Techdirt is off today for Memorial Day. We'll be back with our regular posting schedule tomorrow!
Fogbugzd's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week
from the rebuilding-the-internet dept
By J. Evan Noynaert, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Missouri Western State University
This was a short week at Techdirt thanks to the Labor Day holiday in the United States. Even though it was a short week, we may eventually see it as a pivotal week in the emerging NSA revelations. We started seeing some push-back against the scope of the snooping when we saw the author of the Patriot Act, Jim Sensenbrenner, and members of the Church Commission tell a court that the NSA had gone too far. Even more surprising is that they did it in support of an ACLU lawsuit (and Sensenbrenner's brief was with the EFF); the NSA/FISA scandal is making strange bedfellows. The government continues to face push-back from other sources. Some of these were symbolic, such as the Brazilian President's threat to cancel a US visit over NSA spying. She also backed it up with a threat to cancel four billion dollars worth of contracts with US companies. That is just the sort of thing that tends to get real attention in Washington these days.
And apparently the scandal is getting some attention in the Obama administration as well as in the NSA itself. The NSA review board is now accepting comments on aspects of the scandal that the rest of the NSA won't even acknowledge. The White House CIO seemed to be refuting the claims that we shouldn't worry because "just metadata was collected" He gave a great explanation about how much can be revealed by "just metadata," especially if you collect vast quantities of it. Even President Obama got in on the act by wavering ever so slightly. True, he is still in denial about many aspects of the situation, but the acknowledgment that we may need some changes is at least a glimmer of hope. So the administration as a whole seems to be entering the schizophrenic phase of policy development. It is going to be interesting in the coming weeks to see how they resolve the issue. We can hope that they come down on the side of openness, but there is still a great danger that they will manage to gag the dissenters and go back to stonewalling.
I had a real dilemma when Mike asked me to write this week's favorites. I didn't have a favorite post for my "Favorite Posts" post. Then I awoke to my salvation. Mike published "Online Security isn't Over; It's Just Beginning." It is the call to arms that we need. Mike quoted Micah Lee:
Giving up and deciding that privacy is dead is counterproductive. We need to stop using commercial crypto. We need to make sure that free software crypto gets serious security and usability audits.The NSA scandal should be a wake-up call to everyone involved in technology (basically everyone). There are things we can do now. We should probably start by assuming that every commercial cryptography product has been compromised. Every commercial operating system is suspect. The NSA seems to have gotten backdoors introduced into just about every major commercial security product including many that are not US based companies. We have to assume that if NSA can get in, then so can others. Apparently one of the NSA's surprises when they bugged the UN was that the Chinese were already there. Perhaps the most troubling thing about the NSA's methods is that they preferred to have backdoors installed in the software. An NSA backdoor makes life simple for the NSA. But backdoors almost always compromise the security of the software overall. Backdoors can often be opened by others; they are one more lock that can be picked by an intruder. Backdoors also tend to be patches on existing security systems. Given the fine-tuning that goes on in the design of security systems, tacking on a backdoor often involves some sloppy methods that give attackers additional soft spots that can be exploited.
If we do this right we can still have privacy in the 21st century. If we give up on security because of this we will definitely lose.
If people start turning their backs on commercial security solutions they will probably have to embrace some of the excellent open source security solutions. It is much harder if not impossible to build backdoors into software that the open source community obsesses over as it goes line-by-line through the code. But that's not to say that open source is fully safe. I will admit to being one of the conspiracy nuts who has been concerned that the NSA has influenced the development of some protocols and has managed to sneak in some subtle tells and weaknesses. The open source community needs to revisit all of its software systems and look for hidden weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Techdirt has been calling for rebuilding the Internet since at least 2003. This brings me to my penultimate favorite article of the week, "The US Government Has Betrayed the Internet; It's Time to Fix That Now." The title aptly sums up our current situation. The US Government has betrayed the Internet as well as the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, American Citizens, and our allies. The easiest to repair of all those betrayals is the Internet. As technology leaders we can start that process now. Ironically, the NSA has served up the perfect opportunity to make it very difficult to spy on the Internet.
So it will be interesting to see what will come in the week ahead. One thing that surprised me as I looked back through the week's posts, we hadn't heard from Team Prenda, and it felt like we really needed that kind of comic relief. Thankfully, just as I was finishing this post, Team Prenda delivered.
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It sounds a lot like the design philosophy of pebble watches. It doesn't try do do everything. Battery life is still an issue.
This plus a Raspberry PI could be an interesting combination.
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Big tech companies are disruptive. That makes them unpopular with older, established companies who are not happy that their reign is threatened.
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Does anyone else remember Obama's pledge not to employ lobbyists? I don't remember the details. It was long, long ago and apparently in a galaxy far, far away.
It does seem that our new Corporate Overlords seem like friendly folk. At least we've got that going for us.
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The backers of the trade agreements should learn from their failures in this round. Allowing governments and third party "stakeholders" to be involved in the negotiations causes far too many problems. In the future the major corporations should work out the details among themselves. Then have fast track approval put the agreements into effect. Governments and citizens can see the contents after the agreements are ratified and become law. This would cut out the arguing and angst and give about the same results as the current system.
Re: As a holder of a ThD...
No Pastafarian has ever used his religion as a reason to bomb an abortion clinic or fly an airplane into a building.
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Wonderful. Class action. That means that the lawyers will make a fortune. Customers will probably get something like a $10 credit toward the purchase of a new data plan from Verizon.
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You should feel free to spin it any way you want. Every political pundit out there is reading this set of tea leaves to say whatever they want.
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I used to work in city government. We had a history of being hit by tornadoes, and we took disaster planning and disaster drills very seriously. Most of the disaster drills involved tornadoes. We got hit with a couple of real disasters that were not tornadoes when I was there. It turns out that the tornado drills had provided us with experience in any type of disaster, even if it wasn't remotely related to what we had trained for.
The lesson I learned was that it was important to train for disasters, and it didn't really matter what type of disaster you were planning for. Many skills, especially communications, will come into play in any disaster. We developed contacts with other agencies, we collected maps and information resources. My first year there we discovered we had a shortage of barricades for blocking streets. A few years later we discovered that even though we had bought barricades, they had been loaned to another city after that city had a disaster and we had not gotten the barricades back.
I think training or planning for zombies or space aliens or anything else is perfectly fine. In any type of disaster there are going to be similar issues you have to think about -- communications, evacuations, traffic and crowd control, emergency housing, distributing food and water, and medical community support. The important thing is to plan and train for disasters. The Zombie Apocalypse may sound frivolous, but it forces the participants to think and exercise their response skills. If it is a bit bizarre it is also going to force the participants to think a bit outside the box.
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At first I was surprised that the patent omitted the phrase "one click" of the camera. Then I realized they already had a patent on that part of the process.
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Lots of people rely heavily on Amazon reviews. The comments are a great asset for Amazon. Sometimes I even check the Amazon reviews before buying in a brick and mortar. Last week I was doing that and ended up just buying the item from Amazon because they had a brand that I liked better than anything I was finding locally.
Amazon really can't afford to have companies like this damage the reputation of its review system. It will be interesting to see if they take any action on this particular situation.
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It sounds like he is channeling his inner Steven Colbert.
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The feds are probably just practicing. Once they get the kinks out of the system, get the banks used the closing accounts on request, and get precedents set to "protect the children" then they can go after the real targets. Suspected copyright infringers are probably next. Then they can move on to political dissent.
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I bought a Nexus directly from Google because I loathe bloatware. I was furious that it came with HP printer software. To add insult to injury it updates very frequently.
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It is easy to see why the movie and recording industries are in love with the windowing model.
*It used to work so well and was extremely profitable.
*The careers of many industry executives was built around clever manipulation of the windowing model.
Those are very powerful reasons for keeping something around. Of course, there are some downsides:
*Windowing does not make nearly as much sense give a global internet
*It is no longer as profitable as it used to be. In fact, it is probably reducing profits.
*It encourages piracy.
*Its existence may threaten the survival of the industry in its current form.
For inbred corporate insiders, none of those reasons are good enough to change a way of doing business that you know and love.
Re: Re: This is...
>>Hopefully it will land on a judge who understands the implications of letting Garcia have her way.
Given the current state of affairs, I have slim hope of any currently sitting judge understanding copyright or the implications of bad copyright rulings. However, there is a very good chance the judge will be an ex-MPAA attorney, and I'm sure the MPAA wants this ruling to go away as quickly as possible.
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>>One of the things that you will see, if you study the history of innovation, is that this is exactly how it always happens. The early projects may have some minor successes here and there, but are littered with failures. But the amazing thing about a rapidly changing world where people are doing things in a decentralized and open way is that each of those failures only contributes to the knowledge for future projects, in which more and more people are testing more and more things, getting closer to hitting that point in the "innovator's dilemma" curve, where the new systems actually serve people's needs much better than the old way.
This is exactly why software patents are such a terrible idea. The whole process breaks down if the first person patents the idea. The chances of real progress are greatly diminished if the first person gets a patent. With the patent office and East District of Texas finding that it is OK to patent general ideas the situation is even worse because someone will be likely to patent the original idea in some vague form and never even bother to produce the essential first failure. Yes, it is probably unfair that later innovators eventually reap most of the profits from early essential failures, but that is the price of progress. And in fairness, even those early failures were almost certainly produced on the backs of other, more distant failures.
I singled out software patents as being especially bad, but that is mainly because the pace of software innovation can be so rapid in the absence of software patents. "Design patents" are another case where the patent system blocks innovation, or as the constitution says, promoting progress in the arts and sciences. In practice, most patents are bad because they stifle progress which is the opposite of the purpose stated in the US Constitution.
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The concept of the "Year of the Linux Desktop" is something of a running joke in the open source community. It is to the point where no one in the Linux community will dare declare next year as the Year of the Linux Desktop.
But honestly, the time has finally arrived when we really need a year of the Linux desktop. The technologically challenged should probably be running Linux Mint with a Cinnamon desktop instead of Windows. Linux in any GUI form would keep our grandparents out of many of their computer troubles. The more technologically proficient can find a version of Linux that will meet their needs and preferences.
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>>any time you see someone insisting that "the answer" to dealing with widespread infringement is "more education," you know that you're dealing with someone who is either ignorant, or not particularly serious concerning the issue.
The third alternative: Someone has figured out a way to make a healthy salary from pandering to the IP industry and their fears of the copyright boogeyman.
In retrospect, I should have gone into the snakeoil business years ago.
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This could be interesting. If Disney wins it could set some nice precedents about copying ideas as opposed to actual expression. Could we please get a ruling that says "A moose is not rabbit?"
I suspect Disney will go for a settlement rather than risking a winning a case that might weaken copyright.
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I have noticed a disturbing trend that some parts of the government trying to criminalize poverty. Meanwhile other parts of government are promoting policies that increase number of people forced to live in poverty.