Tag: Technology

You Can’t Vote Your Way To Libertarianism

Are you a libertarian? Are you politically active? If you answered yes to both questions then I have a question for you: why? I came across a good article by Jason Farrell that addresses the contradiction of political libertarianism:

There’s a good reason libertarians remain at the ideological fringe: “Libertarian politics” is a contradiction in terms. Libertarianism is not a third party, like the Know-Nothings or the Whigs or a prescription of policy tweaks to make the government more efficient. It is a distinct value system that abhors political power itself, even if some of its adherents consider power a necessary evil.

Libertarians may disagree whether the state should be abolished or minimized, but the difference matters little to the average American: Both seem frighteningly outside his own experience. Even the most moderate libertarians will wax poetic about ending intellectual property or privatizing the welfare system. Moreover, virtually all voters are deeply invested in government services they have come to depend on, and libertarians have been unable to present hypothesized private-sector alternatives while the state forces dependence upon itself. Conceptually, libertarians are on a page that most people find bizarre.

Libertarianism is best understood as the latest in a long line of radical liberation ideologies, rooted in the principles of natural law and individualism, that have provided the intellectual basis for rebellion since the American Revolution. It is a reaction to the perpetual expansion of government power in the U.S. and its frequent abuses. But radicalism, by definition, is immoderate and cannot compromise its way to reforms. Rather than moving toward the “Overton window” of public opinion by moderating controversial views (as Rand Paul attempted), radicals must pull public opinion towards their own viewpoints. Rand’s straying from libertarian principles means that he likely has little unique appeal even for the tiny libertarian electorate his father created. David Boaz’s research shows that 70% of libertarian-leaning voters went with Mitt Romney over Gary Johnson in 2012, so we know even libertarians who believe in politics are willing to blunt their own sword.

Libertarianism is a radical ideology and therefore doesn’t enjoy popular support. Politics is a popularity contest. If your candidate doesn’t support the views of the majority of voters then they’re not going to get elected. And one need only look at some of the more popular presidential candidates to see what the majority supports.

The current frontrunner for the Republican Party is Donald Trump. Trump is a raging asshole. If it were up to him Muslims would probably be wearing armbands. Ben Caron, another popular Republican candidate, believes the pyramids were funny shaped grain silos.

On the other side of the field we have Bernie Sanders. Sanders spends most of his time bitching about economics, a field he demonstrably knows absolutely nothing about. He also supports dropping bombs on foreigners, which is something he shares with Hillary Clinton who is his primary competitor.

So the majority of voters want a candidate who will blow up foreigners, promise them free shit, or believes archeology is a made up science. They’re not interested in freedom. Quite the opposite in fact. They enjoy their comfortable slavery.

This is usually where some political libertarian tells me that victory can be achieved by slowly moving the political needle towards libertarianism. They will say Rand Paul isn’t perfect but he’s palatable to the masses. According to them his victory will show Americans that a tiny bit of freedom doesn’t hurt. This will supposedly make them receptive to a little more freedom when the next election rolls around. I’ve seen absolutely no proof of this. In fact my observations lead me to believe the opposite is true. The masses are always a crisis away from accepting more chains to wrap them in the false feeling of safety. Maybe the needle moves so slowly I can’t perceive it. If that’s the case I’ll be dead before any perceivable freedom is gained so what’s the point?

Politics is a lost cause for libertarianism just as it is for any radical philosophy. Instead you’re better off taking direct action to advance freedom:

Instead, libertarians might be more useful as single-issue activists and innovators. While U.S. politicians fail to shrink government, individualists like Erik Voorhees, Cody Wilson, Peter Thiel and the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto are using technology to forge a new path. Time will tell exactly where that leads. But Rand’s decline underlines the fact that libertarian ethics predicate disruption and revolution, not moderation and compromise. As such, it is unlikely to ever get big votes in American politics.

Cody Wilson and Satoshi Nakamoto accomplished more for freedom than Rand Paul ever will. Wilson showed the world how technological advancements will overcome restrictions against self-defense. Nakamoto gave the world a functioning alternative currency that is highly resistant to centralized control. Disarming citizens and controlling their money are two of the State’s biggest tools for dominating people.

Direct action, unlike politics, has the advantage of not needing popular support. Most people probably don’t support Wilson’s efforts to make firearms easy accessible or Nakamoto’s, probably inadvertent, contribution to empowering the underground economy. But the masses were powerless to stop either of them just as they were powerless to stop Dread Pirate Roberts from building and operating an online market for illicit substances. Even when the State managed to take him down nothing was really accomplished because alternatives sprang up like wildfire. The man that started the first major hidden service marketplace might have been taken down but the idea can’t be destroyed. Hell, the idea is only advancing. Now efforts are being made by projects such as OpenBazaar to create decentralized online marketplaces, which will be even more resilient to government interference.

Freedom is advancing but not because of libertarian politics. It’s advancing because people unwilling to accept their chains chose to rebel. If you’re willing to rebel you too can play an active role in advancing freedom. But if you’re only willing to beg the masses to see things your way you’re doomed to fail. The masses don’t want what you’re selling.

Losing The Signal In The Noise

As I’ve mentioned before mass surveillance is not effective at discovering and thwarting terrorists attacks before they happen. When you collect everything the signals are lost in the noise. But government officials continue their demands for weakening encryption so their mass surveillance apparatuses can better spy on us. This in spite of the fact the National Security Agency (NSA) is already so overwhelmed with noise that finding signals has become an exercise in luck:

A TOP-SECRET NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY DOCUMENT, dated 2011, describes how, by “sheer luck,” an analyst was able to access the communications of top officials of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela.

Beyond the issue of spying on a business, the document highlights a significant flaw in mass surveillance programs: how indiscriminate collection can blind rather than illuminate. It also illustrates the technical and bureaucratic ease with which NSA analysts are able to access the digital communications of certain foreign targets.

The document, provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is a March 23, 2011, article in the NSA’s internal newsletter, SIDtoday. It is written by a signals development analyst who recounts how, in addition to luck, he engaged in a “ton of hard work” to discover that the NSA had obtained access to vast amounts of Petróleos de Venezuela’s internal communications, apparently without anyone at the NSA having previously noticed this surveillance “goldmine.”

That the NSA, unbeknownst to itself, was collecting sensitive communications of top Venezuelan oil officials demonstrates one of the hazards of mass surveillance: The agency collects so much communications data from around the world that it often fails to realize what it has. That is why many surveillance experts contend that mass surveillance makes it harder to detect terrorist plots as compared to an approach of targeted surveillance: An agency that collects billions of communications events daily will fail to understand the significance of what it possesses.

Since the analyst made a note of finding the data on Petróleos de Venezuela it must be assumed it was on the agency’s list of desired signals. It was only after a lot of work and some dumb luck that the analyst found it buried in the sea of collected data.

If the NSA already has too much data how is adding more data going to improve matters? It’s not. In fact it will only make its ability to find valuable signals even more hopeless. That being the case, it makes you wonder what the real intentions of making mass surveillance easier are. It certainly isn’t to thwart terrorist attacks since doing that would require greatly trimming down the amount of data collected. On the other hand, if you just want the data at hand to prosecute a thorn in the side at a later date the mass surveillance system could prove to be somewhat useful.

Dial 1-800-ISIS-HLP

The mainstream media has been hard at work trying to make extremely mundane things appear terrifying by pointing out Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) uses them. Take phone-based technical support. It’s something most of us have used at some point in our lives. The only things frightening about it are wait times, trying to explain to the poor sap reading from their script that you’ve already performed the basic trouble shooting steps, and having your call dropped when you miraculously get connected to the one competent support specialist in the entire company. But NBC News decided mundane technical support is something that could be made absolutely terrifying by combining it with ISIS:

NBC News has learned that ISIS is using a web-savvy new tactic to expand its global operational footprint — a 24-hour Jihadi Help Desk to help its foot soldiers spread its message worldwide, recruit followers and launch more attacks on foreign soil.

Counterterrorism analysts affiliated with the U.S. Army tell NBC News that the ISIS help desk, manned by a half-dozen senior operatives around the clock, was established with the express purpose of helping would-be jihadists use encryption and other secure communications in order to evade detection by law enforcement and intelligence authorities.

The relatively new development — which law enforcement and intel officials say has ramped up over the past year — is alarming because it allows potentially thousands of ISIS followers to move about and plan operations without any hint of activity showing up in their massive collection of signals intelligence.

Although I highly doubt the claim that this help desk system is a new development its existence doesn’t change anything. Information on using secure communications technology has been publicly available on the Internet for years. There are numerous well-written step-by-step guides that walk users through setting up and using tools for communicating securely. They’re used by victims of domestic abuse who need to contact help without their abuser knowing, political dissidents in countries ruled by ruthless regimes, buyers and sellers of prohibited goods in countries ruled by regimes willing to storm homes at oh dark thirty and shoot family pets over some plants, and many other at risk individuals.

But technology is amoral and serves both the good and the bad alike. A car can whisk you from home to work but it can also help a bank robber escape after a heist. A gun can allow a frail 80 year-old woman to defend herself against a physically fit 20 year-old rapist but it can also be used by a police officer to murder a cannabis user. Encryption is no different.

Fearing something mundane because an evil person or organization is using it is idiotic. Every technology we have developed has been used by both good and evil people. That will never change.

Congressman Wants To Shutdown Twitter, Facebook, and Every Other Social Media Site

You’re being ruled by idiots. They attempt to dictate policy on things they know nothing about. This is especially true when it comes to technology, which most of the rulers know next to nothing about. Ranking up there with Ted Stevens calling the Internet “a series of tubes,” we have a gem from Joe Barton:

Barton today asked Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler if the commission can shut down websites used by ISIS and other terrorist groups. Barton didn’t name any specific sites but said that “we need to do something” because of the terrorist attack in Paris.

“ISIS and the terrorist networks can’t beat us militarily, but they are really trying to use the Internet and all of the social media to try to intimidate and beat us psychologically,” Barton said. Addressing Wheeler during an FCC oversight hearing held by the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, Barton continued:

Isn’t there something we can do under existing law to shut those Internet sites down, and I know they pop up like weeds, but once they do pop up, shut them down and then turn those Internet addresses over to the appropriate law enforcement agencies to try to track them down? I would think that even in an open society, when there is a clear threat, they’ve declared war against us, our way of life, they’ve threatened to attack this very city our capital is in, that we could do something about the Internet and social media side of the equation.

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) isn’t creating a bunch of random self-hosted websites. It’s using popular social media sites such as Twitter. What Barton is asking for is the shutdown of major social media sites. And while sites like Twitter are trying to shutdown accounts used by ISIS it’s not easy because, at the article I just linked to points out, ISIS is gaming the system.

If you want to recruit new members you go to where the people are. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites are where the people are so it’s what ISIS uses. The only way you can shutdown its Internet presence is to shutdown the Internet itself, which isn’t something the United States government can do because the Internet is a collection of interconnected servers spread throughout the world.

Let’s Encrypt To Enter Public Beta On December 3rd

Unfortunately there are a lot of websites that still aren’t utilizing HTTPS to ensure confidential and unaltered communications between them and their users. One of the excuses often given by website administrators for not using HTTPS is that certificates cost money. Another excuse is that managing certificates is a huge pain in the ass.

StartSSL has been providing free certificates for years but administrators still have to manually manage them. A while ago a group of people decided to kill both birds with a single stone and began work on Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority and software package that work together to provide automatically managed certificate to websites. It’s been in closed beta for a while and starting December 3rd it will be making the beta test available to the public.

This means anybody wanting a certificate will be able to request one. It also means there will no longer be any excuses for websites not to implement HTTPS. And with the ever more pervasive surveillance state it’s absolutely necessary to make HTTPS the default.

Political App Wants You To Sell Out Your Friends

Privacy is hard because once you lose exclusive knowledge of your personal information you can no longer control its proliferation, which is why Benjamin Franklin said, “Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” Making matters worse is that personal information is very valuable. Can you trust everybody who, for example, has your phone number not to give it out to unsavory sorts, especially when they believe they’re getting something in return? Ted Cruz’s campaign is betting on your friends being Benedict Arnolds by providing them with your contact information in exchange for imaginary Internet points:

Whenever a new user logs in, the app asks for access to their phone’s contact list. Turning over that information earns a user 250 points. By comparison, a contribution only gets 10 points.

“While we don’t keep anything that they share, what it does allow us to do is identify within a person’s contact list, those voters that may be part of our core targeting list,” Wilson says.

The campaign is searching for information — names, address, phone numbers — that match up with possible Cruz voters. “We have scored the entire national voter file, in terms of their likelihood to support Ted Cruz,” Wilson says. “So if we identify that you have 10 friends in Iowa who are potential Cruz supporters, then we’ll ask you to reach out to those people.”

I’m not sure how Wilson can claim Cruz’s campaign doesn’t keep any collected information and then claim it uses that information to identify potential supporters. The only way to match up such data is if you have it on hand. There is also the question of what criteria they use to determine if a person in your contact list is a potential supporter. My guess is they call to hit them up for a campaign contribution.

In addition to being an example of scummy behavior this story is a great demonstration of how hard maintaining privacy is. If one of your friends is a rabid Cruz supporter would you trust them not to hand over your contact information in exchange for imaginary Internet points (which are posted on a leaderboard so Cruz supporters can see who the most pious supporters are)? I know I have several friends who would gladly do that for Rand Paul’s campaign.

Every person or company that possesses personal information about you is a potential leak and often it is in their best interest to leak your information.

I Void Warranties Upon Request

No new content again? I’m afraid so. Why? Because I was voiding a warranty:

i-void-warranties

Somebody needed the power button in their iPhone 4S replaced and figured I was the man for the job. They were right. I replaced the button and the phone powered up again. Of course it doesn’t boot up, but that part wasn’t my fault as it wasn’t actually booting up beforehand (and since the power button stayed in the stuck down position the thinking was that it was just turning off, due to the power button being held in, immediately after boot).

I will say that working on the iPhone 4S is pretty easy.

When Tradition Watch Manufacturers Treat Smartwatches Like Traditional Watches

There has been some buzz (at least in horology circles) about Tag Heuer’s smartwatch. It is, after all, the first serious attempt by a traditional watch manufacturer to release a smartwatch. But things weren’t off to a good start when the initial price of $1,400 was announced and things only looked worse when Tag Heuer announced a price increase. While there are a few models of the Apple Watch that exceed that price range most smartwatches come in far under what Tag Heuer is asking.

Now the price is settled at $1,500. What does $1,500 get you? You’d think it would get you some of the most cutting edge technology a company could cram into a smartwatch. Instead if gets you the same internals you would get for $150:

There was always a question of how much technology you would get for this $1,500, and unfortunately, it seems that the device has mostly normal smartwatch guts. There’s a 1.5-inch, circular 360×360 (240 PPI) LCD, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of storage, Bluetooth 4.1, Wi-Fi (802.11n) and a 410mAh battery. The one unique item is the processor: a 1.6Ghz dual-core Intel Atom Z34XX. It’s hard to not be disappointed by the LCD when the $350 Huawei Watch clocks in at a superior 286 PPI.

Here’s the problem I see with traditional watch manufacturers trying to enter the smartwatch market. Traditional watch manufacturers are used to selling a luxury product that can last a lifetime. $1,500 can get you a really nice mechanical watch that you will probably pass down to your children. Smartwatches aren’t mechanical watches. Whereas you still have a functional mechanical watch after five years a smartwatch after the same period of time is likely to be little more than a pile of outdated circuits connected to a dead battery. You may pass it down to your children but only because you don’t want to give them something valuable until they’re old enough not to break it by falling off of a jungle gym.

I think it’s going to be difficult for traditional watch manufacturers to enter the smartwatch market without changing up their business model a bit. Why would somebody want to fork out $1,500 to Tag Heuer instead of 1/10th of that to Motorola for basically the same thing? With the exception of people who have brand loyalty to Tag Heuer they’re not. That’s because they’re going to dump their smartwatch in a year or two for the newer model with more powerful and power efficient hardware.

There’s certainly room for a premium product but what qualifies something as a premium electronic device is different than a mechanical watch. When people pay a premium for an electronic device they tend to expect more power, features, and attention to details. Graphics cards are a great example of this. You can spend a lot of money on a graphics card but when you reach that premium top tier you’re getting some cutting edge hardware that you can reasonably expect to run the latest games at ridiculously high resolutions with all of the fancy features turned on. Apple products are an example where users will pay a premium for attention to detail. Making a laptop body out of a solid brick of aluminum, designing a professional workstation in the footprint of a cylinder, and releasing an all-in-one computer that’s almost thin enough to cut paper is appreciated by enough people to command a premium.

So what can a traditional watch manufacturer offer the smartwatch market? To start with their bread and butter: attention to detail. Let’s consider the watch face, which is arguably what most smartwatch users will be looking at throughout the day. Tag Heuer decided recreating watch faces from its mechanical lines was the way to go. But, in my opinion, it was done in a half-assed manner. The watch faces look like a Dashboard (because it’s all but forgotten, Dashboard is a layer in OS X where users can add small widgets) clock widget. For $1,500 Tag Heuer could have included motion sensors sensitive enough to know the wearer’s exact orientation. Combining that with location and time information obtained form the phone and you could add in realistic outdoor shadows under the watch hands and from the side of the case to create the illusion of depth. Assuming the user is inside the watch could use light sensors to detect where light is coming from and provide a similar illusion. Another idea would be to use a series of backlight LEDs instead of a single LED. Theoretically they could allow the watch to only turn on the LEDs behind the parts of the watch with lume to provide a similar night lighting to an actual watch. Of course all of this would look much better on a high resolution screen, which should be doable at that price point.

Traditional watch manufacturers can play in the smartwatch market but doing so seriously will require more than releasing the same product as everybody else with a different name attached to it.

The Surveillance State Starts At Home

As a man in his early 30s I like I’m too young to start with the, “Back in my day,” business. But back in my day kids had some semblance of privacy.

Many of my friends are at a point in life where they’re running into undiscovered territory as parents. When this happens they often post on Facebook to crowd source ideas from parents who have already blazed the path. Reading the recommendations posted by these parents, frankly, scares the shit out of me.

One of my friends has decided to get iPhones for his children. Because he’s not terribly familiar with electronics he asked Facebook for advice on what to do. I told him to ensure his kids put a password on it to protect the device contents (serious) and explain to them that cell phones are voluntary tracking devices so leave them at home when they’re doing something illegal (tongue in cheek).

What some parents posted was frightening. One parent advised my friend to enable Find My iPhone but not tell his kids about it (then explained how this helped her catch her kid lying about sleeping over somewhere one night). Another parent told my friend to prohibit his kids from setting a password and to periodically read through their messages. In fact reading through messages was advice posted by several parents. Yet another parent advised that he require his kids to hand over their phone every night so he can “charge” it (I used quotation marks here because charge is merely an excuse to perform a thorough nightly snooping mission).

If these parents’ Big Brother tendency stopped at personal electronics that might be one thing. But I’ve also seen parents comment in other threads about how they took the door off of their kids’ bedrooms.

Admittedly I’m not a parent but I was a kid and had parents. My parents were and continue to be cool. One thing I greatly appreciate is that they’ve always trusted me. I not only had a door on my bedroom but the door had a lock. They never required me to give them the passwords to my computers or online accounts. The only time they became snoopy is when I did something that justifiably betrayed their trust.

But its seems a lot of parents don’t trust their children. They treat their children like suspects under an investigation. Why you snoop through your kids’ communications, prohibit them from securing devices in a manner you cannot access, or take the door off of their bedroom you’re saying you don’t trust them. That’s an environment that’s bound to breed unhealthy paranoia and distrust in the very people they’re supposed to trust. I believe the mantra of “Innocent until proven guilty,” applies in all aspects of life. If your child has done something to betray your trust then there are grounds to perform an investigation. But I can’t imagine how treating your child like a suspect even when you have no reason to be suspicious is helpful to them.

The Decentralized Internet

“Internet provision is a natural monopoly!” How many times have you heard some economic illiterati say that? I’m sure you’ve heard it a few times even though the entire concept of natural monopoly is a myth. To demonstrate this I’m going to provide a couple of examples of decentralized Internet architectures. First we’re going to look at the corporate world where one Internet Service Provider (ISP) has decided centralized infrastructure isn’t fulfilling all of its needs:

Well T-Mobile wants to fix all that… by putting an LTE tower in your house. Yes, the unconventional carrier has announced a 4G LTE CellSpot that it says will offer 3,000 square feet of LTE coverage for your home or business. Plug it into the wall outlet, connect it to the internet, and your LTE connection will get a boost anywhere T-Mobile has spectrum. The CellSpot supports up to 16 calls at a time, and will work with any 3G, 4G, and LTE device on T-Mobile’s network.

T-Mobile’s biggest limitation is coverage. Improving coverage isn’t easy for a cell carrier because building towers is expensive and the bureaucracy between them and their customers is significant (my hometown kept denying AT&T permission to build a new tower simply because the city council didn’t want travelers to see an “ugly” tower when they passed through town). Being able to install a lot of microcells is a lot easier than building a tower simply because the carrier doesn’t have to buy land and get permission from local bureaucracies.

Two mistakes T-Mobile is making, in my opinion, is only allowing its customers to install these CellSpots and not paying people who choose to install them:

And the price is right too — eligible Simple Choice customers can get the LTE CellSpot for free (with a refundable $25 deposit), and keep it as long as they are customers of T-Mobile.

I bet T-Mobile would quickly find itself enjoying spectacular coverage if it paid anybody willing to install one of these in their home or business a little kickback (these microcells, after all, are consuming electricity and using bandwidth). For the right price (which means enough for me to make a little bit of profit) I’d be willing to install one of these in my home and I’m not even a T-Mobile customer.

Admittedly relying on a centralized ISP, even if they’re utilizing a decentralized architecture, isn’t exactly demonstrating that Internet provision isn’t a natural monopoly. Fear not! T-Mobile isn’t the only game in town:

When you live somewhere with slow and unreliable Internet access, it usually seems like there’s nothing to do but complain. And that’s exactly what residents of Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state, were doing in late 2013. Faced with CenturyLink service that was slow and outage-prone, residents gathered at a community potluck and lamented their current connectivity.

“Everyone was asking, ‘what can we do?’” resident Chris Brems recalls. “Then [Chris] Sutton stands up and says, ‘Well, we can do it ourselves.’”

When somebody says, “Well, we can do it ourselves,” you know they’re on the right track:

Faced with a local ISP that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by Sutton, Brems, and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It’s a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.

[…]

Back in 2013, CenturyLink service was supposed to provide up to 1.5Mbps downloads speeds, but in reality we “had 700kbps sometimes, and nothing at others,” Brems told Ars. When everyone came home in the evening, “you would get 100kbps down and almost nothing up, and the whole thing would just collapse. It’s totally oversubscribed,” Sutton said.

That 10-day outage in November 2013 wasn’t a fluke. At various times, CenturyLink service would go out for a couple of days until the company sent someone out to fix it, Sutton said. But since equipping the island with DBIUA’s wireless Internet, outages have been less frequent and “there are times we’re doing 30Mbps down and 40Mbps up,” Brems said. “It’s never been below 20 or 25 unless we had a problem.”

A better, more reliable service for less. What more could one ask for? Anybody who lives in a rural area knows the struggle of getting fast, reliable Internet access. Unfortunately many people in rural areas turn their frustrations into political campaigns. By the time they’re done they have higher taxes and promises from the local, state, or federal government that go unfulfilled. Had they taken the money they invested in political shenanigans and instead built a network they would have fast, reliable Internet connectivity. This is why you should listen to the person who says, “Well, we can do it ourselves,” instead of the idiot who tries to start a political campaign.

Internet provision isn’t a natural monopoly. A community can come together and build their own network and attach it to the Internet. This is even easier now that wireless connectivity is no longer slow or outrageously expensive.