Category: Quotations

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Quotations

2013.1.11

But an attempt by Canadian ISPs to garner an all-access pass that would let them secretly install software to monitor potentially illicit user activity was thwarted, at least in part.

According to the note accompanying the draft regulations, industry representatives “had argued for exemptions from the requirement for consent to install software to prevent unauthorized or fraudulent use of a service or system, or to update or upgrade systems on their networks.”

Under the revised rules, service providers would only be permitted to install software “where illegal activities pose a threat to [their] networks.”

Kady O’Malley, “Ottawa’s anti-spam proposals prohibit secret monitoring software”
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Quotations

2013.1.10

… Chrome acts as 100 million sensors on the Internet looking for *.google.com MitM attacks. If you are a government wanting to spy on your citizens, as soon as you insert a fraudulent signing certificate into your BlueCoat monitor, one of your citizens using Google Chrome is going to notify the mother ship.

Robert Graham, “Don’t mess with the Google”
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Quotations

2013.1.8

The war on terrorism should not be a war on ethics, integrity, technology and the rule of law. Stopping terrorism should not include terrorizing whistleblowers and truth tellers who raise concern when the government cuts corners to electronically surveill, torture and assassinate its own people. And it is not okay for a president to grant himself the power to play prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner of anyone on the entire fucking planet.

Jesselyn Radack, quoted in “US Whistleblowers on Being Targeted by the Secret Security State”
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Quotations

2013.1.6

What’s interesting about this case – and what leads to the title above – is not so much what went wrong, but rather, what went right. You see, this bogus certificate was detected, and likely not because some good samaritan reported the violation. Rather, it was (probably) detected by Google’s unwavering surveillance.

Mathew Green, on Google detecting fake SSL certificates in “Surveillance works! Let’s have more of it”
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Quotations

2013.1.5

Over the last forty years, a strong and principled argument that privacy is a fundamental human right deserving special protection in an age of high technology has confronted more pragmatic considerations from a variety of interests. The messy twists and turns of this international struggle have produced a sort of consensus on what it means for an organization to process personal data responsibly. But it is an uneasy consensus, hedged by exemptions and qualifications, and regularly shaken by monumental shifts in the processing powers of technology, and by game changers like the 9/11 attacks.

This conflict is now being played out again with respect to a new Draft Regulation on privacy protection from the European Union. We have heard that this Regulation is too burdensome, that it will block innovation, that it will cost jobs, trade, and investment, that it will kill the online advertising industry, that it will unreasonably extend the reach of European law beyond European borders and exacerbate the transatlantic divide between a more protectionist and regulatory Europe and a more open and innovative United States.

These views are simplistic and misleading. The same fears were expressed twenty years ago when the first set of European privacy rules were proposed. The Internet developed and flourished since that time, and within that framework of national and international privacy law. Privacy protection did not constrain innovation then, and it will not do so today.

Colin Bennett, “The Geo-Politics of Personal Data”
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Quotations

2013.1.3

You see, the thing about humans is that we have a really short attention span, and really bad memories. It’s actually hard for me to remember a time before I had a phone that could effectively replace my entire computer in most situations. A phone that I could make video calls from from any spot in the world, one that would let me log into our team’s IRC channel while on the floor of a major media event in any city and communicate with our whole staff. A device that was small enough to fit into the front pocket of my arguably-too-tight jeans that would let me connect and share my most important thoughts about developing news and world events — in real time! — with millions of people at once. A device that would underpin and enable modern social movements and political revolutions, generally shrink our sense of the size of humanity, and mesmerize and delight almost everyone who used it.

Joshua Topolsky, “Reasons to be excited”

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Quotations

2012.12.31

I’m jealous of old people because they didn’t have the internet and Facebook when you were young — you could get away with just about anything.

Mathew Ingram, “Snapchat and our never-ending quest for impermanence”
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Quotations

2012.12.30

Google had the capacity to capture everything people did on the site on its logs, a digital trail of activities whose retention could provide a key to future innovations. Every aspect of user behaviour had a value. How many queries were there, how long were they, what were the top words used in queries, how did users punctuate, how often did they click on the first result, who had referred them to Google, where they were geographically … These logs told stories. Not only when or how people used Google but what kind of people the users were and how they thought.

Steven Levy, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
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Quotations

2012.12.29

…tablets have gotten so cheap that it’s hard to make a case that spending $500+ on a new Windows 8 machine is better than just keeping what you have and spending $200 on a cheap tablet. That goes double when the cheap tablet in question has hundreds of thousands more apps. Throw in an unfamiliar user interface, and you’re basically telling people to please leave the Microsoft Store.

Pete Pachal, “The Problem With Windows 8”
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Quotations

2012.12.11

Life under a national security state is not a life. Living under such a state is simply living like a slave, or at best it is like living in a big prison, albeit one that has invisible bars. While invisible, these bars are, nevertheless, extremely constraining.

Maher Arar, from “What Life Looks Like Under a National Security State”