Thoughts

This category identifies postings that are philosophical in nature.

I See Your DPI and Raise You a SSL

/ Christopher Parsons

A little while ago I was talking about network neutrality and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies with a person interested in the issue (shocking, I know), and one of the comments that I made went something like this: given the inability of DPI technologies to effectively crack encrypted payloads, it’s only a matter of time until websites start to move towards secure transactions – in other words, it’s only a matter of time until accessing websites will involve sending encrypted data between client computers and servers.

The Pirate Bay and Beyond

Recently, Sweden passed a bill that allows for the wiretapping of electronic communications without a court order. This caused the Pirates Bay, a well-known BitTorrent index site, to announce that it was adding SSL encryption to their website as well as VPN solutions for native Swedes who wanted to avoid the possibility of having their network traffic surveyed. Recently, isohunt.com has done the same, and other major torrent sites are expected to follow the lead. The groups who are running these websites are technically savvy, allowing them to implement encrypted access rapidly and with little technical difficulty, but as more and more sites move to SSL there will be an increasing demand amongst tech-savvy users that their favorite sites similarly protect them from various corporate and government oversight methods.

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Why Lessig is Right (At Least When it Comes to Autobots)

/ Christopher Parsons

is the founder of the Creative Commons, which effectively allows for a more nuanced (and reasonable) approach to copyright – it establishes particularized rights for different audiences to use your work in different ways. The aim is to allow people to license work so that citizens can use facets of their culture to create new parts of their culture – as an example they can modify images and songs to produce something new, without their modification being labeled a copyright infringement. You’ll note that this blog is under a CC license.

Music, Mashup, and Meaning

There have been a number of particularly stunning documentaries in the past few years that attempt to grapple with the notion of copyright. Of the ones that I’ve seen, Good Copy, Bad Copy(and it’s a free download!) is likely about the best – it examines the role of mashup in music and the role of copyright as it applies to film. Mashups tend to involve taking multiple tracks of music and overlaying them in new and interesting ways – this also tends to act as a method of ‘culture jamming’, insofar as messages are playfully appropriated and modulated in ways that diverge from the cultural direction of the original works of music. As an example, you might hear a song about war with deep and potent lyrics laid atop an electronic dance beat, transforming both of the works in important and substantial ways.

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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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Common-law = Snooplaw

/ Christopher Parsons

Rather than talk about the FBI’s desire to patrol the Internet backbone, have your laptop searched without warrant or any particular reason when facing US Customs officers, or Microsoft’s Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE), I want to quickly talk about the Australian government’s desire to give law enforcement and corporate IT the power to monitor and inspect any and all electronic employee communications. What is most concerning is that it continues an Australian trend to insert American attitudes into common-law.

Terrorism Down Under

I don’t want to come off seeming as though I think terrorism is a small or unimportant issue. It’s not – terrorism is a very real issue, and it has incredible financial and human costs. That said, whenever someone mentions either children or terrorism as a justification for a new piece of legislation that would dramatically extend the surveillance powers of public and private actors, I immediately want to know just how invasive those new powers might be. Whereas Australian law presently only allows security companies and those dealing with the government to survey communications without permission, after a four year fight to revise the Telecommunications Interceptions Act the government may be successful in extending those surveillance powers. If the amendments are passed, all corporate IT groups will be able to survey employees’ digital communciations. The government’s reason for extending the surveillance powers is that, by monitoring workers’ emails, it will be possible to stop/deploy coercion towards those who would;

attack to disable computer networks that sustained the financial system, stock exchange, electricity grid and transport system “[and would consequently] reap far greater economic damage than would be the case of a physical [terrorist] attack”. (Source)

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Lollipop Ladies and Ubiquitous Surveillance

/ Christopher Parsons

Just a quick note, but in Britain lollipop ladies may soon be outfitted with cameras to monitor traffic at dangerous intersections. It’s the children, of course, who are motivating this new deployment of cameras – cameras will presumably cut down on dangerous drivers. Whether attaching cameras to little old ladies will be effective, it has been shown that traffic cameras have been incredibly effective in some areas of the US in reducing dangerous driving. These cameras have been so successful, in fact, that cities are removing their cameras because drivers are committing fewer crimes; the cameras are simply not profitable.

I wonder if Britain will treat cameras attached to old ladies the same way?

Boost Up Your Net With ISP Injections

/ Christopher Parsons

I’ve written about Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technologies before, and their various potential privacy issues. Generally, I’ve talked about how the possibility of having your ISP persistently monitor your online actions could stifle the substantive abilities exercising of autonomy, liberty, and freedom of conscious. I won’t revisit those issues here, though I’d recommend checking out my earlier post on DPI. What follows examines how ISPs are injecting information into the webpages that you visit, which prevents you from viewing webpages as they were designed.

Web Tripwires

When you visit a webpage, your computer downloads a little bit of code and renders it on your screen – the web is an environment where visual stimulation necessitates copying data. Recently, researchers from the University of Washington and the International Computer Science Institute have discovered that about 1.3% of the time what is displayed on your computer’s screen has been altered. This having been said,

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