Thought Shrapnel

The Opera web browser has joined Brave in allowing users to turn on ‘cryptojacking’ protection:

Bitcoins are really hot right now, but did you know that they might actually be making your computer hotter? Your CPU suddenly working at 100 percent capacity, the fan is going crazy for seemingly no reason and your battery quickly depleting might all be signs that someone is using your computer to mine for cryptocurrency.

For a very short period of time around five years ago I 'cryptojacked' visitors to my blog using JavaScript. Back then, Bitcoin was worth so little, and the slowdown for visitors was so great, that I soon turned it off.

Given the recent explosive rise in Bitcoin’s value, however, it would seem that cryptojacking is yet another thing to guard against online…

Source: Opera blog

Fred Wilson is author of the incredibly popular blog AVC. He prefaces his first post of the year in the following way:

This is a post that I am struggling to write. I really have no idea what is going to happen in 2018.

He does, however, go on to answer ten questions, the most interesting of which are those he answers in the affirmative:

• Will the tech backlash that I wrote about yesterday continue to escalate? Yes.
• Will we see more gender and racial diversity in tech? Yes.
• Will Trump be President at the end of 2018. Yes.

I picked up a copy of WIRED magazine at the airport yesterday for the flight home. (I used to subscribe, but it annoyed me too much.) It is useful, though, for taking the temperature of the tech sector. Given there were sections on re-distributing the Internet, the backlash against the big four tech companies, and diversity in tech, I think they're likely to be amongst the big trends for the (ever-widening) tech sector 2018.

Source: AVC

Albert Wenger, a venture capitalist and author of World After Capital, invited his (sizeable) blog readership to suggest some books he should read over his Christmas and New Year’s break. The results are interesting, as there’s a mix of technical, business, and more discursive writing.

The ones that stood out for me were:

• Big Gods : how religion transformed cooperation and conflict by Ara Norenzayan
• Prosperity Without Growth : economics for a finite planet by Tim Jackson
• An Everyone Culture : becoming a deliberately developmental organization by Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey, and Matthew L Miller

Former Mozilla colleague John O'Duinn has just sent out Update #14 of his Leading Distributed Teams ebook, so I'm looking forward to reading that soon, too!

Source: Continuations

Good stuff from (Lord) Jim Knight, who cites part of his speech in the House of Lords about data privacy:

The use of data to fuel our economy is critical. The technology and artificial intelligence it generates has a huge power to enhance us as humans and to do good. That is the utopia we must pursue. Doing nothing heralds a dystopian outcome, but the pace of change is too fast for us legislators, and too complex for most of us to fathom. We therefore need to devise a catch-all for automated or intelligent decisioning by future data systems. Ethical and moral clauses could and should, I argue, be forced into terms of use and privacy policies.

Jim’s a great guy, and went out of his way to help me in 2017. It’s great to have someone with his ethics and clout in a position of influence.

Source: Medium

I think the author’s correct to frame things in terms of addiction:

Because we are all hooked, it can be hard to recognise your social media habits as problematic. The closest I came to an “aha” moment was during a visit to Facebook’s headquarters at One Hacker Way, Palo Alto, in 2014, when I worked in advertising. Hearing its sales executives explain how much data Facebook had on its users, all the ways it could target people and get them to click on ads, was terrifying. I haven’t posted a personal update on Facebook since. The moment you start thinking about Facebook as a surveillance system rather than a social network, it becomes a lot more difficult to hand it your information.

It's easy to think that 'keeping up-to-date' is part of your job, therefore constant use of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is justified. I can tell you after going pretty much cold turkey on the latter in 2017 that's not true.

Reducing my social media habit didn’t make me more productive – I am very talented at finding ways to waste time. However, it did make me see how little value Facebook added to my life. Choosing to opt out of the constant noise, to reclaim my attention, was a massive relief. I stopped comparing myself with others so much and started to feel a lot happier with my life. It also reduced my anxiety levels. In today’s news cycle, the endless stream of breaking news, amplified by social media, can easily break your spirit.

Source: The Guardian

We don’t live in a cosy world where everyone hugs fluffy bunnies who shoot rainbows out of their eyes. Hacks and data breaches affect everyone:

If you aren’t famous enough to be a target, you may still be a victim of a mass data breach. Whereas passwords are usually stored in hashed or encrypted form, answers to security questions are often stored — and therefore stolen — in plain text, as users entered them. This was the case in the 2015 breach of the extramarital encounters site Ashley Madison, which affected 32 million users, and in some of the Yahoo breaches, disclosed over the past year and a half, which affected all of its three billion accounts.

Some of it isn't our fault, however. For example, you can bypass PayPal's two-factor authentication by opting to answer questions about your place of birth and mother's maiden name. This is not difficult information for hackers to obtain:

According to Troy Hunt, a cybersecurity expert, organizations continue to use security questions because they are easy to set up technically, and easy for users. “If you ask someone their favorite color, that’s not a drama,” Mr. Hunt said. “They’ll be able to give you a straight answer. If you say, ‘Hey, please download this authenticator app and point the camera at a QR code on the screen,’ you’re starting to lose people.” Some organizations have made a risk-based decision to retain this relatively weak security measure, often letting users opt for it over two-factor authentication, in the interest of getting people signed up.

Remaining secure online is a constantly-moving target, and one that we would all do well to spend a bit more time thinking about. These principles by the EFF are a good starting point for conversations we should be having this year.

Source: The New York Times

This is a useful way of framing things:

“Quit” doesn’t have to be the opposite of “grit.” This is where “strategic quitting” comes in. Once you’ve found something you’re passionate about, quitting secondary things can be an advantage, because it frees up time to do that number-one thing.

As someone who burned out in their twenties, I definitely agree with the sentiment that time is more important than money:

When we choose an extra hour at work, we are, in effect, choosing one less hour with our kids. We can’t do it all and do it well. And there will not be more time later. Time does not equal money, because we can get more money.

Although I'll be doing some consultancy in 2018, my main focus is on the work I'm doing for Moodle. I've been careful to establish boundaries to ensure that work is sustainable: I'm working four days per week, and I'm doing that based from home.

By my calculations, that gives me 13 hours more ‘free’ time than if was working in an office in my nearest city. It all adds up!

Source: Fast Company

“And if anything laborious, or pleasant or glorious inglourious be presented to you, remember that now is the contest, now are the Olympic games, and they cannot be deferred; and that it depends on one defeat and one giving way that progress is either lost or maintained. Socrates in this way became perfect, in all things improving himself, attending to nothing except to reason. But you, though you are not yet a Socrates, ought to live as one who wishes to be a Socrates.” (Epictetus)

Although I don’t use elementaryOS on my own laptops, we do use it on the family touchscreen PC in our main living space. It’s a beautifully-designed system, and I very much appreciate way the founders interact with their community in terms of updates, roadmap, and funding:

Every month this year, we’ve published a blog post outlining all of the updates that we’ve released during that month. We’ve made a strong effort to support Loki with regular bug fixes, new features, and other improvements. We’ve also made some big policy and infrastructure changes. It was a busy year at elementary!

This is the kind of thing I'm looking to emulate with Project MoodleNet in 2018. 

With their upcoming ‘Juno’ update based on Ubuntu 18.04, I may just switch to elementaryOS, as ‘Loki’ was good enough for me to voluntarily pay $25 for it, in an age when even proprietary operating systems are ‘free’ 

Source: elementaryOS blog

This article talks about hyperlinks, because that’s what mainstream audiences understand, but the issue is the internet’s Domain Name System (DNS):

Domain Name System (DNS) servers power every hyperlink. They rapidly translate the text of a dotcom address into numbers that can then pinpoint the root server and map the precise locations of every every web page, every image, video, file -- no matter where it is worldwide.

Good DNS services speed up web sites, balance traffic loads and protect against a wide spectrum of cyber threats. Bad DNS makes sites slow and unstable and makes it easy for criminals to change the address of links on a web page to their malware.

Source: ZDNet

There’s some great advice in this article for those, like me, who are leading innovation projects in 2018:

Your role is to make noise around the idea so that potential stakeholders are excited to learn more about it. At this stage, it’s really important to reach out to key individuals within the company and ask for advice, so you can more easily establish an affiliation between them and the new activity, and cultivate a community of internal supporters.

Source: TNW

This should not surprise us:

Facebook now seems to be explicitly admitting that it also intends to follow the censorship orders of the U.S. government.

Many people get the majority of their news through Facebook, so censorship isn't just banning someone from a scoail network, it has an impact on the social and democratic life of nation states:

What this means is obvious: that the U.S. government — meaning, at the moment, the Trump administration — has the unilateral and unchecked power to force the removal of anyone it wants from Facebook and Instagram by simply including them on a sanctions list. Does anyone think this is a good outcome? Does anyone trust the Trump administration — or any other government — to compel social media platforms to delete and block anyone it wants to be silenced?

Source: The Intercept

There’s a few books I read every morning, on repeat. One of them, Daily Rituals, details the everyday working lives of famous writers, painters, composers, and other well-known figures.

I was reading about Charles Darwin earlier this week, and the author of this article has a book that’s sitting waiting for me to read back at home:

Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work. The rest of the time, they were hiking mountains, taking naps, going on walks with friends, or just sitting and thinking. Their creativity and productivity, in other words, were not the result of endless hours of toil. Their towering creative achievements result from modest “working” hours.

The author also references John Lubbock who was, apparently, one of the best-known authors of his time:

So despite their differences in personality and the different quality of their achievements, both Darwin and Lubbock managed something that seems increasingly alien today. Their lives were full and memorable, their work was prodigious, and yet their days are also filled with downtime.

This looks like a contradiction, or a balance that’s beyond the reach of most of us. It’s not.

I’ve often sais that four hours of focused knowledge work is the maximum every day. Factor in emails, meetings, and admin, and the daily routine of figures such as Darwin’s seems abiut right.

Source: Nautilus

A collection of articles on organisational culture from the Harvard Business Review. I need to examine them in more depth, but the diagram above and paragraph below jumped out at me.

Whereas some cultures emphasize stability—prioritizing consistency, predictability, and maintenance of the status quo—others emphasize flexibility, adaptability, and receptiveness to change. Those that favor stability tend to follow rules, use control structures such as seniority-based staffing, reinforce hierarchy, and strive for efficiency. Those that favor flexibility tend to prioritize innovation, openness, diversity, and a longer-term orientation.

Source: Harvard Business Review

Some good stuff in Mike Caulfield’s “somewhat U.S.-centric predictions” for the coming year. In particular:

Creation of pro-government social media army focused domestically. My most out-there prediction. President Trump will announce the creation of a "Fake News Commission" to investigate both journalists and social media. One finding of the committee will be that the U.S. needs to emulate other countries and create an army of social media users to seek out anti-government information and "correct" it.

In other words, a 21st-century version of McCarthyism.

Source: Traces

Image: Washington Post, 1954 (via Spartacus Educational)

It was only last week that I was telling my children how they’d missed out on the joy of exploring CD inserts to find detailed information on tracks and random artwork.

This post gives 20 examples of great artwork from albums that came out in 2017. I do like Beck’s album, and not just because it’s got a badge-shaped cover:

Speaking of his creation, album cover artist Jimmy Turrell said that Beck commissioned both him and Steve Stacey to create the entire visual representation of his latest album. Packed full of bold colour, Turrell says he and Stacey looked back to their youth for inspiration, considering what stimulated them visually as kids. The Deluxe Vinyl edition allows fans to remove and change pieces to create their own bespoke cover.

My favourite from 2017? Morrissey's Low in High School, which I've used as the featured image for this post.

Source: Creative Bloq

David Wiley, the standard bearer for Open Educational Resources, says:

Many of us believe that education is an incredibly powerful tool in the fight to increase equity, and this is a primary motivation for our participation in the open education movement. The shared core of the work we do in open education is increasing access to educational opportunity – with the long-term goal of making access to that opportunity truly universal – by licensing educational resources in ways that make them free and 5R-able. That is, by creating, sharing, and improving OER.

However...

In general, without a stable basic needs floor to stand on you aren’t capable of benefitting from access to educational opportunity – including those opportunities made possible by our collective efforts in open education. And unfortunately, as long as basic needs problems persist, those whose basic needs are not being met will be essentially incapable of taking advantage of the opportunities created by OER, while those whose basic needs are being met will be capable of taking advantage of those opportunities. Consequently, while basic needs issues persist, OER will likely expand some of the gaps we intend for it to shrink.

I can't tell whether he's covering his back or advocating for full communism now.

Source: iterating toward openness

Image: CC BY Atelier Disko, Hamburg und Berlin

Dogger Bank, which thousands of years ago as Doggerland would have been visible from the North East of England where I live, is the proposed site for a huge new wind farm complex with a central island power hub.

To accommodate all the equipment, the island would take up around 5-6 sq km, about a fifth the size of Hayling Island in the English Channel.

While the actual engineering challenge of building the island seems enormous, Van der Hage is not daunted. “Is it difficult? In the Netherlands, when we see a piece of water we want to build islands or land. We’ve been doing that for centuries. That is not the biggest challenge,” he said.

The short YouTube video is pretty cool.

Source: The Guardian

“A wise man needs few things to make him happy; nothing can satisfy a fool. That is why nearly all men are wretched.” (François de La Rochefoucauld)

“A wise man needs few things to make him happy; nothing can satisfy a fool. That is why nearly all men are wretched.” (François de La Rochefoucauld)