#technology – @protoslacker on Tumblr

Bop Spotter is a project by technologist Riley Walz in which he has hidden an Android phone in a box on a pole, rigged it to be solar powered, and has set it to record audio and periodically sends it to Shazam’s API to determine which songs people are playing in public. Walz describes it as ShotSpotter, but for music.

Jason Koebler at 404 Media. Hidden ‘BopSpotter’ Microphone Is Constantly Surveilling San Francisco for Good Music

“This is culture surveillance. No one notices, no one consents. But it's not about catching criminals. It's about catching vibes."

I saw this by way of Slashdot which is a wonderfulWeb institution.

#music #technology #surveillance

protoslacker

Spyware has always been a highly lucrative and increasingly prominent business in Israel. Citizen Lab has spent years uncovering sophisticated spyware from Israeli companies like NSO, which contracts with governments with a long history of imprisoning, murdering and silencing dissidents and surveilling civil society organizations, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE. These governments normalize relations with Israel largely to facilitate access to such technologies, which they then deploy to oppress their own citizens.

Esra’a Al Shafel and Falastine Saleh in TOR Blog. Surveillance as a Service: The Global Impact of Israeli “Defense” Technologies on Privacy and Human Rights

#billionaires #fascisim #technology #cyberwar #israel

protoslacker

Of course, it’s not just sociotechnical systems that are degrading. So too is our collective social fabric. And, with it, the mental health of young people. Last month, Crisis Text Line published some of its latest data about depression and suicide alongside what CTL is hearing from young people about what they need to thrive. (Hint: banning technology is not their top priority.) Young people are literally dying due to a lack of opportunities for social connection. This should break your heart. Teens are feeling isolated and alone. (My research consistently showed that this is why they turn to technology in the first place.) It’s also scary to see the lack of access to community resources. Communities are degrading. And there’s no quick technical fix.

danah boyd at apophenia. Degradation, Legitimacy Threats, and Isolation

New research on census, youth, mental health; a recent talk and an upcoming one

The sentence: "This should break your hearts." when talking about young people is so important to me. Something so central to being human too often is utterly neglected.

The Fireside Chat where Tressie McMillan Cottom, Janet Vertesi, and danah boyd on tech & society issues is very good.

#technology #communities #books #art #sports #parks #care

protoslacker

The future of technological progress, Rushkoff argues, is now an experimental endgame in which the wealthiest and most powerful race to find the escape hatch; it is less about raising up humanity than rising above the rest of us.

Jared Marcel Pollen in The Nation. Why Billionaires Are Obsessed With the Apocalypse

In Survival of the Richest, Douglas Rushkoff gets to the bottom of the tech oligarchy’s fixation on protecting themselves from the end times.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

In his review Pollen cited Neil Postman in explaing what Rushkoff refers to as "The Mindset." That mention got me reading an article by Postman from 1974. Postman asks what it would take to move schooling in a more humae and sensible direction? I would like to see that sort of question asked quite broadly.

#billionaires #future #fascism #book #technology

protoslacker

But the Hawk is not a substitute for existing wind turbines. Kitepower believes that the Hawk is ideal for temporary events or users removed from the main grid: farms, construction sites, music festivals, humanitarian efforts, island communities. The entire system fits into a standard shipping container, and Kitepower says assembly at a new site takes less than 24 hours. Today, these locations might rely on a diesel generator—whose logistical demands make the Hawk cost-competitive, according to Schmehl.

Rahul Rao in IEEE Spectrum. Flying Kites Deliver Container-Size Power Generation

Automated wind-energy system brings portable renewables off-grid

#technology #wind #island communities #energy

protoslacker

We are already living in a world that is drowning in misinformation, it's about to get worse. That's the really scary thing.

Danielle Allen quoted in areport by Alexi Cohan at GBHNews. Harvard professor says government should pause 'scary' development of artificial intelligence

#science #technology #ethics #democracy #artificial intelligence

protoslacker

Jewish authorities accept writing as a viable mode of transmission rather than lose knowledge to the inconsistencies of human memory. Yet even while accepting this technological shift, they make sure to place value on the human transmission that’s being at least partially replaced by this change. We can negotiate a non-apocalyptic future of living with AI only by having open and honest conversations about this tension.

Sara Wolkenfeld at Religion Dispatches. How An Ancient Story Of Rennegade Rabbis Caught With Black Market Technology Can Help Us Navigate ChatGPT's Apocalyptic Aura

#chatgpt #human connection #technology

protoslacker

IF YOU TAKE PICTURES AT A PROTEST: DO NOT FORGET TO SCREENSHOT THE PICTURE AND POST THE SCREENSHOT INSTEAD. IT WIPES THE METADATA SO THEY CANT LOOK BACK AT THE PICTURES YOU POSTED AND ARREST YOU FOR BEING THERE. BY WIPING THE METADATA YOU ESSENTIALLY ERASE TIES TO YOUR CAMERA+

— pj ✬ (@noloveformylove) May 31, 2020

#internet #photography #technology

protoslacker

Expiration. As in other major emergencies in the past, there is a hazard that the data surveillance infrastructure we build to contain COVID-19 may long outlive the crisis it was intended to address. The government and its corporate cooperators must roll back any invasive programs created in the name of public health after crisis has been contained.

Matthew Guariglia and Adam Scgwartz at Electronic Frontier Foundation. Protecting Civil Liberties During a Public Health Crisis

#surveillance #technology #health #covid19

protoslacker

You have to watch the line, not the obstacles. What’s true in extreme sports is also true in politics and planetary coordination for the 21st century. If you look at the obstacles, you hit them. If you look beyond the obstacles to where you’re going, you have a chance of getting there.

Quinn Norton at Emptywheel. NEW YEARS DAY: THINGS I HAVE LEARNED IN THE LAST TEN YEARS

“May you come by this knowledge easier than I did.”

#politics #technology #life #learning

protoslacker

Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On

medium.com|danah boyd

Last night, I was honored by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Alongside Oakland Privacy and William Gibson, I received a 2019 Barlow/Pioneer Award. I was asked to give a speech. As I reflected on what got me to this place, I realized I needed to reckon with how I have benefited from men whose actions have helped uphold a patriarchal system that has hurt so many people. I needed to face my past in order to find a way to create space to move forward.

This is the speech I gave last night. I hope sharing it can help others who are struggling to make sense of current events.

#patriarchy #tech #end violence against women and girls #technology #morals #ethics #values

protoslacker

The Book of Why provides a splendid overview of the state of the art in causal analysis. It forcefully argues that developing well-supported causal hypotheses about the world is both essential and difficult. Difficult, because causal conclusions do not flow from observed statistical regularities alone, no matter how big the data set. Rather, we must use all our clues and imagination to create plausible causal models, and then analyze those models to see whether, and how, they can be tested by data. Just crunching more numbers is not the royal road to causal insight.

Tim Maudlin in the Boston Review. The Why of the World

Allured by the promise of Big Data, science has shortchanged causal explanation in favor of data-driven prediction. But ultimately we must ask why.

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect

#book #science #technology #philosophy #epistemology

protoslacker

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A major telecommunications outage hit the Netherlands on Monday, crippling ambulance and emergency services numbers and prompting the police to send all duty officers onto the streets.

Reuters. Dutch emergency services hit by major telecoms outage

#technology #internet #telecom

protoslacker

It seems this transformation, from physical object to vector of data, is a general and oft-repeated process in the history of technology, where new inventions begin in an early experimental phase in which they are treated and behave as singular individual things, but then evolve into vectors in a diffuse and regimented system as the technology advances and becomes standardised. In the early history of aviation, airplanes were just airplanes, and each time a plane landed or crashed was a singular event. Today, I am told by airline-industry insiders, if you are a billionaire interested in starting your own airline, it is far easier to procure leases for actual physical airplanes, than it is to obtain approval for a new flight route. Making the individual thing fly is not a problem; inserting it into the system of flight, getting its data relayed to the ATC towers and to flightaware.com, is.

Justin Erik Halldór Smith. It's All Over

Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason

#technology #algorithm #ethics #history #book

protoslacker

Our national security depends on the security of our technologies. Demanding that technology companies add backdoors to computers and communications systems puts us all at risk. We need to understand that these systems are too critical to our society and -- now that they can affect the world in a direct physical manner -- affect our lives and property as well.

Bruce Schneier in Schneier on Security. Five-Eyes Intelligence Services Choose Surveillance Over Security

#technology #surveillance #security #Internet #defense

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There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

Douglas Rushkoff in Future Human at Medium. Survival of the Richest

The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind

Team Human

#technology #capitalism #plutocracy #the rich #neoliberalism #book

protoslacker

I don’t have the solutions, but if we want to come back to the question of why we exist, we at this point can say we certainly don’t exist to do routine work. We perhaps exist to create. We perhaps exist to love. And if we want to create, let’s create new types of jobs that people can be employed in. Let’s create new ways in which countries can work together. If we think we exist to love, let’s first think how we can love the people who will be disadvantaged.

Kai-Fu Lee at Edge. We Are Here To Create

#internet #world society #AI #technology #inequality