closing arguments came through today. the plaintiffs pretty much summarized their side of the trial in a few hours, while the defense took the rather unusual course of saying (this is not a paraphrase) “we don’t need to prove our case” on most the issues. so on things like the purpose of marriage is to procreate (despite the fact that people who can’t have kids can marry) and on the claim that gay marriage will hurt straight people, they punted and claimed they don’t need to show evidence, it’s enough for them to say that’s the case.

who knows, it might work. this whole trial is a slight ‘who cares’ since this round is just for bragging rights: it’s going straight to 9th district court for next year where it will win, then supreme court after, where it will lose, since judges vote on party lines. it’s silly, but that’s how the world runs. our future course of civil rights really is up to a bunch of cardiologists who will be trying to keep some justices alive.

tangently, yes, to the anti-gays marriage really is about procreation. more specifically, to them all of sex is about procreation, and all actions taken are supposed to be related to raising families. any deviation from this plan is, well, a deviation. and so deviation by deviation we slide towards a deviant nation where procreation isn’t the only manifestation for showing an affectation of affection.

this sounds like it would lead to self-loathing, combative attitude, and a deep need to believe that somehow homosexuality can be cured, and it seems to do exactly that

i’d think it was pitiful if not for the fact they’re doing damage to society through their lack of acceptance of themselves and others.

(for historical context, this is re the guy caught on vacation with a hired male prostitute, off of rentboy.com)

it’s an example of codeword politics in the US. it’s not ok to be openly racist/homophobic, so instead you use words that are perfectly legit and defendible to the majority, but your fringe racist/homophobic base understands differently. the idea is to hopefully create a “good america” where straight, white, religious people are enshrined, and a second america where everyone else lives.

and no, that’s not ok. it’s why the US had to destroy the south in the civil war: it was a war over state rights, but “states’ rights” is a codeword for “i want to my white privilege to be explicit and legally mandated”. and, again, that’s not ok. deal with it.

Much like early websites, built by enthusiasts (in all the negative connotations of this word), our current approach to distributing information about us has very little security precautions. This is partly because we don’t really understand the scope of our actions, partly because what we’re writing is free content for the social media sites: the more we write and the more people read it, the higher the value of their website.

This isn’t an attack on any specific protocol, site, or network, though I will discuss a few, but rather a talk in the general about our attitude. I realize I’m writing this 1 day after the launch of Google Buzz, but all of these vulnerabilities existed previously as well, Google ubiquity and attempt to centralize all of it makes it more obvious.

One great example of trust is the hash tag mechanism on Twitter. Companies are using hash tags to foster conversation about themselves without any thought about the lack of moderation in the medium. A corporation that would instantly file a cease and desist against a website that in official looking type made claims in it’s name, is more than happy to lend legitimacy to “its” hash tag by having reps post it to it from their twitter account. This creates a trusted space with absolutely no access control as anyone can post using with any hash tag.

If an attacker waits for this company name hash tag to achieve legitimacy and a crowd of followers, all she has to do is to push enough posts quickly enough to cause a (pardon) buzz and an instant bad press rumor is launched. There are plenty of forums that can (and off the top of my head 4chan, digg, and reddit have) push enough posts to create a trending rumor out of the blue, especially as the retweets from confused readers begin and take over the process. Since Twitter provides an API, this could also be done by a bored single person who created a few thousand accounts for himself with a capcha breaker and can write scripts. By endorsing these open hash tags, companies are basically giving the world at large the ability to speak in their voice.

Companies also have taken to displaying screens with their hash tags displayed as scrolling searches in their lobbies (or in one case in San Diego, on a large TV behind the bar). The lack of moderation means that anyone can post ads for their competitors, or simply embarrassing content in order to hurt the brand name. There is no way to stop this content from being posted to the hash tag, and short of closing the feed, no way to remove it. Some of the software goes as far as displaying images inline, ways to prank this are left as an exercise for the readers.

On the complete opposite side of this target space be personal social media attacks. A casual glance at facebook, twitter, and buzz feeds shows that we treat these websites like personal conversation tools, not billboards for all to see. Things that we’d never plaster over our house, like “I’ll be gone on vacation for 7 days so no one is home”, we’re more then happy to put online on a site that also has our address. We fight like mad against the invasive nature of omnipresent cameras while tweeting our exact location every 30 minutes in order to get Foursquare points, with absolutely no sensation of irony.

Google Buzz, which by default appends map information if posting by phone, makes this even more obvious. A chatty person involved in a back and forth might leave a complete trail of where they were at near constant intervals in their day. While I grant that this lack of privacy is not catastrophic in and of itself, a criminal with a smart phone and access to the “local buzzes” feature would be able to have up to the minute reports of who is where, who just went to the atm, who is bringing home a new expensive TV (and where exactly are they plugging it in), and with a trip to the airport, a constant feed of people excited to be going away for a few days.

The last in particular highlights that we have not reached the point that caused the tip towards security on the net: automation of attacks enough to let every Joe the Script Kiddy do harm. Currently an attacker would have to go to the airport, set up a laptop, pull buzzes of people leaving or arriving, compare it to their previous buzzes and figure out their home address. However, all of the above can be converted into a simple application which performs all these steps in a few seconds, something which we’ll playfully call iBurglar. Once it’s an easy to use app, available for download, is the point where we might start to see action from the social media websites.

We also do not realize how permanent the things we write on these website are and how trivial searching them has become. A search on social sites for phrases related to drug use (try 420) shows people more than happy to discuss illegal actions in criminally implicating ways. And this time, unlike phone or txt messages, we can’t even begin to claim an expectation of privacy, we are literally posting it for everyone to see. There was recently a news story about a bail-hopper who was caught because cops recognized the resort in the background of his new Facebook profile photo. This didn’t even require a warrant, it was a public photo.

It’s easy to dismiss examples like that, and all the previous ones, as the fault of the users, but users assume privacy and assume good intention. Currently the social media is a giant space completely open to attack, and our current open-by-default approach is not sustainable. It is the responsibility of social media designers to create mediums that steer users into safe behaviors and quite literally to protect them from themselves, while at the same time balancing the needs of their shareholders and advertisers. It’s an interesting future, no doubt.

- george washington was sterile. this made him a more popular choice for president since he couldn’t have a “dynasty”

- old testament jews practiced legal polygamy

- as part of the “not legal be gay in public”, people were arrested for having too long or too short hair, pretending to dance with someone of the same sex, and in one case, for being two men discussing opera.

- from the above, gender roles used to be enforced by the government

- for a period of time if an american woman married an asian she would have her citizenship revoked, and not gain the husbands. since asian men were never allowed to gain citizenship, the wives became effectively stateless

- from the above, marriage was and is used by the government as a punitive measure to enforce 2nd class status

- till 1975 federal government was not allowed to hire homosexuals for state posts

- the vatican is on record saying “Allowing children being adopted by gay couples would do violence to these children. Their condition of dependency would stunt their full human development”. this implies that in the eyes of the catholic church homosexuals are inferior and not ‘full humans’

one thing i did know but want to reiterate: it’s amazing how blatant it is that “protect” is a fake word. protect children, protect marriage. that word has a specific meaning: you ‘protect’ from evil, you ‘protect’ from criminals, you don’t ‘protect’ from learning about someone else who you respect and value as a fellow human being

it’s also very telling that prop 8, the anti-gays, are actively attempting to block the inclusion of pro-prop 8 ads, including ones they themselves wrote and shot. almost like they are ashamed of them (legally, speaking of course)

look, you wouldn’t say “bob has entered a new stage of walking, he has a bike now”, you would say “bob doesn’t walk places as much, he now bikes”. similarly we’re no longer evolving, we’re now doing something else. coin a word, or just say ‘custom designing ourselves’. evolution requires natural selection and that force nowadays has very little effect on humans, in a world with health care and birth control.

we can’t understand the future by simply blindly shoehorning our reality into outdated concepts and terms. so yes, partially this is me just being a stickler on word choice, but partly we also need to be aware that we shape our thinking in terms of things we know, and there’s no reason to give people wrong conceptions on what’s going on.

power is about being able to do what you want, when you want to, not simply being responsible for greater and riskier things.

i recently thought about this upon receiving a random internet alert. i spent a large chunk of my life thinking that to be more technologically advanced you need to be more hooked up, with all your programs reporting status updates to you constantly. in reality this does not empower you, just scatters your attention.

instead, i’ve now actually made an effort to disconnect myself and hide things away from myself. i have enough trouble concentrating without a periodic ‘beep’ that, upon investigation, will inform me that someone has become the mayor of a new eatery in foursquare. my phone and computer have no twitter/facebook/rss alerts at all anymore, instead i read those when i feel like it using web browser bookmarks. my phone now receives nothing that makes noise, except calls which still require immediate attention unfortunately.

my only exception is emails that go to my work account show up in my computer dock. that’s a work obligation. nothing else does.

technology should never interrupt you. technology should politely wait for you to look in it’s direction, then quickly, clearly, and efficiently say to you what it has to say, and when done move back and wait on the side.

one random facet of this is the assumption that crowds and their voting can be trusted to behave in a productive way. let’s say you have a website where people vote on who is the best poster / reviewer / uploader / whatever, and rewards them in some way. simple to implement, simple to test, and you’re done, right?

well, never underestimate the willingness of crowds to behave maliciously. getting 1000 people to do a prank on a system like that is trivial, and it’s even easier to get one person with a bunch of zombie machines all over the planet.

attacks like this are really common: websites raid amazon review / recommendation pages for fun, 4chan obliterated a “person of the year” TIME poll, and twitter “trending topics” seem to be raids more often than not.

the last one in particular strikes me as funny. businesses are now using personal hash tags to let people talk about them using hashtags, and in some cases display the results real time in the lobby or on their page. i’m astounded at this. all it takes is one message board post asking everyone to twitpic porn to the hashtag and voila, instant PR disaster.

always program for the worst case, not the best case. unless you have some method to block them, assume that at any point in time there are thousands of bored suburban teenagers who would love to abuse any ranking system you have for laughs.

in less serious, i heard a cute response to “god asked me to pray for you” which was “well tell him to man up and talk to me directly and not go behind my back like this spreading rumors”.

so yahoo bought that site for 3 over billion dollars. at the time that was the content center of the internet. this was the future, this was user generated content, a beginning of a new world where we all build our own amusement, learn, and share.

so went wrong? at that point it didn’t dawn on anyone that none of us want to create content. not really. that’s work, requires effort to maintain, and skill in setting up in the first place. we don’t really want to create content, we just want to post pics of our cats, say what we had for dinner, and link people to funny videos. we’re a consumer society, not a creator society. don’t bet against that.

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this is a pretty funny video, i just had dinner that was potato with some random fixings, and here’s a pic of my cat hanging out under a stool where he can still comfortably keep an eye on his food bowl:

Loki under stool