sky, Author at Sky's Blog

Pad Computing in Sci-Fi and in Real Life

28 May, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

The iPad immediately led me to think about how tablet computing is portrayed in science fiction. TV and movies – because that’s the only place you actually saw little beasties like these 10 or 20 years ago.^[1] Today they’re (literally today) all around the world.^[2]

In Sci-Fi Channel’s series Caprica, portable computing has become “foldable” and takes the form of sheets of “paper” on which characters, symbols and other stuff light up so you can read them. The paper is touch-sensitive and you can move the characters around as well as tap them (read “keyboard”). [Read more…]

Secret courts, secret orders

27 May, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

Cory Doctorow posted a BoingBoing article about a recent National Security Letter requiring the Internet Archive to reveal user information to the FBI. In case you’re not familiar with this process, certain government agencies can issue these letters under the PATRIOT act, which require you to disclose information about your online users, and you can be required not to disclose even the existence of the NSL to anyone else – not your board of directors, not your employees, not even your dog. You can tell your attorney, otherwise this would violate due process of law because you would be denied legal representation. EFF stepped into this^[1] as legal adviser to the Internet Archive and Brewster Kahle. The legal grounds on which they contested this was that the Internet Archive is a library (recognized by the State of California) which is exempt from these requirements under US law. The provisions apply to providers of Internet communication services (such as ISPs, duh, by definition).

Regardless of how you feel about government agencies having unchecked access to this kind of information — If you ran an online service that promised “we never share your information with anyone else” – what would your reaction be to an NSL requiring that you give up something like IP addresses, or physical address, or other information about a user of your service, without informing anyone? Would you be happy telling your users that you never share their information?

[Read more…]

Reclaim your Facebook privacy

25 May, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

Neat idea – although ReclaimPrivacy.org has gone away, you still may want to scan your Facebook privacy settings to see exactly how private you might not be! Comparitech offers to guide you through this. Try it out.

Comparitech’s page also describes privacy issues you might want to address on google (gmail and google+) and suggestions on avoiding tracking in browsers. I thought I had most everything set pretty well on my Facebook account, but I was a bit surprised at my results (back in 2010). The old ReclaimPrivacy piece of code could fix the settings for you, but yes, you can do it all yourself if you just follow all the steps. [Read more…]

Heavy metal in Baghdad

8 April, 2010 by sky Leave a Comment

I’ve never gotten seriously into heavy metal, but on occasion I pig out on grunge music for a few hours, and today I was listening to an NPR Music Fresh Air podcast where Dave Davies interviewed the musicians of a heavy metal group Acrassicauda who started playing heavy metal music in Baghdad and are now in the US.

This movie/video Heavy Metal in Baghdad (85 minutes—the entire film is available online) really gives you an understanding of what life has been like in Baghdad for a few years now. Machine guns being fired a block away while the crew is recording… mortal shells exploding during a concert in a hotel… getting stopped on the street… the feeling that they can only stay 5 minutes in one spot or something bad will happen. And it makes you think about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have left the country for other parts of the world. The band escaped Iraq and ended up in the US – via Syria.

By itself the movie wouldn’t have sparked a blog article, but I had a conversation last week with some consultants who are studying the sociology of hacking and are doing some thinking about whether the talent that’s going into the creation of malware might be refocused on more productive enterprises. What you’ll see in this movie is the frustration and anger that wells up in people living under conditions of war year after year. It somehow sparked in me a feeling of where many hackers must be coming from these days! These guys were “living with death and fear every day.” From that standpoint, let alone the images of heavy metal way out of its element in Iraq and Syria, it’s worth watching.