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John Lemke

The White House Big Data Report: The Good, The Bad, and The Missing | Electronic Fronti... - 0 views

  • the report recognized that email privacy is critical
  • one issue was left conspicuously unaddressed in the report. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the civil agency in charge of protecting investors and ensuring orderly markets, has been advocating for a special exception to the warrant requirement. No agency can or should have a get-out-of-jail-free card for bypassing the Fourth Amendment.
  • the algorithm is only as fair as the data fed into it.
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  • the danger of discrimination remains due to the very digital nature of big data
  • especially the elderly, minorities, and the poor
  • an example of this in Boston, which had a pilot program to allow residents to report potholes through a mobile app but soon recognized that the program was inherently flawed because “wealthy people were far more likely to own smart phones and to use the Street Bump app. Where they drove, potholes were found; where they didn’t travel, potholes went unnoted.”
  • The authors of the report agree, recommending that the Privacy Act be extended to all people, not just US persons.
  • metadata (the details associated with your communications, content, or actions, like who you called, or what a file you uploaded file is named, or where you were when you visited a particular website) can expose just as much information about you as the “regular” data it is associated with, so it deserves the same sort of privacy protections as “regular” data.
    • John Lemke
       
      What is Metadate... then discuss
  • The report merely recommended that the government look into the issue.
    • John Lemke
       
      Did the report give a strong enough recommendation? "looking into" and doing are much different
  • several other government reports have taken a much stronger stance and explicitly stated that metadata deserves the same level of privacy protections as “regular” data.
  • We think the report should have followed the lead of the PCAST report and acknowledged that the distinction between data and metadata is an artificial one, and recommended the appropriate reforms.
    • John Lemke
       
      I very strongly agree.  The report failed in this area.
  • the White House suggested advancing the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights, which includes the idea that “consumers have a right to exercise control over what personal data companies collect from them and how they use it,” as well as “a right to access and correct personal data.”
  • Consumers have a right to know when their data is exposed, whether through corporate misconduct, malicious hackers, or under other circumstances. Recognizing this important consumer safeguard, the report recommends that Congress “should pass legislation that provides a single national data breach standard along the lines of the Administration's May 2011 Cybersecurity legislative proposal.”
  • While at first blush this may seem like a powerful consumer protection, we don’t think that proposal is as strong as existing California law. The proposed federal data breach notification scheme would preempt state notification laws, removing the strong California standard and replacing it with a weaker standard.
    • John Lemke
       
      In other words, it failed at what can be done and it would actually lower standards when compared to what California has in place currently.
  • We were particularly disconcerted
  • the Fort Hood shooting by Major Nidal Hasan
    • John Lemke
       
      WTF? how did he get in this group?
  • two big concerns
  • First, whistleblowers are simply not comparable to an Army officer who massacres his fellow soldiers
  • Secondly, the real big-data issue at play here is overclassification of enormous quantities of data.
  • Over 1.4 million people hold top-secret security clearances. In 2012, the government classified 95 million documents. And by some estimates, the government controls more classified information than there is in the entire Library of Congress.
    • John Lemke
       
      Don't leave this stat out.  More classified documents than LOC documents.  WTF? A "democracy" with more secret documents than public?
  • The report argues that in today’s connected world it’s impossible for consumers to keep up with all the data streams they generate (intentionally or not), so the existing “notice and consent” framework (in which companies must notify and get a user’s consent before collecting data) is obsolete. Instead, they suggest that more attention should be paid to how data is used, rather than how it is collected.
    • John Lemke
       
      This is the most troubling part perhaps,  isn't the collection without consent where the breech of privacy begins?
    • John Lemke
       
      "notice and consent"
  • An unfortunate premise of this argument is that automatic collection of data is a given
  • While we agree that putting more emphasis on responsible use of big data is important, doing so should not completely replace the notice and consent framework.
  • Despite being a fairly thorough analysis of the privacy implications of big data, there is one topic that it glaringly omits: the NSA’s use of big data to spy on innocent Americans.
    • John Lemke
       
      If we ignore it, it will go away?  Did they not just mostly ignore it and accept it as a given for corporations and completely ignore it regarding the government? Pretty gangster move isn't it?
  • Even though the review that led to this report was announced during President Obama’s speech on NSA reform, and even though respondents to the White House’s Big Data Survey “were most wary of how intelligence and law enforcement agencies are collecting and using data about them,” the report itself is surprisingly silent on the issue.2 This is especially confusing given how much the report talks about the need for more transparency in the private sector when it comes to big data. Given that this same logic could well be applied to intelligence big data programs, we don’t understand why the report did not address this vital issue.
John Lemke

September 11, 2012: Opus audio codec is now RFC6716, Opus 1.0.1 reference source released - 0 views

  • Free and Open Another reason there are so many audio codecs: silly licensing restrictions. Would you base a business on technology a competitor controls? That's why the Opus specification and complete source are Free, Open, and available for any use whatsoever without IP restrictions, explicit licensing or royalties. Opus was developed and tested in a public, fully transparent process within the IETF, proof that open collaboration can produce a better audio codec than proprietary, secretive, patent-encumbered systems. Open standards benefit-- and benefit from-- open source organizations and traditional commercial software companies alike. Opus itself is the result of a collaboration including Broadcom, Google, the IETF, Microsoft (through Skype), Mozilla, Octasic and Xiph.Org.
John Lemke

Exclusive: Secret contract tied NSA and security industry pioneer | Reuters - 0 views

  • Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that the NSA created and promulgated a flawed formula for generating random numbers to create a "back door" in encryption products, the New York Times reported in September. Reuters later reported that RSA became the most important distributor of that formula by rolling it into a software tool called Bsafe that is used to enhance security in personal computers and many other products.Undisclosed until now was that RSA received $10 million in a deal that set the NSA formula as the preferred, or default, method for number generation in the BSafe software, according to two sources familiar with the contract. Although that sum might seem paltry, it represented more than a third of the revenue that the relevant division at RSA had taken in during the entire previous year, securities filings show.
  • RSA, meanwhile, was changing. Bidzos stepped down as CEO in 1999 to concentrate on VeriSign, a security certificate company that had been spun out of RSA. The elite lab Bidzos had founded in Silicon Valley moved east to Massachusetts, and many top engineers left the company, several former employees said.And the BSafe toolkit was becoming a much smaller part of the company. By 2005, BSafe and other tools for developers brought in just $27.5 million of RSA's revenue, less than 9% of the $310 million total."When I joined there were 10 people in the labs, and we were fighting the NSA," said Victor Chan, who rose to lead engineering and the Australian operation before he left in 2005. "It became a very different company later on."By the first half of 2006, RSA was among the many technology companies seeing the U.S. government as a partner against overseas hackers.New RSA Chief Executive Art Coviello and his team still wanted to be seen as part of the technological vanguard, former employees say, and the NSA had just the right pitch. Coviello declined an interview request.An algorithm called Dual Elliptic Curve, developed inside the agency, was on the road to approval by the National Institutes of Standards and Technology as one of four acceptable methods for generating random numbers. NIST's blessing is required for many products sold to the government and often sets a broader de facto standard.RSA adopted the algorithm even before NIST approved it. The NSA then cited the early use of Dual Elliptic Curve inside the government to argue successfully for NIST approval, according to an official familiar with the proceedings.RSA's contract made Dual Elliptic Curve the default option for producing random numbers in the RSA toolkit. No alarms were raised, former employees said, because the deal was handled by business leaders rather than pure technologists.
  • Within a year, major questions were raised about Dual Elliptic Curve. Cryptography authority Bruce Schneier wrote that the weaknesses in the formula "can only be described as a back door."
John Lemke

Surprise: Obama's New US Trade Rep Overturns ITC, Stops Ban On Apple Products | Techdirt - 0 views

  •  
    "Still, in a somewhat surprising move, Obama's recently appointed US Trade Rep., Michael Froman, has stepped in to directly overturn an ITC injunction issued against Apple products -- including iPhones and iPads, after the ITC sided with Samsung, saying that those devices violated Samsung's patents. The decision by Froman is final -- Samsung can't appeal, and it means that those iPhones and iPads won't get blocked at customs, as would likely have happened otherwise. You can read Froman's letter about this, in which he delves into some detail about the administrations worries about "patent hold up" -- mainly on standards-essential patents (SEPs) that have so-called FRAND (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory) licensing commitments. As the letter notes:"
John Lemke

White House releases trusted Internet ID plan - security, government, Google, Gary Lock... - 0 views

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    The U.S. government will coordinate private-sector efforts to create trusted identification systems for the Internet, with the goal of giving consumers and businesses multiple options for authenticating identity online, according to a plan released by President Barack Obama's administration. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will work with private companies to drive development and adoption of trusted ID technologies, White House officials said. The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), released by the Department of Commerce on Friday, aims to protect the privacy and security of Internet users by encouraging a broad online authentication market in the U.S. "The fact is that the old password and username combination we often use to verify people is no longer good enough," Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said at an NSTIC release event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "It leaves too many consumers, government agencies and businesses vulnerable to ID and data theft."
John Lemke

Opus - the Codec To End All Codecs - Slashdot - 0 views

  •  
    "fully Free and Open audio codec"
John Lemke

NSA paid $10 Million bribe to RSA Security for Keeping Encryption Weak - 0 views

  • According to an exclusive report published by Reuters, there is a secret deal between the NSA and respected encryption company RSA to implement a flawed security standard as the default protocol in its products.
  • Earlier Edward Snowden leaks had revealed that the NSA created a flawed random number generation system (Dual_EC_DRBG), Dual Elliptic Curve, which RSA used in its Bsafe security tool and now Snowden has revealed that RSA received $10 million from NSA for keeping Encryption Weak. So, anyone who knows the right numbers used in Random number generator program, can decipher the resulting cryptotext easily.
John Lemke

Microsoft Announces Windows 10 | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • Starting tomorrow, Microsoft will launch a Windows Insider Program that will give users who are comfortable with running very early beta software access to Windows 10. This first preview will be available for laptops and desktops. A build for servers will follow later.
  • The company went on to detail that its new operating system will have a tailored user experience between different screen sizes — that’s to say that if you are on a smaller device, you will see a different sort of user interface. The code will run across all device categories: “One product family. One platform. One store.”
  • Put more bluntly, the company is going for the enterprise crown.
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  • bringing back a few features of Windows 7
  • ncluding a redesigned start menu that combines the basic Windows 7 menu with the (resizable) tiles of the Windows 8 start screen. Windows 8 Metro apps can now also open in a windowed mode on the desktop, so you aren’t taking into the full-screen mode by default and you can use a “modern” Windows 8 side by side with a standard Windows desktop app.
  • multiple desktops
  • command line, too, which has also been improved quite a bit.
  •  
    "the last 943 people to cover the operating system got the name wrong."
John Lemke

Hundreds of Colorado students stage protest over history curriculum | World news | theg... - 0 views

  • Hundreds of students walked out of classrooms around suburban Denver on Tuesday in protest over a conservative-led school board proposal to focus history education on topics that promote citizenship, patriotism and respect for authority, in a show of civil disobedience that the new standards would aim to downplay.
  • nvolving six high schools in the state’s second-largest school district follows a sick-out from teachers that shut down two high schools in the politically and economically diverse area that has become a key political battleground.
  • organized by word of mouth and social media.
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  • The proposal from Julie Williams, part of the board’s conservative majority, has not been voted on and was put on hold last week. She didn’t return a call from the Associated Press seeking comment Tuesday, but previously told Chalkbeat Colorado, a school news website, that she recognizes there are negative events that are part of US history that need to be taught.
  • The proposal comes from an elected board with three conservative members who took office in November. The other two board members were elected in 2011 and oppose the new plan, which was drafted in response to a national framework for teaching history that supporters say encourages discussion and critical thinking. Detractors, however, say it puts an outsize emphasis on the nation’s problems. Tension over high school education has cropped up recently in Texas, where conservative school board officials are facing criticism over new textbooks. Meanwhile, in South Carolina, conservatives have called on an education oversight committee to ask the College Board, which oversees Advanced Placement courses, to rewrite their framework to make sure there is no ideological bias.
John Lemke

Google has poached an expert scientist to build a quantum computer | The Verge - 0 views

  • the next step in computing technology
  • But the technology took a hit earlier this year when tests on the world's first commercially available quantum computer — the D-Wave 2, priced at around $15 million — appeared to show that it was no faster than a standard computer.
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