The plot really thickens about laptop spying

from Wikipedia

Stryde Hax: The Spy at Harriton High
[Via Stryde Hax]

This investigation into the remote spying allegedly being conducted against students at Lower Merion represents an attempt to find proof of spying and a look into the toolchain used to accomplish spying. Taking a look at the LMSD Staff List, Mike Perbix is listed as a Network Tech at LMSD. Mr. Perbix has a large online web forum footprint as well as a personal blog, and a lot of his posts, attributed to his role at Lower Merion, provide insight into the tools, methods, and capabilities deployed against students at LMSD. Of the three network techs employed at LMSD, Mr. Perbix appears to have been the mastermind behind a massive, highly effective digital panopticon.

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Some every fascinating stuff here. Using the internet, the author, a computer security consultant, was able to examine the Internet life of one of the school staff. This technician has left an amazing trail of what could be self-incriminating evidence around the Internet.

In online videos, he describes writing scripts that make it appear the web cm is not working, even when it is. This allows them to continue watching while the user thinks nothing is working. Here is an excerpt of him discussing this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHu92imqJec

I don’t doubt that this all started with good intentions – keeping track of laptops and making sure that if they were lost or stolen there might be a way to find them. But there are laws against surreptitiously tapping someone’s phone. And we have a Constitution that prohibits search of our homes without a warrant by government agencies, which a school falls under.

We may be seeing a conflict between anti-wire tapping legislation and what laptop technology can do. I have seen nothing about these students giving up their Constitutional rights in order to have a laptop.

And, interestingly, the school apparently would not allow them to use their own laptops at school. But they had to pay for insurance to take the laptops homes. What some people have said is that the student in the center of this took his laptop home, without having paid the insurance. It was reported stolen and thus the picture that is causing all of this.

A picture of some candy, if they are to believed. Great. Some IT technician, proud of his leet skilz, spots a Mike and Ike candy and reports the student to the vice[principal for drug dealing.

And how about this incident that the tech mentioned:

As a prime example, we initially attempted to recover a stolen laptop that reported back to us it’s internet address and DNS name. The police went to the house and were befuddled to find out the people we knew had the laptop was not the family that lived there…well, we eventually found out that they were the neighboring house and were borrowing the unsecured WI-FI.

So, they sent the police to the wrong house. Oh, that could have turned out well!. I imagine the people at home were more than befuddled. I relish the idea of the cops showing up at my house to look for a stolen lap top I do not have. Let’s say I refuse to allow them to search my home. That is my right. So they get a warrant, based on false information. After tearing my home apart, they find nothing but I am now viewed as having stolen property in my possession, a thief.

My reputation is hurt, all because they were not quite as accurate with their spyware as they thought.

One final thing that bugs me. The school claims, and told the students, that the green light that came on from time to time was just a glitch, something wrong with the laptop. The students reported many times that the light came on. The school blamed Apple. If I were Apple, I might seriously consider some sort of law suit.The school is defaming Apple products to hide its own malfeasance. Or so it appears to me.

Will Microsoft zune smart phone makers?

by robertnelson

Microsoft looking at buying Nokia, RIM, or even Palm?
[Via MacDailyNews]

“The new Windows phone software is a big improvement on its predecessor but may not be enough to reverse market share losses, and Microsoft Corp may have to eventually buy a Nokia or BlackBerry maker RIM to get back into the game,” Bill Rigby reports for Reuters.

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Microsoft has done such a great job selling other hardware systems. </snark>? Not if the object of a business is to make money. Xbox is probably their most popular piece of hardware and they lose money on every box. Perhaps $120 per unit, not including cost of doing business (R&D, packaging, marketing, etc.). Just how well would they do in the cutthroat smart phone business? Apple makes about $300 profit on every 8GB iPhone. They never sell anything at a loss.

‘To really compete in this business, Microsoft needs to get into the hardware business, where they are able to control the entire user experience. Apple has shown that’s the model that works. In a consumer device, people just want something that works, they don’t want something as complicated as a PC.’“

If Microsoft did this, it could essentially screw over all the phone manufacturers who currently use the MS mobile software. MS would now be directly competing with them. As the MP3 player companies that licensed MS FlayForSure how they felt when MS came out with the Zune, including a new software that essentially rendered PlayFor Sure obsolete?

When MS is a competitor, they will do what they can to make sure it is not a level playing field. Not really by having a better system but by removing the ability to compete from companies that had previously been customers for MS.

Besides, all Microsoft has ever been able to do really well is sell Windows and Office. These have accounted for maybe 80% of its profits. Entertainment and devices are essentially zero over the last 3 years.

Apple has always been a hardware company that sold some software. Microsoft has always been a software company that sells some hardware. Why would anyone think they have the skills to sell a phone?

Besides, Microsoft has much, much higher profit margins selling its software. Both Apple and MS has similar revenues last quarter ($16 billion vs. $19 billion) but MS had double the profits.

Why take on something very risky, away from their core competencies and with lower profit margins?

[Listening to: The Gallows Pole from the album "At the Gate of Horn" by Odetta]

Reading tea leaves in the want-ads

by chadao

Apple plans to expand iPhone OS to more platforms
[Via Infinite Loop]

Apple is planning to leverage its work in transforming Mac OS X to work on other devices—most specifically the iPhone—to power “new platforms,” according to a recent job posting. Those platforms will also be powered by “custom silicon,” like Apple’s A4 processor that powers the iPad.

As first discovered by Computerworld, Apple is looking for a full-time engineering manager to oversee “platform bring-up,” with the Core Platform team, part of Apple’s Core OS group. Such a manager would be responsible for low-level architecture, hardware drivers, firmware, and platform security for iPhone OS on “a range of hardware platforms, including iPhone & iPod.” The manager will also coordinate the software team with hardware and custom silicon teams in developing and prototyping new platforms.

Candidates for the position are expected to have experience with kernel, driver, and firmware development for Unix-based systems as well as an understanding of system-on-a-chip design. Experience with ARM-based SoC’s is preferred, of course—that’s the platform currently used in the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, as well as Apple’s Time Capsule base station (among others).

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Amazing. How many other companies have people using the want-ads find out what they will be doing? Well, lots of companies do such ‘intelligence’ work to figure out what their competitors are doing but this is an instance where it is consumer markets trying to get information for the consumers.

Apple has really created a self-sustaining interest amongst it customers for this sort of information, something few other companies can claim. I would postulate that no other company produces so much interest by its customers, and their surrogates in the media, as Apple. Apple patent filings are examined in detail by many web sites. The random comments of it executive officers on financial conference calls are likewise put under a microscope.

Not to gain a competitive advantage but simply to fuel people’s expectations. That is why when they really do give out information, such as a special event, Apple can break the Internet.

[Listening to: We Got a Hit (Extended Version) from the album "Endless Wire" by The Who]

Dealing with a big problem

by hermanturnip

A digital preservation primer for scientists
[Via Gobbledygook]

This weeks’s blog post is a guest post on the Biomedicine on Display blog – I was kindly invited by Thomas Soderqvist from the Medical Museum of the University of Copenhagen.

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There are huge amounts of data being created that must now be stored for quite some time, if not ‘forever.’ (Forever being 10 years or more). But few researchers have the budget to pay for this long term storage – it is often not a part of the grant budget.

Who will be responsible for maintaining this? For curating? For keeping it accessible?

Some tough questions, especially since more and more people will be wanting access to the data.

The shape of things to come?

Nature.com iPhone app in pictures
[Via Gobbledygook]

Just four weeks ago I wrote a blog post titled How do you read papers? 2010 will be different. Not only have we since seen the announcement of the Apple iPad, but last Monday the free Nature.com iPhone app was launched. The application gives access to the full text of all Nature and Nature News content (through until 30 April 2010, how access is handled afterwards hasn’t been announced yet). A version for the Android platform was promised for April, and the app will work with the just-announced iPad. I included a few screenshots for those without an iPhone or iPod Touch. A free Nature.com personal account is needed to use the app.

The iPhone app doesn’t use HTML or PDF but rather the ePub format. The Nature.com website will soon offer downloads in ePub format (an example article is here). Adobe Digital Editions and Stanza are examples of ePub readers. In contrast to PDF, ePub adapts to the screen size and is therefore a much better format for the iPhone.

References are links in the text, clicking on them opens a new window.

Figures are also links in the text that open in a new window. The figures can be saved to the iPhone Photos application.

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ePub is a nice format for these publications. And the articles will be free until April. I am going to test this out. Especially for an iPad, this could really change things, particularly when it comes to accessing scientific content.