Posts tagged Quinn Norton

There are few pictures of us together. Very few were taken by us; neither of us are much for selfies. Those that do exist, we ask our friends to keep offline. We know that the vague and soft anonymity of our relationship probably won’t last forever. And I doubt there will ever be a surfeit of digital connections between us. Our phones trace the paths we walk together, existing in telecom databases (and more recently, in WhatsApp’s logfiles) long after we’ve moved on. Their cell tower and GPS logs are like a pair of maze paths with no walls, lines coming together and parting, and coming together again. But what we said on those walks is lost, even to us. Only the feelings, memories, and paths remain.

via https://backchannel.com/love-in-the-time-of-cryptography-dd3a74193ffb

Since we’re agent engineers, my husband and I tend to think agents are great. Also, we’re lazy and stupid by our own happy admission — and agents make us a lot smarter and more productive than we would be if we weren’t “borrowing” our brains from the rest of the internet. Like most people, whatever ambivalence we feel about our agents is buried under how much better they make our lives. Agents aren’t true AI, though heavy users sometimes think they are. They are sets of structured queries, a few API modules for services the agent’s owner uses, sets of learning algorithms you can enable by “turning up” their intelligence, and procedures for interfacing with people and things. As you use them they collect more and more of a person’s interests and history — we used to say people “rub off” on their agents over time.

https://medium.com/message/agency–3d37adfc69a3

These intrusions took place in January/February of 2012 and affected over 2000 domains, including numerous foreign government websites in Brazil, Turkey, Syria, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Nigeria, Iran, Slovenia, Greece, Pakistan, and others. A few of the compromised websites that I recollect include the official website of the Governor of Puerto Rico, the Internal Affairs Division of the Military Police of Brazil, the Official Website of the Crown Prince of Kuwait, the Tax Department of Turkey, the Iranian Academic Center for Education and Cultural Research, the Polish Embassy in the UK, and the Ministry of Electricity of Iraq

https://medium.com/quinn-norton/654abf6aeff7