Blog Post #9

 In the Age of AI

This time for my blog post, I will be reviewing and discussing some of the aspects from the video above about artificial intelligence.

To begin, China's development and focus on AI as discussed during the first part of the video is quite frightening to see. The growth the country has over the time has been incredible, but with their track record, I can definitely see China using the technology in negative ways.

Not to mention that the data being gathered in China is so immense due to their population that it is quite concerning that they will inevitably have the lead in technology due to it. At that point, who knows what China will or could do?

They could go and make an authoritarian surveillance state like described, one which I would fear of for a lack of privacy and sincerity. The jaywalking technology that shames people is a prime example of it as it publicly shames people for doing it no matter the situation.

However, on the other hand, in the US multiple positives were talked about AI. For example, the truck driving AI technology company, Embark was shown, and I didn't realize how far they were along in the process, as I thought it would take much longer to get trucks on the road like they had. 

That said, technology will replace jobs and that is inevitable, but sad, as those affected have to find some way of getting another job or another situation like Saginaw Michigan will occur. Especially when in the future we will need different skills, not all of which can afford to learn.

As for one last positive, AI will allow us to be a lot more efficient than we ever were before and learn small techniques that increase productivity or probability for something we do each day.

Privacy is important to talk about when discussing AI, as this data being farmed by companies like Google and Facebook is an important topic related to privacy. Advertising before Google and Facebook's data they gather was inconsistent as advertisers didn't know if they were advertising to their target market, but now they can at the expense of personal privacy.

Data is gathered on individuals before they are even aware and without their consent a huge negative con for artificial intelligence.

National security on the other hand is likely to be heavily increased with AI technology such as facial recognition as shown during the first part of the video along with the part talking about the Uyghurs. 

During these parts of the video, they show numerous examples about how from these technologies' governments can monitor suspicious individuals or determine if someone is suspicious or dangerous to the government and from there stop any potential threats to national security. 

It's basically an increased surveillance of what the five eyes are doing through the usage of technology.

Online security has become much more important due to the huge amount of data harvesting, that of which if it got leaked would expose so much information about people that there would be a massive problem for numerous people around the world.

One specific problem would be identity theft, that of which would become much easier with the information discovered from data gathered online from companies such as Google and Facebook.

So, do you fear technology after watching this video? I certainly fear some things, but I am still optimistic about the numerous upsides and trust that everything will eventually turn out in the right way just like some people in the video mentioned.

Blog Post #8

 Each One Teach One: Five Eyes

What is the Five Eyes?

The Five eyes is the most significant intelligence alliance with an intricate web of global intelligence, and a covert club of members like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It is widely regarded as the "gold standard for intelligence alliances." 

Origins and Secretiveness

The five eyes stems back from World War 2, where the US and the UK formed an agreement to share intelligence to help against fighting the Axis Powers. This alliance then persisted after the war ended and through the cold war until today, however it now includes Canada (joined in 1948), Australia, and New Zealand (both joined in 1956).

The original document was only 7 pages long, but it was revised and added to several times between 1946 and 1955 when the new agreement was enacted. The most recent version of the agreement has not been declassified.

The nickname Five Eyes is a shorthand derived from the stamp intelligence documents would have on them that marked them as only for the Five Eyes. The stamp read, “TOP SECRET- AUS/CAN/NZ/UK/US EYES ONLY.”   

The alliance is heavily secret and covert, and as such it wasn't even known of by the prime minister of Australia, George Whitlam until 1973. The public also didn't know of it until 2005, and the full text of the original agreement from 1946 wasn't released to the public until 2010.

Five Eyes

Relationships

The Five Eyes alliance held a very important factor the many relationships, not only between the members of the alliance, but also some outside of it.

Most important to note is that the alliance helped forge trust and the basis for a stronger cooperation between the UK and US during the Cold War.

However, the five eyes has also cooperated with countries like Denmark, France, Norway, and the Netherlands (all of which are considered a part of the "Nine Eyes"). The fourteen eyes also exists, which includes everyone in the Nine Eyes plus Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. 

That said, the "Fourteen Eyes" official name is SIGINT Seniors Europe (SSEUR) and the primary objective is to coordinate the exchange of military signals, which is a lot more specific in comparison to the five eyes surveillance which is mainly for national security.

Responsibilities

Each country in the five eyes is responsible for monitoring a specific portion of the world, as shown in the map below.

Britain monitors Europe, Western Russia, Middle East, and Hong Kong. United States monitors the Middle East as well, China, Russia, Africa, and the Caribbean. Australia is responsible for South and East Asia. New Zealand's territory is the South Pacific and Southeast Asia. Canada's is the interior of Russia, China, and parts of Latin America. 

However, note that most information gathered actually comes from multiple members and as such helping each other is essential in this alliance. In fact, sometimes people have trouble telling where the information came from because of the great cooperation and just conclude that it came from the five eyes. This was why it was so detrimental that New Zealand refused to share information to the five eyes for decades.

Finally, the other responsibility the countries have is part of the deal itself. The Five Eyes alliance revolves around a deal that is broken down into two parts: products and methods. Basically, the alliance agreed to share not only the information they gathered (the product), but also how they collected said intelligence (methods and techniques). 

In turn, this has led to an unprecedented era of surveillance and information sharing that continues to shape the world’s approach to national security.   

Downsides

Now, the five eyes has downsides too, it's not all rainbows and roses here. For one, the development of technology has been a problem for the Five eyes, especially encryption. Members are unsure of whether the privacy for citizens outweighs potential security threats they could discover by accessing this encryption.

As such, the intelligence network is a double-edged sword. It enables governments to have the power to uphold national security, but it also allows for the loss of personal privacy. 

This was heavily demonstrated in 2013 with Snowden's (shown to the right) whistleblowing that revealed extensive data harvesting activities of the alliance. Not to mention that data breaches of information such as this continue to pose a disadvantage to the five eyes because the alliance is founded on deep trust.

While the Five Eyes alliance certainly plays a crucial role in global security, it’s equally important to remember that privacy forms a cornerstone of democratic societies. As such, the alliance’s activities highlight the need for a delicate balance between security and individual rights—a balance that remains a significant topic of ongoing debates.   

However, it is up to you to decide if potentially sacrificing your personal privacy to stop over fifty terror attacks in the US and abroad is worth it.

Blog Post #7

 Privacy and Data Collection

Our world today online is much different than it was when I was born about 20 years ago. A massive majority of people now use the internet and as a result get data collected about them. 

If one does not know this already, companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other companies that you utilize their products online, track and collect data about you. From Google search histories, to likes on Facebook pages, to what you have written in your cloud-shared Microsoft document, all of the companies can know that.

The effect on us

Some may be perfectly happy with companies knowing this about them as they likely think "what's so bad about it?"

The main way this issue along with many others like it affects us is by causing everyone to have only "15 seconds of being anonymous" as mentioned in the first video with Juan Enriquez. Anonymity is very important to people as people learn, since without it you can't stop people from learning things about you that you rather not let them learn.

For example, let's say you have an irrational fear of fish that you don't want others to know about, but in our day in age with the internet that is quite hard to do. Same thing applies when one applies for a job, as your employer can likely learn a lot from just looking at your online presence on social media or through searches. 

From this it is also important to note how we can also learn many things about people we know online, so like Orpheus, maybe you should not look too deeply into your close friends, lover, family, etc.

Also as demonstrated in the second video, this is also not exclusive to the online world either. The police and government are also using this technology to gather data on you and then store it for safekeeping just in case since storage costs are now lower than before.

Finally, in the last video it talks about how aspects of the internet such as revenge porn is problems that need to be addressed as it can happen to anyone as our online civil rights are at stake.

What should the government do?

Well as mentioned the government themselves collect data on us, so I would doubt the government would change much as why would they hinder themselves?

That said, preferably the government should pass privacy laws that increase privacy of everyday people from not only companies, but also from the government themselves would it be online or offline. 

People don't take it too kindly to be tracked without their consent, so the government should only allow this collection of data after consent or after enough evidence can be collected to have reasonable doubt (basically a search warrant.) 

Outside of those cases, tracking and data collection should not be allowed as it provides too much power to companies and the government while making the individual suffer. 

Also as seen in the last video, more legislation needs to be passed to counteract these online threats posed to us as individuals through mediums such as explicit photos, background searches (a popular way of "cancelling" now-a-days), and overall harassment online.

What can we do?

Like mentioned in the first video, everyone can decrease the amount of data about themselves online by being careful about what they post and by refraining from overuse of the internet. Users can also utilize things like duckduckgo or firefox to further increase their privacy.

We can also petition the government to pass laws that help protect our privacy from companies and the government itself as mentioned during the section above.

Video 3 also shows how we can use encrypted technologies like text messages, facetime, and whatsapp to avoid government surveillance, but it is also important to note that this does not fully protect one as there is always backdoors into products such as these.

Finally, the last video mentions that we can take some legal actions against certain online actions, but the results of doing this are heavily varied and also plagued with many legal loopholes and such that cause either cases to go on for much longer than they should or not conclude in the right way at all.

Video 1:

Video 2:

Video 3:

Video 4

(Video 4 cannot be shown here for some weird reason, so click on the link if you wish to watch.)

Blog Post #6

 Antiwar Obscurity

During the progressive era around the time period of World War one, America had numerous anti-war voices around the country. This culminated in Woodrow Wilson's election where he stated he wasn't going to go to war, but then in reality we did. 

America is in a similar state today and has been for the past 20 years or so. Numerous voices have been made against war spanning from the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq to the most recent conflicts in Israel and Ukraine. 

That said, the progressive era had many of these voices persecuted and thrown in jail basically censoring the naysayers. Today on the other hand, they are not persecuted as they once were, but they are very obscure and hard to find in comparison to before, so why is this the case?

My take on this topic being so obscure now is that it is in response to the numerous changes that have happened since the progressive era, in order to accomplish a similar goal as before. 

Simply put, I believe those that once persecuted the antiwar voices are now not trying to persecute them, as they realize they would lose, but instead silencing them by popularizing other voices. Sites like Antiwar.com and The American Conservative, I had never heard of before this assignment, and the reason is because I think someone is trying to stop them from being widespread popular.

To add on to this, in the age we are in with social media and mass communication everywhere, it is a lot harder for the antiwar opinion to be heard.

For starters, news sources now focus on all the "dramatic, scary, or negative" stories, all of which can be an accurate description of conflicts or wars. As such, news sources cover these stories just like how they cover school shootings a lot for the same purpose. More dramatic, more views, and more revenue.

Social media, on the other hand, promotes a very big concept of polarization because of echo chambers. 

The basic definition of an echo chamber is where one person hears or sees only their opinion. In social media platforms like Facebook, this occurs because of the data that is gathered about the individual while using the site, and as a result of this data, opinions differing from their own are silently not shown to the individual while ones that agree with their sentiment are.

It is important to understand that these echo chambers exist, as without this understanding one can spiral into a circle of confirmation bias where they eventually could outright reject other opinions different from their own or even become more extreme in their stance.

So due to the mass communication present in news and social media, along with a possible influence behind the scenes that is trying to not popularize the opinion of anti-war, I believe this is why I had never heard of these sites before, especially since I never had antiwar in any of my echo chambers before.

Blog Post #5

 Learnings from Each One Teach One

This past week my fellow peers put on some amazing presentations that give me more insight into the realm of communication technologies such as radio, newspapers, and Bluetooth.

So now to honor their incredible efforts and try to extend their reach of helpful knowledge, I will discuss these topics here!

Radio

The first presentation that will be discussed will be the one of the radio.

The first radio was created because of the discovery of electromagnetic waves. As such, the technology revolutionized the communication industry as it allowed mass communication easily without newspapers, which took also way longer for people to receive because of travel times. 

Because of this, radio boomed from 1930 to 1950 and this time is recognized as the golden age of radio. Eventually, the FCC was created because of the radio, and they now help control and organize radio stations. 

Shown here is one of the old vintage radios from the 1940s.

Newspapers

The next technology is that of the newspaper, which happened to be a lot older than I thought as newspapers can be found as old as during Roman times. 

The printing press heavily boosted their popularity and Sweden was the first country to give the freedom of the press. The US eventually gave freedom of the press as well about a hundred years later. In fact, the first newspaper in the US got shut down due to censorship. 

However, like mentioned during the radio section newspapers had some constraints. First, for one to receive the newspapers they had to be given it in person. This was not a problem for big cities, where most newspapers could be found, but for rural areas it practically meant they would very rarely receive news, and if they did it would likely be outdated. 

The USPS tried to solve this in America, but travel times were still quite long during the time since there were no automobiles or airplanes to decrease the travel times.

The other downside was the fact that they had to be printed. Unlike the radio, newspapers costed a lot to produce because of the numerous amounts of paper and ink that had to be used, and this problem was further exaggerated before the printing press as it was hard to mass print.

Above is a picture of a Canadian newspaper from the 1940s.

Bluetooth

For the final technology I will discuss, I chose Bluetooth due to some personal reasons.

Before going into this presentation, I knew of a person from history named Harald Bluetooth who was a leader of a group of Vikings. Due to his unique name and the unique name of the brand of Bluetooth, I wondered if there was a connection. In fact, there was! 

Bluetooth was developed in the late 1990s and received major popularity for allowing wireless connection between devices. 

Bluetooth was named after the character Harald Bluetooth (the person I thought of), and the symbol for Bluetooth is both Nordic letters H and B combined (also known as the initials for Harald Bluetooth), as shown above. 

Today, Bluetooth is still improving its technology to further increase our connections between devices wirelessly. 

So that's all the communication technologies I wanted to discuss! I hope every person reading this learned something interesting just like I did! Amazing thanks to everyone who did their presentations during class, they were absolutely delightful to learn about.

Blog Post #4

Each One Teach One: Emoticons :D 

The history of emoticons is relatively short, as they were only truly created in the 1980s and popularized in the 1990s, by which the decade later they were mostly replaced by emojis. 

However, this does not diminish the importance of emoticons and emojis had online. Even though they were recently created they have drastically shaped our digital and even real world in ways unseen before. One such example is the word of the year of 2015 for oxford dictionaries being the happy crying emoji as shown below.

History

Emoticons came before emojis, and they were originally created in 1982 by Scott Fahlman who "realized the need for a symbol to temper the bickering that plagued online forums." Specifically, Fahlman created the :-) and :-( emoticons.

Before this in 1979, however, Stanford student Kevin Mackenzie realized how by communicating online we lost important conversational features such as "gestures, emotions, and intonations." As a result, Mackenzie created the emoticon -) to be put at the end of "tongue and cheek remarks." 

Another person named Ralph Ruppert claims the emoticon -) to have been created by his Aunt Ev in 1967 for the same purpose as Kevin Mackenzie's. So, depending on who you ask the creator of emoticons was either Kevin Mackenzie, Ralph Ruppert, or Scott Fahlman. 

That said, some emoticons were found in old historical works in 2014. Such works were one of Lincoln's speeches from 1862 and Robert Herrick's 1648 poem, "To fortune." In these works, the emoticons ;) and :) were used respectively, however it is likely that both of these emoticons were actually not intentional, but instead typos.

Emojis on the other hand were created in 1999 by Japanese Artist Shigetaka Kurita, where he created the original 176 of them, which are now in display at the New York Museum of modern art (as shown).

"Kurita wanted to create an easy-to-understand interface that conveyed information in a simple way rather than having to type out the information fully. For example, using a ☁️ emoji rather than writing out cloudy." says a Wired article. Emojis were also designed to add emotional nuisances to conversations online.

As seen by both emoticons and emojis, they both attempted to combat the issue of the loss of emotional context in online environments where conversations were not had face to face, which would allow for gestures, tone of voice, and etc. to supply this context.

Impact

Both emoticons and emojis have had an impact on our world today, though not as great as other communication technologies in history. Mainly this impact is seen online today where emotions can be expressed through the usage of such characters.

Though not absolutely world changing compared to technologies like the radio or newspaper, emoticons and emojis have shaped our online communication environment to be more inclusive and easier to understand. Having simple flat text being said back and forth allows for numerous misunderstandings, especially if said things were said sarcastically, so the fact that emojis and emoticons exist help solve this problem.

The impact of these two types of symbols and icons can also be seen through how emojis now are on keyboards for practically every phone now-a-days, and emoticons have numerous websites were you can search for specific symbols to use.

To end this post, I think it is important to mention that there is a small negative effect that came around from the usage of emojis and emoticons, however it's more prevalent in emoticons. This is the negativity and obscenity of some icons and symbols, with big examples being the middle finger and sexual symbols.

Not to mention the fact that emojis represent our world but in digital form, so the lack of emojis for something in the real world can also be seen as another negative, for the medium not being inclusive.

That said, emojis are added each year to combat this problem with a recent change being how people can now change emojis with human body parts to specific skin colors, where before there was only one option. This addition may lead to some controversial usages for topics like racism, but overall, it seems like a step in the right direction, especially since these changes were not intended for this usage.

Sources

The Origins of E-mail (stanford.edu)

Emoji: The Complete History | WIRED

https://era.library.ualberta.ca/items/6b838b49-77af-47dd-b7f7-ee5481dc659a/download/6f8d58e3-9614-485f-b916-5cfb209db50b 

(The last source is a download link for its pdf version as it is not viewable online)