Snowden’s Chronicler Reveals Her Own Life Under Surveillance
Andy Greenberg, Wired
I was quite taken with Laura Poitras’ documentary about meeting Edward Snowden, CitizenFour, which was my introduction to her work. It’s not a bad place to start – the film won her an Academy Award for Best Documentary, and the reporting that she did around it helped lead to the joint Pulitzer that the Guardian and Washington Post won in 2014.
What I was not aware of was how much her own life was controlled by surveillance, even before the eponymous CitizenFour first reached out to her. Laura has opened an exhibit at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, titled “Astro Noise”. She aims to show more of herself and give visitors the same feeling that she had as a victim of heavy surveillance.
The paranoia (currently being revealed as justified, thanks to Freedom of Information requests filed on her behalf by the EFF) and lack of privacy after her documentary about the war in Iraq is one of the most terrifying aspects of a surveillance state. The most effective form of silencing anyone is to bully them into self-silencing, and this is a classic example. Knowing that you are being watched can dramatically affect what you say or do, in effect stifling your free speech.
The Search for the Killer Bot
Casey Newton, The Verge
This is a great longform piece about the history and present of chatbots, from therapist ELIZA to SmarterChild for AOL and the Slack tool Lunchbot. I’m excited for the prospect of conversational UI’s, which I believe will be an important tool for marketing and growth in the coming years. There are plenty of places where text simply fits better than voice command, and chatbots are finally hitting their stride to take advantage of that comfort.
The functionality is there, and the major players are working hard to marry existing integrations with the intelligence that deep learning, neural networks, and other forms of AI that have been brewing in their research labs. This includes startups geared toward traditional operator systems that want to move beyond, like Magic, to Facebook’s goal of being able to do anything for you from right inside of their messenger, and Google’s plan to keep up with their rival. There are also bot makers working specifically on consumer and B2B tools, which is where I think huge gains can be made by companies looking to set themselves apart from competitors with great 24/7 customer support.
Google now blocking websites that show fake download buttons
Sebastian Anthony, Ars Technica
Praise be! There are some sites that I want to stay far away from if at all possible, but sometimes find myself stuck with. Sourceforge is one of those sites. When your whole business is around supplying free downloads and pumping SEO garbage out to make your download link rank higher than ones by the actual software author, you need to find ways to make money. One way is to make buttons that look like download buttons but in fact are links to ads, or to other items that contain adware that you didn’t intend on downloading. Needless to say, it’s a pain.
It’s good to see Google take such a strong stance, and it is already making an impact. Sourceforge recently redesigned to become a bit better able to handle this and changes for “social engineering attacks” that the search engine has implemented over the past few months. Cnet appears to have followed suit, and neither popular download destination has an obviously fake “download now!” button in sight.
Link submitted by Jeff de Wit. Suggest stories that you find interesting!
If You Go Near the Super Bowl, You Will Be Surveilled Hard
April Glaser, Wired
I get it, if there were a targeted event to be had, this would be tops. Superbowl 50 is taking place in the heart of the US tech revolution center this Sunday, and over 60 government agencies are working together to keep it secure. That said, I have my own thoughts on what the true driving force behind this level of security is.
https://twitter.com/davidwolfpaw/status/695237533467332608
When you have over 1 million people descending on your city for an event, it makes a perverse sense to setup a command center to manage all of the uniformed an plainclothes resources, have the FAA release a statement informing you that they will shoot your drone down if you try to fly too close to the venue, and have the more than 3,000 cameras installed throughout the city link directly to this command center.
Three and a half degrees of separation
Yesterday was Friends Day according to Facebook (in celebration of their 12th anniversary), and they took the chance to share some research on connection that the company has performed. In 2011, with approximately 721 million people using the site, they found that the common, gee-whiz factoid of everyone on the planet being connected by no more than six people wasn’t impressive enough, with an average of 3.74 people between each user on the site. Now they’ve done their own research and have found that with a more than double user-base, the distance has shrunk instead of grown, to an average of 3.57 users separating you from anyone else in their 1.59 billion person database.
I’m reasonably well connected at an average of 3.31 degrees of separation, with no active attempt at “networking” or even regular maintenance. Visit the post to see where you sit, and if you happen to be closer than my 3.17 to Mark Zuckerberg, let me know. I’ve been interested in meeting him for the past ten years or so 😛
The internet wants you to lose your job
Matthew Bodie, Quartz
We can only repeat the story of Justine Sacco so many times to make the point that what you say on the internet can affect the rest of your life. Just remember: things that you say on the internet are no less real than things said offline. All I can say is that it’s a good thing for me that I’m currently self-employed, as I can imagine lot of my vitriol being misconstrued as reasons for termination at various jobs.
Someone else who has paid for what he’s said online is journalist Barrett Brown, who this week gave an entertaining review of some of the prisons that he’s been in since his sentence of 63 months in prison and over $890,000 in fines to be paid to Stratfor, a company that he did not hack but linked to hacked material from in his writing.
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