Category: Links

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On Minimum Sentences in Canada

Michael Spratt writes:

The evidence on the lack of effectiveness and costs of minimum sentence is clear. In 2016, Wilson-Raybould said that minimum sentences were a priority. After almost a year of inaction, that priority is manifest in a concern about public opinion?

But perhaps this should not be a surprise given that in 2016 The Canadian Press reported that the Liberals were eyeing a “politically viable strategy” to bring changes to minimum sentences.

After a decade of ideological criminal justice policy at the hands of the Harper government, swift and principled action is imperative. Inaction means unjust court results, less safe streets, increased court delays and ballooning costs.

Minimum sentences represent the lowest-hanging fruit for meaningful justice reform. Their counterproductive and negative impacts are well documented.

This is not a matter for debate. The solutions are known and uncomplicated.

All we need now is a justice minister with the principle and conviction to take action. Unfortunately, it seems that piece is still missing.

I heartily agree: these types of sentencing rules must be abolished and discretion returned to the bench.

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Links Writing

Privacy and Gang Affiliations

Photo by Brent Humphreys
Photo by Brent Humphreys

From the Huffington Post:

Four speakers recounted the ways that their lives have been negatively impacted by the FBI’s designation of Juggalos as a gang.

New Mexico resident Crystal Guerrero said that she lost custody of two children because she went to one Insane Clown Posse show. Laura King of Fredericksburg, Virginia, recounted how she was permanently placed on a gang registry while she was on probation for a DUI offense because she had a tattoo of the hatchet man symbol. Jessica Bonometti was fired from her job as a probation officer in Woodbridge, Virginia, because she liked some Insane Clown Posse-related photographs on Facebook.

Fans of the Insane Clown Posse have been identified as gang members since the FBI designated them as a loosely organized hybrid gang. That designation means that routine things that fans do, such as like images of the band or wear band-related clothes, can lead to profound life consequences. It also raises questions about what kinds of information entertainment providers, like Spotify, Apple Music, and Google’s Play Store can disclose to government agencies upon request. Where those companies have information that a subscriber ‘likes’ an ICP track, would disclosing it lead to serious life impediments as individuals try to cross a border, get a government job, or work with children? What policies are in place to prevent governments from fishing for ICP fans, based on likes?

Though it might seem absurd that liking a particular song could harm your life prospects, the possibility that this could happen reveals how metadata — in this case, information of a persons preferences linked to audio or video content — can be more important than the content itself. Viewing a music video or listening to an album may not be sufficient to reveal a person’s ‘affiliations’ but the positive act of liking the video or album is enough to classify someone as a ‘member’ of the ICP ‘organization’.

What happens when someone liked a video or song or album years ago? How can an agency confirm that the person who owns the account was the person who indicated support for the content? And what recourse do people have when the actions of the far past rise up to detrimentally affect them?

While the former head of the NSA bluntly said that his agency used metadata as part of the equation to kill people abroad, less is said about how law enforcement organizations might use metadata to detrimentally impact the lives of persons living within the continental United States. It’s high time that more attention is paid to domestic authorities’ use of metadata and the domestic consequences of its analysis given how it can be used to ruin people’s life chances.

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Links

Threat Modelling and Apple Security

Troy Hunt has a good and accessible account of what kinds of threats PINs, Touch ID, and Face ID secure users from and, ultimately, how Apple is being pragmatic instead of idealistic in the degrees of security it provides. He’s provided one of the clearest accounts of the different security properties associated with iPhones that I’ve read recently.

On biometrics, he notes that:

The broader issue here is trusting those you surround yourself with in the home. In the same way that I trust my kids and my wife not to hold my finger to my phone while I’m sleeping, I trust them not to abuse my PC if I walk away from it whilst unlocked and yes, one would reasonably expect to be able to do that in their own home. The PC sits there next to my wallet with cash in it and the keys to the cars parked out the front. When you can no longer trust those in your immediate vicinity within the sanctity of your own home, you have a much bigger set of problems

This is the kind of threat posed by government agencies who have taken hold of you, your personal effect, and can compel you against your will. In such cases, you’ve got 99 problems, and your phone is just one.

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Links Writing

The Inanity of Academic Publishing

From Verena Hutter and Karen Kelsey:

I have made it clear how I feel about book chapters in edited volumes or editing volumes (read chapter 16 in the book, and don’t publish in edited volumes, and don’t EDIT VOLUMES, until you are tenured). If my advice has come too late, and you have no other publications, it’s fine to mention the book chapter in your publication para, but don’t try to pass it off as an article. Some edited volumes are in fact peer-reviewed, but your contribution is still not an article.

It drives me nuts that edited volumes are given so little prestige compared to journal articles. There is a general position in academia that book chapters are not rigorously reviewed as compared to journal articles but, really, this has more to do with the publishing outlet than anything else. I’ve published with some journals where the review has been a joke and vice versa. The same is true of edited volumes.

But what bothers me even more about the focus on journal publications over edited volumes is that academics are encouraged to publish places where only the wealthy universities can afford to access/read what is written. I was given advice as a very junior scholar that almost no one in government will read academic journal publications because they can’t justify the per-article cost, whereas departmental and government libraries can justify purchasing books.

If you want to make a public policy impact, or want to generally have your work theoretically more available, then publishing in books (or putting pre-pubs in public repositories like SSRN) is a must. But academics are disincentivized from such practices: they’re punished for trying to actually expand the numbers of people who could read and use the work. So while they’re actively glorifying knowledge production they’re simultaneously hindering the dissemination of what is produced.

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Links Writing

Delight and Apple’s Face ID

Om Malik:

The reason Face ID works is because of some key silicon innovations — yes, there is that TrueDepth camera system made up of a dot projector, infrared camera and flood illuminator and a seven megapixel camera. Face ID projects more than 30,000 invisible IR dots. The resulting IR image and dot pattern is then used to create a mathematical model of your face and send the data to the secure enclave to confirm a match, while adapting to physical changes in appearance over time. What decodes the data captured by this camera (for lack of a better descriptor) are neural capabilities of its A11 Bionic chip. I saw this first hand and was blown away by the effectiveness of Face ID.

The FaceID is a perfect illustration of Apple’s not so secret “secret sauce” — a perfect symbiosis of silicon, physical hardware, software, and designing for delight. Their abilities to turn complex technologies into a magical moment is predicated on this harmonious marriage of needs.

I appreciate that a lot of people in the security and technologist community are dubious of Face ID. There are reasonable concerns about whether the technology will enable law enforcement or other third-parties to unlock a person’s phone by flashing it phone in front of their face, and whether or not it will even work.

But all of those questions fail to get what Apple doing with Face ID. Don’t believe me? Then go find entirely normal users who walk into a Best Buy and buy a laptop without doing any real research, and subsequently discovering their Windows laptop supports logging in with the infrared camera. They are amazed by the technology and tend to be pretty forgiving it doesn’t always work perfectly.

If Apple can ensure that Face ID works reliably then they’re going to have an amazing halo product because, remember, those who are amazed by Face ID likely won’t own one of the new top-of-the-line iPhones. So, instead, Face ID will function as an aspirational feature that few people will have but that many will want, and likely lead to regular users purchasing the first ‘normal’ iPhone that has this cool feature.

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Aside Links Photography

Manufacturing Gear Acquisition Syndrome

Nasim Mansurow at Photography Life:

Don’t be a victim of The Hype. Don’t be a cameraholic and a brainless consumer. Stop yourself from the Internet hysteria that surrounds cameras, lenses and other gear. Instead, spend time learning about photography techniques and improving your skills. Travel more, see more, shoot more. And when I review a piece of camera gear, don’t buy it because I praised it. Only buy what you truly need, not what you want. That’s all I have to say for today.

Mansurov’s article spends a lot of time explaining the economics that drive individual ‘influencers’ and websites to get people excited about buying the new ‘best’ camera equipment. By drawing on Photography Life’s website analytics and the marketing material that he receives, he lays bare the economic incentives to focus of gear instead of techniques, skills, and neat locations to visit. In the process he also makes it very clear how the commercial aspects of selling equipment work in a way that most people may think or believe is happening but don’t have evidence or data to substantiate those thoughts or beliefs. It’s not a shocking read but does serve as a reminder that companies are actively attempting to manipulate consumers into buying the newest lenses or body with the hope or dream that it will turn us all into master photographers.

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Links Writing

On the History of Monuments

Monuments and plaques do not necessarily represent ‘history’ so much as a particular interpretation of certain events or aspects of a person’s life. A recent episode of 99% Invisible, originally produced for The Memory Palace, explores what should be on the plaque for Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army who built a fortune off the labour of slaves and who was, allegedly, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The episode is noteworthy for outlining the rationale for creating Forrest’s monument in the first place, the significance of reinterring Forrest’s remains, and for what should go into a plaque that is dedicated to his place in the world, today.

In listening to the episode it’s shocking just how the monument’s creation and erection were laden with racist overtones, and the episode is instructive in explaining what these monuments were (and are) meant to do: act as assertions of white supremacy in increasingly multicultural and diverse societies. The history of such monument is not linked to the events or persons for which they were erected, but in the rationales for which they were created and erected. Their history is inexorably linked the history of white supremacy, and this is a history that we can safely stop lionizing. Rather that destroying such monuments, however, they should be relegated to open museums and parks, which can be used to remind us of the horrors and inequalities associated with past ideological positions that we now acknowledge as being harmful and dangerous to the members of our societies.

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Links Writing

The New Convenience Store?

Elizabeth Segran:

Bodega sets up five-foot-wide pantry boxes filled with non-perishable items you might pick up at a convenience store. An app will allow you to unlock the box and cameras powered with computer vision will register what you’ve picked up, automatically charging your credit card. The entire process happens without a person actually manning the “store.”

Bodega’s logo is a cat, a nod to the popular bodega cat meme on social media–although if the duo gets their way, real felines won’t have brick-and-mortar shops to saunter around and take naps in much longer. “The vision here is much bigger than the box itself,” McDonald says. “Eventually, centralized shopping locations won’t be necessary, because there will be 100,000 Bodegas spread out, with one always 100 feet away from you.”

Segran makes the excellent point through her reporting that these ‘bodegas’ will lack human curation, that persons of Latin descent don’t necessarily appreciate a pair of ex-Google employees trying to appropriate a Latino phrase, and that small business owners aren’t excited about the prospect of losing their businesses and livelihoods.

Beyond those points, there is another issue that the company is going to require credit cards to do anything. What happens when you’re a member of a population that generally doesn’t have access to credit? What happens when you prefer cash? What happens when your credit card is frozen for whatever reason?

(It’s worth noting, of course, that this proposal isn’t nearly as shocking when looking at other countries like Japan which have embraced vending machine culture for a very, very long time.)

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Links

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.