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Google secretly installs mic-enabling spyware / surveillance on all systems with Chrome or Chromium browsers
What the actual fuck?
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-chrome-listening-in-to-your-room-shows-the-importance-of-privacy-defense-in-depth/
Chromium, the open-source version of Google Chrome, had abused its position as trusted upstream to insert lines of source code that bypassed this audit-then-build process, and which downloaded and installed a black box of unverifiable executable code directly onto computers, essentially rendering them compromised. We don’t know and can’t know what this black box does. But we see reports that the microphone has been activated, and that Chromium considers audio capture permitted.
I've confirmed this is present and installed on my own Debian system and that my system mic (typically disabled / zeroed via software) was enabled. I may need to physically cut the circuit.
I also see a need to start firewalling off Google IP and network space.
Seriously: YOU DO NOT FUCKING DO THIS SHIT, GOOGLE.
I've been meaning to nuke Chrome for a while (fucking Stylebot's the monkey on my back). If I can eliminate all Google software from my Debian repos that's not too much.
Correcting one error in the article: Debian don't audit every line of code. There's too much, and the security team's too small. But Debian do have a policy and constitution, and key among the elements of that is that user rights come first.
Also: anyone with tips on physically disabling Thinkpad T520 mics, I'd appreciate the info.
⚫ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9738140
⚫ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3ab0lq/google_chrome_listening_in_to_your_room_shows_the/
⚫ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=%22Google+Chrome+Listening+In+To+Your+Room+Shows+The+Importance+Of+Privacy+Defense+In+Depth%22&sort=relevance&t=all
⚫ https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Google+Chrome+Listening+In+To+Your+Room+Shows+The+Importance+Of+Privacy+Defense+In+Depth%22
+Yonatan Zunger +Andreas Schou +Lea Kissner +Larry Page +Sergey Brin +Eric Schmidt +Bradley Horowitz +Peter Kasting
+Steve Faktor +Stephen Shankland +Dan Gillmor +Danny O'Brien +Danny Sullivan +Tess Vigeland
What the actual fuck?
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-chrome-listening-in-to-your-room-shows-the-importance-of-privacy-defense-in-depth/
Chromium, the open-source version of Google Chrome, had abused its position as trusted upstream to insert lines of source code that bypassed this audit-then-build process, and which downloaded and installed a black box of unverifiable executable code directly onto computers, essentially rendering them compromised. We don’t know and can’t know what this black box does. But we see reports that the microphone has been activated, and that Chromium considers audio capture permitted.
I've confirmed this is present and installed on my own Debian system and that my system mic (typically disabled / zeroed via software) was enabled. I may need to physically cut the circuit.
I also see a need to start firewalling off Google IP and network space.
Seriously: YOU DO NOT FUCKING DO THIS SHIT, GOOGLE.
I've been meaning to nuke Chrome for a while (fucking Stylebot's the monkey on my back). If I can eliminate all Google software from my Debian repos that's not too much.
Correcting one error in the article: Debian don't audit every line of code. There's too much, and the security team's too small. But Debian do have a policy and constitution, and key among the elements of that is that user rights come first.
Also: anyone with tips on physically disabling Thinkpad T520 mics, I'd appreciate the info.
⚫ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9738140
⚫ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3ab0lq/google_chrome_listening_in_to_your_room_shows_the/
⚫ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=%22Google+Chrome+Listening+In+To+Your+Room+Shows+The+Importance+Of+Privacy+Defense+In+Depth%22&sort=relevance&t=all
⚫ https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22Google+Chrome+Listening+In+To+Your+Room+Shows+The+Importance+Of+Privacy+Defense+In+Depth%22
+Yonatan Zunger +Andreas Schou +Lea Kissner +Larry Page +Sergey Brin +Eric Schmidt +Bradley Horowitz +Peter Kasting
+Steve Faktor +Stephen Shankland +Dan Gillmor +Danny O'Brien +Danny Sullivan +Tess Vigeland
Google Chrome listening in to your room shows the importance of privacy defense-in-depth. New column on Privacy News.
Yesterday, news broke that Google has been stealth downloading audio listeners onto every computer that runs Chrome, and transmits audio data back to Google. Effectively, this means that Google had taken itself the right to listen to every conversation in every room that runs Chrome somewhere, without any kind of consent from the people eavesdropped on. In official statements, Google shrugged off the practice with what amounts to “we can do that”.
It looked like just another bug report. "When I start Chromium, it downloads something." Followed by strange status information that notably included the lines "Microphone: Yes" and "Audio Capture Allowed: Yes".
Without consent, Google’s code had downloaded a black box of code that – according to itself – had turned on the microphone and was actively listening to your room.
This episode highlights the need for hard, not soft, switches to all devices – webcams, microphones – that can be used for surveillance. A software on/off switch for a webcam is no longer enough, a hard shield in front of the lens is required. A software on/off switch for a microphone is no longer enough, a physical switch that breaks its electrical connection is required. That’s how you defend against this in depth.
Early last decade, privacy activists practically yelled and screamed that the NSA’s taps of various points of the Internet and telecom networks had the technical potential for enormous abuse against privacy. Everybody dismissed those points as basically tinfoilhattery – until the Snowden files came out, and it was revealed that precisely everybody involved had abused their technical capability for invasion of privacy as far as was possible.
Perhaps it would be wise to not repeat that exact mistake. Nobody, and I really mean nobody, is to be trusted with a technical capability to listen to every room in the world, with listening profiles customizable at the identified-individual level, on the mere basis of “trust us”.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-chrome-listening-in-to-your-room-shows-the-importance-of-privacy-defense-in-depth/
Yesterday, news broke that Google has been stealth downloading audio listeners onto every computer that runs Chrome, and transmits audio data back to Google. Effectively, this means that Google had taken itself the right to listen to every conversation in every room that runs Chrome somewhere, without any kind of consent from the people eavesdropped on. In official statements, Google shrugged off the practice with what amounts to “we can do that”.
It looked like just another bug report. "When I start Chromium, it downloads something." Followed by strange status information that notably included the lines "Microphone: Yes" and "Audio Capture Allowed: Yes".
Without consent, Google’s code had downloaded a black box of code that – according to itself – had turned on the microphone and was actively listening to your room.
This episode highlights the need for hard, not soft, switches to all devices – webcams, microphones – that can be used for surveillance. A software on/off switch for a webcam is no longer enough, a hard shield in front of the lens is required. A software on/off switch for a microphone is no longer enough, a physical switch that breaks its electrical connection is required. That’s how you defend against this in depth.
Early last decade, privacy activists practically yelled and screamed that the NSA’s taps of various points of the Internet and telecom networks had the technical potential for enormous abuse against privacy. Everybody dismissed those points as basically tinfoilhattery – until the Snowden files came out, and it was revealed that precisely everybody involved had abused their technical capability for invasion of privacy as far as was possible.
Perhaps it would be wise to not repeat that exact mistake. Nobody, and I really mean nobody, is to be trusted with a technical capability to listen to every room in the world, with listening profiles customizable at the identified-individual level, on the mere basis of “trust us”.
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/2015/06/google-chrome-listening-in-to-your-room-shows-the-importance-of-privacy-defense-in-depth/
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Speed
@trentonleetiemeyer is one of the things that keeps me going back to Ello.
@trentonleetiemeyer is one of the things that keeps me going back to Ello.
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TIL: Tony Abbott was a Rhodes Scholar
Of the 200 or so scholars who have spent their careers in government, "most of them have had solid, but undistinguished careers," while "perhaps forty or can be said to have had a significant, national impact in their particular areas."[52] Several Scholars subsequently became heads of government or heads of state, including Wasim Sajjad (Pakistan), Bill Clinton (United States), Dom Mintoff (Malta), John Turner (Canada), and three Australian Prime Ministers: Bob Hawke, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. In the United States, the current U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell, Mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg, and Mayor of Los Angeles, California Eric Garcetti are Rhodes Scholars.
This I wouldn't have guessed.
Of the 200 or so scholars who have spent their careers in government, "most of them have had solid, but undistinguished careers," while "perhaps forty or can be said to have had a significant, national impact in their particular areas."[52] Several Scholars subsequently became heads of government or heads of state, including Wasim Sajjad (Pakistan), Bill Clinton (United States), Dom Mintoff (Malta), John Turner (Canada), and three Australian Prime Ministers: Bob Hawke, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. In the United States, the current U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell, Mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg, and Mayor of Los Angeles, California Eric Garcetti are Rhodes Scholars.
This I wouldn't have guessed.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai comments about intolerance of immigrants.
https://medium.com/@sundar_pichai/let-s-not-let-fear-defeat-our-values-af2e5ca92371
I find anti-immigrant sentiment frustrating because it's often so grounded in fear rather than logic. For example, people fear the possible loss of their jobs, and they see immigrants as more competition for jobs, so they oppose immigration, even though economically speaking immigrants are overall an incredible positive for the economy; few people have studied economics, though.
In recent days, the primary fear is a fear of violence rather than an economic fear, but illogic is still present. I saw a reference the other day that the number of people killed in mass shootings in the U.S. annually is roughly equal to the number killed by lightning strikes -- in other words, a tiny number that doesn't even register as a terribly meaningful risk. But humans are notoriously bad at risk estimation, and the salient stories of "Muslim man guns down innocent bystanders" are far more powerful than boring numbers. So, much like with the insanity of the TSA's airport scanning, we begin proposing spending billions of dollars and impacting an enormous number of lives in order to achieve at most an extraordinarily tiny amount of good.
Fear is powerful, and it's not wrong to react with fear, distaste, and anger when we hear of crime and violence. But it is wrong to let that emotional response sweep away the rational considerations we need to make about what reaction would result in the most justice for the most people. Immigrants in America are not just a crucial part of our history, they're also human beings whose lives are as inherently valuable as those of American citizens. We have a moral responsibility to treat them with the same respect and concern we treat everyone else. Demonizing groups of them isn't just illogical, it's unethical.
https://medium.com/@sundar_pichai/let-s-not-let-fear-defeat-our-values-af2e5ca92371
I find anti-immigrant sentiment frustrating because it's often so grounded in fear rather than logic. For example, people fear the possible loss of their jobs, and they see immigrants as more competition for jobs, so they oppose immigration, even though economically speaking immigrants are overall an incredible positive for the economy; few people have studied economics, though.
In recent days, the primary fear is a fear of violence rather than an economic fear, but illogic is still present. I saw a reference the other day that the number of people killed in mass shootings in the U.S. annually is roughly equal to the number killed by lightning strikes -- in other words, a tiny number that doesn't even register as a terribly meaningful risk. But humans are notoriously bad at risk estimation, and the salient stories of "Muslim man guns down innocent bystanders" are far more powerful than boring numbers. So, much like with the insanity of the TSA's airport scanning, we begin proposing spending billions of dollars and impacting an enormous number of lives in order to achieve at most an extraordinarily tiny amount of good.
Fear is powerful, and it's not wrong to react with fear, distaste, and anger when we hear of crime and violence. But it is wrong to let that emotional response sweep away the rational considerations we need to make about what reaction would result in the most justice for the most people. Immigrants in America are not just a crucial part of our history, they're also human beings whose lives are as inherently valuable as those of American citizens. We have a moral responsibility to treat them with the same respect and concern we treat everyone else. Demonizing groups of them isn't just illogical, it's unethical.
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Invented in the 1980s: "Tax and spend liberals"
Another dose of truth from the Ngram viewer.
Looks as if National Journal was there from the start (1983)
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22tax+and+spend+liberals%22&lr=lang_en&source=lnt&tbs=lr%3Alang_1en%2Ccdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F1980%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F1986&tbm=bks#q=%22tax+and+spend+liberals%22&lr=lang_en&tbs=lr:lang_1en,cdr:1,cd_min:1/1/1980,cd_max:12/31/1986&tbm=bks&start=10
And (sorry, +Lev Osherovich), but Monsanto:
https://books.google.com/books?id=9c7nAAAAMAAJ&q=%22tax+and+spend+liberals%22&dq=%22tax+and+spend+liberals%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjxjv_48NXJAhXMeT4KHY97BvkQ6AEIQzAH
Another dose of truth from the Ngram viewer.
Looks as if National Journal was there from the start (1983)
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22tax+and+spend+liberals%22&lr=lang_en&source=lnt&tbs=lr%3Alang_1en%2Ccdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F1980%2Ccd_max%3A12%2F31%2F1986&tbm=bks#q=%22tax+and+spend+liberals%22&lr=lang_en&tbs=lr:lang_1en,cdr:1,cd_min:1/1/1980,cd_max:12/31/1986&tbm=bks&start=10
And (sorry, +Lev Osherovich), but Monsanto:
https://books.google.com/books?id=9c7nAAAAMAAJ&q=%22tax+and+spend+liberals%22&dq=%22tax+and+spend+liberals%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjxjv_48NXJAhXMeT4KHY97BvkQ6AEIQzAH
What's the larger social threat, ultimately? Crime? Or Political upheaval?
+Ronald Parker called out the following quote in the Atlantic interview of UC Davis CompSci professor Philip Rogaway:
"Fortunately, criminal behavior has never been such a drag on society that it’s foreclosed entire areas of technological advance."
Unfortunately, political behavior has. -- Ronald Parker
From which my question, taking Rogaway's comments one step further.
Most crime is unorganised, the exception being organised crime, though that almost always has quasi-political or outright political overtones, with corruption and failed states (themselves forms of political failure) almost always playing roles.
Political violence is of necessity organised. And ... can be absolutely brutal. Krystalnacht. The Hololcaust. The Great Irish Famine. The Ukrainian Holdomor.
In its lesser forms, Political failure and overthrow become frighteningly close to what's become the norm in North America and Europe -- feeding the Plutonomy. Corruption of the legal and economic systems to oppress, take property and livelihoods, destroy lives, or kill directly. With impudence.
With general lawlessness you end up with stories such as the Bronx is Burning episodes of the 1970s (though many if not most of the fires were arson, set by property owners, often for insurance payouts), or Detroit of the past two decades. Or of Venezuela or Honduras, the latter with the highest murder rates in the world.
Widespread organised crime leads to situations such as have afflicted Mexico for the past two decades, with tens of thousands dead in what's very literally been a drug war. The political element of this is hugely significant though -- local and state police, and even the military are involved in both the drugs trade and violence.
And the ultimate degenerate case is outright civil war. The American Civil war remains the bloodiest the country's ever experienced, far the more when casualties as a proportion of the population are considered.
Which suggests again that Rogaway's focus on the political rather than criminal potentials for computer science and technology abuse are very well considered. Tools for magnifying and amplifying power, governmental or otherwise, without the social, civil society, legal, and institutional protections against abuse could be massively dangerous. +David Brin's Transparent Society strikes me as very thin shield.
+Ronald Parker called out the following quote in the Atlantic interview of UC Davis CompSci professor Philip Rogaway:
"Fortunately, criminal behavior has never been such a drag on society that it’s foreclosed entire areas of technological advance."
Unfortunately, political behavior has. -- Ronald Parker
From which my question, taking Rogaway's comments one step further.
Most crime is unorganised, the exception being organised crime, though that almost always has quasi-political or outright political overtones, with corruption and failed states (themselves forms of political failure) almost always playing roles.
Political violence is of necessity organised. And ... can be absolutely brutal. Krystalnacht. The Hololcaust. The Great Irish Famine. The Ukrainian Holdomor.
In its lesser forms, Political failure and overthrow become frighteningly close to what's become the norm in North America and Europe -- feeding the Plutonomy. Corruption of the legal and economic systems to oppress, take property and livelihoods, destroy lives, or kill directly. With impudence.
With general lawlessness you end up with stories such as the Bronx is Burning episodes of the 1970s (though many if not most of the fires were arson, set by property owners, often for insurance payouts), or Detroit of the past two decades. Or of Venezuela or Honduras, the latter with the highest murder rates in the world.
Widespread organised crime leads to situations such as have afflicted Mexico for the past two decades, with tens of thousands dead in what's very literally been a drug war. The political element of this is hugely significant though -- local and state police, and even the military are involved in both the drugs trade and violence.
And the ultimate degenerate case is outright civil war. The American Civil war remains the bloodiest the country's ever experienced, far the more when casualties as a proportion of the population are considered.
Which suggests again that Rogaway's focus on the political rather than criminal potentials for computer science and technology abuse are very well considered. Tools for magnifying and amplifying power, governmental or otherwise, without the social, civil society, legal, and institutional protections against abuse could be massively dangerous. +David Brin's Transparent Society strikes me as very thin shield.
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"[S]cience and technology are inherently political, and whether we want to think about it that way or not, it’s the nature of the beast. Our training as scientists and engineers tends to deemphasize the social positioning of what we do, and most of us scientists don’t give a whole lot of thought to how our work impacts society. But it obviously does."
Phillip Rogaway, professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Davis.
I myself had been thinking increasingly in these terms when the Snowden revelations came out. Those revelations made me confront more directly our failings as a community to have done anything effectual about stemming this transition of the Internet to this amazing tool for surveilling entire populations....
Q: Is there any inherent danger in politicizing an academic discipline?...
Rogaway: My sense is that politics is there, whether one acknowledges it or not. When you have an ostensibly apolitical department, but you scratch beneath the covers and discover that three-quarters of the faculty are funded by the Department of Defense, well, in fact that’s not apolitical....
I don’t think terrorism has much to do with the mass-surveillance issue at all. This is a convenient storyline to be weaving in the present day, but the NSA’s own mission statement says that they’re there to serve their customers. And while some of those customers are interested in terrorism, other NSA customers have completely unrelated interests, and I don’t think that surveilling is particularly aimed at confronting terrorism. It wouldn’t be effective even if it were....
If every contact a journalist makes—and the weight of that contact: the number of minutes, the frequency, and such—is something that hundreds of thousands of analysts can get from a Google-like search tool, I think that this makes serious investigative journalism effectively impossible.
Really good stuff.
Phillip Rogaway, professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Davis.
I myself had been thinking increasingly in these terms when the Snowden revelations came out. Those revelations made me confront more directly our failings as a community to have done anything effectual about stemming this transition of the Internet to this amazing tool for surveilling entire populations....
Q: Is there any inherent danger in politicizing an academic discipline?...
Rogaway: My sense is that politics is there, whether one acknowledges it or not. When you have an ostensibly apolitical department, but you scratch beneath the covers and discover that three-quarters of the faculty are funded by the Department of Defense, well, in fact that’s not apolitical....
I don’t think terrorism has much to do with the mass-surveillance issue at all. This is a convenient storyline to be weaving in the present day, but the NSA’s own mission statement says that they’re there to serve their customers. And while some of those customers are interested in terrorism, other NSA customers have completely unrelated interests, and I don’t think that surveilling is particularly aimed at confronting terrorism. It wouldn’t be effective even if it were....
If every contact a journalist makes—and the weight of that contact: the number of minutes, the frequency, and such—is something that hundreds of thousands of analysts can get from a Google-like search tool, I think that this makes serious investigative journalism effectively impossible.
Really good stuff.
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On how dissipative evolving structures are self-sustaining and self-preserving
Useful selective pressures must come from the outside.
More later.
Useful selective pressures must come from the outside.
More later.
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What's needed is sufficient pay and specifically targeted public subsidies. Not more loans.
The argument for consumer debt of all types, from mortgages to microloans to revolving credit to educational loans to "payday loans" is that they provide ready access to cash, increase access to some good or service (housing, education, spending in general). Only one is directly defended as providing business opportunity (microlending), though those arguments appear possibly specious.
Debt as a short-term measure to cover temporary cash shortfalls, or as a means of converting some tangible asset to liquid currency (e.g., ongoing business loans) is defensible.
Debt as a means to fund current expenses on a going basis, or to access services or goods from which the borrower will not or can not benefit, serves only the lenders. If the argument is "provide more cash in the economy" then the answer is pay people more.
Debt is a financing instrument with obligation to repay, almost always coupled to compound accruing interest, meaning that these obligations increase with time, with no regard to the capacity of the borrower to repay.
The result is an increased ratchet on the cost of assets, including housing, education, and healthcare, without regard to their actual economic benefit.
It's part of the great risk shift, from todays optimates, the empowered, wealthy, ruling class, to the populares -- the people generally, the proletariate, the working classes. Ultimately the fix isn't more loans, or easier financing terms, but one or both of:
1. Increased pay to lower classes. Sufficient to cover housing, food, healthcare, education, and retirement, on a generational timescale.
2. A shift of risk back to the financial system as a whole. Structured bankruptcies, maximum loan repayment periods, caps on real interest, loan forgiveness for failures to deliver fully (e.g., non-graduation from college programs), etc. Society is a web of mutually shared risks, giving rise to mutual interests. Not a grab-me-all-I-can.
The argument for consumer debt of all types, from mortgages to microloans to revolving credit to educational loans to "payday loans" is that they provide ready access to cash, increase access to some good or service (housing, education, spending in general). Only one is directly defended as providing business opportunity (microlending), though those arguments appear possibly specious.
Debt as a short-term measure to cover temporary cash shortfalls, or as a means of converting some tangible asset to liquid currency (e.g., ongoing business loans) is defensible.
Debt as a means to fund current expenses on a going basis, or to access services or goods from which the borrower will not or can not benefit, serves only the lenders. If the argument is "provide more cash in the economy" then the answer is pay people more.
Debt is a financing instrument with obligation to repay, almost always coupled to compound accruing interest, meaning that these obligations increase with time, with no regard to the capacity of the borrower to repay.
The result is an increased ratchet on the cost of assets, including housing, education, and healthcare, without regard to their actual economic benefit.
It's part of the great risk shift, from todays optimates, the empowered, wealthy, ruling class, to the populares -- the people generally, the proletariate, the working classes. Ultimately the fix isn't more loans, or easier financing terms, but one or both of:
1. Increased pay to lower classes. Sufficient to cover housing, food, healthcare, education, and retirement, on a generational timescale.
2. A shift of risk back to the financial system as a whole. Structured bankruptcies, maximum loan repayment periods, caps on real interest, loan forgiveness for failures to deliver fully (e.g., non-graduation from college programs), etc. Society is a web of mutually shared risks, giving rise to mutual interests. Not a grab-me-all-I-can.
Who's Profiting From $1.2 Trillion of Federal Student Loans?
Follow the money.
Follow the money.
Asking (or answering) questions is no end of trouble.
I was wondering what made a good University town the other day. A week later, I'm realising that the trivium is actually an early form of an input-process-output system, or an OODA loop, and pondering planting an olive grove a short ways out of town.
I won't even start with what happens when I start asking for the meaning and purpose of everything.
I was wondering what made a good University town the other day. A week later, I'm realising that the trivium is actually an early form of an input-process-output system, or an OODA loop, and pondering planting an olive grove a short ways out of town.
I won't even start with what happens when I start asking for the meaning and purpose of everything.
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