Tag Archives: privacy

Weak Certificates

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve got an odd little problem at work. I’ve got a Ricoh copier in the Traverse City office that I apparently now can no longer manage remotely due to an error in SSL. The error that Firefox throws is ssl_error_weak_server_cert_key and in Google Chrome it’s ERR_SSL_WEAK_SERVER_EPHEMERAL_DH_KEY. In both situations I understand what the issue is, that the SSL layer is weak because the Diffie-Hellman key is not big enough.

I’ve run into this issue before, mostly with self-signed certs and the browsers have usually allowed me to click on an exception and get on with my day. Except for Firefox and Chrome now, that is no longer the case. The browsers just refuse to display the webpage. I understand the logic behind it, everyone wants a more secure web, but sometimes what we are really after isn’t privacy or security, but rather just getting our work done.

I still need to connect to this copier and manage it, and frankly my dear, I don’t really care that much that the transactions be secure. In a way, this security is irrelevant. The traffic on our WAN is flowing over a Meraki VPN site-to-site link, so it’s already secure. This is security on top of security, and it’s in the way.

So I thought about using the awful Internet Explorer for this and I chafe at even considering using one more wretched bit of Microsoft technology – there has to be a better solution. So when you run into little bits like this the best way forward is to pursue my favorite solution, heterogenous computing! There’s more than one way to get what you are after. So if Firefox and Chrome won’t work, and Internet Explorer is unthinkable, how about Opera?

So I downloaded Opera and installed it. Then browsed to my copier in Traverse City. Opera told me about the error, but it also provided me with an exception button and then once I clicked that, the error was bypassed and my copiers remote management screen appeared.

So now I’ll add Opera to all the other browsers I have on my computers. The answer is competition. I wonder sometimes if there isn’t a special browser out there for IT type people like me. They’ll render anything, ignore any “privacy or security” type errors, all so people like me can get our jobs done. For now, Opera seems to lead the pack, at least for this. Thank you Opera!

Saying Goodbye to Facebook

Posted on by
Reply

Yesterday, July 19th, 2011 I said my final goodbyes to Facebook and announced my transition over to Google+. I went on Facebook and let everyone who could still see my wall, know that I was leaving that service for good and conducting all my sharing over on Google+. For me it was a matter of who built the better mousetrap. The services provided by Google+ far outweigh the headaches that I’d have to wade through to match on Facebook and I like the cleanliness of Google+ and the lack of baggage that comes with running a service that was at one point built for high school and college age kids to socialize on.

When I made my goodbye status updates on Facebook one of my friends who usually doesn’t say much brought up a valid point. His issue with Google+ is their privacy policy, which he took exception to. The policy is composed of jargon and legalese such as “non-exclusionary rights granted by the … for the perpetual use and non-exclusive publishing rights of the …” and so on and so forth. I am not about to make people who read these policies feel less of themselves by denigrating this legalese as so much meaningless and incomprehensible bibble-babble, but I’m not about to let something like that interfere with the path of my life and the things I want to do. Aren’t I running afoul of a policy that strips me of my rights for what I share and what I post online? Don’t I care about the things I write and the music I share and the photos I share? Doesn’t that bother me?

No. Not in one small bit does it bother me. My life is dull. What I have to share is free for the taking. Why should I license what I photograph, what I record, anything at all, when it comes down to it! What am I protecting? If I were to get all worked up I’d be protecting an endless and mindless stream of inconsequential doggerel and pablum. My social existence is important for me, and the message is important for the people in my life, but ownership of that material? It’s utter dreck. So what if someone comes along and licenses all my photography and lays claim to all that I have written. Someone comes along and asserts ownership over my blog? You are welcome to it! Much like Jazz, the crap that I create comes from an infinite source of unceasing malarkey. Grab as much of it as you want, I’ll just shovel up more. I’ve got a big shovel, boundless energy, and you’re just running garbage detail for me. Knock. Your. Socks. Off.

Really what it comes down to is none of these policies mean anything to people like me because we go ahead and live our lives. These policies exist for people who thrive on the minutiae of life. The only times these policies get dusted off and opened up is when someone tries to be a dick. Society gives us a shorthand when people are being dicks and so, in this social fabric, as long as the howler monkeys aren’t hooting and hollering too loudly the rest of us shrug and graze and go about our plain and dull lives. I haven’t heard anyone get bent about a privacy policy whatever from Google and even when I read the policy bibble-babble, I don’t really care. Non-exclusive, penultimate, pejorative, permissible, persimmons blah blah blah. It’s important to a very small subset of people and if it keeps them happy and shuts them up, why should I care? If the service disappears, so be it. It evaporates with all my writing and all my posted pictures? Uh, fine. I’ll just move on to something else. In the end I don’t care! I don’t care if I win, lose, or whatever. This sort of thing doesn’t interest me and life goes on.

And that brings me to another point, one more general than all the others. If everyone uncorked all these very dull and very blah-blah-blah policies and we all decided to dwell in the house of the righteous and mighty we’d quickly find ourselves so wrapped up in legal jargon and rules that we couldn’t do anything. Liability to perform a bowel movement? Nope. How about walking outside in the sunshine? Nope. Eating? Come on. I bet a legal eagle could find a series of policies that outlaw respiration! When you have this amount of text and only a very small segment of the population with enough interest to maintain consciousness when exposed to it, you end up with people who take others statements on-faith. We can’t process the endless stream of legal mumbo-jumbo, so we hire people who we pay and we trust to do it for us and give us a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Truth to be told, once we honor them enough to let them have a say, we forget all about what they said and get on with life! People tell us that we really should have lawyers look at things, and so we do. Not because we understand or actively even care about the lawyers but we understand that lawyers must be fed. Nobody told us why, and it doesn’t directly impact our lives to see to their proper feeding, so we write the right things, we post the right things and we look to the special creatures called lawyers and we look for a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. That’s as far as it goes, kids! Life goes on! Work has to be done! Those agreements and policies are great, they’re done, yes! They were seen by somebody? Yes! Those somebodies were happy? YES! Well, good… WHATEVER. We move on.

Life has to find a way to trudge forward. These policies are meat for lawyers. The only time when you need a lawyer is when people deviate from the Golden Rule. Society pressures each of us to not stray from the Golden Rule, so for a lot of this, once penned, will never see the light of day again. This brings up another point that has bothered me for a long time, and that is the fine-print monsters. There are agreements everywhere and there is fine-print everywhere, you can’t escape it. There is what is written and there is what is understood and the two aren’t necessarily bound together! When someone decides to be a dick, to play the fine-print game, then the lawyers click their mandibles together and there is a feeding frenzy — for the lawyers! For the people in the drama, there is the victim of the dick, the dick, and the fat happy lawyers moaning in ecstasy and having little orgasms when they hear “billable hours”. So afterwards, the victim of the dick and the dick part ways and the victim has learned a lesson. The victim of the dick never approaches the dick again. This used to be the end of it. The dicks never really had anything else to fear from the victim because they were just one little meaningless nobody in a sea of meaningless nobodies. That is, until social media and social networking came to town. Now the victims of the dick can hop up on a soap-box and write about their experiences to all the other potential victims of the dick and warn them. “Dick is here, he’s after you, avoid him.” and so the dick starves and dies because his prey was alerted that he was in the tall grass and fled. This creates a new series of regulatory controls between the victims of the dicks and the dicks. Now that each one of us can instantly publish and amplify our warning hoots to everyone else, the dicks are on the run, scampering left and right looking for victims and finding nothing but pounded earth from the millions of victims that have fled. This is the natural order of things now, and this is why it’s important to not be a dick. The minute you are branded a dick, you are effectively ostracized from society, you are given a Scarlet D to wear and everywhere you go tales of your dickishness proceed you!

So lets get back to where we started… leaving Facebook for Google+. Do I care about the privacy policy? No. Why am I not concerned? Because I value nothing that I create, I WANT TO SHARE IT and because I’m using these systems, isn’t it obvious that I want to GIVE IT AWAY!?! So someone comes along and takes it, well, that’s part of the point. If there is a dick in the tall grass, it might bring down a bit of the storm but it won’t stop the storm from coming and overwhelming it. Even if the dick starts to rampage, it’s now just a matter of pressing a button and walking away, effectively annihilating the dick.

In the end I don’t care. Life goes on. There are more important things to fret over, like whats for dinner tomorrow, did I see the tight little bubble-butt on that twinkie gym-bunny, what are my plans for labor day? These are the pressing things, not “Oooh, Google came in and asserted ownership of my LOLCATZ pics!” There is an order to things, and frankly, bubble-butts trump rampaging company-legalese-dicks. Life goes on.

Privacy is Stupid

Posted on by
Reply

The echo chamber of Twitter, the Blogosphere, and Facebook are reverberating with journalists and pundits going on at length, with intense fretting and dry-handwashing regarding the respect of privacy in social networks. I have two problems with the complaint over privacy in the 21st Century.

My first problem with privacy in the 21st Century is that privacy is the antithesis of socialization. The rage now is social networking, joining sites, finding others, connecting with people deep in your past and right around the corner. There is a kind of magic when you put a whole bunch of people in a social web, from the dissemination of news, information, to the most recent demonstration of altruism regarding the fellow on Metafilter who had people coming out of the woodwork to prevent a possible instance of human trafficking in New York City. We have tasted the candy of socialization and we like it, we have expanded into Facebook, Twitter, even WordPress in order to share ourselves with the outside world. Each of us consumes vast amounts of information now, instead of hunting for it at a Library we now wade through information online, and the places where we engage this social network are vast and varied, the bedroom, the bathroom, the boardroom. We have seen something shiny and the herd has put its head down and begun a social stampede. How does privacy last in this situation? It simply cannot! Privacy is DEAD. If you want to share, then how can you be private? “I want to be found, but I don’t want any of my information to be found.” This is utterly irrational.

The second problem with privacy in the 21st Century is this odd predilection for being utterly truthful to a fault. Lets say you would like to preserve some small shred of privacy online, why would you be utterly 100% honest to social networking sites? There is nothing absolutely binding you to only one email address, and you can elect to not include information you don’t want to provide! Even if you are pressed for information, what prevents anyone from stuffing the box with bogus details? What is my address? 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Obviously. Why are we so driven to be utterly honest online and then pitch a fit when that information is misused? I cannot understand why people who are driven to privacy haven’t yet constructed an alias, a completely fake persona, or even bogus contact information!

These two problems I have just bounce around in my head and I get more and more agitated and irritated when I see people whining at length about their precious privacy. Declaring that they will abandon Facebook because their privacy policies don’t fit in with their utopian ideals. It’s a free service, you aren’t held to be 100% truthful, so why all the bitching, moaning, and above all else impotent whining? If you haven’t poisoned the well when it comes to personal information in order to preserve your privacy, then your privacy is dead. Utterly DEAD. Get over it! Stop complaining about Facebook and Twitter and how you don’t want to share information. You are in a social stampede, all you can do really is stop running with the rest of us and allow yourself to be trampled.

It’s lonely being all by yourself. But at least you’ll have your precious privacy to keep you company.