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Automattic (“the WordPress people”) believe that the problem with Instant Messaging is that there’s not a single app to bring them all together. Clearly he’s never read XKCD 927
Oh dear: Automattic is acquiring Texts and betting big on the future of messaging / ‘Open source communication is a fundamental human right,’ Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg says, and he’s buying a platform to help pull it off. https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/24/23928685/automattic-texts-acquisition-universal-messaging
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Stuff To Read: Curbing Government Internet Surveillance by Riana Pfefferkorn & Callum Voge – Project Syndicate
Despite its immense value and global appeal, online encryption is under threat worldwide, with established democracies leading the charge. But after facing intense public pressure to protect the privacy and security of users, governments have realized that compelling “backdoor” access to applications is politically risky. https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/public-pressure-can-curb-government-internet-surveillance-by-riana-pfefferkorn-and-callum-voge-1-2023-10
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Thought for the Day
I love the way the iPhone continues to be named after the least-used, most-worrying feature of the device. It’s like if ships were called “life raft launch platforms”. https://eigenmagic.net/@vampiress/111285999448929883
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In Case You Missed It: more good news from Europe: the #fairshare proposal (viz: ending #NetNeutrality in EU and permitting ISPs to extort money for preferential treatment of traffic) is apparently dead, for the moment at least
The funny thing is that you could probably describe the above to a basic European digital activist and they would tell you — recognising NetNeutrality keywords — that it’s a bad idea; yet go to the same activist and say “It Helps European Companies Claw Back Money From Huge American Mega-Platforms” and they would likely…
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Google plans to test proxy scheme to hide IP addresses • The Register | Those who do not adopt Tor are doomed to reinvent it
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/23/google_ip_proxy/ Matt Green has a more corporate-political take (THREAD) on the matter, seeing it (probably correctly) as an flagrant attempt to capture IP traffic in order to replace data from cookies which fed the targeted advertising ecosystem: This is our life now: people screaming about ever more invasive things which replace those they previously screamed…
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So I go away for a family get-together for a couple of days and I come back to find that #ChatControl is possibly dead? HT: @ellajakubowska1 @echo_pbreyer
My wordpress drafts folder is full of good stuff, but most notably is this phenomenal thread from Ella Jakubowska on Wednesday afternoon detailing the <cough/> repeated mis-self-reporting and suboptimal engagement by EU Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson, whom I am increasingly wondering may have spent the past year rather tired and confused: …and then,…
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Stuff To Read: OSI: The Internet That Wasn’t – IEEE Spectrum
If you were a geek and online in (not least) UK academia in the 1980s and early 1990s, you were probably not using TCP/IP except on the local LAN of the Computer Science department. This was because people who sat on committees and who were therefore very Clever™ had decided what your network should be…
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Why artist David Shrigley has pulped 6,000 copies of The Da Vinci Code – BBC News
This somehow feels artistically apposite: conspiracy pseudo-fiction being condensed and replaced to tell actual fiction of dystopian surveillance https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-67218454
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Barnstorming thread by Jess Miers on the US-ian Attorneys General (sp?) wanting to sue Meta for being interesting (i.e. “addictive”)
Thread starts here, is entirely worth clicking-through for a read:
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HashiCorp CEO predicts OSS-free Silicon Valley… | /me *laughs in Sun Microsystems*
Oh dear. Predictions based around one’s own business model are rarely generalisable: https://www.thestack.technology/hashicorp-ceo-predicts-oss-free-silicon-valley-unless-the-open-source-model-evolves/
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GitHub – ruffle-rs/ruffle: A Flash Player emulator written in Rust
I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry; this is a brilliant idea assuming that it lives up to its functionality and security expectations, however the pain which Flash wrought upon the web… causes flashbacks. https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
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UK government keeping files on teaching assistants’ and librarians’ internet activity | …this is the sort of feature-creep (ha!) that I expect the #OnlineSafetyBill’s snooping of End-to-End Encrypted Messengers will enable
Back in 2000 the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act was passed as an “urgent” necessity to stop terrorists; 8 years later it was being used to spy on parents re: whether they are in a school catchment area. Ergo: given the capability to snoop on the private messages of Librarians, who wouldn’t? https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/oct/21/uk-government-keeping-files-on-teaching-assistants-and-librarians-internet-activity