Posts by Andre Alessi
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Fairburn used to live in Devonport. This proves something, I'm not sure what, but it definitely proves something.
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I'm not sure that politicians talking about the political context this mess occurred in is necessarily a bad thing, but I do agree that they should stop trying to frame their attacks as "above politics", as if there was some pure realm above politics where "real" issues are discussed dispassionately.
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom and the GCSB, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
But that needn’t matter. What would probably happen is that they’d install a lawful intercept configuration as described here and stick it in a cage at the data centre. Access would be limited to a small group of GCSB cleared (or even GCSB supplied) employees (a bit as described in this New Scientist article ).
(There’s a legitimate reason for this in preventing the disclosure of the targets of monitoring activity).
Yep, and all that happens after the relevant legal hoops are jumped through. It's not done as some kind of favour to Big Brother (which was what your original post suggested.)
Lawful intercepts are not all that uncommon, but there's a process that everybody involved follows to ensure things are done correctly.
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More generally, if you were involved in the process of spying on a group if people who ran a business of making money off the internet, and whose paranoia was fed by the "h4xx0r" culture, you would probably go in to any warrant request aiming for stuff that you knew you could access and get relevant info out of, which just screams "smartphones" combined with basic traffic data on Megaupload's servers. Hacking CCTV feeds (for example) seems like a fishing trip in comparison.
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Well, there’s Twitter’s Firehose for a start. I’m fairly sure the NSA would be one of their small number of paying customers. The CIA has a VC arm, In_Q-Tel who could possibly have invested in Facebook.
At the other end of the scale, the big two telcos’s profits are heavily aligned to the level of regulation applied by government. It’s not hard to believe that voluntary compliance with GCSB demands might be linked with favourable outcomes in this area.
(Then you’ve got a company that’s the largest email provider in the world and also runs a huge repository for multimedia. They don’t get raided, like Mr Dotcom. Part of the quid-pro-quo for that might be a measure of co-operation, too).
It just doesn't happen that way. Requests from police and security services to telcos and other providers are routine-you just wouldn't get a situation where a person able to make a decision like this would say, "Oh well, I guess just this once..." Even a call from the telco's CEO to the Call Investigation Centre (or whoever) would be met with the same response, because everyone knows just how important it is to stick to the correct process for this kind of thing.
Also, knowing the culture of most ISPs like I do, the people who do this stuff are significantly more sympathetic towards people like Dotcom than they are to intelligence services or law enforcement. I know of at least one telco whose call centre staff hid a torrent server running 24/7 in the ceiling of their office, connected to the corporate LAN. It stayed there for years because the people with the ability to locate and remove it were happier to benefit from the "free" movies and tv shows.
ISPs, Twitter, Google, etc don't need the goodwill of governments, particularly not a piddly little entity like NZ's government. They're already seen as "agents of the enemy" by governments, and that's not going to change anytime soon.
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Anyway, I’m wondering where GCSB stand if they persuade an ISP, telco or social network operator to “voluntarily” provide them with a feed.
Never going to happen. Anyone with that kind of access and authority knows exactly what's required of any request for information.
I must have missed something: why are we sure it's Dotcom's Wi-Fi or broadband that was hacked? Seems to me that the most likely source of individually identifiable information would be cellphone geolocation data, or at a stretch live voice surveillance.
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Hard News: Tired and emotional, for reals, in reply to BenWilson,
So Peter Parker rather than Bruce Wayne?
Superman, rather, since journos aren't technically human. (Bonus! Modern Clark Kent is a "social issues" reporter who lives in a dilapidated apartment block.)
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Russell Brown,
So why haven’t we seen hundreds of thousands of iOS users infected with malware, the way Android users have been?
The answer to that is more complicated than simply being a comparison between the technical restrictions of the two OSs. There's a human element in getting an apps into the Apple store that both reduces the possibility of malware ending up on an iPhone *and* makes getting an app to market a more frustrating and slower for many developers.
Then you have to look at the relative demographics of users, for example, both age and location. It's not simply a technical question.
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That's something I find genuinely interesting-the charges being levelled (money laundering and racketeering ) presumably assume that other crimes were committed to make these behaviours criminal (i.e. i don' t believe you can "launder" legitimate income.) How does that work in this case?
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There's a predictable bitter irony to the fact that one of the few businesses that showed it was possible to make good money by charging reasonable (and even optional!) fees for people to consume media online has been targetted here. I'd like to think that the MPAA and RIAA took this opportunity to launch their own international services, but they've hardly been managed with an eye to engaging positively with online consumers so far, so why would they start now?