#3 The Right to repair a broken ventilator
Everyone wants a piece of the internet and notes on Invisible Women
The surge in the use of ventilators for critical COVID-19 patients has let to a lot more ventilators breaking down than usual. Medical device manufacturers are following the shady ways of other electronic equipment makers in not providing a manual for repairs and vague onboard diagnostics. This week, iFixit, the website which you might have visited once when you broke your phone’s screen has released thousands of documents consisting of manuals and other critical information of biomedical equipment crowdsourced from anonymous sources. The hospital biomedical technicians can use the manuals to fix or replace components instead of waiting for a company technician to arrive and overcharge them, potentially saving a few lives due to the time savings.
iFixit provides teardown videos of devices such as mobiles and laptops. In the process, they also create various videos and documentation on how to perform common repairs like changing the battery or a broken screen by yourself. Remember those ‘Warranty void if this sticker is removed’ ugly sticker on devices? The price disparity for premium brands between servicing the devices yourself or at a local service center versus going to an ‘authorized’ one is sometimes 10x. I have changed my broken screen and phone’s battery twice in the past, iFixit videos being the savior.
The right to repair is a recent movement (the 2000s) to create laws that allow people to repair their own equipment and direct manufacturers to publish manuals and diagnostic information. A part of this movement is the concept of Repair Cafes, a meeting of people where they collaboratively fix their household appliances and devices, sometimes also using a 3D printer to print parts out of production.
One of the major concerns with non-repairability is the stress e-waste produces on the environment. It costs an order of magnitude more in terms of energy expenditure to create a device than what the device would consume over its lifetime. Unlike some other products, new smartphones cannot be simply made by recycling older ones since a lot of things are not wholly recycled. China alone discards more than 800 million electronic devices each year. Cobalt and other rare earth metals that are required in most of these devices have had questionable supply chain practices including forcefully employing child laborers as young as 8 years of age in Congo, Africa.
Apple has been notorious to make devices that are too difficult to get fixed or are simply not fixable. The quest to make their laptop line thinner and lighter has made them adopt measures such as permanently soldering the RAM onboard the logic board, using a proprietary SSD, and then the custom T2 chip securing and controlling the SSD that makes it even more difficult. On their iPhone line, Apple came out with a special proprietary screw that made it difficult to open up the iPhone.
John Deere, one of the largest tractor manufacturers in the world is locking down their tractors in the US so that only they can perform repairs once something breaks down. This is a huge pain for the farmers since it makes them wait for someone from the company to come down with the parts to repair and is much more expensive than getting it done locally or by the farmers themselves. This has forced farmers to hack their tractors using cracked firmware developed and sold online by Ukrainian hackers. Cars are also increasingly being locked down in order for companies to enjoy ongoing revenue from servicing them, though a lot of US states have brought out regulations in support of the right to repair for cars.
Everyone wants a piece of the Internet
I got my first computer in 2004. I was in 8th grade and had to throw a lot of tantrums and emotional blackmail stuff to get it. But I did not get an internet connection till three years later in 2007. The official reason given by my parents was we could not afford it. I then did not understand how that worked. The computer cost us 30,000 Indian rupees. The internet connection was 500-600 bucks per month. Anyway, so there were some limited activities I could do on it. My sister had just started as an undergrad in engineering and so I would get to read her books on C programming when she came home. I used to do those pattern drawings and other simple exercises. I also got a free LOTR The Fellowship of the Ring DVD (or CD, I don’t remember) with the computer. Which I must have watched at least 10 times. The trilogy would later become my personal favorite. Though I had to wait till 2008 to watch the second and third movies when I went to college. Then there were games.
The Internet has become a vital infrastructure like electricity and water supply. In fact, a lot of courts around the world have stated that the right to the Internet is a fundamental right of the citizens, the latest being the highest court in India early this year. The web browser has become our gateway to the outside world. More than half of the world’s internet users run Google Chrome. It is not unsurprising for people coming online for the first time to assume that Facebook or Google search is the internet in a lot of developing countries. The quest to control the Internet itself with either proprietary protocols, providing free Internet, or influencing key policymakers has never been so apparent. Companies like Facebook have shown their true intentions with their push for Free Basics in developing nations.
The Internet has become the new protest ground. So much so, that governments around the world have responded to protests by cutting off the internet in regions or sometimes the entire nation for weeks. The Arab Spring saw this with the government shutting down the internet, censoring information, and trying to hack into citizens’ social media accounts. Recently it has been the case in Hong Kong with protestors resorting to local adhoc mesh network-based apps for communication and internet blackout for months in Kashmir, India. China has been doing this for ages, but recently the Internet has been used as a tool to identify and persecute the Uyghur minorities and their connections. Big corps are happy to oblige in response to governments overreaching attempts to obtain perennial access to their citizens’ data. Government-sponsored trolls attacking citizens opposing their line have become common on platforms like Twitter. China has also been accused of taking advantage of Chinese telecom infrastructure companies to deploy mass surveillance outside in other countries.
The fragility of the Internet has never been more apparent than in the last decade. In 2011, an Armenian grandmother literally cut down the internet in the whole country when digging for scrap metal. A Denial of Service attack (DoS) is an attack on an internet infrastructure that renders it useless for the purpose it was made. When the attack is performed using multiple sources, like a network of online bots, we call it a DDoS (Distributed DoS) attack. There have been multiple instances of insecure IoT devices like internet-connected cameras being repurposed to attack key elements of the Internet like large DNS services, sometimes the attacks reaching over a million requests per second. IoT based attacks have slowly become commoditized. It is a matter of hours to scan the entire internet for insecure devices and then craft a payload on the basis of the known vulnerabilities of specific devices that have not yet been patched. A BGP misconfiguration by Verizon in 2016 caused disruption of around 15% of the world’s internet traffic. Anyone who has used a VPN to prevent ISP-level blocks or snooping would know the reduction in browsing and download speed it brings. It makes you wonder if this can be solved if it were a part of the Internet itself.
This brings us to the next set of problems. A lot of features that we currently use have been retrofitted to the Internet. We now have a majority of websites securely delivering content using HTTPS. It was not the case a decade ago. We were running out of addresses to be assigned to each internet-connected device and thus had to move towards a much larger address space (called IPv6). This update has not been smooth and a lot of patchworks are being used till the time the entire internet makes the switch. The anonymity stack on the Internet is broken. Or it simply never existed. A proposed solution called Tor is cumbersome to set up for non-tech people like journalists and even a single error might have grave repercussions and might prove fatal.
Regulatory capture is a term used when a body assigned to be working in the general interest of society starts serving the interests of the industry it was tasked to regulate, at a disadvantage to the society. One of the most important Internet governance organizations is ICANN, a not for profit institution tasked with the coordination of critical infrastructure including the DNS system (described later) and domain registrations. The problem is ICANN is doing some weird stuff lately. Last year, ICANN removed the price cap on the ‘.org’ a top-level domain, commonly used by non-profit organizations. This was despite 6 out of 3000 comments it received in favor of removing the price cap. Soon after, Ethos capital, a newly formed organization agreed to acquire the ‘.org’ domain running entity. After a series of efforts by organizations like Namecheap and EFF and much media uproar, just a couple of weeks ago, the sale of the ‘.org ‘ top-level domain was canceled. Early this year, ICANN allowed an increase in .com prices thus profiting Verisign and netting themselves an additional $20 million (ICANN had revenues of around $300 million in 2017.) There have been efforts by ICANN to remove or subvert the privacy protection provided when you purchase a domain name. Purchasing a domain name requires your email address, postal address, and phone number to be included in a public registry. This opens us, domain owners, to a lot of spam, scams, and sometimes physical harm. Services exist to provide a Post Box address to be used in place of your original address in this public registry, protecting your privacy.
Some components of the Internet Infrastructure
The basic premise of the Internet is that anyone should be able to connect to any other person online without having to figure out the nitty-gritty of it. This happens so effortlessly that we almost forget about it. You could have a Zoom call with someone you met for the first time without having to worry about the underlying mechanism. Essentially, the internet is a large interconnection of relatively smaller networks. One of the major components in the Internet infrastructure is an Autonomous System (AS). It is a group of devices like servers and routers all connected and under a single administration. So if you are a large university or a big company, you would have a network of your own systems you manage internally.
To help an Autonomous System (AS) connect to the other such networks, a set of rules called the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is used. One AS owner has some special devices (routers) that talk the BGP language and these routers connect to their counterparts in other AS. You do this on a large enough scale and you can have one or more paths between all ASes. At present, there are almost 100,000 ASes in the world. Most ASes of similar sizes enter into a mutual ‘peering’ agreement where they let the other party use their network for free. There are designated physical locations where this exchange takes place, aptly named Internet Exchange Points (IXPs).
But how do you connect continents far away? There are companies and organization which have laid down high-speed undersea cables around the world. These collectively form the Internet backbone. The largest of these are called Tier 1 providers. There are six Tier 1 providers including CenturyLink, Tata Communications, and NTT. Then there are the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which are those shitty services that you curse every time your internet goes down.
ISPs are much smaller entities that have an agreement with either the Tier 1 providers or other fiber optic owner entities, to lease their bandwidth and lay down cables and network equipment across a city so that end consumers like you and me can use the Internet. Sometimes both the bigger ISPs and the smaller ISPs who are the customers of those bigger ISPs compete for the same set of customers in an area. ISPs also decide the artificial caps on speed and data limits based on their lease with the infrastructure provider.
Humans can remember alphabetical names better than big numbers, computers prefer the numbers. Domain Name System (DNS) is the service used to map these two views. DNS is a distributed database implemented as a hierarchy of multiple servers all running a particular software. DNS is also a protocol that allows your computer to make a query against this database. If you have ever purchased a domain name such as something.com and configured those silly looking settings to get your mail setup as hello@something.com, you were fiddling with your website DNS settings. Ideally queries on the DNS protocol take the form of - Which IP address does something.com map to? At the top level of the hierarchy of DNS are few root-level servers that can answer queries directly. At the second level, we have the top-level domain (TLD) servers - say a bunch of them for .com having records of all .com websites, another for .org, and so on. A level below we have the DNS servers of the respective websites. Then there are DNS servers provided by your ISP which cache a lot of results so that your computer can get the queries answers faster. A lot of people hosting their own website do not run their own DNS server but use their hosting provider or a service like Cloudflare to manage their DNS settings. Your computer sends a query to any of these DNS servers, ideally starting with the lowest/nearest one in the hierarchy.
Not everything is dark and gloomy. The Mozilla Foundation is doing some impressive work, creating competitive products that can take on the big companies while not compromising on your privacy. They have also been providing grants to open source developers to create useful stuff. The Internet Archive is a non-profit entity archiving several billion webpages, media, books and other content even after the said content disappears from the Internet. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is working on a diverse set of domains aimed at protecting people’s rights in the digital world. The Citizen Lab under the University of Toronto is doing great work on researching surveillance and censorship around the world including the exploitation of security vulnerabilities in popular apps like Whatsapp to target certain individuals. There have been movements around the world to save the Internet though unfortunately sometimes such movements transform into a personal branding exercise for the individuals involved.
If you like what you are reading, do subscribe to get this newsletter delivered to your inbox, every weekend.
[Book Notes] Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Invisible Women by Caroline Perez provides a series of data-backed arguments about where we have failed to account for 50% of humanity. The book is divided into 6 parts - bias against women in daily lives, at the workplace, in the design of commonly used things like cellphones and cars, in medicine and medical research, the bias in women in public life, and when rebuilding after things go wrong e.g. wars, cyclones, and earthquakes. Here are chosen excerpts, mostly reproduced as it is. The book has many more such examples and is a decent read.
…. because a woman barely has to die before she is forgotten - or before we consign her work to the gender data gap by attributing it to a man.
For over a hundred years, a tenth-century Viking skeleton known as the ‘Birka warrior’ had - despite possessing an apparently female pelvis - has been assumed to be male because it was buried alongside a full set of weapons and two sacrificed horses.
Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of injustice (in science) is Rosalind Franklin, whose work (she concluded via her X-ray experiments and unit cell measurements that DNA consisted of two chains and a phosphate backbone) led James Watson and Francis Crick to ‘discover’ DNA. (and the Nobel.)
Women are more likely than men to walk and take public transport. In France, two-thirds of public transport passengers are women. Meanwhile, men around the world are more likely to drive and if a household owns a car, it is the men who dominate access to it - even in the feminist utopia of Sweden.
Equal floor space to male and female toilets might seem fair. However, if a male toilet has both cubicles and urinals, the number of people who can relieve themselves at once is far higher per square foot of floor space in the male bathroom.
Women do significantly more unpaid work than men. An Australian study found that even in wealthier couples who pay for domestic help, the remaining unpaid work is still distributed at the same male to female ratio, with women still doing the majority of what’s left.
A Finnish study found that single women recovered better from heart attacks than married women …. husbands create an extra seven hours of housework a week for women.
The US pay gap over the years between mothers and married fathers is 300% higher than the pay gap between men and women without children. In Germany a woman who has given birth to one child can expect to earn up to $285,000 less by the time she’s forty-five than a woman who has worked fulltime without interruption.
Pension credits for the main carer in Bolivia for a year per childbirth have been found to encourage men to take on more of the unpaid care load.
The US system or tenure in seven years or fired is biased against women - especially women who want to have children, in part because the years between completing a PhD and receiving tenure (30-40) coincide with the years these women are most likely to try for a baby.
Men who take paternity leave tend to be more involved in childcare in the future. In Japan where even holidays are frowned on, fathers report being shamed and penalized at work for taking parental leave. It is also not unusual for employees to stay in the office past midnight. This is in part because promotion tends to be based on hours worked, as well as the length o time an employee has spent at a company.
In the UK, 90% of single parents are women. In the US the figure is over 80%.
Blind auditions in the New York Philharmonic Orchestra where the hiring committee cannot see who was playing in the audition because there was a screen between them and the player, led to a significant increase in the number of female musicians.
Studies have shown that a belief in your own personal objectivity, or a belief that you are not sexist, makes you less objective and more likely to behave in a sexist way.
Female students perform better in science when the images in their textbooks include female scientists.
The standard office temperature is based on the metabolic rate of an average forty-year-old man, making it too cold for the average female employee.
Plough hypothesis: Societies that had historically used the plough would be less gender-equal than those that hadn’t. The hypothesis is based on the relative female friendliness of shifting agriculture (using hoes or digging sticks) vs plough agriculture (driven by horse or an ox).
The average female handspan is smaller than the male one. The standard piano keyboard doesn’t just make it harder for female pianists to match the level of acclaim reached by their male colleagues: it also affects their health.
Dear Apple, make smaller phones.
Various text and speech corpora used in training deep learning algorithms are biased towards male data.
On average female business owners receive less than half the level of investment their male counterparts get, but they produce more than twice the revenue.
Apple health monitor launched in 2014 could track blood pressure, steps taken, blood alcohol level, copper intake but not periods. It was added later.
Cars are mostly designed with an average male driver in mind. Women involved in a car crash are more likely to die than men. The US only started using a female crash-test dummy in 2011. The use of a pregnant crash-test dummy is much rarer.
There are sex differences in the fundamental working of the hear and lung capacity. In fact among men and women who smoke the same number of cigarettes, women are 20-70% more likely to develop lung cancer.
Women make up for only 25% of all major congestive heart failure trials for a period of 25 years.
Young women are twice as likely to die following a heart attack than men because doctors aren’t spotting at-risk women.
As of December 2017, women made up an average of 23.5% of the world’s parliamentarians. Proportional representation almost always improves this number.
In the breakdown of social order that follows war, women are more severely affected than men. Levels of rape and domestic violence remain extremely high in so-called post-conflict settings. E.g. Bostwana, Rwanda, Congo, and Sierra Leone.
Women’s caretaking responsibilities also have more deadly consequences for them in pandemics. During the 2014 Ebola epidemic in Liberia, 75% of those who died from the disease were women.
Social prejudice against women learning to swim in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh has led to more deaths in December 2004 tsunami and cyclones respectively.
Refugee camps in Europe have been a center of unreported sexual violence with the perpetrators including guards.
Other important stuff
Eight Amazon warehouse employees have died due to COVID-19. Despite this, Amazon refuses to share the number of infected employees. Amazon had fired workers last month who were protesting for better treatment of workers and protective equipment. Someone was able to exploit and profit from Softbank funded delivery startup Doordash who were artificially lowering prices of pizza from a local pizzeria for their customers. Uber has let go of 3000 more employees. More companies are becoming remote-first or allowing permanent work from home, with Coinbase and Shopify joining the list. I listened to an interesting podcast episode on Radiolab about Octopus moms and their sacrifices early this week. Someone I know wrote this brave post on surviving depression. There are some points that may prove useful to others.
Thank you to everyone who has subscribed. Maybe stay home, it is not over yet. I will be back next weekend.
Thanks for sharing the post on Surviving Depression <3