S03E09: Bodyheat & Dull Arbitrage
Monday, 15 Jan 2018
Sitrep: Monday morning, tired after one of these nights that friends with kids had always warned me about, half-jokingly. Restored through an excellent cup of coffee & croissant at neighborhood coffee shop Nano. Onward and upward!
There's been a flood of interesting bits this past week. So this is going to be a big one. Let's jump right in, shall we?
x
Very happy that Kai Brach, publisher of the lovely Offscreen) Magazine reached out for a contribution for their upcoming issue (out in April). I'll share the link once it's published. Their current issue (#18, pictured below, just out) is also highly recommended.
x
Powered by body heat
The (horribly named) PowerWatch X is a smartwatch that runs off your body heat (Verge). I'm fairly bearish on smartwatches, but this one peaked my interest. Not because of what it does but of how it does it. Concretely, it's the energy bit that I find interesting. Apparently this watch runs off of body heat. Should that actually work—with sufficient efficiency—it might turn out really useful for a great number of devices in the future.
Turns out that wearable thermoelectric generators for human body heat harvesting are a thing now. Here's a quick summary of a 2016 white paper. TL;DR: Exploiting heat differentials between the body (warm) and its surroundings (cold), you can definitively harvest energy. If you put it in a t-shirt rather than on the upper arm you lose some efficiency but gain the much larger surface area: "T-shirt TEG's [thermoelectric generators] are certainly viable for powering wearable technologies".
x
Privacy, China-style
Internet Users in China Expect to Be Tracked. Now, They Want Privacy (NYTimes). China can serve as an interesting indicator (often an early one) for a great number of things, I think. This might be one of these cases: A subsidiary of Alibaba showed users how they spent their money online, and everyone who wanted to see it was enrolled automatically to their so-called social credit system. "The episode was a rare, public rebuttal of a prevailing trend in China. The country’s largest internet companies, and the government itself, have gathered ever more data on internet users. While Chinese culture does not emphasize personal privacy and Chinese internet users have grown accustomed to surveillance and censorship, the anger represents a nascent, but growing, demand for increased privacy and data protections online."
If even Chinese users are pushing back against commercial surveillance, the rest of the world could very well get their shit together in that area as well.
In related news, if you haven't subscribed to the Magpie Digest, the outstanding weekly exploration of contemporary China published by Christina Xu, Tricia Wang and Pheona Chen, you're missing out big time!
x
Futures & AIs
Dude, you broke the future! This keynote by Charlie Stross at 34C3 resonated with me. He argues that fears of technological AI is overblown—if compared to the very real, well established and very damaging effects of "the very old, very slow AIs we call corporations": "History gives us the perspective to see what went wrong in the past, and to look for patterns, and check whether those patterns apply to the present and near future. And looking in particular at the history of the past 200-400 years—the age of increasingly rapid change—one glaringly obvious deviation from the norm of the preceding three thousand centuries—is the development of Artificial Intelligence, which happened no earlier than 1553 and no later than 1844." It's an interesting take.
ps. The announcer of this talk, if you happen to watch the video (I'd recommend reading the transcript instead) tries to be welcoming to Charlie, introducing by nothing but "what can I say, he's one of us"; what a rude, silly, useless thing to say. Ah well.
The Trouble with Bias. Speaking of AI gone wrong, Kate Crawford's talk on AI bias is ace. Don't miss this one.
AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We're All Fucked (Motherboard). This is both super weird and super obvious at the same time, in that peculiar sense that we see more and more often with tech these days. Here's Motherboard's summary: "There’s a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet. But it’s not really Gadot’s body, and it’s barely her own face. It’s an approximation, face-swapped to look like she’s performing in an existing incest-themed porn video.
The video was created with a machine learning algorithm, using easily accessible materials and open-source code that anyone with a working knowledge of deep learning algorithms could put together."
x
No means no, even on the blockchain. LegalFling (website) is the latest (but surely not the last) horrible tech-bro reaction to a "complicated" world where no means no. I think I might be late to this particular party shitshow, but oh boy, where to start. An app to get legally binding consent before sex. Sure, why not. After all, consent is good. But this looks more like a terrible hoax (and it very well might be). You quickly have all parties swipe their "legally binding" agreement, including contractual penalties for breach of contract, and it's all logged on the blockchain. "Awesome features" include consent given "with the click of a button" (because swiftness is usually a good indicator of truly understanding what you're signing, like with any old ToS or EULA), "penalty clauses" so that if the dude leaks nude pics in breach of the contract the app automatically sends a cease and desist letter, because that clearly will magically make the leak unhappen. And of course, because this is the bro-y-est of bro-ish apps, it has a feature to enable group flings. Le sigh.
Ah yes - it's pretty obvious from the context, but of course the team behind this is all dudes.
x
Let there be breaches
India's government Aadhaar database, which holds personal information of over one billion Indian citizens (who were forced to sign up), was allegedly breached (Engadget). Along with demographic info, the database also contains biometric data like fingerprints and iris scans. Repeat out loud after me: 👏 Centralized 👏 databases 👏 with 👏 critical 👏 personal 👏 information 👏 are 👏 bad 👏.
x
All city, no car
How a city in Spain got rid of its cars (Citiscope): A small Spanish town more or less banned cars, and you won't believe what happened next... What I find most interesting is how the mayor of Pontevedra simply shifted priorities for the city's policy making: "'We inverted the pyramid,' he says, 'leaving the pedestrians above, followed by bicycles and public transport, and with the private car at the bottom.'".
Image: Pontevedra (Source: Citiscope)
More about Pontevedra on Wikipedia.
x
Dull Arbitrage
The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed: The sad story of what Markus Andrezak eloquently called Dull Arbitrage on Instagram. Set up shop for cheap goods, SEO the heck out of them, have fulfillment send the stuff straight from China to the buyer customer, wait for money and/or disappointment to pour in.
It's fascinating in that it puts the infrastructural tools that used to be reserved to global corporations into the hands of individuals; it's sad in that it's just another slightly niche of late capitalism.
x
No place to hide
After a conversation about the (luckily false) missile alert on Hawaii the other day I got nervous: What would we do in case of an incoming missile alert? It took me a while to even think about bunkers; I don't think I'd be a great bunker person. (Then again, who is?) That said, I realized I had no idea where or how to even find potential bunkers in Berlin. So I started googling and turns out, Berlin has an abundance of tourable bunkers (WWII! Cold War!) as well as a few you can rent as event locations. There's one that houses an excellent art collection (Boros Bunker; if you plan to visit, remember you need to book tickets a month or two in advance). But the one thing that doesn't exist in Berlin—or all of Germany for that matter—is bunkers for protection. According to the one article I found (Welt), Germany abandonded the concept of protective bunkers in 2007 and has since stopped maintaining them. (According to that article, a 2015 study concluded that in the case of a global nuclear war the question of protecting the population wouldn't even make sense to ask anymore.) If nothing else, this should make for fun dinner conversations.
x
Follow-ups:
- I'd still be interested in writing a regular column someplace with solid reach. Let me know if you know of a good place that I should consider?
- Probably (hopefully) this is also the last chance to discuss any larger projects for 2018. If there's a project you'd like to chat about that might require need a solid block of time this year, now's the time.
x
If you think this might be of interest to a colleague of friend, please feel free to forward this email or point them to tinyletter.com/pbihr to sign up themselves. Thank you!
Yours sincerely,
Peter