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David Cameron's Plan to Ban Encryption in the UK

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In the wake of the Paris terrorist shootings, David Cameron has said that he wants to ban encryption in the UK. Here's the quote: "If I am prime minister I will make sure that it is a comprehensive piece of legislation that does not allow terrorists safe space to communicate with each other."

This is similar to FBI director James Comey's remarks from last year. And it's equally stupid.

Cory Doctorow has a good essay on Cameron's proposal:

For David Cameron's proposal to work, he will need to stop Britons from installing software that comes from software creators who are out of his jurisdiction. The very best in secure communications are already free/open source projects, maintained by thousands of independent programmers around the world. They are widely available, and thanks to things like cryptographic signing, it is possible to download these packages from any server in the world (not just big ones like Github) and verify, with a very high degree of confidence, that the software you've downloaded hasn't been tampered with.

Cameron is not alone here. The regime he proposes is already in place in countries like Syria, Russia, and Iran (for the record, none of these countries have had much luck with it). There are two means by which authoritarian governments have attempted to restrict the use of secure technology: by network filtering and by technology mandates.

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ftracyfarmer
3598 days ago
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You can finally build a smart home without being an engineer

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Building a smart home should be fun. You should be excited about how easily you can set the lights to turn on when you enter the house, and tell the thermostat to turn down when you leave for the day, and get the doors to automatically lock at the end of the night. These are all little things — and they've all been possible for years and years and years — but only this year are they starting to be things that a lot of people are actually going to want to learn how to do.

What finally changed? There are a lot of reasons, but the biggest one is that the smart home, for now, is beginning to coalesce around controlled ecosystems that are guaranteed to work and are easy to jump into — two of which are made by Apple and Google.

The newcomer...

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ftracyfarmer
3602 days ago
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How to Keep Your Team Motivated

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ftracyfarmer
3618 days ago
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McDonald’s is testing an order-ahead app to make fast food even faster

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In my experience you can’t beat McDonald’s in terms of time from ordering hot food to holding it in your hands. But McDonald’s wants to make fast food even faster, and aims to […]
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ftracyfarmer
3788 days ago
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Report: Rare leaked NSA source code reveals Tor servers targeted

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The structure of a three-hop Tor circuit.

Two Germany-based Tor Directory Authority servers, among others, have been specifically targeted by the National Security Agency’s XKeyscore program, according to a new report from German public broadcaster ARD. Tor is a well-known open source project designed to keep users anonymous and untraceable—users' traffic is encrypted and bounced across various computers worldwide to keep it hidden.

This marks the first time that actual source code from XKeyscore has been published. ARD did not say how or where it obtained the code. Unlike many other NSA-related stories, the broadcaster did not specifically mention the information being part of the trove leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

XKeyscore is one of the high-level NSA surveillance programs that have been revealed via Snowden over the last year. The interface allows NSA and allied intelligence agencies to search all kinds of short-term data captured directly off of various Internet Exchanges worldwide.

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ftracyfarmer
3790 days ago
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The NSA thinks Linux Journal is an “extremist forum”?

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The National Security Agency’s attempts to keep track of people outside the US who use encryption and anonymization software from the Tor Project also apparently captured the traffic of anyone reading a wide range of articles on Linux Journal, according to documents published by the German public television broadcaster ARD and provided by security researchers (and Tor contributors) Jacob Appelbaum, Aaron Gibsom, and Leif Ryge. The documents—which include what appears to be search rules for the NSA’s XKeyscore Internet surveillance system, indicate that the NSA also gathered up data on visitors to articles on the Linux Journal website.

In the Das Erste article, Appelbaum et al wrote that the rule “records details about visits to a popular Internet journal for Linux operating system users called ‘The Linux Journal—the Original Magazine of the Linux Community’" and called it an "extremist forum."

Included in the code is the following block of instructions:

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ftracyfarmer
3790 days ago
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