I’ll start today’s discussion with privacy with
mention of a story about a “smart TV”, a story by Michael Price, “I’m Terrified
of my new TV: I’m scared to turn this thing on, and you should be too,” link here. That’s because of the webcam and Internet
capabilities, and possible tracking. I
haven’t tried to use my Insignia that way.
But the big story today on the front page of the
Washington Post is “U.S., European authorities strike against Internet’s black
markets”, by Craig Timberg and Ellen Nakashima, link here. The law enforcement action was called “Operation
Dark Web” or “Operation Onymous” (the antonym of “anonymous”). Over 400 site were shut down Friday, with 17
people arrested, for selling drugs, weapons, prostitution and sex trade, or
counterfeit goods, on site supposedly protected by TOR and relying on
bitcoin. TOR (“The Onion Router”) has
been touted as something everyone had a moral obligation to learn to use. The NSA has been particularly active with
breaking TOR.
No doubt, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will question
these takedowns, and investigate whether legitimate businesses were affected
with them. That has been the case before
with counterfeit goods and piracy (and some notorious ICE seizures).
I checked all my sites Saturday morning and found
everything working normally (one of the service providers had warned of unusual
scheduled maintenance for security). But
in 2006, I found that on an older site where I had placed an “opposing
viewpoints” database on MySQL, the “java” access failed with internal server
errors, and, unlike the outages previously, it was never restored. (PHP continued to work.) Later I would learn that the smaller ISP, housed
in Florida and then New Jersey, was in legal trouble. I wonder if my stuff got caught in this kind
of operation. I have not restored it,
since it had become clumsy to work this way – in the days before modern social
media and blogging platforms.
But just on November 4, according to another Post
story by Justin Meyer, Facebook had given some overseas users access to TOR (link
as a way to help them counter oppressive regimes, in contradiction to its
usual “real names” identity policy which Mark Zuckerberg has always said was essential to integrity. .
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