Ged Carroll

Category: security | 保衛 | 정보 보안 | 情報セキュリティー

According to Wikipedia security can be defined:

Security is protection from, or resilience against, potential harm (or other unwanted coercive change) caused by others, by restraining the freedom of others to act. Beneficiaries (technically referents) of security may be of persons and social groups, objects and institutions, ecosystems or any other entity or phenomenon vulnerable to unwanted change. Security mostly refers to protection from hostile forces, but it has a wide range of other senses: for example, as the absence of harm (e.g. freedom from want); as the presence of an essential good (e.g. food security); as resilience against potential damage or harm (e.g. secure foundations); as secrecy (e.g. a secure telephone line); as containment (e.g. a secure room or cell); and as a state of mind (e.g. emotional security).

Back when I started writing this blog, hacking was something that was done against ‘the man’, usually as a political statement. Now breaches are part of organised crime’s day to day operations. The Chinese government so thoroughly hacked Nortel that all its intellectual property was stolen along with commercial secrets like bids and client lists. The result was the firm went bankrupt. Russian ransomware shuts down hospitals across Ireland. North Korean government sanctioned hackers robbed 50 million dollars from the central bank of Bangladesh and laundered it in association with Chinese organised crime.

Now it has spilled into the real world with Chinese covert actions, Russian contractors in the developing world and hybrid warfare being waged across central Europe and the middle east.

  • Hasan Minhaj and other things that caught my attention this week

    Supreme by Hasan Minhaj. I hadn’t watched much of Patriot Act mainly because there is more content that grabs my attention on Netflix. This clip is a great dive into hype culture by Hasan Minhaj – often the best humour is that with uncomfortable truths in it.

    Amazon playbook on Amazon Vine. Gartner L2 made this useful clip on the effective use of Amazon’s Vine programme.

    Key take-outs (my observations in italics):

    • Amazon don’t allow vendors any editorial controls over reviews and look to keep them honest and authentic
    • Vine seems to be really good in the process of accelerating product launches for vendors
    • Use Vine BEFORE Amazon’s sponsored products and sponsored brands advertising function; by the sounds of it pretty similar to the way you’d have previously used PR in a product launch marketing campaign
    • L2 recommends ensuring the efficacy of the product; but Vine COULD be used as the last gate in the innovation process before you go gangbusters. Lots of negative reviews could still save you on a massive production run and huge advertising spend

    Sophie Cope (Electronic Frontier Foundation) on digital privacy and the surveillance state. Great video on the World Affairs channel – interesting how this has become such a big issue amongst ‘wonkish’ audiences. More privacy related content here.

    Lynx (Axe for non UK audiences) have latched on to the ASMR meme that has been popular for a couple of years. It feels weird to watch, I am not sure what the strategic insight(s) were for this work beyond the fact that beards are sticking around for a good while yet.

    https://youtu.be/x9T7BJ-jf6o

    The last thing is the positive experience I had with American Express this week when I lost my card. I spoke to a real person on a decent phone line who quickly canceled my old card sent me out a new one that arrived in 48 hours.

  • Douyin + more things

    Are Douyin and TikTok the Same? | What’s on Weibo – China’s Netcasting Services Association (中国网络视听节目服务协会), an association directly managed by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, issued new regulations that online short video platforms in China should adhere to. One of the new guidelines requires all online video service providers to carefully examine content before it is published. Tech China reports that the new stipulations require that all online video content, from titles to comments and even the use of emoticons, has to be in accordance with regulations, which prohibit any content that is ‘vulgar,’ is offending to the Chinese political system, puts revolutionary leaders in a negative light, or undermines social stability in any way – interesting dive into the differences between TikTok and Douyin which seem to run off separate systems. We also see some crossovers, for instance similar ad formats on both Douyin and TikTok. Another area of connectivity is the similar level of censorship on TikTok that is rolled out on Douyin. This is creepy, but makes both Douyin and TikTok brand safe, which is particularly attractive to mainstream advertisers. The big question for me is whether TikTok provides direct access to its data to the Chinese government like Douyin would be obliged to do. More related content here.

    Snap Business | Apoposphere – how the apps you use impact your daily life and emotions – usual caveat emptor considerations apply. Sample size is 1,005. Research is sponsored by Snap

    Facebook culture described as ‘cult-like’, review process blamed | CNBC – can’t work out if there is a lot of employee adulting required or if the culture is reminiscent of peak Microsoft circa 1995

    Major WeChat trends brands can’t ignore in 2019 | Digital | Campaign Asia – WeChat and global traveller connection particularly important

    Major WeChat trends brands can’t ignore in 2019 | Digital | Campaign Asia – WeChat and global traveller connection particularly important

    The perfect plan for the couch potato | Trendwatching – Bilibili and Ele.me partner to provide hybrid content streaming and free food delivery

    Brands should give up control to reach Gen Z | Creativepool – this says more about how marketing hasn’t changed over the past 15 years than gen-Z. This tells me that brands and agencies haven’t been listening. It also tells me that I can recycle decade old platitudes and essays with a Ctrl+F gen-Y and Ctrl+V gen-Z

    Samsung’s Supreme Copyright Spat | The Daily | Gartner L2 – Chinese consumers weren’t fooled by the “Supreme” partnership, eviscerating Samsung on social media following the launch. Its Greater China digital marketing manager responded to the uproar by posting on his Weibo account that the decision to work with Supreme Italia was made because it had obtained the authorization to use the brand in China. Samsung later backtracked as he deleted the post and Samsung’s official Weibo account announced it was “re-evaluating” the partnership – gosh I can feel the heat from the burn on this from half way around the world…

    Apple’s China Problem : 12 Reasons – Counterpoint Research – covers more of the points that I would have hit

    Move over, millennials and Gen Z – here comes Generation Alpha | Society | The Guardian – is defining generations useful? “You have to be careful about it,” says Karen Rowlingson, professor of social policy at the University of Birmingham. “But we shouldn’t ignore generational divides. Younger people are, on average, facing many more challenges. And, certainly, inequalities within that generation [millennials] are greater.”

    Apple is putting iTunes on Samsung TVs – The Verge – makes you wonder about the future of the Apple TV?

    Should we think of Big Tech as Big Brother? | Financial Times – That also used to be the view of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders, who presented a paper in 1998 highlighting the perils of advertising. “We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market,” they wrote.

    When Ad Breaks Get Weird: Branded Content in Chinese TV Dramas Is Ruining It For the Viewers | What’s on Weibo 

    Internet rightists’ strategy of provocation gaining traction in Japan | The Japan Times – Japan starts to see western style internet wars with personal attacks (paywall)

    Chinese coffee startup Luckin: We won’t be the next ofo | HEJ Insight – interesting read that reminded me a lot of the reporting on the original dot com boom in the UK and US

    Amazon says 100m Alexa devices sold – usage figures remain a mystery | The Drum – and in the second part of the headline is the rub

    Masayoshi Son wants Arm’s blueprints to power all tech – Armed with a crystal ball | The Economist – I have a lot of respect for Son-san but this reads like bubble-level BS. There are so many variables such as China 2025 that make this inadvisable. Secondly its not like ARM is the only micro-computer core design that’s low power and available. Thirdly, we’ve hit peak smartphone, other devices won’t offer the same business opportunity

    Opinion | Is This the End of the Age of Apple? – The New York Times – This is a big issue not only for Apple but also for all of tech. There is not a major trend that you can grab onto right now that will carry everyone forward. The last cool set of companies — Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest and, yes, Tinder — were created many years ago, and I cannot think of another group that is even close to as promising

    Understanding the Emerging Era of International Competition: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives | RAND – great read

    Startup founders say age bias is rampant in tech by age 36 – There’s a scourge in tech that apparently runs even deeper than sexism or racism: ageism. In a wide-ranging survey of US startup founders polled by venture-capital firm First Round Capital, 37% said age is the strongest investor bias against founders, while 28% cited gender and 26% cited race.

    The liberating thrill of a slender book | Quartz – Let’s keep this short. We’re busy. We want to read but don’t have time for deep dives, and that applies to books as well as articles

    China says its navy is taking the lead in game-changing electromagnetic railguns – Chinese warships will soon be equipped with electromagnetic railguns that fire projectiles with “incredibly destructive velocity,” and that the underlying technology was based on “fully independent intellectual property,” rather than designs copied from other nations.

    Burberry Zhao Wei and Zhou Dongyu CNY Campaign | HYPEBAE which ended up to be a bit of a mess: Why Burberry’s Chinese New Year campaign doesn’t quite hit the spot | The Drum 

  • Designing the Internet

    David D Clark was involved in the designing the internet as it moved into the commercial sphere. He rose to prominence in the 1980s through to the mid-1990s. In the talk at Google’s Mountain View campus he goes over much of the process. The things he says about network economics and security is particularly interesting.

    Outtakes

    In the 1970s it was about getting the protocols right, they needed to debug both the code and the specification that went alongside.

    1980s made hierarchies to make things scale as everything got bigger.

    1990s brought in the commercial internet, the specific goal of specifications was to shape industry structure. Protocol boundaries define industry structures.

    Quality of service development was compromised because it didn’t work economically for network providers. Specifically by concern about internet telephony. Standards adaptation was affected the internet service providers efforts to get value out of applications that run over the top (like Google).

    His discussions on designing the internet with politicians are particularly intriguing. There are still unanswered questions about societal and political accountability. There is a space for anonymous actions and an accountable internet would fall back to sovereign states including authoritarian regimes.

    Availability as well as integrity and cryptography (disclosure control) are important for security. The internet is insecure by design. Conscious decisions were taken to put risky actions into the internet. This gave us Flash, Acrobat and the Chrome browser.

    Embedding risky actions to provide attractive features for users, versus ensuring that these are only between people who you know. Trustworthiness is key.

    Protocol features affect industry power, adding more features may give power to the wrong people. The prime example of this is the work that the Chinese government have been doing with Huawei to try and define real ID, censorship and cyber sovereignty into next generation standards. More related content here.

  • The Dark Net by Jamie Bartlett

    The Dark Net had been sitting on my shelf for a while. Jamie Bartlett works at Demos, has written for The Telegraph and writes books looking at the intersection between radical politics and technology.

    The Dark Net provides an overview of how politics and social forces have adapted to the internet. Bartlett is largely non-judgemental. In some respects it seemed to a series of essays that followed the Mondo ethos of documentary media. Something that’s factual, yet chosen for shock or entertainment. This was especially popular in the 1960s as these films competed for audiences against early television programmes across Europe and the US in the early 1960s. 

    It felt like some of the content was put in to spice book up, which is the reason why I thought it was similar to Cavara, Prosperi and Jacopetti’s film Mondo Cane 50 years earlier.

    Libertarianism was beneficial to the early web:

    • Privacy infrastructure including strong cryptography. This enabled everything from e-commerce and banking to secure communications. This has built new businesses, made banking and share dealing more convenient and helped protect people from authoritarian regimes. The downside is that it also makes criminal activity harder to detect than in the clear communications, but then so does a hand passed note with paper and a pencil
    • Fighting surveillance legislation – unfortunately authoritarian regimes caught on fast the potential of the web, so their efforts have been uneven

    The Dark Net shows how the libertarianism that spawned the early web has:

    • Weaponised social interactions as the network of people online grew massively
    • Driven extreme marketplaces, due to the lack of regulation and lack of similar values with early netizens
    • Drove the development and adoption of cryptocurrency. More accurately facilitated the adoption of cryptocurrency. A lack of trust in offline institutions like banks and governments accelerated the adoption of cryptocurrency as a store of wealth
    • Facilitated reinforcing communities to encourage suicide, racial hatred and eating disorders

    More security related content here.

  • Dieter Rams handbag + more things

    Buy it now: the Dieter Rams handbag – DisneyRollerGirl – the Dieter Rams handbag reminds me of the kind of thing that would appeal to Chinese millennial luxury buyers. They’ve increased their luxury consumption sophistication in leaps and bounds

    Perspectives on Encryption and Surveillance – Lawfare – great set of essays on the interface of cryptography, privacy and the law

    Autonomous Vehicle Navigation in Rural Environments without Detailed Prior Maps by Ort, Paul and Rus – interesting work being done by MIT and Toyota

    Starwood Reservation Database Security Incident – name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest (“SPG”) account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences. For some, the information also includes payment card numbers and payment card expiration dates, but the payment card numbers were encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard encryption (AES-128). There are two components needed to decrypt the payment card numbers, and at this point, Marriott has not been able to rule out the possibility that both were taken – oh Lordy!

    Time to step away from the ‘bright, shiny things’? Towards a sustainable model of journalism innovation in an era of perpetual change | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism – to be fair the same is true across marketing and advertising and client boards that have been seduced by the same management consultancy bullshit about disruption for far too long

    China unveils first satellite that offers free Wi-Fi to entire world | Video | SupChina – Oh really?

    South Korea Charges 11 With Selling Samsung Technology to China – Bloomberg – Samsung spent about 150 billion won over a period of six years to develop the OLED technology that is now considered highly-classified national knowledge (paywall) – US is the least of Chinese worries if they can get other countries China has been stealing stuff from to take action like Germany, France, Italy, Japan and South Korea

    Why is Huawei Out in the Cold? | China Media Project – ignore the mock surprise at Jack Ma being a communist party member and reflect on the  interesting analysis of the Chinese Communist Party’s reform and opening 40th anniversary celebration

    How Amazon Now Shapes What Our Stuff Looks Like | Gizmodo – how e-tailing is affecting FMCG packaging design

    The Next Great (Digital) Extinction | WIRED – how counterculture met digital and failed to meet its full potential

    Jane Wong explains why she uncovers hidden app features that tech giants like Facebook want to keep secret | South China Morning Post – great read, particularly her comments on WeChat

    How Cheap Labor Drives China’s A.I. Ambitions – The New York Times – manually writing rules is more like prior efforts at AI than the kind of machine learning advocated at the moment, but that doesn’t mean that the Chinese won’t have their successes

    Luxury goods group Kering steps up digital strategy with new Apple deals – Reuters – interesting apparent role for Apple in this

    In China’s hinterland, car market growth engine sputters – Reuters – a mix of consumer credit squeeze, move out of legacy industries, healthcare costs and inflation affecting car buyers in lower tier cities