DancingSamurai.ca

Well, I’m taking a bit of a break from catching up on the mounds of paperwork from my practice. My son is busily banging his toys on the floor beside me… for the moment managing to forget his erupting teeth (thankfully!!).

I’m going to have to lower the mattress in his crib – he’s making attempts to pull himself upright even as I speak, and although not yet successful, it’s only a matter of time… bless his adventurous little heart!!

Anyway, here are a couple of updates from the web:

• Via BoingBoing: A hilarious chart illustrating one of the problems with the movie industry – the product you pay for is far inferior to the product you can get for free. Obviously, people want the better product, even if it is illegal:
• School in the states gives their students laptops, but doesn’t tell them that they can turn the webcams on at any time. Even when said laptop is at home. In their bedroom. 1984, anyone? (But they only use this feature if the laptop has been stolen. Honest!)
• BoingBoing has a page for ‘Games to Get‘ – a list of their recommended games. Most are small, indie titles that are quite interesting, that you would otherwise never hear about. Check it out!
• CHIP and PIN – used in Europe for a while and being pushed in North America – is totally flawed (at least, the European implementation). What good is relying on the PIN & chip on the card for verification when you can trick the device into thinking it’s checked everything without actually checking? (via Schneier and BoingBoing)

And that’s about all for now… OK, back to work!!

BoingBoing points out a couple of concerning stories from the US – In Tiburon (apparently a smally, idyllic town with a very low crime rate) officials want to photograph every car / license plate entering and leaving town, and are using the classic “if you’re innocent, what have you got to hide?” justification. (BoingBoing post)

I think there are plenty of Google Street View examples of people caught in embarrassing but legal situations, for one. Bruce Schneier actually wrote a piece on privacy and has some good replies:

Some clever answers: “If I’m not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what’s wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these — as right as they are — is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It’s not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (“Who watches the watchers?”) and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest — or just blackmail — with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies — whoever they happen to be at the time.

The other related post is a story about Baltimore was thinking plastering their buses and trains with microphones and recording all conversations of passengers and drivers. Just in case. They even asked for a legal opinion about this, and hastily withdrew the proposal when they realized the public could find out about it.

I feel echoes of the Stasi here… am I wrong? What would Orwell think?

Check out the Search Engine Interview with the latest conservative dunderhead in our government. Cory’s paraphrasing about sums it up:

Search Engine: Here’s some audio of your predecessor promising, on behalf of your party and your government, never to ever allow the police to wiretap the Internet without a warrant.

Minister (as though he had been off on another planet): We never promised not to do that.

Search Engine: What about all the personal information that you guys are now proposing to give to the cops without a warrant?

Minister (tragically unclear on the subject): We’re not requiring ISPs to give out any personal information without a warrant, just your real name, your home address, your IP address, your home and cell number…

Search Engine: Huh. Well there’s this really critical, high profile court ruling that calls all that stuff private information?

Minister (pretending he didn’t hear): The courts have ruled that this isn’t private information. Canadians have no legitimate expectation of privacy when they use the Internet, not when it comes to your name, address, cell phone number, etc

Search Engine: Do the cops really need to get this information without a warrant?

Minister: Oh yes. There are MONSTROUS BABY-EATING CHILD PORNOGRAPHERS WHO ADVERTISE THAT THEY ARE ABOUT TO SEXUALLY ASSAULT A LIVE CHILD IN TEN MINUTES and we need to be able to run down their IPs without talking to a judge first.

Search Engine: But when a child is endangered, the law already allows you to get this information without a warrant, right?

Minister: Why are you still asking questions? Didn’t you hear me? BABY-EATING CHILD PORNOGRAPHERS! Surely that settles the matter.

Some juvenile hackers got into Sarah Palin’s yahoo e-mail account, after allegations that she was using this private address to conduct government business and evade any potential scrutiny of said e-mails.

Last I checked, the screenshots were available on rapidshare.

UPDATE: Ed Felten with some thoughts.

Glenn Greenwald points out the irony here:

Still, it’s really a wondrous, and repugnant, sight to behold the Bush-following lynch mobs on the Right melodramatically defend the Virtues of Privacy and the Rule of Law. These, of course, are the same authoritarians who have cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years — put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans’ telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown — all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.

[...]

Shouldn’t these same people be standing up today and insisting that if Sarah Palin has done nothing wrong, then she should have nothing to hide? If Sarah Palin isn’t committing crimes or consorting with The Terrorists, then why would she care if we can monitor her emails? And if private companies such as Yahoo can access her emails — as they can — then she doesn’t really have any “privacy” anyway, so what’s the big deal if others read through her communications, too?

… it may be all your porn. Or personal documents.

Whenever we brought our computer in to get fixed when I was younger (before I was the uber-geek I am now and could fix them myself), my dad was always — in my mind — obsessively paranoid about deleting anything personal from the hard drive before handing it over. I guess he was right (not that he had any porn).

The article has some good suggestions — throw all your files onto a TrueCrypt partition and noone without the passkey can get to it. Safe and not too inconvenient.

I really should do the same, in case of say theft of my machine(s). Also I need to figure out how to do this and then sync the file to an off-site backup with my webhost without too much overhead. Ah, the myriad of things on my todo list…

(via BoingBoing)

I mentioned the Canadian No-Fly list last October. Unfortunately, it has materialized and is coming into effect shortly.

This CBC article is reassuringly critical, calling into question the government’s unsupported statements that “it works”, pointing out obvious flaws (using a fake ID bypasses the whole thing), and points out the potential to inconvenience — or worse; see Maher Arar — innocent people.

I wish we weren’t becoming more like the US every day. (Although I like our dollar being so high… *grin*).

Updated: Michael Geist points out that the Privacy Commissioners have called to suspend this list.

I’m sure many of you have heard about Google’s new Street View feature, where they give you a car’s view of any street in their selected pilot cities. This is great if you’re itching to find out what that storefront you’ll be searching for in rush hour traffic looks like, for example. The problem some people have with it is that to get this images, Google drove vans around said cities and photographed stuff. Including the people who were in said streets at the time (including people urinating or just leaving strip clubs, for example). Not to mention that people’s bedrooms and cars were visible, too.
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I remember a time back in high school when we were playing first person shooters all the time. You know, for fun. I often thought of making a map of our school to run around in, instead of some random weird maze. I never did, because my artistic skills are awful.

Well, some poor kid in Texas actually did what I had thought to do (and probably lots of people have done). He made a level for CounterStrike that looked like his school. Unfortunately, it came to the attention of the school… and then the police… and with the spectre of Virginia Tech hanging over things, everybody flipped out. They ended up expelling this kid.
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