Linked List: August 21, 2019

Wednesday, 21 August 2019

Steven Sinofsky on Steve Jobs’s ‘Bicycle for the Mind’ Metaphor for Personal Computers 

It’s a Twitter thread collected in a Medium post, so the narrative doesn’t read perfectly straight through, but it’s worth your time. Jobs’s 1981 appearance on Nightline is worth it alone. I hadn’t seen this before, and both Jobs (on the potential of personal computers, and their inevitable ubiquity — at a time when only 1 in 1,000 U.S. households owned one) and his counterpart David Burnham (who, even then, was deeply concerned about the privacy implications of computing) are remarkably prescient.

WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy 

Major new policy from WebKit, with inspiration credit given to Mozilla:

We treat circumvention of shipping anti-tracking measures with the same seriousness as exploitation of security vulnerabilities.

If a party attempts to circumvent our tracking prevention methods, we may add additional restrictions without prior notice. These restrictions may apply universally; to algorithmically classified targets; or to specific parties engaging in circumvention.

No Exceptions

We do not grant exceptions to our tracking prevention technologies to specific parties. Some parties might have valid uses for techniques that are also used for tracking. But WebKit often has no technical means to distinguish valid uses from tracking, and doesn’t know what the parties involved will do with the collected data, either now or in the future.

Unintended Impact

There are practices on the web that we do not intend to disrupt, but which may be inadvertently affected because they rely on techniques that can also be used for tracking. We consider this to be unintended impact.

Equating tracking with malware and security exploits is a major policy change, and absolutely correct. Notably, they are not respecting commercial interests at all. The user’s privacy comes first, and if there is commercial collateral damage from that, fuck it:

WebKit will do its best to prevent all covert tracking, and all cross-site tracking (even when it’s not covert). These goals apply to all types of tracking listed above, as well as tracking techniques currently unknown to us.

If a particular tracking technique cannot be completely prevented without undue user harm, WebKit will limit the capability of using the technique. For example, limiting the time window for tracking or reducing the available bits of entropy — unique data points that may be used to identify a user or a user’s behavior.

Hopefully, this will help close the email tracking-pixel loophole as well.

The ball is now in Chrome’s court to follow suit. I think Google could aggressively close these same privacy-invasive loopholes without losing their ability to serve targeted ads — they’d simply be limited to serving targeted ads to users who sign into Chrome with their Google accounts.

Google DeepMind Co-Founder Mustafa Suleyman Placed on Leave 

Giles Turner and Mark Bergen, reporting for Bloomberg*:

The co-founder of DeepMind, the high-profile artificial intelligence lab owned by Google, has been placed on leave after controversy over some of the projects he led.

Mustafa Suleyman runs DeepMind’s “applied” division, which seeks practical uses for the lab’s research in health, energy and other fields. Suleyman is also a key public face for DeepMind, speaking to officials and at events about the promise of AI and the ethical guardrails needed to limit malicious use of the technology.

“Mustafa is taking time out right now after 10 hectic years,” a DeepMind spokeswoman said. She didn’t say why he was put on leave.

Probably not a good sign.

* Bloomberg, of course, is the publication that published “The Big Hack” last October — a sensational story alleging that data centers of Apple, Amazon, and dozens of other companies were compromised by China’s intelligence services. The story presented no confirmable evidence at all, was vehemently denied by all companies involved, has not been confirmed by a single other publication (despite much effort to do so), and has been largely discredited by one of Bloomberg’s own sources. By all appearances “The Big Hack” was complete bullshit. Yet Bloomberg has issued no correction or retraction, and seemingly hopes we’ll all just forget about it. I say we do not just forget about it. Bloomberg’s institutional credibility is severely damaged, and everything they publish should be treated with skepticism until they retract the story or provide evidence that it was true.