Internet matters – Page 15 – a sibilant intake of breath

Web-connected door control

You know what would be very convenient? If the door to your home had an RFID card reader so that it could be programmed to let in anyone with a particular card. You could give houseguests a few days worth of access, without having to worry about getting keys back from them.

Because it would be web-connected, you could authorize people to have access to your home remotely. You could even have an option for unlocking the door through a web interface – for instance, in order to let a repairperson into your place.

There would need to be good security all along the line, from the radio communication between the RFID cards and the reader to the communication between the door control system and you via the web. Rather than try to achieve that though proprietary means, it would be better to publish all the hardware plans and software code and let people spot weaknesses that could then be fixed.

Who should I read in Toronto?

Now that I am focused on the move from Canada’s political capital to the economic and cultural capital, I suppose I should start following some key Toronto blogs.

Any suggestions?

A Toronto equivalent to Ottawa’s Apartment613 arts and culture blog would be especially useful.

Tar Sands Action: Come Join Us!

Roaming without roaming

Data roaming with Fido is ruinously expensive – about a dollar a meg – so I will be foregoing cellular network access while in the U.S. I will probably find WiFi from time to time and thus be able to update my blog, post to Twitter, and upload photos to Flickr.

The meticulous documentation of my somewhat absurd journey will become punctuated rather than continuous.

iTunes has lost its mind

Not only is Apple’s iTunes application constantly crashing, stealing focus, or crashing my entire computer – it just erased all my podcasts and iTunes U files for no clear reason. This is especially maddening for someone who is careful to catalog their media well.

Given that I was about to go on a long bus journey, this is unbelievably annoying. All of a sudden, university courses I was in the middle of listening to are just gone. Podcast collections that I had assembled with some care are deleted. All my audiobooks have vanished as though they never were. Much of the content I had in there cannot simply be re-downloaded.

It is all extremely frustrating.

Why I left Facebook

I have been worried about Facebook for years. I worry about how personal information on users is their most valuable asset, and the ways in which they may seek to profit from it. More generally, I worry about the unintended consequences of creating massive searchable databases on social interactions.

What actually prompted me to ‘deactivate’ (not ‘delete’ yet) was two things.

Excessive time demands

First, Facebook is too time-demanding. People expect me to keep up to speed on their many postings, despite how there are hundreds or even thousands of status updates that appear every day. If you advertise your event on Facebook and I miss it completely, it is probably because I was trying to get some reading done, or enjoying a walk and a cup of coffee, or dealing with my neverending flood of unanswered email and so I missed the status update message or invitation for a few days.

If you really want me to know about something, you must at least send me a text or an email. Putting notice on Facebook (or Twitter, or your own website) is not a sufficiently attention-grabbing action to ensure that I will see it.

As I am writing this, I am ignoring a sizeable collection of projects that are in need of attention. I should be working on finding an apartment in Toronto, packing up my current apartment, and making plans for how to move. I should be researching possible doctoral programs, working on my research proposal, and corresponding with possible references and supervisors. I should also be reading various books from various stacks of semi-read tomes, refining my low carbon mutual fund idea, improving my chess, getting exercise, exploring some elements of Ottawa that are still unknown to me, planning a trip to Washington D.C., planning a trip to New Orleans, writing articles and letters to editors, processing and uploading photos, going out and taking new photos. I should be taking university courses, learning practical skills, responding to letters, searching for photographic gigs, learning to drive, joining clubs, going camping, and improving my data backup regime.

All of those tasks are better uses of time than Facebook.

Privacy

Second, I am worried about facial recognition. The only barrier to it becoming absolutely ubiquitous seems to be the availability of data on our faces. The cameras are already out there, and the software and the computing power to turn pixels representing faces into names are coming inevitably.

Someone with a lot of determination can dig around the internet and probably find dozens of photos of me to feed into a facial recognition algorithm. While I was on Facebook, however, this process was simplified to the point of easy automation. In thousands of photos, I had been specifically identified and even had the region of the photo containing my face marked.

Still not too isolated

So far, I have been glad to be off that particular grid. Anyone who actually wants to contact me has a wide variety of ways to do so. My email address and cellphone number are both on the ‘contact me’ page of my blog, and my blog comes up immediately when you Google my name. If that is too much work for a person to go through, it seems fair to say that they didn’t really want to contact me in the first place.

I don’t want to delete my Facebook account completely because it does have some value to me as an archive. Nearly all my photos from Oxford are in there, with tags and comments affixed. If Facebook provided a way to download all that as an elegant, accessible archive that can be used offline I would be happy to do so. I doubt, however, that they will ever provide such a tool. All their plans hinge on attracting people to the site and making them visit as often as possible. Helping them untangle themselves and walk away with whatever data they find valuable runs completely counter to that. Facebook actually lets you download your photos easily in quite a good archive format.

I will miss the chance to see what distant friends are up to easily, and to have the occasional fortuitous bit of contact with them. I will try to remember to send an out-of-the-blue email every once in a while.

P.S. I left LinkedIn too, but who cares about LinkedIn?

This American Life on patents

A recent episode of the This American Life podcast centres around technology patents, with emphasis on the so-called ‘patent trolls’ who harass legitimate companies using dubious patent claims, in hopes of getting cash settlements.

Designing an ideal patent system is an interesting question from a utilitarian perspective. It seems beneficial to encourage innovation and protect small companies with novel ideas from giant companies that might steal them. At the same time, patents can be used by big companies to bully small ones, and when obvious ideas are given patents it can prevent useful technologies from becoming widely available.

Automated facial recognition

As processing power becomes cheaper and smarter software is produced, it seems inevitable that more and more people and organizations will begin to identify people automatically by recognizing their faces with surveillance cameras.

London’s Heathrow airport is planning to install such a system, and Facebook may be the ultimate database to let freelancers do it themselves.

To me, it is all rather worrisome. At a basic level, life becomes more paranoid and less creative and interesting when you are being watched at all times and all of your actions are being archived forever. It’s only a matter of time before photos from every fun party ever are being combed through by investigative journalists hoping to catch someone who has become famous in an embarrassing-looking situation. Facial recognition allows for the creation of databases that can be used for truly evil purposes, from suppression of political dissent to stalking and blackmail.

Like nerve gas, facial recognition technology is probably one of those things that it would be better if we could un-invent.

OS X Lion available for download

Ars Technica has a detailed 19-part review of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

My take: this new version is a big deal and changes some pretty fundamental things both under the hood and in terms of how you actually use your computer. It will break some old software. Don’t upgrade lightly before checking whether the change will break something really important to you.

Also, you may never really have control of your files in the same way again. With the pervasive new autosave system, OS X will have a mysterious new relationship with them.

Recent lessons from the NPR Planet Money podcast

Arguments and ideas featured in recent Planet Money podcasts:

An effective sex education strategy for preventing pregnancy and disease is to tell teenagers to feel free to have sex with each other, but that they should avoid having sex with older men.
Fareed Zakaria thinks our only hope of dealing with climate change is the emergence of magical technologies that deal with the problem without economic growth having to stop.
Contrary to what some economists have argued, people in countries where malaria is endemic will use bednets if they are given away for free.
A controlled study suggests that attending a couple of years of preschool has very large lifetime benefits, including in higher earnings and less chance of being arrested.
There are sites online selling stolen credit cards where two people must vouch for your criminality before you can join.
One reason why we tip is because we feel guilty about how much more fun we are having than the people serving us.

It’s a good podcast.