Aaron Swartz Continues to Make the Internet More Open

Internet Activist Aaron Swart's project with The New Yorker launched Wednesday. Strongbox lets users share information, messages, and files with writers and editors anonymously.

Months after his suicide, Internet activist Aaron Swartz continues to make the world a more open place. Wednesday the New Yorker announced the launch of a project he helped develop with them, Strongbox, a tool that allows sources to anonymously submit information, messages and evidence with writers and editors.

Strongbox uses a Tor network to protect the transportation of data by redirecting packets through a distributed anonymous network in a series of encrypted steps so no machine in the pipeline knows where the packet came from before arriving. Because any computer within the pipeline can see no more than one hop in the circuit, even a compromised path can't be used to connect the information's source and destination.

Once a user accesses Strongbox, they can upload files or send messages using a randomly generated user name. That anonymous ID can either be used only once to send information to a writer or editor, or the user if they're willing to follow up, can use the ID to access messages and questions from editors and writers who might have further questions.

Within their privacy promise regarding Strongbox they state that, "Strongbox servers are under the physical control of The New Yorker and Condé Nast in a physically and logically segregated area at a secure data center. Strongbox servers and network share no elements in common with The New Yorker or Condé Nast infrastructure."

The final step to access the files involves writers and editors downloading files onto a thumbdrive, using a separate thumbdrive with an encryption key on a laptop without a harddrive that regularly wipes its memory, and then accessing the information on that seperate machine. This allows physical air space between the network that sent the message, and the machine that actually opens the documents.

Strongbox is the first use of Aaron Swartz's Deaddrop code which he finished in the month before his suicide on January 11th of  this year. The code for Deaddrop as well as Strongbox is open source in a fitting tribute to his work.

Aaron Swartz defended the use of anonymous communication on his blog years before in 2008 saying, "In 1787, when America’s framers wanted to argue for its Constitution, they published their arguments (the Federalist Papers) anonymously. Whistleblowers have released everything from the Pentagon Papers to the Downing Street Memos. Anonymous speech is a First Amendment right."

Given the increasing usage of the Internet for everything from our daily communication, work, commerce, socializing and an ever expanding world of applications in our daily lives, digital privacy should be a huge concern. Especially after the recent compromise of the AP phone records, the importance of Strongbox offering journalists a new safer tool to protect sources is more obviously needed than before. And luckily for us, Aaron Swartz was tackling the problem before his death.

As Swartz said, "Here’s to anonymity — and more tools protecting it."

Google Wallet - E-Commerce Just Got Some New Competition.

Google Wallet Newest Feature Will Have E Commerce Running For Cover

Watch out PayPal, Square, VenMo, WePay, and everyone else in the mobile payment market. The 800-pound gorilla of tech is now in the ring. On Wednesday Google announced at Google I/O, their annual developer conference, a new feature named Google Wallet.

Google Wallet is elegantly simple, with a $ icon that you can click to attach a monetary transaction to an email in the same way one might attach a photo or PDF to an email. In addition you will be able to use your Google Wallet to shop in stores using your smartphone in a PIN-protected app. For those concerned about what might happen if you lose your phone, Google has thought about that too, with 100% protection for unauthorized purchases and a feature to disable the app if you lose your phone.

The fee structure of Google Wallet will likely look very familiar to you if you've ever used PayPal. With a flat fee of 2.9% per transaction (minimum $0.30), it looks very similar to PayPal's basic structure, which puts a 2.9% transaction fee on the total sale amount plus a $0.30 fee per transaction.
The feature will be rolled out over the coming months to all U.S. Gmail users over 18 years old, but users can get earlier access if friends have the feature and send money to them.

As someone who's previously used Google Ads to drive app downloads for business reasons, I'd be very excited to have Wallet integrated as it would allow Google Analytics to cover the entire pipeline from ad to purchase with no issues regarding different platforms measuring performance using differing parameters. Being able to track the profitability of every ad directly along with email marketing would be a game-changer not just for e-commerce companies, but also for mobile ad networks and the Android app marketplace.

Because this news was just announced, it's too early to see how other e-commerce startups will react now that their business model has a much bigger competitor.

Picture Credit: Google

Belated #RightsCon Reflection Post (Written the day after, though not posted till now.)

The second day of the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference felt very different to me. It began the same way – professionals in the hallway grabbing coffee and fruit before listening to speeches, watching critiques on the on stage content from the peanut gallery on twitter and then I remembered something… I’m sometimes an activist.

I was making a point on twitter which based on ReTweets and +1-ing from fellow conference attendees I saw had resonated, and rather than looking to find those people physically I raised my hand for the mic when the Q & A portion began and asked the panelists to respond to the elephant in the room.

(In this case it was Google’s attitude to YouTube as being a press, and yet their role as content screeners also making them the editor in chief around the issues)

Just as the day before, professional roles meant I didn’t get to get a true answer or dialog around it – however what I did get was the knowledge my point had been heard, added to a public dialog and live streamed for the general conference, and a few people I would have probably sought out later- found me to initiate the conversations. The ball was rolling in a direction I could engage with it, and I remembered how much the audience matters.

During far too many panels and hallway conversations people love to speak of how the internet is like a megaphone amplifying voices, however in looking for a productive dialog you don’t always need more voices, you also need more people willing to listen. It’s easy for me to find out what techies think – interviews with them amplify their voices, the code on their projects favors their perspectives and the dynamics are built around their visions. But the question I kept returning to was how do those same techies go from a perspective of designing for their user to designing for people in general?

You can assume that by my presence as a user on twitter, on facebook, through gmail and my phone’s apps – I like *something* about the service, trust the provider enough to put my content or ideas there, and will either learn to deal with their world view or remove myself from their sites as a user. But I for example I never consented to being on WhitePages but you can find a listing for me there. Do I have rights there? Or on a graver scale - for the manufacturers of the servers of the tech companies – the environmental toll of those materials is not just limited to the company, it affects the community around it- so do the people in the Democratic Republic of Congo have rights regarding my internet usage when it effects them? It’s easy to when talking to representatives of social media and information sites to fall into a pattern of thinking of Human Rights as being just Privacy and Free Speech concerns – but the issues are bigger, the stakes are higher and sadly the companies not in the room have a bigger impact (security firms doing surveillance, those who designed the kill switches, manufacturers, etc… ).

So if the bigger concern is the people not in the room, you might ask why grill the companies who are already trying, concerned enough to sponsor such an event, and who send representatives to be present? They’re already ahead of the curve and it is precisely for that reason I’m concerned when the voices in their dialogs are limited. While I love Google & Facebook’s services and respect the people I know working at Google & Facebook I also want more. If they are going to shape the communications of the future, the new cultural norms for generations coming of age during the Information Age – I want there to be a social dialog around the issues, not just a team meeting or a corporate strategy.

There are great minds working on the problem – but the issues existed before the digital age. Questions of privacy existed before the internet. So did the issue of free speech. Problems with environmentally degrading manufacturing and waste aren’t new. But Google isn’t just search and advertizing – it’s also become my newspaper headline, my post office, my secretary organizing documents and mapping out the places I will go. Facebook is more than a rolodex of friends & contacts; it is live chats, photo albums, blogging, and more. Twitter isn’t just a way to mass text, it’s changing how I meet people at events, it’s how I get breaking news, and determines if after a piece on the nightly news if I can follow up to continue listening to the subject. We’re living in an era where I see Netflix more than my local theater, iTunes has replaced my record store, Amazon replaced the book stores, eBay replaced garage sales, etc… The old questions need to be reinterpreted, discussed, and decided again.

As an activist a lot of times you approach a situation and precedent is the reason for something being wrong. Whether an offensively named street, an unjust law on the books, the status quo of “this is always how business has been done” that dynamic remains. Looking towards the future of human rights, it’s important to ask as we design the tools, services, and environments for engagement in the digital world – will we design a world that places respect for people, both as users and non-users at the front? Will we build a world of commerce that sees human rights as a PR issue? Will it be centralized to the giants of tech or will the freedom of self-publishing be decentralized to allow individuals greater agency? How do individuals represent themselves to governments, businesses, each other and what are the social rules for these spaces?

When I leave my home I can wear a suit, or jeans & a tee shirt and know the rules of social negotiating that come with those presentations. I know how to research the laws of governance, what rights I can expect, and how to not participate with businesses or how to support them depending on my needs and their actions – the question that remains is how we can make a digital world that respects that diversity. Can I have a facebook profile of punk-kid-me for browsing at home and professional me for when I’m logged on at work to design targeted ads for a business? I can’t pay in cash for services – so how can I trust you to not track a purchase the way I could if I bought a book in real life? As manufacturing goes abroad I can’t rely on knowledge of my local space to know I’m living my values consistently.

With local businesses accountability is much easier. I can ask to speak to the manager – but online I can’t just ask to speak to the manager of Google to know what I am supporting by supporting the business. The inside versus outside voice distinction is much harder to make. The places I tweet most often from are at conferences and in bed.

On the first day I came to a conference more as a standard conference attendee hoping to listen and learn. However on the second morning with the news lingering of #OccupyOakland and the attacks on protesters I remembered my own role as a college activist organizing people online. For a brief moment I had the opportunity to take a microphone knowing people who have the ability to change the services I use are in the room. With their ears, it was more important to remember my voice. And ironically the collection of contacts made and business cards received following then was much greater than the first day.

RIP Steve Jobs

My facebook wall is flooded. My twitter stream is overwhelmingly monolithic in perspective. Google is simply and elegantly stating the truth. Apple has a simple image, minimalistic text, elegantly design. It begins to hit home: Steve Jobs is dead.

He is a man who’s influence is bigger than perhaps any contemporary will ever be able to say. I could say what I admire, the innovation, the relentless creativity, the artistry, the culture he created for technologists and the interest in what people could do with technology rather than how technology could be applied to old problems. 

I definitely admire the man.  And earlier today I posted on my facebook wall some of the inspirational things he said to Stanford's class of 2005.

"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."

"You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle."

I will likely look to his quotes for inspiration again as I have often done in the past. But that doesn’t mean that his inspiring me and the Silicon Valley community I am a part of negates other effects he’s also had.

He acknowledges in 1985 in an interview part of the cost of new technology is old technology is obsolescent. I understand that. But it irks me how much the planned obsolescence is a part of Apple’s design. Simple things like the ability to change a battery without sending it back to the store makes all apple products irreparable, which is horrible for the environment. I am perfectly find with my iPhone seeming inadequate when the next generation comes along, but the inability to choose to use it because it will die in few years time is another story. There is no good way to get rid of it either- while the clean design and compact size are wonderful when I’m using it, the reality is after it’s life the only way to separate those components involves toxic waste which is generally outsourced to China or India – causing a great deal of harm to those who’ve never used his products.

I hate the human toll of ewaste and digital manufacturing. And although he created a culture of creativity for designers where innovation was central, where the budget for juice was over a hundred thousand annually – he also turned a blind eye to the use of conflict materials supported by slave labor. He turned a blind eye the suffering of those building his products when toxic materials were used by Wintek and when conditions were so bad at Foxconn that workers were driven to suicide. Meanwhile in his own offices LGBT employees were treated with respect and Apple was one of the first corporations to stand for marriage equality and against Prop 8 here in California. And the children of the next generation will grow up knowing about ewaste and environmental degradation due to watching Wall-e in their youth. So it’s complicated. He simultaneously pushed forward with radical change and made the computer and the tools it offers accessible to millions of households forever changing how digital media is made, received, distributed, what possibilities exist in film, music, and graphic arts and more – but as many before him, he left a wake of destruction out of sight and out of mind for those using his products.

He is indubitably one of the most visionary men of our era, and any one man could embody how the digital era has changed our way of life, it is him. And that is worthy of reflection. He might be part of a destructive capitalistic society - but he is also brilliantly disrupting elements of it. And inspiring the next generation of technocrats to think creatively, disruptively, and vivaciously. Unlike Bill Gates, he was never one to donate to charities or tackle social problems, but those things he did do, he did well and with passion.

Beginning in elementary school I’ve worked with iMacs. In junior high when running for one of the student council positions my slogan was “iNagrani, uVote4Me” (Thanks to Molly for coming up with that one!) Although my first mp3 player was not an iPhone, it was influenced by one. And I later was given an iTouch which I’ve used fondly ever since. I have an iPad that I carry around and has helped me by carrying emergency maps to help while navigating through Europe & Central Asia. My iPhone has become the way to check in with the world, read the news, and make all my morning calls before getting out of bed. Growing up in Silicon Valley the techies have always been household names and part of the conversational landscape- and so while I unfortunately never got to meet Mr. Jobs, I will miss him. His influence on my local community, the global community, the possibilities of technology and the digital era can never been forgotten.

Before the hipsters with their iPhones...

...one could still get the full frame effect using black and white film. This was hand printed in early 2007