Privacy is hard

“Privacy is Hard, Volume 18283833.

Knowing of 5 downloaded, non-vendor specific apps installed on a device is enough to uniquely identify over 90% of individuals in a sample of a million+ people.”
Privacy researcher and Director of Open Privacy Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis), 17 September 2018. Jamie Lewis cites Temporal Limits of Privacy in Human Behavior by Sekara et al, 2018

Jamie Lewis continues, “This result is not surprising but it’s a nice illustration of the how even seemingly ‘useless’/‘unimportant’ information like ‘what apps do you have installed’ can impact total privacy.”

To will another future into being

“This is the dilemma faced by any large organization or cause: how to keep its people moving, if not in lock step, then at least generally in the same direction. Strategy promises a blueprint for doing this, but in the end it is more an art than a science, an all-too-human process of guessing what might work. It can be undertaken with great deliberation, in regularly scheduled planning meetings and off-site conferences. Or it can be seized upon in moments of crisis and uncertainty, as a hedge against despair — an act of faith that it may yet be possible to will another future into being.”
Strategy May Be More Useful to Pawns Than to Kings, by Beverly Gage, New York Times, 3 September 2018. Gage is Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University.

“A hedge against despair” lingers in the mind.

No answer

At a press conference held by climate activists Extinction Rebellion last week, two of us journalists pressed the organisers on whether their aims were realistic. They have called, for example, for UK carbon emissions to be reduced to net zero by 2025. Wouldn’t it be better, we asked, to pursue some intermediate aims?

A young woman called Lizia Woolf stepped forward. She hadn’t spoken before, but the passion, grief and fury of her response was utterly compelling. “What is it that you are asking me as a 20-year-old to face and to accept about my future and my life? … This is an emergency. We are facing extinction. When you ask questions like that, what is it you want me to feel?”

We had no answer.

The Earth is in a death spiral. It will take radical action to save us, by George Monbiot, The Guardian, 14 November 2018

You cannot give instructions to a gigantic inflatable

Screen grab from Inflatable Cobblestones Berlin Part 2 (Vimeo), by Artur (presumably Artúr van Balen), 2012The video is captioned: On the 25th revolutionary 1st of May demonstration in Berlin-Kreuzberg, protesters were throwing huge inflatable cobbl…

Screen grab from Inflatable Cobblestones Berlin Part 2 (Vimeo), by Artur (presumably Artúr van Balen), 2012

The video is captioned: On the 25th revolutionary 1st of May demonstration in Berlin-Kreuzberg, protesters were throwing huge inflatable cobblestones, made of silver-reflective foil and tape. The creative intervention was initiated by the art-activist collective “Eclectic Electric Collective” (EEC) and was meant as a celebration of an object which is both a symbol and a material weapon of anti-authoritarian struggle everywhere. It also aimed to bring new strategies of tactical frivolity into the demonstration. http://eclectic-electric-collective.blogspot.de/2012/05/under-pavement-beach-gigantic.html

Our intention was also to subvert the image of the “stone-throwing demonstrator” which the media spectacle around May 1 feeds off so much.
 We are interested in tactical frivolity, in finding new ways of protesting. And we are interested in how the opposition between police and protesters can be subverted. So when we playfully throw an inflatable cube at a police line and they, not knowing what else to do, throw it back, suddenly they are engaged in a game with us and their image as tough riot cops is broken.

There was this funny situation when we threw it towards the police. And there was the spontaneous game when they the police kicked it back, protesters again kicked it to the police, police kicked it back, etc. – and suddenly they realised they were part of a game. So they threw it behind the police line where children found it and began to play with it.

You cannot give instructions to a gigantic inflatable by Joanna Rainer, 31 April 2012. Rainer's article is an interview with Artúr van Balen and Verena Meyer, of the Eclectic Electric Collective, about their work with “inflatable cobblestones” and “tactical frivolity” in mass protests.

My garden is the Third Precinct

“No military force can end terrorism, just as firefighters can’t end fire and cops can’t end crime. But there are ways to build a resilient society. ‘It can’t be on a government contract that says In six months, show us these results,” Skinner said. ‘It has to be I live here. This is my job forever.” He compared his situation to that of Voltaire’s Candide, who, after enduring a litany of absurd horrors in a society plagued by fanaticism and incompetence, concludes that the only truly worthwhile activity is tending his garden. “Except my garden is the Third Precinct,” Skinner said.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, New Yorker, May 7, 2018, by Ben Taub. The article is a profile of Patrick Skinner, a former CIA operative turned local police officer.

Car hacking just got real

“When I saw we could do it anywhere, over the Internet, I freaked out. I was frightened. It was like, holy fuck, that's a vehicle on a highway in the middle of the country. Car hacking got real, right then.”
Chris Valasek, as quoted in Hackers remotely kill a Jeep on the highway — with me in it, by Andy Greenberg, Wired, 21 July 2019

Valasek and his collaborator Charlie Miller found a way to remotely hack, and take, for all intents and purposes, full remote control of an entire class of automobiles by exploiting a vulnerability in their Internet-connected sound systems. Valasek and Miller’s work shows that hackers could create “a wirelessly controlled automotive botnet encompassing hundreds of thousands of vehicles.”

A time-shifted risk

“People always ask me: where's the harm?

Privacy harms are a time-shifted risk.

The moment you are protesting against your government, a seamless cashless public transport system can turn into a data trove for surveillance crowd control.”
Reporter Mary Hui (@maryhui), 13 June 2019, on witnessing Hong Kong protesters using cash transactions to board the subway instead of using their trackable/traceable metro cards. Also see Hui's CASH IS KING: Why Hong Kong’s protesters were afraid to use their metro cards, Quartz, 13 June 2019

The fandom it asked for

“The solution here isn’t all that difficult. If fans want to hold banners protesting fascism and racism and gun violence, that should be fine… It’s a feature, not a bug, one that comes from accepting that, when you treat your sport like a beacon of community, then some people will start treating it as such.”
Soccer: By Banning Protest Signs, MLS [Major League Soccer, USA] Is Trying To Lobotomize The Fandom It Asked For, by Luis Paez-Pumar, Deadspin, 20 August 2019.

The article also notes,

It’s a depressing commentary on our current national moment that signs stating opposition to gun violence, fascism, and racism are deemed “political”.

A perfect score

“One algorithm was supposed to figure out how to land a virtual airplane with minimal force. But the AI soon discovered that if it crashed the plane, the program would register a force so large that it would overwhelm its own memory and count it as a perfect score. So the AI crashed the plane, over and over again, presumably killing all the virtual people on board.”
The Spooky Genius of Artificial Intelligence, by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 28 September 2018. Thompson's article is based on the paper The surprising creativity of digital evolution: a collection of anecdotes from the evolutionary computation and artificial life research communities (14 August 2018) and Can Artificial Intelligence Be Smarter Than a Human Being?, an episode of the Crazy/Genius podcast by Kasia Mychajlowycz and Patricia Yacob.

Wikimania Stockholm

Wikimania conference, Stockholm, 16 August 2019; CC-BY

Wikimania conference, Stockholm, 16 August 2019; CC-BY

I was privileged to attend the Wikimania conference in Stockholm last week and give the opening keynote (here). The conference theme was about the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. Almost all of the sessions were livestreamed (over 200 hours) and most are available on the program page and on YouTube.

There were so many good talks and sessions, including this “spotlight session” titled “Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals” featuring Liv Inger Somby (Sámi University of Applied Sciences), Ryan Merkley (Creative Commons), Karin Holmgren (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), Tyler Radford (OpenStreetMap), Emanuel Karlsten (journalist), Mark Graham (Internet Archive), John Cummings (Wikimedian in Residence for UNESCO), and Annika Söder (Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden).

It just requires that Twitter would care

Imagine if signing up to read Twitter was free, but posing required you to spend a week doing moderation first.

Everyone who came into the community would have to learn the rules before they violated them.

Then, when you’re tempted to break the rules, you’d remember that there were people who would read what you wrote, just like you did for others, and you’d lose your account and have to do another week of moderation before getting to post again.

This is not too hard to implement. It’s certainly easier than inventing a magic AI that will solve all your problems. It just requires that Twitter care enough about their community to do it.

Derek Powazek (@fraying), 15 March 2019

The Hottest Chat App for Teens

"When everyone logs on to do homework at night, Google Docs chats come alive. Groups of kids will all collaborate on a document, while their parents believe they’re working on a school project. As a Reddit thread revealed in February, chatting via Google Docs is also a great way to circumvent a parental social-media ban."
The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is … Google Docs, by Taylor Lorenz, The Atlantic, 14 March 2019

To which Christina Xu (@xuhulk) replied: “I wrote my undergrad thesis on the history of instant messengers and learned that teenagers misusing productivity tools to flirt is truly one of the driving forces of the internet.“ (14 March 2019)

“We want voters to be aware of who is trying to influence them. That’s the reason we have disclosure requirements on our campaign ads. We’ve known, at least since Aristotle in Western culture, that the source is judged as part of the message.”
— Kathleen Jameison Hall, author of Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President — What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know (Oxford University Press, 2018), as quoted in How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump, by Jane Mayer, New Yorker, 24 September 2018

Discourse Saboteurs

[Kathleen Hall Jamieson's] case is based on a growing body of knowledge about the electronic warfare waged by Russian trolls and hackers — whom she terms “discourse saboteurs” — and on five decades’ worth of academic studies about what kinds of persuasion can influence voters, and under what circumstances. Democracies around the world, she told me, have begun to realize that subverting an election doesn’t require tampering with voting machines. Extensive studies of past campaigns, Jamieson said, have demonstrated that “you can affect people, who then change their decision, and that alters the outcome.” She continued, “I’m not arguing that Russians pulled the voting levers. I’m arguing that they persuaded enough people to either vote a certain way or not vote at all.”
How Russia Helped Swing the Election for Trump, by Jane Mayer, New Yorker, 24 September 2018. The article is a profile of Kathleen Hall Jamieson forensic's analysis of the 2016 election: Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President — What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know (Oxford University Press, 2018)

A pre-Newtonian moment

“Social media is in a pre-Newtonian moment, where we all understand that it works, but not how it works,” Mr. Systrom told me, comparing this moment in the tech world to the time before man could explain gravity. “There are certain rules that govern it and we have to make it our priority to understand the rules, or we cannot control it.”
A Wise Man Leaves Facebook: Kevin Systrom, a founder of Instagram, wasn’t a “team player.” That was exactly what the company needed, by Kara Swisher, New York Times, 27 September 2018

Leo Laporte: Maybe what he's thinking is Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook to connect and everything like that. It was used against us in our elections by the Russians particularly to convince people not to vote or to stay at home mostly or to vote for somebody in particular. To me that was the come-to-Jesus moment where somebody figured out how to use social media in a very powerful way and they understood it but Zuckerberg did not and it took Facebook off guard, and at first they denied it even happened. Finally of late they've admitted yeah that's what happened.

Larry Magid: I think part of the problem for consumers is that most of us don't know how it works. We know that there are algorithms…

Leo Laporte: But do you think Zuck [Mark Zuckerberg] does is the question?

Larry Magid: That's what I'm saying, I assume that Zuck does, but maybe he doesn't fully understand it.

This Week in Tech (TWIT) 606, 19 March 2019, [at 43:51]