What I was actually thinking about was the issue of understanding the encryption code well enough to be sure that it is properly implemented and not deliberately or accidentally weak. Both one-time-pad and AES are so strong that they are beyond the ability even of quantum computers (theorized to exist in the near future) to crack. In the case of one-time-pad encryption that assumes that you have a good enough random number generator that the pads are not predictable. In the case of AES, it assumes that you have a really good random number generator for your initialization vectors, you use a really strong password, you properly guard against side channel attacks and you use pure AES, not hybridized with anything else (as is typically done.) So I realize that it's a relatively narrow use case that you have people who can confidently audit one-time-pad encryption software and not AES but it is a possibility. I think the simplicity of one-time-pad makes the theoretical point (if not the practical one) stronger that cutting off all encryption is impossible.
TFA says "...68 percent of those who accessed the Google Drive account used Tor. Still, that leaves more than a third who didn't take any protections to mask their real IP address..."
So does this really mean that the other 32% didn't mask their IP address at all or did they use some other method besides Tor?
The drawback to one-time-pad encryption is that it requires a pre-shared secret. You have to generate as many one-time-pads as you think you may need ahead of time and each person that is a party to the communication has to have a copy of each pad to carry with them. This was done by the Germans in WW I. U-boat captains carried a briefcase full of one-time-pads. The allies were not able to crack this encryption the way that they did with the Enigma machine in WW II. What did happen sometimes, however, was that the U-boat captain would run out of one-time-pads and have to reuse one. Then the encryption could be cracked by comparing messages to derive the pad.
Methods like public key cryptography and Diffe-Hellman solve this problem and allow you to establish encrypted communications without having to have a pre-shared secret or send a key over some other secure channel. It's relatively easy for a web site or an app to use one of these methods but completely impractical for them to use one-time-pads for most purposes. Imagine having to physically visit your bank to get a supply of one-time-pads which you would then have to supply to your web browser in order use your online banking. Then, when you use up your supply of pads, you would have to go back to the bank and get more.
Now having said that, terrorists probably do have good use-cases for one-time-pad encryption. They have the motivation to put in the extra effort that it requires. When one-time-pads are not practical, terrorists could use other third-party crypto add-ons and not rely on built-in crypto supplied by Apple and other device manufacturers. So this all means that efforts by intelligence agencies and law enforcement to get back doors or master keys are only going to be effective against those who are unsophisticated or hapless. They will be plenty effective against the ordinary person who is not deliberately trying to evade the authorities but not against state sponsored terrorists.
I watched the PBS documentary mentioned in the article and yes, it could be done without cooperation. The method described in the documentary involves administering a certain drug and then getting the subject to recall the memory which you want to erase. You would do that by showing the person an object, picture or something which would cause them to remember the experience you want to erase. The hypothesis/explanation for the phenomenon is that, each time you recall a memory, it has to be rewritten to be remembered again after that. The drug prevents the memories from being rewritten so all you have to do is remember something while under the influence of the drug and it's gone.
The method of implanting false memories is more complicated and it involves talking to the person at length and using associations. It actually sounds a lot like neurolinguistic programming. They claimed that it worked on 70% of the subjects before they decided they had to end the experiment because of the ethics rules for human subjects research.
Absolutely. The university where I work just instituted a block on BitTorrent, using a new application firewall, because of increased pressure from the RIAA.
It seems to me that Java has lost a lot of mind share (at least) since Oracle took over. Part of that is a shift towards the Open Java implementation over Oracle java but there has also been interest in alternatives. If you search for popularity of programming languages, however, you will find conflicting results as to who is gaining and loosing.
Pascal was originally the native programming language, at the professional level, for the Mac. For many years, Pascal was the introductory language for CS. I guess the reason this didn't promote programming at the high school level, at the time, was that you had to pay to get an IDE.
I think you and the parent post each have a point. 3rd party scripting is being badly abused on the web today and needs to be reigned in somehow. The CA system is broken, especially where revocation is concerned. DNS needs to be more secure than it is today. Browsers need to be better at showing the level of trust in a site, in particular, the case when a cert is good for privacy encryption but not so much for authentication. Error messages from deeply embedded third party sites don't make their way to the browser. These problems combine to create the malvertising climate we have now. It's true that there is a lot of interactivity people expect on web sites today which you can't get without 3rd party scripting. The thing is that the technology needs to be reimplemented in a way that doesn't open things up for abuse so much.
I think it's likely that there will eventually be some form of AI going through the video and picking out interesting things. It's probably going to do a poor job in the beginning and then get refinements. I'm not sure that such a system, however, will ever be better than just good enough to be dangerous.
In the case of organizations like the ACLU and EFF, it's donations from ordinary citizens who want our system to remain a democracy and not a technological totalitarian state.
I agree that there has traditionally been no expectation of privacy in public but the fact that this is collecting so much data and, potentially, keeping it forever makes things different than before we had the technology we have today. Another factor is the state of information security today. It's really hard to keep data secret and away from attackers. Should the body camera footage from all officers be made public? If not, then the data has to be protected. Is this even practical?
By "encounter" I suppose you mean a case where you directly interact with the police, not just walk by one. With these cameras you only need to be in line of sight to be recorded. I remember, when I was a child in a somewhat more rural area, it was a rare occasion to see a police officer, even at a public event. It made people a little nervous to be near the police even if they were doing nothing wrong. It made people nervous just to see a guy with a gun. Today, in the center of the city where I work, you are almost always within line of sight of at least one police officer when you walk down the streets. I probably walk by several every weekday and hardly take notice.
Absolutely right. One of the problems with mass surveillance, especially combined with some kind of automated processing and threat prediction, is that it sensitizes you to diversionary tactics.
I was responding to the notion that the radio telescopes, themselves, are a source of radio transmissions. I was not casting doubt on the sensitivity of radio telescopes to microwave ovens, WiFi, etc. However, I do seriously doubt that these supposed radio sensitive people are anywhere near as sensitive as a radio telescope if they are really sensitive at all.
So I checked my own microwave and it does, indeed, give a small blip on the diode/volt meter when the door is opened while running. It's still much less than a cell phone or WiFi signal. I get absolutely nothing when the door is closed and I never have with any other microwave I have tested. I'm not saying it's impossible but I have yet to see one that is noticeably poorly shielded.
This article reminds me of a couple of sayings. One is that that close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and thermonuclear weapons. The other is probably an urban myth. The idea was that, at one point in the Cold War, the US military was given a list of targets to be able to "destroy" and another list of targets to be able to "neutralize." Military Intelligence had to interpret these words in the context of nuclear war so they decided that "neutralize" meant to reduce the target to rubble with fragments no larger than a certain size while "destroy" meant a finer grade of rubble.
So they don't know that radio telescopes are receivers and not transmitters?
I have tested Microwave Ovens with a diode and a volt meeter (which makes a simple broad spectrum radio receiver) and the ones I have tested are always so well shielded that you get nothing. Cell phones, on the other hand, generate a strongly measurable voltage across the diode. By the way, I've done this demonstration repeatedly to show that a cell phone in air plane mode can still use GPS for navigation without transmitting a thing.
But the smart city isn't addressing this issue at all. You are still anonymous to other ordinary citizens. It's corporations and government agencies you are no longer anonymous to.
Actually, what I imagine is that if we stayed out of the Middle East, then the Shiites would be fighting the Sunnis more than they currently are. Meanwhile, we would find reasons to fight amongst ourselves also. In other words, more Catholic vs. Protestant stuff like the IRA and ETA and probably more white supremacist terrorism like the KKK, Skin Heads and all that. The best way to eliminate infighting is to find a common enemy. In other words redefine who is in and who is out.
The Cancer Genomics Hub uses BitTorrent based software to distribute huge public domain data sets (multiple TB each) from DNA sequencing and related studies. BitTorrent is simply the most efficient way to distribute data on such a scale. This does get interesting when you are at a university which is under pressure from the RIAA to shut down BitTorrent, however. I had to spend way too much time working this all out with a firewall administrator.
The DNA, itself, can be personally identifiable. There is disagreement about exactly how much or what sequences you would have to include for DNA data to be personal health information (PHI, regulated by HIPAA) in and of itself. One thing is perfectly clear - that any sequence which includes forensic DNA markers (specifically mentioned as personally identifiable information in HIPAA) as well as the sequence of any gene which is the subject of an FDA approved diagnostic test, is PHI. There is no need for any additional information accompanying the DNA sequence for it to be subject to HIPAA regulation. In Massachusetts, de-identified DNA data can only include somatic mutations - the differences between diseased tissue (such as cancer) and the patient's normal tissue. Germline variants - differences between the patient DNA sequence and the reference genome (i.e. human genome project), are not allowed. What we need is broader clarification on the matter.
The duopoly is exactly what I have in my area. AT&T is my alternative to Comcast and Verizon FiOS is available as close as just half a mile away. They are not enforcing a bandwidth cap here at all. I exceed 300GB on a regular basis, although a good part of that is backup scripts which run in the wee hours of the morning. I guess they are better here because of the potential competition. Either that or... I do have this pet theory that they have put a flag on my account which says "influential nerd. Keep this guy happy." Actually, I have no idea how good or bad their tech support is. In nine years, I have never used it.
I agree that operating system engineers should not get bogged down in details of security. What they should do, however, is concentrate on those aspects of security which equate to quality, especially stability and transparency. Not crashing in response to unusual input and handling overloads gracefully are really important aspects of security. Likewise, the ability to see what is going on in your OS is fundamental to security. For example, I have argued for some time that the addition of DTrace to Mac OS X is an important security feature. The reaction I get is "That's just a debugger." No, the ability to understand what's going on is absolutely necessary to security. These things do not degrade the user experience or make an OS less usable. They make it better.
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What I was actually thinking about was the issue of understanding the encryption code well enough to be sure that it is properly implemented and not deliberately or accidentally weak. Both one-time-pad and AES are so strong that they are beyond the ability even of quantum computers (theorized to exist in the near future) to crack. In the case of one-time-pad encryption that assumes that you have a good enough random number generator that the pads are not predictable. In the case of AES, it assumes that you have a really good random number generator for your initialization vectors, you use a really strong password, you properly guard against side channel attacks and you use pure AES, not hybridized with anything else (as is typically done.) So I realize that it's a relatively narrow use case that you have people who can confidently audit one-time-pad encryption software and not AES but it is a possibility. I think the simplicity of one-time-pad makes the theoretical point (if not the practical one) stronger that cutting off all encryption is impossible.
TFA says "...68 percent of those who accessed the Google Drive account used Tor. Still, that leaves more than a third who didn't take any protections to mask their real IP address..."
So does this really mean that the other 32% didn't mask their IP address at all or did they use some other method besides Tor?
The drawback to one-time-pad encryption is that it requires a pre-shared secret. You have to generate as many one-time-pads as you think you may need ahead of time and each person that is a party to the communication has to have a copy of each pad to carry with them. This was done by the Germans in WW I. U-boat captains carried a briefcase full of one-time-pads. The allies were not able to crack this encryption the way that they did with the Enigma machine in WW II. What did happen sometimes, however, was that the U-boat captain would run out of one-time-pads and have to reuse one. Then the encryption could be cracked by comparing messages to derive the pad.
Methods like public key cryptography and Diffe-Hellman solve this problem and allow you to establish encrypted communications without having to have a pre-shared secret or send a key over some other secure channel. It's relatively easy for a web site or an app to use one of these methods but completely impractical for them to use one-time-pads for most purposes. Imagine having to physically visit your bank to get a supply of one-time-pads which you would then have to supply to your web browser in order use your online banking. Then, when you use up your supply of pads, you would have to go back to the bank and get more.
Now having said that, terrorists probably do have good use-cases for one-time-pad encryption. They have the motivation to put in the extra effort that it requires. When one-time-pads are not practical, terrorists could use other third-party crypto add-ons and not rely on built-in crypto supplied by Apple and other device manufacturers. So this all means that efforts by intelligence agencies and law enforcement to get back doors or master keys are only going to be effective against those who are unsophisticated or hapless. They will be plenty effective against the ordinary person who is not deliberately trying to evade the authorities but not against state sponsored terrorists.
I watched the PBS documentary mentioned in the article and yes, it could be done without cooperation. The method described in the documentary involves administering a certain drug and then getting the subject to recall the memory which you want to erase. You would do that by showing the person an object, picture or something which would cause them to remember the experience you want to erase. The hypothesis/explanation for the phenomenon is that, each time you recall a memory, it has to be rewritten to be remembered again after that. The drug prevents the memories from being rewritten so all you have to do is remember something while under the influence of the drug and it's gone.
The method of implanting false memories is more complicated and it involves talking to the person at length and using associations. It actually sounds a lot like neurolinguistic programming. They claimed that it worked on 70% of the subjects before they decided they had to end the experiment because of the ethics rules for human subjects research.
Absolutely. The university where I work just instituted a block on BitTorrent, using a new application firewall, because of increased pressure from the RIAA.
It seems to me that Java has lost a lot of mind share (at least) since Oracle took over. Part of that is a shift towards the Open Java implementation over Oracle java but there has also been interest in alternatives. If you search for popularity of programming languages, however, you will find conflicting results as to who is gaining and loosing.
Pascal was originally the native programming language, at the professional level, for the Mac. For many years, Pascal was the introductory language for CS. I guess the reason this didn't promote programming at the high school level, at the time, was that you had to pay to get an IDE.
I think you and the parent post each have a point. 3rd party scripting is being badly abused on the web today and needs to be reigned in somehow. The CA system is broken, especially where revocation is concerned. DNS needs to be more secure than it is today. Browsers need to be better at showing the level of trust in a site, in particular, the case when a cert is good for privacy encryption but not so much for authentication. Error messages from deeply embedded third party sites don't make their way to the browser. These problems combine to create the malvertising climate we have now. It's true that there is a lot of interactivity people expect on web sites today which you can't get without 3rd party scripting. The thing is that the technology needs to be reimplemented in a way that doesn't open things up for abuse so much.
I think it's likely that there will eventually be some form of AI going through the video and picking out interesting things. It's probably going to do a poor job in the beginning and then get refinements. I'm not sure that such a system, however, will ever be better than just good enough to be dangerous.
In the case of organizations like the ACLU and EFF, it's donations from ordinary citizens who want our system to remain a democracy and not a technological totalitarian state.
They also need to held accountable for how they keep the video footage secure from both malicious insiders and outside hackers.
This is exactly the position of the ACLU. You can't count count on police video to be unbiased. You need to take your own video.
I agree that there has traditionally been no expectation of privacy in public but the fact that this is collecting so much data and, potentially, keeping it forever makes things different than before we had the technology we have today. Another factor is the state of information security today. It's really hard to keep data secret and away from attackers. Should the body camera footage from all officers be made public? If not, then the data has to be protected. Is this even practical?
By "encounter" I suppose you mean a case where you directly interact with the police, not just walk by one. With these cameras you only need to be in line of sight to be recorded. I remember, when I was a child in a somewhat more rural area, it was a rare occasion to see a police officer, even at a public event. It made people a little nervous to be near the police even if they were doing nothing wrong. It made people nervous just to see a guy with a gun. Today, in the center of the city where I work, you are almost always within line of sight of at least one police officer when you walk down the streets. I probably walk by several every weekday and hardly take notice.
Something sort of symbolic you could do is to sign every document as Agent Smith and photoshop him into every picture you upload some place.
Absolutely right. One of the problems with mass surveillance, especially combined with some kind of automated processing and threat prediction, is that it sensitizes you to diversionary tactics.
I was responding to the notion that the radio telescopes, themselves, are a source of radio transmissions. I was not casting doubt on the sensitivity of radio telescopes to microwave ovens, WiFi, etc. However, I do seriously doubt that these supposed radio sensitive people are anywhere near as sensitive as a radio telescope if they are really sensitive at all.
So I checked my own microwave and it does, indeed, give a small blip on the diode/volt meter when the door is opened while running. It's still much less than a cell phone or WiFi signal. I get absolutely nothing when the door is closed and I never have with any other microwave I have tested. I'm not saying it's impossible but I have yet to see one that is noticeably poorly shielded.
This article reminds me of a couple of sayings. One is that that close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and thermonuclear weapons. The other is probably an urban myth. The idea was that, at one point in the Cold War, the US military was given a list of targets to be able to "destroy" and another list of targets to be able to "neutralize." Military Intelligence had to interpret these words in the context of nuclear war so they decided that "neutralize" meant to reduce the target to rubble with fragments no larger than a certain size while "destroy" meant a finer grade of rubble.
So they don't know that radio telescopes are receivers and not transmitters?
I have tested Microwave Ovens with a diode and a volt meeter (which makes a simple broad spectrum radio receiver) and the ones I have tested are always so well shielded that you get nothing. Cell phones, on the other hand, generate a strongly measurable voltage across the diode. By the way, I've done this demonstration repeatedly to show that a cell phone in air plane mode can still use GPS for navigation without transmitting a thing.
But the smart city isn't addressing this issue at all. You are still anonymous to other ordinary citizens. It's corporations and government agencies you are no longer anonymous to.
Actually, what I imagine is that if we stayed out of the Middle East, then the Shiites would be fighting the Sunnis more than they currently are. Meanwhile, we would find reasons to fight amongst ourselves also. In other words, more Catholic vs. Protestant stuff like the IRA and ETA and probably more white supremacist terrorism like the KKK, Skin Heads and all that. The best way to eliminate infighting is to find a common enemy. In other words redefine who is in and who is out.
The Cancer Genomics Hub uses BitTorrent based software to distribute huge public domain data sets (multiple TB each) from DNA sequencing and related studies. BitTorrent is simply the most efficient way to distribute data on such a scale. This does get interesting when you are at a university which is under pressure from the RIAA to shut down BitTorrent, however. I had to spend way too much time working this all out with a firewall administrator.
The DNA, itself, can be personally identifiable. There is disagreement about exactly how much or what sequences you would have to include for DNA data to be personal health information (PHI, regulated by HIPAA) in and of itself. One thing is perfectly clear - that any sequence which includes forensic DNA markers (specifically mentioned as personally identifiable information in HIPAA) as well as the sequence of any gene which is the subject of an FDA approved diagnostic test, is PHI. There is no need for any additional information accompanying the DNA sequence for it to be subject to HIPAA regulation. In Massachusetts, de-identified DNA data can only include somatic mutations - the differences between diseased tissue (such as cancer) and the patient's normal tissue. Germline variants - differences between the patient DNA sequence and the reference genome (i.e. human genome project), are not allowed. What we need is broader clarification on the matter.
The duopoly is exactly what I have in my area. AT&T is my alternative to Comcast and Verizon FiOS is available as close as just half a mile away. They are not enforcing a bandwidth cap here at all. I exceed 300GB on a regular basis, although a good part of that is backup scripts which run in the wee hours of the morning. I guess they are better here because of the potential competition. Either that or... I do have this pet theory that they have put a flag on my account which says "influential nerd. Keep this guy happy." Actually, I have no idea how good or bad their tech support is. In nine years, I have never used it.
I agree that operating system engineers should not get bogged down in details of security. What they should do, however, is concentrate on those aspects of security which equate to quality, especially stability and transparency. Not crashing in response to unusual input and handling overloads gracefully are really important aspects of security. Likewise, the ability to see what is going on in your OS is fundamental to security. For example, I have argued for some time that the addition of DTrace to Mac OS X is an important security feature. The reaction I get is "That's just a debugger." No, the ability to understand what's going on is absolutely necessary to security. These things do not degrade the user experience or make an OS less usable. They make it better.