Omnia Mutantur

There’s an article on the L.A. Times detailing how putting all your communication eggs in the basket of a single unscrupulous provider can have serious privacy implications. For example:

There are red flags to be found in each telecom provider’s privacy policy. A close reading of Time Warner’s policy reveals:

* Along with knowing juicy details of your calling and viewing habits — those 900 numbers, say, or that subscription to the Playboy Channel — the company keeps track of “Internet addresses you contact and the duration of your visits to such addresses.”

* Time Warner not only compiles “information about how often and how long” you’re online, but also “purchases that you have made” via the company’s Road Runner portal, which provides access to thousands of goods.

* On top of that, the company may monitor “information you publish” via the Road Runner portal, which should send a chill through anyone who accesses his or her e-mail through Time Warner’s servers.

The disregard for privacy at companies like Time Warner go beyond merely their current customers, apparently.

At least you don’t have to worry about these companies knowing things about you after you take your business elsewhere, right?

Wrong.

Near the very bottom of Time Warner’s privacy policy, the company discloses that it maintains personally identifiable info about people “as long as you are a subscriber and up to 15 additional years.” This, it says, is for tax and accounting purposes.

The aptly titled Your Loss of privacy is a package deal is particularly timely, given today’s publication by a German operator of a Tor node (a network designed to give its users privacy while accessing the Internet) which details his arrest by the police a few months ago. Both the arrest and other privacy concerns are discussed in a CNet article.

What does this mean? That if you don’t protect your privacy now, not only nobody else will do it for you but there are several parties actively interested in taking it from you. On the online front, a good starting point is the Tor network, of which you can read more about here. If you require more reliable access, you can also consider commercial services such as Xerobank.

It takes barely any work, and if you have any interested in safeguarding your information, you should start now.

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics, Science and Technology

From the United Press:

Faced with U.S. economic sanctions and a weak dollar, Tehran is demanding foreign energy companies do business in yen and euros, despite increasingly desperate need for investment.

In a deal announced last week, Japan’s Nippon Oil agreed to buy oil from Iran using yen instead of the traditional U.S. dollars. The agreement comes after years of Iranian efforts to shift its petroleum exports away from dollars and toward yen and euros.

[...]

The economic consequences of sanctions are not Iran’s only motivation. The declining value of the dollar has also made the euro and yen attractive, if not for sales, than at least for saving.

“There is also another key issue that you are seeing, not just in Iran, but in other oil producers, especially Gulf oil producers, is given the depreciation of the dollar, it is better to hold their reserves at least in euros, it is a better store of wealth. Some of the other Gulf producers will accept payment in euros. They won’t price their oil in euros or yen, and even if they are receiving payments in dollars, most likely they are converting a substantial share of that every month into other currency,� Kirsch said.

Here’s the full article.

Ricardo News and politics

A British judge is suggesting an all-inclusive DNA database. The twisted thing is the rationale:

The present database in England and Wales holds details of 4m people who are guilty or cleared of a crime.

Lord Justice Sedley said this was indefensible and biased against ethnic minorities, and it would be fairer to include everyone, guilty or innocent.

[...]

He said the only option was to expand the database to cover the whole population and all those who visited the UK, even for a weekend.

It’s hard to tell if Sedley is attempting to reduce the argument of a DNA database to its absurd extreme or if actually believes that this is an acceptable solution, but nothing in the article indicates he might be anything but serious.

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics

Not the movies, but the Strategic Defense Initiative proposed under Reagan.

Fifty-year-old Alistair Beckham was a successful British aerospace- projects engineer. His specialty was designing computer software for sophisticated naval defense systems. Like hundreds of other British scientists, he was working on a pilot program for America’s Strategic Defense Initiative–better known as Star Wars. And like at least 21 of his colleagues, he died a bizarre, violent death.

It was a lazy, sunny Sunday afternoon in August 1988. After driving his wife to work, Beckham walked through his garden to a musty backyard toolshed and sat down on a box next to the door. He wrapped bare wires around his chest, attached the to an electrical outlet and put a handkerchief in his mouth. Then he pulled the switch.

With his death, Beckham’s name was added to a growing list of British scientists who’ve died or disappeared under mysterious circumstances since 1982. Each was a skilled expert in computers, and each was working on a highly classified project for the American Star Wars program. None had any apparent motive for killing himself.

Each death was apparently under suspicious circumstances, and things have gotten even more so since people started asking questions:

“My solicitor instructed an accident specialist to examine the automobile,” Mrs. Bowden explains. “Somebody had taken the wheels off and put others on that were old and worn. At the inquest this was not allowed to be brought up. Someone asked if the car was in a sound condition, and the answer was yes.”

Hillary, in a state of shock, never protested the published verdict. Yet, she remains convinced that someone tampered with her husband’s car. “It certainly looked like foul play,” Hillary maintains.

And

Investigating journalists found discrepancies in other evidence. “A police report noted a puncture mark on Dijabhai’s left buttock after his fall from the bridge,” explains Tony Collins, who covered the story for Britain’s COMPUTER NEWS magazine. “Apparently, this was the reason his funeral was halted seconds before the cremation was to take place.

[...]

“It’s been almost impossible to get to information about deaths that should be in the public domain,” Tony Collins laments. “I’ve been given false names or incorrect spellings, or I’ve not been told where inquests have taken place. It’s made it very difficult for me to try to track down the details of these cases.”

Here’s the full article. A very interesting read, particularly for those with paranoid inclinations.

Ricardo News and politics, Science and Technology

Maccabee on The Daily KOS has an superb post on a Navy officer discussing the current military situation, and how impending an attack on Iran is:

Like most Marines and former Marines, she is largely apolitical. The fact is, most Marines are trigger pullers and most trigger pullers could care less who the President is. They simply want to be the tip of the sword when it comes to defending the country. She voted once in her life and otherwise was always in some forward post on the water during election season.

Something is wrong with the Navy and the Marines in her view. Always ready to go in harms way, Marines rarely ever question unless it’s a matter of tactics or honor. But something seems awry. Junior and senior officers are starting to grumble, roll their eyes in the hallways. The strain of deployments is beginning to hit every jot and tittle of the Marines and it’s beginning to seep into the daily conversation of Marines and Naval officers in command decision.

“I know this will sound crazy coming from a Naval officer”, she said. “But we’re all just waiting for this administration to end. Things that happen at the senior officer level seem more and more to happen outside of the purview of XOs and other officers who typically have a say-so in daily combat and flight operations. Today, orders just come down from the mountaintop and there’s no questioning. In fact, there is no discussing it. I have seen more than one senior commander disappear and then three weeks later we find out that he has been replaced. That’s really weird. It’s also really weird because everyone who has disappeared has questioned whether or not we should be staging a massive attack on Iran.”

She goes on:

I asked her about the attack, how limited and so forth.

“I don’t think it’s limited at all. We are shipping in and assigning every damn Tomahawk we have in inventory. I think this is going to be massive and sudden, like thousands of targets. I believe that no American will know when it happens until after it happens.”

This is very close to a news story that got published independently on The Times:

The Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes� against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,� he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.� It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus�.

Things are going to hell in a hand basket. Fast.

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics

Two people have been charged with a felony for using flour and chalk to mark a trail through a parking lot to direct runners. For those who don’t know what a felony is, and on what category this pair is being charged, here’s a helpful description from Wikipedia:

Crimes commonly considered to be felonies include, but are not limited to: aggravated assault and/or battery, arson, burglary, some instances of drug possession (dependent on the jurisdiction, often possession over a certain weight, based on the type of drug, is held to indicate intent to sell or distribute), embezzlement, grand theft, treason, espionage, racketeering, robbery, murder, rape, kidnapping, cannabis cultivation and fraud. A third offense for driving under the influence is also a felony in most states.

So treason, arson, murder and rape. Boy these people take their parking lots seriously.

But wait, let’s hear the explanation for the overreacting authorities:

You see powder connected by arrows and chalk, you never know,� she said. “It could be a terrorist, it could be something more serious. We’re thankful it wasn’t, but there were a lot of resources that went into figuring that out.�

Here’s the original new item along with Bruce Schneier’s comments.

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics

On Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End all hardware and operating systems have embedded Digital Rights Management software, a fact that while Vinge doesn’t specifically explain it, probably outlawed operating systems such as Linux which you have under your control (and not the other way around).

Now a guy in the U.S. who has been convicted of uploading a copy of the Star Wars movie has been forced by the court to switch to Windows if he wants to use a computer, because they want to track him using software that is not available on Linux.

Lord knows we need them dangerous criminals tracked.

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics, Science and Technology

Venezuela has passed a constitutional reform that will allow Chávez to legally stay on as a president for the rest of his life.

Assembly President Cilia Flores said Chavez’s proposed changes to the constitution, including the lifting of presidential term limits, were approved by all 167 lawmakers after about six hours of debate.

[...]

Government opponents have attacked the reforms, saying they will weaken democracy by permitting Chavez to become a lifelong leader like his ally Fidel Castro of Cuba.

Chavez, a former paratroop commander who was re-elected by a wide margin in December on promises to steer the country toward socialism, says the changes will give Venezuelans greater decision-making power and aid the transfer of billions of dollars from Venezuela’s foreign reserves into social programs.

Ismael Garcia, one of the assembly’s few dissenting voices, criticized pro-Chavez lawmakers for excluding opposition groups from the discussion, arguing that Venezuelans of all political leanings must be included in the debate before the proposed reforms are put to a national vote.

More on Yahoo news.

Ricardo Freedom, News and politics

Some group is advocating blocking Firefox from accessing some sites, and has set up a site to explain their reasons. Their argument is that Firefox provides an easy way to block ads and – get this – watching a site without ads is theft.

Numerous web sites exist in order to provide quality content in exchange for displaying ads. Accessing the content while blocking the ads, therefore would be no less than stealing. Millions of hard working people are being robbed of their time and effort by this type of software.

If I’m not even willing to look at your ads, that means I’m not your target market. If you don’t want your articles publicly accessible, don’t publish them – otherwise you have to consider the people with ad blockers as the cost of playing the game. Or even better: if your stuff is so great then move to a subscription mechanism, and people will likely be happy to pay.

But even leaving such small things as rational concerns and the structure of the web itself aside, blocking Firefox will do you no good: having Firefox pretend to be some other browser is even easier than blocking ads.

Ricardo News and politics, Science and Technology

Detailed fiat currency article over at Technocrat, with a very spirited discussion on the comments. I completely disagree with Thomas Lord’s points, but an anonymous poster already went through a lot of work calling bullshit! on them. I’d never heard of the Working Group before (more on that group on The Telegraph).

Ricardo Freedom, Math and economics, News and politics