Evil Billionaire Attack

Over at Wired, I propose that the chaos unfolding in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter qualifies as a new kind of security risk in which the intrusion mechanism is simply massive amounts of money.

In the field of information security, there’s a kind of vulnerability known as the evil maid attack whereby an untrusted party gains physical access to important hardware, such as the housekeeping staff coming into your hotel room when you’ve left your laptop unattended, thereby compromising it. We have here a new analog, just as capable of wrecking systems and leaking data. Call it the “evil billionaire attack” if you’d like. The weapon is money, and more specifically, the likelihood that when the moment arrives you won’t have enough of it to make a difference. The call is coming from inside the house.

The reason this strategy works is that most ideas of any consequence are owned by people with more money than you, and then whenever possible they string them together into a network with the specific intent of making the gravity inescapable. Founders and investors and excitable technology writers like myself frequently use the term “platform” to describe technical systems with granular components that can be used to compose new functionality, and the power sources propelling the technology industry find platforms particularly appealing when the bits can be monetized each time they are used.

A platform is better than an app, or so the theory goes, because you can use a platform to build multiple apps, or enable other developers and companies to build apps from which you might take a 30 percent cut. Whatever its advantages, the Twitter debacle should spell the end of the proprietary platform as a serious technical undertaking, a high profile illustration that they are too risky to trust no matter how strong the code might be.

iPhone 12

My first gadget review! I previewed the specs of the new iPhone 12 for Wired.

The iPhone 12 comes with a new ProMotion OLED display, which Apple is calling the “Super Retina XDR” screen. It’s the biggest visual upgrade since the original Retina screens a decade ago, and it’s crafted out of a new material called ceramic shield, which is vastly stronger than regular glass—one-fourth as likely to crack when you angrily throw it across the room. Whether you’re watching news anchors debunk political misinformation or trying to catch up with the incomprehensible meme cycle, this brilliant display is the tool for the moment, your perfect window for the end of the world.

Processing Fellowship recap

As my fellowship with the Processing Foundation wound down, I wrote a bit about the process of deriving the guiding principles of p5.js far enough to write useful documentation for it — a dissection manual, if you will.
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The Internet Is Lying To You

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Just kidding! Ha ha! But I did write about the problems with aggressive link redirecting for New York Magazine.

This is both dangerous and ridiculous. Pages load more slowly, and the extra useless links are much more likely to break, and it’s impossible to know where you’re actually heading until after you’ve already clicked. One of the reasons users must so awkwardly tumble through a useless proprietary server that performs customized URL-redirecting behaviors is because this sort of thing is not actually included in any of our technical standards for building computer networks, and it is not part of any standard because it is a terrible idea. Bouncing internet users around between obfuscating servers in a game of internet pinball is a patently absurd way to run any sort of address system. It is a terrible distributed collective architecture that comes at the expense of the real internet.

Meltdown, Spectre, and everything else

For Wired, a meandering essay that uses the Meltdown and Spectre exploits to point out problems with how we think about the future:

Anything that seeks to reshape the infrastructure built by our past selves should deserve our most aggressive scrutiny, regulation, and suspicion. If backtracking overeager technology is already proving so catastrophic for the cheap chips in our laptops and phones, then we certainly have no hope of reversing its changes to our homes, cities, and oceans.

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AMP for Email

Google recently unveiled a set of proposed upgrades to email. For New York Magazine’s tech section, I wrote about where it went wrong – most notably, that it should not be possible to “unveil” upgrades to a standardized communication platform in the first place.

The biggest flaw is simply that it can’t reasonably be called version two of email. That isn’t Google’s fault — version two of email doesn’t exist anywhere else either. We aren’t even trying. That is such a profound moral failure that maybe technical failure was also inevitable. And so a lukewarm quasi-open standard pushed by a monopoly interest punts our indefensible collective apathy right into the next generation, deeply broken and silly and misguided but also, embarrassingly enough, still the best we say we can do.

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This is in many ways the spiritual successor to a previous article I wrote about the continued stagnancy of email.

Net Neutrality

New York magazine’s tech blog Select All let me go wayyyy overboard explaining why internet application protocols like http:// and ftp:// intrinsically fight for net neutrality even with the FCC does not.

Networks are made of computers, and computers take instruction. They do as they are told reliably until they break, and for decades now, what we have told them to do is move information around as quickly and efficiently as possible. This is for two reasons: practical, because at the dawn of the internet it was important to squeeze bits over the limited bandwidth of dial-up modems; but also elemental, because designing any technology with intentionally suboptimal performance is self-evidently idiotic, so nobody does it — aside from the current FCC, apparently. Nonetheless, for the most part, the internet’s underlying application-layer protocols try to run as quickly as possible. This will remain true unless the internet is completely rebuilt atop a different foundation.

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Tweet Strings

My new piece for Motherboard unpacks the recent changes to Twitter’s character limits. In short, the big news is not that the tweets are growing longer, it’s that they are now being treated as data structures, not text strings.

Twitter has always performed text analysis of the tweet content to detect elements and extract them as distinct entities to discrete data fields. Now the separation is fixed and formal: They’re auxiliary data points, not part of the message content, and as such they will need to be specifically interpreted by any program, site, or service that integrates with Twitter. This means that tweets are no longer just text; they are turning into something entirely new.

Web Safe

Web Safe 2k16 is a strange, beautiful project in which writers sift through their memories of the early internet using a specific color as a prompt. I wrote about blue.

Audio Metadata

For VICE/Motherboard, here’s an obsessive deep dive into the minute details of music metadata, and how information about the songs we love is being co-opted for questionable ends by streaming services like Spotify and Google Play.

Format shifts have already altered the mechanics of music simultaneously several times over the past few decades, and the recent rush toward streaming services like Spotify and Google Play now positions a technology company between the listener and the material. Surely remote cloud storage is a new audio format at least as much as the Walkman?

This is a new kind of consumer relationship, and the play button has a different meaning for each side; to the business, it does more than just switch on entertainment. As a result, there’s now a sort of subtle power play occurring over control of the metadata which surrounds the music and connects it to search fields, filters, and playlists. This is unfortunate, because our ability to meaningfully engage with something depends first and foremost on whether we can find it at all.

Hacker News

Opinions Are Like Software Applications

For New York magazine, an attempt to explain how Apple’s institutional priorities can be understood by looking at its source code, and what that might mean for the big pending legal battle with the FBI over encryption in the iPhone:

One reliable peril of advanced technologies is that the details of implementation usually aren’t yet common knowledge among most people — often including judges and lawyers, regrettably — but the compulsion of speech, or software-as-speech, isn’t made any more acceptable simply because fewer people know how to interpret it. The FBI’s demands in this case rely on that confusion: Its application for the order to compel Apple to provide them with the custom software states that “writing software code is not an unreasonable burden for a company that writes software code as part of its regular business.” This phrasing contains a subtle gamble: that both the courts and the public will conceive of the software as a tangible artifact produced by an incomprehensible factory in the clouds, rather than fully considering its design and development a coordinated act driven by human motivations, politics, and principles.

Email Is Immortal

On the occasion of its inventor’s passing, I wrote up a theory for New York about why it has been so hard for a more modern email replacement to take off.

That is, it will remain impossible to build a better communication system until the primary goal is actually communication itself. But by and large, we don’t invest much in creating new open standards, specifications, and protocols around which entirely new classes of tools can be built — we’re too busy trying to sell apps! The funding structure of the technology world is largely set up to fight interoperability.

Twitter timelines

My first story for Motherboard, the tech vertical at VICE, is about the darker side of Twitter’s recent experiments with polls and non-chronological timelines.

As polls spread highly structured tweet content, algorithmic presentation meanwhile creates a testable structure around the more chaotic tweets. Since the implicit contract with users would no longer be based on publicly verifiable values like timestamps, a fully algorithmic Twitter would actually just be an experimental Twitter, a service in which the content can be constantly tweaked and manipulated in order to see how users will react.

Alien vs. Star Wars

Over at the Message, I have a meandering analysis of the new Star Wars film which tries to connect it to the narrative schism that was created in between Aliens and Alien³ when handing off that franchise between directors.

Successful serials and franchises are small miracles given the complicated competing interests introduced by the business scale of modern blockbusters like the Star Wars saga. Empires are built around their marketing and production, but even writing a sensible core narrative is already hard enough. Weaving stories out of smaller pieces can be incredibly difficult, because in isolation, each piece tends to pull in its own direction, and it’s only through careful and deliberate oversight that they might eventually coalesce into something rational. With that in mind, please sit tight for a moment and pardon this immediate tangent. We’ll get to Star Wars in due course, but in order to contextualize where it’s going, it may actually help to start with Alien.

Drupal Philosophy

Here’s a strange interview I did with the lead developer of Drupal, a software project which is dramatically re-architected for every release, about general philosophies of change.

You’re sort of explaining striking a balance between hierarchical values and non-hierarchical values. How do you manage the relationship between those two types of concerns, and when there’s a new concern that appears, how do you determine whether it’s a hierarchical concern or a non-hierarchical concern?

Let’s say you go to a restaurant and you order fish. You don’t care which truck brought the fish to the restaurant, do you? Sometimes it’s as obvious as that. You have to do what’s right for the operator, the fish is fresh and what have you, but we don’t care what truck gets the fish to the restaurant. Everybody understands that, even the truck driver. Maybe it’s not a great analogy.

Breaking Bad was a UI Problem

For the Message, a theory about the influence of Netflix on television scripts:

Nearly forty percent of American homes pay for access to a streaming video service like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video. A theory: even excluding forays into original programming, their prevalence has now started to shape the material they present. As we’ve seen from a decade of arms races in SEO and social media, content evolves to jockey for position with its audience.

Software Naming Conventions

A strange piece for the Message which attempts to illuminate the absurdity of our current approach to naming software.

If you can’t Google your way to something, it’s almost as though it doesn’t even exist, but luckily the filename suffixes used for coding scripts, such as .js and .py, are linguistic (linguistic.js) anomalies which all but create their own SEO (seo.js). Businesses strategize based on their Google rankings relative to competitors for the same reason that tweets are usually weighed in favorites and retweets — on an impersonal internet, visibility (visibility.js) is almost synonymous with value. Publishing any code at (at.js) all creates an instant presence which would be hard to build in other ways. The tech industry is our modern gold rush, drawing swarms of opportunists westward (westward.js), and memorable terminology is one of its new land grabs.

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Clusterfucks (A Working List)

Just in time for Halloween, a list of things that should scare you about modern technology:

Tech has always generally moved faster than government in most senses, but increasingly it now outpaces the agencies we’ve been conditioned to trust, not just the municipal parks struggling to put pool schedules online. Very real threats form in dark corners of the internet precisely because the people who hang out there can buy drugs and weapons, and trying to limit the transactions quickly led to untraceable online currency. These are functions we theoretically employ vast literal armies of government agents to manage.

Blood, Guts

I’m so excited to have started as a contributor to The Message, the chaotic in-house tech and culture vertical at Medium – thrilled to be working alongside all these geniuses. First up, here’s a look back at the circumstances that have occasionally driven me to write scripts to solve personal issues:

I’d often react to a case of information overload by trying to find a way to pare it down, little data processors which attempted to solve the problems I’ve had in my life over the past decade. I realize these are very strange artifacts to feel nostalgic about, but we don’t get to choose these things.

It’s Time To Choose!

I hope you had a great summer! I wrote about one last round of potential Song of the Summer candidates for the Awl, again excluding anything in English.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a teen pop group this large in the U.S.—there are eight members, including one drummer who doesn’t participate in the choreography. Here they swap out leads so quickly and stitch together the vocals so tightly that the singers are still all but indistinguishable by the end; it’s a five-minute song, so that’s 37.5 seconds allotted to each member, if we allow no time for breathing. To keep things under control, they’re sometimes split into two color-coded sub-groups, just like the blue and gold teams from the early-nineties X-Men.