Wild Webmink

Yep, it’s been quiet here. I have been experimenting with federated web sites of various flavours and most current activity is on one of them. Try:

• Mastodon (that’s Twitter-like micro-posts): Meshed Cloud
• PixelFed (that’s Instgram-style photo sharing): MinkPix
• Plume (that’s for blogging): Minkiverse

If you’ve any Fediverse account, those all support the ActivityPub standard and you can follow and respond to any from any.

For a full list, try my new hub page at webm.ink

Filed under: Links, MinkCast, Social Media, Tweets, Webmink | Tagged: Fediverse | Comments Off on Fediverse Sites

Given the mole rat has gone, the BBC has inspired me to pick a new name for my ongoing series of “State of the Rat” posts where the technology that is supposed to save us – face recognition, automated moderation and the like – turns out to have a bit of an issue. Spoiler: it always will, machines can’t make subjective decisions, discretion can’t be quantised.

In which Facebook reassures us once again they can definitely identify pornography, no problem, trust us to filter it out mate.

• Why some onions were too sexy for Facebook (BBC)
• Seed Company (Facebook)

(10 October 2020)

Filed under: Links | Comments Off on State of the Onion

It’s been a while since we discussed state of the rat filtering technology, but some examples recently need to go on list.

Machines understand exactly what your child should know:

The Filter can tell when you are using dirty language and will protect sensitive Americans from your crudeness:

NASA is of course stealing the coverage of the space launch from NBC.

Facebook’s bots don’t agree with Facebook’s adjudication:

Facial recognition will definitely help us find the right guy

Filed under: Censorship, Filters | Tagged: Copyright, Filters | Comments Off on Rat Redux

While we’re on the subject of mandatory filtering, here’s the sort of technology we are talking about in action:

The original State Of The Rat Technology:

https://twitter.com/AmandaLafrenais/status/1010742488703885312?

Now removed, the original post that triggered this page was from the owner of a mole rat complaining that her photos of her rat were being incorrectly tagged as pornography and consequently her account kept getting blocked.

Political content is so easy to spot:

That reference database is spot on defining ownership:

https://twitter.com/neil_neilzone/status/1014948307939024896?s=19

History and classics are not always PC:

Filed under: Censorship, Copyright, Links, Photography | Tagged: Censorship, Filtering, RatFilter, SaveYourInternet, Twitter | 1 Comment »

The European Parliament’s JURI committee passed on Wednesday a deeply flawed proposed amendment to the copyright directive that could break the Internet for almost everyone. It is just the latest in a stream of misguided legislation responding to the lobbying of special interests trying to triage the effects of the Internet on their expectations of wealth and control. There is still time to contact MEPs to avoid its damage – see https://saveyourinternet.eu/

While the putative targets of much of this bad legislation are US new-wave corporations — especially Google and Facebook — the actual victims are repeatedly the Europeans who are our best hope of countering this US corporate power; citizen-innovators. Far from gutting Google’s guns and foiling Facebook’s finagling, the new rules — notably GDPR and now the new copyright rules — give them and their peers unintended power over European innovators.

A root cause of many of the problems with British and European legislation regarding the Internet is a failure to recognise that, in the meshed society it creates, the citizen can play roles previously reserved for the corporation. I can create published works, I can directly fund new ventures, I can build global-scale applications and so on.

Believing these and other capabilities to only be within the scope of corporations, legislation frequently fails to observe the impact of regulations on individuals. Penalties are disproportionate, recourse is onerous or absent, restrictions are asymetric. Consequently, only well-resourced corporations can hope to fully comply — an exclusionary gift to the large and established players and a further smack in the face of European innovators.

To make significant progress with any “Digital Charter” of the kind the UK government purports to love, we first need to recognise that the Internet has created a meshed society of opportunity for all and not just a new market for the winners of the previous age to re-sell their old goods and methods. Until the legislators consult open source developers, self-published writers and musicians and other small-but-scaleable innovators, new rules targetting the Internet will only result in reinforced oligarchies.

Filed under: Copyright, Zeitgeist | Tagged: Copyright, European Parliament, SaveYourInternet | 2 Comments »

Never give robots guns. Guns are for killing. Robots can’t make analogue decisions and those are the only ones that should ever control the taking of the life of another person. Robots make quantised decisions, not analogue ones. The quanta reflect the programming, and the programming arises from the approximation and modelling of a human view.

When a technologist embodies their or their employer’s view of what’s fair into a technology, any potential for the exercise of discretion is turned from a scale to a step and humanity is quantised. That quantisation of discretion always serves the interest of the person forcing the issue.

Calls for better robots that make better judgement calls are misguided and pointless. A robot that can successfully make life-or-death decisions is a piece of bad science fiction. Any technology that attempts to perform human judgement quantises discretion and inherently dehumanises culture. That technology should never have a weapon.

___________
Background reading

[Microsoft]: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/194338-here-come-the-autonomous-robot-security-guards-what-could-possibly-go-wrong
[Halting]: https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/halting-problem-proves-that-a-lethal-robot-cannot-correctly-decide-whether-to-kill-a-human-7c014623c13f
[3-Laws]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics
[Goedel]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems
[Motherboard]: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-the-pentagons-skynet-would-automate-war
[DoD]: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=123651
[DoD-Paper]: http://ctnsp.dodlive.mil/files/2014/09/DTP1061.pdf
[Moratorium]: http://phys.org/news/2013-05-moratorium-killer-robots.html

[Onion]: http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-law-enforcement-robot-can-wield-excessive-forc,36220/

Filed under: Zeitgeist | Tagged: War | 2 Comments »

Child me lit up for blue lights, wanted to ride them,
saw the freedom to break rules and drive fast.
Missed that they’re arrest lights – police and cardiac;
find fear; lose liberty; run away with life.

I don’t want to ride the blue lights any more.
Blue is for skies and ribbons, for eyes and summer dresses.
The blue lights drain colour from our faces;
presage loss; predict shorter life; pin sadness in each flash.

I don’t want to ride the blue lights any more
and I don’t want you to either.

April 9, 2017

Filed under: Poetry | Tagged: Adulting | Comments Off on Blue Lights

Is the answer to the “gig economy” patronage? I hope to find out using Patreon!

[画像:Turning silver into gold]

The Gig Economy

We’re moving more and more into what’s called the “gig economy”, where instead of a single, full-time, lifetime-long job, people engage in multiple activities. It’s certainly what I have been doing for the last few years; consulting on open source, serving on the boards of a variety of civil society organisations, arranging and conducting study tours, writing for several publications, writing on my own sites, speaking at events and more. Few of those have been paid work. Continue reading →

Filed under: Webmink, Work | Tagged: Meshed Society, Patreon | 1 Comment »

In his article Understanding Trump, George Lakoff offers a master class in the psychology of the Trump phenomenon. It is definitely worth your time to read it.

At the end, he outlines a game plan for responsing to Trump which I think is superb. But I think it applies to more than just US politics; it’s a way to respond to post-truth politics anywhere. Here is a quick edit of the final section of Lakoff’s essay that generalises it for use anywhere: Continue reading →

Filed under: Links | 2 Comments »

At the end of my testimony in the recent Oracle v Google trial in San Francisco, Judge Alsup asked me to explain what an API is. My answer aimed to simplify the answer for a general listener while remaining recognizable to most programmers. Here’s what I said. Continue reading →

Filed under: Java | Tagged: API, Copyright, Java | 3 Comments »