Quotulatiousness

February 23, 2020

Benjamin Griveaux discovers that “privacy” is an outdated 20th century concept

Filed under: France, Government, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At The Register, Alistair Dabbs describes the descent of formerly ascendent French politician Benjamin Griveaux:

Previously a key spokesman for president Emmanuel Macron, he was flying high in the polls to be elected mayor of Paris next month … until the electorate got a good look at his knob.

Benjamin Griveaux on 11 October 2018.
Photo by Jacques Paquier via Wikimedia Commons.

In a case of political revenge porn that is gripping the French nation almost as tightly as Griveaux was gripping himself, videos of him buffing the aubergine appeared on a short-lived satirical website apparently focusing on “political pornography” (don’t bother asking) and promptly went viral.

These were private, first-person videos he’d taken himself spiralising the old courgette and sent to the object of his amour who, unfortunately for his wife, was not his wife. Predictably, neither woman was impressed with the, er, outcome.

Cue an embarrassed press conference with lots of deliberately posed shots of him looking downwards and contrite, during which he announced he would stand down from the imminent elections and pass the, er, baton to someone else. Taking their example from Griveaux himself, Macron’s party La République en Marche (since redubbed “La République en Main“) did a bit of frenzied reshuffling to find a replacement.

Put aside the political, moral and human issues: these are being thoroughly argued out in the media as you read this. As for nudey selfies, come on, most of us have tried it for a laugh – albeit most probably when we were students. What I want to know is how an intelligent, well-connected and tech-savvy party executive like this could allow his personal instruction video on the subject of unclothed self-taming to get into the wild in the first place.

Griveaux’s official statement to the police claims that he sent the video person-to-person via a certain private messenging system – press reports do not name which one, unfortunately – that would delete the video after one minute. If this is true, it strengthens his case for “invasion of personal privacy”, which has massive punitive outcomes in France thanks to Jacques Chirac who as president beefed up the privacy laws to protect his illegal financial dealings from media scrutiny.

What messaging app was he using? And is he being all that tech-savvy in his belief that his video would self-destruct after 60 seconds, like in some ’70s episode of Mission Impossible? Even in WhatsApp, you have to remember to delete it yourself.

Perhaps he was using a business-focused porn-selfie messenger: a kind of doing-the-business sharing app. It’s the innovative new way of engaging with your contacts. Norbert Spankmoney wants to connect with you! Yes, I bet he does.

Come on, Ben, surely you know that for every ultra-secure, ultra-private, ultra-personal video messaging app, there are a dozen freebie video-grabbing utilities out there. Even if you code it up to prevent screen capture, someone could always video your video, just like they can photograph an onscreen secret document.

Give it up. Nothing is private any more.

November 1, 2019

QotD: The much-ballyhoo’d open office benefits are a lie

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As urban rents crept up and the economy reached full employment over the last decade, American offices got more and more stuffed. On average, workers now get about 194 square feet of office space per person, down about 8 percent since 2009, according to a report by the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. WeWork has been accelerating the trend. At its newest offices, the company can more than double the density of most other offices, giving each worker less than 50 square feet of space.

As a socially anxious introvert with a lot of bespoke workplace rituals (I can’t write without aromatherapy), I used to think I was simply a weirdo for finding modern offices insufferable. I’ve been working from my cozy home office for more than a decade, and now, when I go to the Times‘ headquarters in New York — where, for financial reasons, desks were recently converted from cubicles into open office benches — I cannot for the life of me get anything done.

But after chatting with colleagues, I realized it’s not just me, and not just the Times: Modern offices aren’t designed for deep work. […]

The scourge of open offices is not a new subject for ranting. Open offices were sold to workers as a boon to collaboration — liberated from barriers, stuffed in like sardines, people would chat more and, supposedly, come up with lots of brilliant new ideas. Yet study after study has shown open offices to foster seclusion more than innovation; in order to combat noise, the loss of privacy and the sense of being watched, people in an open office put on headphones, talk less, and feel terrible.

Farhad Manjoo, “Open Offices Are a Capitalist Dead End”, New York Times, 2019-09-25.

June 23, 2019

They managed to get 7% approval? That’s surprising

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael van der Galien reports on a recent poll of registered voters in the United States that will not be happy reading for many social media companies:

Only seven percent are happy with social media companies being able to harvest and sell data without permission or compensation.
Chart from Hill.TV – https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/449576-poll-voters-overwhelmingly-want-more-regulations-on-personal

Thirty-six percent of those polled say there is no scenario imaginable to them in which it’s OK for companies to collect and sell such information. Read that again: one-third of those asked always oppose companies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google collecting and selling such data. Another 36% said they can support the collection and selling of personal data if the individuals involved are compensated for it.

Only 21% say they believe companies should be able to collect and sell personal information of users if they’ve expressly asked for permission. As for selling and collecting it without permission:

    Eight percent of Republicans and also Democratic respondents said that firms should be allowed to sell information without permission. Seven percent of independents agreed.

In other words, this is a bipartisan issue, which makes perfect sense. After all, this issue affects all of us, whether we are conservative or liberal.

Matthew Sheffield has more for Hill.TV:

On Monday, the Washington Post reported that the Federal Trade Commission has been investigating Google’s YouTube division for tracking child users, a practice allegedly in violation of a 1998 law which forbids tracking and targeting children under 13 years of age.

The poll found broad bipartisan agreement on what companies should be allowed to do with consumer data. Eight percent of Republicans and also Democratic respondents said that firms should be allowed to sell information without permission. Seven percent of independents agreed.

About the same number of Democrats and Republicans said that companies should not be able to sell data under any circumstance. Thirty-three percent of GOP respondents took this position, as did 35 percent of Democrats. Forty percent of independents agreed.

Younger voters were more willing to allow companies to sell consumer data than older ones although it was still a minority position. Fourteen percent of respondents who were between 18 and 34 said they supported letting companies compile and sell personal data without permission while only 2 percent of those 65 and above agreed.

May 8, 2019

Your electronic devices and the Canadian Border Services Agency

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

A few years ago, many civil libertarians were upset that the US government allowed warrantless searches of electronic devices at the border, but it was less well known that the Canadian Border Services Agency does the same at the Canadian border:

According to the CBSA, it has the right to search electronic devices at the border for evidence of customs-related offences — without a warrant — just as it does with luggage.

If travellers refuse to provide their passwords, officers can seize their devices.

The CBSA said that between November 2017 and March 2019, 19,515 travellers had their digital devices examined, which represents 0.015 per cent of all cross-border travellers during that period.

During 38 per cent of those searches, officers uncovered evidence of a customs-related offence — which can include possessing prohibited material or undeclared goods, and money laundering, said the agency.

While the laws governing CBSA searches have existed for decades, applying them to digital devices has sparked concern in an era where many travellers carry smartphones full of personal and sometimes very sensitive data.

A growing number of lawyers across Canada argue that warrantless digital device searches at the border are unconstitutional, and the practice should be stopped or at least limited.

“The policy of the CBSA of searching devices isn’t something that is justifiable in a free and democratic society,” said Wright who ran as a Green Party candidate in the 2015 federal election.

“It’s appalling, it’s shocking, and I hope that government, government agencies and the courts, and individual citizens will inform themselves and take action.”

May 4, 2019

Canadian privacy laws

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

Michael Geist asks whether it matters that Canadian privacy laws provide more privacy protection if they can’t actually be enforced:

It has long been an article of faith among privacy watchers that Canada features better privacy protection than the United States. While the U.S. relies on binding enforcement of privacy policies alongside limited sector-specific rules for children and video rentals, Canada’s private sector privacy law (PIPEDA or the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act), which applies broadly to all commercial activities, has received the European Union’s stamp of approval, and has a privacy commissioner charged with investigating complaints.

Despite its strength on paper, my Globe and Mail op-ed notes the Canadian approach emphasizes rules over enforcement, which runs the risk of leaving the public woefully unprotected. PIPEDA establishes requirements to obtain consent for the collection, use and disclosure of personal information, but leaves the Privacy Commissioner of Canada with limited tools to actually enforce the law. In fact, the not-so-secret shortcoming of Canadian law is that the federal commissioner cannot order anyone to do much of anything. Instead, the office is limited to issuing non-binding findings and racing to the federal court if an organization refuses to comply with its recommendations.

The weakness of Canadian law became evident last week when the federal and British Columbia privacy commissioners released the results of their investigation into Facebook arising from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The report details serious privacy violations and includes several recommendations for reform, including new measures to ensure “valid and meaningful consent”, greater transparency for users, and oversight by a third-party monitor for five years.

Facebook’s response? No thanks. The social media giant started by disputing whether the privacy commissioner even had jurisdiction over the matter. After a brief negotiation, the company simply refused to adopt the commissioners’ recommendations. As their report notes “Facebook disagreed with our findings and proposed alternative commitments, which reflected material amendments to our recommendations, in certain instances, altering the very nature of the recommendations themselves, undermining the objectives of our proposed remedies, or outright rejecting the proposed remedy.”

February 1, 2019

Severian explains why he quit teaching

Filed under: Education — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Spoiler: it wasn’t fun anymore. As to why it wasn’t fun, it was (say it together with me) the youth of today:

It’s not that kids today are mal-educated, woefully ignorant, and wouldn’t know serious academic work if it bit them on the ass. Those are all true, of course, but that’s the way it has always been — I have no doubt Plato said the same thing about Aristotle (and Socrates no doubt said it about Plato). In my experience, the rueful phrase “back when I was in college” first escapes your lips approximately 36 hours into graduate school.

It’s not the quantity of ignorance, then, but the quality. Generation Snowflake really are New Soviet Men. If you’ve read about life under Stalin, especially, you’ll know what I’m talking about — at once invincibly self-righteous and cringingly subservient, modern students come across like junior volunteer commissars. If they don’t already know it, it’s by definition not worth knowing… and you’re an asshole — to be avoided, undermined, ignored, or (very, very grudgingly) tolerated, as the situation dictates — for trying to make them “learn” something new.

They’re not sociopaths, exactly, but that’s close enough to what they are that we’ll go with it. For instance: They have no problem asking you to move due dates, even for big things like midterm exams, if it inconveniences them. And just them — the rest of the class should still have to take the exam on Friday; it’s just that she, Suzy Snowflake, has a big sorority function that weekend that she really needs to prepare for, so she should be allowed to take it Monday. Nor do they have a problem with lying on spec, just to see if you’ll bite. Tell Suzy no, she still has to take the exam on Friday like everyone else, and there’s a decent chance you’ll be getting a “dead Grandma” email from her over the weekend — my Grandma died suddenly this Friday, I had to go home for the funeral, I’m so broken up, I’m free to take the makeup exam on Monday.

No, I’m not joking, and yes, you can check Suzy Snowflake’s social media and find pictures of her downing shots at the big sorority do Saturday night. And yes, she knows those pictures are out there; Generation Snowflake regards the concept of “online privacy” like your cat thinks about calculus. It’s just that hey, maybe you won’t check. Worth a shot, right? If anyone should be upset it’s her, for making her feel bad by doubting her story. She’ll saunter into class on Monday like nothing happened…. because to her, nothing did. She threw a Hail Mary, it got intercepted, oh well, what’s new in the Netflix queue?

Faced with that, any attempt at education is like King Canute ordering back the tides. It’s excruciatingly pointless, and that’s why I quit. Life’s too short to spend raging against the inevitable.

January 29, 2019

Bell Canada wants the feds to crack down on Virtual Private Networks

Filed under: Cancon — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist discusses some revelations from Bell’s communications with the federal government during the NAFTA negotiations:

Just days after Bell spoke directly with a CRTC commissioner in the summer of 2017 seeking to present on its site blocking proposal to the full commission, it asked Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland to target VPNs as Canada’s key copyright demand in the trade talks. Its submission to the government stated:

    The Canadian cultural industry has long been significantly harmed by the use of virtual-private-network (VPN) services, which facilitate the circumvention of technological protection measures put in place to respect copyright ownership in other jurisdictions such as Canada…When the ability to enforce rights in national markets breaks down it inevitably favours the largest markets (which become the de facto “global” market) at the expense of smaller open economies like Canada. This harms Canada both economically and culturally.

    Canada should seek rules in NAFTA that require each party to explicitly make it unlawful to offer a VPN service used for the purpose of circumventing copyright, to allow rightsholders from the other parties to enforce this rule, and to confirm that is a violation of copyright if a service effectively makes content widely available in territories in which it does not own the copyright due to an ineffective or insufficiently robust geo-gating system.

This is precisely the concern that was raised in the context of the Bell coalition blocking system given fears it would expand to multi-use services such as VPNs just as a growing number of Internet users are turning to the technology to better safeguard their privacy and prevent online tracking.

In fact, the Bell submission went even further than just VPNs, urging the government to consider additional legal requirements on ISPs to enforce copyright rules:

    Notice-and-notice has been a very incomplete solution to the problem of widespread digital piracy. While we do not believe it should be eliminated, the Government should explore other ways to secure the cooperation of service providers whose services are used for piracy (such as the site-blocking regimes required in Europe and also in place in many other countries throughout the world).

January 28, 2019

On modern notions of privacy

Filed under: History, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Terry Teachout does a daily “Almanac” post of a short quotation he’s collected along the way — generally much shorter snippets than my sometimes epic-length QotD postings. A few weeks ago, he posted a short quotation from Charles Stross on the impending loss of privacy, from his SF novel Rule 34:

“Privacy is a peculiarly twentieth-century concept, an artifact of the Western urban middle classes: Before then, only the super rich could afford it, and since the invention of e-mail and the mobile phone, it has largely slipped away.”

Far be it from me to disagree with Charles, but privacy even for the wealthy in the past was an unusual thing: unless you’re of such a refined and haughty sensibility that you literally don’t notice all the servants in your house. Being wealthy meant not having to do a lot of things for yourself, from getting washed and dressed to opening doors and windows to preparing and serving food. Servants were cheap and plentiful, and were everywhere in the worlds of the wealthy and powerful.

Poor people generally had no privacy because the vast majority of them lived in single-room dwellings with their extended families — and outside the towns, even including some of their livestock. All of your activity was in the close company of your family at pretty much all times.

Middle-class people would have at least a servant or two in residence — that was one of the differentiators that helped indicate their social and economic status. Someone would need to do all the necessary work around the house that we no longer need to do thanks to electricity, plumbing, central heating, and all our modern conveniences. At the very least you’d have a cook, a maid, and a footman. If you had a horse-drawn vehicle (much more of a luxury), you’d need staff for the stable and to operate the vehicle (you wouldn’t drive your own carriage most of the time).

Lower middle-class families would also rarely have anything that a modern person would understand as privacy. Aside from a few servants, most tradesmen would have apprentices living in the house, and the house would generally also be the seat of business. Not anywhere near as crowded as houses of the poor, but not particularly conducive to privacy.

I suspect that our modern notion of privacy would have been so rare in historical terms that only certain monastic orders would even come close to it, in the same way that a relatively brief historical period (the 1940s-1960s) defined what “childhood” was supposed to be for most westerners.

January 11, 2019

“It is profoundly stupid, so most people assume it can’t be. But that’s what the law is now”

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

Apparently the federal government believes that drinking and driving is such a huge, intractable problem that they’ve decided it’s worth sacrificing your right to privacy in order to combat this scourge:

It may sound unbelievable, but Canada’s revised laws on impaired driving could see police demand breath samples from people in bars, restaurants, or even at home. And if you say no, you could be arrested, face a criminal record, ordered to pay a fine, and subjected to a driving suspension.

You could be in violation of the impaired driving laws even two hours after you’ve been driving. Now, the onus is on drivers to prove they weren’t impaired when they were on the road.

This isn’t a simple change of rules, it’s a wholesale abandonment of common sense.

“If you start to drink after you get home, the police show up at your door, they can arrest you, detain you, take you back to the (police station) and you can be convicted because your blood alcohol concentration was over 80 milligrams (per 100 millilitres of blood) in the two hours after you drove.”

Changes to Section 253 of the Criminal Code of Canada took effect in December giving police greater powers to seek breath samples from drivers who might be driving while impaired.

Under the new law, police officers no longer need to have a “reasonable suspicion” the driver had consumed alcohol. Now, an officer can demand a sample from drivers for any reason at any time.

But there’s no possible way this could be abused, right?

“It’s a serious erosion of civil liberties,” said Toronto criminal defence lawyer Michael Engel, whose practice focuses almost exclusively on impaired driving cases.

Engel said someone could be unjustly prosecuted. If a disgruntled business associate or spouse called police with a complaint and an officer went to investigate at the persons’ home or place of business, police could demand a breath sample.

“Husbands or wives in the course of separations would drop the dime on their partner,” Engel said, describing the potential for the law’s abuse by those calling police out of spite, for example.

January 6, 2019

“Carding” is an infringement of rights that does nothing to reduce crime

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

Chris Selley wonders why the blatantly unconstitutional practice of “carding” people without even a hint of suspicion that they’ve done anything wrong was instituted in the first place:

… it’s far easier to make a case that carding has no effect at all on serious crime than that it has a huge one. But even if previous carding practice had “worked,” even if the new regulation had stopped it from working, it barely even amounts to a defence. As [Justice Michael] Tulloch notes, “the regulation simply gives effect to the existing law that people do not have to provide their identification when there are no reasonable grounds to believe the person has committed an offence.”

If carding “worked,” in other words, it relied on citizens not knowing or caring about their already-existing right to be left alone whilst minding their own business, or being too intimidated to exercise that right — as well they might be. Politely refusing an armed man or woman’s request to identify yourself is no small thing, all the more so if you have “nothing to hide.”

The problems inherent in such a situation are myriad. There are quantifiable harms: People were denied jobs and security clearances, and in at least one case menaced by child services, thanks to information stored in police databases that implicated them in nothing other than being included in a police database. And there are more existential harms. Imagine growing up with a squeaky-clean nose yet constantly feeling like a person of police interest. It’s profoundly alienating, especially when targets quite logically conclude, based on well-documented statistics if not their own intuition, that they’re being harassed because of their race, skin colour or some other innate characteristic. It’s no less insidious if the bias is unconscious; it might even be more so.

Nothing good can come from it, and plenty bad. It hinders police in solving crimes, for one thing: “When a segment of society believes that it has been unfairly targeted by the police,” Tulloch writes, “it will delegitimize the police in their eyes.” All those desperate calls for witnesses to come forward will be met more skeptically. Tulloch cites research showing “inappropriate interaction with police” can even “desensitize young people from guilt regarding potential acts of crime.”

November 21, 2018

Statistics Canada’s instrumentalist philosophy

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

In the Financial Post, Bruce Pardy discusses the motivation behind Statistics Canada’s recently revealed demand for the private financial records of half a million Canadians:

Recently it was revealed that Statistics Canada sought to obtain the private banking information of half a million Canadians without their knowledge or consent. Jennifer Robson, professor of political management at Carleton University, in an interview with the CBC, justified the data sweep on the grounds that governments need this information to make good policy. But don’t be concerned, she said, it is not for ideological purposes, since Statistics Canada is ideologically neutral. That made me laugh. The very idea of policy based on data reflects an instrumentalist belief that governments should solve social problems by political means. That requires an ideological confidence in the administrative state, to which the agency is a handmaiden.

Ideology is not a dirty word. An ideology is merely a worldview, a lens through which to perceive society. Political parties, by definition, each have one (and sometimes extra ones for special occasions). But it is another thing for a public agency to act independently in furtherance of its own ideology while pretending to be neutral.

Statistics Canada’s deep dive into banking records — presently on hold while federal privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien investigates its legality — appears not to have been directed by government officials but was undertaken on its own initiative. The agency’s decision is consistent with a conviction that the more personal data available to government, the better off we will be; that governments are benevolent; that private financial matters call for public policy management; and that a bigger government is a better government. A commitment to social policy, wrote Milton Friedman “involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scare resources to alternative uses.”

November 4, 2018

Statistics Canada wants to become “Stasi”-tistics Canada by grabbing personal financial data

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

“Stasi” was the abbreviation for the German Democratic Republic’s State Security Service, East Germany’s successor to the Gestapo. Not only did they perform similar functions to the Gestapo, they were even more involved in spying on Germans than their Nazi predecessors had been. Wikipedia says that “the Stasi employed one secret policeman for every 166 East Germans; by comparison, the Gestapo deployed one secret policeman per 2,000 people. As ubiquitous as this was, the ratios swelled when informers were factored in: counting part-time informers, the Stasi had one agent per 6.5 people. This comparison led Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal to call the Stasi even more oppressive than the Gestapo.” Statistics Canada doesn’t want to get the full story on us by physically spying — that’s the RCMP’s job — but they do want to grab huge amounts of our personal financial data to “ensur[e that] government programs remain relevant and effective for Canadians”. Terence Corcoran explains why this might not be such a good idea:

When news broke earlier this year that the accounts of maybe 600,000 Canadian Facebook users had been compromised, Ottawa swung into action to shut down this alarming example of creeping surveillance capitalism. Scott Brison, then acting minister of democratic institutions, said his government had dispatched Canada’s national spy agency to make sure the privacy of Canadians had not been compromised. “Social media platforms have a responsibility to protect the privacy and personal data of citizens,” said Brison.

But when news broke last week that Statistics Canada wants to expand its inventory of data on Canadians by collecting real hard-core personal information on the banking activities of 500,000 Canadians annually, the Trudeau government was suddenly not at all concerned about privacy breaches or even the principle of privacy protection. Instead of waving a red flag over the prospect that StatCan would end up with computers full of private financial details on millions of citizens, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau brushed off privacy concerns, which he implied take a back seat to the government’s need for “high quality and timely data.” Such data, he said, are “critical to ensuring government programs remain relevant and effective for Canadians.”

Spoken like a true central planner and enthusiastic purveyor of policy-based evidence making. Nobody seems to know why StatCan wants to begin collecting personal banking information on individual Canadians, information that Canada’s bankers are rightly reluctant to provide. In the all-new era of fintech and blockchain, the great concern among regulators is how data privacy will be protected. At StatCan, the concern is: “How do we get our hands on the data?”

[…]

StatCan’s assurances on privacy protection are not all that reassuring. In a document dated October 2018 — obtained by David Akin at Global News— the chief statistician describes his agency’s “Generic Privacy Impact Assessment related to the acquisition of financial transactions information.” It is clear that the names of millions of Canadians, their bank account numbers and transactions, their bill payments and personal activities, will be collected and stored in government computers. StatCan is not merely getting useful generic data on the spending and banking habits of Canadians, it is collecting the actual spending and banking habits and names of individual Canadians.

It is one thing to collect and analyze statistics based on anonymous data. It is quite another to “require” — Arora’s word — that the banks provide “individual payments and income history.” Even though billions of bits of private, individual and personal information will be collected, StatCan says that, “Under no circumstances will the personal information obtained from financial institutions be used to perform credit, expenditure or income checks on individual Canadians.” He said none of the resulting statistical reports will include any personal data.

That’s not good enough.

September 29, 2018

‘We Are Always on the Verge of Chaos:’ The PJ O’Rourke Interview

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

ReasonTV
Published on 28 Sep 2018
The libertarian humorist talks about his new book, how to drink in war zones, and why the Chinese are more American than most U.S. citizens.

Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.

—————-

For the last 45 years, no writer has taken a bigger blowtorch to the sacred cows of American life than libertarian humorist P.J. O’Rourke.

As a writer at National Lampoon in the 1970s, he co-authored best-selling parodies of high school yearbooks and Sunday newspapers. For Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and other publications, O’Rourke traveled to war zones and other disaster areas, chronicling the folly of military and economic intervention. In 1991, he came out with Parliament of Whores, which explained why politicians should be the last people to have any power. Subtitled “A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government,” this international bestseller probably minted more libertarians than any book since Free to Choose or Atlas Shrugged. More recently, O’Rourke published a critical history of his own Baby Boomer generation and How The Hell Did This Happen?, a richly reported account of Donald Trump’s unexpected 2016 presidential victory.

O’Rourke’s new book, None of My Business, explains “why he’s not rich and neither are you.” It’s partly the result of hanging out with wealthy money managers and businessmen and what they’ve taught him over the years about creating meaning and value in an ever richer and crazier world. It covers everything from social media to learning how to drink in war zones to why the Chinese may be more American than U.S. citizens. He also explains why even though he doesn’t understand or like a lot of things about modern technology, he doesn’t fear Amazon or Google, especially compared to people who are calling for Socialism 2.0.

I sat down with O’Rourke to talk about all that, the good and bad of Donald Trump, and why being an “old white man” just isn’t what it used to be (and why he’s OK with that).

Edited by Ian Keyser. Cameras by Jim Epstein and Mark McDaniel. Intro by Todd Krainin.

Please Listen Carefully” by Jahzzar used under a Creative Commons license.

September 11, 2018

Fear the Internet-of-Things

Filed under: Business, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Martin Giles talks to Bruce Schneier about his new book, Click Here to Kill Everybody:

The title of your book seems deliberately alarmist. Is that just an attempt to juice sales?

It may sound like publishing clickbait, but I’m trying to make the point that the internet now affects the world in a direct physical manner, and that changes everything. It’s no longer about risks to data, but about risks to life and property. And the title really points out that there’s physical danger here, and that things are different than they were just five years ago.

How’s this shift changing our notion of cybersecurity?

Our cars, our medical devices, our household appliances are all now computers with things attached to them. Your refrigerator is a computer that keeps things cold, and a microwave oven is a computer that makes things hot. And your car is a computer with four wheels and an engine. Computers are no longer just a screen we turn on and look at, and that’s the big change. What was computer security, its own separate realm, is now everything security.

You’ve come up with a new term, “Internet+,” to encapsulate this shift. But we already have the phrase “internet of things” to describe it, don’t we?

I hated having to create another buzzword, because there are already too many of them. But the internet of things is too narrow. It refers to the connected appliances, thermostats, and other gadgets. That’s just a part of what we’re talking about here. It’s really the internet of things plus the computers plus the services plus the large databases being built plus the internet companies plus us. I just shortened all this to “Internet+.”

Let’s focus on the “us” part of that equation. You say in the book that we’re becoming “virtual cyborgs.” What do you mean by that?

We’re already intimately tied to devices like our phones, which we look at many times a day, and search engines, which are kind of like our online brains. Our power system, our transportation network, our communications systems, are all on the internet. If it goes down, to a very real extent society grinds to a halt, because we’re so dependent on it at every level. Computers aren’t yet widely embedded in our bodies, but they’re deeply embedded in our lives.

Can’t we just unplug ourselves somewhat to limit the risks?

That’s getting harder and harder to do. I tried to buy a car that wasn’t connected to the internet, and I failed. It’s not that there were no cars available like this, but the ones in the range I wanted all came with an internet connection. Even if it could be turned off, there was no guarantee hackers couldn’t turn it back on remotely.

Hackers can also exploit security vulnerabilities in one kind of device to attack others, right?

There are lots of examples of this. The Mirai botnet exploited vulnerabilities in home devices like DVRs and webcams. These things were taken over by hackers and used to launch an attack on a domain-name server, which then knocked a bunch of popular websites offline. The hackers who attacked Target got into the retailer’s payment network through a vulnerability in the IT systems of a contractor working on some of its stores.

August 9, 2018

“… here’s your nut graf – this is about Facebook death”

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

Are you on Facebook? Or perhaps it’s more proper to ask “are you still on Facebook?” J.D. Jagiello used to be:

To Whom It May Concern:

I was already tired of your rants about food, bad-hair days, roommates, feeling too many feelings, the public transit, lost IKEA tools, TV shows, wives, husbands and children and, above all, Trump (that’s like ranting about having an asshole—we all have it). I was tired of your quirky disregard of punctuation and how it’s for the olds. Guys you don’t need it to understand what I’m trying to say, so here’s your nut graf – this is about Facebook death.

I was tired of the quizzes: What Kind of Pizza Are You?

And the Inspirational Quotes. “It’s during our darkest hours we must focus on the light” (—Aristotle, supposedly). Here’s mine: “There’s no better time than now to delete.” (Position this one against a background of a man in canoe swimming away to a proxy of freedom.)

Shares about yoga, running, god? Ugh.

“Funny” kid dialogues: no. (But I’ve done it myself, yeah.)

I read your high-brow discussions about postmodernism or grammar, out of my leftover Good-For-You homework sense of obligation. I didn’t go to the right schools to be able to join in and I don’t retain information easily. I rarely felt philistine-aggressive about it; I accepted that I didn’t have the membership.

On a positive note, I always looked at your baby pictures because I like babies. I will miss the baby pictures. I won’t miss twice-a-week updates on some of those babies.

I also never got sick of memes or videos of animals, or articles about octopuses or archaeological digs or stupid but cleverly funny reviews of your mundane experiences on the bus or your convos with grandma. On a serious note: I am also passionate about health policies, and Indigenous issues in my country and have a lot of educated friends who post about it — stuff that doesn’t even make it to mainstream media — so I liked to get my information that way.

I used to post status updates on Facebook that many people found interesting or funny, and sometimes I shared opinions, and it was a good place to feel socially connected during times of isolation (a new baby, illness). But about two years ago or so, I stopped posting about anything serious, though I still asked for recommendations, innocent stuff. Occasionally—an old reflex—I would post something of more substance but then delete quickly because Facebook became the place of who knows who is watching.

I’ve tapered off my Facebook activities over the last few months. I check my feed at most once per day, and I find myself scrolling quickly past “the same old stuff”. I occasionally leave comments on some of my friends’ posts, but for the most part, I’m not getting into conversations — especially on anything faintly political — and I don’t much miss it. I stopped automatically posting links to my blog earlier this year … and only a couple of people seem to have noticed. That tracks well with my blog statistics which show very little of my traffic comes from Facebook and that number didn’t drop very far after I stopped posting links. I still use a plugin to auto-Tweet my blog posts, but outside a few Vikings fan groups, I’ve never really been interested in conversations on that platform.

Facebook’s algorithms seem to have noticed my slow disengagement, as I’m now getting reminders and notifications when friends post much more often than I remember in the past. I’m even getting the odd “Friend A responded to Friend B’s post” stuff, which is certainly a new attempt to entice me to log in again.

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