Posts tagged “privacy”

I defended PRISM on Twitter and caused a shitstorm. My position: surveillance isn't inherently abusive, the government has been doing this for a decade without evidence of misuse, and the real outrage should be Bradley Manning's treatment. If they can read our emails, we should be able to read their cables.

A quick tour through decades of US government surveillance programs, from COINTELPRO's mail-opening in the 50s through Carnivore, ECHELON, Room 641A, DCSNet, and now PRISM. The names change, the methods evolve, but the core activity stays the same. PRISM shouldn't surprise anyone paying attention.

I tweaked Pete Warden's iPhoneTracker to remove the deliberate grid aggregation, revealing the full granularity of the creepy location data your iPhone has been silently collecting. The results are striking, if not entirely accurate. Download my extra-creepy version if you trust me with your Mac.

I sketch out what a truly distributed social network protocol might look like: federated identity like email, distributed search, spam handled via key exchange rather than AI filtering, and pub/sub activity streams. Facebook's "Open Graph" isn't any of those things. Here's what it would actually take.

I started a Facebook group dedicated to keeping parents off their kids' social networks. Nobody needs their mum reading their risque status updates or their boss seeing their job complaints. Join up and resolve to never crash your children's social networking party.

Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, inventors of the world's most obnoxious advertising, officially ends the "Don't Be Evil" era. It's sad to watch one of capitalism's rare ethical giants finally go the way of all the others. Goodbye, non-evil Google. It was nice knowing you.

I outed a fellow blogger's Gaydar profile by Googling his domain name. The fetish list is pretty funny. He doesn't seem too bothered, though he claims his tastes have evolved since posting it. Lesson learned: you can't hide anything from Google.

I'm pulling the best comments from this censorship debate onto the main page where Google can find them. We're getting 1000 hits a day from people searching for "Carlton Cole rumours," and the conversation about freedom of information, slippery slopes, and gossip-as-virus is too good to hide.

Reading a critical article can get you FBI-investigated now. Plus, shredding documents is no longer safe thanks to reconstruction software. Glad I'm not in the States. Also, A Straight Person's Guide to Gay Etiquette is hilarious - go read it.

I explore two opposing views on disclosing security vulnerabilities. Full disclosure with exploit code may spike attacks but drives patching. Secrecy spreads attacks over time with less patching. Both extremes seem wrong: publicize vulnerabilities, yes, but step-by-step attack guides go too far.

The SSSCA would make it illegal to own storage devices without "certified security technologies." Combined with the DMCA and anti-rave legislation, the US is becoming a frighteningly fascist state. The UK will probably follow. Time to emigrate. To Mars.

Exams in a week and I've done everything except revise. Also: Amtrak selling passenger data to the DEA is terrifying, Dogma was great, and Spice World is brilliant precisely because it never pretends to be anything other than a shiny, silly good time.