How the Internet’s Founders Feel About The NSA Scandal

As the co-fathers of the Internet, Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn tend to be pretty protective of their digital masterpiece. Both were early Defense Department engineers of the communications architecture that underlies the modern Internet, and both tend be outspoken about threats to a free and open information superhighway. For instance, when a United Nations body, the Internet Telecommunications Union, tried to assert more control over Internet governance, Cerf was immediately dispatched to Washington D.C. to preempt the power grab.

The National Security spying scandal has, likewise, been hailed as a global threat to privacy and the Internet itself. In a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times, Cerf and Kahn had a more reserved concern for government surveillance.

Here is Cerf on the NSA:

Q. Edward Snowden’s actions have raised a new storm of controversy about the role of the Internet. Is it a significant new challenge to an open and global Internet?
A. The answer is no, I don’t think so. There are some similar analogues in history. The French historically copied every telex or every telegram that you sent, and they shared it with businesses in order to remain competitive. And when that finally became apparent, it didn’t shut down the telegraph system.

The Snowden revelations will increase interest in end-to-end cryptography for encrypting information both in transit and at rest. For many of us, including me, who believe that is an important capacity to have, this little crisis may be the trigger that induces people to spend time and energy learning how to use it.

To give a bit of background, Cerf has suggested that privacy is a relatively new concept (and, historically, he’s correct). During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln collected all telegrams, in a move that has been compared to the modern surveillance state. It appears that this type of mass surveillance, followed by new privacy laws, is typical in American history.

Khan seemed far more reserved in opining how the NSA affects privacy:

Q: Is there a solution to challenges of privacy and security?
In the 1990s when I was on the National Internet Infrastructure Advisory Committee, Al Gore showed up as vice president, and he made an impassioned pitch for Clipper chip

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I, Spammer

As I approach the half-way mark of my crowdfunding project, I wanted to address the thing that makes me feel the worst about this whole process: the spam. As I intimated in in my last post, moving from passive content producer to active content salesperson is hard. As someone used to fire-and-forget posting, convincing others to buy something I’ve built is a hard thing to do. And the best way to do it, sadly, is through spam.

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Dell Looks To Set A New Tone For Its Private Life

The story of Dell is business legend: How a kid starting in his dorm room, hiding computer parts in the bathroom when his parents visited, managed to build a computing giant that employs over 100,000 people.

The Dell saga added a new chapter this year, when its founder and Silver Lake took it private, borrowing $2 billion of Microsoft’s foreign cash in the process.

The deal that closed on October 30th valued the company at $24.9 billion. Tucked away from the public eye, and released from the quarterly trial of investor expectations, Dell may now have the flexibility to retool its troubled PC business, and invest in new areas that could sport better margins.

Now that Dell has crossed the public-private Rubicon, it appears ready to recultivate its image. The firm has released a new video that compares its history to that of other well-known technology companies, like Dropbox. The clip has a clear point: Dell was started just like the other technology companies that you respect. The implication is that it retains that DNA.

A large company freed from quarterly earnings reports is a company unbound from many of its prior shackles. Dell bought its freedom, and we now get to see what it will do with it.

Top Image Credit: Flickr

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The Best iOS And Android Apps Of 2013

Congratulations, Planet Earth! We made it another 365 days without crashing into the sun. Go team!

It’s the end of the year, and that means three things: booze, ridiculous sunglasses with numbers on them, and lists. Lots and lots of lists. You’ve seen our list of best/worst gadgets of the year. Up next? The Best Mobile Apps Of 2013.

Now, to be clear: there’s not a lot of science here. If we were going by the raw numbers, some Angry Birds spin-off would be the top app every year for the rest of eternity. Instead, these are the favorites picked by a bunch of geeks who write about this stuff all day, every day. We’ve seen the good, the bad, and the terrible — and after some heated debate, these apps emerged as the year’s champs.

We tried to stick with apps that launched in 2013, or, in some cases, the tail end of 2012. While many of the apps are cross-platform and we considered that a massively positive bulletpoint, we didn’t eliminate any of our top picks just because they were only on one platform or the other. Some are iOS only. Some are Android only. That’s just the way it goes.

Think we missed something? Got a favorite? Let us know down in the comments.

In no particular order:

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Confirmed: Snapchat Hack Not A Hoax, 4.6M Usernames And Numbers Published

A site called SnapchatDB.info has saved usernames and phone numbers for 4.6 million accounts and made the information available for download. In a statement to us, SnapchatDB says that it got the information through a recently identified and patched Snapchat exploit and that it is making the data available in an effort to convince the messaging app to beef up its security. We’ve also reached out to Snapchat.

SnapchatDB said:

Our motivation behind the release was to raise the public awareness around the issue, and also put public pressure on Snapchat to get this exploit fixed. It is understandable that tech startups have limited resources but security and privacy should not be a secondary goal. Security matters as much as user experience does.

We used a modified version of gibsonsec’s exploit/method. Snapchat
could have easily avoided that disclosure by replying to Gibsonsec’s private communications, yet they didn’t. Even long after that disclosure, Snapchat was reluctant to taking the necessary steps to secure user data. Once we started scraping on a large scale, they decided to implement very minor obstacles, which were still far from enough. Even now the exploit persists. It is still possible to scrape this data on a large scale. Their latest changes are still not too hard to circumvent.

We wanted to minimize spam and abuse that may arise from this release. Our main goal is to raise public awareness on how reckless many internet companies are with user information. It is a secondary goal for them, and that should not be the case. You wouldn’t want to eat at a restaurant that spends millions on decoration, but barely anything on cleanliness.

Earlier we speculated that SnapchatDB might be a hoax meant to call attention to the app’s security issues but, as it turns out, it’s real–at least one member of our editorial team has been affected. A reader also told us he found his own number, that of several friends and Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel in the list. On Hacker News, several people have had trouble downloading the data files (I just got an error message for both of them, but that may be because of high traffic), but a Jailbreak subreddit user who saw the list said that only numbers in some parts of the U.S. have been published so far. If you have not been able to download the list, you can use this site created by developer Robbie Trencheny to see if your username was included.

SnapchatDB said it “censored the last two digits of the phone numbers” in order to “minimize spam and abuse,” but it might still release the unfiltered data, including millions of phone numbers.

The Next Web did a WHOIS lookup on SnapchatDB’s domain and found it was created just yesterday on December 31. The registrant’s name is protected, but its mailing address and contact number are both listed in Panama.

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Google To Close Bump And Flock, Its Recently Acquired File Sharing Apps

Bump and Flock, the file sharing apps Google acquired last fall, will be shut down by the end of this month. Both apps will stop working and be removed from Google Play and the App Store on January 31, Bump confirmed on its blog today.

Google bought Bump Technologies, which make both apps, back in September, and Android Police reports that work on the app appeared to stop shortly after the acquisition.

Bump, which let users tap phones together to share contacts and other files, raised nearly $20 million and enjoyed high download rates, but failed to monetize successfully as other easy, mobile-friendly ways to share information were developed, most notably Apple’s AirDrop for iOS 7. Flock is a collaborative photo-sharing app Bump Technologies released in 2012.

As TechCrunch’s Josh Constine wrote in September, the sale wasn’t an acquihire, but Google might plan to turn Flock into part of Google

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Why I Lost Faith In Bitcoin As A Money Transfer Protocol

As 2013 came to an end, many reflected on last year’s biggest tech news — and Bitcoin was a serious contender. But the main question remains: why are people interested in Bitcoin?

This whole debate reappeared when Charlie Stross stated that “Bitcoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind — to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions.” Paul Krugman then quoted his post, neither denying nor approving this thought.

But Chris Dixon (and Fred Wilson in the comment section) reiterated their strong interest in Bitcoin while sharing that they are both Democrats.

If major Bitcoin enthusiasts don’t have any political agenda in mind, then what is the future of Bitcoin? At its heart, Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency that doesn’t rely on any central bank. Bitcoins are just a chain of characters defined by algorithmic rules, and transactions are handled by the network of miners.

Yet, in a month’s time, the value of a bitcoin went from $200 to more than $1,000 on all the exchanges. In other words, it is as volatile as it can get. Right now, there are only around 12 million of bitcoins in circulation, and many Bitcoin holders are recent converts that buy and sell every day. So how could you think about using bitcoins to pay the rent? You could simply hold your bitcoins and expect to triple your wallet value in a couple of weeks instead.

That’s why I believe Bitcoin isn’t the next world currency. Bitcoin’s true purpose is not what everyone originally expected — you won’t buy a pizza in bitcoins anytime soon. Moreover, Bitcoin won’t be able to remain an unregulated currency for long.

So Bitcoin’s true purpose lies somewhere else. As Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment network, you don’t need any banking institution to make large transfers. Bitcoin could become the first meta-currency that sits on top of traditional currencies, the common language between USD and EUR. That’s what Dixon finds interesting, Bitcoin is as much a money transfer protocol as a currency. And it has the potential of disrupting the traditional banking system.

Replacing Forex Transactions With Bitcoin

As I live in France and work for an American company, I thought I would be the perfect candidate for this particular use case. I tried to use Bitcoin to transfer a small amount of money between the U.S. and France. At first, I purchased bitcoins using Coinbase and my U.S. bank account (no fee). The process was very easy, but because I don’t meet the requirements to make instant purchases, I had to wait about a week before I could actually do anything with my bitcoins. Coinbase had to verify the transaction first.

In that period of time, bitcoins went from about $850 a bitcoin to more than $1,000, then back to $700 — all I could do was sitting back and enjoying the ride. Then, when I finally got my bitcoins, I transfered them to Bitstamp in a couple of hours (no fee) — it was flawless and a great example of the beauty of Bitcoin. Finally, I transfered my bitcoins to my French account ($1.24 fee to convert into EUR with a very good conversion rate). I had to wait a few days before getting my money because of the traditional banking system.

Overall, it was a painful experience, even more painful than using traditional foreign exchange services. But more importantly, I don’t see how I could trust Bitcoin as a money transfer protocol with such a high volatility. Fees were much lower, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t know how much money you will get on your bank account in the end.

A couple of weeks ago, Bitcoin’s value went from more than $1,100 to around $650 in a few hours, because of a new rule in China. You can’t use Bitcoin for serious amounts of money if there is a chance of losing 40 percent of your money overnight.

As long as Bitcoin remains a young and volatile currency, Bitcoin’s mechanisms will remain beautiful on paper. Using it for real world transactions would be crazy, and I think we are still a couple of years away from getting a stable Bitcoin that can be trusted. Until then, using Bitcoin will remain a wild ride — it’s definitely fun, but don’t take Bitcoin seriously just yet.

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