Today is Lucky’s 3rd Birthday! Some of Lucky’s favorite things: Walks, Food, Foxy Toy, Barking at things, Snow, Naps, Scratching Behind Ears, Treats, Lunging at cars.
I finished the the Super Mario 64™ Question Mark Block LEGO build! There were a lot of little hidden details. The transformation from block to show the scenes on top is great. Mario, Princess Peach, and Bowser are all there.
Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?
When I was in high school in Minot, ND I used to volunteer for Craig Nansen, the Technical Coordinator for the Minot Public School District. I got connected to Nansen when I got my Apple //c for Christmas and wrote a letter to the Apple User Group of Minot, which was organized by Craig and was defunct. If I remember right I had also written to Apple to get the name of the local user group.
That connection turned into an opportunity to work with him after school which I leapt after to get access to the labs of Apple and Macintosh computers. A lot of what I remember doing was using the special software from MECC to make hundreds and hundreds of copies of 5.25" floppy disks for the various labs.
When I was volunteering Craig was deeply involved in a cool project with Brøderbund to create a new game in the Carmen Sandiego franchise, Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego?.
I knew of the Carmen Sandiego games and had played a couple of them myself. It was really cool to think that the storyline could extend to North Dakota.
I didn’t know however how rare the game was. All of the other Carmen Sandiego titles were well known, but this specific title was even missing from the founder of Brøderbund’s collection.
While examining Carlston’s donations at The Strong, Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi noted that Where in North Dakota was missing. Cifaldi tweeted about the game, explaining that he’d only recently heard about it and requested information from anyone who had more details.
That tweet initiated a domino effect. Former Minot school district administrator Craig Nansen noticed Cifaldi’s tweet, wrote him back, and arranged a sit-down conversation with as many of his ex-design colleagues as he could locate.
Craig’s reply to that tweet was the genesis of what eventually turned into a hunt to fully document this rare title. The journey is chronicled in this Screenland S1 E6: Eight-bit archaeologists episode with Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation. The segments are 5:46 - 10:41, 15:09 - 19:06, and 21:34 - 24:02.
At 18:00 into the Screenland episode you get a great overview of the history of the game. Craig as well as other contributors to the game are there. Craig was a master archivist and had a tremendous amount of material to share about the game.
Carmen North Dakota was a little unique because in addition to being a game for consumer sale, it was intended to be used in North Dakota classrooms to teach kids about the state. To go with it, there was this blue covered Carmen’s North Dakota Almanac.
The Carmen’s North Dakota Almanac was my very small part in this project. Noted from the cover sheet of the almanac:
I have the full Almanac and the ND Database Project with the cover sheet that included all of the committee members names.
Here they are:
- Mary Littler
- Bonny Berryman (she, I believe spearheaded the project and gave in-services at NDEA about the program)
- Phyllis Landsiedel
- Lola Geffner
- Kathy Froeber
- Gloria Lokken (former President of NDEA)
- Jane Ormiston
- Geraldeen Rude
- Shawneen Voiles
- Kathy Feist
- Brenda Burtness
- Pauline Wahl
- Craig Nansen (Project Director)
- Jamie Thingelstad (Page Layout)
Back then I had gotten pretty good at QuarkXPress and did some page layout assistance for the Yearbook committee and used it for some personal projects too. I don’t recall very well, but I’m guessing that is where the “Page Layout” part came in.
Additional References
You can play Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego? on Internet Archive in an emulator.
I’ve independently archived the ROM (disk) files for the game. You need to download the disk images and then load them in an Apple II Emulator.
There is a full and super detailed writeup on the game by David Craddock at The Video Game History Foundation.
Also see Why in the world was Carmen Sandiego in North Dakota? from July 2016 in the Fargo Forum.
The Carmen North Dakota committee turned over some disks and other resources to Frank Cifaldi to be housed in the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY as a donation of materials. They also have Doug Carlston’s personal archive from Brøderbund.
On Audience Capture
When I first started writing the Weekly Thing the email service showed me two reports that I knew I didn’t want to see. The first was who opened the email, when, where, on what device, and how often. That was a clear violation of privacy. What business do I have knowing what you do in your mailbox? None. The second report was which links got clicked on the most. This caused me grave concern right away. I felt certain that knowing what links people clicked on would influence the content I wrote about each week. Even if I could somehow convince myself that I wouldn’t be influenced, how could I possibly prove that I wasn’t? Thankfully the service allowed me to turn off both of these capabilities.
The thing I was worried about was audience capture. Particularly with a project like the Weekly Thing, where I’m exploring the topics that are interesting to me and sharing that journey with others, audience capture has the potential to impact me as the author in ways that could change my journey and where my exploration took me.
[Audience capture] involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person’s identity with one custom-made for the audience. — The Perils of Audience Capture
I do many things to limit the amount of advertising I’m exposed to. I pay for ad free versions of services if I can. I run an ad blocker. Frankly I just limit the amount of advertising supported content that I’m exposed to. I also work hard to limit algorithmic promotion of content. Some of that is about protecting my privacy, but more important to me is protecting my liberty.
When I think of my liberty I’m considering the ability to act as I please, without constraint and on my own discretion. That last part is the one that I worry about in regard to advertising, or algorithms prompting me with information. It is also the primary concern about audience capture.
Captured by Analytics
The mechanics of audience capture on the web tend to start with analytics. We have analytics for nearly everything. All social media platforms show you analytics on your profile like the number of followers you have, as well as analytics on each item you share in the form of views, likes, shares, and more. I believe services have weaponized this, making analytics as addiction, and the same features open the door for getting captured by your audience.
This bit from the Waking Up podcast is what got my head spinning on this topic in the first place.
[27:01] “If I’m alert to anything, it is to not getting captured by my audience. If ever I were to find myself not wanting to say something for fear of how the audience will respond even though I think it’s true and important, that’s the thing I know I can’t do. There’s obviously a problem of audience capture in the podcasting and alternative media space. This is true wether one is getting support directly by subscription or donation, and it’s also true if you are running ads. And in several cases the evidence of audience capture is absolutely clear. There are people who’ve done 50 episodes more or less in a row on the same topic as though they had lost interest in every other thing on Earth. What’s going on there? There is some training signal coming from the audience, and almost certainly a bad economic incentive that is capturing that podcast host.” — Sam Harris, On Disappointing My Audience
That whole bit from Harris is compelling, but I bolded the key component that I think we need to be mindful of. The same way that we can train an algorithm given a data set and a target, we can also train people by giving them a training signal from the audience. That training signal is the stream of analytics.
I think you could take this further. Something akin to a principle or rule:
The more detailed metrics you have on an audience, the more likely you are captured by that audience.
The metrics provide a mirage of insight and influence. It “feels like” you are learning more about the audience, but you may be modifying yourself to fit the pattern of what you see in the data. Your audience engages a lot with this one topic? It seems far too likely that more of that will start appearing in front of you. In reality all of this data bends and shapes the creator to fit into the mold of their audience.
The opposite is also true. The fewer metrics you have, the less likely you are captured by your audience. I publish the Weekly Thing using Buttondown and I have no tracking of open rates or any links that people click on. Since I have no way of knowing what links people click on, I have no way of being captured going forward. I know that the next set of links I select are for sure not driven by what I think people will click on, since I don’t even know what people click on!
In general, as a creator, I think we need to be very cautious about what data we collect, and how we plan to use that. Don’t collect data unless you know how you are going to put it into action.
We all have an audience now
Audience capture is an interesting concept for people that publish things. Bloggers, podcasters, newsletter writers all have obvious audiences. But it no longer stops there does it? Thanks to social media services we all have an audience, in fact many audiences. You have a set of followers on Facebook, or Twitter, or LinkedIn. Those services give you many metrics about how your “followers” engage with the content you share. This is a perfect setup to be captured.
Much has been written about how social media damages discourse and how people do all of this performative dunking. Typically that is connected with the idea of eroding civility, or not knowing the person as a person but as just an avatar. But some of that performance could obviously be for your audience as well. And if the likes pile in the right way, the vicious cycle will continue. You become what your audience rewards. If you are in a room full of barbarians, be mindful of what they will reward!
As we ponder the challenges of social media, perhaps it is worth considering if we really need another audience — and if so, how will this audience influence us and impact our identity.
Captured Media
Audience capture is easy to personify in the form of a person, particularly an individual creating something. Clearly the activities of thousands of people in the audience can have impact on that one creator. However, I don’t see any reason that an audience can’t capture a brand or a company.
A company doesn’t have liberty or free will. So the capture of a company or brand is very different. In fact, many brands may want to be captured. That may be their ultimate goal. And for some there may be no downside to that. Harley Davidson is probably a better company if they are captured by their audience. They may call that customer obsessed!
But take a moment to think of media. Is media bias accurate? Or is it more accurate to say media is captured by their audience? This is a bit of a chicken and egg question, and perhaps the end result doesn’t really matter. But as we think of modern media organizations they tend to obsess about data. They have a never ending “training set” of data on what their audience likes. The smartest thing as a company may be to feed more content into that known topic. Repeat. More engagement. And magically audience capture.
Where this lands us may be no different than media bias, but it speaks to a totally different cure.
Media bias says that the actors in the media are intentionally biased to one perspective or another. Certainly true for some, but I don’t believe true for all. And I don’t know how you can fix that. Likely you just give up and say everything is biased. But if we frame this different and suggest that modern media has gotten itself trapped, captured by their audience, then the answer is pretty simple. Ditch the analytics. Stop telling the creators what the audience engages in. Starve them of that feedback loop and the capture will die away.
Kids with audiences
The last area of audience capture that I’ve been thinking about scares me the most. Most teenagers use some form of social media. They are acutely aware of their follower counts, likes, retweets, and whatever other feedback loops these platforms have. They have an audience, and that training set of data is coming right at them. Now, lets consider two things about this point in someone’s life:
- Most teenagers are working as hard as they can to fit in. To be part of the group. They may not be aware of audience capture, but they are seeking to be captured in the most desperate way.
- These same teenagers do not have a strong sense of self. They are in the act of defining that. Liberty, free will — these are new thoughts and they are building their identity as they go.
Adding an audience to a child that is still developing their own identity will forever alter that persons identity.
Yes, you could argue that there is nothing new here, this is just part of growing up and forming your identity. To an extent that is true. You maybe had an audience in Chemistry class that you performed for. You might have had a club that you connected with that was a form of audience. But not really. In-person groups are totally different. They are not an audience, they are friends and acquaintances. There is no training set here. You don’t get a data feed of likes and engagement scores at the end of the event. The performative behavior for an audience that social media enables is completely different.
***
Thinking more concretely about audience capture highlights for me the importance of collecting very little data, and on platforms that you cannot opt out of it, try to avoid it at all costs. Want to know a shameful secret of mine? I take note of how many likes and retweets my content gets on Twitter. I’m not proud of it. I don’t know that it has changed what I write about, but I also don’t know that it hasn’t. That notifications section on Twitter is one of the things that makes me want to disengage from that platform.
I know there are certain topics that I blog about and mention in the Weekly Thing that are not popular. Some folks don’t like one topic or another. I know that because they have told me directly, not through analytics. That is fine, but I’m going to keep writing about whatever I want because I’m not selling a product to get maximum engagement. I’m sharing my journey of learning. And where that goes is only up to me. Liberty!
So ask yourself, are you captured? What audiences do you have? How are you protecting your liberty?
Now that the temperatures are out of the deep freeze Mazie and I took Lucky on a walk. Walking on this snowmobile packed snow was like walking on sand.
Tyler’s LEGO Loop Coaster is really tall! The structure alone is very impressive. I can’t wait to see it go!!!
Through bag 9 of the Super Mario 64™ Question Mark Block LEGO. The inside contraption I believe will pop out when done. A lot of fussy small pieces. A very fun build.
Tyler is making great progress on the LEGO Loop Coaster, already done through bag 7!
Just finished bag 3 on the Super Mario 64™ Question Mark Block LEGO. This is a very fun build full of surprises already.
Polarizing Technology: Encryption and Crypto
The fury and vitriol towards crypto is strong. People use words like “hate” and you can feel the emotion in their voice. I’ve had friends suggest that I must hate the environment if I support crypto. Or even that they thought I was “too smart” for crypto. Many suggest that blockchains are “just a database”, but I’ve never seen people yelling at each other, dismissing opinions, and ultimately even losing friends because they liked a database!
This made me wonder, is this unique to crypto? What else in technology might be so polarizing and carry so much emotional energy with it?
Then I realized that crypto isn’t alone. Encryption has a similar polarizing affect. And as I explored that hypothesis, I clearly also saw that the entities that find these technologies threatening use very similar tactics to attack them.
Encryption
Ways to encrypt data have been around for as long as we’ve written things down. Famous hardware devices like the Enigma machine were key tools to successful war operations. Modern technology has made encryption more sophisticated and even more difficult to defeat.
In 1991 Phil Zimmerman wrote Pretty Good Privacy or PGP. PGP was the first widely available implementation of the incredibly secure public-key cryptography. After Zimmerman created PGP he shared the source code online, triggering the US Government to open an investigation into Zimmerman and PGP for potential violations of the Arms Export Control Act. For obvious reasons, the US Government doesn’t want encryption technology that it cannot defeat to be in the hands of other entities. Five years later the US Government dropped its investigation into Zimmerman with no indictment.
The early history of the Electronic Frontier Foundation also involved encryption. In 1995 they represented the defendant in Bernstein v. United States. Similar to Zimmerman, Bernstein wanted to publish the source code of his encryption software. After four years we had a landmark ruling that determined that software source code was speech, and is thus protected by the First Amendment.
It is worth noting that the Bernstein v. United States ruling was one of the cases referenced by Apple when it refused to hack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone.
Encryption is now used widely, and necessary to provide hundreds of secure services. Every modern phone has dozens of encryption routines in it, many that just operate in the background so that if someone stole your device, your private information would be protected.
But should private citizens be able to use encryption that is so secure that nobody else access it? Even law enforcement? Even the US Government? Even after 30 years public opinion on this is still not settled. It absolutely makes law enforcement harder when all communication between parties is encrypted, but it has immense benefit to the privacy of those individuals.
I firmly believe that we have a right to encrypt data in a way that no other entity can ever access it. The same way that I cannot be compelled to share a secret I have memorized, I have the right to have digital information that is completely secure and private to me.
However, there are many people who disagree completely. Many feel strongly that law enforcement particularly should have a backdoor to get into encrypted data. Many believe that Apple should have hacked those terrorist phones and retrieved information for the FBI. The government itself continues to fight for this with. In 1993 we had the Clipper Chip, but the battle continues.
Encryption itself challenges power. It allows normal people to do something that beforehand only governments or corporations could. The power to access secret information is a big one. Those that previously held that capability exclusively are not going to let it go easily. And that is why the FBI steps in to sue Apple when the time is right.
There are two wedges that are used to argue why encryption should not be allowed for regular individuals: terrorism and protecting children. Horrible topics to be sure, but they are the most effective at swaying public opinion against encryption. The next time an established entity with power makes a legal claim that encryption must have a backdoor, look for those two topics.
If we had a Digital Bill of Rights, I would include encryption as one of the first.
Crypto
Crypto, blockchain, cryptocurrencies — this technology has many similarities to encryption. First, let me clarify that while encryption and cryptography play a key role in crypto, it is a completely different solution and set of use cases. There could be no crypto without cryptography, but the application of crypto is not about protecting secrets.
Very similar to encryption though, crypto takes an activity that was previously the exclusive domain of powerful entities and makes it accessible to many. You could not have created a currency that could be trusted by millions without crypto. I can assert ownership of many digital assets without the benefit of any company or government entity, thanks to crypto.
Crypto allows individuals to store and exchange things of value completely on their own, common digital ownership.
The Bitcoin Whitepaper written in 2008, and then launched in 2009 was in many ways like Zimmerman’s publishing of PGP in 1991. The technology was furthered significantly when Ethereum launched in 2015, allowing completely new use cases to be created. Similar to encryption, in the crypto world we now have dozens of technology solutions and thousands of applications built on top of that. But the fundamental ethos is about storing and transferring value between people, directly without a company or government in the middle.
The efficiency benefits of blockchain are incredibly enticing, and like encryption it is possible for existing entities that control power to use these technologies internally to get benefit. The crypto version of a government backdoor is a US Digital Currency, run on a private and controlled blockchain.
Imagine if the FBI published an encryption tool. Would you use it?
Depending on when you start the clock with crypto we are between 7 and 14 years into the same kind of debate that we have been having with encryption. Should groups of people on their own be able to store and transfer value without any tools from the Government? Many smart, educated, and well-meaning people will have different views on this. It is important that a government can control their own currency. It is also important that a government have legal domain over certain forms of ownership. But personally I don’t believe those are blanket needs, and I see a great opportunity for technology to enable new capabilities here.
To fight off crypto there are two narratives that have developed. The first is that crypto supports fraud & crime. The second is environmental destruction. It is true that almost all Ransomware takes payment in Bitcoin, and the energy footprint of a proof-of-work blockchain is enormous. However, Bitcoin has also enabled people with no access to banking systems to store and transmit value. And while the energy footprint for Bitcoin is high, the gold industry certainly has a large energy footprint too. What amount of energy is acceptable for a digital reserve currency of the world to use?
***
This thought exercise was helpful for me to add some context and perspective to these two debates. I hadn’t previously connected the encryption debate that I’ve observed and supported for years with what I was seeing in crypto. Connecting them in this way draws a couple of conclusions:
- Encryption has been an open debate for 30 years and is still unsettled. I suspect that crypto will have a similar path. I don’t think we will gain a consensus as a society soon.
- Existing entities with power that is threatened by encryption and crypto will not give it up easily. Progress will be slow and begrudgingly.
- Unfortunately these technologies do get used for nefarious activities. Terrorists do use encryption to protect terrible things, and bad actors do use Bitcoin to get payments.
What, Why, and How to Improve Your Security and Privacy
I thought I would share a few of the things that I personally do to improve my security and privacy online. I do all five of things I’ve included here and services I reference are ones I use, in many cases for several years. I’m not recommending anything that I don’t personally do.
What: Keep secrets safe.
Why: We all manage a lot of secrets. We have hundreds of passwords to various websites. You’re not using the same password all over the place right? We have a ton of other secrets too. Those random questions that some websites ask about where you were born or the name of your first pet? There are also more traditional secrets like banking information, or the combination to your safe. This stuff all needs to be kept accessible but very secure.
How: I use 1Password for all of my secret management. Specifically, I use 1Password for Families because it allows all four of us to have our own accounts, keep our own vaults, and share vaults between different family members as well. 1Password is a password manager, but it also manages any number of different secrets, including any random notes that you may want to keep in it’s encrypted database.
What: Use a unique email address per service.
Why: Whenever you create an account on a new service, you should create a brand new email address for that account. You know how people have been saying for years to never share passwords between websites? Well, you also shouldn’t share an email address. You see, if you sign up for dozens of websites using the same email address, those websites may share tracking information using your email address as a shared identifier! Gross right? Yeah. The way to defeat this is to make sure that the email address is unique for each service you use.
How: There are a number of ways to do this, and I’ve tried all of them.
Many services allow for “plus addressing”, so if your email address is foobar@proton.me, you can make it unique by putting a + in it with some characters. So, foobar+lyft@proton.me could be the address you give Lyft.
There are also email relayers just forward email to you through a random address. These can be hard to use because they are outside your usual email flow.
I’ve used Fastmail for years and they recently rolled out a Masked Email feature that is awesome. It is easy to create any number of addresses, I have hundreds of them. You can delete any of them at anytime to destroy an address, and fairly unique to Fastmail if you reply it will use your masked email address at the from address. They even supports custom domain names so all of my addresses are in the form of polar.bison4837@thingelstad.com. The nice thing about this is that I could still get these masked emails on another provider if I setup a Catch All address.
Creating unique email addresses is key to limiting tracking.
What: You need a content blocker in your browser.
Why: Imagine if you didn’t have a spam filter on your email for a second. Imagine every single email you ever got just landed in your inbox. That is what is happening if you surf the web without a content blocker. Actually though, it is worse. Because you aren’t just letting every email in, you are letting infinite numbers of little programs run on your computer from any number of different companies. Those programs are tracking you and collecting up all sorts of information about you. Dozens (or more!) of them on every website you visit. Yes, it is terrible. Running a content blocker is the key. Some will get caught in the ethics of running an ad blocker, but good content blockers can selectively block by category. So, if you feel ads should stay that is fine. You can still block the trackers.
How: I’ve used 1Blocker for this and think it is absolutely the best. It has a robust set of categories and definitions are updated regularly. I love that I can create my own custom rules as well. I have a set of rules that stop all activity to any Facebook property. My Internet doesn’t even have Facebook services on it. It is fabulous.
What: Your searches should not profile you.
Why: Google knows what you’re thinking. Searching is a particularly effective way to build a profile of a person. No company should get to hear all the questions that you have in your brain.
What: I love the idea of just paying for search, and have been using Neeva for a long time. I pay a small fee, and in turn they don’t profile and harvest my inner thoughts. That seems fair to me. If you absolutely can’t see to it to pay for something, at least switch your search engine to DuckDuckGo and stop using Google. DuckDuckGo is way better for privacy.
What: Get a feed reader!
Why: New content is published everywhere, and the best way to preserve your privacy is to have a service to get it for you. Instead of subscribing to a YouTube Channel in YouTube, you can have your Feed Reader watch it and show you. YouTube then doesn’t get that data. Or, want to follow a Twitter account but avoid being logged into Twitter, good feed readers can do that too. Your Feed Reader gets to be your armored agent, going into various services and pulling new content for you. No algorithms here either, as the content is just shown in time order. Brilliant!
What: Feedbin is my favorite service here and I’ve been a subscriber for years. I use it for RSS feeds, email newsletters, Twitter accounts, YouTube channels, Medium, Substack, and the list goes on and on. I don’t have to go to all those things, I just go to Feedbin. No social amplification, no algorithms, no ads. Just the stuff I subscribed to in exchange for a small fee.
I’ve been validating the Gnosis Chain for about three months now. I’m running 32 validators. Gnosis made the transition to using proof-of-stake. The validators generate about 0.4 mGNO a day, or about $1.09, a 14% annual yield. On average my 32 validators propose 4 to 5 blocks a day, with a maximum of 10. There are currently 109,386 validators.
I really dig this CC0 is Punk sticker from Matt Downey. CC0 is totally punk!
The snow, subzero temps, and frozen lid on the Big Green Egg are too much to overcome. Need to find different way to cook tenderloin steaks. No grilling this Christmas Eve. 🥶
Negative temperatures with even more negative windchills make the crackle of wood in the fireplace even better as night falls. 🔥❄️
Source of Attention
“Take the thought itself as an object.
Take the feeling of being the thinker also as an object.
What is that feeling?
It too must be an appearance in consciousness.
It feels like something, to be the source of attention.
Is there really a source of attention in the middle of experience?
Or is there just experience?”
— Sam Harris, Waking Up, Daily Meditation for Dec 21, 2022
We got together with friends and had a great time escaping Cuckoo’s Clock at Missing Pieces. We escaped with 13m 36s left on the clock having used 5 clues.
I’m glad I grabbed a screen shot of the “Promotion of alternative social platforms policy” because now that same URL returns a 404 and appears to be deleted from the search index.
I feel like Twitter is disrespecting micro.blog by not including it in the banned list of platforms you can link to. Show some respect! Post is on there and it’s been around for 5 minutes.
Follow me @jthingelstad on micro.blog!
This new “Promotion of alternative social platforms policy” on Twitter deserves memorializing for the pure idiocy of it.
