Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Automated voice impersonation

I’ve written before about some problems with biometric security: it seems convenient to be able to use facial recognition to log in to your computer, until you find your co-workers doing it with colour photocopies of your picture.

Computers aren’t the only context where we use biometrics for identification. “Don’t you recognize my voice?” has been used for decades for authentication over the phone, whether implicitly or explicitly. Now, we’re approaching the day when faking anybody’s voice and having it say anything you like is getting near.

Expect disruption on every level, from teens pranking each other to abusive harassers terrifying victims in new ways to more election-altering political fraud.

No more Twitter on the go

One convincing argument made by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness) is that we intuitively misjudge the importance of the newest information, which is actually the most likely to be trivial and wrong. I wrote about this before.

It’s an especially important point in the Trump era, where I can easily get into an endless cycle: Washington Post, The Guardian, National Post, Slate, Twitter, Los Angeles Times, CBC, BBC, Twitter, etc.

Quite a while ago, I took email off my phone and have found it a big life improvement. I definitely don’t need to be instantly notified every time I have a new message. One slight inconvenience is that I often use email to send information and to-do items to myself. That’s pretty easily addressed, however, by saving them into Google Calendar instead or using the BuryCoal.com contact form.

Yesterday I went a step further and removed Twitter from my phone as well. It’s a bit of a harder case, since I do genuinely learn things from Twitter that I don’t see elsewhere. It’s where I learned about divestment at Laval, for instance. At the same time, the huge majority of what I see on Twitter is a waste of time and it’s an easy reflexive form of procrastination. I still have an account accessible via Sasha’s iPad Mini and my computers, so all told this should be a helpful move.

Climate change messaging

A paper by Pearce, Brown, Nerlich, Koteyko (“Communicating climate change: conduits, content, and consensus“, 2015) contains some interesting ideas about effective communication about climate change. They cite one “best practice guide” which explains that:

in order for climate science information to be fully absorbed by audiences, it must be actively communicated with appropriate language, metaphor, and analogy; combined with narrative storytelling; made vivid through visual imagery and experiential scenarios; balanced with scientific information; and delivered by trusted messengers in group settings.

It also notes that: “Messages focusing on fear and predictions of adverse events can increase skepticism, perhaps because they disrupt underlying ‘just world’ beliefs and can reduce people’s intentions to perform mitigating actions”.

This kind of research is important. Motivation may be the trickiest part of the climate challenge: getting people to care about the welfare of people impacted all over the world by climate change, and well into future generations. Then making people willing to demand political and economic change to prevent the worst potential impacts of excessive fossil fuel use.

Google’s AdWords suck for internet security AND content generators

Having ads on this site is pretty awful for several reasons.

The site is plugged into Google via both analytics and advertising. For people not running an ad blocking plugin, this often leads to ads which are unappealing and often offensive.

If you don’t want Google to know everything you (or everyone with access to your machine) do online, you’re going to need to make a big effort and do a lot of research into, like, cryptographic and technical means of confounding state surveillance.

If you would pay one cent a year or more to support an ad-free site, please leave a comment.

Cyber warfare between the US, Israel, and Iran

I recently saw the documentary Zero Days about state-sponsored cyber warfare in general and the Stuxnet attack against Iran’s enrichment facility at Natanz in particular.

The documentary doesn’t really contain any new information for people who follow the news in this field, but it’s well put together and has some compelling interviews.

A couple of New York Times articles cover much of the same ground: Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran and U.S. Had Cyberattack Plan if Iran Nuclear Dispute Led to Conflict. These, respectively, cover ‘Olympic Games’ (the Stuxnet operation) and ‘Nitro Zeus’, a much broader plan for an across-the-board cyber attack against Iranian civilian and military systems in the event of war between Iran and the US.

An interesting discussion in the film concerns US-Israeli relations. It alleges that US support for Stuxnet was motivated in part by a desire to prevent attempted airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities by Israel. In part, this was allegedly motivated by the thinking that Israel would initiate such attacks not to destroy Iranian capabilities themselves (since that would be beyond Israel’s military means), but to force the US into a war with Iran.

The film also discusses alleged Iranian retaliation for Olympic Games, including attacks against Saudi Armaco and American banks. There’s also some interesting material about the Abdul Qadeer Khan proliferation network.

The instant messaging ghost town

Between when my family first got internet access (I got my first taste at the Science Al!ve daycamp at SFU, using a primitive form of Netscape) and sometime between my M.Phil / working in Ottawa / starting my PhD, I spent thousands of hours talking with all sorts of friends over ICQ, MSN Messenger, and Google Talk.

Now, even though there are other options like WhatsApp and Skype, the instant messaging world seems essentially dead (or maybe all shifted to the dreaded Facebook). A whole host of people are always online, which I guess is because of being logged into email on some computer or having an account linked to a phone, but there is no real activity.

It’s probably impossible to disentangle the extent to which this is the result of people who I know growing up and no longer having time for instant messaging versus a general decline in IM use versus people shifting to platforms which I don’t use.

Black Code

Written by Ron Diebert, the director of the Citizen Lab at U of T, Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace contains some very interesting information, of importance to anyone concerned with the future of the internet and communication. He discusses the major discoveries made by the lab, including massive criminal malware enterprises, government surveillance and censorship, and the use of cyberweapons like Stuxnet.

The first few chapters may seem basic if you actively follow the news on IT security and surveillance, but the material in the later parts is undeniably novel and interesting. The book is a bit of a lament for the death of the idealistic open internet, and the emergence of control by governments, particularly after the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The stakes here are high: the internet is a critical tool for maintaining democracy in open societies, confronting autocratic regimes, and dealing with global threats. The network is now in real danger of being suffocated by governments fixated on terrorism or maintaining domestic control, or who see it as a promising avenue for attacking their enemies.

Diebert proposes a distributed model for both securing and protecting the internet, while repeatedly underlining how governments are now the major threat to online freedom and political participation. Governments have rebuilt the backbone of the internet in order to achieve their censorship and surveillance objectives. It’s not a problem with a technical solution, from the perspective of citizens, but rather one which requires ongoing political agitation.

SSL glitches

I recently updated the SSL certificate used to provide encrypted access to this site via HTTPS. Chances are, nothing sensitive is passing between my server and your computer. Running the site this way by default does, however, increase the overall volume of encrypted traffic on the web, which may hamper some ubiquitous surveillance efforts.

In any case, if you see warnings from your browser about this site’s encryption, let me know. I am hoping they will clear on their own as various caches update.