In ACLU lawsuit, scientist demolishes NSA’s “It’s just metadata” excuse

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Storage and data-mining have come a long way in the past 35 years, Felten notes, and metadata is uniquely easy to analyze—unlike the complicated data of a call itself, with variations in language, voice, and conversation style. “This newfound data storage capacity has led to new ways of exploiting the digital record,” writes Felten. “Sophisticated computing tools permit the analysis of large datasets to identify embedded patterns and relationships, including personal details, habits, and behaviors.”

via In ACLU lawsuit, scientist demolishes NSA’s “It’s just metadata” excuse | Ars Technica.

I remember Ed Felton as being one of the leading researchers who uncovered the Sony rootkit fiasco.  Many years ago Sony included a rootkit installer that would install whenever someone played one of their CDs on a Windows PC.  Felton’s blog at the time covered that situation well.

Patent troll backs down, agrees to stop suing public transit agencies

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Unfortunately, ArrivalStar’s many targets in the private sector are going to have to continue to grapple with the litigious patent-holding company. ArrivalStar has never taken its patents anywhere near a trial, and hardly any of its lawsuits even go beyond early stages of litigation. With today’s settlement, ArrivalStar can continue avoiding any rigorous testing of its patents.

via Patent troll backs down, agrees to stop suing public transit agencies | Ars Technica.

Chicago startup Doggyloot raises $2.5M in funding

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Doggyloot, which offers deals on pet products for members and sells other items on a subscription basis, grew out of Dashmob, a now-defunct Sandbox company focused on highlighting real-time, location-based deals at nearby merchants.

via Chicago startup Doggyloot raises $2.5M in funding – chicagotribune.com.

Interesting how this article hardly gets into specifics as to what Doggyloot actually does.

What is XaaS (anything as a service)?

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XaaS is a collective term said to stand for a number of things including “X as a service,” “anything as a service” or “everything as a service.” The acronym refers to an increasing number of services that are delivered over the Internet rather than provided locally or on-site. XaaS is the essence of cloud computing.

via What is XaaS (anything as a service)? – Definition from WhatIs.com.

Using Metadata to find Paul Revere

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Rest assured that we only collected metadata on these people, and no actual conversations were recorded or meetings transcribed. All I know is whether someone was a member of an organization or not. Surely this is but a small encroachment on the freedom of the Crown’s subjects. I have been asked, on the basis of this poor information, to present some names for our field agents in the Colonies to work with. It seems an unlikely task.

If you want to follow along yourself, there is a secret repository containing the data and the appropriate commands for your portable analytical engine.

via Using Metadata to find Paul Revere – Kieran Healy.

Groklaw – Forced Exposure ~pj

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Harvard’s Berkman Center had an online class on cybersecurity and internet privacy some years ago, and the resources of the class are still online. It was about how to enhance privacy in an online world, speaking of quaint, with titles of articles like, “Is Big Brother Listening?”

And how.

You’ll find all the laws in the US related to privacy and surveillance there. Not that anyone seems to follow any laws that get in their way these days. Or if they find they need a law to make conduct lawful, they just write a new law or reinterpret an old one and keep on going. That’s not the rule of law as I understood the term.

via Groklaw – Forced Exposure ~pj.

The last days of Unix

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Errol Rasit, research director at Gartner, concurs that the primary cause of Unix weakness over the past decade is migration from the RISC platform to x86-processor based alternatives, which can run many Unix workloads, usually at attractive price/performance ratios. Today, x86 technology attracts most new deployments and innovation, such as cloud computing and fabric-based computing, which further validates the technology as a preferred platform.

via The last days of Unix – Network World.

ZMap · The Internet Scanner

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ZMap is an open-source network scanner that enables researchers to easily perform Internet-wide network studies. With a single machine and a well provisioned network uplink, ZMap is capable of performing a complete scan of the IPv4 address space in under 45 minutes, approaching the theoretical limit of gigabit Ethernet.

ZMap can be used to study protocol adoption over time, monitor service availability, and help us better understand large systems distributed across the Internet.

via ZMap · The Internet Scanner.