Daily Archives: August 15, 2010

A taxonomy of social networking data

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Bruce Schneier has come up with what seems to me to be a really useful taxonomy — first presented at the Internet Governance Forum meeting last November, and again — revised — at an OECD workshop on the role of Internet intermediaries in June.

1. Service data is the data you give to a social networking site in order to use it. Such data might include your legal name, your age, and your credit-card number.

2. Disclosed data is what you post on your own pages: blog entries, photographs, messages, comments, and so on.

3. Entrusted data is what you post on other people’s pages. It’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over the data once you post it — another user does.

4. Incidental data is what other people post about you: a paragraph about you that someone else writes, a picture of you that someone else takes and posts. Again, it’s basically the same stuff as disclosed data, but the difference is that you don’t have control over it, and you didn’t create it in the first place.

5. Behavioral data is data the site collects about your habits by recording what you do and who you do it with. It might include games you play, topics you write about, news articles you access (and what that says about your political leanings), and so on.

6. Derived data is data about you that is derived from all the other data. For example, if 80 percent of your friends self-identify as gay, you’re likely gay yourself.

Cracking the U.S. Cyber Command logo

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This is lovely.

A security researcher said on Thursday he was the first to crack the code embedded in the seal of the U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom), the group responsible for protecting the country’s military networks from attack.

Sean-Paul Correll, a threat researcher with antivirus vendor Panda Security, said that the characters visible in a gold ring on Cybercom’s official seal represent the MD5 hash of the group’s mission statement.* MD5 is a 128-bit cryptographic hash most often used to verify file integrity.

A representative of Cybercom confirmed that Correll had it right. “Mr. Correll is correct…it’s a MD5 hash,” said Lt. Commander Steve Curry of the U.S. Navy, in an e-mail.

* Footnote: According to Wikipedia, the aforementioned ‘mission’ statement reads: “USCYBERCOM plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes and conducts activities to: direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and; prepare to, and when directed, conduct full spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.”

Is the Net changing the way we think?

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To mark the publication of Nick Carr’s new book, the Observer decided to ask some UK experts about his thesis. I wrote the scene-setting piece for the feature — which you can find here.

It’s easy to dismiss Carr’s concern as just the latest episode of the moral panic that always accompanies the arrival of a new communications technology. People fretted about printing, photography, the telephone and television in analogous ways. It even bothered Plato, who argued that the technology of writing would destroy the art of remembering.

But just because fears recur doesn’t mean that they aren’t valid. There’s no doubt that communications technologies shape and reshape society – just look at the impact that printing and the broadcast media have had on our world. The question that we couldn’t answer before now was whether these technologies could also reshape us. Carr argues that modern neuroscience, which has revealed the ‘plasticity’ of the human brain, shows that our habitual practices can actually change our neuronal structures. The brains of illiterate people, for example, are structurally different from those of people who can read. So if the technology of printing – and its concomitant requirement to learn to read – could shape human brains, then surely it’s logical to assume that our addiction to networking technology will do something similar?