Reality 2.0

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Dan Miller of Opus Research about the future of Speech and AI.

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Special Guest: Dan Miller.

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• Dan Miller, Author at — Dan Miller has over 25 years experience in marketing, business development and corporate strategy for telecom service providers, computer makers and application software developers. Dan founded Opus Research in 1985 and helped define the Conversational Commerce marketplace by authoring scores of reports, advisories and newsletters addressing business opportunities that reside where automated speech leverages Web services, mobility and enterprise software infrastructure.
• Eze Lanza: "Have you heard of https://you.…" - Mastodon Canada — Have you heard of https://you.com ? The search engine added #chatGTP style chatbot. It's not perfect but these are examples of what the future of AI could look like.
• You.com | The AI Search Engine You Control
• Say Goodbye to CCaaS: How The Conversational Cloud Will Evolve in 2022 - — Here are the trends that  should inform enterprise investment and deployment of Conversational AI, Cloud-based Contact Centers and Intelligent Assistance in the coming year.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk about Facebook's recent Irish problems, Google's Performance Max ad product, and digress into discussing the Houston food scene as we welcome back Reality 2.0 for 2023.

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• Data Protection Commission tries to make victory of its U-turn on Facebook and Instagram – The Irish Times — Watchdog forced to toughen its decision on data protection complaint after European intervention
• Data Protection Commission announces conclusion of two inquiries into Meta Ireland | 04/01/2023 | Data Protection Commission — The Data Protection Commission (DPC) has today announced the conclusion of two inquiries into the data processing operations of Meta Platforms Ireland Limited (“Meta Ireland”) in connection with the delivery of its Facebook and Instagram services. (Meta Ireland was previously known as Facebook Ireland Limited).
• Inside Google’s Ad Display Network Black Box: Porn, Piracy, Fraud — ProPublica — Google’s ad business hides nearly all publishers it works with and where billions of ad dollars flow. We uncovered a network containing manga piracy, porn, fraud and disinformation.
• Meet Performance Max, The Blackest Black Box Of All Google Ad Products | AdExchanger — Lost in the Sturm und Drang of Q4 (Q for quarantine) 2020, Google introduced a beta program called Performance Max, its first ad product spanning all Google-owned media.
• GitHub - dmarti/CAPCA: California Advertising Placements on Criminal Activity Act
• LastPass Data Breach: It’s Time to Ditch This Password Manager | WIRED — The password manager’s most recent data breach is so concerning, users need to take immediate steps to protect themselves.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Ezequiel Lanza and Tony Mongkolsmai about ChatGPT, generative AI, and open source software.

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Special Guests: Ezequiel Lanza and Tony Mongkolsmai.

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• Attention is All You Need – Google Research — The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.0 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.
• fka/awesome-chatgpt-prompts · Datasets at Hugging Face
• Experts Warn ChatGPT Could Democratize Cybercrime - Infosecurity Magazine — A wildly popular new AI bot could be used by would-be cyber-criminals to teach them how to craft attacks and even write ransomware, security experts have warned.
• ChatGPT

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, and Shawn have fun with ChatGPT, rant about email disasters, and chat about Apple's new encrypted backups.

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Special Guest: Shawn Powers.

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• ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue — We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests. ChatGPT is a sibling model to InstructGPT, which is trained to follow an instruction in a prompt and provide a detailed response.
• AI tells me if AI will write novels. - vlogbrothers on YouTube — In which a text-generation AI promises John that of course it won't replace him.
• Apple is adding end-to-end encryption to iCloud backups - The Verge — / Apple is expanding its iCloud security features and introducing support for security keys for two-factor authentication.
• Rackspace confirms ransomware behind days-long email outage • The Register — UPDATED Rackspace has admitted a ransomware infection was to blame for the days-long email outage that disrupted services for customers.  The security snafu took down some of Rackspace's hosted Microsoft Exchange services on Friday afternoon. In its most recent update, posted at 0826 Eastern Time on Tuesday, Rackspace said it has now "determined this suspicious activity was the result of a ransomware incident," and has hired a "leading cyber defense firm to investigate."

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin about hardware supply chains, building the only USA-made mobile phone, trust, open standards, and much more.

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Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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• Why The U.S. Fell Behind In Phone Manufacturing - YouTube
• JMP: Your phone number on every device
• IIW
• Reality 2.0 on Mastodon
• Explore - Texas Observer Social

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Shawn Powers, and Kyle Rankin discuss the ups, downs, and how-tos of using Mastodon amid Twitter's recent instability.

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Special Guests: Kyle Rankin and Shawn Powers.

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• Does Twitter Have Any Employees Left Who Remember That The Company Is Under A Strict Consent Decree With The FTC? | Techdirt — Yesterday I tweeted out a question about whether or not there was anyone left at Twitter who remembered that the company was under a pretty strict FTC consent decree
• Twitter stories at Techdirt.
• A fake tweet sparked panic at Eli Lilly and may have cost Twitter millions — The nine-word tweet was sent Thursday afternoon from an account using the name and logo of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co., and it immediately attracted a giant response: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”
• Day #43 - Mastodon Verification, with Wordpress! - 90 Days of Mayhem!
• Debirdify — This website allows you to search the people you follow on Twitter for possible Mastodon/Fediverse accounts. To use it, you need to click the button below and allow it to communicate with Twitter on your behalf. This is ‘read-only’: we cannot modify anything (write Tweets etc).
• Fedi.Directory — A small human-curated selection of interesting accounts to help you get started, or just to spice up your timeline.

Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls, and Petros Koutoupis talk digital wallets and current events.

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Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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• The digital wallet will be the biggest instrument of personal agency since the browser—but only if we make it ours — Apple and Google already have a wallet in your phone. Other developers want an open way to build alternatives. But the missing player in this is us. Let's step up.
• Podcasts Killed the Radio Star - by Katherine Druckman — As many of our listeners already know, podcasting originated with an idea to add enclosures to an RSS feed. After much lobbying from former MTV personality Adam Curry, Dave Winer, creator of the RSS format, famously updated RSS version 0.92 in 2001 with the addition of an tag, and while it took a few years to catch on with widespread adoption thanks largely to the Apple iPod, the rest, as they say, is history.
• VRM Day 2022b Tickets, Mon, Nov 14, 2022 at 9:00 AM | Eventbrite — This VRM Day will also host the November salon in the Ostrom Workshop's Beyond the Web series, hosted by Doc Searls and starring Roger McNamee. Respected for decades as an investor, musician, tech guru, philanthropist, and mentor to entrepreneurs—most notably Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook—Roger has made big waves recently with his bestselling book, Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
• Elon Musk’s Twitter Layoffs Are Brewing Up a Perfect Storm for the Midterms | Vanity Fair — Misinformation experts are sounding alarms as the tech billionaire sets out to reportedly axe half the company’s workforce and blow up its blue-check verification system ahead of Election Day. “Comms has gone dark,” one reporter tweeted. “To say I’m worried for next week’s election doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
• IIW — The Internet Identity Workshop has been finding, probing and solving identity issues twice every year since 2005. We meet in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Every IIW moves topics, code and projects downfield. Name an identity topic and it’s likely that more substantial discussion and work has been done at IIW than any other conference!
• EmanciPay - Project VRM — Simply put, Emancipay makes it easy for anybody to pay (or offer to pay) — as much as they like however they like for whatever they like on their own terms — or at least to start with that full set of options, and to work out differences with sellers easily and with minimal friction.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls speculate about Twitter's future and discuss the evolution of audience engagement.

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• Things To Never Say To Someone Who Owns A Tesla — Unless you’d like to get run over by a rich, angry tech bro with a chip on their shoulder, you might want to tread lightly when asking a Tesla driver about their car. Here are things you should never say to someone who owns a Tesla.
• Reality 2.0 Episode 109: From Twitter to the Fediverse with Mastodon — Katherine Druckman talks to Shawn Powers and Kyle Rankin about moving from Twitter to the Fediverse using Mastodon, including how to choose a server and find your niche.
• Reality 2.0 Episode 110: More on Mastodon — Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls, and Shawn Powers have far too much fun continuing the conversation about Mastodon and the fediverse, with a dose of photography.
• Twitter is about to be Musked - Burningbird — The Musk buyout of Twitter is all but done, and even before the blo…ink dried on the contracts, the scent of Musk permeates the social service.

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, and Shawn Powers talk communication breakdown in social media, its impact on our culture, and what technical solutions may exist.

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Special Guest: Shawn Powers.

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• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid - The Atlantic — What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said: Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech. The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.
• Democracy in the Next Cycle of History | Jonathan Haidt - YouTube — Jonathan Haidt sees that we have entered a social-psychological phase change that was initiated in 02009 when social media platforms introduced several fateful innovations that changed the course of our society and disintegrated our consensus on reality. In this conversation with Long Now co-founders Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, Haidt presses on questions of technological optimism, morality vs ethics, teen mental health, possible platform tweaks that could reduce the damage and just how long this next cycle of history could last. Prompted by Haidt's piece on Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, this discussion offers a behind the scenes look at the thinking going into Haidt's next book; release slated for the fall of 02023.

When Doc is away, Katherine and Shawn Powers play! (With Static HTML generators) Katherine and Shawn talk about Hugo, a static site generator, WordPress, and the content creator life.

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Special Guest: Shawn Powers.

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• The world’s fastest framework for building websites | Hugo — Hugo is one of the most popular open-source static site generators. With its amazing speed and flexibility, Hugo makes building websites fun again.
• Shawn Powers on Twitter: "I’ve fallen in NerdLove with @GoHugoIO, and it’s all @KatherineD’s fault. The https://t.co/ihNrCjqxrb website is now generated with Hugo… and it’s glorious. I have SO much to learn, but it’s really super awesome-sauce wonderful." / Twitter
• shawnp0wers
• techno-tim/littlelink-server: A lightweight, open source, and self-hosted alternative to linktree in a Docker container! — LittleLink-Server is based on the great work from littlelink, a lightweight DIY alternative to services like Linktree and many.link. LittleLink and LittleLink-Server is built using Skeleton, a dead simple, responsive boilerplate—we just stripped out some additional code you wouldn't need and added in branded styles for popular services. 😊
• Git-based CMS for Hugo, Next.js, Gatsby, Jekyll, Nuxt.js, Hexo, Eleventy, Docusaurus, Gridsome and more. | Forestry.io — Give your editors the power of Git. Create, edit, and instant preview Markdown-based sites.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Shawn Powers about religion, politics, tribalism, sexism, and viral blog posts.

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• Green Hair, Mustard Seeds, and Me - The Brain of Shawn — It’s been a couple weeks now, and my green hair is starting to fade. My light brown roots are peeking through, and since I don’t go many places, most people who will see me have seen me. And while I tweeted a short explanation, I haven’t gotten too detailed when explaining why my hair is green. Mostly because I was (am) angry, and it was hard to talk about it without being mean. And that rationale is sorta the whole point.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk about Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit targeting the Internet Archive that aims to prevent them from lending ebooks.

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• Hachette v. Internet Archive | Electronic Frontier Foundation — The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), with co-counsel Durie Tangri, is defending  the Internet Archive against a lawsuit that threatens its Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program.
• What Does the Blockbuster Antitrust Trial Against Penguin Random House Mean for the Future of Libraries? - Internet Archive Blogs — The publishing industry is large and powerful—by some accounts, it generates nearly $100 billion in revenue worldwide. The United States Department of Justice has accused big publishers of abusing that power in the past, by conspiring with each other to raise the price of e-books. More recently, Penguin Random House has been in the legal crosshairs for an alleged abuse of power, as the Justice Department sues to stop its proposed (and allegedly anticompetitive) acquisition of Simon & Schuster. 
• Internet Archive Opposes Publishers in Federal Lawsuit - Internet Archive Blogs — On Friday, September 2, we filed a brief in opposition to the four publishers that sued Internet Archive in June 2020: Hachette Book Group, Harper Collins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House. This is the second of three briefs from us that will help the Court decide the case.
• The Future of Online Lending: A Discussion of Controlled Digital Lending and Hachette with the Internet Archive | Berkman Klein Center — The Internet Archive offers Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), where it lends digital copies of books to patrons — but ensures that the number of books owned is equal to the number loaned. Through the Open Library, the Internet Archive aims to “make all the published works of humankind available to everyone in the world.”
• Mike Masnick on Twitter: "Shit. I *wish* the vaccine came with 5G internet access..." / Twitter

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman discuss Apple's latest updates, the end of an era, neighborhoods, and more.

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• Apple Events - Apple
• Apple's Passkey Replaces Passwords With iPhone and Mac Authentication | WIRED — Apple’s iOS 16 and macOS Ventura will introduce passwordless login for apps and websites. It’s only the beginning.

Katherine Druckman talks to Doc Searls about his Decentralized Web Camp experience.

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• DWeb Camp — Set in the beautiful redwoods near the Mendocino coast of California, DWeb Camp is a five-day retreat for builders and dreamers, to gather in nature to tackle the real world challenges facing the web and to co-create the decentralized technologies of the future.
• DWeb Camp — Set in the beautiful redwoods near the Mendocino coast of California, DWeb Camp is a five-day retreat for builders and dreamers, to gather in nature to tackle the real world challenges facing the web and to co-create the decentralized technologies of the future.

Katherine Druckman talks to Shawn Powers about home automation using a combination of open source software and proprietary devices using Home Assistant.

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Special Guest: Shawn Powers.

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• Home Assistant — Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.
• Ubiquiti - Rethinking IT — A true multi-application network operating system
• Nabu Casa — We successfully crowdfunded Home Assistant Yellow, the easiest way to get started with Home Assistant.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Adrian Gropper, CTO of Patient Privacy Rights, about health data and human rights, delegating patient agency, and health data standards.

Special Guest: Adrian Gropper.

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• Patient Privacy Rights — Patient Privacy Rights’ purpose is to honor and empower the individual’s right to privacy through personal control of health information wherever such information is collected and used. We educate, collaborate and partner with people to ensure privacy in law, policy, technology, and maximize the benefits from the use of personal health information with consent.
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Zuboff, Shoshana: 9781610395694: Amazon.com: Books — The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin of Purism about the data cars collect, where it goes, and how we’re really just driving around in a smart phone that we don’t even own.

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Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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• Who Is Collecting Data from Your Car? – The Markup — A firehose of sensitive data from your vehicle is flowing to a group of companies you’ve probably never heard of
• I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score. Now You Can Get Yours, Too. - The New York Times — Little-known companies are amassing your data — like food orders and Airbnb messages — and selling the analysis to clients. Here’s how to get a copy of what they have on you.
• Locked In A Remote Control Car – Purism — It’s rare to find modern technology that’s actually on your side. For the most part when technology advances today, new features are less for your benefit, and more to benefit the company that made them.
• Tesla Removes About 80 Miles Of Customer's Available Battery Capacity Via Software Restriction — Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) has some of the most advanced cars on the planet. Software updates allow new features to be added for free, such as better performance or enhanced safety features. But having a car that is dominated by software can have its drawbacks, too.
• Ford, GM Push Harder to Stop New Car Flipping and Price Gouging — Some dealers are overpricing such popular cars and trucks as the Ford F-150 Lightning and Chevy Corvette Z06, but the automakers are cracking down.
• In-car monitoring: Surveillance tech will make your car less private - CNET — Everything you do in your car may soon be noticed.
• How your car is spying on you | Daily Mail Online — Experts have revealed the myriad ways that your car can spy on your personal habits.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls celebrate Doc's birthday and chat about Amazon acquisitions and privacy legislation.

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Katherine Druckman talks to Petros Koutoupis about maintaining RapidDisk, his open source RAM disk software.

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Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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• GitHub - pkoutoupis/rapiddisk: An Advanced Linux RAM Drive and Caching kernel modules. Dynamically allocate RAM as block devices. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives. Access those drives locally or export those volumes across an NVMe Target network. — An Advanced Linux RAM Drive and Caching kernel modules. Dynamically allocate RAM as block devices. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives. Access those drives locally or export those volumes across an NVMe Target network.
• The Linux RAM Disk — The RAM disk has its significant advantages alongside some major disadvantages and despite those disadvantages, it still hasn't prevented it from being used in full production environments to even the local desktop; where it is often used as a temporary cache for various services and applications. The idea is nothing new and has been around for at least a few decades but as we increase our computing power and are capable of utilizing larger amounts of system memory, the concept becomes much more intriguing.
• RAM Drive Acceleration » ADMIN Magazine — Enable and share performant block devices across a network of compute nodes with the RapidDisk kernel RAM drive module.
• Jeff Geerling on Twitter: "lol for one of my #opensource projects, an #infosec employee at @EpicGames emailed me this questionnaire with over 100 questions and wants me to fill it out so *they* can use my freely available open source software. No. https://t.co/IcRgh12LWc" / Twitter

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Zach Kaplan, CEO of Inventables, about design and fabrication with 3D carving, maker culture, and the history of Inventables.

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Special Guest: Zach Kaplan.

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• Projects | Inventables
• Creating the First Usable Mouse | ideo.com — In 1980, Apple asked IDEO to develop a mouse for their radical new computer, the Lisa. Previous attempts at mouse design, by Douglas Englebart and Xerox PARC, yielded results that were too expensive and hard to make. The Apple mouse needed to be more reliable and less than 10 percent of the cost of the earlier versions.
• x-carve - Search Results | Facebook
• kaizen foam at DuckDuckGo
• George Carlin - A place for my stuff - YouTube
• Reality 2.0 Episode 104: Digital Archives and Nomads — Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Steven Roberts about digitizing media, photography, and retro computing.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Gordon Jones and Erica Barnette about Thrivacy, their new digital wallet for private, verifiable credentials.

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Special Guests: Erica Barnette and Gordon Jones.

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• Understanding DIDComm. A cross-community effort to standardize… | by Kaliya-IdentityWoman | Decentralized Identity Foundation | Medium — If you are reading this, you probably know already what Decentralized Identifiers (DID) are: they are “identifiers” or addresses which can be queried to return some information about the subject represented. The addresses take the form of a long, opaque “string” (a long block of letters and numbers, in this case of a fixed length), and the DID “documents” that get returned when they are queried contain some cryptographic key material and, depending on the particularities of the returning system, maybe a few other pieces of information or addresses.
• Decentralized identifier - Wikipedia — Decentralized identifiers are a type of identifier that enables a verifiable, decentralized digital identity.[1][2] They are an important component of decentralized web applications.

Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Adam Bergstein about the evolution of CMSes, the current landscape, and how they fit in with today’s siloed web.

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Special Guest: Adam Bergstein.

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• DrupalCon 2022 Recap | Nerdstein — While the CMS and DXP framework space is exploding, Drupal’s adoption numbers are trending down overall. While the talk covers this in greater depth, there were a few primary reasons my research uncovered:   A heavy focus on an extensible, ambitious development framework de-emphasized builders and adopters who want low/no-code solutions and are concerned with time-to-value Frameworks are positioned for an enterprise market, where extensibility is critical to business success. Adoption is favoring tools that have more SaaS-based delivery (including products that deliver Wordpress) because they address SMB needs: faster time-to-value, common everyday features, usability over extensibility, no-code, and no/low maintenance offerings.
• Evaluating the Landscape of Drupal Competition
• Time for THEM to agree to OUR terms | by Doc Searls | Medium — We can do for customers what Creative Commons does for artists: give them terms they can offer — and be can read and agreed to by lawyers, ordinary folks, and their machines. And then we can watch “free market” come to mean what it says, and not just “your choice of captor.”
• Doc Searls on Twitter: "Remarkable and surprising visualization on @Reddit: https://t.co/86j1FNIk0Z" / Twitter
• Home | Simplytest — simplytest.me helps you to find the module, theme or distribution that fits your needs. It provides sandbox environments for testing the functionality of any project before even downloading it.
• IEEE P7012 - Machine Readable Privacy Terms Working Group - IEEE P7012 Working Group — The standard identifies/addresses the manner in which personal privacy terms are proffered and how they can be read and agreed to by machines.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Paul Bailey of Cognitive Space about open source code, aerospace engineering, managing satellites, and the space shuttle! Listen to the end for your next weekend project.

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• Cognitive Space — Access the full potential of your space resources with our next-generation machine intelligence platform.
• Geospatial Intelligence | Real Time | BlackSky | SmallSat Constellations — BlackSky is Defining the Category of Real-Time Geospatial Intelligence
• Heavens-Above
• Space-Track.Org — Space-Track.org promotes space flight safety, protection of the space environment and the peaceful use of space worldwide by sharing space situational awareness services and information with U.S. and international satellite owners/operators, academia and other entities.
• Aqua Earth-observing satellite mission | Aqua Project Science — Aqua, Latin for water, is a NASA Earth Science satellite mission named for the large amount of information that the mission is collecting about the Earth's water cycle, including evaporation from the oceans, water vapor in the atmosphere, clouds, precipitation, soil moisture, sea ice, land ice, and snow cover on the land and ice. Additional variables also being measured by Aqua include radiative energy fluxes, aerosols, vegetation cover on the land, phytoplankton and dissolved organic matter in the oceans, and air, land, and water temperatures.
• MODIS/VIIRS Land Product Subsets — These MODIS/VIIRS Subsetting and Visualization services provide user-defined subsets of selected MODIS and VIIRS Land Products at a scale useful for field researchers in easy-to-use formats and are offered in collaboration with the Land Processes DAAC.
• Bobiverse Series by Dennis E. Taylor — Bobiverse Series

Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin of Purism about how to advertise without being creepy.

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Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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• Is Ethical Advertising Possible? – Purism — Is ethical advertising possible? We all certainly know unethical advertising is possible, we live with it every day. The ad-driven Internet has created an insatiable hunger for personal data and as a result most of what the average person does in their web browser, or on their phone, and in real life is being measured, tracked, and sold to some degree. Yet if a company actually cared about your privacy and wanted to advertise its products, could it do so ethically? Can you track what a visitor does on your website without violating their privacy? We have been thinking about these issues heavily at Purism as we consider how to expand our marketing and in this article I’m going to explore where we currently are in our thinking.
• Doc Searls Weblog · People vs. Adtech — Below are blog posts, articles and essays I’ve written toward four goals in fighting surveillance of our private spaces online by the tracking-based advertising business and its dependents in publishing.
• Opinion | In Stores, Secret Bluetooth Surveillance Tracks Your Every Move - The New York Times — Imagine you are shopping in your favorite grocery store. As you approach the dairy aisle, you are sent a push notification in your phone: “10 percent off your favorite yogurt! Click here to redeem your coupon.” You considered buying yogurt on your last trip to the store, but you decided against it. How did your phone know?

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Dave Huseby of Cryptid.tech about pseudonymous authentication and verifiable data.

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Special Guest: Dave Huseby.

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• Reality 2.0 Episode 112: Pseudonymous Authentication for Twitter — Katherine Druckman and Kyle Rankin talk to Dave Huseby about his new approach to pseudonymous user authentication.
• Reality 2.0 Episode 61: The Future of Authenticating Your Data — Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Dave Huseby about the authentic data economy, and the future of authentication.

Katherine Druckman and Kyle Rankin talk to Dave Huseby about his new approach to pseudonymous user authentication.

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Special Guests: Dave Huseby and Kyle Rankin.

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• Authentication With Pseudonymity - Cryptid Technologies — Authentication With Pseudonymity How Elon can Legally Transform Twitter with Pseudonymous Free Speech by Dave Huseby “Authentication is important, but so is anonymity for many. A balance must be struck.” — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) In a well-studied and famous letter dated October 17, 1788 from James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, Madison discusses the proposed Bill of Rights and his plan for getting it passed in the first session of Congress. One fact that many do not know is that the letter is encrypted in part using a cipher invented by Thomas Jefferson. In the letter, Madison details the bitter and extremely contentious politics among the states, especially between the prominent Anti-Federalists and the Federalists like themselves. Madison’s chief concern was passing the Bill of Rights to quell any organized opposition to the Constitution. Political persecution was rampant and serious enough that Madison and Jefferson made careful use of encryption to avoid being doxxed and canceled because of their private political opinions.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin and Holmes Wilson about Quiet, a Tor-based peer-to-peer messaging project.

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• GitHub - ZbayApp/monorepo — An early prototype for a peer-to-peer alternative to Slack and Discord.

Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls, and Shawn Powers have far too much fun continuing the conversation about Mastodon and the fediverse, with a dose of photography.

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Katherine Druckman talks to Shawn Powers and Kyle Rankin about moving from Twitter to the Fediverse using Mastodon, including how to choose a server and find your niche.

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• Giving social networking back to you - Mastodon — Follow friends and discover new ones among more than 4.4M people. Publish anything you want: links, pictures, text, video. All on a platform that is community-owned and ad-free.
• Running your own server - Mastodon documentation — Why would you want to run your own Mastodon server? Absolute control over your own voice on the web, not subject to anyone else's rules or whims. Your server is your property, with your rules. It will exist as long as you want it to exist. You are not isolated on your own server. You can follow anyone on any other server, and they can follow you and you can exchange messages just like if you were on the same server. You can either limit sign-ups to be the only one on the server and run it like personal (micro)blog, maintain an invite-only community for family or friends or run a server anyone can sign up on, it's up to you!
• Kyle Rankin (@[email protected]) - Librem Social
• Katherine Druckman (@[email protected]) - Librem Social
• Why does Elon Musk want to take Twitter private, and what does it mean for shareholders? — Billionaire Elon Musk plans to make Twitter a private company following his $44 billion deal to buy the social media platform.
• Elon Musk wants to 'authenticate all real humans' on Twitter. Here's what that could mean — As the public combs through Elon Musk's Twitter feed for clues on how the billionaire entrepreneur intends to run the social media platform he's buying for $44 billion, one mysterious line stands out: "authenticate all real humans."
• The Other Reason It's a Perfect Time to Join Mastodon, the Open-Source Twitter Alternative — Last week, Mastodon finally launched its free, official Android app, making it easier than ever to use the open-source Twitter alternative on Android devices. Mastodon’s timing couldn’t be better, as Twitter’s board just approved Elon Musk’s $44 billion bid to buy Twitter.
• After Musk Acquires Twitter, Mastodon Sees Flood of Traffic, Server Slowdown | PCMag — If you joined social-networking provider Mastodon today because of the Elon Musk-Twitter news, you're not alone. 

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Don Marti about ad tech and its many consequences, as well as recent efforts to reform it.

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• IAB Tech Lab — Today, IAB Tech Lab, the digital advertising technical standards-setting body, announced an update to the widely adopted ads.txt specification which they have opened for public comment for 60 days. The update includes two new values for publishers to declare within their ads.txt files, “ownerdomain” and “managerdomain” which helps  increase the transparency into seller relationships via sellers.json and further strengthens ads.txt as a tool to reduce fraud in buying and selling of advertisements on websites, mobile apps and connected TV.
• IAB Tech Lab — Real-time Bidding (RTB) is a way of selling media that enables an individual advertising opportunity (ad impression) to be put up for bidding in real-time. OpenRTB is the communication protocol that enables real-time bidding. It was designed to spur growth in RTB marketplaces by providing an open industry standard for communication and interoperability between buyers and sellers in the digital advertising industry.
• banning surveillance advertising — New bill in Congress: the Banning Surveillance Advertising Act of 2022. Ambitious goal. May not get far this Congress, but it’s good to have a destination in mind. As Allison Schiff wrote on AdExchanger, Even If Targeted Online Advertising Isn’t Banned – Take Note Of Which Way The Wind Is Blowing. Remember, it took the EPA 23 years to get to the (almost) Final Step in Phaseout of Leaded Gasoline.
• taxing surveillance marketing — Putting a tax on surveillance marketing is sometimes suggested as a solution to a classic externalities problem—firms benefit from surveillance marketing, but the costs and risks are paid for by the people surveilled. A Pigovian tax is the go-to fix for this situation.
• Europe Is Building a Huge International Facial Recognition System | WIRED UK — Lawmakers advance proposals to let police forces across the EU link their photo databases—which include millions of pictures of people’s faces.
• Microtargeting as Information Warfare — F oreign influence operations are an acknowledged threat to national security. Less understood is the data that enables that influence. This article argues that governments must recognize microtargeting—data informed individualized targeted advertising—and the current advertising economy as enabling and profiting from foreign and domestic information warfare being waged on its citizens. The Department of Defense must place greater emphasis on defending servicemembers’ digital privacy as a national security risk. Without the ability to defend this vulnerable attack space, our adversaries will continue to target it for exploitation.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to James Walker of Fission about building the decentralized web, decentralized identity, IPFS, and empowering users.

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• Build the future of web apps at the edge – Fission — Cloud native stacks won't deliver the future We're building the data, auth & compute primitives that enable true local-first edge applications. But we don’t get to the future alone. Our edge computing stack is already embedded into leading protocols, platforms and products.
• Beyond the Web. Answer these questions: | by Doc Searls | Mar, 2022 | Medium — Why are the choices presented to you by websites called your choices, when all those choices are provided by them? And why don’t you give them choices?
• Elon Musk offers to buy Twitter. Here's what we know | AP News — In 10 days, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has gone from popular Twitter contributor and critic to the company’s largest individual shareholder to a would-be owner of the social platform — a whirlwind of activity that could change the service dramatically given the sometimes whimsical billionaire’s self-identification as a free-speech absolutist.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls revisit the topic of data privacy.

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• Views on Current Laws and Practices to Protect Personal Data According to US Likely Voters, July 2021 (% of respondents) | Insider Intelligence
• ProjectVRM – Developing tools for customer independence and engagement with vendors
• Ostrom Workshop Calendar — The main business model of the Web goes by a label we all now know from the title of Shoshana Zuboff’s landmark book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. How do we fight surveillance capitalism? And how do we work around it? How, especially, can we keep our new Byway from becoming infested with it—or with the mendacities behind it? Nobody better to help us toward answers than Shoshana herself, who leads this finale to our salon series. Scholar, writer, and activist Shoshana Zuboff is the author of three major books, each of which signaled the start of a new epoch in technological society. Her recent masterwork, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, an international bestseller translated into twenty-six languages, has been hailed as the tech industry’s Silent Spring and the Das Kapital of the 21st Century. Professor Zuboff is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School and a faculty associate at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights. Her work has received the Axel Springer Award (2019), the EPIC Lifetime Achievement Award (2021), and is the first recipient of the Global Privacy Assembly Giovanni Buttarelli Award (2021).
• Opinion | Facebook and the Surveillance Society: The Other Coup - The New York Times — We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
• Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America: Wylie, Christopher: 9781984854636: Amazon.com: Books
• Slaughterbots - Wikipedia — Slaughterbots is a 2017 arms-control advocacy video presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria.
• Privacy is Power: Why and How You Should Take Back Control of Your Data: Veliz, Carissa: 9781612199672: Amazon.com: Books
• The Privacy Engineer's Manifesto: Getting from Policy to Code to QA to Value: Dennedy, Michelle, Fox, Jonathan, Finneran, Tom: 9781430263555: Amazon.com: Books
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Zuboff, Shoshana: 9781610395694: Amazon.com: Books

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk about the Digital Markets Act and Apple's personal finance plans.

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• The Digital Markets Act: ensuring fair and open digital markets | European Commission — The Digital Markets Act (DMA) establishes a set of narrowly defined objective criteria for qualifying a large online platform as a so-called “gatekeeper”. This allows the DMA to remain well targeted to the problem that it aims to tackle as regards large, systemic online platforms.
• Why Alphabet Will Benefit From New European Privacy Rules — European regulators are once again coming after big American technology companies. Some say it is the beginning of the end for them. Not so fast.
• New EU law could spark gold rush of iMessage alternatives — At the moment, getting access to iMessage’s features on non-Apple devices is a complete pain. In fact, getting access to any messaging platform’s features outside of its native apps can range from difficult to almost impossible. Whether it’s Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or Signal, in every case, the services’ developers want you to stick to their own software to message on their platforms.
• Europe agrees on big new package of tech rules — European regulators have come to an agreement on major competition rules that could force the world's biggest tech platforms, including Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, to reshape big chunks of their business.
• US consumer views on privacy laws — A July 2021 survey from Data for Progress found that nearly three-quarters (72%) of likely US voters felt that existing privacy laws are insufficient.
• Computer Crime Hype - Schneier on Security — Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.
• Apple (AAPL) Working to Bring Financial Services Tasks In-House - Bloomberg — The effort, dubbed ‘Breakout,’ would replace fintech partners
• Wordle Hacking—Suddenly Wordle Is Tracking You, Here’s How To Stop It — Perhaps what will come as some surprise to many players of the game is that it now comes complete with ad-trackers. But don't sweat it, you can stop it with a little Wordle hacking.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Steven Roberts about digitizing media, photography, and retro computing.

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Katherine Druckman talks to Kyle Rankin about global supply chain security, disaster and security preparedness, and the Librem 5.

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• ‘Not the time to go poking around’: How former U.S. hackers view dealing with Russia - POLITICO — People with experience in U.S. hacking operations say they expect both Washington and Moscow to show caution in how they wield their digital weapons.
• BIG sabotage: Famous npm package deletes files to protest Ukraine war — This month, the developer behind the popular npm package 'node-ipc' released sabotaged versions of the library in protest of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War.
• Librem 5 USA – Purism — Librem 5 USA, a premium version of the Librem 5 phone that focuses on security by design and privacy protection by default with a secure supply chain and electronics Made in USA. Outfitted with hardware kill switches and specially designed hardware, you are in control of the flow of information.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman go a bit off-topic and talk to Shawn Powers about his memory loss.

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• My Car Accident | The Brain of Shawn — On March 2, 1999, I was on my way to work. Apparently I had a cellphone in one hand, a cup of pumpkin spice cappuccino in the other hand, and an open briefcase next to me on the seat. The problem is that I was driving a car at the time, and apparently I didn’t enough hands for such multitasking. My car went off the road and into a group of trees, missing each one. That part was amazing.

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, and Shawn Powers discuss wartime journalism and misinformation, and Shawn's brain.

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• Doc Searls Weblog · Where Journalism Fails — “What’s the story?” No question is asked more often by editors in newsrooms than that one. And for good reason: that’s what news is about: The Story.
• My Car Accident | The Brain of Shawn — On March 2, 1999, I was on my way to work. Apparently I had a cellphone in one hand, a cup of pumpkin spice cappuccino in the other hand, and an open briefcase next to me on the seat. The problem is that I was driving a car at the time, and apparently I didn’t enough hands for such multitasking. My car went off the road and into a group of trees, missing each one. That part was amazing.
• Volodymyr Zelensky Is Not a Meme | WIRED — The Ukrainian president's actions in the face of the Russian invasion turned him into a hero online. But the Marvelization of political figures is dangerous.

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Shawn Powers, and Petros Koutoupis celebrate our 100th episode and talk Web3, IPFS, and home automation.

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Special Guests: Petros Koutoupis and Shawn Powers.

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• My first web3 webpage | Dries Buytaert — How I built my first web3 webpage, and what I think about web3's potential.
• Apple’s Siri will finally work without an internet connection thanks to on-device processing - The Verge — Apple’s digital assistant Siri will process audio on-device by default in iOS 15, meaning you will be able to use the feature without an active internet connection. Apple says the upgrade will also make Siri faster.
• Our most popular episode! - Reality 2.0 Episode 28: Destroy This Podcast — Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls, and Petros Koutoupis talk about ownership, freedom, and convenience in the digital world.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Mike Vesey, CEO of IdRamp, about verifiable credentials, decentralization, and real-world identity solutions.

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Special Guest: Mike Vesey.

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• IdRamp Decentralized Identity Services
• IIW
• Reality 2.0 Episode 97: ID.me Vs. The Alternatives — Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kaliya Young of the Internet Identity Workshop about ID.me, our concerns about its use as a national ID, and potential alternatives.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Petros Koutoupis about how big tech navigates the ad tech landscape, for better or worse.

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• Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet (FSG Originals x Logic): Hwang, Tim: 9780374538651: Amazon.com: Books — In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising―the beating heart of the internet―is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008.
• Amazon has a $31 billion a year advertising business — Amazon revealed Thursday just how big its advertising business has become. It generated $31.2 billion in revenue in 2021, with fourth-quarter sales rising 32%, according to the retailer’s fourth-quarter earnings statement.
• Facebook and Google stocks have diverged, and the reason is Apple — Facebook’s apps rely almost entirely on Apple and Google for distribution. So when Apple changed its privacy policy last year, limiting the ability of app developers to target users, Facebook was suddenly stripped of one of its most important assets.
• A public apology - on screwing up by not questioning assumptions - my talk at #BIF10 - Ethan Zuckerman — About a month ago, I wrote an article about a simple idea. I asked whether anyone really believed that advertising should be the main way we supported content and services on the internet. Given how poorly banner advertising on the web worksGiven that nobody likes banner ads, and given that the current system puts users under surveillance, which in turn seems to inure us to government surveillance, I wondered whether there might be a better way.
• Doc Searls Weblog · Apple vs (or plus) Adtech, Part I — If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Apple’s Privacy on iPhone | tracked ad. In it a guy named Felix (that’s him, above) goes from a coffee shop to a waiting room somewhere, accumulating a vast herd of hangers-on along the way. The herd represents trackers in his phone, all crowding his personal space while gathering private information about him. The sound track is “Mind Your Own Business,” by Delta 5.
• Fighting FLoC and Fighting Monopoly Are Fully Compatible | Electronic Frontier Foundation — Are tech giants really damned if they do and damned if they don’t (protect our privacy)?
• Facebook says Apple iOS privacy change will cost $10 billion this year — Facebook said on Wednesday that Apple’s App Tracking Transparency feature would decrease the company’s 2022 sales by about $10 billion.
• Google Drops FLoC and Introduces Topics API to Replace Tracking Cookies for Ads — Google on Tuesday announced that it is abandoning its controversial plans for replacing third-party cookies in favor of a new Privacy Sandbox proposal called Topics, which categorizes users' browsing habits into approximately 350 topics. The new mechanism, which takes the place of FLoC (short for Federated Learning of Cohorts), slots users' browsing history for a given week into a handful of top pre-designated interests (i.e., topics), which are retained only on the device for a revolving period of three weeks.
• GDPR enforcer rules that IAB Europe's consent popups are unlawful - Irish Council for Civil Liberties — Google, Amazon, and the entire tracking industry relies on IAB Europe’s consent system, which has now been found to be illegal following complaints coordinated by ICCL.  EU data protection authorities find that the consent popups that plagued Europeans for years are illegal. All data collected through them must be deleted. This decision impacts Google’s, Amazon’s and Microsoft’s online advertising businesses.
• Case number: DOS-2019-01377 Concerning: Complaint relating to Transparency & Consent Framework

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kaliya Young of the Internet Identity Workshop about ID.me, our concerns about its use as a national ID, and potential alternatives.

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• Cybersecurity Company ID.me Is Becoming Government’s Digital Gatekeeper - Bloomberg — Military veteran Blake Hall’s cybersecurity company has become the government’s digital gatekeeper. Its unproven estimate—$400 billion in pandemic unemployment fraud—is also very good for its business.
• ID.me CEO apologizes for misstatements on IRS facial recognition - Axios — The CEO of ID.me apologized Wednesday for mischaracterizing the facial recognition system the company uses to verify people's identity.
• Homepage - Identity Woman — Shape your impact with[in] Digital Identity
• Sovereign Identity Updates | Substack
• The Domains of Identity: A Framework for Understanding Identity Systems in Contemporary Society (Anthem Impact): Young, Kaliya: 9781785274916: Amazon.com: Books — The Domains of Identity” defines sixteen simple and comprehensive categories of interactions which cause personally identifiable information to be stored in databases. This research, which builds on the synthesis of over 900 academic articles, addresses the challenges of identity management that involve interactions of almost all people in almost all institutional/organizational contexts. Enumerating the sixteen domains and describing the characteristics of each domain clarifies which problems can arise and how they can be solved within each domain.
• Anil John - Technical Director and Silicon Valley Innovation Program @ U.S. Department of Homeland Security - Crunchbase Person Profile
• SVIP | Homeland Security — The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP) is keeping pace with the innovation community to tackle the hardest problems faced by DHS and the Homeland Security Enterprise.
• The Thoughtful Biometrics Workshop 2022 · Thoughtful Biometrics — The Thoughtful Biometrics Workshop is creating a space to dialogue about critical emerging issues surrounding biometric and digital identity technologies.
• European Digital Identity | European Commission — The European Digital Identity will be available to EU citizens, residents, and businesses who want to identify themselves or provide confirmation of certain personal information. It can be used for both online and offline public and private services across the EU.
• The Hymn of Acxiom - Transcription - YouTube
• The Hymn of Acxiom - YouTube

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Dave Huseby about privacy, cryptography, and authentic data.

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• Memorandum on Improving the Cybersecurity of National Security, Department of Defense, and Intelligence Community Systems | The White House — This memorandum sets forth requirements for National Security Systems (NSS) that are equivalent to or exceed the cybersecurity requirements for Federal Information Systems set forth within Executive Order 14028 of May 12, 2021 (Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity), and establishes methods to secure exceptions for circumstances necessitated by unique mission needs. 
• Guess which government doesn't want you to use end-to-end encryption — From a privacy point of view, there is much to love about end-to-end encryption, as employed by the likes of WhatsApp. But while users may delight in the knowledge that their communication is free from surveillance, there are some groups that have a different opinion.
• I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score. Now You Can Get Yours, Too. - The New York Times — Little-known companies are amassing your data — like food orders and Airbnb messages — and selling the analysis to clients. Here’s how to get a copy of what they have on you.
• Black Teen Kicked Out Of Roller Rink Over Face Recognition | News | BET — A face recognition-equipped Detroit roller rink reportedly kicked out a Black teen on June 10 after misidentifying her as a person who’d allegedly gotten into a fight there in March.
• The principles of user sovereignty | by 𝖉𝖜𝖍 | UX Collective — The first time I heard the phrase “user sovereignty” was while working at Mozilla on the Firefox web browser. Firefox ostensibly follows user sovereign design principles and respects its users. Mozilla has even baked it into their list of design principles on page 5 of the Firefox Design Values Booklet. But what does “user sovereignty” actually mean and what are the principles that define user-sovereign design?
• A Unified Theory of Decentralization | by 𝖉𝖜𝖍 | The Startup | Medium — All networks begin as only one thing; one neuron, one cell, one chip, one computer, or one user. One entity alone is not a network, but it is the starting point for understanding the unified theory of decentralization. One entity is fully sovereign, it has no connections to anything else that might influence or control it. One entity in isolation is empowered to act however it wants to strive for whatever results it seeks.
• The Web was Never Decentralized. Redecentralize the web is a fantasy | Design Warp — There are so many people today focused on “re-decentralizing the web.” They have a popular belief that when the web was invented it was a wonderfully optimistic vision of decentralization, governed by democratic principles and full of free information available through open access that all of humanity benefited from. They assume that originally all users of the web were well behaved and companies only wanted to help make the world better. Also, they think that somewhere along the line the web fell under the control of irresponsible corporations and governments and was contorted into the “broken and centralized” system that it is today.
• The Authentic Data Economy. Universal Digital Trust at Global Scale | by 𝖉𝖜𝖍 | Medium — All of us intuitively have a sense of what trust is and how to earn and maintain it as well as how to lose it. Trust never comes for free. The cost of earning trust is consistent trustworthy behavior over time. It forms our reputation in our social circles. But what happens when you have to do business outside of our personal social circles, such as with a new bank, or with a government agency far removed? How is trust established then? How is it transmitted to the distant institution to conduct business and how is it transmitted back? Over human history the solution has been to generate and keep official records about people and their activities. Some examples of official records are: Jane was born on this date, John earned his diploma from this university in this year, Judy received a license to practice medicine.
• Achieving Absolute Privacy. Cryptography Always Works, With or… | by 𝖉𝖜𝖍 | Medium — Absolute privacy on the internet is impossible, today. Why? Because nobody with the power to create it, wants it. The primary revenue model for the internet is based on surveillance making most investors aligned against privacy.
• Zero Architecture is the Way Forward | by 𝖉𝖜𝖍 | Medium — Inmy two most recent articles I discussed something called “Zero Architecture”. It is a new approach to designing decentralized systems using zero-trust security combined with business logic that operates entirely on zero-knowledge proofs — based on authentic data — and contains zero personally identifiable information. The primary motivation for this new way of thinking is building fully user-sovereign systems that automate regulatory compliance, drive out fraud, as well as eliminate surveillance capitalism and its attendant societal problems.
• 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕿𝖍𝖊𝖔𝖗𝖞 𝖔𝖋 𝕯𝖎𝖌𝖎𝖙𝖆𝖑 𝕲𝖆𝖙𝖊𝖘 | by 𝖉𝖜𝖍 | Medium — In computer systems it is common to construct digital gates around a service. The most common example is a username and password login gate that does a combination of authentication (i.e. verifying who is accessing the service) and authorization (i.e. what functions of the service can be executed). This approach for gating digital access is being blindly applied — without deeper contemplation — to vaccine passports and digital gates in the physical world with the explicit goal of denying people access to resources that were considered a human right as recently as this past spring. It is time to present a theoretical model describing the oppressive characteristics of naïve pervasive digital gating of real-world access and show why identity cannot be an input available to digital gates.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Petros Koutoupis about Air Tags and the generations of the web.

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• Byway FAQ – Customer Commons — The Intention Byway—or Byway for short—is a way to move messages of intent between customers and companies, buyers and sellers, demand and supply, anywhere in any value chain or among a collection of participants. Its goal is to maximize the quality and volume of economic signaling by everyone and to expand the range of economic activity that can take place in a networked marketplace.
• Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3 — Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than I am the latest NFT drop. Also – cards on the table here – I don’t share the same generational excitement for moving all aspects of life into an instrumented economy. Even strictly on the technological level, though, I haven’t yet managed to become a believer. So given all of the recent attention into what is now being called web3, I decided to explore some of what has been happening in that space more thoroughly to see what I may be missing.
• Matt Mullenweg on Twitter: "People seem to be redefining Web 2.0 as Facebook, etc, that own data, but Web 2.0 at the time was platforms like WordPress, Odeo, Six Apart, Flickr, Technorati, and https://t.co/vlhR5g6fkg that had open data and interoperated. https://t.co/PXuZBaLbP2 https://t.co/sJJT8kyaJG" / Twitter
• What Is Web 2.0 - O'Reilly Media — The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O'Reilly VP, noted that far from having "crashed", the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What's more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.
• Apple AirTags being used to track cars and stalk victims, police warn — The Apple AirTag is a device created to help people keep track of their misplaced items. But the seemingly harmless tool is being used by some to track people and commit car thefts. As authorities investigate these incidents, the devices are raising privacy and security concerns. 

Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls, Shawn Powers, and Kyle Rankin talk about everything from microphones to roombas to pottery in our last episode of 2021.

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• Amazon.com: Heil Sound PR 40 Dynamic Cardioid Studio Microphone Bundle with PRSM Shock Mount (Black), Two-Section Broadcast Arm and Microphone Cable : Musical Instruments — Doc's mic.
• Amazon.com: Electro-Voice RE20 Microphone Kit with Shockmount, Two-Section Broadcast Arm and Microphone Cable : Musical Instruments — Shawn's mic.
• Blue - Yeti — Katherine's mic.
• The Great (TV Series 2020– ) - IMDb
• The Repair Shop (TV Series 2017– ) - IMDb
• The Great Pottery Throw Down (TV Series 2015– ) - IMDb
• Spot Plushie — Shawn’s furry creation.

Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls and Kyle Rankin talk to John Todd from Quad9 about DNS, privacy, security and their open DNS recursive service.

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• Quad9 | A public and free DNS service for a better security and privacy — Quad9 is a free service that replaces your default ISP or enterprise Domain Name Server (DNS) configuration. When your computer performs any Internet transaction that uses the DNS (and most transactions do), Quad9 blocks lookups of malicious host names from an up-to-the-minute list of threats. This blocking action protects your computer, mobile device, or IoT systems against a wide range of threats such as malware, phishing, spyware, and botnets, and it can improve performance in addition to guaranteeing privacy. The Quad9 DNS service is operated by the Swiss-based Quad9 Foundation, whose mission is to provide a safer and more robust Internet for everyone.
• Pi-hole – Network-wide protection — Instead of browser plugins or other software on each computer, install Pi-hole in one place and your entire network is protected.

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Shawn Powers, and Kyle Rankin talk right to repair Apple devices, cocktails, and our nerdy hobbies.

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• Everyone Is a Genius: Apple Will Offer Parts and Tools for DIY Repairs | iFixit News — Early next year, a previously impossible repair will be possible: you can buy an iPhone screen directly from Apple, use Apple’s repair guide (and tools, if you want) to install it, and have it fully work as intended, using Apple’s diagnostic software. And you won’t have to own an authorized repair shop to do it.
• Apple Self Service Repair Program | Right to Repair - Consumer Reports — In a major win for advocates, device owners and independent repair shops will soon have access to dozens of Apple parts, tools, and manuals—at the same price as authorized shops
• Apple (AAPL) Aims for Fully Autonomous Car - Bloomberg — Apple Inc. is pushing to accelerate development of its electric car and is refocusing the project around full self-driving capabilities, according to people familiar with the matter, aiming to solve a technical challenge that has bedeviled the auto industry. 
• DIY Cocktails: A Simple Guide to Creating Your Own Signature Drinks: Marcia Simmons, Jonas Halpren: Amazon.com: Books — Black Rose, Blood Orange Tequila & Soda, Kentucky Apple Sour: the newest trend in cocktails is creating your own! Now, the editors of DrinkoftheWeek.com have concocted the only guide that teaches you to create your own infallible thirst-quenchers. Using a simple system of basic ratios, you will learn to: Mix new flavor combinations for the perfect new blend using the Flavor Profile Chart as a guide Master advanced mixology techniques from infusing liquors at home to creating custom-flavored syrups Serve the perfect drink every time, whether it kicks off a rowdy party or winds down a romantic evening! With only nine ratios to master, you'll shake, stir, roll, and build literally thousands of unique and exceptional cocktails. All you need is a good thirst, an active imagination--and this guide!
• Amazon.com: Mixology Dice® (tumbler) // Laser Engraved Wood Dice for Craft cocktail inspiration - Christmas gift, boyfriend gift, gift for him, gift for guys : Handmade Products — Whether you’re a newbie or a pro behind the bar, Mixology Dice will take your cocktail game to the next level. Along with providing seemingly endless inspiration (over 1.5 million combos!), this set of dice is actually a clever system for actually learning the art of mixology.
• Redwood Empire Whiskey - Our Whiskeys — The Northern California Coast is a unique place, one of the few in the world where giant redwood trees grow. A place of inspiration and renewal. This same cool climate makes it a perfect place to produce sublime whiskey. Aging barrels here allows for a slow and even extraction of flavor, producing a whiskey of exceptional balance and complexity. Taste what our Redwood Empire inspires.
• Gulden Draak, tremendous beer for titans | Gulden Draak — With its Gulden Draak, the Van Steenberge Brewery has brewed a beer that is as robust as the symbol of the dragon itself. It is a specialty beer with a fiery colour and unparalleled flavour and aroma. Gulden Draak has devoted fans throughout the world.
• xkcd: Sandwich

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin about the metaverse of Facebook and beyond, how it may intersect with Web 3 and blockchain, as well as Second Life and the verses that came before.

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• Snow Crash: Stephenson, Neal: 2015553380958: Amazon.com: Books
• Building a Multibillion-Dollar Company in 18 Months (with Hopin’s Johnny Boufarhat) — Hopin is one of the fastest-growing startups in history. Founder and CEO Johnny Boufarhat joins Azeem Azhar to talk about how he grew the virtual events company from six employees in February 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, to more than eight hundred, and a valuation of almost $8 billion, a year and a half later. Johnny explains how he seized the opportunity presented by the pandemic, what it was like learning to lead at one of the fastest-growing startups in history, and why he dreams of a future in which a founder’s location is no impediment to success.
• Nilay Patel on Facebook’s Reckoning With Reality—And the Metaverse-Size Problems Yet to Come | Vanity Fair — After a decade covering the Zucks, Googles, and Ubers of the scene, the Verge editor in chief reflects on tech’s troublesome relationship with the rest of the world.
• Facebook’s fatal flaws. Facebook is doomed. | by Doc Searls | Medium — Nobody can fix this. Facebook is doomed. True, all companies are mortal. (Geoffrey West has been telling us how and why for years.) But Facebook is actually designed to fail in a world that stops tolerating the way Facebook works, and can’t quit working.
• The Metaverse Was Lame Even Before Facebook - The Atlantic — It was terrible then, and it’s terrible now.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Shawn Powers and Petros Koutoupis about Facebook’s metaverse focus and whistleblower problems.

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• Exclusive: Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen warns company's encryption will aid espionage by hostile nations — A Facebook spokesman said: “The reason we believe in end-to-end encryption is precisely so that we can keep people safe, including from foreign interference and surveillance as well as hackers and criminals.
• Scripting News: Facebook is us — The bullshit about Facebook keeps coming. It's not a fucking autocracy, it's a carrier. You could say everything you say about FB about a city like NY.
• (15) Post | LinkedIn — I've got a big Twitter thread with tons of screenshots from the unredacted docs between Facebook and Google
• Before the “Whistleblowers” there were “Goodbye” posts: leaving #Facebook Engineering in 2016 because of #China, User Content, and #EndToEndEncryption – dropsafe — Before the “Whistleblowers” there were “Goodbye” posts: leaving #Facebook Engineering in 2016 because of #China, User Content, and #EndToEndEncryption In 2016 I quit the best job I ever had: the most impactful, the most challenging, and (yes) the best paid. I did so in part because of explicable burnout from shipping a radical product, but also and primarily because of a shift in Facebook’s company goals towards degrading user-experience for profit, and for experimentally building message-censorship infrastructure to offer-up as a gift and to show willing, for entry into the Chinese market.
• Eva on Twitter: "It is still a bad idea to idolize whistleblowers instead of focusing on the revelations the whistleblowers bring forward, but Frances Haugen says that her opinions on end-to-end encrypted messaging were misinterpreted and mischaracterized and e2e messaging is good, ok?" / Twitter — It is still a bad idea to idolize whistleblowers instead of focusing on the revelations the whistleblowers bring forward, but Frances Haugen says that her opinions on end-to-end encrypted messaging were misinterpreted and mischaracterized and e2e messaging is good, ok?
• My interview with Steven Levy of Wired re: Frances Haugen leaking my Facebook Engineering “Goodbye Post” – dropsafe — My interview with Steven Levy of Wired re: Frances Haugen leaking my Facebook Engineering “Goodbye Post”
• Facebook CIA Project: The Onion News Network ONN - YouTube
• So...what now? - by Charlie Warzel - Galaxy Brain — There’s so much reporting out there from the consortium of news outlets on ‘The Facebook Papers’ that I don’t really know what to do or where to start. Over at Protocol they’ve collected a running list of stories published and I count 50 pieces (as of Monday evening), many of them thousands of words long. Apparently, (according to Casey Newton and Kara Swisher) there are like six week’s worth of stories like this coming.
• FTC Study Confirms ISPs Collect a Scary Amount of Your Personal Data - ExtremeTech — Frustration with Big Tech is reaching a crescendo, and we could be headed for legislative efforts to reduce the influence of companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook, but another technology heavyweight has managed to fly under the radar: your Internet Service Provider (ISP). A new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) report examines what ISPs are doing with your data, and it’s not good news. Even when they promise not to sell your information, it often ends up in the hands of advertisers and other third parties. 
• The Facebook Papers Are a Big Fat Nothingburger - Reason.com — More than a dozen mainstream media organizations published reports today on the so-called Facebook Papers, a trove of internal company documents obtained and released by former Facebook employee Frances Haugen. The headlines promised dramatic revelations and damning indictments.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Phil Windley about digital identity, picos, oauth, and big tech ecosystems.

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• Phil Windley's Technometria
• 7 Laws of Identity – Kim Cameron's Identity Weblog — Here's the most beautiful take yet on the Seven Laws of Identity – put together by Karon and Katrika, who even saw how the Laws connect with the Perception of Ailatan.  In the past people have asked why I didn't do a Laws of Identity poster – this must be it.  Click to view full size.
• Rainbows End - Wikipedia — Rainbows End is a 2006 science fiction novel by Vernor Vinge. It was awarded the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Novel.[1] The book is set in San Diego, California, in 2025, in a variation of the fictional world Vinge explored in his 2002 Hugo-winning novella "Fast Times at Fairmont High" and 2004's "Synthetic Serendipity". Vinge has tentative plans for a sequel,[2] picking up some of the loose threads left at the end of the novel. The many technological advances depicted in the novel suggest that the world is undergoing ever-increasing change, following the technological singularity, a recurring subject in Vinge's fiction and nonfiction writing.
• Ten Reasons to Use Picos for Your Next Decentralized Programming Project — Picos are a programming model for building decentralized applications that provide significant benefits in the form of abstractions that reduce programmer effort. Here are ten eleven reasons you should use picos for your next decentralized application.
• Moore's law - Wikipedia — Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empirical relationship linked to gains from experience in production.
• Doc Searls Weblog · Car design trends — On Quora, here’s my answer to What are the worst design trends in modern cars?—updated by our family’s experience with a new Toyota that features even more indicators than the bunch above::::

Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Jerry Michalski and Petros Koutoupis about Facebook, its weaknesses, relationship to its users, and impact on all of us, and what happens when it disappears for six hours.

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• John Taylor Gatto - The Six Lesson Schoolteacher — “Look...at the...lessons of school teaching - confusion, class position, indifference, emotional and intellectual dependency, conditional self-esteem, surveillance - all of these lessons are prime training for permanent underclasses, people deprived forever of finding the center of their own special genius....Can you imagine a school where children challenged prevailing assumptions? Or worked alone without guidance? Or defined their own problems? It would be a radical contradiction of everything we've been conditioned to expect schools to do. If you want your son or daughter to learn what Harvard said was necessary, you'll have to arrange it outside of school time, maybe in between the dentist and the dancing lessons. And if you are poor, you better forget it altogether.” - John Taylor Gatto
• The Seven Lesson School Teacher — Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will.
• The Hidden Curriculum of School
• Frances Haugen
• Facebook outage, by the numbers: Largest outage ever tracked could cost millions - MarketWatch — Outage cost company about $164,000 a minute in revenue, while stock’s decline wiped away more than $40 billion in market cap and cost Mark Zuckerberg roughly $6 billion personally

Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Gregory Bledsoe about NFTs and the future of transactions and authentication.

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• double-entry bookkeeping – ProjectVRM — What makes double-entry bookkeeping important is that maybe it can save our asses from what computing did to our hands-on knowledge of how business works—or ought to work—in a  hearty economy. Hence the hope behind the headline above.
• Pico Labs
• Triple entry accounting system: A revolution with blockchain | by Kapil RANA | DataSeries | Medium
• NFTY Jigs — NFTY Jigs is a platform to create & manage digital goods for the open metaverse

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Shawn Powers about their various health-related gadgets, including trackers, ebikes, VR workouts, etc., and the ways we incorporate them into our lives.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Dave Taht about bufferbloat, latency, and the issues plaguing our networks.

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• dtaht (Dave Täht) · GitHub
• Postcards from the Bleeding Edge — David Täht writes about politics, space, copyright, the internet, audio software, operating systems and surfing.
• Does my modem have Active Queue Management (AQM) for low latency? | Xfinity Community Forum — Does my modem have Active Queue Management (AQM) for low latency?
• RFC 8290 - The Flow Queue CoDel Packet Scheduler and Active Queue Management Algorithm
• Bufferbloat.net - Bufferbloat.net — Bufferbloat is the undesirable latency that comes from a router or other network equipment buffering too much data.
• Cerowrt Wiki - Bufferbloat.net — The CeroWrt Project is complete. The last build (3.10.50-1) was released in July 2014. The principles learned from that research project have been transferred to the Linux kernel and OpenWrt.
• The congestion-notification conflict [LWN.net] — Most of the time, the dreary work of writing protocol standards at organizations like the IETF and beyond happens in the background, with most of us being blissfully unaware of what is happening. Recently, though, a disagreement over protocols for congestion notification and latency reduction has come to a head in a somewhat messy conflict. The outcome of this discussion may well affect how well the Internet of the future works — and whether Linux systems can remain first-class citizens of that net.
• Objections to L4S WGLC — This document is a companion to a pair of slides presented at the IETF-111 TSVWG session. Due to time and space constraints, the slides could only contain a bare listing of the most pertinent, purely technical issues. This document illustrates and links to concrete data supporting the relevance of those issues, and amplifies them with further relevant issues. The bullet points from the slides are quoted, followed by supporting material.
• Edward Bernays - Wikipedia
• Operational Guidance for Deployment of L4S in the Internet — This document is intended to provide guidance in order to ensure successful deployment of Low Latency Low Loss Scalable throughput (L4S) in the Internet. Other L4S documents provide guidance for running an L4S experiment, but this document is focused solely on potential interactions between L4S flows and flows using the original ('Classic') ECN over a Classic ECN bottleneck link. The document discusses the potential outcomes of these interactions, describes mechanisms to detect the presence of Classic ECN bottlenecks, and identifies opportunities to prevent and/or detect and resolve fairness problems in such networks. This guidance is aimed at operators of end-systems, operators of networks, and researchers.
• draft-ietf-tsvwg-aqm-dualq-coupled-16 - DualQ Coupled AQMs for Low Latency, Low Loss and Scalable Throughput (L4S)
• [OpenWrt Wiki] SQM Details — If you want to set up SQM to minimize bufferbloat, you should start at the SQM Howto page.
• SpaceX nicknames Starlink Internet user terminal 'Dishy McFlatface' — SpaceX started to offer Starlink satellite broadband internet this week. The company sent out e-mails to potential customers who would want to beta test the Starlink network in its early phase. SpaceX currently operates approximately 888 Starlink satellites in low Earth orbit out of thousands it plans to deploy to provide broadband coverage globally. Starlink is initially providing service to the northern United States and southern Canada. SpaceX states that by 2021 the company will provide service to 'the populated world'.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk about respect on the web, including respecting your users, and algorithmic bias.

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Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Bill Wendel and Joyce Searls about where tech meets real estate, and how intentcasting could improve the market.

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• Real Estate Cafe | Serving a Money-saving Menu of Services since 1995
• Real Estate Cafe / reVRM Minifesto — Idea starters to kick-start conversation about VRM's potential role in the residential real estate industry
• Ralph Nader on Twitter: "Absentee giant corporate control over local America expands relentlessly. Latest are huge firms like Blackrock buying hundreds of thousands of houses for speculation purposes. Fight absentee corporatist domination. Support the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. @ilsr -R" / Twitter
• Pacaso Is Turning Houses Into Corporations : Planet Money : NPR — On a sleepy cul-de-sac amid the bucolic vineyards and grassy hills of California's Sonoma Valley, a $4 million house has become the epicenter of a summer-long spat between angry neighbors and a new venture capital-backed startup buying up homes around the nation. The company is called Pacaso. It says it's the fastest company in American history to achieve the "unicorn" status of a billion-dollar valuation — but its quarrels in wine country, one of the first regions where it's begun operations, foreshadow business troubles ahead.
• Bill Wendel on Twitter: "Stats below reveal need to replace Active MLS listings with new metric - owners who #Intend2Sell or #IntentionInventory DEC = good month for price reductions, expired listings & to interact #P2P w/ owners planning #LifeTransition in 2022 DM re #ProactHH https://t.co/Tgvjs9S6nM https://t.co/1KkusoNPpz" / Twitter — #BidWarBacklash: 20 yrs ago, Feds report "Housing Starting to Weaken“ cautioned: "Housing values dropped 8% on average during last recession in 1991. Not only could it happen again, ..it could 'happen rather abruptly.'" Instead of bidding #100KoverAsk, willing to #TimeREMarket?
• In Case You Were Unclear What the US Government Thinks of NAR... - NotoriousROB — In light of yet another intervention in a private lawsuit by the Department of Justice, this time in the REX v. Zillow case, a few things should be clearer. One, the Department of Justice really doesn’t like it when NAR uses the 2008 Consent Decree as any kind of a shield for any kind of a rule. NAR has done this in Moehrl, in Sitzer, and now in REX and in all three instances, the DOJ went out of its way to file a Statement of Interest telling the judge that the DOJ in no way shape or form approved any NAR rule or policy.
• Instant Buyer - Wikipedia — Instant Buyer (or iBuyer) is a real estate transaction model wherein companies purchase residential properties directly from private sellers, to eventually re-sell them.[1][2]

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin about Apple’s new plans to monitor personal devices, and what it means for privacy, ownership, and setting precedence.

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• Apple's Plan to "Think Different" About Encryption Opens a Backdoor to Your Private Life | Electronic Frontier Foundation — Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system.
• Daring Fireball: Apple’s New ‘Child Safety’ Initiatives, and the Slippery Slope — My first advice is to read Apple’s own high-level description of the features, which ends with links to detailed technical documentation regarding the encryption and techniques Apple is employing in the implementations, and “technical assessments” from three leading researchers in cryptography and computer vision.
• Eva on Twitter: "Apple distributed this internal memo this morning, dismissing their critics as "the screeching voices of the minority." I will never stop screeching about the importance of privacy, security, or civil liberties. And neither should you. https://t.co/lLDfxEUIXL" / Twitter — Apple distributed this internal memo this morning, dismissing their critics as "the screeching voices of the minority." I will never stop screeching about the importance of privacy, security, or civil liberties. And neither should you.
• GitHub - nadimkobeissi/appleprivacyletter: An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning. — An open letter against Apple's new privacy-invasive client-side content scanning technology.
• Transactional analysis - Wikipedia — Transactional analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social transactions are analyzed to determine the ego state of the communicator (whether parent-like, childlike, or adult-like) as a basis for understanding behavior.[1] In transactional analysis, the communicator is taught to alter the ego state as a way to solve emotional problems. The method deviates from Freudian psychoanalysis which focuses on increasing awareness of the contents of subconsciously held ideas. Eric Berne developed the concept and paradigm of transactional analysis in the late 1950s.[2]
• Reality 2.0 Episode 80: NSO Group's Pegasus, Stingrays, and Grindr — Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin about NSO group and Pegasus, Stingrays and cars, and surveilling priests.
• The Encryption Debate in Australia: 2021 Update - Carnegie Endowment for International Peace — In 2018, the heads of Australia’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies were given broad powers by the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018,1 or TOLA Act, to gain access to encrypted communicat
• Internet of Snitches – Purism — Imagine an Internet of Snitches, each scanning whatever data they have access to for evidence of crime. Beyond the OS itself, individual phone apps could start looking for contraband. Personal computers would follow their lead. Home network file servers could pore through photos, videos and file backups for CSAM and maybe even evidence of copyright infringement. Home routers could scan any unencrypted network traffic. Your voice assistant could use machine learning to decide when yelling in a household crosses the line into abuse. Your printer could analyze the documents and photos you send it.
• Reality 2.0 Episode 49: Parler, Ownership, and Open Source — Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Petros Koutoupis, and Kyle Rankin talk Parler and platform lock-in, the concept of data, software, and hardware ownership, and the open source social contract.
• Reality 2.0 - Blog - Reality 2.0 Newsletter - November 25, 2020: Owned. — This week’s conversation was rooted in the concept of ownership, including hardware, software, and in the case of platform lock-in, even ownership of ideas. Over the course of nearly an hour, we questioned our ownership of our social media profiles, our photo storage accounts, our MacBooks, and our code.
• Apple Adds a Backdoor to iMessage and iCloud Storage - Schneier on Security — Apple’s announcement that it’s going to start scanning photos for child abuse material is a big deal. (Here are five news stories.) I have been following the details, and discussing it in several different email lists. I don’t have time right now to delve into the details, but wanted to post something.
• Apple Privacy Letter: An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology — An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology Security & Privacy Experts, Cryptographers, Researchers, Professors, Legal Experts and Apple Consumers Decry Apple's Planned Move to Undermine User Privacy and End-to-End Encryption

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Shawn Powers and Petros Koutoupis about how we make our personal spaces better for work and play.

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• My Big Round World – Everyone's a square…
• Pet Sematary (1989) - IMDb — After tragedy strikes, a grieving father discovers an ancient burial ground behind his home with the power to raise the dead.
• Sony Alpha 7R Review: Digital Photography Review — If there's one thing you can say about Sony's digital camera business, it's that they've experimented with many different concepts. From SLRs with dual autofocus systems and Translucent Mirror Technology to its NEX mirrorless line-up, Sony has gone down virtually every avenue in digital imaging. Its latest products - the Alpha 7 and Alpha 7R - may be the most exciting products to come out of the Sony labs in some time. The company has managed to create full-frame cameras which are about the same size as the Olympus OM-D E-M1. In other words, the Alpha 7s are much smaller than their full-frame interchangeable lens peers (such as Nikon's D610 and the Canon EOS 6D), an achievement made possible primarily because they're not SLRs.
• Sony a6400 review: Digital Photography Review — Sony's a6400 is a compact 24MP mirrorless interchangeable lens camera with an APS-C sensor that will serve plenty of photographers from family documentarians to pro shooters looking for a lightweight second body. The big news is that it has a new processor based on that used in Sony's sports-shooting flagship a9 which enables 'Real-Time Tracking' autofocus, which is one of the most effective autofocus implementations we've yet seen. It's also among the easiest to use, once you've gotten it set up.
• Amazon.com: Electro-Voice RE20 Broadcast Announcer Microphone with Variable-D: Musical Instruments
• X2U - Microphone to USB Adapter
• Cam Link 4K | elgato.com
• Key Light Air | elgato.com
• Watch Free Movies Online Now | Stream Free TV with Plex
• 4K UHD Hisense Roku TV with HDR (2020) (55R6G) - Hisense USA
• Aeron - Office Chairs - Herman Miller
• Swopper Active Stool Archives | Ergify
• 18 Best Ergonomic Office Chairs 2021 | The Strategist — Whether you’re working from home at a DIY desk setup or commuting to an office, you may have begun to feel the strain that sitting for seven or more hours a day can put on a body. If said strain has led you to wonder whether it’s worth investing in a better, more ergonomic office chair, the answer is almost certainly yes, according to experts we spoke to. “Makeshift setups can cause a laundry list of problems, including back, shoulder, and wrist pain,” explains Dr. David Perna of Back and Body Medical. Dr. Marc Agulnick, an orthopedic surgeon based on Long Island who’s affiliated with NYU Winthrop Hospital, agrees: “If you’re sitting for a long period of time in one position that’s not natural, or a bad position from a postural standpoint, over time that’s going to break down your spine.”
• Arcade1Up | Officially Licensed Arcade Cabinets

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin about NSO group and Pegasus, Stingrays and cars, and surveilling priests.

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• Defending Against Spyware Like Pegasus – Purism — What’s particularly scary about spyware in general, and is true for Pegasus as well, is that victims have no indication they’ve been compromised. Due to how locked down the iPhone is from the end user, detecting Pegasus in particular requires expert forensics techniques. This has left many at-risk iPhone users wondering whether they too are compromised and if so, what do they do?
• Here’s how to check your phone for Pegasus spyware using Amnesty’s tool - The Verge — Amnesty International — part of the group that helped break the news of journalists and heads of state being targeted by NSO’s government-grade spyware, Pegasus — has released a tool to check if your phone has been affected. Alongside the tool is a great set of instructions, which should help you through the somewhat technical checking process. Using the tool involves backing up your phone to a separate computer and running a check on that backup. Read on if you’ve been side-eyeing your phone since the news broke and are looking for guidance on using Amnesty’s tool.
• Mobile Verification Toolkit — Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) is a tool to facilitate the consensual forensic analysis of Android and iOS devices, for the purpose of identifying traces of compromise.
• The FBI Is Locating Cars By Spying On Their WiFi — The FBI is using a controversial technology traditionally used to locate smartphones as a car tracking surveillance tool that spies on vehicles’ on-board WiFi.
• Catholic priest quits after “anonymized” data revealed alleged use of Grindr | Ars Technica — In what appears to be a first, a public figure has been ousted after de-anonymized mobile phone location data was publicly reported, revealing sensitive and previously private details about his life.
• Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser with Adblocker | Brave Browser — Brave stops online surveillance, loads content faster, and uses 35% less battery.1

Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls and Shawn Powers chat about Twitter verification, facial recognition, YouTube moderation, and algorithmic bias.

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• I’m Not a Reporter. But I’m Verified as One on Twitter | WIRED — I NEVER CALLED myself a journalist until Twitter made me. I’m an attorney, activist, and faculty member, but it was only by using the “journalist” label that I was able to get one of the most coveted assets in social media, the blue “verified” checkmark. My months-long effort to get verified revealed a system that is stacked against grassroots activists, particularly BIPOC communities.
• Twitter verification requirements - how to get the blue check — The blue Verified badge  on Twitter lets people know that an account of public interest is authentic. To receive the blue badge, your account must be authentic, notable, and active.
• Goodbye, Fleets — We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts. We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.
• Black teen barred from skating rink by inaccurate facial recognition - The Verge — A facial recognition algorithm used by a local roller skating rink in Detroit wouldn’t let teen Lamya Robinson onto the premises, and accused her of previously getting into a fight at the establishment.
• Algorithmic bias - Wikipedia — Algorithmic bias describes systematic and repeatable errors in a computer system that create unfair outcomes, such as privileging one arbitrary group of users over others. Bias can emerge due to many factors, including but not limited to the design of the algorithm or the unintended or unanticipated use or decisions relating to the way data is coded, collected, selected or used to train the algorithm. Algorithmic bias is found across platforms, including but not limited to search engine results and social media platforms, and can have impacts ranging from inadvertent privacy violations to reinforcing social biases of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity. The study of algorithmic bias is most concerned with algorithms that reflect "systematic and unfair" discrimination. This bias has only recently been addressed in legal frameworks, such as the 2018 European Union's General Data Protection Regulation. More comprehensive regulation is needed as emerging technologies become increasingly advanced and opaque.
• Face-Detection Cameras: Glitches Spur Charges of Racism - TIME — When Joz Wang and her brother bought their mom a Nikon Coolpix S630 digital camera for Mother's Day last year, they discovered what seemed to be a malfunction. Every time they took a portrait of each other smiling, a message flashed across the screen asking, "Did someone blink?" No one had. "I thought the camera was broken!" Wang, 33, recalls. But when her brother posed with his eyes open so wide that he looked "bug-eyed," the messages stopped.
• Meet the Censored: Matt Orfalea - by Matt Taibbi - TK News by Matt Taibbi — Yes, the government is helping crack down on text messages and Facebook posts, but not to worry. At least your private thoughts are safe, right? Not so fast, found filmmaker Matt Orfalea
• Texas’ social media censorship bill pushes unconstitutional limits on free speech — Amid ongoing allegations that social media platforms are censoring conservatives, regulating Big Tech has become one of the hottest issues across the country. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has called a special legislative session in part to debate and pass content moderation legislation.
• I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score. Now You Can Get Yours, Too. - The New York Times — Little-known companies are amassing your data — like food orders and Airbnb messages — and selling the analysis to clients. Here’s how to get a copy of what they have on you.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Bastian Purrer and Namik Muduroglu about Human ID, their open source anonymous single sign-on solution.

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• humanID | One-Click Anonymous Login — humanID is an anonymous, bot-resistant authentication for safer online communities. Non-profit and open source, the project was started in 2018 by the Foundation for New humanID. With the help of Mozilla and Harvard, we’re on a mission to #FixTheInternet.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Shawn Powers about everything from healthcare to bad weather. Join us for a chat about everything.

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• Apple shouldn't use privacy & security to stave off competition, EU antitrust head warns | AppleInsider — Responding to comments made by Apple CEO Tim Cook in June, European Union competition chief Margrethe Vestager said that Apple shouldn't use privacy and security concerns to stifle competition on the App Store.
• Why Google Can't Bring Itself to Make the Internet Respect Your Privacy | Inc.com — The search giant has delayed the rollout of FLoC, its controversial replacement for third-party cookies, until 2023.
• Real Time Lightning Map :: LightningMaps.org

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Brian Fox about voting systems, open source, work in the post-covid era, blockchain, programming languages, and more.

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• Brian Fox (computer programmer) - Wikipedia — Brian Jhan Fox (born 1959) is an American computer programmer and free software advocate. He is the original author of the GNU Bash shell, which he announced as a beta in June 1989.[1] He continued as the primary maintainer of bash until at least early 1993.[2][3] Fox also built the first interactive online banking software in the U.S. for Wells Fargo in 1995,[4] and he created an open source election system in 2008.
• Opinion | To Protect Voting, Use Open-Source Software - The New York Times — Although Russian hackers are reported to have tried to disrupt the November election with attacks on the voting systems of 39 states, the consensus of the intelligence community is that they were probably unsuccessful in their efforts to delete and alter voter data. But another national election is just 15 months away, and the risk that those working on behalf of President Vladimir Putin of Russia could do real damage — and even manage to mark your ballot for you or altering your vote — remains. Since the debacle of the 2000 election (remember hanging chads?) American election machinery has been improved to reduce the chances of mis-tallying votes, outright fraud and attacks by hackers. These improvements brought with them a new concern: lack of software security. Most voting machines’ software can now be easily hacked. This is in large part because the current voting systems use proprietary software based on Microsoft’s operating system.
• Gerald Jay Sussman - Wikipedia — Gerald Jay Sussman (born February 8, 1947) is the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his S.B. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from MIT in 1968 and 1973 respectively. He has been involved in artificial intelligence (AI) research at MIT since 1964. His research has centered on understanding the problem-solving strategies used by scientists and engineers, with the goals of automating parts of the process and formalizing it to provide more effective methods of science and engineering education. Sussman has also worked in computer languages, in computer architecture and in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design.[1]
• Lisp (programming language) - Wikipedia — Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation.[3] Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today. Only Fortran is older, by one year.[4][5] Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history. Today, the best-known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Racket, Common Lisp, Scheme and Clojure.
• Pwnie Awards - Wikipedia — The Pwnie Awards recognize both excellence and incompetence in the field of information security. Winners are selected by a committee of security industry professionals from nominations collected from the information security community.[2] The awards are presented yearly at the Black Hat Security Conference.[3]
• Z shell - Wikipedia — The Z shell (Zsh) is a Unix shell that can be used as an interactive login shell and as a command interpreter for shell scripting. Zsh is an extended Bourne shell with many improvements, including some features of Bash, ksh, and tcsh.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Drupal Association Community Liaison, Rachel Lawson, and Drupal developer, Tony Savorelli, about Privacy in Drupal and beyond, and protecting ourselves and others on the web.

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• Add Permissions-Policy header to block Google FLoC [#3209628] | Drupal.org — Google is introducing what it calls Federated Learning of Cohorts, which is a way to gather user data without cookies, regardless of whether a website is loading any Google-related trackers. This is enabled starting in Chrome 89, and only in select countries on a trial basis. Although other major browser vendors are likely against this technology and will presumably not be implementing it, given Chrome’s market share this will become a concerning issue, because it largely remove users’ ability to easily opt out of being tracked—particularly true in the case of less-savvy users. See a very informative post by Plausible. Since no one can reasonably expect users to just stop using Chrome, it will be up to responsible developers to block FLoC at the source.
• Amazon is blocking Google's FLoC — and that could seriously weaken the system — Amazon is blocking Google’s controversial cookieless tracking and targeting method.
• Privacy analysis of FLoC — In the current web, trackers (and hence advertisers) associate a cookie with each user. Whenever a user visits a website that has an embedded tracker, the tracker gets the cookie and can thus build up a list of the sites that a user visits. Advertisers can use the information gained from tracking browsing history to target ads that are potentially relevant to a given user’s interests. The obvious problem here is that it involves advertisers learning everywhere you go. 
• Surveillance Self-Defense | Tips, Tools and How-tos for Safer Online Communications — We’re the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an independent non-profit working to protect online privacy for nearly thirty years. This is Surveillance Self-Defense : our expert guide to protecting you and your friends from online spying.
• University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons — The Tradeoff Fallacy - How Marketers Are Misrepresenting American Consumers and Opening Them up to Exploitation
• Reality 2.0 - Blog - Reality 2.0 Newsletter - June 4, 2021: More Tracking Tech and Apple — After a lengthy discussion in Drupal’s core issue queue by some of Katherine’s favorite people, the upcoming release of Drupal 9.2 will officially block Google’s Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) by default! Similarly, the WordPress and Joomla communities are taking similar measures. With these platforms representing a huge chunk of websites, this must be quite a blow to Google, enough so that a member of Google Chrome’s developer relations team weighed in on the Drupal issue himself. I hope this news inspires you to run off and build a Drupal site, so I’ll just leave this documentation link here just in case.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Abine’s Rob Shavell about DeleteMe and other privacy tools, as well as emerging issues like vaccine tracking, AI, and facial recognition.

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• Remove Personal Info from Google - DeleteMe
• Redact | Mass Delete your Social Media — The only platform that allows you to automatically clean up your old posts from services like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Discord and more all in one place
• DuckDuckGo — Privacy, simplified.

Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls, and Shawn Powers discuss Apple's new privacy features, the Anom app, and the problems with cloud storage.

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• Apple unveils new privacy features, digital IDs and changes to FaceTime. - The New York Times — Apple once again took aim at the vast digital-advertising industry on Monday and unveiled a number of changes to protect iPhones users’ privacy and strengthen its position as a gatekeeper between consumers and the rest of the digital industry.
• The FBI operated an 'encrypted' chat app for organized criminals | Engadget — The FBI covertly ran an encrypted communications platform for years that allowed it to intercept 20 million messages from international criminal organizations. Hundreds of arrests have been made across 18 countries as part of the investigation known as Operation Trojan Shield. Suspects, including members of the Italian Mafia and outlaw motorcycle gangs, are among those that have been charged. Australian Police, who helped conceive the sting, have arrested 224 offenders and seized 3.7 tonnes of drugs and $44.9 million in cash and assets.
• Everything you can’t do on an iPhone - The Washington Post — I’ve used an iPhone for the past 12 years, and like most of you I am not looking to change. But we’ve become so accustomed to restrictions Apple built into the iPhone, we don’t even realize how we’re contorting ourselves to comply — or what we’re missing out on. One sign we’re being manipulated by a monopoly is when it’s hard to even consider an alternative. Apple says it’s protecting our security and privacy, but it has become clear that locking down our iPhones is also about controlling us so Apple can make more money.
• iOS 15, iCloud Updates: All the Big Privacy News From WWDC '21 — It wouldn’t be an Apple event without a nod to the company’s pro-privacy stance. As part of its annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) keynote this year, the company announced some major privacy upgrades that will come with iOS 15 and iCloud—here are some of the biggest.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk about Amazon’s new Sidewalk feature, more about Apple’s opt-out options, and other privacy issues.

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• Doc Searls Weblog · Apple vs (or plus) Adtech — If you haven’t seen it yet, watch Apple’s Privacy on iPhone | tracked ad. In it a guy named Felix (that’s him, above) goes from a coffee shop to a waiting room somewhere, accumulating a vast herd of hangers-on along the way. The herd represents trackers in his phone, all crowding his personal space while gathering private information about him.
• Apple’s New Privacy Ad Is Absurd. That’s Why It’s So Brilliant — The iPhone maker is taking a much more aggressive stand on whether users should allow tracking. At all.
• How to Find the Mobile Ad ID on Apple and Android Devices? — The mobile advertising ID, also known as a mobile ad ID or a MAID, is a sequence of alphanumeric characters assigned to a mobile phone or tablet by the device’s operating system, either iOS or Android.
• Amazon devices will soon automatically share your Internet with neighbors | Ars Technica — If you use Alexa, Echo, or many other Amazon devices, you have only 10 days until you're opted in to an experiment that leaves your personal privacy and security hanging in the balance.
• How Amazon Sidewalk Works—and Why You May Want to Turn It Off | WIRED — It promises connected convenience. But the ecommerce giant doesn't exactly have an inspiring record when it comes to privacy.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk about Apple’s IDFA, Ford In-Car ads, and more about AirTags.

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• Ford Patented In-Car Ads Because We Live In Hell Now — I’m all for innovation in the automotive sector, but there are some technologies I simply cannot abide by, and Ford’s newly-patented billboard detector that can read ads and display them inside your car is exactly one of those technologies.
• Apple forcing developers to ditch unique device IDs | Ars Technica — 2013 article about the origins of Apple's IDFA.
• Proposal: Treat FLoC like a security concern – Make WordPress Core — Why is this bad? As the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains in their post “Google’s FLoC is a terrible idea“, placing people in groups based on their browsing habits is likely to facilitate employment, housing and other types of discrimination, as well as predatory targeting of unsophisticated consumers. This is in addition to the privacy concerns of tracking people and sharing their data, seemingly without informed consent – and making it more difficult for legislators and regulators to protect people.
• Add Permissions-Policy header to block Google FLoC [#3209628] | Drupal.org — Google is introducing what it calls Federated Learning of Cohorts, which is a way to gather user data without cookies, regardless of whether a website is loading any Google-related trackers. This is enabled starting in Chrome 89, and only in select countries on a trial basis. Although other major browser vendors are likely against this technology and will presumably not be implementing it, given Chrome’s market share this will become a concerning issue, because it largely remove users’ ability to easily opt out of being tracked—particularly true in the case of less-savvy users. See a very informative post by Plausible. Since no one can reasonably expect users to just stop using Chrome, it will be up to responsible developers to block FLoC at the source.
• Joomla! and FLoC — Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) proposes a new way for businesses to reach people with relevant content and ads. We explore what this could mean and why we are giving you the choice as to whether to use it or not.

Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls, and Petros Koutoupis talk Apple Airtags and privacy.

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• I tracked my kid with Apple's Airtags to test its privacy features - CNN — I clipped a keychain with one of Apple's tiny new Bluetooth trackers, AirTags, onto my son's book bag and waved goodbye to him on the school bus. I watched on my iPhone's Find My app as the bus stopped at a light a few blocks down from our street.
• Apple AirTags only partly stop stalking - The Washington Post

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk about Basecamp’s new policy on workplace political conversation.

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• Changes at Basecamp — Recently, we've made some internal company changes, which, taken in total, collectively feel like a full version change. It deserves an announcement.
• The story of Basecamp’s disastrous policy - The Verge — On April 26th, Basecamp founder and CEO Jason Fried posted on his blog about some policy changes that would be happening at the company, which makes team collaboration software. One policy stuck out to many on the internet — the company would no longer be allowing its employees to have discussions about society or politics on its internal account. What followed was a tidal wave of public outcry, employees speaking out against the policies (and talking about what led to them), several revisions of the blog post, and, finally, almost a third of the company’s employees deciding to accept buyouts and leave. There has since been an apology from Fried, but it remains to be seen if any more will be coming — there are still accusations made by employees that haven’t really been addressed.
• The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy: Graeber, David: 9781612195186: Amazon.com: Books — Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence?
• The Soul of A New Machine: Kidder, Tracy: 9780316491976: Amazon.com: Books — Computers have changed since 1981, when The Soul of a New Machine first examined the culture of the computer revolution. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls chat with Kyle Rankin and Shawn Powers about Signal’s exposure of vulnerabilities in Cellebrite’s mobile device hacking software.

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• Signal >> Blog >> Exploiting vulnerabilities in Cellebrite UFED and Physical Analyzer from an app's perspective — Cellebrite makes software to automate physically extracting and indexing data from mobile devices. They exist within the grey – where enterprise branding joins together with the larcenous to be called “digital intelligence.” Their customer list has included authoritarian regimes in Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, and China; death squads in Bangladesh; military juntas in Myanmar; and those seeking to abuse and oppress in Turkey, UAE, and elsewhere. A few months ago, they announced that they added Signal support to their software. Their products have often been linked to the persecution of imprisoned journalists and activists around the world, but less has been written about what their software actually does or how it works. Let’s take a closer look. In particular, their software is often associated with bypassing security, so let’s take some time to examine the security of their own software.
• Australia’s vague anti-encryption law sets a dangerous new precedent - ProtonMail Blog — the Australian government and its Labor partners rammed a shockingly invasive anti-encryption law through Parliament, over the objections of experts, businesses, and civil rights groups.
• Australia's Encryption-Busting Law Could Impact Global Privacy | WIRED — Australia has passed a law that would require companies to weaken their encryption, a move that could reverberate globally.
• P versus NP problem - Wikipedia — The P versus NP problem is a major unsolved problem in computer science. It asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly verified can also be solved quickly.
• Data Double Dipping: When Companies Mine Paying Customers – Purism — There’s an old snarky saying among privacy advocates: “If you aren’t paying for something, you are the product!” This updated version of “There’s no such thing as a free lunch” arose in the Internet age among the ever-growing list of free services and apps on the Internet funded by collecting and selling your data to advertisers. If large companies like Google and Facebook are any indication, a lot of money can be made with user data and the more data you collect, the more money you can make.
• Eva Galperin: What you need to know about stalkerware | TED Talk — "Full access to a person's phone is the next best thing to full access to a person's mind," says cybersecurity expert Eva Galperin. In an urgent talk, she describes the emerging danger of stalkerware -- software designed to spy on someone by gaining access to their devices without their knowledge -- and calls on antivirus companies to recognize these programs as malicious in order to discourage abusers and protect victims.
• Reality 2.0 Episode 52: Fragmentation and Outrage of the Week — Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin about fragmentation and software development, the Amazon Halo, and surveilling school children.
• This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends — From New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth, THIS IS HOW THEY TELL ME THE WORLD ENDS is the untold story of the cyber arms trade-the most secretive, invisible, government-backed market on earth-and a terrifying first look at a new kind of global warfare.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls discuss a new approach to intent broadcasting, the end of tracking, and the island of Kauai.

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• Customer Commons — Customer Commons’ mission is to restore the balance of power, respect and trust between individuals and organizations that serve them.
• A New Way – Customer Commons — Why do you always have to accept websites’ terms? And why do you have no record of your own of what you accepted, or when‚ or anything?

Katherine Druckman chats with Petros Koutoupis and Kyle Rankin about FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), the benefits of contributing to the projects you use, and why you should be a FOSS fan as well.

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• Upstream (software development) - Wikipedia — In software development, upstream refers to a direction toward the original authors or maintainers of software that is distributed as source code, and is a qualification of either a version (released by the original authors, based on their upstream source code), a bug or a patch.
• osresearch/heads: A minimal Linux that runs as a coreboot or LinuxBoot ROM payload to provide a secure, flexible boot environment for laptops and servers.
• Heads — Heads is secure BIOS replacement that provides tamper-evident features to detect when the BIOS or important boot files have been modified. The official project page can be found at the official Heads GitHub page and we base our Heads BIOS off of this code. On Purism laptops Heads is built as an executable on top of the same coreboot BIOS that we have used in the past but instead of coreboot running SeaBIOS to detect and boot into your devices, coreboot runs Heads instead.
• evilsocket/opensnitch: OpenSnitch is a GNU/Linux port of the Little Snitch application firewall
• Some Thoughts on Open Core | Linux Journal — Why open core software is bad for the FOSS movement.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Shawn Powers about comic art, ecommerce, and the world beyond the browser.

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• My Big Round World – Everyone's a square… — Everyone's a square…
• xkcd: Hammer Incident — A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
• My Dog: The Paradox - The Oatmeal
• Joe Craven - Wikipedia — Joe Craven is an American freestyle folk, world and roots music multi-instrumentalist, singer and educator.
• Thinking Outside the Browser – Customer Commons — Browsers are clients, which are by design subordinate to servers. There is a lot that can’t be done with a browser.
• Toward E-commerce 2.0 – Customer Commons — One reason this happened is that client-server, aka calf-cow  (illustrated in Thinking outside the browser) has been the default format for all relationships on the Web, and cookies were required to maintain those relationships. Which really aren’t. Here’s why:
• Reality 2.0 Episode 43: Ad Tracking Runs Deep
• Reality 2.0 - Blog - Page X-Ray Data Privacy Analysis Featured in Episode 43 — Page X-Ray differs from typical consumer-oriented privacy apps, like The Markup’s recently published Blacklight in that it not only detects trackers that are loaded by the page, but also the trackers that are called by other trackers, giving a more extensive view of tracking activity and data collection.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk about responsibility for disinformation, congressional hearings, and the Suez canal.

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• Zuckerberg and Dorsey Face Harsh Questioning From Lawmakers - The New York Times — Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter testified about their platforms, misinformation and the 2020 election.
• Evan Greer on Twitter: "most of the Capitol rioters had smartphones. were Apple and AT&T partially responsible for the violence? Please answer yes or no." / Twitter — most of the Capitol rioters had smartphones. were Apple and AT&T partially responsible for the violence? Please answer yes or no.
• Pluralistic: 25 Mar 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow — A monopolist's first preference is always "don't regulate me." But coming in at a close second is "regulate me in ways that only I can comply with, so that no one is allowed to compete with me."
• Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Pichai addressed online extremism and misinformation before House committee - The Washington Post — Lawmakers wanted answers on the role Google, Facebook and Twitter played in the attacks on the Capitol and viral covid-19 misinformation
• Reality 2.0 Episode 54: Digital Rights are Human Rights — Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Evan Greer, Deputy Director of digital rights activism group Fight for the Future about Section 230, privacy, politics, de-platforming, and internet policy.
• Reality 2.0 Episode 62: How Did Disinformation Become the Truth? — Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Prof. Chris Bronk, Ph.D. and Petros Koutoupis about disinformation and cyber security, and how they impact our lives, as well as IoT vulnerabilities and voice recognition technology.
• Zeynep Tufekci - Wikipedia
• Ten Questions the Press Should Have Asked President Biden - Insight — Yesterday, President Joe Biden held his first press conference. There were questions on Biden’s plans for the 2024 election (four years away!), the filibuster (over which he has no control), and Donald Trump (could we hear even less about him?), but not a single question on the pandemic. Not one.
• Laurie Garrett - Wikipedia

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Don Marti and Shawn Powers about realistic data privacy measures, surveillance marketing, and privacy regulation.

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• CCPA opt out, nerd edition — While we figure out how to make general-purpose CCPA opt-outs practical (feel free to set up a time on Calendly if you want to talk with me about Authorized Agent projects), here’s a quick summary of my current CCPA opt-out tools. This is a prototype only, but does work.
• Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Laws and Regulations | US EPA — The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) is the public law that creates the framework for the proper management of hazardous and non-hazardous solid waste. The law describes the waste management program mandated by Congress that gave EPA authority to develop the RCRA program. The term RCRA is often used interchangeably to refer to the law, regulations and EPA policy and guidance. 
• Resource Conservation and Recovery Act - Wikipedia — The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), enacted in 1976, is the principal federal law in the United States governing the disposal of solid waste and hazardous waste.[1]
• Global Privacy Control — Take Control Of Your Privacy — Online privacy should be accessible to everyone. It starts with a simpler way to exercise your rights.
• CCPA guidance for authorized agents — The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”) creates a variety of privacy rights for California consumers. Microsoft makes it easy for consumers to exercise their rights, including the rights, via a verifiable request, that we (i) disclose and access what personal data we collect, use, disclose, and sell and (ii) delete the consumer’s personal data. Per the CCPA, consumers may exercise their rights through an authorized agent. This guidance is intended for authorized agents acting on behalf of a consumer looking to exercise the above CCPA rights.
• The State of Authorized Agent Opt Outs Under the California Consumer Privacy Act (PDF)
• Consumer Reports Model State Privacy Act — Though consumers have a fundamental right to privacy, there is no comprehensive federal privacy law granting them baseline privacy and security protections. Instead of leaving it to consumers to “opt-in” or “opt-out,” this bill protects consumer privacy by prohibiting companies from engaging in privacy-invasive behaviors. 

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Prof. Chris Bronk, Ph.D. and Petros Koutoupis about disinformation and cyber security, and how they impact our lives, as well as IoT vulnerabilities and voice recognition technology.

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• “Misinformation” vs. “Disinformation”: Get Informed On The Difference - Dictionary.com — Disinformation means “false information, as about a country’s military strength or plans, disseminated by a government or intelligence agency in a hostile act of tactical political subversion.” It is also used more generally to mean “deliberately misleading or biased information; manipulated narrative or facts; propaganda.” So, disinformation is knowingly spreading misinformation. Our first definition of this word gives one major reason why a person or group might want to spread wrong information, but there are many other nefarious motivations lurking behind the creation of disinformation.
• Amazon.com: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (9781541758001): Zuboff, Shoshana: Books — In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
• Tom Clancy, author of the Jack Ryan Novels - Tom Clancy
• Amazon.com : john le carré
• Amazon.com: Active Measures (9781250787408): Rid, Thomas: Books
• Internet-based chastity belts hijacked by malicious hackers | Boing Boing — Oh man. A bluetooth-controlled chastity belt was the recent victim of a hacker attack. The Cellmate Chastity Cage, made by Chinese company Qiui, was designed so that users are able to lock and unlock their sex partner's penis prison remotely. Users caught in the attack were threatened with having their genitals locked in permanently unless they paid a 0.02 bitcoin (about $270) ransom.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Dave Huseby about the authentic data economy, and the future of authentication.

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• The Authentic Data Economy. Universal Digital Trust at Global Scale | by dwh | Feb, 2021 | Medium — To this day — even with mass computerization — trust-based interactions stubbornly resist digitization and remain at human scale simply because of the way we keep and maintain authentic data records. Tasks such as opening a bank account, having a document notarized, or signing a contract typically involves an in-person meeting to present the authentic data records (e.g. government identification, proof of funds, etc) and to sign a “wet” signature. However, now that we live in a reality twisted by the DNA strands of the COVID-19 virus, how do we ever hope to get back to in-person business as usual and trust as usual? Even if we can vaccinate against the virus and restore normal human interaction, the need for a more lasting technological solution for establishing trust remotely and transmitting it over great distances still exists. This, I believe, is the last great problem in technology and solving it will create the next crop of billion-dollar companies and billionaire founders.
• IIW — The Internet Identity Workshop has been finding, probing and solving identity issues twice every year since 2005. We meet in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Every IIW moves topics, code and projects downfield. Name an identity topic and it’s likely that more substantial discussion and work has been done at IIW than any other conference!
• Merkle tree - Wikipedia — In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every leaf node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of a data block, and every non-leaf node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. Hash trees allow efficient and secure verification of the contents of large data structures. Hash trees are a generalization of hash lists and hash chains.
• A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace | Electronic Frontier Foundation — Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk about Starlink, SpaceX and Mozilla’s new state partitioning privacy feature in Firefox.

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• Starlink: SpaceX's satellite internet project | Space — Starlink is the name of a satellite network that the private spaceflight company SpaceX is developing to provide low-cost internet to remote locations. While SpaceX eventually hopes to have as many as 12,000 satellites in this so-called megaconstellation, the size and scale of the project have flustered astronomers and amateur skywatchers, who fear that the bright, orbiting objects will interfere with observations of the universe.
• Heavens-Above — Awesome site for space nerds.
• How Starlink Is About To Disrupt The Telecommunications Sector — If the logo doesn’t ring a bell, put it on your radar. Starlink, the satellite telecommunications company created by Elon Musk leveraging SpaceX’s rocket development, continues to complete milestones on schedule and announces that it will offer 300Mbps connectivity services with an approximate latency of 20ms by the end of this year. In the United States, where the company has garnered a favorable deal that includes $900 million in funding under FCC programs aimed at providing connectivity to rural areas, that’s a very competitive offer, so much so that many ISPs have protested to the FCC claiming that the technology used by the company is experimental, not sufficiently tested, and will cause problems in the future. If you don’t spot that as a clear sign of disruption, you haven’t seen enough disruptions yet. 
• Introducing State Partitioning - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog — State Partitioning is the technical term for a new privacy feature in Firefox called Total Cookie Protection, which will be available in ETP Strict Mode in Firefox 86. This article shows how State Partitioning works inside of Firefox and explains what developers of third-party integrations can do to stay compatible with the latest changes.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Travis Carden and Petros Koutoupis about maintaining open source projects, mentoring contributors, Drupal, and automated testing.

Show notes:

(42s): Intros, subscribe to our newsletter, and buy our swag. ;)

(1m 38s): Who IS Travis Carden?

(4m 36s): Maintaining an open source project and mentoring contributors.

(8m 13s): Drupal's origins and evolution.

(18m 57s): Impressive Drupal examples.

(24m 49s): Mentorship and Drupal.

(31m 24s): Intro to Orca, the Drupal testing tool.

(33m 17s): Open sourcing Orca.

(48m 33s): Basics of automated testing.

(57m 35s): Automated testing strategy.

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• acquia/orca: A tool for testing a company's software packages together in the context of a realistic, functioning, best practices Drupal build — ORCA (Official Representative Customer Application) is a tool for testing a company's Drupal-adjacent software packages. It ensures their cross compatibility and correct functioning by installing all of them together into a realistic, functioning, best practices Drupal build and running automated tests and static code analysis on them. Its guiding design principle is to use company packages as a customer would. It installs the latest recommended versions via Composer and performs no manual setup or configuration.
• Liskov substitution principle - Wikipedia — Substitutability is a principle in object-oriented programming stating that, in a computer program, if S is a subtype of T, then objects of type T may be replaced with objects of type S (i.e., an object of type T may be substituted with any object of a subtype S) without altering any of the desirable properties of the program (correctness, task performed, etc.). More formally, the Liskov substitution principle (LSP) is a particular definition of a subtyping relation, called (strong) behavioral subtyping, that was initially introduced by Barbara Liskov in a 1987 conference keynote address titled Data abstraction and hierarchy.
• Drupal Cloud: Acquia CMS - YouTube — Preview of Acquia CMS.
• Test Driven Development: By Example: Beck, Kent: 8601400403228: Amazon.com: Gateway — Travis's recommendation - A great resource for anyone getting started driving their own development or struggling "where the rubber meets the road". It's hands-on and practical.
• xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler)) 1, Meszaros, Gerard, eBook - Amazon.com — Travis's recommendation - This is the most comprehensive and authoritative book I know of on unit testing--for those who want to get really good at it. It's a long read at 833 pages, but it covers most issues you're likely to encounter on your way to proficiency. It's organized in such a way that it can be used as a cookbook or pattern library even if you don't read it straight through.
• Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship: Robert C. Martin: 9780132350884: Amazon.com: Books — Travis's Recommendation - This would be my top recommendation for its balance of breadth, comprehensiveness, length, and accessibility. It's companion book The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers, though on a little different topic, is also highly recommendable. Both were highly formative for me. The more recently published Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design in the same series is also excellent.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Shawn Powers and Kyle Rankin about protecting yourself online, password and security best practices, and a tragic tale.

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• Universal 2nd Factor - Wikipedia — Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) is an open standard that strengthens and simplifies two-factor authentication (2FA) using specialized Universal Serial Bus (USB) or near-field communication (NFC) devices based on similar security technology found in smart cards.
• Yubico | YubiKey Strong Two Factor Authentication
• Investing in Real Convergence – Purism — Real convergence means bringing your desktop computer with you wherever you go.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk facial recognition AI using our photos for training, and how we collectively negotiate our own privacy online.

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• This new tool can tell you if your online photos are helping train facial recognition systems - CNN — Exposing.ai, unveiled in January, lets you know whether photos you've posted to image-sharing site Flickr have been used to advance this controversial application of artificial intelligence by allowing you to search more than 3.6 million photos in six facial-recognition image datasets.
• Check if your photos were used in AI surveillance research projects — Check if your Flickr photos were used to build face recognition
• Clearview AI’s Facial Recognition App Called Illegal in Canada - The New York Times — Canadian authorities declared that the company needed citizens’ consent to use their biometric information, and told the firm to delete facial images from its database.
• This 'Anonymizer' Tool Replaces Your Face With a Fake to Trick Facial Recognition | Debugger — Try the Anonymizer tool to create a fake face that looks like you
• Doc Searls Weblog · About face — We know more than we can tell.
• Facebook CIA Project: The Onion News Network ONN - YouTube
• Sun on Privacy: 'Get Over It' | WIRED — "You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company's new Jini technology. "Get over it."
• The Andromeda Strain - MichaelCrichton.com
• A Vast Web of Vengeance - The New York Times — Outrageous lies destroyed Guy Babcock’s online reputation. When he went hunting for their source, what he discovered was worse than he could have imagined.
• Canadian Woman Accused of Defaming Dozens Online Is Arrested in Toronto - The New York Times — Nadire Atas, a Canadian woman who wrote thousands of online posts defaming her perceived enemies, was arrested on Tuesday by the police in Toronto. She was charged with crimes including harassment and libel, a Toronto police spokeswoman said.
• CORE Response: Community Organized Relief Effort — Together, we save lives.

Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls and Petros Koutoupis talk Twitter's new Birdwatch experiment, Signal's resistance to moderation, and Redditors' impact on the stock market.

Show notes:

[02:06]: Twitter outsourcing content moderation with expirimental Birdwatch feature.

[13:32]: Signal's founder has pushed back against internal efforts to have some sort of mechanism to prevent misuse of the platform.

[26:25]: Redditors take on hedge funds and the stock market with Game Stop and others. Robinhood and Discord respond.

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Links:

• Twitter introduces 'Birdwatch' to fight misinformation | Engadget — “Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context,” Twitter writes in a blog post. “We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable.”
• Warning Signal: the messaging app’s new features are causing internal turmoil - The Verge — Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world.
• The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook - WSJ — Deciding what does and doesn’t belong online is one of the fastest-growing jobs in the technology world—and perhaps the most grueling. The equivalent of 65 years of video are uploaded to YouTube each day. Facebook receives more than a million user reports of potentially objectionable content a day.
• Mind Your Own Business! - YouTube — Gladys Kravitz.
• Amazon.com: Shephard's Drone: A Novel (9780960051908): Frischmann, Brett: Books
• Amazon.com: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (9781984897787): Hyde, Lewis: Books
• Amazon.com: COMMON AS AIR (9780374532796): Hyde, Lewis: Books
• The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Zuboff, Shoshana: 9781610395694: Amazon.com: Books
• Opinion | Facebook and the Surveillance Society: The Other Coup - The New York Times — We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
• GameStop, Reddit and Robinhood: A full recap of the historic retail trading mania on Wall Street — GameStop mania took Wall Street by storm, thanks to a legion of retail traders glued to the WallStreetBets message board on Reddit.
• Discord bans the r/WallStreetBets server, but new ones have sprung to life - The Verge — Discord says it did not ban the WallStreetBets server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.” The Verge gained access to the server and can confirm the claim that users of the channel were spamming hateful language, including racial slurs.

Doc Searls and Petros Koutoupis talk to Dean Landsman and Paul Walker about radio broadcasting, including long distance coverage.

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• :: Dean Landsman :: Landsman Communications Group ::
• Doc Searls on Twitter: "Interesting to see my uncredited photo of Boston’s Deer Island, ⁦@creative commons⁩ licensed only to require attribution, I suppose found by @msnbc on ⁦@Wikipedia⁩, on ⁦the ⁦@maddow⁩ show. You’re welcome. :-) https://t.co/N6BiNNHbiN" / Twitter — Interesting to see my uncredited photo of Boston’s Deer Island, ⁦ @creative commons⁩ licensed only to require attribution, I suppose found by @msnbc on ⁦ @Wikipedia ⁩, on ⁦the ⁦ @maddow ⁩ show. You’re welcome. :-)
• KROY — This website was developed and is maintained by a group of former staff members and pays tribute to the memories of those and other eras in KROY’s storied history. We’re glad you stopped by this virtual “KROY window.” Stay awhile and have a look around.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Evan Greer, Deputy Director of digital rights activism group Fight for the Future about Section 230, privacy, politics, de-platforming, and internet policy.

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• Evan Greer (@evan_greer) / Twitter
• Fight for the Future — We are a group of artists, engineers, activists, and technologists who have been behind the largest online protests in human history, channeling Internet outrage into political power to win public interest victories previously thought to be impossible.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin and Petros Koutoupis about the SolarWinds hack, and Facebook's reaction to Apple privacy initiatives.

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Special Guests: Kyle Rankin and Petros Koutoupis.

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• The Pros and Cons of Open-source Tools - THWACK — SolarWinds blog post that didn't age well. "Security becomes a major issue. Anyone can be hacked. However, the risk is far less when it comes to proprietary software. Due to the nature of open-source software allowing anyone to update the code, the risk of downloading malicious code is much higher. One source referred to using open-source software as “eating from a dirty fork.” When you reach in the drawer for a clean fork, you could be pulling out a dirty utensil. That analogy is right on the money."
• Facebook’s Laughable Campaign Against Apple Is Really Against Users and Small Businesses | Electronic Frontier Foundation — Facebook has recently launched a campaign touting itself as the protector of small businesses. This is a laughable attempt from Facebook to distract you from its poor track record of anticompetitive behavior and privacy issues as it tries to derail pro-privacy changes from Apple that are bad for Facebook’s business.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin about fragmentation and software development, the Amazon Halo, and surveilling school children.

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Show notes:

Katherine (41s):
The concept of fragmentation as it applies to software development.

Kyle (1m 44s):
[I]f you're an application developer today and you're writing a program, you know, 20 years ago, what you had to do is think about, well, do I want my application to run on windows, Mac, or Linux, or what combination of those? And then depending on your decision, you would pick different frameworks, different languages, maybe, and each individual platform you had, the support basically made you had the fork, the code in many cases.

Kyle (2m 31s):
I mean, depending on what, what graphical libraries you picked, but these days it's way worse. Because with mobile devices, you've added a couple of extra platforms on top of those three. So now it's not just windows, Mac, or Linux, it's also Android or iOS. And so, and then, so what ends up happening is the developer will say, well, do I want to make a mobile application or do I want to make a desktop application? And then they'll start with that standpoint. And they, or they may say, well, I want to do all of the above, but then there's a minimum of like five different platforms. They have to support them. And all of them are often in different languages, you know, different development, methodologies, different frameworks, different tools to test and build all of that stuff.

Kyle (3m 16s):
[W]e decided, well, it makes the most sense to avoid fragmentation and have the same operating system that our laptop runs just instead of sort of making an application, porting an application to the phone, let's just make the existing Linux desktop ecosystem as a whole portable to a small screen

Katherine (10m 1s):
[W]hat's happening now with the new M1 processor the whole idea is that any Mac app can now be, or rather the other way around, any iOS app is now a desktop app, which is interesting because it's sort of the opposite reality.

Katherine (16m 41s):
[I]t's almost ridiculous to me at this point that I can't just plug in my, if, if I were to have a fancy new iPhone, which I don't, but if I did, why shouldn't I just be able to plug it in? You know, it's a powerful device, it has a massive amount of computing power

Kyle (19m 43s):
If at all, you know, depending on the provider, Google has had huge problems with, you know, all of these third parties that create custom versions of Android and they never update them. So they've had to go through all of these engineering efforts to try to avoid just the fragmentation in the Android market, with all of these custom Androids that are out there.

Katherine (31m 28s):
[T]he Amazon halo wearable device because all of the coverage, even, and maybe even, especially in mainstream press outlets has been so bad. I mean, it's, you know, it's not just privacy advocates or, you know, geeks like us who are going really, who thought this was a good idea. The Washington post, which is as they even pointed out owned by Jeff Bezos is just tearing this thing apart.

Doc (31m 60s):
So the headline Amazon's new health band is the most invasive tech we've ever tested. And then the subhead is even better. It says the halo band asks you to strip down and strap on a microphone. So it can make 3d scans of your body fat and monitor your tone of voice after all that. It still isn't very helpful.

Katherine (43m 47s):
An article in Gizmodo about schools, us schools, having access to the same technology that federal law enforcement has for breaking into phones. And they use this technology to conduct warrantless searches of student phones.

Katherine (46m 6s):
[I]t knows everything that you're anxious about. It knows everything that you're curious about. It knows, you know, it knows everything. And yet somehow some school districts and in fact judges, apparently because these, these issues have gone to court, find it perfectly acceptable for a school to be able to hack into somebody’s device. So I, I find this really disturbing. I wonder, Kyle, if you could kind of maybe give us some insight about how, how potentially dangerous this is.

Kyle (46m 40s):
I mean, I've, I see this trend over and over again, where what will happen is someone will come up with a new invasive technology and it's sort of like boiling the frog kind of thing where you could not, you know, throw this against everybody. Like everyone would rise up and say, this is not okay. But so what you do instead is you start with people with the least possible agency. You can normally, if you have some sort of invasive privacy invasive tech, the first step is to either sell it for stopping terrorism or maybe pedophiles. And then after, after you get sort of a proof of concept there, then you have to expand. If you're selling a product, you need to expand your user base.

Doc (54m 21s):
Yeah. The weird thing for me is that almost nobody's worked on starting with giving us agency, you know, I mean, we should be able to say, here's privacy. Here's, here's what I've got. You can't see anything. You're not seeing anything we're doing.

Doc (57m 34s):
That's my message to all of you. We can't do that. And we need to be able to do that, that's why my preference would be for the default to be, you have to default to, I'm not collecting any of your data. Your data is yours. I'm not allowed to do it. I'm only allowed to do it. If you expressly give me informed consent to do it. And then at that point I will do it, but you, but, but if I, if you do nothing, then I can't do it. I can't take any of your data. It's yours. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the more quoted things that I've written in the last few years.

Katherine (58m 58s):
But I kind of feel like we are in the wild West. That's how I feel like when digitally, when we start talking about things like, you know, schools being allowed to quite literally digitally strip search your children, you know, people should be outraged by that

Kyle (59m 38s):
Well, but that's also because your average parent given the preference, and many of them already do put spyware on their children's phones to track their children, right. Because they want to be able to see everything that their kid did.

Kyle (1h 0m 18s):
I keep, I keep saying, it's not that people don't care about privacy, as much as they don't understand the implications of what they're giving up, you know? And so I, you know, a lot of parents don't necessarily understand the implications of, of what it normalizes.

Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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Links:

• Preventing Fragmentation with the Librem 5 – Purism — Fragmentation is a massive problem in computer software development that has only gotten worse with mobile computers. By fragmentation I’m referring to incompatible platforms that require a developer to maintain separate forks of their code. Twenty years ago if you wanted to write software for an end user, you had to decide whether to support Windows, Macs or Linux. Each of those platforms required you to build, test, and maintain different forks of your software.
• Amazon’s Halo Band wearable tracks your voice and body fat, but isn’t helpful - The Washington Post — The Halo Band asks you to strip down and strap on a microphone so that it can make 3-D scans of your body fat and monitor your tone of voice. After all that, it still isn’t very helpful.
• U.S. Schools Are Buying Cellebrite Phone-Hacking Tech — While companies like Cellebrite have partnered with federal and local police for years, that the controversial equipment is also available for school district employees to search students’ personal devices has gone relatively unnoticed—and serves as a frightening reminder of how technology originally developed for use by the military or intelligence services, ranging from blast-armored trucks designed for use in war zones to invasive surveillance tools, keeps trickling down to domestic police and even the institutions where our kids go to learn.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman have a fun chat with Petros Koutoupis about open source in space, digital detox, World War 2 cryptography, and poop in the desert.

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• NASA is paying startups for moon rocks. It's not what you think - CNN — NASA pledged in September to buy moon rocks from companies that can get robotic rovers to the lunar surface and scoop up samples of the dusty terrain, and the space agency asked for bids from companies all over the world. The winners were unveiled Thursday: California-based Masten, Lunar Outpost of Colorado, and two separate companies that are both called iSpace — one from Japan and the other from Luxembourg.
• semissioncontrol/semcos: SEMC OS is an operating system for Space Exploration and beyond! — Space. The Final Frontier. Where man hesitates to go, for it is one of the most dangerous realms that can be found. Not a world, but a multitude of worlds, accessible through only one tool — the space rocket. But tools of great power rely on systems of even more tremendously large strength. These systems are the ones that are created here, at SEMC. The Space Exploration Mission Control organization strives to create powerful tools and services, Open Sourced. And this is SEMC OS. A from-scratch distro written to be fast and reliable. Why? Because large space agencies lack one. There should be a unification when it comes to softwares that control the future of humanity - and this is where SEMC OS comes in. Hooked? Read on!

Doc Searls and Jon Lebkowsky talk reality, social constructs, the internet, and disinformation.

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Special Guest: Jon Lebkowsky.

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• The Big Lebkowsky - The Big Lebkowsky — Tracking strategic foresight, digital culture, media, and the Internet.
• ... My heart’s in Accra - Ethan Zuckerman’s online home, since 2003… My heart’s in Accra | Ethan Zuckerman’s online home, since 2003
• About EFF-Austin - EFF-Austin — EFF-Austin advocates establishment and protection of digital rights and defense of the wealth of digital information, innovation, and technology. We promote the right of all citizens to communicate and share information without unreasonable constraint. We also advocate the fundamental right to explore, tinker, create, and innovate along the frontier of emerging technologies.

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Petros Koutoupis, and Kyle Rankin talk Parler and platform lock-in, the concept of data, software, and hardware ownership, and the open source social contract.

Show notes:
(49s):
“I think the first one, maybe the that's that we could cover is, well, let's see, how do I put this without causing too much controversy? That's just the idea of siloed social, silos of any kind, but in particular social media and perceived censorship as it, as it applies to social media. That's a, that's a hot topic right now.”

(1m 59s):
“Do you not know about parlor? No. Oh, this is going to be a great episode!”

(3m 54s):
“And so, as a result, a lot of people who are concerned about censorship on Twitter and Facebook have moved over there. And, and in particular on the conservative side, just because like with any social network, there's a network effect.”

(5m 11s):
“It also reminds me of the early days of Google plus”

(8m 53s):
“I think we're moving from one moderator to, I mean, This happens on, on Mastodon quite a bit where you will have, because it's so federated and because all of the instances can in theory, talk to each other, sometimes you'll have a falling out because many Mastodon instances are more or less governed by the winds of a sysadmin who decided to spin it up.”

(10m 55s):
“It looks different to everybody. We all have our own, our own feeds are on, you know, our own preferences, our own, you know, whenever it is, I mean, it's, it's, it's shaped shifts for each of us, depending on what we've looked at and who we follow and all the rest of it. And it's by design. So there's no uniform vision to it.”

(11m 35s):
“I think you said it, Catherine did, a lot of people were sort of creeped out by Facebook, but it's only because of read a bunch of stuff about, Hey, you're not private there. And then the movie they watched that movie, you know...now they're scared of Facebook. They're not entirely sure why.”

(12m 34s):
“We don't need platforms for all this stuff. You can do this stuff without platforms.”

(15m 24s):
“So that's an interesting segue into one of the other topics that we've been talking about and that's, it's being owned by platforms instead of the other way around. And I think, you know, we all have in common that we are, we have a bit of a DIY and obviously open source mentality”

(18m 11s):
“Apple announced a new Big Sur release. And around the time that they announced the update that the update was available. So presumably people were downloading it, et cetera. People started noticing on their Macs that they were having trouble launching programs. They would try to launch an application. And sometimes it would take, you know, a minute after saying to launch before the application showed up on their local machine.”

(23m 15s):
“it really raises the issues of ownership. You know?”

(24m 42s):
“And it sounds like in many cases, you don't, if you have a Mac, you don't necessarily own that”

(24m 59s):
“I don't know if there are degrees of severity of one's lack of control over your digital products in your life.”

(28m 20s):
“And, you know, and I thought the chance that Google is going to get rid of those is pretty high Google's record of holding onto a service that people don't pay for is pretty lousy.”

(29m 40s):
“You have a bundle of rights. And, and I think that we haven't worked out yet online.”

(32m 29s):
“And this ephemeral service, which is now tied to a tangible thing, that tangible thing, which before would have different rules applied to it, like say a thermostat or whatever it is, where when the, the cloud service goes away, the company goes away.”

(33m 17s):
“For example, like this, this thing that happened this week that we already talked about with Apple, I think a lot of people didn't think about how applications launching was tethered to the cloud in any way”

(33m 48s):
“It's like the, the internet is a network of leashes and, like dog leashes with colors on them.”

(35m 48s):
“And I think it was 1890 and it was about the time they decided the right of privacy was the right to be let alone.”

(36m 52s):
“something that we've talked about many times, and that is open source, open source licensing, open source culture, open source awareness, even.”

(37m 50s):
“And people now start to question, they go, Hey, wait a second. This, this big platform is making a ton of money off of this code that I wrote, but I'm not.”

(39m 25s):
“And does it matter, does it matter what exactly we're talking about? Like, does it matter if I'm talking about contributing to something like Apache or, you know, Linux kernel, or does it matter if we're talking about some sort of web framework or library that, you know, a Facebook, a Twitter, a tic talk is using to make a lot of money, you know, that may, or even a product you just don't like, does it, does it somehow matter? I mean, obviously from a licensing perspective, it doesn't, but from an ideological perspective, does it matter?”

(41m 18s):
“And what does it even mean to contribute back to the project?”

(42m 18s):
“I think that's where the social contract starts to break down.”

(46m 10s):
“And that's supposed to be a good thing. What you want is to work with the companies that are using your software, and hopefully they will, they will release patches and fixes and improvements to your software. That's the idealized model.”

(48m 19s):
“open source licenses are pretty ubiquitous.”

(48m 33s):
“Well, you're writing code with an IDE that is probably free software. You didn't pay for it under an open-source license maybe on an OS that has similar licensing that you didn't have to work on using other people's libraries that you didn't have to write yourself from scratch all the way down to the OSTP.”

(49m 16s):
“Well, that's free software. And so the WordPress people knock on your door and like, Oh, well, and that's running on Linux. And so Linus is going to show up and what his handout, you know, it, everyone's sort of, for some reason, people think that, well, you're sitting on this entire body of work that people have put so much effort for free into to share with everyone else you're taking the benefit of that.”

(51m 13s):
I guess the ultimate question though, is at what point does, is there enough pushback that it does shift the open source community? ...at what point is it a significant enough disruption that there are enough people that are questioning the open source social contract?”

Reality 2.0 around the web:
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Special Guests: Kyle Rankin and Petros Koutoupis.

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Links:

• Parler - Wikipedia — Parler is an American microblogging and social networking service launched in August 2018. Parler has a significant user base of Trump supporters, conservatives, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories. Parler has been described as an alternative to Twitter, and is popular among people who have been banned from mainstream social networks or oppose their moderation policies.
• davewiner.com
• Scripting News — This is Scripting News. It's Dave Winer's blog.
• Little Snitch - Makes the invisible visible!
• Amazon.com: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (9781984897787): Hyde, Lewis: Books — Drawing on examples from folklore and literature, history and tribal customs, economics and modern copyright law, Lewis Hyde demonstrates how our society—governed by the marketplace—is poorly equipped to determine the worth of artists’ work. He shows us that another way is possible: the alternative economy of the gift, which allows creations and ideas to circulate freely, rather than hoarding them as commodities.
• Amazon.com: COMMON AS AIR (9780374532796): Hyde, Lewis: Books — Common as Air offers a stirring defense of our cultural commons, that vast store of art and ideas we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich in the present. Suspicious of the current idea that all creative work is "intellectual property," Lewis Hyde turns to America's Founding Fathers―men such as Adams, Madison, and Jefferson―in search of other ways to imagine the fruits of human wit and imagination. What he discovers is a rich tradition in which knowledge was assumed to be a commonwealth, not a private preserve.
• macOS Big Sur launch appears to cause temporary slowdown in even non-Big Sur Macs | Ars Technica — When an Apple device can't connect to the network but you want to launch an app anyway, the notarization validation is supposed to "soft fail"—that is, your Apple device is supposed to recognize you're not online and allow the app to launch anyway. However, due to the nature of whatever happened today, calls to the server appeared to simply hang instead of soft-failing. This is possibly because everyone's device could still do a DNS lookup on ocsp.apple.com without any problems, leading the devices to believe that if they could do a DNS lookup, they should be able to connect to the OCSP service. So they tried—and timed out.
• Apple Users Got Owned – Purism — You’ll often hear hackers say that they “owned” (or sometimes “pwned”) a computer. They don’t mean that they have the computer in their physical possession, what they mean is that they have compromised the computer and have such deep remote control that they can do whatever they want to it. When hackers own a computer they can prevent software from running, install whatever software they choose, and remotely control the hardware–even against the actual owner’s wishes and usually without their knowledge.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Professor Barbara Cherry of Indiana University about political division, legislation and regulation, technical evolution, and more.

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Special Guest: Barbara Cherry.

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Links:

• Official Website - Yuval Noah Harari
• Amazon.com: Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (9780062316110): Harari, Yuval Noah: Books
• Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time: Scheuerman, William E.: 9780801878855: Amazon.com: Books
• Report of the Senate Select Committee on Interstate Commerce ...: (with ... - United States. Congress. Senate. Select Committee on Interstate Commerce - Google Books
• Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History: Andersen, Kurt: 9780812978902: Amazon.com: Books

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman and Petros Koutoupis talk to Hadrian Zbarcea about revolutions, both technical and other.

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Special Guests: Hadrian Zbarcea and Petros Koutoupis.

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Links:

• A Ransomware Attack Has Struck a Major US Hospital Chain | WIRED — UNIVERSAL HEALTH SERVICES, a hospital and health care network with more than 400 facilities across the United States, Puerto Rico, and United Kingdom, suffered a ransomware attack early Sunday morning that has taken down its digital networks at locations around the US. As the situation has spiraled, some patients have reportedly been rerouted to other emergency rooms and facilities and had appointments and test results delayed as a result of the attack. An emergency room technician at one UHS-owned facility tells WIRED that their hospital has moved to all-paper systems as a result of the attack.
• Cyber Attack Suspected in German Woman’s Death - The New York Times — Prosecutors believe the woman died from delayed treatment after hackers attacked a hospital’s computers. It could be the first fatality from a ransomware attack.
• Better lives with Drupal-powered healthcare technologies | Opensense Labs — So how does Drupal come into play here? Dexcom, which is the brand of CGM, has one of its platforms powered by Drupal and Omnipod’s website is built on Drupal as well.
• DrupalCon Nashville 2018: Driesnote - YouTube

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, and Kyle Rankin talk about facial recognition and surveillance technology in the hands of individuals, and how that affects the balance of power.

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Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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Links:

• Activists Turn Facial Recognition Tools Against the Police - The New York Times — These activists say it has become relatively easy to build facial recognition tools thanks to off-the-shelf image recognition software that has been made available in recent years. In Portland, Mr. Howell used a Google-provided platform, TensorFlow, which helps people build machine-learning models.
• Fawkes — The SAND Lab at University of Chicago has developed Fawkes1, an algorithm and software tool (running locally on your computer) that gives individuals the ability to limit how unknown third parties can track them by building facial recognition models out of their publicly available photos.
• Mass Extraction - Upturn — To search phones, law enforcement agencies use mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs), a powerful technology that allows police to extract a full copy of data from a cellphone — all emails, texts, photos, location, app data, and more — which can then be programmatically searched. As one expert puts it, with the amount of sensitive information stored on smartphones today, the tools provide a “window into the soul.”
• Doc Searls Weblog · About face — We know more than we can tell.
• Vivian Maier Photographer | Official website of Vivian Maier | Vivian Maier Portfolios, Prints, Exhibitions, Books and documentary film
• Welcome to the 21st Century: How To Plan For The Post-Covid Future - O'Reilly Media — So too, when we look back, we will understand that the 21st century truly began this year, when the COVID19 pandemic took hold. We are entering the century of being blindsided by things that we have been warned about for decades but never took seriously enough to prepare for, the century of lurching from crisis to crisis until, at last, we shake ourselves from the illusion that our world will go back to the comfortable way it was and begin the process of rebuilding our society from the ground up.

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, and Petros Koutoupis talk social media regulation and its relationship to journalism and the threat to Section 230.

Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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Links:

• FCC chairman says he'll seek to regulate social media under Trump's executive order - CNN — The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will draft regulations intended for social media companies following a petition earlier this year by the Trump administration, the agency's chairman said Thursday. In a tweet, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai indicated he will move forward with a rulemaking to "clarify" Section 230 of the Communications Act of 1934, which currently acts as a legal shield for tech companies' handling of user generated content.
• Executive Order — Here is the full text of President Trump's executive order relating to social media, published by the White House on Thursday May 28, 2020.
• Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act | Electronic Frontier Foundation — Tucked inside the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 is one of the most valuable tools for protecting freedom of expression and innovation on the Internet: Section 230.
• Official Title 47 Section 230 PDF document — 230(c) - (1) Treatment of publisher or speaker No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
• 47 U.S. Code § 230 - Protection for private blocking and screening of offensive material — Reference from Cornell Law.
• Opinion | Tech Companies Are Destroying Democracy and the Free Press - The New York Times — Ad revenue that used to support journalism is now captured by Google and Facebook, and some of that money supports and spreads fake news.
• BIG by Matt Stoller
• Tim Hwang - Subprime Attention Crisis — Tim Hwang is a writer and researcher based in New York. He is the author of Subprime Attention Crisis, a book about the bubble of online advertising. He is currently a research fellow at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University.
• Defending the Caveman | A Broadway Comedy We Can All Relate To
• IU Inc. » Archive » IU Media School professor’s paper was influential in FCC net neutrality decision

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, and Petros Koutoupis discuss the evolution of podcasting vs. radio.

Show Notes:
00:00:57 Please subscribe to our Newsletter - a reminder :)
00:01:35 Radio vs Podcasting, is it like Godzilla vs Bambi?
00:06:51 What makes podcasting so accessible?
00:20:27 Where we host our podcast and a shoutout to fireside.fm
00:41:27 "Linux is free if your time has no value" --Jamie Zawinski
00:45:08 Scotch time, beer o'clock, or Blursday...

Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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Links:

• How podcasting became a new front in the streaming wars | Financial Times — Once a nerdy niche industry populated by talk radio hosts, podcasting has become something everyone wants to get into, with big tech companies and record labels pouring hundreds of millions into landing the next big audio show.
• jwz.org — Jamie Zawinski
• Podcast Hosting and Analytics - Welcome to Fireside! — Podcast hosting.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Dr. Augustine Fou about his privacy analysis app, Page X-Ray, ad tracking, and data privacy.

Show Notes:

00:02:17 Page Xray and Blacklight
00:07:27 While you interact with one web page, who else is harvesting your information?
00:14:13 Listen to which tracker Katherine used for about 10 minute, and promptly removed!
00:15:57 What is malvertising
00:18:55 What about the browser extension privacy trackers?
00:25:54 Who should use PageXray?
00:32:30 What are some good consumer tools?
00:42:26 What is "fingerprinting" and how does a site "fingerprint" you?
00:48:21 Covering your "privates"
00:51:32 Marketers are chasing the shiny object called Digital
00:53:26 what is the ratio of registered domains vs websites vs humans visitors vs real ad impressions?

Special Guest: Dr. Augustine Fou.

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Links:

• Episode 13: Surveillance Marketing — Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Dr. Augustine Fou about surveillance marketing, ad tech, and privacy.
• Page X-Ray Data Privacy Analysis Featured in Episode 43 — A brief overview of Page X-Ray.
• FouAnalytics - Ads By Domain — Privacy Analytics tool from Dr. Augustine Fou.
• Blacklight – The Markup — A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector
• Privacy Badger — Privacy extension from the EFF.
• Ghostery: Online Privacy Made Easy — Ghostery demystifies online privacy by exposing the forces that lurk behind your screen and enabling you to block them.
• Secure, Fast & Private Web Browser with Adblocker | Brave Browser — The Brave browser.

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Kyle Rankin, and Petros Koutoupis talk about Amazon's new flying camera, ad tech, and The Social Dilemma.

00:01:27 The spying based advertising business is on it's way out
00:05:55 The Amazon's April fools joke that is now a product
00:12:14 Doc's issue with 'Alexa' listening to you all the time
00:15:09 California's CCPA
00:16:14 Kyle's perspective on the Amazon drone
00:21:36 Scale of mass surveillance
00:30:28 Facial recognition
00:34:12 Katherine is looking for some good news...
00:35:58 Normalization of fear mongering
00:40:05 When can a company legitimately collect your personal information
00:41:12 What do regulators really hope to do
00:42:32 Lets talk about "the movie"...

Special Guests: Kyle Rankin and Petros Koutoupis.

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Links:

• Blacklight — A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector - Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.
• Amazon wants to put a Ring drone inside your home and LOL WTF? — Not merely content to film both the outside and inside of your home from fixed points, the company announced Thursday a Ring drone that will fly around the interior of your home, shooting and livestreaming video in the process. Say hello to the Always Home Cam, a product that's very existence poses the question: What the absolute fuck is Amazon thinking?

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin and Petros Koutoupis about TikTok and who controls your phone.

Notes:

00:00:37 The new contraband - TikTok
00:04:34 Is the US wanting to "play" China and censor?
00:08:19 Will this become an ugly precedent?
00:15:37 We're concerned about the implementation of this ban
00:17:25 The Social Dilemma on Netflix
00:21:11 Your phone is your castle
00:33:10 Defining the harm from mere content
00:44:59 Final thoughts - Portrait mode video
00:48:20 How does a visually impaired person use a phone? See link.

Special Guests: Kyle Rankin and Petros Koutoupis.

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Links:

• Trump admin orders TikTok, WeChat gone from app stores on Sunday — President Donald Trump signed executive orders banning TikTok and WeChat on August 6. Those orders gave the Department of Commerce a 45-day window to outline what, exactly, a ban would entail. That 45-day period expires on Sunday, September 20, so that is when the bans take effect. Not only will app stores not be allowed to permit new downloads, but Internet hosting services and content delivery network services will also be banned from "enabling the functioning or the optimization" of the apps, and "directly contracted or arranged Internet transit or peering services" will also be prohibited. All platforms will also be prohibited from providing services through WeChat specifically that allow anyone to transfer funds or process payment within the US.
• Your Phone Is Your Castle — If your home is your physical castle, your phone is your digital castle. More than any other computer, your phone has become the most personal of personal computers and holds the most sensitive digital property a person has
• The Castle Doctrine — Since you’re reading this online, let me ask, what’s your house here? What sacred space do you strongly guard, and never suffer to be violated with impunity?
• Video: Voiceover and Braille screen input. — Kristy Viers using voiceover and braille screen input to compose a tweet and show navigation.

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, and Petros Koutoupis talk about Amazon's Alexa for landlords program.

Show notes:

00:00:23 For starters, let's begin with Normalization of Surveillance.
00:50:00 Amazon Alexa for landlords.
00:10:15 Is this really jus another way to discover new markets?
00:19:03 Doc the mechanic?!
00:27:49 If you're young do you really not care about privacy?
00:30:49 A couple of things that will clue people on privacy, are: Health data, and political issues

Link mentioned: https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/09/amazons-alexa-for-landlords-is-a-privacy-nightmare-waiting-to-happen/

Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman and Petros Koutoupis talk remote work, survival, and Facebook.

00:04:09 The three key subjects we're discussing
00:05:41 First subject - Remote work
00:17:41 Covid19 forced remote work, but Petros misses one thing in particular
00:23:24 The increasing disparity between people who can and can't work remotely
00:32:24 Scott Galloway
00:39:30 Moving onto Facebook
00:40:07 Katherine didn't use Facebook until she started WHAT?!
00:44:51 Facebook wasn't designed or built to fully account everything it does.
00:51:04 What is the big wake-up call Apple is sending out?

These people have left big cities for good. Here's where they landed
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/31/success/leaving-the-city-for-suburbs/index.html

Facebook’s fatal flaws - Doc Searls
https://medium.com/@dsearls/the-human-solution-to-facebooks-machine-produced-problems-also-won-t-work-3364656bc257

Send your feedback to [email protected]

Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin of Purism about Digital Convergence.

Links mentioned: https://puri.sm/posts/investing-in-real-convergence/

Show notes:

00:00:32 Today we're talking about the idea of Convergence
00:04:36 Green on black Linux is COOL! --Kyle R.
00:07:01 The realization of adaptive design and how do others handle it
00:10:28 Law enforcement can subpoena your iCloud content straight from Apple
00:12:55 The fundamental problem Apple and Goole have according to Kyle
00:15:17 What is the hassle developers are already living with???
00:21:53 What do people really want?
00:27:23 Doc is using metaphors to make an interesting point
00:37:12 You can't lock users to use only your product
00:40:36 The advantages of open source
00:42:21 Steve Ballmers key to success
00:49:26 Would you give your child a single non-trackable device "To rule them all"?
00:53:59 Digital parenting advice all parents need to understand!
00:57:25 The difference between parental control and eliminating the trail
01:00:33 How do you address your own and child's privacy when "forced" to use digital tools you disagree with
01:06:07 The "Digital Consent"

Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman continue their conversation with Dave Huseby, Hyperledger's Security Maven, about user sovereignty and decentralization, open source culture, cryptography, respectful technology, and more.

For more about Dave's projects, keep an eye on:
https://vi.rs
https://virs-group.slack.com
https://medium.com/@dwh_3562

Show notes:

00:01:27 The importance of individual sovereignty, autonomy, independence, liberty etc.
00:03:50 Linus doesn't take s#!t off of anybody...
00:06:15 The legislative power shifts
00:11:30 Wizards vs Moguls vs Geeks, who leads the way?!
00:15:03 "Garage Engineering", it's a thing...
00:20:00 Dave's take on passion vs. paycheck
00:21:41 Passion projects
00:31:03 Challenging the power structure, divorcing traffic from it's originators and recipients
00:33:21 Going into cryptography
00:36:54 Social rituals that Facebook has totally F'd up
00:41:32 "Second Life" 'nuff said...
00:43:30 So what are we going to do with that information???
00:46:49 Dave's new project and stepping out of the shadows
00:54:10 The motto is "Respectful Technology"
00:56:20 What is the harm in non-user sovereign systems
(01:06:46 The Jocks vs Nerds paradigm)
01:07:25 The "Earn-it" act

Special Guest: Dave Huseby.

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Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman and Petros Koutoupis talk to Dave Huseby, Hyperledger's Security Maven, about User Sovereignty and Decentralization, Hyperledger, blockchain and security.

Special Guests: Dave Huseby and Petros Koutoupis.

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Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Bruce Schneier about contact tracing, digital identity, hacking, privacy, and regulation.

Show notes:

0:00:25: Contact tracing apps
0:02:31: Contract tracing false positive and false negative
0:04:24: Contract tracing apps adoption rate
0:07:36: Katherine agrees apps should build more trust
0:11:44: The 2nd anniversary of the GDPR
0:13:31: Bruce talks about his RSA presentation about the notion of hacking
0:15:26: Katherine dove tails hacking into contact tracing
0:18:24: Hacking discipline around SSI (Self Sovereign Identity)
0:19:08: Should we need proof of immunity or carry an immunization card/immunity passport?
0:23:28: Do the people we entrust to regulate our tech even understand it?
0:29:10: Should we give the FBI digital forensic capabilities?
0:32:24: Katherine wonders if our cellphones are at all secure
0:36:33: Doc ponders the future of travel
0:38:18: Bruce predicts we're in the midst of a major system reset
0:46:49: The political divide between the way people digest information
0:49:36: Bruce: "Truth wins because it actually conforms to reality."

Links:
Bruce Schneier on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps
Contact-tracing apps are not a solution to the COVID-19 crisis

Special Guest: Bruce Schneier.

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Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Robert Douglass of Platform.sh about self-hosting collaboration tools, and other current privacy topics.

Show notes:

0:00:54: Introduction to a couple of tools

0:02:04: Doc's take on Zoom.

0:05:13: A lot of what we do online is not especially private.

0:06:33: Apple and Google and contact tracing.

0:09:00: Healthcare is a B2B insurance business.

0:11:15: Health information and advertising.

0:13:04: Convenience versus privacy.

0:13:26: SaaS products and convenience, Facebook, Apple. Concerns of the individual versus the concerns of the many.

0:15:46: The inevitable part where we go dark.

0:16:02: We're in the weirdest moment in modern civilization.

0:20:36: Radio, Internet, Television and Trump.

0:22:21: Bill Gates.

0:23:45: SaaS collaboration tools and privacy.

0:27:20: Who can you trust with your data, especially during a pandemic among questionable actors.

0:28:00: Mattermost

0:30:23: NextCloud

0:31:07: Jitsi

0:33:19: Cost differences.

0:38:31: ideology and dogmas way easier than real life, right?

0:39:23: Edward Snowden and Signal.

0:40:35: Signal vs. What's App.

0:41:20: Self-hosting and technical skill. Privacy trade-offs.

0:44:17: Apple watch.

0:45:12: Pragmatism.

0:46:58: Zoom and security scrutiny.

0:50:54: Facebook, privacy, and politics.

0:55:29: Facebook vs. Google.

0:56:36: Zoom scrutiny and appeal.

1:02:11: Conferences, air travel, climate change.

1:08:07: COVID innovation.

1:11:23: Stay home, be safe, deploy Mattermost and wash your hands.

Special Guest: Robert Douglass.

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Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin, Petros Koutoupis, and Shawn Powers about the new realities we're facing as a result of COVID-19.

Show notes:

0:04:08: How is this situation a little bit different from what we're used to?

0:04:36: E-learning

0:06:00: Shawn on e-learning and computer-based training.

0:08:09: Kids without computer or internet access.

0:11:31: What is lockdown? What’s on the horizon?

0:14:14: Remote work, how to do it well.

0:16:22: What can distributed open source software teams teach everyone?

0:17:35: This is not normal right now. Don’t judge remote work.

0:18:56: The chicken suppression system's working.

0:25:12: Asynchronous communication, time zones.

0:27:19: This plague may be elevating the Big Bad companies.

0:30:21: Ethical and privacy concerns.

0:35:20: Should harvested data be used to save lives?

0:37:29: Apple privacy

0:37:49: Fourth amendment concerns.

0:39:11 Facial recognition.

0:43:12 Law enforcement and Clearview AI.

0:44:12: What is the step too far? What are the unintended consequences?

0:44:44: Local vs. large scale communication.

0:47:03: Shawn is hopeful.

0:49:05: Innovation in the works.

0:52:45: Return to normal?

0:55:52: Small business.

0:57:16: Shawn’s bidet.

0:57:34: What happens to conferences?

1:02:33 DrupalCon and #vanlife.

1:07:58 Shawn: Wash your hands.

Special Guests: Kyle Rankin, Petros Koutoupis, and Shawn Powers.

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Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman speak with Damien Riehl and Noah Rubin from the All the Music project, allthemusic.info, a project that has machine-generated all possible melodies and released them to the public domain. We discuss music copyright in the digital landscape and musical math and humanity. We highly recommend watching Damien's TEDx Minneapolis talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJtm0MoOgiU

Get the code

Notes:

[01:15] Introduction to All the Music Project

[03:50] How do you see it put to use?

[06:20] How were the melodies discovered?

[08:00] copyright law and alternate arguments.

[9:30] discussion of public domain works

[11:00] Discussion of Damien’s TEDx Minneapolis talk.

[13:00] Copyright, un-copyrightable, and public domain

[14:30] How can/should people contribute to the project?

[19:00] How have people responded to this digital music copyright project?

[23:00] Notable music copyright lawsuits

[28:00] Should data be propertized?

[32:00] How should copyright work in a digital world?

[39:00] Creative commons

[46:00] Tracking rights, data flow

[52:00] Technical discussion and contribution

Special Guest: Damien Riehl.

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Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin, CSO of Purism, about mobile phones, their security and privacy vulnerabilities, and Purism's new Librem 5 device.

Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Don Norman, one of the world's most influential designers, about data privacy, the cult of Apple, hero complexes, and climate change.

Special Guest: Don Norman.

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Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman and Petros Koutoupis discuss the Open Source Cloud landscape, weigh in on Open Source communities and contribution, and open multiple beers. Petros tells us how he really feels about systemd.

Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls, and Petros Koutoupis talk about ownership, freedom, and convenience in the digital world.

Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin, Purism CSO, about Ring doorbells and consumer privacy.

Links:

Here's How Amazon's Ring Doorbell Police Partnership Affects You

Police can get your Ring doorbell footage without a warrant, report says

Amazon’s Ring Is a Perfect Storm of Privacy Threats

Amazon's Ring camera raises civil liberties concerns: U.S. senator

Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls and Petros Koutoupis talk to Chris Davis of adwaterandstir.com about his Arduino-based Altair 8800 replica kits.

Links mentioned:
http://adwaterandstir.com
Going Retro with an Altair 8800 Emulator: Introducing the Altair-Duino

Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Gabriel Weinberg, CEO & Founder of DuckDuckGo, and co-author of Super Thinking and Traction.

Special Guest: Gabriel Weinberg.

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Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Yiftach Shoolman, CTO and Co-founder of Redis Labs, about Redis, Open Source licenses, company culture and more.

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Links mentioned:

Time for Net Giants to Pay Fairly for the Open Source on Which They Depend Redis Labs and the "Common Clause" Redis Labs Changing Its Licensing for Redis Modules Again... Redis Labs’ Modules License Changes

Special Guest: Yiftach Shoolman.

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Katherine Druckman talks to Linux Journal Editor at Large, Petros Koutoupis, about building your own kernel, kernel panics, and other projects.

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Links mentioned:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/kernel-issue

Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Linux Journal Editor at Large, Petros Koutoupis, about moving from Mac to Linux.

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Links Mentioned:

http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Category:Applications http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Application_wish_list https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-laptop-buyers-guide

Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Don Marti, of Mozilla and formerly of Linux Journal, about ad technology, privacy, and the Linux community.

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Links Mentioned:

http://www.globalconsentmanager.com/

Special Guest: Don Marti.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Alex Gounares of Polyverse Linux about Cybersecurity for everyone.

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Doc Searls talks to Zhen, Devon and Melora Lofretto of KidOYO and Doctor Michael Nagler, superintendent of the Mineola Public School system in Mineola  Long Island.

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Links Mentioned:

The Kids Take Over

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Bob Erdman, Security Product Manager for Helpsystems about Linux security threats.

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Links mentioned:

https://www.helpsystems.com/cta/free-network-security-vulnerability-scan https://www.helpsystems.com/cta/intermapper-free-version https://www.helpsystems.com/cta/scan-your-system

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk about digital stalking, journalism, clickbait, and using ad targeting for evil.

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Links mentioned:

The Spinner’s hack on journalism

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Linux Journal Senior Columnist, Reuven Lerner, about learning new languages such as Python.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Elizabeth Renieris about digital identity, ethics, boiled frogs, and horses with lasers.

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Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Dr. Augustine Fou about surveillance marketing, ad tech, and privacy.

Links mentioned:

If it weren’t for retargeting, we might not have ad blocking

Special Guest: Dr. Augustine Fou.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Linux Journal's Technical Editor, Kyle Rankin, about vendor lock-in.

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Links mentioned:

Lessons in Vendor Lock-in: Shaving

Lessons in Vendor Lock-in: Messaging

Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Petros Koutoupis about his Deep Dive articles, storage, blockchain, and moving chairs.

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Links mentioned:

The December issue of Linux Journal Blockchain, Part I: Introduction and Cryptocurrency

Special Guest: Petros Koutoupis.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to David Egts (@davidegts), Chief Technologist North America for the Public Sector at Red Hat (@redhatgov) about open source enthusiasm.

Links Mentioned: 

Time for Net Giants to Pay Fairly for the Open Source on Which They Depend Adopt-a-Hydrant

Special Guest: David Egts.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Bryan Lunduke about Linux and humanity.

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Links Mentioned: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9du5U6Nk4U https://www.linuxjournal.com/video/review-asus-eee-pc https://www.linuxjournal.com/video/open-video-hp https://www.linuxjournal.com/video/review-hp-2133-mini-note https://xkcd.com/936/ https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/5984zn/listen-to-sim-jacking-account-ransom-instagram-email-tmobile

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Special Guest: Shawn Powers.

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Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin about about sounding alarms in various communities.

Links Mentioned:

The Four Essential Freedoms

The Coral Project

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Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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Katherine Druckman talks to Doc Searls about Freenode Live, conferences, and the Linux community.

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Links mentioned:

freenode #live 2018 - Kyle Rankin - The death and resurrection of Linux Journal

freenode #live 2018 - Doc Searls and Simon Phipps - In Conversation 

Time for Net Giants to Pay Fairly for the Open Source on Which They Depend by Glyn Moody

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Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Corbin Champion about Userland, an easy way to run Linux on your Android device, and other new projects.

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Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Linux Journal's own Kyle Rankin about basic security hardening.

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Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Erich Andersen, Corporate Vice President, Deputy General Counsel at Microsoft and Keith Bergelt, CEO of Open Invention Network about Microsoft's recently announced membership with the Open Invention Network patent community.

Useful links:

https://www.openinventionnetwork.com/pressrelease_details/?id=89

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-joins-open-invention-network-to-help-protect-linux-and-open-source/

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Katherine Druckman talks to Doc Searls about consumer privacy, Main Street, and heart attacks at Walmart.

Links mentioned:

https://twitter.com/torproject/status/1049370119338713088

http://customercommons.org/

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Katherine Druckman talks to Doc Searls about digital privacy, wizards and muggles, and boiled frogs.

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