A few years back, I followed @archillect, because I like cool images.
After a bit I started to wonder why it had a seeming preference for military beauty and fascist stuff, decided it was pro-fascist propaganda and unfollowed.
— ⚕C. Reider, looks good⚕ (@vuzhmusic) June 29, 2019
Neural networks can be good at naming things, I’ve discovered. Recently I’ve been experimenting with a neural network called GPT-2, which OpenAI trained on a huge chunk of the internet. Thanks to a colab notebook implementation by Max Woolf, I’m able to fine-tune it on specific lists of data - cat names, for example. Drawing on its prior knowledge of how words tend to be used, GPT-2 can sometimes suggest new words and phrases that it thinks it’s seen in similar context to the words from my fine-tuning dataset. (It’ll also sometimes launch into Harry Potter fan fiction or conspiracy theories, since it saw a LOT of those online.)
One thing I’ve noticed GPT-2 doing is coming up with names that sound strangely like the names of self-aware AI spaceships in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels. In the science fiction series, the ships choose their own names according to a sort of quirky sense of humor. The humans in the books may not appreciate the names, but there’s nothing they can do about them:
Hand Me The Gun And Ask Me Again
Zero Credibility
Fixed Grin
Charming But Irrational
So Much For Subtlety
Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall
Now compare some of the effects pedals GPT-2 came up with:
Dangerous But Not Unbearably So
Disastrously Varied Mental Model
Dazzling So Beautiful Yet So Terrifying
Am I really that Transhuman
Love and Sex Are A Mercy Clause
Give Me A Reason
Thou Shalt
Warning Signs
Kill All Humans
Did GPT-2 somehow have a built-in tendency to produce names that sounded like self-aware spaceships? How would it do if it was actually trained specifically on Culture ships?
A reader named Kelly sent me a list of 236 of Iain M. Banks’s Culture ship names from Wikipedia, and I trained the 345 million-parameter version of GPT-2 on them. As it turns out, I had to stop the training after just a few seconds (6 iterations) because GPT-2 was already beginning to memorize the entire list (can’t blame it; as far as it was concerned, memorizing the entire list was a perfect solution to the task I was asking for).
And yes. The answer is yes, naming science fiction AIs is something this real-life AI can do astonishingly well. I’ve selected some of the best to show you. First, there are the names that are clearly warship AIs:
Not Disquieting At All
Surprise Surprise
And That’s That!
New Arrangement
I Told You So
Spoiler Alert
Bonus Points!
Collateral Damage
Friendly Head Crusher
Scruffy And Determined
Race To The Bottom
And there are the sassy AIs:
Absently Tilting To One Side
ASS FEDERATION
A Small Note Of Disrespect
Third Letter of The Week
Well Done and Thank You
Just As Bad As Your Florist
What Exactly Is It With You?
Let Me Just Post This
Protip: Don’t Ask
Beyond Despair
Way Too Personal
Sobering Reality Check
Charming (Except For The Dogs)
The names of these AIs are even more inscrutable than usual. To me, this makes them much scarier than the warships.
Hot Pie
Lightly Curled Round The Wrist
Color Gold Normally Comes With Silence
8 Angry Doughnut Feelings
Mini Cactus Cake Fight
Happy to Groom Any Animals You Want
Stuffy Waffles With Egg On Top
Pickles And Harpsichord
Just As Likely To Still Be Intergalactic Jellyfish
Someone Did Save Your Best Cookie By Post-Apocalyptic Means
LGRPllvmkiqquubkhakqqtdfayyyjjmnkkgalagi'qvqvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
At least it does sound like some of these AIs will be appeased by snacks.
Bonus content: more AI names, including a few anachronisms (“Leonard Nimoy for President” for example)
Probabilistic modeling and inference are core tools in diverse fields including statistics, machine learning, computer vision, cognitive science, robotics, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. To meet the functional requirements of applications, practitioners use a broad range of modeling techniques and approximate inference algorithms. However, implementing inference algorithms is often difficult and error prone. Gen simplifies the use of probabilistic modeling and inference, by providing modeling languages in which users express models, and high-level programming constructs that automate aspects of inference. Like some probabilistic programming research languages, Gen includes universal modeling languages that can represent any model, including models with stochastic structure, discrete and continuous random variables, and simulators. However, Gen is distinguished by the flexibility that it affords to users for customizing their inference algorithm. It is possible to use built-in algorithms that require only a couple lines of code, as well as develop custom algorithms that are more able to meet scalability and efficiency requirements. Gen’s flexible modeling and inference programming capabilities unify symbolic, neural, probabilistic, and simulation-based approaches to modeling and inference, including causal modeling, symbolic programming, deep learning, hierarchical Bayesiam modeling, graphics and physics engines, and planningand reinforcement learning.
Bayesian Methods for Hackers is designed as a introduction to Bayesian inference from a computational/understanding-first, and mathematics-second, point of view. Of course as an introductory book, we can only leave it at that: an introductory book. For the mathematically trained, they may cure the curiosity this text generates with other texts designed with mathematical analysis in mind. For the enthusiast with less mathematical-background, or one who is not interested in the mathematics but simply the practice of Bayesian methods, this text should be sufficient and entertaining.
A group of German rightwing extremists compiled a “death list” of leftwing and pro-refugee targets by accessing police records, then stockpiled weapons and ordered body bags and quicklime to kill and dispose of their victims, German media have reported, citing intelligence sources. Germany’s general prosecutor had been investigating Nordkreuz (Northern Cross) since August 2017 on the suspicion the group was preparing a terrorist attack.
if you want an image of the future it’s this: police in Paris pepper spraying climate protestors on the hottest day in French recorded history - 45.9°C https://t.co/jv550CX54n
If you’ve ever hiked through the woods with one of those savants who can identify every plant, every tree, every berry, bug and birdsong, you know it can be a revelation. When we’re alone in the trees with our ignorance, however, nature remains an inscrutable beauty.
It needn’t be. On recent walks through Alabama forests and Brooklyn cemeteries, I experimented with apps that use my smartphone’s camera and microphone—plus cloud-based machine learning technology—to identify plants and animals around me as quickly as Shazam can recognize a deservedly obscure Adam Ant song.
I now know a nightmarish-looking red mushroom I saw pushing its way through the grass was an “Elegant Stinkhorn.” And that the avian chorus crooning at my window each morning and interrupting my sleep isn’t just a bunch of stupid birds; it’s a bunch of stupid “house sparrows.” Here, three free apps to demystify flora, fauna, and fine feathered frenemies.
BirdNET: BirdNET lets you record snippets of song and upload them for instant analysis. It can match your recordings with those of the birds in its database—soon to top 1,000 species. The app displays its findings, its level of certainty and a link to the creature’s Wikipedia page. Available for Android.
Seek: Seek analyzes whatever you point your phone’s camera at, working its way up the tree of life in real time—revealing the kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and finally species. Available for iOS and Android.
Merlin: This app offers two avenues for ornithological identification; either snap a photo and submit it, or just answer a few basic questions about the bird in question. Available for iOS and Android.
An honest suggestion: contact someone whose work you admire, enjoy or respect and tell them. Especially if you think they may be having a hard time. Solidarity, friends ✊
sometimes it’s important to take a moment for yourself, for self care, to look back on the years and to remember the good things you have accomplished and be proud pic.twitter.com/SPPtCfUzxl
‘An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion.
This advice seems so easy, and is in fact so difficult to follow.’
Kudos to the Gates Foundation, seriously: after spending $775m on the Intensive Partnerships for Effective Teaching, a Big Data initiative to improve education for poor and disadvantaged students, they hired outside auditors to evaluate the program’s effectiveness, and published that report, even though it shows that the approach did no good on balance and arguably caused real harms to teachers and students.
Cathy “Weapons of Math Destruction” O'Neil has given the report a close reading, and she found that the problems with the approach were pretty predictable: asking principals to rate teachers produces pretty uniform and meaningless five-star results, while the “value add” algorithms that are supposed to figure out how much of a student’s performance is attributable to a teacher are basically random number generators.
The result was a hugely stressful (and sometimes career-destroying) exercise in which teachers and students were human guinea pigs in an experiment that could have been evaluated more cheaply and quickly in smaller laboratory tests before it was unleashed on whole populations.
“Sadly enough, it’s an economically impossibility. The combined world economy is £59.9 trillion – so injecting several quintillion (a one with 18 zeroes behind it) into it would cause the whole thing to come crashing down” https://t.co/falHqGtnhX
How have these places managed to transform from monuments to atrocity and resistance into concrete clickbait? The story told by Spomenik is that these strange structures must have just been dropped onto these rural areas, most likely by the Big Man, the dictator, Tito himself. According to Gal Kirn, who has written several articles on “partisan art” and whose book Partisan Ruptures was recently published in Slovenia, the opposite is true. “For these, let’s call them modernist monuments, you would be surprised to see that the financing many times came as a combination of republican (Yugoslavia was heavily decentralised into its six constituent Republics) and regional funds, and also self-managed funding, meaning also that enterprises and factories contributed — while much less was given from the federal-state level.” There were competitions and “some public calls which had juries — but the existence of these progressive sculptural objects tells us that more conventional representations-resolutions were not favoured.” That is, in many cases these “UFOs” were commissioned, funded and chosen locally.
A while back Joe Fitz tweeted about the S8 data line locator1. He referred to it as “Trickle down espionage” due to its reminiscence of NSA spying equipment. The S8 data line locator is a GSM listening and location device hidden inside the plug of a standard USB data/charging cable. It supports the 850, 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz GSM frequencies. Its core idea is very similar to the COTTONMOUTH product line by the NSA/CSS [1] in which an RF device is hidden inside a USB plug. Those hidden devices are referred to as implants. The device itself is marketed as a location tracker usable in cars, where a thief would not be able to identify the USB cable as a location tracking device. Its malicious use-cases can, however, not be denied. Especially since it features no GPS making its location reporting very coarse (1.57 km deviation in my tests). It can, e.g., be called to listen to a live audio feed from a small microphone within the device, as well as programmed to call back if the sound level surpasses a 45 dB threshold. The fact that the device can be repackaged in its sliding case, after configuring it, i.e. inserting a SIM, without any noticeable marks to the packaging suggests its use-case: covert espionage.
Many ideas were based on a paper by Yan Ke, Derek Hoiem, and Rahul Sukthankar called “Computer Vision for Music Identification” (2005). In fact, even the Last.fm fingerprinter uses the code published by the authors of this paper. This is where I learned that audio identification is more about machine learning that it is about DSP. Many useful methods for extracting interesting features from audio streams are well-known and the problem is more about how to apply and index them the best way. The basic idea here is to treat audio as a spectral image and index the content of the image. I’ll explain this in more detail and how Chromaprint uses this in a following post. Another important paper for me was “Pairwise Boosted Audio Fingerprint” (2009) by Dalwon Jang, Chang D. Yoo, Sunil Lee, Sungwoong Kim and Ton Kalker (Ton Kalker is a co-author of a historically important paper “Robust Audio Hashing for Content Identification” (2001) published by Philips Research), which combined previous experiments of the authors with audio identification based on spectral centroid features and the indexing approach similar to the one suggested by Y. Ke, D. Hoiem and R. Sukthankar. For a long time this was the best solution I had and since it was actually not very hard to implement, the most time I spent on tweaking the configuration to get the best results. The last major change came after I learned about “chroma” features by reading the “Efficient Index-Based Audio Matching” (2008) by Frank Kurth and Meinard Müller. I’ve read more papers about chroma features later, but this was the first and also the most important one for me and some ideas about processing the feature vectors from it are implemented in Chromaprint. Chroma features are typically used for music identification, as opposed to audio file identification, but I tried to use them with the approach I already had implemented and it nicely improved the quality of the fingerprinting function and actually reduced complexity which allowed me to use much larger training data sets.
Understanding beliefs about climate change is important, but most of the measures used in the literature are unreliable. Instead, this column uses prices of financial products whose payouts are tied to future weather outcomes in the US. These market expectations correlate well with climate model outputs between 2002 and 2018 and observed weather data across eight US cities, and show significant warming trends. When money is at stake, agents are accurately anticipating warming trends in line with the scientific consensus of climate models.
ggplot2 is a system for declaratively creating graphics, based on The Grammar of Graphics. You provide the data, tell ggplot2 how to map variables to aesthetics, what graphical primitives to use, and it takes care of the details.
Every six hours, at his home in the high desert outside Kingman, Arizona, midway between Phoenix and Las Vegas, Brian Goss downloads the latest blocks from the bitcoin blockchain via satellite. He receives the transmission through a dish he installed this January; it arrives with messages, too—tweets, blogs, odes to Satoshi—sent by bitcoiners around the world. Goss rebroadcasts them from a radio device perched on his roof, in case the neighbors care to tune in. There’s nothing wrong with Goss’ terrestrial internet connection, he assures me—Kingman is not that remote. But if bitcoin is truly digital gold, as he believes, contingencies are important. If the internet goes down, how else will you access your cache?
Activists, for the love of all things profane, STOP WRITING ABOUT “HOPE”. That shit is a doubling down on the very same obsession with cognitive simulacra and human fantasy that brought us to this point. Drink some nihilism, get humble, and then calibrate your praxis. Do work.
Back in January, Amy Hawkins and Jeffrey Wasserstrom published a fascinating, nuanced look why Chinese state censors had banned the mention of Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” on social media, but not the book itself.
Now, the pair are back with a wider look at the way that Chinese authorities and the Chinese people adapt western culture for both a local audience and local politics. Some of this is just funny twists of syncretism, like Santa Claus invariably being depicted with a saxophone (!), but there’s a much more interesting and meaty political story.
Hawkins and Wasserstrom begin their story with the adoption of Marx’s ideas by the Chinese Communist Party, producing “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and banishing Confucionism to the scrapheap of history – and how that turned into today’s “capitalism with Chinese characteristics,” overseen by Xi Jinping, who describes himself as being a fan of both Marx and Confucious.
Another deeply contested western idea is International Women’s Day, which has taken on many meanings at different times in Chinese history – being celebrated as a tribute to women who stayed home to care for family, then as a holiday celebrating the revolutionary cause of women’s equality, finally turning into a shopping holiday where companies offer discounts on spa treatments (one Beijing pizza chain offered 50% off to women – but only for salads).
This fluxuating nature of political meaning for western symbols is neatly described in the rise, fall, and rise again of Peppa Pig, who entered China as a counterculture icon for millennials, with a fad for Peppa tattoos leading the state to denounce Peppa as “an unexpected cultural icon of gangster subculture in China.” But Peppa was rehabilitated by the state, who drafted Alibaba Pictures to produce a Peppa movie embodying Confucian values, wiht a story about “a rural grandfather who makes a Peppa Pig toy to bring to his grandson in the city at Chinese New Year.”
Likewise with rap music: first it was banned as “tasteless, vulgar and obscene,” then it was rehabilitated with a state-sanctioned TV reality show called The Show of Rap, and now China exports made-in-China hiphop around the world.
This back-and-forth is kind of dance between Microsoft’s old tactic of “embrace and extend” and counterculture’s Gibsonian rallying cry that “the street finds its own use for things.” The Tiananmen protesters sang The Internationale and a rock anthem called “Nothing to My Name,” and carried banners reading “We Shall Overcome” and “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death.”
“Nick Carnes measured the effect of wealthier politicians, and the absence of working-class lawmakers, on outcomes. Martin Gilens argued that elites, and often only elites, influence economic policy. In large majorities, the American people support higher taxes on the wealthy, actions to fight climate change, greater regulation of monopoly companies, and higher wages. But, according to Gilens and co-author Ben Page, ordinary voters have no say in these issues, because the structure of our politics is such that the wealthy—and those they fund on their behalf—have tangible political influence, while “the estimated influence of the public is statistically indistinguishable from zero.””
Mosques receive free energy in Iran. Iranians have set up Bitcoin miners in them. There’s around 100 here, producing around $260,000 USD a year. This money goes a long way in Iran’s choked sanctioned economy. https://t.co/fczwdqCPAd
(got myself in a proper sweaty mood about Object Oriented Ontology late last night [I KNOW I know] & found myself thinking ‘maybe it’s not that there’s some side of objects which is always *withdrawn* and *unknowable* - maybe they *just* *don’t* *like* *you*)
“Sometimes the most direct way to tell the truth is to tell a totally implausible story, like a myth. That way you avoid the muddle of pretending the story ever happened, or ever will happen.” wearing Le Guin on my sleeve today.
From fantasies of departure to transformations in this world: “For Deleuze, it was never a question of ‘breaking-out’ of the world that exists, but of creating the right conditions for the expression of other possible worlds to 'break-in’,” (quoting Gregg Lambert)
Bitcoin is such a comically perfect dark age hedge. It’s like it was invented for a tropey cyberpunk dystopia novel.
Editor to author: “Seriously? A decentralized digital currency that requires burning lots of energy and goes up when nations crumble? Isn’t that kinda lazy?”
What most concerns me about Libra is the potential for further marginalization. People locked out of the financial system, unable to pay rent because a status update flagged them as a sex worker; unable to access healthcare because Facebook thinks their identity is fraudulent.
— Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) June 21, 2019
If you burn a lump of coal, the greenhouse effect from the carbon dioxide released from burning that coal will, over its lifetime in the atmosphere, heat the Earth about 100,000 times more than the thermal energy released from burning that coal.https://t.co/YyqbNXyew9
The only real political polarity is between those supporting the subsumption of time by space (Adam Smith’s logic of the modularisation of production, end-orientation, clock stans) & the subsumption of space by time (the “Anti-Clock Gang”, consistent Bergerism, Kevin Bacon)
Word of the (Solstice) day: “grimmelings”, also “grimplins”, “grimlins"––the first & last gleams of daylight (Scots, esp. Orkney), which around midsummer in northern latitudes blend to form the "simmer dim” (summer twilight).
Cf Swedish “grim(b)la”, “to glimmer before the eyes”. pic.twitter.com/vkmBgy75b9
The down side of being an academic gadfly who made no major contribution to any one field, just minor ones to several, is that u then get asked to do stuff for every single one of them.
you ever think about how stupid it is to be working while we’re accelerating toward a mass extinction event? doesn’t it feel like we should be doing something…else?
‘The Zen approach is to enter right into the object itself and see it, as it were, from the inside. To know the flower is to become the flower … .
The flower, however, is unconscious of itself. It is I who awaken it from the unconscious.’
That’s bad news for anyone who lets internet users communicate with each other, from Tinder to rental listings to Wikipedia, but especially hard-hit will be games. Raising the table stakes for starting a competitor to Blizzard is a surefire way to crush any competition to the current giants of the games industry, and mandatory filter rules will kill mom-and-pop Minecraft hosting and other small players. Add to that the potential for griefing – all you need to do to make your opponent’s avatar disappear is claim their skin on the copyright filters.
It’s not too late: the next vote will likely be on July 4: contact your MEP and get THREE PEOPLE to do the same. MELT THE SWITCHBOARDS, SAVE THE INTERNET!
There’s something like an uncanny horoscope effect, where if a fairly weak theory fits you personally very strongly, you’ll be tempted to assume it’s more broadly, deeply true than it is. Some mix of confirmation bias and attribution error.
FB coin is exactly like when Linux lost to Mac, or Firefox lost to Chrome. Stop spinning this as a victory for crypto. All the normies will use never use Bitcoin. FB coin will become standard online. States will outlaw unregulated cryptos and nobody will pay any attention.
Consulting Tip #21: Pay attention to the peripheries of your network. Your best leads will come from your weakest ties. People who know you best are usually your weakest sources of leads.
I wonder if there’s a correlation between low numbers who think vaccines are safe, and when the last time a country experienced a serious epidemic? If people dying of measles doesn’t happen in your world, you don’t realise vaccines save lives?
Donald Trump launched his 2020 re-election campaign by promising a roundup of 11,000,000 people, even as he has handed millions to Beltway Bandits to build and operate concentration camps on US soil. These could not be more timely.
They’re available in English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Hmong, Spanish and Vietnamese. They read “I do not wish to speak to you, answer your questions, or sign or hand you any documents based on my 5th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution.I do not give you permission to enter my home based on my 4th Amendment rights under the United States Constitution unless you have a warrant to enter, signed by a judge or magistrate with my name on it that you slide under the door. I do not give you permission to search any of my belongings based on my 4th Amendment rights.These cards are available to citizens and non-citizens alike.”
The the reverse they say:
You have constitutional rights
• Do not open the door if an immigration officer knocks on your door.
• Do not answer any questions if the immigration officer attempts to speak with you. You have the right to remain silent. You do not need to give your name to the immigration officer. If you are at work, ask the immigration officer if you are free to leave and if the officer says yes, leave. You have the right to speak with an attorney.
• Give this card to the immigration officer. Do not open the door.
By using a camera and computer vision software it is possible to make a fish control a robot car over land. By swimming towards an interesting object, the fish can explore the world beyond the limits of his tank. Via Studio diip
A fairy fort, with corn stooks of four sheaves each, in Loughinisland, Co Down, in 1962. Photograph: Michael J Murphy/duchas.ie
“A worldwide crowdsourcing movement is currently unearthing Ireland’s deepest fairy secrets and darkest myths. A voluntary collective online is working its way through transcribing 700,000 pages of folklore that were collected throughout Ireland between 1937 and 1939. This mass of previously inaccessible material was gathered by more than 100,000 children who were sent to seek out the oldest person in their community just before second World War to root out the darkest, oddest and weirdest traditional beliefs, secrets and customs, which were then logged into 1,128 volumes, titled the Schools’ Manuscripts Collection.
Half a million pages have been digitised by the National Folklore Collection, of which more than 100,000 pages have now been transcribed by volunteers, revealing the fairy situation in every townland, the types of leprechaun and butter churn common to each area, the names of people who tried to steal gold and what happened to them, or who had relationships with mermaids. There is material on local cures, holy wells, strange animals, travelling folk and spirits.”
Eleven banks, including Citigroup Inc., France’s Société Générale SA and Norway’s DNB ASA, say they will take climate considerations into account when extending new shipping loans.
The goal is for the ship-financing sector to support an industry target to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by half in 2050.
The banks, which have a combined shipping portfolio of about $100 billion, or about one-fourth of the global ship-finance market, have signed on to an industrial framework known as the Poseidon Principles, which seeks to direct new money for shipping toward environmentally-friendly, oceangoing vessels.
“As banks, we recognize that our role in the shipping industry enables us to promote responsible environmental stewardship throughout the global maritime value chain,” said Michael Parker, global industry head of shipping and logistics at Citi.
Mr. Parker said the banks will look at the type of ship, the kind of fuel it uses and other criteria that will support a target by the International Maritime Organization, the global marine regulator, for ships to pare back their emissions compared with 2008 levels.
“We hope that around 90% of lenders will sign the Poseidon Principles,” Mr. Parker said, adding that Chinese lenders could join by next year.
Me: “Why the hell isn’t this working?” *deletes entire working set, rebuilds* “Why is this still not working??? Wait a second…” pic.twitter.com/YZaj5EbTi7
2009: The blockchain will undermine central power!
2019: The blockchain will help Facebook to undermine the central power of the state by using the rhetoric of decentralization to actually centralize power in its own hands.
favourite landscape today / standing in a rockpool which feels like it’s on the moon if the moon had very loud thunderstorms. If I have a spotify party for a min while I’m here, what song suits this landscape? pic.twitter.com/FDTC26fehj
You don’t create tools or toys specifically for infinite games. You view existing things in functionally unfixed ways. The finiteness is in your head not the object. https://t.co/F1AWn5zmLH
— Venkatesh “is moving to LA in a few weeks” Rao (@vgr) June 18, 2019
‘There is a kind of mysticism in perversion. We might compare it to a “black” theology where pleasure ceases to motivate the will and is abjured, disavowed, “renounced”, the better to be recovered as a reward or consequence, and as a law.’ —Deleuze
Yes anthropocene does not specify which humans are responsible, but its task is different: it has to be defined as a stratigraphic term for geologists, no more, no less. Let each of the proponents of the 110 other alternative terms in -cene to be as precise in meaning & audience.
“If one considers the basic concepts image, apparatus, program and information, one discovers an internal connection between them: They are all based on the ‘eternal recurrence of the same’. Images are surfaces above which the eye circles only to return again and again to the starting point. Apparatuses are playthings that repeat the same movements over and over again. Programs are games that combine the same elements over and over again. Pieces of information are improbable states that break away again and again from the tendency to become probable only to sink back into it again and again.”
— Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion Books, 1983. 2001.
Pulling out a few fragments of last week’s talk @uchicago3ct on “Speculative Design: Post-Petroleum Futures”, some thoughts on why visions of the future have stagnated or are simply not appropriate for the world of the 21st Century.
“We misjudged the separation of technology and politics”
I can’t think of a more perfect summary for the continued social failures of infosec. They have clearly learned nothing of value. https://t.co/vGb3al6Ain
— Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) June 14, 2019
Deviant Ollam is runs a physical security penetration testing company called The Core Group; in a flat-out amazing, riveting presentation from the 2017 Wild West Hackin’ Fest, Ollam – a master lockpicker – describes how lockpicking is a last resort for the desperate, while the wily and knowledgeable gain access by attacking doors and locks with tools that quickly and undetectably open them.
Ollam’s techniques are just laugh-out-loud fantastic to watch: from removing the pins in hinges and lifting doors away from their high-security locks to sliding cheap tools between doors or under them to turn thumb-levers, bypass latches, and turn handles. My favorite were the easy-exit sensors that can be tricked into opening a pair of doors by blowing vape smoke (or squirting water, or releasing a balloon) through the crack down their middle.
But more than anything, Ollam’s lecture reminds me of the ground truth that anyone who learns lockpicking comes to: physical security is a predatory scam in which shoddy products are passed off onto naive consumers who have no idea how unfit for purpose they are.
When locksport began, locksmiths were outraged that their long-held “secret” ways of bypassing, tricking and confounding locks had entered the public domain – they accused the information security community of putting the public at risk by publishing the weaknesses in their products (infosec geeks also get accused of this every time they point out the weaknesses in digital products, of course).
But the reality is that “bad guys” know about (and exploit) these vulnerabilities already. The only people in the dark about them are the suckers who buy them and rely on them.
So when Ollam reveals that thousands of American cop cars, fleet cars, and taxis can all be unlocked and started using a shared key that you can literally buy for a few bucks at Home Depot, or that most elevators can be bypassed with a similarly widely available key, or that most file cabinets and other small locks can be opened with a third key, or that most digital entry systems can be bypassed in seconds with a paperclip (or another common physical key), he’s doing important (and hilarious!) work.
He’s such an engaging speaker and the subject matter is nothing short of fantastic. There are a hundred heist novels in this talk alone. It’s definitely my must-watch for the week.
Javier Marin is a Mexican sculptor best known for his precise yet expressive depictions of the human face and figure. Marin mostly works with clay, but has recently begun incorporating bronze and resin mixed with materials such as seeds, dried meat, and tobacco into his practice. Born in 1962 in Michoacán, Mexico, he received his BFA at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City. Today, Marin’s works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, among others. The artist lives and works in Mexico City, Mexico.
Writer and data journalist Kevin Litman-Navarro subjected 150 privacy policies from leading online services to programmatic analysis for complexity (the Lexile test), and found them to be an incomprehensible mess second only to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in their lack of clarity.
Ninth graders are expected to be able to read and understand texts with Lexile scores up to 1050; college students are expected to be able to read texts with Lexile scores up to 1300; trained doctors and lawyers are expected to cope with Lexile 1440 texts.
Facebook’s privacy policy is nestled comfortably between “A Brief History of Time” and “The Critique of Pure Reason.”
Litman-Navarro cites Center for Internet and Society director of consumer privacy Jen King, who describes these as “by lawyers, for lawyers” and challenges the sector to produce “human-centric” privacy policies that are “consumer tools.”
King suggests that privacy policies should contain “a list of companies that might purchase and use your personal information.”
One hopeful note: the European General Data Protection Regulation has produced meaningful improvements to many policies.
‘Sure, the Jesuit Rat Car had its problems, but imagine how many rats it would have carried after 250 years of development by the people who gave the world fireworks.’ (Dan Albert)
Can’t wait for a cryptocurrency with the ethics of Uber, the censorship resistance of Paypal, and the centralization of Visa, all tied together under the proven privacy of Facebook. https://t.co/C4FymDjtFw
— Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) June 14, 2019
Making music specifically for plants/insects is a fantastic idea. I’m convinced that using (ML-based) Generative Music, coupled with plant/soil bio-sensor feedback loops is a highly effective component in new systems that will replace chemical fertilisers/pest control. https://t.co/wZVBSt1BNf
