So Obama has announced his candidate for Vice President. Joe Biden, the senator from Delaware, has been in politics for quite some time. He entered the scene at age 30 (1973), so there’s plenty of history to compare trends against.

I’m sure there’s plenty of information out there about what Biden has done, what his beliefs are, and (more importantly) your thoughts and opinions on him. I’m sure some have plenty to say, but this post will stay focused on the information and privacy sector. I’m sure Biden was picked because of his foreign policy, but seeing how privacy is turning into a thing of the past (when it shouldn’t) in this country, it’s worth taking a look.

Running through Biden’s track record shows that he has a history of some questionable tactics. Let’s discuss:

* Sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs.(lobbied against and shot down by plenty of companies, including Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, and Verizon)

* Signed a letter in 2002 urging that the P2P/online piracy lawsuits should be performed/paid for by the Supreme Court (e.g. taxpayers) instead of the RIAA/MPAA (e.g. a private entity).

* Sponsored a bill in 2007 to restrict Americans’ ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services (passed and came into existence as the Perform Act, and currently is the basis of a lawsuit between RIAA and XM satellite radio about their latest receivers).

* Supported the DMCA.

* Supported both the Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act and the Violent Crime Control Act in the early ’90’s. While they both sound nice, they were very anti-cryptography. From the bill: It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law. This essentially states that there can’t be any encryption. If there is, there must be a backdoor for the government to use to decrypt the data. It’s because of these bills–because of Biden–that PGP was created.

* While the previous bills didn’t come to pass, their reincarnation did in the form of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). It’s pretty obvious, then, why wire-tapping is so common nowadays and why it keeps getting expanded and extended. This bill was huge, was definitely not a small footprint in the Internet’s short history. Directly related to this bill, in a top-secret memo to members of President George H.W. Bush’s administration including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and CIA director Robert Gates, one White House official wrote: “Justice should go ahead now to seek a legislative fix to the digital telephony problem, and all parties should prepare to follow through on the encryption problem in about a year. Success with digital telephony will lock in one major objective; we will have a beachhead we can exploit for the encryption fix; and the encryption access options can be developed more thoroughly in the meantime.”

* Supported the Real ID Act. He also supported the Patriot Act.

* Proposed spending $1 billion of tax payer money to police P2P networks.

* Indicated that he was skeptical of net neutrality, stating that no preemptive laws were necessary because if violations do happen, such a public outcry will develop that “the chairman will be required to hold this meeting in this largest room in the Capitol, and there will be lines wandering all the way down to the White House.” 

Obviously, most won’t vote based on the copyright and privacy opinions of a Vice Presidential candidate. It should be noted that Obama’s views on some of these broader topics are quite opposite and rather refreshing:

* “Strongly supports the principle of network neutrality to preserve the benefits of open competition on the Internet.”

* Instead of declaring war on the Internet and crack down on P2P, piracy, et. all, he says that we need to ”update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated.” (that’s got EFF written all over it)

(Then again, Obama did support FISA.)

Biden probably should just focus on what everyone suspects he’ll be working on: foreign policy, and keep his fingers out of the Technology cookie jar. He’s got a pretty negative history in the sector of privacy and technology in my opinion.

The Internet is young, and needs wise leadership. As is our privacy, both on the Internet and in your daily life. So easily have both fallen to abuse in the past. I can’t say any of his policies with regards to technology and privacy are a step in the right direction.

The election is upon us. Let the games begin.

~Jaker

In a recent post, I mentioned that Apple had a statement in their EULA for their Safari web browser that it could not be run on Windows machines. If you’ve got iTunes, you’ve probably noticed that when it does it’s “New Update Found!” alert every other day, Safari is suddenly in the list, selected by default.

Now, the EULA has been fixed, so this is all good. Now we’ve moved on to something more important: the security of the browser.

There was a contest recently where a group of hackers had three machines: A MacBook running OS X 10.5.2, a laptop running Vista, and a laptop running Ubuntu. The results of this contest were the following:

• The MacBook laptop was hacked first, within minutes. The method used was a security hole in Safari, an application bundled with the operating system, installed by default.
• The Vista laptop was hacked next, a day and hours later. The method used was a security hole in Flash, an application not bundled with the operating system, installed by the user at the user’s discretion.
• The Ubuntu laptop was not hacked.

Now, looking at these results, we need to consider something important. Since Safari’s introduction to the Win32 architecture, it’s been plagued with security issues. Even with these issues not closed, Apple is all about pushing Windows users to use the browser.

The other problem I see here is the fact that Safari is enabled by default when doing an update. And since this update happens often, you’re likely–one way or another–to eventually install it, accidental or not. It’s not required by iTunes, and for most users, it’s not going to add much functionality.

Hmm.. bundling software (Safari) in a market you already saturate (iTunes). Didn’t Microsoft get in trouble for something like this?

~Jaker