Canadian cord-cutters will outnumber cable subscribers by 2020

The first time I wrote about how Canadians were cutting the cord (because cable companies are the worst) was way back in 2016. It would appear that only one thing has changed between then and now: the pace at which Canadians are ditching cable for streaming services.

From CBC News:

Within two years, streaming services like Netflix will be more popular in Canada than cable TV, a new report suggests.

By the end of 2020, 10.6 million Canadian households will be signed up with streaming services, market research firm Convergence Research Group forecasts. That's four per cent higher than the projected 10.2 million who will have traditional TV subscriptions.

"It's kind of the calm before the storm," said Convergence president Brahm Eiley.

He says Netflix's surging subscriber numbers, coupled with new streaming service competitors, such as Amazon Prime Video, will help drive a fundamental shift in Canadian viewing habits, moving them from cable to online.

"The numbers are so big now that it really is happening," he said. "The writing's on the wall."

The report found about a two per cent decline in Canadian television subscribers in both 2016 and 2017, and forecasts a further annual average decline of 2.6 per cent through to 2020.

Meanwhile, 24 per cent more households signed up for streaming services in 2017 compared to the previous year.

[...]

The numbers are no surprise to industry expert Irene Berkowitz, who believes traditional TV's decline is inevitable, fuelled by a demand for generally cheaper and more convenient streaming services.

"It's a consumer-driven disruption," said Berkowitz, an instructor at Toronto's Ryerson University. "[Traditional TV] is clunky, it's infuriating and it feels like a horse and buggy or an electric typewriter."

The CRTC tried valiantly to convince Canadian cable providers to sell the sort of à la carte services that consumers actually wanted to buy, but cable companies weren't having any of that, and the results have been predictable.

Cambridge Analytica is just the tip of the Facebook iceberg

I've been saying for a while that Cambridge Analytica were just the canaries in Facebook's coal mine, but I have to admit, I didn't expect Facebook themselves to agree.

From CNBC:

Buried on page 46 of Facebook's quarterly report, deep in the risk factors section, is an ominous warning to investors: Cambridge Analytica is probably not alone.

"We anticipate that we will discover and announce additional incidents of misuse of user data or other undesirable activity by third parties," Facebook said in the filing published on Thursday. "We may also be notified of such incidents or activity via the media or other third parties."

[...]

In its quarterly report, Facebook said that reports of additional incidents "may negatively affect user trust and engagement, harm our reputation and brands, and adversely affect our business and financial results."

Say it with me, now: Facebook is the problem.

The loot box fallout keeps on falling, hitting everyone... except EA.

Just days after the Netherlands called on other EU nations to join with them in regulating gacha mechanics in videogames, Belgium has stepped up to do just that. And how. From Kotaku:

Loot boxes in FIFA 18, Overwatch, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive are now illegal in Belgium, with the country’s legislators declaring today that if the games’ publishers don’t remove the offending microtransactions, people behind the games could face fines and even time behind bars.

As reported by Eurogamer, Belgium minister of justice Koen Greens said in a statement that the loot boxes in these games were in violation of the country’s gaming legislation and thus the companies selling them are subject to criminal punishment, including fines of up to 800,000 euros ($974,605) and prison sentences. This determination was made after Belgium’s Gaming Commission spent several months reviewing how loot boxes operated in these games and others following the controversy surrounding Star Wars: Battlefront 2’s microtransactions.

[...]

Neither Overwatch publisher Blizzard nor CS:GO publisher Valve immediately responded to requests for comment.

Ironically, EA and SW:BF2 will avoid Belgian censure, "since at the time of the survey, EA had temporarily removed microtransactions from the game." MTs have since been added back into SW:BF2, but they're not tied to gambling mechanics anymore, and therefore don't break Belgian law. Which means that EA, having thoroughly shit the loot box bed, have completely ruined the fun for everybody else while dodging the fines and other penalties. Huzzah!

Still, if you were wondering if the loot box furor had died down... it hasn't. At all. And I have a feeling that it will be a long, long time before AAA videogame publishers attempt this particular trick again.

Is this the beginning of the end for patent trolling?

In non-Facebook news, this ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) will likely have far-reaching consequences, especially for the tech sector. As reported by Bloomberg:

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld an administrative review system that has helped Google Inc., Apple Inc. and other companies invalidate hundreds of issued patents.

The justices, voting 7-2, said Tuesday a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office review board that critics call a patent "death squad" wasn’t unconstitutionally wielding powers that belong to the courts.

Silicon Valley companies have used the system as a less-expensive way to ward off demands for royalties, particularly from patent owners derided as "trolls" because they don’t use their patents to make products. Drugmakers and independent inventors complain that it unfairly upends what they thought were established property rights.

“It came down to this: Is the patent office fixing its own mistakes or is the government taking property?” said Wayne Stacy, a patent lawyer with Baker Botts. “They came down on the side of the patent office fixing its own mistakes.”

The huge body of ridiculous patents on file in the U.S. has been a huge problem in recent years, with patent trolls essentially building a lucrative extortion business out of a combination the failures of the Patent Office and the cost of the litigation required to redress them -- it was often cheaper to just pay the "ransom" than it was to fight to invalidate the junk patent itself. Now that the U.S. Patent Office can void their own patents without a judicial review, though, that changes, suddenly making patent trolling into a much riskier activity with a much lower change of profit.

Wall Street has already noticed, too:

The ruling caused shares to drop in companies whose main source of revenue -- their patents -- are under threat from challenges. VirnetX Holding Corp., which is trying to protect almost $1 billion in damages it won against Apple, dropped as much as 12 percent and closed down 8.5 percent. The patent office has said its patents are invalid in a case currently before an appeals court.

It will be interesting to see just how much of an impact this ruling has, and how quickly. Patent and trademark law are byzantine enough at the best of times, especially in the U.S., and I can't help but feel that any ruling in favour of rational decision-making, which disadvantages deep-pocketed litigants in the process, can only be a good thing.

Can Facebook be replaced?

It's hard to imagine that any social media startup could possibly replace Facebook, given just how big FB has become, and how much of a lead they have in building their network and their database of your data. But it turns out that some aren't willing to simply accept FB's continued dominance in the social media space as fait accompli, and are putting their money where their mouths are to jumpstart a viable competitor to Mark Zuckerberg's troubled giant.

From The Guardian:

Can Facebook be replaced? The prominent Silicon Valley investor Jason Calacanis, who was an early investor in several high-profile tech companies including Uber certainly hopes so. He has launched a competition to find a “social network that is actually good for society”.

The Openbook Challenge will offer seven “purpose-driven teams” $100,000 in investment to build a billion-user social network that could replace the technology titan while protecting consumer privacy.

“We want to invest in replacements that don’t manipulate people and that protect our democracy from bad actors looking to spread misinformation,” the challenge website states.

The seven winning teams will be invited to join Calacanis’s Launch incubator, offering them 12 week of mentorship as they develop their social network.

“All community and social products on the internet have had their era, from AOL to MySpace, and typically they’re not shut down by the government – they’re slowly replaced by better products,” said Calacanis in a blogpost announcing the challenge. “So, let’s start the process of replacing Facebook.”

And that's just the first new wrinkle of the day in Facebook.

Fighting fire with fire

Last week, I posted about this Kotaku article, which discussed the use of Machine Learning algorithms to enable feats of video face-swapping which are increasingly difficult to spot. The video example, in which Jordan Peele masquerades as Barack Obama to warn us about the dangers of the coming "Fucked up dystopia," while exhorting us all to "stay woke, bitches," was both hilarious and disturbing:

If that video gave you both belly laughs and nightmares, then MIT Technology Review has an antidote for you.... kinda.

The ability to take one person’s face or expression and superimpose it onto a video of another person has recently become possible. [...] This phenomenon has significant implications. At the very least, it has the potential to undermine the reputation of people who are victims of this kind of forgery. It poses problems for biometric ID systems. And it threatens to undermine public trust in videos of any kind.

[...]

Enter Andreas Rossler at the Technical University of Munich in Germany and colleagues, who have developed a deep-learning system that can automatically spot face-swap videos. The new technique could help identify forged videos as they are posted to the web.

But the work also has sting in the tail. The same deep-learning technique that can spot face-swap videos can also be used to improve the quality of face swaps in the first place—and that could make them harder to detect.

Artificial Intelligence: making your life both better and worse since 2018.

The fact that the same techniques that make detecting DeepFakes harder also makes them easier to fake in the first place creates an awkward conundrum. I'm inclined to think that arming individuals with the power to spot fakes more easily is a good thing, but it's not exactly a no-brainer. Do you arm individuals with the tools they need to tell real videos from clever ML-powered forgeries, knowing that some of those individuals will use those same tools to create more clever ML-powered forgeries? Would withholding this power from rule-abiding individuals help prevent the DeepFake apocalypse, or just leave them helpless to protect themselves against society's black hats and bad actors, who will almost certainly be disseminating these tools on darknets anyway?

And this is still just Machine Learning, and not the full-blown Artificial Intelligence that it may well lead to. Count on it: things will only get wilder from here.

We now return you to the Singularity, already in progress....

Selling sci fi and snake oil

Articles like this one, from Digital Trends, are so full of ignorance and empty hype that it actually makes me angry:

Gaming is just the beginning. Here are 8 innovative ways VR is being used today

Steven Spielberg’s movie adaptation of Ready Player One is introducing virtual reality (VR) to a whole new audience. But while Ready Player One is set in 2044, here in 2018 VR is capable of some pretty darn exciting things. Here are eight amazing ways that virtual reality is being used right now.

Leaving aside, for a moment, the fact that the VR application presented in Ready Player One isn't actually something that today's VR technology can actually do (it is, after all, science fiction), let's just consider Digital Trends' list of eight innovative, non-gaming uses for VR:

1. Gaming.
2. Surgery.
3. Live events.
4. Collaboration.
5. Therapy.
6. Education.
7. Driving vehicles.
8. Porn.

I'm just going to let breathe, for a moment, the fact that Digital Trends' #1 innovative and non-gaming use for VR is... gaming. Seriously, this is hack work. WTF?

Next, a refresher. In order to be transformative, and technology must enable the user to do something quantitatively new: something that they cannot do without the technology, and which they will want or need to do. This must be a new thing; it cannot simply be a qualitative enhancement of an existing application. It must also be an immediate thing; it cannot be a theoretical future use of the tech, or an unproven hypothetical use of the tech, but must be something can be done right out of the box.

The tech should also be scalable (i.e. it gets cheaper as the technology is more widely adopted) and game-changing in some way, neither of which seem to apply to VR, either, but for now, let's just focus on the first criterion, and apply it to each of the eight items on Digital Trends' list.

Lowering expectations for VR

Then:

From Kotaku:

STAT | $11.2 billion - The amount people will spend on all VR in 2020, according to a forecast by IHS Markit.

STAT | $30 billion - The amount people will spend on all VR in 2020, according to a forecast by Superdata.

STAT | $50 billion - The amount people will spend on VR hardware alone in 2021, according to a forecast by Juniper Research.

QUOTE | “The number one problem facing the VR industry right now is the lack of high quality, highly replayable VR content.” - First Contact Entertainment president Hess Barber lays out the biggest problem his VR studio will focus on solving.

And now:

Virtual reality (VR) arcades and other location-based VR entertainment venues could generate more than $800 million in worldwide revenue by 2022,  according to the latest Futuresource Consulting VR Tracker Report.

That's right... VR has done from a tens-of-billions-a-year-by-2020 industry to an industry that's now forecast to reach only a fraction of that size by 2022. And, for the record, I don't believe that VRcades will be generating anywhere near $800M a year in four years' time, either, not only because there's not enough evidence of consumer interest in the technology to drive that much business, but because neither North America nor Europe have anything like an arcade culture anymore.

Nobody is making money from VR, and anyone trying to convince you in invest in a VR business is lying, to you and possible even to themselves. Don't be fooled.

The "loot box" fallout hasn't stopped falling

Q: How badly did EA miss the mark with Star Wars: Battlefront 2's loot box-driven progression mechanics?

A: Badly enough that the Netherlands is not only banning loot boxes, but urging other EU nations to do the same... after EA decoupled SW:BF2's progression system from its monetization system.

From GamesIndustry.biz:

The Netherlands Gaming Authority (NGA) says it wants to "work together and act together" with other European nations to tackle the issue of loot boxes.

Following on from yesterday's ruling that certain iterations of the mechanic contravene national gambling legislation, the government body has begun trying to work with other EU member states on the matter.

"There is no question of harmonisation of regulations," the NGA told GamesIndustry.biz. "Every European regulator has its own laws and regulations. We now want to work together and act together."

Yes, "gacha" mechanic regulations aren't just coming, they're here, and they're spreading. And while EA isn't the only "loot box" offender, their pairing of gacha mechanics with the Star Wars license, just weeks before The Last Jedi hit theatres, managed to garner a degree and intensity of negative PR that practically begged to be restricted. Good job, EA. GG.

Oh, and that ruling that's referred to? Not only did it find four games as being "in direct contravention of the Betting and Gaming Act" (FIFA 18, Dota 2, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, and Rocket League are supposedly the games in question), it also defined what sort of loot box mechanics violate the law:

The violation is defined by loot box mechanics that require no skill element whatsoever, and contain exchangeable items that hold market value outside the game.

If the developers don't take action to change these mechanics by June 20, they could be fined or even face the prohibition of their game within the region.

I hated to see loot boxes proliferating in AAA videogames, mainly because (as you know) I hate to see bad corporate behaviour rewarded with boatloads of cash... and "gacha" games do rake in metric tonnes of the stuff. So it's good to see bad loot box behaviour finally being penalized, instead. It remains to be seen if the AAA video game industry will actually learn a fucking lesson from all this, of course, but one can always hope.

Reminder: Facebook's fiasco is an international affair

While a lot of the tech media world was focused on Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before the U.S. Congress last week, it's worth remembering that Facebook are facing investigations in multiple countries, on multiple continents. From CBC News:

Senior members of the Facebook leadership team faced a rough ride from MPs at a Commons committee hearing Thursday over their failure to inform more than 600,000 Canadians that their privacy might have been compromised.

For more than two years, Facebook knew that the personal information of thousands of Canadians may have been in the hands of a third party — without their consent, and in contravention of Canadian privacy law. The social media executives offered little explanation as to why the company sat on this knowledge — and only copped to its role in the affair after it was made public in media reports.

[...]

Kevin Chan, head of public policy for Facebook in Canada, offered an apology to Canadians whose profiles might have been compromised. Chan said Facebook was too idealistic — and "naive" — about how its technology is used, and didn't focus enough on abuse.

"What is alleged to have occurred is a huge breach of trust to our users, and for that we are sorry," Chan, ex-policy director for former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, told MPs on the House of Commons privacy committee.

Yes, it was a huge breach of trust. It was also a breach of Canada's privacy laws. More to the point, though, it wasn't anything that Facebook haven't done, apologized for, and then done again... and again... dozens of times since the company was founded. Cambridge Analytica was just the final straw, not the first one. And, Mark Zuckerberg's Congressional cakewalk notwithstanding, Facebook's problems seem to be just beginning.

Machine Learning is a transformative technology... and its transformations won't all be good ones

This is both hilarious and terrifying. From Kotaku:

Last year, University of Washington researchers used the technology to take videos of things that former President Barack Obama had already said, then generate faked videos of him spitting out those lines verbatim in a machine-generated format. The research team stopped short of putting new words in Obama’s mouth, but Get Out director Jordan Peele and BuzzFeed have done just that in a PSA warning malicious actors could soon generate videos of anyone saying just about anything.

Using technology similar to the University of Washington study and Peele’s (fairly good!) imitation of Obama’s voice, here’s a clip of the former POTUS saying “So, for instance, they could have me say things like, I don’t know, Killmonger was right. Or uh, Ben Carson is in the sunken place. Or how about this, simply, President Trump is a total and complete dipshit.”

[...]

“We’ve covered counterfeit news websites that say the pope endorsed Trump that look kinda like real news, but because it’s text people have started to become more wary,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote. “And now we’re starting to see tech that allows people to put words into the mouths of public figures that look like they must be real because it’s video and video doesn’t lie.”

[...]

As colleague Adam Clark Smith noted before, there are countless potential uses of this technology that would qualify as mundane, like improving the image quality of video chat apps, or recreating mind-blowing facsimiles of historic speeches in high-definition video or holograms.

But machine-learning algorithms are improving rapidly, and as security researcher Greg Allen wrote at the time in Wired, it is likely only a matter of years before the audio component catches up and makes Peele’s Obama imitation unnecessary. Within a decade, some kinds of forensic analysis may even be unable to detect forged audio.

Here's the clip:

Machine Learning is only a baby step on the road to Artificial Intelligence, but it's already at least powerful enough to convincingly swap celebrities’ faces with those of porn actors, and the potential chaos that this almost certainly will cause in our public discourse is mid-blowing. It's still a little crude, with FakeApp Obama still lodged firmly inside the Uncanny Valley... but we're also clearly on the upslope that leads out of that valley, and not that far away from the day when even the video that you see on the Internet simply can't be trusted.

This is a lot of power to put into the hands of almost everyone on Earth, and if there's one thing that we know, it's that this power will be used for evil. FakeApp Obama is just a proof of concept; the genuinely malicious fake videos are coming, and you're going to need to be very alert to spot them. Especially since we're living in an era when the actual news of the day is... surreal, to put it lightly. Stay woke, bitches.

We now return you to the Singularity, already in progress.

Facebook's lies revealed... again

Remember when Mark Zuckerberg was asked, point-blank, if he'd implement GDPR-calibre provisions across all of Facebook, and he replied with some word salad that was meant to sound like an affirmative reply... but only after he'd first said that they wouldn't? It looks like his first answer to that question, i.e. that Facebook had no immediate plans to do this, was actually the truth.

From The Hill:

Facebook is moving to exempt 1.5 billion users in Africa, Asia, Australia and Latin America from its terms of service as dictated under a new European Union regulation, according to a Reuters report.

The move comes weeks before the E.U.'s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is set to take effect. The rule addresses the protection of personal data shared outside the E.U.

By exempting so many of its members from the new regulation, Facebook would limit its liability under the new rule, which allows for fines of up to 4 percent of a company's global annual revenue for violations.

For Facebook, that could mean billions of dollars in potential fines, according to Reuters.
According to Reuters, the exemption would affect more than 70 percent of Facebook users worldwide. As of December, the social media platform had 239 million members in the U.S. and Canada, 370 million in Europe and 1.52 billion users in other parts of the world.

So, if you live in the EU, you'll be covered by GDPR, and if you live in the USA, you'll be covered by Facebook's GDPR-lite privacy policy, but if you're of the other 70% of Facebook's users, then you're fucked. And they didn't buy you a drink, first.

The way Facebook are implementing GDPR (in those few places where they are doing so) is drawing heavy criticism as well, as reported by TechCrunch:

In simple terms, seeking consent from users in a way that’s not fair because it’s manipulative means consent is not being freely given. Under GDPR, it won’t be consent at all. So Facebook appears to be seeing how close to the wind it can fly to test how regulators will respond.

Safe to say, EU lawmakers and NGOs are watching.

[...]

Data protection experts who TechCrunch spoke to suggest Facebook is failing to comply with, not just the spirit, but the letter of the law here. Some were exceeding blunt on this point.

“I am less impressed,” said law professor Mireille Hildebrandt discussing how Facebook is railroading users into consenting to its targeted advertising. “It seems they have announced that they will still require consent for targeted advertising and refuse the service if one does not agree. This violates [GDPR] art. 7.4 jo recital 43. So, yes, they will be taken to court.”

The best worst part of all this? Even the parts of the world that are getting GDPR coverage, are only going to be covered because Facebook has their international headquarters in Ireland... for tax reasons. That's right, it's only their shady tax evasion policy that's left Facebook exposed to GDPR in the first place. If not for that, they wouldn't be covering anybody.

Perhaps that's why people like Richard Stallman are speaking out for stronger regulation, as in his recent interview with New York Magazine:

We need a law. Fuck them — there’s no reason we should let them exist if the price is knowing everything about us. Let them disappear. They’re not important — our human rights are important. No company is so important that its existence justifies setting up a police state. And a police state is what we’re heading toward.

I can only agree. Fuck them. Fuck Mark Zuckerberg and his lying, android-like face, and fuck the horse he rode in on. Fuck Facebook.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#DeleteFacebook

Half-hearted and half-assed:Facebook's approach to GDPR compliance isn't at all surprising

It won't surprise you to read that I am not surprised by the extent of the flaws in Facebook's plans for GDR "compliance," as reported by TechCrunch:

Facebook is about to start pushing European users to speed through giving consent for its new GDPR privacy law compliance changes. It will ask people to review how Facebook applies data from web to target them with ads, and surface the sensitive profile info they share. Facebook will also allow European and Canadian users to turn on facial recognition after six years of the feature being blocked there. But with a design that encourages rapidly hitting the “Agree” button, a lack of granular controls, a laughably cheatable parental consent request for teens, and an aesthetic overhaul of Download Your Information that doesn’t make it any easier to switch social networks, Facebook shows it’s still hungry for your data.

A lot of TC's criticisms revolve around a user interface design that's clearly intended to "speed through by hitting that big blue button at the bottom," rather than actually managing their privacy options. For example, the ability to control your sensitive profile information, like sexual preference or religious and political views:

As you’ll see at each step, you can hit the pretty blue “Accept And Continue” button regardless of whether you’ve scrolled through the information. If you hit the ugly grey “Manage Settings” button, you have to go through an interstitial where Facebook makes it’s argument trying to deter you from removing the info before letting you make and save your choice. It feels obviously designed to get users to breeze through it by offering no resistance to continue, but friction if you want to make changes.

Facebook doesn’t let advertisers target you based on this sensitive info, which is good. The only exception is that in the US, political views alongside political Pages and Events you interact with impact your overarching personality categories that can be targeted with ads. You can opt out of being targeted by those too. But your only option here is either to remove any info you’ve shared in these categories so friends can’t see it, or allow Facebook to use it to personalize the site. There’s no option to keep this stuff on your profile but not let Facebook use it.

The pattern repeats, over and over, throughout the long list of small changes that FB is making.

Duplicity, thy name is Zuckerberg...

Was it only Thursday, when I wrote that "Facebook's CEO not only recognizing that new regulation is "inevitable," but asserting that new regulations should not be unfairly advantageous for FB" was unexpected... and maybe even welcome? It was, wasn't it? You'd really think that I'd have learned my lesson by now, about optimism and giving corporate CEOs anything like the benefit of the doubt.

From Politico:

Facebook asked conservative groups for help last week in heading off European-style privacy rules, just as CEO Mark Zuckerberg prepared to apologize to Congress for his company's data scandal.

The company's outreach comes as the European Union is preparing to enforce strict new privacy rules that take effect in late May. Among other things, the EU’s rules allow regulators to impose fines as high as 4 percent of a company’s global revenues for serious violations.

The emailed invitation to a sit-down to discuss the policy, obtained by POLITICO, also shows how Facebook is seeking an unlikely alliance with conservatives, who frequently accuse the the social network of bias against their views but oppose most forms of government regulation. The email did not disclose the recipients but came from Facebook's liaison to conservative organizations.

Facebook made its plea to conservative and libertarian groups last week, just hours before Zuckerberg went before a a joint session of the Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees to express contrition for the leaking of users’ data to Cambridge Analytica and tout new steps the company is taking to boost user privacy.

Mark, Mark, Mark... you two-faced, double-talking weasel.

If you were wondering whether Zuckerberg (and, by extension, Facebook) were sincere in expressing contrition about their many privacy and security mistakes, then wonder no longer: they weren't.

If you were wondering whether Zuckerberg (and FB) were sincere about their determination to implement GDPR-calibre protections for their users at all, let alone outside of the EU, then wonder no longer: they weren't.

If you were wondering whether Mark Zuckerberg, who was testifying to Congress under oath, would at least have Facebook working behind the scenes on programs that were in step with the content and tone of his sworn testimony, then wonder no longer: they weren't.

If, however, you were thinking that Mark Zuckerberg was a double-talking, bald-faced liar, and utterly unworthy of any degree of trust whatsoever... well, wonder on longer, because he most certainly is. Which means that Facebook cannot under any circumstances be allowed to continue policing themselves. They must be regulated from outside Facebook, with hefty fines and even jail time being the consequence of continuing to express contrition while planning to do nothing.

“I think regulations like GDPR are very positive,” Zuckerberg said in a call with reporters ahead of last week’s congressional hearings, but he cautioned that “we need to figure out what makes sense in different markets with the different laws and different places.”

Horseshit. "What makes sense in different markets" to Zuckerberg and Facebook is, very clearly, no regulation whatsoever, and a level of trust that Zuckerberg and Facebook have not only utterly failed to earn, but repeatedly proved they don't deserve. But Zuckerberg know what his Congressional audience would want to hear, so he went through the motions, even though we now know that it was pure manure.

In the meantime, though... well, you know what I think you should be doing.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#DeleteFacebook

IoT's security problem, illustrated with fish

When I wrote on Saturday that the Internet of Things would not become a transformative technology, I was (obviously) thinking of its potential for widespread adoption by individual consumers. I wasn't thinking about IoT's adoption by larger corporate interests like hotels and casinos, many of which might well have some use for the ability to monitor and control several different micro-climates over a single network.

The problem with that, though, is that all of those IoT-connected devices are connected to your business's network, effectively linking a lot of highly valuable business data to IoT devices which are almost impossible to secure. What could possibly go wrong?

From Business Insider UK:

Hackers are increasingly targeting "internet of things" devices to access corporate systems, using things like CCTV cameras or air-conditioning units, according to the CEO of a cybersecurity firm.

The internet of things refers to devices hooked up to the internet, and it has expanded to include everything from household appliances to widgets in power plants.

Nicole Eagan, the CEO of Darktrace, told the WSJ CEO Council Conference in London on Thursday: "There's a lot of internet-of-things devices, everything from thermostats, refrigeration systems, HVAC systems, to people who bring in their Alexa devices into the offices. There's just a lot of IoT. It expands the attack surface, and most of this isn't covered by traditional defenses."

Eagan gave one memorable anecdote about a case Darktrace worked on in which a casino was hacked via a thermometer in an aquarium in the lobby.

"The attackers used that to get a foothold in the network," she said. "They then found the high-roller database and then pulled that back across the network, out the thermostat, and up to the cloud.

Betcha thought I was joking about the fish, didn't you?

I stand by my earlier assessment: IoT is simply too difficult to secure, and not nearly useful enough, to become the transformative technology that it's being touted as.

The "real" Facebook scandal starts to gain traction

It turns out that Facebook's "shadow profiles," wide-ranging data sets about users and non-users alike, might finally be getting the attention they deserve, rather than all of the attention being on the Cambridge Analytica angle... overseas, anyway. From the Sydney Morning Herald:

San Francisco: Concern about Facebook's respect for data privacy is widening to include the information it collects about non-users, after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the world's largest social network tracks people whether they have accounts or not.

[...]

Zuckerberg said on Wednesday under questioning by US Representative Ben Lujan that, for security reasons, Facebook also collects "data of people who have not signed up for Facebook."

Lawmakers and privacy advocates immediately protested the practice, with many saying Facebook needed to develop a way for non-users to find out what the company knows about them.

[...]

Facebook gets some data on non-users from people on its network, such as when a user uploads email addresses of friends. Other information comes from "cookies," small files stored via a browser and used by Facebook and others to track people on the internet, sometimes to target them with ads.

"This kind of data collection is fundamental to how the internet works," Facebook said in a statement.

Asked if people could opt out, Facebook added, "There are basic things you can do to limit the use of this information for advertising, like using browser or device settings to delete cookies. This would apply to other services beyond Facebook because, as mentioned, it is standard to how the internet works."

Facebook often installs cookies on non-users' browsers if they visit sites with Facebook "like" and "share" buttons, whether or not a person pushes a button. Facebook said it uses browsing data to create analytics reports, including about traffic to a site.

If you were wondering why one of FB's fourteen class action lawsuits was filed by a plaintiff who “does not have, and has never had, a Facebook account,” then wonder no longer, because this is why. Creepy AF... and possibly illegal, since people without FB accounts have never consented to having Facebook build a data profile of them. There's nothing obviously security-related about the practice, either; Facebook appear to have no legitimate need for this data, they just want it.

Reminder: IoT is not a transformative technology, either.

First a quick refresher on what qualities make a technology transformative:

#1: Immediately useful. In order to become transformative, a technology needs to become widely adopted, which doesn't happen if it's not useful for something, right out of the box, that users aren't already doing. This can't just be a qualitative enhancement of things we do already; it must be something we cannot currently do at all.

#2: Economically scaleable. A transformative technology must become cheaper to use as more users come online. A technology that doesn't scale can't become widely used, no matter how useful it might be, simply because its use will remain out of reach of almost everyone.

#3: Game-changing/Historical. A transformative technology make possible later technologies, or unlock new activities with later iterations of the tech, and those changes should extend beyond the merely technical.

#3 is the trickiest of the three to asses in a technology's early stages, but a good example would be the smartphone. Smartphones supercharged social media; when combined with the phones' cameras and large memories, smartphones made it possible to record, and even simultaneously upload, e.g. video of encounters between members of minority communities and the police. Consider how profoundly this has impacted the way we talk about law enforcement, or the way in which Mitt Romney's 47% video altered the outcome of that year's U.S. Presidential race, and you get an idea of the potential impact that we're talking about.

That's it; technologies that fulfill those three criteria can turn new tech into technological revolution. Given these three qualities, a new technology can alter the way our society does almost everything; without them, a new technology makes a brief splash and a small ripple, and then vanishes beneath the surface of history, never to be seen again.

Now, let's apply these criteria to an historical example: the telegraph. 

#1: The ability to communicate over long distances has historically been game-changing; many events in history have hinged on whether (or not) a message got where it needed to go in time. Telegraphy allows you to send messages in minutes, rather than weeks or months, with little to no loss of information, the utility of which is obvious. PASS.

#2: The telegraph required wires to be run over long distances, and a source of electricity to power it all, so it was a matter of good timing that it was invented at the same time that steam power was also becoming a thing. Steam-powered trains also required long rail lines to be laid, and telegraph lines could be (and were) run along poles alongside them for comparatively little extra cost; and most of the electricity that we use is still generated using steam-driven turbines, which provides juice. All of this scaled well, and kept scaling, to such an extent that we're still using it all. PASS.

#3: The telegraph made it possible to send information long distances over wires and cables using binary encoding (dots and dashes), an ability which not only didn't exist previous, but which was so powerful that we're still using it. Replace dots and dashes with 0's and 1's, and add microcircuit-controlled switches, and routers, and you end up with the Internet. PASS.

You can do the same exercise for radio, television, microcircuits, personal computers, the Internet, and the smartphone. You can't, however, successfully complete the same exercise for, say, 3DTVs - nobody needed or wanted them, there was little to no content for them, and they've already sunk without trace. VR is sinking now, for the same reasons.

Now, let's apply the three "transformative tech" criteria to the Internet of Things.

Slightly unexpected...

After Tuesday's underwhelming performance by U.S. Senators, I wasn't expecting Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before the House to go much differently. It turns out that I might have been a bit too pessimistic about that.

From the NY Times:

While Tuesday’s Senate hearing contained tough questions, the lawmakers were generally deferential to the executive. That was less the case in the House, where lawmakers repeatedly interrupted Mr. Zuckerberg and chided him for not answering questions to their satisfaction.

Lawmakers on both side of the aisle on Wednesday pushed Mr. Zuckerberg on his company’s handling of user data. They were particularly focused on the platform’s privacy settings, which put the onus on users to protect their privacy.

[...]

Representative Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon and chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, kicked off the hearing by declaring that “while Facebook has certainly grown, I worry it has not matured.”

Mr. Walden floated the prospect of regulation, saying that “I think it is time to ask whether Facebook may have moved too fast and broken too many things.”

Later in the hearing, Mr. Zuckerberg said regulation was “inevitable.” But he repeated that the right kind of regulation mattered and he pointed out that some regulation could only solidify the power of a large company like Facebook, which could hurt start-ups.

Facebook's CEO not only recognizing that new regulation is "inevitable," but asserting that new regulations should not be unfairly advantageous for FB? Unexpected.

Next, the House...

With his testimony before the U.S. Senate behind him, and having made little by way of new news, Mark Zuckerberg now heads to the House, for what should be a round of an even softer questioning. House Republicans, in lockstep with their GOP President, have little to no appetite for new regulations of any kind, and are unlikely to press on any of those issues. And since they're unlikely to be even as well informed as the colleagues from the other chamber, I'm not expecting today's testimony to be much different in tone.

Now to find out if I'm right about that. Place your bets!

The U.S. Senate put their kid gloves on for Zuckerberg

Yesterday, I was genuinely curious how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony would go.

On the one hand, it was a pretty friendly panel, stuffed with elected officials whose election and reelection campaigns receive substantial donations from Facebook, and from FB-connected PACs. On the other hand, the winds of public opinion have been blowing very much against FB for the past two weeks, and Senators wanting to pander to voters couldn't have asked for an easier target. It was going to be either a day of fireworks, or a snooze-fest that produced virtually no new information of note, but which one?

Well... now we know. Snooze-fest, it is. As reported by HuffPpst:

After initially apologizing and accepting responsibility for failing to protect user data, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared support for some vague form of regulation as 44 senators questioned him during his first congressional testimony.

“My position is not that there should be no regulation,” Zuckerberg said. “I think the real question, as the internet becomes more important in people’s lives, is what is the right regulation?”

Under more direct questioning, the 33-year-old billionaire refused to endorse any specific regulatory proposal. He remained on the defensive, touting his company’s idealistic vision.

Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) asked Zuckerberg if he would back legislation to mandate that digital platforms like Facebook obtain affirmative consent from users to collect their data for targeted advertising. Zuckerberg dodged: “In general, I think that principle is exactly right.”

When Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) raised the possibility of the U.S. enacting data protection laws similar to the new rules about to go into effect in the European Union, he dodged again. “It’s certainly worth discussing,” he said.

These kinds of easy dodges were common throughout the hearing. Zuckerberg received numerous questions that revealed simple misunderstandings about what Facebook does and how it works. He answered questions about how the company makes money (“We sell ads”), how much data it collects, whether it sells data, how targeted advertising works and whether it combines data from its many products. It wasn’t clear whether the senators really understood how Facebook worked.

This was good fodder for humor about out-of-touch senators, but it also underscored how complicated Facebook is. Here, 44 senators had a chance to interrogate the chief executive of one of the most powerful corporations in the world about how it has violated user privacy, fueled the spread of propaganda, crushed competitors with potentially unfair practices and gutted the news industry by monopolizing digital ad dollars ― and they couldn’t quite get their arms around what they were dealing with.

The senators, in some cases, were just like most of Facebook’s more than 2 billion users; not well informed about what they signed up for.

I am not surprised; I am merely disappointed.

Zuckerberg's greatest hits

Well, we now know what Mark Zuckerberg plans to say to Congress, and imagine my surprise! It's basically the most successful bits from his "apology tour" comments and press released of the past two weeks. As reported by CBC News:

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg told Congress in written testimony Monday that the social media network did not do enough to prevent itself and its members' data being misused over the past few years, and he offered an apology to lawmakers.

His conciliatory tone in written testimony precedes two days of Congressional hearings, where Zuckerberg is set to answer questions about Facebook user data being improperly appropriated by a political consultancy and the role the network played in the U.S. 2016 election.

"It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm..." he said in remarks released by the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee on Monday. "That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy."

[...]

We didn't take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake," his written testimony continued. "It was my mistake, and I'm sorry. I started Facebook, I run it, and I'm responsible for what happens here."

Some of this is literally pulled verbatim from earlier press releases, which has the effect of making them look even less sincere in retrospect, since those earlier statements now appear to be nothing more than cynical tests of material that he was prepping for the really big event; at the same time, it makes his prepared remarks to Congress appear less than sincere, since he's been field-testing various different versions of these same talking points for weeks now, something that the Congresspeople who are questioning him will doubtless be aware of.

Of course, that's just my take on it; we'll know soon enough how this plays before those Congressional committees themselves. Some pundits think that it won't be much help, though.

VR's early adopter phase is not over

I know that there are a lot of people who've invested heavily in money-losing VR ventures, but their continued refusal to recognize the reality of that reality is just... pathetic. Take, for instance, Venture Beat's latest effort at VR boosterism:

If you haven’t purchased a VR headset yet, congratulations: You missed the early adopter phase. Since then, these headsets have dropped by hundreds of dollars, new controllers have been released, and software has become more abundant — better yet, it’s cheaper. As is always the case, the earliest adopters subsidized VR’s lengthy R&D period, in some cases heavily.

[...]

As I’ve suggested in VR pieces over the past two weeks, the winner here is you, the lucky holdout. Now you can take the hundreds of dollars you saved by not buying a VR headset on day one and use them toward games — cheap games that similarly have been enjoyed by early adopters and fallen significantly in price since then.

[Sigh.]

One more time, for those in the cheap seats: It doesn't matter that prices are dropping; VR prices haven't dropped significantly since August, when Oculus dropped the price on the Rift; HTC followed suit shortly afterwards, but VR headsets did not start leaping off shelves, and are still not selling quickly enough to justify any amount of optimism. That's because VR's problem is not its price point; its VR's lack of perceived value, at any price.

Is Facebook good for the world?

There are few things as unattractive as desperation. PR people mostly know this, and mostly avoid looking desperate, so when a company starts flat-out asking their customers whether the service they provide is actually a good thing, it's a pretty good indicator that they know how much trouble they're in. And Facebook is in real trouble, so we probably shouldn't be surprised that they're seeking some validation... and have settled on their addicted, Stockholm-syndrome suffering users as the place where they're mostly like to find it.

From CBC News:

When some Facebook users log into their accounts, a poll appears under the heading "We'd like to do better" with a statement that says "Please agree or disagree with the following statement: Facebook is good for the world."

The reply options range from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree."

While Facebook has asked users for feedback before, the timing of the poll raises questions as the company faces mounting pressure from regulators, advertisers and investors over its recent data privacy scandal.

Facebook spokesperson Lisa Stratton told CBC News that the company has been doing these surveys since 2015 and this specific question is not new.

Of course, we now know that Facebook have been fucking up more-or-less constantly since 2004, so the idea that they've been fishing for compliments since 2015 shouldn't be too much of a surprise. 2015 is also when Facebook were becoming aware of the scale of the problem posed by Cambridge Analytica, so Stratton's assertion that this is all just routine ring rather hollow.

Asking users if Facebook is "good for the world," especially in a context where actual experts are voicing concerns about the damage that FB is doing to the social fabric, is unlikely to provide FB with any new or useful information, but I don't think it's intended to; like everything else that Facebook does, this appears to be a purely self-serving PR exercise.

Facebook's problems have deep roots

And now, for something completely different.... I'm just messing with you. We're talking about Facebook again, and just how far back their cavalier attitude to user privacy actually extends.

From WIRED:

In 2003, one year before Facebook was founded, a website called Facemash began nonconsensually scraping pictures of students at Harvard from the school’s intranet and asking users to rate their hotness. Obviously, it caused an outcry. The website’s developer quickly proffered an apology. "I hope you understand, this is not how I meant for things to go, and I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences thereafter,” wrote a young Mark Zuckerberg. “I definitely see how my intentions could be seen in the wrong light.”

In 2004 Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook, which rapidly spread from Harvard to other universities. And in 2006 the young company blindsided its users with the launch of News Feed, which collated and presented in one place information that people had previously had to search for piecemeal. Many users were shocked and alarmed that there was no warning and that there were no privacy controls. Zuckerberg apologized. “This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it,” he wrote on Facebook’s blog. "We really messed this one up," he said. "We did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them."

If you're thinking that the tone of those quotes sound very familiar, then you're not alone. "By 2008, Zuckerberg had written only four posts on Facebook’s blog: Every single one of them was an apology or an attempt to explain a decision that had upset users." Facebook's privacy problems have been baked into the company's DNA since before it was founded. The fact that they've learned absolutely nothing in the fourteen years since is simply astonishing.

And they really haven't learned anything in fourteen years, as demonstrated by their ongoing hit parade of privacy issues:

Here's a cool new thing

I don't know about you, but I need a palate cleanser to take this Facebook taste out of my mouth for a minute, and I think that I may have found it.

First, some background: I am a life-long Sci Fi fan. And when I say that, I don't just mean that I love Star Trek and Star Wars and other mass-market fare. I do love those things, but they're not what hooked me on Sci Fi. No, sir/ma'am/other, I started with the hard stuff: Asimov's Robot stories, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood End and 2001: A Space Odyssey (and, yes, I read the book long before I ever saw the movie). Sci Fi concepts like subvocal interfaces are old hat, for me.

Which is probably why this story caught my eye, from The Guardian:

Researchers have created a wearable device that can read people’s minds when they use an internal voice, allowing them to control devices and ask queries without speaking.
The device, called AlterEgo, can transcribe words that wearers verbalise internally but do not say out loud, using electrodes attached to the skin.

“Our idea was: could we have a computing platform that’s more internal, that melds human and machine in some ways and that feels like an internal extension of our own cognition?” said Arnav Kapur, who led the development of the system at MIT’s Media Lab.

[...]

It is worn around the jaw and chin, clipped over the top of the ear to hold it in place. Four electrodes under the white plastic device make contact with the skin and pick up the subtle neuromuscular signals that are triggered when a person verbalises internally. When someone says words inside their head, artificial intelligence within the device can match particular signals to particular words, feeding them into a computer.

[...]

The eventual goal is to make interfacing with AI assistants such as Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri less embarrassing and more intimate, allowing people to communicate with them in a manner that appears to be silent to the outside world – a system that sounds like science fiction but appears entirely possible.

MIND. BLOWN.

Yes, this is a real photo of the thing.

This is literally something right out of a Sci Fi story, and it's already in the prototype stage. And, yes, it looks really, really dorky right now, but with a few more years, and a little more polish, I can see this being something that people actually use. I'm a verbalizer, and as someone who's found himself literally talking to himself in public more than once, the ability to do that silently, and have my device capture my stream-of-consciousness ramblings for later perusal, is a very exciting prospect.

There you go; something to be excited about, rather than just angry. You're welcome.

Facebook switches spokespeople

The Facebook apology tour took a different tone yesterday, as awkward and arrogant Mark Zuckerberg stepped out of the spotlight to let much more effective communicator Sheryl Sandberg take over. And Sandberg, unlike Zuckerberg, seems to be intent on actually coming clean about their recent troubles, rather than trying to tap-dance around them.

As reported by Business Insider:

Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, has continued the company's apology tour over its data scandal, acknowledging that Facebook knew Cambridge Analytica had mishandled users' data 2 1/2 years ago but saying the company failed to follow up when the consulting firm said the data had been deleted.

Had Facebook audited Cambridge Analytica's data holdings, Facebook could have prevented the privacy scandal that has enveloped the company, Sandberg told NBC's Savannah Guthrie during an interview on Friday's "Today" show, part of which aired Thursday night.

[...]

When asked why Facebook didn't follow up when it found that Cambridge Analytica was abusing user data back in 2016, Sandberg told Guthrie: "You are right we could have done this 2 1/2 years ago ... We thought the data had been deleted and we should have checked."

[...]

Sandberg also said, in a different interview, that Facebook could not conduct such an audit because it must wait for the UK information commissioner to finish its investigation of Cambridge Analytica's election activity. "To this day, we still don't know what data Cambridge Analytica have," she told the Financial Times.

Also unlike Zuckerberg, whose comments about the affair have typically been phrased in terms of "we," Sandberg took personal responsibility for the mess:

"We made mistakes and I own them and they are on me," she told the FT.

Of course, for people paying attention to this story, none of what Sandberg said was actually news. We already knew that Facebook knew about Cambridge Analytica's shenanigans over two years ago, and we already knew that Facebook hadn't done anything at all, really, to safeguard their users. The fact that this was a business decision is something we'd mostly already guessed for ourselves, so I supposed that Sandberg, who's their Chief Operations Officer, might well have been the person who signed off on some of the details of that process, but that's the only new detail, here.

Still, Sandberg's belated public re-emergence might mark a shift in tone, at the very least, which might work in Facebook's favour. Zuckerberg's vague and evasive interview responses were clearly not working, even just in PR terms, and with him now prepping for his appearance before Congress, he wasn't going to have time to continue the apology tour, anyway. Whether Sandberg will be any more effective in the role remains to be seen, but it would be hard for her to be less so.

Of course, the admission that Facebook have secret tools that let them delete their own messages from their users' feeds, effectively enabling them to erase evidence, is hardly likely to help.

Facebook admits that its tools were miused on a massive global scale

From The Washington Post:

Facebook said Wednesday that “malicious actors” took advantage of search tools on its platform, making it possible for them to discover the identities and collect information on most of its 2 billion users worldwide.

The revelation came amid rising acknowledgement by Facebook about its struggles to control the data it gathers on users. Among the announcements Wednesday was that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy hired by President Trump and other Republicans, had improperly gathered detailed Facebook information on 87 million people, of whom 71 million were Americans.

But the abuse of Facebook’s search tools -- now disabled -- happened far more broadly and over the course of several years, with few Facebook users likely escaping the scam, company officials acknowledged.

The scam started when malicious hackers harvested email addresses and phone numbers on the so-called “Dark Web,” where criminals post information stolen from data breaches over the years. Then the hackers used automated computer programs to feed the numbers and addresses into Facebook’s “search” box, allowing them to discover the full names of people affiliated with the phone numbers or addresses, along with whatever Facebook profile information they chose to make public, often including their profile photos and hometown.

[...]

Facebook said in a blog post Wednesday, “Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we’ve seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped.”

Yes... they're talking about doxxing and identity theft on a massive scale.

This "very useful" search functionality was, naturally, enabled by default and deliberately difficult to disable -- after all, how else were you going to find people on Facebook to expand your network of data nodes? Facebook would also have been aware of the body of research which "has consistently shown that users of online platforms rarely adjust default privacy settings and often fail to understand what information they are sharing," facts which expect to feature prominently in several of the fourteen (and counting) class action lawsuits that have already been filed here.

Still, there's really no way around the simple realities here: 1) Facebook cannot and will not effectively police themselves; and 2) Facebook are unlikely to face new regulations in the U.S. anytime soon, unless Democrats manage to win veto-proof majorities in both the House and the Senate. That makes the question of whether Facebook will broadly implement privacy protections like those found in the GDPR, into an even more pressing one. It also means that meaningful change will have to come from outside the U.S.

Thankfully, that second thing seems to be happening.

Numbers may not lie, but statistics without context can be incredibly misleading

Consider, for a moment, the state of VR as described by Windows Report:

The Steam Hardware Survey numbers for March 2018 are out and things are not looking good for Microsoft as its Windows Mixed Reality (WMR) fortunes seem to be dwindling.

As you will recall, the WMR headsets have been facing a slow growth in market share, despite the company implementing deep price cuts on the headsets, which initially promised easy setup and support for lower-spec PCs.

Steam’s latest figures place Facebook’s Oculus Rift at the top, with its market share at 50.62 percent, up from 47.31 percent in February this year. This compared to WMR’s share which fell from 5.36 percent to stand at 5.32 percent, while HTC’s Vive also dropped to 44.06 percent from 45.38 percent.

Those statistics, as presented, make it sound like WMR headsets are struggling while Oculus Rift sales are soaring. This is reinforced with this awful graph:

Seriously, this is awful. I could understand sorting in descending order by percentage share, or in alphabetical order, but WTF kind of order is this supposed to be? W, H, O, O, O order? Leader 3rd order?

Would you like to know what the actual numbers are, as presented by the Steam Survey itself?

Why men don't wear cosmetics

Once upon a time, when wealth and power looked like the landed nobility of Europe, men's fashions included every bit as much powder, rouge, jewelry, lace, silk, brocade, and wiggery as ladies' fashions did. Because, naturally, it wasn't enough to be wealthy and powerful -- one also needed to be seen as wealthy and powerful, which meant that ostentatious display was part of the deal.

But a couple of things happened to change that. One such thing was the French Revolution, which transformed the sheltered privilege of France's landed nobility from a near-insurmountable advantage into a death sentence, and hammered home the point for all of Europe's nobles that the common folk really did outnumber them by an enormous margin, and that those unwashed masses really weren't controllable unless they allowed themselves to be controlled. Wealth was redistributed by force, and power shifted from the (mostly) lords who'd held it for centuries, to the commoners that they'd been lording it over.

The other thing that happened, of course, was the other revolution: the Industrial Revolution. The effects of this are far-reaching and ongoing, but the immediate effect was to move most of the population of the Industrialized world away from the crop-growing lands that had formed the basis of the wealth of the landed nobility (hint: it's the "landed" part), and towards the cities where factories could be built. Factories, and mass production generally, relies on population density and economies of scale to work, and requires a lot of money to build things like factories and work-houses in the first place, which meant that landed nobles saw their holding of land rapidly lose value, while the bankers, financiers, and common industrialists that they'd been sneering at suddenly became society's power brokers.

And, as both wealth and power shifted from the ostentatious display of landed nobility towards the bankers and industrialists who'd never much cared about that sort of vanity, the image of what wealth and power looked like also shifted. Powdered wigs persisted in courts of law, at least in some parts of the world, but the new uniform of the wealthy and powerful became the simple, sober suit.

And it was a uniform: bankers and financiers eventually settled into charcoal and navy, while men outside the power structure often opted for earth tones; clergy and undertakers wore black. But the basic construction of the suit was common across all professions and social strata, and it's proved to be such a durable design that it's still the uniform, even in our age of business-casual tech-sector workplaces. It's still dark, and plain, and largely devoid of ostentation and ornamentation, and if you want to look like to you belong in the corridors of real wealth and power, you'd better be willing to put one on, and able to look good wearing it.