tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253Tue, 26 Jul 2016 13:12:14 +0000ebooksLibrariesbook industryE-bookbusiness modelsCopyrightprivacylinked dataSemantic webUngluing EbooksCreative CommonsphysicsGoogle Book SearchPublishingTwitterOpen Accesslibrary automationUnglue.itGluejarPiracyALA MidwinterRDFOverdrivelinking technologyAmazon KindleGooglemagicsocial practiceAmazonWeb Design and Developmentidentifiersmetadatascholarly publishingALA AnnualConferencesGoogle Book Search SettlementHarperCollinsDigital rights managementOpenURLCrossrefNew York TimesRDFafacebookBig Library ReadBook DigitizationBook UseEPUBJust KiddingThe Four Corners of the Sky: A NovelisbnPublic libraryTruthBloggingDenny ChinURL redirectionknowledgebaseslanguagessemtech2009AttributorBook Rights RegistryBugsHackathonIDPFKickstarterLibrarybit.lysocial networksAppleDOIGoogle BooksIPadIndiaNew JerseyNewspaper industrysemantic technologywikipediaDigital Object IdentifierHTTP SecureIntelInterlibrary loanLibrary journalMicrodataProject GutenbergStar TrekAaron SwartzBell LabsBrian O'LearyDPLADigital libraryEntrepreneurshipKohaLiblimeLibraryThingNeal StephensonOCLCOpen SourcePublic DomainPublishing PointSOPAmy atticAccessibilityAdWordsAdobe Digital EditionsAmazon Web ServicesAmerican Library AssociationCode4LibElectronic JournalsGeolocationGoogle WaveJ. K. RowlingJSTORMacmillanNetwork EffectNew York Public LibraryOWLPTFScrowdfundingdeathgenealogyhashtagshttp-rangeiPhonemy dadunicodeAmericans with Disabilities Act of 1990BitcoinBook DesignBook Industry Study GroupBruce SpringsteenDatabase LicensingDisruptive technologyElectronic Frontier FoundationFRBRFair useFan FictionFile sharingForms of governmentFusion TablesGoogle BookGreat GatsbyHachette Book GroupHal VarianHurricane SandyJohn SundmanNookOpenSourcePaymentsPhiladelphia PhilliesProxy serverRadiolabRandom HouseRush HoltSchool librarySearch Engine OptimizationSocial networkSpamStar trek TNGSwedenVegetablesWolfram Alphaebrarylinkedinpublic identitysecuritytr.imAdaptiveBlueAdvertisingAssistive TechnologyBeerBibliocommonsBotsBrewster KahleClay JohnsonClayton M. ChristensenComic ConCryptographyDBpediaDCWGDave WinerDigital watermarkingEBLEvan RatliffEvert TaubeFirefoxGNU Affero General Public LicenseGarage saleGitHubGitenbergGoogle AnalyticsHugh HowieIan DavisInfochimpsInstant MessagingInternet ArchiveJon StewartKnowledge representationKoboLawrence LessigMac OS XMetcalfe's LawNeil GaimanNeurobiologyORCIDOpen Database LicenseOpen Knowledge FoundationOpen LibraryOpenIDPDDLPaypalProQuestPubMedQin DynastyQin Shi HuangdiRV GuhaRalph Waldo EmersonSPARQLSimon and SchusterSingle sign-onSiriStar WarsText-To-SpeechTextbooksThe Hitchhiker's Guide to the GalaxyTim O'ReillyTor (anonymity network)Warner OlandWeedsYouTubeZemantaZola Booksauthenticationdesign patternsgmailh1n1lifeshibbolethswedish musictwitterdataGo To HellmanNow available in HTTPS!http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Eric Hellman)Blogger374125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-4662831806598203993Wed, 22 Jun 2016 18:11:00 +00002016-06-23T09:47:30.133-04:00DOIlinking technologyPiracyWeb Design and DevelopmentWiley's Fake Journal of Constructive Metaphysics and the War on Automated Downloading<br />Suppose you were a publisher and you wanted to get the goods on a pirate who was downloading your subscription content and giving it away for free. One thing you could try is to trick the pirate into downloading fake content loaded with spy software and encoded information about how the downloading was being done. Then you could verify when the fake content was turning up on the pirate's website.<br /><br />This is not an original idea. Back in the glory days of Napster, record companies would try to fill the site with bad files which <i>somehow</i> became infested with malware. Peer-to-peer networks evolved trust mechanisms to foil bad-file strategies.<br /><br />I had hoped that <a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/03/sci-hub-libgen-and-total-information.html">the emergence of Sci-Hub</a> as an efficient, though unlawful, distributor of scientific articles would not provoke scientific publishers to do things that could tarnish the reputation of their journals. I had hoped that publishers would get their acts together and <a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/01/not-using-https-on-your-website-is-like.html">implement secure websites</a> so that they could be sure that articles were getting to their real subscribers. Silly me.<br /><br />In series of tweets, <a href="https://twitter.com/blahah404">Rik Smith-Unna</a> noted with dismay that the Wiley Online Library was using "fake DOIs" as "trap URLs", URLs in links invisible to human users. A poorly written web spider or crawler would try to follow the link, triggering a revocation of the user's access privileges. (For not obeying the website's terms of service, I suppose.)<br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">Don't know why I'm being coy - it's Wiley. Thousands of fake DOIs buried around their site. RE <a href="https://t.co/YORhwzOZPE">https://t.co/YORhwzOZPE</a></div>— ⓪ Rik Smith-Unna (@blahah404) <a href="https://twitter.com/blahah404/status/736301738974646276">May 27, 2016</a></blockquote><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">Whops, not sure if <a href="https://twitter.com/goetheuni">@goetheuni</a> or just me is banned from Wiley because I accessed a fake DOI last week. <a href="https://t.co/G6MTLQEyuK">https://t.co/G6MTLQEyuK</a></div>— Bastian Greshake (@gedankenstuecke) <a href="https://twitter.com/gedankenstuecke/status/740105653390311425">June 7, 2016</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> <br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">.<a href="https://twitter.com/Protohedgehog">@Protohedgehog</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/gedankenstuecke">@gedankenstuecke</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/blahah404">@blahah404</a> Yes. Isn't that illegal? Any comments <a href="https://twitter.com/WileyOpenAccess">@WileyOpenAccess</a> ? <a href="https://t.co/S4P22S5B0g">pic.twitter.com/S4P22S5B0g</a></div>— Sujai Kumar (@sujaik) <a href="https://twitter.com/sujaik/status/740120813060382720">June 7, 2016</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> Gabriel J. Gardner of Cal State Long Beach has reported his library's receipt of a scary email from Wiley stating:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Wiley has been investigating activity that uses compromised user credentials from institutions to access proxy servers like EZProxy (or, in some cases, other types of proxy) to then access IP-authenticated content from the Wiley Online Library (and other material). We have identified a compromised proxy at your institution as evidenced by the log file below.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">We will need to restrict your institution’s proxy access to Wiley Online Library if we do not receive confirmation that this has been remedied within the next 24 hours. &nbsp;</blockquote><br />I've been seeing these trap urls in scholarly journals for almost 20 years now. Two years ago they re<a href="https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2014/04/02/acsgate-pandora-opens-the-american-chemical-societys-box-and-her-university-gets-cut-off/">appeared in ACS journals</a>. They're rarely well thought out, and from talking with publishers who have tried them, they don't work as intended. The Wiley trap URLs exhibit several mistakes in implementation.<br /><ol><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_trap">Spider trap URL</a>s are are useful for detecting bots that ignore robot exclusions. But <a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/robots.txt">Wiley's robots.txt</a> document doesn't exclude the trap urls, so "well-behaved" spiders, such as googlebot are also caught. As a result, the fake Wiley page <a href="https://www.google.com/webhp?ion=1&amp;espv=2&amp;ie=UTF-8#safe=off&amp;q=Constructive+Metaphysics+in+Theories+of+Continental+Drift">is indexed in Google</a>, and because of the way Google aggregates the weight of links, it's actually a rather highly ranked page</li><li>The download urls for the fake article don't download anything, but instead return a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#5xx_Server_Error">500 error code</a> whenever an invalid pseudo-DOI is presented to the site. This is a site misconfiguration that can cause problems with link checking or link verification software.</li><li>Because the fake URLs look like Wiley DOI's, they could cause confusion if circulated. <a href="http://crossref.org/">Crossref</a> discourages this.</li><li>The trap URLs as implemented by Wiley can be used for malicious attacks. With a list of trap URLs, it's trivial to craft an email or a web page that causes the user to request the full list of trap URLs. When the trap URLs trigger service suspensions this gives you the ability to trigger a suspension by sending the target an email.</li><li>Apparently, <a href="https://twitter.com/gedankenstuecke/status/740108898712092672">Wiley used a special cookie </a>to block the downloading. Have they not heard of sessions?</li><li>The blocks <a href="https://twitter.com/sujaik/status/740120813060382720">affected both subscription and open-access content</a>. Umm, do I need to explain the concept of "Open Access"?</li><li>It's just not a smart idea&nbsp;(Even on <a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/04/april-fools-is-canceled-this-year.html">April Fools</a>!)&nbsp;for a reputable publisher to create fake article pages for "<i><a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bocpoyf.11577/pdf">Constructive Metaphysics in Theories of Continental Drift</a></i>. (warning: until Wiley realizes their ineptness, this link may trigger unexpected behavior. Use Tor.) It's an insult to both geophysicists and philosophers. And how does the University of Bradford feel about hosting a fictitious Department of Geophysics???</li></ol><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QQrSSVWweMQ/V2rPH9wN9UI/AAAAAAAAAwY/ci3Ouo2KZygh-sGoUvm09nwI7HkKPr3SgCLcB/s1600/metaphysics.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="323" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-QQrSSVWweMQ/V2rPH9wN9UI/AAAAAAAAAwY/ci3Ouo2KZygh-sGoUvm09nwI7HkKPr3SgCLcB/s400/metaphysics.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /></div><br />Instead of trap urls, online businesses that need to detect automated activity have developed elaborate and effective mechanisms to do so. Automated downloads are a billion dollar problem for the advertising industry in particular. So advertisers, advertising networks, and market research companies use coded, downloaded javascripts and flash scripts to track and monitor both users and bots. I've written about how <a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/03/16-of-top-20-research-journals-let-ad.html">these practices are inappropriate</a> in library contexts. In comparison, the trap URLs being deployed by Wiley are sophomoric and a technical embarrassment.<br /><br />If you visit the Wiley fake article page now, you won't get an article. You get a full dose of monitoring software. Wiley uses a service called Qualtrics Site Intercept to send you "Creatives" if you meet targeting criteria. But you'll also get that if you access Wiley's Online Library's real articles, along with sophisticated trackers from Krux Digital, Grapeshot, Jivox, Omniture, Tradedesk, Videology and Neustar.<br /><br />Here's the letter I'd like libraries to start sending publishers:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">[Library] has been investigating activity that causes spyware from advertising networks to compromise the privacy of IP-authenticated users of the [Publisher] Online Library, a service for we have been billed [$XXX,XXX]. We have identified numerous third party tracking beacons and monitoring scripts infesting your service as evidenced by the log file below.&nbsp;</blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq">We will need to restrict [Publisher]'s access to our payment processes if we do not receive confirmation that this has been remedied within the next 24 hours. &nbsp;</blockquote>Notes:<br /><ol><li><a href="https://gist.github.com/hvwaldow/3bc2f736f1fa3430d49658e962f3df95">Here's another example</a> of Wiley cutting off access because of fake URL clicking. The implication that Wiley has stopped using trap URLs seems to be false.</li><li><a href="https://blogs.wayne.edu/scholarscoop/2016/06/02/wiley-using-fake-dois-to-trap-web-crawlers-and-researchers/">Some people have suggested</a> that the "fake DOIs" are damaging the DOI system. Don't worry, they're not real DOI's and have not been registered. The DOI system is robust against this sort of thing; it's still disrespectful.</li></ol><div>Update June 23:</div><div><ol><li>Tom Griffin, a spokesman for Wiley, has posted <a href="http://listserv.crl.edu/wa.exe?A2=ind1606&amp;L=LIBLICENSE-L&amp;F=&amp;S=&amp;P=51709">a denial to LIBLICENCE</a> which has a tenuous grip on reality.</li><li>Smith-Unna has posted <a href="https://gist.github.com/blahah/0fe1deb5f49422c0723fd3c18c4751f0">a point-by-point response</a> to Griffin's denial&nbsp;in the form of a gist&nbsp;.&nbsp;</li></ol></div>http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/06/wileys-fake-journal-of-constructive.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-6563361705482933377Mon, 23 May 2016 20:16:00 +00002016-05-23T16:18:20.289-04:00AdvertisingAmazonGoogle AnalyticsLibrariesprivacy97% of Research Library Searches Leak Privacy... and Other Disappointing Statistics.<br />...But first, some good news. Among the <a href="http://www.arl.org/membership/list-of-arl-members">123 members</a> of the <a href="http://www.arl.org/">Association of Research Libraries</a>, there are four libraries with <i>almost</i> secure search services that <i>don't</i> send clickstream data to Amazon, Google, or any advertising network. Let's now sing the praises of libraries at&nbsp;<a href="http://www.lib.siu.edu/">Southern Illinois University</a>, <a href="http://library.louisville.edu/">University of Louisville</a>, <a href="http://www.lib.umd.edu/">University of Maryland</a>, and <a href="http://www.unm.edu/libraries.html">University of New Mexico</a> for their commendable attention to the privacy of their users. And it's no fault of their own that they're not fully secure. SIU fails to earn a <a href="https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95617?hl=en">green lock badge</a> because of <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Security/Mixed_content">mixed content</a> issues in the <a href="https://www.carli.illinois.edu/">CARLI</a> service; while Louisville, Maryland and New Mexico miss out on green locks because of the weak cipher suite used by OCLC on their <a href="http://www.oclc.org/worldcat-local.en.html">Worldcat Local</a> installations. These are relatively minor issues that are likely to get addressed without much drama.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.arl.org/templates/arl/images/logo.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.arl.org/templates/arl/images/logo.png" height="52" width="320" /></a></div><br />Over the weekend, I decided to try to quantify the extent of privacy leakage in public-facing library services by studying the search services of the 123 ARL libraries. These are the best funded and most prestigious libraries in North America, and we should expect them to positively represent libraries. I went to each library's on-line search facility and did a search for a book whose title might suggest to an advertiser that I might be pregnant. (I'm not!) I checked to see whether the default search linked to by the library's home page (as listed on the ARL website) <a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/01/not-using-https-on-your-website-is-like.html">was delivered over a secure connection</a> (HTTPS). I checked for privacy <a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/06/protect-reader-privacy-with-referrer.html">leakage of referer headers</a> from cover images by using Chrome developer tools (<a href="https://developer.chrome.com/devtools#devtools-window">the sources tab</a>). I used <a href="https://www.ghostery.com/">Ghostery</a> to see if the library's online search used <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Google Analytics">Google Analytics</a> or not. I also noted whether advertising network "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon">web beacons</a>" were placed by the search session.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2MAkZYKxcyg/V0Ne02GQWeI/AAAAAAAAAvg/cIDY7mScfykVkDU_M5Sv0KUO33r8hXbGwCLcB/s1600/getstartedwithGA.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2MAkZYKxcyg/V0Ne02GQWeI/AAAAAAAAAvg/cIDY7mScfykVkDU_M5Sv0KUO33r8hXbGwCLcB/s320/getstartedwithGA.png" width="246" /></a></div><b>72%</b> of the ARL libraries let Google look over the shoulder of <i>every click by every user,</i> by virtue of the pervasive use of Google Analytics. Given the commitment to reader privacy embodied by the American Library Association's <a href="http://www.ala.org/advocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethics">code of ethics</a>, I'm surprised this is not more controversial. ALA even sponsors workshops on "Getting Started with Google Analytics". To paraphrase <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmRfyg3-YDc">privacy advocate and educator Dorothea Salo</a>, the code of ethics does <b>not</b> say:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted, except for Google Analytics.</i></blockquote>While it's true that Google has a huge stake in maintaining the trust of users in their handling of personal information, and people seem to trust Google with their most intimate secrets, it's also true that <a href="https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/">Google's privacy policy</a> puts almost no constraints on what Google (itself) can do with the information they collect. They offer strong commitments not to share personally identifiable information with <i>other</i> entities, but they are free to <i>keep</i> and <i>use</i> personally identifiable information. Google can associate Analytics-tracked library searches with personally identifiable information for any user that has a Google account; Libraries cannot be under the illusion that they are uninvolved with this data collection if they benefit from Google Analytics. (Full disclosure: many of the the web sites I administer also use Google Analytics.)<br /><br /><b>80%</b> of the ARL libraries provide their default discovery tools to users without the benefit of a secure connection. This means that any network provider in the path between the library and the user can read and alter the query, and the results returned to the user. It also means that when a user accesses the library over public wifi, such as in a coffee shop, the user's clicks are available for everyone else in the coffee shop to look at, and potentially to tamper with. (The <a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-new-years-resolution-for-publishers.html">Digital Library Privacy Pledge</a> is not having the effect we had hoped for, at least not yet.)<br /><br /><b>28%</b> of ARL libraries enrich their catalog displays with cover images sourced from Amazon.com. Because of <a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/09/analysis-of-privacy-leakage-on-library.html">privacy leakage in referer headers</a>, this means that a user's searches for library books are available for use by Amazon when <a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/06/towards-post-privacy-library.html">Amazon wants to sell that user something</a>. It's not clear that libraries realize this is happening, or whether they just don't realize that their catalog enrichment service uses cover images sourced by Amazon.<br /><br /><b>13%</b> of ARL libraries help advertisers (other than Google) target their ads by <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/09/analysis-of-privacy-leakage-on-library.html">allowing web beacons</a> to be placed on their catalog web pages. Whether the beacons are from Facebook, DoubleClick, <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/08/libraries-are-giving-away-user-privacy.html">AddThis or Sharethis</a>, advertisers track individual users, often in a personally identifiable way. Searches on these library catalogs are available to the ad networks to maximize the value of advertising placed throughout their networks.<br /><br />Much of the privacy leakage I found in my survey occurs beyond the control of librarians. There are IT departments, vender-provided services, and incumbent bureaucracies involved. Important library services appear to be unavailable in secure versions. But specific, serious privacy leakage problems that I've discussed with product managers and CTOs of library automation vendors have gone unfixed for more than a year. I'm getting tired of it.<br /><br />The results of my quick survey for each of the 123 ARL libraries are available <a href="https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ssUWWwwmDpA_qo5kZpmImt5ashp1NdBwlYWNMWetQKM/edit?usp=sharing">as a Google Sheet</a>. There are bound to be a few errors, and I'd love to be able to make changes as privacy leaks get plugged and websites become secure, so feel free to leave a comment.<br /><div><br /></div>http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/05/97-of-research-library-searches-leak.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-4639043184460599151Fri, 01 Apr 2016 04:14:00 +00002016-04-07T15:06:50.753-04:00Just KiddingApril Fools is Cancelled This Year<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IY2qJgfIwUw/Vv31JhP-0II/AAAAAAAAAu0/3UfFItWHQpsE0Q4jrzIqk7zlAheJodqKA/s1600/colbertemoji.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IY2qJgfIwUw/Vv31JhP-0II/AAAAAAAAAu0/3UfFItWHQpsE0Q4jrzIqk7zlAheJodqKA/s1600/colbertemoji.png" /></a></div>Since <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.theonion.com/" rel="homepage" target="_blank" title="The Onion">the Onion</a> dropped their fake news format in January in favor of serious reporting, it's become clear that the web's April Fools Day would be very different this year. Why make stuff up when real life is so hard to believe?<br /><br />All my ideas for a satirical blog posts seemed too sadly realistic. After people thought my April 1 <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/04/suggested-improvements-for-medical.html">post last year</a> was real, all my ideas for fake posts about false privacy and the All Writs Act seemed cruel. I thought about doing something about power inequity in libraries and publishing, but then all my crazy imaginings came true on the <a href="http://www.ala.org/acrl/issues/scholcomm/scholcommdiscussion">ACRL SCHOLCOMM list</a>.<br /><br />So no April Fools post on Go To Hellman this year. Except for this one, of course.http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/04/april-fools-is-canceled-this-year.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-2396960636826305488Mon, 21 Mar 2016 16:35:00 +00002016-03-21T12:41:32.464-04:00Piracyprivacyscholarly publishingTor (anonymity network)Sci-Hub, LibGen, and Total Information Awareness<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cQljbyJFbLE/VvAfXmNc0KI/AAAAAAAAAuY/j4VbamdI1zkXbNWtR4Vrq5iWEl0btg9ZA/s1600/Scihub_raven.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-cQljbyJFbLE/VvAfXmNc0KI/AAAAAAAAAuY/j4VbamdI1zkXbNWtR4Vrq5iWEl0btg9ZA/s320/Scihub_raven.png" width="163" /></a></div>"Good thing downloads NOT trackable!" was one twitter response <a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/03/inside-2016-big-deal-negotiation.html">to my post</a> imagining a skirmish in the imminent scholarly publishing copyright war.<br /><br />"You wish!" I responded.<br /><br />Sooner or later, such illusions of privacy will fail spectacularly, and people will get hurt.<br /><br />I had been in no hurry to see what the Sci-Hub furor was about. After <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/search/label/Piracy">writing frequently</a> about piracy in the ebook industry, I figured that Sci-Hub would be just another copyright-flouting, adware-infested Russian website. When I finally took a look, I saw that Sci-Hub is a surprisingly sophisticated website that does a good job of facilitating evasion of research article paywalls. It styles itself as "the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers" and aspires to the righteous liberation of knowledge. David Rosenthal has written a rather <a href="http://blog.dshr.org/2016/03/elsevier-and-streisand-effect.html">comprehensive overview</a> of the controversy surrounding it.<br /><br />I also observed how easy it would be to track all the downloads being made via Sci-Hub. Today's internet is an environment where someone is tracking everything, and in the case of Sci-Hub, everything is being tracked.<br /><br />My follow-up article was going to describe all the places that could track downloads via Sci-Hub, and how easy it would be to obtain a list of individuals who had downloaded or uploaded a Sci-Hub article – in violation of the laws currently governing copyright. But Sci-Hub is not doing things in the usual way of pirate websites. They're actually working to improve &nbsp;user privacy. Around the time of my last post, they <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/01/not-using-https-on-your-website-is-like.html">implemented HTTPS</a>&nbsp;(<a href="https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=sci-hub.io&amp;latest">SSLLabs</a> grade: B) on their website. So instead of inducing users to announce their downloading activity to fellow WiFi users and every ISP on the planet, which is what Sci-Hub was doing in February, today Sci-Hub only registers download activity with Yandex Metrics, the Russian equivalent of Google Analytics.<br /><br />As long as you trust a Russian internet company to NEVER monetize data about you by selling it to people with more money than good sense, you're not being betrayed by Sci-Hub. Unless the data <a href="http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/lack-of-privacy-wont-hamper-yandex/441302.html">SOMEHOW</a> falls into the wrong hands. <br /><br />There are more ways to track Sci-Hub downloads. Many of the downloads facilitated by Sci-Hub are fulfilled by <span style="font-family: &quot;courier new&quot; , &quot;courier&quot; , monospace;">LibGen.io</span> a.k.a. "Library Genesis". LibGen <i>is</i> doing things in the usual way of pirate websites. The LibGen site does NOT support encryption, and it makes money by running advertising served by Google. As a result, Google gets informed of every LibGen download, and if a user has ever registered with Google, then Google knows exactly who they are, what they've downloaded and when they downloaded it. So to get a big list of downloaders, you'd <i>just</i> need to get Google to fork it over.<br /><br /><a href="https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later">History suggests</a> that copyright owners will eventually try to sue or otherwise monetize downloaders, and will be successful. In today's ad-network-created <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Information Awareness Office">Total Information Awareness</a> environment, it might even be a viable business model.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-D3DT6NONNaQ/VvAffKgl8HI/AAAAAAAAAuc/hW-nQv4Wko0i6B9yq7wvQmmGNziGWyoCg/s1600/400px-Tor-logo-2011-flat.svg.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="120" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-D3DT6NONNaQ/VvAffKgl8HI/AAAAAAAAAuc/hW-nQv4Wko0i6B9yq7wvQmmGNziGWyoCg/s200/400px-Tor-logo-2011-flat.svg.png" width="200" /></a></div>The best solution for a user wanting to download articles privately is to use the <a href="https://www.torproject.org/download/download-easy.html.en">Tor Browser</a>&nbsp;and Sci-Hub's onion address, <a href="http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/"><span style="font-family: &quot;courier new&quot; , &quot;courier&quot; , monospace;">http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion</span></a>. Onion addresses provide encryption all the way to the destination, and since SciHub uses LibGen's onion address for linking, neither connection can be snooped by the network. Google and Yandex still get informed of all download activity, but the Tor browser hides the user's identity from them. ...Unless the user slips up and reveal their identity to another web site while using Tor.<br /><br />Since .<span style="font-family: &quot;courier new&quot; , &quot;courier&quot; , monospace;">onion</span> addresses don't use the DNS system (they won't work outside the Tor network), they won't be affected by <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-and-libgen-resurface-after-being-shut-down-151121/">legal attacks</a> on the .<span style="font-family: &quot;courier new&quot; , &quot;courier&quot; , monospace;">io</span> registrar. If you use the <span style="font-family: &quot;courier new&quot; , &quot;courier&quot; , monospace;">Sci-Hub.io</span> address in the Tor Browser, your downloads from <span style="font-family: &quot;courier new&quot; , &quot;courier&quot; , monospace;">LibGen.io</span> can be monitored (and perhaps tampered with) by inquisitive exit nodes, so be sure to use the <span style="font-family: &quot;courier new&quot; , &quot;courier&quot; , monospace;">.onion</span> address for privacy and security. I would also recommend using "medium-high" security mode (Onion &gt; Privacy and Security Settings).<br /><br />It might also be a good idea to use the Tor Browser if you want read research articles in private, even in journals you've paid for; medical journals seem to be <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/03/16-of-top-20-research-journals-let-ad.html">the worst of the bunch</a> with respect to privacy.<br /><br />If publishers begin to take Sci-Hub countermeasures seriously (<a href="http://gavialib.com/2016/02/playing-whack-a-sci-hub/">Library Loon has a good summary</a> of the horribles to expect) there will be more things to worry about. PDFs can be loaded with privacy attacks in many ways, ranging from embedded security exploits to usage-monitoring links.<br /><br />This isn't going to be fun for anyone.<br /><div><br /></div>http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/03/sci-hub-libgen-and-total-information.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-4843313148498492114Mon, 07 Mar 2016 14:57:00 +00002016-03-08T13:19:24.716-05:00LibrariesOpen AccessPiracyprivacyInside a 2016 Big Deal Negotiation...<br /><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Dramatis Personae:&nbsp;</i></div></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"></div><ul><li style="text-align: left;"><i>A Sales Representative from STM Corporation</i></li><li style="text-align: left;"><i>An Acquisitions Librarian at Prestige University.</i></li></ul></div><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div></div>STM Corp Sales Rep: It's so nice to see you! We have some exciting news about your Big Deal renewal contract!<br /><br />PU Acquisitions Librarian: Actually, I'm afraid <i>we</i> have some bad news for <i>you</i>. The Acquisitions Committee has had to make some cutbacks...<br /><br />Sales Rep: I'm sorry to hear that. In fact, we also have some disturbing data to show you.<br /><br />Librarian: We've been studying our usage data, and STM Corp's journals aren't seeing the usage we'd expected.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D4SL6gf9nbo/Vt2VMTBERMI/AAAAAAAAAt4/ui6uHIx1swg/s1600/tia.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D4SL6gf9nbo/Vt2VMTBERMI/AAAAAAAAAt4/ui6uHIx1swg/s200/tia.png" width="145" /></a></div>Sales Rep: Funny you should mention that, because STM Corp's Big Deal service has implemented a new "Total Information Awareness (TIA)" system that will answer all your usage questions. The TIA system monitors usage of our articles however they are acquired, and pinpoints the users, whoever and where ever they are. Our customers have been wanting this information for years, and now we can provide it.<br /><br />Librarian: Now that's interesting. We've been discussing whether that sort of data could improve our services, but as librarians we need to respect the privacy of our users.<br /><br />Sales Rep: Of course! And as publishers, we need to protect our services from unauthorized access and piracy.<br /><br />Librarian: ... and our license agreements oblige us to respond to those concerns.<br /><br />Sales Rep: I'm so glad you understand! But the TIA has exposed some disturbing information about journal usage on your campus.<br /><br />Librarian: Yes, usage is dropping, That's what we wanted to discuss with you.<br /><br />Sales Rep: Actually, total usage is increasing. It's just licensed usage that's dropping. Illicit usage is going through the roof!<br /><br />Librarian: What do you mean?<br /><br />Sales Rep: Have you heard of a website called Sci-Hub?<br /><br />Librarian: <i>[suppressing smile]</i> Why yes...<br /><br />Sales Rep: It seems that students and faculty on your campus have been accessing our articles via Sci-Hub quite a lot, and have been uploading...<br /><br />Librarian: <i>[starting to worry]</i> We would never condone that! Using articles from Sci-Hub is likely copyright infringement in our jurisdiction. And uploading articles would be a violation of our campus policies!<br /><br />Sales Rep: Exactly! Which is why we wanted you to see this data.<br /><br />Librarian: <i>[scanning several pages]</i> But.. but this is a list of hundreds of our students and faculty, including some of our most prominent scientists!<br /><br />Sales Rep: <i>[grinning] </i>... each of them potentially facing hundreds of thousands of dollars of statutory damages for copyright infringement. Even career-ending litigation. It's such a <i>blessing</i> for you that we would <i>never</i> pursue legal actions that would hurt a good customer like Prestige U. Now about your renewal...<br /><br />Librarian: Where did this list come from?<br /><br />Sales Rep: As I said before, STM Corp's "Total Information Awareness" system monitors usage of our articles and pinpoints the users. You said before you had some bad news for us?<br /><br />Librarian: Umm... we need to make some cutbacks.<br /><br />Sales Rep: <i>[smug]</i> Well, then you'll be happy to know that we're limiting your big deal price to just a 19% increase over last time.<br /><br />Librarian: <i>[non-gendered expression of profound despair]</i> ... and our Dean who's been using Sci-Hub?<br /><br />Sales Rep: Sci-Hub? never heard of it.<br /><br />Librarian: <i>[resigned] </i>OK, send us the invoice.<br /><br /><i>[Everything in this drama is fictitious except Sci-Hub and TIA. more next time.]</i><br /><br />http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/03/inside-2016-big-deal-negotiation.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-6523687747935351261Thu, 18 Feb 2016 05:05:00 +00002016-02-24T10:50:53.360-05:00BitcoinCryptographymagicThe Impact of Bitcoin on Fried Chicken Recipe Archives<a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Bitcoin">Bitcoin</a> is magic. Not the technology, but the hype machine behind it. You've probably heard that Bitcoin technology is going to change <a href="http://lfb.org/lamborghinis-and-galactic-spaceships-bitcoin-changes-everything/">everything</a> from banking to fried <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-17/bitcoin-farmer-for-agriculture/6946744">chicken</a> recipes, from <a href="http://reason.com/archives/2014/02/24/is-bitcoin-the-key-to-digital-copyright">copyright</a>&nbsp;to <a href="http://genecoin.me/faq.html">genome</a> research. Like any good hype machine, Bitcoin's whips amazing facts together with plausible nonsense to make a perfect <i>soufflé</i>.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wiyJmUHlh-8/VsVB-DfUe7I/AAAAAAAAAso/f9gE1GqAZLU/s1600/chickencoin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wiyJmUHlh-8/VsVB-DfUe7I/AAAAAAAAAso/f9gE1GqAZLU/s200/chickencoin.jpg" width="193" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">ChickenCoin&nbsp;(Comoros 25 francs 1982)<br />CC BY-NC-ND &nbsp;by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/edelweisscoins/14940008397">edelweisscoins</a></td></tr></tbody></table>The <a href="http://avc.com/2014/09/the-bitcoin-hype-cycle/">hype cycle</a> is not Bitcoin's fault. Bitcoin is a masterful and probably successful attack on a problem that many thought was impossible. Bitcoin creates a decentralized, open, transparent and secure way to maintain a monetary transaction ledger. The reason this is so hard is because of the money. Money creates strong incentives for cheating, hacking, subverting the ledger, and it's really hard to create an open system that has no centralized authority yet is hard to attack. The genius of bitcoin is to cleverly exploit that incentive to power its distributed ledger engine, often referred to as "the blockchain". Anyone can create bitcoin for themselves and add it to the ledger, but to get others to accept your addition, you have to play by the rules and do work to add to the ledger. This process is called "mining".<br /><br />If you're building a fried chicken recipe archive, (let's call it FriChiReciChive) there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that fried chicken is a terrible fuel for a blockchain ledger. No one mines for fried chicken. The good news is that very few nation-states care about your fried chicken recipes. Defending your recipe archive against cheating, hacking, attack and subversion will not require heroic bank-vault tactics.<br /><br />That's not to say you can't learn from Bitcoin and its blockchain. Bitcoin is cleverly assembled from mature technologies that each seemed impossible not long ago. Your <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/eats/kfc-moves-colonel-sanders-secret-fried-chicken-recipe-new-safer-vault-article-1.389489">legacy recipe system</a> was probably built in the days of archive horses and database buggies; if you're building a new one it probably would be a good idea to have a set of modern tools.<br /><br />What are these tools? Here are a few of them:<br /><ol><li>Big storage. It's easy to forget how much storage is available today. The current size of the bitcoin blockchain, the ledger of every bitcoin transaction every made, <a href="https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size">is only 56 GB</a>. That's about one iPhone of storage. The cheapest macbook Pro comes with 128 GB, which is more than you can imagine. Amazon Web Services <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/">offers 500GB</a> of storage for $15 per month. Your job in making FriChiReciChive a reality is to imagine how make use of all that storage. Suppose the average fried chicken recipe is a thousand words. That's about 10 thousand bytes. With 500GB and a little math, you can store 50 million fried chicken recipes.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z7mbU7RQHOs/VsVHst6AkWI/AAAAAAAAAs8/45kBfvf0xbk/s1600/3836773262_5607683d0b_b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-z7mbU7RQHOs/VsVHst6AkWI/AAAAAAAAAs8/45kBfvf0xbk/s200/3836773262_5607683d0b_b.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Momofoku Fried Chicken<br />CC BY-NC by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gandhu/3836773262">gandhu</a></td></tr></tbody></table>Having trouble imagining 50 million chicken recipes? You could try a recipe a minute and it would take you 95 years to try them all. That would be a poor use of your time on earth, and it would be a poor use of 500 GB. So forget about deleting old recipes and start thinking about the FriChi info you could be keeping. How about recording every portion of fried chicken ever prepared, and who ate it. This is possible today. If you're working on an archive of books, you could record every time someone reads a book. Trust me, Amazon is trying to do that.<br /><br /> Occasionally, you'll hear that you can store information directly in Bitcoin's blockchain. That's possible, but you probably don't want to do that because of cost. The current cost of adding a MB (about 1 block) to the bitcoin blockchain is 25 BTC. At current exchange rates, that's about $10 per kB. That cost is borne by the global Bitcoin system, and it pays for the power consumed by Bitcoin miners. For comparison, AWS&nbsp;will charge you 0.36 microcents per year to store a kilobyte. The blockchain does more than S3, but not 30 million times more.<br /><br /> </li><li><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FLxQE2dHXy8/VsVKuD2spkI/AAAAAAAAAtQ/z8d5dKP3WWI/s1600/21294497920_e53dd4cee8_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="128" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-FLxQE2dHXy8/VsVKuD2spkI/AAAAAAAAAtQ/z8d5dKP3WWI/s200/21294497920_e53dd4cee8_z.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Moroccan Chicken Hash<br />CC BY-NC-ND by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mmm-yoso/21294497920">mmm-yoso</a></td></tr></tbody></table>Cryptographic hashes. Bitcoin makes pervasive use of <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Cryptographic hash function">cryptographic hashes</a> to build and access its blockchain. Cryptographic hashes have some amazing properties. For example, you can use a hash to identify a digital document of any kind. Whether it's a password or a video of a cat, you can compute a hash and use the hash to identify the cat video. Flip a single bit in your fried chicken recipe, and you get a completely different hash. That's why bitcoin uses hashes to identify transactions. And you can't make the chicken from the hash. Yes, that's why it called a hash.<br /><br /> Once you have the hash of a digital object, you've made it tamper-proof. If someone makes a change in your recipe, or your cat video, or your software object, the hash of the thing will be completely different, and you'll be able to tell that it's been tampered with. So you never need to let anyone mess with Granny's fried chicken recipe.<br /><br /> </li><li><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_chain">Hash chains</a>. Once you've computed hashes for everything in FriChiReciChive, you probably think, "what good is it to hash a recipe? "If someone can change the recipe, someone can change the hash, too." Bitcoin solves this problem by hashing the hashes! each new data block contains the hash of the previous block. Which contains a hash of the block before that! etc. etc. all the way back to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto">Satoshi</a>'s first block. Of course, this trick of chaining the block hashes was not invented by Bitcoin. And a chain isn't the only way to play this trick. A structure known a <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_tree" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Hash tree">Merkle tree</a> (after its <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Merkle">inventor</a>) lays out the hashes chains in a tree topology. So by using Merkle trees of fried chicken recipes, you can make the hash of a new recipe depend on every previous recipe. If someone wanted to mess with Granny, they'd have Nana to mess with too, not to mention the Colonel!<br /><br /></li><li><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BFeXK2qA92E/VsVMQnGhsSI/AAAAAAAAAtc/eD69PAlAYcs/s1600/11149156105_95a8f1c25c_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="132" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BFeXK2qA92E/VsVMQnGhsSI/AAAAAAAAAtc/eD69PAlAYcs/s200/11149156105_95a8f1c25c_z.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jingu-Galen Ginkgo Festival Fried Chicken<br />CC BY-NC-ND by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mawari/11149156105">mawari</a></td></tr></tbody></table><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature">Cryptographic signatures</a>. If you're still paying attention, you might be thinking. "Hey! what's to stop Satoshi from rewriting the whole <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_chain" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Block chain">block chain</a>?" And here's where cryptographic signatures come in. Every blockchain transaction gets signed by someone using <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-key_cryptography" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Public-key cryptography">public key cryptography</a>. The signature works like a hash, and there are chains of signatures. Each signature can be verified using a public key, but without the owner's private key, any change to the block will cause the verification to fail. The result is that the block chain can't be altered without the cooperation of everyone who has signed blocks in the chain.<br /><br />Here's where FriChiReciChive is much easier to secure than Bitcoin. You don't need a lot of people participating to make the recipe ledger secure enough for the largest fried chicken attack you can imagine.<br /><br /></li><li>Peer-to-peer. Perhaps the cleverest part of Bitcoin is the way that it arbitrates contention for the privilege of adding blocks. It uses puzzle solving to dole out this privilege to the "miners" (puzzle-solvers) who are best at solving the puzzle. Arbitration is needed because otherwise everyone could add blocks earning them Bitcoin. The puzzle solving turns out to be expensive because of the energy used to power the puzzle-solving computers. <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Peer-to-peer">Peer-to-peer networks</a> which share databases don't need this type of arbitration. While the contention for blocks in Bitcoin has been constantly rising, the contention for slots in distributed fried chicken data storage should drop into the foreseeable future.<br /><br /></li><li><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Xi03w1nM3RE/VsVIe1THveI/AAAAAAAAAtE/eOEEyMzSF1w/s1600/8865829044_cc51d24fdb_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="133" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Xi03w1nM3RE/VsVIe1THveI/AAAAAAAAAtE/eOEEyMzSF1w/s200/8865829044_cc51d24fdb_z.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Charleston: Husk - Crispy Southern Fried<br />Chicken Skins CC BY-NC-ND by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/8865829044">wallyg</a></td></tr></tbody></table><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-knowledge_proof">Zero-knowledge proofs</a>. Once everyone's Fried Chicken meals are recorded in FriChiReciChive, you might suppose that fried chicken privacy would be a thing of the past. The truth is much more complicated. Bitcoin offers a non-intuitive mix of anonymity and transparency. All of its transactions are public, but identities can be private. This is possible because in today's world, knowledge can be one-directional and partitioned in bizarre ways, like Voldemort's soul in the horcruxes. For example, you could build ChiFriReciChive in such a way that Bob or Alice could ask what they ate on Christmas but Eve would never know it, even with the entire fried chicken ledger.<br /><br /></li><li>One more thing. Bitcoin appears to have solved a really hard problem by deploying mature digital tools in clever ways that give participants incentive to make the system work. When you're figuring out how to build FriChiReciChive, or solving whatever problem you might have, chances are you'll have <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/02/bitcoin_s_blockchain_technology_won_t_change_everything.html">a different set of really hard problems</a> with a different set of participants and incentives. By adding the set of tools I've discussed here, you may be able to devise a new solution to your hard problem.<br /></li></ol>Bon appetit. Your <i>soufflé</i> will be <i>délicieux!</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>Added note (2/18/2016):</i>&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/griffey">Jason Griffey</a> points out that I have conflated Bitcoin and the "Blockchain". That's true, but I think partly justified. First of all, there are a number of "altcoins" that make use of modified versions of the bitcoin software to achieve various goals. The differences are interesting but mostly not relevant to a discussion of what you should learn from Bitcoin. There are rather narrow applications for blockchain-based distributed databases; these are well discussed <a href="http://www.multichain.com/blog/2015/11/avoiding-pointless-blockchain-project/">by Coin Sciences founder Gideon Greenspan</a>.<br /><br />http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-impact-of-bitcoin-on-fried-chicken.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-4721486424289185590Thu, 14 Jan 2016 04:56:00 +00002016-01-13T23:57:23.512-05:00ALA MidwinterHTTP SecureprivacyNot using HTTPS on your website is like sending your users outside in just their underwear.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Mo0mjw9DxIU/VpcecuytDiI/AAAAAAAAArk/OyLTz4mJ0IE/s1600/CYNzw83UEAEnSNg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Mo0mjw9DxIU/VpcecuytDiI/AAAAAAAAArk/OyLTz4mJ0IE/s200/CYNzw83UEAEnSNg.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">#ALAMW16 exhibits, <br />viewed from the escalator</td></tr></tbody></table>This past weekend, I spent 3 full days talking to librarians, publishers, and library vendors about making the switch to HTTPS. The <a href="https://libraryfreedomproject.org/">Library Freedom Project</a> staffed a table in the exhibits at the American Library Association Midwinter meeting. We had the best location we could possibly wish for, and we (<a href="https://twitter.com/flexlibris">Alison Macrina</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/mrphs">Nima Fatemi</a>, <a href="http://little_wow/">Jennie Rose Halperin</a> and myself) talked our voices hoarse with anyone interested in privacy in libraries, which seemed to be everyone. We had help from <a href="https://twitter.com/griffey">Jason Griffey</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/thatandromeda">Andromeda Yelton</a> (who were next to us, showing off the cutest computers in town for the "<a href="http://measurethefuture.net/">Measure the Future</a>" project).<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-co_YetCVyJk/VpcfafO_BHI/AAAAAAAAArs/G4WNtkNLkQc/s1600/CYPCYZlWkAAEBLu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-co_YetCVyJk/VpcfafO_BHI/AAAAAAAAArs/G4WNtkNLkQc/s200/CYPCYZlWkAAEBLu.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Badass librarians with <br />framed @snowden tweet.</td></tr></tbody></table>We had stickers, we had handouts. We had ACLU camera covers and 3D-printed logos. We had new business cards. We had a framed tweet from <a href="https://twitter.com/snowden">@Snowden</a> praising <a href="https://twitter.com/libraryfreedom">@libraryfreedom</a> and "Badass Librarians", who were invited to take selfies.<br /><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><div dir="ltr" lang="en">DHS fought to stop libraries from using privacy technology, but <a href="https://twitter.com/libraryfreedom">@LibraryFreedom</a> beat them. Librarians are badass. <a href="https://t.co/5BzFywnJLn">https://t.co/5BzFywnJLn</a></div>— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) <a href="https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/653275043087151105">October 11, 2015</a></blockquote><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> Apart from helping to raise awareness about internet privacy, talking to lots of real people can help hone a message. Some people didn't really get encryption, and a few were all "What??? Libraries don't use encrypted connections???" By the end of the first day, I had the message down to the one sentence:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Not using HTTPS on your website is like sending your users outside in just their underwear.</blockquote>Because, if you don't use HTTPS, people can see <i>everything</i>, and though there's nothing really <i>WRONG</i> with not wearing clothes outside, we live in a society where doing so by custom is the respectful thing. There are many excellent reasons to preserve our users' privacy, but many of the reasons tend to highlight the needs of <i>other</i> people. The opposing viewpoint is often "Privacy is a thing of the past, just get over it" or "I don't have anything to hide, so why work hard so you can keep all your dirty secrets?" But most people <i>don't </i>think wearing clothes is&nbsp;a thing of the past; a connection made between encrypted connections and nice clothes just normalizes the normal.<br /><br />We've previously used the analogy that HTTP is like sending postcards while HTTPS is like sending notes in envelopes. This is a harder analogy to use in a 30 second explainer because you have to make a second argument that websites shouldn't be sent on postcards.<br /><br />We <i>need</i> to craft better slogans because there's a lot of anti-crypto noise trying to apply an odor of crime and terrorism to good privacy and security practices. The underwear argument is effective against that - I don't know anyone that isn't at least a bit creeped out by the "unclothing" done by the TSA's full body scanners.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><br /><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Lxx5g-9EhOE/Vpcmvu0XgUI/AAAAAAAAAsI/W7aZXaDr7CY/s1600/16076025417_12ca4b1177_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="206" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Lxx5g-9EhOE/Vpcmvu0XgUI/AAAAAAAAAsI/W7aZXaDr7CY/s400/16076025417_12ca4b1177_o.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: #f3f5f6; color: #212124; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px; text-align: start;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://flic.kr/p/quzQh2">No Pants Subway Ride 2015: cosmetic trierarchs</a> CC BY-NC-ND by <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/captin_nod/">captin_nod</a></span></span></td></tr></tbody></table><br />Maybe instead of green lock icons for HTTPS, browser software could display some sort of flesh-tone nudity icon for unencrypted HTTP connections. That might change user behavior rather quickly. I don't know about you but I never lose sleep over door locks, but I do have nightmares about going out without my pants!http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/01/not-using-https-on-your-website-is-like.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-2469090464450663425Sun, 03 Jan 2016 03:08:00 +00002016-01-03T09:25:52.403-05:00ebooksEPUBWeb Design and DevelopmentThe Best eBook of 2015: "What is Code?"When the <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Compact Disc">Compact Disc</a> was being standardized, its capacity was set to accommodate the length of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, reportedly at the insistence of Sony executive <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norio_Ohga" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Norio Ohga">Norio Ohga</a>. In retrospect it seems obvious that a media technology should adapt to media art wherever possible, not vice versa. This is less possible when new media technologies enable new forms of creation, but that's what makes them so exciting.<br /><br />I've been working primarily on ebooks for the past 5 years, mostly because I'm excited at the new possibilities they enable. I'm impressed - and excited - &nbsp;when ebooks do things that can't be done for print books, partly because ebooks often can't capture the most innovative uses of ink on paper.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://unglue.it/work/154781/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YOzzw0jUAXY/VoiJiciniRI/AAAAAAAAAq4/7KvzktVyDAY/s320/cover.jpeg" title="" width="250" /></a></div>Looking back on 2015, there was one ebook more than any other that demonstrated the possibilities of the ebook as an art form, while at the same time being fun, captivating, and awe-inspiring, Paul Ford's <i><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-code/">What Is Code?</a></i><br /><br />Unfortunately, today's ebook technology standards can't fully accommodate this work. The compact disc of ebooks can store only four and a half movements of Beethoven's Ninth. That makes me sad.<br /><br />You might ask, how does <i>What Is Code?</i> qualify as an ebook if it doesn't quite work on a kindle or your favorite ebook app? <i>What Is Code?</i> was conceived and developed as an HTML5 web application for <i>Business Week</i> magazine, not with the idea of making an ebook. Nonetheless, <i>What Is Code?</i> uses the forms and structures of traditional books. It has a title page. It has chapters, sections, footnotes and a table of contents which support a linear narrative. It has marginal notes, figures and asides.<br /><br />Despite its bookishness, it's hard to imagine <i>What Is Code?</i> in print. Although the share buttons and video embeds are mostly adornments for the text, activity modules are core to the book's exposition. The book is about code, and by bringing code to life, the reader becomes immersed in the book's subject matter. There's a greeter robot that waves and seems to know the reader, showing the ebook's "intelligence". The "how do you type an "A" activity in section 2.1 is a script worth a thousand words &nbsp;and the "mousemove" activity in section 6.2 is a revelation even to an experienced programmer. If all that weren't enough, there's a random, active background that manages to soothe more than it distracts.<br /><br />Even with its digital doodads, <i>What Is Code?</i> can be completely self contained and portable. To demonstrate this, I've packaged it up and archived it at Internet Archive; you can download with <a href="https://unglue.it/download_ebook/3229/">this link</a>&nbsp;(21MB). &nbsp;Once you've downloaded it, unzip it and load the "index.html" file into a modern browser. Everything will work fine, even if you turn off your internet connection. <i>What Is Code?</i> will continue to work after&nbsp;<i>Business Week</i> disappears from the internet (or behind the most censorious firewall). <a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-best-ebook-of-2015-what-is-code.html#fn1" id="fnr1">[1]</a><br /><br />I was curious how much of <i>What is Code?</i> could be captured in a standard <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="EPUB">EPUB</a> ebook file. I first tried making a <a href="https://unglue.it/download_ebook/3227/">EPUB version 2 file</a> with <a href="http://calibre-ebook.com/">Calibre</a>. The <a href="https://unglue.it/download_ebook/3227/">result</a>&nbsp;was not a lame as I thought it would be, but stripped of interactivity, it seemed like a photocopy of a sticker book - the story's there, but the fun, not so much. Same with the <a href="https://unglue.it/download_ebook/3228/">Kindle version</a> .<br /><br />I hoped that more of the scripts would work with an EPUB 3 file. This is more or the same as the zipped html file I made but I was unable to get it to display properly in iBooks despite 2 days of trying. Perhaps someone more experienced with javascript in EPUB3 could manage it. The display in Calibre was a bit better. <a href="http://readium.org/">Readium</a>, the flagship software for EPUB3, just sat there spinning a cursor. It seems that the scripts handling the vertical swipe convention of the web conflict with the more bookish pagination attempted by iBooks.<br /><br />The <a href="https://unglue.it/download_ebook/3229/">stand-alone HTML zip archive</a> that I made addresses most of the use cases behind EPUB. The text is reflowable and user-adjustable. Elements adjust nicely to the size of the screen from laptop to smartphone. The javascript table of contents works the same as in an ebook reader. Accessibility could be improved, but that's mostly a matter of following accessibility standards that aren't specific to ebooks.<br /><br />My experimentation with the code behind <i>What Is Code?</i> is another exciting aspect of making books into ebooks. Code and digital text can use a open licenses&nbsp;<a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-best-ebook-of-2015-what-is-code.html#fn2" id="fnr2">[2]</a> that permit others to use, re-use and learn from <i>What Is Code?</i>. The entire project archive <a href="https://github.com/BloombergMedia/whatiscode">is hosted on GitHub</a> and to date has been enhanced 671 times by 29 different contributors. There have been 187 forks (like <a href="https://github.com/eshellman/whatiscode/tree/ebook-v2">mine</a>) of the project. I think this collaborative creation process will be second nature to the ebook of the future.<br /><br />There have been a number of proposals for portable HTML5 web archive formats for ebook technology moving forward. Among these are "<a href="http://www.5doc.org/">5DOC</a>" &nbsp;and W3C's "<a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/pwp/">Portable Web Platform</a>". &nbsp; As far as I can tell, these proposals aren't getting much traction or developer support. To succeed, the format has to be very lightweight and useful, or be supported by at least 2 of Amazon, Apple, and Google. I hope someone succeeds at this.<br /><br /><i>Whatever</i> happens I hope there's room for Easter Eggs in the future of the ebook. There's a "secret" keyboard combination that triggers a laugh-out-loud Easter Egg on <i>What is Code?</i> And if you know how to look at <i>What Is Code?</i>'s javascript console, you'll see a message that's an appropriate ending for this post:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZMvNWD5WtuU/VoiPOCLN0lI/AAAAAAAAArM/tvGFxy8uy1U/s1600/smash.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZMvNWD5WtuU/VoiPOCLN0lI/AAAAAAAAArM/tvGFxy8uy1U/s640/smash.png" width="100%" /></a></div><br />Best of 2015, don't you agree?<br /><br /><a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-best-ebook-of-2015-what-is-code.html#fnr1" id="fn1">[1]</a> To get everything in <i>What Is Code?</i> to work without an internet connection, I needed to add a small number of remotely loaded resources and fix a few small javascript bugs specific to loading from a file. (If you must know, pushing to the document.history of a file isn't allowed.) The YouTube embed is blank, of course, and a horrible, gratuitous Flash widget needed to be excised. You can see the details&nbsp;<a href="https://github.com/eshellman/whatiscode/tree/ebook-v2">on GitHub</a>.<br /><br /><a href="https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-best-ebook-of-2015-what-is-code.html#fnr2" id="fn2">[2]</a> In this case, the Apache License and the Creative Commons By-NC-ND License.http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-best-ebook-of-2015-what-is-code.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-8345827901398585585Fri, 01 Jan 2016 02:30:00 +00002015-12-31T21:36:16.208-05:00HTTP SecureLibrariesprivacysecurityA New Year's Resolution for Publishers and Libraries: Switch to HTTPSThe <a href="https://libraryfreedomproject.org/ourwork/digitalprivacypledge/library-privacy-pledge-endorsements/">endorsement list</a> for the <a href="https://libraryfreedomproject.org/ourwork/digitalprivacypledge/">Library Digital Privacy Pledge</a> of 2015-2016 is up and ready to add the name of your organization. We added the "-2016" part, because various things took longer than we thought.<br /><br />Everything takes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law">longer than you think it will</a>. Web development, business, committee meetings, that blog post. Over the past few months, I've talked to all sorts of people about switching to HTTPS. Librarians, publishers, technologists. Library directors, CEOs, executive editors, engineering managers. Everyone wants to do it, but there are difficulties and complications, many of them small and some of them sticky. It's clear that we all have to work together to make this transition happen.<br /><br />The list will soon get a lot longer, because a lot of people wanted to meet about it at the <a href="http://2016.alamidwinter.org/">ALA Midwinter meeting</a> just 1 week away OMG it's so soon! Getting it done is the perfect New Year's resolution for everyone in the world of libraries.<br /><br />Here's what you can do:<br /><br />If you're a <i>Publisher...</i><br /><br />... you probably know you need to make the switch, if for no other reason than the extra search engine ranking. By the end of the year, don't be surprised if non-secure websites look unprofessional, which is not what a publisher wants to project.<br /><br />If you're a <i>Librarian...</i><br /><br />... you probably recognize the importance of user privacy, but you're at the mercy of your information and automation suppliers. If those publishers and suppliers haven't signed the pledge, go and ask them why not. And where you control a service, make it secure!<br /><br />If you're a <i>Library Technology Vendor...</i><br /><br />... here's your opportunity to be a hero. You can now integrate security and privacy into your web solution without the customer paying for certificates. So what are you waiting for?<br /><br />If you're a <i>Library user...</i><br /><br />... ask your library if their services are secure and private. Ask publishers if their services are immune to eavesdropping and corruption. If those services are delivered without encryption, the answer is NO!<br /><br />Everything takes longer than you think it will.&nbsp;Until it happens faster than you can imagine. Kids grow up so fast!<br /><br />http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-new-years-resolution-for-publishers.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-664190504466185136Tue, 22 Dec 2015 18:31:00 +00002015-12-22T13:31:17.644-05:00isbnlinked dataOCLCWeb Design and DevelopmentxISBN: RIP<br />When I joined OCLC in 2006 (via <a href="http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2006/02/ljarchives/oclc-buys-openly-informatics/">acquisition</a>), one thing I was excited about was the opportunity to make innovative uses of OCLC's vast <a href="http://worldcat.org/">bibliographic database</a>. And there was an existence proof that this could be done, it was a neat little API that had been prototyped in OCLC's Office of Research: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20060114135308/http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/xisbn/technical.htm">xISBN</a>.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-itzxpTq5oxg/VnmWfnjG2JI/AAAAAAAAAqk/jGEdqEoUGRc/s1600/xisbn.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="217" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-itzxpTq5oxg/VnmWfnjG2JI/AAAAAAAAAqk/jGEdqEoUGRc/s320/xisbn.png" width="320" /></a></div>xISBN was an example of a microservice- it offered a small piece of functionality and it did it very fast. Throw it an ISBN, and it would give you back a set of related ISBNs. Ten years ago, microservices and mashups were all the rage. So I was delighted when my team was given the job of "productizing" the xISBN service- moving it out of research and into the marketplace.<br /><br />Last week, &nbsp;I was sorry to hear about the <a href="https://www.oclc.org/developer/news/2015/change-to-xid-services.en.html">imminent shutdown of xISBN</a>. But it got me thinking about the limitations of services like xISBN and why no tears need be shed on its passing.<br /><br />The main function of xISBN was to say "Here's a group of books that are sort of the same as the book you're asking about." That summary instantly tells you why xISBN had to die, because any time a computer tells you something "sort of", it's a latent bug. Because where you draw the line between something that's the same and something that's different is a matter of opinion and depends on the use you want to make of the distinction. For example, if you ask for <i>A Study in Scarlet</i>, you might be interested in a version in Chinese, or you might be interested to get a paperback version, or you might want to get Sherlock Holmes compilations that included <i>A Study in Scarlet</i>. For each &nbsp;question you want a slightly different answer. If you are a developer needing answers to these questions, you would combine xISBN with other information services to get what you need.<br /><br />Today we have better ways to approach this sort of problem. Serious developers don't want a microservice, they want richly "Linked Data". In 2015, most of us can all afford our own data crunching big-data-stores-in-the-cloud and we don't need to trust algorithms we can't control. OCLC has been publishing rather nice Linked Data for this purpose. So, if you want all the editions for Cory Doctorow's <i>Homeland</i>, you can "follow your nose" and get all the data you need.<br /><br /><ol><li>First you look up the isbn at <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/isbn/9780765333698">http://www.worldcat.org/isbn/9780765333698</a></li><li>which leads you to <a href="http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/795174333.jsonld">http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/795174333.jsonld</a> (containing a few more isbns</li><li>you can follow the associated "work" record: <a href="http://experiment.worldcat.org/entity/work/data/1172568223">http://experiment.worldcat.org/entity/work/data/1172568223</a></li><li>which yields a bunch more ISBNs.</li></ol><br />It's a lot messier than xISBN, but that's mostly because the real world is messy. Every application requires a different sort of cleaning up, and it's not all that hard.<br /><br />If cleaning up the mess seems too intimidating, and you just want light-weight ISBN hints from a convenient microservice, there's always "<a href="http://www.librarything.com/api">thingISBN</a>". ThingISBN is a data exhaust stream from the <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.librarything.com/" rel="homepage" target="_blank" title="LibraryThing">LibraryThing</a> catalog. To be sustainable, microservices like xISBN <i>need</i> to be exhaust streams. The big cost to any data service is maintaining the data, so unless maintaining that data is in the engine block of your website, the added cost won't be worth it. But if you're doing it anyway, dressing the data up as a useful service costs you almost nothing and benefits the environment for everyone. Lets hope that OCLC's Linked Data services are of this sort.<br /><br />In thinking about how I could make the data exhaust from Unglue.it more ecological, I realized that a microservice connecting ISBNs to free ebook files might be useful. So with a day of work, I added the "<a href="http://blog.unglue.it/2015/12/21/free-ebooks-by-isbn/">Free eBooks by ISBN</a>" endpoint to the <a href="https://unglue.it/api/help/">Unglue.it api</a>. <br /><br />xISBN, you lived a good micro-life. Thanks.http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/12/xisbn-rip.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-7683484919058484433Wed, 11 Nov 2015 21:17:00 +00002016-07-07T05:53:08.778-04:00Amazon Web ServicesHTTP SecureWeb Design and DevelopmentUsing Let's Encrypt to Secure an Elastic Beanstalk Website<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NytNjL3ZhMI/VkOtY8LroHI/AAAAAAAAAqI/Xf1YMffKPXE/s1600/letencrypt.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="76" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NytNjL3ZhMI/VkOtY8LroHI/AAAAAAAAAqI/Xf1YMffKPXE/s320/letencrypt.png" width="320" /></a></div>Since I've been pushing the library and academic publishing community to <a href="https://libraryfreedomproject.org/ourwork/digitalprivacypledge/">implement HTTPS</a> on all their informations services, I was really curious to see how the new <a href="https://letsencrypt.org/">Let's Encrypt</a>&nbsp;(LE)&nbsp;<a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Certificate authority">certificate authority</a> is really working, with its <a href="https://letsencrypt.org/2015/08/07/updated-lets-encrypt-launch-schedule.html">"general availability" date</a> imminent. My conclusion is that "general availability" will not mean "general usability" right away; its huge impact will take six months to a year to arrive. For now, it's really important for the community to put our developers to work on integrating Let's Encrypt into our digital infrastructure.<br /><br />I decided to secure the <a href="https://www.gitenberg.org/">www.gitenberg.org</a> website as my test example. It's still being developed, and it's not quite ready for use, so if I screwed up it would be no disaster. Gitenberg.org is hosted using <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/">Elastic Beanstalk</a>&nbsp;(EB) on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is a popular and modern way to build scaleable web services. The servers that Elastic Beanstalk spins up have to be completely configured in advance- you can't just log in and write some files. And EB does its best to keep servers serving. It's no small matter to shut down a server and run some temporary server, because EB will spin up another server to handle rerouted traffic. These characteristics of &nbsp;Elastic Beanstalk exposed some of the present shortcomings and future strengths of the Let's Encrypt project.<br /><br />Here's the <a href="https://letsencrypt.org/about/">mission statement</a> of the project:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA), run for the public’s benefit.</blockquote>While most of us focus on the word "free", the more significant word here is "automated":<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><b>Automatic</b>: Software running on a web server can interact with Let’s Encrypt to painlessly obtain a certificate, securely configure it for use, and automatically take care of renewal.</blockquote>Note that the objective is not to make it painless for <i>website administrators</i> to obtain a certificate, but to enable <i>software</i> to get certificates. If the former is what you want, in the near term, then I strongly recommend that you spend some money with one of the established certificate authorities. You'll get a certificate that isn't limited to 90 days, as the LE certificates are, you can get a wildcard certificate, and you'll be following the manual procedure that your existing web server software expects you to be following.<br /><br />The real payoff for Let's Encrypt will come when your web server applications start expecting you to use the LE methods of obtaining security certificates. Then, the chore of maintaining certificates for secure web servers will disappear, and things will just work. That's an outcome worth waiting for, and worth working towards today.<br /><br />So here's how I got Let's Encrypt working with Elastic Beanstalk for gitenberg.org.<br /><br />The key thing to understand here is that before Let's Encrypt can issue me a certificate, I have to prove to them that I really control the hostname that I'm requesting a certificate for. So the Let's Encrypt client has to be given access to a "privileged" port on the host machine designated by DNS for that hostname. Typically, that means I have to have root access to the server in question.<br /><br />In the future, Amazon should integrate a Let's Encrypt client with their Beanstalk Apache server software so all this is automatic, but for now we have to use the Let's Encrypt "manual mode". In manual mode, the Let's Encrypt client generates a cryptographic "challenge/response", which then needs to be served from the root directory of the gitenberg.org web server.<br /><br />Even running Let's Encrypt in manual mode required some jumping through hoops. It won't run on Mac OSX. It doesn't yet support the flavor of Linux used by Elastic Beanstalk, so it does no good configuring Elastic Beanstalk to install it there. Instead I used the <a href="https://letsencrypt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/using.html#running-with-docker">Let's Encrypt Docker container</a>, which works nicely, and I ran a <a href="https://docs.docker.com/machine/get-started/">Docker-Machine inside "virtualbox"</a> on my Mac.<br /><br />Having configured Docker, I ran<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><code>docker run -it --rm -p 443:443 -p 80:80 --name letsencrypt \ &nbsp; &nbsp; <br />-v "/etc/letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt" \<br />-v "/var/lib/letsencrypt:/var/lib/letsencrypt" \<br />quay.io/letsencrypt/letsencrypt:latest -a manual -d www.gitenberg.org \<br />--server https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory auth</code></blockquote>&nbsp; <br />(the <code>--server</code> option requires your domain to be whitelisted during the beta period.) After paging through some screens asking for my email address and permission to log my IP address, the client responded with<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><code>Make sure your web server displays the following content at http://www.gitenberg.org/.well-known/acme-challenge/8wBDbWQIvFi2bmbBScuxg4aZcVbH9e3uNrkC4CutqVQ before continuing:</code><code><br />8wBDbWQIvFi2bmbBScuxg4aZcVbH9e3uNrkC4CutqVQ.hZuATXmlitRphdYPyLoUCaKbvb8a_fe3wVj35ISDR2A</code></blockquote>To do this, I configured a virtual directory "<code>/.well-known/acme-challenge/</code>" in the Elastic Beanstalk <a href="https://console.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/home">console</a> with a mapping to a "letsencrypt/" directory in my application (configuration page, software configuration section, static files section.). I then made a file named &nbsp;"<code>8wBDbWQIvFi2bmbBScuxg4aZcVbH9e3uNrkC4CutqVQ"&nbsp;</code>with the specified content in my letsencrypt directory, committed the change with git, and deployed the application with the elastic beanstalk command line interface. After waiting for the deployment to succeed, I checked that <code>http://www.gitenberg.org/.well-known/acme-challenge/8wBD...</code> responded correctly, and then hit &lt;enter&gt;. (Though the LE client tells you that the MIME type "text/plain" MUST be sent, elastic beanstalk sets no MIME header, which is allowed.)<br /><br />And SUCCESS!<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><code>IMPORTANT NOTES:</code><code>&nbsp;- Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at</code><code>&nbsp; &nbsp;/etc/letsencrypt/live/www.gitenberg.org/fullchain.pem. Your cert</code><code>&nbsp; &nbsp;will expire on 2016-02-08. To obtain a new version of the</code><code>&nbsp; &nbsp;certificate in the future, simply run Let's Encrypt again.</code></blockquote>...except since I was running Docker inside virtualbox on my Mac, I had to log into the docker machine and copy three files out of that directory (cert.pem, privkey.pem, and chain.pem). I put them in my local &lt;.elasticbeanstalk&gt; directory. (See <a href="https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/saving-account-credentials-from-docker/3616/6">this note</a> for a better way to do this.)<br /><br />The final step was to turn on HTTPS in elastic beanstalk. But before doing that, I had to upload the three files to my AWS Identity and Access Management Console. To do this, I needed to use the aws command line interface, configured with admin privileges. The command was<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><code>aws iam upload-server-certificate \</code><code>--server-certificate-name gitenberg-le \</code><code>--certificate-body file://&lt;.elasticbeanstalk&gt;/cert.pem \</code><code>--private-key file://&lt;.elasticbeanstalk&gt;/privkey.pem \</code><code>--certificate-chain file://&lt;.elasticbeanstalk&gt;/chain.pem</code></blockquote>One more trip to the Elastic Beanstalk configuration console (network/load balancer section), and gitenberg.org was on HTTPS.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wr-WFBVnTrk/VkOrZqPtecI/AAAAAAAAAqA/Yc_2w6isWSY/s1600/gutensecure.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="53" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wr-WFBVnTrk/VkOrZqPtecI/AAAAAAAAAqA/Yc_2w6isWSY/s320/gutensecure.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />Given that my sys-admin skills are rudimentary, the fact that I was able to get Let's Encrypt to work suggests that they've done a pretty good job of making the whole process simple. However, the documentation I needed was non-existent, apparently because the LE developers want to discourage the use of manual mode. Figuring things out required <i>a lot</i> of error-message googling. I hope this post makes it easier for people to get involved to improve that documentation or build support for Let's Encrypt into more server platforms.<br /><br />(Also, given that my sys-admin skills are rudimentary, there are probably better ways to do what I did, so beware.)<br /><br />If you use web server software developed by others, NOW is the time to register a feature request. If you are contracting for software or services that include web services, NOW is the time to add a Let's Encrypt requirement into your specifications and contracts. Let's Encrypt is ready for developers today, even if it's not quite ready for rank and file IT administrators.<br /><div><br /><i>Update (11/12/2015):</i><br />I was alerted to the fact that while https://www.gitenberg.org was working, https://gitenberg.org was failing authentication. So I went back and did it again, this time specifying both hostnames. I had to guess at the correct syntax. I also tested out the <a href="https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/saving-account-credentials-from-docker/3616/6">suggestion from the support forum</a> to get the certificates saved in may mac's filesystem. (It's worth noting here that the <a href="https://community.letsencrypt.org/">community support forum</a> is an essential and excellent resource for implementers.)<br /><br />To get the multi-host certificate generated, I used the command:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><code>docker run -it --rm -p 443:443 -p 80:80 --name letsencrypt \<br />-v "/Users/&lt;my-mac-login&gt;/letsencrypt/etc/letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt" \<br />-v "/Users/&lt;my-mac-login&gt;/letsencrypt/etc/letsencrypt/var/lib/letsencrypt:/var/lib/letsencrypt" \<br />-v "/Users/&lt;my-mac-login&gt;/letsencrypt/var/log/letsencrypt:/var/log/letsencrypt" \<br />quay.io/letsencrypt/letsencrypt:latest -a manual \<br />-d www.gitenberg.org -d gitenberg.org \<br />--server https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory auth</code></blockquote></div><div>This time, I had to go through the challenge/response procedure twice, once for each hostname.</div><div><br /></div><div>With the certs saved to my filesystem, the upload to AWS was easier:</div><div><blockquote class="tr_bq"><code>aws iam upload-server-certificate \<br />--server-certificate-name gitenberg-both \<br />--certificate-body file:///Users/&lt;my-mac-login&gt;/letsencrypt/etc/letsencrypt/live/www.gitenberg.org/cert.pem \<br />--private-key file:///Users/&lt;my-mac-login&gt;/letsencrypt/etc/letsencrypt/live/www.gitenberg.org/privkey.pem \<br />--certificate-chain file:///Users/&lt;my-mac-login&gt;/letsencrypt/etc/letsencrypt/live/www.gitenberg.org/chain.pem</code></blockquote></div><div>And now, traffic on both hostnames is secure!<br /><br />Resources I used:<br /><br /><ul><li><a href="https://realpython.com/blog/python/deploying-a-django-app-to-aws-elastic-beanstalk/">Deploying a Django App to Elastic Beanstalk</a></li><li><a href="https://rickchristianson.wordpress.com/2013/10/31/getting-a-django-app-to-use-https-on-aws-elastic-beanstalk/">Getting a Django App to Use HTTPS on Elastic Beanstalk</a></li><li><a href="http://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/configuring-https-elb.html">HTTPS on Elastic Beanstalk</a></li><li><a href="http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-set-up.html">AWS Command Line Interface</a></li><li><a href="https://www.docker.com/docker-toolbox">Docker Toolbox</a></li><li><a href="https://letsencrypt.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html">Let's Encrypt Client Documentation</a></li><li><a href="https://letsencrypt.org/about/">About Let's Encrypt</a></li><li><a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-barnes-acme-01">Automatic Certificate Management Environment (ACME)</a></li></ul><div>Update 12/6/2015: &nbsp;Let's Encrypt is now in <a href="https://letsencrypt.org/2015/12/03/entering-public-beta.html">public beta</a>, anyone can use it. I've added details about creating the <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/create_deploy_nodejs.container.html">virtual directory</a> in response to a question on twitter.<br /><br />Update 4/21/2016: When it came time for our second renewal, <a href="http://scorpionresponse.com/">Paul Moss</a>&nbsp;took a look at automating the process. If you're interested in doing this, <a href="https://github.com/gitenberg-dev/giten_site/tree/master/letsencrypt">read his notes</a>.<br /><br />Update 7/7/2016: Tony Gutierrez has an <a href="http://bluefletch.com/blog/domain-agnostic-letsencrypt-ssl-config-for-elastic-beanstalk-single-instances/">LE recipe for NodeJS on EB</a></div></div>http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/11/using-lets-encrypt-to-secure-elastic.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-650269136658860949Thu, 22 Oct 2015 22:14:00 +00002015-10-23T11:06:48.847-04:00metadataOpen AccessPublic DomainTruthThis is NOT a Portrait of Mary Astell<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EXEDqrh6Z5U/Vik9cbhhU_I/AAAAAAAAApo/s8mzZhm0Bwk/s1600/Mary-Astell-Not.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EXEDqrh6Z5U/Vik9cbhhU_I/AAAAAAAAApo/s8mzZhm0Bwk/s320/Mary-Astell-Not.jpg" width="192" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Not Mary Astell</i>, by Sir Joshua Reynolds</td></tr></tbody></table>Ten years ago, the University of Calgary Press published a very fine book by Christine Mason Sutherland called <i>The Eloquence of Mary Astell</i>, which focused on the proto-feminist's contributions as a rhetorician. The cover for the book featured a compelling image using a painted sketch from 1760-1765 by the master English portraitist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Reynolds">Sir Joshua Reynolds</a>, currently in Vienna's <a href="http://bilddatenbank.khm.at/viewArtefact?id=1539">Kunsthistorisches Museum</a> and known as <i>Bildnisstudie einer jungen Dame</i> (Study for the portrait of a young woman).<br /><br />Cover images from books circulate widely on the internet. They are featured in online bookstores, they get picked up by search engines. Inevitably, they get re-used and separated from their context. Today (2015) "teh Internetz" firmly believe that the cover image is a portrait of Mary Astell.<br /><br />For example:<br /><br /><ul><li><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=mary+astell">Google</a> (look at the infobox)</li><li>A <a href="http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2013/07/mary-astell-seventeenth-century-feminist.html">blog post</a> on English Historical Fiction Authors</li><li>Another <a href="http://www.genderandeducation.com/issues/the-astell-project/">blog post</a> about the <a href="http://www.astellproject.org.uk/">Astell Project</a></li><li>The Astell Project's <a href="https://twitter.com/astellproject">Twitter feed</a></li><li>A <a href="http://www.artichokewebdesign.com/roomsofourown/imagined/astell_essay.html">website</a> from Cambridge University</li><li>A Portland State history professor's <a href="http://quatr.us/moderneurope/philosophy/astell.htm">website</a></li><li>Wheaton College's <a href="http://wheatoncollege.edu/philosophy/2013/10/18/421/">Philosophy News</a>&nbsp;</li><li>Articles from&nbsp;<a href="http://www.siracusa-online.it/domani-visita-guidata-con-lassociazione-mary-astell-presso-le-catacombe-di-san-giovanni/">Italy</a>, <a href="http://es.paperblog.com/la-digna-educacion-femenina-mary-astell-1666-1731-1336961/">Spain</a>, <a href="https://sandraferrerv.wordpress.com/2015/01/04/cuatro-obras-feministas-clasicas-escritas-por-mujeres/">Spain</a>, <a href="http://www.acikbilim.com/2013/12/dosyalar/dusunce-dunyasinin-golgede-kalanlari-kadin-filozoflar-ii.html">Turkey</a>, <a href="http://www.literaryramblings.com/chauvinist-pig-situating-john-milton-in-a-feminist-discourse-through-comparative-study">Canada</a>,</li><li><a href="https://www.pinterest.com/pin/78320480994176217/">Pinterest</a>, <a href="http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&amp;GRid=22809956">Find-A-Grave</a></li></ul>If you look carefully, you'll see that the image most frequently used is the book cover with the title inexpertly removed.<br /><div><br /></div><div>But the painting doesn't depict Mary Astell. It was done 30 years after her death. In her book, Sutherland notes (page xii):</div><div><div class="page" title="Page 14"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="font-family: 'ACaslon'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">No portrait of her remains, but such evidence as we have suggests that she was not particularly attractive. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s granddaughter records her as having been “in outward form [...] rather ill-favoured and forbidding,” though Astell was long past her youth when this observation was made</span><span style="font-family: 'ACaslon'; font-size: 11.000000pt;">.&nbsp;</span></blockquote></div></div></div><br /><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Astell">Wikipedia</a>&nbsp;has successfully resisted the misattribution.<br /><br />A contributing factor for the confusion about Mary Astell's image is the book's failure to attribute the cover art. Typically a cover description is included in the front matter of the book. According to the Director of the University of Calgary Press, Brian Scrivener, proper attribution would certainly be done in a book produced today. Publishers now recognize that metadata is increasingly the cement that makes books part of the digital environment. Small presses often struggle to bring their back lists up to date, and publishers both large and small have "metadata debt" from past oversights, mergers, reorganizations and lack of resources.<br /><br />Managing cover art and permissions for included graphics is often an expensive headache for digital books, particularly for Open Access works. I've previously written about the importance of <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2012/10/oa-cc-by-mit-wtf.html">clear licensing statements</a>&nbsp;and <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2013/02/anachronisms-and-dysfunctions-of-ebook.html">front matter</a> in ebooks. It's unfortunate when public domain art is not recognized as such, as in <i>Eloquence</i>, but nobody's perfect.<br /><br />The good news is that University of Calgary Press has embraced Open Access ebooks in a big way.&nbsp;<i>The Eloquence of Mary Astell</i> and <a href="http://press.ucalgary.ca/openaccess">64 other books</a> are already available, making Calgary one of the world's leading publishers of Open Access ebooks. Twelve more are in the works.<br /><br />You can find <i>Eloquence</i> at the <a href="http://press.ucalgary.ca/books/9781552381533">Calgary University Press website</a> (including the print edition), <a href="https://unglue.it/work/139595/">Unglue.it</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.doabooks.org/doab?func=subject&amp;cpId=123&amp;uiLanguage=en">DOAB</a>, and <a href="https://archive.org/details/EloquenceMaryAstell">Internet Archive</a>. Mary Astell's 1706 pamphlet <i>Reflections Upon Marriage</i> can be found at the <a href="https://archive.org/details/reflectionsuponm00aste">Internet Archive</a>&nbsp;and at the University of Pennsylvania's <a href="http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/astell/marriage/marriage.html">Celebration of Women Writers</a>.<br /><br />And maybe in 2025, teh internetz will know all about Sir Joshua Reynold's famous painting, <i>Not Mary Astell. </i>Happy Open Access Week!<br /><br /></div>http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/10/this-is-not-portrait-of-mary-astell.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-152631550761676553Sun, 27 Sep 2015 01:17:00 +00002015-11-19T16:18:55.899-05:00LibrariesprivacyWeaponization of Library ResourcesThis post needs a trigger warning. You probably think the title indicates that I've gone off the deep end, or that this is one of my satirical posts. But read on, and I think you'll agree with me, we need to make sure that library resources are not turned into weapons. I'll admit that sounds ludicrous, but it won't after you learn about "The Great Cannon" and "QUANTUM".<br /><br />But first, some background. Most of China's internet connects to the rest of the world through what's known in the rest of the world as "the <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China">Great Firewall of China</a>". Similar to network firewalls used for most corporate intranets, the Great Firewall is used as a tool to control and monitor internet communications in and out of China. Websites that are deemed politically sensitive are blocked from view inside China. This blocking has been used against obscure and prominent websites alike. The New York Times, Google, Facebook and Twitter have all been blocked by the firewall.<br /><br />When web content is unencrypted, it can be scanned at the firewall for politically sensitive terms such as "June 4th", a reference to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989">Tiananmen Square protests</a>, and blocked at the webpage level. China is certainly not the only entity that does this; many school systems in the US do the same sort of thing to filter content that's considered inappropriate for children. Part of my motivation for working on the "<a href="https://libraryfreedomproject.org/ourwork/digitalprivacypledge/">Library Digital Privacy Pledge</a>" is that I don't think libraries and publishers who provide online content to them should be complicit in government censorship of any kind.<br /><br />Last March, however China's Great Firewall was associated with an offensive attack. To put it more accurately, software co-located with China's Great Firewall turned innocent users of &nbsp;unencrypted websites into attack weapons. The targets of the attack were "<a href="https://en.greatfire.org/">GreatFire.org</a>", a website that works to provide Chinese netizens a way to evade the surveillance of the Great Firewall, and GitHub.com, the website that hosts code for hundreds of thousand of programmers, including those supporting Greatfire.org.<br /><br />Here's how the Great Cannon operated &nbsp;In August, Bill Marczak and co-workers from Berkeley, Princeton and Citizen Lab <a href="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/foci15/foci15-paper-marczak.pdf">presented their findings</a> on the Great Cannon at the 5th USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communications on the Internet.<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">The Great Cannon acted as a "man-in-the-middle"[<a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4990922102626688253&amp;pli=1#note">*</a>] to intercept the communications of users outside china with servers inside china. Javascripts that collected advertising and usage data for Baidu, the "Chinese Google", were replaced with weaponized javascripts. These javascripts, running in the browsers of internet users outside China, then mounted the denial-of-service attack on Greatfire.org and Github.</blockquote>China was not the first to weaponized unencrypted internet traffic. Marczak et. al. write:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq">Our findings in China add another documented case to at least two other known instances of governments tampering with unencrypted Internet traffic to control information or launch attacks—the other two being the use of QUANTUM by the US NSA and UK’s GCHQ.[<a href="http://www.wired.com/2013/11/this-is-how-the-internet-backbone-has-been-turned-into-a-weapon/">reference</a>] In addition, product literature from two companies, FinFisher and Hacking Team, indicate that they sell similar “attack from the Internet” tools to governments around the world [<a href="https://citizenlab.org/2014/08/cat-video-and-the-death-of-clear-text/">reference</a>]. These latest findings emphasize the urgency of replacing legacy web protocols like HTTP with their cryptographically strong counterparts, such as HTTPS.</blockquote>It's worth thinking about how libraries and the resources they offer might be exploited by a man-in-the-middle attacker. Science journals might be extremely useful in targeting espionage scripts at military facilities, for example. A saboteur might alter reference technical information used by a chemical or pharmaceutical company with potentially disastrous consequences. It's easy to see why any publisher that wants its information to be perceived as reliable has no choice but to <a href="https://libraryfreedomproject.org/ourwork/digitalprivacypledge/">start encrypting their services</a> now.<br /><br />The unencrypted services of public libraries are attractive targets for other sorts of mischief, ironically because of their users' trust in them and because they have <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/09/analysis-of-privacy-leakage-on-library.html">a reputation for protecting privacy</a>. Think about how many users would enter their names, phone numbers, and last four digits of their social security numbers if a library website seemed to ask for it. When a website is unencrypted, it's possible for "man-in-the-middle" attacks to insert content into an unencrypted web page coming from a library or other trusted website. An easy way for an attacker to get into position to execute such an attack is to spoof a wifi network, for example in a cafe or other public space, such as a library. It doesn't help if only a website's login is encrypted if an attacker can easily insert content into the unencrypted parts of the website.<br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PqH7W7H0blM/VgdCYGD4v3I/AAAAAAAAApM/BUHl3QzC0mQ/s1600/enterCC.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-PqH7W7H0blM/VgdCYGD4v3I/AAAAAAAAApM/BUHl3QzC0mQ/s320/enterCC.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />To be clear, we don't know that libraries and the type of digital resources they offer are being targeted for weaponization, espionage or other sorts of mischief. Unfortunately, the internet offers a target-rich environment of unencrypted websites.<br /><br />I believe that libraries and their suppliers need to move swiftly to take the possibility off the table and help lead the way to a more secure digital environment for us all.<br /><br />http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/09/weaponization-of-library-resources.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-3135526766673977288Tue, 08 Sep 2015 15:35:00 +00002015-10-27T15:49:28.427-04:00BloggingGoogleHTTP SecureprivacyHey, Google! Move Blogspot to HTTPS now!Since I've been supporting a <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/08/update-on-library-privacy-pledge.html">Library Privacy Pledge</a> to implement <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Secure" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="HTTP Secure">HTTPS</a>, I've made an inventory of the services I use myself, to make sure that all the services I use will by HTTPS by the end of 2016. The main outlier: THIS BLOG!<br /><br />This is odd, because Google, the owner of Blogger and <a class="zem_slink" href="http://blogger.com/" rel="homepage" target="_blank" title="Blogger">Blogspot</a>, has <a href="http://searchengineland.com/post-prism-google-secure-searches-172487">made noise</a> about moving its services to HTTPS, <a href="https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/marking-http-as-non-secure">marking HTTP pages</a> as non-secure, and is even giving <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html">extra search engine weight</a> to webpages that use HTTPS.<br /><br />I'd like to nudge Google, now that it's remade its logo and everything, to get their act together on providing secure service for Blogger. So I set the "description" of my blog to "Move Blogspot to HTTPS NOW." If you have a blog on Blogspot, you can do the same. Go to your control panel and click settings. "description" is the second setting at the top. Depending on the design of your page, it will look like this:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_KI4x3Rxp40/Ve7-HGdOhDI/AAAAAAAAAoo/ieYUDbTFIr0/s1600/moveToHTTPS.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="70" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_KI4x3Rxp40/Ve7-HGdOhDI/AAAAAAAAAoo/ieYUDbTFIr0/s320/moveToHTTPS.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />So Google, if you want to avoid a devastating loss of traffic when I move Go-To-Hellman to another platform on January 1, 2017, you better get cracking. Consider yourself warned.<br /><br /><i>Update 10/26/2015. The merciless pressure from the Go-To-Hellman blog worked. <a href="https://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/09/https-support-coming-to-blogspot.html">Blogger now supports HTTPS</a>.</i>http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/09/hey-google-move-blogspot-to-https-now.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-7364378896095469146Mon, 31 Aug 2015 02:34:00 +00002015-10-22T09:55:09.897-04:00HTTP SecureLibrariesprivacyUpdate on the Library Privacy PledgeThe Library Privacy Pledge of 2015, which <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-library-digital-privacy-pledge.html">I wrote about previously</a>, has been finalized. We got a lot of good feedback, and the big changes have focused on the schedule.<br /><br />Now, any library , organization or company that signs the pledge will have 6 months to implement HTTPS from the effective date of their signature. This should give everyone plenty of margin to do a good job on the implementation.<br /><br />We pushed back our launch date to the first week of <strike>November</strike> December. That's when we'll announce the list of "charter signatories". If you want your library, company or organization to be included in the charter signatory list, please send an e-mail to <a href="mailto:pledge@libraryfreedomproject.org">pledge@libraryfreedomproject.org</a>.<br /><br />The <a href="https://letsencrypt.org/">Let's Encrypt</a> project will be launching soon. They are just one certificate authority that can help with HTTPS implementation.<br /><br />I think this is an very important step for the library information community to take, together. Let's make it happen.<br /><br />Here's the finalized pledge:<br /><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Library Freedom Project is inviting the library community - libraries, vendors that serve libraries, and membership organizations - to sign the "Library Digital Privacy Pledge of 2015". For this first pledge, we're focusing on the use of HTTPS to deliver library services and the information resources offered by libraries. It’s just a first step: HTTPS is a privacy prerequisite, not a privacy solution. Building a culture of library digital privacy will not end with this 2015 pledge, but committing to this first modest step together will begin a process that won't turn back. &nbsp;We aim to gather momentum and raise awareness with this pledge; and will develop similar pledges in the future as appropriate to advance digital privacy practices for library patrons.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></blockquote><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We focus on HTTPS as a first step because of its timeliness. The </span><a href="https://letsencrypt.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let's Encrypt</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> initiative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation </span><a href="https://letsencrypt.org/2015/06/16/lets-encrypt-launch-schedule.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">will soon launch a new certificate infrastructure</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that will remove much of the cost and technical difficulty involved in the implementation of HTTPS, with general availability scheduled for September. Due to a heightened concern about digital surveillance, many prominent internet companies, such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook, have moved their services exclusively to HTTPS rather than relying on unencrypted HTTP connections. The White House has issued </span><a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/06/08/https-everywhere-government" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a directive</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that all government websites must move their services to HTTPS by the end of 2016. We believe that libraries must also make this change, lest they be viewed as technology and privacy laggards, and dishonor their proud history of protecting reader privacy.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></blockquote><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The 3rd article of the </span><a href="http://www.ala.org/advocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethics" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">American Library Association Code of Ethics</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> sets a broad objective:</span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: white; color: #303030; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.</span></blockquote><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's not always clear how to interpret this broad mandate, especially when everything is done on the internet. However, one </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">principle of implementation</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> should be clear and uncontroversial:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Library services and resources should be delivered, whenever practical, over channels that are immune to eavesdropping.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></blockquote></blockquote><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">current best practice</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> dictated by this principle is as following:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></blockquote><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Libraries and vendors that serve libraries and library patrons, should require HTTPS for all services and resources delivered via the web.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></blockquote></blockquote><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 22.666666666666664px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Pledge for Libraries:</span></blockquote><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1. We will make every effort to ensure that web services and information resources under direct control of our library will use HTTPS within six months. [ dated______ ]</span></blockquote><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2. Starting in 2016, our library will assure that any new or renewed contracts for web services or information resources will require support for HTTPS by the end of 2016.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></blockquote><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 22.666666666666664px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Pledge for Service Providers (Publishers and Vendors):</span></blockquote><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1. We will make every effort to ensure that all web services that we (the signatories) offer to libraries will enable HTTPS within six months. [ dated______ ]</span></blockquote><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2. All web services that we (the signatories) offer to libraries will default to HTTPS by the end of 2016.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></blockquote><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 22.666666666666664px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 700; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Pledge for Membership Organizations:</span></blockquote><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1. We will make every effort to ensure that all web services that our organization directly control will use HTTPS within six months. [ dated______ ]</span></blockquote><br /><blockquote class="tr_bq" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2. We encourage our members to support and sign the appropriate version of the pledge.</span></blockquote><br />There's a <a href="https://github.com/EbookFoundation/library-privacy-pledge/wiki">FAQ available</a>, too. The pledge is now posted on the <a href="https://libraryfreedomproject.org/ourwork/digitalprivacypledge/">Library Freedom Project website</a>. <i>(updated 9/14/2015)</i><br /><br /><br />http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/08/update-on-library-privacy-pledge.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-343566171632576275Sun, 26 Jul 2015 04:35:00 +00002015-07-26T12:40:28.924-04:00Book UseLibrariesprivacyLibrary Privacy and the Freedom Not To ReadOne of the most difficult privacy conundrums facing libraries today is how to deal with the data that their patrons generate in the course of using digital services. Commercial information services typically track usage in detail, keep the data indefinitely, and regard the data as a valuable asset. Data is used to make many improvements, often to personalize the service to best meet the needs of the user. User data can also be monetized; as <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/08/libraries-are-giving-away-user-privacy.html">I've written here before</a>, many companies make money by providing web services in exchange for the opportunity to track users and help advertisers target them.<br /><br /><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2WuVXY9aRx4/VbRfcg8FMDI/AAAAAAAAAn0/r3LTmnZpV_k/s1600/maginot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="208" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2WuVXY9aRx4/VbRfcg8FMDI/AAAAAAAAAn0/r3LTmnZpV_k/s320/maginot.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A Maginot Line fortification. Photo from the <a href="http://www.army.mil/article/63678/Heading_underground_in_France_to_explore_the_Maginot_Line__WWII_history/">US Army</a>.</td></tr></tbody></table>The downside to data collection is its impact on user privacy, something that libraries have a history of defending, <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/09/analysis-of-privacy-leakage-on-library.html">even at the risk of imprisonment</a>. Since the <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/09/americas-most-dangerous-librarians">Patriot Act</a>, many librarians have believed that the best way to defend user privacy against legally sanctioned intrusion is to avoid collecting any sensitive data. But as libraries move onto the web, that defense seems more and more like a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maginot_Line">Maginot Line</a>, impregnable, but easy to get around. (I've written about <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-library-digital-privacy-pledge.html">an effort to shore up some weak points</a> in library privacy defenses.)<br /><br />At the same time, "big data" has clouded the picture of what constitutes sensitive data. The correlation of digital library use with web activity outside the library can impact privacy in ways that never would occur in a physical library. For example, I've found that many libraries unknowingly use Amazon cover images to enrich their online catalogs, so that even a user who is completely anonymous to the library ends up letting Amazon know what books they're searching for.<br /><br />Recently, I've been serving on the Steering Committee of <a href="http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/patron_privacy/">an initiative of NISO</a> to try to establish a set of principles that libraries, providers of services to libraries, and publishers can use to support privacy patron privacy. We held an in-person meeting in San Francisco at the end of July. There was solid support from libraries, publishers and service companies for improving reader privacy, but some issues were harder than others. The issues around data collection and use attracted the widest divergence in opinion.<br /><br />One approach that was discussed centered on classifying different types of data depending on the extent to which they impact user privacy. This also the approach taken by most <a href="http://www.ala.org/advocacy/privacyconfidentiality/privacy/stateprivacy">laws governing privacy of library records</a>. They mostly apply only to "<a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personally_identifiable_information" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Personally identifiable information">Personally Identifiable Information</a>" (PII), which usually would mean a person's name, address, phone number, etc., but sometimes is defined to include the user's IP address. While it's important to protect this type of information, in practice this usually means that less personal information <i>lacks any protection at all</i>.<br /><br />I find that the data classification approach is another Maginot privacy line. It encourages the assumption that collection of demographics data – age, gender, race, religion, education, profession, even sexual orientation – is fair game for libraries and participants in the library ecosystem. I raised some eyebrows when I suggested that demographic groups might deserve a level of privacy protection in libraries, just as individuals do.<br /><br />OCLC's Andrew Pace gave an example that brought this home for us all. When he worked as a librarian at NC State, he tracked usage of the books and other materials in the collection. Every library needs to do this for many purposes. He noticed that materials placed on reserve for certain classes received little or no usage, and he thought that faculty shouldn't be putting so many things on reserve, effectively preventing students not taking the class from using these materials. And so he started providing usage reports to the faculty.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gmeAqLGO2ZA/VbRierW-irI/AAAAAAAAAoE/UUytOcU42hI/s1600/eyeclamp2.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="116" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gmeAqLGO2ZA/VbRierW-irI/AAAAAAAAAoE/UUytOcU42hI/s200/eyeclamp2.png" width="200" /></a></div>In retrospect, Andrew pointed out that, without thinking much about it, he might have violated the privacy of students by informing their teachers that that they <i>weren't</i> reading the assigned materials. After all, if a library wants to protect a user's right to read, they also have to protect the right <i>not</i> to read. Nobody's personally identifiable information had been exposed, but the combination of library data – a list of books that hadn't circulated – with some non-library data – the list of students enrolled in a class and the list of assigned reading – had intersected in a way that exposed individual reading behavior.<br /><br />What this example illustrates is that libraries <i>MUST</i> collect at least <i>SOME</i> data that impinges on reader privacy. If reader privacy is to be protected, a "privacy impact assessment" must be made on almost all uses of that data. &nbsp;In today's environment, users expect that their data signals will be listened to and their expressed needs will be accommodated. Given these expectations, building privacy in libraries is going to require a <i>lot</i> of work and a <i>lot</i> of thought.<br /><br />http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/07/library-privacy-and-freedom-not-to-read.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-5764398284213499082Mon, 13 Jul 2015 03:47:00 +00002015-07-13T13:33:19.307-04:00BugsElectronic Frontier FoundationLibrariesprivacyWeb Design and DevelopmentThe Library Digital Privacy PledgeI've been busy since my last post! We've created the <a href="http://www.ebookfoundation.org/">Free Ebook Foundation</a>, which will be the home for <a href="http://blog.unglue.it/2015/07/06/unglue-it-goes-non-profit/">Unglue.it</a> and <a href="http://www.gitenberg.org/">GITenberg</a>. I helped with the NISO "<span style="background-color: #feffff; color: #00355f; font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/patron_privacy/">Consensus Framework to Support&nbsp;</a></span><span style="background-color: #feffff; color: #00355f; font-family: inherit;"><a href="http://www.niso.org/topics/tl/patron_privacy/">Patron Privacy in Digital Library and Information Systems</a>", which I'll write more about soon. And <a href="http://codexhackathon.com/">some coding</a>.</span><br /><span style="background-color: #feffff; color: #00355f; font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://libraryfreedomproject.org/beta/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/library-freedom-project11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="120" src="https://libraryfreedomproject.org/beta/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/library-freedom-project11.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><span style="background-color: #feffff; color: #00355f; font-family: inherit;">But I've also become a volunteer for the <a href="https://libraryfreedomproject.org/">Library Freedom Project</a>, run by radical librarian Alison Macrina. The project I'm working on is the "</span><span style="color: #00355f;">Library Digital Privacy Pledge."</span><br /><br />The&nbsp;<span style="color: #00355f;">Library Digital Privacy Pledge is a result of discussions on several listservs about how libraries and the many organizations that serve libraries could work cooperatively to (putting it bluntly) <i>start getting our shit together</i> with regard to patron privacy.</span><br /><span style="color: #00355f;"><br /></span><span style="color: #00355f;">I've talked to a lot of people about privacy in digital libraries, and there's remarkable unity about its importance. There's also a lot of confusion about some basic web privacy technology, like HTTPS. My view is that HTTPS sets a foundation for all the other privacy work that needs doing in libraries.</span><br /><span style="color: #00355f;"><br /></span><span style="color: #00355f;">Someone asked me why I'm so passionate about working on this. After a bit of thought, I realized that the one thing that gives me the most satisfaction in my professional life is eliminating bugs. I hate bugs. Using HTTP for library services <i>is a bug</i>.</span><br /><span style="color: #00355f;"><br /></span><span style="color: #00355f;">The draft of the&nbsp;</span><span style="color: #00355f;">Library Digital Privacy Pledge <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LpV52oSefKhaKSGFcTPONKvXzZUxHbKaW8e6CHHREXk/edit#heading=h.cp4lbs34cfkf">is open for comment and improvement &nbsp;for a few more weeks</a>. We want all sorts of stakeholders to have &nbsp;a chance to improve it. The current text (July 12, 2015) is as follows:</span><span style="color: #00355f;">&nbsp;</span><br /><h1 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 6pt; margin-top: 24pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 30.666666666666664px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Library Digital Privacy Pledge of 2015</span></h1><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Library Freedom Project is inviting the library community - libraries, vendors that serve libraries, and membership organizations - to sign the "Library Digital Privacy Pledge of 2015". For this first pledge, we're focusing on the use of HTTPS to deliver library services and the information resources offered by libraries. Building a culture of library digital privacy will not end with this 2015 pledge, but committing to this first modest step together will begin a process that won't turn back. &nbsp;We aim to gather momentum and raise awareness with this pledge; and will develop similar pledges in the future as appropriate to advance digital privacy practices for library patrons.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We focus on HTTPS as a first step because of its timeliness. At the end of July the </span><a href="https://letsencrypt.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let's Encrypt</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> initiative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation </span><a href="https://letsencrypt.org/2015/06/16/lets-encrypt-launch-schedule.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">will launch a new certificate infrastructure</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that will remove much of the cost and technical difficulty involved in the implementation of HTTPS, with general availability scheduled for September. Due to a heightened concern about digital surveillance, many prominent internet companies, such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook, have moved their services exclusively to HTTPS rather than relying on unencrypted HTTP connections. The White House has issued </span><a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/06/08/https-everywhere-government" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">a directive</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that all government websites must move their services to HTTPS by the end of 2016. We believe that libraries must also make this change, lest they be viewed as technology and privacy laggards, and dishonor their proud history of protecting reader privacy.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The 3rd article of the </span><a href="http://www.ala.org/advocacy/proethics/codeofethics/codeethics" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">American Library Association Code of Ethics</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> sets a broad objective:</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 22.5pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #303030; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.</span></div><b id="docs-internal-guid-1cabaf90-8582-50ea-63f4-695b2a42999e" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It's not always clear how to interpret this broad mandate, especially when the everything is done on the internet. However, one </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">principle of implementation</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> should be clear and uncontroversial:</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 23pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Library services and resources should be delivered, whenever practical, over channels that are immune to eavesdropping.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">current best practice</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> dictated by this principle is as following:</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 23pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Libraries and vendors that serve libraries and library patrons, should require HTTPS for all services and resources delivered via the web.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><h2 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 4pt; margin-top: 18pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 22.666666666666664px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Pledge for Libraries:</span></h2><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1. All web services and resources that this library directly controls will use HTTPS by the end of 2015.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2. Starting in 2016, this library will not sign or renew any contracts for web services or information resources that do not commit to use HTTPS by the end of 2016.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><h2 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 4pt; margin-top: 18pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 22.666666666666664px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Pledge for Service Providers (Publishers and Vendors):</span></h2><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1. All web services that we (the signatories) control will enable HTTPS by the end of 2015.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2. All web services that we (the signatories) offer will require HTTPS by the end of 2016.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><h2 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 4pt; margin-top: 18pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 22.666666666666664px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Pledge for Membership Organizations:</span></h2><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">1. All web services that this organization directly controls will use HTTPS by the end of 2015.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2. We encourage our members to support and sign the appropriate version of the pledge.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><h2 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 4pt; margin-top: 18pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 22.666666666666664px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Schedule:</span></h2><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This document will be open for discussion and modification until finalized by July 27, 2015. The finalized pledge will be published on the website of the </span><a href="https://libraryfreedomproject.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Library Freedom Project</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. We expect a number of discussions to take place at the Annual Conference of the American Library Association and associated meetings.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Library Freedom Project will broadly solicit signatures from libraries, vendors and publishers.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In September, in coordination with the Let's Encrypt project, the list of charter signatories will be made announced and broadly publicized to popular media.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><h2 dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 4pt; margin-top: 18pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 22.666666666666664px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">FAQ</span></h2><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Q: What is HTTPS and what do we need to implement it?</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A: When you use the web, your browser software communicates with a server computer through the internet. The messages back and forth pass through a series of computers (network nodes) that work together to pass messages. Depending on where you and the server are, there might be 5 computers in that chain, or there might be 50, each possibly owned by a different service provider. When a website uses HTTP, the content of these messages is open to inspection by each intermediate computer- like a postcard sent through the postal system, as well as by any other computer that shares a network those computers. If you’re connecting to the internet over wifi in a coffee shop, everyone else in the coffee shop can see the messages, too.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When a website uses HTTPS, the messages between your browser software and the server are encrypted so that none of the intermediate &nbsp;network nodes can see the content of the messages. It’s like sending sealed envelopes through the postal system.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Your web site and other library services may be sending sensitive patron data across the internet: often bar codes and passwords, but sometimes also catalog searches, patron names, contact information, and reading records. This kind of data ought to be inside a sealed envelope, not exposed on a postcard.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Most web server software supports HTTPS, but to implement it, you’ll need to get a certificate signed by a recognized authority. The certificate is used to verify that you are who you say you are. Certificates have added cost to HTTPS, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation is implementing a certificate authority that will give out certificates at no charge. To find out more, go to </span><a href="https://letsencrypt.org/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Let’s Encrypt</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Q: Why the focus on HTTPS?</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A: We think this issue should not be controversial and is relatively easy to explain. Libraries understand that circulation information can’t be sent to patron on postcards. Publishers don’t want their content scooped up by unauthorized entities. Service providers don’t want to betray the trust of their customers. </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Q. How can my library/organization/company add our names to the list of signatories?</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A. Email us at pledge@libraryfreedomproject.org. Please give us contact info so we can verify your participation.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Q. Is this the same as HTTPS Everywhere?</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A. No, that's a browser plug-in which enforces use of HTTPS.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Q. My Library won't be able to meet the implementation deadline. Can we add our name to the list once we've completed implementation?</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A. Yes.</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Q. A local school uses an internet filter that blocks https websites to meet legal requirements. Can we sign the pledge and continue to serve them?</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A. Most of the filtering solutions include options that will whitelist important services. Work with the school in question to implement a work-around.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Q. What else can I read about libraries using HTTPS?</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 9pt; margin-top: 9pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published </span><a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/what-every-librarian-needs-know-about-https" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What Every Librarian Needs to Know About HTTPS</span></a></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Q. How do I know if I have implemented HTTPS correctly?</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A. The developers behind the “Let’s Encrypt” initiative are </span><a href="https://letsencrypt.org/howitworks/" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ensuring</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> that best practices are used in setting up the HTTPS configuration. &nbsp;If you are deploying HTTPS on your own, we encourage you to use the Qualys SSL Labs </span><a href="https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/index.html" style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">SSL Server Test</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> service to review the performance of your implementation. &nbsp;You should strive for at least a “B” rating with no major security vulnerabilities identified in the scan.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Q. Our library subscribes to over 200 databases only a fraction of them currently delivered via https. We might be able to say we will not sign new contracts but the renewal requirement could be difficult for an academic library like ours. Can we sign the pledge?</span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A. No one is going to penalize libraries that aren’t able to comply 100% with their pledge. One way to satisfy the ethical imperatives of the pledge would be to clearly label for users the small number of insecure library resources that remain after 2016 as being subject to surveillance.</span></div><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Q. I/We can contribute to the effort in a way that isn’t covered well by the pledges. Can I add another pledge?</span></div><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A. We want to keep this simple, but we welcome your support. email us with your individualized statement, and we may include it on our website when signatories are announced.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-library-digital-privacy-pledge.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-3633023759169552698Wed, 10 Jun 2015 18:06:00 +00002015-06-15T14:16:11.047-04:00OCLCprivacyWeb Design and DevelopmentProtect Reader Privacy with Referrer Meta Tags<style type="text/css">div.code { margin-left:2em; font-family: monospace; } </style>Back when the web was new, it was fun to watch a website monitor and see the hits come in. The IP address told you the location of the user, and if you turned on the referer header display, you could see what the user had been reading just before. &nbsp;There was a group of scientists in Poland who'd be on my site regularly- I reported the latest news on nitride semiconductors, and my site was free. Every day around the same time, one of the Poles would check my site, and I could tell he had a bunch of sites he'd look at in order. My site came right after a Russian web site devoted to photographs of unclothed women. <br /><br />The original idea behind the <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="HTTP referer">HTTP referer</a> header (yes, that's how the <i>header</i> is spelled) was that webmasters like me needed it to help other webmasters fix hyperlinks. Or at least that was the rationalization. The real reason for sending the referer was to feed webmaster narcissism. We wanted to know who was linking to our site, because those links were our pats on the back. They told us about other sites that liked us. That was fun. (Still true today!)<br /><br />The fact that my nitride semiconductor website ranked up there with naked Russian women amused me; reader privacy issues didn't bother me because the Polish scientist's habits were safe with me. <br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sPMcPfdvkYk/VXhquFmiZkI/AAAAAAAAAnM/hh2YJyAoq7o/s1600/IMG_2057.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="106" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sPMcPfdvkYk/VXhquFmiZkI/AAAAAAAAAnM/hh2YJyAoq7o/s400/IMG_2057.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br />Twenty years later, the <span style="font-family: inherit;">referer</span> header seems like a complete privacy disaster. Modern web sites use resources from all over the web, and a referer header, including the complete URL of the referring web page, is sent with every request for those resources. The referer header can send your complete web browsing log to websites that you didn't know existed.<br /><br />Privacy leakage via the referrer header plagues even websites that ostensibly believe in protecting user privacy, such as those produced by or serving libraries. For example, a request to the&nbsp;WorldCat&nbsp;page for <i><a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/what-to-expect-when-youre-expecting/oclc/183258796&amp;referer=brief_results">What you can expect when you're expecting</a></i> &nbsp;results in the transmission of referer headers containing the user's request to the following hosts: <br /><ul><li> http://ajax.googleapis.com </li><li> http://www.google.com (with tracking cookies) </li><li> http://s7.addthis.com (with tracking cookies) </li><li> http://recommender.bibtip.de </li></ul>None of the resources requested from these third parties actually need to know what page the user is viewing, but&nbsp;WorldCat&nbsp;causes that information to be sent anyway. In principle, this could allow advertising networks to begin <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/06/towards-post-privacy-library.html">marketing diapers to carefully targeted WorldCat users</a>. (<a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/08/libraries-are-giving-away-user-privacy.html">I've written about AddThis</a> and how they sell data about you to advertising networks.)<br /><br />It turns out there's an easy way to plug this privacy leak in HTML5. It's called the <i>referrer meta tag</i>. (Yes, that's also spelled correctly.) <br /><br />The referrer meta tag is put in the <span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">head</span> section of an HTML5 web page. It allows the web page to control the referer headers sent by the user's browser. It looks like this: <br /><br /><div class="code" style="font-family: monospace; margin-left: 2em;">&lt;meta name="referrer" content="origin" /&gt; </div><br />If this one line were used on WorldCat, only the fact that the user is looking a&nbsp;WorldCat page&nbsp;would be sent to&nbsp;Google, AddThis, and BibTip. This is reasonable, library patrons typically don't expect their visits to a library to be private; they <b><i>do</i></b> expect that what they read there should be private. <br /><br />Because use of third party resources is often necessary, most library websites leak lots of privacy in referer headers. The meta referrer policy is a simple way to stop it. You may well ask why this isn't already standard practice. I think it's mostly lack of awareness. Until very recently, I had no idea that this worked so well. That's because it's taken a long time for browser vendors to add support. Although Chrome and Safari have been supporting the referrer meta tag for more than two years; Firefox only added it <a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2015/01/21/meta-referrer/">in January of 2015</a>. Internet Explorer will support it <a href="https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn904194%28v=vs.85%29.aspx">with the Windows 10 release</a> this summer. Privacy will still leak for users with older browser software, but this problem will gradually go away. <br /><br />There are 4 options for the meta referrer tag, in addition to the "origin" policy. The origin policy sends only the host name for the originating page.<br /><br />For the strictest privacy, use <br /><br /><div class="code" style="font-family: monospace; margin-left: 2em;">&lt;meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer" /&gt; <br /><br /></div>If you use this sitting, other websites won't know you're linking to them, which can be a disadvantage in some situations. If the web page links to resources that still use the archaic "referer authentication", they'll break.<br /><br />&nbsp;The prevailing default policy for most browsers is equivalent to <br /><br /><div class="code" style="font-family: monospace; margin-left: 2em;">&lt;meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer-when-downgrade" /&gt;<br /><br /></div>"downgrade" here refers to http links in https pages. <br /><br />If you need the referer for your own website but don't want other sites to see it you can use <br /><br /><div class="code" style="font-family: monospace; margin-left: 2em;">&lt;meta name="referrer" content="origin-when-cross-origin" /&gt;</div><br />Finally, if you want the user's browser to send the full referrer, no matter what, and experience the thrills of privacy brinksmanship, you can set <br /><br /><div class="code" style="font-family: monospace; margin-left: 2em;">&lt;meta name="referrer" content="unsafe-url" /&gt;</div><br />Widespread deployment of the referrer meta tag would be a big boost for reader privacy all over the web. It's easy to implement, has little downside, and is widely deployable. So let's get started! <br /><br />Links: <br /><ul><li><a href="http://w3c.github.io/webappsec/specs/referrer-policy/"> Meta Referrer Specification</a></li><li><a href="http://smerity.com/articles/2013/where_did_all_the_http_referrers_go.html">Where did all the HTTP referrers go? </a>Good article by Stephen Merity</li><li>(June 15) <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/referrer-policy/">W3C Public Draft</a>&nbsp;Though this is labeled the "latest", the link above points to a more recent draft. As pointed out in the comments, there has been a change in the name of the "no-referrer" and "no-referrer-when-downgrade" policies.</li></ul>http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/06/protect-reader-privacy-with-referrer.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-183572696766361119Thu, 04 Jun 2015 21:19:00 +00002015-06-18T12:39:01.305-04:00ebooksprivacyPublic libraryTowards the Post-Privacy Library?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JswuIf8wrBE/VXC_SCYCJaI/AAAAAAAAAms/d5RLzmTxGNc/s1600/Screen-Shot-2015-05-28-at-8.51.54-AM-225x300.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JswuIf8wrBE/VXC_SCYCJaI/AAAAAAAAAms/d5RLzmTxGNc/s200/Screen-Shot-2015-05-28-at-8.51.54-AM-225x300.png" width="150" /></a></div>I have an article in this month's<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">&nbsp;</span><em style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/Launch.aspx?EID=571167d0-6eca-4989-a66f-2b2bf2c40c97">Digital Futures</a></em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">, a supplement to&nbsp;</span><i><a href="http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/">American Libraries</a></i> magazine. The full issue <a href="http://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2015/05/new-american-libraries-supplement-finds-libraries-offense-digital-revolution">is an important one</a>, so go <a href="http://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/Launch.aspx?EID=571167d0-6eca-4989-a66f-2b2bf2c40c97">take a look</a>. In addition to my article, be sure to read the article starting on page 20 entitled "Empowering Libraries to Innovate" in which I am quoted. Here's <a href="http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2015/06/16/toward-the-post-privacy-library/">the web version</a>.</span><br /><br />I'm reprinting the article here so as to have a good place for discussion. <br /><br /><hr width="50%" /><br />Alice, a 17 year old high school student, goes to her local public library and reads everything she can find about pregnancy. Noticing this, a librarian calls up some local merchants and tells them that Alice might be pregnant. When Alice visits her local bookstore, the staff has some great suggestions about newborn care for her. The local drugstore sends her some coupons for scent-free skin lotion. She reads "<a href="http://www.worldcat.org/title/what-to-expect-when-youre-expecting/oclc/183258796&amp;referer=brief_results">what you can expect...</a>" at the library and a few months later she starts getting mail about diaper services. <br /><br />Unthinkable? In the physical library, I hope this never happens. It would be too creepy! <br /><br />In the digital library, this future could be happening <i>now</i>. Libraries and their patrons are awash in data that really isn't sensitive until aggregated, and the data is getting digested by advertising networks and flowing into "big data" archives. The scenario in which advertisers exploit Alice's library usage is not only thinkable, it needs to be defended against. It's a "threat model" that's mostly unfamiliar to libraries. <br /><br />Recently, I read a book called <i><a href="https://unglue.it/work/143177/">Half Life</a></i>. Uranium theft, firearms technology and computer hacking are important plot elements, but I'm not worried about people knowing that I loved it. The National Security Agency (NSA) is not going to identify me as a potential terrorist because I'm reading <i>Half Life</i>. On the contrary, I'd love for my reading behavior to be broadcast to the entire world, because maybe more people would discover what a wonderful writer S.L. Huang is. A lot of a library user's digital usage data is like that. It's not particularly private, and most would gladly trade usage information for convenience or to help improve the services they rely on. It would be a waste of time and energy for a library to worry much about keeping that information secret. Quite the opposite, libraries are helping users share their behavior with things like Facebook Like buttons and social media widgets. <br /><br />Which is why Alice should be very worried and why it's important for libraries to understand new threat models. What breaches of user privacy are most likely to occur and which are most likely to present harm? <br /><br /><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html">A 2012 article in the <i>New York Times Magazine</i></a> described a real situation involving Target (the retailer). &nbsp;Target's "big data" analytics team developed a customer model that identified pregnant women based on shopping behavior. Purchases of scent-free skin lotion, vitamin supplements, and cotton balls turned out to be highly predictive of subsequent purchases of baby diapers. Using the model, Target sent ads for baby-oriented products to the customers their algorithm had identified. In one case, an irate father whose daughter had received ads for baby clothes and cribs accused the store of encouraging his daughter to get pregnant. When a manager called to apologize, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.” <br /><br />Among the companies collecting "big data" about users are the advertising networks, companies that sit in between advertisers and websites. They use their data to decide which ad from a huge inventory is most likely to result in a user response. If I were Alice, I don't think I would want my search for pregnancy books broadcasted to advertising networks. Yet that's precisely what happens when I do a search on my local public library's online catalog. I very much doubt that many advertisements are being targeted based on that searching ... yet. But the digital advertising industry is extremely competitive, and unless libraries shift their practices, it's only a matter of time that library searches get factored into advanced customer models. <br /><br />But it doesn't have to happen that way. Libraries have a strong tradition of protecting user privacy. Once all the "threat models" associated with the digital environment are considered, practices will certainly change. <br /><br />So let's get started. In the rest of this article, I'll examine the process of borrowing and reading an ebook, and identify privacy weaknesses in the processes that advertisers and their predictive analytics modeling could exploit. <br /><ol><li> Most library catalogs allow non-encrypted searches. This exposes Alice's ebook searches to internet providers between Alice and the library's server. The <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/11/if-your-website-still-uses-http-x-uidh.html">X-UIDH header</a>&nbsp;has been used by providers such as Verizon and AT&amp;T to help advertisers target mobile users. By using HTTPS for their catalogs, libraries can limit this intrusion. This is relatively easy and cheap, and there's no good excuse in 2015 for libraries not to make the switch.<br /><br /></li><li> Some <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/09/analysis-of-privacy-leakage-on-library.html">library catalogs use social widgets</a> such as AddThis or ShareThis that broadcast a user's search activity to advertising networks. Similarly, Facebook "Like" buttons send a user's search activity to Facebook whether or not the user is on Facebook. Libraries need to carefully evaluate the benefits of these widgets against the possibility that advertising networks will use Alice's search history inappropriately. <br /><br /> </li><li> Statistics and optimization services like Google Analytics and NewRelic don't currently share Alice's search history with advertising networks, but libraries should evaluate the privacy assurances from these services to see if they are consistent with their own policies and local privacy laws.<br /><br /></li><li> When Alice borrows a book from a vendor such as OverDrive or 3M, it monitors Alice's reading behavior, albeit anonymously. At this date, it's very difficult for an advertiser to exploit Alice's use of reading apps from OverDrive or 3M. Although many have criticized the use of Adobe digital rights management (DRM) in these apps, both 3M and OverDrive use the "vendorID" method which avoids the disclosure of user data to Adobe, and at this date, there is no practical way for an advertising network to exploit Alice's use of these services. Here again, libraries should review their vendor contracts to make sure that can't change. </li><li> If Alice reads her ebook using a 3rd party application such as Adobe Digital Editions (ADE), the privacy behavior of the third party comes into play. Last year, ADE was found to be <a href="http://the-digital-reader.com/2014/10/06/adobe-spying-users-collecting-data-ebook-libraries/">sending user reading data back to Adobe</a> without encryption; &nbsp;even today, it's known to phone home with encrypted reading data. Other applications, such as <a href="http://www.bluefirereader.com/">Bluefire Reader</a>, have a better reputation for privacy, but as they say "past performance is no guarantee of future returns".<br /><br /></li><li>If Alice wants to read her borrowed ebook on a Kindle (via OverDrive), it's very likely that Amazon will be able to exploit her reading behavior for marketing purposes. To avoid it, Alice would need to create an anonymous account on Amazon for reading her library books. Most people will just use their own (non-anonymous) accounts for convenience. If Alice shares her Amazon account with others, they'll know what she reads. <br /><br />This is a classic example of the privacy vs. convenience tradeoff that libraries need to consider. A Kindle user trusts that Amazon will not do anything too creepy, and Amazon has every incentive to make that user comfortable with their data use. Libraries need to let users make their own privacy decisions, but at the same time libraries need to make sure that users understand the privacy implications of what they do. <br /><br /></li><li>The library's own records are also potential source of a privacy breach. This "small-data" threat model is perhaps more familiar to librarians. Alice's parents could come in and demand to know what she's been reading. A schoolmate might hack into the library's lightly defended databases looking for ways to embarrass Alice. A staff member might be a friend of Alice's family. Libraries need clear policies and robust processes to be worthy of Alice's trust.<br /><br /></li></ol>In the digital environment, it's easy for libraries to be unduly afraid of using the data from Alice's searches and reading to improve her experience and make the library a more powerful source of information. Social networks are changing the way we think about our privacy, and often the expectation is that services will make use of personal information that's been shared. Technologies exist to protect the user's control over that data but advertising networks have no incentive to employ them. I want my library to track me, not advertising networks!. I want great books to read, and no, I'm not in the market for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium-238">uranium-238</a>!http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/06/towards-post-privacy-library.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-1261568940509542800Mon, 11 May 2015 04:38:00 +00002015-05-11T00:38:01.927-04:00Aaron SwartzBitcoinprivacyReview: Alex Winter's "Deep Web" about Silk Road's Ross Ulbricht<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XYGwHHRklUI/VVAwYILSYWI/AAAAAAAAAmE/429F5eK_Fw0/s1600/bitflag.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="108" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XYGwHHRklUI/VVAwYILSYWI/AAAAAAAAAmE/429F5eK_Fw0/s200/bitflag.png" width="200" /></a></div><span style="background-color: transparent;">Going in to see the movie </span><i style="background-color: transparent;"><a href="http://www.deepwebthemovie.com/">Deep Web</a></i><span style="background-color: transparent;">, which played yesterday and today at the </span><a href="http://montclairfilmfest.org/" style="background-color: transparent;">Montclair Film Festival</a><span style="background-color: transparent;">, I was most interested in the question "Who is Ross Ulbricht?" Is he the libertarian idealist who created </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)" style="background-color: transparent;">Silk Road</a><span style="background-color: transparent;"> to let people do what the government doesn't want them to do? Or is he the scheming drug lord who put out contracts on associates who had betrayed him, </span><a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/how-the-feds-staged-torture-murder-of-a-silk-road-staffer/" style="background-color: transparent;">as alleged by the government</a><span style="background-color: transparent;">? Though the movie was fascinating, I left with my question unanswered.</span><br /><span style="background-color: transparent;"><br /></span>This is no fault of the filmmaker, whose challenge was to make a documentary about someone he had little access to. Despite interviews with family, friends and business associates, Ross Ulbricht appears as a shadow in this movie. We see him in a few home movies, we see <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/rossulbricht">his LinkedIn profile</a>, but we never really see or hear Ross Ulbricht talk about the subject at hand.<br /><br />We hear more from <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Pirate_Roberts" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Dread Pirate Roberts">Dread Pirate Roberts</a>, a pseudonym that was at least partly Ross Ulbricht. We see many of his posts on Silk Road forums, with highlights to show the complexity of his motivations. DPR seems more interested in ideals than money, he wants to make the world a freer and safer place. But he's a businessman who values loyalty and doesn't tolerate people who don't make good on their promises.<br /><br />The central voice of the film is that of Wired Senior Reporter <a href="http://www.wired.com/author/andygreenberg/">Andy Greenberg</a>, listed as "Consulting Producer" of <i>Deep Web</i>. Because much of the film surrounds Silk Road forum postings and the legal case against Ulbricht, it relies heavily on Greenberg to boil down and assess voluminous posts and complicated proceedings. Greenberg doesn't quite have the screen presence the film needs from him, but hey, that's not his job. But so we don't miss the point, there's always a poster of Edward Snowden behind Greenberg in his office.<br /><br />The film has at least two narratives that make for a sometimes conflicted message. One narrative is the libertarian argument in favor of online drug markets, another is that the government has prosecuted Ulbricht unfairly, perhaps illegally.<br /><br />The moral argument in favor of Silk Road is particularly resonant in this post-Ferguson post-Baltimore era, and I wish the film had followed this thread further. The gist of it is that real-life drug markets are violent scourges that ruin communities, and moving them online removes most of the violence associated with the illegal transactions. Silk Road succeeded by bringing accountability to these transactions; a transaction gone bad would result in a seller losing reputation instead of someone getting killed. In a sense, Silk Road functioned as a government beyond the reach of domestic law. By contrast, the&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs">War on Drugs</a> results in police inflicting violence and punishment &nbsp;on people and communities causing harm out of proportion to the benefit of extending the rule of law.<br /><br />In the context of this war, it's small wonder Ulbricht doesn't get the benefit of the legal doubt. It's hard not to compare <i>Deep Web</i> with the film <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2014/05/review-internets-own-boy.html">I saw last year at Montclair Film Festival</a>, Brian Knappenberger's <i><a href="http://www.takepart.com/internets-own-boy">The Internet's Own Boy</a></i>. Both films recount the story of a bright young man turned entrepreneur, who is driven by idealism to do something to which the legal system reacts with brutality. Both films prominently feature analysis by the eminently reasonable <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindy_Cohn" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Cindy Cohn">Cindy Cohn</a> and the starker views of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Soghoian">Chris Soghoian</a>. Despite the emotional power of Knappenberger's film, Popehat's <a href="https://popehat.com/2014/08/07/the-allure-of-unquestioned-premises-the-internets-own-boy-the-story-of-aaron-swartz/">Ken White criticized it</a> for its naive view of the legal system. White's cynical view is that we shouldn't be so outraged that Aaron Swartz was singled out for extreme prosecution, because that's what our legal system does to most people it turns its attention to today. This point would go double for Ross Ulbricht. The prosecution of Ulbricht was unfair, but that's exactly how most drug-related cases are prosecuted. "Drug kingpins" who complain about the feds hacking their computers can't expect much forbearance from judges who advance in the system by being "tough on crime", and rich white folks shouldn't expect to be treated differently.<br /><br />Unfortunately for Winter, the most shocking revelation in the Ulbricht case came after most of the current film was shot, and is only mentioned briefly at the end - two of the agents investigating Silk Road <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/nyregion/silk-road-case-federal-agents-charges.html">were indicted for stealing over a million dollars</a> worth of bitcoin from the site after they had infiltrated and taken control of the site. It's hard to imagine that this won't play a major role on appeal.<br /><br />As far as I can tell, <i>Deep Web</i> get its facts right. It manages to avoid many of the silly characterizations of Bitcoin in the popular media (for example, bitcoin enables anonymity but it's not automatic). The only quibble I have is the title. "Dark Web" would have been more accurate, as well as more dramatic.<br /><br />Over all, I found <i>Deep Web</i> an extremely engaging telling of an important story. But it ends in an unsatisfying place, with a shoe dropping. See don't miss it when it airs on May 31; you'll be able to enjoy what happens next.<br /><br /><i>Trivia note:</i> Both Ross Ulbricht and I, in our past lives, published scientific articles on the incredibly obscure topic of adsorption-controlled molecular beam epitaxy of oxides. Yep.<br /><ul><li><i>"Adsorption-controlled growth of EuO by molecular-beam epitaxy",&nbsp;</i><b><i>Appl. Phys. Lett.</i></b> 93, 102105 (2008); <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2973180">http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2973180</a></li><li><i>"Adsorption controlled molecular beam epitaxy of rubidium barium bismuth oxide"</i>, <b><i>J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B</i></b> 8, 332 (1990); <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1116/1.585064">http://dx.doi.org/10.1116/1.585064</a></li></ul><i>Deep Web premieres on May 31 at 8PM EST on <a href="http://www.epixhd.com/">EPIX</a>.</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>Here's the Trailer:</i><br /><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/117207739" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe>http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/05/review-alex-winters-deep-web-about-silk.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-6142761014210840952Sat, 02 May 2015 21:02:00 +00002015-05-02T19:47:22.494-04:00IndiaLibrariesprivacyRanganathan and the 5 Blind Librarians<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://chooseprivacyweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ALA_Icon_180x180_E.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://chooseprivacyweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/ALA_Icon_180x180_E.gif" /></a></div><i>It's "<a href="https://chooseprivacyweek.org/">Choose Privacy Week</a>". To celebrate, the <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.ala.org/" rel="homepage" target="_blank" title="American Library Association">American Library Association</a> is publishing a series of blog posts; today <a href="https://chooseprivacyweek.org/choose-privacy-week-2015-raganathan-and-the-five-blind-librarians/">they're running mine</a>! I wanted to write something special, so I decided to have little fun with a parable. I'm reprinting it here:</i><br /><br /><div class="Body1">I've heard it told that after formulating his famous "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_laws_of_library_science">Five Laws of Library Science</a>", the great Indian librarian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._R._Ranganathan">S. R Ranganathan</a> began thinking about privacy in libraries. Here's what I remember of the tale:<o:p></o:p></div><div class="Body1"><br /></div><div class="Body1"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;;">In India at the time, there were five librarians reknowned far and wide for their tremendous organizational skills, formidable bibliographic canny, and the coincidental fact that each of them was blind. It was said that "S" could identify books by their smell. "H" could classify a book just by the sound of the footfalls of a person carrying it. "T" was famous for leading patrons by the hand to exactly the book they wanted; the feel of a person's fingernails told him all he needed to know. "P" knew everything there was to know about paper and ink. "C" was quick with her fingers on a keyboard and there was hardly a soul in his city she had not corresponded with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>But these 5 were also sought out for their discretion; powerful leaders would consult them, thinking that their blindness made them immune to passing on their secrets of affairs and of state.</span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="Body1"><br /></div><div class="Body1"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;;">So of course, Ranganathan asked the five blind librarians to come to him so he could benefit from their wisdom and experience with privacy. The great librarians began talking among themselves as they sat outside Ranganathan's house. </span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="Body1"><br /></div><div class="Body1"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;;">"On my way through the countryside I encountered a strange beast", said librarian H.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>"I can't say what he was, but he had a distinctive call like a horn: Toot-to-to-toooot..." and librarian H reproduced a complicated sound that must have had at least 64 toots.</span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="Body1"><br /></div><div class="Body1"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;;">"By that sound, I think I encountered the same beast." said librarian T. "I reached out to touch him. He was hard and smooth, and ended in a point, like a great long sword."</span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="Body1"><br /></div><div class="Body1"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;;">"No, you are wrong", said librarian P. I heard the same sound, and the strange beast is like a thick parchment, I could feel the wind when it fluttered.</span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="Body1"><br /></div><div class="Body1"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;;">"You fellows are so mistaken." said librarian C "You touch for a second and you think you know everything. I spent 15 minutes playing with the beast, she is like a great squirming snake."</span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="Body1"><br /></div><div class="Body1"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;;">"I know nothing of the beast except the smell of his droppings," said librarian S.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>"But what I do know is that the beast had recently eaten a huge feast of bananas."</span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="Body1"><br /></div><div class="Body1"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;;">At this, a poacher who had been eavesdropping on the five librarians picked up his shotgun and ran off.</span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="Body1"><br /></div><div class="Body1"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;;">Just then, Ranganathan emerged through his door. Surprised at seeing the poacher run off, he asked the librarians what they had been talking about.</span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="Body1"><br /></div><div class="Body1"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;;">The librarians each repeated what they had told the others. When librarian S finally recounted the banana smell, Ranganathan became alarmed. The poacher had run in the direction of a grove of banana trees. Before he could do anything, they heard the sound of a powerful shotgun in the distance, and then the final roar of a dying elephant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span></span><o:p></o:p></div><div class="Body1"><br /></div><div class="Body1"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;;">With tears in his eyes, Ranganathan thanked the 5 librarians for their trouble, and sent them home. Though Ranganathan's manuscript on privacy has been lost to time, it is said that Ranganathan's 1st law of library privacy went something like this: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body1"><br /></div><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:WordDocument> <w:View>Normal</w:View> <w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:TrackMoves/> <w:TrackFormatting/> <w:PunctuationKerning/> <w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/> <w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:DoNotPromoteQF/> <w:LidThemeOther>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:LidThemeAsian>JA</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:LidThemeComplexScript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:Compatibility> <w:BreakWrappedTables/> <w:SnapToGridInCell/> <w:WrapTextWithPunct/> <w:UseAsianBreakRules/> <w:DontGrowAutofit/> <w:SplitPgBreakAndParaMark/> <w:EnableOpenTypeKerning/> <w:DontFlipMirrorIndents/> <w:OverrideTableStyleHps/> </w:Compatibility> <m:mathPr> <m:mathFont m:val="Cambria 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mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} </style><![endif]--> <!--StartFragment--> <!--EndFragment--><br /><div align="center" class="Body1" style="text-align: center;"><span style="mso-hansi-font-family: &quot;Arial Unicode MS&quot;;">"<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Library Spies Don't Need Eyes</i>".</span><span style="color: windowtext; font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: &quot;Times New Roman&quot;;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><br />http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/05/ranganathan-and-5-blind-librarians.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-7497898651752016129Wed, 01 Apr 2015 15:56:00 +00002015-04-01T13:03:41.375-04:00Just Kiddingprivacyscholarly publishingSuggested improvements for a medical journal privacy policy<style type="text/css">.new { color: green; } .old { text-decoration: line-through; } </style> <br />After <a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/03/16-of-top-20-research-journals-let-ad.html">I gave</a> the <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.nejm.org/" rel="homepage" target="_blank" title="The New England Journal of Medicine">New England Journal of Medicine</a> a failing grade for user privacy noting that their website used more trackers than any other scholarly journal website I looked at, the Massachusetts Medical Society asked me to review <a href="http://www.nejm.org/page/about-nejm/privacy-policy">the privacy policy for NEJM.com</a> and make changes that would improve its transparency. On the whole their website privacy policy is more informative and less misleading than most privacy policies I've looked at. Still, there's always room for improvement. They've kindly allowed me to show you the changes I recommended:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YV1aAMMzdBE/VRwTegx26gI/AAAAAAAAAlI/cqx57r6V9V8/s1600/novartis.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YV1aAMMzdBE/VRwTegx26gI/AAAAAAAAAlI/cqx57r6V9V8/s1600/novartis.png" height="47" width="400" /></a></div><i><br /></i><i>Last updated: April 1, 2015</i><br /><h3><b>Governing Principles&nbsp;</b></h3><a class="mceItemAnchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" id="top" name="top"></a>NEJM.org is owned and operated by the Massachusetts Medical Society (“MMS”). We take privacy issues seriously and are committed to protecting your personal information. <span class="new">We want to say that up front because it sounds nice and is legally meaningless.</span> Please take a moment to review our privacy policy, which explains how we collect, use, and safeguard information you enter at NEJM.org and any of our digital applications (such as our iPhone and iPad applications). This privacy policy applies only to information collected by MMS through NEJM.org and our digital applications. This privacy policy does not govern personal information furnished to MMS through any other means.<br /><!--BEGIN ANCHORED LINKS--> <br /><ul><li class="firstChild"><a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/04/suggested-improvements-for-medical.html#collect" target="_self">What Information Do We Collect?</a> </li><li class="lastChild"><a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/04/suggested-improvements-for-medical.html#infoused" target="_self">How Is This Information Used?</a> </li><li class="firstChild"><a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/04/suggested-improvements-for-medical.html#security">What Security Measures Are Used?</a> </li><li class="firstChild"><a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/04/suggested-improvements-for-medical.html#User-generated" target="_self">User-Generated Content Forums</a> </li><li class="lastChild"><a href="http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/04/suggested-improvements-for-medical.html#other" target="_self">Other Information</a> </li></ul><!--END ANCHORED LINKS--> <br /><h4><a class="mceItemAnchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" id="collect" name="collect"></a>WHAT INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT?</h4><h5><b>Information You Provide to Us</b></h5>We will request information from you if you establish a personal profile to gain access to certain content or services, if you ask to be notified by e-mail about online content, or if you participate in surveys we conduct. This requires the input of personal information and preferences that may include, but is not limited to, details such as your name, address (postal and e-mail), telephone number, or demographic information. <span class="new">You can't use secure communications to give us this information, so you should consider anything you tell us to be public information.</span> If you request paid content from NEJM.org, including subscriptions, we will also ask for payment information such as credit card type and number. <span class="new">Our payment providers won't actually let us see your credit card number, because there are federal regulations and such.</span><br /><h5><b>Information That Is Automatically Collected</b><i><b></b></i></h5><div style="padding-left: 30px;"><i><b>Log Files</b></i></div><div style="padding-left: 30px;">We use log files to collect general data about the movement of visitors through our site and digital applications. This <span class="old">may include some or</span> <span class="new">includes</span> all of the following information: the Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) of your computer or other digital device, host name, domain name, browser version and platform, date and time of requests, and the files downloaded or viewed. We use this information to <span class="new">track what you read and to</span> measure and analyze traffic and usage of NEJM.org and our digital applications. <span class="new">We build our site in such a way that this information is leaked to our advertisers, our widget providers, our analytics partners, the advertising partners of our widget providers, all the ISPs that connect us, and government entities such as the NSA, the Great Firewall of China, and the "Five Eyes" group.</span></div><div style="padding-left: 30px;"><i><b>Cookies</b></i></div><div style="padding-left: 30px;">We use cookies to collect information and help <span class="old">personalize your user experience</span> <span class="new">us make more money. </span> We store <span class="old">minimal personally identifying information</span> <span class="new">ten tracking identifiers</span> in cookies and <span class="old">protect</span> <span class="new">allow our partners to access</span> this information. We do not store complete records or credit card numbers in cookies. <span class="new">We don't put chocolate chips in cookies either. Even if they're the other kind of cookies. Because we read about <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1314072">the health effects of fatty foods</a>, in NEJM of course.</span> You can find out more about how we use cookies at our <b><a href="http://www.nejm.org/page/about-nejm/cookie-information" target="_self">Cookie Information page</a></b> <span class="new">which is a separate page because it's more confusing that way. </span></div><div style="padding-left: 30px;">Most web browsers automatically accept cookies. Browsers can be configured to prevent this, but if you do not accept any cookies from www.NEJM.org, you will not be able to use the site. The site will function if you block third party cookies.</div><div style="padding-left: 30px;">In some cases we also <span class="old">work with</span> <span class="new">receive services or get paid by</span> third party vendors (such as Google<span class="new">, Google's DoubleClick Ad Network, Checkm8, Scorecard Reasearch, Unica, AddThis, Crazy Egg, Flashtalking, Monetate, DoubleVerify, and SLI Systems</span>) who help deliver advertisements on our behalf across the Internet, and <span class="new">vendors like Coremetrics, Chartbeat and Mii Solutions, who provide flashy dashboards for our managers</span>. These vendors may use cookies to collect information about your activity at our site (i.e., the pages you have visited) in order to help deliver particular ads that they believe you would find most relevant. You can opt out of those vendors' use of cookies to tailor advertising to you by visiting <a href="http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp" target="_blank">http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp</a>. <span class="new">Except for Checkm8, Scorecard Reasearch, Unica, Crazy Egg, Monetate, Coremetrics, Chartbeat, Mii Solutions and SLI Systems. And even if you opt out of advertising customization, these companies still get all the information. We have no idea how long they retain the information or what they do with the information other than ad targetting and data dashboarding.</span></div><div style="padding-left: 30px;"><i><b>Clear Gifs (Web Beacons/Web Bugs)</b></i><br />We may also use clear gifs which are tiny graphics with unique identifiers that function similarly to cookies to help us to track site activity. We do not use these to collect personally identifying information<span class="new">, because that's impossible. We also do not use clear gifs to shovel snow, even though we've had a whole mess of it. Oh and by the way, some of our partners have used "flash cookies", which you can't delete. And maybe even "canvas fingerprints". But they pay us money or give us services, so we don't want to interfere</span>.</div><br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-b5ZnBd-dfsg/VRwTqjWvGnI/AAAAAAAAAlQ/GyF6eMid2vI/s1600/afinator.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-b5ZnBd-dfsg/VRwTqjWvGnI/AAAAAAAAAlQ/GyF6eMid2vI/s1600/afinator.png" height="48" width="400" /></a></div><br /><h4><b><a class="mceItemAnchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" id="infoused" name="infoused"></a><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><b>HOW IS THIS INFORMATION USED?</b></span><br /></b></h4>Information that you provide to us will be used to process, fulfill, and deliver your requests for content and services. We may send you information about our products and services, unless you have indicated you do not wish to receive further information. <br /><br />Information that is automatically collected is used to monitor usage patterns at NEJM.org and at our digital applications in order to help us improve our service offerings. We do not sell or rent your e-mail address to any third party. You may unsubscribe from our e-mail services at any time. <span class="new">Life is short. You may have a heart attack at any time, or get run over by a truck.</span> For additional information on how to unsubscribe from our e-mail services, please refer to the <b><a href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4990922102626688253&amp;pli=1#Changes" target="_self">How to Make Changes to Your Information section</a></b> of this Privacy Policy. <br /><br />We <span class="old">may</span> report aggregate information about usage to third parties, including our service vendors and advertisers. <span class="new">These advertisers may include your competitors, so be careful.</span> For additional information, please also see our <b><a href="http://www.nejm.org/page/about-nejm/advertising-policy" target="_self">Internet Advertising Policy</a></b>. We may also disclose personal and demographic information about your use of NEJM.org and our digital applications to <span class="new">the countless</span> companies and individuals we engage to perform functions on our behalf. Examples may include hosting our Web servers, analyzing data, and providing marketing assistance. These companies and individuals are obligated to maintain your personal information as confidential and may have access to your personal information only as necessary to perform their requested function on our behalf<span class="new">, which is usually to earn us more money, except as detailed in their respective privacy policies. So of course, these companies may sell the data collected in the course of your interaction with us</span>.<br /><h5><b>Advertisers</b></h5><b></b> We contract with third-party advertisers and their agents to post banner and other advertisement at our site and digital applications. These advertisements may link to Web sites not under our control. These third-party advertisers may use cookie technology or similar means <span class="new">i.e. Flash</span> to measure the effectiveness of their ads or may otherwise collect personally identifying information from you when you leave our site or digital applications. We are not responsible or liable for any content, advertising, products or other materials offered from such advertisers and their agents. Transactions that occur between you and the third-party advertisers are strictly between you and the third party and are not our responsibility. You should review the privacy policy of any third-party advertiser and its agent, as their policies may differ from ours.<br /><h5><b>Advertisement Servers</b></h5><span class="new">In addition to advertising networks run by Google, which know everything about you already, </span>We use a third-party ad server, CheckM8, to serve advertising at NEJM.org. <span class="new">Using an advertising network diminishes our ability to control what advertising is shown on the NEJM website. Instead, auctions are held between advertisers that want to show you ads. Complicated algorithms decide which ads you are most likely to click on and generate the most revenue for us. We're thinking of outsourcing our peer-review process for our article content to similar sorts of software agents, as it will save us a whole lot of money. Anyway, if you see ads for miracle drugs on our site, it's because we really need these advertising dollars to continue our charitable work of publicizing top quality medical research, not because these drugs have been validated by top quality medical research.</span> CheckM8 does not collect any personally identifiable information regarding consumers who view or interact with CheckM8 advertisements. CheckM8 solely collects non-personally identifiable ad delivery and reporting data. For further information, see <b><a href="https://www.blogger.com/MMS" target="_blank">CheckM8’s privacy policy</a></b>. <span class="new">Please note that the opt-out website we mentioned above doesn't cover CheckM8, And there's not a good way to opt out of CheckM8, so there. The Massachusetts Medical Society takes in about $25 million per year in advertising revenue, so we really don't want you to opt out of our targeted advertising.</span><b><br /></b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3TQE20kPTso/VRwT0bEHpHI/AAAAAAAAAlY/XheYrlLaONs/s1600/jazzpharma.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3TQE20kPTso/VRwT0bEHpHI/AAAAAAAAAlY/XheYrlLaONs/s1600/jazzpharma.png" height="48" width="400" /></a></div><br /><h4><b><a class="mceItemAnchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" id="security" name="security"></a></b><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><b>WHAT SECURITY MEASURES ARE USED?</b></span><br /></h4>When you submit personal information via NEJM.org or our digital applications, your information is protected both online and offline with what we believe to be appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect. For information submitted via NEJM.org, we use the latest Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology to encrypt your credit card and personal information. <span class="new">But other information is totally up for grabs.</span> <b><br /></b><br /><b>USER-GENERATED CONTENT FORUMS</b><br />Any data or personal information that you submit to us as user-generated content becomes public and may be used by MMS in connection with NEJM.org, our digital applications, and other MMS publications in any and all media. For more information, see our <b><a href="http://www.nejm.org/page/about-nejm/terms-of-use#usergen" target="_self">User-Generated Content Guidelines</a></b>. <span class="new">We'll have the right to publish your name and location worldwide forever if you do so, and we can sue you if you try to use a pseudonym.</span> <b><br /></b><br /><h4><b><a class="mceItemAnchor" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" id="other" name="other"></a><span style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif;"><b>OTHER INFORMATION</b></span><br /></b></h4><h5><b>Do Not Track Signals</b></h5>Like most web services, at this time we do not alter our behavior or change our services in response to do not track signals. <span class="new">In other words, our website tracks you, even if you use technical means to tell us you do not want us to track you.</span><br /><h5><b>Compliance with Legal Process</b></h5>We may disclose personally identifying information if we are required to do so by law or we in good faith believe that such action is necessary to (1) comply with the law or legal process; (2) protect our rights and property; (3) protect against misuse or the unauthorized use of our Web site; or (4) protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public. <span class="new">So, for example, if you are involved in a divorce proceeding, we can help your spouse verify that you weren't staying late at your office reading up on the latest research like you said you were.</span><b><br /></b><br /><h5><b>Children</b></h5><b></b> NEJM.org is not intended for children under 13 years of age. We do not knowingly collect or store any personal information from children under 13. <span class="new">If we did not have this disclaimer, our lawyer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_Online_Privacy_Protection_Act">would not let us do</a> things we want to do. If you are under 13, we're really impressed, you should spend more time outside getting fresh air.</span><b><br /></b><br /><h5><b>Changes to This Policy</b></h5>This privacy policy may be periodically updated. We will post a notice that this policy has been amended by revising the “Last updated” date at the top of this page. Use of NEJM.org constitutes consent to any policy then in effect. <span class="new">So basically, what we say here is totally meaningless with respect to your ability to rely on it. Oh well.</span><b><br /></b><br /><br />http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/04/suggested-improvements-for-medical.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-5016329685065161381Fri, 13 Mar 2015 02:49:00 +00002015-03-13T09:55:50.769-04:00privacyscholarly publishing16 of the top 20 Research Journals Let Ad Networks Spy on Their ReadersA <a href="http://listserv.crl.edu/wa.exe?A2=ind1503&amp;L=LIBLICENSE-L&amp;F=&amp;S=&amp;P=25138">recent query</a> to the "LibLicense" listserv asked:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><span class="s1">Is there any kind of organization that has put together a website or&nbsp;</span><span class="s1">list of database providers/publishers that indicate the extent to&nbsp;</span><span class="s1">which they respect patron privacy?</span></blockquote>The answer is "no", but I thought it would useful to look at the top journal publishers to see if their websites are built with an orientation towards reader privacy.<br /><br />I came up with a list of 20 top journals. I took the 10 journals with the most citations and the 10 journals with the most citations per published article, according to the <a href="http://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php">SCImago journal rankings</a>.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-awnRDx99low/VQJPaGywwyI/AAAAAAAAAko/ubXT7KM-cBE/s1600/Ghostery-Logo-250px.4989a5f5c140ac7ce49e33612ef0e907.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-awnRDx99low/VQJPaGywwyI/AAAAAAAAAko/ubXT7KM-cBE/s1600/Ghostery-Logo-250px.4989a5f5c140ac7ce49e33612ef0e907.png" /></a></div>I used <a href="https://www.ghostery.com/en/download">Ghostery</a> to count the number of trackers present on the web page for an article in each journal. Each of these trackers gets a feed of each user's browsing behavior. I looked at the trackers to see if user browsing behavior was being sent to advertising networks. I also determined whether the journal supported secure connections. Based on these results, I assigned a letter grade for each journal.<br /><h3>Passing, Grade A</h3>None of the scholarly journals I looked at earned excellent grades for reader privacy.<br /><h3>Passing, Grade B</h3><div>Two journals, both published by the American Physical Society,&nbsp;earned&nbsp;good grades for reader privacy.&nbsp;They use a social sharing widget that respects privacy.</div><div><br /></div><div><b><i>Reviews of Modern Physics</i></b>. &nbsp;Ranked #2 in citations/article. 1 Tracker (Google Analytics). No advertising networks. Supports HTTPS, but allows insecure connections.</div><div><b><i>Physical Review Letters</i></b>.&nbsp;Ranked #9 in total citations, #393 in citations/article.&nbsp;1 Tracker (Google Analytics). No advertising networks. Supports HTTPS, but allows insecure connections.</div><h3>Passing Grade C</h3>Two journals, both published by Annual Reviews,&nbsp;earned&nbsp;acceptable grades for reader privacy.<br /><br /><div class="p1"><b><i>Annual Review of Immunology</i></b>. Ranked #3 in citations/article. 1 Tracker (Google Analytics). No advertising networks. Insecure connections only.</div><div class="p1"><b><i>Annual Review of Biochemistry</i></b>. Ranked #5 in citations/article. 1 Tracker (Google Analytics). No advertising networks. Insecure connections only.</div><div class="p1"><br /></div><h3>Failing Grade D</h3><div class="p1">Failing grades are earned by publishers that allow their readers to be tracked by advertising networks. These networks get access to the full browsing history of a user and track them with cookies; it's difficult for users to maintain anonymity when most of their web browsing is exposed to tracking.</div><div class="p1"><br /></div><div class="p1"><b><i>Science</i></b>, published by AAAS. Ranked #5 in total citations, #49 in citations/article.&nbsp;10 Trackers. Multiple advertising networks. Science gets a D rather than an F because it supports HTTPS, although it allows insecure connections.</div><h3>Failing Grade F</h3><div>15 journals earned failing grades because their participation in advertising networks exposes their readers to tracking and spying. Some of the publishers are more flagrant about this than others. Maybe I should have given F+ to some and F- to others. All of these journals force insecure connections.</div><div><br /></div><br /><b><i> PLoS One</i></b>, published by the Public Library of Science. #1 in total citations, #1776 in citations/article. 3 trackers. One advertising network.<br /><b><i> Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States</i></b>, published by the National Academy of Sciences. #2 in total citations, #155 in citations/article. 3 trackers. One advertising network.<b><i><br /> Journal of Biological Chemistry</i></b>, published by the&nbsp;American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. #8 in total citations, #513 in citations/article. 3 trackers. One advertising network.<b><i><br /> Quarterly Journal of Economics</i></b>, published by Oxford Journals. #6 in citations/article. 4&nbsp;trackers. One advertising network.<b><i><br /> Chemical Communications</i></b>, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. #10 in total citations, #680 in citations/article. 6 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.<b><i><br /> Journal of the American Chemical Society</i></b>, published by the American Chemical Society. #4 in total citations, #185 in citations/article. 7 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.<b><i><br /> Chemical Reviews</i></b>, published by the American Chemical Society. #10 in citations/article. 8 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.<b><i>&nbsp;</i></b><b><i><br /> CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians</i></b>, published by Wiley. #1 in citations/article. 9 trackers.&nbsp;Multiple advertising networks.<b><i><br /> Cell</i></b>, published by Elsevier. #4 in citations/article. 9 trackers.&nbsp;Multiple advertising networks.<b><i><br /> Angewandte Chemie - International Edition</i></b>, published by Wiley. #6 in total citations, #202 in citations/article. 11 trackers.&nbsp;Multiple advertising networks.<b><i><br />Nature Genetics</i></b>, published by Nature Publishing Group. #7 in citations/article. 11 trackers.&nbsp;Multiple advertising networks.<b><i><br /> Nature</i></b>, published by&nbsp;Nature Publishing Group. #3 in total citations, #11 in citations/article. 11 trackers. One advertising&nbsp;network.<b><i><br />Nature Reviews Genetics</i></b>, published by&nbsp;Nature Publishing Group. #8 in citations/article. 12 trackers.&nbsp;Multiple advertising networks.<b><i><br /> Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology</i></b>,&nbsp;published by Nature Publishing Group. #9 in citations/article. 13 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.<b><i><br /> New England Journal of Medicine,</i></b>&nbsp;published by the Massachusetts Medical Society. #7 in total citations, #41 in citations/article. 14 trackers.&nbsp;Multiple advertising networks. <br /><h3>Remarks</h3><div>I'm particularly concerned about the medical journals that participate in advertising networks. Imagine that someone is researching clinical trials for a deadly disease. A smart insurance company could target such users with ads that mark them for higher premiums. A pharmaceutical company could use advertising targeting researchers at competing companies to find clues about their research directions. Most journal users (and probably most journal publishers) don't realize how easily online ads can be used to gain intelligence as well as to sell products.</div><div><br /></div><div>In defense of the publishers, it should be noted that the web advertising business has developed very rapidly over the past few years due to intense competition. A few years ago, the attacks on user privacy enabled by the ad networks' massive data collection were mostly theoretical. But competition has led the networks to increase their targeting ability and scoop up more and more "demographic" data. What was theory a few years ago is today's reality. We still have time to prevent tomorrow's privacy disaster, but change will only happen if the institutions that purchase and fund these journals learn what's really going on and start to demand the privacy that readers deserve.</div>http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/03/16-of-top-20-research-journals-let-ad.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-3787095458999371542Thu, 26 Feb 2015 18:32:00 +00002015-02-26T13:32:59.974-05:00book industryGitenbergGluejarProject GutenbergUnglue.it"Free" can help a book do its job<br /><div style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /></div><i>(Note: I wrote this article for <a href="http://nzcommons.org.nz/project/open-access-publishing-unglue/">NZCommons</a>, based on my presentation at the <a href="http://psp2015conf.com/conference-seminar-agenda/">2015 PSP Annual Conference</a> in February.)</i><br /><br />Every book has a job to do. For many books, that job is to make money for its creators. But a lot of books have other jobs to do. Sometimes the fact that people pay for books helps that job, but other times the book would be able to do its job better if it was free for everyone.<br /><br />That's why <a class="zem_slink" href="http://creativecommons.org/" rel="homepage" target="_blank" title="Creative Commons">Creative Commons licensing</a> is so important. But while CC addresses the licensing problem nicely, free ebooks face many challenges that make it difficult for them to do their jobs.<br /><br /><a href="https://unglue.it/work/81834/" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" height="200" src="https://unglueit.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/olacover_thumbnail.jpg" title="" width="133" /></a>Let's look at some examples.<br /><br />When <i><a href="https://unglue.it/work/81834/">Oral Literature in Africa</a></i> was first published in 1970, its number one job was to earn tenure for the author, a rising academic. It succeeded, and then some. The book became a classic, elevating an obscure topic and creating an entire field of scholarly inquiry in cultural anthropology. But in 2012, it was failing to do any job at all. The book was out of print and unavailable to young scholars on the very continent whose culture it documented. Ruth Finnegan, the author, considered it her life's work and hoped it would continue to stimulate original research and new insights. To accomplish that, the book needed to be free. It needed to be translatable, it needed to be extendable.<br /><br /><a href="https://unglue.it/work/141683/" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://unglueit-files.s3.amazonaws.com/Users/eric/covers/221086/Nga-Reanga-Youth-Development-Maori-styles.jpg" width="141" /></a><a href="https://unglue.it/work/140223/" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://unglueit-files.s3.amazonaws.com/Users/eric/covers/219113/good-and-cheap.jpg" width="141" /></a><br /><i><a href="https://unglue.it/work/141683/">Nga Reanga Youth Development: Maori Styles</a></i>, an Open Access book by Josie Keelan, is another example of an academic book with important jobs to do. While its primary job is a local one, the advancement of understanding and practice in Maori youth development, it has another job, a global one. Being free helps it speak to scholars and researchers around the world.<br /><br />Leanne Brown's <i><a href="https://unglue.it/work/140223/">Good and Cheap</a></i>&nbsp;is a very different book. It's a cookbook. But the job she wanted it to do made it more than your usual cookbook. She wanted to improve the lives of people who receive "nutrition assistance"- food stamps, by providing recipes for nutritious and healthy meals that can be made without spending much money. By being free, <i>Good and Cheap</i> helps more people in need eat well.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://unglue.it/work/140715/" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://unglueit-files.s3.amazonaws.com/Users/eric/covers/219765/barbieremix1.jpg" width="187" /></a></div>My last example is Casey Fiesler's&nbsp;<i><a href="https://unglue.it/work/140715/">Barbie™ I Can Be A Computer Engineer The Remix! Now With Less Sexism!</a></i>&nbsp;The job of this book is to poke fun at the original&nbsp;<i>Barbie™ I Can Be A Computer Engineer</i>, in which Barbie needs boys to do the&nbsp;actual computer coding. But because Fiesler uses material from the original under "fair use", anything other than free, non-commercial distribution isn't legal.&nbsp;<i>Barbie,</i>&nbsp;remixed can ONLY be a free ebook.<br /><br />But there's a problem with free ebooks. The book industry runs on a highly evolved and optimized cradle-to-grave supply chain, comprising publishers, printers, production houses, distributors, wholesalers, retailers, aggregators, libraries, publicists, developers, cataloguers, database suppliers, reviewers, used-book dealers, even pulpers. And each entity in this supply chain takes its percentage. The entire chain stops functioning when an ebook is free. Even libraries (most of them) lack the processes that would enable them to include free ebooks in their collections.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9o7fXoCASfA/VO9mD_UZozI/AAAAAAAAAj8/WTvpMbb9-ZE/s1600/supplychain.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9o7fXoCASfA/VO9mD_UZozI/AAAAAAAAAj8/WTvpMbb9-ZE/s1600/supplychain.png" height="320" width="229" /></a></div>At <a href="https://unglue.it/">Unglue.it</a>, we ran smack into this problem when we set out to bring books into the creative commons. We helped <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.openbookpublishers.com/" rel="homepage" target="_blank" title="Open Book Publishers">Open Book Publishers</a> crowd fund a new ebook edition of <i>Oral Literature in Africa</i>. The ebook was then freely available, but it wasn't easy to make it free on Amazon, which dominates the ebook market. We couldn't get the big ebook aggregators that serve libraries to add it to their platforms. We realized that someone had to do the work that the supply chain didn't want to do.<br /><br />Over the past year, we've worked to turn Unglue.it into a "bookstore for free books". The transformation isn't done yet, but we've built a database of over <a href="https://unglue.it/free/">1200 downloadable ebooks</a>, licensed under Creative Commons or other free licenses. We have a long way to go, but we're distributing over 10,000 ebooks per month. We're providing syndication feeds, developing relationships with distributors, improving metadata, and promoting wonderful books that happen to be free.<br /><br />The creators of these books still need to find support. To help them, we've developed three revenue programs. For books that already have free licenses, we help the creators ask for financial support in the one place where readers are most appreciative of their work- inside the books themselves. We call this "<a href="https://unglue.it/faq/campaigns/t4u/">thanks for ungluing</a>".<br /><br />For books that exist as ebooks but need to recoup production costs, we offer "<a href="https://unglue.it/faq/campaigns/b2u/">buy-to-unglue</a>". We'll sell these books until they reach a revenue target, after which they'll become open access. For books that exist in print but need funding for conversion to open access ebook, we offer "<a href="https://unglue.it/faq/campaigns/supporting/">pledge-to-unglue</a>", which is a way of crowd-funding the conversion.<br /><br />After a book has finished its job, it can look forward to a lengthy retirement. There's no need for books to die anymore, but we can help them enjoy retirement, and maybe even enjoy a second life. <a class="zem_slink" href="http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page" rel="homepage" target="_blank" title="Project Gutenberg">Project Gutenberg</a> has over 50,000 books that have "retired" into the public domain. We're starting to think about the care these books need. Formats change along with the people that use them, and the book industry's supply chain does its best to turn them back into money-earners to pay for that care.<br /><br />Recently we received <a href="http://www.knightfoundation.org/blogs/knightblog/2015/1/30/22-projects-win-knight-news-challenge-libraries/">a grant from the Knight Foundation</a> to work on ways to provide the long-term care that these books need to be productive AND free in their retirements. <a href="https://gitenberg.github.io/">GITenberg</a>, a collaboration between the folks at Unglue.it and ebook technologist <a href="http://seth.wolfwood.is/">Seth Woodward</a> is exploring the use of <a class="zem_slink" href="http://github.com/" rel="homepage" target="_blank" title="GitHub">Github</a> for free ebook maintenance. Github is a website that supports collaborative software development with source control and workflow tools. Our hope is that the ingredients that have made Github wildly successful in the open source software world will will prove to by similarly effective in supporting ebooks.<br /><br />It wasn't so long ago that printing costs made free ebooks impossible. So it's no wonder that free ebooks haven't realized their full potential. But with cooperation and collaboration, we can really make wonderful things happen.http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/02/free-can-help-book-do-its-job.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4990922102626688253.post-3593179954479814553Mon, 09 Feb 2015 23:55:00 +00002015-02-10T11:24:00.046-05:00library automationsecurityWeb Design and Development"Passwords are stored in plain text."Many states have "open records" laws which mandate public disclosure of business proposals submitted to state agencies. When a state library or university requests proposals for library systems or databases, the vender responses can be obtained and reviewed. When I was in the library software business, it was routine to use these laws to do "competitor intelligence". These disclosures can often reveal the inner workings of proprietary vendor software which implicate information privacy and security.<br /><br />Consider for example, <a href="http://10ba4283a7fbcc3461c6-31fb5188b09660555a4c2fcc1bea63d9.r13.cf1.rackcdn.com/01/4a25018c5f8722b787ad0b4c443c0c34.pdf?id=267394">this request</a> for "eResources for Minitex". <a href="https://www.minitex.umn.edu/">Minitex</a> is a&nbsp;"publicly supported network of academic, public, state government, and special libraries working cooperatively to improve library service for their users in Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota" and it negotiates licenses databases for libraries throughout the three states.<br /><br />Question number 172&nbsp;in this Request for Proposals (RFP) was: "Password storage. Indicate how passwords are stored (e.g., plain text, hash, <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_%28cryptography%29" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Salt (cryptography)">salted hash</a>, etc.)."<br /><br />To provide context for this question, you need to know just a little bit of security and cryptography.<br /><br />I'll admit to having written code 15 years ago that saved passwords as plain text. This is a dangerous thing to do, because if someone were to get unauthorized access to the computer where the passwords were stored, they would have a big list of passwords. Since people tend to use the same password on multiple systems, the breached password list could be used, not only to gain access to the service that leaked the password file, but also to other services, which might include banks, stores and other sites of potential interest to thieves.<br /><br />As a result, web developers are now strongly admonished never to save the passwords as plain text. Doing so in a new system should be considered negligent, and could easily result in liability for the developer if the system security is breached. Unfortunately many businesses would rather risk paying paying lawyers a lot of money to defend themselves should something go wrong than bite the bullet and pay some engineers a little money now to patch up the older systems.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ez7IKYMc44Y/VNlGH9Y6pSI/AAAAAAAAAjo/ySz1LUjP988/s1600/hashsalt.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ez7IKYMc44Y/VNlGH9Y6pSI/AAAAAAAAAjo/ySz1LUjP988/s1600/hashsalt.JPG" height="235" width="320" /></a></div>To prevent the disclosure of passwords, the current standard practice is to "salt and hash" them.<br /><br />A <a class="zem_slink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptographic_hash_function" rel="wikipedia" target="_blank" title="Cryptographic hash function">cryptographic hash function</a> mixes up a password so that the password cannot be reconstructed. so for example, the hash of '<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">my_password</span>' is '<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">a865a7e0ddbf35fa6f6a232e0893bea4</span>'. When a user enters their password, the hash of the password is recalculated and compared to the saved hash to determine whether the password is correct.<br /><br />As a result of this strategy, the password can't be recovered. But it can be reset, and the fact that no one can recover the password eliminates a whole bunch of "social engineering" attacks on the security of the service.<br /><br />Given a LOT of computer power, there are brute force attacks on the hash, but the easiest attack is to compute the hashes for the most common passwords. In a large file of passwords, you should be able to find some accounts that are breachable, even with the hashing. And so a "salt" is added to the password before the hash is applied. In the example above, a hash would be computed for '<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">SOME_CLEVER_SALTmy_password</span>'. Which, of course, is '<span style="font-family: Courier New, Courier, monospace;">52b71cb6d37342afa3dd5b4cc9ab4846</span>'.<br /><br />To attack the salted password file, you'd need to know that salt. And since every application uses a different salt, each file of salted passwords is completely different. A successful attack on one hashed password file won't compromise any of the others.<br /><br />Another standard practice for user-facing password management is to never send passwords unencrypted. The best way to do this is to use HTTPS, since web browser software alerts the user that their information is secure. Otherwise, any server between the user and the destination server (there might be 20-40 of these for &nbsp;typical web traffic) could read and store the user's password.<br /><br />The Minitex RFP covers reference databases. For this reason, only a small subset of services offered to libraries are covered here. The authentication for these sorts of systems typically don't depend on the user creating a password; user accounts are used to save the results of a search, or to provide customization features. A Minitex patron can use many of the offered databases without providing any sort of password.<br /><br />So here are the verbatim responses received for the&nbsp;<span style="background-color: white;">Minitex</span>&nbsp;RFP:<br /><br /><b>LearningExpress, LLC</b><br />Response: "All passwords are stored using a salted hash. The salt is randomly generated and unique for each user."<br /><i>My comment: This is a correct answer. However, the <a href="http://www.learningexpresshub.com/learningexpresslibrary?RedirectURL=%2flearningexpresslibrary&amp;Login=true">LearningExpress login</a> sends passwords in the clear over HTTP.</i><br /><br /><b>OCLC</b><br />Response: "Passwords are md5 hashed."<br /><i>My comment: MD5 is the hash algorithm I used in my examples above. It's not considered very secure (see comments). OCLC <a href="http://firstsearch.oclc.org/">Firstsearch</a> does not force HTTPS and can send login passwords in the clear.</i><br /><br /><b>Credo</b><br />Response: "N/A"<br /><i>My comment: This just means that no passwords are used in the service.</i><br /><br /><b>Infogroup Library Division</b><br />Response: "Passwords are currently stored as plain text. This may change once we develop the customization for users within ReferenceUSA. Currently the only passwords we use are for libraries to access usage stats."<br /><i>My comment: The user customization now available for ReferenceUSA appears at first glance to be done correctly.</i><br /><br /><b>EBSCO Information Services</b><br />Response: "EBSCOhost passwords in EBSCOadmin are stored in plain text."<br /><i>My comment: Should note that EBSCOadmin is not a end-user facing system. So if the EBSCO systems were compromised only library administrator credentials would be exposed.&nbsp;</i><br /><br /><b>Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.</b><br />Response: "Passwords are stored as plain text."<br /><i>My comment: I wonder if EB has an article on network security?</i><br /><br /><b>ProQuest</b><br />Response: "We store all passwords as plain text."<br /><i>My comment:&nbsp;The ProQuest service available through my library creates passwords over HTTP but uses some client-side encryption. I have not evaluated the security of this encryption.</i><br /><br /><b>Scholastic Library Publishing, Inc.</b><br />Response: "Passwords are not stored. FreedomFlix offers a digital locker feature and is the only digital product that requires a login and password. The user creates the login and password. Scholastic Library Publishing, Inc does not have access to this information.”<br /><i>My comment:&nbsp;The "<a href="http://auth.digital.scholastic.com/login/fflix/login.php">FreedomFlix</a>" service not only sends user passwords unencrypted over HTTP, it sends them in a GET query string. This means that not only can anyone see the user passwords in transit, but log files will capture and save them for long-term perusal. Third-party sites will be sent the password in referrer headers. When used on a shared computer, subsequent users will easily see the passwords. "Scholastic Library Publishing" may not have access to user passwords, but everyone else will have them.</i><br /><br /><b>Cengage Learning</b><br />Response: "Passwords are stored in plain text."<br /><i>My comment:&nbsp;Like FreedomFlix, the <a href="http://infotrac.galegroup.com/default/">Gale Infotrac</a> service from Cengage sends user passwords in the clear in a GET query string. But it asks the user to enter their library barcode in the password field, so users probably wouldn't be exposing their personal passwords.</i><br /><br />So, to sum up, adoption of up-to-date security practices is far from complete in the world of library databases. I hope that the laggards have improved since the submission date of this RFP (roughly a year ago) or at least have plans in place to get with the program. I would welcome comments to this post that provide updates. Libraries themselves deserve a lot of the blame, because for the most part the vendors that serve them respond to their requirements and priorities.<br /><br />I think libraries issuing RFPs for new systems and databases should include specific questions about security and privacy practices, and make sure that contracts properly assign liability for data breaches with the answers to these questions in mind.<br /><br />Note: This post is based on information <a href="https://twitter.com/codyh">shared</a> by concerned librarians on the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ala.org/lita/about/igs/public/lit-Pp">LITA Patron Privacy Technologies</a> Interest Group <a href="http://lists.ala.org/wws/info/patronprivacy">list</a>. Join if you care about this.http://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2015/02/passwords-are-stored-in-plain-text.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Eric)6
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