privacy

Mar 2 2009   1:56PM GMT

Closed-circuit TV “a high-tech Panopticon”

Posted by: Ivy Wigmore
closed circuit television, CCTV, Panopticon, surveillance, privacy, Security, civil rights, CIO

In The Guardian, Paul Lewis writes about Westminister’s CCTV system: “Using the latest remote technology, the cameras rotate 360 degrees, 365 days a year, providing a hi-tech version of what the 18th century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham conceived as the ‘Panopticon’ - a space where people can be constantly monitored but never know when they are being watched.”

I remember the Panopticon from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. (Disclosure: I read it for a philosophy course.) Foulcault believed that the effect of the Panopticon — if not the precise design — was pervasive throughout modern culture.

From Wikipedia:
The Panopticon is a type of prison building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.”

250px-Panopticon.jpg

Bentham himself described the Panopticon as “a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.” … Many modern prisons built today are built in a “podular” design influenced by the Panopticon design, in intent and basic organization if not in exact form. As compared to traditional “cellblock” designs, in which rectangular buildings contain tiers of cells one atop the other in front of a walkway along which correctional officers patrol, modern prisons are often decentralized and contain triangular or trapezoidal-shaped housing units known as “pods” or “modules” designed to hold between sixteen and fifty prisoners each. In these designs, cells are laid out in three or fewer tiers arrayed around either a central control station or a desk which affords a single correctional officer full view of all cells within either a 270° or 180° field of view (180° is considered a closer level of supervision). Control of cell doors, CCTV monitors, and communications are all conducted from the control station.

May 28 2008   2:10PM GMT

Drop.io: Free, online file sharing made simple, easy and anonymous

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Storage, Mobile, applications, data, Web services, Internet, innovation, cool, free, MP3, feeds, reviews, resource, collaboration, widgets, tool, service, backup, privacy, Web applications

Do you need a simple way to post and share large files on the Web temporarily?

Is sending an attachment over email a bad option, for whatever reason?

You could try Amazon S3 or FileURLs, both of which offer the ability to transfer files around. You could use the tried and true method of posting to a server and FTP client. You could even set up a BitTorrent tranfer between machines.

Or you could check out Drop.io. Launched in November of 2007, this New York City-based storage-as-a-service provider makes storing and sharing files anonymously a breeze. Allen Stern covered the launch of the Drop.io alpha for Center Networks.

You don’t need to register or sign up for an account. Drop.io allows a user to create a “drop” — a dedicated storage space, with all of two clicks. Basic drops are free and include 100MB of storage space.

Here’s how it works:

You creates a drop URL with a unique name more than seven characters long.

You upload a file to it and sets an expiration time (1 day to 1 year) for when it will be deleted, along with passwords for access and administration.

You then can choose what level of access (read, read/write, read/write/delete) any non-admin users will have.

Once you’ve created a drop folder, you can continue to add files and notes to it over the Web, cellphone, email, SMS or even fax.

Each drop also has a dedicated phone extension that allow you to call in and record voice messages that are then added to the drop.

Drop.io isn’t indexed by Google or other search engines, so your data will remain as private as your friends and clients are with the access information.

Drop.io is, in fact, completely anonymous, other than the fact that it tracks your IP address to address legal requirements or tersm of service violations

The service doesn’t require you to give your email address or create a permanent account or profile. Once the drop expires, so does everything related to it.

Just any time you’re uploading large files, there can be freezes or time outs if your upstream connection isn’t all it could be, as David Weinberger noted when he tried it out. I didn’t have any issues when I dropped a screencast for a colleague onto the service.

Drop.io has another cool feature: an RSS feed created for the drop. As a fan of RSS, this is a snazzy feature that instantly opens up new means of collaboration and distribution.

If you post an audio or video file into a drop, bingo: instant podcast, complete with a player. Remember: You can also leave voice messages on a given drop, so this is about as easy a podcasting method as you’ll find.

As Lifehacker pointed out, Drop.io features free, simple faxing. Other folks can send faxes to your dedicated number, where the document are converted into a PDF and syndicated to any portable device that can handle that format. You’ll need to send an automatically generated cover sheet to the sender to ensure proper conversion. Conversely, you can upload a document to Drop.io, enter a destination fax number and click “Fax” to send.

There’s even a way to embed the Drop.io widget in a Web page or wiki, which allows visitors to *send* you files. Password protection is included if you’re leery of malware (an excellent idea, in this writer’s opinion).

Your friends, colleagues and clients can also post to the drop simply by emailing a file to it, though given that the service specifically works *around* sending large files through email servers, this is probably best kept to smaller bits and bytes of content. Just address the message to  yourdropname at drop.io.

Read the Drop.io FAQ for more information or check out the brief tutorial.

Watch a video interview with the founders of Drop.io, Sam Lessin and Darshan Somashekar, from CenterNetworks.
Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur also had Sam and Darshan on the 46th episode of the Net@Night netcast.
[Listen to the MP3]

The service isn’t perfect: As Dave Winer and Michael Arrington both noted, files posted to Drop.io are not added as an enclosure to the RSS feed, which means you’ll have to go back to the service to retrieve the media.

That being said, I’m an instant fan — and I’m far from alone. The following is just a sample of the positive reviews for drop.io out there:

Download Squad: Share files with Drop.io

AppScout: Drop.io simplifies file sharing and uploading

HackZine: Drop.io is simple, anonymous file sharing

Drape Stakes: Drop.io’s file sharing with RSS = endless possibilities

Andy Piper: Sharing large files with Drop.io

One Minute Tips: Drop.io is the Swiss Army knife of transfer

Aug 27 2007   12:26PM GMT

Facebook: A social network evolves into a social utility

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Security, business, applications, Web 2.0, programming, data, new media, Internet, innovation, culture, education, college, public domain, portal, social publishing, interesting, creativity, Silicon Valley, entrepeneurship, startup, collaboration, community, social, discussion board, mashup, trend, social networking, directory, buzz, privacy, Web applications, buzzword, recruiting

What can I say about Facebook that hasn’t been said? Newsweek has placed Mort Zuckerberg, the founder of the social networking giant on its cover. And the press has been hyperventilating about Facebook for months.

So what is Facebook? It’s a simple idea, done well: move the “facebooks” of incoming college undergraduates online, with headshots and interests constituting a basic profile, and then create the tools for nodes on the network to interact and browse each other’s profiles.

It’s also my “latest discovery,” as I joined earlier this spring, egged on by a neighbor. Back when I went to college, we had such a thing, printed on “paper,” bound and distributed to the freshman class (and just as quickly appropriated by upperclassmen frequently interested in more than discovering who else was into rock climbing or Pearl Jam). Facebook was, at its inception, a social network for college students, with access limited to only students in the same institution. Now, Facebook has laid claim to being a “social utility,” bidding to become the platform or framework we use to organize our online lives.

Audacious, perhaps, but not unprecedented. Friendster had the early start in filling that role but never recovered from an inability of its original technical architecture to scale to massive traffic demands or challenges from MySpace and other networks.

To be fair, over the past spring and summer, the social networking phenomenon has continued to explode in popularity and innovation, but Facebook has grown much faster and pulled in the digerati like no other.

Why? There’s no single reason. While the decision to open the formerly closed network to the Internet at large is an obvious place to begin, instead of limiting membership to isolated pools of collegians, other factors are in play. Making APIs available to developers resulted in a tsunami of applications that help to further interconnect nodes within each social network has attracted enormous amounts of energy (and, increasingly) venture capital to the platform.

Choosing to keep a clean, easily navigated interface has mattered as well. While MySpace is still the biggest social network — and by most measurements, the most popular site on the Internet, the contrast between the two services couldn’t be much larger, aesthetically, as Facebook (by comparison) radically limits the visual control a user has over a profile. It doesn’t hurt that all of the young college graduates enter the workforce with profiles, either.

If you need a sense of how bound into the tech community Facebook has become, consider how Silicon Valley reacted to a recent Facebook outage.

There’s plenty of evidence too that spending time on Facebook has also evolved into a significant productivity drain (though some disagree) and security risk. (If you’re wondering which companies lead in embracing Facebook, along with the most risk, just read Elisa’s post). The trouble is that sysadmins with itchy trigger fingers may not be able to quickly shut off the flow of bandwidth by firewalling Facebook. Unlike other more informal networks, many professionals have been using to “friend” their coworkers, clients and collaborators, along with former college roommates and dorm buddies. While LinkedIn has long been the social network of choice for many professionals, Facebook has begun eating into that market. In the online social media world, the gaps between online and offline networks are continuing to close, along with whatever space remained between work and personal lives.

Netizens my age (proud members of the “XY generation” that bridges the gap between Gen X (children of the 80s) and Gen Y (folks who don’t remember life before CDs and email or who said “trust but verify“) and older may find some elements of Facebook surprising, though perhaps not more so than MySpace. Older users are joining, however, and finding a place. While privacy options for profiles exist, unlike MySpace, there’s significant potential for embarrassment and even calamity for college or career prospects for those who aren’t wary about posting photos or blog entries that don’t put them in a good light, to put it mildly. PR professionals and marketers would do well to consider the advice of social media gurus. And, as neighborhood applications crop up, there are also alarming security concerns regarding personal safety and property, given that clever criminals can posit where and when individuals are away.

While much of the value of joining these networks can be found in keeping touch with friends and alumni — and making new ones from within that social network — the amount of information that many people are adding to their profiles has also been identified as a valid phishing risk, with significant potential for social engineering hacks that allow access to corporate networks.

What to do? As is the case with the rest of the Web-based applications that have made their way into enterprise and personal desktops alike (users keep outwitting IT when installing consumer apps, apparently), the key is likely to be adaptive security policies that both recognize the increasingly blurred boundaries between work and personal life while respecting both the bandwidth limitations high usage may inflict upon a network and the need to limit the leak or theft of potentially damaging proprietary or personal data. No one is suggesting that developing, implementing or enforcing such a policy is easy, but the consequences of failing to try may extend well beyond a public relations disaster to the organization or individual who doesn’t consider Facebook to be a risk.

There are also no shortages of critics who view the closed nature of Facebook with some distaste — “yet another profile to populate” is a new form of fatigue in the digital age. Personal data portability may become a online movement. It’s certainly been the inspiration for a business plan or two. The founder of LiveJournal, for instance, has published a mini-manifesto for portable, open social networking, according to Mashable. (It may help that Google appears to be backing him). Other observers have noted that Facebook hasn’t been proven to be a rewarding platform for advertisers yet either, though the model is still evolving, as described in this excellent article from Business.com, the Facebook Economy.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy watching classmates and friends pop up on Facebook; lest you wonder, you can find me there as well. Be warned: I’m sticking with adding friends, coworkers and neighbors, lest I develop social networking fatigue myself.

Jun 5 2007   9:39AM GMT

FireGPG: Encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify your gmail

Posted by: Alexander Howard
Security, open source, email, messaging, software, Internet, useful, free, downloads, freeware, privacy

I’ve been using different online freemail ever since I left the comfort of my collegiate email account. Hotmail and Yahoo were the default options back in the mid-90s when I graduated and, for many years, despite the increasing spam, I stuck with them.

When .Mac was introduced in 2002, being a long-time Apple user, I jumped on that bandwagon. I have to admit, however, that even with Apple’s update of the Web-based email client to a richer, AJAX-heavy interface, gmail is now my clear preference. The fact that it’s free and has a much higher storage limit are almost besides the point; I can access gmail on the go and it doesn’t constantly time out, not to mention the seamless integration of gchat with other gmail users.

It’s quite possible, even likely, that Steve Jobs & Co. will update .Mac, including email, when the iPhone is released at the end of the month. I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled. Recent reports of a dangerous hole in Google Desktop, along with the constant flow of spam and the malware occasionally associated with it, have kept me looking for better way to secure my online messaging, especially when I exchange email with someone who desires a digital signature or encrypted email.

Enter FireGPG. Thanks to popurls, which I love to use to get a snapshot of the Web’s “hive mind” at any given time, I found this great Firefox extension that allows you to encrypt, decrypt, sign and verify your gmail. Just head over to firegpg.tuxfamily.org to download the extension. Of course, as the developers of FireGPG note, it’s just a key management tool. If you’re unfamiliar with PGP, you can review our definition for Pretty Good Privacy. GnuPG is quite similar to PGP, with the notable difference of being free sofware released under the GNU General Public License. GnuPG is managed by the GNU project, with complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC2440. You can download GnuPG here.

Make sure to review Dmitri Popov’s excellent post at Linux.com for more information, if you’re interested in trying FireGPG out.

Enjoy your privacy!