Category: Internet & Computing

Source: André Staltz – The Web began dying in 2014, here’s how

The underlying dynamics of power on the Web have drastically changed since 2014, and Google, Facebook, and Amazon (respectively, GOOG, FB, AMZN) are at the center of a fundamental transformation of the Web.

It looks like nothing changed since 2014, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic.

The original vision for the Web according to its creator, Tim Berners-Lee, was a space with multilateral publishing and consumption of information. It was a peer-to-peer vision with no dependency on a single party. Tim himself claims the Web is dying: the Web he wanted and the Web he got are no longer the same.

Perhaps a future with great user experience in AR, VR, hands-free commerce and knowledge sharing could evoke an optimistic perspective for what these tech giants are building. But 25 years of the Web has gotten us used to foundational freedoms that we take for granted. We forget how useful it has been to remain anonymous and control what we share, or how easy it was to start an internet startup with its own independent servers operating with the same rights GOOG servers have. On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would have no alternative. You could even be restricted from creating a new account. As private businesses, GOOG, FB, and AMZN don’t need to guarantee you access to their networks. You do not have a legal right to an account in their servers, and as societies we aren’t demanding for these rights as vehemently as we could, to counter the strategies that tech giants are putting forward.

The Web and the internet have represented freedom: efficient and unsupervised exchange of information between people of all nations. In the Trinet, we will have even more vivid exchange of information between people, but we will sacrifice freedom. Many of us will wake up to the tragedy of this tradeoff only once it is reality.

Source: Facebook treats its ethical failures like software bugs, and that’s why they keep happening — Quartz

For years, tech has chased growth at all costs—and those costs have been paid by all of us.

every failure gets treated like an isolated incident, rather than part of a systemic pattern that needs systemic action. As a result, Facebook keeps making the same kinds of blunders, over and over again.

Facebook may not have intended to surface traumatic content, just like it didn’t intend to let advertisers post hateful or nefarious ads. But it did intend to prioritize rapid growth and user engagement over all else.
… These priorities have consequences—and those consequences are now more far-reaching than ever, spilling over from affecting our emotional state to manipulating our social and political infrastructure, too.

Source: Anatomy of a Moral Panic | Idle Words

There is no conceivable world in which enough bomb-making equipment is being sold on Amazon to train an algorithm to make this recommendation.
…
So Channel 4 has discovered that fireworks enthusiasts and chemistry teachers shop on Amazon.

But by blending these innocent observations into an explosive tale of terrorism, they’ve guaranteed that their coverage will attract the maximum amount of attention.

The ‘Amazon teaches bomb-making’ story has predictably spread all over the Internet

When I contacted the author of one of these pieces to express my concerns, they explained that the piece had been written on short deadline that morning, and they were already working on an unrelated article. The author cited coverage in other mainstream outlets (including the New York Times) as justification for republishing and not correcting the assertions made in the original Channel 4 report.

The real story in this mess is not the threat that algorithms pose to Amazon shoppers, but the threat that algorithms pose to journalism. By forcing reporters to optimize every story for clicks, not giving them time to check or contextualize their reporting, and requiring them to race to publish follow-on articles on every topic, the clickbait economics of online media encourage carelessness and drama. This is particularly true for technical topics outside the reporter’s area of expertise.

And reporters have no choice but to chase clicks. Because Google and Facebook have a duopoly on online advertising, the only measure of success in publishing is whether a story goes viral on social media.

The very machine learning systems that Channel 4’s article purports to expose are eroding online journalism’s ability to do its job.

Moral panics like this one are not just harmful to musket owners and model rocket builders. They distract and discredit journalists, making it harder to perform the essential function of serving as a check on the powerful.

The real story of machine learning is not how it promotes home bomb-making, but that it’s being deployed at scale with minimal ethical oversight, in the service of a business model that relies entirely on psychological manipulation and mass surveillance. The capacity to manipulate people at scale is being sold to the highest bidder, and has infected every aspect of civic life, including democratic elections and journalism.

Together with climate change, this algorithmic takeover of the public sphere is the biggest news story of the early 21st century. We desperately need journalists to cover it. But as they grow more dependent on online publishing for their professional survival, their capacity to do this kind of reporting will disappear, if it has not disappeared already.

Source: Google and Facebook Have Failed Us – The Atlantic

It’s no longer good enough to shrug off the problems in the system simply because it has computers in the decision loop.

As news consumers, we can say this: It does not have to be like this. Imagine a newspaper posting unverified rumors about a shooter from a bunch of readers who had been known to perpetuate hoaxes. There would be hell to pay—and for good reason.

Source: Why cyber warfare isn’t – Mike’s blog

The big problem is that cyber warfare is totally different to normal warfare, in fact it’s so different that calling it warfare at all is meaningless. In regular warfare you can build up your own defences without improving your opponent’s defences, and you can develop new weapons that your opponents will not have. This basic asymmetry is key to the very concept of war: the side with the better weapons, defences and tactics should normally win.

But cyber warfare doesn’t work like that. Because everyone uses the same software infrastructure, and the “weapons” are nothing more than weaknesses in that global infrastructure, building up your own defences by fixing problems inherently builds up your opponents defences too. And developing new “weapons” is only possible if your opponents are able to develop the very same weapons for themselves, by exploiting the very same vulnerabilities in your country that you are exploiting in theirs.

Successful spying is invisible and undetected. The infiltration of critical national infrastructure by enemies of the state happens quietly and without anyone realising until it’s too late. A successful penetration of someone else’s infrastructure yields an unforgettable intelligence report that makes the government feel successful and in control. A successful penetration of your infrastructure yields nothing visible at all.