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A Pedophile Survivor on Bill C-30

Anne Rector gives voice to many who were systematically abused as children and who, often as a result of the abuse, are now ardent protectors of basic privacy rights. From her piece:

While I’m fairly openly about many things, my privacy has been savagely breached quite enough in this life. I should be able to preserve the tatters of personal privacy that remain, as I wish.

But this Conservative crime bill targets my privacy’s safeguards, and it’s inappropriate of politicians to use ‘pedophiles’ to strip me of them.

Just try claiming that I support child pornographers… and I’ll impart what fierce really is.

Go read the piece. It’s short. It does a good job identifying just how hurtful and harmful the Canadian Government’s equivalency of privacy advocates and child pornographers is for those who have suffered at the hands of child abusers.

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Fallout from Comodo and DigiNotar Hacks Continues

The hacking of major certificate authorities, Comodo and DigiNotar, has been somewhat addressed by certificate blacklists and revocations. Despite these measures, however, the fallout of the hacks continues. As picked up by PC Magazine,

This week Kaspersky has discovered malicious droppers – programs that install malware – bearing stolen VeriSign certificates originally issued to a Swiss company called Conpavi AG.

…

One of the droppers carries a 32-bit driver containing a malicious DLL, which gets injected into your Internet browser process. A malicious 64-bit dropper injects the DLL directly.

From there, the DLL reroutes all your search queries in Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, to a pay-per-click search engine called Search 123. Search 123 makes money off people who search and click on their results.

As a colleague of mine commented, this is just another nail in X.509’s coffin. Let’s just hope that not too many innocents are buried along with it.

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Google Chrome Addons Fingerprinting

Krzysztof Kotowicz has recently published the first part of a Chrome hacking series. In what went up mid-March, he provides the proof of concept code to ID the addons that users have installed. (The live demo – avoid if you’re particularly privacy conscious – is here.) There are various advantages to knowing what, specifically, browser users are running:

  • It contributes to developing unique browser fingerprints, letting advertisers track you passively (i.e. without cookies);
  • It enables an attacker to try and compromise the browser through vulnerabilities in third-party addons;
  • It lets websites deny you access to the site if you’re using certain extensions (e.g. a site dependent on web-based ad revenue might refuse to show you any content if you happen to be running adblock or Ghostery)

Means of uniquely identifying browsers have come and gone before, and this will continue into the future. That said, as more and more of people’s computer experiences occur through their browsers an ever-increasing effort will be placed on compromising the primary experience vector. It will be interesting to see if Google – and the other major browser vendors – decide to see this means of identifying customer-selected elements of the browser as a possible attack vector and consequently move to limit addon-directed surveillance.

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Quotations

The great evil that we as Americans face is the banal evil of second-rate minds who can’t make it in the private sector and who therefore turn to the massive wealth directed by our government as the means to securing wealth for themselves. The enemy is not evil. The enemy is well dressed.

Lawrence Lessig from Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It
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Quotations

… an institution can be corrupted in the same way Yeltsin was when individuals within that institution become dependent upon an influence that distracts them from the intended purpose of the institution. The distracting dependency corrupts the institution.

Larry Lessig from Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress – and a Plan to Stop It
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Links Writing

On Hiring Hackers

Kevin McArthur has a response to firms who are demanding highly credentialed security staff: stop it!

Much of his argument surrounds problems with the credentialing process. He focuses on the fact that the time spent achieving an undergrad, MA, and set of professional certifications leaves prospective hires woefully out-of-date and unprepared to address existing security threats.

I recognize the argument but think that it’s somewhat of a strawman: there is nothing in a credentialing process forcing individuals to solely focus on building and achieving their credentials. Indeed, many of the larger companies that I’m familiar with hire hackers as employees and then offer them opportunities to pursue credentials on their own time, on the company dime, over the course of their employment. Many take advantage of this opportunity. This serves two purposes: adds ‘book smarts’ to a repertoire of critical thinking habits and makes the company ‘stickier’ to the employee because of the educational benefits of working for the company.

Under the rubric of enabling education opportunities for staff you can get security talent that is very good and also happens to be well educated. It’s a false dichotomy to suggest that you can have either ‘book smarts’ or ‘real world smarts’: there are lots of people with both. They don’t tend to be right out of university or high school, but they are out there.

What’s more important, and what I think the real focus of the article is meant to be, is that relying on credentials instead of work accomplished is the wrong way of evaluating prospective security staff hires. On that point, we entirely agree.

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Links Writing

A Populist Critique of “Ladyphones”

Casey Johnston, over at Ars Technica, has a two-pager complaining about how tech companies design and market so-called “Ladyphones.” It’s a quick read that picks up on earlier critiques about how certain colours, and reduced technical capabilities, are associated with derogatory gender perceptions.

That said, there are at least two elements of her piece that fall short to my mind: her analysis of the BlackBerry Pearl and of the LG Windows Phone.

Johnston argues that the BlackBerry Pearl was a device marketed for women, and emphasizes the device’s high costs and pink colouration in the UK as an example of trying to extract more money from a female demographic than would be extracted from a male demographic. She also cites the Pearl’s bizarre keyboard format and limited technical specifications to further reinforce her thesis that manufactures sell second-rate products to the female market.

As someone who owned an original Pearl 8100 I don’t know how fair her critique of RIM’s product is. Pearls were RIM’s attempt to get into the consumer market generally, with the position that a full-sized keyboard was intimidating and offsetting to male and female consumers alike. Moreover, the sizes of RIM’s other smartphones at the time – designed pre-iPhone, let’s not forget! – were offsetting to most regular, non-business, consumers.

The Pearl tried to find a balance between size, consumer market expectations, and traditional BlackBerry functionality. It was also comparatively cheaper than most other smartphones at the time (and, I would note, cheaper than the popular Motorola RAZER phones), though RIM and its carrier partners haven’t necessarily reduced the costs of the phone appropriately in all regional markets. Original colours lacked pink entirely: you could buy them in black or red. New colouring – and targeting – towards particular market segments is arguably more the result of an expanded smartphone market than anything else.

I would note than Johnston is far more generous towards RIM’s marketing and branding departments than, well, any other journalist that I’ve previously read. Her assumption that RIM was so forward thinking as to brand a consumer device ‘Pearl’ to target women is massively overestimating RIM’s (traditionally very, very, very, very poor) marketing and branding departments. Finally, the technical specs of RIM’s devices are criticized from all corners, regardless of the colour or class of device (i.e. Pearl, Curve, Torch, Bold, etc), and regardless of whether the device is targeted at professional, prosumer, or consumer markets.

The other issue with the article is her analysis of the LG Windows Phone. What she’s dead right on: LG ‘partnered’ with Jill Sander to inflate the device’s cost and try to make it appeal to a certain market segment. Yep, that’s attempting to sell a device to consumers interested in or intrigued by Sander’s line of products. Where Johnston is wrong, however, is in her effort to equate low-speced Windows Phones with high cost phones.

Unlike Android and iPhone, Microsoft’s mobile phones almost universally have poor technical specifications compared to the competition. That said, Microsoft has tweaked their devices such that the specifications really don’t matter: you get excellent performance in spite of the device using older tech. As such, I don’t really think that the technical critique rings terribly true – women aren’t expected to purchase crappy Windows phones any differently then men are – though I certainly agree around the ‘branding’ of the LG device to unnecessarily inflate costs and attract a dominantly female market.

Anyways: go read the piece and develop your own opinion. Despite my two bones to pick with her evidence I think that the thesis holds and is well supported. She’s created a piece that’s short and critical, if not as deep or as powerful a critique as I’d have liked. Hopefully we see more tech sites – and mainstream news sources! – similarly take companies to task for their attempts to sell second-rate, unnecessarily gendered, products to women.

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Links

Gorgeous Windows 8 UI Concept

The Verge has a terrific piece on a concept user interface for Windows 8. It’s really, really worth taking a look at: if Windows looked that good (and, *ahem*, wasn’t a pain in the ass to run over the long-haul) then I think an awful lot of people could be visually convinced to switch from OS X to Windows.

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Aside

What the Apps Can Access

Just a few of the mobile phone apps that hoover up your information when you run them on your Android device.

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Links Writing

Poison Texts Targeting Mobile Phones

While smartphones get in the news for security reasons related to mobile malware, it’s important that we not forget about the other means of attacking mobile phones. USA Today has a piece which notes that,

One type of poison text message involves tricking people into signing up for worthless services for which they get billed $9.99 a month. Another type lures them into doing a survey to win a free iPhone or gift card. Instead, the attacker gets them to divulge payment card or other info useful for identity-theft scams. “Malicious attacks have exploded well beyond e-mail, and we are very aware of their move to mobile,” says Jacinta Tobin, a board member of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, an industry group combating the problem.

This approach is really just phishing using text messages. It’s significant, but not necessarily something that we should get particularly jumpy about. The same article recognizes that “hackers are repurposing skills honed in the PC world to attacks on specific mobile devices. Particularly, handsets using Google’s Android operating system are frequently the target of hackers.” What is missing in the article is a recognition that text-based phishing can be made considerably more effective if an individual’s smartphone has already leaked considerable amounts of personal data to the attacker via a third-party application. This is the scenario we should be leery of.

Specifically: we can easily imagine a situation where a hostile application that has been installed on a smartphone acquires enough personal information that an attacker can engage in targeted spear phishing. By getting name, address, names of friends and family, places of employment, recent photos that are geotagged, and so forth, it is possible to trick individuals by text messages to ‘give up’ information. Moreover, by first compromising devices attackers can better target specific individuals based on how the phishermen have profiled device owners: they can be choosy and target those who would either be most vulnerable or best resourced. It’s the integration of two known modes of attack – phishing and compromising smart devices – that will be particularly devastating far in excess of either attack vector on its own.