Category: Quotations

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Quotations

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

The Pirate Bay now lets you download physical objects  (via courtenaybird)

This is going to be a very interesting couple of decades. I’m still curious about the environmental capacities to produce durable 3D objects in homes, but it’s going to be fun to watch develop.

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Quotations

Hate and e-Books

Fuck them is what I say. I hate those e-books. They cannot be the future. They may well be. I will be dead. I won’t give a shit.

Renowned children’s book author MAURICE SENDAK, telling us how he really feels, on The Colbert Report. (via inothernews)

I like e-books for casual reading, like fiction or autobiographies. If it’s a book I want to reference? It absolutely has to bre paper.

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Quotations

2013.3.10

But documents released by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (and an unredacted version of the same unearthed by CNET) late last week show that the DHS has been doing a lot more with drones in the intervening ten years, including tricking them out with cellphone sniffing equipment, sensors that can distinguish between humans and animals, and technology that tells authorities whether someone on the ground is packing a gun.

Frighteningly, the records also show that the DHS’ Predator drones are ready to be equipped with weapons, although a spokesman for DHS sub-agency Customs, Border Protection (CBP) told CNET’s Declan McCullagh that the drones are currently unarmed. McCullagh reports that the DHS has been loaning its drones to domestic law enforcement agencies with criminal justice missions, “including the FBI, the Secret Service, the Texas Rangers, and local police.” Requests from those agencies are becoming more and more common, he writes:

“[DHS drone] use domestically by other government agencies has become routine enough – and expensive enough – that Homeland Security’s inspector general said (pdf) last year that CBP needs to sign agreements ‘for reimbursement of expenses incurred fulfilling mission requests’.”

The DHS told McCullagh that it isn’t using “signals interception” on its drones – yet – and that “[a]ny potential deployment of such technology in the future would be implemented in full consideration of civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy interests and in a manner consistent with the law and long-standing law enforcement practices.” But if “longstanding law enforcement practices” are any indication of where the DHS is headed, we are in trouble.

That’s because often “long-standing law enforcement practice” has been to get away with whatever it can using the loosest interpretation of the fourth amendment possible, before legislators or courts act to correct the problem (if they ever do).

Kade Crockford, “Drones are coming home to skies near you: feel safer?”
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Quotations

2013.3.9

…nowhere does he raise the possibility that feedback loops produced by digital technologies might also be harming governance. Consider a 2011 survey by a British insurance company in which 11 percent of respondents claimed to have seen an incident but chose not to report it, worried that higher crime statistics for their neighborhood would significantly reduce the value of their properties. In this case, the quality of future data is intricately dependent on how much of the current data is disclosed; unconditional “openness” is the wrong move here—precisely because of feedback loops.

Evgeny Morozov, review of Future Shock

I would note that this failure to appreciate the social implications of novel monitoring technologies is something that is drastically unappreciated by public policy planners.

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Quotations

2013.3.8

An often-overlooked dimension of cyber espionage is the targeting of civil society actors. NGOs, exile organizations, political movements, and other public interest coalitions have for many years encountered serious and persistent cyber assaults. Such threats — politically motivated and often with strong links to authoritarian regimes — include website defacements, denial-of-service attacks, targeted malware attacks, and cyber espionage. For every Fortune 500 company that’s breached, for every blueprint or confidential trade secret stolen, it’s a safe bet that at least one NGO or activist has been compromised in a similar fashion, with highly sensitive information such as networks of contacts exfiltrated. Yet civil society entities typically lack the resources of large industry players to defend against or mitigate such threats; you won’t see them hiring information security companies like Mandiant to conduct expensive investigations. Nor will you likely see Mandiant paying much attention to their concerns, either: if antivirus companies do encounter attacks related to civil society groups, they may simply discard that information as there is no revenue in it.

Rob Deibert and Sarah McKune, “Civil Society Hung Out To Dry in Global Cyber Espionage”
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Quotations

2013.3.5

Once your life is inside a federal investigation, there is no space outside of it. The only private thing is your thoughts, and even they don’t feel safe anymore. Every word you speak or write can be used, manipulated, or played like a card against your future and the future of those you love. There are no neutral parties, no sources of unimpeachable wisdom and trust.

The lawyers tell you: take no notes.

The lawyers tell you: talk to no one.

It is the loneliest of lonely things to be surrounded by your loved ones, in danger, and forced to be silent.

May you never experience a Federal investigation. I did, and it consumed me, and changed everyday that will come after it for the rest of my life.

Quinn Norton, “Life Inside the Aaron Swartz Investigation”
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Quotations

2013.3.4

Security signs that begin with ‘For your protection…’ essentially end with ‘…we will restrict freedoms & invade privacy’.

Neil deGrasse Tyson (via kateoplis)

You tell em Neil, we need working and relevant services, not to be babied.

(via scinerds)

This, this is a case of Neil not thinking about the children, right? Right?

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Quotations

2013.3.4

The traditionally advocated uses for NFC have been to replace RFID chips in travel cards, such as the Oyster card in the UK, and RFID chips in credit cards, such as MasterCard’s PayPass.

The problem with these replacements is a simple one, however. Smartphone batteries run out. They do so with alarming regularity, and they do so at inopportune moments. I don’t care what phone you say you have, and I don’t care if you say it doesn’t happen to you, because it does. You end up staying out late, or you leave your charger at home by accident, or you just plain use the phone too much during the day, and then when you need the phone to work, it doesn’t because it’s out of juice.

The phone running out of power is bad enough when it means you don’t have maps and directions. That’s annoying. But even worse is the battery going flat when you need the phone for mass transit or paying for stuff.

And yet that’s precisely the value proposition that NFC offers: go out for a night on the town and get stranded with no money, no subway ride home. The only way to be safe is to take your credit card and travel card with you anyway, and if you’re doing that? Well you don’t exactly need NFC then, do you?

Peter Bright, “Mobile World Congress is Mean Girls, and NFC isn’t going to happen”
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Quotations

2013.3.3

Being crass should not be a crime, but that’s essentially what Andrew Auernheimer was convicted of. This was the case where AT&T accidentally published the emails and device ideas of the first iPad customers. Andrew downloaded them and published proof of the problem to Gawker. His “coconspirator” pled guilty, testified against Andrew, and provided private emails to prosecutors that “proved” Andrew’s bad intentions. These emails disclose things like Andrew talking about stealing the information and wanting to profit from the event. That made his simple actions look very nefarious.

But that’s how we in the cybersec community always talk. When we find cybersec problems, we dream of the worst ways we can be horrible people and exploit them. If you listened to any of our private conversations, you’d be convinced that we were all secretly one step away from triggering World War III.

I’m pretty sure had I been in Andrew’s place, the prosecutors would’ve found much worse to hang me by. Indeed, you’ll find much in my public Twitter feed and blog posts to convict me of. When the Mars Curiosity Rover landed last August, and the first pictures arrived from the planet, I was about to tweet the URL to view those pictures. But the site was already failing under the load of all the nerds worldwide getting those pictures. Therefore, I changed my tweet to comment on the fact that this was essentially a DDoS attack – the sort of attack that activists do against large corporations they don’t like. I therefore made the humorous tweet “Join our DDoS against NASA and click” on their website.

Of course, I’m not against NASA, nor do I think anybody else is. I can’t imagine why anybody would want to DDoS them. It should be obvious that my tweet is humor. But, prosecutors taking this out of context might use it to try to convict me, to prove to jurors of my evil intent.

Robert Graham, “Context matters: we only appear to be blackhats”
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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”