Four short links: 12 August 2016
Lost Infrastructure, Trump as Machine Learning Algorithm, Malicious Proof-of-Work, and Twitter Abuse
- The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media (Anil Dash) — what we’ve lost, and what we could get back.
- Trump is Like a Biased Machine Learning Algorithm — an entertaining take on Trump and a cautionary not for people [who] actually think there will soon be algorithms that control us, operating “through sound decisions of pure rationality” and that we will no longer have use for politicians at all.
- DDoSCoin: Cryptocurrency with a Malicious Proof-of-Work — brilliant Usenix paper! This proof involves making a large number of TLS connections to a target server, and using cryptographic responses to prove that a large number of connections has been made. Like proof-of-work puzzles, these proofs are inexpensive to verify, and can be made arbitrarily difficult to solve.
- A Honeypot for Assholes — a history of Twitter’s failure to prosecute trolls. I didn’t realize how much was inspired by the Free Speech cause in the beginning. It’s interesting just how far the conversation about conversations has progressed since then.
