YouHaveDownloaded.com claims to track the IP addresses of people who use BitTorrent, but I’ve been torrenting Linux ISOs for months, pushing almost 200 GB of data, and the IP address of that box is not in their database. I don’t know what their methodology is, but they’re obviously not interested in people sharing legal files.
According to the rules on Beijing’s microblog management, which went into effect Friday, web users need to give their real names to website administrators before being allowed to put up microblog posts.
Bloggers, however, are free to choose their screen names, said a spokesman with the Beijing Internet Information Office (BIIO), the city’s web content management authority.
“The new rules are aimed at protecting web users’ interests and improving credibility on the web,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
I always thought that personal privacy coupled with institutional transparency was the most effective form of government and society. At least in practice, government secrecy coupled with massive surveillance tends to be despotic. But maybe China will be the outlier…
Looks like my suspicions were correct. Spam bots are now posting complete sentences, rather than gibberish with links to male enhancing drugs. They are still recognizable, because the content is so general. However, I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before they are able to find uncommon words and post comments that appear to address specific points in blog posts.
To get specs on a machine, there’s the obvious stuff:
cat /proc/cpuinfo
df -H
free -m
ifconfig -a
sudo lshw > hardware.txt
But to test the disk I/O performance, you can do this:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
Then you’ll also have a 1 GB file that you can wget to test the bandwidth.
Eben Moglen, from his talk, Freedom in the Cloud:
[People] still think of privacy as “the one secret I don’t want revealed” and that’s not the problem. Their problem is all the stuff that’s the cruft, the data dandruff of life, that they don’t think of as secret in any way but which aggregates to stuff that they don’t want anybody to know. Which aggregates, in fact, not just to stuff they don’t want people to know but to predictive models about them that they would be very creeped out could exist at all. The simplicity with which you can de-anonymize theoretically anonymized data, the ease with which, for multiple sources available to you through third and fourth party transactions, information you can assemble, data maps of people’s lives. The ease with which you begin constraining, with the few things you know about people, the data available to you, you can quickly infer immense amounts more.
My friend and colleague Bradly Kuhn who works at the Software Freedom Law Center is one of those archaic human beings who believes that a social security number is a private thing. And he goes to great lengths to make sure that his Social Security is not disclosed which is his right under our law, oddly enough. Though, try and get health insurance or get a safe deposit box, or in fact, operate the business at all. We bend over backwards sometimes in the operation of our business because Bradly’s Social Security number is a secret. I said to him one day “You know, it’s over now because Google knows your Social Security number”. He said “No they don’t, I never told it to anybody”. I said, “Yeah but they know the Social Security number of everybody else born in Baltimore that year. Yours is the other one”.
When you enter a search term like “symptoms of herpes” or “abortion clinics in Illinois” into Google’s search box, you’re potentially revealing information about yourself that you may not want others to know. You may think that your queries are automated — no human eyes read them — and Google does have better privacy policies than most companies, but is it a good idea for your privacy to rely on the good faith of third parties? Especially when simple and useful solutions exist (like accessing the SSL encrypted Google page through Tor).
But that’s still thinking about privacy as “the one big thing I don’t want anybody to know”. A more insidious problem is the increasing aggregation of data — including patterns of behavior — by third parties. It’s been with us for a long time. Your bank knows where you go and what you like. It only needs to look at your purchase history. Your credit card is a tracking cookie that you’ve been carrying for years. But at least there are strong banking privacy laws. That is not the case for our activities online, where we sometimes reveal far more sensitive information.
Facebook has a dubious history on privacy, and its tentacles have spread across the Internet. If you have a Facebook account, and therefore a Facebook cookie on your computer, then Facebook can track your activities across any site that has a Connect or Like button on it, which is a lot of sites these days. A single site or a single data point doesn’t reveal much, but patterns in large data sets allow third parties to make inferences that you probably don’t want them to know. For example, researchers have demonstrated that Facebook can predict whether someone is gay even before they are out.
Don’t rely on their good graces. Protect yourself.