Archive for: August, 2009

No matter where you go, there you are

Aug 30 2009 Published by brian under privacy, technology

Ran across this excellent report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on threats to locational privacy–your ability to control information about where you are and where you go.

This is a good example of technology creating an issue that we never really had to think about before. Used to be it was difficult for even a dedicated sleuth to know where a particular person was at any given moment. (An example that leaps to mind: detective stories are full of scenes where the protagonist goes to the target’s neighborhood and asks around the local bars, looking for him.)

But now, many of us are carrying around devices that broadcast information about our location to anyone who cares to look. iPhones and other smartphones know roughly where they are by checking for nearby cell towers; people who have to pay tolls regularly can get devices for their cars that talk to the toll gate and debit an account; and many people deliberately reveal their location to search for nearby businesses or to make themselves findable by their friends. These services are useful, but they also make it far easier for us to be found, or to have our movements tracked, when there’s no good reason to do so.

For example, since most with toll passes don’t turn them off (or even have the ability to do so), some police departments with a flexible notion of civil liberties have taken to passively scanning various locations to collect information about who drives by. Street-corner cameras with facial recognition software allow the same kind of tracking for pedestrians. And transit cards, if they’re individually identifiable, allow anyone with access to the data to reconstruct a person’s route through a city. Usually, these systems have little or no privacy controls built in to them.

Not to mention what a sufficiently motivated individual might do, just with some clever searching. In January, Wired magazine put out this article in which their writer tried out a number of location-aware apps. At one point, he watched a random woman taking a photo in a park with her iPhone. Using the time and location, he was able to find the photo later on Flickr, and from the geotags on her photos he was able to deduce her home address. The usefulness to stalkers should be obvious.

Not that I think these apps are necessarily a bad thing; they just have to be used with a bit of thought. The solution, I believe, is simply to educate people about the privacy implications of their activities, so that they can make good decisions about what data they put out there.

Personally, I don’t yet have a camera that uses geotagging, but when I do, I plan on turning it off by default, and then turning it on only for shots I want to be locatable. And you can bet that if I ever have a FasTrak pass, I’ll figure out how to turn it off when I’m not near a bridge.

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Open-source Twitter

Aug 12 2009 Published by brian under technology, web 2.0

Okay, so when I wrote about the possibilities for an alternate Twitter protocol the other day, I was unaware of the solutions that already exist. A couple of days ago, Wired published an article detailing the various alternatives that people are working on.

One system, Laconica, seems to offer pretty much everything that I had in mind in that post. And sites using it have already sprung up–notably Identi.ca, which essentially duplicates Twitter in open-source. And most of these systems offer things Twitter doesn’t, such as trackbacks and image & video support. Most of all, it appears that these microblogging platforms would be immune to the kind of DDOS attack that took down Twitter last week.

I’ve just gotten my account on Identi.ca, but haven’t posted anything on it yet. I’m going to play around with it a bit first, and in particular, I want to be able to crosspost to Twitter (and possibly Facebook, which will be even more powerful once they integrate Friendfeed).

I’m looking forward to seeing how these things develop. Microblogging is an incredibly useful concept, and it will be even more so once freed from Twitter.

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Collateral damage?

Aug 07 2009 Published by brian under politics, technology, web 2.0

So, word is spreading that the DOS attacks on Twitter, Facebook and LiveJournal yesterday (still causing problems today) were apparently targeted against a single individual: a Georgian blogger calling himself cyxymu. Since cyxymu generally writes nasty things about Russia, speculation is rife that the sites were attacked by the Russian government to shut him up.

If this is true, then it’s fairly important. After all, these are sites used by hundreds of millions of people every day. Including Russians. That somebody wouldn’t think twice about taking down a significant chunk of the Internet to go after a single blogger–and somebody who’s not particularly well known, at that–is disturbing, and it does not bode well for the future.

There have been rumors for quite a long time that the cracker underground has a kind of “gentlemen’s agreement” where the Internet is concerned: that, while they’re capable of shutting it down, it’s so important to society–and to they themselves–that they would be shooting themselves in the foot. Essentially, an online version of Mutually Assured Destruction. I have no idea if this is true, but it sounds plausible to me.

But now, if this scenario is true, we have a major world government that is perfectly willing and able to cripple their own citizens’ online capabilities in order to silence one dissident. In other words, they don’t see themselves as being bound by any such scruples about preserving the Internet for themselves or their opponents.

This is going to be seen as a watershed event, I think. But who knows where it’s going to lead.

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If a tweet falls off the screen, and nobody’s there to read it…

Aug 06 2009 Published by brian under technology, web 2.0

Like millions of other Twitter users, I’ve been highly annoyed today to watch Twitter struggle to its knees after suffering a denial-of-service attack. It’s been interesting watching the various parts of the site going in and out of operability; generally, the API has worked while the website hasn’t (at least for me). I presume that they’ll get things under control before too long, but this is the worst outage they’ve had in quite a while.

And, given how many people depend on Twitter now, it might be high time to consider how to establish these kinds of real-time updates as a separate Internet service, independent of any one company or centralized system. Twitter-the-company, sadly, has shown itself to be not all that reliable when it comes to maintaining their core service.

So, how can we decentralize one-to-many text messaging? The obvious model would be the old Usenet newsgroups. Possibly a new protocol could be created, based loosely on NNTP.

But somehow I doubt if that kind of system could scale to the number of “groups”–one per user–that would be needed, even if each message were restricted to 140 characters. Estimates vary and Twitter isn’t telling, but there appear to be somewhere around seven million to 11.5 million users, sending Eris-only-knows-how-many tweets per day. If Twitter-the-company can’t get six sigma uptime with that, how is a distributed system going to?

Anyway, this is just idle speculation. I’m not enough of a hacker to design a distributed microblogging protocol that could replace Twitter. But I do think it’s time to seriously rethink our dependence on this fun but flaky company. Anybody out there got any ideas?

Update, the next day: It occurred to me during the night that one could easily roll a custom microblogging solution with RSS: simply write a lightweight application that would let one update an RSS feed through a web page, and then anyone interested in reading it could subscribe to the page. I could easily do it myself as a proof of concept, but I won’t have time in the next few days.

However, if the rumors are true that this was caused by a political attack against a single person–see my next post, above–then no such system would be able to defend against it. Sadly, it looks like Twitter and Facebook and the like will simply have to figure out how to beef up their systems.

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Always be tweaking

Aug 02 2009 Published by brian under meta

I’ve revised the design of this site a little. I updated the theme (Atahualpa), which fixed an issue I’ve been having with the Twitter applet. I’m still not happy with the Delicious applet–I don’t like how each link has its own line; it’s not supposed to–but it’ll do for now. I also moved things around in the header and the tops of the sidebars to reduce clutter. I think it’s now a lot cleaner and easier to navigate.

I also (finally!) got rid of the default images for the header and replaced them with my own. The new image is from the Spitzer Space Telescope, and is of a star nursery in Rho Ophiuchi. (I found it in the Universe gallery at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory‘s Photojournal site; original image is here.) I like this a lot and I think I’ll be keeping it a while.

Finally, I’ve added a widget to show items I’ve shared in Google Reader. Now, anything I find interesting is only a click away from here.

Slowly I’m proceeding toward the ideal of making this the one central location for everything I’m up to. Onward and upward.

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