Author: Christopher Parsons

Policy wonk. Torontonian. Photographer. Not necessarily in that order.

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AirPods Max Ain’t For Me

Reading early first impressions of the AirPods Max, such as the ones by Matthew Panzarino and John Grueber, has made clear that Apple’s designers have biased the new headphones for audio quality at the expense of everything else that tends to be found in consumer-grade headphones. Reading the impressions, they definitely make it sound like the AirPods Max are designed for someone who’s just going to sit in a stationary position and enjoy the sounds they produce. That is…not how I use my headphones.

What design properties am I looking for? I want a H1 chip for easy shifting between my Apple devices, active noise cancelation, decent-enough battery and sound, and the ability to wear them around the house, at the gym (whenever that’s possible again), and walking around the city without getting ear fatigue. While I’d love to have 3D sound, that just isn’t a requirement in my life with how I tend to use headphones to listen to music and podcasts.

Given local sales on Beats Solo Pro at the time, I think that my decision is made, though I admit some small degree of worry about ear fatigue that can apparently crop up when wearing the Solos Pro for prolonged periods of time.

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Links

Links for December 7-11, 2020

Links for December 7-11, 2020

  • Frustrating the state: Surveillance, public health, and the role of civil society || “…surveillance in times of crisis poses another threat. By granting states unfettered power through emergency orders, data collected through digital surveillance could be shared across agencies and used for purposes beyond the original intention of fighting COVID-19. In states where democratic backsliding has been underway, surveillance could be used to deter dissent and silence government critics. According to Verisk Maplecroft, a risk consultancy firm, Asia is now the highest risk region in both their “Right to Privacy” and “Freedom of Opinion and Expression” indices as “strongmen” in Asia capitalize on the pandemic.” // Surveillance is, almost by its nature, inequitable and the potential harms linked with pandemic surveillance are neither novel nor unforeseeable.
  • Rebecca Solnit: On not meeting nazis halfway || “… the truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists. And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists, rapists and feminists, synagogue massacrists and Jews, xenophobes and immigrants, delusional transphobes and trans people. Who the hell wants unity with Nazis until and unless they stop being Nazis?”
  • Instagram’s latest middle finger || “…Instagram is now nearly completely unrecognizable from the app that I fell in love with. The feed of images is still key, but with posting now shoved into a corner, how long until that feed becomes a secondary part of the service?” // Cannot agree more.
  • The Epicenter // The storytelling for this piece on the experiences of the Covid-19 outbreak is poorer areas of New York by the NYT is simultaneously beautiful and heartbreaking.
  • Poor security at online proctoring company may have put student data at risk || “Kumar, CEO of Proctortrack’s parent company Verificient, says students have “valid concerns” and that he sympathizes with their discomfort. Proctoring software is “intrusive by nature” he says, but “if there’s no proctoring solution, institutions will have to totally change how they provide exams. Often you can’t do that given the time and limitations we have.”” // Justifying producing a gross product on the basis that if you didn’t other organizations would have to behave more ethically is a very curious, and weird, way of defending your company’s very existence.
  • China rethinking its role || “China’s use of war memory to shape its international position has been much less effective overseas than it has at home. However, the significance of its efforts is real, and may become more effective over time. China wants to create a global narrative around itself which shares a common understanding of the modern world – the idea that 1945 is the beginning of the current order – but places China at the heart of the creation and management of that order. The narrative had more power during an era when the US, anomalously, had a leader who cared little for the order shaped by America in Asia since 1945. Now that a president with a more long-range view of the role of the United States is about to take office, we may see something different again: two differing versions of what 1945 meant in Asia, as defined by Beijing and Washington – and the competition for moral standing that comes from the embrace of that legacy.” // This is a fascinating recounting of how China is re-interpreting activities undertaken by Nationalist forces during World War Two, today, to justify its efforts to be more assertive in the international order today. Like so much in China, understanding how narratives are built and their domestic and foreign rationales and perceived utility is critical to appreciate the country’s foreign policy ambitions, and those ambitions’ potentials and limitations.
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Links

Links for November 23-December 4, 2020

  • When AI sees a man, it thinks “official.” a woman? “smile”| “The AI services generally saw things human reviewers could also see in the photos. But they tended to notice different things about women and men, with women much more likely to be characterized by their appearance. Women lawmakers were often tagged with “girl” and “beauty.” The services had a tendency not to see women at all, failing to detect them more often than they failed to see men.” // Studies like this help to reveal the bias baked deep into the algorithms that are meant to be ‘impartial’, with this impartiality truly constituting a mathwashing of existent biases that are pernicious to 50% of society.
  • The ungentle joy of spider sex | “Spectacular though all this is, extreme sexual size dimorphism is rare even in spiders. “It’s an aberration,” Kuntner says. Even so, as he and Coddington describe in the Annual Review of Entomology , close examination of the evolutionary history of spiders indicates that eSSD has evolved at least 16 times, and in one major group some lineages have repeatedly lost it and regained it. The phenomenon is so intriguing it’s kept evolutionary biologists busy for decades. How and why did something so weird evolve?” // This is a truly wild, and detailed, discussion of the characteristics of spider evolution and intercourse.
  • Miley Cyrus-Plastic Hearts // Consider me shocked, but I’m really liking Cyrus’ newest album.
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Aside Links

2020.12.4

With Apple preparing to potentially update some products for next Tuesday, I’m really hoping that they end up announcing a refreshed AppleTV!

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Photo Essay Photography

Pre-Snowfall Hike

Around the Bend by Christopher Parsons
Latent Speed by Christopher Parsons
Curb Your Acceleration by Christopher Parsons
Apocalypse Stronghold by Christopher Parsons
On Guard Against Z by Christopher Parsons
Standing Firm by Christopher Parsons
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Links for November 16-20, 2020

  • The future of U.S. Foreign intelligence surveillance. “Despite President Trump’s many tweets about wiretapping, his administration failed to support meaningful reforms to traditional FISA, Section 702, and EO 12333. Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s foreign intelligence apparatus has continued to expand, violating Americans’ constitutional rights and threatening a $7.1 trillion transatlantic economic relationship. Given the stakes, the next President and Congress must prioritize surveillance reform in 2021.” // I can’t imagine an American administration passing even a small number of the proposed legislative updates suggested in this article. Still, it is helpful to reflect on why such measures should be passed to protect global citizens’ rights and, more broadly, why they almost certainly will not be passed into law.
  • Why Obama fears for our democracy. “But more than anything, I wanted this book to be a way in which people could better understand the world of politics and foreign policy, worlds that feel opaque and inaccessible. Part of my goal is describing quirks and people’s family backgrounds, just to remind people that these are humans and you can understand them and make judgments.” // The whole interview is a good read, and may signal some of the pressures on tech policy the incoming administration may face from their own former leader, but more than anything I think that Obama’s relentless effort to contextualize, socialize, and humanize politics speaks to the underlying ethos he took with him into office. And, more than that, it showcases that he truly is hopeful in an almost Kantian sense; throughout the interview I couldn’t help but feel I was reading someone who had been deeply touched by “Perpetual Peace” amongst other essays in Kant’s Political Writings.
  • Ralfy’s world – whisky magazine. “At a time when the debate over new and old media is raging full on, and questions are asked about integrity and independence, Ralfy is just getting on with it – blogging randomly in the true spirit of the medium and making do it yourself recordings about whiskies he has tasted. Or to put it in his words: “My malt mission over the last two years has been a website called ralfy.com for all things whisky, so long as it’s unorthodox, marketing-light, informative, independent, educational …and entertaining.” // I’ve learned, and continue to learn, a lot from Ralfy’s YouTube channel. But I have to admit it’s more than a bit uncomfortable figuring out the ethics of watching videos from a guy who has inaccurate understandings of vaccines and the pandemics alike. His knowledge of whiskey is on the whole excellent. His knowledge of epidemiology and immunology…let’s just say less so.
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Provincial Governments Have Failed to Protect Us

Lauren Dobson-Hughes.

“Across the country, governments failed to invest enough resources in test, trace and isolate systems. In most provinces, they did not make timely investments in school ventilation or hire more teachers, or prepare the restaurant industry for prolonged winter closing, or shut down workplaces that exposed minimum-wage workers to infection, or hire more long-term care home workers. They issued conflicting, byzantine communications to individual people that boiled down to ‘don’t do any activities unless you’re paying a private company to host them’.

Provincial governments did not come up with compassionate policies that addressed structural barriers to people staying safe. They came up with “personal responsibility,” telling citizens to knock it off or they’ll turn the car around right now. The only realm of life governments seemed willing to regulate was our social lives. It does no good being scolded to stay home if you live in a tiny, cold apartment and have to take public transit to your low-paid, unsafe workplace because you need the income.

As someone who lives in a city going into lockdown I cannot agree more strongly.

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Reviews

Apple Services Subscriptions Confusion

Perhaps I should know better than to adopt any Apple product—or service offering— until the company has worked through the bugs and inconsistencies in whatever it’s selling. Nonetheless, I signed up for Apple One because it actually was a bit cheaper than the services I was already paying for, plus came with some additional storage.

However, the pricing/subscription rollover is incredibly weird. I signed up for Apple One, which was supposed to shift my individual subscriptions to the bundle offering, but that seemingly hasn’t happened. So now I have the pleasure of once again—twice in two months!—trying to resolve billing weirdness in Apple’s part. As lovely as Apple’s customer support representatives are, this is not the delightful experience I signed up for.

I get that Apple is historically bad at services. But this is a level of incompetence that I’d expect of a telecom company and not one of the largest and most customer-focused companies in the world. And, perhaps more problematically for Apple, it definitely means that I’m not about to recommend Apple One to anyone in the near future given that Apple can’t even get their payment processes reliably worked out.

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Links Writing

To What Extent is China’s Control of Information a Cyber Weakness?

Lawfare has a good piece on How China’s control of information is a cyber weakness:

“Policymakers need to be aware that successful competition in cyberspace depends on having intrinsic knowledge of the consequences a democratic or authoritarian mode of government has for a country’s cyber defense. Western leaders have for a long time prioritized security of physical infrastructure. This might translate into better cyber defense capabilities, but it leaves those governments open to information operations. At the same time, more authoritarian-leaning countries may have comparative advantages when it comes to defending against information operations but at the cost of perhaps being more vulnerable to cyber network attack and exploitation. Authoritarian governments may tolerate this compromise on security due to their prioritization of surveillance and censorship practices.

I have faith that professionals in the intelligence community have previously assessed this divide between what democracies have developed defences against versus what countries like China have prepared against. Nonetheless this is a helpful summary of the two sides of the coin.

I’m less certain of a subsequent argument made in the same piece:

These diverging emphases on different aspects of cybersecurity by democratic and authoritarian governments are not new. However, Western governments have put too much emphasis on the vulnerability of democracies to information operations, and not enough attention has been dedicated to the vulnerability of authoritarian regimes in their cyber defenses. It is crucial for democratic governments to assess the impact of information controls and regime security considerations in authoritarian-leaning countries for their day-to-day cyber operations.”

I really don’t think that intelligence community members in the West are ignorant of the vulnerabilities that may be present in China or other authoritarian jurisdictions. While the stories in Western media emphasize how effective foreign operators are extracting data from Western companies and organizations, intelligence agencies in the Five Eyes are also deeply invested in penetrating strategically and tactically valuable digital resources abroad. One of the top-line critiques against the Five Eyes is that they have invested heavily on offence over defence, and the article from Lawfare doesn’t really ever take that up. Instead, and inaccurately to my mind, it suggests that cyber defence is something done with a truly serious degree of resourcing in the Five Eyes. I have yet to find someone in the intelligence community that would seriously assert a similar proposition.

One thing that isn’t assessed in the article, and which would have been interesting to see considered, is the extent(s) to which the relative dearth of encryption in China better enables their defenders to identify and terminate exfiltration of data from their networks. Does broader visibility into data networks enhance Chinese defenders’ operations? I have some doubts, but it would be curious to see the arguments for and against that position.

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Unintentionally Supporting Bad Policy

A way forward for U.S. Policy on TikTok:

“Hu Xijin, the editor of the Chinese state media outlet the Global Times, weighed in recently on the most recent merger proposal. “The US restructuring of TikTok’s stake and actual control should be used as a model and promoted globally,” remarked Hu on Twitter. “Overseas operation of companies such as Google, Facebook shall all undergo such restructure and be under actual control of local companies for security concerns.”

It’s not exactly a good sign for Chinese state media to tout a U.S. play designed to be “tough on China” as a model for global behavior. The United States may be bumbling its way into a precedent the consequences of which it has yet to anticipate. “

This was exactly the concern that was raised by experts in North America the second after the Trump administration proposed its bumblingly-stupid approach to TikTok. With the American policy in place it’s going to be that much harder for Western companies operating in China to have convincing arguments that they shouldn’t need to partner with Chinese organizations tans engage in manufacturing, technology, or intellectual property disclosures as a condition of doing business in China. And the issue won’t end in China: American (and other countries’) businesses are almost certain to have (now) US-framed arguments thrown at them when operating all around the world whenever there is even a marginal ‘national security’ concern linked to the foreign company’s operations.