… surely there is no automatic, positive link between knowledge and power, especially if that means power in a social or political sense. At times knowledge brings merely an enlightened impotence or paralysis. One may know exactly what to do but lack the wherewithal to act. Of the many conditions that affect the phenomenon of power, knowledge is but one and by no means the most important.
Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High Technology
Tag: Technology
Via Wired:
Speaking at Davos, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi pointed out that consumers face a challenge in trying to understand tech’s influence in the age of big data. He called this an “information asymmetry.” In his previous job, as CEO of Expedia, Khosrowshahi said, customers were shown a tropical island while they waited for their purchase page to show up. As a test, engineers replaced the placid image with a stressful one that showed a person missing a train. Purchases shot up. The company subbed in an even more stressful image of a person looking at a non-working credit card, and purchases rose again. One enterprising engineer decided to use image of a cobra snake. Purchases went higher.
What’s good for a business isn’t always good for that businesses’ users. Yet Khosrowshahi stopped testing because he decided the experiment wasn’t in line with the Expedia’s values. “A company starts having so much data and information about the user that if you describe it as a fight, it’s just not a fair fight,” said Khosrowshahi.
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The tech industry often responds to these concerns with a promise to be more transparent—to better show how its products and services are created and how they impact us. But transparency, explained Rachel Botsman in the same Davos conversation, is not synonymous with trust. A visiting professor at the University of Oxford’s Said School, Botsman authored a book on technology and trust entitled “Who Can You Trust?” “You’ve actually given up on trust if you need for things to be transparent,” she said. “We need to trust the intention of these companies.”
I think that it’s how little design flourishes are used to imperceptibly influence consumers that should be used to justify more intensive ethics and legal education to designers and engineers. Engineers of physical structures belong to formal associations that can evaluate the appropriateness of their members’ creations and conduct. Maybe it’s time for equivalent professional networks to be build for the engineers and developers who are building the current era’s equivalents to bridges, roads, and motor vehicles.
From Wired:
An agency like TfL could also use uber-accurate tracking data to send out real-time service updates. “If no passengers are using a particular stairway, it could alert TfL that there’s something wrong with the stairway—a missing step or a scary person,” Kaufman says. (Send emergency services stat.)
The Underground won’t exactly know what it can do with this data until it starts crunching the numbers. That will take a few months. Meanwhile, TfL has set about quelling a mini-privacy panic—if riders don’t want to share data with the agency, Sager Weinstein recommends shutting off your mobile device’s Wi-Fi.
So, on the one hand, they’ll apply norms and biases to ascertain why their data ‘says’ certain things. But to draw these conclusion the London transit authority will collect information from customers and the only way to disable this collection is to reduce the functionality of your device when you’re in a public space. Sounds like a recipe for great consensual collection of data and subsequent data ‘analysis’.
A senior Turkish official said Turkish intelligence cracked the app earlier this year and was able to use it to trace tens of thousands of members of a religious movement the government blames for last month’s failed coup.
Members of the group stopped using the app several months ago after realising it had been compromised, but it still made it easier to swiftly purge tens of thousands of teachers, police, soldiers and justice officials in the wake of the coup.
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Starting in May 2015, Turkey’s intelligence agency was able to identify close to 40,000 undercover Gülenist operatives, including 600 ranking military personnel, by mapping connections between ByLock users, the Turkish official said.
However, the Turkish official said that while ByLock helped the intelligence agency identify Gülen’s wider network, it was not used for planning the coup itself. Once Gülen network members realised ByLock had been compromised they stopped using it, the official said.
But intelligence services are policing agencies are still ‘Going Dark’…
One malicious app infected with the so-called DressCode malware had been downloaded from 100,000 to 500,000 times before it was removed from the Google-hosted marketplace, Trend Micro researchers said in a post. Known as Mod GTA 5 for Minecraft PE, it was disguised as a benign game, but included in the code was a component that established a persistent connection with an attacker controlled server. The server then had the ability to bypass so-called network address translation protections that shield individual devices inside a network. Trend Micro has found 3,000 such apps in all, 400 of which were available through Play.
“This malware allows threat actors to infiltrate a user’s network environment,” Thursday’s report stated. “If an infected device connects to an enterprise network, the attacker can either bypass the NAT device to attack the internal server or download sensitive data using the infected device as a springboard.”
BYOD: a great cost-saving policy. Until it leads to an attacker compromising your network and potentially exfiltrating business-vital resources.
CBC:
Both groups had significant improvements in body composition, fitness, physical activity and diet, with no significant difference between groups, they said.
In total, 75 per cent of participants completed the study.
Estimated average weights for the group wearing trackers were 212 pounds at study entry and 205 pounds at 24 months, resulting in an average weight loss of about 7.7 pounds.
In comparison, those in the website group started out at 210 pounds when the study began and weighed in at 197 pounds at 24 months, for an average loss of 13 pounds.
Still, Jakicic said in an email: “We should not send the message that these wearable technologies do not help with weight loss — there were some in our study for whom it made a difference.
I would argue that the ‘advantage’ that the trackers offer is to motivate people who otherwise might be less mindful on a regular basis to increase their daily activity. The headline of the article directly contradicts the point made by the study’s author: that the message should not be that wearables do not help with weight loss.
Perhaps one of the broader issues is that weight loss is predominantly associated with dietary changes. Fitness trackers focus on activity. As such, meeting fitness tracker goals (absent food monitoring) can lead to reduced weight losses as compared to those engaged in more comprehensive health and diet tracking.
VR Needs to Be Pleasurable for Women Before VR Porn Can Be:
The study measured body movement, with participants playing a Rift game for 15 minutes and researchers recording the time it took for someone to feel nauseous. Of the 35 percent of subjects who felt unwell within ten minutes, 70 percent were women. It’s a major design flaw, says Stoffregen.
“Engineers, the people who design VR systems, tend to think about motion sickness in terms of the technology—resolution, frame rate, things like that—and in terms of the sensory systems that the technology was designed to stimulate, usually the eyes,” he told me. “That’s the origin of the impetus to focus on things like visual field size. But there’s no science behind it.”
Instead, Stoffregen believes that “susceptibility is related to the degree to which people can stabilise their own bodies.” In other words, on the whole, men are able to stabilise their bodies better than women because they have higher centres of gravity, larger feet, and are heavier. This, Stoffregen says, is why men are also less susceptible to more traditional forms of motion sickness like seasickness.
“It’s not surprising that men and women respond differently in a postural sense to unfamiliar motion situations,” he said. “A person using VR must control and stabilize their own body. The more compelling the VR, the more likely it is that the person will try to stabilize the body relative to the virtual world. But that is a mistake; the body is not in the virtual world, and we need to stabilize it relative to the physical world, gravity etc.”
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Other researchers have also found gender differences in the VR experience. A study from Microsoft’s danah boyd (who chooses not to capitalize her name) also found that there’s a difference in how men and women experience the various methods VR producers use to suggest distance. Motion parallax, which uses perspective to suggest distance, is processed far better by men than women; shape-from-shading, which uses light to alter the way you perceive objects, is processed better by women. Most systems use motion parallax—mostly because it’s easier to program—despite the fact it can make the VR experience far less pleasurable or immersive for women.
Setting aside Vice’s focus on pornography, I found the suggested rationales for why VR’s unpleasant effects are unequally experienced along gender lines fascinating. Developers should be striving to increase equality in their development studios, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because not doing so could inhibit the adoption of VR applications as a result of insufficiently diverse testing groups.
Major Qualcomm chip security flaws expose 900M Android users:
Qualcomm makes chips for the majority of the world’s phones, holding a 65 percent share of the market. Most of the major recent Android devices are expected to be affected by the flaw, including:
- BlackBerry Priv
- Blackphone 1 and Blackphone 2
- Google Nexus 5X, Nexus 6, and Nexus 6P
- HTC One, HTC M9, and HTC 10
- LG G4, LG G5, and LG V10
- New Moto X by Motorola
- OnePlus One, OnePlus 2, and OnePlus 3
- Samsung Galaxy S7 and Samsung S7 Edge
- Sony Xperia Z Ultra
Three of the four holes have already been patched, with a solution for the fourth on the way. However, most users are at the mercy of their handset manufacturers if they want these patches applied. Owners of Google’s Nexus devices have already had patches pushed to their phones, but other manufacturers have historically been less interested in patching flaws found in their devices after release.
In many cases these updates will never be released, leaving people permanently vulnerable to this very, very, very serious vulnerability. But hey: at least it only affects around 12-13% of the world’s population. Maybe phone manufacturers and cellular carriers will actually promptly act to protect their users when closer to 20-35% of the world population is affected by the next Android vulnerability…
In the next stage of the copyright wars in Canada, Voltage is moving forward with its efforts to use a reverse class-action lawsuit to reveal the identities of thousands of people the company alleges have infringed on Voltage’s copyright. If the company is successful it will open up a new way for companies to access information about subscribers while simultaneously indicating the relative weakness of the privacy protections baked into Canada’s recent copyright legislation.
How foreign governments spy using PowerPoint and Twitter:
Right now, there are probably many journalists, human rights organizations and democracy activists walking around oblivious to the invisible tracking that is going on behind their backs. It’s time to wake up to the silent epidemic of targeted digital attacks on civil society and do something about it.
The protections built into our technologies are flimsy and routinely subverted. The merits of a ‘first to market’ ethos that predominates technical innovation must be contrasted, and weighed, against the mortal risk these same technologies pose to some users.
Excited Pixels 