In college I built my own computer. It was a great experience, and I still use that computer 7 years later when writing this. Saying you built your own computer tends to earn a lot of tech savvy points with the average person, but it's really not that hard. A lot's changed since the days of Wozniak's home brew club & the Altair, and these days you can by the parts and put them together without much more difficulty than assembling a piece of Ikea furniture. If you need an upgrade later, you can open your case up & snap a piece in.
This ease is based in no small part on the standardization of the ATX & PCI standards, a set of guidelines for how hardware should be made in such a way as to be compatible with other devices. One thing that's impressed and worried me lately is the dearth of such a standard for cell phones, and the perhaps anemic attempts to create one. It's an unfortunate marker of the way technology has gone from a scientific industry with the goal of empowering individuals and humankind to a consumer industry chasing fashion and trendiness, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
People are talking a lot these days about a little thing a little, 3.5 millimeter thing. Apple decided not to include a headphone jack on their phones, Google is following suit with their latest Pixel, and the creator of the android OS also axed the jack with the Essential Phone. The last one really bugs me, because empowering the tech consumer with more choices is one of the reasons why essential was founded, and yet the most ubiquitous, easy to use, and powerful interface options was deemed unnecessary.
OK, when I started this blog I wanted to stick to bigger issues, things that effect society or even humanity. Why am I letting myself get distracted by the minutia of what's popular in cell phones these days? Well, it's because this is a symptom of a larger, much more insidious cultural disease. Wow, OK that could be overselling it, but as I've mentioned before the choice to go with something stylish or convenient instead of something which creates an empowering infrastructure is perilous.
The Essential phone has some special connectors for accessories. Motorola is making phones with attachable accessories as well, but they go the extra mile of providing a developer kit for independent companies that want to produce these. The highest level of this was the now tragically defunct Project Ara which planned to produce an entirely modular smartphone. It also had the distinction of being the only project I know of that would have released a standard that could be used by any company to produce appropriate components. If the essential accessories or moto mods take off, any other manufacturer that wants to let customers use these will have to license the specifications from essential or Motorola, and that means they probably won't proliferate anytime soon.
And thus we, the consumer, have to be content taking whatever the phone companies decide to give us. Oh, we can shop around a little for more memory here or a better camera there, but the reality is we can't really choose what we want in our phones, or how they work. A handful of tech giants makes those decisions for us. And that's not only true for phones. that's true for social networks, gaming platforms, and more. What's the more? Well, perhaps news organizations, political parties, and advertisements. This is where the insidious cultural disease part comes up. Most people have their phone on them for most of the day in 2017. We can't act like decisions about how that works being made by some team of marketers and engineers rather than individuals is OK and won't siphon away independence and freedom from the individual.
Showing posts with label choices. Show all posts
Showing posts with label choices. Show all posts
Thursday, November 2, 2017
Sunday, September 17, 2017
Anger at God
During recent tragedy one thing that's changed is my conception about being angry with God. To be clear, I'm not sure I can say I have ever been angry with God in my life. Some may ask why, and it's likely because I've never really taken the absolutist, omnipotent, or total control of every worldly detail view of God. I believe God is only omnipotent as they have access to all power, and even then I understand that a belief in a just God obviates the ability to believe in an omnipotent God as certain laws greater than that God must then be followed. I've also believed strongly in free will, and that God's protection or preservation thereof is a necessary condition for their existence, or at least their Godhood. However, I am also convinced in a personal God, one who cares deeply for their children and wishes involvement in their lives (but like any good parent, must limit their involvement to allow independence to develop).
I find the parental analogy very compelling, and this has led me to an interesting thought on being angry with God. A quick search on being angry with God will reveal how many people are uncomfortable with the idea. It feels blasphemous, perhaps, but I think there's one person who's quite OK with people being angry at God and that's God themself.
My wife and I hope to have kids, and that hope's no longer in the distant future, so I've read the occasional article about parenting, discussed it with friends and family, and tried to gain what experience I can watching over others' children. I've learned that a mature adult generally weathers the storm and is understanding of a child's anger, even though it often ends up pointed toward them, without becoming upset or angry about the situation themselves. Good parents understand and allow their children to become angry, they often don't take it personally, and recognize that they may have to accept their child's fury themselves because understanding the larger situation is beyond the child (at least at this point in their development).
Some of this thinking may have come together when a friend of mine who is a mother took a sip of her son's drink, leading to a short spat of crying and yelling, "I didn't want you to do that!" over and over. That moment seemed so childish, crying out wishing an event hadn't happened but not providing any ideas for redress or seemingly unwilling to come to an understanding or acceptance of the painful reality of what's occurred, and yet it also seemed so familiar as I and my loved ones were often doing the same only our yells were, "I wish she hadn't died." This may seem uncaring on my part to compare a child's displeasure and losing out on a sip of milk to the death of a loved one, but from God's perspective it might not be so different, and again I find the similarities of the emotional turmoil experienced eerily similar.
Yes, I'm certainly speaking from a Christian perspective here, but I've tried to ensure I'm speaking in the most general terms. If you're an atheist, agnostic, or otherwise unaligned or undecided allow me to speak to you a little more closely at this time, and if you're one of my Christian or otherwise theistic audience members lend me some latitude for a moment. One of the important roles of God is that of an abstraction, or even verbal shorthand. Some theists like to make much of Einstein's very profound theism, but the God of Einstein probably more resembled the impersonal physical laws pervading all creation through all time than the proverbial sky daddy in which many of them might profess faith. From this perspective anger at God is easy to understand; we're angry at the whims of fortune that brought us to our current place (and hey, like the ancient myth-makers knew when they came up with Thor, Ares, or Sopona it's more cathartic to personify your ill fate than to allow it to persist ethereal).
So I think God completely accepts our anger towards them. That said, anger isn't a healthy emotion. Without even addressing the psychology, it increases blood pressure and depresses the immune system so it is unwise to maintain for long periods of time. I think this is why forgiveness is so powerful, and so important. The concept of forgiveness is often abused, taken to mean we can't treat people or entities with suspicion or coolness when that may be exactly what is deserved, but I think forgiveness starts with releasing the feelings of rancor and hatred toward others. Forgiveness can go beyond that, but often anything beyond that requires penitence on the part of the trespasser, so the beginning may well be the most important part of forgiveness if only because it will be the most often used.
Whether one conceives of God as a loving cosmic Allfather or even as an impersonal cosmic force permeating the universe and seen in its structure and beauty we can accept anger toward God, and perhaps even recognize it as necessary at times. When to move beyond this anger, to forgive God and once again connect with the omnipresent divinity will depend on the individual and is likely to be a difficult task. I pray those in need may do so, and hope these meager thoughts on the matter help.
I find the parental analogy very compelling, and this has led me to an interesting thought on being angry with God. A quick search on being angry with God will reveal how many people are uncomfortable with the idea. It feels blasphemous, perhaps, but I think there's one person who's quite OK with people being angry at God and that's God themself.
My wife and I hope to have kids, and that hope's no longer in the distant future, so I've read the occasional article about parenting, discussed it with friends and family, and tried to gain what experience I can watching over others' children. I've learned that a mature adult generally weathers the storm and is understanding of a child's anger, even though it often ends up pointed toward them, without becoming upset or angry about the situation themselves. Good parents understand and allow their children to become angry, they often don't take it personally, and recognize that they may have to accept their child's fury themselves because understanding the larger situation is beyond the child (at least at this point in their development).
Some of this thinking may have come together when a friend of mine who is a mother took a sip of her son's drink, leading to a short spat of crying and yelling, "I didn't want you to do that!" over and over. That moment seemed so childish, crying out wishing an event hadn't happened but not providing any ideas for redress or seemingly unwilling to come to an understanding or acceptance of the painful reality of what's occurred, and yet it also seemed so familiar as I and my loved ones were often doing the same only our yells were, "I wish she hadn't died." This may seem uncaring on my part to compare a child's displeasure and losing out on a sip of milk to the death of a loved one, but from God's perspective it might not be so different, and again I find the similarities of the emotional turmoil experienced eerily similar.
Yes, I'm certainly speaking from a Christian perspective here, but I've tried to ensure I'm speaking in the most general terms. If you're an atheist, agnostic, or otherwise unaligned or undecided allow me to speak to you a little more closely at this time, and if you're one of my Christian or otherwise theistic audience members lend me some latitude for a moment. One of the important roles of God is that of an abstraction, or even verbal shorthand. Some theists like to make much of Einstein's very profound theism, but the God of Einstein probably more resembled the impersonal physical laws pervading all creation through all time than the proverbial sky daddy in which many of them might profess faith. From this perspective anger at God is easy to understand; we're angry at the whims of fortune that brought us to our current place (and hey, like the ancient myth-makers knew when they came up with Thor, Ares, or Sopona it's more cathartic to personify your ill fate than to allow it to persist ethereal).
So I think God completely accepts our anger towards them. That said, anger isn't a healthy emotion. Without even addressing the psychology, it increases blood pressure and depresses the immune system so it is unwise to maintain for long periods of time. I think this is why forgiveness is so powerful, and so important. The concept of forgiveness is often abused, taken to mean we can't treat people or entities with suspicion or coolness when that may be exactly what is deserved, but I think forgiveness starts with releasing the feelings of rancor and hatred toward others. Forgiveness can go beyond that, but often anything beyond that requires penitence on the part of the trespasser, so the beginning may well be the most important part of forgiveness if only because it will be the most often used.
Whether one conceives of God as a loving cosmic Allfather or even as an impersonal cosmic force permeating the universe and seen in its structure and beauty we can accept anger toward God, and perhaps even recognize it as necessary at times. When to move beyond this anger, to forgive God and once again connect with the omnipresent divinity will depend on the individual and is likely to be a difficult task. I pray those in need may do so, and hope these meager thoughts on the matter help.
Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Resolutions
I'm finding myself having trouble with new years resolutions this year. I've always liked new years, and making resolutions. I love the idea of sweeping away old habits and improving oneself by developing new ones. I love the introspection and self examination making goals for the new year can bring. I love looking forward to to the possibilities and opportunities of a new year. This year, I'm having trouble, though.
One question I'm struggling with is what manner is best for making new years resolutions. I've traditionally followed the pattern of building one resolution in four areas of life: social, physical, spiritual, and intellectual/professional. Reading Baumeister and Tierney's Willpower I began to question this strategy. They suggest that one should limit themselves to only one new years resolution, as having several causes them to distract from one another.
This doesn't seem unreasonable, and as I'm looking at things I want to do this year they all seem to roughly fit under a sort of unifying umbrella. I've been thinking about creating a resolution this year that's more of a mission or values statement and peppering a few specific goals under that. I'm not that interested in having a non-specific focus, though, and prefer to focus on the quantifiable and observable to something I can convince myself is motivating or working without having anything to look at to support or refute those assertions.
I'm also wondering if this is a good year for resolutions at all. Much of this year will be just transitioning through larger changes in life that fit in to broader goals and plans of mine and my family. I'll be starting my new job, finishing my associates degree and certifying as an MLT. All of these plans are probably what I'll really be focusing on, and don't really require any new goals or resolutions for 2016 to progress. So to all of my friends, should I make resolutions this year? If so, how?
One question I'm struggling with is what manner is best for making new years resolutions. I've traditionally followed the pattern of building one resolution in four areas of life: social, physical, spiritual, and intellectual/professional. Reading Baumeister and Tierney's Willpower I began to question this strategy. They suggest that one should limit themselves to only one new years resolution, as having several causes them to distract from one another.
This doesn't seem unreasonable, and as I'm looking at things I want to do this year they all seem to roughly fit under a sort of unifying umbrella. I've been thinking about creating a resolution this year that's more of a mission or values statement and peppering a few specific goals under that. I'm not that interested in having a non-specific focus, though, and prefer to focus on the quantifiable and observable to something I can convince myself is motivating or working without having anything to look at to support or refute those assertions.
I'm also wondering if this is a good year for resolutions at all. Much of this year will be just transitioning through larger changes in life that fit in to broader goals and plans of mine and my family. I'll be starting my new job, finishing my associates degree and certifying as an MLT. All of these plans are probably what I'll really be focusing on, and don't really require any new goals or resolutions for 2016 to progress. So to all of my friends, should I make resolutions this year? If so, how?
Friday, February 6, 2015
From an Aspiring Medical Professional
I've always been a scientist. Some of my earliest memories are wanting to use beakers, test tubes, & microscopes in school. My mother tells me that one of my favorite toys as a child was an old radio I was allowed to disassemble and rebuild, being fascinated at how the pieces fit together. I've always seen science as exciting and fun. For most of the time that I understood the concept I've seen it as a noble pursuit as well. "The glory of God is intelligence," I was taught, and science is a rigorous pursuit of understanding.
I've learned since then about the very human nature of this endeavor. Learned things like how Newton's preference for a 'corpuscular' or particle theory of light, rather than the wave theory which works better, probably set back the field of optics a century or two, but few wanted to propose ideas that would dare contradict the great and powerful Newton. I've learned this about religion, philosophy, sports, families, and just about everything else humans do as well, though. These days science may have trouble acknowledging its limitations, but it does good and improves the human condition. And yet the ranks of those who share this view are suffering loses.
This seems mostly in the field of medicinal and health sciences. This rarely used to bother me, but it is more and more lately. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and the issues are closer to affecting me and involving choices I'll have to make. Maybe it's just because things that were more fringe in the past are getting talked about more these days. Maybe it's because part of me agrees that this field of science is a lot more blurry than the physics and mathematics I originally studied, but entering into the field I'm seeing the strength of the science. I'd be remiss not to have mentioned these possibilities in a writing about science, rigor, and emotion, but I don't think they're the reason. At least not the primary one.
I am an aspiring medical professional. I'm going into radiography or clinical laboratory science, depending on which program accepts me and a few other factors. I feel like scientific thinkers, which would include many medical professionals and certainly myself, rarely make effective arguments that would entice someone not scientifically inclined to rethink their ideas. This is likely because anecdotes, emotional pleas, and pithy quips will not change the fundamental forces of nature and therefore aren't the first thing reached for in scientists' mental toolboxes. So it feels odd for me to speak about my emotional and personal reactions in the context of understanding biomedical science, but it may be just what some need to hear.
There always seems to be an edge of accusation toward the medical profession by those that eschew its methods. It's difficult for me to say this as I don't believe it's intentional, but it is the truth. The message is that the medical profession, and therefore medical professionals, is a bumbling ignoramus unwilling to understand the simple truths that should be instinctively understood, a shadowy or scaremongering elite seeking only power and control, or an uncaring power more interested in processing patients to collect their checks than healing them. It may be some combination of the three, but these are the primary narratives with their implications laid bare and made plain.
I believe they are all wrong, but moreover I know they are all insulting. I think this might be why I've been more affected by those who leave the ranks of accepted science for other conceptions of fulfilling medicine. The secret message in those actions, words, and thoughts are that I don't care about my patients. I do care about my patients, and I don't even have any yet. I study hard and ensure I understand the concepts of my classes because I worry about making the wrong call and endangering someone's health. I've listened to opposing views, considered the ideas, and always been unconvinced that those methods and practices would best serve the sick or the healthy. I want to get paid for application of the skills I'm acquiring, sure, but I did when I worked other customer service positions as well and was still driven to serve the client. When I see someone taking medical risks I'm annoyed because so often those risks are unnecessary, and I care about them. So, from an aspiring medical professional, please reexamine your ideas if you're forgoing modern medicine. Please give me and my ilk the benefit of the doubt and some level of trust. We're absolutely doing our best to deserve that much.
I've learned since then about the very human nature of this endeavor. Learned things like how Newton's preference for a 'corpuscular' or particle theory of light, rather than the wave theory which works better, probably set back the field of optics a century or two, but few wanted to propose ideas that would dare contradict the great and powerful Newton. I've learned this about religion, philosophy, sports, families, and just about everything else humans do as well, though. These days science may have trouble acknowledging its limitations, but it does good and improves the human condition. And yet the ranks of those who share this view are suffering loses.
This seems mostly in the field of medicinal and health sciences. This rarely used to bother me, but it is more and more lately. Maybe it's because I'm getting older and the issues are closer to affecting me and involving choices I'll have to make. Maybe it's just because things that were more fringe in the past are getting talked about more these days. Maybe it's because part of me agrees that this field of science is a lot more blurry than the physics and mathematics I originally studied, but entering into the field I'm seeing the strength of the science. I'd be remiss not to have mentioned these possibilities in a writing about science, rigor, and emotion, but I don't think they're the reason. At least not the primary one.
I am an aspiring medical professional. I'm going into radiography or clinical laboratory science, depending on which program accepts me and a few other factors. I feel like scientific thinkers, which would include many medical professionals and certainly myself, rarely make effective arguments that would entice someone not scientifically inclined to rethink their ideas. This is likely because anecdotes, emotional pleas, and pithy quips will not change the fundamental forces of nature and therefore aren't the first thing reached for in scientists' mental toolboxes. So it feels odd for me to speak about my emotional and personal reactions in the context of understanding biomedical science, but it may be just what some need to hear.
There always seems to be an edge of accusation toward the medical profession by those that eschew its methods. It's difficult for me to say this as I don't believe it's intentional, but it is the truth. The message is that the medical profession, and therefore medical professionals, is a bumbling ignoramus unwilling to understand the simple truths that should be instinctively understood, a shadowy or scaremongering elite seeking only power and control, or an uncaring power more interested in processing patients to collect their checks than healing them. It may be some combination of the three, but these are the primary narratives with their implications laid bare and made plain.
I believe they are all wrong, but moreover I know they are all insulting. I think this might be why I've been more affected by those who leave the ranks of accepted science for other conceptions of fulfilling medicine. The secret message in those actions, words, and thoughts are that I don't care about my patients. I do care about my patients, and I don't even have any yet. I study hard and ensure I understand the concepts of my classes because I worry about making the wrong call and endangering someone's health. I've listened to opposing views, considered the ideas, and always been unconvinced that those methods and practices would best serve the sick or the healthy. I want to get paid for application of the skills I'm acquiring, sure, but I did when I worked other customer service positions as well and was still driven to serve the client. When I see someone taking medical risks I'm annoyed because so often those risks are unnecessary, and I care about them. So, from an aspiring medical professional, please reexamine your ideas if you're forgoing modern medicine. Please give me and my ilk the benefit of the doubt and some level of trust. We're absolutely doing our best to deserve that much.
Saturday, December 27, 2014
Thirty Years
Yesterday was my thirtieth birthday. As I leave my thirtieth year of life and enter my thirty-first I reflect on the passed year. Year thirty feels as if I've been a plane that's waited at the gate, taxied up the runway, and taken off for a new destination. Here's the highlights:
- Working at inthinc : I continued my job at inthinc technology solutions for the first part of the year. This time taught me once again the importance of good management. Our last manager was very skilled at keeping the support team of which I was a part happy and feeling valued within the company. During the first part of the year we had no manager and a number of internal conflicts arose within the team as well as numerous difficulties arising from a lack of effective interfacing with the rest of the company. Our new manager, when hired, eventually turned out to make promises like a politician, fail to inform us about and connect us effectively with the rest of the company, and make the talent feel undervalued. I was the third person to leave the team as the burden on our team increased and feelings of valuation decreased. After leaving the company I continued to hear of hardships and found the company was losing money and talent at an alarming rate, though it seems to have stabilized at this point. I have a number of good friends from my time there, but am happy to have gone.
- Returning to University : Leaving inthinc prompted an overall career change. I had noticed that the career trajectory in technical support would take significant time to advance and might not lead to a place I really wanted to be. Looking at what field might be related to my previous scholastic experience in physics I found that radiology is something that would probably take about as much time to train in as it would to advance in my current work, had similar job demands at higher pay, and ultimately would be more fulfilling and interesting. I enrolled at Weber State University and started attending classes. I was reminded how much I appreciated the university atmosphere and learning new material.
- Entering Medicine : Preparing to enter the field of radiography I've been learning about the medical field generally as well. I trained as a phlebotomist and am making arrangements to test for my limited x-ray machine operator's license. I have been fascinated by the challenges and nature of the medical field. There's an intriguing intimacy to healthcare that makes me feel a great deal of responsibility toward patients. I never thought that biochemistry would hold any interest for me but after studying it (in part at least) for a semester I've completely turned the corner and am engaged by protein structures and metabolic pathways. There's clearly a lot to learn and do in this field and I'm eager to continue exploring it in year thirty one of life and beyond.
Friday, November 22, 2013
Sadly, the porn must flow Part 3: Regulatory and Governmental Concerns
I've now addressed concerns with a mandatory pornography filtering system based on conceptual considerations on the nature of pornography and technical ones about how the system might work. Now I will focus on a critique of the plan based on the governmental and regulatory considerations, as stated in the title. A main point in my last part could be summed up as, "Don't trust your ISP to keep you safe, you're better off ensuring that on your own." If we replace ISP with government that same idea will be found here.
America has a unique approach to government in that a fundamental value we hold is liberty, and are sensitive to the power of government to curtail this among individuals or groups. The conflict between this and the need for law forms a basis to our society. Whether pornographic filtering should be mandatory is another manifestation for this conflict, and I will be falling on the side of liberty as opposed to security.
The concept of safety curtailing our liberties is one hotly contested in the media with the government's efforts in the last ten years to crack down on and protect against terrorism. This even has a more direct parallel in the field of communications with recent Snowden leaks on NSA data and metadata collection efforts that, in my own personal opinion and that of at least one court of law, violates American citizens' rights granted by the first (including and perhaps primarily the right of association) and fourth amendments. With these already in peril, why would we want to introduce a new government mandate and increase their ability to curtail citizens' rights online?
Yes, yes, I know, "No one's rights are being curtailed, anyone can still opt in and get the content they want." In the short view this may be true, though many of the points in my previous two essays on the subject should demonstrate ways it may also not be. Though I'd rather not delve too deeply into the 'slippery slope' argument as it necessarily relies on speculation and unverifiable prediction, it would be prudent to mention that any law or regulation would set a precedent that our personal communication methods are something the government has every right to manage.
The proposal would grant new regulatory powers over our methods of communication. It would be handed off to either ISPs or/and government committees and reduce choice for the individual. While it's only a default setting that would change right now, the shame often involved in the complex issue of obscenity could easily cause this to be the societal norm, and forcing those who either held liberal views about sexuality or possibly a desire to protect their privacy and security online to be forced into an 'internet ghetto.' Eventually these people might be lumped in with criminals and subject to greater invasion of their rights because they 'chose to use the internet in a manner recognized to reflect dangerous and deviant behavior.'
Let me explain by way of analogy. How would you feel if car dealerships were now required to sell cars that would automatically avoid driving you anywhere where obscene or illegal activities were known to occur? They would naturally have to standardize and define what obscene behavior was, and so a federal committee would now decide what parts of town you were allowed to drive to. If you wanted to have full control over where you could go in the car you bought you would need to ask the dealer, and maybe they would have a special license plate for your car so that everyone else wouldn't accidentally follow you or wonder why they were having trouble getting to a place that you went to without problems. Does that sound OK to you, or does it seem like a massive intrusion of government control in your life?
The internet is indeed a radically new method of communication. Earlier methods often fell naturally into a pattern of self-regulation when it came to pornography. Movies created a rating system, magazines went under the counter, TV shows had a set of standards to follow until after the watershed. Phone lines were pretty much just as available to youngsters as much as anyone else but you needed to know what number to call and the commercials didn't go on until after the watershed, so their exposure wasn't really significant and in any event parents would get the bill later. The internet, on the other hand, is hugely interconnected and once you're online you have access to most resources with nothing more than a name, or if you're not sure of that a search term will probably work just as well. The industry doesn't lend itself well to self regulationas it is a personal service, the connection is to your home, connected to a vast public network.
It does lend itself easily to personal regulation, though. In my last post I mentioned a few good and fairly easy solutions to filter pornography. I explained my feelings that those who were unwilling to gain the technical skills to implement these shouldn't be foisting their responsibility to protect themselves on the country at large as well, but there's another aspect to this naivete I'd like to address: that pornography is a problem that technology or regulation can only slow, not stop. It plays to the most basic human drives and desires. This is what makes it so tempting, and destructive.
The way to fight pornography is to teach the right values, habits, and behaviors. I admit the prevalence of pornography can make this difficult, but teaching our children and selves the truth of what pornography is is the most effective way to fight it. We shouldn't pretend that we can shut off any exposure to it, and instead prepare ourselves and develop the mental and spiritual discipline to be strong against it when we do. This may include a personal decision to install some sort of filter on our own networks. Others might not even see a need for this.
Maturity comes with responsibility, taking on accountability for the way we live and the decisions we make. I see this petition as immature, trying to abdicate the responsibility for avoiding pornography by passing it along to organizations believed to be more capable of doing so. We must take this responsibility upon ourselves though, immense as it may seem, because immaturity and liberty cannot coexist. The more we decide that something is too hard for us and should be handled by the government, the greater the state will become as the citizen becomes smaller and smaller.
America has a unique approach to government in that a fundamental value we hold is liberty, and are sensitive to the power of government to curtail this among individuals or groups. The conflict between this and the need for law forms a basis to our society. Whether pornographic filtering should be mandatory is another manifestation for this conflict, and I will be falling on the side of liberty as opposed to security.
The concept of safety curtailing our liberties is one hotly contested in the media with the government's efforts in the last ten years to crack down on and protect against terrorism. This even has a more direct parallel in the field of communications with recent Snowden leaks on NSA data and metadata collection efforts that, in my own personal opinion and that of at least one court of law, violates American citizens' rights granted by the first (including and perhaps primarily the right of association) and fourth amendments. With these already in peril, why would we want to introduce a new government mandate and increase their ability to curtail citizens' rights online?
Yes, yes, I know, "No one's rights are being curtailed, anyone can still opt in and get the content they want." In the short view this may be true, though many of the points in my previous two essays on the subject should demonstrate ways it may also not be. Though I'd rather not delve too deeply into the 'slippery slope' argument as it necessarily relies on speculation and unverifiable prediction, it would be prudent to mention that any law or regulation would set a precedent that our personal communication methods are something the government has every right to manage.
The proposal would grant new regulatory powers over our methods of communication. It would be handed off to either ISPs or/and government committees and reduce choice for the individual. While it's only a default setting that would change right now, the shame often involved in the complex issue of obscenity could easily cause this to be the societal norm, and forcing those who either held liberal views about sexuality or possibly a desire to protect their privacy and security online to be forced into an 'internet ghetto.' Eventually these people might be lumped in with criminals and subject to greater invasion of their rights because they 'chose to use the internet in a manner recognized to reflect dangerous and deviant behavior.'
Let me explain by way of analogy. How would you feel if car dealerships were now required to sell cars that would automatically avoid driving you anywhere where obscene or illegal activities were known to occur? They would naturally have to standardize and define what obscene behavior was, and so a federal committee would now decide what parts of town you were allowed to drive to. If you wanted to have full control over where you could go in the car you bought you would need to ask the dealer, and maybe they would have a special license plate for your car so that everyone else wouldn't accidentally follow you or wonder why they were having trouble getting to a place that you went to without problems. Does that sound OK to you, or does it seem like a massive intrusion of government control in your life?
The internet is indeed a radically new method of communication. Earlier methods often fell naturally into a pattern of self-regulation when it came to pornography. Movies created a rating system, magazines went under the counter, TV shows had a set of standards to follow until after the watershed. Phone lines were pretty much just as available to youngsters as much as anyone else but you needed to know what number to call and the commercials didn't go on until after the watershed, so their exposure wasn't really significant and in any event parents would get the bill later. The internet, on the other hand, is hugely interconnected and once you're online you have access to most resources with nothing more than a name, or if you're not sure of that a search term will probably work just as well. The industry doesn't lend itself well to self regulationas it is a personal service, the connection is to your home, connected to a vast public network.
It does lend itself easily to personal regulation, though. In my last post I mentioned a few good and fairly easy solutions to filter pornography. I explained my feelings that those who were unwilling to gain the technical skills to implement these shouldn't be foisting their responsibility to protect themselves on the country at large as well, but there's another aspect to this naivete I'd like to address: that pornography is a problem that technology or regulation can only slow, not stop. It plays to the most basic human drives and desires. This is what makes it so tempting, and destructive.
The way to fight pornography is to teach the right values, habits, and behaviors. I admit the prevalence of pornography can make this difficult, but teaching our children and selves the truth of what pornography is is the most effective way to fight it. We shouldn't pretend that we can shut off any exposure to it, and instead prepare ourselves and develop the mental and spiritual discipline to be strong against it when we do. This may include a personal decision to install some sort of filter on our own networks. Others might not even see a need for this.
Maturity comes with responsibility, taking on accountability for the way we live and the decisions we make. I see this petition as immature, trying to abdicate the responsibility for avoiding pornography by passing it along to organizations believed to be more capable of doing so. We must take this responsibility upon ourselves though, immense as it may seem, because immaturity and liberty cannot coexist. The more we decide that something is too hard for us and should be handled by the government, the greater the state will become as the citizen becomes smaller and smaller.
Thursday, November 21, 2013
Sadly, the porn must flow 2 : Technical Considerations
So I've gone over the conceptual problems with a government mandated ISP based pornography filtering system and given an overview of how these systems might work. One of the problems with this kind of legislation, however, is that there are numerous technical considerations. Much like the recent SOPA bill, a pornography filtering requirement could possibly work out to be a government mandate to restructure how the internet works in the service of a specific special interest.
On the surface this seems like an overreaction, porn filters already exist so how difficult would it be for these to be implemented broadly by ISPs rather than requiring users to implement them personally. It's not, though, as scalability isn't simple. There's a reason why programs have run locally on personal machines for years but only now can be served out from a remote location to hundreds of thousands of users. There's a reason enterprise servers are different from personal computers.
Still, though, it's certainly doable. It would take a lot of work, though, and skilled programmers, network engineers, and system administrators don't work for free. That means forcing this to happen at the ISP level will be expensive. A government mandate means everyone's prices will go up. Think about if a similar resolution were to be passed for gasoline, electricity, or food. People would rightfully be incensed that either they're being forced to pay more for a service they don't want or are already using from a provider they trust and have established a good relationship.
Also, people don't often think about what their ISP is doing with their internet traffic. Usually that's because it's assumed that they shouldn't be doing anything with it apart from passing it on to the intended recipient. That's not the case, though. Your ISP is watching you, much like Google, Facebook, or other online advertising companies are and like these they plan to sell information about your habits to interested parties for some extra cash. They're also watching you as a favor to their friends in the entertainment industries to make sure that you don't "copy or share a movie, television show, or song improperly." The more I find out about the ISP industry, the less I trust them.
Knowing this we're likely to see two things happen should any sort of legislation pass from this petition: First, pornography filtering will be put in place, but thanks to a grant from the pornography industry to ISPs will make this laughably easy to circumvent. There could possibly be a sort of 'protection money' situation where ISPs block the pornography sites that don't pay up to be on their list of sites that aren't too 'extreme or hardcore.' Second, the system will be implemented with little thought to protecting those that want to avoid pornography, but as a great excuse to further other goals for the ISP.
I mentioned encrypted traffic in my last post and how this can create a problem for porn filtering systems. My feelings about ISPs give me every reason to believe that they would be happy to use porn filtering mandates to try to subvert users' efforts that are trying to remain anonymous and gain a modicum of privacy while online (such as when using a VPN service like ProXPN to hide traffic from the ISP, or connecting to a Tor node to remain anonymous). This way they could continue collecting information about you and your habits to sell to advertisers or make sure you fall in line with the entertainment industry's demands. They'd also have the power to brand anyone trying to get around these restrictions on the service they're paying for with a 'scarlet P' by saying that they had opted in to the internet with pornographic access plan.
Going back to the phrase from the petition, "Parents and individuals have to go to great lengths to install Internet filters that often don't weed out all porn," I'm not really certain what these 'great lengths' are. Installing a free program like K9 web protection on your computer, or an app on your cell phone like this web filter? Admittedly my preferred solution, OpenDNS, is a little technical but even then you don't even need to sign up and they'll still provide straight forward instructions like these on their website. Why do we feel it necessary to have the government partner with our ISPs to do this for us? If staying safe from pornography is important to us shouldn't we be willing to put an iota of effort into doing it in a way we understand and are in control of?
This leads me back to one of my original points: naivete. I recently watched a documentary on prohibition and one thing that was pointed out was that once the prohibition amendment had passed the prohibitionists had thought they'd won the war on alcohol. Anyone with a smattering of US history knows that wasn't the case, and a tacit law saying porn is to be avoided won't make it any less desired or sought after. We'll be handing over a good degree of power over our lives, remember the internet is only becoming more and more important to who we are, in exchange for avoiding something like an hour a week, at most, to install, configure, and maintain a filtering solution that fits our personal needs.
I'm writing a novel this month for National Novel Writing Month in the tradition of cyberpunk. One characteristic of the cyberpunk genre is that it features technology not as an enabling force that brings about Utopian lives for mankind, but instead becomes a force for control and oppression. There's hints of this in my novel, but one of the themes is also supposed to be that this happens because people give up their rights, their strength, and their power to others because they think it's too hard to develop the technical skills necessary to understand the systems they use. Society has fallen back into being controlled by a few select elite, but this time we chose it because math, programming, physics, engineering, and computing are hard and we'd rather enjoy ourselves while someone else did those complicated things. This petition is a sad reminder that the bleak future I'm writing should be fiction, but might not be someday.
On the surface this seems like an overreaction, porn filters already exist so how difficult would it be for these to be implemented broadly by ISPs rather than requiring users to implement them personally. It's not, though, as scalability isn't simple. There's a reason why programs have run locally on personal machines for years but only now can be served out from a remote location to hundreds of thousands of users. There's a reason enterprise servers are different from personal computers.
Still, though, it's certainly doable. It would take a lot of work, though, and skilled programmers, network engineers, and system administrators don't work for free. That means forcing this to happen at the ISP level will be expensive. A government mandate means everyone's prices will go up. Think about if a similar resolution were to be passed for gasoline, electricity, or food. People would rightfully be incensed that either they're being forced to pay more for a service they don't want or are already using from a provider they trust and have established a good relationship.
Also, people don't often think about what their ISP is doing with their internet traffic. Usually that's because it's assumed that they shouldn't be doing anything with it apart from passing it on to the intended recipient. That's not the case, though. Your ISP is watching you, much like Google, Facebook, or other online advertising companies are and like these they plan to sell information about your habits to interested parties for some extra cash. They're also watching you as a favor to their friends in the entertainment industries to make sure that you don't "copy or share a movie, television show, or song improperly." The more I find out about the ISP industry, the less I trust them.
Knowing this we're likely to see two things happen should any sort of legislation pass from this petition: First, pornography filtering will be put in place, but thanks to a grant from the pornography industry to ISPs will make this laughably easy to circumvent. There could possibly be a sort of 'protection money' situation where ISPs block the pornography sites that don't pay up to be on their list of sites that aren't too 'extreme or hardcore.' Second, the system will be implemented with little thought to protecting those that want to avoid pornography, but as a great excuse to further other goals for the ISP.
I mentioned encrypted traffic in my last post and how this can create a problem for porn filtering systems. My feelings about ISPs give me every reason to believe that they would be happy to use porn filtering mandates to try to subvert users' efforts that are trying to remain anonymous and gain a modicum of privacy while online (such as when using a VPN service like ProXPN to hide traffic from the ISP, or connecting to a Tor node to remain anonymous). This way they could continue collecting information about you and your habits to sell to advertisers or make sure you fall in line with the entertainment industry's demands. They'd also have the power to brand anyone trying to get around these restrictions on the service they're paying for with a 'scarlet P' by saying that they had opted in to the internet with pornographic access plan.
Going back to the phrase from the petition, "Parents and individuals have to go to great lengths to install Internet filters that often don't weed out all porn," I'm not really certain what these 'great lengths' are. Installing a free program like K9 web protection on your computer, or an app on your cell phone like this web filter? Admittedly my preferred solution, OpenDNS, is a little technical but even then you don't even need to sign up and they'll still provide straight forward instructions like these on their website. Why do we feel it necessary to have the government partner with our ISPs to do this for us? If staying safe from pornography is important to us shouldn't we be willing to put an iota of effort into doing it in a way we understand and are in control of?
This leads me back to one of my original points: naivete. I recently watched a documentary on prohibition and one thing that was pointed out was that once the prohibition amendment had passed the prohibitionists had thought they'd won the war on alcohol. Anyone with a smattering of US history knows that wasn't the case, and a tacit law saying porn is to be avoided won't make it any less desired or sought after. We'll be handing over a good degree of power over our lives, remember the internet is only becoming more and more important to who we are, in exchange for avoiding something like an hour a week, at most, to install, configure, and maintain a filtering solution that fits our personal needs.
I'm writing a novel this month for National Novel Writing Month in the tradition of cyberpunk. One characteristic of the cyberpunk genre is that it features technology not as an enabling force that brings about Utopian lives for mankind, but instead becomes a force for control and oppression. There's hints of this in my novel, but one of the themes is also supposed to be that this happens because people give up their rights, their strength, and their power to others because they think it's too hard to develop the technical skills necessary to understand the systems they use. Society has fallen back into being controlled by a few select elite, but this time we chose it because math, programming, physics, engineering, and computing are hard and we'd rather enjoy ourselves while someone else did those complicated things. This petition is a sad reminder that the bleak future I'm writing should be fiction, but might not be someday.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Sadly, The Porn Must Flow
There's been a white house petition going around lately that I've been saddened to see many friends of mine supporting. The petition is promoting a measure similar to one that was proposed a while back in the UK, that internet service providers be required to block pornography by default. I remember hearing this news back then and thinking of it as an oddity of British politics, and feeling thankful that we weren't foolish enough and that the American spirit had principles of liberty well enough ingrained that we wouldn't support something similar here in the US. Sadly, it seems I'm being proven wrong.
I'm no lover of pornography. Well, I mean, I'm a normal red-blooded heterosexual male so there's the obvious vulgar desire to check it out, but I do avoid it and would counsel anyone to do the same. I actually block pornography on my home network using OpenDNS, which has proved to be a fantastic solution. Make no mistake, my objection is not pro-porn, I object on the grounds that what we'll lose if we try this will be greater than any gains.
So what do we have to lose, except our pornography? The fact that this question needs to be asked is part of what saddens me. It bespeaks a naivete in our society that borders on, if not diving all the way into, a dangerous area. Pornography is very hard to define. Any reasonable person will admit that not all nudity is pornographic. Once this is acknowledged the waters immediately muddle quite a bit. Some might try to avoid this difficulty by saying that our efforts only need to filter out 'the worst kinds of porn' or 'extreme and hardcore pornography' but that only pushes that very hazy line back in hopes that it will reach an area where enough people feel shameful about being on the wrong side of it that they avoid being anywhere near it.
That approach doesn't help when we're talking about electronic content filtering. Our computers, networking routers, or servers aren't like our parents that can look at us and tell when we think something might not be right and ask us in a stern voice if we're really making the correct decision right now. The petition states as one of its concerns that, "Parents and individuals have to go to great lengths to install Internet filters that often don't weed out all porn." I'll get to the first part (oh believe you me I'll get to it), but let's look at the worry that they "don't weed out all porn." Short answer, that's because they can't. Let's get into the two ways to filter pornography (or really anything, the same methods can and are used for your computer's anti-virus): blacklisting, whitelisting and heuristics.
Blacklists are a list that's been built of sites known to be pornographic that are blocked. The obvious flaw with this is that new pornographic sites arise everyday, and there's a delay before these would be added to the blacklist. The less obvious flaw is that it will inevitably be based on the opinions of people making decisions about whether a site is pornographic or not, and your opinion may not agree with the blacklist makers. I'll go into this more after explaining the counterpart to the blacklist, the whitelist.
Whitelists are the inverse of blacklists, building a list of known safe and OK sites that don't contain objectionable material and only allowing a user to visit those sites. It should be fairly apparent that this essentially reduces the internet to barely useful, but then again in certain contexts may be a good solution. Parents installing a whitelisting program on their home computer or network for their children, requiring them to get parental approval before visiting a site, or non-technical users that only use a relatively small amount of web applications (i.e. only visiting facebook, youtube, amazon, and one or two other web applications related to their job). That's not what this petition is about though, and whitelisting would be far too restrictive for an ISP to ever implement for a solution to their customers.
So neither are a good solution for a government mandated ISP pornography filter as they either 'don't weed out all porn' or throw the baby out with the bathwater and cause huge gaps in service in an effort to do so. Again, though, the issue of what porn is comes up. One pornography filter I installed, K9 web protection, was absurdly restrictive for me and blocked sites like facebook and youtube (though admittedly I think this might have been for reasons other than porn). I had to disable these filters while leaving the rest in place. There is some pretty saucy content on these sites, though, and some parents might not want their kids exposed to that. Would you want your ISP to block youtube, since after all you can see videos of girls in bikinis and lingerie or lesbians kissing (albeit that media is often behind youtube's own adult content protections) and then if you wanted to watch a youtube video be forced to tell you ISP to 'turn off their porn blocking' for you? Are you OK with never using facebook since, after all, if an attractive woman who is 'friends' with you posts a picture of her in a bikini or otherwise scantily clad it might as well be porn?
Maybe our final method, heuristics, can help us out. Heuristics will inspect data and websites for specific behaviors, content, or properties and then block it if they meet certain qualifications. Heuristics can easily get false positives, a popular example being filters that scan images for exposed skin or genitals blocking medical journals for having instructional images when examining a disorder. This leads to similar problems as before, either too much is blocked because it might be porn, or not all porn is weeded out. Heuristics also have the problem of requiring much more processing power and access to your information.
The first concern means a huge investment in equipment for ISPs, which will effectively pass on the cost of porn filtering to customers that may not want it. Is it really fair to force people to pay for a service they don't want? The second means it's tricky to impossible for connections that are properly secured to be filtered. It's entirely accurate to say that for an ISP to comply with any law created from this petition they might be within their rights to say, "This traffic is encrypted and has been blocked as possible pornography," when you're accessing your bank or other financial institution's website. Lest you consider this an extreme example of hyperbole to make my point there is precedent for this; the NSA in its data collection efforts collect all encrypted communications they come across despite the fact that they're prohibited from collecting communications from American citizens saying that encrypted communications are essentially by definition unable to be verifiable as between Americans. If you allow the ISP to allow encrypted connections you've approved to connect normally you've short circuited the system, and disabling heuristic filtering for certain approved sites with secure, encrypted connections increases the overhead requiring even more costly processing power.
What can the government and ISPs do to block pornography, then? Well, here's the thing, we still haven't defined what pornography is. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints actually provides what I believe is a very accurate definition in their manual True to the Faith, "Pornography is any material depicting or describing the human body or sexual conduct in a way that arouses sexual feelings." The question here is, how do we know what arouses sexual feelings? To some a painting such as the Venus de Milo might seem sexual, while to others it might not. Pornography, like so much involved with sexuality, is a deeply personal thing, and as such is hard to define, let alone regulate, effectively. Regarding pornography Justice Potter Stewart famously couldn't give a definition other than "I know it when I see it." (and, interestingly, the film referred to in the case where he said that was not, according to him, obscene). We may know indecent content when we see it, but computers don't so any hope of creating a computer system that will block all that out for us is doomed to fail.
I'm no lover of pornography. Well, I mean, I'm a normal red-blooded heterosexual male so there's the obvious vulgar desire to check it out, but I do avoid it and would counsel anyone to do the same. I actually block pornography on my home network using OpenDNS, which has proved to be a fantastic solution. Make no mistake, my objection is not pro-porn, I object on the grounds that what we'll lose if we try this will be greater than any gains.
So what do we have to lose, except our pornography? The fact that this question needs to be asked is part of what saddens me. It bespeaks a naivete in our society that borders on, if not diving all the way into, a dangerous area. Pornography is very hard to define. Any reasonable person will admit that not all nudity is pornographic. Once this is acknowledged the waters immediately muddle quite a bit. Some might try to avoid this difficulty by saying that our efforts only need to filter out 'the worst kinds of porn' or 'extreme and hardcore pornography' but that only pushes that very hazy line back in hopes that it will reach an area where enough people feel shameful about being on the wrong side of it that they avoid being anywhere near it.
That approach doesn't help when we're talking about electronic content filtering. Our computers, networking routers, or servers aren't like our parents that can look at us and tell when we think something might not be right and ask us in a stern voice if we're really making the correct decision right now. The petition states as one of its concerns that, "Parents and individuals have to go to great lengths to install Internet filters that often don't weed out all porn." I'll get to the first part (oh believe you me I'll get to it), but let's look at the worry that they "don't weed out all porn." Short answer, that's because they can't. Let's get into the two ways to filter pornography (or really anything, the same methods can and are used for your computer's anti-virus): blacklisting, whitelisting and heuristics.
Blacklists are a list that's been built of sites known to be pornographic that are blocked. The obvious flaw with this is that new pornographic sites arise everyday, and there's a delay before these would be added to the blacklist. The less obvious flaw is that it will inevitably be based on the opinions of people making decisions about whether a site is pornographic or not, and your opinion may not agree with the blacklist makers. I'll go into this more after explaining the counterpart to the blacklist, the whitelist.
Whitelists are the inverse of blacklists, building a list of known safe and OK sites that don't contain objectionable material and only allowing a user to visit those sites. It should be fairly apparent that this essentially reduces the internet to barely useful, but then again in certain contexts may be a good solution. Parents installing a whitelisting program on their home computer or network for their children, requiring them to get parental approval before visiting a site, or non-technical users that only use a relatively small amount of web applications (i.e. only visiting facebook, youtube, amazon, and one or two other web applications related to their job). That's not what this petition is about though, and whitelisting would be far too restrictive for an ISP to ever implement for a solution to their customers.
So neither are a good solution for a government mandated ISP pornography filter as they either 'don't weed out all porn' or throw the baby out with the bathwater and cause huge gaps in service in an effort to do so. Again, though, the issue of what porn is comes up. One pornography filter I installed, K9 web protection, was absurdly restrictive for me and blocked sites like facebook and youtube (though admittedly I think this might have been for reasons other than porn). I had to disable these filters while leaving the rest in place. There is some pretty saucy content on these sites, though, and some parents might not want their kids exposed to that. Would you want your ISP to block youtube, since after all you can see videos of girls in bikinis and lingerie or lesbians kissing (albeit that media is often behind youtube's own adult content protections) and then if you wanted to watch a youtube video be forced to tell you ISP to 'turn off their porn blocking' for you? Are you OK with never using facebook since, after all, if an attractive woman who is 'friends' with you posts a picture of her in a bikini or otherwise scantily clad it might as well be porn?
Maybe our final method, heuristics, can help us out. Heuristics will inspect data and websites for specific behaviors, content, or properties and then block it if they meet certain qualifications. Heuristics can easily get false positives, a popular example being filters that scan images for exposed skin or genitals blocking medical journals for having instructional images when examining a disorder. This leads to similar problems as before, either too much is blocked because it might be porn, or not all porn is weeded out. Heuristics also have the problem of requiring much more processing power and access to your information.
The first concern means a huge investment in equipment for ISPs, which will effectively pass on the cost of porn filtering to customers that may not want it. Is it really fair to force people to pay for a service they don't want? The second means it's tricky to impossible for connections that are properly secured to be filtered. It's entirely accurate to say that for an ISP to comply with any law created from this petition they might be within their rights to say, "This traffic is encrypted and has been blocked as possible pornography," when you're accessing your bank or other financial institution's website. Lest you consider this an extreme example of hyperbole to make my point there is precedent for this; the NSA in its data collection efforts collect all encrypted communications they come across despite the fact that they're prohibited from collecting communications from American citizens saying that encrypted communications are essentially by definition unable to be verifiable as between Americans. If you allow the ISP to allow encrypted connections you've approved to connect normally you've short circuited the system, and disabling heuristic filtering for certain approved sites with secure, encrypted connections increases the overhead requiring even more costly processing power.
What can the government and ISPs do to block pornography, then? Well, here's the thing, we still haven't defined what pornography is. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints actually provides what I believe is a very accurate definition in their manual True to the Faith, "Pornography is any material depicting or describing the human body or sexual conduct in a way that arouses sexual feelings." The question here is, how do we know what arouses sexual feelings? To some a painting such as the Venus de Milo might seem sexual, while to others it might not. Pornography, like so much involved with sexuality, is a deeply personal thing, and as such is hard to define, let alone regulate, effectively. Regarding pornography Justice Potter Stewart famously couldn't give a definition other than "I know it when I see it." (and, interestingly, the film referred to in the case where he said that was not, according to him, obscene). We may know indecent content when we see it, but computers don't so any hope of creating a computer system that will block all that out for us is doomed to fail.
Tuesday, September 3, 2013
Choosing Style & Convenience Over Principles
Consider which of the following philosophies you agree with more:
Our choice in technology tends to be surprisingly shallow when we consider the depth of the effect technology has on us. We decide based on what looks nice, has the coolest features, or sometimes (usually if we're a little more informed) runs well and has the most processing power. For something that is so rapidly changing the way we interact, work, and quite arguably think this seems like pretty arbitrary criteria. Will it cause me to seek large amounts of less intimate relationships more efficiently? Will I ponder issues less in favor of looking up a quick and easy answer from a third party source in the most sleek and stylish way? These are the kind of questions we're asking, when we could be asking ourselves questions like, "Will I be engaging in and contributing to a infrastructure that promotes openness and individual freedom?"
If I may be candid for a moment let me admit my smug tech nerd ways. I used to be a little annoyed, mostly due to the immaturity one has early in life that others know different things than you do, when people didn't know how a computer's file system worked, the difference between a program and a text file, or why they couldn't get on the internet. I'm quickly becoming less annoyed by these people, but that annoyance is being replaced by fear.
I'm afraid because I know that market forces drive technology, and it's terrifying to see the market choose flashy, easy, and restrictive items over empowering items that might make them work a little harder. I'm afraid because working in tech support I've seen just how helpless people are when their technology breaks, how helpless many people are when it comes to fixing their technological problems, and how earnestly industry is working to make sure that problems may come up less at the expense of being fixable without being invited into a company's inner circle to error codes and access controls. I worry about living in a world where a relatively small conglomerate of programmers, advertisers, and businessmen are making sweeping decisions on how people live their lives, and the people are relatively powerless to and even uninterested in changing that.
Many are afraid of the effect technology is having on the human psyche and sociological structures. It's easy to blame the technology for this, but I feel that's misguided. If our minds or societies are becoming corrupted it's not thanks to the internet, smartphones, or video games. It's because we're using these poorly. And why wouldn't we if most of us don't know how they work at all, and only know what they do as the company making it presents that to us?
Studying mathematics and physics where most modern research is done with the aid of computers I'm perhaps blessed to have been taught in a tradition that specifically points out where computers are helpful and where our own intellect should be applied. Questions of what's computable and what isn't are addressed directly, as well as questions of the best way to compute that which we would indeed like to compute.
I worry a lot about my tone here. As I recently found out when reading a book on obesity, it's sadly easy to dismiss those presenting information and ideas about something as, "Oh, they're one of those type of people. That explains why they would say that." It would be so easy to end up being that "smugly superior" guy who'll criticize folk for having different views on technology or not knowing as much as he does about computers. As the comic below illustrates thouygh, sooner or later we'll be uncomfortable with how the technology we use works, and if unless we develop the appropriate infrastructure we'll be unable to change it.
A central authority will control every aspect possible.or
As much as possible will be made available in its entirety for public inspection and involvement.With that in mind consider this: are you more willing to use Apple or Linux computers? I know, I know "It just works." "I'm not a 'techie,' and don't want to have to deal with all that complicated stuff" "The way the little book opens is just so cute." I've heard it all before. I recognize that Apple has abstracted more of the functions for the user and produced very powerful, stable, efficient (though you wouldn't know if from their pricing) technology solutions, but you're missing the point. I don't want to talk about Apple per se. I want to talk about the choices we make, especially in technology.
Our choice in technology tends to be surprisingly shallow when we consider the depth of the effect technology has on us. We decide based on what looks nice, has the coolest features, or sometimes (usually if we're a little more informed) runs well and has the most processing power. For something that is so rapidly changing the way we interact, work, and quite arguably think this seems like pretty arbitrary criteria. Will it cause me to seek large amounts of less intimate relationships more efficiently? Will I ponder issues less in favor of looking up a quick and easy answer from a third party source in the most sleek and stylish way? These are the kind of questions we're asking, when we could be asking ourselves questions like, "Will I be engaging in and contributing to a infrastructure that promotes openness and individual freedom?"
If I may be candid for a moment let me admit my smug tech nerd ways. I used to be a little annoyed, mostly due to the immaturity one has early in life that others know different things than you do, when people didn't know how a computer's file system worked, the difference between a program and a text file, or why they couldn't get on the internet. I'm quickly becoming less annoyed by these people, but that annoyance is being replaced by fear.
I'm afraid because I know that market forces drive technology, and it's terrifying to see the market choose flashy, easy, and restrictive items over empowering items that might make them work a little harder. I'm afraid because working in tech support I've seen just how helpless people are when their technology breaks, how helpless many people are when it comes to fixing their technological problems, and how earnestly industry is working to make sure that problems may come up less at the expense of being fixable without being invited into a company's inner circle to error codes and access controls. I worry about living in a world where a relatively small conglomerate of programmers, advertisers, and businessmen are making sweeping decisions on how people live their lives, and the people are relatively powerless to and even uninterested in changing that.
Many are afraid of the effect technology is having on the human psyche and sociological structures. It's easy to blame the technology for this, but I feel that's misguided. If our minds or societies are becoming corrupted it's not thanks to the internet, smartphones, or video games. It's because we're using these poorly. And why wouldn't we if most of us don't know how they work at all, and only know what they do as the company making it presents that to us?
Studying mathematics and physics where most modern research is done with the aid of computers I'm perhaps blessed to have been taught in a tradition that specifically points out where computers are helpful and where our own intellect should be applied. Questions of what's computable and what isn't are addressed directly, as well as questions of the best way to compute that which we would indeed like to compute.
I worry a lot about my tone here. As I recently found out when reading a book on obesity, it's sadly easy to dismiss those presenting information and ideas about something as, "Oh, they're one of those type of people. That explains why they would say that." It would be so easy to end up being that "smugly superior" guy who'll criticize folk for having different views on technology or not knowing as much as he does about computers. As the comic below illustrates thouygh, sooner or later we'll be uncomfortable with how the technology we use works, and if unless we develop the appropriate infrastructure we'll be unable to change it.
Monday, July 15, 2013
Well behaved women seldom make history.
I've never been very fond of the slogan in this post's title, I guess because the idea of rebellion and, "behaving badly" hasn't held much appeal for me. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found the original author of the famous slogan far from intended the meaning it now holds, and may even agree with me-at least to some degree.
The phrase, "Well behaved women seldom make history," was first written my Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in a scholarly paper on Puritan funeral sermons. Being far from an academic of history myself I've not read the original paper, but after looking into things a little bit it appears that the author's intention was to point out the way these Puritan women weren't seeking fame or glory. The same paper contains the (much more poignant, in my own opinion) line, "They never asked to be remembered on Earth. And they haven't been."
From what I've found about Ulrich's career, the paper may have also served as criticism of the way history is studied. She seems to have lobbied criticism at the historical establishments and their failures to appreciate the effects and actions of the rank and file members of society. When honored as a professor at Harvard it was said
I think this is where my quarrel with the famous quote comes in; it reinforces the idea that to be great or important, to influence history, to "make a difference" one must necessarily acquire fame in the process. The first black president of the United States would not have been elected without a society that collectively let the scourge of racism whither on the vine rather than hold on to obsolete mentalities. Dr. Ulrich addresses the idea, "that 'empowered' women are by definition 'wild' women. That is a very old idea. Since antiquity, misogynists have insisted that females, being more emotional than males, are less stable, more likely to swing between extremes." She also points out that, "Marie Curie didn't win two Nobel prizes by throwing tantrums in the lab." and that Rosa Parks made history not only for her refusal to abide with the bigoted laws of her day but also because she was recognized as a hard working, upstanding, "well behaved" woman (other women had been arrested for the same thing, but unlike Rosa Parks their lifestyle choices made it too hard to build a case to fight the unjust law they were bucking).
In my younger years, probably until about my junior year of college, I enjoyed aspirations to fame and greatness. I wanted to win the Nobel for physics after making my own re-writes to the laws that govern our universe. I still wouldn't mind doing this, or any other number of fantastic ventures, but I'm also content with my current role in life, unimpressive though it may be especially when compared with the grandiose aspirations of my youth. I feel that I will have lived a life of incalculable worth and leave a powerful legacy even if no one remembers my name after 100 years as long as I continue learning and enriching my mind, be a good husband to my wife (and someday I'm sure, a good father to my children), work hard and earn money honestly, use that money wisely, and live in accordance with my values. I don't feel women should be robbed of this feeling of contentment that living an unassuming & simple but upstanding and meaningful life because they are told that they should be empowered & wild, rebellious, and "not well behaved."
The phrase, "Well behaved women seldom make history," was first written my Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in a scholarly paper on Puritan funeral sermons. Being far from an academic of history myself I've not read the original paper, but after looking into things a little bit it appears that the author's intention was to point out the way these Puritan women weren't seeking fame or glory. The same paper contains the (much more poignant, in my own opinion) line, "They never asked to be remembered on Earth. And they haven't been."
From what I've found about Ulrich's career, the paper may have also served as criticism of the way history is studied. She seems to have lobbied criticism at the historical establishments and their failures to appreciate the effects and actions of the rank and file members of society. When honored as a professor at Harvard it was said
Ulrich is a pre-eminent historian of early America and of the history of women. Her innovative and widely influential approach to history has been described as "a tribute to 'the silent work of ordinary people'" - an approach that, in her words, aims to "show the interconnection between public events and private experience."When briefly discussing the famous quote with my wife she quickly arrived at the conclusion of, "Well behaved people rarely make history." There are some striking examples of this in technology. Edison is famous for the popularization of electricity and numerous inventions, but his contemporary and most likely superior Nikolai Tesla is only recently being recognized for his startling genius. Steve Jobs recently passed away to much fanfare and mourning while Dennis Ritchie - inventor of the C programming language and developer for the Unix operating system on which iOS is built - passed away around the same time to little to no fanfare. Tesla struggled with mental illness (he almost certainly had OCD) in a time where it was much less understood or empathized. Jobs was a demanding CEO who while Mr. Ritchie was more likely a quiet academic and engineer. Even these examples show how we focus in on certain celebrities rather than recognizing the many brilliant minds and Menlo Park or Apple that worked under the direction of these magnates.
I think this is where my quarrel with the famous quote comes in; it reinforces the idea that to be great or important, to influence history, to "make a difference" one must necessarily acquire fame in the process. The first black president of the United States would not have been elected without a society that collectively let the scourge of racism whither on the vine rather than hold on to obsolete mentalities. Dr. Ulrich addresses the idea, "that 'empowered' women are by definition 'wild' women. That is a very old idea. Since antiquity, misogynists have insisted that females, being more emotional than males, are less stable, more likely to swing between extremes." She also points out that, "Marie Curie didn't win two Nobel prizes by throwing tantrums in the lab." and that Rosa Parks made history not only for her refusal to abide with the bigoted laws of her day but also because she was recognized as a hard working, upstanding, "well behaved" woman (other women had been arrested for the same thing, but unlike Rosa Parks their lifestyle choices made it too hard to build a case to fight the unjust law they were bucking).
In my younger years, probably until about my junior year of college, I enjoyed aspirations to fame and greatness. I wanted to win the Nobel for physics after making my own re-writes to the laws that govern our universe. I still wouldn't mind doing this, or any other number of fantastic ventures, but I'm also content with my current role in life, unimpressive though it may be especially when compared with the grandiose aspirations of my youth. I feel that I will have lived a life of incalculable worth and leave a powerful legacy even if no one remembers my name after 100 years as long as I continue learning and enriching my mind, be a good husband to my wife (and someday I'm sure, a good father to my children), work hard and earn money honestly, use that money wisely, and live in accordance with my values. I don't feel women should be robbed of this feeling of contentment that living an unassuming & simple but upstanding and meaningful life because they are told that they should be empowered & wild, rebellious, and "not well behaved."
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
The Fourth Amendment in the Information Age
In my last post I mused on the nature of data and how the information about us defines who we are. I was spurned to write this and finished off the post presenting disappoint with Verizon, my cell carrier, and their failure to protect users' privacy and respect their charge in holding data about us. Lately Verizon has been in the news for handing over call records to the NSA, so the wound has had salt thrown in it rather than had time to heal, so to speak. In my investigations into jumping ship from a company so cavalier about it's responsibility to protect who I am in the form my data I've had some interesting experiences.
I sent an email to Sprint asking if their company does anything to protect users' data and privacy. Their response was,
Both could of course be true, in fact the latter may be the cause and the former the effect. I find the latter more interesting, though. It's easy to dismiss concern with how a company protects (or more often fails to protect) our information as unfounded worry about "government conspiracies" (in fact, that's exactly who a T-Mobile salesperson ended up characterizing my concern when asking about it at a store location). While the fact that most citizens probably won't be much affected is true and the majority of people (including myself with all my seditious comments coming out on this blog) aren't interesting, influential, or dangerous enough for the government to take the effort to spy on, the issue is far from unimportant for everyone save a few security advocates, legal scholars, and tech enthusiasts.
As I pointed out in my last post we're seeing the importance of the physical diminish. The things that are important to us are increasingly in the form of data accessed in a number of different ways? As these changes in the way we communicate, work, and create emerge so the laws which will govern these new methods of living. And they are being changed.
"The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause." This worked well for many years when communication took place between two people in the form of physical letters that they could keep on their property and evidence showed up as physical items that, again, could be held on someone's property. These laws are essentially being re-written as more and more of what's important to us has a digital presence.
The fourth amendment seems to grow out of the presumption of innocence. We aren't to be observed, investigated, or seized until some degree of proof of guilt can be obtained. This is what's being eroded by modern electronic surveillance. It echos the complaints by so many in gaming when considering many invasive digital rights management (DRM) systems, "I'm being treated like a criminal when I haven't done anything wrong. They're just assuming I'm going to steal things."
Privacy and the internet is always, and may always be, a thorny issue. There's many conflicting theories, ranging from the internet being a surveillance state, to the assumption of privacy which is continually being shown to be unsupported, to complex privacy policies written by lawyers and mostly ignored by users, to understanding that privacy is only there when one takes the steps to encrypt their data and secure their connections. The internet is increasingly how we live our lives-in both private and public contexts-and after fighting for our rights and freedoms in the physical world we need to take up the fight once more for cyberspace, whether that means holding elected officials accountable, suffering the inconvenience of using security software, or considering privacy and data security when selecting service providers.
I sent an email to Sprint asking if their company does anything to protect users' data and privacy. Their response was,
which I found alarmingly curt and evasive. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't expecting anything terribly profound or telling, I was expecting a sorta non-committal PR department generated canned response along the lines of, "Sprint is committed to protecting customers' data and ensuring their privacy, however we still must comply with any lawful U.S. Government agency request." There's no real way to peer behind the curtain and discern why they responded with the air of, "Oh geez I don't want to talk about this please don't make me say anything why are you doing this to me?" My speculation on the subject, which I feel such a curious response deserves, would be that either Sprint is just as uncaring when it comes to customers' data and privacy and can provide no unembarrassing response to a customer asking these type of questions, or that they are actually fearful of what might happen should they take a stand.Sprint as a company is not commenting on this report. We do not haveany information to share, and that Sprint will not be commenting on thesubject.
Both could of course be true, in fact the latter may be the cause and the former the effect. I find the latter more interesting, though. It's easy to dismiss concern with how a company protects (or more often fails to protect) our information as unfounded worry about "government conspiracies" (in fact, that's exactly who a T-Mobile salesperson ended up characterizing my concern when asking about it at a store location). While the fact that most citizens probably won't be much affected is true and the majority of people (including myself with all my seditious comments coming out on this blog) aren't interesting, influential, or dangerous enough for the government to take the effort to spy on, the issue is far from unimportant for everyone save a few security advocates, legal scholars, and tech enthusiasts.
As I pointed out in my last post we're seeing the importance of the physical diminish. The things that are important to us are increasingly in the form of data accessed in a number of different ways? As these changes in the way we communicate, work, and create emerge so the laws which will govern these new methods of living. And they are being changed.
"The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause." This worked well for many years when communication took place between two people in the form of physical letters that they could keep on their property and evidence showed up as physical items that, again, could be held on someone's property. These laws are essentially being re-written as more and more of what's important to us has a digital presence.
The fourth amendment seems to grow out of the presumption of innocence. We aren't to be observed, investigated, or seized until some degree of proof of guilt can be obtained. This is what's being eroded by modern electronic surveillance. It echos the complaints by so many in gaming when considering many invasive digital rights management (DRM) systems, "I'm being treated like a criminal when I haven't done anything wrong. They're just assuming I'm going to steal things."
Privacy and the internet is always, and may always be, a thorny issue. There's many conflicting theories, ranging from the internet being a surveillance state, to the assumption of privacy which is continually being shown to be unsupported, to complex privacy policies written by lawyers and mostly ignored by users, to understanding that privacy is only there when one takes the steps to encrypt their data and secure their connections. The internet is increasingly how we live our lives-in both private and public contexts-and after fighting for our rights and freedoms in the physical world we need to take up the fight once more for cyberspace, whether that means holding elected officials accountable, suffering the inconvenience of using security software, or considering privacy and data security when selecting service providers.
Friday, February 15, 2013
What is Marriage?
I'm getting married soon, and that could mean something different to every person I tell that too. I recently discussed with a co-worker about how difficult it is to establish a mutual understanding of what marriage means, so in the spirit of creating a better understanding of what I'll be doing I want to express what marriage means to me, as well as putting forth some general ideas that may be useful to anyone in understanding the concept of marriage.
Often marriage is is equated with lifelong commitment, but I think there's a better way to understand marriage. Marriage is a commitment that goes beyond the couple. It's when two people make a commitment not only to one another but to a third party. The details of who or what that third party is define the greater details of what marriage means to them.
If we marry with a government, it largely means they now have an array of legal rights regarding each other, and that they cannot fully dissolve their relationship without consent returning to a representative of the government. Often the third party will often be God or a church, which introduces a spiritual element into the relationship. This lends important understanding about marriage because it goes beyond being committed to one another.
Yes, many people are committed and plan to spend their whole lives together without ever needing to get married. That's one choice, people can also choose to express this through marriage. I feel that marriage is an option we employ when we feel the need to elevate our relationship above the two (or sometimes more) people in it. Marriage is a declaration that we are not only committing ourselves to another, but to the betterment of our society, our people, or our God.
I'm getting married because I want the benefits granted by government and God. I want to be with my wife for this life and the next. I want to be recognized as one who cares for her and has entwined his life with hers, in finances, health, and the search for spiritual salvation and perfection. I want her to know I won't leave her, and have the guarantee not only of my words but a contract with greater powers to which I will have to go if I ever did. I want to work with her to better ourselves and the world in which we live.
Often marriage is is equated with lifelong commitment, but I think there's a better way to understand marriage. Marriage is a commitment that goes beyond the couple. It's when two people make a commitment not only to one another but to a third party. The details of who or what that third party is define the greater details of what marriage means to them.
If we marry with a government, it largely means they now have an array of legal rights regarding each other, and that they cannot fully dissolve their relationship without consent returning to a representative of the government. Often the third party will often be God or a church, which introduces a spiritual element into the relationship. This lends important understanding about marriage because it goes beyond being committed to one another.
Yes, many people are committed and plan to spend their whole lives together without ever needing to get married. That's one choice, people can also choose to express this through marriage. I feel that marriage is an option we employ when we feel the need to elevate our relationship above the two (or sometimes more) people in it. Marriage is a declaration that we are not only committing ourselves to another, but to the betterment of our society, our people, or our God.
I'm getting married because I want the benefits granted by government and God. I want to be with my wife for this life and the next. I want to be recognized as one who cares for her and has entwined his life with hers, in finances, health, and the search for spiritual salvation and perfection. I want her to know I won't leave her, and have the guarantee not only of my words but a contract with greater powers to which I will have to go if I ever did. I want to work with her to better ourselves and the world in which we live.
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Torn between two loves
Today is the release of Mass Effect 3. Like most major modern video games it costs $60 new, or $80 for the collector's edition. I haven't purchased it, though I absolutely love the series and can't wait to play the latest installment. My mom pointed out earlier that I do have the money. I still have some money in my bank account and credit on my credit card. I could buy it, but I'm saving my money for something else. Specifically, I'm saving for someone else.
I started dating a long time friend on new years day. The near 400 miles separating us are frustrating. We'd like to be together, but she lives in Salt Lake city and I'm in Denver. There's not much tying me down here, though. I'm planning to move once I have enough money to pay my student loans and other basic costs of living until I can find a job (which, after seeking full time work for about a year I worry will be quite a while).
So, I find myself torn between two loves. Many reading this might find my love for a video game frivolous or even downright foolish, so let me defend my already scorned love. The Mass Effect series continues developer Bioware's traditional of strong, character driven, intelligent writing. As discussed here, the game has raised questions about the nature of life and what it is that makes us who we are. It's been called the Star Trek of our generation, and I dare say that's correct. It's an original and epic space opera, in an unfortunate age where well written fiction, let alone science fiction, often loses out to the latest iteration of milf island, some dude dates fifteen women, or watch the train wrecks when it comes to entertainment. Mass effect is one of the games elevating the medium of gaming, a hobby I feel is at least capable of being very uplifting and intellectually engaging but is so often maligned (and not always unfairly) as being a waste of time at best or a mind distorting influence of evil at worst. Mass Effect enriches things I enjoy (science fiction and video games) by adding to worthwhile examples, and its success is a proof to those who finance entertainment that intelligent video games and well written sci-fi make money.
My love for my girlfriend is somewhat less easy to explain, but many more have written about love of a woman than love of a video game so I probably don't need to belabor that point. I've chosen to save what I can to hasten a long term reunion of me and my beloved. I can only hope that I'll be able to earn enough to actually go through with the move, and work hard enough to make it worth it when I get there.
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