Category: Links

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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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Links

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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Links

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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Links

$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?!

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Links

Ransomware app hosted in Google Play infects unsuspecting Android user

Ars Technica:

In 2012, Google unveiled a cloud-based scanner dubbed bouncer that was billed as a way for the company to detect malicious apps before they were made available in Play. Five years later, discovery of malicious apps like Charger are a regular occurrence. Google makes little reference to the tool these days.

Android: a new bag of hurt found each week.

 

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Links Writing

WhatsApp’s new vulnerability is a concession, not a backdoor

The underlying weakness has to do with alerts rather than cryptography. Although they share the same underlying encryption, the Signal app isn’t vulnerable to the same attack. If the Signal client detects a new key, it will block the message rather than risk sending it insecurely. WhatsApp will send that message anyway. Since the key alert isn’t on by default, most users would have no idea.

It’s a controversial choice, but WhatsApp has good reasons for wanting a looser policy. Hard security is hard, as anyone who’s forgotten their PGP password can attest. Key irregularities happen, and each app has different policies on how to respond. Reached by The Guardian, WhatsApp pointed to users who change devices or SIM cards, the most common source of key irregularities. If WhatsApp followed the same rules as Signal, any message sent with an unverified key would simply be dropped. Signal users are happy to accept that as the price of stronger security, but with over a billion users across the world, WhatsApp is playing to a much larger crowd. Most of those users aren’t aware of WhatsApp’s encryption at all. Smoothing over those irregularties made the app itself simpler and more reliable, at the cost of one specific security measure. It’s easy to criticize that decision, and many have — but you don’t need to invoke a government conspiracy to explain it.

A multitude of secure messaging applications are vulnerable to keys being changed at the server level without the end-user being notified. This theoretically opens a way for state security agencies to ‘break into’ secured communications channels but, to date, we don’t have any evidence of a company in the Western or Western-affiliated world engaging in such behaviours.

There are laws that require some types of communications to be interceptable. Mobile communications carried by telecommunications carriers in Canada must be interceptable, and VoIP along with most other kinds of voice communications that are transmitted by equivalent carriers are subject to interception in the United States. There are not, however, similar demands currently placed on companies that provide chat or other next-generation communications system.

While there are not currently laws mandating either interception or decryption of chat or next-generation communications it remains plausible that laws will be introduced to compel this kind of functionality. It’s that possibility that makes how encryption keys are managed so important: as politicians smell that there is even the possibility of demanding decrypted communications the potential for such interception laws increases dramatically. Such laws would formalize and calcify vulnerabilities into the communications that we use everyday, to the effect of not just ensuring that domestic authorities could always potentially be listening, but foreign and unauthorized parties as well.

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Links

Evaluating the Buzzfeed dossier, by a former Intelligence Analyst

Individual details, like lawyer Michael Cohen’s trip to Prague or the spelling of a name or two, may indeed be disproven. Not everything in these reports is 100% accurate.

However, it is extremely important to emphasize that micro-level inaccuracies do not detract from the credibility of the two broad points that I establish above: that Trump’s organization has had a relationship with the Kremlin and that he is subject to blackmail.

This is one of the better analyses of how to understand the dossier that was released this week on Donald Trump’s activities in Russia and involvement with the Russian government.

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Links Writing

Demand for secret messaging apps is rising as Trump takes office

From The Verge:

Marlinspike’s goal isn’t unicorn riches, but unicorn ubiquity. For that, he wants to make encrypted messaging as easy — as beautiful, as fun, as expressive, as emoji-laden — as your default messaging app. His reason: if encryption is difficult, it self-selects for people willing to jump through those hoops. And bad guys are always willing to jump through the hoops. “ISIS or high-risk criminal activity will be willing to click two extra times,” he told me. “You and I are not.”

Marlinspike’s protocol for secure communication is incredibly effective at protecting message content from third party observation. Few protocols are nearly as effective, however, and most chat companies now claim that they offer ‘secure’ communciations. Almost no consumers are situated to evaluate those claims: there are known deficient applications that are widely used, despite the security community having identified and discussed their problems. Encryption isn’t actually going to provide the security that most users think it does so unless the best-of-class protocols are widely adopted.1

The problem of imperfect consumer knowledge is a hard one to solve for, in part because the security community cannot evaluate all claims of encryption. In work that I’ve been involved in we’ve seen simplistic ciphers, hard coded passwords, and similar deficiencies. In some cases companies have asserted they secure data but then fail to encrypt data between smartphone apps and company servers. It’s laborious work to find these deficiencies and it’s cheap for companies to claim that they offer a ‘secure’ product. And it ultimately means that consumers (who aren’t experts in cryptography, nor should they be expected to be such experts) are left scratching their head and, sometimes, just throwing their hands up in frustration as a result of the limited information that is available.

  1. Admittedly, Marlinspike’s goal is to spread his protocol widely and the result has been that the largest chat service in the world, WhatsApp, not provides a robust level of communications security. To activate the protocol in other chat services, such as Google’s Allo or Facebook’s Messenger you need to first set up a private conversation. ↩