OH: Where's Guy Fawkes when we need him now, eh?
Post created with https://apps.rhiaro.co.uk/no-ceremonies-are-necessary
politics (16 out of 19)
Reading about the Bosnian elections is inexplicably making me homesick for the Balkans. It's all the random pictures of Sarajevo and little mountain towns I guess. It's nice that something positive in politics might be happening somewhere in the world, anyway, for a change.
Post created with https://apps.rhiaro.co.uk/no-ceremonies-are-necessary
Bulgarians who don't speak any English when you need directions or to know how much something costs tend to suddenly have enough vocab and perfect grammar when they realise they can laugh at you about Brexit.
Donation to Avaaz
£2 (€2.38 / $2.47 / £2.00)
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
Decentralisation considered harmful
As I work - on writing standards, writing code, studying centralised and decentralised systems - and as I read the news and watch events unfold around me, bubbling away under the surface is always an unease. What if we're making it worse? We all have blind spots, limited experiences. And especially so since many of us working on decentralisting the Web are not amongst those who would benefit most from the purported advantages. Some of us have been working (or watching) in this space for years, decades, longer than the Web. But more of us, an only ever increasing number, have not. We are privileged, we are nerds, most of us don't have all that much experience, and we do not know best. We've jumped on this decentralisation thing as a solution to lots of global problems.
Towards the end of last week, Tantek prompted me to actually articulate some of what were previously just subconscious discomfort. How are the decentralised technologies we're working on going to make people more vulnerable?
Smaller attack surfaces: Large centralised systems have robust network architectures; lots of money and expertise to keep things running even if under attack (except when someone uses all of the Web-enabled kettles to DDOS them, but that aside). Many decentralised architectures imagine smaller 'pods' which federate. It's possible many of these servers will be run by volunteers, hobbyists, or small/poor organisations, and could be easily knocked over and kept down by malicious actors.
Quieter takedowns: We want it to be easier for small communities, perhaps vulnerable minorities, to create safe spaces in their own corner of the Web, and to be able to keep out those who jeopardise that. If these communities are 'disappeared' (perhaps made easier by the previous point) the rest of the Web might not notice until it's too late.
Illusion of control: We promote decentralisation as a way to control who has access to your personal/social data, and to be able to move it somewhere else if you want. But a key part of decentralisation is federation, or enabling access to your data by other systems, ie. so that you and your friends can use a different applications for the same thing, without that getting in the way of your interactions. This involves open data formats and standard APIs and likely complex access control setups. Most people tell me they can't get a handle on their Facebook privacy settings, and these are for a single unified system. Just because you could move your data to a different service, doesn't mean it's safe where it is.
Illusion of control 2: Normies look at me like I'm nuts when they find out I share more about myself on my personal website than they do on social media. I tell them I know exactly what I'm sharing, rather than having it slurped up by algorithms which monitor everything they click or hover over. My explicit sharing is greater, but my implicit sharing is reduced. Or so I think. Related to the previous point, my data is all public and nicely marked up to be machine readable. The confidence I have about the fact that I have to jump through inconvenient hoops of my own making to get it online is dangerous. If social media has normalised dangerous oversharing, and the general populace is starting to clock the 'dangerous' part, then decentralised social media runs the risk of convincing people their oversharing is 'safe' again, setting us back a decade.
The filter bubble: The easier we make it for people to avoid abuse online (just imagine for half a second that the decentralisation efforts are even close to solving this, k?), the easier we make it for people to filter out diverse points of view. The first thing I noticed when Twitter introduced its recent phrase filtering thing was a bunch of privileged liberals screaming about the filter bubble and completely missing the point. But anyway. If this is an either/or we're in trouble.
This is doubtless just the beginning of a very long list, and there are others thinking/writing about this as well. I'll update this post to list other articles as I come across them.
Last modified:
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
Maybe having all of the deeply ingrained social bullshit laid out in plain sight, rather than quietly affecting things from under the surface, will make it easier to deal with.
or maybe we'll see the end of our species in our lifetime, who knows
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/11/never-wait-votehttps://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/11/never-wait-vote
Every single church, school, town/village hall, community center, library, any public space you can think of, probably public toilets, are polling stations in the UK. I'd walk past ten on my way to the office. I guess the US is like really big and far apart and everything, but something just seems really badly organised.
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
I have never had to wait more than like five minutes to vote in a general election. This queuing for hours thing in the US is insane.
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
Some questions
How do we get people to mistrust the media?
How do we get people to take context into account?
Are food bloggers the bane of professional chefs?
How do I prove I know what I'm talking about?
How do I know I know what I'm talking about?
Why would anyone care what I think?
Should I publish it anyway?
Why is three positive conference reviews more reassuring than one thousand facebook comments?
What will I do when the Web runs out?
What comes after?
Where can I hide?
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
I opened DreamHost's email newsletter to unsubscribe, but then I saw this:
Well played.
Post created with https://rhiaro.co.uk/sloph
I accidentally read the comments on an article about how British media is being racist against refugee children and now I'm depressed. From out here it looks like the people living on the piece of rock I was born on are just spiralling into intolerance, facism, inhumanity. How can your reaction to anyone who just escaped from a warzone and now, thousands of miles from home, is trying to find their family, some familiarity... be "oh they're big, they can look after themselves, they don't need our sympathy or aid." This is what the comments say. Why does how tall someone is and if they have facial hair - let alone their age - affect their ability to cope with trauma, or their need for their mum? Have none of these people ever been sad? Ever felt vulnerable? Ever had a shit day and needed a hug? Certainly none of them have fled a war.
Maybe they're not real. They're just internet words. But... what if they're real? What if for 25 years of my life I was surrounded by monsters, and now they've been given permission to speak?
Reading @RealAvocadoFact to attempt to rebalance.
I should be writing.
Amy added https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/24/jack-monroe-i-want-to-be-treated-as-a-person-not-a-woman-or-a-man-interview-transgender-identity to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
SO much good stuff in one story, woah.
Hey American friends who ask where I'm from and think it's funny that it's Boston, my hometown is so racist it made it into the New York Times
Someone needs to turn British politics off and on again.
Brackers is making me watch the Referendum. This is too much of an emotional rollercoaster. I can't. Let me watch Voyager.
Aaaaaaaargh.
Whenever that yellow bar gets bigger it's this surge of relief, and whenever the blue bar does it's a dark cloud of terror. And we're only on 6/382. Too violent. I can't.
I'm craving pink wafers, and I feel like it's probably something to do with the EU Referendum.