The Register has been following the story of a massive archive of “dirty tricks” that Microsoft performed during a lawsuit. Recently, the archive disappeared from the Internet, but now it’s back in the form of torrents. As time goes by, companies may find that any mistakes they make or rules they bend will be preserved forever online regardless of anything they try to do about it.

So now they’re using smart cameras to analyze you based on your not just appearance, but the way you walk, and your actions.

A student walked into the middle of the room, dropped a laptop case, then walked away. On the laptop screen, a green box popped up around him as he moved into view, then a second focused on the case when it was dropped. After a few seconds, the box around the case went red, signaling an alert. In another video, a car pulled into a parking lot and the driver got out, a box springing up around him. It moved with the driver as he went from car to car, looking in the windows instead of heading into the building. In both cases, the camera knew what was normal – the layout of the room with the suspicious bag and the location of the office door and parking spots in the parking lot. Alerts were triggered when the unknown bag was added and when the driver didn’t go directly into the building after parking his car.

Fantastic. So now, you have to explain yourself every time you do something “out of the ordinary”. Stoop down to tie your shoe on the way into the office and get picked up by security for not heading straight into the building. Yes technology has a lot of potentially legitimate uses, but total surveillance has far more potential for abuse.

And the cameras can only see so much – they can’t stop some threats, like a bomber with explosives in a backpack. They can’t see what you are wearing under your jacket – yet.

They can already do this with backscatter x-ray. Tags: Big Brother

In an independent study, Ponemon (not to be confused with Pokemon) conducted a survey of over 7000 people accross the nation as to what their trust level was for various government agencies. Specifically, do we trust the government to safeguard our personal information? Not surprisingly, once you’re out of the top 5, the trust level is in the 60% range or lower. Considering that there are a lot more than 5 government agencies, it seems there’s not a lot of trust in government. Anyway, the report is very short so give it a quick read. Tags: Well Duh!

Ars Technica has an article about the IRS wanting eBay to turn over information on its users’ earnings. This pretty much sums up the issue:

With so many people making part or all of their living through eBay, the government wants its cut. This isn’t an issue of any new taxes, but an attempt to collect the income tax that is already required. Because eBay does not report information about its sellers to the government, income reporting is left up to individuals, and the temptation not to list eBay revenue as income can be a strong one—and in some cases, it’s not always clear when one has to do so.

And,

eBay isn’t the only Internet business that has been feeling the heat in recent months. The government is also considering how to apply tax laws to virtual worlds and goods, and it faces some of the same problems that it does with eBay. While some sellers can make a good living out of hawking such items, few report the profits as taxable income, and Uncle Sam wants its cut.

To me this seems like one of those things you know is wrong, even if you can’t articulate exactly why. Second Lifers, and Warcrafters beware. Tags: Money

Schneier writes about a recent attack against home routers that takes advantage of the fact that most people never change the default passwords on their equipment. One of his commenters said it best:

It has long been standard security practice that when logging in to a new system with a default password, the first required step is to have the user create a new password. If routers did this and refused to function until a customized password was set, none of these problems would occur.

Or more simply put, it’s a problem that would never exist and would dissapear tomorrow if router manufacturers would bother to make a simple and practically free programming change before shipping them out. Tags: Public Confidence, Well Duh!

In an analysis of studies done showing violent video games leading to real world violence, Dr. Christopher Ferguson explains that current work doesn’t take into account real-world situations and other violence factors such as family life.

The overall conclusion is that there does appear to be a connection between violent games and violent thoughts in a laboratory setting. But the connections between such thoughts and violent behavior in the lab or elsewhere are tenuous at best. The studies that try to address those questions currently suffer from a lack of a standardized measure of violent behavior and a lack of sufficient background on other potential influences on the test subjects’ tendencies towards violence, such as family environment.

Here’s one for you. People who are violent already are drawn to violent video games. Duh. Tags: Well Duh!

Privacy.org points to an article explaining that the backscatter x-ray will be fielded in Phoenix. This X-ray device can penetrate clothes, but not skin making a pornographic video of them. Yes this allows the TSA to see if you're carrying bombs or guns, but it also removes your clothing. Tags: Security Theater

Most things don’t work and drivers are hard to find so there’s been quite a call for an easy to access list of Vista compatible drivers. This is a site I found linked on Slashdot of just such a thing. Tags: Microsoft, Windows

When XP came out, I noticed that the cheapies (the really skanky brands) had 256MB of RAM while all the others came with 512. This is because 256 was the minimum recommended RAM size from Microsoft so it was technically “acceptable”. The fact is, just because it runs doesn’t mean it runs well. Well Vista is the same, only worse. The minimum recommended RAM size is a laughable 512 MB. I just recently upgraded to 1GB in my home XP machine and have been very seriously considering at least another 1GB for performance. Well, this Computerworld article recommends 4GB for Vista and explains why. From the article:

For instance, Dell offers a Windows Vista Capable configuration that isn’t capable of much, according to what Dell says about it on its Web site: “Great for … Booting the Operating System, without running applications or games.”

To coin a phrase: lol. Tags: Microsoft, Windows

Here’s another case of fielding a new product without fully evaluating it first. A computer programmer played with a “in-flight game system” finding out that due to common programming mistakes, he was able to crash the system. Every seat has a small screen that can be used to play games or watch movies and every screen went blank when he did this. Most interestingly, he says that he’s glad the crash didn’t affect the flight system to which a commenter posted:

as an airplane avionics technician, i can tell you that any and all navigation and control electronics are totally isolated into themselves. anything that can work on it’s own, does, and anything that needs to share info does it through solid hard-wiring. There are common data busses to reduce weight from too much wiring, but again, totally isolated. Airlines know better than to link everything together in a network.

Airlines know better? Well, it’s nice to see that they know something because they sure did fail on security, pricing, and simple service. Tags: Well Duh!