Why I expect my Ethical
Hackers to do very, very well.
Your
Job, Their Data: The Most Important Untold Story About the Future
All the drones,
synthetic biologists, and self-driving cars notwithstanding, the
story of how companies quantify, analyze, and try to predict your
job performance may be the most important story in technology.
That is to say, when we
look back in 20 years about what has changed in our lives, we will be
able to find this thread of data-driven personnel decision making as
the thing that's changed people's lives the most.
My colleague Don Peck
has an unnerving feature in this month's magazine on precisely this
issue: "They're
Watching You At Work." I highly encourage you to absorb
this tale's anecdotes and data.
See? It's what happens
after your personal everything has been compromised that's important.
Perhaps we could ask him to expand
on that for the Privacy Blog?
Jim Edwards reports:
One
of Google’s top futurists, Vinton Cerf, said yesterday that
“privacy may be
an anomaly” and “it will be increasingly
difficult for us to achieve privacy.”
They
are scary words, coming from a man whose official job title at Google
is vp/chief internet evangelist. Cerf is also known as the “father
of the internet,” after his role in developing ARPANET, the
forerunner to the web.
Read more on Business
Insider.
If being pulled over
wasn't voluntary, is anything that follows?
Texas
Police Set Up Checkpoints To Collect Blood And Saliva From
'Volunteers'
… Now, thanks to
the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, citizens can't
even travel across a single city without
being routed off the road and asked (nicely) to cough up a little
DNA.
The
Fort
Worth Police Department (FWPD) installed the roadblock north of
the city during daytime traffic. They flagged down some motorists at
random and asked them to give breath, saliva, and blood samples. The
FWPD claims the effort was "100 percent voluntary" and
anonymous.
It
acknowledges that most of the drivers had broken no law, but it said
the effort was valuable to federal contractors working to complete a
3 year, $7.9M USD survey on behalf of the The National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) aimed at collecting
medical data for use in combating drunk driving.
The problem is, some
drivers didn't
get the impression this DNA sampling was voluntary.
… But Cope
questioned how it could be voluntary if uniformed officers forced her
off the road.
“I gestured to the
guy in front that I just wanted to go straight, but he wouldn’t let
me and forced me into a parking spot,” she recalled.
… Obviously, if
officers are going to pay you for a blood sample or cheek
swab, then the "detainment" is obviously voluntary. Cops
normally don't pay citizens for DNA they collect. But Cope's
experience shows that even voluntary "surveys" seem
mandatory when officers make every effort to conceal the voluntary
aspects of the stop until after the citizen has already
complied.
…
Apparently on the consent form that officers gave "voluntary"
participants, fine print informed the driver that [the police had
taken] "passive alcohol sensor readings before the consent
process has been completed."
Should we try writing
“First Amendment 2.0?”
Paper
– The New Speech
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on November 21, 2013
The
New Speech - Andrew Tutt, Yale University –
Information Society Project, Yale University – Law School. July
17, 2013. 41
Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly, 2014
“Could the
government...
prevent
Facebook from deleting an individual’s Facebook account without
first following government-prescribed procedures?
Intervene
to require Google to conduct its search engine rankings in a certain
manner, or subject Google to legal liability for wrongful termination
or exclusion?
Require
social networks and search engines to prominently reveal the criteria
by which their algorithms sort, order, rank, and delete content?
Demand
that some user information or data be deleted, withheld, made
inalienable, non-transferable, ungatherable or uncollectable?
Engage
in detailed regulation of the intellectual property and privacy
relationships that inhere between individual users and the platforms
they engage?
Each of these questions
implicates the First Amendment, and as each question reveals, the
same stresses that strained the institution of property when Charles
Reich wrote The New Property in 1964 confront digital speech in 2014.
The most important “speech” of the next century will be
generated, intermediated, transformed, and translated by massive
computers controlled by powerful institutions: petitions in front of
the shopping mall replaced with “Likes” on Facebook and “Votes”
on Reddit; sports leagues replaced by leagues of Counter-Strike and
Call of Duty; broadcast and cable news replaced by interactive,
algorithmically-generated, computer-curated granularly distributed
news memes spread via blogs and aggregators. As more of the
activities that were once exclusively the province of the physical
world become the province of the digital, more of the issues that
once confronted the distribution and allocation of rights in property
will confront the distribution and allocation of rights in speech.
While the great speech debates of the twentieth century were about
the content of speech — that is, what one could say — the
great speech debate of the twenty-first century will be about what
counts as speech and whose speech counts. Will it be that of
institutions and algorithms, or individuals and organic communities?
These are questions courts are already confronting and they are
getting the answers wrong. In contrast to scholars who by turns
either deemphasize the transformative nature of the New Speech or
argue that courts will have little impact on its growth, this
Article argues that potentially critical judicial missteps are
already occurring. Just as the needs of modern industrial
society were delayed and often stymied by the judiciary of the early
twentieth century, if we fail to consider the implications of the
speech decisions courts make now, the needs of the modern information
society may be delayed and stymied by the judiciary of the early
twenty-first.”
This
Article is an effort to explore the ways in which speech platforms
represent a new challenge to the First Amendment, one that will
require it to bend if we are to prevent the Lochnerization of the
Freedom of Speech. It ties together various threads — the power of
automation, the centrality and power of Internet media platforms, the
doctrines developing in the courts, the actual acts of censorship in
which these platforms regularly engage, and the core purposes the
First Amendment was designed to serve — to make a sustained
argument that we must think seriously about restructuring and
dejudicializing the First Amendment if we are to avoid seeing the
First Amendment transformed into a powerful shield for the very sorts
of censorship it was written to prevent.
(Related) How does
Google fit into this?
I don’t know enough
to assert one way or another whether the Google
Books ruling is ultimately a “good” or a “bad” decision.
What I do know is that it is fascinating.
US District Judge Denny
Chin’s decision is, to my mind, far more interesting than a
legal ruling has any right to be. I say this because at the core of
the legal decision is a mind-twisting idea:
The
display of snippets of text for search is similar to the display of
thumbnail images of photographs for search or small images of concert
posters for reference to past events, as the snippets help users
locate books and determine whether they may be of interest. Google
Books thus uses words for a different purpose — it uses snippets of
text to act as pointers directing users to a broad selection of
books.
…
Similarly,
Google Books is also transformative in the sense that it has
transformed book text into data for purposes of substantive research,
including data mining and text mining in new areas, thereby opening
up new fields of research. Words in books are being used in a way
they have not been used before. Google Books has created
something new in the use of book the frequency of words and trends in
their usage provide substantive information.
Google
Books does not supersede or supplant books because it is not a tool
to be used to read book. Instead, it “adds value to the
original” and allows for “the creation of new information, new
aesthetics, new insights and understandings.” Hence, the use is
transformative.
(Related) kind of...
Does this do anything to advance scholarship?
A
Textual Analysis of The
Hunger Games
It's for the children!
(Typical)
CBC News reports:
When
Justice Minister Peter MacKay unveiled the federal government’s
proposed cyberbullying law on Wednesday, he touted it as a necessary
tool to combat the often hurtful spread of intimate images. To
emphasize the underlying point, he made the announcement during
national Bullying Awareness Week.
But
legal experts were left wondering why a piece of legislation that is
meant to rein in online tormentors is also taking on terror
suspects and people who steal cable TV signals.
“There
is a much larger agenda at play here,” says Rob Currie, director of
the Law and Technology Institute at Dalhousie University.
Read more on CBC.
I guess I'm still
waiting for a better definition than, “The US shouldn't be so
powerful, we should.”
The United States and
its key intelligence allies are quietly working behind the scenes to
kneecap a mounting movement in the United Nations to promote a
universal human right to online privacy, according to diplomatic
sources and an internal American government document obtained by The
Cable.
I wonder if I can break
a 3D printer like I do with cameras?
Shapify
creates 3D-printed selfies using Kinect
If you have a
current-gen Kinect, you could soon be the owner of your very own
selfie statue. In concept, Shapify.me's
service is similar to Germany's Twinkind,
which set up a photo booth for your portrait, but Shapify's a little
more DIY (and a little more lo-res).
Using Kinect for
Windows or Kinect for Xbox
360, you can scan in your own image. First, you need to download and
install the Shapify.me app and the Microsoft Kinect SDK.
… As you can see by
the sample image above, it's not perfect, but at a flat rate of $59,
a lot cheaper than Twinkind's booth, it's not a bad deal.
Infographics!
In
A World of Digital Storage, Size Matters
Gigabytes and
terabytes. In the world we live in now, storage space is everything.
Megabytes no longer satisfy our relentless demands to store entire
music libraries on an MP3 player. Single-digit gigabyte storages are
no longer sufficient to hold our photos, videos, games and
applications on smartphones. We need more!
Or do we? How long do
you reckon we’ll take to make the jump from terabytes to petabytes?
Will the computers of the future come with petabyte drives as
standard? What’s with our incessant desire to store everything?
And just how much data can there be? datascience@berkeley
explains.
Oh, should I be getting
Press Releases (with large bribes?) Also reads as, How to write an
interesting blog...
How
To Get A Technology Blog To Ignore Your Press Release
A Google map you have
to be a big fan of Lord of the Rings to enjoy...
The
Hobbit
The desolation of smaug
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