Feb 01

Via John Lewis.

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Via John Lewis.

Originally shared by ****

One for Edward Morbius’ “Data are liability” file.

>>>

This is a thread for those of you who say coders and developers should take no role in politics. Those of you who watched my #WCLDN talk last year already heard this story. You can hear it again.

This was Rene Carmille, and that is a punch card. Image of Rene Carmille

Rene Carmille was the comptroller general of the French army. He eventually headed up the French census. Census data – innocuous, straightforward facts about people – was tabulated on IBM punch cards. Then the Nazis came.

Rene Carmille had all the data about all the people. He saw what the Nazis wanted to do with that data. So he made a decision about what to do with it. He did his job, externally, for the Nazis, of course.

In the background, he sifted through the data to find recruits for the French Resistance. He and his team went further than that. They did things like leave boxes of census records – thousands of people’s data – in a back room, unprocessed.

Then he and his team engaged in – if not invented – ethical hacking. They physically hacked their IBM punch card machines so that nothing could be entered into column 11: religion. That data, for those thousands of people, was missing.

He and his team were caught, and interrogated, and tortured. Rene Carmille died at Dachau. I have been there. There is a smell of burning flesh in the air. It is still there.

As is his legacy. In the Netherlands, 73% of Dutch Jews were found, deported, and executed. In France, that figure was 25%. It was that much lower because they couldn’t find them.

They couldn’t find them because Rene Carmille and his team got political and hacked the data.

On #HolocaustMemorialDay , as the people in the data we collect and store and share face threats we never thought we would see again, you need to be prepared to go that far when the day comes when it is you handling the data.

You can, and you will.

And in reply: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/957722588641419266.html

This seems like a good place to mention that the US Bureau of the Census likes to talk about how strict they are about privacy, even once turning away FBI agents who arrived at the Colorado Springs BOC office with a warrant for confidential Census data. But…

…during WWII the BOC provided block-by-block data on people of Japanese ancestry for the purpose of sending them to concentration camps, something that was officially denied or simply ignored until records research confirmed it in 2000. And…

…in 1943, the BOC provided specific names and addresses of all persons of Japanese ancestry in the Washington DC area, on the request of the US Treasury Secretary, which was also denied until further research confirmed it in 2007.

And the specifics of the request and response indicate that other requests may have been made and fulfilled prior to the one now documented, to the extent that this was then a routine transaction.

What especially disturbs me personally about this is that I worked on a federal contract for BOC from 2007-2008 and again from 2012-2014. Our mandatory data-confidentiality training included the Colorado Springs story…

…but no acknowledgement that the Census Bureau had ever been less than perfect and morally upright in its protection of the confidentiality of respondents’ data.

has officially apologized for the WWII block-level data disclosures, but this is far from just ancient history: in 2004 records requests revealed the previous year, BOC supplied ZIP-code-level data on residents of Arab ancestry broken down by nationality to DHS…

…only apparently later requesting the required statement justifying the need for such data.

When popular fervor or official policy turns against a group, we must not assume that things we always thought were bulwarks against abuse actually were or will continue to be — in fact they are often turned into tools of the very oppression they are supposed to protect against.

Sources: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/confirmed-the-us-census-b/

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/957256426392494080.html
Jan 30

Well, end of January, and I’ve already posted my first two-star review and my first five-star review for the year.

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Well, end of January, and I’ve already posted my first two-star review and my first five-star review for the year.

This is the five-star one. A well-constructed, well-written thriller with both moral complexity and a moral stance, showing that it can be done.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2277253031

Jan 29

“Decision-making, planning, human interaction, or creative work” are the kind of skills your kids will need to…

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“Decision-making, planning, human interaction, or creative work” are the kind of skills your kids will need to thrive in the future world of work.

Originally shared by Singularity Hub

These Are the Most Exciting Industries and Jobs of the Future http://suhub.co/2DJN4qP

Jan 27

This is not a million miles from some of my speculations in Gu, which includes “tumbleweeds” – permanent nomads…

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This is not a million miles from some of my speculations in Gu, which includes “tumbleweeds” – permanent nomads travelling the world in their self-contained mobile residences.

http://csidemedia.com/gu

Via Raja Mitra.

Originally shared by Mark Lewis

I read quite a few articles on driverless cars. This is the first one in a while that I have felt really has creative elements to it. They might be pushing the idea a bit too far, but it is a very interesting idea and goes beyond some of my previous thinking in different areas. What I liked most though was how the author points out that the auto industry could produce enough autonomous cars to replace all human-driven cars in a rather short period of time. That’s significant. The timeline for scaling up autonomous ride sharing is one of the things I’ve worried about the most, but apparently, if current production switched over to fully autonomous, it would produce a complete global supply of such cars in a rather short period of time because so many fewer cars are needed if the cars aren’t left sitting in parking lots all the time.

https://hackernoon.com/driverless-hotel-rooms-the-end-of-uber-airbnb-and-human-landlords-e39f92cf16e1

Jan 27

Small study, so don’t get too excited. Interesting if true, though.

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Small study, so don’t get too excited. Interesting if true, though.

Originally shared by Neuroscience News

Magic Mushrooms May Alter How You Feel About Nature (and Politics)

Long-held beliefs can become entrenched over time, making them hard to change. But psychedelics might provide a way to alter them, a study suggests.

The research is in Journal of Psychopharmacology. (full open access)

http://neurosciencenews.com/nature-politics-psilocybin-8382/
Jan 25

Of course, some of these things are still available to the people they’re available to because other people are poor.

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Of course, some of these things are still available to the people they’re available to because other people are poor. But it’s also the case that with greater connectivity comes a rise in average prosperity.

Originally shared by Todd William

Why You’re Richer than a King

There exists a trend in the Western World to focus on the negative. The more we have, it seems, the more we have to take for granted. Yet much of this pessimism is grossly unwarranted.

Perhaps no one expresses this better than Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist. With a keen sense of perspective, he provides the following anecdote that will leave even the most cynical of mindsets second guessing themselves.

_____________________

THE KING

“The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services.”

“He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.”

But what about today?

“Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was.”

“Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach.”

And yet consider this.

“The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavored with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary.”

“You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.”

“You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia.”

“You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamoring to bring you clean central heating.”

“You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell.”

“You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.”

“My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference?”

“That is the magic that exchange and specialization have wrought for the human species.”

____________________

(Artwork by: Jacek Yerka)