The 49th Block: Mixinformation
Definition: "A half-genuine mixed message meant to both comfort and confuse."
This week…
I welcome a new addition to my family, Michael B anak Wyse. Please enjoy this candid shot of her. She is named after Star Trek Discovery’s Michael Burnham – former first officer of USS Shenzhou under Malaysian-born Captain Philippa Georgiou – and current captain of USS Discovery. 🖖🏽
Compromised Facebook phone numbers now searchable in Have I Been Pwned
Previously, Troy Hunt’s service only allowed email addresses to be searched to find out if details associated with the email address have been breached in a hack.
Meanwhile, Facebook plays down the leak because “it happened in 2019” and won’t notify users because they don’t know who’s compromised (Reuters), as Linkedin also suffers a data leak affecting 500 million users (Wired $).
Facebook groups fill local news void
So what happens when local news disappears? Brandy Zadrozny for NBC News:
Facebook’s hyperlocal groups have been crucial for information-sharing, especially during a pandemic and in a growing number of areas where local newspapers have been shuttered or gutted. At the same time, the groups have turned into hubs for misinformation, partisan squabbling and vigilantism.
Why Silicon Valley’s most astute critics are all women
Explains John Naughton for The Guardian, as he lists a paragraph of “formidable female tech critics”:
I’m not claiming statistical representativeness, just that as someone whose various day jobs involve reading a lot of tech critiques, these are the thinkers who stand out.
What does this interesting correlation tell us? Quite a lot, as it happens. The first conclusion is that the industry that is reshaping our societies and undermining our democracies is overwhelmingly dominated by males. Yet – with a few honourable exceptions – male critics seem relatively untroubled by, or phlegmatic about, this particular aspect of the industry; they seem to see it as inevitable and pass on to more ostensibly urgent concerns.
The men see it, he says, “as a PR problem to be managed rather than as a structural issue that requires radical reform.” And speaking of female tech critic, here’s Kate Crawford piece for Nature on the need for regulation of AI that interprets human emotions.
What I read, watch and listen to…
I’m reading an essay by mathematician Hannah Fry for The New Yorker, wherein she reviews several books on data-driven decision-making, that results in quotable bits such as:
“…Think about our use of GDP to indicate a country’s economic well-being. By that metric, a schoolteacher could contribute more to a nation’s economic success by assaulting a student and being sent to a high-security prison than by educating the student, owing to all the labour that the teacher’s incarceration would create.”
I’m listening to sci-fi author Ted Chiang explaining on The Ezra Klein Show why it is capitalism, not AI, that we fear:
“…Technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two. How much would we fear any technology […] if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries? There’s universal health care. Everyone has child care, free college maybe. And maybe there’s some version of universal basic income there […] how much do you worry about a new technology then?”
I’m watching Coded Bias, a documentary by Shalini Kantayya about MIT computer scientist Joy Buolamwini’s discovery of racial bias in facial recognition algorithm. (If you read John Naughton’s article above with his list of female tech critics, you will be more acquainted with a few of them through this film.)
Chart of the week
Goddy Ray at Surfshark takes a deep dive into the leaked data of 533 million Facebook users, providing a few intriguing charts, including this one:
Clubhouse also leaked..