Technology – Page 46 – A Geek With Guns

Install That Bleeping Ad Blocker Already

iOS 9 has been released and with it the ability for iOS users to install ad blockers. Online publications are already crying foul and declaring an end to the “free” web:

When Apple launches its new software update for the iPhone on Wednesday, users will be offered the chance to surf the mobile Web without annoying ads cluttering up their screen.

But Apple’s support for ad-blocking technology is ringing alarm bells on Madison Avenue, where critics warn it threatens not only the lifeblood of their business — but also the economic underpinnings of the free Internet.

“We don’t think ad blocking is right,” Scott Cunningham, senior vice president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, told The Post.

[…]

“Advertising is the economic engine that drives the free Internet,” Cunningham said. “The reality is the last 20 years have seen people developing content online for distribution, and consumers have opted in for that free content.”

As a general rule when a business has to guilt trip you into abiding by its business model it’s time to let it die. Then there is the ironclad fact that past performance does not predict future results. Just because the last 20 years of Internet content may have been fueled primarily by advertisements doesn’t mean it will always be that way. Advertisements have worked because consumers have felt the benefits outweighed the costs. But the costs of advertising are increasing.

Most cellular providers are charging customers based on data usage, which means the additional bandwidth used by advertisements is beginning to have a very real cost. Mobile devices are also becoming the predominant means for web access. Since advertisements require additional hardware resources to render they negatively impact battery life and that is a major problem for users of mobile devices. Ad networks are also increasingly being used to spread malware.

The reason advertising has been a successful model is because most of the costs have been hidden from the consumer. Now the costs are becoming very visible to consumers. Because of that consumers will likely change their behavior. One of those changes will likely be an increased use of ad blockers. As more consumers block ads more content producers will have to change their business models to survive.

There has never been a free web. Don’t let advertisers bullshit you into believing that. And don’t let them guilt trip you into making yourself vulnerable by not using an ad blocker. I promise you that the web won’t die. You may have to pay content producers directly but that isn’t so bad when you consider how much money you’ll save on bandwidth, extra batteries, and not having to deal with malware.

Cell Phone Carrier Illegally Tapped Journalist’s Phone Proving Privacy Can’t Be Protected By Laws

Whenever a bill purporting to strengthen privacy protections enters the political field I receive numerous requests to support it. I always politely decline, which results in the advocate saying some variation of “I know you’re an anarchist but it doesn’t take any time to call your representatives.” It’s a false argument because it does take time to call the person who supposedly represents me (even though I never appointed him to represent me) in Congress. And since privacy laws are ineffective at protecting privacy it takes time that will gain me absolutely nothing, which is not a wise investment in my opinion.

Privacy laws are just like any other State decree. Those who are willing to tolerate the laws will follow them and those who find them burdensome will ignore them:

Telco giant Vodafone illegally accessed a journalist’s mobile phone records to discover the source of stories about the company, hid systemic privacy breaches from authorities and covered up fraud in its Brisbane office, according to internal documents.

An investigation into these allegations is currently under way. The outcome is irrelevant since the damage has already been done and it’s unlikely Vodafone will be made to pay compensation to the involved parties (usually whatever government agency oversees the regulation gets the winnings from any trail with maybe a pittance given to those actually harmed).

Protecting privacy can only be done by directly protecting it. Once privacy has been violated it’s too late to defend it. That’s why I push cryptography so heavily. Privacy laws are irrelevant if you have taken effective measure to protect your privacy. If you’ve failed to protect your privacy the laws are still irrelevant because the damage has already been done.

Begging the State to issue decrees is a waste of your time that can be better spent learning how to actually address the issue you’re petitioning the State about.

Get Your TSA Approved Lock Keys Here

Air travelers who don’t have firearms in their checked luggage probably use a special Transportation Security Administration (TSA) approved lock. What is a TSA approved lock? I’ll let the TSA’s very own Blogger Bob explain:

TSA has worked with several companies to develop locks that can be opened by security officers using universal “master” keys so that the locks may not have to be cut. These locks are available at most airports and many travel stores nationwide. The packaging on the locks indicates whether they can be opened by TSA.

In other words TSA approved locks are locks with an included backdoor that can be used by TSA officers to access your luggage. I will take a moment to note that the use of TSA approved locks is not lawful when firearms are in your checked luggage so those of us who do fly with them do not, and legally can not, use TSA approved locks.

Now that I’m done with that aside, let’s discuss the major flaw inherent in backdoors. Backdoors necessarily break security systems, whether they’re physical locks of cryptographic algorithms, because anybody in possession of a master key can gain access. I hear some of you saying, “But, Chris, only authorized TSA agents have access to those master keys!” If only that were the case. Unfortunately some bozo went and accidentally released a picture of the TSA’s master keys.

Now you’re probably thinking, “Yeah, but pictures of keys can’t unlock locks!” While that’s true pictures of keys can be modeled and things that can be modeled can 3D printed. Behold! 3D printer models for TSA master keys! Now anybody with a 3D printer can create keys that can utilize the backdoor on TSA approved locks.

Herein lies the problem with backdoors, it only takes one person to accidentally reveal the master key to render anything secured with the backdoored system insecure. In this case a single careless TSA agent allowed a ring of TSA master keys to be photographed and therefore reproduced by anybody. The same threat would apply to any government mandated backdoors in encryption systems. It would only take one careless person with access to the government master key to have it showing on their screen when a reported took photographed to render all data secured with that system insecure.

The moral of the story is say no to backdoors.

Same Exploits, New Target

I can’t wait for self-driving cars to hit the market. If there’s one thing I won’t want to waste my time doing it’s driving. Unfortunately public transportation is limited by destinations and times. Why should I schedule my entire day around the whims of a public transportation provider when I can have the best of both worlds?

But a lot of people don’t agree with me. The biggest argument I hear against self-driving cars is that they could make mistakes. This is an especially laughable argument since humans make mistakes while driving frequently enough to kill over 30,000 people per year in the United States alone. Another argument against self-driving cars is that hackers can more easily manipulate them into performing undesirable actions such as going to an incorrect destination or crashing. Seemingly supporting this argument is recent research that demonstrated how self-driving cars could be manipulated by feeding their sensors faulty data:

The multi-thousand-dollar laser ranging (lidar) systems that most self-driving cars rely on to sense obstacles can be hacked by a setup costing just $60, according to a security researcher.

“I can take echoes of a fake car and put them at any location I want,” says Jonathan Petit, Principal Scientist at Security Innovation, a software security company. “And I can do the same with a pedestrian or a wall.”

Using such a system, attackers could trick a self-driving car into thinking something is directly ahead of it, thus forcing it to slow down. Or they could overwhelm it with so many spurious signals that the car would not move at all for fear of hitting phantom obstacles.

This isn’t as damning as many people are making it sound. While the target has changed the exploit hasn’t. You can cause all sorts of havoc by feeding human drivers false data. Drivers have driving into bodies of water because their navigation software fed them incorrect data. Putting up fake road signs can manipulate people into taking wrong roads. Using an FM transmitter to broadcast a fake emergency message can cause all sorts of chaos.

Humans, like machines, use sensory input to make decisions. That sensory input can be exploited, which is how a lot of less likely to be lethal weapons work. Where machines differ is that they’re easier to update to protect against sensory exploitation. Sensory exploits on self-driving cars are likely correctable with software updates.

As machines continue to replace the need for human labor let us not forget that many of the weaknesses present in machines are also present in ourselves.

Everything Is Made Easier Thanks To The Internet

In high school I took two semester of German and in college I took two semesters of Japanese. Unfortunately my knowledge of these languages has deteriorated to such a point where I can’t read, write, or speak anything intelligible in either. This is mostly because I’ve had no real means of maintaining that knowledge.

Some time ago a friend pointed me to Duolingo, a website that focuses on helping people learn languages. I’ve been playing with it for a few days and I must say that it has impressed me. Sadly Japanese isn’t available but German is so I’ve been relearning a bit of that.

I’ve also been working on Esperanto. Why would anybody learn a manufactured language? Because a surprising number of people in various anarchist communities, including the ones here in the Twin Cities, know it. And because I’m not terribly good with human languages because I lack an understanding of basic language concepts. My hope is a manufactured language that is consistent in its rules will help me learn the concepts enough to make learning other languages easier.

In both cases I’ve been surprised at how well Duolingo works. The fact that it gamifies language learning helps motivate me to keep with it (I’m a sucker for imaginary Internet points). But the fact that it has you translate phrases both ways and, in the case of German, speak some of it helps.

What amazes me is that it wasn’t that long ago that the only practical way to study a language was to enroll in a language class at a university. Now there is a website that offer the basics for free and gamifies it to motivate you to keep studying. I’m constantly in awe of this future we live in, especially in how it makes access to previously scarce information widely available.

New Wealth Is Constantly Being Created So Take Advantage Of It

Neoliberals, communists, and socialists focus primarily on wealth distribution. Much of their rhetoric revolves around the top one percent holding a majority of the world’s wealth. In their eyes there is only so much pie to go around and the top one percent have a vast majority of it while everybody else has to fight over scraps. The error of this viewpoint is that wealth isn’t fixed, it’s constantly being created.

I think part of the problem is people often mistake fiat currency for wealth. Fiat currency, as the name implies, indicates nothing more than a number some oligarch commanded to be created. Wealth, on the other hand, is the abundance of valuable resources and material possessions.

Throughout the entire history of our species wealth has continued to increase. As our agricultural knowledge increased food became more plentiful. As our metallurgical knowledge increased tools became more plentiful. As our mining knowledge increased raw materials became more plentiful. Human history is the history of more knowledge leading to more wealth. Today electricity, running water, and a plethora of home appliances are common in first world household. Internet access, automobiles, pocketable computers, 3D printers, and an almost uncountable number of other products that didn’t even exist merely a generation ago are now widely available. Their isn’t a single pie we all eat from, new pies of constantly being baked at an every increasing rate.

If you only believe there is a fixed amount of pie you focus on taking pie from others. This, in my opinion, is one of the biggest flaws in neoliberalism, communism, and socialism. Instead of trying to take pie by seizing the means of production and increasing taxes a more effective strategy is to start baking pies.

This is where agorism shines. Agorists aren’t trying to seize means of production or increase taxes. They’re focused on creating more wealth. Whether via creating more efficient means of production, preventing the State from taking a cut of everybody’s wealth, or simply creating wealth that has been forbidden by the State agorists are focused on creating more for everybody instead of redistributing what is already there.

The fact that more pie is constantly being created should be taken advantage of by everybody. Why relegate yourself to taking what already exists when you can create something better? There’s no reason to limit yourself like that.

Embrace Automation

Believe it or not quite a few of my friends happen to be communists. One of them specifically dubs himself as an advocate of fully automated luxury communism. Unlike most forms of communism, fully automated luxury communism has a foundation to work from:

Located on the futurist left end of the political spectrum, fully automated luxury communism (FALC) aims to embrace automation to its fullest extent. The term may seem oxymoronic, but that’s part of the point: anything labeled luxury communism is going to be hard to ignore.

“There is a tendency in capitalism to automate labor, to turn things previously done by humans into automated functions,” says Aaron Bastani, co-founder of Novara Media. “In recognition of that, then the only utopian demand can be for the full automation of everything and common ownership of that which is automated.”

Bastani and fellow luxury communists believe that this era of rapid change is an opportunity to realise a post-work society, where machines do the heavy lifting not for profit but for the people.

I think phrases like “common ownership of automation” and “heavy lifting not for profit but for the people” are pretty nonsensical but the basic ideology, letting machines do all of the work, is what I’ve been espousing here. The reason I mention these fully automated luxury communists is because they’re the first communists I’ve come across that are screaming for more automation instead of bitching about machines taking jobs.

Imagine a world where food production is entirely automated and in such abundance nobody has to labor to produce it unless they enjoy doing so. Imagine buildings being constructed by squads of automated robots. Imagine abundances of energy being beamed down from orbital solar collectors. In such a world the necessities of survival would potentially be so cheap to produce and so abundant that even the poorest person could afford them.

Over the years I’ve shifted my views quite a bit. If you read the archives of this blog you’ll see my slow transformation from a constitutional libertarian to an anarcho-capitalist to a slightly more left-leaning anarchist to my current position today, which can basically be summed up as wanting to advance technology as much as possible for the purposes of liberation. Advancements in technology can enable liberation by lessening humanity’s dependence on centralized hierarchies. This strategy not only improves the overall quality of life but also don’t rely on the mob mentality of politics. To advance technology I don’t need to get a majority of people to vote my way. I can either directly create or partner with people creating new technologies. It’s the ultimate libertarian strategy because it relies on individual efforts instead of mobs.

Although I don’t subscribe to the communist part of automated luxury communism I do share a similar dream and can say I have far more in common with them then I do with many libertarians.

AT&T Demonstrates Why HTTPS Is Needed Everywhere

Ads have become a notable threat to computer security. While they are a fact of life for accessing content without paying directly for it you wouldn’t expect a company that you pay money to to infest your web experiences with ads. But some companies like to double dip. AT&T is one of those companies. In addition to getting customers to pay for hotspots AT&T is also maliciously inserting ads into websites visiting through its hotspots:

While traveling through Dulles Airport last week, I noticed an Internet oddity. The nearby AT&T hotspot was fairly fast—that was a pleasant surprise.

But the web had sprouted ads. Lots of them, in places they didn’t belong.

[…]

Curious, and waiting on a delayed flight, I started poking through web source. It took little time to spot the culprit: AT&T’s wifi hotspot was tampering with HTTP traffic.

The ad injection platform appears to be a service from RaGaPa, a small startup. Their video pitch features “MONETIZE YOUR NETWORK” over cascading dollar signs. (Seriously.)

When an HTML page loads over HTTP, the hotspot makes three edits. (HTTPS traffic is immune, since it’s end-to-end secure.)

First, the hotspot adds an advertising stylesheet.

[…]

Next, it injects a backup advertisement, in case a browser doesn’t support JavaScript. It appears that the hotspot intercepts /ragapa URLs and resolves them to advertising images.

[…]

Finally, the hotspot adds a pair of scripts for controlling advertisement loading and display.

The title of this post promised Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) so some may be wondering what HTTPS has to do with ad injection. Simply put, this kind of bullshit can’t happen when the connection between a client and the server is encrypted. A man in the middle, which AT&T is in this case, cannot see the contents of an encrypted communication and if attempts to make any sort of alteration the decryption process will fail.

You won’t see any AT&T injected ads on this blog because everything is secured with HTTPS (the insecure HTTP interface just 301 redirects to the HTTPS connection). If every website did this the business model being used by RaGaPa, the ad injection services being used by AT&T, would be a total failure.

Securing connections doesn’t just protect against eavesdropping. It also protects again altering the contents, which can be just as big of a problem if not an even bigger one. In fact content integrity is another reason why the “nothing to hide” crowd should be ignored in discussions of pervasive cryptography. Cryptography is about so much more than hiding content.

Work Is Replaceable

Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed yet I’m still subjected daily to the whining of people worried about the jobs. What will happen to people working checkout aisles at convenience stores if everybody uses kiosks? How will employees at McDonald’s afford housing if they’re replaced by kiosks? Where will people working in manufacturing go if 3D printers make their jobs unnecessary? Then you have the people, usually old folks, bitching about the current generation not working as hard. You would think any 20-something working less than 80 hours a week was some kind of lazy bums. And don’t even get me started on the people worried that there won’t be as much work available in the future because of automation.

You’re reading this so I infer that you both have access to a computer and aren’t currently working (even if you’re at work). Two things about these inferences should amaze you. First, you have access to an incredibly complex piece of machinery that has went from non-existent to pervasive throughout society in roughly half of a century. Second, you don’t have to perform hard labor every minute of the day just to survive.

It’s true, automation has replaced a lot of jobs. It’s also true that automation has allowed us to work less than the previous generation and still enjoy a better standard of living. That’s the beauty of automation. Not only does it replace hard labor with easier jobs but it also allows us to generate the same wealth in less time.

I, like you, am not spending every moment of daylight hunting animals or gathering berries. Usually I put in around eight hours five days a week. For those 40 hours a week most of it is spent sitting on my ass in front of a computer. The most strenuous effort I have to put forth most working periods is moving my fingers thousands of times to different keyboard positions so I can properly enter in the correct sequence of characters to convince a computer to do what I would rather not do myself. Programming is much easier than automotive repair, which is what my father does. I also work fewer hours than he does.

In most cases when a job is replaced with automation it reduces the amount of physical effort needed overall. You know the socialist dream of abolishing work? It becomes a little more feasible everyday as we make better use of advancing technology. Human history is actually a lengthy demonstration of this point. This generation is lazier than the previous, the previous generation is lazier than its predecessors, and so on.

This is why I scoff at neophobes and why I roll my eyes when some union leader is bitching about the machines replacing jobs. I don’t want to struggle every waking hour to obtain enough food to eek out a substance living. Fuck everything about that! What I want to do is go home after doing what little work I need and enjoy myself. Machines can create more wealth than I can so let them do it. I’ll enjoy the product of their labor.

The Best Argument For Encryption Yet

I’ve made a lot of good arguments favoring effective encryption. Effective encryption protects at risk people from oppressors by concealing their identities and communications, ensures data integrity by preventing third parties from altering data unknowingly, provides a way to verify authenticity and the identity of content creators, etc. Ironically though Jeb Bush made have inadvertently made the best argument for effective encryption:

“If you create encryption, it makes it harder for the American government to do its job—while protecting civil liberties—to make sure that evildoers aren’t in our midst,” Bush said in South Carolina at an event sponsored by Americans for Peace, Prosperity, and Security, according to The Intercept.

Effective encryption makes the American government’s job harder?

Assault, murder, theft, extortion, and kidnapping should be hard and anything that makes those criminal activities harder is a good thing.