Technology

“We Kill People Based on Metadata”

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2014-03-14 President ObamaWhen it comes to telephone calls… nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program is about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers, and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content. But by sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism. – President Barack Obama

It’s just metadata, folks. Not names or content. No big deal, right? On the other hand:

But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has said, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and raised him one, asserting, “We kill people based on metadata.”

So, yeah. Guess President Obama’s “it’s only metadata” comfort isn’t so comforting after all. The rest of the article from whence that quote came is a description of the USA Freedom Act: what’s good, and where it doesn’t go far enough. I’m not sure I really follow all of the arguments. I do agree with the author, David Cole, that we need to balance safety against civil liberties, and that merely saying “people will die if we don’t record everyone’s metadata” is not, all by itself, enough to justify recording everyone’s metadata. But they key word there is balance.

I’m not sure that effectively rolling the clock back to the 20th century and pretending that Big Data isn’t a thing is really the way forward, either. There is immense power in the aggregation and analysis of vast quantities of data, and this isn’t just about terrorism. It’s about tracking disease outbreaks, learning more about the economy, making traffic safer and more efficient, and applications we haven’t even thought of. The potential to make the world a better place or a worse place based on data analysis is too big to ignore and, quite frankly, too enticing to resist.

Just like the European Union and their sadly laughable “right to be forgotten,”[ref]I see no practical way for Google or anyone else to actually enforce this law[/ref] laws based on trying to pretend that the data isn’t there or force people to not use it are likely to only succeed in making sure that the folks who harness and use the data that is already there do so in the shadows. And that’s creepy, whether it’s the NSA deciding who to kill based on metadata or Target sending pregnancy-related advertisements to teenager girls. Rather than prohibition, what I think we need is more clarity about how to collect and use the data in a way that is transparent and commensurate with a new understanding of what privacy really means in the 21st century.

The one thing we can be sure of? It won’t mean what people are used to it meaning. That’s OK. After all, in Scandinavian countries like Sweden, Finland, and Norway, every citizens individual tax returns are published publicly every year. Very different from what we’re used to, sure, but no one really cares over there. I’m not saying we should move to that model. I’m just saying that what certain folks have in mind when they think of “privacy” as a civil liberty is actually a lot less like an inalienable right and a lot more like an individual cultural preference. But if we can’t have a conversation about radically new understandings of privacy to go along with our radically new capacity to aggregate and analyze data, then we can’t take a hand in choosing our own fate.

 

Can a $7 USB Stick Provide Computer Access to Billions?

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2014-05-12 USB Stick

I like this idea, but it doesn’t go far enough.

The concept is to take a customized version of Google’s Android operating system[ref]Which, itself, is a variant of Linux[/ref] and install it on a USB drive. Then give the drives to poor folk, starting with students and staff at schools in Nairobi slums. On its own, the USB drive isn’t very useful, but if you plug it into a computer (any computer, including old computers and computers with broken hard drives) you get a customized, easy-to-use PC. In addition to ease of use and the ability to run on just about any hardware you can find, the device will store all your info on itself, so you can plug it into a different computer next time and all your files and settings will still be there.

So you get lower hardware requirements, simplicity of use, and portability of data. Not bad!

But, as long as we’re talking about deployment in the developing world and using Android’s OS, why not go a little farther. Instead of running on a USB stick, you could put the data on a micro SD card that can be inserted into a cell phone. Then you’d expand the program to include computers and cell phones. Given that lots of folks in the developing world interact with the Internet primarily through cell phones rather than through laptops or PCs, this seems like it would be a bigger step forward. Honestly, a technology did that would be something that could sort of unify the way the developed and developing world interact with technology and each other. I’d love to have a kind of seamless computing experience that followed me from light computer use on my phone to serious number-crunching on a dedicated work station.

Bitcoin: More Important Than You Think

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2014-01-25 Bitcoins

I’ve noticed a couple of really interesting articles going around about how, in order to create Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto[ref]That’s the pseudonym of the creator of Bitcoin[/ref] may have actually created something much more important than even the biggest fans of Bitcoin realize. As Business Insider reports:

By many accounts, Satoshi came up with a real-world solution to a longstanding computer science paradox known as the double-spend problem, or the Byzantine General’s problem (the professor who named it explains why he did so here). The challenge is how to send and receive money online without the need for a trusted third party, such as PayPal, ensuring that the same digital credit standing in for the amount being exchanged isn’t being spent twice…Satoshi does not appear to have been looking to solve this problem when he created Bitcoin. But his design for the blockchain, which he spelled out in his 2008 Bitcoin spec paper[ref]It’s only about 10-12 pages, by the way, and is fairly comprehensible. If you have any comp sci or math background at all, you should read it.[/ref] (PDF), has profound implications.

Look out for that word “blockchain.” You might start hearing it a lot. The concept of the blockchain is, in a way, nothing less than a solution to the problem of distributed trust. It’s not a perfect solution. If you read the paper, you’ll see that being able to trust a transaction in Bitcoin depends on the honest nodes in the network having more combined CPU power than any collection of attacking nodes, and even when the majority of the network nodes are honest you don’t get guaranteed validity. You get pobabilistic validity. In other words: there’s a chance that someone could try to spend their Bitcoins twice (think of someone dropping a coin into a vending machine and then yanking it back out again to reuse), but it’s a very small chance. That’s a mature approach to security. In the real world you can’t really prevent attacks. You can just make them too expensive to be worth the effort.

Well, what if instead of using the blockchain to verify transactions, you use it to verify files? Turns out somebody has already done that:

Perhaps the most straightforward example of a post-Bitcoin service using Satoshi’s blockchain is Proof of Existence. Created by Manuel Araoz, a 25-year-old developer in Argentina, the site allows you to upload a file to certify that you had custody of it at a given time. Neither its contents nor your own personal information are ever revealed — rather, all the data in the document gets digested into an encrypted number. Proof of Existence is built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain (there’s a 0.005 BTC fee), so the thousands of computers on that network have now collectively verified your file.

There are other ideas too, and they could be really, really important. For example, what about replacing ICANN (the organization that oversees web addresses on the Internet) with a blockchain? You know all those fights about whether the US should maintain control of the Internet or hand it over to the UN? They could potentially (potentially) be sidestepped.

The folks at TechCrunch are even more excited:

You see, it’s not that hard to imagine other blockchain-based systems which aren’t currencies and don’t attract as many “colorful personalities.” Suppose you replaced the Internet’s centralized Domain Name System with a blockchain for Internet names (like Namecoin) such that every DNS request included some proof-of-work effort. Or you used any blockchain (including Bitcoin’s) as a notary service. Or you built a new blockchain for crowdfunding. Or you replaced a centralized system which absolutely does need to be scrapped — that horrific barrel of worms known as TLS/SSL Certificate Authorities — with a blockchain-based solution powered at the browser level.

Or you built a new distributed email service, with a blockchain for email addresses, and every time you checked your email you contributed to the network. Or a new distributed social network, with a blockchain verifying identities, powered by code that ran every time its users launched its app or visited its web page.

For me, this is a really big “ah ha” moment. It’s always been a bit confusing that a serious guy like Andreessen Horowitz would put his capital into what was, until now, basically understood to be more of a goldrush / speculative gamble than a new technology. Well, it turns out that he’s been talking about this for months already.[ref]That’s what he means when he says “All over Silicon Valley and around the world, many thousands of programmers are using Bitcoin as a building block for a kaleidoscope of new product and service ideas that were not possible before.”[/ref] Horowitz gets it, and now I get why a serious guy like Horowitz is so vested in Bitcoin. It’s not about Bitcoin. It’s about the blockchain. It’s about a distributed trust system.

This is a big deal. If you’re interest is as piqued as mine was, here are a couple more articles for you to check out.

Bitcoin 2.0: Unleash The Sidechains

“Cryptocurrencies will create a fifth protocol layer powering the next generation of the Internet,” says Naval Ravikant. “Our 2014 fund will be built during the blockchain cycle,” concurs Fred Wilson. And Andreessen Horowitz have very visiblydoubled down on Bitcoin.

Tomorrow’s Apps Will Come From Brilliant (And Risky) Bitcoin Code

The bitcoin platform (or blockchain) allows for the deployment of decentralized applications that combine the benefits of cloud computing — in terms of ubiquity and elasticity — with the benefits of P2P technologies in terms of privacy and anonymity.

 

The Humanity of Markets

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

This is an older Wall Street Journal article (from October 2010), but it’s one of those great articles that is at once intrinsically interesting and also really offers a glimpse into how us anti-social free-marketeers see the world: Why Some Islanders Build Better Crab Traps. The research is pretty simple: scientists found a way to quantify the complexity of crab traps made by various Pacific tribes, and then they compared complexity of traps to population size.

What they found was that the bigger the population, the more varied and more complex the tool kit was. Hawaii, with 275,000 people at the time of Western contact, had seven times the number and twice the complexity of fishing tools as tiny Malekula, with 1,100 people.

But it’s not just the size of the population on the island group that matters, but the size of the population it was in contact with. Some small populations with lots of long-distance trading contacts had disproportionately sophisticated tool kits, whereas some large but isolated populations had simple tool kits. The well-connected Micronesian island group of Yap had 43 tools, with a mean of five techno-units per tool, while the remote Santa Cruz group in the Solomon Islands, despite having almost as large a population, had just 24 tools and four techno-units.

This is what makes markets great: it’s a way of pulling together more people to cooperate, exchange information, and have a better life for everyone. Markets are, by their nature, impersonal but by that token so are penicillin and electricity. What matters in all three cases is the good they do for all of us.

Couple of minor corollaries: every now and then I’ll hear a serious academic talk about how things aren’t really better in the modern world. Like Jared Diamond who, apparently in all seriousness, decried agriculture as The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. These people are idiots. I suppose if an academic sang the praises of subsistence living and then actually left the modern world to adopt that lifestyle I might take them seriously. Or at least think that they weren’t a raving hypocrite. Until such time: the fact that rich and famous academics aren’t willing to trade medicine, literacy, and travel for the pleasures of 20-hour work week with the Hadza nomads in Tanznia suggests that they are either trolling or insane when they write such articles.

Which might sound like some kind of cultural smugness (aren’t we so much better than “primitive” tribes) if it weren’t for the second corollary:

Archeologists suggest that the ephemeral appearances of fancy tool kits in parts of southern Africa as far back as 80,000 years ago does not indicate sudden outbreaks of intelligence, forethought, language, imagination or anything else within the skull, but simply has a demographic cause: more people, more skills.

In other words: I have no basis whatsoever for feeling that I am in any way personally superior to a human who lived 80,000 years go or to someone from a less-technologically sophisticated civilization today. People are just people. The difference isn’t who we are, it’s where we live. The convenience of modern society doesn’t reflect any superior intellectual or moral sophistication on our part, but is just a natural result of having so many people all contribute to a shared social project.

The proper attitude is not arrogance for what we have, but rather humility for what we’ve been given.

Land Rover Invents Transparent Hood

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2014-04-12 Transparent Bonnet

OK, so it’s not actually a hood that’s transparent. In a way, it’s even cooler. As The Verge describes it:

The Transparent Bonnet Concept utilizes cameras mounted in the car’s grille to capture a view of the road that’s usually obscured by the hood. This data is then fed to a heads-up display that shows the video in real-time at the bottom of the windscreen, overlaying where a driver sees their car’s bonnet and effectively giving the impression that it — and the engine — are transparent.

Sound cool? Watch the video. It’s even cooler.

I’m still holding out for self-driving cars, but this ain’t bad either.

VR is Sexist

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Games Game Developers Conference

It’s always interesting to check the correspondence between the headline of an article and it’s URL. In this case, the headline reads: “Is the Oculus Rift sexist?” and the URL includes: “is-the-oculus-rift-designed-to-be-sexist/.” That nuance, that it is designed to be sexist, is going to be important as we delve into this story and ask ourselves this simple question: where do we reach the point where silliness outweighs legitimacy in the discrimination olympics?

So here’s the first fact: virtual reality (like the Occulus Rift) tends to make some people hurl. In fact, a major design point for the upcoming Occulus Rift has been to figure out how to alleviate headaches and nausea that can arise with use. And here’s the second: women tend to react much more to VR then men. But does it really make sense to fling around the term “sexist”? Danah Boyd, who wrote the piece for Quartz, clearly thinks so:

That’s when a friend of mine stumbled over a footnote in an esoteric army report about simulator sickness in virtual environments. Sure enough, military researchers had noticed that women seemed to get sick at higher rates in simulators than men. While they seemed to be able to eventually adjust to the simulator, they would then get sick again when switching back into reality. Being an activist and a troublemaker, I walked straight into the office of the head CAVE[ref]Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, a 1997-era VR technology[/ref] researcher and declared the CAVE sexist.

So, to be clear, we’re now declaring inanimate objects to be sexist.

But wait, is this just short-hand for calling the designers sexist? If someone makes a technology that is designed to make women spew chunks, but not men, that would indeed register as “sexist” in my book. But what’s actually going on?

Based on some interesting research, Boyd concludes that men and women process two different cues for depth perception differently. Men rely on motion-parallax, which basically means that closer things move more than things that are far away. Look at the way the clouds in this video (the most distant) move the slowest vs. the tubes (the closest) which move the fastest. That’s parallax.

Women, by contrast, tend to rely more on “shape-from-shading,” which Boyd describes as “a bit trickier.” She goes on to describe it:

If you stare at a point on an object in front of you and then move your head around, you’ll notice that the shading of that point changes ever so slightly depending on the lighting around you. The funny thing is that your eyes actually flicker constantly, recalculating the tiny differences in shading, and your brain uses that information to judge how far away the object is.

It’s not just trickier to describe, however. It’s also much trickier to implement. This is obvious to anyone who knows even a little bit about computer graphics (lighting is hard!) and Boyd agrees:

It’s super easy—if you determine the focal point and do your linear matrix transformations accurately, which for a computer is a piece of cake—to render motion parallax properly. Shape-from-shading is a different beast. Although techniques for shading 3D models have greatly improved over the last two decades—a computer can now render an object as if it were lit by a complex collection of light sources of all shapes and colors—what they they can’t do is simulate how that tiny, constant flickering of your eyes affects the shading you perceive. As a result, 3D graphics does a terrible job of truly emulating shape-from-shading.

So that’s my problem with calling VR “sexist”. The problem isn’t, or at least isn’t primarily, that you’ve got a bunch of dudes who don’t care what women need and/or enjoy excluding women. The problem is that the kind of technology that men react to is computationally easier than the kind that women react to. I’m all for recognizing that fact and working to mitigate it. Now that Facebook owns Occulus I think there’s no doubt that they are going to work hard to get to the bottom of that because you don’t want to alienate half your market. (When Occulus was a hardcore gaming device there may have been a perception that this wasn’t as important. Not anymore.)

I don’t mean to chalk this up to Boyd’s hyperventilating victim-complex. I know that editors choose headlines, and her concluding paragraphs are quite reasonable. But calling the technology itself sexist? Alleging, as the URL does, that it was designed that way? Come on, people. It’s getting silly.

Cut Off By Technology?

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Criticisms of iPhones, Facebook, the Internet, etc. have been around for years. The complaint is often along the lines of “texting is destroying language” or “kids these days are antisocial because all they do is play on their phones.” People have been making strikingly similar claims for centuries and it has never really come to pass. My own skepticism of these claims and those similar emerged when I read science writer Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. Plus, even if the criticisms were true, the benefits of these new technologies seem to far outweigh the costs.

An article from the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley explores several recent studies that analyze the connection between technology and social capital. The conclusion?:

Taken together, these three studies hint at a compelling story—that social networking services can be a significant way of developing, maintaining, and strengthening our social connections, both online and in person. Using social networking services builds social capital in a number of ways: greater emotional support, lower levels of loneliness, and more feelings of connectedness. But these studies also contain a note of caution: Too many followers and too much participation can lead to information overload, depression, and feelings of disconnectedness.

The bottom line? I’m going to keep my iPhone and my Facebook account—but I think I’ll also keep setting limits.

Check it out.

Science and Seances

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Image result for seances

Nathaniel posted this past week on the relationship between religious faith and scientific evidence in the wake of new evidence for cosmic inflation. I followed up with a brief post about religious scientists (including Big Bang discoverer Georges Lemaitre). To top it off, this month’s issue of Nautilus has an excellent article entitled “Why Physicists Make Up Stories in the Dark.” The author presents a fascinating history of modern science. Here are a few gems:

  • “Who now will stand up for the British physicist Edmund Fournier d’Albe, who in 1908 put forward the theory that the human soul is composed of invisible particles called “psychomeres” possessing a rudimentary kind of intelligence?”
  • “[W]hen science first began to fixate on invisible entities, many leading scientists saw no clear distinction between such occult concepts and hard science…Victorian physicists were particularly prone. Some conjectured that there exist intelligent, unseeable beings on the subatomic or the cosmic scale. Others speculated that high-frequency waves outside the visible range could transmit thoughts between minds, or that immortal souls were consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. Anything seemed possible, as it often does when we awaken to our ignorance.”
  • “It is no coincidence that these discoveries [e.g. radio waves] happened at the height of the Victorian enthusiasm for spiritualism, in which mediums claimed to be able to contact the souls of the dead. The two trends supported each other. The new physics hinted at explanations for thought transference, whether from other people or from spirits; and a widespread belief in invisible influences and intelligences created a receptive environment for ideas in physics that seemed scarcely less incredible. If radio waves could transmit invisibly between a broadcasting device and a receiver, it did not seem so hard to imagine that human brains—which are after all quickened by electrical nerve signals—could act as receivers.”

And so on. Check it out.

Level 3 Communications Throws Hat in Net Neutrality Ring

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level3

I previously posted about Cogent Communications complaining that Comcast, Verizon, AT&T et al are trying to “unfairly” squeeze more money out of Cogent by holding their own customers hostage from the content those customers ask for and have been told they have access to. Up until recently, Cogent was the only major internet backbone carrier piping up publicly, but now Tier 1 network operator Level 3 is speaking out against major-ISP anti-consumer misbehavior in this blog post by Level 3’s General Counsel of Regulatory Policy Michael Mooney. This is a big deal, because it illustrates just how far-reaching and critical this issue is for the future of the internet and everyone who relies on it. Want to get an idea of how big Level 3 is? You could make a drinking game out of it, but do so at your own peril. Go to your nearest command or terminal window and type tracert (if in Windows) or traceroute (Mac OS X, Linux) and then any random website you go to often, like this:

traceroute www.yahoo.com

Then hit enter, and watch. Whenever you see “l3” or “level3” anywhere in the scrolling results list, take a note. That’s your request being routed through Level 3’s sprawling, expansive network. Enter in some more top-level domains. You’ll see it popping up over and over again.

In the blog post, Michael Mooney takes ISPs to task, criticizing them for utilizing their (oft-ill-gotten and oft-misused) last-mile monopolies to strong-arm content providers into paying for the same service the ISPs’ own customers are already supposed to have paid for. He addresses the ISPs’ counter-claims about the “unbearable” costs of increased bandwidth usage by their customers streaming video and downloading large files by pointing out the inconsistency of such complaints next to the public financial records of these same ISPs showing soaring and growing profits year-by-year. However, instead of using these record revenues to upgrade their infrastructure to provide the level of service their customers are already paying for (oh, yeah, and also being charged increasingly larger fees for, and also being increasingly slapped with data caps over), the ISPs simply let their service degrade and insist the content providers to pick up the tab for upgrades. Mooney claims they have so far refused to negotiate fairly or in good faith. Netflix, for one, has already been forced to cave on the issue with Comcast out of fear of losing droves of customers and for no other reason than Comcast’s customers really, really like using Netflix.

This is not capitalism, or anything like it. It’s rent-seeking, pure and simple, and it’s collusion, not only between ISPs agreeing to not compete with each other but also between ISPs and the governments and politicians that grant them the power and status to play chicken with the welfare of an ever-growing sector of our economy.