Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Technology

Shiny gadgets and clever computers

  • Social media is different for girls

    I retweeted a post by Common Space editor Angela Haggerty last night. If you’re not familiar with the social network Twitter, retweeting is when you copy somebody’s message so that the people who follow you on Twitter can see it.

    As part of a thread on Twitter’s toxic abuse problem, Haggerty wrote:

    Social media abuse is probably doing more long term harm to young women/girls, and they don’t have a voice in media. Some of the stories I’ve heard are frightening and I don’t think I could have coped with it as a teen. As adults we have a huge responsibility to fight this.

    This isn’t remotely surprising to anybody who’s been paying attention. Social media can be toxic, and it can be especially toxic for young women – even more so if those women are from any minority group.

    So naturally a complete stranger charged into my Twitter mentions to post widely-debunked Men’s Rights Activist nonsense: women are really the villains, men get more online abuse, lesbians are wife-beaters and so on.

    I’ll spare you the ins and outs of my replies – executive summary: there’s tons of data that shows the significant difference in what men and women experience online; men are more likely to be told to piss off or called a cockwomble while women are more likely to be threatened with sexual violence – and present an anecdote instead.

    I’ve been using social media since 1994*. I’ve been a journalist since 1998. And I didn’t come out online as trans until 2017.

    That means I was a guy on social media for 23 years and a male journalist with publicly available social media and email for 19 years.

    During that period, lots of people called me names and told me to fuck off. Some people made a hobby of it.

    But the total amount of actual abuse I experienced in total over 19 years is less than many women experience in one day.

    * CompuServe forums FTW! <g>

  • The best democracy money can buy

    This is superb journalism, very frightening and quite clearly the tip of an iceberg.

    Observer: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach.

    The short version: one company surreptitiously and unethically gathered data on 1/3 of US Facebook users and used it to precision-target them with political messages on behalf of the Trump campaign.

    The algorithm at the heart of the Facebook data breach sounds almost too dystopian to be real. It trawls through the most apparently trivial, throwaway postings –the “likes” users dole out as they browse the site – to gather sensitive personal information about sexual orientation, race, gender, even intelligence and childhood trauma.

    A few dozen “likes” can give a strong prediction of which party a user will vote for, reveal their gender and whether their partner is likely to be a man or woman, provide powerful clues about whether their parents stayed together throughout their childhood and predict their vulnerability to substance abuse. And it can do all this without an need for delving into personal messages, posts, status updates, photos or all the other information Facebook holds.

    Meet the data whistleblower.

    How Likes became a weapon.

    The same company was used by the Leave side during the run-up to the Brexit referendum.

    The data in this scandal is a tiny proportion of the data Facebook has on everybody.

    Here’s your regular reminder that Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, plans to run for President of the USA.

  • The camera lies

    If you think we’ve got problems with fake news now, wait until deepfake is mainstream.

    The Guardian:

    Show a neural network enough examples of faces from two celebrities and it’ll develop its own mental model of what they look like, capable of generating new faces with specific expressions.

    Ask it to generate a set of expressions on one face that are mapped onto a second face, and you have the beginnings of a convincing, automatically generated, utterly fake video. And so, naturally, the internet created a lot of porn.

    I haven’t seen the porn – I have no interest in seeing videos created without people’s consent – but I have seen what the technology can do in the hands of ethical people.

    This is absolutely stunning: Sven Charleer replaces actors with his wife.

    Beyond just pure fun, I can only imagine how people will start turning this tech into business ideas. Fashion will be huge (what would I look like with this kind of hair, this kind of dress…), fitness could be interesting (do I look good with muscles, will I really look better skinny), travel (this is you standing on a beach is going to be quite convincing). It’ll bring advertising to a whole new level. No need to imagine what if, they’ll tell you what your “better” life will look like! And it’ll be hard to get that picture out of your head…

    This technology is in its infancy, but it’s getting smarter by the day. And the potential ramifications for everything from revenge porn to political propaganda are enormous and disturbing.

    Back to The Guardian:

    It’s grim. But it’s not going to go away. The technology is publicly available, extensively documented, and the subject of research around the globe. This is our world now. As Lucas warned MPs: “Please don’t spend too much time looking in the mirror at what Russia did to us; look through the windscreen at what’s coming down the road. That’s much more dangerous.”

  • YouTube and Facebook are fuelling fake news and bigotry

    This is absolutely terrifying: YouTube has a “conspiracy ecosystem”.

    YouTube viewers who started searching for information on “crisis actors” — people who supposedly play roles as mass shooting survivors to push gun control — could soon find themselves tumbling down a rabbit hole of conspiracies about the the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, the JFK assassination and Pizzagate, the hoax about a supposed child molestation ring run by Democratic Party luminaries out of a Washington pizzeria.

    “It’s a conspiracy ecosystem,” said Albright, research director at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. “It’s growing, not only in size but in depth.”

    Exactly the same thing happens on Facebook.

    The problem is “trending” content, the stuff you’re recommended by Facebook and YouTube’s algorithms, which then leads to other things.

    As Frederic Filloux writes in his Monday Note newsletter:

    For both YouTube (the world’s main provider of videos) and Facebook (the dominant vector of fake news), solving this problem would actually be easy: kill Trending Topics, which has a terrible track record. But neither tech giant will do that, because that’s where the advertising money is.

    That money is mainstreaming extreme views. Some of the people who subscribe to the “crisis actor” bullshit are violent bigots; therefore if you view some crisis actor bullshit you’re likely to see other content relevant to violent bigots. It’s not long before you’re in very disturbing territory.

    As the columnist Christopher Mims notes:

    Facebook is a unique enabler of extremism, full stop. “If it’s outrageous, it’s contagious” is literally the bedrock, fundamental modus operandi of its engagement-optimizing algorithms.

  • Detox your digital life without giving up your digital life

    We’re coming out of digital detox season, where newspaper columnists share the incredible insight that you can get a lot of stuff done if you don’t spend all your time dicking about on the internet. But as the developers of the excellent iA Writer app point out, taking a break is good but going offline permanently is hardly desirable or practical.

    …you can’t escape digital culture as long as you live in a society that lives on digital fuel. If you block email you’ll have trouble holding onto most jobs. If you have no cellphone people just won’t get in touch with you anymore. Who calls landlines these days? However long your digital Sabbatical, you will inevitably get sucked back in. And so will your kids.

    What you can do, they argue, is to make your digital life more meaningful. They use the analogy of being a tourist walking down a busy street in a foreign city: the people yelling to get your attention aren’t generally the people you should be paying attention to. As in life, so online.

    The challenge when you are in is to not become passive. To change from consumer to maker, following to self-thinking, quoter to commentator, liker to publisher, but mostly, from getting angry about headlines of articles you haven’t read to reading precisely, asking questions, researching, fact-checking, thinking clearly and writing carefully.

    These are the developers of a writing app, so they’re talking primarily to writers. But it’s sensible advice generally. It’s easy to fall into a passive role online, to consume only the content that’s pushed to you. In the era of social media that’s often the lowest quality content.

    The article talks about blogs, and the changes to blogging culture that have seen blogs and blogging become very much a niche activity (incidentally, almost 20 years ago I wrote my first ever piece of published journalism about the then-new niche trend of people publishing online “journals”. It’s come full circle and is a niche once more).

    One of the reasons blogging has fallen from favour, and there are many others, is that commenting – what used to be the lifeblood of blogging, the conversations that began when your post finished – became poisoned. Drive-by bullshit from complete strangers. Spammers and hackers trying to drive traffic to other websites. And marketing.

    God, the marketing.

    Even now, there isn’t a single day when I don’t get approached by somebody wanting to publish a guest post to my blog, or asking me to replace a dead link from a post I published in 2005 with a link to their site, or an offer of an infographic, or any of the other things that I say I don’t publish on the sodding contact page of this website.

    So the comments had to go.

    Comments were the first core function that got gamed. For trolls, PR companies using persona software, SEO blackhats, spammers, and dogs pretending to be humans the comments section was free sex. Commenting costs nothing. Managing comments sections is so expensive that even big media organizations can no longer afford them.

    I also stopped blogging here for some time because I felt I was saying what I wanted to say on social media. But whether that was true or not, what I was saying wasn’t being read. Unless you upset somebody famous a tweet is just a drop in Twitter’s Niagara Falls, a Facebook post something that a handful of people will see if Facebook deems your post worthy of their attention.

    iA again:

    it’s writing as opposed to liking, thinking as opposed to reacting, owning your traffic as opposed to building up your Facebook followers that one day a Zuckerberg will take away from you when it suits his needs.

    What I’m finding works best is to mix things up, to continue with short, sharp, knee-jerk stuff on social media and to post more interesting things by others here (as well as to post my own longer, more rambly thoughts). I still share the links on social media, but I don’t hand over the entire content to Facebook or Twitter: it remains here, where it can be discovered long after social media sites’ short attention spans have moved on.

    Writing gets real when it is read. Before that, it is a dream in letters.

    A dream in letters. I like that.

  • Instant Pot, Instant Pot, how much do I like it? Quite a lot

    I know what people want to read about: while this is supposedly a blog about me, bad jokes, technology and music, the most popular post I’ve ever published here is a post I wrote 13 years ago about a defrosting plate.

    I laughed the other day when I saw a Kickstarter campaign for one, presumably by people who thought they’d invented it. No amount of millennial cool or fast-cut editing can disguise the fact that it’s the same block of aluminium you can buy for a tenner, albeit with some extra lime-green plastic around it.

    Anyway. I like kitchen gadgets. You clearly like kitchen gadgets. And now The Guardian’s written about my very favourite kitchen gadget, the Instant Pot.

    Emma Brockes writes:

    the Instant Pot is to this decade what yogurt makers were to the 70s, SodaStream to the 80s and bread-makers to the 90s; that is, kitchen devices invested with magical, life-altering qualities.

    She’s right. There are entire communities devoted to it, and food site The Kitchn has gone absolutely mad for it. But while the hype is a bit silly, it’s genuinely one of the best things I’ve ever bought: slow cooking without the slow, roast chicken without the roasting, all kinds of great food without a pile of pots and pans to clean afterwards. It’s particularly great if you live in a flat or have a small kitchen, because it replaces a whole bunch of devices: slow cooker, pressure cooker, rice cooker, enormous stock pot and so on.

    Just one bit of advice: never pay the RRP. Amazon in particular discounts it all the time, and not just on Black Friday. I’d strongly advise using CamelCamelCamel to check the price history and make sure you’re buying it as cheaply as possible.

    On the subject of Black Friday, I bought a Sous Vide cooker on the BF just gone. I haven’t actually used it yet, but I will soon and I’ll report back.

  • “When I arrive in Hell, the Devil will sound like a headline”

    I’m indebted to my old friend, the inimitable Professor Batty, for telling me about this excellent essay on the internet and reality and our feelings and quite a lot of other things too.

    Do it now. Fight the new pace of thinking designed to keep us in Facebook fights and make Facebook more money. Resist getting so wound up by every story that you accelerate off a cliff into apathy. Lengthen the circuit between a candid thought and your anticipation of how it will be received, a circuit constantly shrinking in fear. Try your ideas out with people you are not desperate to impress, so there’s less ego clouding your discussion.

  • Unintended consequences

    Inevitable, but unintended: the same remote wipe tech that protects your data from thieves is being used by criminals to outwit the police. BBC News:

    Asked whether the police felt that the issue had damaged their investigation, the spokeswoman said: “We don’t know because we don’t know what was on the phone.”

  • Really good things about the iPhone 6

    Brilliant.

    on the bottom bit of the telephone there is a little rounded shaped button that hides a secret hidden fingerprint scanner that you can use to scan your wifes fingerprints while she is sleeping at night time to make sure that she is not wanted for any crimes.

  • It’s (nearly) time to get excited about virtual reality gaming

    A fantastic piece by Richard Cobbett on what’s great about VR and what isn’t quite ready for prime time. I am *really* excited about this tech.

    In an experience like the Museum of Games, you get to see many famous game characters rendered at their actual size – to really appreciate the scale of something like a Left 4 Dead Boomer and why it would be so terrifying to meet one in the flesh, or to stare up, up and further up at a Transformer rendered at a scale that no monitor can do justice to. It sounds like bullshit, but it’s true – VR adds a sense of meaning to things, from turning a series of empty corridors into a place, to making its inhabitants feel solid.