Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
"Retaining all TLS and other encrypted traffic is likely tractable.
In 15 years, computing breakthroughs -- possibly quantum computing,
possibly breakthroughs in mathematics -- will allow all this
retained traffic to be decrypted. 15 years is not an especially long
timescale for state security apparats."

I think there's a practical limit on storage, and the question is
whether storing all traffic indefinitely, and decrypting it all at
some point when the technology exists, makes sense. The point of
surveillance, as I understand it, is to gather currently actionable
intelligence. Based on what I've heard from Bill Binney et al, the
NSA looks at patterns to determine what's value and to make
predictions about potential threats.

15 years may not be a long timescale, but there are are
bang-for-buck considerations relative to historical distance and
volume of data.

Decryption and analysis inevitably have cost, cycles, and labor
overhead that will restrict their use, just like any activity can be
restricted by the applicable economies. 

It just doesn't make sense to me that you would store everything, or
even decrypt everything, even what's most current.  What you would
do is look for patterns (as Cory suggest in his example) and zero in
on indications of value in context. You might argue that there's
potential value in long-term retention: better technologies reveal
clues you couldn't see when you first gathered the data. But I think
that's a diminishing return.

This is not my usual realm of expertise, though, and common sense
doesn't always apply.
  

    
More from Stefan Jones via email:

Thanks to Tiffany for the correction and link. Here is another
article from the SF Chronicle:

http://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/Self-cleaning-house-still-has-glit
ches-2880104.php

Could there possibly be another self cleaning house? Googling only
turns up Francis Gabe's invention, but I recall a very reluctant
demonstration. 

* * *
RE high tech obsolescence cycle, it deeply dismays me. I buy gadgets
very reluctantly, in part as a protest from knowing -- from regular 
visits to  thrift stores -- that a lot of them end up gathering dust
and effectively useless in a few years. I have a relative who
indulges the kids' gadget fascination, to the point where there's a
box in their house with old iPads and cameras. Not broken, just a
couple of models behind. Me, I buy good-enough used stuff when I
can. I have three or four used digital cameras around the house and
car; my phone is a dowdy thing I bought at Walgreen's for $15. I
still use my first MP3 Sans Disk player.

I don't pretend these personal measures amount to much.

For what it is worth, retailers and manufacturers do seem to be
taking steps to facilitate recycling. Best Buy will take your old
tech-kipple, and there are places that will get your old but working
cell phone to people in need.

On the other, other hand, when I go dumpster diving, I see a hell of
a lot of discarded old TVs, the CRT kind with pounds of lead in
their tubes. Unless we implement garbage policing, something I don't
see Americans, at least, ever accepting, it is far too easy to just
ditch e-waste.

And then again, even the ewaste efficiently removed from American
cities doesn't just disappear in a puff of pine-scent and a flash of
virtuous rainbow light. It ends up in developing countries, in
toxic-steeped teardown yards that Dickens' corpse would spin to
pieces if we called them Dickensian.
  

    
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/12/-sp-charlie-hebdo-attackers-kids-
france-radicalised-paris

*Nice profile of the attackers here.  I don't think la belle France
is likely to run out of sans-culotte canaille. 

*It's a historical accident that World War I wasn't started by a
Moslem gunmen.  There was a Moslem guy on the streets of Sarajevo
who was part of the same Black Hand cell as Gavrilo Princip.  They
were high school students.  They didn't look any more or less of a
"security threat" than these characters.
  

    
There's always Goodwill. We've offloaded quite a bit of now or near
obsolete tech into Goodwill locally, but I have no idea whether any
of it is useful. They seem to want whatever they can get.
http://www.goodwillsc.org/donate/computers

Obsolescence is fine in a cradle to cradle cycle. The Buddha says no
product is permanent, no more than anything else. Form is emptiness
etc.

Some humans like to think self is real and permanent, transcending
the cycle of inevitability, therefore our various implements,
appliances, devices should be permanent. The inherent impermanence
of quickly obsolete computers and peripherals teaches us the Truth:
nothing lasts. (As you get older and see whole cities transform,
this becomes clearer.)

Re: the state and permanence of human biological entities: we could
get into the h+ debate:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism#Debate, and the question
of potential tech-mediated human immortalism
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality#Attempts_to_engineer_biolo
gical_immortality_in_humans).
  

    

A couple of tweets:

from @bzor

@TheWELL reading this years sotw and can't help but wonder their thoughts on
black mirror, esp the Christmas Special

from @paulfharrison

This is the cyberpunk utopia of free expression we dreamed of in the '00s.
It's bitter and I'm at a loss as to the next move. @TheWELL


(readers, you can still tweet @ us or email inkwell at well dot com with
comments and questions, thanks for playing along at home.)
  

    
Can BitCoin Save Democracy?

<http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/staff-editorials/11334/bitcoin-on
line-voting-issues/>

<http://tinyurl.com/kxrydva>
  

    
<It's like being a Tumblr Social Justice Warrior who meets somebody
from
4Chan.> (post 106)

Bruce, that one really did have me laughing out loud. And it
captures an undercurrent we aren't directly addressing. There are so
many cyber sub-cultures, with every point of view being expressed
that it is rare that anyone comes together on anything. Nor can
they, really. One would think the horrors of climate change would do
it, but it doesn't - and that's about as real as it gets. 

As you point out re: Sarah Palin, we're not listening to the other
sides to gain a perspective or even begin a dialog. And there is a
generational digital-cultural divide as well. 

Just staying at home, here on the Well, there are a lot of us old
time, funky granola, Whole Earth Catalog, Co-Evolution Quarterly
types losing the last of our utopian dreams in the face of  myriad 
dystopian possible futures. I don't think we're bitter, tho I can
understand why @paulfharrison might pick that up. I think we're sad
that all the 60's enthusiasm just never won out and now we're trying
to practically find a way forward for our grandkids. 

And there is a new generation coming up, without any of those values
as a predisposition. And we're still talking about a narrow slice of
Western white bread culture. We haven't gotten to the rest of the
planet and how they are streaming into this new world.

As much as I want to think about the 22nd century, and I like the
intentional focus of that way of thinking ... that all starts with a
lot of 'IF's for me. I don't even want to think about the power of
the 1% by that point. And I guess that's your point. If I don't want
that kind of scenario, then I have to work to engineer another one.
  

    
<satyr>: "I look around and don't see many examples of such goal-
driven concerted effort happening"

Surprised the Neal Stephenson-inspired Hieroglyph project hasn't
come up here yet:

http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/book/hieroglyph/

<bruces> & <doctorow>: Have y'all seen any positive fallout from
Hieroglyph? Or did it get lost in the sky above the port?
  

    
*I'm not quite sure what "positive fallout" from the Hieroglyph
project would look like.  Unless maybe it was genuine fallout from
some Chinese state-supported super-weapons test.  It seems to me
that the Chinese are the ones who still get it about legitimating a
government with concerted, focussed efforts of mega-engineering.

*I've seen some of those efforts.  The Pudong skyscrapers, the Hong
Kong airport, one of the mega-dams.  If you moved even one of those
giant structures into the continental USA, not-in-my-back-yard
people would scream their heads off.  It's not that science fiction
writers to talk about them (although they do talk less).  It's that
the population's actively hostile to efforts of that scale.

*On the other hand, the USA casually dropped a trillion dollars on
an Afghan democratic utopia that never happened.  I don't hear much
complaining about that.  It's not that Americans can't do big stuff,
we just ignore the results when they don't please us.
  

    
Today is Serbia's New Years Day on the Orthodox calendar.  I've got
to run a lot of party errands.  More tomorrow, if I'm not too hung
over *8-/
  

    

thanks for the Sarah Palin quote, and Happy New Year!
  

    
I haven't read the Hieroglyph stories, but I admire the concept for
its permission to think utopian. We've certainly done dystopian
thinking long enough to be weary (and wary) of it. 

Dystopian thinking, like bad news and conflict in general, excites
people, and is therefore marketable. So it has traction. Utopia is
boring.

Given that, it's unusual to see a project dedicated to utopian
optimism, as we ponder the flawed and potentially apocalyptic
aspects of 21st century human endeavor. How are we going to fix
pervasive economic injustice, catastrophic climate change, rampant
sexism (manifest by white guys holding forth etc.), media
conglomeration, network interference, terrorism, etc.?
  

    
The EU is a prominent exception to the kneecapping of government...

Horizon 2020: The EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation
http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/
  

    
Thanks for the pointer to Hieroglyph http://hieroglyph.asu.edu/

Storytelling, a game, conversation/community project aspects.  
An anthology (including pieces Bruce & Cory & Brenda Cooper and a
bunch of other familiar and new (to me anyway) voices, too. I'll be
checking that out, while I murder the planet with electric lights. 

Pretty nice project.  And out of Arizona. You never can tell where
ideas will sprout.
  

    
I put on a big data hat a few months ago, after wearing a cloud hat for a
few years, and I can tell you that the prospect of storing all the TLS
traffic and cracking it later and then running through it looking for
patterns is exactly the kind of thing these deep nerds would be great at.
We're already building great open source toolsets to enable just that kind
of mining, and it keeps getting cheaper.  GPUs make it really efficient to
parse video streams for object detection, it doesn't even take 100% of the
chip today, much less next years tech.

On a more positive note, I wonder if 2015 is the year procedurally generated
content breaks out of the tech art space and into the mainstream.  The game
developers:

http://itch.io/jam/procjam

And 'writers':

https://github.com/dariusk/NaNoGenMo-2014/issues

Have been going at it like crazy lately.  Eventually one of these things
will get internet popular.

I had a thought today about the dispersion of attention and the rise of
computed content.  My wife and I communicate in short hand through quotes.
TV show quotes, movies we both know, general cultural ephemera.  My friends,
who largely belong to the same geek tribe, do the same.  But what happens
when I can put all my interests into a TV show generator or book generator
or game generator and have content that's customized just for me?  There
must be a continuum from "NBC Must See TV" to "Raised in Finland without
Television or Internet", but what happens when everyone's on the Finnish
side of it?  Are we naturally attracted to shared experiences like Game of
Thrones and Walking Dead not because they're just great shows, but because
it gives us something to talk about?

My daughter's 3, and is addicted to YouTube videos of people opening plastic
surprise eggs and playing with toys.  She'll watch them for hours.  Right
now it's in the creators and YouTube's best interest to promote the best of
them, since that's more ad revenue, and a legitimate business.  But what if
you had a machine to generate endorphine optimized surprize toy opening
videos?  What if the key to that is to just let the machine watch YouTube
Videos:

http://rt.com/news/219687-robot-learns-watching-video/

Right now, as a parent I can relate to other parents who are sick to death
of CookieSwirlC videos or that guy on the Engineering Family channel, and
when the kids get together they can talk about their favorites.  But what if
they're all different, made just for us, feedback-loop-optimized for maximum
viewing and stickiness?  Maybe then we just all sit around staring at our
phones.  Not that we don't do that anyway...
  

    
Yeah we're pretty much there already. The current version is called "music".
  

    
The "Hieroglyph" project isn't about utopias, it's more about
creating memes or icons that center around very large, but feasible,
think-big construction projects.  The idea is that if fantasists
could make the megaproject seem exciting and glamorous again, people
might put aside their petty divisions and do something.

*It's worth a try, but it kind of elides the likelihood that all
that energy and money would be swiftly siphoned into the pockets of
the eighty super-moguls who own half the wealth on the planet.
  

    
*I should point out here, that, far from despairing about the
prospects of sci-fi, I am editing the yearly science-fiction issue
of TECHNOLOGY REVIEW *again* now.   The 2014 issue's still around,
and the planet's feverish masses of the relentlessly oppressed seem
to be enjoying it.
  

    
*I don't write big, tub-thumping novels with the eagerness I used
to, but I'm writing rather a lot of short science fiction lately. 
I'm not sure what this stuff is supposed to demonstrate to anybody
-- it doesn't really "advance the cause," or anything --  but it's
all exceptionally topical and rather politically pointed.  I've done
so many pieces of this ilk now that it's starting to look like some
kind of web-fiction mini-genre.

http://www.iftf.org/fanfutures/sterling/

http://www.dissidentblog.org/en/articles/nexiste-pas

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-brain-dump
  

    
On Stefan's self-cleaning house front, the first device we bought
for "Casa Jasmina" was an iRobot Roomba.  It's not open-source, it's
not particularly new or advanced device.  It's surprisingly delicate
and tender for a dirt-sucking machine.  Its maneuvering system is so
algorithmically wonky that it wanders the floors like a drunken
sailor.  It tends to chew carpet fringes.  The battery life is
short.

Despite these design drawbacks, the robot really and seriously
cleans the floor.  It doesn't exactly do a "good" job, but it does a
job that no human being would do.  Especially its penchant for the
"three D's," the dull, dirty and dangerous.  It crawls under beds
and bookcases, it mechanically obsesses with walls, corners,
crannies, closets, the nameless junkspaces that people don't
valorize or notice, and therefore don't clean very well.  You can
try hand-vacuuming, and then fire up the Roomba, and it returns to
its dock full of household dirt a human eye overlooks.

A Roomba costs rather a lot, for a vacuum cleaner.  I don't know how
much it "costs" to breathe large volumes of pollen, urban grime and
shed pet-hair, every day  Probably rather a lot more.
  

    
Speaking of the relentlessly oppressed, I ran across a good metaphor
for their plight a couple of days ago. Marsha and I were watching an
episode of the political melodrama "Madame Secretary," in which Tea
Leoni plays a former CIA analyst appointed Secretary of State, who
each week juggles various family dramas with always-complex global
political affairs. She's alternately perplexed and powerful.
Hilarity ensues.

In this week's show an older Indonesian woman was found imprisoned
in the home of the Bahrainian ambassador and his wife, apparently as
a housekeeper. They had confiscated her passport and made sure she
couldn't go anywhere. The police break into the residence (I forget
what brought them there) and find the woman blissfully watching
television, living in some closet in the house. They free her, and
at that point the ambassador and his wife arrive home, take one look
at the scene, and declare diplomatic immunity. Madame Secretary,
horrified at the thought that someone was keeping a slave imprisoned
in DC, wants to waive immunity and prosecute the ambassador. The
balance of the episode wrestles with the political issues this
entails - I won't get into the gory details (you'll tl;dr if I do).

But what I found interesting was the Indonesian woman's reaction to
all this. She doesn't seem to feel "rescued." She had work and a
situation that made sense, and now she's cast adrift. Ultimately the
Bahrainians offer reparations - she can have an apartment and her
freedom in the U.S. This doesn't light her fire at all. Offered the
option of returning to Indonesia, she says "there's no work there."
She can't imagine who she would work for in the U.S.  She does have
an offer or work in Bahrain, so she chooses to go there.

I thought this character was a good metaphor for much of the world's
population. They're not thinking about politics or oppression,
they're wondering how to be secure, working, with full bellies and a
roof over their heads. I.e. they're at the lower end of Maslow's
pyramid; they can't even imagine those higher levels.

The Bodhisattva has some work to do, for sure.
  

    
I wonder if any of the universal living wage proposals will get traction
globally this year.  It'll be interesting to see what comes out of a net-
connected population where the bottom 80% aren't worried about losing the
roof over their head or their health.  It seems like the global economy's
taking a beating, though, so those kumbaya dreams may have to wait.
  

    
Occasionally you'll run into a piece of writing that articulates and
focuses what your life's about. Kathy Mitchell, my colleague at
Consumers Union, just forwarded a piece like that, an article in
Harvard Business Review called "Understanding 'New Power'." 

"Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it
is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of
it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It
downloads, and it captures.

"New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many.
It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it
distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it
surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel
it."

https://hbr.org/2014/12/understanding-new-power

This helps me understand how to explain the evolution and direction
of my own life over the last couple of decades. I'm totally drawn
into the "current" they describe. 

Aside from projects like this conversation on the WELL, I work
full-time and Consumers Union, and I'm also fully committed as a
member of a web development co-op, Polycot Associates, that used to
be "my company." I'm also president of EFF-Austin, a non-profit that
depends on a working board (we don't have revenues.) And I do a
bunch of other stuff I can't get into here. Suffice to say that I
could never live the life I'm living if I was part of the "old
power" model. Not only would I be miserable, but it just wouldn't
work.

Another point: Tiffany Lee Brown posted earlier a soft criticism of
this conversation as three white males holding forth as experts, but
that's "old power" thinking. I was troubled by her post, but until
now I was less clear how to articulate a response. Neither Bruce nor
Cory nor I are "experts" in the traditional sense. We're all heavy
networked, working within collaborative open systems, constantly
informed and revised by our friends, colleagues, and sometimes by
total strangers who run across our rants and ramblings. And this
conversation is always open to generally unfiltered participation by
others - that doesn't fit the old power concept of "white guys
holding forth."

From the HBR article:

"New power norms place a special emphasis on collaboration, and not
just as a way to get things done or as part of a mandated
'consultation process.' New power models, at their best, reinforce
the human instinct to cooperate (rather than compete) by rewarding
those who share their own ideas, spread those of others, or build on
existing ideas to make them better. Sharing-economy models, for
example, are driven by the accumulated verdict of the community."

I should add this quote, which confirms their roots in reality vs
utopian thinking:

"New power is also fundamentally changing the way everyday people
see themselves in relation to institutions, authority, and one
another. These new norms aren’t necessarily better. For instance,
new power offers real opportunities to enfranchise and empower, but
there’s a fine line between democratizing participation and a mob
mentality. This is especially the case for self-organized networks
that lack formal protections. New power can easily veer in the
direction of a Tea Party or an Occupy Wall Street. (We assume that
most people think at least one of these is a bad thing.)"

And this toward the end of the article:

"As we revel in moments of promise and see ever more people shaping
their destinies and lives, the big question is whether new power can
genuinely serve the common good and confront society’s most
intractable problems. Strategy and tactics are important, but the
ultimate questions are ethical. 'For all of its democratizing power,
the Internet, in its current form, has simply replaced the old boss
with a new boss,' warns Fred Wilson, a partner at Union Square
Ventures. 'And these new bosses have market power that, in time,
will be vastly larger than that of the old boss.'"
  

    
For those who (like myself) were unaware and need an overview,
here's a link to the Wikipedia article on Project Hieroglyph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hieroglyph
  

    
<bruces> in <134> "It seems to me that the Chinese are the ones 
who still get it about legitimating a government with concerted,
focussed efforts of mega-engineering."

To add further substance to that point, here's two recent articles
on Chinese megaprojects:

108 Chinese Infrastructure Projects That Are Reshaping The World
http://www.businessinsider.com/108-giant-chinese-infrastructure-projects-that-
are-reshaping-the-world-2011-12?op=1

In China, Projects to Make Great Wall Feel Small
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/13/business/international/in-china-projects-to-
make-great-wall-feel-small-.html?_r=0