Cloudy With a Chance of False Security

It's been barely more than a decade since the internet slipped into our homes in earnest, and even though we're still getting used to it the technology has been moving like a loaded shopping cart going down a hill--there's no telling what direction it's going to go in and it's not going to stop unless it hits something big, in which case there's going to be a major mess.

If you haven't yet heard about Mat Honan's experience of having been epically hacked over on Wired, I suggeest you check it out immediately. It seriously underscores the nature of the online world we're living in today, a world that's snuck up on a lot of us. In short, in the course of an attack by hackers who wanted to seize control of his Twitter account for the lulz, Honan ended up having his digital life deleted. It's the online equivalent of having everything you own wiped out in a house fire, and it's not something I'd wish on anyone.

Nevertheless, when I encountered this news it underscored to me the problems of the ongoing rush to the cloud, to having our own personal information stored on a hard drive in some unknown server farm that might be in a cave on Spitsbergen for all the difference that it makes. Honan shouldn't have been able to have been hacked--his attackers were able to get access to his digital life by exploiting security flaws in Apple and Amazon accounts, but I don't just mean that holes like that should have been patched before anyone had an opportunity to punch a fist through one.

No, I'm more of the opinion that there shouldn't be a case where this sort of damage can be done entirely remotely and online.

Clouds ahead, and we keep flying on.

The idea of the cloud isn't a new one. Following on the heels of tech forecasters, Scott Adams of Dilbert recognized its shadow coming back in 1998, when in The Dilbert Future he predicted the coming challenge of the Network Computer, "a PC with no hard drive (or a tiny one)... [that] downloads software from the Internet and executes it on an as-needed basis." Even then, I thought it was a cheapjack notion; why else would anyone want to surrender control over their own software, their own productivity, their own information? Taking advantage of the cloud for certain specific, occasional tasks is one thing, like renting a car to take a vacation for the weekend when you don't own one yourself. While the state of the internet has improved since 1998--after all, the cloud wasn't feasible technically when everyone was still using dialup, and could get kicked off whenever someone upstairs needed to use the phone--I don't think it's addressed the underlying problems. To me, making use of the cloud for basic, day-to-day stuff feels like living out of a storage locker.

Because it isn't really secure--Honan's story demonstrates that, and just because it's one of the first that doesn't mean it will be the last. Apple has supposedly taken action to patch the security hole that Honan's attackers targeted, but there will always be vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited. The cloud can be easy and user-friendly, but that sort of thing comes at the expense of security. When it comes to my digital life, my important files and photos and so on, I keep them backed up on an external hard drive that is only ever connected to a computer when the backup process is underway. Aside from that, it's an isolated system that can't be reached by any online attack.

I've never trusted the cloud. Purely electronic things on my hard drive are ephemeral enough--the cloud takes this just one step beyond, so that the ephemeral things I use aren't even in something I can control. In the end, the key to security is control.

The Trouble with Twitter

It's a bit surprising, thinking about it, the presence that Twitter has taken in the professional and personal lives of so many people only six years after being launched; I suppose it's because I'm perpetually stuck in 2000, when dialup was how you got online and ICQ was how you talked to people once you got there. Imagine coordinating something like the Iranian election protests a couple of years back, or even something as minor as the #TellVicEverything thing from a little while ago, over point-to-point instant messaging. Twitter gives a level of basic engagement that, in some respects, is vastly elevated over what came before.

In some cases, perhaps too basic. On Friday the Toronto Star reported on the decision of NDP MP Charlie Angus - who I first heard of in his capacity as the NDP's digital affairs critic - to quit Twitter, which he described as "like being badgered by a drunk on a 24-hour bus ride." It's true that Twitter gives people a line to prominent figures - be they government, corporate, or celebrity - but what's also true as a result is that it gives people a line to each other, giving mute testimony that the world is not as we believe it to be.

I can understand why Angus left Twitter. As a politician, and especially an NDP politician at that, I can imagine that his timeline and Direct Message box must have always contained at least a significant minority of heinous shit in the form of received messages. It's life, without filters - and it's not the sort of thing that's restricted to political figures alone.

In the Star article, Susan Delacourt takes a rather optimistic view of Twitter, asking if people "are any nicer" in any given Tim Horton's than online, and that it "holds the potential to be a window into vast new worlds of politics." For the latter, I think it does, but not in the way a lot of us would hope; I would describe it more as a magnifying glass, throwing the quiet beliefs of a lot of people into unflattering sharpness. It's yet another demonstration of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, or for you science majors, the online disinhibition effect - people who feel anonymous, who are at a remove from what they're saying and who they're speaking to, and who have an audience through use of a carefully-placed hashtag, will say things on Twitter that they would never say to a stranger in the real world.

Are people at Tim Horton's any nicer? Perhaps not, but the difference is that they'd at least act nicer. Someone in Tim Horton's who is, say, opposed to Earth Hour would probably be more circumspect about accusing its supporters as being "lunatics" who want to return civilization to the thirteenth century - which, I stress, is something that I honestly encountered - because if you pull out those kind of insane accusations in someone's face, you're running the risk of getting someone's fist in yours. As of yet, no one has invented a device that will allow you to stab people in the face over the Internet.

This is a problem that, honestly, I don't see being resolved any time soon. It's basic human nature, and from what I've seen too many humans are unwilling to climb above their basic natures. Nevertheless, in the end I think it's for the best that the internet has enabled conversations like this, and that politicians and so on should stick with it. If nothing else, it provides them with a far more honest appraisal of some of the people they are representing.

Dealing in Absolutes

You know, it sure is thoughtful of the Conservatives - now that they've got a majority in the House of Commons and can thus do whatever the hell they want thanks to the wonderfully broken system we call Westminster-style parliament - to keep giving us reasons why it was such a bad idea to elect them into power in the first place, because they don't have to face the electorate for another three years and by then most people will have forgotten.

The latest was a zinger of a punch delivered by Vic Toews, the Minister of Public Safety - a position, incidentally, that immediately brings to mind Revolutionary France - in response to an opposition MP who attacked the Conservatives for overstepping their bounds with their latest controversial law, which would substantially increase the ability of the police to conduct potentially invasive investigations into Canadians' digital lives without first obtaining a warrant to do so. Michael Geist provides a good look into the implications of this bill - I encourage everyone to check it out.

"He can either stand with us," Toews said of his critic, "or with the child pornographers."

Just don't think about that for a minute - here's a picture of a bunny.

It's rare that things are so utterly black-and-white in politics. Usually people have to dig a bit for things like this. As the Globe and Mail says, though, this is completely in-character for the Conservatives; eight years ago, when they were still trying to crack Liberal fortunes in the House, the party issued press releases claiming that the Liberals and the New Democratic Party supported child pornography. Now that they don't have to worry about the opposition or the electorate, why should we be surprised that this sort of talk is resurfacing?

The way I see it, there are only two options here - Vic Toews is either a manipulator or a shithead. Either he's fully aware of what he's doing and is using the argument to marginalize opposition, or he honestly believes that an ordinary, law-abiding citizen would have no reason to oppose what the Conservatives are putting forward. I can't figure out which is worse.

It's easy to realize why they actually use this charge: it's indefensible, horrific, political poison to touch and thus they toss these claims like grenades. The fact that the Conservatives do use it, and have used it consistently, likewise explains a lot about the way the party as a whole thinks. For the Conservatives, it seems, everything boils down to a binary choice - this or that, us or them, good or evil.

That's no way to run a government. It's a cynical ploy to marginalize their opponents in the eyes of their core supporters, the people who will follow them solely because they are Conservatives - like, say, Alberta, which seems to have an inexplicable political reflex in that it consistently gives absolute majorities of its votes to the big blue machine. It's that kind of automatic support, support given without regard to whether the party acts in a manner to make it worthy of that support, that energizes things like this. If the Conservatives were still a minority government, Harper would likely have already thrown Toews under the bus by now. Here's hoping that this causes at least some of those automatic supporters to consider throwing the Conservatives under the bus instead come 2015.

At its core, it's completely indefensible - equivalent to me saying that either one stands with the opposition or with the fascists. If an opposition MP stood up in the house and suggested that the Conservatives were supporters of fascism, I have no doubt that that MP would shortly find out what it felt like to be raked over the coals.

The ideal of government is consensus, not dominance. Binary choices have no place there. Nevertheless, there are far too many people out there who can only think in terms of one or zero - good or evil.

Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge

I Present the Data, Nothing More

The recruitment of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential nominee back in 2008 took plenty of people by surprise. Before August 29, when John McCain announced her as his pick, she was pretty much unknown about Alaska - the only reason I was aware of her was from coming across a few articles around the Alaska Public Safety Commissioner dismissal issue.

There are few things that will make your name widely known faster than being tapped to be a major figure in a major leadership campaign. I can illustrate this, to a degree, with Google search results. Specifically, the number of hits that came up from a Google search of "Sarah Palin" + MILF. Why this specific term? I can't remember anymore - most likely I saw someone make a reference to it in some forum and thought it would be funny to track its progress across the net. It has the advantage of not necessarily including traditional media sources - unless, of course, you count the comment threads - because I doubt any serious newspaper would refer to a candidate like that in its own pages.

I conducted my first search with those terms at 11:29 AM Eastern Standard Time on August 29, 2008, so within a matter of hours of the announcement itself. That search gathered 3,190 hits - it's up in the air as to how many were done by Alaskans. By 12:19 AM on August 31 it stood at 4,580, down from 5,040 twelve hours before; but Google must have done a fresh round of webcrawling that day, because by 10:54 PM on the 31st, there were 13,400 hits for that phrase.

Things picked up steadily after that. By the morning of September 30, Google came up with 167,000 hits. Ultimately, on the morning of November 4 there were 752,000 hits for the phrase, and that's when I stopped tracking - but people didn't stop spreading it. As of this writing, Google pulls up nearly 1.9 million hits. By comparison, "The Hawley-Smoot Tariff" only gets 89,300 hits... but it would make a good name for a band.

Google Stats for "Sarah Palin" + MILF

August 29, 2008 (1129 ET) - 3,190
August 30, 2008 (0117 ET) - 4,640
August 30, 2008 (1218 ET) - 5,040
August 31, 2008 (0019 ET) - 4,580
August 31, 2008 (2254 ET) - 13,400
September 1, 2008 (1249 ET) - 13,500
September 2, 2008 (0849 ET) - 13,700
September 3, 2008 (0829 ET) - 20,800
September 4, 2008 (0812 ET) - 21,000
September 5, 2008 (1057 ET) - 33,600
September 6, 2008 (0839 ET) - 33,500
September 7, 2008 (0924 ET) - 33,200
September 8, 2008 (2155 ET) - 52,100
September 9, 2008 (0832 ET) - 52,300
September 10, 2008 (1237 ET) - 52,100
September 13, 2008 (0723 ET) - 63,400
September 14, 2008 (0926 ET) - 81,500
September 15, 2008 (1231 ET) - 82,100
September 16, 2008 (1153 ET) - 90,500
September 17, 2008 (2128 ET) - 93,300
September 18, 2008 (0831 ET) - 93,300
September 19, 2008 (1033 ET) - 93,800
September 22, 2008 (1201 ET) - 91,000
September 23, 2008 (2124 ET) - 91,300
September 24, 2008 (1224 ET) - 92,000
September 25, 2008 (1051 ET) - 169,000
September 26, 2008 (0856 ET) - 175,000
September 27, 2008 (0900 ET) - 175,000
September 28, 2008 (0930 ET) - 179,000
September 30, 2008 (0954 ET) - 167,000
October 2, 2008 (0824 ET) - 167,000
October 3, 2008 (1829 ET) - 186,000
October 5, 2008 (0758 ET) - 186,000
October 6, 2008 (1504 ET) - 194,000
October 7, 2008 (0953 ET) - 194,000
October 8, 2008 (1323 ET) - 207,000
October 9, 2008 (1002 ET) - 206,000
October 10, 2008 (1131 ET) - 214,000
October 11, 2008 (1617 ET) - 207,000
October 13, 2008 (1843 ET) - 206,000
October 14, 2008 (1253 ET) - 207,000
October 16, 2008 (1331 ET) - 208,000
October 17, 2008 (1111 ET) - 214,000
November 4, 2008 (0939 ET) - 752,000

The Rights of Man at 1Mbps

Near the intersection of Parliament and Gerrard, Randy McDonald pointed me to a bit of news the other day that, I'll admit, struck me as faintly ludicrous at the time - Finland, one of the few nations ever successful at beating back the Russians, has apparently decided that broadband internet is a human right. This strikes me as particularly relevant now, as right now I'm looking down the barrel of an ISP changeover that will temporarily leave me without home internet access. At first I thought it was odd because, really - when I think of fundamental human rights, I think of things that are necessary for life. Access to food, water, shelter, that sort of thing. The internet has only been around for forty years - assuming you count ARPANET - and there are still a vast many people who have never been able to use it. One might think that states would best focus on more immediate concerns.

So cold...

But that's a pretty hollow dismissal of something that, realistically, is of fundamental importance to 21st century society. Limiting the scope of fundamental human rights to the things that are biologically required for survival isn't magnanimous. It's the ground state, the absolute lowest that things should go. We built civilizations to go beyond that. Sure, there are those who would argue that internet access is a luxury, that it's not necessary to live one's life - but then liberty, justice, free speech, and all that aren't strictly necessary either. People don't die in dictatorships because they can't say what they want, though people frequently do because they say it regardless. We've long since established the precedent that social inventions are equally valid human rights.

Besides, internet access is becoming more and more necessary to day-to-day life, in its capacity as a means to connect individuals and communities. If you think it's a frippery, how willing would you be to try living without electricity? Our ancestors managed just fine without it for hundreds of thousands of years, but look at the nature of their lives. The internet, in addition to being the sine qua non for ninja cat videos, is in my opinion a revolution on the order of writing. Throughout human history, the societies that have advanced are those that were open and those that communicated widely. The internet enables that to a greater degree than anything we've ever done before.

Beyond that, there's a strictly utilitarian reason why this sort of recognition should press on beyond just Finland. Governments, as I've written before, constantly seek greater and greater control of the people, and the current controversy about internet-enabled copyright infringement is giving them an excuse to exercise it. Three strikes laws such as the French HADOPI law provide an avenue for internet users to be disconnected and blacklisted after three accusations of copyright infringement. Laws such as these are tailor-made for abuse by governments - if they want to silence a person, they can simply accuse them of torrenting a few first-run movies and let the wheels turn.

The enshrinement of broadband internet access as a fundamental human right would be a step in the right direction, I think, to tying the bastards' hands behind their backs. The specification of broadband is, I think, particularly important. If it was just "internet access" as a human right, that's something that could easily be warped. "Sure," says the government, "of course you're entitled to internet access. Enjoy your 300-baud modem."

The internet is more than a meme factory, and to deny people access to it is equivalent to denying them literacy.

Blizzard's GIFT

For the last fifteen years, Blizzard Entertainment has been one of the most beloved companies of the video gaming industry. Their catalog since the release of Warcraft II is success after success - Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo II, Warcraft III, and the reigning king of the massively multiplayer online RPG field, World of Warcraft. I recall many good times in the late 1990s spent on Battle.net, Blizzard's multiplayer gaming framework. Even their acquisition by Activision a few years ago didn't cramp their style, since their new bosses weren't stupid enough to think they knew how to run Blizzard better than Blizzard. At least, that's what it seemed like at first.

Now, Blizzard is dealing with one of the first large outbreaks of anger among its customer base that I can remember, thanks to its newly-announced Real ID forum identification system. Blizzard describes it as "a completely voluntary and optional level of identity that keeps players connected across all of Battle.net." If you've never heard of it, it's simple - right now, posters on Blizzard's World of Warcraft forums can post under the name of any of their in-game characters; once Real ID is rolled out, there will be no option but to post under the name that appears on the credit card that is paying for the Battle.net account that's making the post. For now, this applies only to World of Warcraft accounts - other games haven't been folded into this system of forced identification yet. Nevertheless, with this precedent set, it's only a matter of time.

When I first heard about this initiative a few days ago, my first thought was that Blizzard was that Blizzard was trying to beat John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, first elaborated by Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik of the webcomic Penny Arcade back in 2004 - a commentary on Internet culture that's genius in its simplicity. Blizzard's official comments seem to support this, as they claim to be changing the nature of the system in order to "contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven't been connected before."

Personally, thanks but no thanks. I like my veil of anonymity. It's one of the bedrock principles that makes the Internet what it is - and, I think, that's what might really be at the core of the issue. After thinking on this some more, this goes beyond forum names. What this looks like to me is one of the strongest signals yet that the great, freewheeling "frontier era" of Internet culture is under siege.

If I want you to know who I am, I'll bloody well tell you.

There have always been people who conducted business online under their own names. It was common in the days of Usenet, when the wired community was small and tight-knit, but when the World Wide Web exploded into the mainstream in the mid-1990s, millions of new Internetters flooded in and upended the original social mores. By the time I got my first home internet connection, back in 1998, many of the patterns that endure today had been set. Prime among those was the forum handle - a name you chose for yourself, another identity with which you could express yourself freely. Even then there were those people who chose to post under their true names, but at the core it was their choice.

While the "Wild West" nature of the Internet is, I think, one of its greatest strengths, it's not something that's idolized everywhere. Governments and corporations, for example, would love to parcel up the online wilderness into nice, neat, manicured lots - governments to control and monitor their populace, and corporations to sell, sell, sell! Unrestrained freedom is a threat to them, because the point-to-point communication that the Internet makes possible the diminution and degradation of their authority.

The saving grace is that in this particular situation, there's an easy way for people to register their discontent with it - vote with their feet. I've heard rumors that World of Warcraft account cancellations have been spiking in the few days since this was announced, and if I had one, I would be cancelling it too. For that matter I'm reconsidering my potential purchase of Starcraft II later this month, a game I've been waiting twelve years for.

I realize that this may be weird coming from someone who posts under his own name and face. The point is that to do so is my choice - and as James Alan Gardner wrote in Ascending: "Deliberate choices are the only sacred things in the universe. Everything else is just hydrogen."