Category: Writing

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Links Writing

Privacy Enhancing Technologies – A Review of Tools and Techniques

From the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada:

PETs are a category of technologies that have not previously been systematically studied by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC). As a result, there were some gaps in our knowledge of these tools and techniques. In order to begin to address these gaps, a more systematic study of these tools and techniques was undertaken, starting with a (non-exhaustive) review of the general types of privacy enhancing technologies available. This paper presents the results of that review.

While Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) have been around for a long time there are only some which have really taken hold over time, and usually only as a result of there being a commercial incentive for companies to integrate the enhancements.

Some of the failures of PETs to be widely adopted have stemmed from the reasons specific PETs were created (to effectively forestall formal regulatory or legislative action), others because of their complexity (you shouldn’t need a graduate degree to configure your tools properly!), and yet others because the PETs in question were built by researchers and not intended for commercialization.

The OPC’s review of dominant types of PETs is good and probably represents the most current of reviews. But the specific categories of tools, types of risks, and reasons PETs have failed to really take hold have largely been the same for a decade. We need to move beyond research and theory and actually do something soon given that data is leaking faster and further than ever before, and the rate of leakage and dispersal is only increasing.

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Links Roundup Writing

The Roundup for November 25-December 1, 2017 Edition

Photo made with iPhone 7 at the edge of Kensington Market in Toronto, Ontario. Edited in Apple Photos and Snapseed.

I’m a kind of obsessive consumer. Before I buy something I tend to get excited about it, and do a lot of research, and get super into whatever it is that has struck my fancy. When the iPhone X came out, even knowing that I wasn’t on a buying cycle this year, I still wanted it and so did dozens of hours of research. A few weeks prior I was looking at a particular Olympus lens. And before then it was a new Sony rx100 or Fuji x100.

But I’ve gotten to know myself well enough that I let myself wallow in the obsession…and then just let go. It’s a self-reflective defensive mechanism that kept my wallet pretty safe throughout the sales of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and one that more generally has helped to lift me out of consumer debt hell over the course of the past year. Consumerism is exciting, so long as you only enjoy the dreams and avoid crushing them by actually purchasing the item(s) in question.

During the Cold War humanity did terrible things to the natural ecosystems of the world by testing nuclear weapons. Bikini Atoll is one of the areas that most felt humanity’s ugly destructive impulses. So it was pretty exciting to learn that after abandoning that part of the world for about fifty years things seem to be recovering:

The research, López says, provides at least preliminary evidence that even if you destroy an ecosystem, it can heal with time — and with freedom from human interference. Ironically, Bikini reefs look better than those in many places she’s dived.

Despite the fact that the ecosystem is healing what’s there now remains dangerous to human life. The coconuts (and coconut trees more generally) hold huge doses of radiation, and the platter-sized crabs are presumably similarly radioactive because their primary food source is coconut meat. Despite the outward appearances of healing the atoll will likely remain hostile to human life: for the foreseeable future this paradise will only be accessible to animal life and off limits to human habitation.

In some exciting personal news, I got back a review from a journal to which I’d sent an article. While some revisions are required, work that I’ve been hacking on for the past few years is more than likely going to be public in one of Canada’s law journal’s next year! Unlike some other publishing experiences this time it was a fast turn around: submit in September, hear back by end of November, revisions by January, and publication in Spring 2018. W00T!

New Apps and Great App Updates from this Week

Great Photography Shots

Jenna Martin gave herself a challenge: go to an ugly location (Lowe’s) and get some pretty shots (success, in my opinion).

Music I’m Digging

Neat Podcast Episodes

Good Reads for the Week

Cool Products

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Roundup Writing

The Roundup November 19-24, 2017 Edition

Photo made with iPhone 7 on November 2, 2017 in Toronto, Ontario. Edited in Apple Photos.

It’s another week closer to the end of the year, and another where high profile men have been identified as having engaged in absolutely horrible and inappropriate behaviours towards women. And rather than the most powerful man in the world — himself having self-confessed to engaging in these kinds of behaviour — exhibiting an ounce of shame, he’s instead supporting an accused man and failing to account for his past activities.

I keep going back and forth as to whether I want to buy a new Apple Watch; I have zero need for one with cellular functionality and, really, just want an upgrade to take advantage of some more advanced heart monitoring features. The initial reviews of the Apple Watch Series 3 were…not inspiring. But Dan Seifert’s review of the Apple Watch Series 3 (non-LTE) is more heartening: on the whole, it’s fast and if you already have a very old Apple Watch and like it, it’s an obviously good purchase. I just keep struggling, though, to spend $600 for a device that I know would be useful but isn’t self-evidently necessary. Maybe I’ll just wait until Apple Canada starts selling some of the refurbished Series 3 models…

While photographers deal with Gear Acquisition Syndrome (GAS), which is usually fuelled by the prayer that better stuff will mean better photos, I think that writers deal with the related Software Acquisition Syndrome (SAS). SAS entails buying new authoring programs, finding new places to write, or new apps that will make writing easier, faster, and more enjoyable. But the truth is that the time spent learning the new software, getting a voice in the new writing space, or new apps tend to just take away from time that would otherwise be spent writing. But if you’re feeling a SAS-driven urge to purchase either Ulysses or iA Writer, you should check out Marius Masalar’s comprehensive review of the two writing tools. (As a small disclosure, I paid for Ulysses and use it personally to update this website.)

New Apps and Great App Updates from this Week

Great Photography Shots

If tapeworms are your thing then there’s some terrific shots of them included as part of an interview with tapeworm experts. A few gems include:

Music I’m Digging

Neat Podcast Episodes

Good Reads for the Week

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Links Writing

The Insanity of ‘Terrorism’ Offences

The Fool by Christopher Parsons, All Rights Reserved

Via The Intercept:

At the end of a quick one-day trial, Judge Emma Arbuthnot at Westminster Magistrates Court ruled that Rabbani had willfully obstructed police when he declined to hand over his passwords. Rabbani avoided a possible three-month jail term and was instead handed a 12-month conditional discharge and told he must pay court costs of £620 ($835). This means a Terrorism Act offense will be recorded on his criminal record. But as long as he does not re-offend within the 12-month period, no further action will be taken against him.

…

Rabbani had argued his electronic devices should have been protected under the latter category, as they contained confidential information related to his work. The judge said that Rabbani did not make this clear to the officers who initially interrogated him, but did say so later in a prepared statement following his arrest. She described Rabbani as “of good character,” acknowledged he was “trying to protect confidential material on his devices,” and noted that “the importance of passwords and PIN numbers in the 21st century cannot be overstated.” However, she still concluded that his “decision not to provide the information when requested by the examining officers” amounted to “a wilful obstruction of the lawful examination in the circumstances.”

A lawyer was charged and found guilty of a terrorism offence for refusing to decrypt a device containing sensitive client information. A baseline part of the criminal justice system is that what is said between a client and their lawyer is protected speech, but this protection is under threat in the UK: solicitors who do their duty and uphold the oaths to their clients risk serious convictions that may permanently refigure their lives and liberties. This dismantling of baseline aspects of our legal systems to fight ‘terrorism’ are ludicrous and do more harm to our societies than can be inflicted upon us by violent extremists and criminals.

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Links Writing

Privacy and Gang Affiliations

Photo by Brent Humphreys
Photo by Brent Humphreys

From the Huffington Post:

Four speakers recounted the ways that their lives have been negatively impacted by the FBI’s designation of Juggalos as a gang.

New Mexico resident Crystal Guerrero said that she lost custody of two children because she went to one Insane Clown Posse show. Laura King of Fredericksburg, Virginia, recounted how she was permanently placed on a gang registry while she was on probation for a DUI offense because she had a tattoo of the hatchet man symbol. Jessica Bonometti was fired from her job as a probation officer in Woodbridge, Virginia, because she liked some Insane Clown Posse-related photographs on Facebook.

Fans of the Insane Clown Posse have been identified as gang members since the FBI designated them as a loosely organized hybrid gang. That designation means that routine things that fans do, such as like images of the band or wear band-related clothes, can lead to profound life consequences. It also raises questions about what kinds of information entertainment providers, like Spotify, Apple Music, and Google’s Play Store can disclose to government agencies upon request. Where those companies have information that a subscriber ‘likes’ an ICP track, would disclosing it lead to serious life impediments as individuals try to cross a border, get a government job, or work with children? What policies are in place to prevent governments from fishing for ICP fans, based on likes?

Though it might seem absurd that liking a particular song could harm your life prospects, the possibility that this could happen reveals how metadata — in this case, information of a persons preferences linked to audio or video content — can be more important than the content itself. Viewing a music video or listening to an album may not be sufficient to reveal a person’s ‘affiliations’ but the positive act of liking the video or album is enough to classify someone as a ‘member’ of the ICP ‘organization’.

What happens when someone liked a video or song or album years ago? How can an agency confirm that the person who owns the account was the person who indicated support for the content? And what recourse do people have when the actions of the far past rise up to detrimentally affect them?

While the former head of the NSA bluntly said that his agency used metadata as part of the equation to kill people abroad, less is said about how law enforcement organizations might use metadata to detrimentally impact the lives of persons living within the continental United States. It’s high time that more attention is paid to domestic authorities’ use of metadata and the domestic consequences of its analysis given how it can be used to ruin people’s life chances.

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Links Writing

The Inanity of Academic Publishing

From Verena Hutter and Karen Kelsey:

I have made it clear how I feel about book chapters in edited volumes or editing volumes (read chapter 16 in the book, and don’t publish in edited volumes, and don’t EDIT VOLUMES, until you are tenured). If my advice has come too late, and you have no other publications, it’s fine to mention the book chapter in your publication para, but don’t try to pass it off as an article. Some edited volumes are in fact peer-reviewed, but your contribution is still not an article.

It drives me nuts that edited volumes are given so little prestige compared to journal articles. There is a general position in academia that book chapters are not rigorously reviewed as compared to journal articles but, really, this has more to do with the publishing outlet than anything else. I’ve published with some journals where the review has been a joke and vice versa. The same is true of edited volumes.

But what bothers me even more about the focus on journal publications over edited volumes is that academics are encouraged to publish places where only the wealthy universities can afford to access/read what is written. I was given advice as a very junior scholar that almost no one in government will read academic journal publications because they can’t justify the per-article cost, whereas departmental and government libraries can justify purchasing books.

If you want to make a public policy impact, or want to generally have your work theoretically more available, then publishing in books (or putting pre-pubs in public repositories like SSRN) is a must. But academics are disincentivized from such practices: they’re punished for trying to actually expand the numbers of people who could read and use the work. So while they’re actively glorifying knowledge production they’re simultaneously hindering the dissemination of what is produced.

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Links Writing

Delight and Apple’s Face ID

Om Malik:

The reason Face ID works is because of some key silicon innovations — yes, there is that TrueDepth camera system made up of a dot projector, infrared camera and flood illuminator and a seven megapixel camera. Face ID projects more than 30,000 invisible IR dots. The resulting IR image and dot pattern is then used to create a mathematical model of your face and send the data to the secure enclave to confirm a match, while adapting to physical changes in appearance over time. What decodes the data captured by this camera (for lack of a better descriptor) are neural capabilities of its A11 Bionic chip. I saw this first hand and was blown away by the effectiveness of Face ID.

The FaceID is a perfect illustration of Apple’s not so secret “secret sauce” — a perfect symbiosis of silicon, physical hardware, software, and designing for delight. Their abilities to turn complex technologies into a magical moment is predicated on this harmonious marriage of needs.

I appreciate that a lot of people in the security and technologist community are dubious of Face ID. There are reasonable concerns about whether the technology will enable law enforcement or other third-parties to unlock a person’s phone by flashing it phone in front of their face, and whether or not it will even work.

But all of those questions fail to get what Apple doing with Face ID. Don’t believe me? Then go find entirely normal users who walk into a Best Buy and buy a laptop without doing any real research, and subsequently discovering their Windows laptop supports logging in with the infrared camera. They are amazed by the technology and tend to be pretty forgiving it doesn’t always work perfectly.

If Apple can ensure that Face ID works reliably then they’re going to have an amazing halo product because, remember, those who are amazed by Face ID likely won’t own one of the new top-of-the-line iPhones. So, instead, Face ID will function as an aspirational feature that few people will have but that many will want, and likely lead to regular users purchasing the first ‘normal’ iPhone that has this cool feature.

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Links Writing

On the History of Monuments

Monuments and plaques do not necessarily represent ‘history’ so much as a particular interpretation of certain events or aspects of a person’s life. A recent episode of 99% Invisible, originally produced for The Memory Palace, explores what should be on the plaque for Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army who built a fortune off the labour of slaves and who was, allegedly, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The episode is noteworthy for outlining the rationale for creating Forrest’s monument in the first place, the significance of reinterring Forrest’s remains, and for what should go into a plaque that is dedicated to his place in the world, today.

In listening to the episode it’s shocking just how the monument’s creation and erection were laden with racist overtones, and the episode is instructive in explaining what these monuments were (and are) meant to do: act as assertions of white supremacy in increasingly multicultural and diverse societies. The history of such monument is not linked to the events or persons for which they were erected, but in the rationales for which they were created and erected. Their history is inexorably linked the history of white supremacy, and this is a history that we can safely stop lionizing. Rather that destroying such monuments, however, they should be relegated to open museums and parks, which can be used to remind us of the horrors and inequalities associated with past ideological positions that we now acknowledge as being harmful and dangerous to the members of our societies.

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Links Writing

The New Convenience Store?

Elizabeth Segran:

Bodega sets up five-foot-wide pantry boxes filled with non-perishable items you might pick up at a convenience store. An app will allow you to unlock the box and cameras powered with computer vision will register what you’ve picked up, automatically charging your credit card. The entire process happens without a person actually manning the “store.”

Bodega’s logo is a cat, a nod to the popular bodega cat meme on social media–although if the duo gets their way, real felines won’t have brick-and-mortar shops to saunter around and take naps in much longer. “The vision here is much bigger than the box itself,” McDonald says. “Eventually, centralized shopping locations won’t be necessary, because there will be 100,000 Bodegas spread out, with one always 100 feet away from you.”

Segran makes the excellent point through her reporting that these ‘bodegas’ will lack human curation, that persons of Latin descent don’t necessarily appreciate a pair of ex-Google employees trying to appropriate a Latino phrase, and that small business owners aren’t excited about the prospect of losing their businesses and livelihoods.

Beyond those points, there is another issue that the company is going to require credit cards to do anything. What happens when you’re a member of a population that generally doesn’t have access to credit? What happens when you prefer cash? What happens when your credit card is frozen for whatever reason?

(It’s worth noting, of course, that this proposal isn’t nearly as shocking when looking at other countries like Japan which have embraced vending machine culture for a very, very long time.)

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Links Writing

How to protect yourself (and your phone) from surveillance

I understand what the person interviewed for this article is suggesting: smartphones are incredibly good at conducting surveillance of where a person is, whom they speak with, etc. But proposing that people do the following (in order) can be problematic:

  1. Leave their phones at home when meeting certain people (such as when journalists are going somewhere to speak with sensitive sources);
  2. Turn off geolocation, Bluetooth, and Wi-fi;
  3. Disable the ability to receive phone calls by setting the phone to Airplane mode;
  4. Use strong and unique passwords;
  5. And carefully evaluate whether or not to use fingerprint unlocks;

Number 1. is something that investigative journalists already do today when they believe that a high level of source confidentiality is required. I know this from working with, and speaking to, journalists over the past many years. The problem is when those journalists are doing ‘routine’ things that they do not regard as particularly sensitive: how, exactly, is a journalist (or any other member of society) to know what a government agency has come to regard as sensitive or suspicious? And how can a reporter – who is often running several stories simultaneously, and perhaps needs to be near their phone for other kinds of stories they’re working on – just choose to abandon their phone elsewhere on a regular basis?

Number 2 makes some sense, especially if you: a) aren’t going to be using any services (e.g. maps to get to where you’re going); b) attached devices (e.g. Bluetooth headphones, fitness trackers); c) don’t need quick geolocation services. But for a lot of the population they do need those different kinds of services and thus leaving those connectivity modes ‘on’ makes a lot of sense.

Number 3 makes sense as long as you don’t want to receive any phone calls. So, if you’re a journalist, so long as you never, ever, expect someone to just contact you with a tip (or you’re comfortable with that going to another journalist if your phone isn’t available) then that’s great. While a lot of calls are scheduled calls that certainly isn’t always the case.

Number 4 is a generally good idea. I can’t think of any issues with it, though I think that a password manager is a great idea if you’re going to have a lot of strong and unique passwords. And preferably a manager that isn’t tied to any particular operating system so you can move between different phone and computer manufacturers.

Number 5 is…complicated. Fingerprint readers facilitate the use of strong passwords but can also be used to unlock a device if your finger is pressed to a device. And if you add multiple people to the phone’s list of who can decrypt the device then you’re dealing with additional (in)security vectors. But for most people the concern is that their phone is stolen, or accessed by someone with physical access to the device. And against those threat models a fingerprint reader with a longer password is a good idea.