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The Impending Crisis of Messenger Communications in the Westminster Bubble
So I keep tabs on Westminster discussion of internet technology via a selection of RSS feeds, and this gem directed my attention to this report from the ICO, dated from mid-2022, titled: Behind the screens – maintaining government transparency and data security in the age of messaging appsReport of the Information Commissioner to Parliament, July…
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Some Friday Afternoon Laundry Political Predictions
I get a lot of time to think whilst cooking, cleaning, and doing vast amounts of laundry, and here’s a summary of where I believe a few political topics are, at the moment:
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A Land Acknowledgement for the Internet
For many years I have sought to push back against treatment of the internet as a “space” — simply: to do so is a category error because it is a domain of speech, unlike the more normal military/political operational domains such as air, sea, sky, land, and space. Thus: the “cyberspace” has always been a…
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How the United States has just made it illegal for #WhatsApp to contain a Remote Code Execution (RCE) bug, via the Executive Order on Spyware
I have spent literally years attempting to explain to civil society and the public at large, that: …that attempting to regulate software by the “shape” of it (viz: what features it enables or provides) will always lead to ambiguity and almost certainly lead to illiberal or problematic legislation. Tip: never attempt to regulate the shape…
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A Short Twitter-Thread on Scraping, Copyright, and Licensing, touching on Derivative Use, and LLMs / OpenAI / ChatGPT, etc…
…and (in case it’s not apparent) I propose that this argument can be extrapolated to the entire rest-of-the-net; if we don’t accept that LLMs may scrape data, then we need to popularise the throwing-up of paywalls and identity being required for all web-fetches. Because “trust” ain’t gonna cut it. Thread The number of devs from…
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Possibly the most biting article on the whole of Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22No_Way_to_Prevent_This%22,_Says_Only_Nation_Where_This_Regularly_Happens
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Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) op-ed at @CNN: “When it comes to TikTok, the US is blind” — waging proxy war on China via TikTok will make the USA & “The West” more *like* China
Personally, I am outright terrified of how people will interpret Alex saying: It turns out that there is no US law clearly governing the access that Beijing or Moscow-based employees of any tech or social media company have to the personal data of US citizens that use their services. …because damn we don’t need NOFORN…
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BREAKING: new paper from Jenny Blessing & Ross Anderson at Cambridge: “One Protocol to Rule Them All? On Securing Interoperable Messaging” re: interoperability under the EU #DigitalMarketsAct #DMA @rossjanderson
Quoth Ross: Links
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“#DigitalMarketsAct: Commission creates High-Level Group to provide advice and expertise in implementation” – Gosh, what will happen when the infeasible reality hits?
This High-Level Group may provide the Commission with advice and expertise to ensure that the DMA and other sectoral regulations applicable to gatekeepers are implemented in a coherent and complementary manner. It may also provide expertise in market investigations into emerging services and practices, to help ensure that the DMA is future-proof. The High-Level Group…
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This thread by Phillip Hallam-Baker (@hallam) is a historical- and business-reality-checking response to the UK Minister for Geekery (@michelledonelan) and well worth a read re: who can foster / claim credit for fostering innovation #PHB
Unrolled Thread (my emphasis) The Web was created at CERN, it was the work of a multi-national team. The only other Brit on the CERN team was myself and I was an EU fellow, the EU paid my salary. The only government that took a direct interest in the Web early on was the US…
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Andy Burrows has insinuating questions about WhatsApp Security; I don’t work for WhatsApp but I think I can answer most of them: The War On Regular Expressions
So Andy posted this thread, and I thought I would have a go at answering it here because (a) he blocks me for previous corrections I’ve issued to his posts, and (b) he’s restricted who can respond… https://twitter.com/_andyburrows/status/1637770139314561025 A few days ago @WhatsApp VP of Engineering @nagupta made the charge I was spreading ‘misinformation’ about…
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ChatGPT: create a list of 20 new code names for “advanced persistent threat” hacking teams hosted by hostile nation states.ChatGPT:
It got the zeitgeist perfectly: