Four short links: 26 August 2019
Avoiding Sexual Predators, YouTube Radicalization, Brian Behlendorf Interview, and Cyberpunk Present
- How to Avoid Supporting Sexual Predators (Valerie Aurora) — Your research process will look different depending on your situation, but the key elements will be: (1) Assume that sexual predators exist in your field and you don’t know who all of them are. (2) When you are asked to work with or support someone new, do research to find out if they are a sexual predator. (3) When you find out someone is probably a sexual predator, refuse to support them.
- Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube — the three communities increasingly share the same user base; that users consistently migrate from milder to more extreme content; and that a large percentage of users who consume Alt-right content now consumed Alt-lite and I.D.W. [Intellectual Dark Web] content in the past. And recommendations steer people to more extreme content.
- Brian Behlendorf Interview — Where a distributed database that was not just “Here is a master MySQL node and slaves that hang off of it,” was not just a multi multi-write kind of system, but one that actually supported consensus, one that actually had the network enforcing rules about valid transactions versus invalid transactions. One that was programmable, with smart contracts on top. This started to make sense to me, and was something that was appealing to me in a way that financial instruments and proof-of-work was not. Hyperledger was announced by a set of large companies, along with the Linux Foundation to try to research this space further, and try to figure out the enterprise applications of these technologies.
- Employees Connect Nuclear Plant to the Internet so They Can Mine Cryptocurrency (ZDNet) — on the one hand I’m “we’re living in a Cyberpunk novel!” and on the other hand I’m “oh god, we’re living in a Cyberpunk novel!”.
