These ads depicted people doing stuff that was fundamentally normal,
but made exotic because they were doing it over a 128k bonded ISDN pair
provided by AT&T: tucking in their kids, attending meetings,
getting medical advice, using self-serve kiosks at the DMV, etc.
The ads are infamous in their own way, first because they were
beautifully executed, and second because AT&T managed to predict a
bunch of technologies without making any significant inroads in
supplying those technologies (part of the reason AT&T is so anxious
to kill Net Neutrality is that it failed to out-compete the companies
that provided services over its wires, and so now it wants to exact a
tax from them instead of trying to make things that people want).
That’s right, as far as it goes, but there is another way in which these
so-right ads were so, so wrong: they predicted that the major impact of
technology would be to make us more normal, not weirder: that
teleconferencing would allow nuclear families to remain in touch even
when separated by distance, but not that networks would allow
polyamorous people to discretely meet one another and form amorphous,
blended families. That we’d have videoconference board-meetings, but not
that we’d galvanize political opposition by livestreaming police
brutality. That we’d have smart-watches but not that we’d have hardware
hackers creating free/open laptops from the bootloader up to root out
monopolism and surveillance.
I dropped out of four undergraduate programs, and the last university I
didn’t graduate from was the University of Waterloo, where I had
submitted a thesis proposal for the Interdisciplinary Studies program
that was grounded in this idea: that the predictions everyone made about
the internet were about how much normal we were going to get, but that
all the early evidence was that we were about to get way, way weirder,
for better and for worse. It was 1993, and these ads were the impetus
for the proposal. The university turned down my proposal, I took a job
programming multimedia CD ROMs for Voyager, and never looked back.
John Perry Barlow, who died on February
7th, helped shape how we think about digital rights. Here, the OU’s
Mike Richards introduces a short obituary by John’s friend, Cory
Doctorow.
John Perry Barlow died peacefully in his sleep on February 7, 2018,
at the age of 70, in the midst of global turmoil about the nature and
destiny of the information systems he had devoted his life to improving.
Barlow had lived an odd and adventurous life, scion of a rural
political family; cowboy-poet at an American liberal arts college;
lyricist for the legendary jam band The Grateful Dead; co-founder of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (a charitable pressure group); and
biotech entrepreneur devoted to using single-celled organisms to convert
sunshine and sewage into useful fuel.
Barlow was famous several times over, but one of his landmark claims
to fame was the 1996 “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” a
piece of soaring, poetic rhetoric demanding that the internet be treated
as a place where humanity could make common cause, where ideas could be
debated and improved, where bridges could be built and walls
demolished.
Twenty-some-years on, Barlow and his Declaration became a punching
bag for a certain species of historical revisionist, a new crop of
techno-dystopians who insisted that Barlow – and the people he
inspired, and the organisation he founded – were hopelessly naive to
think that the internet would automatically be a force for good, rather
than the trolling, surveillant, controlling cesspit of crime, racism and
harassment that we struggle with today.
But I knew Barlow. Reading his Declaration changed the course of my
life when I was just starting out as an internet developer in the early
1990s, and when I met him and went to work for the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, I had the incredible and inspiring opportunity to affirm my
first impression of his philosophy: the internet would only be a force
for good if we committed ourselves endlessly to that cause, and
otherwise, it could go horribly, horribly wrong.
Barlow – and his pioneering colleagues like Mitch Kapor and John
Gilmore – founded EFF because they were simultaneously excited about
the power of the internet to remake the world for the better, and
starkly terrified about how badly it would go if no one took
responsibility for fighting for it.
Barlow understood that “information wants to be free” wasn’t an
anthropomorphising statement about the desires of an abstraction like
“information” – it was a shorthand for “*PEOPLE* want to be free, and
in an information society, freedom for people is impossible without a
free, fair and open information infrastructure.”
The internet is not and never was the most important fight in our
world: addressing racial and gender bias, averting climate catastrophe
and addressing gross income inequality are all far more important than
the internet ever was. But the internet is the terrain where that
struggle will be waged – which makes the internet fight the most
foundational one, the fight on whose outcome all the other fights ride.
Barlow understood that – and he inspired generations that will come after him.
It’s been less than a year since a public-spirited hacker
broke into the servers of Florida stalkerware vendor Retina-X, wiping
out all the photos and data the company’s customers had stolen from
other peoples’ phones (including their kids’ phones) by installing the
spying apps Phonesheriff on them.
Now, it’s happened again.
A hacker who uses the handle Precise Buffalo
on a Mastadon server says they wiped a terabyte of data from Retina-X’s
servers. Retina-X, who eventually admitted that they’d lied when they
denied last year’s attack, have denied that an attack took place this
year. Precise Buffalo presented compelling evidence to Motherboard that
they had indeed taken over Retina-X’s servers (again).
Last year’s breach was possible because Retina-X distributed the
necessary keys to download all its customers’ data with every copy of
its app, meaning that parents who used the app to spy on their children
also exposed their children to surveillance by everyone in the world.
Jared Kushner quietly filed an addendum to his personal financial disclosure adding even more previously undisclosed business interests in recent weeks — and may have even more to disclose, according to real estate documents shared with TPM.
Reminder that Kushner can not get a security clearance, because he is so wrapped up in shady business deals (that he keeps “remembering” he forgot to disclose), but Shitler doesn’t care and is granting him – probably the most compromised person in the White House not named Trump – top secret security clearance.
And all the while, the Republican-controlled Congress refuses to act to stop this clear and present danger to our national security.
ELECTRICITY MAY BE THE DRIVER. One day your car may speed along an electric super-highway, it’s speed and steering automatically controlled by electronic devices embedded in the road. Travel will be more enjoyable. Highways will be made safe–by electricity! No traffic jams…no collisions… no driver fatigue. LIFE Magazine, 25 feb 1957
Fedex acquired a company called Bongo International in 2014; Bongo
specialized in helping North American companies sell overseas and after
the acquisition, Fedex renamed the company FedEx Cross-Border
International.
Bongo and/or Fedex stored 119,000 of its customers scanned pieces of ID
on an Amazon Web Services bucket that had no password or encryption;
these included passport scans, drivers licenses and other docs, each
accompanied by customs forms stating the customer’s full name, home
addresses and phone numbers.
Fedex shut down the division last April, but even then it did not audit its data-handling practices and shut down the archive or at least add a password to it (it’s down now).
Fedex says this is OK because if someone stole this data, they did so
without leaving a trail that Fedex can find. Kromtech, who made the
discovery, says they think the data may have been available since 2009.
