Sin's Notebook

Exploring the cellar

I thought I would explore Freenet [site] [Wikipedia] and it’s possibilities this weekend. No, I don’t expect entering a darkweb or a strange world of TAZs, it’s more like do a bit of research on how it works and what possibilities applied usage of it there are.

After all, curiosity is good, one should always try to learn and a little “Semper paratus” is never bad, right?

[The image is released under Wikimedia Commons. Read more here]

Surveillance thoughts

A non-techie ponders about techie stuff

In a couple of weeks, they will plugin the surveillance points into the Swedish cables, monitoring all traffic between Sweden and Abroad. Of course it’s for the safety of the Swedish citizens and to monitor Terrorists, as today’s bogeymen are known in newspeak. You can read more about ‘Lex Orwell’ here.

Now, it’s not like they are going to actually look at the content (they have promised not to look inside your mail, really. Really cross their hearts and hope to die promised), but instead they are monitoring traffic data (I think that is the proper term in English) and construct sociograms from that (example, Creative Commons licensed). Basically, they look at who is talking to whom, when, how and how often and what pages they like to visit, pr0n, political fringe parties, well, everything, basically. And then they look for “patterns of irregularity”.

Of course, in order to know what is irregular, you have to have a pretty good picture of what is regular. And since normal traffic between normal citizens is the defintion of regular, you monitor all normal citizens, in order to catch the deviants.

Now, what I am wondering about is not mail. Mail are great for these chaps, since it distincly tells everything they want to know, sender, reciever, IP numbers, time, date, the lot. All this is packaged into the parcel that is sent through the tubes and picked up by The Powers.
But then we have messages within services, like Facebook.

Ponder if I set up a false name account on Facebook and instead of sending mail, use the message function they have?
When the person I am sending it to is opening the message (i.e. downloading the data, which then is monitored), what data about me, outside the content in the mail, is actually transferred? If you look at the header of a mail, you see there is a lot of data about “me” and the mail itself in there.
(Of course you can get around it, TOR, VPN, change MAC-address and all that, but that is a bit outside this particular question/thought).

Same thing if you upload a file to one of those freebie websites that are around, and the person in Sweden goes to the web page and downloads the file. What data about the original uploader/uploading computer is packaged in the transfer of either a web page or the file?

Like the sub-title of this post says, I’m a non-techie, just pondering.

Slovakia to try to outlaw VPNs, TOR and other "anonymizer" services

If I am translating this correctly, the Ministry of Interior in Slovakia is trying to outlaw “anonymizer” services, such as VPNs, Tor, and so on.

Of course, since the current regime is perhaps the not most cyber savvy, how it is actually going to be carried out is probably not exactly worked out yet. But experiences from the passing of laws limiting the press’ freedom of speech and increasing the MPs own immunity, that has usually only been a minor issue.

In the text, it states

“Podľa návrhu sa majú postihovať tí, ktorí takúto službu poskytujú alebo umožňujú a to pokutou vo výške 33 tisíc Eur (1 milión Sk). Deliktom teda nebude len prevádzkovanie „anonymizéra“, nech už je to čokoľvek, ale aj umožnenie jeho používania (napríklad prevádzkovanie uzla siete Tor).”

The translation is made of me, a foreigner and Google Translate, so it may not be 100%, but this is how I would say it in English:

According to the proposal, those providing such a service [my note: such as a VPN service] would be penalized or have the possibility of facing a fine of 33.000 Euro. It would not just be an offense to run such services, but also anything that allows usage of anonymizing online, e.g. running a Tor network node.

Source: [Inet.sk]

Ministerstvo vnútra navrhuje zakázať používanie anonymizérov a uchovávať údaje používateľov verejných internetových fór
http://www.inet.sk/clanok/8135/ministerstvo-vnutra-navrhuje-zakazat-pouzivanie-anonymizerov-a-uchovavat-udaje-pouzivatelov-verejnych-internetovych-for

Below is a link to the original Google translation. When reading, apart from Google usually having some troubles translating Slavonic languages, remember to substitute any ‘he’ or ‘she’ with ‘it’, as this is true in 90% of the times. (Slovak language refers to things by their gender, as well, so a fridge or a bank is a she)

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=sk&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.inet.sk%2Fclanok%2F8135%2Fministerstvo-vnutra-navrhuje-zakazat-pouzivanie-anonymizerov-a-uchovavat-udaje-pouzivatelov-verejnych-internetovych-for

Update: Switched Google link that now leads to the article, and not the comments

Thoughts on Google Wave

Repost from my “professional” blog.

It’s been quite interesting to test Google Wave these past weeks, and I think, to more than one of us, a tad confusing.

And herein lies the interesting question; We feel it’s confusing, because we are unsure of what it actually is for, how it actually is meant to be used?
Some places, like the The Complete Guide to Google Wave have tried to be helpful by providing, not only support and handy hints, but use cases, as well.

But more than once, while using and discussing Wave have my friends and I arrived to a similar conclusion. Google Wave is not in beta, it is in alpha, if that even. Or perhaps outside the standard classification we have used so far. Not even the question of what it is for is likely to actually be finalised.
To be honest, a better way to state that last question is ‘How can it be used?‘, and this is what Google has done really right.

Some of us are no longer just customers, but participants in the development of the tools.
It’s an old truth in web and software development that users participating in the process tend to be more positively inclined to tools they feel they have participated in developing.
Will we feel the same when we see things grow, while we are using it? Even if Google don’t ask us, seeing a feature implemented that you have yourself reflected “It would be nice if…” makes us feel like they listened or even asked us. Google don’t have to ask us, they see how we use it, yes, we are lab rats in this case, and willingly so.

I think some of the ones feeling disappointed right now were expecting more, as in exclusive betas they sometimes get invited to. Like when you get a beta invitation to applications that are more or less ready for prime time, the beta test, apart for the bug hunters, is just a sneak peek for some of the elected.
Of course the software industry has a long tradition of allowing in testers before releases, but these people are usually developers themselves, programmers, bug hunters, and so on.
I am no programmer, even if I work in the IT industry. Still I got the invitation to Google Wave in the first batch. Mind you, they released 100.000 invitations, so it’s not all that exclusive. I am a heavy user of Google’s services, however, maybe that is what made me eligible? I simply don’t know.
But it is possible that Google in this case thought wider than inviting only ‘bug hunters’ (nothing wrong with bug hunting, on the contrary! As a staunch defender of Open Source and ardent user of Open Office, I owe a lot of mental health to bug hunters).
But perhaps Google invited people they thought would use it, and that is why we, ‘more-users-than-programmers’ are on Wave, at this early, erratic stage with greyed out buttons galore.
So our job is not to file reports on bugs all the time… Not all the time, but when you get that text field and crash message asking you to describe what you just did, be a sport and fill it in, will you?
However, our job, I suspect, is mainly to use it, use and abuse it, drag, drop, write, link, use gadgets, while we provide loads of input and data to the people over at Google Labs.
And sorry to say, but if you take the ‘customer approach’ with the ‘eligible to good service’ attitude and even blog from that perspective, when it comes to Wave, please let go of the mouse and slowly step away from the keyboard, please? We will get back to you after the release party.

Personally, I think this spells the end of ‘Black Box Design’, followed by product presentations in the vein of ‘We Will Show You & You Will Be Amazed’. (Sorry, Steve Jobs, old friend, but at least it may mean less black turtlenecking for you in the future).
I honestly think the reason we’re not sure how Google Wave can be used is because the people over at Google have an idea, but are themselves not 100% sure themselves and they simply want us to participate. They give us the tools and help us help them discovering how it can be used.

Weird dream?

I had this weird dream last night. Probably been reading up too much on ACTA, the Telecoms package and so.. It was.. yep, you may have guessed it… in a future not too far away.

I was hiding in some kind of cellar, together with some other chaps, dirty, we were tired, laptops almost out of batteries, pure cypherpunk stuff (cheesy, but hard to control your dreams, you know, at least in the details). We seem to have been out on some illegal work, because we were trying to evade The Authorities.

The thing that I really recall from the dream was one thing, though. We encountered problems, which were the ones we were actually running from.
Not from some police force, nor any Corporate Enforcement team, but from a group of “ordinary citizens of higher decency and moral standing”.. Fundies.

And suddenly, it all made sense to me, right there in the dream..
The Corps wanted a piece of the cake, the proles were too busy watching telly or tellynet (The public internet was just another Disneyfed channel in the dream) and the third group, that was decentralised, erratic to say the least, but still a real power in my dream future, the religious fundamentalists.

When things are going from worse to bad, when change is happening right in front of you and you have no possibility to influence it, you can react in different ways.
And one way is to cling to what you feel is eternal, neverchanging and Safe. So the Evangelical groups had had a surge. People unable to ignore it like most of the proles were looking for stability and they found it in the churches and congregations, the priests feeding them simple truths, blaming the sinning forces that had made all this happen, the homos, the atheists, the immigrants…

A permanent lynch mob, ready to cleanse the unsafe streets, to purify homos and perverts in the name of the Lord, to put the fear of God in anarchists, pirates and criminals, with baseball bats if necessary.

Late edit: I suspect reading this article last evening was the real culprit. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/06/france-evangelical-church-growth-religion

Telecoms package and HADOPI

Just a thought here.. Not being a lawyer, but the French HADOPI law includes something called ordonnance pénale, which is basically an automated court, with the accused having no chance to defend her or himself. It was added, since France’s Constitutional Court declared the first version (no legal instance) unconstitutional.

However, with the new text in the Telecom package combined with the ordonnance pénale means that each case must be heard, and the “automatic process” (the only viable option economically at the scale Sarkozy wants it to be handled) has to be abolished?

Article 1.3a in the Telecoms Package states that:

Accordingly, these measures may only be taken with due respect for the principle of presumption of innocence and the right to privacy. A prior fair and impartial procedure shall be guaranteed, including the right to be heard of the person or persons concerned

If so, France is looking at a hefty cost in administration every time a media company points finger at a person…