HP Pavilion DV7 Review- It's Not Good

All I wanted was a basic functional laptop. I wasn't looking for anything fancy. After lots of research, I chose the HP Pavilion DV7. I had an HP before and I liked it. It was better than the Dells I've had that have gone through power cords and mother boards and hard drives. For the money, it looked like a good deal. It also has a 17" screen, which I figured would be good because I spend a lot of time at the computer (probably 10 hours a day) and I can use as much assistance as I can get with making the display readable. I've had the laptop for about a month, maybe two. 


Two keys have fallen off the keyboard. I hesitate to call customer service. As I recall from my last HP, they require you to send the laptop in for service. I may as well save my time and just buy a keyboard because that is never going to happen. There is an odd thing that happens with the mouse or the keystrokes. It is either a combination of keystrokes or a super-sensitivity of the mouse, but at times the cursor flies up to a section of my document while I'm typing and will highlight a section and delete it, or insert the text that I'm typing at the point where it's landed. It can be a big productivity waster, because I find I spend unnecessary time tracking down and correcting errant cursor flitting about in my documents.

Blackberry P 9981 - $2k for a Phone? Not Happening

Blackberry announced a new phone designed by Porche- the P 9981. Meh. Same keyboard design. Chromey and a bit thinner than my bold. New apps? Can it do all the stuff a Droid or an iPhone can? Does it have the new Microsoft OS? No.

But it has augmented reality abilities and a touch screen. And RIM says it can browse the web faster. All for a mere $2,000.

Did I say $2,000 for a Blackberry? Yes. And how many people are going to buy it? Four, maybe five people so they can keep them in the original box and try to sell them twenty years from now for millions because they'll be 'rare.'

I try not to let myself waste too much time speculating about things like this, but I wonder what the meetings were like that led to the pricing decision on a 2 thousand dollar cell phone. I might pay two thousand dollars for a phone if I could call the spirit world (and someone would answer) or God, maybe for a five minute conversation with the president or Dali Lama. But for a Blackberry? Seriously. I would LOVE to meet the people responsible for the pricing decision and learn from how that lapse of collective reasoning was made.

The Cybercrime Wave that the Op-Ed Authors Didn't Address

Today’s NYT published an Op-Ed by Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley and Dinei Florêncio that informed us that reports of cybercrime have been greatly over exaggerated. Their article suffers two major flaws. First, they never define cybercrime. Second, their premise is both naïve and irrelevant.

Take a look at the article. Cybercrime isn’t defined. The authors apparently assume we know what they’re talking about. No, we don’t. Is cybercrime Internet facilitated crime that results in financial loss? Is it any activity defined by law as a crime facilitated by the Internet? What, exactly, are they talking about?

By every account, 2011 saw more data breaches than have ever. The first quarter of 2012 is on track to break that record. Online trafficking in child abuse images and infringement of intellectual property is not subsiding as more people enter the Internet community. It increases. We lack the ability to measure the rate at which these activities occur.

Their premise is that cybercriminals don’t make a lot of money from their crimes. Individual losses are small. But the thesis isn’t why we’re all concerned about cybercrime, is it? The loss in terms of dollars actually stolen is not what matters. What is important is the cost of mitigation, and that cost is very large.

Anyone who has suffered a virus infection on their home pc knows that the down time required to wipe a hard drive and reinstall your operating system is significant. Many people don’t bother. They buy a new computer. Identity theft on the smallest scale requires a great deal of time to contact credit agencies, banks and creditors, get new cards issued, and check credit reports.

Businesses spend a lot of money guarding against cybercrime because the threat of data breach is great. Data breaches require assembly of a team of experts, response and mitigation. Clean up following a breach can be costly, requiring identification of account holders whose information may have been compromised. The cost to reputation and good will for businesses charged with protecting client data when they fail to protect it is incalculable.

When government databases are breached and private data exposed, the direct individual cost may be small. However, it is irrelevant, isn’t it? Who can place a value on your social security number combined with your name, birthdate and address? It isn’t the small financial gain per
person per incident, if that was what the authors of the op-ed article were talking about.

The important consequence of data breaches, at least, are the exposure of private personal data that makes people vulnerable to financial and personal attack. Do not negate the inherent value of privacy. Many countries protect personal privacy as something that is as valuable as property. It has value and the authors completely ignore the host of violent crimes and other crimes against persons facilitated by the Internet. Most prominent among those crimes is the trafficking in child abuse images. We certainly have not seen any abatement in the flow of child pornography on the web, nor have we seen a drop in the rate of arrests or prosecutions for the crimes.

Thankfully, we have seen a reduction in online auction fraud due to improvements in security and practices at the major auction sites. We have seen a drastic reduction in the number of minors lured by predators as well. Today, it is fairly safe to say that the only 13 year olds who are on chat rooms being enticed into sexual relationships are more than likely police officers.

One is left to wonder what the authors' were really saying, then. What's the motivation? Being a skeptic, I look to who wrote the article and what they didn't talk about. I also look at what has been going on lately. One of the authors works at Microsoft. They didn't define 'cybercrime.' They focused on the costs to individual victims of small events like identity theft and didn't calculate the remediation costs. In the past eighteen months there have been hacks of government networks and major corporations unparalleled. My conclusion is that the article is an attempt to salve our legitimate concerns about a very real threat.

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Eleventh Circuit Weighs in -- Encryption Key IS Protected by 5th Amendment

Out of a sense of obligation, I'm posting this update on 5th Amendment protection of encryption passwords. Ho hum. In United States v John Doe, the 11th Circuit ruled that yes, the 5th Amendment does protect one's encryption password as it is testimonial in nature. Right.

As I've stated before. Big deal. Who cares? If the 11th Circuit had held the opposite, and had ordered the defendant to produce the key, what would have been the practical result? Tick tock. The defendant would have 'forgotten' the password. Hello?

I'm as game as the next lawyer for 'angels dancing on the head of a pin' sorts of arguments, but in this economy, it seems. . . well. . . not only excessive but insulting to us as taxpayers to address such obviously idiotic issues. Really. I'm not going to waste my valuable time researching how much the exercise over at the 11th Circuit cost. I'm willing to bet it was more than $100 grand, though. I can buy a lot of paper clips with that. Just sayin.

Spam-Smishing-Cramming: Tips

Sunday’s New York Times Technology Section carried two articles that, together, provide some valuable information to cell phone users. First, you’ve probably noticed an increase in spam on your cell phone. If you’ve got texting, you’ve no doubt received at least a couple of spam messages. Apparently, there has been a large increase in phone spam in the past three years, and a spike in phishing spam- termed ‘smishing.’

As with email spam, there’s not much you can do about it. Delete it. Not much point in blocking individual numbers, because it’s unlikely that the same number will spam you more than once. You can sign up for a service that costs money to block the spam texts. You can change your phone number. Wait- no, not really, because if you discontinue your service before your contract expires, you’re subject to an early termination fee. OR, you can do what another article in the Times mentioned in the context of another topic- cramming.

Cramming is what happens when your cellphone bill gets bigger and bigger as your provider tacks on curious charges for things you didn’t ask for and don’t use. Cramming can work insidiously with smishing to make your cellphone bill unwieldy. Here’s how it works. You get an unsolicited text and respond. That gets you signed up for a service that charges your account ten bucks a month. The cellphone company gets a cut of the charge because it bills for it.

The Times blogger brought up an excellent point. Why is it that the default isn’t that all phones don’t block unrequested services unless requested? Instead, what happens is that the companies charge customers and customers pay the charges until they notice that their bills are costing them as much as their mortgages do and they take a look at the itemized bill. When cornered, AT&T and Verizon assured the Times reporter that they will block unrequested services if requested by the subscriber. Note, though, that the customer must request that the services be blocked, so don’t assume it’s happening if you haven’t made the call.

Is Your Password Protected by the Constitution?

Whether the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination is implicated when a defendant is asked to reveal a password was, until now, a theoretical question. The topic was the subject of heated geek-debates which were akin to the early Christians slugfests about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Two recent federal cases have finally brought the matter into the legal limelight. The arguments are academic. The practicalities are marginally meaningful. Let me tell you why.

First, the cases. In USA v Ramona Fricosu, the defendant was ordered to decrypt her encrypted hard drive. Fricosu was accused of bank fraud and the government believed there was evidence on her laptop. She fought the order on the grounds that the government cannot force her to testify against herself, arguing that revealing her password is testimonial. The government responded that a password is not testimonial. Much like ordering a blood test from a suspected drunk driver or swab of the cheek from a suspected sex offender, a password is more like a key to a lock than an admission of guilt or testimony, prosecutors theorized.

The judge in the case issued an early decision, completely weaseling around the Fifth Amendment issue. Instead of dealing with whether or not a password is testimonial and whether or not it invokes the protection of the Fifth Amendment, the court ordered the defendant to provide the government with a non-encrypted version of the computer drive. That’s basically the same thing as providing the password, but the court avoided the big-time constitutional ramifications and the inevitable scrutiny that would ensue.

A 2009 case, U.S. v Boucher, was similar. The U.S. District Court in Vermont ordered the defendant to produce an unencrypted version of the media, avoiding the password issue.

Another recent case held that yes, indeed, a password is testimonial and does implicate the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit thought more deeply than the common analogies to providing blood or a key to a lock. Here is what the court ruled in In re Grand Jury Duces Tecum, released March 11, 2011.

“We hold that the act of Doe’s decryption and production of the contents of the hard drives would sufficiently implicate the Fifth Amendment privilege. We reach this holding by concluding that (1) Doe’s decryption and production of the contents of the drives would be testimonial, not merely a physical act; and (2) the explicit and implicit factual communications associated with the decryption and production are not foregone conclusions.

First, the decryption and production of the hard drives would require the use of the contents of Doe’s mind and could not be fairly characterized as a physical act that would be nontestimonial in nature. We conclude that the decryption and production would be tantamount to testimony by Doe of his knowledge of the existence and location of potentially incriminating files; of his possession, control, and access to the encrypted portions of the drives; and of his capability to decrypt the files.”

Form Over Substance

The court seemed to recognize that the mind is a more complex device than a lock. In so doing, it recognized that there is more going on with regard to information technology and securing it than securing a locker. While this recognition is important and gratifying to the information technology sector, it is academic, really a matter of form over substance.

The more important question than, “Is a password testimonial, thus implicating the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination?” is, “Does it make any difference whatsoever”? The answer to that second question is twofold and can save the government and defendants lots of money and time. Here’s why.

On a technical note, the government has all sorts of programs that defeat passwords. They don’t really need the defendant to reveal his or her password. If they are demanding the password, it’s the one time in a million that they have run into a situation in which they do not have the software or decryption capability to defeat it.

If encryption is employed, a password is required to decrypt the contents. Just as with your BlackBerry or other smartphone, if you don’t provide the correct password given a certain number of attempts, the contents of the media are “wiped.” By “wiped,” I mean the contents are completely scrubbed. The contents are deleted and overwritten by a neutral character, such as an “x” or “0” or “1.”

Besides (and this may sound cynical), but as a practical matter, who’s going to remember their password after all that litigation? Seriously. I had to reset the password to my blog three times last week because I forgot the password. I have to use GPS to get home from places I’ve been a million times. And the government is going to order people to remember stuff when they’ve been under stress and it’s been a year or two since they’ve even accessed the system?

The probability of the defendants remembering the passwords are slim. So why bother with all the litigation for a moot point? Is it to bankrupt the defendant (because that’s what usually happens)? Is it to make a point? (Really, what is the point?) Is it because the government can do it? (We do it because we can!) What happens, if at the end of the day, the defendant really has forgotten the password and the disk gets wiped of its contents? Does the government prosecute the defendant for destroying evidence? (Well, the defendant didn’t destroy the evidence, the government did, didn’t it?) Does the government prosecute the defendant for obstruction of justice? (Why? Because the defendant can’t remember something?)

Of course, I don’t have any answers. I don’t proclaim to. I just have questions. Lots of them. The philosophical discussions we had in law school about password production and the Fifth Amendment were for fun. The litigation taking place now is for big money. Just walking through the door of a federal courthouse costs a defendant tens of thousands of dollars. Not chump change. Not these days. And the reverberations run deep.•

By the way. . . news is that the defendant in the Fricosu case has forgotten her password. Shocking!

Courtesy of the Connecticut Law Tribune, March 26, 2012