More surveilance whakery. Gotta thank the republicans and democrats for taking away our privacy.
The second image is terrific!
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Surveillance Whakery
Category: Aside
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TVO: Beyond the Blinders
So, I pointed to some of the issues with Steve Paikin’s comments a few days ago. Recap: he posted to his blog that he had significant problems getting women onto his program, and used some insensitive/poorly considered language in expressing why he thought TVO was facing challenges.
TVO’s put on a show that (more or less) takes Paikin to task. It’s worth a watch, and it reveals both how Paikin views the challenges of booking as well as a set of women who take him to task. More discussions like this need to happen, and at length, in more of our popular media venues.
We take a look at how Android Wear works, and even manage to break some stuff.
This is the most in-depth analysis that I’ve seen of the Android Wear API and functionality. I have doubts that predicating most/many of the ‘active’ uses of the Wearable through voice is going to be a super popular thing: I can’t recall the last time that I saw someone ask Siri a question, or used Google’s voice-based search. I’m sure that some people do engage in such behaviours, but I’ve never once seen it while riding public transit or walking around the cities I’ve visited or lived in. As a result, I’m left wondering: who is actually using voice-based commands to control their devices? And will expanding the kinds of devices that can receive such commands actually lead to mass changes in how people engage with technologies?
Source: In-depth with Android Wear, Google’s quantum leap of a smartwatch OS
I can take issue with an awful lot of academia, but was fortunate to have an incredibly supportive dissertation supervisor who did (and continues to do) his best to ensure that I landed either in a good academic, government, non-profit, or corporate position. And there’s never been a stigma attached when I’ve pursued these various options (really: there’s just been support and encouragement!)
But I know that my experiences aren’t common. The series that Karen is running over at her website on leaving academe is useful in just exposing what it’s like to leave an academic ‘life’, and the baggage that is often associated with that choice. Allesandria Polizzi’s pieces, in particular, strike me as explaining to academics and non-academics alike what it’s like to straddle academe and corporate life, and the difficulties that a lot of people face in simply trying to explain themselves to their academic and corporate colleagues.
Source: How I Left Academia: A Recovering Academic’s Introduction – Polizzi 2
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2014.3.19
…undercutting this fair-to-strong record on the policy side is Mr. Flaherty’s general approach to the budget process, which could only be more opaque if it were one of Frank Underwood’s schemes on “House of Cards.” As the finance minister has tackled the budget deficit with across-the-board spending cuts, it has been impossible to get reliable information on what was being cut. Compounding the problem has been the use of omnibus budget implementation bills, which have included a host of things not directly related to the budget, such as changes to environmental regulations and policies affecting First Nations.
Not even the parliamentary budget officer, a position created as part of broader “accountability” reforms, could obtain the information needed to see what programs were being affected by the government’s austerity measures. Rather than operating on the basic democratic principles of transparency, Mr. Flaherty attacked the PBO, Kevin Page, as exceeding his proper mandate.
This is a pronounced stain on a legacy that is otherwise up for legitimate debate. Whether the GST or corporate tax cuts were inappropriate or whether one ideologically favours or disapproves of the government’s efforts to reduce the size of government, we should all agree that Canadians deserve to know, with clarity, what the government is doing. While much of the focus on Flaherty has been his ability to return the budget to balance, the climate of obfuscation surrounding his budgets is a significant and lamentable background to everything else he accomplished.
Emmett Macfarlane, “Flaherty’s policy brilliance overshadowed by darker politics”
What will be most damning is if, whenever another party is elected to govern the country, they merely change policy positions without also ending the current practices of omnibus legislation and budgetary obfuscation. Fiscal policies are something that Canadians can legitimately debate the merits of. There should be little to no debate that legislation, regulations, and budgets should be accessible to citizens who just want to understand what these things mean, how they are implemented, and the implications of their implementation. A representative democracy is farcical when citizens and their representatives alike cannot discern the actions of the day’s government; as it stands today, much of Canadian democracy is little more than a bad farce.
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2014.4.19
the [Australian Security Intelligence Organization] ASIO said that Snowden’s leaks will make it more difficult for the organization to collect meaningful data about a person, so the organization should be given more leeway to perform its surveillance duties. In its proposal, the ASIO asserted that certain technological advances are detrimental to its spying on bad actors (a refrain that is not often heard, as it’s generally accepted that technology is making it easier to spy on citizens).
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Smaller state police organizations joined the ASIO in asking that telecom companies be obligated to retain customers’ metadata for a substantial period of time. (The ASIO cited as a preferred model President Obama’s proposal earlier this year to compel telecom companies to keep customer data rather than having the NSA siphon that data into its own repositories.) But police organizations like the Northern Territory Police and the Victoria Police also went further in requesting that the Australian government require companies to keep IP addresses and Web browsing history as part of its metadata collection.
The Northern Territory Police, for example, argued for a two-year retention of Web browsing history. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the police thought “a shift away from traditional telephony services to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and others meant that data may be included in browser histories and was ‘as important to capture as telephone records.’”
Megan Geuss, “After Snowden, Australia’s cops worry about people using crypto”
So, given that Australians are decreasing their trust in their government based on what they’re learning their intelligence services are presently doing, the same services argue that they should have even more access to Australians’ private communications? Because more data retention combined with shadowy access to telecommunications data will improve trust in government and, as a result, strengthen the democratic spirit of the Australian people, right?
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2014.4.18
If the going metaphor of the startup is that male hackers are stars whose physical characteristics are a source of status and power, the role of women in startups often becomes tinged by differently sexualized and submissive ‘groupie’ expectations. Because even though employers might imagine that startup slogans like “who’s your data” are denatured of their original sexual meanings, they aren’t. Deploying terms for engineers that invoke sexual dominance signals that the startup at some subconscious level wants to emulate a model of power where men perform while others watch and wait, intent on servicing their needs. Some startups even make the desired correlation between women workers and selfless service explicit, as in the app “Geisha” which served links to web designers in the guise of a red-cheeked, submissive female product mascot. The Geisha app deploys fetishized racial stereotypes towards an all-too-common model of tech culture in which men are centered and powerful while women serve them from the position of exotic ‘other.’ The Geisha app’s deployment of racial and gender stereotypes was so blatant that it even received criticism on Hacker News, which prompted the app to change its name.
Kate Losse, “Sex and the Startup: Men, Women, and Work”
Kate Losse, once again, doing a terrific job critiquing the masculine and sexist working conditions in Silicon Valley. You should really read her book The Boy Kings to understand what it was like working at Facebook; it’s an absolute eye-opener.
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Cellular Competition in Canada
Cellular contract competition in Canada. It’s incredible that the major cellcos all raised their rates over the same weekend.
OTTAWA – An investigation at Canada’s secretive eavesdropping agency has uncovered misuse of public assets and “serious breaches” of the spy outfit’s values and ethics code.
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the agency took “various measures” with regard to the employees in question.
CSEC spokesman Ryan Foreman said that for privacy reasons he could not release any information about “specific employees involved in this disclosure of wrongdoing.”
Foreman also refused to discuss the number and type of employees implicated, whether anyone was disciplined or fired, what kind of public assets were involved or their value.
Nor would he say when the matter came to CSEC’s attention, or when were the corrective steps were taken.
“They basically tell you nothing,” said Liberal public safety critic Wayne Easter.
NDP defence critic Jack Harris said the response “shows an unwillingness to be up-front with the public.”
“It just seems to me to be a public-relations response which doesn’t do much to inspire trust and confidence, frankly,” Harris said in an interview
My money is that in terms of misuse, facilities were being used to store, access, or download copyright infringing materials. And, in terms of asset misuse, I have at least one very good idea what that might have encompassed…
Source: Canada’s electronic spy agency uncovers wrongdoing, ethics breaches
Excited Pixels 