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The Spy In Our Living Room
An anonymous reader writes "Ben Kuchera at Polygon ponders the surveillance capabilities of our gaming consoles in light of recent NSA and GCHQ revelations. 'Xbox One Kinect can see in the dark. It can keep a moving human being in focus without motors. It knows how to isolate voices from background noise. The privacy implications of having a device that originally couldn't be removed pointed at your living room at all times was always kind of scary, and that fear has been at least partially justified.' Kuchera, like many of us, habitually disconnects cameras and microphones not currently in use. But he also feels a sense of inevitability about the whole thing: 'If the government wants this information they're going to get it, no matter what we do with our gaming consoles. It's important to pay attention to what our government is doing, but this issue is much bigger than our gaming consoles, and we open ourselves up to much greater forms of intrusion on a daily basis.'"
Reminds me of the TVs in "1984".
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
What if I put an XBox360 in a locked room with no windows, turned it on with a kinect camera pointing at a sign which threatens a top political figure. If someone acts on it, how would they justify their actions? Legally it would be extremely questionable and ultimately, it would not be a threat as much as it would be a trap for the government to fall into. After all, discovery would result in all manner of details which should enter public record. ...or I could disappear into a puff of darkness.
The landline telephones in the old USSR didn't hang up when the user put the handset back in the cradle and so people routinely put a pillow over them.
This is the entire point of parallel construction. They can't or won't reveal how they are monitoring you secretly. Instead they can claim that you were acting suspicious based on something else you've done which has nominally taken place in some kind of public space. Then they get a warrant based on that, and "find" the threats you are making, and charge you with that too.
If you think that is bad enough that the government is doing it, think that in fact the ones doing it is the people of the government, the same ones that spied the conversation between US soldiers and their fiancees/wives when they were at Afganistan, and shared between themselves the hottest parts.
Probably the biggest repository of child porn of the world is in NSA servers for their "investigative" use. And we are speaking about people that have power over you and your family.
Ben Kuchera is a fucking tool who has no business writing about anything. The same goes for Polygon.
Kuchera was one of the assmunches on the front lines defending MS's initial DRM and always-online schemes for the XBOX One.
His opinions were so bad and so obviously paid-for that he got kicked out of Penny Arcade for shit like this http://penny-arcade.com/report... (I think they pulled it down because it was so bad) and this https://twitter.com/BenKuchera... .
Penny fucking Arcade realized how shitty he was, Yes, that Penny Arcade. The one run by the no-standards shills that did an instant 180 from gamers to tools once MS started paying them. The PA that bullies its own fans and offers a kickstarter to remove ads from their massively-profitable website, with stretch goals to remove more ads, but still not all the ads.
Ben Kuchera's internet fame was spawned from PA, and he became such an insufferable goon that even PA realized he needed to be cut loose. He shat around Arse Technica for a while and now he's shitting it up at Polygon.
We all know games "journalism" is about one of the most laughable things ever, but Kuchera and Polygon represent the fucking highest echelon of shilling, shit-flinging, and all around douchebaggery. There is zero integrity involved with Polygon as a whole and with Kuchera as a person. You shouldn't simply distrust their reviews, news, opinions, etc., you should actively trust it to be complete and utter paid-for horseshit.
Matrix multiplication means picking up where multiple factors can be combined to produce a high score. It can analyze threat = capability x intent. I think this approach can be used as much by the individual trying to get a handle on reality (multiply news by what you know is possible) as by a massive organization (crunch data streams to find exploitable juicy bits).
If you think this way you will be paranoid. But, if you just want to imagine where things can go if they get even worse than they are now, say if unlimited resources are deployed by utterly immoral actors, it can be useful.
For example, without formal training I came up with the above threat equation. After typing the equation into Google, it turns out that it is correct and part of formal risk/threat assessment calculations. I figure that's because it is common sense.
http://www.aci-na.org/sites/de...
Capability matrix:
Look. The entire data stream starting from the time a Kinect is plugged into electrical power can be automatically saved forever in a quiet data center.
XBox+Kinect is a very powerful listening device because of its smarts. It can download a program or search parameters and seek high-quality data, such as a conversation with a certain person's name in it, and filter it before sending it upstream. It can also compress a raw feed and gradually upload it over time.
So if anyone ever does something criminal or suggestive, like maybe your child has a party and someone does drugs in the living room, that data can be silently tagged and stored without any human's knowledge.
Any of your computers, or any computer ever in your vicinity throughout your daily life, or the lives of other people, can do the same thing. Just silently record at all times. There are too many ways it can be done in software. Free apps, buggy malware, browsers..
All phones, networked hardware, your car's On-Star navigation system and black box, can be additional channels.
Intent matrix:
Years later, if someone wants to find something on you they just make a mining query.
Queries can ultimately matrix multiply all locations x all channels x all individuals x all conversations files or positioning data.
Such as any conversation that mentions a target name or keyword ever held in front of anybody's XBox, personal laptop, tablet, wall phone, mobile phone, desk at work in any company. If you ignore any difficulty associated with processing/telecom/power/time capacity you will understand that rather than simply being "overheard" it is like you are leading your life by crawling over a jungle-gym moving from one data capture point to another. Your life over time and space, and those of all people with whom you interact, together become an immense transparent crystal object that can be observed at one's convenience from any angle.
Matrix Product: (exploitable output, or the threat)
Forget trying to end-run around the NSA, there is no point. But worry about other actors.
The U.S. data will be privately owned and controlled by other actors.
Any big company or country has a chance at subverting these streams and building their own global capacity.
A criminal organization could pressure a Verizon sysadmin.
The captured data does not have to go to court. It can be shown to someone else, or to you in order to embarrass you into tilting you towards a given course of action, for example if a target was shown video capturing an infidelity. The actor can dial in any degree of formality, truth or fairness.
Data that might have saved you (such as data proving innocence or entrapment) can be deleted, ignored, or modified in whatever private data center it is stored.
Parallel construction means all of this dark activity, a dark war against humanity, can be kept in the dark, but leveraged when some other expedient is selected.
Comments:
Once you or someone many steps removed who you don't even know has been targeted or an annotation has been made
I don't mean rant in a negative light exactly, but that you are behaving similar to what you are complaining about. The Article is about how game consoles can monitor people, which does not have positive consequences for society and citizens. This writer and source is not the first to cover the topic, just the most recent. Spending 4 paragraphs telling everyone how bad the author and source without mention of the topic distracts from the article and topic.
Welcome to the game, if you were not playing intentionally you just became a sucker. If you were playing intentionally, well, go find a sand box and pound some.
People have been concerned about Xbox One and it's always on sensor arrays designed for spying. There was a recent report in the Guardian telling us that GCHQ used it to spy on people in Xbox360. There is no reason to believe that the latest will be used any differently, and no reason to believe that what GCHQ does also happens at the NSA, CIA, FBI, DHS, etc...
My family is smart enough to have boycotted all versions of the MS consoles. Yeah, we have owned PS2 through PS4 and some people have concerns with those. Most Sony PS concerns relate to the old Sony root kit issues however, and not some always on spytech filming and recording your every move.
If people want a fix to the solution, start boycotting. Remember that a boycott is not just not purchasing something, but actively persuading others to not purchase that same thing. It will take a lot to force change, because there are all these nice back door payments to companies so that they do the wrong thing (yet another Snowden/Guardian piece you should read).
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Nope, temperature and motion sensors could be used to tell people want to watch the camera. The microphone is a different issue but sensors and GPS would still let them know when to start looking at you. Sensors have been in phones for a long time, as has been the ability for your phone to broadcast sensor information even when you believe the phone is turned "off".
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
And that's just too bad as I'd love to bash MS and their Xbox. -PS4 future owner.
I just purchased a SAMSUNG UN32F6300AFXZA is it 120Hz or not being a running question? I use it as a 32" monitor, and it has one hell of a display http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
This HDTV is decked out, WiFi and hardwired, lots of things to keep one occupied, even has it's own web browser, Voice commands, Turn on , Turn off (I guess), and, "Gestures" it reads your body language or maybe just your hand, and face recognition. What you might not see, is my reluctance to set it up to just a SamSung account.
As usual I read the ToS's and the privacy policy of the system when I set it up;( It's required reading or else you just click on ok and continue) It mentions the privacy policy in passing (a link) in the ToS's, When you enter the "Smart Hub" area your shown another privacy policy (previous link) that shows this HDTV is one hell of a data miner, what's collected is placed in a data base, kept and based as per South Korea laws (jurisdiction).
Why would it do this? It's for the "S Recommendation", "Find something good to watch. Simply click the recommend button on the remote to get instant recommended shows that are on now". (from link above)
Cause it should know who you are and what you like; if you've had this HDTV 6 months or more it should know you and your sister apart, or a request to "show me something dirty" could go horribly wrong.
A person with this set up in their place would most likely have it linked to the Lan, A Web cam setup to read gestures and face recognition, a microphone turned on for the voice commands. All the requirements of an Xbox plus more (the constant Internet connection) while not required to be connected all the time, most likely once it's set-up it will stay in that configuration.
I've looked and can't find a ToS or Privacy policy easily. I just know what I read and have sansung.com blocked at the router level for two reasons. I use it as a monitor and don't need it as an 240Hz LCD HDTV, my Panasonic 600Hz Plasma HDTV takes care of that feature poking fun at refresh rates and the big lie) - The second reason is Samsung tries to access and work with your FaceBook account and if you don't have one, highly suggest you get one. Facebook being a third party would have access to all of SamSung's data on you (no basis for that, would seem a given so to me).
I really would like to read the ToS again I positive it's against Samsung's ToS to watch pornography on this HDTV. :}
To opt out:
opt-out-shine-the-light-law@sisa.samsung.com
(Samsung may need to ask you to provide follow-up information in the order to duly process an E-mail request).
I guarantee you that the Kinect does not transfer that kind of information to Microsoft since it will be caught and there will be outrage.
Obviously, if they were planning on using the device to spy on people, it'd be for extremely targeted operations, activating monitoring mode only for certain people, and therefore not likely to be discovered.
Why not send the previously collected bursts while you're playing games? Remember the big stink about the last generation of games needing to be online originally? well, we're already all doing online games and services (netflix, Facebook, twitter) on the TV anyway. The XBOX data can go wherever it is the online data servers are, and distributed man-in-the-middle-style from there to MS, and thus, the NSA. Just sneak a bit at a time into the game / video / DLC bursts and encryption will hide the rest.
The door lock analogy has been broken with things like PRISM now verified to exist.
The analogy is now more along the lines of every door lock being built to allow a single planet-wide master key and employing millions of people to rummage through your things every couple of hours to see if you've added anything they don't like (note: not necessarily illegal!) to your list of possessions.
The problem though isn't that they're going to find something and come after you right now -- everyone's got something they should hide (whether they think so or not) and there's not enough agents in the world to nail every person out there.
The problem is that they'll find something and store it away so that IF they ever decide to come after you for any reason in the future, they'll have something on you. I mean sure the filters will be looking for absolutely blatantly obvious stuff like Googling for a bunch of bomb ingredients consecutively (needs to have a plausible justification for its existence) but for the most part, the real goal is just to dig up dirt on everyone so that nobody can ever be completely free from fear of prosecution and/or blackmail.