My dissertation is now available to the public!
Author: Christopher Parsons
Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
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Dissertation Submitted
Finished at last.
Jon Brodkin, writing for Ars Technica:
Unfortunately, it’s kind of a mess. iCloud Keychain does accomplish the most basic things you’d expect a password manager to do, but it often does so in an awkward manner. Important functionality is hard enough to find that it may be effectively hidden from the average user, particularly on iPhones and iPads.
Ultimately, iCloud Keychain can be put to good use if you’ve carefully examined what it does well and doesn’t do well. It works best as a complement to a complete service like 1Password or LastPass, but it just isn’t convenient and robust enough to act as a standalone password manager.
I think it’s a bit harsh to call it a “mess”, but Brodkin provides a good overview of what iCloud Keychain does. Complaining that it’s not as full-featured as 1Password is like complaining that iPhoto doesn’t do everything Lightroom or Aperture do.
Comparing iCloud Keychain and Lightroom is a bit odd. One helps to manage the security of one’s online life and is meant to resolve a security problem for anyone who uses the Web. Lightroom is a specialist product that caters to experts in a particular field. The two products may have an overlapping user base (i.e. individuals who want secured usernames and passwords) but otherwise bear little resemblance to one another.
Oh hai Internetz.
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2013.11.4
The NSA allegedly collected the phone records of 320 million people in order to identify roughly 300 people who might be a risk. It’s just bad public policy.
Eric Schmitt, in “Google’s Eric Schmidt calls NSA surveillance ‘outrageous’”
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Analog Life
Kind of going crazy not having access to a real Internet signal at home. It’s been days since I’ve been able to properly respond to email, let alone read and work.
I’ve been significantly reduced to catching some of my news from TTC screens in the subways. Such an utterly primitive way to learn!
“…the Conservative tragedy grinds on. When your only principle is paranoia — when your central organizing proposition is that “everyone is out to get us” — when every criticism is merely confirmation of the essential rightness of that proposition, and every deviation is evidence of disloyalty, then you are less a party than a cult.”
Strong words, this time from Andrew Coyne.
The Globe and Mail reports on discussions in the Canadian Senate. Specifically, Liberal Senator Wilfred Moore asked:
“Can the [Senate] leader enlighten this chamber as to what was done with the data obtained by CSEC from the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy?”
…
Alleging that CSEC’s “cyberhacking” was intended to probe Brazil’s claims about discovering billions of barrels of oil in a new offshore-field find, Mr. Moore noted that no Canadian or U.S. corporations have joined the bidding for drilling rights in an auction that was held earlier this week in Brazil.
This is an incendiary question. If it turns out that Canadian companies didn’t bid because CSEC found Petrobras has overestimated the oil reserves in the Libra field, or if CSEC found that it was going to be harder to extract the oil that stated by the Brazilian government, then it’s a very, very big deal on the basis that the Canadian government (and extension of the department of national defence) would then be engaging in espionage on the behalf of Canadian companies.
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Dissertation Defence Soon!
This is why I’ve been away from the public Interwebz for the past bit. Friday, Friday, Friday!
For several months there have been warnings that the NSA revelations will seriously upset American technology companies’ bottom lines. Though not directly implicated in any of the leaks thus far it appears that IBM’s Chinese growth predictions have just been fed through a wood chipper. From Zerohedge:
In mid-August, an anonymous source told the Shanghai Securities News, a branch of the state-owned Xinhua News Agency, which reports directly to the Propaganda and Public Information Departments of the Communist Party, that IBM, along with Oracle and EMC, have become targets of the Ministry of Public Security and the cabinet-level Development Research Centre due to the Snowden revelations.
“At present, thanks to their technological superiority, many of our core information technology systems are basically dominated by foreign hardware and software firms, but the Prism scandal implies security problems,” the source said, according to Reuters. So the government would launch an investigation into these security problems, the source said.
Absolute stonewalling ensued. IBM told Reuters that it was unable to comment. Oracle and EMC weren’t available for comment. The Ministry of Public Security refused to comment. The Development Research Centre knew nothing of any such investigation. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology “could not confirm anything because of the matter’s sensitivity.”
…
This is the first quantitative indication of the price Corporate America has to pay for gorging at the big trough of the US Intelligence Community, and particularly the NSA with its endlessly ballooning budget. For once, there is a price to be paid, if only temporarily, for helping build a perfect, seamless, borderless surveillance society. The companies will deny it. At the same time, they’ll be looking for solutions. China, Russia, and Brazil are too important to just get kicked out of – and other countries might follow suit.
Now, IBM et al. aren’t necessarily purely victim to the NSA’s massive surveillance practices: there likely are legitimate domestic market changes that are also affecting the ability of Western companies to sell product in China and other Asian-Pacific countries. But still, that NSA can be used to justify retreats from Western products indicates how even companies not clearly and directly implicated in the scandals stand to lose. One has to wonder whether the economic losses that will be incurred following the NSA revelations are equal to, or exceed, any economic gains linked to the spying.
Excited Pixels 