Imagine that you are considering the purchase of your first self-driving car. You anticipate the benefits of sensors and steering that avoid accidents, conserve energy and keep you in contact with emergency personnel should you need help. You unlock the door, get situated in the driver's seat and are about to engage the ignition and then a question pops into your mind, "Is it really safe"? To answer that question, we need to understand first, that the car is not being controlled by Artificial General Intelligence... more
Over the past say six months there are trends and events on and around the Internet that made me come up with this bizarre sounding question. Still it may actually make sense if we look at some facts. I'll be honest up front. This is a contribution that is not totally thought over and more a compilation of ideas and impressions gathered over the past weeks and months. Still, it could well serve as the beginning of a discussion on giving the recent events a place. There's nothing better than a provocative question in that case! Let's start here. more
A directive known as "Written Declaration 29," adopted last week by the European Parliament, calls for legislation that would require search engines to make a record of all search queries, as reported today by Startpage and Ixquick, anonymous search engine providers. "Framed as a measure to crack down on paedophiles, the controversial Declaration calls on the EU to require that search engines store all search traffic for up to two years for possible analysis by authorities." more
I've been ruminating on this for a while, this follow-up that was a decade in the offing. My article Trench Warfare in the Age of The Laser-Guided Missile from January 2007 did pretty good in terms of views since I wrote it. Less so in terms of how well the ideas aged or didn't, but that's the nature of the beast. Everything gets worse, and simultaneously, better, and so here we are: Using embarrassingly ancient approaches to next-generation threats. Plus ça change. more
Surveillance capitalism monetizes private data that it collects without consent of the individuals concerned, data to analyze and sell to advertisers and opinion-makers. There was always an intricate relationship between governments and surveillance capitalists. Governments have the duty to protect their citizens from the excesses of surveillance capitalism. On the other hand, governments use that data, and surveillance capitalism's services and techniques. more
Last month the FCC released a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on Customer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI), the information telcos collect about consumers' phone calls. The Commission's proposed rules would adapt and apply privacy rules that have historically applied to the traditional telephone space to broadband carriers. It would also regulate how broadband providers use and share that data. more
EU holds an eight-hour-long hearing taking an extensive look at whether US surveillance practices break European data protection laws. more
The Microsoft action against 3322.org, a Chinese company, started with the news that computers were infected during the production phase. Stepping away from the controversy surrounding the approach, there are important lessons that cyber security officials and upper management, deciding on the level of and budget for cyber security in organisations should learn and take into account. I'm writing this contribution from a premise: China uses the fact that most IT devices are built in China to its advantage. Allow me to start with an account from personal memory to set the stage. more
It is not often that you read a book where afterward nothing seems the same again. Like Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Shoshana Zuboff's book: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power,, puts what we do in these times into a context and gives a focus to ongoing issues of privacy and governance with regard to the Domain Name System. This is even more astonishing as the book does not even mention the DNS, the Internet ecosystem or even Internet Governance directly. more
On Friday I was on a surprisingly interesting session at Rightscon 2018 in Toronto about GDPR and WHOIS. The panel consisted of Eleeza Agoopian from ICANN staff; Avri Doria who was recently appointed to the ICANN board; Elliot Noss who runs large registrar Tucows; Stephanie Perrin who has done a lot of privacy work for the Canadian government and as an ICANN volunteer, and me; Milt Mueller, who is now at Georgia Tech, moderated. more
According to news reports, part of the EU's cybercrime strategy is "remote search" of suspects' computers. I'm not 100% certain what that means, but likely guesses are alarming. The most obvious interpretation is also the most alarming: that some police officer will have the right and the ability to peruse people's computers from his or her desktop. How, precisely, is this to be done? Will Microsoft and Apple – and Ubuntu and Red Hat and all the BSDs and everyone else who ships systems – have to build back doors into all operating systems? more
Israel's entire voter registry was recently uploaded to a vulnerable voting management app which effectively left the data wide open for days. more
One of the throwaway remarks I sometimes make at conferences is that "Google knows you're pregnant before you do". I can say this because the things you search for will change as your life changes, and search engine providers may well be able to spot the significance of these changes because they aggregate data from millions of people. Now Google's philanthropic arm, google.org, has shown just what it can do with the data it gathers from us all by offering to predict where 'flu outbreaks will take place in the USA. more
This is the fundamental question that the Internet Society is posing through the report just launched today, our 2017 Global Internet Report: Paths to Our Digital Future. The report is a window into the diverse views and perspectives of a global community that cares deeply about how the Internet will evolve and impact humanity over the next 5-7 years. We couldn't know what we would find when we embarked on the journey to map what stakeholders believe could shape the future of the Internet... more
The current implementation of the Internet is hierarchical in that we get IP addresses from providers and then use a DNS that is rooted. We go even further in requiring that we conform to conditions on our intent (AKA our use) of connectivity in order to get a temporary lease on something so fundamental as our identity in the guise of a DNS name. We go further by accepting the idea that we communicate within pipes owned by service providers who can dictate terms in order to extract a rent. more
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