Posted February 25th, 2009  Example of the strangeness Like a good little fanboy, I installed the Safari 4 beta on my aging iMac. So far, I am really liking the new version. Nothing earth shattering, but the performance gains are quite nice. Even on this old G5, Safari seems a lot zippier.
I have noticed something really odd since installing the beta. Mail.app stops rendering HTML emails correctly. I’ll get the first few lines of an HTML email and then a bunch of whitespace. If I resize the window, the email appears normally.
Anyone else seeing this?
Posted February 13th, 2009 When you think of “the usual” privacy risks you think of things like brand and reputation damage, fines, and increased regulations. You don’t think of jail time for executives. But jail time is exactly what some Google executives face if an Italian prosecutor has his way.
The arrest of Peter Fleischer, Google’s Paris-based Global Privacy Counsel, in Milan on January 23 stems from video that was briefly available on Google’s site in Italy. The video showed high school students bullying a classmate with Down Syndrome. Google took down the video in less than 24 hours after receiving complaints about it. The view of Milan’s public prosecutor is that permitting posting of the video for any period of time was a criminal offense. Fleischer and three other Google employees have been charged with defamation and failure to control personal information.
In our forthcoming report, Bob and I explore the contextual nature of privacy. Google clearly operates in multiple geographic and legal contexts. In the US, Google enjoys protections similar to those afforded “common carriers”. However, in Italy, Google is being treated as a content provider and not a content distributor, and thus is not receiving any such protection. Continue reading "Privacy risks get real"...
Posted February 10th, 2009 Looks like Amtrak police got a little ahead of themselves; they arrest a photographer in NYC which he attempted to take pictures for an Amtrak photography contest. I know – it is a bit confusing. Don’t worry – Colbert explains it all to us in nice small words.
Posted February 5th, 2009
Nishant has commented on my post about federated provisioning. He has provided two different examples of federated provisioning. One of these, the advanced provisioning example, involves a company who manages its employees’ access to a service provider service via provisioning. In this case, Nishant agrees with me that provisioning of this sort is no different than provisioning the UNIX box down the hall.
But it is Nishant’s second example, the just-in-time provisioning example, which is a bit tougher. In this case, the enterprise and its service provider have a federation in place. Using SAML-based authentication, a new user attempts to access the service provider’s service. The idea (hope?) is that the service provider recognizes the new user request, provisions the user, and authenticates the user in the same conversation. Nishant does add a degree of difficult in this scenario as he ties the federation service to a provisioning service. Grabbing attributes from the SAML token, creating a SPML message, and handing that to a provisioning service is possible, but as a commentator points out this sort of interop isn’t spec’ed out so the heavy lifting is left to the service provider. And even if the service provider doesn’t want to directly link its federation and provisioning services, it still needs to grab that assertion attributes and create the account in the backend system.
Continue reading "Will the “real” federated provisioning please stand up?"...
Posted February 3rd, 2009 Here is a short piece on how a researcher, Chris Paget, bought a $250 RFID reader on eBay and used it to clone ePassports while driving 30 miles an hour near Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. I fully recognize that this demonstration doesn’t represent a method for fabricating complete paper-in-hand cloned passports. Cloning is just the first step, but it is a big step. More importantly, it is a step that the State department has is somewhere between impossible and unlikely. The following is a passage from the privacy impact assessment (PIA) of TDIS – the Travel Document Issuance System:
The Department of State has taken extensive measures to prevent a third-party from reading or accessing the information on the chip without the passport holder’s knowledge. This includes safeguards against such nefarious acts as “skimming” data from the chip, “eavesdropping” on communications between the chip and reader, “tracking” passport holders, and “cloning” the passport chip in order to facilitate identity theft crimes. These safeguards are described in detail on the Department of State website.
Apparently those safeguards aren’t very strong.
I invite you to read the State Department’s FAQ on e-Passports. Notice the incredibly defensive tone in the opening of the answer to the question, “Will someone be able to read or access the information on the chip without my knowledge (also known as skimming or eavesdropping)?” Also notice the tacit acknowledgment that passport RFID chips can be cloned.
Mr. Paget intends on driving around DC this weekend to see what he can clone, and with a macbre sense of humor, I look forward to reading his results. Continue reading "I’ll keep my paper passport, thanks"...
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