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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

Categories
Quotations

The Possible Implication of Letting Lying Liars Keep on Lying (Often About Their Lies)

From Salon:

But here’s the thing. Mnuchin’s shameless posturing about the administration’s tax plans—at one point he even promised there would be “no absolute tax cut for the upper class,” which was a laugher given every proposal Trump had ever backed—points to a deeper problem. The man regularly says things that just aren’t true. He’s been claiming that there was an analysis underway. There wasn’t. And while a lot of people may roll their eyes about that in the context of a wonky tax debate, his complete lack of credibility is going to be a problem if we ever run into a serious economic or financial crisis. Just ask yourself: If the markets were crashing and Steve Mnuchin held a press conference assuring everybody that the administration had an action plan in the works, would you believe him? His complete detachment from reality has mostly been an infuriating sideshow during this tax push. If stuff ever really hits the fan, though, his reputation for fibbing is going to make things even worse. Just like someone else we know.

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Aside

Expenses at University

It’s absurd that I have to carry expenses for multiple months before universities will reimburse me for expenses incurred speaking at their events. It shouldn’t take 160+ days to reimburse speakers who put aside multiple hours to prepare presentations, travel to location, present, etc.

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Aside Links

Supreme Court of Canada to Decide on Protection of Journalistic Material

From CBC News:

The materials at issue relate to three stories Makuch wrote in 2014 on a Calgary man, Farah Shirdon, 22, charged in absentia with various terrorism-related offences. The articles were largely based on conversations Makuch had with Shirdon, who was said to be in Iraq, via the online instant messaging app Kik Messenger.

With court permission, RCMP sought access to Makuch’s screen captures and logs of those chats. Makuch refused to hand them over.

RCMP and the Crown argued successfully at two levels of court that access to the chat logs were essential to the ongoing investigation into Shirdon, who may or may not be dead. They maintained that journalists have no special rights to withhold crucial information.

Backed by alarmed media and free-expression groups, Makuch and Vice Media argued unsuccessfully that the RCMP demand would put a damper on the willingness of sources to speak to journalists.

The conflicting views will now be tested before the Supreme Court.

This case matters for numerous reasons.

First, there has been a real drying up of certain sources, which has prevented journalists in Canada from bringing material to public light. Such material doesn’t just pertain to terrorism and foreign combatants but, also, white collar crime, political scandals, cybercrime issues, and more. The Canadian public is being badly served by the Crown’s continued pursuit of this case.

Second, this case threatens to further diminish relations between the state and non-state actors who may, as a result, be (further) biased against state authorities. It’s important to be critical of the government and especially aspects of the government which can dramatically reshape citizens’ life opportunities. But should the press gallery adopt an unwarranted and more critical and combative tone towards the government there could be a deleterious impact on the trust Canadians have in their government . By extension, this could lead to a further decline in the willingness to see the government as something that tries to represent the citizenry writ large. That kind of democratic malaise is dangerous to ongoing governance and a threat to the legitimization of all kinds of state activities.

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Quotations

2017.11.29

Most fundamentally, is it in Canada’s interest to further normalize the growing use of CNA (Computer Network Attack) activities by states? Should CNA be classified as just another tool of statecraft? Should such capabilities be restricted to a deterrent role? Is cyber deterrence, whether through CNA capabilities or more conventional responses, even a practical goal, given difficulties of attribution and the inevitable overlap between CNE (Computer Network Exploitation) and CNA? Would improved defence and resilience be a preferable, or at least sufficient, response or are all three required?

Bill Robinson, “CSE to get foreign cyber operations mandate”
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Quotations

2017.11.28

As effective encryption spreads, it may well be that the future of SIGINT lies increasingly in “end point” operations and other activities designed to cripple or bypass that encryption, and some of those activities could certainly benefit from HUMINT assistance. But there are also pitfalls to that approach. Using on-the-scene people in foreign jurisdictions can mean putting individuals at extreme risk, and such operations also have increased potential to go wrong in ways that could expose Canada to extreme embarrassment and even retaliation. If the government is contemplating going down that road, it should probably be open with parliament and the public about its intentions.

Informed consent. Because it’s 2017.

Bill Robinson, “CSE and Bill C-59 overview”
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Aside

Christmas in Coffeeshops

I’m certain that it’ll eventually drive me mad, but at the moment I’m enjoying the holiday music that’s playing in the coffee shops I work out of. Bring on Christmas and the holidays!

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Aside

I’m Not Linking to the Clickbait

The title of an article The Verge put up today — “My $2,000 iPhone X” — is the worst kind of clickbait. The article’s title is misleading (the phone was about $1500) and doesn’t actually inform the reader of the topic (the author bought extra stuff). It’s stuff like this that best exemplifies the bait and switch problems with online writing.

And no: I’m not linking to the clickbait.

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Aside

Consolidation of Writing

One of the long(er) term goals of this site is to host my personal thoughts. But it’s meant consolidating stuff from medium-personal (as opposed to journal-like) sites. Today marked when I migrated + published more than 600 items. Only multiple hundred left!

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Links

Metadata in Context – An Ontological and Normative Analysis of the NSA’s Bulk Telephony Metadata Collection Program

Abstract:

In the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, the National Security Agency (NSA) responded to fears about warrantless domestic surveillance programs by emphasizing that it was collecting only the metadata, and not the content, of communications. When justifying its activities, the NSA offered the following rationale: because data involves content and metadata does not, a reasonable expectation of privacy extends only to the former but not the latter. Our paper questions the soundness of this argument. More specifically, we argue that privacy is defined not only by the types of information at hand, but also by the context in which the information is collected. This context has changed dramatically. Defining privacy as contextual integrity we are able, in the first place, to explain why the bulk telephony metadata collection program violated expectations of privacy and, in the second, to evaluate whether the benefits to national security provided by the program can be justified in light of the program’s material costs, on the one hand, and its infringements on civil liberties, on the other hand.

A terrific paper from Paula Kift and Helen Nissenbaum.