IT is not magic pixiedust – Page 3

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.

Security is overrated

Published on August 26, 2010

Charlie Stross has made a little list of where computer science went wrong:

I’m compiling a little list, of architectural sins of the founders (between 1945 and 1990, more or less) that have bequeathed us the current mess. They’re fundamental design errors in our computing architectures; their emergent side-effects have permitted the current wave of computer crime to happen …

Let’s not quibble about the examples Charlie gives, but assume that he is right to say that these are what makes computer crimes of all sort possible. But does it matter? Or should we just look at computer crime as an unfortunate cost of actually being able to do something useful with computers? Of the six specific “sins” Charlie mentions (von Neumann architecture, String handling in C, TCP/IP lacking encryption, The World Wide Web, User education and Microsoft) at least three are the way they are because that’s what made them useful in the first place. Von Neumann architecture, where data and code are stored in the same memory and can be freely mixed made it much easier to program computers, hack them to do all kinds of tricks and squeeze the most out of limited means — not so important now perhaps, but very important even a few decades ago. TCP/IP being simple and largely unsecure makes it easy to setup and use; it’s a “good enough” solution to the problem of coupling disparate computers and networks together. The World Wide Web is again something that worked from the start and could evolve itself towards ever increasing complexity, as the hackability that does make it vulnerable to attack also meant it could be extended quite easily to scale up and deal with new demands.

Even Microsoft, evil as it is and crappy as much of its software still remains, is the way it is because it has consistently tried to give people useful hacks rather than properly designed vapourware. Ironic as it is, I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion MS DOS and Windows did as well as they did because they were so open and easy to hack around in compared to their competitors.

As Charlie admits, the most secure mainstream computer today is perhaps the IPad, in which basically you can only do what Steve Jobs allows you to do: a consumer device like your television more than a real computer. Any fule knows that security comes at the expense of usability: the more secure a computer the less you can do with it, certainly the less you can use it in unexpected ways. The other side of the medal is that with increased freedom comes greater vulnerability.

On the other hand, even if the right choices had been made way back when, does anybody doubt that with our reliance on computers and the internet in our daily lives and businesses, computer crime would be any less? You use something, it will be abused.

Link like it’s 1995

Published on June 22, 2010

It’s hard to imagine these days, but remember back in the nineties when the web started to go mainstream and all sort of not very IT aware companies took their first baby steps on it? Remember how quite a few of those companies just didn’t understand linking and how some of those tried to get their lawyers to forbid socalled deeplinking, wanting to gain control of whoever was linking to them and requiring them to only link to their homepage, rather than “deeplinking” to a specific page on the site? Well, it seems in some remote corner of Belgium it’s still 1995, as the national railways have forbidden links to anything but their welcome page (in dutch).

Specifically, the NMBS doesn’t like it when you link to this page (Dutch), explaining how you can get compensation when your train is delayed. At least one blogger who linked to this page got a cease and desist letter for their troubles (Dutch again). Very likely the NMBS doesn’t have a leg to stand on, but I’m not a lawyer and the chilling effect is bad enough. Even if a blogger could win a lawsuit, the question is whether they could afford one. It’s all deeply silly, symptomatic of a company that doesn’t understand the internet or why they should be doing more with it.

On Kindle will reading highlights become ads?

Published on May 6, 20101 Comment

In the same vein as that Facebook security leak that’s gotten Palau annoyed over at Prog Gold, here comes another scary story about how we’re losing our privacy and paying for the priviledge. This time it’s the Kindle that’s at the heart of it. Via Matt Ruff:

The Amazon Kindle, Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for iPad each provide a very simple mechanism for adding highlights. Every month, Kindle customers highlight millions of book passages that are meaningful to them.

We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people. We show only passages where the highlights of at least three distinct customers overlap, and we do not show which customers made those highlights…

Matt invented a similar scheme for his novel Bad Monkeys, involving a bug in the spine of physical books noting how long you spent reading each page, so he’s a bit miffed somebody made his paranoid fantasy real. The next step is to sell ads based on this data… It reminds me slightly of the soup ads the German publisher of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels used to insert in his books. They’re not his publisher anymore.

Socialist Unity gets dragged into Toube libel suit

Published on April 6, 20101 Comment

The supposed libel case George Galloway has mounted against David Toube for a comment he left at Socialist Unity has now dragged the latter in:

Many readers will be aware that George Galloway and Kevin Ovenden are each seeking redress from David Toube of Harry’s Place for a libellous comment made by David on this blog back in December.

Last Wednesday I received a letter from Mr Toube’s solicitors saying that should either or both of these libel actions proceed then David Toube will seek to join me as a third-party (part 20) defendant and will seek full indemnity from me in respect of all costs and other liabilities that Mr Toube incurs under the Civil Liability (contribution) Act 1978.

In essence, despite all his huffing and puffing about free speech, David Toube has the chutzpah to publish comments on this blog, and then when faced with the consequences, is seeking to hold me legally responsible for his own actions.

In fact I do consider that the comment made by David T was libellous, and I sought to mitigate that libel by refuting the inaccurate content in subsequent comments on the same thread. This blog does not operate pre-publication moderation, so David Toube’ comment appeared and was read by hundreds of people without any participation whatsoever by the administraors of Socialist Unity blog.

If David Toube’s legal argument is successful, it will mean the end of blogging as we know it, as the burden of responsibility for libel will be shifted to the registered proprietors of blogs, and people posting libellous comments will seek to hide behind the blog owners to avoid legal responsibility.

Unfortunately for Andy, his assumptions here are slightly wrong. The way he puts it, he seems to think that David Toube’s action to drag Socialist Union into this suit is wrong, as if without this action he couldn’t be hold liable for David’s alleged libelous comment. However, this is not true. Had Galloway wanted to, he could’ve held Socialist Unity responsible from the start. Now I’m not a lawyer, so treat the following with all due skepticism.

There’s a semi-famous libel case called Godrey vs Demon Internet 1999 which already gives that chilling effect that Andy worries about. In that case Demon was held responsible for an Usenet post not even posted but propagated through their servers and the judge found that the “common carrier” defence Demon mounted (i.e. you can’t hold the post office responsible for a libelous letter) wasn’t adequate.

Which means that any blog with comments can probably be hold responsible for its commenters already, more so if said blog already screens comments, as Socialist Unity does, as it has banned several commenters for being disruptive (including yours truly). For Andy therefore to think he has no part in this when he led the allegedly libelous comment stand, when he has deleted other comments (including ones for possible libelous intent) and even banned people, is somewhat premature. The idea is that the more you filter, the more you become like a publisher, hence responsible for the content of the comments you allow, whether you agree with them or not. As such, a blog can therefore have a duty of care to remove comments that are held to be libelous at the very least when they are pointed out to them, or face the consequences in court.

At the time the judgement in Godfrey vs Demon 1999 was given there was somewhat of a panic about what this meant in practical terms. Should all Usenet post be pre-vetted, or would Usenet be dropped by internet providers as not worth the trouble? The upshot was that many ISPs started removing posts as soon as they got complaints about them, which is a course also open to blogs. This may have a chilling effect, in that malicious people could complain about reasonable comments then removed by blog owners fearful of costly ligitation, but I’m not sure how much of an effect it has had so far…

Now personally I think Galloway has had some grounds to complaint about David’s original comment, but think he should have complained to Andy/Socialist Unity directly, as David himself couldn’t remove the comment anyway, only ask SU to do so for him. The more so considering the ties Socialist Unity has to Respect and Galloway anyway.