No, really, no joke: a Japanese hacker is playing with the authorities. The latest gambit involved attaching an SD card with malware code to a cat’s collar. Authorities still have no clue who designed the software or who the individual(s) is/are.
Author: Christopher Parsons
Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.
So, the Microsoft 64GB Surface Pro will only have 23GB of usable storage at launch. This is, to be blunt, absurd. Consumers are entirely used to variations between the storage that manufacturers say will be available versus what actually is available for use, but in this case we’re talking about less than 50% of the advertised storage actually being available. Microsoft is saying that removing the recovery partition will alleviate some of this storage use, but that’s immaterial: few consumers will do this, or feel comfortable doing so. As a result, they’re going to generally have devices that have less than half of the market storage.
While Apple – and, to an extent, Google – comes under fire for announcing hardware specs and then not meeting them because of OS storage consumption, neither company has ever had such deceptive claims as Microsoft’s regarding the Surface Pro. I can entirely appreciate that the newest Microsoft OS plus applications consumes a huge amount of space. I’m OK with that. But, given this consumption, the 64GB surface shouldn’t ever be marketed (or even suggested as being) as a 64GB device; the device should be presented as being closer to the actual storage available. Don’t get me wrong, all OSes take room. But, as far as I know, no OS plus application suite has ever consumed this amount of space in competing product offerings.
For the past two months I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about something Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, wrote about his personal email retention and deletion policies. After talking about whether people should worry about “covering their tracks” from government snooping, he writes (emphasis added):
In the meantime, as users, we all have to decide if we want to keep thousands of old emails in our inboxes in the cloud. It’s free and convenient to keep them. Statistics published by some companies seem to confirm that the risks of governments seeking access to our data are extremely remote for “normal people”. But the laws, like ECPA, that are meant to protect the privacy of our old emails are obsolete and full of holes. The choice is yours: keep or delete. I’m a pragmatist, and I’m not paranoid, but personally, I’ve gotten in the habit of deleting almost all my daily emails, except for those that I’d want to keep for the future. Like the rule at my tennis club: sweep the clay after you play.
His comments struck me as being incredibly poignant when I first read them, and remain so today. I’ve stopped archiving email. I delete email (as best I can, given cloud data retention policies and all…) on a regular basis. Over the Christmas break I removed an aggregate of about 6 GB of mail that had just…accrued…in my various accounts over the past decade. In short, his post motivated me enough to spend the better part of 3 or 4 days sifting and sorting through my digital life. Ultimately I removed an awful lot of what was there.
At some point I hope to spend more time writing about, and thinking through, some of Peter’s points. At the moment, however, I’d just recommend you think about what it means when Google’s Global Privacy Counsel – the guy who is best able to go to the mat to protect the privacy of his own inbox – chooses to routinely delete his email from the cloud. If he takes that precaution, and he has the influence that he does, shouldn’t you at least consider following his lead?
A dated, but poignant, bit of information from Bell Canada concerning Internet-based computer security threats in Canada
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2013.1.29
The actors that represent the majority of users today, stakeholders from the South, the developing world, and the non-English segments of the net, will do more to shape the future of cyberspace than any discussions at the Pentagon or in policy circles in North America and Europe. To understand how and in what ways cyberspace will be characterized in years to come we need to think beyond the beltway, beyond Silicon Valley, and into the streets of Shanghai, Nairobi, and Tehran. The contests occurring in those spaces deserve our attention today, if for no other reason than that they provide a glimpse of the types of global issues that will drive cyberspace governance in the future.
Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski, “Contesting Cyberspace and the Coming Crisis of Authority”
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2013.1.25
Facts are not a trustworthy source of knowledge. Cryptome is not an authoritative source. It’s a source of imaginary material. Don’t trust Cryptome, we lie to you helplessly. Don’t believe anything you see there.
John Young, from Andy Greenberg’s This Machine Kills Secrets
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Globe and Mail runs loony screed against “hackers”, Aaron Swartz, logic – Boing Boing:
*Actually, there is a connection between Ahmed Al-Kabaz and Aaron Swartz. Ahmed investigated a powerful institution to see if it was competent and safe, and when he discovered that it wasn’t, he exposed it. Aaron believed passionately in the public’s right to information. Both were doing journalism. In decrying their actions, the Globe has in effect taken a position against the basic mission of journalism .
Hadn’t thought of this through a journalism angle; just through the angle of “cruddy editorializing based on ignorance of how technical systems function.”
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2013.1.24
Social utopians like Haque, Tapscott and Jarvis are, of course, wrong. The age of networked intelligence isn’t very intelligent. The tragic truth is that getting naked, being yourself in the full public gaze of today’s digital network, doesn’t always result in the breaking down of ancient taboos. There is little evidence that networks like Facebook, Skype and Twitter are making us any more forgiving or tolerant. Indeed, if anything, these viral tools of mass exposure seem to be making society not only more prurient and voyeuristic, but also fuelling a mob culture of intolerance, schadenfreude and revengefulness.
Andrew Keen, #digitalvertigo: how today’s online social revolution is dividing, diminishing, and disorienting us
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2013.1.23
… it is worth continuing to ask whether the problem is solely, or even mostly, spectrum. The large wireless carriers could also increase the information-carrying capacity of their networks by building more towers and connecting them to fiber rather than copper wires. Today, even though 97.8 percent of the U.S. population has 3G coverage, more than 80 percent of cell sites are still connected to copper wires. But since the goal of any private company seeking Wall Street investment is to achieve the same levels of revenue (or more) while laying out less money, spending on “backhaul” (connections between towers and Internet access points) has not been a high priority. The problem in wireless transmission, therefore, is probably the wires and the towers, not spectrum. Executive compensation and quarterly results trump higher-quality service every time.
Susan Crawford, Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age
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2013.1.22
One of my concerns at the time was network reliability. So, I brought Ken Kocienda, the first Safari engineer, with me to troubleshoot since he wrote so much of our networking code. If necessary, Ken could also diagnose and duct tape any other part of Safari too. He coined one of our team aphorisms, “If it doesn’t fit, you’re not shoving hard enough.”
Don Melton, “Safari is released to the world”
Excited Pixels 