Multiple sources are reporting that Google services are once again available in China. They had been blocked in the lead up to the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen Square protests.
Access to Google services within China returns | Reuters
Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
In anticipation of possible protests in memory of the Tiananmen Square massacre 25 years ago, China has blocked access to Google search and Gmail. The censorship has been in place for a few days now, suggesting that this may be more than a short term action.
China has long blocked access to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and services which would circumvent the blocking, like Anonymizer.
Google search, and Gmail are both popular in China. It will be interesting to see if this actually draws attention to the anniversary, rather than diffusing it.
The image with this post is from 2010 when Google moved out of their China offices to avoid government control. (via Wikipedia)
Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Earlier this month I talked about the ECJ ruling against Google on the “right to be forgotten."
Google has now set up a web form and process for making these requests. You need to provide your name, the URLs you want hidden, and an explanation of why the URL is "irrelevant, outdated, or otherwise inappropriate”.
Google will then make the call about whether your request will be honored. They will "assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials."
Remember, this only removes that URL from Google searches for your name, not from other searches, other search engines, or from the underlying website.
Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.
Back in 2010 I blogged about Google’s legal troubles over capturing sensitive open Wi-Fi data with their Street View cars.
In a nutshell, Google was accused of violating the federal Wiretap Act when it intercepted the data on open Wi-Fi networks it passed. The purpose was to capture just the MAC addresses of the base stations to improve their enhanced location services. It appears that recording small amounts of data was accidental. Certainly if they were trying to collect data, they could easily have grabbed much more.
Google lost that case and is now appealing to the Supreme Court, hoping to overturn the decision.
Obviously it was inappropriate for a company like Google to drive around sniffing people’s Wi-Fi traffic, but they are not really the threat. What we all need to be worried about is hackers war driving our neighborhoods, either using our networks to hide their illegal activities, or capturing our personal information for their own purposes.
Whatever the legal outcome of whether it is “OK” to sniff someone’s open Wi-Fi traffic, the reality is that people do, and doing so is trivial. Anyone with a laptop can download free software and be sucking down all the Internet activity in their local coffee shop in just minutes. I think laws like this give a false sense of security. It is like saying that, as you walk down the sidewalk, you can not look in through your neighbor’s big picture window at night when they leave the curtains open.
Thinking that people are “not allowed” to sniff your open Wi-Fi just gives a false sense of security. What we need to do is make sure that ALL Wi-Fi is securely encrypted. Even public Wi-Fi should be encrypted, even if the password is “password” and is posted prominently on the wall. Using encryption changes the situation from looking though a window as you walk by to drilling a peep hole through the wall.
None of should be in denial about this. Open Wi-Fi is insecure. It will be sniffed.
If you find yourself in a situation where you have to use an open Wi-Fi hotspot, for whatever reason, make sure you immediately establish a VPN to protect yourself. I might be biased, but I use Anonymizer Universal for this purpose.
Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
A Stranger Can Find Out Where You Are By Getting You To Open An Email - On The Media
The ability to use remotely loaded images in HTML emails for tracking has been known for years, but perhaps not widely known.
The On The Media: TLDR podcast just re-surfaced the issue in the above article, where they talk about a free Gmail plugin called Streak, which provides this capability.
It automatically embeds the hidden images in emails you send, then lets you see when and even where the recipient opens them.
Because they appear to use IP address based locations, you can block the “where” part by using Anonymizer Universal.
You can block this tracking completely by turning off the loading of images in your emails. Of course, if you then choose to load images, know that you are also enabling tracking. If you block image loading you will also find that your email become much less attractive and significantly more difficult to read.
Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook and Google+.
Google’s Location History Browser Is A Minute-By-Minute Map Of Your Life | TechCrunch
TechCrunch has a nice article on the location tracking of Android based devices.
It is an “opt in” thing, but I suspect that most people are robo-approving all the questions they are asked when they are trying to get their new phones or tablets set up for the first time.
In this case, you may have given Google permission to track and maintain high resolution location information on you. That information is used to discover where you live and work, to improve weather, travel, and traffic information.
If you follow this link, you can see a track of your activities for up to the last 30 days. Really cool in a very frightening way.
Lance Cottrell is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Anonymizer. Follow me on Facebook and Google+.
This is episode 14 of the Privacy Blog Podcast for November,2013.In this episode I talk about:
How your phone might be tracked, even if it is off
The hidden second operating system in your phone
Advertising privacy settings in Android KitKat
How Google is using your profile in caller ID
and the lengths to which Obama has to go to avoid surveillance when traveling.
Welcome to episode 13 of our podcast for September, 2013.In this episode I will talk about: A major security breach at Adobe How airplane mode can make your iPhone vulnerable to theft Russian plans to spy on visitors and athletes at the winter Olympics Whether you should move your cloud storage to the EU to avoid surveillance Identity thieves buying your personal information from information brokers and credit bureaus How to stop google using your picture in its ads Why carelessness lead to the capture of the operator of the Silk Road And how Browser Fingerprinting allows websites to track you without cookies.
Please let me know what you think, and leave suggestions for future content, in the comments.
Welcome to the 12th episode of The Privacy Blog Podcast brought to you by Anonymizer. In September’s episode, I will talk about a court ruling against Google’s Wi-Fi snooping and the vulnerabilities in the new iPhone 5s fingerprint scanner. Then, I’ll provide some tips for securing the new iPhone/iOS 7 and discuss the results of a recent Pew privacy study.
Hope you enjoy – feel free to add questions and feedback in the comments section.
An important decision just came down from the Federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals about whether Google can be sued for intercepting personal data from open WiFi networks. The intercepts happened as part of the Street View program. In addition to capturing pictures of their surroundings, the Street View vehicles also collect GPS information (to correctly place the pictures) and the MAC addresses (unique hardware identifiers), SSIDs (user assigned network names), and until 2010 they captured some actual data from those networks. The purpose of the WiFi collection is to provide enhanced location services. GPS drains phone batteries quickly, and the weak signals may be unavailable indoors, or even under and significant cover. Nearly ubiquitous WiFi base stations provide another way of finding your location. The Street View cars capture their GPS coordinates along with all of the WiFi networks they can see. Your phone can then simply look at the WiFi networks around it, and ask the database what location corresponds to what it is seeing. WiFi is often available indoors, has short range, requires much less power, and is generally turned on in any case. Google claims that capturing the actual data was an accident and a mistake.
Unfortunately that data contained usernames, passwords and other sensitive information in many cases. A lawsuit was filed accusing Google of violating the Wiretap Act when it captured the data. There is no suggestion that the data has been leaked, misused, or otherwise caused direct harm to the victims.
The ruling was on a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on the grounds that Google’s intercepts were protected under an exemption in the Wiretap Act which states that it is OK to intercept radio communications that are “readily accessible” to the general public. The Act specifically states that encrypted or scrambled communications are NOT readily accessible, but the decision hangs on exactly what IS readily accessible. The court ruled that WiFi did not count as “radio” under the Act because several types of radio communications were enumerated, and this was not one of them. They then considered this case under the umbrella of “electronic communications”, which also has an exemption for readily accessible communications. On that, they decided that open WiFi is not readily accessible.
From a privacy perspective, this is good news. It says that people who intercept your information from your open WiFi can be punished (if you ever find out about it). This would clearly prevent someone setting up a business to automatically capture personal and marketing data from coffee shop WiFi’s around the world. It is less likely to have any impact on criminals. I am concerned that it will also lead to a sense of false confidence, and perhaps cause people to leave their WiFi open, rather than taking even minimal steps to protect themselves.
The hacker / tinkerer / libertarian in me has a real problem with this ruling. It is really trivial to intercept open WiFi. Anyone can join any open WiFi network. Once joined, all the the data on that network is available to every connected device. Easy, free, point and click software allows you to capture all of the data from connected (or even un-connected) open WiFi networks. If you are debugging your home WiFi network, you could easily find yourself capturing packets from other networks by accident. They are in the clear. There is no hacking involved. It is like saying that you can not tune your radio to a specific station, even though it is right there on the dial.
I think peeping in windows is a reasonable analogy. If I am standing on the sidewalk, look at your house, and see something through your windows that you did not want me to see, that is really your problem. If I walk across your lawn and put my face against the glass, then you have a cause to complain.
Open WiFi is like a window without curtains, or a postcard. You are putting the data out there where anyone can trivially see it. Thinking otherwise is willful ignorance. All WiFi base stations have the ability to be secured, and it is generally as simple as picking a password and checking a box. You don’t even need to pick a good password (although you really should). Any scrambling or encryption clearly moves the contents from being readily accessible, to being intentionally protected. If you want to sunbathe nude in your back yard, put up a fence. If you want to have privacy in your data, turn on security on your WiFi router.
I think that radio communications are clearly different than wired. With radio, you are putting your data on my property, or out into public spaces. There is no trespass of any kind involved to obtain it, and we have no relationship under which you would expect me to protect the information that you have inadvertently beamed to me. It would be like saying that I can’t look at your Facebook information that you made public because you accidentally forgot to restrict it.
Similar to provisions of the DMCA, which outlaw much research on copy protection schemes, this is likely to create accidental outlaws of researchers, and the generally technical and curious.
Welcome to The Privacy Blog Podcast for May 2013. In this month’s episode, I’ll discuss how shared hosting is increasingly becoming a target and platform for mass phishing attacks. Also, I’ll speak about the growing threat of Chinese hackers and some of the reasons behind the increase in online criminal activity.
Towards the end of the episode, we’ll address the hot topic of Google Glass and why there’s so much chatter regarding the privacy and security implications of this technology. In related Google news, I’ll provide my take on the recent announcement that Google is upgrading the security of their public keys and certificates.
Leave any comments or questions below. Thanks for listening!
Yesterday Google announced that it was updating its certificates to use 2048 bit public key encryption, replacing the previous 1024 bit RSA keys.
I have always found the short keys used by websites somewhat shocking. I recall back in the early 1990's discussion about whether 1024 bits was good enough for PGP keys. Personally, I liked to go to 4096 bits although it was not really officially supported.
The fact that, 20 years later, only a fraction of websites have moved up to 2048 bits is incredible to me.
Just as a note, you often see key strengths described in bit length with RSA being 1024 or 2048 bits, and AES being 128 or 256 bits.
This might lead one to assume that RSA is much stronger that AES, but the opposite is true (at these key lengths). The problem is that the two systems are attacked in very different ways. AES is attacked by a brute force search through all possible keys until the right one is found. If the key is 256 bits long, then you need to try, on average, half of the 2^256 keys. That is about 10^77 keys (a whole lot). This attack is basically impossible for any computer that we can imagine being built, in any amount of time relevant to the human species (let alone any individual human).
By comparison, RSA is broken by factoring a 1024 or 2048 bit number in the key into its two prime factors. While very hard, it is not like brute force. It is generally thought that 1024 bit RSA is about as hard to crack as 80 bit symmetric encryption. Not all that hard.
Another from the "if the data exists, it will get compromised" file.
This article from the Washington Post talks about an interesting case of counter surveillance hacking.
In 2010, Google disclosed that Chinese hackers breached Google's servers. What only recently came to light was that one of the things compromised was a database containing information about government requests for email records.
Former government officials speculate that they may have been looking for indications of which of their agents had been discovered. If there were records of US government requests for information on any of their agents, it would be evidence that those agents had been exposed. This would allow the Chinese to shut down operations to prevent further exposure and to get those agents out of the country before they could be picked up.
I had not thought about subpoenas and national security letters being a counter intelligence treasure trove, but it makes perfect sense.
Because Google / Gmail are so widely used, they present a huge and valuable target for attackers. Good information on almost any target is likely to live within their databases.
Google Transparency Report shows government surveillance, takedown requests are up.
The number of information requests coming to Google from governments around the world is growing fast. It is up 55% for the first half of 2012 vs. the first half of 2010. The linked article has some nice graphs showing the trend.
It is interesting to note that the US leads the world with over a third of the total requests, followed by India then Brazil.
The other even faster trend is in takedown requests. Since they are s search engine, not a host, this is really pure censorship. It is up 88% between the first half of 2011 and the first half of 2012. That is a true hockey stick. A lot of it appears to be trying to suppress criticism of government or government activities.
The more such information is gathered, the more important it is to take control of your own personal privacy.
CNET has a good description of exactly how to do it.
Google and other online advertising companies like Vibrant Media, Media Innovation Group, and PointRoll, are using a flaw in Safari on iOS to track you despite your privacy settings.
iOS Safari is set by default to reject tracking cookies from 3rd party websites. That means that unless you are directly and intentionally interacting with a site it should not be able to cookie and track you. Specifically that is intended to prevent tracking by advertisers displaying banner ads on websites.
The hack is that these advertisers use a script within the website to cause submit an invisible web form to the advertising website, which looks to Safari like you directly interacted with that site and so allows the site to send a cookie. Another flaw in Safari causes those cookies to be returned to the 3rd party sites once they have been set.
Apple is saying that they will address the issue. Google is blaming Apple for breaking with web standards (even though almost all browsers support blocking 3rd party cookies iOS Safari is unusual in making this the default).
My suggestion:
The WSJ had the first article I saw on this, but it is paywalled.
9 to 5 Mac has a nice article on it.
John Battelle's searchblog tries to look at this issue from both sides.
A reader of this blog recently emailed me to ask:
What s/w do you recommend to keep anonymous while using Gmail, IE, Outlook, and Facebook on a laptop?
This is actually a very tricky question because the nature of all of these tools, except Internet Explorer (IE), is to be associated with a visible and discoverable account and identity in the "cloud". I will discuss IE last and separately.
Gmail ties to your gmail and other Google accounts. Outlook ties to some existing email account at some email provider. Facebook is tied to your Facebook account and is explicitly designed for making your information public.
The profound question here is, what do we even mean by being anonymous using these services? I would argue that the best one can manage is to be pseudonymous; that is to maintain a persistent and visible pseudonym / alias which, while discoverable, is not associated with your true identity.
Fortunately Gmail and Facebook are free and typically do not require any real credentials to set up an account, and many of the free email providers work similarly. Using Anonymizer Universal (AU), and a browser with no history or cache to set up the accounts would ensure they were not connected to your real identity. It is important that the accounts never be accessed in any way except through AU, or they will be forever after associated with your real IP address. Furthermore, it is critical that the browser used is never used for any activity connected to your real identity, or the cookies and other digital detritus in your browser may allow these sites (or other folks) to tie the pseudonym to your other real name accounts.
IE is in many ways the easiest because there is no underlying account, but all the same rules apply. You need to ensure that you isolate your anonymous or pseudonymous activity from your real name activity.
For all of this activity a virtual machine can be a very effective tool. For example, if you use a Mac you can use a virtual machine running Windows or Linux for all of your alias activities and use the normal operating system for your real name activities. Similar tools exist for other operating systems.