Pure miscellany
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A really powerful article about the use of labor practices to destroy public education and also to prevent the ability to organize among young teachers expected to work eighteen-hour days for low pay. What was particularly striking to me was the anecdote on upper management “walkthroughs” looking not at what was actually happening in the classroom (who cares?) but at whether the teachers had the right “look”-the right posters on the walls, the right ties. It was as if the charter school had the same principles as an Abercrombie & Fitch. This philosophy really does want to reduce workers to mindless automatons, further "justifying" their terrible working conditions.
Bruce Schneier: NSA Spying Is Making Us Less Safe:
So you’ve recently suggested five tips for how people can make it much harder, if not impossible, to get snooped. These include using various encryption technologies and location-obscuring methods. Is that the solution?
My five tips suck. They are not things the average person can use. One of them is to use PGP [a data-encryption program]. But my mother can’t use PGP. Maybe some people who read your publication will use my tips, but most people won’t.
Basically, the average user is screwed. You can’t say “Don’t use Google”-that’s a useless piece of advice. Or “Don’t use Facebook,” because then you don’t talk to your friends, you don’t get invited to parties, you don’t get laid. It’s like libertarians saying “Don’t use credit cards”; it just doesn’t work in the real world.
The Internet has become essential to our lives, and it has been subverted into a gigantic surveillance platform. The solutions have to be political. The best advice for the average person is to agitate for political change.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
A really powerful article about the use of labor practices to destroy public education and also to prevent the ability to organize among young teachers expected to work eighteen-hour days for low pay. What was particularly striking to me was the anecdote on upper management “walkthroughs” looking not at what was actually happening in the classroom (who cares?) but at whether the teachers had the right “look”-the right posters on the walls, the right ties. It was as if the charter school had the same principles as an Abercrombie & Fitch. This philosophy really does want to reduce workers to mindless automatons, further "justifying" their terrible working conditions.
Bruce Schneier: NSA Spying Is Making Us Less Safe:
So you’ve recently suggested five tips for how people can make it much harder, if not impossible, to get snooped. These include using various encryption technologies and location-obscuring methods. Is that the solution?
My five tips suck. They are not things the average person can use. One of them is to use PGP [a data-encryption program]. But my mother can’t use PGP. Maybe some people who read your publication will use my tips, but most people won’t.
Basically, the average user is screwed. You can’t say “Don’t use Google”-that’s a useless piece of advice. Or “Don’t use Facebook,” because then you don’t talk to your friends, you don’t get invited to parties, you don’t get laid. It’s like libertarians saying “Don’t use credit cards”; it just doesn’t work in the real world.
The Internet has become essential to our lives, and it has been subverted into a gigantic surveillance platform. The solutions have to be political. The best advice for the average person is to agitate for political change.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.