Want to see a (small) element of how your personal information is collated by major companies around the world? Watch the video and find out.
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Search Neutrality
Google’s recent decision to integrate its social services into its search product has led to (another) round of outrage. There’s some speculation that the FTC and European Commissioners could launch anti-trust investigations, on grounds that Google is leveraging their search monopoly to unfairly muscle into other markets. Many of the popular tech news and gadget blogs are in an uproar (perhaps knowing it will lead to page views), with Gizmodo proclaiming that Google’s recent action “wiped out all those years of loyalty and goodwill it had built up” because while the new Google search service is
…ostensibly meant to deliver more personalized results . .. it pulls those personalized results largely from Google services—Google+, Picasa, YouTube. Search for a restaurant, and instead of its Yelp page, the top result might be someone you know discussing it on Google Plus. Over at SearchEngineland, Danny Sullivan has compiled a series of damning examples of the ways Google’s new interface promotes Plus over relevancy. Long story short: It’s a huge step backwards.
I actually use Bing a lot – it’s the default (and sole option) for native search on my phone – and I hate it. HATE IT. It’s really an incompetent search tool at this point. Google, even after integrating social results, works far, far better. Nevertheless, I get the complaints surrounding the anti-trust issues and even agree with them, to a point.
What is that point, you might ask? Well, there has been a long-standing discussion of whether we need ‘search neutrality’ along the lines of ‘network neutrality’, on the basis that people increasingly find sites via search rather than directly plugging in URLs. Thus, Google’s new approach could be seen as constituting a violation of so-called ‘search neutrality’. So, where does the question or issue arise? It’s when we ask this: do search algorithms, or sets of search algorithms, function as networks do – are they ‘dumb’ algorithms meant to get us and data from point A to point B – or do they constitute a form of creative expression, of speech? If you see the algorithms as speech then the notion of ‘speech neutrality’ seems awkward: such neutrality would insist that individuals/corporations moderate their algorithmically-derived ‘speech’ once they reach a certain size.
Whether there are anti-trust violations from Google’s integration of their social services into search will remain to be seen. The more pressing question, however, is whether we see algorithms along the lines of speech or raw data transmission from A to B. I suspect that this question will be addressed or discussed in anti-trust cases and that is where the real action will likely take place.
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Another Playbook UI Fail
Over the past years, one of the things I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time researching and writing about has been security certificates and data transport security. This is just to say: I spend time in security and know more than a lot of non-technical people.
I have no clue what the fuck this message in the Kobo application for the BlackBerry PlayBook is doing here.
To be specific: I opened the app in a wifi-dead area that was dead in the middle of no where. There was no cell service. I checked with packet sniffing applications on my computer, there were no adhoc or other wireless networks. This kind of a warning indicates that some third-party was trying to intercept encrypted messaging traffic that was destined to Kobo’s servers but gives no indication of how or why this certificate problem was raised. In effect, it’s a warning “shit’s gone back, son!” without say “because X just happened!”
Security – on all devices – should be transparent to the user. The warning above (which I’ve seen in other PlayBook apps) is useless to the end-user because it gives no guidance as to what just happened, how to address it, or even how to learn more about the issue. While I commend RIM for making certificate errors so front and centre, presenting highly technical security information to the end-user is garbage unless you also inform them what the hell just happened.
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Comcast’s Catch-22 Position on SOPA
As noted by the folks over at Techdirt:
Just as NBC Universal and other SOPA supporters continue to insist that DNS redirect is completely compatible with DNSSEC… Comcast (and official SOPA/PIPA supporter) has rolled out DNSSEC, urged others to roll out DNSSEC and turned off its own DNS redirect system, stating clearly that DNS redirect is incompatible with DNSSEC, if you want to keep people secure. In the end, this certainly appears to suggest thatComcast is admitting that it cannot comply with SOPA/PIPA, even as the very same company is advocating for those laws.
Without presenting a single shred of evidence that Canadian police need any more power than they already have (arguable too much as it is, if Toronto’s disastrous G20 summit is any indication), you are being asked to believe that handing law enforcement agencies a blank cheque to snoop through your life is actually for your own good.
This is, of course, nonsense. Passing legislation whose only benefit is police convenience comes nowhere close to justifying the dismantling of Canadians’ privacy rights.
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Experts Again Unlawful Access in Canada
Surveillance technologies are a double-edged sword, one that often lack a hilt guard.
According to the report, a top German security official installed a trojan on his own daughter’s computer to monitor her Internet usage. What could possibly go wrong?
Nothing—well, at least until one of the daughter’s friends found the installed spyware. The friend then went after the dad’s personal computer as a payback and managed to get in, where he found a cache of security-related e-mails from work. The e-mails, in turn, provided the information necessary for hackers to infiltrate Germany’s federal police.
That was bad, but it got worse. The hackers got into the servers for the “Patras” program, which logs location data on suspected criminals through cell phone and car GPS systems. Concerned about security breaches, the government eventually had to take the entire set of Patras servers offline.
A critical read about the contemporary aims of intelligence and policing communities to expand their technical surveillance capabilities whilst reducing legal oversight of their activities. A snippet:
This post casts new light on government agency claims that we are “going dark.” Due to changing technology, there are indeed specific ways that law enforcement and national security agencies lose specific previous capabilities. These specific losses, however, are more than offset by massive gains. Public debates should recognize that we are truly in a golden age of surveillance. By understanding that, we can reject calls for bad encryption policy. More generally, we should critically assess a wide range of proposals, and build a more secure computing and communications infrastructure.
Go read the whole piece. It’ll take a few minutes, but it’ll be some of the best minutes you’ve spent today.
They tried and failed with UBB. Now they are at it again with “speed boost” technologies. The two technologies at question are Verizon’s “Turbo” service and Roger’s “SpeedBoost”. There are very few technical details, but it appears in the former case that users will be able to purchase additional instantaneous bandwidth to the detriment of other users on the same shared service. Whether this will make a difference to actual throughput is another matter because the slow video may be due to server problems and not network congestion. And if you are in elevator with very poor connectivity, you will unlikely get any faster download speed, no matter how many times you press the turbo button. But will Verizon give you a credit if you don’t get the advertised speed boost? I doubt it. Similarly the Rogers’ service, while still free, seems to imply faster speeds if they detect you are streaming a video, particularly from their own on-line service. Will users who are not streaming video, but using other real time applications get the same benefit such as VoIP or Telepresence? I doubt it.
I agree with his thrust that this kind of practice creates undue preference for certain kinds of content distribution over others. I would just note that (based on some people I’ve spoken to about Rogers’ practices) it seems like Rogers’ system temporarily ‘upgrades’ a person’s throughput capacity to try and get ‘bursty’ traffic to the end-user quickly, and to create a buffer for streaming media. Thus, if you subscribe to a 10 mbps service then you would temporarily go to a 15 mbps connection, and after those few seconds pass by you revert back to your 10 mbps speeds.
Pretty well required reading at the moment if you’re interested in the consequences of Google integrating their own social products into their search results. I’d really recommend reading the whole thing but, if not, at least take a glance at Danny Sullivan’s takeaway:
It’s not Google’s job to be sticking it to anyone with its search results. Those results are supposed to be showing what are the most relevant things for searchers out there. That’s how Google wins. That’s how Google sticks it to competitors, by not trying to play favorites in those results, nor by trying to punish people through them.
The Google+ suggestions are indeed search results, to me. Right now, they’re search results on who to follow on Google+. I think they could be better search results if they were who to follow on any social network, anywhere.
Excited Pixels 