- Blog
- Profile
- Homepage
-
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…
-
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
-
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:
-
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/
-
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
-
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
-
Sick of Cancel Culture? One Man Has a Surprising Solution – POLITICO | I feel Lukianoff’s “coddling” writing should be informing how we approach Trust & Safety
The culture of “Safeytism” that he describes has begun over the past few years to drive the debate about “tech” and public trust; there’s been a broad move in civil society from “the internet enables us to” towards “the internet should protect us from” and the architectural goals which improve the ability to connect more…
-
“Raw AI Training Data leaks into City water supply, tens of thousands poisoned; Refugee Cyber hackers in Small Boats blamed.”
-
I’ve seen at least three hagiographies for Mastodon in the past 48 hours. I fear this won’t end well. #Mastodon #Threads #EternalSeptember2
For context: from 1989/ish to 1997/ish, I was a USENET user, moderator and administrator – the latter C-News, LeafNews and INN, first at aber.ac.uk and then much more notoriously as the manager of uk-usenet.uk.sun.com. Moore’s Law has rendered any mention of megabytes or gigabytes to be meaningless in the modern day, but I fought a…
-
Please enjoy the names of this seventeenth century Sussex jury | a thread on Twitter still worth a click-through
-
This is what you get for enabling people like Nadine Dorries