Notices by Doc Edward Morbius ⭕ (dredmorbius@mastodon.cloud)

@strypey If only someone from Finland could write an operating system....

@thegibson Most such conversations end up with expressions along the lines of:

- That's impossible.
- I just don't understand this stuff.
- Why would anyone do that?

... and the like. Again, any notion of informed consent or willing participation is absolute fraud.

Software and surveillance are tracking "Every click, every search, every purchase. On every page"
https://c-sirt.org/avast-sells-your-data-every-click-purchase-search/

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@thegibson There's also the notion that information overload is a form of attack. I'm going to build off my earlier comments and claim it is an attack on _agency_. Specifically, it confounds (and overloads) the ability to perceive the environment.

Alvin Toffler's "Future Shock" explores many of the dynamics of this, in 1970, and is surprisingly prescient.

Awareness of surveillance is a form of information overload, especially of _unseen_ surveillance, or surveillance one cannot avoid.

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@thegibson As to _why_ privacy matters, I'll borrow from Paul Baran in 1966:

"Privacy is really the right to be wrong, then go on and live the rest of your life, without having it mark you forever"

https://invidio.us/watch?v=FwaDvJYZTVk&t=29m31s

Baran is one of the inventors of packet-based switching, the foundation of the Internet, and worked at RAND in the 1960s. His writings there are freely available online, many address social concerns of computer networks:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/baran_paul.html

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@natecull "Chief Damnation Officer" is going on my next business card.

"Fuck you Google" now passes audio RECAPTCHA on the first try.

Just sayin'.

Thank, peeps.

@tastytea This is a contentious issue.

EFF:

EFF to Court: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/12/eff-court-accessing-publicly-available-information-internet-not-crime

Ninth Circuit Doubles Down: Violating a Website’s Terms of Service Is Not a Crime
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/ninth-circuit-doubles-down-violating-websites-terms-service-not-crime

Dear Canada: Accessing Publicly Available Information on the Internet Is Not a Crime
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/dear-canada-accessing-publicly-available-information-internet-not-crime

‘Scraping’ Is Just Automated Access, and Everyone Does It
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/04/scraping-just-automated-access-and-everyone-does-it

Based on: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aeff.org+web+scraping&ia=web

@ajroach42 NYPL are likely to be the best specific source for you to contact regarding whether or not any such database exists, and/or if there's any work toward creating one.

Sean Raymond specifically seems to be the lead person, see:
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2019/05/31/us-copyright-history-1923-1964

I don't have contact information for him, though you're welcome to dig for that.

@SecretlyPublicDomain

@thegibson There was a man upon the stair
When I looked back, he wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
I think he's from the CIA.

@freakazoid The tendency of technology to serve as a power multiplier *is* something that concerns me.

I'm not entirely convinced it's a universal tendency, and tech can absolutely disrupt *existing* powe centres.

It just seems to usually replace them with one even more powerful.

A possible counterexample is the devolution of monarchic power in England, starting with the Magna Carta, onwards. Generally to a wider class of nobility, but since ~19thc, also commoners.

I'm not burned out, I'm pissed off

...I'm pissed off at the state of information security. I'm pissed off that our tooling is falling behind. I'm pissed off that my clients don't seem to take it seriously, and I'm pissed off that the vendors don't seem to want to help. Let me ask you: is the state of information security really any better today than it was 8 years ago when I started? The easy answer is no. The better answer is, it's worse....

https://www.myname.website/im-not-burned-out-im-pissed-off

Affordances

Fiction, for now, possibly. By Cory Doctorow.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/10/affordances-cory-doctorow-sf-story-algorithmic-bias-facial-recognition.html