Tag: Insights

Was man von Pegida halten soll

Ich glaube Herr Theisen trifft es ganz gut. 😀

Der Fraktionschef der CDU in Pulheim erklärt Pegida
Der Fraktionschef der CDU in Pulheim erklärt Pegida

Trotzdem ist “ganze Ding” sehr eigenartig. :/

Der französische Redner auf der Bühne kann sich nicht vorstellen “dass unter uns Rassisten sind”, während ein Chorleiter aus Würzburg alle Muslime erschießen will. Solche Widersprüche fallen bei Pegida nicht auf. Da weht die Fahne der rechtsextremen “German Defense League” friedlich unweit der israelischen im Dresdner Abendwind. Da ist quer durch den Wutbürgerkatalog für jeden etwas dabei zum “Jawoll”-Schreien – auch das Gegenteil. Hauptsache, irgendwas ist schlecht und jemand anderes hat Schuld.
— Telepolis

Aber eins ist klar, Deutschland hat ein massives Rassismussproblem!

Und für alle, denen das alles zu viel Text ist, gibt es istdasabendlandschonislamisiert.de. 😀

JavaScript History as Seen From 2035

Gary Bernhardt presents a thought-provoking history of JavaScript as seen from 2035.

His arguments are that

  • With asm.js JavaScript VMs ran code with 50% of native speed (even in 2013)
  • Anything that can be compiled can be compiled into asm.js
  • Asm.js has basically become the universal runtime

So by further moving the JavaScript VM into the kernel we save ourselves the overhead of hardware process isolation as the VM does this any way.

All this lead to interesting consequences

  • Nobody uses binaries any more, everything is asm.js
  • The windowing systems of old have been ported to the DOM
  • Deployments are as simple as a push
  • JavaScript (as a language) is effectively dead
  • Overall developer happiness has increased

:’D

No, You Go First

Bruce Schneier talks about how security companies sat on knowledge and research data about military-grade Regin malware for at least six years. They only decided to share their knowledge because the Intercept was about to publish an article about it. Their arguments for why they withheld their knowledge until now range from “our customers asked us not to disclose what had been found in their networks” to “we didn’t want to interfere with NSA/GHCQ operations”. :/ It’s safe to say that they sit on a bunch more.

Privacy Consequences of the SPE Hack

Bruce Schneier in his comments on the recent Sony Hack cites a Gizmondo article that sums it up very well why privacy is important to everyone even for mundane everyday stuff we do on the internet:

These are people who did nothing wrong. They didn’t click on phishing links, or use dumb passwords (or even if they did, they didn’t cause this). They just showed up. They sent the same banal workplace emails you send every day, some personal, some not, some thoughtful, some dumb. Even if they didn’t have the expectation of full privacy, at most they may have assumed that an IT creeper might flip through their inbox, or that it was being crunched in an NSA server somewhere. For better or worse, we’ve become inured to small, anonymous violations. What happened to Sony Pictures employees, though, is public. And it is total.

And in Bruce’s words:

These people didn’t have anything to hide. They aren’t public figures. Their details aren’t going to be news anywhere in the world. But their privacy has been violated, and there are literally thousands of personal tragedies unfolding right now as these people deal with their friends and relatives who have searched and reads this stuff.

Government agents ‘directly involved’ in most high-profile US terror plots

Human Rights Watch has examined about 500 U.S. trials related to terrorism and came to a “shocking” conclusion.

  • 18% of those cases are “tenuous” “material support” charges  (e.g. “providing military gear to al-Qaida” actually mans having “waterproof socks” in your luggage)
  • another 30% are “sting” operations, where government agents play a significant role in inciting, planning, supplying, preparing for execution and finally arresting

So this means that at least 50% of cases where they were “confident” enough to even go to trial fall flat on their faces when taking a closer look. :/

Whispers of Betrayal

The Guardian exposed in a series of articles how the creators of the Whisper app track individual and group behavior.

Whisper violated their own claims made in their terms of service and privacy policy which was updated just days before the Guardian article was published, but after being asked for comment for the publication. :/

    • They had tools to track and build profiles of users although claiming they would be “anonymous”
    • They tracked the location of people who explicitly opted-out of geolocation
    • They cooperated with the DoD, sharing infos about messages from military personnel
    • They shared information with law enforcement bodies like the FBI and MI5 with a lower legal threshold than is common practice

They process data with a staff of over 100 in the Philippines although claiming to process and store all data in the US.

Update: The Guardian has since published a clarification, removing some of the previous claims. It seems like Whisper really planned to change their ToS for quite some time and doesn’t store data on non-US servers. The claims about geolocation tracking for those who’ve opted out is based on Whisper’s ability to geolocate IP addresses (which may be a quite rough estimation).