Internet

28
Aug
2022
Are You a Digital Nomad?

Are You a Digital Nomad?

Once upon a time, traveling from state to state and country to country in an RV was the dream of retirees. Then came the Internet, and as early as the mid-1990s, people found themselves able to work remotely. The phrase “digital nomad” was born around that time to encompass those high-tech workers who could work independently, setting up tech networks and working where they wanted to work.

The world’s experiences with the COVID pandemic resulted in an explosion of remote work. Thanks to a lot of creative thinking, all sorts of jobs and activities went online. No longer the purview of purely high-tech workers, remote work expanded to include clothing salespeople, librarians, winery hosts, personal brand coaches, and more. Give people a laptop and a reliable Internet connection, and they’re as ready to work in a hostel in Barcelona as they are in an apartment in Singapore. 

Does that make all remote workers digital nomads? There’s debate on that. 

Some consider only those people who have independent, entrepreneurial-style gigs that let them travel and work from anywhere to be the “true” digital nomad. Others think that the type of employment and employer don’t matter—if you’re taking advantage of 100% remote work and avoiding long-term fixed residences, then you, too, should consider yourself a digital nomad. 

All that to say, since the legal requirements and technical resources for both views are basically the same, the debate seems like a distinction without a difference. 

Keeping it Legal

Of course, whether you admit to being a digital nomad is another story, particularly when traveling to different countries. From a legal perspective, traveling for vacation is one thing; that assumes a basic travel visa. Those visas usually include in the fine print that you’re there for a holiday, not to work. If you want to actually work in a country, where ‘work’ means “I’m here and will be making money,” then you are often legally required to apply for a work visa. 

Different countries have different requirements, and sometimes those requirements are fairly vague. The most critical thing to remember is to do your research in advance to make sure you are following the proper legal procedures is important when crossing international borders. It’s like insurance. Sure, you can drive without it, and if no one catches you, fine. But if anything goes wrong, you might be in a world of trouble. 

Remember Your Digital Safety

The digital nomad lifestyle depends on technology, and that means you have to be on your A-game when it comes to making sure that your online accounts are protected. Having a password manager and using multi-factor authentication is no longer a “nice to have” but an absolute necessity. 

In fact, you’ll want to step it up and make sure you have a personal VPN, that your bank is top of the line when it comes to security, and a plan for what to do if your devices are lost or stolen (that means backing up your files regularly and testing that you can restore from those backups).

What Resources Exist for Digital Nomads?

Fortunately, there are a lot of resources out there to help you navigate the digital nomad lifestyle!

What You Can Do in 5 Minutes 

  • Wikipedia has a great page on being a digital nomad, including links to countries that embrace the concept and have clear(ish) guidelines on how to work in their countries. 
  • Subscribe to the Digital Nomad subreddit to get a sense of what others are experiencing as digital nomads. 

What You Can Do in 15 Minutes

  • This comprehensive article by Legal Nomads offers a LOT of tips and tricks to make working remotely easier. If you’re committed to becoming a digital nomad, definitely check this out.
  • If you have a day job that allows for 100% remote work, check in with your HR person and manager just to make sure there are no restrictions on where you might end up in the world. They might not care, but in some fields, information (like encryption technology) can’t leave a country. 

What You Can Do in 30 Minutes (or more)

  • Want to learn more about the cultural aspects of doing business in other countries? One great site to visit is eDiplomat, which focuses on the cultural do’s and don’ts for many countries around the world. Want to know about cultural etiquette in Vietnam? How about reports on living conditions in Croatia from a diplomat’s perspective? There’s a lot on this site to explore. 
  • Want to get the most out of the experience and actually make enough money to support the lifestyle? You need to sit down and start some serious research and budget planning to figure out where your goals and what you can actually afford to align.

Wrap Up

There are a lot of considerations for entering into the world of the digital nomad. Visas, cybersecurity, banking, and money management… This is the tip of the iceberg! Still, travel is amazing, and you may find that the risks involved are absolutely worth the reward of the experience. Just be careful, make sure you have a community to talk to, and don’t forget to be smart with your passwords. 

Photo by David Espina on Unsplash

Posted by heather, 0 comments
15
May
2022
Information Silos – the First Click Down a Rabbit Hole

Information Silos – the First Click Down a Rabbit Hole

Human behavior, at a grand level, is often fairly predictable. While you’ll find exceptions for every single rule out there, for the most part, people want to be comfortable. They want a decent place to sleep (for their definition of decent). They want enough to eat (for their definition of enough). They want to feel safe (for their definition of safe). There’s an interesting theory called Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that touches on all of this, but what we’re going to focus on here is how people prefer to engage with other people like them. 

There are so many examples to point to of this kind of behavior. Ethnic neighborhoods in cities. University fraternities and sororities. Hobby groups like book clubs or knitting circles. People find comfort in being with people they feel like they understand. They like hearing messages that affirm what they believe. And that’s not always wrong. It’s not always right, either, but right and wrong aren’t the point. The point is, people LOVE this kind of thing. Not just in physical reality, but also in virtual reality. Media companies, advertising services, political parties, lobbyist organizations, they love it, too. They find this basic human tendency to want to be with like-minded people and have like-minded ideas validated absolutely the Best Thing Ever.

In previous posts, we’ve talked at a high level about how tracking happens on the web. And tracking is a part of building information silos. Tracking, however, doesn’t necessarily mean following you as you surf the web. It can also be a single company, following what you choose to see on their own site. The purpose of these platforms is to get you to spend lots of time there. The more time you spend, the more money they make. And they get you to spend time there by showing you what you, comfort-loving human that you are, what you want to see.

It’s not always about money, though. China is probably the most common example of when and how governments can get involved in building information silos. In those cases where censorship is a real and pervasive problem, the information silos are about explicitly controlling behavior by controlling information. 

But let’s get back to the drive of capitalism; government control and censorship is a topic for another time. When we’re talking about Western Culture and capitalism, it all boils down to making money. And keeping you on a single platform means that platform shows you all the advertisements, gets all the subscriptions, and generally makes out like a bandit.

YouTube has been studied quite a bit when it comes to how they tweak their services to show you what you (probably) want to see. Of course, a human isn’t on the other side of your screen, quickly flipping through content and deciding that you, Alice, would really like this cat video. They have a computer figure all that out, and computers make decisions using algorithms. Think of it like a whole lot of “if this, then that” decisions. A digital image is a bunch of dots. Where the dots are located, what colors they represent, all of that can be turned into numbers. Those numbers are then matched to say “this is like that” – that’s how pattern matching works. A computer can get pretty darn good (though not perfect) at matching cats to more cats. A digital image is also more than a bunch of dots. It also has information that says who uploaded the image, how they described the image, when the image was taken, and quite possibly. All that information is fed to the algorithms so it knows what it has to work with.

So, you have a big database of information about content. What other kinds of information can be added to this data soup? Ah, yes! Who has actually looked at the content in the past! Just like an image is more than dots – it’s the wide variety of information about what, when, where, and who uploaded the image – a visitor to the site is more than a single statistic. A visitor quickly builds a profile about themselves, starting with the information of what brought them there. 

I’m pretty sure my first visit to YouTube was to find bird videos for my cats, and to this day, the first thing YouTube shows me when I follow a link back to their platform is another video of birds for cats. In an effort to keep me on the site, there will always be bird videos for cats. And, hey, since I like cats, I will probably like videos about cats, too. I’ll probably also like videos about people who train cats to do tricks. Hours later, I am thoroughly enjoying all things cat, I have a cat on my lap watching the screen with me, and I have suffered through countless pet food commercials.

Which, for me, is pretty harmless. But it isn’t always. There has been some interesting research about how this kind of algorithmic content matching takes people down really ugly rabbit holes. These rabbit holes are extremely disturbing to me, but can be so validating to someone else. I have my silo of liberal, cat-loving people. They have their silo of conservative, end-of-world preppers. And without research, I’ll never have any idea of what kind of information they are hearing over and over and over again, because that’s not going to show up in any of my online content feeds. 

Information silos are good for business. Think about it: why on earth would a content platform want to make you uncomfortable? You won’t ever visit them again! You’re here for entertainment and comfort, not to be constantly challenged by stuff you think is absolutely insane (and not in a good way). 

Information silos are not, however, good for societal empathy. It’s a lot harder to understand the other side of the story if you never see it. And if you’re in a silo, anyone from outside who challenges the information that you’ve already decided makes you happy and comfortable has an uphill battle to get you to change your mind.

It almost sounds like an unwinnable scenario, but at least in this case there are a few easy, actionable things you can do.

  • Easy step: Follow a service like Ground.News that explicitly shows a variety of news stories and what political leanings those stories come from. More than once I’ve said “huh. If that’s what the people in that other information silo are reading, no wonder they’re making those bizarre decisions!”
  • Less easy step: Regularly watch the news of your least favorite popular news source. I’ll admit, I struggle with this one because it makes me crazy. But it’s very effective in helping understand other viewpoints (even when I vehemently disagree with them).
  • Hard step: Go international. If you see a news article on war in some foreign country, go look for how the news is being reported elsewhere. Are you getting the same information in the U.S. that is being shown in France? What’s being reported in the English language version of the newspapers in Malaysia? It’s fascinating what’s considered important outside your silo.

Information silos are absolutely a thing. They are a comfortable thing. They make day-to-day living a lot simpler. They give you what you want. And there’s nothing wrong with that… as long as you realize that a) you are in a silo and b) you really need to leave that silo every once in a while.

Good luck! It’s a big world out there.

Photo by Jim Witkowski on Unsplash

Posted by heather in Communication, Line Dancing, 0 comments
10
Apr
2022
A Call Made Round the World…And More On Internet Resiliency

A Call Made Round the World…And More On Internet Resiliency

If you look at a map of the world, you see lines around cities, states, and countries that mark the boundaries of those regions. Those lines seem so tidy when looking at a map of the world. Of course, that assumes you’re looking at a well-surveyed area with a stable political infrastructure. 

The Internet is nowhere near that tidy; its boundaries are not well defined. Maps of the Internet don’t look like anything in the physical world. There’s an interesting map based on all known websites and where their domains are registered as of  2011 called The Internet map. There’s a super-fun map called The Map of the Internet that maps out the World Wide Web and gives you a sense of scale. Heck, you can go to Vox and look at “40 maps that explain the Internet,” but none of those map out the Internet itself. When it comes right down to it, there is no single authoritative map of the Internet.

Why is it this way, and why does it matter? Read on!

Why the Internet is Resilient

Did you know the Internet started as a US military defense project? Think about the mindset that would result in: any military would want a computer system to stand up to anything and everything. It would need to be resilient if some pieces went offline. It would need to allow lots of different types of computers to talk to each other any time, day or night. Think of those requirements as the DNA of the Internet. Technical implementations build from there.

But wait, if the Internet started as a military project, how did the rest of us get to use it??? That kind of exchange, from government to private sector and back, is pretty common. That’s a post for another time.

Back to the Internet. The way things work, it’s a lot like a postal letter. Someone writes a letter and it includes the address of where it’s trying to go. And at every step, the delivery system asks, “what’s the best next step from here?” These systems are always chatting with each other, sharing the best path to get from anywhere to everywhere. If one path goes down because a computer broke, that’s ok, because the systems will tell each other a new way to get there. And that happens fast. And it is one part of what makes the Internet so resilient. There is always a path forward.

A while back, I videoconferenced with my mother in Chicago from a hotel in Taipei. I opened an app, clicked on her face, let it ring a few times, and voilá, there she was. WOW, seriously, how cool is it that within a second, the computer I was on in Taipei figured out how to get to my mom’s computer in Chicago? We were nearly 7500 miles apart. I was on a hotel network in Taiwan. She was on a mobile network in Chicago. I opened my app, which itself has the addresses of the computer used by that video service. The network I was on said, ‘ahHA! You’re trying to get way over there! Let’s start routing you through lots of different countries, under the ocean, or maybe into space via satellite.’ 

It is possible for a local region or country to cut itself off from the rest of the Internet, but to do it, it has to get into that delivery system and take its information out of the network. Then any system trying to get there from here won’t know how to do that anymore. (It’s obviously a bit more complicated than that, especially when you throw satellites into the mix, but you get the idea.)

Controlling (Mis)Information

The Internet is resilient, which means it can route information around many different kinds of interruptions like broken computers or weird human error. Yay! That means that cat videos can be available day and night! Well, true, but not everyone is a fan of this level of resiliency, and there are reasons for that. 

The thing about technology is that technology itself is neutral. It’s like a bunch of bricks—you can build houses or you can vandalize windows. It’s not the brick that’s an issue, it’s how the brick is used. But if you’re in a situation where people are using bricks to break things, then you almost certainly want to do something to prevent that. One of those preventative measures is likely to be controlling access to the bricks. Same goes for technology like the Internet—if you use it to harm, someone is going to want to prevent that by controlling what gets posted.

Now more than ever, we are seeing people and their governments demand ways to prevent the spread of information they don’t like on the Internet. From addressing “fake news” that attempts to skew democratic elections to reactions to cyberwarfare, controlling information is considered by many to be necessary for a safe society.

Some governments go so far as to demand restrictions between the Internet within their country and everyone else. This has been top of the news when it comes to Russia, but Russia is just the latest example. China has its Great Firewall, which had its start in 1997. Several other countries in Asia and Africa censor the Internet to various extents. In the US, free speech laws prevent much government censorship, which has many people turning to the social media platforms themselves and demanding action, either to restrict content or to stop restricting content, depending on their point of view.

Why Does This Matter?

Identity Flash Mob is a passion project led by two women who want people to have a better understanding of how the Internet works and why it really matters to know more about it. So, if you take away anything from this article, it should be two things:

  1. The Internet is incredibly resilient, but it’s not invincible. While individuals will always be able to build connectivity to the Internet (if they have the technical know-how and access to satellite networks) that’s not the case for most everyone. Governments may well be able to control big chunks of it, and through that, they control the information people have access to.

Which leads to the second thing:

  1. Not everyone sees the same thing on the Internet. What seems obvious to you based on what you’re reading in the news or social media might not be obvious to others who are not seeing the same thing. 

The resiliency of the Internet that lets me call my mom from halfway around the world is an incredible thing. Hopefully, we’ll still keep in mind all the good things that resilience as a foundational principle allows us in today’s online society.

Posted by heather in Data Security, Mosh Pit, 0 comments