There’s been a lot of outrage on social media in recent days about Apple’s decision to scan photos on people’s phones for hash collisions with material that has been reported to them to be CSAM (but as we’re likely talking hash lists originating with states, who knows – as I’ve seen asked online, “How long before the Tank Man photo appears on this list?"). This isn’t a bad blog post on the matter. Aral does also make the point that we can’t really blame consumers for being stuck between a rock and a hard place – it’s increasingly expected these days that everyone has a smartphone (for purposes like 2FA, mobile banking, Covid-19 check-ins…) and nothing outside the duopoly of Apple and Google is supported well enough to serve these purposes. People shouldn’t be expected to choose between privacy violations and living a reasonably normal, modern life… and yet…

We will have to migrate back to a world in which we are not controlled and dominated by our intimate enemy – our mobile phones. We have to try to rebuild our lives, struggles and social movements outside the asphyxiating realm of digital surveillance. We must dislodge the regimes that are deploying it against us. We must do everything we can to prise open their grip on the levers of power, everything we can to mend all that they have broken, and take back all they have stolen.

Arundhati Roy on the Pegasus project.

An article about a man whose fiancée had passed away years earlier, but by feeding old texts of hers into a sophisticated AI he could talk to a chatbot facsimile of her, bringing him some peace. There’s definitely a startling aspect to the story, but it’s thought-provoking and quite affecting.

I remember when I was a kid and told my dad I wanted my own homepage (early 2000s), his reaction was to go, “OK, here’s where you can learn how to run your own web server,” which is definitely not where my mind was at the time 😂 These days I’m actually kind of tempted, if not enough to have actually made any steps towards doing so yet, so I found this an interesting read.

In late April, a wave of protests swept across Colombia, sparked by a proposed tax reform measure that many people worried would have disproportionately affected the country’s already struggling working class. Police soon began rounding up a number of the demonstrators, including one woman in the southwestern city of Cali. Authorities handcuffed her, took her cellphone, and then left her with a group of other detainees.

At some point, a police officer returned and offered to loosen the woman’s handcuffs. As they did so, the protestor realized the officer was pressing her fingertips to her phone in order to open it, she later told Fundación Karisma, a Colombian digital rights organization. When the authorities eventually gave the protester back their device, she noticed it was unlocked.

Ten years ago I blogged that smartphones would not have a revolutionary effect on public transportation. I think the trend since then has vindicated me – routing apps have not had visible impact on ridership, whereas traditional investments in better service have.