📅 June 10 - June 16 | Watch out for cybersecurity issues at the Olympic Games

I’d mentioned previously that I had been travelling, specifically I was in Spain for 10 days or so. Sadly I haven’t been myself since coming back and probably caught a virus or something similar that has affected my health over the last few weeks. I won’t bore you with the details, but it did culminate in a bout of severe dizziness and nausea. I seem to have gotten over it now and hoping to get back up to full speed soon.

Last week was full with teaching. It is getting to the end of the school year for most of the organisations I work with, and as such we have an urgency to finish the programmed lessons and practicals before the end of year exams. I have very little time to anything for these weeks (including this week) a part from teach, plan, read and a few administrative tasks.

I’ll have a second rush shortly after that too, as I’ll need to mark the exams and read and assess the mémoires submitted in my Project Management course. I have 10 students there, with each providing a 30-page mémoire. A lot of reading to be done. 😱

I’m looking forward to building the consultancy side of my work, with more focus on getting clients over the coming months, as that is what is lacking in the development. I’m building a strategy to do that at the moment, based on what I’d done previously of course, but it takes time and effort that I don’t have fore the time being. My doctor said slow down a little and I should definitely take heed.

Reading

As we get closer to the Olympic Games in Paris this summer, we’re starting to see a number of reports about the state of cybersecurity (and other subjects like the egregious use of biometric identification systems), like this article that exposes a number of major shortcomings in the critical infrastructure of the games.¹

The next piece of writing I’ve wanted to share for a long time is about the use and abuse of the word “ecosystem”, particularly in the ICT sector. I co-wrote a report with USAID, where we studied the digital ecosystem of the Caribbean and we used the term to highlight a broad set of areas and how they interacted together, akin to an, er, ecosystem. You can read it here.² But the following article is more critical of the over use of the term.³

This recent news particularly annoyed me. As a longtime un-fan of Meta and its democracy-busting properties, this confirmed its intentions in being the most awful company on the internet. Research about the effects of Social Media is very important, but it seems that despite being a company that likes to know everything about you, it doesn’t like anyone outside knowing too much about them. The sooner the world is rid of Meta, the better as far as I’m concerned. There’s a place for Social Media, but the flavour of these types. From Mastodon: ⁴

One the same theme, Meta are liars. It is often best just to come out and say it as it is. Meta recently stated that the EU is preventing it from introducing AI tools to its user base in the economic region. Citing the ruling against it from the EU on GDPR grounds, it stated that it couldn’t work on AI tools in the EU. That is a lie. There is no other way of putting it. Liar, liar, pants on fire! It’s about consent dumbasses! ⁵

This last share, I’ll not summarise and let you read it for yourself. It’s not long. Enjoy.⁶

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.