Blown To Bits

Archive for June, 2008

Another BITS day

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 by Ken Ledeen
People accutane for sale should speak with a healthcare professional if they experience frequent order cheap viagra sale dosage migraine episodes that affect their quality of life or if viagra canada migraine symptoms are particularly severe and OTC medications do not buy cheap zofran provide relief. If you already have existing problems with your pharmacy glyburide liver, kidneys, or adrenal glands, you may be at higher cheapest atrovent online risk of this side effect. Primrose (Primula officinalis) has similar cheap celexa without prescription properties and is also an expectorant, helping the body expel glyburide pharmacy online mucus. Toddlers go through various developmental milestones during this time, tetracycline without prescription such as learning to walk, talk, and gain independence. There order generic cialis are various medical and home remedies available for dry eyes cheap cephalexin that may be safer and more effective. The venoarterial ECMO is.

One of the reasons that we wrote “Blown to Bits” was because we realized that so much of what goes on is connected to the changes digital technology has brought, and we wanted everyone to understand the implications.¬† Not a day goes by when we don’t see more bits stories.

Like today.¬† A witness¬†alleged that the driver of an MBTA trolley that crashed was talking on her cell phone at the time.¬†Thanks to the fact that cell phone service is now all “bits” that allegation is gone. Recent news stories reported that the cell phone records show no phone, text, or Internet activity at the time.

“We were able to recover the driver’s cell phone at the scene. We issued legal process to access records of her phone calls and text messages as well as her Internet usage on the phone, and engaged in forensic analysis,” Middlesex District Attorney Gerry Leone said in a statement.

We should all be aware that every single thing that we do with our handy little phones is tracked and stored.  It may take a warrant to retrieve those data, but they are there for the asking.

That wasn’t the only bits story today.¬† The front page of USA Today reported that visitors to the Olympics are at risk of being hacked by the Chinese government.¬† That story won’t be news to anyone who has read Blown to Bits – we talk at some length about how digital communications can be monitored and analyzed, about how search results vary from country to country, and, most importantly, how digital censorship can be a powerful tool for molding the thinking of a nation.

The Celtics (sadly!) lost to LA last night.  How, you might ask, is that one a bits story?  Answer РKobe. whose 36 points made the difference, was cleared of charges to some degree because the cellphone text messages of his accuser were all stored, and subsequently retrieved.  You may have thought those message went away after you sent them.  Not so.

As my hero, Ron Popeil likes to say, “wait, there’s more.”¬† According to the Washington Post, the Red Cross was fined because six units of blood were improperly washed.¬† That’s six units out of literally millions.¬† Imagine finding that needle in a haystack if the records weren’t all bits.

The list has no end.  We are living in a bits world, with endless possibilities and perils.

Data Protection or Wiretaps?

Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 by Ken Ledeen

Vontu, Tablus, Code Green, PacketSure, — these are all players in the world of “data security,” of making sure that valuable, confidential, protected, secure data doesn’t leak out. It’s a noble calling. After all, we don’t want our private information leaking everywhere, and corporations, for sure, don’t want theirs sneaking out the back door either.

Here’s what they do. They listen to everything passing through the company network. Often, they sit in a place on the network where information heads out the digital door to the Internet. They are “configurable.” That means that, like much of the software we use, the administrator can set up rules. “If Susan Black sends an email that includes the word ‘Prada’ or ‘Tiffany’ then …” Oh wait, that isn’t exactly the kind of rule you would expect for data security. My point exactly.

The tools that guard against data leaks are nothing more or less than digital wiretaps. The marketing term is “content inspection agents.” I love marketing-speak. The folks in marketing could have just named them “eavesdroppers.” Unlike the wiretaps of old, they don’t require a human listener. They have digital listeners; software that can be configured to detect whatever the administrator might think is suspicious, and then take appropriate action. That action might be as severe as blocking the transmission, or as aparently benign as keeping a copy for administrative review. The tools can look at every form of network traffic, because they operate at the deepest level, inspecting all the bits as they pass by.

Like so many innovations in our digital world, things developed for one purpose can be directed, or mis-directed to another. So it is with these tools. Guarding against data leaks is like protecting the homeland from terrorists. No one would ever argue against it. The question is, which of our assumptions about personal privacy are being sacrificed along the way. Our observation is that, for the most part, we don’t care. The more we know about the world of bits, the more we will come to accept that Big Brother is watching and listening, and we will just have to accept that new reality.

Frequency Hopping On Stage

Monday, June 9th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times reviews an 80-minute multimedia play about the discovery of spread-spectrum technology, now the basis of much wireless communication, by actress Hedy Lamarr and the avant-garde composer George Antheil. This is the strangest story of technological discovery I have ever heard. Blown to Bits just scratches the surface, but does give the basic outline. Lamarr, familiar with torpedo warfare because her first husband was an Austrian munitions maker, teamed up with Antheil to design a jam-proof torpedo in Hollywood. The control signal would be broadcast at a sequence of frequencies, and the control station and the torpedo would contain synchronized player piano mechanisms with identical scrolls, which would in essence encrypt the signaling sequence. Antheil’s contribution was the idea of using player piano mechanisms, with which he was familiar because he scored his masterpiece, Ballet M?©canique, for 16 player pianos. If you don’t believe me, here’s the patent (Lamarr was using her second husband’s name).

The play, now on stage in a Manhattan theater, includes a complete performance of the Ballet M?©canique. And the review includes a charming and ironic detail: This performance is the first in which the piece sounds as Antheil intended it. He could never figure out how to get 16 player pianos properly synchronized, so earlier performances substituted other instruments.

End of the Internet?

Sunday, June 8th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

This site claims to have inside information from Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that they are planning to go to the Cable TV model for the Web — basic service buys access to a list of web sites they stipulate, but if you want to wander off that territory, you’d have to pay them extra. $19.95 to get to Google, say, but $29.95 if you want access the New York Times web site (for which the New York Times itself charges nothing). That would be the end of the Internet as we know it, where anyone can put information up on a site and anyone else, for nothing more than their base ISP connection fee, can go see it.

“Net neutrality” is an important basic principle. I like to think of Internet connectivity as the US thought about rural electrification in the last century — something that might not be cost-efficient for private providers in the short run, but would yield enormous social and economic benefits to the US in the long run. If this report is true, imagine a world in which the electric company might supply you with electricity so you could run stoves and refrigerators on its approved list, but would charge you extra if you plugged in an appliance not approved by the electric company itself.

This is a complicated topic, but the fundamental problem is that there are not enough competing suppliers of Internet services. A quarter of the US still has only dialup; half has two suppliers, usually cable and telephone DSL; and a quarter has only one. The percentage of US households that have more than two choices for broadband connectivity is negligible. Under such conditions, the suppliers can contemplate tiered pricing schemes, which make absolutely no sense in terms of resources required — it costs no more to deliver packets from a billion different sources than from only one.

Keeping the Internet Open, Innovative, and Free

Sunday, June 8th, 2008 by Hal Abelson

On June 4, the Center for Democracy and Technology published The Internet in Transition: A Platform to Keep the Internet Open, Innovative and Free. This 25-page report summarizes CDT’s recommendation on Internet policy for the next Administration and Congress.

Readers of Blown to Bits will find the issues here familiar: preserving free speech while protecting children online; strengthening consumer privacy and restoring protections again government surveillance; using the power of the Internet to promote freedom and democracy on a global scale; protecting innovation by resisting attempts to undercut the Internet’s open architecture; and capitalizing upon the Internet as a force to encourage open government.

In the words of the report:

In recent years, policymakers seem to have forgotten what makes the Internet special. Increasingly, policy proposals treat the Internet as a problem to be solved rather than a valuable resource that must be supported. Debates over objectionable content online, protecting intellectual property, preventing terrorism, or restructuring telecommunications policy seem to have lost sight of the Internet’s history and its architecture.

This version of the report is a first draft. CDT and has launched a web site for readers to comments and suggest additional policy initiatives for incorporation into later versions of the report.

There are many detailed proposals and links to other CDT policy reviews. This is a great reference to Internet policy, and well worth reading and commenting on, regardless of where you stand on the issues.

The site is at http://www.cdt.org/election2008/ and the report itself is available at http://cdt.org/election2008/election2008.pdf.

The inexact science of takedown notices

Friday, June 6th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

A lot of college students are getting “pre-litigation” letters from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) claiming that they have illegally downloaded music. The RIAA threatens them with enormous penalties and offers them the opportunity to settle up for only modestly large fines.

The RIAA identifies these students by their IP addresses — the numerical address of their connection to the Internet. In residential colleges, where students living arrangements are known, the IP address is arguably a reliable identifier of an individual student.

Doubtless many of the RIAA’s claims are accurate. But many are not; we give a particularly dramatic mistake in Blown to Bits.

Now three researchers at the University of Washington have demonstrated ways to spoof IP addresses — that is, to make it look to the RIAA as though a download is going to your IP address when it isn’t, and in fact no download is occurring at all. A new way to be mean to your enemies — induce the RIAA to send threatening letters to them, even though they are completely innocent!

The moral of the paper is that the RIAA’s identification methods are deeply flawed and are unreliable. That could be a very important fact, given the levels to which the RIAA has taken the war over music file sharing.

There is more on the New York Times blog or you can read the original paper here.

More on J.K. Rowling

Thursday, June 5th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

In the Crimson piece I mentioned in this morning’s post, I said that Rowling might prove to be an inspirational speaker. SHE WAS! The speech is well worth listening to. text and video here, cut to 1:03 unless you want to hear the reports on how much money Harvard raised. One of the best commencement addresses I’ve heard, wise, and personal without being maudlin.

Harvard Commencement

Thursday, June 5th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

I have a piece in the Crimson about copyright, including a strange story about the publication of Blown to Bits.

Big Brother on Your Network

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 by Harry Lewis

I got an email yesterday from a sales agent for Palisade Systems, which offers a product called PacketSure. The “Packet” in that name refers to Internet packets, the little blocks of bits that are the unit of information the Internet transports. And “Sure” means that the product will make sure the packets going into and out of your business won’t contain information you’d rather not see crossing the boundary into and out of the outside world. For example, movies you don’t want your employees wasting their time watching, or Social Security Numbers that might be client or employee data leaking out, or medical records which are private by law. The web site has a short demo video that gives the idea.

As originally conceived, the Internet was simply a packet delivery system. A computer at a junction point in the network was just supposed to look at the address part of the packets so it could send them off on the proper outgoing link. Those computers were slow enough that it wasn’t practical for them to do much more anyway in the way of peeking inside packets, and it also wasn’t feasible to do much scanning of bits as they entered or left host computers at the edge of the Internet.

With faster computers and much more concern about undesirable uses of the Internet, it is now possible, as the email I received states, “to manage communications across over 150 different protocols and¬†applications ‚Ķ¬†to block, log,¬†report, and alert based on company policy.” Not only possible — it may well be wise or even necessary, given the variety of laws and regulations now in place about appropriate handling of data.

But the “based on company policy” part makes this technology much more than a tool for legal compliance. It gives the company complete control over the web sites employees are allowed to visit, the content of their email, and the use of office computers for sharing pictures. It is as though your office phone were locked to work only with certain other phone numbers, and was subject to a constant wiretap to boot. (Except that, I suspect, most personal communication out of offices these days probably goes by IM or email: Telephone conversations are less private because they are audible.)

Questions: If there were a home version of this product, would you buy it to keep your children in line? Should a university install these boxes to monitor or prevent students’ illegal music and movie downloading? If you were the government of Myanmar, would you want to install the system for the entire country?

Like so many other ingenious and useful technologies, this one is wonderful or terrible, depending on how it is used. A few years ago, no one needed to face the question of whether such systems were good or bad, because there was no practical way to build them. Now they exist, and they will keep getting cheaper and better. And I’m sure no one from Palisade Systems does ethics checks on its customers before shipping the PacketSure products.

Endwistle’s alias

Monday, June 2nd, 2008 by Harry Lewis

An alias is literally just ‘another’ — another name someone uses, or another identity. An alibi (alias ubi) is ‘another place’ where a suspect in a criminal place claims he was at the time the crime was committed.

The term ‘alias’ has been adopted into tech talk to describe what happens when information is lost in the course of capturing it as bits. When you see the pixellation of a low-resolution image, or the staircase effect on what is supposed to be a straight, smooth line, you are seeing an aliasing phenomenon. The staircase is as close to a straight line as can be drawn using only a few pixels, but if what you were depicting really was a staircase, you’d get exactly the same representation. Different realities, when reduced to bits, wind up as the same representation, and there is no way to know from those bits alone which reality they came from.

Information is always discarded when anything continuous is represented as bits. The question is not whether such data loss happens, but whether it matters. And whether it matters depends on how the representation is going to be used. The author photo on this site is a good representation of us, but not if you wanted to recognize us from behind. In a digital audio file, it may not matter if very high frequencies are discarded, since most people over the age of 20 couldn’t hear them anyway.

What does this have to do with Mr. Entwistle, who is standing trial on charges of murdering his wife and child? We noted earlier that his computer gave up some bits that the prosecution planned to use against him: the URLs of some adult-oriented web sites he had visited. Apparently the prosecution will argue that these bits are relevant because the URLs gave a glimpse of Mr. Entwistle’s sexual dissatisfaction, thus helping establish a motive for the murder. Not so fast: the defense doesn’t deny that those sites were visited, but offers another interpretation of the same bits. As the Boston Herald explains,

Attorney Elliot Weinstein argued turning to steamy online porn sites is not necessarily an indication of a joyless sex life; it could also mean a couple was looking to spice up their marriage.

“It might improve sexual activity . . . it might be a curiosity,” Weinstein said during the final pretrial arguments in Middlesex Superior Court in Woburn.

Searching for porn may just be for “interest,” or “excitement” or to “expand knowledge,” Weinstein added in his appeal to strike any online sex surfing as evidence of prior “bad acts.”

The judge will decide whether these bits are relevant, and if they are, the jury will get to decide whose interpretation of them is more plausible. But the defense’s basic point is sound: decontextualized bits can represent more than one reality, and our digital fingerprints, while revealing, are an imperfect representation of who we really are.