Episode 184 - Academic Freedom, Crypto Regs, and Security Devices
Max talks about a video on anti-Semitism by professor Henry Abramson getting censored on YouTube, the meaning of academic freedom, and the fight over Bitcoin and crypto regulations in the US Senate. Then, he proposes a new personal security device that may one day be ubiquitous.
Links
Henry Abramson: Regarding my Recently Censored Video
TechCrunch: Crypto Community Slams Amendment to Infrastructure Bill
White House Reporter: It’s remarkably that the heat at the goal line is Crypto
Cynthia Lummis: The Senate Should Support Innovation
Related Episodes
Episode 174 with Jeremy Kauffman on Odysee
Episode 155 on Why Oppose Censorship
Episode 82 with Henry Abramson
Episode 70 on the New York Times calling for Tighter Control
Episode 9 on Fixing Facebook
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum Episode 184.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Welcome, everyone. Welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum. We've got a whole bunch of issues to talk about today. Well, we, I mean I guess it's the royal we, we as in me and you because this is a solo show. First of all, I'm going to talk about an instance of YouTube censorship I came across recently, with regarding Professor Henry Abramson who has been on the show, and that's really interesting. Maybe you could talk about that and academic freedom a little bit. I'm going to talk about the crypto regulation in the infrastructure bill that's currently in Congress. I don't have a good sense of what that regulation really is but I have a broader sense of what's the politics of that - how's crypto Twitter reacting and what does it mean going forward. And then finally, I am going to give you my idea for how a third device on our person, which might sound really crazy, but this is just a crazy idea I came up with this week so who knows if that's going if it's gonna be worth it or not.
But I believe we're heading toward a world where we're all going to have to own a new device, which is pretty crazy. Why would… Why a new device? Why? Was your phone not good enough and the seven other devices we have? But I think that's what's happening. I'm going to talk about all three in succession.
First of all, let's talk about the YouTube censorship example. This one is particularly egregious for me because if you look at Henry Abramson who has been on the show, Episode 82, he does a lot of Jewish history lectures, he's like, the last person in the world who should be censored, but by or you would think that the powers that be would want to censor, but I guess if you're talking about important stuff that eventually you'll be caught up in something like this. He had a lecture on antisemitism, and obviously, the lecture contains antisemitic images. I could see someone posted those images as memes, maybe you wouldn't want that. But that was flagged as hate speech. What was very strange was he asked YouTube to review it; YouTube kept it down after review. Then I believe, a little time later, maybe a few weeks later, it was finally restored, but it took a lot of work to restore it; you had to go through several review processes.
Henry Abramson also, he posted a response. A professor posted a response on this and on YouTube that you should definitely check out. He definitely gives YouTube the benefit of the doubt here. He says moderation is important. It's important for academic freedom and learning and he understands that there will be issues with that moderation. And I, for one, don't disagree. But I want to dive into this a little more because, from my point of view, I think a lot more is going on there.
For my part, I suggested that Professor Abramson use Odyssey, which is the YouTube alternative, that where I talked to founder Jeremy Kaufman back in Episode 174. I know what he got my suggestion, but whether it does or not, I always put that out there because I know if somebody gets my suggestion, three times, four times from different angles, then eventually they'll do it, and that's how I act to somebody suggests that I do something. Maybe I'll do it, but I probably won't. But then if I get a random email from an acquaintance, and then a friend tells me, and then a colleague tells me, it's like, okay, maybe I'll check this out. And, obviously, I don't tell anyone to go on Odyssey only, but I say, “Look, go on, take your YouTube channel.
There's a simple tool, you can use an odyssey, and you could just copy it all over in Odyssey. And, essentially, now you have it in two places.” And that's just one more place that people can access your content. In this case, they have in Jewish history lectures. They have some videos hosted locally. They have hosted on their own servers, so YouTube can't censor that you can put it on your own website without going through YouTube. So that's also a possibility, for sure.
I'll get into why I think this happened in a minute. It kind of asked the question, what should freedom of speech on YouTube be? I mean, there are a lot of people who say, it should just be a complete free for all. We know that that's not possible. There's stuff that's literally like illegal to go on. Even though I'm kind of a free expression and free idea, maximalist, I know that eventually, you could push it to such a level where you wouldn't want something on there. And if there's a certain video product where you're trying to entice people for certain videos. I mean, the one example is adult content and Odyssey handles that as well. You might want to segregate that out a bit. But, that leads to the questions, well, what should they be doing?
I definitely think that it's good to give creators control over the comments if they still want it, especially in the type of stuff that lends itself to kind of just a lot of comments that seem to be what could be termed vandalism, has been trashing YouTube probably since the beginning, probably since 2004.
I noticed this a lot on Twitter too and nobody ever does anything about it. People say you could follow who you want, that's great. But then whenever I go to the side on Twitter and I click one of the trending topics, It's entirely trash talk after the topics. I think I posted a tweet today, “Haven't you ever seen a thread where you wish you can block in one button - everyone on the thread?” I mean, sometimes I feel like that with Twitter. It's a good idea to give creators control over the con comments in some situations. Sometimes there needs to be more control of the recommended content. But I do want to point out that… So there's one thing to say, “Hey, let's post anything that's legal to be posted.”
I recall last year, and I'm sure I did an episode on this. I don't necessarily have a link with me right now. But the New York Times, a couple years ago I think, put out videos. Put out a whole thing saying, “Hey, all these YouTube videos are radicalizing people and it's the algorithm that's doing this.” And the powers that be really got the employees in the tech industry, the workers in the tech industry craze. And I've seen this I've seen people getting nuttier and nuttier over the 15 years that I've worked in the tech industry from. The internet is free expression and allows everybody to do everything to really kind of single-mindedly believing that, “No, we have to be the arbiters of information.
We have to censor, and we have to demonetize, and otherwise, all the bad ideas are going to get out and the world is going to be destroyed.” And that's a really dangerous kind of craze, to have. I mean, it's leading to the censoring of well, first of all, true information. And it's sort of a, it makes a mockery of the scientific method and mockery of the pursuit of information, of academic information on modern mockery of free expression. I mean, if you're going to have a platform for free expression, I've said this again, and again, and again, you should have that. Yes, there has to be limits, but it... what's really happening right now is you have a group of people who are completely obsessed with controlling information.
That is, and I know, it's hard to believe for certain people or outside the industry, but it seems like, that's what's going on. And look, if you're not their target, and that's the case here, you might be collateral damage if you're trying to say something that it's important as, as this case shows.
It doesn't matter that it was restored, t's still kind of shows, it's still kind of when that kind of thing goes on, it kind of puts a chilling effect on the pursuit of information, which is very dangerous. But we know this, in episode nine, I suggest a decentralized approach to moderation for Facebook, maybe I think YouTube needs to act the same way. But I think YouTube is I think this stuff's too far gone. I'm not gonna suggest anything to YouTube. I'm just saying switch to Odyssey, which right now is kind of, sort of anything legal plus they have a mature tag, and there's not really a big recommendation algorithm yet. Hopefully, that's coming soon and we can maybe you can maybe choose from a few different options there.
Fortunately, when more recommendation options are available for the library network, it won't be the YouTube rec algorithm which is designed to keep you hooked for as long as possible. It’s just designed to kind of, it's just designed to help you out, it'll be like, “Hey, I can choose from a few different recommender services, maybe it'll be a plugin. And I can choose from a few different options. And maybe it's just one I like one that helps me find videos that are useful to me.” And I think that will be… that's the best future. That's the future I want.
Alright, what about academic freedom now? Because there's sort of freedom on YouTube, not everything on YouTube or Odyssey that you would totally want to be free to do there is good for an academic lecture. Let me see if I can give an example. There's some of the early stuff on YouTube - well, music videos or whatnot, while youtube music videos in academia on music, music lecture, but look, there's a lot of like fun videos on YouTube that are not really meant for academic use. Here's an example that does carry over in the academy, there should be no freedom to disrupt lectures, disrupt the professor, and unfortunately, this does happen all the time.
You could say that the disruptors have their right to freedom of expression, but also that's anti-freedom of expression, anti-academic freedom because if somebody wants to speak, they need the space to speak a bit. That happened at Yale once when I went to a lecture and there was a protest there. And they kind of disrupted the whole thing. This is way back in 2005 before it became a lot more commonplace recently. And so it was very difficult to understand what was going on, then people have to have the freedom to ask questions. There's a certain level in an academic setting a certain level of respect required with I think, some slack. I don't think that if somebody says something, the questioner is allowed to be slightly ignorant of the rules decorum when asking a question or can be corrected.
But it's not okay to take up everybody's time. But of course, if you wind down a little bit, you should be like, “Okay, let's wrap this up. What are we talking about?” or, “Let's keep it within scope.”, that's totally fine, too. But, there's kind of a certain level of… if you're there for learning, there's a certain level of kind of respect for the situation required. I want to contrast this with a public hearing, by the way, because I saw this in a situation with a school board, and a YouTube video of all places the other day, where the government officials were shutting people down for not being respectful. I said, “Look, you know, we don't have to be nice to you. This is a public hearing. You know, we think what you're doing is really bad. We get to have our say, that's, that's how our system of government works.”
But, even there, your requirement is that you get your turn to speak and you don't speak out of turn, but in. In exchange, the authorities need to give you your turn. Otherwise, you're going to have a shouting match, which we often see in our politics today.
Another interesting question in terms of academic freedom, do you have the freedom to investigate anything? This is a tough question, I think, and I think it deserves more thinking on my part. I just have some things to say off the top of my head, you probably don't have the freedom to investigate any question you want but how do you draw upon the wisdom to draw that line? I mean, off the top of my head, I can think: first of all, we want to avoid something like a circular citation farms. That's like, I print something that's BS, then you agree with me more BS, and you link me and then I link you and so on and so forth. And, we just have heaps of circular references, and we don't really have any ground truth to what we're saying. And that's a problem.
Academia can be very prone to fads, some of which become tomorrow's atrocities like eugenics. And I think that some of these things are kind of difficult to suss out. Sometimes there needs to be a set of like principles in order to find them. But we still do want researchers to be free to explore questions that make peers or academy boards uncomfortable. We not only do we want we… that it's extremely important. And I think that you've got to look for kind of historical long-standing standards in the field being followed, and maybe look for interest in certain work outside the field of study. And most importantly, if I'm doing some work, you want to look for false certification or development of alternative narratives because that tells me that I'm actually saying something useful and I am examining evidence. This could be true for history. This could be true for math and science, and all that.
Okay, cool. Now that I said that, let's get on to the infrastructure bill because there's, what, is it a 1.5 trillion infrastructure bill? Is that true, going through Congress? how much is the infrastructure bill? Everything is funny money these days. Infrastructure bill costs, that's what I'm going to comment on. Hmm, I see a whole bunch of numbers being floated around. But these numbers just keep increasing, increasing and money doesn't mean anything anymore, because they print so much, which is why we need crypto in the first place. It's not a surprise that the administration is trying to slip something on crypto into the infrastructure bill. They want to further regulate it.
They want more reporting requirements from everybody involved. Some of these reporting requirements do seem kind of insane, and probably likely to be very difficult to enforce, like, “Hey, if I build a hardware wallet, do I have to tell? Do I have to tell the government how I use it?” Well, I mean, that's the… the analogy is if I build a physical wallet that I put in my pocket, and I sell it to someone, do I then have to tell the government how many dollars that people are putting in and out of it, especially since a lot of these hardware wallets don't connect to the internet. It's just like, “Hey, this is just a device for you to use. You know, once you have it, we don't have any information on it.” Things like miners and people involved in running nodes, which is essentially checking the Bitcoin blockchain as it goes, but not necessarily publishing any transactions.
Some of that seems like you should be able to do that without much hassle, but, and with, without running afoul of the law. Of course, Bitcoin is designed to work under almost any legal regime unless they want to shut down the internet. We'll have a very interesting discussion, regardless of how this comes out. But what's interesting is that a lot of very high-level politicians are fighting against it. In fact, there was a bill that came through through Senator Ron Wyden, who's a Democrat from Oregon, and sometimes takes a very strong pro-privacy stance may be the kind of a remnant of the true liberal, not classic liberal of a modern liberal, contingent in the Democratic Party. And then Cynthia Loomis from Wyoming who's a new senator from Wyoming, and to me, from Pennsylvania.
They were, last I checked, trying to slip in a change to this regulation to make it less onerous. And if I can quote from TechCrunch article, “The legislations vocal critics argue that the bill's effort to do this is slapdash, particularly the bit that would declare anyone responsible for and regularly providing any service effectuating transfers of digital assets to be a broker subjects to tax reporting requirements.” They're asking, “Well, you know, it's kind of fuzzy, what about wallets and hardware devices. Again, is that analogous to people creating real-life wallets to hold cash?”
To quote another article, Jeff Stein, the White House economics reporter for The Washington Post and founder of the Ithaca Voice recently tweeted that, “It is remarkable that all the provisions in a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, crucial to the nation's water systems, electric grid, trains, highways, bridges, and ports. The issue generating the most heat at the goal line is cryptocurrencies. Very interesting.” And according to Cynthia Loomis, the senator who's one of the people trying to fix it, “The Loomis-Wyden-Toomey amendment sponsored by Senators Ron Wyden, Pat Toomey and me, simply put: this amendment clarifies and law what most of us already believe that validators of distributed ledger data, like miners, for example, or hardware, wallet providers and software developers should not be quired to report transaction data to the IRS just common sense because these individuals are not the ones conducting financial transactions. They're simply creating the financial tools.”
What's the status of this? Well, the status of this is there's ongoing procedural fights. Last I looked, they might not make this change in the Senate. I think there was an attempt to compromise. Did it work? It may still be on the table, but it's probably going to the House of Representatives. The administration is going to try to slip in these regulations under the radar, of course, and whether they do or not, we'll have another interesting conversation. It might drive crypto innovation outside the United States if it happens. But on the other hand, it shows that they're also relying on crypto taxes to help them pay for their crazy spending. I am guessing that they're, all the people said they're gonna ban crypto, that's also off the table as well.
All right. All this leads to my thought the other day, and this is one of my thoughts just when I was in the swimming pool. So who knows if this is… who knows if this is crazy or not? The first chapter of George Gilder’s book, Life After Google, it really takes a humorous take on all of the crazy things that need to happen to log into accounts on the internet, you have to log in, you have to remember your password, all the things you have to do to reset your password, you need to… Okay, we have one password now. Sometimes you have password managers, so that helps remember passwords. But you have to answer security questions, you need two-factor authentication.
Then sometimes you need to, and then if it doesn't work, and then you contact customer support, then you need to fill out a survey and how customer support went, and all that. And I was wondering, can we use the same tools that we use in crypto and Bitcoin? Can we use it to replace our awful login system? So I'm thinking of a crypto wallet.
Now for those of you don't know how a crypto hardware wallet works, it essentially has your private keys in the wallet. These are the cryptographic keys that you use to sign Bitcoin transactions. And the wallet itself signs the transaction and outputs the transaction to another device. But the way it's designed, it can't actually output the original private key. It's really safe in that device. And then, of course, these devices have a paper backup. If you lose it, you can restore it from a paper backup, you can keep it in your safe, safe deposit box, or something like that. You really don't need two-factor authentication for this.
Although there is a second factor in that a lot of times these devices do have a pin number available, it doesn't have to be too crazy of a pin number, but that way if somebody steals your device, they can't take all your money, because they need to know your PIN number. I don't know, maybe we could put a thumbprint thing on there just to make it a little easier. The question is, can we use this to replace our awful login system? Essentially the idea is that you would have when you create a new account on a web page, instead of choosing a password, you essentially use public-private key encryption.
You give it a public key, and you instead of… Rather than going into how all that works, let's just say that you create an account, and your private key, aka your password, is on your device. But instead of actually this device, sending the password directly to the website, what it does is it signs a “transaction with the password” which essentially proves that “Hey, I have the password. Nobody else knows what it is, but me, but you know, I have this proof that I have the password to this account. And I can also prove that I just signed it right now. You can let me in. I also signed it with a code that you gave me right now. And so that would all kind of work seamlessly.
The way I see it working is you have this device on you, maybe it's on your key chain, and you want to log into a website, you press the login button, and then by Bluetooth, it sends a code to your device and because you have your thumb on the thumbprint thing in your device or you type in the code or your PIN number or something, then it signs a transaction and then boom you're in. You don't actually have to type in any password and perhaps with Bluetooth, all this stuff could be made very quick, can be done very quickly. One question, I think you would ask, why not just use your mobile phone? Why does this need to be separate from your mobile phone?
Well, first of all, it's easy access. Because I think that a lot of time spent, particularly with professionals on the internet, and also just like no messing around the internet, is there's a lot of mental overhead that it takes to log into all of these sites and all of these accounts. Even if you're oftentimes you’re at your computer all day, you're still logged in, but it's amazing how many... Yep, yes, it's true. If I go to Google, on my own device, I don't have to log in every single time. But it's amazing how many times you get kind of stymied and stopped. And context switched by having to put in passwords and two-factor authentications, especially in modern-day just seems to be getting worse and worse.
If you had to take out your phone to do that, well, first of all, then logging in on your phone wouldn't help. You wouldn’t want to close one app and open another app and then you wouldn't have to like open, your signing app knows. You really have to have easy access to this device. Just want to take it out. It could even be like a ring on your finger to boom. Secondly, another good reason why you don't want to on your phone is you don't want to deal with security concerns on your phone. Because the phone is designed as a high communication model, lots of data is going back and forth. It's hard to prove that certain pieces of information are not being sent. It's a lot easier to have a security breach on that kind of a thing with a mobile device.
When you trade in your mobile device for something, you don't want to then have to worry are all my passwords gonna be transferred over. No, no, you just want to deal with trading in your phone. I mean, we have to deal with that nowadays. With two-factor authentication where if you trade in your phone, you're worried about the two-factor authentications that are in your phone and say Google Authenticator might not be in your next phone. That's not what you want to think about when you're getting a new iPhone or Android device. Whereas this device, it would, first of all, would last a lot longer.
Secondly, because it only does a small number of things very well. It wouldn't really have to go through... You're a lot more likely to be highly secure, and could be more easily audited for security. And that would get people used to owning and controlling private keys and kind of a safe way, which I think would be very good for society.
Is this crazy? Maybe. I bet the future wouldn't look exactly like this. But that's kind of what I want. I go on to a machine, I let's say have to log in to I don't know, a work, a site for work a system for work, I click login, and then I hit my special ring or key chain or whatever. I hold it up to something and then boom I'm in. I don't really have to think about it that hard. Again, I don't think the future will look exactly like this, just an idea. Maybe this could save us a lot of time, a lot of frustration with a context switch and it could also save people I think from a lot of phishing scams.
It wouldn't, it would be very difficult to because what a phishing scam does is it gives you a site that looks a lot like the site that you want to log into and then you give it your password, where in this case, the site talks to the device first, then gives it a code, and then the device signs that code with the password. Yu wouldn't be able to do that with a phishing site because it wouldn't be able to get the original code from the original service. I don't know, we'll see.
Just an idea, do you think that people would stand for having another device if it would make their life that much easier? We'll see. But I wouldn't be surprised actually if a company like Apple has thought of this. They're probably not going to put something out in the next year or so. But, I think it's quite possible. Alright. Have a great week everyone.
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