Random Flux

Privacy online no longer exists and there is nothing at all you can do about it. In fact, everything you can try to do about it will just make it worse. While everyone and the media and their dog have all been screaming and shouting about privacy on Facebook, privacy and Google Street View and privacy on Blackberries and iPhones, the real battle has been going on very quietly in the background. The battle is now over, the war is over, the bad guys won and you have lost your privacy. All of it. And you never even noticed. Everything you do online is trackable. Everything, and it is happening now.

This post just summarizes what is going on. For the full details, listen to the Security Now podcast on “Side Channel Privacy Leaking” by Internet security expert Steve Gibson.

Your computer’s fingerprint is as unique as yours

This is made possible by what is called “computer fingerprinting” or “browser fingerprinting”. The idea is very simple: Your browser and computer have a  large number of characteristics that web pages need to know to be able to display the pages properly, and other characteristics that they don’t really need to know but that your computer shares anyway. Put all this information together, combine it with your computer’s clock time, your IP address range and a few other little items that are all freely available and it is generally possible to identify you with over 99% accuracy. None of these things can be switched off, any more than you can switch off your own fingerprints, height or eye color. Any changes you make to “protect” yourself will actually make it even easier to identify you, because it will make your computer even more easily identifiable.

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In a recent Twitter exchange Helen Emerson, a web designer I admire a lot, celebrated the fact that Internet Explorer 9 is finally going to support rounded corners. My feeling on this to this is that’s nice, but it would have happened a lot sooner if we web designers hadn’t hidden IE’s deficits by finding ways to make it display rounded corners anyway.

This is a general problem, and it’s the reason why web standards generally are still such a mess. Most users aren’t aware of this because we hide it from them. Everything seems to work fine in all browsers – as far as users are concerned we are living in an era of universally compatible browsers. Actually, we’re still a long way away from that.

If you look at the code of almost any modern web page you’ll find it full of workarounds that are necessary to make things work properly in different browsers. This applies particularly for Internet Explorer, which may have got better on the surface but still requires countless special solutions to get it to behave. Much of the work on any modern website is devoted to getting it to work in IE as well as in normal browsers.

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Video game makers could probably at least double their sales if they would allow you to save you current progress at any point in the game, instead of only allowing specific “waypoints”. It would be fine to do this in Easy Mode only. This would make games more accessible to a huge number of potential customers who now give up on them quickly.

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I think the time has come for web developers everywhere to rebel against the tyranny of Internet Explorer, particularly the older versions (6 and before). We’re all donating hours of valuable working time making modern websites backward-compatible with IE6 for freeloaders who are feeding off of our work. The time has come to just say No.

Freeloaders? That’s right. Companies that still use IE6 are freeloaders feeding off your work.

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Geeks and tech users tend to be junkies. Literally. I’ve noticed that in myself recently in connection with the issue of whether or not to get an iPhone. There is no good reason for me to get one, but my inner geek has developed what is quite literally a physical craving for one. Dealing with this has become my ongoing Zen koan over the last few weeks and it’s a very interesting experience.

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The operating system debate is so dated that it’s getting to the point where it’s embarrassing when people get heated up about them. Nowadays being passionate about a particular OS makes you look about as cool as those people who used to build their own bomb shelters during the Cold War. Get over it, it’s over and everybody won.

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If you use Fring, the Skype client for the iPhone, iPod Touch and numerous other mobile phones, have a look at your Skype privacy settings on your computer after running Fring. You will probably find that all your incoming settings have been reset to “Anyone” can contact you for both chats and calls, no matter what you set before. This gets reset every time you run Fring to use your Skype account — you don’t actually have to do anything, just Fring starting up and logging into your account to display your active buddies is enough.

I’ve been getting a lot of Skype spam chats (“Hello Dear…”) and I finally discovered that Fring is the culprit that’s opening Skype up. There are quite a few annoyed messages about it on the Fring forum but the Fring programmers don’t seem to have responded yet.

Brilliant little idea suggested by SeanFX, use makeup bags transparent on one side for adapters, small cables etc:

OK, the story was different: Apple actually wanted to allow customers to be able to create their own ringtones for free. The RIAA forced them to charge royalties and pass them on to the RIAA, while ensuring that the artists responsible for actually creating the music would not get any cut of the royalties. Words fail me…

Apple is the latest major company to get into nickel and dime crime, which is safe, legal and fantastically profitable. Their new iPhone ringtones function gets people to pay 99 cents for something they already own, and money for nothing is always the best best profit margin you can have. It used to be called theft.

Robbers used to hang out in the woods and collect loot from unwary travellers by threatening to insert sharp instruments into their soft parts or banging them over the head with a heavy stick. This is no longer necessary, there are much better ways to boil a frog nowadays.

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