It now becomes difficult for the government to invoke idea of state secrets when they are no longer secrets

by discoodoni

How the NSA leaks may help EFF sue the government into defending its bulk surveillance programs
[Via Boing Boing]

The “other shoe” in the Edward Snowden NSA leaks has been the potential effect of all these disclosures on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s efforts to force the government to account for itself in court. Since 2005 — when Mark Klein, a former AT&T worker came into EFF’s offices with documentary evidence of a secret room at AT&T’s Folsom Street switching center, where the NSA was effectively making a copy of all the traffic on AT&T’s network without a warrant — the EFF has been trying to get the government to explain to a judge why they think this kind of bulk surveillance is legal.

But at every turn, the Bush and Obama DoJs have convinced judges that these questions can’t be asked in court, let alone answered. The invocation of state secrecy has stymied all attempts to date at getting the government to square the circle on the Fourth Amendment and bulk, warrantless surveillance of every American’s Internet traffic.

[More]

The Catch-22 in all this was that the cases did not even get herd in court because the government said that need to hide the very technology was great enough to be a state secret. How could you have a court case about the appropriateness of collecting all that data when the very idea that the data was being collected was secret?

And courts let this go.. People who had evidence that the US was gathering their data were, nonetheless, not allowed to have a court examine this because the Executive branch claimed the very discussion was a state secret.

Well, not so secret anymore. The Executive branch can not relaly claim a state secret on something that is not secret anymore.

This may be the real damage to ‘security’ they are worried about – thousands of people suing.

It will be interesting to see how things have “shifted” in the Apple ebook case

by kapchurus

‘The issues have shifted’ says the judge in the Apple e-book trial
[Via Brainstorm Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine » Apple 2.0]

She waited until the penultimate day of a three-week trial to share her feelings.

FORTUNE — U.S. District Judge Denise Cote, who played her cards close to the chest throughout the proceedings of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case against Apple (AAPL), opened up a bit on Wednesday.

It started with the declaration of her feelings for her iPad, and ended with something that could be more material to the outcome of the case.

[More]

Before the litigation started. she was asked by both sides to provide a public opinion on where she thought things stood after seeing the pre-trial evidence.

She said the evidence favored the DOJ. As Philip states, she felt  ”the government would be able to show by direct evidence that Apple “knowingly participated in and facilitated a conspiracy to raise prices of e-books.”

Now after both sides have rested, she stated:

“I look forward to your summations,” she continued. “It seems to me the issues have somewhat shifted during the course of the trial. Things change. People have to stay nimble. I’m looking forward to understanding where we are now.”

Makes one wonder what issues shifted in which way. It is interesting that earlier this week Apple called an executive from Barnes and Noble, another distributor just like Apple, who testified that they had been pushing the publishers to move to an agency model – just like Apple did, and asked for most-favored nation status – just like Apple did. 

In fact, B&N did this BEFORE Apple discussed things with the publishers, all without any discussion with Apple.

Seems to me that Apple has done nothing wrong. There may have been a horizontal conspiracy by the publishers to form some sort of cartel. That is illegal

But Apple is part of a vertical distribution industry, just as Barnes & Noble is. Anti-trust against vertical parts of the supply chain have not been seen very often and a conspiracy like this has not been adjudged by the Federal courts.

Both Apple and Barnes & Noble wanted all distributors to be treated the same.

If Apple did anything wrong, than so did Barnes & Noble.

We do know that the company that held over 90% of the ebook market was dumping those books at below cost. I will never figure out how that is not an abuse of its monopoly position,

Sure, it might be beneficial in the short term, until all competitors like Apple and B&N are gone. Amazon has to make a profit sometime. Raising prices is so much easier when you have no competition.

Will ARKYD – OUR own FRACKING satellite – make it? It’s in your hands

Come on. Less that 10% of the way to go. This project is for all of us. It is our own satellite.

A People’s Satellite paid for by the people.

We will all be part of history as we near the end of the ARKYD project. Or we will watch as the first direct public funding of a project in low Earth orbit fails.

Don’t be that person who waits too long. $10 will have a huge impact. $99 has the possibility of changing the life of a child while also snagging a once-in-a-lifetime trinket for yourself. 

And if you are any kind of amateur astronomer, there are perks that put you in control of the People’s Satellite.

I started this project as a way to learn about crowd funding while working on something that I believe can have a huge impact on our future.

We are so close to meeting our goal. And one thing I know from crowd funding projects is what a nailbiter the last few days can be.

I need you to just make a couple of clicks and make a difference, while getting something nice for yourself.

If you have already provided support, thanks so much. Now tell everyone in your networks about ARKYD, put it on Facebook and tweet your followers. 

This is something positive in a world full of so much negative.

Be a part of it.

Apple security and its users – they can’t get our iMessages

 by Daniel Dudek-Corrigan

Apple issues rare public comment on its ‘commitment to customer privacy’
[Via AppleInsider]

Apple published a rare public comment discussing “Apple?s Commitment to Customer Privacy” in the wake of reports on the United States’ “Prism” surveillance program.

[More]

So Apple gets permission to reveal how many government requests it gets and what it does. Not too suprising

But the interesting thing in their response is this:

For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data.

I wrote about al of this before all the news broke. The government WILL find a way to read your digital communications in real time unless we stop them. Apple encrypts their data from user to user so well that the Feds complained and were trying to get Apple to give them a key.

Doesn’t this sound very different today than it did a few months ago?

 ”iMessages between two Apple devices are considered encrypted communication and cannot be intercepted, regardless of the cell phone service provider.”

If you have been using iMessages or Facetime, the Feds can only see you have sent them, not what is inside.

So I guess they can get meta-data of a sort but none of the actual information. As I said, encryption should be used by every teleco. Why in the world are our emails sent in the open (with the passwords) without high level encryption?

I htink this is why they are so upset about this going mainstream. 

I wonder when we will see the first ads from Apple stating that iMessages are safe from government intrusion?

Will iOS 7 disruption be an opportunity or a deathknell?

by m:eightysix

Fertile Ground
[Via Marco.org]

One of my favorite patterns in our industry is when the old and established are wiped out by disruption, irrelevance, or changing fashions. Like a forest fire, clearing out the old is very destructive and shouldn’t be taken lightly. But what’s left behind is a clean slate and immense opportunity.

I don’t think we’ve ever had such an opportunity en masse on iOS. After what we saw of iOS 7 yesterday, I believe this fall, we’ll get our chance.

The App Store is crowded: almost every common app type is well-served by at least one or two dominant players. They’ve been able to keep their leads by evolving alongside iOS: when the OS would add a new API or icon size, developers could just add them incrementally and be done with it. Established players only became more established.

iOS 7 is different. It isn’t just a new skin: it introduces entirely new navigational and structural standards far beyond the extent of any previous UI changes. Existing apps can support iOS 7 fairly easily without looking broken, but they’ll look and feel ancient. Their developers are in a tough position:

• Most can’t afford to drop support for iOS 6 yet. (Many apps still need to support iOS 5. Some unlucky souls even need to support 4.3.) So they need to design for backwards compatibility, which will be extremely limiting in iOS 7.
• Most can’t afford to write two separate interfaces. (It’s a terrible idea anyway.)
• Most have established features or designs that won’t fit well into a good iOS 7 design and will need to be redesigned or removed, which many existing customers (or the developers themselves) will resist.

[More]

One of the times when it might be easier to start up a new app than convert an old one. If you don’t have a business model that can deal with this, you will be in trouble.

“Drones” – the high concept movie that might be too close for comfort.

by Don McCullough

My Drone Book/Movie (If I wrote one)
[Via Global Guerrillas]

If I did write a near future, CGI thriller about drones, here’s my back of the envelope sketch of the plot. It’s definitely a movie plot, and not real.  That means it is meant to be over the top.

If you aren’t interested in an autonomous weapons disaster story, please disregard.

________________

Start.  An Israeli drone hunter/killer op, run out of a converted trailer in the desert.  Drone IDs a target in urban area.  At risk of losing target, the drone “tags” target (microdots).  Target disappears inside building, and begins to into large, sprawling tenement, doesn’t emerge.  Call in “mother hen” delivery system full of “chick” ground drones for search and destroy mission inside the complex.  They are flown in, inserted, and enter the complex.  Target is IDed several floors/walls away but appears to be on the run and deploying counter-measures to spoof ground drones.  

Target is intermittent and numerous ghosts appear intermittently.  All are moving.  The ground drones swarm, moving in a pattern that would encircle the target within the complex.   Probability calculation for primary target is over threshold (80%), so the order is given to swarm to go lethal.  Moments later the target drops a series of effective counter measures and blows through a wall into a corridor that allows a fast transient out of area.  Comms with the swarm is lost.  Since the swarm already has the green light on the target (not uncommon, but frustrating in the terminal phase of a misison), it continues on mission.  Drones, confused by the new counter-measures and out of comms with the team, begin to see targets everywhere.  They clear an entire tenement of 1000 + people, exit the complex and depart.  

News emerges on social media feeds.  Wireless and Internet nodes are brought down in area to slow media upload.  To hide the mission failure, a drone is called in to blow up the evidence.  Explosion trumps other info.  The incident is lost in the noise within a couple of days.

Few people know about this logic flaw.  No lesson learned.

[More]

The rest of the idea is a pretty sweet  action movie, demonstrating both a world in the panopticon, where security ‘requires’ autonomous drones in urban settings, and one with rampant mobile communication, hacking etc.

The scary thing is that drones do not only have to be in the air. Ground drones will probably be the most ubiquitous in a city. Easier to hide.

I wonder if Faraday cages will be illegal? In an authoritarian future, they would seem to be perceived as only of use to terrorists. So booster bags could become more important for protection.

Nice demonstration of how our fear of terror creates a terrifying world. I’d pay to see this movie.

People making their own dents in the universe

by perpetualplum

Jobs, while famously misquoted, did say this:

We attract a different type of person‐‑a person who doesn’t want to wait five or ten years to have someone take a giant risk on him or her. Someone who really wants to get in a little over his head and make a little dent in the universe.

Jobs certainly did make a dent in the universe. And Apple deserves some credit for making it possible for just regular people to make their own dents in the universe.

Sure this is a marketing video but is one of the best filmed, edited and paced ones I have ever seen. I want to see a TV show which just examines the worldwide effects of  mobile apps.

Not a single Apple employee is identified in the video. It focusses on people, working in the places they live around the world from Africa to the Arctic.

It also shows just how different the world is today than 5 or even 3 years ago. Things are getting so much better in so many bottom-up ways that have a hard time getting the attention that top-down “The End is Near” approaches clammer for.

While Apple’s devices are featured here, there is so much more, so many instances of what people can do with technology The health official riding an easily maintained motorcycle whose mobile app help provides medical care, the parathlete with state-of the art prosthetics controlled by an app so she can row and wear high heels, the Inuit woman working to save the language of her people by speaking into a portable super-computer,  the 10-year old disabled child who ‘spoke’ for the first time on the day he got a tablet, 

I dare anyone whose heart still beats to make ti through this video and not be joyful at what people have done. The ability to craft solutions that fit their personal needs is a hallmark of the current age.

Instead of mass-marketed tools, they can have personalized ones. We would have gotten here eventually but Apple, with its disruption of the mobile market and the creation of the app economy, deserves credit.

We can now all make our own dents in the universe.

Google is not making any friends at the ITC

by Anamorphic Mike

ITC calls for import ban against Samsung, rejects Google’s flip-flop arguments
[Via AppleInsider]

The US International Trade Commission’s Office of Unfair Import Investigations (OUII) has recommended an import ban against Samsung’s Android devices infringing upon four Apple patents, rejecting contradictory, flawed arguments by Google.

 

[More]

Wow. Google’s lawyers really got smacked down, and they were just bystanders to the case between Samsung and Apple. It’s not good to tick off the judges, even if you are right. 

Which does not appear to be the case here, which is why they got smacked down so hard.

Huff Post discusses ARKYD, the People’s Satellite

Planetary Resources Kickstarter Wants Your Help Finding Alien Planets
[Via Huffington Post]

Ever wanted to visit an alien planet? The technology to “boldly go where no man has gone before” may not be here yet, but one cutting edge company wants to offer average citizens what it hopes is a close second – the opportunity to join the search for alien worlds.

[More]

Now begins the final push. We are really close to the goal but there are many things in the pipeline. Check out the video contest. Or the great stretch goals.

There are also special things for special milestones, such as getting 10,000 supporters. This is a big one.

Having a large base of supporters is probably more important than how much total money is raised. These are people who really, really care.

How about becoming one of them? Your children, grandchildren, friends and even the people you only see in the grocery store will be thankful.

Starting the final push for ARKYD

This is the end of the slow time for any Kickstarter project. I’ll be making a pest of myself the  next couple of weeks.

I apologize in advance but this is something I not only really believe in, it is helping me understand a ton of stuff – about space, its future, about crowdfunding – all while I connect with a lot of really exciting people.

You all know how ‘manic’ I get when excited, You will just have to deal with it the next few weeks ;-)

People whose selfie from space I want to see, taken by the ARKYD Satellite

After walking all over Seattle center this afternoon evangelizing the people’s satellite paid for by the people, I was tired but excited. While driving home I thought about one of the perks – a self-portrait sent to space where a picture would capture it with the Earth in the background – a seflie from space.

Then I thought of those people I’d love to see have theirs taken. Here is a quick list (who would you add?):

• Wil Wheaton
• Adam Savage
• Felicia Day
• Evil Wil Wheaton 
• Codex
• Zaboo
• Vork
• Bladezz
• Clara
• Tinkerbella
• Fawkes
• Nathan Fillion (in his Firefly outfit as Mal)
• Morena Baccarin (as either Inara or Anna of V)
• Adam Baldwin (as Jayne)
• Gina Torres  (as Zoe)
• Alan Tudyk ( as Wash)
• Jewel Straite (as Kaylee)
• Sean Maher and Summer Glau ( as the Tams)
• Ron Glass ( as Shepard Book)
• Mark Sheppard ( Badger fron Firefly, Romo from Battlestar Galactica, Crowley from Supernatural, Tanaka from Doll house, Benedict Valda from Warehouse 13, Canton Delaware from Dr. Who,  
• George Takei
• Either Spock (Nimoy or Quinto)
• Shatner
• Any of the main cast of Big Bang Theory
• Joss Whedon
• Mads Mikkelson (as Hannibal)
• Eliza Dushku
• Fran Kranz
• Edward James Olmos
• Jamie Bamber
• Katie Sackoff
• Tricia Helfer
• Jamie Callis
• Mary McDonald
• Seth MacFarlane

I have to stop ot this will just be way too long. Got any you’d like to add?

As long as Federighi is at Apple it will be fine

by Compudemano

Apple’s Federighi thrust into spotlight with successful WWDC keynote performance
[Via AppleInsider]

During Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote on Monday, the most stage time wasn’t allotted CEO Tim Cook, or marketing head Phil Schiller, but to Craig Federighi, the software chief who stepped out from his “behind-the-scenes” role and into the spotlight.

[More]

I wrote about Federighi a while ago. He was at NeXT with Jobs, came over to Apple  a bit ago and now is the face of all Apple software. I expect we will see much more of him.

What everyone seems to say about him is that he not only gets the programming aspect, he knows how to bring people together to solve problems., even people who are lousy at collaboration.

Rumors were that iOS7 was behind schedule, as was the OS X timeline, and might not even make the unveiling that the developers conference. Yet both were unveiled in very useful ways.

And Apple may need a better ‘spokeperson’ than either Cook, who while brilliant in his balliwick, is not the most inspiring, or Ive, who simply does not want the job.

Here you can see an early example of his coolness, as he reveals his name is “Hair Force One.”

And here he is from Monday, providing the sort of awe-struck observation, mixed with inside jokes, that made Steve Jobs so much fun.

But that is what Jobs had – the ability to bring disparate groups together and get them to produce. Will we see more of him?

I bet we find out.

What happens when our TVs watch us and send the data to the NSA?

NSA Domestic Spying Program Makes Xbox One Even Scarier
[Via American Times]

The government has been spying on US citizens by tapping into the servers of American tech giants according to The Guardian—so much for making privacy a priority.

Revelations that the government has access to all of Verizon’s call ‘metadata’ have widened.

The Guardian is reporting that the government has had essentially unfettered access to the servers of most of the biggest American tech companies since the end of the Bush administration.

This access began in 2007 and includes tech giants like Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.

[More]

New computer game consoles will have the ability to determine who is watching games and what they are doing. Biometric data will be collected.

If this is being sent to Microsoft severs, then it appears the NSA will also be collecting them.

Do we really want the government to be able to watch us at home when it wants to? This is a discussion we need to have.

I wonder who will play Google Executive, Thomas Turvey, in the movie

by superiphi

Google helps DOJ make first big mistake in Apple ebook trial
[Via The Verge - All Posts]

With his arms folded tightly across his chest, Apple’s lead attorney Orin Snyder appeared to seethe as he began to question Thomas Turvey.

Turvey, Google’s director of strategic partnerships, was in federal court in Manhattan as a government witness. He was there to add credibility to the DOJ’s allegation that Apple, one of Google’s biggest rivals, had conspired with five of the nation’s top six book publishers to limit Amazon’s ability to discount books and remove a key competitive advantage. The high-profile antitrust case is likely to help remake the ebook sector and determine who the frontrunners will be.

[More]

This is getting really interesting. The cross-examination of the government’s witness – who was supposed to provide credible evidence that Apple forced the publishers into anti-trust behavior – flipped this around, reducing Turvey’s credibility tremendously.

He could not name anyone who told him the facts that he stated in his deposition. Wow.

You know a witness is having a bad day when the judge kindly lets them leave – for now – by saying, “Let’s allow Mr. Turvey to escape so he can enjoy his Thursday.”

I’m not so sure he will enjoy his Friday, Saturday or Sunday. He will be back on Monday. 

Next week will be fun for someone.

Big data is still just data

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

 by BBVAtech

Big data vs. big reality
[Via O'Reilly Radar]

This post originally appeared on Cumulus Partners. It’s republished with permission.

Quentin Hardy’s recent post in the Bits blog of The New York Times touched on the gap between representation and reality that is a core element of practically every human enterprise. His post is titled “Why Big Data is Not Truth,” and I recommend it for anyone who feels like joining the phony argument over whether “big data” represents reality better than traditional data.

In a nutshell, this “us” versus “them” approach is like trying to poke a fight between oil painters and water colorists. Neither oil painting nor water colors are “truth”; both are forms of representation. And here’s the important part: Representation is exactly that — a representation or interpretation of someone’s perceived reality. Pitting “big data” against traditional data is like asking you if Rembrandt is more “real” than Gainsborough. Both of them are artists and both painted representations of the world they perceived around them.

[More]

Data by itself has no meaning. It does not if it is big or traditional. Data simply exists.

It requires interaction with human beings to be transformed into information, humans to provide context, humans to provide understanding. It requires interactions between human being to transform data into information and beyond onto knowledge.

As I wrote “Information that is held by an individual, which is never revealed or acted upon, has no value. The greatest medical discovery in the world does little good if it dies with the discoverer.”

All big data is allow humans to examine data that is too large, too complex or too difficult to examine by traditional means.

But the problems with any data – confirmation bias, cherry-picking, etc. – do not simply go away because the data is big. It still requires humans to transform this data into meaningful knowledge.

That still requires open and transparent communication between people to function best.