Day: 14 January 2011

Report: Belarusian mobile operators gave police list of demonstrators

According to this unsourced report, the Belarusian mobile operators have cooperated with the country’s secret police to provide a list of everyone who was in the vicinity of an anti-government demonstration; the spooks are now calling in everyone on the list to interview them about their involvement in political dissidence. I’d love to see a better-sourced version of this article, but it’s technically possible for the operators to have logged every phone near a given tower at a given time.

This is one area where I really agree with Evgeny Morozov, who has written extensively about the risks that technology use poses to demonstrators: at present, mobile phones are not fit for purpose. Mobiles are too closed, the mobile operators too vulnerable to be considered safe enough for use against powerful hostile states. Unless your mobile-driven protest ends with the collapse of the state, it’s all too likely that you and your friends will face dire reprisals.

It’s one of the reasons I’m so anxious to see more free/open phone operating systems, which open up possibilities for IMEI spoofing, anonymizing tunnels through proxies, etc. But until there’s widespread adoption of open handsets, your phone is eminently capable of finking you out.

Mobile operators rat out all demonstrators

(Thanks, Svabodu!)

 

HOWTO break Kindle book DRM

Most of the Kindle owners I know love their gadgets, but I always wonder how they’ll feel about them if they decide to switch devices and can’t bring their books — dozens? hundreds? thousands? — with them because of Amazon’s use of DRM. To Amazon’s credit, they now offer some DRM free books and have allowed me (at least) to include text with my titles telling you that I don’t expect you to abide by their long, crazy EULA and instead only ask that you respect the copyright law of the country where you bought the book.

In this video, Too Smart Guys show you how to remove the DRM from your Kindle books using Python and Windows. The method looks pretty foolproof, too. Think of it as an insurance policy for your precious books.

How to Remove DRM from Your Kindle Ebooks

 

Threatened library gets its patrons to clear the shelves

The library in Stony Stratford near Milton Keynes, England, urged its patrons to check out every book on the shelves as a way of proving to the local council that its collection and facilities provide a vital service to the community. Stony Stratford is one of many towns across the UK that are facing severe library closures as the Tory-LibDem coalition government recklessly slashes its transfer payments to local governments (while breaking their promise to rein in enormous bonuses at the banks, even the ones that are owned by the taxpayer).

The empty shelves, as the library users want to demonstrate, represent the gaping void in their community if Milton Keynes council gets its way. Stony Stratford, an ancient Buckinghamshire market town famous only for its claim that the two pubs, the Cock and the Bull, are the origin of the phrase “a cock and bull story”, was one of the communities incorporated in the new town in 1967. The Liberal Democrat council, made a unitary authority in 1997, now faces budget cuts of £25m and is consulting on closing at least two of 10 outlying branch libraries.

Stony Stratford council got wind in December and wrote to all 6,000 residents – not entirely disinterestedly, as the council meets in the library, like many other groups in the town. “In theory the closure is only out for consultation,” Gifford said, “but if we sit back it will be too late. One man stopped me in the street and said, ‘The library is the one place where you find five-year-olds and 90-year-olds together, and it’s where young people learn to be proper citizens’. It’s crazy even to consider closing it – they should be finding ways to expand its services and bring even more people in.”

Library clears its shelves in protest at closure threat

(Thanks, BannedLibrary, via Submitterator!)

 

Paranoia and deletion: the wipe man page

Today I decided I wanted to really securely delete some files off my hard-drive; a quick search revealed that the GNU/Linux wipe command was just the thing. Before running it, I had a quick look at its man page and discovered something much more interesting than mere dry documentation: rather, the wipe manual is a paranoid masterpiece on the possible snitchware lurking inside your hard-drive and the special problems of being really sure you’ve deleted your data:

I hereby speculate that harddisks can use the spare remapping area to
secretly make copies of your data. Rising totalitarianism makes this
almost a certitude. It is quite straightforward to implement some
simple filtering schemes that would copy potentially interesting data.
Better, a harddisk can probably detect that a given file is being
wiped, and silently make a copy of it, while wiping the original as
instructed.


Recovering such data is probably easily done with secret IDE/SCSI
commands. My guess is that there are agreements between harddisk
manufacturers and government agencies. Well-funded mafia hackers
should then be able to find those secret commands too.


Don’t trust your harddisk. Encrypt all your data.


Of course this shifts the trust to the computing system, the CPU, and
so on. I guess there are also “traps” in the CPU and, in fact, in
every sufficiently advanced mass-marketed chip. Wealthy nations can
find those. Therefore these are mainly used for criminal investigation
and “control of public dissent”.


People should better think of their computing devices as facilities
lended by the DHS.

wipe(1)

(Image: Hard Drive 016, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jon_a_ross’s photostream)

 

Classroom Superheroes: recognize excellent teachers

Classroom Superheroes allows you to nominate the teachers you love for recognition; having been raised by teachers, I have a keen appreciation for how much overtime and personal money teachers pour into their classrooms, but with the current climate of cutbacks, teachers are being asked to do even more, for more kids, with less.

Classroom Superheroes

(Thanks, Khart25, via Submitterator!)

 

Canadian regulator smacks Rogers for Net Neutrality failures

Michael Geist sez, “The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission concerns with telcoms company Rogers and its response to net neutrality complaints escalated this week when the Commission sent a letter to the company advising that it has received a growing number of complaints and that its public disclosures have not been compliant with CRTC Internet traffic management policy requirements. The case began last fall when the CRTC received a complaint over changes to Rogers’ practices that affected downstream P2P traffic.”

Staff consider that in order to comply with TRP 2009-657, the discussion in the page titled Legal Disclaimer and the detailed discussion available on the network management policy web page should indicate that there are circumstances whereby the Rogers ITMP will also affect download speeds available to subscribers. Further, the detailed discussion on the network management policy page should clearly indicate which download applications might be affected in these circumstances and to what degree (i.e., the impact on download speeds should be indicated).

CRTC Says Rogers Not Complying With Net Neutrality Disclosure Requirements

 

Alternate universe film-posters

Sean Hartter’s large collection of “Alternate Universe Movie Posters” (which includes numerous book covers and other ephemera) are extremely well-done and present a tantalizing view of a better world than this one.

ALTERNATE UNIVERSE MOVIE POSTERS

(via Neatorama)

 

Scary rope-bridge is Disney’s Animal Kingdom


The Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World — a beautiful and thoughtful safari park — has just added a new attraction, the “Wild Africa Trek,” which allows small groups of people to walk over and around the “African savannah” area of the park. The Trek includes a crazy, high-altitude, Indiana-Jones-style rope-bridge over a deep gorge.

Wild Africa Trek Adventures Begin This Weekend at Disney’s Animal Kingdom