digital fabrication, sustainable technology, small scale democracy and speculative fiction
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We at FSFÍ went out to Þingvellir yesterday with our foreign speakers at today’s conference, including John Perry Barlow and Eben Moglen. We sat John down and made this profound video:
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — Sweden’s Parliament narrowly approved a law Wednesday that gives authorities sweeping powers to eavesdrop on all e-mail and telephone traffic that crosses the Nordic nation’s borders.
I urge all Swedish people to start using strong crypto. Download PGP for e-mail, exchange public keys (hold parties!), and use encrypted VoIP rather than the phone system whenever possible. In fact, I don’t just urge Swedish people to do this. I urge everybody to do this.
I am dumbstruck. I just heard. This is BIG. David Davis, for this, I salute you.
Naomi Klein never fails:
Remember how we’ve always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American “homeland security” technologies, pumped up with “war on terror” rhetoric.
Link (Thanks Gummi and Herbert)
Storage is cheap, right? Back when I started using computers there were 320 kilobyte hard plate magnetic disks. Later I was shocked by the Atari ST having a megabyte of RAM (although I suppose I didn’t give it much thought at the time - I was only eight, after all). When I got my first IBM clone, a Hyundai box with a Pentium chip, back in 1996, it had 8 megs of RAM and 800 megs of hard disk space. It had a CD-ROM drive too.
The guy at the computer store claimed I’d never be able to fill the 800 megs. Sometimes when I see that guy today I laugh a bit, deep inside. Storage is cheap, right?
So far this year I’ve lost four gigabytes worth of memory sticks. Another two gigs have been misplaced, but I’m fairly sure I left it plugged into Maria’s computer at the party I was at the other day.
Nowadays we don’t actually need to delete anything. Storage is so cheap we should be able to keep perfect records of everything that transpires in our lives. Sure, data organization is still a bitch, one that Google has nailed pretty well for any identifiable data, but still something a lot of people waste a lot of time on. Do I stick this file in /home/spm or /var? I have /files for relatively large files of a static nature - stuff I don’t change. Stuff like leeched PDFs, BoingBoing TV shows, downloaded TED talks. Stuff I don’t have any reason to change.
Anyway. My current cell phone used to be pretty suave. Now I look at it with moderate disdain: I just realized how many megabytes of data I must have deleted from it. Emptying the text message inbox. Sent items too.
I also just realized that the phone offers no features for organizing such items. The phone book is of limited use. There isn’t message threading, I can’t color code by sender. I can’t star important items. Sure I can push entries into different folders, but that’s of limited use: the phone only offers a fixed set of folders, predefined.
Cell phones have lagged severely behind when it comes to data retention. Fifty years from now the amount of available data from the text-messaging period will be little enough to trivialize the role of communications in our time. What will historians of the future think teenagers did with themselves back when the digital age was coming to fruition?
Cell phone companies haven’t made it easy for people to crypt their stuff. There aren’t very good privacy features, there’s no strong public key stuff bundled. And the memory gets filled up quick. Unreplenishable, scarce.
Does it matter at all? I don’t know. Perhaps I should just press ‘Delete all’ like everybody else and not worry about future history. But that wouldn’t really be my style, now, would it?
Since about 2001 I’ve had my passport in my backpack. It only leaves the backpack to be inspected at airports and occasionally into my jacket if I’m outside of Iceland and not carrying the backpack. But since the U.S. adopted RFID tags in passports and required anybody traveling to or from the U.S. to have the same, I’ve been slightly worried about walking around with my passport. I still do, but I’ve decided that it’s time to do something about it
I clearly can’t just Microwave the RFID, because my ability to enter certain countries is dependant on it working. The first step is to buy or build a passport-sized Faraday cage. It’s not a bad idea at all, because it’ll protect my passport against physical abuse as well as protect my identity. Stylish faraday cages should be easy enough to make by weaving a copper mesh into a felt fabric that can be dyed any which way. But skipping the dye for now I’m going for the most basic. A quick Google search gave me Mobile Cloak, a company that makes Faraday cage bags for passports and other identity-radiating devices, cell phones and other equipment that you don’t want radiating in hospitals for example, and so on. Their bags look good, they’re cheap ($26 + s&h for a passport sized bag), and they’re closed in all dimensions.
When I first thought about this I considered just making a felt bag like the one I keep my dice in. The downside of that would be that it would be open to RF at the top, but that wouldn’t be too bad because it would still block almost everything and RFID readers are highly attenuated.
The second step of this idea, once I’ve protected my own identity, is to figure out how to help other people protect theirs. This blog entry is part of that. Raising awareness is a fickle trade, and I think the best way to do it is to go out to an international airport with a homebrew RFID reader and approach people. “Hello, are you John Smith, born on the seventh of May 1968? Did you know that your passport is broadcasting your identity all over the place?” (I recommend Bruce Schneier’s blog on this.)
But what then? Do you suggest they get a Faraday cage of their own? I wouldn’t want to sit there selling Faraday cages, that isn’t the point. Sign my petition? Puh-lease. The politicians don’t pay any attention to those and besides, the Evil Empire is forcing the RFID’s down our throats.
Figuring out the clever hacks is always the hard part. Lukas Grunwald figured out a way to exploit faulty JPEG2000 decoders in the airport RFID readers, with the potential to execute arbitrary code. Scan my passport and the airport computer system will die. Unfortunately that kind of hack comes with a writeup for terrorism and a jail sentence. Not my cup of tea.
This entire train of thought is going through a very strange tunnel - a Krasnikov Tube - pushing me back in time to 2001, when I was semi-active in the privacy/security game. I can’t remember what my reasons were for dropping out of that part of the digital freedoms activism game for this long, but I’ve got a pretty strong feeling I’m coming back with a vengeance.
I haven’t been the world’s best blogger recently, sorry. I’ve been extremely busy. But I’m going to try and get better - if only by dumping odd links and such on here. In general, if I lapse in my blog activity, it isn’t because I have nothing to say, but rather that I have more to say than usually and just don’t have time to say it. Therefore, if I lapse, poke me.
Gummi pointed out A Short History of Psychological Torture to me. Very interesting. Gummi’s infrequent blog posts are worth reading too - he normally blogs in Icelandic, but if that’s something you can deal with his points hit home every time.
