Category: Digital Culture

Talking Cybercrime with Leandra Ramm (Podcast)

As most people know, we are this week watching a developing story after some as yet unidentified hacker, or hackers, gained access to naked photos of a handful of celebrity women and published them on the web.  As that investigation unfolds, especially into what appears to be a failure in the security of Apple’s iCloud server, many of us non-celebrities are naturally wondering how safe our information is, but we are probably still underestimating just how dangerous it can be to become the target of a hacker with the right skills and too much time on his hands.  The lines between hacking, identity theft, and stalking can get blurry very fast, and my guest on this podcast has some insightful, first-hand experience with that frightening reality.

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Photo by Melissa Hamburg.

In her early 20s, Leandra Ramm had her life and career derailed by a cyberstalker operating halfway around the world in Singapore.  It was about ten years ago when Leandra was an aspiring opera singer, living and working in New York City, her career just taking off, when she appeared on CNN with Anderson Cooper to talk about her origins from the Genius Sperm Bank.  A Singaporean named Colin Mak Yew Loong saw the broadcast on CNN International and from that moment on, he made Leandra one of what turned out to be his many projects in stalking, harassment, and threats of violence.  The experience cost Leandra many professional opportunities, made her terrified for her safety, and left her in a continued state of anxiety.

Pressing a case of international cyberstalking is extremely difficult because laws vary nation to nation, and some countries have no cyberstalking laws whatsoever.  Nevertheless,  Leandra pursued her stalker aggressively along with the help of digital forensics examiner, A.J. Fardella, and as of last December, Mr. Loong is serving a three-year sentence as the first person ever convicted in a case involving cyberstalking across borders.

Leandra also wrote a book about her experience called Stalking A Diva, in collaboration with attorney D. Rocca. Today, these two women, along with Mr. Fardella,  represent the founding members of the Alliance Against Cybercrime, a new organization designed to address stalking and other forms of Internet-based crime through international advocacy, policy initiatives, and public outreach.  Leandra’s case and this new alliance were instrumental in helping to pass Singapore’s Protection from Harassment Act in March of 2014.

I am also happy to report that Leandra’s singing career resumed after her ordeal.  She continues to work in a wide range of genres, both recording and performing live.

Visit Leandra’s music website here.

Buy the book Stalking A Diva here.

Visit the Alliance Against Cybercrime here.

Remix Culture & Food?

It was while sneaking one of my guilty pleasure foods, a small bag of Cool Ranch Doritios, that I read this article in the New York Times “Rethinking Eating” by Kate Murphy in which she reports that Silicon Valley is getting into the food business.  Well, the sustenance business anyway.  I’m not sure food is the goal in any of the cultural, social, or personal connotative senses of that word.  But technologists getting into the sustenance game isn’t necessarily a bad thing, applying algorithmic genius to the task of creating nutritional, and maybe experiential, substitutes for animal protein based foods.  Certainly, your vegetarian friends will remind you that animal-protein foods come with myriad downsides, ranging from environmental impact to cruel treatment of the animals themselves to any number of potential health hazards for the eater.  At the same time, too much of the still-growing world population remains hungry, and so it is not inconceivable that computer scientists mucking about in the world of algae and protein could be the legacy of Norman Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for inventing the hybrid “dwarf wheat,” credited with saving a billion lives.

As Murphy reports, “Instead of the go-to ingredients previously used in animal protein substitutes — soy, wheat gluten, vegetable starches — Food 2.0 companies are using computer algorithms to analyze hundreds of thousands of plant species to find out what compounds can be stripped out and recombined to create what they say are more delicious and sustainable sources of protein.”  No question, it’s an interesting area of research, and in all likelihood, this experimentation will yield some benefit the scientists aren’t even seeking.  Isn’t that part of the fun of science?

On the other hand, food scientists still trying to understand Food 1.0 have only just begun to seriously explore the microbial biodiversity of the human gut.  It is understood, for instance, that the innards of typical Western citizens are home to a more homogenous microbiome than they likely were in the past, while societies still living and eating more “primitively” show signs of a greater diversity of microbes.  How exactly certain microbes benefit humans — and thus how their absence may be harmful — is still science in its infancy, but researchers theorize that an increase in certain diseases in the developed world may be manifestations of our unwittingly killing off symbiotic species of bacteria and the like.  And since research in this area is so new, I’m going to assume that the algorithms being tested in Food 2.0 labs cannot account for these myriad chemical interactions between man and his meat, as it were.

At a glance, the efforts of these food tech entrepreneurs appear contrary to contemporary trends in culinary wisdom, which seeks food sources unsullied by mass production processes that often strip the very elements our bodies need in the first place.  While gut biodiversity science is still nascent, the general consensus among the food conscious is to follow the wisdom of experts like Michael Pollan who advises (if I may paraphrase), “Eat food and enough of it, and don’t eat that which is not food.” (My Cool Ranch Doritios definitely belong in the “not food” category.)  In short, we don’t necessarily need to know what every microbe does so much as we understand generally that we need to consume a fairly broad range of foods that are not over-sanitized because different symbiotic microbes thrive on different elements in the diet.  This is why the Western diet that is a bit too protein and sugar-rich has sustained certain microbes and killed off others.

And of course nobody needs me to tell them that, at its best, food feeds the soul, which may be much harder to factor into any equation than the probable influence of a single microbe.  So, it will certainly be interesting to see what comes from this new line of R&D, but historically, technology has a way of tasting like technology.  Anyone who has ever eaten a grocery-store tomato alongside a farm-stand tomato knows what I mean.  If this research leads to solutions that address world hunger and/or environmental and health hazards associated with current food production models, bring it on.  But if it’s a bunch of guys developing yet another way to treat food like a necessary evil that gets in the way of work or some other activity, that may not be progress for the human experience.

We like what appear to be ready solutions — like eCigarettes, which are so far unregulated on the assumption that they’re safe and are, therefore, being marketed to kids with sugary flavors like snicker doodle (yeah, I was surprised by that myself). So, perhaps these food tech guys are onto something, but they certainly appear to be investing in the opposite proposal that suggest maybe we just stop poisoning the apples and eat the damn apples.

Helen Wong Shares Views on Piracy

Dear Helen Wong and especially the Editors of The Daily Californian:

On today’s opinion page, I see that you have decided to share your thoughts (we’ll call them thoughts) on the subject of piracy, predicated on your desire to see the film Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  After trying unsuccessfully to view this film through a legal and relatively cheap channel, you found yourself forced to pirate the film via a torrent site, a technology you say you’ve come to rather late. Indeed.  This experience prompted you write some of your observations on the subject of piracy, and the editors of your newspaper thought these worthy of publication.  But, Helen, not only are you late to the game of using pirate sites, you’re even later to the game of expounding on your bullshit rationalizations for doing so.  I mean, Girl, your statements from beginning to end are so six years ago.  I quote:

“Theft refers to the removal of the original material, while piracy means making a copy. If music were to be treated as physical property, then laws that absolutely prohibit illegal downloading would have to be passed. That’s not the case.”

This is how your whole article reads.  It’s filled with careless generalizations like these three little sentences that suggest you’ve found a tattered copy of the pirate manifesto somewhere but haven’t bothered to do any research or even more than a few minutes thinking on the issues implied.  “Laws that prohibit illegal downloading would have to be passed?”  Does it occur to you that if there were no such laws, the downloading would not be illegal? That’s just careless writing.  But tell me you’re not late to using Google because you certainly might have expended just bit of effort checking to see if, for instance, Amanda Palmer’s “success story” has any holes in it, or discovered that Radiohead’s Thom Yorke has actually been very vocal in recent years about some challenges in the digital age. Most importantly, a bit of research might have shown you that the subject of piracy as a promotional vehicle is, at best, controversial but that most producers of works don’t see it that way.  In fact, in your offhand and typical comment about “Marvel and Disney having made enough money,”  as a justification for your actions, you didn’t even bother to check that Disney is not a producer of the film but is a distributor.*  This information is freely available on a website called IMDB.

Now, I know I’m being unkind and that everything implied in the paragraph above would require some effort.  You would have to ask yourself journalistic questions like, Do I have my facts straight?  Is what I’m writing current or outdated?  And in so doing you would have to spend up to several hours coming up to speed on the subject of piracy and perhaps then offer some original observations on the matter.  Had you done this, Helen, the most important lesson you would have learned is that journalistic writing, like filmmaking and other creative crafts, require work to do well, and that work has value.  Had the makers of Captain America skimped on process as you did in this article, it would not be a film you’d be interested in seeing, which brings us to the matter of its presently limited distribution.

Captain America:  The Winter Soldier cost $170 million to produce, and if you think that’s too much, perhaps they should cut some corners like skip the process of compositing.  You don’t know what compositing is? Let’s just say that it’s one of several hundred steps performed by skilled professionals in order to make this film something you were eager to see in the first place.  All those steps cost lots and lots of money — 170 million dollars lots — and you are in absolutely no position to know whether or not the investors have made the kind of return required thus far for them to invest in the next Marvel project.  It may seem greedy for the film’s owners to limit the distribution to sales for the time being, but there’s a window of opportunity when a film like this recoups its investment from a big pie chart of revenue streams (e.g. DVD sales), and then the film becomes available through cheaper channels.  You’ll find this is a pattern consistent with the distribution of many products.

Here’s a thought, Helen.  While waiting for this or any other film to become available as a low-price rental, I might suggest checking out any of several thousand movie titles you have yet to see in your young life that are available right now through various affordable and free channels.  Alternatively, you might also Google the word “library,” and discover that you very likely have one of these mythical facilities in your community and that they either have or can get you a DVD of Captain America: The Winter Soldier that they will let you borrow for free.  But I know you wanted to stream it to your computer in the very moment you felt the whim to see it.  I hear that.  My kids do the same thing sometimes.  They want what they want when they want it.  But sometimes they have to wait for what they want, and in the meantime, they often have other experiences of equal or greater value.  In the meantime, they learn to be citizens.  Just like my twelve-year-old has to do her homework, she’ll one day learn that somebody has to do a thing called compositing in order for her to enjoy a high-tech action movie and that journalists have to do some research before they write articles worth reading.

*Disney does own Marvel Studios. I should clarify the point that it is all too easy to just point to big names and forget that there are multiple entities with real-life employees involved in these types of films.