I should be less surprised to have to say this than I am: Google’s trials in China have nothing whatsoever to do with censorship. In spite of the often breathless accounts of Google’s fight against the Empire, this is not a David and Goliath hero story. When the issue was censorship or the Great Firewall of China, Google made their choice: sell, sell, sell.
I’m not as altogether opposed to that decision as I know many on both the Right and the Left are. I am of a persuasion that believes that the more money and the more power flows through a society, the more inevitably free that society becomes. At least, to a point. It is certainly self-evident in China’s case that controlling information is a cornerstone of a closed society.
But that is all water under the bridge. The issue before us now is not one of censorship, but of politico-industrial espionage. Threatening to lower the firewalls on Google.cn’s service is merely Google’s way of putting pressure on the Chinese government where it hurts. Google found evidence it claims as fairly indisputable that China launched attacks on the email accounts of Gmail users as well as 34 other companies. The Gmail users were apparently dissidents within and without China’s borders.
For Google, this is a classic pocketbook issue: maintaining the security of Gmail accounts is paramount to maintaining the viability of that revenue source. It is also true that Gmail accounts are tied to a host of other Google products, from Google Docs to Google Talk, iGoogle and many others. The security issue flows well outside the email system and compromises Google’s entire empire right down to the fledgling Android OS.
For the US, currently catching heat from the press for remaining silent on the issue, this is an extremely complex issue for which rash, Bush-era responses are ill-fitted. While many in this country would like to consider China an enemy and weave paranoid stories of conquest, the truth is much stickier. They are certainly a chief rival in a world with a sizable power vacuum – political and economic. They could quickly become an enemy, but for now and in public, they are not.
Plus, every country worth it’s salt is messing around with Cyber-spying. We can’t possibly have clean hands, nor really is it in our national interest to be so driven-snow pure. Throwing stones is not in anyone’s interest, either. Let’s not forget that the Internet’s first iteration was the ARPANet, a wholly military-scientific enterprise of the United States’ design.
But I think that, in the wake of an eight-year administration, our media gets used to a certain way of doing things at the White House. Doubtless the Bush Administration would have had some bellicose words about “Freedom” and “Democracy” within moments of hearing of the suspected attack. I think we can all agree, upon reflection, that’s just stupid.
Via TL on FaceBook, a federal judge rules in a case vs Microsoft that IP addresses are not personal information… because they identify a computer, not a person.
So, to be clear: your car’s VIN number is not personal information; your address is not personal information; your place of employment is not personal information. Because none of it specifically identifies you, merely things associated with you. That’s good to know, because I’ll bet a lot of us thought differently up till now….
One might make the argument that, since IP addresses are leased by your cable or phone company – and since one IP address could actually be used for a number of different computers over time – IP addresses are therefore not your property. But if by using your IP address, an entity can narrow your location down to a few houses, that’s close enough to private information in my book.
Apologies for the self-reference, but over at my web design discussion website, I posted an article which I think probably bears some reference on my political one:
It seems Google has decided to change it’s AdSense code to allow it to read Internet user’s cookies and advertise to them based on their browsing history. Why is this a bad idea? Well, let me count the ways (I already did).
This is something for all of you who use Google AdSense on your websites to consider. Personally, I’m not going to be forced to change my privacy policy to satisfy Google’s need to violate or at least dangerously skirt the law. If this plan goes through, I’m ditching AdSense.
Am I the only one who thinks that a company that cannot plug a simple security hole in their social networking site should not be trusted to automatically grab data from your grandma’s sugar monitor?
I’ve just been informed by a friend of the website that DFE appears to be getting blocked by a local store offering WiFi access to its customers. I shan’t mention their name until I’ve confirmed it myself, and since this is a store with multiple locations, I’ll also be checking more than one place. There don’t seem to be any other blogs from Rochester blocked, according to our friend, SM.
This could be an oversight: proxy filters tend to be overly restrictive by default. This could be technical: one store could have a minor bug, whereas if DFE’s being filtered in more than one location, it suggests a policy. Either way, its the purview of any company to allow or block whatever they like on their own network. But it’s an interesting case, nonetheless, and an excuse to take the laptop and do some investigating. So, I think that’s what I’ll do.
Those of you who use FireFox are familiar with the fact that you can install add-on scripts to make the browser more useful to you in a variety of ways. For example, I use a plugin called FireBug which slices and dices the code on a page to help me track down problems with web design or make live changes to the code to see how it will effect the site before I commit it to actual data. I also use a plugin which allows me to post any video I see on the Internet to a service called VodPod, which I’ve discussed at length before.
Well, now there is another plugin which is causing quite a stir and could lead to some pretty interesting clones and spin-offs. . . as well as some interesting complaints and even possible lawsuits. Welcome to the new Pirates of the Amazon, a plugin that identifies the album you’re viewing on Amazon.com and then takes you to a link where you can download a free torrent of the same album. “Where,” you ask? Why, ThePirateBay.org, where else?
I’ve been discussing this plugin at some length with a friend of this site, MC, all afternoon.
The thing is: try as they might, no one has been able to tie The Pirate Bay down to any kind of illegal activity. Strictly speaking, there really isn’t anything illegal about file sharing in the first place, but that’s splitting hairs, for the sake of this discussion. So the question is: who made this plugin? If they’re affiliated with TPB in any way, then there’s a possibility that we’re one step closer to a TPB conviction for something. If not, then I don’t see how either party is doing anything which can be considered illegal. They claim not to be affiliated with ThePirateBay.org, but I suppose that’s still an open question for now.
And even if TPB is directly responsible for this new plugin’s creation, is there really anything more illegal or questionable about what they’ve created than what they’ve done in the past? My sense is that no, there isn’t anything really new here to prosecute, but I don’t doubt that there’s a prosecutor out there just itching to take this one on.
And forgetting the legal implications of this particular plugin aside, what other similar projects might loom just over the horizon? What about a button that sends you to Google Shopping Search to find the product you’re looking for, only cheaper elsewhere? Or an instant eBay link? Or even something sinister like a cheap online drug alternative to something you see at Rite-Aid? You could even create a plugin that disables all “Buy Now” buttons on pages where your shopaholic teenagers are always lurking.
And all of this happens on your own PC, presumably without the phishing or security implications. But there *is* a privacy concern: namely any attempt by Amazon or others to remove this sort of plugin from your system means they would be violating your privacy.
We’re only seeing the beginning of this, I can promise you that.
Those of you who read this blog know I try to post any suspicious emails I see online for the benefit of the community. I’ve been recieving emails lately – which correspond quite well with actual purchases for the holidays – that purport to be from UPS. The body of the email goes something like this:
Unfortunately we were not able to deliver postal package you sent on Oct the 28 in time because the recipient’s address is not correct. Please print out the invoice copy attached and collect the package at our office Your UPS
The sender’s domain name is bostonequipment.com, which is a legit domain name, but unlikely to be the sender’s real domain.
The “invoice” in question is, of course, a zip file. People: never, never, never open a zip file from someone you didn’t know was going to be sending you one. This includes friends and relatives. You never know when one of these dastardly little bastards is a virus, and what you think is an email sent by a friend may actually be virus activity your friend knows nothing about.
There were any number of issues I’d wanted to get to yesterday and didn’t. But this was one of the big ones:
MSNBC is reporting that the days of corporate police are getting closer all the time, at least on the Internet. A new law quietly but unanimously passed through the Congress, which goes into effect at the first of the year, begins the process of compelling your ISP to snoop through every file passed back and forth from your computer to the Internet in search of kiddie porn:
But such monitoring just became easier with a law approved unanimously by the Congress and signed on Monday by President Bush. A section of that law written by Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain gives Internet service providers access to lists of child porn files, which previously had been closely held by law enforcement agencies and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Although the law says it doesn’t require any monitoring, it doesn’t forbid it either. And the law ratchets up the pressure, making it a felony for ISPs to fail to report any “actual knowledge” of child pornography.
And we all hate the idea of kids being used by letchers of the world for profit and malice, so this is the kind of provision that gets passed into law without a second thought by a lot of Congress critters. But let’s you and I give it that second though, shall we?
First above all, since when is a corporation required to snoop on it’s customers by the government? And where does it stop? If your ISP or Google is forced to reveal private data of it’s customers, we should be worried that FedEx, Kinko’s or the Wegmans One Hour Photo Lab will be the next corporate entities pressed into the service of corporate policing of citizens. Call me old fashioned, but I’d always thought of the local police department or the FBI as the sort of agencies that were better off as public services, rather than private enterprises.
Secondly, to bring the discussion back to the Internet, let us consider who is going to be affected by this law: everybody. Well, no. Not quite everybody. Those of possessed of a relatively nominal level of computer sophistication will have no problem at all getting around anonymously on the Internet. Even if that means driving around looking for unprotected WiFi hotspots to get their porn from. Criminals, in other words, will always find a way around the system.
So that leaves everybody else. All the people not going out of their way to hide their identities on the Internet. All the people who are – in the end – doing nothing wrong. They’re the ones who are left completely open to having every single email, every single Christmas purchase, every single lookup of herpes, alcoholism, battered women’s shelters, or gambling problems filtered and categorized for the benefit of. . . well, anyone with access to that data, do you suppose?
And at what point does some of the other information not related to kiddie porn also become fair game? When does the government decide that – as long as we’ve got all this data lying around – it would be a good idea to look into possible drug use or illegal downloads or simply saying things in an IM session that someone determines is “dangerous?”
You’ve heard all these arguments about privacy and free speech in the past. The question is: when is someong going to do something about it?
In yet another sign of the slowly eroding rights we citizens of the U.S. thought the government was there to protect, DHS has announced that it has been tracking your every border crossing for the last year. Even more worrisome, they cite an unspecified “new technology” that they’re testing out as a reason for tracking this data. What is this new technology and what is it’s purpose?
The Washington Post is reporting that recently disclosed Homeland Security policies lay claim to the right to indefinitely detain your laptop PC, iPod or other electronic device without probable cause and share the information stored on those devices with third-party companies. It’s all a part of making you feel safer. Do you feel safer, yet?
I’m sure I’m basically wasting time trying to argue logically about the policies of an organization which is neither founded upon nor governed by rational interests in security. Nevertheless, let me point out that border security – especially airport security, for which this rule seems largely designed – is about preventing dangerous items from entering a plane or the country. Such things include guns, knives or shoe bombs. Or more than one lighter at a time. Or toothpaste.
So really, there is no logical reason for needing to interpret data on a PC or iPod hard-drive, is there? Other than an attempt to bully and intimidate travelers, I mean.
