Group items tagged

This one is a little sketchy. It's just links to articles on VPNs from news sources I haven't heard of. Can you find someone a little less spammy and a little more likely to be a real person?

Just like in Little Brother! Schneiner responds to this article here: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/09/gait_analysis_f.html

Interesting to read a little more about the history of the Vigenere Cipher. Also explains how it is cracked.

After a high school principle pulls the plug on a plan to use Little Brother as a common reading, Cory Doctorow sends the school 200 copies of the book for free. Good man.

This article may be biased but it is still interesting. It implies that the government is using cell phones to track citizens in the same way bus passes were used in Little Brother.

Little Brother, the entire book, on a poster.

Apparently, a little plagiarism won't get you fired sometimes.

A little progress on the mysterious Voynich manuscript...

Facial scanning isn't quite to the point where it could be reliably implemented in a school, but it's not far off either.

Essentially, this paper goes through the types of gait recognition software that currently exist as well as the reliability of this software. There are a lot of different elements that influence a persons gait (like terrain, shoes, fatigue, etc.), which effects how well the software works. It's a pretty heavy read but it's really interesting if you want to just jump to a certain section and read in depth. This technology is very much out there and in development, and it is definitely being improved upon. Also, even though this paper is a little bit older, it is still being cited in a lot of more recent research papers and I thought it would give a good enough grasp on the science for our purposes.

This writer did a good job of keeping an informal tone without being too casual. It was an easy read and they connected the topic to other areas of science. The little bit of humor was a really nice touch too!

An app circulated among the protesters in Hong Kong that supposedly was for coordinating protest efforts, but was in reality a phishing attack that would track keystrokes, messages, and identity information of devices it was installed on. Many signs point to the Chinese government as the origin of the malware, though. Not the first time a government has done something like planting spies and monitoring protestors. We saw this in Little Brother too, with the DHS spies on the Xnet.

Interesting that ~35% of 1000 surveyed have upped the strength of their passwords, but only 6% turned on two-factor ID, which was a major cause of the iCloud hacks going undetected for so long.

It seems that two-factor authentication would not have prevented those iCloud hacks (according to this piece: http://www.tuaw.com/2014/09/02/think-iclouds-two-factor-authentication-protects-your-privacy/), but since Apple has now changed the triggers for two-factor to include things like iCloud access, two-factor will be more helpful going forward. So it is a little surprising that more people haven't enabled it.

I'm also reminded of the ACLU's Chris Soghoian's point (https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/lessons-celebrity-icloud-photo-breach) that one reason people have crappy Apple passwords is that Apple makes you use your password so darn often. I know I get frustrated when I have to enter my (crazy long) Apple password on my iPhone just to download a free app.

With the shutdown of the silk road, the NSA has proven that it is monitoring even the most anonymous parts of the web. This raises some serious questions. Is anything that we do online really "private?"

It's a little depressing, isn't it? One solution would be stronger oversight for the NSA. We could assume they can see everything, but have stronger assurances that they're using that power responsibly.

Here's Cory Doctorow's blog post about my blog post about our debate mapping activity.

Cory Doctorow's blog posts concerning RFID tags and arphid technology; especially several posts on its usage in schools

This article details how MetroCard tracking is used in solving crimes, which is somewhat similar to the FastPass tracking in Little Brother.

Interesting how this article talks about the gait analysis being used for catching terrorists, while in Little Brother, it was used to keep track of the high school students. The technology is not quite ready to be used, but seems to be much more reliable than the gait trackers in the book.

Georgia Tech Research Institute is making gait recognition technology a reality. "The ultimate goal is to detect, classify and identify humans at distances up to 500 feet away under day or night, all-weather conditions. Such capabilities will enhance the protection of U.S. forces and facilities from terrorist attacks."

A little history on FBI surveillance of MLK. via @snowden