Author: Maverisk

Hmmm…, There’s a lot of tok again about pseudonymity, lately. As if that would ever work. Same, with homomorphic encryption as a means to that end.
Both missing the mark, since both missing the point. The point being: Deanonymisation isn’t about backtracking the encrypted info, decrypting it or so, it’s about the metadata. It’s not about the ‘content’ of the data point; it’s about the class identifier (which you’ll need for any useful use of the data point – otherwise random data would do &ndash) that, linked with other-class identifiers, leads to just one (i.e., < 3 remember?) human having all those classifiers as attributes. Not the data (content) counts, but the use of the classifiers over them i.e. the meta- Now, that only regards data points ‘at rest’ rather: their static properties. Pseudo it may be, by the dictionary literal meaning of that adjective being: Seemingly, but not of fact. Seemingly, to the gullible that wants to believe in fairy tales. Yes, Euro-politicians indeed, in the GDPR.

[Edited to add: this proof.]

Add in ‘traditional’ metadata, info (like, classifiers) about the effects of the content on processing. When your doctor calls, and within ten minutes you call the STD clinic, the content of your call doesn’t need to be encrypted — the conclusion’s already there. That sort of thing. Metadata isn’t protected in the way as in and of itself it will not reveal anything of your persona. It is ‘protected’ (quod non) by being PII, but the identifying data (caller ID &c.&c.) is readily available in systems that every right and purpose to collect them (how else will you phone co. be able to bill you …?). Again, the content may be pseudo’d but – see above. And the sources of auxiliary data will be spread far wider and will be much less protected or less-quality-encrypted/pseudo’d then in the straightforward case, if at all.
Since metadata is partly-but-pre-processed conclusions i.e., information, it’s much more valuable to extortionist conmen, gov’t agencies and other parties of similar moral value. Note that these parties may not care if they inferred the wrong thing like in the above example, they don’t care about false positives but will make you pay anyway due to the difficulty of repudiation and through silently disqualifying you for all sorts of societal benefits like work, respectively and yes that’s too long a sentence. But hence, while you might be busy pseudo’ing as per above, if at all, the problem may not be in that even if you would have made any progress there.

Also: Privacy’s an emergent property. Take the easiest roads: Data minimisation; by design; by default, by rock solid information security. The latter, e.g., by the letter and spirit of the new one on the block cypher, 27701.

That’s it. No question marks, no call for response as you’ll not give any, anyway. Leaving you with:

[Ávila it is, protecting you through the ages. Hehhehheh… gotcha, it’s Monteriggioni in Italy, not quite the size eh?]

Had this post on destructed rebound options disabling lottery-shot society from succeeding. And also, more recently this.
Now [as of writing…], this: Not as much a closure of the outside, or re-entry, but a spongy moulding from the inside.

Recalling what one would have learned from Plato [despite this possibly sounding elitist, which may/may not bother you; either way bringing troubling assessment of your intellect (not being beyond IYI), and of mine ..?], about meritocracies versus equality. That there is no one solution that is best, anytime, anywhere.

With if analysed deeply enough, both approaches circle around a central issue, being the one of heridetaricity – a word now that I coined it – the point already made by some bloke under the name of Adam Smith: All’s well, markets can be perfect [which means REGULATED otherwise they’ll NOT be anywhere near perfect!] etc.etc., but the very fact that economic power amassed, can be handed over to next generations in a family, and often will be, undoing the tabula rasa assumed by meritocracy et al.
For many, this is the purpose of Life. E.g., see the standard immigrants’ response upon entering … the US or anywhere else if of clear mind]: “I may have to work hard all my life, but at least here this will enable my children to have a better life”. So, whether outright (and easily squandered, often will be) through Money, or more subtly, through ‘investment’ in education etc., life’s earnings will be driven forward — this may be seen in the abovesecondmentioned/lined article as the core problem.
Maybe ridiculously-tax the rich / their inheritances so pre-death they’ll be more altruistically bee-hiving ..? To go through the needle’s eye but then, hardly anyone is of suitable moral virtue (of any of the world’s wisdom traditions) anymore to be lured by that parable.

So, to solve meritocracy, one would have to live in a totalitarian global commy state that would allow individual strife but not pass-ons to next generations; all children to be raised by the state. Not a privacy-sensitive or Free utopia it would be.

Darn. What’s next ..?

[Edited to add: Well, there’s this monumental piece too easily ignored: Not only meritocracy, but also democracy going crazy … Truth to be told: Counterarguments don’t hold, are not productive, certainly not helping towards a synthesis…]
[Edited to add to the add: this, on similar lines.]
Edited to add to the add²: this, on how capitalism’s decline looks eerily like communism’s…]

This:

[Moneygrabbers feeling empty, copying the double edge (copying earstwhile simplemindtons-also-labor-projects), still feeling empty. And failing. Toronto]

To start, “When experienced accountants were asked in a study to use a new tax law for deductions that replaced a previous one, they did worse than novices. Erik Dane … calls this phenomenon ‘cognitive entrenchment’.”
and
“They ‘travelled on an eight-lane highway’,” he wrote, “rather than down a single-lane one-way street. They had Range. The successful adapters were excellent at taking knowledge from one pursuit and applying it creatively to another, and at avoiding cognitive entrenchment. … They drew on outside experiences and analogies to interrupt their inclination towards a previous solution that may no longer work. Their skill was in avoiding the same old patterns. In the wicked world, with ill-defined challenges and few rigid rules, range can be a life hack.”
[David Epstein; Range – he continues with a psych description of overtraining (humans), by the way, illuminating qua ML-not-moving-to-AGI]

Anyone recognise a. the accountants’ inability to change their so blatantly flawed trade (association, business model, rules, etc.etc.), b. the limits of still, everywhere too narrowly trained (big fat fact) AI systems ..?

Whereas the a., mostly led by dinos, will go the way of the dinos. Though huge beyond big, Schumpeter’s the latter-day equivalent.
The b., obviously, and also a chance to retain the head start that humans have over AI/ML — if and only if [here, desda for Dutchmen] humans move at blinding speed to change themselves, collectively and individually, overnight into something range-holding. Which, for the average human, may be much too difficult.

But you must! Or be replaced indeed by AI. Remember, you don’t need to outrun AI, just outrun your co-worker on this one. Open your mind ..!

On deaf ears. Too bad.
Well then:

[Art. May remind you of life; London]

“ This is your dream job when your profile fits the role perfectly“… This, in a job posting. Unsure from what millennium it was – not; of course it was one from a couple of weeks ago, but then, also from the time that Time forgot, when job seekers had to compete to fill drudge jobs. Had to be happy to deal with these people, even.

Hah. Hah. The organisations that aren’t aware of today’s seller market, will hire the dunces that are in the same boat. Which is sinking without any sliver of doubt, but they themselves may be the precious few unawares. As in the Dutch saying: A ship aground serves as a beacon at sea.
Big mistake. Huge. [Source: this on IMDb]

Also, what do you want; someone who considers the job a dream one, where all one would have to do is fit one’s profile in the role ..? How wrong is that on numerous aspects, in today’s world of Range ..?
Just don’t waste your and all our time as everyone’s joke of the day, ‘mmmkay ..?

And:

[If you know this is Nieuwegein, you know it’s at the Blockhead conference center, or so]

Hey how is it that anyone would be able to act surprised when a project goes wrong or even at a tangent, when some previous projects did the same, similarly ..?

As if there is a project methodology that requires [hardcore concrete block gateway: IF not(done) Then None shall pass] to investigate all previous projects’ evaluations, to establish which risks re-occur with the current one, and mitigate the risks by implementing the lessons learned ..?
Since at least, all projects close off with such an Evaluation, right? Or [i.e., XOR] no discharge of the project manager; no pay. Evaluation, months after go-live, to establish full experience built with using/maintaining the new system and being able to fully gauge the benefits realised [mostly: not].

Prince II: …
Pino: Prince II In Name Only;
Nepino: Not Even Pino.

Dunces, all those project managers that don’t do the above correctly, and dwell in the above nepino.
Yes, there’s a few one can call ‘experienced’ – experience is learning from mistakes; ones own or preferably one’s next of organisational kin’s – but still they’ll be the few among many in any project team, and are so expensive that the less experienced are hired first. Because you don’t want a successful project, you want to have the PM slot filled. By a blockhead or whatever, why would you mind ..?

Yes indeed, Lessons will be repeated until they’re learned.
But now I’m repeating this. For you. Guess why.

Also in repeat:

[Yes Porto again. Better learn of your mistakes or I will keep on banging this drum.]

For all those that promote ‘transparent’ AI: You want induction to work in a way that it never has in history. Logical fallacies prevent that – if you would want to sate that ‘logic has progressed’, congratulations; you have now declared your own incompetence in these matters.

Yes, there’s thoughtful content around re interpretability, like here [hey I noticed that Medium is becoming the prime platform for reading up on the latest AI developments in all sorts of areas and issues; maybe I should join the frey].
It even delves into ‘interpretability’. Rightfully; progress can be made in little steps there. Transparency, not so much. And it’s not ‘semantics’ because it’s semantics ..!

But the transparency wanters don’t see the difference. Being that what they want, is the black box explaining itself in terms humans can understand.
Which humans; those that are subject to its outcomes? That’ll be all in the lower “IQ” categories [yes I know that is a ridiculous metric mostly used by IYIs]; the upper regions [qua wealth, then, mostly inherited or swindled (qua long-term societal ethics) off the others] will always pay for ‘personal’ services as they’re too decadent to act themselves. But those are the ones already in trouble today.
Explaining: In what way? Revealing the [most often] ever-changing model used for one particular decision ..? The above article, among many, explains [duh] that this is a. difficult, b. an Art even to trained humans. No way that this will be done for all cases, always, everywhere. Because that is the very opposite of what ML deployments are for.

And again, the explainability is about understanding the model, which in turn is stacked upon the idea of modelling itself. Which was devised to understand some complex stuff in the first place, not to predict or so as it was clear from the outset that the model would be too simple always to be able to do that or the modelled would be simple enough (in a cyber(sic)netic sense) already to ‘use’ outright.

And so on, and so forth.

Induction simply doesn’t work for explanations. Summaries of stats is most one could get out of it.

If 50% of your AI project is in making anything work, the other 95% is in humans steering, making decisions, managing and controlling, and interpreting the project and its results.
It’s as if each and every medical study would have to give a complete explanation at grammar school level of all the statistics and (often linear) regression on the research data, over and over again. The difference being that with ML, parts of the maths involved can be proven to be nondeterministic and/or the inverse function (that would form part of the explanation of its functioning) simply doesn’t exist or has an infinite number of solutions.

I’ll stop now. Whatever turn you’d like to take, you’ll run into fundamental issues that will slow down and stop progress. Just swallow the idea that you may be building something that is as intransparent as human thought. Even when the latter would be the ‘rational’ part of thought, not counting the interaction with the seemingly irrational parts, interaction with the body, and with the infinite outside world, etc.

In the end [which is near, qua this post], the question keeps rearing its head: What do you want? – Which over and over again isn’t answered properly so no solution will fit.

Dammit. By trying to outline the scale of the problem, I already keep turning in all directions. I’ll stop now, with:

[Human Life is difficult to explain; Porto]

I take it you all have noticed the issuance of ISO 27701:2019 (here), a.k.a. ISO/IEC 27552 in development..?

Apart from the odd fact that it refers to the 001 and 002 in their :2013 original, but not include the :2014 and :2015 formally ratified updates to the 001. [Rightfully skipping the :2017 since that’s a local variant.]
And apart from the fact that it should mostly be a mapping exercise when (sic; not if) one would have been decently GDPR-compliant per May 25th of last year but then, I know I know, you’re still trying to piece together your 2700x:201y compliance basics like having a ‘register’ [only dunces have a legal-style ‘register’, separate from the IT architectures that should have been around at all Levels as they would be a. a basic requirement for any half+ baked Information/IT management, b. compliance requirement for 2700x/x+1 anyway or how else would you know what you were/are protecting in the first place?

Really. In all the GDPR implementations that I advised/consulted/implemented on (some #36), I seem to have been compliant avant les lettres des exigences et lignes directrices. Apparently, a standard was required. To be compliant with.
If you need a standard to be(come) compliant with an EU rule ‘of law’ [Regulation; note the difference?], you have better things to do, like a study program on Security 101 or rather 0.01 – if you have demonstrated (by wanting to go where apparently you weren’t, only now) such incompetence, at the very least you may want to consider to be released of your duties immediately, with discharge of past ‘performance’, to free up all of your time to get a grip on such basics.
Oh and one could also want a standard to be certified on [‘against’ – a better characterisation]. Admitting you’re joining the circus, not doing serious work rather joining, instead of ..?

Otherwise, the 27701 is just a mapping indeed, from the GDPR req’s to what you’d need to do. Noting also the wording has a lot of ‘can’, ‘may’ et al.

Returning to the intro: Have any of you found any problems, yet, with 27701 ..?
Would want to learn so please reply.

In lieu of kind regards:

[‘In lieu of’ ..?? You mean, through total irrelevance ..? Utrecht Papendorp]

Never mind the risk (of planes going down, full of coach cattle class humans) skyrockets, as long as our profits do too.
And if we go bust, well never mind, we have our many years of bonuses behind us and will soon find another places to pick up the steady flow of them again. And the company will be bailed out by the government since they’re too deeply dependent on our money-robbing scheme; think DoD playthings. Come to think of it; that might be ideal to get rid of most staff [that are complaining about ‘quality’ all the time anyway, we’ll just keep the handful quiet ones that we can squeeze out and then throw away b/c they have whole families depending on the paychecks, for food, shelter, and elementary healthcare. If we’d know what that would be.
And also this; the customer is the one who pays and damn the society we live in.

But what to expect in a country that isn’t a society, by lightyears… Outlined here and here. A constitutional crisis may be the least of the worries; necessary as it may be to fix the foundational flaw(s). The lack of frontier and open space to escape, was unique. Now, how deep is the pain of transformation going to have to be, to unroot the false premises of society ..?

Not for SFFS, I mean. Schadenfreudefernsehen. The world cares, even towards evil.

Oh well; this:

[Oh hey, there’s still Space to explore and colonise! Guess which country’s trying to extend their head start ..?]

Before you all jump to re-re-rerunnning the real ‘Space vid (here), asking for a friend:

If one stores a bitcon wallet on a satellite in (well, relatively) outer space, say beyond the stratosphere, would its value be tax exempt?

[Edited to add: That leaving-out of an i was a typo, but I’ll leave it there to ponder the appropriateness of the result]
Like, one shoots a Tesla into space, loaded with stellar music and some machine holding bitcoin, or even better: holding some smart contracts in blocks of the ‘chain plus some mining and comms stuff, which earthy tax authority would have authority over that all ..? Could some company linked to the above carrier have some ‘surpreme’ DAO doing nothing but being surpreme (the holding at a distance, and what distance is outer space), catching all revenue but escaping not earth’s gravity but earth’s tax collectors ..? The DAO is silent [new times, new spelling], and the ‘minority’ shareholder(s) on earth calls the shots (?).

Oh but will banks fork out the Bs and Bs in cold cash on earth with backing from coins in space ..? How would mr repo man operate? Seems already problematic with the far time-nearer Mars colonies, right? Or oh, the latter aren’t nearer, necessarily.

[Edited to add: A month and a half ago, Amazon asked for permission to launch 3200 satellites. They need a lot of ‘storage’ out there.]

Whatever. Your thoughts, please; your 2c_{space-currency}.
And:

[When the orb crashes back to the blue planet, it’ll be not worth its salz near the burg much]

A couple of days ago, there was this honour awarded to Denmark by not visiting, by youknowwho.
For the reason you’re all aware of, officially [i.e., per tweet] so declared.

1. As was in the news, too, the true reasons for wanting to ‘buy Greenland’ were in the ground. ‘Strategic’ interests indeed, for once, not [only !!] qua global-geographical location as such;
2. Any sale would actually have ‘helped’ the climate, but then, in the extreme negative;
3. What would it cost? In $ that may not be worth their exchange rate, in € [see below under F] or in DKK ..? Either way, it would create a currency demand-followed-by-a-supply shock. And the price might be [Trump-tower-ft²-price]x[Greenland’s total ft²] = … the 2^nd part is 2.331555e+13
4. The idea one just buys colonies with their inhabitants is beyond idiocy;
5. Inhabitants would either be slaves by being sold with the land, or forced into exile (into the same country i.e. Denmark) which also is slavery. Last time I looked, that is unconstitutional on both the seller and the buyer side but praxis mat differ (not as much on the seller side, one sees);
6. As Greenland is an autonomous country in the Kingdom of Denmark and the latter is part of the EU, one would expect the EU to have a say in the spin-off of its territory, no? Is there such a thing as a Section 50subB or so regarding such outlier bit of the EU itself? Would want to know since other countries have similar outliers. He who sells what isn’t his own, buys it back or goes to prison. But that’s an old short-seller trade law of stock exchanges, not that the erstwhile prospective buyer would know anything about this since I wrote ‘law’;
7. for Greenland would better fit, geographically, culturally, strategically, climate-wise, etc.etc.etc. with Canada. With CETA in place, we’d have even some more interesting free trade route/logistics options… Which leads me to consider a referendum:
   1. Remain with the Kingdom;
   2. Be independent;
   3. Join Canada;
   4. Jump commonwealths from Kingdom to Queen;
   5. Be sold to the US with the proceeds going to Denmark for centuries of loyal subsidies;
   6. The same, but with proceeds going to the populace. See C., at some 57.000 census that would be something in the vicinity of 362M per head. Hmmm…;

   The overwhelming vote would go to 2., with 1. close by; there will be someone [you know who we mean, Ole!] who for a minute would consider 5. but he would be clubbed before the vote already.

8. Also, if sold, what about GDPR et al ..?
9. will stop now.

[Where Greenland has a lot of ice, still, and Iceland has a lot of green, this is Lakefield CND]

Let’s Finnish with something from 1904: