Monthly Archive:: June 2013

The term 'direct access' seems to be the central issue when it comes to the coordinated PR campaign from Silicon Valley, and a new article from The Washington Post seems to clarify it all quite a bit. "Intelligence community sources said that this description , although inaccurate from a technical perspective, matches the experience of analysts at the NSA. From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees cleared for PRISM access may 'task' the system and receive results from an Internet company without further interaction with the company's staff." This seems to explain why the leaked official documents speak of 'direct access' even though the companies themselves deny it. The leaked documentation probably wasn't written by a technical expert, so he simply used a term that describes the end result (i.e., access whenever, wherever, whatever), but not the actual technical workings (i.e., the system does not directly tap into the companies' own servers). Update: The Guardian has released a new slide from the NSA slide deck: it speaks of "collection directly from the servers" of several US companies, like Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and so on. It also mentions directly tapping into the very cables that carry data to and from the US. I wonder how long Silicon Valley will continue to lie and/or legalese around the issue. Man up for once.

Yes, it's as bad as we expected. This particular paragraph illustrates everything that is wrong with what Microsoft is doing: "Xbox One is designed so game publishers can enable you to give your disc-based games to your friends. There are no fees charged as part of these transfers. There are two requirements: you can only give them to people who have been on your friends list for at least 30 days and each game can only be given once." Yes, with this, Microsoft and publishers are destroying the ability to sell your games on Ebay or similar sites (because of the 30-day requirement). To make matters worse, the ability to sell or even loan games to your friends can be disabled by publishers. Asinine.

"It allows you to easily host your own website, email, 'cloud' and more, all within arm's reach. It does this by interfacing with existing software and allowing the user to easily update and change settings with a graphical interface. No more need to depend on external cloud services, which can be insecure 'walled gardens' that require you to give up control over your data. arkOS will have several different components that come together to make a seamless self-hosting experience possible on your Raspberry Pi. Each of these components will work with each other out-of-the-box, allowing you to host your websites, email, social networking accounts, cloud services, and many other things from your arkOS node." I have to look into this.

"If you've been watching the webOS Nation Forums or the webOS community on Twitter, you may have seen the troubling reports that a vital 'root certificate' on webOS devices is due to expire on July 23, 2013. This certificate is responsible for ensuring secure access to HP's webOS cloud services, including backup and the App Catalog, and once it expires, there's no accessing those services. It's a problem, a ticking time bomb, if you will. We've been wondering if or when HP was going to fix the issue, and indeed had heard rumblings that a fix was in the works and due - wait for it - in the coming weeks. Today we got word from HP that the fix is indeed coming. In fact, it's due today, and it's coming in the form of an update to the the webOS App Catalog."

"The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America's largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April. The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an 'ongoing, daily basis' to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries. The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk - regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing." Hey Americans, welcome to the club. And here we were, afraid of Google!

"Three days into Computex Taipei, Asia's biggest computer show, not a single manufacturer has announced a Windows RT device. Windows RT, the version of Windows 8 designed for more power-efficient ARM processors, made its official debut at last year's show on a convertible tablet by Asus." Not surprising. Windows 8's Metro is pretty terrible in and of itself, and on Windows RT specifically, it's even worse. My Surface RT is very promising, but Windows RT 8.1 better fix the loads of performance issues cripling the operating system.