“I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things”
- Franz Kafka
Has the NSA really changed its mind?
Hmmm… Fascinating report in today’s NYT:
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency has taken a significant step toward protecting the world’s computer systems, announcing Tuesday that it alerted Microsoft to a vulnerability in its Windows operating system rather than following the agency’s typical approach of keeping quiet and exploiting the flaw to develop cyberweapons.
The warning allowed Microsoft to develop a patch for the problem and gave the government an early start on fixing the vulnerability. In years past, the National Security Agency has collected all manner of computer vulnerabilities to gain access to digital networks to gather intelligence and generate hacking tools to use against American adversaries.
The foolishness of policy was critically exposed A while back when some of those tools fell into the hands of cybercriminals and other baddies, including North Korean and Russian hackers.
So does this new spirit of cooperative ness signal a real shift in strategy? Or does it just show that the agency was temporarily traumatised by accusations that its unscrupulous collection of vulnerabilities caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage? Should we believe the declaration by Anne Neuburger, the NSA’s Cybersecurity director, that “We wanted to take a new approach to sharing and also really work to build trust with the cybersecurity community.”
Good news if she’s serious. And the theft of the tools should serve as a warning against governments’ incessant campaign for backdoors into commercial encryption systems.
Quote of the Day
”Awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance. The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance.”
- Lawrence Fink, CEO OF Blackrock, the world’s biggest investment fund, reported in the New York Times.
Er, what took you so long, Larry?
Ten tech trends that shaped a decade – Pew Research Center
- Social media sites have emerged as a go-to platform for connecting with others, finding news and engaging politically.
- Around the world and in the U.S., social media has become a key tool for activists, as well as those aligned against them.
- Smartphones have altered the way many Americans go online.
- Growth in mobile and social media use has sparked debates about the impact of screen time on America’s youth – and others.
- Data privacy and surveillance have become major concerns in the post-Snowden era.
- Tech platforms have given rise to a gig economy.
- Online harassment has become a fairly common feature of online life, both for teens and adults.
- Made-up news and misinformation has sparked growing concern.
- A majority of Americans see gender discrimination as a problem in the tech industry.
- Americans’ views about tech companies have turned far less positive in recent years.
No surprises, really. But useful to have empirical evidence.
See Source for details.
Evening at the Folly
Wimpole Estate, Cambridgeshire.
Linkblog
- Adam Smith and the Pin Factory Lovely essay by John Kay. Adam Smith’s account of work in a pin factory, his model for the division of labour, which begins The Wealth Of Nations, is “perhaps the most famous description of an industrial process in the history of economic thought”. But did Smith ever visit a pin factory? Not as far as anyone knows. He took his example, without attribution, from Diderot’s Encyclopédie, and added details of his own invention. Shocking perhaps; but does it matter? No.
- The Twitter Electorate Isn’t the Real Electorate I wish more journalists understood that.
- Most websites don’t follow European cookie consent laws, study shows
- Facebook Loves to Pass the Buck Scathing article by the NYT’s Kara Swisher about the hypocrisy implicit in Andrew Bosworth’s ‘internal’ memo.
Quote of the Day
Twenty years ago we searched for islands of digital access in a sea of meatspace—homes, offices, internet cafes; now we seek equally scattered pockets of protection from that connectivity, and those pockets are increasingly the products of conscious design.
- From a nice essay by Drew Austin, who leaves his phone in the kitchen when he goes to bed.
Realism about carbon capture
From “Can we fix the Air?”, a sobering post by the Azimuth Project about the possibilities of absorbing CO2:
Totaling up some of the options I’ve listed, we could draw down 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by planting trees, 1.5 billion by better forest management, 3 billion by better agricultural practices, and up to 5.2 billion by biofuels with carbon capture. This adds up to over 10 billion tonnes per year. It’s not nearly enough to cancel the 37 billion tonnes we’re dumping into the air each year now. But combined with strenuous efforts to cut emissions, we might squeak by, and keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius.
We might. But the prospects of the world implementing the measures outlined in the post are, I think, zero.
In praise of bloggers
From a “Blogging in an expert society” by Ken Smith:
At least there are certain mistakes that bloggers don’t often make:
They usually don’t pull rank.
They usually don’t insist that a problem can be solved only by a certain kind of expert or talked about only in one kind of language.
They tend to think that people’s experience has something to offer.
They assume that tradition or dogma should be challenged by people reflecting on their experiences.
They get riled up, but down deep they like to hear more voices, not fewer. They want their turn to speak, not the only turn. They get really impatient, but down deep they want democracy.
(HT to Dave Winer)
Serial Killers: Moore’s Law and the parallelisation bubble
Cory Doctorow had a thoughtful reaction to Sunday’s Observer column, where I cited Nathan Myhrvold’s Four Laws of Software. “Reading it”, he writes,
made me realize that we were living through a parallel computation bubble. The period in which Moore’s Law had declined also overlapped with the period in which computing came to be dominated by a handful of applications that are famously parallel — applications that have seemed overhyped even by the standards of the tech industry: VR, cryptocurrency mining, and machine learning.
Now, all of these have other reasons to be frothy: machine learning is the ideal tool for empiricism-washing, through which unfair policies are presented as “evidence-based”; cryptocurrencies are just the thing if you’re a grifty oligarch looking to launder your money; and VR is a new frontier for the moribund, hyper-concentrated entertainment industry to conquer.
“Parallelizable problems become hammers in search of nails,” Cory continued in an email:
“If your problem can be decomposed into steps that can be computed independent of one another, we’ve got JUST the thing for you — so, please, tell me about all the problems you have that fit the bill?”
This is arguably part of why we’re living through a cryptocurrency and ML bubble: even though these aren’t solving our most pressing problems, they are solving our most TRACTABLE ones. We’re looking for our keys under the readily computable lamppost, IOW.
Which leads Cory (@doctorow) to this “half-formed thought”: the bubbles in VR, machine learning and cryptocurrency are partly explained by the decline in returns to Moore’s Law, which means that parallelizable problems are cheaper/easier to solve than linear ones.
And wondering what the counterfactual would have been like: if we had found a way of extending Moore’s Law indefinitely.