Category: Writing

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New malware infects millions of Android users

ch3ukl1:

Symantec has identified 13 apps on the Android Market that are all hiding Android. Counterclank, a Trojan horse that steals information, and could also download more files and display ads on the device.

These apps are still available on the Android market, and up to five million handsets could be infected. The popularity in Android will continue to make it a lucrative target. Unless Google does more to prevent such apps appearing, it could mean the start of defection of users to other systems.

Click on above link for more.

For emphasis: up to five million handsets could be infected. That’s it, I’m calling it: Android is the new Windows for security and virus defence. Reminds me of the late 1990s and early 2000s for the number of reported actionable vulnerabilities being reported on an almost daily basis.

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Practical Quantum Computing?

From the article:

So-called quantum key distribution is unconditionally secure–it offers perfect secrecy guaranteed by the laws of physics.

Or at least that’s what everyone thought. More recently, various groups have begun to focus on a fly in the ointment: the practical implementation of this process. While quantum key distribution offers perfect security in practice, the devices used to send quantum messages are inevitably imperfect.

It will be interesting to see how quantum computing practically differs from the theoretics of quantum physics; I suspect that efforts will be made to find ‘kludges’ that will ultimately be the source of practical problems to quantum-based security and computing efficiency. Of course, this is a similar issue that currently besets security and computing: dealing with real-world materials and accommodating imperfections (and variable modes of breaking security models that extend beyond the system being imagined) are amongst the most pressing of today’s issues.

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Humour Links

Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology

From the lede:

 MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Responding to recent public outcries over its handling of private data, search giant Google offered a wide-ranging and eerily well-informed apology to its millions of users Monday.

“We would like to extend our deepest apologies to each and every one of you,” announced CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking from the company’s Googleplex headquarters. “Clearly there have been some privacy concerns as of late, and judging by some of the search terms we’ve seen, along with the tens of thousands of personal e-mail exchanges and Google Chat conversations we’ve carefully examined, it looks as though it might be a while before we regain your trust.”

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Writing

Copyright and Valuation

A very nice SOPA infographic.

Patry, Gillespie, Wu and other academics/industry experts have (literally) written books on the absurdities concerning how the American entertainment establishment has tried to control technological development. These attempts to control technology stem from fears of what might happen to particular bodies’ revenues. Such fears tend to be hypothetical and assume that self-cannibalism of one’s own business model is inherently bad, as opposed to a necessary element of a thriving capitalist, neo-liberal, marketplace. Amazon and others have thrived on cannibalizing factions of their businesses, rightly realizing that if you get there first then you can enjoy first-mover advantage, whereas if you are the last then there is a lowered opportunity to enter into the new market environment.

Possibly the thing that sticks in my mind the most around copyright infringement comes from an economic forum I attended a few years back. One of the fashion industry’s top branding specialists was presenting and asked about how copyright threatens her (Paris, Brazilian, American) business interests.

In response, she laughed and opened a quick file off her computer. It showed just how much money the fashion industry – as a component of US GDP – was worth in comparison to the entertainment industries. Fashion was worth more than 10x as much as entertainment. After pointing out differences in scale, she simply noted that a lack of copyright protection didn’t hinder or limit brand development or product creation in fashion: instead it created a more cut throat, innovative, industry which in turn led to higher productivity and profits.

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Sign the petition: Respect the privacy of cell phone customers

ACLU:

Thanks to a nationwide ACLU campaign to learn how our cell phones are being used to monitor us, we now know that cell phone service providers keep a staggering amount of data about their customers:

  • Call records up to seven years.
  • Contact information of who you’ve exchanged text messages for up to seven years.
  • Cell tower history — which helps track the movement of your cell phone: all data from July 2008 onward.
  • Copies of paid bills for up to seven years.
  • IP addresses assigned to your device for up to one year.

Tell your cell phone service provider that you demand an explanation of the information that is kept about your account, when and how it is shared with third parties, and an easy way to control how long your private information is kept. Additionally, tell them you demand to be notified if this information is ever lost in a data breach or demanded by the government or anyone else.

If you use AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile or Verizon, this affects you.

Some of the reasons behind this data aggregation stems from law enforcement demands/expectations. Some stems from the low amount of storage all of this data (effectively) amounts to. Some stems from a need to plot out use patterns and predict growth rates. Some stems from a belief that more data is good data.

Regardless, the ACLU is right: customers should be demanding to know exactly why this data is being retained, the purposes the data is used for, and the parties that the data is shared with. Remember: if it isn’t collected or stored, it can’t be used against you in commercial, civil, or governmental practices.

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Writing

Making Sense of Twitter ‘Censorship’

Jillian York, the Director of International Freedom of Expression at the EFF, has a good (and quick) thought on Twitter’s recent decision to ‘censor’ some Tweets in particular geographical areas.

Let’s be clear: This is censorship. There’s no way around that. But alas, Twitter is not above the law.  Just about every company hosting user-generated content has, at one point or another, gotten an order or government request to take down content.  Google lays out its orders in its Transparency Report.  Other companies are less forthright.  In any case, Twitter has two options in the event of a request: Fail to comply, and risk being blocked by the government in question, or comply (read: censor).  And if they have “boots on the ground”, so to speak, in the country in question?  No choice.

In the event that a company chooses to comply with government requests and censor content, there are a number of mitigating steps the company can take.  The most important, of course, is transparency, something that Twitter has promised.  Google is also transparent in its content removal (Facebook? Not so much).  Twitter’s move to geolocate their censorship is also smart, given the alternative (censoring it worldwide, that is) – particularly since it appears a user can manually change his or her location.

I tend to agree with her position. I’m not particularly happy that Twitter is making this move but can appreciate that from an Internet governance – and national sovereignty – position that Twitter’s new policy ‘fits’ with international practices. Further, the company’s unwillingness to globally censor is positive, and limits that damage caused by state-mandated censorship.

Admittedly, I’d like to see the company go a bit further that is in line with their drive towards transparency. Perhaps if you did a keyword search in a particular geographic area you might receive a notice reading, “Some items in this search have been censored in your region” or something along those lines. Still, Twitter is arguably the best ‘good’ company that is prominent in the social networking environment at the moment, so I’ll hope they make additional steps towards full transparency rather than lambasting the company for its policy changes right now.

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Writing

On Cell Phone Bill Comparisons

Canadians often state that they are hurt by high cell phone bills and point to other jurisdictions to insist that other markets enjoy far lower prices. With cost concerns in mind, I suspect we’ll soon see reporting that, on T-Mobile’s UK network, customers can get unlimited Internet access, texts, and calls between T-Mobile users and 2000 minutes to talk with other, non-T-Mobile, customers for just under $57/month.

It should be noted, of course, that ‘unlimited Internet access’ under most T-Mobile plans is quite limited: 500MB of streaming content and upload/downloads of files are included, though browsing, social media (barring uploads and downloads of files), and email is (more or less) ‘unlimited.’

While costs are arguably higher in Canada, doing a close comparative analysis to divine cost structures across jurisdictions is fraught with difficulties, especially when quality of the network and their relative speeds are taken into consideration as well. Still, I’d love to see a default in Canada where long distance across Canada vanishes and basics like voice mail and call display are free to each and every plan. That I pay for such basic services is absolutely shameful and not something you routinely see in the US and UK.

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Writing

A Comment on GPS and Smartphones

There are a great number of concerns around GPS chips being integrated into smartphones; surveillance, third-party tracking, and profiling (to say nothing of bad results!) are all issues that technologists ‘in the know’ warn of. I don’t want to talk about any of these issues.

No, I want to say this: of the smartphones that I’ve used in the past 6 months (iPhone 3GS, Samsung Focus, BlackBerry Bold 9900, BlackBerry Torch 9800) the BlackBerry devices have the most reliable, accurate, and speedy GPS functionality. The Focus was unreliable, at best, and while the 3GS’s UI was the best it was slower and less accurate than what I enjoy with the aforementioned BlackBerry devices.

For many people the GPS is a nicety, icing on the cake. For me, I rely on my GPS and maps integration to get from points A to B. The integration between Google Maps and the iPhone was excellent, if not the fastest. Integration on the Windows Phone was poor, largely because they missed my market: I’m a conscientious traveller and so prefer public transit. Windows Phones are absolutely unable to parse transit information in any of the major or minor cities I’ve visited over the past several months. If they can’t even do a non-US world city then the integration is not ready for prime time.

While the Google Maps/GPS integration on BlackBerry has an archaic UI – it really, really, looks like it was developed several years ago (because it was) – it’s fast and reliable. UI beauty is of critical importance for getting novices to use new technologies, but UI alone is insufficient to sell consumers on the value of a device over the long term. On this basis the Windows Phone OS failed outright and iOS trailed the ‘older’, ‘archaic’ and ‘aging’ BlackBerry OS 7.1 device I’m using right now.

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Viruses stole City College of S.F. data for years

The viral infestation detailed by the Chronicle is horrific in (at least) two ways: first, that data was leeched from university networks for year after year, and second that it’s only now – and perhaps by happenstance – that the IT staff detected the security breach. From the article:

a closer look revealed a far more nefarious situation, which had been lurking within the college’s electronic systems since 1999. For now, it’s still going on. So far, no cases of identify theft have been linked to the breach. That may change as the investigation continues, and college officials said they might need to bring in the FBI.

…

Each night at about 10 p.m., at least seven viruses begin trolling the college networks and transmitting data to sites in Russia, China and at least eight other countries, including Iran and the United States, Hotchkiss and his team discovered. Servers and desktops have been infected across the college district’s administrative, instructional and wireless networks. It’s likely that personal computers belonging to anyone who used a flash drive during the past decade to carry information home were also affected.

Some of the stolen data is probably innocuous, such as lesson plans. But an analysis shows that students and faculty have used college computers to do their banking, and the viruses have grabbed the information, Hotchkiss said.

It is for precisely this kind of reason that regular updates of common, lab-based, computer equipment must be performed. These computers must centrally factor into campus security plans because of their accessibility to the public and a broad student population. I simply cannot believe that systems were so rarely refreshed, so rarely updated, and so poorly secured that a mass infection of a campus could occur, unless a university security and data protection policy were not being implemented by staff. Regardless, what has happened at this campus is an inexcusable failure: lessons should be learned, yes, but heads should damn well roll as well.

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American Internet Imperialism

Think about this for a second: you are a good, law abiding citizen, and thus break no local laws. Your state has no reason to bring criminal charges against you. Your actions, however, are provisionally criminal in another jurisdiction. As a result, despite your actions being perfectly legal in your home nation you are threatened with extradition. This is not a theoretical concern:

TVShack was a site that collected links to TV shows. Certainly, many of those shows were likely to be infringing – but TVShack did not host the content at all, it merely linked to it. Richard O’Dwyer, the guy who ran the site, was a student building an interesting project over in the UK. However, the US Department of Justice decided that he was not only a hardened criminal, but one who needed to be tried on US soil. Thus, it began extradition procedures. Even worse, nearly identical sites in the UK had already been found legal multiple times – with the court noting that having links to some infringing content was certainly not criminal copyright infringement. That makes things even more ridiculous, because extradition is only supposed to be allowed for activities that are criminal in both the US and the UK. [Emphasis added]

The implications for extradition would be significant: UK citizens could be extradited to certain countries for actions that are legal within their own nations, on the basis that they violate the laws of other countries. It is precisely this kind of process that can stifle innovation, speech, and association online. It narrows the range of speech actions whilst demanding that – prior to speaking or acting or creating – individuals consult with counsel as the first part of any serious online behaviour.

Such an approach – lawyers, then speech – is directly contradictory with basic rights that form the bedrock of our Western democracies.