Month: January 2019

archimaps:

Inside the Salle Labrouste of the old National Library, Paris

kaiamar:

Republicans hate women.

mostlysignssomeportents:

Facebook provides a suite of turnkey app-building tools for Android that are widely used among the most popular Google Play apps, with billions of combined installs; naturally, these tools create incredibly data-hungry defaults in the apps that incorporate them, so that even before you do anything with an app, it has already snaffled up a titanic amount of data, tied it into your Google Ad ID (which is recycled by Facebook to join up data from different sources) and sent it to Facebook.

Needless to say, the GDPR made these practices radioactively illegal, but despite two years’ warning that the GDPR was coming into effect last spring, Facebook dragged another six months out before updating its tools, and these updates still have propagated to all the apps in Google Play.

The data harvested from phones – including, for example, which Bible verses you read using a King James Bible app, and which searches you made on Kayak – is added to your “shadow profile”, and no one (outside of Facebook) knows for sure how that’s used.

You can practice a little self-defense, but it’s cumbersome: root your phone and you can block all network traffic to *.facebook.com; you can also reset your Ad ID and disaggregate the data coming off your phone. I’ve had a poke around but can’t find a tool that resets the Ad ID every 10 seconds – please leave a comment if you know of one.

Frederike Kaltheuner and Christopher Weatherhead from Privacy International gave an outstanding talk on the subject at the Chaos Communications Congress in Leipzig last month; an accompanying paper gives more detail, including methods.

Kaltheuner and Weatherhead were able to gain insight into the apps’ behavior by rooting an Android phone and installing a man-in-the-middle proxy that used forged certificates to intercept and decrypt data on its way to Facebook. Ominously, none of the apps they tested used certificate pinning (let alone certificate transparency) to detect/prevent this kind of man-in-the-middle activity.

It’s not clear whether the same conduct is present in apps in Apple’s App Store; Apple uses unique Ad IDs that are similar to Google/Android’s and could be exploited in the same way. However, Apple’s DRM is designed to make this kind of research much harder. I hope the Privacy International researchers take a crack at it: perhaps they could use simulated, cloud-based Ios devices used for developer testing.

https://boingboing.net/2019/01/28/deletefacebookdelete.html

mostlysignssomeportents:

The Writers Guild of America submitted an exemplary set of comments to the U.S. Government’s Internet Policy Task Force green paper on the future of American copyright. The WGA calls for balance in copyright law, and stresses that censorship, surveillance and chilling of critical speech have no place in copyright policy. It’s amazing to see artists’ groups taking a stand for free expression when it comes to copyright – far too often, arts groups are staunch free speech defenders except when it comes to unproven accusations of copyright infringement, which they hold to be sufficient grounds for arbitrary censorship.

But artists who think the issue through know that communications policies like copyright can’t do their job if they compromise free expression. Artists have a wide variety of business-models and commercial opportunities, but if you’re making art in a way that requires total surveillance and arbitrary censorship, you’re doing art wrong.

Torrentfreak summarizes the best of the WGA submission. It’s an important read: it shows that the entertainment industry’s regulatory agenda doesn’t serve the creators they employ (and exploit).

https://boingboing.net/2014/01/28/writers-guild-of-america-tells.html

mostlysignssomeportents:

Bruce Sterling’s All Things Facebook is a massive linkdump of the latest-and-greatest reasons to delete Facebook (and possibly put Zuck and Sandberg on trial for crimes against humanity). This morning’s post on Facebook’s tracking of non-Facebook users on Android came from here.

Some highlights:

* Facebook is the new crapware [Natasha Lomas/Techcrunch]: “Crapware is named crapware for a reason. Having paid to own hardware, why should people be forever saddled with unwanted software, stub or otherwise?”

* Technological Sovereignty, Vol. 2: “ This book deals with its psychological, social, political, ecological and economic costs while it relates experiences to create Technological Sovereignty.”

* What 284 Days Without Facebook Feels Like (Pure. F*cking. Joy) [Jonathan Greene/Uncalendared] “What I Miss About Facebook? Nothing. Even on the rare occasion when I saw an update that made me happy, that joy was continually outweighed by the deluge of trash sent my way.”

* The fall of Facebook has only begun. [13D Research/Medium]: “The market is drastically underestimating the peril the company is in.”

* Walt Mossberg, Veteran Technology Journalist, Quits Facebook [Daniel Victor/New York Times] “I am doing this — after being on Facebook for nearly 12 years — because my own values and the policies and actions of Facebook have diverged to the point where I’m no longer comfortable here.”

There’s so much more, though.

https://boingboing.net/2019/01/28/zuckermonster-vs-reality.html