As people digest what the leaks mean, ripples are going out into the business community. Firms were moving towards free, American, reliable cloud-based services; now things are screeching to a halt, as they think “do we want the NSA having access to this?”
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Perhaps the hardest hit is Canadian phone manufacturer RIM, who make the Blackberry phone. One of the last things going for the struggling firm was the perceived security of the Blackberry handset, and particularly the BBM instant messaging system. However, following on from the allegation last week in the Guardian that British intelligence was regularly “Penetrating the security on [G20] delegates’ BlackBerrys to monitor their messages and phone calls”, rivals to Blackberry in the secure messaging market have seen sales surge.
All these big com companies run messaging services on some cloud based off site system – the internet and hardware makers are going towards an off-board cloud data storage system – plans were to offer super powerful, low power pull, portable computing that runs its drive system via i-net link to a huge storage site can you imagine the play ground all that personal info will be for nosey spooks? Once we all have unencrypted data flow to our off-board drives? Hell, no need to intercept data com, just hack into the huge cloud based storage sites and data mine billions of tetras of personal storage .
As for the NSA snooping making things tough for ompanies who want to protect their client’s privacy, don;t make me laugh. Th biggies like MS and Google/Face Book/Twitter have been cooperating with the spooks for years – MS windows 3 up has built in ports that can be remote access by os key holders – no firewall will stop these intrusins because they think it is MS super user. – none of your data on a PC or google or social media site has been safe from spook hackers. It was set up that way.
This is slightly off topic (maybe). The IRS has targetted conservative groups, possibly with considerable political effect. To what extent was this facilitated by information provided by the NSA? That would be truly vicious.
Interesting revelation about the blackberry. I seem to remember the won was in possession of a so-called “encrypted” crapberry.
I bought a Blackberry because the company doesn’t use my own data as a profit center and source of information on my activities, as both Google and Apple are known to do. I was never fool enough to think their server network would be secure from the NSA. NSA owns the pipes, so they know what’s on RIM’s network.
Besides, we know the Canadian government is doing EXACTLY what PRISM is doing. We just haven’t had any Canadian spill the beans on them like Snowden did. We know they have insider access to all the phone companies in Canada, all the ISPs and etc. because the enabling legislation was passed years ago.
The Canadian government doesn’t even have to have their own data stores, the legislation requires telcos and ISPs to keep their routing data indefinitely.
one really has to wonder why the gov’t is interested in were, on line, I buy my a$$wipe?????
I guess the one good thing to come out of this is the potential death of cloud based computing. This is something I’ve never understood; why would I want to put my data on a remote server somewhere that isn’t under my control? Proper data backup requires geographic isolation of the backup data server from the server being backed up and my EMR system is backed up nightly to another server located at one of the clinics physicians houses. In addition, I also back up the data on one of my servers. Thus, one has the claimed benefits of cloud storage without the security risk. Of course, if a meteor were to hit the town I live in all of the data would be destroyed (the comeback of the cloud computing companies) but in such an event I probably wouldn’t care.
It’s always puzzled me why there has been such a push for cloud computing unless it was orchestrated secretly by the NSA. Given the capacity of modern disk drives, the average person can carry almost all of their lifes data accumulation on a laptop. One of my laptops comes with an 850 Gb builtin drive and I have numerous 1 Tb portable drives in addition to multiple Tb network drives at home. Realistically, I can carry all of the data I need on a trip on a 1 Tb portable drive with backup on my home and office servers. My suspicions about the malignant nature of cloud computing and storage have been confirmed.
Having played with Tor, I’ve shut down my Tor servers given the problems I had controlling data flow through the servers and the fact that the NSA is one of the big users of Tor. However, the more data one has flowing through a Tor connection, the safer ones own data passing through that server will be. Thus, I’m just going to have to accept that I’ll be paying extra charges for my internet connections as I already exceed the 100 Gb/month limits on multiple connections. Given that I have no plans on stopping my attacks on totalitarians, it is prudent to make it more difficult for them to find me. Given that SDA seems to block some classes of IP addresses this may have to be changed as one can’t predict the exit node of a Tor connection.
Another good thing that will come out of this is postponing the death of powerful desktop systems. There is a curious push to have users switch to underpowered tablets with minimal local storage capabilities with use of cloud data storage for both data and programs. The purported rationale for this is that rather than buying an expensive word processing program, one can buy access to such a program for a much lower cost. However, doing so makes if trivially easy to determine exactly when and how the user of this program is using it as well as access to all data entered by the user. I much prefer having total privacy on my own machine and I have a number of my machines that have no internet access. Data transfer to such machines is via manual flash drive transfer. One of these days I’ll get motivated enough to create a network of my own which is totally isolated from the internet although this will require completely wired connections as use of wireless connections is a potential security breach.
Governments don’t like people having very powerful computers because that means they can encrypt data to a degree that the NSA spooks can’t decrypt it. I routinely use 2048 and 4096 bit encryption on my data and consider the 128 bit encryption that secure sockets connections use to be laughably insecure.
The other thing that I do is to purchase as much as possible with cash only. It’s important to make cash withdrawals under $10 K which is a pain in the ass. However, cash has significant effects on people who are suddenly much less inclined to collect various taxes when they are offered a large pile of $100 bills for a service. The biggest problem I find, despite having numerous people at times having called me paranoid, is that I’m not paranoid enough.
Well stated LOki, I think I said that but in a much less lucent manner.
I tend to agree with you that the push for hardware designers to go to off board storage, when there is really no practical need/demand for it, was probably the result of “official” pressure exerted through regulatory/standards bodies – and of course the sole beneficiaries of the cloud systems will be spook data miners and the big ISPs who will sell the expanded bandwidth needed.
Eh.. while spooks may like the convenient cloud, it’s a big stretch to say they have that much power. The cloud is popular for same reason people go to McDonalds instead of making a hamburger at home. (about calling them spooks – there must be black NSA staff.. is that not RACIST?).
And blackberries.. the handsets are only as secure as the weakest link.. such as network links as Phantom mentioned. But also, service providers have their own branded firmware and load their own “service books” (software modules) to enable certain features, so any and every backdoor can be in the phone. The devil is always in the details with this stuff. It’s not suprising this incident is being used to resume the herd of tech writers’ favourite passtime of beating on RIM. Good, could be another window for some cheap stock again.
AND DON’T LET PARANOIA RULE YOUR LIFE!
Suspect RIM is resiting conformity; hence, the physical network attacks and poor media srrounding their products. Blackberry is the black sheep. They’re probably being eyed for takeover.
Loki, strongly agree with you on “cloud computing”. Its really nothing more or less than a return to the “mainframe” mindset, where users are doled out storage and CPU time as the sysadmin sees fit. Central processing equals central control. This is the model that the PC broke, and here they are trying to stuff it down our throats again.
I keep nothing on the “cloud”. I keep DVD backups and multiply redundant disk drive backups. I also chuck old hard disks in a drawer in case I might need what’s on there some day.
If I could have an off-line copy of various reference sites that updated automatically, that would be something I’d be willing to pay money for. The web is awesome, but if some bunch of spooks are hoovering up every packet I generate, the more stuff I do off line the better I like it.
Businesses large and small will be following suit, I have no doubt. I also predict a large increase in face-to-face meetings and a reduction in phone traffic. If you -know- people are tracking and archiving your coms virtually forever, there’s a lot of stuff that regular, normal people are not going to want “on the record” so to speak. And they certainly aren’t going to want random government employees of unknown provenience having access at whim to their data store.
You’re right Occam, we both ended up saying pretty much the same thing although my post was a bit verbose.
Max, your analogy would be valid if there was a choice but the plans I’ve seen for cloud based computing are, to use your analogy, only to give you the choice of getting a McDonald’s burger. Making a home cooked meal requires far more effort than installing software on ones machine (that is, unless it is M$ or other software that uses increasingly obnoxious copy protection or is extreme bloatware requiring multiple DVD’s for software that could be compressed to 1/100 of its size by older programmers).
Phantom, quite right that we’re seeing an attempt to recreate the mainframe model. Obviously the mere existence of a powerful, self-contained computer is anathema to the totalitarian mindset and hence a rigorous top down model must be instituted instead. Never mind that the current generation of ARM based tablets are significantly more powerful than the 80486 laptops that I still use except for high bandwidth video applications.
What I see in high school kids today is them carrying around cell phone technology which puts a 1970’s supercomputer in every phone and yet they are totally ignorant of the capabilities of their CPU. All they seem to use their phones for are texting, watching youtube videos and photography. I presume they use their phones to make telephone calls once they’re out of my exam room (at least they’ve retained this degree of civility) but they seem to be in a perpetual texting mode. This is a generation that doesn’t realize to the degree that they’re locked into a deliberately crippled hardware platform (unless they have an Android phone and have the necessary attention span and drive to learn Java). Such individuals will accept the new mainframe model imposed on them by totalitarians without complaint as they know of nothing else. Haven’t had the time to learn Java yet as I’m involved in another computing project using a Propeller chip but developing Android medical applications is next on my list.
Gamers seem to be the closest to hackers nowadays as their goal is to have the fastest machine around although such speed is now measured not in Gflops in the CPU but rather GPU operations. These people are determined enough to deal with what they perceive as bugs in games to work around them. True hackers seem to be increasingly scarce and being labelled as such makes one considered a danger to any institutional computer system as I’ve found hospital IT people to be some of the most ignorant individuals I’ve had the misfortune to meet.
Micro$oft is attempting to lock in users just to windoze 8 on new hardware and the new EFI boot process has been subverted by M$ so that one can’t boot up a W8 machine into another OS. Again this is for “user safety” but it means that one can’t buy a windoze machine and easily install Linux on it. I do have to admit that I haven’t tried hacking a W8 machine yet but I don’t like EFI as it’s another move to ensure that the user can’t get at the low level hardware of a machine. It’s also annoying because its existence means that I need to find out how it operates at a low level so I can hack it.
I won’t get into treacherous computing, the process whereby only “trusted” programs are allowed to execute on a CPU with the determination of whether or not the program is “trusted” being made by a hardware module. The TPM module was supposed to do this but some of the laptops I’ve bought recently don’t seem to have TPM installed; in any event I just disable the drivers for the TPM module in any system that I run.
Now that we know about the NSA’s attempt to create a total surveillance society in the US, one doesn’t have to be overly paranoid to start wondering about how much the evolution of CPU architecture since 2000 has been determined not by technical considerations but by totalitarian imperatives. Seems that the only way to get a clearly defined CPU architecture with no hidden backdoors is to create ones own open source CPU on a FPGA chip (the easy part) and then creating ones own defined architecture motherboard (the harder part). Fortunately we have the EFF and enough hackers poking into things to get warned away from the dangerous technologies that have thus far been found but it’s the hidden dangers that we need to be most alert for.