Things That Make You Look Over Your Shoulder

Two articles well worth your time to read:

• It turns out Donald Trump's father was the racist landlord Woody Guthrie hated
  

  

  I admit I am a fan of Woody Guthrie (I wish I could truthfully say "This Keyboard Kills Fascists," as Guthrie often labeled his "machine" [guitar]), and not so much a fan of Donald Trump or landlords in general, but based on this article, Fred Trump was worse than the lot regarding racial discrimination. Like father, like son? I wouldn't go that far, but things one learns in youth about interaction with other people tend to last a lifetime, and a racist parent makes me nervous about the child.

• U.S. will use facial recognition at airports
  

  

  I no longer fly because I do not like undergoing invasive searches without a warrant, but these machines, however well they appear to work, make me very uncomfortable. What happens if you're a close match (as the device reckons) with a terrorist? Are your happy urban life, your career, your relationships personal and business, etc. immediately over? I wouldn't bet against it. It's the no-fly list writ large. ("No-live list"?)
  
  And then there's the fact that these machines work, um, badly. Here's the ACLU on the subject:
  

  A study by the government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), for example, found false-negative rates for face-recognition verification of 43 percent using photos of subjects taken just 18 months earlier, for example. And those photos were taken in perfect conditions, significant because facial recognition software is terrible at handling changes in lighting or camera angle or images with busy backgrounds. The NIST study also found that a change of 45 degrees in the camera angle rendered the software useless. The technology works best under tightly controlled conditions, when the subject is starting directly into the camera under bright lights - although another study by the Department of Defense found high error rates even in those ideal conditions. Grainy, dated video surveillance photographs of the type likely to be on file for suspected terrorists would be of very little use.

  Does that give you a lot of confidence?

(I'm afraid I didn't log the sources of these links. If you published one or both, and you are on my blogroll, please accept my thanks.)

Now THAT Is 21st-Century Technology!

Contributors at Juan Cole's Informed Comment outline for us an emerging technology use by Kenya's nomadic shepherds that may possibly leapfrog that nation into the 21^st century in a hurry: solar panels attached to the sides of donkeys. Usage is straightforward: the panels are mounted on the sides of donkeys, which are then released for some unspecified time to graze; when the donkeys return, the charged panels are dismounted and used to power cell phones and lighting in the shepherds' manyattas (encampments or settlements, often temporary) at night:





Note how neatly this avoids the need for a grid or a connection to a grid, at least on the client end... expect TV ads here in the US, explaining to us why the same approach wouldn't work here, in three... two... one...

(UPDATE: Oh, and don't miss this:
Google Wants To Help You Buy Solar Panels For Your House. Seriously.)

The Creepy IoT (Internet Of Things)

Sue Halpern at The New York Review of Books dives from her review of four books (by Jeremy Rifkin, David Rose, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, and Jim Dwyer) into the deep and murky waters of the IoT (Internet of Things), the world of daily living enabled by the use of the Internet to interconnect various kinds of new devices with each other and occasionally with mere humans to accomplish results that are indeed nearly miraculous, as well as utterly destructive of anything that can reasonably be called privacy.

Everything from the much-debated and sophisticated Google Glass to simple pills you swallow that keep your doctor informed of your basic physical state and whether and/or when you take your meds, Internet-enabled light bulbs that turn on when your car signals by Internet that you are almost home, Internet-enabled sensors that locate every member of your household within the city in which you all live, truly automated purchases and other transactions, Internet-monitored status of your car's engine/brakes/etc., and other scary data collections about your person and your world... it's all there.

What happens to privacy? (Obsolete, say some sages; humans never had it in the genuinely old days anyway.)

What happens to the livelihoods of people who make their living providing some of these goods and services now, and hence what happens to capitalism? (Gone, say the sages.)

What happens when a person or group succeeds in hacking these systems? (Power outages that make Hurricane Sandy and 9/11 look like minor blips, say the wizards.)

The general message is that such changes are inevitable in our future, and I tend to believe that is true. But I admit it makes me glad I don't have all that much longer to live... I doubt it will be a world I can adapt to. Leave it to the kids who don't care about the things I care about!

(H/T neighbors George and Barbara [NOT Bush!], who loaned me the dead-tree edition of NY Review.)