As if September hasn't been an interesting enough month for governmental Internet regulation, the Obama administration is now pushing for a federal law that would require built-in backdoors for law enforcement surveillance of email, instant messaging, and other communication tools. Many of these services, which maintain the security of their content through detailed encryption methods, would need to implement procedures allowing them to intercept and decrypt messages when served with a wiretap order.
If this sounds threatening to you, you're not alone. The ACLU is already on the case, condemning the proposal as a "huge privacy invasion." James Dempsey, VP of the Center for Democracy and Technology, called the proposed law a challenge to the "fundamental elements of the Internet revolution." As providers will foot the bill for implementing changes and be forced to expend resources that could be better spent elsewhere, the government may be imposing limitations that stifle product innovation and prevent start-up companies from getting off the ground.
But Valerie Caproni, general counsel for the FBI, defends the proposed law stating, "We're not talking expanding authority. We're talking about preserving our ability to execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security." The government argues that its information gathering methods are "going dark," a term used to describe the limitations of traditional wiretap methods given the decreasing importance of telephone communication.
The government maintains that any type of electronic monitoring would still require a court order, and that the interception ability would lie with the service provider and not in the hands of a governmental agency, thus retaining confidentiality. But the opening of security holes could lead to exploits from the outside, and with the major social networking privacy leaks of the last year still fresh in our minds, the move could undermine user confidence in those services significantly. The proposal is expected to be submitted to Congress when it reconvenes next year.
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Porn user list leaked from law firm that pursues pirates
Tens of thousands of Internet porn users in the UK have had their emails containing personal information leaked online, along with which content they've downloaded and shared, according to BBC News. The list reportedly includes over 5,300 names and addresses of Sky broadband customers, their IP addresses, and some credit card details.
The entire archive was first uploaded to the Pirate Bay, but has since spread to other file sharing networks, and has been downloaded thousands of times. The list originates from a law firm by the name of ACS:Law Solicitors, which specializes in assisting intellectual property rights holders to exploit and enforce their rights. ACS:Law compiled the list in order to track down Internet pirates and then send letters demanding compensation for copyright holders.
Now, users who have previously received letters from the company demanding money, as well as those who have paid using their credit cards, are being warned to beware of criminals making unsolicited calls and/or unusual transactions. Experts are expecting fraud, identity theft, and severe emotional distress for those affected.
The attack was carried out by 4Chan under the same Payback campaign the site used to target the MPAA and RIAA just over a week ago. ACS:Law's website was taken down by the attack for much of the week, but when it came back up, it appears that the 365MB file containing the confidential information was inadvertently published on the site's front page. While ACS:Law's email archive was exposed after the DDoS attack, there's no evidence that the web server was compromised, meaning that the data breach was caused by poor security and administration.
Protesting against the methods used by ACS:Law to pursue alleged file sharers is one thing, but it gets serious when those the law firm is pursuing have become victims. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office is now investigating the whole ordeal.
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Storing tweets requires four petabytes of data a year
Twitter analytics lead, Kevin Weil, spoke recently at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York and revealed some interesting information about Twitter and its infrastructure.
Weil said that all of tweets, which are limited to just 140 characters, add up to 12 terabytes of storage every day. He said, "that would translate to four petabytes a year, if we weren't growing."
All that data is being analyzed by Weil and his team to attempt to find information that would be useful to help make Twitter a profitable business. Twitter has been working hard to become profitable, they recently made major changes to their website in an attempt to increase user engagement.
Twitter is using user data to determine whether their changes are successful. They track users who have been inactive for some time and suddenly become active again. They match the time the user becomes active with changes they have made to determine the success of those changes.
Twitter is also analyzing what influences a retweet, what tweets are most successful. They are using "machine learning techniques" to figure out which tweets resonate most with users.
"Twitter benefits from a variety of open-source software developed by companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook. These tools are designed to deal with storing and processing data that's too voluminous to manage on even the largest single machine."
Gathering and storing all of this data has been an issue for Twitter, they currently operate on a 100-machine cluster which can not completely handle the load. They plan to move to a new data center later this year with three to four times the capacity of their current data center.
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