Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

twitter’s an addictive land of trolls

I have written before about the cognitive and emotional (and insomniac) downsides of checking the news too often. It seems worth re-emphasizing how twitter is a worst-case scenario in this regard, at least for people more interested in developments in matters of public interest than developments in the lives of friends and acquaintances, where facebook is untouchable.

With twitter it’s possible to use any internet-connected device to get an endless stream of updates and — crucially — little decisions for as long as you want at any time of day. It’s an exercise perfectly crafted to short-circuit longer term planning, even at the scale of turning off your phone to get a night’s rest before a busy day tomorrow. Every tweet presents the cognitive task of interpreting the content; determining whether it contains any factual, ethical, or political claims; and then evaluating that content in light of what the user believes and what, if anything, they are trying to accomplish through engagement online. Even for fairly passive users, every tweet involves the decision of whether to publicly ‘like’ or ‘retweet’ it, forcing your brain to engage decision-making circuitry more often and immediately than when reading a news article or book. Of course the real addictive prompts come from the social features: the notifications that someone has ‘liked’ or responded to your tweet. That engages all the emotional machinery which we use to socialize with others, maintain or alter our beliefs about the world, and protect out own self-esteem. It also embodies the slot machine logic of unpredictable and variable responses to the same action, ranging from someone amazing expressing agreement or saying something clever in response to your message to the depredations of the most hateful trolls.

Twitter often exposes me to content which I subsequently wish I could unsee, including particularly blockheaded claims and arguments which tend to re-emerge with a sense of frustration and anger in the shower the next day. The platform isn’t entirely without virtues — it can provide useful or at least engaging up-to-the-minute information and analysis on ongoing events, it allows users to engage directly with people who would otherwise be inaccessible, and perhaps it does sometimes direct people to good quality information they wouldn’t otherwise see. At the same time, it’s the venue for the least pleasant interactions in my life and it’s a repository of almost limitless idiocy and unkindness.

I have resolved for now to “cut off the time wasters quickly. They can’t be won over and whatever value there is in publicly refuting their arguments doesn’t justify the time and stress commitment”. There’s really no alternative strategy possible, since the platform is so full of people who (a) aren’t debating in good faith (b) can never be convinced or won over and (c) only get nastier with repeated interaction. They can take decades of meticulously collected, analyzed, and reviewed scientist and ‘refute‘ it with a silly accusation about the scientist or the person referencing them, a conspiracy theory, or an disreputable source which is nonetheless equally accessible online. Maybe very early on engaging with them helps draw some of the undecideds who are silently observing toward well-supported beliefs, but that almost certainly ceases to be true once your back and forth with that person has become one of your top ten present-moment sources of annoyance and irritability.

Hypocrisy back and forth

Blair King (whose blog bio says he has an “Interdisciplinary PhD in Chemistry and Environmental Studies”) is one of the people who had sent a tweet arguing that only people who use few or no fossil fuels can call for decarbonization and who I linked to this rebuttal post. He subsequently wrote his own response to me. I appreciate the substantive quality of what he wrote, but I still disagree with his conclusions.

To begin with, he says:

The reason the charge of hypocrisy is used so often in this debate is because it represents a valid concern. We live in a world full of hypocrites who will say one thing in public and do another in the privacy of their own lives. The problem is that until you have personally tried to go without fossil fuels you can’t really understand how hard it really will be. So a hypocrite is apt to make claims that are not founded on an understanding of the scope of the challenge, usually that doing so will be relatively easy

Fair comment, but I don’t think I understate the cost, difficulty, or challenge of rebuilding of the global energy system, nor automatically assume people in the future will use as much energy as we do today. Saving the biosphere justifies major lifestyle changes.

He goes on to say: “[t]o suggest that we can make massive global political changes without anyone making individual changes represents magical thinking”. That’s not what I have been saying at all. My point is that it’s wrongheaded to argue that only people who don’t use oil can call for decarbonization and further that efforts at addressing climate change through voluntary individual action are hopeless. People will definitely need to make changes, but they won’t for the most part be voluntary and individual. People don’t individually decide what sort of power plants get built, where our raw materials come from, or how any part of our integrated, technological global society functions. A lot of those systems have actually been set up by larger entities like corporations and governments making choices, but so far that decision making doesn’t reflect a determination to control how much fossil fuel gets burned and thus how much climate change gets imposed on the world. Decarbonization requires large scale political change and the relevant criterion for evaluating our individual behaviour is whether it is promoting or impeding that transition.

Dr. King then goes on to talk about sea level, challenging my prior claim that there are “centuries of experience that the sea level is always at more or less the same height”. Oddly, he then includes a chart that directly supports my point. It shows sea level going back to 1880, and shifting from about 125 mm below the zero axis to about 50 mm above. Compared to what is being induced by us melting the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, the variation he shows is trivial. As described in the sea level rise portion of the U of T divestment brief: “A 2009 Science article examined the relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentrations and ice sheet stability. The paper identifies how the last time global CO2 concentrations were at current levels, global temperatures were between 3 ˚C and 6 ˚C hotter and sea levels were ’25 to 40 meters higher than at present’.” Expected sea level rise resulting from business-as-usual fossil fuel use is of the order of 1 m to much more: well outside the scope of what anatomically modern humans have experienced, and certainly way beyond what our present-day seafront infrastructure was built for.

Dr. King doesn’t provide much of a response to my using David MacKay’s book as evidence that there is enough renewable and fission energy available to more than replace our current fossil fuel use. In the same paragraph, he argues that somehow the creation of hydrogen-powered airliners is a critical missing part of decarbonization. First, I don’t assume that people will or should be able to fly anywhere near as much as they currently do. Second, I make clear in my post that decarbonization is a progressive process that needs to begin with the fossil fuel use that’s easiest to eliminate before moving to the harder stuff. If you want to keep using them, planes and rockets need energy dense fuel so they’re both part of the hardest to shift portion of our emissions. I would be happy to see air travel become much rarer and more expensive, and accept that such a shift is probably a necessary part of our overall decarbonization effort.

On raw materials, Dr. King says:

Petrochemicals represent a treasure trove of stored chemical energy that simply cannot be replaced given our current scientific knowledge and energy systems.

I wasn’t saying that replacing fossil fuels will be easy. I have been consistent in saying it’s one of the greatest challenges humanity has ever faced and it’s far from clear whether we will manage it. That said, there is no basis for saying that fossil fuels are an irreplaceable raw material. If their precursors could be made by plants out of air and sunlight we can do the same thing: quite possibly at a smaller scale than today’s petrochemical-fed industries and at a higher cost, but again I accept that many things in a low carbon future will be rarer and more costly than they are now.

It might affect Dr. King emotionally to know that I have actually done a lot personally to reduce my fossil fuel dependence and contribution to climate change. I have structured my life so that I can do everything essential on foot: easily able to walk to work and to complete necessary errands. At times, I go weeks at a time without even taking public transit. I have never had a driver’s license or owned a car. I last flew in 2007 and the last time I visited my family and hometown was in 2009/10 by Greyhound, which we calculated would be substantially less greenhouse-gas intensive than flying. I live in a single room on a floor shared by three people. I don’t bring this stuff up in response to hypocrisy allegations because I think the whole ‘only someone who doesn’t use fossil fuels can or should call for decarbonization’ is logically unsound. It’s perhaps worth mentioning here in response to Dr. King’s argument that only people who have chosen to greatly reduce their footprint can know what sort of future they are calling for. I think I have such an idea and, if the alternative is imposing the kind of massive threat that we currently are on people in the future and non-human nature, I think those sacrifices and more are not only acceptable but mandatory.

The emotional tone of Dr. Blair’s post is a bit exasperating in that he seems to think that his level of contempt toward the caricature he has developed of me is itself somehow an argument. He and his supporters have gotten into a big huff because I blocked him on twitter. This easily bleeds into the utterly indefensible argument that anyone who you care to talk to has the obligation to listen to you, and to do so on a platform of your choice (brilliantly lampooned by XKCD). As most people now seem to accept, twitter is a pretty awful place made marginally more tolerable by the ability to block people. I routinely encounter climate change deniers and twitter users who don’t even try to respond to substantive arguments but who simply hurl abuse. If I didn’t block them, they would dominate my timeline. Furthermore, I think I have every right to block people whose tweets I don’t want to see: a category that still includes Dr. King and the other twitter users who took a personally interest in the matter of this banning who followed on after him in arguing that blocking him was very, very wrong.

Another basic error in Dr. King’s post shows in the title: “When political scientists do environmental science the results are not always pretty”. The question of what we ought to do in response to climate change certainly requires science to answer. We need to know how much warming will result from how much coal, oil, and gas burning and what consequence a given level of warming will have for humanity and the rest of nature. Actually deciding what to do, however, goes well beyond environmental science to incorporate politics, economics, and most fundamentally ethics. Condemning people in the future for thousands of years to live in a world which we destabilized and degraded through our selfish use of fossil fuels is a profoundly immoral choice. If we’re not going to make it, we need to stop producing new fossil fuel production, transport, export, and use architecture in rich and highly polluting places like Canada and then play a determined and good faith role in spreading climate-safe energy technologies globally. That’s not the “Chinese Communist Party and Russia’s Vladimir Putin” view, as Dr. Blair rather childishly alleges. That’s survival politics in the 21st century. The alternative is not to keep the cozy fossil-dependent world we have now, but see how rich and prosperous we can remain as devastating global change is making large parts of the planet uninhabitable and huge numbers of people start fighting over what’s left.

Search Canada’s Parliamentary record

Tanya Whyte, one of my classmates at U of T, has been integrally involved in setting up Lipad: a searchable online database of everything said in Canada’s Parliament since 1901.

It’s sure to be valuable to everyone from elementary school students researching projects to academic researchers, journalists, and politicians.

There was a segment about it on TVO yesterday: Every Parliamentary Word Ever Spoken.

Incidentally, it seems that perhaps the first reference to climate change in Parliament was Cyril Lloyd Francis (Liberal) in 1974. Admittedly, it doesn’t discuss anthropogenic climate change, but simply the possibility that the climate will revert of its own accord to something less accommodating for humanity. Nonetheless, some of the predicted consequences align with what we now expect from continuing with unfettered fossil fuel burning.

Online romance

I have seen it argued in several places that among heterosexuals romance is a more egalitarian game for women than for men, with most women being able to find a partner, get married, and have children if they prioritize those things, while the least attractive men struggle to find anyone at all who wants them as a partner.

This is substantiated somewhat in a recent Economist briefing about online dating. They note:

Men on Tantan, he says, tend to like about 60% of all the female profiles they see, but women like just 6% of the male ones. The least attractive women receive similar levels of attention to the most attractive men, says Mr Wang; all can find someone reasonably attractive. Men at the bottom of the ladder end up completely matchless. This fits with the work by Ms Bruch and Mr Newman. In general, both men and women concentrate on people that the common opinion of the site rates as 25% more attractive than they are. Even for women not seen as desirable, that can work. For the least desirable men, nothing works. “I don’t expect that final 5% to be that easy to help,” says Mr Wang.

There’s bad news for women as well. Whereas men actually become more attractive as they age from 20 to about 45, women peak in attractiveness at the youngest end of the scale and decline gradually until about 65.

All told they make the case that online romance is a very good thing, giving everyone the opportunity to efficiently contact a wide range of partners, and being especially helpful for people who are looking for relatively rare characteristics. They note that 70% of same-sex relationships now begin online.

Subject-specific databases

One of my main strategies for organizing information is to create databases for subjects of interest. I’m using the term in the broad Wikipedia sense of “an organized collection of data, stored and accessed electronically” here, and it includes everything from a single folder where PDF versions of all the references cited in a particular monograph of mine are stored to financial tracking spreadsheets, records of my weight, and sets of original RAW files for my photoshoots.

So far for my PhD research I have set up a few:

  • A spreadsheet of all accredited Canadian universities, with pertinent information about each divestment campaign I have identified
  • A master timeline for significant events in all campaigns, as well as events relevant to university divestment that happened in other institutions, like municipalities
  • A list of all scholarly work about university divestment campaigns, including which school(s) the authors looked at
  • A spreadsheet with titles and links to common document types at many campaigns, including detailed petitions like our ‘brief’, recommendations from university-appointed committees, and formal justification for university decisions
  • The consent database specified in my ethics protocol, which has also been useful for keeping tabs on people who I’m awaiting responses from
  • (Somewhat embarrassingly) A Google sheet where I manually tally how long each MS Word chapter draft is at midnight each day

For my earlier pipeline resistance project I had started putting together a link chart of relevant organizations and individuals, as well as a glossary and timeline.

I would love to have more formal training (and ideally coding ability) for working with more flexible kinds of databases than spreadsheets. That would be useful for debugging WordPress MySQL issues, but more importantly for more fundamental data manipulation and analysis. I haven’t really coded (aside from HTML and LaTeX) since long-passed days of tinkering with QBASIC and Pascal during the days of my youth in Vancouver. It seems like it would make a lot of sense to learn Python as a means of building and playing around with my own SQL databases…

Security vulnerabilities in computer hardware

Why is trustworthy computer security impossible for ordinary users? In part because the system has multiple levels at which failure can occur, from hardware to operating systems and software.

Spectre and Meltdown show that no matter how careful you are about the operating sytem and software you run you can still be attacked using the underlying hardware. Another bug included at least in some VIA C3 x86 processors has similar ramifications.

These kinds of problems will be much worst with the “Internet of Things”, since bugs like Heartbleed will go unpatched, or even be unpatchable, in a lot of embedded computing applications for consumers.

How this site broke and got back online

The world is now full of technology that needs regular software updates to fix security vulnerabilities as they are publicly reported. This includes all of your computers (including cell phones, smart devices like TVs and sensors, and network equipment like routers). It definitely applies to website content management systems (CMS) like WordPress.

That’s why when WordPress 4.9.4 was released in February, my hosting provider DreamHost implemented my ongoing instruction to automatically update the software.

How WordPress works

For those who don’t know, WordPress stores posts, comments, and all sorts of other things inside a database based on open-source software called MySQL. The other big piece of WordPress is the programming language PHP.

You can think of the MySQL database as where WordPress stores everything it knows, and PHP as the machinery that lets WordPress operate and serve up what you ask for. You might think of websites as being like newspapers: all set up and formatted before you have anything to do with them. Actually, modern websites are created dynamically as your web browser talks to the server and the software on the server makes decisions about what to send you.

For example, consider the web address:

https://www.sindark.com/page/50/

WordPress is set up to show a certain number of posts per page, and then to allow users to scroll back through older pages if they wish.

When your web browser visits https://www.sindark.com/page/50/ some pretty complicated stuff happens on the server side. It works out how many posts there should be on each page, works out what should be on the 50th page, goes into the MySQL database to find the titles and contents of posts, as well as their authors and the number of comments on them, and then it puts together an HTML page which your browser displays.

Exactly how everything looks visually in WordPress depends a lot on themes. These are collections of files that tell WordPress what typefaces to use, where to locate design elements, what to show on each page, and more.

For years this site used a premium paid theme called Thesis. Specifically, it used the latest version of Thesis 1. Sometime around 2012, Thesis 2 was released but, whereas Thesis 1 allowed non-expert website operators to set up the look they wanted with simple menus, in my opinion Thesis 2 doesn’t help all that much in designing a look from scratch and requires essentially a web designer’s capabilities to use.

So, the site was using what was arguably an antiquated theme before the WordPress 4.9.4 update was installed.

How the site broke

For someone as non-expert as me, a big piece of software like WordPress is like a space station. It’s complicated and I don’t begin to understand how most of it works, but I can see when things have gone badly wrong, like because the station modules are full of smoke or, worse, literally nothing.

WordPress themes store information in the MySQL database, such as the location and content of menus.

It’s not that Thesis 1.8.9 (the latest version of Thesis 1) is incompatible with WordPress 4.9.4. My old climate-focused site BuryCoal still uses the theme and upgraded just fine, as did my professional photography site durablepigments.com.

Computers make a lot fewer mistakes than humans, but they do happen. A file you download can have some of its contents incorrectly transmitted, and a processor can perform an operation incorrectly on data. Of course, bugs in software can produce errors too.

First, some kind of error broke the back-end system that allows a WordPress site operator to create new posts, manage comments, change how the site looks, and so on. At that stage, all the visitor-facing parts of the site still looked normal. I just couldn’t manage the site from my end as usual.

I put in some effort trying to fix the site, eventually leading to it going down completely. This highlighted the importance of not allowing my ignorance and DreamHost’s limits to permanently wreck the old database. It had problems that kept the site from working, but it was still a good copy of all my posts and all your comments.

Fixing the site

Job number one was to avoid destroying all the years worth of content on the site. Tinkering with the MySQL database, undertaken by an absolute non-expert, carried a considerable risk.

This site is hosted using the least expensive plan DreamHost provides, which is called shared hosting. The name is a little misleading, because even sites on more expensive plans “share” the computer server where they operate with other sites. Those higher-end plans, however, promise you a certain amount of resources like RAM. On shared hosting, an unknown number of sites are all sharing those resources which, among other things, makes it possible for a big jump in popularity on some totally unrelated site to slow down yours.

Shared hosting has other limitations. Crucially, in this case, DreamHost limits which tools you can use to work with your MySQL databases. Through their website they provide a tool called phpMyAdmin which theoretically lets you do things like modify the content of databases, export their contents, and import contents into a new blank database.

Unfortunately, phpMyAdmin suffers from one huge limitation that crops up commonly in shared hosting. If you ask the server to handle too much data, it gets overwhelmed and gives up. This happens to me constantly when I try to upload photos to the site (indeed, that frustration is a big reason I have been considering leaving shared hosting and/or DreamHost). For a site with as many posts and comments as this one, a lot of what I read online suggested that this could be a problem. One major alternative — copying the database using Secure Shell (SSH) isn’t allowed for shared hosting users.

At the beginning of March, I was struggling with efforts to make a copy of my MySQL database to tinker with without risk of breaking the original.

There’s actually a bigger problem, though. Think for a moment about a typewriter. It has all the letters of the alphabet, punctuation, and probably some special symbols like & and ^. With computers, there are different character encodings which similarly include letters and symbols. A basic one, ASCII from 1963, doesn’t handle much more than the typewriter. It basically includes Arabic numerals 0–9, upper and lowercase letters from the English alphabet, and standard punctuation.

But people use computers in languages other than English which include diacritical marks and characters not used in the English alphabet. People also use special punctuation marks like endashes and emdashes. Partly for these reasons, Unicode was developed in the 1980s, eventually allowing people to use all sorts of characters. WordPress, like many computer systems, now uses a UTF-8 character encoding.

To summarize: WordPress is software that helps you turn content like the text of blog posts into a website people can access. It stores that content in a MySQL database, and the content of that database is encoded using UTF-8.

This next bit is a little tricky and probably won’t have occurred to most web users. Using a system like UTF-8 can be risky in a variety of ways. For example, it contains characters from foreign alphabets which look indistinguishable from English letters but which are known to be different by computers. This could allow somebody, for instance, to register a website that looks visually like google.com but which is actually run by the person who made the site with the non-English characters.

Even when it comes to importing new content into a MySQL database UTF-8 could cause problems, so phpMyAdmin will take certain non-standard characters and replace them with what looks like gibberish on import. So, the Greek letter delta imported into phpMyAdmin becomes Δ and `smart’ quotes, which I hate because of these kinds of problems, but which the Thesis theme uses, turn into “ and â€.

So, even when I succeeded in importing my old database into a new one (to be able to fix the site without risk of breaking the original), the new version contained many thousands of errors. I didn’t want to keep adding to a site full of errors, since I realized it should eventually be possible to get a properly copied database.

More on encoding and the web:

The fix

Anyway, it turned out that the pretty basic steps I had been asking DreamHost to use all along worked fine as soon as I found a customer service representative willing to read through and implement them.

I’m not the first person who had this problem with character encoding and phpMyAdmin. Early on I found a website called Orthogonal Thought which describes the problem and some ways to fix it.

Unfortunately, the fixes are done via SSH, which DreamHost doesn’t allow with MySQL for those on shared hosting. I had to get someone on DreamHost’s side to run these commands.

And so began an agonizing process of submitting customer service ‘tickets’, as requests for help are often called in the world of information technology. In each I tried to explain what the problem was, and in each I directed the tech support person to the post on Orthogonal Thought along with a request that they make a copy of my database with characters intact.

DreamHost tech support person after tech support person then did one of three things: refused to help because they thought this problem was something I should fix (despite how the necessary tools are denied to those on shared hosting), made a copy of the database where the character encoding was still broken, or made a copy of the database that somehow didn’t work with WordPress at all. In March, “John R” gave me the “not our problem” treatment, while the efforts of other tech support personnel yielded a set of unfixed databases through April and May.

I sought help from other forums and expressed my frustration on Twitter, leading to many messages from other web hosting companies explaining how bad DreamHost shared hosting is. In many cases, the people operating Twitter accounts for other hosting companies provided me with tech support via Twitter, trying to find ways to copy the database properly myself.

After months with the site down, in desperation I started tweeting at all the people who describe themselves as DreamHost employees in their Twitter bios like @DreamHostBrett whose Twitter handle is in their newsletters, “WordPress Core Developer” Mike Schroder, and “Product Marketing Manager” Jennifer Kay. None of them responded to me, but this prompted another round of exchanges with the DreamHost tech support Twitter account @DreamHostCare.

Finally, a day ago, one of their tech support people emailed me to say they had made a good copy of the database. Indeed, they finally had.

Aware that other people have had and will have this problem, I asked for the solution they used and was told by email: “Per our manager “I made sure to include –default-character-set=latin1” and changed it to “changed latin1 to utf8″”. They had used one of the fixes from the blog post which I had been sending them all along.

There doesn’t seem to be much appetite at DreamHost for looking into and fixing problems with their customer service. That plus all the site reliability problems that have cropped up due to shared hosting over the years have me still searching for alternatives. Probably, I will test out another hosting provider with a set dedicated to my PhD research and move everything over there once I am confident it’s better.

I hope some people from DreamHost will read this and reflect on what it says about the effectiveness of their tech support. One huge problem is how every time a new ticket is created it seems to get randomly assigned to someone new who doesn’t understand the background to the problem. I have been told there is also no way to elevate the problem to the attention of a manager when it proves beyond the capabilities of the first-line tech support people. Unwillingness or inability to follow simple instructions has been the problem all along here, and I would like to hear that they have some intention of making things better.

If they want to credit me back for the nearly four months my site was down, I would be open to that too.