Clearview AI (previously) is a grifty facial recognition company that sells untested, secretive tools to police departments, claiming that they can identify people from security camera footage by matching the pictures those scraped from big social media sites.
Continue reading “The answer to the Clearview AI scandal is better privacy laws, not anti-scraping laws”
Tag: adversarial interoperability
Sonos warns customers that their older speakers will shortly be e-waste
Sonos has warned customers who bought speakers five or more years ago that it will no longer provide software updates to their property, and that they will cease to operate in systems that include newer equipment, and will have to be separated on its own subnet.
Continue reading “Sonos warns customers that their older speakers will shortly be e-waste”
In serving big company interests, copyright is in crisis
Copyright rules are made with the needs of the entertainment industry in mind, designed to provide the legal framework for creators, investors, distributors, production houses, and other parts of the industry to navigate their disputes and assert their interests.
Continue reading “In serving big company interests, copyright is in crisis”
Charter/Spectrum sold customers expensive home security systems, then killed the program and left them high and dry
Prior to being acquired by Charter, the cable company Spectrum aggressively marketed home security systems to its customers, inducing them to spend hundreds of dollars on proprietary cameras and other equipment that integrated with their cable networks and offered them remote monitoring and other services.
Continue reading “Charter/Spectrum sold customers expensive home security systems, then killed the program and left them high and dry”
2019: EFF enters the competition fray
None of us signed up for an Internet composed of “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four”, but here we are, watching as hyper-concentrated industries rack up catastrophic victories against net neutrality, right to repair, security auditing, and a host of other issues.
Mint: late-stage adversarial interoperability demonstrates what we had (and what we lost)
In 2006, Aaron Patzer founded Mint. Patzer had grown up in the city of Evansville, Indiana—a place he described as “small, without much economic opportunity”—but had created a successful business building websites. He kept up the business through college and grad school and invested his profits in stocks and other assets, leading to a minor obsession with personal finance that saw him devoting hours every Saturday morning to manually tracking every penny he’d spent that week, transcribing his receipts into Microsoft Money and Quicken.
Talking Adversarial Interoperability with Y Combinator
Earlier this month while I was in San Francisco, I went over to the Y Combinator incubator to record a podcast (MP3); we talked for more than an hour about the history of Adversarial Interoperability and what its role was in creating Silicon Valley and the tech sector and how monopolization now threatens adversarial interop and also how it fuels the conspiratorial thinking that is so present in our modern politics. We talk about how startup founders and other technologists can use science fiction for inspiration, and about the market opportunities presented by challenging Big Tech and its giant, massively profitable systems.
alt.interoperability.adversarial
Today, we are told that the bigness of Big Tech giants was inevitable: the result of “network effects.” For example, once everyone you want to talk to is on Facebook, you can’t be convinced to use another, superior service, because all the people you’d use that service to talk to are still on Facebook. And of course, those people also can’t leave Facebook, because you’re still there.
Continue reading “alt.interoperability.adversarial”
Facebook sues notorious spyware company NSO Group for 1,400 attacks on diplomats, journalists, dissidents, and government officials
[Addendum 2/20/2020: Following a legal complaint, the Guardian removed its article of 14 June 2019 and apologised to Mrs Peel. We are happy to clarify that Yana Peel is not, and was not, personally involved in the operation or decisions of the regulated Novalpina Capital investment fund, which is managed by her husband Stephen Peel, and others. Mrs Peel was not involved in any decision-making relating to the fund’s acquisition of NSO. Mrs Peel only has a small, indirect and passive interest in the fund. She does not own, whether directly or indirectly, any Novalpina Capital entity or any stake in NSO Group.]
The NSO Group is one of the world’s most notorious cyber-arms dealers, selling hacking tools to some of the world’s most oppressive regimes that are used to identify targets for arrest, torture and even murder.
The Israeli company went through a series of buyouts and buybacks, ending up in the hands of the European private equity fund Novalpina.
Novalpina has pledged to rehabilitate the NSO Group’s reputation by reforming its practices and limiting the sale of its spying tools to legitimate actors (whomever they may be). But research from the world-leading Citizen Lab (previously) revealed that NSO was behind a string of attacks on Whatsapp users last may, which was used to target human rights campaigners, journalists, and political dissidents.
Facebook has filed a lawsuit against the NSO Group, accusing the company of being behind Whatsapp attacks in 20 countries (Whatsapp is a division of Facebook); Facebook claims that the attacks swept up at least 100 members of civil society groups.
The suit seeks an injunction against future NSO Group attacks on Whatsapp and unspecified monetary damages.
NSO is also being sued in Israel for allegedly helping to entrap the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was kidnapped, murdered and dismembered at the direction of the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.
Facebook’s suit presents a mixed bag of legal theories: they accuse NSO Group of violating California contract and property law, but also of violating the tremendously flawed Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a 1986 federal anti-hacking law that Facebook drastically expanded when it sued a competitor called Power Ventures in 2008 (the CFAA was also the law used to hound Aaron Swartz to death). There’s a risk that a verdict in Facebook’s favor will strengthen precedents that allow the CFAA to be wielded against legitimate competitors, independent security researchers, and other good actors.
One potential fix for this would be an “interoperator’s defense” that would clarify that CFAA and other statutes do not apply to good actors, ever, something like “Notwithstanding any law or regulation, it is never an offense to create a new interoperable product, service, part, software patch or application, tool, or consumable that allows the legitimate owner or user of an existing product to service to repair, reconfigure, improve or customize that product or service.”
In its statement, Facebook frames its work in the context of defending human rights, citing the work of UN Special Rapporteur on Free Expression David Kaye (previously), who has called for a moratorium on sales of cyber-weapons, including to nation-states.
The NSO Group denies any wrongdoing.
WhatsApp sues Israel’s NSO for allegedly helping spies hack phones around the world [Raphael Satter/Reuters]
NSO Group / Q Cyber Technologies [Citizen Lab]
Bipartisan legislation would force Big Tech to allow interoperability with small competitors
The Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching” (ACCESS) Act was introduced by Senator Mark Warner [D-VA] and co-sponsored by Senator Josh Hawley [R-MO] and Senator Richard Blumenthal [D-CT]; it mandates the creation of “third party custodial services,” regulated by the FTC, that will allow uses of Facebook and other Big Tech platforms to switch to smaller, direct competitors who would then act as an intermediary between these new entrants and the platforms.
Continue reading “Bipartisan legislation would force Big Tech to allow interoperability with small competitors”