State Surveillance on the Internet

[Tomas]

.

A Work By Francisco Javier Bernal

Big Brother Capabilities in an Online World

http://www.bernal.co.uk

.

[PreppyBoy]

Its already happening.

With more and more people-growing dependant on Computers, the outcome is not surprising.

[HUNTEDvsINVIS]

Yeah, I keep on getting these "Warning: Your privacy is being threatened" messages when I switch on my computer. Is this normal? Wouln't be surprised if the university is bugging my computer because everyone here says I am weird and expresses deep concern for my odd socialist tendencies. Words like " Very rich people are weaklings, they need money to feel secure and special" gets me into a lot of trouble. Darn it, if I could only fit into the systems of life.

[Katy]

You might have a spyware type thing telling you that to try to get you to download a program to get rid of it or something. That happened to me at one point - caused a bloody nightmare trying to get rid of the whole thing.

[Faust]

Yeah, I keep on getting these "Warning: Your privacy is being threatened" messages when I switch on my computer. Is this normal? Wouln't be surprised if the university is bugging my computer because everyone here says I am weird and expresses deep concern for my odd socialist tendencies. Words like " Very rich people are weaklings, they need money to feel secure and special" gets me into a lot of trouble. Darn it, if I could only fit into the systems of life.

Socialism? Pft, that has its own terrible problems.

[Dan Rowden]

Socialism's only problem is human nature. If it wasn't for that it'd be dandy.

[HUNTEDvsINVIS]

I am all for difference in societies, but everyone should theoretically be warm, safe and happy. Sure, life would not be the same without the rich people and their interesting behaviour, they give variety and excitement to life. But the basic needs of people should be worked on, greater access to food, medical attention, intellectual stimulation, that type of thing.

[Tomas]

.

British Revolution (photos)

The people are burning surveillance cameras (photos)

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2007/12/ ... itish.html

.

[Dave Toast]

They're not surveillance cameras Thomas, they're GATSOs - speeding enforcement cameras. They're seen as revenue generators for the treasury/police/local authorities and rightly so but this is no romanticised revolution against big brother watching us. It's just people who don't like the way GATSOs are used, people who've been hit in the pocket by them too many times and/or people who don't want to have to slow down to 30mph 5 or 6 times on every 5 minute journey they make.

[sagerage]

FUCK YOU!!!!

[Tomas]

.


Dave Toast - They're not surveillance cameras Thomas,

-tomas-
There isn't a letter 'H" in my name... it's pronounced Toe-mass (Tow-mass)... but another 'Tomas' I met said his parents said it is "Toe-Moss" (Tow-Moss).


-Wheaties-
they're GATSOs - speeding enforcement cameras.

-tomas-
Believe me, I know what they are, scads of these in the US.




-Wheaties-
They're seen as revenue generators for the treasury/police/local authorities and rightly so but this is no romanticised revolution against big brother watching us.

-tomas-
I don't have a pro/con argument regarding this revenue-boosters for the state apparatchik. (In the end, some corporation is making some money servicing these boxes)
Here in the States, the occasional newsclipping is where they are shot up by some "gun crazy" fellow. Being from North Dakota, I sympathize for the "gun crazy" :-)




-Wheaties-
It's just people who don't like the way GATSOs are used, people who've been hit in the pocket by them too many times and/or people who don't want to have to slow down to 30mph 5 or 6 times on every 5 minute journey they make.

-tomas-
If they're being torched, obviously some people aren't happy about this the (sad state of affairs) people have less and less of a voice at council meetings. The higher-up one goes in political circle jerks, the more-deaf these 'elected representatives' become to the taxpaying public.

In the end, swallow your pride and pay the pied-piper (follow me). Better than 30 days in the hole.


Tomas (the tank)
VietNam veteran - 1971

.

[daybrown]

Linux is socialism; Windows is capitalism. Which do you trust?

[Tomas]

.

Will Big Brother finally arrive in 2008?

Thomas Jefferson told us that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We must decide whether we will allow the government to use technology to restrain us or whether we will use technology to restrain the government.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne ... er_fin.htm

.

[brokenhead]

Linux is socialism; Windows is capitalism. Which do you trust?

Trust to do what?

My linux partition can do most of what my Windows does, but that's a recent thing. I've been trying to find a linux distro advanced enough for years now.

And linux is largely free. But you get what you pay for.

Actually, most of my Windows setup is free, too, since I have no qualms about, um, evaluating software for extended periods of time. You can get what you don't pay for. What I do is donate to software manufacturers if I find their products worthwhile.

The reason I don't trust MS is that the code is so immense, complex, and arcane, even to the developers themselves. I am in the IT field and have had to deal with MS reps under service contracts and often find I know more than they do about day-to-day issues with their software.

Which leads me to question: Since some flavor of Windows is on 90% of business and private machines, how do you know all of the OS's behavior is above-board? It constantly contacts Micrsoft over your Internet connection, as any firewall will tell you. How do you know that they haven't rigged a sample of their products to gather information from corporate and home installations and pass it on to MS? If they were interested in obtaining trend data, how difficult would it be? Third-party programs do it all the time.

[daybrown]

.

Will Big Brother finally arrive in 2008?

Thomas Jefferson told us that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We must decide whether we will allow the government to use technology to restrain us or whether we will use technology to restrain the government.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne ... er_fin.htm

.

Only an ignorant fool would not be worried. But the power elites are worried also. Information technology goes in both directions, from the bottom to the top, and top to the bottom, with no means that I can see for anyone to really control the flow. Yes, privacy is history; but the private lives of the elites risk exposure as well.

Geeks know how to communicate in ways that the "intelligence community" does not know about. And whatever system the latter uses is subject to being cracked by the geeks. I, for instance, know how to boot a pc off a floppy to get online. With the write tab locked, it activates a switch in the drive so that no matter what the software does, it cannot physically alter the software on the boot floppy.

I know how to connect with another pc at other locations, all over the globe that none of the technologies Big Brother, or anyone else could tap into to monitor the data. There are millions of geeks who know how to do this. Conversely, the elites must use geeks to maintain their networks, and those geeks have ways of making copies of data and moving them beyond the pale.

Basically, the elites are so wrapped up in trying to control others, they've not learned to control themselves to operate in a fashion that cannot be hacked into. I am much more worried that the elites will loose such control as they now have as a result of their own greed and incompetence. That could result in breakdowns of the New World Order that cascade into global financial panic, revolution, and anarchy.

With regard to Microsoft and Linux, only the latter has published source code, which is subject to peer review giving us some confidence that there are those, familiar with one part or other, who understand how it works. Nobody can plant sabotage software in open source without others wondering what that section of code is doing there.

Proprietary software houses have been discovered to have stolen code. Long ago, programmers realized this kind of thing was going on, and therefore inserted 'back doors', special undocumented command sequences to identify where the code was being used. If you find that to be the case, its a simple matter to install calls to other subroutines in other places to do whatever comes to mind.

My own website, http://daybrown.org uses handwired html that is so simple any competent webmaster can look at it and see there is no risk of sabotage software. Much of the text presented is as .png or .gif, which as far as the browser is concerned, are only graphic images with no way to install subroutine calls.

I know the font looks strange, but nobody can cut and paste it out of context; its not html; the filled voids of the consonants means that OCR software wont work either. You can copy it, but you havta type it out, or far simpler, simply copy the entire graphic or link to the page.

If private messages were sent as ANZI screenshots, the surveillance software would go nuts. They'd havta hire someone to look at every graphic to read it. No way to have software look for suspicious sequences of words.

[Ryan Rudolph]

Dan wrote:

Socialism's only problem is human nature. If it wasn't for that it'd be dandy.

Its not just human nature, there are basic economic reasons as to why socialism is inferior to total privatization. For instance: if the government has a monopoly on a certain service whether it be road construction, mail delivery or education, then there is no invisible hand or competitive pressure forcing them improve, downsize, and become more efficient, so the end result is that you end up with an overpriced and relatively poor service compared to what could be if the service was privatized, and many competiting companies were involved. Not to mention that total privatization of a service better promotes technological innovation compared to if the Nanny state provides it to the people.

This is why libertarianism is looking more appealing to me all the time. I think the Ron Pauls, Miltion Friedmans, and Walter Blocks have converted me....

[brokenhead]

.

Will Big Brother finally arrive in 2008?

Thomas Jefferson told us that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. We must decide whether we will allow the government to use technology to restrain us or whether we will use technology to restrain the government.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne ... er_fin.htm

.

Tomas, Big Brother is here and it's about time.

You do know that the Patriot* Act has spawned unprecedented eavesdropping on Internet traffic, email in particular? And that's just by the Feds.

Big Brother is where you work.

I worked for a long time in IT at a Major Pharmaceutical Company, and I was surprised at the scrutiny to which employees' everyday communication was subjected. People belive for some unfathomable reason that their email is "theirs" and therefore somehow private. It is not. People seem to understand that personal phone calls are only tolerated to the extent of their employer's grace. Yet these same people will put things in writing to send electronically to other employees and to persons outside the workplace.

I have been an email administrator. Do I have to tell people how easy it is for the Powers That Be to read their messages? Personally, I had insufficient time to read my own email, let alone that of others. But I easily could have, and no one would have known or questioned me if they had known. I was in charge. But I was not the PTB, ultimately. I answered to them. The Security Department always had top priority. In fact, the only way I could have been fired is if I read a message store that Security had requested me to provide to it. PTB are paid to be paranoid. If they think you are supplying corporate info to the competition, or are considering it, or considering joining them, every single email you have ever written and that is still recorded somewhere will be examined minutely, make no mistake.

Unless you own your own business, BB is watching every move you make. It is so much easier these days to gather up and use the rope that people seem intent on supplying for their own hangings.

*FYI - "Patriot" is an acronym for "Providing All Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism."

[brad walker]

Nobody can plant sabotage software in open source without others wondering what that section of code is doing there.

False. Reflections on Trusting Trust

[brokenhead]

No way to have software look for suspicious sequences of words.

I think you are wrong there, daybrown. That's exactly what software can do, among other things, NTS.

[Laird]

Thanks for that link, brad - I've read it before but it was just as good on a second reading.

I've been using (and coding under) Linux on and off since 1995 and I'm encouraged by its increasing popularity. Being enamoured of geeky ways I stick with the more technical distributions (I run Gentoo at home) so I don't really know how far it's come for non-technical folks who just want their damn computer to work without having to open up a shell, look up a manpage listing and figure out which parameters to feed to the command. The ultimate distribution would have a graphical user interface (GUI) overlay for all components of the system, working in synergy with the existing textual interfaces so that an experienced user could at any time switch to the command line and optionally back again to the graphical interface with their changes reflected there. Occasionally I search for these GUIs and often they're there to be found but sometimes I'm disappointed by their quality. I don't know whether Linux will ever be 100% viable for casual, non-technical users - I suspect that there will be (or perhaps already are) versions of it that are suitable but that rely for user-friendliness on proprietary interfaces that cost money.

In terms of the risk of a trojan horse of the type that Ken Thompson talks about in his address existing in Linux/GNU software I would rate it as very low. From what I understand of him, Richard Stallman (rms) is a highly idealistic man who values software freedom highly, and he being the original programmer of core GNU software such as gcc, the primary Linux C compiler, I would be extremely surprised to find that he had acted in dischord with his ideals by inserting code that abrogates the user's freedom/security. But hey, anything's possible. And actually, I've just read on the Wikipedia page documenting gcc that rms "extended an existing compiler to compile C", but it doesn't say who created that existing compiler so I suppose that there's a small (IMO vanishingly small) risk of something malicious coming through there.

I haven't read the links posted in this thread so I will refrain from comment on the main topic. I might read them later and perhaps have something to say then.

[hsandman]

Censorship is not only for teevee in Australia.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/ ... 61,00.html

ps. The nice guys at the nsa are looking after you too amrikans :-).

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2 ... cro_1.html

[brokenhead]

I don't know whether Linux will ever be 100% viable for casual, non-technical users - I suspect that there will be (or perhaps already are) versions of it that are suitable but that rely for user-friendliness on proprietary interfaces that cost money.

Ubuntu is nearly there, Laird. It's a snap to install, its update procedures are quicker and more clear-cut than MS, and yet you can still get geeky. Casual, non-technical users would be its best target, IMO. If you want the latest and greatest Soundforge, for example, you are not casual enough for Ubuntu or any Linux. If by casual you mean, connect to the Internet, play videos and music, use email, and don't require cutting edge from anything, Ubuntu is already that.

[Laird]

Yes that's what I meant by casual, in addition to word processing and spreadsheets which I already know that Linux supports handsomely. I'm glad to hear that there's a very-close-to-truly-user-friendly Linux distro - I've heard of Ubuntu before but haven't checked it out yet. Go that penguin!

[daybrown]

Nobody can plant sabotage software in open source without others wondering what that section of code is doing there.

False. Reflections on Trusting Trust

I know where he's coming from, but dont buy it. Its not that self replicating code cannot be written, its that there's been so much effort trying to produce the fastest, most robust, concise, and understandable source code that has been going on so long that the extra length and longer performance time of code including sabotage software would be noticed.

As he notes at the outset, someone else produced the same code he did, and for the same reason. looking for the best way to do it. Including any form of sabotage software does not meet that test. I myself, work in assembly. http://www.daybrown.org/anzi/anzi.html and example of which you can see here.

If you understand assy, you can see how it works, and see it does not have any room for sabotage software. Linux is built up out of a collection of such small programs that have been around forever. And for each of them, there have always been tools to evaluate how fast they ran. And efforts to find code that ran faster. Which necessarily cannot include non-functional sabotage code that just takes up space.

What I do worry about, with both windows and Linux, is some unforeseen interaction among the myriads of modules, not out of any deliberate effort, but merely Murphy's law. Its one of the reasons I still use dos in my own work. Even the latest, DRDOS 7, is only 55k. There simply isnt room in such compact hardwired assy for sabotage software, and when it calls up a driver, for the mouse, video, or whatever, there are not that many of them that you cant identify problems. The number of possible unforeseen interactions is low enuf to be a real number.

Worrisome also is stuff like Java, software that is automatically downloaded from a remote and run on your PC, That's asking for it. The firewalls are spozed to look that over, but someone may come up with a method that does not compile into anything that looks dangerous until it is run, and even then, may only do so on the nth time. But one way to cope with that is to use something like Knoppix, in which the boot kernel is on a CD or locked floppy that no sabotage software could possibly alter.

Lastly, and perhaps most dangerous are the plans for your PC to be no more than a dumb terminal with all the programs on a central server. Big Brother would just love that, but so would those who wish to destroy him. The only alternative is to get out your old 56k dialup modem and use the BBS software to use the plain old telephone system to communicate with whoever you find agreeable and useful. Even if Big Brother put a tap on your line, all he'd hear is meaningless white noise.

[daybrown]

Yes that's what I meant by casual, in addition to word processing and spreadsheets which I already know that Linux supports handsomely. I'm glad to hear that there's a very-close-to-truly-user-friendly Linux distro - I've heard of Ubuntu before but haven't checked it out yet. Go that penguin!

I've tried it, it is nice, but since I have other drives with other operating systems, I prefer Xandros.

When it boots, it finds all the other drives and partitions on the PC and makes all the files on them, whether Linux, Windows, or DOS, available with the file manager. Xandros also has a thing called CROSSOVER which runs all the windows software I tried on it. I dont much care to do that cause it takes a few minutes to load the windows emulator. But that mite not be a problem with the newer faster systems.

The other thing I like about Xandros is that you can have it default to your username and then only require a [cr] not the rest of a password to pull up your desktop. I have a personal computer which nobody else uses, so I hate the inconvenience of 'logging on'. I like dos cause when I turn it on, and come back with my coffee, my desktop is sitting there. No username, no password, no nuttin.

If Xandros finds a dos or windows drive it'll ask, and wait as many seconds as you setup, for it to boot into some other OS. Setting up a system is easier than windows too; it dont ask for the damn registration number. Xandros is based on Corel's debian distro; some of us remember Corel as producing very nice apps and interfaces, and Xandros inherited that code and tradition.