Quotulatiousness

August 29, 2024

Pavel Durov’s arrest isn’t for a clear crime, it’s for allowing everyone access to encrypted communications services

Filed under: France, Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille explains the real reason the French government arrested Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram:

It’s appropriate that, days after the French government arrested Pavel Durov, CEO of the encrypted messaging app Telegram, for failing to monitor and restrict communications as demanded by officials in Paris, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that his company, which owns Facebook, was subjected to censorship pressures by U.S. officials. Durov’s arrest, then, stands as less of a one-off than as part of a concerted effort by governments, including those of nominally free countries, to control speech.

“Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov is expected to appear in court Sunday after being arrested by French police at an airport near Paris for alleged offences related to his popular messaging app,” reported France24.

A separate story noted claims by Paris prosecutors that he was detained for “running an online platform that allows illicit transactions, child pornography, drug trafficking and fraud, as well as the refusal to communicate information to authorities, money laundering and providing cryptographic services to criminals”.

Freedom for Everybody or for Nobody

Durov’s alleged crime is offering encrypted communications services to everybody, including those who engage in illegality or just anger the powers that be. But secure communications are a feature, not a bug, for most people who live in a world in which “global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023”, according to Freedom House. Fighting authoritarian regimes requires means of exchanging information that are resistant to penetration by various repressive police agencies.

“Telegram, and other encrypted messaging services, are crucial for those intending to organise protests in countries where there is a severe crackdown on free speech. Myanmar, Belarus and Hong Kong have all seen people relying on the services,” Index on Censorship noted in 2021.

And if bad people occasionally use encrypted apps such as Telegram, they use phones and postal services, too. The qualities that make communications systems useful to those battling authoritarianism are also helpful to those with less benign intentions. There’s no way to offer security to one group without offering it to everybody.

As I commented on a post on MeWe the other day, “Somehow the governments of the west are engaged in a competition to see who can be the most repressive. Canada and New Zealand had the early lead, but Australia, Britain, Germany, and France have all recently moved ahead in the standings. I’m not sure what the prizes might be, but I strongly suspect “a bloody revolution” is one of them (if not all of them).”

June 9, 2024

Microsoft’s latest ploy to be the most hated tech company

Filed under: Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Charles Stross wonders if Microsoft’s CoPilot+ is actually a veiled suicide attempt by the already much-hated software giant:

The breaking tech news this year has been the pervasive spread of “AI” (or rather, statistical modeling based on hidden layer neural networks) into everything. It’s the latest hype bubble now that Cryptocurrencies are no longer the freshest sucker-bait in town, and the media (who these days are mostly stenographers recycling press releases) are screaming at every business in tech to add AI to their product.

Well, Apple and Intel and Microsoft were already in there, but evidently they weren’t in there enough, so now we’re into the silly season with Microsoft’s announcement of CoPilot plus Recall, the product nobody wanted.

CoPilot+ is Microsoft’s LLM-based add-on for Windows, sort of like 2000’s Clippy the Talking Paperclip only with added hallucinations. Clippy was rule-based: a huge bundle of IF … THEN statements hooked together like a 1980s Expert System to help users accomplish what Microsoft believed to be common tasks, but which turned out to be irritatingly unlike anything actual humans wanted to accomplish. Because CoPilot+ is purportedly trained on what users actually do, it looked plausible to someone in marketing at Microsoft that it could deliver on “help the users get stuff done”. Unfortunately, human beings assume that LLMs are sentient and understand the questions they’re asked, rather than being unthinking statistical models that cough up the highest probability answer-shaped object generated in response to any prompt, regardless of whether it’s a truthful answer or not.

Anyway, CoPilot+ is also a play by Microsoft to sell Windows on ARM. Microsoft don’t want to be entirely dependent on Intel, especially as Intel’s share of the global microprocessor market is rapidly shrinking, so they’ve been trying to boost Windows on ARM to orbital velocity for a decade now. The new CoPilot+ branded PCs going on sale later this month are marketed as being suitable for AI (spot the sucker-bait there?) and have powerful new ARM processors from Qualcomm, which are pitched as “Macbook Air killers”, largely because they’re playing catch-up with Apple’s M-series ARM-based processors in terms of processing power per watt and having an on-device coprocessor optimized for training neural networks.

Having built the hardware and the operating system Microsoft faces the inevitable question, why would a customer want this stuff? And being Microsoft, they took the first answer that bubbled up from their in-company echo chamber and pitched it at the market as a forced update to Windows 11. And the internet promptly exploded.

First, a word about Apple. Apple have been quietly adding AI features to macOS and iOS for the past several years. In fact, they got serious about AI in 2015, and every Apple Silicon processor they’ve released since 2016 has had a neural engine (an AI coprocessor) on board. Now that the older phones and laptops are hitting end of life, the most recent operating system releases are rolling out AI-based features. For example, there’s on-device OCR for text embedded in any image. There’s a language translation service for the OCR output, too. I can point my phone at a brochure or menu in a language I can’t read, activate the camera, and immediately read a surprisingly good translation: this is an actually useful feature of AI. (The ability to tag all the photos in my Photos library with the names of people present in them, and to search for people, is likewise moderately useful: the jury is still out on the pet recognition, though.) So the Apple roll-out of AI has so far been uneventful and unobjectionable, with a focus on identifying things people want to do and making them easier.

Microsoft Recall is not that.

May 20, 2024

The first post-privacy generation in human history

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

You may have mixed feelings about the Zoomers — even if you happen to be a Zoomer — but it’s beyond argument that they are the first generation who have grown up in a zero-privacy world:

“Privacy” by g4ll4is is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Zoomers are the first post-privacy generation in human existence. They will never know a world in which they can try to lose themselves without somehow being tracked. Roughly three years ago, I was speaking with the CEO and founder of a commercial digital advertising company from NYC. He told me that their technology was so powerful that they were able to figure out when people were getting up from their couches to go into another room simply via their own digital advertising software.

It’s very tough to wrap our heads around the complete loss of privacy. For me, I have trouble remembering how it was to be out of instantaneous reach via mobile phone. Pre-mass adoption of cell phones, people would effectively be out of reach i.e. disappear for hours at a time, as the only way to contact them was to call them at home (inb4 beepers, as I never had one). We are constantly tracked and monitored, and our personal data is sold by data brokers all over the globe. One customer of personal ad tracking data is the CIA, as Matthew Petti explains:

    For years, the U.S. government has bought information on private citizens from commercial data brokers. Now, for the first time ever, American spymasters are admitting that this data is sensitive—but they’re leaving it up to the spy agencies on how to use it.

    Last week, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines released a “Policy Framework for Commercially Available Information.” Her office oversees 18 agencies in the “intelligence community“, including the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), and all military intelligence branches.

    In the 2018 case Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to obtain mobile phone location data from phone companies. (During the case, the Reason Foundation filed an amicus brief against warrantless snooping.) As a workaround, the feds instead started buying data from third-party brokers.

    Haines’ new framework claims that “additional clarity” on the government’s policies will help protect Americans’ privacy. Yet the document is vague about the specific limits. It orders the agencies themselves to come up with “safeguards that are tailored to the sensitivity of the information” and write an annual report on how they use this data.

more:

    As national security journalist Spencer Ackerman points out in his Forever Wars newsletter, the framework doesn’t require the feds to delete old purchased data. Earlier this year, Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) called on the NSA to purge all data that it bought without a warrant and without following the Federal Trade Commission’s privacy policies.

    “The framework’s absence of clear rules about what commercially available information can and cannot be purchased by the intelligence community reinforces the need for Congress to pass legislation protecting the rights of Americans,” Wyden tells Reason. “The DNI’s framework is nonetheless an important step forward in starting to bring the intelligence community under a set of principles and policies, and in documenting all the various programs so that they can be overseen.”

Case in point:

    Wyden has been aggressively pushing for transparency on data purchases over the past few years. In 2021, he uncovered that the Defense Intelligence Agency was buying Americans’ smartphone location data. That same year, he sent a letter to Haines and CIA Director Bill Burns complaining about a secretive CIA data collection program. (In an Orwellian turn, the letter itself was classified until 2022.) This year, Wyden revealed more details on NSA data purchases.

    Some of this data is collected and sold directly by the apps. For example, an intelligence company called X-Mode once paid MuslimPro, an app that offers a daily prayer calendar and a compass pointing towards Mecca, to include a few lines of location tracking code. X-Mode then sold the data to U.S. government agencies. MuslimPro claims that it did not intend to sell the data to the government and ended the arrangement after the story broke.

So, yeah … app maker will sell your personal data to a buyer like the CIA.

    In other cases, the data is siphoned from advertising markets. Every time a user opens a website with paid advertisements, their location and attributes appear on a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange, a virtual auction where companies buy ad space. Data brokers posing as advertisers scrape the listings for information on users.

    “Any government with a halfway decent cyber intelligence program is participating in these RTB exchanges, because it’s such an immensely valuable source of data,” says Byron Tau, author of Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State.

    As a demonstration of how powerful RTB data is, an intelligence contractor used data from the dating app Grindr to track gay government employees from their offices to their homes, Tau reported in his book.

The IRS is in on it too:

    Lawyers for the Internal Revenue Service, on the other hand, have argued that users voluntarily handed over the information, so the government is free to use it. Tau points out that users don’t really know how their data is being resold, and even the RTB exchanges themselves aren’t supposed to be used for data scraping.

    “A lot of these companies that are collecting data from the global population don’t have a real consumer relationship” with the people they’re spying on, Tau says. “Unless you know how to decompile software and you’re technically savvy, you can’t even make informed choices.”

In an increasingly digitized world, the right to privacy becomes wholly unworkable. Think digital payments by way of credit and debit cards vs. cash.

March 15, 2024

QotD: The ever-growing state

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Inconvenience would seem to be a small price to pay for peace of mind.”

That one phrase sums up all the problems we are having with government in this country. It justifies the humiliating personal searches at airports. It justifies the police state tactics of “sobriety checkpoints” or “identification stops”. It justifies the Patriot Act, and the new Intelligence Reform Act, with all their draconian intrusions on personal privacy, including the repulsive, illegal and un-Constitutional parts, such as no-warrant-required searches, a national ID card, federal snooping into our reading habits at libraries and book stores. It justifies any intrusion into private, personal, or intimate matters. After all, if someone has more than one wife (or husband), doesn’t your peace of mind require that that person be harassed, jailed, or otherwise punished for violation of your religious or moral code? It doesn’t matter that the people involved are adults who freely and willingly consent to live in that situation. For that matter, if two men or women live together, doesn’t your peace of mind require that their “immoral and ungodly” lifestyle be exposed, and the people involved publicly pilloried?

Ron Beatty, “Peace of Mind”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-03-06.

February 24, 2024

QotD: Big government

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I’m Canadian and have a romantic fondness for the famous motto of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the one about the Mounties always getting their man. But the bigger you make the government, the more you entrust to it, the more powers you give it to nose around the country’s bank accounts, and phone calls, and e-mails, and favourite Internet porn sites, the more you’ll enfeeble it with the siren song of the soft target. The Mounties will no longer get their man, they’ll get you instead. Frankly, it’s a lot easier.

[…]

What should have died on September 11th is the liberal myth that you can regulate the world to your will. The reduction of a free-born citizenry to neutered sheep upon arrival at the airport was the most advanced expression of this delusion. So how’s the FAA reacting to September 11th? With more of the same kind of obtrusive, bullying, useless regulations that give you the comforting illusion that if they’re regulating you they must be regulating all the bad guys as well. We don’t need big government, we need lean government — government that’s stripped of its distractions and forced to concentrate on the essentials. If Hillary and Co want to argue for big government, conservatives could at least make the case for what’s really needed — grown-up government.

Mark Steyn, “Big Shift”, National Review, 2001-11-19.

January 3, 2024

They all spy on you, the FBI, RCMP, MI5 … and apparently your Subaru

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

JoNova linked to this disturbing little article explaining what legal rights you give away merely by being a passenger in a modern Subaru vehicle:

Subaru is a Japanese car company started back in the 1950s. Their all-wheel drive, sporty SUVs and cars are popular with outdoor types and the LGBT+ community (and your privacy researcher’s Mom … Mom swears by Subaru and has since the 1980s). Popular models in the Outback, Forester, Crosstrek, Impreza, Legacy, the sporty WRX, and the electric Solterra. The MySubaru app and Subaru’s Starlink connected services offer up all the usual connected car things like remote start/stop, lock/unlock, honk your horn and flash your lights from bedroom, automatic collision notification, multimedia services like navigation and news, trip logs, and a way to manage other people who might drive your Subaru with boundary, speed, and curfew alerts. So, do we love Subaru’s privacy? Not really. But hey, they aren’t the worst car company we reviewed, so there’s that.

Here’s something you might not realize. The moment you sit in the passenger seat of a Subaru that uses connected services, you’ve consented to allow them to use — and maybe even sell — your personal information. According to their privacy policy, that means things like your name, location, “Audio recordings of Vehicle Occupants“, and inferences they can draw about things like your “characteristics, predispositions, behavior, or attitudes“. Call us bonkers, but we don’t think that simply sitting in the passenger seat of someone’s Subaru should mean you consent to having any of your personal information use for, well, pretty much anything at all. Let alone potentially sold to data brokers or shared with third party marketers so they can target you with ads about who knows what based on the the inferences they draw about you because you sat in the back seat of a Subaru in the mountains of Colorado. We’re gonna really call out Subaru for this, because they lay it out so clearly in their privacy policy, but please know, Subaru isn’t the only car company doing this sort of icky thing.

If you go read Subaru’s privacy policy (or don’t, we did it for you, you can just read our review here), you’ll see at the very start they say this: “This Privacy Policy applies to each user of the Services, including any ‘Vehicle Occupant’, which includes each driver or passenger in a Subaru vehicle that uses Connected Vehicle Services, such as Subaru Starlink (such vehicle, a ‘Connected Vehicle’), whether or not such driver or passenger is the vehicle owner or a registered user of the Connected Vehicle Services. For the avoidance of doubt, for purposes of this Privacy Policy, ‘using’ the Services includes being a Vehicle Occupant in a Connected Vehicle.” So yeah, they don’t want there to be any doubt that when you sit in a connected Subaru, you’ve entered the world of using their services.

December 15, 2023

Bill S-210 “isn’t just a slippery slope, it is an avalanche”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

You sometimes get the impression that the only person in Ottawa who actually pays attention to online privacy issues is Michael Geist:

“2017 Freedom of Expression Awards” by Elina Kansikas for Index on Censorship https://flic.kr/p/Uvmaie (CC BY-SA 2.0)

After years of battles over Bills C-11 and C-18, few Canadians will have the appetite for yet another troubling Internet bill. But given a bill that envisions government-backed censorship, mandates age verification to use search engines or social media sites, and creates a framework for court-ordered website blocking, there is a need to pay attention. Bill S-210, or the Protecting Young Persons from Exposure to Pornography Act, was passed by the Senate in April after Senators were reluctant to reject a bill framed as protecting children from online harm. The same scenario appears to be playing out in the House of Commons, where yesterday a majority of the House voted for the bill at second reading, sending it to the Public Safety committee for review. The bill, which is the brainchild of Senator Julie Miville-Duchêne, is not a government bill. In fact, government ministers voted against it. Instead, the bill is backed by the Conservatives, Bloc and NDP with a smattering of votes from backbench Liberal MPs. Canadians can be forgiven for being confused that after months of championing Internet freedoms, raising fears of censorship, and expressing concern about CRTC overregulation of the Internet, Conservative MPs were quick to call out those who opposed the bill (the House sponsor is Conservative MP Karen Vecchio).

I appeared before the Senate committee that studied the bill in February 2022, where I argued that “by bringing together website blocking, face recognition technologies, and stunning overbreadth that would capture numerous mainstream services, the bill isn’t just a slippery slope, it is an avalanche”. As I did then, I should preface criticism of the bill by making it clear that underage access to inappropriate content is indeed a legitimate concern. I think the best way to deal with the issue includes education, digital skills, and parental oversight of Internet use including the use of personal filters or blocking tools if desired. Moreover, if there are Canadian-based sites that are violating the law in terms of the content they host, they should absolutely face investigation and potential charges.

However, Bill S-210 goes well beyond personal choices to limit underage access to sexually explicit material on Canadian sites. Instead, it envisions government-enforced global website liability for failure to block underage access, backed by website blocking and mandated age verification systems that are likely to include face recognition technologies. The government establishes this regulatory framework and is likely to task the CRTC with providing the necessary administration. While there are surely good intentions with the bill, the risks and potential harms it poses are significant.

The basic framework of Bill S-210 is that it creates an offence for any organization making available sexually explicit material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. Organizations (broadly defined under the Criminal Code) can rely on three potential defences:

  1. The organization instituted a “prescribed age-verification method” to limit access. It would be up to the government to determine what methods qualify with due regard for reliability and privacy. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
  2. The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
  3. The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).

The enforcement of the bill is left to the designated regulatory agency, which can issue notifications of violations to websites and services. Those notices can include the steps the agency wants followed to bring the site into compliance. This literally means the government via its regulatory agency will dictate to sites how they must interact with users to ensure no underage access. If the site fails to act as instructed within 20 days, the regulator can apply for a court order mandating that Canadian ISPs block the site from their subscribers. The regulator would be required to identify which ISPs are subject to the blocking order.

March 20, 2023

“It amounts to nothing less than a declaration of all-out war between the government and the Big Tech companies”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The editors of The Line have strong opinions on the federal government’s decision to batter Google, Facebook, and other online “giants” over their opposition to the proposed internet legislation in bills C-11 and C-18:

As a result of C-18, both Google and Meta have considered dropping news distribution from their platforms, or have outright promised to do so. To which we have responded: “Well, no shit, Sherlocks.” We have, in fact, warned all of the parties involved with this misguided bill that that’s exactly what was going to happen.

Nonetheless, the dim-witted government officials and corporate media barons who have pinned their hopes of survival to the apparent money spigot of Big Tech didn’t believe us. So when Meta came right out and said it would drop news last week, the ashen-faced Minister of Heritage accused them of using “intimidation and subversion” tactics. And, thus, these demands for private correspondence appear to have been drafted.

It amounts to nothing less than a declaration of all-out war between the government and the Big Tech companies — and, by extension, the many independent media creators like ourselves.

Well. Okey Dokey then.

*cracks knuckles*

Let’s start with two very obvious points: firstly, we at The Line don’t object to forcing these tech companies to disclose funding to third parties for the purpose of opposing C-18 et al. That is perfectly reasonable, in our minds. Further, if these companies are being accused of anything illegal, by all means, investigate away — after you get a warrant.

The rest of these demands are nothing short of banana crackers; it’s an extraordinary interpretation of the committee’s mandate. It’s the kind of overbroad dragnet that will necessarily create privacy breaches for the unknown numbers of ordinary citizens, dissidents and journalists who have corresponded with these companies about these bills.

We will remind the government that private citizens and private companies do not owe the government a full accounting of their private business or communications. The government is subject to this kind of transparency and disclosure because the government works for us. Not the other way around.

We will also point out the irony. The government is demanding years worth of correspondence from private entities within a very short time frame: this is a level of transparency that no government department would subject itself to. Don’t believe us? Just try to draft a similar ATIP request to any ministry; it would take years to get such a request fulfilled, and half if it would come back redacted.

March 19, 2023

Disagree with the Canadian government’s attempt to take over significant parts of the internet? Get ready for administrative punishment, citizens!

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist, who often seems like the only person paying close attention to the Canadian government’s growing authoritarian attitudes to Canadians’ internet usage, shows the utter hypocrisy of the feds demanding access to a vast array of private and corporate information on a two-week deadline, when it can take literally years for them to respond to a request for access to government information:

Senator Joe McCarthy would be in awe of the Canadian government’s audacious power grab.
Library of Congress photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The government plans to introduce a motion next week requiring Google and Facebook to turn over years of private third-party communication involving any Canadian regulation. The move represents more than just a remarkable escalation of its battle against the two tech companies for opposing Bill C-18 and considering blocking news sharing or linking in light of demands for hundreds of millions in payments. The motion – to be introduced by the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Canadian Heritage (yes, that guy) – calls for a series of hearings on what it describes as “current and ongoing use of intimidation and subversion tactics to avoid regulation in Canada”. In the context of Bill C-18, those tactics amount to little more than making the business choice that Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez made clear was a function of his bill: if you link to content, you fall within the scope of the law and must pay. If you don’t link, you are out of scope.

While the same committee initially blocked Facebook from even appearing on Bill C-18 (Liberal MP Anthony Housefather said he was ready for clause-by-clause review after just four hearings and no Facebook invitation), bringing the companies to committee to investigate the implications of their plans is a reasonable approach. But the motion isn’t just about calling executives before committee to answer questions from what will no doubt be a hostile group of MPs. The same motion sweeps in the private communications of thousands of Canadians, which is a stunning disregard for privacy and which could have a dangerous chilling effect on public participation. Indeed, the intent seems fairly clear: guilt by association for anyone who dares to communicate with these companies with an attempt to undermine critics by casting doubt on their motivations. Note that this approach is only aimed at those that criticize government legislation. There has been a painfully obvious lobbying campaign in support of the bill within some Canadian media outlets, but there are no efforts to uncover potential bias or funding for those that speak out in favour of Bill C-18, Bill C-11, or other digital policy initiatives.

It is hard to overstate the broad scope of the disclosure demands. Canadian digital creators concerned with Bill C-11 who wrote to Youtube would find their correspondence disclosed to the committee. So would researchers who sought access to data from Google or Facebook on issues such as police access to social media records or anti-hate groups who contacted Facebook regarding the government’s online harms proposal for automated reports to law enforcement. Privacy advocates focused on how Google administers the right to be forgotten in Canada would ironically find their correspondence disclosed as would independent media sites that wrote to Facebook about the implications of Bill C-18.

December 5, 2022

QotD: Open concept house designs

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The shift from open concepts demanded by necessity to widespread construction of separate rooms to open concepts demanded by style is relatively recent. Before the 17th century, especially for the poor, “rooms did not have specialized functions”, explains architect Witold Rybczynski in Home: A Short History of an Idea. “Houses were full of people, much more so than today, and privacy was unknown.”

A single room could serve as a study in the morning, a dining room at noon, a living room in the evening, and a bedroom at night. Beds were couches, and couches were beds. Your house was your workspace, and your minimal furniture typically had no fixed arrangement, as it was constantly moved about to accommodate different uses of the only room available. (The French and Italian words for “furniture” still hint at this history: You can see the similarity to “mobile” in meubles and mobilia.)

These open concepts of old were not only motivated by different conceptions of privacy and the expense of building additional walls. They were also required for the lower classes by premodern heating technologies. A single open hearth, or, later, fireplace or stove, could warm one large room but could not do much for other, closed-off spaces. A lord or king could build a heating element into every room, but for the average family, winter warmth required most of life to happen in a single space.

As technology advanced, ideas about privacy changed, and standards of living improved over the last 500 years, ordinary people were increasingly able to move away from an open concept home, and they eagerly did so. “Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves,” notes Bill Bryson in At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Though the transition was slow — toilets long had “multiple seats, for ease of conversation” — rooms were increasingly devoted to particular uses, and those uses were separated from one another as much as resources permitted.

Bonnie Kristian, “Open concept homes are for peasants”, The Week, 2019-05-12.

November 8, 2022

QotD: Marx was right about “commodification”

Filed under: Economics, History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Marx was right. Not for the right reasons, and not in the way he intended, but right for all that. Think of one of those medieval plague doctors in the bird masks. They think the plague was caused by a conjunction of the planets, and they want to give you a poultice made from sheep rectum to cure it … so, you know, they’re wrong about big important stuff. But they’re right about the critical, live-or-die thing: You’ve got the plague, and they know it better — and, crucially, faster — than anybody.

Marx was right about three critical things: Commodification, alienation, and class consciousness (again, bearing in mind that “right” in this context means “correct diagnosis”, not “correct in every particular”).

If it helps, you can swap in financialization for commodification. Briefly, it’s the ever-accelerating phenomenon we’ve all observed: burning through social capital in order to make a buck. Things that should not be subject to market forces are not only turned into commodities, but soon become the only commodities, or the only ones that matter.

Consider pretty much everything about the “laptop class”. E.g. the laptop itself. It commodifies time. Now you have the “ability” to work even when you shouldn’t. It is now virtually impossible to leave work at the office. For those of us who are independent contractors, this is a nice bonus — we can invoice every minute of our time, which means we can work as much (or as little) as we want to. For everyone else, though …

See what I mean? It’s simply understood that you’re never off the clock. Throw in the rest of the paraphernalia of laptop-class work — smartphone, social media, etc. — and nobody thinks twice about sending you stuff on a Saturday, a holiday, at your kids’ dance recital, at a funeral, whatever. People still have the residual social habit to say “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry for your loss” when you explain that you couldn’t get to that email because you were at your Mom’s funeral … but not for long, because you can already hear it in their voices: “Yeah yeah, sucks to be you, now will you please get me that TPS report!”

Same way with social media. You will be fired for expressing certain kinds of opinions, even on your “private” accounts, because the assumption is that there is no privacy. You don’t own you. You are a wholly-owned subsidiary of GloboPedo, and while we’re tempted to get outraged at the kinds of opinions for which you will get fired, that’s why those old Leftists — the ones we’re increasingly coming to resemble — would say “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The kind of opinion is epiphenomenal; it’s the principle that matters, because you are not a commodity.

Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.

November 6, 2022

The ArriveCAN farce as the poster child for Canada’s vastly diminished state capacity

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Andrew Potter considers the expensive, ineffective ArriveCAN app the government tried to impose on international travellers as a symptom of Canada’s decreasing state capacity:

There is perhaps no clearer poster child for the current crisis of state capacity than the ArriveCAN app, which was a bad policy initiative, poorly implemented, at great cost, and whose ultimate effect was not to keep Canadians safe and healthy, but rather to annoy users and generate a great deal of hostility towards the government.

The question of state capacity (or more frequently, its absence) became an issue of popular concern during the COVID-19 pandemic when governments, both in Canada and elsewhere, struggled to accomplish basic tasks of pandemic management. Whether it was sourcing enough PPE for the health-care system, scaling up testing or contact tracing, securing the borders, properly staffing long-term-care facilities, taking care of temporary foreign workers, and so on … the authorities struggled to get their act together. This is a well-documented story.

But this all came at a time when we had already started a national conversation about whether Canada had become a place where it was impossible for government to get anything done. Pipelines were the big issue, but we seemed to have turned into a country where crumbling infrastructure and slow and ineffective public services had become simply accepted as a fact of life. “State capacity” just put a name to something that had been in the air for a long while.

And so the pandemic served to both exacerbate and accelerate the concern over state capacity, for two main reasons. First, it raised the stakes. Before the pandemic, the failure of state capacity manifested itself as a slow-motion and genteel sort of generalized decline. With the arrival of COVID-19, it quickly became a matter of life and death. But second, the gusher of money the government printed during the pandemic helped put a point on the problem: the problem didn’t originate in a lack of funds. Indeed, what transpired during the pandemic was a bit of a spin on the old Woody Allen joke about the restaurant with terrible food and such small portions: There was so much government, and so much of it was bad.

So what is state capacity anyway? And why is it so important?

As I’ve said many times, the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything. More government is worse government … and I’m not even being a pedantic libertarian here, I’m talking objectively about the outcomes of pretty much every new government action.

June 15, 2022

“Privacy” seems to be an archaic concept that doesn’t matter to the Canadian government

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist wonders why the Canadian government doesn’t seem to care at all about the privacy of Canadians:

“Privacy” by g4ll4is is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Over the past several weeks, there have been several important privacy developments in Canada including troubling privacy practices at well-known organizations such as the CBC and Tim Hortons, a call from business organizations for privacy reform, the nomination of a new privacy commissioner with little privacy experience, and a decision by a Senate committee to effectively overrule the government on border privacy rules. These developments raise the puzzling question of why the federal government – led by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez – are so indifferent to privacy, at best treating it as a low priority issue and at worst proposing dangerous measures or seemingly hoping to cash in on weak privacy laws in order to fund other policy priorities.

The privacy alarm bells have been ringing for weeks. For example, the Globe and Mail recently featured an important story on children’s privacy, working with Human Rights Watch and other media organizations to examine the privacy practices of dozens of online education platforms. The preliminary data suggests some major concerns in Canada, most notably with the CBC, whose CBC Kids platform is said to be “one of the most egregious cases in Canada and really all around the world”. The CBC responded that it “complies with relevant Canadian laws and regulations with regard to online privacy, and follows industry practices in audience analytics and privacy protection”. Yet that is the problem: Canada’s privacy laws are universally regarded as outdated and weak, thereby enabling privacy invasive practices with no consequences. Soon after, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released findings in an investigation involving the Tim Hortons app tracking location data. First identified by then-National Post reporter James McLeod, the commissioner found privacy violations, yet Canadian privacy law does not include penalties for these violations.

Despite the obvious need for privacy reform – outgoing Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien reiterated the necessity for reform in his final speech as commissioner and business groups have made a similar call for privacy reform – the government seems indifferent to the issue. The nomination of Philippe Dufresne as the new privacy commissioner is a case in point. I don’t know Mr. Dufresne and I’m hoping that he proves to be a great commissioner. He certainly said many of the right things in his appearance before committee yesterday. However, the government’s choice is instructive. In choosing someone with no obvious privacy experience, the government sided instead with government managerial experience. Good managerial experience is valuable, but a career spent within government is not a training ground for pushing the policy envelope, pressuring governments to reform the law, and demanding that the private sector comply with it. The Dufresne choice signals that the government may be more comfortable with a well-managed agent of Parliament than with an agent of change.

May 25, 2022

“What is a reasonable general concern?”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Paula Simons has a concern that I think is quite reasonable:

What is a reasonable general concern?

That’s not a rhetorical question. I really don’t know the answer. I’m not sure anyone else does, either.

And that’s exactly the problem with Bill S-7, a new piece of government legislation, which amends both the Customs Act and the Preclearance Act.

Bill S-7 set a new standard to allow border services officers to search through our cellphones, laptops, tablets, Apple Watches and other personal computers. If the bill passes, it will allow officers who feel a “reasonable general concern” to search through the emails, documents, texts, instant messages, photos or videos stored on our digital devices, to look for evidence that we may have violated customs regulations.

Reasonable general concern. Or, as it says in the French-language draft of the bill, “des préoccupations générales raisonnables“.

It’s an absolutely novel legal threshold. That phrase, be it in English or French, doesn’t appear anywhere else in Canadian criminal or civil law. It’s not a standard borrowed from any other country. It’s a brand new legal test to authorize an invasive search of your most private personal records and correspondence.

A reasonable concern, one might intuit, is a lower standard than a reasonable suspicion, because a concern is less grave, less specific, than a suspicion.

But a general concern? A general preoccupation?

That sounds even more vague, more subjective, than a good old-fashioned hunch or inkling.

It seems counter-intuitive, to put it mildly, to create a lower, broader standard to search our private data on our private devices than to search our conventional mail, or our suitcases, or our car trunks. Yet that is exactly what Bill S-7 does.

How did we get here? The answer is an ironic one.

Back in 2020, the Alberta Court of Appeal ruled unanimously that portions of the Customs Act were unconstitutional.

The court found the act violated the protection against unreasonable search and seizure, because it allowed for what the court called “suspicion-less and unlimited” searches of our personal digital devices.

That violation, held the court, could not be saved by section 1 of the Charter, because it allowed unfettered and unrestricted access to people’s most personal and intimate information, and because it allowed the state almost unlimited latitude to dig around in the what the court called our “biographical core of identity”.

March 21, 2022

For some reason, Canadians’ interest in alternative currencies has risen substantially since February

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m far from alone in taking the Canadian government’s absurd over-reaction to the Freedom Convoy 2022 political protest in February as a reason to be concerned about the Canadian banking system. Until then I’d paid very little attention to alternative currency options like Bitcoin and the like, but I now understand that they may be a key element in future financial planning. At Quillette, Jonathan Kay explains that he realized at the same time he needed to know much more about crypto:

“Bitcoin – from WSJ” by MarkGregory007 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

On February 15th, following weeks of anti-vaccine-mandate protests in downtown Ottawa, Justin Trudeau lurched from complete inaction to absurd overreaction by declaring a national emergency. One effect of this was that banks were suddenly authorized to freeze the personal assets of citizens linked with the protests, civil liberties be damned. Around the same time, moreover, hackers acquired and published identifying information associated with thousands of people who’d donated money to the protest movement. Rather than denounce this apparent criminal data breach, many public figures — including Gerald Butts, who’d been Trudeau’s right-hand man before resigning amid scandal in 2019 — actually celebrated this doxxing. Some media outlets even tried to mine the dox information for clickbait before being stung by a public backlash. While I hadn’t donated to the Freedom Convoy movement, I was sufficiently appalled by these developments that I started educating myself about how one might donate to a similar cause without government officials and social-media hyenas exploiting these transactions as a pretext to attack my assets and reputation.

The easiest way to get into the crypto market, I learned, is simply to open an account at an exchange platform such as Coinbase or Wealthsimple. But while they’re easy to use, exchange platforms also generally require clients to supply government-issued ID when they secure their accounts, and transactions are traceable by authorities. To assure myself of real anonymity and theft-protection, my tutor instructed me, a better (if more complex) option is “cold storage”. This is a real physical device — in my case, something called a Ledger — that acts as a personal crypto wallet.

My Ledger (which looks like a large USB key drive) contains the data required to generate the “private keys” (which look like long passwords, though that isn’t quite what they are) that allow me to send my crypto to other people. And that spending can be done only in those moments when the device is connected to the Internet, after which it can be relegated to a drawer or safe (thus the metaphorical concept of “cold storage”). On the other hand, I can receive money even if the Ledger is offline, so long as the sender has my public key, which (unlike a private key) is generally safe to give to others (such as, say, a prospective donor to any charitable cause that I might establish).

Bitcoin’s basic mechanics were set out in 2009 by the much-mythologized pseudonymous author (or collective) known as “Satoshi Nakamoto”. In a legendary white paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, Satoshi describes the newly conceived electronic coin as consisting of a chain of digital signatures (a blockchain) that build one upon the next through a mathematical mechanism known as a cryptographic hash function — a one-way function whose output doesn’t expose the original private key to reverse-engineering. So once a bitcoin transaction is recorded and added in verified form to the blockchain by everyone — this being the “public distributed ledger” that bitcoin users are part of — the transaction can’t be erased or reversed (with one important theoretical exception, described later on).

Image contained in Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, demonstrating the use of public and private keys to verify and sign bitcoin transactions.

Of course, you don’t need to understand how this cryptography works to use cryptocurrency. But it is worth getting your head around an important concept that fundamentally separates crypto from conventional assets such as, say, money that sits in a bank account. Your bank account number doesn’t have any value in and of itself: It’s just an institutional convenience that tells you and your bank where your actual money’s been filed (which is why that account number sits in plain sight on every physical check you sign, assuming you still use checks). But in the case of bitcoin, a private key basically is money — in the sense that anyone with access to such a key can spend the associated funds. And so if you lose your private-key information, or it gets stolen by a thief, there’s no 1-800 helpdesk number. It’s gone forever.

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