Monthly Archives: July 2010

What is going on with LaPorte?

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Leo LaPorte is a long time tech journalist, doing everything from radio shows, TV shows, and now a full Internet-based network, TWIT, devoted to tech.

Lately, he has been very displeased with Apple and Steve Jobs. Now, as shown in the video below, he seems to have accused Jobs of having some kind of interest in pornography.  This followed recent remarks by Jobs to the effect that he wants to keep porno off the iPhone and iPad.

I think it is safe to say that LaPorte is unlikely to be invited to Apple press events in the near future.

Your secrets: collected and sold (updated)

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The Wall Street Journal has published a series of reports that reflect a comprehensive review of the current state of Internet tracking. It shows, sometimes in startling detail, just how much information is being tracked, analyzed, and sold without the knowledge of users of the Net.

The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.

  • The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.
  • Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.
  • These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

This is the kind of coverage that will get the attention of average users and, hopefully, the Federal Trade Commission. It is time at long last to make all Internet tracking “opt-in” so that users explicitly decide whether to waive their privacy or not. Users should have this basic right. And it is bad enough that the data is collected, but there are generally no limits whatsoever on the use of the collected data by any person for any purpose.

By the way, one way to fight back against this kind of tracking is to go the opt-out page of the Network Advertising Initiative and opt-out of all the member advertising networks.

Update: Doc Searls offers his reaction to the WSJ series and also recommends (for Firefox users) trying TACO to block third-party tracking cookies.

Tech quote of the day

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Today, one of the top issues on my mind, hey there’s a category — tablets.  Apple has done an interesting job. They’ve sold more than I’d like them to sell. We think about that.  So it’s our job to say, we have got to make things happen. Just like we made things happen with netbooks, we have to do that with Slates.”

– Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.  Good luck with that. I am not at all sure that the world is waiting for tablets running Windows 7.

Disclosure: I own Apple stock.

FBI wants more warrantless data (updated x2)

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Chalk this up as another Obama breach of campaign promises. He claimed that he would rebalance civil liberties in national security matters, at least partially restoring traditional privacy rights of citizens. Instead, he is proposing a broadening of the information that the FBI can require ISPs to produce regarding individuals. And this production can be required without a warrant and merely on the basis of a claim by a local FBI field office.

The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.

But what officials portray as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity strikes industry lawyers and privacy advocates as an expansion of the power the government wields through so-called national security letters. These missives, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret. They are the mechanism the government would use to obtain the electronic records.

Stewart A. Baker, a former senior Bush administration Homeland Security official, said the proposed change would broaden the bureau’s authority. “It’ll be faster and easier to get the data,” said Baker, who practices national security and surveillance law. “And for some Internet providers, it’ll mean giving a lot more information to the FBI in response to an NSL.”

This is outrageous. And a flat repudiation of Obama’s campaign pledges.

Update: By the way, why do we need court review of subpoenas from the FBI? How about because of this.

Update 2: Now the New York Times, in an editorial, notes the same breach of campaign promises by the Obama administration.

In 2008, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion saying this discrepancy meant the F.B.I. could no longer ask for the information. Many Internet providers stopped turning it over. Now the Obama administration has asked Congress to make clear that the F.B.I. can ask for it.

These national security letters are the same vehicles that the Bush administration used after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to demand that libraries turn over the names of books that people had checked out. The F.B.I. used these letters hundreds of thousands of times to demand records of phone calls and other communications, and the Pentagon used them to get records from banks and consumer credit agencies. Internal investigations of both agencies found widespread misuse of the power, and little oversight into how it was wielded.

President Obama campaigned for office on an explicit promise to rein in these abuses. “There is no reason we cannot fight terrorism while maintaining our civil liberties,” his campaign wrote in a 2008 position paper. “As president, Barack Obama would revisit the Patriot Act to ensure that there is real and robust oversight of tools like National Security Letters, sneak-and-peek searches, and the use of the material witness provision.”

Android app steals data

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From Apple Insider:

An app distributed by Google’s Android Market has collected private data from millions of users and forwarded it to servers China, validating Apple’s uniquely strong stance on mobile security in the iPhone App Store.

The exploit, tied to an app that appeared to simply load free custom background wallpapers, was downloaded “anywhere from 1.1 million to 4.6 million times. The exact number isn’t known because the Android Market doesn’t offer precise data,” according to a report by Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat.

The app “collects a user’s browsing history, text messages, your phone’s SIM card number, subscriber identification, and even your voice mail password. It sends the data to a web site, www.imnet.us. That site is evidently owned by someone in Shenzhen, China,” the report noted.

The data theft was only discovered afterward, through forensics performed by mobile security firm named Lookout which sells virus and malware protection software for Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices. The problem was announced at the Black Hat security conference being held in Las Vegas.

Information on 100 million Facebook users (updated)

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I have been warning for some time that Facebook’s complicated and difficult privacy settings are unfair to users who have difficulty understanding, let alone managing, their data on Facebook.

Now it turns out that data on 100 million Facebook users is being shared via Bit Torrent on the Net. Not by Facebook, but by some sketchy individual. Facebook replies that it is all data that users have allowed to be published to the open Web. A more correct statement is that it is data that users had no idea how to protect, due to Facebook’s carelessness with such data and unduly complex privacy settings they expect their users to manage.

The list, which has been shared as a downloadable file, contains the URL of every searchable Facebook user’s profile, their name and unique ID.

If you have a Facebook account, get out now.

Update: Coincidentally, Gawker today released an entire paparazzi profile of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder. Although I am no fan of Gawker, this coverage something I like to call “instant karma.”

If it feels a little naughty to take such a close look into Zuckerberg’s life, remember that this is the executive who pushed the private information of Facebook’s hundreds of millions of users progressively further into the public sphere. Facebook turned users’ friends lists into public information; it asked them to either publicize their likes and interests or delete such information entirely; it removed the option to conceal their profile photos; Facebook even let some partner websites tap into profiles without asking. The list goes on and on.

Etiquette of technology

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Paggy Nelson writes about the new etiquette developing around individuals who are always connected to networks, via their cellphones. She calls it the “etiquette of the flow.” We want to be connected and satisfying that desire is changing the rules of etiquette, and fast. Worth a read.

We’ve moved from the etiquette of the individual to the etiquette of the flow.

This is not mob rule, nor is it the fearsome hive mind, the sound of six billion vuvuzelas buzzing. This is not individuals giving up their autonomy or their rational agency. This is individuals choosing to be in touch with each other constantly, exchanging stories and striving for greater connection. The network does not replace the individual, but augments it. We have become individuals-plus-networks, and our ideas immediately have somewhere to go. As a result we’re always having all of our conversations now, flexible geometries of nodes and strands, with links and laughing and gossip and facts flying back and forth. But the real message is movement.

Certain times and locations have been crucibles for the rapid development and proliferation of ideas; for example, 18th century coffeehouses, or the 19th century’s café society. But now we assemble virtually, via the mobile technologies of the conversations themselves. The new coffeehouse is not a place per se, it’s a feature.

Eventually I learned to stop worrying and love the flow. The pervasiveness of the new multiplicity, and my participation in it, altered my perspective. Altered my Self. The transition was gradual, but eventually I realized I was on the other side. I was traveling with friends, and one of them took a call. Suddenly, instead of feeling less connected to the people I was with, I felt more connected, both to them and to their friends on the other end of the line (whom I did not know). My perspective had shifted from seeing the call as an interruption to seeing it as an expansion. And I realized that the story I had been telling myself about who I was had widened to include additional narratives, some not “mine,” but which could be felt, at least potentially and in part, personally. A small piece of the global had become, for the moment, local. And once that has happened, it can happen again. The end of the world as we know it? No — it’s the end of the world as I know it, the end of the world as YOU know it — but the beginning of the world as WE know it. The networked self is a verb.

Film a cop, go to jail

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A motorcyclist in Maryland, who happened to be wearing a helmut camera, was stopped by a police officer. The motorcyclist recorded the video of what happened next, including the cop drawing a gun. He posted the video on YouTube, and now faces a wiretap charge under Maryland law his efforts. Ridiculous. And the ACLU is defending him. The idea that citizens cannot record the activities of police officers in public is outlandish and offensive.

Much more from Digby.

Oh, and here is the video.

The intervention worked

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The New York Times highlights a report from two prominent economists that indicates that the various Federal actions in the wake of the economic collapse substantially improved the situation.

In a new paper, the economists argue that without the Wall Street bailout, the bank stress tests, the emergency lending and asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, and the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus program, the nation’s gross domestic product would be about 6.5 percent lower this year.

In addition, there would be about 8.5 million fewer jobs, on top of the more than 8 million already lost; and the economy would be experiencing deflation, instead of low inflation.

The paper, by Alan S. Blinder, a Princeton professor and former vice chairman of the Fed, and Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, represents a first stab at comprehensively estimating the effects of the economic policy responses of the last few years.

Another take on the report is available from David Leonhardt.

This is good news for Democrats heading into this fall’s election. However, the deniers on the right will no doubt refuse to accept any validity in the report.

The end of fishing

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A great article from the current New Yorker. Elizabeth Kolbert on the rapid demise of fish in our oceans due to over-fishing.

If the Atlantic bluefin tuna were the first species to be fished into oblivion, its destruction would be shameful. But, of course, its story has become routine. Cod, once so plentiful off the coast of Newfoundland that they could be scooped up in baskets, are now scarce. The same goes for halibut, haddock, swordfish, marlin, and skate; it’s been calculated that stocks of large predatory fish have declined by ninety per cent in the past half century. In 1943, Rachel Carson was a young biologist working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service when she wrote a booklet titled “Food from the Sea.” The point of the boosterish guide was to convince American consumers of the delectableness of fish like the wolffish, an enormous creature with a bulbous head, big teeth, and an eel-like body. Wolffish is “one of New England’s underexploited fishes, a condition that will be corrected when housewives discover its excellence,” Carson wrote. Apparently, she was so persuasive—and bottom trawling so wrecked its habitat—that the wolffish is now considered a threatened species.

The sorry state of ocean life has led to a new kind of fish story—a lament not for the one that got away but for the countless others that didn’t. In “Saved by the Sea: A Love Story with Fish” (St. Martin’s; $25.99), David Helvarg notes that each year sharks kill some five to eight humans worldwide; meanwhile we kill a hundred million of them. Dean Bavington, the author of “Managed Annihilation: An Unnatural History of the Newfoundland Cod Collapse” (University of British Columbia; $94), observes that two hundred billion pounds’ worth of cod were taken from Canada’s Grand Banks before 1992, when the cod simply ran out. In “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food” (Penguin Press; $25.95), Paul Greenberg estimates that somewhere in the range of a hundred million salmon larvae used to hatch in the Connecticut River each year. Now the number’s a lot easier to pin down: it’s zero. “The broad, complex genetic potential of the Connecticut River salmon,” Greenberg writes, has “vanished from the face of the earth.”