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So the OnlineSafetyBill is now law; but what will the activists and politicians behind it attempt next to do?
The people who believe that a “Duty of Care” can be imposed upon platforms that broker speech between arbitrary people, are now in the position of having got what they wanted. They won – which, of course, for them is the worst possible thing because now they have to (a) live with the consequences, and
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Stuff To Read: Google Decides To Pull Up The Ladder On The Open Internet, Pushes For Unconstitutional Regulatory Proposals | interesting take from @mmasnick suggesting that Google has caved (?) to age-estimation / child-protection interests in order to shore-up monopoly interest, rather than from fear
But, last week, Google took a big step towards pulling up the open internet ladder behind it, which got almost no coverage (and what coverage it got was misleading). And, for the life of me, I don’t understand why it chose to do this now. It’s one of the dumbest policy moves I’ve seen Google
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Think Kiwi Farms Is Legally Unassailable? Copyright Law Might Disagree | Greer v. Moon, Technology & Marketing Law Blog | Eric Goldman
https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2023/10/think-kiwi-farms-is-legally-unassailable-copyright-law-might-disagree-greer-v-moon.htm
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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