Better's Blinkist

What’s in it for me? Get an insider’s take on the threats and promises of the digital age.

why the data cloud is more like a fortress than a real cloud;what an eighteenth-century British MP and Edward Snowden have in common; andhow a Stasi prison taught Microsoft a valuable lesson.

18 March, 2020 01:27 Share

Data has always been an integral part of human civilization.

We’ve always relied on data. All human civilizations have passed information down from one generation to the next. Without being able to record our methods, we wouldn’t have been able to make progress.Without the scrolls of antiquity, our great architectural techniques wouldn’t have developed over centuries, mathematical solutions wouldn’t have traveled from one mind to the next, and military strategies wouldn’t have made it from Caesar’s battlefields to Napoleon’s.Then, when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, there was something of a data explosion. As more individuals gained access to the achievements of humankind through the printed word, a democratic revolution began. This had momentous consequences for religion, politics and cultural life.Later, the acceleration of commerce in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant an exponential increase in the amount of data in the world. By the mid-twentieth century, there were filing cabinets overflowing with data in every organization, for every imaginable purpose.And today, through digitization, we store a quantity of data inconceivable at any other moment in history. We call this digital architecture the cloud.

18 March, 2020 01:29 Share

And though this word brings to mind a fluffy, soft cumulus floating above us, the reality is more like a fortress. The cloud has a very definite physical reality. Every time you look something up on your mobile device, you are pulling a piece of information from a gigantic data center.These are modern marvels that almost nobody gets to see. Take the one in Quincy – a tiny town about 150 miles east of Seattle. Here, there are two campuses with more than 20 huge, nondescript buildings. Each building is the size of a football field and can comfortably house two large commercial airplanes.At the heart of each of these buildings is a computer center, where thousands of servers are lined up in long racks. Somewhere, in one of these buildings, each of us will have our own digital file. In one of these humming, cavernous rooms, there are our photographs, private emails and bank account details.Even more remarkable is the fact that each data center has an exact double, with another set of buildings, just like the one in Quincy, somewhere else. This way, if there’s a natural or humanmade disaster, our data – our memories, messages, private details – will be kept safe.

18 March, 2020 01:29 Share

Edward Snowden reignited the old question of privacy for the twenty-first century.

The source for this story was Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old computer systems administrator working at the NSA Threat Operation Centre in Hawaii. He’d downloaded over 1.5 million classified documents and then fled to Hong Kong before contacting the Guardian and Washington Post with his story.What he’d revealed was that the NSA, in league with the British government, had been hacking into undersea fiber-optic cables to copy data from Yahoo and Google networks. Microsoft, whose own user info was compromised, was stunned.At this moment, Snowden’s revelations brought about a clash between the people and their government that had deep roots. The question of how much privacy a private citizen should have has a long history, and Snowden was just the latest individual to pose it.

18 March, 2020 01:30 Share

One of the first was John Wilkes, a British MP of the eighteenth century. He was notorious for writing critical polemics on the monarchy and the prime minister of the day. Finally, a particularly provocative letter drove the government to issue a warrant for his arrest, allowing them to search any house without warning. The law in Wilkes’ day offered little protection from trespass – the king’s soldiers could break in anywhere without reasonable suspicion. So, many doors were broken down, trunks ransacked and private possessions taken as proof. They arrested 49 people, almost all of whom were innocent, in their hunt for Wilkes.Wilkes was finally arrested but decided to fight his case – and the way he was pursued – in the courts. To the establishment’s shock, he won.As part of his case, the courts ruled that authorities must have greater probable cause to support a search. The British press hailed the ruling, declaring that "every Englishman’s house is his castle and is not liable to be searched."In many ways, Wilkes’ case marked the birth of modern privacy rights. It was an issue reignited by Edward Snowden, in 2013, when he revealed again the age-old tendency of governments to encroach on their citizens’ private lives.

18 March, 2020 01:30 Share

Final summary

When you read a news story, make sure it can be verified.When browsing the internet and coming across some particularly inflammatory headline, check that it’s grounded in truth. Here’s what you can do. See if numerous, well-regarded sources repeat the same story. If not, and it’s limited to only one source, be careful that you’re not being hoodwinked!

18 March, 2020 01:27 Share

New digital technologies present us with astonishing possibilities but also with unforeseen threats. We can either master these inventions for good, such as by using AI to fight poaching and climate change, or we can allow their darker potential to be harnessed by hostile actors. To ensure that technology is a force for good, it is vital that tech companies collaborate with governments on regulation and an ethical framework.

18 March, 2020 01:27 Share