Author: Christopher Parsons

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

Categories
Writing

Making Sense of Twitter ‘Censorship’

Jillian York, the Director of International Freedom of Expression at the EFF, has a good (and quick) thought on Twitter’s recent decision to ‘censor’ some Tweets in particular geographical areas.

Let’s be clear: This is censorship. There’s no way around that. But alas, Twitter is not above the law.  Just about every company hosting user-generated content has, at one point or another, gotten an order or government request to take down content.  Google lays out its orders in its Transparency Report.  Other companies are less forthright.  In any case, Twitter has two options in the event of a request: Fail to comply, and risk being blocked by the government in question, or comply (read: censor).  And if they have “boots on the ground”, so to speak, in the country in question?  No choice.

In the event that a company chooses to comply with government requests and censor content, there are a number of mitigating steps the company can take.  The most important, of course, is transparency, something that Twitter has promised.  Google is also transparent in its content removal (Facebook? Not so much).  Twitter’s move to geolocate their censorship is also smart, given the alternative (censoring it worldwide, that is) – particularly since it appears a user can manually change his or her location.

I tend to agree with her position. I’m not particularly happy that Twitter is making this move but can appreciate that from an Internet governance – and national sovereignty – position that Twitter’s new policy ‘fits’ with international practices. Further, the company’s unwillingness to globally censor is positive, and limits that damage caused by state-mandated censorship.

Admittedly, I’d like to see the company go a bit further that is in line with their drive towards transparency. Perhaps if you did a keyword search in a particular geographic area you might receive a notice reading, “Some items in this search have been censored in your region” or something along those lines. Still, Twitter is arguably the best ‘good’ company that is prominent in the social networking environment at the moment, so I’ll hope they make additional steps towards full transparency rather than lambasting the company for its policy changes right now.

Categories
Writing

On Cell Phone Bill Comparisons

Canadians often state that they are hurt by high cell phone bills and point to other jurisdictions to insist that other markets enjoy far lower prices. With cost concerns in mind, I suspect we’ll soon see reporting that, on T-Mobile’s UK network, customers can get unlimited Internet access, texts, and calls between T-Mobile users and 2000 minutes to talk with other, non-T-Mobile, customers for just under $57/month.

It should be noted, of course, that ‘unlimited Internet access’ under most T-Mobile plans is quite limited: 500MB of streaming content and upload/downloads of files are included, though browsing, social media (barring uploads and downloads of files), and email is (more or less) ‘unlimited.’

While costs are arguably higher in Canada, doing a close comparative analysis to divine cost structures across jurisdictions is fraught with difficulties, especially when quality of the network and their relative speeds are taken into consideration as well. Still, I’d love to see a default in Canada where long distance across Canada vanishes and basics like voice mail and call display are free to each and every plan. That I pay for such basic services is absolutely shameful and not something you routinely see in the US and UK.

Categories
Writing

A Comment on GPS and Smartphones

There are a great number of concerns around GPS chips being integrated into smartphones; surveillance, third-party tracking, and profiling (to say nothing of bad results!) are all issues that technologists ‘in the know’ warn of. I don’t want to talk about any of these issues.

No, I want to say this: of the smartphones that I’ve used in the past 6 months (iPhone 3GS, Samsung Focus, BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Torch 9800) the BlackBerry devices have the most reliable, accurate, and speedy GPS functionality. The Focus was unreliable, at best, and while the 3GS’s UI was the best it was slower and less accurate than what I enjoy with the aforementioned BlackBerry devices.

For many people the GPS is a nicety, icing on the cake. For me, I rely on my GPS and maps integration to get from points A to B. The integration between Google Maps and the iPhone was excellent, if not the fastest. Integration on the Windows Phone was poor, largely because they missed my market: I’m a conscientious traveller and so prefer public transit. Windows Phones are absolutely unable to parse transit information in any of the major or minor cities I’ve visited over the past several months. If they can’t even do a non-US world city then the integration is not ready for prime time.

While the Google Maps/GPS integration on BlackBerry has an archaic UI – it really, really, looks like it was developed several years ago (because it was) – it’s fast and reliable. UI beauty is of critical importance for getting novices to use new technologies, but UI alone is insufficient to sell consumers on the value of a device over the long term. On this basis the Windows Phone OS failed outright and iOS trailed the ‘older’, ‘archaic’ and ‘aging’ BlackBerry OS 7.1 device I’m using right now.

Categories
Links Writing

Viruses stole City College of S.F. data for years

The viral infestation detailed by the Chronicle is horrific in (at least) two ways: first, that data was leeched from university networks for year after year, and second that it’s only now – and perhaps by happenstance – that the IT staff detected the security breach. From the article:

a closer look revealed a far more nefarious situation, which had been lurking within the college’s electronic systems since 1999. For now, it’s still going on. So far, no cases of identify theft have been linked to the breach. That may change as the investigation continues, and college officials said they might need to bring in the FBI.

…

Each night at about 10 p.m., at least seven viruses begin trolling the college networks and transmitting data to sites in Russia, China and at least eight other countries, including Iran and the United States, Hotchkiss and his team discovered. Servers and desktops have been infected across the college district’s administrative, instructional and wireless networks. It’s likely that personal computers belonging to anyone who used a flash drive during the past decade to carry information home were also affected.

Some of the stolen data is probably innocuous, such as lesson plans. But an analysis shows that students and faculty have used college computers to do their banking, and the viruses have grabbed the information, Hotchkiss said.

It is for precisely this kind of reason that regular updates of common, lab-based, computer equipment must be performed. These computers must centrally factor into campus security plans because of their accessibility to the public and a broad student population. I simply cannot believe that systems were so rarely refreshed, so rarely updated, and so poorly secured that a mass infection of a campus could occur, unless a university security and data protection policy were not being implemented by staff. Regardless, what has happened at this campus is an inexcusable failure: lessons should be learned, yes, but heads should damn well roll as well.

Categories
Aside Links

American Internet Imperialism

Think about this for a second: you are a good, law abiding citizen, and thus break no local laws. Your state has no reason to bring criminal charges against you. Your actions, however, are provisionally criminal in another jurisdiction. As a result, despite your actions being perfectly legal in your home nation you are threatened with extradition. This is not a theoretical concern:

TVShack was a site that collected links to TV shows. Certainly, many of those shows were likely to be infringing – but TVShack did not host the content at all, it merely linked to it. Richard O’Dwyer, the guy who ran the site, was a student building an interesting project over in the UK. However, the US Department of Justice decided that he was not only a hardened criminal, but one who needed to be tried on US soil. Thus, it began extradition procedures. Even worse, nearly identical sites in the UK had already been found legal multiple times – with the court noting that having links to some infringing content was certainly not criminal copyright infringement. That makes things even more ridiculous, because extradition is only supposed to be allowed for activities that are criminal in both the US and the UK. [Emphasis added]

The implications for extradition would be significant: UK citizens could be extradited to certain countries for actions that are legal within their own nations, on the basis that they violate the laws of other countries. It is precisely this kind of process that can stifle innovation, speech, and association online. It narrows the range of speech actions whilst demanding that – prior to speaking or acting or creating – individuals consult with counsel as the first part of any serious online behaviour.

Such an approach – lawyers, then speech – is directly contradictory with basic rights that form the bedrock of our Western democracies.

Categories
Links

EMI Sues Irish Government

Admittedly this is a few weeks old at this point, but it’s absurd that EMI is trying to sue the Irish government for access to a bill prior to its being introduced.

EMI is effectively confessing here that it’s upset that the government isn’t sharing the bill ahead of time with EMI or others in the industry. Again, the massive sense of entitlement of these guys is such that they expect that they get to write the laws, and when they’re left out of the process, they get to sue over it. And yet, on every one of these laws, the people actually impacted by them – the public – get no real say or can’t see them. Remember ACTA? The public was left totally in the dark, while RIAA/MPAA officials and others had pretty detailed access and the ability to help craft the bills. And yet, when EMI doesn’t get to see a draft of a bill, and it makes them think that it won’t go the way they want, they sue? Damn.

If EMI (and other bodies) get access to these documents then all parties should have access to them, on grounds that the public interest groups should be on equal footing in trying to influence how this legislation is shaped prior to it’s introduction. Perhaps better would be that no one sees the legislation and that experts are ‘simply’ called in to give commentary on the legislation.

Categories
Links Quotations

How to hack a smartphone via radio

Network World:

Encryption keys on smartphones can be stolen via a technique using radio waves, says one of the world’s foremost crypto experts, Paul Kocher, whose firm Cryptography Research will demonstrate the hacking stunt with several types of smartphones at the upcoming RSA Conference in San Francisco next month.

“You tune to the right frequency,” says Kocher, who described the hacking procedure as involving use of a radio device much like a common AM radio that will be set up within about 10 feet from the smartphone. The radio-based device will pick up electromagnetic waves occurring when the crypto libraries inside the smartphone are used, and computations can reveal the private key. “We’re stealing the key as it’s being used,” he says, adding, “It’s independent of key length.”

Kocher says the goal of the hacking demo, which Cryptography Research will demonstrate throughout the RSA Conference at its booth, is not to disparage any particular smartphone manufacturer but to point out that the way crypto is used on devices can be improved.

“This is a problem that can be fixed,” he says, noting Cryptography Research is working with at least one of the major smartphone makers, which he declined to name, on the issues around these types of radio-based attacks.

This is a high level of awesome. I wonder who the major smartphone maker is; Microsoft? Apple?

Categories
Links

Should Microsoft Mandate a Windows Phone Hardware Mute Switch?

testingdavid:

 The audio controls stick to the lock-screen when the phone is locked, in the same screen location but always present to allow even quicker control and obviate the need to tap the volume rocker in order to play, pause or skip on the lock-screen. Interestingly, the “vibrate” or “ring + vibrate” button, which I call the mute switch, does not remain on the lock-screen, and requires that the user press the volume rocker to display it when the phone is locked. This means that to mute a Windows Phone, the user must take the phone out of their pocket, tap the power button, tap the volume rocker, and finally tap the mute switch. With the current iPhone design, the user need only reach into their pocket and flip the hardware switch to prevent all unexpected noises.

The answer to David’s question is clear and unequivocal: YES! While having an excess of rarely needed/used hardware buttons and toggles can diminish the quality of a device, a deficiency of such buttons/toggles can do the same thing. It sounds small, but the ability to rapidly and easily mute a device is a key professional feature of a device.

Categories
Aside

Wasteful

 

 

The stages of absolutely wasteful packaging.

Categories
Humour Links

The 8 Stages of an All-Nighter

An awesome strip on how far too many essays are produced in University. Very truthful. Very painful.