Weekly Roundup: Friday, 22 September, 2017
Here are some links I thought were worth sharing this week:
DATA PRIVACY
Facebook’s war on free will
This extract from a new book "World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech" by Franklin Foer, has a good take on the engineering mindset and the use of algorithms.
"Facebook is a tangle of rules and procedures for sorting information, rules devised by the corporation for the ultimate benefit of the corporation. Facebook is always surveilling users, always auditing them, using them as lab rats in its behavioural experiments. While it creates the impression that it offers choice, in truth Facebook paternalistically nudges users in the direction it deems best for them, which also happens to be the direction that gets them thoroughly addicted."
CYBER SECURITY
Introducing Azure confidential computing
"Confidential computing ensures that when data is “in the clear,” which is required for efficient processing, the data is protected inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE - also known as an enclave). TEEs ensure there is no way to view data or the operations inside from the outside, even with a debugger. They even ensure that only authorized code is permitted to access data. If the code is altered or tampered, the operations are denied and the environment disabled. The TEE enforces these protections throughout the execution of code within it."
DEVELOPMENT
How Github became the web's largest font piracy site (and how to fix it)
"When a commercial font ends up where it shouldn’t — for instance on a huge, freely searchable database of code — it’ll most certainly break the terms of the license, and once downloaded from there, it becomes a pirated font."