jason | Entries tagged with surveillance

Just what we all need. What happened to TALKING to your kids and SHARING online experiences?

In June, EchoMetrix unveiled a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms. … Parents who don’t want the company to share their child’s information to businesses can check a box to opt out. But that option can be found only by visiting the company’s Web site, accessible through a control panel that appears after the program has been installed. It was not in the agreement contained in the Sentry Total Home Protection program The Associated Press downloaded and installed Friday.

No, we can just watch them from the office. I am totally supportive of technologies for vulnerable/special needs individuals, but not when we’re talking about invasive snooping. One more way to keep kids from growing up. Silly.

Mirrored from Lemmingworks.

Dolphin Digital Media is Invited to Participate At D.A.R.E International Training Conference

Dolphin Digital Media, Inc. (OTCBB:DPDM), a creator of secure social networking websites for children utilizing state-of the-art fingerprint identification technology, is pleased to announce its invitation to participate at the D.A.R.E. International Training Conference being held July 21-23, 2009 at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort, Orlando, Florida.

Employees of Dolphin Digital Media will highlight the company’s innovative fundraising plans for schools and charitable organizations as well as plans for establishing its family Internet solution — Dolphin Secure (http://www.dolphinsecure.com) — in anticipation of its launch in the United States during Back-to-School 2009. Dolphin Secure gives parents tools to protect their children from online threats such as cyberbullying and unsolicited chat requests while they are using home computers.

“We’re excited to participate at the 2009 D.A.R.E. International Training Conference as we couldn’t think of a better venue to introduce ourselves to educators and law enforcement officials,” says Bill O’Dowd, Chairman and CEO of Dolphin Digital Media. “We’re looking forward to discussing exciting fundraising opportunities for both D.A.R.E and the various schools in which they serve, as well as ways in which Dolphin Secure can provide students with a safer online experience while using school computers,” he said.

D.A.R.E., the leading drug-resistance education program in the United States, will be introducing their new D.A.R.E. Middle School/Junior High curriculum titled “Keepin’ it REAL.” “Keepin’ it REAL” is a multi-cultural substance abuse and life skills curriculum developed by Arizona State University and The Pennsylvania State University with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Have a look at DDM’s work. It is very interesting. They fingerprint children and then children must use biometric scanners in order to access web sites. This is a way of keeping children safe from internet predators, based on the assumption that you can’t fake a biometric scanner (which has already been done by people getting past airport security fingerprinting in Japan).

Imagine yourself having grown up using your fingerprint as proof of who you are, and giving it to every corporation that asks for it. What kind of person would you grow up into? Probably just a person who thinks that biometric scanning and the use of personal information by corporations is just the way things are. Let’s turn it around… you have grown up in this world. You grew up in a world where various forms of institutions control your birth, education, work, leisure and death. Can you think of a single activity in your life that is not mediated by a corporation or institution?

Mirrored from Lemmingworks.

PCs Used in Korean DDoS Attacks May Self Destruct

There are signs that the concerted cyber attacks targeting U.S. and Korean government and commercial Web sites this past week are beginning to wane. Yet, even if the assaults were to be completely blocked tomorrow, the attackers could still have one last, inglorious weapon in their arsenal: New evidence suggests that the malicious code responsible for spreading this attack includes instructions to overwrite the infected PC’s hard drive.

According to Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, the malware that powers this attack — a version of the Mydoom worm — is designed to download a payload from a set of Web servers. Included in that payload is a Trojan horse program that overwrites the data on the hard drive with a message that reads “memory of the independence day,” followed by as many “u” characters as it takes to write over every sector of every physical drive attached to the compromised system.

Such an order would spell certain disaster for many tens of thousands of Microsoft Windows PCs. Several experts I spoke with yesterday and today estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 systems may be infected with this potentially suicidal malware.

Mirrored from Lemmingworks.

Google Image Search Implements CC License Filtering – Creative Commons
Today, Google officially launched the ability to filter search results using Creative Commons licenses inside their Image Search tool. It is now easy to restrict your Image Search results to find images which have been tagged with our licenses, so that you can find content from across the web that you can share, use, and even modify. Searches are also capable of returning content under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License, or images that are in the public domain.

To filter by CC search, go to Google’s advanced Image Search page and select the options you’d like in the “Usage rights” section. Your results will be restricted to images marked with CC licenses or other compatibly licensed photos.

Mirrored from Lemmingworks.

Slashdot | Suspect Freed After Exposing Cop’s Facebook Status

“A man on trial in New York for possession of a weapon has been acquitted after subpoenaing his arresting officer’s Facebook and MySpace accounts. His defense: Officer Vaughan Ettienne’s MySpace “mood” was set to “devious” on the day of the arrest, and one day a few weeks before the trial, his Facebook status read “Vaughan is watching ‘Training Day’ to brush up on proper police procedure. From the article,’You have your Internet persona, and you have what you actually do on the street,” Officer Ettienne said on Tuesday. “What you say on the Internet is all bravado talk, like what you say in a locker room.” Except that trash talk in locker rooms almost never winds up preserved on a digital server somewhere, available for subpoena.’”

The whole NYT article is even more fun: About New York - A New York Police Officer Who Put Too Much on MySpace - NYTimes.com

I wonder if the cop can be fired for just being thick? I assume that police try and fight the ‘thug with a badge’ stereotype? I cannot imagine they still nurture it. I’m dedicating this post to all my students past, present and future who will have their personal information found, pulled out and presented in public to support or contradict their actions or statements made in a professional forum. It is ok to do and say crazy things… but know it is out there. Everything you do on the net can come back to haunt you. I shudder at the thought of someone putting comments about the children and families and colleagues they work with on their FB or MS accounts.

What brings it all home is: Pope: We should have Googled Holocaust bishop. SEE? Even the pope is saying that your past will be googled.

I’ve got a nice EFF member’s sticker on my laptop, and paid my dues… so yesterday I got an email pointing me to the The SSD Project | EFF Surveillance Self-Defense Project:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.
Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?

For students in CLD419, where we’ve been discussing how to search out information on people, how to protect children’s information, and issues around children as creators of content, EFF is one of the key sources for information on how governments and corporations collect and use information about you. Perhaps this will be a good site to add to the course next year.

I follow David’s blog on surveillance to keep up to date on the issues, particularly when I’m teaching my Children and Technology course, where we focus on digital photography and children and protection of children’s information online. I actually thought that people had rights to take pictures in britain.

How many people are being arrested for taking pictures in public in Britain?

I’m seeing more and more local and self-reported stories of ordinary people being harassed and arrested in Britain, for taking photographs in public. Today BoingBoing is reporting on this Manchester man who was arrested because the police thought he might be photographing sewer gratings…. This tends to support the argument that I have been making that several democratic countries, with Britain and Italy at the forefront, are drifting into a kind of ’soft fascism’, a creeping totalitarianism that is presented as reasoned and reasonable. It allows supporters to claim that opponents are being ‘extreme’ and underestimating the ‘real danger’, that all of these measure are ‘for our own good’. Yet we have arrived at a point where even untrained, ill-educated street-level minions of the state can now decide whether wee are allowed to take pictures in public. When people like ex-MI5 chief, Stella Rimington are saying that we are in danger of heading towards a police state, even the cynics, and the ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ crowd, should be taking some notice.

Nora Young’s planning something on Anne’s Diary and biometric scanning: Spark | CBC Radio Anne’s Diary: What Do You Think? Just thought you’d like to know. I’m just finishing my chapter for Ben’s project that discusses the site.

Slashdot points to an interesting article on the register (Slashdot | Collateral Damage as UK Censors Internet Archive and IWF confirms Wayback Machine porn blacklisting • The Register) that talks about how attempts to block “images of children which contravenes UK law (Protection of Children Act 1978)” is also causing blocking of access to entire important sites such as Archive.org and wikipedia. The debate about censorship is ongoing and interesting… do we have a right to block access to valid and legal information in the name of blocking access to agreeably dangerous information, or must be protect access to legal information and find a way to block access to illegal information that does not impinge on this other right. What is the fine line. The discussion’s ongoing, but it seems that the same heavy handed approach continues to appear from ISPs and governments.

Palin E-Mail Hacker Says It Was Easy | Threat Level from Wired.com has an interesting post that I’ll want to share with my students when my “Children and Technology” course starts up in the winter. We talk about hacking and the protection of children’s information… parents cannot protect their children if their accounts are so hackable.

After student watched the famous Catsy video on hacking, this comes up: Article - News - Ex-judge Kline gets prison:
“Kline admitted he stored more than 100 sexually explicit photos of under-age boys on his computer and on several disks found at his Irvine home in November 2001. Police caught onto Kline after a Canadian computer whiz hacked into the judge’s Irvine home computer and discovered sexually explicit images of young boys and a diary that revealed Kline’s fantasies involving young boys. A subsequent search of his court computer revealed more images and more Web sites.”

[via Slashdot | Ex-judge Gets 27 Months on Evidence From Hacked PC]

Though I’m pleased with the result, I find it a problem that you can break into someone’s space, and then use what you find in your crime to convict you.

Slashdot | One Laptop Per Child Security Spec Released

“The One Laptop Per Child project has released information about its advanced security platform called Bitfrost. Could children with a $100 laptop end up with a better security infrastructure than executives using $5000 laptops powered by Vista? ‘What’s deeply troubling — almost unbelievable — about [Unix style permissions] is that they’ve remained virtually the only real control mechanism that a user has over her personal documents today…In 1971, this might have been acceptable…We have set out to create a system that is both drastically more secure and provides drastically more usable security than any mainstream system currently on the market.’”

I teach about children and technology, so my statement is not strange, but I’ve always believed that young learners (if they’re going to use digital technology at all, which is a different issue) should have the best. In the old days, you’d see a child with a 256 colour display trying to do something using cassette tapes to load programs while we whizzed away with the best stuff. It seemed strange to provde the developing mind with the most limited set of tools when a business exec who never did much with it anyway and the brightest and shiniest. Of course the child is seen as less valuable. My attitude is, and was before I started teaching about childrean and tech., that you give the best [insert variable] to the children to get the best children, and that the best children lead to the best adults. But we give the worst to children. (I’ve used best and worst for their vague sense of value without specifics to keep with the notion of the article). I don’t know if the OLPC project is the best thing for children, though I’ve been following the topic for longer than this specific project’s been around, but they might as well have the best possible security, since the world does such a poor job of keeping them safe in most other categories.

And this just in time for my Flickr, digital photography lab and after our discussion of the safety of children’s information. Ya gotta love how slashdot is willing to help with my course materials.

Slashdot | Your House Is About To Be Photographed
“Photographers from a Canadian company are going house to house, shooting pictures of every house in America, in hopes of building a giant database that can be sold to banks, insurance companies, and appraisal firms. While this activity is legal (as long as the photographers don’t trespass on private property to get their shots), there are obviously concerns about security and privacy. Considering that an individual can be detained and questioned by the FBI for photographing a bridge in this country, why should this Canadian company get a free pass? Tinfoil hat aside, something seems very, very fishy here.”

Jeremy blogged about this video “Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us” and in the name of my courses, everyone should watch it. We’re studying Google and wikis these weeks in the three classes, this includes readings on hacking and the protection of information online… nice to have some visual gems to go along with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Slashdot | How Skype Punches Holes in Firewalls “Ever wondered, how P2P software like Skype directly exchanges data — despite the fact, that both machines are sitting behind a firewall that only permits outgoing traffic? Read about the hole punching techniques, that make a firewall admin’s nightmares come true.”

I’ve never liked skype, though perhaps it has improved. When I found it was using my computer to route information and was making connections to things over the internet even when I had it turned off and disabled, I wiped the harddrive and did a clean install of everything to be sure it was off my computer. Of course there are people who know more than I do who can run skype and control port access and whatnot. But for the rest of you, when there’s something bad on your computer that runs when you tell it to turn itself off… what else is it doing or can it do?

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

I know one of the authors slightly through some work I did with Barry and Steve on Sousveillance/Surveillance in a paper Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments, and though it is not really my field, I’m very curious about how children’s information is collected and used, and the sort of world they’re growing up into. I think this is something to be rather bothered by, especially if it doesn’t bother you.

Britain is ’surveillance society’

Fears that the UK would “sleep-walk into a surveillance society” have become a reality, the government’s information commissioner has said.

Researchers highlight “dataveillance”, the use of credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card information, and CCTV. Monitoring of work rates, travel and telecommunications is also rising. There are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain - about one for every 14 people.

But surveillance ranges from US security agencies monitoring telecommunications traffic passing through Britain, to key stroke information used to gauge work rates and GPS information tracking company vehicles, the Report on the Surveillance Society says.

It predicts that by 2016 shoppers could be scanned as they enter stores, schools could bring in cards allowing parents to monitor what their children eat, and jobs may be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk….

The report’s co-writer Dr David Murakami-Wood told BBC News that, compared to other industrialised Western states, the UK was “the most surveilled country”.

[Surveillance society - full report]

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

New Scientist - Surveillance system scrambles people’s faces
This has interesting implications for early learning environments and being ‘watched on the job’.

An intelligent video surveillance system that automatically scrambles people’s faces to protect them from unwarranted monitoring has been developed by a Swiss company.
…the technology singles out any people in a video feed, on the basis of their movement, and disguises them digitally while leaving the rest of the scene intact. … The system can be used as an add-on to a normal video surveillance feed. At its core is an algorithm that scrambles the relevant parts of a video feed using an encryption key that can be kept secret. This means the resulting video can then be viewed by anyone, but only those in possession of the encryption key can unlock the scrambled regions and identify the people shown on-screen. Its developers say the system could let law enforcers use closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras without invading the privacy of those being watched. For example, a video stream could remain anonymous until its operators realise that a crime has been committed. The video could then be unscrambled by authorities with the necessary encryption key.

Originally published at .... You can comment here or there.

The Observer has an article about women using camera phones to take pictures of men who are sexually harassing in public and uploading them to the internet. What a wonderful thought.

Harassed women in New York are using a website to shame men behaving badly… The day that a man was caught masturbating on the subway was the day that the women of New York said enough was enough. Thao Nguyen, a disgusted fellow passenger, took a picture of the man with her camera phone and posted it on the internet.