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John Lemke

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

www.xiph.org/rfc-6716

2012 audio rfc codec technology codecs slashdot news standard INN

shared by John Lemke on 12 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • 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

Petition Launched To Get The White House To Open Source Healthcare.gov Code | Techdirt - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...ource-healthcaregov-code.shtml

2013 indienationnews code gov healthcare source politics yourrights waste

shared by John Lemke on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Of course, there are a few issues with this. First of all, while things created by government employees is automatically public domain, works created by contractors is not. So while conceptually we can argue that the code should be open sourced, it's not required by law. Second, and more importantly, it's a lot harder to take proprietary code and then release it as open source, than it is to build code from the ground up to be open source (and it's even more difficult to make sure that code is actually useful for anything). Indeed, if the code had been open sourced from the beginning, perhaps they wouldn't make embarrassing mistakes like violating other open source licenses.
  • By this point, open sourcing the code isn't going to fix things, but if more attention is put on the issue of closed vs. open code in government projects, hopefully it means that government officials will recognize that it should be open source from the beginning for the next big government web project.
  • After the disastrous technological launch of the healthcare.gov website, built by political cronies rather than companies who understand the internet, there has been plenty of discussion as to why the code wasn't open sourced. At that link, there's a good discussion from On the Media, with Paul Ford, discussing what a big mistake it was that the government decided not to open source the code and be much more transparent about the process. It discusses the usual attacks on open source and why they almost certainly don't apply to this situation.
John Lemke

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

www.eff.org/...ta-report-good-bad-and-missing

2014 EFF mass data indienationnews law technology legal White House report review privacy yourrights notice and consent

shared by John Lemke on 05 May 14 - No Cached
  • 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.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • 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
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      What is Metadate... then discuss
  • The report merely recommended that the government look into the issue.
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      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
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      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
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      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
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      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
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      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
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      This is the most troubling part perhaps,  isn't the collection without consent where the breech of privacy begins?
    • John Lemke
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      "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
      John Lemke on 05 May 14
       
      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

Former NSA Boss Says NSA Should Just Reveal Everything Itself And Move On | Techdirt - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...l-everything-itself-move.shtml

2013 nsa leaks Snowden spying transparency

shared by John Lemke on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Bobby R. Inman, who weathered his own turbulent period as N.S.A. director from 1977 to 1981, offers his hyper-secret former agency a radical suggestion for right now. "My advice would be to take everything you think Snowden has and get it out yourself," he said. "It would certainly be a shock to the agency. But bad news doesn't get better with age. The sooner they get it out and put it behind them, the faster they can begin to rebuild."
John Lemke

Report: NSA among worst offenders of mass surveillance, Snowden says - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

2013 Snowden spying surveillance nsa cnn com indienationnews leaks transparency yourrights

shared by John Lemke on 04 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • "The world has learned a lot in a short amount of time about irresponsibly operated security agencies and, at times, criminal surveillance programs. Sometimes the agencies try to avoid controls," Snowden wrote, according to the news magazine. "While the NSA and GCHQ (the British national security agency) appear to be the worst offenders -- at least according to the documents that are currently public -- we cannot forget that mass surveillance is a global problem and needs a global solution."
  • A recent report by Der Spiegel, citing documents provided by Snowden, alleged the NSA monitored German Chancellor Angela Merkel's cell phone. Some reports also suggest the United States carried out surveillance on French and Spanish citizens.
  • "If he wants to come back and open up to the responsibility of the fact that he took and stole information, he violated his oath, he disclosed classified information -- that by the way has allowed three different terrorist organizations, affiliates of al Qaeda to change the way they communicate -- I'd be happy to have that discussion with him," Rogers said on "Face the Nation."
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