Science Addiction

October 10, 2008

Think About the Children Award: Delta and American Airlines

Ars Technica is reporting that American Airlines and Delta announced this week that they would block “inappropriate” sites on their in-flight WiFi service.

As recently as last month, they had left the matter up to the good judgment of their customers. It seems like the judgment of their customers has crashed with the economy and is no longer trustworthy.

As Jacqui at Ars Technica points out, travelers have always been able to bring video porn and “men’s magazines” on to the plane- it has always been up to their “good judgment”. The Internet changes nothing- except the ease with which the gatekeepers can control access to content.

Keep in mind, the problem here is not porn (nor it is the theoretical hazard of WiFi on a plane). The problem is: who gets to decide which site gets blocked. What is inappropriate? Of course, this problem will blow up in their face when the service enters the mainstream. Expect some genius to set up a web site where people can submit legitimate web sites that were blocked by AA and Delta- which will then become a PR fiasco for the airlines. They will have inadvertently blocked a competitor, or a detractor or the ACLU or the NAACP or something much simpler, and will be faced with the wrath of a thousand blogs, with the mainstream media not far behind.

In anticipation of that day, the inaugural Think About the Children Award goes to Delta and American Airlines! This award is reserved for those entities that, in the name of protecting children, use a sledgehammer to thread a needle.

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October 10, 2008

More on Wireless Devicess on Airplanes

Yesterdays story about Australian officials blaming a wireless mouse and other consumer electronics for severe problems in their avionics left me very confused. Either they were looking for an easy scapegoat or there is something seriously wrong with airline security.

In 2004, the FCC was considering lifting the ban on wireless devices in airplanes. However, in March of 2007 the FCC terminated that effort. This was their statement:

Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules prohibit the use of cellular phones using the 800 MHz frequency and other wireless devices on airborne aircraft. This ban was put in place because of potential interference to wireless networks on the ground. […]

The FCC determined that the technical information provided by interested parties in response to the proposal was insufficient to determine whether in-flight use of wireless devices on aircraft could cause harmful interference to wireless networks on the ground. Therefore, it decided at this time to make no changes in the rules prohibiting in-flight use of such devices.

The question is- in an environment where 4 ounces of liquid are deemed unsafe for travel, you would think the heavy-handed TSA would have banned cell phones and wireless mice a long time ago.

I’m not suggesting that they do that- in fact, I want someone to call Qantas and the Australian Transport Safety Board’s bluff. Or prove them right and take the entire airline industry down- because which suit wants to travel without their cell phone, laptop or PDA?

(Also: Scienceline investigates why you have to turn off your iPod at take off and landing.)

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October 10, 2008

With Us or Against Us

You’re either with us or against us [via Schneier]:

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday. […]

Both Hutchins and Sheridan said the activists’ names were entered into the state police database as terrorists partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries.

Bruce Schneier, who is generally the most sound source on these matters, says that “the database needs more nuance”. I say, the database doesn’t need to classify nonviolent activists at all! Included in these lists were people who belonged to groups opposing the Iraq war and groups opposing the death penalty. Reminds me of a question they have on the USCIS form you fill out to apply for naturalization [pdf] here in the United States:

Have you ever been a member of or associated with any organization, association, fund, foundation, party, club, society or similar group in the United States or in any other place?

Errr.. hasn’t everyone?

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October 9, 2008

That One ’08, remixed

That One ’08, remixed: http://tinyurl.com/425bvg

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October 9, 2008

Track Your Stolen Laptop for Free

Researchers at the University of Washington and University of California, San Diego have released a free and open source software called Adeona. It tracks your stolen or lost laptop without relying on proprietary or centralized software or databases. And unlike commercial services, it preserves the privacy of the user- it uses cryptography mechanisms so that only the user has access to the laptop location information.

Adeona is designed to use the Open Source OpenDHT distributed storage service to store location updates sent by a small software client installed on an owner’s laptop. The client continually monitors the current location of the laptop, gathering information (such as IP addresses and local network topology) that can be used to identify its current location. The client then uses strong cryptographic mechanisms to not only encrypt the location data, but also ensure that the ciphertexts stored within OpenDHT are anonymous and unlinkable. At the same time, it is easy for an owner to retrieve location information.

It is licensed under GPLv2, and is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Like Lojack for cars, simply the prevalence of such software can serve as a deterrent for casual theft. A determined thief can replace the operating system before using (or selling) it, but a lot of consumer electronics theft is casual and opportunistic.

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October 9, 2008

Coming Soon: Terrorist Armed with a Wireless Mouse

There is something wrong with this report, though I’m not sure what it is:

Passenger laptop computers are now being investigated as a possible cause of the Qantas mid-air emergency off Western Australia on Tuesday.

The Airbus A330-300, with 303 passengers and a crew of 10, experienced what the airline described as a “sudden change in altitude” north of its destination on Tuesday.

The mid-air incident resulted in injuries to 74 people, with 51 of them treated by three hospitals in Perth for fractures, lacerations and suspected spinal injuries when the flight bound from Singapore to Perth had a dramatic drop in altitude that hurled passengers around the cabin.

In July, a passenger clicking on a wireless mouse mid-flight was blamed for causing a Qantas jet to be thrown off course, according to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau’s monthly report.

Can modern airplane electronics be so dramatically affected by wireless mice and laptops? If so, the airline industry is doomed- forget about taking off your shoes and all your 3oz liquid bottles in little ziploc baggies. The real threat is in every business traveler’s carry-on luggage.

Of course, there is something wrong here. I am not quite sure what- but either the Australian Transportation Safety Bureau is looking for an easy scapegoat or there is a gaping security hole in our airlines that should be bigger news. I’m guessing it’s the former.

There is some interesting discussion in this slashdot thread, including the following from “pla”:

This has nothing to do with “I want to use my laptop/DS/phone, so make me happy as the paying customer”, and everything to do with “if an unauthorized wireless mouse can bring down a plane, we need the entire fleet of such badly defective planes grounded and fixed yesterday“.

Seriously. Any system that can’t deal with weak RF interference needs to hit the scrapheap. In any other industry, we’d see the customers suing – Imagine if Ford said using a bluetooth headset in their vehicles violates your warranty… They’d go bankrupt overnight. Only the fact that the aviation industry has slowly boiled the frog, making us expect horrible customer service at unpredictable (but high) prices, allows any of the BS we’ve put up with for the past 20 years (and the shout-and-taze squads aside, the airlines had problems long before 9/11).

Well said.

UPDATE: A little more info from the FCC. Still doesn’t resolve anything.

UPDATE #2: Turns out it was faulty avionics, not passenger laptops, that caused the dive. No kidding.

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October 8, 2008

Barack Skywalker: A New Hope: …

Barack Skywalker: A New Hope: http://tinyurl.com/4yax9d

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October 8, 2008

Let’s Not Insult Hackers

Let’s get one thing clear: The kid who broke in to vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account was not a hacker.

I’m not even talking about the debate over the use of the word hacker as a pejorative. At a fundamental level, all this guy did was click on “Forgot Password”, answered “password questions” about Palin and reset her password. I’ll be charitable and call it clever, but let’s not call it hacking.

Unfortunately, any time someone does something remotely reproachable with a computer, the traditional media calls it hacking.

P.S. Make sure the answers to your own “Forgot Password” questions are sufficiently absurd.

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October 8, 2008

That One ’08

That One was born in Hawaii on August 4th, 1961. His father, That One Sr., was born and raised in a small village in Kenya, where he grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British. That Oneâ€™s mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in small-town Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression, and then signed up for World War II after Pearl Harbor, where he marched across Europe in Pattonâ€™s army.

McCains off-hand, inartful description of Obama in last nights debate is now an internet phenomenon. You can buy t-shirts and there’s a facebook page. And here’s the original video.