Don’t touch that dial!
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” — Ian Fleming, Goldfinger
“Follow the money.” — William Goldman, All the President’s Men
The Fatfinger Economy
Category: Medium
About those kill-switched Ukrainian tractors
What John Deere did to Russian looters, anyone can do to farmers, anywhere.
Here’s a delicious story: CNN reports that Russian looters, collaborating with the Russian military, stole 27 pieces of John Deere farm equipment from a dealership in Melitopol, Ukraine, collectively valued at $5,000,000. The equipment was shipped to Chechnya, but it will avail the thieves naught, because the John Deere dealership reached out over the internet and bricked these tractors, using an in-built kill-switch.
Since that story ran last week, I’ve lost track of the number of people who sent it to me. I can see why: it’s a perfect cyberpunk nugget: stolen tractors rendered inert by an over-the-air update, thwarting the bad guys. It could be the climax of a prescient novella in Asimov’s circa 1996.
But I’m here to tell you: this is not a feel-good story.
I mean, sure. In the short term, it’s really cool to think of those looters arriving in Chechnya only to discover that their looted tractors and combines and such are only good for spare parts (and maybe not even that).
But if you scratch the surface of that cinematic comeuppance, what you find is a far scarier parable about the way that cyberwarfare could extrude itself into the physical world. After all, if John Deere’s authorized technicians can reach out and brick any tractor or combine, anywhere in the world, then anyone who suborns, hacks or blackmails a John Deere technician — say, Russia’s storied hacker army, who specialize in mass-scale infrastructure attacks, which they perfected by attacking Ukrainian embedded systems — can do the exact same thing.
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End-To-End Encryption is Too Important to Be Proprietary
The EU’s Digital Markets Act is playing on the hardest setting (and it doesn’t need to).
The EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) is set to become law; it will require the biggest tech companies in the world (Apple, Google and Facebook, and maybe a few others) to open up their instant messaging services (iMessage, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, and maybe a few others) so that smaller messaging services can plug into them. These smaller services might be run by startups, nonprofits, co-ops, or even individual tinkerers.
The logic behind this is sound. IM tools are the ultimate “network effects” products: once they have a critical mass of users, other users feel they have to join to talk to the people who are already there. The more users who sign up, the more users feel they must sign up.
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Automation is Magic
The Messy Business of Security Economics.
There is no such thing as security.
I’m not being a realist here (“there are no sure bets”) nor is this mere nihilism (“you will never be safe!”).
There is no such thing as security in the abstract.You cannot be generically secure — you can only be secure from something. A sprinkler system increases your security from fires, but not burglars. Not only that, but a sprinkler system reduces your security from water-damage.
Revenge of the Chickenized Reverse-Centaurs
Algorithms and worker power
In AI circles, a “centaur” describes a certain kind of machine/human collaboration, in which “decision-support” systems (which the field loves to call “AI”s) are paired with human beings for results that draw upon the strengths of each, such as when a human chess master and a chess-playing computer program collaborate to smash their competition.
In labor circles, “chickenization” refers to exploitative working arrangements that resemble the plight of the American poultry farmer. The U.S. poultry industry has been taken over by three monopolistic packers, who have divided the nation up into exclusive territories, so that each chicken farmer has only one buyer for their birds.
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Big Tech Isn’t Stealing News Publishers’ Content
It’s Stealing Their Money.
Governments around the world — Australia, France, Brazil, and now Canada —have fallen in love with the idea of creating a pseudo-copyright system that requires tech companies to pay license fees to news publishers when their users quote the news.
These governments start from the (correct) premise that a vigorous, independent news sector is vital to democracy, and the (likewise correct) premise that there’s something fundamentally crooked in how the tech companies operate, and then draw the (alarmingly wrong) conclusion that the way to solve this is with a “snippet tax” (or, more charitably, a “remuneration right”).
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When Automation Becomes Enforcement
What we talk about when we talk about interoperable end-to-end encryption
I was wrong about Snapchat, but I was also kinda right.
When I first encountered the idea of disappearing messages, I was both skeptical and alarmed.
Skeptical because disappearing messages have an obvious defect as a security measure: If I send you a message (or a photo) that I don’t want you to have, I lose. You can remember the contents of the message, or take a screenshot, or use a separate device to photograph your screen. If I don’t trust you with some information, I shouldn’t send you that information.
I was wrong.
The Best Defense Against Rubber-Hose Cryptanalysis
The cypherpunks were wrong (but also right)
Listen to those who extol the virtues of blockchain and cryptocurrency and pretty soon, you’ll hear about the power of cryptocurrency to resist tyranny.
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Marc Laidlaw’s “Underneath the Oversea”
A wondrous fairytale, wondrously read, from the storyteller of Half-Life.
I have been a Marc Laidlaw fan since his debut novel, Dad’s Nuke — an apocalyptic, madcap dark comedy/road-trip novel that anticipated Snow Crash and its motif of an America dominated by paranoid, fortresslike gated communities.
I avidly consumed all of his subsequent novels and short stories — especially “400 Boys,” his contribution to Bruce Sterling’s seminal cyberpunk anthology Mirrorshades.
The Byzantine Premium
On the contradiction at the heart of Bitcoin advocacy
When you write critically about blockchain, Bitcoin, speculation, NFTs and DeFi, you get an earful back. Advocates for these things are…well, aggressive is a polite term for how many believers respond to critiques of their financial/philosophical/political/technological project.