Category: Writing

Categories
Links Writing

NYC Mayor Bloomberg Thinks Boston Bombing Renders The Constitution Obsolete | Techdirt

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.

Categories
Aside Links

Keeping Fitbit safe from hackers and cheaters with FitLock

As if having the caloric details of your sex life posted publicly wasn’t 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’.

Categories
Links Writing

The neoliberal assault on academia

jakke:

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.

Categories
Links

The neoliberal assault on academia

The neoliberal sacking of the universities runs much deeper than tuition hikes and budget cuts, notes Barkawi.

Source: The neoliberal assault on academia

Categories
Links

What Facebook Continues To Tell Us About Violence Against Women

There is a photograph being shared in Facebook of a woman cowering in a corner, eyes downcast, as large man standing in the foreground swings his fist at her head. The caption reads, “Women deserve equal rights. And lefts.”

This is a particularly good, if depressing, discussion of Facebook’s treatment of violence towards women, masquerading under the guise of a Millian-attitude towards protecting speech.

Categories
Links Writing

Will the BC Services Card Be Used for Online Voting?

Last year Rob Shaw wrote a piece for the Times Colonist about online voting in British Columbia. (This is a Bad Idea by the way, for reasons that are expounded elsewhere.) At the very end of his article, we read:

B.C.’s flirtation with online voting coincides with changes to its information and privacy laws last year that paved the way for high-tech identity cards.

The government has said people will one day be able to use the cards to verify their identity and access Internet-based government services, including, potentially, online voting.

No government document released under FOIA laws that I’ve read has stated voting as a driver of the card. However, this isn’t an indictment of Shaw’s reporting but of the government’s unwillingness to fully disclose documents pertaining to the Services Card.

To be clear: there is no good reason to believe that the Services Card will be particularly helpful in combating the core problems related to online voting. It won’t actually verify that the same person associated with the Card is casting the ballot. It won’t ensure that the person is voting in a non-coerced manner. It won’t guarantee that malware hasn’t affected the computer to ‘vote’ for whomever the malware writer wants voted for.

The Services Card is (seemingly) a solution looking for a problem. Voting is not one problem to which the Card is the solution.

Categories
Aside Links

Twitter Now Has a Two-Step Solution

So, I use two factor authentication for a variety of services. It’s great for security.

It’s also a royal pain in the ass to be (re)inputting secondary authentication information all the time. That basic ‘pain point’ is sufficient to dissuade most people from setting it up. I support Twitter adopting this, and for some people it’ll be awesome. For most people it’ll just be a pain in the ass.

Categories
Aside Links

A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering: Zerocoin: making Bitcoin anonymous

Matt Green has a really excellent post on why Bitcoin isn’t as anonymous as people think, and how to ‘fix’ that problem. If this is something that you’re interested in then his (very) detailed writeup (and link to his paper!) is worth the time and effort.

Categories
Quotations

2013.4.20

We’re living in hard times, we’re not living in jolly boom dotcom times. And that’s why guys like Evgeny Morozov, who comes from the miserable country of Belarus, gets all jittery, and even fiercely aggressive, when he hears you talking about “technological solutionism.”

“There’s an app to make that all better.” Okay, a billion apps have been sold. Where’s the betterness?

Things do not always progress, and the successes of progress become thorny problems for the next generation. They don’t stay permanently “better.” Our value judgments about what are better are temporary. They are time-bound. When you overuse the word “better,” it’s like a head-fake, it’s a mantra.

You don’t have a better-o-meter. You can’t measure the length and breadth and duration of the “betterness.” “Better” is a metaphysical value judgement. It’s not a scientific quality like mass or velocity.

You can’t test it experimentally. We don’t know what’s “better.” We don’t even know what’s “worse.” Which is good. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Google doesn’t want to be “evil,” but they don’t have an evilometer. They don’t have an evil avoidance algorithm.

Bruce Sterling, Closing Remarks at SXSW2013
Categories
Aside Quotations

2014.4.19

As many I was deeply shocked by the tragedy that occurred in Boston earlier this month. It was a stark reminder of the fact that any of us could be a victim of senseless violence anywhere at any moment.

As more information on the origin of the alleged perpetrators is coming to light, I am concerned to note in the social media a most unfortunate misunderstanding in this respect. The Czech Republic and Chechnya are two very different entities – the Czech Republic is a Central European country; Chechnya is a part of the Russian Federation.

As the President of the Czech Republic Miloš Zeman noted in his message to President Obama, the Czech Republic is an active and reliable partner of the United States in the fight against terrorism. We are determined to stand side by side with our allies in this respect, there is no doubt about that.

Petr Gandalovič, Ambassador of the Czech Republic, “Statement of the Ambassador of the Czech Republic on the Boston terrorist attack”

That an ambassador has to clarify where his nation is – and isn’t – in the face of incorrect American media and social media statements is….disturbing. Moreover, it raises serious doubts about scholarly arguments that the teaching of ‘facts’ is no longer necessary in an era of Google and the crowd.