2012-04-28
post/22000549195
Screenshots of the websites of Gideon Protective Services, Savior Protection Ministries, and Watchman Security Consulting Ministries, three provides of security for US churches as mentioned in God is Watching, and So Am I: The Theology of Surveillance.
2011-09-14
post/10179603214
JSON payload sniffing and surveillance photographs of cars, from Troy Hunt’s post about Bondi Westfield’s iPhone “find my car” app and its privacy failings:
That URL for the service endpoint we looked at earlier contains a number of parameters – filters, if you like – and removing these readily provides the current status of all 2,550 sensors. This includes the number plate of any car currently occupying a space and as you can see, it’s available by design to anyone.
(via Tom Carden)
2010-03-22
post/466148691
2010-03-21
TSA Screening and Photo Equipment
With the amount of equipment that I pack into my Think Thank Airport International, I’m a regular candidate for a bag check at airport security checkpoints. Two camera bodies, four or five lenses, batteries, and all the miscellaneous stuff makes for a dense bag. I’ve noticed, however, that there’s been an almost perceptible pattern to the airports where this occurs the most.
(Cutting a story shorter…)
Today at SLC, my bag was pulled after the squint. The TSA agent that did the secondary inspection—the bomb swab—mentioned they had pulled it because they couldn’t see through the lenses that were standing on end as the bag went through the machine. Apparently, when on end, all the layers of coated specialized glass appear totally opaque to the scan. But, if the lens is laying on its side, it’s just fine.
My brain chewed on that for a second, thinking about how I could pack my bag so that my lenses were all in the same orientation. It failed. Long lenses travel best laying down. Short lenses go best standing up. Fail. Then, after thinking quickly that scanning from one angle had to be an easily fixable bug, I blurted out, “Well, in that case, it’d be nice if you could see through the bag from two directions at once.”
“Oh, we have machines that do that,” replied the agent, “but this particular one doesn’t. You see how it only has one screen? That means it’s only scanning from the top. If you see a machine with two screens, like that one over there, it means they’re scanning from the top and the side and showing the agent both views at once. Next time, you should look for the line that has a machine with two screens. It might save you a bit of time.”
Ah ha! I’ll be doing that from now on.
2009-12-26
post/301615181
2009-05-03
When Deleted Means Deleted
On Tuesday, I had a run-in with iPhoto’s Flickr integration, resulting in about twenty photos being deleted. On Flickr, deleted means deleted; not only did the web pages vanish, but the URLs couldn’t be reclaimed, other people’s favourites list no longer referenced the images, and even the stats page started showing the images as deleted. (A few days on, and even those references have vanished.)
Whilst annoying, I accept this is the right thing to do: if something’s deleted, it should vanish. (I do blame iPhoto for not prompting, though; removing a photo from an online service isn’t the same as taking it out of a local album.)
In contrast, it seems on Twitter that deleted doesn’t mean deleted. As this New Scientist article says:
Another problem [Cluley] identifies is that deleting an embarrassing or incriminating tweet you have mistakenly sent does not remove it from the Twitter site, where it remains forever searchable. “I think deleted should mean deleted,” he says.
Want an example? Labour MP Sion Simon got into trouble with the papers when he parroted a joke about Susan Boyle and the spread of flu this week, and he quickly deleted the offending post and apologised for it. The problem? If you go to search.twitter.com, it’s still right there.
The technological explanation for this is simple: search.twitter.com is a different site from www.twitter.com, even though the recent redesign of the latter integrates it somewhat. Indeed, it used to be on an entirely different domain: it was acquired when Twitter bought Summize last year. It has its own database, and as any programmer will tell you, updating is hard enough; updating and checking if something’s been deleted more or less doubles (or worse) the complexity of your product.
(This also explains another quirk of Twitter’s search engine: it only handles public posts. That’s probably fine for the recent crowd of new folk on the site, who are used to thinking about it as a broadcast medium, but a whole chunk of the folk I follow are private, as I am myself. Finding what they said a month ago isn’t easy.)
Nonetheless, I suspect most people expect that a deleted item really will be deleted. Nobody seems to care, yet, but one day, this’ll bite.
