Quotulatiousness

December 7, 2018

The Anti-Authoritarian Politics of Harry Potter

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 6 Dec 2018

JK Rowling’s wizarding world isn’t all wands, charms, and transfigurations. The magical universe inhabited by characters like Harry Potter and Newt Scamander is rife with the dangerous incompetence of adults, unchecked corruption, and appalling abuses of power, and not just by Voldemort or Grindelwald.

_____________
Written & Produced by Sean W. Malone
Edited by Arash Ayrom & Sean W. Malone

Australian parliament votes to weaken encryption

Filed under: Australia, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Shackford reports on the latest bit of oddness from the southern hemisphere:

Pretty much every single person in the tech industry, human rights circles, and academia warned the Australian government that forcing online platforms to weaken encryption would lead to disastrous results. Nonetheless, lawmakers are pushing forward — and it’s not just Australians who will suffer as a result.

Last night, Australia’s parliament rushed through the Assistance and Access Bill of 2018 right as their session was coming to a close. The bill gives various government agencies the authority to demand that tech and communication platforms provide them secret bypass routes around encrypted messages.

This is what is known as an encryption “backdoor,” and it’s a bad idea. Governments insist such tools are needed to fight crime and terrorism. The problem is that an encryption backdoor doesn’t care who uses it: If there’s a mechanism to bypass privacy security on a communication system, it can be exploited by anybody who knows how. That includes hackers, thieves, officials from authoritarian governments, and all sorts of dangerous people (including, of course, the very government people who insist they’re trying to protect us). That’s why tech companies have spent years fighting against the idea.

Weak encryption is a threat to the health of any tech platform that involves transferring data, and governments know that. So they insist they’re not demanding encryption backdoors while attempting to enact policies that pretty much demand them.

The Assistance and Access Bill won’t just grant the Australian government the power to demand that everybody from Facebook to Whatsapp help them bypass security to access private communications. The bill will let officials order companies, through “technical capability notices,” to alter their programming to facilitate snooping. And it gives the government the authority to force the tech employees who implement the changes to keep them secret. Break that secrecy, and the employees can face up to five years in jail.

“A date that will live in infamy” – Speech

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

FootageArchive – Videos From The Past
Published on 19 Mar 2015

Welcome to FootageArchive! On this channel you’ll find historic and educational videos from the 1900s. Watch, learn, and take a trip back in time as we gain insight into a previous time. Subscribe for more.

Note: this video contains archived public domain / licensed footage. This footage serves documentary purposes on world history and is to be viewed as educational.

QotD: Why did our grandparents adopt “mass market” foods?

Filed under: Food, Health, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If those authentic old foods were so great, how come our ancestors were so eager to switch to processed foods? The culprit most often identified is the power-mad food scientists of yesteryear, who convinced the housewives of previous generations to give up the good stuff in favor of tasteless packaged foods. The people who write these theories have apparently not spent much time observing today’s food scientists in their tireless quest to get people to stop eating the junk they like to eat now. If they had, they might have asked why yesterday’s food scientists had so much more power to alter dietary habits. And after they asked that question, they might have come to the conclusion that our ancestors switched because they liked the new foods better than whatever they were eating before.

That’s because so much of what we eat now as “authentic” is mostly some combination of peasant special-occasion dishes and the rich-people food of yesteryear, fused with modern technology and a global food-supply chain to become something quite different from what our ancestors ate, or the ancestors of people half a world away ate. And that’s OK. The baguette is delicious, and so is that pricey “peasant” loaf. But they are no better for having been invented decades ago than something that was invented last week, nor would they be better still if Caesar’s legions had been carrying them across Europe.

Megan McArdle, “‘Authentic’ Food Is Not What You Think It Is”, Bloomberg View, 2017-02-24.

Powered by WordPress