Little Brother Conundrum

It is unbelievable to me that my little brother Ben just started high school! He always was a computer whiz and had no doubt that he wanted to follow in my footsteps and apply to the computer  science department of Bergen County Academies.  It turned out to be a totally right decision for him, and he is already skipping levels in math and programming. We love talking "geek" as our sister teases us.  Sometimes we code games and apps just for fun. My parents are both computer programmers and we routinely discuss interesting innovations and leaps in the field of computers. I was encouraged to build my own computer in middle school. My mom made a Trader Joe's app to help her make shopping lists. My dad created a debit/ credit program to balance our bank accounts way before online banking was even a concept. My little brother participates in all local hack-a-thons. Even my sister took Java class her Freshman year as a birthday present for our dad.

Everyone in my family was excited when I was accepted into Stevens Institute of Technology. My desire to go to this school started during summer of my Junior year when I participated in robotics camp. We had such a great time and had a final project presentation with NASA. Also, for my Senior Experience in high school, I chose to work with Professor Duggan. Our goal was to collect data from patients in Cameroon using Android tablets rather than in Visual Basic on a computer, which they had running Windows 95. Being accepted into Stevens meant that my future would be always revolving around computer software; and that I would be fulfilling my childhood dream. I am still pretty happy with my decision and always encouraged my brother to look into applying to Stevens. He always agreed that Stevens is the best possible choice for him because Ivy League schools are overpriced and overrated, and have a lot of mandatory classes that are irrelevant to computer programming. Then, on Friday, I received an email from him that blew my mind. He read an article that one of the esteemed world schools Technion was planning to build a Tech Department campus in New York City with affiliation with Cornell. The year the new school is planning to open is 2019- exactly the year of my brother's graduation from High School! I was speechless and stunned by the news. I always imagined us sharing stories and anecdotes not only about Bergen County Academies, but about Stevens as well. Also, I was very doubtful about the quality of teaching and curriculum in a brand new school VS a well established one. It might seem to be fun going to school that no one had ever gone to before, and to be its very first graduate class. But, at the same time, what about a school that proved to be most useful in providing a great education and career to multitude of students?

This conundrum made me ponder the role our choice of college plays in our future life. Is it absolutely crucial to find a perfect match or is it enough for the school to be reputable in your chosen field? Questions, questions... I guess my life will give me the answers.

YouTube Fights Back for Fair Use

                For as long as I’ve been following technology in any sort of meaningful way I’ve been hearing about the problems of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is. Under the DMCA, companies are able to send “take down requests” to those companies who are violating their copyrights. Seems reasonable enough, but it lacks due process, which is an obvious problem. Companies like YouTube have to setup infrastructure that allows them to process these requests. Because o f the nature and scope of the problem, it is cost prohibitive to involve humans at every step of this process, which is unfortunate because copyright is too complex for programs to handle everything correctly. Fair use specifically makes this almost impossible. A human is required to judge what is and what is not an example of fair use.

                Just to demonstrate this let’s look at an example of fair use. One place where fair use applies is in news and criticism. Imagine you’ve just bought a game recently and it was so bad that you just had to tell someone, so you make a review of it that tears it apart. Fair use should protect you from any sort of copyright issues with this video in theory. It makes sense that it would work that way, using copyright law to silence criticism would be awful.

                You know what really sucks? That kind of thing actually happens on YouTube. Companies abuse copyright law to try to silence critics.  I really don’t know why, it’s about a good idea as trying to put out grease fire with water, you just make it worse. If the person who has their video taken down knows what they’re doing, they’ll manage to make a big deal out of the situation. They may even be able to get Twitter to form an angry mob (who can blame them, it’s not very hard and I bet it’s a TON of fun).

                Unfortunately angry twitter users don’t mean anything when lawyers get involved. Actually, maybe it’s fortunate.  Regardless, when the copyright holders try to take legal action outside of the DMCA’s takedown system, many of the time content creators are not equipped to deal with this. If the content creator can’t fight back, then the censors win.

                After years of problems with intellectual property on YouTube, Google finally did something that might start to fix the problem. In a post on the Google Public Policy blog, they announced that they would be offering legal protection to select number of videos. If the creator gets sued for their fair use video on YouTube, Google will pay for the court costs to defend themselves in any legal battle that may arise. There is another caveat with this; the video will only remain available in the United States. This is to ensure that any case would occur under U.S. jurisdiction. Depending on the video, this may basically render the service useless, but it’s better than nothing.

                Personally, I love the theory behind this. Google has been putting millions of dollars into YouTube to encourage better content. The specter of Google’s legal team with millions of dollars to spend should also help encourage content creation. Without even going to court, this should be able to make a difference. I anxiously await any data on what this new policy actually does.

Too Many Group Chats

This piece, you will notice, deviates slightly from my typical work. This will be more or less an opinion piece supported by facts which have led to these thoughts.

A little over a year ago, a fellow member of the Stevens Game Development Club Executive Board decided it was time to switch our built-in, cellular-based group chat over to the popular group messaging service GroupMe. I had of course heard of similar services, but I saw no reason for this switch. Why would I install an additional application that did what my native texting application already could? I also already had the Facebook Messenger application, which supported a faster, web-based group messaging service like GroupMe. With these thoughts as drivers, I participated in the new GroupMe chat via their SMS service, which uses a single number and delivers all texts to the non-app user with the senders name at the front. For example, If Jason and Pat messaged me, both messages would be received from the same arbitrary phone number, but Jason's would be prefaced with "Jason: ", Pat's with "Pat: ", and so on.

I had been in other group chats, of course, but all of these were handled through SMS/MMS and were connected with primarily iPhone users. iPhones use iMessage to connect to other Apple devices via the internet, thus obtaining a faster speed and higher quality service than standard SMS. Because most of the chats' members had iPhones, the speed of our group chats was rarely a concern and thus any argument ever made for switching a chat to Facebook was shot down by the iPhone users and their comfort with their current application.

After about a week of using the SMS GroupMe subscription, the clunkiness of SMS services became as apparent as ever. The other members of the Executive Board, who were all using the internet-based app, could deliver far more messages in a much shorter time, making it difficult to remain an active part of the conversation. Having an option I had never had with my iMessage loving friends, I chose to switch to the application version and began to use GroupMe. It was great, to say the least. I could add and remove members, change the group name, change my nickname, change the group avatar as well as my personal profile picture, send animated gifs and other pictures, send emojis, and many more very useful things. It even had a like button to accompany every message sent; I loved GroupMe.

Each of my group chats which were based on Facebook or in an SMS/MMS chat quickly moved to GroupMe and countless other chats were formed due to the convenience and ease of use that GroupMe offered in addition to its socially encouraging features. Finally, after months of fighting, I convinced my last iPhone-loyal friend group to switch to GroupMe. Eventually, after getting used to the change and seeing all it had to offer, they loved it too. In friend groups and organizations everywhere, GroupMe had successfully taken over. It turned out, however, that GroupMe was not the only service making its move over the last couple of years.

My friend Adam, with whom I was in multiple group chats, convinced one of his Facebook group chats to switch over to Telegram. With an easy-to-use bot API available, Adam had written a bot for the application Telegram with which the users in the chat could call a number of functions. With an otherwise similar (and in my opinion lesser) feature set to GroupMe, Telegram offered no clear advantages to me. Last September, however, the draw of the bot lured one of my group chats to switch from GroupMe over to Telegram. As such, I was forced to comply (or otherwise not participate) and add another messenger to my phone. With this new messenger to play with spawned a variety of new group chats, most of which I have decided to mute because they are simply excessive

Similarly, the service Slack has been invading the Stevens Institute of Technology campus for some time now. Claiming to offer much more than typical group chat applications and services, Slack is a team working service which allows users to have multiple channels per team, file sharing, and an overwhelming variety of other supported features. Recently, the Student Government Association has agreed that it will be making a Slack for its members to help cut-down on on email-chains. Having surrendered to the fact that yet another group messenger will end up on my phone, I also agreed to use Slack as the medium for starting the SGDC general body chat, which would be more inclusive than the previously existing e-board chat.

What scared me even more, however, was when I heard that one of the biggest Slack supporters on campus commented that "Slack is getting too mainstream, we have to switch to a different open source service."

With four different group messengers on my phone, each offering some unique feature set but all grounded in the same premise, it is beginning to feel redundant. Keeping up with all four of these messengers, Facebook. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, emails, and (and maybe this is crazy) normal text messages (gasp!), my phone is used less as a communication and work tool and more as an over complicated social chain. With so many services and each service providing so many sub-services and different chats, it is sometimes impossible to actively follow every conversation and interaction. Additionally, group chat psychology has another series of interesting (and probably quite disputable) implications, however, I will leave that to be possibly examined in a follow-up piece.

The point I'm getting at and the question I'm posing is "Why do we need so many different social services?" At what point are we going to say it's too much? Apps used to offer something unique and cool, giving you new features to access on your mobile device. Now, however, despite being a mobile developer, I still spend a majority of my time on my phone using one of these same four applications which all accomplish the same fundamental goal: group communication. So many resources are being put into developing these free messaging applications (for seemingly no point), and I wonder what those developers could be doing instead. What could I have better spent my time doing instead of learning four different ways to contact multiple people at once? And even more, each time I need to re-create my profile. I have so many profiles that I have a special task-bar on my personal website specifically for organizing all of my profiles.

This, to be blunt, is ridiculous. There are too many group messengers, and we need to pick one and move on.

Lifehacks and You

             A few nights ago as I bashed my head into my floorboards, fruitlessly trying to invent new ways to clean hardwood, my roommate showed me an image macro. A picture of a Swiffer – wrapped in a sock. “Clean your floors with socks”, bold overlaid text read, “If you run out of Swiffer pads”.

            That picture was a genius. My floor sparkled. It was the first time that I ever used a lifehack.

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Lifehacks are advice – good or bad – that are meant to show novel ways to make your life easier. Typically presented as an image macro, they’re their own subgenre of internet meme.

That’s everything I knew about Lifehacks.

To me, they’ve always existed somewhere in the background of the internet; something that exists, definitely, but not something I care about. I’d become jaded to the splendor of free advice offered by strangers.

So I thought I would change. I wanted to find out the history and the meaning of the lifehack.

            As luck would have it, I didn’t have to go very far back. The term was coined in 2004. During the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, tech writer Danny O’Brien used the term to describe the quick, dirty solutions that many IT workers used to get things done. It’s a portmanteau of the words ‘life’ and ‘hack’, which should be immediately obvious. Less obvious is the reason these words were chosen. The word ‘hack’ has many meanings; in this case, it’s used to refer to a  cobbled-together solution to a problem that’s only meant to get things done quickly. The word ‘life’ suggests applying this hack-methodology to everything.

            Since 2004, when it was meant to refer to badly-written scripts by tech professionals, the term lifehack has come into its own.  By 2005, the word ‘lifehack’ was awarded runner-up for ‘most useful word of 2005’ by the American Dialect Society. 2005 also marked the launch of Lifehacker.org – the first of many lifehack aggregation sites.

            After 2005, the lifehack remained dormant for eight years, like some species of arctic frog. Starting in 2013, however, the lifehack explodes in popularity. According to Google Trends, the term begins to spike all over the web, and especially on news sites. This popularity has maintained itself.

            What are the reasons for this popularity? Just about the same fifty image macros from the late 00’s make up the majority of articles today. Buzzfeed, lifehacker.com, and lifehack.org pass around and reassemble the same pictures into new articles like a co-op Frankenstein’s monster.

            I would argue that the lifehack represents the ideal of internet culture. You can make long articles of lifehacks out of easily subdivided blurbs; all the better to split your attention with. The concept of the lifehack is that ephemeral promise of an easier life, streamlined and multitasked to perfection. And, they’re eco-friendly; most have been recycled since 2006.

Microtransactions

Snapchat is a free app-it always has been, and always will be. However, in the past few weeks, Snapchat has introduced a new feature called "lenses". These lenses allow you to put overlays over your face, such as a thunderstorm when you raise your eyebrows or a rainbow flowing out of your mouth when you open it. Originally lenses were free, similar to the app. Now, Snapchat wants to profit from lenses. They allow you to pay money for additional features, adding the much despised microtransactions to the app. A microtransaction is an in-app purchase that's typically done by tapping a button. Microtransactions are supposed to be quick and painless, but for casual cell phone users like myself, microtransactions are a huge source of annoyance and frustration.

Think of it like this- you're on Facebook, and you try to send a message. You are then presented with the popup "You have exceeded your daily messaging limit. For $10, you can send unlimited messages per day." That is essentially a microtransaction. Unfortunately, apps and video games are riddled with these.

Despite the fact that microtransactions are extremely annoying to the end users, they make an exceptional business model. Companies with an app with millions of users with a few microtransactions for several dollars can make thousands of dollars with these "quick and painless" transactions.

The annoyance of making profit from microtransactions goes hand-in-hand with company sponsorship. Users sometimes find sponsored items like ads equally as annoying as microtransactions. Take Snapchat for an example. You can pay to get more lenses, but at the same time they have sponsored filters for McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, etc, so they are making profit from two sources: the users purchasing lenses, and the company paying Snapchat to advertise within their app.

Microtransactions are two-facted: on the one hand, they annoy the users to no end, and on the other hand, they make tons of money for the company using the feature. Although users may hate them, it is somewhat understandable why companies torment their users with them.

Snowden on Ad-Blocking

The article that I chose to blog about this week is one that is about our good friend Edward Snowden. In this article, Snowden declares his support for ad blockers. For those who are not familiar with ad blockers, these are programs that filter out content that it recognizes as an advertisement. Snowden is supporting these programs for a different reason than you may think. He claims that using them is a way to secure your computer. Snowden claims that through the contents in ads is a way that attackers can get into your system. By filtering out these buses of malicious code, we can shut down one possible route for attackers to target us.

Ad blockers seem like a good idea right? They keep you safe and stop annoying ads. However, there is a downside to the ad block software. By selling ads, sites are able to keep their content free or as cheap as possible. Advertisers pay a lot of money to get websites to show their images or play their videos. The article speculates that ad blocking will cost content publishers $22 billion in 2015. This is money that goes towards maintaining and improving their services. So, if advertisers are not willing to pay for ads that will be blocked, who will pay for the sites? You and I will. More sites will require paid subscriptions for their services.

Advertisers have gotten better and better at shoving their ads in our faces. They do this via side images, commercials before videos, and especially the dreaded popup. There is even a relatively new breed of ad that requires the user to interact with it by answering a question of performing a simple click and drag task, before the ad will go away and allow you to access whatever content that you were trying to see. These ones are particularly evil. There ads have become incredibly intrusive on many sites, often rendering the sites unusable. So, ad block software can make ones browsing experience much more enjoyable, on top of making it safer.

A current trend in ad block software is a sort of white list that contains ads that will pass through the filter and be displayed. This will allow non-intrusive ads to be shown. Many people don’t like this because it allows advertisers to “bribe” programmers to allow their ads through. I however like this development. This will allow decent, non-intrusive ads to be displayed, benefiting website owners and advertisers without hurting the user’s experience. This will encourage good ad-development practices as well.

I agree with Snowden’s point about the security benefits of blocking ads. These days, you can only trust yourself when it comes to web security. While you may be able to rely on your one antivirus program, it won’t stop everything. You must take additional steps to secure your computer, whether this is through safe browsing practices or blocking potentially infected advertisements. This article just reveals one more concern that people should have when using computers. 

Article from the Washington Post

FBI Accused of Paying Carnegie Mellon $1 Million to Break Tor

It has been recently reported that the head of the Tor Project has accused the FBI of de-anonymizing Tor users with the help of Carnegie Mellon computer science researchers. They have suspected the FBI of paying $1 million to CMU researchers to access the vendor side IP addresses of the Silk Road 2. If the claims are true, it shows what great lengths the FBI is going through to stop the illegal trade of drugs on the darkweb.

It was reported in January 2015 that a Homeland Security search warrant revealed that from January to July 2014 a “source” provided law enforcement with “particular IP addresses” of those who accessed the vendor side of the Silk Road 2. By July, the Tor Project was able to find and stop the attack, concluding that it was the same Carnegie Mellon researchers who a few weeks earlier canceled their Blackhat presentation on a low cost way to de-anonymize Tor users. Both the FBI and CMU have not responded to any claims of collaboration, but Ed Desautels, a spokesman for Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute, did not deny the accusations, stating “I’d like to see the substantiation for their claim,” adding, “I’m not aware of any payment.”

If the reports are true, this could be extremely troubling for users of Tor. Not only does this breach violate our 4^th Amendment rights, but it also demonstrates that you never know who will breach security a person’s security for just money. With our civil liberties being challenged everyday, we cannot allow the FBI to circumvent the law and use universities for their own dirty work. Although not many details have surfaced, you can never know how many innocent users were caught in the crossfire. Roger Dingledine, Tor Project Director, agrees stating “Such action is a violation of our trust and basic guidelines for ethical research. We strongly support independent research on our software and network, but this attack crosses the crucial line between research and endangering innocent users.”