I was at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) XI conference two weeks ago. Lots of surveillance cameras around Pennsylvania Station and surrounding buildings in NYC. I mapped a bunch of them and photographed a few as well. You can find them mapped at cctv.masspirates.org.
There are at least two more just out of the picture:
The map:
Finally getting around to notifying you all about the pictures I took of the 2016 Boston Pride Parade and the Pirate Party marchers. If you are looking for other Pirate Party activities, Aaron James’ campaign for 27th Middlesex State Representative is going door to door today and the Pirate Picnic is Sunday.
I posted pictures from the Free Software Foundation/Defective by Design No DRM in HTML rally on March 20th. It was after Libre Planet 2016. The Massachusetts Pirate Party endorsed it and Pirates acted as marshals.
Two short stories that bring together the pitfalls of big data and the internet of things.
Found this well done short film about the intersection of virtual reality games, remotely controlled weapons, control and power via Boing Boing.
Our disposable society example #807.
It looks like the US’ major military involvements seem to poison US soldiers and the civilians of the countries we fight. Agent Orange in Vietnam. Gulf War syndrome in that war. Now the US government has covered up the burning of toxic waste in open pits at US miltary bases by private contractor Kellogg, Brown, and Root (KBR), a former subsidiary of Halliburton.
Since the illness’ effects are delayed, respiratory issues or cancers, the VA won’t cover it. Iraqi and Afghan civilians, like the Vietnamese, are just left to suffer.
Of course, outsourcing the burn pits to private contractors allowed them to cut costs by cutting corners:
Did the military’s use of private contractors like KBR in some ways help to facilitate this crisis?
KBR operated many of the burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan. There are some regulations for contractors, but they’re not nearly as stringent, and the penalties are not nearly as harsh for contractors as they are for soldiers. So these contractors were super-careless with these burn pits. There were burning anything and everything in them, and they didn’t care and they didn’t think they could be held accountable.
They’ve grown to the point where they feel that the government can’t operate without them. These companies have that arrogance. Contractors that were operating the burn pits in Iraq were actually told by their headquarters, “If they’re going to investigate us over these burn pits, don’t worry about it. If we pull out, they can’t run this base.”
Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration hasn’t been helpful to whistle-blowers on this issue. Thankfully, in the documents that Chelsea Manning leaked is information about how the US military was aware of the burn pit health hazards.
The GWoT just keeps giving.
Posting here and at masspirates.org.
The FBI got a judge to order Apple to create a custom iOS version so they can decrypt the work iPhone 5c of Syed Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters. They want Apple to push out a custom version that will disable the delays between wrong pin entries and the ten wrong pin tries and the phone gets wiped security feature. Apple is fighting it.
This Tuesday the Pirate Party is joining with Fight for the Future to protest the judge’s order. We will meet at 5:30pm at the Apple Store, 815 Boylston Street in Boston. Join us and stand up for your privacy and right to keep your data encrypted and secure.
Considering that ISIS didn’t know about the attack, it is doubtful there is much on the phone that will help them get other leads. The FBI can already request the metadata (who was called, when, how long, from where) for Farook’s communications using the phone or any other service the shooters used. The mobile phone providers are always willing to provide that information, often for a fee. Whatever other info they need, the NSA has likely gathered it with their mass surveillance program. FBI could use the NSA’s data to identify what other information they need and then get a subpoena to get the data legally, though unconstitutionally.
It isn’t as if the Federal government hasn’t used parallel construction in the past.
The phone was owned by Farook’s employer, the San Bernardino Health Department, and someone there reset the phone in an attempt to gain access. Had they not, the FBI could have backed up the data to Apple’s iCloud service and gained access to it. It isn’t clear who made the decision to reset the password.
Which is all good for the FBI, because it gives them the excuse they need to force Apple to modify iOS to make it easier to break into, and set a precedent for getting a backdoor in any phone, even newer ones. Once those backdoors are there, anyone can take advantage of them whether the security services of other countries, criminals or abusive ex-boyfriends. That process may already have begun with China.
So please come out this Tuesday and join the Pirate Party, Fight for the Future and others to protest the judge’s order. We will meet at 5:30pm at the Apple Store, 815 Boylston Street in Boston. The more people who stand up for privacy and encryption, the stronger is our message.
More articles to read on this subject:
Our disposable society example #806.
Looks like the military’s practice of discarding soldiers applies to bomb-sniffing dogs used in Iraq and Afghanistan according to an NYPost investigation. Robby’s Law allows military dog handlers to adopt the dogs they worked with, but “hundreds of handlers [are] still searching for their dogs — and the Army, the Pentagon and K2 Solutions [are] covering up what happened, and what may still be happening.” Of course the military mercenary private contractor is blaming the military since the dogs are owned by the military, but it isn’t clear who really owns the dogs.
Soldiers suffer:
“I guess I had PTSD before, but I never really noticed till I gave Fistik up,” Kornse says. “I started having nightmares. I never experienced that before. She made everything better for me — that’s the best way I can describe it.”
And the dogs suffer:
“All of these dogs have PTSD,” Scarborough says. “Squires said that to me.”
…
“Half of the dogs were on human Prozac and Xanax,” kennel master Greg Meredith tells The Post.
And so may the public:
None of the people who sought to adopt was vetted. None was asked what they planned to do with the dogs, or if they were capable of dealing with a dog with war wounds. None was asked whether they had small children.
Someone made money off of these dogs and the dogs sacrificed for our expeditionary wars. Apparently it is too much to ask that they find people who need them and can take care of them.
Took some photos of the surveillance cameras at the South Station MBTA stop. They are up at my Surveillance album.
Update: I have installed SSL certificates for all of my sites which have images on this site. All of the side bar images are back up.
One of the reasons I migrated from Typepad to another hosting provider, was so I could enable SSL on my site. Making sure your site supports SSL is the one of the basic efforts you can do to support encrypting the web.
I set it up for my main domain a few weeks ago, but since some of the images I use are on sites that didn’t use https, my blog did not appear to be completely secure.
I have adding SSL to two of my (sub-)sites, and will finish the rest tomorrow. I have removed the non-SSL widgets so the site shows a nice green lock and will add them back then they are all set. As an added bonus, I removed a bunch of tracking javascript that Typepad adds to their photo galleries that I don’t need.
One up shot of this effort is that I have a nice set of instructions that work for my setup which will help speed the process in the future.
