Reality 2.0

By Katherine Druckman and Doc SearlsTechnology

Reality 2.0 episodes

February 26, 2021Episode 59: FOSS, Mentorship, and Doing Great Work
Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Travis Carden and Petros Koutoupis about maintaining open source projects, mentoring contributors, Drupal, and automated testing.
Show notes:
(42s): Intros, subscribe to our newsletter, and buy our swag. ;)
(1m 38s): Who IS Travis Carden?
(4m 36s): Maintaining an open source project and mentoring contributors.
(8m 13s): Drupal's origins and evolution.
(18m 57s): Impressive Drupal examples.
(24m 49s): Mentorship and Drupal.
(31m 24s): Intro to Orca, the Drupal testing tool.
(33m 17s): Open sourcing Orca.
(48m 33s): Basics of automated testing.
(57m 35s): Automated testing strategy.
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Special Guests: Petros Koutoupis and Travis Carden.
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acquia/orca: A tool for testing a company's software packages together in the context of a realistic, functioning, best practices Drupal build
— ORCA (Official Representative Customer Application) is a tool for testing a company's Drupal-adjacent software packages. It ensures their cross compatibility and correct functioning by installing all of them together into a realistic, functioning, best practices Drupal build and running automated tests and static code analysis on them. Its guiding design principle is to use company packages as a customer would. It installs the latest recommended versions via Composer and performs no manual setup or configuration.
Liskov substitution principle - Wikipedia
— Substitutability is a principle in object-oriented programming stating that, in a computer program, if S is a subtype of T, then objects of type T may be replaced with objects of type S (i.e., an object of type T may be substituted with any object of a subtype S) without altering any of the desirable properties of the program (correctness, task performed, etc.). More formally, the Liskov substitution principle (LSP) is a particular definition of a subtyping relation, called (strong) behavioral subtyping, that was initially introduced by Barbara Liskov in a 1987 conference keynote address titled Data abstraction and hierarchy.
Drupal Cloud: Acquia CMS - YouTube
— Preview of Acquia CMS.
Test Driven Development: By Example: Beck, Kent: 8601400403228: Amazon.com: Gateway
— Travis's recommendation - A great resource for anyone getting started driving their own development or struggling "where the rubber meets the road". It's hands-on and practical.
xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Fowler)) 1, Meszaros, Gerard, eBook - Amazon.com
— Travis's recommendation - This is the most comprehensive and authoritative book I know of on unit testing--for those who want to get really good at it. It's a long read at 833 pages, but it covers most issues you're likely to encounter on your way to proficiency. It's organized in such a way that it can be used as a cookbook or pattern library even if you don't read it straight through.
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship: Robert C. Martin: 9780132350884: Amazon.com: Books
— Travis's Recommendation - This would be my top recommendation for its balance of breadth, comprehensiveness, length, and accessibility. It's companion book The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers, though on a little different topic, is also highly recommendable. Both were highly formative for me. The more recently published Clean Architecture: A Craftsman's Guide to Software Structure and Design in the same series is also excellent.
1 hr 6 min
February 19, 2021Episode 58: So Someone Stole Your Identity
Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to Shawn Powers and Kyle Rankin about protecting yourself online, password and security best practices, and a tragic tale.
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Special Guests: Kyle Rankin and Shawn Powers.
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Universal 2nd Factor - Wikipedia
— Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) is an open standard that strengthens and simplifies two-factor authentication (2FA) using specialized Universal Serial Bus (USB) or near-field communication (NFC) devices based on similar security technology found in smart cards.
Yubico | YubiKey Strong Two Factor Authentication
Investing in Real Convergence – Purism
— Real convergence means bringing your desktop computer with you wherever you go.
1 hr 4 min
February 12, 2021Episode 57: You Look Familiar, Did I See You on the Internet?
Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk facial recognition AI using our photos for training, and how we collectively negotiate our own privacy online.
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This new tool can tell you if your online photos are helping train facial recognition systems - CNN
— Exposing.ai, unveiled in January, lets you know whether photos you've posted to image-sharing site Flickr have been used to advance this controversial application of artificial intelligence by allowing you to search more than 3.6 million photos in six facial-recognition image datasets.
Check if your photos were used in AI surveillance research projects
— Check if your Flickr photos were used to build face recognition
Clearview AI’s Facial Recognition App Called Illegal in Canada - The New York Times
— Canadian authorities declared that the company needed citizens’ consent to use their biometric information, and told the firm to delete facial images from its database.
This 'Anonymizer' Tool Replaces Your Face With a Fake to Trick Facial Recognition | Debugger
— Try the Anonymizer tool to create a fake face that looks like you
Doc Searls Weblog · About face
— We know more than we can tell.
Facebook CIA Project: The Onion News Network ONN - YouTube
Sun on Privacy: 'Get Over It' | WIRED
— "You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company's new Jini technology.
"Get over it."
The Andromeda Strain - MichaelCrichton.com
A Vast Web of Vengeance - The New York Times
— Outrageous lies destroyed Guy Babcock’s online reputation. When he went hunting for their source, what he discovered was worse than he could have imagined.
Canadian Woman Accused of Defaming Dozens Online Is Arrested in Toronto - The New York Times
— Nadire Atas, a Canadian woman who wrote thousands of online posts defaming her perceived enemies, was arrested on Tuesday by the police in Toronto. She was charged with crimes including harassment and libel, a Toronto police spokeswoman said.
CORE Response: Community Organized Relief Effort
— Together, we save lives.
45 min
February 05, 2021Episode 56: The Age of the Moderator
Katherine Druckman, Doc Searls and Petros Koutoupis talk Twitter's new Birdwatch experiment, Signal's resistance to moderation, and Redditors' impact on the stock market.
Show notes:
[02:06]: Twitter outsourcing content moderation with expirimental Birdwatch feature.
[13:32]: Signal's founder has pushed back against internal efforts to have some sort of mechanism to prevent misuse of the platform.
[26:25]: Redditors take on hedge funds and the stock market with Game Stop and others. Robinhood and Discord respond.
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Twitter introduces 'Birdwatch' to fight misinformation | Engadget
— “Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context,” Twitter writes in a blog post. “We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable.”
Warning Signal: the messaging app’s new features are causing internal turmoil - The Verge
— Employees worry that, should Signal fail to build policies and enforcement mechanisms to identify and remove bad actors, the fallout could bring more negative attention to encryption technologies from regulators at a time when their existence is threatened around the world.
The Worst Job in Technology: Staring at Human Depravity to Keep It Off Facebook - WSJ
— Deciding what does and doesn’t belong online is one of the fastest-growing jobs in the technology world—and perhaps the most grueling. The equivalent of 65 years of video are uploaded to YouTube each day. Facebook receives more than a million user reports of potentially objectionable content a day.
Mind Your Own Business! - YouTube
— Gladys Kravitz.
Amazon.com: Shephard's Drone: A Novel (9780960051908): Frischmann, Brett: Books
Amazon.com: The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (9781984897787): Hyde, Lewis: Books
Amazon.com: COMMON AS AIR (9780374532796): Hyde, Lewis: Books
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power: Zuboff, Shoshana: 9781610395694: Amazon.com: Books
Opinion | Facebook and the Surveillance Society: The Other Coup - The New York Times
— We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both.
GameStop, Reddit and Robinhood: A full recap of the historic retail trading mania on Wall Street
— GameStop mania took Wall Street by storm, thanks to a legion of retail traders glued to the WallStreetBets message board on Reddit.
Discord bans the r/WallStreetBets server, but new ones have sprung to life - The Verge
— Discord says it did not ban the WallStreetBets server for financial fraud — rather, it was banned because it continued to allow “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings.” The Verge gained access to the server and can confirm the claim that users of the channel were spamming hateful language, including racial slurs.
42 min
January 29, 2021Episode 55: Radio Broadcasting
Doc Searls and Petros Koutoupis talk to Dean Landsman and Paul Walker about radio broadcasting, including long distance coverage.
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Special Guests: Dean Landsman and Petros Koutoupis.
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:: Dean Landsman :: Landsman Communications Group ::
Doc Searls on Twitter: "Interesting to see my uncredited photo of Boston’s Deer Island, ⁦@creative commons⁩ licensed only to require attribution, I suppose found by @msnbc on ⁦@Wikipedia⁩, on ⁦the ⁦@maddow⁩ show. You’re welcome. :-) https://t.co/N6BiNNHbiN" / Twitter
— Interesting to see my uncredited photo of Boston’s Deer Island, ⁦
@creative
commons⁩ licensed only to require attribution, I suppose found by
@msnbc
on ⁦
@Wikipedia
⁩, on ⁦the ⁦
@maddow
⁩ show. You’re welcome. :-)
KROY
— This website was developed and is maintained by a group of former staff members and pays tribute to the memories of those and other eras in KROY’s storied history. We’re glad you stopped by this virtual “KROY window.” Stay awhile and have a look around.
57 min
January 22, 2021Episode 54: Digital Rights are Human Rights
Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Evan Greer, Deputy Director of digital rights activism group Fight for the Future about Section 230, privacy, politics, de-platforming, and internet policy.
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Evan Greer (@evan_greer) / Twitter
Fight for the Future
— We are a group of artists, engineers, activists, and technologists who have been behind the largest online protests in human history, channeling Internet outrage into political power to win public interest victories previously thought to be impossible.
53 min
December 22, 2020Episode 53: The SolarWinds Attack
Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin and Petros Koutoupis about the SolarWinds hack, and Facebook's reaction to Apple privacy initiatives.
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The Pros and Cons of Open-source Tools - THWACK
— SolarWinds blog post that didn't age well. "Security becomes a major issue. Anyone can be hacked. However, the risk is far less when it comes to proprietary software. Due to the nature of open-source software allowing anyone to update the code, the risk of downloading malicious code is much higher. One source referred to using open-source software as “eating from a dirty fork.” When you reach in the drawer for a clean fork, you could be pulling out a dirty utensil. That analogy is right on the money."
Facebook’s Laughable Campaign Against Apple Is Really Against Users and Small Businesses | Electronic Frontier Foundation
— Facebook has recently launched a campaign touting itself as the protector of small businesses. This is a laughable attempt from Facebook to distract you from its poor track record of anticompetitive behavior and privacy issues as it tries to derail pro-privacy changes from Apple that are bad for Facebook’s business.
53 min
December 18, 2020Episode 52: Fragmentation and Outrage of the Week
Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin about fragmentation and software development, the Amazon Halo, and surveilling school children.
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Show notes:
Katherine (41s):
The concept of fragmentation as it applies to software development.
Kyle (1m 44s):
[I]f you're an application developer today and you're writing a program, you know, 20 years ago, what you had to do is think about, well, do I want my application to run on windows, Mac, or Linux, or what combination of those? And then depending on your decision, you would pick different frameworks, different languages, maybe, and each individual platform you had, the support basically made you had the fork, the code in many cases.
Kyle (2m 31s):
I mean, depending on what, what graphical libraries you picked, but these days it's way worse. Because with mobile devices, you've added a couple of extra platforms on top of those three. So now it's not just windows, Mac, or Linux, it's also Android or iOS. And so, and then, so what ends up happening is the developer will say, well, do I want to make a mobile application or do I want to make a desktop application? And then they'll start with that standpoint. And they, or they may say, well, I want to do all of the above, but then there's a minimum of like five different platforms. They have to support them. And all of them are often in different languages, you know, different development, methodologies, different frameworks, different tools to test and build all of that stuff.
Kyle (3m 16s):
[W]e decided, well, it makes the most sense to avoid fragmentation and have the same operating system that our laptop runs just instead of sort of making an application, porting an application to the phone, let's just make the existing Linux desktop ecosystem as a whole portable to a small screen
Katherine (10m 1s):
[W]hat's happening now with the new M1 processor the whole idea is that any Mac app can now be, or rather the other way around, any iOS app is now a desktop app, which is interesting because it's sort of the opposite reality.
Katherine (16m 41s):
[I]t's almost ridiculous to me at this point that I can't just plug in my, if, if I were to have a fancy new iPhone, which I don't, but if I did, why shouldn't I just be able to plug it in? You know, it's a powerful device, it has a massive amount of computing power
Kyle (19m 43s):
If at all, you know, depending on the provider, Google has had huge problems with, you know, all of these third parties that create custom versions of Android and they never update them. So they've had to go through all of these engineering efforts to try to avoid just the fragmentation in the Android market, with all of these custom Androids that are out there.
Katherine (31m 28s):
[T]he Amazon halo wearable device because all of the coverage, even, and maybe even, especially in mainstream press outlets has been so bad. I mean, it's, you know, it's not just privacy advocates or, you know, geeks like us who are going really, who thought this was a good idea. The Washington post, which is as they even pointed out owned by Jeff Bezos is just tearing this thing apart.
Doc (31m 60s):
So the headline Amazon's new health band is the most invasive tech we've ever tested. And then the subhead is even better. It says the halo band asks you to strip down and strap on a microphone. So it can make 3d scans of your body fat and monitor your tone of voice after all that. It still isn't very helpful.
Katherine (43m 47s):
An article in Gizmodo about schools, us schools, having access to the same technology that federal law enforcement has for breaking into phones. And they use this technology to conduct warrantless searches of student phones.
Katherine (46m 6s):
[I]t knows everything that you're anxious about. It knows everything that you're curious about. It knows, you know, it knows everything. And yet somehow some school districts and in fact judges, apparently because these, these issues have gone to court, find it perfectly acceptable for a school to be able to hack into somebody’s device. So I, I find this really disturbing. I wonder, Kyle, if you could kind of maybe give us some insight about how, how potentially dangerous this is.
Kyle (46m 40s):
I mean, I've, I see this trend over and over again, where what will happen is someone will come up with a new invasive technology and it's sort of like boiling the frog kind of thing where you could not, you know, throw this against everybody. Like everyone would rise up and say, this is not okay. But so what you do instead is you start with people with the least possible agency. You can normally, if you have some sort of invasive privacy invasive tech, the first step is to either sell it for stopping terrorism or maybe pedophiles. And then after, after you get sort of a proof of concept there, then you have to expand. If you're selling a product, you need to expand your user base.
Doc (54m 21s):
Yeah. The weird thing for me is that almost nobody's worked on starting with giving us agency, you know, I mean, we should be able to say, here's privacy. Here's, here's what I've got. You can't see anything. You're not seeing anything we're doing.
Doc (57m 34s):
That's my message to all of you. We can't do that. And we need to be able to do that, that's why my preference would be for the default to be, you have to default to, I'm not collecting any of your data. Your data is yours. I'm not allowed to do it. I'm only allowed to do it. If you expressly give me informed consent to do it. And then at that point I will do it, but you, but, but if I, if you do nothing, then I can't do it. I can't take any of your data. It's yours. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's one of the more quoted things that I've written in the last few years.
Katherine (58m 58s):
But I kind of feel like we are in the wild West. That's how I feel like when digitally, when we start talking about things like, you know, schools being allowed to quite literally digitally strip search your children, you know, people should be outraged by that
Kyle (59m 38s):
Well, but that's also because your average parent given the preference, and many of them already do put spyware on their children's phones to track their children, right. Because they want to be able to see everything that their kid did.
Kyle (1h 0m 18s):
I keep, I keep saying, it's not that people don't care about privacy, as much as they don't understand the implications of what they're giving up, you know? And so I, you know, a lot of parents don't necessarily understand the implications of, of what it normalizes.
Special Guest: Kyle Rankin.
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Preventing Fragmentation with the Librem 5 – Purism
— Fragmentation is a massive problem in computer software development that has only gotten worse with mobile computers. By fragmentation I’m referring to incompatible platforms that require a developer to maintain separate forks of their code. Twenty years ago if you wanted to write software for an end user, you had to decide whether to support Windows, Macs or Linux. Each of those platforms required you to build, test, and maintain different forks of your software.
Amazon’s Halo Band wearable tracks your voice and body fat, but isn’t helpful - The Washington Post
— The Halo Band asks you to strip down and strap on a microphone so that it can make 3-D scans of your body fat and monitor your tone of voice. After all that, it still isn’t very helpful.
U.S. Schools Are Buying Cellebrite Phone-Hacking Tech
— While companies like Cellebrite have partnered with federal and local police for years, that the controversial equipment is also available for school district employees to search students’ personal devices has gone relatively unnoticed—and serves as a frightening reminder of how technology originally developed for use by the military or intelligence services, ranging from blast-armored trucks designed for use in war zones to invasive surveillance tools, keeps trickling down to domestic police and even the institutions where our kids go to learn.
1 hr 3 min
December 11, 2020Episode 51: Poop in the Desert
Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman have a fun chat with Petros Koutoupis about open source in space, digital detox, World War 2 cryptography, and poop in the desert.
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NASA is paying startups for moon rocks. It's not what you think - CNN
— NASA pledged in September to buy moon rocks from companies that can get robotic rovers to the lunar surface and scoop up samples of the dusty terrain, and the space agency asked for bids from companies all over the world. The winners were unveiled Thursday: California-based Masten, Lunar Outpost of Colorado, and two separate companies that are both called iSpace — one from Japan and the other from Luxembourg.
semissioncontrol/semcos: SEMC OS is an operating system for Space Exploration and beyond!
— Space. The Final Frontier. Where man hesitates to go, for it is one of the most dangerous realms that can be found. Not a world, but a multitude of worlds, accessible through only one tool — the space rocket. But tools of great power rely on systems of even more tremendously large strength. These systems are the ones that are created here, at SEMC. The Space Exploration Mission Control organization strives to create powerful tools and services, Open Sourced.
And this is SEMC OS. A from-scratch distro written to be fast and reliable. Why? Because large space agencies lack one. There should be a unification when it comes to softwares that control the future of humanity - and this is where SEMC OS comes in. Hooked? Read on!
41 min
December 04, 2020Episode 50: What Happened to Cyber Utopia?
Doc Searls and Jon Lebkowsky talk reality, social constructs, the internet, and disinformation.
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The Big Lebkowsky - The Big Lebkowsky
— Tracking strategic foresight, digital culture, media, and the Internet.
... My heart’s in Accra - Ethan Zuckerman’s online home, since 2003… My heart’s in Accra | Ethan Zuckerman’s online home, since 2003
About EFF-Austin - EFF-Austin
— EFF-Austin advocates establishment and protection of digital rights and defense of the wealth of digital information, innovation, and technology. We promote the right of all citizens to communicate and share information without unreasonable constraint. We also advocate the fundamental right to explore, tinker, create, and innovate along the frontier of emerging technologies.
1 hr 4 min

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Join Privacy and Open Source advocates, Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman, as they navigate the new digital world, covering topics related to digital privacy, cybersecurity, digital identity, as well…

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