[continued from previous message]

and before radio, this kind of standardization was not available to the illiterate at all.

In the print age, the intelligentsia got their ideas from the canon of
great literature and so were capable of groupthink at scale, but their illiterate or semi-literate peers were exploring epistemic space together
in a more organic fashion, without powerful time-binding technology
tethering them to any baseline.

The sharedness of their realities mirrored their social connectedness --
almost always bidirectional, if not even or equitable -- and their social graphs mirrored geography (because transport technologies, though they
could warp transit-space, did not flatten it -- it may be easier to go 100 miles by train than 10 miles by horse, but it has never become equally easy
to physically transport oneself to anywhere on earth).

What the Internet did was to make visible the already-existing alien
realities of the outgroup and allow faster mutation through the cross-pollination of fringe groups.

Telephony could have done to these oral cultures some of what social media
has done to our literate culture, had it become common and affordable a
decade earlier and had party lines remained normal, but charging by the
minute (with a multiplier for long-distance calls) prevented the telephone network from being the basis for the kind of multi-continent perpetual
hangouts that make the Internet so cosmopolitan -- with the exception of
phone phreaks, who used exploits to create exactly this kind of community behind Bell's back.

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2020 09:33:13 -0700
From: the keyboard of geoff goodfellow <geoff@iconia.com>
Subject: Why Is Social Media So Addictive? (Mark D. Griffiths)

Social media is awful and whatever pleasures it confers in the form of
mildly amusing memes or a fleeting sense of community/belonging are
massively outweighed by its well-documented downsides. Their psychic consequences are of interest to its owners only in the sense that, past a certain threshold, people might turn away from their platforms and cut off
the endless stream of monetizable private data that sustain their business models and corrode conventional ideas about privacy, self-determination,
etc. [...]

I guess this is something I believe, though even typing it out is
embarrassing -- because at this point it's so obvious/trite, and because its obviousness/triteness hasn't stopped me or anyone I know from using it.
Some vague comfort is extractable from the fact that these platforms were designed to foster just this kind of behavior, but it might be nice to know how, exactly, that end was/is achieved. To that end, for this week's Giz
Asks <https://gizmodo.com/c/giz-asks> we've reached out to a number of
experts to find out why social media is so addictive.

<https://www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/social-sciences/mark-griffiths>

Distinguished Professor, Behavioural Addiction, Nottingham Trent University

https://gizmodo.com/why-is-social-media-so-addictive-1841261494

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2020 12:14:19 -0500
From: Monty Solomon <monty@roscom.com>
Subject: The high cost of a free coding bootcamp (The Verge)

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/11/21131848/lambda-school-coding-bootcamp-isa-tuition-cost-free

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2020 22:23:48 -0500
From: Ed Ravin <eravin@panix.com>
Subject: Debunking the lone woodpecker theory

Looking up more information about that acorn woodpecker stash, according to
a couple of sources (especially the Nat Geo article below), an entire family
of woodpeckers generally works as a team to build their stash, and it might have taken them as long as five years to squirrel away that 300-pound load:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/11/151113-antenna-cache-acorn-woodpecker-california/

Even more interestingly, that video is from 2009, leading to yet another
RISK of finding things on the Internet - thinking something you've
discovered is new just because it's new to you and the source conveniently didn't mention any dates on it.

The "first woodpecker" quote is attributed to Gerald Weinberg, I remember
that because I checked for a canonical version before putting in my post in RISKS-28.21. At the time I thought I was being novel, but I see now that I
was merely the 3rd person to have that same great idea.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2020 17:06:31 +0200
From: Amos Shapir <amos083@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Benjamin Netanyahu's election app potentially exposed data for
every Israeli voter (RISKS-31.57)

While the WP article is technically correct when saying that the app had exposed every "registered voter" in Israel, it makes the fault seem a bit
less severe that it really is. The fact is, voters in Israel do not have to register; every citizen over 18 can vote, and is listed automatically. This means there is no opting out, everyone is on the exposed list, voting or
not.

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2020 16:09:59 -0800
From: Tom Russ <taruss@google.com>
Subject: Re: Backhoes, squirrels, and woodpeckers as DoS vectors (R 31 57)

A colleague points out that a longer video of this was uploaded to YouTube
in 2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZkAP-CQlhA It identifies the
location as being Bear Creek Road microwave site. The video is mis-titled "Squirrel [sic] fills Antenna with Acorns", but the comments identify a woodpecker as the culprit.

------------------------------

Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2020 10:57:21 +0000
From: Martin Ward <martin@gkc.org.uk>
Subject: Re: A lazy fix 20 years ago means the Y2K bug is taking down
computers, now (New Scientist)

The two options were: Extend the year field from 2 digits to 4 digits (which might have knock-on effects all over the system), or use a "sliding window" which would treat all dates whose 2 digit year could be interpreted as up
to, say, 20 years in the future as actually in the future and not the past.

In 2020 the sliding window should treat dates "20" to "40" as 2020
to 2040 while "41" would be interpreted as 1941.

Another option is simply to pick the closest date to the current date:
this is approximately equivalent to a 50 year sliding window.

Implementing a Y2K "fix" which is guaranteed to fail in a few years seems insane given that this is exactly the kind of short-sightedness which
created the Y2K mess in the first place! (Unless it was a cunning plan for
the programmers to give themselves extra business in 20 years time: like the programmer who was implementing a payroll system and programmed the system
to crash if his name was not found on the payroll!)

[And there won't be any COBOL programmers around when we hit Year 2100,
PGN]

------------------------------

Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2020 16:42:09 +0000
From: Stephen Mason <stephenmason@stephenmason.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Autonomous vehicles (RISKS-31.57)

Reading through the latest RISKS, I think your readers might be interested
in the article by Professor Roger Kemp, 'Autonomous vehicles, who will be liable for accidents?" -- not quite a legal analysis, but an excellent
overview of some of the practical issues that do not get discussed very
often: https://journals.sas.ac.uk/deeslr/issue/view/528

The books listed below are published on paper and available as open source from: https://ials.sas.ac.uk/about/about-us/people/stephen-mason

Stephen Mason and Daniel Seng, editors, Electronic Evidence (4th edition, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies for the SAS Humanities Digital Library, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2017)

Electronic Signatures in Law (4th edn, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies
for the SAS Humanities Digital Library, School of Advanced Study, University
of London, 2016)

Open source journal: Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review http://dev-ials.sas.ac.uk/digital/ials-open-access-journals/digital-evidence-and-electronic-signature-law-review
(also available via the HeinOnline subscription service)

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2019 11:11:11 -0800
From: RISKS-request@csl.sri.com
Subject: Abridged info on RISKS (comp.risks)

The ACM RISKS Forum is a MODERATED digest. Its Usenet manifestation is
comp.risks, the feed for which is donated by panix.com as of June 2011.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: The mailman Web interface can be used directly to

subscribe and unsubscribe:
http://mls.csl.sri.com/mailman/listinfo/risks

SUBMISSIONS: to risks@CSL.sri.com with meaningful SUBJECT: line that

includes the string `notsp'. Otherwise your message may not be read.
*** This attention-string has never changed, but might if spammers use it.

SPAM challenge-responses will not be honored. Instead, use an alternative

address from which you never send mail where the address becomes public!

The complete INFO file (submissions, default disclaimers, archive sites,

copyright policy, etc.) is online.
<http://www.CSL.sri.com/risksinfo.html>
*** Contributors are assumed to have read the full info file for guidelines!

OFFICIAL ARCHIVES: http://www.risks.org takes you to Lindsay Marshall's

searchable html archive at newcastle:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/VL.IS --> VoLume, ISsue.
Also, ftp://ftp.sri.com/risks for the current volume
or ftp://ftp.sri.com/VL/risks-VL.IS for previous VoLume
If none of those work for you, the most recent issue is always at
http://www.csl.sri.com/users/risko/risks.txt, and index at /risks-31.00
Lindsay has also added to the Newcastle catless site a palmtop version
of the most recent RISKS issue and a WAP version that works for many but
not all telephones: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/w/r
ALTERNATIVE ARCHIVES: http://seclists.org/risks/ (only since mid-2001)
*** NOTE: If a cited URL fails, we do not try to update them. Try
browsing on the keywords in the subject line or cited article leads.
Apologies for what Office365 and SafeLinks may have done to URLs.

Special Offer to Join ACM for readers of the ACM RISKS Forum:

<http://www.acm.org/joinacm1>

------------------------------

End of RISKS-FORUM Digest 31.58
************************

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)