Website monitoring is an established business. Perhaps the best known example is Keynote, whose statistics carry a weight akin to Neilsen ratings minus the subjective element of user preference. These systems measure the performance of websites as perceived by customers. Typically they have an array of sensors, distributed across the globe– the more dispersed, the better a picture that emerges– that periodically pings a website to check how quickly the pages load, whether any errors are returned or key services such as authentication experience an outage.

So far none of them have stepped up to the plate and offered to detect traffic shaping. Considering that network neutrality is under attack from all directions, this could be the next application. Suppose an ISP in North America decides to put the brakes on downloads from Netflix while prioritizing streaming video traffic from a competing website. (It’s not a stretch to imagine a kickback, revenue sharing model or even past grudge against Netflix could motivate this behavior.) An extensive sensor array would reveal this anomaly, provided there is at least one sensor inside this ISP boundary. The measurement may reveal an unexpected latency compared to other network locations in the same region or strange bandwidth caps in effect over time.

That still leaves open one question: whether the web service provider could have any legal recourse once they discover their traffic was being discriminated against.

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EFF takes Windows Media Center to task for intentionally restricted functionality, in the name of compliance with a non-existent legal requirement. WMC will decline to record certain over-the-air digital TV broadcasts. Quoting the official response to CNET:

“As part of these regulations, Windows Media Center fully adheres to the flags used by broadcasters and content owners to determine how their content is distributed and consumed.”

The problem is, as the EFF Deeplinks blog points out, a DC circuit court has already struck down this requirement on hardware and software vendors, in one of the rare victories for sanity. This is one case where design decisions and conflicting priorities can not be blamed on the government.

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The Max Planck Institute for software systems has released the results of a study on BitTorrent blocking. The research was conducted by asking volunteers around the world to download and run some code on their computers that simulates BitTorrent traffic to test servers controlled by the institute. By  carefully monitoring what is happening on both sides of this connection, it’s possible to determine any unexpected traffic shaping attempts.

What emerges is a global map of non-intereference with US and Singapore having the dubious distinction of being the only countries to have sizable fraction of tampered connections. (The percentages are not reliable; it’s quite likely that self-selection lead to many users on Comcast and Cox to volunteer for the experiment.

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By way of The Unofficial Apple Weblog comes this story of criminal ineptitude. A Macintosh user traced her stolen laptop and identified the criminals responsible by using nothing more than standard OS X features. Alerted by a friend that her missing laptop appeared to be online (because she was signed in to an instant messaging application, another case of COTS software doubling as security alarm) the owner used the Back To My Mac functionality to remotely connect to the machine. She turned on the built-in iSight camera and a few minutes later was rewarded with a live view of the perpetrators. Luckily they turned out to be familiar faces who attended a party at her residence earlier. Law enforcement must have gotten a good laugh out of this one.

Great story but this is still a case of the old adage about cybercrime: “we catch the dumb ones.” The thieves in this case made made several mistakes: for started they booted up the machine using the existing operating system. That alone would have given any protection software the chance to hop on any open wireless network in the vicinity and send out a cry for help to some server in the cloud. On top of that they decided to connect the laptop to a network, without a firewall to block incoming remote connections. The machine was left running in this state for several hours, not realizing that several application were designed to automatically login to services. Even without a user being able to remotely command the laptop, these logins alone would have created a trail of evidence linking them to the machine. This is how service providers often get dragged into theft cases. Suppose the user configured their OS to automatically login  a particular user after boot and also saved their password with Yahoo Messenger for auto-login. Each time the stolen machine is booted, Yahoo will see its IP address and anyone on the user’s contact list will notice user presence. That includes the original owner: most instant messaging applications are designed to log out the user from one machine after a more recent login at another machine. The clueless criminal is up against serious pitfalls.

But professionals would have been home safe: wiping out the drive or swapping in a new one is a good start. This implies the loss of any software on the machine so it’s understandable why perpetrators would be motivated to resell the machine intact. The market is awash in “laptop recovery” solutions, all of which are based on the idea of calling home when the laptop decides it has gone AWOL. Most of them depend on software running on the computer and a network connection. If the drive is wiped out or swapped with a new one, that protection is moot. Some of them also claim to protect the data on the drives– but that is best reserved for full volume encryption solutions such as Bitlocker or PGP. Tracking is not about the value of data on the drive, which can be protected cryptographically, but the cost of the hardware itself.

At least one product claims that it can use GSM for remotely tracking and destroying data on the laptop. (Interestingly their product literature presages the Mac story by suggesting that in some cases perpetrators picture can be recovered using an integrated camera on the laptop.) Having this independent channel is a major improvement. With stories of remote tracking in the news, would-be-thieves will become more reluctant to connect them to a machine. But the machine still has to be booted for the recovery software to function. If the drive is removed first, it can be mounted from another machine and the data recovered. There is no substitute for encryption in this case.

Even with hardware support, there is no reliable way of tracking a laptop. One can imagine implanting tracking beacons that report their location to a remote server. The problem is GPS requires line of sight to satellites (does not work indoors) and cellular connections require reliable reception– does not work in remote area and can be jammed.  Finally if the adversary suspects the existence of tracking devices, they could open the laptop and attempt to remove it completely. This is why LoJack devices are hidden in one of dozens of possible locations in a car. The internals of a laptop offer few opportunities for stashing away relatively bulky electronics.

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Does asking consumers for photo ID before accepting a credit card purchase help reduce fraud? Perhaps but the question is moot because doing that is a violation of the card network-merchant agreement, as made clear in a series of Consumerist posts. Actually it is more subtle: Visa and Mastercard make this a bit tricky for merchants. They are allowed to ask for identification, but they can not decline a purchase if the shopper refuses to show one.

This convoluted compromise must have been the result of conflicting incentives between the network and the merchants, with Visa/MC deciding to make a concession. On one side, merchants want to reduce the possibility of fraud because they risk getting stuck with charge-backs. Strangely enough bricks-and-mortar stores are in a better situation here because the would-be-criminal must walk in the door, produce the card and risk having their mugshot appear on hundreds of surveillance cameras. That’s much higher bar than the card-not-present or “CNP” type of transactions such as mail-order and Internet where the physical possession of the card can not be verified. The plastic is reduced to a bunch of easily phished digits and the fraudsters can sit comfortably in a different jurisdiction halfway around the world. Without proof that the customers was in possession of the card, the merchant is forced to issue the charge-back and absorb the loss. (In principle a bricks-and-mortar retailer is off the hook with a signed receipt; the issuing bank eats the loss.)

On the other side, card networks want to make the purchase experience as convenient and hassle-free as possible for card holders. Any transaction that does not complete is revenue missed out on the interchange fee. The card network recognizes that downside and does not want the merchant to arbitrarily prevent shoppers from using the card.

The result is the current mess: “you can ask for  ID but you can not require it.” This is banking on consumer ignorance or cooperation: the assumption is most people will either not know the rights granted by the merchant agreement or will simply choose to cooperate as the path of least resistance. If that is the plan, retailers need to do a better job at educating employees. More incidents of consumers threatened and cards confiscated can only lead to greater awareness, upsetting this uneasy truce.

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April 22nd was Earth Day and this prompted a good deal of reflection in the mainstream media about the problem of climate change and curbing emissions. One of the readily identifiable culprits for carbon emission is transportation. In the US it makes up for 25% of all CO2 emissions. This is also by far the easiest one to inspire ranting and hand-wringing because it is at least partially a direct reflection of individual choice. (Strangely enough the amount of energy used to warm the McMansion through a cold Northeast winter is somehow considered a fixed variable while SUVs continue to inspire wrath for their inefficiency.) There is increased focus on fuel efficiency and vehicle choice. For the first time, the issue has moved beyond moral overtones of saving the environment to simple economics: when gasoline is pushing $4/gallon fuel economy suddenly begins to make sense. US automobile manufacturers have been trying to outdo one another in green-washing their mediocre track records by embracing the language of virtue. Congress recently weighed in and decided to up the CAFE standards frozen since the 1980– a change the said manufacturers vehemently opposed.

Fuel economy is just one factor determining vehicle choice. (In fact it is also just one factor determining carbon emissions: the gas guzzler driven 5K miles a year still emits less than the hybrid driven 30K miles. The Earth does not care about the efficiency of pollution, only the total amount of carbon emitted.) New York Times had an interesting article in the April 13 Sunday paper titled Tiny saves gas, but big can save lives looking at the relationship between weight and safety. One of the standard arguments reliably trotted out by talking heads against CAFE standards is that any “artificial” increase in fuel economy beyond what the market itself has generated will force consumers into driving tiny, unsafe death traps. This argument is clearly bogus for a number of reasons– vehicles with the same weight drastically differ in fuel economy, so even if weight was the only factor determining safety, improvements in aerodynamics, engine and transmission would increase MPG while keeping the weight constant.

Nevertheless the NYT article does look at the underlying premise (“weight equals safety”) and confirms that it is for the most part correct, with some exceptions. It also dispels some of the misconceptions around comparison across categories. Commercials often feature glowing results from crash-tests run by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Small cars such as the Smart Fortwo and Honda Fit do very well here, often getting five-star rating. But as the article points out:

“In frontal crash tests the vehicles can be compared only against other vehicles of similar size and weight. That’s because in a frontal crash test the vehicle hitting a barrier provides the amount of striking force.”

In other words a 5-star rated small car is not necessarily better than a 3-star rated heavy one. This is basic physics: when two objects collide, the lighter one experiences greater acceleration forces. Side impact is a different story however:

“The impact comes from a ram that strikes the car. Because the striking force is the same for each test it is possible to compare vehicles of different sizes.”

In this case the Honda Fit with the “good” rating is a true improvement over the much heavier Ford Crown Victoria getting the “marginal” rating.

Because the safety against frontal impact remains a function of weight, this leads to a simple game-theory problem. If everyone had a vehicle of the same weight, then fuel economy could be tackled independently of safety. And arguably reducing that weight would improve safety because lighter vehicles are less likely to damage each other in a collision. But this is not a stable situation: anyone with a heavier vehicle will gain a competitive advantage over other drivers. The advantage is short-lived because others will reason the same way and opt for heavier automobiles. This is the prisoner’s dilemma on a large scale: if everyone “cooperated” by opting for low-weight, they would be better off in terms of safety. But avoiding the sucker payoff (namely being disadvantaged by having a lighter vehicle than the neighbors) creates an incentive for going with the heavy-weight option and when everyone does that they are all worse off collectively. The result is that any equilibrium state likely to emerge will be one where everyone is driving the heaviest possible vehicle they could have– assuming safety is the only criteria. It is not, and the increasing price of fuel is now pulling the market to a different equilibrium point. When most vehicles on the road become lighter simply as a result of high oil prices, the false dichotomy between fuel efficiency and safety may finally disappear from the repertoire of excuses for inaction.

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Book titles are meant to be provacative. During the dot-com boom when no company that had the word “internet” in its business plan could go wrong, two authors published Dow 36000: The new strategy for profiting from the coming rise in the stock market. This widely optimistic prediction became a Business Week best-seller. But the authors’ optimism was topped by another book called Dow 40000. That was still doom-and-gloom compared to Dow 100000 which trounced all competitors in the Business Week review aptly titled Talk about throwing the bull. Eight years after the bubble burst, the authors continue to provide amusement. Today the Dow Jones index hovers around 12750, about one third of the conservative 36K estimate while the book itself managed a whopping one-and-half start from a total of three reviewers on Barnes and Noble website.

Yet one equally outrageous prediction may be coming reality faster than expected. In February 2006 Steven Leeb and Glen Strathy published The coming economic collapse: how you can profit when oil costs $200 a barrel. Leeb is no stranger to playing the virtual Casandra when it comes to apocalyptic renditions of the peak oil theory. One year earlier he had co-authored Oil factor: protect yourself and profit from the coming energy, so the newer publication could be considered variation on a theme. But prominently committing to a specific price point in the title is a bold move– and as the authors of the Dow 36000 theory discovered, one that can make you look foolish quickly.

At the time light crude oil traded around $70, roughly where it had settled after the supply crunch following Hurricane Katrina. That was already considered exorbitant, prompting consumer indignation and posturing from aspiring politicians eager to call oil companies on the carpet for alleged price-gouging. Of all place in the US where cheap oil and even cheaper gasoline are considered foundational pillars, the prediction that this price would triple not as a temporary spike but a stable long-term inevitability would have been heresy.

Crude oil has recently cleared $125/barrel. This is not simply seasonal variation and the much maligned summer driving season. Between May 2007 and May 2008 alone it has more than doubled. The long standing weakness of the US dollar has played a part. But Goldman Sachs predicted the situation is not about to improve: one report recently set a target of $150-$200 barrel. For the authors of the oil-collapse book, it may be time for a revised second edition because their predictions will be given a reality check much sooner than expected.

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Security often makes for a convenient excuse for hidden agendas. An article from Gaming Today looks at the possibility of officially sanctioned modifications to the gaming console XBox 360 and concludes on a pessimistic note. Quoting a group manager from the XNA initiative:

“I’m a little disturbed when I think about other systems and people using what we call native code – code that goes right down to the metal – and then allowing people to run script mods on top of that without the right security measures. It could be really dangerous.”

This is no doubt a thinly-veiled reference to the Sony Playstation 3, which makes it very easy to install a different operating system: it’s there on the UI. Is that a dangerous security vulnerability? To answer that question, a different question must be posed: security of what? Dangerous to which persons?

It is well-known that one of the reasons for trying to lock down the hardware is that the consoles are sold at a loss. The revenue from games and additional services is expected to recoup that loss and move into the black on the balance sheet. If users could install Linux on the console, then they would have simply acquired a very capable general purpose computer on the cheap and opted out of the gaming ecosystem. This is a security problem all right, but it is the security of the revenue stream. It is not about user data.

Once that is acknowledged, the discussion quickly turns to the other bogey-man: cheating at online games. This is about to become the fifth horseman of the digital apocalypse, riding the coat-tails of rampant P2P content piracy horse. Stopping piracy was one of the arguments for closing down the open PC architecture and replacing it with the Trusted Computing Group vision where remote attestation capabilities would force users to run the “approved” software. Preventing cheating at online games falls into the same category and has also been used as an example for the benefits of attestation. If all the users in a multi-player game can prove they are running the official game software– instead of one tweaked and perhaps modified with cheating aids– the playing field is leveled. The same argument could be made in favor of locking down gaming consoles. Unofficial software can give the player an unfair edge; by design, each player’s computer receives a lot of information that the game keeps hidden, such as the location of other players. A modified client would not respect the rules of the game and could “see through walls” so to speak. Gary McGraw has done a lot of work on exploiting online games such as on Second Life. This is an example of what happens when game modifications are easy (because the software runs on PC) and the designers failed to appreciate the fact that user’s machine is outside the trust boundary.

This becomes the last refuge for arguing that modifications to a console pose a security threat. But even this is qualified: a user modifying their console at home is not a threat to the gamer ego of anyone else until they connect to a multi-player game. In that case the problem could have been framed as detecting modded consoles as opposed to preventing modifications in the first place, which also happens to be an easier problem.

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