CAN IT BE TURNED BACK?

WE ARE SUFFERING SELF INFLICTED WOUNDS

     It is as though we've crossed a "Rubicon" and now worry about the consequences. Big Data, Surveillance, Algorithmic Analysis, NSA, etc, etc.

     Now FaceBook confirms that up to six million users' personal data, even that which is not public, has been seen and or gathered by third parties.  Many have argued those who post so much personal information willingly have themselves to blame when that data is hijacked, hacked, sold or used to either bug or defraud you.

     A couple of experts are now saying that analyzing big data needs to be more effectively used by federal authorities.  They contend the alleged Boston bombers history of viewing violent or terrorist prone on-line videos should have led to an interdiction before they acted out what they were thinking.  Thought police? 

     Being a First Amendment advocate, I've been posting about this crunch since I entered the blogosphere.

      Here's an earlier set of thoughts, dealing with this idea of thought police. The Eli Pariser video should be must viewing for anyone who spends anytime in cyberspace.

      The point is our privacy suffers, by our own hand, by commercial enterprises, by government agencies and by information pirates. It is just out there and all to easy to overlook or put out of mind.  But like most things,it grows.  What can, what should we do about it?

Jon Stewart

The Diplomat

     Those of you who appreciate the satire of Jon Stewart

know he is off this summer, directing a film in the Middle East.  Well, he's made an interesting appearance.

See you down the trail.

PEACE, LOVE & DIRT and HOW TO USE THE NSA DATA

CYBER BOMB THE THIEVES

   Since they've got the data, why not create an algorithmic analysis to interdict and then shut down all of those phishers, scammers, identify thieves and that Kenyan who wants to give you 1.3 million dollars.

   While rounding up and tracking terrorists, the NSA and FBI should find these internet hustlers who steal, extort and are at their best, annoying. Then let the CIA or Cyber Command send a counterstrike that evaporates their illicit program and network, melts their computers and shocks the scammers into the next county. Then maybe Seal Team 6 can capture them and paint a red bulls eye on their forehead.

   Well, at least the first part of that eh?!

peace, love & dirt

LIVE OAK 25

   25 years of Father's Day Weekends at Live Oak Music Festival.

   People who came first as children are now volunteers
of the KCBX event that is quintessential California.

 Music, sun, friends and good vibes under the beautiful

oaks near Lake Cachuma.

 The logo quilt was a hot item in the silent auction.

    Entertainment and grins and just doing your thing.

   Owing to California's wine culture, there are amenities the old festivals may not have had.

   I watched as one of the performing musicians tuned and played the first guitar in the left rack.  She made it sound great.  She ended by smiling and saying, "this thing would make me crazy."

      Later, another of the players had R2D2 sounding pretty good. It would have rocked the Star Wars cantina.

      Those live oaks shelter a lot of great memories and have heard some extraordinary music.

 and an occasional nap.

      Some chair, huh?

      See you down the trail.

THE WEEKENDER-YOUR PROFILE

WHO ARE YOU?

WE KNOW.

    Frequent readers may recall my cautionary concerns about the surrender of information autonomy to convenience, communication and the aggregating power of algorithms.

    As an aside in this battle, I'd prefer to write the word, rather than have the spell check, auto write function fill in or begin to assume the word I wish to say. But this is the age of information warfare and collateral damage comes in many forms, so we all soldier on. Hopefully, wisely.

    Well, this is The Weekender and we try to keep the mood light and entertaining, so it is in that vein we bring you this video beware.  It's a pitch, but the message makes sense.

A PARTING BITE

A leftover of sorts-an image in this case-from a

Friday Lunch Flash Mob treat.

A Hearst Ranch all beef foot-long hotdog, Sebastian style.

Have a great weekend. See you down the trail.

DID TWITTER COMMIT SUICIDE? & BIG KIDS AT RECESS

NEWS FROM THE FRONT LINE

OF THE INFORMATION WARS

It's probably a result of my decades in journalism,

broadcasting and documentary production,

but I'm super sensitive when there are 

rumblings in the "force," that is

communications and information flow.
Veteran readers may recall a couple of 
posts that shook up a few people-
Posting (link here) about the convenience of algorithms and a kind of "thought control."  
Or about the danger of cyber crime
Read the post by linking here.
Now a new battle line has been drawn.
Here's the Forbes blog on what has set off many recriminations.


Twitter Commits Social Suicide
By Mark Gibbs, Forbes
27 January 12
Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country - while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.
ith those words earlier today, in a blog posting titled "Tweets still must flow" the management ofTwitter's went over to the dark side and may well have dug their own grave
In what can only have been a fit of corporate insanity, Twitter announced that it has the ability to filter tweets to conform to the demands of various countries.
Thus, in France and Germany it is illegal to broadcast pro-Nazi sentiments and Twitter will presumably be able to block such content and inform the poster why it was blocke
Quite obviously, Twitter's management believes that there is some kind of value in being able to filter in this way but given that, over the course of 2011, the number of tweets per second (tps) ranged from a high of almost 9,000 tps down to just under 4,000 tps, any filtering has got to be computer-driven.
So, consider this tweet:
@FactsorDie Nazi Germany led the first public anti-smoking campaign.
Could that be considered to be pro-Nazi? How will a program accurately make that determination?
What concerns me is that if the algorithm Twitter uses registers a false positive (i.e. determines that the tweet is pro-Nazi when it isn't) and the tweet has any time sensitivity to it then that attribute will be completely nullified by the time the tweet makes it out of tweet-jail if it ever does.
On the other hand if the software makes a false negative (i.e. determines that the tweet is NOT pro-Nazi when it is) then the filtering is useless and Twitter will be held accountable by every political group with an axe to grind.
Now it might be argued that some percentage of false positives or false negatives will be acceptable but what is that percentage? 0.0000o01%? That equates, at a minimum of 4,000tps, to 3,456 misclassified tweets per day or 1,261,440 per year!
And will the filtering software be able to detect irony and sarcasm? I rather doubt it.
And what about the fact that Twitter will be implicitly editing all tweets? Doesn't that attract legal issues in that they are taking on an editorial responsibility and therefore become a lightning rod for lawsuits?
I see Twitter's management having made a huge epic, mistake. In trying to appease the demands of political pressure they've dug themselves a huge hole that they won't be able to climb out of. The mere fact that they have published a blog posting claiming that they can filter seals their fate.
I really like Twitter; it's a unique and amazingly rich social platform but Twitter's management may have just diminished if not wiped out their edge and their global relevance.
You can't service all of humanity if you allow the needs of politics to triumph over the needs of the people. And if you can't service all of humanity, what is your relevance?

What do you think?
It is certainly a different world from when most information flowed from major news gathering organizations dedicated to the proposition of the public's right to know and adamant about the First Amendment. That was of course a time before news organizations were expected to be profit centers and before mergers and group ownership of once competing media.  And certainly before the sophistication of data mining and social media.


DAY BOOK
ANOTHER FLASH MOB BIRTHDAY 
AND THE OLD SCHOOL HOUSE GETS A NEW CUPOLA.

The historic San Simeon school has been spiffed up.

While the Friday Lunch Flash Mob has grown to 4 tables.

 With the tradition of a candle in the chocolate chip cookie continues.

It's like big kids at recess!
See you down the trail.

DECIDING FOR YOURSELF OR A PRIORI

OLD IS SOMETIMES BETTER
Have you followed the almost other worldly debate between
Twitter and Google about access to data and subsequent
sharing of that information?
Link here for background from Reuters news.

This very medium that we are sharing at this moment is 
extraordinary in its depth, reach and ability to be 
instant. It continues to change how we live, inform ourselves and think.  And yet as we rely on its
capacity, it begins to replace some of our
own intellectual command.  Decisions are being made for us.
This video appeared here earlier, but many of you missed it,
according to the analytics available to even a blogger such as me.  And that is part of the point.

The technology is impressive, even if inevitable.
But I wonder what happens as the decision making, fed by 
 data mining and analytics, continues. Will
we become like the humans depicted
in the Pixar masterpiece Wall-e?
What happens to the human specie if everything
is done based on convenience, prior patterns
and algorithmic decision making?
I fear that anything that begins to shape or trim 
our curiosity and free exploration leads us
to being intellectual chia pets.


HERE IS AN EXAMPLE OF HOW IT HAS CHANGED
The video was recorded during a break
on the NBC Today show in January 1994.
Bryant Gumble and Katie Couric ask
WHAT IS THE INTERNET ANYWAY?

I assume Bryant and Katie now get a kick out of 
their naivety. In those days
there was no threat to the media from the new
technology platforms that today call
institutions like the network news "mainstream" or "lame stream" media. Of course all news organizations
calculate how to survive.
Computer mined and manipulated data leads to 
a kind of apriori decision making,
but how free or unbounded is it?
What price for convenience?
I hope you sometimes visit the 
21st Century Intelligence component at the
very bottom of this page.  It does a great 
job of tracking the business of our tech future.
See you down the trail.