Phone call logs, credit card records, emails, Skype chats, Facebook message, and more: The precise nature of the NSA's sweeping surveillance apparatus has yet to be confirmed.
But given the revelations spilling out into the media recently, there hardly seems a single aspect of daily life that isn't somehow subject to spying or surveillance by someone.
Using anonymity services and encryption "simply make it harder, but not impossible," said Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher. "Someone can always find you -- just depends on how motivated they are."
Emails sent across the Web are like postcards. In some cases, they're readable by anyone standing between you and its recipient. That can include your webmail company, your internet service provider and whoever is tapped into the fiber optic cable passing your message around the globe - not to mention a parallel set of observers on the recipient's side of the luggage tag.
Experts recommend encryption, which scrambles messages in transit, so they're unreadable to anyone trying to intercept them. Techniques vary, but a popular one is called PGP, short for "Pretty Good Privacy." PGP is effective enough that the US government tried to block its export in the mid-1990s, arguing that it was so powerful it should be classed as a weapon.
Like emails, your travels around the internet can easily be tracked by anyone standing between you and the site you're trying to reach. TOR, short for "The Onion Router," helps make your traffic anonymous by bouncing it through a network of routers before spitting it back out on the other side. Each trip through a router provides another layer of protection, thus the onion reference.
Originally developed by the US military, TOR is believed to work pretty well if you want to hide your traffic from, let's say, eavesdropping by your local internet service provider. And criminals' use of TOR has so frustrated Japanese police that experts there recently recommended restricting its use. But it's worth noting that TOR may be ineffective against governments equipped with the powers of global surveillance.
Your everyday cellphone has all kinds of privacy problems. In Britain, cellphone safety was so poor that crooked journalists made a cottage industry out of eavesdropping on their victims' voicemails. In general, proprietary software, lousy encryption, hard-to-delete data and other security issues make a cellphone a bad bet for storing information you'd rather not share.
An even bigger issue is that cellphones almost always follow their owners around, carefully logging the location of every call, something which could effectively give governments a daily digest of your everyday life. Security researcher Jacob Appelbaum has described cellphones as tracking devices that also happen to make phone calls. If you're not happy with the idea of an intelligence agency following your footsteps across town, leave the phone at home.
The Wall Street Journal says the NSA is monitoring American credit card records in addition to phone calls. Some cybercriminals can use the same methods. So stick to cash, or, if you're more adventurous, use electronic currencies to move your money around if you want total privacy.
Disadvantages: Credit cards are a mainstay of the world payment system, so washing your hands of plastic money is among the most difficult moves you can make. In any case, some cybercurrency systems offer only limited protection from government snooping and many carry significant risks. The value of Bitcoin, one of the better-known forms of electronic cash, has oscillated wildly, while users of another popular online iPhone headset, Liberty Reserve, were left out of pocket after the company behind it was busted by international law enforcement.
US companies are subject to US law, including the Patriot Act, whose interpretations are classified. Although the exact parameters of the PRISM data mining program revealed by the Guardian and The Washington Post remain up for debate, what we do know is that a variety of law enforcement officials - not just at the NSA - can secretly demand your electronic records without a warrant through an instrument known as a National Security Letter. Such silent requests are made by the thousands every year.
If you don't like the sound of that, your best bet is to park your data in a European country, where privacy protections tend to be stronger.
Disadvantages: Silicon Valley's internet service providers tend to be better and cheaper than their foreign counterparts. What's more, there's no guarantee that European spy agencies don't have NSA-like surveillance arrangements with their own companies. When hunting for a safe place to stash your data, look for smaller countries with robust human rights records. Iceland, long a hangout for WikiLeaks activists, might be a good bet.
Former officials don't appear to contradict him. Ex-NSA chief Michael Hayden described it as "commuting to where the information is stored and extracting the information from the adversaries' network." In a recent interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, he boasted that "we are the best at doing it. Period."
Malicious software used by hackers can be extremely hard to spot. But installing an antivirus programme, avoiding attachments, frequently changing passwords, dodging suspicious websites, creating a firewall, and always making sure your software is up to date is a good start.
2013年6月18日 星期二
That’s Why They Call it Hardware
Tony Fadell, father of the iPod, was right. “There is a reason they call it hardware—it is hard,” he said at the LeWeb conference in Paris last year. But that hasn’t stopped many tech entrepreneurs from eschewing software for physical products.
What is behind the renaissance in hardware? According to entrepreneurs, a number of things have coincided to lower the barriers for hardware startups and speed up development: the growth of the silicone bracelet, the rise of 3-D printing and, to a lesser extent, the impact of new funding models.
In much the same way that mobile devices have disrupted the desktop, they have liberated hardware products from having their own interfaces, allowing companies to create devices that can communicate with a smartphone. Shamus Husheer is chief executive officer of Cambridge Temperature Concepts Limited, which offers a service to help women detect the moment of ovulation. The company was founded in 2006, before the smartphone revolution. “We had to build a hand-held wireless device. But for unregulated sectors it is just obvious that you use a smartphone. The speed of development is blinding and the quality of interface is so far beyond anything you could hope to produce yourself.”
The smartphone also hints at one of the big changes in what someone somewhere has almost certainly christened “hardware 2.0″: while they are physical products, their real value lies in the software that drives them and the data they produce, rather than the device itself. The “quantified self” movement—the idea that people record every aspect of their lives from how long they sleep to how many steps they take—has driven a whole new category of health-data related devices.
The other big technology enabler is the availability of 3-D printers. These devices work a bit like a bubble-jet printer, but instead of squirting drops of ink on paper from a printer head, they exude plastic, building up a 3-D object a layer at a time and allowing highly accurate prototypes to be made in well under an hour. “I don’t know how many iterations we made of our card reader but 3-D printing was essential for us,” said Jacob De Geer, CEO of Stockholm-based iZettle AB, which allows retailers to take card payments either through a device plugged into a smartphone, or a stand-alone CHIP and PIN reader. “In just a couple of minutes we can have a new version just to look at a new surface texture, or changing the roundness of a corner.”
The role of crowdfunding site Kickstarter, which lets the public buy products before they have been built, has had some impact on the growing popularity of hardware. Sweden’s Memoto AB—which is making a miniature camera worn on the lapel that takes a picture every 30 seconds—received $550,189 on Kickstarter last year, after asking for $50,000. However, the company’s CEO Martin K?llstr?m said its importance should not be overestimated.”It is a very good channel for getting information from the market about how it will receive your product but it doesn’t solve all the problems. You need to have a finished prototype before you can launch your campaign. That means you need to already have the funding to build a prototype before you can use Kickstarter.”
But what do the investors make of this hardware renaissance? Unfortunately, not a lot. [Mike Volpi], a partner at London venture capital firm Index Ventures, which has a number of hardware investments, said most hardware startups just don’t have a compelling business case. The conditions for success, he said, are rare. “While it is trendy to do hardware at the moment, we are not super positive on the category.”
Mr. Volpi was skeptical about Kickstarter’s significance. “The problem is none of the success stories are at a scale I would feel good about. A couple of million in orders is really nothing in the custom keychain. You really need to think in the tens of millions.”
He said there were three things Index looked for in a hardware product. “The first is it must be more than just a connected device. There have been a lot of things that just connect to your phone. That is not very exciting. It is easy to copy and commoditize. We look for things that may be embodied in hardware, but have a very significant software component.
“The second thing we look for is that it is not a single unit, but a system of some kind. The business model that follows from that is that the more of them you buy, the better off the system is. We are looking for a platform, not a one-off buy.”
“The last thing we look for is some kind of cloud-based service that sits behind it. The way we think of it is that the hardware is our monetization method—where you get the charge, but a lot of the virtues of the product actually come from the software.”
So why focus on hardware at all? For many the hardness of hardware is a reward in itself. Mr. K?llstr?m said “the main attraction comes from the uniqueness you get from creating a physical device. In software now there is very little innovation.” This point is echoed by Jon Bradford, CEO of Springboard, the U.K.’s first program dedicated to helping hardware startups grow their business. “The smartest people in the room are trying to create something different—and hardware represents the manifestation of that.”
What is behind the renaissance in hardware? According to entrepreneurs, a number of things have coincided to lower the barriers for hardware startups and speed up development: the growth of the silicone bracelet, the rise of 3-D printing and, to a lesser extent, the impact of new funding models.
In much the same way that mobile devices have disrupted the desktop, they have liberated hardware products from having their own interfaces, allowing companies to create devices that can communicate with a smartphone. Shamus Husheer is chief executive officer of Cambridge Temperature Concepts Limited, which offers a service to help women detect the moment of ovulation. The company was founded in 2006, before the smartphone revolution. “We had to build a hand-held wireless device. But for unregulated sectors it is just obvious that you use a smartphone. The speed of development is blinding and the quality of interface is so far beyond anything you could hope to produce yourself.”
The smartphone also hints at one of the big changes in what someone somewhere has almost certainly christened “hardware 2.0″: while they are physical products, their real value lies in the software that drives them and the data they produce, rather than the device itself. The “quantified self” movement—the idea that people record every aspect of their lives from how long they sleep to how many steps they take—has driven a whole new category of health-data related devices.
The other big technology enabler is the availability of 3-D printers. These devices work a bit like a bubble-jet printer, but instead of squirting drops of ink on paper from a printer head, they exude plastic, building up a 3-D object a layer at a time and allowing highly accurate prototypes to be made in well under an hour. “I don’t know how many iterations we made of our card reader but 3-D printing was essential for us,” said Jacob De Geer, CEO of Stockholm-based iZettle AB, which allows retailers to take card payments either through a device plugged into a smartphone, or a stand-alone CHIP and PIN reader. “In just a couple of minutes we can have a new version just to look at a new surface texture, or changing the roundness of a corner.”
The role of crowdfunding site Kickstarter, which lets the public buy products before they have been built, has had some impact on the growing popularity of hardware. Sweden’s Memoto AB—which is making a miniature camera worn on the lapel that takes a picture every 30 seconds—received $550,189 on Kickstarter last year, after asking for $50,000. However, the company’s CEO Martin K?llstr?m said its importance should not be overestimated.”It is a very good channel for getting information from the market about how it will receive your product but it doesn’t solve all the problems. You need to have a finished prototype before you can launch your campaign. That means you need to already have the funding to build a prototype before you can use Kickstarter.”
But what do the investors make of this hardware renaissance? Unfortunately, not a lot. [Mike Volpi], a partner at London venture capital firm Index Ventures, which has a number of hardware investments, said most hardware startups just don’t have a compelling business case. The conditions for success, he said, are rare. “While it is trendy to do hardware at the moment, we are not super positive on the category.”
Mr. Volpi was skeptical about Kickstarter’s significance. “The problem is none of the success stories are at a scale I would feel good about. A couple of million in orders is really nothing in the custom keychain. You really need to think in the tens of millions.”
He said there were three things Index looked for in a hardware product. “The first is it must be more than just a connected device. There have been a lot of things that just connect to your phone. That is not very exciting. It is easy to copy and commoditize. We look for things that may be embodied in hardware, but have a very significant software component.
“The second thing we look for is that it is not a single unit, but a system of some kind. The business model that follows from that is that the more of them you buy, the better off the system is. We are looking for a platform, not a one-off buy.”
“The last thing we look for is some kind of cloud-based service that sits behind it. The way we think of it is that the hardware is our monetization method—where you get the charge, but a lot of the virtues of the product actually come from the software.”
So why focus on hardware at all? For many the hardness of hardware is a reward in itself. Mr. K?llstr?m said “the main attraction comes from the uniqueness you get from creating a physical device. In software now there is very little innovation.” This point is echoed by Jon Bradford, CEO of Springboard, the U.K.’s first program dedicated to helping hardware startups grow their business. “The smartest people in the room are trying to create something different—and hardware represents the manifestation of that.”
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