Category: Links

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Links

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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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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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.

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Links Photography

National Geographic Photos of the Year

These are absolutely amazing shots; I have to admit my preference for the People’s Awards is definitely ‘Colourful Markets’. The vibrancy of the image combined with the elevated angle of the shot is really magical.

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Cider Profiles

 AV Club:

English ciders, for example, tend to be still, dry, and higher in alcohol than most ciders. (English ciders are often considered the red wine of the cider world.) Spanish ciders are more often compared to sour beers, with a funkier taste. French ciders are the most approachable of European ciders, as they have a champagne-like sparkle and are lower in alcohol content. Terroir isn’t all that differentiates European ciders from American ones, however, as their use of wild yeasts results in a bolder, more offbeat flavor profile.

American ciders are harder to pin down, as the unique processes brewers have been applying to craft beer—barrel-aging, hopping, the addition of spices and other fruits—are also being used by cider makers, resulting in a variety of different tastes. What most American ciders have in common, however, is lightness, crispness, and an easy-going approachability.

As someone who appreciates well-crafted beers and liquors, and has recently tried to get into cider, this is really helpful in orienting myself. Thus far I think my preferred kind of cider tends to be semi-experimental (I had a truly delightful gin barrel-aged dry cider earlier this summer) but knowing what to look for in flavour profiles is definitely helpful going forward.

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Links Writing

Why We Need to Reevaluate How We Share Intelligence Data With Allies

Last week, Canadians learned that their foreign signals intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), had improperly shared information with their American, Australian, British, and New Zealand counterparts (collectively referred to as the “Five Eyes”). The exposure was unintentional: Techniques that CSE had developed to de-identify metadata with Canadians’ personal information failed to keep Canadians anonymous when juxtaposed with allies’ re-identification capabilities. Canadians recognize the hazards of such exposures given that lax information-sharing protocols with US agencies which previously contributed to the mistaken rendition and subsequent torture of a Canadian citizen in 2002. 

Tamir Israel (of CIPPIC) and I wrote and article for Just Security following these revelations. We focused on the organization’s efforts, and failure, to suppress Canadians’ identity information that is collected as part of CSE’s ongoing intelligence activities and the broader implications of erroneous information sharing. Specifically, we focus on how such sharing can have dire life consequences for those who are inappropriately targeted as a result by Western allies and how such sharing has led to the torture of a Canadian citizen. We conclude by arguing that the collection and sharing of such information raises questions regarding the ongoing viability of the agency’s old-fashioned mandates that bifurcate Canadian and non-Canadian persons’ data in light of the integrated nature of contemporary communications systems and data exchanges with foreign partners.

Read the Article

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$1,700 per month to live in a rebuilt garage in the Junction Triangle

Not everyone wants to live in such a small space. And—surprise, surprise—the suite isn’t legal, which is why the owners requested that we not publish their full names or address. And then there’s the fact that the kitchen doesn’t have a stove or oven, just a hot plate.

Let’s see how quickly the city finds this, and shuts it down, given the publicity that Toronto Life gave it. Separately: it costs $1,700 to live in a garage in Toronto right now?!