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E-Books That Read You
An anonymous reader writes "Internet users have sadly grown used to having their every click and scroll measured by advertisers and content providers seeking to squeeze every last ounce of attention out of them. Now, it seems such data gathering is spreading into your favorite novels as well. The NY Times profiles several companies trying to collect data on how people read ebooks. Quoting: 'Scribd is just beginning to analyze the data from its subscribers. Some general insights: The longer a mystery novel is, the more likely readers are to jump to the end to see who done it. People are more likely to finish biographies than business titles, but a chapter of a yoga book is all they need. They speed through romances faster than religious titles, and erotica fastest of all. At Oyster, a top book is What Women Want, promoted as a work that "brings you inside a woman's head so you can learn how to blow her mind." Everyone who starts it finishes it. On the other hand, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s The Cycles of American History blows no minds: fewer than 1 percent of the readers who start it get to the end. Oyster data shows that readers are 25 percent more likely to finish books that are broken up into shorter chapters. That is an inevitable consequence of people reading in short sessions during the day on an iPhone.'"
In Soviet Russia...erm...capitalist America, eBook reads you!
I am far less concerned with research about how I read than information on what I read and who I share it with being given to those in power. How I read may make for better written, more useful tomes. Information on what I read can be misconstrued and misused. Unfortunately, what I read has been a matter of record since long before data on how I read.
Silence is a state of mime.
Don't buy e-book readers that force you to be connected to the internet, or only read proprietary file formats, or buy from online store.
My old Sony PRS-650 doesn't have hardware to go on the internet, and it reads whatever file I feed it, so I'm sure it doesn't snitch on me.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
At Oyster, a top book is What Women Want, promoted as a work that "brings you inside a woman's head so you can learn how to blow her mind." Everyone who starts it finishes it. On the other hand, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s The Cycles of American History blows no minds: fewer than 1 percent of the readers who start it get to the end.
200 pages of soft core porn are more likely to be read than 500 pages of history. Who knew?
That's called a comic book.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Oh, and my reader's wifi, is never on.
I don't mean to sound like I have a tinfoil hat on, but all you're sure of is that you have instructed the software to turn the wifi off. That doesn't mean the software doesn't lie to you and keeps trying to connect without telling you.
Think I'm paranoid? Well, maybe I am, maybe I'm not.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
In Capitalist America, book reads you!
.... because they are easy reading and you know there's a happy ending.
Eroticas go faster because people are skipping over the pages of badly written sex trying to find more plot.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Phones, unfortunately, have really upped the game in terms of creepy surveillance and exfiltration.
When dealing with normal computers, you always have the easy option of just installing wireshark.
If that's too disruptive, or you want to monitor multiple systems, or you don't trust the system you want to inspect, you just tap the last link before the ISP's probably-not-trustworthy gear and examine that. Wireless doesn't change the game much, as long as you know the key (passive tapping becomes easier; but there's a greater risk that your monitoring system will miss some packets in the noise, and driver support for things like promiscuous mode tends to be a lot spottier).
Cellular connections, though? The entire network is Ma Bell's black-box, so even RF sniffing won't get you much (unless you can coax it down to A5/1 or A5/2 and have some time on your hands), and doing the packet capture on-device is markedly harder than on a PC. At best, with a very well behaved android you should be able to use the same tools that you would on normal linux, against whatever peculiar device name is assigned to the cell connection. It's all downhill from there, though creative abuse of VPNs should work against any application not trying to hide from you, even on devices you can't root/jailbreak.
It isn't impossible, with the right device; but you can certainly make things a great deal more difficult if your application waits until it is on a cellular connection before phoning home.
How about shorter novels? We could make them short enough to be a sentence. We could call them 'tweets'!
Hardware switch off, only WiFi within range under my full control (and I mean it) - no attempt to connect. Hardware switch on, wireshark on, full dump - nothing suspicious. Good enough for me.
Get a good one and test it, that's it. Paranoia is fun, but needs to have some limits. Still, it is kind of a niche reader - if you use something more publisher-controlled, a Kindle or some official app... YMMV.
Actually, most internet users are not aware of how much their every click is tracked, by how many different companies, for any given web page.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
The longer a mystery novel is, the more likely readers are to jump to the end to see who done it. People are more likely to finish biographies than business titles, but a chapter of a yoga book is all they need. They speed through romances faster than religious titles, and erotica fastest of all.
None of this would have been news to a book publisher in 1910.
Best Books of the 1900's - 1900-1909
I can't get wire shark reliably working with my wifi card, so here's how I sniff iphone app access.
Share the wifi from the laptop, sniff the wired connection to the router. With enough playing around you can get filters for exactly what you're interested in. But for simple monitoring app access it's good enough.
You wouldn't believe the stuff that gets sent around in plain text.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Next, we need a time machine to go 10 years into the future. I'm being nice because I have books much older than that. In 10 year will your e-reader still work? Probably not.
Who cares? My eBooks are all in EPUB format, and if for some bizarre reason no "eBook reader device" in 10 years supports this open format, the actual text of the book is nothing more than HTML and CSS.
If you seriously think I won't be able to find a device that will render HTML 10 years from now, you're paranoid beyond belief.
Meanwhile there will always be a market for printed books, which I will continue to read and enjoy for decades to come, free of any censorship, legal issues, anyone taking them away from me, breakdowns, battery issues, or anything else that comes with e-readers.
Again, EPUB is completely safe from being "taken away", and hardware issues really don't matter when you have a format that can be read on virtually any device. As for "censorship", read about how you can no longer get the original version of this book in a physical book, yet my eBook version has the deleted text added back, because I did it myself. Sure, you might be able to hunt down a first edition and pay big money for it, but I'd rather spend far less money and a few minutes of my time to get the same result.
Wireless doesn't change the game much, as long as you know the key (passive tapping becomes easier; but there's a greater risk that your monitoring system will miss some packets in the noise, and driver support for things like promiscuous mode tends to be a lot spottier).
One method I've used in the past is set up an ad-hoc wireless network with a USB-wifi key, and then you can sniff all the traffic with wireshark. If you happen to have a Windows Phone 7 (for example), this is a relatively easy way to get the binaries for your apps from the phone (if you do it while they are downloading from the app store).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Could Slashdot please refuse to post stories that link to paywalled sites? BTW, I put some of the text from the summary into Google, and the first non-paywalled link that popped up was http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/e-books-reading-the-minds-of-reader-to-learn-what-they-crave/articleshow/27903865.cms
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
If you control the AP, tapping wireless is pretty much identical to tapping wired(whether your 'AP' is also the computer doing the tapping, running an adapter in ad-hoc or AP mode, or whether the computer doing the tapping is sniffing the AP's ethernet link). What makes me nervous is the possibility that (mostly likely out of malice) a phone app might deliberately avoid chatting on any interface except the cellular connection. Non-malicious apps (or malicious apps that assume you aren't paying attention) can presumably be forced over to wifi and sniffed like any computer; but something that maintains silence except when connecting through the cell network would be very hard to pin down.
RF sniffing to establish the the existence of traffic isn't that hard (doesn't everyone seem to own a set of cheap speakers that provides that 'feature' for free?); but anything more than very rough estimates of traffic volume would be orders of magnitude more difficult than anything running over your network...
I get the unpleasant impression that, just as the patent office treats "Do something obvious but on a cellphone!" as a totally novel invention, a lot of 'apps' are hell-bent on ignoring the (not exactly ironclad) advances in security applied to programs written for typical computers and re-learning, the hard way, what the PC crew had to learn once internet connections became a thing...
At least it can make for interesting reading, if it's some other sucker's phone...