Read any dangerous books lately?

From Scott Rosenberg:

Among many other unfortunate provisions in the Patriot Act, passed in haste and hysteria in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there’s one that’s especially loathsome to American values: It gives the government an unprecedented and scary carte blanche to paw through library and bookstore records to see what you’ve been reading. If you believe that such records might actually help the government nail the next wave of al-Qaida terrorists, then you don’t have to do anything. But if you believe, as I do, that this particular power is useless for that goal — but might prove handy for John Ashcroft and successors should they decide that, for example, citizens who read too many books about subject X might warrant close surveillance — then you should go here and sign the petition by the Campaign for Reader Privacy, a coalition of booksellers, librarians and writers, to push Congress to change this un-American law.

This particular part of the Patriot Act is one of those stealth provisions that simply invites government abuse. Consider: “The FBI may request the records secretly; it is not required to prove that there is ‘probable cause’ to believe the person whose records are being sought has committed a crime; and the bookseller or librarian who receives an order is prohibited from revealing it to anyone except those whose help is needed to produce the records.”

Inside the mind of the copyright thug

Neatly summarised by this lovely phrase in a very perceptive Groklaw article about Free and Open Source software (FOSS): “Corporate views on IP law might be described, I think, as similar to a 2-year-old’s concept of who gets to play with all the toys in the playground, regardless of who brought them.” Groklaw is a wonderful Blog. The article was a commentary on Gabriella Coleman’s anthropological perspective on the political dimensions of FOSS.

The sartorial is political

It being Sunday, I’ve been reading and posting in my pyjamas. This has attracted a certain amount of local ribald comment about lack of discipline, sloppiness etc. But in fact wearing pyjamas has become a political statement. Eh? Well, you may recall the CBS documentary about George Bush’s national service record that turned out to be based on faked memos. This was exposed by (right-wing) Bloggers, but initially CBS went into denial. And Jonathan Klein, the Chief Exec of 60 Minutes, the offending documentary strand, was foolish enough to observe that, “Bloggers have no checks and balances. [It’s] a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas.” Mr. Klein is now the former Chief Exec of 60 Minutes, and CBS has finally admitted its blunder. Wonder if he is sitting around in his pyjamas.

And while we’re on the subject of slumberware, weren’t the Viet Cong guerrillas who humiliated the US in Vietnam always described by Western media as wearing “black pyjamas”? The moral: beware folks wearing pyjamas! But now I really must get dressed.

How to enjoy hassle-free computing

Q: Who wrote this?

“The single most effective way to avoid viruses and spyware is to simply chuck Windows altogether and buy an Apple Macintosh. There has never been a successful virus written for Mac OS X, and there is almost no spyware that targets the Mac. Plus, the Mac is invulnerable to viruses and spyware written for Windows. Not only is it more secure, but the Mac operating system is more capable, more modern and more attractive than Windows XP, and just as stable.”

Answer: Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal on September 17th.

The Kryptonite bike-lock story

My Observer column about it is here.

Imperial overstretch

As it becomes clear that the US could be stuck in Iraq for decades, I’d been wondering why the issue of conscription hasn’t come up. The answer I guess is that there’s an election on. (But then why isn’t the Kerry campaign talking about it?) After all, one of the things that made Vietnam so traumatic for the US was that most of the soldiers out there (excluding, of course, the two most recent US presidents) were conscripts. The news that continuation of current US policy in Iraq will require conscription would surely be political dynamite. It turns out, though, that there IS a universal conscription Bill before the US Congress. It’s HR163, and it was introduced well over a year ago. To read it, go to the Congressional website and enter HR163 in the search box. Or get the pdf from here. One interesting thing about it is that, next time round, women will have to do military service too. Now there’s sexual equality for you.

The big puzzle (for me, anyway) is why there has been no media or political discussion of this. Is it because the Bill has no chance of becoming law? (I don’t know enough about Congressional procedure to be able to judge; the Congressional website says that HR163 has been referred to the Armed Services Committee — I am not sure what that implies.) It seems unlikely that there’s a media conspiracy to keep quiet about this. And it seems inconceivable that it has just been overlooked. Hmmm…

Nokia’s new camera

From the blurb “The Nokia Remote Camera helps you keep an eye – and an ear – on things. Install it indoors or outdoors, in your home or cottage, warehouse or office. When it detects motion, it snaps a photo (megapixel resolution) and sends it as an MMS to your phone or to an email address. It’s peace of mind in a compact device.”

Er, it’s also a neat piece of snooping technology. It has one-way audio — you can call in and listen.

How to turn someone else’s Windows XP machine into a nice little earner

Fascinating piece in MIT’s Technology Review about the black market in compromised machines. Quote:

“Here’s a new stat for the data-ravenous tech industry: $100 per hour. No, it’s not the new wage programmers charge for their services. Rather, it’s the average going rate for your computer’s resources, sold without your knowledge in shadowy underground markets, according to Vincent Weafer, senior director of Symantec’s security response team.

Weafer is speaking of  ‘bot networks,’ ad-hoc clusters of several thousands computers that — unbeknownst to the user — are being deployed toward some nefarious end. Bot nets originate when a user unwittingly downloads a Trojan horse program containing malicious code. Sometimes the code gets onto a user’s computer when the user clicks on an e-mail attachment. Other times it’s embedded in a virus, and other times it’s masked as a different program and downloaded through peer-to-peer networks or IRC channels. According to a semi-annual report released by Symantec this week, these bot nets, are growing at an incredible rate. Last year, Symantec saw about 2,000 machines per day recruited into these bot armies. In its new report, that figure had grown to 30,000 per day. An unprotected machine will typically be attacked within 20 minutes of being put on the Internet, according to Weafer. ‘The fastest we’ve seen was a machine taken over six seconds after it was connected to the Web,’ he says.”

This is further confirmation that malware authoring has moved from being a hobby to a business. The problem with these Tech Review links is that they change very quickly into subscriber-only ones.

Reset the Election…

…is apparently an option in a drop-down menu on the Diebold central tabulators to be used in many states for the US Presidential election! According to this report,

“Black Box Voting on Wednesday demonstrated two quick ways that ‘an unscrupulous person with no computer skills whatsoever’ could sabotage vote totals, according to Associate Director Andy Stephenson.

The entire voting record can be deleted by choosing ‘reset the election’ on a drop-down menu, he said, or a hacker can destroy a tabulator’s ability to recognize ballots by un-selecting three checkboxes on a program control panel.

Once those changes are made, a hacker could cover his tracks by deleting the audit log, as Baxter did.

The Diebold central tabulators use a program called ‘GEMS’ that saves vote totals in Microsoft Access, a Windows-based database program.

GEMS requires users to enter a password to access the vote totals, but Harris showed that the totals can also be opened — and altered — with Access, without ever running GEMS.

Because Access functions are already built in to the Windows operating system, the totals could be altered even if a computer did not have Access installed on it, said Herbert Thompson, a computer security expert who teaches at the Florida Institute of Technology. He demonstrated how to change vote totals with a six-line program in Microsoft notepad, ‘a simple text editor’ that comes with all copies of Windows.”

Cat Stevens revisited…

Apropos of the decision to exclude him from the US on national insecurity grounds, it’s interesting to see that ‘American idiot’ by Green Day is top of this week’s iTunes download chart — in the US iTunes store!