Category: Links

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Dollar Shave Club and The Disruption of Everything

Dollar Shave Club and The Disruption of Everything:

The implications of this go far beyond P&G: fewer Gillette razors also mean less TV advertising and no margin to be made for retailers, who themselves are big advertisers; this is why I argued last month that the entire TV edifice is not only threatened by services like Netflix, but also the disruption of its advertisers, of which P&G is chief.

The importance of looking at secondary consequences of product disruption – in this case with regards to men’s razors – is key to mapping out the still-developing Internet-inflected economy. If it’s razors today, what might it be tomorrow?

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Can we design sociotechnical systems that don’t suck?

Can we design sociotechnical systems that don’t suck?:

Many hard problems require you to step back and consider whether you’re solving the right problem. If your solution only mitigates the symptoms of a deeper problem, you may be calcifying that problem and making it harder to change.

Ethan’s essay is a long response to Shane Snow’s proposals for prison reform. In short, Snow is aiming to adjust conditions inside of prisons without considering whether there is a broader series of social issues that are responsible for actually leading to incarcaration. And, worse, he’s making his proposals without lived experiences of what prison itself is like.

The crux of Ethan’s argument, really, doesn’t concern the kinds of prison reform which are(n’t) appropriate so much as this: is it appropriate for a given person, or group, to solve the problem(s) in the first place? Are they capable of even identifying what are the problem(s)?

I think that this kind of attitude – of humbleness and appreciation for one’s limited perspective on the world – is something that should be taken up by more technologists, policy makers, and law makers. Too often we assume we know how to help without even knowing whether, and if so why and under what conditions, help is needed in the first place.

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Chelsea Manning Could Face Additional Punishment for Her Suicide Attempt

Chelsea Manning Could Face Additional Punishment for Her Suicide Attempt:

U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning tried to kill herself on July 5 in her cell at Fort Leavenworth military prison. Now, military officials are considering filing charges in connection to the suicide attempt that could make the terms of her imprisonment much more punitive — including indefinite solitary confinement — while possibly denying her any chance of receiving parole.

According to a charge sheet posted by the American Civil Liberties Union, Manning was informed by military officials on Thursday that she is under investigation for “resisting the force cell move team,” “prohibited property,” and “conduct which threatens.”

After engaging in the equivalent of torture, the US government considers doubling down and to make Manning’s live even more unbearable after driving her to suicide. A ‘just’ state indeed.

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The Best Coffee Roasters in Toronto

Only helpful for those local to Toronto, but it’s great for those of us that are. I particularly enjoy Pilot and Propeller, though admit that my favorite place to get coffee these days is from Ideal Coffee (the Red Sea beans are absolutely terrific). Still, I look forward to trying the whole list and determining if there is a company that can unseat Ideal Coffee or Pilot and Propeller!

The Best Coffee Roasters in Toronto

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Roger Ailes Got Us To Mistrust Everyone—Including Himself

Roger Ailes Got Us To Mistrust Everyone—Including Himself:

The best evidence that Ailes no longer wields the power he once did? If reports are to be believed, Ailes himself is about to step down from the network he defined. On its surface, the reasons have nothing to do with Fox News’ diminishing political influence. Gretchen Carlson, a former anchor, has accused Ailes of harassment, and apparently a number of other women—including Kelly—have come forward with their own accusations. James and Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s sons, have long looked to boot Ailes, and now they seem to have found the opportunity to do so. Still, it’s hard to imagine that Ailes would be so vulnerable if his role as GOP kingmaker were still secure.

He wouldn’t be ‘vulnerable’ to being fired for sexual misconduct if he still was influential in, or with, the Republican Party. This is the definition of casual sexism in journalism.

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Scientists Release Air that Has Been Trapped for 800 Million Years

Scientists Release Air that Has Been Trapped for 800 Million Years:

“There was a lot of debate as to what the oxygen content was 800 million or more years ago,” said Blamey in a statement. “We’ve come up with a direct method of analyzing the content of those trapped fossil gasses in the atmosphere and found that the oxygen level was approximately half of what it is today.”

To get a nice healthy wiff of that nearly billion-year-old atmosphere, the team placed halite crystals from southwest Australia in a vacuum chamber and crushed them, releasing the actual air that circulated during this bygone era in our planet’s history.

“It’s a direct measurement of the atmosphere of that time, not an interpretation,” emphasized study co-author Uwe Brand.

Modern science is amazing.

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On weaponized transparency

On weaponized transparency:

Over the longer term, it’s likely that personal or sensitive data will continue to be hacked and released, and often for political purposes. This in turn raises a set of questions that we should all consider, related to all the traditional questions of openness and accountability. Weaponized transparency of private data of people in democratic institutions by unaccountable entities is destructive to our political norms, and to an open, discursive politics.

Weaponized transparency, especially when it affects the lives of ordinary persons who take an interest in the political process, is dangerous for a range of reasons. And responsible journalists – to say nothing of publishers such as Wikileaks – ought to be condemned when they fail to adequately protect the private interests of such ordinary persons.

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The Top-Secret Cold War Plan to Keep Soviet Hands Off Middle Eastern Oil

This article discusses how, following the Second World War and advent of the Cold War, the United States and British governments worked with oil companies to plan ‘denial’ operations should the USSR invade the Middle East. Core to the plan was for combined CIA and military, along with corporate employees, efforts to strategically blow up parts of the refineries such that the Soviets would be unable to take advantage of the oil reserves and thus empower the West to invade and ideally retake the strategic resource.

The efforts were developed and iterated on for almost a decade, though towards the end the focus shifted from the USSR and towards nationalist governments in the region. Moreover, what started as a denial approach transformed into one where oil production would be maintained: the thirst for oil on the part of the United States and Britain meant that turning off the taps could be a serious blow to their economic and military efforts.

These were contingency operations but they were taken seriously. Explosives were moved and put in place and the British even established plans for nuclear assaults to prevent the fields from falling into non-Western hands. It raises the question of whether similar kinds of activities are planned, today, or whether cooler heads now are responsible for establishing contingency plans when it comes to core resources that contemporary Western economies rely upon. And would nuclear or other explosives be used, now, or is this where we would see a first and genuinely far-reaching aspect of hard ‘cyber’ power?

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Young, rich and totally not buying a house

In Toronto there’s a small group of people that are responsible for spending big and not thinking about the longer-term implications of their decisions now. This article highlights the current life that one such person has, with lots of time spent on how much he travels and drinks and parties while he travels. The subject of the piece consistently devalues experiences that are inexpensive, a devaluation of those who decide to have a family, and a broader (incorrect) focus on life just being about what wine you drink or what car you (temporarily) drive. It’s definitely one of the lowest ‘hate reads’ I’ve come across in recent memory.

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The RCMP Is Trying to Sneak Facial and Tattoo Recognition Into Canada

The RCMP Is Trying to Sneak Facial and Tattoo Recognition Into Canada:

“That the RCMP is looking at purchasing this kind of capability is in line with what the FBI and other [law enforcement agencies] around the world are doing,” said Christopher Parsons, a postdoctoral fellow at Toronto-based surveillance research hub Citizen Lab.

A previously published RCMP document notes that all of the new system’s scanners for fingerprints and facial images “must have undergone testing by the FBI and be listed on the FBI Certified Products List.”

“However,” Parsons continued, “in all of those jurisdictions there are significant privacy concerns, concerns about the general efficacy of the technology, concerns about whether too much data is collected in the first place, and concerns linked to the risks associated with information sharing between departments.”

The FBI’s biometric database, called the Next Generation Identification (NGI), has been widely criticized by civil rights groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union due to the potential for abuse by officers. As numerous incidents in the UK and US have shown, police are sometimes unable to resist the urge to dip into a database of personal information to settle their own very personal scores.

There may be an additional privacy risk in Canada, Parsons wrote, thanks to recent legislation that made it even easier for federal agencies to share information. A January 2016 email sent to S/Sgt. Michael Leben, manager of RCMP latent fingerprint operations in Ottawa, states that the force’s new AFIS system is part of a joint venture with Canada Border Services Agency to identify people entering Canada.

The RCMP has a bid out where companies would have to be able to add-on facial recognition capabilities to the primary fingerprint-biometric system. And the RCMP currently lacks the authority to engage in such facial and bodily recognition. But that’s not stopping it from planning for the future…