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Category: Internet matters
Posts about the internet
Aesthetic query
What do people think about the big thumbnail images in the last few posts? They do allow for a much better sense of the overall picture, and they don’t sit awkwardly to one side of a white space. At the same time, they seem to diminish the text – especially when you cannot see the beginning of a post without scrolling down.
Should I stick with 450 pixel thumbnails or revert to 320 pixel ones?
Recovering encryption keys from RAM
Most successful attacks against strong, well-designed encryption take the form of ‘side channel’ attacks: ones that aren’t based on breaking the strong cryptographic algorithm, but which are based or circumventing it or subverting it somehow. Common varieties include timing attacks, which examine the precise amounts of time cryptographic equipment or software takes to perform operations, and power monitoring attacks, which examine which parts of a piece of equipment are using energy when.
Researchers at Princeton have recently uncovered a potentially significant side-channel attack against whole-disk encryption systems like BitLocker (built into Windows Vista), FileVault (same for Mac OS X), and Truecrypt. The attack is based on analyzing the random access memory (RAM) of a computer system once it has been turned off. Despite the common perception that this clears the contents of the RAM, they have demonstrated that it is possible to use simple techniques and equipment to get a copy of what is inside: including the cryptographic keys upon which these programs depend:
We found that information in most computers’ RAMs will persist from several seconds to a minute even at room temperature. We also found a cheap and widely available product — “canned air” spray dusters — can be used to produce temperatures cold enough to make RAM contents last for a long time even when the memory chips are physically removed from the computer. The other components of our attack are easy to automate and require nothing more unusual than a laptop and an Ethernet cable, or a USB Flash drive. With only these supplies, someone could carry out our attacks against a target computer in a matter of minutes.
This is bad news for anyone relying on encryption to protect the contents of their laptop: whether they are a banker, a spy, a human rights campaigner in China, or a criminal. Other technologies exist to help foil whole-disk encryption systems when the attackers are lucky enough to find a computer that is turned on and logged in.
Researchers in the same organization have done some good work on electronic voting machines.
Pondering Mac succession
Three years ago today, I first turned on my 14″ G4 iBook. Since then, it has served me very well: progressing from Panther through Tiger to Leopard and from Photoshop 7.0 to CS2. The machine has served purposes ranging from editing every photo posted to this site to serving as the platform on which my thesis was written to initiating video calls through Skype. Unlike most of my electronics, it has never needed to be handed over to a technician for repair. That said, the machine is definitely showing its age – particularly in terms of processing power and hard disk space.
Three years is a decent lifespan for a laptop (especially one that was a value rather than a performance model from the outset) and I am planning to replace the thing within the next few months, finances permitting. While the MacBook is an obvious successor, I am leaning more towards one of the Intel-based iMacs. I will still have the old iBook to lug around for taking notes and writing emails, when required, and it’s a whole lot nicer to watch movies on a 20″ screen than on a 14″ one. I would also feel a lot more unconstrained with a 250 gigabyte drive than with an 80 GB one.
Setting up my mother’s system also provided a hands-on demonstration that the new iMacs are more than elegantly designed boxes. They are well-designed, well-integrated systems focused on doing the things for which any computer I use is essential. The Mighty Mouse may be fiddly and frustrating, but that’s the only element of the package I found to be less than excellent.
[Update: 1 April 2008] I was seriously thinking about buying a 20″ iMac this month, but the fact that the new ones will have inferior screens is giving me pause. Apparently, the new screens only show 2% of the colours the old ones did.
[Update: 22 August 2008] I got my new 24″ iMac today. It’s a gorgeous machine, and I especially appreciate how well the Migration Utility works for transferring files and settings from an old to a new Mac. In the tradition of naming my computers after characters from science fictions books, I have dubbed this one ‘Seldon’ after Hari Seldon of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation universe.
Wikileaks and whistleblowers
Wikileaks is a website that allows anonymous whistleblowers to disseminate sensitive or embarrassing documents online. These could be anything from evidence of corruption and bribery in government to corporate wrongdoings to secret military interrogation manuals. While the ability to publish anonymously does have potential for abuse, it is also a valuable public service. There are plenty of barriers that prevent people from becoming whistleblowers, even when there is massive evidence of wrongdoing. Having technological mechanisms to aid the process – and reduce the dangers of retribution – thus serves the public interest. Particularly in places where governments are undermining traditional forms of public and legal oversight, such as in the treatment of terrorist suspects, there is extra value in whatever sources of information remain accessible.
As of today, the site is suffering from a California court decision that required Dynadot – the domain name registry that associates the URL ‘Wikileaks.org’ with an IP address – to “prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org Web site or any other Web site or server other than a blank park page until further notice.” This doesn’t make the site inaccessible, since the server can be accessed directly at http://88.80.13.160/, but it will prevent a good number of people from finding it. The ruling arose from proceedings involving Julius Baer – a Swiss bank that leaks have implicated in tax evasion and money laundering in the Cayman Islands. In addition to the DNS restriction, the site is apparently suffering from a denial of service attack, probably orchestrated by one or more organizations the site has embarrassed.
The final result of this will be an interesting development in the ongoing battle to control what kind of information can be distributed online, whether that can be done anonymously or not, and which jurisdictions are most accommodating towards such activities.
Comprehensive storage
Your average active computer user has more and more data. The first computer I effectively administered had 170 megabytes of hard disk space. Difficult choices had to be made about the relative merits of Doom versus Simcity. Now, just my primary email account has 1500 megabytes of data in it. I have 15 gigabytes worth of photos I have taken (all since 2005) and 20 gigabytes of music.
All this has been made possible by dramatically falling storage prices, combined with the spread of broadband internet. Soon, I expect that this combination will reach its logical conclusion. Right now, people are constrained by the size of their smallest hard drive, as well as by the difficulty of accessing larger remote drives. Eventually, I expect that most people will have a multi-terabyte disk connected to the internet at high speed and securely accessible from virtually any device in the world over the internet. The biggest question is whether this will be an ‘answering machine’ or a ‘voicemail’ solution.
The answering machine option is a big disk purchased by an individual consumer (perhaps a rack of disks, so that cheaper bigger ones can be added to the array as they become available). A company that made three things easy would have a license to print money. The first is integrated ease of use. iTunes music on the big disk should be immediately accessible from a person’s laptop or iPhone, provided they have internet access. The same should be true for saved television shows, photos, etc. The second is effortless backup. It is perfectly feasible to have a disk that is big enough to ensure that the failure of any one component does not lead to any loss of data. The third is security. The big disk should be secure enough against outside attack for use in storing commercially sensitive materials; likewise, the connection between outside devices and the disks should be secure. Probably, this means different levels of access for different sorts of devices, managed through a good user interface.
The voicemail option is to leave all the kit to someone else and just buy a service. Lots of companies are moving towards this model. In many ways, it’s a lot more efficient. Maintaining adequate but not excessive space for a million users is easier than doing the same thing for one; there are also economies of scale, since you can have specialists do all the technical work. The downsides of this model are mostly security related. You need to trust the service provider to keep your data safe. You also need to trust them not to apply arbitrary constraints on how you can use it, as Apple has sometimes done.
I predict that most people will use the second model exclusively, and will pay little or nothing to do so. More technically savvy people will run their own drives, but will probably use external services for (free) unencrypted or (subscription based) encrypted backup. Personally, I can’t wait. External hard drives have the feel of a 1980s solution, rather than one that is aware of the potential of the internet.
Seeking USB stick crypto
A piece of software that does the following would be very helpful to me:
- Creates an encrypted archive on a USB key
- Does so using a credible open-source algorithm, such as AES
- Ideally, is open source and well scrutinized by competent members of the security community
- This archive can be read using software on the key, on either a Mac OS X machine or a Windows XP box
- The software that does the encryption and decryption does not require administrator priveleges to run.
Do any such utilities exist? TrueCrypt is cool, but requires an admin account. SanDisk’s CruzerLock is Windows only, and has a really awkward interface. The disk encryption feature of PGP cannot be run off a flash drive. The encrypted disk images created by Mac OS cannot be read using a Windows machine.
Facebook and the expectation of privacy
Another privacy spat has erupted in relation to Facebook, the social networking site. It all began when the site began actively advertising everything you did you all of your friends: every time a photo was updated or a relationship status changed, everyone could see it by default, rather than having to go looking. After that, it emerged that Facebook was selling information to third parties. Now, it seems that the applications people can install are getting access to more of their information than is required for them to operate, allowing the writers of such applications to collect and sell information such as the stated hometown and sexual orientation of anyone using them.
Normally, I am in favour of mechanisms to protect privacy and sympathetic to the fact that technology makes that harder to achieve. Facebook, I think, is different. As with a personal site, everything being posted is being intentionally put into the public domain. Those who think they have privacy on Facebook are being deluded and those who act as though information posted there is private are being foolish. The company should be more open about both facts, but I think they are within their rights to sell the information they are collecting.
The best advice for Facebook users is to keep the information posted trivial, and maintain the awareness that whatever finds its way online is likely to remain in someone’s records forever.
[Update: 12 February 2008] Canada’s Privacy Comissioner has a blog. It might be interesting reading for people concerned with such matters.
Something strange is happening to undersea fiber optic cables in the Middle East: they are being cut. At least four, and possibly five, of the communications links have failed in the last twelve days. The first two were allegedly damaged by a ship’s anchor; subsequent failures are more mysterious. Serious disruptions are being experienced in Egypt and India, along with lesser problems in Bahrain, Bangladesh, Kuwait, the Maldives, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. The fifth cable cut seems to have disabled internet access in Iran. It’s tempting to ascribe some nefarious motive to all of this. That said, it is sensible to recall how past hysterias proved unjustified. After much hoopla in the media, it turned out that the ‘cyberwar’ against Estonia was the work of a twenty year old subsequently fined $1,620 for his misdeeds. The cable problems are being widely discussed: [Update: 16 February 2008] According to The Economist, all this was just hysteria. With existing technology, it is entirely possible to build houses that allow their owners to be dramatically more energy aware. For instance, it would be relatively easy to build electrical sockets connected to a house network. It could then be possible to see graphically or numerically how much power is being drawn by each socket. It would also be easy to isolate the energy use of major appliances – furnaces, dish washers, refrigerators – thus allowing people to make more intelligent choices about the use and possible replacement of such devices. In an extreme case, you could have a constantly updating spreadsheet identifying every use of power, the level being drawn, the cost associated, and historical patterns of usage. Being able to manage electrical usage through a web interface could also be very helpful. People could transfer some of their use of power to low-demand times of the day. They could also lower the temperature in houses and have it rise in time to be comfortable by the time they got home. Such controls would also be very useful to people who have some sort of home generating capacity, such as an array of solar panels. A web interface could provide real-time information on the level of energy being produced and the quantity stored. While all of these things are entirely possible, there do seem to be two big barriers to implementation. The first is in convincing people to install such systems in new houses or while retrofitting houses. The second is to make the systems intuitive enough that non-technical people can use them pretty well. The first of those obstacles would be partially overcome through building codes and carbon pricing. The second is mostly a matter of designing good interfaces. Perhaps an Apple iHome is in order.Cut cables in the Middle East
Improving energy efficiency through very smart metering
