Link Roundup August 2016

THE L.E.D. QUANDARY: WHY THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS “BUILT TO LAST”

The thousand-hour life span of the modern incandescent dates to 1924, when representatives from the world’s largest lighting companies—including such familiar names as Philips, Osram, and General Electric (which took over Shelby Electric circa 1912)—met in Switzerland to form Phoebus, arguably the first cartel with global reach. The bulbs’ life spans had by then increased to the point that they were causing what one senior member of the group described as a “mire” in sales turnover. And so, one of its priorities was to depress lamp life, to a thousand-hour standard. The effort is today considered one of the earliest examples of planned obsolescence at an industrial scale.

For 90 years, lightbulbs were designed to burn out. Now that's coming to LED bulbs.

JB MacKinnon's excellent New Yorker piece tells the story of planned obsolescence and home lighting, but only skims the surface of the Internet of Things future of "smart" bulbs. It's been less than a year since Philips pushed out a firmware update that gave its light fixtures the ability to detect and reject non-Philips lightbulbs -- and thanks to laws like the DMCA, which have metastasized in the IoT era, it's a potential felony to alter your light fixture to override this behavior and force it to work with non-Philips bulbs. The IoT's twin dark patterns are control (forcing you to use original consumables, only get service from the manufacturer, and limiting features to those that benefit the manufacturer, at the owner's expense) and surveillance -- and that's the other side of this.

How Women Are Harassed Out of Science

A 2015 report that one of us co-authored found that one in three women science professors surveyed reported sexual harassment. There’s been a lot of talk about how to keep women in the STEM pipeline, but it fails to make a crucial connection: One reason the pipeline leaks is that women are harassed out of science. And sexual harassment is just the beginning.

“I Want to Know What Code Is Running Inside My Body”

She found the technical manual for her pacemaker online, and learned that her device had remote monitoring capabilities that worried her. To a computer security professional, wireless communication was just one more way that the device was vulnerable to malicious tinkering. Then she bought a pacemaker programmer online, and she and other hackers figured out that it could be used to update the code on her implant. She didn’t hack her own device, though — she was mainly alarmed that she’d entrusted her heartbeat to a stranger’s code, which might get updated without her knowledge.

The Story is a Spell. The Story is a Curse.

Who get to tell the story? Whose stories are celebrated? Whose are the most true?

Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons

According to the inspector general’s report, private prisons housed roughly 22,660 federal inmates as of December 2015, though Bureau of Prisons website indicates the total is now closer to 22,100. That represents about 12 percent of the Bureau of Prisons total inmate population, according to the report.

Q&A with Kitten’s Got Claws Artist Kanesha Bryant, Part 1

Even though I supported others, asking for support or understanding felt so dangerous. A lot of people turn weirdly hostile or dismissive when someone they see as strong shows weakness. In that moment you become very aware that you aren’t an equal to them. You are, emotions wise, “the help.” You’re there to provide a service for them and they’re frankly a little put off that their feelings garbage can is talking back.

Why Letting Women Take Tea Breaks Was Once Considered Dangerous

But in some ways, O'Connell says, "contemporary culture has all of these ideas about food which might appear ludicrous in time to come."

The Online Abuse Playbook

The tactic here is for the community to use any publicly-accessible information about the person as ammunition for attacking them, and to delegate the worst attacks to the most anonymous members of the community.

Hackers Trick Facial-Recognition Logins With Photos From Facebook (What Else?)

Biometric authenticators have the potential to be extremely powerful security mechanisms, but they’re threatened when would-be attackers gain easy access to personal data. In the Office of Personnel Management breach last year, for instance, hackers stole data for 5.6 million people’s fingerprints. Those markers will be in the wild for the rest of the victims’ lives.

One of the biggest crime waves in America isn't what you think it is

Catherine Rampell pointed out that some of the Senate cafeteria workers were so poorly paid that they were homeless or on public assistance. The Americans who get hit hardest by wage theft tend to be the most vulnerable workers with the least power: low-paid, often in service work, often racial minorities or part of marginalized social groups.

What Is Public?

Clearly, one reason law has stayed out of date in regard to what’s public is because two of our biggest industries profit from that anachronism. But another key reason is because a creeping expansion of what’s considered public enables one of the most effective tools for expanding the power of the state: surveillance.

Farm to Fable

What makes buying food different from other forms of commerce is this: It’s a trust-based system. How do you know the Dover sole on your plate is Dover sole? Only that the restaurateur said so.