Reality 2.0

Tune in to our new episode! Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Kyle Rankin of Purism about how to advertise without being creepy.

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Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.

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• Is Ethical Advertising Possible? – Purism — Is ethical advertising possible? We all certainly know unethical advertising is possible, we live with it every day. The ad-driven Internet has created an insatiable hunger for personal data and as a result most of what the average person does in their web browser, or on their phone, and in real life is being measured, tracked, and sold to some degree. Yet if a company actually cared about your privacy and wanted to advertise its products, could it do so ethically? Can you track what a visitor does on your website without violating their privacy? We have been thinking about these issues heavily at Purism as we consider how to expand our marketing and in this article I’m going to explore where we currently are in our thinking.
• Doc Searls Weblog · People vs. Adtech — Below are blog posts, articles and essays I’ve written toward four goals in fighting surveillance of our private spaces online by the tracking-based advertising business and its dependents in publishing.
• Opinion | In Stores, Secret Bluetooth Surveillance Tracks Your Every Move - The New York Times — Imagine you are shopping in your favorite grocery store. As you approach the dairy aisle, you are sent a push notification in your phone: “10 percent off your favorite yogurt! Click here to redeem your coupon.” You considered buying yogurt on your last trip to the store, but you decided against it. How did your phone know?

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk about the Digital Markets Act and Apple's personal finance plans.

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• The Digital Markets Act: ensuring fair and open digital markets | European Commission — The Digital Markets Act (DMA) establishes a set of narrowly defined objective criteria for qualifying a large online platform as a so-called “gatekeeper”. This allows the DMA to remain well targeted to the problem that it aims to tackle as regards large, systemic online platforms.
• Why Alphabet Will Benefit From New European Privacy Rules — European regulators are once again coming after big American technology companies. Some say it is the beginning of the end for them. Not so fast.
• New EU law could spark gold rush of iMessage alternatives — At the moment, getting access to iMessage’s features on non-Apple devices is a complete pain. In fact, getting access to any messaging platform’s features outside of its native apps can range from difficult to almost impossible. Whether it’s Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or Signal, in every case, the services’ developers want you to stick to their own software to message on their platforms.
• Europe agrees on big new package of tech rules — European regulators have come to an agreement on major competition rules that could force the world's biggest tech platforms, including Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft, to reshape big chunks of their business.
• US consumer views on privacy laws — A July 2021 survey from Data for Progress found that nearly three-quarters (72%) of likely US voters felt that existing privacy laws are insufficient.
• Computer Crime Hype - Schneier on Security — Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.
• Apple (AAPL) Working to Bring Financial Services Tasks In-House - Bloomberg — The effort, dubbed ‘Breakout,’ would replace fintech partners
• Wordle Hacking—Suddenly Wordle Is Tracking You, Here’s How To Stop It — Perhaps what will come as some surprise to many players of the game is that it now comes complete with ad-trackers. But don't sweat it, you can stop it with a little Wordle hacking.

Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Ezequiel Lanza and Tony Mongkolsmai about ChatGPT, generative AI, and open source software.

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Special Guests: Ezequiel Lanza and Tony Mongkolsmai.

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• Attention is All You Need – Google Research — The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism. We propose a new simple network architecture, the Transformer, based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. Experiments on two machine translation tasks show these models to be superior in quality while being more parallelizable and requiring significantly less time to train. Our model achieves 28.4 BLEU on the WMT 2014 English-to-German translation task, improving over the existing best results, including ensembles by over 2 BLEU. On the WMT 2014 English-to-French translation task, our model establishes a new single-model state-of-the-art BLEU score of 41.0 after training for 3.5 days on eight GPUs, a small fraction of the training costs of the best models from the literature. We show that the Transformer generalizes well to other tasks by applying it successfully to English constituency parsing both with large and limited training data.
• fka/awesome-chatgpt-prompts · Datasets at Hugging Face
• Experts Warn ChatGPT Could Democratize Cybercrime - Infosecurity Magazine — A wildly popular new AI bot could be used by would-be cyber-criminals to teach them how to craft attacks and even write ransomware, security experts have warned.
• ChatGPT

Doc Searls, Katherine Druckman, Shawn Powers, and Kyle Rankin discuss the ups, downs, and how-tos of using Mastodon amid Twitter's recent instability.

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Special Guests: Kyle Rankin and Shawn Powers.

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• Does Twitter Have Any Employees Left Who Remember That The Company Is Under A Strict Consent Decree With The FTC? | Techdirt — Yesterday I tweeted out a question about whether or not there was anyone left at Twitter who remembered that the company was under a pretty strict FTC consent decree
• Twitter stories at Techdirt.
• A fake tweet sparked panic at Eli Lilly and may have cost Twitter millions — The nine-word tweet was sent Thursday afternoon from an account using the name and logo of the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Co., and it immediately attracted a giant response: “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.”
• Day #43 - Mastodon Verification, with Wordpress! - 90 Days of Mayhem!
• Debirdify — This website allows you to search the people you follow on Twitter for possible Mastodon/Fediverse accounts. To use it, you need to click the button below and allow it to communicate with Twitter on your behalf. This is ‘read-only’: we cannot modify anything (write Tweets etc).
• Fedi.Directory — A small human-curated selection of interesting accounts to help you get started, or just to spice up your timeline.

Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Don Marti and Shawn Powers about realistic data privacy measures, surveillance marketing, and privacy regulation.

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Special Guests: Don Marti and Shawn Powers.

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• CCPA opt out, nerd edition — While we figure out how to make general-purpose CCPA opt-outs practical (feel free to set up a time on Calendly if you want to talk with me about Authorized Agent projects), here’s a quick summary of my current CCPA opt-out tools. This is a prototype only, but does work.
• Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Laws and Regulations | US EPA — The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) is the public law that creates the framework for the proper management of hazardous and non-hazardous solid waste. The law describes the waste management program mandated by Congress that gave EPA authority to develop the RCRA program. The term RCRA is often used interchangeably to refer to the law, regulations and EPA policy and guidance.
• Resource Conservation and Recovery Act - Wikipedia — The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), enacted in 1976, is the principal federal law in the United States governing the disposal of solid waste and hazardous waste.[1]
• Global Privacy Control — Take Control Of Your Privacy — Online privacy should be accessible to everyone. It starts with a simpler way to exercise your rights.
• CCPA guidance for authorized agents — The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (“CCPA”) creates a variety of privacy rights for California consumers. Microsoft makes it easy for consumers to exercise their rights, including the rights, via a verifiable request, that we (i) disclose and access what personal data we collect, use, disclose, and sell and (ii) delete the consumer’s personal data. Per the CCPA, consumers may exercise their rights through an authorized agent. This guidance is intended for authorized agents acting on behalf of a consumer looking to exercise the above CCPA rights.
• The State of Authorized Agent Opt Outs Under the California Consumer Privacy Act (PDF)
• Consumer Reports Model State Privacy Act — Though consumers have a fundamental right to privacy, there is no comprehensive federal privacy law granting them baseline privacy and security protections. Instead of leaving it to consumers to “opt-in” or “opt-out,” this bill protects consumer privacy by prohibiting companies from engaging in privacy-invasive behaviors.