Hannah Thinks

Before I begin, I lament an ending. In less poetic terms, I’m rather going to miss our seminar! Where else can I find homework I always enjoy? I suppose that’s one very good lesson to take from this class- take classes in which I look forward to doing the homework.

Anyway. Blockchain.

I have a friend, who shall remain unnamed, who believes very firmly in gold as a superior store of value as compared to government issued currency. After all, the central banks do have us ordinary citizens by a leash; if they decide, wether on a whim or on a firm belief in its efficacy, to increase the currency supply for some reason, those of us who have savings have just watched our bank accounts loose value. Gold, on the other hand, has a very tight supply chain. There is no quantitative easing for mining.

Of course, much like cash, gold has value simply because we believe it does. Compared to many other materials- silicon, uranium, oil- it is less directly useful. However, reviewing its history, it has maintained a place of high value in society with relatively few instances of major bubbling, especially when compared to most paper currencies. People have never truly ceased to demand gold.

Consider another store of value; the stock market. Volatile and untrustworthy is the name of the game, and stock bubbles have been a tragic fact of life since the creation of stocks. This, I would argue, is what bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies resemble. An application of blockchain used as a store of value, built on the expectations of people buying, used like stocks to make money. Though it does share the anti-central-government flavor of gold, it lacks the ownership security, and prices vary wildly with the whims of the market. One bug discovered can cut your wealth in half; one failed fork and you’re out a million dollars.

This, in my mind, makes cryptocurrency only limitedly superior to the stock market. Both are subject to the whims of their investors, even if one does provide more protection from the whims of government. And yet, cryptocurrencies are only the most public face of the technology called blockchain. Used privately or publicly, blockchain could provide banks and their auditors with a means to verify transactions are legitimate; health care providers with a secure record of patient use; patent seekers to verify their intellectual property; or individuals in questionable professions like lobbying to provide a record of their work. With some modifications, I believe that blockchain holds promise for all of these applications and more.

To specifically address concerns about healthcare; having a blockchain ledger of prescriptions, where additions to the blockchain are made with the patient in room, could provide doctors a means of verifying patient need. Additionally, a distributed blockchain shared among the hospitals of any one country could allow for the secure transfer of patient records, accessible only via certain keys. While there may be some security risks, the current system is not exactly secure, as the WannaCry attack on the British health system shows; blockchain could provide at least a marginal improvement. The other applications mentioned above are most useful for private parties or governments, and thus pose fewer questions as to efficacy.

I am worried that the public face of blockchain may ruin the reputation of its more useful siblings. Cryptocurrencies are massive targets for wrongdoing; a treacherous combo of stock markets and hackable banks, vulnerable to predatory initial coin offerings and especially to bubbles. Blockchain, on the other hand, is a fascinating technology with many possible applications. But humans are predictable; we follow the popular, follow the sensational, and follow the money.

P.S. I’ll miss my weekly blog!

I don’t mean to sound like an old woman yelling ‘get off my lawn.’

But even as a young person, in the digital age, it doesn’t take much to feel outdated. In some ways, though, perhaps that is a good thing.

One of our most poignant topics of discussion in seminar today was the subject of internet usage and mental health; what does the internet do to our psychology as it becomes ever more integrated into our lives. This is something I find myself quite frequently entranced by. Even though I am extremely young, I am watching my juniors grow up in a digital world that I entered only as a teenager. Back when I was a kid, as they say, I didn’t have a smart phone until eighth grade.

There are many ways I consider today’s kids to be in a different situation than my own, and yet there are some ways in which I think fears for the safety of their young souls are overblown.

First, my worries.

I grew up without constant connectivity, and I like to think that I still carry the ability to be on my own. I am more than happy to  set my phone to ‘do not disturb’ and to be unbothered for several hours. And yet, I compulsively check my email for fear of missing an opportunity or event that I would want to go to. Does that undermine my belief in my ability to be alone? And what does it mean for the kids who grew up even more connected than I am?

Secondly, I fear for the future of self-esteem. When I was growing up, I had fairly little exposure to idealized standards of beauty and glossy magazine perfect lives. My television diet mainly consisted of cartoons with progressively more raunchy themes as I grew older, and if I saw a model, it was likely a limited exposure as I waited in line at the grocery store. As I grew older, broadened my television diet, and started to surf the internet, that changed. I started to see a great deal more of the idealized female form and idealized lifestyles in everything from advertisements to movies to my occasional visits to women’s magazines. But as I think about today’s kids, I know that my exposure to instagram-constant levels of curated lives and bodies didn’t begin until early high school. Even then, I think some of my drop in self esteem around that period was probably attributable to the new content exposure. What can we say for today’s pre-teens, who are bombarded by these messages beginning in early middle school?

And third, I worry for the future of privacy. It seems in our modern era that the younger you are, the less you fear for the safety of your data, and the more you are willing to share online. I am definitely more willing to put myself on the web than many older people, but I stop far short of much of the sharing that is done by many of my peers, and I’m even further from what younger internet users find acceptable to post. However, as we’ve seen with Facebook and Linkdin, once sharing at a certain level reaches some critical mass in society, sharing becomes almost obligatory, and those without Facebooks (like myself) can find certain tasks, like scheduling, more of a struggle. Will the privacy of the older internet users be eroded as the younger generations give it up willingly?

But some concerns, I think, are overblown. Namely concerns about parental monitoring and what children will ‘get up to’ online. Certainly kids have new ways to be secretive; deleted search histories and fake instagram accounts. But as long as parents inform their children about being physically safe online, I don’t believe that there is a great deal of difference between the the secrets I kept as a teen and the secrets kept by today’s kids. The only change is the move from a paper to digital diary- and there the problem lies not with the secrets that are kept, but that the secrets stay safe, and the risks of digital diaries to, as I mentioned before, privacy.

In sum, I’m intrigued and frightened to see what the future of the modern digital native looks like. As today’s teens outpace college students and generations become shorter and shorter, I worry that I myself will be obsoleted by the pace of technology change, and that those same changes will irrevocably damage our fragile human psyche. But there is hope, at least on the former front; smartphone adoption is rising among those 65 and older (1). Maybe there’s a future even for an old lady like myself.

1- http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/05/17/tech-adoption-climbs-among-older-adults/

We are all afraid of two types of illness: illness of the body, and illness of the computer.

Which one is worse?

Just joking.

Following this week’s seminar, I found myself thinking about the variety of tools, bugs, and viruses that cyber criminals and cyber attackers employ to attack their adversaries. What makes them destructive? How do they attack their victims, and why?

A few high profile examples; ILOVEYOU, Conficker, and Reign.

ILOVEYOU; the ultimate in unwanted affection. Beginning in 2000, ILOVEYOU sent what appeared to be a text file via email to its victims, claiming to be a love letter. The virus, once opened, would send itself to the first fifty people in the contact list, spreading faster than any previous virus. It was not, in fact, a text file, and would then destroy user’s image files. By preying on human emotions, ILOVEYOU went global in just a few hours. (1)

Conficker; first detected in 2008, Conficker downloads itself onto a computer that has not been properly updated, and additionally attempts to spread through leaking into shared files and hitching rides on USB drives. The virus protects itself by disabling updates and security protection attempts (2), and became one of the largest computer viruses of all time, costing millions in damages. (3)

Reign; a tool of cyber attack, likely created by a nation state, capable of turning an infected computer inside out. Reign can collect screenshots, copy files, and watch what you type. (4) Some watchers believe that the virus passes directly from internet service providers to customers, without infecting the service provider itself. (5)

So we have a collection of strategies; self propagation, self protection, using human psychology, and targeted attacking.

Say we wanted to cause the most destruction possible. I would follow a strategy of self-propagation, in which the virus downloads itself, and then lies dormant while quietly disabling security services. The virus would simultaneously attempt to spread to any device which connects to the infected computer. At some point, when the infections had reached a desirable level, the creator would trigger the virus to wipe the files of every computer with the worm.

Say we had more nuanced motives; money. I would again self-propagate, and lie dormant until I had reached some sufficient spread. I would then trigger a key log capability to harvest user’s passwords when they visit the IP addresses of banks.

Say we were looking to run reconnaissance. I would create a worm which mimics an email sent to a device, deleting the original email and replacing the old file with the virus’s code. Once opened, the email would download a watcher, much like Reign. The purpose of email propagation is to lull the user into a false sense of security, oblivious to the presence of my watcher.

Like dreaming up chimeras, this activity is a fun one. But it also serves as a warning. Don’t open suspicious files; don’t forget to update; don’t use USB drives; don’t be a target of espionage.

Maybe that sounds like too much for one person to do, even a young digital native. But until there are legislative protections in place or true care from the companies that make our software, self defense is our best, and only, means of protection.

1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/top-ten-most-destructive-computer-viruses-159542266/?c=y&page=2
2. https://www.pcc.edu/resources/tss/info-security/conficker.html
3. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/technology/internet/23worm.html
4. https://usa.kaspersky.com/resource-center/threats/regin-platform-malware
5. http://www.irelandwebsitedesign.com/blog/290-reign-spying-malware-virus.html

The internet is a magical place, where ideas flow like water from an infinite spring.

The internet is a road leading to many things, mostly invisible, terribly useful.

On the road of the internet, browsers are like cars, apps are like busses. A car can take you anywhere, providing that you know the address. A bus will take you many places, but you have to choose from a proscribed list.

Today in seminar, we briefly discussed the relative merits of the two vehicles, and who would prefer which. While I can confidently say I would not want to give up either apps or my dear browser, I also know that in the end I would choose my browser over any (or all) apps. The reasoning behind this is largely due to personal experience. In my early days as an internet user, I was also a nascent middle school philosopher. Needless to say, I didn’t know much about the world (and I still don’t!) The internet was where I went to try to learn more. Specifically, I followed several very obscure independent blogs with religious devotion. Each was published on a different platform, and each I had stumbled upon by sheer accident of words typed into a search engine. They were weird blogs, to be perfectly honest, including one that I hold very dear to my heart written by a woman who left a somewhat abusive religious and family situation to find her own path. They inspired me to think differently, to speak my mind, and to not fear the niche and unpopular.

One could argue that a search engine in and of itself can be an app; while that is true, any single search engine is still a bus, in a way. You can get off at hundreds of thousands of stops, but there will be some that are harder to access than they might be on another search engine. And regardless, as of 2015, most traffic has not been driven by even the most dominant search engine, Google; the plurality of website traffic, 40% as of 2017 (1), comes from Facebook. This is in many ways even more limiting than being funneled into one search engine; when traffic comes from Facebook, you can rest assured that the sites you are linked to are either those that you already visit, those that are in your opinion network, or those that are most popular.

And so I argue for browsers, for the sake of children, specifically teenagers, everywhere. Every young person is like a sponge for ideas and opinions around them, and they will soak up what they read online. For many people, that might just be Buzzfeed listicles and the occasional CNN brief or New York Times smash report. But for a few, there will be exploration and learning that takes place through the browser. I believe that we are worse off if we raise the next generation of digital natives inside the bubbles that social media creates for them. I hope that even as many of us stray toward apps, browsers will continue to maintain enough of a presence to give everyone, especially the teenage internet users, a place to be exposed to new ideas.

1 – http://www.businessinsider.com/google-facebook-news-traffic-chart-2017-5