Mass surveillance of the citizens of a country allows intelligence services to use ‘big data’ techniques to find suspicious things which they would not otherwise have found. They can analyse the graph structure of communications to look for suspicious patterns or suspicious keywords. However as a long term strategy it is fundamentally flawed. The problem is the effect of surveillance on those being watched. Being watched means not being trusted, being outside and other, separate from those who know best and under suspicion. It makes you foreign, alien and apart, it causes fear and apprehension, it reduces integration. It makes communities which feel that they are being picked on, distressed and splits them apart from those around them. This causes a feeling of oppression and unfairness, of injustice. This results in anger, which grows in the darkness and leads to death.

That is not the way to deal with ‘terrorism’. Come, let us build our lives together as one community, not set apart and divided. Let us come together and talk of how we can build a better world for us and for our children. Inside we are all the same, it does not matter where we came from, only where we are going to and how we get there.
Come, let us put on love rather than fear, let us welcome rather than reject, let us build a country where freedom reigns and peace flows like a river through happy tree lined streets where children play.

I may be an idealist but that does not make this impossible, only really hard, and massively worth it. The place to begin is as always in my own heart for I am not yet ready to live in the country I want us to be. There is a long way to go, and so my friends: let us begin.

Edit: I think this now longer works with more recent versions of Firefox, or at least I have given up on this strategy and gone for extending Webdriver to do what I want instead.

For something I am currently working on I wanted to use Selenium to automatically access some parts of Firefox which are not accessible from a page. The chosen method was to use a Firefox extension and send events between the page and the extension to carry data. Getting this working was more tedious than I was expecting, perhaps mainly because I have tried to avoid javascript whenever possible in the past.

The following code extracts set up listeners with Selenium and the Firefox extension and send one event in each direction. Using this to do proper communication and to run automated tests is left as an exercise for the author but hopefully someone else will find this useful as a starting point. The full code base this forms part of will be open sourced and made public at some future point when it does something more useful.

App.java


package uk.ac.cam.cl.dtg.sync;

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

import org.openqa.selenium.JavascriptExecutor;
import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.firefox.FirefoxProfile;

public class App {
private static final String SEND = "\"syncCommandToExtension\"";
private static final String RECV = "\"syncCommandToPage\"";

public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
// This is where maven is configured to put the compiled .xpi
File extensionFile = new File("target/extension.xpi");
// So that the relevant Firefox extension developer settings get turned on.
File developerFile = new File("developer_profile-0.1-fn+fx.xpi");
FirefoxProfile firefoxProfile = new FirefoxProfile();
firefoxProfile.addExtension(extensionFile);
firefoxProfile.addExtension(developerFile);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(firefoxProfile);
driver.get("about:blank");
if (driver instanceof JavascriptExecutor) {
AsyncExecute executor = new AsyncExecute(((JavascriptExecutor) driver));
executor.execute("document.addEventListener( " + RECV + ", function(aEvent) { document.title = (" + RECV
+ " + aEvent) }, true);");
executor.execute(
"document.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent(" + SEND + "));");

} else {
System.err.println("Driver does not support javascript execution");
}
}

/**
* Encapsulate the boilerplate code required to execute javascript with Selenium
*/
private static class AsyncExecute {
private final JavascriptExecutor executor;

public AsyncExecute(JavascriptExecutor executor) {
this.executor = executor;
}

public void execute(String javascript) {
executor.executeAsyncScript("var callback = arguments[arguments.length - 1];"+ javascript
+ "callback(null);", new Object[0]);
}
}
}


browserOverlay.js Originally cribbed from the XUL School hello world tutorial.


document.addEventListener(
"syncCommandToExtension", function(aEvent) { window.alert("document syncCommandToExtension" + aEvent);/* do stuff*/ }, true, true);

// do not try to add a callback until the browser window has
// been initialised. We add a callback to the tabbed browser
// when the browser's window gets loaded.
window.addEventListener("load", function () {
// Add a callback to be run every time a document loads.
// note that this includes frames/iframes within the document
gBrowser.addEventListener("load", pageLoadSetup, true);
}, false);

function syncLog(message){
Application.console.log("SYNC-TEST: " + message);
}

function sendToPage(doc) {
doc.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent("syncCommandToPage"));
}

function pageLoadSetup(event) {
// this is the content document of the loaded page.
let doc = event.originalTarget;

if (doc instanceof HTMLDocument) {
// is this an inner frame?
if (doc.defaultView.frameElement) {
// Frame within a tab was loaded.
// Find the root document:
while (doc.defaultView.frameElement) {
doc = doc.defaultView.frameElement.ownerDocument;
}
}
// The event listener is added after the page has loaded and we don't want to trigger
// the event until the listener is registered.
setTimeout(function () {sendToPage(doc);},1000);
};
};


The Raspberry Pi project is one of the more popular projects the Computer Lab is involved with at the moment and all the incoming freshers are getting one.

One of the things I have been working on as a Research Assistant in the Digital Technology Group is on improving the infrastructure we use for research and my current efforts include using puppet to automate the configuration of our servers.

We have a number of servers which are VMs and hence can be a little short of entropy. One solution to having a shortage of entropy is an ‘entropy key‘ which is a little USB device which uses reverse biased diodes to generate randomness and has a little ARM chip (ARM is something the CL is rather proud of) which does a pile of crypto and analysis to ensure that it is good randomness. As has been done before (with pretty graphs) this can then be fed to VMs providing them with the randomness they want.

My solution to the need for some physical hardware to host the entropy key was a Raspberry Pi because I don’t need very much compute power and dedicated hardware means that it is less likely to get randomly reinstalled. A rPi can be thought of as the hardware equivalent of a small VM.

I got the rPi from Rob Mullins by taking a short walk down the corridor on the condition that there be photos. One of the interesting things about using rPis for servers is that the cost of the hardware is negligible in comparison with the cost of connecting that hardware to the network and configuring it.

The rPi is now happily serving entropy to various VMs from the back of a shelf in one of the racks in a server room (not the one shown, we had to move it elsewhere).

Initially it was serving entropy in the clear via the EGD protocol over TCP. Clearly this is rather bad as observable entropy doesn’t really gain you anything (and might lose you everything). Hence it was necessary to use crypto to protect the transport from the rPi to the VMs.
This is managed by the dtg::entropy, dtg::entropy::host and dtg::entropy::client classes which generate the relevant config for egd-linux and stunnel.

This generates an egd-client.conf which looks like this:

; This stunnel config is managed by Puppet.

[egd-client]
accept = 7777
connect = entropy.dtg.cl.cam.ac.uk:7776

And a host config like:

; This stunnel config is managed by Puppet.

[egd-host]
accept = 7776
connect = 777
cert = /root/puppet/ssl/stunnel.pem
key = /root/puppet/ssl/stunnel.pem
CAfile = /usr/local/share/ssl/cafile


Getting that right was somewhat tedious due to defaults not working well together.
openssl s_client -connect entropy.dtg.cl.cam.ac.uk:7776
and a python egd client were useful for debugging. In the version of debian in rasperian the stunnel binary points to an stunnel3 compatibility script around the actual stunnel4 binary which resulted in much confusion when trying to run stunnel manually.

(This follows on from discussion in Hall earlier (yes Chris this is for you))

It is fairly common and I think reasonable to argue that what is in the best interests of the economy (at least in the long term) is also in the best interests of the people in the long term. (There is much subtly here and I am not saying I agree)
However it is also frequently argued that what is clearly not in the interests of large groups of people is in the best interests of the economy. For example making large numbers of people unemployed overnight so as to slim down the NHS or similar.

I consider the lecture I had from a City investor this morning and the statement he made that essentially the value of the economy of a country is (modulo many other transient factors) the number of working people times the productivity of those people. In the event of making large numbers of people unemployed instantaneously the number of working people is reduced and due to the sudden influx into the jobs market not all those people will get jobs straight away as there won’t be enough available [0]. Then as a person remains unemployed their productivity decreases with time, they become progressively less useful to the economy and less employable so we have a situation where both the number of people working is reduced and where even when we get those people back into work their productivity will be reduced. So negative impact on the economy. Don’t do that. [1]
Yes management and bureaucracy breeds if left to itself and so periodically it is necessary to go around with a sharp knife, a keen eye and a steady hand and remove unnecessary things. However this should be done carefully at a rate such that those being made unemployed can be reabsorbed into working elsewhere doing something more useful.

Personally I would say that people are far more valuable than any physical thing and all structures of countries and economies and physical objects only have value when they are serving people (using a rather wide definition of both serving and people).

Yes I am procrastinating my dissertation. Well spotted.

[0]: Of course if that is not the case then this isn’t so much of a problem.
[1]: It might be possible to argue in certain circumstances that the effect on other factors (debt etc.) is sufficiently large as to outweigh this cost however I think that is likely to be rather rare.