[cezkaivq] sending a message

X hurts Y to send a threatening message to Z: "hey Z, don't be like Y, or you will be next."  developing the communication channel from X to Z is just as important as committing the hurtful action against Y.  Z might be a large group of people.

if the hurtful action was murder, dead men (Y) tell no tales, so X especially needs a way to communicate to Z.  if it wasn't murder, Y might lie to Z, or otherwise communicate poorly.  or, Y might be silenced (perhaps by another party who opposes X), or choose not to speak for other reasons.  many things could go wrong in communication: this is complicated, perhaps more difficult to get right than the act of hurting Y.

the communication channel from X to Z often must be one that cannot easily be traced backwards, or else retribution becomes possible, including by law enforcement.  (not relevant if X is law enforcement, which is often.)

privileged communication channels can aid one-way communication.  of particular interest is from confidential informant to reporter, to widely disseminate, as news, a message to a large group of people Z.  "if it bleeds, it leads" gives X incentive to be extra violent.  evaluate how much journalism is enabling this kind of nefarious communication.

are there other privileged communication channels that enable this kind of communication?

X might be the government, ruling by fear.  there is not much difference between government and organized crime.

sometimes the government acts secretly in this manner, perhaps trying to circumvent its own checks and balances, but still needing to send the message.

inspired in part by the RIAA's lawsuits against file-sharing.  for every case it took to court, it lost money: legal fees outweighed damages it could recover.  the only way for the lawsuits to be worth it for them was for the lawsuits to spread fear.  many additional parties participated in helping spread the fear, becoming part of the RIAA's communication channel.  most infuriating was the RIAA often not needing to spend any of its own money to do this communication: others spent their own money to design and publish shiny posters warning against file sharing.

some types of terrorism only work if communication also occurs.  but not all: false flag attacks, or terrorism to induce retaliation (e.g., 9/11).

[vaquvxtl] State supported press

It's important for a society to have a healthy institution of the press, as that is one of the channels through which government finds out about what's going on in society.  Because both the government and the people are reading (etc.) the same content, it is common knowledge, which is good: the people know what the government knows, etc.  (Compare this with domestic surveillance by the government, or Bentham's Panopticon.)

Therefore, because it benefits the public, the press ought to be partially supported by the government (because government acts in the best interests of the people).  Can this be done without the government influencing the press?  Freedom of the press is also important.

Some possibilities, low-hanging fruit.  These aren't all necessarily good ideas.

Government support of various infrastructure needed to do journalism: the internet, public education (writing, reading).  Open records regulations.  Regulations requiring private organizations not to conceal information. Tax deductions for donations to journalism organizations.  Trademarks so that trustable journalism organizations can establish a reputation.  Copyright so that journalism organizations can earn revenue independent of government support.

This is made even more complicated because there may be some natural forces encouraging monopolies in the press, and monopolies are not healthy: economies of scale, tendency of power (to influence people and the government) to become consolidated, feedback effect of popular news sources using their popularity to become more popular.

[rvzduqoc] Free speech versus political skepticism

In a regime which does a lot of censorship, people will suspect censorship is happening even in situations in which it is not:

• They're suppressing the truth about the harmfulness of vaccines.
• My favorite (fringe) news site reports truths which are being suppressed by the fake news that is mainstream media.

Hypothesize that one can measure the amount of censorship going on elsewhere in society by measuring the degree to which people believe stuff like the above.

Then, despite Constitutionally protected free speech and free press, America must have a lot of censorship going on.  Hypothesize that it's non-governmental censorship mechanisms like political correctness.

It also suggests what must be done to counter anti-vaxx movements: increase free speech generally.  Though achieving that might require something deeper.

[staxaako] Mass surveillance of mass surveillance

Mass surveillance seems inevitable given its decreasing cost and economies of scale.  Therefore, the best way to regulate it is to monitor who does what with it.  This can be done, ironically or optimistically, with mass surveillance of those with power, those who have access to the mass surveillance big data: watch the watchers.

Is this being done?  It seems it isn't.

There will probably be some constantly evolving and escalating game involving people with power trying to deceitfully deny they had access to, or deny they were influenced by, some questionable use or abuse of mass surveillance.  For example, parallel construction.

[xeizbshn] Early developments of a technology

Although we celebrate the first to achieve a technology, what happens immediately afterward is often very exciting: the technology gets rapidly refined (often by others, assuming no zealous intellectual property enforcement, which is a big if).

The Wright brothers' first plane was not very good.  Who built the first good plane by modern standards?

After a good mathematical proof, the techniques of the proof often get used to prove other things.

[oovttyoz] Check the reference

Given an academic paper with an inline citation to another work, create a tool which fetches the other work, does NLP on both works, and verifies that what the citer says about the cited is valid.

Also Wikipedia citations.

[esotcmtl] Recalling a moment of light

There was a brief glimpse of light in the late 90s with the proliferation of P2P software such as Napster, et al., when it looked like the flow of information might not remain controlled by a few giant media companies.  That light got extinguished by lawsuits and legislation, and now we have Facebook, Apple, Google, etc., as well as a few traditional companies controlling most of the media people see, as well as having and exercising powerful editorial ability to restrict what people see.

[dplqpgns] Newspaper public key

A newspaper should publish a public key so that people can send them encrypted information safe from eavesdropping.  This complements encouraging anonymous communication.

A newspaper can easily publish a revocation certificate if its private key gets compromised.

Proper key management within the newspaper organization is of course a challenge.

[uvnygvfz] Anonymous email

Anonymous email through chaining remailers (mixmaster, cypherpunk, nym, etc.) seems dead, perhaps killed off by spam, which is a shame because anonymous communication remains very important in society.  This is an example of technology getting worse, not improving, over time.  (It is possible anonymous email is actually just fine; I haven't tested or kept abreast of its deployment.)

Can it be resurrected?  Hashcash and bitcoin offer spam mitigation.

There needs to be lots of mixing to preserve anonymity, but attackers can and probably have created many bad hosts.

There are two classes of recipients of anonymous email: those who wish to receive anonymous email, and those who do not.  In the former, e.g., a journalist receiving a leak, anonymity needs to be preserved from both the journalist and eavesdroppers/surveillance.  In the latter, people with power who would like to unmask and punish those who send unpleasant emails to them -- they have the power to punish.

That people with power wish to see anonymous email as a deployed technology go away makes one suspect malice rather than incompetence as the reason for its demise, despite the adage to the contrary.  How would one purposely destroy anonymous email deployment?

Perhaps creating a throwaway Gmail account, etc., is good enough for anonymity these days.  Is it?  It seems vulnerable to subpoena or voluntary cooperation.

People wanting to receive anonymous email can create a website which accepts HTTP POST, which a sender can access through Tor.  Are there other, better ways?  What are the best practices?  All newspapers should offer this, prominently.

Anonymous publishing, Tor onion sites and Freenet, seems alive (so far), and can and is being used to attack people with power.  Is anonymous email for that purpose redundant?

[exgbexzz] Adversarial truth discovery

An adversarial framework seems like it should work well for discovering truth: each side challenges the other's version of the truth, causing lies and manipulation to be revealed.

We see this model in science, in the justice system, in political campaigns in democracies, in journalism.  However, these examples cynically or pessimistically demonstrate that reality is almost diametrically the opposite of theory.  It sometimes works in science (but often not: "cargo-cult science"), and both the justice and political systems are about who can bullshit better.  Journalism, motivated by advertising revenue, publishes the entertaining version of the story, not necessarily the true one.  In all these fields, effort seems better spent trying to take advantage of fallibility in human reasoning than to actually discover truth.

We imagine an alternate universe in which adversarial truth discovery does work well in all these fields.  It would have an interesting side effect: transcripts of jury trials and propaganda from a political campaign would be extremely good educational resources afterward.  Suppose unemployment were an important political issue between two parties.  As the sides debate and try to convince voters, both sides need voters to understand how the labor market functions and how domestic and macro economics work so that voters can evaluate proposed policy differences between the two parties.  Therefore, both sides will produce very good, easy to understand, educational material on these topics.  If the educational material is bad, confusing, the voter might come to the wrong conclusion and vote for the opponent, so there is tremendous incentive for the educational material to be good, and for the parties to attack opponent's bad educational material.  Compare this to the incentives (or disincentives) to create good educational material in the traditional education system.

Perhaps someday computers can help.

[erewaocu] Publicly funded journalism

Journalism is a public good, so suffers from tragedy of commons: a private business has difficulty making a profit from it (unless it resorts to journalism as entertainment, which we see happening: politics as NASCAR).

The standard solution for inducing the optimal production of public goods is public funding, but publicly funded journalism tends to go terribly, e.g., Pravda.

Is there a solution?  Perhaps somehow the public or agents of the public enforcing accountability in accuracy and completeness of the journalism, maybe something adversarial.

[wgqpqyrk] Journalism providing the choice to avoid preconceptions

An online news article can provide options to hide people's names, genders, locations, and other markers that people use to form preconceptions based on stereotypes.  Hidden is the default; the reader has to actively choose to see those things, actively admitting that he or she wants to judge by those features.

[opeycwsz] Nantucket Cottage Hospital

Nantucket Cottage Hospital is classified as the only rural hospital in Massachusetts in order to obtain significant federal Medicare benefits for all of Massachusetts.  Could a journalist have discovered this sleaziness through transparency mechanisms in government before the filing mistake which caused it to make the news?

Find other similar things.  A challenging task for an artificial intelligence agent.

[enwpxahc] Liberate what you cite

If you cite a work in an academic paper, you have a moral obligation to make sure the cited work is easily available, or make it so if not.  Your paper depends on the previous paper; without it your paper loses value and meaning.  If it weren't for copyright, copy it verbatim and include it as an appendix.  Copyright interferes with the moral obligation.

Even with copyright, rewriting is possible.

Let this idea be the basis for modification of copyright law for academic publishing.  Frequently cited works will become frequently copied, so preserved.

[xmdphusz] Exposing or exploiting bias in the justice system

Suppose a person, a lawyer, becomes aware of a certain bias in the justice system.  They can choose to publicly disclose it, which could benefit society by inducing efforts to correct the bias, or they could keep it private, letting the bias continue, seeking to personally profit from the knowledge, using it to further help clients.

How can we induce the first choice?

Vaguely similar to 0days in computer security.

[zglsdxln] Inactive Superman in the Justice League

Superman participates in only a few missions of the Justice League.  Very slowly it is revealed why: on the remaining missions, the League is actually doing evil, despite their best intentions.  Only Superman, with his near godlike abilities, realizes this, and it is actually beyond his ability to convince the rest of the League otherwise, perhaps like trying to convince a virus not to cause cancer by reasoning with it.

Or perhaps, on the remaining missions, the League is doing neither good nor harm (despite appearances); they are just wasting their energy, and Superman has better things to do, like be a good journalist.

[ntqhgtdh] Comparing Wikileaks CableGate and cables.csv

The complete collection of cables published as a SQL dump by Wikileaks ("Cable database in searchable format - for developers (updated!)") has substantial differences from cables.csv whose password was divulged by David Leigh in his book WIKILEAKS: Inside Julian Assange's War on Secrecy. Here are some scripts to compare the two, assuming you have both sources. (cables.csv from z.7z on cryptome.org .)

The methodology was to reformat the CSV to look like the SQL dump, perform some normalization, then compare the two dumps. The scripts find 5189 cables which differ, though this likely still includes many trivial formatting differences.

Technically, one interesting difference is that the CSV contains timestamps at minute resolution, while the SQL dump has the timestamps "fuzzed" to a resolution of one day: all messages are at midnight. However, often (but not always), the timestamps are also present in the header text of both sources.

More substantially, the SQL dump has quite a few redactions, often replaced with "XXXXXXXXXX" or ellipses "...".

(See also previous post about Cablegate.)

[pwzjzwcz] Interviewing someone less knowledgeable

A diligent reporter ends up becoming the most knowledgeable expert in a subject.  This might be a problem if the reporter becomes forced to interview someone else, a lesser expert, to provide information about a subject, because citing oneself as an authority is not journalistically acceptable.

Does this paradox hint at something deeply wrong with the way journalism is normally carried out?

[kqsvuqhi] Point counterpoint

Governments typically censor speech deemed inflammatory, acting within their prerogative to prevent destabilization of society.  Modify such a policy such that such censorship may only be temporary, during which time the government may prepare counterbalancing speech to be released in conjunction with lifting the censorship of the speech in question.

Is such a policy good for a democracy?  On one hand, it is good to avoid knee-jerk bad policies induced by persuasive inflammatory speech.  On the other hand, there is a natural tendency of societies not to do anything even when something is wrong until there is some sort of crisis.  The best idea does not naturally win.  Inflammatory speech can induce action better than calm speech proposing a better idea.

[ufeyfcns] Howto

The most important documents are those which help you do something: mere information transforms into actions in the real world.  Often it is how to replicate what someone else has done.

Wikihow is arguably more important than Wikipedia, but it is only a start.

Create processes and incentives for the creation of such documents and methods to identify which documents describe "how to" well.

Too often this kind of knowledge is only stored in some human's brain, and often there is incentive to keep it that way: it increases the value of the person who has the knowledge.