Link Salad, the .hack/Life Edition
-- The Attorney Fighting Revenge Porn - Margaret Talbot, The New Yorker, Dec. 5, 2016
"Norma’s complaint would almost certainly not have proceeded to court had she not been represented by Carrie Goldberg, who was sitting in the courtroom next to her that day. Goldberg is a thirty-nine-year-old Brooklyn attorney with a practice specializing in sexual privacy, a new field of law that has emerged, in large part, to confront some of the grosser indulgences of the Internet. She has clients like Norma, who are trying to get intimate images of themselves, or graphic ads offering their sexual services, off the Internet before they go viral and strangers start showing up at their houses. She also has clients who are being extorted into providing sex or money because someone has graphic pictures of them and is threatening to send the images to employers or parents or siblings. She has even begun advising teen-age students who have been sexually assaulted and had the incidents recorded on cell phones, and who have then had to go to school with peers who may have been watching the videos in the cafeteria or the hallways."
-- How a Grad Student Found Spyware That Could Control Anybody's iPhone From Anywhere in the World - Bryan Burrough, Vanity Fair, Nov. 28, 2016
"FinSpy was quickly identified as part of a spyware product named “FinFisher,” created and marketed by a British company called Gamma Group, which billed FinFisher as a new way for police and intelligence agencies to monitor criminals and spies. Like several other new entrants into the spyware field, Gamma termed its products “lawful intercept” tools. Just the year before, however, protesters who had stormed Egypt’s state security headquarters carted out boxes of internal government documents, one of them an offer from the Egyptian secret police to buy the FinFisher program for $353,000. The Egyptian discovery suggested that Gamma, far from limiting its clients to those who targeted criminals, was quietly marketing FinFisher to authoritarian governments to monitor dissidents. Marczak’s work seemed to confirm it. But Gamma, contacted by a Bloomberg News reporter, denied selling FinFisher to the Bahraini government, suggesting it was using a stolen copy."
-- Only Human - Anna Wiener, The New Republic, Feb. 16, 2017
"There is something deeply sad about transhumanism, too-a yearning, one that perhaps harks back to the self-improvement doctrines that have so colored California since the halcyon days of the midcentury. The promise of a better world-a better you-is hard to turn away from these days. We are not more than human; we have not found a way to transcend. In the weeks between the election and the inauguration, our collective visions of the future adjusted to accommodate the possibilities of rampant corruption and the rapid perversion of constitutional freedoms, among many other things. It feels indulgent to fantasize about a future in which humanity is optimized for immortality; it feels indulgent to fantasize about a future at all."
"Norma’s complaint would almost certainly not have proceeded to court had she not been represented by Carrie Goldberg, who was sitting in the courtroom next to her that day. Goldberg is a thirty-nine-year-old Brooklyn attorney with a practice specializing in sexual privacy, a new field of law that has emerged, in large part, to confront some of the grosser indulgences of the Internet. She has clients like Norma, who are trying to get intimate images of themselves, or graphic ads offering their sexual services, off the Internet before they go viral and strangers start showing up at their houses. She also has clients who are being extorted into providing sex or money because someone has graphic pictures of them and is threatening to send the images to employers or parents or siblings. She has even begun advising teen-age students who have been sexually assaulted and had the incidents recorded on cell phones, and who have then had to go to school with peers who may have been watching the videos in the cafeteria or the hallways."
-- How a Grad Student Found Spyware That Could Control Anybody's iPhone From Anywhere in the World - Bryan Burrough, Vanity Fair, Nov. 28, 2016
"FinSpy was quickly identified as part of a spyware product named “FinFisher,” created and marketed by a British company called Gamma Group, which billed FinFisher as a new way for police and intelligence agencies to monitor criminals and spies. Like several other new entrants into the spyware field, Gamma termed its products “lawful intercept” tools. Just the year before, however, protesters who had stormed Egypt’s state security headquarters carted out boxes of internal government documents, one of them an offer from the Egyptian secret police to buy the FinFisher program for $353,000. The Egyptian discovery suggested that Gamma, far from limiting its clients to those who targeted criminals, was quietly marketing FinFisher to authoritarian governments to monitor dissidents. Marczak’s work seemed to confirm it. But Gamma, contacted by a Bloomberg News reporter, denied selling FinFisher to the Bahraini government, suggesting it was using a stolen copy."
-- Only Human - Anna Wiener, The New Republic, Feb. 16, 2017
"There is something deeply sad about transhumanism, too-a yearning, one that perhaps harks back to the self-improvement doctrines that have so colored California since the halcyon days of the midcentury. The promise of a better world-a better you-is hard to turn away from these days. We are not more than human; we have not found a way to transcend. In the weeks between the election and the inauguration, our collective visions of the future adjusted to accommodate the possibilities of rampant corruption and the rapid perversion of constitutional freedoms, among many other things. It feels indulgent to fantasize about a future in which humanity is optimized for immortality; it feels indulgent to fantasize about a future at all."