IT is not magic pixiedust – Page 2

The future of the internet according to CmdrTaco

Published on December 2, 20111 Comment

MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey interviews Slashdot founder Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda, who is not optimistic about the future of the internet:

Rob: The internet is simply not as free as it was when Slashdot began. Government is increasingly legislating away our rights and criminalizing actions that are impossible to regulate. I know it’s inevitable, but it’s still disappointing to witness. The joy of logging in to an IRC chat room in the early 90s, to talk to people who were innovating powerful technologies simply for the sake of it was absolutely intoxicating. To be able to talk to the guy who was responsible for some component of your system. We were all pseudo-anonymous strangers brought together by the technology that we loved, and the belief that an open future was spread out before us. The future will be exciting for my children, but I’m afraid that their technology will come in boxes welded shut at the factory. Their software locked down. Linux, and the Internet broke everything wide open. It’s taken 20 years to get a lot of it boxed back up again. I hope there are still air cracks by the time my kids are old enough to jam screwdrivers in there.

On the other hand, there’s the experience of MetaFilter commenter dreamyshade of working on the Ipad/Iphone hacking scene:

One of my favorite parts of working on Cydia is when I meet young kids who know exactly what jailbreaking is and how to do it. (Like at Thanksgiving, telling acquaintances what I work on — the 12-year-old boy grinning in surprised recognition while the grown-ups carefully listened to an explanation of the concept.) There are lots of kids splashing around on their hand-me-down iPod touches jailbroken in one way or anoher: installing goofy homebrew software, crafting custom icon themes with terrifically ugly icons, installing OpenSSH and forgetting to change the default password but learning to SSH in and paste intriguing commands from the internet, editing plists to enable hidden features, figuring out how to restore the device when things inevitably go wrong, and generally making a lively mess of the device they get to totally play with. They cause some support burden for Cydia and App Store developers alike, but this is one way to learn to feel comfortable with poking around at the internals of things, to gain the confidence to break stuff because you know you can figure out how to fix it, to self-identify as a person good with technical stuff, to take an interest in AP Computer Science class later. This makes me happy. Each new generation of devices gets harder to jailbreak, but for now there’s still some good stuff happening.

I hope dreamyshade is right but I fear CmdrTaco is closer to the truth. Internet has long ago ceased to be the domain of hardcore geeks — nothing wrong with that — but with it has come the Facebooking of the internet, where you sacrifise your freedom and privacy for ease of use and comfort.

Your internet feed, let us censor it

Published on October 11, 20111 Comment

So who really thinks giving BT et all control over what you can see on the internet is a good idea:

Four leading web providers are to offer customers the option to block adult content at the point of subscription, the BBC understands.

BT, Sky, Talk Talk and Virgin will offer the protection for smart phones, laptops and PCs.

It comes as David Cameron is set to meet industry representatives amid concern over sexualisation of children.

The prime minister will also launch Parentport – a website to help parents complain about inappropriate content.

And he will back a ban on billboards displaying risque images near schools.

The new measures, aimed at helping parents protect their children from internet porn and other explicit sites, follow a report earlier this year by the Mothers’ Union charity.

It’s all part of the further childproving of society, where anything that potentially could be seen by children and “harm” them has to be packed off to some adults only ghetto. And the internet, being the newest, biggest and still scariest medium available to children of course has to be controlled the most. But you’d be stupid as parents to trust Sky or Virgin with making your internet feed child safe. If these filtering efforts are to be effective they have to be draconian, filtering out anything that talks about s*e*x* or mentions a naughty word — so much for Scunthorpe — and taking a lot of false positives down too. Sex education sites, rape support centres, GLBT blogs, those are all vulnerable to such filtering, because all too often already they’re blocked by net nanny software.

Either that or this sort of filter will be wholly ineffective and consist of only a token effort to block playboy.com… Remember, for these internet providers, this is just an added cost so they’ll be looking to do it as cheaply as possible.

The Netherlands embraces net neutrality

Published on June 10, 2011

Imagine a world without net neutrality

Dutch politicians as a class are not know for their internet nous, but they exceeded expectations in a big way this week. Lately several big mobile phone companies (ex government monopoly KPN and of course Vodafone) have been whinging about their consumers not texting and phoning enough. Instead people have increasingly turned to things like WhatsApp or Skype to do it for free, over mobile internet. And sure, KPN and Vodafone earn money selling mobile internet subscriptions, but not enough. Which is why KPN announced a few weeks ago it would start to charge extra for access to certain kinds of internet services.

Which pissed people off big time, of which politicians took notice and last week the opposition parties drafted a proposal to introduce net neutrality, which would prohibit providers from filtering or charging for access to internet services the way Vodafone and KPN wanted to. If this proposal makes it into law, the Netherlands would be one of the first countries in the world to regulate internet access this way. Which is important, because it means your provider will no longer be able to decide what you can and cannot see on the internet.

Without net neutrality, we’d see mobile internet evolve cable access subscription schemes: you’d just get a small part of the internet with your standard subscription and would have to pay extra to see the more interesting stuff, without ever having the opportunity to see everything, a bit like on the illustration above. Kudos for our politicians for preventing this from happening.

Of course not

Published on April 15, 20111 Comment

Alex asks whether politicians learned anything from the News of the World phone hacking scandal:

Also, did the central government have any communications security at all? Did CESG or MI5 not have anything at all to say about this? Didn’t any of them just change their damn password, or even change their damn number?

Of course not. As a class politicians are the group most clueless about ICT and worst placed to make decisions on anything to do with it and that gets worse the higher up the ranks you get. Most modern politicians these days have never been anything but politicians and in that job you only need a pc as a glorified typewriter, while once you get high enough on the ladder the normal computer scutwork most of us have to deal with day to day can all be fobbed off on interns who’ll print out all the important documents for you. So I doubt they’ve spent any time at all thinking about communications security.

Case in point: several Dutch politicians got hit with a variant of what the News of the World did recently, as investigative reporters from the newsshow Één Vandaag “hacked” their voicemails by trying the standard Vodaphone pincode on them. Quite a few ministers turned out not to have bothered resetting this or even knew that they had to do that. Worse, neither did their IT department. Personally I think having voicemail at all is way too much of a security risk anyway and I’d switch it off altogether if I were in such a responsible function, but than that’s too much of a hassle.

What doesn’t help either is that is how much party political business is interwoven with government responsibilities for modern politicians, meaning that there’s a high risk for cross pollution anway. In an ideal world government ministers would have two or three separate mobiles: one for their job, one for journalists and party workers to reach them on and another for the family, but I suspect most people use the same phone for everything…

What a porn ban would also do

Published on December 21, 20101 Comment

Make it that much harder for transgender teens to get support:

Yes, they exist. I hated what I was for nearly all my teenage years., wanting to rip the skin from my body, sobbing myself to sleep at night because I couldn’t understand what I was. But then came along the internet. Oh, the internet. It fucking saved me. It gave 18 year old me a view of the world that made me realise that I wasn’t alone, that I could do something about the pain that made me want to die.

Claire Perry, and her evil piece of legislation, would take that lifeline away. Oh, maybe not conciously. I doubt she even knows that trans people exist, let alone that there are trans teenagers out there who rely on the internet for vital support. She wouldn’t notice as the sites they use to gain crucial advice from are blocked, due to having never-quite-defined “adult materials”, as support channels are closed down for “endangering youth”. She wouldn’t notice as sites all over the net are blocked for containing mention of sex, genitals, puberty and sexuality, when what they are doing is educating a badly unrepresented and unsupported section of society.

Not that such a scheme, as proposed by some daft British MP, would actually work in the real world anyway, but it could do quite a lot of collatoral damage anyway. Worse, any such scheme is going to disproportionally hurt self help sites and support sites rather than truly exploitative sites, because the former are always going to be easier to find and shut down.