“Continuing our quest to know
everything about everyone, inside and out...”
FBI
renews broad Internet surveillance push
The FBI is renewing its request for new
Internet surveillance laws, saying technological advances hinder
surveillance and warning that companies should be
required to build in back doors for police.
"We must ensure that our ability
to obtain communications pursuant to court order is not eroded,"
FBI director Robert Mueller told a U.S. Senate committee this week.
Currently, he said, many communications providers "are not
required to build or maintain intercept capabilities."
… It's not exactly clear how much
of the FBI's problems in conducting surveillance arise from wireless
communications, encryption, social networks, or VoIP; the bureau has
not been eager to be specific. Microsoft's Skype service has worked
with law enforcement to make online chats and other user information
available to police, the Washington Post reported
in July.
(Related)
Watch
Your Tongue: Law Enforcement Speech Recognition System Stores
Millions of Voices
September 22, 2012 by Dissent
Ryan Gallagher reports:
Intercepting
thousands of phone calls is easy for government agencies. But
quickly analyzing the calls and identifying the callers can prove a
difficult task.
Now one company
believes it has solved the problem—with a countrywide biometric
database designed to store millions of people’s “voice-prints.”
Russia’s
Speech Technology Center, which operates under the name
SpeechPro
in the United States, has invented what it calls “VoiceGrid
Nation,” a system that uses advanced algorithms to match identities
to voices. The idea is that it enables authorities
to build up a huge database containing up to several million
voices—of known criminals, persons of interest, or
people on a watch list. Then, when authorities intercept a call and
they’re not sure who is speaking, the recording is entered into the
VoiceGrid and it comes up with a match. It takes
just five seconds to scan through 10,000 voices, [That way too slow
to be really useful Bob] and so long as the recording is
decent quality and more than 15 seconds in length, the accuracy,
SpeechPro claims, is at least 90 percent.
Read more on Slate.
Traing a generation of tattlers...
Is
#Snitchgate much ado about nothing?
September 22, 2012 by Dissent
Back on July 5, Aliette de Bodard
tweeted,
“WTF, FB greets me with a picture of one of my friends and asks me
“is this your friend’s real name”? Like I’m going to
denounce them…” Her tweet was re-tweeted by only one person and
got only one response. On July 6, however, Heise
reported on Facebook’s attempt to get information on whether
its users were really using their real names or pseudonyms. Apart
from Heise, a handful of other sites also mentioned this latest
development, but only one was in English, which may help explain why
the story really didn’t get any traction.
Fast-forward a few months, and when
“dǝǝɥƆ Deefy” tweeted,
“Facebook wants to know if your friends’ names are real. Are you
going to be the snitch? pic.twitter.com/CdqGoxvQ”
it gets over 800 re-tweets and its own hashtag – #snitchgate.
So Facebook has been doing this since
the beginning of July, but it seemingly flew under privacy advocates’
radar until September 19. In a statement to AllFacebook,
Facebook explains:
We are always
looking to gauge how people use Facebook and represent themselves to
better design our product and systems. We are showing people
information that their friends have made available to them, and we
indicate to the person taking the survey that their response will be
anonymous to ensure them that we are not sharing their data with
anyone and only looking to understand the results in an aggregate
sense. Additionally, it is important to understand that we will not
be using this data for enforcement actions.
But there’s no way out of the survey
pop-up except to click “I don’t want to answer:”
Of course, Facebook is a company and
not the government, so they can decide that their Terms of Service
requires real names – even if they don’t attempt to justify it by
saying the real names policy is for safety purposes. And they can
take steps to find out whether most users are complying with those
terms. There’s nothing seemingly illegal or unethical about what
Facebook is doing. It’s just plain creepy. And it may create
distrust among users who fear they will be “outed.” How social
is that?
But more than creepy, it
also reminds us that while Facebook offers its users some privacy
settings and controls, its business model is based on real names and
making as much information about users as public as possible so that
advertisers can target advertising. Using a pseudonym on
Facebook still permits targeted advertising based on content, but how
much richer would the data mining – and advertising revenues for
Facebook – be if the Facebook account can be linked to Gmail or
other accounts?
So what should a good friend do when
confronted by the screen? Do you say “yes?” (even if it’s not
the real name) or do you answer “I don’t want to answer?”
Hopefully, you won’t answer “no.”
As for me, I’ll never encounter that
survey, because I’ve never used Facebook and never understood why
anyone who cares about their privacy would use it. But that’s just
me. YMMV.
Local and depressing...
"A Colorado county put bar
codes on printed ballots in a last minute effort to comply with a
rule about eliminating identifying markings. Citizens sued, because
the bar codes can still be traced back to individual voters. In a
surprise ruling, Denver
U.S. District Judge Christine Arguello said the U.S.
Constitution did not contain a 'fundamental right' to secret ballots,
and that the citizens could not show their
voting rights had been violated, nor that they might suffer any
specific injury from the bar codes.
Well of course it is.
"In Victoria (Australia),
detailed information about electricity customers' power usage, which
gives insights into when a house is occupied, is being
shared with third parties including mail houses, debt collectors,
data processing analysts and government agencies."
My Computer degree says: Solve the
problem and give it to anyone who needs it. My MBA says: Would a
nominal fee bee so bad?
"A Private
User Agent W3C Community Group has been proposed to tackle the
privacy of the web browser by developing technical solutions to close
the leaks. Current Javascript APIs are capable of leaking a lot of
information as we browse the Internet, such as details of our browser
that can be used to identify and track our online presence, and the
content on the page (including any private customizations and the
effects of extensions), and can monitor and leak our usage on the
page such a mouse movements and interactions on the page. This
problem is compounded by the increased use of the web browser as a
platform for delivering software. While the
community ignores the issue, solutions are being developed
commercially and patented — we run the risk of
ending up unable to have privacy because the solutions are patented.
The proposed W3C PUA CG proposes to address the problem with
technical solutions at the web browser, such as restricting the back
channels available to Javascript, and also by proposing HTML
extensions to mitigate lost functionality. Note, this work cannot
address the privacy of information that we overtly share, and there
are other current W3C initiatives working on this, such as DNT."
Online music
Pandora
Users: An Explanation Of The Radio Law You’re Asked To Support
Pandora
listeners may notice their regularly scheduled commercial breaks of
Ford products and tight jeans were interrupted by
a call to support a bill called, “The Internet Radio Fairness
Act.” The proposed bill would reduce the royalty fees paid by
Internet music-streaming services to those paid by other digital and
satellite radio stations (the so-called “801(b)” standard). The
Hill reports
that online radio services shell out more than 55% of their revenue
to pay off royalty fees, while satellite and cable companies only pay
somewhere between 7 and 16 percent, according to co-sponsor Rep Jason
Chaffetz’s office. Like Google and Wikipedia blacking
out their websites in opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act,
Pandora has a captive audience of 150+
million users to broadcast their campaign, once again revealing
how web giants can transform into powerful media outlets.
A bit geeky. This is a SEO tool...
September 21, 2012
Google
Keywords and search queries using metatags
Google
News blog: "...today we’re excited to announce a
news_keywords metatag. The goal is simple: empower news writers to
express their stories freely while helping Google
News to properly understand and classify that content so
that it’s discoverable by our wide audience of users. Similar in
spirit to the plain keywords metatag, the news_keywords metatag lets
publishers specify a collection of terms that apply to a news
article. These words don’t need to appear anywhere within the
headline or body text. Taking the Variety example above, news
keywords such as “stocks”, “stock market”, or “crash”
would be helpful in allowing Google News to better understand the
article content for ranking without forcing the editors to water down
the creativity of a great headline. Because the
metatag appears only as part of the HTML code of a page, visitors to
a site won’t ever see the magic under the hood."
Perspective
For my students, while we are on
break...
Handy for illustrating some Math
concepts...
… Loopcam is an application for the
iOS devices that allow people to make GIF using their iPhone and iOS
device cameras.
Are you ignoring me? (Yet another way
to freak out my students!)
BananaTag not only allows users to tag
and track their emails but it also analyzes them and shows the whole
summary using a graph.
This graph shows you a complete detail
of the emails you sent, the number of people who clicked it and the
ones who opened it. It also shows you how many of the people you
sent the emails to be accessing them from their Desktop or Mobile.
The location insight gives you an insight to the places where the
emails were accessed from – the location of the people.
Honestly, this type of tool is not for
the regular email user, but for business organizations and small
businesses who communicate with their clients via e-mails. This is
also great for people who advertise via e-mails (not SPAM), and would
allow them to find how much audience they reach.
Using the BananaTag tool is pretty easy
and simple. Just download the tool and have it
integrated into your Outlook software or your Google or Google Apps
account. There is also a non-integrated browser email tracking for
all other email clients and mobile devices.
There is a FREE available version for a
person that allows them to track 100 emails per day.
SImilar tool: Unbox,
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