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“It’s Hard to Prevent What’s Hard to Imagine,” more sarcasm from TheRegister, and an article from Slate. From the third:
More important, though, the London bombs failed because open, Western societies are more resilient than we sometimes think they are.
And this, from the Asia Times.
EDITED TO ADD (7/9): And this.
Read this essay by Randy Farmer, a pioneer of virtual online worlds, explaining something called Disney’s ToonTown.
Designers of online worlds for children wanted to severely restrict the communication that users could have with each other, lest somebody say something that’s inappropriate for children to hear.
Randy discusses various approaches to this problem that were tried over the years. The ToonTown solution was to restrict users to something called “Speedchat,” a menu of pre-constructed sentences, all innocuous. They also gave users the ability to conduct unrestricted conversations with each other, provided they both knew a secret code string. The designers presumed the code strings would be passed only to people a user knew in real life, perhaps on a school playground or among neighbors.
Users found ways to pass code strings to strangers anyway. This page describes several protocols, using gestures, canned sentences, or movement of objects in the game.
After you read the ways above to make secret friends, look here. Another way to make secret friends with toons you don’t know is to form letters/numbers with the picture frames in your house. Around you may see toons who have alot of picture frames at their toon estates, they are usually looking for secret friends. This is how to do it! So, lets say you wanted to make secret friends with a toon named Lily. Your “pretend” secret friend code is 4yt 56s.
- You: *Move frames around in house to form a 4.* “Okay.”
- Her: “Okay.” She has now written the first letter down on a piece of paper.
- You: *Move Frames around to form a y.* “Okay.”
- Her: “Okay.” She has now written the second number down on paper.
- You: *Move Frames around in house to form a t* “Okay.”
- Her: “Okay.” She has now written the third letter down on paper. “Okay.”
- You: *Do nothing* “Okay” This shows that you have made a space.
- Repeat process
Randy writes: “By hook, or by crook, customers will always find a way to connect with each other.”
Richard Clayton is presenting a paper (blog post here) that discusses how to defeat China’s national firewall:
…the keyword detection is not actually being done in large routers on the borders of the Chinese networks, but in nearby subsidiary machines. When these machines detect the keyword, they do not actually prevent the packet containing the keyword from passing through the main router (this would be horribly complicated to achieve and still allow the router to run at the necessary speed). Instead, these subsiduary machines generate a series of TCP reset packets, which are sent to each end of the connection. When the resets arrive, the end-points assume they are genuine requests from the other end to close the connection—and obey. Hence the censorship occurs.
However, because the original packets are passed through the firewall unscathed, if both of the endpoints were to completely ignore the firewall’s reset packets, then the connection will proceed unhindered! We’ve done some real experiments on this—and it works just fine!! Think of it as the Harry Potter approach to the Great Firewall—just shut your eyes and walk onto Platform 9¾.
Ignoring resets is trivial to achieve by applying simple firewall rules… and has no significant effect on ordinary working. If you want to be a little more clever you can examine the hop count (TTL) in the reset packets and determine whether the values are consistent with them arriving from the far end, or if the value indicates they have come from the intervening censorship device. We would argue that there is much to commend examining TTL values when considering defences against denial-of-service attacks using reset packets. Having operating system vendors provide this new functionality as standard would also be of practical use because Chinese citizens would not need to run special firewall-busting code (which the authorities might attempt to outlaw) but just off-the-shelf software (which they would necessarily tolerate).
Here are the side-by-side search results for “tiananmen” on google.com and google.cn.
Seems that the censorship service that Google has set up at China’s request suffers from a trivial bug: if you type your searches using capital letters, you bypass the censor.
This’ll be fixed real soon, I’m sure.
How bizarre:
Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.
[…]
Buried deep in the new law is Sec. 113, an innocuously titled bit called “Preventing Cyberstalking.” It rewrites existing telephone harassment law to prohibit anyone from using the Internet “without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy.”
What does this mean for the comment section of this blog? Or any blog? Or Usenet?
More importantly, what does it mean for our society when obviously stupid laws like this get passed, and we have to rely on the police being nice enough to not enforce them?
EDITED TO ADD (1/9) Some commenters to BoingBoing clarify the legal issues. This is from an anonymous attorney:
The anonymous harassment provision ( Link ) is the old telephone-annoyance statute that has been on the books for decades. It was updated in the widely (and in many respects deservedly) ridiculed Communications Decency Act to include new technologies, and the cases make clear its applicability to Internet communications. See, e.g., ACLU v. Reno, 929 F. Supp. 824, 829 n.5 (E.D. Pa. 1996) (text here), aff’d, 521 U.S. 824 (1997). Unlike the indecency provisions of the CDA, this scope update was not invalidated in the courts and remains fully effective.
In other words, the latest amendment, which supposedly adds Internet communications devices to the scope of the law, is meaningless surplusage.
The U.K. has used terrorism laws to stifle free speech; now it’s using them to keep pedestrians off bicycle paths.
With her year-round tan, long blonde hair and designer clothes, Sally Cameron does not look like a threat to national security.
But the 34-year-old property developer has joined the ranks of Britain’s most unlikely terrorist suspects after being held for hours for trespassing on a cycle path.
And also to prevent people from taking pictures of motorways:
A Hampshire student was stopped and warned by police under new anti-terror laws—for taking pictures of the M3.
Matthew Curtis had been gathering images for the website of a design company where he works part-time when he was stopped, searched and cautioned.
The 21-year-old was told that he was in a “vulnerable area” as he snapped pictures of the M3 and was made to account for his actions before he was issued with a warning and told not to do it again.
Officers, who had quoted the Prevention of Terrorism Act, today apologised for causing concern but say they were just being vigilant.
I get that terrorism is the threat of the moment, and that all sorts of government actions are being justified with terrorism. But this is ridiculous.
Walter Wolfgang, an 82-year-old political veteran, was forcefully removed from the UK Labour party conference for calling a speaker, Jack Straw, a liar. (Opinions on whether Jack Straw is or is not a liar are irrelevant here.) He was later denied access to the conference on basis of anti-terror laws. Keep in mind that as recently as the 1980s, Labour Party conferences were heated affairs compared with today’s media shows.
From The London Times:
A police spokeswoman said that Mr Wolfgang had not been arrested but detained because his security accreditation had been cancelled by Labour officials when he was ejected. She said: “The delegate asked the police officer what powers he was using. The police officer responded that he was using his powers under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act to confirm the delegate’s details.”
Also this:
More than 600 people were detained under the Terrorism Act during the Labour party conference, it was reported yesterday.
Anti-Iraq war protesters, anti-Blairite OAPs and conference delegates were all detained by police under legislation that was designed to combat violent fanatics and bombers – even though none of them was suspected of terrorist links. None of those detained under Section 44 stop-and-search rules in the 2000 Terrorism Act was arrested and no-one was charged under the terrorism laws.
Walter Wolfgang, an 82-year-old Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, was thrown out of the conference hall by Labour heavies after heckling the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw.
When he tried to get back in, he was detained under Section 44 and questioned by police. The party later apologised.
But the Home Office has refused to apologise for heavy-handed tactics used at this year’s conference.
A spokesman insisted: “Stop and search under Section 44 is an important tool in the on-going fight against terrorism.
“The powers help to deter terrorist activity by creating a hostile environment for terrorists.”
He added that the justification for authorising the use of the powers was “intelligence-led and based on an assessment of the threat against the UK.”
The shadow home secretary, David Davis, said: “Laws that are designed to fight terrorism should only be used against terrorism.”
The Minister of the Interior of Bavaria requested that the industry produces web content filtering on “instructions on how to build a bomb.” These pages, he claims, are “a very dangerous security problem.” He hopes filters like those for parental filtering can solve this problem.
I think he’s trying to solve the wrong problem.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.