Tech

A Google Privacy Stumble

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If you use Gmail you may have noticed a new feature called “Buzz”, which is Google’s attempt to create something like Facebook.

Email and Facebook-type social networking services are different in function and in their users’ privacy expectations. Google erred by 1) assuming that users of email, the less intrusive service, would want to be signed up by default for the more intrusive social networking service, and 2) configuring the privacy settings of the social networking service in a way that can casually expose a user’s private information before the user has a chance, or even knows, to change the relevant settings.

Here is an example of the kinds of problems Google’s new scheme caused.

Here are instructions for restoring the (relative) privacy of your Google account.

Google will probably correct its blunder soon if it hasn’t already. But it’s interesting that they blundered in this way in the first place. They showed a Microsoftian level of cluelessness about privacy and security. It’s as if the Google offices were a monoculture of young computer geeks for whom clever new features are first and foremost cool toys with business upside and no downside, rather than complex systems that sometimes interact in unexpected ways and may have the potential to harm people who have something to lose. Oh, wait…

Google’s “don’t be evil” motto, always a cynical joke, deserves at least as much ridicule as does the DHS terror-threat color code. People in China learned this some time ago.

Don’t be stupid. Don’t trust Google or other free Web-service providers with information that you can’t afford to make public.

UPDATE: An attorney offers scathing and insightful critique of Google here and here. The second linked post gives additional advice on deactivating your Buzz account, including a link to Google’s own instructions for doing this.

TEDx Chicago

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Yesterday was Chicago’s inaugural TEDx meeting. It was thought provoking, a full house, and a very educational evening. The event lost one speaker due to snowstorm but he made it in via Skype. Like any inaugural event there were a few technical hiccups but mostly they added charm to the event. I expect them to only get better from here.

The next one’s in October. I’ll be there. Fortunately, the room will be bigger so hopefully it will take a bit more than a week to sell out though I fully expect it to sell out again. Details to be released soon.

So Long, LORAN

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On Monday at 2000 GMT, the U.S. Coast Guard terminated the transmission of the LORAN-C radionavigation signal, marking the end of a system which has been an important factor in maritime navigation (and, to a lesser extent, air navigation) for more than half a century. The termination of LORAN was based on budget considerations and on the conclusion that LORAN’s functions have been supplanted by GPS. I’m not totally sure that this was a good decision.

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Networks

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Being without electricity for almost 12 hours, and without Internet service for 4 days (both are back now) encourages contemplation of the multiple networks on which we are dependent for our well-being and even our survival, and of the interdependencies that exist across these networks…

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Would Someone Please Just Release a Mac OS X Virus Already?

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Because, people, the suspense is killing me.

If you went back in time to 2002, at the time of the initial release of Mac OS X, and told everyone that over the next eight years not a single Mac OS X virus or worm would be found in the wild, everyone, including me, would have called you barking mad.

Ever since Apple began the transition to Mac OS X in 1999, computer security experts have every week of every month of every year confidently told us that Mac OS X is just as vulnerable on a technological level as Windows or any other operating system. By that they mean that it is just as technically easy for a malicious programmer to write a program to hijack the operating system of Mac as it is to write a program to hijack a Windows machine.

Several times a year, they demonstrate flaws in Mac OS X that they claim could be used to spread viruses. They complain about Apple’s insular, arrogant and cavalier attitude toward finding and patching these security flaws. They tell us that all these factors make Mac OS X a ticking bomb and that “any day now” Mac users will face a sudden tsunami of self-propagating viruses and worms just like Windows users do.

They tell us the exact same thing every week, month and year.

They told us that in 1999 with the release of Mac OS X server.
They told us that in 2000.
They told us that in 2001.
They really told us that in 2002 when Mac OS X shipped widely for desktops.
They told us that in 2002.
They told us that in 2003.
They told us that in 2004.
They told us that in 2005.
They told us that in 2006.
They told us that in 2007.
They told us that in 2008.
They told us that in 2009
And they continue to tell us that in 2010.

Yet, der Tag never comes and waiting for it is giving me ulcers.

So, I have to ask: How many more years have to elapse before we begin to suspect the security experts (and everyone else, myself included) have misunderstood something critical about how the Mac OS X security model works out in the real world?

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