Re: [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: Re: The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook

[Winston Kodogo]

Alas, I can make absolutely no sense of anything from the cigarmeister.

But then again an inability to tell what's true at all could be an emerging
trajedy of these commons.

Or perhaps there is some creative merit in this.

Where is Boyd when you need him?

On 4 April 2016 at 23:37, hiro <23h...@gmail.com> wrote:

> here at my university mensa is just the place where the food tastes the
> worst.
>
>

Re: [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: Re: The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook

[hiro]

here at my university mensa is just the place where the food tastes the worst.

Re: [9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: Re: The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook

[Wes Kussmaul]

On 04/02/2016 10:30 PM, cigar562hfsp952f...@icebubble.org wrote:


That's one of the reasons why it's so important to maintain control and
ownership of OUR OWN data.  My data + my programs = my image of reality.


This went out Friday...

THOUSANDS TRAPPED IN MINING DISASTER

While exact figures are not available at this time, the total number of 
victims in this latest mining disaster will surpass the total from any 
mining accident in history. Subsurface PII mines are known to stretch 
for miles in the underground economy south of San Francisco and beyond, 
where large veins of gold made up of the personally identifiable 
information (PII) of every user of a phone, computer or tablet are 
relentlessly excavated by skilled data miners.


“It's hard to get a handle on just how many people are trapped along 
with the sources of PII gold” said an official at the scene. “The miners 
built a whole economy by breaking into your information home, stealing 
your personal information and putting it on their balance sheet as a 
money-making asset. As it starts to sink in just what they've been up 
to, people feel trapped.” Much of that feeling, he noted, “is 
exacerbated by earlier pronouncements about doing no evil.”


Wes Kussmaul, author of Escape The Plantation, noted that the data mines 
have much in common with plantations during the era of slavery. “In the 
information age, ownership of information about you, your relationships 
and habits and affiliations and finances is like owning you” said 
Kussmaul, adding that “breaking into your information home is an act of 
burglary, and taking your information assets out of your information 
home should be considered grand larceny. The perpetrators of these 
felonious acts should consider getting into another line of work before 
law enforcement and the courts wake up and see the burglary and theft 
that are being perpetrated right in front of them in broad daylight.”


Asked whether the use of the plantation metaphor might be controversial, 
Kussmaul responded, “My book is about ownership of people. The word for 
that is slavery. Since the ownership of people via their digital selves 
is new, the metaphor may strike some as insensitive. My hope is that 
those who feel that way will take a good look at where we are headed if 
we don't do something about rampant burglary of, and theft from, our 
information homes. That practice leads to enslavement.”


Escape The Plantation goes beyond describing enslavement to presenting 
the Authenticity Infrastructure and its Personal Information Ownership 
Component, offering a viable way for people to take ownership and 
control of information about themselves. Characterized by Kussmaul as 
“PKI done right,” the Authenticity Infrastructure's credential “lets you 
log in anywhere using one single password. And just as your car's 
license plate makes you accountable but doesn't disclose the identity of 
the driver or owner of the car, this credential lets you assert your 
identity without disclosing your identity. If you use it to digitally 
sign a document, the relying party knows that the true identity of the 
signer is available, given his or her consent.”


_Escape The Plantation_, 387 pages, ISBN 978-1-931248-23-5, published by 
PKI Press, is available in ebook form ($12.98) and in print ($24.95) 
from PKI Press at https://pkipress.com .

[9fans] OT: Ubiquitous data vs. Reality, WAS: Re: The Plan 9/"right" way to do Facebook

[cigar562hfsp952fans]

Giacomo Tesio  writes:

> physical tool. Now, we "know that a programmable computer is no more and no
> less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism
> without changing a single wire", but are we sure we really want to remove
> the awareness of the wires?

I don't think people are necessarily aware of the "wires", anymore.
Many millenials think of the Internet as a resource that just sort of
floats around in the air, kind of like oxygen.  (I once built a little,
"mini-Internet" for a cryptography demonstration I did for a group of
millenials.  One of them expressed to me his confusion that the network
actually contained a wired hub!)  When people use the Web, send a text,
or make a call, they assume that their information is private because
they can't see the radio waves.  They have little, if any, concern with
how the technology actually works, just that it somehow "magically" does
something useful.

> Google glasses scare me even more: we are going to look the world through
> some one else eyes. In the long run, our brain will start to accept the

That's one of the reasons why it's so important to maintain control and
ownership of OUR OWN data.  My data + my programs = my image of reality.

> some one else eyes. In the long run, our brain will start to accept the
> virtual baloons like the other physical entities that really exists.

I think we already have one foot planted firmly in that mine field.
People already mistake what they see on social media for reality.  A
little over a year ago, I attended a Mensa* meeting in Portsmouth, NH
(the same city that the treaty was signed in).  Our discussion focused
on how to get more people to join Mensa, and how to encourage existing
members to participate in chapter activities.  (Less than 1% of people
who qualify for Mensa are actually members, and the overwhelming
majority of those don't participate in any of our calendered events.)
As is wont to happen when discussing promotion of ANYTHING, these days,
someone offered the perennial suggestion of using social media.  I posed
this group the question, (paraphrasing) "If someone was invited to an
event by someone who they knew in real life, as opposed to someone they
only knew from Facebook, would they be more likely to attend?"  Another
member there answered my question by saying that she saw her friends on
Facebook as BEING real friends.  I was just blown away by that answer.
On social media, you have no idea who you're talking to, if what they
say is true, or if they're even a real person.  Not long ago, it was
revealed that the U.S. government has actually paid contractors to
create hundreds of fake social media profiles.  It had never before even
OCCURRED to me that people might acutally mistake what they see on
social media for reality.

I could probably list half a dozen other annecdotes that illustrate how
social media have distorted people's perceptions of reality.  But this
one is perhaps the most compelling, because it is so unexpected and so
foreboding.  If a member of Mensa (whose IQ must be at or above the 98th
percentile) can mistake social media for reaility, then that same
mistake can be (and most certainly is) made by the other 98% of the
population.  That's terrifying.

> We are already trained to be suspicious about the truth even when it's
> clearly evident, now we can even start to ignore the information from the
> physical world, while accepting the virtual information that someone else
> feed us.

Maintaining a strong sense of skepticism might be a healthy way to
engage with the dubious world of social media.  Whenever you listen to a
politician speak, for instance, you do so with a healthy dose of
skepticism.  Perhaps we could treat everything we see on social media
like we treat politicians.  If we were to adopt a popular predisposition
to consider anything on social media as "quite likely false", then the
damage to reality might be limited.  Earlier in this thread, ...

lu...@proxima.alt.za writes:

> to publish.  Stupidly, we still demand that people be consistent, but
> that will drift away over time, of that I'm pretty certain.

There is some creative merit in doing that.  Then again, an inability to
tell what's true at all could be an emerging trajedy of these commons.

*Mensa is a trade name, and Mensa does not necessarily agree with or
endorse any of my kooky views.  They should, though.  ;)

-- 
+--+
|   human   |
|Any sufficiently high intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.|
+--+