Quotulatiousness

December 19, 2012

Exiting gracefully from Instagram

Filed under: Business, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Lots of folks are furious about Instagram’s recently announced changes to their terms of service. If you’re an Instagram user and don’t want to sign up for the changed TOS, here’s Roberto Baldwin‘s recent Wired How-To on rescuing your Instagram photos and closing your account:

First you’ll want to download all of your photos. Instaport will download your entire Instagram photo library in just a few minutes. Currently the service only offers a zip file download of your photos, although direct export to Flickr and Facebook are in the works.

Once the photos are downloaded, you can upload them to another photo service. Some of the Gadget Lab staff is fond of the new Flickr app and service.

After you’ve removed your photos from Instagram, you can quickly delete your account and pretend you’ve never even heard of Lo-Fi filter.

But once you delete your account, that’s it. Instagram cannot reactivate deactivated accounts and you will not be able to sign up for Instagram later with the same account name.

H/T to Nick Packwood for the link.

Update: Charles Cooper at CNET News:

From the outset, let’s note a couple of points that ought to be abundantly clear to anyone watching the unfolding controversy about the upcoming changes to Instagram’s terms of use.

A) Instagram — and thus by definition, Facebook, the site’s corporate parent — is entirely within its rights to change the terms of use governing how photos uploaded by people using the service get used.

B) Facebook’s management is comprised of incredibly smart folks.

Given that A and B are true, the powers that be who are running the company must either be amazingly tone deaf or crazy as loons.

It’s obviously not the latter, so we’re left with the conclusion that the people at the top, so impressed by the sound of their own voices, have lost touch with the people who helped turn them into gazillionaires — in other words, the users.

December 9, 2012

Verizon attempts to patent creepy targeted ad delivery technology

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:02

Verizon wants your TV to carefully observe you so it can deliver ads tailored for whatever activity you might be doing:

The U.S. Patent Office has delivered a “non-final” rejection of a Verizon patent application for a controversial technology that would have served targeted ads to TV viewers based on what they might be doing or saying in front of their sets.

[. . .]

The patent in question has been the subject of intense media scrutiny since FierceCable uncovered it last week. Verizon’s somewhat laboriously titled the patent application “Methods and Systems for Presenting an Advertisement Associated with an Ambient Action of a Use.”

The application says the technology would be capable of triggering different advertisements depending on whether a viewer or viewers might be eating, playing, cuddling, laughing, singing, fighting or gesturing in front of their sets. Specifically, the patent covers technology that can serve ads “…targeted to the user based on what the user is doing, who the user is, the user’s surroundings, and/or any other suitable information associated with the user.”

Privacy? You don’t need that, because we need to sell you shit.

December 6, 2012

NZ court allows Kim Dotcom to sue for illegal spying

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

This could get interesting quickly:

Details of the top secret international spy agency ring known as Echelon will have to be produced after a new judgment in the Kim Dotcom case.

The internet tycoon was also cleared to pursue a case for damages against the police and the Government Communications Security Bureau in a judgment which has opened the Government’s handling of the criminal copyright case for its harshest criticism yet.

[. . .]

Chief high court judge Helen Winkelmann said the GCSB would have to “confirm all entities” to which it gave information sourced through its illegal interception of Dotcom’s communications.

She said her order included “members of Echelon/Five Eyes, including any United States authority”. The Echelon network is an international intelligence network to which New Zealand and the United States are members, along with Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

The judgment also recorded Dotcom’s suspicions he had been spied on at least six weeks before the GCSB admitted to doing so, and sought details as to whether others had been swept up in the illegal operation.

Update: Moved the video below the fold to stop it auto-playing any time someone visited the blog main page.

(more…)

December 4, 2012

ITU approves Deep Packet Inspection requirement to enable government snooping of internet traffic

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

The UN’s International Telecommunications Union continues its in-camera campaign to wrest control of the internet from all other organizations with a new policy designed to please intrusive and authoritarian governments worldwide:

The telecommunications standards arm of the U.N. has quietly endorsed the standardization of technologies that could give governments and companies the ability to sift through all of an Internet user’s traffic – including emails, banking transactions, and voice calls – without adequate privacy safeguards. The move suggests that some governments hope for a world where even encrypted communications may not be safe from prying eyes.

At the core of this development is the adoption of a proposed international standard that outlines requirements for a technology known as “Deep Packet Inspection” (DPI). As we’ve noted several times before, depending on how it is used, DPI has the potential to be extremely privacy-invasive, to defy user expectations, and to facilitate wiretapping.

[. . .]

The ITU-T DPI standard holds very little in reserve when it comes to privacy invasion. For example, the document optionally requires DPI systems to support inspection of encrypted traffic “in case of a local availability of the used encryption key(s).” It’s not entirely clear under what circumstances ISPs might have access to such keys, but in any event the very notion of decrypting the users’ traffic (quite possibly against their will) is antithetical to most norms, policies, and laws concerning privacy of communications. In discussing IPSec, an end-to-end encryption technology that obscures all traffic content, the document notes that “aspects related to application identification are for further study” – as if some future work may be dedicated to somehow breaking or circumventing IPSec.

Several global standards bodies, including the IETF and W3C, have launched initiatives to incorporate privacy considerations into their work. In fact, the IETF has long had a policy of not considering technical requirements for wiretapping in its work, taking the seemingly opposite approach to the ITU-T DPI document, as Germany pointed out in voicing its opposition to the ITU-T standard earlier this year. The ITU-T standard barely acknowledges that DPI has privacy implications, let alone does it provide a thorough analysis of how the potential privacy threats associated with the technology might be mitigated.

These aspects of the ITU-T Recommendation are troubling in light of calls from Russia and a number of Middle Eastern countries to make ITU-T Recommendations mandatory for Internet technology companies and network operators to build into their products. Mandatory standards are a bad idea even when they are well designed. Forcing the world’s technology companies to adopt standards developed in a body that fails to conduct rigorous privacy analysis could have dire global consequences for online trust and users’ rights.

December 3, 2012

We’re from the ITU and we’re here to “fix” your internet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:32

At Techdirt, Nick Masnick recounts some of the wonderful things the International Telecommunications Union would like to “help” regarding that pesky “internet” thing:

We’ve been talking about the ITU’s upcoming World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) for a while now, and it’s no longer “upcoming.” Earlier today, the week and a half session kicked off in Dubai with plenty of expected controversy. The US, the EU and now Australia have all come out strongly against the ITU’s efforts to undermine the existing internet setup to favor authoritarian countries or state-controlled (or formerly state-controlled) telcos who want money for internet things they had nothing to do with. The BBC article above has a pretty good rundown of some of the scarier proposals being pitched behind closed doors at WCIT. Having the US, EU and Australia against these things is good, but the ITU works on a one-vote-per-country system, and plenty of other countries see this as a way to exert more control over the internet, in part to divert funds from elsewhere into their own coffers.

Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the ITU, keeps trying to claim that this is all about increasing internet access, but that’s difficult to square with reality:

    “The brutal truth is that the internet remains largely [the] rich world’s privilege, ” said Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary-general of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, ahead of the meeting.

    “ITU wants to change that.”

Of course, internet access has already been spreading to the far corners of the planet without any “help” from the ITU. Over two billion people are already online, representing about a third of the planet. And, yes, spreading that access further is a good goal, but the ITU is not the player to do it. The reason that the internet has been so successful and has already spread as far as it has, as fast as it has, is that it hasn’t been controlled by a bureaucratic government body in which only other governments could vote. Instead, it was built as an open interoperable system that anyone could help build out. It was built in a bottom up manner, mainly by engineers, not bureaucrats. Changing that now makes very little sense.

Canada is also on the record as being against the expansion of the ITU’s role.

Canada will look to prevent governments from taking more power over the Internet when governments sit down for 12 days of negotiations on the future of the Internet next week, but the government didn’t say Thursday where it stands on a contentious proposal that could see users pay more for online content.

Canada’s position going into the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) mirrors a number of Western allies in opposing having governments control how the Internet functions, leaving it to the current mix of public and private sector actors, according to documents released to Postmedia News under access to information laws. That stance is in contrast to proposals from some of the 193 members of the International Telecommunications Union, such as Russia, that want greater control over the Internet — more so than they already have in some cases — including more powers to track user identities online.

The meeting in Dubai will determine whether the ITU, an arm of the United Nations, will receive broad regulatory powers to set rules of road in cyberspace. The potential to centralize control over the Internet into the hands of governments has some users and hacktivists concerned that freedoms online would be crushed should a new binding international treaty change the status quo for how telecommunications companies interact across borders.

November 9, 2012

Solving the “tax haven problem” … with military intervention

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

Radley Balko suggested that this is insanity. I agree, but as Dan Mitchell explains, it’s being bruited about by people who should know far, far better:

A former bureaucrat from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development actually called for the forcible annexation of low-tax jurisdictions, writing in the Financial Times that, “Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man should simply be absorbed lock, stock and barrel into the UK…Andorra, Monaco and Liechtenstein should be given the choice of ending bank secrecy or facing annexation.”

He wasn’t quite so belligerent about Switzerland, perhaps because all able-bodied male citizens have fully automatic assault weapons in their homes. But he did urge financial protectionism against the land of chocolate, yodeling, and watches.

What a bizarre attitude. It’s apparently okay for certain countries to persecute – or even kill – ethnic minorities, religious minorities, political dissidents, homosexuals, and other segments of their populations. Very rarely do people like Mr. Buiter call for annexation or sanctions against such loathsome regimes.

But if a nation has low taxes and a strong human rights policy on financial privacy, then cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.

October 24, 2012

UN report says the internet is too vulnerable to terrorist use

Filed under: Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:21

Mike Masnick views with alarm a new UN report that deserves to be viewed with alarm:

Ah, the UN. As highlighted by Declan McCullagh, a new report from the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force, clocking in at an unwieldy 158 pages (pdf) warns that this old internet of ours is just too damn open, and that means terrorists can use it. Thus, it has to stop the openness. The report really is just about that bad: if terrorists might misuse it, it’s bad and must be stopped. The costs of locking up all this openness are brushed aside, if they’re even considered at all. Among the problems? How about open WiFi?

    ISPs may require users to provide identifying information prior to accessing Internet content and services. The collection and preservation of identifying information associated with Internet data, and the disclosure of such information, subject to the appropriate safeguards, could significantly assist investigative and prosecutorial proceedings. In particular, requiring registration for the use of Wi-Fi networks or cybercafes could provide an important data source for criminal investigations. While some countries, such as Egypt, have implemented legislation requiring ISPs to identify users before allowing them Internet access, similar measures may be undertaken by ISPs on a voluntary basis.

It seems like it should be a general rule that, if you’re supporting something that includes better surveillance tools by saying, “Hey, Egypt — the same country that recently had the people rise up to force out a dictator, who tried to shut down the internet — does it!” perhaps you don’t have a very good argument.

The report is basically one big “OMG! But… but… terrorists! Kill it!”

October 14, 2012

“I would hate to live in a world where every dumb ass thing I did from 13 to 30 would be captured forever for those who Googled my name”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

James Joyner on the phenomenon of internet privacy — and the growing reality that it’s pretty much an illusion.

In the first instance, a bad person is likely to have his real life — including his ability to make a living — upended by the conscious act of a reporter. In the second, two young people who did nothing more than join a school club had their biggest secret exposed by a well-meaning person who made the mistake of trusting Facebook, a data mining company that makes billions by getting people to give them their personal information.

[. . .]

I’ve been active online now since the mid-1990s and have, by virtue of this blog, been a very minor online public figure for almost a decade. For a variety of reasons, including the fact that my professional career is one that encourages writing and publishing, I’ve done virtually all of my online activity under my real life name. As such, I’ve long been aware that my family, friends, co-workers, bosses, and prospective employers might read everything that I put out there. That’s the safest way to operate online, in that it avoids the sort of disruptive surprises that Brutsch, Duncan, and McCormick received. But it also means, inevitably, that there’s a subtle filter that makes me more cautious than I might otherwise be. That’s likely both good and bad in my own case.

But I continue to worry about what it means for a younger generation, for whom Facebook and other social networks are part and parcel of their everyday existence from their teenage years forward. By the time the Internet was a public phenomenon, I was a grown man with a PhD. I would hate to live in a world where every dumb ass thing I did from 13 to 30 would be captured forever for those who Googled my name.

I have generally used my real name — or at least not tried to actively conceal my real identity — in most of my online activities. Some of this has been because there wasn’t a pressing reason to remain anonymous, but as in the writer’s case, it was a strong suspicion from the start that it would be difficult to maintain that degree of privacy over the long term (information wanting to be free, and all that).

September 2, 2012

The importance of encryption for private citizens

Filed under: History, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:26

Wendy McElroy relates one of the earliest examples of private encryption in the young American republic:

In America, the tug of war between privacy and forced access to encrypted data is as old as the nation’s formation. As always, forced access was executed by authorities against individuals.

In 1785, a resolution authorized the secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs to open and inspect any mail that related to the safety and interests of the United States. The ensuing inspections caused prominent men, like George Washington, to complain of mail tampering. According to various historians, it also led James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe to correspond in code. That is, they encrypted their letters to preserve the privacy of their political discussions.

The need for Founding Fathers to encrypt their correspondence is high irony. The intrusive post office against which they rebelled had been established specifically to provide a free flow of political opinion. In the 1770′s, Sam Adams urged the 13 colonies to create an independent postal system because the existing post office, established by the British, acted as a barrier to the spread of rebellious sentiment. Dorothy Ganfield Fowler in her book Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office observed, “He [Adams] claimed the colonial post office was made use of for the purpose of stopping the ‘Channels of publick Intelligence and so in Effect of aiding the measures of Tyranny.’”

Alas, the more government changes, the more oppression remains the same. Soon the Continental Congress itself wanted to declare some types of matter ‘unmailable’ because their content were deemed dangerous. Anti-Federalist letters and periodicals became one of the first types of information to become de facto unmailable. (Anti-federalists resisted centralized government and rejected a Constitution without a Bill of Rights.) During the ratification debates on the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists were unable to circulate their material through the Federalist-controlled post office.

July 5, 2012

Cisco “updates” consumer routers to allow tracking of internet usage, automatic bricking for terms & conditions violations

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

If you have a modern Cisco or LinkSys router on your home network, you may have just given up a significant amount in the last “update” the company distributed. ESR has the details:

For those of you who have missed the news, last a few days Cisco pushed a firmware update to several of its most popular routers that bricked the device unless you signed up for Cisco’s “cloud” service. To sign up, you had to agree to the following restrictions:

    When you use the Service, we may keep track of certain information related to your use of the Service, including but not limited to the status and health of your network and networked products; which apps relating to the Service you are using; which features you are using within the Service infrastructure; network traffic (e.g., megabytes per hour); internet history; how frequently you encounter errors on the Service system and other related information (“Other Information”).

So in order to continue using the hardware you bought and paid for and own, you have to agree to let Cisco snoop your browser history and monitor your traffic — a clickstream they would of course instantly turn around and sell to advertising agencies and other snoops. Those terms are so loose (“including but not limited to”) that they could legally read your email and sell that data too.

Disgusted enough yet? Wait, it gets better. The cloud terms of service also includes this gem:

    You agree not to use or permit the use of the Service: (i) to invade another’s privacy; (ii) for obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes; (iii) to infringe another’s rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property rights; (iv) to upload, email or otherwise transmit or make available any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, spam, junk mail or any other form of solicitation; (v) to transmit or otherwise make available any code or virus, or perform any activity, that could harm or interfere with any device, software, network or service (including this Service); or (vi) to violate, or encourage any conduct that would violate any applicable law or regulation or give rise to civil or criminal liability.

Translated out of lawyerese, this gives Cisco the right to brick your router if you use it to view anything Cisco considers pornography, or do anything that it might consider IP theft — like, say, bit-torrenting a movie. Or even if you send anything it considers unsolicited advertising — which doesn’t have to mean bulk spam, see “any other form of solicitation”?

The sum of these paragraphs is: “We control your digital life. We can spy on you, we can filter your traffic, we can cut off your net access unilaterally if you do anything we don’t like, and you have no recourse.”

The idea of replacing your router with one that can load and run an open source rather than proprietary system just became a lot more enticing (such things do already exist, although not for all routers).

June 7, 2012

“What’s next? Prosecutions before military tribunals in the U.S.?”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

Judge Andrew Napolitano on the lack of outrage over the use of military drones within the borders of the United States (and, in all probability, Canada):

When drones take pictures of us on our private property and in our homes, and the government uses the photos as it wishes, what will we do about it? Jefferson understood that when the government assaults our privacy and dignity, it is the moral equivalent of violence against us. The folks who hear about this, who either laugh or groan, cannot find it humorous or boring that their every move will be monitored and photographed by the government.

Don’t believe me that this is coming? The photos that the drones will take may be retained and used or even distributed to others in the government so long as the “recipient is reasonably perceived to have a specific, lawful governmental function” in requiring them. And for the first time since the Civil War, the federal government will deploy military personnel inside the United States and publicly acknowledge that it is deploying them “to collect information about U.S. persons.”

It gets worse. If the military personnel see something of interest from a drone, they may apply to a military judge or “military commander” for permission to conduct a physical search of the private property that intrigues them. And, any “incidentally acquired information” can be retained or turned over to local law enforcement. What’s next? Prosecutions before military tribunals in the U.S.?

The quoted phrases above are extracted from a now-public 30-page memorandum issued by President Obama’s Secretary of the Air Force on April 23, 2012. The purpose of the memorandum is stated as “balancing…obtaining intelligence information…and protecting individual rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution…” Note the primacy of intelligence gathering over freedom protection, and note the peculiar use of the word “balancing.”

May 21, 2012

Will privacy be on one of the things that differentiates the rich from the rest?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Brendan O’Neill in the Telegraph:

Is privacy being turned into a privilege that only the moneyed and the well-connected may enjoy? Two striking stories in the news last week suggest that it is.

In the first story, it was reported that activists and hacks are heaping further pressure on Mark Zuckerberg to improve the privacy settings on Facebook, so that they might update their statuses and post photos of their social shenanigans without having the world and its mother peering over their shoulders. In the second story, we were told that social workers, backed by much of the media, are calling on the prime minister to get rid of “red tape” so that they might more easily interfere in — I’m sorry, intervene in — so-called problem families. There are a lot of damaged families out there, the social workers hinted, and thus we need to rip up some of the rules governing when it is and isn’t okay to stick our snouts into their business.

That these two stories could appear in the same week, and not be considered contradictory, suggests we have a pretty screwed-up attitude to privacy today. Indeed, sometimes the very same members of the political and media classes who believe that their private lives must remain absolutely private will think it is perfectly logical that other people’s private lives — the lives of Them — should be thrown open to state snooping.

May 15, 2012

Nerd politics: problems and opportunities

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Cory Doctorow in the Guardian on the current state of “nerd politics:

In the aftermath of the Sopa fight, as top Eurocrats are declaring the imminent demise of Acta, as the Trans-Pacific Partnership begins to founder, as the German Pirate party takes seats in a third German regional election, it’s worth taking stock of “nerd politics” and see where we’ve been and where we’re headed.

Since the earliest days of the information wars, people who care about freedom and technology have struggled with two ideological traps: nerd determinism and nerd fatalism. Both are dangerously attractive to people who love technology.

In “nerd determinism,” technologists dismiss dangerous and stupid political, legal and regulatory proposals on the grounds that they are technologically infeasible. Geeks who care about privacy dismiss broad wiretapping laws, easy lawful interception standards, and other networked surveillance on the grounds that they themselves can evade this surveillance. For example, US and EU police agencies demand that network carriers include backdoors for criminal investigations, and geeks snort derisively and say that none of that will work on smart people who use good cryptography in their email and web sessions.

But, while it’s true that geeks can get around this sort of thing — and other bad network policies, such as network-level censorship, or vendor locks on our tablets, phones, consoles, and computers — this isn’t enough to protect us, let alone the world. It doesn’t matter how good your email provider is, or how secure your messages are, if 95% of the people you correspond with use a free webmail service with a lawful interception backdoor, and if none of those people can figure out how to use crypto, then nearly all your email will be within reach of spooks and control-freaks and cops on fishing expeditions.

[. . .]

If people who understand technology don’t claim positions that defend the positive uses of technology, if we don’t operate within the realm of traditional power and politics, if we don’t speak out for the rights of our technically unsophisticated friends and neighbours, then we will also be lost. Technology lets us organise and work together in new ways, and to build new kinds of institutions and groups, but these will always be in the wider world, not above it.

May 7, 2012

Reason.tv: The True Story of Lawrence v. Texas

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

May 1, 2012

The Onion: Every Potential 2040 President Already Unelectable Due To Facebook

Filed under: Government, Humour, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

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