Facebook's Catch-22

John Herrman's How Secrecy Fuels Facebook Paranoia takes the long way round to come to a very simple conclusion. My shorter version of Herrman's conclusion is this. In order to make money Facebook needs to:

1. Convince advertisers that it is an effective means of manipulating the behavior of the mass of the population.
2. Avoid regulation by convincing governments that it is not an effective means of manipulating the behavior of the mass of the population.

The dilemma is even worse because among the advertisers Facebook needs to believe in its effectiveness are individual politicians and political parties, both big advertisers! This Catch-22 is the source of Facebook's continuing PR problems, listed by Ryan Mac. Follow me below the fold for details.

Blockchain Video and Podcast

CNI has now posted the video of my 20-minute talk Blockchain: What's Not To Like? to YouTube and Vimeo. Here is the YouTube version:



Gerry Bayne interviewed me at the Fall CNI meeting for CNI's podcast series. The 20-minute conversation is a companion piece to the talk. The podcast is on the Educause SoundCloud channel.

I made one, easily spotted, mistake in the interview when I said $3,000 instead of $300,000. But other than that I'm happy with both the video and the podcast.

Trump's Shutdown Impacts Information Access

Source

Government shutdown causing information access problems by James A. Jacobs and James R. Jacobs is important. It documents the effect of the Trump government shutdown on access to globally important information:

Twitter and newspapers are buzzing with complaints about widespread problems with access to government information and data (see for example, Wall Street Journal (paywall 😐 ), ZDNet News, Pew Center, Washington Post, Scientific American, TheVerge, and FedScoop to name but a few).

Maybe when/if the government opens again, we should scrape the NIST and CSRC websites, put all those publications somewhere public. It’s worrying that *every single US cryptography standard* is now unavailable to practitioners.

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) January 12, 2019

Matthew Green, a professor at Johns Hopkins, said “It’s worrying that every single US cryptography standard is now unavailable to practitioners.” He was responding to the fact that he could not get the documents he needed from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) or its branch, the Computer Security Resource Center (CSRC). The government shutdown is the direct cause of these problems.

They point out how this illustrates the importance of libraries collecting and preserving web-published information:

Regardless of who you (or your user communities) blame for the shutdown itself, this loss of access was entirely foreseeable and avoidable. It was foreseeable because it has happened before. It was avoidable because libraries can select, acquire, organize, and preserve these documents and provide access to them and services for them whether the government is open or shut-down.

Go read the whole thing, and weep for the way libraries have abandoned their centuries-long mission of safeguarding information for future readers.

Digital Preservation Network Is No More

In Why Is the Digital Preservation Network Disbanding? Roger Schonfeld examines the demise of the Digital Preservation Network which was announced last month:

An initial announcement said directly that "After careful analysis of the Digital Preservation Network's membership, operating model, and finances, the Board of Trustees of DPN passed a resolution to affect an orderly wind-down of DPN," including committing to consultations with each member to ensure that content would not be lost in the wind-down. Shortly thereafter, messages came out from DPN's hubs, both individually including HathiTrust, and collectively, characterizing their operating and financial strength and ability to provide for an orderly transition. Because DPN was not itself directly preserving anything but rather a broker for preservation services by underlying repositories, it does not appear that any content will be put at risk.

Below the fold, I look at various views of the lessons to be learned.

Trust In Digital Content

This is the fourth and I hope final part of a series about trust in digital content that might be called:

Is this the real  life?
Is this just fantasy

  The series so far moved down the stack:

• The first part was Certificate Transparency, about how we know we are getting content from the Web site we intended to.
• The second part was Securing The Software Supply Chain, about how we know we're running the software we intended to, such as the browser that got the content whose certificate was transparent.
• The third part was Securing The Hardware Supply Chain, about how we can know that the hardware the software we secured is running on is doing what we expect it to.

Below the fold this part asks whether, even if the certificate, software and hardware were all perfectly secure, we could trust what we were seeing.