Via Ars Technica:
Rushed production, faulty code doomed a Cold War game changer 26 years ago today.
A super interesting story about the politics and the (minor, but very significant) technical failure that doomed the Soviet Union’s attempt to put anti-Satellite lasers in space.
Via the New Yorker:
This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity. It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen.
This has lots of interesting promise, though it’ll be *more* interesting when a non-US group of journalists use the system (the code will be open sourced). Frankly, given the history of American courts, I don’t think that leaking to a US publication is a terribly good idea at the moment if you want to remain anonymous.
Via The Atlantic:
For those whose privately shared photos have made their way to the web, an argument of implied confidentiality may be a good bet.
(…)
We should have a better national dialogue about a romantic partner’s obligations of confidentiality. Salient norms of confidentiality would strengthen our relationships as well as the legal remedies for those whose trust has been betrayed. Notably, confidentiality law is not as problematic under the First Amendment as legislation or other tort remedies. Instead of prohibiting a certain kind of speech, confidentially law enforces express or implied promises and shared expectations. The tort of breach of confidentiality is currently very limited in scope, but could be made much more robust to sit alongside the more commonly asserted privacy torts. Under an “inducement to breach confidentiality” theory, it is even possible that certain websites would not be able to take full advantage of the immunity typically provided by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
This is an interesting approach, and one that might undermine some of the protections used to shield truly abhorrent websites.
Via The Tyee:
Last September I filed FOIs that got me blacklisted for a time, depriving voters of facts they deserve.
You should read Bob’s article in case you’re curious about why the press, academics, and active citizens laugh at the ‘transparency’ into government operations made possible by access to information, or freedom of information and access, laws.
I would note: one of my colleagues has had a federal access request open for seven years at this point. Our work on license place recognition equipment, at the federal level, has been open almost two years, with no end in sight. There have been repeated ‘inappropriate’ (read: illegal, except it’s not illegal if the police do it, right?) closures of our file, and personal involvement by the federal information commissioner.
ATIP and FOI laws are a joke, and a bad ones at that.
For anyone curious about (some of) the absurdity concerning policing in BC, this is a must read. Rob continues to do excellent work investigating the lack of accountability in the governance of BC authorities, this time showing how the police continue to do end-runs around access requests pertaining to their lobbying activities.
If you’re invested in post-secondary education, the letter from the Philosophy department at San Jose State is one of the best articulations of why the MOOC-phenomenon could seriously threaten the quality of education provided by Universities.
Via Techdirt:
Good news, everyone. The terrorists will win and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to help. Of course, his speech is all about not letting the terrorists win. But he’s giving them exactly what they want.
Bloomberg is an incredibly worrying political figure. He’s gone from earlier this year stating the privacy is important, but cannot be maintained in the face of expanding police surveillance, to this:
“The people who are worried about privacy have a legitimate worry,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a press conference in Midtown. “But we live in a complex word where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will. And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”
This is the second time in very recent memory that he, on the one hand, supports a notion of privacy while, on the other, asserts that privacy has to be increasingly limited to enjoy ‘security’. This is an absolutely false dichotomy, and is often linked to blasé efforts to ‘secure’ a population in ineffective, inefficient, or incorrect ways. Strong security protections can and should be accompanied by equally strong privacy protections; we need to escape the dichotomy and recognize that privacy and security tend to be mutually supportive of one another, at least when security solutions are appropriately designed and implemented.
As if having the caloric details of your sex life posted publicly wasnât enough, new research has exposed additional security vulnerabilities in the popular Fitbit fitness tracking devices.
The ability to hack these devices, at the outset, seems silly: who would bother?
But as more and more organizations provide these to employees, to individuals they insure, and so forth, the desire to ‘game the system’ will increase. The problem is less along the lines of ‘you can capture this data’ – though that is a privacy concern – and more along the lines of ‘how can I beat the system reliably to advantage myself’.
The neoliberal sacking of the universities runs much deeper than tuition hikes and budget cuts, notes Barkawi.Today in articles that criticize “meaningless buzzwords” but then also use “neoliberal” in the title.
Seriously – if you have a graduate education, you are not the oppressed and marginalized party here. There’s no reason that professors should be getting tenure in the first place; why should this one small class of wealthy well-educated people get the right to keep their jobs indefinitely regardless of performance while their students rack up six figures of debt?
If there’s an assault on academia, it comes from the fact that post-secondary education is wholly unaffordable to students from low-income backgrounds. Being expected to provide a service in exchange for money is not assault. Any confusion on this matter is a good indication of why people are skeptical about giving you more money.
Just re: tenure. There are very, very, very good reasons to provide it. I know of a host of graduate students who are prohibited from communicating their research findings for fear of the potentially very serious blowback associated with their (entirely valid, grounded) research results. Others simply avoid research tracks on the basis that ‘no good can come of it.’
These individuals are working on issues of significance (e.g. how government engages in anti-democratic surveillance and interdiction of communications) that simply cannot be engaged with by most members of the public. Such members tend to lack the time, expertise, or safety to publicly engage in the research. Tenure is meant to afford faculty the ability to engage in such ‘risky’ work while also granting the space to do what might be seen as useless basic research. It also is intended, ultimately, to offer a shield that graduate students can retreat behind if needed. The absence of tenure weakens the already precarious conception of ‘academic freedom’.
Academe is, without a doubt, an increasingly bureaucratic domain. Faculty are often as guilty as government in this transition; it wasn’t always like it is today (which, I might add, also isn’t a reason to lust for the old days: grad students in the 90s complained about pretty similar issues as the students of today). The increased shift towards publish or perish, and in the UK the ‘tiering’ of publications, has been incredibly problematic for the quality of much literature: some publications are ‘slanted’ to accommodate the tiering model, as opposed to the actual way that the research may flow. Such attitudes and efforts to ‘game’ the system are linked to a systematic problem around academe. I don’t know that there’s a ‘fix’, but it also isn’t something that’s terribly healthy today.
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