Category: Security

Security is immunity from the will of others.

FileVault in Lion

While the interface changes in Mac OS X Lion are confusing, the whole-disk encryption provided by FileVault is a definite step forward.

People who have their laptops stolen and then find their confidential documents posted all over the internet really have no excuse. If it is sensitive, it should be encrypted – especially if it is on a portable device that cannot be wiped remotely.

I hope a future release of iOS includes comparable whole-disk encryption capabilities. iPhones and iPads are even easier to lose than laptops.

Fight spam! Gain life satisfaction!

Spammers are getting especially annoying these days, with targeted messages.

I have been striking back, though. My honey pot has recently caught a few of them red-handed, to be reported to such authorities as there are for such things.

If you run a web server and you want to help combat the scourge of spam, consider joining Project Honeypot.

You get a certain definite measure of satisfaction when they email you to let you know that your honeypot has helped to identify a server contributing to spam, such as by harvesting email addresses.

So far, I have contributed to the identification of a few dozen malicious IP addresses, hopefully preventing quite a lot of spam.

Supreme Court supportive of InSite

The Supreme Court of Canada’s unanimous decision to support Vancouver’s safe injection site is very encouraging, particularly in the present political context. Overall, the direction of Canada’s policy toward illegal drugs is depressing and frustrating. We are choosing the emulate the country with the worst drug policy in the developed world – the United States. We are pursuing a hopeless policy of prohibition, while trying to shut down options with a better chance of success, such as those that seek to reduce the harm associated with addiction.

Politicians often choose to cater to the irrational fears and biases of the general population. Judges are a bit freer to consider the ethics and evidence that bear upon a situation. That seems to be what the Supreme Court has done in this case:

During its eight years of operation, Insite has been proven to save lives with no discernible negative impact on the public safety and health objectives of Canada. The effect of denying the services of Insite to the population it serves and the correlative increase in the risk of death and disease to injection drug users is grossly disproportionate to any benefit that Canada might derive from presenting a uniform stance on the possession of narcotics.

Hopefully, this ruling will prompt a broader rethink of how Canada deals with drugs that are currently prohibited.

Related:

Cross-platform crypto

The world really needs a secure, free, easy-to-use, cross-platform encryption system. At the most basic, it would allow you to have a USB drive with encrypted contents and be able to access those contents using a passphrase from any computer – Mac, PC, Linux, etc – you happen to use.

Big bonus points if you can run the software without administrative privileges. That’s important, since so many work, public, and borrowed computers will not allow you to install software that requires an admin password.

I pleaded for such a thing back in 2008, but I still don’t think it exists.

Stockholm’s Dialogue Police

This seems quite interesting:

Protests in Europe against Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2009 quickly turned violent—but not in Sweden. A special unit in Stockholm, known as the Dialogue Police, is credited with this success. “They have legitimacy in the eyes of the community,” says Clifford Stott, an expert in crowd behaviour at the University of Liverpool, “because they facilitate peaceful protest, they don’t carry guns and they can’t arrest people.”

Has anyone read anything more about this organization?

Civilian unmanned aerial vehicles

For about US$2,000, you can get a pretty ridiculous camera-equipped UAV, which can be controlled by radio at a range of up to 15km. People fly them using live video streaming to goggles.

One group of people using these drones has made some impressive videos of places like New York City and the Matterhorn. Their work is pretty audacious, both in terms of how they flirt with the destruction of their drones by flying close to obstacles and because of how they flirt with trouble with the authorities by flying low in major urban centres.

These drones may have been part of the inspiration for the drone-related plot points in William Gibson’s latest novel, Zero History.

Related:

Web-connected door control

You know what would be very convenient? If the door to your home had an RFID card reader so that it could be programmed to let in anyone with a particular card. You could give houseguests a few days worth of access, without having to worry about getting keys back from them.

Because it would be web-connected, you could authorize people to have access to your home remotely. You could even have an option for unlocking the door through a web interface – for instance, in order to let a repairperson into your place.

There would need to be good security all along the line, from the radio communication between the RFID cards and the reader to the communication between the door control system and you via the web. Rather than try to achieve that though proprietary means, it would be better to publish all the hardware plans and software code and let people spot weaknesses that could then be fixed.

Why I left Facebook

I have been worried about Facebook for years. I worry about how personal information on users is their most valuable asset, and the ways in which they may seek to profit from it. More generally, I worry about the unintended consequences of creating massive searchable databases on social interactions.

What actually prompted me to ‘deactivate’ (not ‘delete’ yet) was two things.

Excessive time demands

First, Facebook is too time-demanding. People expect me to keep up to speed on their many postings, despite how there are hundreds or even thousands of status updates that appear every day. If you advertise your event on Facebook and I miss it completely, it is probably because I was trying to get some reading done, or enjoying a walk and a cup of coffee, or dealing with my neverending flood of unanswered email and so I missed the status update message or invitation for a few days.

If you really want me to know about something, you must at least send me a text or an email. Putting notice on Facebook (or Twitter, or your own website) is not a sufficiently attention-grabbing action to ensure that I will see it.

As I am writing this, I am ignoring a sizeable collection of projects that are in need of attention. I should be working on finding an apartment in Toronto, packing up my current apartment, and making plans for how to move. I should be researching possible doctoral programs, working on my research proposal, and corresponding with possible references and supervisors. I should also be reading various books from various stacks of semi-read tomes, refining my low carbon mutual fund idea, improving my chess, getting exercise, exploring some elements of Ottawa that are still unknown to me, planning a trip to Washington D.C., planning a trip to New Orleans, writing articles and letters to editors, processing and uploading photos, going out and taking new photos. I should be taking university courses, learning practical skills, responding to letters, searching for photographic gigs, learning to drive, joining clubs, going camping, and improving my data backup regime.

All of those tasks are better uses of time than Facebook.

Privacy

Second, I am worried about facial recognition. The only barrier to it becoming absolutely ubiquitous seems to be the availability of data on our faces. The cameras are already out there, and the software and the computing power to turn pixels representing faces into names are coming inevitably.

Someone with a lot of determination can dig around the internet and probably find dozens of photos of me to feed into a facial recognition algorithm. While I was on Facebook, however, this process was simplified to the point of easy automation. In thousands of photos, I had been specifically identified and even had the region of the photo containing my face marked.

Still not too isolated

So far, I have been glad to be off that particular grid. Anyone who actually wants to contact me has a wide variety of ways to do so. My email address and cellphone number are both on the ‘contact me’ page of my blog, and my blog comes up immediately when you Google my name. If that is too much work for a person to go through, it seems fair to say that they didn’t really want to contact me in the first place.

I don’t want to delete my Facebook account completely because it does have some value to me as an archive. Nearly all my photos from Oxford are in there, with tags and comments affixed. If Facebook provided a way to download all that as an elegant, accessible archive that can be used offline I would be happy to do so. I doubt, however, that they will ever provide such a tool. All their plans hinge on attracting people to the site and making them visit as often as possible. Helping them untangle themselves and walk away with whatever data they find valuable runs completely counter to that. Facebook actually lets you download your photos easily in quite a good archive format.

I will miss the chance to see what distant friends are up to easily, and to have the occasional fortuitous bit of contact with them. I will try to remember to send an out-of-the-blue email every once in a while.

P.S. I left LinkedIn too, but who cares about LinkedIn?

Automated facial recognition

As processing power becomes cheaper and smarter software is produced, it seems inevitable that more and more people and organizations will begin to identify people automatically by recognizing their faces with surveillance cameras.

London’s Heathrow airport is planning to install such a system, and Facebook may be the ultimate database to let freelancers do it themselves.

To me, it is all rather worrisome. At a basic level, life becomes more paranoid and less creative and interesting when you are being watched at all times and all of your actions are being archived forever. It’s only a matter of time before photos from every fun party ever are being combed through by investigative journalists hoping to catch someone who has become famous in an embarrassing-looking situation. Facial recognition allows for the creation of databases that can be used for truly evil purposes, from suppression of political dissent to stalking and blackmail.

Like nerve gas, facial recognition technology is probably one of those things that it would be better if we could un-invent.