General Category > Blog
Terrorism, web sites, games and privacy (anonymity)
ratty redemption [RIP]:
interesting tech but scary for our future lives.
kat:
The DailyMail isn't exactly a fountain of facts and responsible journalism but this article - "Drones, satellites and lasers: Mark Zuckerberg reveals Facebook's sci-fi vision for the future of the internet" - raises some interesting questions and concerns about why there is this need and apparent rush for giant Internet corporations like Facebook and Google to be wanting to "bring the Internet to everyone". What does that even mean in this day an age of NSA spying, traffic and data harvesting, heavy commercialisation of 'information' through advertising, political, religious and economic censorship, 'hacking', and on, and on, and on.
The long and short of it is that there's nothing egalitarian about bringing the Internet to everyone, the West isn't saving the digitally poor Countries of the often Third or Developing World, it's simply about expanding, exploiting and controlling new markets, a bit like oil, gas and other 'natural' resources... we're resources you see.. what we do can be harvested, collected, and commoditised. Perhaps we can add a new euphemism to "BigAgra", "BigOil", "BigPharma"... "BigData".
kat:
So it turns out the "HeartBleed" security flaw, which affects specific versions of OpenSSL and potentially allows inadvertent access to server memory (KatsBits isn't affected by this issue by the way), is being reported by Bloomberg and other news outlets to have been exploited by the NSA since the flaws discovery some two or so years ago to grab data, without informing the public, under the catch-all guise of "National Security". Notwithstanding issues of Government Agencies exploiting flaws and gaps in the system instead of 'fixing' them, this whole situation raises far more questions that it does answers... If you want to know what you can do as a 'user' have a read of this article by ZDNet on ways you can check or mitigate fallout from HeartBleed.
ratty redemption [RIP]:
wow, it's comforting to know our governments were there to protect us all as soon as they knew about this bug.
seriously though, is it just luck that katsbits didn't use the vulnerable versions of openssl?
kat:
Without revealing too much about what is *not* used (which is just as 'valuable' as knowing what is)? Pretty much "yes" ;)
Isn't it wholly ironic that the largest, actual and very real, threat and imminent danger to our "safety" and "security", certainly where the Internet and technology is concerned, is from Government Agencies around the World. And there we are thinking there's no harm in sending cat pictures to each other!
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