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When I read this…
… my first reaction was “Irreversible? I certainly hope so”. June 7th, 2013 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The flood of revelations about the sheer scale of NSA information theft… direct server access without an individual court order whenever the NSA wants something from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype*, PalTalk, YouTube, AOL and Apple… has made me wonder if savvy non-US based business might not be able to market their services as explicitly non-US. Just imagine the possible tag lines:
…or tapping into a bit of anti-Americanism never hurt the bottom line…
… which is not to say such services cannot be marketed to Americans…
The creative possibilities are endless and anyone who cannot leverage this into internet gold is not trying hard enough! Capitalism for the win!
*= Skype, originally a Luxembourg based company, was purchased by eBay in 2005 and then Microsoft in 2011. June 7th, 2013 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
The media and blogosphere are abuzz with the astonishing info-grab by the US government…
I assume the Guardian got this information because someone inside Verizon said “fuck this” and leaked it. I also hope the Guardian has the ghoolies to well and truly protect their source. June 6th, 2013 | 42 comments - (Comments are closed)
Never people to let a nice atrocity go to waste, the recent murder of a British solider in London is being used by the ruling classes to renew the push for more state surveillance. Never mind that the two perpetrators were already known to the security services, somehow the non sequitur that a more panoptic state could have stopped a pair of low tech islamic psychopaths carrying out an outrage that required perhaps ten minutes of prior planning (drive to an area with a lot of soldiers, grab one, murder him in broad daylight in front of witnesses) is being run up the flagpole to see how many people salute it. Pure and utter bullshit. Just remember this when some idiot holds up Boris Johnson as someone preferable to the ghastly David Cameron when (rather than if) Cameron gets the heave ho from the Tory party leadership as they start to feel Nigel Farage’s breath on the back of their necks. May 24th, 2013 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
Some organisation has recently filled my local neighbourhood in the inner London borough of Southwark with a remarkably large number of the above signs. These have been attached to stop signs and other traffic signs, poles holding street lighting, and a few are even attached to poles that hold nothing else and have presumably been installed specially for the occasion. It is hard to imagine government of some kind not being involved, given the public places where they have been erected, but WTF? Are these supposed to make me feel safe? Reassured? Threatened? Creeped out? Vaguely worried? Concerned that money that could otherwise be spent on something useful is being used to pay the salaries of people with far too much time on their hands? Also, WTF? Going to the advertised website is only of limited help. Something about fighting crime with fighter jets? In any event, a badly designed website of the kind one would find from some small company that is desperately short of capital and trying to impress investors after an unsuccessful listing on AIM. Oh, okay, there is something about some kind of partnership in London with the Metropolitan Police elsewhere on the website, but it is virtually impossible for me to link to due to the horrendous overuse of Flash. So taxpayer money probably is involved somewhere. Once again, WTF? March 25th, 2013 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
As noted in my previous posting last night, I went out photoing photoers last Sunday, and one of the more interesting photoers I photoed was this guy:  That’s an iPad, being used as a camera. I mentioned this to Michael Jennings, and he told me that the first iPad didn’t have a camera built in. The second one did, but it wasn’t very good. Not designed for proper photoing, merely for video-conferencing. But people used it to take proper photos anyway, or they tried to. And on iPad number three, the camera is quite good. Not in the same league as a dedicated camera, but good enough for many, for taking tourist snaps in good daylight and for telling friends what they are seeing. I know the feeling. If you are a techy, or if whatever you are doing just has to be really, really good, you use the best kit for each job that you are doing. But if you are a civilian, you just love the idea of one machine that does everything for you. There is just one pile of magic to master, just the one gadget to be faffing about with when you are on holiday. I have never used an iPad, but I entirely know why this guy is using his iPad to take photos, rather than a regular camera type camera. I talked with him. So, using one of those things to take photos, eh? Yes, he said, and he eagerly showed me some of the photos he had just taken, of Westminster Abbey. They looked fine to me, although a regular CSI character could easily work out the man’s identity from his reflected face in this:  He’s not the first iPad (or Tablet or whatever) photoer I have spotted in recent months, just the first who obliged with a good clear pose for me to photo, a pose which obligingly hid his face. I have been photoing digital photoers for over a decade, and if there is a technological trend in evidence, it is that the range of cameras being used by digital photoers has slowly grown. First, there were the very first digital cameras, like my very first digital camera. Rather big, very expensive and rather clunky, but they worked! Meanwhile the Real Photographers were going digital, with even bigger and massively more expensive cameras, which looked, then as now, just like regular old cameras that used film, and which made use of the same even more expensive sets of interchangeable lenses. Then cameras started to emerge which were betwixt and between (“bridge” cameras) the little ones and the Real Photographer cameras, like my last two cameras, with their ever more amazing zooming abilities. I try to get cameras in focus whenever I can, and in my photos you can see the zoom numbers climbing as the years have gone by, the latest Canon “bridge” camera being 50x! And while all that was happening, mobile phones were also getting good enough to use as cameras. Just like my iPad Man, Mobile Phoner relishes only having one machine to fret about, to do everything. Hence the ever increasing smartness of smartphones. It all reminds me of how General Motors worked out, in the 1920s, that the idea of just one basic kind of car for everyone was silly. Instead GM offered a range of cars, to suit all tastes and pockets. But, there never was a Model T digital camera, available only in black, and the camera market is easier to enter, so there never was a General Cameras either. The range rule has prevailed with digital cameras from the start. It didn’t have to be thought of, it just happened. This range of cameras is reflected in my latest clutch of photoer photos, here (already linked to above). There is the Real Photographer (1.2), or at any rate the photographer using a Real Photographer camera, the guy with the reflecting sunglasses. There are the ever smaller and ever cheaper dedicated digital cameras, often decked out in bright colours (silver (2.3) and red (3.1) in these photos as well as just black). There is the guy using his smartphone (3.3) to take photos (of the man blowing bubbles on the South Bank). There is the 26x zoom camera (3.2). Even the little red camera (3.1) is 10x, as you can clearly read if you click on that one. Tellingly, there are cameras there where it is a bit hard to tell at a glance if they are single fixed-lens or multiple choice lens, bridge or Real. There must also be another kind of camera being used, to add to all these others, which is the one that is so small and so unobtrusive that it cannot even be seen. These cameras are hidden in glasses, or in buttons, or in hats, or in jewellery. Time was when only the likes of James Bond had such devices, but now, I presume, anyone who wants such a camera can have one. I must have photoed many such cameras, but I will never know about it. I salute these invisible cameras with particular fervour. They are Little Brother’s answer to Big Brother’s now ubiquitous and very visible surveillance cameras. These invisible cameras are the reason that They will find it so very hard to ban outdoor photography by civilians, however much They might like to and however hard They try, because They won’t be able to see it happening and tell it to stop. December 4th, 2012 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
Face recognition is now starting to loom large, and it won’t be long before etiquette changes in response. The internet has been instructed to email me whenever face recognition gets a big mention, and the emails ever since I said to do this have flowed to me in a steady trickle. Face recognition will soon be a Big Issue, and for many it already is. To photo anyone in public will soon be universally understood as like a potential public announcement of exactly where they were, exactly when. I presume that celebrities of ever decreasing celebrity are already hunted down with such software. Now regular people are starting to track each other. Soon, this possibility will be routine. Governments will want to make it illegal for anyone except themselves to behave like this, but I can’t see how they will be able make this stick. I wonder where my husband was last weekend. I know where he said he was, but … let’s run the programme, and see if anything shows up. Was he in London with that tramp with the pink hat, I wonder? That young speaker I heard yesterday for the first time seemed like quite a dangerously clever chap, with a potential big future that I disapprove of. So, www, show me every picture you have, and I don’t just mean the ones with his name attached. What does he do with himself? How does he relax? How does he unwind? Give me some dirt. That kind of thing. As the memory of the internet grows, people will be living more and more of their lives in a state of perpetual surveillance, of everyone, by everyone. At present, your name needs to be spelt out and attached to such revelations for them to be revelations. But that is fast changing. Soon, your face will be enough. When I say “soon”, I don’t really know when all this is going to happen, and be seen to have happened. This may already be happening, or it may only really get talked about a decade hence. But happen it surely will. Whereas I only arrange to be informed when the words “face recognition” appear in an internet news story, it is surely only a matter of time before we can all of us say “show me any picture that looks like this person”. → Continue reading: What happens when face recognition becomes the new reality December 3rd, 2012 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have frequently noted here the obsessive fortification of the state during the last decade: how all public buildings in Britain have steadily become the opposite – closed-off, accessible only through guardrooms, by special permission. A fascinating and frightening piece by Anna Minton in the FT Locked in the security cycle describes something I did not know. Though I had noticed a more general neurotic security obsession in new developments, I thought this was merely a matter of insurance and corporate cowardice. Some of it may be. But some of it is official coercion. Minton explains:
Beware the security-industrial complex! Note this is enforced by state power: since the all-nationalising Attlee government of 1945-51 planning permission controls all building in Britain. It is a panopticon of the built environment, covering all significant building or alteration of building: nothing is legally done privately; nothing is legally done without prior official approval. So “a prerequisite of planning permission”, means developers comply or they don’t build. But the standards to be applied by planning officers are controlled by a ACPO – a closed professional body for senior police and civilian policing officials – and far from correcting the producer interest, as choice might, deliberately incorporate it as a driving factor. What will we get – what are we getting – all around us? An architecture calculated to reproduce the assumptions of those in security positions and industries of what’s a good place for people to live, trade or work, for children to play or be educated. Those are assumptions about order, ‘appropriate’ persons and behaviour, the need for oversight, the nature of – and constant presence of – threat. Hence the suspicious building syndrome: you will be increasingly screened to permit entry, and watched, controlled inside the perimeter. Hard, plan-defined boundaries, rather than freely negotiated common use of space. But look! Lots of jobs for guards and electrical maintenance crews. Compliance by large builders will make their lives easier and competition more difficult. ACPO members will find valuable consulting work. Politicians can say we live in a society with “world class” security. The execution of policy will be deemed its success. Everybody (who matters) wins. Positive feedback. But not the only feedback loop. The authorities are not interested in contrary evidence. Public bodies and quangos are skjlled at commissioning proleptic studies, and the institution of ‘public consultation’ is highly developed as an art of obtaining affirmation for policy, but even so, there are clear signs that that official security obsession creates psychological insecurity in the populace. Minton again:
[my emphasis] I would add: they also remind us of something else. The pressure for all this comes from regulatory culture. As with the fortification of the state, it reveals and propagates the intense fearfulness in authority itself. Authority is frightened of the unsupervised individual, and thinks we should be too. To recycle a phrase, they hate our freedom. The possibility that life may be lived harmlessly in divers ways is just as much anathema to a secular bureaucrat as a religious totalitarian. If rules and fear are not everywhere, we might not accept that the people who make up rules always know best. October 14th, 2012 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Profiling whole populations instead of monitoring individual suspects is a sinister step in any society. It’s dangerous enough at national level, but on a Europe-wide scale the idea becomes positively chilling. September 2nd, 2012 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
‘I don’t regret outing Anderson Cooper’ by Brian Moylan July 2nd, 2012 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
If you visit, for example, the Financial Times website, you will be presented with a pop-up box warning you about cookies. This is becoming more common and is a result of the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, also known as the e-Privacy Directive, also known as the cookie law, which took effect on 26th May. Since no-one understands the law and has to rely on vague guidance that gets updated without really clarifying anything, web designers who have heard of the law will likely rely on the annoying pop-up box for some time and it will become boilerplate which is instinctively dismissed by users. Luckily most web designers seemingly have not heard of the law or are otherwise ignoring it, probably because they have real work to get on with. Dave Evans of the Information Commissioner’s Office writes:
Freely co-operating organisations did solve the problem years ago, when they invented web browsers with cookie settings. This legislation solves nothing at the cost of confusing, worrying and irritating people. June 6th, 2012 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Further to my brief remarks yesterday on the UK government’s plans to intensify scrutiny of the internet (although it may be that the government is changing its tack), comes this piece of crap from Dan Hodges, a Labour Party supporter who writes approvingly of the Big Brother state. This man is beyond irony. Take this as an example of his thinking:
And of course this is his idea of the killer argument:
Ah, “only the innocent have anything to fear” argument. Mr Hodges is undisturbed by the thought of mistaken identities, or youthful radicalism catching up with anyone. No sir, ordinary good men and women of the UK can rest easy in the knowledge that their innocuous, dull messages to friends and business will not incur the suspicion of those men from GCHQ or wherever. This sort of thing is mildly terrifying to the extent that it shows how trusting so many people are of the modern state and its apparatus. And there is simply no space in Mr Hodge’s mind, it appears, for any suspicion of how such intelligence might be misused. If the recent allegations of corruption by the UK police over the supply of data to bent journalists has taught us anything, it is that if we aggregate vast caches of data into one place, someone, somewhere, will be tempted to make wrongful use of it. It boggles the mind that Mr Hodges does not see this. Mr Hodges also argues, not very convincingly, that recent some miscarriages of justice would not have happened had we British not been so precious about privacy:
Ah, yes, if only Britain had been completely festooned with CCTV and the rest in the early 70s and later, then all those folk banged up for killing people would have been free. I would recommend Mr Hodges spends some time reading the thoughts of security expert Bruce Schneier before opining again about the “benign” nature of an all-encompassing surveillance state. April 5th, 2012 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
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