Bits and Bobs for the Week of 23 July 2023

Below is a collection of the interesting things I've been writing about and reading over the last week or so

Bing Image Creator’s vision of the adorable sea otter #841 chomping down on a surfboard.

ICYMI: The Right to Data Portability, Meta's Flawed Moderation, and More Insights

• I explored the oft-ignored concept of the GDPR's Article 20's Data Portability right, which you've probably seen on Google and Facebook under the heading 'Download Your Data'. I ask: What if the portability right could be better? What if, in addition to making data available in a common, machine-readable format, companies also treated portability as a tool to allow users to curate their digital personas online. I'm sad that I didn't get much traction on it and I'm mildly curious -- was this just glaringly obvious? Is it a non-starter? What am I missing? Anyway, here it is:

  The Right to Data Portability Is Kind of a Joke, But It Could Be So Much More

• I also discussed while Meta's new social network Threads is probably doomed. It's not just that user participation is dwindling or that people who are good at sharing photos aren't always great at creating compelling written content. The real issue? Meta as a company is downright terrible at content moderation, and they've gotten worse over time. I relay the story of a friend of mine who I've been trying to help deal with a scammer on Facebook for the past week. Update: The scammer accounts are still live.

  Threads Will Probably Fail

Deep Dives: Intriguing Insights and Provocative Perspectives (> 20 minutes)

• Hack Your Bureaucracy Marina Nitze & Nick Sinai: The authors offer fascinating hacks for navigating bureaucratic inertia. Although a bit repetitive at times, their insights — from 'Looking Between the Silos' to 'Find the Doers' — are deeply resonant and inspiring. I've found some great themes for future blog posts and probably a little bureaucracy hacking of my own. Marina's interview on the 'You are Not So Smart' Podcast is also great, and it's where I first learned about the book.

• What Should Newsrooms Do with AI? (Casey Newton, $): Casey Newton raises compelling points about AI-generated content in his piece. My favorite bit? A publisher's attempt to use AI to write clickbait video game content by mining Reddit's /r/WOW forum posts backfired hilariously after a group of savvy Redditors manufactured a completely fictional video game. A modern-day Luddite uprising.

Quick Reads: Snapshots of Intrigues and Curiosities (5-20 minutes)

• What the Hell Is Threads Anyway? (Ricky, $): Ricky explored similar themes regarding Meta's Threads, though he was far more optimistic than I was. Optimistic, but not naïve: "Zuckerberg sees social media apps less as places where people can socialise and share media - and more where he can turn everyone into drones whose data he can harvest and sell to the government and probably your employer and landlord so they can work out your social credit score." Pretty sure that's true for the lot of them, to be honest.

• Grading the Economic Schools of Thought (Noah Smith): I enjoy reading NoahPinion's pieces from time to time. He's got a lot of insight on economic theory, and this post represents a bit of a crash course in all the various economic schools' overarching philosophies -- including what they got right and (mostly) wrong about the post-COVID recessionary period we're still sorta experiencing.

Light-Hearted Escapades(<5 minutes)

• XML is the Future (Bite Code): A trip down the tech memory lane, with a short retelling of tech's various hype cycles. Remember XML, the early 2000s 'it' thing? (Okay, most of you probably don't, getoffmylawn). Turns out, there's a pattern to these cycles of hype and failure and a root cause: We keep ignoring that systems are complex, and optimistically hoping for silver bullets.

• Service Providers, Security Researchers Again Warn UK Against Mandating Compromised Encryption (Tim Cushing, Techdirt): For the past year or so, the EU and UK have been trying like mad to force providers to build in backdoors to stop child sexual abuse and other material from being shared across end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) systems like WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, etc. Of course, the legislators are not technologists, and they refuse to acknowledge reality and the simple fact that any backdoor will
  

  1) destroy E2EE entirely, harming perfectly legitimate uses of these tools;
  2) create exploitable vectors for hackers, hostile nation states, and illiberal governments everywhere;
  3) be expanded to cover tons of speech that isn't CSAM;
  4) and oh, it probably won't even work to stop CSAM.
  

  In June or so, after years of concerted efforts by encryption experts, the CEOs of most E2EE apps, academics, and regular punters, the EU finally got the memo and withdrew language from their larger Child Sexual Abuse legislation mandating client-side scanning and other backdoors. But over in the UK, Parliament still hasn't gotten the clue, and so, a group of 68 security researchers have offered up their group opposition to the Online Safety Bill in a letter [PDF] that briefly, but incisively, points out the flaws in the legislation. I have spoken on this a few times, and it continues to remain exhausting.

• New Project Uses AI to Turn Project Gutenberg Texts Into Free Audiobooks With Lifelike Voices — In 30 Seconds (Glyn Moody, Techdirt): Not all uses of AI are bad! Microsoft, working in collaboration with Project Gutenberg, has been using its AI tools to create human-sounding audiobooks based on PG's public-domain corpus. This is quite cool, and I am all for it.

• Surfboard-Stealing Otter Continues to Elude Capture as Fan Club Grows: (Haven Daley & Olga Rodriguez, Huffpost): I absolutely love this. The title basically says it all, but it does go into more detail about the antics of Otter #841, and her 'aggressively wrestling surfboards away from surfers' off the Santa Cruz, CA coast.