Wednesday: Wandering

All that is gold does not glitter; not all those who wander are lost.

— excerpt, The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien

It’s a lovely summer day here, cool and dry. Perfect to go walkabout, which I will do straight away after this post.

Hackety-hack-hack, Jack

• Spearphishing method used on HRC and DNC revealed by security firm (SecureWorks) — Here’s their report, but read this Twitter thread if you don’t think you can handle the more detailed version. In short, best practice: DON’T CLICK ON SHORTENED LINKS using services like Bitly, which mask the underlying URL.
• Researchers show speakerless computers can be hacked by listening to fans (arXiv.org) — Air-gapping a computer may not be enough if hackers can listen to fan operation to obtain information. I’ll have to check, but this may be the second such study.
• Another massive U.S. voter database breached (Naked Security) — This time 154 million voters’ data exposed, revealing all manner of details. 154M is larger than the number of voters in the 2012 general election, though smaller than the 191M voters’ records breached in December. At least this time the database owner slammed the breach shut once they were notified of the hole by researcher Chris Vickery. Nobody’s fessed up to owning the database involved in the the December breach yet.
• Speaking of Vickery: Terrorism databased leaked (Reddit) — Thomson-Reuters’ database used by governments and banks to identify and monitor terrorism suspects was leaked (left open?) by a third party. Vickery contacted Thomson-Reuters which responded promptly and closed the leak. Maybe some folks need to put Vickery on retainer…
• Different kind of hack: Trump campaign hitting up overseas MPs for cash? Or is he? (Scotsman) — There are reports that Trump’s campaign sent fundraising emails received by elected representatives in the UK and Iceland. Based on what we know now about the spearphishing of HRC and DNC, has anybody thought to do forensics on these emails, especially since government officials are so willing to share them widely? Using these kinds of emails would be a particularly productive method to spearphish government and media at the same time, as well as map relationships. Oh, and sow dissension inside the Trump family, urm, campaign. On the other hand, lack of response from Trump and team suggests it’s all Trump.

Makers making, takers taking

• Apple granted a patent to block photo-taking (9to5Mac) — The technology relies on detecting infrared signals emitted when cameras are used. There’s another use for the technology: content can be triggered to play when infrared signal is detected.
• Government suppressing inventions as military secrets (Bloomberg) — There’s merit to this, preventing development of products which may undermine national security. But like bug bounties, it might be worth paying folks who identify methods to breach security; it’s a lot cheaper than an actual breach, and a bargain compared to research detecting the same.
• Google wants to make its own smartphone (Telegraph-UK) — This is an effort apart from development of the modular Ara device, and an odd move after ditching Motorola. Some tech industry folks say this doesn’t make sense. IMO, there’s one big reason why it’d be worth building a new smartphone from the ground up: security. Google can’t buy an existing manufacturer without a security risk.
• Phonemaker ZTE’s spanking for Iran sanction violations deferred (Reuters) — This seems kind of odd; U.S. Commerce department agreed to a reprieve if ZTE cooperated with the government. But then think about the issue of security in phone manufacturing and it makes some sense.

A-brisket, a Brexit

• EU health commissioner Andriukaitis’ response to Nigel Farage’s insulting remarks (European Commission) — Farage prefaced his speech to European Commissioners yesterday by saying “Most of you have never done a proper day’s work in your life.” Nice way to win friends and influence people, huh? Dr. Vytenis Andriukaitis is kinder than racist wanker Farage deserves.
• Analysis of next couple years post-Brexit (Twitter) — Alex White, Director of Country Analysis at the Economist Intelligence Unit, offers what he says is “a moderate/constructive call” with “Risks definitely to the downside not to the upside.” It’s very ugly, hate to see what a more extreme view would look like. A pity so many Leave voters will never read him.

Follow-up: Facebook effery
Looks like Facebook’s thrown in the towel on users’ privacy altogether, opening personal profiles in a way that precludes anonymous browsing. Makes the flip-flop on users’ location look even more sketchy. (I can’t tell you anymore about this from personal experience because I gave up on Facebook several years ago.)

Happy hump day!

The Stalker Outside Your Window: The NSA and a Belated Horror Story

[photo: Gwen’s River City Images via Flickr]

It’s a shame Halloween has already come and gone. The reaction to Monday’s Washington Post The Switch blogpost reminds of a particularly scary horror story, in which a young woman alone in a home receives vicious, threatening calls.

There’s a sense of security vested in the idea that the caller is outside the house and the woman is tucked safely in the bosom of her home. Phew, she’s safe; nothing to see here, move along…

In reality the caller is camped directly outside the woman’s window, watching every move she makes even as she assures herself that everything is fine.

After a tepid reaction to the initial reporting last week, most media and their audience took very little notice of the Washington Post’s followup piece — what a pity, as it was the singular voice confirming the threat sits immediately outside the window.

Your window, as it were, if you have an account with either Yahoo or Google and use their products. The National Security Agency has access to users’ content inside the corporate fenceline for each of these social media firms, greasy nose pressed to glass while peering in the users’ windows.

There’s more to story, one might suspect, which has yet to be reported. The disclosure that the NSA’s slides reflected Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) unique to Google and Yahoo internal systems is only part of the picture, though this should be quite frightening as it is.

Access to proprietary RPCs means — at a minimum — that the NSA has:

1) Access to content and commands moving in and out of Google’s and Yahoo’s servers, between their own servers — the closest thing to actually being inside these corporations’ servers.

2) With these RPCs, the NSA has the ability to construct remote login access to the servers without the businesses’ awareness. RPCs by their nature require remote access login permissions.

3) Construction through reverse engineering of proprietary RPCs could be performed without any other governmental bodies’ awareness, assuming the committees responsible for oversight did not explicitly authorize access to and use of RPCs during engineering of the MUSCULAR/SERENDIPITY/MARINA and other related tapping/monitoring/collection applications.

4) All users’ login requests are a form of RPC — every single account holder’s login may have been gathered. This includes government employees and elected officials as well as journalists who may have alternate accounts in either Gmail or Yahoo mail that they use as a backup in case their primary government/business account fails, or in the case of journalists, as a backchannel for handling news tips.

5) The public may not understand, nor may they ever receive adequate clarification with regard to the breadth of NSA’s access over time to Google’s and Yahoo’s content, given the rolling application of masking methodology which ostensibly protected non-targets’ data. In 2006, Google researchers disclosed that as many as 60 applications used “Bigtable” [PDF] — a proprietary distributed storage system for structured data. That number is likely larger today, but some applications have come and gone since then. What Google applications don’t use Bigtable, and are otherwise not included in the “defeat” list believed to be the applications excluded from tapping/monitoring/collection applications? We don’t know on the face of it; Google engineers do, of course, though they may not be able to communicate this publicly for proprietary and security reasons. Further, what content was monitored and collected from the initial tap to today’s partially masked state? There was a slow ramp up of the defeat list over time; the applications on the list to be masked off from NSA’s screening/collection were not present initially. We can only assume that the same challenges exist with Yahoo’s content and applications — or worse, given the business’s somewhat disorganized approach to its application portfolio up until 2012.

6) The data screened/collected including the RPCs may also include metadata — it may indicate users’ location by IP address, which in some cases is the same as a physical address. It’s not at all clear this was masked out for any user.

7) To bypass the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)  employed to secure transmissions between users and the social media businesses’ servers, the NSA tapped either private and/or leased lines directly between servers, not the public transmission lines between users and servers, in order to access Google’s and Yahoo’s content as it moved between servers. This is yet another example of the NSA ignoring property rights, though they may claim that because the taps were located outside the US they were not limited by US law.

In spite of these challenges, the media and the public continue on blithely as if there were no new problems revealed this last week with regard to the NSA’s behavior.

What should truly shake them up is not merely the threats revealed so far, or the initial angry reaction of Google engineers shared by the Washington Post in the 30-OCT revelatory article.

It’s the persistent and increasing anger of Google engineers who are now going public, though speaking not for Google but as individuals about the breach of Google’s systems by the NSA. The degree of anger suggests there is far more to this story than appears on the surface. What would torque off engineers enough to be so deeply angry, so very openly?

As @Public_Archive tweeted earlier this week,

We’ve reached a point in history where the writings of JG Ballard & Philip K Dick have clattered into the quotidian realm of realism.

Be afraid; the horror is no longer a mere story. Happy much-belated Halloween.

Monday Morning: Falling

This morning feels like a fall from great height — disorienting yet certain to end only one way.

Should have rolled over and gone back to sleep instead of mixing it up about politics during the wee hours. ~ yawn ~

The embedded video actually launches a playlist of Afro Celt Sound System. They’re a favorite mood lifter, a perfect example of diverse music styles meeting to create something even more special. Cuts I’ve worn out besides When You’re Falling (with Peter Gabriel) are Lagan, Life Begin Again (both with Robert Plant), and North — yes, I think my favorite album is Volume 3 – Further in Time.

Let’s fall forward.

Oracle v. Google: The most important technology case not about privacy and security
Yet another reminder/disclosure before I start on this case: I own $GOOG, $GOOGL, and $AAPL. I do not own $ORCL or $MSFT, nor did I ever own Sun before it was acquired.

That said, Oracle v. Google is about the gift economy, the march of time and its effect on technology companies, and patent/intellectual property trolling as a business model. The gift economy I’ve followed for years; I was hired to provide competitive intelligence on open source software because the company seeking my services felt it was a threat to their business. And it was, it very much was, though the threat changed over the last decade from free open source software (FOSS) to free software as a service (SaaS) provided with cloud storage.

In a nutshell, Oracle is suing Google for $9 billion — the amount it feels it is due as the heir to Java, acquired when it bought the former Sun Microsystems in 2010. You’ll recall that Sun Micro was once a moderately competitive producer of servers and the creator of open source operating system OpenSolaris (based on Solaris Unix) as well as Java.

Java is a software language used as an alternative to C and C++. Its creators at Sun wanted “Write Once, Run Anywhere” capability so that software written in Java could run on any hardware platform. Contrast this to Microsoft software which runs on Windows-compatible PCs only. Sun did not sell Java licenses but instead sold developers’ kits to encourage the propagation of both the language and its Java-friendly hardware and Solaris Unix operating system. Java was a loss leader offering — like the dozen eggs for free if your total grocery order is $50 or more. This is the gift economy at work.

Java’s creation was initially a response to the lock-in of the desktop PC environment. However, IBM began using Java, allowing the same language to be used on everything from its mainframes to IBM-supported handheld devices.

Handheld devices now include smartphones and tablets running the Android operating system, a variant of Linux now owned by Google after its acquisition of Android, Inc. in 2005. Android’s popularity ate away at cellphone market share running Symbian, Nokia OS, and Windows-based mobile OS. Approximately 80% of the world’s smartphones now run on Android and with it Java application programming interfaces (Java APIs). It’s this installed user base from which Oracle insists it deserves a cut of the revenues.

Oracle is a software company, though unless you are in a larger enterprise, you’ve probably not used their products. Initially, a relational database management system company, over time Oracle has purchased a number of middleware businesses which rely on databases. Like PeopleSoft, a human resource management software — human resource information in a database, manipulated and managed by a middleware application above it. It has also acquired software and businesses with which its products once competed. Innobase, an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) developer, was acquired in 2005; its application was based on MySQL, another open-source RDBMS.

MySQL’s parent company MySQL AB was itself purchased by Sun in 2008, and acquired by Oracle with Sun in 2010. MySQL remains open source and underpins many commonly used applications used across the internet, though Oracle is now its owner/developer.

You can see the ownership chain gets incredibly messy over time. But it’s also easy to see that Oracle is predatory; its business model relies on consuming other businesses to ensure the survival of its underlying database software, not merely to flesh out its offerings. It has acquired software to build an enterprise stack, or it buys nascent threats to its database software and closes them off in a way to ensure no leak of profit-making opportunities (ex: killing OpenSolaris, the FOSS version of Sun’s Solaris operating system). It also buys businesses and applications used to monitor intellectual property and competitive intelligence.

Not a surprise, really, when one considers the founders — Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates — all once worked on a CIA project code-named Oracle.

A test of the gift economy and the open source movement are at the heart of this case. FOSS relies on it, and now the internet does, too. Anyone connecting to the internet is touched by software and hardware consisting of or shaped by FOSS. Many believe the roots of the open source movement are in software, but the underlying premise goes even further back, to the late 1700s and the first freedom of information law (Sweden’s Freedom of the Press Act, c. 1766). Based on freedom of information, some contemporary governments demand FOSS as a means to ensure citizens have access to information without regard to proprietary business models.

Read any of the links above and your head will spin with the Byzantine convolutions of the software industry over the last two decades. Add the snark-laden quirks of geekdom shaping the decision-making process — quirks which are inside baseball and define one’s belonging to the industry.

Top it off with the inexorable co-development and emergence of the gift economy, and it’s utterly beyond the comprehension of the average Joe or Josephine on the street. Unfortunately, Joe and Josephine are seated as jurors, directed by an equally clueless judge appointed by a neoliberal president (who likewise cannot grok anything created and given to benefit all without some immediate upfront cost benefit in an offshore account). The concepts behind APIs are particularly hard for the judge and jury to understand, exacerbated by testimony from people who did not rise to the top of their industry because of their facility with spoken English.

Read Sarah Jeong’s piece in Motherboard about this case. Read others, like the overview at Ars Technica (read the enlightening comments, too), but keep in mind that everyone who has a stake in the success of technology also has an agenda. Sometimes it’s as simple as their stock portfolio or the type of phone they hold in their hand.

Sometimes their agenda is more complex and based on the concepts of free open-source software and the gift economy. What is open-source if it can be bought and retroactively used as a profit center long after the horses have been freed from the barn? What did the progenitors and decades of collaborators intend Java to be: a profit center in itself for a company they couldn’t see coming more than a decade later, or a means by which users/owners could freely choose more than a single software or hardware company to accomplish their tasks?

And will this case discourage and suppress the explosion of technology developed using a variety of open source licenses?

Phew, this was more than I expected to write about this. Swamped my usual morning roundup, which I’ll save for tomorrow morning.

One more thing: after reading the above about the legal war between the Titans of Technology, you might find this speculative mythological fiction rather entertaining. Where do these Titans fit in this mythology?

Tuesday Morning: Garbage in, Garbage out

Why’d I pick this music video, besides the fact I like the tune? Oh, no reason at all other than it’s trash day again.

Speaking of trash…

Facebook furor just frothy foam?
I didn’t add yesterday’s Gizmodo piece on Facebook’s news curation yesterday or the earlier May 3 piece because I thought the work was sketchy. Why?

• The entire curation system appears to be contractors — Where is a Facebook employee in this process?
  

  “…News curators aren’t Facebook employees—they’re contractors. One former team member said they received benefits including limited medical insurance, paid time off after 6 months and transit reimbursement, but were otherwise excluded from the culture and perks of working at Facebook. […] When the curators, hired by companies like BCForward and Pro Unlimited (which are then subcontracted through Accenture to provide workers for Facebook), arrive at work each day, they read through a list of trending topics ranked by Facebook’s algorithm from most popular (or most engaged) to least. The curators then determine the news story the terms are related to.

  The news curation team writes headlines for each of the topics, along with a three-sentence summary of the news story it’s pegged to, and choose an image or Facebook video to attach to the topic. The news curator also chooses the “most substantive post” to summarize the topic, usually from a news website. […] News curators also have the power to “deactivate” (or blacklist) a trending topic—a power that those we spoke to exercised on a daily basis. …” (emphasis mine)

  I see a Facebook-generated algorithm, but no direct employees in the process — only curator-contractors.

• Sources may have a beef with Facebook — This doesn’t sound like a happy work environment, does it?
  

  “…Over time, the work became increasingly demanding, and Facebook’s trending news team started to look more and more like the worst stereotypes of a digital media content farm.

  […]

  Burnout was rampant. ‘Most of the original team isn’t there anymore,’ said another former news curator. ‘It was a stop-gap for them. Most of the people were straight out of [journalism school]. At least one of them was fired. Most of them quit or were hired by other news outlets.’ …” (emphasis mine)

  It’s not as if unhappy contractors won’t have newsworthy tips, but what about unhappy Facebook employees? Where are they in either of Gizmodo’s pieces?

• Details in the reporting reveal bias in the complainant(s) — So far I see one reference to a conservative curator, not multiple conservative curators.
  

  “Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project.

  […]

  Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work. …”

  Note the use of “a” in front of “former journalist” and “the” in front of “conservative curator.” (Note also Gizmodo apparently needs a spell check app.)

• No named sources confirming the validity of the complaints or other facts in Gizmodo’s reporting — Again, where are Facebook employees? What about feedback from any of the companies supplying contractors; did they not hear complaints from contractors they placed? There aren’t any apparent attempts to contact them to find out, let alone anonymous confirmation from these contract companies. There are updates to the piece yesterday afternoon and this morning, including feedback from Vice President of Search at Facebook, Tom Stocky, which had been posted at Facebook. Something about the lack of direct or detailed feedback to Gizmodo seems off.
• Though named in the first of two articles, Facebook’s managing editor Benjamin Wagner does not appear to have been asked for comment. The May 3 piece quotes an unnamed Facebook spokesperson:
  

  When asked about the trending news team and its future, a Facebook spokesperson said, “We don’t comment on rumor or speculation. As with all contractors, the trending review team contractors are fairly compensated and receive appropriate benefits.”

I’m disappointed that other news outlets picked up Gizmodo’s work without doing much analysis or followup. Reuters, for example, even parrots the same phrasing Gizmodo used, referring to the news curators as “Facebook workers” and not contract employees or contractors. Because of this ridiculous unquestioning regurgitation by outlets generally better than this, I felt compelled to write about my concerns.

And then there’s Gizmodo itself, which made a point of tweeting its report was trending on Facebook. Does Gizmodo have a beef with Facebook, too? Has it been curated out of Facebook’s news feed? Are these two pieces really about Facebook’s laundering of Gizmodo?

I don’t know; I can’t tell you because I don’t use Facebook. Not going to start now because of Gizmodo’s sketchy reporting on Facebook, of all things.

Miscellany
Just some odd bits read because today is as themeless as yesterday — lots of garbage out there.

• SAS Confidential: Unpacking @AcademicsSay, Part 1 (SAS blog) — This is just good fun and yet it’s an incredibly educational collection of insights into the creation of a popular microblog. Worth a read.
• Five Solomon Islands have sunk below sea level (CNN) — This climate change stuff isn’t bullshit. It’s affecting entire cultures with permanent displacement beginning now.
• FCC and FTC want security patches from wireless providers yesterday (CNET) — If not sooner. Maybe these patches would have been done already if these firms hadn’t needed to redirect resources to responding to USDOJ’s encroachment on encryption…
• Amazon’s new Video Direct goes after Google’s YouTube’s user-created videos (Investor’s Business Daily) — Amazon’s throwing out some monetary chum, too, offering to split a monthly pot of $1M among the creators of most popular videos. This could rock indie film distribution.

Skepticism: I haz it
As I read coverage about news reporting and social media leading up to the general election, I also keep in the back of my mind this Bloomberg report, How to Hack an Election:

As for Sepúlveda, his insight was to understand that voters trusted what they thought were spontaneous expressions of real people on social media more than they did experts on television and in newspapers. […] On the question of whether the U.S. presidential campaign is being tampered with, he is unequivocal. “I’m 100 percent sure it is,” he says.

Be more skeptical. See you tomorrow morning!

Friday Morning: This Thing Called Life

It’s Friday, when we usually cover a different jazz genre. But we’re playing these sorry cards we’ve been dealt this week and observing the passing of a great artist.

We’ll probably all be sick of seeing this same video, but it is one of the very few of Prince available for embedding with appropriate intellectual property rights preserved. It’s a result of Prince’s tenacious control over his artistic product that we won’t have ready access to his past performances, but this same tenacity taught many artists how to protect their interests.

It’s worth the hour and a quarter to watch the documentary Prince in the 1980s; the enormity of his talent can’t be understood without reactions by professionals to his abilities.

The way his voice slides easily into high registers at 05:44, his guitar playing beginning at 06:53, offer us just the smallest glimpses of his spectacular gifts.

Good night, sweet Prince, may flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Great Google-y moogley

• European Community’s Antitrust Commission issued a Statement of Objections regarding perceived breaches of antitrust laws by Google’s Android operating system (European Commission press release) — The EU has a problem with Android’s ~90% market share in some member states. They may have a tough time with their case as the EU did very little to preserve the Nokia Symbian OS when Microsoft bought Nokia phone business. Their point about lack of application interoperability and portability between mobile devices is also weak as they did not make that case with Windows-based applications on personal computers. Further, Google has been aggressive to the point of annoyance in its efforts to segregate Android and Google apps — I can attest to this, having a handful of Android devices which have required irritating application upgrades to facilitate this shift over the last year and a half. This will be an interesting case to watch.
• The second annual Android Security Report was released on Google’s blog this week (Google Blog) — Some interesting numbers in this report, including Google’s revelation that it scans 400 million devices a day. Gee, a figure intelligence agencies must envy.
• Roughly 29% of Android devices can’t be accessed to issue monthly security patches (Naked Security) — Sophos has a bit of an attitude about the back-of-the-envelope number it scratched out, calculating a little more than 400 million Android devices may not be running modern Android versions Google can patch, or may not be accessible to scanning for patching. You’d think a cybersecurity vendor would revel in this opportunity to sell product. Or that an otherwise intelligent and successful security firm would recognize the numbers reflect Android’s continued dominance in the marketplace with more than 1.4 billion active devices. The risk is big, but how much of that risk is due to the success of the devices themselves — still highly usable if aging, with insufficient memory for upgrades? Sounds so familiar (*cough* Windows XP)…
• Google passed a benchmark with mobile version of Chrome browser on more than 1 billion devices (Business Insider) — Here’s another opportunity to screw up interpretation of data: mobile Chrome works on BOTH Android and iOS devices. I know for a fact the latest mobile Chrome will NOT work on some older Android devices.

Under Not-Google: Opera browser now has free built-in VPN
A lesser-known browser with only 2% of current market share, Opera is a nice alternative to Chrome and Firefox. Its new built-in free VPN could help boost its market share by offering additional privacy protection. It’s not clear this new feature will protect users against censorship tools, though — and this could be extremely important since this Norwegian software company may yet be acquired by a Chinese company which placed a bid on the firm a couple of months ago.

Definitely Not-Google: Apple cracker cost FBI more than $1 million
Can’t swing an iPad without hitting a report on FBI director James Comey’s admission at the Aspen Security Forum this week in Londn that cracking the San Bernardino shooter’s work iPhone cost “more than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is 7 years and 4 months,” or more than $1 million dollars. Speaking of exorbitant expenses, why was Comey at this forum in London? Oh, Comey was the headliner for the event? Isn’t that interesting…wonder if that speaking gig came with speaker’s fee?

That’s it for this week’s morning roundups. Hope you have a nice weekend planned ahead of you!

Monday Morning: Synthesized Brain

When you need a break this hectic Monday morning, take five minutes and watch ANA from Factory Fifteen. I'm intrigued by the props and set -- how much is CGI, and how much is actual production line? What company allowed this production company access to their equipment? Though snappy and visually engaging, the story's not realistic -- yet. But much of the equipment on the production line is very close to that used in manufacturing today. And just as depicted in this short film, the weakest link is the human. Worth keeping in mind this week as we plow deeper into the conflict at the intersection of humans and devices. Speaking of which... Apple-heavy week ahead

• Hearing in California tomorrow in front of Judge Sheri Pym over the San Bernardino's shooter's iPhone. Be sure to read Marcy's take on the hearing and witnesses.
• WLTX of Columbia SC posted a timeline of #AppleVsFBI events -- unfortunately, it starts on February 16 with Judge Pym's order to Apple.
• NYT reported last week that Apple employees may quit if Apple is ordered to cooperate and write security-undermining code. But is this a deliverable in itself? The article offered an incredible amount of detail about Apple's operations; if employees quit, any entities observing the technology company will know even more. Has this shakedown been designed to yield information about Apple's operations, while risking corporate and personal security?
• Apple will release information about new products today at a media event. The buzz may be less about the new products than the hearing tomorrow.
• An iPhone 6 bursting into flames during a flight to Hawaii didn't help Apple. One might wonder why this particular phone flamed out so spectacularly as it's a relatively new device.

HEADS UP TECH USERS

• Kindle users: Amazon is forcing a mandatory update across all its older Kindle reader devices. Deadline: TOMORROW MARCH 22 -- after that date, users will have to manually update devices and download books via PC and not over the internet.
• Tweetdeck users: Owner Twitter will kill the Windows app on April 15th. After that time, Windows-based users will need to use a browser. Can't blame Twitter--it's ridiculously expensive to write and service so many apps when the same devices usually have a browser.
• Android users: 1) Protect your privacy and security by checking these settings; 2) Check this setting, stat, to prevent unauthorized access.
• Nexus users: Make sure you have the latest patch issued last week. All other Android users should nag their equipment makers for their version of the same patch.

Before the machines complete their occupation of our world...

• Nice read on law emerging with the rise of robots. Too bad none of them really incorporate Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. (The Atlantic)
• Want to bet the overlords will argue workers should be paid less because they don't have to work as hard wearing an exoskeleton -- like these at Panasonic? (By the way, DARPA, that's yet another commercially-developed exoskeleton near release; where's yours/ours?) (Mashable)
• Artificial intelligence already pitted against humans by those bloody banksters. Watch this video and ask yourself if this guy from Global Capital Acquisitions realizes there are humans at the nodes of the investment network whose lives are affected by his blah-blah-blah-babbling about artificial intelligence. STG he could be a machine himself. (Bloomberg)
• Myths about AI busted - another solid read. Combined with the preceding Bloomberg bankster video it reinforces AI threat awareness. (Gizmodo)

After watching that video at Bloomberg, I think we're a lot closer to ANA than we realized. Watch your backs -- Monday is certainly gaining on you, if robots aren't.