Dave the Web Guy

Now that it has become common knowledge that super-secret government agencies do in fact rummage through our various online accounts, one might wonder if my previous posting requires some sort of about-face on my part. 

I've decided not.  In the first place, I never said this sort of thing wasn't go on.  I said that concluding it did based on the obviously technically-true-without-super-secret-access-statements by one FBI guy, was erroneous.  Even now the leaked PowerPoint-looking document showing off the scariest (oddly most digestible) illustration of what government agencies do access, is hardly compelling evidence on its own.  I've read that the document was leaked by a disgruntled intelligence worker so by itself it could be just as fabricated and weak as the first charge.  

What makes the current round of revelations credible is that the government has more or less "concurred and defended" through controversy what the mysterious "disgruntled" employee said, so this time we have to concede completely.

Partially at least, my theory on the sort of thing that might actually take place, has been called out spot-on.  Corporate collusion here is key after all, and yes, that would take a limited number of people in an organization to pull off, and, whaddya know in wake of the latest information, that would take a CEO and a few inner-circle people.  

Details I'm reading about today indicate that companies are able to deny that they are aware of government interception because what they've in fact done is set up proxies, sort of "access points", reflecting the activities of their service, yet outside of them.  It sounds like they then turned their heads and left the back gate open to these proxies somehow so that the only people who knew about it, the spooks, could walk in and rummage as they please.  Not an accurate characterization of their freedom to do so, by the way, as they do in fact have to hop through many oversight hoops - which I also speculated would be the case.  Among these hoops is that the feds have to at least make some half-hearted (well, half plus one as in 51%)  justification that they are in fact only looking at foreign nationals and not American citizens.  But for conversation's sake, acceptable.

These days I tend to be skeptical of first-tier conspiracy rants because by their very assertion they suppose that conspiracies aren't happening every day at every level, which they are.  My suspicion in this case is that an unsustainable "secret" has been let loose to flow out in a controlled and deliberate manner, probably by the same people who set up this entire apparatus in the first place.  Let's face it, we have a pleasantly horrifying PowerPoint presentation, dual-occurring leaks (the Verizon phone records matter in addition to the Internet service one) which could be a tactic to delude the public's immediate grasp by being hit with two competing headlines at once, and that guy a few weeks ago who seemed to be laying the foundation for everything else to come.  If you ask me, I'd say someone wanted these policies and tactics out in the open in order to normalize them and just needed a frothy controversy to pipeline it all into a single self-dissipating weekend.   Before you give me up as a straight-lacer, there's my conspiracy theory.

Links

• US Company Officials:  Internet Surveillance Does Not Indiscrimately Mine Data

It's been a productive Memorial Day weekend.  I updated the Battle Blog engine with 2 (unreleased) improvements, and I launched Tech for the City, yet another blog under the ol' DWG brand.  While content-mining for Tech for the City I strolled through Union Square and encountered "Rocky", the Union Square USTream broadcaster.  It was an opportunity to interview him as the topic of an entry for the new blog, but while I was interviewing him he wound up interviewing me.  Until my piece is written, here's the interview from his point of view!

Video streaming by Ustream

It was all fun and good.  And in keeping with the point, thank everyone who made the ultimate sacrifice so that I and people like me and you, could do these things on a sunny afternoon like today.

Links

• Battle Blog
• Tech for the City

The list of free over-the-air digital TV channels is growing as more networks apparently take to sacrificing a bit of bandwidth to hop on the wagon of what I call "retro-networks", or, networks that focus on classic television programs and movies.  COSI and Bounce come to mind.

The latest is MOVIES! which is launching officially on Memorial day, although I find it active with a running loop promoting the fact today.  Here in NYC the channel is 5.2, a sub-channel of FOX Network 5.1.  So this is a FOX thing.

I researched this a little bit (well, okay, I looked at this Wikipedia article) wondering how many sub channels a network can operate.  After all, if there can be a 5.2 and a 5.3, why can't there be a 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 and so on?  It turns out that it's really a matter of how much overall bandwith networks want to give up because all channels and sub channels share the same alotted amount granted to the broadcaster.   Most broadcasters want enough left over to support at least one HD stream, so, barring an extraordinary sacrifice on their part, no network is ever going to go haywire on offering up a rich array of sub channel programming.  The classic programs and movies are in fact ideal for the non-HD streams that make up these special programming sub channels, so it works out.

Links

• FOX Television Stations Launches New Channel: MOVIES!

Well, from the police officer's standpoint, it's official.  Women can walk around New York City topless.  Apparently from a civil law standpoint it's been official since at least 1992.

There's at least one woman no doubt merried by the news, Moira Johnston, a "topless activist" who shows up periodically in Union Square Park, among other parts of town, in an effort to push the issue in her role as a sort of living social enzyme to the cause.  I admit that I was initially mesmerized in my sightings of her -- a predicament not helped on one sunny afternoon when she decided then and there to apply sunscreen directly to her ladies. 

August 13, 2013 - Moira Johnston and unidentified fellow topless friend give interview in Union Square Park.

However, to her point's credit, I noticed that in time I jaw-dropped less in our random encounters, shrugging a little more each time.  I began to imagine just how "intrestingly" normal it could actually be if somehow the streets filled up with hundreds more just like her.  Ultimately, what's more interesting and fun to watch now are the reaction of other, unacclimated people, whenever she shows up.  

She was arrested at least once but she wasn't fazed by it.  As I recall from an interview (which appears to have been pulled from embedded status on Vimeo) she knew what she was getting into when she started, calculating and expecting all the predictable outcomes which are, from my own observations, excited men constantly trying to befriend her, photo requests, concerned parents for their kids, and, yes, the occassional arrest - which she has been rightly adamint about would be false arrests.  Well, judging by the police memo at least a night in the pen is one concern she can scratch.

Links

• NYPD Reminds Us That It's Totally OK to Go Topless in NYC
• The 1992 Case Summary making topless women legal in New York
• BreakThruRadioTV You Tube Interview With Moira Johnston (NSFW)
• Google search results for Moira Johnston (resulting links may be NSFW)
• Moira Johnston Website

Linked below is an article citing someone with the FBI (spilling the beans?) over the fragility of digital privacy.

But I guess I'm not getting it.  The article quotes an FBI agent or someone with the FBI who says that all calls and digital communication is recorded.  The quote then goes on to say that all this information can be recalled.  

So?

I mean, isn't that a given?  Of course every Tweet, Facebook posting, web posting, even this very entry, is "stored electronically" and can be "recalled" if not for at least a period of time.  That is an indisputable technical fact.  But this article seems to go on and allow the reader to believe - with no specific mechanism other than it was an FBI agent observing the obvious - that the FBI or some other top secret intelligence entity itself was doing all of this.

I'm sorry to dilute the impact of that article but, okay, yes, I suppose that, among the many parties that could access all of this "recorded" information such as a CEO or a bored system administrator on the midnight shift, there would be the FBI, sometimes, under some circumstances.  Although, they probably have to jump through more hoops than a CEO or a bored system administrator to get at it.

Look, I get agitated whenever I encounter a counter-culture frame like The Viligant Citizen get riled up without parsing information evenly (to be fair, they actually are just quoting the CNN original but this doesn't mean CNN isn't just as guilty of fear-mongering).  I'm pretty sure the people who posted that article "get" what the FBI guy was really talking about but chose to build up their "street cred" as it were by ignoring that and letting the reader believe the worst.  It goes on, for instance, to weave these quotes into fragments of other unsbustantiated rumors and likely half-truths.

By the time the article wraps up we're all left to fear government's prying eyes yet again  and giving nary a thought to corporate sniffing and privacy autrocities which by stark comparison takes place unabated in every aspect of our day-to-day lives.

Article

• Former FBI Counterterrorism Agent: "All Digital Communications" and Phone Calls are Recorded

When you're working with Gmail filters one tip to make the work easier is to open and keep the "Filters" section in a separate browser tab in order to double check work, or, to troubleshoot the behavior post-implementation.  Don't attempt to bounce back and forth between the inbox, settings, and filters sub-section in a linear flow as that would in time drive you crazy.  In general, always make good use of tabbed browsing for the parts of a website you will be accessing over and over again while working on a problem.

As an ardent Obama supporter who continues to be even in light of this confession, let me say that yes, there were probably some shannigans with respect to Benghazi.  However, I don't think they amounted to the cause of anyone dying as the right wing media is so desperate to believe.  For a variety of political and possibly even tactical reasons our government didn't want the fact that the attack that day was terrorist-spawned and they were spinning eddies left and right to dilute reality.  I became convinced of all this when some days or weeks after the attack Hillary Clinton was making speeches in foreign nations to the effect that people need to understand that in our country freedom of speech means that anyone can make videos.  Like, she was over-scoring the whole You Tube video thing with a certain eagerness that didn't make sense to me.   It felt like spin.  

For shame, but, hey, all administrations have been fast and furious with the truth to a certain level and it isn't like, although it was probably everyone's good hunch, anyone knew for sure anything about it being a bonafide terrorist attack.  Yes it's stretching the band of my ability to overlook and forgive, and maybe unreasonably so to the right-wingers, but it isn't breaking it.

What I am creeped out by, however, is the fact that, somehow, there was full and handy knowledge of a convenient You Tube video out on the web that, in the moment, someone turned into the go-to material in building the cover story.  How the hell did they do that exactly?   Think about it -- a quick cover story to mask some real truth about events someplace is developed and, in just a few short hours, the stock material to support that cover story is found on the web, theme-processed, then circulated widely in the apparently agile-as-ever mainstream media.  Internet democracy that should check that sort of thing be damned.   And christ, think about this!  The poor sap who posted the goofy thing is not only demonized well beyond what he deserves (as much a jerk he apparently was), he's actually swiftly picked up and arrested!  I mean: Holy shit!

So what's going on there?  Is this some weird national intelligence apparatus thing where suckers are pre-fabbed and stored on the wait whenever gaps in theme development need to be filled in?  I don't think Obama had anything to do with this so much as I suspect that a long-standing machine evidently geared to zeroing in on circumstantial ingrediants that can from time to time include American citizens, did.  And it fascinates me.  I would love to pick apart the process by which some poor dude was marked, processed, and delivered for a cover story, in just a few hours, in this country.   Tell ya what, it makes you not want to post You Tube videos! 

If there's really a story in any of this -- man, this is where.

I've been working on an improved version of Check That ID this week.  One that allows users to develop a lifelong authenticated relationship with their stuff.  The current version is okay for its simplicity but once something goes in it's mandatorily out of an item owner's hands.  The re-work will allow someone to control and future edit their items as well as other nifty things.  Some if you DWG first-timers might wonder why I bother with such a trivial concept as "tracking" stuff randomly circa circa Where's George.  Honestly I can't explain where the fascination comes from but the idea of knowing the history behind anything is exciting.  Providing the tool that allows for that?  Priceless.

I learned about Google killing Google Reader today and was shocked that yet another fantastic web application in the Google house was being tossed out.  I don't know what it is with my taste in good ideas but it seems that every time I find God in an application some profit-premise market analysis rules that it isn't sustainable and it goes away. 

Now like so many other hardcore RSS aggregators I am forced to decide on an alternative solution and the web consensus seems to be that this is a service called Feedly.  It seems to match all of Google Reader's features but does the one thing I abhore of any web application which is that it tries to do too much.  I like a smart index and the ability to build my own lists around a solid  "systems" data view.   But Feedly it seems wants to turn all my RSS input into a flippin' magazine which is really, really, annoying.  It's like e-mail services that insist on insist on insist on doing crap with my e-mail before I ever get a chance to see it ("priority inboxes", "starring", spam control anyone? - screw that - btw, folks, if you want to say goodbye to spam learn about Spam Arrest and kick goofy "algorithms" goodbye).  I suppose if I can't configure my way out of Feedly's default behavior I'll go back to using something on the desktop.  There still have to be good client-side RSS readers around.  It's not like e-mail clients dried up, right.