Category Archives: Technology

Technology focused posts.

Goofy Stock photos might not be so silly any more

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Silly Stock photo

@NFEN and @Cheddarchezz having a conversation about “hacking”

I just saw a few people that I follow tweeting about trying to take over Youtube. There’s a Meme on Youtube right now that’s been going on for a while as a form of protest over some of the recent changes to the comment policy, copyright policy, integration with Google+ and probably a litany of other issues. To the gaming community Youtube is a dying platform.

What struck me about the conversation wasn’t really what they were talking about, but the stupid stock photos that are supposed to represent “hackers’ breaking into a network. For some absurd reason stock photography companies almost always put them in the same outfit they’d be wearing if they were breaking into a house, mugging someone, or doing some other nefarious activity. Clearly it’s just a ploy to help people understand that the person using the computer is up to no good, but it just looks ridiculous as almost no one wears any of those clothes while using the computer. So instead of making it look like a criminal it just make it look like an idiot. However, I think that with some recent revelations about the FBI and the hacking process called “RAT” these imagines are looking less absurd. Not that I’ll go out and buy clothes like this to work at my computer on.

One of the more recent Edward Snowden revelations has to do with breaking into personal computers by the US government. This isn’t really shocking, nor is what they do when they are on the computer. The FBI has admitted that they have the capabilities to hack into your computer and activate your webcam without turning on the indicator light. These capabilities aren’t new. In fact Ars Technica did a report on this in the kiddie hacker community called RAT. I imagine that some of the tools that my friends used to use while we were in highschool to remotely open a CD drive or type messages to each other operates in a similar fashion.

So, if you are hacking a computer does it make sense to take precautions against showing your face? It might or as the Ars article suggest, just cover up the camera.The difference is that you don’t know if you’re under surveillance or not. It’s also not clear if the FBI only means laptop webcams or if they are able to do the same to a smart phone or tablet. As the ACLU mentions in one article “we’ve never had discussion” about law enforcement hacking into computers. This is part of the reason there was a petition for We the People to update our privacy laws. Regular mail and packages are protected by the fourth amendment while email is not. Using a web cam with or without a web cam constitutes a much larger breach of privacy than just taking pictures through the camera. It’s likely that with access to the webcam the entire computer is open to the FBI, which means that a warrant for a web cam is a warrant for everything you do. If you have services that you’re always logged into like Drop Box or Tresorit those are also accessible through the computer you’re cam is being used on.

We need to have a conversation about the limits of searching and privacy. I don’t want to sit around in a ski mask or cover up my webcam. Users likely need to install firewalls, more passwords, and disconnect from services they aren’t actively using.

Amazon’s potential army of Drones – what’s the point?

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Amazon wants to deliver packages to you in 30 minutes via drone. While the convenience might be pretty awesome. I’m not sure how good of an idea this is going to be. I also think that this points to a broader push for Amazon. In the past Amazon has mentioned how they had plans to sell groceries locally and deliver rapidly. This is currently in beta test with only two cities involved, LA and Seattle. Depending on the size of these drones this will make delivery of groceries much easier and reduce the risk for goods to thaw while waiting for the resident to come home and get the groceries. Furthermore, if these drones are really good, Amazon could time the delivery of the groceries based on when the customer wanted them to arrive at their home. Let’s say you place the order in the morning, but know you won’t get home until around 6:30, you could ask Amazon to deliver the goods around 6:30 so you could just bring them in the house and start cooking.

A few years ago there were some rumors that Amazon was planning on going to brick and mortar stores while everyone else is going more web, web, web. These drones that are in the video do not look like they have the farthest range in the world, which means for a place like my home town about an hour north of Pittsburgh by car and if there was a distribution center in Pittsburgh (there’s not, but there is one in Allentown), the drone would need to fly close to 120 miles per hour. That doesn’t seem likely for these things. They don’t look like they have the speed, they are clearly designed for shorter ranges than that. Additionally, implementing these drones would require significantly more distribution centers throughout the US. Distribution centers work best when there is a need for high volume, high speed, and high variety at least in many distribution models. However, if Amazon were to use retail stores as part of their distribution network and looked to use the stores as the location where the drones would send goods from, this makes a lot more sense. Retail stores aren’t really there to be retail stores, but micro distribution centers.

This would impact the types of items that would be a candidate for Air Prime in many locations, for instance cities with Stores only would have a much smaller list of applicable items. Cities with distribution centers near by would likely have any item up for Air Prime that would fit on the drone.

This is still 4-5 years out from being deployed, so why is Amazon showing this off now? Well, bad press recently. There have been several articles that came out this past month about how horrible the distribution centers are in the US.

All said though, I think these drones point to continued interest in providing different approaches to brick and mortar stores as well as grocery stores. I think it will start out small and grow from there. Amazon will likely build out some stores first with a similar function to Best buy where you can pick up in the store. In later store deployments they will have options for Air Prime and pick up in store for certain items. It will certainly change things for Amazon workers and will change the way the distribution centers are managed. They may simply become hubs with a lot more being pushed out closer to the end customer.

Review: Dealers of Lightning Story of Xerox PARC

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This is the Third historical book written about a business. The first was the history of Bell Labs and compared to that book, this was a wild ride in terms of organization. It would bounce back and forth over the span of ten years, while Idea Factory (Bell Labs book) was a stately possession moving forward with time. I believe that the major difference was that while a lot was happening at Bell Labs, it wasn’t crammed into 10 years. It occurred over 40 years or more, which allowed the author to pick and choose the people to follow. In Dealers of Lightning so much was happening at the same time with the same people and unique people that it forced the author to jump backwards and forwards through time.

Despite that, it really made me realize how much we owe to PARC researchers in the 70’s for technology we have today. If you’re using a tablet, one of the very first visionaries that created that concept was Alan Kay, he first envisioned it in the 60’s and from what was described in the book, the iPad is pretty much true to his vision. Amazing to be honest.

Here’s a list of things they made:
Object Oriented Programming
Ethernet
The First mass produced PC
The predecessor to Word
The original Desktop
VLSI, what has enabled the development of basically every semiconductor chip
The first Graphics Chip
Copy, Cut, and Paste
The right click
First Laser Printer
The predecessor to Postscript (Adobe)
A piece of software where you could edit text and pictures at the same time
A computer in 1982 that had 6000 Japanese characters and could type in 100+ languages and it’s capabilities wouldn’t be match again until the 90’s

Dramatically influenced Apple, Microsoft, 3Com (Metcalfe founded this after leaving PARC), Adobe (2 PARC researchers founded this), and many other companies.

Xerox was a visionary company to fund a research agency like PARC. PARC was likely one of the last of its kind as well. There are very few companies that have a similar branch of research facilities that push basic and applied scientific research. I suggest reading this book, just so it helps you understand where the technology we all use and love came from.

I give this book 4/5. Well researched, great topic, difficult to write because of the concurrent activities.

The NSA, FBI, and Internet Security

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Over the past few months we’ve learned a lot about how the US government looks at its own citizens. We’ve learned this through the actions of Edward Snowden. He’s done us a great service by forcing a conversation that the NSA and FBI didn’t want us to have. The NSA lied to the Senate recently by claiming that it never tracked US citizens through Cell Phones. We would never have known about these activities if it wasn’t for Snowden.

Snowden was using email to send information back and forth between himself and Glenn Greenwald. Since email is in one of those fuzzy gray areas of the law around data retention and government access to it this has caused a bit of a problem. It make things more difficult Snowden used an encrypted email service called Lavabit. It’s encryption was at such a level that when the FBI requested data from it, they were confounded and essentially attempted to blackmail (legally of course) the owner into handing over the encryption key. This would have effectively rendered the service these people were paying for worthless. They were paying to have their email traffic be secured from both public and private entities.

As we hear and more about how the US government has been behaving towards internet security, the more we’re learning that the NSA and other US agencies are doing their best to thwart it. They have worked with the NIST and weakened the encryption key they developed. The problem with these backdoors is that if it’s there for the “good guys” (whoever that might be) it’s also there for the “bad guys” (whoever that might be). This isn’t just general encryption keys, it’s things that we use every day without using it. Whenever we are using any website that includes “https” we are using a basic encryption protocol called SSL. Think about when you’re banking, you see the https. Google now allows you to use this when you send information to and from them. This encryption has also been broken by the NSA. This is our personal stuff and if it’s broken by the NSA it can be broken by other people. Now does this mean we’re likely to have a rash of new fraud cases or theft cases? No, as it’s been compromised for some time. However, people do know about it now and this of course is a greater cause for concern.

What can we do about this? Well, first, look into more secure encryption methods. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google and applications like HTTPS everywhere will change their algorithm in result. Second, contact your representative and your senator. I’m lucky my senator in Oregon is very vocal (Ron Wyden) not everyone is so please help inform your leaders. Third, buy from companies that you know haven’t given up data to the NSA, don’t use Facebook and the like and basically try to follow the great writing that Sean did several months ago over on KBMOD. He nailed it then and it’s even more pressing than before to keep up with security.

NSA and Edward Snowden

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Today saw the unveiling of the NSA leaker, Edward Snowden, a highschool dropout that worked his way through sheer capabilities as a programmer. To me this guy is pretty amazing. He cares about the people that he could have put in harms way, he made sure that he did not release any information that would put anyone in harms way, even though he had the capabilities. He learned from Bradley Manning and worked to ensure there would be no risks of physical injury. He felt that these actions violated the constitution and decided to expose these deeds to the public even though he knew his life was over. He believes he’s likely to be targeted by the US government or an agent, such as a member of the Triad gang (he’s in Hong Kong), to be executed.

Not only he is clearly concerned, but the media seems to think that this is also true. My roommate was watching ABC news with Diane Sawyer and during one segue she mentioned that he may have left because he feared for his life and was likely in danger. Think about it. It’s publicly acknowledged by our press, that it’s likely a whistleblower might be killed by the US government. This is a US citizen that has a family history of serving (father a member of the coast guard and mother a legal clerk) the US government. He is afraid for his life because he believes that the US government would murder him. If he dies and his body is found the blame will automatically fall upon the government. Edward will not be able to answer phone calls, call anyone, and is essentially on his own to make it to a country that has no extradition treaty with the US. This is a travesty – the fact that many people believe this man is going to die within the next few weeks – killed by his own government without his right to a trial.

Why does what he said matter? A lot of people are talking about it being only Metadata – here’s an excellent article explaining what would have happened if the British had meta data during the revolutionary war. It would have ID’d Paul Revere as a likely revolutionary based on his association. Knowing nothing else about him other than a few clubs he and 254 other people in Boston were members of it was possible to deduce the entire social network and who was at the center of the networks.

As I mentioned in my last blog post this network analysis would have caused the changes in my Facebook network to raise some red flags. I suddenly move to Europe (I didn’t list Eindhoven has my city of residence it would have been inferred from my friends), some of my first connects in Europe on Facebook were 2 Colombians, 2 Pakistanis, an Iranian, and a Turk. These changes represented a major shift in my circle of friends. I had few non-americans as friends and no Iranians or Pakistanis in my network. Using the full history of my data they wouldn’t have found much except that I liked to drink and wrote drunk posts on Facebook while in college. However, it’s likely I would have remained someone to keep an eye on, and since then I’ve written numerous posts about Anonymous, LulzSec and other controversial topics.

Anyway, it’s important to keep this in mind when selecting the companies you decide to store your information with, even if it’s “only” metadata. Where you go, who you talk to, and what you do online are all representations of you and a lot of information can be gleaned from that.

What can we do? Vote all the bums out of office next go around for one. Start companies that only hand over encrypted data that the end users are the only ones that can decrypt it. Educate your friends, family, co-workers, and anyone politically minded you know. We need to drive change otherwise this will continue and will only get worse. At what point do we need to start worrying that the NSA/US Government will start killing your friends because of who they talk to and what they believe?