RE: Investigation software snoops through social networks - Techw orld.com

Maybe Henry.  I've doubts that such broad and widespread social evolution of
society will occur.  The Great Firewall of China may be the future for us
all.  I hope not.

Possibly the wrong forum for this, but then there is the Canadian company,
Innovative Marketing Ukraine that set itself up to hijack computers by
masquerading as anti-spyware.  At least the snoopware is honest about being
snoopware.

The only approach I know to safe or secure computing on the web is to keep
one computer with all private and secure information on a never-connected
system, and have another only used for the web and which can be trashed at
any time.  It's a variant on the approach from the 80s and 90s where the
phrase was, the system is as safe as the room it's in.

Meanwhile, culture steps in.  At least one famous person I know has
fictional personalities and pages for the folks he/she actually wants to
have as friends, and the official sites are for his/her fans.  If one is
uncovered, he/she shifts to another one.  For the inner circle, he/she pays
to host a pre-social network site.  It's open to join and nothing is hidden
but it acts like a front porch:  comfort, familiarity and local ruthless
moderators.

Don't get me wrong:  I like the social networks for the friends I've been
connected to that I would never have been connected to otherwise.  My FB
page is a who's who of web pioneers, musicians, graphics artists, and other
talented brainy people.  I enjoy that more as with each person, the friends
list gets exponentially richer and really, not an echo chamber.  No fun in
that.  The difference is I knew at the very beginning of the web as Steve
Newcomb counseled me to never use it for anything I would mind seeing in the
New York Times.  Part of the solution is education of the laity and a frank
admission that there are likely no effective solutions for protecting
private information on an inherently unsecurable and gameable network such
as the world wide web much less for-profit free services that sell
information by consent.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: hjs@bblfish.net [mailto:hjs@bblfish.net]On Behalf Of Story Henry
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2010 9:20 AM
To: Len Bullard
Cc: 'Karl Dubost'; public-xg-socialweb@w3.org
Subject: Re: Investigation software snoops through social networks -
Techw orld.com


That is why the next stage of the internet will require massive
strengthening of democracies. We will need to slowly proceed towards a Swiss
like complete participation of everyone in the polis. The potential for
abuse is can be defused only in a completely p2p system.

Just my .2 €

Henry


On 24 Mar 2010, at 15:12, Len Bullard wrote:

> Not new news Karl or even particularly innovative technology.
> 
> Like it or not, this kind of work has been the point of the web from the
> beginning for some early supporters, at least once they separated their
own
> networks from it.  Social networks simply make it a lot easier by using
> self-identification of traits somewhat like Match.com.  Those who don't
like
> this are advised to get off the network except with the increasing
reliance
> on these silos, you become like those who don't want credit cards (why pay
> someone to use your own money - convenience) and public telephones (where
> are those today?).
> 
> Privacy has been willingly swapped for ease and access, and ... the
customer
> is always right.
> 
> len
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-xg-socialweb-request@w3.org
> [mailto:public-xg-socialweb-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of Karl Dubost
> Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 2010 9:06 AM
> To: public-xg-socialweb@w3.org
> Subject: Investigation software snoops through social networks -
> Techworld.com
> 
> 
> We will love our social network future. Our data in silos ;) 
> Well, it depends where you are on the cable. 
> 
> In Investigation software snoops through social networks - Techworld.com
> At
>
http://news.techworld.com/applications/3214195/investigation-software-snoops
> -through-social-networks/
> 
> Hone works in tandem with NarusInsight. By Nucci's 
> own admission, however, it can do some pretty 
> "scary" things. The software's user creates a 
> target profile, and Hone then proceeds to link 
> what Nucci calls "islands of information." Hone 
> can analyse VOIP conversations, biometrically 
> identify someone's voice or photograph and then 
> associate it with different phone numbers.
> 
> "I can have a sample of your voice in English, and 
> you can start speaking Mandarin tomorrow. It 
> doesn't matter; I'm going to catch you."
> 
> It uses artificial intelligence to analyse emails 
> and can link mails to different accounts, doing 
> what Nucci calls topical analysis. "It's going to 
> go through a set of documents and automatically 
> it's going to organise them in topics. I'm not 
> talking about keywords as is done today, I'm 
> talking about topics," he said.
> 
> That can't be done with today's technology, he 
> said. "If you search for fertilisers on Google... 
> it's going to come back with 6.5 million pages. 
> Enjoy," he said. "If you want to search for 
> non-farmers who are discussing fertiliser... it's 
> not even searchable."
> 
> Hone will sift through millions of profiles 
> searching for people with similar attributes, 
> blogger profiles that share the same email 
> address, for example. It can look for 
> statistically likely matches, by studying things 
> like the gender, nationality, age, location, home 
> and work addresses of people.
> 
> Another component can trace the location of 
> someone using a mobile device such as a laptop or 
> phone. Bit by bit, it pieces together the 
> subject's different identities on the Internet.
> 
> Narus is still testing the waters with Hone. 
> Working with a consortium of universities, the 
> company has used Hone to sift through massive 
> amounts of public information. "We started to 
> collect data three years ago and we've gone 
> through several programs," Nucci said. "We have 
> something like 75 million users in our system." 
> With the permission of users, Nucci's team also 
> analyzed data on about 50,000 private profiles.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Karl Dubost
> Montréal, QC, Canada
> http://www.la-grange.net/karl/
> 
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Received on Wednesday, 24 March 2010 15:19:49 UTC