My friend was shot four times. Our prom dates became pallbearers. Our friends were murdered in front of us and our innocence has been take.
Student from Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school
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Tag: Quotation
For the past few weeks I’ve been deliberately constraining my photography by shooting exclusively by a 35mm equivalent lens. This was the focal length that really convinced me that I enjoyed photography as a way of seeing and experiencing the world. I’m a big fan of zoom lenses, and keep eyeing the Olympus 12-40mm 2.8 Pro lens, but I find that I learn the most about a scene by having to walk around it with a bright prime lens.
When I travelled to Cuba, having to march around with a 50mm equivalent lens meant I went into entirely new places and angles that I wouldn’t have if I’d had a zoom lens to otherwise get a shot. And while I’ve previously used my 35mm equivalent, I have to admit that I’ve been far more reliant on some of my zooms and the 50mm; I just haven’t focused on learning to use the 35mm lens because there is so much more walking-by-zooming that I have to do with it compared to even my other prime lenses.
But that’s silly: I enjoy the focal length, I just have to work a lot more to get things out of the camera. So I’ve been using it at night, during the day, and exclusively attached it to my camera body for the past month and intend to bring it (along with an 80-300mm equivalent lens) when I travel to South America in a week and change. I like the idea of an unobtrusive lens as my walkabout, and then the zoom for when I’ve trekking through nature. And, perhaps most importantly, I really like the idea of forcing myself to get a lot more comfortable with my current gear as a way to inhibit my desire to buy more gear: I have functionally underused equipment, and I should be playing with it, first and foremost, before even considering the purchase of new kit.
Inspiring Quotation
“We start on the path to genuine adulthood when we stop insisting on our emotional competence and acknowledge the extent to which we are – in many areas of our psyche – likely to be sharply trailing our biological age. Realising we aren’t – as yet, in subtle ways – quite adults may be the start of true maturity.”
Great Photography Shots
Mobiography’s landscape photography shots are really, really amazing and showcase just how much you can do with a contemporary smartphone and good lighting conditions.
Music I’m Digging
Neat Podcast Episodes
Good Reads for the Week
- Mapping apps and how advertising subtly warps user experience
- The Sinking Brothel
- Inside Trump’s Cruel Campaign Against the U.S.D.A.’s Scientists
- Instagram Influencers Are the New Fashion Establishment
- Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology
- ‘Living laboratories’: the Dutch cities amassing data on oblivious residents
Cool Things
An update by Ars Technica on Cellebrite’s ability to access the content on otherwise secured iOS devices:
Cellebrite is not revealing the nature of the Advanced Unlocking Services’ approach. However, it is likely software based, according to Dan Guido, CEO of the security firm Trail of Bits. Guido told Ars that he had heard Cellebrite’s attack method may be blocked by an upcoming iOS update, 11.3.
“That leads me to believe [Cellebrite] have a power/timing attack that lets them bypass arbitrary delays and avoid device lockouts,” Guido wrote in a message to Ars. “That method would rely on specific characteristics of the software, which explains how Apple could patch what appears to be a hardware issue.”
Regardless of the approach, Cellebrite’s method almost certainly is dependent on a brute-force attack to discover the PIN. And the easiest way to protect against that is to use a longer, alphanumeric password—something Apple has been attempting to encourage with TouchID and FaceID, since the biometric security methods reduce the number of times an iPhone owner has to enter a password.
This once again confirms the importance of establishing strong, long, passwords for iOS devices. Sure they’re less convenient but they provide measurably better security.
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Pick
You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.
Joan Didion
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Seeing
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
David Thoreau
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Leadership
Leadership is not about being in charge. It is about taking care of those in your charge.
Simon Sinek
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Deliberate Sharing
Every time you share a link, or a piece of news, you are actually telling people to look at it. You are asking them to spend their biggest resource — attention (and time) — on what you are sharing.
Om Malik, “(Social) share, but with care”
Categories
On Facebook’s Woes
There’s another theory floating around as to why Facebook cares so much about the way it’s impacting the world, and it’s one that I happen to agree with. When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.
Some people are terrified that these services are listening in to their private conversations. (The company’s anti-privacy tentacles go so far as to track the dust on your phone to see who you might be spending time with.) Others are sick of getting into an argument with a long-lost cousin, or that guy from high school who still works in the same coffee shop, over something that Trump said, or a “news” article that is full of more bias and false facts. And then there’s the main reason I think people are abandoning these platforms: Facebook knows us better than we know ourselves, with its algorithms that can predict if we’re going to cheat on our spouse, start looking for a new job, or buy a new water bottle on Amazon in a few weeks. It knows how to send us the exact right number of pop-ups to get our endorphins going, or not show us how many Likes we really have to set off our insecurities. As a society, we feel like we’re at war with a computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play.
There was a time when Facebook made us feel good about using the service—I used to love it. It was fun to connect with old friends, share pictures of your vacation with everyone, or show off a video of your nephew being extra-specially cute. But, over time, Facebook has had to make Wall Street happy, and the only way to feed that beast is to accumulate more, more, more: more clicks, more time spent on the site, more Likes, more people, more connections, more hyper-personalized ads. All of which adds up to more money. But as one recent mea culpa by an early Internet guru aptly noted, “What if we were never meant to be a global species?”
Nick Bilton, ““This Is Serious”: Facebook Begins It’s Downward Spiral”
As much as I’d like to believe that users will flee Facebook, I still think the network effect will keep them inside the company’s heavily walled garden. It’ll take a new generation using new applications and interested in different kinds of content creation — and Facebook not buying up whatever is popular to that generation — for the company’s grasp to be loosened.
As much as I love the intimacy of a stable, healthy romantic partnership, I’ve always been wary of my need for loneliness and private time. I brandish my introvert badge with chutzpah. But, deep inside, whenever I got with someone and I needed to take time off to replenish, I always felt guilty. I felt like I wasn’t ready . That if I really, really wanted a relationship, I would not have this need to be by myself.
Tchassa Kamga, Before I Could Date Anyone, I had to Date Myself.
What’s the big deal about Hillary using her personal email at work?
Christopher Parsons, a Toronto-based cybersecurity expert with the think tank Citizen Lab, explained the security difference between a personal and official government email.
“The core security advantage is that the U.S. government will be attuned to the risk of her communications being deliberately targeted and, as such, would have a chance to maximize protections afforded to her communications,” Parsons said. “Moreover, data sent and received in U.S. government systems could be protected according to the sensitivity of the communications. So when sending classified or secret documents, a higher standard of care could have been provided.”
I would note that I don’t work at a think tank: I work at the University of Toronto, within the Munk School of Global Affairs.
Excited Pixels 