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!!

Possibly related posts:

1. Misc BoingBoing links
2. Birthday updates…
3. Misc Updates

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?

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2. Privacy, DNA, and a Hamilton talk…
3. Palin’s e-mail was hacked…

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.

Possibly related posts:

1. Modern technology’s march on privacy
2. Study shows widespread violation of privacy laws
3. The meaning of privacy online for the next generation

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?

Possibly related posts:

1. Conservatives: No expectation of privacy on the Internet
2. The meaning of privacy online for the next generation
3. Privacy, DNA, and a Hamilton talk…

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)

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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.

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2. Another reason no-fly lists and terrorist watch lists are bad…
3. Goodbye Habeus Corpus (in the US) [UPDATED]

This ubiquitous shedding of personal data about you — which is stored for eternity in the elephant-like memory of the Internet — is becoming a fact of life, whether one actively contributes to it or not. Google knows what you’ve been looking for on the Internet; your bank knows what you’ve been buying, and your car company knows where and how fast you’ve been travelling to. And the government, under legislation propelled by fear, has more and more access to this essentially private information.

While I would be among the first to worry about this trend and insist on limits on what information govermments and corporations can collect and store, and on how they use it, there’s a potential beneficial side effect of this increased transparency; namely, that we as a society become more tolerant of others. When we can all see each other’s warts, perhaps we will be less inclined to call each other on them. This article about Street View in Technology News is the first pseudo-mainstream source where I’ve heard this mentioned…

Perhaps I’m still a young, naive, idealist, but I still dream of living in a society where we can be who we want to be, and express our ideas, free of persecution. Is that really too much to ask for?

Possibly related posts:

1. Conservatives: No expectation of privacy on the Internet
2. The meaning of privacy online for the next generation
3. Privacy, DNA, and a Hamilton talk…

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.

The initial concern of school officials seems reasonable enough. Even calling the police to ask him questions, although excessive, seems justifiable. It’s when they get to this that I get upset:

At that point, the boy’s mother arrived and agreed to allow the police to search the boy’s room at home. When they arrived and searched, they found five “ornamental or decorative knives of varying lengths.” Four of them “were not sharpened at all, and one was slightly sharpened”. The parents apparently didn’t know about them, and took possession of them when they were discovered. The police do not think they were weapons.

Oh boy, I don’t know where to start with this thing. You never ever let police search or enter your home. Ever. Especially when you don’t know what the hell is in it! As a parent you should be protecting your child, which means talking to themin private over this matter, and coming to your own determination of risk. Maybe you should search his room, if you were concerned. I believe very strongly that the state has no business raising people’s children.

If they want to search the hosue, let them get a search warrant. No sane judge would have given them one for this student who had done nothing wrong.

They found nothing significant in the kid’s room, and they still expelled him. Now imagine if the police had found marijuana or even cigarettes in the kid’s room.

Anyway, the states, and this kid’s parents, are just nuts.

(via BoingBoing)

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(via BoingBoing)

This reminds me of that Trusted Computing video I caught a while back, which was a longer presentation on a specific item of that video.

Local Cache: Big Brother State XVid
Lafkon – Trusted Computing

Possibly related posts:

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But maybe it’s a cheap shot to talk about reality television and Paris Hilton. Because what we’re discussing is something more radical if only because it is more ordinary: the fact that we are in the sticky center of a vast psychological experiment, one that’s only just begun to show results. More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would — and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing.

(via Bruce Schneier; also covered on BoingBoing)

Local, printable cache of article: Kids, the Internet, and the end of privacy

Possibly related posts:

1. Modern technology’s march on privacy
2. Conservatives: No expectation of privacy on the Internet
3. Privacy, DNA, and a Hamilton talk…