GigaOm writer Miguel Valdes Faura points to things like social networking and tools like Salesforce’s Chatter as things that are gradually replacing email.

Look, here’s the thing — the beauty of (most) email is that it is based on an open protocol, SMTP. I have email I sent and received in the late 1980s that I can still read on an email client that was just released yesterday, thanks to the wide support for SMTP.

I’ve also had the same email address for 16 years even though I’ve changed email hosts 6 or 7 times during that period. During a small part of those 16 years, my email was hosted at another company, but for most of the time I’ve owned the server that my email domain ran on. Today, it is dirt cheap for anyone to grab a domain name and a hosting account that includes a mail server.

Social networking and similar systems are largely the antithesis of prevailing state of affairs with email. I can use my Google+, Twitter, Facebook and other accounts only because those companies have decided to continue to allow me to — and their Terms of Service make it clear they can change their mind at any moment and cut me off for pretty much any reason.

On the other hand, if I get fed up with one of my social networks, there’s little I can do but close my account and leave. Since all of these companies use proprietary standards, I can’t easily move my Twitter account to Facebook, much less even consider moving either account to my own webserver.

I can (and do) get my data out of these systems, with varying degrees of difficulty, but just having static copies of the data doesn’t come close to replicating my account. Moreover, most of these systems seem to be getting less open. Twitter, for example, used to make it obvious where the RSS feed for your tweets was, but now they hide it like they’re ashamed of it (or, more likely, can’t figure out how to monetize it).

Every time I read someone write about relying on social networking or closed systems, I always think of the BBC’s Domesday Project — an early attempt at creating a digital artifact in which more than a million people participated. But, of course, the Domesday Project is famous in part because the BBC chose to use a proprietary technology that quickly became obsolete and almost rendered the entire project unreadable.

Social networking, as it is currently constituted, is one giant Domesday Project just waiting to happen.

Related posts:

1. World Backup Day – Backing Up Gmail from Windows with MailStore
2. Champions Online Adds In-Game Social Networking Features
3. Facebook Is Evil, But People Are Stupid

Gray comes down closer to the latter view,

I have a very high opinion of children’s abilities to make good choices about how to use their free time, as long as they really have choices. Some kids go through long periods of doing what seems like just one thing, and then some adults think there’s something wrong, because they (the adults) would not make that choice. But in my experience, if kids are really free to play and explore in lots of different ways, and they end up playing or exploring in what seems to be just one way, then they are doing that because they are getting something really meaningful out of it.

In my family, both my wife and I play a lot of video games. And what we emphasize to our kids is the importance of balance. Mom plays World of Warcraft, but she doesn’t say, “I’m not going to make dinner or go to work today because I’d rather play video games.” In fact, although we play a lot of video games, we also do a lot of reading, and other activities in our free time.

We’re more project-oriented than time-oriented at our house. Kids get home at 4 p.m. and bedtime is 9 p.m. Each day there are a certain number of tasks that each child is expected to finish, whether that is homework, helping out with dinner, cleaning, etc. Once our children have finished the tasks we expect them to finish that day, they are free to use their free time as they wish. Sometimes that means my 9 year old whips off a three hour session of World of Warcraft or Skyrim. More often it means they tend to mix up their activities, alternating between watching television, playing video games, reading, or other activities such as playing board games or going swimming.

Which is not to say I wouldn’t step in and place limits on my children’s screen time if they failed to live up to their responsibilities. My son knows the laptop in his room is there because he does such a good job of keeping up with all of the things my wife and I expect him to do, and that it can easily be removed or the password changed if he acts inappropriately (something we’ve only had to do a handful of times).

No related posts.

No related posts.

Pretty much, must watch/read (transcript below):

The Coming War on General Computation
Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com

Presented at 28C3

Introducer:

Anyway, I believe I’ve killed enough time … so, ladies and gentlemen, a
person who in this crowd needs absolutely no introduction, Cory Doctorow!

[Audience applauds.]

Doctorow:

[[27.0]] Thank you.

[[32.0]] So, when I speak in places where the first language of the nation is
not English, there is a disclaimer and an apology, because I’m one of
nature’s fast talkers. When I was at the United Nations at the World
Intellectual Property Organization, I was known as the “scourge” of the
simultaneous translation corps; I would stand up and speak, and turn around,
and there would be window after window of translator, and every one of them
would be doing this [Doctorow facepalms]. [Audience laughs] So in advance,
I give you permission when I start talking quickly to do this [Doctorow
makes SOS motion] and I will slow down.

[[74.1]] So, tonight’s talk — wah, wah, waaah [Doctorow makes 'fail horn'
sound, apparently in response to audience making SOS motion; audience
laughs]] — tonight’s talk is not a copyright talk. I do copyright talks
all the time; questions about culture and creativity are interesting enough,
but to be honest, I’m quite sick of them. If you want to hear freelancer
writers like me bang on about what’s happening to the way we earn our
living, by all means, go and find one of the many talks I’ve done on this
subject on YouTube. But, tonight, I want to talk about something more
important — I want to talk about general purpose computers.

Because general purpose computers are, in fact, astounding — so astounding
that our society is still struggling to come to grips with them: to figure
out what they’re for, to figure out how to accommodate them, and how to cope
with them. Which, unfortunately, brings me back to copyright.

[[133.8]] Because the general shape of the copyright wars and the lessons
they can teach us about the upcoming fights over the destiny of the general
purpose computer are important. In the beginning, we had packaged software,
and the attendant industry, and we had sneakernet. So, we had floppy disks
in ziplock bags, or in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like
candy bars and magazines. And they were eminently susceptible to
duplication, and so they were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was
to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.

[[172.6]] Enter DRM 0.96. They started to introduce physical defects to the
disks or started to insist on other physical indicia which the software
could check for — dongles, hidden sectors, challenge/response protocols
that required that you had physical possession of large, unwieldy manuals
that were difficult to copy, and of course these failed, for two reasons.
First, they were commercially unpopular, of course, because they reduced the
usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers, while leaving the
people who took the software without paying for it untouched. The
legitimate purchasers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they
hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they
resented the inconvenience of having to transport large manuals when they
wanted to run their software. And second, these didn’t stop pirates, who
found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication.
Typically, the way that happened is some expert who had possession of
technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor
itself, would reverse engineer the software and release cracked versions
that quickly became widely circulated. While this kind of expertise and
technology sounded highly specialized, it really wasn’t; figuring out what
recalcitrant programs were doing, and routing around the defects in shitty
floppy disk media were both core skills for computer programmers, and were
even more so in the era of fragile floppy disks and the rough-and-ready
early days of software development. Anti-copying strategies only became
more fraught as networks spread; once we had BBSes, online services, USENET
newsgroups, and mailing lists, the expertise of people who figured out how
to defeat these authentication systems could be packaged up in software as
little crack files, or, as the network capacity increased, the cracked disk
images or executables themselves could be spread on their own.

[[296.4]] Which gave us DRM 1.0. By 1996, it became clear to everyone in
the halls of power that there was something important about to happen. We
were about to have an information economy, whatever the hell that was. They
assumed it meant an economy where we bought and sold information. Now,
information technology makes things efficient, so imagine the markets that
an information economy would have. You could buy a book for a day, you
could sell the right to watch the movie for one Euro, and then you could
rent out the pause button at one penny per second. You could sell movies
for one price in one country, and another price in another, and so on, and
so on; the fantasies of those days were a little like a boring science
fiction adaptation of the Old Testament book of Numbers, a kind of tedious
enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information and
the ways we could charge them for it.

[[355.5]] But none of this would be possible unless we could control how
people use their computers and the files we transfer to them. After all, it
was well and good to talk about selling someone the 24 hour right to a
video, or the right to move music onto an iPod, but not the right to move
music from the iPod onto another device, but how the Hell could you do that
once you’d given them the file? In order to do that, to make this work, you
needed to figure out how to stop computers from running certain programs and
inspecting certain files and processes. For example, you could encrypt the
file, and then require the user to run a program that only unlocked the file
under certain circumstances.

[[395.8]] But as they say on the Internet, “now you have two problems”. You
also, now, have to stop the user from saving the file while it’s in the
clear, and you have to stop the user from figuring out where the unlocking
program stores its keys, because if the user finds the keys, she’ll just
decrypt the file and throw away that stupid player app.

[[416.6]] And now you have three problems [audience laughs], because now you
have to stop the users who figure out how to render the file in the clear
from sharing it with other users, and now you’ve got four! problems,
because now you have to stop the users who figure out how to extract secrets
from unlocking programs from telling other users how to do it too, and now
you’ve got five! problems, because now you have to stop users who figure
out how to extract secrets from unlocking programs from telling other users
what the secrets were!

[[442.0]] That’s a lot of problems. But by 1996, we had a solution. We had
the WIPO Copyright Treaty, passed by the United Nations World Intellectual
Property Organization, which created laws that made it illegal to extract
secrets from unlocking programs, and it created laws that made it illegal to
extract media cleartexts from the unlocking programs while they were
running, and it created laws that made it illegal to tell people how to
extract secrets from unlocking programs, and created laws that made it
illegal to host copyrighted works and secrets and all with a handy
streamlined process that let you remove stuff from the Internet without
having to screw around with lawyers, and judges, and all that crap. And
with that, illegal copying ended forever [audience laughs very hard,
applauds], the information economy blossomed into a beautiful flower that
brought prosperity to the whole wide world; as they say on the aircraft
carriers, “Mission Accomplished”. [audience laughs]

[[511.0]] Well, of course that’s not how the story ends because pretty much
anyone who understood computers and networks understood that while these
laws would create more problems than they could possibly solve; after all,
these were laws that made it illegal to look inside your computer when it
was running certain programs, they made it illegal to tell people what you
found when you looked inside your computer, they made it easy to censor
material on the internet without having to prove that anything wrong had
happened; in short, they made unrealistic demands on reality and reality did
not oblige them. After all, copying only got easier following the passage
of these laws — copying will only ever get easier! Here, 2011, this is as
hard as copying will get! Your grandchildren will turn to you around the
Christmas table and say “Tell me again, Grandpa, tell me again, Grandma,
about when it was hard to copy things in 2011, when you couldn’t get a drive
the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every
movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken,
everything, and transfer it in such a short period of time you didn’t even
notice it was doing it, tell us again when it was so stupidly hard to copy
things back in 2011″. And so, reality asserted itself, and everyone had a
good laugh over how funny our misconceptions were when we entered the 21st
century, and then a lasting peace was reached with freedom and prosperity
for all. [audience chuckles]

[[593.5]] Well, not really. Because, like the nursery rhyme lady who
swallows a spider to catch a fly, and has to swallow a bird to catch the
spider, and a cat to catch the bird, and so on, so must a regulation that
has broad general appeal but is disastrous in its implementation beget a new
regulation aimed at shoring up the failure of the old one. Now, it’s
tempting to stop the story here and conclude that the problem is that
lawmakers are either clueless or evil, or possibly evilly clueless, and just
leave it there, which is not a very satisfying place to go, because it’s
fundamentally a counsel of despair; it suggests that our problems cannot be
solved for so long as stupidity and evilness are present in the halls of
power, which is to say they will never be solved. But I have another
theory about what’s happened.

[[644.4]] It’s not that regulators don’t understand information technology,
because it should be possible to be a non-expert and still make a good law!
M.P.s and Congressmen and so on are elected to represent districts and
people, not disciplines and issues. We don’t have a Member of Parliament
for biochemistry, and we don’t have a Senator from the great state of urban
planning, and we don’t have an M.E.P. from child welfare. (But perhaps we
should.) And yet those people who are experts in policy and politics, not
technical disciplines, nevertheless, often do manage to pass good rules that
make sense, and that’s because government relies on heuristics — rules of
thumbs about how to balance expert input from different sides of an issue.

[[686.3]] But information technology confounds these heuristics — it kicks
the crap out of them — in one important way, and this is it. One important
test of whether or not a regulation is fit for a purpose is first, of
course, whether it will work, but second of all, whether or not in the
course of doing its work, it will have lots of effects on everything else.
If I wanted Congress to write, or Parliament to write, or the E.U. to
regulate a wheel, it’s unlikely I’d succeed. If I turned up and said “well,
everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that
every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from
the bank robbery? Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would of
course be “no”. Because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still
generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys.
And we can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that
we’d be foolish to risk them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies by
changing wheels. Even if there were an /epidemic/ of bank robberies, even
if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies, no-one
would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

[[762.0]] But. If I were to show up in that same body to say that I had
absolute proof that hands-free phones were making cars dangerous, and I
said, “I would like you to pass a law that says it’s illegal to put a
hands-free phone in a car”, the regulator might say “Yeah, I’d take your
point, we’d do that”. And we might disagree about whether or not this is a
good idea, or whether or not my evidence made sense, but very few of us
would say “well, once you take the hands-free phones out of the car, they
stop being cars”. We understand that we can keep cars cars even if we
remove features from them. Cars are special purpose, at least in comparison
to wheels, and all that the addition of a hands-free phone does is add one
more feature to an already-specialized technology. In fact, there’s that
heuristic that we can apply here — special-purpose technologies are
complex. And you can remove features from them without doing fundamental
disfiguring violence to their underlying utility.

[[816.5]] This rule of thumb serves regulators well, by and large, but it is
rendered null and void by the general-purpose computer and the
general-purpose network — the PC and the Internet. Because if you think of
computer software as a feature, that is a computer with spreadsheets running
on it has a spreadsheet feature, and one that’s running World of Warcraft
has an MMORPG feature, then this heuristic leads you to think that you could
reasonably say, “make me a computer that doesn’t run spreadsheets”, and that
it would be no more of an attack on computing than “make me a car without a
hands-free phone” is an attack on cars. And if you think of protocols and
sites as features of the network, then saying “fix the Internet so that it
doesn’t run BitTorrent”, or “fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no
longer resolves”, then it sounds a lot like “change the sound of busy
signals”, or “take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network”, and
not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking.

[[870.5]] Not realizing that this rule of thumb that works for cars and for
houses and for every other substantial area of technological regulation
fails for the Internet does not make you evil and it does not make you an
ignoramus. It just makes you part of that vast majority of the world for
whom ideas like “Turing complete” and “end-to-end” are meaningless. So, our
regulators go off, and they blithely pass these laws, and they become part
of the reality of our technological world. There are suddenly numbers that
we aren’t allowed to write down on the Internet, programs we’re not allowed
to publish, and all it takes to make legitimate material disappear from the
Internet is to say “that? That infringes copyright.” It fails to attain
the actual goal of the regulation; it doesn’t stop people from violating
copyright, but it bears a kind of superficial resemblance to copyright
enforcement — it satisfies the security syllogism: “something must be done,
I am doing something, something has been done.” And thus any failures that
arise can be blamed on the idea that the regulation doesn’t go far enough,
rather than the idea that it was flawed from the outset.

[[931.2]] This kind of superficial resemblance and underlying divergence
happens in other engineering contexts. I’ve a friend who was once a senior
executive at a big consumer packaged goods company who told me about what
happened when the marketing department told the engineers that they’d
thought up a great idea for detergent: from now on, they were going to make
detergent that made your clothes newer every time you washed them! Well
after the engineers had tried unsuccessfully to convey the concept of
“entropy” to the marketing department [audience laughs], they arrived at
another solution — “solution” — they’d develop a detergent that used
enzymes that attacked loose fiber ends, the kind that you get with broken
fibers that make your clothes look old. So every time you washed your
clothes in the detergent, they would look newer. But that was because the
detergent was literally digesting your clothes! Using it would literally
cause your clothes to dissolve in the washing machine! This was the
opposite of making clothes newer; instead, you were artificially aging your
clothes every time you washed them, and as the user, the more you deployed
the “solution”, the more drastic your measures had to be to keep your
clothes up to date — you actually had to go buy new clothes because the old
ones fell apart.

[[1012.5]] So today we have marketing departments who say things like “we
don’t need computers, we need… appliances. Make me a computer that
doesn’t run every program, just a program that does this specialized task,
like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make
sure it doesn’t run programs that I haven’t authorized that might undermine
our profits”. And on the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea — just
a program that does one specialized task — after all, we can put an
electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and
we don’t worry if it’s still possible to run a dishwashing program in a
blender. But that’s not what we do when we turn a computer into an
appliance. We’re not making a computer that runs only the “appliance” app;
we’re making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some
combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from
knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and
from terminating processes that she doesn’t want. In other words, an
appliance is not a stripped-down computer — it is a fully functional
computer with spyware on it out of the box.

[audience applauds loudly] Thanks.

[[1090.5]] Because we don’t know how to build the general purpose computer
that is capable of running any program we can compile except for some
program that we don’t like, or that we prohibit by law, or that loses us
money. The closest approximation that we have to this is a computer with
spyware — a computer on which remote parties set policies without the
computer user’s knowledge, over the objection of the computer’s owner. And
so it is that digital rights management always converges on malware.

[[1118.9]] There was, of course, this famous incident, a kind of gift to
people who have this hypothesis, in which Sony loaded covert rootkit
installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that
watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs, and terminated them,
and which also hid the rootkit’s existence by causing the kernel to lie
about which processes were running, and which files were present on the
drive. But it’s not the only example; just recently, Nintendo shipped the
3DS, which opportunistically updates its firmware, and does an integrity
check to make sure that you haven’t altered the old firmware in any way, and
if it detects signs of tampering, it bricks itself.

[[1158.8]] Human rights activists have raised alarms over U-EFI, the new PC
bootloader, which restricts your computer so it runs signed operating
systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures
from OSes unless they have covert surveillance operations.

[[1175.5]] And on the network side, attempts to make a network that can’t be
used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance
measures that we know from repressive governments. So, SOPA, the U.S. Stop
Online Piracy Act, bans tools like DNSSec because they can be used to defeat
DNS blocking measures. And it blocks tools like Tor, because they can be
used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the proponents of SOPA,
the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing
research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as
are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these
measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in
America, too!

[audience laughs and applauds] Don’t applaud me, applaud the MPAA!

[[1221.5]] Now, it may seem like SOPA is the end game in a long fight over
copyright, and the Internet, and it may seem like if we defeat SOPA, we’ll
be well on our way to securing the freedom of PCs and networks. But as I
said at the beginning of this talk, this isn’t about copyright, because the
copyright wars are just the 0.9 beta version of the long coming war on
computation. The entertainment industry were just the first belligerents in
this coming century-long conflict. We tend to think of them as particularly
successful — after all, here is SOPA, trembling on the verge of passage,
and breaking the internet on this fundamental level in the name of
preserving Top 40 music, reality TV shows, and Ashton Kutcher movies!
[laughs, scattered applause]

[[1270.2]] But the reality is, copyright legislation gets as far as it does
precisely because it’s not taken seriously, which is why on one hand, Canada
has had Parliament after Parliament introduce one stupid copyright bill
after another, but on the other hand, Parliament after Parliament has failed
to actually vote on the bill. It’s why we got SOPA, a bill composed of pure
stupid, pieced together molecule-by-molecule, into a kind of “Stupidite
250″, which is normally only found in the heart of newborn star, and it’s
why these rushed-through SOPA hearings had to be adjourned midway through
the Christmas break, so that lawmakers could get into a real vicious
nationally-infamous debate over an important issue, unemployment insurance.
It’s why the World Intellectual Property Organization is gulled time and again
into enacting crazed, pig-ignorant copyright proposals because when the
nations of the world send their U.N. missions to Geneva, they send water
experts, not copyright experts; they send health experts, not copyright
experts; they send agriculture experts, not copyright experts, because
copyright is just not important to pretty much everyone! [applause]

[[1350.3]] Canada’s Parliament didn’t vote on its copyright bills because,
of all the things that Canada needs to do, fixing copyright ranks well below
resolving health emergencies on First Nations reservations, exploiting the oil patch
in Alberta, interceding in sectarian resentments among French- and
English-speakers, solving resources crises in the nation’s fisheries, and
a thousand other issues! The triviality of copyright tells you that when
other sectors of the economy start to evince concerns about the Internet and
the PC, that copyright will be revealed for a minor skirmish, and not a war.
Why would other sectors nurse grudges against computers? Well, because the
world we live in today is /made/ of computers. We don’t have cars anymore,
we have computers we ride in; we don’t have airplanes anymore, we have
flying Solaris boxes with a big bucketful of SCADA controllers [laughter]; a
3D printer is not a device, it’s a peripheral, and it only works connected
to a computer; a radio is no longer a crystal, it’s a general-purpose
computer with a fast ADC and a fast DAC and some software.

[[1418.9]] The grievances that arose from unauthorized copying are trivial,
when compared to the calls for action that our new computer-embroidered
reality will create. Think of radio for a minute. The entire basis for
radio regulation up until today was based on the idea that the properties of
a radio are fixed at the time of manufacture, and can’t be easily altered.
You can’t just flip a switch on your baby monitor, and turn it into
something that interferes with air traffic control signals. But powerful
software-defined radios can change from baby monitor to emergency services
dispatcher to air traffic controller just by loading and executing different
software, which is why the first time the American telecoms regulator (the
FCC) considered what would happen when we put SDRs in the field, they asked
for comment on whether it should mandate that all software-defined radios
should be embedded in trusted computing machines. Ultimately, whether every
PC should be locked, so that the programs they run are strictly regulated by
central authorities.

[[1477.9]] And even this is a shadow of what is to come. After all, this
was the year in which we saw the debut of open sourced shape files for
converting AR-15s to full automatic. This was the year of crowd-funded
open-sourced hardware for gene sequencing. And while 3D printing will give
rise to plenty of trivial complaints, there will be judges in the American
South and Mullahs in Iran who will lose their minds over people in their
jurisdiction printing out sex toys. [guffaw from audience] The trajectory
of 3D printing will most certainly raise real grievances, from solid state
meth labs, to ceramic knives.

[[1516.0]] And it doesn’t take a science fiction writer to understand why
regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on
self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or
the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers.
Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it’s
really… really… important to make sure that computers can’t execute
programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat
their lunch… literally. Regardless of whether you think these are real
problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of
lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and
big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the
same place — “can’t you just make us a general purpose computer that runs
all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just
make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any
two points, unless it upsets us?”

[[1576.3]] And personally, I can see that there will be programs that run on
general purpose computers and peripherals that will even freak me out. So I
can believe that people who advocate for limiting general purpose computers
will find receptive audience for their positions. But just as we saw with
the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, or protocols, or messages,
will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy; and as we
saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on
rootkits; all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on
surveillance and censorship, which is why all this stuff matters. Because
we’ve spent the last 10+ years as a body sending our best players out to
fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it
turns out it’s just been the mini-boss at the end of the level, and the
stakes are only going to get higher.

[[1627.8]] As a member of the Walkman generation, I have made peace with the
fact that I will require a hearing aid long before I die, and of course, it
won’t be a hearing aid, it will be a computer I put in my body. So when I
get into a car — a computer I put my body into — with my hearing aid — a
computer I put inside my body — I want to know that these technologies are
not designed to keep secrets from me, and to prevent me from terminating
processes on them that work against my interests. [vigorous applause from
audience] Thank you.

[[1669.4]] Thank you. So, last year, the Lower Merion School District, in a
middle-class, affluent suburb of Philadelphia found itself in a great deal
of trouble, because it was caught distributing PCs to its students, equipped
with rootkits that allowed for remote covert surveillance through the
computer’s camera and network connection. It transpired that they had been
photographing students thousands of times, at home and at school, awake and
asleep, dressed and naked. Meanwhile, the latest generation of lawful
intercept technology can covertly operate cameras, mics, and GPSes on PCs,
tablets, and mobile devices.

[[1705.0]] Freedom in the future will require us to have the capacity to
monitor our devices and set meaningful policy on them, to examine and
terminate the processes that run on them, to maintain them as honest
servants to our will, and not as traitors and spies working for criminals,
thugs, and control freaks. And we haven’t lost yet, but we have to win the
copyright wars to keep the Internet and the PC free and open. Because these
are the materiel in the wars that are to come, we won’t be able to fight on
without them. And I know this sounds like a counsel of despair, but as I
said, these are early days. We have been fighting the mini-boss, and that
means that great challenges are yet to come, but like all good level
designers, fate has sent us a soft target to train ourselves on — we have a
organizations that fight for them — EFF, Bits of Freedom, EDRi, CCC,
Netzpolitik, La Quadrature du Net, and all the others, who are thankfully,
too numerous to name here — we may yet win the battle, and secure the
ammunition we’ll need for the war.

[[1778.9]] Thank you.

[sustained applause]

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First, you decided what you want to log. I track sleep and wake times, food, daily weight, television and reading habits and a few other things. TapLog then makes it easy to set up buttons that will quickly create a time stamped log of the event/item you’re tracking. For example, here’s the sample logging screen from the Android Market (love the rabbit sighting option):

Click the button and it creates a time stamped log. TapLog also lets you update the quantity, record location, and add notes. So I can hit my Weight button and input my weight. Or I can hit the reading button and input how many pages I read as well as add a text note summary of what I was reading, what I thought of it, etc.

The key here is that, unlike many other logging applications, TapLog really makes it easy for the users to set up the application to log what they want, how they want. It also supports having a button open a sub-menu. So a user could create a “Food” button which would then open a second screen of buttons labeled “Breakfast,” “Lunch,” “Dinner.”

The log can be exported as a CSV file and either shared to the SD card or emailed. The app also supports emailing a non-CSV log of events. An export to Google Docs would be nice.

Other than that, TapLog does an excellent job and is easily the best logging app available for Android at the moment.

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The plugin sends an email to an SMS Gateway that triggers an SMS. Currently it only support US carriers out of the box.

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For example, here’s a pretty straightforward thing I’d like to do in Windows — I’d like to set it up so that when I close the lid on my laptop, Windows automatically locks itself. Based on a couple Google searches a lot of people would like to be able to do this.

And yet, as of 2012, there is no version of Windows in which this can be done. Microsoft will let you put a laptop to sleep automatically when you close the lid, and you can always hit the Windows key+L to lock the computer, but there’s no way to configure Windows to lock automatically when the laptop lid is closed.

That, my friends, is f***ing stupid. I did find a couple of people who had created programs that intercepted the lid state and would automatically lock the lid when closed, but none of these were currently available (the website of the most popular utility for doing this was hijacked by hackers a couple years ago and is still compromised).

So if you know of a decent utility for automatically locking a Windows laptop when the lid closes, I’d be glad to hear it. Or maybe Microsoft could actually follow up on a simple, obvious feature that many of its users have requested. Just don’t hold your breath on that.

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On the one hand, WorkFlowy is ridiculously simple. Set up an account, login, and you have an empty screen to start entering parent and child nodes like pretty much every other outlining tool in the world.

On the other hand, WorkFlowy adds a couple of powerful twists. The first is the ability to take any child node and focus in just on that. So while I’m writing this post in WorkFlowy, I see a blank page with just the title of this particular child node at the top, so I can focus just on writing down my thoughts about WorkFlowy.

WorkFlowy also features both # and @ tagging systems. For example, as I am outlining the various steps on a project I am outlining, I can tag any of the action items as #todo and then easily view all of my todo items throughout my huge spreadsheet. Similarly if I had a todo that I needed to assign to someone else, I could add a @name tag. Some people are using WorkFlowy as a full-fledged task manager, but I just want to keep track of tasks to transfer them to Toodledo, which I prefer to use for task management.

Finally, WorkFlowy works very well in Android and iOS browsers. I was on a long trip and spent a couple hours adding and reorganizing items in WorkFlowy on my Android phone. It worked like a charm. This would be awesome on a tablet.

As for the downsides? At the moment WorkFlowy is entirely browser-based. The developer is apparently working on mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms, but at the moment there is no app version and hence no offline option either.

The export options are also fairly weak. In a popup menu associated with in each node and at the bottom of each page on WorkFlowy is an export option. Selecting the export option will pop up a new windows with the text of either the entire outline or a particular subset of it pre-selected which you can then copy and paste into another application. At the moment, that’s pretty much the extent of WorkFlowy’s export options. Obviously, an export as CSV/email to Gmail/copy to Google Docs, etc. would be extremely useful to have.

That said, WorkFlowy is one of the more useful tools that I’ve run across in a long time — I’ve pretty much started using it for every text-based thing I do, from tracking tasks to writing blog posts like this.

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Fujitsu insists on using its proprietary software for its Scansnap line. That means no scanning directly into applications that are perfectly capable of utilizing TWAIN-based scanners. Rather, you’re stuck using Fujitsu’s proprietary software for your scans.

Fujitsu compounds this idiotic decision by making it impossible to download the software from its website. You can download updates to the software just fine, but if you lose that original installation disc, you’re pretty much screwed — unlike its much friendlier competitors like Epson, you can’t simply pop online and download the software again. I just copy the stupid CD to Dropbox in case I ever need it again for a reinstall.

So, from the software end Fujitsu sucks. Hardware-wise, though, I’ve owned several ScanSnap’s and if you can live with those limitations these are awesome document scanners.

The ScanSnap 1100 is Fujitsu’s portable version that operates entirely off of USB power, and unlike some other USB-powered scanners, the ScanSnap 1100 requires just a single USB cable for power.

Now that limited power supply does mean a couple of other drawbacks that are common in this class of devices. The biggest drawback is that the ScanSnap 1100 only scans a single side of a document at a time. It is fairly easy to flip a document over and scan the reverse side, but if your primary use for this would be scanning lengthy double-sided documents, you’re going to want one of the desktop versions that can do so.

The second drawback is that the scanning speed is relatively slow — 5 to 8 seconds to scan an 8 1/2″ x 11″ piece of paper at highest resolution (I don’t bother with lower resolutions, so I couldn’t tell you how much faster it is if you’re willing to compromise on scanning quality).

Despite all of the above, I absolutely love this scanner. Having a scanner everywhere I am makes it so much easier to keep on top of scanning all of the crappy pieces of paper people insist on giving me.

The ScanSnap 1100 is perfect for receipts, business cards and other paper ephemera.The first couple of weeks I had this, I was able to finally power through the 500 or so receipts I had shoved in a desk drawer. I also used it to scan hundreds of shorter one and two page documents, leaving the longer, double-sided documents for my ScanSnap 1500.

If you will be carrying this with you a lot, I’d recommend purchasing the carrying case that Fujitsu makes for this as well. The case is absurdly expensive at about $40, but it has a cutout on the side so that the scanner can be operated without taking it out of the case.

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Holds 12 hard drives in a foam padded case suitable for shipping, if you wanted to — though I just want a nice storage solution for a bunch of loose drives.

This thing goes for $129.99 and weighs 8 lbs. I can’t wait to get one.

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(via Kotaku)

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The thing is, plain text is something that is just obvious to me — saying you should generally use plain text is a bit like saying you should back up your documents regularly.

The rest of the world, however, seems to be in love with their Office documents. I can’t count the number of times people have needed to send me a short list, like a 5 or 6 point agenda, and they send it along in email as a Microsoft Word attachment.

The only thing I’d add to Smith’s article is that the best text editor I’ve ever used on Windows is still the venerable TextPad. There may be better text editors for coding purposes, but for straight up writing, nothing beats TextPad.

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The increasing use of full disk encryption (FDE) can significantly hamper digital investigations, potentially preventing access to all digital evidence in a case. The practice of shutting down an evidential computer is not an acceptable technique when dealing with FDE or even volume encryption because it may result in all data on the device being rendered inaccessible for forensic examination. To address this challenge, there is a pressing need for more effective on-scene capabilities to detect and preserve encryption prior to pulling the plug. In addition, to give digital investigators the best chance of obtaining decrypted data in the field, prosecutors need to prepare search warrants with FDE in mind. This paper describes how FDE has hampered past investigations, and how circumventing FDE has benefited certain cases. This paper goes on to provide guidance for gathering items at the crime scene that may be useful for accessing encrypted data, and for performing on-scene forensic acquisitions of live computer systems. These measures increase the chances of acquiring digital evidence in an unencrypted state or capturing an encryption key or passphrase. Some implications for drafting and executing search warrants to dealing with FDE are discussed.

The sentences I added emphasis to are interesting. Once a laptop or computer that has been encrypted with FDE is shut off, gaining access to the data is going to be extremely difficult unless the password/passphrase used is very weak or easily guessable, or if the owner can be persuaded, compelled or tricked into surrendering it. On the other hand, if the machine is left on when investigators arrive, there are a number of ways to recover the key, including using a cold boot attack where the RAM is preserved and copied in an effort to recover the key.

So if your computer is likely to be the focus of one of these attacks, ideally there needs to be a way to shut it down as quickly as possible, ideally one that doesn’t require user intervention.

Toni Korpela offers an interesting solution for quickly and automatically shutting down a computer that you still have physical access to without appearing to be shutting it down. He has written a script for his Fedora laptop that executes at user logon,

When the script is executed it starts looping a check where it checks first if my SD-Card is mounted at /media/DATA/ then it checks if file /media/DATA/.key exists if the key exists then it opens it and reads the contents and compares the “password” stored in the file to another hash stored in the hard drive. If any of these steps fail the system will initiate the Linux shutdown command. If everything passes the script will make the loop sleep few seconds to lessen CPU usage. Thought he sleep is not enough long to do much anything on the PC if the SD-Card is not mounted.

Very clever.

I’m not sure that the silly three letter agencies have much to worry about, however, as most people I know a) don’t see any value in full disk encryption, and b) if they did would likely used incredibly weak/easily guessable passwords.

I’d also think that unless there were an imminent risk of some violent action by the subject of such an investigation, that there are several fairly easy ways to grab the key, from installing a keylogger on the system by modifying the bootloader, to installation of a camera or other recording device to physically record the keys being press on bootup. Full disk encryption certainly raises the costs for any attacker to access information on an encrypted disk, but it by no means render such access impossible.

(With that said, I use full disk encryption on every disk I use, with an extremely long passphrase that I’ve never shared with anyone).

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When the system came back online, I tried to login, but they had wiped all the passwords so I had to create a new one. Since the one I had before was pretty secure and I had it memorized, I figured I’d just used the same password again. Oops, not so fast. The system rejected my password with the following message:

That’s right. Last week I could use a 12 character password. Now, after the upgrade the system can handle a maximum of 10.

Not to worry, though. In order to ensure my account doesn’t get hacked, the system asked me to set up three challenge questions, the answer to which — if I actually followed along — is easily discoverable on the Internet. I typically use another 12 character passphrase for the answers to the challenge questions, but really whoever signed off on this should be ashamed.

This is one of the few times maintaining such a small balance has actually made me feel better.

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…maintains a repository of web crawl data that is openly accessible to everyone. The crawl currently covers 5 billion pages and the repository includes valuable metadata. The crawl data is stored by Amazon’s S3 service, allowing it to be bulk downloaded as well as directly accessed for map-reduce processing in EC2. This makes wholesale extraction, transformation, and analysis of web data cheap and easy. Small startups or even individuals can now access high quality crawl data that was previously only available to large search engine corporations.

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And so created his own version of the image redoing all of the male characters in the Black Widow style:

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Relevanssi is available in both a free version from WordPress.org and a premium version available from Relevanssi.com The premium version comes in several different licensing flavors — for $9.95, you can install it on an unlimited number of personal blogs, though with no support. There are also standard and developer licenses at $39.95 and $69.95 per year that add additional support and installation options.

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NoScript 3.x is implemented as a restartless add-on for Firefox Mobile, meant to explore the issues and the challenges posed by the Electrolysis multiprocessing architecture to a NoScript porting.

It also features a new page permission editing UI, specifically redesigned for smartphone usage and easily accessible by tapping on a navigation bar icon.

Once installed (with no need to restart the browser), it blocks every script and embedded object (plugin content and iframes) unless the loading resource is whitelisted.

NSA’s whitelist is implemented as a JSON map, having domains or URL prepath components as its keys and custom permission sets (or reference to the TRUSTED and UNTRUSTED predefined permission sets) as its values (references are serialized as 0 for UNTRUSTED and 1 for TRUSTED).

There developer also has plans to use Firefox Sync to sync NoScript settings across platforms. That would be awesome.

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An interesting approach to password management, though I’m sticking with Diceware plus KeePass.

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Instead I’m using SpiderOak. Like Dropbox, SpiderOak is intended as tool to backup files to the cloud and then sync those files with other computers and devices such as smart phones.

What SpiderOak has that Dropbox doesn’t is the option for genuine encryption — my SpiderOak account is set up so that nobody, including SpiderOak employees, can access my files without my password. Dropbox promised users this capability, but it turned out they were not telling the truth and their employees could access user files at any time (or accidentally expose them for a couple hours to the entire Internet as they did earlier this year).

Of course with great power comes great complexity, and this is the major downside to SpiderOak. Dropbox is dead simple to install and use — it took me no time at all to get people who barely understood how to use their computer to install and use Dropbox with no problem. SpiderOak, on the other hand, requires a lot more thinking about what you’re doing.

So in SpiderOak, first you have to create a Backup set (for example, all files in a directory), and then the application backs that up. Then you need to go in and sync the backup, authorizing specific devices and/or specific directories or files. Don’t get me wrong — it is not that SpiderOak is obsessively complex, but rather that it is just not drop dead simple like Dropbox is.

On the other hand, SpiderOak is much cheaper than Dropbox — I’m currently paying $10/month for 100gb of space (and, like Dropbox, there is a free account with a 2gb limit).

The only other thing I’d add is that I think the Dropbox app for Android is crap. the SpiderOak app wasn’t much better until recently, but the latest version does a nice job of letting me pick and choose which files, directories, etc. I want my phone to keep in sync.

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The problem, however, is that interpreting and painting at the application level adds an unwanted overhead, which usually goes unnoticed on most modern desktop and laptop computers, but becomes a bottleneck in resource constrained devices like cell phones and tablets. Native widgets are handled by Android directly so it doesn’t require additional translation or memory to map how to draw them.

Faster startup, less memory consumption, and improved responsiveness are some of the expected benefits of such a move,which is not free of important new challenges, most notably: localization and add-ons support, both of which are completely XUL-oriented.

I like the Firefox browser on Android, but it crashes and randomly restarts so often, it is essentially unusable for me. Hopefully this planned change will actually make the browser useful.

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Anna Anthropy also argues that the game makes some interesting choices in how it handles the gender of the main character the user plays:

There are tons of gendered accessories for the player’s character – she’s surrounded by urban gang culture, or some facsimile thereof – but the game gives the player the choice of how to use those accessories (or not) to present her gender. Play as a burly man in a dress and heels, a woman with a beard, someone totally androgynous – I played through the game as a fat woman, and I can’t remember the last time a game, mainstream or otherwise, gave me that choice. You can present as a wide variety of genders because, for all the game’s scripted scenes and recorded dialogue, no one ever gives you a gender.

 

All of the dialogue has been written to explicitly avoid giving the protagonist a gender, in fact. Your gang minions address you as “Boss,” and refer to you in third person either as “the Boss” or “the leader of the Saints.” No one ever gives you a pronoun. There’s a scene early in the game where one of the Saints’ lieutenants is planning a raid on a casino by moving bobble heads of the gang members through a scale model of the place: the player’s character is represented by a featureless, genderless chess pawn. The player is given the room to internalize her character how she pleases. At the start of Saint’s Row 2, a fellow Saint who knows the protagonist from the first Saint’s Row says, “You look different. You do something with your hair?” That’s the game’s tacit acceptance of however you’ve decided to present your character. And who’s going to question it? Who would fuck with the boss of the Saints?

Couldn’t agree more, and I wish more games would give you this range of choices.

For the life of me, for example, I cannot understand why Madden NFL will not allow me to create a female character for its Superstar mode. The common argument I seen online is that this wouldn’t be “realistic”. Really? Well, it is not very realistic when I run for 1,000 yards in a game on the Rookie setting either.

This is what games do best after all — allow players to make all sorts of different choices in simulated worlds and see what happens. A video game where gang leaders and starting linebackers can only be one gender is beyond dull.

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China has attempted to use its current position in rare earth metals to gain leverage over buyers, but apparently to little avail. In fact, China is attempting once again to cut back on production, in a move that will likely fail:

China’s biggest producer of rare earths is suspending production for one month in hopes of boosting slumping prices of the exotic minerals used in mobile phones and other high-tech products.

 

…

 

In China, prices of some rare earths have fallen sharply since June.

 

The price of neodymium oxide has declined 34 percent to $157 per kilogram, while europium oxide is down 35 percent at $2,904 per kilogram, according to Lynas Corp., an Australian rare earth producer.

As the Associated Press notes, mines outside China have restarted production in the wake of China’s (so far failed) attempts to restrict supply, and thankfully it looks like the “threat” of Chinese dominance of the rare earth market is going to be of the empty variety.

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Not surprisingly, the worst for logging were StrongVPN and VyprVPN. I’ve used both in the past primarily because I wasn’t doing any file sharing while using the VPNs, but rather was using them to avoid being spied on locally over wireless and wired Ethernet.

That is still my primary goal with a VPN service, but it is also becoming more and more difficult to determine what is and is not illegal to do on the Internet, even in the United States.

Using the TorrentFreak overview as a starting point I looked over the various options and finally settled on AirVPN. AirVPN doesn’t maintain any logs, and is surprisingly cost-effective — I paid just $21 for a three month subscription.

AirVPN is OpenVPN-based, and the connection speed is generally good. The difference between something like AirVPN vs. StrongVPN — aside from the excessive logging of the latter — is the difference in server choices. StrongVPN had numerous servers I could choose from in the United States. AirVPN has just two.

Personally, though, I never had a need to switch servers while I was using StrongVPN. I’ve never seen the servers at AirVPN at capacity or had any problem connecting, so they’re keeping their capacity at an appropriate level which is all I care about.

Assuming the next couple months go as smoothly as October went, I’ll be going for the year’s subscription which cuts the cost to $6/month.

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(via Misanthropy666)

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What the HJ-720ITC adds over other Omron products is the data recording and analysis functions. This pedometer displays 7 days of data and it stores the previous 41 days of data. The Omron can be hooked up to a computer via USB and then transfer data to a Windows computer using data tracking software that can be downloaded from Omron’s website.

Although you have to use the Windows software to transfer data, Omron lets users export data to CSV. It also goes beyond just recording basic steps. The pedometer tracks steps, aerobic steps, calories and distance, and tracks that data in hourly increments. So not only can I check, for example, how many total steps I took, but I can also check how many steps I take during the workday excluding my walking-based workout. In this way, I can track my general activity level throughout the day and week.

The software also does a nice job of producing graphs and tracking data over time, such as most steps in a day, week, etc., and total, weekly and monthly averages. It is extremely satisfying to log in and see how an estimate of how many thousands of miles I’ve walked since the beginning of the year.

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