I have a confession to make. Hollywood has always fascinated me. Not because of the larger-than-life
stories they come up with. But because of the enormous machinery that churns out a movie. To the
utter frustration of my family, I always stay back at the end of a movie, looking at all the credits
which flash by - to see the rest of the iceberg under the tip. The thousands of people who made this
movie happen, out of which only a fraction gets the world wide adulation, but all of them were
needed to make it happen.
Apple has patented a piece of technology which would allow government and
police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs,
from any public gathering or venue they deem “sensitive”, and “protected from
externalities.”
In other words, these powers will have control over what can and cannot be
documented on wireless devices during any public event.
And while the company says the affected sites are to be mostly cinemas,
theaters, concert grounds and similar locations, Apple Inc. also says “covert
police or government operations may require complete ‘blackout’ conditions.”
Who said the field of security cannot have humour! An Android app to
control the commode in Japan (you know the
land of fully programmable toilets, I kid you not) has announced a
vulnerability because the bluetooth pairing code is hardcoded.
Curious about several peculiar Apple related 404 errors for images in my web
server logs, I decided to find what is going on, and became knowledgeable about
yet another nugget that I really didn’t want to know. (sigh)
Just now read a rather disturbing article from Sophos security. The
article describes the interpretation of the law by NSA and some of the internal
policies that they use in surveillance.
They also reveal that courts don’t always determine who’s targeted for
surveillance because that discretion is practiced by the NSA’s own analysts,
with only a percentage of decisions being reviewed by regular internal audits.
To make those decisions, NSA analysts use information including IP addresses,
potential targets’ statements, and public information and data collected by
other agencies.
A scene from the ‘Touch of Evil’ (1958). Flickr image by Luisru León
In this day and age of the surveillance state, a quotation worth remembering
from the legendary Orson Welles over 50 years back.
A policeman's job is only easy in a police state.
-- Charlton Heston as Mike Vargas in the movie "Touch of Evil"(1958),
Orson Welles (screenwriter and director)
Curiously, a similar statement was made over a decade back, in fact a couple of
years before 9/11, before the world changed, or actually before the United
States’ war on terror changed the world.
High Scalability had an interesting link today about a project that combines Raspberry
PI, btsync and owncloud to create essentially a personal Dropbox
replacement with none of the costs or the storage limitation. Also very importantly, keeping up with
the hot topic nowadays, the peace of mind from knowing that you are not making it easy for
intelligence agencies to go through your most important and personal data.
Another “hey there is a term for it” moment today!
Years ago when I was running a business of my own, my intention was never to be
wildly successful. All I wanted to do was to make my ends meet, learn a lot of
stuff, do a lot of work on stuff that really interested me, and work in a way
that made sense. After giving this some time, and when I am somewhat
self-sustaining, the next stage was to organically scale up with a set of
productized services (as an Opensource focused company normally does) which
will fund the next stage which was to come out with actual products which really
rakes in the moolah. Being an overnight sensation was neither my style, nor did
I consider it practical.
In a sensational release yesterday, Guardian has revealed scary
details of how Microsoft has been collaborating with NSA to give access to its
customer data for PRISM purposes. The extent of privacy breach is shocking:
There is no doubt that Wordpress is a wonderful blogging system. But being a
dynamically generated website, all the nightmares of scripting languages kick
in. Patches come regularly to Wordpress and until you login and update, it keeps
nagging you inside and ruins your happiness.
There is an alternative - hosting on wordpress.com directly. But not only does
it cost unnecessary money (I already have a shared hosting account), it is also
severely limited by what you can run on it - no plugins or themes or custom
javascript other than what is provided.
