Human beings, Shannon saw, communicate through codes
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The Information by James Gleick: Review by Nicholas Carr - The Daily Beast - 0 views
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James-Gleick Nicholas-Carr Information History-of-Information-Technologies
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Information is a logical arrangement of symbols, and those symbols, regardless of their meaning, can be translated into the symbols of mathematics.
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“bit”—indicating a single binary choice: yes or no, on or off, one or zero—as the fundamental unit of information
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When, in the early 1950s, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered that genetic information was transmitted through a four-digit code—the nucleotide bases designated A, C, G, and T—biologists and geneticists began to draw on Shannon’s theory to decipher the secrets of life.
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The mathematical analysis of information, Gleick points out, entails the “ruthless sacrifice” of meaning, the very thing that “gives information its value and its purpose.”
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in separating meaning from message, Shannon risked reducing communication to a series of “beep beeps.”
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Information, he argued, can only be understood as a product of the human search for meaning—it resides not “in the beeps” but in the mind
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James Gleick. In his formidable new book, The Information, Gleick explains how we've progressed from seeing information as the expression of human thought and emotion to looking at it as a commodity that can be processed, like wheat or plutonium. It's a long, complicated, and important story, beginning with tribal drummers and ending with quantum physics, and in Gleick's hands it's also a mesmerizing one. Wisely, he avoids getting bogged down in the arcane formulas and equations of information theory-though (fair warning) there are quite a few of those-but rather situates his tale in the remarkable lives and discoveries of a series of brilliant mathematicians, logicians, and engineers
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Google will 'de-rank' RT articles to make them harder to find - Eric Schmidt - RT World... - 0 views
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Eric Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet, says the company will “engineer” specific algorithms for RT and Sputnik to make their articles less prominent on the search engine’s news delivery services. “We are working on detecting and de-ranking those kinds of sites – it’s basically RT and Sputnik,” Schmidt said during a Q & A session at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada on Saturday, when asked about whether Google facilitates “Russian propaganda.”
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“We are well of aware of it, and we are trying to engineer the systems to prevent that [the content being delivered to wide audiences]. But we don’t want to ban the sites – that’s not how we operate.”The discussion focused on the company’s popular Google News service, which clusters the news by stories, then ranks the various media outlets depending on their reach, article length and veracity, and Google Alerts, which proactively informs subscribers of new publications.
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The Alphabet chief, who has been referred to by Hillary Clinton as a “longtime friend,” added that the experience of “the last year” showed that audiences could not be trusted to distinguish fake and real news for themselves.“We started with the default American view that ‘bad’ speech would be replaced with ‘good’ speech, but the problem found in the last year is that this may not be true in certain situations, especially when you have a well-funded opponent who is trying to actively spread this information,” he told the audience.
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RT America registered under FARA earlier this month, after being threatened by the US Department of Justice with arrests and confiscations of property if it failed to comply. The broadcaster is fighting the order in court.
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WikiLeaks' Julian Assange warns: Google is not what it seems - 0 views
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surveillance state internet freedom Google NSA
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Back in 2011, Julian Assange met up with Eric Schmidt for an interview that he considers the best he’s ever given. That doesn’t change, however, the opinion he now has about Schmidt and the company he represents, Google.In fact, the WikiLeaks leader doesn’t believe in the famous “Don’t Be Evil” mantra that Google has been preaching for years.Assange thinks both Schmidt and Google are at the exact opposite spectrum.“Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this proximity,” Assange writes in an opinion piece for Newsweek.
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“Long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). And even as Schmidt’s Google developed an image as the overly friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the intelligence community,” Assange continues.Throughout the lengthy article, Assange goes on to explain how the 2011 meeting came to be and talks about the people the Google executive chairman brought along - Lisa Shields, then vice president of the Council on Foreign Relationship, Jared Cohen, who would later become the director of Google Ideas, and Scott Malcomson, the book’s editor, who would later become the speechwriter and principal advisor to Susan Rice.“At this point, the delegation was one part Google, three parts US foreign-policy establishment, but I was still none the wiser.” Assange goes on to explain the work Cohen was doing for the government prior to his appointment at Google and just how Schmidt himself plays a bigger role than previously thought.In fact, he says that his original image of Schmidt, as a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, “a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast,” was wrong.
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However, Assange concedes that that is not the sort of person who attends Bilderberg conferences, who regularly visits the White House, and who delivers speeches at the Davos Economic Forum.He claims that Schmidt’s emergence as Google’s “foreign minister” did not come out of nowhere, but it was “presaged by years of assimilation within US establishment networks of reputation and influence.” Assange makes further accusations that, well before Prism had even been dreamed of, the NSA was already systematically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act under its director at the time, Michael Hayden. He states, however, that during the same period, namely around 2003, Google was accepting NSA money to provide the agency with search tools for its rapidly-growing database of information.Assange continues by saying that in 2008, Google helped launch the NGA spy satellite, the GeoEye-1, into space and that the search giant shares the photographs from the satellite with the US military and intelligence communities. Later on, 2010, after the Chinese government was accused of hacking Google, the company entered into a “formal information-sharing” relationship with the NSA, which would allow the NSA’s experts to evaluate the vulnerabilities in Google’s hardware and software.
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“Around the same time, Google was becoming involved in a program known as the “Enduring Security Framework” (ESF), which entailed the sharing of information between Silicon Valley tech companies and Pentagon-affiliated agencies at network speed.’’Emails obtained in 2014 under Freedom of Information requests show Schmidt and his fellow Googler Sergey Brin corresponding on first-name terms with NSA chief General Keith Alexander about ESF,” Assange writes.Assange seems to have a lot of backing to his statements, providing links left and right, which people can go check on their own.
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The "opinion piece for Newsweek" is an excerpt from Assange's new book, When Google met Wikileaks. The chapter is well worth the read. http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447
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shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Feb 15
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The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle - 0 views
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AMERICAN AND BRITISH spies hacked into the internal computer network of the largest manufacturer of SIM cards in the world, stealing encryption keys used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the globe, according to top-secret documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. The hack was perpetrated by a joint unit consisting of operatives from the NSA and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The breach, detailed in a secret 2010 GCHQ document, gave the surveillance agencies the potential to secretly monitor a large portion of the world’s cellular communications, including both voice and data. The company targeted by the intelligence agencies, Gemalto, is a multinational firm incorporated in the Netherlands that makes the chips used in mobile phones and next-generation credit cards. Among its clients are AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers around the world. The company operates in 85 countries and has more than 40 manufacturing facilities. One of its three global headquarters is in Austin, Texas and it has a large factory in Pennsylvania. In all, Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. Its motto is “Security to be Free.”
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With these stolen encryption keys, intelligence agencies can monitor mobile communications without seeking or receiving approval from telecom companies and foreign governments. Possessing the keys also sidesteps the need to get a warrant or a wiretap, while leaving no trace on the wireless provider’s network that the communications were intercepted. Bulk key theft additionally enables the intelligence agencies to unlock any previously encrypted communications they had already intercepted, but did not yet have the ability to decrypt.
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Leading privacy advocates and security experts say that the theft of encryption keys from major wireless network providers is tantamount to a thief obtaining the master ring of a building superintendent who holds the keys to every apartment. “Once you have the keys, decrypting traffic is trivial,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The news of this key theft will send a shock wave through the security community.”
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According to one secret GCHQ slide, the British intelligence agency penetrated Gemalto’s internal networks, planting malware on several computers, giving GCHQ secret access. We “believe we have their entire network,” the slide’s author boasted about the operation against Gemalto. Additionally, the spy agency targeted unnamed cellular companies’ core networks, giving it access to “sales staff machines for customer information and network engineers machines for network maps.” GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal the spy agency’s secret actions against an individual’s phone. Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and his or her telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.”
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The U.S. and British intelligence agencies pulled off the encryption key heist in great stealth, giving them the ability to intercept and decrypt communications without alerting the wireless network provider, the foreign government or the individual user that they have been targeted. “Gaining access to a database of keys is pretty much game over for cellular encryption,” says Matthew Green, a cryptography specialist at the Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute. The massive key theft is “bad news for phone security. Really bad news.”
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Remember all those NSA claims that no evidence of their misbehavior has emerged? That one should never take wing again. Monitoring call content without the involvement of any court? Without a warrant? Without probable cause? Was there even any Congressional authorization? Wiretapping unequivocally requires a judicially-approved search warrant. It's going to be very interesting to learn the government's argument for this misconduct's legality.
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Trump Declares War On Silicon Valley: DoJ Launches Google Anti-Monopoly Probe | Zero Hedge - 0 views
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Just before midnight on Friday, at the close of what was a hectic month for markets, WSJ dropped a bombshell of a story: The paper reported that the DoJ has opened an anti-trust investigation of Alphabet Inc., which could "present a major new layer of regulatory scrutiny for the search giant, according to people familiar with the matter." The report was sourced to "people familiar with the matter," but was swiftly corroborated by the New York Times, Bloomberg and others. For months now, the FTC has appeared to be gearing up for a showdown with big tech. The agency - which shares anti-trust authority with the DoJ - has created a new commission that could help undo big-tech tie-ups like Facebook's acquisition of Instagram, and hired lawyers who have advanced new anti-monopoly theories that would help justify the breakup of companies like Amazon. But as it turns out, the Trump administration's first salvo against big tech didn't come from the FTC; instead, this responsibility has been delegated to the DoJ, which has reportedly been tasked with supervising the investigation into Google. That's not super surprising, since the FTC already had its chance to nail Google with an anti-monopoly probe back in 2013. But the agency came up short. From what we can tell, it appears the administration will divvy up responsibility for any future anti-trust investigations between the two agencies, which means the FTC - which is already reportedly preparing to levy a massive fine against Facebook - could end up taking the lead in those cases.
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Though WSJ didn't specify which aspects of Google's business might come under the microscope, a string of multi-billion-euro fines recently levied by the EU might offer some guidance. The bloc's anti-trust authority, which has been far more eager to take on American tech giants than its American counterpart (for reasons that should be obvious to all), has fined Google over its practice of bundling software with its standard Android license, the way its search engine rankings favor its own product listings, and ways it has harmed competition in the digital advertising market. During the height of the controversy over big tech's abuses of sensitive user data last year, the Verge published a story speculating about how the monopolistic tendencies of each of the dominant Silicon Valley tech giants could be remedied. For Google, the Verge argued, the best remedy would be a ban on acquisitions - a strategy that has been bandied about in Congress.
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We're Halfway to Encrypting the Entire Web | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views
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The movement to encrypt the web has reached a milestone. As of earlier this month, approximately half of Internet traffic is now protected by HTTPS. In other words, we are halfway to a web safer from the eavesdropping, content hijacking, cookie stealing, and censorship that HTTPS can protect against. Mozilla recently reported that the average volume of encrypted web traffic on Firefox now surpasses the average unencrypted volume
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Google Chrome’s figures on HTTPS usage are consistent with that finding, showing that over 50% of of all pages loaded are protected by HTTPS across different operating systems.
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This milestone is a combination of HTTPS implementation victories: from tech giants and large content providers, from small websites, and from users themselves.
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Starting in 2010, EFF members have pushed tech companies to follow crypto best practices. We applauded when Facebook and Twitter implemented HTTPS by default, and when Wikipedia and several other popular sites later followed suit. Google has also put pressure on the tech community by using HTTPS as a signal in search ranking algorithms and, starting this year, showing security warnings in Chrome when users load HTTP sites that request passwords or credit card numbers. EFF’s Encrypt the Web Report also played a big role in tracking and encouraging specific practices. Recently other organizations have followed suit with more sophisticated tracking projects. For example, Secure the News and Pulse track HTTPS progress among news media sites and U.S. government sites, respectively.
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But securing large, popular websites is only one part of a much bigger battle. Encrypting the entire web requires HTTPS implementation to be accessible to independent, smaller websites. Let’s Encrypt and Certbot have changed the game here, making what was once an expensive, technically demanding process into an easy and affordable task for webmasters across a range of resource and skill levels. Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority (CA) run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and founded by EFF, Mozilla, and the University of Michigan, with Cisco and Akamai as founding sponsors. As a CA, Let’s Encrypt issues and maintains digital certificates that help web users and their browsers know they’re actually talking to the site they intended to. CAs are crucial to secure, HTTPS-encrypted communication, as these certificates verify the association between an HTTPS site and a cryptographic public key. Through EFF’s Certbot tool, webmasters can get a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt and automatically configure their server to use it. Since we announced that Let’s Encrypt was the web’s largest certificate authority last October, it has exploded from 12 million certs to over 28 million. Most of Let’s Encrypt’s growth has come from giving previously unencrypted sites their first-ever certificates. A large share of these leaps in HTTPS adoption are also thanks to major hosting companies and platforms--like WordPress.com, Squarespace, and dozens of others--integrating Let’s Encrypt and providing HTTPS to their users and customers.
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Unfortunately, you can only use HTTPS on websites that support it--and about half of all web traffic is still with sites that don’t. However, when sites partially support HTTPS, users can step in with the HTTPS Everywhere browser extension. A collaboration between EFF and the Tor Project, HTTPS Everywhere makes your browser use HTTPS wherever possible. Some websites offer inconsistent support for HTTPS, use unencrypted HTTP as a default, or link from secure HTTPS pages to unencrypted HTTP pages. HTTPS Everywhere fixes these problems by rewriting requests to these sites to HTTPS, automatically activating encryption and HTTPS protection that might otherwise slip through the cracks.
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Our goal is a universally encrypted web that makes a tool like HTTPS Everywhere redundant. Until then, we have more work to do. Protect your own browsing and websites with HTTPS Everywhere and Certbot, and spread the word to your friends, family, and colleagues to do the same. Together, we can encrypt the entire web.
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HTTPS connections don't work for you if you don't use them. If you're not using HTTPS Everywhere in your browser, you should be; it's your privacy that is at stake. And every encrypted communication you make adds to the backlog of encrypted data that NSA and other internet voyeurs must process as encrypted traffic; because cracking encrypted messages is computer resource intensive, the voyeurs do not have the resources to crack more than a tiny fraction. HTTPS is a free extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. You can get it here. https://www.eff.org/HTTPS-everywhere
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World's first programmable quantum photonic chip | ExtremeTech - 0 views
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A team of engineering geniuses from the University of Bristol, England has developed the world’s first re-programmable, multi-purpose quantum photonic computer chip that relies on quantum entanglement to perform calculations.With multiple waveguide channels (made from standard silicon dioxide), and eight electrodes (see image above), the silicon chip is capable of repeatedly entangling photons. Depending on how the electrodes are programmed, different quantum states can be produced. The end result is two qubits that can be used to perform quantum computing — and unlike D-Wave’s 128-qubit processor (well, depending on who you ask) this is real quantum computing.
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We know that entanglement can be used for very effective encryption, but beyond that it’s mostly guesswork. There’s general agreement that qubits should allow for faster computation of very complex numbers — think biological processes and weather systems — and early work by Google suggests that pattern recognition might also be a strength of qubits.
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YouTube Gives UK Gov't Broad Powers To Censor Videos It Doesn't Like, Even If They're L... - 0 views
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Over in the UK, where the government has been gradually censoring more and more of the internet over the past few years, Google has apparently agreed to give the UK government broad powers to "flag" videos they argue are bad, even if they're not illegal. Ostensibly, the goal is to block videos that "proliferate jihadi material." The YouTube permissions that Google has given the Home Office in recent weeks include the power to flag swaths of content “at scale” instead of only picking out individual videos. They are in part a response to a blitz from UK security authorities to persuade internet service providers, search engines and social media sites to censor more of their own content for extremist material even if it does not always break existing laws. And the UK government even admits that the videos it will be taken down are not illegal: The UK’s security and immigration minister, James Brokenshire, said that the British government has to do more to deal with some material “that may not be illegal, but certainly is unsavoury and may not be the sort of material that people would want to see or receive”. Of course, that kind of statement shows the program is wide open to abuse. The sort of material people would not want to see or receive? Well, then they just don't watch it. Besides, who gets to decide what people would not want to see? Because there's lots of important content that a government might not want its citizens to see, but which are kind of important to a functioning democracy and open society.
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While I'm sure the pressure from the government here was quite strong, it's upsetting to see Google cave in to these kinds of requests. Giving the UK government a giant "censor this video" button seems like exactly the wrong approach.
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Google Wants to Write Your Social Media Messages For You - Search Engine Watch (#SEW) - 0 views
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Overwhelmed by social media? Google may have patented a solution for you, in the form of software that mimics the types of responses you make to update messages on various social networks. The patent, by Ashish Bhatia representing Google, describes a comprehensive social media bot, providing suitable yet seemingly personalized responses on social media platforms. Essentially, the program analyzes the messages a user makes through social networks, email, text messaging, microblogging, and other systems. Then, the program offers suggestions for responses, where the original messages are displayed, with information about others reactions to the same messages, and then the user can send the suggested messages in response to those users. The more the user utilizes the program and uses the responses, the more the bot can narrow down the types of responses you make.
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Visions of endless conversations between different people's bots with no human participation. Then a human being reads a reply and files a libel lawsuit against the human whose bot posted the reply. Can the defendant obtain dismissal on grounds that she did not write the message herself; her Google autoresponder did and therefore if anyone is liable it is Google? Our Brave New (technological) World does and will pose many novel legal issues. My favorite so far: Assume that genetics have progressed to the point that unknown to Bill Gates, someone steals a bit of his DNA and implants it in a mother-to-be's egg. Is Bill Gates as the biological father liable for child support? Is that child an heir to Bill Gates' fortune? The current state of law in the U.S. would suggest that the answer to both questions is almost certainly "yes." The child itself is blameless and Bill Gates is his biological father.
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Wikimedia and Twitter Bots Are Breaking the News | Motherboard - 0 views
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We already knew that bots were writing news content, automating narrative stories from data-rich topics like sports scores and financial markets. Now, robo-reporters are starting to get scoops. They're not just writing stories; they're breaking them. Thomas Steiner, a Google engineer in Germany, designed an algorithm that covers the news as it's breaking by monitoring activity on Wikipedia (old school journalists everywhere are wincing) and watching for spikes in editing activity. The idea is that if something big is happening—especially if it’s a global event—multiple editors around the world will be updating Wikipedia and Wikidata pages at once, in different languages. That spike in activity tips off the bot to the story. According to Steiner, his news bot spotted major stories like the Boston Marathon bombing and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370.
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The bare-bones site tracking real-time editing is called Wikipedia Live Monitor. It was first created last year, and now Steiner's has extended his robo-news operation to Twitter. The bot mines the social media site for a particular search term triggered by the Wikipedia activity and pulls out all relevant photos to illustrate the story.
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You can check out the visual news events on the Twitter bot account @mediagalleries. The earliest are from a case study Steiner did to test out the program during the Olympics in Sochi. More recently, there are galleries illustrating major sports events, and the latest updates to flight MH370 and the conflict in Crimea.
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You can see, it's still a rudimentary process, hardly about to put the staff of the New York Times out of business. But it says a lot about the direction automating the news is heading in.
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Still, the Fourth Estate is one of the more disconcerting industries being taken over by robots, and not just because it’s my own livelihood. And it’s more common than you think; Kristian Hammond, cofounder of Narrative Science, a company that's been automating content for several years now, predicted that 90 percent of the news could be written by computers by 2030.
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NSA Spying Relies on AT&T's 'Extreme Willingness to Help' - ProPublica - 0 views
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he National Security Agency’s ability to spy on vast quantities of Internet traffic passing through the United States has relied on its extraordinary, decades-long partnership with a single company: the telecom giant AT&T. While it has been long known that American telecommunications companies worked closely with the spy agency, newly disclosed NSA documents show that the relationship with AT&T has been considered unique and especially productive. One document described it as “highly collaborative,” while another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”
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AT&T’s cooperation has involved a broad range of classified activities, according to the documents, which date from 2003 to 2013. AT&T has given the NSA access, through several methods covered under different legal rules, to billions of emails as they have flowed across its domestic networks. It provided technical assistance in carrying out a secret court order permitting the wiretapping of all Internet communications at the United Nations headquarters, a customer of AT&T. The NSA’s top-secret budget in 2013 for the AT&T partnership was more than twice that of the next-largest such program, according to the documents. The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its Internet hubs on American soil, far more than its similarly sized competitor, Verizon. And its engineers were the first to try out new surveillance technologies invented by the eavesdropping agency. One document reminds NSA officials to be polite when visiting AT&T facilities, noting: “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.” The documents, provided by the former agency contractor Edward Snowden, were jointly reviewed by The New York Times and ProPublica.
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It is not clear if the programs still operate in the same way today. Since the Snowden revelations set off a global debate over surveillance two years ago, some Silicon Valley technology companies have expressed anger at what they characterize as NSA intrusions and have rolled out new encryption to thwart them. The telecommunications companies have been quieter, though Verizon unsuccessfully challenged a court order for bulk phone records in 2014. At the same time, the government has been fighting in court to keep the identities of its telecom partners hidden. In a recent case, a group of AT&T customers claimed that the NSA’s tapping of the Internet violated the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches. This year, a federal judge dismissed key portions of the lawsuit after the Obama administration argued that public discussion of its telecom surveillance efforts would reveal state secrets, damaging national security.