digital culture

[anywigwilldo]

Reblog, click the picture, and prepare for battle.

[vikingserket]

after a while i became convinced that the words were mocking me

[whisperrun-blog]

Nothing happened. 

I WAS PROMISED A BATTLE

*throws down gauntlet*

Edit: Went back. This is the best thing to happen to my dashboard ever.

[whisperrun-blog]

Reblogging again because my followers need to see this. To be clear, rebog, go to your actual blog, then click the picture. 

[penandpage]

[dark-ayyyyy-blog]

aight

[sunbeamrobin-deactivated2018073]

OH MY GOD I WAS NOT EXPECTING THAT

[thornsword]

DO IT

[20053]

WOW IT REALLY IS SOMETHING FREAKING GOOD PLEASE CHECK IT OUT

[warp6]

Okay, if this is a rickroll I swear to…

[warp6]

1) It was not a rickroll

2) It was super awesome!

3) No jumpscare or anything designed to freak you out, so doesn’t need an unreality warning (YMMV, of course).

[captacorn-deactivated20230731]

Suspicious but curious. Curiosity wins!

[agenderraskel-deactivated202303]

attention all writers following me- try this or you will lament.

[viperbranium]

EVERYONE TRY THIS (you gotta go to your on blog to click on it!)

[boopifer]

OK THIS IS THE COOLEST

[wolfliving]

The Critical IoT Reading List

*If you’re reading this Tumblr you’ll want a look at this.

http://www.thingclash.com/critical-iot-reading-list/

Critical IoT Reading List

Our first post on the blog was a compilation of writings about the IoT that provide a critical lens on the IoT and its social and cultural impacts. We’ve put that list here so it can grow and become a dynamic resource over time. Feel free to suggest additions.

Articles

As We May Understand — Dan Lockton — Medium

The Internet of Things Will Ruin Birthdays — Joanne McNeil — Medium

If This Toaster Could Talk — Alexis Lloyd — The Atlantic

Too Much Magic, Too Little Social Friction — Evan Selinger — LA Review of Books

Stepping Down: Rethinking the Fitness Tracker — Sara Watson — The Atlantic

Honeywell, I’m Home! The Internet of Things and the New Domestic Landscape — Justin McGuirk - e-flux

‘Dumb’ Smart Gadgets: The Bubble is Set to Burst — Christopher Mims — Wall Street Journal

Things Get Weird When Objects Get Hooked Up to the Internet of Things — Scott Smith — Quartz

Kids and the IoT — Backchanneled — Changeist

Quantified Us — Susan Cox-Smith — Medium

The Ethics of Experimentation and the IoT — Anthony Townsend — Medium

The Anxieties of Big Data — Kate Crawford — The New Inquiry

The Machines Are Coming — Zeynep Tufekci — New York Times

Data Dada and the Internet of Paternalistic Things — Sara Watson — Medium

Public Engagement on the Internet of Things is Essential— Sonia Bussu — LSE

Broke and Scared: The Home of the Future — Ben Valentine — Furtherfield

The Internet of Things Will be an Internet of Obsolete Junk— Toby Miller — The Conversation

Everything is Broken — Quinn Norton — Medium

Why Tech’s Best Minds Are Worried About the Internet of Things — Klint Finley — WIRED

The Changes Leading to a Hyperconnected World Will Change Our Values and Identities — Iiris Lagus — Demos Helsinki

The Internet of Things You Inherit or Leave Behind — Stephanie Rieger — Medium

Why Smart Objects May Be a Dumb Idea — Zeynep Tufekci — New York Times

The Internet of Things You Don’t Really Need — Ian Bogost — The Atlantic

In the Future, the Robots May Control You, and Silicon Valley May Control Them — Dan Gillmor — The Guardian

Means Well Technology and the Internet of Good Intentions — Natalie Kane — Thingclash

Can We Avoid Marginalizing Women with the Internet of Things? — Susan Cox-Smith — Medium

Who is the Object in the Internet of Things? — Iohanna Nicenboim — Objects of Research

The Internet of Emotions: Putting the Person Back in Personalization — John C Havens — Mashable

Listening Machines, and the Whether, When and How of New Technologies — Ethan Zuckerman — My Heart’s in Accra

If Dishwashers Were iPhones — Cory Doctorow — The Guardian

The Internet of Dependent Things — Nat Buckley — ntlk.com

Can We Trust Connected Devices? — Leonardo Amico — Uniform

The Many Futures of Babytech — Natalie Kane — How We Get To Next

The True and Hidden Costs of Stuff—John Thackara

Audio  (((etc etc)))

[stoweboyd]

I can’t attest to this being the best IoT list; I am simply reposting it as a starting point for stoweboyd.com readers. I admire a lot of these writers.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The malware that's pwning the Internet of Things is terrifyingly amateurish

Following the release of the sourcecode for the Mirai botnet, which was used to harness DVRs, surveillance cameras and other Internet of Things things into one of the most powerful denial-of-service attacks the internet has ever seen, analysts have gone over its sourcecode and found that the devastatingly effective malware was strictly amateur-hour, a stark commentary on the even worse security in the millions and millions of IoT devices we’ve welcomed into our homes.

http://boingboing.net/2016/10/04/the-malware-thats-pwning-the.html

[infoneer-pulse]

Data collected by Pew from February of this year say that 51 percent of Mechanical Turkers have a college degree, compared with 36 percent of the adult U.S. workforce. Additionally, 52 percent of Turkers make less than $5 per hour on a job (the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour), and 39 percent earn between $5 per hour and $7.99 per hour. Amazon and gig economy advocates (see: Uber, Lyft, Postmates, etc.) generally say the trade-off for making less per hour is that workers have greater flexibility over the hours they choose to work. The Pew research sort of puts a dent in that argument, showing that “almost two-thirds of these workers (63%) say they perform tasks on the site ‘every day.’”

Amazon’s Mechanical Turkers are college-educated millennials making less than minimum wage - Recode (via infoneer-pulse)

[privacyandtechnology]

Paper by Stacey Gray (Future of Privacy Forum).

From the introduction to the paper:

“Is your Smart TV listening to your conversations? Are your children’s toys spying on your family? These types of questions are increasingly raised as the next generation of internet-connected devices enter the market. Such devices, often dubbed “always on,” include mobile phones, televisions, cars, toys, and home personal assistants—many of which are powered and enhanced by speech recognition technology. There is no doubt that the increasing prevalence of voice integration into everyday appliances enables companies to collect, store, analyze, and share increasing amounts of personal data. But what kinds of data are these devices actually collecting, when are they collecting it, and what are they doing with it? This paper explores how speech recognition technology fits into a broader scheme of “always listening” technologies, discusses promising current and future applications, and identifies emerging practices by which manufacturers and developers can alleviate privacy concerns and build consumer trust in the ways that data is collected, stored, and analyzed.”

Read more: Full text in PDF.

See also: Related blog post.

[iquantny]

The NYPD Was Systematically Ticketing Legally Parked Cars for Millions of Dollars a Year- Open Data Just Put an End to It

New York City is a complex place to drive.  And when it comes to parking, there are plenty of rules and regulations to follow.  It’s no wonder that sometimes people get confused and end up getting their cars ticketed or towed. 

But in all of these rules, there is one thing that very few drivers seem to know. As of late 2008, in NYC you can park in front of a sidewalk pedestrian ramp, as long as it’s not connected to a crosswalk.  It’s all written up in the NYC Traffic Rules, and for more detail, take a look at this article. The local legislation making these parking spots legal was proposed by Council Member Gentile, and adopted by the Department of Transportation before it ever made it for a vote.  Though few people seem to know about the change.

Is it a problem that drivers don’t realize that there are some extra parking spots they are now allowed to park in?  Not so much.  But, I’ve got a pedestrian ramp leading to nowhere particular in the middle of my block in Brooklyn, and on occasion I have parked there.  Despite the fact that it is legal, I’ve been ticketed for parking there.  Though I get the tickets dismissed, it’s a waste of everybody’s time. And that got me wondering- How common is it for the police to give tickets to cars legally parked in front of pedestrian ramps?  It couldn’t be just me…

In the past, there was not much you could do to stop something like this. Complaining to your local precinct would at best only solve the problem locally.  But thanks to NYC’s Open Data portal, I was able to look at the most common parking spots in the City where cars were ticketed for blocking pedestrian ramps.   It’s worth taking a moment upfront here to praise the NYPD for offering this dataset to begin with.  Though we are behind on police crime data in the city, we are ahead in other ways and the parking ticket dataset is definitely one of them.  

What I found when I dove into the data surprised me.  To start, I found the top address where this ticket were given: in front of 575 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn, where over $48,000 in parking fines were issued in the last 2.5 years. 

To my surprise, the spot, (or really spots since there are two ramps), are legal, since they are in the middle of the block, with no crosswalk.  $48,000 in tickets at a legally parked spot, and that is just the last 2.5 years.  If we had more historical data, I suspect we would see a similar story. 

The next top spots on the list had the same story to tell.

1705 Canton Avenue in Brooklyn, 273 Tickets, $45,045: Legal.

270-05 76 Avenue in Queens, 256 Tickets ($42,440) Legal.

143-49 Cherry Ave, Queens, 246 Tickets, ($40,590).  Legal.

Those were of course the most extreme cases that topped the list.  I started to skip down the list.  This spot in Battery Park, ranked #16 on my list and the top spot in Manhattan, had 116 tickets ($19,140) and turned out to be legal.  (Yellow paint has no meaning in NYC traffic enforcement, and the spot has no crosswalk)

I started to skip down the list faster and faster.  Take #1000 in my top list, at 1059 Virginia Avenue, where 8 tickets had been given ($1320).  It is a classic T intersection, meaning it’s legal.

See the pattern?  I did.  So I then selected 30 random spots that had received 5 or more tickets over the time period, and based on Google Maps found that all of them appeared to be legal parking spots!  (Randomly selecting spots with a single ticket in the database showed some illegal spots as well, so I chose 5 as a conservative cutoff.)

How many spots received 5 or more of these pedestrian ramp tickets in the last 2.5 years?  We are talking 1,966 spots that are generating about 1.7 million dollars a year in tickets at parking spots that are mostly legal.  Are all 1966 spots legal?  Surely not, but the majority sure are and many more that have fewer than five tickets are likely legal too.  

To see where the hotspots were for this sort of abuse of drivers, I mapped the top 1000 pedestrian ramps generating parking tickets below, so you can see if you have a spot in your neighborhood that the police have been wrongly ticketing.  Clicking on a spot tells you if the tickets are given in front of, or opposite the address, as well as how many tickets have been given.  

My challenge to you…  click on a spot and then look at pictures of it on Google Maps to determine if its legal.  You will most likely find it is. 

Other findings in the data:

Brooklyn’s 70th Precinct seems to have the most cars wrongly ticketed, bringing in over $100,000 in fines a year.  The 77th, also in Brooklyn, comes in second:

So what is going on here? Well, it seemed from my browsing that many police officers were systematically ignoring the 2009 rule change, all across the city.  

But that is not where the story ends. As mentioned, we live in a city progressive enough to release parking ticket data.  I’ve repeatedly said that putting data into the hand of citizens will make our city run better and more equitably.  So, I reached out to the NYPD via the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics to tell them about the findings.  They helped me get in touch with the appropriate people at the NYPD, and then I waited.

After a couple of weeks, I received the following quote from the NYPD:

“Mr. Wellington’s analysis identified errors the department made in issuing parking summonses. It appears to be a misunderstanding by officers on patrol of a recent, abstruse change in the parking rules.  We appreciate Mr. Wellington bringing this anomaly to our attention.

The department’s internal analysis found that patrol officers who are unfamiliar with the change have observed vehicles parked in front of pedestrian ramps and issued a summons in error. When the rule changed in 2009 to allow for certain pedestrian ramps to be blocked by parked vehicles, the department focused training on traffic agents, who write the majority of summonses.

Yet, the majority of summonses written for this code violation were written by police officers. As a result, the department sent a training message to all officers clarifying the rule change and has communicated to commanders of precincts with the highest number of summonses, informing them of the issues within their command.

Thanks to this analysis and the availability of this open data, the department is also taking steps to digitally monitor these types of summonses to ensure that they are being issued correctly.”

I was speechless.  THIS is what the future of government could look like one day. THIS is what Open Data is all about.  THIS was coming from the NYPD, who is not generally celebrated for its transparency, and yet it’s the most open and honest response I have received from any New York City agency to date. Imagine a city where all agencies embrace this sort of analysis instead of deflect and hide from it.   

Democracies provide pathways for government to learn from their citizens. Open data makes those pathways so much more powerful.  In this case, the NYPD acknowledged the mistake, is retraining its officers and is putting in monitoring to limit this type of erroneous ticketing from happening in the future.  In doing so, they have shown that they are ready and willing to work with the people of the city.  And what better gift can we get from Open Data than that. 

—-

Parking Ticket Data Available here, here and here.   Map made in cartodb Analysis done in pandas with IPython.

[emergentfutures]

A surgical robot was able to repair pigs’ bowels more accurately than human doctors.

The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR), developed by researchers at Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C., uses an advanced 3-D imaging system and very precise force sensing to apply stitches with submillimeter precision. The system was designed to copy state-of-the art surgical practice, but in tests involving living pigs, it proved capable of outperforming its teachers.

[accessnow]

As a third hospital gets hit with what is likely ransomware, experts explain why they are such vulnerable marks for ransomware and what they need to do to fight back.

[wolfliving]

Greg Lindsay smart home scenario

http://www.greglindsay.org/blog/not-sosmart_homes_and_the_internet_of_things/

“For more than a month now, my house has been haunted. There’s nothing supernatural about it; there are more than 15 million homes infected with the H@untedM@nsion worm, BuzzCNN reported yesterday. Every morning between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.—never the same time twice—my bedroom lights begin to strobe, and Lou Reed’s “Metal Machine Music” kicks in again. I would replace the smart lightbulbs (which were the hackers’ initial entry point into my smart home) with dumb ones, but then I’d lose the tax credits.

“Fortunately, I sleep on the floor of my Amazon Prime kitchen, which hasn’t interacted with my Microsoft bedroom since the acquisition talks broke down in 2019. It’s annoying when I ask for the weather report and both Alexa and Cortana talk over each other trying to answer. Even with my circadian rhythms shattered by the cacophony upstairs, Alexa knows me well enough to have started the coffee ten minutes ago.

“I wish she had stocked the fridge with milk, however. I haven’t had dairy in months, after hackers took advantage of my flirtation with the paleo diet to tweak Amazon’s predictive ordering routine to have racks of lamb and other big-ticket meats delivered. They ship them to me through their referral code; this earns them pennies but costs me a lot more. If I give them away or throw them out, more arrive automatically. All I can do is let them rot in the fridge, pitting the algorithm’s learning function against its zombie programming.

“While the coffee brews, I take a shower. As part of the haunting, my security camera ritualistically snaps a photo while I’m au naturel. When the haunting started, the first picture was accompanied by an automated email threatening to post my less-than-paleo physique to my Facebook account daily, unless I paid up – 300 μBTC, or about $20 US, to their bitcoin wallet.

“There isn’t sufficient power for me to work from home today. A 2022 Supreme Court decision granted power utilities the right to requisition stored electricity in my Tesla Powerwall during “periods of emergency” (i.e., summer), so by around noon I won’t have enough power to both charge the car and run the smart lights. And I’ll have to get back before 7 p.m., when the power normally comes back on. AT&T Cisco’s Smart+ Connected Collection service has started refusing to unlock the door without a pro-rated daily payment to cover the utility bill. It’s a good thing I never upgraded the door to the garage, so I can still hack its Bluetooth lock and sneak into my smart home.”

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google reaches into customers' homes and bricks their gadgets

Revolv is a home automation hub that Google acquired 17 months ago; yesterday, Google announced that as of May 15, it will killswitch all the Revolvs in the field and render them inert. Section 1201 of the DMCA – the law that prohibits breaking DRM – means that anyone who tries to make a third-party OS for Revolv faces felony charges and up to 5 years in prison.

Revolv is apparently being killswitched because it doesn’t fit in with Google’s plan for Nest, the other home automation system it acquired. Google’s FAQ tells its customers that this is OK because their warranties have expired, and besides, this is all covered in the fine-print they clicked through, or at least saw, or at least saw a link to.

This isn’t the earthquake, it’s the tremor. From your car to your lightbulbs to your pacemaker, the gadgets you own are increasingly based on networked software. Remove the software and they become inert e-waste. There is no such thing as a hardware company: the razor-thin margins on hardware mean that every funded hardware company is a service and data company, and almost without exception, these companies use DRM to acquire the legal right to sue competitors who provide rival services or who give customers access to their own data on “their” data.

We are entering the era where dishwashers can reject third-party dishes, and their manufacturers can sue anyone who makes “third-party dishes” out of existence. Selling you a toaster has never afforded companies the power to dictate your bread choices, nor has making a record player given a company the right to control which records get made.

The last-millennium Digital Millennium Copyright Act has managed to stay on the books because we still think of it as a way to pull off small-potatoes ripoffs like forcing you to re-buy the movies you own on DVD if you want to watch them on your phone. In reality, the DMCA’s anti-circumvention rules are a system that makes corporations into the only “people” who get to own property – everything you “buy” is actually a license, dictated by terms of service that you’ve never read and certainly never agreed to, which give companies the right to reach into your home and do anything they want with the devices you’ve paid for.

https://boingboing.net/2016/04/05/google-reaches-into-customers.html

[privacyandtechnology]

US | Software flags 'suicidal' students, presenting privacy dilemma

Article by Anya Kamenetz (nprEd).

From the article:

“And yet identifying young people at risk remains a complicated challenge. Last month, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force released a recommendation, aimed at doctors recommending that adolescents be screened for depression. But they have also stated that, ‘Unfortunately … it is not clear how primary care clinicians can effectively identify and help people who are not already known to be at increased risk for suicide.’ In the cases mentioned, software programs do seem to be able to assist in that identification process. But they do so by effectively thrusting school IT directors […] into the role of eavesdroppers.”

Read more: Full text.

[jbaquerot]

Privacy Is The New Money, Thanks To Big Data

In the Grand Bargain of the digital era over consumer privacy, people give their personal information and receive in return free services. Is it a good bargain? Should lawmakers override it and protect people from its dangers?

The Apple/FBI showdown was the recent installment in an unfolding legal battle over privacy protection. Beginning with the Snowden revelations, it is widely thought that the major threat to our privacy in the digital era comes from the power of Big Government to access personal information stored in devices and websites. As this debate rages, we are losing sight of the other enterprise of personal data collection—known as “Big Data”—which is subject to less popular interest, but is far grander in scope, involves higher stakes and numerous ongoing legal battles.

The FBI or NSA data collection is Small Data. It focuses on meta-data or on few targeted individuals under investigation. In contrast, Big Data business is really big. I am talking about the collection of personal data by websites, mobile apps, retailers, insurance companies – any commercial entity that receives information from people. In the old brick-and-mortar world, firms had Pendaflex files about their customers, neatly tucked away in file cabinets. If you walked into a supermarket or bookstore and browsed the shelves, there would be no record of this activity. In the digital world, people leave their prints everywhere. The sum of our activities – where we browse, shop, or drive; what we read, eat, or own; who we chat with, like or love – is collected, neatly organized by algorithms, smartly analyzed by sophisticated software, and used or sold primarily for marketing purposes. It does not decay or gather dust, and it is never forgotten.

[digicultbb]

Turning Citizen Media Into Citizen Evidence: Authentication Techniques For Human Rights Researchers

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ransomware hackers steal a hospital. Again.

A month after a hospital in Hollywood was shut down by a ransomware infection that encrypted all the files on its computers and computer-controlled instruments and systems, another hospital, this one in Kentucky, has suffered a similar fate.

The hacker who stole Hollywood Presbyterian asked for $3.6 million, but settled for a piddling $17,000 (40 bitcoin), presumably after they realized that their random infectious agent had kidnapped a giant, high-profile institution that would be able to motivate serious law-enforcement investigations that would move ever-closer to their true identity the longer the ransom negotiations continued.

Henderson, Kentucky’s Methodist Hospital has declared an “Internal State of Emergency,” having been shut down by a piece of ransomware called “Locky.” The hospital’s spokeslawyer, David Park, said that they’re addressing the ransomware attack using plans designed to help the hospital weather a tornado or other natural disaster.

The attackers are only asking for $1,600 (4 bitcoin) to unlock the hospital’s files.

Brian Krebs speculates that the attackers didn’t set out to hold a hospital to ransom, and have no real appreciation of how much they could be asking for (though the Kentucky hospital seems to have been less compromised than the one in Hollywood). He warns that in future, ransomware creeps will start targeting their attacks, aiming for victims who have more to lose, and more to spend, when their data is taken from them.

https://boingboing.net/2016/03/25/ransomware-hackers-steal-a-hos.html

[brucesterling]

*Aggressive Crypto

[tacanderson]

Welcome To The Post-Work Economy - 

“If the goal of the economy is to provide decent-paying work for everyone, that economy clearly isn’t doing a good job at the moment. Real wages for most Americans haven’t increased in 40 years. Real unemployment—which includes the “under-employed"—is above 10%. Many jobs are now part-time, flexi-time, or "gigs” with no benefits and few protections. And, we spend a lot of money to subsidize so-called “bullshit jobs”: more than 50% of fast food workers receive some form of public assistance, for instance.”

[accessnow]

Employee Wellness Firms Use Data to Predict Worker Health Issues:

Well this sounds a little creepy. Employee wellness firms and insurers are working with companies to mine sensitive health data about workers like you: such as which prescription drugs you use, whether you vote, how you shop—all in order to predict your health needs and risks. For example, if one of these firms thought you were at risk for diabetes, it might send you personalized messages about seeing a doctor or signing up for a weight-loss program. If that isn’t unsettling enough for you, one wellness firm can predict impending pregnancies by looking at when a woman fills—or stops filling—her birth control prescriptions, her age, and the age of any children she already has. Although employers don’t get access to which individuals are flagged by data mining, they do receive aggregated data on the number of workers at risk for each condition.

[accessnow]

Hack Brief: Hackers Are Holding an LA Hospital’s Computers Hostage:

The latest notable ransomware victim is Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles, whose computers have been offline for over a week. The computers will come back online, the hackers reportedly say, in exchange for $3.4 million, paid in bitcoin.