Links

Another slug of links for you. I must say that I’m disappointed that more people haven’t spoken out against CISPA, and that it’s drawn much less attention than SOPA and PIPA did. I wonder: has the public just become apathetic? It’s the same bill, pretty much, only worse in some ways than SOPA / PIPA, in that this is outsourcing the censorship.

Censorship:

1. Pakistan – Sindh high court orders government to stop censoring websites illegally    24 April 2012, 2:50 am
2. How can we guarantee free speech online?    25 April 2012, 5:21 am
3. China – TV presenter suspended after microblog warning about tainted gelatine    25 April 2012, 9:36 am
4. British ISPs Ordered to Block The Pirate Bay    30 April 2012, 12:20 pm
5. Pakistani Court Says Internet Censorship Plan Is Unconstitutional    2 May 2012, 5:08 am
6. High Court: The Pirate Bay must be blocked by UK ISPs    2 May 2012, 5:18 am

Links 4 and 6: because censoring a paricular website will accomplish exactly nothing, particularly as people can just use VPN software to do what they’d like. This is yet another idiotic misuse of authority, and an abuse of technology.

Copyright:

1. Aereo, free airwaves, and the copyright land grab    23 April 2012, 11:28 am
2. [Updated] Limbaugh Copies Michael Savage’s Bogus Copyright Theory, Sends DMCA Takedown to Silence Critics    24 April 2012, 12:33 am
3. Hollywood’s Trolls    1 May 2012, 5:57 pm
4. EU court: Reverse engineering OK, API not protected by (c) and more    2 May 2012, 4:59 am
5. Microsoft sends GitHub DMCA shutdown for Skype open source project    2 May 2012, 10:59 am
6. Third Circuit Denies Employee’s Copyright Claim to Computer Program    3 May 2012, 12:55 am

Link 2 is a classic misuse of copyright. Link 4 tells me that at least some legal authority has some sense – if I buy it, I should be able to take it apart. Link 6 should tell everybody to be very careful what you sign in your employment contracts, lest something you build on your own time end up being stolen by your employer.

Education:

1. Secret Computer Code Threatens Science    20 April 2012, 11:14 am
2. More Universities Should Shut Down Their Computer Science Programs    28 April 2012, 8:42 am
3. Fla. University Writing New Computer Science Plan, Cites ‘Overwhelming’ Backlash    1 May 2012, 5:35 am

Links 2 and 3 are in disagreement with each other. Link 2, though, is rather interesting, and makes some good points. Of course, link 3 points out that the university in question caved into public pressure and will keep their computer science program going, even though it’s not teaching the skills needed, and even though their professors don’t teach all that much, relying on graduate students to carry the load of educating the students.

Gender:

1. A little gender experiment confirms that Reddit is full of douchebags    24 April 2012, 4:31 am
2. Gangbang Interviews and “Bikini Shots”: Silicon Valley’s Brogrammer Problem    27 April 2012, 10:40 am
3. Tech Needs Girls: World Leaders Draw Up Roadmap for Female Tech Education and Careers Push    27 April 2012, 2:09 pm
4. Bridging the Gender Gap: Why More Women Aren’t Computer Scientists, Engineers    1 May 2012, 5:35 am

These are all particularly interesting links, although link 2 is very disturbing. When did sexism become so entrenched in the tech field? Was it ever not so entrenched, and has only become more virulent as of late?

Law:

1. Cops Would Be Liable Arresting Citizens For Recording Under Approved Conn. Bill    24 April 2012, 4:26 am
2. Senate Bill Would Make Unconstitutional Anti-Stalking Law Even More Unconstitutional    24 April 2012, 8:47 am
3. Who owns your files on Google Drive?    25 April 2012, 5:24 am
4. United States – US sanctions on Iranian and Syrian entities and individuals for monitoring and tracking dissidents online    26 April 2012, 11:01 am
5. Tech Shops Gearing Up Repressive Regimes Feel the Squeeze    27 April 2012, 4:16 am
6. UK orders Heathrow to suppress evidence of customs queues    30 April 2012, 2:40 am
7. With May First/Riseup Server Seizure, FBI Overreaches Yet Again    30 April 2012, 10:15 am
8. Telco caught colluding with dictators    1 May 2012, 6:00 am
9. Megaupload Prosecution Is Lawless and Unconstitutional, Law Professor Says    2 May 2012, 4:59 am
10. EFF Asks FCC to Forbid Cell Phone Shutdowns in Wake of 2011 BART Incident    2 May 2012, 11:21 am
11. U.S. Appeals Court Clears Torture Memo Author    2 May 2012, 11:59 am

Link 1 makes me VERY happy, particularly as police have been so against being held accountable for their actions. Link 6 is rather silly: the UK Borders Agency has ordered Heathrow Airport to stop blaming UKBA for long lines at customs, and also to prevent people from taking photographs of the long lines. Great Public Relations, UKBA (oh, and give us our passports back, please – you’ve had them since January already!).

Medical Technology:

1. Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases    24 April 2012, 4:52 am
2. Regenokine: The Unproven Treatment That Professional Athletes Are Flying To Germany For    24 April 2012, 7:39 am
3. Is Psychology About to Come Undone?    27 April 2012, 2:19 pm
4. New GM Crops Could Make Superweeds Even Stronger    1 May 2012, 3:30 am
5. Aspirin Really Is Kind of a Wonder Drug, Studies Continue to Show    2 May 2012, 5:14 am
6. Controversy Continues After Engineered-Bird-Flu Study Published    2 May 2012, 10:20 am

Link 5 is very interesting. I don’t know that I’ll go out and start taking an aspirin a day, but there’s certainly evidence pointing towards that not being a bad idea. Link 6 is quite interesting, not because of the disease but because it’s about freedom of expression, really.

Miscellany:

1. Books geeks should read to their kids    21 April 2012, 10:25 pm
2. The Great California Exodus    21 April 2012, 10:29 pm
3. Thou Shalt Not Commit Logical Fallacies [poster]    24 April 2012, 4:23 am
4. S.E.C. Asks if Hollywood Paid Bribes in China    25 April 2012, 5:22 am
5. Bureau nominated for two Amnesty Awards    25 April 2012, 7:19 am
6. Join the Launch of The World’s Longest Invoice    26 April 2012, 10:01 am
7. Lessons from Sheryl Sandberg: Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week    27 April 2012, 12:57 pm
8. The Invention of Jaywalking    27 April 2012, 2:24 pm
9. Olympics 2012: A Bruce Schneier Moment    29 April 2012, 8:51 am
10. Missiles Mounted on East London Apartments for Olympic Defense Drill    30 April 2012, 7:30 am

Links 9 and 10 … are just madness. Really, London? Surface-to-air missiles on people’s houses? For the olympics? Link 3 is quite a nice poster, explaining some common logical fallacies. The rest are fairly self-explanatory, but link 8 is rather interesting, as is link 2.

Museum / Library / Archive:

1. Archives digitize 19th century materials for 21st century access    20 April 2012, 8:48 am
2. Up for Bids: Classic Soviet Space Propaganda Posters    20 April 2012, 4:18 pm
3. Hitler Back in Print: Bavaria Plans New Edition of ‘Mein Kampf’    24 April 2012, 7:47 am
4. Harvard puts metadata for 12M library items into the public domain    25 April 2012, 5:24 am
5. Turing’s Rapid Nazi Enigma Code-Breaking Secret Revealed    25 April 2012, 1:17 pm
6. Apollo program source code    27 April 2012, 2:20 pm

In a strange twist (link 3), because the copyright on Mein Kampf will run out, Bavaria (which owns the copyright and has refused to license it for print) will be printing the work … with commentary.

Open Source / Open Access:

1. ‘Pay What You Want’ Works by Making People Feel Good    24 April 2012, 6:45 am
2. Classic maths books reset with LaTeX on Project Gutenberg    27 April 2012, 10:40 am

Link 2 makes me happy, because it’s a good use of LaTeX. If only LaTeX were easier to use, and not so fiddly, the world would be a better place. This is a start, though – and yay for Project Gutenberg!

Politics:

1. Intellectual Property Debate: Artists Turn Against Pirate Party    20 April 2012, 4:53 am
2. Does USA need an Arab Spring?    21 April 2012, 10:28 pm
3. Google on track to outspend banks, big tobacco in lobbying    24 April 2012, 4:24 am
4. American democracy will have disappeared    24 April 2012, 7:43 am
5. The Grand Experiment: German Pirate Party Attempts to Reinvent Politics    25 April 2012, 3:18 am
6. Online Tool Can Detect Patterns in U.S. Election News Coverage    25 April 2012, 1:12 pm
7. How government uses private emails and texts to evade scrutiny    27 April 2012, 5:43 am
8. Constitutional Amendment: Corporations are not people and money is not speech.    29 April 2012, 8:30 am

Link 4 is a Letter of Note: John Steinbeck replying to a letter accusing him of writing Jewish propaganda. Quite a pithy reply. Link 9 is a petition trying to get a constitutional ammendment put through so that corporations can’t participate in politics.

Privacy:

1. Judges Drive Truck Through Loophole in Supreme Court GPS Ruling    20 April 2012, 3:30 am
2. If You Have A Smartphone, Anyone Can Now Track Your Every Move    20 April 2012, 8:48 am
3. The media companies that lobby against transparency    20 April 2012, 9:20 am
4. Mobile Carriers Lobby Against Cellphone Location Privacy Bill    23 April 2012, 3:49 pm
5. Show HN: Email that self-destructs when forwarded    24 April 2012, 4:18 am
6. Privacy and Our Humanity    24 April 2012, 4:50 am
7. Storyboard Podcast: James Bamford on How the NSA’s New Spy Center Might Know Everything    25 April 2012, 1:17 pm
8. CA Legislators Allow Wireless Industry to Continue “Working Day and Night” Selling You Out in Secret    25 April 2012, 4:31 pm
9. Calif. Bill Protecting Social Media Passwords Easily Clears Hurdle    26 April 2012, 5:45 am
10. Onion Browser brings encrypted mobile browsing to iOS    27 April 2012, 12:52 pm
11. Google Drive Terms Of Service Let Google Do Whatever It Likes With Your Files    27 April 2012, 2:20 pm
12. Austrian Activists Push Back Against EU Data Retention Directive    30 April 2012, 4:30 pm
13. DOJ Wants Cell Phone Tracking Records Kept Secret    1 May 2012, 5:30 am
14. Young File-Sharers Respond To Tough Laws By Buying a VPN    2 May 2012, 5:08 am
15. Time to Make Warrantless Home Video Surveillance Extinct    2 May 2012, 9:53 am
16. An Intentional Mistake: The Anatomy of Google’s Wi-Fi Sniffing Debacle    2 May 2012, 4:18 pm

Much of this week’s privacy section is about location privacy. To be fair, even before the advent of “smart” phones, having a cellular phone meant that you could be tracked to within a few hundred feet, simply because the cell phone checks in periodically with cell stations, which are very short-ranged and which can be used to triangulate and calculate your location. “Smart” phones simply make it incredibly easier to do such a thing, and also share that information with many more people and applications. Old-style cellular triangulation required law enforcement to pull cellular station logs and do a bit of work. Now? Now, the cell phones do the work for them, automatically, all of the time.

Security:

1. Obama to Target Foreign Nationals’ Use of New Technologies in Human Rights Abuses    24 April 2012, 5:05 am
2. Insecure websites to be named and shamed    25 April 2012, 5:22 am
3. Equipment Maker Caught Installing Backdoor Account in Control System Code    25 April 2012, 12:11 pm
4. Security for the 99%    25 April 2012, 8:00 pm
5. Rugged OS (industry, military & power plant OS) has backdoor into SCADA networks    27 April 2012, 12:58 pm
6. In U.S.-Russia Deal, Nuclear Communication System May Be Used for Cybersecurity    27 April 2012, 2:08 pm
7. Equipment Maker Caught Installing Backdoor Vows to Fix Following Public Pressure    30 April 2012, 1:06 pm
8. Researchers: Skype Ignored Location-Tracking Vulnerability for More Than a Year    2 May 2012, 2:32 pm
9. Fake Skype Encryption Tool Targeted at Syrian Activists Promises Security, Delivers Spyware    2 May 2012, 4:42 pm

Links 3, 5, and 7 are about the same issue: the manufacturer of networking equipment specially designed for use in places like utilities has, for years, been installing its own account on all of the equipment … and that account is very weakly secured. So much for security, people.

Social Media:

1. Using Foursquare Data to Redefine a Neighborhood    24 April 2012, 5:07 am
2. Former Terrorists and Neo-Nazis Get Their Own Social Network    25 April 2012, 9:19 am
3. social media expert    26 April 2012, 1:00 am
4. Girl Sues Peers in Defamation Suit Over Facebook Fakery    27 April 2012, 4:17 am
5. LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman: Not All Tech Is Social (Think Toilets)    27 April 2012, 10:36 am
6. What Online Social Networks May Know About Non-Members    2 May 2012, 11:26 am

Link 3 is a comic for you. Link 4 is quite important, I think: someone being essentially bullied by her peers was unable to address the issue other than via a civil lawsuit. No law enforcement agency helped, nor did FaceHook, despite the fact that it was an obvious case of bullying. I really hope that she wins her lawsuit. Link 6 is rather creepy: you don’t have to even be engaged in social media for it to know things about you. Hmm.

SOPA / PIPA / CISPA / ACTA:

1. [WWW] Founder Berners-Lee: CISPA a Threat to Privacy Rights    20 April 2012, 10:29 am
2. EFF opposes CISPA on Hackers and Founders Panel    20 April 2012, 2:24 pm
3. Opposition to CISPA Increases: Free Market Coalition and Ron Paul Come Out Against Bill    23 April 2012, 6:00 pm
4. An Open Letter From Security Experts, Academics and Engineers to the U.S. Congress: Stop Bad Cybersecurity Bills    23 April 2012, 7:23 pm
5. How The Expansive Immunity Clauses in CISPA Will Facilitate Abuse of User Privacy    24 April 2012, 3:24 pm
6. Cybersecurity Measure Heads to House Floor Despite Privacy Fears    25 April 2012, 1:35 pm
7. CISPA, “National Security,” and the NSA’s Ability to Read Your Emails    25 April 2012, 1:50 pm
8. Even with Rogers’ Amendments, CISPA is Still a Surveillance Bill    26 April 2012, 11:56 am
9. House Passes Controversial Cybersecurity Measure CISPA    26 April 2012, 3:42 pm
10. EFF Condemns CISPA, Vows to Take Fight to the Senate    26 April 2012, 5:03 pm
11. CISPA Just Got Way Worse, And Then Passed    27 April 2012, 4:51 am
12. Microsoft backs away from CISPA    28 April 2012, 8:06 am
13. A quick guide to our current privacy threats    28 April 2012, 8:51 am
14. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act: CISPA explained    29 April 2012, 8:39 am
15. ACTA in the EU: We Can’t Call it Dead Yet    30 April 2012, 12:16 am
16. FAQ: What you need to know about CISPA    30 April 2012, 4:55 am
17. Mozilla slams CISPA, says the bill “infringes on our privacy.”    2 May 2012, 5:01 am

Yet again, the idiots in Washington, D.C. have decided that censoring the internet is a good thing. I think that there probably needs to be a Pirate movement in the U.S., similar to that at work in Europe, so that technology can finally stop being abused by the morons currently in power.

Technology:

1. Amazon CTO: ‘You should be able to walk away’ from cloud providers    24 April 2012, 4:53 am
2. The War On RSS    24 April 2012, 4:53 am
3. A Researcher and a Robot Walk Into a Bar…    25 April 2012, 1:53 pm
4. From D.C. To Beijing In 2 Hours – Evacuated Tube Transport Could Revolutionize How We Travel    26 April 2012, 7:31 am
5. Cynical Agile and Scrum Dictionary    27 April 2012, 4:36 am
6. RSS will never die    27 April 2012, 10:43 am
7. Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?    27 April 2012, 12:45 pm
8. The Google Hack That Could Be The Antidote To Search Engine Spam    2 May 2012, 11:01 am

Links 2 and 6 are of particular interest, as I rely so heavily on RSS in my blog reading. Basically, though, I think this is one of those cases where the tech isn’t “cool” any more, because it’s stable and ubiquitous. It’s similar to how, in the programming world, everybody talks about Ruby or Python when those languages account for far less than even 5% of the jobs on the market, whereas Microsoft’s .NET languages account for something approaching 90% of the jobs. Because the technology isn’t new, nobody’s really talking it up. Rather, the tech just … exists, and people use it, and the world moves on. Culture is strange, that way: people equate newness with goodness, when that’s not really the case at all. Link 5 makes me quite happy, as “Agile” and “Scrum” have always seemed rather idiotic to me – and I’m glad someone else feels the same way! Any job ad which uses either of those words gets immediately ignored, as those words tell me that the person doing the hiring has no idea how programming works, nor how to manage a software project.

-D