[Plura-list] Straightened Trees; AI Dungeon with GPT-3; EU court kills data-sharing deal with USA;

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Straightened Trees: Changing the buildings to straighten the trees.

* AI Dungeon with GPT-3: An AI invents a grimoire in an instant.

* EU court kills data-sharing deal with USA: Schrems' Revenge.

* Librarians' virtual escape rooms: Trapped in a Google Forms MUD.

* What's in Blueleaks: The boondoggle of Fusion Centers.

* A new contract for land: Real estate is the literal basis for feudalism.

* This day in history: 2010, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🏜 Straightened Trees

Daniel Temkin is a tech artist and coder who does weird and amazing
things with software. Who can forget the time he created an
"anti-imperialist, Turing complete" programming language with only one
command?

https://esoteric.codes/blog/a-programming-language-with-only-one-command-and

His latest project is Straightened Trees, and he is the rare artist who
manages to describe his work in words that make it clear what it is: "In
Straightened Trees (a series of silver gelatin prints), strips malls,
telephone poles and restaurant signs take on the curves that once
belonged to the elms, palms, and oaks they stand beside. The trees are
shot with a 4x5 camera and then straightened with custom code.

"Although analog-produced images allow for smoother curves and richer
light than digital, the impulse to straighten objects is a digital one,
rooted in a computational idealism."

http://danieltemkin.com/StraightenedTrees

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🏜 AI Dungeon with GPT-3

Last year's AI Dungeon was a sensation, for good reason: Nick Walton's
deployment of GPT and GPT2 to automatically generate D&D-style; text
adventures that were simultaneously sophisticated and just super-weird.

Well, GPT has a new version, GPT3, and it's the most powerful machine
learning prose-generation tool in wide use, and when Walton applied it
to AI Dungeon, the results were jaw-dropping.

https://medium.com/@aidungeon/ai-dungeon-dragon-model-upgrade-7e8ea579abfe

The new version of AI Dungeon is called "Dragon" and Walton's
walkthrough of a random dungeon is pretty impressive, including some
really cool dialogues with NPCs that you'd swear understood what they
were talking about.

But then comes the kicker:

When Walton's character finally locates the "Book of Essence" - an
imaginary grimoire invented by the algorithm, he is "able to seamlessly
read entire sections from it. The game invents a complex magic system
and underlying theory behind why it works and describes it."

AI Dungeon is free for 7 days, $5/mo thereafter.

https://play.aidungeon.io/subscribe

Bolton urges you to pay to support his long-term goal: "AI will enable
games that are alive and dynamic, where your actions impact the world in
significant ways and where you are not bound by the imaginations of the
developers who created them."

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🏜 EU court kills data-sharing deal with USA

Few people have had a more profound impact on tech's data-hoovering
propensities than Max Schrems, who, as a law student, sued over
Facebook's data-handling and won, leading to the passage of the GDPR.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out-here-everything-hurts/#noyb

In the wake of that lawsuit, the EU ordered that Europeans' data could
no longer be stored on US servers, a stance that was later softened
thanks to the "Privacy Shield" regulation, which once again allowed
Europeans' data to be processed in the USA.

Schrems challenged Privacy Shield, saying that its precautions were
inadequate given the US's tolerance for mass surveillance by its
intelligence agencies, especially the NSA, whose ability to gather data
was never effectively curbed, even after the Snowden revelations.

Today, EU top court CJEU agreed with Schrems, and nuked Privacy Shield,
which means that firms that operate in the EU will no longer be allowed
to process Europeans' data outside of Europe.

https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-07/cp200091en.pdf

That includes banks and law firms, but also Big Tech giants like
Facebook and Google.

Here's what Schrems told The Verge: "As the EU will not change its
fundamental rights to please the NSA, the only way to overcome this
clash is for the US to introduce solid privacy rights for all people —
including foreigners."

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/16/21326795/eu-us-personal-data-transfer-privacy-shield-invalidated-sccs-upheld


_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🏜 Librarians' virtual escape rooms

Libraries have been a center of excellence for escape-room creation for
years, and librarians have used their collections, buildings and their
excellent knowledge-acquisition skills to craft fiendishly clever
riddles and puzzles for their patrons to solve.

For obvious reasons, this has been severely curtailed by the pandemic,
but for the puzzlemasters of librarianship, lockdown is just another
challenge to be solved. The answer turns out to be...Google Forms?

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/15/21324558/google-forms-virtual-escape-rooms-librarians-games-puzzles-homeschooling

It started with youth services librarian Sydney Krawiec from Peters
Township Public Library in McMurray, Pennsylvania, who created a viral,
virtual Harry Potter escape room when the physical escape room she'd
designed was sidelined by a lockdown that started on its opening day.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSflNxNM0jzbZJjUqOcXkwhGTfii4CM_CA3kCxImbY8c3AABEA/viewform

Librarians across the world ran with it and now the web is filled with
brilliant virtual escape rooms that are "like doing an online
personality quiz, but with puzzles mixed in" (h/t Aliya Chaudhry),
themed on popular media and incorporating math, geography, language and
logic.

Naturally, the librarian-creators link these puzzles into online
resources from their collections and the whole world, turning them into
jumping-off points for self-directed research and learning.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🏜 What's in Blueleaks

Last month, the Distributed Denial of Secrets transparency org published
a massive dump of internal police documents dubbed Blueleaks.

The release triggered a massive backlash from Twitter, including a
removal of the DDoSecrets account.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/23/cryptocidal-maniacs/#ddosecrets

Twitter also blocks all links to DDoSecrets' website, claiming that it
violates the company's policy against publishing leaks (a policy that
Twitter enforces *very* selectively) and falsely claiming that the site
hosts malicious software, which is categorically untrue.

Writing for The Intercept, Micah Lee delves into the leaks' origins and
contents.

The leaks all likely originate with the Houston web-hosting company
Netsential, who rolled their own insecure CMS using Asp.net and Vbscript.

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/15/blueleaks-anonymous-ddos-law-enforcement-hack/

The defects in their custom code exposed 250+ law-enforcement related
sites and their data. This resulted in personal details on 700k+ police
officers being leaked; in some cases, this included home addresses,
hashed passwords, etc.

But the most revealing docs come from "Fusion Centers" - these being the
post-9/11 cross-agency meta-departments that aggregate data from
multiple sources in a bid to prevent terror attacks.

Despite lavish budgets, a free rein, and anemic oversight, no fusion
center has ever foiled a terror attack. So what *are* they doing?

This is where Blueleaks sheds some light.

For example, when a BLM student activist wrote to a Bay Area law firm
asking if any of its lawyers would be willing to be included on a list
of pro-bono counsel, the attorney who received the letter forwarded it
to police authorities, with a profanity-laced, all-caps covering letter.

"PLEASE SEE THE ATTACHED SOLICITATION I RECEIVED FROM AN ANTIFA
TERRORIST WANTING MY HELP TO BAIL HER AND HER FRIENDS OUT OF JAIL, IF
ARRESTED FOR RIOTING...I CANNOT RISK THIS PIECE OF SHIT ANTIFA […]
FILING A BAR COMPLAINT AGAINST ME...THE SAN FRANCISCO PUBLIC DEFENDERS
WILL VIGOROUSLY DEFEND THESE TERRORISTS....HAPPY HUNTING."

The lawyer who sent this letter to the police used the SF District
Attorney's office for the return address on the envelope.

Despite the unhinged nature of the covering letter and the innocuous
nature of the request from the student activist for pro bono counsel,
"An investigator in the Marin County DA’s office considered this useful
intelligence."

"She logged into the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center’s
CMS and created a new Suspicious Activity Report, or SAR, under the
category 'Radicalization/Extremism' and typed the student’s name as the
subject."

Get that? This kid who asked a lawyer for pro-bono counsel is now
eternally branded as a "radical/extremist" in a (formerly) secret
government database on the strength of the all-caps rant of the lawyer
she unwisely sought assistance from.

Fusion Centers suck millions from our public budgets and don't catch the
criminals they're supposed to be catching. Instead, these boondoggles
are hives of unchecked poor judgment, places where secret dossiers are
filled with paranoid rants dressed up as "intel."

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🏜 A new contract for land

Economists of every stripe, from Marx to Milton Friedman, have a
consensus on the nature of land: "Land is a natural commons — it belongs
to everyone, and that land value (rents) should be recaptured by the
community, who create the value in the first place."

When your property becomes more valuable, it has virtually nothing to do
with any action you've taken. Even the most ambitious home-improvement
shifts house prices by small margins.

What DOES increase land value is what everyone else does: the
businesses, schools, amenities, transit links, street furniture,
planning, and other improvements made to your land's *location*.

This was driven home for me a couple years ago when we bought and
thorougly renovated a home in LA after an overseas move. We'd insured
our personal effects, and we'd done major renos, and we'd just closed on
the house, so (thought) I knew what the renos and goods were worth.

Then I took out earthquake insurance, which covers the house and
contents - but not the land - and I was amazed to learn that everything
apart from the lot was worth a tiny slice of the total. Land is where
the value is, and that value comes from the community, not the owner.

In "A New Land Contract," Alastair Parvin's talk at Civic Square's
'Department of Dreams,' in Jun, Parvin develops this observation along
with the history of land development to lay bare some truths that have
been made far more obvious by the crisis.

https://medium.com/@AlastairParvin/a-new-land-contract-684c3ba1f1b3

Housing is remarkable expensive, and getting more expensive all the
time. When the crisis came, the UK (and US) governments bailed out
mortgage borrowers (including virtually every landlord) but not their
renters.

"As taxpayers we’re pouring billions of pounds of life support into the
economy, but a huge chunk of it is just being paid straight on to
private landlords. If you think of the economy as a bucket, it’s like
having a huge hole in the bottom of it. Or rather, the top."

All the injustices that we see in the world - racial wealth gaps, gender
gaps, etc - are magnified by this dynamic. If you're a landlord, you're
overwhelmingly likely to be white. If you're brown or Black, you're
overwhelmingly likely to be a tenant.

Rising land prices extract a fee from every business and ever renter, a
fee just for being alive and conducting your affairs. It's a tax on
life, levied by private landowners, and that is literally by design.

The modern system of land-ownership has its origins in feudalism:
specifically, it was how William the Conqueror could afford his army.
Rather than keeping a standing army, he gave nobles a contract giving
them dominion over some land and its residents.

The noble was obliged to contribute soldiers to the king on demand, and
in return, he was empowered to extract any rent he chose from the people
on the deeded land. The origin of "feudal" is feudalis: Latin for "fee."
Feudal means "rent-based."

Modern states updated this system, doing everything - anything - to keep
property values high, especially loosening finance rules to allow
lenders to pump titanic sums into the property market. Home ownership is
an intensely political goal, the cornerstone of Thatcherism.

Not just ownership of your home, but ownership of someone else's: the
"income property" that provides "passive income" that you can leave to
your kids: the heritable right to tax other people for being alive.

Today, the UK is a nation dependent on the "business" of taxing people
and firms for simply existing - that is, rentierism. 83% of the total
wealth of the UK is land. The UK spends  £71bn on rent and £67bn on
mortgages per year, enough to pay for a whole other NHS.

Meanwhile, the grossly inadequate housing benefit costs  £23b/year -
more than is spent annually on the UK highways, police and military
combined - all to try to address the social crisis created by rentierism.

Talking about property this way may sound weird, but it's actually
pretty mainstream, historically speaking. Here's Winston Churchill on
the subject:

"To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist… contribute,
and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He
renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the
general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his
own enrichment is derived."

Nor does this problem lack for solutions. As Parvin points out, there is
a longstanding, well-theorized movement to replace landlords with land
*stewards*, "effectively renting a piece of land from Everyone for as
long as you want it, paying the community for its use."

Pavin enumerates many of the proposals to make this shift:

* Public land buy-backs, at a savings of £6b/year in public subsidies
and £35b/year in rents

* Land value capture, local govts buying ex-industrial land and
developing it for community use, saving £9.3b/year

* Soft landings: a national land trust that slowly buys land from under
peoples' homes and leases it back

* Fairhold (Pavin's new proposal): local governments buy land and
license it to stewards who pay fair rents

As Pavin points out, land ownership is at the root of inaction on
climate: "we will need to fix this obsolete right of extraction that is
coded into the foundations of our society, this dysfunction that is
coded into the foundations of our economy this injustice that is coded
into the foundations of our democracy."

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🏜 This day in history

#10yrsago Winds howl over the deserted moonscape behind Rupert Murdoch's
UK newspaper paywalls
https://web.archive.org/web/20100716212545/http://www.newser.com/off-the-grid/post/502/whats-really-going-on-behind-murdochs-paywall.html

#10yrsago Vatican: ordaining women is as bad as raping children from the
pulpit https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/world/europe/16vatican.html

#5yrsago State Department willing to overlook Malaysia's mass graves for
the sake of TPP
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150715/16495831655/senators-up-arms-over-state-department-plan-to-deliberately-ignore-malaysian-mass-graves-just-to-get-tpp-deal.shtml

#5yrsago UK Tories launch quiet inquiry into privatising the NHS
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ournhs/government-moves-to-consider-nhs-user-charges/

#5yrsago UK schools' "anti-radicalisation" software lets hackers spy on
kidshttps://www.propublica.org/article/trump-tax-law-threatened-turbotax-profits-started-charging-disabled-unemployed-and-students

#1yrago How Wechat censors images in private chats
https://citizenlab.ca/2019/07/cant-picture-this-2-an-analysis-of-wechats-realtime-image-filtering-in-chats/

#1yrago Tennessee police to drug users: don't flush your dope or you'll
create "meth gators"
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tennessee-police-warn-locals-not-flush-drugs-fear-meth-gators-n1030291
#1yrago In 1943, the chairman of the NY Fed backed Modern Monetary
Theory: "Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete"
https://boingboing.net/2019/07/16/spend-then-tax.html

#1yrago Read: Trump's grandfather's letter, in which he begs not to be
deported https://harpers.org/archive/2017/03/the-emigrants/

#1yrago Many of the key Googler Uprising organizers have quit, citing
retaliation from senior management
https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/onward-another-googlewalkout-goodbye-b733fa134a7d

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🏜 Colophon

Today's top sources: Waxy (https://waxy.org/), Monty Zukowski, Anonymous
Coward (https://twitter.com/That_AC), Four Short Links
(https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Today's progress: 521 words (38703 total).

Currently reading: Anger Is a Gift by Mark Oshiro

Latest podcast: Full Employment:
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/07/13/full-employment-2/

Upcoming appearances:

"Working as Intended: Surveillance Capitalism is not a Rogue
Capitalism," Jul 21,
https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_9AwAiQSmTj2ZjaIsIoTr5A

Latest book:

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

This work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
That means you can use it any way you like, including commerically,
provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are
included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the
basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

_,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_

🏜 How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/web/accounts/303320

Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and
advertising):

https://twitter.com/doctorow

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 195 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/attachments/20200716/fe95981e/attachment.sig>