Privacy and Emails

Back in 2014, Glenn Greenwald gave a great TED talk on privacy and why it matters. Here’s the section that’s always stuck with me since the very first time I watched it:-

“Over the last 16 months, as I’ve debated this issue around the world, every single time somebody has said to me, “I don’t really worry about invasions of privacy because I don’t have anything to hide.” I always say the same thing to them. I get out a pen, I write down my email address. I say, “Here’s my email address. What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just troll through what it is you’re doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you’re not a bad person, if you’re doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide.”

Not a single person has taken me up on that offer.”

The Challenges of Decentralisation

I read a great series of articles by an ex-BitTorrent Inc guy Simon Morris on decentralisation today. You can check them out here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

They’re interesting for a number of reasons but I’d urge you to read them if like me, you’re working in any way with decentralised technology. Even if that just means you’re holding cryptocurrency.

Obviously the fairly recent news about the acquisition of BitTorrent Inc by Tron and the new token white paper (BTT) that they’ve released is useful background here. But given his involvement for a decade with BitTorrent (which, as he says, as the perhaps the most broadly decentralised technology yet, you should be reading it if your view is that decentralisation is a major feature, and not a bug, of a global technology system.

He argues that the most interesting use cases for decentralisation – and perhaps the only ones that will ultimately work – are those that break the rules. Now, those could be laws, they could simply be outdated regulations overdue for an update or perhaps they are simply strong societal norms. But being censorship-resistant (with no centralised organisation or technology to be attacked) is clearly crucial here. As he puts it:-

“If you’re not breaking rules, you’re doing it wrong!”

Interestingly, it’s a point that you heard often in the earlier Bitcoin days but the message has been watered down as vast amounts of VC and early institutional money started to enter the scene. Put simply, the killer use cases are payment on dark markets and ICO’s (where vast sums of money could be raised without having to follow the restrictive capital-raising procedures of many nation states). In other words, areas where this new technology enabled new things to happen that were impossible before.

Of course, foundation-shaking, risk-taking, rule-breaking is part of the DNA of true innovation and necessary if you’re planning on shifting those paradigms. So it’s unsurprising. But he also points out, that’s a tightrope for those in the industry: perhaps coming out and saying you’re looking to break the law isn’t the sort of messaging that’s going to give you (the organisation – as opposed to the platform that you’re working on) the best chances of success in any event. It worked out for Bitcoin – even if much of the second half of the last ten years has seen many obsess over a fascination with discovering the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Ultimately, decentralisation is hard – like, ridiculously hard. People misunderstand precisely what level of difficulty is involved to deliver. We’re talking way past boss-level here. So (to put words into his mouth), those who’re shouting loudest for results from these projects in a timescale of a few months are probably doing little beyond highlighting how poor their own understanding is of the technology and challenges that are involved.

So at the end of the day, why do you really want to seek decentralisation for your project? If censorship-resistance is the reason (or at least the overwhelmingly important part of it) then it makes sense: take on the increased costs and the massive increase in complexity when it comes to governance.

Governance is a hot topic of course. Ridiculous sums of money have been thrown at attempts to solve the issue and plenty of conference debates have been held on the subject. But as he points out, you can’t have it both ways: any platform that is censorship-resistant will have no obvious controlling element (which would then be a weakness that others could attack). So is it any surprise being able to control and roll out agreed updates and decisions is hard.

I always liken blockchain upgrades to human evolution: like standing on the sidelines as you grab some poor guy by the shoulders and scream in his ear that he should have grown a third arm by now, or be ten feet tall already. Evolution takes time. With decentralised technology, the strength of the network comes precisely from the fact that no-one can be prevented from joining. So expecting a massively disparate group of individuals around the world who have freely chosen to run software to agree quickly and efficiently on the direction a community should take, despite the fact that each has his or her own unique incentives and contexts to consider is simply unrealistic.

Overall, it’s a great selection of articles and well worth reading. Food for thought, for sure.

Protecting Your Digital Door

Given the choice, humans will always work harder to avoid losing property than they will to get more. So it’s unsurprising that technology is becoming increasingly in demand in this respect.

There’s a company called Ring that seems to be doing well for itself. Amongst other things, they make smart dooorbells which allow the home owner to not only see, but also hear and record what’s going on outside their front doors. Bye bye parcel delivery thieves. Hello app notifications that tell you when someone’s knocking on your door, trying to deliver a parcel.

You’ll be hardly surprised to hear that they were subsequently bought by Amazon…

But the reason I’ve come across them recently is because of a particularly dodgy practice that appears to have been going on. Yes, that’s right – this personal property surveillance system (which some people also use inside their homes) have been allowing other people to view strangers’ feeds.

Its a story that is depressingly familiarise. Company finds way to develop decent technology to serve a demand. Company decides to extend service to create a (‘neighbourhood watch’ type of) platform to build scale so individuals can share data between themselves. Company tries to automate with very basic identification techniques in order to tag objects. Process proves to be difficult and so is forced to rely on humas to do the brain-crushingly boring job of tagging masses of images by hand each day in an effort to teach/feed the machine. Resulting in free, unencrypted access for strangers associated with that company (in this case, in the Ukraine).

It’s not something new. People are increasingly attracted to technology in order to monitor their property in ways that weren’t possible before. Shame on you if you’re a parent in this modern day and age who doesn’t have a baby monitor (even if you have no idea how to secure it).

But still, it’s probably worth stopping and thinking before you sign up to these things. Taken as individual items, they may not cause harm directly to you. But the problem is that very few things exist as private islands purely for your benefit when it comes to personal technology these days.

Almost everything is, or soon will be, online. So every time you open that digital door to the outside world, just be very careful who you’re letting through it. You might not know who’s come through – but it’s worth bearing it in mind.

The Madness of Rice (Revisited)

Exactly a month ago, I ended up writing a post called The Madness of Rice.

Not what I’d usually write about, I mentioned that I’d been told about a piece of internet folklore that alleged that you could take two jars of cooked rice and treat them differently for a month – giving one nothing but compliments and the other only abuse.

It sounds like nonsense. It’s miles from being a scientific experiment in any way. And what’s more it sounds crazy. But I realised that my default with such things is to immediately go off and research the truthfulness of any such stories on the internet. Whereas, in this case, I could simply test the frankly unbelievable idea out for myself.

So after committing to do so, and to report back, here’s the photo:-

You’ll just have to take my word for it. But the rice that got abuse for a month? Ended up in a pretty bad shape. Whilst the other was almost the same as the day it went into the container.

It’s a long way from proving anything much. Maybe all it shows is that one container will grow mould faster than another and you’ve therefore got a 50/50 chance of the ‘experiment’ ending up with the results that are promised.

But it did prove one thing, perhaps more important. That’s the fact that it’s worth investigating things yourself. No matter how flawed. We rely on simply headlines and online simplifications for so much of modern life. From now on, the next time I fall myself falling into the track of blindly accepting something, I’ll be thinking of two words instead: Stupid Rice.

Fake Faces

Back in 2014, the following faces were created by AI:-Then in 2018, AI has improved just a little:-

You can read about all the details in this paper if you’re interested.

I think you’d agree that it’s stunning how realistic these are. I doubt anyone would be able to work out that many of these people are artificially generated simply by examining a photograph. Of course, there’s still a long way to go before man can fully leap that uncanny valley and accurately recreate these individuals in real 3D life. But it’s coming. And given the progress over the last four years, I wouldn’t bet against it happening much sooner than we think.

Oh, and good luck for all those professional models out there. If I’m designing advertising copy or fashion, then I suspect I’ll be picking the artificial model that’s designed to have the characteristics that are most appealing to my target audience. Why settle for relying on simple, expensive humans, with their imperfect bodies, irregular eye placement and all the rest…

And if nothing else, just think how good those computer games that must be coming down the line very soon are going to be…

 

The Bitcoin Standard

One of my favourite books of 2018 without doubt was Saifedean Ammous’ ‘The Bitcoin Standard’.

Probably my favourite release about Bitcoin during the last five years or so as well, it doesn’t even mention Bitcoin itself until you’re near something like page 180 of 280 pages. But if you’re even vaguely interested in economics and cryptocurrency, I’d mark it down as a must-read.

Now I’ve been intending to write an in-depth post about it for a while. And I may well still do that. But in the meantime, thanks to the wonders of Twitter, I came across a incredible tweetstorm by Yorick de Mombynes which pretty much summarises the entire book in 135 tweets!

You can read the full thing here or even better, do it directly on Twitter:

A Beginner’s Mind Beats The Expert

“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities.

But in the expert’s, there are few.”

The Beginner’s Mind concept is a Buddhist concept (Shoshin) that was made famous by Shunryu Suzuki, a monk and teacher who helped to bring the teachings of Zen to the United States.

I’ve been reading quite a bit about the process of learning recently. That’s come from a few experiments I’ve been carrying out into spaced repetition, some has been as a result of reflecting on talks given by people such as Adam Robinson who studied the SAT exam system in the US a couple of decades ago and worked out the process for how to pass the exams (with the result that the exam system had to be fundamentally overhauled).

Much of learning (school, music, athletic pursuits etc.) comes down to one simple fact: if you want to get good at something, you really need to practice it – it being the specific thing that you wish to do. So if you want to get better at interviews, sit down with people you don’t know asking you random questions beforehand. For music, get great at playing one piece – before you get averagely bad at ten. And when it comes to exams in general, practice by reading the sample questions at the end of a textbook chapter before you’ve even read the chapter. It sounds counterintuitive but the value is exceptionally high for two reasons:

1/ You’re now primed to read the chapter with the correct focus in your mind; and

2/ (Even more importantly) you’re actually practicing how to respond to questions where you don’t know what the answer is.

As an aside: apparently the data from an unpublished study that Adam Robinson carried out shows that male students do better than female students on tests where questions crop up on the day which the test taker doesn’t know how to answer. This is because girls at school (generally) work harder and/or are  more prepared for exams than boys. So when a question crops up that has an unknown answer, girls are often more put off by it (‘why’s this happened when I’ve done all this hard work preparing for the exam?’) compared to boys (‘well, I know I didn’t actually work as hard as I could have coming into this exam so I’ll just muddle my way through the areas I don’t know’).

Back to the original point: a beginner views each piece of learning with wonder, open to the myriad of unknown possibilities that may exist. It comes from Buddhist literature. Whereas the expert looks at everything through the lens of whether or not it conforms to a pre-existing view of the world. As I’ve written before, there are many reasons why experts (self-professed or otherwise) can in fact be damaging (see here, here and here).

So think carefully before you spend your life striving to be the expert that society tells you delivers the greatest personal rewards. At least, if you view learning as a journey for life, and not simply a route to a title.

Oumuamua and the Paradigm Shifts

I read a bit of sci-fi (not enough) and one of my favourites is Arthur C. Clarke’s classic ‘Rendezvous With Rama‘. So when I first heard about the appearance of Oumuamua last year, I was fascinated. The parallels between this emergence of this first ever visitor from outside our solar system and the mysterious cylindrical alien starship were notable for anyone with an ounce of imagination.

So I really enjoyed listening to the ‘After On’ podcast that I’ve discovered recently (tagline: unhurried conversations with thinkers, founders and scientists). This episode revolves around a conversation between Rob Reid and Avi Loeb from the end of November last year. If you were following the story, you’ll know that Loeb is the Chair of the Harvard Astronomy Department who published a paper last year (one of over 700 so far in his career) in which he stated that there was a possibility that the object passing through our solar system might well be the product of an alien intelligence.

So you can probably imagine why the media suddenly went crazy around the story.

What’s really interesting here is the extent of the backlash against his paper. The comments were met with serious criticism – and it appears to be that this is because the ‘A’ word was mentioned. Much like Voldemort, using the word ‘alien’ is a trigger, perhaps one of only a few within the scientific community over the use of which careers can be destroyed in an instant. Whereas Loeb’s approach is very different: as he says in the podcast, he’s simply looking for the truth. He is agnostic as to what that is – but to simply shut down and refuse to engage in such debate is not an environment that is conducive to enabling truly great discoveries to be made.

For example, Einstein worked in a patent office. It’s not simply about research at the top universities – genius can increasingly be found everywhere (partly because increasing amounts of scientific data is being opened up for public access). But one of the most vitriolic rebuttals of Loeb’s theory came from an individual on a blog whose thoughts were then picked up by the mainstream media. Perhaps an example of the huge power that you can wield as an expert (real or otherwise) when news outlets simply need a pithy summary to fit into the daily news diet.

Regardless of the outcome here (interestingly, we may have the answer relatively quickly when the existing telescopes that initially identified the visitor – the Pan-STARRS telescopes in Hawaii – are replaced by a far more powerful system within the next three years), it’s interesting to see how Loeb’s theory was received.

When it comes to the stars, we still know so little. And sometimes things that are ‘certain’ do change. Einstein made mistakes for example. And what about the Copernican Revolution where mankind’s entire view of the solar system changed entirely? Previously, the Ptolemaic Model (with a stationary earth at the centre of the universe) was accepted scientific wisdom.

Then Nicolaus Copernicus came along and argued that everything here was wrong. That instead, the Sun was at the centre of the Solar System and it was the Earth and other planets revolve around it (the Heliocentric System). Didn’t exactly go down too well with many people, at least initially.

Who knows what the real answer is. It’s possible that we’ll never know in the case of Oumuamua. But as a general tip regardless of the subject, it feels that it’s probably important to remind ourselves to keep our minds open wherever possible. Because at some point, when accepted wisdom becomes factually incorrect, you probably don’t want to be the Luddite on the other side.

Employee Fitness & Surveillance

So, here’s a bad idea – employers microchipping employees to monitor their activities.

It sounds futuristic and somewhat unlikely. And yet it’s already happening. Research has shown that many employees are keen for their employers to take an active role in their health and wellbeing (61% in this report). This has translated in some cases to large companies (including Barclays, BP) providing wearable fitness trackers to employees to encourage healthy activities.

The risk here is that employees don’t realise how much sensitive information they are sharing – about their location, rest breaks and hours that they’ve worked. The cost of each chip is between £70 and £260 per person so it’s not hard to see how companies that do pay that expense might be seeking some form of financial benefit that justifies the investment.

It’s not an idea that’s entirely new. Henry Ford had a Sociological Department which would monitor workers. After making unscheduled calls on employees, the rewards for any that failed to meet the standards came in the form of lower wages.

So it’s not hard to see that story being repeated just over a century later. As The Economist points out:-

“It seems reasonable for companies to expect some level of economic return on any wellness programme that they provide. But the trade-off should not be too blatant. Making employees fitter so you can work them a lot harder seems rather like drilling your infantry on an assault course before sending them to face the machine guns. A better impact on morale (and thus productivity) might occur if workers felt that their managers had a genuine interest in their welfare.”

Something to think about before you start giving the log-in details to your Fitbit account to your HR Department.