Internet & Computing – Page 9 – Amalgamated Contemplation

The secret rules of the internet | The Verge

Source: The secret rules of the internet | The Verge

The murky history of moderation, and how it’s shaping the future of free speech.

Their stories reveal how the boundaries of free speech were drawn during a period of explosive growth for a high-stakes public domain, one that did not exist for most of human history. As law professor Jeffrey Rosen first said many years ago of Facebook, these platforms have “more power in determining who can speak and who can be heard around the globe than any Supreme Court justice, any king or any president.”

However, these debates (unlike say, congressional hearings), are shielded from public view, as both corporate and civil society participants remain nearly silent about the deliberations. Without greater transparency, users, consumers — the public at large — are ill-equipped to understand exactly how platforms work and how their own speech is being regulated and why. This means that the most basic tools of accountability and governance — public and legal pressure — simply don’t exist.

Doug Rushkoff Says Companies Should Stop Growing | FiveThirtyEight

Source: Doug Rushkoff Says Companies Should Stop Growing | FiveThirtyEight

When your reality is reconfiguring itself based on not ‘who you are’, ‘what you want’, and creating new possibilities, but reconfiguring itself based on ‘how can we extract the most value from *this little tendency* that we’ve just seen’. When your Google search is so different from my Google search, and it’s not different because it’s optimizing itself for ‘how are we going to help you be more you’, but ‘how are we going to help you be more statistical category 17.03c’, that’s not good. That’s about changing who you are to better serve the market.

“Internet of Things” security is hilariously broken and getting worse | Ars Technica

Shodan crawls the Internet at random looking for IP addresses with open ports. If an open port lacks authentication and streams a video feed, the new script takes a snap and moves on.

While the privacy implications here are obvious, Shodan’s new image feed also highlights the pathetic state of IoT security, and raises questions about what we are going to do to fix the problem.

Source: “Internet of Things” security is hilariously broken and getting worse | Ars Technica

If something advertises itself as “IoT” or “part of the Internet of Things”, you probably do not want it. Assume that whatever it does is completely public to the entire world.

Does it let you see some video from your phone? Assume that video is also broadcast to the rest of the world.

Does it let you turn your home security system on and off from your phone? Assume that everyone else with a phone can also turn that system on or off.

Does it let you change your thermostat from a web page while you’re at work? Or locate your car? Or notify you of pills grandpa didn’t take out of that smart pillbox? Assume everyone else on the internet also has access to that information and those controls.

The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly. The fundamentals are broken and whatever happens to the price in the short term, the long term trend should probably be downwards. I will no longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and have sold all my coins.

It has failed because the community has failed. … the network is on the brink of technical collapse. The mechanisms that should have prevented this outcome have broken down, and as a result there’s no longer much reason to think Bitcoin can actually be better than the existing financial system.

When misinformed investors lose money, government attention frequently follows.

Source: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment, by Mike Hearn

Iran’s blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web | Technology | The Guardian

Hossein Derakhshan was imprisoned by the regime for his blogging. On his release, he found the internet stripped of its power to change the world and instead serving up a stream of pointless social trivia

a blind webpage, one without hyperlinks, can’t look or gaze at another webpage – and this has serious consequences for the dynamics of power on the web.
…
When a powerful website – say Google or Facebook – gazes at, or links to, another webpage, it doesn’t just connect it , it brings it into existence; gives it life. Without this empowering gaze, your web page doesn’t breathe. No matter how many links you have placed in a webpage, unless somebody is looking at it, it is actually both dead and blind, and therefore incapable of transferring power to any outside web page.

Source: Iran’s blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web | Technology | The Guardian