HOPE XV; What is Activity Pub
The HOPE talk (starts at 3:34:10). You didn’t miss anything, dear readers, because you’ve heard it all in this very newsletter.
Instead please spend considerable time reading and clicking on all of the links in this recounting of the Take Back Tech conference earlier this month https://mijente.net/blog/take-back-tech-2024-exposing-harms-reclaiming-people-power/
Fantastic programming. Every one of the session recordings deserves your eyeballs.
Also read Mijente's report "Automating Deportation: The Artificial Intelligence Behind the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration Enforcement Regime" https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Automating-Deportation.pdf
Subscribe! And please share.
An Embarrassment of Links
- The US State Department is training diplomats in cybersecurity, privacy, telecommunications, and other technology issues https://www.wired.com/story/us-state-department-diplomacy-school
- New policy brief from Open Knowledge Foundation on "Governing Digital Public Infrastructure as a Commons" https://blog.okfn.org/wp-content/files/2024/07/T20-Brasil-TF05-Policy-Brief-Governing-Digital-Public-Infrastructure-as-a-Commons.pdf
- Follow the Money writes about Ashton Kutcher's tour of Europe to push his company Thorn and #chatcontrol https://www.ftm.eu/articles/ashton-kutcher-s-anti-childabuse-software-below-par
- My colleague Gabe Nicholas writes, "Researchers need far more information to understand AI’s true risks." https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/07/08/artificial-intelligence-ai-election-misinformation-technology-risks/?utm_content=gifting&tpcc=gifting_article&gifting_article=YXJ0aWZpY2lhbC1pbnRlbGxpZ2VuY2UtYWktZWxlY3Rpb24tbWlzaW5mb3JtYXRpb24tdGVjaG5vbG9neS1yaXNrcw==&pid=PNIIEQRnirhjrth
- You could join Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center's Rebooting Social Media team https://sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Search/Home/Home?partnerid=25240&siteid=5341#jobDetails=2008720_5341
- Human Rights Watch is hiring a Director, Information Technology Operations https://boards.greenhouse.io/humanrightswatch/jobs/7522848002
- https://leap.se/blog/android-dev-wanted/
- You could be the CIO at the ITU– apply! https://jobs.itu.int/job/Geneva-Chief-Information-Officer-%28CIO%29/985083055/
- New newsletter by the folks at GreatFire on Apple's App Censorship in China https://mailchi.mp/applecensorship/isolation-by-design_censorship-in-apples-app-store-in-china-and-human-rights-implications?e=71f4e27648
- You should subscribe to the Association for Progressive Communication's newsletter! Here are some relevant hits:
- APC highlights stories of connectivity centred on local communities that have occupied their land for centuries without triggering the socio-environmental destruction of their regions.
- There is widespread dissemination of violent and inflammatory content in Hebrew against Palestinians across social media platforms, particularly after October 2023. This piece is based on a Lightning Talk, titled “Digital freedoms censorship” at the 2024 APC Community Gathering.
- As Uganda prepares for its National ID mass enrolment, Witness Uganda’s position paper calls for comprehensive data protection impact assessments to safeguard privacy and data security before making significant changes to the National ID system.
- NLnet, APC’s partner in the NGI Zero consortium, is looking for a technology assessor to review incoming applications.
- Internet Society BOLT grants are open until 6 August https://www.isocfoundation.org/grant-programme/bolt-grant-program/
- Submissions are open for AI-CONTROL, an Internet Architecture Board workshop: https://datatracker.ietf.org/group/aicontrolws/about/
- A report from Quirium on how Russia uses EU companies for propaganda https://www.qurium.org/alerts/russia/exposing-the-evil-empire-of-doppelganger-disinformation/
- Amnesty's guide to the Apple "mercenary spyware attack" notifications https://securitylab.amnesty.org/latest/2024/04/apple-threat-notifications-what-they-mean-and-what-you-can-do/
- Standards are getting political. Yep. https://academic.oup.com/ia/article/100/4/1635/7692873?login=false
- Internet Society on the systemic risks introduced by proposals to screen the message content of end-to-end encrypted https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2024/preemptive-monitoring-e2ee-services/
This week's essay is an excerpt from the clever and informative newsletter Building Activity Pub
What the hell is ActivityPub, anyway?
It's a fair question. A couple of weeks back we talked about what the benefits of ActivityPub are and how it can be used to create an open network where you can follow people and they can follow you... but what is it?
ActivityPub is an open "standard" — and a standard is really just a set of ideas that a group of humans have decided to agree on.
Some common standards you're likely familiar with: Most of the world has standardized on the Metric system for measuring things. All the appliances in your country share the same voltage. People drive on the same side of the road. Shipping containers all fit on the same trucks, trains and ships.
A standard is just a common set of rules or parameters. When standards work well, things generally become efficient and consistent; like how most of your devices now charge with the same USB-C cable. When standards work poorly, there's often frustration and friction because things that seem like they should work together simply... do not. Like ebooks, cookie banners, or the electoral college.
The web is a set of standards for displaying text and images on computers. Because the post you're reading is published using standardized HTML on our website, your computer knows how to display it for you to read in a browser.
This represents decades of humanity agreeing "here's the format we're going to all use to do shit on the internet" — and sticking to it, so that when new things are built, they're compatible with all our existing things.
So, HTML is a standard for displaying text and images on a computer. Email is a standard for sending and receiving messages privately. ActivityPub, then, is a standard for sending and receiving content publicly.
That's all a social network really is, for the most part: A way to send and receive content, publicly.
Not as exciting as you were hoping?
Standards and networks are rarely very exciting when they start out, because they don't have scale yet.
Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.
It was March 10th, 1847, and it had been a long day for Thomas. Working as an assistant to a prolific inventor was a pretty thankless vocation. Recently his boss had been yammering about a future where humans would communicate with one another all over the world, instantly, without even leaving their homes.
Moments later, Thomas was the recipient of the world's first phone call as Alexander Graham Bell demanded to see him from another room in the house.
In 1847 being able to transmit your voice to another room using electricity was remarkable, but it was no more useful than a centuries-old technology for communicating between rooms: Shouting. Which didn't even require electricity.
What Bell could see, though, was that this technology—if adopted by others—would make voices audible at distances that shouting could never reach, at speeds that written letters could never match.
In between his vision of the future and its ultimate reality stood significant obstacles. First, he'd need to convince everyone that they should have large, expensive devices in their homes. After that he'd have to convince towns, cities, and countries to run miles and miles of copper cables between every single telephone at enormous cost, to provide standardized infrastructure to make any of those devices function.
Some people were easily convinced that this invention was the future, but not everyone was so certain.
Rutherford Hayes, the 19th president of the United States, reportedly mused "That's an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one?" While the Chief Engineer of the British Post Office was succinct in his rebuke: "The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys."
When you hear people talking excitedly about the Fediverse in 2024, what you're tuning into is the collective energy of a group of people coming into contact with an invention which, if it can overcome non-trivial barriers to adoption, has the potential to once again transform the way we interact with one another.
But infrastructure takes time to develop and evolve before its value is obvious. In the late 1800s that sort of invention looked like this:
While today, in the early 2000s, that idea — every bit as primitive — looks something a little more like this:
Where's this all going?
So far, we've been collectively making a lot of calls from room to room inside the same house. We have some very early products that are difficult to use, and limited in utility compared to existing alternatives. Like shouting.
If you look closely, though... if you squint slightly and tilt your head to the side just so... you might just catch a glimpse of a future that's much more than that.
ActivityPub is a shared idea that's catching on.
The technical engineering required to make it all work will always be a major topic of conversation, but the way to truly understand ActivityPub is to examine the idea, not the technology. It's a way for people to interact without algorithms, independently, at scale.
If that isn't something worth fighting for, I don't know what is.
At the very least, now you'll have a good answer the next time one of your friends says "ActivityPub? What's that? Like Mastodon or something?"