Month: February 2021

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality The Next Computer

Cloud islands

A lot of what I write is about data custody. It’s a topic that we’re inevitably going to have to debate in the mainstream sometime this decade – I mean prime time conversations on TV. That’ll happen when enough people experience the downsides of having their data reside with just a few large tech companies.

The Custodial Internet
Data Ownership vs Custody for the 21st Century – Part 1

There are many ways things could go wrong with your data in the Cloud.

People could be locked out of their account for some violation of terms of service they weren’t even aware of, or being hacked via social engineering. If it’s their Google account, they lose access to their email, their photos, contacts. This has happened several times. We only rarely hear of it when it happens to someone with a large online following.

One of these companies may have a problem with their data centers. Even though people have access to their accounts, they could find their emails, documents, chats lost.

Companies could suffer an outage. This happens fairly regularly, most recently just a few days ago with the data organisation company Notion. If you can’t access your information at a critical moment – if you need to pull up a receipt number or a scan of a medical prescription – you lose trust in the company you stored your data with.

There are others still:

Governments could ban companies overnight, leaving you unable to access your data – India’s upcoming cryptocurrency law could do just that.

Companies could readjust free limits, leaving you with no choice but to begin paying them to hold your data – the upcoming changes to Google Photos’ free tier is an example.

You could find that there’s no easy way to export your data – if you move from an iPhone to an Android, it’s really hard to transfer the notes from your Notes app to an equivalent Android app.

The ‘cloud’ as the default for our life’s information and documents and photos – this is all very new. Email was probably the first to move to the cloud with Gmail, but even that was just fifteen years ago. That’s barely half a generation.

Each of us needs to spend at least some time thinking about how we’re going to deal with our data when we’re ten, twenty, thirty years older than today. How likely is it we’ll continue use iPhones or whatever they evolve to, to have several terabytes of info in our iCloud Drive or its successor(s), that we’ll keep buying Apple TVs to project our photos on? Ditto with Google. Or {giant trillion dollar corporation}.

We have collectively been exposed to billions of dollars of marketing to keep us from thinking about this, to believe that our data’s safe in the Cloud for now and forever.

To add to that, most of us aren’t ‘tech-savvy’ enough to even know what alternatives exist, much less be able to move to them and use them on an every day basis – why, even if you change your default browser, you’ll be asked if you want to switch back by the browser your computer shipped with (try it – change your default browser to Firefox on Mac OS; Safari will ask you right away if you want to switch back. Microsoft is even worse with Edge)

Finally, neither independent software makers nor open source projects been able to create software that, for the most part, can replace the entire gamut of Cloud-like software that the dominant tech companies provide. For instance, it’s not straightforward to organise your photos using something that’s not Apple Photos or Google Photos or Adobe Lightroom Classic – alternatives exist but they’re not great.

So. It’s not easy and it’s not a solved problem by any means.

Until the Cloud becomes a safe, reliable commodity like the electricity grid or the Internet itself, we’re going to have multiple independent Cloud islands. Apple’s. Google’s. Amazon’s. Microsoft’s. Yandex’s. Dropbox’s. Adobe’s. And a dozen more.

Each are closed worlds, but worlds that hold your life’s work and loves. And your only key, your username and password, isn’t guaranteed to always work.

It’s not sustainable.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Pearse O’Halloran/Unsplash)

Categories
Making Money Online Products and Design Startups

No-code gives founders superpowers

I’m working with a few founders, mostly first-timers, who are going about building the initial experience for their very first customers in an interesting way. Two short tweets:

When it comes to raising capital, being able to demonstrate traction with a few hundred or a few thousand customers quickly is extremely valuable. Ditto when hiring a team or even a technical co-founder.

When it comes to actually going ‘live’, the founder leapfrogs the usual build phase → market phase transition. The founder is both building and marketing simultaneously. It’s a much quicker road to product-market fit.

Finally, when it comes to the actual tech that the founder’s using, a no-code set of tools is typically built by startups building for other small startups. They’re well-thought-out: they make it easy to build visually compelling, data-heavy pages (Notion), they make it easy to ‘glue’ together disparate elements (Zapier, IFTTT), they make it easy to build and engage with an audience (Convertkit), they even make it easy to collect money from that audience (Gumroad, Memberful) – all are things that would otherwise require complicated signup forms, KYC, licensing/commitments, and complicated technical integration.

This tweet captures this dynamic well:

Categories
Privacy and Anonymity Wellness when Always-On

Privacy and the imbalance of power

We explored this in a lot of detail in our three-part series on Alternate Realities, where we dive into how the Internet has made it possible to express safely who we are – often multiple selves – and find others like us.

Alternate realities – Part 1

Privacy, closely related to anonymity, works just like this. We need privacy not necessarily because we are up to something that is criminal or something that causes harm. It is because people differ about what is considered acceptable. The norm for this is always set by those in power. Privacy is the only thing that lets people act in ways considered unacceptable, without incurring censure, ridicule, ostracisation, even harm. Whether by themselves or with people like them.

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Stress and pressure

In my opinion, this is mostly true. In fact, acknowledging this distinction reveals something important:

The distraction and attention suck that’s skillfully designed into social media, games and other apps is hard to shake because it blurs the line between pressure and stress.

On the surface, this addiction seems to be in our control – we got into it, it’s self-inflicted. Most advice advocates deleting apps, turning off notifications, locking our devices away temporarily, setting our screens to black-and-white, turning off 4G, deliberately downgrading our phone – actions that we’re supposed to take and then maintain. Any subsequent failure is personal because the original responsibility was ostensibly ours, and therefore there’s deserved pressure to stick to our de-addiction goal.

But it isn’t really like that is it? Social media and notification addition cause stress that is inflicted upon us by apps, apps that have been designed by companies with enormous resources and incentives to keep us engaged for as long as possible. The battle is unequal and the onus should be as much on these apps to encourage good, healthy behaviour as it is on you and me to reduce screen time.

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality Privacy and Anonymity The Dark Forest of the Internet

Decentralisation and criminal activity

A few days ago we discussed how end to end encryption and decentralisation were an inherently political matter.

Signal and Bitcoin are equally dangerous

We saw how Signal’s end to end encryption meant that security agencies can’t simply compel the Signal nonprofit to unscramble users’ messages or monitor them. With Bitcoin, there is no central authority to target, and no easily traceable identities, unless you’re a beginner who’s left their cryptocurrency in an exchange’s account. But it’s because they’re inherently secure, they’re attractive to criminals and terrorists. That in turn attracts the attention – and ire – of law enforcement agencies. And turns it into a political issue.

This article in fact describes the use of Jabber-based messaging apps by criminals in Russia:

Jabber’s federation means that anyone can open a server and run it as they see fit. That’s enormously attractive to criminals worried about companies cooperating closely with governments, especially in the United States. And some Jabber servers are set up specifically to cater to criminals.

– Why Jabber reigns across the Russian cybercrime underground

This isn’t a matter of forcing wiretapping phones, or compelling Apple to unlock iPhones, or forcing a bank to turn over account statements. If traffic on this server is tunneled through a VPN, even locating what Jabber chat server criminals use is a huge problem for security agencies. And unlike Parler or Facebook groups, one can simply set up another Jabber server.

It’s the same reason that sites on the Tor network that sell and list torrents and other contraband are so resilient to being taken down.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Ricardo Gomez Angel/Unsplash)

Categories
Life Design Making Money Online Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

The Precariat and today’s tech age

The precariat is a neologism for a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term is a portmanteau merging precarious with proletariat.

Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labour to live, members of the precariat are only partially involved in labour and must undertake extensive unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings. Classic examples of such unpaid activities include continually having to search for work (including preparing for and attending job interviews), as well as being expected to be perpetually responsive to calls for “gig” work (yet without being paid an actual wage for being “on call”).

The hallmark of the precariat class is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence.

– Precariat, Wikipedia.

We usually ascribe the ability of technology-first companies to disrupt existing industries to the fact that tech brings the marginal costs to service customers down to nearly zero. Tech-first companies can ‘scale’, get things done more efficiently: cheaper, faster, with fewer errors and people.

Another, darker side of many types of technology companies is that they externalise costs that were usually absorbed by more traditional companies.

These costs are often borne by employees themselves. This is more obvious in the ‘gig’ economy, where companies have fought hard to have their drivers, delivery persons and other roles classified as contractors so they wouldn’t be required by law to receive all the benefits employees were due. But this is also evident at several other tech companies, especially those that have moved to remote work (or were remote-first to begin with). Many companies have employees pay for their own computers, phone and equipment, internet, power, and their own home office while saving on rent, IT and utilities.

The precariat isn’t a consequence of the Tech age or tech companies. Its emergence and persistence are more than anything the symptoms of an inadequate welfare system which itself, as Wikipedia article suggests, is a result of “neoliberal capitalism”.

But it is also true that the very things that make some types of technology companies efficient and innovative are those that create precarious employment.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Carl Campbell/Unsplash)

Categories
Data Custody Decentralisation and Neutrality Personal Finance Privacy and Anonymity Real-World Crypto The Dark Forest of the Internet

Dalio on Bitcoin – store of value and its threat to governments

Some extracts from the hedge fund manager Ray Dalio’s public note about Bitcoin.

I believe Bitcoin is one hell of an invention. To have invented a new type of money via a system that is programmed into a computer and that has worked for around 10 years and is rapidly gaining popularity as both a type of money and a storehold of wealth is an amazing accomplishment.

Because of what is going on in the world, besides there being a growing need for money or storehold of wealth assets that are limited in supply, there is also a growing need for assets that can be privately held. Because there aren’t many of these gold-like storehold of wealth assets that can be held in privacy and because the sizes of their markets are relatively small, there exists the possibility that Bitcoin and its competitors can fill that growing need.

He does make a counter-argument against supply: that while Bitcoin itself is limited, there is no limit to the number of cryptocurrencies that can be created in the same manner. As untamperable and un-shut-down-able as Bitcoin.

Speaking of untamperable, Dalio recognises that the biggest threat to Bitcoin is not an attack on the chain itself, but in governments restricting access to it in the first place.

I suspect that Bitcoin’s biggest risk is being successful, because if it’s successful, the government will try to kill it and they have a lot of power to succeed… for good logical reasons governments wanted control over money and they protected their abilities to have the only monies and credit within their borders. When I a) put myself in the shoes of government officials, b) see their actions, and c) hear what they say, it is hard for me to imagine that they would allow Bitcoin (or gold) to be an obviously better choice than the money and credit that they are producing.

This is potentially what could happen in India. While the government recognises – rightly – that cryptocurrency isn’t clearly either a currency or an asset and therefore doesn’t fit into existing regulatory frameworks, its approach to it seems to be one of antipathy. A bill that may be tabled and discussed in the coming weeks is described in the current parliamentary session agenda as one that intends to

… create a facilitative (sic) framework for creation of the official digital currency to be issued by the Reserve Bank of India. The Bill also seems to prohibit all private cryptocurrencies in India, however (sic) it allows for certain exceptions to promote the underlying technology of cryptocurrency and its uses.

Categories
Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design

On the internet, there’s no such thing as lost forever

Spoonbill snapshots and tracks the changes people make to their Twitter bios, displaying those changes as a timeline. It’s a view into how people express their identity. Especially when that identity needs to be compressed into a couple hundred characters. This article is a good overview of both the service and its implications, using lots of examples such as this one:

The writer says

Spoonbill not only satisfies our tendency for online lurking, but pushes it into voyeur territory; surfacing what’s meant to be hidden is intimate in a way that scrolling a timeline isn’t.

The app isn’t doing anything special in terms of data access. This is an official Twitter API, and it’s how alternative Twitter clients work. What’s special is that it places previously scattered, obfuscated data side by side. That’s what creeps people out.

This is another aspect of privacy isn’t it. We think of it primarily as ‘someone is reading what I type or browse’. It is, but the other aspect is also analysis of data you reasonably expect to be ‘in the wind’.

Say you shopped locally at a grocer’s, a pharmacist’s, a greengrocer’s, your local pub, your barber, and so on. You know that each of them knows what you’re buying. Now imagine they pooled together their receipts and ran a pivot table on them. And now when you visit the greengrocer, (s)he says ‘You bought antacid on Monday? Don’t buy your oranges and kiwis; they might exacerbate it. Here’s some bananas.’ and now you’re freaked out.

Essentially, be aware that most things you put out on the internet that can be seen publicly can also be catalogued, put together and analysed. Just like Spoonbill did. Just because you change something does not mean the previous version is lost forever – no such thing.

Categories
Decentralisation and Neutrality The Next Computer

The physical limits of software and the Internet

There’s a worldwide shortage of semiconductor chips. Across industries. Nearly every device we own today has chips, and often dozens of them. We think of chips as essentially infinite in number. But:

Industry executives also blame excessive stockpiling, which began over the summer when Huawei Technologies Co. — a major smartphone and networking gear maker — began hoarding components to ensure its survival from crippling U.S. sanctions… Rivals including Apple, worried about their own caches, responded in kind… “There’s a chip stockpiling arms race,”

All that has dried up the spigot for smaller-volume buyers such as the makers of cars and gaming consoles: Nintendo Co., Sony and Microsoft Corp. have struggled to make enough Switches, PlayStations and Xboxes for about a year… [a] growing chorus of industry leaders warning in recent weeks they can’t get enough chips to make their products. Carmakers appear in direst straits and have spurred the U.S. and German governments to come to their aid

– “Chip Shortage Spirals Beyond Cars to Phones and Consoles”

We discuss the centralisation of the Internet on this site. This article shows that even the other end of the stack – chips, the building blocks of hardware, are centralised.

It also shows that while we aren’t wrong in thinking of the Internet and software in general as infinite, there are real physical constraints for the hardware that it all runs on.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: @awmleer/Unsplash)

Categories
Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

A no-bullshit look at Facebook’s and Apple’s privacy propositions – Part 2

(Part 1 – How Facebook’s using guilt to get people to voluntarily opt out of Apple’s privacy protections)

There is a kernel of truth in Facebook’s argument that “with the upcoming iOS 14 changes, many small businesses will no longer be able to reach their customers with targeted ads”. Targeted ads work better than generic, non-targeted ones. And facebook is able to provide user targeting like no other for two reasons: because people share very personal information on Facebook, and because outside of that, Facebook aggressively collects information on people through their activities outside of Facebook, both via businesses who themselves install Facebook tracking to understand their customers better and through other companies they call “Audience Data Providers“

However, Facebook’s ad targeting can be used by businesses large and small. A small burger joint in a city in theory could use Facebook’s sharp targeting to reach its type of customers in its catchment area. But a nationwide burger chain or its franchisee can use the same targeting software to drive people to its store instead, often outspending the independent small business. Facebook makes no promises to small businesses that this is only about them.

It follows that should a person agree to allow themselves to be tracked, Facebook also makes no claim to its users that that information will only be used by small businesses. Just like Facebook’s ad software is available to businesses large and small, user data once collected is also available to any company with a Facebook ad account.

So while Facebook’s ability to track people in such detail doesn’t really give small businesses any sort of sustainable competitive advantage, it doesn’t give its users any choice about trading their data to support an ostensibly noble cause.

Finally, Facebook’s argument holds weight only because of its dominant position in the online ad business, alongside Google. A small ad network would hardly be taken seriously if it claimed to stand up for small businesses nationwide, leave along globally. It’s disingenuous for Facebook to accuse Apple of using its dominant position to push its own agenda while it does the exact same thing. 

Apple’s position on privacy is simple. As one of its ads says, “What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone”. [1] It is a commitment one party makes to another, no one else, and that party proves it by aligning its interests to the others’.

Facebook’s (opposite) position on privacy is more messy and conflicted. It urges one party (its users) to make sacrifices (allow data tracking) in order to benefit a third party (small businesses) whose thriving only it (Facebook) can ensure. That does not sound like a healthy relationship between any of the parties

As we’ve discussed many times on this site, in the Internet we’ve ended up building, the question of privacy is one of data custody – who you trust with your data. And in that regard, I’d much rather cast my lot with Apple that with Facebook.

End note: One could argue that Google’s stance on privacy, while being the opposite the opposite of Apple’s, is also straightforward: give me data, I’ll make your life dramatically better. Search, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Photos, even the much-missed Google Reader. I’d trust Google with my data way before I trust Facebook.

[1] This is in the context of how Apple’s AI to categorise photos and other data works on-device instead of first sending all data to some central server.