Month: November 2014

Should I Call 999 for a Whambulance? ⇥ ft.com

Robert Hannigan, the head of the GCHQ — sort of the British equivalent of the NSA — wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times:

Terrorists have always found ways of hiding their operations. But today mobile technology and smartphones have increased the options available exponentially. Techniques for encrypting messages or making them anonymous which were once the preserve of the most sophisticated criminals or nation states now come as standard.

It’s unrealistic for governments to shut down all spying and intelligence operations, but why should Apple and Google make it any easier for creepy agencies to peek into and record our everyday communications?

Besides, it’s not as though the new security measures in iOS 8 are uncrackable. Apple’s just not going to do — and, in fact, can’t do — the job of a law enforcement official seeking to extract the data from a perp’s phone.

Hannigan, again:

However much [technology companies] may dislike it, they have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals, who find their services as transformational as the rest of us. If they are to meet this challenge, it means coming up with better arrangements for facilitating lawful investigation by security and law enforcement agencies than we have now.

Presumably, Hannigan was getting close to the word limit offered to him by the Times, because it cut off the rest of this paragraph. Which, I assume, was to read: “For example, we could stop the bulk collection of data from global internet traffic.” Pity this got cut off in the final version though.

Hannigan:

But privacy has never been an absolute right and the debate about this should not become a reason for postponing urgent and difficult decisions.

Act before you think. Shoot first and ask questions later. That’s what they say in Texas and, as it turns out, in Cheltenham.

As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the spectacular creation that is the world wide web, we need a new deal between democratic governments and the technology companies in the area of protecting our citizens. It should be a deal rooted in the democratic values we share. That means addressing some uncomfortable truths. Better to do it now than in the aftermath of greater violence.

That’s how Hannigan actually ends this thing: with a taunt. Ridiculous.

Verizon Is Launching a Tech News Site That Bans Stories on U.S. Spying ⇥ dailydot.com

It’s telling about this site’s popularity that the three most recent stories on Sugarstring’s homepage were published 6, 10, and 12 days ago. Its Twitter account may have 75,000 followers, but StatusPeople estimates that 17% of them are fake and 29% are inactive, as of September 3. It also looks like a totally generic knockoff of ReadWrite and the Verge. What an exciting entrant into the world of churnalism.

Amazon Unclear on Diversity ⇥ bits.blogs.nytimes.com

This week, Amazon released their workplace diversity figures, and they’re, well, a little sketchy. The Rainbow PUSH Coalition, as quoted by David Streitfeld in the Times:

“Their general work force data released by Amazon seems intentionally deceptive, as the company did not include the race or gender breakout of their technical work force,” the statement said. “The broad assumption is that a high percentage of their black and Latino employees work in their warehouses.”

I’m not sure about malicious, but Amazon’s figures are certainly less forthcoming than the figures from other companies. Amazon, like Microsoft, seems to be masking their male- and white-dominated workforce. Apple, too, does not break out their retail employees from their corporate employees; one might reasonably guess that, in the current employment environment, their retail employees are more likely to be women or minorities than their corporate employees. Diversity statistics which break out different divisions within the company would be much more revealing for all tech companies.

The Internet’s First Family ⇥ penguinrandomhouse.ca

Stephan Thomas wrote a great profile of Metafilter for Hazlitt Magazine:

People connect to each other here, is what I’m saying. They get to know each other and they treat each other well. If Twitter is people you don’t know at their wittiest, and Facebook is people you do know at their most mundane, then MetaFilter, I would say, is a family of strangers.

Trent Reznor Is Doing Something at Apple ⇥ billboard.com

Joe Levi interviewed Trent Reznor for Billboard. Reznor answered a question about his role at Apple:

Beats was bought by Apple, and they expressed direct interest in me designing some products with them. I can’t go into details, but I feel like I’m in a unique position where I could be of benefit to them. That does mean some compromises in terms of how much brain power goes toward music and creating. This is very creative work that’s not directly making music, but it’s around music.

Intriguing.

Let’s Talk About Money

Over the past few years, I’ve let this site run at a loss. It’s not super expensive to host, but it’s not super cheap either. But I’d like to change that. I’m not going to be writing for profit or for my only job at any point in the near future, but I’d like to offset the costs of hosting the site. I think that’s fair.

To do so, I’ve joined the Carbon Ads network. There’s a tiny, tasteful ad in the sidebar. Just one, though, and that’s all you’ll see.

Writing here has never been about money, but I’ve always liked to be reasonable about my costs in everything I do. You will see no negative changes here — I won’t be doing clickbait headlines, listicles, or any of that other crap to drive up page views and impressions. I just want to offset some of my costs here. Perhaps I’ll even write a little more regularly, something which has fallen by the wayside a bit.

I’m running this as a little experiment, and we’ll see how it goes. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to let me know.

Thank you, as always, for reading.