Thursday, January 19, 2012

Privacy, Piracy and Hacking

The Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times" seems about true at the moment.
As there is world wide, 24 hr blackout of Wikipedia (English site)in protest at the US SOPA Bill, other sites such as Flickr are encouraging users to blackout their photos also.
As a user of Blogspot I also wonder what these laws will do. Do I have to worry about linking to someone's else's content, even if they have an explicit "Share" link on their site? Am I supposed to ask permission every time I review a book and link to a picture of the book cover on the blog? If I quote an article on an online site will I be infringing US Copyright laws, if these bills pass? As a resident of one country outside the US, will my authorities crumble if they are asked to extradite me.
My content is my own, with occasional links to Youtube, published content in the news services and occasionally linked pictures with reference to the originator.
And yet, as someone who has recently been a victim of someone hacking into one of my services, provided online, do I allow criminal gangs and the odd young person to take my online information (identity) as easily as they seem to be able. What role does the social networking and service providers take in trying to preserve my identity information and freeze accounts that have been hacked? "Interesting" times indeed!
Do I need to ask all my providers to ensure I have 12 character passwords that have a mixture of Lower/uppercase/numbers/special characters by forcing this in the creation and maintenance of passwords. We do this at my library but it is noticeably absent on sites such as gmail, yahoo, blogspot, flickr, facebook etc. They tell you to have strong passwords but don't enforce it that much.
And what else can we do - ask for random number generators for each service, like my banks are now providing to (of course) Business customers!
The Electronic Frontier Foundation people have some interesting arguments! So does Crikey, though I would put piracy at a much higher level than 40%..

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Greenstone Girl