Linked List: September 6, 2023

Wednesday, 6 September 2023

Wikipedia:

The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle, although it does imply various incorrect values of the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by a physician who was an amateur mathematician, never became law due to the intervention of Prof. C.A. Waldo of Purdue University, who happened to be present in the legislature on the day it went up for a vote.

Here’s a good summary (from modern day Purdue professor Edray Goins) of how this kook Edwin Goodwin arrived at π = 3.2.

I was reminded of this laughable legislation^* by a friend commenting on the U.K. abandoning its foolhardy attempt to mandate the inspection of impossible-to-inspect end-to-end messaging. E2EE communication cannot be “scanned” for child pornography while remaining secure for all other purposes, but it would be nice if it could. Pi is not 3.2 and a circle cannot be squared, but it would nice if it were so. The U.K.’s legislation is every bit as much ignorant wishful thinking as Indiana’s was over a century ago.

That Indiana bill was not defeated, however — it was apparently merely shelved. The U.K., likewise, has not repealed the law granting them the power to effectively ban end-to-end encryption — they’ve merely declared that they will not use it — yet. That’s dangerous. This law should be rescinded, not ignored.

* From Waldo’s own account of the saga comes this gem of a quote (written in the third person), regarding an offer to be introduced to Goodwin: “A member then showed the writer a copy of the bill just passed and asked him if he would like an introduction to the learned doctor, its author. He declined the courtesy with thanks remarking that he was acquainted with as many crazy people as he cared to know.”

Amen, Dr. Waldo.

Twitter/X’s Descent Into an Antisemitic Cesspool ★

David Leavitt:

Public reminder that @elonmusk wants you to falsely believe there isn’t antisemitism on X, and refuses to remove hateful comments and accounts.

Leavitt posted screenshots to two “After reviewing the available information, we want to let you know [account] hasn’t broken our safety policies” notices from Twitter’s content moderators — one for the account “@J3wsAreBad”, the other for “@gasthejews6969”. I won’t link to either account, but I checked and both are indeed active actual usernames. (J3wsAreBad’s “real” name: “✨J3wsRapeK1ds✨”.)

If you’re unfortunate enough to be working as a content moderator at Twitter, these should be two of the easiest reports of your day to deal with. You don’t even need to look at any of their tweets — both of their usernames should be sufficient on their face to just delete them. No warnings, no suspension, just nuke them. There should be no more question whether these accounts should be deleted than there is whether a turd ought to be scooped off the sidewalk. But no, these accounts are welcome on Twitter.

This has nothing to do with any sort of reasonable criticism of or disagreement with the Anti-Defamation League. This is about a big blinking “Welcome Nazis” neon sign. Antisemitism is more than just a form of bigotry and hatred, it’s a millennia-old conspiratorial crackpot worldview. And Elon Musk is seemingly sinking into it.

Rotten Tomatoes Is Rotten ★

Lane Brown, writing for Vulture:

But despite Rotten Tomatoes’s reputed importance, it’s worth a reminder: Its math stinks. Scores are calculated by classifying each review as either positive or negative and then dividing the number of positives by the total. That’s the whole formula. Every review carries the same weight whether it runs in a major newspaper or a Substack with a dozen subscribers.

If a review straddles positive and negative, too bad. “I read some reviews of my own films where the writer might say that he doesn’t think that I pull something off, but, boy, is it interesting in the way that I don’t pull it off,” says Schrader, a former critic. “To me, that’s a good review, but it would count as negative on Rotten Tomatoes.” [...]

Another problem — and where the trickery often begins — is that Rotten Tomatoes scores are posted after a movie receives only a handful of reviews, sometimes as few as five, even if those reviews may be an unrepresentative sample. This is sort of like a cable-news network declaring an Election Night winner after a single county reports its results. But studios see it as a feature, since, with a little elbow grease, they can sometimes fool people into believing a movie is better than it is.

Brown also uncovers implicit payola, with a Hollywood PR firm paying small-time critics tracked by Rotten Tomatoes $50 (fifty measly bucks!) for positive reviews. My whole family has been growing ever more skeptical of Rotten Tomatoes scores for years, but we reached a breaking point earlier this year when we rented M3gan, which we all found to be a shitty movie, but scored a 93 from Rotten Tomatoes. (It has a “generally favorable” 72 from Metacritic.)

Apple Acquires Classical Music Specialty Label BIS Records ★

Robert von Bahr, founder of BIS Records:

A few days ago BIS Records turned 50 years old and I am immensely proud of what our small team of people has accomplished during this half-century. BIS’s specialty, while paying our dues to the core repertoire, has been to nurture young classical artists and interesting living composers and to safeguard the musical treasure that we all represent long into the future. It is to that end that, after much careful consideration, and having just turned 80, I am excited to announce the rather momentous news that we have made the decision to become part of the Apple family.

We thought long and hard on how to maintain and build upon our prestigious history and looked for a partner who would further our mission, as well as an increased global platform to bring classical music to new audiences all over the world. Apple, with its own storied history of innovation and love of music, is the ideal home to usher in the next era of classical and has shown true commitment towards building a future in which classical music and technology work in harmony. It is my vision and my sincerest dream that we are all a part of this future.

Now this is an Apple-style acquisition. (Via Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch.)

U.K. Abandons, for Now, Legislation That Would Have Banned End-to-End Encryption ★

Cristina Criddle, Anna Gross, and John Aglionby, reporting from London for The Financial Times (paywall-circumventing Twitter link):

The UK government has conceded it will not use controversial powers in the online safety bill to scan messaging apps for harmful content until it is “technically feasible” to do so, postponing measures that critics say threaten users’ privacy.

In a statement to the House of Lords on Wednesday afternoon, junior arts and heritage minister Lord Stephen Parkinson sought to mark an eleventh-hour effort to end a stand-off with tech companies, including WhatsApp, that have threatened to pull their services from the UK over what they claimed was an intolerable threat to millions of users’ privacy and security.

Parkinson said that Ofcom, the tech regulator, would only require companies to scan their networks when a technology is developed that is capable of doing so. Many security experts believe it could be years before any such technology is developed, if ever.

No, Thursday’s out. How about never — is never good for you?

WhatsApp, owned by Facebook’s parent Meta, and Signal, another popular encrypted messaging app, are among those that have threatened to exit the UK market should they be ordered to weaken encryption, a widely used security technology that allows only the sender and recipient of messages to view a message’s contents. [...]

Officials have privately acknowledged to tech companies that there is no current technology able to scan end-to-end encrypted messages that would not also undermine users’ privacy, according to several people briefed on the government’s thinking.

This isn’t the worst reporting on encryption and lawmakers’ fantasies about “backdoors only accessible by the good guys”, but it’s fundamentally misleading. End-to-end encryption’s meaning is right there in its name. There’s no dial that can be adjusted from “weak” to “strong”. There’s no option for content inspection between end points. It’s not about choosing not to allow eavesdroppers, it’s about implementing protocols where it’s technically impossible to inspect content between sender and receiver.

The actual math is far more complex, but ultimately this boils down to the U.K. acknowledging that 2 + 2 can only equal 4.

The Rolling Stones: ‘Angry’ ★

Amazing video and a great new song from the world’s greatest band. So fucking good.