Lemmingworks

Just what we all need. What happened to TALKING to your kids and SHARING online experiences?

In June, EchoMetrix unveiled a separate data-mining service called Pulse that taps into the data gathered by Sentry software to give businesses a glimpse of youth chatter online. While other services read publicly available teen chatter, Pulse also can read private chats. It gathers information from instant messages, blogs, social networking sites, forums and chat rooms. … Parents who don’t want the company to share their child’s information to businesses can check a box to opt out. But that option can be found only by visiting the company’s Web site, accessible through a control panel that appears after the program has been installed. It was not in the agreement contained in the Sentry Total Home Protection program The Associated Press downloaded and installed Friday.

No, we can just watch them from the office. I am totally supportive of technologies for vulnerable/special needs individuals, but not when we’re talking about invasive snooping. One more way to keep kids from growing up. Silly.

lj, Social Tech for Children, surveillance

Dolphin Digital Media is Invited to Participate At D.A.R.E International Training Conference

Dolphin Digital Media, Inc. (OTCBB:DPDM), a creator of secure social networking websites for children utilizing state-of the-art fingerprint identification technology, is pleased to announce its invitation to participate at the D.A.R.E. International Training Conference being held July 21-23, 2009 at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort, Orlando, Florida.

Employees of Dolphin Digital Media will highlight the company’s innovative fundraising plans for schools and charitable organizations as well as plans for establishing its family Internet solution — Dolphin Secure (http://www.dolphinsecure.com) — in anticipation of its launch in the United States during Back-to-School 2009. Dolphin Secure gives parents tools to protect their children from online threats such as cyberbullying and unsolicited chat requests while they are using home computers.

“We’re excited to participate at the 2009 D.A.R.E. International Training Conference as we couldn’t think of a better venue to introduce ourselves to educators and law enforcement officials,” says Bill O’Dowd, Chairman and CEO of Dolphin Digital Media. “We’re looking forward to discussing exciting fundraising opportunities for both D.A.R.E and the various schools in which they serve, as well as ways in which Dolphin Secure can provide students with a safer online experience while using school computers,” he said.

D.A.R.E., the leading drug-resistance education program in the United States, will be introducing their new D.A.R.E. Middle School/Junior High curriculum titled “Keepin’ it REAL.” “Keepin’ it REAL” is a multi-cultural substance abuse and life skills curriculum developed by Arizona State University and The Pennsylvania State University with funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Have a look at DDM’s work. It is very interesting. They fingerprint children and then children must use biometric scanners in order to access web sites. This is a way of keeping children safe from internet predators, based on the assumption that you can’t fake a biometric scanner (which has already been done by people getting past airport security fingerprinting in Japan).

Imagine yourself having grown up using your fingerprint as proof of who you are, and giving it to every corporation that asks for it. What kind of person would you grow up into? Probably just a person who thinks that biometric scanning and the use of personal information by corporations is just the way things are. Let’s turn it around… you have grown up in this world. You grew up in a world where various forms of institutions control your birth, education, work, leisure and death. Can you think of a single activity in your life that is not mediated by a corporation or institution?

surveillance surveillance

PCs Used in Korean DDoS Attacks May Self Destruct

There are signs that the concerted cyber attacks targeting U.S. and Korean government and commercial Web sites this past week are beginning to wane. Yet, even if the assaults were to be completely blocked tomorrow, the attackers could still have one last, inglorious weapon in their arsenal: New evidence suggests that the malicious code responsible for spreading this attack includes instructions to overwrite the infected PC’s hard drive.

According to Joe Stewart, director of malware research at SecureWorks, the malware that powers this attack — a version of the Mydoom worm — is designed to download a payload from a set of Web servers. Included in that payload is a Trojan horse program that overwrites the data on the hard drive with a message that reads “memory of the independence day,” followed by as many “u” characters as it takes to write over every sector of every physical drive attached to the compromised system.

Such an order would spell certain disaster for many tens of thousands of Microsoft Windows PCs. Several experts I spoke with yesterday and today estimated that between 60,000 and 100,000 systems may be infected with this potentially suicidal malware.

Evil, surveillance

Google Image Search Implements CC License Filtering – Creative Commons
Today, Google officially launched the ability to filter search results using Creative Commons licenses inside their Image Search tool. It is now easy to restrict your Image Search results to find images which have been tagged with our licenses, so that you can find content from across the web that you can share, use, and even modify. Searches are also capable of returning content under other licenses, such as the GNU Free Documentation License, or images that are in the public domain.

To filter by CC search, go to Google’s advanced Image Search page and select the options you’d like in the “Usage rights” section. Your results will be restricted to images marked with CC licenses or other compatibly licensed photos.

CLD415, CLD419, Joi Ito, Social Tech for Children, surveillance photography

Slashdot | Suspect Freed After Exposing Cop’s Facebook Status

“A man on trial in New York for possession of a weapon has been acquitted after subpoenaing his arresting officer’s Facebook and MySpace accounts. His defense: Officer Vaughan Ettienne’s MySpace “mood” was set to “devious” on the day of the arrest, and one day a few weeks before the trial, his Facebook status read “Vaughan is watching ‘Training Day’ to brush up on proper police procedure. From the article,’You have your Internet persona, and you have what you actually do on the street,” Officer Ettienne said on Tuesday. “What you say on the Internet is all bravado talk, like what you say in a locker room.” Except that trash talk in locker rooms almost never winds up preserved on a digital server somewhere, available for subpoena.’”

The whole NYT article is even more fun: About New York – A New York Police Officer Who Put Too Much on MySpace – NYTimes.com

I wonder if the cop can be fired for just being thick? I assume that police try and fight the ‘thug with a badge’ stereotype? I cannot imagine they still nurture it. I’m dedicating this post to all my students past, present and future who will have their personal information found, pulled out and presented in public to support or contradict their actions or statements made in a professional forum. It is ok to do and say crazy things… but know it is out there. Everything you do on the net can come back to haunt you. I shudder at the thought of someone putting comments about the children and families and colleagues they work with on their FB or MS accounts.

What brings it all home is: Pope: We should have Googled Holocaust bishop. SEE? Even the pope is saying that your past will be googled.

CLD415, CLD419, surveillance CLD419, ECE, stupidity

I’ve got a nice EFF member’s sticker on my laptop, and paid my dues… so yesterday I got an email pointing me to the The SSD Project | EFF Surveillance Self-Defense Project:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has created this Surveillance Self-Defense site to educate the American public about the law and technology of government surveillance in the United States, providing the information and tools necessary to evaluate the threat of surveillance and take appropriate steps to defend against it.
Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?

For students in CLD419, where we’ve been discussing how to search out information on people, how to protect children’s information, and issues around children as creators of content, EFF is one of the key sources for information on how governments and corporations collect and use information about you. Perhaps this will be a good site to add to the course next year.

CLD419, Social Tech for Children, surveillance CLD419, surveillance

I follow David’s blog on surveillance to keep up to date on the issues, particularly when I’m teaching my Children and Technology course, where we focus on digital photography and children and protection of children’s information online. I actually thought that people had rights to take pictures in britain.

How many people are being arrested for taking pictures in public in Britain?

I’m seeing more and more local and self-reported stories of ordinary people being harassed and arrested in Britain, for taking photographs in public. Today BoingBoing is reporting on this Manchester man who was arrested because the police thought he might be photographing sewer gratings…. This tends to support the argument that I have been making that several democratic countries, with Britain and Italy at the forefront, are drifting into a kind of ’soft fascism’, a creeping totalitarianism that is presented as reasoned and reasonable. It allows supporters to claim that opponents are being ‘extreme’ and underestimating the ‘real danger’, that all of these measure are ‘for our own good’. Yet we have arrived at a point where even untrained, ill-educated street-level minions of the state can now decide whether wee are allowed to take pictures in public. When people like ex-MI5 chief, Stella Rimington are saying that we are in danger of heading towards a police state, even the cynics, and the ‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’ crowd, should be taking some notice.

CLD415, Social Tech for Children, surveillance CLD415, surveillance

Everyone in my CLD419: children and technology course should read this. Not only is it taking up the important issue of tracking child pornography, but it is also talking of the world into which all children are growing up in. It speaks to the potential that everything you ever do on the internet can and will be trackable. And that you must live your life assuming that you will be watched. From what we know about the need for autonomy in proper child development, and no doubt in the lives of adults, what does this say? Sorry to note that since none of you have probably ever had the joy of reading foucault, you might miss the import of this. But I’m just the science/teach teacher.

Slashdot | Ontario Court Wrong About IP Addresses, Too

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton comments on a breaking news story out of the Canadian courts:
“An Ontario Superior Court Justice has ruled that Canadian police can obtain the identities of Internet users without a warrant, writing that there is ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy’ for a user’s online identity, and drawing the analogy that ‘One’s name and address or the name and address of your spouse are not biographical information one expects would be kept private from the state.’ But why in the world is it valid to compare an IP address with a street address in the phone book?”
Read on for Bennett’s analysis.

Where you’ve been on Net not private, judge rules

An Ontario Superior Court ruling could allow police to routinely use Internet protocol addresses to find out the names of people online, without any need for a search warrant.

Justice Lynne Leitch found that there is “no reasonable expectation of privacy” in subscriber information kept by Internet service providers, in a decision issued this week.

The decision is binding on lower courts in Ontario, and it is the first time a Superior Court level judge in Canada has ruled on whether there are privacy rights in this information that are protected by the Charter.

The ruling is a significant victory for police investigating such crimes as possession of child pornography, while privacy advocates warn there are broad implications even for law-abiding Internet users.

“There is no confidentiality left on the Internet if this ruling stands,” said James Stribopoulos, a law professor….

“One’s name and address or the name and address of your spouse are not biographical information one expects would be kept private from the state,” Judge Leitch said.

The reasoning of the judge misses the context of what police are seeking, suggested Mr. Stribopoulos, who teaches at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto.

“It is not just your name, it is your whole Internet surfing history. Up until now, there was privacy. An IP address is not your name, it is a 10-digit number. A lot more people would be apprehensive if they knew their name was being left everywhere they went,” he said.

CLD419, surveillance CLD419

Nora Young’s planning something on Anne’s Diary and biometric scanning: Spark | CBC Radio Anne’s Diary: What Do You Think? Just thought you’d like to know. I’m just finishing my chapter for Ben’s project that discusses the site.

LM Montgomery, Social Tech for Children, surveillance AoGG, LM Montgomery, surveillance

I recommend that students in C/CLD419 watch this video lecture to get a sense of what a search engine society is. Consider it a reading in the course, if you will, for the module that includes the google lab.

If the video doesn’t show cause you’re a noisy student, click here.

Alex Halavais, CLD419, surveillance CLD419