My "Story About Steve" in Business Week

By Mark Frauenfelder at 4:06 pm Friday, Oct 7

[Video Link] BusinessWeek asked me to write my "Story About Steve." I never met Steve, but I had a story to tell. Here it is.

In May 2002 I got a call from my friend Alberta who asked if I'd like to be in an Apple TV commercial. Alberta had a friend who was an art director at Apple, and he needed people in Los Angeles who'd switched from a Windows machine to a Mac. That was me.

The next day, I got calls from Apple and Chiat/Day, and they e-mailed me a thick stack of forms to sign. Most of them swearing me to secrecy.

The day after that, I drove 15 minutes to a soundstage in Hollywood. At least 100 people from Apple and Chiat/Day were on the set. Errol Morris, the director, was hiding inside a white tent on the far end of the warehouse-like soundstage. I could hear his voice booming through an amplifier. Someone on the set told me he was using his invention called the Interrotron to interview the switchers. "Just wait until you see how it works," she said.

My taping was scheduled for 12 p.m. I was a little early, so I grabbed a bagel from craft services and looked for a place to sit. All the chairs on the set were occupied, but not by people. The Chiat/ Day workers had set their laptops and backpacks on all the chairs with hand-drawn signs that said "DON'T TOUCH." I asked a young woman in a smart gray outfit where I could sit. "Someplace outside," she said.

Read the rest: Mark Frauenfelder: My Story About Steve

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Clockwork Fagin, free YA steampunk story

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

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Zahra’s Paradise: graphic novel about Iranian uprising is a story and a history

Zahra's Paradise, a new book from FirstSecond, collects in one volume the serialized (and brilliant) webcomic, written by two pseudonymous Iranian dissidents. It's the gripping story of a Medhi, a young man kidnapped by Iran's secret police during the election-season demonstrations of 2009, and it is a heart-rending tale of loss, hope, technology, revolution, politics, bravery and resilience. Told form the point of view of Medhi's blogger brother (who has previously been arrested for publishing political material), it features an in-the-round look at the power and limits of technology to effect revolution. Its cast includes bloggers, secret policemen, brave copy-shop/Internet cafe owners, influence peddlers, disgraced bourgeois, broken prisoners and a family devastated by loss.

And while Zahra's Paradise is an informative (if fictionalized) account of the Iranian election uprising and a vivid condemnation of the stern, joyless Khomeniest version of Islam, it is also a fantastic story, a graphic novel that races to its conclusion. The webcomic was serialized in 12 languages (including Farsi and Arabic) and the print edition is available in a dozen countries from today.

Zahra's Paradise

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Understanding the security story of the year: “Iranian” hack attack on SSL

Last week's attack on Dutch certificate authority DigiNotar completely blew my attempt to avoid the Internet while I was on holidays: it seemed like enormously important news, but of such a highly technical bent that none of the traditional nonspecialist media could coherently discuss it.

In short, one of the companies that is authorized to create SSL certificates that your browser trusts -- the certificates that let you make trusted, private connections to your bank, your Gmail, your government -- was terminally compromised. The most likely culprit is a boastful "Iranian hacker" who claims to be a patriot who compromised the CA in order to allow the Iranian government to forge certs from Gmail and other companies to facilitate spying on dissidents.

Now, Electronic Frontier Foundation staffers Eva Galperin, Seth Schoen and Peter Eckersley have written a timely postmortem on the attack, explaining what's known, what's speculated, the risk it presents to you, and what you can do to make yourself safer now and in the future. This is the kind of analysis I was hoping for when I interrupted my net.fast last week -- it's pretty crucial stuff to know.

SSL certificates are the glue that holds the encrypted portions of the Internet together — they are how your browser knows that the website you visit is the website you intended to visit. The official report on the attacks from Fox-IT includes data from DigiNotar that suggests that over 300,000 (primarily Iranian) Internet users may have been had their communications intercepted, but the danger to Internet users extends well beyond Iran.

The problem we face with Certificate Authorities is not just that there are particular vulnerabilites in any one CA. Rather, the massive structural crisis is that, as the SSL Observatory has shown, there are many hundreds of certificate authorities and an attacker only needs to break into one of those order to start issuing fraudulent certificates. Furthermore, these CAs appear to exist within around fifty countries' jurisdictions. Any one of these countries could conceivably compel a CA to create fraudulent certificates for purposes of espionage or for spying on that country's citizens. The DigiNotar hack has merely underlined how fragile the certificate authority system really is. Anyone who values the privacy and security of their communications and financial transactions online should take steps to protect themselves.

Statements have appeared strongly suggesting that the DigiNotar attacker is the same person who attacked Comodo earlier this year. The Tor Project has published extensive updates on the scope of the attack, including the list of the 531 fraudulent certificates issued by DigiNotar. This list shows that the attacker was prepared to facilitate spying against many major Internet sites. The attacker claims to be an individual Iranian who has chosen to help the government monitor individuals' communications. Additionally, he claims to have compromised four additional as-yet-unspecified certificate authorities. If true, the Iranian government may still have the power to forge new certificates in the name of these other authorities.

A Post Mortem on the Iranian DigiNotar Attack

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