[Integrity]-I spy...Warcraft spy

Spyware is everywhere and as the net has grown, we have learned to be cautious to the point of paranoia against anything that might be a distributor of these malicious software, anything from e-mails to free or paid software. But how cautious do you need to be to be totally safe? What happens when corporations you trust, corporations overflowing with goodwill break all their trust and decides to go behind customers backs, planting spyware without notice? Thomas has allready written in his blog about the rootkit hidden in Sony’s copyprotected records. This time I write about the game company Blizzard.

With every game a bestseller and truckloads of fans, the company has plenty of goodwill to spend. In late 2005 Greg Hoglund, an engineer and Blizzard fan, discovered a spyware hidden in Blizzards latest success World of Warcraft. The spyware checked every program Hoglund had opened while running the game, it checked e-mail adresses of people on MSN, titles of word documents, even minimized applications, everything. Blizzard allready had it covered from a legal point of view though, as a small fine print in the EULA. Hoglund started to blog about his discoveries and the news (noone had apparently read and understood the EULA) soon reached the official forums of the game. The reactions wasn’t however what you’d expect. After some displeased grunting and a promise from Blizzard to not use the information for anything that would violate privacy, the players accepted the intrusion. At the time World of Warcraft had around 4,5 million users. Today that number exceeds 8,5 million. Have people gone numb and ignorant? Apparently peoples trust in some companys are limitless. Blizzard stated that the reason they employed the spyware was to make sure noone cheated in the game. Wouldn’t it then be easy to limit the spyware’s search area around executable files?

Nevermind the good will of the company or their original intended purpose for the spyware. In every case where spyware is used, the information gathered could be used in a way that we do not approve of. To trust blindly in a company and never question their methods can in my opinion never be a good thing.

As a funny sidenote, people have now found a way to work around Blizzard’s spyware och run cheating programs undetected. The hackers ironically used Sony’s infamous spyware/rootkit in order to mask their programs. The procedure is simple, just put your files in the right folder and add $sys$ to the filename. The trick is on you Blizzard!

[Integrity]-Darknet vs Lightnet

One of the great things about the internet is the possibility to act anonymously to a greater extent than in real life. This has made life a lot easier for people engage in activities ranging from political discussions to filesharing and has provided safehouse for people with differing opinions. This has changed a lot through the years though and as it is now, several nations in europe are introducing laws and regulations heavily jeopardizing the integrity of it’s citizens. Goverments are given full authority to gather and collect information of each everyones habits on the net. Companies are given the right to persecute people and violate their integrity for the sole sake of profit. Sweden is no exception to this. The human rights-group “Privacy International” has published a report on how well europe’s nations are handling peoples integrity each year since 1997. On the latest index of 2006, Sweden was left almost last on the list, only second to Brittain when it comes to violating peoples privacy. As a citizen of Sweden I had no idea things were this bad mostly because we are kept in the dark when it comes to these changes. Our politicians try to tone down every new law contributing to the big brother society we are clearly heading towards.

Slowly people are realizing this though, and countermeasures have been taken. As the open internet slowly turns into a censored, surveiled proporty, more and more people are turning to darknets. The traditional definition of a darknet is an isolated community of people trusting each other, closed to everyone else. Anonymity is maintained by keeping unwelcomed people out rendering surveillance impossible. Several different software tools that help setting up and using such a community are available freely in the internet. Most software can only handle small groups of people but some software, like Freenet is said to support millions of users.

On a larger scale, services are popping up that allows for anonymously switching IP. This enables users to have total anonymity independent of ISP. Some people say that this is a perfectly good solution in order to reestablish users integrity on the internet. The problem with these anonymous darknets is that they work indiscriminatly. Terrorists, rapists, pedophiles aswell as filesharers and political activists all hide under the same umbrella with no distinction between them from the outside. On the open internet, “lightnet” if you will, heavier criminals such as terrorists and sexual predators could still be traced. I believe the lobby organisations representing record companys and the movies industry are largely to blame for this devlopment. With so many filesharers scared to be persecuted the development of darknet services are inevitably driven forward. In many ways it is a choice between security and privacy. On one hand we have a big brother society monitoring our every move, on the other, a lawless darknet where criminals do as they please. At this time I see no middle path. As more people will understand the extent of the privacy invasion currently being performed, whether it is a lobbyorganisation looking for filesharers, a marketing company logging your behavior or a goverment looking for unwanted opinions, they will consider darknets as a viable option.

Privacy is a precious thing and as long as darknets are our only option, I am totally for it. Question is what it will take for our goverment to fully understand darknets potential. Are they really ready to lose what little controll they still have left?

Tor - online anonymity
Privacy International
Relakks - ip-switcher
Freenet - online anonymity

[Digital Resistance]-Internet, the grey zone

When I first started to write about digital resistance through websites I mixed up digital resistance with ethics. Instead of thinking about what this technology means for the people that uses it to protest, I started to debate with myself wheter or not the medium in itself was ethically viable. I realize I made the same mistake with the post about Floodnet. That debate is going nowhere. Ethics have nothing to do specificly with internet webpages. Just as any medium, be it books, movies, posters or games, it may contain questionable content. But content is protected under the freedom of speech and rightfully so. The question is not what ethics have to do with the web but rather how the web has affected the way we spread and recieve ethically charged content. That is a question I am much more comfortable with.

I feel amazed every day at what a beast the internet has become. News become history in a matter of seconds, we are forced to devour information in such a ridiculous speed it is a wonder anything sticks at all. I think this flow is what define internet as a united medium best, no matter if we’re dealing with filesharing or a passive webpage about digital resistance. It has made so many things possible it’s hard to even begin thinking about it. Still, a digital resistance movement close to me, since I was there from the beginning and saw it happen, would have to be the rise of Sweden´s Pirate Party. Their organisation wouldn’t be possible without the internet. Everything happened in a matter of hours, days. The first 6 hours the project was announced, their site had over 75.000 hits. They now have close to 9.000 members in their fold and an infrastructure allmost exclusively based around the internet.

But the information flow can be both a good and a bad thing. While news travel fast on the internet I believe we aren’t as fast to filter it. I think we are drowning in information and it’s getting harder to find the right one. I read Sofies blog yesterday and she pointed out something something absurd but true. We have too much information to form any clear opinion. We seldom encounter anything anymore that is clearly “good” or “evil”. A loving single father can still be a murderer, bankrupting a “evil” company will leave thousands innocent people unemployed, which is better, improving eldercare or daycare? These are issues that the internet, with it’s flow of information, is extremely good at enlighting and it states a problem with resistance based content on websites: which is one to believe?

While there is no doubt the internet with it’s speed and sheer amount of information is ideal to spread a message and form a community around, I think increasingly less people are willing to choose any one side with all the grey zones present.

[Digital Resistance]-Zapatista Floodnet

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Blog started!

Well, my first blog is officially started. This blog will serve as a gathering place for my thoughts around ethic issues in technology during a class, revolving around the very same subject. That is also the reason I chose the name "Biotech is godzilla". This is a song written by the band Sepultura, dealing with what happens when bio technology, or for that matter all technology, is driven forward by interests too strongly rooted in profit. Human lives on one side of the scale, big bags of money on the other. In the hands of the wrong people, that scale is easily tipped to the wrong side...

"Biotech is godzilla"

/Olof