
What is Traitorware? - gasull
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/what-traitorware
======
nickpinkston
I love the coining of this word - let's claim the language high ground on
this. Do mainstream people even know/care about this yet?

~~~
towelrod
Most people don't care about things like this at all. Look at how many of them
happily use Facebook. If Apple put in a warning screen that said, "Angry Birds
is requesting the following information: your location, your contact list, and
your phone number. Is that ok?", then I would bet at least 90% of the users
would just click "sure, no problem".

We are losing this battle because very few people care about privacy any more.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
_We are losing this battle because very few people care about privacy any
more._

Rephrase: "We have lost this battle because privacy disappeared a long time
ago." This isn't a new concern: I remember Usenet discussions over _ten years_
ago about the loss of privacy due to the amount of personal data stored in
large corporate databases and how easy it was for that data to be stored and
transferred. It's increased exponentially since then. Look, 2 months ago I
wanted to send a friend a snail-mail letter but I couldn't remember her whole
address. A quick hop to Google Street View and I just "drove" down her street
from my computer 120 miles away until I recognized her house and got the
address off the sign.

Seriously guys, find another battle to fight: this one was lost a long time
ago. _Database Nation_ <http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781565926530/> was written
a decade ago!

Oh, and Merry Christmas :-)

~~~
sans-serif
What's wrong with driving down a street via Google Street View? Your house is
already publicly visible as strangers physically drive past them everyday.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with Google reducing the cost of doing
that, and if that's what you hope to hide behind, isn't that the kind of
security-via-obscurity we all decry here?

Trying to stop people from seeing your front lawn via the Internet is
comparable to DRM, both in principle and effectiveness. Merry Christmas.

------
russell
Here's EFF's list of printers: [http://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-
do-or-do-not-di...](http://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-
display-tracking-dots)

------
alanh
I made a (small) bit of cash after the Sony DRM rootkit fiasco broke by
selling T-shirts that read, in camouflage-pattern Army-stencil lettering:

$sys$

INVISIBILITY COURTESY SORY CORP

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ck2
Hmm, but there's something negative implied about the original intent in the
word though, like you were doing something wrong.

How about "snitchsoft", nah, same problem.

Really it's "trackware" because regardless of how you use the device/product,
you are being tracked. Even your PDF documents have serial numbers by default.

~~~
nickpinkston
Ha - I thought most people would think "trackware" were related to running,
but I Googled the term and got all spyware related links - interesting...

~~~
famblycat
Try "trackwear". Now you're on the trolley.

~~~
nickpinkston
Haha - yea I guess "wear" would be a jersey, but wouldn't a pedometer be
"ware" - not sure...

------
frobozz
Although I agree that there is a privacy problem with some of these things.
The fact that geotagged photographs is lumped in with this is nonsense. This
is not "acting behind your back to betray privacy", this is good archival
practice. It is also a desirable marketed feature of such cameras.

If you take a photo of the stone under which your 90-year-old mother keeps her
spare key in her front garden. Then publish it on the web, that's your own
fault; not the fault of the camera.

------
gallerytungsten
So my question: which of you guys is going to start the comprehensive
"traitorware awareness" database, and then intermediate it to the rest of us
via facebook, twitter, or your own platform, so that we can be secure in our
persons, house, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and
seizure.

Where the traitors are rocks, be a river that flows around them.

------
baud
My first thought was this scenario:

Company A with software X.

Employees from Company A defect to Company B and "recreate" software X. Hence
Traitorware!

Have to start clicking before thinking.

But getting on track with topic, we could also consider cookies a somewhat
primitive form of Traitorware...

~~~
cookiecaper
Cookies are often used for good. Based on the examples in the article,
"traitorware" as herein termed is a specific implementation of a technology
that betrays its user, and not the component parts that make up that software.
So, a cookie may be part of traitorware (say, an ad network that tracks your
movements across every page it can (Facebook)), but cookies themselves are not
traitorware.

~~~
chunkbot
Facebook tracks your movement across every page with a Facebook asset? Does
Google do something like this as well?

~~~
cookiecaper
Word is that Facebook assigns a unique ID to anyone that visits a page with a
Like button on it and reports back, whether you're logged in to Facebook or
not, or even whether you're a member of Facebook or not.

Many ad networks try that to varying degrees, Google may own or run some, I
don't know.

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benatkin
I'm not impressed with the article. This part in particular seems lacking in
perspective:

> Traitorware is not some science-fiction vision of the future. It is the
> present. Indeed, the Sony rootkit dates back to 2005.

We're firmly in science-fiction territory and most everyone who would pay
attention to this article knows it.

This reminds me of when the EFF pleaded with its audience not to buy an iPad.
What good is a boycott by sympathetic developers going to do? Keep them from
making web apps work well on the iPad, and giving developers tasked with
building a business app that works well on an iPad a choice to keep using an
open platform?

~~~
_pius
_We're firmly in science-fiction territory and most everyone who would pay
attention to this article knows it._

What's your justification for saying this? The author of the article laid out
a series of examples supporting the contrary point.

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anigbrowl
Bullshit. My camera's serial number in the file is what enables me to get
paid. When I want anonymity I'll use EXIFtool and wipe the metadata because I
feel like it. EFF are annoyingly patronizing sometimes, and this is one of
them.

~~~
drdaeman
So you say it's _Hacker_ News here... Okay, have you ever heard of
steganography? And are you sure your camera isn't _covertly_ embedding
something into image data (not metadata), like printers _do_ with yellow dots?

And there are a lot of different watermarking algorithms, some of which are
capable of surviving basic image operations, like resizing or color balance
adjustment.

~~~
palish
Could you provide reference links for what you're talking about? It seems like
very interesting reading.

~~~
Create
As all detector arrays, digital sensors have a fingerprint/signature/profile
[however you look at it] that can affect noise/(d)efficiency/colour etc.

This used to be all too apparent, even Kodak digital cameras had a correction-
filter file calibrated for each camera to adjust white balance etc. that came
with the camera.

