Lauren Weinstein's Blog

UPDATE (February 16, 2018): The FBI is reporting today that on January 5th of this year, they received a tip from an individual close to the shooter, specifically noting concerns about his guns and a possible school shooting. In sharp contrast to the single unverifiable YouTube comment discussed below that had been reported to the FBI, the very specific information apparently provided in the January tip is precisely the kind of data that should have triggered a full-blown FBI investigation. Since the information from this January tip reportedly was never acted upon, this dramatically increases FBI culpability in this case.

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Before the blood had even dried in the classrooms of the Florida high school that was the venue for yet another mass shooting tragedy, authorities and politicians were out in force trying to assign blame everywhere.

That is, everywhere except for the fact that a youth too young to legally buy a handgun was able to legally buy an AR-15 assault-style weapon that he used to conduct his massacre.

Much of the misplaced blame this time is being lobbed at social media. The shooter, whom we now know had mental health problems but apparently had never been adjudicated as mentally ill, had a fairly rich social media  presence, so the talking heads are blaming firms like YouTube and agencies like the FBI for not “connecting the dots” to prevent this attack.

But the reality is that (as far as I can tell at this point) there wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about his social media history in today’s Internet environment.

There was — sad to say — nothing notable to differentiate his online activities from vast numbers of other profiles, posts, and comments that feature guns, knives, and provocatively “violent” types of statements. This is the state of the Net today — flooded with such content. When I block trolls on Google+, I usually first take a quick survey of their profiles. I’d say that at least 50% of the time they fall into the kinds of categories I’ve mentioned above.

We also know that 99+% of these kinds of users are not actually going to commit violent acts against people or property.

20/20 hindsight is great, but by definition it doesn’t have any predictive value in situations like this. Law enforcement couldn’t possibly have the resources to investigate every such posting.

In the case of this shooter, the FBI actually became involved since a YouTube user had expressed concern when a comment was left by someone (using the name of the shooter) saying “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.”

That’s not even an explicit threat. There’s no specified time or place. It’s very nasty, but not illegal to say. Social media is replete with far more explicit and scary statements that would be much more difficult to categorize as likely sarcasm or darkly joking around.

The FBI reportedly did a routine records search on that name (of course, anyone can post pretty much anything under any name), and found nothing relevant. To have expended more resources based only on that single comment didn’t make sense. Nor is there apparently any reason to believe that if they’d located that individual, then gone out and immediately interviewed him, that the course of later events would have been significantly changed.

We’re also hearing the refrain that authorities should have the right to haul in anyone reported to have mental stability issues of any kind, even if they’ve never been treated for mental illness or been arrested for any crime.

Well golly, these days that would probably include about four-fifths of the population, if not more. Pretty much everyone is nuts these days in our toxic social and political environments, one way or another.

The world is full of loonies, but these kinds of attacks only happen routinely here in the U.S. — and we all know in our hearts that the trivial availability of powerful firearms is the single relevant differentiating factor that separates us from the rest of the civilized world in this respect.

And that’s the tragic truth.

–Lauren–

Google has announced the bringing of its “AMP” concept (an acronym for “Accelerated Mobile Pages”) to Gmail, and is encouraging other email providers to follow suit.

AMP in the mobile space has been highly controversial since the word go, mainly due to the increased power and leverage that it gives Google over the display of websites and ads.

The incorporation of AMP concepts into email, to provide what Google is calling “a more interactive and engaging” email experience, is nothing short of awful. It seriously sucks. It sucks so much that it takes your breath away.

I am not in this post interested in how or by how much AMPed email would push additional market power to Google. That’s not my area of expertise and I’ll largely defer to others’ analyses in these regards.

But I do know email technology. I’ve been coding email systems and using email for a very long time — longer than I really like to think about.  I was involved in the creation of various foundational email standards on which all of today’s Internet email systems are based, and I have a pretty good feel for where things have gone wrong with email during ensuing decades.

Introduction of “rich” email formats — in particular HTML email with its pretty fonts, animated icons, and wide array of extraneous adornments — can be reasonably viewed as a key class of “innovations” that led directly to the modern scourge of spam, phishing attacks, and a wide variety of other email-delivered criminal payloads that routinely ruin innumerable innocent lives.

Due to the wide variety of damage that can be done through unscrupulous use of these email formats, many sites actually ban and/or quarantine all inbound HTML email that doesn’t also include “plain text” versions of the messages as well.

In fact, the actual underlying email specifications require such a plain text version to accompany any HTML version. Unfortunately, this requirement is now frequently ignored, both by crooks who use its absence to try trick email users into clicking through to their malignant sites,  and by “honest” email senders who just don’t give a damn about standards and only care about getting their bloated messages through one way or another.

This state of affairs has led many site administrators to consider inbound HTML-only email to be a 100% signal of likely spam. Much actually legit email is thrown into the trash unseen as a result.

Google now plans to be pushing what amounts to HTML email on steroids, creating a new email “part” that will likely quickly become the darling of the same email marketers — further bloating email, wasting data, and causing both more confusion for users and more opportunities for virulent email crooks.

No doubt Google has considered the negative ramifications of this project, and obviously has decided to plow ahead anyway, especially given the rapidly growing challenges of the traditional website ad-based ecosystem.

I frequently am asked by users how they can actively avoid the tricky garbage that arrives in their email every day. I have never in my life heard anyone say anything like, “Golly, I sure wish that I could receive much more complicated email that would let me do all sorts of stuff from inside the email itself!”

And I’ll wager that you’ve never heard anyone asking for “more interactive and engaging” email. Most people want simple, straightforward email, keeping the more complex operations on individual websites that aren’t “cross-contaminated” into important email messages.

AMP for email is a quintessential “solution in search of a problem” — a system being driven by corporate needs, not by the needs of ordinary users.

Worse yet, if email marketers begin to widely use this system, it will ultimately negatively impact every email user on the Net, with ever more unnecessarily bloated messages clogging up inboxes even if you have no intention of ever touching the “AMPed” portion of those messages.

And I predict that despite what will surely be the best efforts of Google to avoid abuse, the email criminals will find ways to exploit this technology, leading to an ever escalating whack-a-mole war.

Throwing everything except the kitchen sink into HTML email was always a bad idea. But now Google apparently wants to throw in that sink as well. And frankly, this could be the final straw that sinks much of email’s usefulness for us all.

–Lauren–

We’re losing the account security war. Despite the increased availability of 2-step verification (2sv) systems — also called 2-factor and multiple-factor verification/authentication — most people don’t use them. As a result, conventional phishing techniques continue to be largely effective at stealing user account credentials, ruining many lives in the process.

As I’ve discussed previously, part of the reason for this low uptake of 2sv relates to the design of the systems themselves — they frankly remain too complicated in terms of “hassle level” for most users to be willing to bother with.

They don’t really understand them, even when many options are provided. They’re afraid they’ll screw up and get locked out of their accounts. They don’t want to hand over their phone numbers. They don’t trust where the verification phone calls are coming from when they see them on Caller ID — sometimes even reporting those calls as spam on public websites! They don’t know how to use 2sv with third-party apps. Often they tried to use 2sv, got confused, and gave up. It goes on and on. We’ve discussed this all before.

And to be sure, many 2sv implementations simply suck. Frequently they’re badly designed, break down easily, are a pain in the ass to use, and sometimes do lock you out.

Even for Google, which has one of the best 2sv systems that I know of (see their 2sv setup site at: https://www.google.com/landing/2step), user acceptance of 2sv is dismal — Google reports that fewer than 1 in 10 Gmail users have 2sv enabled.

And so the phishing continues. Recently there have been reports of new Russian hacking attacks against Defense Department users’ Gmail accounts (mostly their personal accounts, but that’s bad enough given the leverage that personal info found in such accounts might provide to adversaries).

In corporate environments it’s possible to require use of 2sv. But outside of those environments, this is a very tricky proposition. I’ve noted the theoretical desirability of requiring 2sv for everyone — but I also acknowledge that as a practical matter, given current systems and sensibilities, this is almost certainly a non-starter for now.

Too many users would object, and unlike some government entities (e.g. the Social Security Administration and IRS) that now require 2sv to access their sites and always offer alternative offline mechanisms (e.g., phone, conventional mail) for dealing with them, any major Web firm that tried to require 2sv would be likely to find itself at a competitive disadvantage in short order.

But there’s an even more fundamental problem. Most users simply don’t believe that they’re ever going to hacked. It always “happens to somebody else” — not to me! Using 2sv just feels like too much hassle for most people under such conditions, though after they or someone close to them have been hacked, they frequently change their tune on this quite quickly — but by then the damage is done.

It’s time to face the facts. Trying to “scare” users into adopting 2sv has been an utter failure.

Maybe we need to consider another approach — the carrot rather than the stick.

What can we do to make 2sv usage desirable, cool, even fun?

In other words, if we can’t successfully convince users to enable 2sv based on their own security self-interests, even in the face of nightmarish hacking stories, perhaps we can “bribe” them into the pantheon of 2sv.

There are precedents for this kind of approach.

For example, Google in the past has offered a bonus of additional free disk space allocations for users who completed specified security checkups.

Could we convince users to enable 2sv (and keep it enabled for at least reasonable periods of time) through similar incentives?

How about a buck or two of Play Store or other app store credits?

Can we make this more of a game, a kind of contest? Why not provide users with incentives not only to enable 2sv themselves, but to help convince other users to do so?

Obviously the devil is in the details, and any such incentive programs, rewards, or account bonuses would need to be carefully designed to avoid abuse.

But I increasingly believe that we need to explore new account security paradigms, especially when it comes to convincing users to enable 2sv.

The status quo is utterly unacceptable. If “bribing” users to enable better security on their accounts could make a positive difference, then let’s bring on the bribes!

–Lauren–

I come originally from an era where music was especially important to us, before the ability to watch pretty much any movie or other video program at the click of a mouse. But we did have radio, and vinyl records, and later CDs. 

And as each new plateau of technology was reached, we’d be able to hear our music with ever better fidelity. (Yes, I know all too well that there were some utterly atrocious early CD players and early CD pressings — but overall the trend line has been constantly upward in terms of audible quality.)

Since I’ve done quite a bit of audio work in my time, over the years I’ve had the opportunity to hear some really great sound systems, including incredibly expensive studio monitor speakers. But I never had the opportunity to really choose what I wanted to hear on those super speakers. Nor are they necessarily the best kind of speakers for simply enjoying music — they’re typically designed for the kind of “flat” response you want for a music mix, but that’s not ideal if you’re — for example — listening to music in your bedroom.

I’ve written before about Google Home, e.g. in “Why Google Home Will Change the World” — https://lauren.vortex.com/2016/11/10/why-google-home-will-change-the-world — and elsewhere.

The original Google Home and Home Mini can be reasonably described as Google Assistant terminals that happen to also play music. 

Google’s latest edition to the Home pantheon, the Home Max, is best described as a very high quality audio system that happens to also include Google Assistant. 

Google recently sent me a Max to explore (thanks Google!) and I wanted to offer my initial impressions to date.

There are articles all over the Web that describe the impressive specifications of Max in great detail. I will not repeat them all here.

Is Max heavy? Yep, you wouldn’t want to drop it on your foot. Is Max loud? Indeed. I’ve rarely run it over 65% volume so far, and that was for an experiment, not for routine listening. Great bass response? Certainly!

Does Max do all the good stuff that you expect of Google Assistant? Of course, and it even does so while music is blaring from the speakers, though you might have to raise your voice just a wee tad to get its attention when it’s really booming out the decibels.

Max uses Class D amplifiers, so it barely gets warm even at high volume levels. I’ve seen some reviewers actually complain that Max is somehow “dull” looking in design. I don’t know about you, but personally I listen to speakers — I don’t spend a lot of time staring at them. I consider it a plus for Max to blend into the visual background.

But it’s my subjective impressions of Max (in combination with Google Play Music and YouTube Red) that I really want to describe.

While I certainly enjoy much current music, my preferences more often than not steer toward classical music, classic rock and pop, and film scores (typically orchestral). As an aside, one of my favorite streaming stations — available on Home via TuneIn — is “M2 Classic” from Paris, which just happens to specialize in film scores and classical music!

Many of the reviews you can find about Max emphasize its very high maximum volume levels. That’s good, but there are aspects of audio reproduction that are even more important.

Quality. Clarity.

Volume without clarity and quality is the audio equivalent of Donald Trump’s incoherent and moronic rants. No matter how much you turn up the volume, he’s still just agonizing, stupefying noise.

And so it is with speaker systems. I don’t claim to have “golden ears” anymore (if I ever did), but you don’t have to be an audio expert to know that many people consider loud to be good no matter how painfully distorted the result.

Max’s magic is that no matter how far you crank up the volume, the results are crystal clear and a joy to behold.

Are they as good as high-priced studio monitors? That’s an apples and oranges question. I don’t want flat response audio monitors in my bedroom. I want speakers that do the best job possible of reproducing music in a quality way given the complex acoustic environment in that room, very different from a studio where you can install speakers in ideal locations in a space specifically designed for audio work. 

I want appropriate equalization for my listening at home. Max accomplishes this automatically. It just works. I don’t even have to think about it.

And that’s not just for high quality music streams coming in from Google or third party sources. Max includes a standard audio input jack. I have my TV plugged in there and Max does a great job with that audio too (plus, I get the bonus of voice control to mute or change TV volume levels).

Now here’s the seriously subjective section of this discussion.

There are songs, albums, scores, classical works, and all manner of other musical selections that I’ve heard innumerable times over my life, in some cases first on a little AM transistor radio tucked under my pillow at night.

Each subsequent technology sounded better than the previous, even though I was never in a position to own really good speakers of my own.

What I’m finding with Max is that I’m now hearing those familiar songs, that familiar music, in an entirely new way. I’m listening to the tracks, the compositions, the scoring cues properly for the very first time.

It’s sort of similar to how one feels when first seeing an old movie in the theater or on a big flat screen TV in proper aspect ratio, when originally you had seen it on a little black and white set with the vertical hold needing adjustment every few minutes, or on an early NTSC color set where tints would go awry with every minor temperature change.

It doesn’t matter with Max whether I’m listening quietly or with the volume cranked up, what I hear is clear as a bell. I’m now hearing utterly new aspects of music that I thought I already knew like the back of my hand.

Rock bass lines that I’ve never heard before. Underscore instrumentations that I didn’t know existed. Vocals that sound like I’m standing in the studio just across the glass from the singer. 

Perhaps these sound like small things to you (no pun intended, naturally).

But music matters a lot to me, and thanks to Google and Max I’m now able to hear pretty much anything in the musical realm that I wish, whenever I wish, and to hear it with the highest audio quality of my life.

And given the toxic world of pain in which we reside today, that’s one hell of a lot more than a modicum of happiness.

–Lauren–

The monsters are everywhere — self-righteous sickos who laugh at other people’s misfortunes — the same kind of diseased personalities who slow down in traffic to take photos of horrific accidents and urge distressed persons on the edges of buildings to jump to their deaths.

And they’re online as well. Oh man, are they online. Worst of all perhaps, they’re extremely well represented among the tech community where I’ve spent my entire career, such as it’s been.

Perhaps this helps to explain why so many techies are so disdainful of non-techies, why so many software designers call the people using their systems by the pejorative “losers” rather than users or customers.

It certainly provides some insight into why many non-technical persons view our technical fields with so much disdain and distrust.

Lately I’ve been writing a lot about people being harmed — in some cases killed — by social media fads — e.g., in “YouTube’s Dangerous and Sickening Cesspool of ‘Prank’ and ‘Dare’ Videos” — https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/05/04/youtubes-dangerous-and-sickening-cesspool-of-prank-and-dare-videos — and other posts.

Inevitably, when I note the vast array of videos on YouTube, Facebook, and other sites that show individuals being burned, shocked, poisoned, crushed, or otherwise injured and sometimes killed in the name of challenges, dares, and dangerous pranks, there are always the Trumpian “wits” who chuckle in the comments about “Darwin Awards” and stupid people, and how this helps to improve the gene pool, and golly Lauren aren’t we clever to think up a comment like this?

I point out that the tragedies from ingesting toxic substances or playing with guns — or the array of other horrific pranks and dares that are easily found on these video platforms pulling in vast numbers of views — often involve suckering in for “social media fame” real people with actual families and loved ones, and frequently young people including sometimes very young children.

“Oh well, I’m not including children of course,” tends to come the belated reply — though it’s obvious that in reality their actual degree of caring about their fellow human beings is somewhere south of absolute zero.

I’ve discussed elsewhere my concerns regarding how YouTube fails to properly enforce their own published Terms of Service when it comes to hate speech and the sorts of videos I described above.

Google has recently announced a series of efforts relating to these and associated content areas, including significantly more humans in the abuse reporting loops — something I have long advocated as a crucial adjunct to the automated systems that by necessity must be the first line of defense for the vast firehose of video pouring into YouTube 24/7 from around the world.

As one of YouTube’s biggest fans — I make no bones about this fact! — I very much want to see Google succeed in these efforts. Frankly, I personally have doubts that they’re moving fast enough to avoid the increasing specter of politically motivated, heavy-handed government regulations that threaten the entire video ecosystem. But certainly Google’s trajectory in this regard is now positive.

In fact, my faith in Googlers is such that I’m certain that they can solve these problems if enough resources are devoted to them — provided that scheming politicians and their minions don’t get in the way.

I wish I could offer the same degree of confidence regarding human beings in general. Whenever I see them laughing and making their malignant comments regarding people injured or killed in online videos, I’m torn between vomiting and fantasizing of a means to send a brief pulse of high voltage back to these commenters’ keyboards over the Net.

Fortunately, we do have the ability to deal with the array of technological policy issues that seem so vexing, if we choose to seriously do so.

Unfortunately, human nature itself has barely advanced at all since the caves, and our powerful technologies tend to enable not only the best of humanity, but disproportionately even more so the very worst.

Be seeing you.

–Lauren–

I informally try to help quite a few Google users with their Google-related issues when I can. Many of these involve Google Account problems of one sort or another.

I’ve frequently written about why it’s so important to use Google’s 2-step verification systems, e.g. in: “Protecting Your Google Account from Personal Catastrophes” —https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/09/07/protecting-your-google-account-from-personal-catastrophes — and various other posts.

I’ve also noted some of the reasons why Google users tell me that they don’t use Google’s 2-step verification, e.g. in: “Google Users Who Want to Use 2-Factor Protections — But Don’t Understand How” —  https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/06/10/google-users-who-want-to-use-2-factor-protections-but-dont-understand-how — and related discussions.

Google recently announced that fewer than 1 in 10 Gmail users have 2-factor enabled on their Google accounts — so this is a very serious matter.

Yesterday, I was approached by a long-time reader who told me that he had long been trying — without success — to use 2-factor, had been unable to get assistance from Google in this regard, and wondered if I could help. Perhaps you’ve had the same problem.

This Google user needed to make use of various non-Google applications via his Google account, that seemingly would only function when his Google account had 2-factor disabled. 

Google actually has a mechanism (that I’ve routinely used myself) for dealing with this — though you may never have heard of it — called “application specific passwords” (aka “App passwords”). Using this system, you can assign secure passwords to these kinds of apps that will work with Google 2-factor enabled. 

But this user was unable to access the Google page for setting up these passwords:

https://security.google.com/settings/security/apppasswords

Whenever he tried, he received the obscure error message:

“The setting you are looking for is not available for your account.”

Hmm. Not very helpful. He got this message every time he tried, so he finally gave up on enabling 2-factor at all.

When I looked at this in detail, the solution turned out to be trivially simple, in retrospect. You can’t access the apps passwords page unless 2-factor is already turned on!

He’d been trying to use his apps with 2-factor on and always failed. So he turned 2-factor off. Then he learned about the apps passwords and wanted to set those up — but couldn’t reach the setup page. So he left 2-factor turned off (so that he could continue using his apps).

Chicken and egg!

Now, the fundamental problem here is obvious. That error message should have told him something like:

“You cannot use app passwords unless 2-factor is enabled.”

That would have given him the clue he needed to have immediately fixed this entire situation by himself. 

A similar situation exists for G Suite users, who must both have 2-factor enabled and have had their administrator enable “less secure apps” before they can reach the apps password page successfully.

Complicating this all a bit more is that changes to Google Account parameters don’t necessarily seem to always take effect immediately. It appears that sometimes there is a lag before all background systems apparently sync up. So for example, if you turn 2-factor on and immediately try a test that requires 2-factor, it might not work unless you’ve waited long enough after changing that parameter.

It’s really, really important to enable Google 2-factor. I can’t emphasize this enough. If issues with non-Google apps have been preventing you from using 2-factor up to now, please give it another try as described above. As always, I’m glad to try assist. Take care, all.

–Lauren–

I’ve been getting a bunch of queries from folks asking if I could provide any insight into alt-right darling James Damore’s class action lawsuit against Google. I have no personal knowledge of the circumstances of that suit, and so I have nothing to say about its specific allegations.

I do however have considerable insight into Google’s culture — I spent enough time inside Google several years ago to have a pretty clear sense of that.

While like any other firm Google isn’t perfect, Google in particular has a culture to be roundly applauded, not condemned — I believe the finest I’ve seen in any corporate environment during my career.

Let’s start with an obvious truth. 

White heterosexual males — like myself — don’t need any special protections in the USA. When you hear straight white males bitching about supposedly being discriminated against, you can be sure that nearly always these snowflakes (to borrow a term typically thrown against liberals by the alt-right) are actually upset about pushback regarding their own racism, antisemitism, or other expressed hate speech.

Unapologetic racists like Donald Trump and many of his followers falsely assert that left and right both use the same tactics.

That claim is indeed a lie. There is no organized structure of hate and false propaganda aimed at the right, while the right most certainly has devoted vast efforts to such attacks directed at the left, even beyond the right’s traditional hate groups such as the KKK and Nazis. There is no valid comparison.

Right-wing groups are upset that new fact checking systems on social media and search predominantly point out the lies on right-wing sites (as opposed to more left-oriented sites). The reason for this is simple and obvious — those right-wing sites are the primary sources of lying propaganda (and the vast majority of hate speech). You just don’t find anything comparable in scope on left-wing sites. That’s just a fact.

Which brings us back to Google.

Google has a remarkably freewheeling internal discussion culture. The great extent to which Googlers debate technical and policy issues inside Google is in fact vastly reassuring in ways I’d never seen anywhere else in my life. Within hours of first logging in, I was personally invited into several important discussion forums — I later joined many more — and I even started several discussion lists internally myself while I was there, on topics that I felt were important.

As in most other large firms today, there are many employees at Google who are not white, straight males like me. And it’s my personal belief that it’s essentially impossible for guys like me to truly understand what it’s like for women, for blacks, for LGBT individuals, and for other minorities who typically have little power in our country, many of whom live in fear of serious discrimination and even personal harm in the daily lives. They feel — with complete justification — that they are under constant threat.

Google’s culture is widely inclusive and celebratory of true diversity. This is enormously positive. It’s good for Google, it’s good for Google’s users, and it’s good for the broader community. I wish every large firm were equally forward-thinking in such regards.

But such inclusiveness does not imply that any firm need tolerate employees whose freely stated views are fundamentally hateful, sexist, racist, antisemitic, or otherwise divisive — often attacking the very groups that I described above who are most in need of protection.

This is not an issue of political viewpoints. It’s a matter of how so many white male conservatives attempt to camouflage their racial and other hateful animus in hypocritical claims of  being discriminated against, as if the rest of us were obligated to just stand by idly while they attempt to sabotage everything positive that we’ve built.

If you spend some time over on alt-right websites (not recommended shortly after eating), you’ll quickly learn that making false claims of “discrimination against whites” is a major bullet point high up in their playbooks. It’s explicitly seen as a way to inject racial and other divisiveness into firms (and society generally) without the need to buy white hoods or sew swastikas onto your clothing.

Don’t be fooled by alt-right rhetoric. White guys like me are at the top of the power food chain in the USA. Racist alt-right forces are explicitly working to falsely and deviously weaponize open discussions and anti-discrimination laws designed to protect the truly vulnerable, attempting to hideously mutate those laws into tools to spread hate, racism, and worse throughout our country and the world.

We should be honoring and supporting companies, organizations, and individuals who resist these efforts by haters to roll back the clock to the mindset of slavery, lynchings, and government-enforced white and male supremacy.

To do any less is to empower the worst part of our natures as Americans, and to surrender our great country to the real world forces of evil.

–Lauren–

As always when I talk about Google’s YouTube, I want to make one thing perfectly clear. I love YouTube. I consider it to be a gem in Google’s pantheon and one of the most important sites on the Internet. If YouTube vanished tomorrow I’d be devastated. And I’m a big fan of the many folks in the teams at Google (quite a few of whom I know personally) who keep the incredibly complex systems and machinery of YouTube running.

That all said, I fear for YouTube’s future — and what this could mean overall for Google and its users in the long run, since in many ways YouTube’s issues are representative of Google’s issues more broadly.

I’ve written a lot about various matters regarding YouTube before, of course. I’ve lauded the sublime educational and entertainment content, but have been deeply critical of hate speech; dangerous pranks, dares, and stunts; and user interface issues that I believe suppress users from easily reporting videos that are believed to be in violation of YouTube’s Terms of Service.

Lately YouTube has been under fire from an array of quarters, including various pandering politicians associated with national governments — some of whom have passed laws imposing potentially impractical “moderation” and takedown requirements, along with massive fine structures for infractions, that may ultimately threaten the entire YouTube model in significant ways.

Some aspects of this unfortunate dilemma are indeed of Google’s own making. Google has long tried to keep as much of a “hands-off” attitude regarding YouTube content as possible, for a variety of reasons — some very valid, others significantly less so. 

But there’s no question that Google has a right and duty to enforce YouTube’s published terms of service regarding acceptable content, and the uneven manner in which this has typically occurred has left gaping openings for Google haters to leverage. This is certainly not to suggest that applying their terms of service is easy at the massive scale of YouTube — but even taking scale into account and looking only at specific highly publicized incidents involving videos and YouTube creators with enormous numbers of subscribers and video views, the issues persist.

Another aspect of YouTube’s problems is also intrinsic to Google itself, in terms of how they choose to communicate with the public at large. 

Google’s public communications apparatus has always been much more focused on dealing with tech media than with ordinary non-tech forms of media that are more likely to reach relatively non-techie users in ways that those users and the broader community will genuinely understand. Nowadays, with the many powerful forces aligning against Google, especially at the government level, this just isn’t good enough.

Google tends to communicate policy issues mostly through blog posts and emails with the tech trade press, and rarely offline. In the case of a YouTube controversy over the last few days, Google used a series of Twitter tweets to apologize for a long delay in addressing a very controversial issue — already an international story — involving a highly-ranked YouTube star. More than a bit ironic, to say the least.

Except mainly in terms of technical developer liaisons, Google hasn’t really had representatives of their own out in the “real world” with the specific role of interacting directly with the ordinary public regarding everyday and more controversial Google-related policy issues through the wide array of both online and offline discussion forums or mainstream media like radio and television (though Google’s recent hiring of Danny Sullivan as a search division adviser/liaison is indeed a welcome move in the specific context of search issues).

But in the broader scope of YouTube and Google more generally, the lack of effective ongoing public communications outside the boundaries of Google’s traditionally limited “comfort zone” risks costing Google and its users dearly in the long run. 

Google is full of great people in every respect — but they are now facing escalating adversarial relationships with governments and others — including competitors and the outright Google haters — who are exceedingly skilled at political and mass media public communications of the cutthroat variety — and unless Google significantly improves their game in this sphere they could very well come out on the losing end.

And that would likely be a disaster for Google, for the Internet, and for billions of individuals around the world, leaving us increasingly vulnerable to the “tender mercies” of government and other forces hellbent on remaking the Net in their own images of government-dictated censorship and politically-motivated, government-mandated information control.

It’s a battle that neither Google — nor the rest of us — can afford to lose.

–Lauren–

Greetings. As I’ve noted in posts such as:

The Google Account “Please Help Me!” Flood: https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/09/12/the-google-account-please-help-me-flood

Protecting Your Google Account from Personal Catastrophes:
https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/09/07/protecting-your-google-account-from-personal-catastrophes

and in various other associated missives, I’m nearly constantly being approached for informal assistance by Google users who are having problems accessing their Google accounts. Many are in a panic. Some call me on the phone and are literally crying — their whole lives are pretty much on Google and they’re desperate. Sometimes they find me from articles I’ve written or from radio discussions, in other instances via word of mouth.

I try to help when I can. I can offer direct advice to some of them (especially if they haven’t been “hard” locked out of their accounts through continued “thrashing” around on their part), for others in some situations I’m able to help them reach Google support personnel for their issues.

But I’m just one guy here in L.A. — I don’t scale well to the scope of these problems — nor do I have any official connection with Google these days.

While Google indeed offers various proactive means to protect your Google accounts, the plain truth is that many users don’t use them. In many cases, they’ve never even heard of them — or they don’t understand them.

With so much of so many people’s personal lives now dependent on Google’s great services, loss of access to your account can be devastating, and regaining access — especially if you don’t fully understand what’s going on, can be a frustrating exercise in futility.

I’ve talked in the past about the shortcomings in Google’s account recovery flows and how they affect ordinary users — it’s a very complex area. Let’s leave this aside for the moment.

Let’s instead ask the more fundamental question — how can we help Google users of all sorts — not just relatively young techies — avoid problems with their Google accounts in the first place? Remember, all sorts of persons from all walks of life, including growing numbers of the elderly in a rapidly aging overall population, are very much dependent on Google these days.

The most common ad hoc “solution” to this class of problems is telling someone else — for example a family member or friend — your Google username and password credentials. This is not at all uncommon. But from a security and privacy perspective, it’s awful.

Someone else who has your credentials has total access to your Google account and all related services, at identical privilege levels as yourself across the board. Good security practices strongly suggest that only providing minimum necessary access to third parties is by far the desirable procedure, but in the current context of Google accounts that really isn’t possible — it’s all or nothing.

Still, as an alternative to a user getting confused and losing data or getting locked out of their account (or otherwise disrupting their essential Google services), handing someone else your Google credentials is frequently seen as the only practical course of action.

In fact, there’s a significant number of Google users who have given me their Google credentials for this purpose — for some I also act as their account recovery address and I deal with their 2-factor verifications as well.

I don’t like doing this. Again, it’s awful from a privacy and security standpoint. But I won’t leave these users out in the cold.

To be sure, none of these problems are trivial to solve, especially at Google scale.

There is a better way though, that would be extremely useful for Google to implement — a concept that various other online services should consider using as well.

I propose that Google seriously explore solving this class of problems in a more controlled and structured manner, by creating a formal “Google account delegation” system.

Such a system would permit a user to delegate (that is, share with third parties in a controlled manner) specific permissions and capabilities (either individually and/or in logical groupings) for access to various aspects of the user’s Google account.

This would allow a designated third party to provide the kinds of ongoing assistance that many users desire and require — including but not limited to helping the user avoid errors that could disrupt their account access or usage in various ways — but without the need to share their primary, full Google credentials with those third parties as would be necessary today.

Delegated capabilities and permissions would be revocable by the user at any time.

I won’t in this post get into the details (to which I’ve given quite a bit of thought!) regarding what would be involved in making a concept like this deploy successfully in practice — it involves various layers ranging from upper level account capabilities down through specific Google services permissions. It’s certainly not simple but is wholly within Google’s abilities.

Given the vast numbers of persons who now depend on Google in so many ways, it makes enormous sense that these users should — if they so desire — be able to delegate specific aspects of their Google accounts to trusted individuals who could help them to manage those accounts and related services effectively, and in particular help them to avoid mistakes that can cause extremely upsetting situations such as accidentally deleted data and account lockouts, to name but two common scenarios.

Google account delegation options would be great for Google’s users, for Google itself, and for the broader community.

Google can do this.

–Lauren–

UPDATE: Please see Meltdown and Spectre for important additional information regarding Intel and other affected processors, including AMD and ARM in specific situations.

– – –

Just a very few quick words about a new Intel CPU security problem. You may have heard that a new, serious security bug has been discovered in generations of Intel CPU chips used in most consumer and business computers. I won’t get into the technical details here right now, but it’s a mess. The good news is that fixes will be rolling out in operating system updates (if you have computers that are still getting updates, that is!) — there’s nothing for most users to do themselves to manually deal with this — but these fixes will significantly degrade the performance of affected systems.

Users of computers with AMD CPU chips are (as far as we know currently) not vulnerable to this particular security bug. However, it is possible that some operating system updates to fix the Intel bug will have the side effect of unnecessarily reducing the performance of AMD CPU chips as well, if those patches don’t differentiate between the two different manufacturers. Obviously, AMD is working hard to avoid this situation in the CPU bug fix patches being developed and deployed by various entities to fix the Intel bug.

Intel has released a statement claiming that the same class of exploits can affect other CPU manufacturers. One of my readers wrote to tell me that while the specific issue now being patched does not affect AMD CPU chips, information about the broader exploit class (and other related problems that may involve manufacturers other than Intel) could be going public shortly. I do not have independent confirmation regarding these broader issues at this time.

I’ll say more about this all as additional information becomes available.

–Lauren–

UPDATE: Please see Meltdown and Spectre for important additional information regarding Intel and other affected processors, including AMD and ARM in specific situations.

Given the furor that has erupted in the wake of the latest infantile and dangerous tweet from Donald Trump — yesterday’s already infamous “my nuclear button is bigger than your nuclear button” tweet directed at the leader of the unstable and unpredictable nuclear-armed dictatorship of North Korea, I would assert that a Twitter thought experiment is in order.

We’ll draft a figure from history — Adolf Hitler (you remember him, right?) — to complete our tyrant triad along with Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. We’ll be talking about the actual Adolf himself here, so “Godwin’s law” prohibitions against inappropriate Hitler analogies will not apply.

OK, boys and girls, let’s begin the thought experiment.

The Big Question that comes up after so many of Trump’s tweets is why do so many Twitter users posting far less provocative content have their Twitter accounts temporarily or permanently disabled or terminated, while an individual literally threatening nuclear war — about as provocative as you can get — continues to tweet with impunity?

Twitter’s legal and policy teams have a ready answer — they point to clauses in their terms of service that provide exceptions for “newsworthy” tweets.  They also exempt public office holders elected through “democratic elections.”

Interestingly, tweets from Donald Trump would seem to conveniently fall into both of these policy buckets. Ironically, so would tweets from Adolf Hitler.

One certainly couldn’t argue that Hitler’s tweets wouldn’t have been newsworthy. And yes, Hitler was democratically elected. While he was appointed chancellor of Germany in January 1933 by President Hindenburg, he was elected to the presidency in a plebiscite vote in 1934 after Hindenburg died.

Bottom line: By Twitter, Inc. standards, anything Hitler might have tweeted would be golden.

Yet we know what’s really going on with these Twitter terms of service standards — it’s all about “engagements” — likes and reshares — and the income to Twitter that results. Twitter is terrified of cutting off those income streams by upsetting large chunks of Twitter users (such as Trump’s base of racist and antisemitic followers).

The fact that Twitter is putting money ahead of ethics and public safety shouldn’t surprise us — they’re on firm historical footing.

During the rise of the Third Reich, entire major firms — like IBM — knowingly provided resources to accelerate National Socialism’s Nazi evils, as did entire countries, like Switzerland.

So the next time that Twitter gets asked about their terms of service in the context of Trump, perhaps they might want to point to Adolf and Friends as an explanatory precedent.

I suspect though that Hitler’s Twitter feed would have looked a lot different than Trump’s. For one thing, Adolf was far more intelligent and mature than Trump overall, and I’ll bet that the lion’s share of Hitler’s Twitter posts would have typically been relatively adult and subtle compared against Trump’s third grade rants (no offense meant to third-graders).

So I doubt very much that we’d have seen tweeted photos of Jews, gypsies, and others being stuffed into boxcars on the way to the death camps, nor images of his victims in the millions piled into ditches or burning in crematoriums.

More likely, we’d have seen carefully worded tweets on political issues and lots of animal photos — Hitler was indeed a dog lover and many shots of Adolf and his dogs still exist today.

It would have been an interesting Twitter feed. I might have followed it myself.

Of course this would have belied the truth of what was actually going on, as the world was well aware — and largely attempted to ignore — as the Reich rose to power and implemented its murderous policies.

By any logical analysis, the decision to remove Trump from Twitter should be far easier for Twitter than it would have been for dealing with @realAdolfHitler (by the way, a Twitter account with that handle has existed since 2009, but has never tweeted to date).

After all, while Hitler was smart enough to be fairly constrained in his public statements when he felt that this served his own purposes, Trump’s continuing Twitter streams of deranged nuclear threats and sociopathic, senile ramblings are front and center on Twitter — and Twitter is making a mint from them.

It has been argued that letting Trump rant on Twitter will be his ultimate downfall — creating all manner of potential legal problems for him in the future.  Perhaps so.

However, I draw the line when it comes to threats of nuclear war and the potential deaths of millions or billions of people.

It’s time for Twitter to call a halt to this madness. They are not merely bystanders in this nightmare, they are active participants, enablers, and unethical beneficiaries.

Twitter, it’s time for you to do the right thing and dump Trump.

By doing so, you might even save the world.

–Lauren–

I continue to be an enormous fan of Google Home — for example, please see my post “Why Google Home Will Change the World” —https://lauren.vortex.com/2016/11/10/why-google-home-will-change-the-world — from a bit over a year ago.

But as time goes on, it’s becoming obvious that a design decision by Google in the Home ecosystem is seriously disadvantaging large numbers of potential users — ironically, the very users who might otherwise most benefit from Home’s enormous capabilities.

You cannot install or routinely maintain Google Home units without a smartphone and the Google Home smartphone app. There are no practical desktop based and/or remotely accessible means for someone to even do this for you. A smartphone on the same local Wi-Fi network as the device is always required for these purposes.

This means that many elderly persons and individuals with physical or visual disabilities — exactly the people whose lives could be greatly enhanced by Home’s advanced voice query, response, and control capabilities — are up the creek unless they have someone available in their physical presence to set up the device and make any ongoing configuration changes. Additionally, all of the “get more info” links related to Google Home responses are also restricted to the smartphone Home app.

I can see how imposing these restrictions made things faster and easier for Google to bring Home to market. For example, by requiring a smartphone for initial Wi-Fi configuration of Home, they avoided building desktop interfaces for this purpose, and leveraged smartphones’ already configured Wi-Fi environments.

But that’s not a valid excuse. You might be surprised how many people routinely use the Internet but who do not have smartphones, or who have never used text messaging on conventional cell phones — or hell, who don’t even have cell phones at all!

Now, one could argue that perhaps this wouldn’t matter so much if we were talking about an app to find rave parties or the best surfing locations. But the voice control, query, and response capabilities of Home are otherwise perfectly suited to greatly improve the lives of the very categories of users who are shut out from Home, unless they have someone with a smartphone in their physical presence to get the devices going and perform ongoing routine configuration changes and other non-voice interactions. 

In fact, many persons have queried me with great excitement about Home, only to be terribly disappointed to learn that smartphones were required and that they were being left behind by Google, yet again.

I have in the past asked the question “Does Google Hate Old People” — https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/02/06/does-google-hate-old-people — and I’m not going to rehash that discussion here.  Perhaps Google already has plans in the works to provide non-smartphone access for these key Home functionalities — if so I haven’t heard about them, but it’s clearly technically possible to do.

I find it distressing that this all seems to follow Google’s pattern of concentrating on their target demographics at the expense of large (and in many cases rapidly growing) categories of users who get left further and further behind as a result.

This is always sad — and unnecessary — but particularly so with Home, given that the voice-operated Home ecosystem would otherwise seem tailor-made to help these persons in so many ways. 

And at the risk of being repetitious, since I’ve been making the same statement quite a bit lately: Google is a great company. Google can do better than this.

–Lauren–

Sometimes Facebook’s manipulative tendencies are kept fairly well below the radar. But in some cases, their twisted sensibilities are so blatant that even their own public explanations immediately ring incredibly hollow.

Such is the case with their response yesterday to a ProPublica report accusing their advertising systems of enabling explicit (and in the opinion of many experts, illegal) age discrimination by advertisers seeking employees.

This one is as obvious as Bozo’s bright red nose. Facebook permits advertisers to target employment ads to specific age groups. Facebook users who are not in the designated groups would typically have no way to know that the ads existed at all!

Facebook’s attempted explanation is pathetic:

“US law forbids discrimination in employment based on age, race, gender and other legally protected characteristics. That said, simply showing certain job ads to different age groups on services like Facebook or Google may not in itself be discriminatory — just as it can be OK to run employment ads in magazines and on TV shows targeted at younger or older people.”

The evil duplicity in this statement hits you right in the face. Sure, advertisers run ads on TV shows and in magazines that are oriented toward certain age groups. But there’s nothing stopping adults of other ages from reading those magazines or watching those shows if they choose to do so — and seeing those ads.

By contrast, in Facebook’s tightly controlled, identity-focused ecosystem, the odds are practically nil that you’ll even realize that particular ads exist if you don’t fall into the targeted range. The old saying holds: “You can’t know what you don’t know.”  Facebook’s comparison with traditional media is false and ridiculous. 

ProPublica notes that other large Web services, including Google and others, permit ad targeting by age.  But unlike Google — where many services can be used without logging in and pseudonyms can be easily created — Facebook is almost entirely a walled garden — logins and your true identity are required under their terms of service to do pretty much anything on their platform.

Given Facebook’s dominance in this context, it’s easy to see why their response to these ad discrimination complaints is being met with such ridicule. 

It’s clear that this kind of Facebook age-based ad targeting by advertisers is an attempt to avoid the negative publicity and legal ramifications of explicitly stating the ages of their desired applicants. They hope to accomplish the same results by preventing anyone of the “wrong” ages from even seeing the ads — and the excuses from these advertisers denying this charge are nothing but sour grapes at their schemes (empowered by Facebook) being called out publicly.

Preventing adult users of any age from seeing employment ads is unethical and just plain wrong. If it’s not illegal, it should be.

And that’s the truth.

–Lauren–

This evening, a reader of my blog post from earlier this year (“YouTube’s Dangerous and Sickening Cesspool of ‘Prank’ and ‘Dare’ Videos” – https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/05/04/youtubes-dangerous-and-sickening-cesspool-of-prank-and-dare-videos), asked if I knew about YouTube’s “laxative” prank and dare videos. Mercifully, I didn’t know about them. Unfortunately, now I do. And while it’s all too easy to plow the fields of toilet humor when it comes to topics like this, it’s really not at all a funny subject.

In fact, it can be deadly.

Some months back I had heard about a boy who — on a dare — ate 25 laxative brownies in one hour. The result was near total heart and kidney failure. He survived, but just barely.

What I didn’t realize until today is that this was far from an isolated incident, and that there is a stunningly vast corpus of YouTube videos explicitly encouraging such dares — and even worse, subjecting innocent victims to “pranks” along very much the same lines.

Once I began to look into this category, I was shocked by its sheer scope.  For example, a YouTube search for:

laxative prank

currently yields me 132,000 results. Of those, over 2,000 were uploaded in the last month, over 300 in the last week, and 10 just today!

As usual, it’s difficult to know what percentage of these are fakes and which are real. But this really matters not, because virtually all of them have the effect of encouraging impressionable viewers into duplicating their disgusting and dangerous feats.

Many of these YouTube videos are very professionally and slickly produced, and often are on YouTube channels with very high subscriber counts. It also appears common for these channels to specialize in producing a virtually endless array of other similar videos in an obvious effort to generate a continuing income stream — which of course is shared with Google itself.

Is there any possible ethical justification for these videos being hosted by Google, and in many cases also being directly monetized?

No, there is not.

And this is but the tip of the iceberg.

YouTube is saturated with an enormous range of similarly disgusting and often dangerous rot, and the fact that Google continues to host this material provides a key continuing incentive for ever larger quantities of such content to be produced, making Google directly culpable in its spread.

I spent enough time consulting internally with Google to realize that there are indeed many situations where making value judgments regarding YouTube content can be extremely difficult, to say the least.

But many of these prank and dare videos aren’t close calls at all — they are outright dangerous and yes, potentially deadly. And as we’ve seen they are typically extremely easy to find.

The longer that these categories are permitted to fester on YouTube, the greater the risks to Google of ham-fisted government regulatory actions that frankly are likely to do more harm than good.

Google can do so much better than this.

–Lauren–

UPDATE (January 25, 2018): This feature is now available in the standard, stable, non-beta version of Chrome!

– – –

Tired of sites that blare obnoxious audio at you from autoplay ads or other videos, often from background tabs, sometimes starting long after you’ve moved other tabs to the foreground? Aren’t these among the most disgustingly annoying of sites? Want to put them in their place at last?

Of course you do.

And as promised by Google some months ago, the new Chrome browser beta — I’m using “Version 64.0.3282.24 (Official Build) beta (64-bit)” on Ubuntu Linux — provides the means to achieve this laudable goal.

There are a number of ways to use this truly delightful new feature.

If you right click on the address bar padlock (or for unencrypted pages, usually an “i” icon), you may see a sound “enable/disable” link on the settings tab that appears, or you may need to click on “site settings” from that tab. In the former case, you can choose “allow” or “block” directly, in the latter case, you can do this from the “sound” entry on the full site settings page that appears.

There’s an easier way, too. Right click on the offensive site’s tab. You can choose “Mute site” or “Unmute site” from there. 

These mute selections are “sticky” — they will persist between invocations of the browser — exactly the behavior that we want.

You can also manually enter a list of sites to mute (and delete existing selections) at the internal address: 

chrome://settings/content/sound

And as a special bonus, considering enabling the longstanding “Tab audio muting UI control” experiment in Chrome on the page at the internal address:

chrome://flags

This lets you mute or unmute a specific tab by clicking on the tab “speaker” icon, without changing the underlying site mute status — perfect if you want to hear the audio for a specific video at a site that you normally want to keep firmly gagged. 

I have long been agitating for a site mute feature in Chrome — my great thanks to the Chrome team for this excellent implementation!

In due course we can expect this new capability to find its way from Chrome beta to stable, but for now if you’re running the latest beta version, you should be able to starting enjoying this right now.

You’re going to love it.

–Lauren–

Last month, in “Google’s Extremely Shortsighted and Bizarre New Restrictions on Accessibility Services”  —https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/11/13/googles-extremely-shortsighted-and-bizarre-new-restrictions-on-accessibility-services — I was highly critical of Google’s move to restrict Android app accessibility services only to apps that were specifically helping disabled persons. 

Google’s actions were assumed to be aimed at preventing security problems that can result when these accessibility services are abused — but these services also implement critical functionalities to other well-behaved apps that cannot currently be provided to most Android users without the use of those services.

My summary statement in that post regarding this issue was:

“The determining factor shouldn’t be whether or not an app is using an accessibility service function within the specific definition of helping a particular class of users, but rather whether or not the app is behaving in an honest and trustworthy manner when it uses those functions.”

I’m pleased to report that Google is apparently now in the process of reevaluating their entire stance on this important matter. Developers have received a note from Google announcing that they are “pausing” their decision, and including this text:

“If you believe your app uses the Accessibility API for a responsible, innovative purpose that isn’t related to accessibility, please respond to this email and tell us more about how your app benefits users. This kind of feedback may be helpful to us as we complete our evaluation of accessibility services.”

Bingo. This is exactly the approach that Google should be taking to this situation, and I’m very glad to see that the negative public reactions to their earlier announcement have been taken to heart.

We’ll have to wait and see what Google’s final determinations are regarding this area, but my thanks to the Google teams involved for giving the feedback the serious consideration that it deserves.

–Lauren–

One of the most frequent questions that I receive these days relates to the privacy of “smart speaker” devices such as Google Home, Amazon Echo, and other similar devices appearing from other firms. 

As these devices proliferate around us — driven by broad music libraries, powerful AI assistants, and a rapidly growing pantheon of additional capabilities — should we have privacy concerns?

Or more succinctly, should we worry about these “always on” microphones being subverted into 24/7 bugging devices?

The short and quick answer is yes. We do need to be concerned.

The full and more complete answer is decidedly more complicated and nuanced.

The foundational truth is fairly obvious — if you have microphones around, whether they’re in phones, voice-controlled televisions, webcams, or the rising category of smart speaker devices, the potential for bugging exists, with an obvious focus on Internet-connected devices.

Indeed, many years ago I began writing about the risks of cellphones being used as bugs, quite some time before it became known that law enforcement was using such techniques, and well before smartphone apps made some forms of cellphone bugging trivially simple.

And while I’m an enthusiastic user of Google Home devices (I try to avoid participating in the Amazon ecosystem in any way) the potential privacy issues with smart speakers have always been present — and how we deal with them going forward is crucial.

For more background, please see:

“Why Google Home Will Change the World” –https://lauren.vortex.com/2016/11/10/why-google-home-will-change-the-world

Since I’m most familiar with Google’s devices in this context, I will be using them for my discussion here, but the same sorts of issues apply to all microphone-enabled smart speaker products regardless of manufacturer.

There are essentially two categories of privacy concerns in this context.

The first is “accidental” bugging. That is, unintended collection of voice data, due to hardware and/or firmware errors or defects.

An example of this occurred with the recent release of Google’s Home Mini device. Some early units could potentially send a continuous stream of audio data to Google, rather than the intended behavior of only sending audio after the “hot word” phrase was detected locally on the unit (e.g. “Hey Google”).  The cause related to an infrequently used manual switch on the Mini, which Google quickly disabled with a firmware update.

Importantly, the Mini gave “clues” that something was wrong. The activity lights reportedly stayed on — indicating voice data being processed — and the recorded data showed up in user “My Activity” for users’ inspection (and/or deletion). For more regarding Google’s excellent My Activity system, please see:

“The Google Page That Google Haters Don’t Want You to Know About” –  https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/04/20/the-google-page-that-google-haters-dont-want-you-to-know-about

Cognizant of the privacy sensitivities surrounding microphones, smart speaker firms have taken proactive steps to try avoid problems. As I noted above, the normal model is to only send audio data to the cloud for processing after hearing the “hot word” phrase locally on the device. 

Also, these devices typically include a button or switch that users can employ to manually disable the microphones.

I’ll note here that Google lately took a step backwards in this specific respect. Until recently, you could mute the microphone by voice command, e.g., “OK Google, mute the microphone.” But now Google has disabled this voice command, with the devices replying that you must use the switch or button to disable the mic.

This is not a pro-privacy move. While I can understand Google wanting to avoid unintended microphone muting that would then require users to manually operate the control on the device to re-enable the mic, there are many situations where you need to quickly disable the mic (e.g. during phone calls, television programs, or other situations where Google Home is being discussed) to avoid false triggering when the hotword phrase happens to be mentioned. 

The correct way of dealing with this situation would be to make voice-operated microphone muting capability an option in the Google Home app. It can default to off, but users who prefer the ability to quickly mute the microphone by voice should be able to enable such an option.

So far we’ve been talking about accidental bugging. What about “purposeful” bugging?

Now it really starts to get complicated. 

My explicit assumption is that the major firms producing these devices and their supporting infrastructures would never willingly engage in purposeful bugging of their own accord. 

Unfortunately, in today’s world, that’s only one aspect of the equation.

Could these categories of devices (from any manufacturers) be hacked into being full-time bugs by third-parties unaffiliated with these firms? We have to assume that the answer in theory (and based on some early evidence) is yes, but we can also assume that these firms have made this possibility as unlikely as possible, and will continually work to make such attacks impractical.

Sad to say, of much more looming concern is governments going to these firms and ordering/threatening them into pushing special firmware to targeted devices (or perhaps to devices en masse) to enable bugging capabilities. In an age where an admitted racist, Nazi-sympathizing, criminal serial sexual predator resides in the White House and controls the USA law enforcement and intelligence agencies, we can’t take any possibilities off of the table. Google for one has a long and admirable history of resisting government attempts at overreach, but — as just one example — we don’t know how far the vile, lying creature in the Oval Office would be willing to go to achieve his evil ends.

Further complicating this analysis is a lack of basic public information about the hardware/firmware structure of these devices.

For example, is it possible in Google Home devices for firmware to be installed that would enable audio monitoring without blinking those activity lights? Could firmware changes keep the microphone active even if the manual disable button or switch has been triggered by the user, causing the device mic to appear disabled when it was really still enabled?

These are largely specific hardware/firmware design questions, and so far my attempts to obtain information about these aspects from Google have been unsuccessful.

If you were hoping for a brilliant, clear-cut, “This will solve all of these problems!” recommendation here, I’m afraid that I must disappoint you.

Beyond the obvious suggestion that the hardware of these devices should be designed so that “invisible bugging” potentials are minimized, and the even more obvious (but not very practical) suggestion of unplugging the units if and when you’re concerned (’cause let’s face it, the whole point is for them to be on the ready when you need them!), I don’t have any magic wand solutions to offer here. 

Ultimately, all of us — firms like Google and Amazon, their users, and the community at large — need to figure out where to draw the lines to achieve a reasonable balance between the vast positive potential of these devices and the very real potential risks that come with them as well.

Nobody said that this stuff was going to be easy. 

Be seeing you.

–Lauren–

You’ve probably heard that there’s an escalating “YouTube War” between Amazon and Google, that has now led to Google cutting of users of Amazon’s Fire and Echo Show products from YouTube, leaving legions of confused and upset users in the wake.

I’m no fan of Amazon. I intensely dislike their predatory business practices and the way that they treat many of their workers. I studiously avoid buying from Amazon.

Google has a number of completely legitimate grievances with Amazon. The latter has refused to carry key Google products that compete with Amazon products, while still designing those Amazon devices to access Google services like YouTube. Amazon has also played fast and loose with the YouTube Terms of Service in a number of ways.

I can understand Google finally getting fed up with this kind of Amazon behavior. Google is absolutely right to be upset.

However, Google is wrong in the approach that they’ve taken to deal with these issues, and this may do them considerable ongoing damage, even long after the current dispute is settled.

Cutting those Amazon device users off from YouTube with essentially a “go access YouTube some other way” message is not buying any good will from those users — exactly the opposite, in fact.

These users aren’t concerned about Google’s marketing issues, they just want to see the programming that they bought their devices to access — and YouTube is a major part of that.

As the firm that’s cutting off these users from YouTube, it’s Google that will take the brunt of user anger, and the situation unnecessarily sows distrust about Google’s behavior in the future. This can impact users’ overall feelings about Google in negative ways that go far beyond YouTube.

Worse, this kind of situation is providing long-term ammunition to Google haters who are looking for any excuses to try bring antitrust or other unwarranted regulatory focus onto Google itself.

Essentially, Amazon laid a trap for Google in this instance, and Google walked right into it.

There is a much better approach available to Google for dealing with this.

Rather than cutting off those Amazon device users, permit them to continue accessing YouTube, but only after presentation of a brief interstitial very succinctly explaining Google’s grievances with Amazon. Rather than making enemies of those users, bring them around to an understanding of Google’s point of view.

But above all, don’t punish those Amazon users by cutting them off from YouTube as you’re doing now.

Your righteous battle is with Amazon. But those Amazon device users should be treated as your allies in this war, not as your enemies!

And that’s the truth.

–Lauren–

Regular readers of my missives have probably grown tired of my continuing series of posts relating to my concerns regarding particular categories of videos that have increasingly contaminated Google’s YouTube platform.

Very briefly: I’m one of YouTube’s biggest fans. I consider YT to be a wonder of the world, both technologically and in terms of vast swathes of its amazing entertainment and educational content. I would be horrified to see YouTube disappear from the face of the planet.

That said, you know that I’ve been expressing increasing concerns regarding extremist and other hate speech, child exploitation, and dangerous prank/dare videos that increasingly proliferate and persist on YouTube, often heavily monetized with ads.

I have never ascribed evil motives to Google in these regards. YouTube needs to bring in revenue both for its own operations and to pay creators — and the absolute scale of YouTube is almost unimaginably enormous.

At Google’s kind of scale, it’s completely understandable that Google has a strong institutional bias toward automated, algorithmic systems to deal with content of all sorts.

However, I have long argued that the changing shape of the Internet requires more humans to “ride herd” on those algorithms, to fill in the gaps where algorithms tend to slump, and to provide critical sanity checking. This is of course an expensive proposition, but my view has been that Google has the resources to do this, given the will to do so.

I’m pleased to report that Google/YouTube has announced major moves in exactly these sorts of directions that I have long recommended:

https://youtube.googleblog.com/2017/12/expanding-our-work-against-abuse-of-our.html

YouTube will hire *human* video reviewers to a total of over 10K in 2018, will expand  liaisons with outside expert groups and individuals, and will tighten advertising parameters (including more human curation), among other very positive steps.

At YouTube scale, successful execution of these plans will be anything but trivial, but as I’ve said about various issues, Google *can* do this!

My thanks to the YouTube teams, and especially to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, for these very welcome moves that should help to assure a great future both for YouTube and its many users!

–Lauren–

You may recall that back early this year I expressed concerns that direct, obvious access to SSL encryption security certificate information had been removed from Google’s Chrome browser:

“Here’s Where Google Hid the SSL Certificate Information That You May Need” – https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/01/28/heres-where-google-hid-the-ssl-certificate-information-you-may-need

As I noted then, there are frequent situations where it’s extremely useful to inspect the SSL certificate info, because the use of SSL (https: — that is, the mere presence of a “green padlock” on a connection) indicates that the connection is encrypted, but that’s all. The padlock alone does not render any sort of judgment regarding the authenticity or legitimacy of the site itself — but the details in an SSL cert can often provide useful insight into these sorts of aspects.

After the change to Chrome that I reported last January, it was not longer possible to easily obtain the certificate data by simply doing the obvious thing — clicking the green padlock and then an additional click to see the cert details. It was still possible to access that data, but doing so required manipulation of the browser “developers tools” panels which are (understandably) not obvious to most users.

I’m pleased to report that easy access to the SSL cert data via the green padlock icon is returning to Chrome. It is already present in the Linux beta version that I run, and would be expected to reach Chrome’s stable versions on all platforms in due course. 

With this feature in place, you simply click the green padlock icon and then click the obvious “Valid” link under the “Certificate” section at the top. The SSL cert data opens right up for quick and direct inspection. The version of Chrome that you’re running currently may not have this feature implemented quite yet, but it’s on the way.

My thanks to the Chrome team!

–Lauren–