#data discrimination

Let's reclaim the language.  Cease speaking of net neutrality - you're going to lose bc few understand the term.

Start calling a spade a spade.  What the FCC and the future employers of FCC commissioners and officers are afraid of is being accused of being discriminatory.  

COOKIES

Based on the NSA presentation „Tor Stinks” (…), Ars Technica decided to look into if it’s possible to identify TOR users based on their Yahoo/Hotmail/Gmail cookies. The article’s answer: only the older versions of TOR have this vulnerability. Other people: the NSA has so, so many other ways to intercept data – and something that we’re just beginning to find out about is hardware backdoors, which are truly scarier than cookies. Nobody is really sure yet, but

„The Times report says, however, that the NSA inserted backdoors into some encryption chips that businesses and governments use to secure their data, and that the agency worked with an unnamed U.S. manufacturer to add backdoors to computer hardware about to be shipped to an overseas target.”

The question is, if the backdoor does exist (which would mean that the NSA compromised security at literally every step of computer-making: does anyone remember how it was said the NSA placed backdoors in encryption standards?), what would stop them from only using them for „overseas targets”? Would it not have been easier to just use the compromised hardware everywhere?

The problem is that finding out if the hardware has backdoor is not easy.

„The Columbia group is currently working with a commercial fab company to test software it designed that can scan designs for possible backdoors. “They are trying out the tool on their line,” Sethumadhavan explains. Called FANCI, the tool analyzes a chip design, simulates how its circuits would operate, and looks for connections or circuits that almost never become active.

Such circuits are suspected of being part of a backdoor, because chip designers avoid wasting space or circuitry in designs since manufacturing chips is expensive.”

In different cookie-related news: it will die, soon. Microsoft is already getting ready for it (Google has started as well, while Apple and Facebook have their “own” trackers): as The Verge reports,

“sources say is working on a technology that could track users across Windows computers, Bing, Internet Explorer, Windows Phone devices, and Xbox consoles in order to serve highly targeted ads.”

The article points out multiple ways why this would be better for Microsoft: one is that cookies lose out on mobile, console, or video streaming activity, and the other is that they could make more money there would be fewer privacy concerns if they were the sole keepers of user data, instead of the multitude of third parties.

Also, lest we forget how bad cookies (and metadata and data analytics are): the Technology Review looks at the civic battle against “data discrimination”, wherein “anonymous data can be mined to reveal health data and other private information”. Kate Crafword, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, proposes that there would be a “due process”, which would give people more legal rights in understanding how data analysis can be used against them.

And really, how?

“purchasing histories, tweets, and demographic, location, and other information gathered about individual Web users, when combined with data from other sources, can result in new kinds of profiles that an employer or landlord might use to deny someone a job or an apartment.”

Crawford mentions something that’s very often disregarded: that not everything gets on social media

“If we start to use social media data sets to take the pulse of a nation or understand a crisis—or actually use it to deploy resources—we are getting a skewed picture of what is happening,” Crawford warned in her talk.”

Interestingly enough, the article makes note of how the Google flu predictions failed last year, when chatter and media coverage on flu were mistaken for complaining about having the flu – which leads us right into our next topic,

TWITTER

, about which Jiwei Li and Claire Cardie believe could be a useful tool in mapping epidemics. While I hope these findings can help save lives, I am also skeptical (after Kate Crawford told me to be): to what extent can we trust these predictions? To what extent to the skewer reality? To what extent can they become reflective of class/wi-fi coverage?

Not from this week, but still interesting about Twitter: it makes $0.00008 every time you look at your feed. Also, the most valuable clients are in the U.S. – I wonder if that because it’s primarily U.S. companies who utilize Twitter, or is there some other reason?

Also, somebody finally figured out how Twitter could make more money. It is still just an educated guess, but

“Presumably, as this strategy evolves, Twitter users could start to see very specific sponsored tweets closely married to a piece of TV content that someone they followed just tweeted about. The targeting of such sponsored tweets could be further refined using insights about the users’ interests, gleaned from his or her tweets, the profiles of people he or she follows, and other sources.”

AMAZON

One article on how Amazon will be the end-all of online retail (especially with the new “Login pay with Amazon”:

“So here’s our prognosis. This new service will start small, US mostly to begin with, but over time will start to gather steam as customers start to learn about the benefits. Some astute crossover marketing, offers, extended customer tie-ins (e.g. Amazon Local coupon deals especially tailored for Login And Pay With Amazon retailers) and more and very soon the roster of retailers sporting the yellow button will literally explode across the web.

At that point, not having the feature will produce such a hit to the bottom line that it will take on a life of its own, and suddenly the online retail world is all Amazon. “

Also, think about all the more information Amazon will have on you. $$$.

And another article on the “notoriously” confrontational culture of Amazon. “The Secrets of Bezos: How Amazon Became the Everything Store” reads like the “Difficult Men” of retail.

IT’S THE FUTURE, THE YEAR 2000

The Technology Review had an article about the open source software that tries to provide a “software platform for linking Internet-connected gadgets, making it easier to control all kinds of smart home devices, regardless of who made them.” Which sure, sounds exciting. But it really becomes sci-fi only at the end of the article: