Sunday, September 23, 2012

“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.
Similar tools: Gifture and GifBoom.


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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