[Plura-list] Al Jaffee has retired; Raffi on radical politics; Force Multiplier; Socializing with spreadsheets

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Al Jaffee has retired: MAD's tribute to a 99-year-old legend.

* Raffi on radical politics: The more we get together the happier we'll be.

* Podcast: Part 6 of "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town": Young
love, strange love.

* Force Multiplier: Free Little Brother story for Attack Surface
pre-orders, UK edition.

* Socializing with spreadsheets: Party in a shared doc.

* Red state pandemic rising: Pools can't have pissing and non-pissing ends.

* US cyberdefense is AWOL: US "cyber" spending is all offense, no defense.

* Scraping traffic-cams to capture police violence: NY activists are
archiving public camera footage.

* Huge trove of unprotected dating-app data: 845GB of pics, chat and PII
hanging out in unprotected Amazon buckets.

* This day in history: 2010, 2015

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

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🙇🏾‍♀️ Al Jaffee has retired

Al Jaffee is the longest-working comics artist in history, responsible
for two of MAD Magazine's canonical gags: "Snappy Answers to Stupid
Questions" and the back-page fold-in. He's 99 years old, and he's just
retired.

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/419611-longest-career-as-a-comics-artist

MAD Magazine largely stopped publishing new material in 2016, but
they've produced a special tribute issue celebrating Jaffee's career
that has just hit stands. It includes Jaffee's last-ever fold-in (after
nearly 500 in total!).

https://13thdimension.com/exclusive-preview-mad-magazine-14-the-al-jaffee-tribute-issue/

Also in the issue: Sergio Argones's tribute to Jaffee.

The first-ever "Snappy Answers" column.

And much more.

Jaffee led a pretty amazing life, having been born in the US but raised
in a rural shtetl in Lithuania with his mother, subsisting on the comics
his father sent him from the USA until he returned at the age of 12.

https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/280/what-him-worry/

He's credited his Fold-Ins to this dual life of his:

https://forward.com/culture/448517/mad-magazine-legend-al-jaffee-folds-it-in-at-99-check-out-his-last-fold-in/

They really are remarkable works.

https://13thdimension.com/13-mad-fold-ins-an-al-jaffee-celebration/

As great as they are, they're not the only experimental form that Jaffee
pioneered: his syndicated "Tall Tales" strips (long, skinny comics that
have some kind of amazing sight gag) are fantastic:

https://boingboing.net/2008/11/11/al-jaffees-tall-tale.html

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🙇🏾‍♀️ Raffi on radical politics

Like most Canadian kids in the 70s, I was raised on Raffi Cavoukian's
music - I even went to see him in concert with my folks at Seneca
College, near suburban Toronto neighbourhood.

And like most Canadian kids, Raffi kinda fell off my radar as I aged out
of his audience.

Years later, I learned he was the brother of AnnC avoukian, then Ontario
privacy commissioner - a visionary and principled fighter who pioneered
the idea of "privacy by design." I thought, "How odd that one sib is a
fighter, and the other a gentle kids' entertainer."

And *then* I discovered Raffi on Twitter, and learned they're *both*
fighters. Raffi's Twitter is a brilliant, fiery, impassioned, hilarious
running commentary on progressive politics, the climate emergency, and
the terrors of the far-right resurgence.

https://twitter.com/Raffi_RC

Raffi is profiled in Jacobin for International Children's Day, in an
interview in which he explains the - now obvious - connection between
caring for kids and caring about justice overall.

https://jacobinmag.com/2020/06/raffi-kids-singer-climate-change-bernie-sanders/

Here are some choice quotes:

"I was full of admiration for who I call humanity’s 'primary learners'
who, at the time of their life when evolution has seen fit to give them
play as their essential mode of being, they’re learning the most
sophisticated human tasks of speech and language acquisition."

"Not caring about people is not an option, because we are human. It is
our nature to care. So when we envision a society, it ought to work for
everyone. Because the opposite is untenable. Whose child would you leave
out?"

"We find these joys to be self evident, that all children are created
whole, endowed with innate intelligence, with dignity and wonder, worthy
of respect."

Raffi has a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading his philosophy of
"Child Honoring" and even offers an online course in the subject:

https://raffifoundation.org/take-the-course/

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🙇🏾‍♀️ Podcast: Part 6 of "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town"

This week on my podcast, part 6 of my novel "Someone Comes to Town,
Someone Leaves Town," a book that Gene Wolfe called "a glorious book
unlike any book you've ever read."

https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/14/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-06/

This week's installment is all about young love in a small town for a
strange lad.

Here's the MP3:

https://ia601506.us.archive.org/26/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_346/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_346_-_Someone_Comes_to_Town_Someone_Leaves_Town_006.mp3

And here's my podcast feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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🙇🏾‍♀️ Force Multiplier

My next novel is Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book, which
comes out in October. To celebrate, I've written a new Marcus Yallow
story, "Force Multiplier," about stalkerware, power, and revenge, as a
free bonus ebook and audiobook for people who pre-order the novel.

If you're in the UK, Australia, NZ, South Africa, Eire, and other parts
of the Anglosphere (excluding US/Canada), send your pre-order receipt to
Head of Zeus, the UK publisher:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfBcoOM3m3fCwipXRcexWuBD4nZMIF13r2StmSnpT5amD4Icg/viewform

In the US, Canada, and non-English-speaking countries, send your
pre-order receipt to Tor Books, the US publisher:

https://read.macmillan.com/promo/attacksurfacepreordercampaign/

Attack Surface is a standalone novel for adults that stars Masha, the
young woman who both gets Marcus into and out of trouble at the start
and end of the first two Little Brother books. After the terrorist
attack that radicalizes Marcus, Masha joins the DHS.

She wants to hunt terrorists but instead finds herself embroiled in a
junk-science scheme to algorithmically attribute guilt to Muslims and
other disfavored minorities that the DHS has already decided to blame
for the attacks (Little Brother).

From there, Masha ends up in the private sector, working in the cyber
division of a mercenary outfit loosely based on Blackwater, where her
life outside of the US intelligence services' command structure makes
her a mother confessor for US spooks' guilty leaks (Homeland).

By the time we meet Masha in Attack Surface, she's working for a cyber
arms dealers similar to the NSO Group, helping ex-Soviet dictators put
down color revolutions while secretly helping the radicals evade the
spyware she spends her working days installing.

Disillusioned, Masha ends up back in Oakland, helping childhood friends
in a successor to the Movement for Black Lives who are being targeted by
the same cyberweapons she's spent her career developing and servicing.

It's a book about the limits of self-knowledge, about how smart people
can talk themselves into doing the worst things imaginable and then
excuse it by telling themselves that anyone else would do the same
thing, given the chance.

And it's a book about allyship, and the problems of appointing yourself
the cyber-defense force of someone else's political struggle.

(And yes, Marcus is in it too, as is Ange!).

It got a fabulous review from Publishers Weekly: "The high stakes and
believable world keep the pages turning. Doctorow’s fans will be pleased."

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978125075753110/9/8/7/6/5/4/3/2/1/

PS: Thanks to Eva Galperin for help with Force Multiplier!

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🙇🏾‍♀️ Socializing with spreadsheets

Socializing via videoconference can be exhausting (especially if you're
spending your working days *also* in videoconferences): the panopticon
nature of not knowing whether someone is looking at you can make it hard
to relax.

Here's Marie Foulston's solution: a party in a spreadsheet.

https://onezero.medium.com/party-in-a-shared-google-doc-d576c565706e

Foulston's spreadsheet opens with a picture of a door pasted into a
cell; it has a "coat-room" tab and then, as guests arrive and start
adding tabs, it sprouts a "hallway" and a "kitchen."

People come with animal avatars, and "A flurry of coloured cursors dart
from cell to cell announcing names, and guests attempt to decipher their
anonymous animal alter egos."

People cut-and-paste coat images into the coatroom tab. A guest paints
all the cells in one tab blue, and it becomes the "blue room." Party
snacks are pasted into cells. There's an animated dance-floor (GIFs?
Scripts? she doesn't say).

Bonfires appear in the garden tab, and above them, s'mores. Someone
pastes a police-car into the "front drive" tab and everyone gets briefly
quiet until the cops leave.

The tabs each have their own lingering conversations to pop into and
scroll back through.

At the end of the night, the action moves to "paint by numbers" tabs
where tired stragglers' cursors move between cells, coloring them in to
make crude images.

Finally, to end the festivities, Foulston creates a sunrise tab and
colors it from dark blue to warm orange.

Foulston's delightful description reminds me of the glory days of MUDs
and MOOs and MUSHes, a collaborative, playful form of mostly textual
storytelling and pretend.

You can visit the remains of her party here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RrqFW_-j8pvF_lehoQhcHGZgxGwfDvBWr0kwvrZNDLg/edit?usp=sharing

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🙇🏾‍♀️ Red state pandemic rising

There's a reason the GOP politicized the pandemic and started urging
businesses in their states to reopen: they saw the numbers that showed
that the dead were disproportionately Black and brown, and so deaths
from the virus became a feature, not a bug.

But humanity has a shared microbial destiny. It's impossible to be safe
while dooming the people who pack your meat, ring up your groceries,
clean your house, paint your nails, cut your hair and serve your meals
to die of a highly contagious virus.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/08/volcano-gods/#reopening

That's like denying the use of the pool bathrooms to those who can't
afford an entry fee, then saying it'll work out because the pool has a
"pissing" and "no-pissing" end and people can choose which end to swim in.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/19/shared-microbial-destiny-2/#shared-microbial-destiny

"Red states" that rushed to re-open are seeing surging numbers of
coronavirus infections, particularly in "vulnerable, rural populations"
- that is, in the GOP's voter strongholds.

 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/15/republican-coronavirus-skepticism-may-shift-cases-rise-states-trump-won

Some GOP officials haven't gotten the memo yet: Ohio GOP Senator Steve
Huffman, offered this explanation for disproportionate Black mortality:
"Could it just be that African Americans, the colored population, do not
wash their hands as well as other groups?"

Meanwhile, cases and hospitalizations are spiking in Arizona, Florida,
South Carolina, Arkansas and Texas - states whose GOP leadership refused
Medicare expansion in an effort to sabotage the Affordable Care Act,
leaving their people with a brittle, underfunded health system.

The GOP is trapped in a prison of its own making. To keep the fortunes
of the 1% intact, they need to restart American commerce. But doing so
will not just murder racialized people who don't typically vote
Republican, but also the GOP's base: elderly and rural people.

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🙇🏾‍♀️ US cyberdefense is AWOL

In security, attackers have an easier job than defenders: an attacker
has to find a single mistake that a defender has made; a defender has to
make no mistakes.

But the best defense is *not* a good offense. Neglecting defense means
abandoning the people you're defending.

So guess how the US apportions its "cyber" budget.

It's all "deterrence" (i.e. offensive capability) and virtually no
actual defense. As Jason Healey writes in Lawfare, this leaves Americans
as "prey," not "predators."

https://www.lawfareblog.com/cyber-budget-shows-what-us-values

Healey is writing about the Cyberspace Solarium Commission's report "on
a strategic approach to defending the United States in cyberspace
against cyber attacks of significant consequences."

https://www.solarium.gov/

The report shows that the vast majority of information security spending
in the US is though the military, not through defensive organizations
like the DHS, a trend that began with Clinton and has been continued by
every president since, with massive acceleration under Trump.

Ironically, Trump has criticized previous admins for neglecting defense
and pledged to increase it as a priority, but all he did was redefine
"defense" to mean "punishing those who use cyber tools for malicious
purposes" and attaining "peace through strength."

Which is why the DoD's cyber budget is 25% higher than the total infosec
budget of *all* defensive agencies, with US Cybercommand HQ getting 33%
more to cover program *administration* than the *entire* State Dept
cyber budget, *including* operations.

The DoD's cyber ops budget is 250% of the budget for then entire
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and 1000% of the
budget for the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center.

And that's just the part of the budget we know about; most of the DoD's
budget is a secret. It's part of the trend Rosa Brooks spoke of:
"everything became war and the military became everything."

Healey: "There are tremendous risks when a fearsome offense is paired
with a weak defense," because "a more fearsome cyber offense makes it
more likely they will get in a sucker punch on the U.S. before Cyber
Command can bring its big guns to bear."

He's focused on the geopolitics, but we must attend to  human costs.
When computer criminals steal trade secrets or kompromat, steal
identities or clean out your bank account, they get away clean because
your government has prioritized attacking rivals over defending YOU.

To take just one example: the NSA found a vulnerability in Windows that
they codenamed "Eternalblue." Rather than report that bug to Microsoft
so it could be fixed and everyone relying on Windows could be safer, the
NSA kept the bug a secret so it could attack its enemies.

Then Eternalblue leaked. It got picked up by dumdums and spliced into
some not-very-effective ransomware, supercharging in and giving birth to
the Wannacry epidemic. Wannacry went on to shut down numerous businesses
and hospitals around the world, including in the US.

But it did worse than that: Wannacry was used to shut down entire *US
cities*. For *months*. Including, for example, Baltimore, a city that
serves as a commuter town for Beltway Bandits, perhaps including some
who decided not to fix Eternalblue.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/us/nsa-hacking-tool-baltimore.html

It would be one thing if the only people who suffered as a result of
this ghastly blunder was DoD personnel and their overpaid contractors -
but the collateral damage here is staggering.

An offensive posture means you can make your enemy's rubble bounce after
they slaughter your people. Only a general hoping for a consulting job
with a defense contractor could view this as a good tradeoff for the
casualties experienced by the people they've sworn to protect.

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🙇🏾‍♀️ Scraping traffic-cams to capture police violence

Back in 2017, NYC community activists teamed up with Motherboard to
start an open mesh wireless network, called NYC Mesh.

And because providing communications infrastructure is a radical act,
NYC Mesh is a radical political group.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5djd7/motherboard-and-vice-are-building-a-community-internet-network-to-protect-net-neutrality

Their latest activist move: bulk-archiving the freely available NYC
traffic-cam footage streaming online and using it as evidence of police
brutality against Black Lives Matter protesters.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3zp55/activists-are-using-traffic-cameras-to-track-police-brutality

NYC Mesh volunteer Aakash Patel explains, "The NYC Mesh colocation
facility allows us to plug a server directly into the backbone with low
latency and high bandwidth. This allows the tool to pull over 200 GB of
footage per day and make it available."

https://www.nycmesh.net/blog/nyc-surveillance-archive/

It appears that the NYC DOT is now throttling the tool, and they have
not responded to Patel's requests for collaboration.

The project is seeking technical volunteers to help manage the video
they can get.

They have an open call for sysadmins, UI designers, and ML specialists
to help improve the tool, and they're actively seeking connections in
the NYC DOT and with activists in other cities to expand the tool's reach.

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🙇🏾‍♀️ Huge trove of unprotected dating-app data

Back in March, security researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar discovered
a massive collection of unprotected Amazon Web Services data
repositories belonging to "niche dating sites" like "3somes, Cougary,
Gay Daddy Bear, Xpal, BBW Dating, Casualx, SugarD, Herpes Dating, and
GHunt."

In a new report published today with VPN Mentor, the researchers detail
the scale of the breach: 845GB of data for 2.5m accounts, including
sexual photos, audio recordings, and personally identifying info, along
with financial information.

https://www.vpnmentor.com/blog/report-dating-apps-leak/

There's no indication that the data was ever breached, but it could have
been - there's nothing stopping anyone from scraping that data and using
it for kompromat, nonconsensual porn, or just to grief people and
destroy their lives.

The apps seem to all be run by the same company, possibly "Cheng Du New
Tech Zone," which is listed as the proprietor on several of the apps.

As Lily Hay Newman writes in Wired, "If you use one of the affected apps
there's not a lot you can do to protect against the possibility that the
data was stolen before the researchers found it."

https://www.wired.com/story/dating-apps-leak-explicit-photos-screenshots/

The researchers report that after they disclosed the vulnerability to
the administrators of 3somes, ALL the services were fixed, suggesting
that they do have a common owner.

The report makes a series of commonsense recommendations for securing
sites, but misses one very important one: don't save data. The kinds of
data that the services kept on their servers should never have been
retained indefinitely, if at all.

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🙇🏾‍♀️ This day in history

#10yrsago HOWTO silence vuvuzela drone on your TV
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-silence-vuvuzela-horns-in-world-cup-broadcasts-5564085

#10yrsago Shortest-possible Monopoly game
https://scatter.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/the-shortest-possible-game-of-monopoly-21-seconds/

#5yrsago Anti-corruption journalist immolated by cops, allegedly under
orders from minister https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-33090032

#5yrsago The Internet may not be the question, but it's the answer
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/15/internet-answer-questions-of-our-time

#5yrsago Industry Minister defends the Canadian DMCA
https://web.archive.org/web/20100618022053/https://www.tvo.org/cfmx/tvoorg/searchengine/index.cfm?page_id=613&action;=blog&subaction;=viewPost&post;_id=12824&blog;_id=485

#5yrsago "Reporter" who wrote ridiculous story about Snowden leaks in
China admits he was just acting as a government stenographer
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150615/11565531344/reporter-who-wrote-sunday-times-snowden-propaganda-admits-that-hes-just-writing-what-uk-govt-told-him.shtml

#5yrsago Sunday Times sends copyright threat to The Intercept over
critical article
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2101948-news-uk-dmca-notification-first-look-productions.html

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🙇🏾‍♀️ Colophon

Today's top sources: Spider Robinson, Interconnected
(http://interconnected.org/), Naked Capitalism
(https://nakedcapitalism.com/), Schneier (https://schneier.com/), Riles
(https://twitter.com/raaleh).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Friday's progress: 505 words (26982 total).

* A short story, "Making Hay," for MIT Tech Review. Friday's progress:
334 words (657 total)

Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater

Latest podcast: Part 6 of "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town"
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/14/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-06/

Upcoming appearances:

* Keynote, Transparency By Design, Jun 17,
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/transparency-by-design-tickets-103925443800#

* In Conversation with Hank Green, Jul 10,
https://www.magersandquinn.com/product_info?isbn_id=26578312&products;_id=163359157

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-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

"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

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.

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🙇🏾‍♀️ How to get Pluralistic:

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

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