Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Testing BuryCoal

As discussed recently, there seem to be a few key ideas about climate change that aren’t yet widely recognized or discussed, much less accepted. The major purpose of BuryCoal.com is to help spread these: arguing that we don’t need to burn all the world’s fossil fuels; that doing so would be extremely dangerous; and that we can choose to leave the carbon embedded in these reserves safely underground forever.

I have personally spent much of the past five years reading and writing about climate change issues. As such, there are a lot of ideas (and a lot of terminology) which is already very familiar to me, where it might not be to most educated people.

If readers are willing, I would really appreciate if they would have a look at BuryCoal.com and the ‘Why bury coal?’ page and identify elements that are confusing, too technical, or otherwise problematic. It doesn’t have much value if is simply serves as a forum for those who agree with the message. It needs to be able to speak to those who have different views, as well.

As always, the site is also looking for contributors.

I hate hovercards

You know the deal: some website decides that it would be super slick to show a preview of linked pages when you hover your mouse over a link, or a preview of someone’s profile when you hover over their Gravatar.

The trouble is, it is obtrusive and distracting. Moving a mouse over a website shouldn’t cause dramatic new things to happen. When they do, they break concentration and cause frustration.

It is acceptable to have menus that enlarge when you hover a mouse over them. Mouseover text for images is also perfectly fine, since it takes a moment to appear and is thus effectively requested rather than imposed. By contrast, website elements that pop out of nowhere just because a cursor crossed something are bad form in the same way as universally despised pop-up ads.

Thankfully, many such unwanted features are killed by AdBlock and NoScript.

WordPress.com offsite redirects

There are too many pieces of software and web services that rely on a deliberate lack of interoperability to lock in users and boost profits. While it may be better for companies when people are forced to use operating X, software Y, and website Z, it is usually better for users if they can use any combination that suits their purposes. Apple is particularly notorious, when it comes to locking things down and sabotaging their own products.

One welcome exception is the new link forwarding service on WordPress.com. One early choice faced by bloggers is whether to use free hosting on a site like WordPress.com or whether to get their own hosting account. The former is cheaper and easier, while the latter allows many more possibilities. Now, users on WordPress.com who decide that they want the added power that comes with private hosting can move in a way that preserves all their old URLs and avoids exposing visitors to error 404 pages.

The service costs $15 per year and uses 301 permanent redirects. That means Google and company will figure out the new addresses for your content, avoiding the need to keep paying WordPress indefinitely.

BuryCoal update

After months in limbo, Google has assigned a PageRank to BuryCoal.com, significantly increasing the amount of traffic going there.

In order to help drive that site’s evolution, I am planning to put most of my climate-related writing over there now. That should also be helpful for those who are only interested in following that topic of discussion, as opposed to the miscellaneous ones that crop up here. I encourage anyone with an interest in climate change to subscribe to the RSS feed or sign up to get updates by email.

BuryCoal is also looking for contributors, including those who wish to post anonymously.

The Stuxnet worm

There has been a recent flurry of discussion online about a piece of malware that targets the control systems of industrial facilities – specifically, one that seems designed to sabotage one particular facility. The speculation is that the target is either the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran or Iran’s uranium enriching centrifuge cascades at Natanz. If so, the idea would presumably be to slow down the development of Iranian nuclear weapons.

The sophistication of the worm has led many security researchers to speculate that only a nation state would have the resources to assemble it. That said, there are a great many unknown factors in play. The entire situation could be someone’s attempt at misdirection, or making a threat. Assuming the basic elements of speculation are correct, this would be an interesting development in unconventional military tactics. It probably wouldn’t be entirely unprecedented, however. There have already been three generations of Suter: a computer program developed by a British defence corporation, designed to interfere with communications and communications systems in a military context. Suter or similar software may have been used in Israel’s 2007 airstrike on a suspected nuclear facility in Syria.

The Young Turks

When Jon Stewart interviewed former president Jimmy Carter recently, the topic of Stewart’s upcoming ‘Rally to Restore Sanity‘ arose. Carter commented that Stewart was now becoming involved in politics. At the same time, fellow comedian Stephen Colbert testified before a congressional committee.

At the same time as Stewart and Colbert are moving in new directions, a new satirical news source has emerged. The Young Turks is a website and media show sponsored by Sirius Satellite Radio. It has a kind of unpolished authenticity, lacking the production values of Stewart and Colbert’s offerings. It skews younger and edgier, and the website will start playing a Sirius Satellite stream if you leave it alone too long.

Many young people who I know don’t own televisions, and watch only Stewart and Colbert as video news sources. I am not sure how to feel about that, all in all. Neither seems too partisan, in the end. They mock Obama and Democrats about as much as Republicans. At the same time, perhaps it is worrisome that people (myself included) only absorb American news by means of a couple of spoof shows. There is a risk of fostering confirmation bias, and of developing a distorted sense of what political figures stand for and how influential they are.

On the other hand, most people I know also get a lot of print news from online sources (and sometimes even old school printed newspapers). Stewart and Colbert make intelligent arguments in clever ways, and don’t usually seem to misrepresent people too egregiously. Also, watching those shows helps people stay in touch with the general state of discussion about American politics, which probably resides more on television than online, at least for those who aren’t part of the tech-savvy subset of news consumers.

Privacy and the evercookie

In the context of the internet, cookies are little bits of data stored by web browsers that allow them to track visitors. They have many useful purposes. Commerce sites can keep track of what you have put in your shopping cart; sites can store your language preferences and login information; and so forth. This site uses a cookie so that those leaving comments only need to enter their name and email address once. Of course, cookies can also be used in more malicious ways, such as keeping track of what sites you visit without your approval.

Clearing out cookies is something that can nominally be done by all browsers. Unfortunately, this only applies to cookies of the conventional sort. Now, there are a multitude of ways through which browsers can store information through which to identify a particular computer and browser. As a demonstration of that, the ‘evercookie’ developed by Sami Kamkar stores information in eight different ways. Furthermore, it is able to regenerate any of the information if the user deletes it, provided all eight are not deleted simultaneously.

Kamkar’s intention is to show how tracking technology has outpaced the privacy features in browsers. The loss of anonymity is one of two big changes that have taken place on the internet, since the heady days of its birth. The other, of course, is the increasingly intrusive role played by governments.

Northern lights webcam

The Canadian Space Agency has set up a website that allows the live viewing of the northern lights from Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories. You can watch live during the appropriate hours, as well as watch the previous night’s video in time lapse and selected videos from especially active nights.

The videos are pretty small and not super high resolution. The ‘AuroraMAX’ site would probably benefit from the addition of some large still photos. The sun’s 11-year cycle of activity is expected to peak in 2013, and the site has a mandate to carry on until then. The site doesn’t say what kind of equipment is being used, but it seems to be a fisheye lens on either a video camera or dSLR.

Password reuse

The latest XKCD comic identifies one of the major security failings of the internet today: the tendency of users to use the same password on more than one important site. It’s fine to use the same password for a bunch of news sites that do not store important personal information. What’s foolish is using the same password for a potentially vulnerable site and for something important, like a bank’s website or the password on an encrypted hard drive partition. Doing so risks allowing someone to compromise your information, one step at a time.

Another related risk is password recovery systems. Countless websites allow users to either have their password emailed to them or reset their password via email. That means that anybody who gains access to an email account linked to such features can then gain access to any sites that rely on that sort of password replacement system.

The wisest thing seems to be using strong unique passwords for email and other important sites, then having a couple of lower tier passwords to use for general sites that do not pose security risks. Random.org has a password generator, though the trick of building up a password from a memorable piece of music or poetry is probably less troublesome and still quite secure. An alternative approach is to have unique passwords for everything and rely on a password management program (or a piece of paper kept guarded in your wallet) to keep track of them.

Online security would also be better if all sites allowed the use of passphrases, rather than just passwords (and sometimes ones with an absurdly short maximum length). Two-factor authentication can also help.

Quantum cryptography

In theory, quantum cryptography (mentioned before is as good as a one time pad, without the need for a secure channel through which to exchange keys. Potentially, it could also employ quantum phenomena to verify that nobody is eavesdropping.

In practice – as with all cryptographic systems – there are weaknesses to be exploited. One known attack exploits a weakness in some sorts of photon detector. Another works by manipulating synchronization signals.

Quantum cryptography may well have some useful applications, but people who expect it to be foolproof and completely secure probably aren’t thinking too well.