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.
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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 29, 2018
September 11, 2018
Fear the Internet-of-Things
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
July 4, 2018
Open office plans do not increase personal interaction among workers
From the abstract of a recent study:
Example of an open plan office
Photo by VeronicaTherese via Wikimedia Commons.
Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into ‘open’, transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes. In two intervention-based field studies of corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office spaces, we empirically examined — using digital data from advanced wearable devices and from electronic communication servers — the effect of open office architectures on employees’ face-to-face, email and instant messaging (IM) interaction patterns. Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM. This is the first study to empirically measure both face-to-face and electronic interaction before and after the adoption of open office architecture. The results inform our understanding of the impact on human behaviour of workspaces that trend towards fewer spatial boundaries.
This certainly matches my own experiences working at companies that changed their offices to more open or fully open spaces. The accountants may have loved the new spaces as being less expensive, but one of the key advantages claimed for open designs does not appear to be true.
H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.
April 15, 2018
April 6, 2018
QotD: Bordertown, USA
Welcome to Bordertown, USA. Population: 200 million. Expect occasional temporary population increases from travelers arriving from other countries. Your rights as a US citizen are indeterminate within 100 miles of US borders. They may be respected. They may be ignored. But courts have decided that the “right” to do national security stuff — as useless as most its efforts are — trumps the rights of US citizens.
Tim Cushing, “Wall Street Journal Reporter Hassled At LA Airport; Successfully Prevents DHS From Searching Her Phones”, Techdirt, 2016-07-22.
March 30, 2018
March 29, 2018
March 24, 2018
March 18, 2018
Border privacy issue should (eventually) get to the US Supreme Court
In Reason, Damon Root reports on two duelling precedents about US citizens’ right to privacy and the government’s interest in what’s on your smartphone when you re-enter the United States:
In its 2014 decision in Riley v. California [PDF], the U.S. Supreme Court held that law enforcement officials violated the Fourth Amendment when they searched an arrestee’s cell phone without a warrant. “Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “With all they contain and all they may reveal, they hold for many Americans ‘the privacies of life.’ The fact that technology now allows an individual to carry such information in his hand does not make the information any less worthy of the protection for which the Founders fought.”
But what about when an American citizen is returning home from abroad and U.S. border officials want to thoroughly search the contents of that person’s cell phone? Does the Fourth Amendment require the government to get a warrant before searching cell phones at the border? According to a decision issued this week by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, the answer to that question is no.
[…] a divided panel of the 11th Circuit took a different view. “The forensic searches of Vergara’s cell phones occurred at the border, not as searches incident to arrest,” declared the majority opinion of Judge William H. Pryor. “And border searches never require a warrant or probable cause.”
Writing in dissent, Judge Jill Pryor wrote that while she agrees “with the majority that the government’s interest in protecting the nation is at its peak at the border,” she disagrees “with the majority’s dismissal of the significant privacy interests implicated in cell phone searches.” In Riley, she noted, the Supreme Court recognized “the significant privacy interests that individuals hold in the contents of their cell phones.” And in her view, “the privacy interests implicated in forensic searches are even greater than those involved in the manual searches at issue in Riley.” If it were up to her, “a forensic search of a cell phone at the border [should require] a warrant supported by probable cause.”
One thing is clear: We have not heard the last of this debate. Either this case, or one very much like it, is almost certainly headed for the Supreme Court.
November 18, 2017
QotD: A key drawback of a cashless society
When I was just starting out as a journalist, the State of New York swooped down and seized all the money out of one of my bank accounts. It turned out — much later, after a series of telephone calls — that they had lost my tax return for the year that I had resided in both Illinois and New York, discovered income on my federal tax return that had not appeared on my New York State tax return, sent some letters to that effect to an old address I hadn’t lived at for some time, and neatly lifted all the money out of my bank. It took months to get it back.
I didn’t starve, merely fretted. In our world of cash, friends and family can help out someone in a situation like that. In a cashless society, the government might intercept any transaction in which someone tried to lend money to the accused.
Unmonitored resources like cash create opportunities for criminals. But they also create a sort of cushion between ordinary people and a government with extraordinary powers. Removing that cushion leaves people who aren’t criminals vulnerable to intrusion into every remote corner of their lives.
We probably won’t notice how much this power grows every time we swipe a card instead of paying cash. The danger is that by the time we do notice, it will be too late. If we want to move toward a cashless society — and apparently we do — then we also need to think seriously about limiting the ability of the government to use the payments system as an instrument to control the behavior of its citizens.
Megan McArdle, “After Cash: All Fun and Games Until Somebody Loses a Bank Account”, Bloomberg View, 2016-03-15.
October 24, 2017
More on Quebec’s niqab ban
Ted Campbell is emphatically against Quebec’s attempt to ban facial coverings for Islamic women:
These laws are stupid … but they are worse than stupid, they are an assault on individual liberty by a bunch of political nincompoops.
Now, there are a number of variants of head and face coverings, they are especially common among some Muslim women …
… and some restrictions on some of them in some situations are, pretty clearly, justified on common sense or security-identification grounds. We, most of us, can probably agree that a lady should not wear a burqa or chador or even a niqab when she’s driving a car (it might restrict her vision) or when she is applying for a driving licence, which is a pretty common form of recognized identification … and it seems pretty clear that airport security should insist that a burqa or chador must be removed for security screening (to permit positive facial recognition).
But, why the hell does the state ~ the BIG, collective, state ~ care what any individual wears when (s)he boards a bus. It ought to care that she deposits the correct fare, of course, or taps her card to pay, but why does the state care if her face is covered? It’s arrant nonsense, and it is an infringement on a fundamental right.
Reminder: you (and I, and Muslim women, too) have lots of rights but four of them are quite fundamental: life, liberty and property as defined by John Locke in 17th century England and privacy, as defined by Brandies and Warren in 19th century America. These rights all accrue to all individuals, only, and they, those individuals, need to have their fundamental rights protected against constant threats from collectives including religions, societies and states, themselves. These new laws, passed by big, collectivist states, are threats to individual liberties and must be challenged and overturned. Liberals, like Justin Trudeau, will not do it because they are progressives, not liberals, and because people like Justin Trudeau cannot think about fundamental rights … only about partisan, short term, political advantage.
Let me be clear about my own position:
- Women may wear whatever they want for their own (good or not so good) reasons; but
- It is wrong for anyone (including any father or husband or rabbi or provincial premier) to force women to dress in some certain way for social (including political) or religious reasons.
Your religion is a wholly private matter between you and your gods … you may never try to impose your beliefs on others, including your wife and children.
September 8, 2017
Google’s unbridled market power and ability to quash critics and competitors
In Wired, Rowland Manthorpe reports on another case of Google roughing up someone for being critical of their current “be evil” business philosophy:
The latest allegation against Google? Jon von Tetzchner, creator of the web browser Opera, says the search giant deliberately undermined his new browser, Vivaldi.
In a blogpost titled, “My friends at Google: it is time to return to not being evil,” von Tetzchner accuses the US firm of blocking Vivaldi’s access to Google AdWords, the advertisements that run alongside search results, without warning or proper explanation.
According to Von Tetzchner, the problem started in late May. Speaking at the Oslo Freedom Forum, the Icelandic programmer criticised big tech companies’ attitude toward personal data, calling for a ban on location tracking on Facebook and Google. Two days later, he suddenly found Vivaldi’s Google AdWords campaigns had been suspended. “Was this just a coincidence?” he writes. “Or was it deliberate, a way of sending us a message?” He concludes: “Timing spoke volumes.”
Von Tetzchner got in touch with Google to try and resolve the issue. The result? What he calls “a clarification masqueraded in the form of vague terms and conditions.” The particular issue was the end-user license agreement (EULA), the legal contract between a software manufacturer and a user. Google wanted Vivaldi to add one to its website. So it did. But Google had further complaints.
According to emails shown to WIRED, Google wanted Vivaldi to add an EULA “within the frame of every download button”. The addition was small – a link below the button directing people to “terms” – but on the web, where every pixel matters, this was a potential competitive disadvantage. Most gallingly, Chrome, Google’s own web browser, didn’t display a EULA on its landing pages. Google also asked Vivaldi to add detailed information to help people uninstall it, with another link, also under the button.
The links Vivaldi says it was forced to add to comply with Google’s demands (image via Wired)
August 12, 2017
Why The Government Shouldn’t Break WhatsApp
Published on 3 Jul 2017
Encryption backdoors – breaking WhatsApp and iMessage’s security to let the government stop Bad Things – sounds like a reasonable idea. Here’s why it isn’t.
A transcript of this video’s available here: https://www.facebook.com/notes/tom-scott/why-the-government-shouldnt-break-whatsapp/1378434365572557/
August 1, 2017
Ontario adopts voluntary self-surveillance app from CARROT Insights
I often joke about how inexpensive it appears to be to “influence” politicians, but it’s only fair to point out that the voters those easily influenced politicians represent are even more easy to influence:
Ontario announced earlier this month that it will become the fourth Canadian government to fund a behavioral modification application that rewards users for making “good choices” in regards to health, finance, and the environment. The Carrot Rewards smartphone app, which will receive $1.5 million from the Ontario government, credits users’ accounts with points toward the reward program of their choice in exchange for reaching step goals, taking quizzes and surveys, and engaging in government-approved messages.
The app, funded by the Canadian federal government and developed by Toronto-based company CARROT Insights in 2015, is sponsored by a number of companies offering reward points for their services as an incentive to “learn” how to improve wellness and budget finances. According to CARROT Insights, “All offers are designed by sources you can trust like the BC Ministry of Health, Newfoundland and Labrador Government, the Heart and Stroke Foundation, the Canadian Diabetes Association, and YMCA.” Users can choose to receive rewards for companies including SCENE, Aeroplan, Petro-Canada, or More Rewards, a loyalty program that partners with other businesses.
It’ll be interesting if they share the uptake of this new smartphone app … just how many of us are willing to let the government track just about all of our actions in exchange for “rewards”.
In order to use the app, users are giving Carrot Insights and the federal government permission to “access and collect information from your mobile device, including but not limited to, geo-location data, accelerometer/gyroscope data, your mobile device’s camera, microphone, contacts, calendar and Bluetooth connectivity in order to operate additional functionalities of the Services.”
Founder and CEO of CARROT Insights Andreas Souvaliotis launched the app in 2015 “with a focus on health but the company and its partner governments quickly realized it was effective at modifying behavior in other areas as well,” according to CTV News.
