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Tech at Night: Carrier IQ a non-issue, Spectrum, ARRA failure, SOPA fight continues

By: Neil Stevens (Diary)  |  December 6th, 2011 at 02:00 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Tech at Night

It’s Monday night, so naturally we start now with my weekly appearance at the Daily Caller. This week I finally got around to reading up on the Carrier IQ scare, and decided it was just a scare. Smoke, but no fire. Keep calm and carry on, people.

How about some spectrum? Jerry Brito takes on the thorny issue of civil defense/first responder spectrum and the D Block, while Ernest Istook points out spectrum sales are only a short run budget fix. Regardless of budget concerns, though, we need more spectrum dedicated to mass market Internet. Competition, jobs, innovation.

Oh and it turns out the ARRA was terrible at job creation. Big surprise, huh?

The SOPA battle continues with a strike back from the forces in favor of SOPA, the selective Internet kill switch bill that favors “intellectual property” (not that a bad sitcom or a handbag design are all that intellectual) ahead of all other industries in America. Well, just the ones that import, export, or otherwise operate online. Which is most of them.

And that’s all for tonight. It was observed to me today that there really wasn’t a lot going on today. I guess I agree.

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  • cfogel1973

    Would you be all right with me using the man in the middle “attack” between your PC and your ISP? Don’t worry I am just collecting URL’s, location, keystrokes, application data, etc and it is for your ISP. They paid for me to be there. Oh you want to know who my ISP customers are? I am sorry but contractually I am not allowed to talk about that.

    You want to remove me from your PC well unfortunately for you I can’t unless you want to void your warranty on your device.

    I understand that networks can view most of this stuff all ready, why do they need a third party between me and them. I didn’t accept this policy to my knowledge.

    See, they can talk about how valuable they are to their customers, the carriers, but it is my device and is my personal property. Being a conservative my property is of utmost importance.

  • dcacklam

    Because the carrier owns everything between your device and whatever point they hand off your call to someone else’s hardware…

    And the reason they contract this network monitoring out, is that it’s cheaper for all the carriers to hire one contractor, than it is for them all to redundantly implement the functionality themselves…

    And I doubt anyone reads their cell contract closely enough to actually know what they’re signing… There’s a good chance you agreed to allow your carrier to do this, without even knowing it…

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    … from the power grab that is SOPA.

  • cfogel1973

    They own the network your right. The device is mine and this is on peoples devices. They were not asked to opt in nor were they told this is on the device.

    Why contact this out? They all ready have all this information. This is clearly from the department of redundancy.

    Yea I am sure no one reads it. Heck I just did the last couple days. I am no lawyer but I don’t see anywhere that they allow an uninstallable monitoring software on your device.

    Any lawyers out there look at these and give us a heads up?

  • dcacklam

    In most cases, it’s copyrighted software owned by the carrier and/or the manufacturer. Android is a bit different, since the ‘core’ software is open source – eg, it’s ‘owned’ by the community… But even there, individual modules are the intellectual property of the carrier and/or phone manufacturer.

    The only thing you own outright is the physical hardware… Everything else is either not yours, or licensed/loaned to you…. And in most cases, these agreements allow the carrier to update their software, which is running on your hardware. They can add features you like, features they need, etc – and they generally don’t have to tell you….

    IT-world ‘property’ law is a bit more complicated than ‘ownership’ of a car or house…

    As for already having the info and/or the ability to collect it, the service they are buying is not just info collection, but analysis & possibly solution development.

    Many companies do this – they hire an outside firm to ‘data mine’ info they already have or can already collect, and give them a ready-made recommendation at the end…. Most commonly it’s market research… In this case, it’s network-related….

  • http://www.hakubi.us/ Neil Stevens

    EULAs are untested, and ‘jailbreaking’ for software interoperability is perfectly legal.

  • dcacklam

    To date, custom firmwares are completely legal – and in some cases quite popular…

    My point to the above poster was that as long as you keep the stock firmware, the carrier generally has a pretty wide leeway in what they package in their updates/etc, or ship as part of the out-of-box software…. Such as network analysis software/CarrierIQ….