It has been quiet around here for a while as I was travelling for a few days in Europe. Then, as soon as I got home, I contracted a nasty cold. It knocked me out for a good 10 days or so, and I’m only just getting back to normal. Not fun.

One of the things I enjoy as an independent consultant is that I get to work on some new and interesting projects. Sometimes, those projects are a little outside of my core competencies, but that’s what makes them fun. I’ve recently finished a market research/opportunity study for a small client in the textile industry. The business is struggling a little and hasn’t embarked on any modernisation since it was founded a couple of generations ago. It has been ticking along successfully up until now. Times are changing and it is evident that businesses that don’t modernise are going to find the going more and more difficult.

Last Thursday evening I was invited to participate in a round table discussion during the annual general meeting. The subject was, of course, artificial intelligence. With three of us, a lawyer, a data scientist, and me, a generalist, the discussion was interesting and, I think, useful to the members of the association concerned. It was a private meeting, so I’m not at liberty to detail anything other than to say that it is clear that small businesses are having a hard time understanding what AI may or may not bring them.

I tried to clarify a little of that, but the time allowed was short, and we weren’t able to get deep into the weeds. Perhaps another session is on the cards.

Reading

I like cross-Atlantic travel as it gives me time to read books. The out journey is difficult, as it is usually overnight, so I can’t disturb too many people in the cabin with a light (I sleep poorly, if at all, on the plane). I tend to listen to a lot of music or podcasts during this time. I should perhaps try audiobooks, but I can’t get on with them in normal circumstances, so I doubt I’d like them on the plane. The return journey, however, is during the day and more conducive to lecture. I finished one book I had just started and then proceeded to finish a second book during the nine-hour flight.

I finished Machine Readable Me by Zara Rahman. A very interesting short book on the impact of our data-obsessed society and where it can lead to serious issues, particularly with those least privileged in society.

The other book was about ADHD. I’ve been diagnosed recently, despite my knowing for the last thirty years or so. This book was a whim purchase and contained some interesting information and articulated reasonably well the difficulties of this condition, despite the overly North American tone, which is a little too much for me. It’s worth a read if you have, or you know, someone who has ADHD.

I’ve been discussing for a number of months the rather egregious deployment of video surveillance for the Olympics in Paris this year, particularly the use of AI to biometrically identify people. Well, it goes further than that, and I’m not comfortable with that. This article (in German—use the translate page feature of your browser) explains what’s happening, and it is not pretty.¹

Meredith Whittaker, CEO of Signal, recently gave a speech at an award acceptance event. Regardless of your position on the use of cryptography, the speech is worth your time.²

Lastly, this article exposes the limitations of current generation genAI systems. It delves (🤭) into the use of words and how the (over) use of some is a telltale sign of genAI.³

That feels better, to have sat down and written some thoughts.

Have a great week.

As you know, I’ve been taking Internet Governance very seriously for a few years now and have accelerated that implication over the last couple of years. One of the highlights of that journey recently was attending ARIN 52 in San Diego and remotely attending ARIN 53 in Barbados.

As an organisation responsible for the management and distribution of Internet number resources in the North American region, including much of the Caribbean, ARIN is an important cog in the system of good governance and community-developed policies. It’s crucial to acknowledge that the success of ARIN’s initiatives and policies is largely attributed to you, the users of these resources. Active community involvement in promoting good governance drives progress. ARIN not only helps enforce policies but also gives back to the community in various ways. It is present at a large number of Internet governance conferences, provides support for organisations working in that area, and hosts its open-to-anyone conference twice a year (I’ve attended a couple virtually and one in person. See above).

However, ARIN runs a little-known assistance program that is currently looking for participants. The ARIN Community Grant Program offers up to 20,000 USD for a project. Smaller grants are also issued for smaller projects.¹

I would encourage you to apply, even if your project idea is not fully baked yet. ARIN will absolutely help get the project going if it aligns with its mission. Many of the people who work for ARIN directly or who are on the various councils would be only too happy to help out where possible.

I recently had a proposal with Stanford University rejected due to an extremely high level of interest, so I am looking at finding a way to redesign that project so that it can be considered by ARIN. I’ll let you know and update my Research page as and when.²

Please take a look at the ARIN Grant Program page for more information: https://www.arin.net/about/community_grants/program/

The 2024 application period runs from 22 April to 7 June, so you should start the application process as soon as possible. Learn more about how to apply in this post on the ARIN Blog.³

P.S. You may find you’ve benefitted from the program without knowing it. If you have attended the Virtual School of Internet Governance, they were a recipient in 2021.

Let me know if I can help in any way.

As I noted last week, I’ll link to articles through footnotes rather than inline https links to make things more readable, especially if you’re reading this using Dark Mode. I should look into updating the theme, but I’m not that disturbed, and to be fair, I don’t really have the expertise to mess around with Hugo. Perhaps I’ll take a look in the future, but for now, footnotes it is.

I’ve been working with a couple of clients, both fairly small in size, but as I have been saying for many years, requiring expertise and tools like any other corporation. The fact that they are small is an issue of scale, not an issue of the types of tools they require. A business process for dealing with billing for a 10-person company is similar, if not the same, as for a 100 or 1000-person company. Sure, there’ll be some differences in hierarchy, approvals, etc, but the basics are very much alike. This is what I help my clients with. Looking at business processes and finding ways to help make them more efficient. This doesn’t automatically mean software. At times, it is organisation or management rather than an app for that.

For my business, I’m seriously considering reorganising my data into a “proper” database with metadata, versioning, and all that good stuff. OS Filesystems just don’t cut it anymore. Having structured data, even if it contains files (Word, Excel, PDF, etc.), is a bonus and helps in many areas: search, collaboration, sharing, and versioning (as previously mentioned). I’ll try to document what I decide to do, as it may help you.

Reading

There’s a lot of text out there discussing LLMs. There’s even text out there discussing LLMs created entirely by LLMs. If you’re like most people, you can tell much of the generated text reasonably easily. There’s just something odd about it. An article from Baldur Bjarnason, which I forgot to link to a week or so back, goes into why.¹ Unlike a lot of articles discussing the subject, it is a lot more nuanced as well as being very well researched.

You may have noticed that I’m pretty against Internet advertising that is egregious, privacy-violating, and downright nasty. You may also have understood that I fall into the group of people who always use ad-blocking techniques as much as possible through software, scripts, or even DNS redirects to 127.0.0.1, where they deserve to be. Some companies, like FB and Google, are unhappy with this and are trying to bust these techniques. It won’t work. It never does.²

Talking about advertising —and I’ve written a lot about its lack of effectiveness—well, here’s an article from Arstechnica that discusses how Facebook’s AI advertising system, which controls all sides of the rigged game, is blowing through budgets in a few hours and charging them more than they have assigned. I’m pretty sure this is fraudulent and not “Computer says no”.³

And it would be remiss of me not to mention that Spain, as well as other European and African countries, have shut down Sam Altman’s pyramid privacy nightmare shitcoin scam, Worldcoin.⁴

I’m reading a lot about Internet Governance, and I’ll share as much as I can here. This article, for example, is about Human Rights in the Digital World. It is worth your time.⁵

On the same topic, there is this article about Digital Rights in the Caribbean. It discusses the integration of Human Rights and Digital Rights and the fact that they cannot be separated now.⁶

You may have heard about a GDPR challenge to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. There have been plenty of poor articles discussing the case. I suggest reading the release from the source.⁷

I thought I’d leave on a positive note, and it will neatly lead into some of the new reading and research I have been doing. Molly White, in her newsletter Citation Needed, writes about the Internet we could have. I highly recommend it.⁸

Thank you for reading, and I’m glad you got some value out of this. I’m compelled to write; I don’t know why; it just is. I’m sitting here finishing this off on a Sunday night before posting tomorrow morning with a lovely glass of old Rhum. It is quiet, apart from the insects, and the temperature is finally coming down to a comfortable level.

Wishing you an excellent week ahead.

I’ll be busy, so I’m not sure how much I’ll post for the next couple of weeks. Please bear with me.

Have a great week.

I had a very busy week with a lot of things coming to a head art the same time. Teaching, training, a corporate speaking gig and a couple of ongoing consulting projects. It took a lot of effort and concentration to get all the ducks in line to produce the work that was required, but I managed to keep it together and I feel quite happy with the things I achieved during the week.

That gave me an excuse to have a lazy Saturday doing absolutely nothing but relaxing, reading and having a little tipple of the excellent Rhum that is found in the part of the work where I live.

Update: I made a change to this article and future articles. I noticed inline links didn’t stand out in dark mode, so I’ve changed them to footnotes. This should help readability and further reading, for those inclined.

Reading

I don’t know how many of you have either used or heard of the Commodore Amiga. It was the first proper computer I owned after having a Sinclair ZX81 when I was much younger. The Amiga is the computer that changed my life, literally. I sold my car to buy one and despite losing a lot of cash on the car resale, I’m still benefitting from that sale over thirty years later. I read a comment article in The Guardian newspaper about just that computer. It’s a fun dip into the past.¹

I know I’ve been going on a lot about advertising and how it is ruining the Internet as we know it. I stumbled across a video someone uploaded about a little application that made the computer buzz every time a tracker called back home. The video is astonishing! It sounds like a 56k modem.²

On the other end of the fight on the Internet for open and interoperability, there is some good news, with modern platforms starting to federate and support decentralised and federated protocols like ActivityPub. Ghost has just joined that list.³ The venerable newsletter platform has started to embrace a better Internet. With a bit of luck the inertia might lead to meaningful changes by the rest of the Internet. And no I’m not talking about Threads federating with Mastodon. I remain very sceptical of their motivations and I suspect they are trying to find a way to advertise on this new Internet. I hope they fail. But they are very motivated by money and a have lots of it to throw around.

There is no doubt that many nations in the Global North are having a moment whereby they are swinging to right politically. Sometimes to the extreme right wing. This is very worrying and will only lead to conflict, possibly of a scale we’ve never witnessed on the planet. It needs to be stamped out as quickly as possible. Tolerating the intolerant is a very bad idea. Anyway, much of the finance and force behind this is found in Big Tech, specifically in Silicon Valley. They have done a good job thus far in hiding their true motivations and have successfully created a cult of sycophants around the world who champion the success of Silicon Valley without really understanding where it came from, why and what it is aiming. To put it bluntly, many (possibly a majority) want to setup segregation, selective procreation, the eternal human, eugenics systems and much much more. They don’t think you deserve to live unless you are a billionaire and are extreme in your world views. They are a fucking disgrace and can’t wait to celebrate the day they fail or otherwise disappear of the face of the earth. Enough of my rant, read these two articles to get a sense of just how dangerous and bad these people are:

The violent disdain of the ordinary man from Marc Andreesson is sickening.⁴

Balaji Srinivasan is even worse. He said the quiet bit out loud, and he wants to “ethnically cleanse” San Francisco.⁵

JFC! What is wrong with these people?

Have a great week.

When you have a decent routine it shows. When that routine is broken, for whatever reason, if you’re able to get back into the swing of things easily enough, then its a sign that the routine is Ok. I need these routines to be able to function efficiently. I’ve talked about why before, so I’m not going to go over that again here. But I’m glad that I could get back into those routines relatively quickly.

My week was dominated by nearly fours days of conferences. Monday to Wednesday was taken up by the ARIN 53 Public Policy and Members Meeting. It was held in Barbados, although I attended remotely as it was too complicated for me to get there easily and cost effectively. Attending remotely was the next best thing as ARIN takes great care to ensure that remote participants can contribute effectively and not feel out of step. I asked a number of questions over the few days and all were read out and answered as though I was there. I wish other online meetings would take the same care! After ARIN 53, it was CaribNOG 27. A two and a half-day conference that I was connected to for two days solid, again participating where I could.

I wrote a quick blog post —that I’m turning into a newsletter over the coming days— over on the Virtual School for Internet Governance. Have a read a let me know what you think.

I spent quite a bit of time working on a PoC for a client, based on basic SharePoint tools. For many small and micro-sized businesses, it can provide the kind of functionality typically found in specialised business software for a fraction of the price. It requires a bit of effort to understand the business logic and configure accordingly, which is not as easy as it sounds. From my experience, most clients don’t know or fully understand the business logic of the procedures and processes they have in place and they miss steps or misunderstand what those steps are doing in logical terms. That’s why consultants exist, I guess.

Reading

I did a lot of reading this week, but not very much progress in the book list.

In keeping with my current obsession, I read a lot of blogs from people working, studying and participating in the Internet Governance space. Once such blog is the Internet Exchange. A recent post discussed the relationship between encryption backdoors and government hacking, specifically how they can enable disastrous consequences, even genocide. Project Lavender was a cited example.

I read a truly frightening vision of the authoritarian future of major US cities in a blog post entitled Cool Grey City of Tech Authoritarians. I would recommend you read this as it discusses a lot of what is happening in big tech at the moment, to the detriment of everyone except the privileged few.

In the same vein, I’ve been feeling particularly unhappy with the way the Internet has turned (walled-garden, performative posting, surveillance capitalism run amok, etc.). This article goes a long way to explain why the Internet is currently broken for most people and how it is ruining art, music and many other creative talents. Definitely worth your time.

France is trying to block children under 15 years old using Social Networks. 1) Good luck with that. 2) I despise the likes of Facebook’s shitty product, but I don’t think banning its use for youngsters is the right response. Something much more effective is the EU decision to smash down the egregious posture of Facebook requiring you pay to not be spied upon. FU Facebook. Oh, and before you moan about them not being able to have a business model because targeted advertising is basically banned (or highly restricted at least), then you are only showing us you don’t understand the situation.

You may have heard about LLMs… I’ll just leave this here for you to read

You might have heard about the Internet Reviewer war of 2024 that recently started. An (Internet) famous reviewer called MKBHD trashed the Humaine AI Pin in one of his videos, and it started an online that didn’t quite go the way the person intended in their criticism of MKBHD. It might actually produce a net positive in the online reviewing scam, I mean, game. Take any online review as a shill or product placement unless you can verify it is an authentic “review”. Much like the rest of the Internet, sadly (see above). Read this blog post for more context.

If there is anything you should read out of this list, it is They’re Looting The Internet by Ed Zitron. Modern-day robber Barons are destroying the internet on the backs of you and me. We need to do something to stop it!

One last thing, I’ve been printing some of these articles and documents on paper to read and take notes on. I wish there was a digital application that was as useful as good old pen and paper. I used to use MarginNote but I haven’t used it in ages. I couldn’t get it to stick. I might give it another shot.

Of note

I mentioned in an earlier blog post that I was again on the Innovation, Agilité et Excellence podcast with my friend Jean-François Nantel. I had a blast, as always and we discussed a number of topics I enjoy researching, learning about and sharing.

Thanks for reading, and have a great week.