required to issue a password reset, or have someone get into our account through a company’s tech support system.
But hackers do.

I’m working on another story looking at how widespread these practices are, and while there’s much reporting left to be done, it’s already very clear that the vulnerabilities at Amazon aren’t unique. It’s also clear that many of these gaping security holes are common knowledge within certain communities online. Bored teenagers up late on hot summer nights know more about social engineering exploits than I would wager most of the executives at affected companies do. That needs to change.

Previously, when I had the option for ease-of-use versus security, I always went the easy route. I stored my credit cards with the merchants I used for faster transactions. I didn’t enable two-factor authentication on Google or Facebook. I never set up dedicated (and secret) e-mail accounts for password management. I take those steps now. But I also know that no matter what security measures I take, they can all be undone by factors beyond my control.

We don’t own our account security. And as more information about us lives online in ever more locations, we have to make sure that those we entrust it with have taken the necessary steps to keep us safe. That’s not happening now. And until it does, what happened to me could happen to you.

Title: Facebook post of undercover cop's photo gets woman charged with felony
Post by: bigdog on October 15, 2012, 07:01:22 PM

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/facebook-post-undercover-cops-photo-gets-woman-charged-felony-1C6477731#/technology/technolog/facebook-post-undercover-cops-photo-gets-woman-charged-felony-1C6477731

Title: Twitter and Facebook war
Post by: bigdog on November 16, 2012, 01:34:50 AM

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/technolog/new-propaganda-armies-take-war-twitter-gaza-conflict-1C7094755

Title: Fascist States and UN vs. Internet Freedom
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 27, 2012, 04:04:56 PM

Bitter struggle over Internet regulation to dominate global summit
 
2:41pm EST
By Joseph Menn
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An unprecedented debate over how the global Internet is governed is set to dominate a meeting of officials in Dubai next week, with many countries pushing to give a United Nations body broad regulatory powers even as the United States and others contend such a move could mean the end of the open Internet.
The 12-day conference of the International Telecommunications Union, a 147-year-old organization that's now an arm of the United Nations, largely pits revenue-seeking developing countries and authoritarian regimes that want more control over Internet content against U.S. policymakers and private Net companies that prefer the status quo.
Many of the proposals have drawn fury from free-speech and human-rights advocates and have prompted resolutions from the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament, calling for the current decentralized system of governance to remain in place.

While specifics of some of the most contentious proposals remain secret, leaked drafts show that Russia is seeking rules giving individual countries broad permission to shape the content and structure of the Internet within their borders, while a group of Arab countries is advocating universal identification of Internet users. Some developing countries and telecom providers, meanwhile, want to make content providers pay for Internet transmission.

Fundamentally, most of the 193 countries in the ITU seem eager to enshrine the idea that the U.N. agency, rather than today's hodgepodge of private companies and nonprofit groups, should govern the Internet. They say that a new regime is needed to deal with the surge in cybercrime and more recent military attacks.

The ITU meeting, which aims to update a longstanding treaty on how telecom companies interact across borders, will also tackle other topics such as extending wireless coverage into rural areas.

If a majority of the ITU countries approve U.N. dominion over the Internet along with onerous rules, a backlash could lead to battles in Western countries over whether to ratify the treaty, with tech companies rallying ordinary Internet users against it and some telecom carriers supporting it.

In fact, dozens of countries including China, Russia and some Arab states, already restrict Internet access within their own borders. Those governments would have greater leverage over Internet content and service providers if the changes were backed up by international agreement.

Amid the escalating rhetoric, search king Google last week asked users to "pledge your support for the free and open Internet" on social media, raising the specter of a grassroots outpouring of the sort that blocked American copyright legislation and a global anti-piracy treaty earlier this year.

Google's Vint Cerf, the ordinarily diplomatic co-author of the basic protocol for Internet data, denounced the proposed new rules as hopeless efforts by some governments and state-controlled telecom authorities to assert their power.

"These persistent attempts are just evidence that this breed of dinosaurs, with their pea-sized brains, hasn't figured out that they are dead yet, because the signal hasn't traveled up their long necks," Cerf told Reuters.

The ITU's top official, Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré, sought to downplay the concerns in a separate interview, stressing to Reuters that even though updates to the treaty could be approved by a simple majority, in practice nothing will be adopted without near-unanimity.

"Voting means winners and losers. We can't afford that in the ITU," said Touré, a former satellite engineer from Mali who was educated in Russia.
Touré predicted that only "light-touch" regulation on cyber-security will emerge by "consensus", using a deliberately vague term that implies something between a majority and unanimity.

He rejected criticism that the ITU's historic role in coordinating phone carriers leaves it unfit to corral the unruly Internet, comparing the Web to a transportation system.

"Because you own the roads, you don't own the cars and especially not the goods they are transporting. But when you buy a car you don't buy the road," Touré said. "You need to know the number of cars and their size and weight so you can build the bridges and set the right number of lanes. You need light-touch regulation to set down a few traffic lights."

Because the proposals from Russia, China and others are more extreme, Touré has been able to cast mild regulation as a compromise accommodating nearly everyone.

Two leaked Russian proposals say nations should have the sovereign right "to regulate the national Internet segment". An August draft proposal from a group of 17 Arab countries called for transmission recipients to receive "identity information" about the senders, potentially endangering the anonymity of political dissidents, among others.
A U.S. State Department envoy to the gathering and Cerf agreed with Touré that there is unlikely to be any drastic change emerging from Dubai.

"The decisions are going to be by consensus," said U.S. delegation chief Terry Kramer. He said anti-anonymity measures such as mandatory Internet address tracing won't be adopted because of opposition by the United States and others.

"We're a strong voice, given a lot of the heritage," Kramer said, referring to the United States' role in the development of the Internet. "A lot of European markets are very similar, and a lot of Asian counties are supportive, except China."

Despite the reassuring words, a fresh leak over the weekend showed that the ITU's top managers viewed a badly split conference as a realistic prospect less than three months ago.

The leaked program for a "senior management retreat" for the ITU in early September included a summary discussion of the most probable outcomes from Dubai, concluding that the two likeliest scenarios involved major reworkings of the treaty that the United States would then refuse to sign. The only difference between the scenarios lay in how many other developed countries sided with the Americans.

An ITU spokesman said Tuesday that "the management team has never doubted that consensus will be found" and that the scenarios were meant to aid efforts at facilitating the process.

Touré said that because the disagreements are so vast, the conference probably will end up with something resembling the ITU's earlier formula for trying to protect children online — an agreement to cooperate more and share laws and best practices, perhaps with hotlines to head off misunderstandings.

"From Dubai, what I personally expect is to see some kind of principles saying cyberspace is a global phenomenon and it can only have global responses," Touré said. "I just intend to put down some key principles there that will lay the seeds for something in the future."

Even vague terms could be used as a pretext for more oppressive policies in various countries, though, and activists and industry leaders fear those countries might also band together by region to offer very different Internet experiences.

In some ways, the U.N. involvement reflects a reversal that has already begun.

The United States has steadily diminished its official role in Internet governance, and many nations have stepped up their filtering and surveillance. More than 40 countries now filter the Net that their citizens see, said Ronald Deibert, a University of Toronto political science professor and authority on international conflicts in cyberspace.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said this month that the Net is already on the road to Balkanization, with people in different countries getting very different experiences from the services provided by Google, Skype and others.

This month, a new law in Russia took effect that allows the federal government to order a Website offline without a court hearing. Iran recently rolled out a version of the Internet that replaced the real thing within its borders. A growing number of countries, including China and India, order sites to censor themselves for political, religious and other content.

China, which has the world's largest number of Internet users, also blocks access to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter among other sites within its borders.

The loose governance of the Net currently depends on the non-profit ICANN, which oversees the Web's address system, along with voluntary standard-setting bodies and a patchwork of national laws and regional agreements. Many countries see it as a U.S.-dominated system.
T
he U.S. isolation within the ITU is exacerbated by it being home to many of the biggest technology companies - and by the fact that it could have military reasons for wanting to preserve online anonymity. The Internet emerged as a critical military domain with the 2010 discovery of Stuxnet, a computer worm developed at least in part by the United States that attacked Iran's nuclear program.

Whatever the outcome in Dubai, the conference stands a good chance of becoming a historic turning point for the Internet.

"I see this as a constitutional moment for global cyberspace, where we can stand back and say, `Who should be in charge?' said Deibert. "What are the rules of the road?"
(Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Martin Howell, Ken Wills and Andrew Hay)

Title: Scott Grannis highly recommends "Internet Trends"
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 05, 2012, 07:09:05 AM

http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/2012-kpcb-internet-trends-yearend-update#btnNext

Title: Morris: The End of the Free Internet?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 07, 2012, 01:38:24 PM

The End Of The Free Internet?
By DICK MORRIS
Published on DickMorris.com on December 7, 2012


Click Here To Sign The Petition To Stop UN Control Of The Internet!

Until now, the work of the UN negotiators who are pondering how to regulate the Internet has been shrouded in secrecy.  But as 1,950 delegates from 193 countries gather this week in Dubai to consider 900 proposals to regulate the Internet, their game is becoming clear.
 
The Russian-educated head of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the UN body seeking to control the Internet, Dr. Hamadoun Toure says: "The brutal truth is that the internet remains largely [the] rich world's privilege."  He adds that "the ITU wants to change that."
 
Here's how:
The ITU wants to force companies -- and eventually their users (us) -- to pay for streaming video.  The proposal is called "pay to stream" or "a quality based model."  According to the BBC, "This would see firms face charges if they wanted to ensure streamed video and other quality-critical content download without the risk of problems such as jerky images."  Presumably the revenues from this Internet Tax would go to building up Net infrastructure in the less developed world.  And, undoubtedly, the cost will be passed onto the users throughout the world -- including you!
 
But building up the Net's third world infrastructure is not the real agenda here.  It's a facade.
 
Russia and China want firms like Google to have to pay to send streaming video into other countries, creating a charge that can be passed on to the users.  The idea is to make it so expensive that nobody in their totalitarian countries downloads anything they shouldn't which might open their eyes to the truth Moscow and Beijing want to keep out.

The ITU is now charged with regulating long distance phone services.  But Moscow and Beijing, want to expand its power to dictate to the Internet and they have a willing tool in Toure who was educated in Leningrad and Moscow in the pre-glasnost era.
 
The delegates and would-be regulators have until December 14th to agree on which proposals to adopt.  Russia and China are seeking a declaration that each nation has an "equal right to manage the Internet" to enhance its ability to block politically free sites.
 
Fortunately, the European Union's digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes has tweeted that "the internet works, it doesn't need to be regulated by ITR Treaty."  And Vinton Cerf, the computer scientist who co-designed some of the Internet's core underlying protocols, says "a state-controlled system of regulation is not only unnecessary, it would almost invariable raise costs and prices and interfere with the rapid and organic growth of the internet."
 
Cerf notes that "only governments have a voice at the ITU...engineers, companies, and the people that build and use the web have no vote."
 
And so it would be if these talks lead to a new treaty: Only governments will run the Net.  God help us all!
 
(NONE of this is being covered by American media, whether cable, broadcast, or print).  Please send this column around to your family and friends and encourage them to sign the petition protesting Internet regulation!)
Click Here To Sign The Petition To Stop UN Control Of The Internet!

Title: WSJ: UN internet takeover efforts
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 10, 2012, 07:59:29 AM

In a referendum among the world's two billion Internet users, how many would vote to transfer control of the Internet to the United Nations? Perhaps 100,000, an estimate based on the number of top officials ruling the most authoritarian countries, whose power is threatened by the open Web.
 
Under the one country, one vote rule of the U.N., these 100,000 people trump the rest of the two billion. It only takes a majority of the 193 countries in the U.N. to hijack the Internet.
 
The International Telecommunications Union is hosting a conference in Dubai, where many countries are eager to extend the agency's role beyond telecommunications to regulate the Internet. The two-week conference is half over, with meddlesome proposals from China, Russia and other authoritarian regimes dominating the discussion.
 
A U.S.-Canadian proposal would have limited topics to telecommunications, excluding the Internet. Top U.S. negotiator Terry Kramer said in a call with the media last week that the State Department believes that "fundamentally, the conference should not be dealing with the Internet" and that the U.S. team was working "day and night" to find allies. But State didn't respond to my follow-up question asking for an estimate of how many countries have pledged to keep hands off the Internet. This is likely a low percentage of the 193.
 
Instead, authoritarian governments want to legitimize government censorship, tax Internet traffic that crosses national boundaries and mandate that ITU bureaucrats replace the nongovernmental engineering groups now smoothly running the Internet.







Enlarge Image




European Pressphoto Agency
Secretary General of the (ITU), Hamadoun Toure of Mali, speaks during plenary session at World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), in Dubai.
.
The good news is rare bipartisan opposition in the U.S., where the House last week voted unanimously to "keep the Internet free from government control." In that spirit, this column is happy to report on a speech by Andrew McLaughlin, a former deputy chief technology officer in the Obama administration who also worked at Google GOOG +0.86% . He urged President Obama to "kneecap" the ITU, abolishing it rather than let it put the open Internet at risk.

"What is so bad about the ITU?" Mr. McLaughlin asked in a speech to the New America Foundation in Washington on Nov. 29. "It's just simple things like the nature, structure, culture, values and processes of the ITU. They are all inimical to a free and open Internet, and they are all inconsistent with the nature of the technical infrastructure that now characterizes our communications networks." Voting rules let repressive governments "engage in horse trading that has nothing to do with the technical merits of the decisions under consideration."

Mr. McLaughlin cited the "soft corruption" of the ITU, where regulators and the monopoly telecommunications companies from many countries "get to take nice trips to Geneva on a regular basis, and people build their careers around the ITU as a gravy train." This is "yet another reason it should be killed off in its current form." The ITU could be closed if the U.S. did the hard work to persuade other countries to assign its functions to private groups under the successful nongovernmental model of the Internet.
 
"You need look no further than the fact that the ITU is the chosen vehicle for regimes for whom the free and open Internet is seen as an existential threat—Russia, China, Iran, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Belarus and Cuba. These are the countries placing their hopes and ambitions in the vessel of the ITU for governance and regulation of the Internet," Mr. McLaughlin said.
 
"I hate to say this in such a stark way, but I will anyway: It strikes me that the Obama administration, coming from the left in the U.S., where I come from, has an opportunity to be the Nixon that goes to the China of trying to kneecap a useless, inimical, bloated, bureaucratic and corrupt international organization like the ITU. I hope they will take this challenge."
 
A kneecapping sounds about right, and Mr. McLaughlin has given his former boss excellent talking points. He concluded: "There's also a symbolic importance to winding down a centralized, government-centric treaty organization in the context of a new communications network that doesn't need it, and in fact is harmed by it."

The U.S. can refuse to join any new ITU treaty arising from this conference, but today's largely open and global Internet would become a paradise lost. Many countries would sign the treaty to put roadblocks along global networks, monitor email and censor and tax foreign websites they find threatening. A global communications utility will be fragmented and made less robust for all.
 
A generation ago, President Ronald Reagan stymied similar efforts by another U.N. agency. Authoritarian governments had used Unesco to suppress free speech under the rubric of a "New Information World Order." The U.S., joined by Britain, delegitimized the effort by leaving Unesco.

President Obama would be a hero if he took Mr. McLaughlin's advice to neutralize the ITU. Failing this, he could follow the Reagan precedent, minimizing the harm done by the ITU by having the U.S. leave.
 
A version of this article appeared December 10, 2012, on page A19 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Would-Be Internet Regulators Need Deleting.

Title: WSJ: America's first big digital defeat
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 17, 2012, 11:31:59 AM

America's First Big Digital Defeat A majority of the 193 U.N. member countries have approved a treaty giving governments new powers to close off access to the Internet in their countries.
By L. GORDON CROVITZ

The open Internet, available to people around the world without the permission of any government, was a great liberation. It was also too good to last. Authoritarian governments this month won the first battle to close off parts of the Internet.

At the just-concluded conference of the International Telecommunications Union in Dubai, the U.S. and its allies got outmaneuvered. The ITU conference was highly technical, which may be why the media outside of tech blogs paid little attention, but the result is noteworthy: A majority of the 193 United Nations member countries approved a treaty giving governments new powers to close off access to the Internet in their countries.

U.S. diplomats were shocked by the result, but they shouldn't have been surprised. Authoritarian regimes, led by Russia and China, have long schemed to use the U.N. to claim control over today's borderless Internet, whose open, decentralized architecture makes it hard for these countries to close their people off entirely. In the run-up to the conference, dozens of secret proposals by authoritarian governments were leaked online.

ITU head Hamadoun Touré, a Mali native trained in the Soviet Union, had assured that his agency operates by consensus, not by majority vote. He also pledged that the ITU had no interest beyond telecommunications to include the Internet. He kept neither promise.

A vote was called late one night last week in Dubai—at first described as a nonbinding "feel of the room on who will accept"—on a draft giving countries new power over the Internet.

The result was 89 countries in favor, with 55 against. The authoritarian majority included Russia, China, Arab countries, Iran and much of Africa. Under the rules of the ITU, the treaty takes effect in 2015 for these countries. Countries that opposed it are not bound by it, but Internet users in free countries will also suffer as global networks split into two camps—one open, one closed.

The U.S. delegation never understood this conference was fundamentally a battle in what might be called the Digital Cold War. Russia and China had long been lobbying for votes, but U.S. opposition got serious only at the conference itself. Even then, Mr. Touré claimed he thought the U.S. would support the ITU treaty: "I couldn't imagine that at the end they wouldn't sign."

The treaty document extends control over Internet companies, not just telecoms. It declares: "All governments should have an equal role and responsibility for international Internet governance." This is a complete reversal of the privately managed Internet. Authoritarian governments will invoke U.N. authority to take control over access to the Internet, making it harder for their citizens to get around national firewalls. They now have the U.N.'s blessing to censor, monitor traffic, and prosecute troublemakers.

Internet users in still-open countries will be harmed, too. Today's smoothly functioning system includes 40,000 privately managed networks among 425,000 global routes that ignore national boundaries. Expect these networks to be split by a digital Iron Curtain. The Internet will become less resilient. Websites will no longer be global.

Under the perverse U.N. definition of progress, Mr. Touré is delighted with the ITU undermining the open Internet. "History will show that this conference has achieved something extremely important," he said. "It has succeeded in bringing unprecedented public attention to the different and important perspectives that govern global communications." The treaty calls on countries to "elaborate" their views on the Internet at future ITU conferences, so these issues are here to stay.

Robert McDowell, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission, summarized the harm. "Consumers everywhere will ultimately pay the price for this power grab as engineers and entrepreneurs try to navigate this new era of an internationally politicized Internet," he said. "Let's never be slow to respond again."

One lesson is that the best defense of the Internet is a good offense against an overreaching U.N. The majority of authoritarian governments in a one-country, one-vote system will keep chipping away at the open Internet. The best way to stop them is to abolish the ITU.

As outlined in last week's column, former Obama administration technology adviser Andrew McLaughlin proposes applying the nongovernmental model now operating the Internet to the telecommunications industry as well. That would make the ITU unnecessary. Both houses of Congress voted unanimously against any ITU treaty endangering the open Internet. One expects lawmakers would happily support the Obama administration if it gathers the resolve to abolish the U.N. agency.

Just as during the last Cold War, the clash over the future of the Internet will have many battles across many fronts. Authoritarian governments are highly motivated to close the Internet off. But just as in the Cold War, these regimes are doomed to lose if free countries resolve to fight. Whatever governments want, people prefer freedom and eventually will get it, including on the Internet.

Title: WaTimes: Glitch imperils encrypted records
Post by: Crafty_Dog on December 26, 2012, 07:05:12 AM

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/25/glitch-imperils-swath-of-encrypted-records/

Title: Stratfor: Solar Storms and Technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 28, 2013, 03:44:03 PM

Summary



The sun can put on quite a show, with violent storms releasing large amounts of electromagnetic energy into the solar system. With increased reliance on satellite-based communication, the vulnerability to disruption from solar storms and flares increases. Because the sun is currently in a period of relatively high activity, expected to peak in 2013, solar storm warnings will likely be more frequent in the coming year. However, despite the increasing frequency of bursts of electromagnetic energy from the sun, the possibility of a direct hit by a truly debilitating storm is still small, and the possibility of any other kind of disruptive electromagnetic pulse is even smaller.
 


Analysis
 
If energy from solar storms comes into contact with Earth's magnetic field, it can increase radiation levels and disturb the ionosphere. These effects have the ability to disrupt satellite operations, radio transmissions, GPS and cellular communications, and damage electrical equipment on the ground. For example, electromagnetic energy from a solar storm in 1989 caused widespread power outages throughout Quebec.
 
On Feb. 19, a very large sunspot appeared and grew to six times the size of Earth within 48 hours. The spot remains unstable and could result in solar storms. These storms, which release the electromagnetic energy that could eventually come into contact with Earth, are not all of the same intensity. Traditionally, solar flares -- a type of solar storm -- are ranked: the strongest flares are labeled X, the weakest flares are labeled C, and those in the middle are labeled M. As technology has become more incorporated into daily life, and satellites have transitioned into a more commercial role, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has developed a scale that allows the general public to better understand the impacts of these storms. A numbering system of 1-5 indicates severity, with 5 being the most severe, while letters indicate how the storm is interacting with Earth and its surrounding magnetic field. G indicates a geomagnetic storm and corresponding disturbance in Earth's magnetic field, which can cause problems with electrical grids on the ground. S indicates an increase in radiation levels, and R refers to radio blackouts that result from disturbances in the ionosphere, often caused by solar flares.
 
NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration monitor space weather and are somewhat capable of predicting solar storms. Space weather forecasts, while still subject to some level of uncertainty, have improved greatly in recent years, allowing scientists to predict the arrival times of storms fairly accurately. The forecast through Feb. 24 gave a 40 percent chance for an M flare and a 10 percent chance for an X flare. The probability of an R3 or higher blackout, which could cause radio outages for an hour or more on the sun side of Earth, was 5 percent or less through Feb. 24. The possibility of a severe geomagnetic storm was 1 percent. NASA's predictions, put in layman's terms, were for Feb. 22 and Feb. 23 to be "quiet to unsettled" with Feb. 24 "quiet." Such forecasts could become more common in the coming year.
 






.
 Activity on the sun is not constant. Sunspot occurrences have increased since 2010, and the sun currently is near its maximum point in the 11-year cycle. Multiple large storms were reported in 2012, but at worst they led to minor disruptions -- primarily in air travel -- but no major disturbances. However, ongoing levels of increased activity could make sporadic communications interruptions more likely. An increase in activity could also bring the possibility of disruption to electrical grids and satellite activity to the forefront of the mainstream media.
 
The threat of electromagnetic pulses is often brought up in relation to an act of terrorism. However, Stratfor has long held the position that this risk is extremely small. Space is the most likely source of an electromagnetic disturbance.
 
Satellites are able to withstand most solar storms, although some minor problems with computer subsystems are possible. An extremely severe electromagnetic storm, sometimes referred to as a 100-year storm, would have the ability to disrupt the electrical grid on the ground. There is some debate within the United States about whether the cost of completely hardening the electrical grid against such a storm is justified. An EMP Commission report released in 2008 concluded that the United States' electrical grid was vulnerable to electromagnetic energy, and the U.S. Department of Defense has estimated that retrofitting all military electrical equipment could cost as much as 10 percent of the initial cost. However, the electrical grid's vulnerability means that if a severe solar storm hit, widespread power outages could result.
 
However, the likelihood of a solar storm being both strong enough and correctly positioned to do this is very small. Storms this severe only appear a few times during the sun's 11-year cycle. Still, smaller communications disruptions are possible, especially since the world is becoming more and more dependent on technology. In short, communications and navigational systems are the most likely casualties of this year's increased solar activity.
 
This is not to belittle the possible detriment of communications disruptions. Equipment used to direct strategic military activity, among other things, could be affected. Disruptions could also have short-term political and economic consequences for affected nations, given the unknown effects of even a minor disturbance in global communications. Much of modern life revolves around cellular and positioning technology. A strong solar storm could create inconveniences, but a doomsday situation -- especially the use of an electromagnetic pulse in a terrorist attack -- is extremely unlikely.
 

Title: Shodan
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2013, 09:22:16 PM

I'm too low tech to describe this, but I think folks here will find it interesting.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/08/technology/security/shodan/

Title: Re: Shodan
Post by: G M on April 10, 2013, 11:10:43 AM

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on April 09, 2013, 09:22:16 PM

I'm too low tech to describe this, but I think folks here will find it interesting.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/04/08/technology/security/shodan/

Anything with an IP address is vulnerable. It's as bad as the article states, if not worse.

Title: 5G
Post by: ccp on May 13, 2013, 06:15:20 AM

Is this a big deal?   Where's GG.

From Samsung:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/technology/samsung-announces-breakthrough-in-mobile-data-speed.html?partner=yahoofinance&_r=0

Title: who owns the auto data
Post by: ccp on May 23, 2013, 06:36:25 AM

Well whoever it is, it won't be our own.  It will be who ever has the most money and the most political connections or bribed politicians.

"GM even wants to add popups in your car"

!@#$%^&*()_+!!!

http://t.autos.msn.com/news/who-owns-your-car%e2%80%99s-data

Title: Microsoft phone scam
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 28, 2013, 02:54:32 PM

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/how-to/security/3378798/microsoft-phone-scam-dont-be-victim/

Title: Did a google images search on dogbrothers
Post by: ccp on July 03, 2013, 06:50:40 PM

This is what came up:

http://www.google.com/search?site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1414&bih=730&q=dogbrothers&oq=dogbrothers&gs_l=img.3..0i10i24.8579.10672.0.10755.11.11.0.0.0.0.83.699.11.11.0....0...1ac.1.19.img.K3fRaBvhB08

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 03, 2013, 07:06:09 PM

Interesting!

Title: Doug Hornig: Want to Defend Your Privacy?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 05, 2013, 07:49:23 AM

Want to Defend Your Privacy?
By Doug Hornig

Happy Independence Day to our American readers, wherever they might be.

While you're enjoying friends, family, and that charbroiled steak, perhaps this is also a good time to take stock of your own state of independence. To ponder your privacy, or lack thereof, and what you might do about it.

For the record, the word "privacy" doesn't appear in the Declaration of Independence, nor anywhere in the Constitution. It's difficult at this late date to divine whether the authors of those documents had any real notion of the term or thought it worth protecting. Nevertheless, we can draw some inferences from what they did write.

The Fourth Amendment declares that "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue but on probable cause." The Fifth Amendment adds that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law."

An overarching right to be left alone certainly seems implied.

But what about personal electronic communications—a concept that could hardly have existed in the 18th century. Should they also be secure? That's the question before us as a society. It's been a big one for a long time now, even though it only makes the front pages when an Edward Snowden type appears.

Snowden might be the current flavor of the day, but many of his revelations are little more than yesterday's news. For example, investigative reporter Kurt Eichenwald, in his book 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, revealed how the NSA's questionable mass surveillance program—what he calls "the most dramatic expansion of NSA's power and authority in the agency's 49-year history"—was devised just days after 9/11, as an end run around the traditional requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Formerly, FISA demanded that an individual warrant be obtained if the government wanted to monitor Americans communicating overseas. But the Baby Bush administration unilaterally swept that aside. The new presidential directive granted the NSA the power to gather unlimited numbers of emails and phone calls into a database for analysis, all without the approval of Congress or any court. (Not to put everything on Dubya—Obama has essentially doubled down on this encroachment.)

Moving the surveillance totally onshore was a breeze from there. Connections between a suspect email address abroad and anyone else—accounts that either sent or received messages, whether in the United States or not—would be subject to examination. At that point, a more detailed list could be constructed, ensnaring any email addresses contacted by the suspect, and then any addresses contacted by those addresses, and so on without end.

More specifics came from whistleblower William Binney, a 30-year veteran of the NSA. Binney, who resigned from the agency in 2012 because of the dubious nature of its activities, volunteered the first public description of NSA's massive domestic spying program, called Stellar Wind, which intercepts domestic communications without protections for US citizens. Binney revealed that NSA has been given access to telecommunications companies' domestic and international billing records, and that since 9/11 the agency has intercepted between 15 and 20 trillion communications. He further disclosed that Stellar Wind was filed under the patriotic-sounding "Terrorist Surveillance Program" in order to give cover to its Constitutionally questionable nature.

We also can't pretend to be shocked just because we now know PRISM's name. The government has long employed techniques which they hide behind euphemisms like "full pipe monitoring," "sentiment analysis," and "association mapping." These involve concurrent surveillance of both email and social media, in order to build a detailed map of how evolving movements are organized. Political protests receive extremely close scrutiny, with information about them shared among federal, state, and local law enforcement officials. This is what happened with the "Occupy" demonstrations, where everything participants did was watched, every communication was recorded, and all of it was filed away for future reference. Everyone involved is now the subject of a government dossier.

Even if you're not part of a political movement, heaven help you if get caught up in some vast fishing expedition that hooks everyone who has ever visited some "suspicious" website, or even merely typed in some alarm-bell keywords.

Nor has the value of this kind of information gathering been lost on politicians. In fact, the presidential race of 2012 will likely go down as the first one in history—and it won't be the last—that was decided by who had the better Internet sniffers. Both the Romney and Obama campaigns continuously stalked voters across the Web, by installing cookies on their computers and observing the websites they visited as a means of nailing down their personal views. CampaignGrid, a Republican-affiliated firm, and Precision Network, working for the Democrats, jointly collected data on 150 million American Internet users. That's a full 80% of the entire registered voting population, for those keeping score.

Cellphones are another rich source of user data, especially when it comes to apps. If you download one, you grant to the vendor the right to gather all sorts of personal information. But then, you knew that when you read the "Permissions" document—you did read it, right?—so at least you know you can opt out.

Forget about turning off your phone's location-tracking feature (which a mere 19% of us do, Pew says). Regardless of whether it's on or off, your wireless carrier knows (and keeps a record of) where your phone is at all times it's connected to the cell network. Carriers can be forced to surrender the information to law enforcement, not to mention that they've been rather less than forthcoming about what else they may be doing with this data.

Anyone who thinks the government's ultimate goal is not to intercept and archive our every digital message, oral or written—or that it doesn't have that capability—needs to be aware of what's happening in Bluffdale, Utah, AKA the middle of nowhere. There, NSA contractors (and only those with top secret clearances) are putting the finishing touches on a staggeringly huge decryption and data storage center. James Bamford, the country's leading civilian authority on the NSA, wrote inWired of the facility's purpose, which is no less than: "to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks."

Bluffdale will cost upwards of $2 billion and occupy a million square feet of space. Included will be four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with state-of-the-art supercomputers. The ultimate goal, Bamford says, is to construct a "worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes of data." (A yottabyte is a septillion, or 1024 bytes—it's so gigantic that no one has yet coined a colloquial term for the next higher order of magnitude.)

To gather up those yottabytes, the NSA has dotted the country with a network of buildings set up at key Internet junction points. According to William Binney, the wiretaps in these secret locations are powered by highly sophisticated software that conducts "deep packet inspection," which is the ability closely to examine traffic even as it streams through the Internet's backbone cables at 10 gigbytes per second.

Fortunately, the situation is impossible but not hopeless—because whenever technology gets too intrusive, the free market nearly always reacts with some kind of solution. And that's the case here. As the surveillers extended their reach, enterprising liberty lovers immediately began developing countermeasures.

Keep in mind, however, that the technologies outlined below can only lessen your shadow so much, catching a little less attention from the all-seeing eye of Sauron. No one solution provides perfect privacy, and when push comes to shove and a government official shows up with a warrant in hand, he or she will inevitably get access to anything needed.

The first area to consider addressing is the digital trail you leave when researching any topic that might be of concern to someone's prying eyes (or, for that matter, doing anything at all on the Internet which you don't want analyzed, packaged, and sold).

One option for dealing with this concern is Tor, which is free and open source. According to its website, the service was "originally developed … for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others."

Tor tackles the problem of traffic analysis head on:

"How does traffic analysis work? Internet data packets have two parts: a data payload and a header used for routing. The data payload is whatever is being sent, whether that's an email message, a web page, or an audio file. Even if you encrypt the data payload of your communications, traffic analysis still reveals a great deal about what you're doing and, possibly, what you're saying. That's because it focuses on the header, which discloses source, destination, size, timing, and so on…

"Some attackers spy on multiple parts of the Internet and use sophisticated statistical techniques to track the communications patterns of many different organizations and individuals. Encryption does not help against these attackers, since it only hides the content of Internet traffic, not the headers."

To combat this, Tor has created a distributed network of users called a VPN (virtual private network). All data packets on that network "take a random pathway through several relays that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where it's going."

One of the beauties of Tor is that it's packaged all up in single download. Just install the Tor browser—a privacy-tuned clone of the popular open-source Firefox browser—and it automatically manages all the networking for you. Surf in relative privacy with just a few clicks.

For more advanced users, there are options to route all kinds of activities through the network other than web browsing, such as Skype calls and file sharing.

Tor also offers Orbot, an Android application that allows mobile phone users to access the Web, instant messaging, and email without being monitored or blocked by a mobile ISP. It won't get you around those pesky data limits, but it will certainly reduce the amount of data your ISP can provide about you. If you find yourself in a region where access to certain services is restricted, it will open those options back up to you.

Cryptohippie is another site that utilizes the privacy capabilities of a VPN. According to the company, its subscription-based Road Warrior product "creates a strongly encrypted connection from your computer to the Cryptohippie anonymity network. From there, your traffic passes through at least two national jurisdictions, loses all association with your identifiers and emerges from our network at a distant location. But, even with all of this going on, you can surf, check your email, use Skype, and everything else exactly as you have been. Unless you reveal it yourself, no one can see who you are or what your data may be."

The service is well aware of the ever-present possibility of government interference with its operations. Thus Cryptohippie is truly international. Its only US presence is to authenticate connections to its servers in other countries. None of its servers are in the States.

(Of course, if you use Tor or Cryptohippie to log in to secured sites like Amazon or eBay, your activities at that end will still be logged to a database and associated with you, so don't delude yourself that such tools make you invisible. All they can do is keep your activity limited to the two parties involved—you and the computer or person on the other end—and keep outsiders from knowing that the conversation is taking place.)

These are highly sophisticated products. Perhaps you don't think you need that level of protection, but would just like to keep your browsing habits private. All of the major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Google Chrome, have a "clear browsing history" button. They also have "enable private browsing" functions that you can activate.

How much value these options actually have is questionable, but in any event they're not going to stop Google from archiving your searches, if that's the engine you use. (And who doesn't?) So if you don't want that, you can use a different search service, like DuckDuckGo, whose strict non-tracking policy is entertainingly presented in graphic form. Try it out in comparison to Google, and you'll find that the results are reasonably similar (although it seems odd at first not to have that strip of ads running down the right side of the screen). DuckDuckGo reports that it has seen a big increase in users since Snowden came forward.

Another area to consider addressing is your email. If you'd rather not have your email subject to daily inspection for "watchwords" our guardians consider inflammatory, one option is to use a foreign provider that will be less inclined to comply when Washington comes knocking with a "request" for user data. There are countless providers to choose from, including:
•   Swissmail.org, which is obviously domiciled in Switzerland;
•   Neomailbox.com, located in the Netherlands;
•   CounterMail.com in Sweden;
•   TrilightZone.org in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, and Malaysia; and
•   Anonymousspeech.com, which boasts over 600,000 subscribers and is unusual in that it has no central location. "Our servers," the company says, "are constantly moving in different countries (Malaysia, Japan, Panama, etc.) and are always outside the US and Europe."
Whichever provider you choose, just be sure they offer at least an SSL connection to its services at all times. That will stop someone from downloading your email right off the wire. Features like encrypted storage and domicile in a state known for protecting privacy are also nice features.

The latest entrant in the privacy space is Silent Circle, a company whose story is worth detailing, because it has placed itself squarely in the forefront of the clash between alleged governmental need-to-know and personal privacy rights.

Silent Circle's CEO is Mike Janke, a former Navy SEAL commando and international security contractor who has gathered around him a megastar cast of techies, including most prominently, the legendary Phil Zimmermann, godfather of private data encryption and creator of the original PGP, which remains the world's most-utilized security system. Also on board are Jon Callas, the man behind Apple's whole-disk encryption, which is used to secure hard drives in Macs across the world; and Vincent Moscaritolo, a top cryptographic engineer who previously worked on PGP and for Apple.

The team hit the ground running last October with the introduction of its first product, an easy-to-use, surveillance-resistant communications platform that could be employed on an iPhone or iPad to encrypt mobile communications—text messages plus voice and video calls.

In order to avoid potential sanctions from Uncle Sam, Silent Circle was incorporated offshore, with an initial network build-out in Canada; it has plans to expand to Switzerland and Hong Kong.

Silent Circle immediately attracted attention from news organizations, nine of which signed on to protect their journalists' and sources' safety in delicate situations. A major multinational corporation ordered some 18,000 subscriptions for its staff. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies in nine countries have expressed interest in using the company to protect the communications of their own employees.

As Ryan Gallagher wrote in Slate:

"The technology uses a sophisticated peer-to-peer encryption technique that allows users to send encrypted files of up to 60 megabytes through a 'Silent Text' app. The sender of the file can set it on a timer so that it will automatically 'burn'—deleting it from both devices after a set period of, say, seven minutes. Until now, sending encrypted documents has been frustratingly difficult for anyone who isn't a sophisticated technology user, requiring knowledge of how to use and install various kinds of specialist software. What Silent Circle has done is to remove these hurdles, essentially democratizing encryption. It's a game-changer that will almost certainly make life easier and safer for journalists, dissidents, diplomats, and companies trying to evade state surveillance or corporate espionage."

The burn feature is extraordinarily valuable. It can mean the difference between life and death for someone who uses a phone to film an atrocity in a danger zone and transmits it to a safe remote location. Seven minutes later, it disappears from the source, even if the phone is seized and its contents examined.

Additionally, Silent Circle "doesn't retain metadata (such as times and dates calls are made using Silent Circle), and IP server logs showing who is visiting the Silent Circle website are currently held for only seven days. The same privacy-by-design approach will be adopted to protect the security of users' encrypted files. When a user sends a picture or document, it will be encrypted, digitally 'shredded' into thousands of pieces, and temporarily stored in a 'Secure Cloud Broker' until it is transmitted to the recipient. Silent Circle ... has no way of accessing the encrypted files because the 'key' to open them is held on the users' devices and then deleted after it has been used to open the files."

The Silent Suite, a subscription to which costs US $20/month, covers the communications spectrum with four features:

Silent Phone works on iPhone, iPad, Android, Galaxy, and Nexus, and provides encrypted, P2P, HD mobile voice and video over 3G, 4G, Edge, and WiFi, "with almost no latency" and no possibility of anyone (including the company) listening or wiretapping. The cryptographic keys involved are destroyed at the end of the call.

Silent Text allows the user to send P2P encrypted material—business documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Pages, Keynote, PDFs, CAD drawings, etc.), any file, any movie, any picture, map locations, URLs, calendar invites—and then delete them with its "Burn Notice" feature.

Silent Eyes allows for encrypted HD video and voice transmission using a laptop or desktop device. It's compatible with all Windows operating systems.

Silent Mail encrypts email with PGP Universal. It will run on smartphones, tablets, and computers using existing mail programs such as Outlook and Mac Mail. Absolute privacy is ensured with a silentmail.com email address and 1 Gb of encrypted storage.

This is not intended as an endorsement of Silent Circle, although we heartily approve of what the company is trying to do, and the other above references by no means represent an exhaustive guide to securing your communications. But they will point you in the right direction and perhaps spur you to action. A basic search will turn up dozens more options. Carefully study what each offers, read reviews from sources you trust, determine the service best suited to your particular needs, then just sign up.

However, we all have to accept the cold, hard fact of the matter, which is that this cat-and-mouse game is likely to be with us for a very long time. Those who believe they have the right to spy on us will develop ever more sophisticated ways of doing it. Those who believe we have a Constitutional right to privacy will fight tooth and nail to protect it.

It's possible that the one side eventually will develop an unstoppable offense or that the other will come up with a defense that can't be breached. But that's not the way to bet.

In the end, technology is completely neutral. It will evolve with no regard to how it is used. Expect those cats and mice to continue chasing each other, around and around and around. And make do with the best that is available to you at any given time.

Title: Using a smartphone's eyes and ears to track you
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 05, 2013, 07:55:09 AM

second post6

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/516566/using-a-smartphones-eyes-and-ears-to-log-your-every-move/

Title: Universities facing increasing attacks
Post by: Crafty_Dog on July 17, 2013, 03:11:49 PM

I wonder what research is involved?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/education/barrage-of-cyberattacks-challenges-campus-culture.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130717&_r=0

 America’s research universities, among the most open and robust centers of information exchange in the world, are increasingly coming under cyberattack, most of it thought to be from China, with millions of hacking attempts weekly. Campuses are being forced to tighten security, constrict their culture of openness and try to determine what has been stolen.


Bill Mellon of the University of Wisconsin said the school has seen as many as 100,000 hacking attempts a day from China.


University officials concede that some of the hacking attempts have succeeded. But they have declined to reveal specifics, other than those involving the theft of personal data like Social Security numbers. They acknowledge that they often do not learn of break-ins until much later, if ever, and that even after discovering the breaches they may not be able to tell what was taken.

Universities and their professors are awarded thousands of patents each year, some with vast potential value, in fields as disparate as prescription drugs, computer chips, fuel cells, aircraft and medical devices.

“The attacks are increasing exponentially, and so is the sophistication, and I think it’s outpaced our ability to respond,” said Rodney J. Petersen, who heads the cybersecurity program at Educause, a nonprofit alliance of schools and technology companies. “So everyone’s investing a lot more resources in detecting this, so we learn of even more incidents we wouldn’t have known about before.”

Tracy B. Mitrano, the director of information technology policy at Cornell University, said that detection was “probably our greatest area of concern, that the hackers’ ability to detect vulnerabilities and penetrate them without being detected has increased sharply.”

Like many of her counterparts, she said that while the largest number of attacks appeared to have originated in China, hackers have become adept at bouncing their work around the world. Officials do not know whether the hackers are private or governmental. A request for comment from the Chinese Embassy in Washington was not immediately answered.

Analysts can track where communications come from — a region, a service provider, sometimes even a user’s specific Internet address. But hackers often route their penetration attempts through multiple computers, even multiple countries, and the targeted organizations rarely go to the effort and expense — often fruitless — of trying to trace the origins. American government officials, security experts and university and corporate officials nonetheless say that China is clearly the leading source of efforts to steal information, but attributing individual attacks to specific people, groups or places is rare.

The increased threat of hacking has forced many universities to rethink the basic structure of their computer networks and their open style, though officials say they are resisting the temptation to create a fortress with high digital walls.

“A university environment is very different from a corporation or a government agency, because of the kind of openness and free flow of information you’re trying to promote,” said David J. Shaw, the chief information security officer at Purdue University. “The researchers want to collaborate with others, inside and outside the university, and to share their discoveries.”

Some universities no longer allow their professors to take laptops to certain countries, and that should be a standard practice, said James A. Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a policy group in Washington. “There are some countries, including China, where the minute you connect to a network, everything will be copied, or something will be planted on your computer in hopes that you’ll take that computer back home and connect to your home network, and then they’re in there,” he said. “Academics aren’t used to thinking that way.”

Bill Mellon of the University of Wisconsin said that when he set out to overhaul computer security recently, he was stunned by the sheer volume of hacking attempts.

“We get 90,000 to 100,000 attempts per day, from China alone, to penetrate our system,” said Mr. Mellon, the associate dean for research policy. “There are also a lot from Russia, and recently a lot from Vietnam, but it’s primarily China.”

Other universities report a similar number of attacks and say the figure is doubling every few years. What worries them most is the growing sophistication of the assault.

For corporations, cyberattacks have become a major concern, as they find evidence of persistent hacking by well-organized groups around the world — often suspected of being state-sponsored — that are looking to steal information that has commercial, political or national security value. The New York Times disclosed in January that hackers with possible links to the Chinese military had penetrated its computer systems, apparently looking for the sources of material embarrassing to China’s leaders.

This kind of industrial espionage has become a sticking point in United States-China relations, with the Obama administration complaining of organized cybertheft of trade secrets, and Chinese officials pointing to revelations of American spying.
==============================================

 Like major corporations, universities develop intellectual property that can turn into valuable products like prescription drugs or computer chips. But university systems are harder to secure, with thousands of students and staff members logging in with their own computers.
Readers’ Comments



Mr. Shaw, of Purdue, said that he and many of his counterparts had accepted that the external shells of their systems must remain somewhat porous. The most sensitive data can be housed in the equivalent of smaller vaults that are harder to access and harder to move within, use data encryption, and sometimes are not even connected to the larger campus network, particularly when the work involves dangerous pathogens or research that could turn into weapons systems.

“It’s sort of the opposite of the corporate structure,” which is often tougher to enter but easier to navigate, said Paul Rivers, manager of system and network security at the University of California, Berkeley. “We treat the overall Berkeley network as just as hostile as the Internet outside.”

Berkeley’s cybersecurity budget, already in the millions of dollars, has doubled since last year, responding to what Larry Conrad, the associate vice chancellor and chief information officer, said were “millions of attempted break-ins every single week.”

Mr. Shaw, who arrived at Purdue last year, said, “I’ve had no resistance to any increased investment in security that I’ve advocated so far.” Mr. Mellon, at Wisconsin, said his university was spending more than $1 million to upgrade computer security in just one program, which works with infectious diseases.

Along with increased spending has come an array of policy changes, often after consultation with the F.B.I. Every research university contacted said it was in frequent contact with the bureau, which has programs specifically to advise universities on safeguarding data. The F.B.I. did not respond to requests to discuss those efforts.

Not all of the potential threats are digital. In April, a researcher from China who was working at the Medical College of Wisconsin was arrested and charged with trying to steal a cancer-fighting compound and related data.

Last year, Mr. Mellon said, Wisconsin began telling faculty members not to take their laptops and cellphones abroad, for fear of hacking. Most universities have not gone that far, but many say they have become more vigilant about urging professors to follow federal rules that prohibit taking some kinds of sensitive data out of the country, or have imposed their own restrictions, tighter than the government’s. Still others require that employees returning from abroad have their computers scrubbed by professionals.

That kind of precaution has been standard for some corporations and government agencies for a few years, but it is newer to academia.

Information officers say they have also learned the hard way that when a software publisher like Oracle or Microsoft announces that it has discovered a security vulnerability and has developed a “patch” to correct it, systems need to apply the patch right away. As soon as such a hole is disclosed, hacker groups begin designing programs to take advantage of it, hoping to release new attacks before people and organizations get around to installing the patch.

“The time between when a vulnerability is announced and when we see attempts to exploit it has become extremely small,” said Mr. Conrad, of Berkeley. “It’s days. Sometimes hours.”

Title: Is Electronic Culture Warping Our Minds?
Post by: bigdog on August 04, 2013, 05:11:18 AM

http://bigthink.com/praxis/is-electronic-culture-warping-our-minds

From the article:

M.T. Anderson’s novel Feed is an uncanny exploration of our (inevitable?) future, in which most of the U.S. population has a “software/wetware interface,” so that online data is accessible directly through our brains. Anderson’s work chronicles the personal and social effects of an increasingly “wired” community, providing a valuable map for the range of potential human dysfunction we should watch for, think about, and preempt.

The main character in Feed, Titus, along with his various friends and relations, broadly experience what sociologist Max Weber called “disenchantment” with the world, a reduction in their appreciation of its mystery, wonder, and beauty. The instant gratification and ready stimulus of the feed induces a jaded, disappointed attitude captured by the novel’s very first line: “We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck.”

Title: Millennials Are More Forgetful Than Seniors
Post by: bigdog on August 04, 2013, 08:44:40 AM

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/02/millennial-forgetfulness_n_3695512.html?ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

Title: Internet about to start fragmenting?
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 18, 2013, 11:31:53 PM

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/brazil-looks-break-us-centric-040621384.html

Title: Google changing cookie policies
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 19, 2013, 09:36:32 AM

Please do note the the previous post seems quite significant and should not be lost in the shuffle!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324807704579083723267549160.html?mod=trending_now_4

Title: Protecting your digital self
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 20, 2013, 09:08:03 AM

Al-Qaeda's Wet Dream
 
Submitted by Capitalist Exploits on 09/19/2013 17:21 -0400

 
Originally posted at: CapitalistExploits.at

Imagine for a second you're a terrorist intent on inflicting unimaginable harm on your enemy. Now let's further imagine that your enemy is the United States...
The sun rises over your holy mother land, a land now inhabited by the infidels. You don your Kalishnikov, climb out of your cave, scan the skies searching for drones. Stroking your beard you wonder what the virgins do with their time between incoming martyrs. Then you contemplate how you might go about your Jihadist day, seeking (un)holy vengeance against the great Satan?

You pose a grave danger to the citizens of the United States - their government tells you so - you've seen it on CNN (satellite dish in the cave, of course). This brings you immense satisfaction and pride.

As you survey some stray goats wandering the barren hillside you're troubled as to how this can be so. Your options appear severely limited.

1.   You could capture a passing, stray American NGO, decapitate them on video and post it for the world to see - along with a mouth frothing, unintelligible rant in a language few understand. Impact negligible...and lots of time spent stalking, capturing, struggling with your victim, etc. Then there's the whole decapitation thing...messy, very messy. Best to go back inside the cave and smoke your fine Afghan Hashish.

2.   You consider another popular option. You could find yourself a locale full of infidels, oh say maybe a heavily-fortified US military base, strap a bomb to your ass and rush the gates. Impact better...however this one takes a bit of planning - gotta make sure not to blow the bomb in any practice runs. Then of course there's the nagging question as to whether the virgins really exist. Maybe a rethink is in order.

Sitting comfortably back in your cave you fire up the satellite dish and tune in to watch Wolf. To your amazement you find that you don't actually have to do anything! Your wildest fantasies are coming true...OK, not all; the virgins remain as elusive as ever.

What you find is that your enemy is being dealt some terrible blows without your having to do much more than smoke, herd and stare at your sandals - which you realise really do need replacing.

The damage is being done not by swish bang fighter jets from an invading army, not by any Jihadist bombers with scant regard for their innards, nor from any of your fellow sky-gazing, bearded, cave-dwelling brethren.

No, instead these blows come from none other than your enemies very own National Security Agency. The very chaps entrusted to protect the citizens of the great Satan!

To understand how this works, lets take a step back and consider what has allowed America to become so powerful.

In a phrase, "economic dominance". It is how the United States won the cold war and how it grew to be the greatest nation on earth. Capitalism was allowed to do what it inevitably does...create wealth. Sadly enough

capitalism (now cronyized), economic and personal freedom are undergoing exponential decay.

It costs money to become a military power. $695.7 billion at last count. More than any other nation on earth. A truly astonishingly, grotesque amount of waste to be sure. Pretty sure we could have eradicated poverty and disease with that "war chest" by now!

Financing this military machine, and indeed the entire government structure has to come from somewhere. Debt is one avenue, and whooboy are they using that particular lever. In the long run this will destroy the ability to wage wars. Hope springs eternal...

But let's look at what effect the NSA's forcing of US companies to corrupt their systems and provide illegal spying capabilities is now doing to America.

The US technology industry is by far the biggest in the world. However, consumers both in the US and especially outside its borders are beginning to realise what Ladar Levison, the founder of Lavabit meant when he said:

"This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a
strong judicial precedent, I would strongly recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."

I thought about these comments when talking with a businessman in Asia yesterday. He said to me:

“Chris, we simply can't take the risk of our proprietary business intelligence getting into competitors/American businesses hands. We're looking at moving everything, our hardware, operating systems and we've already ditched all Microsoft software. Our business depends on our IP and proprietary information.”

Petrobras was spied on. Visa has a back door...as does SWIFT. Forget Skype, Facebook, Twitter, even the sacred Apple has been complicit!

Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's President cancelled a trip to the US until Mr. Obama can give her a satisfactory answer as to why a country that is supposedly a "friend" of the US is being spied on. According to the BBC:

"Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has called off a state visit to Washington next month in a row over allegations of US espionage."

Oooooh, someone is in trouble!

So, what do you do if you're a businessman with proprietary information that needs to be stored and shared? Parchment and quills won't work. You're still going to have to use technology, the only question is what technology and from where.

US technology companies that deal with data, Internet, etc, just like the US government, are increasingly being viewed as something that nobody in their right mind wants anything to do with. Pariahs, really.

While I don't personally use it, I would now never even consider using any Microsoft software. I'm even thinking of ditching my Mac. I don't use a smartphone - never have. Why take the risk?

Convenience? Hmmmm, how convenient is a tax audit or a crazy stalker? Wait, those are the same thing, right?

In regards to using Windows for example...there are a myriad of competing options, many of them superior in quality. Not to mention, I don't want to reward a company that treats me with disrespect, lies to me and steals my private information...allegedly of course. I'm their customer, yet they abuse me? No thank you.

From a macro perspective this has the potential to be far bigger than most realise, and I'm seeing the repercussions begin to unfold as normal, everyday people come to understand what exactly the threats are, and what they mean!

The danger of a government spying on you does not stop at simply analysing your spending habits and sharing that information with the tax department, who then cross check it with your tax bill, though this IS happening.

The risks run deep my friends, and even though the cat is out of the bag, it seems a non-event to the NSA and the US government. It's business as usual. I don't believe history is going to look back on these shenanigans kindly.

This is a trend worth following because fortunes are going to be lost - and made - as this continues to play itself out.

On a more personal level we can and must take steps NOW to protect ourselves. This involves carefully chosen hardware, software and understanding what our "digital self" looks like and how to go about protecting it.

Our friend and colleague “John”, an anarchocryptologist (is that a word?) by his own admission, has kindly put together a two-part report on laying the ground work for protecting your "digital self." Part I was released on Tuesday, and the ink has just dried on Part 2.

You can get a copy of both parts by clicking here

So, if you, like us believe that our privacy is worth protecting, that spying governments are not as benign as they suggest, then I encourage you to read it. It's FREE, unlike most of us any longer.

If not, then feel free to go back to the Kardashians and your bag of Cheetos, while updating your Facebook status and Instagram'ing the world a picture of your double bacon burger...with cheese.

You'll be just fine...really.

- Chris

"Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." - Ayn Rand

Title: phoney "hits" more common than we realize and not likely accidental
Post by: ccp on September 24, 2013, 06:02:55 AM

This confirms what I suspect about tallies of hits on yahoo, google, twitter etc.   When I see "trending now" on yahoo and see a lot of celebrities who are being pushed on us in the news such I wonder if many, perhaps most of the supposed generated "hit" are not computer generated by interests financially tied to those celebrities.   I guess there could be less nefarious reasons behind the phoney generated "hits" such as programs that search certain terms etc. but I think it less likely an accident:

http://dailycaller.com/2013/09/24/michelle-obama-has-nearly-2-million-fake-twitter-followers/

Title: web shutdown selection not all based on essential needs
Post by: ccp on October 07, 2013, 07:10:21 AM

but on political needs.  If this does not put a chill on those who think the NSA stuff is a big threat to freedom nothing will.   I know the other posters on the board think Snowden is a rat.  And that is ok.  You all have a big valid argument.  I just come down on the other side I guess cause I have an emotional response to surveillance.  To me he is a hero.  But the internet is the battleground of the future (as is space).  So there is a good reason for the NSA/military to try to have more control over it.  In any case this should be impeachable:

http://therightscoop.com/obama-plays-politics-with-your-lost-children-shuts-down-amber-alert-website/

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on October 07, 2013, 07:56:10 AM

I am more than fine with some of what Snowden has unveiled.

I am quite unfine with other parts of it, handed over to hostile powers.  This is treason.

Title: Internet and psychology
Post by: bigdog on October 16, 2013, 12:20:31 AM

 
http://elitedaily.com/news/world/this-video-will-have-you-completely-rethink-how-you-conduct-yourself-online-and-in-person-video/

Title: WSJ: DC Circuit overturns FCC on net neutrality
Post by: Crafty_Dog on January 15, 2014, 12:23:34 AM

Net Neutralized
The D.C. Circuit tosses the FCC's latest attempt to regulate the Web.
Jan. 14, 2014 7:45 p.m. ET

Another day, another judicial rebuke to the Obama Administration's abusive rule-making habits. On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit tossed out as illegal the Federal Communications Commission's bald attempt to regulate the Internet.

For those keeping score at home, that means the FCC is now zero for two in its attempts to impose "net neutrality" rules on the Internet. Net neutrality travels under the guise of ordering Internet service providers like Verizon VZ +0.11% and Comcast CMCSA +1.25% not to discriminate against content providers. In reality it's a government attempt to dictate how these providers must manage their Internet pipes and how much they can charge companies for using those pipes.


Silicon Valley kingpins like net neutrality because it means Verizon can't charge Google's GOOG +2.35% YouTube or Netflix NFLX +0.34% more for using more capacity or faster speeds. This makes no more economic sense than forcing a cable company to charge one price no matter how many channels a consumer subscribes to, or saying a retailer can't charge more for two dresses than for one. It also means less innovation and slower broadband rollout because Internet companies are less sure of their return on investment.

President Obama nonetheless made net neutrality one of his 2008 campaign pledges, but he tried and failed to get even a Democratic Congress to pass legislation. No matter, because former FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski took up the dirty work and jammed the rule through the commission on a partisan 3-2 vote in December 2010.

Now the three judges, two of them Democratic appointees, have concluded that this power grab exceeded the FCC's legal authority as some of us argued at the time. Their ruling throws out the entire regulation except for its disclosure requirements.

Alas, there is a catch in Wednesday's ruling, as Judge Laurence Silberman noted in his separate opinion. Judge Silberman agreed with Judges David Tatel and Judith Rogers on overturning the rules. But he dissented from Judge Tatel's majority opinion that offers the FCC a loophole for further regulation by saying the agency has the power to regulate the Internet as long as it doesn't treat service providers the way it does common telephone carriers.

Judge Silberman notes that the FCC could return to exploit this, and he explains with an extensive legal and economic analysis why he thinks this interpretation is wrong. The good news is that this offers other judges a legal road map for opposing the Tatel-Rogers logic if the FCC tempts the law by trying to reimpose net neutrality.

It's also a warning to new FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, a liberal and net neutrality devotee, that he should think twice about seeking review of Wednesday's ruling by either the entire D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court. Judge Silberman carries a bigger legal stick than his two comrades.

Mr. Wheeler would be better off to accept strike two and move on. An appeal risks an even bigger judicial smackdown if the Supreme Court sides with Mr. Silberman, and passing another rule would take months and a great deal of political capital. As former FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell notes nearby, the FCC and other federal agencies have plenty of other regulatory and enforcement power to police Internet abuses or anti-competitive behavior. These include antitrust and consumer protection laws.

The larger reality is that the Internet has succeeded in bringing an entire new world to consumers under the current light regulatory model. Broadband has spread to most of the country save its most rural areas, and content services are proliferating. The biggest obstacle to this progress would be political intervention that impeded innovation in the name of a false equity that serves only the giants of Silicon Valley. Mr. Wheeler shouldn't waste his tenure on a lost legal cause.

Title: Hedy Lamarr helped invent CDMA
Post by: ccp on January 21, 2014, 08:57:09 PM

http://www.bubblews.com/news/1938391-hedy-lamarr-and-the-cellphone

Title: Huge appeasement
Post by: ccp on March 15, 2014, 10:55:46 AM

In typical Obama and the Progressive movement fashion we give up more and more to the "world community".   As Newt asks?  *Who are the stakeholders?*
We all are if you ask me.   I guess we are going to have an international tax now?  So Americans can continue funding for the rest of the new world order?

*****U.S. to relinquish remaining control over the Internet

 Joe Raedle/Getty Images -  Pressure to let go of the final vestiges of U.S. authority over the system of Web addresses and domain names that organize the Internet has been building for more than a decade.

By Craig Timberg,   
 
U.S. officials announced plans Friday to relinquish federal government control over the administration of the Internet, a move that pleased international critics but alarmed some business leaders and others who rely on the smooth functioning of the Web.

Pressure to let go of the final vestiges of U.S. authority over the system of Web addresses and domain names that organize the Internet has been building for more than a decade and was supercharged by the backlash last year to revelations about National Security Agency surveillance.

Move comes after revelations about National Security Agency surveillance.

The change would end the long-running contract between the Commerce Department and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a California-based nonprofit group. That contract is set to expire next year but could be extended if the transition plan is not complete.

“We look forward to ICANN convening stakeholders across the global Internet community to craft an appropriate transition plan,” Lawrence E. Strickling, assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information, said in a statement.

The announcement received a passionate response, with some groups quickly embracing the change and others blasting it.

In a statement, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) called the move “consistent with other efforts the U.S. and our allies are making to promote a free and open Internet, and to preserve and advance the current multi-stakeholder model of global Internet governance.”

But former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) tweeted: “What is the global internet community that Obama wants to turn the internet over to? This risks foreign dictatorships defining the internet.”

The practical consequences of the decision were harder to immediately discern, especially with the details of the transition not yet clear. Politically, the move could alleviate rising global concerns that the United States essentially controls the Web and takes advantage of its oversight position to help spy on the rest of the world.

U.S. officials set several conditions and an indeterminate timeline for the transition from federal government authority, saying a new oversight system must be developed and win the trust of crucial stakeholders around the world. An international meeting to discuss the future of Internet is scheduled to start on March 23 in Singapore.

The move’s critics called the decision hasty and politically tinged, and voiced significant doubts about the fitness of ICANN to operate without U.S. oversight and beyond the bounds of U.S. law.



“This is a purely political bone that the U.S. is throwing,” said Garth Bruen, a security fellow at the Digital Citizens Alliance, a Washington-based advocacy group that combats online crime. “ICANN has made a lot of mistakes, and ICANN has not really been a good steward.”

Business groups and some others have long complained that ICANN’s decision-making was dominated by the interests of the industry that sells domain names and whose fees provide the vast majority of ICANN’s revenue. The U.S. government contract was a modest check against such abuses, critics said.

“It’s inconceivable that ICANN can be accountable to the whole world. That’s the equivalent of being accountable to no one,” said Steve DelBianco, executive director of NetChoice, a trade group representing major Internet commerce businesses.

U.S. officials said their decision had nothing to do with the NSA spying revelations and the worldwide controversy they sparked, saying there had been plans since ICANN’s creation in 1998 to eventually migrate it to international control.

“The timing is now right to start this transition both because ICANN as an organization has matured, and international support continues to grow for the multistakeholder model of Internet governance,” Strickling said in a statement.

Although ICANN is based in Southern California, governments worldwide have a say in the group’s decisions through an oversight body. ICANN in 2009 made an “Affirmation of Commitments” to the Commerce Department that covers several key issues.

Fadi Chehade, president of ICANN, disputed many of the complaints about the transition plan and promised an open, inclusive process to find a new international oversight structure for the group.

“Nothing will be done in any way to jeopardize the security and stability of the Internet,” he said.

The United States has long maintained authority over elements of the Internet, which grew from a Defense Department program that started in the 1960s. The relationship between the United States and ICANN has drawn wider international criticism in recent years, in part because big American companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft play such a central role in the Internet’s worldwide functioning. The NSA revelations exacerbated those concerns.

“This is a step in the right direction to resolve important international disputes about how the Internet is governed,” said Gene Kimmelman, president of Public Knowledge, a group that promotes open access to the Internet.

Verizon, one of the world’s biggest Internet providers, issued a statement saying, “A successful transition in the stewardship of these important functions to the global multi-stakeholder community would be a timely and positive step in the evolution of Internet governance.”

ICANN’s most important function is to oversee the assigning of Internet domains — such as dot-com, dot-edu and dot-gov — and ensure that the various companies and universities involved in directing digital traffic do so safely.

Concern about ICANN’s stewardship has spiked in recent years amid a massive and controversial expansion that is adding hundreds of new domains, such as dot-book, dot-gay and dot-sucks, to the Internet’s infrastructure. More than 1,000 new domains are slated to be made available, pumping far more fee revenue into ICANN.




Major corporations have complained, however, that con artists already swarm the Internet with phony Web sites designed to look like the authentic offerings of respected brands.

“To set ICANN so-called free is a very major step that should done with careful oversight,” said Dan Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers. “We would be very concerned about that step.”

 





Follow The Post’s new tech blog, The Switch, where

Title: FCC in Net Neutrality reversal
Post by: Crafty_Dog on April 23, 2014, 04:05:45 PM

F.C.C., in ‘Net Neutrality’ Turnaround, Plans to Allow Fast Lane
The Federal Communications Commission will propose new rules that allow Internet service providers to offer a faster lane through which to send video and other content to consumers, as long as a content company is willing to pay for it, according to people briefed on the proposals.
The proposed rules are a complete turnaround for the F.C.C. on the subject of so-called net neutrality, the principle that Internet users should have equal ability to see any content they choose, and that no content providers should be discriminated against in providing their offerings to consumers.
The F.C.C.’s previous rules governing net neutrality were thrown out by a federal appeals court this year. The court said those rules had essentially treated Internet service providers as public utilities, which violated a previous F.C.C. ruling that Internet links were not to be governed by the same strict regulation as telephone or electric service.
The new rules, according to the people briefed on them, will allow a company like Comcast or Verizon to negotiate separately with each content company – like Netflix, Amazon, Disney or Google – and charge different companies different amounts for priority service.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/24/technology/fcc-new-net-neutrality-rules.html?emc=edit_na_20140423

Title: WSJ: The End of the Permissionless Web
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 05, 2014, 08:53:30 AM

The End of the Permissionless Web
Regulators want to become the gatekeepers for Internet innovation.
By
L. Gordon Crovitz
Updated May 4, 2014 6:52 p.m. ET

The first generation of the Internet did not go well for regulators. Despite early proposals to register websites and require government approval for business practices, the Internet in the U.S. developed largely without bureaucratic control and became an unstoppable engine of innovation and economic growth.

Regulators don't plan to make the same mistake with the next generation of innovations. Bureaucrats and prosecutors are moving in to undermine services that use the Internet in new ways to offer everything from getting a taxi to using self-driving cars to finding a place to stay.

What has made the Internet revolutionary is that it's permissionless. No one had to get approval from Washington or city hall to offer Google GOOGL -0.44% searches, Facebook FB +1.22% profiles or Apple AAPL +0.63% apps, as Adam Thierer of George Mason University notes in his new book, "Permissionless Innovation." A bipartisan consensus in the 1990s led Washington to allow commercial development of the Internet without onerous regulations. Unlike the earlier telecommunications and broadcasting industries, Internet entrepreneurs didn't need licenses to proceed, just good ideas.

"The central fault line in technology policy debates today can be thought of as 'the permission question,' " Mr. Thierer writes. "Must the creators of new technologies seek the blessing of public officials before they develop and deploy their innovations?" Before the Internet, regulatory systems were "overly rigid, bureaucratic, inflexible and slow to adapt to new realities," pre-empting the "beneficial experiments that yield new and better ways of doing things."

Some officials want to go back. In a recent New York Times NYT -0.26% opinion article, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman acknowledged that technology moves at a faster pace than laws can keep up. But instead of waiting to see if new rules are needed, he argues: "The only question is how long it will take for these cyber cowboys to realize that working with the sheriffs is both good business and the right thing to do."

Mr. Schneiderman has targeted Airbnb, an online service that lets users easily rent homes or apartments for short-term stays, giving travelers a new option. The hotel industry, concerned about being disrupted, is lobbying hard to kill the upstart. Mr. Schneiderman went to court demanding the names of people who rent out their homes to see if they violate any laws. Airbnb objects to this fishing expedition. With a valuation in the billions, the Silicon Valley company can afford lawyers to protect its customers, but costly regulatory overreach will inevitably suppress new startups from trying to compete.

Like Airbnb, mobile-phone app Uber creates a marketplace directly linking buyers and sellers—in its case, passengers and drivers—outside the ornate regulations of analog-era municipal taxi commissions. Brussels, Seattle and Miami have banned or strictly limited Uber cars. New York's Mr. Schneiderman objects to the company's practice of pricing more when demand is heavy. The alternative is severely restricted supply, as anyone knows who has tried to hail a cab in the rain.

The drone industry in the U.S. has been grounded because the Federal Aviation Administration has banned commercial use of drones pending new regulations. Meanwhile, countries such as Canada and Australia encourage drones. "As American regulators struggle to come up with a rulebook for the fast-moving industry," Toronto's Globe and Mail bragged recently, "Canada has emerged as perhaps the center of commercial drone technology—from Ontario farmlands to Alberta's oil sands."

Other examples include the Food and Drug Administration's scrutiny of 23andMe's marketing, which forced the company to stop offering health data from its at-home $99 genetics-analysis kit, and prohibitions against selling self-driving cars, which have left the U.S. in the dust behind less regulated Europe.

In his book, Mr. Thierer argues that regulations should be the last resort. The common law provides remedies for innovations that inadvertently cause harm without imposing prior restraint on innovation: "Under tort law, instead of asking for permission to introduce a potentially dangerous product, a firm must pay for the damages its dangerous product creates if it is found liable." If someone flies a drone recklessly or with a mounted camera that violates "peeping Tom" privacy laws, victims can sue for damages. Likewise, traditional contract law protects users of Airbnb and Uber to ensure that the services are honest.

The hardest thing for government regulators to do is to regulate less, which is why the development of the open-innovation Internet was a rare achievement. The regulation the digital economy needs most now is for permissionless innovation to become the default law of the land, not the exception.

Title: US behind in internet speed and affordability
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 01, 2014, 11:05:41 PM

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/31/upshot/why-the-us-has-fallen-behind-in-internet-speed-and-affordability.html?abt=0002&abg=1&_r=0

Title: Apps vs. the Web
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 17, 2014, 01:13:09 PM

The Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It
Tech’s Open Range Is Losing Out to Walled Gardens
By Christopher Mims
Updated Nov. 17, 2014 2:53 p.m. ET


The Web—that thin veneer of human-readable design on top of the machine babble that constitutes the Internet—is dying. And the way it’s dying has farther-reaching implications than almost anything else in technology today.

Think about your mobile phone. All those little chiclets on your screen are apps, not websites, and they work in ways that are fundamentally different from the way the Web does.

Mountains of data tell us that, in aggregate, we are spending time in apps that we once spent surfing the Web. We’re in love with apps, and they’ve taken over. On phones, 86% of our time is spent in apps, and just 14% is spent on the Web, according to mobile-analytics company Flurry.

This might seem like a trivial change. In the old days, we printed out directions from the website MapQuest that were often wrong or confusing. Today we call up Waze on our phones and are routed around traffic in real time. For those who remember the old way, this is a miracle.

Everything about apps feels like a win for users—they are faster and easier to use than what came before. But underneath all that convenience is something sinister: the end of the very openness that allowed Internet companies to grow into some of the most powerful or important companies of the 21st century.


Take that most essential of activities for e-commerce: accepting credit cards. When Amazon.com made its debut on the Web, it had to pay a few percentage points in transaction fees. But Apple takes 30% of every transaction conducted within an app sold through its app store, and “very few businesses in the world can withstand that haircut,” says Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz.

App stores, which are shackled to particular operating systems and devices, are walled gardens where Apple, Google , Microsoft and Amazon get to set the rules. For a while, that meant Apple banned Bitcoin, an alternative currency that many technologists believe is the most revolutionary development on the Internet since the hyperlink. Apple regularly bans apps that offend its politics, taste, or compete with its own software and services.

But the problem with apps runs much deeper than the ways they can be controlled by centralized gatekeepers. The Web was invented by academics whose goal was sharing information. Tim Berners-Lee was just trying to make it easy for scientists to publish data they were putting together during construction of CERN, the world’s biggest particle accelerator.

No one involved knew they were giving birth to the biggest creator and destroyer of wealth anyone had ever seen. So, unlike with app stores, there was no drive to control the early Web. Standards bodies arose—like the United Nations, but for programming languages. Companies that would have liked to wipe each other off the map were forced, by the very nature of the Web, to come together and agree on revisions to the common language for Web pages.

The result: Anyone could put up a Web page or launch a new service, and anyone could access it. Google was born in a garage. Facebook was born in Mark Zuckerberg ’s dorm room.

But app stores don’t work like that. The lists of most-downloaded apps now drive consumer adoption of those apps. Search on app stores is broken.
On phones, 86% of our time is spent in apps, and just 14% is spent on the Web, according to mobile-analytics company Flurry. ENLARGE
On phones, 86% of our time is spent in apps, and just 14% is spent on the Web, according to mobile-analytics company Flurry. Bloomberg News

The Web is built of links, but apps don’t have a functional equivalent. Facebook and Google are trying to fix this by creating a standard called “deep linking,” but there are fundamental technical barriers to making apps behave like websites.

The Web was intended to expose information. It was so devoted to sharing above all else that it didn’t include any way to pay for things—something some of its early architects regret to this day, since it forced the Web to survive on advertising.

The Web wasn’t perfect, but it created a commons where people could exchange information and goods. It forced companies to build technology that was explicitly designed to be compatible with competitors’ technology. Microsoft’s Web browser had to faithfully render Apple’s website. If it didn’t, consumers would use another one, such as Firefox or Google’s Chrome, which has since taken over.

Today, as apps take over, the Web’s architects are abandoning it. Google’s newest experiment in email nirvana, called Inbox, is available for both Android and Apple’s iOS, but on the Web it doesn’t work in any browser except Chrome. The process of creating new Web standards has slowed to a crawl. Meanwhile, companies with app stores are devoted to making those stores better than—and entirely incompatible with—app stores built by competitors.

“In a lot of tech processes, as things decline a little bit, the way the world reacts is that it tends to accelerate that decline,” says Mr. Dixon. “If you go to any Internet startup or large company, they have large teams focused on creating very high quality native apps, and they tend to de-prioritize the mobile Web by comparison.”

Many industry watchers think this is just fine. Ben Thompson, an independent tech and mobile analyst, told me he sees the dominance of apps as the “natural state” for software.

Ruefully, I have to agree. The history of computing is companies trying to use their market power to shut out rivals, even when it’s bad for innovation and the consumer.

That doesn’t mean the Web will disappear. Facebook and Google still rely on it to furnish a stream of content that can be accessed from within their apps. But even the Web of documents and news items could go away. Facebook has announced plans to host publishers’ work within Facebook itself, leaving the Web nothing but a curiosity, a relic haunted by hobbyists.

I think the Web was a historical accident, an anomalous instance of a powerful new technology going almost directly from a publicly funded research lab to the public. It caught existing juggernauts like Microsoft flat-footed, and it led to the kind of disruption today’s most powerful tech companies would prefer to avoid.

It isn’t that today’s kings of the app world want to quash innovation, per se. It is that in the transition to a world in which services are delivered through apps, rather than the Web, we are graduating to a system that makes innovation, serendipity and experimentation that much harder for those who build things that rely on the Internet. And today, that is pretty much everyone.

—Follow Christopher Mims on Twitter @Mims; write to him at christopher.mims@wsj.com.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 08, 2015, 07:03:15 AM

AmericanExceptionalism.com
With Internet freedom safe for now, let’s embrace the values that make the Web work so well.
By
L. Gordon Crovitz
Feb. 1, 2015 6:08 p.m. ET
29 COMMENTS

Congress did the world’s three billion Internet users a favor by blocking President Obama’s plan to end U.S. protection of the open Internet. Now it is time to embrace the American exceptionalism that made today’s Internet possible.

In March 2014, the Obama administration said it would give up the U.S. contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, when the current term expires in September. The plan ran into a buzz saw of criticism, including from Bill Clinton, whose administration built American protection of freedom into the core workings of the Internet when it opened for commercial use in the 1990s.

American oversight protects the engineers and network operators who manage the Internet from political interference. China, Russia and Iran can block access only in their own countries. The Obama plan would have enabled them to get control over root-zone names and addresses so they could censor or remove websites in other countries.

The Commerce Department official charged with carrying out the plan to give up U.S. stewardship, Lawrence Strickling, last week gave the administration’s first reaction to the omnibus budget bill, which Mr. Obama signed into law late last year. It effectively vetoed the Obama plan by prohibiting any expenditures by the Commerce Department to end the U.S. contract overseeing Icann.

Mr. Strickling acknowledged that the law bars the administration from giving up control over the Internet as it had planned. He told last week’s annual meeting of the Congressional Internet Caucus: “The act does restrict [Commerce] from using appropriated dollars to relinquish our stewardship during fiscal year 2015 with respect to Internet domain name system functions. We take that seriously. Accordingly, we will not use appropriated funds to terminate the . . . contract with Icann prior to the contract’s current expiration date of Sept. 30, 2015.”
ENLARGE
Photo: Getty Images

What he didn’t make explicit is that under the clear terms of the Icann contract, U.S. control over the Internet must be renewed for a further two years, through September 2017—past the end of the Obama presidency. That means it will be up to the next president whether to pursue the Obama plan, which seems unlikely. Why would any candidate from either party run on a platform of giving up U.S. protection for the open Internet?

Instead of making clear that there will be no change during the Obama presidency, Mr. Strickling encouraged other governments and Icann to act as if U.S. oversight will still end soon. He asked them to keep trying to overcome the key stumbling block of keeping Icann accountable in the absence of a U.S. contract. Even before Congress made the point moot, Icann said it wouldn’t have found any alternative to continued U.S. oversight by the deadline set under the Obama plan.

The Obama administration needs to roll back expectations it set but won’t meet for changing Internet governance. Washington should instead embrace the American exceptionalism that created the Internet as a haven for free speech and permissionless innovation. People everywhere benefit from the absence of Internet censorship and international regulation of websites or apps.

If Mr. Obama believed that, he wouldn’t have proposed giving up American protection in the first place. So it is up to Congress to make the case for not fixing what ain’t broke. The new chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, South Dakota’s John Thune, last week announced hearings on Internet governance. He said that without an effective alternative to U.S. oversight, the U.S. should renew its oversight of Icann indefinitely.

As the Obama administration was trying to give up protection for the open Internet, authoritarian regimes were redoubling their efforts to assert control. China recently cut off the virtual private networks that Chinese citizens relied on to gain access to the world’s websites and evade the Great Firewall. One Chinese historian said that without access to Google Scholar, which links to scholarly research around the world, “it’s like we’re living in the Middle Ages.” The world’s autocrats prefer the top-down Middle Ages to Internet-driven democratization of information and communication.

The U.S. oversees an Internet built in its own image, with the result that people around the world increasingly expect free speech and open innovation. All presidential candidates should embrace this enormous accomplishment and pledge never to abandon the open Internet.
Popular on WSJ

Title: Very important and very sneaky FCC vote impending
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 23, 2015, 11:04:26 PM

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/obamas-regs-will-make-internet-slow-as-in-europe-warn-fcc-fec-commissioners/article/2560567

Also worth noting is that the FCC chairman is refusing to post the 150 pages of regulations that he is proposing (a four page summary only) for comment. When I was an attorney in Washington DC I had occasion to become familiarized with the Administrative Procedure Act. This would sure seem to me a violation; the APA was designed to meet the Constitutional questions that came with the development of bureaucracy, a fourth branch of government with both quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial qualities.

In other words, the requirement of Due Process is what is at stake here, This most recent manifestation of a certain type of lawlessness from Team Obama carries heavy consequences: It may well be that the aspiring omnipotent state is about to take yet another big step towards the reification of its dream of total control.

Title: Local govt regulation is why US internet is slow.
Post by: Crafty_Dog on February 24, 2015, 07:05:33 PM

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-just-cable-companies-and-blame-local-government-for-dismal-broadband-competition/

Title: WSJ: Netflix recants on net neutrality
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 09, 2015, 01:07:44 PM

    Netflix Recants on Obamanet
    Proponents of net neutrality appear to be experiencing lobbyists’ remorse.
    by L. Gordon Crovitz March 8, 2015 7:49 p.m. ET WSJ

    Corporate executives choose their words carefully at investor conferences hosted by the large investment banks, and analysts listen closely to decide whether to drive share prices up or down. Presentations are preceded by required securities-law disclosures, heightening the pressure to speak only carefully considered thoughts.
    With that in mind, consider what David Wells, chief financial officer of Netflix said last week at the annual Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference. He disclosed that Netflix, one of the few companies that advocated the most extreme form of Internet regulation, had lobbyist’s remorse only a week after the Federal Communications Commission voted to replace the open Internet with Obamanet.

    “Were we pleased it pushed to Title II?” Mr. Wells said to investors. “Probably not. We were hoping there might be a nonregulated solution.”

    Title II is the part of the Communications Act of 1934 that bureaucrats used to exert near-total control over the AT&T telephone monopoly. The FCC recently did President Obama’s bidding by voting to impose that micromanagement on the Internet. The FCC will decide what prices and other terms online are “just and reasonable.” The agency added a new “general conduct” catchall provision giving itself oversight of Internet content and business models.

    Netflix PR handlers claimed that Mr. Wells was just “trying to convey how our position had evolved.” But the company’s actions support Mr. Wells’s words. Last week, Netflix violated a core tenet of net neutrality when it launched its service in Australia as part of a “zero rating” offering by broadband providers, which excludes its video from data caps. Net neutrality advocates want to outlaw such deals. Netflix shrugged off this objection: “We won’t put our service or our members at a disadvantage.”

    Last year National Journal reported that Netflix was “relishing” its role as the lead lobbyist for net neutrality, “not only advocating a position that would protect its profits,” but “also earning goodwill from web activists and liberals.”

    Today Netflix is a poster child for crony capitalism. When CEO Reed Hastings lobbied for Internet regulations, all he apparently really wanted was for regulators to tilt the scales in his direction with service providers. Or as Geoffrey Manne of the International Center for Law and Economics put it in Wired: “Did we really just enact 300 pages of legally questionable, enormously costly, transformative rules just to help Netflix in a trivial commercial spat?”

    Ironically, Netflix could end up the biggest loser with a regulated Internet. The FCC did not stop at claiming power to regulate broadband providers. It will also review the interconnection agreements and network tools that allow the smooth functioning of the Internet—including delivery of Netflix videos, which take up one-third of broadband nationwide at peak times.

    Net-neutrality advocates oppose “fast lanes” on the Internet, arguing they put startups at a disadvantage. Netflix could not operate without fast lanes and even built its own content-delivery network to reduce costs and improve quality. This approach will now be subject to the “just and reasonable” test. The FCC could force Netflix to open its proprietary delivery network to competitors and pay broadband providers a “fair” price for its share of usage.

    There’s no need for the FCC to override the free-market agreements that make the Internet work so well. Fast lanes like Netflix’s saved the Internet from being overwhelmed, and there is nothing wrong with the “zero cap” approach Netflix is using in Australia. Consumers benefit from lower-priced services.

    The FCC still hasn’t made public its 300-plus pages of new regulations, but there is increasing opposition against changing the Internet as we know it. Last week John Perry Barlow, the Grateful Dead lyricist-turned-Internet-evangelist, participated in a conference call of Internet pioneers opposed to the FCC treating the Internet as a utility. He called the regulatory step “singular arrogance.”

    In 1996 Mr. Barlow’s “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” helped inspire a bipartisan consensus for the open Internet: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

    The permissionless Internet succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations, becoming an unmatched outlet for creativity and innovation. Mr. Obama has defied the bipartisan consensus that made this possible. Unless Congress or the courts intervene, the future of the Internet will look like the past, when bureaucrats and lawyers, not visionaries and entrepreneurs, were in charge.

Title: Obama's bungled internet surrender
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 19, 2015, 06:18:50 PM

Obama’s Bungled Internet Surrender
The group the White House favors for online oversight is turning into an abusive monopolist.
By L. Gordon Crovitz
May 17, 2015 5:39 p.m. ET
WSJ

President Obama’s plan to give up protection of the open Internet is wreaking havoc even though it will probably never be carried out. In anticipation of the end of U.S. stewardship, the organization the White House wants to give more power has become an abusive monopolist, refusing to be held accountable by the Internet’s stakeholders.

The administration last year announced its intention to abandon the contract the Commerce Department has held since the beginning of the Web with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann. Congress used its power of the purse to block the move, which had been set for September this year.

But the prospect of escaping U.S. oversight led Icann to deny accountability even for its core duty of keeping its monopoly over Web addresses working smoothly. The House Judiciary Committee last week held a hearing titled “Stakeholder Perspectives on Icann: The .Sucks Domain and Essential Steps to Guarantee Trust and Accountability in the Internet’s Operation.”

The .sucks domain was one of hundreds of new top-level domains Icann added beyond the original .com, .org and .gov. Icann, organized as a nonprofit, collects a fee each time it approves a new top-level domain and gets a cut of the registration charge for individual domain names. The corporation’s total take so far from the new domains is more than $300 million.

The Intellectual Property Constituency, an Icann stakeholder group, calls the .sucks domain “predatory, exploitative and coercive.” Judiciary chairman Bob Goodlatte says trademark holders are “being shaken down”—compelled to buy new addresses defensively to prevent their use.

Apple bought applestore.sucks. Gmail, Sam’s Club, Uber and Yahoo registered .sucks addresses, as did celebrities including Taylor Swift and Kevin Spacey. The standard price: $2,499, versus $10 for unclaimed .com addresses.

Mr. Goodlatte says the approval of .sucks “demonstrates the absurdity and futility of Icann’s own enforcement processes.” Instead of policing itself, Icann asked the Federal Trade Commission to look into whether the .sucks domain is abusive. Philip Corwin, a lawyer for the Internet Commerce Association, wrote on the CircleID website: “This is the equivalent of sending a message stating: ‘Dear Regulator: We have lit a fuse. Can you please tell us whether it is connected to a bomb?’ ”

Mr. Corwin told lawmakers the U.S. has been a “useful and corrective restraint on Icann” and a “first line of defense against any attempt at multilateral takeover and conversion to a government-dominated organization,” so “should exercise strong oversight in support of Icann’s stakeholders” in any transition of the contract.

The Internet ain’t broke, and Mr. Obama shouldn’t have tried to fix it. Icann and its stakeholders have spent the past year exhausting themselves on the impossible mission the White House set for them. They were tasked with finding some way to keep Icann operating with accountability but without U.S. oversight. Unsurprisingly, no one found a viable alternative.

Mr. Obama may be uncomfortable with American exceptionalism, but the Internet since its launch has reflected U.S. values of free speech and open innovation. That is why China, Russia and other authoritarian regimes lust for the power to control it.

Some stakeholders proposed a new institution to oversee Icann, while others wanted to build more accountability within Icann.

Last week Icann chief Fadi Chehade told the French news agency AFP that China and Brazil agreed with Icann’s proposals to end U.S. oversight and let Icann oversee itself: “It is now up to the community to wrap them up, put them in a nice little box with a bow and ship them to Washington.”

Even the Obama administration knows Mr. Chehade’s nonaccountability approach is a nonstarter. The .sucks saga shows that Icann won’t protect the Internet from unscrupulous business practices, never mind authoritarian regimes.

The Commerce Department recently asked several stakeholder groups how far past the original September date it would take to propose and implement alternatives to U.S. protection. The Obama administration still acts as if it can give up the contract overseeing Icann, but it can’t. Congress banned any steps by Commerce to give up the contract before the date in September, when the agreement must be renewed for two more years. This means Mr. Obama’s successor will decide.

The administration should tell Icann and the stakeholders to use the next two years to focus on creating accountability for Icann. If the White House persists in its wrongheaded idea to give up U.S. protection for the Internet, it should take the precaution of buying up ObamaInternetPlan.sucks.

Title: Ted Cruz's fight to protect the open internet
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 03, 2015, 09:13:09 AM

Ted Cruz’s Fight to Protect the Open Internet
The Texas senator blocks legislation that could lead to world-wide censorship of the Web.
By
L. Gordon Crovitz
Aug. 2, 2015 5:38 p.m. ET


Sen. Ted Cruz wants to safeguard the open Internet from authoritarian regimes. You’d think that would be an easy position to take, but it’s not. The Texas senator and presidential candidate is bucking the leadership of his Republican Party to push hard against the Obama administration plan to abandon America’s protection of the Internet from political interference.

This became an issue in March 2014, when the Commerce Department announced it would give up its Internet oversight by September 2015. Commerce exercises oversight through its contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, which keeps the engineers and network operators who manage the Internet free from political interference. China, Russia and other authoritarian regimes can censor websites only within their own countries, not globally as they have long desired.

Congress used its budget power to block Commerce from giving up the Icann contract during 2015, which should mean a two-year renewal into the next presidency. The Obama administration ignored that timetable and set the new date of July 2016 to give up control. Meanwhile, no alternative has emerged to protect the open Internet.

The House passed the Dotcom Act (“Domain Openness Through Continued Oversight Matters”) in June, which requires the Obama administration to present such a plan to Congress. The Republican leadership supports the bill, but Mr. Cruz put a hold on it in the Senate because of a fatal flaw: U.S. protection for the Internet would automatically end 30 days after the Obama administration presents its plan unless Congress votes against it. Mr. Cruz instead wants to require congressional approval of any administration plan.

“It’s a key issue that the U.S. not give away control of the Internet to a body under the influence and possible control of foreign governments,” Mr. Cruz told me last week. “U.S. leadership is still needed, and we should defend freedom of speech and freedom on the Internet, not hand it over to other countries with different priorities.”

Mr. Cruz argues that the Dotcom Act is bad policy and unconstitutional. He cites the Constitution’s Property Clause (Article IV, Section 3), which says Congress must pass legislation before government property can be transferred. Under the contract between Commerce and Icann, “all deliverables provided under this contract become the property of the U.S. government.” The power to dispose of it, as Mr. Cruz says, belongs to Congress, “not to an assistant secretary of the Commerce Department.”

The administration claims it won’t hand the Internet over to a body controlled by governments. But in anticipation of the American abdication, many governments are quietly finalizing the details of how they take over.

At an Icann meeting in Paris last month, several governments said they would upgrade the current advisory role for governments within Icann as soon as the U.S. gives up control. They would elevate governments above Internet stakeholders—network operators, engineers and civil society groups. China, Brazil and France define this as “enhanced” power for governments.

A concerned participant shared with me internal Icann documents prepared for the meeting. A survey Icann conducted on the future of Internet governance highlights the dangers of an Obama surrender. Russia’s response to the survey insists that governments get “a more meaningful role than an advisory role . . . in all matters affecting public policy.” China wants “independent status” for governments in controlling the Internet. Even Switzerland wants more power for governments.

The Obama administration is conducting “stress tests” for what happens without U.S. protection. What’s called “Stress Test No. 18” relates to how governments could get control over Icann. Under current rules, governments can press Icann on Internet policy issues only if no country objects—“any formal objection” by just one country vetoes a power grab by governments at the expense of the multistakeholder community.

The Obama plan for Icann if the U.S. contract ends now requires only a “consensus” among governments to dictate Internet policy. That’s a far lower standard than today’s requirement of unanimity and would further sideline U.S. influence. The majority of authoritarian governments could act together to politicize Icann. Instead of censoring GayRightsInRussia.org or LiberateTibet.org only in their own countries, Russia and China could forge a “consensus” to impose a global ban.

Protecting the open Internet was a bipartisan issue for many years and should be one again. The Obama Internet giveaway invites a high-profile campaign issue for politicians who oppose it. Considering the popularity of the Internet, being for it is better politics than being against it.

Title: Declaring Digital Death
Post by: Body-by-Guinness on August 11, 2015, 10:07:43 AM

Something new to keep your eyes open for:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-08-08/def-con-hackers-can-virtually-kill-people-expert-says/6683190

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 11, 2015, 07:10:11 PM

BBG:

Somebody whom I respect in these things brings this to my attention:

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2015/0810/How-this-hacker-can-virtually-kill-you-and-what-to-do-about-it

Title: WSJ: FCC reifies our fears
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 16, 2015, 04:24:51 AM

y
Bret Swanson
Aug. 14, 2015 6:43 p.m. ET
95 COMMENTS

Imagine if Steve Jobs, Larry Page or Mark Zuckerberg had been obliged to ask bureaucrats in Washington if it was OK to launch the iPhone, Gmail, or Facebook ’s forthcoming Oculus virtual-reality service. Ridiculous, right? Not anymore.

A few days before the Independence Day holiday weekend, the Federal Communications Commission announced what amounts to a system of permission slips for the Internet. The agency said its July 2 public notice would help firms understand how its comprehensive and controversial Open Internet Order—which subjects the dynamic world of broadband, mobile, content, cloud and apps to public-utility oversight—will be applied in practice.

The new public notice, outlining the “Open Internet Advisory Opinion Procedures” turns upside down the historical presumption that Internet firms are free to innovate.

In February, when the FCC voted 3-2 to adopt the 400-page Open Internet Order, critics said it was intrusive, overly broad and ambiguous. The fear was that arbitrary judgments and legal uncertainty could chill the feverish pace of digital innovation.

And a feverish pace it is. In the week before the Open Internet Order’s initial rules went into effect in June, Apple launched its new music streaming service. Amazon revealed it is building an ambitious new online videogame. Google began offering nearly unlimited free storage of photos and videos, and it advanced its planning for “app streaming” from the cloud. Oculus unveiled its new Rift virtual-reality headset, a platform that will generate massive multimedia traffic on the Internet.

The FCC said its Open Internet Order regulations are needed to prevent Internet Service Providers from “blocking” and “throttling” content. But the evidence says the previous regime of Internet freedom was a rousing success. The U.S. today rules the world in mobile innovation and generates two to three times more Internet data traffic per capita than most advanced nations.

The market value of seven American technology firms—Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Oracle, Intel and Microsoft —totals $2.3 trillion, more than the entire stock markets of Germany or Australia. How long will this last if companies have to wait for FCC gatekeepers to prejudge the next wave of innovative digital products before consumers get to decide if they have value?

As the FCC begins to issue guidance and enforcement actions, it’s becoming clearer that critics who feared there would be significant legal uncertainty were right. Under its new “transparency” rule, for example, the agency on June 17 conjured out of thin air an astonishing $100 million fine against AT&T, even though the firm explained its mobile-data plans on its websites and in numerous emails and texts to customers.

The FCC’s new “Internet Conduct Standard,” meanwhile, is no standard at all. It is an undefined catchall for any future behavior the agency doesn’t like. And that’s where the advisory opinions on the legality of new products and services come in. The advisory opinions are an attempt to clarify what the Conduct Standard means. Yet the Conduct Standard is vague and open-ended, while advisory requests from firms must be specific and based on real products.

“A proposed course of conduct for which an advisory opinion is sought,” the FCC guidelines state, “must be sufficiently concrete and detailed so as to be more than merely hypothetical; it must be sufficiently defined to enable the Bureau to conduct an in-depth evaluation of the proposal. In addition, the Bureau will not respond to requests for opinions that relate to ongoing or prior conduct.”

And so, to request an advisory opinion, a firm must launch a project, making it “concrete,” not “hypothetical.” But the product or technology must also not be “ongoing.” At what point does a hypothetical product become concrete, and at what point does a concrete product become ongoing? And because the advisory opinions—and the “detailed” requests—will be public, won’t entrepreneurs and corporations worry about revealing proprietary information and strategies?

Large broadband firms may be able to navigate the new “advisory opinion” world, at least from a legal perspective. As with most regulation, however, smaller entrepreneurs will have a tougher time. Because the Internet relies on so many complementary and competitive relationships among network and content firms of all sizes, the overall effect is likely to slow experimentation.

Already, the rules are beginning to tip the scales toward some network firms but away from others. With FCC support, Netflix has signed new deals for free or near-free bandwidth from Time Warner Cable, AT&T and others. But sponsored data plans from Facebook, Pandora and Spotify—where the content firm pays the consumer’s charges—are under suspicion and the FCC has said it would scrutinize them. Groups like the New America Foundation are calling for the prohibition of broadband data limits, which are currently ubiquitous in mobile plans. If data plans with limits are banned, the casual user who checks his emails a couple of times a day will subsidize the round-the-clock videogame player.

From the beginning, Internet pioneers operated in an environment of “permissionless innovation.” FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler now insists that “it makes sense to have somebody watching over their shoulder and ready to jump in if necessary.” But the agency is jumping in to demand that innovators get permission before they offer new services to consumers. The result will be less innovation.

Mr. Swanson, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is president of Entropy Economics LLC, which advises investors and Internet firms.

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: G M on August 16, 2015, 01:30:26 PM

It is like this country has been fundamentally changed.

Title: WSJ: Not Obama's to give away
Post by: Crafty_Dog on September 28, 2015, 03:18:36 PM

By L. Gordon Crovitz
Sept. 27, 2015 4:36 p.m. ET
86 COMMENTS

The flaw in President Obama’s plan to give up U.S. protection of the open Internet becomes clearer with each delay in carrying it out: The Internet isn’t broken, so why fix it? The good news is congressional leaders have found a way to block the plan in the Constitution, which makes clear that the Internet isn’t Mr. Obama’s to give away.

Since the launch of the commercial Internet, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, has operated under a contract from the U.S. Commerce Department. American oversight freed engineers and developers to run the networks without political pressure from other governments. China and Russia can censor the Internet in their own countries, but not globally because Washington would block tampering with the “root zone” of Web addresses.

The Obama administration, looking to placate other governments after the Edward Snowden disclosures in 2013 about U.S. surveillance, said it would end this American exceptionalism. Surveillance is unrelated to Internet governance, but the White House thought it would be an easy concession.

No one has found a way to keep authoritarian regimes at bay without U.S. protection. The administration originally planned to surrender U.S. control this month, but was forced to postpone to September 2016. Last week the Commerce Department admitted there is still no post-U. S. plan for the Internet. Assistant Secretary Lawrence Strickling posted an update online saying there are “many questions still to be answered, both about the substance of the overall plan as well its implementation” and “significant confusion and uncertainty.” He wants a plan “as simple as possible”—but a simple plan would have been crafted by now.

Instead, the process is frustrating the Internet stakeholders it was supposed to protect. “In an extraordinary, almost surreal three-hour teleconference,” an industry blog reported this month, “the working group drawing up plans to make Icann—wannabe masters of the Internet—more open and responsive to the public were treated to a level of Orwellian ‘double speak’ rarely seen outside the British civil service.”

The Icann board says it is willing to be held accountable but rejects the key accountability proposals developed over the past year. Icann doesn’t want to share power or let stakeholders replace its board if it misbehaves or comes under the influence of authoritarian regimes. “It may be prudent to delay the transition” from U.S. control, Icann acknowledges.

This column has quoted confidential Icann documents detailing steps authoritarian regimes will take if the U.S. cedes authority. The Russian representative says governments will get a role “more meaningful than just advisory,” to be accomplished in the “post-transition period”—that is, after the U.S. surrenders control and can’t block other governments.

In addition to the immediate risk of other governments seeking power, the stakeholders also want more accountability for Icann’s core function, running an efficient Internet. Icann has earned hundreds of millions in fees, collected from registrars for every .com, .org and .net address they sell. Without U.S. control, Icann would go from being a regulated monopoly to being an unregulated monopoly. That could boost its coffers at the expense of Internet companies and users.

Congress may yet save the Internet by blocking the administration’s plan. Sen. Ted Cruz last week joined Chuck Grassley and Bob Goodlatte, respectively chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary committees, in sending a letter to the Government Accountability Office arguing that the executive branch cannot act alone. The letter, which is not yet public, notes the constitutional requirement that only Congress can “dispose” of federal property.

The U.S. contract with Icann says deliverables, including the root zone of the Internet, are “the property of the U.S. government.” Icann’s monopoly over the root zone and its Web addresses is worth billions. Any disposal of the Icann contract without congressional approval—which is unlikely—should be voided by the courts.

“Mr. Obama lacks the authority to give away what isn’t his,” Mr. Cruz told me last week. He says the letter to the GAO shows “grave concern in both the Senate and House.” He and fellow Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush are campaigning against the plan, which adds an important technology topic to the race. American protection for the Internet had bipartisan support until Mr. Obama decided to give it up.

If the Obama administration wants a simple solution to the Internet-governance mess it created, it should announce that the U.S. will retain its stewardship and support more accountability from Icann to its stakeholders. The open Internet is too important to be abandoned by an administration that thought surrendering the Web would be easy.

Title: Sen. Cruz opposing Obama's release of US control of internet
Post by: Crafty_Dog on June 25, 2016, 08:57:53 AM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrWHeVy003c

Title: From a left wing site
Post by: ccp on August 11, 2016, 06:13:48 AM

The tech oligarchs ruling the world, our politics, our government, our privacy and basically everything else:

ttp://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/11/today-s-tech-oligarchs-are-worse-than-the-robber-barons.html

Title: Daily Beast: Tech Oligarchs are the new Robber Barons
Post by: Crafty_Dog on August 16, 2016, 10:25:45 AM

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/11/today-s-tech-oligarchs-are-worse-than-the-robber-barons.html

Title: Re: WSJ: Not Obama's to give away
Post by: DDF on October 04, 2016, 01:08:47 PM

Quote from: Crafty_Dog on September 28, 2015, 03:18:36 PM

If the Obama administration wants a simple solution to the Internet-governance mess it created, it should announce that the U.S. will retain its stewardship and support more accountability from Icann to its stakeholders. The open Internet is too important to be abandoned by an administration that thought surrendering the Web would be easy.

But he can't.... because his Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement needs him to give this up too. In fact, he needs to "insure a FREE AND OPEN" internet. His words.

https://ustr.gov/tpp/#ensuring-a-free-open-internet

They'll no doubt pass the TPP immediately after the elections, with the bill containing everything from this, to open visas and mandatory export requirements, which also allows for export of labor services.

The bill also specifically allows for sharing of technology and services, also detailing cryptography, and allowing for foreign workers to be imported to any signatory's country.

Being that the bill was kept in secrecy, politicians actually denied access to it, and when granted access, access was supervised, bill signed in February of 2016, and with everything this controls, almost no one is talking about it, but Kardashian's jewelry, insurance scam is international news.

Yeah. You can bet this will pass...even if Trump wins.

Ask yourself, what does giving away control of the internet have to do with establishing trade across the ocean? But it's in there.

They attempt to make a sales pitch for it here - https://medium.com/the-trans-pacific-partnership/intellectual-property-3479efdc7adf#.paxmxv65e

In which they want to eliminate "cyber squatting:"

"Preventing Domain Name Cyber-Squatting

In an effort to reduce domain name cybersquatting, the TPP ensures that, in connection with a Party’s country-code top-level domain name registration system, appropriate remedies are available in cases of bad faith registration of domain names that are confusingly similar to registered trademarks." - taken from the preceding link.

They can't very well control that if the control does not lie within UN or WTO hands.

From what I have read thus far, in every aspect, they have absolutely sought to diminish the standard of living for Americans, send American jobs (including intellectual jobs), elsewhere, and establish law that overrides US law.

Also interesting is the last sentence of this quote from the same page:

"Enforcement in the Digital Environment

TPP is the first FTA to clarify that IPR enforcement should be available against infringement in the digital environment and not just against physical products. Some countries in the WTO have asserted that existing IP enforcement commitments do not apply online or to digital products.

The author of the page, instead of denouncing the disagreement, immediately follows with:

"TPP takes additional steps toward promoting legitimate digital trade, including the delivery of movies, music, software, and books online. In particular, the ISP copyright safe harbor section helps to provide certainty and predictability about the scope of the safe harbors, as in prior FTAs, while also reflecting the diversity of approaches in the TPP countries, and ensuring that existing effective systems, such as ones upon which rights holders, ISPs, and consumers have come to rely in the course of digital trade, can stay in place. TPP also recognizes the important role of collective management societies for copyright and related rights in collecting and distributing royalties through fair, efficient, transparent, and accountable practices, which promote a rich and accessible digital marketplace for content.

Basically... they are stating directly, that control over everything must remain in international hands. They aren't even hiding it anymore.

Title: Does HIPPA apply to president?
Post by: ccp on October 06, 2016, 06:36:14 PM

I wonder if HIPPA applies to our fearless leader:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/10/06/surgeon-generals-office-confirms-potential-security-breach/

Title: IOT - "internet of things"
Post by: ccp on October 30, 2016, 07:33:02 PM

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iot-growing-faster-than-the-ability-to-defend-it/

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 02, 2016, 07:40:53 AM

 :-o

Title: How technology hijacks people's minds
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 23, 2016, 09:56:53 AM

https://medium.com/swlh/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3#.eqyrzypkf

Title: single atoms into to two states which can be
Post by: ccp on March 13, 2017, 05:58:51 AM

made equivalent to + or 0:
https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2017/03/10/scientists-store-data-on-a-single-atom-for-the-first-time/

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 13, 2017, 12:29:47 PM

 :-o :-o :-o

Title: Web Archiving - (Saving Web Pages)
Post by: DDF on March 15, 2017, 07:27:22 AM

https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/292z2b/ysk_about_archivetoday_a_website_that_lets_you/

There are a number of archiving sites. Some are more trustworty than others, Google - obvousily owning an "archiving" service.

The safest way is to create an archive and save it on your computer or a secondary hard-drive, memory stick, etc.

There are two problems:

1.) Archive.today won't save audio/video files.

2.) If you save the file on your computer, you won't be able to share it online with the ease that one shares a webpage, unless you have your own website (which isn't all that difficult, depending upon the complexity of the site), with the ease that one could share an existing webpage.

Other Options for archiving -

https://archive.org/web/

http://cachedview.com/ - owned by Google



More information - https://www.labnol.org/internet/archive-web-pages/20192/

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: Crafty_Dog on March 18, 2017, 10:21:12 PM

DDF, please post that here as well:  http://dogbrothers.com/phpBB2/index.php?topic=550.0

Title: and the most successful "blog" of all time is =>
Post by: ccp on October 05, 2017, 04:28:04 PM

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertadams/2017/03/02/top-income-earning-blogs/#4faa05012377

Title: information hygiene
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 05, 2017, 01:36:25 PM

In an email to me a very brainy friend (PhD in Physics, and generally a tech whiz)wrote of

" information hygiene" and the breakdown of human social structure when exposed to technology"

This struck as very penetrating.

Title: Google and Facebook sucking up 85 % of all the online ad revenue
Post by: ccp on November 09, 2017, 05:09:24 PM

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/yahoos-demise-is-a-death-knell-for-digital-news-orgs/523692/

Title: Daily Wire : Net Neutrality is a bad idea
Post by: Crafty_Dog on November 28, 2017, 10:59:55 AM

http://www.dailywire.com/news/24004/everything-you-need-know-about-why-net-neutrality-harry-khachatrian?utm_source=shapironewsletter-ae&utm_medium=email&utm_content=112817-news&utm_campaign=modelnames

Title: net neutrality
Post by: ccp on May 16, 2018, 06:28:20 PM

Frankly I don't really understand what this is all about but if murkowsky and collins join the crats to vote for this then I would naturally assume this is NOT good
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/05/16/democratic-control-senate-passes-resolution-to-restore-net-neutrality/

Title: Re: net neutrality
Post by: G M on May 16, 2018, 07:30:57 PM

Quote from: ccp on May 16, 2018, 06:28:20 PM

Frankly I don't really understand what this is all about but if murkowsky and collins join the crats to vote for this then I would naturally assume this is NOT good
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/05/16/democratic-control-senate-passes-resolution-to-restore-net-neutrality/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2014/05/14/am-i-the-only-techie-against-net-neutrality/

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: ccp on May 17, 2018, 08:34:14 AM

GM interesting piece but it has a lot of broad proclamations and short on specifics or examples:

"I don’t like how much power the telecoms have. But the reason they’re big and powerful isn’t because there is a lack of government regulation, but because of it. Government regulations are written by large corporate interests which collude with officials in government. The image of government being full of people on a mission to protect the little guy from predatory corporate behemoths is an illusion fostered by politicians and corporate interests alike. Many, if not most, government regulations are the product of crony capitalism designed to prevent small entrepreneurs "

Is this really true?   I can't tell from this article

Title: Re: net neutrality, government takeover of the internet? Great idea.
Post by: DougMacG on May 17, 2018, 11:18:54 AM

The first thing to know with "Net Neutrality" is that liberal governmentists lie with their words when they make up names of things to shape the dishonest debate.  Case in point, affordable housing is anything the buyer owner renter cannot afford.  Affordable Healthcare?  Same thing.  Since when did the best innovation of our lifetime need "neutralizing"?  We were net neutral BEFORE the internet.

Second, why screw up what is working great so far?  The public utilities where I live are all headed backwards. 

Third, if you were going to try to kill off innovation, what would you do?  Net neutrality is exactly how you would kill it off if you wanted to.  It puts government in charge and makes advances illegal because every hierarchical or priority based usage will always favor one use or user ahead of some other.  With innovation banned, guess what happens, innovation stops.  If spam gets the same priority as national security or higher priced, priority signals, spam wins.  There is more of it.

Fourth, it ends the US technological advantage in this industry and more.
----------------------

Quote from: G M on May 16, 2018, 07:30:57 PM

Quote from: ccp on May 16, 2018, 06:28:20 PM

Frankly I don't really understand what this is all about but if murkowsky and collins join the crats to vote for this then I would naturally assume this is NOT good
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/05/16/democratic-control-senate-passes-resolution-to-restore-net-neutrality/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshsteimle/2014/05/14/am-i-the-only-techie-against-net-neutrality/

"George Gilder, economist and author of Telecosm said: "We've had 15 years of marvelous success, just stunning success on the Internet. . . Our seven top technology companies are all related to the Internet. The US has four times the investment in fixed broadband than Europe, with its government intervention, and twice the investment in wireless. Most of Internet traffic in the world flows through the US. What on earth is wrong that the FCC thinks it has to reduce it to a public utility?"
https://www.ncta.com/positions/what-people-are-saying-about-the-net-neutrality-congressional-solution

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/03/18/net-neutrality-obama-fcc-puts-internet-american-innovation-at-risk.html
Net neutrality: Obama's FCC puts Internet, American innovation at risk
By George Gilder  Published March 18, 2015  Fox News

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released its disastrous new network neutrality rules earlier this month, officially signaling to the world that the U.S. will adopt a policy destined to stifle technological advancement and put network investment into neutral.

By heeding President Obama's call to make the Internet a government-regulated public utility, the FCC has adopted a system equipped to regulate public utilities and monopolies, not the dynamic and fast paced Internet economy.

Worst still, it is doing so under a guise to impose price regulation on the Internet and grant unfair advantages for Silicon Valley companies like Netflix and Google which account for nearly half of all U.S. Internet traffic.

At such an important time for this industry, now is not the time to stall investment -- something this ruling is bound to do. For a prosperous future of high-speed Internet services, it needs to go full speed ahead.

Put simply, this brand of rigid net neutrality would bring to a screeching halt a trillion-dollar program of network expansion and upgrades marked by the move to cloud computing.

As Peter Thiel's masterly new book "Zero-to-One" demonstrates, every real innovation creates a monopoly. The Internet is a multifarious engine of real innovations, launching new and transitory monopolies with every new phase of its tumultuous growth. An unnecessary effort to suppress every monopoly would bring all this innovation to a halt.

How the Internet functions -- from business deals with consumers to business deals with peers in the Internet ecosystem -- is no legal problem; it is a technical and financial challenge that will be met not with mandates but with profits. By disallowing companies the ability to negotiate business arrangements on their own terms -- something needed but prohibited by utility-style regulations -- the FCC has put forth network neutrality price caps and controls destined to produce a static, zero-sum Internet. Such an environment will actually result in the conditions of zero-sum scarcity and oligarchy that network neutrality seeks to remedy.

A crucial enabler for the funds being raised for the current transition has been the FCC's treatment of new technology as a new frontier that should not be burdened by legacy regulation.

Investors have acted on the assurance that regulators would refrain from imposing on the Internet the anti-investment regime of utility-style laws, with its mazes of rules and tariffs.

The core of the FCC's new rules is to regulate monopolies and it is riddled with onerous regulations like price controls, tariffs and provisions that require a company to seek permission to offer or discontinue services. Yet the Internet's existing regulation-lite "information services" classification has freed Internet traffic to flow across an un-tariffed set of dynamically advancing global webs, rather than a U.N.-regulated telecommunications carrier.

The Telecom Act of 1996 followed 60 years of suffocating regulation that led to somnolent telecom service with virtually no innovation beyond the invention in 1959 of the many-colored Princess phone. This archaic regime still requires telecommunication companies to spend half their working capital maintaining obsolete legacy copper landlines.

Unbeknownst to many, network neutrality can shift Internet progress and control to nations outside the U.S. At a moment of critical transition for all world networks, the U.S. administration is joining global critics of U.S. Internet influence: our content and search providers, our datacenter leviathans, our global net address and domain name registrars, our fiber optic worldwide webs.

As a public utility telecom, the Internet would fall under the sway of U.N.-administered treaties and agreements, as specified by the constitution of the International Telecom Union (ITU).

Subjecting the Internet to this style of utility regulation sends a strong signal to the rest of the world -- including nations like China and Russia seeking greater control of the Internet -- that more regulation of the Internet is a wise path.

But what happens in Washington does not stay in Washington. Power-hungry, anti-American governments are deeply suspicious of the clout and coverage of U.S. Internet players such as Google and Apple. Russia and China have been urging the international community for stronger regulations on the Internet pushing for things like Internet censorship among others. Does the U.S. administration really want to join them?

Taxing and regulating the Internet like it was 1934 would be the surest way to stifle investment and innovation, turn increasing bandwidth abundance into bandwidth scarcity and nullify the Internet's contribution to U.S. economic growth and world leadership. The FCC has chosen the wrong path.

George Gilder is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute, a non-profit public policy think tank based in Seattle, Washington.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drbEqLIEI3M

http://www.bretswanson.com/index.php/category/internet/net-neutrality/
http://bit.ly/15KAzZA

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: ccp on May 17, 2018, 05:31:12 PM

Thanks Doug and GM

Gilders free market approach of course is well known.

I do have real concerns that libs like Bezos and Zuck  have in controlling our lives and their ability to swallow or stifle competition.  I agree the government might simply make it worse and they more or less wind up becoming complicit rather then open of competition.  


I remember I thought this about MSFT and Gates in the 90s yet he missed the "net" and now MSFT is second tier.  I remember even posting my concerns on the original Gilder board to be mostly shot down by Gilder and many others (Doug?)  :))
but that is kids play compared to what is going on now .  

I just don't know what the answer is if anything.  We will see.

Title: End of Google by G Gilder
Post by: ccp on September 08, 2018, 11:52:30 PM

https://www.conservativebookclub.com/book/life-after-google-blockchain-economy

Title: Xi plans for China to control internet
Post by: Crafty_Dog on May 03, 2021, 07:45:59 AM

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/chinese-leader-xi-jinping-lays-out-plan-to-control-the-global-internet-leaked-documents_3791944.html?utm_source=Morningbrief&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mb-2021-05-03&mktids=dde638cfc42810e3fba4696359a6485a&est=WEzzWsyd7faBz3lUacNYq7maVFffgljovvU5S2%2BRQhg0IQbEa3Kip1mY1gN24q3RBbK8

Title: "tik tok " now producing the new "titans" of the business world
Post by: ccp on January 13, 2022, 05:33:46 AM

https://www.wsj.com/articles/these-tiktok-stars-made-more-money-than-many-of-americas-top-ceos-11642078170

the new Kardashians
gaming

the whole young tech generation and their lusts craving vices and entertainment interests

girlie heroes

gaming and other made up worlds are the craze

the beginning of metaverse

this can't be good , can it?

Title: Re: "tik tok " now producing the new "titans" of the business world
Post by: G M on January 13, 2022, 06:22:42 AM

Quote from: ccp on January 13, 2022, 05:33:46 AM

https://www.wsj.com/articles/these-tiktok-stars-made-more-money-than-many-of-americas-top-ceos-11642078170

the new Kardashians
gaming

the whole young tech generation and their lusts craving vices and entertainment interests

girlie heroes

gaming and other made up worlds are the craze

the beginning of metaverse

this can't be good , can it?

https://embedded.substack.com/p/the-new-tiktok-surveillance-state

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/07/25/beware-tiktok-really-is-spying-on-you-new-security-report-update-trump-pompeo-china-warning/?sh=d80490e40148

Title: Re: "tik tok " now producing the new "titans" of the business world
Post by: DougMacG on January 13, 2022, 07:23:32 AM

From G M Forbes link:

"relentless pressure on TikTok ramped up further this week, with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo again claiming user data is sent to China. “It’s not possible to have your personal information flow across a Chinese server,” he warned during a British media interview, without that data “ending up in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party,” which he characterized as an “evil empire.” "

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/07/25/beware-tiktok-really-is-spying-on-you-new-security-report-update-trump-pompeo-china-warning/?sh=d80490e40148
---------
As recently as July 2020 we had a Sec State looking out for America's interests.

I guess China won that round.

Title: File 404
Post by: ccp on January 20, 2023, 08:04:16 AM

https://www.ionos.com/digitalguide/websites/website-creation/what-does-the-404-not-found-error-mean/

Title: metaverse 2040 - to be, or not to be ?
Post by: ccp on March 26, 2023, 01:18:24 PM

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2022/06/30/the-metaverse-in-2040/

Title: tik tok is bad just a week ago
Post by: ccp on March 29, 2023, 04:40:18 PM

tik tok bad

Tucker says alternative worse

now tik tok good   :roll:

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2023/03/29/restrict-act-labeled-a-tiktok-ban-includes-jail-sentences-huge-fines-for-american-citizens/

tiktok
is owned by Chinese company ByteDance
which started an app for Chinese Douyin
and later started a *separate * app for international use called Tiktok

interestingly the company was started by Chinese man named
Zhang Yiming who for a time worked at Microsoft

Title: Re: Internet and related technology
Post by: ccp on March 30, 2023, 08:14:34 AM

not sure
what all this talk about tiktok legislation being trojan horse

Hawley sponsored it . was he snookered by Dems

congressman on Bill O'Reilly yesterday
does not expect bill to pass - states it was intended to get compromise

maybe to get legislation to get it under US control
I don't know how that can be done, AND GUARANTEE  it won't be accessed by CCP
irregardless

he did discuss the importance of stopping the CCP from continuously gathering data on everything in the US

I cannot find the link

Title: apple glasses
Post by: ccp on June 06, 2023, 07:46:48 AM

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/5/23738968/apple-vision-pro-ar-headset-features-specs-price-release-date-wwdc-2023

Title: Silicon photonics
Post by: DougMacG on September 11, 2023, 06:19:06 AM

https://asiatimes.com/2023/09/silicon-photonics-the-key-to-unlocking-ais-full-potential/

Title: Quantum computing
Post by: ccp on January 26, 2024, 07:05:16 AM

threatens ALL our cybersecurity

we need to start taking action now.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2024/01/09/whats-ahead-for-quantum-security-in-2024/?sh=40ba8a67c009