Quotulatiousness

April 21, 2013

“Fatally flawed” CISPA bill passed by US congress

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

The BBC reports on the unwelcome CISPA bill and its progress through the legislative machinery:

The US House of Representatives has passed the controversial Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act.

Cispa is designed to help combat cyberthreats by making it easier for law enforcers to get at web data.

This is the second time Cispa has been passed by the House. Senators threw out the first draft, saying it did not do enough to protect privacy.

Cispa could fail again in the Senate after threats from President Obama to veto it over privacy concerns.

[. . .]

The bill could fail again in the Senate after the Obama administration’s threat to use its veto unless changes were made. The White House wants amendments so more is done to ensure the minimum amount of data is handed over in investigations.

The American Civil Liberties Union has also opposed Cispa, saying the bill was “fatally flawed”. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without Borders and the American Library Association have all voiced similar worries.

Documentary War for the Web includes final interview with Aaron Swartz

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

CNET‘s Declan McCullagh talks about an upcoming documentary release:

From Aaron Swartz’s struggles with an antihacking law to Hollywood’s lobbying to a raft of surveillance proposals, the Internet and its users’ rights are under attack as never before, according to the creators of a forthcoming documentary film.

The film, titled War for the Web, traces the physical infrastructure of the Internet, from fat underwater cables to living room routers, as a way to explain the story of what’s behind the high-volume politicking over proposals like CISPA, Net neutrality, and the Stop Online Piracy Act.

“People talk about security, people talk about privacy, they talk about regional duopolies like they’re independent issues,” Cameron Brueckner, the film’s director, told CNET yesterday. “What is particularly striking is that these issues aren’t really independent issues…. They’re all interconnected.”

The filmmakers have finished 17 lengthy interviews — including what they say is the last extensive one that Swartz, the Internet activist, gave before committing suicide in January — that have yielded about 24 hours of raw footage. They plan to have a rough cut finished by the end of the year, and have launched a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo that ends May 1. (Here’s a three-minute trailer.)

Swartz, who was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, faced a criminal trial that would have begun this month and the possibility of anywhere from years to over a decade in federal prison for alleged illegal downloads of academic journal articles. He told the filmmakers last year, in an interview that took place after his indictment, that the U.S. government posed a more serious cybersecurity threat than hackers:

    They cracked into other countries’ computers. They cracked into military installations. They have basically initiated cyberwar in a way that nobody is talking about because, you know, it’s not some kid in the basement somewhere — It’s President Obama. Because it’s distorted this way, because people talk about these fictional kids in the basement instead of government officials that have really been the problem, it ends up meaning that cybersecurity has been an excuse to do anything…

    Now, cybersecurity is important. I think the government should be finding these vulnerabilities and helping to fix them. But they’re doing the opposite of that. They’re finding the vulnerabilities and keeping them secret so they can abuse them. So if we do care about cybersecurity, what we need to do is focus the debate not on these kids in a basement who aren’t doing any damage — but on the powerful people, the people paying lots of money to find these security holes who then are doing damage and refusing to fix them.

April 20, 2013

The problematic crowd-sourcing of justice

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

In the Globe and Mail, Tabatha Southey is uncomfortable with the way members of Anonymous, Reddit, 4chan, and other online quasi-organizations leaped into the fray:

The Internet is brimming with people who want to help. To help you prune an orchid, perfect the shape of your gnocchi. Shortly after the bombings this week, hundreds of Bostonians posted offers of accommodations, spare rooms and couches.

Most assistance is graciously received, yet I was surprised last week to see how many people embraced the announcement by the self-appointed public conscience Anonymous that it had investigated the unbearably sad Nova Scotia case of 17-year-old Rehtaeh Parsons, who killed herself after she was allegedly gang-raped at a summer party, then was tormented over the incident.

[. . .]

Anonymous as an organization doesn’t really exist. It’s more of a meme — a concept, or behaviour that spreads within a community — than an agency. Anyone who says they’re Anonymous is Anonymous, which makes the groundswell of support its actions received so understandable.

I think a lot of us, upon learning of Rehtaeh’s death, wanted to go to Nova Scotia and shake those kids until something that looked closer to truth came out. Anonymous’s motivations are much like ours, and it can be difficult to remember that the presumption of innocence should be given more weight, not less, the more heinous the crime; the part that is almost the best in us screams otherwise.

Anonymous is not composed of superheroes, nor is it evil. Anonymous is just your nephew, or your neighbour, or you. We cede our pursuit of justice to that highly distractable quarter to our peril.

One only had to see that massive game of Where’s Waldo? taking place on Reddit this week to witness both the good intention, the potential and the problems inherent in crowd-sourced jurisprudence.

April 18, 2013

Reason.tv: Why Bitcoin is Here to Stay

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

Don’t bet on the decentralized currency Bitcoin as a retirement investment, says Mercatus Center policy analyst Jerry Brito, but go long on it as the payment system of the future. Reason‘s Nick Gillespie talks with Brito, the editor of the new anthology Copyright Unbalanced, about Bitcoin bubbles and why governments are so afraid of this virtual payment system.

April 16, 2013

New study shows students of online courses learn as much as in traditional classes

Filed under: Education, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:03

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok summarizes the findings from a recent large study:

In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class (noted earlier by Tyler). Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! Online education trumps the cost disease!

Bowen et al. caution that their results on cost savings are speculative and it is true that they do not include the fixed costs of creating the course (either the online course or the traditional course) so these cost savings should be thought of as annual savings in steady-state equilibrium. The main reason these results are speculative, however, is that Bowen et al. only considered cost savings from faculty compensation. Long-run cost reductions from space savings may be even more significant, as the authors acknowledge.

The university model we’ve known for centuries is long overdue for change. However, remember that just about every new communication technology was touted as being “revolutionary” for education: the printing press, radio, movies, TV, and now online courses. The traditional university model has survived each new technological breakthrough relatively unscathed.

April 13, 2013

3D printing, guns, and the hacker ethic

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

At The Verge, Joshua Kopstein outlines the state of play in 3D printing, guns, and the hacker subculture:

Cyberculture icon Stewart Brand’s famous notion that “information wants to be free” has been an almost ubiquitous refrain ever since utopian-minded hackers began populating computer networks in the 1980s. Today, 3D printing has given the phrase a whole new meaning, allowing raw data to become real world weapons with the click of a button. Cody R. Wilson, the antagonistic founder of Defense Distributed, is taking that idea to its logical — and hugely controversial — extreme.

Having recently obtained his federal manufacturing license, Wilson hopes to release files for the world’s first fully 3D-printable firearm by the end of this month. His past progress has already thrown a major wrench into America’s resurgent gun control debate, feeding doubts about the efficacy of renewed bans on undetectable firearms. But his reasoning, he claims, isn’t really about the Second Amendment at all — it’s about technological progress rendering the very concept of gun control meaningless.

“It’s more radical for us,” he told Motherboard in “Click Print Gun,” a recent mini-doc about the dark side of the 3D printing revolution. “There are people all over the world downloading our files and we say ‘good.’ We say you should have access to this. You simply should.”

If this all sounds very similar to the good gospel spread by Brand and advanced by progressives and activists like the late Aaron Swartz, you’re hearing it right. But even without the context of Wilson’s operation, firearms and freedom of information share a strangely similar history, an oft-overlooked ideological confluence between hackers and gun advocates that seems to be gaining momentum.

April 12, 2013

The nasty phenomenon of “revenge porn” websites

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:19

In the Guardian, Adam Steinbaugh looks at the legal side of fighting against “revenge porn”:

A jilted ex-paramour seeks vengeance on a former lover. His trump card is a nude photo he acquired in happier times. In the dark corners of the internet, revenge porn sites are happy to help out, posting these photos alongside the subject’s full name, address and even phone number. The result for the victim can be anything from terrible embarrassment to potential job loss, and all accompanied by threats and harassment from people whose greatest contribution to society is usually surpassed by the average YouTube comment.

While ex-lovers act out of malice, the site operators act with sociopathic greed. With embarrassing photos often featuring prominently in Google results, the sites often advertise “independent” takedown services charging upwards of $300 (£195) to quickly remove photos — cheaper and faster than hiring a lawyer. Those extortionate services usually turn out to be fronts run by the site owners themselves. One even concocted a fake lawyer (“David Blade III, Esq”) to give his business a more legitimate face.

While the people who upload the photos can almost certainly risk significant civil liability, revenge porn sites are protected in the United States by the Communications Decency Act. The CDA requires that responsibility for tortious acts online (like defamation or invasion of privacy) lie with whoever created the content, not those who facilitate its dissemination.

The Economist explains how Bitcoins work

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

A brief overview of the much-talked-about digital currency:

BITCOIN, the world’s “first decentralised digital currency”, was launched in 2009 by a mysterious person (or persons) known only by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. It has been in the news this week as the value of an individual Bitcoin, which was just $20 at the beginning of February, hit record highs above $250, before falling abruptly to below $150 on April 11th. What exactly is Bitcoin, and how does it work?

Unlike traditional currencies, which are issued by central banks, Bitcoin has no central monetary authority. Instead it is underpinned by a peer-to-peer computer network made up of its users’ machines, akin to the networks that underpin BitTorrent, a file-sharing system, and Skype, an audio, video and chat service. Bitcoins are mathematically generated as the computers in this network execute difficult number-crunching tasks, a procedure known as Bitcoin “mining”. The mathematics of the Bitcoin system were set up so that it becomes progressively more difficult to “mine” Bitcoins over time, and the total number that can ever be mined is limited to around 21m. There is therefore no way for a central bank to issue a flood of new Bitcoins and devalue those already in circulation.

And a bit more technical detail:

All transactions are secured using public-key encryption, a technique which underpins many online dealings. It works by generating two mathematically related keys in such a way that the encrypting key cannot be used to decrypt a message and vice versa. One of these, the private key, is retained by a single individual. The other key is made public. In the case of Bitcoin transactions, the intended recipient’s public key is used to encode payments, which can then only be retrieved with the help of the associated private key. The payer, meanwhile, uses his own private key to approve any transfers to a recipient’s account.

This provides a degree of security against theft. But it does not prevent an owner of Bitcoins from spending his Bitcoins twice—the virtual analogue of counterfeiting. In a centralised system, this is done by clearing all transactions through a single database. A transaction in which the same user tries to spend the same money a second time (without having first got it back through another transaction) can then be rejected as invalid.

The whole premise of Bitcoin is to do away with a centralised system. But tracking transactions in a sprawling, dispersed network is tricky. Indeed, many software developers long thought it was impossible. It is the problem that plagued earlier attempts to establish virtual currencies; the only way to prevent double spending was to create a central authority. And if that is needed, people might as well stick with the government devil they know.

To get around this problem, Bitcoins do not resemble banknotes with unique serial numbers. There are no virtual banknote files with an immutable digital identity flitting around the system. Instead, there is a list of all transactions approved to date. These transactions come in two varieties. In some, currency is created; in others, nominal amounts of currency are transferred between parties.

April 10, 2013

If there’s a “Bitcoin bubble”, it doesn’t predict long term success or failure for the currency

Filed under: Economics, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:55

In Forbes, Tim Worstall explains that calling the current rise in Bitcoin value a bubble does not actually pass a judgement on whether Bitcoin will be a long term success:

And yes, I’m still of the opinion that Bitcoin is in a bubble. You know the walks like a duck, quacks like a duck idea? If it does those then it’s a duck. And the price changes that we’re seeing in Bitcoin make me and many other observers think that Bitcoin really is in a bubble. Indeed, there’s some nice work here showing that many of the Bitcoins in existence are being hoarded and that in itself is bubble behaviour.

However, do let me make one more thing clear: whether or not Bitcoin is in a bubble or not doesn’t mean that Bitcoin will succeed or not. They are entirely different questions, as different as is your wife Welsh or is your dog female? They really have no connection with each other at all.

Let us take the standard bubble example always used, the Dutch tulipmania. We could use others, the South Sea Bubble, the dot com boom, or we could even use an entirely different set of examples, say the introduction of the automobile. That last being when a new technology arrived without a speculative bubble around it.

The point of the first three, and let’s stick with tulips, is that there really was a quite obvious bubble in the prices of them. Most of the participants in the bubble (as with the other two) knew quite well that it was a bubble too. Prices were way out of line with any sort of “true value”. However, do note this very well: the tulip did indeed go on to become an important part of the Dutch economy. Indeed, it’s still there right now. Vast fields of tulips are grown there every year to supply cut flowers and bulbs for replanting that are shipped all over Europe. It’s actually become so important that other flowers, grown outside Europe, are still marketed through Holland as that’s where all the skill and infrastructure is.

April 9, 2013

Bitcoins as Tulips or viable virtual gold?

Filed under: Economics, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

In the New Yorker, Maria Bustillos reviews the history of bitcoins:

In many ways, bitcoins function essentially like any other currency, and are accepted as payment by a growing number of merchants, both online and in the real world. But they are generated at a predetermined rate by an open-source computer program, which was set in motion in January of 2009. This program produced each one of the nearly eleven million bitcoins in circulation (with a total value just over a billion dollars at the current rate of exchange), and it runs on a massive peer-to-peer network of some twenty thousand independent nodes, which are generally very powerful (and expensive) G.P.U. or ASIC computer systems optimized to compete for new bitcoins. (Standards vary, but there seems to be a consensus forming around Bitcoin, capitalized, for the system, the software, and the network it runs on, and bitcoin, lowercase, for the currency itself.)

[. . .]

There is an upper limit of twenty-one million new coins built into the software; the last one is projected to be mined in 2140. After that, it is presumed that there will be enough traffic to keep rewards flowing in the form of transaction fees rather than mining new coins. For now, the bitcoins are initially issued to the miners, but are distributed when miners buy things with them or sell them to non-miners (such as jumpy Spanish bank depositors) who desire an alternative currency. The chain of ownership of every bitcoin in circulation is verified and registered with a timestamp on all twenty thousand network nodes. This prevents double spending, since no coin can be exchanged without the authentication of some twenty thousand independent cyber-witnesses. In order to hack the network, you would have to deceive over half of these computers at the same time, a progressively more difficult task and, even today, a very formidable one.

[. . .]

A casual review of Nakamoto’s various blog posts and bulletin-board comments also confirms that, from the first, Bitcoin was devised as a system for removing the possibility of corruption from the issuance and exchange of currency. Or, to put it another way: rather than trusting in governments, central banks, or other third-party institutions to secure the value of the currency and guarantee transactions, Bitcoin would place its trust in mathematics. At the P2P Foundation, Nakamoto wrote a blog post describing the difference between bitcoin and fiat currency:

    [Bitcoin is] completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust. The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts… With e-currency based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions effortless.

* * *

Much of what has been written so far about bitcoins has centered on the perceived dangers of their relative anonymity, the irreversibility of transactions, and on the fact that they can be used for money laundering and for criminal dealings, such as buying drugs on the encrypted Web site Silk Road. This fearmongering is a red herring, and has so far prevented the rational evaluation of the potential benefits and shortcomings of crypto-currency.

Cash is also anonymous; it is also used in money laundering and illegal transactions. Like bitcoins, stolen cash is difficult to recover, and a cash transaction can’t readily be traced back to the source. Nor is there immediate recourse for the reversal of transactions, as with credit-card chargebacks or bank refunds when one’s identity has been stolen. However, I find it difficult to believe that anyone who has written critically of the dangers of bitcoin would prefer an economy where private cash transactions are illegal.

Update: Meet the $2 Million Bitcoin Pizza.

Floridian Laszlo Hanyecz thought it would be “interesting” to be able to say he paid for a pizza in bitcoins. He worked out a deal where he transferred 10,000 of his bitcoins to a guy in England, who ordered him two pizzas from Papa Johns.

Today, one Redditor notes, those 10,000 bitcoins would be worth about $2.3 million, thanks (in part) to folks fleeing unstable and politically risky state currencies in Cyprus and elsewhere.

Some news outlets are covering this as a “doh!” story. But these pizzas were a huge publicity boon for Bitcoin, contributing to the success of the currency today. If Lazslo had been a hoarder, perhaps his bitcoins would be worth very little now. Cashing in bitcoins for pizza when they were worth a fraction of a cent each is not obviously smarter or stupider than selling now would be, with bitcoins trading at $234. It’s a bet on which way the market is headed, that’s all.

March 29, 2013

If cable company ads were honest, we’d see something very similar to this

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

H/T to Joey “Accordion Guy” deVilla for the link.

If North American cable-and-internet providers were honest, they’d produce an ad that went like this. Note that there’s some swearing involved, as is often the case with cable-and-internet providers.

March 27, 2013

MI5 and GCHQ will include assistance from the IT industry in the fight against online crime

Filed under: Britain, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:42

Two of the British government’s top intelligence agencies will team up with specialists from the IT field in a new initiative to counter online “cyber” crime:

Cyber-security experts from industry are to operate alongside the intelligence agencies for the first time in an attempt to combat the growing online threat to British firms.

The government is creating a so-called fusion cell where analysts from MI5 and GCHQ, the domestic eavesdropping agency, will work with private sector counterparts.

The cell is part of the Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership (Cisp), launched on Wednesday, to provide industry with a forum to share details of techniques used by hackers as well as methods of countering them.

At any one time there will be about 12 to 15 analysts working at the cell, based at an undisclosed location in London.

“What the fusion cell will be doing is pulling together a single, richer intelligence picture of what is going on in cyberspace and the threats attacking the UK,” a senior official said.

John Leyden at The Register has more:

The programme, which follows a successful pilot scheme in 2011, is designed to support the wider aims of the UK’s cyber security strategy: such as making Britain the best country in the world to do e-business and protecting critical components of the national infrastructure (ie banks, utilities, telecoms and power grid).

Eighty companies from five key sectors of the economy — finance, defence, energy, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals — were encouraged to share information as part of the pilot scheme. The wider programme (involving a reported 160 organisations, at least initially) will allow access to a secure web-portal to gain access to shared threat intelligence information in real time, the BBC reports.

[. . .]

Terry Greer-King, UK MD for internet security firm Check Point, commented:

“This is a key step forward for both Governments and business in fighting web attacks, and reducing their impact. It’s essential that organisations collaborate and share intelligence with each other to track emerging threats, mitigate their severity or block them before they cause damage. Fighting threats together is much more effective than fighting alone.”

“In 2012, our research found that 63 per cent of organisations were infected with bots, and 54 per cent infected with malware that they didn’t know about. Any move which helps to reduce these figures is very welcome,” he added.

March 26, 2013

Tunisians troll their own government with memestorm

Filed under: Africa, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

Timothy Geigner on the Tunisian response to a government that fails to comprehend YouTube:

You will remember the nation of Tunisia for being a flash point of the Arab Spring revolution, in which social media and the internet played a massive role, as well as for the post-revolution government’s subsequent crackdown on those tools that brought them into power. There seems to be something of an ongoing problem within Middle East governments, in that they simply don’t recognize how to handle popular dissent, often taking on the very characteristics of the dissenter’s complaints to an almost caricature level. In that respect, while it may sound silly, any government learning to deal with the open communication system of the net is going to have to come to terms with memes and the manner in which they spread.

Which brings us back to Tunisia. They seem to have a problem with this Gangnam Style, Harlem Shake combo-video produced by some apparently fun-loving Tunisian students (the original was taken down due to a highly questionable copyright claim, by the way, because while even the Tunisian government wasn’t evil enough to block the video, a bogus DMCA claim had no such qualms).

You can guess how the Tunisians reacted…

March 19, 2013

New British press control rules to apply to the internet … the whole internet

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:37

In Forbes Tim Worstall explains why the British government’s new Ministry of Truth press censorship body will have effective reach across the entire internet:

This isn’t what they think they’ve done, this is true. And it’s also not what they intended to do (or at least I hope they didn’t mean to do this) but it is still what they’ve done. They’ve passed a law which effectively censors the entire world’s media. And they’ve done this simply because they are ignorant of the very laws they’re trying to change. Which is, I think you’ll agree, a little disturbing, that politicians would casually negate press freedom just because they don’t know what they’re doing.

[. . .]

It’s a standard Common Law assumption that publication does not take place where the printing presses (or servers etc) are. Publication takes place where something is made available to be read or seen. We’ve even had two recent cases that show this. Rachel Ehrenfeld published a book in the US and yet was still sued for libel in London. For a few copies of that book had made it over to England and thus it was deemed that publication had taken place where English libel law prevailed. Just in case you think that this is some English peculiarity there was a very similar case with Dow Jones in Australia. Something was published in New York. But it was read in Australia (remarkably, by the man the piece was about, he downloaded it) and this was sufficient for the Australian courts to agree that therefore the potential libel had occurred in Oz and should be tried under Oz law.

This is even clearer with reference to child pornography laws. “Production” of child pornography includes the act of downloading such. For before it was downloaded there was one copy, on the server. Once downloaded, there are two, one on the server, the other in the browser. Thus the downloading is in itself the production of that pornography. This very point is drawn from the standard Common Law principles about publication.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter where your servers are. For that’s not what defines publication. It also doesn’t matter who the material is aimed at: nor even what language it is in. Publication happens if someone in the UK downloads whatever it is. That, in itself, is the act of publication.

March 17, 2013

Proposed British press regulation will apply to bloggers as well

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:55

Guido Fawkes offers a warning to those bloggers cheerleading for the British government to impose controls on the tabloid press:

One thing that surprises Guido is that his comrades in the liberal, progressive blogosphere have seemingly not noticed that the proposed Royal Charter aims to control and regulate them as well as the tabloids.

Schedule 4, Point 1 of both the government and the opposition’s versions of the Royal Charter will bring blogs under the regulator’s control:

    “relevant publisher” means a person (other than a broadcaster) who publishes in the United Kingdom: a. a newspaper or magazine containing news-related material, or b. a website containing news-related material (whether or not related to a newspaper or magazine)”

[. . .]

To all those bloggers who support this press control Charter because they hate Murdoch and Dacre, Guido offers this cautionary counsel, remember that the new regulator will cover you as well. You will have all the expense and bureaucracy of compliance as Murdoch and Dacre face, without the means. Unless like Guido and the Spectator you plan to become media outlaws too…

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