An elegy for sweet forgetfulness, soon to be lost forever

In my memory, I'm standing on the Île Saint-Louis, looking at a butcher shop.

But was I ever there? I've provably been in Paris. I've likely been on the Île Saint-Louis. After that I don't know. In my mind's eye I can picture it and picture myself there, but my mind's eye is a notoriously filthy liar. I can remember any number of events that never happened, and I have forgotten many important events that did.

If I was never there, where did this memory come from? It could have been Edmund White, whose evocative novels of his life in Paris have always brought the city to life for me. Reading Declare by Tim Powers brought these memories back, and added wartime paranoia and Nazi intrigue to the mix.

I'll never know for sure whether I've been there before. My previous visits to Paris were before the era of ubiquitous surveillance, GPS cellphone tracking, Google Latitude, Foursquare and ultrazillions of digital photos being taken of absolutely everything at every moment and being pasted online. So even once all of the artificial "privacy" barriers are dropped, once indexing and face recognition systems correlate every sparrow fart since the dawn of the digital age, once every credit-card purchase record is cracked open and something like Vernor Vinge's GreenInc provides a complete personal history of every human, nobody will be able to say with any degree of clarity whether that memory is true or false.

I weep for the children. Their digital trail will never allow them to erase their personal history and start over. No more retrospective virginity restorations. No more he-said, she-said he-did. No more bonfire of the diaries for personal reinvention. Everyone will become a politician denying their words of the day before, followed by an immediate multi-POV video playback with subtitles, location tags, and links to probable original sources shown in the goggles of everyone around them.

On the other hand, I weep with joy for the children. Memory prostheses will make arguments quite different: instead of arguing whose recollection is more accurate, people's agents will automatically debate the relative authoritativeness of the certificate chains and trust authorities of the different sources of evidence. When professionally photoshopped memories, reputation laundering, real-time distributed consensus auctions and whitelisted memory attestation services become common we just won't worry about it anymore. We won't argue about trivia.

Maybe I'll steer clear of the Île Saint-Louis on my next trip and leave the past alone, whether it's mine or borrowed from somebody else. I'll just preserve my own personal mythology a little bit longer.

Second, Third, and Fourth-Order Effects of Social Marketing and Mass Securitization

Several years ago, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg crowed that he was able to use the database to retroactively predict with 33% accuracy with whom people would hook up a week later. This was widely viewed as very creepy (and was not spoken about again until recently) but you can guess that this was a dog whistle meant for potential advertisers. The advertisers have listened, and now Google is scrambling to catch up with Facebook on social search (and then advertising).
It’s impossible to get clear numbers on how well this stuff works. Even Facebook and Google probably have no clear numbers, but they certainly have clear enough indications. Google obviously has a clear enough indication to reform their entire company around this. So we can assume it is real. It all seems plausible enough, right?


So we can easily assume that this trend will continue, and that Google and Facebook will correlate increasing amounts of data on us, our friends, our coworkers, and the people we encounter, and will sell this data to advertisers who will essentially be placing bets on our behaviour. If there is a 27% chance that a given couple will marry within the next nine months, then there is a 14% chance that each of their closest long-distance friends will want to buy a plane ticket to the ceremony. Therefore, as an advertiser, you buy a tranche of ads for people whose out-of-town friends are soon to marry. The MapReduce job is an exercise for Google’s new Malaysian coding shop, the tranche is sold to the highest bidder via AdWords. Bada-bing, ca-ching.


As a second-order effect, this advertising activity begins to affect the behaviour of these out-of-town friends. A measurable jump in the number of people attending out-of-town weddings results, and the price on these ads consequently rises. Advertising grows markets all the time, so this is not surprising.


Now we emerge into science fiction-ville. An analyst-bot for a huge trading firm is trawling the AdWords marketplace, looking for interesting tranches for which the price has become overweight, and happens upon the out-of-town weddings advertising market, which is suddenly hugely oversubscribed. It pops up on the screen of a junior analyst (of the human variety) who clicks through to approve the creation of a out-of-town weddings futures market, which the trading firm then (automatically) proceeds to sell to its customers, and then (automatically) takes a short position.
An analyst-bot for one of the advertising agencies flags this new offering, and raises it to the desk of the (human) product manager for this market. She promptly buys into the futures market, betting that the market will rise. She talks to an executive VP and gets approval to buy a large product placement with a popular television show to feature a destination wedding as an upcoming plot. She does not get approval for a proposed contribution to a PAC formed by the National Organization for Marriage, as the VP is gay and cites the growing market for same-sex weddings.


Of course, this assumes that the securitization of everything will continue apace. Certainly there has been no progress in stemming the tide, and I don’t expect it to happen (barring a bloody worldwide insurrection against the dominant economic order).


What are some other examples of the weird things that could result from social marketing combined with this level of financial automation?

• A new global baby boom triggered by businesses embracing new market development, caused by an algorithmic storm of projected demand for diapers, crude oil, softwood lumber, and manual labour. [The whole thing is triggered by a rounding bug in an Excel spreadsheet.]

• Investment banks engage in wide-scale manipulation of tampon supply futures indexes by using sponsored advertisements to influence birth control method preferences so that women favour Depo-Provera over oral contraceptives.

• The Corrections Corporation of America gets into a bidding war with Indian defense contractors on a cheap-labour-supply futures index, which is based on the relative probability of incarceration due to attempted drug sales by American teens.  The Indian defense contractors are shorting this to offset their own risk (due to the effect of rural broadband penetration shortfalls on the gold mining talent pool), and the market becomes very volatile.  To ease this situation, the CCA makes a large automated contribution to a tough-on-crime SuperPAC.

• Asperger's patients become a new hot dating commodity, as their profiles are moved to the top of the activity ranking by social networks who wish to boost their visibility to advertisers who are bidding extremely highly for their ad dollars.  Social networks optimize their users lives to improve their value to advertisers.  This results in nerds getting laid a whole lot more, and lots more little Asperger's-prone nerdlings (who have truly wonderful advertising potential).

So just remember kids, just because you don't click on those ads in Facebook doesn't mean that those ads aren't clicking on you. And with Google+ and Facebook embedded in every single webpage, you can run, and you can hide, but you cannot avoid being aggregated, and those aggregations will be monetized until they control your every move. Resistance is futile.

---

Re-reading this hours later I realized that what I'm describing here is a much less rosy portrait of the same technological trends outlined by Bruce Sterling in his seminal short story Maneki Neko back in 1998. Except of course his story has excellent characterization, plot, and narrative drive.

Attention whores in the reputation economy

Yesterday on my way home I saw an ambulance driver texting as she drove. (At least she didn't have her siren and lights on.) But that wasn't the ironic part - no, that was the act of will that kept me from whipping out my phone and tweeting about it. Or better yet, whipping out my phone, taking a picture of her while I attempted to drive, and then tweeting the link. On the whole I'm glad I made it home alive.

The walk to the subway station this morning was surreal. It was snowing pink cherry blossoms which covered the streets and the grass, making me think of nuclear fallout and what a challenge it would be to clean that up if it wasn't just, you know, flower petals.

So then at the subway station there were new additions to the usual gauntlet of free newspaper pushers: a couple of well-scrubbed men pushing The Watchtower. So many voices clamoring to be heard.

The problem isn't an attention deficit, it's a surplus of bullshit. We create a cloud, a lake, an ocean, a galaxy of data, simultaneously afraid of where all this data is going and afraid that if we don't reveal more our voice won't be heard. We've reached the point of saturation with trivia and are waiting for the tool that will come along and stitch it together, but we're afraid of what that'll show. Mostly we're afraid that it'll expose our banality, our utter simplicity and lack of special worthiness of this embarrassment of riches that has been visited upon us.

I have the whole of human knowledge at my fingertips and I want to know more about the Octomom.

Spam now leverages social networks

I've been getting spam lately purporting to be from a former co-worker. Apparently they harvested her MSN Messenger list – it impersonates her hotmail account and sends to my work account.

This was probably due to a virus which hijacked MSN messenger, it's a notoriously problematic service: between the service outages, trojans and viruses, its usefulness is debatable. But even as Microsoft gets its security act together a decade too late, the attack is inevitably shifting someplace else.

With social networking sites asking for email passwords to "import connections", people respond quickly. After all, they say it's safe, and you can always change your password later (but you don't). As it has been pointed out, as an industry we've trained people to type passwords, and that's what they do – whether it's a good idea or not, and that's why phishing is so successful. But once they have your contact list they can keep that forever, and it's a wonderful tool for a spammer.

Facebook and Twitter are unlikely to misuse this data too egregiously, they are connected to real money and companies with reputations to protect. But Pownce, which is going out of business – what about their data? And tacky little utilities like Twitterank which spam your stream, you'd better believe they're warehousing your connections. And your private messages. And everything else. You can put these things together and draw meaningful conclusions about the people involved.

Science fiction has been talking about spambots impersonating your family and friends for years, but now it's happening for real, and expect to see a whole hell of a lot more of it. Expect to start seeing requests from friends and family, asking for money through new and unfamiliar websites (or even familiar websites that have been compromised). Expect increasingly strange and subtle requests: you may not even know what they're really trying to get you to do, or why. In short, this is going to get deeply weird, really fast.

Senator Herb Kohl on HR 6304 (The "I Spy" act)

Herb Kohl, Senator from AT&T

Back when the Democrats were preparing to sell our rights, our privacy, and the very rule of law to the telecom lobby while capitulating in the most pathetic way possible to the Bush administration, I wrote a letter to Wisconsin Democratic senator Herb Kohl. I urged him most specifically not to vote for H.R. 6304, a bill that made a mockery of the rule of law by giving felonious telecom companies a free pass for having helped the federal government to spy on US citizens in a way directly prohibited by federal statute.

Of course, he took his marching orders from the Democratic "leadership" (who take their marching orders from AT&T) and voted for the bill. In his letter he never addresses telecom immunity, which was the key issue I wrote to him about. Instead, he lies about the bill and its provisions, parroting the line set down by his masters. And of course, he never mentions that he personally voted to sustain telecom immunity.

Finally, I find it particularly offensive that he says he's taking time to "address my concerns" when he's not addressing them, he's ignoring and dismissing them. No, Senator Kohl, "everyone" doesn't agree.

HERB KOHL		COMMITTEES:
WISCONSIN
		APPROPRIATIONS
WASHINGTON OFFICE:
330 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING		JUDICIARY
WASHINGTON, DC 20510
(202) 224-5653		SPECIAL COMMITTEE
http://kohl.senate.gov	United States Senate	ON AGING
	WASHINGTON, DC 20510-4903
	July 24, 2008

Mr. Chuck Leduc
[address redacted]

Dear Mr. Leduc:

     Thank you for taking the time to contact me. I value the input I get from people back home in Wisconsin, and I would like to take this opportunity to address your concerns.

     In December 2005, the revelation that the President authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor telephone calls and e-mails of United States citizens without obtaining a warrant or court order raises important legal and policy questions. I strongly believe that the President, Congress, and the courts all share a common goal: to protect the American people. If terrorists are operating in this country, or people in this country are communicating with terrorists, everyone can agree that we must give our government the tools it needs to protect the American people, including the power to listen to their phone calls. Security, the Rule of law, and the protection of civil liberties, however, are not mutually exclusive concepts; we can have all three.

     In August 2007, Congress passed, and the President signed, the Protect America Act (PAA). I opposed this bill because it authorized broad electronic surveillance of Americans' communications, and provided for little oversight by Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The PAA was ultimately enacted as a temporary fix. The ability to conduct surveillance pursuant to the PAA was set to expire in early August.

     It was critically important for Congress to authorize necessary surveillance authorities, this time with appropriate civil liberties protections. To that end, on June 19, 2008, Representative Silvestre Reyes introduced the FISA Amendments Act of2008 (H.R. 6304). This measure authorizes the Intelligence Community to conduct electronic surveillance of individuals located outside of the United States, but also provides Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court greater authorities to conduct oversight of this surveillance and protect the privacy of innocent Americans. In addition, the bill authorizes a thorough investigation of the President's Terrorist Surveillance Program and clarifies that no surveillance can be conducted outside of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I voted for H.R. 6304 because I believe it strikes an appropriate balance between national security and protecting civil liberties. It was signed into law on July 10, 2008.

[page 2]

     Thank you again for contacting me on this important issue.

                         Sincerely,
                         (signed)
                         Herb Kohl
                         United States Senator
HK:mxh

... and finally, my response to his letter:

Dear Senator Kohl,

I am rather disappointed in your response to my letter about telecom immunity and spying. In my letter I specifically urged you to uphold the rule of law by holding telcos accountable for their lawbreaking. I obviously think your vote went contrary to the best interests of the people of the state you represent, but that is not why I am writing back.

The reason I am writing back is because you did not address telecom immunity, my primary concern, in your letter. That is political cowardice: if you are going to put the interests of corporations above those of your constituents, you might as well own up to it. You could even have made up some implausible justification (you seem to be pretty good at that), but to pretend it didn't happen is just plain insulting. Just how stupid do you think we are?

Sincerely,
Charles LeDuc

WebEx is watching you, and won't stop

WebEx on the MacBook turns on the camera for no good reason, and doesn't let you turn it off.

I had a conference call yesterday, and as usual with these corporate time-wasters, there was a powerpoint deck intended to distract the audience from the carbon-14 decaying in their bones. I fired it up on the MacBook which I use for WebEx, because it doesn't work on Ubuntu and I've already wasted more than enough time trying to fix it. So it was going on (and on) repeating previous presentations, and I proceeded to try to get other work done.

When I proceeded to fire up Photo Booth to take a picture of an error I was getting on my iPhone I was told "The camera is already in use." That's weird, I thought. Sure enough, the little green light was on next to the camera. So I proceeded to close down apps. Finally nothing was left but WebEx, and when I shut that down the light turned off. Hmmm. So I started WebEx back up and started searching for the option to turn off the camera. And I kept searching. I couldn't find it, and that made me feel kind of dumb, so I sent in a support request to WebEx. Their response:

Hello Chuck,

Thank you for choosing WebEx.

Since you are using a built in camera, it starts automatically in the meeting. WebEx does not have any control over this and there is no option in the Meeting Manager to disable this feature.

However, if you are the host, you can uncheck the "Video" option while scheduling the session. You can uncheck this option even in the middle of the meeting.

To disable the webcam, please contact Mac Support or check in Mac Forums. For your convenience, I have provided a link which discuss about turning off webcam.

Disclaimer: The URL below will take you to a non-WebEx Web Site. WebEx does not control or is responsible for the information given outside of WebEx Web Sites.

http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/26/how-to-disable-the-built-in-isight-camera/

Please let me know if there is anything I can do to further assist you.

Regards
WebEx Technical Support.

Waitasecond. "WebEx does not have any control over this"? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Do they not have the flipping source code? WTFH? And then they recommend that I go into a console and hobble my operating system's camera support? Are they high?

Of course, that's just bullshit. They allow the host of the meeting to control the cameras of the attendees, but they don't allow you to control the camera on your own flipping machine. This is a backassward privacy policy. I have no idea or control over where my video is going – it could be recorded, it could be broadcast: millions could be watching me absently pick my nose.

There is now a piece of tape covering the webcam on my MacBook. When I first used the iPhone I thought that the camera warnings when using an app that touches the camera were silly, but now I greatly appreciate them.

Bad WebEx. I'm still waiting for you to go out of business, you silly $3.2B behemoth.

Security and privacy: bait and switch

Holy cow: Rolling Stone has a relevant article! I always think of Rolling Stone as some sort of tired 70s by-blow of Gloria Steinem and Larry Flynt, the place P.J. O'Rourke writes about vomiting in foreign lands. They get major credit for signing Naomi Klein.

(via BoingBoing (via Schneier))

Here's a story: China reinvents its nation, and in the process uses new technology to build "Totalitarianism 2.0" à la Orwell. Klein sketches a scary picture, draws disturbing parallels and connections with the U.S. government, and points out some nasty trends in our not-so-free society.

Although she doesn't spell it out in the article, I'll take it a step further and give a progression:

1. U.S. citizens were highly resistant to living in a police state.
2. A temporary crisis resulted in permanent security measures which cause widespread delay and irritation, but are ridiculous by any reasonable standard and provide no actual improvement in security.
3. The government provides a new method of sailing through security by handing over biometric information and submitting to electronic tracking.
4. Governments threaten to prohibit travel without biometric identification.

A simplistic view, but when you strip away the fear, propaganda and fancy talk, that's what is left.

I've already fallen for it. The border between the U.S. and Canada used to be a lot easier to cross, but since they tightened it so much in the past decade it is now very slow. As a result, the US and Canadian governments introduced the ominously named NEXUS program to facilitate crossing the border. I'm still regularly stopped and searched at customs and asked the usual questions, but now they have a more easily tracked dossier and my retina prints on file (hello General Poindexter!). This is how our privacy and freedom of movement are chipped away: piece by piece, year by year, and one person at a time.

Smile!

When we bought our house in Toronto two years ago, we decided to get a Murphy bed for the guest room. We wandered around the city looking for the right one, astounded at every turn by the prices they charge for these things. A thousand bucks for a stack of compressed wood? Yup.

When we finally decided to cough up the dough, we were faced with a salesperson who mumbled curses in Russian under her breath, rolled her eyes, and sighed as we discussed options and paid her god-damned salary.

I was entranced.

I got out my phone and pretended to be playing around with it, and surreptitiously captured her image for posterity. (I had used a hack to disable the obnoxious snapshot sound effect. Hello, Motorola, it's my frigging phone, okay?) So here she is to brighten your day, too.

Colour laser printers not anonymous

We have a lovely new colour laser printer. It is pretty sweet... except I can't use it anonymously. If I print something that annoys somebody, like maybe expose corporate or government corruption, or express an unpopular or dangerous political opinion, it can be traced back to me.

This is done with little yellow dots scattered across the image. You can't see them easily. They are intended to fight counterfeiting of currency; there is no law mandating this; some (not all) printer makers do it to mollify governments. And hey, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that counterfeit currency is a bad thing that hurts us all. But to solve that problem I'm not willing to end privacy and anonymity of the printed word.

So imagine that I do want to use my printer for anonymous communication. Say I call my printer manufacturer to ask how to turn off the narc bits: chances are, I'll get a visit from the goon squad to ask me what my intentions are. And chances are I'll get added to a list of "troublemakers".

That sounds like good company. Count me in.