Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2011

Michael Geist: the “Lawful Access” legislation does not criminalize hyperlinking

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

At least, on a reasonable person’s reading of the proposed law, it doesn’t criminalize hyperlinks to material that “incites hatred”:

The source of the latest round of concern stems from the Library of Parliament’s Parliamentary Information and Research Service legislative summary of Bill C-51. On the issue of hyperlinking, it states:

Clause 5 of the bill provides that the offences of public incitement of hatred and wilful promotion of hatred may be committed by any means of communication and include making hate material available, by creating a hyperlink that directs web surfers to a website where hate material is posted, for example.

I must admit that I think is wrong. The actual legislative change amends the definition of communicating from this:

“communicating” includes communicating by telephone, broadcasting or other audible or visible means;

to this:

“communicating” means communicating by any means and includes making available;

The revised definition is obviously designed to broaden the scope of the public incitement of hatred provision by making it technology neutral. Whereas the current provision is potentially limited to certain technologies, the new provision would cover any form of communication. It does not specifically reference hyperlinking.

Michael is much more informed about this issue than I am, so I find his confidence as a welcome balm to all the concern raised about this issue. The bill itself, of course, remains a civil liberty disaster in other ways, even with this issue addressed:

As I have argued for a long time, there are many reasons to be concerned with lawful access. The government has never provided adequate evidence on the need for it, it has never been subject to committee review, it would mandate disclosure of some personal information without court oversight, it would establish a massive ISP regulatory process (including employee background checks), it would install broad new surveillance technologies, and it would cost millions (without a sense of who actually pays). Given these problems, it is not surprising to find that every privacy commissioner in Canada has signed a joint letter expressing their concerns.

May 3, 2011

Michael Geist on what the Conservative majority means for digital policies

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:29

In short, he sees it as a mixed bag:

For example, a majority may pave the way for opening up the Canadian telecom market, which would be a welcome change. The Conservatives have focused consistently on improving Canadian competition and opening the market is the right place to start to address both Internet access (including UBB) and wireless services. The Conservatives have a chance to jump on some other issues such as following through on the digital economy strategy and ending the Election Act rules that resulted in the Twitter ban last night. They are also solidly against a number of really bad proposals — an iPod tax, new regulation of Internet video providers such as Netflix — and their majority government should put an end to those issues for the foreseeable future.

On copyright and privacy, it is more of a mixed bag.

The copyright bill is — as I described at its introduction last June — flawed but fixable. I realize that it may be reintroduced unchanged (the Wikileaks cables are not encouraging), but with the strength of a majority, there is also the strength to modify some of the provisions including the digital lock rules. Clement spoke regularly about the willingness to consider amendments and the Conservative MPs on the Bill C-32 committee were very strong. If the U.S. has exceptions for unlocking DVDs and a full fair use provision, surely Canada can too.

The Conservatives are a good news, bad news story on privacy. A fairly good privacy bill died on the order paper that will hopefully be reintroduced as it included mandatory security breach notification requirements. There will be a PIPEDA review this year and the prospect of tougher penalties for privacy violations is certainly possible. Much more troubling is the lawful access package which raises major civil liberties concerns and could be placed on the fast track.

April 1, 2011

Erasing your (digital) past

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

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google said: “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable, and recorded by everyone all the time.” Privacy is dying, if not already clinically dead, in the online world. If you really want (or need) to airbrush yourself out of the picture, here are some suggestions on how to go about doing it.

The Internet has made our world a lot smaller. It has also made our histories a lot better-catalogued and more-searchable, and those developments — coupled with the weird phenomenon that people’s common sense tends to fly out the window when it comes to posting information and pictures — aren’t always beneficial to us.

[. . .]

Instead of popping you into a Witness Protection program — or changing your name — let us show you five steps on how to disappear from the Internet.

Step 1: Know Thine Enemy

Before you take any action, you need to know what you’re trying to get rid of. So first, do a search for your name — don’t just search Google, though, search online people search aggregation sites such as ZabaSearch, Intelius, Pipl, and Spokeo.

Here’s how to run an online background check (on yourself) for free.

March 11, 2011

Another oddity of British law

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 17:19

I was unaware, until today, that it is possible to get a legal injunction that effectively prevents anyone from knowing that the injunction has been issued: a “super injunction“:

The existence of the draconian injunction — so strict it prevents $PERSON being identified as a $OCCUPATION — was disclosed by John Hemming, a back-bench Liberal Democrat MP, in a question during a business debate at the House on Thursday morning. His comments are protected by parliamentary privilege.

He said: “In a secret hearing $PERSON has obtained a super-injunction preventing him being identified as a $OCCUPATION.

“Will the government have a debate or a statement on freedom of speech and whether there’s one rule for the rich like $PERSON and one rule for the poor?”

Leader of the House Sir George Young said a forthcoming Westminster Hall debate would explore freedom of speech, adding: “I will raise with the appropriate minister the issue he has just raised.”

The terms of the injunction are so strict that the Daily Telegraph cannot reveal the nature of the information that $PERSON is attempting to protect.

Because I am not rich, I’ve chosen to avoid including any information which may fall under the strict terms of the injunction . . . others are not being as careful, so you can find out who the rich wanker is and what occupation he wants to prevent the public from discovering by reading the whole thing.

February 21, 2011

Facebook? Inconsistent enforcement of terms and conditions? Say it ain’t so!

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

Facebook is having another of its periodic mood swings on just what exactly their terms and conditions really mean:

Facebook has announced it is actively reviewing its policy of a total ban on all content relating to sexual activities.

The review follows the deletion on 4 February of Collared Events page following a complaint from a site user. This deletion angered and mystified many members and supporters of Collared, which operates Slaves and Masters Club Nights and which identifies itself as a community non-profit organisation with a focus on safety and socialization. It used the Facebook page merely as a means to communicate.

There was no explicit imagery or sexual content of any kind and the page was set to “secret”. The page strictly followed the Facebook Terms. Facebook initially cited its user condition (3.7) that: “You will not post content that: is hateful, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.”

However, following extensive dialogue with senior staff at the company, including Richard Allan, Facebook’s Head of Policy for Europe, Collared has apparently stirred Facebook into reviewing not just this ban but its entire policy. A wide ranging “internal dialogue” is now under way.

Simon, who runs Collared, told the Reg: “I feel that Facebook are in complete confusion on this issue. The problem is that their policy is inconsistent and whether a site survives or not depends on whether a site is able to lobby the right person in the company — and not offend the wrong one.

Last time it was non-pornographic breastfeeding information groups being banned, and now gay, lesbian, and transgender groups are worried that this new interpretation will have their Facebook pages banned without warning, too. Makes you wonder if there’s been a silent take-over by the religious right, doesn’t it?

February 15, 2011

QotD: Don’t trust your government

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

Last week’s civil liberties bill was hardly perfect but it’s still a step in the right direction. And, frankly, it’s bonny and startling in equal measure to have a Deputy Prime Minister who says things like this:

“I need to say this — you shouldn’t trust any government, actually including this one. You should not trust government — full stop. The natural inclination of government is to hoard power and information; to accrue power to itself in the name of the public good.”

I’m quite happy to oblige Mr Clegg. I don’t trust this government either. I think it’s intentions are often fine but I doubt whether it has the courage of those convictions. Government necessitates trimming and compromising but the troubling ease with which this crew can be blown off course does not bode well for stormier times ahead. It needs to make a proper — muscular, you might say — defence of its liberalism. Thus far it has been too wimpy by far and, for that matter, too content to try and blame everything on its predecessor. That dog won’t hunt anymore.

Cameron, Clegg, Clarke, Grieve, Gove, Alexander, IDS and so on are, on the whole, decent men with decent ideas. Their government still has a surprising amount of potential and the ability to do some good. But that doesn’t mean they can be trusted.

Alex Massie, “Nick Clegg is Right. Again.”, The Spectator, 2011-02-14

January 17, 2011

QotD: The impermanence of “The Cloud”

Filed under: Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 15:13

We adopt many web services because they’re convenient (and free!), but it’s only after becoming dependent on those services that we recognize why they were provided for free in the first place: after all, it’s only by eliminating the inconvenience of paying users that startups can snag attention and secure the freedom to alter, downgrade, or cancel their services at will. By then, of course, we’re trapped in an unstable relationship, and our only means of recourse is to wail as loudly as possible, “You broke my heart!”

The big lesson that should have come out of the Tumbleocalypse was that we trust too easily. Did any of us listen? Nah. Instead, we’re signing our friends up to Dropbox to score 250 megs of bonus storage space and sending our most important documents to “the cloud.” We trust Dropbox because we trust others who use Dropbox: web designers, tech writers and professionals who, we believe, would never gamble with an unproven, flaky, or suspect service. Without this kind of trust-by-proxy, free web services couldn’t survive at all. Can you imagine anybody in their right mind signing up for a Facebook account today without a good friend by the sidelines whispering, “Don’t mind all that privacy whaffle. I know these guys mean well.”

Cloud storage is convenient, of course — ask anybody who’s experienced the horrors of manually synching PC to iPhone — but we downplay the risks involved in outsourcing control of the data we own. We so badly want to live in the future that we’ve lost the ability to question what living in the future might actually mean.

[. . .]

Those who believe that “the cloud” can act as a storage platform for our collective memories believe that everything that was available to us yesterday will be just as available to us tomorrow. Where exactly does this conviction come from?

The web is like any other sprawling city, and maybe worse: it’s so damn rickety it’s a minor miracle it hasn’t collapsed entirely. When you link, you do so trusting that the data to which you direct your readers won’t just up and disappear into the virtual ether. Except that, inevitably, it will — the short history of the web has established that much. We live somewhere, we leave, it becomes forgotten, and then we come back years later to find our old haunts brutally 404’d.

Connor O’Brien, “Link Rot”, The Bygone Bureau, 2011-01-17

January 13, 2011

Adobe finally gets the message

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:25

Ever wanted to delete all the tracking cookies that your browser collects? Most browsers provide ways to do that for ordinary cookies, but did nothing for the Flash cookies. Adobe seems to have heard the demands to fix this:

Adobe has finally fixed a privacy weakness that threatened users of its ubiquitous Flash Player: the software’s storing of cookie-like files that many websites used to track visitors’ behavior against their wishes.

So-called LSOs, or local shared objects, are useful for storing user preferences, such as the preferred sound volume when visiting YouTube, but the Flash feature comes with a dark side. Unscrupulous websites can use them to restore tracking cookies even after a user deliberately deletes them. Files that do this have come to be known as Flash cookies.

Now, developers at Adobe have worked with their counterparts at Mozilla and Google on a programming interface that allows LSOs to be deleted from within the settings panel of compliant browsers. The API, known as NPAPI ClearSiteData, has already been approved for implementation in Firefox. It will soon appear on the Google Chrome dev channel.

November 30, 2010

Assange says next target is a “major American bank”

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:35

Julian Assange talked to Forbes about the next big WikiLeaks release of confidential data:

Early next year, Julian Assange says, a major American bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out. Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings. The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

When? Which bank? What documents? Cagey as always, Assange won’t say, so his claim is impossible to verify. But he has always followed through on his threats. Sitting for a rare interview in a London garden flat on a rainy November day, he compares what he is ready to unleash to the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial: a comprehensive vivisection of corporate bad behavior. “You could call it the ecosystem of corruption,” he says, refusing to characterize the coming release in more detail. “But it’s also all the regular decision making that turns a blind eye to and supports unethical practices: the oversight that’s not done, the priorities of executives, how they think they’re fulfilling their own self-interest.”

November 14, 2010

Well, give them partial credit for their answer . . .

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:33

Another article where the headline really carries the whole story:

WSJ Warnings About Privacy-Invading Cookies Carry Privacy-Invading Cookies
Can you move this one to the ‘Irony’ section?

The Wall Street Journal posted a story yesterday about the Obama administration’s plan to add a privacy watching task force to evaluate rules on cookies, metacookies, flash cookies and all the other online threats to consumer privacy.

[. . .]

Of the threatening, deletion-resistant Flash cookies they revealed on in my browser, tracking my trip over to the NYT to read more: two from the Wall Street Journal.

August 16, 2010

Practically speaking, the end is in sight for passwords

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

Advances in computing are not always uniformly beneficial: short passwords are increasingly vulnerable to brute-force cracking:

The availability of password-cracking tools based on increasingly powerful graphics processors means that even carefully chosen short passwords are liable to crack under a brute-force attack.

A password of less than seven characters will soon be “hopelessly inadequate” even if it contains symbols as well as alphanumerical characters, according to computer scientists at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. The security researchers recommend passwords at least 12 characters long.

The number crunching abilities of graphics processors were recently applied to commercial password auditing and recovery tools from Russian developer ElcomSoft. It’s a safe assumption that black hats are able to use the same type of technology for less laudable purposes. Richard Boyd, of the Georgia Tech Research Institute, told the BBC that the number-crunching capacity of graphics cards compares to those of supercomputers built only 10 years ago.

Passwords are going to go away, sooner rather than later. All of us have too many passwords to remember that it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’re using one of the following coping strategies:

  • Using the same password on many different sites (or, shudder, all of them)
  • Using a simple password (among the most commonly used are “password” and “letmein”)
  • Leaving a sticky note on your monitor or your keyboard with your passwords listed
  • Using the name of the site as your password for that site

There are tools available to generate passwords that avoid the most obvious pitfalls (too short, no numeric or non-alphanumeric characters, using full words), but very few people use them consistently. I don’t know what the replacement for passwords will be, but we clearly need to move to more secure ways of verifying identity as soon as we can.

I’ve posted items about password security before.

July 28, 2010

What is a “fusion center”?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Wendy McElroy thinks you should know how much domestic surveillance has increased in recent years:

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported on July 25 that “there are 72 fusion centers around the nation, analyzing and disseminating data and information of all kinds. That is one for every state and others for large urban cities.”

What is a fusion center?

The answer depends on your perspective. If you work for the Department of Homeland Security, it is a federal, state, local, or regional data-coordination units, designed to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism and anti-crime data in order to make America safer. If you are privacy or civil-rights advocate, it is part of a powerful new domestic surveillance infrastructure that combines data from both the public and private sectors to track innocent people and so makes Americans less safe from their own government. In that respect, the fusion center is reminiscent of the East German stasi, which used tens of thousands of state police and hundreds of thousands of informers to monitor an estimated one-third of the population.

The history of fusion centers provides insight into which answer is correct.

July 23, 2010

Stalkers enjoy cool new tools to pursue their prey

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:41

Leo Hickman finds that Foursquare is a very handy tool to track down your cyberobsession in the real world:

Louise has straight, auburn hair and, judging by the only photograph I have of her, she’s in her 30s. She works in recruitment. I also know which train station she uses regularly, what supermarket she shopped at last night and where she met her friends for a meal in her home town last week. At this moment, she is somewhere inside the pub in front of me meeting with colleagues after work.

Louise is a complete stranger. Until 10 minutes ago when I discovered she was located within a mile of me, I didn’t even know of her existence. But equipped only with a smartphone and an increasingly popular social networking application called Foursquare, I have located her to within just a few square metres, accessed her Twitter account and conducted multiple cross-referenced Google searches using the personal details I have already managed to accrue about her from her online presence. In the short time it has taken me to walk to this pub in central London, I probably know more about her than if I’d spent an hour talking to her face-to-face. She doesn’t know it yet, but Louise is about to meet her new digital stalker.

Privacy and expectations thereof are becoming less and less realistic, but even knowing that, the merging of social media and geo-location services gives me the creeps.

I was an early user of Facebook (once it was opened to non-students) and LinkedIn and have been getting great use out of Twitter lately, but it seems like every day there’s a new social media platform being touted as the best ever. Social media is like any other form of networking: the value increases as the number of nodes goes up. The next boom in convergence will probably be cross-network liaison tools.

Update: Shea Sylvia finds the attention of a cyberstalker very unwelcome.

July 12, 2010

QotD: Silly census fuss

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:20

[. . .] isn’t it just the slightest bit embarrassing for a government whose leader has trashed libertarians for their ethical myopia to have minions and media partisans present a libertarian pretext for an action that is not literally among the first 200 policy changes that would be implemented by an intelligent libertarian given plenary power?

Colby Cosh, “Census squabble: weak arguments shouldn’t have even worse foundations”, Maclean’s, 2010-07-12

July 7, 2010

Blizzard to de-anonymize their user forum

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:53

Blizzard, the publisher of World of Warcraft and other MMO games, has announced that they will no longer allow anonymous postings to their official forum:

Existing posts are not affected, but many WoW subscribers are concerned about the privacy implications of the move. Emails complaining about the decision are already flooding in — to El Reg’s inbox — so one can imagine the furore on Battle.net forums.

As one Reg reader says: “So every man, woman and child who plays World of Warcraft or the upcoming Starcraft 2 will only be able to post on their forums if they’re perfectly happy for anyone who may want to know what their name is. The mind boggles at the security implications from social engineering passwords, email addresses and account names or even safety if people have ex partners or stalkers etc. And then there’s the idiots who you meet in the games themselves who can now take their abuse to real life with just a little googling and rare name or background info.”

No doubt, Blizzard has considered this and is willing to wave goodbye to anonymous forum participants: damn the traffic — or dam the traffic? It simply wants people to behave themselves, to create a new and different kind of online gaming environment — one that’s highly social, and which provides an ideal place for gamers to form long-lasting, meaningful relationships. “

I’d have thought that a viable compromise between the current situation (anyone being able to post anonymously) and the “solution” would be to allow registered users to post under a pseudonym. Blizzard probably doesn’t want to police their forums too heavily, and believe that removing anonymity will automatically reduce the worst excesses with no further policing required from them. Well, it’s a theory.

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