Protocols and Privacy

This week my thoughts have returned again to monopolies. I still dislike them. Susan Crawford’s article on the “middle mile” section of the telecoms network. This is effectively the part of the net that connects local ISPs to the internet’s “backbone”. A comprehensive study by the FCC shows that 95% of locations are served by at most two middle mile providers. According to the Consumer Federation of America, this has cost the American consumer $150 billion since 2010. For me, this is the worst kind of monopoly because consumers don’t even see it. ISPs pay middle mile companies, and whereas everyone and their mother hate their ISP, most people don’t know the middle mile provider their data goes through. Because people don’t know that this company is ripping them off (via their ISP), it’s far easier for those companies to lobby government to deregulate them. Regulation is difficult to maintain when the public is ignorant of the issues at stake.

These debates are just a part of the larger net neutrality debate about what internet delivery companies can and can’t do. Something I’ve learned this semester is that the internet is neutral by design (it treats all data equally). The protocols define the internet and how it works. End users, severs and so on all speak this same language and if they don’t, they won’t work. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) takes care of this and it seems to have done a wonderful job at having such a confusing structure that no single interest or company has been able to capture it. The IETF also has no power, it just makes voluntary standards that help maintain compatibility. However, as long as this compatibility is maintained, ISPs and other internet providing companies can do what they want, unless government or “the market” regulates. I know that in the past ISPs have banned users from attaching certain types of devices to their networks, interestingly one such example were WiFi routers (a modern variant is disallowing third party routers). This has nothing to do with treating data equally, just with how much control the ISPs have over how users use their services. Thus ISPs can still provide a connection to the internet, without providing the same freedoms usually associated with it.

In the summer of 2016 I sat in on a meeting of the Cambridge broadband task force which had been set up by city hall to explore different ways to make broadband connects more attainable/affordable for all city residents. One option they were considering was to provide broadband like any other public utility. I don’t remember if anything came of it but I think that it’s import to look into these sorts of solutions. If there’s anything that the past 100 plus years of telecom history tells us, it’s that the industry tends strongly towards monopolies unless regulated heavily.  I worry even more about the wireless industry because of how a few key players (Qualcomm) have rather predatory patent licensing practices that literally all 3g and 4g phone manufactures have to pay. These patent companies are very similar to the middle mile provides because they are invisible to the consumer yet control the network and, I assume, cost the consumer millions each year. Qualcomm even has ads saying; “You don’t know us but you enjoy us every 9.8 seconds” — as if.

Fake news is not new. I think the recent clamor about it is just a result of a previous political establishment having been usurped by a new coalition of news media and politicians and the information monopolies that profit with off their rise. Advertising based pseudo-curated content platforms like Facebook and Google have made it possible to target far more individuals far more accurately than ever before. Those in politics who have best taken advantage of this are the ones winning the elections. I’m not saying that Breitbart and co. are scheming geniuses who’ve cracked social media, but rather that social media selected them. Far right conspiracy blogs and news sites aren’t new. Drudge Report started in 1995 as an email-based news blog. Breitbart launched over ten years ago. It just happened that as Facebook and Google pivoted from being personal profiles and hyperlink based search results to platforms that can show us everything we “want”, even before we know we “want” it. Google search and Google news display news based on proprietary magic whatever Google thinks you want to read, or thinks you should read, or gives them the most advertising revenue. Facebook has also aggressively shifted towards showing us the news and more and more “sponsored” content mixed in with the things our friends actually post. As Ethan Zuckerman writes, Facebook denies that it is a publisher yet it clearly is curating content and not giving users any real choices regarding what they see (users can’t modify what type of content the algorithms select for, they can only block specific pages/profiles).

A novel feature of today’s fake news is that different people believe in different lies. In the good old days vast majorities of Americas were caught up in the fake news’ web. Before the invasion of Iraq, 70% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein played a direct role in the 9/11 attack. There were no such links nor reason to think so. 40% of Americans still think that the US discovered active weapons of mass destruction programs in Iraq, they hadn’t. Heck, in 1876 Western Union, the telegraph monopoly and the Associated Press, the only wire service that was allowed to use Western Union’s lines coordinated to suppress negative news and further positive news about their chosen candidate for president, Rutherford B. Hayes [Tim Wu]. Comparatively, only 10% of Americans believe that there is strong evidence that Obama was born outside the US.

But why Trump? Hayes was Western Union’s candidate, but I doubt Trump was Google’s and Facebook’s. Rather I think that Facebook and Google care primarily about advertising sales, preventing federal regulation and tax evasion; i.e. profits. In response to the election and the spread of fake news, both companies have promised to stop it by improving their proprietary magic algorithms and filter out fake news. The benevolent monopolists in Mountain View and Menlo Park feel that they have a civic obligation (or financial need to appear to be civic minded…) to stop the spread of lies. This is like Western Union and AP promising never to manipulate another election, without giving up their monopolies. The problem is that big tech’s ability to manipulate individuals (voters) has grown so great that it is inherently a threat to democracy. Elections are won by the side that figures out how to best rig the system (news media not necessarily ballot boxes) and manipulate the most voters. Truth be damned.

Obama had big data, JFK had makeup, Roosevelt had the radio, Hayes had the telegraph and Luther had the printing press. Some of these examples are more spectacular than others, but all show a similar trend; new communication technologies reward those best able to use them and disrupt the previous elite. These upsets aren’t necessarily the work of single politicians, the Daily Mail began publishing misinformation since at least the start of the 20th century without being connected to any single prime minister. More tabloids followed and supported both Labour and the Conservatives in sensational fashion. Cable news networks like Fox have unarguably had major impacts on US politics.

The key difference between historical fake news and the modern version is that it has become decentralized. There’s no one person to blame and no one clear motive. I think this is a result of two changes, the generally decentralizing effect of the internet and a loss of trust in large entities. That the internet has allowed more people to create content that can reach arbitrarily large audiences far more easily than before is well documented. Anyone who can use the internet can write a blog or start an online tabloid complete with all caps headlines and retouched photos. The loss of trust in large entities is based on empirical measurements that Ethan Zuckerman points out in his election postmortem. If people don’t trust traditional news sources, companies or governments, then it’s hardly surprising that alternatives sources will gain more attention. Perhaps I’m just an actor in this general trend, but I don’t think any of these institutions deserve anyone’s trust, at least not trust that they are working in our best interests. I’ve never understood why anyone would trust a president’s administration or a newspaper except out of willful ignorance (life’s easier when you just trust ’em). Zuckerman also notes that trust in institutions does not correlate to interpersonal trust; Sweden is an example of a country with high levels of interpersonal trust and low trust in institutions. Sweden generally seems like a pretty healthy democracy. I can’t prove that that not trusting institutions strengthens democracy, but trusting them seems awfully ignorant. Every administration has told its lies and every newspaper has at some point lost touch with its mission (remember that time the New York Times waited until after the election and then some to say that Bush was tapping our phones without warrants?). Wikileaks, the Panama Papers, Paradise Papers and Snowden have shown how governments, companies, business people and leaders all over have skirted their duties, hidden their crimes and lied under oath.

These may not be the reasons why the average person distrusts institutions, but I bet everyone has their own reasons, and just like mine, they will be largely correct if somewhat opportunistic and politically motivated. I have not suggested a single solution or remedy. I’m not sure what could be done and what would work. The one thing I’m fairly certain about is that the big tech monopolies must be broken up or regulated as common carriers. Zuckerman says Facebook should allow users control the filters that dictate the content they see. Facebook will not want to do this because too many users will filter out the ads (although they could still appear on the side). The wonderful thing about government is that it can force companies to comply. Strict regulation may be the only option.

Estonia:

“Digital citizenship” in the Estonian case seems to be mostly about attracting business. Their pitch is simple; register as an Estonian e-citizen by filling out a couple of forms, get your ID and start your company based in Estonia (which has access to the European Single Market). The German word for shell corporation is “Briefkastenfirma” — literally post box company. Perhaps here the term may become email company.

The Estonian case is more than a Baltic pitch at paradise papers tax evasion because it also includes this concept of proving who you are online and thus being able to digitally sign contracts that are enforceable by law. We can already use credit cards to pay for things online, which is a sort of contract, but they are very limited. However, Credit card fraud is a big problem, and while the general setup and verification process of Estonian e-citizenships may be better than credit cards, humans will prevail and mess up leading to computationally inexpensive ways to steal e-identities. This may lead to some issues.

Open source government:

This can mean several very different things. 1) greater transparency, 2) online collaborative lawmaking and 3) open source development of government tools.

1) Greater transparency. Government would be open source in the sense that you can read the source code which would not just include constitutions and laws but also government interpretations of laws so that they are precisely defined and government agenda. Open source might also imply that anyone can submit bug reports or patches which leads us to

2) Collaborative lawmaking. I think that using an approach similar to open source projects for lawmaking is quite promising. It is a format that would allow many to contribute in small or big ways and wouldn’t require any expertise, kinda like wikipedia. Of course would still need some sort of framework to enact the laws which again is possible but would require a fundamental shift in politics. There are examples of projects with large similarities to such a frame work, like the Icelandic constitutional reform in 2010-13 which included the publishing of drafts and public feedback but did not follow the typical format of an open source project. Lastly, for lawmaking to work it presumably must be seen as legitimate by the people (or enforced autocratically but that seems antithetical to the point of open source government) and that is difficult to do when so many can contributed and the Russian troll army has infiltrated — although now that I think of it maybe this is also a feature of more traditional government…

3) Open sourcing government software. This city of Boston has a github page and other cities have done similar things. The US federal government has code.gov. These projects are great but I doubt that making some github pages will lead to much because open source projects depend on dedicated developers and a base of users who care. I think this is the sort of issue that Aaron Schwartz would have been really good at tackling.

Ramblings of a college student who thinks he’s smarter than he is; mostly in response to this piece by Vernor Vinge.

I’m not in a position to criticize a whole field, or even a small subset of a field, but I find the general approach to finding “superhuman intelligence” quite unconvincing. It seems the limitations are taken to be largely computational, that the human brain is somehow better than modern hardware. I’m not sure something that runs on less than 100 watts is computationally more powerful than a cluster of computers consuming several kilowatts. From what I understand the strength of our brains seems to come from some innate structure or features that are dictated genetically. This allows any given human infant to learn any given human language even with the so-called “poverty of stimulus”.[1] More and more we are finding unexpected characteristics in our “AI” programs, notably those that exhibit human bias in the form of racial prejudice. Surely if these algorithms can learn and “think” just as well as humans then given enough time even the racist ones would conclude that racism has no biological basis. I think rather that any intelligent being can only learn if it has been “pre-programmed” to be “narrow minded” in some sense. Like humans may have some sort of innate understanding of grammar so too must machines. Even if we build our AI using methods that simulate evolutionary processes, we could have to constrain them initially as the space of all possible genetic combinations (or the space of all possible algorithms) of a reasonable length is far far larger than what can reasonable be explored (even by evolution in the “natural” world, even given billions of years…with or without accelerating returns). Assuming a static fitness landscape, where exactly we begin will determine what local maximums (in terms of fitness, i.e. intelligence) are plausibly achieved. There is no guarantee of getting anywhere unless we constrain, and if we do we are not guarantied anything close to a global maximum. Also, if we constrain, then we will be the creators and principle designers of super-intelligence. Somehow this sounds much less exciting — assuming we are pretty dumb, human super-intelligence doesn’t sound nearly as exciting as “superhuman intelligence.”

Another potential way to attain “superhuman intelligence” is by augmenting human intelligence with machines. Vinge discusses a mild form of transhumanism by having humans interact with computers to collaborate on tasks rather than uploading our brains to silicone chips etc. His argument is the humans augmented with machines can reach a higher intelligence by moving beyond what just a human can do. High school algebra is certainly easier with a calculator, but I think that many of the advances in human machine interaction/collaboration have not created more intelligent beings. Cellphone-distraction causes accidents, both for motorists and pedestrians. Studies show that their presence, even when turned completely off, distracts us and makes us perform worse on human-only tasks. Yes we can communicate far more quickly and with far fewer constraints and yes we have the world at our fingertips but most of us just end up opening and closing the same programs in cycles, scrolling through Facebook news feeds consuming adverts (Russian or otherwise) and arguably gaining nothing but the comfort of dull complacency. All while risking death by distracted street-crossing.[2] Moving on to stronger transhumanism (real physical integration) I expect Facebook, Apple and co. will make this just as distracting (even if it increases productivity, as cellphones certainly can) and again it won’t actually be a significant step towards “superhuman intelligence.” At any rate, I think we should first figure out what makes us intelligent (or not) and what intelligence even is (it’s not chess anymore) before claiming the singularity is near.

[1] Some argue that the poverty of stimulus and universal grammar are not correct theories, but when in doubt I’ll side with Chomsky.

[2] I haven’t found any real evidence that this has happened, but sadly I find it more “inevitable” than super-intelligence.

Whenever I read articles about the Internet of Things (IoT), they all seem to be saying the same things; “smart” is good, “smart” things will solve all our problems and most importantly “smart” things are the future. My favorite part is when the article starts proclaiming which problems all these networked doorbells will solve but somehow forget to define the problem or outline how we they will fix anything. It’s always nice to say that there’s this great new technology that will herald in a new era in human development, but I question whether this new thing is really the future (or just a fad) and whether this will actually represent a significant change in our lives or the way we interact with technology.

Of course viewing the IoT as just a part of modern decadence isn’t reasonable either; one can argue that automated window shades that lower when the sun is about to hit your computer screen will just keep you from getting up, looking out the window and noticing you’d much rather be out there enjoying the day than wasting your time on buzzfeed. I’m actually very partial to this argument, but I somehow don’t think that indoor plumbing is a disaster because it keeps you from going outside every morning to the outhouse so there must be limits here. Further, some IoT devices are truly useful, for instance smart thermostats that lower energy consumption by optimizing heating/cooling according to your habits. But back to my earlier point, does any of this make smart thermostats a game changer? Are they more effective in lowering carbon emissions and energy bills than simply turning down the heat and being conscious about energy use? I’m not so convinced.

Lastly, much has been written about security concerns regarding the IoT. Recent DDoS attacks using botnets of routers, home security cameras and other IoT devices have crippled websites and dns severs. This all happens without the actual owners of the physical devices knowing that they are part of an international cyber attack and therefore is a difficult issue to tackle. Nobody in the IoT business or their consumers are incentivized to secure these devices. Not all IoT devices are equally prone to hijacking but security still comes at a premium. Worryingly, embedded smart devices may never be disconnected from the internet and many will never receive security updates (or be running software that is remotely secure). Neither the producers or the consumers of these devices will pay their true price but rather this will be distributed among the victims. I find this highly troubling and indicative of an out-of-control tech industry that “innovates” first and asks questions later. The greatest irony is that some IoT devices are even marketed as increasing “security” by providing smarthome security in the form of locks, alarms and cameras. These devices aren’t just a menace to general internet security, but are often an excellent way for the criminally minded to get access to people’s homes. Imagine how much easier it is to rob a house if you have access to the security cameras ahead of time and slide past the secure smart lock using a months old Bluetooth vulnerability (not that normal locks are secure either but still). I’ll just end by linking to this lovely website I came across where you can scroll through unsecured webcam feeds ordered by location, manufacturer or “popularity.”