Random thoughts

I've somewhat soured with time on Twitter as a platform for thoughts/tweets. This Twitter thread is a good example of how not to provide interesting information in article form:

• Unnecessary background of Twitter user's profile
• Lede with bigger font
• Distracting retweets and likes after each 240-character text block
• Way too much extra stuff for each comment (actual comment text highlighted).

 If you want to have photographs along with itty bitty blurbs of your subject, then use an appropriate format: e.g. EnglishRussia or LiveJournal travelogues.


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The whole discussion about UBI is useful, but (without any sources) I wonder why the argument "people will have more time to focus on their passions" is frequently trotted out. I think it's fair to say that most people aren't terribly self-propelled and might just vegetate all day in front of the TV or play computer games forever. Of course new jobs might be developed to help manage the hosts of issues that crop up when you sit all day, but is that something we will have to acknowledge when it happens.


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The Facebook thing going on brings to mind again how easy it is to exploit the vast quantity of information to be evil, so much that I'm surprised it doesn't happen more frequently. Perhaps it's because Opsec is hard, or because the thinking is easy but implementation is harder. So many people don't use ad blockers, or go through life with low IQ or lack of critical thinking skills to identify when they are being duped, or give apps any permissions necessary. Non-compliance with the law is not an issue if you don't get caught, and aside from getting prosecuted on an individual scale, lawsuits against companies take so long that you can continue predatory practices so long as a ruling hasn't happened.

Once you dispel the notion that a product has to follow all the rules of government regulations, ethics, normal human politeness, etc, then it's very easy to decide to exploit human weaknesses for your own purposes, whether it be marketing, advertisement, or whatever (see social engineering and OSINT). 

“If you know the personality of the people you’re you’re

targeting, you can nuance your messaging to resonate

more effectively with those key audience groups”

—

Alexander Nix, Cambridge

Analytica"

So strictly speaking CA did nothing wrong. Who knew that it would take the election of the wrong person for the media to notice it? CA is the logical conclusion of the ability to weaponize ubiquitous ad networks, coupled with Facebook's targeted advertising, and probably a bit of de-anonymizing as well.

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With all the reading I'm doing thanks to the plane's holding pattern, I'm getting lots of new thoughts. Currently musing while reading this interesting presentation from Defcon 25 (August 2017) about weaponizing ads and propaganda. If politics / targeted advertising / Facebook / all that is so bad, wrecks your ability to do math (see here, page 14, Discussion section), then why not disengage? You'll only wind up smarter than everyone who engages, and possibly more employable in the near future when the unholy combination of gig economies, loss of welfare programs, wealth inequality, long squeeze of climate change, and pending automation via neural networks, all combine to make a lot of people become unemployable.