That’s Not Going to Be Easy to Do

As April winds down, and we move from calendar jokes about weed (4/20) to calendar jokes about Star Wars (May the 4th Be With You), in this, Our Age of Nerditude (I tried a lot of other options before settling on that one, but if you have a better one, I’ll entertain it if I’m entertained by it), news articles are starting to grapple with elements of reality that Just Ignore It and It Will Go Away did not already get rid of.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/28/tech/elon-musk-authenticate-all-real-humans/index.html

Here, Brian Fung at CNN engages with what Elon Musk might mean by Authenticate All Real Humans, and also mentions Musk’s focus on spam cryptocurrency tweets and accounts. This is highly unusual! Most coverage I’ve seen so far in regular media on the topic of The Acquisition has fallen into a deep hole of fear surrounding “What Does Free Speech Mean” and “Will Orange Guy Return to Twitter”, which as near as I can tell is the closest thing to zombie movie in real life ever, at least for people sufficiently distant from Russia (if you are not sufficiently distant from Russia, obviously that’s the closest thing ever to zombie movie in real life).

“Musk's drive to "authenticate" Twitter users stems from one of his biggest pet peeves with the platform: spam accounts, particularly those that push cryptocurrency scams. It's often not hard to find these accounts lurking in the replies to Musk's tweets; many even attempt to trade on his celebrity and lure the unsuspecting by impersonating him.”

This is _entirely accurate and relevant_! Thank you Fung! Thank you CNN!!! (<— Sincere!!!)

OK, now to the criticize it part.

“Musk's verified account was affected by a widespread Twitter hack that led to users including former President Barack Obama and Kanye West unwittingly spreading a bitcoin scam.”

NOT accurate! “Users” did not unwittingly spread a bitcoin scam. _Their accounts on twitter did that when not under their control_. This distinction matters. If Fung — who so far is just about the most reality based analysis of The Acquisition ever — can’t distinguish between an account and its user, and attributes actions taken in that account by a hacker to its legitimate user, _even years after the hack is documented and publicized_, how can we possibly expect anyone else to make that distinction, much less _before_ documentation and publicity? Fung getting this wrong severely undermines criticism of Musk that suggests Musk is overly concerned about this problem.

OK, fine, whatever, and we’ll step over the snark in the next paragraph, and move on to Fung’s speculation about what Musk’s “Authenticate All Humans” might mean. He offers three possible options:

“One possibility is an expansion of Twitter's existing verification program. Currently, to receive a blue check on their accounts, users have to supply a link to an official website that they're affiliated with, an official email address or a government-issued form of identification. Musk could stop short of requiring identification but require that users use their real names.”

Currently, in order to use the existing verification program, you have to be “notable”, and Twitter describes what that means.

https://help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/about-twitter-verified-accounts

As a practical matter, if you are not famous, working for a famous something, or something kinda adjacent to that, you cannot get a blue check, no matter how well behaved and/or documented you are. As far as I can tell, the blue check is the only current twitter verification program (they have had others in the past, I think). One possible thing that Musk could do is create a new category of verification that has all the requirements except the famous / famous adjacent part (that is, you would have to supply all the authenticating information, and behave well, but other than that, you would not have to be of particular Public Interest). Fung does not entertain this possibility. Fung _does_ entertain the Real Name possibility, which is a rhetorical device known as a Straw Man. No one is going to do that. Facebook already did that.

Fung entertains using CAPTCHa, or credit card to determine that someone is a Real Human, again, these are rhetorical devices known as Straw Men. These do not establish “real humanity”, and everyone is super clear on that. However, Fung instead steps from one Straw Man to another, altho, to be fair, this segues to a source, York. Maybe someone doesn’t have a credit card. Maybe they are worried about credit card fraud, etc. Bunch of nonsense. No one at scale uses credit cards to establish “real humanity”. (<— If you argue, I’m going to point to “at scale” and “real humanity”, so come prepared for that.)

Next up! If Twitter collects enough personal information of any sort to establish “real humanity”, then they’d be a target for all kinds of shenanigans by criminals and repressive governments. _Without engaging with who might do that_, I would point out that it should be fairly straightforward to collect the information for the purpose of verifying an account, and then _purge the information completely_. You don’t have to save it, and you probably shouldn’t (for account NOT of public interest — accounts of public interest are a different matter, but Twitter seems to have a solid solution there). But if you decided _to_ save it, there are tokenization methods to save it in a disconnected, silo’d manner, and only permit access by a very limited number of people in a highly controlled way. Companies that lose their credit card data usually have not set up these kinds of controls (for a long time, many companies were using credit card numbers — untokenized! — as customer identifiers, which is beyond insanity).

I wasn’t going to post a long thing about this, because while it’s great that Fung has engaged with the core issues here — that Musk has a stated goal (authenticate real humans) to solve a stated problem (cryptocurrency spam bots who are stealing his likeness) — the _way_ that Fung has engaged with that core issue falls short of typing this much.

But I decided to post a long thing about this because of how it wraps up.

“After years of trial and error, tech platforms have already developed important lessons about user authentication that could benefit Musk, said York.

"If he merely means things like CAPTCHAs, I think he's in for a surprise," said York. "He's talked a lot about how he'll get rid of bots, but Twitter's been trying to do that for years and I think he'll soon realize it's not an easy problem to solve."”

It’s hard to know really what to do with this. I mean, do I snark on EFF? Do I snark on York? Do I snark on Fung? Do I look at it and point out how all statements of the form “If FALSE then” are all by definition true? Because “he merely means things like CAPTCHAs” is _obviously false_. Duh. No, he does not mean that. Come on. Rockets landing on their butts. Starting a new car company in the United States. Judge signed off on the SolarCity acquisition. Harassed Al-Rumayyan in email and is still walking around quite fine and with even more money now than before. Tweeted about how he wanted to go mano a whatever with Putin as a way to resolve WTF and no one even bothered to mention that again. Did not had to pay up for calling someone a pedo who clearly was not and who went to the bother to take him to court over it.

I am pretty sure this is a person who knows what is a hard problem and also how to solve hard problems. He’s not thinking it is an easy problem.

I mean, unless he _is_ thinking it is an easy problem, in which case a sensible person with any access to wikipedia and the ability to read should sit back and wait and see how it turns out because if it _is_ an easy problem for him, then he should damn well solve it so twitter works better for everyone.

ETA:

Sometimes, I’m struggling with something, and my husband shows up and tries to take it over. This is terrible! He should not do this. He does it to the kids, too, and he _really_ should not do it to them, either. It is terrible parenting. It induces dependency. It is disruptive of process. Etc. I’ve done a lot of screaming about this (with cogent arguments — I don’t just verbally abuse people, I raise the volume and stay on topic. I’m not new to this game). Still, he’ll show up and try to take over a task.

Lately, if I don’t have specific concerns about him ruining something that cannot be corrected, I’ve been letting him. I do this now because I slowly realized a couple of things. First off, if he can do it, and he wants to do it, sure, fine, whatever. Go ahead. I have plenty of things to do, and if I run out, Lego makes more things for me to do. Second, if he thinks he can do it, and I really do know he can’t but also that he’s unlikely to break anything irretrievably, it’s far more fun to have that as another example of the list of Remember That Time When You (I have a very good memory. And a blog. And other documentation of my life) than it is to scream at him. AND — and this is golden, seriously, keep it in mind — the amount of conflict in my life is drastically reduced. Partly because I’m not screaming, which is important because I hate screaming, but mostly because it turns out that even a short list of Remember That Time When You is a profound deterrent. Honestly, I can evoke most of it with two or three words in a particular tone of voice. He’s even started _waiting_ (arguably hovering, but I’ll take it) until asked before reaching for something and just taking it over.

Musk is a little feral still. But if he’s really got a trick that’ll get the stuck lid off the pickle jar, I say let him give it his best shot. Twitter is not in a good place as a public company, and there is no clear path forward for it to get to a good place as a public company.

Think of it as Bezos buying the WaPo. When El Jefe bought the paper, there was a lot of wringing of hands and fear. But now, it’s a really nice news source, very well run, even the comments are often worth a glance. And honestly, the odds of Musk being worse for our country than the Murdochs have been seem kinda low.

User Numbers

In yesterday’s Matt Levine column, I learned that Twitter made a mistake in reporting its active users.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-28/elon-musk-s-other-merger-worked-out

But if you cannot connect to that for a reason of like, you know, a paywall:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000141809122000072/twtrq122ex991.htm

And then search for the heading:

mDAU Recast

Specifically the statement:

“In March of 2019, we launched a feature that allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between accounts. An error was made at that time, such that actions taken via the primary account resulted in all linked accounts being counted as mDAU. This resulted in an overstatement of mDAU from Q1’19 through Q4’21.”

Who knows what this really means, but I know I immediately thought, Sock Puppets Are Supported!

Goddess, I hope that is an inaccurate reading of the actual, typical usage of multiple separate accounts on twitter. I _actually_ believe that the people who need to use this feature are more typically people responsible for posting official type updates to official type accounts, like, the various CPG (consumer packaged goods) brands that are all under a single corporate owner probably have one person in charge of tweeting for many / all of them on the regular. Altho who knows! Also, what are the implications for Brand accounts of “Authenticate All Real Humans”?

HOWEVER! The fact that this showed up around the same time as the Acquisition, and the fact that the Acquisition was preceded by a possible seat on the existing board suggests to me that this particular issue came to light in the course of All of That.

Which further suggests to me that person responsible for the shenanigans is at least asking the right questions and getting at the relevant data.

Cashless Transactions: Fenway edition, legality thereof

https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/play-ball-healey-oks-cashless-payments-fenway-park/XIZLVB5BDVDNZEIFZ5D3VGKY7I/

I have a long-running conversation with my sister about when folding green stuff is going to go away. There are a variety of laws at least here in Massachusetts saying you can’t NOT take cash, altho the precise details of what that means are a little interesting. I mean, _YOU_ try going to a car dealership and buying a car that costs more than $10K with a suitcase full of cash. See how far you get (okay, now is not the best time for that joke, because it’s hard to find a car to buy anyway).

Dick’s Burgers in Seattle, like many similar places, held out for a long time, and even had an ATM machine right next to it for those people who failed to bring cash to get their burgers. But even Dick’s takes cash now. Honestly, marijuana retailers go to a lot of effort to support payments from customers that are other than folding green stuff, decide their limited access to the banking system. When my sister and I (and others) sit around talking about What Do We Still Need Folding Green Stuff For Anyway, it tends to devolve pretty rapidly to “tipping”, and broad acknowledgement that venmo/zelle/apple pay/google pay/paypal/etc. make it very easy to tip people without cash and probably the remaining use case is needing folding green stuff to tuck into a g-string because there is in that use case a desire for physical contact which is technical not allowed. Hardly the kind of thing we are keeping cash around for in any case.

We _could_ get rid of cash, and at this point businesses in general _want_ to get rid of cash (because once you stop having to make drops to the safe and/or bank, you never want to do that again. Ever.). But those laws.

“Massachusetts law says customers must be able to make purchases using legal tender, which tranditionally has been cash, according to Healey. Fenway offers fans the option of loading cash onto a Mastercard debit card at a Cash-2-Card exchange kiosk, meaning their cash is not obsolete at the ballpark.”

I did not retype that — that spare n was in the original.

This is pretty awesome! I don’t understand how an underbanked person could possibly afford to be in Fenway park, much less purchasing anything there, but hey, they’ll have a mastercard debit card after loading their cash into the machine. Technology developed elsewhere (ATMs that can take non-enveloped cash and automatically read it)(immediate card issuance only one step above arcade-type cards) has been converted into a maw that moves cash-oriented types towards payment cards. Inexorably, at least if you are trying to use cash at Fenway.

Healey says its fine. Yay!

Friday: precheck appointment, Paparazzi, FF

I took A. out of school early to make absolutely certain we could make it to the Burlington Staples in time for a 3:20 appointment for precheck. This was utterly pointless, because they had computer issues, and there were people in line from 1:10 appointments. Yikes. We bought some random stuff (because it is a Staples). Also, all the construction made it tricky to figure out how to even _get_ to the Staples. Oh well! One of the things we bought was a Popl keychain, because A. wanted to try it. That’s an NFC tag plus an app (freemium) that is a “business card replacement”. Simple to set up, and once you do, in theory anyway, anyone with a phone with NFC should be able to just “tap” your phone, and your contact info should pop up as an option to go into their contacts on their phone. There are a variety of other things (like a QR code) that can also be tried if the “tap” does not work. *shrug* It was $20 to see whether it works, basically; there have been a variety of efforts in the general direction of make-contact-sharing-more-effortless. Perhaps this one will take off. NFC stickers are also being used in interesting ways for smarthome type stuff. I haven’t gotten into it (I totally skipped Dash buttons, too) but you never know.

On the way home, it was late enough that we got to the Concord rotary backup at about 5 pm. I suggested to A. that we have dinner at Paparazzi, and she asked if I was serious, and was super excited when I said yes. V. was our server and she recognized us as T.’s family, so that was nice. I had the PEI mussels and the chopped salad, minus butter and cheese. I wound up with the gluten free bread, because the current bread has milk products in it. It was above average, and I asked about buckwheat and was reassured — and didn’t have any negative reactions, so, yay! I got a manhattan and a triple templo. Yum.

When we got home, we made peanut butter bread. I’d seen the Dylan Hollis tiktok, and showed it to A. and she was excited to make that. I made some changes, because the original recipe involves milk, and because I never follow recipe directions exactly.

2 Cup freshly ground soft red wheat (measure after grinding!)
1 egg plus enough apple juice to be 1 Cup of liquid by volume
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup peanut butter (Trader Joe’s unsalted valencia creamy — natural peanut butter, you know, the kind everyone says you cannot use in this recipe)
3 tsp baking powder
Chocolate chips

You will note there is no salt anywhere in this.

My technique was a little different than some of the descriptions out there. It is inspired by elements of Dylan Hollis’ youtube video in which he shows the original recipe, the 1945 Searchlight variation, and then his own version.

I combined the flour, baking powder and brown sugar (mix dry). Then I added the peanut butter, and used a fork to cut it in until it was evenly crumbly. (Cut in peanut butter). Finally, I added the 1 cup of liquid (combined egg and apple juice). I forgot to mix in the chips, so I sprinkled them on top. I expected them to sink it (that’s what happens with my blondies) but they sat on top and melted a bit.

Here is the thought process: with the egg, I’m not going to need as much BP for the rise. The bread came out nicely rounded on top so this worked well. I suspect it could be cut down a bit more, altho it does not matter much. I never mind not having salt; this is a bread that in the 1932 and 1945 formulations is broadly agreed to need something spread on it, so putting a salted spread or butter should satisfy the salt lovers out there. I, personally, thought it tasted fine, because, chocolate chips. This version of the loaf kinds tastes like a very bread-y peanut butter cookie and the crumb has a bit of that texture as well (I attribute that to how I assembled it, at least in part). Most important, I needed _some_ kind of liquid, and I don’t consistently keep non-dairy milk in the house. As a result, usually what we have is the unsweetened almond milk from costco that R. puts in his coffee, and which I am not a particular fan of. Dylan Hollis used applesauce in his final variation, and apples and peanut butter are always good together, so I went with apple juice (rather than orange juice, which I often use, or just water) and 1 beaten egg, in place of the milk. I reduced the volume a lot, based partly on the Searchlight approach, and partly on my own (deep) history of baking — I just thought that batter was excessively loose.

I _thought_ that I was going to recommend reducing the liquid further, however, actually think this is a very forgiving recipe (not unlike my biscuit recipe), and tolerates a very broad range of liquid, and a broad cooking temp. The original called for 325 for an hour. I went with 375, convection, 45 minutes, which is much closer to the Searchlight cooking temp. A lot of this comes down to how much do you want the outside of it to brown.

Final comments on the recipe. I’ve been through a lot of phases of baking technique. I used to use Nucoa stick margarine as a straight butter replacement, and water or soy milk as a straight milk replacement and reduced or left out the salt depending on what the recipe was. Over time, I experimented with other spreads, and then switched to oil, after someone made my apple crisp very successfully using oil. I had to adjust technique (instead of creaming butter and egg, I usually combined oil and other liquids as part of a “mix wet”), but it was within the standard baking repertoire to use that kind of technique. The awesome thing about switching to oils was it got rid of a lot of salt (as most non-dairy spreads have a salt in them, and some have quite a bit). After the switch to oils, I read some stuff that was kinda harshing on refined oils (in retrospect, this was a pretty bonkers critique, but at the time, I was in a very crunchy phase). I was still using a lot of nuts in cooking at the time (I was in a very meat-light phase of eating), and I had some really good food processor / grinder type equipment, so I started experimenting with modifying baked goodies to use freshly ground nuts / nut butters, instead of refined oils. I was having interesting and good results, but pregnancy sort of derailed that and I never returned to it. I’m excited to try the peanut butter bread, in part because it is a potential gateway to that phase of my cooking experimentation.

I walked in the morning with A.