Online, Anonymity Breeds Contempt - NYTimes.com

Online, Anonymity Breeds Contempt - NYTimes.com
This is a thoughtful piece on the dangers of anonymity on the web, and it certainly makes valid points, and raises clear examples of places where anonymity allows people to do all sorts of ugly things.
However, there is another side to the argument. There are times when anonymity allows people the freedom to speak the truth and to challenge authority. It is just a question of knowing what types of anonymity we need to keep and which we are better off without.

News Desk: Cable Traffic: WikiLeaks, Facebook, and You : The New Yorker

News Desk: Cable Traffic: WikiLeaks, Facebook, and You : The New Yorker

The State Department is a social network, and accusing Assange of treason (never mind that he’s not an American citizen) is screaming privacy foul on a national scale. So is the White House’s condemnation of WikiLeaks. At the same time, the Times reports that these very same diplomats have been asked to commit privacy fouls themselves:

One cable asks officers overseas to gather information about “office and organizational titles; names, position titles and other information on business cards; numbers of telephones, cellphones, pagers and faxes,” as well as “internet and intranet ‘handles’, internet e-mail addresses, web site identification-URLs; credit card account numbers; frequent-flier account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information.”

Whether you buy WikiLeaks’ justification for releasing the cables and whether you accept the arguments by the Times’s Bill Keller and other top editors about why they published and reported on the cables will be popular debates among bloggers and guests on cable TV and talk radio. But it almost doesn’t matter. Today, massive amounts of data can be collected, stored, and mined. We still harbor the illusion that many of our conversations are private or ephemeral, but the company that now owns my very first ISP could have fifteen years of my e-mail on its servers; my instant messages are all logged; my voice-mail messages are now audio files that can be forwarded and archived; my photographs and even my word-processing documents are moving into the cloud. It may be harder today to guarantee that you are having a private conversation than it was in the Soviet Union.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/11/cable-traffic-wikileaks-facebook-the-cloud-and-you.html#ixzz16iYZtW1B

Lots of interesting thoughts about WikiLeaks are coming out, but many of them turn out to be reflections on our own dependence on and trust of others who may not be as trustworthy or whose systems may not be as secure as we would like them to be, or as they claim they are. It is a good moment to reflect on our own personal information management practices.

Search Engine Land: Must Read News About Search Marketing & Search Engines

Search Engine Land: Must Read News About Search Marketing & Search Engines
Google’s “Gold Standard” Search Results Take Big Hit In New York Times Story
November 28, 2010 at 5:08 pm ET by Danny Sullivan
The New York Times has a great, detailed story out today about a merchant with an unusual marketing strategy: be mean to customers. Any publicity, even negative publicity, means a win with Google’s ranking algorithms. Is he right? Maybe. Certainly the story illustrates the fallacy of Google’s “gold standard” search results. Rank Well With Bad [...]
Both the NYT article -- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28borker.html?_r=1 and the article on Search Engine Land are worth reading

US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian

US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian:

"Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing's snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms."

Simon Jenkins article summarizing what we have learned so far from the latest WikiLeaks release.

Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? — Times Labs Blog

Do music artists fare better in a world with illegal file-sharing? — Times Labs Blog
Interesting data analysis brom the Times Labs (it is interesting that this part of the Tunes is not behind a paywall (yet)). Perhaps this data is only true for Britain, but it does show that certain things in the music industry have not changed for the worse for music creators as the recording industry lobby groups would have us believe.

Online Tracking Company RapLeaf Profiles Users by Name - WSJ.com

Online Tracking Company RapLeaf Profiles Users by Name - WSJ.com
More from the Wall Street Journal on personal privacy issues. It is clear from this article just how much information can be amassed about individuals by private companies like RapLeaf, and also makes clear the power of groups who hire this type of company to target individuals. It is a kind of dystopian future not too difficult to imagine where politicians and advertisers are able to target unique hopes or fears or vulnerabilities or worse in order to get you to act in specific ways.

RapLeaf knows even more about Mrs. Twombly and millions of other Americans: their real names and email addresses.

This makes RapLeaf a rare breed. Rival tracking companies also gather minute detail on individual Americans: They know a tremendous amount about what you do. But most trackers either can't or won't keep the ultimate piece of personal information—your name—in their databases. The industry often cites this layer of anonymity as a reason online tracking shouldn't be considered intrusive.

RapLeaf says it never discloses people's names to clients for online advertising. But possessing real names means RapLeaf can build extraordinarily intimate databases on people by tapping voter-registration files, shopping histories, social-networking activities and real estate records, among other things.

The Internet needs peacekeepers. Is Canada ready? - The Globe and Mail

The Internet needs peacekeepers. Is Canada ready? - The Globe and Mail
Reading this article does not necessarily convince one that it is "peacekeepers" that the web needs; however, it needs something, and it does highlight that Canada is developing some expertise in the area through the citizenlab and other ventures. But, the message is clear that cyber-espionage (and less-so cyberwar) are being carried out by many governments. Here is a case I have not read about before:

EARLIER THIS YEAR, one of the biggest law firms in Canada came under attack. Staff members began receiving e-mails that appeared to be from one of the firm’s partners, who was working on a major international M&A deal. The e-mail’s author cited confidential details of the deal, and instructed recipients to open an attached file.

The file turned out to be a form of malware, giving the e-mail’s real author access to the infected computers. When the law firm began investigating the incident, 20 computers were believed infected. The investigation eventually turned up 500 infected machines.

The law firm contacted a Toronto-based company called Digital Wyzdom, which specializes in investigating such attacks. Daniel Tobok, Digital Wyzdom’s President, says his firm soon traced the attacks to an alarming source -- the malicious e-mails originated from government servers in Asia. Indeed, the servers belonged to the government of the nation where the deal was taking place -- and that government opposed the deal. (Mr. Tobok would not identify his client or the nature of the deal).

Two years ago, Mr. Tobok says such cases -- in which a foreign government played a part, or appeared to play a part, in a cyber attack -- made up about 1 to 5 per cent of Digital Wyzdom’s business. Today, it makes up 10 to 15 per cent of cases.

“Governments are starting to realize that this is a vehicle for making things happen,” Mr. Tobok says of such government-assisted cyber attacks.

“Honestly, unless criminal charges are pressed or our government gets involved through political channels, there’s not much that can be done about it.”

The Great Cyberheist - NYTimes.com

The Great Cyberheist - NYTimes.com
This is a long article on the case of Albert Gonzalez, who was mentioned in one of our presentations last week.

Gonzalez, law-enforcement officials would discover, was more than just a casher. He was a moderator and rising star on Shadowcrew.com, an archetypal criminal cyberbazaar that sprang up during the Internet-commerce boom in the early 2000s. Its users trafficked in databases of stolen card accounts and devices like magnetic strip-encoders and card-embossers; they posted tips on vulnerable banks and stores and effective e-mail scams. Created by a part-time student in Arizona and a former mortgage broker in New Jersey, Shadowcrew had hundreds of members across the United States, Europe and Asia. It was, as one federal prosecutor put it to me, “an eBay, Monster.com and MySpace for cybercrime.”

The article is long but makes fascinating reading. It could be made into a movie, and could be titled something like "The Anti-Social Network" but the themes would be similar to those of the Facebook movie. A brilliant central character taking advantage of and betraying friends and colleagues, and behind the mysterious motivation for his actions is no clear answer.

During the legal proceedings, the court ordered Gonzalez to undergo a psychological evaluation. “He identified with his computer,” the report reads. “It is hard, if not impossible, even at the present for Mr. Gonzalez to conceptualize human growth, development and evolution, other than in the language of building a machine.”

The Great Cyberheist - Values-Based Hacking

The Great Cyberheist - NYTimes.com
In the NYTimes account of the work of Albert Gonzalez and his crew of hackers an instance of what might be called "values-based" action on the part of one of Gonalez's hacker colleagues, Stephen Watt.

Gonzalez urged Watt and Toey to experiment with SQL. Watt wasn’t interested. “I had objections to what he was doing on a moral level — and on top of that, I took an intellectual exception,” Watt says. “If Albert said we were going to go after the Church of Scientology or Blackwater, I would have dove in headfirst.” Toey, however, said he felt he owed Gonzalez. He began poking around on the sites of businesses that seemed vulnerable — or for which he had a philosophical distaste. “I just didn’t like what they did,” he said of the clothing chain Forever 21. The clothes were poorly made, he said, and the employees poorly paid. “It’s just everything I hate about this country in one store.”

Even among thieves there can be honour or actions determined by a set of values.

What They Know - WSJ

What They Know - WSJ
The Wall Street Journal has this article -- part of a series -- on the issue of online privacy that we were discussing this week. It includes a cool interactive graph. And it will probably convince you never to visit dictionary.reference.com

How Canada became an open data and data journalism powerhouse | News | guardian.co.uk

How Canada became an open data and data journalism powerhouse | News | guardian.co.uk

magine if you took the historic records of everyone who died in the first world war. Then you matched them to one area to see how it had been affected. Or if you wanted to see if one part of your city had an epidemic of bedbugs. Or if you wanted to find out where the most guns are.
This is the work of data journalist Patrick Cain, quietly and methodically producing strikingly interesting maps of his home city of Toronto.

Article about the open data initiatives in Canada and some journalists and others who are making use of the data released to create maps and tools.

Steal this book: The loan arranger | The Economist

Steal this book: The loan arranger | The Economist:

If you own a physical book, in much of the world you may sell it, lend it—even burn or bury it. You may also keep the book forever. Each of those characteristics is littered with footnotes and exceptions for e-books. We are granted an illusion of ownership, but may read only within the ecosystem of hardware and software supported by the bookseller with sometimes additional limitations imposed by publishers.

An Economist article on ebook and ebook readers.

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books:

“Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics). In Lanier’s view, there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a “person.” In life, we all profess to know this, but when we get online it becomes easy to forget. In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database...

Zadie Smith's interesting review of the movie The Social Network and Jaron Lanier's You are not a gaget. For me, this is the most interesting point of Smith's reflection on the book and the movie. But, it is still a debatable point. Yes, the system needs us to put in data that it can use. But are we the sum of what the system sees? Is what we input into a system that the system can see, the sum total of what we put in? I don't really think so.

Professional climate change deniers' crusade continues - environment - 02 November 2010 - New Scientist

Professional climate change deniers' crusade continues - environment - 02 November 2010 - New Scientist

Books such as Merchants of Doubt by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have detailed how front groups for the fossil-fuel industry have been waging an orchestrated, well-funded campaign against climate science and climate scientists for more than two decades. Hacking into the CRU's email was simply the latest skirmish in this war against science, timed to forestall any progress towards lowering carbon emissions at the Copenhagen climate conference being held about a month later.

a different kind of hactivism from the story above...

Anonymous DDoS Attacks Crash U.S. Copyright Office Website - NYTimes.com

Anonymous DDoS Attacks Crash U.S. Copyright Office Website - NYTimes.com

Continuing its campaign against the defenders of copyright law, Anonymous orchestrated a denial-of-service attack against the website of the U.S. Copyright Office today, knocking the site offline for half an hour and rendering it slow to unusable for a couple of subsequent hours.

Online Learning Is Growing on Campus - NYTimes.com

Online Learning Is Growing on Campus - NYTimes.com
If you are thinking about writing a report on the topic of online classes, this is an interesting piece to read. It gives examples of universities which have made use of online classes as a solution to financial problems and lack of classroom space.

Mark Zuckerberg: The iPad Isn't Mobile

Mark Zuckerberg: The iPad Isn't Mobile
Facebook is trying to make the most of the mobile market and to place itself not just on people's virtual (computer life) but also in their mobile every day real life. And tablet devices may not be at the top of their list right now as crucial areas of development.

Facebook is still trying to figure out its approach and strategy for tablet devices. Because tablets are a new form factor, it requires a new approach.

Meanwhile, Jemima Kiss at the Guardian has some interesting facts about Facebook's strategy for reaching the next half billion users. She quotes some stats, including

1) Mobile use is surprisingly 60% through mobile browsers, rather than apps, though 15% is through SMS.

2) Most active mobile users are in Indonesia, South Africa, Kenya, Canada and the US, where at least 60% of Facebook users spend just as much time on a mobile device as on the desktop.

Slashdot News Story | Do Firefox Users Pay More For Car Loans?

Slashdot News Story | Do Firefox Users Pay More For Car Loans?
It turns out that online retailers consider that your choice of web browser tells them something about who you are, and offers you deals accordingly.
Slashdot has this story of different car loan rates pitched to clients based on browser preference.

A commenter on the article claims to have been previously employed by Capital One, and writes: If you model the risk and revenue of applicants, the type of browser shows up as a significant variable. Browsers do predict an account's performance to some degree, and it will affect the rates you will view. It isn't a marketing test. I was still a bit dubious, but at least one of her previous comments backs up her claims to have worked for a credit card company.

Inside the Google Books Algorithm - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

Inside the Google Books Algorithm - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic
Books are different from the web, but Google is trying to find ways to make its book search tool as effective as its web search engine.

Rich Results is the latest in a series of smaller front-end tweaks that have been matched by backend improvements. Now, the book search algorithm takes into account more than 100 "signals," individual data categories that Google statistically integrates to rank your results. When you search for a book, Google Books doesn't just look at word frequency or how closely your query matches the title of a book. They now take into account web search frequency, recent book sales, the number of libraries that hold the title, and how often an older book has been reprinted.