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December 29, 2014: 'The Interview' And 'I Can't Breathe': Connecting The Dots
Our propensity to perceive real-world events in the neat, tidy context of stories may serve the purposes of the government and media, but it ultimately does us all a grave disservice. It's time for us to start doing our own thinking rather than letting someone else do it for us. Telling us the stories they want us to hear December 29, 2014: Various And Sundries ID'ed by your body cam: If you wear a video camera, you can be identified based on only four seconds of the video recorded by the camera. A research paper entitled "Egocentric Video Biometrics" makes that claim, although it must be noted that the paper was not subjected to peer review. Ars Technica's Marek Ziolkowski reports on the research in a December 15, 2014, article. Financial industry looks to government for cybersecurity guidance: The outlook appears bright for the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which Congress intends as the framework for collecting and sharing "cyber threat information," as Michael Dodson describes it in a December 15, 2014, post on the JD Supra site. Financial services in particular are hoping the law will provide guidance on what constitutes adequate protections to reduce their liability for data breaches that put their customers at risk. Courts are increasingly finding that heightened risk of future damage is sufficient grounds for a cause of action against an entity that suffers a data breach after failing to implement adequate security precautions. If the organization can show that it complied with government cybersecurity guidelines, it may be able to avoid liability in the event of a breach of its networks. At present, there are no such guidelines. Dodson cites several cases in which financial companies had reason to believe their networks were at risk and failed to act, which made them liable for potential damages to plaintiffs whose data was lost. In the past, courts generally required a showing of actual damages to plaintiffs as a result of data breaches. Those days appear to be coming to an end, which increases the need for such guidelines by any entity that collects and stores anyone's personal information. Yahoo does a 180 on use of Creative Commons images: The December 16, 2014, Weekly explained how Yahoo intended to profit via its Wall Art print service from use of Flickr images that were assigned a Creative Commons license when they were uploaded to the service (see below). In a December 18, 2014, article, TechCrunch's Catherin Shu reports that Yahoo has subsequently removed Creative Commons-licensed images from the service. The company also stated that it would refund all sales of such images. As I stated in the original post, not all of the affected CC licensees objected to the use of their images by the service. They were happy to receive the increased exposure for their pictures and expected no monetary compensation. There was also nothing illegal about Yahoo's use of the CC-licensed images. But Yahoo decided to take a step back and consult with the community before proceeding with its plans. To that I say, "Yippee!" December 16, 2014: Cyberwar? Fuhgeddabouddit! There are plenty more serious threats worth fretting over, such as your everyday, ordinary Internet thievery, which is now the most-common property crime in the U.S., totaling $24 billion in losses in 2012. What's behind the cyber-saber rattling? December 16, 2014: Yahoo Cashes In On Your Cute, Royalty-Free Flickr Images Millions of people have uploaded billions of images to Yahoo's Flickr image-sharing service. Not many of the uploaders expect any payment from people who download or otherwise use their images. In a December 10, 2014, post on the Sophos Naked Security blog, Lisa Vaas explains that Yahoo is planning to make canvas prints from 50 million Flickr images that have Creative Commons licenses. The prints will be sold for up to $49 each, according to Vaas. The company will also use images for the prints whose creators have retained the licensing rights to; these people will receive a 51-percent share of the sales proceeds. The CC licensees are out of luck -- and there's nothing illegal about it. Not all the people whose CC-licensed images will be used object to the lack of any payment, however. Many are satisfied with the extra exposure the prints will afford them. If you're a Flickr user who would like to retain the rights to your images, you can change the license type by opening your Albums and choosing "Batch edit > Change licensing." Your licensing options are shown in the image above. As Vaas points out, for people who've uploaded thousands of CC-licensed images to the service, there's no practical way to opt out of Yahoo's sale and unfettered reuse of the pictures. The lesson is to be careful about which Internet services you trust with your data. Once a file is in the cloud, you've ceded a goodly amount of control over it, one way or the other. Could external hard drives be making a comeback? Nah, but maybe a new kind of cloud-storage service is needed -- one such as SpiderOakthat lets you encrypt your data before you upload it so that only you can decrypt it. December 9, 2014: Five Fantastic Web Freebies There has never been a better time to be a cheapskate. The Internet is full of free programs and services, not to mention public-domain books, pictures, videos, and music available royalty-free. Here's a quick look at five of my favorite freebies. Five great web freebies December 9, 2014: Internet Privacy Awareness Is On The Upswing, And A Common-Sense Drug Policy Articulated By A State Court New tools tell you what the trackers and snoops know about you Want to get creeped out? Use one of the many programs that tell you what personal information social media and other Web sites have collected about you: Creepy, PleaseRobMe.com, and Girls Around Me, which is a service that locates pictures of women who are near you and superimposes the pictures onto a map. There are also apps that scan social-media posts in an attempt to identify people who are suicidal; others track your movements through a store; and one called Turnstyle even follows you around the city of Toronto. The Guardian's Ben Goldacre explains in a December 5, 2014, articlethat nearly all security is now digital, but we don't understand how it works. Instead, we are dealing with "a series of black boxes into which we entrust our money, our privacy and everything else we might hope to have under lock and key. We have no clear sight into this world, and we have few sound intuitions into what is safe and what is flimsy – let alone what is ethical and what is creepy. We are left operating on blind, ignorant, misplaced trust; meanwhile, all around us, without our even noticing, choices are being made." Two areas in particular where reams of sensitive data are being collected are health and finance. Imagine your refrigerator reporting to your insurance company on your excessive ice cream intake. Or merchants basing the price you pay for their goods and services on what they know about how badly you need the product, or how willing you would be to overpay (whether you know you're overpaying or not.) Now imagine the market intelligence in the hands of consumers, who can determine more precisely the market value of an item right here, right now, and can time their purchases accordingly. Which way do you think the information-distribution pendulum will swing? ----------------------------------------------------------- There's a reason why Internet services don't talk about privacy People on the Internet are increasingly concerned about losing their privacy. That's according to the results of a recent Pew Research Internet Project survey. The Pew numbers, which were released on November 12, 2014, indicate that 91 percent of U.S. adults agree or strongly agree that consumers have lost control of the collection and use of their personal information by companies. The results of another Pew survey, released on December 4, 2014, show that more than half of us erroneously believe that a Web site's privacy policy ensures the company keeps confidential all information it collects about its customers. In fact, they should be called anti-privacy policies because they grant the company the right to use whatever information it collects about you in nearly any way it chooses. In any event, few people bother reading privacy policies, which isn't a surprise, considering that Joseph Turow of the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School Communications calls the policies "unreadable." Forbes' Jonathan Salem Baskin writes in a December 7, 2014, articlethat people may not know much about what's happening with their personal information now, but it won't take long for them to realize there's an "asymmetrical exchange of information" going on, and consumers are getting the short end of the stick. Baskin hints that some of the more forward-thinking of the multibillion-dollar behemoths might want to get ahead of this trend before the inevitable consumer backlash swamps them. ------------------------------------------------------------ Common-sense drug policy from courts in the Land of the Midnight Sun In 1975, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the state's Constitutional right to privacy prevented law enforcement from preventing people from smoking marijuana in their own homes. The state would need a "compelling interest" to violate the person's privacy, not the lower threshold of an interest that is merely "rationally related[] to the accomplishment of a permissible state policy." The state argued that the health and safety of its citizens outweighed the privacy rights of individuals who wanted to smoke marijuana in their homes. The court disagreed, ruling that marijuana use "does not constitute a public health problem of any significant dimensions. It is, for instance, far more innocuous in terms of physiological and social damage than alcohol or tobacco.” In 1978, the Alaska Supreme Court revisited the issue, this time as it related to cocaine use. In this instance, the court ruled that cocaine is far more dangerous than marijuana, in part because you can die of an overdose. Therefore, the state's argument that it must protect the health and safety of citizens justifies the violation of the constitutional right to privacy. The police can arrest you for using cocaine in your home. Fast-forward to 1984, when the issue came up again in relation to alcohol use. Some local communities had taken advantage of a 1981 Alaska statute that allowed them to ban alcohol, although people could still drink alcoholic beverages in their homes. A man was convicted of importing alcohol to one such community in violation of the ordinance. The man argued that the conviction violated his constitutional right to privacy. The court ruled that alcohol was more like cocaine than marijuana in terms of its threat to the community's health and safety. Last month, Alaskans approved the sale and use of marijuana in the state. Some communities want to include marijuana in their local prohibition of alcohol. Even if the legislature (or the state courts) allow marijuana to be prohibited in local communities that decide to do so, it appears people in those areas would retain a constitutional right to use the drug in their own homes. As AlterNet's David Morris states in a December 4, 2014, article, the Alaska courts are to be commended for using "scientific evidence to determine the balance between the right of the state to protect its citizens with the right of its citizens to be left alone. The U.S. Congress and Supreme Court have much to learn from the next to last state to join the Union." December 2, 2014: How Google, Facebook, And Twitter Make Billions By Offering 'Free' Services Online ads may not be as effective as their supporters claim, although mobile ads get noticed more than their desktop counterparts. Hopes for social networks profiting from selling what they know about their customers may also be dashed. Hold onto your wallet! How big-name web services make billions December 2, 2014: Smoking Continues To Decline, Airlines Crack Down On Internet Thieves, And Email's Cloudy Outlook Good news! Smoking rates continue to drop The U.S. Centers for Disease Control's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report isn't what most people would consider required reading. Sometimes, however, the report can actually be downright inspirational. For example, last week's report shows that the number of people in the U.S. who smoke cigarettes daily declined from 16.9 percent in 2005 to 13.7 percent in 2013. The number of cigarettes each person smokes per day is down as well. Mother Jones's Kevin Drum examines the smoking decline in a November 28, 2014, article. The CDC report indicates that smoking is more prevalent among gay people than in the general population: 26 percent of gay people smoke, compared to 17 percent of all adults in the U.S. However, the CDC points out that the discrepancy could be due to the survey methodology, which relied on self-reporting and may not have accurately categorized "lesbian, gay, and bisexual." If you're a smoker who would rather be an ex-smoker, check out the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Smokefree.gov, which is jam-packed with resources to help you quit. The American Cancer Society offers a Guide to Quitting Smoking. ------------------------------------------------- Long arm of the law nabs 118 online credit-card thieves It may be a drop in the bucket, but it's still reassuring to know that not all Internet criminals go unpunished. In a November 28, 2014, article on the SecurityWeek site, Eduard Kovacs reports that the recent "Global Airport Action" involving law enforcement agencies around the world led to the arrest of 118 people accused of using stolen or false credit cards to purchase airline tickets online. The operation entailed 60 airlines operating in 45 countries, as well as the International Air Transport Association and all the major credit-card companies. The IATA estimates that the airline industry has lost $1 billion due to fraudulent online ticket purchases. Of course, those losses are passed on to us customers in the form of higher ticket prices, smaller seats, bag-check fees, and innumerable other minor indignities. So much for the friendly skies! ------------------------------------------------- Has email use peaked? The other day I was remarking to a friend that I'm spending much less time writing, reading, and (most importantly) deleting email than I used to. Yet reports persist that claim workers spend as much as one-fourth of their workday handling email. Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz has made it his mission to convince the world that email has peaked and will soon be obsolete. Wired's Marcus Wohlsen reports on Moskovitz's anti-email campaign in a January 21, 2014, article. Moskovitz left Facebook in 2008 and founded Asana with the goal of creating a more efficient way for workers to collaborate. Taking the counter argument is the Atlantic's Alexis C. Madrigal, who posits in an August 14, 2014, article that email is the Internet's best feature. The reason for email overload, according to Madrigal, is that the technology is being used for purposes that it may not be well-suited to, such as document sharing and project management. Could email evolve (or devolve) into the role for which it was conceived originally: letter writing? Imagine that! November 24, 2014: Telephone Tech-Support Scams Are On The Rise Don't be tricked into paying a fake phone technician to "fix" your perfectly healthy PC. Avoid PC-scan download come-ons, and never, ever grant someone you don't know remote access to your system. Don't fall for a tech-support scam November 24, 2014: Free Tech Ebooks For Students, And How To Identify Your Power-Sapping IPhone Apps Safari Books Online provides a catalog of thousands of tech titles whose topics are a glossary of cutting-edge technology. Now, as part of the White House's ConnectED program, O'Reilly Media is making all the Safari material available for free to every K-12 student in the country. The rollout of Safari for Schools was scheduled to begin in January 2015, but last week Safari CEO Andrew Savikas announced that the first schools have already signed up for the program through theEdmodo service. The ultimate goal of the program is to make the entire Safari catalog of books and videos available for free to any K-12 studentin the U.S. My hat is off to Tim O'Reilly and everyone at O'Reilly Media. Their generosity will benefit all of us for years to come. Find out which apps are using up your iPhone's battery power The September 15, 2014, Weekly described how a change in the default settings of Facebook's iPhone app caused videos to play automatically. This caused many people to reach and exceed the cell-data transmission limits of their accounts. The fix: Press Settings > Facebook > Settings > Auto-play > Wi-fi only (or Off). Alternatively, you can toggle the Use Cellular Data setting to disabled (gray). A new feature of iOS 8.1 gives you the low-down on which iPhone apps are soaking up all the device's juice. The battery-usage tracker is one of the 11 tips in an October 31, 2014, article by Forbes' Jay McGregor. To open the battery tracker, press Settings > General > Usage > Battery Usage. After a few seconds, the apps are listed that use the most battery when the device isn't charging. On my phone, the mail app was eating half the battery power. Since I open my phone's mail app about once a month and get an average of about zero important emails a day, I can nearly double my phone's battery life by disabling the mail app's push feature: Press Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Fetch New Data, and then toggle the Push setting to off. With Push disabled, the account's Fetch setting is enabled, so your phone will apply its default Fetch setting. What's the difference between Push and Fetch? Pushes happen right away, and fetches are done on the schedule you set. The four Fetch options are Every 15 Minutes, Every 30 Minutes, Hourly, and Manually. The only two options I need for most of my email are "Pitch" (as in "Delete") and "Retch" (as in "Delete with extreme prejudice"). November 18, 2014: Trading Privacy For The Public Good How much of our privacy are we willing to give up? Who are we giving it up to? And how do they intend to use our data? If they're using it to help themselves, that's one thing. If they're using it to help everyone, that's another. Trading privacy for the public good November 11, 2014: Tor Breach Shows There's No Such Thing As Internet Anonymity The FBI is believed to have used a hole in the Tor anonymizing service to capture the crooks behind Silk Road 2.0 and other Internet crimes. The battle for/against online anonymity November 11, 2014: Scary Details On Home Depot's Massive Data Breach, And A Call For Federal Breach-Notification Laws Hackers had unfettered access to Home Depot's internal networks -- including all the data collected by its point-of-sale terminals -- for five long months earlier this year. Their haul included 53 million email addresses. As data breaches become more prevalent and more damaging, companies are forced to deal with 47 separate state breach-notification statutes in the absence of a single federal regulation specifying when and how consumers must be informed when their personal data has been stolen. Home Depot's huge data loss Call for a federal breach-notification law November 4, 2014: Comcast Battles Netflix, And Everybody Loses When they put the squeeze on content providers, ISPs end up shortchanging their customers on the network speeds they were promised. ISP customers caught in the crossfire November 4, 2014: Election-Day Blues, States Proposing Constitutional Amendments, And Half An Earth Better Than None? Election-day blues: You already know a very small number of people have a very big impact on the outcome of elections. But you may not have realized just how few, how rich, and how white. In an October 31, 2014, article, The Nation's Zoe Carpenter reports that only 42 people (that's right, Larry, 42) are responsible for one-third of the spending by Super PACs in the 2014 election cycle. Also not a surprise: All 42 of the superdonors are white, and all but seven are men. Carpenter cites data compiled by the Reflective Democracy Campaign that indicates white men account for 65 percent of elected officials, which is about twice their percentage of the total U.S. population. Rich white men tend to contribute to the campaigns of other white men. Duh! So the influence of white men in politics increases as their percentage of the general population decreases. Add in the barriers being raised to potential minority voters and the trend away from public campaign financing (which in the past has served to even the contribution imbalance) and you get the rise of an elite minority class (rich white men) ruling over a disenfranchised majority (everybody else). What's democratic about that? More than one way to amend the Constitution: Everybody hates Congress. Congress doesn't care what everybody thinks -- it's their ball, and if you don't want to play by their rules, you can go home. Some Congress-haters at both ends of the political spectrum (and probably many points in between) are proposing to amend the Constitution by invoking the power granted to state legislatures via Article V of the Constitution. Nick Dranias and Lawrence Lessig make the case for such an approach in a November 2, 2014, article on Constitution Daily. Such a convention convened by the states could only propose amendments -- the amendment process would otherwise be the same. Dranias and Lessig claim that the founding fathers intended Article V as a way for the states to rein in a runaway Congress. The Constitution is silent on how such a convention would operate, apart from it requiring two-thirds of the states to agree to calling one. In the absence of guidelines, groups such as Dranias's Compact for America Educational Foundation are working to get states to agree to a format for an amendment-by-convention process. As Dranias and Lessig point out, our nation's founders provided us with tools for ensuring the perpetuation of our democracy. If the political insiders refuse to use these tools when necessary, it's up to the rest of us to step into the breach. (As an aside, the state legislatures may not be any less corrupt than the U.S. Congress, at least according to John Oliver, who hosts HBO's Last Week Tonight. The Washington Post's Jaime Fuller reports on Oliver's most-recent rant in a November 3, 2014, article.) Maybe half an Earth is all we need: Last year, the National Geographic Society awarded its highest prize, the Hubbard Medal, to Edward O. Wilson, an 84-year-old evolutionary biologist who believes that philosophy and religion are as important to human biology as genes and molecular structures. In a November 2, 2014, interview on the National Geographic site, Wilson explains the connection between the humanities and human biology. But what really caught my eye was Wilson's proposal that humans abandon half the planet. The half-Earth concept is intended as an attempt to give all the other species on the planet a chance to thrive without having to deal with the destructive impact of us humans. Humans have left their mark on nearly ever habitable inch of the Earth. One effect of our broad reach is that other species are dying off at extinction-event levels. So if humans can find a way to thrive while requiring a much smaller per-capita footprint, we could excuse ourselves from a goodly chunk of the orb and let nature do its magic without us getting in the way. (Somewhere a boardroom full of oil-company executives is laughing so hard at this notion that they're soiling their Brionis.) October 28, 2014: Sexting Has Become Part Of Growing Up (Gulp!) Teenagers have phones with cameras and Internet connections. Teenagers push the boundaries. It's inevitable that some teenagers will, um, behave inappropriately on their phones. Then what? Sexting commonplace among teens October 28, 2014: Undo Untoward Online Behaviors, Defuse Worries By Logging Them, And Fight Back Against Online Surveillance So you got naked online... Or maybe you did something else you regret. Or perhaps you're just trying to help someone else who did something online that they now regret. A U.K-based nonprofit called the South West Grid for Learning offers an online resource (pdf) intended to help minimize the damage of embarrassing or otherwise regretful online behavior. Among the topics: Pictures taken with your phone find their way online, whether deliberately or accidentally, so assume any picture you take could end up on the Internet. When you share something with one person, you are potentially sharing it with everyone. You can't trust anybody. If something inappropriate finds its way online, contact the service to request the content be removed. Sometimes it works, but most times it doesn't. In an August 8, 2013, post I described "How to report problems to Google, Facebook, and other Web services." And in a June 27, 2011, post I explained how to "Remove embarrassing YouTube videos and untag Facebook photos." Consider that the number of places the content could be uploaded to is innumerable -- photo-sharing sites, webcam sites, online communities, cloud storage sites, etc. The first time you share that photo or other file, the genie is out of the bottle. Keep in mind that anyone under the age of 18 can be prosecuted for disseminating child porn. However, police will usually treat an underage person sharing an inappropriate image of themselves as a victim, particularly for the first offense. If this (or anything else) has got you feeling anxious... We've all got more than our share of things to worry about. Of course, most of the things that keep us tossing and turning at night never come to pass, but that doesn't necessarily prevent the incessant fretting. An app for iPhones and iPads called Worry Watch lets you keep a log of your troubles so you can track their outcomes. Lifehacker's David Greenbaum writes about the app in an October 26, 2014, post. The goal is show that your concerns were unfounded, or as Tom Petty sings in Crawling Back to You, "Most things I worry about never happen anyway." Greenbaum points out that Worry Watch shouldn't be considered a replacement for "traditional therapies" for anxiety, and you should check with any mental health professionals who are currently treating you. And if you're thinking, "Just what I need -- another app to keep updated," maybe you should just try drinking some chamomile tea. Beyond anxiety: Surveillance Self-Defense Considering the capabilities of modern technology to spy on us, it isn't unreasonable to assume that somebody, somewhere, is using those tools -- and may to spy on you. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Self-Defense site provides overviews, tutorials, briefings, and "playlists" on such subjects as creating strong passwords, encrypting phones and PCs, and protecting yourself on social networks. As Readwrite's Selena Larson explains in an October 24, 2014, article, the site's playlists are collections of tools designed specifically to protect journalism students, Mac users, human-rights workers, security pros, and security newbies. So once you're armed with an arsenal of security tools tailored to your needs, you'll have one less item on your worry list. At least until you add worrying about whether these tools are delivering on their promise. I knew I'd start worrying about whether items are worth adding to my worry list! October 21, 2014: Quick, Simple Fixes For Everyday Tech Glitches Stuff doesn't always work the way it's supposed to. When one of your tech gadgets starts acting up, here's a three-step troubleshooting protocol. Quick fixes for everyday tech glitches October 21, 2014: Randomitries The rise of the fingerprint scanner: The iPhone's got 'em (recent versions, anyway), and with the arrival of Apple Pay, fingerprint scanning for authentication is going mainstream. Fingerprint readers have existed for years, but to date the technology has been difficult to use and relatively easy to bypass. More than five years ago I bought a laptop with a fingerprint scanner for identifying myself, but it failed so often I soon reverted to entering my user ID and password without even trying the scanner. Likewise, when I worked at PC World almost 10 years ago another editor was able to use a water balloon and other techniques to lift the residue of the owner's fingerprint off the scanner and then use it to gain access to the system. Fingerprint scanners appear to have improved to a point that makes them more practical as the primary authentication mechanism for online payments and other uses. In my book, an alternative to passwords for authentication couldn't come fast enough. (I wrote about the inherent weaknesses of passwords in an August 18, 2014, article, "Can we get rid of passwords now? Please?" Forbes' Aaron Tilley writes in an October 10, 2014, article that the market for fingerprint sensors is predicted to increase by a factor of four by the year 2020, according to a report by research firm IHS. The primary reasons cited for the rise of fingerprint scanners are 1) the technology's reliability is improving as the sensors themselves get smaller and are able to analyze with more detail (including peering under the skin to identify you by your capillaries and other subcutaneous material); 2) sensors are more convenient to use than tapping an ID and password on a small screen; and 3) fingerprint readers offer better protection against unauthorized access to your data and accounts. Teens prefer Instagram to Facebook: Another Forbes article, this one posted on October 13, 2014, but Amit Chowdhry, reports on a survey conducted in late August through September by investment firm Piper Jaffray indicating teenagers are skipping Facebook updates in favor of Instagram posts. The percentage of teens active on Facebook declined from 72 percent last April to only 45 percent in September. At the same time, the percentage of teens regularly using Instagram increased from 69 percent last spring to 76 percent in the most-recent survey period. Teens' use of Twitter declined from 63 percent last spring to 59 percent in September, while Google's popularity with teens dropped from 29 percent to 12 percent in the period. Use of Pinterest and Tumblr by teenagers held steady at 22 percent and 21 percent, respectively, according to the survey. Snapchat's popularity with teens increased from 1 percent last spring to 4 percent in September. Why are teens dropping Facebook in favor of Instagram -- or skipping big-name social networks entirely? Chowdhry says it's because teens don't want to share their posts with older folks. Can't say as I blame them one darn bit! U.S. government says it will fight attempts to control the Internet: Who controls the Internet? Nobody, really, although much Internet governance has been the province of the U.S.-based National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Earlier this year the NTIA announced its intention to shift some control over the Internet to the "global multistakeholder community," as TechCrunch's Alex Wilhelm reports in an October 13, 2014, article. Some analysts worry that an authoritarian government could take over at least part of the Internet as a result of the NTIA's proposed change. The subject is expected to be raised at this week's International Telecommunication Union Conference in Korea. U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker told the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers that the U.S. would not allow the Internet to be "co-opted by any person, entity, or nation seeking to substitute their parochial worldview for the collective wisdom of this community.” At the same time, there continues to be international pressure to reduce the amount of control the U.S. has over the Internet. Much of the criticism relates to the U.S. government's surveillance activities. The big question remains: Who can we trust with the important job of keeping the Internet relatively free and relatively open? There appears to be agreement that no government or official international body such as the United Nations should be granted control over any part of the Internet. For the longest time the U.S. National Science Foundation ran the Internet show, but the network simply became too much for the organization to handle. What we need is an international group of talented, apolitical scientists and engineers -- with a few trustworthy former CEOs thrown in for good measure. We wouldn't want to do anything to get in the way of commerce, would we? Would we? (Maybe we would -- see the next item.) It isn't our country anymore: If you're not a corporate executive, banker, or government official, you just don't count. That's the conclusion of former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who spent the last three years traveling throughout the U.S. talking to people of all strata. Bill Moyers' interview with Herbert appears in an October 10, 2014, article on AlterNet. As Herbert writes in his book Losing Our Way, corporations, banks, and government have formed an unholy alliance focused on corporate and financial interests (which to me are synonymous) at the expense of what's best for everybody, particularly the working or middle classes. Herbert's solution begins by people refusing to vote for the power and money interests (once again, synonymous). Herbert calls for a grass-roots movement that will "fight for the interests of ordinary men and women." Where do I sign up? Where are the candidates who will fight against the power? Or has the power already won the fight? October 14, 2014: Battle Of The Behemoths -- Facebook Ad Network Takes On Google Facebook's Atlas ad network is taking on Google's cookies-based DoubleClick in an attempt to serve you ads customized to what the services know about you. Facebook's ability to track you on multiple devices could give the company a big edge. Facebook's ad network challenges Google October 14, 2014: Shadow Profiles And The Myth Of Anonymized Personal Info You're tracked whether or not you use Facebook, Google, and other big web services. The companies can determine private facts about you based solely on what they know about their users who know you. By analyzing what they know about your friends and family who use the services, the companies can extrapolate with pretty good accuracy facts about you, such as your age, occupation, relationship status, political affiliation, and sexual orientation. Wired's Robert McMillan explains in an October 6, 2014, article. McMillan interviews a Swiss researcher named David Garcia who studied information the social network Friendster had collected about the contacts of its users. Garcia extrapolates from the Friendster research that a social network the size of Facebook or Google has a tremendous amount of information about the contacts of the services' users, even if the contacts don't use the services themselves. (read more) Anonymized personal information? No such thing Bradley Cooper and Jessica Alba are lousy tippers. That is one conclusion that could be drawn from the un-anonymized information released by the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission about fares in Manhattan in 2013. Stefan Kulk describes in a September 23, 2014, article on the Interdisciplinary Internet Institute site how researchers were able to determine the people associated with specific fares. The researchers were able to figure out the fares' destinations, some of whom were dropped off at what are euphemistically referred to as gentlemen's clubs. Researcher Vijay Pandurangan determined the drivers associated with each ride, and Anthony Tockar found images of taxis in Manhattan in 2013 and tied taxi license numbers to celebrities and events. That was how Tockar learned that Cooper traveled to a restaurant in Greenwich Village and paid $10.50 for the fare, with no recorded tip. (I choose to believe the tip was off the record for tax purposes.) More potentially damaging is the ability to trace the destination of people leaving adult-oriented establishments by taxi, which could reveal their home addresses. (Note that the commission did not release the information voluntarily, but only after being served with a Freedom of Information order.) (read more) October 6, 2014: Instant Access To All Your Recent Files The quickest way to find a file that has gone AWOL is to use to press Windows key -R, type "recent" (no quotes), and press Enter to open Windows' true recent-files folder. The fastest way to open recent files October 6, 2014: Classy Sisters, Safer Browsing, A Used IPhone Verifier, Real Attack Ads, And A Way To Claim Your Personal Data The four Brown sisters are the definition of growing old(er) gracefully. Their portraits captured once a year since 1975 make aging together look not so bad after all. (Whatever you do, don't rush through the black-and-white images.) Bonus link: If you like perusing vintage photos, check out Vintage Everyday, another donation site whose images of San Francisco in the late 19th century caught my eye. Free app encrypts your phone, protects your privacy Government officials are still criticizing Apple's decision to allow iPhone and iPad users to encrypt their devices without Apple or anyone else but them being able to decrypt it. (Google quickly followed Apple's move by announcing it would allow the same level of encryption on Android devices; I wrote about this in a September 22, 2014, article.) As the Register's Iain Thomson explains in an October 4, 2014, article, the only real change is that law enforcement must now get a warrant before ordering that the phone be decrypted. Finding evidence of a crime on an encrypted device is more difficult and potentially more time-consuming, but doing so is not impossible. For added protection, a German company called ZenGuard offers the free ZenMate VPN browser extension that encrypts your phone's connection and keeps your location a secret. The extension works with iPhones/iPads, Android phones and tablets, and the Chrome and Firefox browsers. When I tested the free version of the app on an iPhone 5, it installed without a hitch. You get a 30-day trial of the fee-based version's data encryption and automatic blocking of "harmful" sites. Sign up by providing an email address and password. You'll be promoted to install a VPN profile by pressing the Install button (as shown in the screen above). To encrypt your connection, open the app and press the big red "Touch to secure" button. The button will turn green and state that "You are secured." The screen also shows the amount of your 500MB monthly data allotment you have remaining, and the country "you appear to be coming from." You can change this via a drop-down menu. (read more) Before you buy that used iPhone... Check to make sure a pre-owned iPhone you're thinking of buying isn't also pre-stolen by visiting Apple's Check Activation Lock Status page. There you can enter the Device IMEI or serial number (plus a captcha) to determine whether the phone has been reported lost or stolen. TechCrunch's Greg Kumparak explains in an October 2, 2014, article that thieves have figured out how to bypass the iPhone's activation lock screen far enough to make the phone look legitimate. That's why potential buyers of used iPhones need to go to the source to confirm the device's ownership status via Apple's database. Malicious ads strike again! Online ads are becoming the preferred medium for malware. In a September 26, 2014, article on Forbes, Thomas Fox-Brewster explains how Google's DoubleClick network was serving up ads laced with the Zemot Trojan that is used to install even more malware on infected machines. Security firm Malwarebytes discovered the ad-network breach and traced it to ad-provider Zedo. UK security company Bromium identified malware-ad attacks in August 2014 against Yahoo, Dictionary.com, and Answers.com, according to Fox-Brewster. The malware authors fool the ad networks into thinking they are legitimate businesses. The malware they ultimately deliver takes advantage of vulnerabilities in old versions of Adobe Flash and Internet Explorer; it also affects the Firefox and Opera browsers, according to Malwarebytes. One researcher was able to use the malware's technique to take over an Android phone, accessing its camera, email, data, and other resources. The best prevention is to keep all software up-to-date, especially Flash and browsers. For more on the dangers of online advertising, see my June 10, 2014, article. Will we finally own our own data? MIT Media Lab researchers are creating a personal data store designed to protect your sensitive information while also allowing you to share it easily when you choose to.openPDS works by collecting and storing your personal data locally, according to MIT graduate student Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, who is working on the project with MIT Media Lab Director Alex Pentland. When an app requests your information, openPDS's SafeAnswers system shares only the data the app requires to function, according to de Montjoye. Jessica Leber describes the project on the Fast Company Co.Exist site. The example de Montjoye gives is an app that needs to know whether you are home. Rather than providing the app with your complete GPS log (including the location of your home), SafeAnswers will reply with a simple "yes" or "no." openPDS also makes it possible for users to monetize the sharing of their personal information. Instead of Google or Facebook selling your private details to advertisers, you could offer it to the companies yourself and negotiate your own terms. I can see the exchange now: "You really want to know what I had for dinner? What's it worth to you?" September 29, 2014: IPhone's New Medical ID Feature Could Save Your Life iOS 8's new Health app features a Medical ID card for entering emergency information that can be accessed from the lock screen. Of course, you can also use it to facilitate retrieval of a lost phone. iPhone's new medical-alert feature September 29, 2014: Double Randomnity: Four Items In Malarrayed Disevalence Mobile data collection for the public good? At least one study indicates that aggregate mobile-phone data could help predict high-crime areas. (pdf) Then again, you could just ask the cabbies. An oncologist named Paolo G. Casali wrote an article in the Parliament Magazine in which he pleads for the European Union not to enact proposed regulations that would restrict access to health information by cancer researchers. The European Society of Medical Oncology objects to two requirements: re-consent each time data or tissues are reused; and requiring consent to use patient data in population-based cancer registries, which generally cover broad areas and have only generic personal information. As with Europe's misguided attempt to enforce a right to be forgotten despite online being forever, there's careful and there's too careful and there's shooting yourself in the foot. From the north, a sign of hope for authentication that doesn't depend on passwords. As I wrote in an August 18, 2014, article, stolen or compromised user IDs and passwords are the cause of nearly all data breaches. Now a Canadian company named Bionym is developing a wristband it claims will identify you based on your heartbeat. The Nymi bracelet has an electrocardiogram sensor that verifies your identity by monitoring your unique heart rhythm. The sensor doesn't record your heart rate the way a standard EKG machine does. Instead, it tracks the electrical activity generated by your heart. In addition to authenticating you to computers and devices, the company claims the Nymi can be used to unlock doors and activate devices automatically in the future Internet-of-Things universe. But why stop at a wristband? The potential anatomical adjuncts are limitless! A connected earpiece, a cloud necklace, an Internet of Things ring, a really smart pair of glasses (minus the camera and other creepiness of Google Glass). Which body-accoutrement authenticator would you prefer? Law enforcement is crying foul over iOS 8's encryption, which Apple claims can be decoded only by you. On the Huffington Post, Igor Bobic and Ryan J. Reilly report on FBI Director James Comey's objections to Apple's plans. Last week's Weekly pointed out that there are many other sources for the information, so the government would simply have to work a little harder to get it. Micah Lee explains on the Intercept that Apple's claims about the iPhone's data protections may be overstated. First of all, iCloud storage and backups on Mac or PC either aren't encrypted or use encryption that Apple can decrypt. Also, four-digit passcodes are susceptible to brute-force attacks, and the fingerprint scanner found on some iPhone models can be bypassed. Lastly, video and audio recordings may not be encrypted: they weren't previously, and Lee states that Apple didn't respond to a request for comment on that matter. The consensus appears to be that iOS 8's unbreakable encryption is part legitimate, part hyperbole. Apple can now claim to be unable to decrypt an iPhone's data, and the government has to look elsewhere for the information they need to prosecute crimes. But is your data absolutely, positively inaccessible to anyone but you? Don't bet on it. September 22, 2014: Now you can really lock your phone iOS 8 turned out to be a slow-starter. That's not a big surprise. The kinks now appear to be worked out, so if you haven't upgraded yet it's time. There's one new security feature in particular that makes the upgrade worthwhile: encryption that Apple claims even it can't crack. (read more) September 22, 2014: Dis, Dat, D'udder Me and My Shadow pinpoints the information you're sharing, and how you're sharing it Tracking is everywhere. Trying not to be tracked is more trouble than it's worth. That appears to be the prevailing sentiment. What the data analyzers can do with what they know about us isn't scary enough -- yet. If you're curious about what personal information is leaking from your computers, phones, Internet connection, and web services, visit Me and My Shadow, a free site offered by the Tactical Technology Collective. When I used the site's Trace My Shadow tool, it identified "at least" 122 personal-information shares. It would be nice to have a "Stop Sharing" button you could click that would apply to all shares -- or at least those that aren't necessary for your machines, devices, and apps to run correctly. Me and My Shadow provides plenty of information about free services that help you restrict the amount of personal information you share, including Better Privacy, AdBlock Plus, Privacy Badger, and Lightbeam. (In a May 7, 2013, article I described three essential security add-ons for Firefox, Chrome, and IE.) Guesstimating the number of government requests to ISPs for personal info Much attention is being paid to the transparency reports issue regularly by Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other Internet services. In a September 16, 2014, article on Vice, Joseph Cox points out the imprecision of the reports, which include ranges of requests or accounts affected, such as "0-999" or "15,000-15,999." When you look at the big picture, you see that government requests affect very few accounts. For example, Dropbox's transparency report indicates the service received between 0 and 249 government requests, which affected between 0 and 249 accounts. Considering the 300 million total Dropbox users, that would represent a little drop in a big bucket. (The number of Dropbox users is quoted by Cox from a September 15, 2014, article in the Guardian.) Still, when it comes to online privacy, it's safest to assume there's simply no such thing. The Hype Chart: New technologies' long, slow ride to acceptance The 2014 edition of the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies separates the hokum from the real deals in a single, easy-to-decipher infographic. It's looking good for speech recognition and consumer telematics, but if you're waiting for brain-computer interfaces and bioacoustic sensing to go mainstream, well, don't hold your breath. The chart indicates that cloud computing is just entering the "Trough of Disillusionment" and is still two to five years from reaching the "Plateau of Productivity," a.k.a. tech nirvana. I don't know if that's the good news or the bad news, both, or neither. One thing that gives the graphic instant credibility in my book is the placement of the Internet of Things at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations." You won't find me among the Cult of (id)IoTs -- at least not for another five to ten years. September 15, 2014: Facebook Auto-Play Videos Eat Up Mobile Data Allotments Did your mobile data usage spike recently? If you run the Facebook app on your phone, News Feed videos now play by default, which could be pushing you close to or beyond your mobile-data limits. In a September 6, 2014, article, Forbes' Amit Chowdhry reported on a survey by a finance site MoneySavingExpert.com, which was motivated to conduct the survey after noticing an increase in the number of people complaining about high data use on their phones. Chowdhry lists the steps for disabling auto-play: iOS: Settings > Facebook > Settings > Auto-play. Set to Wi-fi only or Off. Android: Settings > App Settings > General Settings. Set Auto-play to Wi-fi only or Off. Facebook.com on a desktop or laptop: Settings > Videos > Auto-Play Videos > Off. September 15, 2014: Sundries and apropos-of-nuthin's Facebook Messenger: Don't call it 'spyware,' call it 'inquisitive' Digital security expert Jonathan Zdziarski analyzed the Facebook Messenger app and reported that it "appears to have more spyware type code in it than I've seen in products intended specifically for enterprise surveillance." In a September 10 2014, article, Motherboard's Matthew Braga quotes an email sent by Zdziarski in which he comments on the results of his forensic analysis of the app. I got suspicious when I couldn't find any other source reporting Facebook Messenger as spyware. In fact, Sophos's Naked Security blog came to the opposite conclusion after completing its examination of the app. In an August 12, 2014, post, John Zorabedian states that the permissions Facebook Messenger requests are in line with those sought by other messenging apps. Zorabedian admits, however, that users have many good reasons to distrust Facebook's claims about privacy. The Facebook Help Center explains why Messenger asks for permission to access your phone's microphone, camera, contacts, and other resources. An August 12, 2014, Newsday article debunks five Facebook Messenger myths. App privacy sweep reveals excessive permissions, lack of disclosure It's often difficult or impossible to read the privacy policy of the app provider before you download the program. The Privacy Sweep conducted in May 2014 by the Global Privacy Enforcement Network (GPEN) found that many apps direct you to a web page, where the privacy policy hasn't been formatted for the phone screen. Some apps require that you sign into a social network to view the privacy policy, while for others, the link is broken. GPEN's sweep included 1,211 apps. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada separated 151 of those apps it identified as being from Canadian developers or used widely in the country. Of those programs, 28 percent were deemed to ask for more permissions than they needed to operate, compared to 31 percent in the global sweep. Only 10 percent of the OPC apps had no privacy policy, compared to 30 percent of the apps in the global sweep. The Privacy Sweep wasn't all bad news. Many apps state explicitly what they will not do with your personal data as well as what they will do with it. They often have links to the privacy policies of their advertising partners, and they may let you opt out of providing "analytics" information. Get paid for sharing your personal information I don't know if it qualifies as a trend, but at least two companies are offering to pay you for the information it collects about your online and other activities. In a September 2, 2014, article, Quartz's Elizabeth Lopatto reports that a company called Datacoup ran a pilot program that paid people $8 a month for access to their social media accounts and a record of their credit card transactions. Another service, Luth Research's ZQ Intelligence, takes that several steps further by offering people $100 a month to be tracked on their devices and to answer questions about their behavior. As Lopatto states, data collectors willing to pay are likely to find plenty of takers for their services. She quotes a survey of smart phone users (registration required) that found one-third are ready to exchange their personal information for cash. StreetLight is tracking to the nth Take all the location data gleaned from cell towers, traffic-data aggregators, and GPS satellites. Then filter out the IDs so the data can't be traced to individuals but retains its other unique properties. Then apply sophisticated pattern-recognition algorithms to extract information from the data. What do you get? StreetLight, a company founded by UC Berkeley researcher Laura Schewel to develop a data-analysis system sophisticated enough to know that people without college degrees visit the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California, only on Monday evenings in the spring. (You don't need an algorithm to tell you that upscale shoppers are more likely to frequent the mall on weekends in August and December.) Alex Salkever explains the concepts behind StreetLight in a September 2, 2014, article on ReadWrite. Knowing when and where you're likely to shop is only the tip of the iceberg. Over time, the system will learn how people in a huge geographic area respond to situations such as bad weather or big events. This can help communities prepare for and respond to such happenings in the future. Make sure the law's on your side with these 10 great legal resources Will the airline reimburse me if it loses my luggage? Will my security deposit earn interest? Will this get me fired? How do I know if I need a lawyer? These and six other common legal questions are answered by Lifehacker's Melanie Pinola in a September 6, 2014, article. One of the areas I found most useful was how to know when you can use an image or video without violating a copyright. The entry directs you to the Creative Commons licensing chart and the Ten Legal Commandments of Photography. Of more practical use are the entries covering your rights when dealing with the police, and the legal documents you should prepare before your final logoff. If you're pondering whether to seek the advice of an attorney, the last of the 10 items has links to information about the LegalSifter service that promises to demystify legal contracts, the six contract provisions freelance should include, and how to talk to a lawyer (I suggest you speak slowly and use small words). End-of-the-world roulette: An Armageddon smorgasbord We're many decades into the Age of Anxiety, yet when it comes to epic disasters, it seems like we're just getting warmed up. Every day brings at least one more thing to worry about. And on September 6, 2014, we got five via AlterNet's Cliff Weathers, who compared and contrasted five different cosmic doomsday scenarios. Asteroid impact is old hat -- Hollywood's had that covered going back generations. Even a supernova wouldn't catch folks by surprise, figuratively speaking. But getting wiped out by a solar superstorm was a new cataclysm on me. Such a solar blast isn't particularly uncommon, either. One scientist claims such an outburst wiped out a good number of mammals about 13,000 years ago. Little did I know Mercury could abandon its orbit and start colliding into stuff -- including the Earth -- as it billiard-balls its way out of the solar system. But for full Stephen King effect, I'll put my money on a chance encounter with a dark nebula. If the Earth were to get enveloped in such a cloud of cosmic dust, it would choke out the sunlight and cause Global Cooling. So you got your fire, and you got your ice -- what do you say we meet in the middle? September 9, 2014: Cyber-crime pays: Protect yourself with three essential browser security add-ons These days there are so many data breaches you have to assume your personal information has been compromised. Sandboxie, AdBlock Plus, and Web of Trust substantially decrease your chances of becoming a data-theft victim. Do we have the courage to change the political narrative? That's what Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig asks in his August 2014 TED Talk. I know, nobody watches egghead speeches on the Internet, but I guarantee this is the most important 18-minute presentation you will ever see. It's even bigger than naked pictures of celebrities, I promise! Lessig explains how the .05 percent came to control the U.S. political system by depriving the 99.95 percent of their right to vote. September 2, 2014: Items of no particular importance Where in the world is the Internet? A guy named John Matherly pinged the Internet and took a picture of the resulting world map. Wow. While you're at it, check out this database of 12 million historical copyright-free images from the Internet Archive. Double-wow. Leo Kelion of BBC News describes how Kalev Leetaru is creating a searchable database of 12 million copyright-free images dating from 1500 to 1922, which was the year copyright restrictions took effect. The database is searchable by entering a term and choosing Internet Archive Book Images Photostream. If you don't select the second search option, the results are for all of Flickr. I had a lot of fun rummaging around the seemingly endless image collection. And to think you can use them all you want. On-screen options let you share, "fave," and download images. An alternative to a download is to capture the browser window the image appears on, paste the captured screen into Paint or another image editor, use Paint's Select option to copy only the image (or as much of it as you want), open a new Paint window, paste the selection into a blank canvas, and save the picture as a jpeg or png file. Is "Redskins" disparaging? Sounds like it to me, but the Washington football team of that name claims fuzziness. The USPTO stripped the team of its trademark for "Redskins" on the grounds that the term is derogatory and thus doesn't qualify for trademark protection. The team responds on four fronts: first, the ruling is a content-based restriction on free speech and is thus unconstitutional; second, the Lanham Act's use of the terms "disparage," "contempt," and "disrepute" is too vague and therefore void under the First Amendment; third, the decision deprived the team of property rights in violation of due process; and fourth, the loss of the trademark was a taking of property without just compensation in violation of the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause. In an August 28, 2014, article on JDSupra Business Advisor, Susan Neuberger Weller reports that at least one of the five original complainants criticized the team for continuing its efforts to retain the name. The complainant is expected to file a response in opposition to the team's challenge to the USPTO decision to cancel its trademark. Click like you mean it. The opening to the old Outer Limits TV show freaked me out when I was a kid: "We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical." Of course, they didn't really. Same with the Internet. When you travel around the Web, you're contributing to the content everyone else sees every time you click. The more times a thing gets clicked, generally speaking, the more people it gets shown to. Sally Kohn says we can influence the Internet for the better by thinking about our clicking as a public act. Her August 2014 TED Talk explains that "[w]e are the new editors." Yes, this means we are bowing in abeyance to the algorithms that do the actual content selecting. But did you really want to see that picture of Kim Kardashian's sideboob? (I know, I did too.) A more practical example is refusing to click links to stories about incivility among politicians. Even better, stories about incivility. Best of all, stories about politicians! Your Likes are protected free speech. So a company miscalculated taxes for some employees and forced them to make unexpected payments to the IRS for back taxes. One former employee who was affected criticized the company on Facebook. Among the people who liked her comment were two current employees, one of whom added a defamatory comment to the former employee's original post. The employer promptly fired both workers for violating the company's Internet/blogging policy. The National Labor Relations Board ruled for the employees. The Facebook thread was perceived as concerted activity intended to help decide their official response to the company's action that triggered the discussion. That means the discussion is protected under the National Labor Relations Act. The upshot is that companies have to have a thick skin when it comes to employee complaints posted and discussed on social media. Unless the comments are defamatory and clearly not intended to lead to a concerted response, they aren't grounds for dismissal. We're closer than ever to medication-free cures. What's DARPA been up to since it invented the Internet? For one thing, looking for ways to treat diseases of all types without any medications. In an August 29, 2014, article on Extreme Tech, Sebastian Anthony describes the tiny implants being developed that connect directly to your nervous system to "directly control and regulate many different diseases and chronic conditions, such as arthritis, PTSD, inflammatory bowel diseases (Crohn’s disease), and depression." DARPA's ElectRx program uses closed-loop neural implants that constantly monitor your biological systems and stimulate nerves as necessary to keep all your organs functioning as designed. Human trials could start as soon as five year from now. That's about when I'll be ready for a hook-up. And if tiny neuron implants don't work, we can try optogenetics. Science is said to shine a light on the world, and now science's light is shining on the brain. But not just shining, controlling and manipulating with light. Forbes' Josh Wolf explains the MIT Media Lab technology in an August 29, 2014, article. First you get molecules that convert light into signals the brain understands. Then you use the molecules to activate or deactivate neurons to achieve a desired response. For example, one group of researchers has figured out how to make bad smells seem pleasant and pleasant smells seem bad. Locker rooms may never be the same! Are governments trying to take over ICANN? The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is sort of like the Internet's clerk. Or maybe the Internet's plumber. Or maybe the Internet's traffic cop. Whatever, ICANN keeps the packets flowing, more or less. According to an August 29, 2014, article by Robin Gross on the CircleID site, ICANN has always used a bottom-up structure that gave hard-working volunteers an integral role in the organization's policy decisions. Now the Governmental Advisory Committee wants to change ICANN's bylaws to give governments -- not all of which are democratic -- more control over the organization. Under the proposal, all policy "advice" issued by the government committee would be adopted automatically unless vetoed by a two-thirds vote of ICANN's "non-conflicted" board members. Since many ICANN board members have conflicts of interest on many voting matters, getting a two-thirds majority would be nearly impossible, according to Gross, who is a former Chair of ICANN's Non-Commercial Stakeholders Group. Gross states that should the proposal pass, it would "send the Internet back towards the dark ages when the Crown controlled access to printing presses and what information was allowed to spread." The proposal appears to be an attempt to fix something that isn't broken. Maybe privacy policies don't matter after all. A group of researchers at Fordham studied privacy violations and FCC privacy-related actions to determine whether notice of privacy policies had any bearing on the type and prevalence of privacy violations. The four types of violations were unauthorized disclosure, surreptitious collection, failure to secure, and undue retention. When it comes to surreptitious collection and failure to secure, whether you had true notice of the violator's privacy policy didn't matter. But you were less likely to suffer unauthorized disclosure or undue retention if the privacy policy provided clear, unambiguous notice of the service's privacy policy. So you may continue to completely ignore privacy policies with the full knowledge that not having notice of what the service does with your personal information makes you only 50 percent more vulnerable to a privacy violation. If you're ever accused of infringing on a patent, you can defend yourself against the charge either by showing that you're not infringing on the patent, or that the patent is invalid. The America Invents Act that took effect in 2012 has helped cut through the clutter of patent suits by providing a simpler and quicker way to challenge the validity of a patent. It also makes it easier for patent holders to prove the validity of their patents. For example, one of the new post-grant procedures allows a competitor to challenge a patent's validity without first being threatened with an infringement charge, which is required if you want to file suit in court. These and other post-grant procedures under AIA are described by Ethan Horwitz of Carlton Fields Jordan Burke on the JDSupra Business Advisor, August 29, 2014. When it comes to cleaning up the patent mess, every little bit helps. Electric bikes for the masses. One of the problems with electric bikes is that they cost too much. Micah Toll's trying to change that via aKickstarter campaign. His Barak Electric Bicycle Kit costs from $585 to $655, depending on wheel size and battery power, and comes in 350-watt and 500-watt models. Julian Chokkattu describes the kits in anAugust 29, 2014, article on TechCrunch. If you're looking for the "Order Now!" button, you'll have to cool your proverbial jets. The kits are not likely to be available to consumers for some time. It's not Jennifer Lawrence's fault. Or Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Or Kate Upton. Or even Justin Verlander. I blame passwords. More specifically, our continued reliance on an outmoded authentication system that hackers find trivially easy to defeat. Social engineering has been around for nearly as long as the Internet. With celebrities, it's even easier to glean enough personal information about them to make some pretty good guesses about their password choices, security questions, and other alternative access methods. TechCrunch's Mike Butcher looks into the possible ways the accounts were hacked in a September 1, 2014, article (which includes an update from earlier today). So change your passwords yet again. But also change your approach to authentication. For example, if you are asked to provide your mother's maiden name, try "Pittsburgh." Sign up for two-factor authentication whenever the option is available. Yes, doing so is a hassle, but until there's a more fool-proof way to prove we are who we claim we are, we'll have to take advantage of all the security options we're offered. |
August 25, 2014: Google Patent Infringement: The Proof's In The Post-Its?
A company in the UK has sued Google for theft of trade secrets and backs up its claims by pointing to notes left by Google staff in returned copies of its own documents.
Google's Post-It faux pas
August 25, 2014: Control Which IPhone Apps Are Allowed To Stay 'Active' When They're Off
Change your iPhone's default setting for Background App Refresh to prevent apps from tracking you and otherwise helping themselves to your private data even when the apps aren't active.
Prevent Apps from Refreshing in the Background
August 18, 2014: Most Data Breaches Are The Result Of Weak Or Stolen Credentials
Organizations have little incentive to invest in authentication systems that offer better protection from theft than the nearly porous password-based security we rely on today.
Rising cost of passwords for authentication
August 11, 2014: The Best Government Money -- Lots And Lots Of Money -- Can Buy
Big money has become such an integral part of politics that office holders and would-be office holders can accept millions of dollars from special interests without any taint of corruption. Is government by the highest bidder what our forefathers had in mind?
Best Government Money Can Buy
August 4, 2014: The Best Browser You're Probably Not Using
Opera is the little browser than can -- and does. The program is fast and efficient: it gets the job done without taking a big bite out of your system resources.
Why you should switch to opera
July 28, 2014: It All Depends On Who's Doing The Surveilling
Online tracking is here to stay, but the EFF's Privacy Badger add-on for Chrome and Firefox can help keep the commercial trackers at bay.
Tame the online trackers
July 19, 2014: Be Careful What You Comment -- It Might Get You Sued
Posting an anonymous negative comment about an organization could lead to a threat of legal action against the site to reveal your name, and against you for defamation.
Be careful what you comment
July 12, 2014: Never Pay For Software Again (Almost)
Free alternatives are available for nearly every application an individual is likely to need -- excluding operating systems and professional apps such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. Here's a roundup of the best freebie replacements for MS Office, security apps, and system utilities. Plus: the best sites for finding your own no-charge apps.
Best free software
July 5, 2014: The Pros And Cons Of Cloud Computing
My friend Zarpaden contacted me recently to ask about a cloud storage service his Mac was prompting him to use. Zarp had plenty of storage space on his system and was rightly concerned about his pictures and letters and other personal stuff on who-knows-which Web server for anyone and his Uncle Pacheco to view at their pleasure and Zarp's pain.
Cloud computing pros and cons
A company in the UK has sued Google for theft of trade secrets and backs up its claims by pointing to notes left by Google staff in returned copies of its own documents.
Google's Post-It faux pas
August 25, 2014: Control Which IPhone Apps Are Allowed To Stay 'Active' When They're Off
Change your iPhone's default setting for Background App Refresh to prevent apps from tracking you and otherwise helping themselves to your private data even when the apps aren't active.
Prevent Apps from Refreshing in the Background
August 18, 2014: Most Data Breaches Are The Result Of Weak Or Stolen Credentials
Organizations have little incentive to invest in authentication systems that offer better protection from theft than the nearly porous password-based security we rely on today.
Rising cost of passwords for authentication
August 11, 2014: The Best Government Money -- Lots And Lots Of Money -- Can Buy
Big money has become such an integral part of politics that office holders and would-be office holders can accept millions of dollars from special interests without any taint of corruption. Is government by the highest bidder what our forefathers had in mind?
Best Government Money Can Buy
August 4, 2014: The Best Browser You're Probably Not Using
Opera is the little browser than can -- and does. The program is fast and efficient: it gets the job done without taking a big bite out of your system resources.
Why you should switch to opera
July 28, 2014: It All Depends On Who's Doing The Surveilling
Online tracking is here to stay, but the EFF's Privacy Badger add-on for Chrome and Firefox can help keep the commercial trackers at bay.
Tame the online trackers
July 19, 2014: Be Careful What You Comment -- It Might Get You Sued
Posting an anonymous negative comment about an organization could lead to a threat of legal action against the site to reveal your name, and against you for defamation.
Be careful what you comment
July 12, 2014: Never Pay For Software Again (Almost)
Free alternatives are available for nearly every application an individual is likely to need -- excluding operating systems and professional apps such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. Here's a roundup of the best freebie replacements for MS Office, security apps, and system utilities. Plus: the best sites for finding your own no-charge apps.
Best free software
July 5, 2014: The Pros And Cons Of Cloud Computing
My friend Zarpaden contacted me recently to ask about a cloud storage service his Mac was prompting him to use. Zarp had plenty of storage space on his system and was rightly concerned about his pictures and letters and other personal stuff on who-knows-which Web server for anyone and his Uncle Pacheco to view at their pleasure and Zarp's pain.
Cloud computing pros and cons