Limiting discourse, leaking borders
It is difficult to ignore the latest moves by social media providers like YouTube to change their terms and conditions so as to block individuals and groups they don’t like. The shift from an open platform, where all ideas are welcome, to one more concerned with the window of discourse is disappointing, and points to the huge pressure being applied by a small number of special interest groups, mostly via advertisers. The really sad part of this is that there are already indications that Minds, a supposed open alternative, is already censoring content, so for the moment at least I need to withdraw my recommendation for that platform.
That said, the tactics adopted recently may be backfiring on the big names. Some unexpected victims are starting to be caught in the crossfire. While this may be considered collateral damage, larger numbers of people are starting to leave, and committees are being formed to ask difficult questions that could see the big names redefined as publishers rather than providers. Enforcing privacy laws more stringently would also have a huge impact.
Ihave two interesting hack stories for you this week. The first comes from the US Customs and Border Patrol, who have revealed that hackers broke into a poorly secured third-party license plate scanning app and absconded with pictures and plate numbers of those crossing the US-Mexico land border. To make matters more interesting, the subcontractor had illegally copied the data to their own servers, which is where the hack occurred. The subcontractor remains unnamed (ironically for privacy reasons) but others have identified Perceptics as the possible culprit. The hack involved hundreds of gigabytes of data, and included internal emails and databases, documentation along with client details, blueprints, backups, music and more. The information was posted on a Dark Web onion site. At the time of writing, it is still there.
In the second incident, an internet routing problem temporarily directed European network traffic through China Telecom systems. This included a lot of cellular traffic. This does happen from time to time, but not for two hours, as happened on this occasion. There were some suspicions raised by European engineers but no evidence of foul play has come to light, so this remains an unproven hypothesis. The issue involved 70,000 routes, mostly involving Switzerland, France and the Netherlands. Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP, leaks are on ongoing issue and a percentage of them are hacks to reroute information for a variety of shady purposes including spying, theft, surveillance and disruption. The number one source of BGP errors remains the USA, mostly due to the large number of networks there. One issue is that a BGP leak does not affect the network making the mistake but instead the connected networks. This is a complex issue with many actors, and progress in counteracting it has been slow. To date, China Telecom has not implemented filtering and anti-spoofing measures that can reduce incidents. Just saying.
It turns out that if you turn the screen brightness down to zero on your MacBook Pro because you plugged it into a monitor, this can cause all kinds of problems if the computer crashes or is shutdown. When restarted, the screen stays black and pushing the brightness buttons doesn’t help. It took two replacement motherboards and multiple visits for the Apple geniuses to figure this out. The only solution is to login blind, only after which can the screen brightness be changed. It came to an estimated A$10,000 (215,000 baht) under warranty and I suspect there will be some changes made to the OS in the near future.
Huawei has suspended its notebook business. Without access to Windows 10, Google, Intel, AMD, Western Digital or Qualcomm they had no real choice. It started when Microsoft removed the MateBook X Pro from their online retail store. Next will be the lack of a decent Android system on their new phones that will likely affect their next product release. No doubt Huawei will come out with their own OS, but given previous attempts to create a fork from Android, it will not be anywhere as attractive as the real thing.
In related news, Laptop Mag has hailed HP as the best notebook brand of the year, taking over from Lenovo. Lenovo, Acer, Microsoft, Apple, MSI and Samsung have all fallen away, with only HP, Asus and Razer moving up in the rankings. Apple phone sales are down in China and in Europe, where Huawei is currently the second top seller after Samsung. Where Huawei will be this time next year is anyone’s guess.
Finally for this week, Microsoft just can’t help itself. The CERN high particle physics centre has for years been running on Microsoft products. Microsoft recently rescinded their academic designation and increased their fees more than tenfold. CERN responded by moving to open source software. A spokesperson for Microsoft declined to comment.