Wednesday, May 21, 2008
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[ECP] NetHappenings
China's All-Seeing Eye
"Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world."
"The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric... "  "...to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world's attention at Tiananmen Square."
"The mergers made L-1 a one-stop shop for biometrics. Thanks to board members like former CIA director George Tenet, the company rapidly became a homeland-security heavy hitter."  "L-1 can legally supply its facial-recognition software for use by the Chinese government."
"I get to the customs line at JFK, watching hundreds of visitors line up to have their pictures taken and fingers scanned. In the terminal, someone hands me a brochure for "Fly Clear." All I need to do is have my fingerprints and irises scanned, and I can get a Clear card with a biometric chip that will let me sail through security. Later, I look it up: The company providing the technology is L-1."


2)
NBC-Vista copy-protection snafu reminds us why DRM stinks
By Jacqui Cheng
Published: May 14, 2008 - 11:54AM CT
Handfuls of Windows Vista Media Center users found themselves blocked
from making recordings of their favorite TV shows this week when a
broadcast flag triggered the software's built-in copy protection
measures. The flag affected users trying to record prime-time NBC shows
on Monday evening, using both over-the-air broadcasts and cable.
Although the problem is being "looked into" by both NBC and Microsoft,
the incident serves as another reminder that DRM gives content providers
full control, even if by accident.
Vista MCE users began reporting problems on Monday evening, starting
with posts on the popular DVR-enthusiast forum on The Green Button
<http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9943631-7.html?tag=nefd.top>. While
trying to record shows like /American Gladiator/ and /Medium/, Vista
users were presented with an error that read, "Recording cancelled. [TV
show] cannot be recorded. Restrictions set by the broadcaster and/or
originator of the content prohibit recording of this program." The Green
Button user justinjas posted a screenshot of the error
<http://justinjas.com/post/34602210> on his blog.
It seems the flag only triggered copy protection measures in Vista, as
one of our staffers with a DirecTV HD DVR recorded /Gladiators/ as
usual, and a TiVo spokesperson told CNet
<http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9943631-7.html?tag=nefd.top> that the
company had not received any complaints. Spokespersons from Microsoft
and NBC also told CNet that the issue was being looked into, indicating
that the broadcast flag was likely switched on by accident.
The serves as a unsettling reminder that broadcasters can give
instructions to the software built into DVRs, although they almost never
do. Many DVRs and other, similar devices appear to be aware of the
content-restriction flags set by broadcasters, even if they're not
programmed to "obey" them by default. Still, broadcasters would love to
have the power to stop users from recording their shows, watching them
later, and most importantly, skipping commercials when they do it.
Vista users aren't the only one to get hosed by broadcaster's
copy-protection flags this year. Last month, DirecTV began to limit the
window in which users could watch recorded pay-per-view movies. Previously,
users who purchased PPV movies had unlimited time to watch their
content, but DirecTV said the movie industry wanted tighter
restrictions. As a result, DirecTV DVR owners must now watch their
movies within 24 hours of purchase (unlike rentals on iTunes, which must
be watched within 30 days of purchase, or 24 hours from the time you
press the play button), or else the content will go "poof."
Remember: DRM isn't about fighting piracy. It's about the ability to
strictly control how we consume content. Users who are interested in
pirating TV shows and movies aren't going to do so with a DVR or buy
them through PPV. They've already skipped the middle-man and gone
straight to BitTorrent with its decent-quality, commercial-less, and
DRM-free offerings. Boneheaded mistakes like the one apparently made by
NBC and Microsoft Monday night will only serve to make alternative means
of obtaining content more attractive.



3)
High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers - New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/
After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually
facing a dwindling number of young people entering engineering and
technology-related fields.
Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.” The
decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising
campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies
are slowly starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where
the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.
It was engineering prowess that lifted this nation from postwar defeat
to economic superpower. But according to educators, executives and young
Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans:
choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine, or more purely
creative careers, like the arts, rather than following their salaryman
fathers into the unglamorous world of manufacturing.
The problem did not catch Japan by surprise. The first signs of
declining interest among the young in science and engineering appeared
almost two decades ago, after Japan reached first-world living
standards, and in recent years there has been a steady decline in the
number of science and engineering students. But only now are Japanese
companies starting to feel the real pinch.
By one ministry of internal affairs estimate, the digital technology
industry here is already short almost half a million engineers.
Headhunters have begun poaching engineers midcareer with fat signing
bonuses, a predatory practice once unheard-of in Japan’s less-cutthroat
version of capitalism.

4)
PDF REDACTION
I work on the Acrobat Team at Adobe, and have been involved in our redaction feature.  As I think others have pointed out on your distribution list, Acrobat and other PDF applications have specialized features which can properly and permanently remove sensitive information from PDF files.  In Acrobat, we have two sets of features:
Redaction – This can remove any visible content from a PDF file, including text, images, artwork/lines, video/multimedia, and more.  It can also remove visible content from image-only PDFs created from scanners.  Acrobat’s Redaction feature first became available in the current Acrobat 8 family of products and is available in Acrobat 8 Professional (Mac/Win) and Acrobat 3D Version 8 (Win).
Examine Document – This can detect, preview and remove non-visible content from a PDF file, including metadata, comments, file attachments, hidden text, and more.  Acrobat’s Examine Document feature also first became available in the current Acrobat 8 family of products and is available in Acrobat 8 Standard (Win), Acrobat 8 Professional (Mac/Win) and Acrobat 3D Version 8 (Win).
Aadditional information on the tools available in Acrobat, there is some information available here
(including a brief Show Me video, a redaction tutorial available and a good blog article on redaction
Dave Stromfeld  |  Senior Product Manager,
p 408.536.4203  |  f 347.214.2154

5)
Mozilla phancies doing a Phorm
Firefox - your friendly data snooper
By Andrew Orlowski
The Phorm bug is spreading. The idea of collecting a user's browsing
history and flogging that data doesn't just appeal to ISPs. The
Mozilla Foundation, the people behind the Firefox browser, want some
of that action too.
The Foundation is officially a tax exempt non-profit - but still
manages to pay its chairperson $500,000 a year. Executives last week
confirmed they are working on a project referred to internally as
"Data". This would gather anonymised data on a voluntary basis, and
provide the analytical information for anyone who wanted it.
But recent history reminds us that "anonymised" data is anything but
anonymous. Meanwhile, bugs in the bloated browser have blown
supposedly "private" data wide open.
Mozilla claims Firefox has around 170m users, which means it has
more users than the largest ISP outside China. So it's easy to see
why the temptation is there.
"There are worlds of information about how people use the web that
are locked up and not currently shared," tootles Mozilla CEO John
Lilly.
But what's a non-profit web browser doing building in a
data-gathering infrastructure? It would be creepy if we discovered
say Nokia putting stealth recording equipment into its handsets. But
this is creepier still.
Michael Arrington, who Nick Carr described as the "Madam of the Web
2.0 brothel", thinks it's a great idea.
"The potential is huge. Tell them in the comments below and on
Lilly's blog how much you want this to happen," he urged in the
Washington Post.
(You can't trust Web 2.0 evangelists with privacy, we've noted
before. People forget that AOL's notorious data leak was not
accidental, but intentional - a gift to the hive mind. For some
network utopians, the biggest regret about the scandal was that we
wouldn't see more such gifts.)
Cryptome puts it more succinctly - "Firefox Ponders Suicide".


Response from a Mozillarist here:
http://john.jubjubs.net/2008/05/13/mozilla-firefox-data/
[[
So we asked ourselves what we can do to help unlock some of this latent
potential — and started thinking about whether there’s a project we can
do at Mozilla that does a few things:

    1. Collects & shares data in a way that embodies the user control &
privacy options which are at Mozilla’s core.
    2. Enables everyone — from individual researchers and entrepreneurs
(both the social and capitalist types) to the largest organizations in
the world — to take usage data, mix it up, mash it up, derive insight,
and hopefully share some of that insight with others.
    3. Helps move the conversation around data collection and web usage
forward, to help consumers make more informed decisions.

It seems obvious to us that there’s lots to be done here, and lots that
we can do, if we can work with our broad community to figure it out.
]]
 

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Wednesday, May 21, 2008 9:55:54 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)    Disclaimer  |  Comments [0]  |  Related posts:
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