You Are a Target

Posted on 2018-12-05 by jcs

Last week, I wrote in Nothing to Hide that although the “I Have Nothing to Hide” folks believe they are too unimportant to be targeted by governments and hackers, that is almost certainly wrong. Serendipitously, the current issue the SANS security awareness newsletter, Ouch!, addresses this very point.

In Yes, You Are a Target they discuss why everyone’s information has value to hackers and—to a surprisingly large degree—governments, your own or others. If you’re living under the rosy assumption that no one would bother hacking you, you really need to read this post.

The article also mentions a few ways that you can protect yourself. Mostly, their advice boils down to not being stupid and doing things like clicking on links you get in an email. Regardless, the article is very worthwhile and you should definitely read it. It’s short so it won’t take more than a couple of minutes.

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The Psychology Replication Crisis

Posted on 2018-12-04 by jcs

I’ve written several times about the dismal reproducibility rate of experiments in Psychology. Mostly that’s been in support of my contention that “Tech Addiction” is a nonexistent problem made up by journalists looking for something to write about and supported—when it’s supported at all—by what amounts to junk science on the part of Psychology profession.

There is ample reason to be skeptical of any “study” in Psychology as even the profession itself is coming to realize. The Atlantic is running an article entitled Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses that takes a look at the problem and concludes that it’s very real. The best quote from the article is, “Ironically enough, it seems that one of the most reliable findings in psychology is that only half of psychological studies can be successfully repeated.”

The article recounts the findings of the Many Labs 2 project which set out to carefully reproduce some of the most important research findings in the field. It was designed to answer the criticisms of those who say the crisis is not real and has mundane explanations. If you have any interest in this at all, you should definitely read the Atlantic piece but the TL;DR is that efforts to reproduce 28 of Psychology’s most important results—those that are in text books or the subject of TED talks—succeeded in only 14 cases. The meaning of that is that we could save a lot of grant dollars by simply flipping a coin; we wouldn’t be any less accurate. Or even better, maybe we’d stop hearing about cell phone addiction. But probably not.

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Capturing Receipts

Posted on 2018-12-03 by jcs

Moritz Schäfer has posted the workflow he uses to capture photos of receipts into an Org file. His method is to capture receipts by taking a photo of them with his smart phone using an app—it sounds like JotNot Pro—that crops and color corrects the image so that the result looks like a scan. The processed photo gets synced to his computer automatically and he would like to capture information about the receipt into an Org file and attach the photo.

Sadly, Org mode doesn’t support this out of the box but it’s pretty easy to implement with a little Elisp and the org-download package. When the Schäfer’s receipt capture template is invoked, the most recently synced photo is attached to the Org entry that the template creates.

It’s a nice hack and might be useful in your own workflow. As Schäfer points out, it does suffer from the defect that only the most recently synced photo can be captured. That makes it a little unwieldy if you’d like to capture several receipts at once. It would, however, be pretty easy to allow the user to choose the photo they want to capture using something like completing-read to narrow the choices. That’s basically what I do to get a link to receipts I’ve scanned with my ScanSnap 500.

I like this kind of workflow because it mostly automates away the otherwise tedious task of organizing and recording receipts for tax or reimbursement purposes. Take a look at Schäfer’s post if you’re interested in doing something similar.

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Making a Poster with Org-mode

Posted on 2018-12-02 by jcs

It is common in many academic fields to have “poster sessions” at their professional conferences where a quick synopsis of research results are presented in a poster. This is the case in Computer Science and, apparently, in medicine.

Philipp Homan is an MD, Psychiatrist, and Assistant Professor at Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. For the annual meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, Homan has prepared a poster on his research into weight gain as a result of antipsychotic drugs. It’s a beautiful poster with professional production values: take a look at it and see if you don’t agree.

Most Irreal readers won’t have the background to understand the material in the poster except in a general way but another aspect of the poster that’s not obvious from looking at it is that it was produced with Beamer and Org-mode.

The poster shows the really impressive results that are possible with the Beamer/Org combination. You can tweak the results until you’re happy with them and then, presumably, take them to a print shop to convert the PDF to a full size poster.

If you’re wondering how Homan did it, here’s the Org source file. I found it very instructive to read through. If you are thinking of presenting a poster at some professional conference, you would do well to take a look at Homan’s source code.

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Microsoft Data Collection

Posted on 2018-12-01 by jcs

I don’t get it. I. Just. Don’t. Get. It. A recent study commissioned by the Dutch Government found that Microsoft was collecting individual user data from the enterprise version of Office 365 including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook without any public disclosure of the practice and without any way of turning the telemetry off.

When word leaked out that Microsoft was doing this in the personal versions of Windows 10, I shook my head sadly wondering why anyone would pay to be spied on. I couldn’t imagine that corporations, let alone governments would tolerate that sort of malfeasance, proving, once again, my infinite capacity for naiveté.

You would think that the Dutch Government upon discovering this would have told Microsoft to “get the hell out of our country and take your malware with you.” But no. Instead they are doubling down and considering using the Web version of Office 365 and letting Microsoft store their data for them. No, really: go read the article if you don’t believe me.

Microsoft is promising to behave and install a “zero-exhaust” switch to turn the collection off. They’re also promising to be more transparent and provide tools so users can see what sort of data is being collected (it’s currently encrypted so no one but Microsoft knows). A cynic might suspect that what these promises really mean is, “we’ll try harder not to get caught again.”

If you had any illusions that Microsoft had become “kinder, gentler” after the Gates and Ballmer regimes, this should put your delusions to rest.

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Cashless in Sweden

Posted on 2018-11-30 by jcs

I’ve written several times about China moving to a cashless society [1, 2, 3] and speculated about how long it would take for the West to move in similar directions. I didn’t realize that Sweden has advanced quite far down that path. Advanced so far that total value of outstanding cash now accounts for less than 1% of the Swedish GDP and it’s increasingly common for retail businesses to refuse to deal with cash.

The World Economic Forum has an interesting article on these developments and what it means for Sweden and its people. The primary concern is that control of the money supply will pass from the government to private corporations. Cynics will suggest that the real worry is that government is concerned that they will no longer be able to finance social programs by printing money but regardless of your views on that you’ll probably agree that further regulation of the markets will be required.

I found the article interesting because it points out that moving to a cashless society does present problems and the answers to them aren’t always obvious. In Sweden’s case, the government is discussing issuing e-kronas, which are pretty much like a normal Krona except that they’re digital and can be easily used and moved electronically.

If you have any interest in this area, the article is worth taking a look at.

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The Org-ref Video Revisited

Posted on 2018-11-29 by jcs

Recently, John Kitchin tweeted that he has added the org-ref video to his YouTube play list:

The video is three years old and I wrote about it back then but on rewatching it, I was struck anew at how astounding org-ref is.

Kitchin begins the video by showing some of the ways you can add a document to your bibliography. It’s like magic. Drag a PDF reference, or a paper’s Web site into your bibliography and org-ref will fetch the paper and a BibTeX entry and insert it into the bibliography for you. You can also copy a reference from an existing paper and when you add it to your bibliography, org-ref will retrieve the paper and the BibTeX entry for you. You can do the same thing by copying a paper’s DOI and asking org-ref to get the paper and BibTeX entry for you.

The rest of the video discusses adding reference to papers, equations, code, and figures to the paper you’re writing. Keep in mind that this is all being done in an Org mode file.

If you’re a researcher, or student, or anyone at all who writes papers with a bibliography you owe it to yourself to watch the video (it’s here on YouTube) and install org-ref. Org mode users often say it’s Emacs’ killer app and reason enough to use Emacs. If you’re writing papers, org-ref could be considered reason enough to use Org mode.

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Nothing To Hide

Posted on 2018-11-28 by jcs

One of the tiresome and annoying things that the uninformed say about privacy issues is, “I have nothing to hide.” The idea, of course, is that, “I’m not a criminal or a terrorist so (1) no one will bother surveilling me and (2) my life is an open book and there’s nothing about me that would bother me if it was revealed.”

Both of those statements are almost certainly wrong. Governments and corporations will surveil anyone they can. Governments do it looking for trouble makers and corporations do it to target advertising or, for example, to identify poor insurance risks. You can take for granted that anyone who’s not completely off the grid is being surveilled to some degree.

At first blush, the second argument might seem stronger. Most of us aren’t doing anything that would excite the interest of law enforcement so who cares if they spy on us? Here’s a story about a man who discovered his sexual health searches were being sent to multiple companies. In this case, he was researching vasectomies—presumably for the usual reasons—and found out that that information had been made available to advertising companies. The story is from Australia but don’t congratulate yourself if you live elsewhere; it’s happening where you reside too.

If you’re one of those people who don’t care if complete strangers know you’re considering having a vasectomy, consider this scenario: For one reason or another you do some research on HIV. You don’t have HIV and you’re not doing anything that would put you at risk but let’s say you’re writing a paper on it. This information leaks out the same way the vasectomy searches did and the next thing you know you can no longer get health insurance.

You had nothing to hide but you got surveilled with disastrous results anyway.

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Search and Replace

Posted on 2018-11-27 by jcs

Clemens Radermacher over at (with-emacs has a nice post that discusses various strategies for search and replacement. He considers searching and replacing both in single buffers and in multiple buffers or files.

In each case, he looks at the “traditional” way of doing it and then considers some newer ways that use packages such as Ivy and Helm. Finally, he describes his preferred method. The post provides a nice recap of the various techniques of searching and replacing as well as talking about some packages such as objed, anzu, and deadgrep that you may not be familiar with. Even if you’re an experienced Emacs user, it’s worth taking the time to read the post if only for the possibility that you may discover some newer techniques.

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More Trouble for Adtech

Posted on 2018-11-26 by jcs

If you’re like me and really, really hate Adtech and those who push it, I have some good news. After the GDPR went into effect, advertisers had to have your explicit, informed, and affirmative consent to collect personal information about you. It was perfectly predictable that the advertisers would try to game the system, of course, and one way they’ve been doing that is by passing on permissions through contractual relationships. That means, for example, that when you agree to a particular site’s terms of use, they pass that permission on to the Adtech firms because they have a contractual relationship with them.

Now a French regulator has ruled that passing on permissions through contractual relationships is illegal. It’s hard for the non-lawyers among us—and probably hard for the lawyers too, for that matter—to know what the effect of this ruling will be but according to TechCrunch, it could mean the end of Adtech as it’s currently practiced.

The TechCrunch article has lots of details about the ruling and its probable consequences so it’s an excellent place to start if you want to understand what it all means. The TL;DR, as far as I can tell, is that it’s good news for those of us who want advertisers to stop spying on us.

Of course, all this applies only in the European Union but one can hope that it’s coming to a country near us too.

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