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Google has backtracked on its plan to delete inactive YouTube videos—at least for now. Of course, it could change its mind anytime it wants.
It would be nice if this would get people to think about the vulnerabilities inherent in letting a for-profit monopoly decide what of human creativity is worth saving.
A mafia fugitive hiding out in the Dominican Republic was arrested when investigators found his YouTube cooking channel and identified him by his distinctive arm tattoos.
Yesterday at the RSA Conference, I gave a keynote talk about the role of public-interest technologists in cybersecurity. (Video here).
I also hosted a one-day mini-track on the topic. We had six panels, and they were all great. If you missed it live, we have videos:
I also conducted eight short video interviews with different people involved in public-interest technology: independent security technologist Sarah Aoun, TechCongress’s Travis Moore, Ford Foundation’s Jenny Toomey, CitizenLab’s John-Scott Railton, Dierdre Mulligan from UC Berkeley, ACLU’s Jon Callas, Matt Mitchell of TacticalTech, and Kelley Misata from Sightline Security.
Here is my blog post about the event. Here’s Ford Foundation’s blog post on why they helped me organize the event.
We got some good press coverage about the event. (Hey MeriTalk: you spelled my name wrong.)
Related: Here’s my longer essay on the need for public-interest technologists in Internet security, and my public-interest technology resources page.
And just so we have all the URLs in one place, here is a page from the RSA Conference website with links to all of the videos.
If you liked this mini-track, please rate it highly on your RSA Conference evaluation form. I’d like to do it again next year.
James Mickens gave an excellent keynote at the USENIX Security Conference last week, talking about the social aspects of security—racism, sexism, etc.—and the problems with machine learning and the Internet.
Worth watching.
Ross Anderson gave a talk on the history of the Crypto Wars in the UK. I am intimately familiar with the US story, but didn’t know as much about Britain’s version.
This is my talk at the RSA Conference last month. It’s on regulation and the Internet of Things, along the lines of this essay.
I am slowly meandering around this as a book topic. It hasn’t quite solidified yet.
Last November, I gave a talk at the TEDMED Conference on health and medical data privacy. The talk is online.
This Verge article isn’t great, but we are certainly moving into a future where audio and video will be easy to fake, and easier to fake undetectably. This is going to make propaganda easier, with all of the ill effects we’ve already seen turned up to eleven.
I don’t have a good solution for this.
New Atlas has a great three-part feature on the history of hacking as portrayed in films, including video clips. The 1980s. The 1990s. The 2000s.
Richard Thieme gave a talk on the psychological impact of doing classified intelligence work. Summary here.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.