Tag Archive for 2010

| October 24, 2010
Comments Off on Facebook Privacy Fail Again

Facebook Privacy Fail Again

Facebook Privacy Fail Again -Updated 11-01-10- Facebook has completed its internal investigation into reports from The Wall Street Journal that Facebook applications were violating its user privacy. The WSJ says FB is sharing unique user IDs with advertising agencies and data collection companies. According to the firm’s blog, some developers were sharing Facebook UIDs with data brokers for a fee, “this violation of our policy is something we take seriously,” Facebook engineer Mike Vernal wrote in the corporate response.

The Social Networker is reportedly taking action against developers who violated the Facebook policies by “instituting a 6-month full moratorium on their access to Facebook communication channels, and we will require these developers to submit their data practices to an audit in the future to confirm that they are in compliance with our policies” according to the corporate blog.

The blog also states that Facebook has struck a deal with Rapleaf (Which I wrote about here), the data-mining firm that has tied Facebook ID information collected by Facebook applications to a database of Internet users it sold. “Rapleaf has agreed to delete all UIDs in its possession, and they have agreed not to conduct any activities on the Facebook Platform (either directly or indirectly) going forward.”

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Last May Facebook was caught using “referrers” to send users’ ID information to advertising agencies every time the users click on ads. In response, the social networker changed some of the code that allowed this and issued a half-hearted apology. Now, the Wall Street Journal has found that third-party applications or “apps” on Facebook have been guilty of the same thing.  The WSJ says the privacy breach affects tens of millions of Facebook app users, including people who set their profiles to Facebook’s strictest privacy settings.

Facebook logo“Apps” are pieces of software that let Facebook’s 500 million users play games or share common interests with one another. The company says 70% of users use apps each month. The WSJ found that all the 10 most popular apps on Facebook were transmitting users’ IDs to outside companies including:

  • FarmVille,
  • Phrases,
  • Texas HoldEm,
  • FrontierVille,
  • Causes,
  • Cafe World,
  • Mafia Wars,
  • QUiz Planet,
  • Treasure Isle
  • IHeart.

The WSJ says that Zynga Game Network Inc.’s (ZNGA) FarmVille, with 59 million users has also been transmitting personal information about a user’s friends to outside companies.

The information being transmitted includes the unique “Facebook ID” number assigned to every user on the site. Since a Facebook user ID is a public part of any Facebook profile, anyone can use an ID number to look up a person’s name even if that person has set all of his or her Facebook information to be private. For other users, the Facebook ID reveals information they have set to share with “everyone,” including age, residence, occupation, and photos. The apps reviewed by the WSJ were sending Facebook ID numbers to at least 25 advertising and data firms, several of which build profiles of Internet users by tracking their online activities.

The Journal found that data-gathering firm, RapLeaf Inc., (Which I wrote about earlier) had linked Facebook user ID information obtained from apps to its own database of Internet users, which it sells. RapLeaf also transmitted the Facebook IDs it obtained to a dozen other firms including Google’s Invite Media, the Journal found.  “We didn’t do it on purpose,” said Joel Jewitt, vice president of business development for RapLeaf to the WSJ.

Facebook has again issued a statement that it will look into the matter and correct the code and has in the meantime disabled thousands of applications. According to the WSJ, the applications transmitting Facebook IDs may have breached their own privacy policies. Zynga, for example, says in its privacy policy that it “does not provide any Personally Identifiable Information to third-party advertising companies.” A Zynga spokeswoman told the WSJ, “Zynga has a strict policy of not passing personally identifiable information to any third parties. We look forward to working with Facebook to refine how web technologies work to keep people in control of their information.”

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Mark ZuckerbergOnce again, Facebook has a user privacy breach on its hands. The social networker keeps promising to protect its customers’ personally identifiable information but never seems to get it right.

Perhaps the question Facebook users should be asking is does Facebook really want to protect their user’s privacy?

 

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Social Networking | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
| October 22, 2010
Comments Off on Intel to Invest In America

Intel to Invest In America

Intel to Invest In AmericaThis week, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) announced it will invest In America. Chipzilla will invest between $6 billion and $8 billion in American-based manufacturing facilities. Dailywireless says this investment in America will fund the deployment of Intel’s next-generation 22 nanometers (nm) manufacturing process across several existing U.S. factories and building a new development fabrication plant in Oregon. The Oregon factory should be ready in 2013 and will primarily produce chips for research and development as Intel advances its designs.

In an era when politicians and Wall Street refuse to invest in America, Intel has shown its leadership. “This is probably the largest private investment during this last two or three years in this country,” proclaimed Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski. The projects will support 6,000 to 8,000 construction jobs and result in 800 to 1,000 new permanent high-tech jobs according to media reports.

Highlights

  • Intel will invest in America with $6-8 billion in manufacturing to support future technology advancements in Arizona and Oregon.
  • The investment will create 6,000-8,000 construction jobs and 800-1,000 permanent high-tech jobs, and allows Intel to maintain its current manufacturing employment base in the U.S.
  • The investment will fund a new development fab in Oregon, as well as upgrades to four existing U.S. fabs (Fab 12 and Fab 32 in Arizona and D1C and D1D in Oregon) to manufacture the next-generation 22-nm process technology.
  • Intel’s next-generation, 22 nm microprocessors will enable sleeker device designs, higher performance, and longer battery life at lower costs.

Intel’s upcoming 32-nanometer “Sandy Bridge” Core architecture got much of the attention at the company’s developer show last month. Sandy Bridge chips, built using 32 nm architecture, will be out early in 2011. Ivy Bridge is the codename given to the 22 nm die shrink of Sandy Bridge.

The “tick” (new architecture) of 32 nm Sandy Bridge, available in January 2011, will be followed by the “tock” (22 nm shrink) of Ivy Bridge in January 2012. The new D1X plant may be built with the 15 nm process in mind since that process would likely be mainstreamed just 12 months after D1X begins production.

Moving to 22-nanometer could also help the company produce chips with lower power consumption to better compete in smartphones—where designs from ARM currently dominate. Intel launched the Atom platform two years ago. Now executives are looking to aggressively expand the reach of the Atom chips, into tablets, handheld devices, and phones.

Intel Technology Outlook

Intel is also building its first production facility in China, reports Bloomberg. Intel is vying with Samsung Electronics to be the industry’s biggest spender on plants and equipment in 2010. Intel’s microprocessors run more than 80 percent of the world’s personal computers. Rival Samsung is the biggest maker of memory chips.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| October 22, 2010
Comments Off on IPv4 Doomsday Pushed Back

IPv4 Doomsday Pushed Back

IPv4 Doomsday Pushed BackThe American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) announced (10-20-2010) that Interop returned its unneeded Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) address space. The ARIN Press Release explains that Interop was originally allocated a /8 before ARIN’s existence and the availability of smaller address blocks.

Another press release indicates that Interop founder Dan Lynch acquired the addresses block to allow for unfettered Interoperability Testing between TCP/IP equipment vendors in the formative years of the Internet. Interop will continue to use a small part of the original grant to continue Interop’s 25-year mission to foster industry-wide interoperability while returning the rest of the address block to ARIN for the greater good of the Internet community. The organization recently realized it was only using a small part of its address block and that returning the rest to ARIN would be for the greater good of the Internet community.

ARIN will accept the returned space and not reissue it for a short period, per existing operational procedure. After the hold period, ARIN will follow global policy at that time and return it to the global free pool or distribute the space to those organizations in the ARIN region with documented need, as appropriate.

With less than 5% of the IPv4 address space left in the global free pool, ARIN warns that Interop’s return will not significantly extend the life of IPv4. ARIN continues to emphasize the need for all Internet stakeholders to adopt the next generation of Internet Protocol, IPv6.

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As the original poster at Slashdot points out, if any of the other IPv4 /8 address holders return their unused addresses, the IPv4 exhaustion date would be pushed back even further. I wonder what some of these companies plan on doing with all of these IP addresses?

  • HP has 32 million publicly routable addresses (16 million of its own and 16 million from DEC which HP acquired when it ingested Compaq) most of which seem to be used to handle VoIP calls to India for sales and support calls.
  • Is Ford going to install a IPv4/IPv6 gateway on all the cars with My Ford Touch, an upgrade of Sync, its in-car Internet service with Microsoft?
  • How is the USPS using it 16 million IP addresses?

Some IPv4 /8 Address Holders

PrefixDesignationDate
003/8General Electric Company 1994-05
004/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc.1992-12
008/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc.1992-12
009/8IBM 1992-08
012/8 AT&T Bell Laboratories 1995-06
013/8Xerox Corporation 1991-09
015/8Hewlett-Packard Company 1994-07
016/8 Digital Equipment Corporation 1994-11
017/8Apple Computer Inc. 1992-07
018/8MIT 1994-01
019/8Ford Motor Company 1995-05
034/8 Halliburton Company 1993-03
035/8MERIT Computer Network 1994-04
040/8Eli Lily & Company 1994-06
048/8Prudential Securities Inc. 1995-05
054/8Merck and Co., Inc. 1992-03
056/8 US Postal Service 1994-06
The allocation of IPv4 address space to various registries is listed at www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml.

This gadget was developed by Takashi Arano, Intec NetCore

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , ,
| October 16, 2010
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Apple Wants to Patent Spyware

Apple Wants to Patent SpywareThe Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is reporting that Apple, Inc., (AAPL) has filed a patent application for a “Systems and Methods for Identifying Unauthorized Users of an Electronic Device. ” The patent is for a device to investigate a user’s identity to decide if that user is “unauthorized.”

Information Apple plans to collect

  • EFF logoThe system can take a picture of the user’s face, “without a flash, any noise, or any indication that a picture is being taken to prevent the current user from knowing he is being photographed“;
  • The system can record the user’s voice, whether or not a phone call is even being made;
  • The system can determine the user’s unique individual heartbeat “signature”;
  • To decide if the device has been hacked, the device can watch for “a sudden increase in memory usage of the electronic device“;
  • The user’s “Internet activity can be monitored or any communication packets that are served to the electronic device can be recorded“; and
  • The device can take a photograph of the surrounding location to find where it is being used.

Who is the responsible party

Apple logoThe EFF believes that as a result of this new technology, Apple will know who you are, where you are, and what you are doing and saying, and even how fast your heart is beating. In some embodiments of Apple’s “invention,” this information “can be gathered every time the electronic device is turned on, unlocked, or used.”  When an “unauthorized use” is detected, Apple can contact a “responsible party.” A “responsible party” may be the device’s owner or as the EFF points out the “responsible party may also be “proper authorities or the police.” Once an unauthorized user is identified, Apple could wipe the device and remotely store the user’s “sensitive data.” Apple’s patent application suggests it may use the technology not just to limit “unauthorized” uses of its phones but also to shut down a stolen phone.

However, the EFF says Apple’s new technology would do much more. The EFF believes that this patented device enables Apple to secretly collect, store, and potentially use sensitive biometric information about the user. This is dangerous in two ways according to the EFF:

  1. It is far more than what is needed just to protect you against a lost or stolen phone. It’s extremely privacy-invasive and it puts you at great risk if Apple’s data on you are compromised. But it’s not only the biometric data that are a concern.
  2. Apple does not explain what it will do with all of this collected information on its users, how long it will keep this information, how it will use this information, or if it will share this information with other third parties. We know based on long experience that if Apple collects this information, law enforcement will come for it, and may even order Apple to turn it on for reasons other than simply returning a lost phone to its owner.
  3. Apple’s technology includes various types of usage monitoring — also very privacy-invasive. This patented process could be used to retaliate against users who jailbreak or tinker with their device in ways that Apple views as “unauthorized” even if it is perfectly legal under copyright law.

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The EFF says this is a new business opportunity: spyware and what they are calling “traitorware.” The patent would allow Apple to find and punish users who tinker with their devices. The EFF says it’s not just spyware, it’s “traitorware,” since it is designed to allow Apple to retaliate against customers who do something Apple doesn’t like.

This patent is downright creepy and invasive — certainly far more than would be needed to respond to the possible loss of a phone. Spyware, and its new cousin traitorware, will hurt customers and companies alike — Apple should shelve this idea before it backfires on both it and its customers.

Steve Jobs wants you

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| October 12, 2010
Comments Off on 5 Billion Mobile Phones

5 Billion Mobile Phones

5 billion mobile subscriptionsThe market research firm iSuppli predicts that 73.4% of Earth’s population now owns a mobile phone. Thanks to demand in the emerging economies, analysts at iSuppli are predicting that there are now 5 billion mobile subscriptions. That works out to nearly 3 out of every 4 people on this planet will own a mobile phone.

Dr. Jagdish Rebello, iSuppli senior director, and principal wireless analyst believes that mobile phones are driving the tech industry. Rebello says “… the proliferation of wireless communications stands out as one of the most significant phenomena in the history of technology.”  He says that wireless communication is now. “ …  a basic staple like food, clothing, and shelter.”

Mobile and wireless subscriptions

“Wireless now represents the biggest stage that any technology market has ever played on, offering unlimited opportunities for members of the mobile communications supply chain,” Rebello said in a press release. “Because of the prevalence of mobile communications, the focus of the global technology supply chain has shifted away from the slower-growing computer market toward fast-expanding wireless-oriented platforms he says, ”The vast size of the installed base means wireless delivers greater opportunities for content and service developers to reach a large part of the population. Furthermore, the evolution of mobile handsets into smartphones is leading to the deployment of more value-added services, software, and components.”

Wireless subscriptions vary widely by region

iSuppli says wireless subscriptions vary widely by region. At the low-end is the combined Africa and Middle East region at 50% to 157.6% in Western Europe. The global installed base of wireless devices will amount to 4.9 billion at the end of 2010. The remaining subscribers will be accounted for by added Subscriber Identification (SIM) modules used in mobile handsets and services to Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications systems.  IntoMobile points out that 47.6 million subscriptions were added per month since December 2008 to reach current levels.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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