net.wars

Earlier this year, I wrote a short story/provocation for the recent book 22 Ideas About the Future. My story imagined a future in which the British central government had undermined local authorities by allowing local communities to opt out and contract for their own services. One of the consequences was to carve London up into tiny neighborhoods, each with its own rules and sponsorships, making it difficult to plot a joined-up route across town. Like an idiot, I entirely overlooked the role facial recognition would play in such a scenario. Community blocs like these, some openly set up to exclude unwanted diversity, would absolutely grab at facial recognition to repel - or charge - unwelcome outsiders.

Most discussion of facial recognition to date has focused on privacy: that it becomes impossible to move around public spaces without being identified and tracked. We haven't thought enough about the potential use of facial recognition to underpin a braad permission-based society in which our presence in any space can be detected and terminated at any time. In such a society, we are all migrants.

That particular unwanted dystopian future is upon us. This week, we learned that a New Jersey lawyer was blocked from attending the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show with her daughter because the venue's facial recognition system identified her as a member of a law firm involved in litigation against Radio City's owner, MSG Entertainment. Security denied her entry, despite her protests that she was not involved in the litigation. Whether she was or wasn't shouldn't really matter; she had committed no crime, she was causing no disturbance, she was granted no due process, and she had no opportunity for redress.

Soon after she told her story a second instance emerged, a male lawyer who was blocked from attending a New York Knicks basketball game at Madison Square Garden. Then, quickly, a third: a woman and her husband were removed from their seats at a Brandi Carlile concert, also at Madison Square Garden.

MSG later explained that litigation creates "an inherently adverse environment". I read that this way: the company has chosen to use developing technology in an abusive display of power. In other words, MSG is treating its venues as if they were the new-style airports Edward Hasbrouck has detailed, also covered here a few weeks back. In its original context, airport thinking is bad enough; expanded to the world's many privately-owned public venues, the potential is terrifying.

Early adopters of sharing data to exclude bad people talked about barring known shoplifters from chains of pubs or supermarkets, or catching and punishing criminals much more quickly. The MSG story means the mission has crept from "terrorist" to "don't like their employer" at unprecedented speed.

The right to navigate the world without interference is one privileged folks have taken for granted. With some exceptions: in England, the right to ramble all parts of the countryside took more than a century to codify into law.To an American, exclusion from a public venue *feels* like it should be a Constitutional issue - but of course it's not, since the affected venues are owned by a private company. In the reactions I've seen to the MSG stories, people have called for a ban on live facial recognition. By itself that's probably not going to be enough, now that this compost heap of worms has been opened; we are going to need legislation to underpin the right to assemble in privately-owned public spaces. Such a right sort of exists already in the conditions baked into many relevant local licensing laws that require venue operators to be the real-world equivalent of common carriers in telecommunications, who are not allowed to pick and choose whose data they will carry.

In a fourth MSG incident, a lawyer who is suing Madision Square Garden for barring him from entering, tricked the cameras at the MSG-owned Beacon Theater by disguising himself with a beard and a baseball cap. He didn't exactly need to, as his company had won a restraining order requiring MSG to let its lawyers into its venues (the case continues).

In that case, MSG's lawyer told the court barring opposition lawyers was essential to protect the company: "It's not feasible for any entertainment venue to operate any other way,"

Since when? At the New York Times, Kashmir Hill explains that the company adopted this policy last summer and depends on the photos displayed on law firms' websites to feed into its facial recognition to look for matches. But really the answer can only be: since the technology became available to enforce such a ban. It is a clear case where the availability of a technology leads to worse behavior on the part of its owner.

In 1996, the software engineer turned essayist and novelist Ellen Ujllman wrote about exactly this with respect to databases: they infect their owners with the desire to use their new capabilities. In one of her examples, a man suddenly realized he could monitor what his long-trusted secretary did all day. In another, a system to help ensure AIDS patients were getting all the benefits they were entitled to slowly morphed into a system for checking entitlement. In the case of facial recognition, its availability infinitely extends the British Tories' concept of the hostile environment.

Illustrations: The Rockettes performing in 2008 (via skividal at Wikimedia).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.

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It's hard to properly enjoy I-told-you-so schadenfreude when you know, from Juan Vargas (D-CA)'s comments this week, that disproportionately the people most affected by the latest cryptocurrency collapse are those who can least afford it. What began as a cultish libertarian desire to bypass the global financial system became a vector for wild speculation, and is now the heart of a series of collapsing frauds.

From the beginning, I've called bitcoin and its sequels as "the currency equivalent of being famous for being famous". Crypto(currency) fans like to claim that the world's fiat currencies don't have any underlying value either, but those are backed by the full faith and credit of governments and economies. Logically, crypto appeals most to those with the least reason to trust their governments: the very rich who resent paying taxes and those who think they have nothing to lose.

This week the US House and Senate both held hearings on the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange and hedge fund FTX and its deposed, arrested, and charged CEO Sam Bankman-Fried. The key lesson: we can understand the main issues surrounding FTX and its fellow cryptocurrency exchanges without understanding either the technical or financial intricacies.

A key question is whether the problem is FTX or the entire industry. Answers largely split along partisan lines. Republican member chose FTX, and tended to blame Securities and Exchange Commission chair Gary Gensler. Democrats were more likely to condemn the entire industry.

As Jesús G. "Chuy" García (D-IL) put it, "FTX is not an anomaly. It's not just one corrupt guy stealing money, it's an entire industry that refuses to comply with existing regulation that thinks it's above the law." Or, per Brad Sherman (D-CA), "My fear is that we'll view Sam Bankman-Fried as just one big snake in a crypto garden of Eden. The fact is, crypto is a garden of snakes."

When Sherrod Brown (D-OH) asked whether FTX-style fraud existed at other crypto firms, all four expert speakers said yes.

Related is the question of whether and how to regulate crypto, which begins with the problem of deciding whether crypto assets are securities under the decades-old Howey test. In its ongoing suit against Ripple, Gensler's SEC argues for regulation as securities. Lack of regulation has enabled crypto "innovation" - and let it recreate practices long banned in traditional financial markets. For an example see Ben McKenzie's and Jacob Silverman's analysis of leading crypto exchange Binance's endemic conflicts of interest and the extreme risks it allows customers to take that are barred under securities regulations.

Regulation could correct some of this. McKenzie gave the Senate committee numbers: fraudulent financier Bernie Madoff had 37,000 clients; FTX had 32 times that in the US alone. The collective lost funds of the hundreds of millions of victims worldwide could be ten times bigger than Madoff.

But: would regulating crypto clean up the industry or lend it legitimacy it does not deserve? Skeptics ask this about alt-med practitioners.

Some background. As software engineer Stephen Diehl explains in his new book, Popping the Crypto Bubble, securities are roughly the opposite of money. What you want from money is stability; sudden changes in value spark cost-of-living crises and economic collapse. For investors, stability is the enemy: they want investments' value to go up. The countervailing risk is why the SEC's requires companies offering securities to publish sufficient truthful information to enable investors to make a reasonable assessment.

In his book, Diehl compares crypto to previous bubbles: the Internet, tulips, the railways, the South Sea. Some, such as the Internet and the railways, cost early investors fortunes but leave behind valuable new infrastructure and technologies on which vast new industries are built. Others, like tulips, leave nothing of new value. Diehl, like other skeptics, believes cryptocurrencies are like tulips.

The idea of digital cash was certainly not new in 2008, when "Satoshi" published their seminal paper on bitcoin; the earliest work is usually attributed to David Chaum, whose 1982 dissertation contained the first known proposal for a blockchain protocol, proposed digital cash in a 1983 paper, and set up a company to commercialize digital cash in 1990 - way too early. Crypto's ethos came from the cypherpunks mailing list, which was founded in 1992 and explored the idea of using cryptography to build a new global financial system.

Diehl connects the reception of Satoshi's paper to its timing, just after the 2007-2008 financial crisis. There's some logic there: many have never recovered.

For a few years in the mid-2010s, a common claim was that cryptocurrencies were bubbles but the blockchain would provide enduring value. Notably disagreeing was Michael Salmony, who startled the 2016 Tomorrow's Transactions Forum by saying the blockchain was a technology in search of a solution. Last week, IBM and Maersk announced they are shutting down their enterprise blockchain because, Dan Robinson writes at The Register, despite the apparently idea use case, they couldn't attract industry collaboration.

More recently we've seen the speculative bubble around NFTs, but otherwise we've heard only about their wildly careening prices in US dollars and the amount of energy mining them consumes. Until this year, when escalating crashes and frauds are taking over. Distrust does not build value.

Illustrations: The Warner Brothers coyote, realizing he's standing on thin air.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.

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There are plenty of readily available reasons why everything is suddenly so much more expensive: pandemic-blighted supply chains, staff shortages, rising energy prices that push everything else up, the war in Ukraine, monopolistic consolidation that has created a "profits-inflation spiral", per Matt Stoller, and, in the UK, Brexit. But there's another factor also at work: the rising cost of capital.

Throughout the last 15 years of low interest rates, venture capitalists have, by pouring funding into money-losing technology-adjacent companies, been funding what some have called the "millennial lifestyle". I doubt it's limited to millennials; people of all ages have taken advantage of what has been an era of predatory loss-leading pricing intended to undercut the competition until it goes away and they can raise prices.

Amazon did not invent this tactic, but it may have been the first web company to really exploit it. It lost money the first five years it was a public company, and again at other times in its history. Cheap prices were an important part of getting people to use the site; Bezos famously chose its Seattle location to avoid sales taxes on the books it began with. As long ago as 2014, however, people had begun warning that it was now often the more expensive option. And, these days, its search results are full of clutter, ads, "sponsored products", and weird brand names.

I began using Amazon so early in its history that I have an insulated mug the company sent its customers one mid-1990s Christmas. These days, I sometimes go for months at a time without using it.

It's not easy because, as "honest broker" Ted Gioia points out, the long tail Chris Anderson touted in 2004, first in a Wired article and then in a book, doesn't really work. Instead of niche products dominating the market, we continue to have blockbusters and what Gioia calls the "short tail". Companies like Netflix and Amazon, who made their names selling the widest possible range, have since narrowed their offerings. (As Gioia deoesn't say, in its early days Amazon didn't actually have warehouses full of every possible book title; it let the distributor Ingram do that, and sent runners over to collect copies of obscure titles when they were ordered. Now, the long tail is often handled by third-party merchants in its Marketplace.)

As Gioia concludes, the 80/20 rule won and kept winning - which also means that 20 percent of online retailers do 80 percent of the business, and occupy 80 percent of the search listings, and that 20 percent becomes harder and harder to find.

But back to the "millennial lifestyle". "If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you've interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year," Derek Thompson wrote at The Atlantic in 2019 just after the WeWork crash. Thompson went on to predict that WeWork's example was going to make venture capitalists much less willing to finance all that free living in future.

Last week, he published an update, noting that while the combination of spiking energy and labor costs is getting all the headlines, rising prices among the "millennial lifestyle" companies are also part of why life feels so much more expensive for urbanites. Tl;dr: those companies can't afford the subsidy any longer. Rising interest rates surely play a part, too, particularly for a company like Netflix, which used easy access to cheap money to acquire substantial debt with which to finance building its own content library. It didn't have much choice, since it was inevitable that eventually content producers like Disney and the legacy broadcast networks would want to reserve their content for their own streaming services. Now, however, with subscriber numbers under pressure from cost-of-living decisions, its prices are going up and it's adding an advertising-supported tier.

At the New York Times, Kevin Roose reports the same experience as Thompson: "For years, these subsidies allowed us to live Balenciaga lifestyles on Banana Republic budgets." Today...well, less $16 for an Uber ride across greater Los Angeles, more $250 to get from midtown Manhattan to JFK airport. (Pro tip: there's an express bus from just outside Grand Central station that runs every 30 minutes and gets you there in under an hour for $19.)

The startup extravagance Roose describes - his used car was delivered by a white-gloved valet and adorned with a giant bow - is utterly 1999, when startups recklessly burned through their all-too-easily-raised capital by installing in-office chefs and TGIF bartenders. We know what happened to that: market collapse, followed by more sensible burn rates. WeWork provided a similar, but much crazier, cautionary tale, which Stoller dubbed- counterfeit capitalism.

This approach was never going to be sustainable. So now these services - Stoller lists Bird, Lyft, and Uber (which transport industry expert Hubert Horan notes has lost $31 billion over its lifetime) - are being forced to adopt realistic pricing. In the long run, hopefully it will improve competition and be better for the workers in those industries. For right now, though, it's going to hurt.

Illustrations:

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.

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This week provided two examples of the dangers of believing too much hype about modern-day automated systems and therefore overestimating what they can do.

The first is relatively minor: Google employee Blake Lemoine published his chats with a bot called LaMDA and concluded it was sentient "basd on my religious beliefs". Google put Lemoine on leave and the press ran numerous (many silly) stories. Veterans shrugged and muttered, "ELIZA, 1966".

The second, however...

On Wednesday, the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a report (PDF) studying crashes involving cars under the control of "driver-assist" technologies. Out of 367 such crashes in the nine months after NHTSA began collecting data in July 2021, 273 involved Teslas being piloted by either "full self-driving software" or its precursor, "Tesla Autopilot".

There are important caveats, which NTHSA clearly states. Many contextual details are missing, such as how many of each manufacturer's cars are on the road and the number of miles they've traveled. Some reports may be duplicates; others may be incomplete (private vehicle owners may not file a report) or unverified. Circumstances such as surface and weather conditions, or whether passengers were wearing seat belts, are missing. Manufacturers differ in the type and quantity of crash data they collect. Reports may be unclear about whether the car was equipped with SAE Level 2 Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) or SAE Levels 3-5 Automated Driving Systems (ADS). Therefore, NTHSA says, "The Summary Incident Report Data should not be assumed to be statistically representative of all crashes." Still, the Tesla number stands out, far ahead of Honda's 90, which itself is far ahead of the other manufacturers listed.

SAE, ADAS, and ADS refer to the system of levels devised by the Society of Automotive Engineers (now SAE International) in 2016. Level 0 is no automation at all; Level 1 is today's modest semi-automated assistance such as cruise control, lane-keeping, and automatic emergency braking. Level 2, "partial automation", is now: semi-automated steering and speed systems, road edge detection, and emergency braking.

Tesla's Autopilot is SAE Level 2. Level 3 - which may someday include Tesla's Full Self Drive Capability - is where drivers may legitimately begin to focus on things other than the road. In Level 4, most primary driving functions will be automated, and the driver will be off-duty most of the time. Level 5 will be full automation, and the car will likely not even have human-manipulable controls.

Right now, in 2022, we don't even have Level 3, though Tesla CEO Elon Musk keeps promising we're on the verge of it with his company's Full Self-Drive Capability, its arrival always seems to be one to two years away. As long ago as 2015, Musk was promising Teslas would be able to drive themselves while you slept "within three years"; in 2020 he estimated "next year" - and he said it again a month ago. In reality, it's long been clear that cars autonomous enough for humans to check out while on the road are further away than they seemed five years ago, as British transport commentator Christian Wolmar accurately predicted in 2018.

Many warned that Levels 2 and 3 are would be dangerous. The main issue, pointed out by psychologists and behavorial scientists, is that humans get bored watching a computer do stuff. In an emergency, where the car needs the human to take over quickly, said human, whose attention has been elsewhere, will not be ready. In this context it's hard to know how to interpret the weird detail in the NTHSA report that in 16 cases Autopilot disengaged less than a second before the crash.

The NHTSA news comes just a few weeks after a New York Times TV documentary investigation examining a series of Tesla crashes. Some it links to the difficulty of designing software that can distinguish objects across the road - that is, the difference between a truck crossing the road and a bridge. In others, such as the 2018 crash in Mountain View, California, the NTSB found a number of contributing factors, including driver distraction and overconfidence in the technology - "automation complacence", as Robert L. Sumwalt calls it politely.

This should be no surprise. In his 2019 book, Ludicrous, auto industry analyst Edward Niedermeyer mercilessly lays out the gap between the rigorous discipline embraced by the motor industry so it can turn out millions of cars at relatively low margins with very few defects and the manufacturing conditions Niedermeyer observes at Tesla. The high-end, high-performance niche sports cars Tesla began with were, in Niedermeyer's view, perfectly suited to the company's disdain for established industry practice - but not to meeting the demands of a mass market, where affordability and reliability are crucial. In line with Nidermeyer's observations, Bloomberg Intelligence predicts that Volkswagen will take over the lead in electric vehicles by 2024. Niedermeyer argues that because it's not suited to the discipline required to serve the mass market, Tesla's survival as a company depends on these repeated promises of full autonomy. Musk himself even said recently that the company is "worth basically zero" if it can't solve self-driving.

So: financial self-interest meets the danger zone of Level 2 with perceptions of Level 4. I can't imagine anything more dangerous.

Illustrations: One of the Tesla crashes investigated in New York Times Presents.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.

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The untutored, asked how to handle a food crisis, are prone to suggest that everyone grow vegetables in their backyards. They did it in World War II!

I fell into this trap once myself, during the 2008 financial crisis, when I heard a Russian commentator explain on US talk radio that Americans could never survive because we were too soft and individualistic, whereas Russians were used to helping each other out in hard times, living together in cramped conditions, and working around shortages. Nonsense, I thought. Americans are quite capable of turning off their TVs, getting up off their couches, and doing useful stuff when they need to. Wishing for a Plan B, I thought of the huge backyard some Pennsylvania friends had, which backed onto three more similarly-sized backyards, and imagined a cooperative arrangement in which one family kept chickens and another grew some things, and a third grew some complementary things...and they swapped and so on.

My Pennsylvania friends were not impressed. "Is this a joke?"

"It's a Plan B! It's good to have a Plan B!"

It's not a Plan B.

A couple of years ago, at the annual conference convened by the Cybernetics Society, I learned it wasn't even a Plan Y.

"It's subsistence farming," Kate Cooper explained as part of her talk on food security. The grueling full-time unpredictability of that is is what most of us gave up in favor of selecting items off grocery store shelves once or twice a week.

The point about subsistence farming is that it's highly unreliable, highly individual, and doesn't scale to the levels required for a modern society, still less for a densely populated modern British society that imports almost all its food. Yes, people were encouraged to grow vegetables in World War II, but although the net effect was good for morale and for helping people better understand the foods they eat, it doesn't help anyone understand the food system and its scale and complexity. Basically, in terms of the problem of feeding the nation, it was a rounding error. Worth doing, but not a solution.

Cooper is the executive director of the Birmingham Food Council, a community interest company that grew out of efforts to think about the future of Birmingham. "It's our job to be an exemplar of how to think about the food system," she explained.

Two years later, with stories everywhere about escalating food prices and dangerous shortages, the interdependencies that underlie our food supply are being exposed by the intermingling of three separate crises, each of which would be bad on its own: the pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and climate change. A source I can't recall calls this constellation a "polycrisis" - multiple simultaneous crises that interact to make them all worse. Plus, while the present government doesn't admit it, *Brexit* has added substantially to the challenges of maintaining the UK's increasingly brittle, highly complex system that few of us understand by fracturing trade relationships and pushing workers out of the industry.

As part of its research, the Council created The Game, a scenario-based role-playing game for decision makers, food sector leaders, researchers, and other policy influencers in which teams of four to six are put in charge of a city and must maintain the residents' access to enough safe and nutritious food.

I felt better about my own level of ignorance when I learned that one player's idea for combating shortages was to grow potatoes along the A38, a major route that runs from Bodmin, Cornwall, to Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. No idea of scale, you see, or the toxins passing automobiles deposit in the soil. (To say nothing of the inefficiencies of trying to farm a plot of land that's 292 miles long and a few hundred yards wide...) Another player wanted to get the national government to send in the army. Also not helping...but they were not alone, as many players found it difficult to feed their populations. People who had played it when the pandemic began forcing lockdowns and hourly changes to the food system. "Nothing had surprised [the people who had played The Game]", she said. Even so, the lockdowns showed the fragility of the food system and how powerless local officials are to do anything about it.

There are options at the national level. If you are lucky enough to have a government that has both the resources and the will to plan for the future, you can create buffer stocks to tide you through a crisis. You need a plan to rotate and resupply since some things (grain) store much better than others (fresh produce). Cooper has a simple plan for deciding which foodstuffs should be stored and which not: is it subject to VAT? That would lead to storing essentials - the healthy, nutritious stuff - and not candy, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, potato chips. Cooper calls those "drug foods", and notes that over 50% of most household budgets are spent on them, 6% of the potato crop goes to making Walker's potato chips, and a 2012 estimate found that Coca Cola's global consumption of water was enough to meet the annual daily needs of more than 2 billion people.

"Is this a sensible use of increasingly scarce land and water?" she asked.

Put like that, what can you say?

Illustrations: Kate Cooper. *Quote attributed to Alfred Henry Lewis, 1906.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.

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This week, someone you've never met changed the configuration settings on their individual account with a company you've never heard of and knocked out 85% of that company's network. Dumb stuff like this probably happens all the time without attracting attention, but in this case the company, Fastly. is a cloud provider that also runs an intermediary content delivery network intended to speed up Internet connections. Result: people all over the world were unable to reach myriad major Internet sites such as Amazon, Twitter, Reddit, and the Guardian for about an hour.

The proximate cause of these outages, Fastly has now told the world, was a bug that was introduced (note lack of agency) into its software code in mid-May, which laid dormant until someone did something completely normal to trigger it.

In the early days, we all assumed that as more companies came onstream and admins built experience and expertise, this sort of thing would happen less and less. But as the mad complexity of our computer systems and networks continues to increase - Internet of Things! AI! - now it's more likely that stuff like this will also increase, will be harder to debug, and will cause far more ancillary damage - and that damage will not be limited to the virtual world. A single random human, accidentally or intentionally, is now capable of creating physical-world damage at scale.

Ransomware attacks earlier this month illustrate this. Attackers' use of a single leaked password linked to a disused VPN account in the systems that run the Colonial Pipeline compromised gasoline supplies down a large swathe of the US east coast. Near-simultaneously, a ransomware attack on the world's largest meatpacker, JBS, briefly halted production, threatening food security in North America and Australia. In December, an attack on network management software supplied by the previously little-known SolarWinds compromised more than 18,000 companies and government agencies. In all these cases, random strangers reached out across the world and affected millions of personal lives by leveraging a vulnerability inside a company that is not widely known but that provides crucial services to companies we do know and use every day.

An ordinary person just trying to live their life has no defense except to have backups of everything - not just data, but service providers and suppliers. Most people either can't afford that or don't have access to alternatives, which means that precarious lives are made even more so by hidden vulnerabilities they can't assess.

An earlier example: in 2012, journalist Matt Honan's data was entirely wiped out through an attack that leveraged quirks of two unrelated services - Apple and Amazon - against each other to seize control of his email address and delete all his data. Moral: data "in the cloud" is not a backup, even if the hosting company says they keep backups. Second moral: if there is a vulnerability, someone will find it, sometimes for motives you would never guess.

If memory serves, Akamai, founded in 1998, was the first CDN. The idea was that even though the Internet means the death of distance, physics matters. Michael Lewis captured this principle in detail in his book Flash Boys, in which a handful of Wall Street types pay extraordinary amounts to shave a few split-seconds off the time it takes to make a trade by using a ruler and map to send fiber topic cables along the shortest possible route between exchanges. Just so, CDNs cache frequently accessed content on mirror servers around the world. When you call up one of those pages, it, or frequently-used parts of it in the case of dynamically assembled pages, is served up from the nearest of those servers, rather than from the distant originator. By now, there are dozens of these networks and what they do has vastly increased in sophistication, just as the web itself has. A really major outlet like Amazon will have contracts with more than one, but apparently switching from one to the other isn't always easy, and because so many outages are very short it's often easier to wait it out. Not in this case!

At The Conversation, criminology professor David Wall also sees this outage as a sign of the future for the same reason I do: centralization and consolidation have shrunk, and continue to shrink, the number of single points of widespread failure. Yes, the Internet was built to withstand a bomb outage is true - but as we have been writing for 20 years now, this Internet is not that Internet. The path to today's Internet has led from the decentralized era of Usenet, IRC, and own-your-own mail server to web hosting farms to the walled gardens of Facebook, Google, and Apple, and the AI-dominating Big Nine. In 2013, Edward Snowden's revelations made plain how well that suits surveillance-hungry governments, and it's only gotten worse since, as companies seek to insert themselves into every aspect of our lives - intermediaries that bring us a raft of new insecurities that we have no time or ability to audit.

Increasing complexity, hidden intermediation, increasing numbers of interferers, and increasing scale all add up to a brittle and fragile Internet, onto which we continue to pile all our most critical services and activities. What could possibly go wrong?

Illustrations: Map of the Colonial Pipeline.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.

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In 2011, as part of an investigation she conducted into the possible genetic origins of the streak of depression that ran through her family, the Danish neurobiologist Lone Frank had her genome sequenced and interviewed many participants in the newly-opening field of genomics that followed the first complete sequencing of the human genome. In her resulting book, My Beautiful Genome, she commented on the "Wild West" developing around retail genetic testing being offered to consumers over the web. Absurd claims such as using DNA testing to find your perfect mate or direct your child's education abounded.

This week, at an event organized by Breaking the Frame, New Zealand researcher Andelka M. Phillips presented the results of her ongoing study of the same landscape. The testing is just as unreliable, the claims even more absurd - choose your diet according to your DNA! find out what your superpower is! - and the number of companies she's collected has reached 289 while the cost of the tests has shrunk and the size of the databases has ballooned. Some of this stuff makes astrology look good.

To be perfectly clear: it's not, or not necessarily, the gene sequencing itself that's the problem. To be sure, the best lab cannot produce a reading that represents reality from poor-quality samples. And many samples are indeed poor, especially those snatched from bed sheets or excavated from garbage cans to send to sites promising surreptitious testing (I have verified these exist, but I refuse to link to them) to those who want to check whether their partner is unfaithful or whether their child is in fact a blood relative. But essentially, for health tests at least, everyone is using more or less the same technology for sequencing.

More crucial is the interpretation and analysis, as Helen Wallace, the executive director of GeneWatch UK, pointed out. For example, companies differ in how they identify geographical regions, frame populations , and the makeup of their databases of reference contributions. This is how a pair of identical Canadian twins got varying and non-matching test results from five companies, one Ashkenazi Jew got six different ancestry reports, and, according to one study, up to 40% of DNA results from consumer genetic tests are false positives. As I type, the UK Parliament is conducting an inquiry into commercial genomics.

Phillips makes the data available to anyone who wants to explore it. Meanwhile, so far she's examined the terms of service and privacy policies of 71 companies, and finds them filled with technology company-speak, not medical information. They do not explain these services' technical limitations or the risks involved. Yet it's so easy to think of disastrous scenarios: this week, an American gay couple reported that their second child's birthright citizenship is being denied under new State Department rules. A false DNA test could make a child stateless.

Breaking the Frame's organizer, Dave King, believes that a subtle consequence of the ancestry tests - the things everyone was quoting in 2018 that tell you that you're 13% German, 1% Somalian, and whatever else - is to reinforce the essentially racist notion that "Germanness" has a biological basis. He also particularly disliked the services claiming they can identify children's talents; these claim, as Phillips highlighted, that testing can save parents money they might otherwise waste on impossible dreams. That way lies Gattaca and generations of children who don't get to explore their own abilities because they've already been written off.

Even more disturbing questions surround what happens with these large databases of perfect identifiers. In the UK, last October the Department of Health and Social Care announced its ambition to sequence 5 million genomes. Included was the plan to being in 2019 to offer whole genome sequencing to all seriously ill children and adults with specific rare diseases or hard-to-treat cancers as part of their care. In other words, the most desperate people are being asked first, a prospect Phil Booth, coordinator of medConfidential, finds disquieting. As so much of this is still research, not medical care, he said, like the late despised care.data, it "blurs the line around what is your data, and between what the NHS was and what some would like it to be". Exploitation of the nation's medical records as raw material for commercial purposes is not what anyone thought they were signing up for. And once you have that giant database of perfect identifiers...there's the Home Office, which has already been caught using the NHS to hunt illegal immigrants and DNA testing immigrants.

So Booth asked this: why now? Genetic sequencing is 20 years old, and to date it has yet to come close to being ready to produce the benefits predicted for it. We do not have personalized medicine, or, except in a very few cases (such as a percentage of breast cancer) drugs tailored to genetic makeup. "Why not wait until it's a better bet?" he asked. Instead of spending billions today - billions that, as an audience member pointed out, would produce better health more widely if spent on improving the environment, nutrition, and water - the proposal is to spend them on a technology that may still not be producing results 20 years from now. Why not wait, say, ten years and see if it's still worth doing?

Illustrations: DNA double helix (via Wikimedia)

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. Stories about the border wars between cyberspace and real life are posted occasionally during the week at the net.wars Pinboard - or follow on Twitter.

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