A Quick Plug

Episode 107: Building the Decentralized Web

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to James Walker of Fission about building the decentralized web, decentralized identity, IPFS, and empowering users.

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We had the pleasure of speaking with James Walker of Fission, a decentralized web platform, about decentralization, IPFS, and his long history with digital identity.

James is an old friend of ours, and is a kindred spirit who values user agency as much as we do. For him that means designing standards and protocols that help to ultimately empower users, and we were inspired to learn of the work he’s doing. We hope you enjoy it as well!

We encourage you to share your thoughts with us on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form.

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More From Fission

Fission CTO, Brooklyn Zelenka, presented this fantastic overview of Web 3 recently, and it’s well worth a look. She packs a lot of knowledge into a quick presentation.

This Week’s Reading List

• Build the future of web apps at the edge – Fission — Cloud native stacks won't deliver the future We're building the data, auth & compute primitives that enable true local-first edge applications. But we don’t get to the future alone. Our edge computing stack is already embedded into leading protocols, platforms and products.

• Beyond the Web. Answer these questions: | by Doc Searls | Mar, 2022 | Medium — Why are the choices presented to you by websites called your choices, when all those choices are provided by them? And why don’t you give them choices?

• Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter. Here's what we know | AP News — In 10 days, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has gone from popular Twitter contributor and critic to the company’s largest individual shareholder to a would-be owner of the social platform — a whirlwind of activity that could change the service dramatically given the sometimes whimsical billionaire’s self-identification as a free-speech absolutist.

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 106: Revisiting Privacy

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls revisit the topic of data privacy.

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We’re back to the newsletter after a bit of a 2022 hiatus, and it’s perfect timing with the topic of our most recent episode. Last week, we circled back to the topic that got our podcast started and explored what has, and possibly more notably, what hasn’t changed with regard to data privacy and personal agency. While we may not have seen the progress we had hoped for, there has been some notable work (including some praiseworthy books, linked below), so we hope you’ll join us as we discuss the changes we have seen in the last three and a half years.

You can still find us on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form.

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Thank you to frequent guest, Shawn Powers, for sending us this gem that we had to resurrect the newsletter just to share with you.

This Week’s Reading List

• Views on Current Laws and Practices to Protect Personal Data According to US Likely Voters, July 2021 (% of respondents) | Insider Intelligence

• ProjectVRM – Developing tools for customer independence and engagement with vendors

• Ostrom Workshop Calendar — The main business model of the Web goes by a label we all now know from the title of Shoshana Zuboff’s landmark book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. How do we fight surveillance capitalism? And how do we work around it? How, especially, can we keep our new Byway from becoming infested with it—or with the mendacities behind it? Nobody better to help us toward answers than Shoshana herself, who leads this finale to our salon series. Scholar, writer, and activist Shoshana Zuboff is the author of three major books, each of which signaled the start of a new epoch in technological society. Her recent masterwork, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, an international bestseller translated into twenty-six languages, has been hailed as the tech industry’s Silent Spring and the Das Kapital of the 21st Century. Professor Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School and a faculty associate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights. Her work has received the Axel Springer Award (2019), the EPIC Lifetime Achievement Award (2021), and is the first recipient of the Global Privacy Assembly Giovanni Buttarelli Award (2021).

• Opinion | Facebook and the Surveillance Society: The Other Coup - The New York Times — We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.

• Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America: Wylie, Christopher: 9781984854636: Amazon.com: Books

• Slaughterbots - Wikipedia — Slaughterbots is a 2017 arms-control advocacy video presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria.

• Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data: Veliz, Carissa: 9781612199672: Amazon.com: Books

• The Privacy Engineer's Manifesto: Getting from Policy to Code to QA to Value: Dennedy, Michelle, Fox, Jonathan, Finneran, Tom: 9781430263555: Amazon.com: Books

• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Zuboff, Shoshana: 9781610395694: Amazon.com: Books

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 92: DIY

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Shawn Powers, and Kyle Rankin talk right to repair Apple devices, cocktails, and our nerdy hobbies.

Please remember to subscribe via the podcast player of your choice.

We’re back with a new episode this week, which you can check out on the website, but if you didn’t get a chance to listen to our previous episode, Episode 92: The DIY Episode, it’s worth a listen. We talked all about DIY, Apple and right to repair, and even “hacking” cocktails. You’ll find all the episode links in the reading list below, and as a bonus, we’ve added a bunch of interesting links from Doc’s more extensive reading list, including quite a few relevant to Episode 91: The Metaverse, and some about the work he’s been involved in lately. Enjoy!

We’ll have another episode or two before the end of year, and then we’ll take a break and see you again in January with some great episodes we have lined up for 2022. In the meantime, you can find us on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form.

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Doc’s Links

Report of the Commission on the Geopolitical Impacts of New Technologies and data — by the Atlantic Council

How NFTs Create Value — by Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers

Investing in Friends With Benefits (a DAO) — by Carra Wu and Chris Dixon

The Singularity Is Here
Artificially intelligent advertising technology is poisoning our societies. — by Ayad Akhtar

You Are the Object of a Secret Extraction Operation — by Shoshana Zuboff

Facebook is blocking access to data about how much misinformation it spreads and who is affected: Simply counting instances of misinformation found on a social media platform leaves two key questions unanswered. — by Ethan Zuckerman

Vizio makes nearly as much money from ads and data as it does from TVs — by Richard Lawler

Earlier on that:

Vizio Admits Modern TV Sets Are Cheaper Because They're Spying On You — by Karl Bode

Software Freedom Conservancy files right-to-repair lawsuit against California TV manufacturer Vizio Inc. for alleged GPL violations — by the Software Freedom Conservancy

Litigation is historic in nature due to its focus on consumer rights, filing as third-party beneficiary

An Ethics Bounty System Could Help Clean Up the Web: Tech companies just need to adapt the bug bounty system they already use to detect vulnerabilities in code. — by Jonathan Cohn

Unfreezing the ice age: the truth about humanity’s deep past: Archaeological discoveries are shattering scholars’ long-held beliefs about how the earliest humans organised their societies – and hint at possibilities for our own — by David Graeber and David Wengrow

Sci-Fi Icon Neal Stephenson Finally Takes on Global Warming: The renowned author says his genre should inspire solutions. In his new novel, Termination Shock, he tackles our most existential crisis. — by Adam Rogers

Good video by After Skool, whatever that is:

‘We Need To Have This Knife Fight.’ Inside Facebook’s Strategy To Bring the War to Apple: An internal Facebook plan reveals the machinations of a company determined to fend off Apple’s new privacy controls — by Alex Kantrowitz

Studying the Internet: A course in designing the future of the net — by Jeff Jarvis

“IT MIGHT WELL BE UNSOLVABLE”: NILAY PATEL ON FACEBOOK’S RECKONING WITH REALITY—AND THE METAVERSE-SIZE PROBLEMS YET TO COME: After a decade covering the Zucks, Googles, and Ubers of the scene, the Verge editor in chief reflects on tech’s troublesome relationship with the rest of the world. — by Delia Cai

[As a separate matter, Nilay (@reckless) and I got into it on Twitter: 

http://pagexray.fouanalytics.com/q/theverge.com","title":"FouAnalytics - Ads By Domain","description":null,"domain":"pagexray.fouanalytics.com"},"video_url":null}">

Doc Searls @dsearls

Yo @rjcc, @reckless, @verge: good piece on how @VIZIO, @Roku, et. al. make money: theverge.com/2018/7/20/1759… Now explain to @acfou and the rest of us how The Verge doesn't do the same kind of thing with trackers on websites. See here: FouAnalytics - Ads By Domainpagexray.fouanalytics.com

November 11th 2021

1 Retweet13 Likes

 Clearly they're not going to own, or care about, the tracking they do. They'll just keep picking on Facebook.]

Facebook Is Bad. Fixing It Rashly Could Make It Much Worse. — by Farhad Manjoo

Missing the Point
When AI manipulates free speech, censorship is not the solution. Better code is. — by Lessig

The Imminent Collapse of Digital Advertising: Digital ad fraud could be a $150 billion business by 2025, which would make it the largest criminal enterprise after the drug trade — by Scott Galloway

The Seven Rules of the Metaverse: A framework for the coming immersive reality — by Tony Parisi

AI home-buying and how it could change real estate — by Dorey Scheimer and Meghna Chakrabarti

Your Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead:
CR tested 126 products from McCormick, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and other popular brands. Almost a third had heavy metal levels high enough to raise health concerns. — by Lisa L. Gill

Beyond the Web: Making a platform-free online marketplace for goods, ideas and everything else — Doc and Joyce Searls, plus (upcoming) David P. Reed, Ethan Zuckerman, Robin Chase and Shoshana Zuboff

Tracking-industry body IAB Europe told that it has infringed the GDPR, and its “consent” pop-ups used by Google and other tech firms are unlawful:
Google and the entire tracking industry relies on IAB Europe’s consent system, which has now been found to be illegal.' — by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties

Joyce and I starred in this

https://www.idsnews.com/article/2021/11/ostrom-workshop-partner-visiting-scholars-to-lead-e-commerce-event-the-byway

—but it's already gone by, and the recording of it sucked.

This Week’s Reading List

• Everyone Is a Genius: Apple Will Offer Parts and Tools for DIY Repairs | iFixit News — Early next year, a previously impossible repair will be possible: you can buy an iPhone screen directly from Apple, use Apple’s repair guide (and tools, if you want) to install it, and have it fully work as intended, using Apple’s diagnostic software. And you won’t have to own an authorized repair shop to do it.

• Apple Self Service Repair Program | Right to Repair - Consumer Reports — In a major win for advocates, device owners and independent repair shops will soon have access to dozens of Apple parts, tools, and manuals—at the same price as authorized shops

• Apple (AAPL) Aims for Fully Autonomous Car - Bloomberg — Apple Inc. is pushing to accelerate development of its electric car and is refocusing the project around full self-driving capabilities, according to people familiar with the matter, aiming to solve a technical challenge that has bedeviled the auto industry. 

• DIY Cocktails: A Simple Guide to Creating Your Own Signature Drinks: Marcia Simmons, Jonas Halpren: Amazon.com: Books — Black Rose, Blood Orange Tequila & Soda, Kentucky Apple Sour: the newest trend in cocktails is creating your own! Now, the editors of DrinkoftheWeek.com have concocted the only guide that teaches you to create your own infallible thirst-quenchers. Using a simple system of basic ratios, you will learn to: Mix new flavor combinations for the perfect new blend using the Flavor Profile Chart as a guide Master advanced mixology techniques from infusing liquors at home to creating custom-flavored syrups Serve the perfect drink every time, whether it kicks off a rowdy party or winds down a romantic evening! With only nine ratios to master, you'll shake, stir, roll, and build literally thousands of unique and exceptional cocktails. All you need is a good thirst, an active imagination--and this guide!

• Amazon.com: Mixology Dice® (tumbler) // Laser Engraved Wood Dice for Craft cocktail inspiration - Christmas gift, boyfriend gift, gift for him, gift for guys : Handmade Products — Whether you’re a newbie or a pro behind the bar, Mixology Dice will take your cocktail game to the next level. Along with providing seemingly endless inspiration (over 1.5 million combos!), this set of dice is actually a clever system for actually learning the art of mixology.

• Redwood Empire Whiskey - Our Whiskeys — The Northern California Coast is a unique place, one of the few in the world where giant redwood trees grow. A place of inspiration and renewal. This same cool climate makes it a perfect place to produce sublime whiskey. Aging barrels here allows for a slow and even extraction of flavor, producing a whiskey of exceptional balance and complexity. Taste what our Redwood Empire inspires.

• Gulden Draak, tremendous beer for titans | Gulden Draak — With its Gulden Draak, the Van Steenberge Brewery has brewed a beer that is as robust as the symbol of the dragon itself. It is a specialty beer with a fiery colour and unparalleled flavour and aroma. Gulden Draak has devoted fans throughout the world.

• xkcd: Sandwich

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 90: Can Facebook Be the Good Guy?

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Shawn Powers and Petros Koutoupis about Facebook’s metaverse focus and whistleblower problems.

Please remember to subscribe via the podcast player of your choice.

If there is one guarantee in life lately, it’s that Facebook will give us something to talk about. Last week, we discussed the Facebook papers, whistleblower Frances Haugen’s allegations, and the metaverse announcement. We’ve since released Episode 91 as well, which explores the metaverse idea further.

Perhaps most surprising was Shawn’s fairly optimistic take:

But I think that they have an advantage in that they are the company that is in the weeds with that situation right now. Right. I mean they're in Congress voluntarily and you know, whistleblowery, so I mean, the good, the bad and the ugly. I think though that the company could take this opportunity to leverage all of this horrible, bad press and this evilness that they have brought upon themselves to do good. And, and I say that because who knows more about how to be creepy with privacy data than Facebook right now. . .

I mean, and if they lean into that, like, okay, we designed an AI or “the algorithm” as as it's known, we designed this thing and man, it got, they got the better of us. It got the better of everybody because it has done terrible things. And if they learn from that in anything other than how to make more money then, you know, it could be a positive. I like to think that, that there is still some soul left in the people working there. So maybe there's some hope.

We also touched a little on the spotlight Frances Haugen finds herself in, and how her ideas around end-to-end encryption may or may not have been misconstrued. People seem to fit the released information into their existing narratives, whatever those may be, and we hope people will take a few deep breaths and digest the released information carefully.

We hope you’ll dive in with us and explore these ideas, and then let us know your thoughts on the recent Facebook issues. Can they become the good guys and turn their reputation around?

Please let us know in a comment, on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form.

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This Week’s Reading List

• Exclusive: Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen warns company's encryption will aid espionage by hostile nations — A Facebook spokesman said: “The reason we believe in end-to-end encryption is precisely so that we can keep people safe, including from foreign interference and surveillance as well as hackers and criminals.

• Scripting News: Facebook is us — The bullshit about Facebook keeps coming. It's not a fucking autocracy, it's a carrier. You could say everything you say about FB about a city like NY.

• (15) Post | LinkedIn — I've got a big Twitter thread with tons of screenshots from the unredacted docs between Facebook and Google

• Before the “Whistleblowers” there were “Goodbye” posts: leaving #Facebook Engineering in 2016 because of #China, User Content, and #EndToEndEncryption – dropsafe — Before the “Whistleblowers” there were “Goodbye” posts: leaving #Facebook Engineering in 2016 because of #China, User Content, and #EndToEndEncryption In 2016 I quit the best job I ever had: the most impactful, the most challenging, and (yes) the best paid. I did so in part because of explicable burnout from shipping a radical product, but also and primarily because of a shift in Facebook’s company goals towards degrading user-experience for profit, and for experimentally building message-censorship infrastructure to offer-up as a gift and to show willing, for entry into the Chinese market.

• Eva on Twitter: "It is still a bad idea to idolize whistleblowers instead of focusing on the revelations the whistleblowers bring forward, but Frances Haugen says that her opinions on end-to-end encrypted messaging were misinterpreted and mischaracterized and e2e messaging is good, ok?" / Twitter — It is still a bad idea to idolize whistleblowers instead of focusing on the revelations the whistleblowers bring forward, but Frances Haugen says that her opinions on end-to-end encrypted messaging were misinterpreted and mischaracterized and e2e messaging is good, ok?

• My interview with Steven Levy of Wired re: Frances Haugen leaking my Facebook Engineering “Goodbye Post” – dropsafe — My interview with Steven Levy of Wired re: Frances Haugen leaking my Facebook Engineering “Goodbye Post”

• Facebook CIA Project: The Onion News Network ONN - YouTube

• So...what now? - by Charlie Warzel - Galaxy Brain — There’s so much reporting out there from the consortium of news outlets on ‘The Facebook Papers’ that I don’t really know what to do or where to start. Over at Protocol they’ve collected a running list of stories published and I count 50 pieces (as of Monday evening), many of them thousands of words long. Apparently, (according to Casey Newton and Kara Swisher) there are like six week’s worth of stories like this coming.

• FTC Study Confirms ISPs Collect a Scary Amount of Your Personal Data - ExtremeTech — Frustration with Big Tech is reaching a crescendo, and we could be headed for legislative efforts to reduce the influence of companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, but another technology heavyweight has managed to fly under the radar: your Internet Service Provider (ISP). A new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report examines what ISPs are doing with your data, and it’s not good news. Even when they promise not to sell your information, it often ends up in the hands of advertisers and other third parties. 

• The Facebook Papers Are a Big Fat Nothingburger - Reason.com — More than a dozen mainstream media organizations published reports today on the so-called Facebook Papers, a trove of internal company documents obtained and released by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen. The headlines promised dramatic revelations and damning indictments.

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 89: Digital Identity

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Phil Windley about digital identity, picos, oauth, and big tech ecosystems.

Please remember to subscribe via the podcast player of your choice.

We need self-sovereign identity. We need to be in charge of the way we identify ourselves in the digital and physical worlds. Today, however, there is a significant delta between the way most of us currently identify ourselves online, and the way many would consider ideal.

The concept of logging in for everything has not always been the norm online. In the early days, the web was less dependent on the practice, and much more sovereign in the sense that people tended to mind their own individual islands, using independent blogs or websites rather than the current way of sharing information via social media or other large platforms like Medium or Substack, but the early web was largely made up of more technical users, so one wonders if we could go back or how we might evolve. How will we identify ourselves in the metaverse?

In The End of Logins and Passwords, Just for Starters, Doc wrote:

There is no end to the number and ways SSI can grow outside of the old administrative identity box. Take, for example, what the tech educator Phil Windley calls the self-sovereign internet of things. Here your things are truly yours and under your control. They don’t even need to be smart. For example, you can slap a QR code on your dumb gizmo, scan it into a cloud of its own (called a “pico,” for “persistent compute object”), and you can have a relationship with the maker or seller of that gizmo through that pico. When picos become common, they will give you one way to deal with many different companies, and save those companies the trouble of maintaining their own proprietary systems for limiting customer involvement (including useful forms of customer input).

For more on identity, see Doc’s archive, or the Internet Identity Workshop.

We dove into these ideas in Episode 89, and we’d love to know your thoughts.

You can always reach us in a comment, on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form.

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This Week’s Reading List

• Phil Windley's Technometria

• 7 Laws of Identity – Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog — Here's the most beautiful take yet on the Seven Laws of Identity – put together by Karon and Katrika, who even saw how the Laws connect with the Perception of Ailatan.  In the past people have asked why I didn't do a Laws of Identity poster – this must be it.  Click to view full size.

• Rainbows End - Wikipedia — Rainbows End is a 2006 science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge. It was awarded the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel.[1] The book is set in San Diego, California, in 2025, in a variation of the fictional world Vinge explored in his 2002 Hugo-winning novella "Fast Times at Fairmont High" and 2004's "Synthetic Serendipity". Vinge has tentative plans for a sequel,[2] picking up some of the loose threads left at the end of the novel. The many technological advances depicted in the novel suggest that the world is undergoing ever-increasing change, following the technological singularity, a recurring subject in Vinge's fiction and nonfiction writing.

• Ten Reasons to Use Picos for Your Next Decentralized Programming Project — Picos are a programming model for building decentralized applications that provide significant benefits in the form of abstractions that reduce programmer effort. Here are ten eleven reasons you should use picos for your next decentralized application.

• Moore's law - Wikipedia — Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empirical relationship linked to gains from experience in production.

• Doc Searls Weblog · Car design trends — On Quora, here’s my answer to What are the worst design trends in modern cars?—updated by our family’s experience with a new Toyota that features even more indicators than the bunch above.

A Quick Plug

Episode 88: Can We Fix Facebook?

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Jerry Michalski and Petros Koutoupis about Facebook, its weaknesses, relationship to its users, and impact on all of us, and what happens when it disappears for six hours.

Please remember to subscribe via the podcast player of your choice.

Last week we talked to Jerry Michalski all about Facebook, capitalism, and its impact on users. We really got into the weeds in this one, and I encourage you to listen to the whole episode, and to make use of the supplementary links below. A good question to put in your mind as you start listening is, “What if Facebook treated its users as citizens instead of consumers?” How would you ask Facebook to treat you, as a user?

You can hear more from Jerry in his TEDx talk below:

Please let us know your thoughts in a comment, on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form. Thank you!

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This Week’s Reading List

• John Taylor Gatto - The Six Lesson Schoolteacher — “Look...at the...lessons of school teaching - confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance - all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius....Can you imagine a school where children challenged prevailing assumptions? Or worked alone without guidance? Or defined their own problems? It would be a radical contradiction of everything we've been conditioned to expect schools to do. If you want your son or daughter to learn what Harvard said was necessary, you'll have to arrange it outside of school time, maybe in between the dentist and the dancing lessons. And if you are poor, you better forget it altogether.” - John Taylor Gatto

• The Seven Lesson School Teacher — Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will.

• The Hidden Curriculum of School

• Frances Haugen

• Facebook outage, by the numbers: Largest outage ever tracked could cost millions - MarketWatch — Outage cost company about $164,000 a minute in revenue, while stock’s decline wiped away more than $40 billion in market cap and cost Mark Zuckerberg roughly $6 billion personally

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 85: Bufferbloat

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Dave Taht about bufferbloat, latency, and the issues plaguing our networks.

Please remember to subscribe via the podcast player of your choice.

Last week’s show, Episode 85, is one of our most technical ones; but also one of the most important, because it involves how well the Internet actually works for each and all of us. 

Take the matter of AQM: Active Queue Management. AQM keeps latencies (lag times) low. Poor or nonexistent AQM, rather than low bandwidth, is one of the main reasons that images and sound uploads can break up Zoom, FaceTime and other common calls over the Net. Given how much that kind of activity is becoming a primary way to use the Internet, it is hugely important for AQM to be deployed and work well.

One approach to that is DOCSIS-PIE, or PIE for short. (It stands for "Proportional Integral Controller Enhanced.") According to this paper, "For the device with AQM, the large majority of the latency under load tests resulted in 15-30 milliseconds of latency. In comparison, the device without AQM averaged roughly 250 milliseconds of latency – between 8-16 times higher – a highly significant difference to the end user quality of experience (QoE)."

PIE is the kind of civil engineering work on the Internet that happens all the time out of the public eye. This work often involves productive cooperation between the big entities putting the Internet's base protocols to work (for example, cable and phone companies), and independent queue theorists such as Dave, in an organization called the IETF. In fact, Dave singles out Comcast, which provides many of us Internet service through its Xfinity brand, as one of the good guys, in fact being one of the few ISPs actively investing in Open Source, and especially WiFi, via the Comcast Innovation Fund.*

As a separate matter, there is a new non-improvement to the Internet, led by some of the same big companies, called "Low-latency, low-loss, scalable throughput," or L4S for short. Here's a paper explaining it: Operational Guidance for Deployment of L4S in the Internet. Dave says L4S is meant to privilege some data flows, giving them a "fast lane" on the Internet while initially leveraging docsis pie to provide that initial, well agreed upon, truly fair, performance enhancement to the internet.

Dave calls this “the battle over the last bit in the IP header”. Should that bit be used to divide the internet in two, giving a performance advantage to ISP servers and specialized applications kept close to the ISP's network? Or used to provide better congestion signaling end to end, in a backwards compatible way for all applications? Or not used up at all, as Dave thinks neither approach can work. This battle is holding up deployments of docsis-pie, sch_cake, and fq_ codel when deployment of the proven AQM algorithms is direly needed to improve internet access for all stuck, working from home, suffering from latency stress and network glitches.

Still, it's interesting to witness the debate, for example reading that the BigCos are busy caring about "fairness" toward uses they favor.

Among other interesting and hyper-relevant things, Dave describes a simple hack that SpaceX's Starlink can use to make good on its promise of low-latency Internet service from space.

Dave also pointed us at the (now concluded) Internet Architecture Board workshop, keynoted by Vint Cerf, where among many other things, Matt Mathis of Google Measurement Labs described a marked (3-fold!) improvement in Internet responsiveness over the last 5 years for some ISPs, and Apple explained their new Network Responsiveness tool and metric, which is in beta now, and will be released in the next iOS and OSX versions.

Back on the ground, you should check out what you can do to maximize the quality of your own connection using SQM (Smart Queue Management), developed by Dave and his colleagues in the OpenWrt project. 

If you care about the way the Internet actually works, and what great hackers are doing to make sure it works well, this is a show not to miss.

—Doc

* It’s worth noting that Dave Taht's work has been funded by NLNET, Google fiber and the Comcast Innovation Fund.

This Week’s Reading List

• Pitch in on Dave’s Patreon

• dtaht (Dave Täht) · GitHub

• Postcards from the Bleeding Edge — David Täht writes about politics, space, copyright, the internet, audio software, operating systems and surfing.

• Does my modem have Active Queue Management (AQM) for low latency? | Xfinity Community Forum — Does my modem have Active Queue Management (AQM) for low latency?

• RFC 8290 - The Flow Queue CoDel Packet Scheduler and Active Queue Management Algorithm

• Bufferbloat.net - Bufferbloat.net — Bufferbloat is the undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too much data.

• Cerowrt Wiki - Bufferbloat.net — The CeroWrt Project is complete. The last build (3.10.50-1) was released in July 2014. The principles learned from that research project have been transferred to the Linux kernel and OpenWrt.

• The congestion-notification conflict [LWN.net] — Most of the time, the dreary work of writing protocol standards at organizations like the IETF and beyond happens in the background, with most of us being blissfully unaware of what is happening. Recently, though, a disagreement over protocols for congestion notification and latency reduction has come to a head in a somewhat messy conflict. The outcome of this discussion may well affect how well the Internet of the future works — and whether Linux systems can remain first-class citizens of that net.

• Objections to L4S WGLC — This document is a companion to a pair of slides presented at the IETF-111 TSVWG session. Due to time and space constraints, the slides could only contain a bare listing of the most pertinent, purely technical issues. This document illustrates and links to concrete data supporting the relevance of those issues, and amplifies them with further relevant issues. The bullet points from the slides are quoted, followed by supporting material.

• Edward Bernays - Wikipedia

• Operational Guidance for Deployment of L4S in the Internet — This document is intended to provide guidance in order to ensure successful deployment of Low Latency Low Loss Scalable throughput (L4S) in the Internet. Other L4S documents provide guidance for running an L4S experiment, but this document is focused solely on potential interactions between L4S flows and flows using the original ('Classic') ECN over a Classic ECN bottleneck link. The document discusses the potential outcomes of these interactions, describes mechanisms to detect the presence of Classic ECN bottlenecks, and identifies opportunities to prevent and/or detect and resolve fairness problems in such networks. This guidance is aimed at operators of end-systems, operators of networks, and researchers.

• draft-ietf-tsvwg-aqm-dualq-coupled-16 - DualQ Coupled AQMs for Low Latency, Low Loss and Scalable Throughput (L4S)

• [OpenWrt Wiki] SQM Details — If you want to set up SQM to minimize bufferbloat, you should start at the SQM Howto page.

• SpaceX nicknames Starlink Internet user terminal 'Dishy McFlatface' — SpaceX started to offer Starlink satellite broadband internet this week. The company sent out e-mails to potential customers who would want to beta test the Starlink network in its early phase. SpaceX currently operates approximately 888 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit out of thousands it plans to deploy to provide broadband coverage globally. Starlink is initially providing service to the northern United States and southern Canada. SpaceX states that by 2021 the company will provide service to 'the populated world'.

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 83: Intent Broadcasting and the Real Estate Market

Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Bill Wendel and Joyce Searls about where tech meets real estate, and how intentcasting could improve the market.

Please remember to subscribe via the podcast player of your choice.

Last week we veered away from our usual topics a bit to talk about real estate markets and how they may benefit from intentcasting, discussing ideas born out of Doc’s work (and others) from project VRM at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

We hope you’ll listen to the whole episode, but this quote from Joyce Searls is the heart of the issue that we cover in more detail.

I just want to wind back to this thought where bill was talking about the institutional buyers, the iBuyers. And, and what I've been saying is it's like the family farm movement with that family farms sold out to agribusiness.

And it, that was the way that agriculture became big ag, but before that agriculture in the U S was all family farms. And my fear about residential real estate is that these are our family farms now. And what will happen next is that the iBuyers will come in and they'll be agricultural type giant conglomerates. So it'd be residential real estate, giant conglomerates that buy and run, and we then have to, you know, get our housing from the, the equivalent of big ag.

So the reason I really care about it is because I have been a small landlord and I've been a small homeowner. And I really think that there's so much power to having your own agency and your own way of, of, you know, running your own business, your own show, even if you have a job at a corporation, but if you own some, a duplex or something that you are as a small landlord, you have a sense of agency. So why real estate really resounds with me in this is like, let's not do what happened with big ag to the American dream, the actual American dream, which is, you know, owning your own home.

So I wanted to just start with that. And then now I can stay a little bit about what we're we're doing with this on our Customer Commons non-profit, building something called the byway, which is the alternative to the web. The web is the highway. Remember the information highway that Al gore talked about? Well, the information highway turned out to be basically your choice of big tech, you know, your choice of platform you can be on. You have full agency as long as you're, you know, selling on eBay or selling on Amazon or, or you're driving for Uber or whatever.

So the, the big platforms have, have captured in the same way that I was talking about with big ag have, have captured tech. Now let's just use the internet to take the byway, which is kind of like, you know, the back roads of America. So it's the back roads of tech so that I can just connect with whoever it is. Maybe I want to sell my house, I'm getting ready to sell my house maybe, or my parent is getting ready to sell. And there's a lot of work that needs to be done.

But if I have the availability of connecting with, you know, locals in my community who might be interested in buying my house, if I can connect with them directly without the giant industrial system that is industrial real estate, then I might really have a very satisfying transaction and have the right outcome for what I want. And I believe that the baby boom generation, which Bill really spends a lot of time talking about is ripe for this. We're like, we want to do the right thing for the next generation.

And so why if we... Not saying everybody's going to do it, there's plenty of people that will do it the way, whatever way that is out there to be done, but have have an alternative. . .

The idea is, is that, that my platform, my machine is my platform so that I could have an algorithm that runs on my data and the runs on what I'm concerned with and my financials and my ownership, and that I would have an algorithm, which would work on my personal data and help me to figure out what I should do, and that I could buy this from an independent app store. It doesn't have to be an app store that's run by Google or apple. And it would be an app of my own, an app for me.

So that's why we called it a palgorithm like personal algorithm, but also my buddy. And, and that it, it reports to me. So it's not out there, you know, giving information to some larger platform.

Please let us know your thoughts in a comment, on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form. Thank you!

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This Week’s Reading List

• Real Estate Cafe | Serving a Money-saving Menu of Services since 1995

• Real Estate Cafe / reVRM Minifesto — Idea starters to kick-start conversation about VRM's potential role in the residential real estate industry

• Ralph Nader on Twitter: "Absentee giant corporate control over local America expands relentlessly. Latest are huge firms like Blackrock buying hundreds of thousands of houses for speculation purposes. Fight absentee corporatist domination. Support the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. @ilsr -R" / Twitter

• Pacaso Is Turning Houses Into Corporations : Planet Money : NPR — On a sleepy cul-de-sac amid the bucolic vineyards and grassy hills of California's Sonoma Valley, a $4 million house has become the epicenter of a summer-long spat between angry neighbors and a new venture capital-backed startup buying up homes around the nation. The company is called Pacaso. It says it's the fastest company in American history to achieve the "unicorn" status of a billion-dollar valuation — but its quarrels in wine country, one of the first regions where it's begun operations, foreshadow business troubles ahead.

• Bill Wendel on Twitter: "Stats below reveal need to replace Active MLS listings with new metric - owners who #Intend2Sell or #IntentionInventory DEC = good month for price reductions, expired listings & to interact #P2P w/ owners planning #LifeTransition in 2022 DM re #ProactHH https://t.co/Tgvjs9S6nM https://t.co/1KkusoNPpz" / Twitter — #BidWarBacklash: 20 yrs ago, Feds report "Housing Starting to Weaken“ cautioned: "Housing values dropped 8% on average during last recession in 1991. Not only could it happen again, ..it could 'happen rather abruptly.'" Instead of bidding #100KoverAsk, willing to #TimeREMarket?

• In Case You Were Unclear What the US Government Thinks of NAR... - NotoriousROB — In light of yet another intervention in a private lawsuit by the Department of Justice, this time in the REX v. Zillow case, a few things should be clearer. One, the Department of Justice really doesn’t like it when NAR uses the 2008 Consent Decree as any kind of a shield for any kind of a rule. NAR has done this in Moehrl, in Sitzer, and now in REX and in all three instances, the DOJ went out of its way to file a Statement of Interest telling the judge that the DOJ in no way shape or form approved any NAR rule or policy.

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 82: Apple’s Child Safety and the Screeching Voices of the Minority

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin about Apple’s new plans to monitor personal devices, and what it means for privacy, ownership, and setting precedence.

Please remember to subscribe via the podcast player of your choice.

The Screeching What, Now?

Apple distributed this internal memo this morning, dismissing their critics as "the screeching voices of the minority."

I will never stop screeching about the importance of privacy, security, or civil liberties. And neither should you. pic.twitter.com/lLDfxEUIXL

— Eva (@evacide) August 6, 2021

A few weeks ago, Apple announced a new approach to child safety that caused a swift backlash from nearly every privacy expert and advocate, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU, Fight for the Future, and many individuals and others, with many ultimately signing an open letter to Apple strongly condemning the move.

The undersigned organisations committed to civil rights, human rights and digital rights around the world are writing to urge Apple to abandon the plans it announced on 5 August 2021 to build surveillance capabilities into iPhones, iPads and other Apple products. Though these capabilities are intended to protect children and to reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), we are concerned that they will be used to censor protected speech, threaten the privacy and security of people around the world, and have disastrous consequences for many children.

Reality 2.0 guests, Kyle Rankin and Bruce Schneier weighed in with reasoned commentary as well. Schneier provides an excellent round up of various information related to Apple’s announcement, and in his first post, aptly recalls his own 2005 warning:

Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.

Rankin’s more thorough analysis on the Puri.sm blog raises the very fair question of precedence setting:

So companies capture and sell our data, and the police and private groups sometimes buy that data to look for crimes. But up to this point, the “snitching” that devices did on you was indirect–it would send data to vendors or app developers to sell to brokers, but the only time that vendors might search your data and alert the authorities is when searching files stored on their own servers that you have shared. Up to now, actually scanning for potential contraband on a person’s device was a line companies wouldn’t cross.

We hope you’ll listen to episode 82 to hear our full discussion with Kyle on what we feel is a gravely important issue. We’re with the experts on this, and you can add us to the “screeching voices of the minority.” You can show your support for the podcast and digital privacy by ordering a t-shirt or other printed items with the design below.

And as always, please let us know your thoughts in a comment, on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form. Thank you!

Site/Blog/Newsletter | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Mastodon

This Week’s Reading List

• Apple's Plan to "Think Different" About Encryption Opens a Backdoor to Your Private Life | Electronic Frontier Foundation — Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system.

• Daring Fireball: Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Initiatives, and the Slippery Slope — My first advice is to read Apple’s own high-level description of the features, which ends with links to detailed technical documentation regarding the encryption and techniques Apple is employing in the implementations, and “technical assessments” from three leading researchers in cryptography and computer vision.

• Eva on Twitter: "Apple distributed this internal memo this morning, dismissing their critics as "the screeching voices of the minority." I will never stop screeching about the importance of privacy, security, or civil liberties. And neither should you. https://t.co/lLDfxEUIXL" / Twitter — Apple distributed this internal memo this morning, dismissing their critics as "the screeching voices of the minority." I will never stop screeching about the importance of privacy, security, or civil liberties. And neither should you.

• GitHub - nadimkobeissi/appleprivacyletter: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning. — An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning technology.

• Transactional analysis - Wikipedia — Transactional analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social transactions are analyzed to determine the ego state of the communicator (whether parent-like, childlike, or adult-like) as a basis for understanding behavior.[1] In transactional analysis, the communicator is taught to alter the ego state as a way to solve emotional problems. The method deviates from Freudian psychoanalysis which focuses on increasing awareness of the contents of subconsciously held ideas. Eric Berne developed the concept and paradigm of transactional analysis in the late 1950s.[2]

• Reality 2.0 Episode 80: NSO Group's Pegasus, Stingrays, and Grindr — Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin about NSO group and Pegasus, Stingrays and cars, and surveilling priests.

• The Encryption Debate in Australia: 2021 Update - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — In 2018, the heads of Australia’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were given broad powers by the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018,1 or TOLA Act, to gain access to encrypted communicat

• Internet of Snitches – Purism — Imagine an Internet of Snitches, each scanning whatever data they have access to for evidence of crime. Beyond the OS itself, individual phone apps could start looking for contraband. Personal computers would follow their lead. Home network file servers could pore through photos, videos and file backups for CSAM and maybe even evidence of copyright infringement. Home routers could scan any unencrypted network traffic. Your voice assistant could use machine learning to decide when yelling in a household crosses the line into abuse. Your printer could analyze the documents and photos you send it.

• Reality 2.0 Episode 49: Parler, Ownership, and Open Source — Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Petros Koutoupis, and Kyle Rankin talk Parler and platform lock-in, the concept of data, software, and hardware ownership, and the open source social contract.

• Reality 2.0 - Blog - Reality 2.0 Newsletter - November 25, 2020: Owned. — This week’s conversation was rooted in the concept of ownership, including hardware, software, and in the case of platform lock-in, even ownership of ideas. Over the course of nearly an hour, we questioned our ownership of our social media profiles, our photo storage accounts, our MacBooks, and our code.

• Apple Adds a Backdoor to iMessage and iCloud Storage - Schneier on Security — Apple’s announcement that it’s going to start scanning photos for child abuse material is a big deal. (Here are five news stories.) I have been following the details, and discussing it in several different email lists. I don’t have time right now to delve into the details, but wanted to post something.

• Apple Privacy Letter: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology — An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology Security & Privacy Experts, Cryptographers, Researchers, Professors, Legal Experts and Apple Consumers Decry Apple's Planned Move to Undermine User Privacy and End-to-End Encryption

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 81: Geeks at Home: The Gear That Makes Us Happy

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Shawn Powers and Petros Koutoupis about how we make our personal spaces better for work and play.

Please remember to subscribe via the podcast player of your choice.

TOYS!

I think a lot of us think of something electronic when we think of our favorite toys, but sometimes the toys that truly speak to our souls are a bit simpler. While recording last week’s podcast, Shawn was kind enough to show us a prototype of his new Spot plush. Spot is the adorable dog in Shawn’s webcomic, MyBigRoundWorld.com, featured in strips like you’ll see below. We think it turned out incredibly well, and we can’t wait until we can all have Spots of our own.

pic.twitter.com/OTJvreQwxs

— My Big Round World (@MyBigRoundWorld) July 29, 2021

Our Favorite Gear

Our focus last week was the things that make us happy while working and playing from home, which we’ve all done a lot more of this past year. We’ll outline the highlights here:

Katherine’s Picks

Herman Miller Aeron Chair — A lifesaver (backsaver? buttsaver?). Possibly an actual medical expense. Try to find one used.

This Star Wars themed rug — I love it. It knows. (I don’t actually have this yet, but I will. Someday.)

AeroGarden — I have become weirdly obsessed with my two Aerogardens over the last year and a half.

Blue Yeti Mic — A great entry-level mic.

Shawn’s Picks

Sony a6400 — This camera is why Shawn always looks better than the rest of us on video calls. Now you know.

Electro-Voice RE20 Broadcast Announcer Microphone — And this mic is why he sounds better!

X2U - Microphone to USB Adapter

Cam Link 4K | elgato.com

Key Light Air | elgato.com

Plex — Shawn’s preferred home media solution. There’s a background story in last week’s episode!

Krikzz — A retro gaming find. Load ROMs on cartridge, play on original console!

Doc’s Picks

Sony Alpha 7R — Doc’s preferred camera.

Fast.com — The best speed test. No ads, no bullshit. But there is a small trick to getting the whole picture: click on "Show more info" and then on "Settings." Then put a check by "Measure loaded latency during upload" and "Always show all metrics" and save. Loaded latency will be your bufferbloat.

EFF's Cover Your Tracks page — A favorite privacy tool.

Ear 1 Earbuds — An AirPods killer?

4K UHD Hisense Roku TV — Big, cheap, and easy to use.

Petros’s Picks

Arcade1Up — Officially Licensed Arcade Cabinets. This is why Petros has a cooler gameroom than me.

Digging Up The Past — His own monthly newsletter for ancient history enthusiasts.

This Week’s Reading List

• My Big Round World – Everyone's a square…

• Pet Sematary (1989) - IMDb — After tragedy strikes, a grieving father discovers an ancient burial ground behind his home with the power to raise the dead.

• Sony Alpha 7R Review: Digital Photography Review — If there's one thing you can say about Sony's digital camera business, it's that they've experimented with many different concepts. From SLRs with dual autofocus systems and Translucent Mirror Technology to its NEX mirrorless line-up, Sony has gone down virtually every avenue in digital imaging. Its latest products - the Alpha 7 and Alpha 7R - may be the most exciting products to come out of the Sony labs in some time. The company has managed to create full-frame cameras which are about the same size as the Olympus OM-D E-M1. In other words, the Alpha 7s are much smaller than their full-frame interchangeable lens peers (such as Nikon's D610 and the Canon EOS 6D), an achievement made possible primarily because they're not SLRs.

• Sony a6400 review: Digital Photography Review — Sony's a6400 is a compact 24MP mirrorless interchangeable lens camera with an APS-C sensor that will serve plenty of photographers from family documentarians to pro shooters looking for a lightweight second body. The big news is that it has a new processor based on that used in Sony's sports-shooting flagship a9 which enables 'Real-Time Tracking' autofocus, which is one of the most effective autofocus implementations we've yet seen. It's also among the easiest to use, once you've gotten it set up.

• Watch Free Movies Online Now | Stream Free TV with Plex

• 4K UHD Hisense Roku TV with HDR (2020) (55R6G) - Hisense USA

• Aeron - Office Chairs - Herman Miller

• Swopper Active Stool Archives | Ergify

• 18 Best Ergonomic Office Chairs 2021 | The Strategist — Whether you’re working from home at a DIY desk setup or commuting to an office, you may have begun to feel the strain that sitting for seven or more hours a day can put on a body. If said strain has led you to wonder whether it’s worth investing in a better, more ergonomic office chair, the answer is almost certainly yes, according to experts we spoke to. “Makeshift setups can cause a laundry list of problems, including back, shoulder, and wrist pain,” explains Dr. David Perna of Back and Body Medical. Dr. Marc Agulnick, an orthopedic surgeon based on Long Island who’s affiliated with NYU Winthrop Hospital, agrees: “If you’re sitting for a long period of time in one position that’s not natural, or a bad position from a postural standpoint, over time that’s going to break down your spine.”

• Arcade1Up | Officially Licensed Arcade Cabinets

Doc’s Bonus Links

The myth of individual control: Mapping the limitations of privacy self-management: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3881776

The Thermocline of Truth: https://robm.me.uk/2021/04/thermocline-of-truth/

Apple’s Privacy Mythology Doesn’t Match Reality:https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-apples-privacy-mythology-doesnt-match-reality/

Apple says it will refuse gov’t demands to expand photo-scanning beyond CSAM: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/apple-says-it-will-refuse-govt-demands-to-expand-photo-scanning-beyond-csam/

Buried in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill: In-Car Breathalyzers:https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/buried-bipartisan-infrastructure-bill-car-180614671.html

How open-source intelligence is disrupting statecraft: https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2021/08/10/how-open-source-intelligence-is-disrupting-statecraft

4 Keys to Self-sovereign Identity Adoption:https://medium.com/trinsic/4-keys-to-self-sovereign-identity-adoption-ad269b208569

Meet the man who wants you to give up Google: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/29/opinion/sway-kara-swisher-sridhar-ramaswamy.html

Everything Cory writes and links to: https://pluralistic.net/

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 80: You’re Being Surveilled. Did You Consent?

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin about NSO group and Pegasus, Stingrays and cars, and surveilling priests.

Please remember to subscribe via the podcast player of your choice.

What is Pegasus?

Last week, we spoke to our favorite security expert, Kyle Rankin, about some recent privacy and security news. In particular, we are all gravely concerned about the recent frightening revelations about NSO Groups’s Pegasus spyware, and its use in targeting journalists around the world. As privacy geeks with journalism backgrounds, this hits close to home, and even worse is the realization that it is possible to violate a target’s device without the target initiating any action such as clicking on a link like you might find in a typical phishing attack. There will also be no indication of compromise. Kyle’s post on the Puri.sm blog goes into further detail:

What’s particularly scary about spyware in general, and is true for Pegasus as well, is that victims have no indication they’ve been compromised. Due to how locked down the iPhone is from the end user, detecting Pegasus in particular requires expert forensics techniques. This has left many at-risk iPhone users wondering whether they too are compromised and if so, what do they do?

We’d encourage you to read Kyle’s post as well as Amnesty International’s full forensic report on Pegasus. And if you are so inclined, you can check your own devices with the MVT tool released by Amnesty International, which is available on github.

Edward Snowden on Pegasus

Check out the episode for our full discussion about Pegasus, law enforcement surveillance technology, and an unfortunate story about a priest on Grindr. Yikes! 

And as always, please let us know your thoughts in a comment, on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form. Thank you!

Site/Blog/Newsletter | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Mastodon

This Week’s Reading List

• Defending Against Spyware Like Pegasus – Purism — What’s particularly scary about spyware in general, and is true for Pegasus as well, is that victims have no indication they’ve been compromised. Due to how locked down the iPhone is from the end user, detecting Pegasus in particular requires expert forensics techniques. This has left many at-risk iPhone users wondering whether they too are compromised and if so, what do they do?

• Here’s how to check your phone for Pegasus spyware using Amnesty’s tool - The Verge — Amnesty International — part of the group that helped break the news of journalists and heads of state being targeted by NSO’s government-grade spyware, Pegasus — has released a tool to check if your phone has been affected. Alongside the tool is a great set of instructions, which should help you through the somewhat technical checking process. Using the tool involves backing up your phone to a separate computer and running a check on that backup. Read on if you’ve been side-eyeing your phone since the news broke and are looking for guidance on using Amnesty’s tool.

• Mobile Verification Toolkit — Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) is a tool to facilitate the consensual forensic analysis of Android and iOS devices, for the purpose of identifying traces of compromise.

• The FBI Is Locating Cars By Spying On Their WiFi — The FBI is using a controversial technology traditionally used to locate smartphones as a car tracking surveillance tool that spies on vehicles’ on-board WiFi.

• Catholic priest quits after “anonymized” data revealed alleged use of Grindr | Ars Technica — In what appears to be a first, a public figure has been ousted after de-anonymized mobile phone location data was publicly reported, revealing sensitive and previously private details about his life.

• Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser with Adblocker | Brave Browser — Brave stops online surveillance, loads content faster, and uses 35% less battery.

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 79: Your Identity - Twitter Verification, Facial Recognition, and More

Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls and Shawn Powers chat about Twitter verification, facial recognition, YouTube moderation, and algorithmic bias.

Please remember to subscribe via the podcast player of your choice.

Last week we discussed identity from a few angles. The first was the frequently contentious topic of Twitter verification, and the coveted (Maybe?) checkmark next to certain account names. Incidentally, Shawn is verified. Katherine and Doc are not. How about you? Do you want to be? Should we want to be? These are the questions, among many, we attempted to address in episode 79.

We would love to hear your thoughts on Twitter verification. Please drop us a line and tell us what you think in a comment, or on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form. Thank you!

Site/Blog/Newsletter | Facebook | Twitter | YouTube | Mastodon

This Week’s Reading List

• I’m Not a Reporter. But I’m Verified as One on Twitter | WIRED — I NEVER CALLED myself a journalist until Twitter made me. I’m an attorney, activist, and faculty member, but it was only by using the “journalist” label that I was able to get one of the most coveted assets in social media, the blue “verified” checkmark. My months-long effort to get verified revealed a system that is stacked against grassroots activists, particularly BIPOC communities.

• Twitter verification requirements - how to get the blue check — The blue Verified badge  on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic. To receive the blue badge, your account must be authentic, notable, and active.

• Goodbye, Fleets — We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts. We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.

• Black teen barred from skating rink by inaccurate facial recognition - The Verge — A facial recognition algorithm used by a local roller skating rink in Detroit wouldn’t let teen Lamya Robinson onto the premises, and accused her of previously getting into a fight at the establishment.

• Algorithmic bias - Wikipedia — Algorithmic bias describes systematic and repeatable errors in a computer system that create unfair outcomes, such as privileging one arbitrary group of users over others. Bias can emerge due to many factors, including but not limited to the design of the algorithm or the unintended or unanticipated use or decisions relating to the way data is coded, collected, selected or used to train the algorithm. Algorithmic bias is found across platforms, including but not limited to search engine results and social media platforms, and can have impacts ranging from inadvertent privacy violations to reinforcing social biases of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. The study of algorithmic bias is most concerned with algorithms that reflect "systematic and unfair" discrimination. This bias has only recently been addressed in legal frameworks, such as the 2018 European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. More comprehensive regulation is needed as emerging technologies become increasingly advanced and opaque.

• Face-Detection Cameras: Glitches Spur Charges of Racism - TIME — When Joz Wang and her brother bought their mom a Nikon Coolpix S630 digital camera for Mother's Day last year, they discovered what seemed to be a malfunction. Every time they took a portrait of each other smiling, a message flashed across the screen asking, "Did someone blink?" No one had. "I thought the camera was broken!" Wang, 33, recalls. But when her brother posed with his eyes open so wide that he looked "bug-eyed," the messages stopped.

• Meet the Censored: Matt Orfalea - by Matt Taibbi - TK News by Matt Taibbi — Yes, the government is helping crack down on text messages and Facebook posts, but not to worry. At least your private thoughts are safe, right? Not so fast, found filmmaker Matt Orfalea

• Texas’ social media censorship bill pushes unconstitutional limits on free speech — Amid ongoing allegations that social media platforms are censoring conservatives, regulating Big Tech has become one of the hottest issues across the country. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has called a special legislative session in part to debate and pass content moderation legislation.

• I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score. Now You Can Get Yours, Too. - The New York Times — Little-known companies are amassing your data — like food orders and Airbnb messages — and selling the analysis to clients. Here’s how to get a copy of what they have on you.

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 78: Human ID for Single Sign-On

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Bastian Purrer and Namik Muduroglu about Human ID, their open source anonymous single sign-on solution.

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Last week, we talked to the co-founders of Human ID, an ambitious non-profit project, inspired by a desire to fight misinformation and its potential threat to democracy around the world. We hope you’ll listen to these energetic founders and consider their perspectives. From ours, we see putting in the work to address the problem as admirable in itself. Whether this solution or one of their future projects end up hitting the mark, we’re excited to see them tackle some tough problems.

Here’s Bastian with some background:

If you’d like to dive further into Human id, and we hope you will, you’ll find their GitHub profile, a demo, and a live implementation.

I’m sure they would love to see your feedback, and we would too. Please feel free to get in touch with us in a comment, or on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form. Sometimes it take us a little while to respond, but we’re definitely reading. Thank you!

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This Week’s Short Reading List

• humanID | One-Click Anonymous Login — humanID is an anonymous, bot-resistant authentication for safer online communities. Non-profit and open source, the project was started in 2018 by the Foundation for New humanID. With the help of Mozilla and Harvard, we’re on a mission to #FixTheInternet.

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 76: Brian Fox on Voting Systems, Post-COVID Work, and Bash

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Brian Fox about voting systems, open source, work in the post-covid era, blockchain, programming languages, and more.

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In last week’s episode, we had a great time talking to well-known free software advocate, Brian Fox, about everything from remote work to open source voting, to blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. For even more wisdom from Brian, you might enjoy the following videos. The first is a recent episode of FLOSS Weekly, also featuring our own Doc Searls.

This Week’s Reading List

• Brian Fox (computer programmer) - Wikipedia — Brian Jhan Fox (born 1959) is an American computer programmer and free software advocate. He is the original author of the GNU Bash shell, which he announced as a beta in June 1989.[1] He continued as the primary maintainer of bash until at least early 1993.[2][3] Fox also built the first interactive online banking software in the U.S. for Wells Fargo in 1995,[4] and he created an open source election system in 2008.

• Opinion | To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software - The New York Times — Although Russian hackers are reported to have tried to disrupt the November election with attacks on the voting systems of 39 states, the consensus of the intelligence community is that they were probably unsuccessful in their efforts to delete and alter voter data. But another national election is just 15 months away, and the risk that those working on behalf of President Vladimir Putin of Russia could do real damage — and even manage to mark your ballot for you or altering your vote — remains. Since the debacle of the 2000 election (remember hanging chads?) American election machinery has been improved to reduce the chances of mis-tallying votes, outright fraud and attacks by hackers. These improvements brought with them a new concern: lack of software security. Most voting machines’ software can now be easily hacked. This is in large part because the current voting systems use proprietary software based on Microsoft’s operating system.

• Gerald Jay Sussman - Wikipedia — Gerald Jay Sussman (born February 8, 1947) is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his S.B. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from MIT in 1968 and 1973 respectively. He has been involved in artificial intelligence (AI) research at MIT since 1964. His research has centered on understanding the problem-solving strategies used by scientists and engineers, with the goals of automating parts of the process and formalizing it to provide more effective methods of science and engineering education. Sussman has also worked in computer languages, in computer architecture and in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design.[1]

• Lisp (programming language) - Wikipedia — Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation.[3] Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today. Only Fortran is older, by one year.[4][5] Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history. Today, the best-known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Racket, Common Lisp, Scheme and Clojure.

• Pwnie Awards - Wikipedia — The Pwnie Awards recognize both excellence and incompetence in the field of information security. Winners are selected by a committee of security industry professionals from nominations collected from the information security community.[2] The awards are presented yearly at the Black Hat Security Conference.[3]

• Z shell - Wikipedia — The Z shell (Zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a command interpreter for shell scripting. Zsh is an extended Bourne shell with many improvements, including some features of Bash, ksh, and tcsh.

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 75: Let's Talk About FLoC Blocking

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Drupal Association Community Liaison, Rachel Lawson, and Drupal developer, Tony Savorelli, about Privacy in Drupal and beyond, and protecting ourselves and others on the web.

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In last week’s episode, we talked to Rachel Lawson and Tony Savorelli about privacy on the web, the role developers play in advocating for users, and the heightened responsibility we feel when important issues are at stake.

The springboard for this conversation starts with the decision by Drupal and other web frameworks to block Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) out of the box. The swift actions taken by these projects, including WordPress and Joomla, reflects the concern many privacy advocates and developers have about the implications of Google’s new plan to replace third-party cookies with a new type of user tracking that relies on federated learning, grouping people into “cohorts” in order to target users for advertising without the use of cookies, a.k.a FLoC.

Major organizations like Mozilla, Amazon, and others have also taken swift steps to head FLoC off at the proverbial pass with thorough analysis and outright blocking. Subsequently, Google announced that it would now continue to support 3rd party cookies until 2023 instead of 2022, which delays a full launch of FLoC as well. Inc. Magazine had an interesting take on this announcement:

The cynical take is that Google is dragging this out because it's addicted to your data and wants to protect its business. The truth, however, is that's only partially true. In fact, I think you can make the case the truth is actually worse. Google doesn't even need that data.

While Google could technically make the internet respect your privacy, the problem is that doing so would give it an enormous advantage over every other advertising network and platform. Google collects massive amounts of first-party data on its users, meaning that it is far less dependent on third-party tracking.

Besides, Google's most profitable advertising platform is search. Google doesn't have to do any third-party tracking to know what you search for since you literally type what you're looking for into its website. All it has to do is show you ads at the top of the search engine results page.

What happens with FLoC remains to be seen, but the most interesting part of this story is how quickly developers took steps of their own to take back some control on behalf of the user.

We hope you enjoy the episode and give some further thought to this and the many other issues we raised, and please reach out with any comments or questions here in a comment, on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form.

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This Week’s Reading List

• Add Permissions-Policy header to block Google FLoC [#3209628] | Drupal.org — Google is introducing what it calls Federated Learning of Cohorts, which is a way to gather user data without cookies, regardless of whether a website is loading any Google-related trackers. This is enabled starting in Chrome 89, and only in select countries on a trial basis. Although other major browser vendors are likely against this technology and will presumably not be implementing it, given Chrome’s market share this will become a concerning issue, because it largely remove users’ ability to easily opt out of being tracked—particularly true in the case of less-savvy users. See a very informative post by Plausible. Since no one can reasonably expect users to just stop using Chrome, it will be up to responsible developers to block FLoC at the source.

• Amazon is blocking Google's FLoC — and that could seriously weaken the system — Amazon is blocking Google’s controversial cookieless tracking and targeting method.

• Privacy analysis of FLoC — In the current web, trackers (and hence advertisers) associate a cookie with each user. Whenever a user visits a website that has an embedded tracker, the tracker gets the cookie and can thus build up a list of the sites that a user visits. Advertisers can use the information gained from tracking browsing history to target ads that are potentially relevant to a given user’s interests. The obvious problem here is that it involves advertisers learning everywhere you go. 

• Surveillance Self-Defense | Tips, Tools and How-tos for Safer Online Communications — We’re the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an independent non-profit working to protect online privacy for nearly thirty years. This is Surveillance Self-Defense : our expert guide to protecting you and your friends from online spying.

• University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons — The Tradeoff Fallacy - How Marketers Are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them up to Exploitation

• Reality 2.0 - Blog - Reality 2.0 Newsletter - June 4, 2021: More Tracking Tech and Apple — After a lengthy discussion in Drupal’s core issue queue by some of Katherine’s favorite people, the upcoming release of Drupal 9.2 will officially block Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) by default! Similarly, the WordPress and Joomla communities are taking similar measures. With these platforms representing a huge chunk of websites, this must be quite a blow to Google, enough so that a member of Google Chrome’s developer relations team weighed in on the Drupal issue himself. I hope this news inspires you to run off and build a Drupal site, so I’ll just leave this documentation link here just in case.

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.

A Quick Plug

Episode 74: DeleteMe, Privacy Tools, and Protecting Yourself

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Abine’s Rob Shavell about DeleteMe and other privacy tools, as well as emerging issues like vaccine tracking, AI, and facial recognition.

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Last week, we talked to Rob Shavell of Abine, the company behind privacy tools DeleteMe and Blur, about his company, current issues concerning privacy advocates such as vaccine passports, AI, and a few other topics. We hope you’ll check it out and maybe give DeleteMe or Blur a try.

Perhaps the most encouraging takeaway from the conversation was the dynamism in the privacy start-up space. When talented and passionate people get together to serve a market that is eager to be guided through an increasingly challenging consumer technology landscape, there is tremendous potential for paradigm-shifting products, and that is very encouraging to see.

Do you have any favorite privacy tools you would like us to talk about or recommend? Are you or someone you know innovating in this field? Please let us know here in a comment, or on any of our social outlets, or via our contact form.

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This Week’s Links

• Remove Personal Info from Google - DeleteMe

• Redact | Mass Delete your Social Media — The only platform that allows you to automatically clean up your old posts from services like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Discord and more all in one place

• DuckDuckGo — Privacy, simplified.

The Reality 2.0 Podcast explores how tech, privacy, and security impact reality in a post-COVID world. Subscribe now and don't miss a thing! We welcome your feedback at our contact page.