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The Not-So-Fine Print
Posted: May 27, 2010 (03:23) under Humor, Intellectual Property, Security

We’ve discussed the monolitic data mining system known as “Facebook” before. Let’s discuss it again in light of the recent change in “privacy” settings and subsequent public outcry. I think this about sums it up.

Facebook Privacy

People know that when they post information about themselves to a website they and the website are bound by the user agreement that they signed during the registration process. The problem here is that Facebook (and several other sites to which you should similarly give the side-eye) reserves the right to rewrite their side of the contract at any time. Maybe they’ll actually tell you; maybe they’ll expect you to have Techcrunch on your RSS reader and check it hourly.

Remember: this is a service contract. It’s true that you pay nothing in cash, but you are giving them precious information which they then use to make a significant amount of money. Look at it as a consumer would, for that is what you are. Weigh the tradeoffs and realize that even though there’s no cash exchanged, there is a significant cash value to your information as far as Facebook is concerned, which is why they do not charge you for the service. You are entitled to bring critical intelligence to bear on the issue.

I still have my Facebook profile, one Facebook Group, and two Facebook Pages, and it’s unlikely I’ll join the so-called mass exodus on May 31 (we’ll see how many of them really delete their profiles; nobody wants to get left off a birthday party invitation list!). But it is similarly unlikely that I will actually trust Facebook to keep my best interests at heart, or even keep my settings.

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• Facebook Not Screwing Around With Its PR Around Privacy Changes (businessinsider.com)
• Facebook Admits ‘Mistakes’ With Privacy (news.sky.com)

Face the Facts on Facebook
Posted: May 20, 2010 (10:09) under Security

The Internet is over; also, for porn

Don’t even THINK your mother won’t see what you said about her.

We’ve ranted about Facebook before; its inflexibility, its unreliability, the fact that Viggo Mortensen won’t Friend u- oh, never mind that last bit. We’ve hardly even gotten started on the privacy leaks, and it’s a good thing, because they’ve just made them much worse. Fortunately, there’s a useful little tool you can simply add to your Bookmarks that will tell you where your Facebook profile is vulnerable; it’s called PrivacyScanner, and it’s from ReclaimPrivacy.org.

Here’s what it says about my personal profile:

secure    Instant Personalization is currently sharing personal information with non-Facebook websites. you are opted-out of the Instant Personalization feature

secure – all of your personal information is at restricted to your friends or closer

secure – all of your contact information is at restricted to your friends or closer

secure – all of your friends, tags, and connections information is at restricted to your friends or closer

INSECURE – your friends can accidentally share your personal information. Prevent friends from sharing your data

secure – you have blocked all known applications that could leak your personal information

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• Does Facebook Privacy Even Matter? (allfacebook.com)
• HOW TO: Reclaim Privacy on Facebook (mashable.com)
• Facebook has another shot at killing Privacy shock horror….. (broadstuff.com)

Fence in your mobile data!
Posted: March 29, 2010 (22:08) under Hardware, Security, Theft

Apple giveth and Apple taketh away

Oh, how I wish I wasn’t writing this from experience.

But I am.

This post; this one right here. This post, which is about how you iPhone addicts out there should always be sure to register with the websites associated with your apps, so that if (GAWD forbid) the JesusPhone gets raptured or falls into a toilet or whatever, you’ve got a backup of all the data that you’ve entered into it, a backup you can access and continue to use even without your Holy Handset.

Not all apps come with an associated website, but most fitness apps, personal databases like Contact lists, food logs and timekeepers do. And I won’t even mention, or yeah, maybe I will, the multiple iPhone locator apps that you should have installed. The thing comes with a GPS built-in. Use it.

I’m not gonna say it again, not gonna embellish it: just go, and register, and synch, and relax.

Because the most important part of your Jesusphone isn’t the black box: it’s your irreplaceable data.

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• Jesus Phone to exhibit holy gift of bilocation (go.theregister.com)

Hammer time!
Posted: February 25, 2010 (21:16) under Hardware, Intellectual Property, Security

Hammer Time!

Ah, there’s nothing like a good metaphor! Without metaphors, we’d be as lost as…well, we’d be just plain lost, wouldn’t we? We couldn’t be fancy-lost if we tried, not without metaphors. And here’s a killer metaphor:

Your data is like the precious contents of an exotic shark tank in Dubai (no, it really is, bear with me here): without its proper support and maintenance, it can leak away so slowly you don’t even notice until it’s too late, to the point where it reaches a critical failure and comes crashing to the ground all at once in a massive and irreparable cascade that will cost WELL over Goliath’s arm and leg to fix. For example:

A friend of mine was once responsible for the computer systems of the government a small, here-nameless Asian country. He insisted his onsite team install duplicate systems in a separate physical location to ensure that in case of emergency they could continue to function, and they did so and reported it back to him. Then there was an earthquake.

And the mainframe computer housing the alpha of the government’s systems fell through the floor onto the mainframe directly below it, which was the one housing the emergency backup systems.

Offsite. It’s a very important word when it comes to backups. And no, the room immediately below is not off enough.

Your backups should not only be in a physically different location, they should if at all possible be on a completely independent system, so that no matter what virus, worm, trojan or act of Gob may occur, you can be up and running with minimal if any downtime.  Now, if you’re a Dubaious shark keeper, this is somewhat of a challenging proposition. If, however, you’re a webmaster, writer, photographer, filmmaker, or other creator or packager of information in any form, it’s not so hard at all. In fact, we’re here to make it easy.

Trust your precious data to a specialist who’ll make sure it’s there when you need it and not out there duplicating your content, diluting your audience, and weakening your brand when you don’t.

360 Degrees of Copyright Protection
Posted: February 2, 2010 (22:23) under Copyright, Intellectual Property, Security, Theft

Rebecca Bollwitt wants you to talk nerdy to her

Copyright’s a heated topic in the internet, and one about which there is a great deal of misinformation (see this example for an adamant, strongly held, oft-repeated, and completely illegal, belief about copyright). Essentially, if you’re using a major platform such as Blogspot, WordPress, or Tumblr, or if the server hosting your site is in a country which is a signatory of the major international copyright agreements (such as Canada, the US, India, China, the UK, all EU members, etc) your post is protected by copyright the moment it is created. Yes, even before you hit Publish.

Naturally, as copyright owner you are entitled to sell various subsidiary or even All Rights to your work as you please. Sadly, that doesn’t always mean you can relax, as Vancouver blogger Rebecca Bollwitt, known as Miss604, found out.

What happened was this: Miss604 signed a contract with Tourism Vancouver to supply posts for their site. One of those posts suddenly showed up on NBC’s site, contrary to the exclusivity contract in the Tourism Vancouver contract, which was binding on both sides. When Rebecca complained, NBC removed her name from the post, but keeping the content up, as you can see by her tweet above. When this hit the thunderdome of teh intarwebs, meaning Miss604′s thousands of followers on Twitter, and their followers, and all of their blogs, NBC reinstated her name, in a tiny font, with no link. It’s unclear what position Tourism Vancouver takes in all of this; whether they gave NBC the right to repost the content in contravention of the contract is still not clarified, but all parties involved now consider the matter resolved.

If Tourism Vancouver had taken down the post from its site, which sometimes happens in these disputes when companies want to stay “out of the fray,” it would have been difficult for Rebecca to prove her case to NBC or the public, as she’d have had no objective proof that it was her content which had been copied. This is yet another reason that keeping a backup of all your work (and writing that into your contract) preferably at a neutral third party’s office or site is critical to anyone who makes a living from intellectual property. Can you ever have too many?

Real World Insecurity
Posted: December 14, 2009 (20:43) under Hardware, Offline Security, Security, Theft

Now, this is just a sad tale, one with all the classic ingredients of a tragedy, and none of the happy endings you’re used to from Disney adaptations of the Greek myths.

Vancouver artist and photographer Sharon Burns recently showed her latest works at the Interurban Gallery downtown at Hastings and Carrall streets. She’s previously exhibited at public and private galleries from the Vancouver Art Gallery to the Gallery Gachet, and her work is both critically respected and popular.

And now, it’s gone.

If you saw the show at the Interurban, congratulations; you saw the only extant record of three years of work. Here’s how it happened:

Nobody likes moving house much, and moving house single-handedly they like even less. Burns had to move house, didn’t have any friends free that night, and decided, since it was a small job, to dispense with a moving company and hire some freelance labour. All appeared to go well, and she’d been settled into her new apartment several months when she had occasion to double-check her photo-storage hard drive for an image for the upcoming show.

You know what happened then.

The loss of a hard drive, whether due to “the confusion of moving” or to some more sinister cause, is always a blow, but if you’ve got a backup of your data somewhere else, it’s a surmountable blow. In contrast to the common assumption, online data storage can often be more secure than offline storage, and more flexible as well. Don’t get caught out like this, losing three years of work. But then, if you’re reading this blog, you probably know you’ve got some safety options; use them!

Status: Loser
Posted: November 26, 2009 (09:53) under Security

What can we say? It’s always been hard to get good help, but now it’s easier than ever to confirm that they’re so … not good. If this happens on your own site, you’ve no-one to blame but yourself, for setting the privacy settings to “broadcast to the entire universe” but there’s more of a sting at setting something to Private on a trusted site and finding out that what you mean by private and what they mean by private are different.

Or mutable.

Hundreds of thousands of users were unpleasantly surprised earlier this year to find that Facebook contents are now visible to search engines, and to people who are not logged in to Facebook. While Facebook is one of the biggest offenders, it’s really just the most obvious example.

Do. Not. Use. The. World’s. Most. Powerful. Communication. Tool. To. Keep. Secrets.

It just doesn’t work.

Do not make a private blog and enable an RSS feed, unless you just don’t have enough drama in your life. You wouldn’t use a safe deposit box that was located in the middle of a public square, or put your jewels in a safe in someone else’s basement, would you? If you’ve got files and information that you want kept private, but need to put online for whatever reason, do not do this on a third-party site like Facebook or Twitter; their priorities are not yours, and if it comes down to a choice between protecting you and monetizing the business, guess who’ll come out the loser? Own the land you stand on, and maintain your fences; get your own site and make sure it’s professionally maintained and protected.

Ahem.

Grande Nonfat Virus Please
Posted: July 8, 2008 (14:03) under Security

THIS is what you want in an espresso machine: a foolproof foam frother, a powerful boiler that guarantees enough steam for a dozen consecutive cappuccinos, a brew head and portafilter that deliver a full cover of crema on your silky-smooth espresso, a $2000 price tag, and a gaping security hole.

Craig Wright, a risk advisory services manager at professional services firm BDO, found several security holes, including a buffer overflow in the Internet Connection software that links his Jura F90 coffee maker to his PC.

Yes, the Jura F90 espresso machine is web-enabled and hacker-ready!

In addition to keeping your kitchen appliances on a fireproof surface you might also want to keep this one behind a firewall.

The Issue
Posted: July 1, 2008 (13:56) under Security

The issue is not privacy. The issue is equality of exposure. – John Perry Barlow

Truly it hath been said that all websites are created equal, but some websites are equaller than others. So it is with Google.

The search engine behemoth actively strives to index everything that, however briefly, pokes its nose into the Internet, and it employs a number of lawyers to make sure nothing interferes with its ability to do so.

Apparently, it employs at least one other lawyer to make sure nothing confidential to Google shows up there, or, if it does, it sleeps with the fishes in an expeditious manner. Read more…

Safe iPhone Recycling
Posted: June 24, 2008 (13:47) under Security

Now that the newest godPhone is out (and at only $199), everyone will be putting their iPhone Classics up on eBay to make a quick killing, yes?

Not so fast, my phone-flipping friends. Before you dump that collectable in your mad frenzy for the New New Thing, make sure it’s well and truly empty of all your personal data.

Easier said than done, however. Apple provides no utility which will completely wipe out the contents of your iPhone, and several resold iPhones have inconsiderately turned up with the previous user’s information on them. There IS, however, a procedure which will totally clear the contents, but it’s not simple, and it takes about an hour.

Still, if you plan on selling your phone, it’s not exactly optional. The last thing you need is a stranger having access to your phone records.

Or didn’t you see Ocean’s Twelve?