Memory and the Forgiving Internet?

It is widely bruited about that both society and the internet are utterly unforgiving. That any nude photo or youthful indiscretion will be remembered until the galaxies go dim. That teen instagrams will scandalize potential mates and employers, ruining your life, forcing you to live in gutters. But this Atlantic article -- Naked on the Internet is Not Forever -- casts doubt on both assumptions…. that those photos hang around, or that anyone really cares. 

Patrick de Justo asks, “Why are the "experts" wrong about our Internet past sticking around forever? Is it that something has changed in the way we access information through search engines in the past 10 years? Or are these two examples—my unfortunate pictures and Ms. R.'s nude pictures — just weird anomalies?”

Long ago, in The Transparent Society, I suggested that a more relaxed and forgiving society had to be an outcome of vastly expanded information flows, and all evidence since has borne that out.  Only one criterion seems to carry a stench of opprobrium that sticks hard… hatred. Perhaps “haters gotta hate,” but they lose credibility and their patterns do not become accepted, with time. And those items, the hateful pictures and/or postings, tend to hang around.

What underlies this trend for acceptance of youthful errors and minor eccentricities? Our increasing willingness to shrug, providing it wasn't deliberately harmful... and maybe that some time has passed? The last thing that any cynic would expect. Basic self-interest. 

Is part of the solution to info age quandaries simply to “chill” and worry less?  Maybe, argues Anthony Rotolo, assistant professor of social media at Syracuse University. "There's a half life to the stuff that we share on line, and it's really short,” he says. “The Internet lives on moments. It lives on what is viral right now, whether globally (like Justin Bieber getting arrested), or viral within your own social network. Then it's over very quickly. What we're seeing is that your naked pictures from 10 years ago are nowhere near as appealing as someone else's new naked pictures, which will be forgotten tomorrow anyway." 

According to this article, Prof. Rotolo credits Facebook with helping to foster this change. “As recently as a decade ago, identities on the Internet were much more protected. It was seen as foolhardy to ever use your real name online, to the extent that people even had separate credit cards for their online purchases. Under those circumstances, it was easy to pretend that embarrassing Internet pictures were something that could never happen to the average person. Then Facebook came along, forcing everyone to use their real name. And in doing so, the blue F helped embarrassing Internet pictures become a normal part of being online. As Rotolo puts it, “Facebook made us realize that anyone claiming they haven't done embarrassing things on the Internet is probably lying.”

== But there’s a downside to amnesia ==

Vint Cerf and David Brin

Google's vice president -- the great and mighty and dapper Vint Cerf -- has warned internet users to print out treasured photographs or risk losing them.  Digital storage has ballooned, mostly for the good, but the media for storage has grown ever more volatile and -- well -- unreliable. This was made worse by the retirement of optical drives (though CDs and DVDs did have their own problems.)

In what may be an historical tragedy of mis-timed technology, the Flash Memory revolution came (I believe) just one year too early! If my old Hughes Aircraft office mate Eli Harari had founded San Disk just 12 months later, we would have had time to develop an interim storage technology of real value. BLU-RAY read-write drives, capable of storing a hundred gigabytes in non-volatile - though still somewhat perishable – form, were in the offing. They would have replaced onboard DVD-RW drives in laptops and desk-tops.  I’d have loved to have one of those, as one more storage option. Alas. Thanks, Eli.

In any event, Vint raises a good point. (He was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in San Jose, California… where I also was on the program, talking about the Search for ET Intelligence: SETI.  Having dinner with Vint was the highlight of the weekend.) We should be researching strongly non-volatile memories, such as I depicted in EARTH. Hard-etched storage systems that can be relied upon, for decades, even centuries or more.

Speaking of disk drives… The “Equation” hacker consortium has achieved technical feats unseen and unanticipated, using the secret internal configuration codes of hard disk manufacturers to create hidden residence sectors for their malware that are invulnerable even to a user-commanded disk wipe.

Seriously, what does it take for all of this to become a matter for the commons?  For politics (if it still existed in America) and a demand that hardware makers create and live by open and secure standards?

Indeed, at a future time I plan to broach what I think to be a matter of basic national and international public health -- offering a standard, yearly "flu shot" against bot-nets. Such matters have been left to the private sector far too long.  Worth a try... but Norton and Kaspersky aren't solving this. If your puter hosts a bot-net, you are a hazard to public health.  Get clean -- (and we'll make it easy) -- or stop coughing on folks by getting off the Net.

== The Internet of Things and Eavesdropping TVs ==

In this very interesting article -- Before we give doors and toasters sentience, we should decide what we're comfortable with first -- Ian Steadman offers an illuminating view of the coming Internet of Things and why we ought to start having an informed and imaginative conversation, now. For example: "… last year the New York Times reported that dozens of people across the United States are now waking up each day to find that their cars won't start. They've fallen behind on their monthly payments, and so dealers are able to remotely disable their vehicles as an "incentive" to fix their debts."

Of course the uproar over the latest Samsung televisions, with their voice command feature that can send eavesdropped conversation to their "partners," shows that one or another Orwellian pitfall lie right in our path. The author quotes liberally from fine and prescient science fiction novels, including Philip K. Dick's UBIK, which add layer and nuance to an interesting piece.

More from Ian Steadman's excellent article: "There's a movement towards what's called the "sharing economy" - instead of owning a car, for example, you rent one only on the days you need, summoned with an Uber-like app perhaps. Despite the benefits this shift may have for city congestion and air pollution (we'll only need a fraction of the current number of cars in the world we have now), a change from an ownership to a rental economy (where the companies that create and sell products retain ownership instead, importantly) is a world where individual control over consumer products is reduced even further."

Bruce Schneier plumbs into the Samsung eavesdropping imbroglio, writing, "Earlier this week, we learned that Samsung televisions are eavesdropping on their owners. If you have one of their Internet-connected smart TVs, you can turn on a voice command feature that saves you the trouble of finding the remote, pushing buttons and scrolling through menus. But making that feature work requires the television to listen to everything you say. And what you say isn't just processed by the television; it may be forwarded over the Internet for remote processing. It's literally Orwellian." He concludes, "This has to change. We need to regulate the listening: both what is being collected and how it's being used. But that won't happen until we know the full extent of surveillance: who's listening and what they're doing with it." 

True enough, as far as it goes.  But Bruce never goes deep. For example, HOW do you expect to accomplish all of that, in a world where Moore’s Law inherently expands and distributes every power of vision, exponentially? 

Ironically, the only way to gain this kind of control over elites - demanding they stop using prying eyes - is to make them feel it’s likely they’ll be caught, if they stare. 

Through Transparency.