- Although data leaks are common, we give our information away because we get something back in return; the digital explosion creates both opportunity and risk.
- Bits (basic units of information in computing and telecommunication) travel almost instantaneously and take almost no space to store
- Seven truths (koans) about bits:
- It's all about bits (ex. there is no difference between texts and phone calls in the world of bits, but the law hasn't caught up with this technology)
- Perfection is normal: every copy is perfect although computers and networks can still fail; digital copies are perfect only to the extent that they can be communicated at all; networks do check to make sure bits were submitted properly
- There is want in the midst of plenty: there is a loss of information that is not online; for anything to "exist" online it must be about to be found and found quickly
- Processing is power
- More of the same can be a whole new thing: exponential change is smooth and steady but it takes little time before unnoticeable change becomes highly visible
- Nothing goes away: by 2011, we may be producing more bits than we can store; (ex. hotel key cards and loyalty cards)
- Bits move faster than thought: international help desk calls, intimate news released online, national and state borders still count
- Technology is neither good nor bad, but it can be used for good and ill-brings both opportunities and risks
- Orwell's 1984 describes a world of permanent surveillance, a society void of both privacy and freedom
- Are we far from that world? the bank tells the government if big withdrawals are made, "little brothers" are always watching (devices of surveillance got smaller and are put in consumer goods, but we don't worry about their uses as surveillance...ex: the camera phone)
- Footprints and Fingerprints: we can see footprints easily, but rarely pay attention to the fingerprints we make, same with technology
- Our digital cameras encode their serial number into the pictures we upload, GPS in cars allow them to be tracked, RFID in clothing, printed paper can be traced through the printer encoding
- The issue: taking bits from a car is not like taking things from a house, no warrant is necessary; no information is truly unidentifiable
- Why we loose control of personal information: to save time (EZ pass), save money (loyalty cards, store credit cards), convenience of the customer, fun to be exposed (Facebook), we can't live any other way
- There is a difference between public and readily available: information available before by going down to city hall and searching through records is available with a click of a button online
- Reports including sensitive/private information are commonly redacted before they are shared, but ordinary office software makes it easy to quickly recover redacted text. This is dangerous and embarrassing to the government.
- Adobe offers security with encryption and Redax software; printing and scanning a document works too, but the text is reduced to dots and cannot be searched or used as a document
- With Word you can "track changes" to a document, to avoid put text in the body of an email not as an attachment
- Reproducing images electronically create "ghosts of the original"; they are not identical but contain enough of the original to be useful.
- A photograph is represented in bits (model by modeling, omits information) and the model is turned into an image (rendering) which brings the "ghost" back to life
- But this can also turn things that never existed into "reality" (ex. photoshopped evidence in court)
- Processing is power because of the amount of information we store now, compact disk is dying
- No one owns the internet, but everyone owns the internet; it is not hardware by protocol
- "OpenDocument Format" where multiple companies could enter into the market and read documents produce by other software
- Open Source v. Proprietary format
- Spam: mass emails are so cheap, one response is worth the cost; they can produce graphics of text to get around spam filters
- Steganography: art of sending secret messages in imperceptible ways (the message itself is not suspicious) while cryptography is the art of sending mesages that are indecipherable
- Most things on a hard drive can be recovered even if you "format" them and erase information
- Since bits have widths, information can even be detected on a zeroed disk
- Although search engines can be used to find long lost relatives and discover things we didn't know existed, they are also used by governments to distort out picture of reality
- "Search is a new form of control over information"
- We used to give control over where we get information to authoritative sources like newspapers on record and encyclopedias, but now we give that control to search engines
- Search engines gather information about us when we search
- Search engines succeed if we are happy with the connections they make, not on the quality of information they provide because that does not come from them
- How do search engines survive? adds, if something is "sponsored" on Google, they paid to get it there
- Either users would pay, sites pay, government/nonprofit pays, or advertisers pay
- Consumer Alert through the FTC made search engines say that ads are ads
- How do they work? They search an existing index of sites, not the entire World Wide Web
- Background: Gather information by visiting sites on a regular basis (those that don't change may only be visited once a year, others are visited by spiders); keep copies ("cached", copying of some sort is permitted or web wouldn't work); build index to show what appear on each page
- Foreground: Understand query (quotation marks help clarify search), determine relevance of each possible result to the query (however relevance is inherently subjective, long documents tend to be measure more relevant than shore ones because they have more word repetitions), determine ranking of relevant results (if many pages link to one page it must be important, where a company appears in search results is a matter of life and death), present the results
- Search engines shape our view of the world through the lens of their search results
- Google: PageRank Algorithm, fast, vast storage, expanding, not much money though until AdWords, now it is pay-per-click
- "bias can be coded into a computer program"; Search Engine Optimization industry seeks to improve how particular web pages rank within major search engines
- Ex: put "JC Pennys" in white text on a white background of "Kohls" website and it will come up when users are searching for "Kohls"
- US Patriot Act can require a search company to hand over personal search records without informing you they are getting information on you
- "Information access has greater market value than information creation"
Chapter Five: Secret Bits
- Encryption: the art of encoding messages so they can't be understood by eavesdroppers or adversaries whose hands the messages might fall; de-scrambling requires the key (sequence of symbols) used to create it
- Congress has to allow banks, airlines, and online stores to use encryption or personal security is at risk; efforts to control encryption would be ineffective and costs would exceed benefit.
- Bits move through the internet in packets like exposed postcards, wireless networks allow bits to be grabbed without detection
- Cryptography (secret writing) has been around basically since writing; Caesar Shift (three places); Substitution ciphers (one symbol for another according to uniform rule; frequency analysis can break this though)
- Can't reuse pads without risk of being deciphered, loss or interception is also a risk, big pads are hard to conceal
- Lessons for the Internet Age: Weak systems and their risks are often rationalized to try to avoid the trouble of switching to more secure alternatives.
- Bernardo Provenzana, mafia boss, stayed on run from Italian police for 43 years but a paper was found with correspondence between him and his son written in Caesar shift. He tried to switch to a new code but was traced and arrested in April 2006 (174)
- WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) and WPA (Wi-FI Protected Access)
- A cryptographic method should be considered reliable if it is widely known and seems not have been broken (Ex: encryption on DVDs was not distributed, but then it was cracked within three years after announced)
- For a long time, secure communication was practical "only for people who could arrange to meet beforehand, or who and access to a prior method of secure communication for carrying the key between them"
- Now they need a common g, private a and b, and a public A and B that can be seem by anyone and not deciphered; with this public-key encryption, anyone can send encrypted mail to anyone over an insecure publicly exposed communication path
- Digital signatures help verify a mark is probably not forged, attests to integrity and authenticity
- RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) algorithm with public and secret keys rely on difficulty of factoring and thus have created much interest in finding fast ways to factor numbers
- Privacy? Clipper from Clinton to decrypt phone communications, US Patriot Act (Government can sift through data to look for harmful information)
Chapter 6: Balance Toppled (Who Owns the Bits?)
- Tanya Anderson (2005) Recording Industry Association of America searched her hard drive and tried to sue her for close to a million dollars for illegally downloading songs, they had no proof (195)
- 26,000 lawsuits in five years
- MediaSentry (RIAA's investigative company), scans suspicious computers for music files and sends IP address to RIAA's Anti-Privacy group, but computers on the same network can have same IP address and some networks rotate IP addresses
- High Stakes for Infringement: 3 million dollars for 4,000 songs
- NET Act Makes Sharing a Crime: Copyright infringement not even criminal until turn of 20th c., and in 1976 Congress started enacting a series of laws to increase the penalty
- A machine at MIT (1993) was being used for file transfer and the FBI questioned it, there was no commercial motive, no crime; law needed to change so these types of cases could be prosecuted (199-200)
- Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright damages Improvement Act of 1999, penalties needed to be increased, copyright arms race was in full swing
- Peer-to-Peer Upheaval: Napster by Sean Fanning, file sharing no longer used "centralized systems", but had a central directory showing who had the songs on their computers "peer-to-peer", no passing through server, "universal jukebox"
- Specter of Secondary Liability: "how can you hold a company liable for simply publishing the locations of items on the internet?" (203), guilty of secondary copyright infringement (allowing others to infringe and profiting by infringement); "P2P"-no reliance on central authorities
- Sharing Goes Decentralized: the central directories of Napster allowed for liability; so to get around, flooding was created (each computer has a file-sharing network of other computers, like FOAF)
- No Safe harbors: RIAA saw this as another Napster, so Grokster, Morpheus, and Kazaa were sued and finally the Supreme Court ruled in the RIAA's favor (unlike Sony v. Universal Studios where the VCR recorder remained legal because it had many legitimate uses)
- A Question of Intent: these companies' liability came from the intent on their distribution, not the capabilities of the software
- With TiVo you can't skip commercials automatically and songs transferred from Microsoft Zune self-destruct after three plays to limit liability
- Authorized Use Only: If computer's make file sharing easy, change computers...but there are ways to encrypt information so it cannot be manipulated or distributed
- "The general technique of distributing content together with control information that restricts its use is called digital rights management (DRM)" (210) (industry specifications that detail restrictions that can be imposed=rights expression languages)
- The chip "Trusted Platform Module" keeps a computer from booting whose operating system was tampered with, but having a "world of trusted systems" could jeopardize the rapid innovation that has taken place because the infrastructure is currently open
- Forbidden Technology: anti-circumvention laws to keep people from going around copyright protection; made it illegal to talk about how to unlock iphones from AT&T network
- 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has anti-circumvention provision that "outlaws technology for bypassing copyright protection" (214) the book gives a couple lines of a program that unscrambles encrypted DVDs, by providing whole code it would violate law. Outlaw manufacturing, selling, writing, and talking about technologies that allow copyright bypass, not just outlaw infringement but bypassing; Circumvention; were allowed to undo lock-in on their mobile phones when shifting service providers then iPhone...AT&T threatened legal action against unlocking companies...unlock own phone not others.
- need permission from companies in industry to create new technologies/products/services around DRM-restricted content
- Copyright Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance
Chapter 7: You Can't Say That on the Internet
- Katherine Lester (16) went missing from her home in Michigan; she had met Jimzawi from Jericho on MySpace and went to Jordan to meet him. This led to Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) to require schools/libraries to prevent children from using on-site computers to access chat rooms/social networking sites (229-230). This would also prevent "access to online encyclopedias and bookstores"--> education not prohibition to bring safer internet...DOPA not passed into law
- "Internet is not exactly like anything else" (231): 2-way, no limit to number of channels, delivers packets of bits.
- Transmitted information always has source and destination, may also have intermediaries, with internet there is "cloud computing" (source->ISP->Cloud->ISP->destination) who should government regulate? can control ISP, destination, source, or intermediaries
- Ex: parents of child who Pete Solis (232) assaulted tried to sue MySpace; CompuServe computer service provider had bulletin board (Rumorville) while DFA provided content. Rumorville began bashing competing company. Compuserve was the "distributor" and like a trucker, not liable, if it was, this would limit use for participatory democracy (234-235)
- Prodigy (like Compuserve but said they were like newspaper and wanted to provide family friendly content). On their bulletin board "Money Tallk" information was posted about Stratton Oakmont criminal fraud and was sued for defamation. Held responsible as publisher because they said they were. "Undercut efforts to create safe districts in Cyberspace...Don't even consider editing or censoring" (236).
- 1st Amendment doesn't protect against censorship of obscene material: Miller v. California Miller Test 1.) community standards, appeals to prurient interest 2.) depicts or describes in offensive way sexual conduct 3.) lacks social value. Obscene if all three are yes. What is community in cyberspace
- The Thomas's bulletin board Amateur Action the "Nastiest Place on Earth". Pictures were not obscene in California but were in Tennessee and they were arrested
- Porn was not new, but the availability or digital porn made it seem new. Time Magazine didn't mention that they bulletin boards which offered images were not openly available to children. Senator Grassley (239) read article which claimed to be from Georgetown University Law School and passed into law Communications Decency Act (CDA) which criminalizes using computer that is used by minor to view/whatever offensive content and distribute such material to minors
- "court was unwilling to risk the entire Internet's promise as a vigorous marketplace of ideas to serve the narrow purpose of protecting children from indecency" (241) burden from source ISP to destination
- Good Samaritan clause in CDA allowed ISP to not be responsible for anything they did "in good faith" to protect minors, can censor without being liable (Ken Zeran...see blog)
- This clause also protected AOL twice, once when Russel used AOL to sell sexual images of little boys, AOL was notified and did not suspend his use. AOL won (246).
- Gary Dellapenta (doorman) wrote woman's address and name on a chatboard and said she wanted to be raped and gave directions how to break in to he apartment->federal anti-cyberstalking laws. (250)
- Like an annoying telephone call? 2005 law stated internet could not be used for the purpose of annoying someone
- "Given the Choice between protection from personal harm and some fool's need to spout profanities, most of us would opt for safety" (253)
- In Saudi Arabia, every web access goes through government computers to censor
- "Technological changes happen faster than legal changes" (257)
Chapter 8: Bits in the Air
- 2006 Bush talking to British Prime Minister and said the s word, most stations censored word or could get sued $300,000 by FCC; 2002 Bono said f word at Golden Globes, "offensive" (260)
- First Amendment, freedom of speech, so government isn't fast to restrict it
- FCC gained authority when there were fewer ways to distribute information, public airways scarce and needed be regulated to be used in public interest, "protecting a defenseless public from objectionable radio and television content" (260)
- Now we have an abundance of sources of information maybe in the "absence of scarcity", Congress should stop censorship entirely (261)
- James Clerk Maxwell proposed there may be waves of other frequencies that couldn't be seen like light waves. 1887 radio era began with Henrich Hertz using a wire to create a spark of electromagnetic waves. Marconi experimented with wireless transmission of messages. solved problem of telegraphs, nothing could stop wireless transmission by severing cables, BUT anyone could listen in and signals were crossed and muddled.
- Ex: titanic, Newspapers had reported all safe because one signal asked if all were safe and another gave a location of another ship.
- In 1907, Lee De Forest patented technology that allowed production of radio waves at a narrow range of frequencies and a receiver that let those through and screened out the rest.-->amateur broadcaster.
- Radio Act of 1912 limits broadcasting to license holders, government stipulates frequencies to prevent interference. Amateurs pushed to short wave
- On Nov 2, 1920 station presented election results, radio not just point-to-point communication, then World Series broadcast, sports broadcasting; regulation in 1921 (could tell "shipping lanes to use, but he couldn't keep them out of the water" (267))
- Radio Act of 1927, radio spectrum became federal property
- Brinkley "doctor" bought degree from medical school in Kansas, made it big with buck gland transplants to promise virility...opened Kansas's first radio station KFKB (country, preaching, medical advice to buy patent medicines). Court held FRC had right to not renew license, no prior restraint...central planning not going so well
- Path to Spectrum Deregulation: broadcast signals when using key fob to unlock door, regulation of these waves would have snuffed digital explosion (273)
- Spectrum allocation: changing way spectrum utilized, at first cell phones were limited by number of channels, now signal only transmitted a mile or so then sent through wire to company. SHORT DISTANCE!!
- HD radio inaudible on normal radio, uses guard bands to be filtered out from adjacent channels; secondary spectrum marketing pay per use
- Everybody shares roads with rules and regulations, commons
- Hedy Lamarr (actress) married Austrian munitions maker, left and met Mayer and Antheil in Hollywood
- Radio controlled torpedoes, broadcast noise at same frequency of signal could cause to miss mark (278), came up with idea instead to transmit signal in short burst at different frequencies (transmission couldn't be jammed by flooding a small range of frequency, and too much power to jam all frequencies at the same time; patent ignored for decade
- Spreading signals across spectrum: channel capacity (bits/second handles), "bits can be transmitted through the channel, from the source to the destination, with negligible probability of error as long as he transmission rate does not exceed the channel capacity" (281)
- Capacity of radio channel depends on frequencies an power. Bandwidth is the size of the frequency band (difference between top and bottom), channel capacity is proportional to bandwidth. Power increases exponentially with bits. Capacity depends on both bandwidth and power, more bandwidth more important than more power
- Wireless sensor networking with remote areas with hostle environments
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