Category Archives: Uncategorized

BitCoin is the leading innovator in a new emerging market of digital currency. BitCoins are created and held electronically. It is decentralized, which means no one owns it, and can run due to the massive amount of computer power put into “mining” BitCoins. Some people believe that BitCoin could be the future of the global economy. If this happens there would only be one currency and it would be completely digital. This is obviously a huge change for what we know of now.

BitCoin was created by a Japanese man under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakomoto. No one actually knows who this guy is and he could’ve started a huge revolution in the way we view money.

BitCoin is so special because it takes out the middleman. There are no banks involved in BitCoin transactions which means no bank fees. This makes shopping online and in theory shopping anywhere much much cheaper for everyone.

This leads me to my question. If BitCoin takes off (p.s. it already has) how will banks fare? How will this effect the governments and their national currency? This could lead to catastrophe for banks and national governments. Was it ethical for this guy to ensue this chaos of banks and governments to give everyday people an easier, cheaper, and safer way to use money?

links to learn more about BitCoin. And sources I used.

http://www.coindesk.com This site has many other links about BitCoin news.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/12/26/how-you-should-have-spent-100-in-2013-hint-bitcoin/

Side note, if you invested $100 into BitCoin at the beginning of 2013. You would have made over $5000 today.  This proves the rate at which people are catching on to this new currency. Many big companies such as Google and Ebay are planning on integrating BitCoin use with their companies.

This seems to be a pretty common problem these days. An organization or company stores our data in some way that can easily be hacked or as in this case, in the open. According to this ComputerWorld article, Starbucks has apparently made the choice to save a person’s passwords directly on the mobile device to allow for quicker purchases that allows for convenience when purchasing items. However, if the phone is then connected to a PC, the data can then be found in clear text form. I guess all in all it’s not that big of deal, that should only allow a thief to purchase all the ridiculous amounts of caffeine fixes they want, unless you’re one of those people that uses the same username and password for everything (I was unclear when I read the article if the credit card information is easily found). I do think it rises some questions,

Why does a company think it’s a good idea to store data that allows quick purchasing in an easy to get to place? I think companies need to be a little more aware of what they doing in.

Are there other companies that allow “one-click” or quick purchases, storing financial and other user information in easy to access places. It is a great convenience to make fast purchases but at what cost to our security.

Google Inc. has acquired, at the price tag of $3.8 billion, another tech company called Nest. Nest is a company that develops electronic, Wi-Fi enabled thermostats. These thermostats, called the Nest Learning Thermostat, are capable of both analyzing your temperature preferences and they are able to detect when you are home. The founders of Nest, Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, will also be joining the Google along with their company.

Google and Nest both have a lot to bring to each other’s table. Google would be able to provide its incredibly accurate location data to Nest and its presence on Smart Phones. Ron Amadeo writes, “An easy, low-power way to detect location would be to use a resident’s smartphone and Wi-Fi as an “at home” indicator. Just register each smartphone as a member of the household in the Nest app, and as long as one of those devices is connected to the home Wi-Fi SSID, Nest could safely assume that someone is at home. Or, Google Maps can predict the time it takes to arrive home, and Nest can predict the time it takes to warm a house up; by combining those two pieces of information, the Nest could kick on in advance of someone arriving home and have the house at an appropriate temperature by the time a household member arrives.” All while Google is able to take home information, which could provide very useful to advertisers or any other buyer, about temperature in your home, how often you enter and exit the house, and through their smoke detector product, they can tell how often these smoke detectors are set off.

While these all seem very specific and minor pieces of information, they can prove valuable to a few unique markets. There is speculation that Google is using this as an introduction into connected home devices, and allowing Google software/hardware into the home. Google could either use Nest engineers to develop more household goods, or acquire more businesses that focus on “smart technology” in the house. The more household goods developed under Google, the more data Google can collect and advertising markets they can serve. As the world becomes more and more connected, it is hardly a surprise that Google would want influence in these emerging technologies. However, it poses a few questions:

“How will Google store the data for Nest?”

“Will Nest data solely be used for the product itself?”

“Will Google sell this information off to potential advertisers?”

“What other implications could Google’s acquisition of Nest have?”

If you have any comments, or spot any errors, please post below.

PC World Article: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2087520/why-google-paid-32-billion-for-thermostat-startup-nest.html

Arstechnica Article: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/the-battle-for-the-home-why-nest-is-really-googles-new-smart-home-division/

Google Official Announcement: http://investor.google.com/releases/2014/0113.html

Nest Website: https://nest.com/

I don’t have tons of time to discuss the article but I found it while studying and it is pretty interesting. It links together artificial and real scarcity with IA. It seems to make the point that scarcity will always be around, just not ‘physical’ scarcity.

Decline of Scarcity

I was originally going to write my paper on this video, but I feel that it is very important to expose as many people as possible to the truth.

The topic of this video is government surveillance and, specifically, the regimes involved in the Arab Spring and US capabilities.

The speaker starts off talking about the current trends of US warrantless communication interceptions. Last year, 1.2 million intercepts (non-national security letters) were issued at the request of local police departments for phone dumps. In fact, the number of intercepts for Sprint alone was more than all the court ordered issues nationwide! He mentions that ISP’s (by name, Time Warner) log the IP addresses of wireless devices used behind wireless gateways to help police identify users, which is obviously not required by law. He says that the state uses software like Palentir to cross check multiple databases searching for “terrorists”. He also mentions Facebook monitoring chat logs looking for child predators.

He then turns to the Arab Spring. This is to build the argument that if this third world country can get their hands on these capabilities, just imagine what a country like the US can do. Libyan suppression capacities during their revolution included the ability to monitor all unencrypted traffic – email, IM, VoIP, web, deep packet inspection, cell phone triangulation and monitoring, and land line phone tapping gear. This essentially provided Ghadafi the capability to monitor nearly all traffic.

The US is very secretive in their capabilities – much of which is even kept secret from Congress. The NSA had most of Ghadafi’s abilities 20 years ago with the ECHELON system. CALEA has remote interception capability. Here, the speaker makes a very profound statement. He says that it is safe to assume all Internet traffic nationwide is being logged and analyzed, and that it is also safe to assume that all SSL’s and VPN’s are compromised.

He mentions the Utah Data Center a couple of times throughout the speech. Carrier logs are now available to even local police (anybody you dial or that calls you, including messaging). Apparently last week it came out that a police department can get a tower dump for only $75 from AT&T. Another alarming statistic that we’ve covered is that warrantless “emergency” intercepts are growing at a rate of 15% a year. One of the most interesting things – I thought – that he talked about was some new legislation in the US giving the state the ability to remotely interrupt cellphones, use a land line kill switch, and send threatening SMS messages to citizens!

At the end, he poses an excellent question: if you combined the McCarthy era with today’s surveillance tools and laws, what would be the result?

I think that question sums up his speech very nicely. In the past decade, we’ve seen fear used as a motivator so many times, we’ve seen blatant lying become the norm, we’ve all experienced news sources making up facts and figures and giving opinions rather than facts (yes, some more than others). The average citizen who doesn’t have the time or the care to look up facts will either refuse to believe anything they hear, or only listen to one news source because “every other one has a (liberal) bias!” The state that things have come to is rather despicable. People are unwilling to take back our country – at the very least by voting for people that would actually represent them – as we move closer and closer to a police state. How long did it take before the police “found” Ted Kaczynski? 17 years? How long did it take them to find the Boston Bombers? Two days? Obviously the government has these capabilities and in situations like what happened last week, it’s good that they do. But there’s definitely more going on behind the scenes that we don’t know about.

This isn’t a call to arms (at least, not from me), it’s just a public service announcement that our freedom is an illusion. Any thoughts on these privacy violations?

I’m rather surprised that no one else has written a post on the CISPA bill passed in the House of Representatives last week. So I guess I’ll take the easy one. CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, passed rather convincingly in the House (288 to 127) even after a surprising veto threat from the President. Essentially, the bill allows companies to share every piece of information they possess on clients with any other entity – to include the federal government. This effectively supersedes any Terms & Agreements contract made between clients and companies. Even so far as protecting the company from any sort of civil litigation. If you guys remember, a similar bill was struck down in the House last year after passing the Senate because the House didn’t feel like it was strong enough. Also, the SOPA bill from early last year never made it out of the House because of overwhelming opposition from the American people – a staggering 4,500,000 signatures. To put that number in perspective, the second highest signature count was for Texas to secede after the Presidential election at about 80,000. Here’s a link to a Huffington Post article that includes a video for further information.

So what’s being done in response and why is it that CISPA passed the House when SOPA never even made it to the vote? In response, Anonymous has proposed an Internet blackout on Monday. There is no word yet on which websites plan on doing so, but historically, numbers have been very good. They did something similar for SOPA and more than 7,000 websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit and Google participated. Why has CISPA “succeeded” where SOPA failed? Because majority of the opposition to CISPA are non-profits, whereas SOPA had major corporate backers. Obviously, in the corrupt government we have, money talks, not people. Well, considering corporations are now considered people, I should say that money talks louder, but I digress.

My question is: why in the hell does the government keep trying to censor the Internet in the face of overwhelming opposition?! I’m a strong supporter of freedom, and most especially in the freedoms afforded by the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech to which arguably the greatest conduit in history is the Internet. We’ve already seen our Fourth Amendment rights essentially eliminated (drones, warrantless wiretappings, the door-to-door search conducted by Boston Police to catch suspect 2 in the past week), our Second Amendment right being currently targeted, and our Sixth Amendment rights not even being acknowledged (in cases such as Bradley Manning, who has been sitting in Fort Leavenworth since 2010 and is just now receiving a trial). I just can’t fathom how these laws can supersede Constitutional Amendments, and furthermore, I can’t see how Congressmen are getting reelected when they support neither the Constitution, nor their constituents!

Here’s a little change of pace and back on our privacy topic.  I was recently filling out my application for an internship this summer and came across the paper that I had to sign agreeing to a background check before I was to be employed.  Well being in this class I decided to finally read what this background check completely entails even though I knew I had nothing to hide.  I was just wondering what all information is pried before they decide to hire you.  Here’s a short list that I found online:

• Driving records
• Vehicle registration
• Credit records
• Criminal records
• Social Security no.
• Education records
• Court records
• Workers’ compensation
• Bankruptcy
• Character references
• Neighbor interviews
• Medical records
• Property ownership
• Military records
• State licensing records
• Drug test records
• Past employers
• Personal references
• Incarceration records
• Sex offender lists

Well most of the things on here make sense to go through and check/reference before hiring someone.  Being in my situation and applying for an internship position I didn’t understand why some of these checks had to be made.  Like I said before, I have nothing to hide but for instance why should my medical records be any sort of thing I could be “accidently” discriminated over.  I’ve had quite the medical past and don’t understand why a company I’m trying to receive an internship with needs to know.  Another example was the check they do on your credit records.  What should my credit have to do with how fit I am for the position and safe to hire.  I understand this is something a landlord or bank needs to know before giving a loan but why should a company have this information and be something that you could be discriminated over therefore hiring someone with equal job skill and great credit.

I believe certain things like the ones mentioned about shouldn’t be sought out so that they couldn’t be used as “accidental” discrimination when hiring. What does everyone else think about this topic? Is everything on the list valid and should be known before hiring you?

In class recently we have spent a lot of time discussing the singularity and this idea that technology will advance to the point it could overrun humanity as the dominate life form on earth. But this assumes technology develops into greater than human intellect, while its not hard to be smarter than some humans (see jackass ripoffs on YouTube, not the actual jackass people since they are all rich and thus not dumb), for a computer to be smarter than the average child that would be quite difficult and it could take a long time. I’m more worried about computers ruining my future than technology killing my grand kids after the singularity.

By ruining my future I mean ruining my future job opportunities, or the economy of my country. In this article it is pointed out that software has been harming the job market for years. Not everyone can be a doctor, lawyer or engineer thus more common jobs like secretaries, factory workers, and even house maids (Roomba!!!) are being replaced by technology. Soon the vast majority of middle to lower class jobs will be replaced by software or robots. An entire team of construction workers will be replaced by one guy who can run multiple machines on a computer who will then be replaced by a piece of smart software that can manage the machines for him. Bars will be filled with alcoholic drink machines instead of bartenders. Software could replace all repetitive or “easier” jobs long before it goes terminator on the human race.

If every thing goes to plan in my life and in the lives of most of the people in this course who will read this, we wont be construction workers or bartenders. We all will hopefully be the ones creating this software. But the problems it could cause others raises a very difficult question: should we look to replace jobs and tasks with software?

Creating this software would probably make this individual very rich, but it would also cost hundreds or even tens of thousands of jobs. Under any utilitarian view, the unhappiness of hundreds or thousands of unemployed people would outweigh the couple dozen programmers. But even if you evaluated it from a greedy standpoint, if thousands lose jobs the economy suffers. If the economy suffers then it would effect everyone including the now rich programmer. There is a different level of loss for the programmer compared to the now unemployed construction worker but no one truly wins.

Others would argue that it would cause people to become better educated so they don’t need construction jobs and can be engineers, doctors, or businessmen  There can only be so many people doing certain jobs and still be successful. There is a supply and demand effect in the job market too.

So what does everyone think? do we create smart software that could replace workers like bartenders or construction workers? Or is it better to restrict the creation of software to save jobs and not replace people?

This article explains that a former Google employee, Brian Kennish, released a new plugin called Disconnect that helps protect your privacy online. The plugin was released for both Chrome and Firefox and it blocks over 2000 different websites that track you to provide targeted advertisements, including Facebook, Google, and Twitter. In addition, the plugin allows you to force websites to use secure HTTPS logins whenever possible. The plugin is available on their site, linked below, for a pay-what-you-want fee (including nothing) and you can even designate a percentage of the payment to go to charity rather than to Disconnect.

Kennish worked at Google in their advertising department and helped pioneer targeted ads. First of all, isn’t this a conflict of interest? I can’t imagine that Google likes him taking his knowledge of Google’s inner workings and then using it to prevent them from tracking users.

Secondly, is preventing sites from tracking you an ethical decision? The sites that you use on a daily basis make their money from ad-clicks and to get them, websites need to make sure their ads apply to you. Without revenue from ad-clicks, websites that we take for granted may decrease in quality or become a pay site after a certain amount of uses, such as WolframAlpha has done. I think that the privacy tradeoff is worth it to keep websites running in the long term, because it provides the most happiness to both parties. I can use their site, they can sell my data. Let me know what you guys think.

Here’s the link to the plugin.

“TrapWire is a counter-terrorism technology company that produces a homonymous predictive software system designed to find patterns indicative of terrorism attacks” (Wikipedia). According to Wikileaks information this program takes information gathered from video cameras in major cities (Washington DC and Seattle are mentioned by name) and provides the ability to detect persons, or suspicious behavior. Wikileaks also revealed that TrapWire is owned by the company Abraxas which is staffed by ex-CIA members with a lot of experience and time in the CIA.

Consider a few of these cases through the eye of common sense and rule utilitarianism.

If a city has a warrant to surveil a person, TrapWire allows the process to be mostly automated within city limits saving the city time and money. This appears to be a legally and morally (again, rule utilitarianism) right because the city received a warrant through the judicial process which is supposed to err on the side of caution with respect to a citizens rights

Now consider a crime that has been committed and the police find a suspect. The suspect is convicted because TrapWire tracked his movements back showing motive and premeditation resulting in the death penalty. In this case it seems that TrapWire is functioning to illegally surveil the suspect because the city never received a warrant through the judicial process before hand to track the suspect. On the other hand, if the city were to piece together the same information by looking through every video camera in the city, would that be considered good sleuthing? Now the rule utilitarian has to start creating a lot of sub-rules to handle these situations specifically.

If the judicial process could be trusted then authorities using TrapWire would be doing so in a manner that would be applicable in all situations. But who’s watching the watchers?

In class we discussed an internet attack DDoS, or distributed denial of service. I found this article, Spamhaus vs Cyberbunker  on arstechnica, a very interesting look into massive scale DDoS attacks.  Summarizing the article, Spamhaus is a major anti-spam company while Cyberbunker is a major spam, among other questionable things, hoster. Due to Spamhaus blacklisting them, Cyberbunker decided to retaliate through internet warfare.

Because Cyberbunker has unbelievable resources they generated an attack reaching 300 Gb/s in bandwidth. This kind of attack would take down all but the most prepared web services. Cyberbunker has the motto about hosting which goes something like anything goes ‘except child porn and anything related to terrorism’. With Cyberbunker generating so much traffic the backbone tier 1 routers could go down. This could disrupt THE ENTIRE internet. In my opinion, this is terrorism. The internet is such a precious resource I believe we need to take an active role in protecting it.

The United States government is happy to go abroad and foil terrorist and other illegal efforts. Should they get involved in this battle? If we were to get involved, would it be to directly undermine the government (the Netherlands) since they fail to control Cyberbunker? Possibly a third option, if a country is unwilling or unable to disrupt its own terrorist activities, should we take action onto that country?