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Photography

Featured Photograph: ‘Urban’ in Glass’ Monthly Category Showcase

Each month Glass has a different featured photographic category. In March, a photograph I took of College Park was amongst the many excellent images that photographers published to the platform throughout the month in the ‘Urban’ category.

A feature of my street photography is to showcase lone humans in busy metropolitan areas. For context, College Park is surrounded by condos and rental apartments, and is located by a major subway stop; I suspect it’s amongst the denser parts of the city. Nevertheless I was able to catch this lone figure and the ever-present pigeons when I was running to a grocery store to get a few things.

I don’t know that I, personally, consider this to be the best image I made in March. But it definitely is very reflective of the types of images I’ve been making and so is representative of a particular body of work that I continue to develop.

For those interested, this was made using a Ricoh GR iiix. I use a custom monochrome jpeg simulation, applied minor edits in Apple Photos, and cropped the image slightly so it is 20 megapixels as displayed.

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Links

New York City’s Chatbot: A Warning to Other Government Agencies?

A good article by The Markup assessed the accuracy of New York City’s municipal chatbot. The chatbot is intended to provide New Yorkers with information about starting or operating a business in the city. The journalists found the chatbot regularly provided false or incorrect information which could result in legal repercussions for businesses and significantly discriminate against city residents. Problematic outputs included incorrect housing-related information, whether businesses must accept cash for services rendered, whether employers can take cuts of employees’ tips, and more. 

While New York does include a warning to those using the chatbot, it remains unclear (and perhaps doubtful) that residents who use it will know when to dispute outputs. Moreover, the statements of how the tool can be helpful and sources it is trained on may cause individuals to trust the chatbot.

In aggregate, this speaks to how important it is to effectively communicate with users, in excess of policies simply mandating some kind of disclosure of the risks associated with these tools, as well as demonstrates the importance of government institutions more carefully assessing (and appreciating) the risks of these systems prior to deploying them.

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Photography Writing

Tecumseth & Niagara, Toronto, 2023

Tecumseth & Niagara, Toronto, 2023

Toronto is a city of destruction and construction: destruction of the previous era’s architecture (and often industrial buildings) and the construction of housing or glass office towers in their stead. This image by Tecumseth & Niagara shows the destruction of an abattoir that was removed to make room for condos, and the buildings in the background are new rentals in Toronto’s Liberty Village. When I landed in Toronto, in Liberty Village over a decade ago, the land those rentals are on were home to a few artist spaces where the big Toronto samba schools practiced and massive parade puppets were made. Nothing has replaced those artist spaces, to the detriment of artists across the city.

Weirdly I have very intimate memories of the abattoir. Toronto hosts an annual sunset-to-sunrise art festival, Nuit Blanche, and a couple interesting art exhibits were hosted at the abattoir over the years, and I have photos of them that I regularly return to re-experience. After the buildings were designated for destruction a number of community vegetable gardens were maintained on the outside lots. It was always a striking place to come and make images, and was a reminder of the Toronto-that-once-was and was yet-to-become.

For many street photographers, we take images and it is decades later that ‘difference’ is registered because many cities take a long time for major changes to become visible. It’s part of why the habits of the population —what people are wearing, holding, or driving — resonate so strongly with viewers; people and culture change while the built environment persists.

Toronto, by way of contrast, is in a moment of hyper-growth and so an attentive and active street photographer can document things today that may literally be different tomorrow. It turns the street photographer, almost by default, into an urban documentarian. And, also, is one of the many reasons why I think that Toronto offers a subset of street photographers a real opportunity to do novel and rapidly impactful work, as compared to those working in cities that aren’t undergoing the same tempo of destruction and re-construction.

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Aside

2024.3.18

It is exceptionally rewarding to see years of research and advocacy while I was at my former employer lead to significant reforms to legislation The effect, thus far, has been to protect residents of Canada from cyber-related threats while, also, imposing checks on otherwise unfettered government power and simultaneously protecting all residents of Canada’s privacy.

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Aside Humour

The Durability of Certain Online Comments

One of the projects I’m involved in at work relates very closely to a bulk of academic policy books I read while doing my PhD. That’s not particularly surprising, I guess. One of those books, in particular, would be invaluable to my team as they navigate a neat (and well researched) policy space.

So I did what most people do: go to Amazon, search for the book, and then send it to my employer to purchase the title for the internal library.

Lo and behold, however, when I found said book on Amazon there was a single review of it. Interesting! Who would comment on this niche academic text and what did they say?

Well… apparently I would comment on this niche book and leave a review, and did so way back in 2008. I’ll be honest: the review does hold up. Though the fact that I was reviewing my supervisor’s book, publicly, and offering (fair!) critiques admittedly makes me grin a bit. And, also, probably speaks lots about why I tend to fit in well at workplaces where speaking truth to power is just the daily 9-5.

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Photography

Print Day!

Bathurst Station, Toronto, 2023
Bay & Queen, Toronto, 2023

A friend identified a series of photos I’ve made over the past year that they wanted to have as prints. The matte prints all came in yesterday, and I was really pleased at how well Annex Photo made them.

Bathurst Station, Toronto, 2023

I hade three prints made, one from my Ricoh GRiiix (uncropped, 10×15), one from my Fuji X100F (cropped to 17MP, 10×15), and one from the telephoto on my iPhone 14Pro (9MP, 8.5×11). When I’ve shown the prints to others they can’t tell which camera made which image, nor do they see any notable quality difference between the prints.

Spadina & Grange, Toronto, 2023

Now all that’s left is to package and mail the prints to their owner!

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Photography

Bathurst & College, Toronto, 2023

Bathurst & College, Toronto, 2023

This is one of the cityscapes I took last year. It resonates with a number of themes that are often present in my photography: icons of Toronto, construction in the city, and the sense of impermanence and isolation associated with the Toronto streetscape.

The absence of humans along one of Toronto’s many core cross streets also spoke to me. It provided me with a sense of humanity-absent, which is narratively aligned with many of the images that I made throughout the depths of the pandemic.

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Photography Quotations

Moments of Thinking and Photography

Thinking should be done beforehand and afterwards—never while actually taking a photograph. Success depends on the extension of one’s culture, on one’s set of values, one’s clarity of mind and vivacity.

Henri Cartier-Bresson
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Links Writing

RCMP Found to Unlawfully Collect Publicly Available Information

The recent report from Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, entitled “Investigation of the RCMP’s collection of open-source information under Project Wide Awake,” is an important read for those interested in the restrictions that apply to federal government agencies’ collection of this information.

The OPC found that the RCMP:

  • had sought to outsource its own legal accountabilities to a third-party vendor that aggregated information,
  • was unable to demonstrate that their vendor was lawfully collecting Canadian residents’ personal information,
  • operated in contravention to prior guarantees or agreements between the OPC and the RCMP,
  • was relying on a deficient privacy impact assessment, and
  • failed to adequately disclose to Canadian residents how information was being collected, with the effect of preventing them from understanding the activities that the RCMP was undertaking.

It is a breathtaking condemnation of the method by which the RCMP collected open source intelligence, and includes assertions that the agency is involved in activities that stand in contravention of PIPEDA and the Privacy Act, as well as its own internal processes and procedures. The findings in this investigation build from past investigations into how Clearview AI collected facial images to build biometric templates, guidance on publicly available information, and joint cross-national guidance concerning data scraping and the protection of privacy.

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Links Writing

Near-Term Threats Posed by Emergent AI Technologies

A cyberpunk image of a series of hackers that represent the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s, and the 2050s.

In January, the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) published its assessment of the near-term impact of AI with regards to cyber threats. The whole assessment is worth reading for its clarity and brevity in identifying different ways that AI technologies will be used by high-capacity state actors, by other state and well resourced criminal and mercenary actors, and by comparatively low-skill actors.

A few items which caught my eye:

  • More sophisticated uses of AI in cyber operations are highly likely to be restricted to threat actors with access to quality training data, significant expertise (in both AI and cyber), and resources. More advanced uses are unlikely to be realised before 2025.
  • AI will almost certainly make cyber operations more impactful because threat actors will be able to analyse exfiltrated data faster and more effectively, and use it to train AI models.
  • AI lowers the barrier for novice cyber criminals, hackers-for-hire and hacktivists to carry out effective access and information gathering operations. This enhanced access will likely contribute to the global ransomware threat over the next two years.
  • Cyber resilience challenges will become more acute as the technology develops. To 2025, GenAI and large language models will make it difficult for everyone, regardless of their level of cyber security understanding, to assess whether an email or password reset request is genuine, or to identify phishing, spoofing or social engineering attempts.

There are more insights, such as the value of training data held by high capacity actors and the likelihood that low skill actors will see significant upskilling over the next 18 months due to the availability of AI technologies.

The potential to assess information more quickly may have particularly notable impacts in the national security space, enable more effective corporate espionage operations, as well as enhance cyber criminal activities. In all cases, the ability to assess and query volumes of information at speed and scale will let threat actors extract value from information more efficiently than today.

The fact that the same technologies may enable lower-skilled actors to undertake wider ransomware operations, where it will be challenging to distinguish legitimate versus illegitimate security-related emails, also speaks to the desperate need for organizations to transition to higher-security solutions, including multiple factor authentication or passkeys.