Category: Links

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Links Quotations

2013.3.2

At least Britain sort of got it half right. There, to make life easier for stores selling age-restricted items there’s a “Challenge 21″ programme, so anyone looking 21 or under is asked for ID, even if the products are restricted to over-18s. Tesco and other large chain stores championed a “Challenge 25″ programme just in case someone slipped through the net. Finally some idiot in the seaside resort of Blackpool came up with the idea of “Challenge 30″, which is roundly lambasted across Britain.

But at least these outlets demand high-integrity forms of ID such as driving licences. In the US you can show a picture of your dog pasted on the back of a chocolate biscuit and they’re likely to accept it.

That’s because no-one really knows why they are asking for ID in the first place, and no-one up the chain tells them – mainly because they don’t know either. Everyone just goes through the motions. There’s no way to verify the validity of ID, so everyone just plods along with the security theatre.

Simon Davis, “How a dog and some chocolate biscuits reveal an identity crisis in America”
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Links Quotations

2013.3.2

In Jewel, the Obama administration has already twice invoked the “state secrets” privilege, a mechanism left behind from the McCarthy-era persecution of Communist sympathizers which effectively lets the government ‘turn off’ the Constitution and the justice system whenever they feel that a case might jeopardize national security. The administration has promised to limit its use of the privilege to situations which present the potential for “significant harm” to the country. But that promise obviously hasn’t stopped them from deflecting recent challenges to warrantless wiretapping and other government counterterrorism initiatives — like indefinite detention provisions, or the secret program for targeted killings carried out by drones — nor will it necessarily restrain future administrations from doing the same.

Jewel may be the last chance for meaningful judicial review of the wiretapping programs in the foreseeable future. Failing that, the only remaining response for journalists and others dealing in sensitive overseas communications may be exactly what digital activists have been advocating for decades: widespread personal encryption. But aside from being somewhat impractical, the necessity of encrypted communications would more broadly underscore just how thoroughly the legal system has failed to protect citizens from unnecessary intrusion.

Joshua Kopstein, “Denied in the Supreme Court, warrantless wiretap opponents are losing ground fast: Does secret surveillance violate the Constitution? Sorry, that’s a secret”
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Humour Links

Compare Office For Business Plans – Office.com

parislemon:

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Focus.

I thought that this was a joke. Someone exaggerating Microsoft’s actual product offerings.

I was wrong.

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Links

Powerful men may actually be the worst?:

As a political reporter for GQ, I’ve been jokingly asked whether I ever posed for the magazine and loudly called a porn star by a senior think-tank fellow at his institute’s annual gala. In my prior job as a Hill reporter, one of my best source relationships with a member of Congress ended after I remarked that I looked like a witch who might hop on a broom in my new press-badge photo and he replied that I looked like I was “going to hop on something.” One journalist remembers a group of lobbyists insisting that she was not a full-time reporter at a major publication but a college coed. Another tried wearing scarves and turtlenecks to keep a married K Street type from staring at her chest for their entire meeting. The last time she saw him, his wedding ring was conspicuously absent; his eyes, however, were still fixed on the same spot. Almost everyone has received the late-night e-mail—“You’re incredible” or “Are you done with me yet?”—that she is not entirely sure how to handle. They’re what another lady political writer refers to as “drunk fumbles” or “the result of lonely and insecure people trying to make themselves feel loved and/or important.” … Sometimes they reach the level of stalking: One colleague had a high-profile member of Congress go out of his way to track down her cell-phone number, call and text repeatedly to tell her she was beautiful, offer to take her parents on a tour of the Capitol, and even invite her to go boating back home in his district.

This speaks depressing volumes about many individuals who are deeply invested in the political machinations of nation-states.

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Links

TarenSK: Thank you

tarensk:

I’m being very careful not to generalize from this grieving experience. Someday other people close to me will die. It will not be like this. But this once, it can be and is like this, and I am grateful.

Along with all the multitudes of lessons to draw from Aaron’s life and death, I hope one can be an ongoing commitment to unconditional support for each other in times of great personal crisis.

The truth is, Aaron was very bad at asking for support. He didn’t want to be a burden on others. He believed he ought to be able to make it on his own. He demanded independence from those who loved him. He was eager to help anyone else, but to ask for help for himself was terrifying. That made his 2-year ordeal much harder in many ways.

I’ve learned what I believe are the right lessons from this, and I hope you all will as well. The world is often — though not always — naked and cold. Confronting it on our own is sometimes merely difficult, sometimes downright impossible. We have a responsibility to help each other through the hard times, and an equal responsibility to ask for help from each other.

 

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Links

I still think [Apple] should go back to Dropbox with a blank check and just ask how many zeros they need to put at the end to make it happen.

My friend Dave Zaffrann, practicing the art of Having a Decent Idea while lamenting iCloud’s future (via chartier)

I think that this is on the mark, in the sense that iCloud is gross and Apple needs to do better. I also hope it never comes to be, given how much I use Dropbox on non-Apple devices and products.

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Links

TarenSK: DOJ admits Aaron’s prosecution was political

tarensk:

Even if Aaron’s intention was in fact to distribute the journal articles (to poor people! for zero profit!), that in no way condones his treatment.

But the terrifying fact I’m trying to highlight in this particular blog post is this: According to the DOJ’s testimony, if you express political views that the government doesn’t like, at any point in your life, that political speech act can and will be used to justify making “an example” out of you once the government thinks it can pin you with a crime.

Talk about a chilling effect on freedom of speech.

Chilling of speech is very, very real. And the things we’re learning in the aftermath of Aaron’s death only amplify concerns.

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Links Writing

Attacks on the Press: A Moving Target – Committee to Protect Journalists:

While not every journalist is an international war correspondent, every journalist’s cellphone is untrustworthy. Mobile phones, and in particular Internet-enabled smartphones, are used by reporters around the world to gather and transmit news. But mobile phones also make journalists easier to locate and intimidate, and confidential sources easier to uncover. Cellular systems can pinpoint individual users within a few meters, and cellphone providers record months, even years, of individual movements and calls. Western cellphone companies like TeliaSonera and France Telecom have been accused by investigative journalists in their home countries of complicity in tracking reporters, while mobile spying tools built for law enforcement in Western countries have, according to computer security researchers working with human rights activists, been exported for use against journalists working under repressive regimes in Ethiopia, Bahrain, and elsewhere.

 

“Reporters need to understand that mobile communications are inherently insecure and expose you to risks that are not easy to detect or overcome,” says Katrin Verclas of the National Democratic Institute. Activists such as Verclas have been working on sites like SaferMobile, which give basic advice for journalists to protect themselves. CPJ recently published a security guide that addresses the use of satellite phones and digital mobile technologies. But repressive governments don’t need to keep up with all the tricks of mobile computing; they can merely set aside budget and strip away privacy laws to get all the power they need. Unless regulators, technology companies, and media personnel step up their own defenses of press freedom, the cellphone will become journalists’ most treacherous tool.

Network surveillance is a very real problem that journalists and, by extension, their sources have to account for. The problem is that many of the security tools that are used to protect confidential communications are awkward to use, provide to sources, and use correctly without network censors detecting the communication. Worst is when journalists simply externalize risk, putting sources at risk in the service of ‘getting the story’ in order to ‘spread the word.’ Such externalization is unfortunately common and generates fear and distrust in journalists.

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Aside Links

What Canadian Political Parties Know About You

Colin J. Bennett, writing in Policy Options, explains how Canadian political parties collect and use voters’ personal information. It’s a quick, and valuable, read; highly recommended.

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Aside Links

If You Can’t Breach the OS, Target Developer Watering Holes

F-Secure has a good, quick, overview of the recent attacks against Facebook, Twitter, and (presumably) other mobile developers. Significantly, we’re seeing an uptick in attacks against developers rather than just against platform manufacturers. The significance? Even though the phone OS may be ‘secure’, the applications you’re loading onto those devices may have been compromised at inception.

Smartphones: the source of anxiety and worry for IT managers that keeps on going.