Linked List: December 10, 2015

Thursday, 10 December 2015

Mark Harris:

I’ve accepted a commission to write a story about the collapse of the Zano drone project on Kickstarter, its largest project ever to have been funded in Europe.

In itself, that’s hardly news. I’ve written a number of investigative features in the past, and have covered crowdfunding numerous times, too. Usually, I work for technology editors at newspapers like The Guardian and The Economist, magazines like Scientific American, IEEE Spectrum and MIT Technology Review, or online publications like Backchannel and Quartz.

This time, however, I’ve been commissioned by Kickstarter itself. The company wants to help the backers of this failed project get the information they are entitled to under their agreement with the project creator. They would like to uncover the story of Zano, from its inception to the present, and decided that the best way to do that was to hire a journalist. The primary audience for the story is the 12,000+ backers of the project, although I will also make the story publicly available once I’ve completed it, most likely in the middle of January.

Fascinating — and I think admirable — move by Kickstarter.

Reddit ‘Ask Us Anything’ With Google Pixel C Team Goes Awry ★

Not sure who at Google thought this would be a good idea. Brutal.

Some strong feelings about devices that don’t allow for storage expansion with SD cards as well. I understand the mindset there — there’s a certain type of person who believes everything should, in a moral sense, be priced near the cost of goods. And clearly the cost of goods for 32 vs. 64 GB of storage is not even close to $100. But the passion some of these people express about this is eye opening. With PCs, these sorts of people can get what they want by building their own systems. That doesn’t work with phones and tablets (and to some degree, laptops), where everything needs to be tightly integrated and intricately assembled. These sort of people have never been fans of Apple, but in the old days, they had alternatives. Now that the entire industry is moving toward Apple-style devices, their frustration is palpable.

The Trump Effect, and How It Spreads ★

The New York Times editorial board:

This is the force that Mr. Trump feeds on and that propels him. It is bigger than he is, and toxic. Not a vote has been cast in the 2016 presidential race. But serious damage is already being done to the country, to its reputation overseas, by a man who is seen as speaking for America and twisting its message of tolerance and welcome, and by the candidates who trail him and are competing for his voters.

Mr. Trump has not deported anyone, nor locked up or otherwise brutalized any Muslims, immigrants or others. The danger next year, of course, is giving him the power to do so. And the danger right now is allowing him to legitimize the hatred that he so skillfully exploits, and to revive the old American tendency, in frightening times, toward vicious treatment of the weak and outsiders.

Gizmodo and Wired Apparently Taken by Bitcoin Creator Hoax ★

Sarah Jeong, writing for Motherboard:

A lot of this evidence isn’t authenticated, so there’s that. But there’s one really big problem with the case for Craig S. Wright as Satoshi: at least one of the key pieces of evidence appears to be fake. The “Satoshi” PGP keys associated with the Wired and Gizmodo stories were probably generated after 2009 and uploaded after 2011.

We say keys, because there are two entirely different keys implicated by Wired and by Gizmodo. And neither of them check out.

FBI Director James Comey Calls on Tech Companies Offering End-to-End Encryption to Reconsider ‘Their Business Model’ ★

Dan Froomkin and Jenna McLaughlin, reporting for The Intercept:

Comey had previously argued that tech companies could somehow come up with a “solution” that allowed for government access but didn’t weaken security. Tech experts called this a “magic pony” and mocked him for his naivete.

Now, Comey said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday morning, extensive conversations with tech companies have persuaded him that “it’s not a technical issue.”

“It is a business model question,” he said. “The question we have to ask is: Should they change their business model?”

It’s not in the headline, but Betteridge’s Law applies. Business models have nothing to do with this. It’s a right-to-privacy issue, which is why the FBI is so confused — they’re blinded by their institutional values, which place investigative power and surveillance capabilities above all else.