Day: 25 November 2019

‘5G Has Become a Sort of Magic Pixie Dust’ ⇥ techdirt.com

The Washington Post and New York Times have both now struck deals with cellular providers to hype 5G networking for journalism; neither has explained what, exactly, faster cellular networks will do to make journalism any better — where by “better”, in the case of journalism, I mean “more accurate, situated in context, and comprehensive”.

Here’s what the Times said they’d be using 5G to do in their partnership with Verizon:

The Times has journalists reporting on stories from over 160 countries. Getting their content online often requires high bandwidth and reliable internet connections. At home, too, covering live events means photographers might take thousands of photos without access to a reliable connection to send data back to our media servers. We’re exploring how 5G can help our journalists automatically stream media — HD photos, videos and audio, and even 3D models — back to the Newsroom in real-time, as they are captured.

And here’s the Post announcing their partnership with AT&T:

In addition, as news breaks throughout the country, The Post plans to experiment with reporters using millimeter wave 5G+ technology to transmit their stories, photos and videos faster and more reliably, whether they are covering forest fires on the West Coast or hurricane weather in the southeast.

Most journalism is still text. The Times and Post are absolutely doing wonderful things with video, but most of what they produce is still text, and text doesn’t need speed. I can see how photos and video would get to the newsroom faster, but is the speed of delivery really improving journalism?

I hope that the most time-consuming part of a journalist’s job is and remains in the analysis and research of a story — and having a faster connection does not inherently make someone a better researcher.

Karl Bode, Techdirt:

[…] It’s pretty telling of the era that nobody at either paper thought such a partnership could potentially represent a possible conflict of interest as they cover one of the most heavily hyped tech shifts in telecom history.

I don’t think either publication would jeopardize its integrity to spike stories about its corporate partners. But as antitrust questions increasingly circle tech companies, it is only a matter of time before questions about the lack of competition amongst ISPs and cellular providers cannot be ignored by lawmakers any longer. These are among the most important stories of our time. Should inherently skeptical publications be cozying up to the subjects of their investigations?

‘Visit Eroda’ Is a Tourism Campaign for an Island That Doesn’t Exist ⇥ waxy.org

Andy Baio:

Late last week, people on Twitter started noticing sponsored tweets promoting the island of Eroda, linking to a website advertising its picturesque views, marine life, and seaside cuisine.

The only catch? Eroda doesn’t exist. It’s completely fictional. Musician/photographer Austin Strifler was the first to notice, bringing attention to it in a long thread that unraveled over the last few days.

The creators of the Visit Eroda campaign covered their tracks well. According to Baio, they didn’t leave any identifying information in image metadata, domain records, or in the site’s markup.

Ryan J:

I verified a connection between @visiteroda and @Harry_Styles. The Eroda page is using a [Facebook] pixel installed on http://hstyles.co.uk. You can only track websites you have control of. They are related.

I’m not arguing that a promotional campaign for Harry Styles’ new record should be taken as a serious privacy violation; I am, in fact, quite sober. But I think there’s a lesson in the campaign’s difficulty for identifying data to be completely disassociated. A need for behaviourally-targeted advertising is what ultimately made it easy to reassociate the anonymous website.

See also: A 2011 article by Andy Baio in which he describes how he was able to figure out the author of an ostensibly anonymous blog because of a shared Google Analytics account.

The Contract for the Web ⇥ theguardian.com

Ian Sample, the Guardian

Sir Tim Berners-Lee has launched a global action plan to save the web from political manipulation, fake news, privacy violations and other malign forces that threaten to plunge the world into a “digital dystopia”.

The Contract for the Web requires endorsing governments, companies and individuals to make concrete commitments to protect the web from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity.

The “contract” — a term I use very loosely, as the only punishment for a signatory’s failure to uphold its terms is to be removed from the list of organizations which support it — is endorsed by usual suspects like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and DuckDuckGo. It also counts as supporters Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Two of the nine principles of the Contract for the Web are about respecting users’ privacy in meaningful ways. You do the math.

Matthew Butterick:

So it’s flabbergasting to now see Berners-Lee in the New York Times sidestepping any accountability, and instead promoting himself as the restorer of the web’s virtue. Berners-Lee is pushing what he calls the Contract for the Web, which he describes, with no irony, as a “global plan of action … to make sure our online world is safe, empowering and genuinely for everyone.” He assures us that “the tech giants Google, Facebook, [and] Microsoft” are all “committing to action.” What a relief! Berners-Lee still seems to think Big Tech can do no wrong, even at a time when public and political opinion are going the opposite direction.

I’m not sure I share Butterick’s cynical view of this effort, but I do not see it making a lick of difference in the behaviour or business models of behavioural advertising companies with interactive front-ends.

Also not a good sign: in a random spot-check of a dozen of the companies I didn’t recognize, the website for Trisent was redirecting to some adware garbage, while CKA’s site is entirely in Comic Sans, was last updated in 2010, and displays the referrer in a JavaScript alert.