Tuesday, January 28. 2014
Via MIT Technology Review
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Revelations about NSA surveillance have prompted Yahoo, Microsoft, and other companies to deploy long-overdue security improvements.
Last week, Google, Microsoft, and five other leading Web companies formally requested that the U.S. government rein in its use of dragnet surveillance. These companies don’t have to wait for the government to act, though. Encryption technology can protect the privacy of innocent users from indiscriminate surveillance, but only if tech companies deploy it. In the wake of the Snowden disclosures, they are starting to do so. It shouldn’t have taken them this long.
In October of 2010, security researcher Eric Butler released an easy-to-use tool designed to hack into the webmail accounts of people using public Wi-Fi networks. Butler’s Firesheep wasn’t the first technology to make Wi-Fi sniffing possible, but it made it easy to intercept e-mails and documents, and even to capture authentication cookies that could be used at a later time to log in to a victim’s account.
Firesheep exploited the fact that most webmail and social networking sites at the time did not use HTTPS encryption to protect their customers’ information, or provided such encryption only to users who enabled an obscure configuration option most people were unaware of.
Google embraced encryption by default for its Gmail service a few months before Firesheep was released. Other major Web companies ignored calls from Pamela Jones Harbour, a commissioner with the Federal Trade Commission, for them to follow suit. One year later (soon after Firesheep was written about in the New York Times), Senator Chuck Schumer wrote a letter to Yahoo, Amazon, and Twitter urging them to enable HTTPS by default.
Twitter, Facebook, and Microsoft’s e-mail service eventually did switch to HTTPS encryption by default. However, Yahoo continued to expose its customers’ private information not only to hackers using tools like Firesheep, but also to governments around the world that are capable of intercepting the communications of their own citizens. In January of this year the company finally announced an opt-in encryption setting, which few users were likely to use.
Yahoo ignored not just strong words from an FTC commissioner and a letter from a U.S. senator, but also a public plea from human rights groups. What made the company finally decide to use HTTPS by default was a Washington Post story revealing that the NSA was intercepting nearly half a million of Yahoo users’ unencrypted webmail address books per day.
Shortly after the news broke, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer proclaimed that “there is nothing more important to us than protecting our users’ privacy.” If that’s the case, why did it take the disclosures of Edward Snowden for the company to finally deliver industry-standard Web encryption? Why didn’t the company protect its customers from hackers using tools like Firesheep, or from the deep packet inspection equipment that we have long known governments around the world are using?
The answer is that they didn’t care—until their utter failure to deploy basic Web security was featured on the front page of the Washington Post.
Yahoo isn’t the only company to up its game in response to the Snowden disclosures. Indeed, many of the big cloud computing companies—including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others—have started to encrypt information between data centers. They have also increased the size of their encryption keys and switched to encryption algorithms that offer “perfect forward secrecy.”
The EFF’s “Encrypt the Web” report reflects the rapid embrace of security technologies by major companies. However, were it not for Snowden’s whistle-blowing and the brave decision by journalists to reveal technical details about some of the NSA’s activities, it’s doubtful that many companies would have made these security improvements.
For that reason alone, we owe Edward Snowden our thanks.
Christopher Soghoian is principal technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
Friday, January 24. 2014
A new call by the very interesting Bracket magazine/books!
Via Bracket
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Dear Bracket friends,
We hope you consider submitting. Please also pass this along to anyone you think might be interested.
The deadline is quickly approaching — February 28th!
Best wishes,
Neeraj & Mason
Bracket [takes action]
“When humans assemble, spatial conflicts arise. Spatial planning is often considered the management of spatial conflicts.” —Markus Miessen
Call for submissions
Hannah Arendt’s 1958 treatise The Human Condition cites “action” as one of the three tenants, along with labor and work, of the vita active (active life). Action, she writes, is a necessary catalyst for the human condition of plurality, which is an expression of both the common public and distinct individuals. This reading of action requires unique and free individuals to act toward a collective project and is therefore simultaneously ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’. In the more than fifty years since Arendt’s claims, the public realm in which action materializes, and the means by which action is expressed, has dramatically transformed. Further, spatial practice’s role in anticipating, planning, or absorbing action(s) has been challenged, yielding difficulty in the design of the ‘space of appearance,’ Arendt’s public realm.
Our young century has already seen contested claims of design’s role in the public realm by George Baird, Lieven De Cauter, Markus Meissen, Jan Gehl, among others. Perhaps we could characterize these tensions as a ‘design deficit’, or a sense that design does not incite ‘action’, in the Arendtian sense. Amongst other things, this feeling is linked to the rise of neo-liberal pluralism, which marks the transition from public to publics, making a collective agenda in the public realm often illegible. Bracket [takes action] explores the complex relationship between spatial design, and the public(s) as well as action(s) it contains. How can design catalyze a public and incite platforms for action?
Consider two images indicative of contemporary action within the public realm of our present century: (i) the June 2009 opening of the High Line Park in New York City, and (ii) the January 2011 occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo. These two spaces and their respective contemporary publics embody the range within today’s space of appearance. At the High Line, the urban public is now choreographed in a top-down manner along a designed, former infrastructure with an endless supply of vistas into an urban private realm. In Tahrir Square, an assembled swirling public occupies, and therefore re-designs, an infrastructural plaza overwhelming a government and communication networks. This example reveals a bottom-up, self-assembling public. But what role did spatial practice play in each of these scenarios and who were the spatial practitioners and public(s)? The contrast of two positions on action in a public realm offers an opening for wider investigations into spatial practice’s role and impact on today’s public(s) and their action(s).
Bracket [takes action] asks: What are the collective projects in the public realm to act on? How have recent design projects incited political or social action? How can design catalyze a public, as well as forums for that public to act? What is the role of spatial practice to instigate or resist public actions? Bracket 4 provokes spatial practice’s potential to incite and respond to action today.
The fourth edition of Bracket invites design work and papers that offer contemporary models of spatial design that are conscious of their public intent and actively engaged in socio-political conditions. It is encouraged, although not mandatory, that submissions documenting projects be realized. Positional papers should be projective and speculative or revelatory, if historical. Suggested subthemes include:
Participatory ACTION – interactive, crowd-sourced, scripted
Disputed PUBLICS – inconsistent, erratic, agonized
Deviant ACTION – subversive, loopholes, reactive
Distributed PUBLICS – broadcasted, networked, diffused
Occupy ACTION – defiant, resistant, upheaval
Mob PUBLICS – temporary, forceful, performative
Market ACTION – abandoning, asserting, selecting
The editorial board and jury for Bracket 4 includes Pier Vittorio Aureli, Vishaan Chakrabarti, Adam Greenfield, Belinda Tato, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto as well as co-editors Neeraj Bhatia and Mason White.
Deadline for Submissions: February 28, 2014
Please visit www.brkt.org for more info.
Wednesday, January 15. 2014
Via Make
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Intel’s new single board computer, Edison, takes on a familiar form factor. Jammed into an SD card, the 400MHz Quark processor on board has two cores, flash memory, and includes Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Low Energy for communication. It runs Linux on one core and a real time operating system on the other. You can program Edison by inserting the board into the SD card reader of your computer. The pins on the bottom of the board are capable of GPIO, UART, I2C, SPI, and PWM. “It can be designed to work with most any device—not just computers, phones, or tablets, but chairs, coffeemakers, and even coffee cups,” according to Intel’s press release. “The possibilities are endless for entrepreneurs and inventors of all kinds.” At first glance, I think this could be a good board for makers as well.
Check out the video below for more about Intel’s newest dev board including some test implementations from Thomas Lipoma, the founder of Rest Devices, the makers of the Mimo baby monitor.
Friday, January 10. 2014
By fabric | ch
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After its creation for Close, Closer, the Lisbon Architecture Triennale last summer, we had the opportunity to exhibit Deterritorialized Living for the first time in November 13 during Acces(s) Festival in Pau (curated by Ewenn Chardronnet), at the Maison de l'Architecture.
The project, which consists in an "artificial troposphere" that reverses our causal relationship to the rythms of day and night, air, seasons, time -- based on real time global network activity by both humans and robots and that is delivered in the form of open data feeds, fictional data in some ways -- was displayed accompanied by videos of former projects by fabric | ch.
Specifically, we took the ocasion to complete an electromagnetic sample of Deterritorialized Daylight, based on its feed of data.




The simple spatialization took the appearance of two strong controllable projectors and two light reflectors. These were the only sources of light in the exhibition space, accompanied by five screens that displayed the different data feeds and the interactive version of Deterritorialized Daylight (a controllable intensity of the 13 last hours). Two small but intense "suns", an "eclipse" and a "waning moon" seemed to appear in the space, at the same time.


The variable intensity of the light in the space defined a pattern of illumination within the exhibition room where the display tables took place, in an apparent random manner, yet following this pattern accordingly to their own reflection potential and their exhibition program.

Exhibition after exhibition, we plan to develop physical samples of the data feeds and materialize the "geoengineered" troposphere. We will also look into some architectural explorations of this "geoengineered" climate, architectural environments that will locate themselves within, or just use this deterritorialized atmosphere.
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