#Data Privacy Management Software

[gotrust-tech]

The Role of Encryption in Modern Data Protection Strategies Discover how GoTrust's data protection management software uses advanced encryption for robust data security. Learn more today!

[filehulk]

Folder Lock

If you have folders and files that you want to keep private, consider using Folder Lock. Unlike My Lockbox, it isn’t a free app, but it offers excellent configuration options and numerous methods to protect important and private documents from prying eyes. Folder Lock is a complete solution for keeping your personal files encrypted and locked, while automatically and in real-time backing up…

[lifehacksthatwork]

Just a bunch of Useful websites - Updated for 2023

Removed/checked all links to make sure everything is working (03/03/23). Hope they help!

Sejda - Free online PDF editor.

Supercook - Have ingredients but no idea what to make? Put them in here and it'll give you recipe ideas.

Still Tasty - Trying the above but unsure about whether that sauce in the fridge is still edible? Check here first.

Archive.ph - Paywall bypass. Like 12ft below but appears to work far better and across more sites in my testing. I'd recommend trying this one first as I had more success with it.

12ft – Hate paywalls? Try this site out.

Where Is This - Want to know where a picture was taken, this site can help.

TOS/DR - Terms of service, didn't read. Gives you a summary of terms of service plus gives each site a privacy rating.

OneLook - Reverse dictionary for when you know the description of the word but can't for the life of you remember the actual word.

My Abandonware - Brilliant site for free, legal games. Has games from 1978 up to present day across pc and console. You'll be surprised by some of the games on there, some absolute gems.

Project Gutenberg – Always ends up on these type of lists and for very good reason. All works that are copyright free in one place.

Ninite – New PC? Install all of your programs in one go with no bloat or unnecessary crap.

PatchMyPC - Alternative to ninite with over 300 app options to keep upto date. Free for home users.

Unchecky – Tired of software trying to install additional unwanted programs? This will stop it completely by unchecking the necessary boxes when you install.

Sci-Hub – Research papers galore! Check here before shelling out money. And if it’s not here, try the next link in our list.

LibGen – Lots of free PDFs relate primarily to the sciences.

Zotero – A free and easy to use program to collect, organize, cite and share research.

Car Complaints – Buying a used car? Check out what other owners of the same model have to say about it first.

CamelCamelCamel – Check the historical prices of items on Amazon and set alerts for when prices drop.

Have I Been Pawned – Still the king when it comes to checking if your online accounts have been released in a data breach. Also able to sign up for email alerts if you’ve ever a victim of a breach.

I Have No TV - A collection of documentaries for you to while away the time. Completely free.

Radio Garden – Think Google Earth but wherever you zoom, you get the radio station of that place.

Just The Recipe – Paste in the url and get just the recipe as a result. No life story or adverts.

Tineye – An Amazing reverse image search tool.

My 90s TV – Simulates 90’s TV using YouTube videos. Also has My80sTV, My70sTV, My60sTV and for the younger ones out there, My00sTV. Lose yourself in nostalgia.

Foto Forensics – Free image analysis tools.

Old Games Download – A repository of games from the 90’s and early 2000’s. Get your fix of nostalgia here.

Online OCR – Convert pictures of text into actual text and output it in the format you need.

Remove Background – An amazingly quick and accurate way to remove backgrounds from your pictures.

Twoseven – Allows you to sync videos from providers such as Netflix, Youtube, Disney+ etc and watch them with your friends. Ad free and also has the ability to do real time video and text chat.

Terms of Service, Didn’t Read – Get a quick summary of Terms of service plus a privacy rating.

Coolors – Struggling to get a good combination of colors? This site will generate color palettes for you.

This To That – Need to glue two things together? This’ll help.

Photopea – A free online alternative to Adobe Photoshop. Does everything in your browser.

BitWarden – Free open source password manager.

Just Beam It - Peer to peer file transfer. Drop the file in on one end, click create link and send to whoever. Leave your pc on that page while they download. Because of how it works there are no file limits. It's genuinely amazing. Best file transfer system I have ever used.

Atlas Obscura – Travelling to a new place? Find out the hidden treasures you should go to with Atlas Obscura.

ID Ransomware – Ever get ransomware on your computer? Use this to see if the virus infecting your pc has been cracked yet or not. Potentially saving you money. You can also sign up for email notifications if your particular problem hasn’t been cracked yet.

Way Back Machine – The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and loads more.

Rome2Rio – Directions from anywhere to anywhere by bus, train, plane, car and ferry.

Splitter – Seperate different audio tracks audio. Allowing you to split out music from the words for example.

myNoise – Gives you beautiful noises to match your mood. Increase your productivity, calm down and need help sleeping? All here for you.

DeepL – Best language translation tool on the web.

Forvo – Alternatively, if you need to hear a local speaking a word, this is the site for you.

For even more useful sites, there is an expanded list that can be found here.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Demon-haunted computers are back, baby

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

As a science fiction writer, I am professionally irritated by a lot of sf movies. Not only do those writers get paid a lot more than I do, they insist on including things like "self-destruct" buttons on the bridges of their starships.

Look, I get it. When the evil empire is closing in on your flagship with its secret transdimensional technology, it's important that you keep those secrets out of the emperor's hand. An irrevocable self-destruct switch there on the bridge gets the job done! (It has to be irrevocable, otherwise the baddies'll just swarm the bridge and toggle it off).

But c'mon. If there's a facility built into your spaceship that causes it to explode no matter what the people on the bridge do, that is also a pretty big security risk! What if the bad guy figures out how to hijack the measure that – by design – the people who depend on the spaceship as a matter of life and death can't detect or override?

I mean, sure, you can try to simplify that self-destruct system to make it easier to audit and assure yourself that it doesn't have any bugs in it, but remember Schneier's Law: anyone can design a security system that works so well that they themselves can't think of a flaw in it. That doesn't mean you've made a security system that works – only that you've made a security system that works on people stupider than you.

I know it's weird to be worried about realism in movies that pretend we will ever find a practical means to visit other star systems and shuttle back and forth between them (which we are very, very unlikely to do):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

But this kind of foolishness galls me. It galls me even more when it happens in the real world of technology design, which is why I've spent the past quarter-century being very cross about Digital Rights Management in general, and trusted computing in particular.

It all starts in 2002, when a team from Microsoft visited our offices at EFF to tell us about this new thing they'd dreamed up called "trusted computing":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The big idea was to stick a second computer inside your computer, a very secure little co-processor, that you couldn't access directly, let alone reprogram or interfere with. As far as this "trusted platform module" was concerned, you were the enemy. The "trust" in trusted computing was about other people being able to trust your computer, even if they didn't trust you.

So that little TPM would do all kinds of cute tricks. It could observe and produce a cryptographically signed manifest of the entire boot-chain of your computer, which was meant to be an unforgeable certificate attesting to which kind of computer you were running and what software you were running on it. That meant that programs on other computers could decide whether to talk to your computer based on whether they agreed with your choices about which code to run.

This process, called "remote attestation," is generally billed as a way to identify and block computers that have been compromised by malware, or to identify gamers who are running cheats and refuse to play with them. But inevitably it turns into a way to refuse service to computers that have privacy blockers turned on, or are running stream-ripping software, or whose owners are blocking ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

After all, a system that treats the device's owner as an adversary is a natural ally for the owner's other, human adversaries. The rubric for treating the owner as an adversary focuses on the way that users can be fooled by bad people with bad programs. If your computer gets taken over by malicious software, that malware might intercept queries from your antivirus program and send it false data that lulls it into thinking your computer is fine, even as your private data is being plundered and your system is being used to launch malware attacks on others.

These separate, non-user-accessible, non-updateable secure systems serve a nubs of certainty, a remote fortress that observes and faithfully reports on the interior workings of your computer. This separate system can't be user-modifiable or field-updateable, because then malicious software could impersonate the user and disable the security chip.

It's true that compromised computers are a real and terrifying problem. Your computer is privy to your most intimate secrets and an attacker who can turn it against you can harm you in untold ways. But the widespread redesign of out computers to treat us as their enemies gives rise to a range of completely predictable and – I would argue – even worse harms. Building computers that treat their owners as untrusted parties is a system that works well, but fails badly.

First of all, there are the ways that trusted computing is designed to hurt you. The most reliable way to enshittify something is to supply it over a computer that runs programs you can't alter, and that rats you out to third parties if you run counter-programs that disenshittify the service you're using. That's how we get inkjet printers that refuse to use perfectly good third-party ink and cars that refuse to accept perfectly good engine repairs if they are performed by third-party mechanics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

It's how we get cursed devices and appliances, from the juicer that won't squeeze third-party juice to the insulin pump that won't connect to a third-party continuous glucose monitor:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

But trusted computing doesn't just create an opaque veil between your computer and the programs you use to inspect and control it. Trusted computing creates a no-go zone where programs can change their behavior based on whether they think they're being observed.

The most prominent example of this is Dieselgate, where auto manufacturers murdered hundreds of people by gimmicking their cars to emit illegal amount of NOX. Key to Dieselgate was a program that sought to determine whether it was being observed by regulators (it checked for the telltale signs of the standard test-suite) and changed its behavior to color within the lines.

Software that is seeking to harm the owner of the device that's running it must be able to detect when it is being run inside a simulation, a test-suite, a virtual machine, or any other hallucinatory virtual world. Just as Descartes couldn't know whether anything was real until he assured himself that he could trust his senses, malware is always questing to discover whether it is running in the real universe, or in a simulation created by a wicked god:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/28/descartes-was-an-optimist/#uh-oh

That's why mobile malware uses clever gambits like periodically checking for readings from your device's accelerometer, on the theory that a virtual mobile phone running on a security researcher's test bench won't have the fidelity to generate plausible jiggles to match the real data that comes from a phone in your pocket:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/google-play-malware-used-phones-motion-sensors-to-conceal-itself/

Sometimes this backfires in absolutely delightful ways. When the Wannacry ransomware was holding the world hostage, the security researcher Marcus Hutchins noticed that its code made reference to a very weird website: iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com. Hutchins stood up a website at that address and every Wannacry-infection in the world went instantly dormant:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#the-matrix

It turns out that Wannacry's authors were using that ferkakte URL the same way that mobile malware authors were using accelerometer readings – to fulfill Descartes' imperative to distinguish the Matrix from reality. The malware authors knew that security researchers often ran malicious code inside sandboxes that answered every network query with fake data in hopes of eliciting responses that could be analyzed for weaknesses. So the Wannacry worm would periodically poll this nonexistent website and, if it got an answer, it would assume that it was being monitored by a security researcher and it would retreat to an encrypted blob, ceasing to operate lest it give intelligence to the enemy. When Hutchins put a webserver up at iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com, every Wannacry instance in the world was instantly convinced that it was running on an enemy's simulator and withdrew into sulky hibernation.

The arms race to distinguish simulation from reality is critical and the stakes only get higher by the day. Malware abounds, even as our devices grow more intimately woven through our lives. We put our bodies into computers – cars, buildings – and computers inside our bodies. We absolutely want our computers to be able to faithfully convey what's going on inside them.

But we keep running as hard as we can in the opposite direction, leaning harder into secure computing models built on subsystems in our computers that treat us as the threat. Take UEFI, the ubiquitous security system that observes your computer's boot process, halting it if it sees something it doesn't approve of. On the one hand, this has made installing GNU/Linux and other alternative OSes vastly harder across a wide variety of devices. This means that when a vendor end-of-lifes a gadget, no one can make an alternative OS for it, so off the landfill it goes.

It doesn't help that UEFI – and other trusted computing modules – are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it a felony to publish information that can bypass or weaken the system. The threat of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine means that UEFI and other trusted computing systems are understudied, leaving them festering with longstanding bugs:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#que-viva

Here's where it gets really bad. If an attacker can get inside UEFI, they can run malicious software that – by design – no program running on our computers can detect or block. That badware is running in "Ring -1" – a zone of privilege that overrides the operating system itself.

Here's the bad news: UEFI malware has already been detected in the wild:

https://securelist.com/cosmicstrand-uefi-firmware-rootkit/106973/

And here's the worst news: researchers have just identified another exploitable UEFI bug, dubbed Pixiefail:

https://blog.quarkslab.com/pixiefail-nine-vulnerabilities-in-tianocores-edk-ii-ipv6-network-stack.html

Writing in Ars Technica, Dan Goodin breaks down Pixiefail, describing how anyone on the same LAN as a vulnerable computer can infect its firmware:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/new-uefi-vulnerabilities-send-firmware-devs-across-an-entire-ecosystem-scrambling/

That vulnerability extends to computers in a data-center where the attacker has a cloud computing instance. PXE – the system that Pixiefail attacks – isn't widely used in home or office environments, but it's very common in data-centers.

Again, once a computer is exploited with Pixiefail, software running on that computer can't detect or delete the Pixiefail code. When the compromised computer is queried by the operating system, Pixiefail undetectably lies to the OS. "Hey, OS, does this drive have a file called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope." "Hey, OS, are you running a process called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope."

This is a self-destruct switch that's been compromised by the enemy, and which no one on the bridge can de-activate – by design. It's not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.

There are models for helping your computer bust out of the Matrix. Back in 2016, Edward Snowden and bunnie Huang prototyped and published source code and schematics for an "introspection engine":

https://assets.pubpub.org/aacpjrja/AgainstTheLaw-CounteringLawfulAbusesofDigitalSurveillance.pdf

This is a single-board computer that lives in an ultraslim shim that you slide between your iPhone's mainboard and its case, leaving a ribbon cable poking out of the SIM slot. This connects to a case that has its own OLED display. The board has leads that physically contact each of the network interfaces on the phone, conveying any data they transit to the screen so that you can observe the data your phone is sending without having to trust your phone.

(I liked this gadget so much that I included it as a major plot point in my 2020 novel Attack Surface, the third book in the Little Brother series):

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/

We don't have to cede control over our devices in order to secure them. Indeed, we can't ever secure them unless we can control them. Self-destruct switches don't belong on the bridge of your spaceship, and trusted computing modules don't belong in your devices.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

Image: Mike (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/stillwellmike/15676883261/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[probablyasocialecologist]

Surveillance developments of the 21st century have replaced the traditional gaze of the supervisor on the industrial factory floor with an automated, digital one that continuously collects real-time data on living, breathing people. Even unionized workers do not have an explicit legal right to bargain over surveillance technologies; when it comes to the right to privacy, unions have an uphill battle to fight. We now live in a world where employees are stuck in a web of participatory surveillance because they consent to be monitored as a condition of employment. Today’s workplace surveillance practices, as in the case of Amazon, have become invasive and almost limitless. Technology has allowed employers an unprecedented ability to surveil workers. Management can minutely track and persistently push workers toward greater productivity at the risk of exacerbating harms to workers’ physical health, as the high rates of injury in Amazon warehouses show. And the growing business of selling workplace surveillance software has allowed for massive amounts of data to be collected on working people: when and who they talk to, how quickly they complete tasks, what they search for on their computers, how often they use the toilet, and even the state of their current health and moods.

[shinelikethunder]

Hello there! I hope you don’t mind me just dropping into your asks like this, but by all means def feel free to just delete this if so, it is kind of a weird ask.

This is the anon from the computer blog asking about a private laptop for collage! After doing (a small amount of) research into Linux, one thing that’s super confusing to me, is… how does one know which distro to use? You mentioned in the replies of the post that you use Ubuntu Linux, which seems to be one of the more popular ones. Would you recommend — and if so, why? Is it good for privacy, do you think? The best? Does the user need to have a good deal of experience with computers to keep it running? (I’ve never used a laptop before but I don’t mind trying to learn stuff)

Also this is an EXTREMELY stupid question my apologies, but how….. exactly do you put Linux on a laptop? OP from my ask said to buy a laptop with no OS but is that something you can do? I’d think so, since 0P works with computer and stuff as their job, but Reddit says that it’s not really possible and that you should just “buy like a Windows laptop and scrap the software”??? Is that… correct? How did you install Linux on your laptop — did y ou have to remove software off it or did you, as OP says, manage to find a laptop with no OS?

Again, feel free to ignore if you don’t wanna put in the time/effort to reply to this, I absolutely don’t mind — it’s a lot of stuff I’m asking and you didn’t invite it all, so ofc feel free to delete the ask if you’d like!

ha, you've zeroed in on one of the big reasons Linux is kind of a contrarian choice for me to recommend: the wild proliferation of distros, many of them hideously complex to work with. luckily, the fact that most of them are niche offshoots created by and for overly-technical nerds makes the choice easier: you don't want those. you want one of the largest, best-supported, most popular ones, with a reputation for being beginner-friendly. the two biggies are Ubuntu and Linux Mint; i'd recommend focusing your research there.

this isn't JUST a popularity-contest thing: the more people use it, the more likely you are to find answers if you're having trouble or plugging a weird error message into google, and the greater the variety of software you'll find packaged for easy install in that distro. some combination of professional and broad-based community support means you'll find better documentation and tutorials, glitches will be rarer and get fixed faster, and the OS is less likely to be finicky about what hardware it'll play nice with. the newbie-friendly ones are designed to be a breeze to install and to not require technical fiddling to run them for everyday tasks like web browsing, document editing, media viewing, file management, and such.

info on installation, privacy, personal endorsement, etc under the cut. tl;dr: most computers can make you a magic Linux-installing USB stick, most Linuces are blessedly not part of the problem on privacy, Ubuntu i can firsthand recommend but Mint is probably also good.

almost all Linux distros can be assumed to be better for privacy than Windows or MacOS, because they are working from a baseline of Not Being One Of The Things Spying On You; some are managed by corporations (Ubuntu is one of them), but even those corporations have to cater to a notoriously cantankerous userbase, so most phoning-home with usage data tends to be easy to turn off and sponsored bullshit kept minimally intrusive. the one big exception i know of is Google's bastard stepchild ChromeOS, which you really don't want to be using, for a wide variety of reasons. do NOT let someone talk you into installing fucking Qubes or something on claims that it's the "most private" or "most secure" OS; that's total user-unfriendly overkill unless you have like a nation-state spy agency or something targeting you, specifically.

how to install Linux is also not a dumb question! back in the day, if you wanted to, say, upgrade a desktop computer from Windows 95 to Windows 98, you'd receive a physical CD-ROM disc whose contents were formatted to tell the computer "hey, i'm not a music CD or a random pile of backup data or a piece of software for the OS to run, i want you to run me as the OS next time you boot up," and then that startup version would walk you through the install.

nowadays almost anyone with a computer can create a USB stick that'll do the same thing: you download an Ubuntu installer and a program that can perform that kind of formatting, plug in the USB stick, tell the program to put the installer on it and make it bootable, and then once it's done, plug the USB stick into the computer you want to Linuxify and turn it on.

Ubuntu has an excellent tutorial for every step of the install process, and an option to do a temporary test install so you can poke around and see how you like it without pulling the trigger irreversibly: https://ubuntu.com/tutorials/install-ubuntu-desktop

having a way to create a bootable USB stick is one reason to just get a Windows computer and then let the Linux installer nuke everything (which i think is the most common workflow), but in a pinch you can also create the USB on a borrowed/shared computer and uninstall the formatter program when you're done. i don't have strong opinions on what kind of laptop to get, except "if you do go for Linux, be sure to research in advance whether the distro is known to play nice with your hardware." i'm partial to ThinkPads but that's just, like, my opinion, man. lots of distros' installers also make it dead simple to create a dual-boot setup where you can pick between Windows and Linux at every startup, which is useful if you know you might have to use Windows-only software for school or something. keep in mind, though, that this creates two little fiefdoms whose files and hard-disk space aren't shared at all, and it is not a beginner-friendly task to go in later and change how much storage each OS has access to.

i've been using the distro i'm most familiar with as my go-to example throughout, but i don't really have a strong opinion on Ubuntu vs Mint, simply because i haven't played around with Mint enough to form one. Ubuntu i'll happily recommend as a beginner-friendly version of Linux that's reasonably private by default. (i think there's like one install step where Canonical offers paid options, telemetry, connecting online accounts, etc, and then respects your "fuck off" and doesn't bug you about it again.) by reputation, Mint has a friendlier UI, especially for people who are used to Windows, and its built-in app library/"store" is slicker but offers a slightly more limited ecosystem of point-and-click installs.

(unlike Apple and Google, there are zero standard Linux distros that give a shit if you manually install software from outside the app store, it's just a notoriously finicky process that could take two clicks or could have you tearing your hair out at 3am. worth trying if the need arises, but not worth stressing over if you can't get it to work.)

basic software starter-pack recommendations for any laptop (all available on Windows and Mac too): Firefox with the uBlock Origin and container tab add-ons, VLC media player, LibreOffice for document editing. the closest thing to a dealbreaking pain in the ass about Linux these days (imo) is that all the image and video editing software i know of is kinda janky in some way, so if that's non-negotiable you may have to dual-boot... GIMP is the godawfully-clunky-but-powerful Photoshop knockoff, and i've heard decent things about Pinta as a mid-weight image editor roughly equivalent to Paint.net for Windows.

[warningsine]

All right, since I bombarded a poor mutual yesterday...

Privacy is not security and security is not privacy. These terms are not interchangeable, but they are intrinsically linked.

While we're at this, anonymity =/= security either. For example, Tor provides the former, but not necessarily the latter, hence using Https is always essential.

It is impossible to have privacy without security, but you can have security without privacy.

A case in point is administrators being able to view any data they want due to their full-access rights to a system. That being said, there are ethics and policies that usually prevent such behavior.

Some general tips:

Operating System: Switch to Linux. Ubuntu and Linux Mint are widely used for a reason. Fedora too. And don't worry! You can keep your current operating system, apps and data. If you're on a Mac computer, you can easily partition your hard drive or SSD by using Disk Utility. If you're on Windows, you can follow this guide.

You want to go a step further? Go with Whonix or Tails. They're Linux distributions as well, but they're both aiming for security, not beauty so the interface might not be ideal for everyone. Many political activists and journalists use them.

You want anonymity? Then you need to familiarize yourself with Tor. Also, Tor and HTTPS and Tor’s weaknesses. When you're using it, don't log in to sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter etc. and make sure to stay away from Java and Javascript, because those things make you traceable.

Alternatives for dealing with censorship? i2p and Freenet.

Is ^ too much? Welp. All right. Let's see. The first step is to degoogle.

Switch to a user-friendly browser like Firefox (or better yet LibreWolf), Brave or Vivaldi. There are plenty of hardened browsers, but they can be overwhelming for a beginner.

Get an ad blocker like Ublock Origin.

Search Engine? StartPage or Duckduckgo. SearXNG too. Like I said degoogle.

Get a PGP encrypted e-mail. Check Protonmail out.

There's also Tutamail that doesn't cover PGP, but uses hybrid encryption that avoids some of the cons of PGP.

Skiff mail is also a decent option.

Use an e-mail aliasing service such as SimpleLogin or AnonAddy.

Check OpenPGP out. Claws Mail is a good e-mail client for Windows and Linux, Thunderbird for Mac OS.

Gpg4win is free and easy to use for anyone that wants to encrypt/decrypt e-mails.

Instead of Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, Telegram etc. use Signal for your encrypted insant messaging, voice and video calls.

Get a metadata cleaner.

Get a firewall like Opensnitch, Portmaster or Netguard which can block Internet for trackers.

Alternatively, go with a private DNS that blocks these trackers. NextDNS is a good paid service. Rethink a good free option.

Replace as many of your applications as you can with FOSS (free and open source) ones. Alternativeto can help you.

Always have automatic updates on. They are annoying af, I know, but they are necessary.

Keep your distance from outdated software.

Always have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled.

Do not use your administrator account for casual stuff. If you're on Linux, you probably know you can be sudo, but not root.

On Linux distributions use AppArmor, but stay away from random antivirus scanners. Other distributions default to SELinux, which is less suited to a beginner.

Never repeat your passwords. If you can't remember them all, use a password manager like KeePass.

Encrypt your drive.

Honestly, VPNs have their uses and ProtonVPN, Mullvad and Windscribe are decent, but eh. If you don't trust your ISP, why would you trust the VPN provider that claims they don't log you when you can't verify such a thing?

[ms-demeanor]

I am SUPREMELY interested in your internet activity book - I work at a library and am trying to make a similar resource myself. The Australian Government created a fantastic digital literacy resource website called Be Connected, but even though it has tutorials that go right down to 'this is a mouse' basics you do need a certain level of comprehension to access the site (also it doesn't go far enough on privacy imo) so I've been trying to patch the gaps and driving myself slightly insane with it bc there is just. so much.

If you're willing to share more I'd be thrilled to hear about it, and I would LOVE to pool resources if you're willing.

So what I'm basically doing is 11 activities to help people get familiar with a windows computer that they own. It assumes that the user has permissions to make changes to the desktop and install software, etc. The activities I'm writing up do include some browser activities (I walk people through creating a protonmail account and signing up for a password manager) but starts with things like "pin programs to your taskbar" and "create a folder on the desktop and rename it."

The stuff that I'm focusing on is things like "save a QR code in paint to print it out because you don't have a smartphone and can't return this item otherwise" and "learn how to find where files are on your computer." This is mostly supposed to be a way for someone to feel like they're being supervised and are doing safe activities as they learn to get comfortable with simply handling the various input devices and navigating the desktop.

So I don't go in-depth on security because that's not the purpose of this resource specifically, and security can, unfortunately, be something of an advanced topic.

What I would love to know is what in-browser things people tend to struggle with because it's likely that you are seeing people who can't install software on the computers they are using and can't store data on the computers long-term, so they have a very different relationship to your computers than they would to their own. What do people at the library struggle with on library computers? What are the things that they come in to do? Do people use your computers more for going on the internet or for things like printing? Do most of the people who come in to use library computers have email addresses? Because I would very much like to create a similar activity book for using the internet regardless of browser or operating system.

[netscapenavigator-official]

Watching a ““privacy education”” post come onto my dash where the poster recommends installing a shitton of extensions, like:

Usually not only are the extensions awful, but the real privacy advice would be to use as few extensions as possible.

Every extension you add to your browser makes your online fingerprint more unique, and therefore, more traceable. If you really care about your online privacy, you need to minimize your extensions down to the bare necessities and learn to use your browsers built-in settings to their full potential. uBlock Origin can handle A LOT of the stuff that extensions like Privacy Badger, Decentraleyes, and ClearURLs can. Firefox also has native settings that make extensions like HTTPS Everywhere and Cookie Autodelete entirely redundant.

Also for the love of god DO NOT install more than one ad blocker. By doing so, you dramatically increase the chances that your browser will take an anti-ad blocker bait ad, resulting in the anti-ad blocker pop-ups. uBlock Origin is all you need. It’s the best of the best, and it respects your privacy unlike some blockers like Ghostery which are known to sell your data.

Also, on the topic of password managers, Bitwarden should be your only choice. Yes, even over Proton Pass. Any software that has a marketing budget that big should not be trusted. They will flip on a dime and paywall features without warning. We’ve seen it time and time again. Use Bitwarden. Period.

[mariacallous]

Generative AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot are rapidly evolving, fueling concerns that the technology could open the door to multiple privacy and security issues, particularly in the workplace.

In May, privacy campaigners dubbed Microsoft’s new Recall tool a potential “privacy nightmare” due to its ability to take screenshots of your laptop every few seconds. The feature has caught the attention of UK regulator the Information Commissioner’s Office, which is asking Microsoft to reveal more about the safety of the product launching soon in its Copilot+ PCs.

Concerns are also mounting over OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has demonstrated screenshotting abilities in its soon-to-launch macOS app that privacy experts say could result in the capture of sensitive data.

The US House of Representatives has banned the use of Microsoft’s Copilot among staff members after it was deemed by the Office of Cybersecurity to be a risk to users due to “the threat of leaking House data to non-House approved cloud services.”

Meanwhile, market analyst Gartner has cautioned that “using Copilot for Microsoft 365 exposes the risks of sensitive data and content exposure internally and externally.” And last month, Google was forced to make adjustments to its new search feature, AI Overviews, after screenshots of bizarre and misleading answers to queries went viral.

Overexposed

For those using generative AI at work, one of the biggest challenges is the risk of inadvertently exposing sensitive data. Most generative AI systems are “essentially big sponges,” says Camden Woollven, group head of AI at risk management firm GRC International Group. “They soak up huge amounts of information from the internet to train their language models.”

AI companies are “hungry for data to train their models,” and are “seemingly making it behaviorally attractive” to do so, says Steve Elcock, CEO and founder at software firm Elementsuite. This vast amount of data collection means there’s the potential for sensitive information to be put “into somebody else’s ecosystem,” says Jeff Watkins, chief product and technology officer at digital consultancy xDesign. “It could also later be extracted through clever prompting.”

At the same time, there’s the threat of AI systems themselves being targeted by hackers. “Theoretically, if an attacker managed to gain access to the large language model (LLM) that powers a company's AI tools, they could siphon off sensitive data, plant false or misleading outputs, or use the AI to spread malware,” says Woollven.

Consumer-grade AI tools can create obvious risks. However, an increasing number of potential issues are arising with “proprietary” AI offerings broadly deemed safe for work such as Microsoft Copilot, says Phil Robinson, principal consultant at security consultancy Prism Infosec.

“This could theoretically be used to look at sensitive data if access privileges have not been locked down. We could see employees asking to see pay scales, M&A activity, or documents containing credentials, which could then be leaked or sold.”

Another concern centers around AI tools that could be used to monitor staff, potentially infringing their privacy. Microsoft’s Recall feature states that “your snapshots are yours; they stay locally on your PC” and “you are always in control with privacy you can trust.”

Yet “it doesn’t seem very long before this technology could be used for monitoring employees,” says Elcock.

Self-Censorship

Generative AI does pose several potential risks, but there are steps businesses and individual employees can take to improve privacy and security. First, do not put confidential information into a prompt for a publicly available tool such as ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, says Lisa Avvocato, vice president of marketing and community at data firm Sama.

When crafting a prompt, be generic to avoid sharing too much. “Ask, ‘Write a proposal template for budget expenditure,’ not ‘Here is my budget, write a proposal for expenditure on a sensitive project,’” she says. “Use AI as your first draft, then layer in the sensitive information you need to include.”

If you use it for research, avoid issues such as those seen with Google’s AI Overviews by validating what it provides, says Avvocato. “Ask it to provide references and links to its sources. If you ask AI to write code, you still need to review it, rather than assuming it’s good to go.”

Microsoft has itself stated that Copilot needs to be configured correctly and the “least privilege”—the concept that users should only have access to the information they need—should be applied. This is “a crucial point,” says Prism Infosec’s Robinson. “Organizations must lay the groundwork for these systems and not just trust the technology and assume everything will be OK.”

It’s also worth noting that ChatGPT uses the data you share to train its models, unless you turn it off in the settings or use the enterprise version.

List of Assurances

The firms integrating generative AI into their products say they’re doing everything they can to protect security and privacy. Microsoft is keen to outline security and privacy considerations in its Recall product and the ability to control the feature in Settings > Privacy & security > Recall & snapshots.

Google says generative AI in Workspace “does not change our foundational privacy protections for giving users choice and control over their data,” and stipulates that information is not used for advertising.

OpenAI reiterates how it maintains security and privacy in its products, while enterprise versions are available with extra controls. “We want our AI models to learn about the world, not private individuals—and we take steps to protect people’s data and privacy,” an OpenAI spokesperson tells WIRED.

OpenAI says it offers ways to control how data is used, including self-service tools to access, export, and delete personal information, as well as the ability to opt out of use of content to improve its models. ChatGPT Team, ChatGPT Enterprise, and its API are not trained on data or conversations, and its models don’t learn from usage by default, according to the company.

Either way, it looks like your AI coworker is here to stay. As these systems become more sophisticated and omnipresent in the workplace, the risks are only going to intensify, says Woollven. “We're already seeing the emergence of multimodal AI such as GPT-4o that can analyze and generate images, audio, and video. So now it's not just text-based data that companies need to worry about safeguarding.”

With this in mind, people—and businesses—need to get in the mindset of treating AI like any other third-party service, says Woollven. “Don't share anything you wouldn't want publicly broadcasted.”

[eversea143]

You know what would be funny?

All these big companies nowadays are investing so much money into AI, all in the utmost confidence it'll pay itself back in the future, literally flooding the internet with AI blogs, articles, tools, etc.

But with the rise of anti-AI and how even AI supporters are going to get annoyed when certain red lines are crossed (privacy is universal and everyone has their limits) there'll come a point where being on the internet becomes too grating to be, well, dopamine-sufficient.

Then people will look out of their windows and realise 'oh, right, the world isn't JUST the internet' and get up from behind their computers to go outside in order to enjoy life.

And all those big companies aren't going to notice until it's far too late because, spoiler alert, there's enough data stored on the worldwide web to feed even the most efficient AI scrapping software for YEARS.

They'll go ask the people 'why aren't you using our tools? Why aren't you watching out vlogs? It's all AI!'

And all the people can give them the good old finger because, flash news! Before the invention of the internet our species has managed just fine for millenia! You seriously think we're going to become so relient on it that we can't even function without? THINK AGAIN IDIOTS!

Let's not forget. Humans adapt to make things both efficient and enjoyable. When either factor falls on the wayside, we abandon ship faster than mice. We're petty like that.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Whether you call it “tattleware,” “bossware,” or “surveillance capitalism,” Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) has had enough of exploitative workplace monitoring technologies. Late last week, Casey and a handful of other Senate Democrats introduced the Stop Spying Bosses Act, which would help protect workers from intrusive employer surveillance both on and off the clock.

The legislation would require “timely and public” disclosures by companies about the data they’re collecting on employees, prohibit businesses from using surveillance practices that obstruct union organizing or monitor workers while they’re off the clock, and create a new division of the Department of Labor to regulate workplace surveillance. Sens. Cory Booker, John Fetterman, Elizabeth Warren, and Brian Schatz are cosponsoring the bill, which has also garnered support from some major labor groups.

Workplace surveillance has been a growing area of concern for Democrats in the past few years, as the shift to remote work during the pandemic has prompted increased use of employee monitoring technologies. Since the onset of the pandemic, the percentage of large companies that digitally monitor their workers has doubled, to more than 60%. At a time when managers can no longer keep an eye on workers in the office, they’ve increasingly relied on technologies such as keylogger software, geolocation tools that track workers’ physical movements, and even software that monitors worker attentiveness with webcams, using biometric data to scrutinize minute body movements and facial expressions.

Currently, federal law gives workers few protections from these kinds of surveillance practices. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 does have some safeguards against workplace monitoring, but it has wide-ranging exceptions that allow employers to keep tabs on virtually all communications for “legitimate business purposes.” Currently, no federal law requires employers to disclose that they are monitoring workers, though individual states are increasingly taking steps to protect workers’ rights. In May 2022, for example, New York passed a law requiring private companies to publicly disclose whether employees will be electronically monitored, following similar legislation in Delaware and Connecticut. In California, a bill introduced last year would eliminate tools like facial recognition and emotion recognition technologies from the workplace.

The National Labor Relations Board is beginning to address the issue at the federal level, too. Last fall, the agency’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, issued a memo indicating that companies have overreached with their aggressive surveillance. She recommended that the NLRB impose a requirement that employers tell workers about the surveillance tools they use to monitor them, the justifications for those tools, and how they use the information they collect from workers.

In the memo, Abruzzo also acknowledged “abusive electronic monitoring” could interfere with employees’ right to organize a union or engage in other protected labor activities. As I’ve written before, unions around the country are currently in the middle of negotiating how data collected on workers can be used by employers. At companies like Amazon, unionization efforts are being driven partly by a culture of relentless workplace surveillance—and in some cases employers are responding to unionization efforts by doubling down on digital monitoring. Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, used heat maps to identify its stores at risk of unionization, according to Insider.

While the bill isn’t likely to pass in a divided Congress, it’s a sign that the proliferation of workplace surveillance during the pandemic is finally getting more national attention. “As the power imbalance in workplaces continues to grow, employers are increasingly using invasive surveillance technologies that allow them to track their workers like pieces of equipment,” Casey said in a statement introducing the legislation. “The Stop Spying Bosses Act is a first step to level the playing field for workers by holding their bosses accountable.”

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: River Page

Published: Feb 2, 2024

"Companies also cannot take race-motivated actions to maintain a demographically 'balanced' workforce." — Commissioner at Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Andrea R. Lucas in Reuters, June 29, 2023

"An unlawful employment practice is established when the complaining party demonstrates that race, color, religion, sex, or national origin was a motivating factor for any employment practice, even though other factors also motivated the practice." — 42 USC § 2000e–2(m) of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

---

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, tech companies promised to hire more minorities. One company that claims to help them do it is Gem, and although you might not have heard of it, you’ve probably heard of some of its 1,200-plus clients: Reddit, Dropbox, Robinhood, Discord, Zillow, Stripe, Affirm, and Grammarly, just to name a few. Although Gem’s software is primarily used for things like non-race- and gender-based recruiting, payroll, and benefits management, John, (not his real name) — who worked for Gem as a sales development representative through a B2B outsourcing firm from March to July of 2021, told us that the prospective corporate clients he talked to were most interested in Gem’s “diversity enhancing” capabilities. Essentially, they had race- and gender-based hiring quotas and wanted to use Gem’s software to meet them. He said one prospective client, an executive at the Bay Area-based AI and robotics research arm of one of the world’s leading car manufacturers, told him explicitly: “I need more black candidates this month.”

According to its website, Gem’s software allows recruiters to track “gender and race/ethnicity throughout the entire hiring funnel.” Essentially, it appears to include a comprehensive race and gender tracking system designed to help companies fill race- and gender-based quotas with precision. For example, in a 2021 diversity webinar posted on YouTube, a Gem employee seemed to explain how the software could show how many candidates a company would need to reach out to if it had three engineering positions open, but didn’t want to hire men for them (in her words: “wanted to give women a chance”). In the same video, she demonstrated how to break down each stage in the hiring funnel by race, and explained (but did not show, probably for privacy reasons) how companies could further track how their recruiters’ own efforts break down along the lines of the company’s race- and gender-based hiring quotas, so that the company may “hold them accountable.”

[ Screen capture from Gem’s diversity webinar ]

All this requires a lot of data. According to a recent LinkedIn post by Gem founder Steve Bartel, this data can come from three sources:

Self-ID: the demographic data collection on job applications

Manual override: the recruiter reports your race and gender based on visual cues such as your LinkedIn profile picture

Predicted: Gem’s proprietary AI determines a candidate's race and gender based on machine learning (Bartel notes this is only for aggregate/anonymized use, meaning that the UI doesn’t allow recruiters to see which race was assigned to individual candidates)

John told me that, of Gem’s features, its race- and gender-identifying AI was the biggest selling point. “A key part of the pitch was to tell clients that Gem uses AI and machine learning to determine race and gender.” (This is especially ironic, given the panic about “racist AI” that has consumed every discussion about artificial intelligence for years.)

“One thing that cracked me up was that recruiting/DEI buyers at companies would ask, ‘Is this legal?’” John told me. “Not because they were offended by how obviously racist the software was — they loved what they saw. The concern was pushback from their legal team.” He said this question was asked so frequently that Gem’s Chief Legal Counsel had a prewritten response to the question that would be passed along to clients who asked.

[ Source: Gem’s website, February 1, 2024 ]

The "Diversity Recruiting" section of Gem’s website offers a slate of what it calls “Case Studies” — essentially customer testimonials — where companies explain how they used Gem to hire based on race and gender.

In a case study for payroll firm Gusto, Gem seems to indicate the company used its “Candidate Rediscovery” tool to hire based on candidates’ race and gender. In Gem’s language, Gusto used the tool to “unearth talent who is vetted — and diverse — ultimately reducing time-to-hire.” In other words, companies could use Gem’s software to find people with specific racial and gender-based characteristics that meet the position’s requirements and hire them quickly, while weeding out similarly qualified candidates who are, presumably, white or male or both.

In a case study about the telecommunications company Twilio, Gem seems to describe how one of its senior recruiters was able to avoid hiring men with their tool:

Gem’s metrics have also helped [the recruiter] zero in on stages in the interview process where the team is falling short on equitable gender hiring. “For one division, we intuited that we were hiring more women than the average team—and we were! We were prepared to roll off our passive sourcing efforts for that division, but I don’t like to make a move without looking at all the data first. That’s where Gem came through.” [The recruiter] dug through the data in more detail and discovered that the proportion of male candidates was actually increasing quarter over quarter—so much so that, by Q3, they would have made significantly more male than female hires. “If we hadn’t had access to that data, we wouldn’t have been able to identify that trend and strategize on how to allocate our resources properly.”

This is easily interpretable as: We thought everything was fine until Gem showed us that by Q3 we might hire a disproportionate number of men in a division that a disproportionate number of men applied to work in. It's worth noting that when announcing massive job cuts in 2022, Twilio’s CEO bragged that the layoffs had been carried out through an “Anti-Racist/Anti-Oppression lens.”

In another testimonial from Chili Piper, an inbound conversion platform for B2B revenue teams, the company’s Talent Ops Manager says she used Gem to discover that URG (under-represented group) candidates were dropping off after the company stopped including a video submission in the application (itself seeming to indicate that a significant proportion “URGs” were being advanced through the hiring pipeline because of their race or gender). She successfully lobbied to bring the video submission back and modified the assignment. “Now it’s like, sell us a new smartphone: something that really levels the playing field and lets us see candidates’ creativity, communication, and approach in action. It’s not necessarily entrenched in experience in tech and SaaS sales.” Since then, the company has “seen a decisive shift in the demographics of candidates who make it to the interview stage of our process. We have seen a 54% increase in URG candidates and a 31% increase in female-identified candidates making it to the first round of interviews. Offers extended to, and offers accepted by URGs have increased.”

In other words, Chili Piper's testimonial seems to indicate that Gem showed the company that when it stopped asking applicants to submit a video that allowed them to see their race and gender, they stopped hiring more minorities. So they brought video back, and seemed to effectively lower their standards by changing the assignment to one in which industry experience was deprioritized.

Gem’s own hiring practices also raise red flags. An internal jobs board from June 2021 provided to Pirate Wires shows that under a field titled “Diversity Search,” positions are either listed as “Open,” “Women,” “URM,” or “Women & URM,” suggesting that certain positions were closed off to straight white males, or perhaps that women and minorities were being sought after in those positions. We sent the screenshot of the internal job board — with company name and other identifying information redacted — to a tech industry employment lawyer, who said:

Without knowing more about the company or getting clarification on what some of the designations mean on the chart, it looks a bit problematic. The law allows companies to set “targets” and “goals” as they relate to the hiring, retention, and promotion of women, veterans, and underrepresented minorities (those targets/goals must be temporary). But the law does not currently allow private companies to set aside or otherwise designate specific positions for such group members. There are some grey areas for certain types of federal contractors, but it’s the exception to the rule.

As a non-lawyer, I’ll not comment on the legality of Gem’s hiring practices. However, I will say the company seems to use unorthodox recruiting methods. In Gem’s diversity webinar I referred to earlier, one of the hosts said, “Here at Gem, each time we open a new req [position], we actually focus solely on sourcing URGs, and in conjunction [with that] we don’t post the job on the career site until other levers need to be pulled…”

The host then explained how she found candidates of specific races and genders at Gem, telling the audience: “Sourcing for URGs may require you to shift some fundamental ideas you have about what a quote-unquote good candidate looks like.” Next, she described how she would go through LinkedIn, searching for candidates with stereotypically minority names, who use neo-pronouns, or who went to minority-majority schools, among other tactics.

[ Slide from Gem’s diversity webinar]

When asked for comment, a representative from GEM told us “Our product provides interested customers with insights that help them build a diverse talent pipeline. We work closely with legal counsel to ensure our platform complies with all applicable laws and welcome potential customers looking to learn more to reach out to us."

Gem: a company that apparently doesn’t post some job announcements publicly without searching for specific races and genders on LinkedIn first. A company whose value proposition is to help companies hold their recruiters “accountable” for hiring too many of the wrong race and gender. A company that created an AI that predicts your race and gender. A company whose AI tracks race throughout the hiring pipeline so efficiently that, allegedly, even woke companies question its legality during sales calls. Gem is the company that vast swaths of the tech industry are using to hire.

So if you’re in the business, and you’re a Derrick O’Donnell or a John Chau, good luck out there. I think you’re gonna need it.

[ Via: https://archive.md/gxFMK ]

==

DEI is discrimination.

[healthcaremarketanalysis]

Revolutionizing Healthcare: The Role of Cloud Computing in Modern Healthcare Technologies

In today’s digital era, cloud computing is transforming industries, and healthcare is no exception. The integration of cloud computing healthcare technologies is reshaping patient care, medical research, and healthcare management. Let’s explore how cloud computing is revolutionizing healthcare and the benefits it brings.

What is Cloud Computing in Healthcare?

Cloud computing in healthcare refers to the use of remote servers to store, manage, and process healthcare data, rather than relying on local servers or personal computers. This technology allows healthcare organizations to access vast amounts of data, collaborate with other institutions, and scale operations seamlessly.

Download PDF Brochure

Key Benefits of Cloud Computing in Healthcare

Enhanced Data Storage and Accessibility Cloud technology allows healthcare providers to store massive volumes of patient data, including medical records, images, and test results, securely. Clinicians can access this data from anywhere, ensuring that patient information is available for timely decision-making.

Improved Collaboration Cloud-based healthcare platforms enable easy sharing of patient data between healthcare providers, specialists, and labs. This facilitates better collaboration and more accurate diagnoses and treatment plans, especially in multi-disciplinary cases.

Cost Efficiency The cloud reduces the need for expensive hardware, software, and in-house IT teams. Healthcare providers only pay for the resources they use, making it a cost-effective solution. Additionally, the scalability of cloud systems ensures they can grow as healthcare organizations expand.

Better Data Security Protecting sensitive patient information is critical in healthcare. Cloud computing providers invest heavily in data security measures such as encryption, multi-factor authentication, and regular audits, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards like HIPAA.

Telemedicine and Remote Patient Monitoring Cloud computing powers telemedicine platforms, allowing patients to consult with doctors virtually, from the comfort of their homes. It also enables remote patient monitoring, where doctors can track patients' health metrics in real time, improving outcomes for chronic conditions.

Advanced Data Analytics The cloud supports the integration of advanced data analytics tools, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), which can analyze large datasets to predict health trends, track disease outbreaks, and personalize treatment plans based on individual patient data.

Use Cases of Cloud Computing in Healthcare

Electronic Health Records (EHRs): Cloud-based EHRs allow healthcare providers to access and update patient records instantly, improving the quality of care.

Genomics and Precision Medicine: Cloud computing accelerates the processing of large datasets in genomics, supporting research and development in personalized medicine.

Hospital Information Systems (HIS): Cloud-powered HIS streamline hospital operations, from patient admissions to billing, improving efficiency.

Challenges in Cloud Computing for Healthcare

Despite its numerous benefits, there are challenges to implementing cloud computing in healthcare. These include:

Data Privacy Concerns: Although cloud providers offer robust security measures, healthcare organizations must ensure their systems are compliant with local and international regulations.

Integration with Legacy Systems: Many healthcare institutions still rely on outdated technology, making it challenging to integrate cloud solutions smoothly.

Staff Training: Healthcare professionals need adequate training to use cloud-based systems effectively.

Request Sample Pages

The Future of Cloud Computing in Healthcare

The future of healthcare will be increasingly cloud-centric. With advancements in AI, IoT, and big data analytics, cloud computing will continue to drive innovations in personalized medicine, population health management, and patient care. Additionally, with the growing trend of wearable devices and health apps, cloud computing will play a crucial role in integrating and managing data from diverse sources to provide a comprehensive view of patient health.

Conclusion

Cloud computing is not just a trend in healthcare; it is a transformative force driving the industry towards more efficient, secure, and patient-centric care. As healthcare organizations continue to adopt cloud technologies, we can expect to see improved patient outcomes, lower costs, and innovations that were once thought impossible.

Embracing cloud computing in healthcare is essential for any organization aiming to stay at the forefront of medical advancements and patient care.

Content Source:

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Algorithmic feeds are a twiddler’s playground

Next TUESDAY (May 14), I'm on a livecast about AI AND ENSHITTIFICATION with TIM O'REILLY; on WEDNESDAY (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD with HARRY SHEARER for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

Like Oscar Wilde, "I can resist anything except temptation," and my slow and halting journey to adulthood is really just me grappling with this fact, getting temptation out of my way before I can yield to it.

Behavioral economists have a name for the steps we take to guard against temptation: a "Ulysses pact." That's when you take some possibility off the table during a moment of strength in recognition of some coming moment of weakness:

https://archive.org/details/decentralizedwebsummit2016-corydoctorow

Famously, Ulysses did this before he sailed into the Sea of Sirens. Rather than stopping his ears with wax to prevent his hearing the sirens' song, which would lure him to his drowning, Ulysses has his sailors tie him to the mast, leaving his ears unplugged. Ulysses became the first person to hear the sirens' song and live to tell the tale.

Ulysses was strong enough to know that he would someday be weak. He expressed his strength by guarding against his weakness. Our modern lives are filled with less epic versions of the Ulysses pact: the day you go on a diet, it's a good idea to throw away all your Oreos. That way, when your blood sugar sings its siren song at 2AM, it will be drowned out by the rest of your body's unwillingness to get dressed, find your keys and drive half an hour to the all-night grocery store.

Note that this Ulysses pact isn't perfect. You might drive to the grocery store. It's rare that a Ulysses pact is unbreakable – we bind ourselves to the mast, but we don't chain ourselves to it and slap on a pair of handcuffs for good measure.

People who run institutions can – and should – create Ulysses pacts, too. A company that holds the kind of sensitive data that might be subjected to "sneak-and-peek" warrants by cops or spies can set up a "warrant canary":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary

This isn't perfect. A company that stops publishing regular transparency reports might have been compromised by the NSA, but it's also possible that they've had a change in management and the new boss just doesn't give a shit about his users' privacy:

https://www.fastcompany.com/90853794/twitters-transparency-reporting-has-tanked-under-elon-musk

Likewise, a company making software it wants users to trust can release that code under an irrevocable free/open software license, thus guaranteeing that each release under that license will be free and open forever. This is good, but not perfect: the new boss can take that free/open code down a proprietary fork and try to orphan the free version:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39772562

A company can structure itself as a public benefit corporation and make a binding promise to elevate its stakeholders' interests over its shareholders' – but the CEO can still take a secret $100m bribe from cryptocurrency creeps and try to lure those stakeholders into a shitcoin Ponzi scheme:

https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/03/11/kickstarter-blockchain-a16z-crypto-secret-investment-chris-dixon/

A key resource can be entrusted to a nonprofit with a board of directors who are charged with stewarding it for the benefit of a broad community, but when a private equity fund dangles billions before that board, they can talk themselves into a belief that selling out is the right thing to do:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/how-we-saved-org-2020-review

Ulysses pacts aren't perfect, but they are very important. At the very least, creating a Ulysses pact starts with acknowledging that you are fallible. That you can be tempted, and rationalize your way into taking bad action, even when you know better. Becoming an adult is a process of learning that your strength comes from seeing your weaknesses and protecting yourself and the people who trust you from them.

Which brings me to enshittification. Enshittification is the process by which platforms betray their users and their customers by siphoning value away from each until the platform is a pile of shit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Enshittification is a spectrum that can be applied to many companies' decay, but in its purest form, enshittification requires:

a) A platform: a two-sided market with business customers and end users who can be played off against each other; b) A digital back-end: a market that can be easily, rapidly and undetectably manipulated by its owners, who can alter search-rankings, prices and costs on a per-user, per-query basis; and c) A lack of constraint: the platform's owners must not fear a consequence for this cheating, be it from competitors, regulators, workforce resignations or rival technologists who use mods, alternative clients, blockers or other "adversarial interoperability" tools to disenshittify your product and sever your relationship with your users.

he founders of tech platforms don't generally set out to enshittify them. Rather, they are constantly seeking some equilibrium between delivering value to their shareholders and turning value over to end users, business customers, and their own workers. Founders are consummate rationalizers; like parenting, founding a company requires continuous, low-grade self-deception about the amount of work involved and the chances of success. A founder, confronted with the likelihood of failure, is absolutely capable of talking themselves into believing that nearly any compromise is superior to shuttering the business: "I'm one of the good guys, so the most important thing is for me to live to fight another day. Thus I can do any number of immoral things to my users, business customers or workers, because I can make it up to them when we survive this crisis. It's for their own good, even if they don't know it. Indeed, I'm doubly moral here, because I'm volunteering to look like the bad guy, just so I can save this business, which will make the world over for the better":

https://locusmag.com/2024/05/cory-doctorow-no-one-is-the-enshittifier-of-their-own-story/

(En)shit(tification) flows downhill, so tech workers grapple with their own version of this dilemma. Faced with constant pressure to increase the value flowing from their division to the company, they have to balance different, conflicting tactics, like "increasing the number of users or business customers, possibly by shifting value from the company to these stakeholders in the hopes of making it up in volume"; or "locking in my existing stakeholders and squeezing them harder, safe in the knowledge that they can't easily leave the service provided the abuse is subtle enough." The bigger a company gets, the harder it is for it to grow, so the biggest companies realize their gains by locking in and squeezing their users, not by improving their service::

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

That's where "twiddling" comes in. Digital platforms are extremely flexible, which comes with the territory: computers are the most flexible tools we have. This means that companies can automate high-speed, deceptive changes to the "business logic" of their platforms – what end users pay, how much of that goes to business customers, and how offers are presented to both:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

This kind of fraud isn't particularly sophisticated, but it doesn't have to be – it just has to be fast. In any shell-game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

Under normal circumstances, this twiddling would be constrained by counterforces in society. Changing the business rules like this is fraud, so you'd hope that a regulator would step in and extinguish the conduct, fining the company that engaged in it so hard that they saw a net loss from the conduct. But when a sector gets very concentrated, its mega-firms capture their regulators, becoming "too big to jail":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Thus the tendency among the giant tech companies to practice the one lesson of the Darth Vader MBA: dismissing your stakeholders' outrage by saying, "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Where regulators fail, technology can step in. The flexibility of digital platforms cuts both ways: when the company enshittifies its products, you can disenshittify it with your own countertwiddling: third-party ink-cartridges, alternative app stores and clients, scrapers, browser automation and other forms of high-tech guerrilla warfare:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

But tech giants' regulatory capture have allowed them to expand "IP rights" to prevent this self-help. By carefully layering overlapping IP rights around their products, they can criminalize the technology that lets you wrestle back the value they've claimed for themselves, creating a new offense of "felony contempt of business model":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

A world where users must defer to platforms' moment-to-moment decisions about how the service operates, without the protection of rival technology or regulatory oversight is a world where companies face a powerful temptation to enshittify.

That's why we've seen so much enshittification in platforms that algorithmically rank their feeds, from Google and Amazon search to Facebook and Twitter feeds. A search engine is always going to be making a judgment call about what the best result for your search should be. If a search engine is generally good at predicting which results will please you best, you'll return to it, automatically clicking the first result ("I'm feeling lucky").

This means that if a search engine slips in the odd paid result at the top of the results, they can exploit your trusting habits to shift value from you to their investors. The congifurability of a digital service means that they can sprinkle these frauds into their services on a random schedule, making them hard to detect and easy to dismiss as lapses. Gradually, this acquires its own momentum, and the platform becomes addicted to lowering its own quality to raise its profits, and you get modern Google, which cynically lowered search quality to increase search volume:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

And you get Amazon, which makes $38 billion every year, accepting bribes to replace its best search results with paid results for products that cost more and are of lower quality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Social media's enshittification followed a different path. In the beginning, social media presented a deterministic feed: after you told the platform who you wanted to follow, the platform simply gathered up the posts those users made and presented them to you, in reverse-chronological order.

This presented few opportunities for enshittification, but it wasn't perfect. For users who were well-established on a platform, a reverse-chrono feed was an ungovernable torrent, where high-frequency trivialities drowned out the important posts from people whose missives were buried ten screens down in the updates since your last login.

For new users who didn't yet follow many people, this presented the opposite problem: an empty feed, and the sense that you were all alone while everyone else was having a rollicking conversation down the hall, in a room you could never find.

The answer was the algorithmic feed: a feed of recommendations drawn from both the accounts you followed and strangers alike. Theoretically, this could solve both problems, by surfacing the most important materials from your friends while keeping you abreast of the most important and interesting activity beyond your filter bubble. For many of us, this promise was realized, and algorithmic feeds became a source of novelty and relevance.

But these feeds are a profoundly tempting enshittification target. The critique of these algorithms has largely focused on "addictiveness" and the idea that platforms would twiddle the knobs to increase the relevance of material in your feed to "hack your engagement":

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/04/has-dopamine-got-us-hooked-on-tech-facebook-apps-addiction

Less noticed – and more important – was how platforms did the opposite: twiddling the knobs to remove things from your feed that you'd asked to see or that the algorithm predicted you'd enjoy, to make room for "boosted" content and advertisements:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/z9j7uy/what_happened_to_instagram_only_ads_and_accounts/

Users were helpless before this kind of twiddling. On the one hand, they were locked into the platform – not because their dopamine had been hacked by evil tech-bro wizards – but because they loved the friends they had there more than they hated the way the service was run:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

On the other hand, the platforms had such an iron grip on their technology, and had deployed IP so cleverly, that any countertwiddling technology was instantaneously incinerated by legal death-rays:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/10/google-removes-the-og-app-from-the-play-store-as-founders-think-about-next-steps/

Newer social media platforms, notably Tiktok, dispensed entirely with deterministic feeds, defaulting every user into a feed that consisted entirely of algorithmic picks; the people you follow on these platforms are treated as mere suggestions by their algorithms. This is a perfect breeding-ground for enshittification: different parts of the business can twiddle the knobs to override the algorithm for their own parochial purposes, shifting the quality:shit ratio by unnoticeable increments, temporarily toggling the quality knob when your engagement drops off:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

All social platforms want to be Tiktok: nominally, that's because Tiktok's algorithmic feed is so good at hooking new users and keeping established users hooked. But tech bosses also understand that a purely algorithmic feed is the kind of black box that can be plausibly and subtly enshittified without sparking user revolts:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Back in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg was coming to grips with Facebook's success, he boasted to a friend that he was sitting on a trove of emails, pictures and Social Security numbers for his fellow Harvard students, offering this up for his friend's idle snooping. The friend, surprised, asked "What? How'd you manage that one?"

Infamously, Zuck replied, "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me.' Dumb fucks."

https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zuckerberg-called-people-who-handed-over-their-data-dumb-f/

This was a remarkable (and uncharacteristic) self-aware moment from the then-nineteen-year-old Zuck. Of course Zuck couldn't be trusted with that data. Whatever Jiminy Cricket voice told him to safeguard that trust was drowned out by his need to boast to pals, or participate in the creepy nonconsensual rating of the fuckability of their female classmates. Over and over again, Zuckerberg would promise to use his power wisely, then break that promise as soon as he could do so without consequence:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

Zuckerberg is a cautionary tale. Aware from the earliest moments that he was amassing power that he couldn't be trusted with, he nevertheless operated with only the weakest of Ulysses pacts, like a nonbinding promise never to spy on his users:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050107221705/http://www.thefacebook.com/policy.php

But the platforms have learned the wrong lesson from Zuckerberg. Rather than treating Facebook's enshittification as a cautionary tale, they've turned it into a roadmap. The Darth Vader MBA rules high-tech boardrooms.

Algorithmic feeds and other forms of "paternalistic" content presentation are necessary and even desirable in an information-rich environment. In many instances, decisions about what you see must be largely controlled by a third party whom you trust. The audience in a comedy club doesn't get to insist on knowing the punchline before the joke is told, just as RPG players don't get to order the Dungeon Master to present their preferred challenges during a campaign.

But this power is balanced against the ease of the players replacing the Dungeon Master or the audience walking out on the comic. When you've got more than a hundred dollars sunk into a video game and an online-only friend-group you raid with, the games company can do a lot of enshittification without losing your business, and they know it:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/10/24153809/ea-in-game-ads-redux

Even if they sometimes overreach and have to retreat:

https://www.eurogamer.net/sony-overturns-helldivers-2-psn-requirement-following-backlash

A tech company that seeks your trust for an algorithmic feed needs Ulysses pacts, or it will inevitably yield to the temptation to enshittify. From strongest to weakest, these are:

Not showing you an algorithmic feed at all;

https://joinmastodon.org/

"Composable moderation" that lets multiple parties provide feeds:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-13-2023-moderation

Offering an algorithmic "For You" feed alongside of a reverse-chrono "Friends" feed, defaulting to friends;

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

As above, but defaulting to "For You"

Maturity lies in being strong enough to know your weaknesses. Never trust someone who tells you that they will never yield to temptation! Instead, seek out people – and service providers – with the maturity and honesty to know how tempting temptation is, and who act before temptation strikes to make it easier to resist.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm

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