A reporter asked me a provocative question some days ago: "Why do you think Twitter hasn't enforced their own Terms of Service rules when it comes to Donald Trump?"

I didn't have an immediate answer. I told him I'd look into this, think about it, and get back to him.

So I've been researching this in considerable depth.

I found that any reasonable analysis of the situation suggests that Trump should have been closed down on Twitter long ago.

To be sure, I don't regularly follow Trump on Twitter, just as I don't frequent websites devoted to close-up photos of diarrhea.

Certainly I do hear about some of his tweets from time to time, when they leak onto other social media or when the press tries to get more clicks from displaying them on cable news and such (ah, perhaps our first clue to the mystery!).

Exploring an archive of even his relatively recent Twitter activity -- which instantly reminded me somehow of a vile bully named Sheldon I knew back in elementary school -- it was startling what a hateful, deceitful spew of apparent lies and direct attacks that Trump has been leveraging Twitter to deliver -- with his enormous following on Twitter, presumably to Twitter's financial benefit as well (another clue!).

It's quite a Twitter stream Trump has going there -- if you're into gawking at gruesome highway wrecks, that is. Onslaughts against individuals. Similar attacks against organizations, even against entire races. White supremacist propaganda. On and on and on. Try retrospectively reading Donald's tweets without feeling the need to vomit -- virtually impossible if you're a socialized human being and not someone raised by hyenas.

Yet as long as a Tweet isn't actually illegal (irrespective of Trump's creepy, sexualized comments about his own daughter) Twitter is not actually obligated to take any action against anyone.

But Twitter is certainly obligated to apply the rules that they do have in an evenhanded manner. And looking back over the collection I have of complaints from Twitter users who feel Twitter terminated their accounts inappropriately -- even for a single comment that was interpreted to be disrespectful in some way -- it would appear that Twitter is coddling Trump in a unique manner indeed.

A reading of the Twitter content Terms of Service suggests at least three categories relating to hate speech and harassment that should apply to Trump (but apparently haven't been applied), but seem to have been rigorously enforced against other, ordinary users on a hair-trigger basis.

Are there special exceptions in the Twitter ToS for obnoxious billionaires running for the presidency? Or for tweets where the individuals, organizations, or others targeted by those tweets did not formally complain to Twitter?

No matter how deeply you study those Terms of Service, you won't find such exceptions.

But wait! Perhaps there's an exception if you're only retweeting other users' material? After all, Trump's most popular excuse for his most offensive tweets seems to be that he was "only retweeting someone else."

Nope, I can't find an exception for that, either. You retweet someone else's tweet, you own that content just as if it was your tweet originally.

The conclusion appears inescapable. Twitter apparently has voluntarily chosen to "look the other way" while Donald Trump spews forth a trolling stream of hate and other abuses that would cause any average Twitter user to be terminated in a heartbeat.

There's always room to argue the propriety or desirability of any given social media content terms of service -- or the policy precepts through which they are applied.

It is also utterly clear that if such rules are not applied to everyone with the same vigor, particularly when there's an appearance of profiting by making exceptions for particular individuals, the moral authority on which those rules are presumably based is decimated, pointless, and becomes a mere fiction.

In other words, we thought that Twitter was far more ethical than Donald Trump.

Apparently, that assumption is in error.

--Lauren--
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.

There's stuff about today's Internet that I love, and there's stuff about today's Internet that I hate. This seems entirely fair and just and proper, given that I have much the same feelings about the world at large and humanity in particular.

One of the aspects of the Internet that I love is Google's YouTube.

It is, in many ways, at the center of the Internet universe and of our Internet lives for many of us, despite advancing efforts of its various competitors to (in some cases literally and illicitly) steal its thunder.

Personally, I don't much care about the latest dance video to hit a billion YT views. And I've never monetized any of my own videos on YouTube, so my videos up there have never made me a dime, not even one that recently passed a million views itself.

That's all fine with me.

It's also fine with me that other folks do monetize, and do care about those billion dance video views -- because all of that is what helps pay the bills that keep those Google data centers humming along and spewing forth those godzillabytes of YouTube video streams.

I mostly watch YouTube for current "issues of importance" items, occasional current entertainment, educational and often money-saving "how-to" videos of all sorts, and gobs of archival searches.

In that last category tend to be not only the nostalgic clips from yesteryear -- often that I haven't seen in decades, but frequently incredible serendipity from YouTube's astronomical corpus of uploaders and their videos. In fact, this posting today was partly inspired by my stumbling upon wonderful 1974 videos this morning that I never knew existed, showing the comedian Marty Feldman performing classic Tom Lehrer songs. Praise be to YouTube!

There is also a seeming dark side to YouTube -- but in fact it is not actually of YouTube at all, but rather a reflection of the world's own Yin and Yang, for the astronomical quantities of video being uploaded to YouTube 24/7/365 represent but a reflection of humanity in all its wonderful glory and hideous evil. YouTube itself is no more responsible for the existence of planet Earth's problems than a mirror hanging on the wall is responsible for the images reflecting from it.

It is also my belief that most attempts to force Google to censor YouTube tend to be misguided in the extreme. For example, YouTube already prohibits explicitly violent videos that could reasonably be interpreted to incite attacks on people, animals, or property -- all addressed via YouTube's existing Terms of Service. Efforts to bury and hide all evil from public view will inevitably result in blowback that can ultimately be even more damaging to society.

There are indeed practical and reasonable limits to specific speech in certain extreme and specific situations, but using fears of terrorism as an excuse to try impose broad restrictions on free speech aren't effective nor appropriate ways to fight terrorism -- they are in fact ceding power to the very terrorist philosophies that we wish to eradicate.

Google is between a rock and a hard place when it comes to YouTube in particular. Governments around the world want to control YT for their own ends, often to the political or personal financial advantage of their own nations' leaders and other politicians.

And YouTube is lodged between the devil and the deep blue sea in terms of other dilemmas as well.

A large percentage of the Google-related queries I receive virtually every day involve YouTube. Often these are concerns from users who are complaining about problems that their uploaded videos are having with YouTube's Content ID system, or with copyright strikes, or with other related YT Terms of Use matters where they're unhappy with associated responses they've received from Google regarding their concerns.

I try to help to the limited extent that I'm able. At the least I can often offer free advice. And I often feel for them, too. I've had my own YT videos that suffered errant Content ID hits. I once saw my entire main YouTube account closed (and later restored in full, after some considerable effort on my part) due to mistaken copyright strikes.

Frequently in these queries is expressed the belief that Google is attacking them -- these individual YouTube users -- out of evil, or spite, or just because they can. There is not infrequently an implicit (or explicit) assumption that YouTube favors the "big guys" over the "little guys" when it comes to rights disputes.

But in reality there is no spite nor evil there, and the perceived imbalance between users is the result of the way domestic and international laws and agreements are written -- for example the DMCA -- these are complex issues and legal edicts with which Google must abide.

This is not to suggest that improvements in YouTube's usually automated and rather officious DMCA claim/counterclaim system wouldn't be welcome, certainly. But Google is significantly legally constrained in flexibility in these regards, and an unbiased, longitudinal examination will show that major improvements have been deployed in these YouTube processes, especially for individual uploaders, particularly over the last few years.

Yet beyond all this is the foundational truth that without Content ID and copyright strikes, without the YouTube Terms of Service and claim forms and all the rest -- including all the great people at YouTube/Google who work their asses off (tech-wise and policy-wise) to keep it all going -- YouTube as we know it today likely could not exist at all, and much of what we find so wondrous there would blink out of existence like a shooting star crossing the horizon.

There's no major moral to this post today, well, except perhaps this ...

In a time of fascist politicians spouting simplistic slogans about race, religion, terrorism, and censorship, along with whatever other pandering platitudes they believe will win them votes, prestige, power, and control -- it's worth remembering how much good the Internet brings us, and how much poorer we'd all be in so many ways for the shackling of Internet services like YouTube, in the name of such self-serving proclamations and damaging false solutions.

Be seeing you.

--Lauren--
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.

Yesterday, in "The Politicians' Encryption Backdoor Fantasies Continue -- and Legislating Pi" ( https://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001147.html ), I discussed moves in the U.S. Senate to convene a commission to proceed toward their fantasy goal of finding a way to backdoor strong encryption algorithms "while still protecting the privacy of honest users."

As I noted then, this is an impossible task, since the very act of building backdoors into these algorithms (ostensibly for law enforcement and intelligence needs) would make these encryption systems exceedingly vulnerable both to "official" abuse and vast third-party black-hat hacking attacks -- including by terrorist groups and other criminals -- who of course for themselves will continue using easily available strong crypto systems without backdoors.

I viewed the call for an encryption commission to be essentially a smokescreen for moving toward the government's ultimate goal -- being able to read all encrypted communications upon demand.

Within hours of my posting yesterday came word that there's already a bipartisan move in the senate to not bother with any commission, to just move directly to legislation mandating law enforcement access to encrypted communications. Period.

I rest my case -- smokescreen proven. Q.E.D.

Whether or not such legislation passes immediately is not really the point, because ultimately the odds are very high that sooner or later something like it will become law here in the U.S. -- and likely in many other countries as well. Not just the obvious suspects like Russia and China, but in the EU also, which constantly speaks out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to privacy and surveillance issues.

So sometime soon -- be it one year, or two, perhaps a bit more if such laws become entangled in court cases (as seems likely), we will be facing the reality of strong, end-to-end encryption essentially being outlawed, at least in the context of the major Internet services that most of us depend upon.

These are the firms that government is currently most concerned about -- Google, Apple, Microsoft, and more -- who have been moving rapidly and correctly to provide their users with strong crypto (e.g. on smartphones) that even the firms themselves can't crack. Such moves have been triggered in large part by the continuing parade of government overreach when it comes to accessing the data in these devices.

Also, these same services have been moving toward providing stronger crypto for their centralized "cloud" services as well, including "only the user holds the keys" encrypted file/data storage systems.

All of these services and more will likely be targeted by government encryption backdoor legislation in coming months and years.

The question is, what are we going to do about it?

Or first, a different question.

Do we care?

The pro-backdoor argument runs something like this ...

Bad guys use encryption (to some extent not clearly known, but expanding). Government can't monitor their communications to prevent or solve terrorist attacks or other crimes (child pornography is frequently mentioned in the latter category) without access to that data. The risks and potential loss of privacy that honest users face from backdoors in these systems for law enforcement and intelligence use is the price we have to pay for living in a 21st century society.

If you're in the category just described, you likely need not read any further in this post.

The counter-argument is that serious bad guys will quickly move (if they haven't already) to crypto systems that don't have backdoors, leaving mainly honest users on the compromised systems.

Encryption experts and computer scientists are in virtually unanimous agreement that any attempts to backdoor these systems weakens them in fundamental ways, making them massively vulnerable not only to government abuse and demonstrated ineptitude (such as permitting the personal info of millions of persons to be obtained by crooks from government computers), but also hacking attacks of all sorts, including by criminal gangs and worse. With so much of our financial and personal information now online -- whether we all like that or not -- purposely weakening encryption systems for honest users is intolerable.

If you're in this second camp -- as am I -- we're back to the "What do we do about it?" question.

And actually, the answer is quite clear. Data that is already encrypted when it is stored or shared, using strong encryption systems that are validated to not contain backdoors (a much tougher validation task than laymen might assume) is not subject to the sorts of backdoor snooping or backdoor hacking exploitations as would be data encrypted on systems mandated to contain backdoors.

Perhaps even more to the point, government still has ways to target particular criminals or other evildoers when they really need to -- in particular through "endpoint" surveillance of various sorts directly on targeted PCs. But generally speaking, backdoored centralized crypto systems represent much greater risks related to mass abuse, mass hacking, and mass surveillance. And this holds true irrespective of how "clever" proponents try to be about splitting up encryption keys and the various related key handling processes.

So honest, good users who feel that they deserve at least the same level of encryption protection as bad, evil users will need to be ramping up their own use of strong encryption systems locally, so data that doesn't need to be stored unencrypted in central services for processing is encrypted in ways that backdoors cannot typically penetrate.

Which data will fall into this category will be largely an individual choice, of course. Cloud environments provide immense value in a vast number of ways -- email systems, file searching, document creation and editing -- on and on. Most of these -- given current tech, anyway -- require that data be unencrypted in the cloud so that it can be processed for the user. On the other hand, for end-to-end communications -- say from one phone user to another, or between users in various other contexts, the need for central processing of those messages -- other than passing them along encrypted as they are -- will often be nil. So central systems in these circumstances become the conduits of data that they do not need to decrypt nor interpret.

A bitter irony is that while some terrorist groups seem to have all manner of sophisticated and relatively standardized strong encryption systems that government backdoors are unlikely to reach, ordinary honest users are faced with a confusing hodgepodge of crypto systems that are generally hard to use, often incompatible, and basically just a pain in the neck that discourage their widespread adoption, especially by non-techies.

The relatively straightforward bottom line?

Given the quite reasonable assumption that mandated encryption backdoors legislation targeting large Internet services is very likely coming -- exact timing unclear, but on the way -- efforts need to be expanded right now toward making personal encryption systems that can run on users' local computers as simple, reliable, automatic, and ubiquitous as possible.

Not to shield evil. Not to mask criminals and terrorists.

But simply to protect the good guys. The rest of us. You and me.

And that's a fact.

Be seeing you.

--Lauren--
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.

"I Got You Babe."

I've written about law enforcement, politicians, and their hopeless fantasies of "safe" encryption backdoors so many times -- and have become so disgusted at the endlessly repeating nature of the situation -- that I really do feel like I'm hearing that old Sonny and Cher song in much the way Bill Murray did in his 1993 classic film "Groundhog Day" -- again, and again ... and yet again.

But the crypto backdoor "hits" just keep on comin' -- and today is no exception.

Now comes word that a bipartisan pair of lawmakers is introducing federal legislation to establish a national commission to figure out "how police can get at encrypted data of honest citizens without endangering those citizen's privacy at the same time."

The usual slogans are being bandied about: "What we're trying to do is get that collaboration started," said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who joined [Republican] McCaul on the call and will sponsor the upper chamber bill. "Let's get the experts in the room."

We keep hearing stuff like this from the usual suspects. Just get those brainiacs together! Get "Bill Gates" working on it! Lock all those liberal LGBT-lovin' software engineers in a basement somewhere and they'll solve the problem. Or they'll never eat pizza again!

OK, that's more of the GOP line. The Democrats also pushing crypto backdoors are wording it a bit differently.

Though some crypto backdoor proponents have laudable motives, the end result must be the same.

Perhaps "Scotty" from the original "Star Trek" said it best, when he noted that the laws of physics were immutable ("I can't change the laws of physics") -- or, I might add, of mathematics.

Not that politicians haven't tried to break these laws before. As far back as 1897, the Indiana legislature came very close to passing legislation that would have had the effect of setting the transcendental ("never ending") value of the constant "Pi" to an incorrect and fixed 3.2.

So the fact that politicians and law enforcement continue to try bend physics, math, and computer science to their wills -- irrespective of the realities -- should come as no surprise.

Any attempt to backdoor strong encryption systems will by definition make them immensely vulnerable not only to abuse by authorities, but also to outside hacking -- including by sophisticated terrorist groups! -- that would put all honest users at immense risk as ever more of our financial and other aspects of our personal lives are online.

It doesn't matter if you break up the backdoor key into a thousand pieces and distribute them to Boy and Girl Scouts sworn to only use them in a national emergency.

The mere act of creating any backdoor to these systems weakens them enormously and catastrophically. Even Einstein wouldn't be able to change that. And he'd be far too intelligent to ever try.

Yet, most of the law enforcement officials and politicians pushing for these "meetings of the experts" on backdoored encryption aren't actually stupid either.

So what's really going on?

In my view, most of them already realize that they would have to fundamentally weaken crypto to get backdoors, and that the industry overall quite rightly will never voluntarily go along with doing that.

Google, Facebook, Apple, and the others will be polite -- as they should be -- but will not willingly betray the security and privacy of their users with encryption backdoors.

So the odds are that what's actually going on currently with the "voluntary" backdoor crypto push is essentially a smokescreen.

It's an attempt to provide political cover for the next step, when proponents begin the "well, we tried to get cooperation first!" push for legislation that would mandate backdoors in these USA crypto systems, whether the firms want to do it or not, and irrespective of the risks to honest users.

Nor will the fact that strong encryption systems from firms outside the U.S., and from independent third parties, will continue to be available and will be the encryption systems of choice for terrorists and other criminals, who won't willingly make use of backdoored crypto once the word gets around.

This suggests that ultimately it's mostly a game of political cover, of politicians being willing to massively weaken the security and privacy of us all to ensure themselves an excuse to spout at the press when bad things happen.

That sort of attitude is sad. And depressing. And so very, very wrong.

And about as realistic as declaring Pi to be 3.2.

I think I'm going back to bed ... ... ... ... ...

"Then put your little hand in mine.
There ain't no hill or mountain,
We can't climb.
Babe.
I got you babe.
I got you babe ..."

- - -

--Lauren--
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.

Literally within hours of the horrifying and sickening news of a 15-year-old boy in Pakistan who cut off his own right hand after he was the target of hysterical false accusations of blasphemy, comes word that Google -- in a successful bid to get a three year YouTube ban in Pakistan lifted -- will be permitting government officials in that country -- apparently all the way down to the local level -- essentially unfettered rights to censor and block individual YouTube videos from view in Pakistan.

This is an enormously troubling development for free speech advocates around the world, particularly because it's impossible to overlook the relationship between the boy's actions and the upcoming Pakistan/YouTube censorship system.

The powers being ceded to the government there to censor Google at the individual YouTube video level -- arguably even worse than the EU's awful "Right To Be Forgotten" (RTBF) scheme -- continues our acceleration down the slippery slope of permitting governments to demand rights to micromanage information for their own political benefit and the personal enrichment (politically and in some cases financially) of their leaders and other politicians.

I like to think of myself as a "responsible" free speech advocate. That is, I strongly assert the importance of free speech, but acknowledge that sometimes, in carefully delineated circumstances that must be minimized as completely as possible, some restrictions are necessary.

So, for example, I generally strongly support Google/YouTube's global Terms of Service that prohibit videos that are directly violent -- such as videos that show physical abuse of people or other animals.

And I have nothing but respect for the Google policy and legal teams that must deal with these complex multinational situations. Similarly, the work done by Google engineers on politically neutral abuse detection systems and that of the human teams that help apply YouTube anti-abuse rules are also all exemplary.

I've explicitly noted the exceptional circumstances of videos that incite terrorism, e.g., recently in my discussion of "A Proposal for Dealing with Terrorist Videos on the Internet" ( https://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001139.html ).

But in Pakistan the concepts of (for example) blasphemy and government control are intertwined -- accusations of the former are frequently used for purposes of the latter -- and any discussions that the government there feels are blasphemous (by their own broad and self-serving definitions) -- or speaking out against the government in any manner -- are key targets for abusive censorship.

With Google now explicitly buying into this censorship regime as the price of removing an overall Pakistan block on YouTube -- and note that the Pakistani government apparently will be setting the standards under which YT videos will be judged in violation -- the situation in my view becomes much worse for the population there than would be the case without access to YT at all (yes, we know that some relatively small number of people have always gotten through with VPNs and proxies, but that's largely irrelevant to the overall population).

The Pakistan version of Google-enabled national censorship isn't as straightforward as say, a relatively "simple" ban against Nazi memorabilia-related materials in France. In Pakistan, Google has become much more of a direct partner in the government's very broad, politically-motivated and personally suppressing censorship actions.

The kind of YT censorship that will be enabled in Pakistan is much more akin to how China censors its population -- where what will or will not be allowed to be seen in any media is carefully chosen and restricted to promote the government line and muzzle dissenting points of view.

I absolutely understand the pragmatic realities of having to obey laws in those countries in which Google chooses -- voluntarily -- to operate, but I find the newly announced and apparently Google-endorsed government controls over YouTube content in Pakistan to be extremely disturbing, and a horrific precedent for other countries going forward.

Everyone everywhere who is concerned about the responsible exercise of free speech should be alarmed at these developments.

--Lauren--
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.

Yesterday evening I discovered a fault in a rather complex piece of electronics apparatus here. It was not obvious to debug and I'm not an expert regarding that particular circuitry. I posted a query on a specialized Web forum that is devoted to discussing that device, and went to bed.

This morning there were several responses, and then ensued a flurry of forum messages between those unseen correspondents and myself, including magnified photos of circuit boards with overlaid circles and arrows and suggestions.

By early afternoon I had enough info to grab a soldering iron, flux, and magnifier, and attempt a patch of the board. It worked.

I posted a photo of my soldered fix for future folks with the same problem, thanked everyone, and the world kept spinning.

There might not seem to be a deep philosophical aspect to this story except for one thing. I'm sitting here in L.A. My helpful correspondents were in Canada, Germany, and the Russian Federation.

In these kinds of discussions, you're just as likely to find engineers and hobbyists chiming in to help from Japan, Iran, Pakistan, India, or Saudi Arabia as well -- literally from anywhere the Internet touches.

Persons scattered around the globe, sometimes in widely different cultures and national frameworks whose governments may even be distinctively antagonistic toward each other --- persons all bending over backwards to help each other as individuals to solve technical and other problems.

I sit here in the San Fernando Valley and I feel distinct anger about this.

Not anger about these great people around the world -- certainly not.

Rather, it's anger toward our leaders and politicians who endeavor to make us think of other countries and other cultures as homogeneous wholes -- not as actual individual beings with far more commonalities than differences by virtue of our shared humanity.

Don't trust the Iranians. Blame the Americans. Eliminate the Shias. Hate the Russians. Throw out the Muslims. On and on, ad nauseam -- the siren calls of politicians seeking to set us all at each other's throats for the sake of their own aspirations and glory.

To be sure, many of these politicians and leaders have come to despise key aspects of the Internet. They know all too well that the Net -- by facilitating the kinds of one to one communications that belie their hateful and manipulative slogans -- threatens to undermine their propaganda and controls.

So there are the ever increasing calls for Internet censorship, nowadays wrapped in an ostensible veneer of fighting terrorism, but in reality only the steppingstones toward the political goals of governments' comprehensive communications control, with the vast people power of the Internet muzzled and flogged into tattered submission.

I still recall from decades ago the very first time I communicated -- in that case via a typing link -- with someone in another country over the Net. I was sitting at a greenly glowing CRT terminal in the UCLA ARPANET basement computer room, and at the other end of the ARPANET connection was a military officer in Norway.

So we dealt with our technical issues, and then chatted about the weather and movies for a while, and then typed our goodbyes.

Much as I sit here now, I sat at that table afterwards with the roaring fans of the minicomputers around me and pondered what had just transpired.

I thought -- "My God, this could change the world so much for the better." And I remember then adding to myself -- "If the politicians don't f*** it all up."

Now all these years later, well into the 21st century, I worry about the latter aspect of my thoughts back then more than ever -- for many politicians indeed seem hell-bent in doing exactly what I had feared.

Yes, the threats of terrorism are real. Yes, the Internet is used for evil purposes as well as good ones. Yes, there will always be some extremely egregious, directly violence-inducing materials on the Net that we need to try control -- but not at the cost of undermining the Internet's greatness.

For if there's one lesson I've learned spending my entire adult life watching the Internet grow from a few IMPs, Teletypes, and dial-up modems into the vast wonder it is today, it's that with very few exceptions the cure for problematic information is not restrictions on the ability to communicate.

Rather, we need more and better information, more communications, more one-to-one contact between individuals mutually connected by the largely unseen instrumentalities of fiber cables, routers, data centers, and Wi-Fi signals around planet Earth.

And this holds true whether we're looking for help with a personal problem, assistance with an errant circuit board -- or if we merely seek to try save the world from mutually assured destruction.

If we permit our leaders and politicians to continue building their walls between us, walls figuratively electronic, or physically brick and mortar and steel, we will have squandered the Internet's promise as a tool for the benefit of humanity.

We can surrender to fear and demagoguery, or we can grasp the nettle and do our utmost to assure the Internet's place in a bright future for the world, rather than standing by and permitting it to be twisted into a tool of political censorship and governmental oppression.

It's ultimately up to us.

Be seeing you.

--Lauren--
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.

I've been spending a lot of time recently on issues related to the accessibility of websites. This continues to be at or near the the top of queries I get regarding the Internet in general, and of Google in particular (because most queries on all Internet topics I receive tend to relate to Google, one way or another).

I've attempted to give some flavor of the frustrations people send me on these topics, including in some of my relatively recent postings, including among others:

UI Fail: How Our User Interfaces Help to Ruin Lives
https://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001112.html

The Three Letter Cure for Web Accessibility and Discrimination Problems
https://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001136.html

The observant reader might wonder ... how can this situation persist? Why aren't there accessibility standards for websites?

In fact, there are such standards.

But the irony is that by encouraging a "one size fits all" view of user interfaces -- typically with few or no user control options, such standards can provide an excuse for not making interfaces more customizable, more targeted to users with particular needs, and overall better than what the standards provide for.

So, to take one case, we have low font contrast -- you know, the dim gray letters on a gray background problem (at least when viewed with aging or otherwise imperfect eyes). This is one of the issues most commonly mentioned to me regarding Google products, e.g. in the new Google+ (where some text is distinctly dimmer and harder to read than in legacy G+).

Is Google just pulling these fonts and backgrounds out of a hat?

No, they're not.

In fact, when you discuss this issue with Google directly (and Google has reached out to me for such discussions on accessibility issues -- many thanks!) you will be told that the fonts and backgrounds in question all pass WCAG 2.0 guidelines.

Odds are you've never heard of WCAG -- the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

They come in three compliance levels, reminiscent of battery sizes: A, AA, and AAA.

Google asserts that (for example) the new G+ passes the compliance checkpoints for W3C WCAG 2.0 AA -- pretty much the end of the story from their standpoint.

And I have no reason to doubt that they do pass those compliance tests.

But is WCAG magical? A gift from the heavens? The last word in creating excellent user interfaces that play well with users of widely varying needs?

Of course not.

In fact, W3C WCAG is something of a Godzilla of standards, that hardly anybody really likes.

It's relatively big and complicated. Accessibility advocates often complain that it doesn't go far enough and doesn't provide for adequate customization by users.

Web services complain that it's unyielding and difficult to implement correctly.

And they're all correct.

It's a classic example of design by committee, resulting in a complex mess that doesn't serve anybody particularly well.

I'm just one guy sitting here alone in L.A. I can listen to frustrated users, I can compile their concerns, I can make suggestions.

But I can't fix any of this stuff by myself.

Yet we damned well better find a way to find and deploy realistic fixes. And soon. Because (among other things) an aging population demographically means ever more users with accessibility needs that are often not being met by today's user interfaces.

And as frustration turns to anger, the probabilities increase of government getting more directly involved in this area, with bureaucrats calling the shots. Oh goody.

We need to deal with this now, ourselves -- or government is going to address this complicated area with their usual delicate finesse, that is, the "bull in a china shop" approach.

Guess who will have to pick up the pieces afterwards?

Yeah, all of us.

And that's the truth.

Be seeing you.

--Lauren--
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.

I had not planned to post this item this evening. I actually started on it earlier today, but put it aside for another time. It's Friday, I'm tired, and the topic is just too depressing.

But when I flicked on the television a few minutes ago, I saw CNN covering the live spectacle of a Muslim woman in a hijab, who stood silently wearing a yellow star labeled Muslim, being evicted from a Donald Trump rally by a boisterous crowd of Trump supporters who would have fit right in during 1930s Germany.

And so I've pulled my depressing text back up in Google Docs, and I'll finish it here and now.

How many billions of words have been written about terrorism since 9/11? I wouldn't want to wager a guess, even while I'll admit that likely some tens of thousands or more of them -- a drop in the proverbial bucket -- have been written by yours truly.

Over the years since there has been a marked change in the perceived terrorist threats against Western countries -- a transition from mass, directed attacks to "self-radicalized, lone-wolf" attacks, and an alarming attempt to cast the Internet in general -- and social media in particular -- as being especially complicit in the rise of the latter terrorist type.

So Western governments (and other governments too, using the West's reactions as an excuse for their own tyranny), have increasingly argued that if somehow Internet social media could be "controlled" -- if there were no way for the mentally ill, criminals, and the simply disenfranchised members of society to not view radical videos, not see radical websites, these problems could be massively lessened or even perhaps eliminated.

Even ignoring for the moment that much radicalization takes place inside prisons themselves, the view that choking off the more violent, angry, or even more subtly propagandistic aspects of terrorist-related social media would even make a dent in the rise of lone-wolf, self-radicalized terrorist attacks is a horrifically and dangerously incorrect idea.

And that quiet Muslim woman with the yellow star, being thrown out of a Trump rally this evening to the delight of Trump's screaming fans, is all the proof we need.

For self-radicalization -- lone-wolf terrorism -- does not require sophisticated technology. It does not require strong encryption systems that governments around the world would subvert to the detriment of their own law-abiding citizens.

The kind of terrorism on the lips of politicos and law enforcement these days requires but two basic elements -- weapons, and not necessarily elaborate ones at all -- trivially obtained in a country awash in gun shops and hardware stores -- and the second element, simple anger of sufficient intensity.

I believe I'd be accurate in asserting that the images and sounds recorded of the eviction of that Muslim woman from Trump's fascist lovefest this evening -- already winging their way around the world's news media -- will provide more inspiration to more lone-wolf terrorists than any 100 terrorist-produced videos or terrorist propaganda websites.

It's not just Trump, of course, though at the moment he is clearly the leader of the fascist pack. It's the messages of hate that now pervade conventional media -- including mainstream news organizations. FOX News revels in it. CNN is only relatively better. And it's much the same on other outlets both in the USA and around the world.

The message to marginalized persons is that we hate them. They don't belong. They're inferior. They should carry special identification. They should be rounded-up, evicted, blocked, spied upon, and spit on.

And ironically, these messages don't simply fire up radical Islamic domestic terrorism, they energize the far more prevalent racist, white supremacist, fascist domestic terrorists who view killing a Muslim with the same joy they traditionally reserved for lynching blacks.

This is why attempts by our governments to lay false blame for terrorists upon the Internet -- the government's all too obvious iron fists only casually covered with velvet gloves -- alternately cajoling and threatening the social media firms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others -- are virtually all bogus accusations doomed to failure.

You could shut down every Internet social media site on the planet, and terrorism would continue because hate and anger would continue -- in fact, they would likely accelerate faster as a result.

Even in countries where the news media is tightly controlled -- like China and Russia -- it's impossible to prevent the people from ultimately learning what's actually going on.

And what's going on is mindless hatred, racism, bigotry, and fascism -- and so the resulting terrorism as well -- being energized by many of the men and women who would have us anoint them as leaders of our nations.

It's worse than madness, it's suicidal. The problem isn't the Internet, it's ourselves. We're all to blame, one way or another.

I feel ill.

Try to have a good weekend, fellow monsters.

Be seeing you.

--Lauren--
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.

Buried among his recent expletive-laden rants against Google, EFF, and everybody else who doesn't agree with him, T-Mobile USA's CEO John Legere has explicitly claimed that he has a "propriety technology" to detect video streams and deal with them specially -- according to EFF, essentially by just slowing them way, way down and creating a terrible user experience for many viewers (see: "T-Mobile's Tampering with Video Is Bad for Everyone, Not Just Google" - https://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001141.html).

So let's think a bit about what his ostensible "proprietary technology" might be, given that most video streams these days are in encrypted SSL/TLS data channels.

Now, I doubt very much that John has cracked SSL/TLS, nor is even he likely insane enough to be attempting man-in-the-middle attacks on encrypted communications.

So what other possibilities have we?

One would be that John is basing his assumptions about identifying video on the source of the data. For example, if he sees traffic sourcing from an ip address that he thinks can be traced back to YouTube, he declares that data to be video.

But such assumptions can become problematic very quickly.

Content distribution on the Internet these days is very complicated, often involving arrays of shared NAT addresses, CDNs (Content Delivery Networks), and an array of other complicated techniques ("twisty passages, all different" galore, to paraphrase the old ADVENTURE game).

As a result, using the source ip address as a video indicator is very much a guessing game, with a likely very high error rate and resulting inaccurate categorizations.

But hey, it's quite possible that John is happy to live with such error rates, especially given that inaccurately tagging a non-video stream as video is to T-Mobile's benefit under his data slowing scheme.

There's another possibility though, that is arguably the most likely of all. John may be simply looking at the amount of data that appears to be coming through connections and declaring to be video the ones that seem to contain significant amounts of "continuous" data, on the assumption that they're the most likely to be video streams.

In the surveillance terms of NSA and their various global counterparts, this would be considered to be a rudimentary form of "traffic analysis" (in fact, the analysis of ip source addresses I mentioned earlier would also fall into this category) -- that is, attempting to derive useful information from patterns of traffic flow, even when you can't decrypt the actual payload contents of encrypted communications.

And in fact, there is already anecdotal evidence that relatively large non-video data transfers are now seeing slowdowns on T-Mobile, exactly what one would expect if aggressive, incorrect categorizations of encrypted data as video are occurring.

The bottom line appears to be that T-Mobile may have been caught in a lie, and when they were called out on it, their CEO let loose an array of obscene, incoherent rants like some sort of nightmarish telecom industry incarnation of Donald Trump.

Unfortunately, this leaves in something of a bind the legions of T-Mobile USA customers, many of whom moved to T-Mobile specifically because they despised the various practices of AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint. Thanks to the tiny oligarchy of mobile carriers here in the U.S., we seem to be well and truly screwed.

There are various innovative mobile service resellers, like Google's Project Fi and others, but these are ultimately still dependent on the network infrastructures of the major carriers. Local mesh networks have yet to prove practical for non-techie users. And when you're not in range of a usable public Wi-Fi access point, you need a mobile carrier.

Most of the payphones are gone. Unreeling very, very, very long telephone extension cords from your car trunk on the road back to a home landline connection seems iffy at best.

Yep, the way things are going, we probably should at least be researching techniques to help keep that string taught between tin cans over several thousand miles.

Be seeing you.

--Lauren--
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.

It's been clear for years that major early battles over net neutrality would likely be in the video delivery realm.

With the rise and expansion of Internet video streaming services like YouTube, Netflix, and many others, major percentages of overall Internet bandwidth are now used to delivery video streams to users, especially in their local evening hours.

Concerns about the neutrality of ISPs (whether land or mobile based) have long been simmering on at least two fronts.

One of these is bandwidth caps and limits -- how much Internet data a user may "consume" before they're blocked, throttled, or charged extra by their landline ISP or mobile carrier. Since video, especially higher quality video like HD (or now also 4K) can use a lot of data, this is a big deal to consumers -- and to video stream providers.

It gets even more complicated when dominant ISPs establish their own video services whose use does not count against users' bandwidth caps, even though such services compete directly with those of outside firms where usage does count against those same bandwidth caps. The related "fox guarding the hen house" analogies are straightforward to understand.

Current controversies regarding T-Mobile's new "Binge On" service can be more complicated to explain, because they combine key aspects of bandwidth cap issues like those mentioned above, with another aspect entirely -- T-Mobile is apparently actually tampering with outside services' video streams and slowing them down.

Google's YouTube has been particular vocal in expressing concerns about this, and with excellent reasons.

Because what T-Mobile is doing threatens fundamental precepts of net neutrality that are crucial to avoid Internet consumers from being -- frankly -- shafted, whether they realize it at the time or not.

We could very quickly get bogged down in a fascinating (well, fascinating to me) deeply technical discussion of video streaming systems, codecs, transcoding, formats, content delivery networks, and other aspects of the instrumentalities that bring Internet video to your computer, TV, tablet, or phone.

But for now I'll just put it this way ...

Getting quality video to your screen with smooth motion, and without freezes, the squarish mosaics of pixelization, smearing, breakups, and the other multitude of ways that Internet-based video can be disrupted, is immensely complex.

There are many endlessly changing variables involved, including performance characteristics of the user's device, speed of their Internet connection, buffering on their connection, characteristics of the connections between the user and the video streaming service -- a long and complicated list.

To make all this work, streaming services depend on knowing that the data they send to users is the data those users will receive, at the expected speeds and without slowing or modifications by third parties.

Once such a third party arbitrarily tampers with the video streaming experience, all bets on performance and quality for viewers are off the table.

The video service no longer knows what data will reach the user and in what form and speed, nor can it any longer necessarily depend on the accuracy of the metrics that video player software send back so that the streams can be adjusted in real time to maximize performance for the viewer.

Small wonder that Google is upset about what T-Mobile is doing. If I was running an Internet video streaming service, I'd be damned angry about it.

Obviously, I'm not in a position to negotiate a solution to the current situation regarding T-Mobile.

But from my standpoint, this kind of T-Mobile saga is a very disappointing and worrisome (though not unexpected) development -- especially for someone who has long been concerned about exactly these kinds of scenarios shredding the net neutrality concepts that have been crucial to the development of the Internet and the ability of new players to compete.

Remember, if ISPs and mobile carriers feel that they can manipulatively inject themselves without penalty or proscription into the data transactions of outside services and their users, it likely won't be very long at all before we see similar large-scale tampering with non-video Internet data becoming the norm as well.

And then we'd all be the chickens at the mercy of the fox.

--Lauren--
I have consulted to Google, but I am not currently doing so -- my opinions expressed here are mine alone.