technology embedding ethics

Having tried to confront ethics in internet experiments at a conference a couple of weeks ago, I'm trying to think about the way technologies like the internet embed ethics and how this challenges us both in every day life and as researchers into communications, but also for developers creating new technologies.

One obvious place where this shows up repeatedly is in the tension between free speech and hate crimes, as well as between privacy and accountability. but it also shows up in the power imbalance between large organisations and the individual. Taking these in the reverse order, then:

1/ The cloud is run by a small number of very big trans-national companies, for profit - original technical reasons for centralising resources (compared with the world wide web of the 1990s, or even early 2000s) was economic - scale gets price/performance advantages for servers, as management and control are run in one place for a lot of people. prevention of various attacks (e.g. denial of service on small sites) goes away as a problem, since few bad guys have the resource to launch a big attack on today's giant data centres (outside a couple of government agencies:)

However, once all that information is concentrated in one place, it affords opportunities which didn't make sense when it was decentralised. A for profit company has no choice: It has to maximise the shareholder value. This isn't mission creep, its just capitalism.

Of course, putting all your eggs in one basket does have a downside when there is a successful hack (viz the ever increasing list of Cablegates, Sony's, Ashley Maddison's)

2/ Privacy is not assured in a network. when you communicate, at least one other party now knows what you said. In a computer network, your privacy is now in their hands, since everything you "send" to them is a copy. They now have a copy. It can be copied again. While the parties to your original communication may be accounted for (you think/hope), further copies are not accounted for. This is a consequence also of the near-zero cost of copying. In days of illuminated manuscripts, only people with a monastery full of monks could copy stuff again. Nowadays, as downloaders know, anyone can re-upload. As YouTube demonstrated, you can even legitimise file sharing if you have enough power (see 1/:)

However, privacy is not dead. There are social norms which prevent us repeating all secrets to all and sundry. There are also legal situations where confidentiality is required (patient/doctor or client/lawyer, or just gf/bf but only if at least one of them is a celeb:)

What isn't clear because of the way technology has made copying easy, is when you are trespassing on those social norms - the technology could be less neutral - it is fairly easy now to provide tools that look (locally, on your device) at the information you have and make suggestions about reasonable use of it (delete now for ever, do not copy, etc) - in organisations that care about security (defense agencies) classification provides rules about where data can go - we could help every day people by building better support for remembering what you should and should not do.

3/ Many systems provide platforms for public utterances - blogs, have-your-say, comment-is-free, etc etc - but also just being able to get a throw away e-mail account at the drop of a hat.

Many are geared to ease of use, so don't need accountable sign-on, and don't check what is said or who it is said to.

Such systems allow trolling and other offence.

The problem is that the policing of what people can say, to whom, and where is generally regarded as a form of censorship, and in some countries, strongly opposed.
This conflates two things
a) anonymity (which has its place for whistleblowers, or people in countries where free speech is anathema anyhow)
with
b) free speech.

In general, if you think you have a right to say something, you should be able to stand by what you say, hence being anonymous is not only not a requirement, it is actually a really weird thing to require. Experiments on requiring true names, or at least accountable identities, on some sites have resulted in visible reduction in abuse.

So what I'm trying to say here is that we have built an internet, web, cloud, which to a large degree is not fit for human purpose.

• It is good for corporations to make money at your expense
• It is excellent for us to live in a panopticon
• It is a fine public space for people to shout abuse at others while wearing a mask.

Time to fix this.

lost and not not forgotten

social scientists studying the right to be forgotten have forgotten why

sharing and hiding - e-books and crypto comms

two ideas for the day:
1/ when you're reading an ebook, people around you don't have the pleasure of seeing what you're reading as they do by seeing the cover of a paper book....

so e-books have wireless for download - why not (up to you to turn on/off) use a whispernet style ad hoc meassage to broadcast to people nearby what you currenty are lookin at....?

2/ when you type an email that has a word like "attachment" in it, the mailer notices if there isn't an attachment often, & asks you if you meant to have one
how about the mail app (or browser) could also look at the email and make a guess "this looks private, don't you want to use the recipient's public key"?

j

democracy and debate - what's wrong with vanguards etc

just listening to lots of talks by social scientists - when people talk about politics, they've spent a lot of time reading, digesting, thinking, synthesising and so on. so then they report their results back. what's the problem?

well, basically, TL;DR

the process has to be a process for al potential involved parties - this is why syndicalist anarchism is the way forward - direct democracy has to engage, so the naive extension of representative democracy into direct democracy just burdens people with too many irrelevant discussions, so is alienating in a worse way.

towards an antisocial contract

Towards an Anti-Social Contract


I've read the David Kaye's report, which I very much like (clarity and precision, but also happen to agree). 


What is missing? A clear way to measure proportionality, and a social/legal framework to implement judgement of what is a (currently on hold) proposals to replace the European Human Rights proportional way to suspend crypto rights. So for example, the UK's where decisions are made, and replace them with politicians - with a UK Bill of Rights threatened to remove judges as the place Anderson's report makes it plain this is unacceptable (not just and proportional scheme to carryout lawful intercept, the advent of ethically, given conflict of interest, but constitutionally).

However, there's a very real threat that without a transparent, fair, intercept. Government agencies need to be persuaded to reduce their really good perfect forward secrecy mechanisms, and better key  management in general, will basically mean there will be no feasible (child porn , terrorism organisation, money laundering etc) would mission creep (similar to commercial agencies abuse of personal data) as that would mean legitimate policing of really bad uses of the net simply go completely unchecked. 

There's a secondary threat, which is that wholesale monitoring by too: If citizens feel confident that monitoring is only done for good reason, and without weakening out crypto-systems, they may not feel the need to adopt unbreakable systems. Many agencies will result in a massive breach of privacy when should never have had access to 2 Million documents - modern cloud (inevitably) one of those agencies accidentally leaks a collection of monitoring data. This is the other lesson from Snowden (the NSA's internal security procedures were incompetent, in that one person providers do not let their system administrators have such privilege.




This is the balancing act that needs to be created, in my view. and nor should a security agency, and what better way to enforce this, than only to collect necessary and sufficient data in the first place - the needle, not the whole haystack.

A sort of Anti-Social Contract c.f. always on

So maybe we need a new arbiter organisation - a distributed citizenship v. government tie-breaker - not the police, business or the press or current national judiciary  - a sort of 7th estate. It should, like the Internet itself, admit of no kings, just working codes of practice. It could manage rights to be forgotten too. It might need to employ some very smart social machines to cope with ddos, edit war, troll, bot farms etc etc

science and policy #101

Three recent pieces of work in Cambridge came to light

1. scientists have been working on the basis for randomized trials, and realized that, of course, we must have some non-randomized trials, to check if the very basis for randomization as part of scientific empirical method is sound.
In a bold inter-disciplinary move, the scientists collaborated with the department of history and analyzed a number of UK and other policies for economics and military action, to see if one could find random (e.g. the 100 years) and non-random (e.g. the 1st world) wars, as well as economics (e.g. monetarism, and austerity). The results will be published very soon, but are currently under embargo, in case they disturb a current experiment with Greece.

2. Engineers in Cambridge have long wanted to build a railway to replace the ageing bus and taxi system. Working from earlier chinese experiments with mono-rails, and the guided by the guided bus success, the proposal is not to take the modern electric line from Royston to King's Lynn, where customers are already used to the trains splitting at Cambridge, with one half going forward, for example, to Ely, and the other half, soon, to the Science Park. From next year, they hope to split the train laterally, with the left half going around the pieces (Christs, Parkers) and Commons (Midsummer etc), and the right half going in a long overhead loop, to Ely, allowing the Eels much easier migration along their breeding paths in the fens. If the duo-mono-rail is a success, the engineers propose to extend the routes to Paris and Brussels, where onward mono-mono routes could serve ski-resorts and some of the Belgian mountain regions where the finer beers are produced.

3. For some time now, a very ambitious project in CRASSH has been working on Consipiracy Theory. This work has involved linguists, computer scientists, taxi drivers and publicans, and has recently yielded a breakthrough. A new tool has been built that can detect consipiracy theories with a false positive rate of 2% and a false negative rate of 3%. The method is based on a mix of Bayes and various NLP clustering algorithms. Currently the tool is part of a possible startup and venture capitalists are clamouring to fund the work. The business case is unclear as yet, and there have been some suggestions that at least one major journalism organisation may have prior art, although scientists suggest that their conspiracy generator is based on different technology (followers of Chomsky will understand that recognition and generation are quite different linguistic machines). At least one government agency claims that they had build a system exactly like this in 1961, and that it correctly identified Cuba and Suez, but they could not reveal the technology for fear of showing potential national enemies how much more advanced the UK was than them. Security analysts have asked them to "put up or shut up" as this is not the first time that they have claimed to have approaches to their work that would save time and money, but have not deployed because they would have, err, saved time and money and lives and red faces.

Meanwhile, CRASSH were not available for comment.

intent with meaning - future network control

there's a lot of chat about intent-oriented networking e.g. Nemo, - latest fad - seems to be a little bit like predicate routing - or declarative networking - where you way, in a very high-level way (e.g. legalease, c.f. recent microsoft paper on compliance) what you want to happen. Hopefully, this is 11 layers higher than open flow, and employs P4 at a minimum, as most of the intents that aren't just 5-tuple flowspec based, must necessarily employ DPI and application based content patterns.

however, where are the semantics? this seems to me to be a massive missing mole of an elephant in the room

Who (subject/object) wants What (packet, router, link, user) to be Where (in a jurisdiction, or not) When (before T, after T etc), and Why (profit, loss, legal link, fun) - the WWWWW (High 5 ?) of networking - it shouldn't be too hard to do a bit of deontic logic and denotational sugar to get this right...a suitable job for computer science, and possibly, the NaaS project, but possibly not...

Not Worn Down. or Out.

Some company has bet its farm on some new fangled wearable device called the Watch. A bunch of other wearable computing/communication devices have done ok (highly portable mp3 music players to alleviate the burden of having to talk to people while exercising, wrist bands to measure speed and vital signs to olympic precision, to save the burden of having to look at a map and step on a scales. etc etc

None of this stuff is for me - maybe I am an outlier, outlandish, outspoken (sure), and out there, but I can't stand this stuff but not for a luddite reason -

ALthough I've always been slow to take up a tech (didn't have broadband at home or computers in the house til the kids needed it for school, didn't have a mobile phone til someone gave me one at work, didn't have a car for decades before needing to transport elderly people and do shopping etc - all driven by cost benefit analysis basically), this is not why I'm eschewing the old wearable stuff...

I've not ever been able to wear a watch, and find it hard to wear gloves - no idea why, but when uncles gave me watches as presents when I was a kid, I would run into doors, walls, catch them on aunties pointy noses, smash the glass, rip the strap in shreds, or drop them in a cup of really hot tea, to see if Douglas Adams would be right - who knows why? I just find this stuff intensely irritating.

If someone built something so tough it wouldn't break, I'd end up like Isidora Duncan, killed by being dragged behind a drone that accidentally got entangled with the fitbit it just delivered to my left paw.

One of our cool students built the nearest thing to an ideal wearable for me, a high-visibility cycling jacket that is decently made, well waterproof, light enough to wear on anything except a really hot day, and has a set of lights and sensors built in. Good on you, Andy Li, for visijax - I am betting he actually could have saved lives, but I still managed to break it (note to andy - the jacket is still fine, so it still gets used, just needs re-wiring - my fault entirely)....

I am not especially known as clumsy  - I can do fiddly things like thread a needle or hand solder electrical stuff without having to use a vice...I am obviously not averse to having tablets, smart phones, internet tv, blogs, twitter etc etc - I am not eve averse to doing some exercise (12 miles per day cycling, occasional long (100 mile) rides) and having some idea how to plan pace and fuel over a day etc

but I for one, am not going to be sporting one those new, extremely expensive, hopelessly hipster wannabe things on my wrist any day soon, no not even if Apple gave me one:)

EU versus US cloud economy

was at interesting meeting yesterday where it was shown that the EU lags the US in business adoption of  cloud technology, and that this is harming growth/productivity of companies (I think I can believe this) - positive role model companies do exist, so it isn't just head-in-the-sand

A lot of the talk was about the fact that the network deployment in EU is NOT a barrier  (capacity/latency/price are all fine), but at the same time, some of the net is actually under-utilisaed.

That's a useful point, and indeed, one could claim that the fact that the entire warfare about Net Neutrality has been largely US based is evidence that the stakes for content and service providers versus network providers are much higher in north american than in Europe.

for my part, I reckon a large part of the problem is that most european countries rely on overseas companies to provide cloud technology (Amazon, Microsoft, etc) and it is really hard to do a large scale business transformation that cloud can achieve with a remote company (or a company you don't trust, own, or have the same language/culture as). So the answer seems pretty obvious - the fact that the UK has less of a problem in this space is consistent with this, in that we have more local cloud expertise in the UK (having provided some of the core tech here anyhow:)

some people there disputed this viewpoint, and claimed there was no problem having BT or Microsoft cloud-ify their EU-based business - that assertion was made with no concrete examples.

the me-oh-my tube revolution is coming and it will not be televised

decentralized cloud - you know it makes sense. So youtube/google make a lot out of the amount of material that is uploaded every day. However, note that the usual zipf law of popularity (the very very very very very very long tail, where the vast vast vast majority of cats-falling-off-bicycle-videos are only ever viewed by .5 people) means that this stuff stays on 1 server, and never gets replicated (pushed) to caches.

So why upload it? Its personal - only you and your mum ever look at it.
Perhaps you are an aspiring pop star and its your video - so still, why upload it ? you only need to be _indexed_. Its far more efficient if you serve it yourself and you get to count how many people look at it directly, and from where, and get 100% of any advertising revenue (If you chose to host adverts too).

its obvious.

dis-intermediate google now!

Privacy in the Past

Have been reading about the past some, recently. For example, the rather fine England Arise! by Juliet Barker, about the revolt by Peasants in late 14th century England, triggered by the last straw, yet antherpoll tax (lets not pause to reflect how the rediculous sanctions threatened against Greece if they renege on their debt, and revoke their austerity measures under their own democatically elected governement might by related in some way:)

What I am more interested in here is the notion, reported in some places, that the idea of personal privacy is somehow only a recent invention.

Its actually quite hard to find good evidence on this,  of course, but it is clear that in every day life, most people lived hand-in-glove with each other to the extent that routinely private activities (the privy and procreation) were likely not terribly private, from your kith and kin.

Note well, though, this is the nub -- "private" is a triadic adjective. WHat is private about you, with respect to whom. I doubt very much if medieval peasants would have appreciated strangers turning up to queue at the window of their toilet or marital bed to watch. There was a social context.

What is interesting in the account in the book is that a highly distributed, lightly (hardly) coordinated activity arose which could not have used letters to coordinate since many were barely literate, but also due to cost, let alone the Victorian Internet (telegraph) or the telephone or e-mail or Online Social Networks. So people rode around on horseback, or walked about a lot to tell others what was happening.

And yet the powers that be were practically caught napping.

i.e. no surveillance state.

I assume the folks running this uprising were not idiots (they nearly succeeded, after all) and realized that a moducum of secrecy was needed in planning resistince and events. So they had a pretty good clue, obviously that their discussions and communications were indeed private, at least against being overheard by adversaries.

As with all revisionism, apologists angling to support the encroachment of the surveillance state on civil society, use the claim that privacy was a brief-lived, recent invention associated with wealth and individualism, and they use this to justify, in the face of relatively small injury to open societies, massive revokation of the right to privacy of every day folk (of course, secrecy in government (and banking and so on) is retained - why? do they have anything more to hide, I wonder:)).

Fact is, privacy is as old as whispering.innocently

Addendum  - just dealing with yet another teenager - do you remember hiding stuff from your parents when you were a kid? Its normal. Its part of asserting your individual nature and becoming self sufficient. Growing up. SPying on your kids is bad for them and you. Spying on your citizens is same, oh governments...

anonymous, boring, repetitive and dull

I've just read two very good (but quite similar books on Anonymous, one is We Are Anonymous by Parmy Olson, and the other is Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy by Gabriella Coleman.

While I like a shot of lulz as much as the next guy, and the righteous support of Wikieleaks, and even more, support of Arab Spring uprisings (esp. Tunisia) was a Good Thing, a huge amount of what these folks did is really rather dull and tedious. Indeed, reading the Enki of Loki (apologies to Neal Stephenson ) or any random religious tract of biblical proportions is really quite similar (and topiary slew glenbarry who slew kayla who was the daugther of Satan who was the son of SkuleMystress who lay with socketscientist and beget IIS and Apache vulernabilities daily etc etc)

Sheesh, if i wanted this sort of stuff I could just turn to the Gideon's Bible (cue Bungalow Bill)

Open Sauce

Recent moves in US and EU have meant that Science (especially publications) that is largely funded from the public purse, is being made openly available by requiring Scientists (now, no longer in an adventure with Pirates) to publish in Open Access journals and conferences - this is a jolly good thing, in my view. Indeed, the science (drugs, software, machines) itself should also be so available.

But what about other walks of life  like Comedy, or even Politics, Economics and Philosophy?
Surely most of this is developed at Universities, and so should be made freely available to the public in the same way? Indeed, I think it would be a tragedy if we don't have Open Access to Comedy and Rock and Roll as soon as possible.

Just finishing the excellent Hacker/Anonymous book by Gabriella Coleman. Its really a work of an anthropologist, studinying the weird new tribes in the cyber-jungle and their odd, odd ways....fun, but it does make one wonder (especially bits about Arab Spring) how nuch of a "performance installation/artwork" this all is, how much truth, rather than a Margaret Mead type debacle...we shall see....(or probably not, given the nature of Anonymous....

collaborated to death

I'm working on quite a few projects, and we use what used to be quaintly known as "productivity tools" - basically, we use (for example - non exhaustive list):

twitter/facebook/google groups & email lists and sms to coordinate stuff

shared calender tools

Git, Svn, Basecamp and a zillion other version controlling repositories

wikis, wordpress, for shared live journaling/awareness/coordination where > 140 char and less ephemeral, but not as versions as code, reports/papers

hotcrp, easychair, edas for conference management

webex, skype, younameit for video/voice realtime meetings

sharedlatex, office360, google docs for shared edits

This is a triumph of toolsets over sanity! I spend the first 7 minutes of any meeting trying to remember the use-context of the tools....arghhh!!!

death by computer supported collaborative computing!

Big Brother2.0 debate/conversazione, Lady Mitchell Hall, Nov 1, 11-12.30

I'm going to discuss things from a technical (computing) perspective, but with a modicum of social science

1. The canard: "If you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" needs debunking

(cue visual duck being thrown out of a hammock:)

This oft-repeated statement misses various important features of the way the world and people work:

Firstly, we all hide things all the time - the reasons are many:

some things are not finished, and need further work before they are presentable - 

sometimes, that is our own selves -our half baked opinions.

some things are hurtful to some people, but not to others

we present ourselves differently to different people - our kin, our close friends, our colleagues, our acquaintances and people that we encounter - all are given different levels of trust, because there are different levels of shared experience (and many other reasons). Context matters

Surveillance is toxic. It reduces everyone's choice of behaviour to that which is acceptable to everyone else. For all time. 

2. Because of the change of context over time (we grow older, our social network varies, the world changes, new stuff gets discovered, people forget stuff), we need to control aspects of information about ourselves as seen by others - indeed, we need to have obsolete data removed from their view

The statement that this is "censorship" is false. It is about a generalization of the "public right to know"

In general, the "public" is a set of people who we can send information to - e.g. my family, my friends, google, facebook, Sky TV, Isil, or GCHQ or the NSA or the Polis. Most of these, most the time, do not have a "right" to know. this is obviously false. I have a right to tell or not. I can judge my context.

e.g. Wes Hardaker, en route from san Francisco to Vancouver in SFO airport tweets to his partner at 5am "this airport is so dead" - the NSA might think he's a terrorist. he isn't - he means that the airport is really quiet (its 5am, after all).

e.g. Euan Blair on his 18th birthday gets drunk and is found /photographed in a gutter. before he was 18 it was no-one's business (he's a minor)- after he's 18, he's an adult -t he fact that his father is prime minister isn't relevant. the fact that many of the journalists covering the story are functional alcoholics and hipocrites is of no more interest, either, even if it is deliciously ironic.

e.g. mark thatcher gets lost in a rally drive across the sahara isn't specially interesting - see above. His mother isn't responsible for her 25yr old son's poor navigation skills doesn't reflect on her free market dogma or handbagging skills

3.with a suitable combination of technology (tracking content using DRM just as music and movie companies do, but on behalf of the citizen) we can tell if people send our data further than we wish, and law (data protection law, esp. in Germany - mainly because over time, the experience of the Stasi surveillance state rammed home why you really should care about this) we can 

catch bad people, fine them, put them in jail and (hopefully) make people think about whether they should inappropriately gossip - we can also age and remove from sight data that is no longer relevant (criminal records for crimes that the perp has rehabilitated, health records of no public interest, financial info that is out of date). THis is no less true of trivia (my birthdate is not necessary for buying a drink, just the fact that I am over age X...)

4. Enforcement ideally should be social, but should include suitable independent organisations - perhaps a new Estate (the first virtual estate)

5. GCHQ (and the NSA etc) are in no special privileged relation to most people in regards the above.

We need to incent them to do their job right. expensive surveillance is not a substitute for good old fashioned Humint....

6. Google (facebook, NHS care data/Price Waterhouse) aren't exempt either

7. we need law with sharper teeth, because of the heavily asymmetric power held by agencies named above compared with the individual

8. data,just because it can be copied without error, is not necessarily true in the first place. and it can become false (law change, for example). recall by humans is revisionist, because context changes. Data without context is inherently false

9. Every decoding is an encoding (Maurice Zapp, Small World, by david lodge).

10. If you don't by this, give me all your keys and all your passwords.

There's a lot of background work to this, but I'm assuming the audience probably won't want bell, book, candle and footnotes:-)

My 10 cents

http://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/events/big-brother-20-our-future-age-surveillance

refs
stephen farrell quite (59 mins in):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV71hhEpQ20

terrorism, evidence etc report card:
http://www.lawandsecurity.org/portals/0/documents/02_TTRCFinalJan142.pdf

CATO report on costs of counter terrorism compared to what:
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa755.pdf

John Naughton's notes are now available too

Not wrong to be forgotten

A few more points after the illuminating debate at the Cambridge Union Society last night (23.10.14).

i) so people are still hung up on the notion that,
because the internet/web/cloud can copy/store things so cheaply,
then deletion is impossible -

first off, that isn't necessarily so,
but even assuming it is,
its tantamount to arguing that
because we can now 3D print guns, we don't have to bother with gun control law...

- in fact, if there is a reason to remove data from publication
(its required by law - because its  defamatory or wrong,
or its required by ethics because the use is no longer relevant,
or its required by emotions - it would hurt someone's feelings again and again)
then the imperative is to embed the right in a law so that we incent people to withold their copies
(which is not the same as _erasure_ but is quite possible, and easily enforced

keeping a copy of my ex-partners photos private is fine (i do) -
re-broadcasting them 35 years later is not.

ii)  preventing search producing a hit on content from i) isn't pointless -
its just a weaker version of stopping people re-publishing stuff
the european court finding was blurry on this
because of the definitions of stakeholders in current law. poor.

iii) the argument that there are many search engines and meta-search,
and that the internet "routes around damage"
so people will setup sites like "blockedbygoogle"
minutes after something is not returned by search, is irrelevant -

if we get the law right, and the right put into action, then technology can work -

scale out of distributing rules for filtering spam (e.g. see how ApamAssinsin shares filter rules, see how ingress filtering and BGP policy checks work, see how legal censorship works etc etc and see how collaborative filtering and recommendation engines work), and
other tricks works vert well (no, not 100% -but we aren't arguing 100% -
we're arguing shifting the balance so
a) people think a bit about this,
plus
b) law that gives victims teeth, so deliberate flouting
earns the perpetrator fines/criminal records, public opprobrium etc

personal clouds, with personal control of flow of data through cloud, and
making the relationships between people and between people and organsations
(whether government or corporate)
more symmetric in terms of control of flow and lifetime of data)
is essential

people get confused about "google do x" or "person re-tweets y" -
the size of the agencies shouldn't
matter - anyone can leverage the internet to scale out cheap copying of data to many,
but should they?, is the question to ask?,
to whom? who is the entitled audience, now? or later? -
see next points:


iv) people are confused that this is censorship -
certainly currently the legal framework, and its "enforcement" by Google is a form of censorship,
because the "right to know" (i.e. public interest)
isn't being tested by an organisation that _represents_ public interest,
in any accountable way - sure, that's a bug, but we can fix that too - that doesn't mean
the right to be forgotten is wrong either

popular journalism (especially in recent years) has not helped :-)

Right to be forgotten & trolls & hobbits & elves

A two-part blog today

1. Right to be forgotten.
This is a very bad phrase. The right should be to not be reminded (as much).
The false dichotomy is just that - the binary decision between "remember and not remember".
Neither humans nor technology remember things accurately.

a) Every encoding is a decoding (Maurice Zapp, of Euphoric State University, in David Lodge's fictional Small World) - recall is revisionist for humans. It is also revisionist in technology - you may decide to do an audit (who read the file, when ? these are often recorded or appended to meta data) - where were the people looking at the data? why. Should we sort the results of a search to show more recently accessed data higher? this will affect others. Just as it does with your own grey matter!
b) We need to forget things - its part of coping with trauma, even just at the level of embarassment
c) We evolve (and we all evolve) so stuff we did that they agreed with then, we and they may not agree with anymore. Why should we be faulted now for what was ok back then?

Ref:
Delete, by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

Better solutions - social nets should use interaction/activity based weights to decide what is recalled easily - stuff should fade - this copes with public figures naturally (as they interact with world but about their public duties, not their private lives) as well as the private individual online - if I havn't seen you for 25 years, I won't naturally recal lstuff about you - if you show up asking mefor a reference, maybe some stuff will come "flooding back" - this maps also to natural cognitive resource limits that are known about in humans, and implements a nice form of relevance filtering easily. THis also implements "unfriending without tears" on online social media - you just ddidn't interact with someone (like or mention or comment on their timeline) so they slowly fade from memory - many systems already are implementing things a bit like this, but for somewhat misguided reasons - lets fix it - its easy!

2. Trolls
There's a saying from 30 years or more of newsgroups (Usenet, if you go back that far):
"Don't feed the trolls"

So trolling is getting worse - this is not surprising - there's more people in the hills (which have eyes) than ever. These people don't know from Adam (and they are probably eating the apple). Why do they troll - to share in your glory? who knows....but they can because of what I might call Internet Induced Empathic Disorder - they are alienated, and they don't know you are a person - many of them do stuff they wouldn't dream of doing in the same room as you - this is well known. Its worse where there are too many terrible cultural examples (see the Russian Social Media abuse below, but nearer to home, see BBC's :Have your say" comments  or Youtube's hilarious children from hell type comments on videos there (remindes me of the evil devils on rollerblades in the hilarious film, Dogma!)

How to fix? Engage or Ignore? I don't believe the troll's target is the right person - we need to have a social response - peer pressure - show the troll where they sit, surrounded by hobbits and wizards (and elves) - that'll wake them up, or else turn them to stone, come sunrise.


Ref:
Protest 2.0 - networked negoative consolidation

The Lottery of Babel and the Library of Babylon

On every floor of the tower, it is sometimes said, a different language is spoken. once a month, the floor manager buys a ticket for the lottery. if the ticket wins, the language stays the same. otherwise, a new language is chosen, and everyone on that floor must learn it. the chances are rare that the language stays the same for 2 months in a row, let alone a lifetime. however, it is rumoured that sometimes this has happened. Indeed, it is said that there are dizzy heights and possibly sepulchrous depths in the tower where denizens of neighbouring floors have found they spoke the same language as each other for a time. the lottery is administered, of course, by a priesthood, who either understand all the languages, or else have their own universal tongue and each learn the language of a handful of floors. nobody knows which.

few people on each floor are capable of learning a new language every month, and so most people cannot truly understand one another. sometimes, a group get together and try to keep the old tongue alive. these cathars claim too that there are no priests and there is no lottery. they are quickly suppressed.


In the library of babylon, the most sacred works of all religions are kept. the more common books, such as the bible, the torah, the koran, the vedas and so on occur in many versions. the rarer religions, or ones for whom there are few remaining living followers, often have a single copy, or even only a partial segment of the Ur text. the organisation of the library is chaotic. the librarians wanted to organise the text in order of date, but could not agree on whose calendar to employ. then a small group  proposed alphabetizing the entire collection, but were resisted by those who pointed out that there were more ways of writing than there were religions.

the theological experts suggested that there was a tree of religions, not to imply "older" or more "fundamental", but that one could see many similarities in the gods - the indo-european polytheists at least, and the abrahamic religions.

the chief librarian suggested that this was merely the result of errors that crept in during the copying of texts due to the biases of the monks at the time.

as a result, no-one can vouch for the correctness of any of the religious tracts. reform and born-again are thrown together in confusion. there is a ground swell of opinion that the library must be burned, as it represents the ultimate sacrilege. the librarians have all deserted the buildings, which stretch far across the sands to the sea, where the boats full of foreigners are arriving. it will not be long now.

I Need a Vacation

I went away (as we do) for 2 weeks to Paleochora, Crete and then 1 week in La Villa, Fosciadora, Garfagnana so I should be feeling great, n'est ce pas? well up til the last minute in each place, all was v. good, but then, in each case, there's a long drive to an airport, waiting around for a plane, and a long drive home from the airport in England. Then there's no food in the house and everything smells of damp and cat. Then there's a pile of obscure letters on the doormat. Then there's kids' results to open and ponder.

Then there are rental car add-on bills in the e-mail which appear to be made up out of thin air (thank you Maggiore, yes that's you - bogus bill about twice the amount of the quote on the booking).

Then there's email - two weeks away and 1300 mesages to deal with, at least 100 of which actually require thought - 1 week away, and another 450 messages - this is in august, for godsakes, when most people should be on a beach or by the pool, but no, they are writing research proposals, drafting theses, preparing responses to research funding agency calls, discussing research code releases, posting papers from conferences (yes that's you SIGCOMM, right in the middle of august and in Chicago, where no sane person would go except to see Buddy Guy, and then not in mid-summer). And my vacation away mail told people (and I told all my colleagues I'd be offline too).

I think that German Company that started to delete all e-mail for people on vacation has the right idea - work/life balance tricks like that are essential for some sort of sanity. I actually had a vacation message that said that once, but still people resent stuff after I know they got my auto-response.

Modern Technology is not progress - repeat after me:)