After installing an outgoing firewall on my laptop I was amazed to see that Firefox was continuously sending updates about the wifi networks I was connected to to a maps.google.com/something address.
I was quite dissapointed, and switched to Waterfox for a while.
Chrome is, of course, much worse. But still. I would love to see a fast browser that really takes privacy seriously. You'd think that limiting tracking might speed up the browser as well.
Samsung sells the SGR-A1 machine gun sentry bot that has a fully autonomous mode, meaning it kills anything that comes in front of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
South Korea uses it at the border with North Korea.
To what extent is this SOC comparable to Intel's management engine? Isn't Google basically putting a second computer in my computer? With all the risks that entails?
The people rally: "we want you to forbid the use of lead in paint in childrens toys, as thousands of children have died!"
The EPA: sorry, but you didn't use the correct legal verbiage.
or
The people rally: "we think its morally wrong that black people are only allowed to sit in the back of the bus".
The transport authority: sorry, you forgot to fill out the form in triplicate.
Making this about following procedure displays a willing tone deafness to the larger moral debate the American people are trying to have. If the FCC takes the american people seriously, the very least they should do is offer a sincere response to the implicit but very real message they have been served. Optimally, they would understand that with an overwhelming response like this, you should interpret the situation as if it were a democracy.
This is like a clerk (FCC) telling the CEO (the people) that he doesn't feel obliged to take her wishes seriously, as the regular procedure is that orders come from middle management.
The thing is that technology has moved to the center of our political reality. Personally I'm equally interested in both types of stories, and feel that there is a good balance.
What I do worry about is that in many of these more political stories the comments often seem very reactionary. For example, on the stories about how Russia used Facebook to drive the left and right further apart. There you get comments like "nothing to see here, we always had propaganda, doing it through Facebook doesn't change much". While clearly it changes the scale, precision, subtlety and cost - all meaningful differences. But there were multiple comments downplaying if that all got up-voted. That gets me more worried. It means that either Slashdot is being manipulated, or that Slashdot's more critical readers have disappeared.
So for me the problem is not these stories, the problem is the low quality of discussion around them.
Some parts are definitely new!
- The massive scale. Through Facebook you can reach a lot of people.
- The plausible deniability: "it's was just a few hackers working on their own".
- The targeting. You can target individuals. Old propaganda couldn't.
- The intensity. These systems use 'psychographics' to create models of your psychological weaknesses and use that knowledge to make their messages more difficult to rationally shield yourself against. That's why a well educated populace is not enough.
It's also important to point this out in general, as many geeks still believe that digital technologies will automatically make the world better, and should be embraced as quickly and uncritically as possible. Disruption! Innovation! Yay!
On a side note: I'm always surprised at the immediate "ZOMG this is not new" argumentation. Technological innovation rarely does anything really new (revolution). What technological innovation mostly does is scale things up while lowering the barrier to entry (evolution). But that does change the nature of the thing!
Look at Google Streetview for example. Taking pictures on the street is not new. But scaling it up and automating it breaks through established privacy norms, and really should require a public debate. But this "it's not new" argument hinders having that debate.
These companies have a very narrow definition of employee quality that they peddle to insecure managers.
What they don't take into account is the influence their systems have on the level of 'psychological safety' that employees feel in organizations. The level to which they are willing to challenge dominant (but often wrong) ideas, or share new thoughts. In short, by over-measuring these systems actually limit the ability to innovate.
Ironically, one of the organizations that has pointed to psychological safety as the key factor for good teamwork is Google: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...
A good example of a company in this 'human risk management' field is Red Owl, which recently got bought by another risk management company, Forcepoint. Amongst other things, their software aims to weed out potential whistle blowers.
A concept I've been working on to help us talk about the long term issues at stake here is "Social Cooling". The website explains the large scale chilling effects which are created by our unprecedented ability and desire to manage risk. https://www.socailcooling.com/
I used to be an IT person, but have spent time in the humanities too. From that experience, I'd say the biggest lesson of all is that often more technology is not the solution. And that as much as we nerds like to think we are rational, we often fall into the trap of being religious about our belief that all a situation needs is more tech. The humanities - ethnography, sociology, philosophy - have valuable insights to offer into the complexities of human society.
Now when I see thing like the blockchain I see projections of ideology, and very little real understanding of the complexities of politics, ethics and social norms. To a nerd, all of that is noise, something that ideally shouldn't be there.
To learn more about this, search for the 'technological determinism vs social contructivism' debate.
There's another serious unintended consequence that I'm more worried about: Social Cooling. It describes how the reputation scores that databrokers like Equifax make and sell are increasingly influencing your job opportunities and other aspects of your life. As people become aware of this reputation economy they start to self-censor and avoid risk in order to have good scores.
The main reason the internet has become a corporate surveillance nightmare is because the only way to really pay for small bits of content has been through advertising.
"Surveillance is the businessmodel of the internet" - Bruce Schneier
HTML6 needs to have a micropayment feature. I want to be able to choose to pay google 1 cent per query in return for not being tracked. All this talk about innovation, yet this simple payment system has still not materialized.
A blockchain payment system might seem like an obvious fit to this problem. However, I suspect that in the long term the blockchain might pose an even bigger privacy risk. When the cryptography of these distributed leggers gets broken, everybody could know which websites you visited.
There's an "implementation gap" between reality and our algorithmic models or reality. We can deal with that gap in a lot of ways.
This book analyses "algorithms" from the perspective the humanities. Specifically it looks at how they are part of narratives and 'magical thinking', and appeal to our ideals of rationality and universal knowledge. The tension between our ideals and reality.
This is how it starts:
"The myth is probably as old as language itself. There are spell in the world: incantations that can transform reality through the power of procedural utterances. The marriage vow, the courtroom sentence, the shaman curse: these words are codes that change reality. It's an old and attractive idea."
It talks about Gibson's sci-fi books, draws lines between Google's mission and the ideas behind the first encyclopedia. It analyses for Netflix' algorithms work. It talks about quantum theory and the rise of probability math. Siri and star trek.
"Computation becomes a universal solvent".
Parts are brilliant, parts are opaque. You have to be a little into the humanities a bit to get the most out of the book.
Honestly curious: why has this raised so much more ire than, for example, another recent huge leak of data on 200 million Americans by the RNC, which included âoemodeled voter ethnicities and religions"?
https://www.upguard.com/breach...
Still, most people don't know this. It still helps create a culture where pointing camera's at faces becomes more normal.
Not to mention how the AR thing will push a culture of pointing camera's at everything in private space of the home.
Everyone was rightfully upset at the idea that smart vacuum cleaners would send digital maps of our homes to the cloud. And now we're jumping for joy at a technology that will take this to a whole new level.
We also need to develop a more nuanced about data:
Databrokers create 'derived data' from your data: probabilities that you fit categories like 'parents divored before the age of 21'. These scores are no longer your data, they are their data.
In the USA these 'opinions' are protected as corporate free speech, which makes your proposal harder to implement than you may think.
Slashdot Mirror
Just really wanting everyone to use Google for search isn't plausible?
After installing an outgoing firewall on my laptop I was amazed to see that Firefox was continuously sending updates about the wifi networks I was connected to to a maps.google.com/something address.
I was quite dissapointed, and switched to Waterfox for a while.
Chrome is, of course, much worse. But still. I would love to see a fast browser that really takes privacy seriously. You'd think that limiting tracking might speed up the browser as well.
Samsung sells the SGR-A1 machine gun sentry bot that has a fully autonomous mode, meaning it kills anything that comes in front of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
South Korea uses it at the border with North Korea.
To what extent is this SOC comparable to Intel's management engine? Isn't Google basically putting a second computer in my computer? With all the risks that entails?
Well, on OS X it sure seems to use a lot of ram. Five tabs open, and the core proces uses 600Mb, with sub-processes using about 150 each.
Imagine if this happened..
The people rally: "we want you to forbid the use of lead in paint in childrens toys, as thousands of children have died!"
The EPA: sorry, but you didn't use the correct legal verbiage.
or
The people rally: "we think its morally wrong that black people are only allowed to sit in the back of the bus".
The transport authority: sorry, you forgot to fill out the form in triplicate.
Making this about following procedure displays a willing tone deafness to the larger moral debate the American people are trying to have. If the FCC takes the american people seriously, the very least they should do is offer a sincere response to the implicit but very real message they have been served. Optimally, they would understand that with an overwhelming response like this, you should interpret the situation as if it were a democracy.
This is like a clerk (FCC) telling the CEO (the people) that he doesn't feel obliged to take her wishes seriously, as the regular procedure is that orders come from middle management.
Yes, and research backs that up. https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
"And if you can kill it at the state level too, we'll throw in a private jet"
Sigh.
It's a sad thing for the world.. but a great opportunity for Europe.
The best antidote is having both.
The thing is that technology has moved to the center of our political reality. Personally I'm equally interested in both types of stories, and feel that there is a good balance.
What I do worry about is that in many of these more political stories the comments often seem very reactionary. For example, on the stories about how Russia used Facebook to drive the left and right further apart. There you get comments like "nothing to see here, we always had propaganda, doing it through Facebook doesn't change much". While clearly it changes the scale, precision, subtlety and cost - all meaningful differences. But there were multiple comments downplaying if that all got up-voted. That gets me more worried. It means that either Slashdot is being manipulated, or that Slashdot's more critical readers have disappeared.
So for me the problem is not these stories, the problem is the low quality of discussion around them.
I wouldn't mind less functionality if it meant that the product is more privacy friendly.
Currently, privacy concerns are what are keeping these devices form showing serious market growth. And rightly so.
Some parts are definitely new!
- The massive scale. Through Facebook you can reach a lot of people.
- The plausible deniability: "it's was just a few hackers working on their own".
- The targeting. You can target individuals. Old propaganda couldn't.
- The intensity. These systems use 'psychographics' to create models of your psychological weaknesses and use that knowledge to make their messages more difficult to rationally shield yourself against. That's why a well educated populace is not enough.
It's also important to point this out in general, as many geeks still believe that digital technologies will automatically make the world better, and should be embraced as quickly and uncritically as possible. Disruption! Innovation! Yay!
On a side note: I'm always surprised at the immediate "ZOMG this is not new" argumentation. Technological innovation rarely does anything really new (revolution). What technological innovation mostly does is scale things up while lowering the barrier to entry (evolution). But that does change the nature of the thing!
Look at Google Streetview for example. Taking pictures on the street is not new. But scaling it up and automating it breaks through established privacy norms, and really should require a public debate. But this "it's not new" argument hinders having that debate.
These companies have a very narrow definition of employee quality that they peddle to insecure managers.
What they don't take into account is the influence their systems have on the level of 'psychological safety' that employees feel in organizations. The level to which they are willing to challenge dominant (but often wrong) ideas, or share new thoughts. In short, by over-measuring these systems actually limit the ability to innovate.
Ironically, one of the organizations that has pointed to psychological safety as the key factor for good teamwork is Google:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...
A good example of a company in this 'human risk management' field is Red Owl, which recently got bought by another risk management company, Forcepoint. Amongst other things, their software aims to weed out potential whistle blowers.
A concept I've been working on to help us talk about the long term issues at stake here is "Social Cooling". The website explains the large scale chilling effects which are created by our unprecedented ability and desire to manage risk.
https://www.socailcooling.com/
I couldn't find any browser plugins that block Web Assembly.
I also couldn't find any way to disable it through settings or about:config in Chrome or Chromium.
Any tips? Is anyone working on this?
This allows services to learn more about your smart phone and, potentially, your surroundings.
You don't need brain scans for this. Databrokers already try to figure this by datamining your data.
I used to be an IT person, but have spent time in the humanities too. From that experience, I'd say the biggest lesson of all is that often more technology is not the solution. And that as much as we nerds like to think we are rational, we often fall into the trap of being religious about our belief that all a situation needs is more tech. The humanities - ethnography, sociology, philosophy - have valuable insights to offer into the complexities of human society.
Now when I see thing like the blockchain I see projections of ideology, and very little real understanding of the complexities of politics, ethics and social norms. To a nerd, all of that is noise, something that ideally shouldn't be there.
To learn more about this, search for the 'technological determinism vs social contructivism' debate.
We need a micro payments system built into browsers if we ever want to move away from the 'pay with your data" business model.
This is going to speed up social cooling..
https://www.socialcooling.com/
There's another serious unintended consequence that I'm more worried about: Social Cooling. It describes how the reputation scores that databrokers like Equifax make and sell are increasingly influencing your job opportunities and other aspects of your life. As people become aware of this reputation economy they start to self-censor and avoid risk in order to have good scores.
https://www.socialcooling.com/
It will even get some attention in a public hearing on 'horizontal privacy' by the Dutch Government this thursday.
The main reason the internet has become a corporate surveillance nightmare is because the only way to really pay for small bits of content has been through advertising.
"Surveillance is the businessmodel of the internet" - Bruce Schneier
HTML6 needs to have a micropayment feature. I want to be able to choose to pay google 1 cent per query in return for not being tracked. All this talk about innovation, yet this simple payment system has still not materialized.
A blockchain payment system might seem like an obvious fit to this problem. However, I suspect that in the long term the blockchain might pose an even bigger privacy risk. When the cryptography of these distributed leggers gets broken, everybody could know which websites you visited.
There's an "implementation gap" between reality and our algorithmic models or reality. We can deal with that gap in a lot of ways. This book analyses "algorithms" from the perspective the humanities. Specifically it looks at how they are part of narratives and 'magical thinking', and appeal to our ideals of rationality and universal knowledge. The tension between our ideals and reality. This is how it starts: "The myth is probably as old as language itself. There are spell in the world: incantations that can transform reality through the power of procedural utterances. The marriage vow, the courtroom sentence, the shaman curse: these words are codes that change reality. It's an old and attractive idea." It talks about Gibson's sci-fi books, draws lines between Google's mission and the ideas behind the first encyclopedia. It analyses for Netflix' algorithms work. It talks about quantum theory and the rise of probability math. Siri and star trek. "Computation becomes a universal solvent". Parts are brilliant, parts are opaque. You have to be a little into the humanities a bit to get the most out of the book.
Honestly curious: why has this raised so much more ire than, for example, another recent huge leak of data on 200 million Americans by the RNC, which included âoemodeled voter ethnicities and religions"? https://www.upguard.com/breach...
Still, most people don't know this. It still helps create a culture where pointing camera's at faces becomes more normal.
Not to mention how the AR thing will push a culture of pointing camera's at everything in private space of the home.
Everyone was rightfully upset at the idea that smart vacuum cleaners would send digital maps of our homes to the cloud. And now we're jumping for joy at a technology that will take this to a whole new level.
We also need to develop a more nuanced about data:
Databrokers create 'derived data' from your data: probabilities that you fit categories like 'parents divored before the age of 21'. These scores are no longer your data, they are their data.
In the USA these 'opinions' are protected as corporate free speech, which makes your proposal harder to implement than you may think.