Slashdot Mirror
Guilty By Association
dmf writes "News.com is running a little piece about Microsoft's forays into researching aspects of social computing. With AOL Buddy Lists, Yahoo Messenger, Friendster, and other mappable relationship environments, is it possible the information will soon be used against you? Scenarios such as governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links, political groups finding potential donor lists, marketing departments finding affinity groups, and other easily imagined data mining opportunities could open the doors for information abuse and misinterpretation of individual ties. What implications can it bring in the future of the personal life?"
You mean like this? Won't be long before /. is mined for this data, regardless of what the robots.txt file says about it.
#include
:-) **
#include
void main()
{
if
contacts more then 75 = female;
anything else = male;
}
**any code monkey wish to do this properly it would be more humours
Candle burns its brightest in the dark
All I can say is that if you transmit private information over an insecure channel, you should not be surprised at the results.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Now I don't have to worry about browsing slashdot, and nobody can associate me with all the terrorists and mexican drug lords among the slashdot community.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/my_doom.html
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
It's bad enough getting friends of friends contacting me on orkut. For some reason the religious right people think it's fair game to email me with all kinds of links to support their causes.
A swift "fuck off" does the job there, but you can't do that with an auto bot that then goes and pumps your details into Yet Another Mass Marketing Tool
That is why you don't put REAL personal info in your $CHAT_PROGRAM profile. As long as it thinks that I was born on 1/1/1900 and live on 123 main st. Beverly Hills 90210, I'm not worried about data mining. :)
SCO.com uses Linux
My AIM (err iChat) buddy list has a decent sized section of casual aquaintences. They're people who I game with, used to work with or met at conventions. If one of them does something nasty are the Feds going to come knocking on my door asking questions?
I know my chats are fully logged already and never discuss anything even semi-private over IM. But the concept of guilt by association on an electronic level is simply frightening.
-Rusty the paranoid
The Master (Angelo Rossitto) in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, "Not shit, energy!"
have everyone add 'Link' to their buddy list... now everyone is everyone's 'second cousin' through link.
if you can beat em, flood them with false data.
Runnin' On Empty
Motion Picture Association of America
Recording Industry Association of America
Feel free to contribute...
OSAMA BIN LADEN wants to MURDER the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, a certain chap named GEORGE W BUSH by hitting him repeatedly over the head with a ROCKET PROPELLED GRENADE LAUNCHER shaped sausage while dreaming of using TACTICAL NUCLEAR WEAPONS and drive his fave Type-R sport ZSU-23 SHILKA with BIOLOGICAL, CHEMICAL and NUCLEAR AAA rounds.
There, Eris knows wether US intelligence is tracking this or not but if they are, this is sure to mess up someone's day, hehehe... Ooo, look at that pretty black helicopter!
Hate me!
I post on Slashdot
Trolls post on slashdot
Trolls watch TV
George W. Bush watches TV
In Soviet Russian, TV watches YOU!
You breath air
Terrorists breath air
Terrorists see the stars at night
Posting on Slashdot can be associated to Astronomy. Cool!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I can't wait until 10 (or 2) years from now these companies start buying each other and consolidating the network information, along with everything available publicly from, say, livejournal.
that in the future, more and more people will rely on anonymous handles for their online identities. This is already happening to some extent, for my own purposes, I used bogus information for the yahoo registration when creating my anti-war page... not because I seriously fear repercussions today, but 20, 30 years from now, who knows, we may be living in a very different world, and an anonymous identity (as far as it goes) is the best way to protect yourself.
of course, for true anonymity you need the right tools.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
"...governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links..."
So, you're saying that I should take Osama off of my buddy list if I don't want trouble from the feds?
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Services like AOL? I don't know how MSN or anouther online service works, but AOL stores your 'Buddy List' on their servers.
They can also keep track of what sites you're visiting when you browse the WWW. How long do you think it'll be till spam is custom fitted to groups?
Spammer A: This kid here goes to these freaky anime sites, and so do half of the people on his Buddy List. Let's send them all SPAM on learning Japanese and Freaky Bukake Sites!
Think about it.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
one of the idiots who bother to fill in your phone number, birth date, street address and SSN in your AIM profile you get what you deserve.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
I would not be so worried about the government collecting such information if it were not for the knowledge that they have tried to collect it in the past and used it in less than ethical ways.
Is it any wonder people are paranoid about them doing it again in the future or the people who defend some of the governments actions?
.. when credit cards and clubcards are already so heavily used. A credit card shows where you've been and where you've spent money - for example, someone only need look for a pub that you use your card at regularly to track you down. And the FBI has already shown its willingness to get information from ISPs regards even the vaguest suspicion of a crime - is there any real anonymity left? I doubt it.
Kevin Bacon is surely going to be in a lot of trouble.
Free XBox, PS2
I used to have a room mate who worked for the Anti-Terrorist Task Force here in New York City. The horror stories he'd tell me were gut wrenching. The truth is... privacy isn't real. Everything you do is tracked.
All of the data mining companies end up selling their information to the government...
He told me that the government had dummy corporations who purchased the data and it was all centralized.
Everything from your NYC Metrocards, to the discount cards you get at the local grocery store. Everything from your Email accounts, to your cell phone habits. I didn't believe it until he proved it.
He was able to take someones first and last name, approximate age, and in return give me their home address, childrens names, home mortgage amount, bank used, cell number, parents address, university, major, where he went on vacation, how long he was gone, spending habits, etc. etc. It was scary stuff. Scary.
1984 in 2004.
That's why there should be privacy laws saying that information is non-usable unless explicitly permitted. Right now, it's bass-ackwards.
Hasn't Microsoft learned from the lessons of Outlook, why should contact information be tied to the File System? It is not enough that personal information can be harvested in a variety of ways now, lets create a new one! So the next generation of worms will not only look at your contact list in your favorite e-mail client, but the file system for anything that could be missed!
And what kind of security controls are going to be placed on this "feature", hopefully it is Mandatory Access Control (yeah, I'm dreaming but what the Hell, it's Friday)!!I think you need to have some faith that the Judicial branch will see through a charge built on "Guilt by Assocation". There is excellent case law that shows how unsuccessful a prosecutor will be in building a case in this manner.
The bigger question is, should the government be allowed to mine this data to look for individuals to put under surveillance. What are the criteria here?
The only historical model we have of this type of thing is landline phone taps. Again, the Judicial system had to get involved -- in the form of a judge or grand jury. Today, the scope of opportunity is so much greater than just telephone lines.
I personally think we need more policymaking and caselaw in the area of government-commercial database relationships. It will come, but only after the government oversteps its bounds a few times and gets its foot chopped off by a successful lawsuit.
Simple! Just jack Kevin Bacon into the Matrix and you'll have a link to everyone!
That's why a lot of us are using SSH tunnels or VPNs with our own IM protocols, DNS and mail servers. There's a whole phantom internet out there and a lot of people don't even realize it.
.ssh/config file and point them to a Jabber client. It's worked well, and no one else has access to the Jabber server other than the people who I've allowed in. Same with e-mail. Sure, I still have to interact with the outside world, but most of my friends and family are pointed to my mail server and use SSH tunnels to communicate with me. They don't see it as an inconvenience because to them, they just double click the "Connect to the T4D Network" icon on their desktop and then use their mail/IM/web clients like they would any other time. When they're done, they just click the "X" in the upper right corner of the CMD window that has a nice friendly message in it that says, "Close this window to disconnect from the T4D network".
Personally, I've been using ssh and Jabber to IM with all my friends. The only thing that's required is that I give them a custom configured ssh client,
I can only imagine that this will become more commonplace as these technologies get easier to use. Tunnels and VPN are sure to be the next "big thing" once they are really simple enough to install. So far my installation experiences with people who want to access the T4D network have just been to email them a zip file and tell them where to put the extracted files. But a double click wizard would be nicer... Can't code in Windows though because I don't have the money to waste on a compiler.
Un-news
A co-worker of mine has an MSN messenger account that he keeps getting IM's in Arabic. Aparently someone else had the account and it expired and just by chance he picked the same name. He also is on some kind of Islam mailing list getting Koran verses in his mail every day. I hope that they do some research on this idea before they start handcuffing people.
It wouldn't be too hard to profile me.
The question remains: How can the cat be put back in the bag? Answer: It can't.
The only reasonable solution I see is to not let *anyone* slip through the net of info (yes, I'm talking about you high ranking government officials, and corporate bigwigs...is that redundant?) and making it freely available to all.
Then, at least, the illusion of privacy is lifted, and everyone can get on with their lives, knowing that everything is open.
Apparently, the only ones with privacy are terrorists. Hell, we can't find a guy on a kidney machine in a desert? (I'm thinking of starting a pool for how close to the election good ol' Osama will pop up. Place your bets!)
Just goes to prove that technology in the hands of people will always be misused. We can't handle the responsibillity.
dmf writes ".... With AOL Buddy Lists, Yahoo Messenger, Friendster, and other mappable relationship environments, is it possible the information will soon be used against you? Scenarios such as governments tracking private citizens, investigating terrorist links,
Wasn't there a front page post about bloggers plaigarizing other bloggers today?
This sounds so familiar.
It reminds me of this post:
And this post
And this one too:
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Here's what I think, YOUR HELPING THE PEOPLE (GOVNT) YOU ACCUSE OF INVADING YOUR PRIVACY! Your doing the hard work for them which is thinking up of ways that you can spy on people. I'm sure some government researcher is sitting back in his cubicle reading slashdot thinking to himself.. Damn thats a good idea, we'll have to do it!
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Child pornography rings.
They busted a guy here at work who was doing it. By they, I mean the FBI and Customs officers. By doing it, I mean trading child pornography.
Investigators have said Jeffs and two mid-Michigan men were members of an Internet club that produced child pornographic photographs, videos and live broadcasts and shared the images with other group members on their buddy lists.
Some of the "buddies" face charges that they performed sex acts with minors. Many of the victims are the suspects' own children.
What happens is, they bust one guy by meeting up with him in real life, posing as a young child. Once they've got him, they can go on his computer and see who he's got on his buddy lists, address books, they just get everyone else.
- If you wish to truly be anonymous, only use cash, post only from libraries, or use open wireless connections with spoofed MACs.
- If you want to live in the real world and be anonymous, use credit cards for normal stuff, use your home PC/broadband for normal stuff, use #1 for anything you don't want tracked.
- Or, have so much sporadic activity by allowing free access from your own wireless AP, have large groups of friends share logins, etc, and obfuscate the entire tracking system via multiple simultaneous logins. Note - AIM already allows multiple logins (I've had 3 simultaneous logins at once, the only downside is that only your received messages get sent to all 3
So, that's a real brief primer on anonymity, and the fact that you have little or no anonymity. If you don't like the way the country's going, get out and vote in the next election.The cesspool just got a check and balance.
... Sure there are both extremes in ways of thinking with this.
But am I wrong to think that
1)anything i do online *may* be subject to monitoring, storing or somehow intercepted by one or more individuals or agencies that i don't intend?
2) therefore make sure that i don't discuss my cc numbers or that multiple homicide i pulled off last summer freely amongst people
3) consider exactly what it would take in forms of hardware, computing and people resources to collect, organize, interpret and investigate the amount of raw data that would be generated in server-side logs, on a service that is (for all intensive purposes) provided for little to no cost.
4) consider that in the logs above (or email archives, or...) that about 99.9% is going to be completely useless and/or boring drivel about tons of other people you don't know or care about.
???
I dunno.. shoot. I see the whole "invasion of privacy" and "do this today, and here's what it will lead to" argument, and it makes sense, but then i consider the points above and it all seems blown out of proportion.
What do slashbots think?
do() || do_not();
This is, of course, the optimal state for things. If everybody is a criminal, the police can arrest anybody, because they can always find a law the person has broken. Even now it is getting that way. There are over 3,000,000 federal laws, not to mention state laws and local laws. Are you SURE you havn't broken any?
For example, purchaced a sex toy of some form? They're available everywhere, but it is illegal to sell them. The fact that the law isn't regularly enforced doesn't change the fact that you can go to jail for working in an adult store. Then there are the crazy state and city laws like "You can't kiss on Sundays" and "You cannot sell yo-yo's on Sundays" and "No more than 3 women can live under the same roof" and "It is illegal to drink a beer immediatly after having sex." and "A husband cannot have sex with his wife if he has eaten garlic or anchovis. If she requests it, he is legally obligated to brush his teeth"
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Isn't this why freedom of association is important?
If you can't communicate freely, you have no freedom.
Bought anything with a bank card, credit card, or check? Your bank records are available for investigation. This yields your address, phone number, probably a cell number, Social Security Number, date of birth, and anyone you've ever paid by check or using a bank card (Visa Check card or ATM). Under the same statute, everyone you paid by check or bank card can also have their records for you examined. Library records are also open for scrutiny. I'm not positive, but I also believe that phone records (who you called and when as opposed to actual transcripts of conversations) are also covered under this. Oh, and all of the places that have their records checked are under a gag order so you won't know about it.
Doesn't sound so far fetched now, does it?
.technomancer
Technology has marched on, and the world has changed (again).
All the trends in technology over the last 10 years say that privacy as we have known it, is headed for extinction. Cameras that get smaller and smaller, remote controlled robots, hacking into wireless LANs, PLUS all the electronic interactions (like RFID) that are coming, PLUS computers getting cheaper by the day... This all adds up to privacy basically being impossible.
Proprietary software is doomed, because the Internet made the level of interactivity that open-source software needs possible. For exactly the same reasons that the medieval guilds (with their proprietary methods for things like ironsmithing and glassblowing) were doomed once the movable-type printing press was invented, proprietary software cannot compete. In the near term (5-10 years), it will still have a solid space in niche markets, but I'm not even sure that will last. It certainly isn't going to last in mainstream software arenas like OSes and databases.
But that same increase in processing power and decrease in communication delay means that doing things like examining every electronic transaction that someone performs (and building a detailed profile of their life from it), is not only beginning to be possible, it's very nearly inevitable. Even the most paranoid of you out there (and on Slashdot, the percentage of paranoids is a good bit higher than average) would not want the sort of draconian methods that would be required to prevent it. (No computers and no networks, for instance.)
The proper solution, I think, is to change our culture, so that it doesn't matter that someone knows the kinks in my soul.
I am mostly connected to reality, so I'm not holding my breath on this cultural shift, but I really only see three possibilities:
We turn Luddite and roll back the clock technologically. (Not likely to happen voluntarily by most of this audience, but some of the non-technical types turning Luddite IS all too possible.)
Privacy gets moved to the same status as apprenticeship - it's something that existed historically, and it's occasionally useful for analogies, but it's not part of anybody's life anymore. This could either go the Japanese route (I believe the usual phrase is something like "Nakedness is frequently seen and never noticed." In other words, commenting on someone's quirks is far more shameful than having said quirks to begin with.), or simply an open acceptance that other people do things differently than you.
The third possibility is the one that worries me. That's a totalitarian society (probably theocratic) that uses this information to control people to a degree that has heretofore been unbelievable. I don't think such a state would last very long at all, but the creation and destruction of it would get really, really ugly.
The US is the only culture I have extensive first-hand experience with. I would strongly prefer to see us go to option 2B (taking the attitude that you can live your life any way you want as long as you don't hurt me).
That fits wonderfully with our stated national beliefs. It's an absolutely lousy fit with what our behavior says we believe. The behavior (IMO) says we urgently want #3.
That's the big reason the 3rd option worries me. I can very easily see a theocratic state as an intermediate step to the live-and-let-live one. If anyone has any practical, pragmatic suggestions for how to create such a cultural shift (one suitable for a total absence of privacy), speak up now, because the situation could get critical within 10 years, and is almost guaranteed to get critcal in 20.
This occurs despite explicit promises to the electorate when the tax file number was introduced, that it would NEVER be used for this sort of purpose.
Add to this the ability to track online activity by merging on:
"Privacy" guarantees are torn down at the merest suggestion of higher purposes, and data is then freely shared. This can have excellent results: attacking paedophile rings. But it can also have wider, less salubrious results, when blind application of some new hysteria and a couple of incidental "hits" on the database scan sucks innocents into a nightmare.
Disk is cheap too. A startling amount of on-line activity is routinely recorded. The very first internet sourced "crack" can still be viewed, keystroke for keystroke...
In a world where paediatricians have been attacked by mobs and hospitalised following newspaper campaigns against paedophiles, where 20 year olds are exposed in "underage drinking scandals", where unfair or incorrect criminal convictions occur, where a data-entry glitch can destroy an innocent person's credit record with no timely hope of appeal against suddenly foreclosed mortgage, where a country parson on holiday is interred as a terrorist suspect based on rigorous computer screening, where political correctness is a moving feast and the witch hunt du jour dominates reasoned thought: it's perhaps a good idea to keep as much off the computer as possible, let alone the wider internet.
--
Sal
Writings: saltation.blogspot.com
Wravings: go-blog-go.blogspot.com