Category: Aside

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Aside Quotations

2014.2.18

“We are assessing Public Mobile pricing right now and looking at product offerings,” Joe Natale, Telus’ executive vice-president and chief commercial officer, said Thursday in a conference call with analysts to discuss the company’s fourth quarter results.

“We have made a commitment to keep the $19 unlimited voice plan in the market through 2014, but we will be looking at all the various aspects of Public Mobile rate plans and making sure we strike the right balance between doing what’s right for Public Mobile customers and putting forth a set of economic considerations with the Telus organization.”

Nicholas Kyonka, “Telus working on Public Mobile integration” (subscription required)

Whenever I read ‘balance between our acquired customers and our own economic considerations’ I almost immediately translate to ‘the acquired customers are gonna enjoy the economic benefits of rate hikes.’

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Aside Links

CTV News Channel: ‘No invasion of privacy here’

Christopher Parsons, Citizen Lab Postdoctoral Fellow, reacts to the assessment that it is okay Wi-Fi data was collected at airports.

My appearance on CTV yesterday, talking about the CSEC Commissioner’s statement that it’s perfectly legal for the foreign signals intelligence agency to collect Canadians’ metadata.

CTV News Channel: ‘No invasion of privacy here’

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Aside

Tumblr and Security PR

staff:

You can now take extra precaution against hackers and snoops by enabling SSL security on your Tumblr Dashboard. Just head over to your Account Settings and flip the switch.

“Any reason I shouldn’t do this?” Nope, not really. It doesn’t change anything about the dashboard, it just encrypts your connection to it. We’ve been using it for weeks and haven’t even noticed. So, yeah, turn it on and forget about it. Easy.

That this isn’t enabled by default shows that Tumblr is interested in the PR of offering security rather than giving enough of a damn to automatically enable SSL across the entire user-space.

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Aside

New Mug

Spoils of my on-air interview this morning!

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Aside

Whitetail Deer

howtoskinatiger:

A Whitetail Deer (Odocoileus virginianus) chows down on a rabbit carcass.

Although primarily herbivorous deer will also meat, particularly in times of hardship such as winter when the natural food is harder to come by.

This puts the herds of deer that roam the University of Victoria in a new light.

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Aside

CSE Redactions

Clearly, Canadians can totally have confidence in CSEC’s steps to protect privacy. As in, there are 5 separate steps to protect Canadians, plus (possibly) other ‘incidental’ steps that are dealt with elsewhere. (Source: 2011 ATIP from CSEC)

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Aside Humour

Spy Agency Spies “Incidentally”

mebuell:

Meme: Spy agency admits it spies on citizens “incidentally”

And don’t worry about those incidents because they’re all dealt with in ‘privacy protective’ ways. (And just trust CSEC on the latter, even though CSEC redacts its privacy protective practices for when incidentally collecting Canadians’ information.)

Categories
Aside Quotations

2014.1.3

jakke said: This seems like he’s hoping referees will be sufficiently unfamiliar with the subject matter, no?

It’s a published piece; it landed in International Data Protection Law. And the people he acknowledges in the published piece are some of the experts who were – at the time, pre-Snowden – calling Swire’s article out for BS. I was at an event where his paper was critiqued as largely devoid of real, empirical, details which if included would have undermined many of the premises of the paper. But the paper was published (largely unchanged) regardless.

But peer-review…still not broken, am I right?

Categories
Aside Quotations

2014.1.3

To players of WoW (such as my sons), WOW is a fun game. They often wear headsets to talk with teammates while playing, and keep a chat window scrolling as well. To law enforcement, WoW (or any other similar game) can seem instead to be a global terrorist communications network. Players can talk and send chat messages, internationally, outside of the traditional telephone network and outside of the scope of CALEA. The architecture is based on what works for the game, and not what facilitates lawful access.

Peter Swire, “From real-time intercepts to stored records: why encryption drives the government to seek access to the cloud”

Of course, this statement is largely bunk given that the large companies (like Blizzard, the producers of World of Warcraft) tend to have lawful access guides. And Blizzard’s, in particular, is incredibly detailed (and humorous) and been around since at least 2009. It’s statements like the one quoted, above, that make Swire’s entire paper dubious: given the empirical deficiency of his paper (especially in light of Snowden) he should be required to either write an update to the paper and identity everything that was false in it, or just recant the old paper in its majority.

Categories
Aside Humour

Laptop Stickers

The new laptop stickers have arrived. (Explanation of logo)