Interesting reads, 7 May 2018

Interesting things I read on the Internet this week

• Signal >> Blog >> Amazon threatens to suspend Signal’s AWS account over censorship circumvention — Two weeks ago I wrote about Google blocking domain fronting, a censorship circumvention technique. Now Amazon has done the same. This is big news in the internet freedom community who relied on this to operate in oppressive countries.

• On the Shortness of Life — I’ve found a lot of wisdom recently from Seneca, a Roman stoic. Among many other things he talks about materialism, greed, inequality and the fallacy of seeking happiness through possessions. It’s astonishing reading a 2000 year old text and thinking it could have been written yesterday.

• ‘I had to guard an empty room’: the rise of the pointless job — David Graeber elaborates on categories of ‘bullshit job’, those which the people doing them think might as well not exist. There’s a hypocrisy in this — our society is so rich it can pay people to waste time, but it can’t (yet) accept the idea of a basic income, and people working fewer hours.

• UK regulator orders Cambridge Analytica to release data on US voter — Quite a big deal — the UK ICO is forcing Cambridge Analytica to uphold a US citizen’s request for data held about him.

• Chinese debtors shamed with broadcast of names and faces on giant screens on May 1 holiday — Embracing capitalism.

• Unroll.me to close to EU users saying it can’t comply with GDPR — Good riddance, I hope GDPR kills off more deceptive businesses. For background, unroll.me accesses your whole email inbox to help you mass unsubscribe from newsletters. Last year it came out that they were selling people’s Lyft receipts to Uber, causing outrage as people hadn’t realised that’s what they’d “agreed” to.