Lessig aside, two other speakers particularly impressed me. Alberto Escudero Pascual gave a fascinating talk. It was notionally to do with IPv6 – actually it was about privacy. He pointed out that web logs, mobile phone records and, yes, IPv6 packets, contain more metadata that old-fashioned telephone records. Therefore, the old division between “traffic data” – typically available to EU law enforcement authorities without much judicial oversight – and conversations (which are harder to get authorisation to tap) may be artificial – you can find out a lot about someone from their “patterns” without listening in to their actual conversations.
He also pointed out that IPv6’s freeing up of IP addresses allowing them to be assigned permanently to phones or to people could make surveillance easier. It’s true that IPv6 allows for randomising of your IP address, but it also requires you to indicate in your IP address that it is random – thus showing that “you have something to hide”.
There was lots of other interesting stuff in his presentation as well – more than he had time to talk us through in fact.
Alan Davidson also spoke about the work of the Center for Democracy and Technology, discussing how difficult it is to get the public and government interested in public policy problems thrown up by new technologies. He mentioned two scary privacy threats that have been brewing that I was not aware of and revealed how through working with standards bodies the CDT managed to tackle them.
1) RFIDs – wireless tags like bar-codes but storing more data and readable at “tens of metres”. They are already used in industry and are likely to replace barcodes for consumers in the coming years. Very useful for shopping but what about when you have bought an item? Do you want remote readers to be able to know everything you have in your knapsack as you walk around? Thanks to the CDT, the tags will come with the ability to make them “commit suicide”. Of course (as I pointed out) consumers and vendors have to know to use this facility but at least the facility is there.
2) Open Pluggable Edge Services – “application-level intermediaries in the network, for example, at a web proxy cache between the origin server and the client, that would transform or filter content. Examples of proposed OPES services include assembling personalized web pages, adding user-specific regional information to web pages, virus scanning, content adaptation for clients with limited bandwidth, language translation.” All sounds innocuous enough – but it could also be used by less benign intermediaries to seamlessly remove content that, say, a repressive government doesn’t want you to see or to add ads to the web pages you see that the website producer didn’t use. The CDT is helping to put in safeguards – though the requirement that such services should be authorised either by the website or by the reader seems to me possibly inadequate.
It was nice to bump into Steve Bowbrick again at the conference, a surprisingly un-grizzled veteran of the UK commercial Internet – he posted up some pictures including a few rather un-flattering ones of me at the reception.a personal fast loanaccount loann no bank paydayaccount payday advance loan cashcanada loan advance paydayadvance 20 loan instant cashadvance money payday loan cashcash loan online personal advanceloan payday texas advanceloans america payday advancedloan payday america advannceporn amature vids freefree anal sex video adult contentsex group 500 personadult pornography photosblack sex amatuerfree porn amateur videosporn for women amateur sitesaare kanal Maplevels mp3 adjust on6 mp3 minutesmujawwad abdullah mp3 basfar78 dose zenegra viagra2cc credit mortgage lendingpin gambling 9 bowlinghmo 2007 viagrareign acid ringtones Map
