S03E06: Wrong turns
Monday, 18 Dec 2017
While writing this week's newsletter, the theme that emerged was that of wrong turns: How could stuff turn out so wrong? It's not a depressing read, though, I promise. Failure is a great motivator to learn after all.
The next newsletter will probably be out in January. If another one arrives in December, let it be a nice surprise to you and me both!
Quoted
SPIEGEL called for a chat about insecure IoT devices. A small quote made it into the final article. Befitting the theme, the quote is about systemic failure to secure cheap connected devices. SPIEGEL: Internet der Dinge Ist der Ruf erst ruiniert, vernetzt es sich ganz ungeniert.
In directly related news, I also wrote up some of the bigger questions that have been keeping me busy and that have come up a lot in recent conversations across my peer group. They might be interesting for you, too. In the interest of saving you a click, here they are. (For some details and context, hop on over to the blog post.)
- What’s the relationship between (digital) technology and ethics/sustainability?
- The Internet of Things (IoT) has one key challenge in the coming years: Consumer trust.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI): What’s the killer application? Maybe more importantly, which niche applications are most interesting?
- What funding models can we build the web on, now that surveillance tech (aka “ad tech”) has officially crossed over to the dark side and is increasingly perceived as no-go?
Overzealous
The Mirai Botnet Was Part of a College Student Minecraft Scheme WIRED: An interesting plot twist at the end of the Mirai saga: Turns out the global IoT-enabled botnet that crashed lots of popular websites in late 2016 wasn't malicious organized crime hackers (per se) but a bunch of kids with a criminal bend and let's say extremely questionable grasp of unintended consequences. These were some seriously over-motivated young adults. It was DDoS for hire, but for cheating in online games.
WIRED has the full story: "As the 2016 US presidential election drew near, fears began to mount that the so-called Mirai botnet might be the work of a nation-state practicing for an attack that would cripple the country as voters went to the polls. The truth, as made clear in that Alaskan courtroom Friday—and unsealed by the Justice Department on Wednesday—was even stranger: The brains behind Mirai were a 21-year-old Rutgers college student from suburban New Jersey and his two college-age friends from outside Pittsburgh and New Orleans. All three—Paras Jha, Josiah White, and Dalton Norman, respectively—admitted their role in creating and launching Mirai into the world.
Originally, prosecutors say, the defendants hadn’t intended to bring down the internet—they had been trying to gain an advantage in the computer game Minecraft." Welcome to the 21st century.
Old Social
In remarks from a 2011 event that surfaced recently (Verge), former Facebook exec (VP for user growth, natch) Chamath Palihapitiya expressed "tremendous guilt" over his work at Facebook. He describes FB as "tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works" (generally) and hyper engineered feedback loops specifically: "The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we've created are destroying how society works". Interestingly, that was back in 2011. And in his defense: He left FB in the same year.
It was as good a reminder for me as any to make the jump off of Facebook. It's been feeling like an outdated model of social media for a while, and I haven't got any real use out of the platform in a long time. I doubt I'll miss it, but I also hope I won't lose some old university contacts. May new, better platforms arise out of the ashes.
But it's not all about wrong turns. Here's some interesting, probably-maybe positive (or at least exciting) things, too:
Data Light Fog
What if wifi but through light? At ThingsCon Amsterdam, Bruce Sterling gave a shout-out to Li-Fi (short explainer), which transmits data through visible light. It appears to be a French thing. How had this slipped under my radar until now?
AI imagination
Nvidia looks to reduce AI training material through 'imagination' (ZDNet). Nvidia researchers have used a pair of generative adversarial networks (GANs) along with some unsupervised learning to create an image-to-image translation network that could allow for artificial intelligence (AI) training times to be reduced.
AI & your genome
Google Has Released an AI Tool That Makes Sense of Your Genome (MIT Technology Review). Almost 15 years after scientists first sequenced the human genome, making sense of the enormous amount of data that encodes human life remains a formidable challenge. But it is also precisely the sort of problem that machine learning excels at.
Thanks for following along. Forwarding & recommending this newsletter is always appreciated, as are your questions and your feedback (thanks for both!).
I wish you a great end of the year and hope to talk to you soon.
Best, Peter