Authorisation vs. Consent An Article by Terence Eden shkspr.mobi I recently read this interesting, and distressing, story of a man who was drugged and robbed. A form of crime which has been going on for centuries. But the 21st Century twist is that the thieves forced him to transfer large sums of money via his phone's banking apps. While under the influence, the victim used his usernames, passwords, PINs, and biometrics to send money to the criminal's accounts. Is there a "technological" way to stop this? His banks initially refused to refund the stolen money. Only once the press stepped in did they relent. One bank, Revolut, said: This was an unusual case where the payments were authorised by the customer but, as is now clear, without his consent. Upstream Color crime
Rethinking Twitter Verification An Article by Terence Eden shkspr.mobi The main problem, I think, is that no one knows what "Verified" means. If I were in charge (which I'm not) there would be various types of ticks. 🤖 is a bot 🆔 proved their legal identity 🏭 is run by a brand ⚖ is run by a government department 👮 Official law enforcement 😎 Celebrity And so on. iconographyidentity
Guided by image In our minds, the drawings we had originally made for the columns and capitals were no more than first approximations of the final shapes. We assumed that we would work out the real shapes during construction, and left the inaccurate approximations on our drawings, just for the sake of the building permit. Fujita, used to working with architects in System B, assumed that whatever was on our drawings must be what we wanted, and must be implemented as drawn. Anybody who was making those column capitals, if they had seen this "double" capital, and had been free to make something harmonious, would have done it differently. But Fujita's people, in System B, did not know how to be guided by reality. They were guided by "image". So Fujita, in this situation, was not free to respond in a natural way to what they saw. They were trapped by the image-making process they were used to. But because of this, they doomed their own carpenters to a pretentious kind of slavery, producing whatever silly images they were told to do, without being able to ask themselves whether they were beautiful, and unable to use their own sense of reality to make them better. Christopher Alexander, The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth Maps and observation design