Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

Categories
Quotations

2013.7.8

This week, court documents filed by the RCMP pertaining to their investigation of Mr. Duffy were disclosed. They show that the Conservative Party of Canada was initially prepared to use taxpayer-subsidized party funds to repay the debt that Mr. Duffy owed because of improperly claimed Senate expenses. It balked, however, when it learned that the amount was $90,000, not $32,000.

The Conservative government of Canada: tough on crime over $32,000; anything above $32,000, you’re on your own – or not, since the documents confirm that Stephen Harper’s then-chief of staff, Nigel Wright, did, as reported, step in and give Mr. Duffy a personal cheque for $90,000.

Tabitha Southey, “Duffy the empire slayer: How the PMO created a big, big problem”
Categories
Quotations

2013.7.8

Like a giant python that has consumed a rat, Facebook captures, swallows, and slowly digests its users.

Ron Deibert, Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
Categories
Quotations

2013.7.7

In this light, the selfie isn’t about empowerment. But it also isn’t not about empowerment. Empowerment, or lack thereof, is not part of the picture. Neither is narcissism, as either a personal or a cultural moral failure. And the selfie isn’t about the male gaze. The selfie, in the end is about the gendered labour of young girls under capitalism. Do we honestly think that by ceasing to take and post selfies, the bodies of young women would cease to be spectacles? Teenage girls are Young-Girls, are spectacles, are narcissists, are consumers because those are the very criterion which must be met to be a young woman and also a part of society. That their bodies are commodities enters them into economies of attention, and that is where the disgust with selfies comes from. In an economy of attention, it is a disaster for men that girls take up physical space and document it, and that this documentation takes up page hits and retweets that could go to ‘more important’ things. And so the Young-Girl must be punished, with a disgust reserved for the purely trivial. To paraphrase that beloved of Young-Girl films, Ever After — itself paraphrasing Thomas More’s Utopia — what are we to make of the selfie but that we first create teenage girls and then punish them?

Sarah Gram, “The Young-Girl and the Selfie”
Categories
Aside

Nature: it can happen to you, too

Categories
Quotations

2013.7.7

An Ipsos Reid survey on federal politics, released on Wednesday, titled At the Midpoint, shows the public’s ambivalence. Among the more curious findings is one that suggests that Canadians believe that there is an inverse proportion between competence and honesty. Of the three major parties, the Conservatives are held to be the most competent and the least honest; with the NDP, it is the other way around. As usual the Liberals are somewhere in-between. On the face of it, greater competence is likely to attract the voters, but if the Conservatives drift on in their current direction, a desire for a change may yet prevail.

Editorial, “The Tory turning-point ahead of the next election”
Categories
Links

A handy guide to the hidden meaning behind all those NSA and government statements

A very helpful resource for deciphering ‘government-speak’ surrounding national security surveillance practices.

Categories
Links Writing

DHS, Drones, and Domestic Surveillance

In the name of efficiency and good long-term planning, DHS is ensuring that its Predator Drones over the USA are able to distinguish persons from animals, evaluate whether such persons are armed, and are also integrating signals intelligence systems into the vehicles. From the article:

Homeland Security’s specifications for its drones, built by San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, say they “shall be capable of identifying a standing human being at night as likely armed or not,” meaning carrying a shotgun or rifle. They also specify “signals interception” technology that can capture communications in the frequency ranges used by mobile phones, and “direction finding” technology that can identify the locations of mobile devices or two-way radios.

The analysis and interdiction capabilities being integrated into drones may – prospectively – be considered legal. If they are legal then it should be clear that ethical and normative (to say nothing of constitutional) claims should be brought to bear on the basis that such expansions of government surveillance are almost certain to be used inappropriately and to the disadvantage of American citizens and residents alike.

Categories
Links Writing

Your TV as a Beachhead

The Internet of Things is moving apace and consumers are increasingly purchasing Internet-connected devices for their homes. In the case of SmartTVs it appears that manufacturers’ poor security design(s) could pose a direct threat to the network the TV is integrated with:

Since the well-known Javascript object XmlHttpRequest is available within the DAE, not only the TV is the target of possible attacks but also other networked devices in the user’s home network.

Using a timing-based approach, attackers are able to scan the user’s home network from the TV for other devices that are behind the user’s firewall and would not directly be visible from the internet. This could be used for user profiling and for finding further attack targets.

The next step for the attackers could be the reconfiguration of components in the local area network in order to facilitate further attacks via different vectors. For example the home router – which in many cases has no password protection when accessed from the LAN – could be reconfigured by the attacker to have no protection against attacks from the internet.

In order to gain personal information, attackers could access well-known services like UPnP or http in the user’s network via the connected TV. For example IP cameras or printers could be compromised using this technique.

Also using the XmlHttpRequest object, attackers can transfer all of the gained information to arbitrary Internet drop-zones, which would also expose the victim’s IP address.

As a lot of these attacks have been publicized in the context of browser hacking, there is a lot of available code on the Internet that might be used for also compromising Smart TVs.

While the researcher who’s done this work is presently posing SmartTVs as potential – rather than necessary, or actual – threats, now that the cat’s out of the bag it’s almost guaranteed that more people will be working on weaponizing your TV. Isn’t the pervasive connection of equipment to the Internet just great?

Categories
Quotations

2013.7.5

Privacy’s moral weight, its importance as a value, does not shrink or swell in direct proportion to the numbers of people who want or like it, or how much they want to like it. Rather, privacy is worth taking seriously because it is among the rights, duties, or values of any morally legitimate social and political system.

Helen Nissembaum, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life
Categories
Links

Lockdown: RSS and Webstandards

An excellent piece that address how the Web is increasingly shifting from a domain of open standards that facilitated the free exchange of data and flight of users to proprietary standards designed to limits subscriber flight.