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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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Turning IT Into a Profit Centre

Jeffrey Carr has some amusing thoughts on transforming IT in corporate businesses from a cost to a profit centre. Just a taste of the humour:

The good news, or at least potential good news since no one is doing this yet, is that the undiscovered malware lurking on corporate networks potentially represent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in income for the corporation. And since it resides on the corporate network, it becomes the property of that corporation. All of a sudden, something that you’ve viewed only as a threat and an expense has become a valuable commodity thanks to the trend in selling offensive malware to government agencies.

One can easily imagine how his article, slightly reworked, would have made an excellent April fool’s column.

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How foreign firms tried to sell spy gear to Iran

Steve Stecklow is one of the few reporters that has continued to write about Iran’s acquisition of surveillance equipment for the past several years. At this point he has a good grasp of how the technology gets into the country, what’s done with it, and why and how vendors are evading sanctions. His article earlier this year provides a good look at how Huawei and ZTE alike have sold ‘lawful intercept’ equipment to the Iranian government. I’d highly recommend taking a look at what he’s written.

Categories
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”
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Quotations

2012.12.10

When it comes to a backhoe versus fiber, the backhoe always wins.

Jim Reese, from Steven Levy’s In The Plex
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Incredibly Detailed Outing of Android UI Problems

Ron Amadeo has a terrific and comprehensive post on all the various Android UI issues. Well worth the read if UI and UX is something you pay attention to.

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The issue here is that data reduced to paper form loses much of its usefulness. The effect is to take power away from the recipient of the data (and by extension in this case from you as a citizen) and conserve it in a government institution as much as possible. Unless the user is bloody-minded enough to re-enter it manually, which of course is only possible at a certain scale.

On the topic of Canadian FOI responses; read the blog post here
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Feudalism 2.0

Bruce Schneier has a clever piece discussing the contemporary model of ‘feudal security’, where user have committed themselves to differing lords of the Internet. As a taste:

Some of us have pledged our allegiance to Google: We have Gmail accounts, we use Google Calendar and Google Docs, and we have Android phones. Others have pledged allegiance to Apple: We have Macintosh laptops, iPhones, and iPads; and we let iCloud automatically synchronize and back up everything. Still others of us let Microsoft do it all. Or we buy our music and e-books from Amazon, which keeps records of what we own and allows downloading to a Kindle, computer, or phone. Some of us have pretty much abandoned e-mail altogether … for Facebook.

These vendors are becoming our feudal lords, and we are becoming their vassals. We might refuse to pledge allegiance to all of them – or to a particular one we don’t like. Or we can spread our allegiance around. But either way, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to not pledge allegiance to at least one of them.

Feudalism provides security. Classical medieval feudalism depended on overlapping, complex, hierarchical relationships. There were oaths and obligations: a series of rights and privileges. A critical aspect of this system was protection: vassals would pledge their allegiance to a lord, and in return, that lord would protect them from harm.

Of course, I’m romanticizing here; European history was never this simple, and the description is based on stories of that time, but that’s the general model.

And it’s this model that’s starting to permeate computer security today.

The rest of the piece is clever; highly recommend taking a read.

Categories
Quotations

2012.12.4

… sacrifices often involve the rights and liberties of minorities and dissidents, so the costs aren’t born equally by all in society. When people say they’re willing to give up rights and liberties in the name of security, they’re often sacrificing the rights and liberties of others rather than their own.

Dan Solove, Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security