Even Buildings Will Behave in the Same Vaguely Suspicious Way
1. A fascinating look at what the VW scandal really portends.
"So the fact is that our experience of the world will increasingly come to reflect our experience of our computers and of the internet itself (not surprisingly, as it’ll be infused with both). Just as any user feels their computer to be a fairly unpredictable device full of programs they’ve never installed doing unknown things to which they’ve never agreed to benefit companies they’ve never heard of, inefficiently at best and actively malignant at worst (but how would you now?), cars, street lights, and even buildings will behave in the same vaguely suspicious way. Is your self-driving car deliberately slowing down to give priority to the higher-priced models? Is your green A/C really less efficient with a thermostat from a different company, or it’s just not trying as hard?"
2. Important new book on digital resistance.
"With Obfuscation, Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum mean to start a revolution. They are calling us not to the barricades but to our computers, offering us ways to fight today’s pervasive digital surveillance—the collection of our data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers. To the toolkit of privacy protecting techniques and projects, they propose adding obfuscation: the deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects. Brunton and Nissenbaum provide tools and a rationale for evasion, noncompliance, refusal, even sabotage—especially for average users, those of us not in a position to opt out or exert control over data about ourselves."
3. Shell is giving up on oil and gas exploration off the coast of Alaska.
"Until now, that is. On Monday, Shell said that it had successfully drilled its first exploratory well to a depth of some 6800 feet in the Burger Prospect in the Chukchi Sea (in red on the map above). Yet the company simply hadn't found enough oil and gas to 'warrant further exploration.' Instead, Shell said it would seal the well it has already drilled and 'will now cease further exploration activity in offshore Alaska for the foreseeable future.' That means that no one is likely to drill off the coast of Alaska anytime soon."
"DOTS is a true visual 'eye-readable' method of storing digital files. With sufficient magnification, one can actually see the digital information. Our 'Rosetta Leader' specification calls for microfiche-scale human readable text at the beginning of each tape with instructions on how the data is encoded and instructions on how to actually construct a reader. Because the information is visible, as long as cameras and imaging devices are available, the information will always be recoverable."
5. Border walls as ecological problems.
"My first year in graduate school, I read a paper in which the authors laid out the state of twenty-first-century nature. There was a great map of the world’s remaining High Biodiversity Wilderness Areas. There were only five: the Amazon and Congo rainforests (aka the Usual Suspects), Papua New Guinea, a patchy swathe of southern Africa…and the arid region around the U. S. – Mexico border, covering most of the American Southwest and north-central Mexico. The area near the border is dry, but it’s mountainous, with many microclimates and hardly any people. I once spent a week in the desert where California meets Nevada, and an ecologist out there told me that it’s not unusual for a dedicated naturalist to find plants, even trees, that haven’t yet been described by science. The border fence cuts right through these kinds of places."
On Fusion: Kashmir Hill interviews Edward Snowden on whistleblowing, Mr. Robot, and more.
1. ieet.org | @ID_R_Mcgregor 2. mitpress.mit.edu 3. vox.com 4. group47.com | @mikko 5. orionmagazine.org
Even Buildings Will Behave in the Same Vaguely Suspicious Way