StopNCII Announces PhotoDNA Integration →
We are also pleased to announce that StopNCII.org will integrate an updated version of Microsoft's PhotoDNA technology into our platform allowing for wider implementation and potential for more industry platforms to join the initiative.
Glad to see that PhotoDNA is still around and gotten some significant upgrades to support reporting non-consensual intimate imagery in a privacy-preserving way.
Why You Can No Longer Get Lost in the Crowd →
Obscurity is vital to our well-being for several reasons. It gives us breathing room to go about our daily routines with little fear of being judged, sent unwanted ads, gossiped about or needlessly shamed.
Obscurity makes meaningful and intimate relationships possible, ones that offer solidarity, loyalty and love. It allows us to choose with whom we want to share different kinds of information. It protects us from having everyone know the different roles we play in the different parts of our lives. We need to be able to play one role with our co-workers while revealing other parts of ourselves with friends and family. Indeed, obscurity is one reason we feel safe bonding with others over our shared vulnerabilities, our mutual hopes, dreams and fears.
As Drs. Woodrow Hartzog and Evan Selinger write, "[O]ur failure to collectively value this idea shows where we’ve gone wrong in the debates over data and surveillance."
The Coming Software Apocalypse →
“When we had electromechanical systems, we used to be able to test them exhaustively,” says Nancy Leveson, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been studying software safety for 35 years. [...] “We used to be able to think through all the things it could do, all the states it could get into.” [...]
Software is different. Just by editing the text in a file somewhere, the same hunk of silicon can become an autopilot or an inventory-control system. This flexibility is software’s miracle, and its curse. Because it can be changed cheaply, software is constantly changed; and because it’s unmoored from anything physical—a program that is a thousand times more complex than another takes up the same actual space—it tends to grow without bound. “The problem,” Leveson wrote in a book, “is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage.”
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System →
The systems analysis community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have all absorbed one of his favorite stories. “People know intuitively where leverage points are,” he says. “Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point — in inventory policy, maybe, or in the relationship between sales force and productive force, or in personnel policy. Then I’ve gone to the company and discovered that there’s already a lot of attention to that point. Everyone is trying very hard to push it IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!”
An excellent primer on stock, flow, positive and negative feedback loops, and systems thinking.
Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? →
Perhaps we’ve all gotten a little hungry for meaning. Participation in organized religion is falling, especially among American millennials. In San Francisco, where I live, I’ve noticed that the concept of productivity has taken on an almost spiritual dimension. Techies here have internalized the idea — rooted in the Protestant work ethic — that work is not something you do to get what you want; the work itself is all.
The power of imagination, and other parenting lessons from Calvin and Hobbes →
One day, I asked Otis what he thought of Hobbes. “What do you believe? Is he real or is he stuffed?” In a tone that connoted my knucklehead status, my son answered, “He’s a real tiger, but for some reason grown-ups think he’s a stuffed animal. I guess they just don’t know any better.”
His explanation silenced me. I realized I’d made a grave mistake. [...] Whether Hobbes was live or stuffed was beside the point. To believe in Hobbes is to believe in the power of imagination.
The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon →
A Times investigation reveals how Israel reaped diplomatic gains around the world from NSO’s Pegasus spyware — a tool America itself purchased but is now trying to ban.
He builds lifelike replicas of D.C. landmarks—brick by Lego brick →
Last year, Paules spent the better part of six months putting together about 50,000 Lego pieces to form a replica of Dulles Airport’s iconic passenger terminal, designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen in 1958.
The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin →
Now entering the third year of a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the intelligence partnership between Washington and Kyiv is a linchpin of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. The C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support spy networks.
But the partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary.
It took root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very different U.S. presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.