How To Watch TV News

Posted on July 3, 2018 by smellincoffee

How to Watch TV New
© 1992 Neil Postman, Steve Powers
192 pages (2008 edition)

Don’t.

Well, that was easy.  From television insider Steve Powers and technological critic Neil Postman comes this slim book, How To Watch Television News, which explains how televised news is produced and scrutinizes the platform’s ability to deliver seriously useful information.  Although  this is not a takedown of television news — at the end they merely encouraged readers to reduce their TV news consumption by a third —   it doesn’t foster trust in the medium.   Powers’ insight reveals an industry which scrambles to stay ahead of the latest developments, seizing on whatever is most likely to keep eyes on the screen and keep the ratings high.    Most readers are aware, of course, that television news programs play to the ratings:  no serious journalist would focus their attention on the goings-on of celebrities otherwise.  What we might fail to appreciate, however, is how carefully orchestrated television shows are, from the music chosen to the arrangement of news sequences,  designed to draw viewers in and keep them fixated.  Because of the pace, the need to keep as many viewers’ attention as possible,  and the amount of production work required to put each show together, serious journalistic pieces are impossible for something as small as the nightly news, whether it’s a half-hour local news spot or an hour-long nationwide show.  To truly evaluate what’s happening in the world, Postman and Powers maintain, we need print media — stories that allow us to consider ideas at length, not merely be distracted by them as objects on the screen.  If readers were to reflect on the news and the commericals which it actually serves, they might see through the illusion — and see that just as a mouthwash commericial is more about social acceptnance than mouthwash, a news show is more of a show than the actual news.

Despite its multitude of references to the eighties, How to Watch TV News is far from outdated. Powers’ 2008 revision updated some references and tech, but Postman’s contributions are timeless. Some of them will be familiar to anyone who has read Postman before, from his view that different technologies foster different beliefs, to the belief that television has trivialized and eroded culture in general.  How To Watch Television News is less about television, however, and more about news, the barrage of facts we’re told are important. Postman and Powers help us to look for the stage behind the story: why are these facts being presented,   what judgments are we expected to accept in viewing them? In giving recommendations to the reader, however, Postman urges readers to realize they don’t have to have an opinion about everything.  This has never been more relevant than today, when  the social media cloud that we’re all forced to live in – -because it rains on those of us who don’t use it, when people insist on talking about what they’re tweeting or reading — constantly pushes us to react to everything as if it were important. We are still a nation — and now a globe — amused to death, frazzled by distraction.

Also from Neil Postman:
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business 
The Disappearance of Childhood
Building a Bridge to the 18th Century

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The survivor

Posted on July 2, 2018 by smellincoffee
When I visit towns I like to poke around their libraries, and I recently discovered a book in a public library — city undisclosed for the book’s protection — which  astonished me. It’s hard to make out from this graphic, but the first due date stamped is November 23, 1931..  That wouldn’t be unusual for a university library, where great swathes of the collection sit undisturbed for eons, their treasure of 1930s farm reports unvisited, but for a public library where books are constantly being destroyed or declared missing by patrons, it’s kind of incredible.   The book in question, for those curious, is Michael and his Lost Angel, a play.  Many of the books in this section also hadn’t moved since the 1970s, despite frequent and steady borrowing throughout the forties, fifties, and sixties. It’s as if the people in the town decided, in the 1970s, to give up on reading and watch Family Feud instead. 
Let’s  see an eBook file last that long without its data being corrupted! 
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The Art of Invisibility

Posted on June 28, 2018 by smellincoffee

The Art of Invisibility: The World’s Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data
© 2017 Kevin Mitnick
320 pages

So, you want to be invisible online? Great. All you’ll need is three separate computers — one for your top secret business, one for your banking, and one for your everyday use; a few new email addresses,  a handful of burner phones, a large pile of cash to buy gift cards and electronics without leaving a credit trace, a slightly larger pile if you intend on paying strangers to buy said cards and electronics for you,  an ability to habitually lie, and the concentration of a criminal mastermind to remember which accounts you’re using on which computer so you never accidentally blend your Top Secret identity with your real one. Child’s play.

Kevin Mitnick knows a thing  or two about the necessity and the difficulty of staying invisible. He spent two and a half years as a fugitive from the FBI, wanted for hacking, unauthorized access, and wire fraud. These days he works as a security consultant,  and in The Art of Invisibility he provides a point-by-point tour of the surveillance web created by the internet and telecommunications infrastructure. There are also specialized chapters on surveillance in the workplace, and maintaining privacy while traveling abroad.  Mitnick’s survey and advice have at least two audiences:  most of the book can be appreciated by a technologically savvy and privacy-minded individual who wants to know more, while a smaller but not insignificant portion of the book, somewhere between 30 and 40 percent,  would be of interest to the truly paranoid.

Although Mitnick does cover material would be a given to those with an interest in security —  don’t use public WIFI networks for banking or other sensitive business, even if they’re password-protected, that kind of thing — most of his information is less elementary. He’s thorough, explaining how tools like email and hardware encryption work,  where they’re vulnerable, and why they’re useful.   The Tor browser  is a mainstay of recommendation, as it allows users to be relatively anonymous and evade filters that restrict access in territories controlled by authoritarian states like China by redirecting the user’s activity across a series of nodes. The nodes chosen are random, and it’s possible to encounter a node controlled by surveying authorities. If a person uses Tor on the same computer and accesses the same accounts as they normally do, however, then if they’re under active surveillance by someone their token efforts at anonymity are for naught.  People in witness protection can’t go to family reunions, and those who want remain invisible can’t muddle their identities together. If you want to have an email account and use Tor,  Mitnick advises, then use Tor and create a new email account. The same concept applies across communication technologies: Mitnick was caught in the 1990s because despite using multiple cell phones, he was using them in the same location (a motel room), and thereby connecting to the same cell tower every single time — allowing  the FBI to collaborate with the local telecom to get a fix on their man.

The Art of Invisibility is far more comprehensive and helpful than Mitnick’s previous books on intrusion and social engineering.  Mitnick offers his exhaustive tour of vulnerabilities not to scare readers into retreating to a monastery, but to point out — this is what you’re up against, this is what you can do about it, this is where you’ll still be weak. Like a security consultant’s tour of your home, The Art of Invisibility shakes expectations, and disturbs the illusion of safety — while at the same timeVanishingly few people are capable of taking all of Mitnick’s advice: even he doesn’t. He leaves the decision to the reader how best to integrate this information with their own practices. Everyone can benefit from better cyber-security hygiene, even if it’s something as basic as keeping your cellphone locked, running adblock to disable malicious scripts on websites,  and keeping SmartTvs that never stop listening to you out of your house.

Related:

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Forgotten Founders

Posted on June 22, 2018 by smellincoffee

America’s Forgotten Founders
© 2011 ed. Gary Gregg II
185 pages

After reading several thoughtful full-length biographies in this series, I expected the same quality in miniature from this collection. That is not the case at all; after a lengthy opening essay on what constitutes a founding father, and why some are forgotten and others not, the reader is treated to ten brief articles about revolutionary-area personalities. Some of these men are unequivocally  not forgotten, like Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine. A few others are more obscure, but the information included here is so slight that one could just as well read any entry in a biographical dictionary about them. I liked the organization of each article: a biographical sketch, an outline of their chief contributions, and an excerpt of their writing. There’s just not enough content here. One gentleman’s writing excerpt is the Preamble of the Constitution. The full-length volumes in this series, particularly American Cicero and The Cost of Liberty are much more helpful.

The men considered:  James Wilson, George Mason, Gouverneur Morris, John Jay, Roger Sherman, John Marshall, John Dickinson, Tom Paine, Patrick Henry, and John Witherspoon. According to the introduction, many names were submitted and considered, but the editor chose the names which were suggested most often. The native American and female contributors teased at in the introduction don’t actually get sketches.

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Daemon

Posted on June 21, 2018 by smellincoffee

 Daemon
© 2006 Daniel Suarez
444 pages

SO YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION
YES NO

When a incomparable programming genius known for his immersive games and uncanny AI dies, his greatest creation awakes.  A sophisticated program running in the background begins putting into action a plan that will remain unknown to the reader throughout most of the novel, hidden except for when its actions result in death or global panic.  So begins a technological thriller, featuring a faceless enemy which grows more daunting by the moment as it steadily increases its power, imposing a new technological order over a world that has grown too complex for its own good. The world is to be reprogrammed, and resistance is futile.

The kernel of Daemon’s story is that a doomed genius (Matthew Sobol) once courted by the NSA created a program which scanned the news for announcement of his death, and then began a hostile takeover of anything powered by silicon chips. Effecting the deaths of opponents, recruiting human agents through a video game, taking over computerized systems and using their resources for its own expansion, it lurks in the background  except for when it issues press releases to manipulate public reaction. The Daemon’s greatest strength is that it is a distributed program, a global botnet;  it has no master server to destroy, no switch which can be thrown. The Daemon is autonomous, persistent, and pervasive. When it sends instructions to its human agents through wireless headsets, it concentrates its demands for action into YES/NO prompts. While Sobol presumably could have created an AI that can parse spoken sentences, the nature of this machine-human communication makes the Dameon seem like an alien intelligence, instead of a naughty instance of Alexa.

As the story progresses, readers encounter a pair of battered men who are trying to unravel the Daemon and expose it, as well as a few individuals who come agents of the Daemon.  The Daemon entices them in different ways, each according to their ambitions:  a sociopathic identity thief finds his calling in enlisting to the machine’s service  as its greatest champion, the  Sauron to its Morgoth (or the Saruman to its Sauron, but without the initial resistance), and a criminal is given freedom, and a frustrated TV tabloid reporter is given the chance to become a Serious Journalist.  All they have to do is listen to the remorseless voice in their head and follow its instructions. The Daemon’s ability to manipulate systems grows throughout the novel, to the point where it controls physical infrastructure producing autonomous weaponized vehicles.

I had no idea that this book was written in 2006, as the amount of now mundane electronic control within it is perfectly in sync with our own world. The only clue that this novel had a few years on it was the Daemon’s inability to parse complete sentences, but as mentioned that actually helped reinforced the Daemon’s other-ness.  Daemon is an unnerving thriller, one capable of unsettling the reader with the kind of world we’re headed into, in which authentic freedom and privacy are as impossible as Triceratops flank steaks.  As successful a thriller as it is, Daemon also succeeds in raising questions about how politics, society, and the economy will be transformed by ubiquitous networking;  although it only offers a glimpse into early disruption,  one can’t help but think that the present state of affairs will be as alien in a century as early 19th century agrarian society is to our own.

Sidenote:  Sobol was known for a World War 2 shooter and a game in which one opens the gates of hell. Sounds kiiiiiiiiiinda like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.  Considering that Sobol’s company was named CyberStorm, I wonder if he was inspired by John Romero — cocreator of the two programs mentioned above, and founder of a company called Ion Storm. (See Masters of Doom).

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Top Ten Tuesday: Summer TBR

Posted on June 20, 2018 by smellincoffee

This week, the Artsy Reader Girl inquires: whaddya reading at the beach? Or this summer, anyway.  This was to have gone up yesterday, but what’s 24 hours between friends?

1. Something in American lit, because I’m…a little behind on my Classics Club participation, and I like to do something to celebrate Independence Day. I’ll probably finish The Sun Also Rises, which I’ve been grudgingly picking my way through.

2. The Invaders, some speculative anthropological history that posits the Neanderthals fell because we had man’s best friend and they didn’t.

3. How to Watch TV News, Neil Postman. I ordered the “updated” version of 2008, with a supplement by another author.

4. The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future . At the beginning of the year I posted a list of ten titles I hoped to read in 2018, and the rest were finished by April.

5. The Essential Russell Kirk.  Kirk is an extraordinary author, who I first read in disagreement but quickly realized had an intelligent, principled perspective that I could learn from even if I remained unconvinced.

6. The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. Robert Wright.

7. How the Post Office Created America, Winifred Gallagher. This one is intended as one of my ‘celebrating America’ books, set for around Independence Day.

8. Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society, Bill Bryson. History of science and Bill Bryson? Say no more.

9. Forgotten Founders, ed. Gary L. Gregg II, Mark David Hall. Biographical articles about long-forgotten founding figures of the former federation (sorry),  including women and at least one native American.  Also Indendence Day reading, but continuing in a series that I’ve been reading the last few Independence Days. Full works in this series have included: American Cicero, Forgotten Founder & Drunken Prophet,  The Cost of Liberty, and (almost) Founding Federalist.  I didn’t finish that last one last year because I was reading too much about the Constitutional Convention all at once.

10. The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age, Scott Woolley. 

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Fire and Blood

Posted on June 20, 2018 by smellincoffee

Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico
 © 1973 T.R. Fehrenbach
675 pages

Fire and Blood is an epic history of Mexico, one that begins at the dawn of time and takes its time moving on.  Case in point: the 20th century is addressed in the last 10% of the book.   If nothing else, Fehrenbach should be lauded for a historical survey that focuses more on the past rather than the recently-expired present.  Fire and Blood is dauntingly comprehensive, taking no shortcuts; not only are the cultures of the Aztecs and Maya plumbed, but when the 16th century arrives Fehrenbach pauses to render a history of the Spanish empire, and readers are continually fed with changes on its evolution as they affect Mexico.  The arrival of the Spanish is a pivotal moment,  as they destroyed the old tribal order — and imperial order, while easy to declare, was  harder to realize.  A dominant theme within the book is a search for Mexican identity, and it begins with the Spanish disruption.  Spanish authorities organized their new domain into a multitude of racial castes, with varying privileges and duties depending on whether one was a Spaniard born in Spain, a Spaniard born on the peninsula, or racially mixed in some way. Over time, and especially after the Spanish empire collapsed of its own corruption with Napoleonic assistance,  the mixed Spanish-and-Native population was dominant,  but even so Mexico still writhed trying to create social, economic, and political order for itself. Some wanted a republic, some a monarchy; some wanted to destroy the Church utterly, some to embrace it.  Struggles over land a la the brothers Gracchai also drove politics.  All this turmoil tended to produce autocratic leaders, not principled democrats,  and even once democracy had established itself one political party held sway.

Prose-wise, Fire and Blood is approachable history; the history itself, however, as the title indicates, is harsh, unforgiving, and often violent.  It took me several weeks to finish, with frequent breaks,  because the constant strife seemed relentless.  The content an style make this a valuable resource for those interested in learning about the roots of Mexican culture, however.

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The Switch

Posted on June 19, 2018 by smellincoffee

The Switch
© 2017 Joseph Finder
384 pages

Picture this. You’re a senatorial aide whose boss is technologically illiterate enough to be dangerous. The senator’s MacBook, containing information that was never supposed to leave the Senate offices,  has been inadvertently switched with someone else’s at an airport security checkpoint.  The guy who mistook the senator’s MacBook for his knows something is screwy, because when you tried to get it back you pretended to be someone else. Your  clumsy attempt to hire an bagman from the Dark Net backfired when the target got nervous and ran over your employee.   Now you’re thinking this hapless owner of a failing coffee company is some sort of criminal mastermind, and he thinks he’s being targeted by some cold-blooded Agent Smith type at Fort Meade.  In reality, you’re both goofballs not taken seriously by their wives and bosses,  who have manged to turn an innocent mistake into a light action thriller which is accidentally funny, despite pitting secret government goons on opposing sides trying to kill a nice buffoon of a main character.

The Switch  is…extremely light reading — basically,  what might happen if James Patterson tried a novel with cybersecurity and surveillance themes. I  was often entertained by it, sometimes in ways not intended by the author.  I would probably try the author again to see if  the quality varies, but only for the mental equivalent of a lazy morning on the couch.  I like the general premise of this novel, but the execution was often bizaare: one journalist character claims to have gotten Hillary Clinton’s oatmeal cookie recipe from their whistleblower dropbox, and an NSA character refers to a flashdrive as something like a thingamabob. He was wearing cowboy boots and flannel at the time.  I only got through that scene by pretending the NSA guy was playing some bizarre mind game with the main character that required him to pretend to be an insidious country bumpkin who can also delete all of your from Google, Facebook,  and even your favorite craft beer website. (I’d wager a bottle of IPA that Finder has watched The Net at some point and thought it was worth borrowing liberally from.)

In short, The Switch is kind of like the Rush Hour movies — kind of preposterous, but entertaining.

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50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True

Posted on June 18, 2018 by smellincoffee

50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True
© 2011 Guy Harrison
458 pages

“Just because it’s vivid, detailed, and expressed with confidence and emotion…doesn’t mean it’s true.”

Chances are you know someone who harbors what you know to be irrational beliefs, and chances are they hold the same opinion about you. It isn’t easy to stay sober with a monkey brain trying to impose order on the chaos of life,  sometimes mesmerizing itself with its own fiction.  50 Popular Beliefs consists of an introduction, fifty brief essays debunking various icons of culture from ghosts to horoscopes, and a conclusion.  Those who count themselves skeptics already will find no surprises, and should not anticipate anything that will add greatly to their own knowledge, like The Demon Haunted World or Why People Believe Weird Things. This is straightforward debunking, along with some information on how we are so easy to fool — especially when we’re fooling ourselves. The ideal audience is people who regard themselves as well-informed and appropriately skeptical, but who are exposed to some ideas so often that they’re wanting confirmation that yes, horoscopes really are BS.

While many of the essays address areas of constant skeptic scorn — astrology, homeopathy, ancient aliens, Area 51,  Holocaust denial —  Guy Harrison also covers matters that aren’t low-hanging fruit, like the value of television and the dimensions of race. He explores race as a concept, then some stereotypes about it in regards to sports and intelligence. The pieces have a strong personal flavor, as Harrison uses his own experiences to try to understand those of others, and he attempts to experiment directly when he can. For instance, in the chapter on psychics he successfully cold-reads someone, and in the chapter on faith healing he attends a Benny Hinn performance. The pieces are sometimes too short to do their topic service, which I think will expose them to “what about” rebuttals as believers present similar convictions from a slightly different angle  Not every article has the same length, however;  Harrison is partcularly passionate about the veracity of the Moon landings and that essays goes on for a bit rebutting the various arguments for their being a fraud.

The most valuable part of 50 Beliefs, personally, are its resources for extended reading. I saw more than a few titles in here which I’d either long forgotten about or had never heard of at all.  Harrison has written more in this genre, but I’m more interested in Brian Dunning’s new book dissecting conspiracies or The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe’s  October release of a book using their name.

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Brinkmanship

Posted on June 16, 2018 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Typhon Pact: Brinksmanship
© 2012 Una McCormack
352 pages

Who’s up for the Cuban Missile Crisis….in spaaaaaaace? When an otherwise friendly nation on the borders of the Federation and two of its allies signs a treaty with a hostile power, allowing them bases for repair and refueling along the Federation border,  Starfleet is understandably concerned — and doubly so when news arrives that a fleet is enroute to supply the bases for their new tenants, carrying chemicals that could be used in biogenic warfare attacks on the Federation. While the USS Enterprise speeds to meet with the Space Cubans to work the diplomatic angle, the USS Aventime is dispatched to do a little friendly snooping near the proposed base nearest the Federation border.   When the Cardassians — who, along with the Ferengi are the other two threatened allies —  arrive ready for war, and the Space Cubans catch wind of possible spies inserted in their country, events begin to spiral out of control, heading towards a war that no one wants but no one seemingly can avoid.  But the drama unfolding in open view is only the smoke and mirrors for another maneuver,  one that is using parties on both sides.

I bought this book a couple of years back,  intrigued by the possible historical parallels and interested in a book which includes both Picard and Dax.   The primary appeal of the book is learning about the Tzenkethi, who along with the Breen were pretty much black holes before the Typhon Pact series began. Romulans, we know, love, and fear;  while the Gorn and Tholians can be wrapped up in primal fears about reptiles and insects, respectively.   The Tzenkethi are presented as a very stable, very hierarchical society who have a natural affinity for the Space Cubans, another stable and hierarchical society.  The Tzenkethi view the Federation as some kind of chaos monster, however, the epitome of their every social fear:  it’s all argument,  class-and-racial intermixing, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria!  Who can tell what they’ll do, what new planet will sudden fall under their spell?

Having read beyond this series, I knew that no epic war between the Federation and the Typhon Pact broke out, so the drama was largely dampened for me. I assumed the drama would keep ramping up until something happened out of left field to defuse things,  and that’s more or less what happens. Still, it’s nice to see Picard being the commanding diplomat again, and I’ll never say no to a story with Ezri Dax and her ship,  in part because the Relaunch developed her in such a commendable way — turning the awkward 20-something shrink of 2000 into the Captain on the Bridge, and in part because the Aventine looks much different than the other Starfleet ships and I ‘m ever curious about it.

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