ARTS & FARCES internet

Cryptography

When you access your bank accounts on the internet, your browser verifies the bank website’s certificate and if it checks out, encrypts the traffic between your browser and the bank’s website. The protocol providing this service is Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), now known as Transport Layer Security (TLS). Ryan Singel, writing for Wired, reports that security researcher Chris Soghoian discovered a company called Packet Forensics was marketing hardware to the US federal government designed to intercept the encrypted communication between a user’s browser and a secure website by using forged certificates. In security-speak this is what’s known as a man-in-the-middle exploit. You may think your interacting securely with your bank’s website, but maybe not. To use the device, a law enforcement or intelligence agency (or criminal) would have to obtain a fake certificate from one of the more than 100 certificate authorities. For more than 10 years Matt Blaze has been warning about SSL certificates and certificate authorities. In his recent article on this exploit, Blaze writes, “... commercial certificate authorties protect you from anyone from whom they are unwilling to take money. That turns out to be wrong; they don’t even do that much.” For these and other reasons, ARTS & FARCES issues its own SSL certificates.

ESRD

The US House of Representatives passed the health care bill and Firedoglake/Jane Hamsher have the best post-passage analysis I’ve found.

The New York Times published a really good interactive guide to how healthcare reform affects individuals. It provides adequate overviews for each situation, but I wish it was more complete.

Intellectual property

Glenn Fleishman has the most level-headed, cogent, and complete coverage of the international copyright cartel’s “three strikes” plan in his “Disconnection notice” for Publicola. The plan, already in place in France, and currently being negotiated secretly everywhere else, calls for permanent disconnection of any user’s internet connection after three allegations of copyright infringement. “This disconnection regime has a fundamental chilling effect on personal freedoms,” Fleishman writes.  “Not the non-existent freedom to share copyrighted media without permission, but the freedom from unfair processes that don’t allow appeal, rebuttal, or dispute, and which turn ordinary citizens into non-persons.” Meanwhile, Nate Anderson, writing for Ars Technica reports that since the three-strikes law was passed in France, “total infringing behavior has actually increased by three percent.”

Technology

Scott Rosenberg is having flashbacks. Publishers are falling all over themselves to herald the coming of Apple’s iPad as the final and true rescue pod for the media industry. In the early 1990s, the same publishers were making the same kind of noises about CD-ROM: The future of publishing was shiny bright. But CD-ROMs were a flop because most publishers treated the form as a big floppy disk; “... neither users nor producers ever had a solid handle on what the form was for,” writes Rosenberg. The excuse most every publisher parroted was “that every new medium goes through an infancy during which nobody really knows what they’re doing and everyone just reproduces the shape and style of existing media forms on the new platform,” according to Rosenberg. CD-ROMs virtually disappeared when the web started its rise. The difference? The web wasn’t read-only. Everyone suddenly had a voice. As I’ve said before, Apple is positioning the iPad heavily at consuming media, not creating it—the iWork suite notwithstanding.

User experience

In 1997, usability expert Jakob Nielsen retracted his guideline advising online editors to avoid scrolling pages. By then, Nielsen reasoned, users had “acclimated to scrolling on the web.” Nielsen’s most recent article on the subject, “Scrolling and Attention,” maintains “web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold.” Nielsen notes, however, that for long articles, scrolling is better than paging “because it’s easier for users to simply keep going down the page than it is to decide whether or not to click through for the next page of a fragmented article.” He stresses that the most important information should remain above the fold of all pages because users will only scroll below the fold if they find value in the information above the fold.