Berkman Buzz: October 10, 2014

Last week Apple announced that it is closing a serious security vulnerability in the iPhone. It used to be that the phone's encryption only protected a small amount of the data, and Apple had the ability to bypass security on the rest of it.

From now on, all the phone's data is protected. It can no longer be accessed by criminals, governments, or rogue employees. Access to it can no longer be demanded by totalitarian governments. A user's iPhone data is now more secure.

To hear U.S. law enforcement respond, you'd think Apple's move heralded an unstoppable crime wave. See, the FBI had been using that vulnerability to get into peoples' iPhones. In the words of cyberlaw professor Orin Kerr, "How is the public interest served by a policy that only thwarts lawful search warrants?"
 

This week, I was asked to give a talk on the art of listening to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. It was a really lovely challenge to distill my knowledge, and I thought I would share it here as well.

I have three observations to share with you, and have woven through a few tips for how you might also deepen your listening capacity.

Close your eyes for the next 10 seconds and just listen.
 

Parents are watching: A software satire by @LeahAPlunkett huffingtonpost.com/leah-plunkett...
—Rey Junco (@reyjunco)
 

Too bad we can't put to work the delicious usage data gathered by libraries.

Research libraries may not know as much as click-obsessed Amazon does about how people interact with their books. What they do know, however, reflects the behavior of a community of scholars, and it’s unpolluted by commercial imperatives.

But privacy concerns have forestalled making library usage data available to application developers outside the library staff, and often even within. And the data are the definition of incompatible: Libraries collect them in different formats at different levels of granularity and at different time scales, making them hard to work with.
 

Jean Yang went on a big trip through Europe this summer, from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Dubrovnik, Croatia, to Oslo, Norway, and back. Like a good tourist, she took pictures on her phone, an Android, throughout her trip. When she returned home, she found a surprise package in her Google+ notifications: a neatly collated, summarized, annotated digital scrapbook titled "Trip."

Jean shared the album with me with this message:

"This is equally cool and creepy: Google made this scrapbook of my June travels based on a random selection of photos I took - and also its knowledge of where I was. It's kind of nice to have this information organized automatically, but this is really trusting them with a lot of information. It would be funny if they took quotes from emails I sent during this time and put in quotes relevant to the places. 'Oslo is so expensive! My second dinner of wonton soup cost 68 kroner.' I'm curious how they decide what to include." - Jean Yang, Cambridge, Massachusetts
 

...Natural disasters are fundamentally experiences of place: The epicenter was here. It was this many miles from this other place. It affected here and here and here. Place is understood through position and relationship, through contact and distance.

Geography determines terrestrial points of contact. These change, but usually at a rate barely perceptible to the human eye. Politics and language anchor societal points of contact, through alliance, ideological similarity, and shared knowledge. These change more quickly than continents, but stay stable long enough to fill history textbooks. Communication technologies scaffold personal points of contact. These change quickly indeed.
 

Thousands in Mexico City protested against the disappearance of dozens of Ayotzinapa students from the coastal state of Guerrero on Wednesday, October 8.

Victims’ families experienced anguish anew this week, when authorities discovered 28 bodies (yet to be identified) in secret mass graves in Guerrero's southeast. Sadly, this kind of news is not unfamiliar in Mexico, especially after the two San Fernando massacres.

Protesters are demanding that students still alive be returned to their homes. Those who didn't survive must be found, as well, demonstrators say. As people took to the streets throughout the country, Mexico's netizens discussed the campaign on Twitter.