2020
Pandemic surveillance will be abused
Our failure to contain coronavirus has nothing to do with failure of “invasive surveillance,” Blue says. It’s because autocrats in China and the wannabe autocrat in the White House refused to take coronavirus seriously in the beginning.
Surveillance advocates are trotting out the old canard of privacy vs. safety. But it’s not a “vs.” – privacy is a form of safety. When we have less privacy, we are less safe, from overreaching police, unscrupulous big business, terrorists and stalkers.
Israel and China are going full 1984.
On the other hand, countries like South Korea and Taiwan are balancing surveillance with privacy protection. Even Singapore, which otherwise ranks low on civil liberties and privacy protections, understand that it needs to protect privacy during the pandemic.
Singapore “clearly gets that if you treat your people’s privacy and data the same way Facebook does (or China, or Zoom for that matter), your problems are going to breed problems like tribbles,” Blue says.
These data collection tools were not built to save lives in emergencies: they were purpose-built for exploitation and abuse.
The only way to repurpose them safely and effectively is to treat them like they’re radioactive: we must proceed with the certainty that all virus tracking and tracing tech will be abused.
Violet Blue also outlines privacy problems with Zoom. It’s a privacy nightmare. I’m going to look for alternatives.
Big tech conferences could be a COVID-19 casualty
Lindsay Clark at the Register predicts smaller, fewer tech conferences post-COVID-19.
My first was CA World in New Orleans in 1998. In front of an audience of thousands, then Computer Associates CEO Charles Wang wandered across the stage pontificating as a chorus of children danced about him (no, really) and I knew I had indeed entered a whole new world of weird.
A chorus of children dancing around the CEO is actually not particularly unusual for a tech conference for a billion-dollar company. You see some weird-ass shit for entertainment at conference keynotes.
Already pre-COVID-19 we saw the big vendor-neutral tech conferences dry up. Remember COMDEX? Remember Interop? And there were always rumors that the gargantuan Mobile World Congress was struggling to break even.
These were replaced by events sponsored by individual vendors, including Amazon Web Services, Google, Cisco, VMware, etc., with attendance in the tens of thousands, as well as smaller, focused multivendor events with attendance in the hundreds.
I prefer the smaller, focused events myself; easier to find people to talk with who are useful professionally.
At the bigger events, sheer navigation becomes a challenge. Some years, my commute to and from Mobile World Congress was 30-60 minutes on public transit, like a regular job. Though part of me actually enjoyed that; it made me feel cosmopolitan and worldly. Like I lived in Barcelona.
Salespeople love conferences because it helps them generate leads and make deals. Engineers get a rare opportunity for face-to-face networking. And everybody loves the parties.
Or, rather, everybody except me loves the parties. As an introvert who went to one or two conferences per month, I looked forward to the opportunity to go back to my hotel room and decompress.
Big conferences give CEOs and senior executives the opportunity to bask in front of a wildly cheering crowd of thousands. They get to be rock stars for a day. Don’t overlook that as a driver keeping big conferences in business.
Portrait of a weekly newspaper in the small town of Julian, California, circulation in the hundreds, founded in 1985, owned and run since 2004 by Michael Hart, now 67 years old, and his wife Michele Harvey, 69.
Small Julian newspaper is all about community, by J. Harry Jones at the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Just once, Michael Hart and his bride of 17 years, Michele Harvey, took a few days off to stay at an inn at Joshua Tree.
āIt was sort of our honeymoon years after we got married,ā Hart, 67, said.
āJust once we took off three days in a row,ā Harvey said. āThose three days and two nights were really all we could stand to be away.ā
Since the summer of 2004, Hart and Harvey, 69, have been putting out the weekly Julian News. The newspaper was established in 1985 and had a handful of owners before they purchased the business for $200,000.
āHe puts in 70 to 90 hours a week,ā Harvey said of her husband. āMake that 65 to 70,ā said Hart.
The writers are colorful characters. One “was obsessed about the size of his byline.”
āHe wanted his byline to be bigger than the headline of his stories,ā Harvey said. He would bring into the office many examples of bylines from newspapers around the country.
And then there was a contributor who didnāt know how to replace the ribbon on her typewriter so instead she would put carbon paper between two white sheets of paper and then write her column even though she couldnāt see what it was she was composing. Sheād then give the carbon copy of the column to the paper to let them try to figure out what it said.
Social distancing vs. economic recovery is a false choice. According ta recent study, cities that enacted social distancing hard and fast during the 1918 pandemic were quicker to recover economically. “… the earlier, more forcefully and longer cities responded, the better their economic recovery.”
Scott Duke Kominers at Bloomberg:
Thatās not to say that the flu pandemic didnāt cause an economic strain: the authors found that the areas hit hardest saw real declines in manufacturing employment and output, as well as a persistent reduction in bank assets ā probably because of losses on loans amid bankruptcies. They also found a decline in auto registrations, which they say suggests a decline in demand for consumer durables.
That said, the cities that implemented aggressive social distancing and shutdowns to contain the virus came out looking better. Implementing these policies eight days earlier, or maintaining them for 46 days longer were associated with 4% and 6% higher post-pandemic manufacturing employment, respectively. The gains for output were similar. Likewise, faster and longer-lasting distancing measures were associated with higher post-pandemic banking activity.
Cory Doctorow: The US coronavirus epidemic is Part 2 of the 2008 financial meltdown, in the wake of which we elected dufus strongmen, gutted emergency preparedness budgets and passed the money to billionaries.
Before reporting to the American people, coronavirus task force members need to say how wonderful Trump is - Meredith McGraw at Politico
Doonesbury captured Trump 44 years ago, in this strip about Chairman Mao. via
Screenwriter J.D. Shapiro on the making of the 2000 movie, “Battlefield: Earth:”
“I Penned the Suckiest Movie Ever - Sorry!"
“… comparing it to a train wreck isn’t really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch those.”
Sophie Lewis at CBSNews.com: Walmart reports increased sales for tops but not pants
Weāve come full rectangle: Polaroid is reborn out of The Impossible Project
Devin Coldewey at TechCrunch: The Polaroid camera is back, with a sleek new model priced at just $100. But film will cost you $2 per shot!
Love the headline!
Podcast downloads in the US have fallen about 10%. True crime podcasts are down the most, and comedy podcasts are also hit hard.
Coronavirus Causes Dip in Podcast Listening
Makes sense. Social distancing = fewer people commuting.
I listen to podcasts while walking and doing chores, so my podcast listening duration is unchanged. However, more of my podcasts now are daily news than they were before.