Year: 2008

Transparency and *My* Click-Stream

/ Christopher Parsons

I get strange looks from some of my friends and colleagues sometimes. On the one hand, I strongly advance the idea that people’s privacy should be protected, by default, and at the same time I blog, use social networking sites (though somewhat uncomfortably), own a cell phone, use credit cards, etc. This week I’ve ‘stepped things up’ by syndicating my del.icio.us bookmarks with my blog – you’ll now be treated (or spammed, I guess, depending on how you see things) with the articles that I’ve tagged in the past 24 hours that I think are interesting.

SPAM Ahoy!

I’ll start by stating this: I don’t think that the links you’ll be seeing are Spam. I think that I’m tagging good, solid, helpful links for people that might be interested in surveillance, privacy, and (typically) how either of those topics intersects with technology in some fashion. You’ll note that, for the next little while at least, you’ll see links to articles on Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) and behavioral advertising. I expect some WiMAX stuff as well. There are a couple reasons why I’m syndicating this kind of content:

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DPI, Employees, and Proper Inspection

/ Christopher Parsons

In my last post I alluded to the fact that Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies could be used by businesses to try and reduce the possibility of ‘inappropriate’ employee use of bandwidth and wrongful or accidental transmissions of confidential IP. In that last post I was talking about IT security, and this post will continue to reflect on DPI technologies’ applications and benefits to and for corporate environments.

A Quick Refresher on DPI

From ArsTechnica:

The “deep” in deep packet inspection refers to the fact that these boxes don’t simply look at the header information as packets pass through them. Rather, they move beyond the IP and TCP header information to look at the payload of the packet. The goal is to identify the applications being used on the network, but some of these devices can go much further; those from a company like Narus, for instance, can look inside all traffic from a specific IP address, pick out the HTTP traffic, then drill even further down to capture only traffic headed to and from Gmail, and can even reassemble e-mails as they are typed out by the user. (Source)

For a slightly longer discussion/description of DPI I suggest that you look at the wiki page that I’m gradually putting together on the topic of Deep Packet Inspection.

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The Coming of Ubiquitous Bandwidth?

/ Christopher Parsons

At work, I’m often referred to as the ‘neo-luddite‘ because I don’t advocate the rapid adoption of new technologies for their own sake, nor do I adhere to the position that technologies are inherently value neutral. In fact, I think that technologies are typically inscribed with a particular value-orientation; this orientation is not necessarily the one that is expressed at the technology’s creation. I think that there should be genuine thought and caution advanced when developing technologies that could be destructive to various facets of social life. With the introduction of new technologies comes the possibilities of reshaping cultural traditions, and sure a reshaping shouldn’t be done without at least some forethought. This shouldn’t be taken to mean that I see technology as adding to, or detracting from, a culture, but rather that accompanying a new technology’s adoption is a new cultural system with its own unique environmental characteristics. The world with cellphones isn’t the world as it was, plus cell phones, but instead is an entirely different techno-cultural world. We need to be mindful of the potency of new technologies to reshape facets of our lives through the transmutation or abolition of our traditions – doing otherwise is irresponsible to ourselves and the other members of our society.

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The Sweet Smell of Redmond…

/ Christopher Parsons

I’ve previously talked about the horrors of the native document format in the Office 2007 (and now 2008 for Mac as well), OOXML. I’m not going to go through an extended talk about the nonsense that Microsoft has done to essentially bankrupt the legitimacy of ISO bodies around the world. I’ll let you head over to Bob Sutor’s blog if you want to do that (disclaimer: Bob is a VP at IBM. He’s super smart, but IBM is an ardent supported of ODF, and opposed to OOXML. That position comes through in the blog.).

Now, I just want to note something that you might have missed in some of the FUD that has been swirling about OOXML receiving ISO certification. While it’s true that OOXML may indeed receive such certification (which will be a sad, sad day), the current office suites that Microsoft has on the market (i.e. 2007 and 2008) do not support ISO 29500 – the OOXML standard. That’s right: if you’re saving your documents in OOXML right now, you are NOT saving it as the default standard that Microsoft is championing. Instead, you’re just saving in the ‘transitionary’ format. This means that you could potentially be stranded with a lot of OOXML documents in the future, especially if you decide to move to a non-Microsoft office package. At the very least, it’s looking as though only Microsoft will be able to be ‘backwards compatible’ with 2007 and 2008 when and if the ISO 29500 is approved – no Open Office, Neo Office, Abiword, Google Docs, or anything else for you!

I’m so impressed that ‘open standards’ are translating to ‘closed, proprietary based standards’. It seems in accordance with the thousands of pages that go into the OOXML so-called ‘standard’.

Counterfeit and Security

/ Christopher Parsons

One of those batteries is fake. Can you tell which?

Over the past few weeks more and more attention has been drawn to fake computer hardware that was sold to varying interests around the world. While fakes aren’t new (AMD, Intel, and a variety of other hardware companies have processes in place to avoid repeats of past counterfeiting), what seems to be new is the kind of hardware being ‘faked’.

Networking Hardware

The FBI investigated claims that the government had purchased counterfeit Cisco hardware that may have potentially held, well, God knows what. As is noted by Assistant Attorney General Alice S. Fisher;

Counterfeit network hardware entering the marketplace raises significant public safety concerns and must be stopped . . . It is critically important that network administrators in the private sector and government perform due diligence in order to prevent counterfeit hardware from being installed on their networks.

While it’s of concern that government data may be being directed/inspected by unknown groups, I don’t really want to talk about that. Instead, what I think this shows is that when deploying new networking tools that it is essential that some kind of authentication process occurs – rather than just purchase from trusted vendors and call it a day, those purchases must be tested. Moreover, while the FBI was able to conduct an operation that resulted in convictions and fines, it raises the specter that other groups with less capital to invest in internal investigations may similarly be threatened, and their data and customers as well.

It Just Works (Sometimes)!

/ Christopher Parsons

Time Capsule is incredibly helpful – it’s saved me from several moderately catastrophic data loses. What is less than terrific, however, is the instructions for connecting an external hard disk drive (HDD) to it. To save myself the hassles of figuring out how to set it up again in the future, and for those who are searching for the solution, I’ve thrown this together.

Problem:

Many drives are shipped partitioned to FAT. That’s great…for PCs. Heck, my Macbook could read it too, but doing so crashed my Time Capsule. I figured that it was probably FAT, and so just opened up the Disk Utility to erase the drive and partition it to HFS+ (Journal). Then I found out that this element of OS X has been broken for a long, long time.

Crap.

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