If you live in the Caribbean or have interests in the region, you’ll know that we’re now past the peak intensity of hurricane season on average. The statistical peak is the 10th of September, and we’re now two weeks past this (on the day this is sent as a newsletter), and the remarkable thing is that, so far, we haven’t experienced much heavy activity with the lead-up to the peak being particularly quiet in the Atlantic. And aside from the major hurricane at the start of the season that devastated several of the Windward islands to the south, it felt like it was an announcement of a very active season, as predicted by the NOAA and other prognostications, the reality has been very different for most of us. So I’m writing this on a Sunday evening as the sun sets to an orange sky with some angry-looking clouds, thinking about how I’m pleased that things have been calm for us so far. But… there’s often a sting in the tail, so I’m not celebrating just yet.

ARIN 54 is fast approaching, and if you’re interested in IP, DNS, and the Internet, it is an excellent free online conference to attend. I’ll be there both days because, as I mentioned, I’m a second-time fellow and on the electoral list for a place on the ARIN Advisory Council. I’d appreciate it if you could add a couple of words of endorsement for my candidature to the site. It’s simple and only takes a few moments, and it goes a long way to helping. Just ensure to take a look at the rules to ensure you comply (they’re nothing onerous, trust me).

I’ve been busy with two main topics this week: project management and document management.

I teach at a couple of local further education establishments on the island, and one of the topics I teach is Project Management for IT projects/Software Development. Last week, I spent far too much time trying to wrestle with a well-known project management SaaS application to abide by basic PM rules. And despite it being sold as a “real” PM product, it is woefully inadequate and allows you to do things like planning a task that needs to start only if another task has been completed BEFORE that task. WTF?

This led to an interesting interaction with ChatGPT by a colleague. The interaction was surprising and got me thinking about human-computer interactions and how we haven’t learned much since the original ELIZA experiment, where a simple computer program simulated human-like conversation through pattern-matching, substitution and crude reflection of language (i.e., repeating the words of the user) to generate an illusion that the user was speaking to a device that ‘understood’ or ‘felt’ the human’s feelings during interaction. Of course, it was nothing of the sort and was only a decent parlour trick. This new generation of LLMs is, similarly, a more elaborate version of the very same parlour trick, and more and more people are falling for it.

So now, I’m starting to see more people uncritically trusting the words statistically regurgitated from a website over those from an experienced expert. This is not good, and no good can come from this. And I’m sure I’m not the first to encounter this, but I fear that this is going to become more prevalent, making discussions with people more complicated, given they’re based on misinformation (incorrect information unintentionally repeated or shared), thus continuing to polarise society. I’m pretty concerned.

On the document management front, I’ve been helping a client consolidate and structure their business documents (the usual stuff, Word, Excel, PDFs, etc) to a SharePoint-based model. Things have been going well despite the self-sabotage that Microsoft seems to do when you’re using its products. The end result will be more flexible, scalable and user-friendly, but getting there is not. When I say self-sabotage, I mean from a technical point of view. To be brief, the documents in question were all stored on OneDrive, and a migration to several SharePoint libraries was necessary to structure the data better, and several libraries were required for data separation between company entities. So OneDrive provides a simple way of moving (or copying) data to SharePoint Libraries (and Teams), but it doesn’t expose the paths to all your libraries, only a couple of them. That is, you cannot directly select where you want the data to go unless it happens to be one of the libraries listed that (for the life of me) I don’t understand which ones get listed on which do not. The workaround is dumb, but it works. You have to open the library in SharePoint or in Teams, then create a shortcut to that library in your OneDrive. Only then can you copy data through the shortcut from OneDrive. Way to go Microsoft, let’s make it simple. 🤦‍♂️

Reading

One popular topic that seems to have been displaced by everything AI is Quantum Computing. While not ready for general use, much work is being done behind the scenes in universities like Sherbrooke in Québec, Canada. Le Monde profiled the lab in an interesting article recently. A nice place to study, apparently (a close friend of mine studied there).

I’ll leave it up to you to judge this, but a major Hollywood company, Lionsgate, has sold its catalog to Runway, enabling it (it is hoping) to remove all creative staff from its payroll. There’s an argument for this being determined as immoral. If you’re unfamiliar, Runway is an AI startup with the byline “Tools for human imagination”. I’m guessing imagination means, “Imagine all the money you can keep by getting rid of those pesky employees and their need to eat, live and breathe.”

Let me ask you a simple question. How many domain names do you think it is legitimate for an organisation to possess? 1? 10? Maybe even 30 or 40, that wouldn’t seem odd to me and wouldn’t spark any concerns. Meta (née Facebook) has TWO THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY NINE known domains. KNOWN DOMAINS. Yeah, that’s not shady at all! For reference, it has four main products: Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Quest. Why so many domains? Sneaky skirting of detection for fraudulent advertising is why. Just look at the list yourself to see it clearly.

Last week, I wrote about a weird billionaire who got his pet social media company banned in Brazil. Refusing to do so, then climbing down in the face of the rule of law (despite bleating to the world that he’d “never” do such things, all the while doing exactly that in other territories), implementing a workaround to bring it back online illegally, irking Brazilian regulators even more, then climbing down once more, and implementing what had been initially asked for, i.e., legal representation in the country and the removal of a couple of provable disinformation tweets. I keep asking myself the same question when it comes to tech billionaires, what the fuck is wrong with these people? Rest of World has a good background article.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this yet, but I thought it would be right to share: The disturbing impact of exposure to 8 minutes of TikTok videos revealed in new study. To ensure my sharing of this is not taken the wrong way, I’m not on board with the moral panic about social media and apps like TikTok, and the holier-than-thou attitudes of some are nothing more than contemptible. Please read the article with an open mind and take the time to read the study.

Lastly, if this wasn’t depressing enough as a newsletter issue 😀, this short article is absolutely worth your time: “The Department of Energy Wants You to Know Your Conservation Efforts Are Making a Difference” from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Thank you for all your efforts.

If you’re interested, I’ll be speaking at the second Caribbean IIC meeting this coming Thursday. It’s free to attend, and you don’t have to be a member to register. The roundtable is entitled “AI Ethics & Governance, Cybersecurity, and Data” and I’ll be on a panel discussing AI Ethics and Governance. Mostly.

A human produces this newsletter —admittedly, poorly— but completely free from a parlour-trick algorithm. Have a great week.

Finally, after a few days of rain, rain, rain, we’re back to no weather alerts for a little respite. The ground is saturated, and any more rain just runs off or causes localised landslides, but so far, nothing too worrying.

Last week, I mentioned that I had been selected for a second time as an ARIN Fellow, although this time, I won’t be travelling; I am attending as a virtual Fellow. I’ve marked my calendar for the two days in October (24th and 25th), and if anyone is interested in Internet Governance, it is a good conference to attend. Even as a visual attendee, ARIN go out of their way to include comments from remote participants.

The other announcement I alluded to is that I am on the ticket for the ARIN Advisory Council (ARIN AC) elections. The AC looks after the Internet numbering policy and assists in policy modifications through the community’s wishes. I’m looking forward to the outcome of these elections. Even if I’m not voted in, I’ll put myself forward in future elections as I feel the need to give something back to the Internet, having made my career from it for over thirty years. I need to sign off and write an election speech as I’ll be recording it early next week, and although I have “concepts of a plan” (🤦‍♂️), I haven’t finished it yet.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the workings of the Internet and the existing vulnerabilities, hypothesising on the amount and scale of damage that could be caused. Luckily, I’m not the only one thinking about this, and there has been some progress in dealing with these weaknesses that largely surround DNS, but it reminded me of this (old) DNS meme:

I recorded a new Innovation, Agilité & Excellence podcast episode with my friend Jean-François Nantel. We talked about DNS and a few other topics, such as cloud deployment and SMBs, AI (of course), and a little discussion on the ongoing events in Brazil over the blocking of X (ex-Twitter). It’s in French, but I suspect a good run-through something like the Whisper model, and then DeepL will give you a good understanding of what we discussed for the non-French speakers among you. I’ll post here once available.

Changing the subject, I’m a firm supporter of certain civil liberties extending to the Internet, like the right to privacy, the right to decide which systems I use and how I use them, fundamental human rights, etc. In this discourse, there is a danger of falling into the trap of the manifesto known as Cyberlibertarianism. I’ve written a little bit about this already. This discourse was related to my views of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. (Hint: I’m not a fan). I wanted to highlight an upcoming book by David Golumbia on this very topic. I’m looking forward to reading it attentively.

Reading

I’ve started reading the IEEE Spectrum blog recently. And to be honest, I’m not sure why I didn’t start reading it earlier. I guess I just didn’t chance upon it early enough. Anyway, the blog is very interesting, with many in-depth articles on ICT topics. This article discusses the upcoming IEEE Conference on Digital Platforms and Societal Harms, where they will be discussing misinformation (false information), disinformation (deliberately false) and extremism (and other distasteful behaviours on the Internet) over two days. If I’m able to register remotely, I will try to write up any important discussions.

Staying with the same blog, if you’re an old computer nerd, the article entitled From Punch Cards to Python, is an excellent look into the history of computing —catnip for people like me.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, AI is one of the most prominent subjects of the moment. Many articles are AI hype machines, others AI doomsters, and there is precious little nuanced discussion on the topic. However, we’re starting to see the results of deployments of this technology (I wrote about a Microsoft study that was less than conclusive in the usefulness of generative AI). Worklife published a story —I forgot to link to it in July when it was published— about how generative AI is making workers less productive. I think articles like this are informative and worth your time to help build a more balanced view of the technology. So far, generative AI, like ChatGPT, does seem to be more of a solution looking for a problem.

Another topic I have written about previously is Virtual Reality, specifically its privacy and cybersecurity issues. I’d previously talked about how VR headsets can reveal with surprising accuracy who you are, not from your personal data being logged to a session in one of these devices but by your gait. A paper from 2022 is worth looking through if you’re interested in cybersecurity. A new discussion has been made public by a group of six computer scientists who have determined that it is possible to see precisely what you’re typing in the Apple Vision Pro through exposed eye-tracking data. The exploit requires access to that data for it to be used. But if a compromise of data at this level is successful, as in the test scenario, it is possible to reveal logins, passwords, PIN codes, and any other text typed by your eyes. Not great.

That’s it for this week. I hope you have a great week.

It might be a short one today, as I am currently writing this amid a fairly heavy tropical wave passing over us. Heavy rains, lots of thunder and lightning, a breaker tripping every few minutes, oh, and a UPS battery failure are making my morning a little more difficult than it normally is. It’ll pass, but in the meantime, I will try to get this written and out the door before the end of the day. Bear with me. If you’re reading this email on Tuesday, I guess I got it done. 😀

Nothing particularly exciting happened last week, although tech news was primarily dominated by events with X’s (ex-Twitter) shutdown in Brazil after it failed to comply with local laws, and Elon Musk thinking he could bully an entire country, found out that that was not the case. The issue went as far as his Starlink company outright refusing a government order to block access to X through its services, again, only to find out that it had to back down after the government froze assets. This elicited a bunch of interesting conversations I had on a local social media group about the merits of government interference in cases like this, all with a particularly technical implication. For example, many people felt it would be difficult to block satellite services in a country by the nature of their technology, only to quickly discover that it is not that difficult but is still quite challenging. The IEEE has an interesting article on the topic, highlighting the pertinence of the subject during the ongoing aggression of Ukraine by Russia. It talks of a lack of encryption in the hardware and the possible increased attack surface due to the nature of the frequent handovers required in LEOs. If you want to know more about LEOs and how they work, this primer document from the Internet Protocol Journal is a very good resource: (pdf link): https://ipj.dreamhosters.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/262-ipj.pdf

Now, this was an interesting thought experiment because I didn’t (and don’t) believe that things will get that far, and the latest climbdowns tend —Brazil rolled back the threat to fine users using a VPN to access X— to support that point of view. What it does illustrate is that we are currently working through some uncomfortable truths about the internet, such as how it works technically and how it will be regulated in the future. And it will likely be a lottery about where you live in the world that determines your experience on the internet rather than any technical capacity or innovation. The average Chinese user sees a very different internet to the one you probably see. And much of this is going to be hotly contested in the years to come, whether or not the Global Digital Compact is adopted at the UN. As an example, take a look at what Pakistan’s government is allegedly doing. Activists and tech users are accusing the government of installing an all-encompassing firewall à la that of China. Internet speeds have plummeted around 40% recently, and despite the government’s insistence on it being undersea cable issues —of which there is a distinct lack of proof— or that there is an “overuse” of VPNs causing the slowdowns (a technically silly argument) what most in the technical community observe, is that this is the first phase of a much tighter control of the Internet through the technical means pioneered by the Chinese state. We should also remember that Pakistan had tried —and no one is sure if it didn’t succeed— to centralise the DNS of Pakistan, making it a one-stop-shop to control who sees what. Moves like these are very concerning and bode for a much more fractious relationship with the internet over the coming years. Even I, living in a relatively free society —and France is not beyond shutting down access to internet apps— I refuse to use my ISP’s DNS servers until they make that illegal… cold dead hands, etc.

Lastly, I wanted to let you know that I have been selected for a second fellowship with ARIN. I’m very much looking forward to contributing more to this important aspect of Internet governance (see above about why). I’ll have another announcement to make in the coming days, too, but that’ll have to wait.

Reading

Facebook keeps insisting that it has to be a bad Internet citizen. The perverse nature of Internet incentives and economics continue to contribute to its destruction.

In other Facebook news, the use of their (and Rayban’s) glasses is starting to cause consternation about privacy and security at the highest levels of government. TLDR; Captured video and images are all sent through Facebook’s infrastructure leaving sensitive and/or secret areas exposed to security risks.

Talking of incentives, Kenyan Uber, Bolt and Faras drivers have had enough of being ripped off and are ignoring the prices set by those platforms. In a demonstration that you don’t have to use or go along with these services.

I wanted to share the following article entitled “Racism, misogony, lies. How did X become so full of hatred, and is it ethical to keep using it? … but the Grauniad has pulled it! Original link. 🤷‍♂️ EDIT: Now it’s back. Typical 🤣

Last week, I linked to a piece in The Continent magazine about Bill Gates’s farming disruption (trashing food production in some areas, potentially causing/enhancing starvation on a massive scale). Well, Forbes has an article on the topic now.

Right, I’m off to curl up in a warm, cosy place with a nice drink while I wait for the storm to pass. Have a great week.

😱 It’s already September! I’m not entirely sure where the earlier part of the year went. A lot of things happened in the news, but many events also made for a busy period for me up until now. Spoiler: it doesn’t look like it’ll be any calmer, either!

I wanted to get back to some of the thinking I have been doing about governance and the open web. I mentioned a project last week from a team that decided to look into Fediverse governance and offer a guide to setting up and operating Social Web services by looking at the technology, moderation, legal risks and other topics important to good governance. The document is long, and I still haven’t had time to read it all, so I’ll refrain from providing an AI summary, as I doubt it could capture some of the subtleties of such a document. I hope to have time this week, but it depends on other project deadlines.

Regardless, this project and others seem to be spurring a resurgence of interest in the open web, specifically the social web. Social networks, whatever your view of them, have galvanised the public and been the gateway drug to the internet for many. Unfortunately, they have been enough of a drug in their own right to allow the social network platforms to fence in their users, discouraging them from going elsewhere —and there are plenty of other places on the internet to go. This is often termed the Walled Garden… “Everything is nice and neat here, so you don’t need to look over the fence.” This has been done through network effects. You tend to go to a place where the others are, more accurately, where the people you know or like reside, hence the ‘effect’ of the network. Leaving such a place is generally too difficult for most, which instantly changes the balance of power away from the users to the platforms. The platforms leveraged the real-life networks to create the walled garden digital networks and then lock everyone inside.

The open web, or social web, completely upends this, as you can congregate in a place that has all the people you know and love, and you can easily leave to go to a different place that, perhaps, aligns with your point of view or social affinities more closely, without losing access to your friends. The major platforms know this, and they are doing what they can to head this off at the pass, and they will embrace, extend and extinguish. It’s in their nature. Remember the tale of the frog and the scorpion?

With Twitter —or X if you prefer— being shut downin Brazil, there has been a substantial increase in new users to other social platforms, most notably Bluesky. If you have used it, you will notice the resemblance to Twitter and its residents’ overall fun and snarky nature. It’s not for me, but I pop my head around the door now and again to see if anyone interesting is in there. One thing I think they are doing that is interesting and follows the theme of governance and management of platforms I have going on here is its latest announcement to give users more control over the use of their posts. One major criticism of Twitter was how quote-tweeting became a weaponised sport. Bluesky is trying to address this apparent shortcoming by allowing users to detach their original post from quote tweeters (is that the correct term for Bluesky? Checks notes… apparently it is “posts”) and hide replies. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out and whether it dissuades poor behaviour, or dissuades using the feature entirely. It is a laudable effort, and I hope it is the former and not the latter, but if the internet has taught me anything, it brings out the worst in some people. I’m bookmarking this to revisit in the future.

I’m a fan of the open web, not because I’m an old-timer who used the Internet before HTTP was implemented —ok, some of that— but because it allows a much richer environment to try out new stuff and develop new ideas. You can’t have escaped the newsletter revolution that happened a few years ago, everyone and his dog (including me) has a newsletter, and many of them are hosted on platforms like Substack (Nazi Bar) or other popular ones like Ghost. Ghost gained popularity when Substack outed themselves as being OK with enabling Nazis to make money, and it is a good platform. It’s somewhat expensive if hosted and a little too technical for most to self-host. 2024 ushered in their support of Activity Pub (the federated social web protocol) and have recently announced the implementation of two-way communication through inbound likes to enable people to publish and readers to react through tools like (I’m guessing) Mastodon, ensuring those likes get back to the original post. This is interesting, but a development I’m a little sceptical about for reasons of incentives and eventual ad-tracking. I reserve judgement for the moment, and I’ll try to learn more about it and how it works.

Reading

Microsoft recently released a study into the use of generative AI in the “real world”. You can find it here. Perhaps if I have some free time, I’ll write up some of the notes I made on the report. In the meantime, here’s a couple of quick thoughts about it:

• One, the report never defines what “real world” actually means for the study and the studies referenced. So I’m not sure what value the moniker “real world” has given that my “real world” working environment is almost certainly very different to yours.
• The outcomes of the studies discussed in this paper are less than a stellar endorsement of generative AI in the workplace. Some examples:

… agents with the assistant resolved 14% more issues per hour than those without the assistant. Consistent with what has been observed in some lab studies (e.g., Noy and Zhang 2023), the largest impact was on novice and low-skilled workers, with very little effect on experienced or highly-skilled workers

Wiles and Horton (2024) explored how having an LLM generate a first draft of a job posting affected postings and hiring on a large online labor market. They found that the AI tool decreased time spent writing posts and increased the number of posts completed but had no effect on the number of hires.

Researchers found that on average, those with Copilot for Microsoft 365 read 11% fewer individual emails and spent 4% less time interacting with them, compared to people without Copilot

Moreover, to preserve privacy, the study observes activity, not the content created, so it cannot study quality or how well output aligns with people’s goals or intents

On coding:

However, developers also voiced significant concerns. The top worry (29%) was that AI might not be as helpful as expected. Another major concern (21%) was that AI might introduce defects or vulnerabilities, emphasizing the need for thorough validation and human oversight. Job security was a worry for 10% of respondents, reflecting fears of AI encroaching on their roles.

In contrast, no substantial difference was observed between Copilot and non-Copilot groups for the less familiar task.

In other reading, I learned that Musk’s troubles continue:

Brazilian court orders suspension of Elon Musk’s X after it missed deadline - The Guardian

I’ve already mentioned an excellent regular read of news from The Continent. They continue to do outstanding work. The article about Bill Gates’ “farming expertise” is actually about Tech Bro Solutionism, and is a fantastic case study into why tech bros should be a little more humble and learn from others. The consequences of their actions are and could be devastating.

Direct link to the pdf.

Speaking of bros thinking they know more about stuff than anyone else, James Hoffmann has an exquisite takedown of Science Bro Andrew Hubermann, who exudes, “I know one science; therefore, I know ALL science”. What is he really offering… of course, protocols on supplements to make you a “better” human… Nothing at all to do with bettering his bank account. Silly me.

The last article I wanted to highlight is another egregious use of technology, which I have been discussing with clients and during training. The use of surveillance cameras for face recognition at the 2024 Olympics and now in general use across Paris. The installed cameras will operate until at least March 2025, around seven months after the games have finished, including the Paralympics. Two points merit discussion, one being obvious. Why will they be in operation months after the games, and what will happen once that time is up? The second interrogation is about their accuracy and the less than exemplary record of these systems already in use in places like London, UK, where false positives of non-whites clearly show the uselessness of these systems. This article gets somewhat into that discussion.

Written from the heart and with sweat and tears. Have a great week.

Good morning from a frighteningly quiet Caribbean in terms of hurricane activity. Looking at the previsions, that is about to change over the coming week or two as we head into the statistically peak hurricane activity period.

Here on the internet, there are no seasons, just waves and waves and never-ending waves of innovation, development, and more. For me, three interesting developments on the web merit a little discussion and sharing. One is about the name of the Fediverse—something that is presently misunderstood, too technical, too “techie.” The second is about the governance of such systems, given their federated and distributed nature, and the third is about the inclusion/exclusion of the current tech giants from the Social Web.

Firstly, the term “Fediverse” is a portmanteau of two words: federation and universe. I can’t definitively say when this term was coined and first used, but it has become the standard term to describe federated and open-source protocols used in products such as Mastodon, Bluesky (sort of), Pixelfed, and Peertube. The application list is growing, as is the user base of many of these applications.

But as is often the case, most used terms are not particularly descriptive enough of the technology’s accurate meaning and actual use. There’s a growing voice advocating using a different term than Fediverse to represent better what Mastodon, etc., provides in applications and services. Many involved in the indie web use the Social Web to indicate what the Fediverse is trying. I think this term is a bit better, and I like the idea behind the web in the first place. I think Fediverse is a little alienating and too “techie” for most. Ask people around you what the Fediverse is or what it does, and you’ll get differing responses. Some will say it has something to do with the Feds, the Multiverse, or even the Metaverse. “Social Web” is succinct and descriptive.

Which makes me think about the use of the internet and particularly the social web in the Caribbean. So far, I haven’t encountered any instances of Mastodon or anything similar. It seems that we in the Caribbean are content with the offerings of the huge tech companies that provide people with a just-good-enough service to prevent them from leaving, despite it being an icky experience for many. The last statistics I had showed that once a user got on the Internet in the Caribbean, they would sign up for some Social Networking platform, usually one that is Meta (nee Facebook) owned: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. With WhatsApp being the most popular, despite it not really being a social network —it’s a messaging app. Have I missed something? If you know of any Social Web (Fediverse) projects, let me know by replying to this email.

Fediverse terminology aside, I’ve been following a project about the governance and moderation of various Fediverse (social web) platforms since its start. In fact, it inspired me to write the blog posts to accompany our own project request with Stanford, which was ultimately rejected, sadly.

The project aimed to answer the following research question: “What are the most effective governance and administration models/structures in place on medium-to-large-sized Fediverse servers, and what infrastructural gaps (human and digital) persist?”

The project has now produced its final report. Although I haven’t read it yet, the findings go into a lot of detail about moderation, leadership when running an instance, federated diplomacy, and the tools required for this. If anyone is interested in starting an instance of something like Mastodon, then I think you should give this report a look over. The main areas discussed are about the governance structures to put into place, what it is you’re trying to achieve with an instance of a Social Web product/platform, how to moderate and what to build as a team to do that work, including the community of users (something big tech should learn about), all the way to legal liabilities, something that can’t be ignored.

Lastly, I wanted to discuss my feelings about the Social Web federation and where it relates to the services offered by the big tech platforms. Off the bat, and if this isn’t clear to you, I have a lot of issues with Facebook and other similar platforms, mostly about their incentives related to advertising and how those incentives are feeling a dangerous lurch to a more authoritarian political landscape. Oh, and the genocide they have sponsored … But. But, I will defend the right of all platforms to decide whether or not to federate with Facebook through their Threads federation projects. I will also defend Facebook’s right to pursue such projects. Where I diverge from some is my opinion on what Facebook is trying to do. I do not believe for an instant that this is benevolent inclusion in a powerful competitor and, some would say, a threat to the existence of Instagram and other advertising systems. To explain what I mean, let me recount the fable of the scorpion and the frog.

The fable starts with the scorpion on the bank of a river wanting to cross, but the scorpion can’t swim. With a frog nearby, the scorpion asks the frog if it can carry itself on its back. To which the frog points out that the scorpion will sting it, ultimately killing it. The scorpion retorts that it couldn’t do such a thing as it would indeed kill itself in the process, so the frog should rest assured of its safety. The frog considers the proposition and then accepts to carry the scorpion on its back. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, ending both their lives. With its last breath, the frog asks the scorpion why it stung, given the consequences. The scorpion simply replied, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist. It’s in my nature”.

Facebook will take, steal, profile, and hoard data insecurely, putting us all at risk. They have knowinglysold nazi ads, aided child abuse, provided tools to commit genocideand many other vile things. They ultimately strangle anything they touch, like the Social Web (Fediverse). It’s in their nature.

Reading

I’m in deep on the Internet Governance track, continuing to read Anu Bradford’s book Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology. I’ve linked to it before, but it’s worth linking again.

As I read it, I thought of the terrible takes several tech pundits (primarily based in the US) are having about the effect of the DSA on companies like Apple. A certain, shall we say, Apple Fanboy population is losing their minds about how there is finally a regulatory body taking on and winning against the company. I shall not name names, but one prominent blogger would do well to read the above book and perhaps travel outside the country to gain a better perspective and knowledge of the world.

If you thought the Disney corporation was all nice and cosy, producing fun light entertainment, perhaps it’s time to reevaluate that. Recently, a visitor to one of its parks died after an allergic reaction to food served in one of the restaurants onsite. It seems Disney was clearly at fault, which will finally be decided in the courts through a wrongful death lawsuit. But that didn’t stop them from trying to maggot their way out of responsibility and liability. How? Because the widower had once signed up for a Disney+ trial. He wasn’t even a paying subscriber, but the clauses of that trial exonerated Disney from all evil, even forcing the user to waive the right to trial. They relented, but only after a nasty backlash, providing a clearly BS and insulting comment.

Things need to change on the Internet.

I’m a little late posting this to the web, but it’s here now 😀 The newsletter version will go out as usual on Tuesday morning. Have a great week.