Farr.all
Information theory, privacy, East Asia…
Does Twitter = Democracy?
02 months ago
A study released in September by the project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington argues that social media including Facebook, Twitter and Youtube played a “central role” in the Arab Spring. They find that a spike in the volume of Tweets in Egypt, for example, anticipated the high volume of physical presence in Tahrir Square just prior to Mubarak’s resignation. There is some very interesting data and analysis here. It is clear that the autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt did not have the technological resources to combat Twitter’s obvious value as a tool for the political opposition. And Twitter’s de-centralized implementation makes it particularly difficult for governments to censor. We must be careful, however, not to read too much into these findings.
There were complaints early this fall among members of the Occupy Wall Street movement that Twitter has been censoring the #occupywallstreet hashtag, not allowing the term to reach the highly visible trending topics section. While Twitter has dismissed these claims, it is important to remember that it’s a private company whose interests do not necessarily resonate with those of the OWS movement. J.P. Morgan reportedly has a 10% stake in Twitter (also, see this and this), though indirectly via the Chris Sacca managed Digital Growth Fund. There is no law preventing Twitter from interfering with Tweet traffic.
Jonathan Albright at the University of Auckland has poked holes in Twitter’s argument that people simply do not understand how their proprietary algorithm works. And there has been enough suspicion on the ground to prompt adoption of Twitter-alternative Vibe. Unlike Twitter, Vibe “tweets” disappear after a fixed time and can be limited to a specific physical radius. Trust doesn’t (and shouldn’t) always scale.
Privacy Tip #23378 (on public terminals, logging out is not enough)
02 months ago
Ever use a computer in a public space or friend’s house to check an account? Although making sure you log out and close the browser window is important, it is often not enough. Make sure that the browser options have not been set to remember passwords for sites. If the option is checked, a subsequent user of the browser could easily gain access to your account even if you have logged out and closed the browser. On Firefox, find Options-Security in the browser menu. Make sure it is unchecked and then choose OK.
MD Researchers on Time Travel, Big Bang
09 months ago
by admin
in Belief Systems
Recently published at PhysOrg.com, suggesting that the widely accepted Big Bang origin theory precludes time travel.
Science, concepts and the cognitive toolkit
01 year ago
by admin
in Belief Systems
From the world question center at edge.org: “What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” Interesting contributions from Howard Gardner, George Lakoff and others. Below is from experimental psychologist Bruce Hood:
Haecceity
Understanding the concept of haecceity would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit because it succinctly captures most people’s intuitions about authenticity that are increasingly threatened by the development of new technologies. Cloning, genetic modification and even digital reproduction are some examples of new innovations that alarm many members of the public because they appear to violate a belief in the integrity of objects
Haecceity is originally a metaphysical concept that is both totally obscure and yet very familiar to all of us. It is the psychological attribution of an unobservable property to an object that makes it unique among identical copies. All objects may be categorized into groups on the basis of some shared property but an object within a category is unique by virtual of its haecceity. It is haecceity that makes your wedding ring authentic and your spouse irreplaceable, even though such things could be copied exactly in a futuristic science fiction world where matter duplication had been solved.
Online Collectivism, Individualism and Anonymity in East Asia
01 year ago
This is the abstract of a presentation I’ll be giving this spring at a cyber-surveillance workshop at the University of Toronto.
Entering the second decade of the 21st century, anonymity, appears to be under siege. While targeted behavioral advertising continues to expand and personal information becomes increasingly commoditized, government officials around the globe warn us that true anonymity is in conflict with national security goals. Indeed, there appear to be growing questions about its continued viability within the digital environment in the age of terrorism.Will anonymity turn out to be a relic of the 20th century or does it have a future?
As Gary Marx has noted, different contexts and value conflicts make it difficult to take an absolute position for or against anonymity. And while the basic idea is clear, a formal definition of anonymity remains elusive. There are a wide range of approaches to anonymity across the world; some are parts of cultural tradition, while others seem more emergent, less bound by established norms.
This paper, a meta‐analysis drawing data from related academic studies, trade press and mass media, will examine recent variations in the salience, use, and comparative value of anonymity, and its tripartite relationship with individuality and collectivism, across three specific cultural contexts: China, South Korea, and Japan. Anonymity is framed in this investigation as a critical form of “context relative informational norms” within Nissenbaum’s (2010) “contextual integrity” model of social information flows. While data gathering is likely to continue until the end of 2010, some of the intermediate findings are discussed below.
Although the primary subcultures of East Asia share a broad range of social values including Confucian collectivism, they have unique stories to tell about the role and importance of anonymity in their lives.
China, perhaps, is the most surprising, where anonymity, and its affordance of experimentation with alternate online identities, is prized more highly among Chinese youth than their American counterparts. Chinese netizens have continued to push back successfully against PRC government policies to require real name registration for bloggers.
In South Korea, public sentiment is more wary of anonymity, as it is seen to have facilitated extreme and inappropriate crowd behaviors leading to public shaming and a number of suicides. Disparate, nameless crowds combine bits and pieces of knowledge about a target to identify it, a curious case (known in China as the “Human Flesh Search Engine”) in which anonymity in one place can be used to extinguish anonymity in another.
The Japanese seem to value anonymity for different reasons and are less social than the Koreans and Chinese. Their anonymous “2chan” web site was the inspiration for the West’s 4chan. Confucian collectivism expresses itself most as the desire to blend nameless into the crowd.
It is through increased understanding of global cultural contexts that we can better understand the critical role anonymity plays in social systems. Even within a region where collectivism rules over individuality, anonymity plays a surprisingly key role. We must be especially wary about assuming social systems might be better off, more secure, without it.
Ground broken for massive cybersecurity data center
01 year ago
The federal government has just broken ground on a massive new cybersecurity center in Utah, the “Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative Data Center .” From the Deseret News story “Utah’s $1.5 billion cyber-security center underway“:
Officially named the Utah Data Center, the facility’s role in aggregating and verifying dizzying volumes of data for the intelligence community has already earned it the nickname “Spy Center.” Its really long moniker is the Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative Data Center — the first in the nation’s intelligence community.
A White House document identifies the Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative as addressing “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation, but one that we as a government or as a country are not adequately prepared to counter.”
The most complete open source information I’ve found to date on the data center can be found at the public intelligence web site.
Washington Post Story on Monitoring America
01 year ago
by admin
in Surveillance
A in-depth report today in the Washington Post describes the expanding apparatus of US domestic intelligence since the September 11th Terrorist Attacks, including fusion centers, the new Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative and the FBI’s Guardian Database. One of the many eye opening findings in this report:
The vast majority of fusion centers across the country have transformed themselves into analytical hubs for all crimes and are using federal grants, handed out in the name of homeland security, to combat everyday offenses.
This article is well worth reading, but it is missing a bit of legal context that is important to an understanding the government policy that is driving the change. US domestic intelligence is being expanded under the authority of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA) of 2004. This was the first and most comprehensive legal response to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. It outlined a wholesale rewiring of the domestic intelligence apparatus and the establishment of an Information Sharing Environment (ISE). The nationwide suspicious activity reporting initiative (NSI), which journalists Dana Priest and William M Arkin mention briefly, is the primary focus of the ISE today. It includes its own federal data standard. The “See something say something” campaign which has been getting so much press recently is simply one facet of the NSI, the focus of which up until recently has been training local and state police to be intelligence agents. For a wide range of public documents that provide coverage of the NSI and ISE, see my isesar.us web site, developed with the support of NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication and a grant from the Department of Defense.
Email Protected by 4th Amendment
01 year ago
Earlier this week the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals released its decision in the US v Warshak case. In short, the court found that the federal government must obtain a warrant to search email accounts stored by internet service providers.
When I first read of this decision, I had a kind of deja vu, thinking that the court had actually issued this decision a couple of years ago. I wrote a short post on this in my former blog, US- China Surveillance. Turns out that the earlier decision had been vacated based on procedural grounds. As EFF says, this is currently the only federal appellate court ruling on the books related to email and the 4th Amendment. It calls into question the constitutionality of the Stored Communications Act, which makes it lawful for the federal government to obtain your email without a warrant in many contexts.
Climate Change vs. Global Warming
01 year ago
by admin
in Belief Systems
Google has a very interesting new service, the Ngram Viewer, which lets you graph out the frequency of particular words and phrases (in many languages) over the last 500 years, via a databases Google says covers some 4% of the world’s books. It is not clear exactly how this sample is derived (though I read it is a subset of their larger database) so its validity remains an open question, but it looks to be a very useful tool for content and discourse analysts of all stripes.
I decided to graph the terms “climate change” vs. “global warming” from 1800 to the present (you can click on the image for a clearer view) Interesting to see the sudden appearance and then dying out of the term “climate change” at the dawn of the 20th century and the distancing of its lead over the term “global warming” beginning in the mid to late 90s. One wonders whether this dynamic reflects any change in core propositions of the climate change discourse. Is it still the core argument that the planet overall is warming at an accelerating and unnatural rate? Or is it that CO2 somehow disrupts the earlier stable climate system, increasing the likelihood of all forms of extreme whether conditions from hot to cold?
European scientists publish evidence challenging Big Bang
01 year ago
by admin
in Belief Systems
One topic I will be writing about in this more general blog project will be how beliefs tend to cluster and what happens when certain “core beliefs” are challenged with what one might call “disconfirming evidence.” I haven’t seem much coverage of this yet, but a recent journal article publication provides evidence, that, if true, would fundamentally challenge the dominant origin theory of the universe. Scientists at the INAF-Brera Astronomical Observatory in Italy and the Astronomical Observatory of Paris-Meudon found a cluster of galaxies that appears to be several billion years older than possible under the evolutionary timetable that follows from the Big Bang model. The full article, Red sequence determination of the redshift of the cluster of galaxies JKCS 041: z ~ 2.2, in Astronomy & Astrophysics, is intended for a specialized audience. A press release at the INAF web site, makes the significance of their finding much clearer for the layperson, but only if you speak Italian. Here is a quote from the press release, courtesy of google translate:
It is the farthest cluster of galaxies ever observed. Thus, the oldest. A record. It is not just a record. To get an idea of the implications of the discovery of Stefano Andreon and Marc Huertas-Company (INAF-Brera Astronomical Observatory of the former, the Astronomical Observatory of Paris-Meudon second), we try to think of the babies. And how, slowly, begin to speak. They begin to stutter the first words within the year. To compose the two already know a few words, those who after the first. Every so often there will certainly be someone who started before everyone else, setting a new record.
But suppose that an infant, we have made a child of just six months, he leaps out with a “Mom, let’s stop here for today’s milk I guess I’ve had enough.” We would be dismayed. Are not merely the killing of a new record: a child would mean that radical rethinking. Would force us to reconsider from scratch all the models available to us of neurology, linguistics and developmental psychology. How can know when to make complex sentences would still be barely able to put together a simple syllable?
If true, this will be a very interesting case to watch.
