Privacy, Security, & Encryption
I agree with Thorsten von Eicken’s comments over here on the RightScale blog that Amazon’s new Virtual Private Clouds are a BIG DEAL. (Jeff Barr’s announcement blog post is here.) Now any enterprise can create a secure tunnel into virtually unlimited instances sitting over at Amazon. No more need to design, buy, rack, configure, and [...]
Okay, so I was finally fed up with my contacts list (or social graph as the cool kids call it) looking like this and being completely unsynced and unmanageable. Once I got through the slightly hard to use website to actually pay Plaxo for a premium account (there is a 15 day trial offer BTW), [...]
Google launched Latitude – a features in Google Maps that lets you keep track of your friend’s locations. As with all technologies, this one will pose new challenges. I can’t wait for the first divorce stories to hit the press where spouses tracked their spouse’s activities and logged all of the locations they stopped. “Your [...]
Something just occurred to me. Given the massive cost efficiencies of Amazon’s cloud computing service, doesn’t that mean that the cost of brute-force decryption has also just fallen to 1 penny on the dollar compared to a year ago. Has anybody else been talking about this?
(For the most recent articles on Web 2.0, check out my full Web 2.0 articles category.) This posting has links to all of the Web 2.0 Summit 2006 blog posts that I wrote: Day 1 Enterprise 2.0 SMB Session Launch Pad Keynote with Eric Schmidt Joi Ito on Worlds of Warcraft Ben Trott of Six [...]
Here are the day 3 notes for the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco: [My notes are in this square brackets.] Harnessing Collective Intelligence with Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), Owen Van Natta (Facebook), Toni Schneider (Automattic), and Richard Rosenblatt (Demand Media) On the panel: Jim Buckmaster / CEO, Craigslist Owen Van Natta, COO of Facebook Toni [...]
THIS is the reason you don’t allow overly broad stupid legislation like the Patriot Acts I and II and the most recent Military Commission Act to pass. They are always unintended uses that far exceed the original intent of the law. In this case, a couple in their mid-forties were being overtly sexual on a [...]
Day 1 Notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA Session 1: Enterprise 2.0 Mayfield had talked about SLATES – (search, linking, authoring, tagging, extensions, and signals) finally being possible on Socialtext’s new platform that they have formed with Six Apart, and a bunch of other companies called the Intel Suite. [I side with [...]
Ben Franklin said it best: “Those who would trade liberty for a bit of safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” This is appalling. I urge everybody to watch this:
A Cornell university study has found that 44% of Amerikans favoured “some restrictions on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans.” But remember George Bush, “this is not a war of Christian against Muslim or Westerners against Easterners, it is a war on terror.” Umm, yeah, right. Shockingly, those who were most inclined to vote this [...]
Read it and weep, my Amerikan friends. And support the EFF. QUOTE December 10, 2004 A Taste of the System 02:07 AM | Current Affairs/ Drugs/ Politics Since the election, as you’ve doubtless noticed, I haven’t had much to say here. Having lost that crusade – and I do think we lost, election skullduggery notwithstanding [...]
The author of this article in The Register says it better than I could: QUOTE The plan underlying Fallujah’s ID scheme and phased return may be an effort to stop it reverting to a hostile no-go area for security forces, but it’s doubtful that this could entirely work. It won’t be possible to stop arms [...]
Once this system is in place that requires foreigners entering the U.S. from Canada to have their fingerprints scanned, it will only be a matter of a year or two or another trade dispute and suddenly the system will be extended to Canadian citizens. I would be quite happy to not visit the USA until [...]
From the Register: QUOTE Three “bored” German teenagers blew a staggering £80 million (₠130 million) in just two hours after they ran amok in an online spending spree. Using stolen credit card details the trio bought airplanes, works of art, designer clothes, restaurants, industrial machinery, patents and sound systems. They were arrested by police on [...]
This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.
Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for CNET News, covers the next degree of heat in the boiling frog pot otherwise known as the American government’s plan to track every American citizen’s communications, travel, finances, relationships, and lives from cradle to grave. This time, One section of the new proposed legislation: “…anticipates storing the ‘lifetime travel [...]
I love Ray Kurzweil. Here is a short but interesting interview from CIO magazine where Kurzweil predicts things that will sound outlandish to most people: • outsourcing is a good thing and in the bigger picture not an issue because it’s not a zero-sum game – he gives a 200 year view of these similar [...]
Bruce Schneier comments on the new “Trusted Traveller” program. Also, who’s creating all of the Orwellian program names in the U.S. government?
Cheney is trying to weasel out of his comments the other day where he said that if Americans vote for Bush, they will be safe, but if they vote for Kerry, they will likely get attacked again. Now he is saying that what he meant to say was the Bush and Kerry would RESPOND differently [...]
You have got to love the ability of spammers to adopt new measures to get their mail read. Microsoft has been pushing SenderID, but now spammers are using SenderID headers to get through the filters. When I attended a Privacy conference about four years ago in Quebec, a Microsoft rep was there talking about how [...]
The American government’s penchance for secrecy above all continues unabated. Defense Tech news reports that a bill has now passed, which puts all remote sensing data into the hands solely of the U.S. Government and its allies, where allies is defined in the law itself. So, the data is not classified and it is not [...]
It is utterly incomprehensible how the U.S. Justice department can have a secret law that people are supposed to adhere to when they don’t know what it is, and that when challenged in court, that they would claim that the court case itself must also be kept secret, because knowledge of the case would inhibit [...]
I don’t even have the energy to write much about this much-maligned system that was CAPPS and then CAPPS 2 and now SecureFlight. It is essentially a passenger screening system (like the flawed one I wrote about here and here) that has cost $100M to date and that is being relaunched with a new, friendly [...]
Bruce is one of my favourite security authors. He has a very macro view of the world and his reasoning on security issues is always well-thought out and pragmatic. He has written an article on CNET about how he sees the ongoing American dissolution into a police state that is happening right now. QUOTE We [...]
Reuters is covering the story of how EPIC extracted through the Freedom of Information Act the fact that the Census Bureau pulled Arab-American data out and gave it to the Department of Homeland Paranoia. I’m not sure what pisses me off more – that the DHP requested this info, that the Census Bureau provided it [...]
Dan Gillmor points out in this posting a great little Flash animation developed by the ACLU that shows a customer trying to buy a pizza but the pizza company is connected to a master database containing the client’s work and home addresses, recent purchases, credit record, and health insurance. Bizarre and chilling all at once.
I have put these articles into this blog because I am seeing a whole host of news and interesting articles now that I refer to as evolution articles that cover ongoing mutation-based miniature arms-races where both sides are actively developing their skills and each side often holds the upper hand for only a short time [...]
The Universe is 14 billion years old and will either either re-collapse into itself, expand into a completely diluted state, or rip apart in its 36th billion year in a runaway expansion so violent that galaxies and planets will be torn asunder in a fraction of a second. How do we manage the polarity inherent [...]
