Quotulatiousness

November 13, 2012

Rapidly retreating freedom of expression in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:59

It’s almost as if Britain is in some sort of demented race to get rid of freedom of expression altogether:

At 9pm last night, with a knock on the door of a 19-year-old man, Kent police hammered another nail into the coffin of free expression in the UK.

Earlier in the day the unnamed man from Aylesham had allegedly posted a photo of a poppy being burned, with a crudely worded (and crudely spelled) caption. He was arrested under the Malicious Communications Act and held in the cells overnight to await questioning.

It is of course just the latest in a succession of police actions against individuals deemed to have caused offence: mocking a footballer as he fights for his life on Twitter; hoping British service personnel would “die and go to hell”; wearing a T-shirt that celebrated the death of two police officers; making sick jokes on Facebook about a missing child, the list goes on. A few months ago, these could have been dismissed as isolated over-reactions or moments of madness by police and judiciary. Not any longer. It is now clear that a new criminal code has been imposed upon us without announcement or debate. It is now a crime to be offensive. We are not sleepwalking into a new totalitarianism — we have woken up to find ourselves tangled in its sheets.

News of the arrest was first announced on Kent police’s Twitter feed, and it didn’t take long for users to spot the painful irony of their official avatar, which simply says Kent police 101. The number is taken from the non-essential police phone number, but as we all know, Room 101 was where Winston Smith was taken in George Orwell’s 1984 to be tortured and eventually persuaded to recant his individual beliefs and fall into line with officially sanctioned viewpoints.

October 30, 2012

Detecting Photoshopped images – a primer

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:18

I’m sure almost everyone saw dramatic and scary images of “Hurricane Sandy” like this one that went round my friends’ Facebook timelines yesterday:

As you’ve probably guessed from the title, this is a ‘shopped image. RJS Security has a quick primer on detecting doctored images using this example:

Whenever a major media event happens (like Hurricane Sandy), we are inundated with news. Sometimes that news is useful, but often it merely exists to create FUD… Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. While I have not personally seen any malware campaigns capitalizing on the event yet, it is inevitable. The pattern is generally as follows:

  1. Event hits the news as media outlets try to one-up eachother to get the word out.
  2. People spread the warnings, making them just a little bit worse each time they are copied.
  3. Other people create hoaxes to ride the wave of popularity.
  4. Still other people create custom hoaxes to exploit the disaster financially.

A few minutes ago, at least in my little corner of the internet, we hit stage 3 when this image was posted

H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.

October 14, 2012

“I would hate to live in a world where every dumb ass thing I did from 13 to 30 would be captured forever for those who Googled my name”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:27

James Joyner on the phenomenon of internet privacy — and the growing reality that it’s pretty much an illusion.

In the first instance, a bad person is likely to have his real life — including his ability to make a living — upended by the conscious act of a reporter. In the second, two young people who did nothing more than join a school club had their biggest secret exposed by a well-meaning person who made the mistake of trusting Facebook, a data mining company that makes billions by getting people to give them their personal information.

[. . .]

I’ve been active online now since the mid-1990s and have, by virtue of this blog, been a very minor online public figure for almost a decade. For a variety of reasons, including the fact that my professional career is one that encourages writing and publishing, I’ve done virtually all of my online activity under my real life name. As such, I’ve long been aware that my family, friends, co-workers, bosses, and prospective employers might read everything that I put out there. That’s the safest way to operate online, in that it avoids the sort of disruptive surprises that Brutsch, Duncan, and McCormick received. But it also means, inevitably, that there’s a subtle filter that makes me more cautious than I might otherwise be. That’s likely both good and bad in my own case.

But I continue to worry about what it means for a younger generation, for whom Facebook and other social networks are part and parcel of their everyday existence from their teenage years forward. By the time the Internet was a public phenomenon, I was a grown man with a PhD. I would hate to live in a world where every dumb ass thing I did from 13 to 30 would be captured forever for those who Googled my name.

I have generally used my real name — or at least not tried to actively conceal my real identity — in most of my online activities. Some of this has been because there wasn’t a pressing reason to remain anonymous, but as in the writer’s case, it was a strong suspicion from the start that it would be difficult to maintain that degree of privacy over the long term (information wanting to be free, and all that).

September 1, 2012

Digital “inheritance”: law has not caught up to our online lives

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

As I mentioned in a post the other day, our laws are still designed for a world where most things have a physical presence, and the problems we see in intellectual property and patent law are just the start of the turmoil our legal system will have to face:

What will happen to your Facebook account after you are gone?

Dealing with digital assets after someone dies is becoming a challenge for families and the legal system alike.

Lawmakers are trying to clarify rules governing the passage of social-media and email accounts, along with other online assets that might have financial value. Several states have enacted laws to deal with post-death access to digital assets, and several more are working on similar legislation, says Gene Hennig, a lawyer at Gray Plant Mooty in Minneapolis and a commissioner of the Uniform Law Commission.

That group, which recommends uniform state laws, plans to come up with a recommended statute that more states could adopt.

“Eventually people are going to start putting in their wills what they want, and we need to know what’s allowed,” Mr. Hennig says. “In the olden days, grandma had a chest in the attic full of photo albums. Now, your chest of photos is in your computer.”

Update, 3 September: Bruce Willis wants his kids to inherit the music library he’s built up, but the iTunes licensing won’t let him do that.

May 26, 2012

The cost of getting to space

Filed under: Economics, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

According to a tweet passed along by Tim Harford, the Dragon flight is a huge bargain:

RT @dcurtis: SpaceX’s entire history, incl. rocket design, testing, and launch operations, has cost less than Facebook paid for Instagram.

May 23, 2012

Chris Selley on the disproportional sentences handed out by the “court of public opinion”

Filed under: Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:59

People can be idiots. Some of them are idiots all the time. Others are only idiots every now and again. When the idiotic events happen to co-incide with fluctuating public opinion, the sentence for public idiocy can often vastly exceed the impact of the original idiotic action:

It has been a tough week for notorious, misbehaving young people — well, outside of Quebec anyway. On Monday in a New Jersey courtroom, Dharun Ravi was sentenced to 30 days in jail for having briefly spied, twice, via webcam, on his Rutgers University roommate’s romantic encounters. He was 18 at the time. And on Tuesday, Swansea University, in South Wales, made it clear that 21-year-old Liam Stacey is forever unwelcome on its campus, where he was nearly done studying biology. Mr. Stacey just served half of a 56-day jail sentence for publishing some flamboyantly racist tweets. “Go suck a ni–er d-ck you f–king aids ridden c–t,” one read.

Both individuals are unredeemed pariahs. Yet on either side of the Atlantic, and across the political spectrum, their cases have sparked an interesting debate over whether criminal justice was the proper means through which to express polite society’s revulsion at their actions. I think it was not, for the simple reason that the charges bore little relationship to the true nature of the outrage.

[. . .]

The context of Mr. Stacey’s crimes is less tragic. On March 17, before a television audience of millions, Premier League soccer player Fabrice Muamba collapsed of a heart attack. (He has since made a remarkable recovery.) In response, an admittedly soused Mr. Stacey Tweeted the following: “LOL. F–k Muamba he’s dead!!! #Haha.” That astoundingly insensitive missive was what elicited society’s outrage; it is still quoted at least 100 times in the media for every mention of the torrent of racist abuse that followed, when fellow tweeters complained.

Twitter is not, generally speaking, a racism-free zone; earlier in this year’s NHL playoffs, it hosted some jaw-dropping invective against Washington Capitals forward Joel Ward. And British white trash can match or exceed anything their North American counterparts are capable of. So here it is even clearer: Mr. Stacey’s problem wasn’t “inciting racial hatred,” the charge of which he was convicted, but doing it at the wrong time and getting noticed.

In the end, while two months was a remarkably harsh sentence for mere words, it’s hard to feel sorry for Mr. Stacey. One can argue for unfettered free speech, and equal application of the law, without defending this particular oik.

May 21, 2012

Will privacy be on one of the things that differentiates the rich from the rest?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Brendan O’Neill in the Telegraph:

Is privacy being turned into a privilege that only the moneyed and the well-connected may enjoy? Two striking stories in the news last week suggest that it is.

In the first story, it was reported that activists and hacks are heaping further pressure on Mark Zuckerberg to improve the privacy settings on Facebook, so that they might update their statuses and post photos of their social shenanigans without having the world and its mother peering over their shoulders. In the second story, we were told that social workers, backed by much of the media, are calling on the prime minister to get rid of “red tape” so that they might more easily interfere in — I’m sorry, intervene in — so-called problem families. There are a lot of damaged families out there, the social workers hinted, and thus we need to rip up some of the rules governing when it is and isn’t okay to stick our snouts into their business.

That these two stories could appear in the same week, and not be considered contradictory, suggests we have a pretty screwed-up attitude to privacy today. Indeed, sometimes the very same members of the political and media classes who believe that their private lives must remain absolutely private will think it is perfectly logical that other people’s private lives — the lives of Them — should be thrown open to state snooping.

May 11, 2012

The University of Calgary is told by the courts that it “is not a Charter-free zone”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:36

The university attempted to suppress free speech by students and lost in court. And then lost on appeal:

This week, in the case of Pridgen v. University of Calgary, the Alberta Court of Appeal affirmed that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects the free speech rights of university students on campus.

[. . .]

The University of Calgary prosecuted the 10 students who had joined the Facebook page, and found all of them guilty of “non-academic misconduct” — including students who had not posted any comments. The university accused the students of defaming Mitra with “unsubstantiated assertions,” yet refused to hear any evidence from the students about the professor. Nobody testified to deny that the professor had asserted, bizarrely, that Magna Carta was a document written “in the 1700s for native North American human rights purposes.”

The University of Calgary threatened the Pridgen brothers and the other eight students who’d joined the Facebook page with expulsion if they failed to write an abject letter of apology.

Having been found guilty of non-academic misconduct, Keith and Steven Pridgen took the university to court, which declared in 2010 that, “the university is not a Charter-free zone.” That judgment was upheld this week by the Court of Appeal.

While the ruling is a victory for the free-speech rights of university students, it is disheartening that the University of Calgary needs a court order to compel it to fulfill its own mission statement: To promote free inquiry and debate.

May 1, 2012

The Onion: Every Potential 2040 President Already Unelectable Due To Facebook

Filed under: Government, Humour, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

April 13, 2012

Blogging tip #2: Don’t be this guy

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Every now and again, someone asks me what it takes to be a successful blogger. If I knew all those secrets, I’d be a much bigger internet presence than I currently am, let me tell you. However, aside from updating frequently (daily or better), the best advice I can give you is to not be this guy:

See the whole thing at The Oatmeal.

April 11, 2012

“Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:55

An interesting analysis of the Instagram takeover by Facebook:

First, to understand this deal it’s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life. The company is also technologically weird. For example, much of the code that runs the site is written in a horrible computer language called PHP, which stands for nothing you care about. Millions of websites are built with PHP, because it works and it’s cheap to run, but PHP is a programming language like scrapple is a meat. Imagine eating two pounds of scrapple every day for the rest of your life — that’s what Facebook does, programming-wise. Which is just to say that Facebook has its own way of doing things that looks very suspect from the outside world — but man, does it work.

Now consider Instagram. If Facebook is a sprawling, intertextual garden of forking pokes, Instagram is no more complex than a chapbook of poetry: It lets you share pictures with your friends and keep track of strangers who post interesting pictures. It barely has a website; all the action happens on mobile devices. Thirty million people use it to pass time in the bathroom. You can add some fairly silly filters to the photos to make the pictures look like they were taken in the seventies, but that’s more of a novelty than a requirement. So that’s Instagram. It’s not a site, or an app. What it is, really, is a product.

[. . .]

To some users, this looks like a sellout. And that’s because it is. You might think the people crabbing about how Instagram is going to suck now are just being naïve, but I don’t think that’s true. Small product companies put forth that the user is a sacred being, and that community is all-important. That the money to pay for the service comes from venture capital, which seeks a specific return on investment over a period of time, is between the company and the venture capitalists; the relationship between the user and the product is holy, or is supposed to be.

So if you’re an Instagram user, you’ve been picking up on all of the cues about how important you are, how valuable you are to Instagram. Then along comes Facebook, the great alien presence that just hovers over our cities, year after year, as we wait and fear. You turn on the television and there it is, right above the Empire State Building, humming. And now a hole has opened up on its base and it has dumped a billion dollars into a public square — which turned out to not be public, but actually belongs to a few suddenly-very-rich dudes. You can’t blame users for becoming hooting primates when a giant spaceship dumps a billion dollars out of its money hole. It’s like the monolith in the movie 2001 appeared filled with candy and a sign on the front that said “NO CANDY FOR YOU.”

April 1, 2012

Nightmare progression from Facebook data to stalker app to genocide tool

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:11

Charles Stross on the very disturbing implications of Facebook and other social media tools:

There is an app, currently on the Apple app store as a free download, called Girls Around Me.

A couple of days ago, computer journalist John Brownlee wrote an essay about it explaining why he found it disturbing. I’d like to propose that it is symptomatic of a really major side-effect of our forced acculturation into Facebook’s broken model of human social interaction — a broken model shared by all the most successful social networks, by design — and that it is going to get much worse, until it kills people. Quite possibly in very large numbers.

I wish this was an April Fool’s joke or a piece of dystopian near-future fiction. Unfortunately it isn’t.

[. . .]

What “Girls Around Me” does is simple: it looks up your GPS location, then queries Facebook and FourSquare for people matching a simple search criterion (are they female?) who have checked in (or been checked in by their friends) in your vicinity. It then makes it really easy to pull up their publicly visible information — stuff such as age, occupation, favourite sports, what school they attended, and so on. All the stuff Facebook encourages you to share.

You can probably see why John and his friends became increasingly uneasy about this app: it’s pitched as innocent, slightly hokey fun, but it stops being amusing the instant you imagine it in the hands of a stalker or serial rapist. Or even just an unscrupulous ass-hat in search of a one night stand who isn’t above researching his target’s taste in music and drinks without their knowledge.

Creepy and stalkerish, right? So where’s the dystopic vision? Right here:

It’s easy to imagine how we could make something worse than “Girls Around Me” — something much worse. Facebook encourages us to disclose a wide range of information about ourselves, including our religion and a photograph. Religion is obvious: “Yids Among Us” would obviously be one of the go-to tools of choice for Neo-Nazis. As for skin colour, ethnicity identification from face images is out there already. Want to go queer bashing? There’s an algorithm out there for guessing sexual orientation based on the network graph of the target’s facebook friends. It’s probably possible to apply this sort of data mining exercise to determine whether a woman has had an abortion or is pro-choice.

In the worst case, it’s possible to envisage geolocation and data aggregation apps being designed to facilitate the identification and elimination of some ethnic or class enemy, not only by making it easy for users to track them down, but by making it easy for users to identify each other and form ad-hoc lynch mobs. (Hence my reference to the Rwandan Genocide earlier. Think it couldn’t happen? Look at Iran and imagine an app written for the Basij to make it easy to identify dissidents and form ad-hoc goon squads to proactively hunt them down. Or any other organization in the post-networked world that has a social role corresponding to the Red Guards.)

But as I said earlier, the app is not the problem. The problem is the deployment by profit-oriented corporations of behavioural psychology techniques to induce people to over-share information which can then be aggregated and disclosed to third parties for targeted marketing purposes.

Update, 2 April: The app has been pulled from the App Store after Foursquare revoked the developer’s API access, but the underlying problem is still there.

March 23, 2012

Facebook seen as harmful … to deployed troops

Filed under: Asia, Middle East, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:17

Strategy Page explains how increasing sophistication on the part of the al Qaeda/Taliban forces has been allowing them to select targets of opportunity through things like Facebook posts and cell phone traffic:

The U.S. Army is warning its troops to be careful what they post to on social networking sites (like Facebook). When they post photos of themselves they often reveal militarily useful information. This was discovered in Iraq, where a lot of tech savvy people working with terrorists were able to compile information from what troops posted. This sometimes led to attacks, and this was discovered from interrogating captured terrorists and captured documents and computer data. The background of pictures often indicated targets for the terrorists, or details of base defenses and American tactics. Islamic terrorists have been quick to use the Internet and other modern technology to plan and carry out their attacks.

Some of this technology can be very dangerous, like the geo-locating capability of many smart phones (which include GPS receivers and location data that hackers can obtain.) Troops in combat zones are ordered to turn geo-locating off while in areas where the enemy could use it. Even without geo-locating turned on, cell phone use can provide militarily useful information. This goes back to a century old practice called traffic analysis. This has been used with great success against terrorists in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, but it can be used against the troops.

[. . .]

Al Qaeda was long suspected of knowing how to manipulate message traffic in order to deceive our traffic analysis methods. This was rarely the case, but this form of deception has been used in the past with success. For example, when the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion of France was being planned, a fake army group headquarters was set up in England. Actually, this “army group” consisted largely of a lot of radio and telegraph operators sending a large number of messages that would be normal if the “army group” were preparing for an invasion of France, in an area other than where the actual invasion was going to take place. The deception worked. German traffic analysis experts were fooled and the Germans believed the actual invasion at Normandy was just a feint, a move to get the Germans to send their reinforcements to Normandy rather than were the fake “army group” was going to invade.

Intelligence agencies have to be constantly on the guard for al Qaeda, or any other terrorist group, using this kind of deception. It has happened in a few instances, so a larger-scale attempt is not out of the question.

March 10, 2012

“[A]theists and theists […] are quacking and waddling in the same way in different ponds”

Filed under: Media, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:19

Kennedy expresses the idea that atheism is a religion and becomes “a minor celebrity and a major troll” to her social media circles:

I didn’t know what fire and brimstone was until I made a throwaway claim recently during an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher. It seemed pretty unaudacious at the time, but by dropping the simple sentence “Atheism is a religion,” I opened a biblical floodgate of ridicule, name-calling, and abuse.

My Twitter feed and Facebook page became engorged with angry responses. “Your adherence into adulthood to what is usually an adolescent phase (Libertarianism), speaks volumes about your confirmation bias levels,” wrote Kernan. Touchstone Supertramp added; “Damn girl you got a big forehead.” A guy named Kevin and about 70 other people shared this bumper-sticker nugget: “‎If atheism is a religion, then off is a TV channel.” Liz wrote, “Kennedy, is that if atheism constitutes a religious belief than anorexia is whenever you don’t eat.” Michael wrote: “re·li·gion /riˈlijən/ Noun: 1. Whatever Kennedy says it is.” That was awesome. Beth called me a minor celebrity and a major troll—and it was also awesome to have somebody think I’m a celebrity.

[. . .]

Newberg and his late partner Eugene D’Aquili mapped various parts of the brain showing activation in specific areas when people were undergoing certain religious rituals or experiences, such as a shaman being in a trance or a Buddhist entering a mystical state. Regardless of the religion, the brain function was the same. Something was happening when these people experienced their version of religious phenomena, and the scans lit up like Robert Redford’s suit in The Electric Horseman.

This does not prove God exists, but it does show humans are wired or biologically predisposed to believe in something. When I interviewed him for this article, Newberg said his research demonstrates that “we are wired to have these beliefs about the world, to get at the fundamental stuff the universe is about. For many people, it includes God and for some it doesn’t. Your brain is doing its best to understand the world and construct beliefs to understand it, and from an epistemological perspective there is no fundamental difference.”

[. . .]

When atheists rail against theists (as many did on my Facebook page), they are using the same fervor the religious use when making their claims against a secular society. By calling atheism a religion, I am not trying to craft terms or apply them out of convenience. I just see theists and atheists behaving in the same manner, approaching from opposite ends of the runway. The entire discourse about religion stems from those who think they know more than the other guy. But what we really know is that we don’t know much. And we seem to share the same mechanism in our brains that drives us to make claims of faith and rationalism as a way of making sense of the great unknown.

You can call atheism a belief system, which Newberg guardedly does, or you can make a stronger assertion and say that atheists and theists, who have conveniently developed hate-tinged froth and vitriol for one another, are quacking and waddling in the same way in different ponds. Either way, they are ducks and atheism is a religion. At least it is in the hands of those who are so religious about their disbelief that they place the weight of the argument on the feathery shoulders of their believing brothers and sisters.

February 26, 2012

VisitBritain’s spelling problem

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

A bit of an embarrassment for Britain’s national tourism agency:

Tourists attempting to follow VisitBritain’s tip to travel to the Welsh region of the “Breacon Beacons” may find themselves rather lost when entering the destination into their satnav.

The misspelling of the Brecon Beacons was spotted by an eagle-eyed tourist on a New York subway advertisement, which was accompanied with a picturesque photograph capturing the countryside of Llandovery, a market town in Carmarthenshire.

The promotional image, which also currently appears in the advertising spaces in front of passenger seats in New York taxis, was promptly posted on Facebook.

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