Category: Links

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Google’s latest IM client, Allo, isn’t ready for prime time

Ars Technica:

It’s no secret that Hangouts was poorly supported inside Google, so will Allo be any different? I’ve heard that Google Hangouts was never given resources because Google felt it would never be a money-maker. In instant messaging, you talk to your friends and send pictures back and forth, and an ad-powered Google service is never involved. With Allo, that changes because the Assistant is a gateway to search. Every question to the Assistant is a Google Search, with in-app answers coming for questions and links to generic Web searches for everything else. With search comes the possibility for ads, both from the generic search links and in the carousels that answers often provide. I’ve yet to see an advertisement inside Allo, but since it seems possible for Allo to make money, maybe it will receive more support than Hangouts did.

Setting aside the basic privacy issues of Google having access to unencrypted, plaintext, chats you have with friends and colleagues, the fact that Google is apparently unwilling to support its own products if they can’t be used to empower Google advertising is just gross. Google has impressively wasted the skills and talents of a generation of developers: imagine what might exist, today, if people were empowered to write software absent the need to data mine everything that is said for advertising purposes?

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True stories of lawsuits, fisticuffs and harassment in condoland

Toronto Life:

Lifestyle clashes are inevitable when people of all ages and socio-economic backgrounds live on top of each other in a forced community. When different priorities collide, a siege mentality can set in. In the years since Pantoliano’s case, Toronto has sprouted tens of thousands of new condo units in every shape and size. Retired empty nesters live below boisterous hipsters. People who work night shifts are trying to sleep while parents are getting their toddlers off to daycare. Families with rowdy kids take up residence across the hall from quiet professional couples. And they all unrealistically expect the same degree of freedom and privacy as they’d have in a detached home. Instead, they’re keeping each other up at night, squabbling in hallways, sparring in elevators and petitioning condo boards. The shimmering vertical city has become a breeding ground for lawsuits, bullies and brawlers.

I’ve (generally) been blessed with good condo neighbours above, below, and around me for the entirety of my life. But having spoken to people in my own building who are living beside those who party all the time, cram 6+ people into three bedroom units, and drink and fight in the halls, I know that I’ve just been very fortunate.

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Congress Needs to Press the Pentagon, Saudi Arabia on Abuses in Yemen War

Just Security:

The panel also said the coalition should have warned medical staff at the Doctors Without Borders-supported Haydan hospital in Saada governorate before bombing it six times. But the panel dismissed the seriousness of attacking a hospital by concluding there had been no “human damage.” Besides the two patients who the aid group’s country director told me were injured, the attack destroyed the emergency room of the hospital, which had received about 150 cases a week. It was the only medical facility within an 80-kilometer radius, making the “human damage” of the attack incalculable.

The panel also concluded that a February 27, 2016 attack on a village marketplace didn’t kill any civilians, while we documented10 civilian deaths, including a woman and four children. In an attack on another marketplace on March 15 that United Nations research and ours found that 97 people died, the panel incredibly said it saw no proof of civilian casualties. One man told us he lost 17 relatives and another lost 16.

The coalition’s examination of attacks is a reversal of past practice, but there’s a long way to go before its investigations can be considered credible, transparent, and impartial. Since the Saudis haven’t released details about the panel members or the actual reports on each incident, it’s hard to know why their findings are so different from what we and the UN found on the ground.

There are also many more airstrikes that need to be investigated. It is unclear how the panel chose these 8 strikes over the more than 70 apparently unlawful airstrikes that we and Amnesty International have documented, and the more than 100 that the United Nations has. These documented coalition strikes have killed nearly 1,000 civilians.

For instance, a March 30, 2015 strike on a camp for internally displaced people killed at least 29 civilians and another strike a day later on a dairy factory near the Hodaida port killed at least 31. On May 12, the coalition struck a civilian prison in the western town of Abs, killing 25 people.

That same day, aircraft dropped at least five bombs on a marketplace in the town of Zabid, killing at least 60. A July 4 attack on another marketplace in the village of Muthalith Ahim killed at least 65. On October 7, the coalition bombed a triple wedding in the village of Sanaban, killing 43 civilians, including 13 women and 16 children.

There is an ongoing human rights crisis in Yemen, supported by Western technology systems and implicitly backed by the world’s largest superpower. And, at the same time, Canada is selling armoured vehicles to nations known to engage in similar types of human rights abuses.

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Trump’s Empire: A Maze of Debts and Opaque Ties

New York Times:

Tracing the ownership of many of Mr. Trump’s buildings can be a complicated task. Sometimes he owns a building and the land underneath it; sometimes, he holds a partial interest or just the commercial portion of a property.

And in some cases, the identities of his business partners are obscured behind limited liability companies — raising the prospect of a president with unknown business ties.

A revealing analysis of Trump’s actual financial situation.

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France’s Emergency Powers: The New Normal

Just Security:

The new, six-month extension of emergency powers creates France’s longest state of emergency since the Algerian War in the 1950s. The new law restores or extends previous emergency provisions, such as empowering police to carry out raids and local authorities to place suspects under house arrest without prior judicial approval. It also expands those powers, for example allowing the police to search luggage and vehicles without judicial warrants. In addition it reinstates warrantless seizures of computer and cellphone data that France’s highest legal authority had struck down as unconstitutional, adding a few restrictions that still fall short of judicial oversight.

In separate reports in February, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International documented more than three dozen cases in which the use of these emergency powers violated universal rights to liberty, privacy, or freedoms of movement, association and expression. The two groups also found that the emergency acts lost suspects jobs, traumatized children, and damaged homes. The vast majority of those targeted were Muslims. Those interviewed said the actions left them feeling stigmatized and eroded their trust in the French authorities. The latest version of the emergency law risks compounding these effects.

The decisions to advance unconstitutional and discriminatory ‘security’ laws and policies following serious crimes threaten to undermine democracies while potentially strengthening states. But worryingly there are fewer and fewer loud voices for the rough and tumble consequences of maintaining a democratic form of governance as opposed to those who assert that a powerful state apparatus is needed if normalcy is to exist. The result may be the sleepwalking from governments for and by the people, to those that protect citizen-serfs and harshly discriminate against difference.

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WSJ Reporter: Homeland Security Tried to Take My Phones at the Border

Motherboard:

“Travel “naked” as one encryption expert told me. If any government wants your information, they will get it no matter what,” she adds.

Something has gone terribly awry if this is the advice that journalists working for international news outlets are giving to those entering or exiting the United States.

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Judge Orders Yahoo to Explain How It Recovered ‘Deleted’ Emails in Drugs Case

Motherboard:

After receiving requests from UK police and the FBI in September 2009 and April 2010, Yahoo created several “snapshots” of the email account, preserving its contents at the time—and revealing the messages. But the defense alleges there should have been nothing for law enforcement to find.

Yahoo’s explanation is that the recovered emails were copies created by the email service’s “auto-save” feature, which saves data in case of a loss of connectivity, for example. The company has filed several declarations from a number of its staff, but the defense said some of those contradicted each other, and it wants more information.

The question of when, and for whom, data has been deleted or made inaccessible is often based on power and knowledge. And end-users tend to lack both.

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Yahoo is expected to confirm a massive data breach, impacting hundreds of millions of users

Recode:

But there’s nothing smooth about this hack, said sources, which became known in August when an infamous cybercriminal named “Peace” claimed on a website that he was selling credentials of 200 million Yahoo users from 2012 on the dark web for just over $1,800. The data allegedly included user names, easily decrypted passwords and personal information like birth dates and other email addresses.

It will be curious (and worrying) to see whether this was a one-off breach or persistent. And, if persistent, whether the data also includes information from users of services like Tumblr.

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iMessage apps offer more layers of encryption, but do you need one?

Macworld:

Adding encryption you control inside an iMessage transmission can provide more assurances that your messages remain unreadable to others, but there a whole lot of provisos you need to consider before accepting this as a higher level of security.

It’s nice to see reviewers of applications present the concerns, first, before what might be nice about new ‘security’ apps. Namely that crypto is hard to do, not all crypto is the same, and there are basic questions concerning the reliability of the companies providing the security assurance.

More broadly, that applications can route double-encrypted messages through Apple Messages will not necessarily enhance security but, instead, mean that comunications are only as secure as the application applying the second layer of security. Apple is a great big target that everyone wants to penetrate and so Apple hires terrific technical and legal staff to keep government and others at bay. Can we expect that app developers selling encryption apps for a dollar or two will possess an equivalent commitment and competency?

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Why wearable fitness trackers offer no weight-loss ‘advantage’

CBC:

Both groups had significant improvements in body composition, fitness, physical activity and diet, with no significant difference between groups, they said.

In total, 75 per cent of participants completed the study.

Estimated average weights for the group wearing trackers were 212 pounds at study entry and 205 pounds at 24 months, resulting in an average weight loss of about 7.7 pounds.

In comparison, those in the website group started out at 210 pounds when the study began and weighed in at 197 pounds at 24 months, for an average loss of 13 pounds.

Still, Jakicic said in an email: “We should not send the message that these wearable technologies do not help with weight loss — there were some in our study for whom it made a difference.

I would argue that the ‘advantage’ that the trackers offer is to motivate people who otherwise might be less mindful on a regular basis to increase their daily activity. The headline of the article directly contradicts the point made by the study’s author: that the message should not be that wearables do not help with weight loss.

Perhaps one of the broader issues is that weight loss is predominantly associated with dietary changes. Fitness trackers focus on activity. As such, meeting fitness tracker goals (absent food monitoring) can lead to reduced weight losses as compared to those engaged in more comprehensive health and diet tracking.