This is his signature on the screwball letter he wrote to Speaker Pelosi.
Linkblog
- How to recognise AI snake oil Slides of a terrific lecture by Arvind Narayanan of Princeton.
- Killer doubts Good review by Diane Coyle of * Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Erik Conway and Naoini Oreskes.
- Very thoughtful commentary by Wendy Grossman on my observer column about how we hold AI systems to higher standards than humans doing the same thing.
- Elon Musk’s weird ‘cybertruck’ Jean-Louis Gasseé on whether it’s a real prospect, or just PR clickbait.
Thanks to Philip Cunningham for spotting a duff link.
The 26 words that created the Internet we have today
This morning’s Observer column:
Stratton Oakmont sued Prodigy and the unidentified poster for defamation – and won. Prodigy argued that it couldn’t be held responsible for what anonymous users posted on its platform. The judge disagreed, arguing that the company was liable as the publisher of the content created by its users because it exercised editorial control over the messages on its bulletin boards in several ways and was thereby potentially liable for any and all defamatory material posted on its websites.
The case alarmed an Oregon congressman (now a US senator), Ronald Wyden, who accurately perceived it as a mortal threat to the growth of the internet. It would mean that every online hosting service would need to have lawyers crawling over its site, thereby slowing exploitation of the technology to a crawl. So with another congressman, Chris Cox, he inserted a short clause – Section 230 – into the Communications Decency Act, which was then incorporated in the sprawling 1996 Telecommunications Act. The section itself is short (about a thousand words) but the core of it is a single sentence: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
That sentence laid the basis for everything that has followed. It constitutes, as the title of a recent book puts it, The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet. What it does is create a “liability shield” for online platforms…
Linkblog
- Can the Internet survive climate change? Partly about whether the planet can survive Netflix (i.e the carbon footprint of streaming video).
- Sale of second-hand e-books infringes copyright, rules CJEU Just because you paid for an e-book doesn’t mean you own it. The EU’s highest court has ruled that the exhaustion of copyright does not apply to e-books.
- The Cathedral and the Bizarre A hyper-critical take on The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond’s famous essays on Open Source software.
- DeepMind and Google: the battle to control Artificial Intelligence Terrific article by Hal Hodson.
A blogger’s mascot
Sits on top of my big iMac and never interferes with my copy. What more could one ask for?
The decade in tech
Neatly summed up by Scott Galloway in the Pivot podcast.
Linkblog
- We Tested Ring’s Security. It’s Awful Ring lacks basic security features, making it easy for hackers to turn the company’s cameras against its customers. Why are we not surprised?
- Last House On The Left: Following Jeremy Corbyn’s Campaign Trail Remarkably insightful (long) article about Jeremy Corbyn — written four years ago.
- The scientific events that shaped the decade Nature’s summary of a decade breakthroughs in frontiers from gene editing to gravitational waves. The coming one must focus on climate change.
- The decade that tech lost its way The New York Times’s oral history of the 2010s
Linkblog
- Keynes was wrong: Generation Z will have it worse Long, thoughtful essay on Keynes’s famous 1933 essay on “The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”.
- Raspberry Pi celebrates its 30 millionth sale The little computer that could. It’s the one great British success story of our times.
- The Very Respectful Wikipedia Battles Over “OK Boomer” Another illustration of the intrinsic wisdom of Wikipedia’s methodology for separating fact from fiction. And it was invented long before anyone had heard of fake news.
- How to Control a Conversation Without Saying Much at All When one speaker is monopolizing a discussion, use a tactic called ‘cognitive incision’.
Quote of the day
“The problem is our brains are intuitively suited to the sorts of risk management decisions endemic to living in small family groups in the East African highlands in 100,000 BC, and not to living in the New York City of 2008.”
- Bruce Schneier
Patronising BS from the Google boys
Announcing their decision to step down from directly managing the company they created, the Google co-founders wrote:
With Alphabet now well-established, and Google and the Other Bets operating effectively as independent companies, it’s the natural time to simplify our management structure. We’ve never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company. And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President. Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He will be the executive responsible and accountable for leading Google, and managing Alphabet’s investment in our portfolio of Other Bets. We are deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term, and will remain actively involved as Board members, shareholders and co-founders. In addition, we plan to continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we’re passionate about!
John Gruber is having none of it:
This whole “Alphabet” thing is a joke. I still don’t get what they’re even trying for with it. The company is Google and we all know it. The subsidiary owns the parent and everyone knows it. No one is fooled by this. Nothing has changed regarding the goofy super-class shares that Page and Brin hold that give them complete control of the company. Google is a privately-held company that trades as a publicly-held one.
Here’s the thing that’s always rubbed me the wrong way about Google. They’re insulting. Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates — I completely believe they’re all geniuses. But they never seem(ed) condescending. Tim Cook and Satya Nadella aren’t founders but they’re both great examples of what a CEO should be: smart, honest, respectful.
Brin and Page are almost certainly smarter than you and me. But they’re not as much smarter as they think they are. Read this whole announcement through the filter of “they think we’re dumb” and it makes a lot more sense. And if they were as smart as they think they are, they’d therefore be smart enough to recognize how tone-deaf this plays.
Yep.