This is my first newsletter of 2024, and it’s a long one. I look forward to writing more during the year. I won’t promise they will be sent on a strict schedule, but I’m setting an overall goal to get back into the rhythm of writing these long-form posts here and in newsletter form for this year’s subscribers list.

Enjoy, and let me know your thoughts by email or on Mastodon.

I’ve set up a new site to consolidate all the public writing I’ve been doing. I mentioned it before in the previous emails, but I’ll take the opportunity to plug my site again. I’ve added a page with what is essentially my CV to the site; the idea is to give people an easy one-stop shop to see what projects I have worked on over the last few years. The list isn’t exhaustive; it’s more representative.

An Update on the Newsletter Migration

In the last newsletter email, I talked about the distasteful issues and goings-on at Substack. In that update, I said I would be moving to a different platform and that I had my sights on either WordPress or micro.blog. After a lot of research and discussion with the support at WordPress, I took the plunge and decided to go with a WordPress site. That didn’t turn out to be a good decision for several reasons.

Sadly, WordPress’s idea of a newsletter is not really aligned with mine. Secondly, it was a challenging task to get the site up and running and looking the way I wanted it to. I needed to take a few training sessions to get started before I could get the site edited to look like something I’d be happy with. Domain purchased, WordPress plan purchased, I did the transfer and moved across the entire library of articles I’d written on Substack. The migration was easy enough until I reached a limit of subscriber numbers, which, to be fair, was easily resolved but annoying to run into and be taken completely by surprise.

However, I wasn’t happy with the way things work over at the site. Number one, a subscriber has to create a WordPress account to use the newsletter properly, and I don’t think that should be necessary. Secondly, there is a non-optional amount of tracking performed by sites like WordPress (Substack did this, too), which I didn’t want to keep de facto endorsing. I don’t need to see ‘stats’, and I don’t need them feeding the anxiety bucket. I want to write informed and interesting articles, put them out there and see what happens over time. I don’t need tracking stats to know where you’re from, what you read and when, what you had for breakfast or anything for that matter.

All this to say that I have performed a second migration in the space of one week from WordPress to micro.blog. It is a small and independent company I knew about a few years ago, as I was one of the early backers on Kickstarter to get the platform up and running. For some reason, I didn’t find a use for it back then, but recent events made me reevaluate that, and I’m here now.

You should continue to receive the newsletter as previously, but the look and feel will be a little different, as I noted in the last email from Substack (So long and thanks for all the fish).¹ The new platform doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Substack, but I’m okay with that, as I think it is the content that is the most important, not the flashiness. I think it speaks more to who I am and what I do.

The Internet’s Past, Present, and the Movement for a More Open Future

I haven’t been as enthusiastic about the Internet since I first started using it back in 1989 when the Internet was a series of clunky command-line tools like Gopher, WAIS, and a few others. It blew my mind back then that I could communicate in almost real-time with a student in San Fransisco from my university DEC VAX VMS terminal in London, UK. But logging on to baymoo.sfsu.edu became a ritual and a pastime that shaped how I used the internet and thought about the future. Shortly after that, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) started popping up in the UK, and I was one of the early clients of a dial-up service based in North London. I even applied for a job with them and went through an interview (and failed), but I remember seeing the hundreds of dial-up modems they had in the office for the connections from their customers like me. I got myself a ‘real’ email address and sent an email to myself from my university account to that personal account, racing home to check I got it as intended. My car didn’t go as fast as electrons, so I lost that race too.

What set the Internet apart at that time was its truly open nature. Open, as in having not walled off, private, or for-profit-only tools. Tools like GOPHER², WAIS³, and TELNET⁴. This presented an almost limitless opportunity in its time for people to develop new ideas and new applications. The most notable of those is the very system that you might be reading this on now, the web, the World Wide Web, or WWW.

In 1991, Tim Berners-Lee and CERN released the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)⁵ protocol and a rudimentary browser called Nexus.⁶ This transformed the Internet entirely, and its technologies developed into what we have today: visual, virtual spaces on the Internet. It democratised the Internet for anyone able to get online through an ISP by allowing people to create easy-to-navigate, easy-to-use and interactive websites. If you’re interested in the specification of such things, the RFC for HTTP can be found here.

What developed after this amounted to what I would call a Cambrian explosion of websites and innovation on the Internet, which, eventually, made it big enough for the financiers to step in. Slowly but surely, bits of the Internet got walled off. Here and there at first. Little by little, then, all at once. The Internet was no longer an open system. Sure, there are still some open systems, but they are dwarfed by the platforms such as Facebook, Microsoft and Google. All are responsible for intimating and pretending to be open whilst closing down the real openness of the Internet so they could sit in between all Internet things and extract money from anything that happened in either direction —Site to user, user to site.

And that’s where we are today. An Internet with a rich tapestry of site designs, features, and opportunities (primarily for grifters). But it is a sad Internet, one with plenty of bad things despite an enormous amount of innovation and ideas for an open Internet. Most of them are stillborn or are stifled or bought out by giants as soon as they make enough of an impression on the masses and possibly threaten an incumbent. Instagram is the canonical example. It was a lovely app for amateur and professional photographers alike to share ‘olde filtered’ square photos taken using smartphones that had only just gained decent camera parts. It is now a disinformation machine entirely driven by advertising, most of it absolute garbage or downright dangerous. There is only one winner, Mark Zuckerberg. It is now a platform that could be subject to health warnings or regulated to change if some of the proposals to control the platform get implemented. It, and others like Twitter, are being targeted by the EU for abusive privacy practices and flat-out violations of the GDPR. But even that doesn’t stop them trying to squeeze the last drop of cash from people. It’s just a cost of doing business. Take a recent example, Facebook. They recently announced a convenient feature called Facebook Link History. Convenient for who? Facebook, of course. It is essentially a key-logging Javascript injected into every site you visit and monitors everything you type or tap on, including your passwords! It should be illegal. Facebook has ignored GDPR since the law has been in force, believing it is too powerful to be taken down.

You should understand that advertising incentives are not aligned with you, the customer, or the seller. If you want to know more about online advertising and understand how the machine actually works and, importantly, why this type of advertising isn’t as efficient as we are led to believe, I’d suggest looking at this EU Commission document. For the record, I don’t subscribe to the notion that you are the product if you’re not paying for it. This is too reductive of an explanation and doesn’t adequately describe what really happens. Advertising giants are squeezing both ends of the value chain, you and the would-be advertiser, by telling you both lies about reach, accuracy, and the other largely made-up metrics.

I believe we should try to get to a modern version of the open Internet of before. I don’t mean dialling back the clock as it is impossible. I don’t believe in the “things were better before” doctrine either. I’m advocating getting back to a point where anyone could have and, this is the crucial part, control their own plot of cyberspace. A more distributed Internet, one that values quality, not quantity. One that values truth, not who can shout the loudest. In trying to explain what I mean in clear terms, I’m thinking about the British Broadcasting Company, the BBC —one of the world’s oldest and most respected media companies.⁷ The Internet link it promotes on its News programs is www.facebook.com/bbcnews. The site and brand is Facebook. Not the BBC! It should only ever be www.bbc.com/news. It should only ever be a space that they control, not a Facebook walled-garden portal.

I’ve been reading a lot about the distributed Internet, and I believe it is a good start. Note: Don’t confuse the web3, crypto, etc model of “distributed” with what I’m thinking about. That is an entirely different “distributed” and a discussion that has somehow damaged the image of distributed in its meaningful form. I want to write more on that in the future as I think it is at the heart of the reason why, in the Caribbean, we don’t have value in using the ccTLDs, with businesses not benefiting from that visibility and attractiveness as in other regions. Anguilla would disagree with me here, but they are the exception currently riding a wave of popularity. The .ai ccTLD is a hot property currently earning the tiny British dependency millions of pounds in revenue.

Harnessing AI Responsibly: Insights from Training Business Leaders

I wanted to mention a little about the new hotness, AI. I’ve been teaching a reasonable number of business leaders about these tools over the last six months.

It is clear to me that I have been surprised by the interest from such a broad range of managers and business leaders for a product that is so technical and so linked to ICT. The OpenAI hype machine has galvanised the public into believing that these tools can make them one hundred or more times as efficient for 100 times less money than they are spending at the moment (on personnel). This, of course, is not true at all, and I find I have to temper expectations and canalise those runaway thoughts they often have about generative AI and how it will make every person redundant.

For the record, I remain enthusiastic about the technology from a basic productivity point of view. I do think it brings something to the table that can be helpful when used responsibly. I liken it to the automated systems on some cars that ensure the correct security distance between you and the vehicle in front without human input. It’s not self-driving. It is just an assistive technology that needs guardrails and human verification. If an accident occurs where you run into the back of the cat in front (despite the technology being activated), who is responsible? The assistant software in the car or you That’s exactly what we’re dealing with when we use these systems. You, the user, remain responsible, and you, the user, should ensure you use it responsibly.

I don’t think discussing accuracy, efficiency or other measures of “intelligence” is helpful at this stage, as these systems are changing rapidly. To give you an example, I have had to modify the training materials no less than ten times in the last six months. I would suggest a wait-and-see approach before integrating them into fundamental or central processes in your businesses that would provoke significant consequences in the case of error or failure. I would also suggest you integrate human-based verification and validation to the output generated to ensure you don’t fall foul of mis and dis-information, obviously wrong answers, and poor analysis that these LLMs can produce. That doesn’t mean that I don’t support the use of them. Please do. However, please don’t rely on them too much, as you may be sorely disappointed and dissatisfied with the results. For once, I’m bullish on Microsoft’s approach, but I would still exercise caution handing over the car keys to Copilot, ChatGPT, Bard and other LLMs.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to email you again soon.

/comittedtodisk

I wanted to expand upon our thoughts on the research question for our proposal at the Stanford Internet Observation Center.

To recap, the research question is:

What key factors constrain the development of online safety skills in the Caribbean? Does uneven technology adoption in the Caribbean affect the vulnerability to online harms, what role does early education have in mitigating them, and do current multistakeholder collaboration initiatives have a significant effect?

Of course, we know that that is not strictly one question. However, it is a central question with three sub-questions directly related to the central question.

So when we’re asking what the key factors constrain the development of online safety skills are, we need to consider the context in the Caribbean, which is often quite different from the context we find in countries and regions like the USA, UK, or Europe and in doing so, we needed to think about the region’s specifics. One of the first things that came up during our brainstorming and our previous research is just how fractured the development of technology adoption is throughout the various islands and countries that make up the Caribbean. Some are way ahead of the curve, and others still need work done to get up-to-speed, as it were.

That implies that any initiative that wishes to develop internet adoption, use, cybersecurity capacity-building, or other digital tool-based systems needs to understand that we have essentially a 100 m race being run by many countries, each starting at a different starting point. Some starting at 80 m while others starting at -20 m!

In subsequent sessions, whilst thinking about this research, we looked at the region’s education system and curriculum(s). We tried to get a quick overview of what they were doing with respect to Online Safety. I’ll leave our initial conclusions to the results of the desk research’s first and second passes; however, it suffices to say that it was a mixed bag. But, in our view, it is primordial to investigate further to try to see the links (or not) between the education systems and how people comport themselves on the Internet. Is there a relation? Is it anecdotal? Does it pass statistical scrutiny? These are all the lines of investigation and sub-sub questions we hope to answer in the research. There are and will be other questions developed throughout the research.

Lastly, the third part of the sub-question refers to some of the initiatives we have seen in the Caribbean to help capacity-build knowledge about online safety on the internet. The question is, what was done? Was it effective? How much of the population was targeted, included and trained? Since we know of some of these projects and some that have subsequently halted, we wanted to get a better understanding of their lasting legacy. Did they change anything, and if so, did the effects last?

Virtually the last thing we did was name our proposal. The title we landed on is: “The Online Safety Digital Divide: Exploring Constraints in Online Safety Skills Development in the Caribbean”.

Internet governance training and being spied on by Meta

I started a new training course from the Virtual School of Internet Governance this week. Over the next ten weeks, I’ll read, watch and learn more about the Internet and the structures and people behind its governance. I already know a fair amount, some of it from the fact that I was on the internet very early through a university account in London around ’89/’90. We didn’t have direct access, and I had to log in to JANET (Joint Academic Network), hop to NIST (?) and then on to the Internet that was still identified as ARPANET on some systems I was connecting to. I’m looking forward to this course and have already completed the first evaluation.

I participated in a preparatory meeting with the EU-LAC Digital Alliance on Cybersecurity policy. There’s a meeting to be held in the Dominican Republic in early February that I’m hoping to be selected to attend. If not in person, then at least virtually if possible.

I registered as a Virtual attendee for ARIN 53. This is an area that I am very interested in, and I am looking forward to the next meeting in April. I suggest you register, as all participants are very much welcome.

Reading

I read a short article entitled “AI Act threatens to make facial surveillance commonplace in Europe” which suggests that the early provisions for restricting the use of realtime biometric identification systems have been loosened, or removed. This makes me uneasy, and it feels like things are going a little too far in the breach-personal-rights-for-security direction. National and local security is always a trade-off between privacy and surveillance, and it is difficult to get it right, but deploying mass facial scanning systems —not for access to accounts, aeroplanes, etc.— seems to cross a line in my mind.

I read this article from the Verge about Meta’s mass surveillance operation on the internet. 186000, yes, one hundred and eighty-six thousand companies supply Meta data from legal (and illegal) sources scanning everything you do online. Something is disconcerting and nauseating about this, which really creeps me out. I have long said that anyone who willingly works for this company is morally bankrupt.

Of note

There were two pieces of big news in the tech world, both from Apple. One was the announcement of the availability of Apple Vision Pro and the opening of orders for the 3500$ device. The other is Apple’s response to the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), given that it has been categorised as a “gatekeeper”. Apple couldn’t have written it more laced with malice.

Let’s talk about Apple Vision Pro initially. I’m not a big fan of the idea, despite recognising that the implementation and design of the device from a technological position is nothing short of phenomenal. My issues have more to do with it being, and this is only opinion, a solution looking for a problem on the one hand and being yet a mother that extracts us from reality and places a barrier between us humans and the world. Clearly, the device will be pretty good for entertainment purposes, and some may find it useful for productivity (although that has yet to be seen). But in both cases only in individual pursuits. There is nothing about being together, sharing the same space and collaborating. I don’t know; I get an icky feeling about the world we’re creating, placing ever more filters between us and the people around us.

On a snarky note, I can’t wait for the first report of an airline passenger having personal belongings stolen as they were otherwise distracted by giant dinosaurs or whatever stupid shite is being forced into their eyeballs.

Concerning the DMA, I have split opinions, but I haven’t had enough time to process all the parts. I’m uncomfortable with Apple’s response, and much of it seems to be a little petulant, like how a kid is forced to share his snacks spits in the packet before offering them to others. However, Apple has built something extremely useful and valuable to developers —the App Store and the iOS devices— but seemingly feels entitled to take a cut of absolutely everything that passes through them. I’m not sure that’s a valid argument these days. I’m still thinking this through. I might write something a little longer in an upcoming newsletter.

Have a great week.

Following on from the announcement we made relating to the research proposal, the next bit of news is that we have submitted our final proposal.🙌🥳

Proposals of this type are actually more challenging to write than you think. They often come with constraints, and this one was no exception. We had only two pages of plain text in a traditional font like Times New Roman, at size 12. That turns out to be around 800 or so words. Not a lot to express your research in detail. So, it requires a decent amount of restraint and a lot of editing!

I said I’d document the process in brief, so this is the aim of this post.

To start the project, we agreed to work together, and the first thing I did was start a new team on Microsoft Teams. This was used as the central document repository, collaboration space for writing and project management. Despite being rudimentary, one of the functionalities in Teams that helps manage a small project like this is the Tasks by Planner tool.s It is a simple Kanban-style tool that allows you to set up and manage the progress of tasks in a project and assign them to individuals or multiple team members. You get a simplified dashboard and —too many for my tastes— reminder emails for tasks nearing completion, late, due, etc.

The completed list of tasks

The next task was to outline a plan with associated tasks (see image above), assign them to people and add dates to ensure we could finish before the deadline. Once this was complete, we wrote a brief outline for the submission and created a requirements document to ensure we complied with all the requirements. This took a little time as we needed to ensure we understood all the aspects required for the submission.

The process after this is quite simple, in that we just had to write the document. Using the co-editing tools of Word through the Teams document library ensured we could optimise our work and work on documents as and when we saw fit. The other indispensable feature was the Track Changes tool that helped us monitor changes, suggestions and comments.

Once we got past each stage, I ticked off the tasks as being done, which is why it looks like I did everything, which is definitely not the case. 🤣

We signed off the final draft last night and pushed the submission button the same evening.

We worked on the proposal together really well, putting a lot of effort into getting it done. Done well and on time. I’m proud of our submission and hope we get selected, as I think the research will be valuable in the region.

I’ll write a little more about the research, our motivation and what we hope to achieve in a few days.