This week, we received official notification that our proposal was not successful. There were over 230 proposals to be considered, and I believe ours was a strong candidate, but these things don’t always go your way.

While we are a little disappointed, the idea itself is not dead, and we are starting to think about how we can get some funding elsewhere to conduct the study.

I’ll keep this blog up to date once we have decided on our next move.

On a separate note, I have other ideas for research, and I’d like to keep those published here as a kind of register and reminder to help me move ahead with them. Keep a eye on this blog for further information.

No week note this week. I’m taking a well-earned rest and enjoying the beautiful island that I live on. I’ll be back in a week or two.

Have a great week.

It was another one of those weeks that seemed to come and pass without much particularly standing out, but when I looked back, I found that I had completed a lot of things that I hadn’t registered.

I finally got around to roasting the coffee beans I had prepared from the fruit to the bean. It was something I really wanted to do, and I really appreciated the effort involved. For the first coffee of Sunday morning, I made an espresso from those beans and thoroughly enjoyed it. Such fresh coffee has a much fruitier flavour and a strong and layered texture.

I decided to put the foot to the floor and finish the Virtual School of Internet Governance training. With only two modules left out of ten, I decided it was a good time to put in a little effort to finish them before the deadline. The materials are really good, and there is much to read and take on board. The questions for the test are not so hard, but that’s not really the point of these kinds of courses. The access to people, materials and discussion forums makes it interesting. Despite finishing the course, I have a pile of unread supplementary documentation to read. I’ll be going over them during the following months. I have an upcoming overseas voyage, so I’ll take advantage to read much of it then.

I ran one of my GenAI training courses last week with a small group of managers and directors. The idea behind these courses is to expose the people responsible for their companies to the capabilities, but importantly, to the risks and limitations of the tools. I don’t take a binary position in that these tools are either all good or all bad. I can see that they are a bit of both and need to be used responsibly, so I based my training on that premise. So far, it has been very successful, and I am happy to contribute.

Reading

I’ve not been reading novels as much as I would have hoped, but I think there’s something to be said for doing other things now and again and not getting saturated doing the same thing over and over. Again, that doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading. Like last week, I have been reading a lot, just not the things I had set out to read. For professional reasons, I had to concentrate on other texts rather than the books I had planned to read.

One of my favourite reads is The Internet Protocol Journal. The latest issue has a very interesting article about Ethernet. It covers the beginnings of the latest developments of one of the single most important technical protocols ever invented. It reminded me of a couple of books about TCP/IP that changed my life that I have lying around somewhere in the house. I can’t remember the exact title, but they influenced my understanding of networks, networking, and the infrastructure behind it.

Of note

I’ve been working with a couple of clients on aspects of digitalisation. It’s clear that there is a huge opportunity out there to help clients with the basics of digital organisation, document management, administration of systems, and, of course, compliance.

This was another big week for regulation news, with Apple being the subject of much scrutiny. There seems to have been a lot of cognitive dissonance amongst the pro-Apple media, with many journalists too young to remember what happened in the years of IBM, or later, Microsoft, when it came to regulation and compliance. There is a lot of misplaced attribution to the “genius” of Apple versus the reality of a market that allowed Apple to grow into the giant it is now.

I have two comments on Apple’s current attitude. Apple is a giant, and its priorities have changed. It is no longer as interested in serving its clients in the best way possible. It is now mainly interested in resting on the laurels of an admittedly hard-won position and extracting rents without doing the work it used to. Secondly, the pro-Apple press/bloggers and other commentators are mostly US-based and have shown absolutely no understanding of the reasoning and aims of EU regulation. This will bite them in the arse soon as the investigations play out. I’m getting the popcorn ready.

Have a great week.

I have a particular difficulty writing this part of the blog as I don’t seem to recall any details of what I have been doing this past week. Luckily, I write a small note in a journal every morning (-ish) to help remind me and also to help me process what I have actually achieved each week.

I did a lot of admin-type work last week, tying up loose ends and planning the next set of projects in the pipeline. I finished the slides I had prepared for a teaching session scheduled for Thursday afternoon. I had devised a fun activity for the students around the topic of Project Management and was looking forward to the class activity and seeing how they would go about the task. Sadly, the session was moved online at the last minute, and I had to improvise a little. The theory section was fine, although teaching online is really difficult as you don’t get immediate feedback as most people shut off their cameras for privacy reasons, which I can totally relate to. The exercise was possible but had to be completed during a collaborative online meeting through Teams. I split the class into groups and assigned breakout rooms and then spent the time moving between the rooms to offer assistance and advice. It was okay, but I would have much preferred to have done this in the class.

One thing that has come up as a direct result of the push to deploy AI tools in business is the need to control and protect data. I think there will be a number of surprises over the coming months as businesses discover that their data governance policies are inadequate and lend the AI tools to create security and confidentially issues. I have started developing a consultation for small businesses to address this before it becomes a problem. If you want to know more, reach out.

In personal news, I had been given 1.7kg of coffee fruit to process. I’d asked for it, and as a friend produces coffee, he gave me a small bag to try out. It is a long and arduous process to get from the fruit to dried beans that can be roasted. I have a bag ready for roasting, which comes out at less than 200 grams of beans, quite a reduction from that initial amount. The fruit can be used to make juice, but I’m not sure how to do that, so I binned the outer shells. Perhaps I’ll look into that another time. I’m looking forward to the roasting, but I have done it before, from beans supplied by my friend previously.

Reading

I haven’t been as religious or as motivated to read novels this week. I have no specific explanation; it’s just one of those things, I guess.

Not reading novels doesn’t mean that I don’t read a lot. In fact, the amount I read this week is as much as ever. I read or started reading a couple of interesting articles and papers.

I started to read a blog post on the impact of Starlink’s push to provide internet to the Amazonian region. The post entitled Starlink’s Amazonian Adventure: Bridging Gaps Or Just Adding Concerns? by Lua Cruz examines one of the interesting but largely misunderstood aspects of the so-called digital divide (zero-rated schemes) and other topics. Often touted as a means to get the underserved online, these schemes actually restrict and reduce the beneficiaries to a subset of the internet and create incentives for monopolies to do nothing to develop communications in the served regions. We’ve seen a lot of that in the Caribbean, and the most prominent example worldwide was Facebook’s attempt to control the Internet in India, which luckily didn’t get off the ground.

I started another paper entitled “China’s digital expansion in the Global South: Systematic literature review and future research agenda”. I haven’t read enough to form an opinion as yet. However, it is interesting to learn more about the global forces vying for control of the Internet and how we’re at a precarious point in its history in that it might start to fracture badly. That will not be good for the world.

Speaking of which, on the 35th anniversary of the modern Internet, at least the Internet as most people experience it, Time Berners-Lee wrote a blog post on his WWW Foundation site. It’s not long, and I think you should read it:

Of note

The crypto world is all a buzz because number go up! The world burns faster because of your ilk, and all you care about is a little bit of magic bean money rising in value. May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your anuses for a thousand years.

I mentioned the resurgence of ideas from the old Internet; well, another one was promoted and did the rounds (at least in my Internet circles). Do you remember blog rolls? They were the Internet’s recommendation engine before advertising and marketing destroyed the Internet by making us units of production to place ads next to. Long live the independent web and the ideas that they promote.

Have a great week.

I had one of those in-between weeks. I would probably be better describing it as a transition week. Some things came to an end, and others started up.

I had some marking to do for the students I teach, I had a bit of admin work to tie up some loose ends, and then I spent a lot of time researching and continuing the course on Internet governance. As a little context, this course spans over ten weeks and at the end of every module, there is a quick knowledge check test. What takes most of the time is the amount of reading to be done, as well as the supplementary videos and talks to listen to. You really need to enjoy the subject and have the fortitude to put in the required hours. I love reading and read fast, so I don’t mind that part. However, I wouldn’t say I like video as a format for learning, and I am aware that I’m going against the grain of how online learning is headed. Thankfully, I have a simple solution that gives me what I need in the format I like. I use various transcript tools to export and then read the text. What I can also do with that is store it in my DEVONthink database for searching and note-taking at a later date. This is much more useful than a link to a YouTube video.

Reading

I finished Clément Perarnaud’s (Open Future) paper entitled Finding the path to a more open internet. A new European approach toward internet standards. If you are interested in the open Internet, I would recommend reading it. It provides a good overview of what is happening there.

I know I said I wouldn’t, but I bought a new book to read, but I couldn’t ignore a book called Machine Readable Me by Zara Rahman, which “considers how and why data that is gathered about us is increasingly limiting what we can and can’t do in our lives and, crucially, what the alternatives are.”. I’m looking forward to reading it. It’s a small book, so it shouldn’t take too long.

Of note

All You Face Are Belong To Us

I was happy to learn that Spain has decided to end the operations of World Coin in the country. I can’t think of another project that is as poorly thought out as this one, and I implore anyone thinking of signing up the reflect on the risk of giving intimate biometric data in exchange for a lousy shitcoin that will be worthless when the plug is inevitably pulled.

The currency of destruction

Speaking of shitcoins, Bitcoin hit an all-time high this week, some seem to think, proof that it is a viable currency. Proof (I would say) of this excellent quote from Kurt Vonnegut, “We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”

A New Hope?

From my little corner of the internet, there seems to be a real resurgence in interest in some of the earlier and open standards and protocols. One example is RSS or Really Simple Syndication. I’ve been a fan and a user of it since its beginnings and have never stopped using it. It’s the main way I get much of the news I read.

Have a great week.