From Marc Lacey’s “Exploiting Real Fears With ‘Virtual Kidnappings’ ” (The New York Times: 29 April 2008):
MEXICO CITY — The phone call begins with the cries of an anguished child calling for a parent: “Mama! Papa!” The youngster’s sobs are quickly replaced by a husky male voice that means business.
“We’ve got your child,” he says [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, business, law, security | No Comments »
From Mark Dery’s response to R.U. Sirius’ “Is The Net Good For Writers?” (10 Zen Monkeys: 5 October 2007):
But we live in times of chaos and complexity, and the future of writing and reading is deeply uncertain. Reading and writing are solitary activities. The web enables us to write in public and, maybe one day, [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: On Writing, Technology, art | No Comments »
From Seth David Schoen’s “Wiretapping vulnerabilities” (Vitanuova: 9 March 2006):
Traditional wiretap threat model: the risks are detection of the tap, and obfuscation of content of communication. …
POTS is basically the same as it was 100 years ago — with central offices and circuit-switching. A phone from 100 years ago will pretty much still work today. [...]
Posted on August 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, law | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “VOIP Encryption” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 April 2006):
There are basically four ways to eavesdrop on a telephone call.
One, you can listen in on another phone extension. This is the method preferred by siblings everywhere. If you have the right access, it’s the easiest. While it doesn’t work for cell phones, cordless phones are [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, law, politics, security | Comments Off
From Nicholas Thompson’s “Who Needs Keys?” (Legal Affairs: November/December 2004):
The event was organized by 2600, a quarterly magazine whose name refers to one of the great discoveries in hacker history: that the plastic whistles given away free in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal in the early 1970s could be slightly modified to create sound waves [...]
Posted on June 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, Writing Ideas, history, law | Comments Off
From Brendan I. Koerner’s “Your Cellphone is a Homing Device” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003):
What your salesman probably failed to tell you - and may not even realize - is that an E911-capable phone can give your wireless carrier continual updates on your location. The phone is embedded with a Global Positioning System chip, which can [...]
Posted on June 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, business, law, security | Comments Off
From John Schwartz’s “Text Hackers Could Jam Cellphones, a Paper Says“:
Malicious hackers could take down cellular networks in large cities by inundating their popular text-messaging services with the equivalent of spam, said computer security researchers, who will announce the findings of their research today.
Such an attack is possible, the researchers say, because cellphone companies provide [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, security | Comments Off
From R. W. Kostal’s Law and English Railway Capitalism, 1825-1875 (quoted in Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“):
In Britain in 1889, postal officials reprimanded a Leicester subscriber for using his phone to notify the fire brigade of a nearby conflagration. The fire was not on his premises, [...]
Posted on April 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, history | Comments Off
From Andrew Odlyzko’s “Pricing and Architecture of the Internet: Historical Perspectives from Telecommunications and Transportation“:
Moreover, flat rates for local calling played a key role in the rise of the Internet, by promoting much faster spread of this technology in the U.S. than in other countries. (This, as well as the FCC decisions about keeping Internet [...]
Posted on April 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, business, history | Comments Off
From Douglas Adam’s “Is there an Artificial God?“:
Let me back up for a minute and talk about the way we communicate. Traditionally, we have a bunch of different ways in which we communicate with each other. One way is one-to-one; we talk to each other, have a conversation. Another is one-to-many, which I’m doing at [...]
Posted on April 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society | Comments Off
From David Pescovitz’s “The Big Picture“:
Mobile researcher John Poisson, CEO of the Fours Initiative, focuses on how cameraphones could revolutionize photography and communication — if people would only start using them more.
As the leader of Sony Corporation’s mobile media research and design groups in Tokyo, John Poisson spent two years focused on how people use [...]
Posted on April 15th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Technology, Wash U: Social Software, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society | Comments Off
Overheard: “I have a habit of not answering the phone too much, because rumors piss me off.”
Related posts
Virtual kidnappings a problem in Mexico
Tracking via cell phone is easy
The strictest of teachers
The shift from interior to exterior lives
The real purposes of the American school
Posted on November 22nd, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: overheard | Comments Off
From the ACLU’s No Competition: How Monopoly Control of the Broadband Internet Threatens Free Speech:
Common carriage policy requires that a network owner - in this case, a telephone company - not discriminate against information by halting, slowing, or otherwise tampering with the transfer of any data. The purpose of common carriage is to prevent a [...]
Posted on October 4th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Technology, politics | Comments Off
