Category: Links

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Links Writing

Notes EM: My FT oped: Google Revolution Isn’t Worth Our Privacy

evgenymorozov:

Google’s intrusion into the physical world means that, were its privacy policy to stay in place and cover self-driving cars and Google Glass, our internet searches might be linked to our driving routes, while our favourite cat videos might be linked to the actual cats we see in the streets. It also means that everything that Google already knows about us based on our search, email and calendar would enable it to serve us ads linked to the actual physical products and establishments we encounter via Google Glass.

For many this may be a very enticing future. We can have it, but we must also find a way to know – in great detail, not just in summary form – what happens to our data once we share it with Google, and to retain some control over what it can track and for how long.

It would also help if one could drive through the neighbourhood in one of Google’s autonomous vehicles without having to log into Google Plus, the company’s social network, or any other Google service.

The European regulators are not planning to thwart Google’s agenda or nip innovation in the bud. This is an unflattering portrayal that might benefit Google’s lobbying efforts but has no bearing in reality. Quite the opposite: it is only by taking full stock of the revolutionary nature of Google’s agenda that we can get the company to act more responsibly towards its users.

I think that it’s critically important to recognize just what the regulators are trying to establish: some kind of line in the sand, a line that identifies practices that move against the ethos and civil culture of particular nations. There isn’t anythingnecessarily wrong with this approach to governance. The EU’s approach suggests a deeper engagement with technology than some other nations, insofar as some regulators are questioning technical developments and potentialities on the basis of a legally-instantiated series of normative rights.

Winner, writing all the way back 1986 in his book The whale and the reactor: a search for limits in an age of high technology, recognized that frank discussions around technology and the socio-political norms embedded in it are critical to a functioning democracy. The decisions we make with regards to technical systems can have far-reaching consequences, insofar as (some) technologies become ‘necessary’ over time because of sunk costs, network effects, and their relative positioning compared to competing products. Critically, technologies aren’t neutral: they are shaped within a social framework that is crusted with power relationships. As a consequence, it behooves us to think about how technologies enable particular power relations and whether they are relates that we’re comfortable asserting anew, or reaffirming again.

(If you’re interested in reading some of Winner’s stuff, check out his essay, “Do Artifacts Have Politics.”)

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Links

EU regulators accuse smart card chipmakers of price-fixing

Looks like some chipmakers might experience some revenue ‘setbacks’ after engaging in antitrust actions:

The case has been ongoing for years, as the European Commission searched the offices of Infineon Technologies AG, STMicroelectronics NV, Renesas Technology Corp. and Atmel Corp. in 2008. In 2009 it investigated companies that make chips for telephone SIM cards, bank cards and ID cards over price-fixing and customer allocation. NXP Semiconductors NV has admitted that it has been involved in the investigations and could be subject to fines.

Should the EU prove that price-fixing is occurring, it can levy fines on companies. While the commission has been trying to negotiated a settlement, those talks have fallen through, which may lead to stiffer fines.

 

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Aside Links

jakke: getallthedegrees replied to your post: must force myself to stop…

jakke:

getallthedegrees:

jakke:

imagegetallthedegrees replied to your post: must force myself to stop eating pad thai

I’ve been told your supervisor does the asking, though you have input. But that might just be my department. However, for my MA my supervisor did the asking but asked who I wanted. So I dunno??

Sorry – to clarify, when I said “committee” I was including supervisor. Because I don’t yet have anyone formally signed on. Three years into the PhD. Despite semi-frequent discussions of research and stuff with three or four faculty members. And it’s really hard to track anyone down unless there’s a talk or something where I can chase them afterwards and beg for a meeting time.

Forgive my ignorance of econ programs, but how did you get through your comps without a formal supervisor? Unless, this means you didn’t do comps? Do you do quals instead? How is your program structured?

I was told that I’m supposed to formally ask who I want to be my supervisor, and should really be thinking about it soon (September at the latest) according to the grad advisor. In my program you don’t ask formally until you do candidacy* (after you finish your coursework), but since I’m not able to take the remaining classes I need over the summer I’ll be doing candidacy work sort of unofficially.

*In my program (and I think most programs in my institution) we take more classes than most (eight, rather than four or six), and skip the comps/quals process and do candidacy instead. Candidacy is the first three chapters of your dis, so intro, lit review and methodology (~ 80-100 pages) which you defend in an oral exam.

Okay so hopefully this isn’t overshare but here’s how my program (and, I think, most econ programs) works:

  1. Eight months of general coursework (three per term for two terms). Everyone takes this together.
  2. Two comp exams. Everyone takes these together. They cover all of macro and micro theory. One or two people get kicked out.
  3. Another eight months of coursework, this time with four per term for two terms. This is where specialization happens.
  4. Four months of writing a paper. This is supposed to get you familiar with the process but is almost always a failure.
  5. Twelve months of preparing for prospectus defence. This is where I am now. Typically a big chunk of your thesis gets written here.
  6. Prospectus defence and assembling a committee. Including the prof who’s formally your supervisor.
  7. Twelve months of preparing for the job market. Your best paper gets super polished as your Job Market Paper around this point.
  8. Four months of job market. In here, you’re also finishing your thesis. But really it’s your Job Market Paper that matters more than the actual thesis.
  9. Four months of finishing up the thesis, getting a job, and defending the thesis.
  10. Graduating and very very hopefully progressing to gainful employment.

So the big paper I’m currently working on right now will very hopefully be my Job Market Paper. Other projects I’m working on might end up in my thesis. At least one is getting published and isn’t going to be part of my job application at all because it’s not economics.

And yeah accordingly I really really need to put together a committee to formally supervise my actual thesis. And I don’t know how much coldness is par for the course or at what point it actually becomes a strong negative signal.

That’s….a different structure from any other I’ve seen. I’ve the good fortune of entering the program with a supervisor (you can switch later, if you want). He’s helped pay a bunch of my bills + general guidance.

He’s also taken most of the work out of finding people for the committee: we had a meeting and went back and forth on names, and then he rounded folks up. It’d have been super awkward to do this myself, given that I tend not to know people in the program terribly well (and they tend to look at me funny, not quite knowing what it is that I actually do as an academic).

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Links Writing

Privacy Policies Don’t Need to Be Obtuse

Peter Fleischer has a good summary piece on the (miserable) state of online privacy policies today. As he writes:

Today, privacy policies are being written to try to do two contradictory things.  Like most things in life, if you try to do two contradictory things at the same time, you end up doing neither well.  Here’s the contradiction:  should a privacy policy be a short, simple, readable notice that the average end-user could understand? Or should it be a long, detailed, legalistic disclosure document written for regulators?  Since average users and expert regulators have different expectations about what should be disclosed, the privacy policies in use today largely disappoint both groups.

(…)

The time has come for a global reflection on what, exactly, a privacy policy should look like.  Today, there is no consensus.  I don’t just mean consensus amongst regulators and lawyers.  My suggestion would be to start by doing some serious user-research, and actually ask Johnny and Jean and Johann.

I entirely, fully, wholeheartedly agree: most policies today are absolute garbage. I actually read a lot of them – and research on social media policies will be online and available soon! – and they are more often than not an elaborate act of obfuscation than something that explains, specifically and precisely, what a service does or is doing with the data that is collected.

The thing is, these policies don’t need to be as bad as they are. It really is possible to bridge ‘accessible’ and ‘legalese’ but doing so takes time, care, and effort.

And fewer lawyers.

As a good example of how this can be done check out how Tunnelbear has written their privacy policy: it’s reasonably accessible and lacks a lot of the ‘weasel phrases’ you’ll find in most privacy policies. Even better, read the company’s Terms of Service document; I cannot express how much ‘win’ is captured in their simultaneously legal and layperson disclosure of how and why their service functions as it does.

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Links Writing

No, the internet isn’t sick. It also isn’t healthy.

How things are phrased matters a great deal. This is something that Evgeny Morozov has done good work examining over the past few years. Specifically, Morozov calls out thinkers and popular articles about technology as often pushing technology as a ‘solution’ to particular social issues (his most recent example is in The Babbler). Solutions, by strongly correlating technology with a ‘problem’, effectively become cast through very particular (often corporate) lenses that tend to hide or obscure the real problems, questions, or alternate solutions that might address – or (re)define – the issue(s) at hand.

To give you an idea of the kind of stuff that enrages Morozov (and, to a lesser extent, me), look no further than Cory Doctorow’s recent piece, titled “Copyright wars are damaging the health of the internet.” In this case, the life of ‘the Internet’ is the key driver of the future of social issues related to speech and freedom. The first few paragraphs read as follow:

I’ve sat through more presentations about the way to solve the copyright wars than I’ve had hot dinners, and all of them has fallen short of the mark. That’s because virtually everyone with a solution to the copyright wars is worried about the income of artists, while I’m worried about the health of the internet.

Oh, sure, I worry about the income of artists, too, but that’s a secondary concern. After all, practically everyone who ever set out to earn a living from the arts has failed – indeed, a substantial portion of those who try end up losing money in the bargain. That’s nothing to do with the internet: the arts are a terrible business, one where the majority of the income accrues to a statistically insignificant fraction of practitioners – a lopsided long tail with a very fat head. I happen to be one of the extremely lucky lotto winners in this strange and improbable field – I support my family with creative work – but I’m not parochial enough to think that my destiny and the destiny of my fellow 0.0000000000000000001 percenters are the real issue here.

What is the real issue here? Put simply, it’s the health of the internet.

The regularized reference to the ‘health’ of the Internet is significant because it creates the lens through which the reader should, apparently, understand the dispute between rights holders and Internet users. From this way of thinking about a piece of technology it’s possible to think of the ‘net as an organism that can be either ‘sick’ or ‘healthy’. Given that we (presumably) tend not to see the Internet as a bacteria or virus deserving destruction it makes sense that we (almost automatically) want to search for ‘antibiotics’ to get the Internet healthy again. Doctorow frames that as resisting new copyright reforms and repealing past ones.

In effect, Doctorow’s framing of the issue personalizes and humanizes a socio-technical invention that is embedded in differential policy and cultural domains across the world. Moreover, he has cast ‘the Internet’ in a manner that predisposes your reaction to any solution: clearly, ‘the Internet’ should be kept healthy. (Unless you hate technology, of course.)

The article goes on to insist that copyright policies are being designed in a manner that is detrimental to free speech, privacy, and general good governance. That’s fine. But it’s not the point that most readers are going to walk away with, and that’s unfortunate. As it stands, the ‘copyright wars’ seem to be never-ending, and we keep seeing these very popular pieces that are crafted to draft new recruits into the ‘armies’. Personally, I’d prefer that the ‘generals’ of the various sides actually engage in conversation about the relationship between copyright, freedom of speech, freedom of publication, and the power relationships between corporate, governmental, and citizens’ interests. I’d rather we get a real public debate instead of (seeming) non-stop sloganeering.

I should note that Cory isn’t just a ‘solutionist’. He really does ‘get’ the significance of talking about the ‘net as an organism: by doing so people can more directly – and quickly – connect with ‘saving’ it. It’s surprisingly hard to talk about ‘saving’ something when doing so entails learning an awful lot about complex policy and social rights issues. So, in the case of this article, I think you’re witnessing a particular epistemic elite crafting language to achieve very specific political goals.

And that’s what’s important. By phrasing language, as he has, Doctorow is committing to a specific political maneuver by way of embedding in people’s minds that copyright is the equivalent of a Japanese whaler going after a rare soon-to-be-extinct whale. It’s a helpful kind of thought-worm to implant. But it also obscures the power politics and policy wonkery and just plain silliness involved in the whole copyright ‘issue.’ It also makes you choose if you’re ‘for’ a ‘living’ or a ‘dead’ Internet: why can’t I be for a middle position? What is that middle position? Does a ‘live’ Internet mean a ‘dead’ copyright? Can I get a ‘semi-living’ Internet along with only a ‘half-dead’ copyright?

Strong statements – and rhetoric – like Doctorow’s and other elites in the copyright wars are as meant to obscure potential avenues of thinking as they are to make clear how to ‘fix’ problems. Doctorow does a good job in getting people riled up, which is part of his ‘job’ as an activist, but I’m not confident that after two decades we shouldn’t be moving towards a more nuanced debate. I’m also just sick and tired of ‘war’ language.

I think that it’s increasingly important to focus on positive solutions. Copyright reformists (like me!) have about as much chance successfully framing policy solutions to copyright using war language as we do spearing Moby Dick. And I’d rather stop chasing white whales.

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Links Writing

Tower of Sleep: You’re Fucked, and You’re Probably to Blame.

karengregory:

In 2009, theChronicle of Higher Educationran an “advice” piece entitled “Graduate School in the Humanities: Don’t Go.” In the article, Professor William Pannapacker (ironically of Hope College) proceeded to get real and lay down some truth for aspiring seekers of higher education: there are no jobs, you will grow old trying to get one, you will be poor and in debt (and did we mention old, particularlywomen, who age so much more decisively, what with your womb clocks and all), and you will become angry and embittered by your failures to secure stable employment. This hit a nerve. And probably because that particular nerve rarely gets sleep and likes to wake many of us up at 4:15 in the morning, we are aware that Professor Pannapacker speaks a certain truth. The world that many graduate students are trying to enter is broken and there are no easy roads to security. Even if we manage to grab hold of a rare job, the future of working as an academic looks pretty bleak. So why don’t those of us who understand this pack up and leave?

If we listen to Rebecca Schuman, who recently updated Pannapacker’s screed for 2013 inSlate, it’s because we were too stupid to heed his message, suggesting that the original article “convinced no one.” And, as Schuman writes, “It certainly didn’t convince me! Why? Because Pannapacker is a tenured professor. He pulled it off, so why can’t you? After all, someone has to get these jobs.” Yes, perhaps we are stupid and optimistic and blind. In some situations, like when the world is going to shit, sometimes these aren’t the worst things to be. But I don’t think it’s that we’re all just sitting unaware that the sky is falling and hoping it won’t fall on us. Some of us, as Tressie Cottom suggests on her blog, are trying our best to be “brave” and we are trying to stick around in this shitstorm of terrible labor practices, endless competition for scarce jobs, nasty administrative choices (like the president of CUNY calling grad students “roaches” or, even worse, pepper spraying our undergraduates who have dared to question the vision for higher education in this country) because we care and we want to change it. Or, because even if the university succeeds in chasing us out, we haven’t failed by completing a PhD.

There are many reasons why these screeds of “Don’t go! Graduate School will ruin your life” leave me wanting to kick the wall. Yes, things suck. I make no bones about that, but these screeds overlook the work that students are doing to organize, agitate, and resist the restructuring of higher education. And this oversight raises the question: if you realized the Pannapacker “Truth,” then did you then get involved in your union, in an activist group, in an education alternative (like the Free University), or in a conversation with your students? When did you start realizing that a career in academics also means addressing the very conditions of our labor? What have you done besides comparing the kind of tenacity it takes to be a graduate student today to being a willful smoker who smokes “four packs a day” and hopes to not get cancer?

As someone who has had cancer, I’m a little offended, but I’m also deeply aware thatthere are no self-interested choices that can really save you. This is true in academics as well. We’re finding ourselves in a world where “doing the right thing,” including staying on the straight and narrow path that may or may not culminate in tenure, is not enough.There is a cold logic of privatization at work in these “don’t go” screeds. This logic foregrounds an “every man for himself” mentality, which mirrors the very toxic culture of academics that so closely binds self-worth and research production. To what degree have we internalized this toxicity when we suggest to others that they should “save themselves”? This is not to say that we should not be very angry about the state of the job market, but to ask how does such privatization lead us away from addressing larger, structural issues at play here?

In addition to this, everyone should readTressie’spost. It is smart, impassioned, and on the money response to these “reality checks.” Too many of “some” people have gone on to higher education, but too many others simply haven’t. What happens if “you can’t do better” than go to school? I agree with Tressie that the “Truth” of the “don’t go” advice is not entirely wrong and that we need to be very clear with prospective students about the road ahead of them and the placement of financial burden, but just because we may not see the future clearly for ourselves is no reason to throw the entire institution under the bus. Are we really ready to say that higher education is no longer a link to mobility?

If so, we have some serious thinking to do about what life is this country is about and what such a “no future” really looks like. I am not ready to accept that fate. Many of us are not, which is probably part of why we stick around in our adjunct positions.We know that when and if we leave, our students will be even more on their own—and we also know that the wolves are circling, ready to MOOC-ify the classroom, by which I mean get rid of it entirely and truly strip education down even further. This is really the big issue here, and I wish that more graduate students would realize that participating in the freakout over tenure is a drain on energy that would better be used to stand up to the larger forces that are eager to break the tie between education and mobility, particularly in the public university.

This is not to say don’t freak out, but send the energy outward. Make it social. Organize. Read the news and reject this bullshit mantra of private failure. My guess is that it is this type of mental resilience and recasting of shame (like we see happening around student debt) that will need regardless of where we work.

Also, grad students: If the following is true of your experience, where have you gone to graduate school and how do those very programs needs to be modified:

During graduate school, you will be broken down and reconfigured in the image of the academy. By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why. (Bright side: You will no longer have any friends outside academia.)

CUNY may be a rare case, but it has not been as lonely as this. Nor has it suggested to me that my entire selfismy research. Perhaps because we are public, scraping along, working full-time, parenting, and teaching, we are a little more pissed off then other graduate students? But students here talk to one another. They create community. If I had not gone back to school, I would not have had the chance to learn alongside of some of these truly brilliant, radical people.So, if you ask me about graduate school, I will tell you it sucks, but I will also say: Flock to the Public Universities. Demand access and entry to higher education. Nothing will be easy when you get there. But we cannot afford to leave the university to those currently in charge of it.PhDs, we need you.

This is why the fight for free education matters. Changing the discourse around education is crucial to changing the discourse (and the reality) of income inequality and social mobility in general.

I think that, intellectually, the desire to reform the academy is admirable.

But I can’t image it succeeding or, by the time that it does, it’s going to be pretty late for the entire massive set of graduates who are trying – still – to find marginally meaningful work. Is this a pretty individualistic and pessimistic view of things? Yep, totally. But the collective isn’t going to pay my rent. Or my cats’ vet bills. Or put food on my family’s table. From my position, based on being amongst grad students for going on 2 decades now (another discussion, but no, my parents aren’t professors or permanent staff), things aren’t measurably improving: the same problems are being discussed, but they’re more dire each and every year.

There are long-term fiscal challenges that are associated with a PhD, especially immediately after graduating from the academy. Most have to discover new networks. Even more have to convince those networks that they are capable despite often lacking the ‘basic skills’ needed for employment somewhere within ten miles of what they trained in. Note: by training I don’t mean literature, or economics, or whatever, but in reference to the core skills that PhDs are meant to develop: research, analysis, and whatever ‘fungible’ skills were developed in the PhD (e.g. discourse analysis, policy analysis, stats, etc).

Grad school is a terrific place to be. It’s intellectually stimulating and one of the most pleasant places to be while living close to – or well below – the poverty line. But the thing is, a lot of us are still at or below that line. The absence of tenure track positions, depreciation of pay in many universities for RA/TA and sessional work, and university’s failure to provide meaningful career counselling and training are significantly damaging the academy. And, what’s saddest, is I don’t really think the universities (or most faculty) give a damn because they can externalize or ignore most of these challenges and problems facing PhD students and candidates.

Is the state of the world in academe terminal? No, not necessarily. It’s entirely possible that things could be healed. But, at the same time, if I want to complete my degree in a timely basis (funding runs out!) and mitigate the accumulation of huge amounts of debt and do all the professional development things I need to do in my own time, I’m not going to be a hardcore activist on campus that tries to reshape academe. I appreciate the sentiment, but I think I have more effect changing politics outside the University that inside, and I’d rather spend my time working in a domain where change is more plausible. And, given that I’ll be thrust outside of the academe soon enough anyways, at least the stuff I do ‘outside’ provides a marketable set of ‘real work’ skills.

Tower of Sleep: You’re Fucked, and You’re Probably to Blame.

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Aside Links

Don’t Use Linksys Routers

cleverhacks:

multiple remote root exploits for some of Cisco’s latest consumer-grade gear – and remember, if your router is pwned, it doesn’t matter if all your computers are patched and ultra-secure; your traffic can still be silently MITM’d and your connection hijacked for nefarious purposes.

Ah…another set of router exploits. At least all the major routers that run traffic in the core of the networks are secure from these kinds of vulnerabilities because of high degrees of security-first coding, right?

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Aside Links

New credit cards vulnerable to electronic pickpockets

Fortunately, only ‘advanced payment cards’ are currently affected by this. Well, and the BC Services Card once it’s in people’s hands and the chip has been activated.

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Links

Trojan can hijack smart cards, says researcher

Well, at least this technical threat isn’t a problem in Canada, where we aren’t moving towards advanced electronic identity cards meant to subsequently be accessed using personal computers to access sensitive data held by government services.

Oh. Wait. I forgot: we’re doing just that, aren’t we.

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Links Quotations

Sometimes, I Like To Wait

parislemon:

Anthony Ha for TechCrunch:

Yet when I watched House of Cards, I really enjoyed the space between the episodes, when I could wonder about what happens next and anticipate the next time I’d have an hour or two to catch up. That’s not a new idea — in fact, it’s one of the main pleasures of television. But I think it’s something people lose sight of when they talk about bold new distribution models.

I agree, this topic is being lost in the larger debate. I believe I prefer the House of Cards model for the same reason I’ve long preferred watching shows on DVD rather than when they air — I like to binge.

But I do miss some of the “watercooler” effect of everyone talking about what just happened on Lost this week — something which the very existence of Twitter has essentially perfected. There’s still definitely a watercooler effect with House of Cards but it’s more about the show in general rather than specific plot points since we’re all likely at different parts of the show right now (unless we’re doing with season 1 already, of course).

I think that the sense of community can be lost in the binging, insofar as it’s (often) a solitary event. But, at the same time, I think this (to an extent) may speak to how some people are increasingly moving to more private viewing (i.e. in a room alone) that is simultaneously more social (i.e. ability to share/comment/etc on social media).