Microsoft Live has no respect for users privacy choices

I am a member of a small private blog that discusses matters of a highly personal nature. There are a couple dozen members. The blog was hosted on spaces.live.com, which recently upgraded its services/UI. As part of this upgrade, the ability to comment anonymously on blogposts was removed. Anonymous comments can be abused by spammers, I get that, its why I moderate comments here on the Hideaway. But on a blog with restricted membership I think the threat of spam is about nil. Is having a system intelligent enough to respect user privacy in that situation too much to ask for though? Lemme see… IF blog has restricted membership ALLOW blog owner to SELECT whether or not to allow members to comment anonymously. Yeah, that's some wicked complicated logic. But whatever, new policy moving forward, I can live with that. Sucks as people are less likely to comment and engage in supportive discussion - I know I'll think a little more carefully about what I comment since I am personally identified - but at least I know that going in.

But no, it isn't that easy. Because Live went and applied the policy retroactively so all the anonymous comments posted in the past NOW EXPOSE THE COMMENTER'S NAME. Thankfully the blog owner noticed this and shut the blog down completely. Apparently un-selecting the 'use my profile' box and entering a pseudonym for your comment is entirely unsupported now AND they were tracking commenters identity on the back end anyway, so now with no warning what-so-ever to users, the privacy choice users made to un-select that box has been reversed.

Did I mention I'm pissed off?

I will NEVER, NEVER use a Live blog/mashup/cloud offering again. I'd ditch the email too if I didn't need it for my gamertag. Asstards.



~Elphie

Do no evil. Unless its really profitable.

OEM's have long been known to install craplets that frustrate and annoy end users in order to beef up their razor thin hardware margins. These craplets are difficult to remove and generally not well tested or certified by (insert OS developer here), which leads to the potential for them to introduce security vulnerabilities. But now Google has teamed up with Dell to create Yet Another Miserable User Experience.

GOOG - for shame. You have forsaken users for your own avarice.

~Elphie

Why anonymity is necessary

Because in some parts of the world, dissenting opinions can get you put in prison.

From the New York Times:

...Yahoo has come under particularly sharp criticism. Human rights groups say that Yahoo has helped identify at least four people, including the journalist Shi Tao in 2004, who have since been imprisoned for voicing dissent in cyberspace.

In other parts of the world, you can lose your job. oh wait, that's right here... If you are hard core about protecting your anonymity, here are a few tips from the EFF.

~Elphie

RFID Guardian

This isn't super new, but I just ran across it last week. Pretty interesting, if you are paranoid about RFID security like I am.

The RFID Guardian Project is a collaborative project focused upon providing security and privacy in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) systems. The goals of our project are to:
Investigate the security and privacy threats faced by RFID systems
Design and implement real solutions against these threats
Investigate the associated technological and legal issues
The namesake of our project is the RFID Guardian: a mobile battery-powered device that offers personal RFID security and privacy management. One the focuses of our project is to build an RFID Guardian prototype.

Our group also performed the first-ever research on RFID Malware.

~Elphie

AAAAAAAAARGH!!

From the headlines... Bloggers call for a code of manners? Call for an end to anonymous commenting? (remember, people think anonymity is the enemy here)

I agree, bloggers should be able to delete comments from their blogs without facing accusations of censorship - IF the comments are offensive or pure flame-bait without merit. Censorship happens when you delete comments that merely disagree with you. I don't think rampant comment censorship is spawning the Blog Civility movement though.

I'm with Scoble, the proposed 'code of manners' is not something I'm willing to sign on for. Not because I'm pro-harassment, but because I'm anti-regulation, and the crazy social pressure that is resulting from it. What's more, I'm not willing to post their stupid 'Anything Goes' logo on my site, because that suggests that I recognize their program's legitimacy in policing the manners of the blogosphere. Bullshit. And yes, Mr. O'Reilly, I'd be willing to say that to you in person.

Bloggers are not so freaking special that they need a code of manners to govern their conduct. Civility cannot be regulated into existence. What we need is some basic courtesy in the world. Disagreements are disagreements. You don't post photos of the people you dislike in violent or sexually explicit ways, you don't drag their families into it, you don't make threats. Grow up people. It's called the Golden Rule. Check it out.

annoyed,
~Elphie

not everyone who owns a ski mask is a criminal

ok, so that is a ridiculous blog title. but it illustrates the dangerous oversimplification we tend to fall into when discussing societal issues.

Mike Rothman says anonymity is for cowards. To borrow a quote, I call bullshit on that. Anonymity is nothing more than a technique to promote privacy and safety. Do cowards use it to threaten and intimidate others? Yes. Do criminals use it to carry out illegal action? Yes. But that doesn't make everyone who tries to protect their privacy a coward or a criminal. People have a right to share their opinions without advertising their personal information to the world. Many people don't want their personal opinions to be misquoted or presented as if they are officially representing their employer – should they be forced to stay out of the public discussion of a topic as a result? Anonymity has often been used by people who fear retribution from those who disagree or disapprove of their statements or philosophies. All these people deserve anonymity and to not be called cowardly.

Being anonymous is a choice, one that becomes even more attractive when you see what has happened to Kathy Sierra. If she blogged anonymously, she might not feel in as much danger as she does now. Am I blaming her? Absolutely not. She has a right to speak her mind openly without being threatened and abused, and the people who have harassed her should be held accountable. I can't imagine being in her position, I'd be terrified out of my mind. But that is one of the reasons that I try to retain some anonymity.

The Kathy Sierra situation has ignited the blogosphere in a way that HD Moore and his new tool Torment haven't. Earlier this month HD announced a rough set of tools that allows anyone operating a Tor server to attempt to track the source of network data. Moore's goal in creating the tool was to track criminals such as child pornographers, and he says he plans to turn the tools over to law enforcement to use. Can his tool be mis-used and the personal privacy of legitimate Tor users be compromised? Yes, sort of. (read the entire article to see some of the limitations of the tool). Is everyone who uses Tor a criminal? No, that is not what anyone is saying here - and if you are, then shame on you for oversimplifying a complex social issue.

Until we establish a utopian nirvana where anyone can trust everyone, and honest disagreements don't result in retribution/bloodshed, there will always be a need for anonymity. The key is to find ways to work together to protect innocent users while making it possible to catch and stop the people who have figured out how to leverage anonymity and privacy tools for criminal or abusive purposes.

~Elphie

Justice Department, internet surveillance, and security theater...

Last week I read that the Bush administration has accelerated its Internet surveillance push by proposing that Web sites must keep records of who uploads photographs or videos in case police determine the content is illegal and choose to investigate.

First, there are serious privacy concerns here. To be clear, I am all for catching criminals, I just don't like the idea of this info being datamined under the very broad auspices of the Patriot Act. Think I'm paranoid?

Often invoking terrorism and child pornography as justifications, the administration has argued that Internet providers must install backdoors for surveillance and has called for routers to be redesigned for easier eavesdropping.

yeah, there is a reason I don't fully trust our government. Plus, most web businesses already have healthy data retention policies and have a strong track record of responding to subpoenas from law enforcement.

But I also feel like it is a no brainer to say this is little more than security theater, something that will inconvenience honest folks, and potentially invade their privacy and civil rights. Yes, some bad people will go to jail for child porn. But only those who don't do their porn uploads from a university or public library. That's right, the proposal excludes them. Why? Because they are safe already from such things? Because they already do user logging of uploads? no.

"There's a PR concern with including the libraries, so we're not going to include them," the participant quoted the Justice Department as saying. "We know we're going to get a pushback, so we're not going to do that."

That's right, too much pushback. So we won't do it.

If it isn't an important enough issue to force in libraries, why are we even discussing the issue anywhere else? Either it is important, or it isn't. Pick one.

~Elphie

Internet mental health index

From a pure geek perspective this is one of the coolest things I've seen on the internet lately.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Blog data comes from a variety of online sources, including LiveJournal, MSN Spaces, MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, Feedster, Ice Rocket, and Google. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

Pretty neat technology, eh? As a result of the We Feel Fine project, one is reminded that there are likely a number of other people around the world who feel the same way you do - something often forgotten in monocultures and regional/demographic sub-cultures of multi-cultural populations. If urban Americans and rural Chinese share some of the same experiences and emotions, maybe that means that on the micro-societal level the goths and the jocks really aren't that different underneath the eyeliner and jerseys? We could have cats and dogs living together before you know it as we break down the stereotypes that separate us and start building relationships on our shared human experience!

Unfortunately, before we all break out into song and belt out a verse of "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing", there is inevitably a downside to this. I'm a bit freaked out by the privacy aspect of such a massive data collection endeavor.

Because a high percentage of all blogs are hosted by one of several large blogging companies (Blogger, MySpace, MSN Spaces, LiveJournal, etc), the URL format of many blog posts can be used to extract the username of the post's author. Given the author's username, we can automatically traverse the given blogging site to find that user's profile page. From the profile page, we can often extract the age, gender, country, state, and city of the blog's owner. Given the country, state, and city, we can then retrieve the local weather conditions for that city at the time the post was written. We extract and save as much of this information as we can, along with the post.

They also save any photo associated with the post. I'm suddenly having second (well, okay, third) thoughts about blogging at all. If nothing else now I've got an F word I'll do my best to avoid using here in the future.

~Elphie

I always feel like somebody's watching me*

Disney Phone Service For Kids Has Parents In Mind
Wall Street Journal - 4/5/2006
Disney is unveiling a mobile cellphone service that gives parents the ability to track the whereabouts of their children and control how and when they use their phone.

OK, so maybe I'm more paranoid about privacy than the average parent. But I don't really want Disney to know/have access to where kids go and tracking their habits or patterns. That seems like an insanely rich data source for planning future marketing etc of their other products. Not to mention I think is is creepy that they could have a captive audience to push sms messages to about their new theme park rides or movies or toy in their "exclusive content for both kids and parents". I'm not anti-Disney, I'd be just as weirded out if Nickelodeon or Sesame Street were doing this...

Maybe we should all get a few and start going to shooting ranges, military bases, porn shops, fetish clubs, strip bars, casinos, etc just to screw with their data... give them to truckers on trans-continential routes just for giggles...

~Elphie

*Rockwell, 1984

I feel so much safer...

2 air marshals plead guilty to drug smuggling
Marshals accepted $15,000 in return for carrying cocaine on Vegas flight

The marshals admitted they accepted $15,000 to use their positions as air marshals to bypass airport security and smuggle 15 pounds of cocaine.

I feel so much safer knowing I get the full body grope, er, patdown, every time I fly to make sure I don't have a shiv hidden in my underwire bra, while these guys who are paid law enforcement officials (who presumably passed background checks to get their jobs) circumvent security screening with the substance they've been told is cocaine. Because you can always trust criminals. If the drug dealers said it was cocaine, I'm sure it was. There wouldn't have been anything else hidden in that package. The only criminals that create elaborate double-cross diversions to hide a more heinous crime are on fictional TV shows, right?

And while we are talking about hiding things from people... why not put that secret passageway in your house like you've always dreamed of? Colonel Mustard won't find you with that damn lead pipe as you covertly move from the study to the kitchen! DIY kits start at just $1500, though I'm guessing that is just for a fancy bookcase with hidden space behind it, not a full room-to-room passage. Still, how cool would it be to twist a candlestick and have your fireplace rotate open to reveal a hidden room? The challenge would be to not show it off to all your geek friends and defeat the purpose of a SECRET room. Of course if all your plushophilia stuff is hidden in there, maybe you'll be extra motivated to keep it secret after all...

~Elphie