Author: Christopher Parsons

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

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Climate Change is Threatening Coffee

Imbach et al:

Coffee production supports the livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers around the world, and bees provide coffee farms with pollination. Climate change will modify coffee and bee distributions, and thus coffee production. We modeled impacts for the largest coffee-growing region, Latin America, under global warming scenarios. Although we found reduced coffee suitability and bee species diversity for more than one-third of the future coffee-suitable areas, all future coffee-suitable areas will potentially host at least five bee species, indicating continued pollination services. Bee diversity also can be expected to offset farmers’ losses from reduced coffee suitability. In other areas, bee diversity losses offset increased coffee suitability. Our results highlight the need for responsive management strategies tailored to bee pollination, coffee suitability, and potential coupled effects.

In effect: climate change is risking the growth of coffee beans, in particular the more sensitive arabica beans that are lower in caffeine content and generally regarded as more delicate and tasty compared to robusta-type beans.

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Links Writing

How to protect yourself (and your phone) from surveillance

I understand what the person interviewed for this article is suggesting: smartphones are incredibly good at conducting surveillance of where a person is, whom they speak with, etc. But proposing that people do the following (in order) can be problematic:

  1. Leave their phones at home when meeting certain people (such as when journalists are going somewhere to speak with sensitive sources);
  2. Turn off geolocation, Bluetooth, and Wi-fi;
  3. Disable the ability to receive phone calls by setting the phone to Airplane mode;
  4. Use strong and unique passwords;
  5. And carefully evaluate whether or not to use fingerprint unlocks;

Number 1. is something that investigative journalists already do today when they believe that a high level of source confidentiality is required. I know this from working with, and speaking to, journalists over the past many years. The problem is when those journalists are doing ‘routine’ things that they do not regard as particularly sensitive: how, exactly, is a journalist (or any other member of society) to know what a government agency has come to regard as sensitive or suspicious? And how can a reporter – who is often running several stories simultaneously, and perhaps needs to be near their phone for other kinds of stories they’re working on – just choose to abandon their phone elsewhere on a regular basis?

Number 2 makes some sense, especially if you: a) aren’t going to be using any services (e.g. maps to get to where you’re going); b) attached devices (e.g. Bluetooth headphones, fitness trackers); c) don’t need quick geolocation services. But for a lot of the population they do need those different kinds of services and thus leaving those connectivity modes ‘on’ makes a lot of sense.

Number 3 makes sense as long as you don’t want to receive any phone calls. So, if you’re a journalist, so long as you never, ever, expect someone to just contact you with a tip (or you’re comfortable with that going to another journalist if your phone isn’t available) then that’s great. While a lot of calls are scheduled calls that certainly isn’t always the case.

Number 4 is a generally good idea. I can’t think of any issues with it, though I think that a password manager is a great idea if you’re going to have a lot of strong and unique passwords. And preferably a manager that isn’t tied to any particular operating system so you can move between different phone and computer manufacturers.

Number 5 is…complicated. Fingerprint readers facilitate the use of strong passwords but can also be used to unlock a device if your finger is pressed to a device. And if you add multiple people to the phone’s list of who can decrypt the device then you’re dealing with additional (in)security vectors. But for most people the concern is that their phone is stolen, or accessed by someone with physical access to the device. And against those threat models a fingerprint reader with a longer password is a good idea.

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Contemporary Email is a Threat to Us All

Per researchers:

Companies and other organizations are even more vulnerable than individuals. One person needs only to worry about his or her own clicking, but each worker in an organization is a separate point of weakness. It’s a matter of simple math: If every worker has that same 1 percent chance of falling for a phishing scam, the combined risk to the company as a whole is much higher. In fact, companies with 70 or more employees have a greater than 50 percent chance that someone will be hoodwinked. Companies should look very critically at webmail providers who offer them worse security odds than they’d get from a coin toss.

As technologists, we have long since come to terms with the fact that some technology is just a bad idea, even if it looks exciting. Society needs to do the same. Security-conscious users must demand that their email providers offer a plain-text option. Unfortunately, such options are few and far between, but they are a key to stemming the webmail insecurity epidemic.

Mail providers that refuse to do so should be avoided, just like back alleys that are bad places to conduct business. Those online back alleys may look eye-pleasing, with ads, images and animations, but they are not safe.

The problem is that few people appreciate the dangers of email; their understanding of phishing tends to be centred around the garbage that gets caught by most SPAM filters, when they have any clue what phishing is in the first place. Further, it’s not enough to personally avoid the ‘back alleys’ of the Internet email crowd: you need to excise all email that is received by such providers. And that means the problem is one of herd protection and immunity, which is challenging at best to overcome. Who’s going to unilaterally ban email from all the major email providers in the world today?

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Amateur Hours

Nir Eyal:

… we not only build skill but we strengthen our willpower. Studies have demonstrated that rewarding your brain with small “success experiences” builds willpower over time. Once the MEA [Minimal Enjoy Action] turns into a habit, it allows for expansion into slightly more advanced behaviors, such as walking for a few minutes more or increasing the pace. Through consistent practice of the MEA, both skill and willpower are increased until doing what once seemed difficult, becomes easy.

Eyal hits it on the head on how to become an amateur at something: engage in an activity on a sufficiently regular basis, with that engagement based on some kind of pleasure in the activity, and you’ll eventually become an qualified amateur at the activity in question. The degree to which one is an amateur varies, of course, with there being gradients of expertise within amateur communities.

We can’t all be responsible for creating the mountain bike, as just one example.

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What Is Identity Theft?

Ross Anderson:

…when I worked in banking, if someone went to Barclays, pretended to be me, borrowed £10,000 and legged it, that was “impersonation”, and it was the bank’s money that had been stolen, not my identity. How did things change?

The members of this association are banks and credit card issuers. In their narrative, those impersonated are treated as targets, when the targets are actually those banks on whom the impersonation is practised. This is a precursor to refusing bank customers a “remedy” for “their loss” because “they failed to protect themselves.”

Its always helpful to remember who is responsible for defining threats and risks to society.

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Aside Quotations

Hyper-Regulated Mass Surveillance

The difficult project of establishing meaningful oversight would be aided by a deeper appreciation by all sides of the surveillance debates that their adversaries are generally acting in good faith. Too often it seems that we occupy parallel universes. In the first, the U.S. intelligence community operates in a framework so regulated and constrained that it should be the envy of the world, not the target of its scorn. No intelligence agency in the world can match our respect for rules and laws. In the second, the U.S. surveillance state has outgrown legal restraints and allowed its surveillance activities to be driven by technological capabilities. It developed and deployed a global system of mass surveillance without the knowledge or consent of the public, and it is sitting on massive databases of private information that constitute a genuine threat to free societies.

We should acknowledge the possibility that both of these pictures are largely accurate. The intelligence community is staffed by honorable public servants who have an abiding respect for the Constitution. And history gives us reason to be concerned that information collected for one purpose will likely be put to other purposes, particularly in the aftermath of a terrorist attack or other national trauma. We might even elect a president who has no regard for the rule of law.

–Ben Wizner, ACLU

The question of how to draft a system of secret rules while simultaneously ensuring that the actors solely operate within the realm of the rules continues to vex policymakers, academics, politicians, and lawyers. What definitely seems to not work is maintaining a veil of secrecy over the baseline set of rules themselves, to say nothing of cloaking the interpretations of those rules in their own layers of secrecy.

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Making Game of Thrones Sensible

M.G. Siegler had a terrific suggestion for making Littlefinger’s death more meaningful and interesting:

In the scene itself, as Sansa calls out Littlefinger as the conspirator, rather than having him grovel as he does before dying, I would have had him play his one final card: he knows that Jon Snow is not a Stark. As Arya draws the blade, he could let slip that “Jon is not your brother” to not only Sansa and Arya (who still do not know this) but also to all the lords in Winterfell who are present to overhear. This plants a seed in the head of the girls, but more importantly it calls into question the leadership of The North.

Littlefinger’s demise was particularly pathetic: it made little sense as to why the Stark women acted as they did, nor was it apparent how Littlefinger managed to lose everything so quickly given his own planning and resiliency. Had he at least inserted a final barb as he died, the viewer would have the pleasure of watching the effects in the final season. Unfortunately that’s a lost pleasure so we’re just left with are dragons, the dead, and (almost certainly) betrayal and mayhem.

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Links Writing

The Role of Link Posts

One of the things that I’ve thought a lot about over the past few years are link posts. I’ve tried numerous different platforms and ways of sharing and commenting on links. And something that I’ve always appreciated are blogs that combine different forms of content (including link posts) along with something else to give them some unique perspective on the content of interest to their authors.

Gabe Weatherhead has recently written that:

It’s far too easy to grab a story headline streaming by and create a link post.

…

The reason I’ve walled off Macdrifter link articles behind Hobo Signs was because I wanted to clearly show that they weren’t my work. They are source materials. There is no guarantee I’ve reviewed them or even thought much about them. Sometimes I provide commentary but often they are just links.

I like link articles as much as the next person. But I felt disingenuous mixing those on a site that also provided commentary and opinion. It blurred lines I didn’t want to blur at a time when regurgitation looks like the successor to original content on the web. I don’t wonder why indie blogs are dying any more. Link posts are killing them.

I don’t think that link posts are necessarily killing indie blogs. I think that the problem is that indie blogs are often so replete with them that there isn’t a clear voice, narrative, or expertise associated with the comments on the links.

But link posts also raise the question about who blogging is for, and what we mean to do when blogging. Twitter and Facebook are fluid publication spaces: it can be impossible to see what you wrote on those platforms, about different topics, whereas its comparatively easy to retroactively see what you’ve written about on (most) structured blogging platforms. You can build a body of work that includes a shifting, or development, of thoughts and ideas over time. At the very least, you can turn Google search onto a blog and dredge up the various posts related to your search query to try to divine how your thoughts have changed over time. That’s next to impossible on more transient social media.

While commercial (or commercially-motivated) indie blogs might suffer from link posts I’m not convinced that such posts are kryptonite to personal blogs. And even for those which are commercially-oriented it’s not self-evident that link posts are bad: for the big indie blogs, the authors operate as tastemakers and news curators. They can quickly indicate their pleasure or displeasure where a fully review is unnecessary, or surface news of interest to them and their readers without requiring a detailed analysis of the issue at hand. Admittedly breaking news or entirely novel products may be ill served by such hot takes, but fast and short posts are routinely useful to their readership. The trick is to have a sufficiently interesting and authoritative voice that someone wants to read the author’s work in the first place. And that’s a space where most authors routinely struggle, indie writers or not.

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Writing

WhatsApp Profits

Facebook’s purchase of WhatsApp made sense in terms to buying a potential competitor before it got too large to threaten Facebook’s understanding of social relationships. The decision to secure communications between WhatsApp users only solidified Facebook’s position that it was less interested in mining the content of communications than on understanding the relationships between each user.

However, as businesses turn to WhatsApp to communicate with their customers a new revenue opportunity has opened for Facebook: compelling businesses to pay some kind of a fee to continue using the service for commercial communications.

WhatsApp will eventually charge companies to use some future features in the two free business tools it started testing this summer, WhatsApp’s chief operating officer, Matt Idema, said in an interview.

The new tools, which help businesses from local bakeries to global airlines talk to customers over the app, reflect a different approach to monetization than other Facebook products, which rely on advertising.

This is Facebook flipping who ‘pays’ for using WhatsApp. Whereas in the past customers paid a small yearly fee, now customers will get it free and businesses will be charged to use it. It remains to be seen, however, whether WhatsApp is ‘sticky’ enough for consumers to genuinely expect businesses to use it for customer communications. Further, Facebook’s payment model will also stand as a contrast between WhatsApp and its Asian competitors, such as LINE and WeChat, which have transformed their messaging platforms into whole social networks that can also be used for robust commercial transactions. Is this the beginning of an equivalent pivot on Facebook’s part or are they, instead, trying out an entirely separate business model in the hopes of not canibalizing Facebook itself?

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Plant Memories

Europeans citizens and their settlers have long treated the natural world as mere ‘stuff’ that can be manipulated to achieve our human-centric ends. It wasn’t that long ago that animals were regarded as dumb beasts without the ability to genuinely feel pain or have thoughts or memories. It turns out that our presumptions of plants are similarly undergoing radical reevaluations by some in the scientific community.

After training the plants, Gagliano withheld the light. When she next turned on the fans, she had switched them to the opposite branch of the Y shape. She wanted to see if the plants had learned to associate airflow with light, or its absence, strongly enough to react to the breeze, even if it was coming from a different direction, with no light as a signal. It worked. The plants that had been trained to associate the two stimuli grew toward the fan; the plants that had been taught to separate them grew away from the airflow.

“In that context, memory is actually not the interesting bit—of course you have memory, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to do the trick,” she says. “Memory is part of the learning process. But—who is doing the learning? What is actually happening? Who is it that is actually making the association between fan and light?”

It’s telling that Gagliano uses the word “who,” which many people would be unlikely to apply to plants. Even though they’re alive, we tend to think of plants as objects rather than dynamic, breathing, growing beings. We see them as mechanistic things that react to simple stimuli. But to some extent, that’s true of every type of life on Earth. Everything that lives is a bundle of chemicals and electrical signals in dialogue with the environment in which it exists. A memory, such as of the heat of summer on last year’s beach vacation, is a biochemical marker registered from a set of external inputs. A plant’s epigenetic memory, of the cold of winter months, on a fundamental level, is not so different.

It’s absolutely amazing to learn how much we do not know, and similarly striking that so many people actively work to prevent scientists from learning more about the natural world.