Hi, I have, with interest, been 1

[rpwin]

Hi,

I have, with interest, been reading about the US and EU plans for incorporating digital fingerprints and digital scans of the face an iris into a chip that will be combined into passports. Of course there are mixed feeling about this.

However, it made me think about spyware which is (anyway) probably to be found on the majority of PC's around the world.

I imagine that it will not be too far into the future that there is government approved/sponsered and initiated spyware (for "state security reasons" of course) and that it will be illegal/impossible to remove it from computer systems.

What do you think? Impossible/unrealistic?


Ron Winslow

http://www.rpwdesign.dk

A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

 

[Chance1234]

biggest problem with "big brother" is the amount of time it takes to go through every bit of data, there just simply isnt the hours full stop, so im not too woried about it anyway,

but! interesting as a little bird tells me, already in place via credit cards, shopping receipts, etc etc lists all ready exist to check for certain paterns, ie if you went down the road and started buying ovedr a week say

1. 24 bottles of bleach
2. 6 Bottles of Weed Killer
3. 5 Kilos of Flour
4. Crate of nails
5. 4 Plastic lunchboxes
6. Cable
7. 12 9 V BAtteryts
8. 3 110 cammeras
9. Detailed maps of houses of parliment
10. One ticket for a guided tour of the houses of parliment

Then somewhere on some system your details are going to pop up. can dismiss that as urban myth but fact is that all bank accounts in the UK Are scanned via Inland Revenue once a year. GCHQ has to do something

regarding the web, i m not trying to sound conspiracy theorist here but i reckon a great deal is already in place, a good example is all the sites recently set up to capture peaodophiles etc etc,

spyware? nah , but other things are probably already out there on the web waiting......

Filmmaker, gentlemen and proffesional drinker

http://public.fotki.com/chance1234/

 

[sleipnir214]

I pick "unrealistic". At least a government-mandated spyware is concerned.

There was great hue and cry over the U.S. Department of Defense T.I.A. program, which was intended to construct data mining and analysis tools of public information to track down terrorists. The U.S. Senate recently voted to kill funding for the project.

If you are concerned about the possibility of your having to run spyware on your computer, I recommend you keep and eye on projects like Mi¢ro$oft's "Trusted Computing" initiative.

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!!

 

[harebrain]

1. Government awards contract to lowest bidder.

2. Lowest bidder hires cheapest labor.

3. Cheap labor doesn't know the difference between miles and kilometers.

4. Mars probe crashes.

5. Government wants TIA, awards contract to lowest bidder...

Seriously, we should be more fearful that government will implement information/awareness/security initiatives and screw them up than we should fear them deliberately, maliciously turning against the innocent citizen. Doing things wrong is just as dangerous as doing wrong things.

--harebrain

 

[Grenage]

Don't all paranoid users believe the "echelon" project is Big Brothers tool of choice?

 

[dilettante]

I can't wait until "spyware" starts harvesting biometric data from all these thumb and retina scanners. Sheesh.

 

[jwenting]

typical US response...
Anything that makes it harder to catch them doing something illegal is considered a violation of their civil rights yet at the same time they demand those same measures from any other country wanting to deal with them to protect US interests...

 

[JimHorton]

Years ago (it seems, anyway) I read about something called Palladium. This sounds very similar--a chip-level copy-protection scheme. Since it's at the hardware level, then it's virtually foolproof and can't be hacked, at least not with any ease or feasibility.

A paranoid thought is--what if it's out there already? Of course not being enforced, but the chip-level support could be there, say, on any P4 shipped since q1 '03, and 'they' could be moninoring stuff and quitely testing it.

Just an alternative, paranoid thought.
--jim

 

[Grenage]

Oh I think palladium is still in the workings. I'm putting good money on machines having this sort of system in the near future.

And once one business has them it's going to be MS office all over again...

 

[JimHorton]

I just did a search on 'microsoft trusted computing' and found several interesting articles. One good one is:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/rja14/tcpa-faq.html

It explains that "Trusted Computing" is Palladium, just newly named. In my opinion, "Palladium" had sort of an Orwellian, big-brother sound to it anyway, and obviously Microsoft doesn't want to tip it's hand with a name like that, so 'Trusted' was incorporated into the name. This article points out an interesting thing:

"Trusted System" is defined as "A System that can break your security policy"

This initiative is a truly scary thing.
--Jim

 

[sleipnir214]

As an adjunct to Mi¢ro$oft's "Trusted Computing" initiative, Mi¢ro$oft is working with Phoenix to develop a new BIOS for blade servers:

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/2841/

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

TANSTAAFL!!