Day: June 21, 2014

This is an interesting idea… they say that “information desires to be free!” And, it gets us closer to ubiquitous WiFi!

This Tool Boosts Your Privacy by Opening Your Wi-Fi to Strangers

Wired – By: Andy Greenberg – “In an age of surveillance anxiety, the notion of leaving your Wi-Fi network open and unprotected seems dangerously naive. But one group of activists says it can help you open up your wireless internet and not only maintain your privacy, but actually increase it in the process.

At the Hackers on Planet Earth conference next month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation plans to release software designed to let you share a portion of your Wi-Fi network, password-free, with anyone nearby. The initiative, part of the OpenWireless.org campaign, will maintain its own flavor of free, open-source router firmware called Open Wireless Router. Good Samaritans can install this firmware on a cheap Wi-Fi router, creating a public slice of bandwidth that can dialed up or down with a simple smartphone interface.

‘We want to encourage a world of open wireless, sharing Wi-Fi with each other for privacy, efficiency, and innovation in devices that don’t have to fall back on subscriptions to wireless carriers,’ says EFF activist Adi Kamdar. Many locked wireless networks sit idle for much of the day, Kamdar argues. OpenWireless.org would put that untapped bandwidth to use while still allowing the router’s owner to take priority when needed, limiting freeloaders to as little as 5 percent of the pipe.

And just how does opening your network protect privacy, as Kamdar claims? One goal of OpenWireless.org, says EFF staff attorney Nate Cardozo, is dispelling the legal notion that anything that happens on a network must have been done by the network’s owner. ‘Your IP address is not your identity, and your identity is not your IP address,’ Cardozo says. ‘Open wireless makes mass surveillance and correlation of person with IP more difficult, and that’s good for everyone.’

On the other hand, mixing a stranger’s traffic with your own can be risky. In 2011, for instance, a man in Buffalo, New York saw his home raided by a SWAT team that accused him of being a pornographer and a pedophile. The police eventually realized he’d simply left his Wi-Fi router unprotected, and a neighbor had used it to download child porn.

For anyone wary of home invasions by similarly misguided cops, OpenWireless.org says it will at some point integrate an option to route guest traffic over the anonymity software Tor or a VPN that ties it to a different IP address. But Cardozo hopes the open routers will for most users cement the idea that network owners aren’t responsible for passersby who use their connection. ‘If everyone runs open Wi-Fi, there’s no real argument that anyone is being negligent by doing so,’ he says. ‘If you’re not the person doing the illegal activity, you have no liability.’

OpenWireless.org won’t be the first attempt to create a network of open guest access points. But others who have tried the strategy, like the Spanish company Fon and British Telecom, have required users to be subscribers or pay for access. The EFF’s option will be free for all.

The first version of the software is to appear on OpenWireless.org in mid-July. The initial download will be compatible with one specific cheap Wi-Fi router that the OpenWireless developers declined to reveal until the HOPE talk. If the idea catches on, the group says it will eventually update the firmware to work on other models and eventually offer its own router with pre-installed hardware.

Anyone wishing to use the initiative’s free Wi-fi hotspots should search for networks called ‘OpenWireless.org,’ the label the project is encouraging people to give their networks. For guest users, the router software is also designed to offer better-than-average security: Each user’s link will be individually encrypted with a protocol called EAP-TLS, the equivalent of HTTPS on every connection. The price of that encryption, however, is that users must download a certificate from OpenWireless.org before accessing the free networks, a tradeoff that will no doubt limit use in favor of privacy. ‘Part of the goal here is to make open Wi-Fi as secure as logging on to a private network,’ says Ranga Krishnan, an EFF technology fellow working on the project.

Network owners may ask what incentive beyond altruism might motivate them to share limited Wi-Fi resources with strangers. The Open Wireless Router creators argue their software will be more convenient and secure than the buggy default firmware in typical Netgear and Linksys devices. Unlike those rarely-updated devices, the OpenWireless.org router firmware will be security-audited and allow users to check for updates on the devices’ smartphone-friendly web interface and quickly download updates. ‘We want to get a much better router in peoples’ hands that will improve their overall experience and security,’ says Krishnan.

Krishnan argues that users also will benefit, both personally and on a societal level, from the barrier to surveillance that comes from sharing their network with strangers. ‘This is not just a neighborly good thing to do,’ he says. ‘If you allow this kind of guest usage, it will make your traffic part of the mix and not associated with you. That gives you some protection.’

But Kamdar points instead to security guru Bruce Schneier’s famous argument that despite the security risks, leaving your Wi-Fi open is an act of civic hospitality. ‘To me, it’s basic politeness,’ Schneier wrote in 2008. ‘Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea.’

Given the kind of widespread network surveillance that’s been revealed in the years since Schneier wrote that line, no one would be considered rude for keeping their network locked down. With the right tools and protections, though, sharing Wi-Fi might become as common as any other baseline social kindness. ‘For some users,’ Kamdar says, ‘A smile from a friend or neighbor is incentive enough.'”

Would YOU pay $555 Million for a “web-cam” company? Hummmmm…

Google’s Nest Buys Dropcam for $555 Million

From Re/Code – By: Liz Gannes – “Dropcam, the popular home monitoring camera startup, will be acquired by Nest, maker of smart thermostats and smoke detectors. The deal is worth $555 million in cash.

Nest itself was just purchased by Google just four months ago for $3.2 billion. But the company says it is undertaking this acquisition on its own, outside of Google. Dropcam will be folded into Nest’s brand and company culture, and will also be subject to its privacy policy, Matt Rogers, Nest co-founder and VP of engineering, told Re/code in an interview Friday.

‘The teams are very well-aligned and we love the product,’ Rogers said. ‘We both think about the entire user experience from the unboxing on. We both care deeply about helping people stay connected with their homes when they’re not there.’

Rogers said the deal was signed Friday and has yet to close. The Dropcam team plans to move from San Francisco to Nest’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif.

Dropcam has never disclosed sales, but it is routinely the top-selling security camera on Amazon, and it recently branched into selling in retail stores like Apple and Best Buy. The company’s newest camera sells for $199, and a version with lower resolution and less field of view sells for $149.

But Dropcam is not solely a device company. As I wrote in a 2012 profile, it is a hardware startup with its head in the cloud. The company originally tried to use existing webcams to support a hosted personal video archive, but found the ones on the market were not up to snuff. So it began making its own.

Online storage is the other part of Dropcam’s business model. The company charges $99 per year to save a week’s worth of video at a time. Last we checked, Dropcam said 39 percent of of consumers who buy its cameras pay for its cloud storage service as well.

People concerned about the privacy implications of Google’s acquisition of Nest may be further unsettled by Nest’s purchase of a home surveillance company. Rogers anticipated that in a blog post announcing the deal, insisting there’s no reason to worry:

Like Nest customer data, Dropcam will come under Nest’s privacy policy, which explains that data won’t be shared with anyone (including Google) without a customer’s permission. Nest has a paid-for business model and ads are not part of our strategy. In acquiring Dropcam, we’ll apply that same policy to Dropcam too.

By the way, if Google owning Dropcam sounds a lot like Dave Eggers’ ‘The Circle’ to you, I asked Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy about the parallels in an interview last year.

As for Eggers’s vision, Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy allowed that it was surprisingly close to home. But he said, ‘With Dropcam, it’s the individual who chooses to share. That helps keep it from being weird and dystopian.’

Prior to its acquisition, Dropcam had raised a total of $48 million from investors including Institutional Venture Partners, Accel Partners, Menlo Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In recent months, it had made key hires, including long-time Apple product development leader Andy Hodge, who formerly worked with members of the Nest team on the original iPod.”