Saturday, January 27, 2018
Time: "Cybersecurity: Hacking, the Dark Web, and You"
Time has a Special Edition coffee table book. “Cybersecurity:
Hacking, the Dark Web, and You”.
The most startling chapter is the third, “Inside the Hack of
the Century”, by Peter Elkind, about the hack of Sony Pictures in late 2014 as
the showing of “The Interview” approached.(Movies, Dec. 27, 2014). Sony had
weak security, although this was probably comparable to what many companies had
at the time (individuals and small businesses are much better at this). And the
consequences, including the doxing of employees, were horrific, and for a time
theaters felt threatened by Commie-terror attacks. Today, the incident reminds one of the possibility that a foreign enemy (like North Korea) could try to undermine our system by going after much smaller businesses or individuals it didn't like, just to prove it could do it.
Robert Hackett writes about “Google’s Elite Hacker Swat Team”
(p. 42), about how they detected a vulnerability at Cloudflare in February
2017, and how Cloudflare (later prominent in shutting down Daily Stormer) fixed
it in London in the middle of the night. The SWAT team Project Zero has recently
exposed the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerability of Intel chips.
Massimo Calabresi writes “The Secret History of an Election”,
p. 34, about how the Obama administration would have called out the military to
protect voting systems, but it couldn’t stop the fake news manipulation on
social media that preceded the election.
Charlotte Alter writes on p. 22 “Fighting Revenge Porn”, which
gives the gratuitous web one of its most serious challenges in the downstream
liability (Section 230) issues. It also shows how difficult “online reputation”
can be to manage.
“The Deep Web” on p. 12, by Lev Grossman and Jay Newton Small,
gives a biography of Ross Ulbricht and the story of the Silk Road, which was
supposed to be legitimate but which the government claims is used mostly for
evasive purposes.
The book concludes with the usual home safety tips.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
Wired January 2018 issue takes up "The Golden Age of Free Speech" and its self-destruction
The January 2018 issue of Wired is dedicated to the paradox
of how tech is using free speech to turn it against itself. The issue is titled “The (Divisive, Corrosive,
Democracy-Poisoning) Golden Age of Free Speech”, link here.
There is an opening essay by Zyneck Rufecki, explains that
the passive outreach technique that I used with the infrastructure set up by
Googles and others has run into the limitation of human attention spans (and cognition in the masses). I actually do go looking for articles on my own,
where one thing leads to another; so I am not as influenced by algorithmic news
feeds as others. (Neither would be Dr, Shaun Murphy.) But most people have
too many social commitments to maintain such intellectual oversight of their ideas. There seems to be a problem with “viral
outrage” which can cause people to feel targeted, to lose jobs or employment
opportunities, or lead to other family members.
The article goes into some specifics, then, as with a long
essay by Steven Johnson on Cloudflare’s cutoff of Daily Stormer, which spread
quickly. The content lead-in "Nice Website .... shame if something happened to it" suggests that activists will pursue almost any site they see is dismissive of minorities (neutrality equals aggression) and tech executives say this is happening, and they have practiced grade school self-control.
Doug Bock Clark then explains the sub-doxing campaigns by
some of Antifa’s activists. Generally
these activities are barely within the law.
Alice Gregory writes about a startup, Yondr, with a pouch
that keeps your phone silent until you get to a “smoking pen”. Reduce your speech and unchanged the
world? This sounds like a good idea for
public schools and cell phone use. The concept could also work at venues that don’t
want to allow photography (as of other attendees).
Monday, January 22, 2018
"Moron Corps": short book that would accompany "McNamara's Folly"
Author: John L. Ward, with Dr. William E. “Gene” Robertson
Title: “Moron Corps: A Vietnam Veteran’s Case for Action”
Publication: Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co., 2012,
ISBN 978-1-62212-207-3, 95 pages, paper, 12 chapters (link)
This short personal account is mentioned in Hamilton Gregory’s
“McNamara’s Folly”. The writer enlisted
in the Marine Corps as one of “McNamara’s Morons”, so to speak, although his
performance generally outruns most of his peers, and the book (with some help)
is reasonably well written. The book is
more about the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD and herbicide damage
than about the social bad faith of the “Moron” program, which he admits was
supposed to provide job training.
He would serve in Vietnam and be wounded once, and recover,
only later to have serious health problems from Agent Orange and herbicides,
and to get short shrift from the VA and civilian bosses.
He claims, on the last page, that he has a “narcissistic
personality” but sees nothing wrong with promoting your victimhood. He provides
a lucid discussion of Affirmative Action for government contractors regarding
war veterans.
He also notes Dr. Martin Luther King's strong radicalism in a 1967 speech.
He also notes Dr. Martin Luther King's strong radicalism in a 1967 speech.
He says he supports the military draft when necessary, and
maintains we may be headed back toward it, with all the Stop-Loss policies of
the Iraq war.
Friday, January 19, 2018
Huffington Post cuts off unpaid self-published contributions
The Huffington Post is ending is unpaid self-publisher’s
platform, the New York Times reports, here. The reason is, well, fake news and the cluttering
of the debate in the past two years.
But I had not been aware that HuffPost had accepted “self-published”
contributors. It still might accept some
authors, but only if it thinks it can afford to pay them.
Also, this Personal Tech story in the New York Times casts a
much more positive picture on book self-publishing, and mentions that some self-publishers
(like Milo Yiannopoulos) now publish other authors.
Thomas F. La Vecchia has invited former Huffington contributors to New Theory.
Thomas F. La Vecchia has invited former Huffington contributors to New Theory.
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
"The Population Bomb": How a book can unintentionally give repressive governments excuses to do what they want
The Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting interpretive
article about a 1968 book, Paul R. Ehrlich, “The Population Bomb”. I remember scanning this on the bus when I was in the Army.
The article indicates that the book had a tremendous but
misleading influence on the future of world population growth, causing
repressive birth control policies in authoritarian countries (maybe even China’s
one-child policy). The article notes
that it is consumption per person that matters as much as population
itself. That ties in to the current
debate on climate change, which Trump wants to deny.
It’s interesting that a single book can have so much worldwide
influence. Sometimes well-meaning authors give authoritarian leaders excuses to
do what they want.
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Stephen King explains how Donald Trump could get elected
Stephen King on Donald Trump (in the Guardian): “How Do Such
Men Rise? First as a Joke”, link.
What follows is like a short-film screenplay, where King
hauls in some of his fictional characters from his novels, gives them truth serum,
and asks who they voted for and why.
The childishness and low cognition of them is shocking.
Also, on MLK Day, there was an outdoor used book stand at Foggy Bottom Metro, selling mostly African-American material books, out in the cold.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018
Midwest Book Reviews sheds light on how authors should get reviews
Recently, Pam Daniels (author of Robert LeBlanc’s book “Silent
Drums” [my Wordpress review]) mentioned submission to Midwest Book Review, and I thought I would
pass along the site.
My own immediate reaction is that my most recent book is
already four years old (from early 2014), and the first is over twenty years
old. But I would consider working with a
review company in advance of the novel I plan for this year.
The site (the company is located in Wisconsin) is set up in old-fashioned way, with frames, and
links to a lot of articles with somewhat repetitious content. My own older sites were set up this way.
The site has a low opinion of some of the self-publishing companies
and of vanity publishing in general, and says it prefers small presses (which
tend to stress local and iconic topics, or specialized writing like
poetry). But it also says you can apply
to work for them as a book reviewer.
Sunday, January 07, 2018
NYTimes has booklet-length front page story on intelligence failures with respect to North Korean "speed"
The Sunday New York Times has an alarming front page booklet-length
story by David R. Sanger and William J. Broad: “U.S. Miscalculated the Nuclear
Progress of North Korea by Years”, with subheadline.”Flawed Estimates Rank as
One of the Biggest Intelligence Failures”, link here,
But Mike Pompeo of the CIA criticized this assessment on CBS’s
“Face the Nation” today.
I tend to agree with the NYT. It seems that Kim had a lot of black market
help from other post-Communist nations.
Friday, January 05, 2018
Is self-publishing starting to implode under criticism?
Here’s a provocative piece from a
conservative-to-libertarian site, “Way too many books are being published”. But open self-publishing has
become one reason. About two-thirds of the new books offered today are self-published. It’s not reported what percentage are
print-on-demand. (416,000 books were
self-published in 2013; 300,000 by
traditional; most traditional need to
sell about 10,000 at a min.)
It reminds me of a time in the mid 1960s when we thought
“too many people are going to college”. And there was a draft.
I do wonder how well self-publishing-assist book publishers
business models will hold up – the sustainability issue. Starting around 2012 I started getting calls
asking my why my old books from 1997/2000 and 2002 were no longer selling. Well, even with most trade books (with
certain exceptions like Harry Potter) that tends to be the case.
Note the BookScan (doesn’t look at ebook) from Nielsen – it
knows how well your self-published books have sold (or not).
Intellectual Takeout seems to make a curious point for a
libertarian site: people need to share
more goals in common and belong more.
That’s Charles Murray’s theme in “Coming Apart”.
Thursday, January 04, 2018
Trump seeks to block publication of a book about White House with Bannon's leaks
In an move that sounds like totalitarian censorship, Donald
Trump’s lawyers are seeking a cease-and-desist order against author Michael Wolff
and publisher Henry Holt regarding the publication of the upcoming book “Fire
and Fury: Inside the Trump White House”. The Washington Post article by Josh Darsey and Ashley Parker is here. CNN Money reports on it here.
The title of the book is provocative in that it invokes
Trump’s threat against North Korea (“fat little rocket man”)
But the “objectionable content” in the book has to do with
Steve Bannon’s “telling” and Trump’s break with him. Apparently a cease and desist was sent to
Bannon too about breaking his employment agreement.
Some attorneys are saying that this action constitutes "prior restraint". The publisher says it intends the release Tuesday. I have a pre-order on Amazon.
Author's Guild has weighed in as Trump's threatening to sue a journalist "is what dictators do" (Guild statement).
Some attorneys are saying that this action constitutes "prior restraint". The publisher says it intends the release Tuesday. I have a pre-order on Amazon.
Author's Guild has weighed in as Trump's threatening to sue a journalist "is what dictators do" (Guild statement).
Monday, January 01, 2018
Timothy B. Lee's "Gentle Primer" on Bitcoin
Timothy B. Lee has a booklet-length article on Ars Technica,
“Want to Really Understand How Bitcoin Works? Here’s a Gentle Primer”. Gentle indeed. It takes time to follow this. (This is the "right" Tim Lee; he is "Binarybits" on Twitter.)
This would have taken a long time to write. Lee explains the Blockchain (which any advanced
alien civilization will also have come up with), and the importance of public
and private cryptography. These things don’t matter a lot until people want to
do things under the covers. It also
depends on robust peer-to-peer computing (with all affiliated security risks
from using it).
My own perception is that it is a good idea for any retired
investor to have a small percentage of holdings in digital currencies, and
learn how to use them. Maybe 1% of
liquid assets is a good target. I plan to look into this in 2018.
Tim's own website "AboutMe" page has some interesting comments, especially March 25, 2012, and June 4, 2016, which I think was directed at me and my own books, not Tim (whom I met in Minneapolis, and who helped set up my 1999 lecture at the University of Minnesota; I also spoke at Hamline in 1998).
Update: Jan 3
There is increasing concern about the energy consumption (and fossil fuels, especially in China) for bitcoin mining. Would solar plants solve this?
Update: Jan 23
While energy consumption of mining continues to be controversial, here is a New York Times piece by Nathaniel Popper, "A View from the Bitcoin Bubble", referring to the Winklevii.
Update: Jan 3
There is increasing concern about the energy consumption (and fossil fuels, especially in China) for bitcoin mining. Would solar plants solve this?
Update: Jan 23
While energy consumption of mining continues to be controversial, here is a New York Times piece by Nathaniel Popper, "A View from the Bitcoin Bubble", referring to the Winklevii.
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