Rolandt

The Washington Post: They rejected coronavirus shots in vaccine-rich countries. In the hospital, they changed their minds.

““I should have gotten the damn vaccine,“ 39-year-old Micheal Freedy of Las Vegas texted his fiancee, Jessica DuPreez, shortly before he died of the coronavirus, which put him in an intensive care unit last month.

Freedy was not opposed to vaccination, DuPreez told The Washington Post this week. But like many Americans who have yet to get their shots, the father of five wanted to wait and learn more about how people reacted to the vaccines before he got inoculated.

“I would take a bad reaction to the vaccine over having to bury my husband. I would take that any day,“ Freedy’s fiancee, who is now an avid campaigner for people to get vaccinated, told CNN.”

I have lived in a few places around the world, but nowhere have I encountered so much dust than since I moved to Vancouver. I have lived downtown Toronto with lots of cars around, in Edmonton with lots of dry dust blowing around but all of them pale in comparison to the the amount of dust that is present in Vancouver.

I am not really sure where it is coming from. I have been told in part it is some of the volcanoes putting stuff into the air, maybe. I know once source of black soot are the ships parked in the bay that regularly spew crap into the air. It's also evident in how black some of the dust is when you sweep it up.

Obviously that isn't the most healthy of things and over the years I tried a bunch of air purifiers. They all pretty much clogged up with the dust, so now I am taking a different approach.

Most forced air systems in houses have filters on the intake to keep external crap out. These "furnace filters" come in a variety of grades (known as MERV), the higher the MERV number, the more particulate matter they remove, including really small stuff like PM2.5.

The goal is of course to keep the stuff out of my place as much as I can, but I am also someone who likes to have the window open, which poses a problem. The solution for me is to install an easily removable box fan into the window and use it at a low setting to draw in fresh air. I have a second box fan in the living room with a MERV-11 filter that picks up the stuff within the unit. It's relatively low cost, but even after running it for a few days, the difference is noticeable.

Building your own

There is really not a whole lot that you need:

1. Box fan
2. Furnace Filter of your desired rating (recommend MERV-11 or higher)
3. Some masking tape
4. Some cardboard / insulation / wood to cover up open parts of the window.

I use masking tape instead of duct tape because the masking tape can easily be removed without leaving anything behind, duct tape would def. work, but if you want to be able to easily change / move things around masking tape is the way to go.

Some Assembly required.

Put your box fan "face down" on a flat surface.

Put the filter on the back and align with the box fan. Make sure to put the correct side forward, the arrow indicating air flow should be pointing towards the fan.

I chose a 16x20x4 filter here. You want to avoid 1" filters as they have less surface area and cause the fan to provide reduced air flow, which can also overheat and burn out the motor. The 4" one provides much more surface area and requires less work from the fan to move the air.

Fix the filter in place with the masking tape, then use the masking tape to cover up any other openings. This does not have to be perfect, but you want to make sure that the vast majority of the air is being pulled by the fan through the filter and not through any openings on the side.

Seat the fan in your window and make sure it is stable. I chose the 16x20 size filter to provide some stability, the fan cannot fall out of the (sliding) window as the window opening is smaller than the fan, if you are concerned about "knocking it over" (e.g. with kids or pets) you may want to consider to lock the fan down. The fan I have has some holes that would, for example, allow you to screw it in. Or you could use some work clamps.

What you do not want in this setup though is a wide open window as shown in this picture. As the fan moves the air it will draw more air through the opening, bypassing the filter. In order to prevent this, we have to install a cover.

I chose a piece of 0.5" insulation which I had still around from building myself a window kit for one of my portable ACs. I just cut it too size, put some weather stripping at the bottom and secured it with some more masking tape. Installation took a few seconds and removing both the fan and the cover will only take a few seconds too.

Final Thoughts

That's really it. The air flow is definitely reduced with the filter in place, but it will produce a much cleaner air environment. There are some downsides with it, mostly that the filter is housed in a cardboard box and is exposed to the elements. So when it is heavily raining you probably do not want the filter in the window as it could be destroyed by the rain. But other than that, that's it. Clean air flow, less dust.

Sometimes computers are just too much of a hassle.

I’ve had my fair share of hardware issues in the past (enough to make me appreciate the carefree “appliance” model of thin terminals and iPads, which, incidentally, are at least twice as appealing during these sweltering summers), but intermittent failures easily take the cake – they are the most annoying and frustrating kind of hardware problem, often taking weeks (if not years) to get properly diagnosed.

If ever.

And, guess what, as a sort of karmic follow-up to my kernel_task woes I’ve been having a few more interesting problems with my iMac that fall squarely into that category.

The first obvious symptom was that the Big Sur 11.5 update refused to install, repeatedly erroring out with an “unable to download” message.

This has been discussed in detail by other people, but my story has an extra twist.

After the fourth or fifth attempt, I gave up on the GUI and switched to the CLI in an attempt to get more information, since (like I pointed out during my earlier saga), Console.app has become borderline unusable and I wanted detailed, but easily digestible info on what was going on.

And I did get more information, in the sense that softwareupdate logged its lack of success, but in a strange way: It reported successful download up to 65%, and then appeared to immediately proceed to expanding the update package–and failed with a file verification error.

I could see progress building up to 65% and then, after a long pause, “jumping” after which it errored out:

Now, that jump from 65% to 100% is typical of when a connection stalls and times out, and was consistent with the error dialogs I got from the GUI. But since Akamai was having CDN issues at the time I assumed the update file had been truncated.

I later figured out the reason this seemed to halt at 65% is that softwareupdate, for some ungodly reason, reports the overall update percentage in front of the “Downloading:” message.

I left the machine running overnight, tried it again, and got this:

Now, I don’t believe in coincidences, but there was absolutely no way a fresh package would create exactly the same error. Something else was afoot.

After exhausting all other options, I went into System Recovery and triggered a full reinstall.

As usual, if you hit Command+L you get a detailed log of what is going on, so I was able to verify that Recovery downloaded the full muiti-gigabyte OS package and applied it. This took less than an hour, and kept all my data and user accounts.

However, when the system came up the Finder refused to run, and upon further investigation Console.app complained the binary signature was wrong (unfortunately I didn’t keep a screenshot of that).

I then began a long, long cycle of reboots, tests and troubleshooting.

Singe Disk Utility reported no problems with the drive, the next likely suspect was RAM. Which was plausible, since this iMac is one of the last with accessible DIMM slots, and I had added an extra 16GB on top of the 8GB it shipped with.

To test it, I went through a few days’ worth of the following routine:

• Do a PRAM and SMC reset
• Unplug the machine, try a new combination of DIMMs (first-party, the third-party I had been running and a few more I had lying around)
• Run the built-in hardware test–which always gave me No Issues found. and an ADP000 reference code
• Reinstall the OS from scratch (still keeping my user data)

In the meantime, in those intervals while things apparently worked, I installed smartmontools and DriveDx, which also found no apparent issue with the drive.

But I kept running into problems:

• Random applications would stop launching (store or non-store, didn’t matter). I eventually started launching every single application I had installed systematically after each reinstall, and, sure enough, some would fail.
• One or two strange post-launch app crashes (one-offs I could not discern a good reason for in Console.app).
• My Mail.app message index got corrupted (and had to re-index everything):

At this point, I had just the stock RAM in the machine, since it had passed all my tests (like every other set of DIMMs, but I wanted to have a stock configuration).

So I decided to bypass the Fusion drive altogether and plug in an NVMe USB-C enclosure I had lying around. I then installed Big Sur to that and get a minimal setup working–which worked, at least in the sense that I had zero issues while doing so.

At this point everything pointed to some kind of Fusion drive issue that, for some reason, doesn’t show up on any disk diagnostic tool, even when testing the SSD and HDD independently.

But while running off the NVMe I experienced a resurgence of my kernel_task slowdowns, so I’m really starting to suspect that there are deeper issues here than just storage.

In the meantime, I had reached out to @AppleSupport on Twitter and eventually got on a call with a support rep in the UK to whom I recounted my saga. He suggested I set up Big Sur in a new APFS volume (which took another hour, so we had to close the call before it was done).

The new volume crashed during booting, so when a second support rep (this time in PT) reached out there wasn’t much else to do–I was walked through the process of clearing out caches in all boot partitions (which was the only thing in the troubleshooting process I had never done), confirmed the test partition still crashed upon boot, supplied all logs and screenshots I had taken, was told it would be escalated to Engineering, and…

Nothing yet. It’s been a week now.

I’m not surprised there isn’t a response yet (it’s Summertime and this isn’t a trivial situation), but after spending nearly two weeks troubleshooting this and without a reliable desktop machine, I decided to start counting my blessings.

Fortunately, and although I rely on my iMac to work (sitting down) at my normal desk, my regular work machine is the Surface Book 3 on my standing desk, which is why I was able to keep working throughout all this.

And, even more fortunately than that, 80% of my work (except calls, which I prefer to do standing, and the occasional bit of coding, which I remote to other machines for) is actually done on a Windows Remote Desktop farm, so to use the machine while testing the new installs all I needed was the Remote Desktop app (which, thanks to Murphy, was one of the apps that failed to launch on one of the re-installs).

No (important) data was lost, since everything of consequence is on OneDrive or my home NAS anyway (and I still have TimeMachine backups there). I am, however, a bit worried as to the integrity of those backups.

Since I still have a MacBook (a 2016 one, which I use lightly due to fear of breaking its infamous keyboard), I also started planning to use that as a stopgap until it makes sense for me to get an M1/M1X/M2 machine (which may take a good while yet–maybe until next March for a Mini/desktop refresh).

I now strongly suspect the kernel_task saga is tied to this, and that I may have been having hardware issues for a good while without realising it.

For instance, I have noticed that some of the git repositories I had on my desktop to curate (decide whether to archive/cleanup/re-file) have oddly empty folders (some clearly temporary from build processes, but others just… gone).

And some of the SyncThing issues I had (also with git repositories, but a couple of large ones) may be related as well.

Plus there were a few images in Photos that were glitchy a year or so ago, etc., etc. – but this may just be bias, since it’s quite tempting to attribute all sorts random weird behaviour to this kind of problem.

Since I can’t really trust the iMac, I decided to step up my upgrade plans to an Apple Silicon machine, but piecemeal.

As a first step, I took the iMac off my desk and am now using my MacBook Pro with an ultra-wide monitor (more on that in a few weeks), which means this is the first time in over 15 years I don’t have a desktop Mac.

Although replacing the Fusion drive is entirely doable (and the kit is around €200-€300 depending on SSD capacity) I’m wary of doing it and failing to address the real issue.

I’m quite interested in seeing what will come out of my support case, since hauling the whole thing to be repaired without having a proper diagnosis (in the middle of Summer and, incidentally, a pandemic) is just asking for weeks of hassle.

And since Portugal doesn’t have any sort of trade-in programs (or, now that I mention it, not even a 100% “normal” Apple Store, despite a local support center and offices), there’s no trade-in upgrade path, either.

Having the machine cast aside and in this Schroedinger Cat-like situation where it’s simultaneously broken or OK depending on how I look at it feels incredibly wasteful (especially considering the built-in display was the best I ever used until now), but the inconvenience of the all-in-one format is that I can’t really make any use of it as it is (this model doesn’t have target display mode because there was really no way to implement that when it was designed).

I’ve been musing that if all else fails I can always gut the machine, get an LVDS driver board and use it as a monitor (it’s been done before), but that would be a project I don’t have the time to do right now.

Would be great fun, though.

Too often, a popular consumer app unexpectedly gets worse: Some combination of harder to use, missing features, and slower. At a time in history where software is significantly eating the world, this is nonsensical. It’s also damaging to the lives of the people who depend on these products.

First, a few examples to clarify the kind of thing I’m talking about. These are just the ones I’ve had personal experience with.

iPain

One super-obvious example is the long, sad story of iPhoto and iMovie.

For years after the introduction of iMovie ’08, you could still get and use the ’06 version and lots of people did, because it was simple, straightforward, and the obvious things you needed to do were always within reach. I was using the program back then and since I’m a tech geek updated to the newest and greatest, then was reduced to inchoate screams of rage by ’08. I couldn’t figure out how to do lots of obvious things, everything was klunky. There wasn’t a single dimension along which ’08 was better.

As for iPhoto, I never used it much, but my eighty-something mother did, and took lots of great photos with the Sony RX100 I gave her when I gave up on pocket cams. She’s not geeky but has a Bachelor’s in the sciences and is really smart. At some point they broke iPhoto so she couldn’t figure out how to do anything, and when she asked me for help she had tears in her eyes. I tried to get her fixed up, but she doesn’t take pictures much any more. I miss them.

Economist pain

I was still a Developer Advocate in the Android group when The Economist shipped their app. I thought it had one of the best user experiences ever. You started at the beginning of the current issue, swiped down through an article to the bottom, then swapped to bring the next article in from the right. It remembered where you’d got to, which supports The Economist’s vision of being a weekly newspaper; one pass through and you’re caught up on the world that week. There was always a gesture to get to the Table of Contents, but I found I usually didn’t need it much, just swiped over the things I didn’t care about. I praised it to the skies at the time, and (admittedly) since criticized its “Back” affordance, but that was a minor gripe.

The most recent version has been fancified and crippled. First of all, when you open the app, it doesn’t take you to where you were last reading. It insists on starting with “news of the day” (there are lots of other sites for that stuff) and you have to press “week” to get back into the actual publication. When you do that, even though it knows which articles you’ve read (marking them with a check-mark in the table of contents) it maddeningly doesn’t take you to where you were last. So you have to hunt through the table of contents to get yourself restarted.

And when you get to the bottom of an article, it doesn’t stop, it drops you into some weird bastardized section-specific table of contents thingie. All I want is to flip down then flip right until I get to the damn end of the damn magazine. Why?!

MLB

I’ve used the Roku/MLB combo for years to watch ball games on our big TV. The app has evolved over the years and mostly gotten better. I find things on Roku tend to be a little sluggish, but MLB wasn’t too bad; it’d drop you, pretty quickly, into a screen containing a nice picture of a baseball stadium, then overlay a grid of games that were on; pick the one you want and away you go.

Suddenly, it’s become immensely slower, and apparently is spending that time trying to use some AI voodoo to figure out which game I’d like to watch. After an endless delay, you get live video of the game it thinks you want to watch, with a few other games and menu choices overlaid around the edge. It’s reasonably good at guessing which game I want to watch, but way slower at getting me there than it used to be. When’s it’s (regularly) wrong, there are two (slow) menu transitions to get back to the grid of all the games.

Also, they screwed up the Android Auto app — I find listening to a game a good way to pass the time on the road. It’s always had a flaw in that it tries to guess which game you want to watch and starts playing that — the guesses are laughably bad and I often end up with something like Miami Marlins in Spanish. But, you were one tap away from a nice list of everything on offer.

Recently, the startup screen is trying be smarter, thus much slower, in presenting its guess as to what you might want to hear, with a few others (not all) offered as options. So I have to wait forever for this to manifest then hit a teeny little “More…” target to get the actual list of all the games on offer.

Why does this happen?

It’s obvious. Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted.

It is the dream of every PM to come up with a bold UX innovation that gets praise, and many believe the gospel that the software is better at figuring out what the customer wants than the customer is. And you get extra points these days for using ML.

Also, any time you make any change to a popular product, you’ve imposed a retraining cost on its users. Unfortunately, in their evaluations, PMs consider the cost of customer retraining time to be zero.

How to fix this? Well, in my days at Amazon Web Services, I saw exactly zero instances of major service releases that, in the opinion of customers, crippled or broke the product. I’m not going to claim that our UX was generally excellent because it wasn’t; the fact that most users were geeks let us somewhat off the hook.

Why no breakage? Because these were Enterprise products, so the number of customers was orders of magnitude smaller than iAnything, so the PM could go talk to them and bounce improvement ideas off them. Customers are pretty good at spotting UX goofs in the making.

The evidence suggests that for mass-market products used by on the order of 10⁷ people, it’s really difficult to predict which changes will be experienced as stupid, broken, and insulting.

Maybe we ought to start promoting PMs who are willing to stand pat for an occasional release or three. Maybe we ought to fire all the consumer-product PMs. Maybe we ought to start including realistic customer-retraining-cost estimates in our product planning process.

We need to stop breaking the software people use. Everyone deserves better.

To what extent do developers consciously influence the time taken to actually complete a task?

If the time estimated to complete a task is rather generous, a developer has the opportunity to follow Parkinson’s law (i.e., “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”), or if the time is slightly less than appears to be required, they might work harder to finish within the estimated time (like some marathon runners have a target time)?

The use of round numbers are a prominent pattern seen in task estimation times.

If round numbers appeared more often in the actual task completion time than would be expected by chance, it would suggest that developers are sometimes working to a target time. The following plot shows the number of tasks taking a given amount of actual time to complete, for project 615 in the CESAW dataset (similar patterns are present in the actual times of other projects; code+data):

The red lines are a fitted bi-exponential distribution to the ‘spike’ (i.e., round numbers, circled in grey) and non-spike points (spikes automatically selected, see code for details), green and purple lines are the two components of the non-spike fit.

Tasks are not always started and completed in one continuous work session, work may be spread over multiple work sessions; the CESAW data includes the start/end time of every work session associated with each task (85% of tasks involve more than one work session, for project 615). The following plots are based on work sessions, rather than tasks, for tasks worked on over two (left) and three (right) sessions; colored lines denote session ordering within a task (code+data):

Shorter sessions dominate for the last session of task implementation, and spikes in the counts indicate the use of round numbers in all session positions (e.g., 180 minutes, which may be half a day).

Perhaps round number work session times are a consequence of developers using round number wall-clock times to start and end work sessions. The plot below shows (left) the number of work sessions starting at a given number of minutes past the hour, and (right) the number of work sessions ending at a given number of minutes past the hour; both for project 615 (code+data):

The arrow (green) shows the direction of the mean, and the almost invisible interior line shows that the length of the mean is almost zero. The five-minute points have slightly more session starts/ends than the surrounding minute values, but are more like bumps than spikes. The start of the hour, and 30-minutes, have prominent spikes, which might be caused by the start/end of the working day, and start/end of the lunch break.

Five-minutes is a convenient small rounding interval to either expand implementation time, or to target as a completion time. The following plot shows, for each of the 47 individuals working on project 615, the number of actual session times and the number exactly divisible by five. The green line shows the case where every actual is divisible by five, the purple line where 20% are divisible by five (expected for unbiased timing), the dashed purple lines show one standard deviation, the blue/green line is a fitted regression model () (code+data):

It appears that on average, five-minute session times occur twice as often as expected by chance; two individuals round all their actual session times (ok, it’s not that unlikely for the person with just two sessions).

Does it matter that some developers have a preference for using round numbers when recording time worked?

The use of round numbers in the recording of actual work sessions will inflate the total actual time for most tasks (because most tasks involve more than one session, and assuming that most rounding is not caused by developers striving to meet a target). The amount of error introduced is probably a lot less than the time variability caused by other implementation factors (I have yet to do the calculation).

I see the use of round numbers as a means of unpicking developer work habits.

Given the difficulty of getting developers to record anything, requiring them to record to minute-level accuracy appears at best optimistic. Would you work for a manager that required this level of effort detail (I know there is existing practice in other kinds of jobs)?

I’ve been asked by the folks at OECD’s CERI (Center for Educational Research and Innovation) to develop a teacher training curriculum for… let’s call it integrating creativity into the online classroom. I’ve been picking away at it all summer and have come up with a list of critical discussion that I ‘think’ should be included in this kind of course. I’ve been designing activities and such for them, and I kind of want to pin them to the wall in this blog post, and see how much of it still rings true in October when the project needs to be delivered.

What’s the deliverable?

It’s pretty straightforward actually. They are looking for a ‘teacher syllabus’ and about 30 minutes of video addressing some of the key concepts. The idea is that these could be taken, presumably as a whole or in part, and used to train in-service or pre-service teachers to include ‘creativity’ in the classroom.

So… creativity?

The word creativity, for me, fits way more in with words like ‘fun’ and ‘love’ and ‘friendly’ than it does with words like ‘slope’ or ‘equilateral’ or ‘cat’. Imagine for a second what it would be like to have a specific definition of fun that you applied to everyone. In order to not make the process ridiculous you end up having to append ‘for the individual or group’ to the definition making it meaningless in practical application. I can, however, talk about what fun probably isn’t, and I can talk about what it looks like when different people talk to me about it. I think our working definitions of creativity are going to look like this.

Potentially more importantly to the process, I think a teacher is going to struggle trying to implement someone else’s idea of creativity in the classroom. I am, for instance, not a very arty person, neither through talent nor through inclination. When I think of creativity I think of a novel approach to a given idea, a new perspective for that individual. Am I wrong about that being creativity? Students are going to be better served, i think, by getting different versions of creativity from different teachers than by some centralized concept.

Pretty sure we’re going to have to spend some time talking about our own feelings about creativity and the kinds of things that it means to other people – both inside and outside the classroom community.

Another critical question here is how to balance different teachers attempts to encourage their own kind of creativity and the space for students to perform THEIR own kind of creativity. I think this just underlines how important the public discussion of different people’s views of creativity are going to be in the course…

Well-defined problems and compliance

Friends of this blog will know that I am constantly on about ill-defined/ill-structured/complex challenges and what they mean in terms of making space for learning. A well-defined challenge (one where the teacher knows the input, the process and the outcome) can certainly be a good way to develop certain kinds of skills, but they are mostly about compliance. Success for a student given a well-defined problem is to figure out what the teacher wants and give it to the teacher.

This relationship between compliance and creativity is going to be a tough one I think. For one, so much of our systems of education are about compliance. Teacher’s set a standard, choose (or have chosen for them by their systems) the things a student ‘needs to know’ and then reward those students with grades for performing appropriately.

And yeah, about grades. It’s a whole other post, but I don’t really think you can put a number grade on the creative part of creativity. It opens you up to so many problems.

Ill-defined problems and engagement

It is my belief (i don’t really have another word for it) that there is a fundamental relationship between ill-defined problems and student engagement. I mean… there’s lots of research that supports it, but there’s just as much research that says it’s nonsense, that you need to offer clear learning objectives, clear processes and defined outcomes for students to learn. Given this contradiction, I choose the word belief rather than just choosing a faction in the literature and ignoring the ‘other side’.

I’ve been using Schlechty’s distinction between compliance and engagement for the last six months or so, and am finding it really useful.

The argument, I guess, goes like this. In order to support students to be creative, they need to be personally engaged in an activity and not simply compliant IF our desired outcome is for students to genuinely create and not just deliver on a well-defined outcome.

That means as a teacher you’re going to be asking students to do something without a clear sense of what you’re going to be getting back. Tricky. Not enough scaffolding? Students will panic and not be able to do anything. You’ll also be open to things that are wildly out of scope (students working too much, ritually compliant students working to the letter and not the spirit of an activity). Too much structure and you’ll only be encouraging compliance in students and you’ll get 27 copies of the same ‘creative product’.

Being creative online

The course is meant to be about doing this online, or at least with access to the internet, necessitating me to talk about abundance and scarcity again :). Imagine a simple task like “draw me an interesting circle”. Without touching your computer, take out a pen and, in 60 seconds or so, go ahead and complete that task. Now, after you’re done, do a google image search for ‘interesting circle’ and contemplate doing the task again. It’s different. Very, very different.

You can take two different perspectives on this.

You can try and recreate that scarcity environment, where I only have my own brain to work with, for your students to be creative in. You can ‘try’ and do this. This is what teachers all over the world are doing now, and they are fighting a losing battle against students who are ‘cheating’ by using any number of online resources to help them with their work.

OR

You can give in to the abundance of the Internet and you can get students to cite where their inspirations came from. All of our creativity, one could argue, comes from bits we’ve seen and done combined together in a novel way. Or, put another way…

the writer’s fictive illusion is made up of bits of true autobiographical and factual detail but the whole thing is a lie

O. S. Mitchell on W. O. Mitchell’s writing strategy

The lie, in this case, is our own creative insertion. The way in which we’ve combined a thing. Our own spin. Our interpretation. The difference between the scarcity model (all the things i can remember) and the abundance model (all the things i can find that other people remembered) is both an acceptance of where our bits of true came from and the quantity of bits we have to work with.

I mean… we can also make the workforce readiness argument here, but lets take it as read.

Thoughts going forward

This seems like three big enough issues for go forward with for now.

• The nature of creativity and the balance between a teacher’s sense of creativity and different sense of it in different students
• The relationship between ill-defined problems and the kind of engagement that leads to the fostering of creativity
• The challenges and opportunities of doing creativity with access to such an abundance of influences.

Thoughts for other big issues that need to be addressed? Comments on these gratefully accepted.

I’m not sure it’s possible to gain 1,000 true fans without ten true enemies.

Ten true enemies can make you feel like a failure. Any time you announce a new project, feature, or try to celebrate a success; they will voice their critical thoughts and bring you down.

Ten true enemies can consume almost all your time. They will create multiple accounts to post abuse towards you and other members. They may attempt to hack your website or run campaigns against you. They can suck you into endless debates about rules and interpretations of guidelines.

Ten true enemies will also get personal. They might follow you personally on social media platforms just to bring you down. They will do everything possible to make you feel flawed and inferior.

Ten true enemies lead the vanguard against your community. Any time there is trouble, they are there to stir it up, identify past faults, and try to turn opinion against you. They will always refer to personal experiences or present perceived instances of bias as proof that you are ‘bad’.

The number ten is arbitrary of course. It might be one or 100. But, regardless of the precise number, you can easily spend your time (or your life) trying to avoid the criticism of a tiny minority of people who are predisposed to be critical. Some might begrudge your success (as it reflects poorly upon their own), others might be responding to a perceived slight, others are simply people in personal pain who need to bring you down to feel better about themselves.

But as loud as your ten true enemies might become, it’s important to remember the plural of anecdote isn’t data. A volume of opinions doesn’t denote facts. A vocal minority doesn’t represent a silent majority. You shouldn’t assume this group is any more representative of your community than you would assume ten people protesting outside a supermarket represent the views of your nation.

Vocal minorities need the shadow of uncertainty to have power. The spiral of silence is their friend. If the majority aren’t sure what the group opinion is on a topic, it’s easier for your members to keep silent than risk voicing the wrong opinion. If you take away that uncertainty, you take away their power.

Ten people outraged about a new feature or the state of the community are going to look pretty dumb when you can show the majority are big fans. I’ve had clients who were certain their members hated the community only for hundreds, even thousands, of anonymous survey respondents to reveal the majority think the community is very useful. Collecting and sharing survey/poll results works in your favour.

You can spend your days (perhaps your life) trying to please your 10 true enemies. I’d suggest you don’t.

The post Ten True Enemies first appeared on FeverBee.

Last week I shared some thoughts about Domains with faculty at Grinnell College. It was supposed to be a conversation, and if I was as responsible and prepared as Alan Linklover it might have been, but I wasn’t and it wasn’t. But to my defense it was not only because I was underprepared, but also because when I tried to approach the faculty at Muhlenberg College for a conversation in Spring I found I was all over the place. I felt it was pretty awful, so with that in mind I fell back on the structure of some slides for this session.*

I met with Mo Pezel the week before the session to make sure the tech works, and try out my virtual camera setup through OBS, which worked a treat. It’s always fun to present as a fly on top of the screen you’re sharing.

This image is purely for OBS screen-fly demonstration purposes

The above slides have some links in them, but the jist of my talk was the following:

• The history of Domain of One’s Own, specifically trying to localize how it grew out of a time and place at UMW as part of a broader community (including the Bluehost Experiment, UMW Blogs, ds106, and a Personal Cyber Infrastructure), too many to list here, but interesting that two major figures in that moment, Martha Burtis and Alan Levine, would also be talking to these folks—bavastock was really Burtistock!
• Thinking through the value of a domain as your home on the web, something that the group took and ran drove away with in a shiny Ferrari! This included talking about Olia Lialina‘s work around Dr. Professor sites, her recent on on the shift of the web “From My to Me,” as well the longer history of universities in developing these technologies
• I also threw in some discussion’s of the mythical house metaphor, Jon Udell’s 7 ways to think like the web, and a few examples of awesome work like Lauren Heywood’s Coventry Domains Learn site.

I’m not sure I realized it at the time, but this talk was not so much about Reclaiming one’s web presence and all—although it’s always that—but  (thanks to a trackback I got from Tierney Steelberg’s post about the workshop) the fact that Domains is always about the people and the connections that emerge as a result. I make no apologies for continuing to “play the hits” from the good-old UMW days. They were professionally formative and a deep part of that were the conversations and connections that made us believe we could build an alternative space within the field. Domain of One’s Own was not some ridiculous technical or ideological dream-vision born from a mad genius, it was an everyday occurrence amongst people within the field who would regularly share their thoughts on the state of the web from their own domain. What’s more, it was from these syndicated missives that I would learn about the field, get inspired to explore new things, and then write and share what I’ve learned. A pretty virtuous cycle when it was working well. At the center of it was a decentralized network of people that did this same thing somewhat regularly—a web that extended far beyond UMW.

There was (and I believe still is) a core set of values at the center of that web that was built upon having faith in a seed of a thought that you share with others in hopes the great chain of professional, personal, and intellectual connections gets stronger, and in turn further fortifies the hope that together we can change how we imagine teaching and learning both within and beyond formal institutions. The sense of possibility there is often discounted 10-15 years later, but it was real and it was sustaining at the level of the soul.

And as edtech has become more a financial market than a blogging network some of the finer points of the work can get lost. But one thing that remains pretty consistent in my experience is behind any successful, interesting project is a group of creative, committed people working with faculty, students and staff to help them imagine alternatives. This workshop run my Mo and Tierney kind of struck me as an example of that, and I appreciate them bringing in a washed-up edtech like me in to talk (even if I was having trouble conversating), because it sounds like it was a decent starting point to get the attendees excited about what’s possible, that will then be backed up with localized support to will it into being…and then it is no dream!

There is no secret sauce to Domains, it’s all about people on the ground supporting others who want to do something cool (and maybe sometimes not so cool). I love Domains and still believe a basic literacy in the web is an essential part of a 21st century curriculum, but even more important are folks on the ground who can communicate and support this idea—so for those about to rock Domain of One’s Own (or just about any other technology they believe in except all proctoring spyware) we salute you!

_______________________________________

*Luckily I knew folks like Alan and Martha Burtis and Robin De Rosa were going to talk after me, so I could afford to be the weakest link in the chain as the conversations grew stronger as the professionals rolled in.

It was in August 2009, two months after the release of the iPhone 3GS, that the barbarians crashed the gates; from The Online Photographer:

The leading photo sharing site, flickr.com, charts the popularity of the cameras used by its membership. Recently the Apple iPhone has jumped into a virtual tie for first place with the Canon XTi. Furthermore, flickr states on its “Camera Finder” page that it can only detect the camera used about 2/3rds of the time, and that, therefore, cameraphones are under-represented on the graphs. Yikes.

The iPhone would go on to not only be the number one camera on Flickr, but in a far more compelling measure of its impact, create the conditions for Instagram, the photo-sharing network that eclipsed Flickr like Google once eclipsed Yahoo (Yahoo, of course, owned Flickr). Instagram itself was soon acquired by Facebook, which itself had benefited tremendously from the iPhone camera; having a good and ever-improving camera with you everywhere, paired with constant connectivity, transformed photos from memorials for special occasions to, in the words of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, “part of the communication fabric of our daily lives.”

How is it, then, that a company like Facebook, which is mostly used on mobile — i.e. Android or iOS — made 20.3 million reports of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in 2020, while Apple made only 265?¹ After all, there are almost certainly more photos on smartphones than there are on social networks — the former is in large part a superset of the latter.

18 USC § 2258A

U.S. Code Title 18 Part 1 Chapter 110 Section 2258A lays out how companies must handle CSAM (complete text here):

(a)Duty To Report.—

(1)In general.—

(A) Duty.—In order to reduce the proliferation of online child sexual exploitation and to prevent the online sexual exploitation of children, a provider—

(i) shall, as soon as reasonably possible after obtaining actual knowledge of any [CSAM], take the actions described in subparagraph (B); and
(ii) may, after obtaining actual knowledge of any facts or circumstances [suggesting imminent child abuse], take the actions described in subparagraph (B).

(B)I Actions described.—The actions described in this subparagraph are—

(i) providing to the CyberTipline of NCMEC [National Center for Missing & Exploited Children], or any successor to the CyberTipline operated by NCMEC, the mailing address, telephone number, facsimile number, electronic mailing address of, and individual point of contact for, such provider; and
(ii) making a report of such facts or circumstances to the CyberTipline, or any successor to the CyberTipline operated by NCMEC.

There is no escaping this responsibility when and if CSAM is discovered:

(e)Failure To Report.—A provider that knowingly and willfully fails to make a report required under subsection (a)(1) shall be fined—

(1) in the case of an initial knowing and willful failure to make a report, not more than $150,000; and
(2) in the case of any second or subsequent knowing and willful failure to make a report, not more than $300,000.

What is not required is that companies actively seek out CSAM on their services:

(f)Protection of Privacy.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to require a provider to—

(1) monitor any user, subscriber, or customer of that provider;
(2) monitor the content of any communication of any person described in paragraph (1); or
(3) affirmatively search, screen, or scan for facts or circumstances described in sections (a) and (b).

These two provisions get at why Facebook and Apple’s reported numbers have historically been so different: it’s not because there is somehow more CSAM on Facebook than exists on Apple devices, but rather that Facebook is scanning all of the images sent to and over its service, while Apple is not looking at what is in your phone, or on their cloud. From there the numbers make much more sense: Facebook is reporting what it finds, while Apple is, as the title of Section (3) suggests, protecting privacy and simply not looking at images at all.

Apple Protects Children

Last week Apple put up a special page on their website entitled Expanded Protections for Children:

At Apple, our goal is to create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives — while helping them stay safe. We want to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them, and limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).

Apple is introducing new child safety features in three areas, developed in collaboration with child safety experts. First, new communication tools will enable parents to play a more informed role in helping their children navigate communication online. The Messages app will use on-device machine learning to warn about sensitive content, while keeping private communications unreadable by Apple.

Next, iOS and iPadOS will use new applications of cryptography to help limit the spread of CSAM online, while designing for user privacy. CSAM detection will help Apple provide valuable information to law enforcement on collections of CSAM in iCloud Photos.

Finally, updates to Siri and Search provide parents and children expanded information and help if they encounter unsafe situations. Siri and Search will also intervene when users try to search for CSAM-related topics.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball has a good overview of what are in fact three very different initiatives; what unites, them, though, and continues to differentiate Apple’s approach from Facebook’s, is that Apple is scanning content on your device, while Facebook is doing it in the cloud. Apple emphasized repeatedly that this ensured that Apple does not get access to your content. From the “Communications Safety in Messages” section:

Messages uses on-device machine learning to analyze image attachments and determine if a photo is sexually explicit. The feature is designed so that Apple does not get access to the messages.

From the “CSAM Detection” section:

Apple’s method of detecting known CSAM is designed with user privacy in mind. Instead of scanning images in the cloud, the system performs on-device matching using a database of known CSAM image hashes provided by NCMEC and other child safety organizations…This innovative new technology allows Apple to provide valuable and actionable information to NCMEC and law enforcement regarding the proliferation of known CSAM. And it does so while providing significant privacy benefits over existing techniques since Apple only learns about users’ photos if they have a collection of known CSAM in their iCloud Photos account. Even in these cases, Apple only learns about images that match known CSAM.

There are three ways to think about Apple’s approach, both in isolation and relative to a service like Facebook:² the idealized outcome, the worst case outcome, and the likely driver.

Capability Versus Policy

Apple’s idealized outcome solves a lot of seemingly intractable problems. On one hand, CSAM is horrific and Apple hasn’t been doing anything about it; on the other hand, the company has a longstanding commitment to ever increasing amounts of encryption, ideally end-to-end. Apple’s system, if it works precisely as designed, preserves both goals: the company can not only keep end-to-end encryption in Messages, but also add it to iCloud Photos (which is not currently encrypted end-to-end), secure in the knowledge that it is doing its part to not only report CSAM but also help parents look after their children. And, from a business perspective, it means that Apple can continue to not make the massive investments that companies like Facebook have in trust-and-safety teams; the algorithm will take care of it.

That, of course, is the rub: Apple controls the algorithm, both in terms of what it looks for and what bugs it may or may not have, as well as the input, which in the case of CSAM scanning is the database from NCMEC. Apple has certainly worked hard to be a company that users trust, but we already know that that trust doesn’t extend everywhere: Apple has, under Chinese government pressure, put Chinese user iCloud data on state-owned enterprise servers, along with the encryption keys necessary to access it. What happens when China announces its version of the NCMEC, which not only includes the horrific imagery Apple’s system is meant to capture, but also images and memes the government deems illegal?

The fundamental issue — and the first reason why I think Apple made a mistake here — is that there is a meaningful difference between capability and policy. One of the most powerful arguments in Apple’s favor in the 2016 San Bernardino case is that the company didn’t even have the means to break into the iPhone in question, and that to build the capability would open the company up to a multitude of requests that were far less pressing in nature, and weaken the company’s ability to stand up to foreign governments. In this case, though, Apple is building the capability, and the only thing holding the company back is policy.

Then again, Apple’s policy isn’t the only one that matters: both the UK and the EU are moving forward on bills that mandate online service companies proactively look for and report CSAM. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the most important factor behind Apple’s move: the company doesn’t want to give up on end-to-end encryption — and likely wants to expand it — which leaves on-device scanning as the only way to satisfy governments not (just) in China but also the West.

Cloud Versus Device

I think that there is another solution to Apple’s conundrum; what is frustrating from my perspective is that I think the company is already mostly there. Consider the status quo: back in 2020 Reuters reported that Apple decided to not encrypt iCloud backups at the FBI’s request:

Apple Inc. dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices in the company’s iCloud service after the FBI complained that the move would harm investigations, six sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The tech giant’s reversal, about two years ago, has not previously been reported. It shows how much Apple has been willing to help U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite taking a harder line in high-profile legal disputes with the government and casting itself as a defender of its customers’ information.

This has a number of significant implications for Apple’s security claims, and is why earlier this year I ranked iMessage as being less secure than Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger:

iMessage encrypts messages end-to-end by default; however, if you have iCloud backup turned on, your messages can be accessed by Apple (who has the keys for iCloud backups) and, by extension, law enforcement with a warrant. Unlike WhatsApp, though, this is both on by default and cannot be turned off on a granular basis.

This caveat applies to almost everything on your iPhone: if you give in to the never-ending prompts to sign-in to iCloud and its on-by-default backup solution, your data is accessible to Apple and, by extension, law enforcement with a warrant. I actually think this is reasonable! I wrote this when that Reuters report came out:

Go back to what I said above: determined actors will have access to encryption and facial recognition. Anyone trying to argue whether or not these technologies should exist is not living in reality. It follows then, that we should take care to ensure that good actors have access to these technologies too. That means not making them illegal.

Second, though, legitimate societal concerns about the needs of law enforcement and the radicalizing nature of the Internet should be taken seriously. That means we should think very carefully about making encryption the default…This also splits the difference when it comes to principles: users have agency — they can ensure that everything they do is encrypted — while total privacy is available but not given by default.

I actually think that Apple does an excellent job of striking that balance today. When it comes to the iPhone itself, Apple is the only entity that can make it truly secure; no individual can build their own secure enclave that sits at the root of iPhone security. Therefore, they are right to do so: everyone has access to encryption.

From there it is possible to build a fully secure environment: use only encrypted communications, use encrypted backups to a computer secured by its own hardware-based authentication scheme, etc. Taking the slightly easier route, though — iCloud backups, Facebook messaging, etc. — means some degree of vulnerability that, let’s not forget, is sometimes justifiably leveraged. Law enforcement can get a warrant for those backups or chat logs, just as they can install a wire tap.

Again, this isn’t going to stop determined bad actors, but as I noted, nothing is. The question is what of the rest, those that get swept up by the worst sort of communities, and who commit legitimate crimes: what should their defaults be?

I made a similar argument about Facebook’s plans to encrypt-by-default Facebook Messenger conversations, which I opposed, even as I supported encryption-by-choice: I am not anti-encryption, and am in fact very much against mandated backdoors. Every user should have the capability to lock down their devices and their communications; bad actors surely will. At the same time, it’s fair to argue about defaults and the easiest path for users: I think the iPhone being fundamentally secure and iCloud backups being subject to the law is a reasonable compromise.

Apple’s choices in this case, though, go in the opposite direction: instead of adding CSAM-scanning to iCloud Photos in the cloud that they own and operate, Apple is compromising the phone that you and I own and operate, without any of us having a say in the matter. Yes, you can turn off iCloud Photos to disable Apple’s scanning, but that is a policy decision; the capability to reach into a user’s phone now exists, and there is nothing an iPhone user can do to get rid of it.

A far better solution to the “Flickr problem” I started with is to recognize that the proper point of comparison is not the iPhone and Facebook, but rather Facebook and iCloud. One’s device ought to be one’s property, with all of the expectations of ownership and privacy that entails; cloud services, meanwhile, are the property of their owners as well, with all of the expectations of societal responsibility and law-abiding which that entails. It’s truly disappointing that Apple got so hung up on its particular vision of privacy that it ended up betraying the fulcrum of user control: being able to trust that your device is truly yours.

I wrote a follow-up to this Article in this Daily Update.

1. Google made 547k ↩

2. Beyond the fact that it may be illegal  ↩

The gcloud CLI tool has the alpha ability to tail log files - but it's a bit of a pain to setup.

You have to install two extras for it. First, this:

gcloud alpha logging tail

That installs the functionality, but as the documentation will tell you:

To use gcloud alpha logging tail, you need to have Python 3 and the grpcio Python package installed.

Assuming you have Python 3, the problem you have to solve is which Python is the gcloud tool using to run. After digging around in the source code using cat $(which gcloud) I spotted the following:

CLOUDSDK_PYTHON=$(order_python python3 python2 python2.7 python)

So it looks like (on macOS at least) it prefers to use the python3 binary if it can find it.

So this works to install grpcio somewhere it can see it:

python3 -m pip install grpcio

Having done that, you can start running commands. gcloud logging logs list shows a list of logs:

~ % gcloud logging logs list
NAME
projects/datasette-222320/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Factivity
projects/datasette-222320/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fdata_access
projects/datasette-222320/logs/cloudaudit.googleapis.com%2Fsystem_event
projects/datasette-222320/logs/cloudbuild
projects/datasette-222320/logs/clouderrorreporting.googleapis.com%2Finsights
projects/datasette-222320/logs/cloudtrace.googleapis.com%2FTraceLatencyShiftDetected
projects/datasette-222320/logs/run.googleapis.com%2Frequests
projects/datasette-222320/logs/run.googleapis.com%2Fstderr
projects/datasette-222320/logs/run.googleapis.com%2Fstdout
projects/datasette-222320/logs/run.googleapis.com%2Fvarlog%2Fsystem

Then you can use gcloud alpha logging tail projects/datasette-222320/logs/run.googleapis.com%2Frequests to start logging. Only you also need a CLOUDSDK_PYTHON_SITEPACKAGES=1 environment variable so that gcloud knows to look for the grpcio dependency.

CLOUDSDK_PYTHON_SITEPACKAGES=1 \
  gcloud alpha logging tail projects/datasette-222320/logs/run.googleapis.com%2Frequests

The default format is verbose YAML. A log entry looks like this:

httpRequest:
  latency: 0.123684963s
  remoteIp: 66.249.69.240
  requestMethod: GET
  requestSize: '510'
  requestUrl: https://www.niche-museums.com/browse/museums.json?_facet_size=max&country=United+States&_facet=osm_city&_facet=updated&_facet=osm_suburb&_facet=osm_footway&osm_city=Santa+Cruz
  responseSize: '6403'
  serverIp: 142.250.125.121
  status: 200
  userAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
insertId: 611171fe000a38a469d59595
labels:
  instanceId: 00bf4bf02dab164592dbbb9220b56c3ce64cb0f1c1f37812d1d61e851a931e9964ba539c2ede42886773c82662cc28aa858749d2697f537ff7a61e7b
  service: niche-museums
logName: projects/datasette-222320/logs/run.googleapis.com%2Frequests
receiveTimestamp: '2021-08-09T18:20:46.935658405Z'
resource:
  labels:
    configuration_name: niche-museums
    location: us-central1
    project_id: datasette-222320
    revision_name: niche-museums-00039-sur
    service_name: niche-museums
  type: cloud_run_revision
severity: INFO
timestamp: '2021-08-09T18:20:46.669860Z'
trace: projects/datasette-222320/traces/306a0d6e7e055ba66172003a74c926c2

I decided to import into a SQLite database so I could use Datasette to analyze the log files (hooray for facets).

Adding --format json switches the output to JSON - but it's a pretty-printed array of JSON objects, something like this:

[
  {
    "httpRequest": {
      "latency": "0.112114537s",
      "remoteIp": "40.77.167.88",
      "requestMethod": "GET",
      "requestSize": "534",
      "requestUrl": "https://datasette.io/content/repos?forks=0&_facet=homepage&_facet=size&_facet=open_issues&open_issues=3&size=564&_sort=readme_html",
      "responseSize": "72757",
      "serverIp": "216.239.38.21",
      "status": 200,
      "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)"
    },
    "insertId": "6111722f000b5b4c4d4071e2",
    "labels": {
      "instanceId": "00bf4bf02d1d7fe4402c3aff8a34688d9a910e6ee6d2545ceebc1edefb99461481e6d9f9ae8de4e907e3d18b98ea9c7f57b2abb527c8857d9163ed193db766c349a1ee",
      "service": "datasette-io"
    },
    "logName": "projects/datasette-222320/logs/run.googleapis.com%2Frequests",
    "receiveTimestamp": "2021-08-09T18:21:36.061693305Z",
    "resource": {
      "labels": {
        "configuration_name": "datasette-io",
        "location": "us-central1",
        "project_id": "datasette-222320",
        "revision_name": "datasette-io-00416-coy",
        "service_name": "datasette-io"
      },
      "type": "cloud_run_revision"
    },
    "severity": "INFO",
    "timestamp": "2021-08-09T18:21:35.744268Z",
    "trace": "projects/datasette-222320/traces/016d640caf845fbf8709486bc8dff9c7"
  }
]

I want to stream the logs into sqlite-utils using newline-delimited JSON since that can insert while the data is still being tailed.

I ended up using two new jq recipes:

cat example.json | jq -cn --stream 'fromstream(1|truncate_stream(inputs))'

This turns an [{"array": "of objects"}, {"like": "this one"}] into a stream of newline-delimited objects. I found the recipe here - I don't understand it.

As you can see above, the objects are nested. I want them as flat objects so that sqlite-utils insert will create a separate column for each nested value. I used this recipe for that.

The end result was this:

CLOUDSDK_PYTHON_SITEPACKAGES=1 gcloud alpha logging tail \
  projects/datasette-222320/logs/run.googleapis.com%2Frequests \
  --format json \
| jq -cn --stream 'fromstream(1|truncate_stream(inputs))' \
| jq -c '[leaf_paths as $path | {
  "key": $path | join("_"), "value": getpath($path)
}] | from_entries' \
| sqlite-utils insert /tmp/logs.db logs - --nl --alter --batch-size 1

That last line inserts the data into the /tmp/logs.db database file. --nl means "expect newline-delimited JSON", --alter means "add new columns if they are missing", --batch-size 1 means "commit after every record" (so I can see them in Datasette while they are streaming in).

UPDATE: sqlite-utils 3.15 added a --flatten option which you can use instead of that second jq recipe, so this should work instead:

CLOUDSDK_PYTHON_SITEPACKAGES=1 gcloud alpha logging tail \
  projects/datasette-222320/logs/run.googleapis.com%2Frequests \
  --format json \
| jq -cn --stream 'fromstream(1|truncate_stream(inputs))' \
| sqlite-utils insert /tmp/logs.db logs - --nl --alter --batch-size 1 --flatten

The resulting schema looks like this (via sqlite-utils schema /tmp/logs.db):

CREATE TABLE [logs] (
   [httpRequest_latency] TEXT,
   [httpRequest_remoteIp] TEXT,
   [httpRequest_requestMethod] TEXT,
   [httpRequest_requestSize] TEXT,
   [httpRequest_requestUrl] TEXT,
   [httpRequest_responseSize] TEXT,
   [httpRequest_serverIp] TEXT,
   [httpRequest_status] INTEGER,
   [httpRequest_userAgent] TEXT,
   [insertId] TEXT,
   [labels_instanceId] TEXT,
   [labels_service] TEXT,
   [logName] TEXT,
   [receiveTimestamp] TEXT,
   [resource_labels_configuration_name] TEXT,
   [resource_labels_location] TEXT,
   [resource_labels_project_id] TEXT,
   [resource_labels_revision_name] TEXT,
   [resource_labels_service_name] TEXT,
   [resource_type] TEXT,
   [severity] TEXT,
   [timestamp] TEXT,
   [trace] TEXT,
   [httpRequest_referer] TEXT
);

Then I ran datasette /tmp/logs.db to start exploring the logs. Faceting by resource_labels_service_name was particularly useful.

The httpRequest_latency column contains text data that looks like 0.012572683s - thankfully if you cast it to a float the trailing s will be ignored. Here's an example query showing the services with the highest average latency:

select
  resource_labels_service_name,
  avg(cast(httpRequest_latency as float)) as avg_latency,
  count(*)
from
  logs
group by
  resource_labels_service_name
order by
  avg_latency desc

Using the Logs explorer

Alternatively, you can use the Google Cloud logs explorer! It has pretty decent faceted search built in.

Here's a query showing results from that log file:

resource.type="cloud_run_revision"
log_name="projects/datasette-222320/logs/run.googleapis.com%2Frequests"

Run that at https://console.cloud.google.com/logs/query - or here's a link I can use to execute that directly (for the last 7 days): https://console.cloud.google.com/logs/query;query=resource.type%3D%22cloud_run_revision%22%0Alog_name%3D%22projects%2Fdatasette-222320%2Flogs%2Frun.googleapis.com%252Frequests%22;timeRange=P7D;?project=datasette-222320

We in the Purism kernel team maintain a set of patches against the mainline Linux codebase that is released by Linus Thorvalds on a regular basis.

The post Librem 5 support in mainline Linux appeared first on Purism.

The vast majority of keyboards aren’t made with people like me in mind. I’m a one-handed writer. So with the help of Wirecutter keyboard expert and senior staff writer Kimber Streams, I tried out multiple compact mechanical keyboards to find the best one for me.

We gave the Afghan people hope. Briefly. Now we’ve abandoned them to the fate of being overrun by and crushed under the heel of the Taliban.

I get why people wanted to leave. Twenty years is a long time. But there are people in danger here. Leaving them to what’s coming their way isn’t just wrong, it’s cruel; and I’m appalled that we’re going to just stand back and let this happen.

Another generation of Afghans will suffer. And my heart breaks for the girls and women that will have to live (if that’s really what you can call it) under Taliban rule. The hope we had given them, yanked away, is most tragic of all. Things haven’t been perfect under the new government by any means, but they were so much better than under Taliban rule, and there was hope. At least women had rights of any kind. That is about to end.

Our excuses for leaving are weak at best. “It’s expensive, it’s taking too long, why out our troops at risk for them?” Why? Because we promised to help them. We can’t just quit on them because we’re tired of it.

It’s like promising to teach someone to swim then wandering off when they start to drown. We are complicit in what’s happening and, worse, we’re to blame for what’s to come.

While it's possible to understand Apple's motivations behind its decision to enable on-device scanning, the company had a better way to satisfy its societal obligations while preserving user privacy.

It was in August 2009, two months after the release of the iPhone 3GS, that the barbarians crashed the gates; from The Online Photographer:

The leading photo sharing site, flickr.com, charts the popularity of the cameras used by its membership. Recently the Apple iPhone has jumped into a virtual tie for first place with the Canon XTi. Furthermore, flickr states on its “Camera Finder” page that it can only detect the camera used about 2/3rds of the time, and that, therefore, cameraphones are under-represented on the graphs. Yikes.

The iPhone would go on to not only be the number one camera on Flickr, but in a far more compelling measure of its impact, create the conditions for Instagram, the photo-sharing network that eclipsed Flickr like Google once eclipsed Yahoo (Yahoo, of course, owned Flickr). Instagram itself was soon acquired by Facebook, which itself had benefited tremendously from the iPhone camera; having a good and ever-improving camera with you everywhere, paired with constant connectivity, transformed photos from memorials for special occasions to, in the words of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel, “part of the communication fabric of our daily lives.”

How is it, then, that a company like Facebook, which is mostly used on mobile — i.e. Android or iOS — made 20.3 million reports of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) in 2020, while Apple made only 265?¹ After all, there are almost certainly more photos on smartphones than there are on social networks — the former is in large part a superset of the latter.

18 USC § 2258A

U.S. Code Title 18 Part 1 Chapter 110 Section 2258A lays out how companies must handle CSAM (complete text here):

(a)Duty To Report.—

(1)In general.—

(A) Duty.—In order to reduce the proliferation of online child sexual exploitation and to prevent the online sexual exploitation of children, a provider—

(i) shall, as soon as reasonably possible after obtaining actual knowledge of any [CSAM], take the actions described in subparagraph (B); and
(ii) may, after obtaining actual knowledge of any facts or circumstances [suggesting imminent child abuse], take the actions described in subparagraph (B).

(B)I Actions described.—The actions described in this subparagraph are—

(i) providing to the CyberTipline of NCMEC [National Center for Missing & Exploited Children], or any successor to the CyberTipline operated by NCMEC, the mailing address, telephone number, facsimile number, electronic mailing address of, and individual point of contact for, such provider; and
(ii) making a report of such facts or circumstances to the CyberTipline, or any successor to the CyberTipline operated by NCMEC.

There is no escaping this responsibility when and if CSAM is discovered:

(e)Failure To Report.—A provider that knowingly and willfully fails to make a report required under subsection (a)(1) shall be fined—

(1) in the case of an initial knowing and willful failure to make a report, not more than $150,000; and
(2) in the case of any second or subsequent knowing and willful failure to make a report, not more than $300,000.

What is not required is that companies actively seek out CSAM on their services:

(f)Protection of Privacy.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to require a provider to—

(1) monitor any user, subscriber, or customer of that provider;
(2) monitor the content of any communication of any person described in paragraph (1); or
(3) affirmatively search, screen, or scan for facts or circumstances described in sections (a) and (b).

These two provisions get at why Facebook and Apple’s reported numbers have historically been so different: it’s not because there is somehow more CSAM on Facebook than exists on Apple devices, but rather that Facebook is scanning all of the images sent to and over its service, while Apple is not looking at what is in your phone, or on their cloud. From there the numbers make much more sense: Facebook is reporting what it finds, while Apple is, as the title of Section (3) suggests, protecting privacy and simply not looking at images at all.

Apple Protects Children

Last week Apple put up a special page on their website entitled Expanded Protections for Children:

At Apple, our goal is to create technology that empowers people and enriches their lives — while helping them stay safe. We want to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them, and limit the spread of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).

Apple is introducing new child safety features in three areas, developed in collaboration with child safety experts. First, new communication tools will enable parents to play a more informed role in helping their children navigate communication online. The Messages app will use on-device machine learning to warn about sensitive content, while keeping private communications unreadable by Apple.

Next, iOS and iPadOS will use new applications of cryptography to help limit the spread of CSAM online, while designing for user privacy. CSAM detection will help Apple provide valuable information to law enforcement on collections of CSAM in iCloud Photos.

Finally, updates to Siri and Search provide parents and children expanded information and help if they encounter unsafe situations. Siri and Search will also intervene when users try to search for CSAM-related topics.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball has a good overview of what are in fact three very different initiatives; what unites, them, though, and continues to differentiate Apple’s approach from Facebook’s, is that Apple is scanning content on your device, while Facebook is doing it in the cloud. Apple emphasized repeatedly that this ensured that Apple does not get access to your content. From the “Communications Safety in Messages” section:

Messages uses on-device machine learning to analyze image attachments and determine if a photo is sexually explicit. The feature is designed so that Apple does not get access to the messages.

From the “CSAM Detection” section:

Apple’s method of detecting known CSAM is designed with user privacy in mind. Instead of scanning images in the cloud, the system performs on-device matching using a database of known CSAM image hashes provided by NCMEC and other child safety organizations…This innovative new technology allows Apple to provide valuable and actionable information to NCMEC and law enforcement regarding the proliferation of known CSAM. And it does so while providing significant privacy benefits over existing techniques since Apple only learns about users’ photos if they have a collection of known CSAM in their iCloud Photos account. Even in these cases, Apple only learns about images that match known CSAM.

There are three ways to think about Apple’s approach, both in isolation and relative to a service like Facebook:² the idealized outcome, the worst case outcome, and the likely driver.

Capability Versus Policy

Apple’s idealized outcome solves a lot of seemingly intractable problems. On one hand, CSAM is horrific and Apple hasn’t been doing anything about it; on the other hand, the company has a longstanding commitment to ever increasing amounts of encryption, ideally end-to-end. Apple’s system, if it works precisely as designed, preserves both goals: the company can not only keep end-to-end encryption in Messages, but also add it to iCloud Photos (which is not currently encrypted end-to-end), secure in the knowledge that it is doing its part to not only report CSAM but also help parents look after their children. And, from a business perspective, it means that Apple can continue to not make the massive investments that companies like Facebook have in trust-and-safety teams; the algorithm will take care of it.

That, of course, is the rub: Apple controls the algorithm, both in terms of what it looks for, what bugs it may or may not have, and also the inputs, which in the case of CSAM scanning is the database from NCMEC. Apple has certainly worked hard to be a company that users trust, but we already know that that trust doesn’t extend everywhere: Apple has, under Chinese government pressure, put Chinese user iCloud data on state-owned enterprise servers, along with the encryption keys necessary to access it. What happens when China announces its version of the NCMEC, which not only includes the horrific imagery Apple’s system is meant to capture, but also images and memes the government deems illegal?

The fundamental issue — and the first reason why I think Apple made a mistake here — is that there is a meaningful difference between capability and policy. One of the most powerful arguments in Apple’s favor in the 2016 San Bernardino case is that the company didn’t even have the means to break into the iPhone in question, and that to build the capability would open the company up to a multitude of requests that were far less pressing in nature, and weaken the company’s ability to stand up to foreign governments. In this case, though, Apple is building the capability, and the only thing holding the company back is policy.

Then again, Apple’s policy isn’t the only one that matters: both the UK and the EU are moving forward on bills that mandate online service companies proactively look for and report CSAM. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if this were the most important factor behind Apple’s move: the company doesn’t want to give up on end-to-end encryption — and likely wants to expand it — which leaves on-device scanning as the only way to satisfy governments not (just) in China but also the West.

Cloud Versus Device

I think that there is another solution to Apple’s conundrum; what is frustrating from my perspective is that I think the company is already mostly there. Consider the status quo: back in 2020 Reuters reported that Apple decided to not encrypt iCloud backups at the FBI’s request:

Apple Inc. dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices in the company’s iCloud service after the FBI complained that the move would harm investigations, six sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The tech giant’s reversal, about two years ago, has not previously been reported. It shows how much Apple has been willing to help U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite taking a harder line in high-profile legal disputes with the government and casting itself as a defender of its customers’ information.

This has a number of significant implications on Apple’s security claims, and is why earlier this year I ranked iMessage as being less secure than Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook Messenger:

iMessage encrypts messages end-to-end by default; however, if you have iCloud backup turned on, your messages can be accessed by Apple (who has the keys for iCloud backups) and, by extension, law enforcement with a warrant. Unlike WhatsApp, though, this is both on by default and cannot be turned off on a granular basis.

This caveat applies to almost everything on your iPhone: if you give in to the never-ending prompts to sign-in to iCloud and its on-by-default backup solution, your data is accessible to Apple and, by extension, law enforcement with a warrant. I actually think this is reasonable! I wrote this when that Reuters report came out:

Go back to what I said above: determined actors will have access to encryption and facial recognition. Anyone trying to argue whether or not these technologies should exist is not living in reality. It follows then, that we should take care to ensure that good actors have access to these technologies too. That means not making them illegal.

Second, though, legitimate societal concerns about the needs of law enforcement and the radicalizing nature of the Internet should be taken seriously. That means we should think very carefully about making encryption the default…This also splits the difference when it comes to principles: users have agency — they can ensure that everything they do is encrypted — while total privacy is available but not given by default.

I actually think that Apple does an excellent job of striking that balance today. When it comes to the iPhone itself, Apple is the only entity that can make it truly secure; no individual can build their own secure enclave that sits at the root of iPhone security. Therefore, they are right to do so: everyone has access to encryption.

From there it is possible to build a fully secure environment: use only encrypted communications, use encrypted backups to a computer secured by its own hardware-based authentication scheme, etc. Taking the slightly easier route, though — iCloud backups, Facebook messaging, etc. — means some degree of vulnerability that, let’s not forget, is sometimes justifiably leveraged. Law enforcement can get a warrant for those backups or chat logs, just as they can install a wire tap.

Again, this isn’t going to stop determined bad actors, but as I noted, nothing is. The question is what of the rest, those that get swept up by the worst sort of communities, and who commit legitimate crimes: what should their defaults be?

I made a similar argument about Facebook’s plans to encrypt-by-default Facebook Messenger conversations, which I opposed, even as I supported encryption-by-choice: I am not anti-encryption, and am in fact very much against mandated backdoors. Every user should have the capability to lock down their devices and their communications; bad actors surely will. At the same time, it’s fair to argue about defaults and the easiest path for users: I think the iPhone being fundamentally secure and iCloud backups being subject to the law is a reasonable compromise.

Apple’s choices in this case, though, go in the opposite direction: instead of adding CSAM-scanning to iCloud Photos in the cloud that they own-and-operate, Apple is compromising the phone that you and I own-and-operate, without any of us having a say in the matter. Yes, you can turn off iCloud Photos to disable Apple’s scanning, but that is a policy decision; the capability to reach into a user’s phone now exists, and there is nothing an iPhone user can do to get rid of it.

A far better solution to the “Flickr problem” I started with is to recognize that the proper point of comparison is not the iPhone and Facebook, but rather Facebook and iCloud. One’s device ought be one’s property, with all of the expectations of ownership and privacy that entails; cloud services, meanwhile, are the property of their owners as well, with all of the expectations of societal responsibility and law-abiding which that entails. It’s truly disappointing that Apple got so hung up on its particular vision of privacy that it ended up betraying the fulcrum of user control: being able to trust that your device is truly yours.

1. Google made 547k ↩

2. Beyond the fact that it may be illegal  ↩

Subscription Information

Member: Roland Tanglao

Manage your account

Transmission

This study took COVID patients and counted the virus particles they emitted (well, RNA pieces). They found four interesting things:

•  Being quiet keeps most of your viruses to yourself.
• A few people were more dangerous when talking than singing.
• Most of the viral load came from fine aerosol particles. 
• There was a huge variation between people in how much virus they exhaled. 

Vaccines

Israel has started giving boosters to its older population because they think immunity is waning. (Reminder: they used a three-week dosing interval, not a 12-week or 7-week interval like we’ve mostly used in BC.) This tweet says that it’s effective (it shows cases per 100k in those over 60, with green for double-vaxxed, red for unvaxxed, purple for thrice-vaxxed):

(Note: the vaxxed rate is higher than the unvaxxed rate because the outbreak started in highly-vaxxed areas which were kind of separate from the unvaxxed areas. The unvaxxed areas are now catching up.)

This preprint says that the Phase 2 results for Medicago were good. (Medicago is a Canadian company making a vax with the aid of a plant that’s a relative of tobacco.)

Long COVID/Kids

Buried in this mostly-anecdotes article about Long COVID in kids are reports that in two UK studies:

• Study1: 9.8% of 2-to-11 y/os and 13% of 12-to-16 y/os still had symptoms at 5 weeks after COVID-19. 7.4% of 2-to-11 y/os and 8.2% of 12-to-16 y/os still had symptoms at 12 weeks.
• Study2: 4.4% of kids had symptoms >4 weeks after COVID-19, versus ~1% with non-COVID-19 respiratory illnesses. About 2% had symptoms after 8 weeks.

Press Briefing

I didn’t actually watch the press briefing, but this tweet says that there wasn’t much news aside from that the province is now allowing a second dose at 4 weeks across the province. (They had shortened the interval in the Okanagan.)

Mitigation Measures

The Americans are coming! This article says that there was a big lineup by 7AM this morning at the Peace Arch crossing going north.

This blog post argues that we can’t vaccinate our way out of the pandemic. I can’t argue with the math, but the case rates are in fact a LOT lower in places with higher vax rate. From this tweet:

I don’t have hard, aggregated numbers for the vax rate by health authority, but eyeballing from the Surveillance Dashboard, it looks like the Lower Mainland’s rate varied from the high sixties to high seventies; the Okanagan looks like it varies from the high fifties to low seventies.

But suppose the blog post is correct, and we can’t vaccinate our way out of this. There is another way to increase the herd’s immunity, and that’s to give boosters. That’s good from a immediate, selfish point of view, but it’s absolutely the wrong thing to do from a global point of view.

Statistics

Round number alert! BC has given more than seven million doses now.

Fri/Sat: 422 new cases
Sat/Sun: 364 new cases
Sun/Mon: 293 new cases

Over the weekend, +5 deaths. Currently 68 in hospital / 20 in ICU, 3,036 active cases, 148,066 recovered.

We have 598,742 doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 21.2 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more doses than we’d received by 20 days ago.

We have 554,441 mRNA doses in fridges; we’ll use it up in 19.7 days at last week’s rate. We’ve given more doses than we’d received by 20 days ago.

93.1% of the people who had gotten a first dose 7 weeks ago (the previous allowed shortest interval) have gotten a second dose.

88.9% of the people who had gotten a first dose 4 weeks ago (the current allowed shortest interval) have gotten a second dose.

85.6% of all the people who have gotten a first dose have gotten a second dose.

Charts

First up, an acknowledgement that I haven’t written anything here for a year. That makes me a bad blogger. As well as this being the longest break in gigs since I was in my early teens (I literally played in more school orchestra gigs when I played violin than I’ve had actual shows in the last 18 months) it’s been one of not writing here either. For those that know, you’ll be all to familiar with the story of my ongoing PhD and how that’s taking all my writing time, but as I need to do some thinking about this topic right here, I may as well do it out loud. That said, this may be a very long post! 

Sheila Chandra just shared this post to Facebook: “Jessamyn Stanley’s ‘Yoke’ Breaks Down Being Black In The Thin, White Yoga World” – I read it because I read pretty much anything Sheila shares. She’s a brilliant source of thought-provoking articles, news and commentary. And for whatever set of reasons, the FB algorithm actually lets me see a fair amount of what she posts…

There’s so much in the article that’s a vital read, so many areas in which people are marginalised and then looked at like they’re insane for raising it as an issue. Her story of being (in her words) a black, fat, queer woman in the world of yoga is as sad and enraging as it is depressingly predictable in the all-consuming fact of white supremacy and the extreme cultural appropriation of a millennia old Indian practice co-opted by rich, thin, white people. Read the whole thing…

However, the bit I want to address here is the quote in the extract from her book about social media, which though written about Yoga could just as easily have been written word for word about music. Here’s the extract:

“Teaching yoga on social media means fighting with your ego every day. Praying that it doesn’t eventually swell so large that you turn into a blimp. It means checking, constantly checking. It means posting, constantly posting. It means creating, constantly creating. But always with the other person in mind, always with your followership riding shotgun. The follower begins to color your inner sight. It becomes hard to see yourself without them. It’s hard to know yourself without them. It means constantly thinking of ways to do better, to do more than the other guy. It’s a never-ending state of comparison-no amount of work is ever enough and the idea of “good enough” becomes a fantastical myth. I don’t think it’s possible to work in social media without these feelings eventually rising to the surface. Frankly, I don’t think you can engage with social media at all without eventually arriving on this page.”

The horrendous contradiction between making ‘content’ to try and boost all those social media metrics that hopefully eventually lead to you getting paid (and may be part of the reason why you get gigs in this age of Numbers), and trying to put forward a presentation of self that speaks of your artistry, your integrity, your creative flair and passion… That absurd conflict between the need to self-promote and the idea that the stuff you’re promoting is free from the corrupting influence of the mess that is social media… The blandness of so much commentary on Facebook and Instagram, the obviousness of so much that happens politically, and the simple observation that the most radical of choices are the ones we don’t get to see, because the radicalism is in the choice to post things that don’t feed the algorithm, or even more so, to refuse to engage at all. The choice to be ignored rather than present an algorithmically-defined  version of ourselves.

There is in this a second layer of corruption, that of our perception of audience. This is, I imagine where yoga and music might diverge. Perhaps not. There is some degree to which no matter how far we desire to de-commodify our practice as musicians, we’re ultimately making things that have a value, and we’re hoping to amplify that value, whether it’s the value of listening, the value of buying, the value of our audience branding themselves with merch and logos, the value of a concert ticket and the experience it represents as well as the value of talking about it afterwards, often resourced by us sharing the fumes of the experience and allowing them to circulate to extend the life of the show beyond its temporal constraints… We’re in the business of creating value, but we’re also in a far more complex relationship with our audience than that of supplier and consumer.

Stuart Hall wrote 40 years ago about the way that audience response feeds back into mass media, about audience reception being cyclical not linear (he broke it down into four stages: production, circulation, distribution/consumption and reproduction.) and it’s clear that audience reception and ‘use’ feeds back into our work, how we understand our work, how we relate what we do to our peers. Not just in terms of ‘success’ metrics but in terms of utility, the observable use that people find in our work. So that duality of ‘unfettered creation’ and ‘grasping desire for bigger social media numbers as a representation of audience and meaning’ is nonsense. The audience for our work is a vital part of the work itself, but perhaps we’re misunderstanding the degree to which they are actively present in the feedback which influences the kind of art we make.

In social media contexts, sharing is an act not just of re-distribution, but of alignment (sometimes in the inverse – sharing awful things to highlight our awareness of their awfulness…), and public reactions to things can hold multiple meanings and carry multiple layers of significance, depending on the context, the thing being commented on, the person commenting and our understanding of their relationship to us and the field we’re working in, our anticipation of how other people will interpret what they’ve said, even the use of specific emojis (yup, there’s a whole field of theory devoted to the semiotics of emojis, go look it up). And the thought that someone might share something without our knowing is.. well, unthinkable. Imagine somebody talking about me and me not being able to track it?? This is why so many of the native sharing tools have been added to networks, so we can generate more metrics with which to assume and interpret the meaning in those actions. Which in true Pavlovian style can lead us to replicate the successful patterns, a mode of engagement that leads inexorably towards a feed of selfies (smile and look into the camera, you’ll get more likes) and memes (who cares that they have literally nothing to do with your art, life, values or even sense of humour they get HUNDREDS OF LIKES!) The signal to noise of social media appears to worsen year on year as all the old memes stay in circulation (occasionally diminishing in fidelity as native shares become screengrabs in an attempt to remove a watermark and falsely imply originality…?) and new memes arrive.

But dealing with the fact that to hold onto your creative uniqueness might mean you have to be ‘bad’ at social media, to miss out on the stuff that gets other people views and likes, that leaves some of your posts languishing in ways that feel ignored despite the fact that they are connecting with exactly the people they need to reach in ways that are far more significant than a 1000 memes to try and game the algorithm – none of that undermines the rest of the ways in which your audience are absolutely vital to your work and your understanding of it. That audience may even arrive with you through social media, they may find you thanks to those same hateful algorithmic fuckeries that leave us feeling exploited or worse, ignored.

The mistake is to see social media as the end goal, to see the numbers as enough. Nowhere is this more apparent for musicians than YouTube and Spotify, the twin destinations for people craving viewer figures that are indistinguishable from phone numbers if you hope to make a living from the direct financial return. Both reward quite specific modes of creative work, both have led to changes in the modes of creative practice for musicians through the kind of actions they foster. In the case of YouTube, that’s been an explicit aim, to foster particular kinds of engagement in order to show people more and more ads, and to gather more and more data about those users. With Spotify, the consequential shifts in the way people make music seem to be largely be driven by hard economics (people need not to skip in the first 30 seconds for the track to get paid, so better not have a 63 second intro, eh?), as well as listening happening in a context where the next thing is always a click away. Add to that the promise of riches if you land on a genre or purpose-specific playlist (the sweet, sweet easy money of landing on a sleep playlist!) and you’ve got yourself a context in which the invitation to use ones creative skills to meet the needs of the market is there for all to see.

And, let’s be clear, that’s not a bad thing to do. There’s nothing remotely evil about musicians making music for a market. Music as professional craft is the same as any other skill at work in capitalism, whether it’s customer service or accounting. We can use musical training and the skills of cultural observation to make music for specific requirements. Music libraries the world over are full of work by people who excel at doing just that. Many of those tracks you hear at the end of hit use TV shows are written by people targeting those very slots, with publishers who know how to get the tracks to the right music supervisors. It’s a job, and it’s OK. As much as we’d like to be able to opt-out of capitalism, it’s a totalising system, so probably best not to hate on people for not starving, eh?

What’s weird about social media is that these B to B – business to business – transactions around music making get recast as B to C – business to consumer – mythologies, and music makers of all stripes get lost in the translation. And here the issues arise, when we have fewer distinct metrics of success, fewer ways of measuring meaning, we end up with a cultural hegemony of chasing social media numbers and specific forms of ‘success’ as monolithic within the creative industries. I’m amazed by the number of musicians who like the deer in Peter Rabbit just stare blankly  into the headlights of the music economy and say ‘SPPOOOTTIFFYYYYY’, then set about doing what everyone else does on Social media to find an audience. Ignoring, of course, the massive, expensive marketing campaigns that are so often behind ‘viral’ successes…

While we’re on this, it’s important to remember that non of this is new, as David Hesmondhalgh has written, the streaming economy is worse than it could be, but not demonstrably worse than what came before. For many of us, what we miss isn’t the old industry but the VERY short period, from maybe 2007-2011/12 when social media felt way more meritocratic. It wasn’t, of course, in that it rewarded pushy, confident, shouty, funny people the same as any marketing context does. And there no version of reality where music by pushy people is demonstrably better or more worthy of attention than music by introverts, but during those years when we were inadvertently training the algorithms that Facebook and Twitter and Instagram would sell back to use from 2012 onwards, it felt like we were onto something new, something that really did cut through the stranglehold of the major labels on the attention economy in music.

But it was very shortlived. So we’re back where we were before the Internet, with those independents who manage to avoid the honeytrap of pursuing virality doing their best to make work sustainably, to keep making work they are happy to have represent them in the world. And hopefully to find an audience they can communicate with and listen to outside of the toxicity of social media environments, where the meaning and context and beauty and sheer usefulness of it all is absolutely in spite of the way its been built, not because of it. We’re resourceful animals and so much that is wonderful still happens on social media.

For me, I’d be genuinely lost without my audience. Actually, not lost, just different. I’d be distracted, I’d have a far less nuanced frame of reference for what the purpose is for all this tinkering with technology, for all the technique and harmony learning and practice. It could all just end up as 20 second Insta-videos, and endless stream of flyers with no gig, as Mike Watt might say. Maybe I’d end up spending time learning other people’s music rather than making my own, in the absence of any way to understand its value beyond these four walls. But the audience, my audience, specifically my Bandcamp subscription audience, are there as a reminder to make things, to land the plane, to tell the story of why this stuff exists, to give an account of why it wasn’t deleted, scrapped, rolled into a ball of bytes and recycled into something new. Why this? Why now? ‘Because people on Instagram like fast bass playing’ isn’t enough. it was never enough, it will never be enough. For me.

No mistake, that shit is as beguiling as it is toxic, and it’s the environment we occupy. Whenever there is a crossover in what I make and what distracted bass-owners want to see on Instagram (usually because ScottsBassLessons share it ) I wonder if I should do more of that, if Pavlov’s chops should be flexed to gather more into the fold. But I know that it’s an over-served field. There are enough videos for people who like that stuff, whether they know it or not. It’s a space that distracts, that stops me from doing what I care about, and stops me from connecting with that audience who give meaning and context to the work, who tell me what it means to them, how they use it, who invite me to Do My Thing. One of the ways I try to keep my head clear is to have mini-manifestos for what I’m trying to do. They’re more for me than anyone else, but making them public helps with accountability – “trying to make music that’s important without pretending I’m special”, “making the music that I think should be in the world but isn’t” – that sort of thing. Even the strapline from my website started out here – “the soundtrack to the day you wish you’d had” – an invitation to myself to make music imbued with hope.

If you make work that is for anyone but you (I’m suspicious of anyone who says they make music just for themselves, purely because if I know they make music, then they’ve chosen to at least talk about it elsewhere…) you may find yourself in need of some time to consider who it is for and how to find them. The economics of social media push ever further towards an understanding of audiences as a massive crowd of faceless avatars, who need understanding through metadata and ad revenue matrices, who can be reached through shared interests and the pages they’ve liked on Facebook. But if your tribe is small, or strange, or disparate, or heterogeneous, or you just want to say HI to them, you’ll need to look elsewhere, to do the work to swim upstream, to divert energy and attention away from the social media waterfall.

Keep your head, and if you need to talk it over, find likeminded friends to hold you to account and push you to find your soul in the midst of all the metrics. And come find me on Bandcamp.

The local Democratic City Committee convened a Disciplinary Committee, just for me! They tell me that they have devoted more than 100 hours this summer to compiling a dossier of my offenses.

If I apologize at once for my all my crimes, whatever they imagine them to be, and if I express contrition and remorse, and if I join them in the serenity prayer, they say they might possibly show mercy.

My offense, as far as I can learn, is that I have hurt people’s feelings. I also stand accused of being loud, argumentative, of raising my voice, of gesturing or gesticulating when I speak, of obstinacy, of using big words, and of being hard to understand. I am, they say, too inclined to believe myself right, too critical of officials and party officers when they are wrong, and I manipulate obscure details of law and procedure.

All this sounds hauntingly familiar. Loud, obstinate, argumentative? Gesturing and gesticulating and difficult to understand? Excessively concerned with ritual and law? Where have we all heard this before?

Hi, Fagan! I never thought my neighbors would look at me and see you! And good day to you, Mr. Shylock. Welcome to the new middle ages.

My great and terrible offense against the Democratic Party, it seems, is that I have sometimes engaged in policy discussions and political bargaining! Or, perhaps I have engaged in policy discussions while Jewish. Or, to be scrupulously fair, perhaps the objection is that, in the course of these political discussions, I’ve behaved Jewishly.

Of course, there is no rule against any of this. Those inconvenient rules concern things I have not done: endorsing Republicans, misusing stationery, committing actual felonies. (One might bring an interesting case that the Disciplinary Committee infringes the rule on misuse of Party resources, but even thinking that is probably a crime, right? )

Sure: I’m sometimes dramatic, often long-winded, occasionally cantankerous. (Look at this!) I am inclined to interrupt. I’m impatient with fools and contemptuous of frauds. I sometimes consider my opinion to be correct. No doubt my mother would be very sorry to hear how badly I turned out, but my mother died eighteen months ago. I cannot see that this is anyone else’s business.

Our government still holds captive children stolen from refugee parents. The West of our land is on fire. One of our two political parties is in a state of open insurrection. Police murder black citizens with impunity. A terrible plague has killed a half million and continues unabated. Yet the most important priority of the Democratic Party in a city of 60,000 as it approaches municipal elections is, apparently, me.

I wonder why?

Our local Democratic Disciplinary Committee has now demanded my prompt response to "six specific allegations." Here’s a sample of two, in their entirety: (We'll discuss the others another time.)

• Seeing your perspective as the only right way
• Being unwilling to examine your impact on both individuals and the whole group

These are not offenses against the Democratic Party: they are character flaws. Eleanor Roosevelt was a good Democrat: did she sometimes see her perspective as the only right way? How about Bella Abzug? Shirley Chisholm? The modern Democratic Party was born in a convention speech that ended: "You shall not crucify Mankind upon a Cross Of Gold!" Does that strike you as a model of modesty and open-mindedness?

Worse: these are matters of belief. How could anyone objectively prove their willingness to examine their impact? How would you know they were sincere? What evidence could they provide? This is a religious test: I am to be compelled to swear that I believe these things or I shall be removed from the Party position to which the voters of my Ward elected me.

Worse still: this could appear to be corrupt. The chair of the Disciplinary Committee runs some sort of “restorative justice” business that sells counseling services based on “examining your impact on others.” It seems I must provide good advertising and offer suitable sacrifice on the altar of this cult, or I shall be cast out to make, with halting steps and slow, my solitary way into the wilderness.

The Democratic Party is a party: a vast collection of disparate people and interests who, in general, agree to support each other in matters otherwise indifferent. Democrats are saints and sinners, wise and foolish, brave and timid. Some Democrats worship an awesome God, and some coach Little League. In the 2004 speech that made a president, Barack Obama recalled "the true genius of America — a faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles." One of those simple dreams was “That we can participate in the political process without fear of retribution.” Another was “That we can say what we think, write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door.”

The Malden Democrats should be ashamed.

Image: Democrats, always models of introspection and humble open-mindedness, reflect on the nomination of William Jennings Bryan and solemnly ponder the harm they might have inflicted on Eastern bankers and other millionaires. McLure’s Magazine, April 1900.

We are pleased to announce a new, major privacy enhancement to Firefox’s cookie handling that lets you fully erase your browser history for any website. Today’s new version of Firefox Strict Mode lets you easily delete all cookies and supercookies that were stored on your computer by a website or by any trackers embedded in it.

Building on Total Cookie Protection, Firefox 91’s new approach to deleting cookies prevents hidden privacy violations and makes it easy for you to see which websites are storing information on your computer.

When you decide to tell Firefox to forget about a website, Firefox will automatically throw away all cookies, supercookies and other data stored in that website’s “cookie jar”. This “Enhanced Cookie Clearing” makes it easy to delete all traces of a website in your browser without the possibility of sneaky third-party cookies sticking around.

What data websites are storing in your browser

Browsing the web leaves data behind in your browser. A site may set cookies to keep you logged in, or store preferences in your browser. There are also less obvious kinds of site data, such as caches that improve performance, or offline data which allows web applications to work without an internet connection. Firefox itself also stores data safely on your computer about sites you have visited, including your browsing history or site-specific settings and permissions.

Firefox allows you to clear all cookies and other site data for individual websites. Data clearing can be used to hide your identity from a site by deleting all data that is accessible to the site. In addition, it can be used to wipe any trace of having visited the site from your browsing history.

Why clearing this data can be difficult

To make matters more complicated, the websites that you visit can embed content, such as images, videos and scripts, from other websites. This “cross-site” content can also read and write cookies and other site data.

Let’s say you have visited facebook.com, comfypants.com and mealkit.com. All of these sites store data in Firefox and leave traces on your computer. This data includes typical storage like cookies and localStorage, but also site settings and cached data, such as the HTTP cache. Additionally, comfypants.com and mealkit.com embed a like button from facebook.com.

Firefox Strict Mode includes Total Cookie Protection, where the cookies and data stored by each website on your computer are confined to a separate cookie jar. In Firefox 91, Enhanced Cookie Clearing lets you delete all the cookies and data for any website by emptying that cookie jar. Illustration: Megan Newell and Michael Ham.

Embedded third-party resources complicate data clearing. Before Enhanced Cookie Clearing, Firefox cleared data only for the domain that was specified by the user. That meant that if you were to clear storage for comfypants.com, Firefox deleted the storage of comfypants.com and left the storage of any sites embedded on it (facebook.com) behind. Keeping the embedded storage of facebook.com meant that it could identify and track you again the next time you visited comfypants.com.

How Enhanced Cookie Clearing solves this problem

Total Cookie Protection, built into Firefox, makes sure that facebook.com can’t use cookies to track you across websites. It does this by partitioning data storage into one cookie jar per website, rather than using one big jar for all of facebook.com’s storage. With Enhanced Cookie Clearing, if you clear site data for comfypants.com, the entire cookie jar is emptied, including any data facebook.com set while embedded in comfypants.com.

Now, if you click on Settings > Privacy and Security > Cookies and Site Data > Manage Data, Firefox no longer shows individual domains that store data. Instead, Firefox lists a cookie jar for each website you have visited. That means you can easily recognize and remove all data a website has stored on your computer, without having to worry about leftover data from third parties embedded in that website. Here is how it looks:

In Firefox’s Privacy and Security Settings, you can manage cookies and other site data stored on your computer. In Firefox 91 ETP Strict Mode, Enhanced Cookie Clearing ensures that all data for any site you choose has been completely removed.

How to Enable Enhanced Cookie Clearing

In order for Enhanced Cookie Clearing to work, you need to have Strict Tracking Protection enabled. Once enabled, Enhanced Cookie Clearing will be used whenever you clear data for specific websites. For example, when using “Clear cookies and site data” in the identity panel (lock icon) or in the Firefox preferences. Find out how to clear site data in Firefox.

If you not only want to remove a site’s cookies and caches, but want to delete it from history along with any data Firefox has stored about it, you can use the “Forget About This Site” option in the History menu:

Firefox’s History menu lets you clear all history from your computer of any site you have visited. Starting in Firefox 91 in ETP Strict Mode, Enhanced Cookie Clearing ensures that third-party cookies that were stored when you visited that site are deleted as well.

Thank you

We would like to thank the many people at Mozilla who helped and supported the development and deployment of Enhanced Cookie Clearing, including Steven Englehardt, Stefan Zabka, Tim Huang, Prangya Basu, Michael Ham, Mei Loo, Alice Fleischmann, Tanvi Vyas, Ethan Tseng, Mikal Lewis, and Selena Deckelmann.

The post Firefox 91 Introduces Enhanced Cookie Clearing appeared first on Mozilla Security Blog.

Just in time for Summer.

I can’t wait to get this new Elementary release going on my aging netbook–and, perhaps, one of those nice Ryzen-powered compact desktops you can build around their 5x00G APUs.

A month ago, I built a personal search engine called Monocle that let me search through a trove of personal information I’ve saved over time, from notes to journal entries to bookmarks and tweets. Shortly thereafter, I switched my default search engine in my web browser from Google to Monocle, marking the start of my slow descent into the fascinating rabbit hole that is transmogrifying my web browser into my best, most flexible, most versatile tool for thinking, learning, and remembering.

A couple of weeks later, I built and started using Revery, a browser extension that shows quick summaries and topically related notes and bookmarks from my collection whenever I’m reading anything on the Web.

Living with these small bits of customization and intelligence scattered throughout my browser, I’m increasingly convinced that the future of the web browser is the best tool – nay, medium – for thought.

This conviction comes from a myriad of ideas and realizations, but most significant among them are three insights I’ve discovered while building and living with these projects for the last month:

1. Medium for thought, not just a tool
2. Information lives outside of tools
3. To surf the Web, you must first understand it

At the end, I’ll try to bring these ideas together to muse a little on what I want to see as the future of the browser.

Medium for thought, not just a tool

In Designing a better thinking-writing medium, I wrote on the difference between a tool and a medium:

A tool is something that takes an existing workflow, and makes it more efficient. A nail is an efficient way of holding pieces of wood together; a to-do app is an efficient way of remembering your responsibilities. A medium, on the other hand, gives us new agency or power by which we can do something we couldn’t do before.

As with any dichotomy, there are grey areas. Powerful, effective tools can become mediums and enablers too. The graphical computer user interface wasn’t just a better way to write scientific simulations or data processing systems – it also became a new medium for creative work. Programming languages began history as a more efficient way to store and maintain punchcard programs, but a half-century of innovation has made it a medium for expressing programs that couldn’t be written before.

Despite the renewed focus I see in the community of people and companies trying to build better tools for thought, I think much of our work is still confined to tool-making. That is, most of our efforts are about creating more automatic, more efficient ways to do what we already know how to do – spaced repetition, Zettelkasten, journaling, and so on. We are busy making more effective command-line apps for thought, rather than dreaming up graphical interfaces.

Building a tool is a relatively straightforward affair. We can look around at existing workflows and needs that people have, and design some set of features around the workflows and needs that we observe.

However, to build an enabling medium that’s more than a single-purpose tool, it isn’t simply enough to look at existing workflows and build tools around them. To design a good creative medium, we can’t solve for a particular use case. The best mediums are instead collections of generic, multi-purpose components that mesh together well to let the user construct their own solutions. For example, Microsoft Excel is ostensibly a tool for calculation, but it’s also a medium for manipulating data in a 2-D grid for lots of other use cases, from organizing a budget to collecting a poll to even creating simple graphics. This flexibility comes from the fact that Excel is really just composed of a few powerful primitive components: the 2-D grid of cells, formulas that can reference other cells, and a responsive programming model that lets the whole table change anytime a value somewhere changes.

Designing a medium for thought requires that we discover what these primitive components of a thinking medium should be. Should there be some sense of geometry and space? How important should text be, against drawings and images? How should people collaborate and share their thoughts? I propose that the solution to these questions are not an opinionated tool with a “Share” button and a rigid way to use an image in a project, but something with a collection of capabilities that happen to include inserting and positioning text and images, sharing and collaborating on those objects on the page, and connecting ideas. These capabilities should work well together, to leave room for any combination of use cases. The line here can be blurry, so I don’t think it’s worthwhile to argue whether any particular tool is a good tool or a good medium, but in the future, I want to see more mediums like Excel, Google Docs, and Figma that seem like multi-purpose canvases that leave room for creativity, and fewer tools like Zoom, Slack, and of course the venerable web browser of today that lock you into particular use cases and make you feel like you need to “learn how to use” the thing.

The current state web browsers is particularly damning from this perspective. Web browsers have access to such a treasure trove of valuable, often well-structured information about what we learn and how we think, what interests we have, and who we talk to. Rather than trying to take that information and let us build workflows out of them, browsers remain a strictly utilitarian tool – a rectangular window into documents and apps that play dumb, ignorant of the valuable information that transits through them every day. I think we can do better.

Information lives outside of tools

Once I started using my personal search engine, Monocle, day-to-day, I made an observation about how Monocle seemed different than most of my other software tools. I wrote on my newsletter:

Every productivity app company these days seems to embrace the phrase “second brain,” as in “make X app your second brain.” One of my big takeaways from using Monocle on a daily basis for the last week has been that no single app can be my second brain. There are going to be parts of my life that are inherently spread out across different apps. For example, there’s a huge amount of knowledge sitting in my email inbox and my blog, and there are some things I only remember because I tweeted about it once, or recorded in a quick journal entry. There are ideas saved in text messages and contacts. “Notes apps,” it turns out, are not the only places where knowledge lives. And a true “second brain”, or whatever you want to call it, needs to recognize that and let you wield its magic over all of your digital footprint.

Most of us don’t realize just how much the “app-centric” mindset is ingrained into us, until we get a chance to think in a “problem-centric” way free from the limitations of apps. One of my most frequent kinds of search on Monocle is a search for people – people whose names I vaguely remember, people whom I’ve never heard of but might have been mentioned in a news article, people whose birthdays might be coming up. Before Monocle, to find some information about a person, my first thought would have been “What app did I write that down in? Should I check my messages or my contacts?” I might even have given up, after searching a couple of apps without finding the result I was looking for. With Monocle, the question doesn’t need to be asked. I just search for the right person, and Monocle searches across all my data.

If we want to organize information that flows through our lives, we simply can’t restrict our design space to be a single product or app. No matter how great a note-taking app is, my emails are going to live outside of it. No matter how seamless the experience in my contacts app, my text conversations are going to live outside of it. We should acknowledge this fundamental limitation of the “note-taking app” approach to building tools for thought, and shift our focus away from building such siloed apps to designing something that lives on top of these smaller alcoves of personal knowledge to help us organize it regardless of its provenance.

If we want to build a software system that can organize information across apps, what better place to start than the one piece of software that has access to it all, where most of us live and work nearly all the time? I think the browser is a rich place to build experiments in this space, and my personal experience building Monocle and Revery support this idea so far.

To surf the Web, you must first understand it

One of my perennial complaints about the current crop of “tools for thought” has been that most of them aren’t really about thinking per se, just about improving memory. We can take down information into apps like Roam Research or Notion and recall them easily later, but it’s an overstatement to call them tools for thought. Recollection is such a small, basic part of thinking! There is so much more to thinking than simply remembering something accurately. I think we can acknowledge the benefits these apps bring while also admitting that better tools for thought should help us do more with ideas than just remember and recall.

Even when using the best of these apps, it’s up to the human users to manually annotate every single connection, every single hierarchy, and every single highlight and summary we want to remember about what we write. Humans are still doing most of the “thinking” work. It’s as if we had invented a “calculator” that was purely a record of the results of our arithmetic, rather than a machine that performed calculations. Sure, a record of our computation is helpful, but it’s hardly an effective calculator. It almost feels disingenuous to say that this current generation of tools help us think. I think it’s more accurate to say they encourage us to think with the promise of perfect recall, but we are not yet living amongst tools that truly help us think better thoughts, faster.

So, what are the building blocks of a powerful thinking medium that can actually help us think, more than just recall? For a tool that has such broad access to information like a web browser, I think a critical piece of the puzzle is better machine understanding of language.

Most existing tools and browsers treat web pages and pieces of notes like complete black boxes of information. These tools know how to scan for keywords, and they have access to the metadata we use to tag our information like hashtags and timestamps, but unlike a human, most current tools don’t try to peer into the contents of our notes or reading materials and operate with an understanding of our information.

With ratcheting progress in machine understanding of language, I think we have good high-quality building blocks to start building thinking mediums and information systems that operate with some understanding of our ideas themselves, rather than simply “this is some text”.

Take my custom browser extension Revery as an example. I’ve been using it as the testing ground for some of my own ideas about what these tools should be able to do. While it doesn’t take advantage of any of the more recent advancements in NLP, its current capabilities are still changing how I browse the web. For any webpage I visit, Revery currently:

• Scans the page and surfaces information from my personal search index that might be topically relevant to what I’m reading. For example, on an article about South Korea’s economic and cultural ascent, Revery surfaced my bookmarks on parallel stories from Taiwan and Singapore, letting me contextualize the current article.
• Provides a quick extractive summary of long articles for me to scan before I decide to spend time reading the rest of the page.

In addition, Revery could in the future pick out important keywords and topics from the page and automatically search my search engine for them, or help me spot key people and places I know that appear on the page.

Because all of these experiments are grounded in my web browser rather than any particular application, these tricks and workflows work on any website, including other notes applications. I could visit my Ideaflow notes or someone else’s Roam graph and take advantage of these capabilities of my browser just as easily. It’s not that far-fetched to imagine a scenario in which I visit a well-connected Roam graph, and realize that my browser has made just as many connections between their notes and my notes as the author of the Roam notes have across their information.

If we were to build a medium for better thinking on top of the web browser, it’s reckless to expect the average user to manually connect, organize, and annotate the information they come across. Just as the early World Wide Web started out manually-curated and eventually became curated by algorithms and communities, I think we’ll see a shift in how individual personal landscapes of information are curated, from manual organization to mostly machine-driven organization. Humans will leave connections and highlights as a trail of their thinking, rather than as their primary way of exploring their knowledge and memory.

In the browser of the future, the boundary between my personal information and the wider Web’s information landscape will blur, and a smarter, more literate browser will help me navigate both worlds with a deeper understanding of what I’m thinking about and what I want to discover. It’ll remind me of relevant bookmarks when I’m taking lecture notes; it’ll summarize and pick out interesting details from long news articles for me; it’ll let me search across the Web and my personal data to remember more and learn faster.

A web browser for thoughts, not documents or apps

The web browser has advanced remarkably far in the first couple of decades of its history. But despite the technical achievements, it staunchly remains a pure utility, a tool meant to be used almost exclusively for visiting what lies at the other end of URLs.

There’s a renewed attention in the web browser space today. Too many of them are simply focused on making existing browsers faster and more powerful, but there’s an exciting small clan of founders and engineers trying to make the browser something more.

The vision of the web browser that excites me the most is one where the browser is a medium for creativity, learning, and thinking deeply that spans personal and public spheres of knowledge. This browser will be fast and private, of course, but more than that, this browser will let me explore the Web from the comfort of my own garden of information. It’ll break the barriers between different apps that silo our information to help us search and remember across all of them. It’ll use a deeper machine understanding of language and images to summarize articles, highlight important ideas, and remind me what I should remember. It’ll let me do it all together with other people in a way that feels like real presence, rather than just avatars on screen.

Forget space tourism – the most thought-provoking ideas, the most romantic stories, the most beautiful reveries of the future are right here, on the Web. There is still much to explore, and such beautiful worlds deserve a better spacecraft. One built to help us think new thoughts, together.

This post is a culmination of ideas sparked by conversations with Jess Martin, Raj Thimmiah, Jacob Cole, Molly Mielke, Karina Nguyen, and Josh Miller. Thanks to them for such enlightening conversations, and in many cases, for their own work in pushing these ideas forward!

mkalus shared this story from Charlie's Diary.

(This is a short expansion of a twitter stream-of-consciousness I horked up yesterday.)

The error almost everyone makes about COVID19 is to think of it as a virus that infects and kills people: but it\'s not.

COVID19 infects human (and a few other mammalian species—mink, deer) cells: it doesn\'t recognize or directly interact with the superorganisms made of those cells.

Defiance—a common human social response to a personal threat—is as inappropriate and pointless as it would be if the threat in question was a hurricane or an earthquake.

And yet, the news media are saturated every day by shrieks of defiance directed at the "enemy" (as if a complex chemical has a personality and can be deterred). The same rhetoric comes from politicians (notably authoritarian ones: it\'s easier to recognize as a shortcoming in those of other countries where the observer has some psychological distance from the discourse), pundits (paid to opine at length in newspapers and on TV), and ordinary folks who are remixing and repeating the message they\'re absorbing from the zeitgeist.

Why is this important?

Well, all our dysfunctional responses to COVID19 arise because we mistake it for an attack on people, rather than an attack on invisibly small blobs of biochemistry.

Trying to defeat COVID19 by defending boundaries—whether they\'re between people, or groups of people, or nations of people—is pointless.

The only way to defeat it is to globally defeat it at the cellular level. None of us are safe until all of us are vaccinated, world-wide.

Which is why I get angry when I read about governments holding back vaccine doses for research, or refusing to waive licensing fees for poorer countries. The virus has no personality and no intent towards you. The virus merely replicated and destroys human cells. Yours, mine, anybody\'s. The virus doesn\'t care about your politics or your business model or how office closures are hitting your rental income. It will simply kill you, unless you vaccinate almost everybody on the planet.

Here in the UK, the USA, and elsewhere in the developed world, our leaders are acting as if the plague is almost over and we can go back to normal once we hit herd immunity levels of vaccination in our own countries. But the foolishness of this idea will become glaringly obvious in a few years when it allows a fourth SARS family pandemic to emerge. Unvaccinated heaps of living cells (be they human or deer cells) are prolific breeding grounds for SARS-NCoV2, the mutation rate is approximately proportional to the number of virus particles in existence, and the probability of a new variant emerging rises as that number increases. Even after we, personally, are vaccinated, the threat will remain. This isn\'t a war, where there\'s an enemy who can be coerced into signing articles of surrender.

So where does the dysfunctional defiant/oppositional posturing behaviour come from—the ridiculous insistence on not wearing masks because it shows fear in the face of the virus (which has neither a face nor a nervous system with which to experience emotions, or indeed any mechanism for interacting at a human level)?

Philosopher Daniel Dennett explains the origins of animistic religions in terms of the intentional stance, a level of abstraction in which we view the behaviour of a person, animal, or natural phenomena by ascribing intent to them. As folk psychology this works pretty well for human beings and reasonably well for animals, but it breaks down for natural phenomena. Applying the intentional stance to lightning suggests there might be an angry god throwing thunderbolts at people who annoy him: it doesn\'t tell us anything useful about electricity, and it only tenuously endorses not standing under tall trees in a thunderstorm.

I think the widespread tendency to anthropomorphize COVID19, leading to defiant behaviour (however dysfunctional), emerges from a widespread misapplication of the intentional stance to natural phenomena—the same cognitive root as religious belief. ("Something happens/exists, therefore someone must have done/made it.") People construct supernatural explanations for observed phenomena, and COVID19 is an observable phenomenon, so we get propitiatory or defiant/adversarial responses, not rational ones.

And in the case of COVID19, defiance is as deadly as climbing to the top of the tallest hill and shaking your fist at the clouds in a lightning storm.