Category: Technology

Search warrant overrides 1M users’ choice not to share DNA with cops | Ars Technica

Police in Orlando, Florida, obtained a warrant this summer to search DNA site GEDmatch and review data on all of its users—about a million people, The New York Times reports. Privacy advocates are now concerned that police will continue to get broad warrants for DNA sites, including larger peers such as 23andme or Ancestry that have much larger pools of user data.

Source: Search warrant overrides 1M users’ choice not to share DNA with cops | Ars Technica

When are people going to realize that IF a company can collect data, it WILL be sold, and it WILL be accessed by the government. Period. Full stop. No exceptions. I don’t care what the laws say. I don’t care what the companies say. If you give your data — any data — to someone else, it will be monetized and used against you. I don’t say that as anything other than what it is. Everyone must make a value judgement for themselves whether letting someone access their data is worth it. Just understand that once a company gets their hands on it, it will eventually be available to anyone who really wants it.

Addendum: Another story from Ars is really the same story:

The 22 women said they responded to ads for clothed modeling gigs. When they were asked to shoot porn instead, they initially resisted. But they went along with it after the company assured them that their videos would only be sold on DVD to customers outside the United States and would not be posted online. That turned out to be a lie, as their videos wound up on GirlsDoPorn, a website with plenty of American viewers.

Source: Feds hit GirlsDoPorn owners with criminal sex trafficking charges | Ars Technica

So Goes Mobile, So Goes the Desktop

After many years of decreasing usability, and increasing-user hostility, the same annoyances making the mobile web suck have wormed their way into the desktop experience.

You know what? I’m just closing tabs like this these days. I don’t even care to find the buttons that close the interstitials, because I know I’m going to get more of them, and some gods-forsaken unrelated video is going to start playing, despite all the protections against it that are supposedly built into Safari. Just forget it.

Alright, then. Keep your secrets.

Opinion: 50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong?

When my scientist colleagues and I invented the internet 50 years ago, we did not anticipate that its dark side would emerge with such ferocity — or that we would feel an urgent need to fix it.

Source: Opinion: 50 years ago, I helped invent the internet. How did it go so wrong?

When I saw the headline to the link, I said to myself, “You know what’s wrong with it. We all know what’s wrong with it.” To the surprise of no one — except, apparently, LA Times readers — the article concludes that financial incentives are to blame for making the web suck.

What made me click through to the article was the absolutely certainty that I would see the following, and the notion that I would capture the horrible, inescapable irony for posterity. To wit: On the site of one of the nation’s largest newspapers, over an article describing the ruination of the web by crass commercialization, capped with a complaint of the loss of privacy, there is a banner ad for subscribing, overlaid with a warning that you (effectively) surrender any notion of privacy, just by looking at the site.

Well done, all around.

I Was the First “YouTube”

Back in the early 2000’s, I was getting pretty deep into Linux. I also had a job which allowed me to have the castoff computers no one needed any more, after upgrades. Linux has always run just fine on older hardware, so I wound up with, at one point, 9 servers in my house, doing all sorts of things, in addition to my hand-built personal computers.

At the time, I had been running a dual phone line connection back to my computer at work, and using their T1 line for internet access. I had cleared this with the person in charge of the network. He was satisfied that I wouldn’t be using it except out of business hours, by definition.

While I knew it at the time, it’s become even more clear in retrospect: Arvin was a pretty great place to work. And Meritor ruined it. But I digress.

I found out that DSL was available at my house, so I got a 512Kb symmetric connection, which was rare. At the time, the phenomenon of the “Super Bowl commercial” was getting into full swing, and I had started collecting them. I was storing them on my “big” server, which had 6 SCSI drives in a hardware-based RAID array, for a whopping 100 GB of space. My collection included things like the old Budweiser “wassup” adverts, and that sort of thing.

Since I had a broadband connection, I started running my own web and email servers, out of my house. On my web server, I hosted an FTP service for all of these videos. You could click on them and play them, but I left it easy to just grab them all, if you knew how. I watched the logs, and saw that many people did. As thanks, a couple of people sent me their collections on CD’s through the mail. It was going well. To me, this is what the internet was all about.

Then along came “farting preacher.” It was an instant classic of the time, and I immediately added it to my collection. In a couple of months, if you searched on that phrase, my web site, running out of my house, was the #1 hit for it. That month, I did 8 GIGABYTES of uploads over my 512Kb connection. And, remember, these were tiny, little, lo-fi vid caps of the time. Most were just a couple megs. I thought about running banner ads on my site, to try to “monetize” the traffic, and then immediately rejected that idea as crass. It’s not that I didn’t think I couldn’t make any money; it’s that I thought the amount of money I would make wouldn’t be worth the hassle.

The very next month, someone created farting preacher .com, and loaded it up with ads. I have to admit that I felt a little whinge of missing the boat, for a moment.

The, the next month after that, YouTube was launched, and it put all of those spammy, one-off video sites out of existence, in favor of a new, spammy video site, where you can randomly get banned or de-monetized, or have your videos removed because of bogus copyright claims.

Abrams Dieselization Project: Doing the Math | Defense Media Network

“And that’s with better performance,” he added. “The modern diesel has greater torque in it than the turbine does. And you’ve got a couple of other things going for you as well. First, we’ve changed the nuclear, biological and chemical protection system, so it doesn’t operate off of the engine. On the turbine it operated off of ‘bleed air,’ so you had performance degradation on the turbine when the NBC system was on – and it’s on quite a bit. So that helps. Then, at idle, this [diesel] vehicle uses less fuel than if you put an under armor auxiliary power unit in there. And it’s quiet – it’s very quiet. The heat that comes out the back of the engine is 300 percent less than what was coming out of the back of the turbine. So there’s a significant reduction in heat signature and you can actually stand behind the tank now – when it’s running – and have a conversation.”

Source: Abrams Dieselization Project: Doing the Math | Defense Media Network (emphasis mine)

I looked up whether Cummins provided the engine for the Abrams tank, and discovered that it uses a gas turbine, not a diesel. I was gob-smacked. My engineering spider senses were tingling. On a checklist comparing a gas turbine against a diesel, in a tank, I can imagine that there are a lot of bullet points that I don’t even have a clue about, so I was willing to give the decision by the Pentagon the benefit of the doubt. However, the very next article on the search results was this one, showing a lot of compelling reasons to switch out the turbine for a diesel, and this made me feel justified in my feelings. Again, though, I am open to the possibility that other, valid constraints may still dictate this solution. Maybe it’s a mass/acceleration, or a moment-of-inertia/maneuverability thing? I don’t know, but the idea of the engineering tradeoff conversation on this topic fascinates me.

China’s New Cybersecurity Program: NO Place to Hide | China Law Blog

This system will apply to foreign owned companies in China on the same basis as to all Chinese persons, entities or individuals. No information contained on any server located within China will be exempted from this full coverage program. No communication from or to China will be exempted. There will be no secrets. No VPNs. No private or encrypted messages. No anonymous online accounts. No trade secrets. No confidential data. Any and all data will be available and open to the Chinese government. Since the Chinese government is the shareholder in all SOEs and is now exercising de facto control over China’s major private companies as well, all of this information will then be available to those SOEs and Chinese companies. … All this information will be available to the Chinese military and military research institutes. The Chinese are being very clear that this is their plan.

Source: China’s New Cybersecurity Program: NO Place to Hide | China Law Blog

It will be very interesting to watch how Cummins’ new “cybersecurity” initiative deals with the fact that one cannot keep proprietary secrets from the Chinese government, if one wants to sell products in their country.

It will also be very interesting to watch how other Fortune 500 companies deal with this, just in terms of email, chat, and file-and-print services. American companies have been collectively brainwashed into overly-restrictive IT practices for decades now, based on second-hand interpretations of SOX and related laws, by huge consulting firms, and “peer pressure” from other companies also implementing unfounded restrictions. Now, none of those policies will be allowed in China. How does a global company go about setting up a system, say, for instance, where I’m not even allowed to see my chat history, for fear of legal repercussions, yet the Chinese government has full access to all logs, including the CEO’s, if he chats in China, or someone chats at him from China?

Why customers love Tesla despite its many mistakes | Ars Technica

In a reasonable world, people could acknowledge both Tesla’s huge contribution to advancing electric vehicle technology and the significant ways it has fallen short of its own hype. Unfortunately, the modern Internet is not a reasonable place. The centrifugal force of social media has turned online discussion of Tesla—like most other topics—into an angry, polarized flamewar.

Source: Why customers love Tesla despite its many mistakes | Ars Technica

All I know is that I see a Tesla on the road every time I leave the house, and this is Columbus, Indiana, the home of Cummins. Heck, there’s even a Tesla in the parking lot at the facility I work at. Bold move considering that there’s an entire front row, at a different facility, that is reserved for people who drive diesel Ram trucks.

Tesla is clearly succeeding, given their steep uphill climb against the Big 3. Every car manufacturer has a full-electric in their lineup, and I think the entire automotive industry is about one more battery-tech innovation away from eliminating combustion engines entirely. Buses, cargo trucks, and long haulers are just dominoes in the chain.

For years, lots of people on the left have been freaking out that we have to rid ourselves of gasoline and Diesel engines by way of governmental regulation. They’ve managed to pressure regulators to make emissions requirements so stringent that it’s hampered the entire transportation market for decades. But the answer to getting rid of engines is right here in front of us, and it won’t take heavy-handed regulation. People will want to move to electric, once all the bugs are worked out of the supply chain, and the charging infrastructure is fully in place. I’ve never read an article about someone who drove one, and said that they preferred a gas engine. Everyone who drives one says it’s simply a better way to “car.”

 

Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian as part of going carbon-neutral by 2040 | TechCrunch

Amazon will be stepping up its efforts to reduce its climate impact, CEO Jeff Bezos announced on Thursday. The company will be ordering 100,000 electric delivery trucks from Michigan’s Rivian as part of this commitment, Bezos said.

Source: Amazon orders 100K electric delivery trucks from Rivian as part of going carbon-neutral by 2040 | TechCrunch

A challenger enters the game! I think I remember seeing their consumer camping truck awhile back. I didn’t know they were making delivery trucks. This is big news.

Edward Snowden says the government is in your phone, insists he only wanted to ‘reform’ the NSA

Snowden in an interview from Russia with Brian Williams talked Trump, stealing classified information from the NSA and how cellphones are killing privacy.

Source: Edward Snowden says the government is in your phone, insists he only wanted to ‘reform’ the NSA

“Anything you can do on that device, the attacker ⁠— in this case, the government ⁠— can do,” Snowden claimed. “They can read your e-mail, they can collect every document, they can look at your contact book, they can turn the location services on.”

“They can see anything that is on that phone instantly,” he continued, “and send it back home to the mothership.”

In retrospect, this shouldn’t be surprising, since the government was heavily involved in creating the first cellular networks.

Mark my words: Anything we allow the government to do, and any rights we surrender in the name of catching “the bad guys,” will eventually be used against the general population, because, in the future, everyone will be an enemy of the government for 15 minutes.