-
The Prodigal Techbro – The Conversationalist
The Prodigal Tech Bro is a similar story, about tech executives who experience a sort of religious awakening. They suddenly see their former employers as toxic, and reinvent themselves as experts on taming the tech giants. They were lost and are now found. They are warmly welcomed home to the center of our discourse with…
-
Game over for digital rights? – Hi, I’m Heather Burns
So if I sound like I’m spitting sour grapes, I can’t help but think that you would too, if you learned that your abrupt unemployment happened in order to pay for the globetrotting tour of a Prodigal Techdaughter and her VIP entourage. And given how the operation that surrounds her seems very slick for an…
-
The Whistleblower And Encryption: Everyone Has An Angle, And Not Everyone Is A Policy Expert
Again, Haugen has likely done the world a great benefit in leaking a bunch of internal documents (I’ll have more on those soon). But it’s important to remember that just because she blew the whistle regarding Facebook research, it doesn’t make her an expert on everything else. She’s not an expert on content moderation, or antitrust,…
-
On Public Messages, Private Messages, Multicast, Broadcast, Large Groups, and End-to-End Encryption
It’s really interesting to see HackerNews get its knickers in a twist about the concept of a end-to-end-secure “chat” group which might have (for the sake of argument) 1000 participants: Their question is: “Is such a big group not effectively ‘public’? Is a message sent to onesuch group not already somehow public content, fit for…
-
Anyone who feels that memes & social-media are a distraction from the realities of the world, presenting a (relatively) new menace to society, should read this Saki short-story on “Music Hall” in 1914
Cousin Teresa takes out Caesar, Fido, Jock, and the big Bor-zoi! – read it, and tell me it’s not familiar… “Politics and patriotism are so boring and so out of date,” said a revered lady who had some pretensions to oracular utterance; “we are too cosmopolitan nowadays to be really moved by them. That is…
-
Reason: Whistleblower Absurdly Attacks Facebook’s Privacy-Protecting Encryption Efforts
https://reason.com/2021/10/25/whistleblower-absurdly-attacks-facebooks-privacy-protecting-encryption-efforts/
-
Before the “Whistleblowers” there were “Goodbye” posts: leaving #Facebook Engineering in 2016 because of #China, User Content, and #EndToEndEncryption
In 2016 I quit the best job I ever had: the most impactful, the most challenging, and (yes) the best paid. I did so in part because of explicable burnout from shipping a radical product, but also and primarily because of a shift in Facebook’s company goals towards degrading user-experience for profit, and for experimentally…
-
My interview with Steven Levy of Wired re: Frances Haugen leaking my Facebook Engineering “Goodbye Post”
Bottom Line Up Front: Frances, if you read this, do please tell the DCMS committee up front (and don’t let them distract or dissuade you) that people need the privacy which end-to-end encryption can bring to them, and that keeping people “safe” does not require their communications to be interfered with by platforms or governments.…
-
Unrolled: 5Rights Foundation (@5RightsFound) and their report “By what rights should we strip privacy and anonymity from People who are not Children?”
It is telling that your report is called "But how do they know it is a Child" …rather than: "By what rights should we strip privacy and anonymity from People who are not Children?" People – adults – are not an "it". In 2019 Baroness Kidron herself criticised Government pushing to weaken Messenger End-to-End Encryption…
-
Unrolled: John Carr cites LinkedIn as a reason that Apple won’t be coerced in China
This is egregious: John Carr — noted child protection advocate who argues that end-to-end encryption is a "threat to the rule of law" — says Apple will walk away from 17.7 billion dollars of QUARTERLY revenue from China… because LinkedIn is leaving China LinkedIn's *global* revenue over a similar (same?) time was $10 billion, China…
-
What is the #OnlineSafetyBill actually intended to do?
Inhibit Illegal and Harmful Content The draft Online Safety Bill sets out proposals to impose a new duty of care on tech companies to tackle illegal and harmful content on their services. https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2021-09-10.47057.h&s=%22online+safety+bill%22#g47057.r0 Require “Vetting” of Financial Services Advertisers The Online Safety Bill must be the right place to legislate to require the platforms to…
-
Hartley Wintney, Hartford Bridge, Rodolphe Trempe & “Caber Feidh”
Hartfordbridge is a reasonably-named hamlet, east of Hartley Wintney, which largely comprises a bridge, replacing a ford, over the River Hart. It’s a split bridge, each half carrying one carriageway of the A30 and therefore many hundreds, probably thousands of vehicles pass over it each day. The eastbound bridge appears to be the older half,…