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Links Tagged With “privacy” (Show All Items Tagged With “privacy”)

Feds to Let Citizens Log In With Yahoo, Google, Paypal Accounts (via OpenID)

Bookmarked via Diigo on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 @ 12:11 CDT by Daniel Andrlik

This is an enormous win for OpenID, but it is also a huge risk if anything goes wrong with such a high-profile project. Obviously, it will all depend on the implementation, and if all goes well it will give OpenID the push it needs to increase the number of consumers as opposed to providers, which is a ratio that is sorely lopsided at the moment.

I’m a little sad to see that my preferred OpenID provider, myOpenID from JanRain, Inc., was not included in the approved list of providers for the pilot program. Hopefully, that will be rectified soon, although even if it does not, one of the great things about the OpenID protocol is that delegation means that I can change providers on a whim. :-)

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The Pirate Bay Guilty; Jail for File-Sharing Foursome

Bookmarked via Diigo on Friday, April 17, 2009 @ 11:02 CDT by Daniel Andrlik

Prepare for some serious escalation on both sides of the file sharing issue. This doesn’t end the debate, it just upgrades the weapons on both sides. It’s going to be ugly, and neither side is totally in the right. Try not to let yourself become a legal casualty.

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IPREDator, the Terrifyingly Awesome Privacy Tool Prepares to Launch - ReadWriteWeb

Bookmarked via Diigo on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 @ 12:28 CDT by Daniel Andrlik

sigh

Privacy tools like this have existed for a long time, but this new service from the Pirate Bay will probably go a long way towards popularizing them. I’m conflicted, because I think these types of tools are necessary, that computer users need to learn about them to avoid intrusive surveillance, but I’m uncomfortable with it becoming popularized by its connection to an illegal activity. These tools, and the skills that use them will be essential in the future to avoid unlawful (or at least inappropriate) surveillance and to protect people from the malicious theft of data, but its association with the illegal just provides more fuel for those representing the other side of this digital arms race.

We are heading to a scary place here, and far sooner than I think even the cyberpunks expected it.

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Bill proposes ISPs, Wi-Fi keep logs for police - CNN.com

Bookmarked via Diigo on Friday, February 20, 2009 @ 16:44 CST by Daniel Andrlik

This is ridiculous. Essentially, if this passes as it stands it means if you have a router in your home or business, even if it is password protected, you need to keep logs of network activity for two years. From the article:

The legal definition of electronic communication service is “any service which provides to users thereof the ability to send or receive wire or electronic communications.” The U.S. Justice Department’s position is that any service “that provides others with means of communicating electronically” qualifies.

That sweeps in not just public Wi-Fi access points, but password-protected ones too, and applies to individuals, small businesses, large corporations, libraries, schools, universities, and even government agencies. Voice over IP services may be covered too.

Seriously, I can be held culpable if my router doesn’t maintain two years of log data? I mean, I’m all for stopping child pornography, but it’s boneheaded provisions like this, proposed by people who don’t understand the technology they are regulating, that causes me to have absolutely no faith that our government can effectively deal with the issues of the modern age.

I’m not even going to get started on the potential privacy issues that this raises, as I’m sure the rest of the Interwebs are busy enough doing that for me.

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Does what happen in Facebook stay in Facebook?

Bookmarked via Diigo on Saturday, April 12, 2008 @ 07:46 CDT by Daniel Andrlik

OK, this video from 2006 may be a little overblown, but conspiracy theories aside there are some questions worth asking here. Particularly when you consider the connections the author draws between some of Facebook’s investors. We’re not talking just about marketing firms here, we’re talking about CIA and DARPA. It’s a little tin-foil hat, but come on, in a country where something like the Total Information Awareness Project can be proposed by our defense department, anything is possible.

The video is well done so I will forgive the author the constant errors of referring to Facebook as “the Facebook” and asking the audience “do you have a Facebook?” :-)

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OAuth Discovery 1.0 Draft 2 released with support from Ma.gnolia, Fire Eagle and Satisfaction

Bookmarked via Diigo on Wednesday, April 9, 2008 @ 10:07 CDT by Daniel Andrlik

“OAuth Discovery, simply, is an extensible, machine-readable format for identifying OAuth-protected resources and service endpoints. Take a look at the provided example or Ma.gnolia’s actual discovery profile to get an idea for what these documents look like. ”

OAuth = Awesome-sauce

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Introducing the Google Contacts Data API

Bookmarked via Diigo on Thursday, March 6, 2008 @ 21:39 CST by Daniel Andrlik

Finally, Google has provided a secure way of accessing contact information from a Google account. I for one will be happy to no longer have to hand my password over to a third party to access my account data. It’s also nice to have a standardized way of getting that data that does not depend on screen scraping.

Kudos to Google for releasing this much needed API!

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Clarity Sought on Electronics Searches

Bookmarked via Diigo on Thursday, February 7, 2008 @ 15:37 CST by Daniel Andrlik

The title of this Washington Post article fails to do the material justice. This has to do with U.S. customs officials that have been requiring travelers to turn over laptop passwords (booting their laptops to verify it is correct), copying web history information and occasionally confiscating laptops.

I wish I could say that I didn’t believe this was happening, but this is becoming an all too familiar sort of story in our country.

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Command Line Warriors : Encrypt Your Home Directory

Bookmarked via Diigo on Saturday, December 8, 2007 @ 20:25 CST by Daniel Andrlik

This is a really great guide for setting up your /home directory as an encrypted partition in Linux. Since I’m always a bit data paranoid, and am a sucker for any kind of software tinkering, I think I’ll give this a try on my laptop when I get it back from being repaired.

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Unit Structures: We’re not sheep, you’re just not paying attention

Bookmarked via Diigo on Friday, December 7, 2007 @ 08:43 CST by Daniel Andrlik

“[Bloggers] look at Facebook’s growing numbers, see the impressive trends, and conclude we don’t care about privacy or anything else Facebook does. This logic is flawed, of course - it’s sort of like saying any American who doesn’t renounce their citizenship and move to Canada agrees with President Bush.”

I’m so tired of new media people saying privacy is dead and that users are sheep. Most of that is because people in new media have as much an understanding of the average user as I have of what it’s like to be an astronaut or spy. We’ve got plenty of ideas about it, but in general we’re almost certainly wrong.

This post from Fred Stutzman, an academic who has been watching Facebook usage patterns since before it opened up to everyone, begins to poke some significant holes in the frankly bullshit theory that users don’t care about privacy and are just a bunch of sheep.

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