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The wonderful, but so far uncharted world of personal data
The term “Personal Data” is everywhere, but almost nobody knows anything about it. How can that be? Let’s start with what we do know about: We know about “government data”. Well, at least the government does. It is where information technology originated, for the census, for taxing and so forth. The government collects data about…
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Migratio Mentium
In the old days, peoples would migrate, creating all sorts of upheaval in the process, including the demise of the Roman Empire. There’s a similar migration going on right now. It has already destroyed entire industries, and keeps rattling the Roman Empires of today. But it is not a Migratio Gentium — a migration of…
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Let’s create the Internet of Our Own Things #IndieIoT
Bruce Sterling penned a marvelous, impassioned essay titled “The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things” a few months ago. ($3.99 at Amazon). He pulls no punches, right from the beginning: The first thing to understand about the “Internet of Things” is that it’s not about Things on the Internet. It’s a code term that…
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The Perfect Surveillance Architecture
If you set out to design the perfect surveillance architecture, what would you come up with? Assume there are no “legacy” issues, and you get to design the entire system for the benefit of the entity that gets to do the surveillance (government, or private sector, doesn’t really matter which). It’s an interesting thought experiment,…
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We need open-source firmware
Kapersky reports that hackers in the “Equation Group” (see Ars Technica coverage) infiltrated the firmware of most major hard drive manufacturers: rewrote the hard-drive firmware of infected computers … on 12 drive categories from manufacturers including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate. The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survived…