One week turned into two. Taking a short break is a good thing.

But, if I’m honest, I’m rather drained about the state of tech at the moment. It’s one bad story followed by another. From the obsequiousness, the knee-bending, and the sycophantic brown-nosing on display, the tech oligarchs have shown us in no uncertain terms that they are more about themselves than they are about their customers. It won’t last. It never does. That’s the story of the world. But the question is about what damage is being caused, and how long will it take to repair it?

The potential consequences are extremely dangerous, and I don’t feel as though this is hyperbole or over-egging what is at stake. I give you permission to laugh at me to my face if I’m wrong. I’d rather be laughed at than be even half correct.

We have never before been in a situation where almost every aspect of our daily lives is a simple SQL query away from abuse. Abuse from our governments that have gone rogue. Abuse from other governments that want to influence the enemy’s population, and on a more pedestrian note, abuse from unscrupulous companies hellbent on selling you something whether you need it or not, giving zero fucks about the state of the planet.

This is not a Disney good vs evil story. There are real consequences, real lives, and real people being hurt.

The real spyware

I’ve never been a fan of Facebook, and I’ve never held an account in any meaningful way. Quite the opposite. I created a family account a long time ago to see what the fuss was about, but this was many years into its domination of the public space of the Internet.

I was horrified by what greeted me.

No sooner had I created the account than there were a number of pre-created connections and associations that I would never have chosen had I had been given the choice.

The vibe was creepy from the outset, in only what I could describe at the time as a sociopath’s wet dream, the origins of the application were laid bare for me to see. Perhaps you don’t know or remember the original purpose for Facebook (the hint is in the name). It was an application designed to creepily and surreptitiously “rate” how “hot” college girls (female university students) were.

I felt I was being spied on from all directions at all times. From people I only fleetingly knew, or had passed in the Boulangerie, to the people who obsessively wanted to know what was going on in my life and the lives of others.

I felt nauseous and deeply uncomfortable about what the Internet of the masses was being turned into, even then. I hated it, and I shut it down as soon as I could, deeply regretting the fact that I had created the account in the first place.

I’ve subsequently exercised my rights as a European citizen to have all data about me removed, but I doubt that Meta has fully complied. With them refusing to comply with numerous laws globally, why would my tiny profile be any different?

Ads: Meta wants to be ‘less illegal’ - but much more annoying…

Unbeknownst to many, too, is that Meta has been exposed creating fake and shadow profiles, essentially giving itself the same functionality for targeted advertising, without the explicit consent of the users concerned.

And to anyone who hasn’t understood how the Internet actually functions, it boils down to one thing. Advertising. Or to be specific, the highly targeted digital advertising.

I’ve written before about how this is all smoke and mirrors and how the incentives are only aligned to the companies doing this, namely Google and Meta. There are thousands of other advertisers, but between those two they own the vast majority of the advertising spend on the planet, well into the 90s in terms of percentage points.

To combat this, we all need to earnestly expose these companies and change the narrative on ad companies like Goole and Meta. And no, they’re not tech companies, they’re ad agencies, and thieving ad agencies at that. They have been shown to falsely inflate prices through their biding systems that control both the supply and the demand, thus making businesses pay more for nothing extra.

Tech is a means to an end, and their actions clearly show this. The tools are a by-product of them getting their creepy stats about your last urine sample, or what you last looked at on a random website. That means we need to publicly call them out for the creeps they are and constantly until they behave differently. Do you know the origins of Chrome, the browser of choice for most? Let’s just say it wasn’t to provide you with the best browsing experience. That’s not fair. It was to provide the best browsing experience, to onboard the world so that the tool could be used to spy on you even more closely than you had been up to then and once captured, you would not be able to leave.

Users using other browsers frustrated Google because they could get to constantly spy on you whilst you went about your day on the Internet. So Chrome was born to centralise web usage on a platform designed from the ground up to collect data about your online habits, without them specifically or materially disclosing such. In fact, they specifically lied about that, too. Until they were caught.

How deep will this go?

Source: https://www.imperva.com/learn/application-security/osi-model/

Much like the OSI network model, to get more data about the packets being flung around networks, you need to go deeper and deeper into the stack. Which is precisely why Android exists. And the likes of Apple, who previously provided tools for computing with a good computing experience, have fundamentally changed and are now providing tools for advertising, that also happen to provide a good computing experience that is slowly being eroded.

Which leads me onto recent news about Meta’s other big projects that fly largely under the radar in the public arena.

Meta is BIG on Infrastructure. It has just announced that it will build a globe-spanning undersea cable to transport data between five continents. And this is just part of a decade-long plan to control and surveil you at every level of the OSI stack. The following animated GIF, gives you an idea of their expansion in global infrastructure control.

Source: https://fairinternetreport.com/research/facebook-meta-submarine-cable-ownership#map-header

I can’t know what you think about this, but it makes me deeply uncomfortable that more and more of the Internet, the system the world relies on for much of life itself, is being centralised and controlled by an ever-decreasing group of companies that have shown time and time again their self-serving intentions without regard for the rest of us.

This is both undemocratic and unbelievably dangerous at the same time.

These developments in internet infrastructure are tempting governments around the world to succumb to authoritarian tendencies. And the ubiquitous nature of tech, finding itself ever deeper in our lives, has done nothing to curb the authoritarian ambitions of governments around the world. Quite the opposite. Even those governments that fight against what they call ‘repressive and authoritarian regimes’ have found the centralisation of control of internet data from the deepest levels of networking to the applications and operating systems web use all the time, too tempting to leave alone. They are and will continue to be abused indiscriminately, harming the world as a whole. With the help of Meta and Google, governments with ambitions to snoop on the most private aspects of the life of every individual under their jurisdiction. And sometimes beyond. Yes, U.K., I’m looking at you! (More on that in the future when things have settled a little).

From 1950 to 1990, the East German secret police, the Stasi, controlled the population of the country through mass surveillance and a large network of informants that were used and dumped when they were no longer useful. What has been constructed in the 21st century Internet is a vast set of tools with powers the Stasi could only dream about. A network that doesn’t need any human compliance for information to flow back to central command. Your telephone, your television, your car, your fridge, everything you do is known to the companies that have just shown that they are not only willing to work with authoritarians, but will actively support and develop new tools for them to operate their surveillance.

This is not the Internet I want.

What I’ve tried to do here, perhaps a little clumsily, is make the link between tech and democracy, outlining some of the dots that make up the web of deceit and manipulation exercised now.

It also provides a hint about what you can do to disrupt this and the way only we as a mass can. Individually, our actions are worthless. Collectively, however, it’s an entirely different story. You should do two things. Participate in limiting your exposure to online advertising, blocking ads, ‘local-hosting’ (127.0.0.1) or otherwise limiting the flow of data from your devices to these companies. Secondly, you should make it known that you are not in agreement and that there are already many non-invasive solutions for businesses to advertise, for example, Contextual Advertising, which is based on content analysis and not privacy-invading attributes.

Remember, there is only ONE metric that is of value to you as a business, and that is if your ads provide more sales. Period. If you need to know my age, my sex, the colour of my skin, my income, where I live, and literally hundreds of thousands of other data points, you don’t deserve my business, and you have a serious problem morally.

And yes, as I’ve discussed before, distributed and decentralised systems should play a part too. And no, they are not the only solution.

There. That feels better. Have a great week.

My apologies, there’ll be no writing this week.

A personal situation has kiboshed any plans I had to write anything about the past week.

I’m looking forward to getting back to normal next week.

Have a great week.

That’s it, done. The first month of the year is already over.

If it didn’t pass by at breakneck pace for you, I’d like a little bit of what you’re drinking please!

For this instalment, I’m not sur how much I am going to write as I start typing this out. It has been a strange couple of weeks for me on both a personal and professional footing. Various issues took up far too much time than I had anticipated and left me a little on the back foot to prepare a focused article here.

But, as it’s my online space and I get to decide what I do with it, I suppose that’s ok.

Let’s dive straight in.

Turbulence online

I’ve been an advocate for a more open social web, one where the likes of Meta are reduced to being members or players, but are stripped of any overbearing control, creepy surveillance systems and damaging societal-level incentives through advertising. It is a feeling I’ve had for many years, and one that has accentuated more recently. Particularly with the turn to the right that that has manifested for much longer than most realise, but is only just being noticed.

I’d written about this some time ago, and possibly even had some of my thoughts dismissed for it. Heck, I even blinked myself, thinking that I had pretty much gone too far and that this is not what was happening in front off my eyes. But here we are. And the truth is that I, and many others, were right. The signs were there. There were warnings, and still we were unable collectively to do anything about it and that has left us in a very compromised position as general members of the exploited public.

What we have now is a tech oligarchy that is systematically dismantling many pillars of democracy for their own profits and power, at the expense of you and anyone not connected. They have skilfully convinced a number of people who would be the natural targets of such extreme political stances that they, too, are part of this new power —people of colour, people with neurodivergence, and people of sexual orientations that differ from what their religion normally accepts historically. What those who have been co-opted seem to not realise, is that once there are no longer other easier targets to attack, it will be them next in line.

Extreme right-wing politics is fuelled by hate and fear. The two resources in abundance in America right now. Yes, in abundance for the moment, but it is not an infinite resource and at some point it will run out, or become so extreme as to disgust the world into action.

Are we there yet? Of course not, but it is a short route from where we are today and totalitarianism and imperialism and dare I say it, Fascism. America is in a dangerous place.

It used to be said that when China sneezes, the whole world catches a cold. It referred to its power in manufacturing prowess and supply chain management, and any disruption there could have had enormous consequences for the world. This phrase is likely to get adjusted for the current political situation in the US. I’ll leave that to you imagination. I have my ideas.

Looking at the practical fallout of this and how it relates to the Caribbean, leads me to feel very worried for the near future.

Over weekend a sustained and violent attack on an institution that I have worked for took place. The entire website of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) got taken offline. No holding page, no explanation. Nothing. Just a 404.

USAID has (had?) an annual budget of $50 billion and has been a big donor, developer, and assistant in the Caribbean for a long time. The Agency has been called “criminal” by Musk, and its shuttering is in line with Trump’s “America first” agenda, that is just a thinly veiled warning to the world of their imperial ambitions. (See Greenland and Panama and Project 2025). Many businesses, many people, and many families in the Caribbean are going to be directly and negatively affected by this. It is so depressing to see this happen to people who least deserve it.

And, yes, you can argue that USAID wasn’t a perfect organisation and it left a few things to be desired in terms of development and effectiveness, but it tried. The people I worked with there were all passionate about helping, and unlike many development agencies, it wasn’t staffed by “white knights in shining armour”, which is a legitimate criticism of many aid organisations around the world. It was staffed by Caribbeans from communities in the Caribbean, trying to do their best for their communities and the region as a whole.

It is all about to end, if we believe what we see. And I’m sad about that for a number of reasons. But one of which, I suspect, hasn’t been thoroughly thought through.

Geopolitically, the Caribbean is in the Americas, and at its closet point, only approximately 50 miles from mainland USA. It is intrinsically linked to the USA through its history and is a gateway to the continent both physically and through telecoms infrastructure. And it is this that is a danger for the USA, because it is also a gateway for other forces, open to exploit.

During some research I did on the Caribbean a few years back, I crossed by information that showed how some US citizens had been spied upon within the continental United States, through the telecoms and internet infrastructure of the Caribbean. It was a shock to the security forces and lead to a number of decisions being made about the use of various telecoms equipment manufacturers. Telecoms equipment is essentially made in two places currently, Europe and China, with the USA effectively losing its place in that market a long time ago. An out and out ban on the deployment of Chinese equipment was instigated, and pressure subsequently put on Caribbean nations to divest and replace them.

Some of the reasons behind this, and I cannot go into any detail here, were that America had let go of any interest in helping the Latin America and the Caribbean for a number of years, leaving the door open to other influences to provide money, equipment, assistance and training to deploy telecoms and ancillary devices (CCTV and the like). La nature a horreur du vide!

So you see —and without any judgement on my part— withdrawal of interest in Latin America and the Caribbean will only provide an incentive for other parties to invest, setup and implant themselves in the region. You don’t need me to tell you who the most likely candidates are and their track record of freedom of speech are.

The tech oligarchy is actively supporting and enabling this and they deserve our derision and our resistance by us contributing rebuilding an open social web that they stole from us a couple of decades ago, before it is too late.

Reading

“LLMs amplify existing security risks and introduce new ones”

Gary Marcus discusses the previously-linked Microsoft research on Cybersecurity in the age of AI. TLDR: 😱

On the Grid​ | How Surveillance Became a Love Language

It is out of hand and must be comprehensively dealt with, in my view.

Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads

What the headline fails to convey is that location tracking, i.e., precise longitude and latitude coordinates are being passed on, even if you have turned them off! I smell criminal proceedings.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great week.

In what I can only describe as a fantastically depressing week, with events worldwide kicking off as expected, but simultaneously going further than anyone imagined.

I wanted to keep this blog apolitical, concentrating mostly on tech, with a little bit of cultural commentary thrown in and a dose of analysis to try to understand how technology has, is and will affect us in the region. That can no longer be the case because I cannot stand by and let powerful (and incredibly vicious) white me in Silicon Valley take everything away to make them and their cronies even richer than obscenely rich. I get the idea that you’d like to make a lot of money, I would too. But there is a point where your wealth is too much. It’s disgusting. It’s a cancer. And just like cancerous cells, it grows and grows at the expense of healthy cells, eventually killing the host. If you need me to spell out who is who in that analogy, I invite you to consider where you place yourself today.

/rant over

I promised to write about an article I recently read, and I think now is a good time to do so. The article is called Analog Privilege. It is written by Maroussia Lévesque. The article piqued my interest because it spoke about a long-standing secret in tech. Something that has been reported on, but not enough and not with any conviction either. The purveyors of the tech pushed on us either don’t use it, don’t let their children use it, or have special “override” privileges that shield them from the actual damage their wares have on the everyday person.

If it is good enough for Meta to surveil us 24 hours a day, even when we have explicitly requested they do not, and from applications and products that are not and should not be related, but by backroom deals still spy on us, passing that data to Mark Zuckerberg. The minimum we should require is absolute and complete access to his life. And when a fraction of that intrusion was discovered (the various bots following the private jets of these people), there were shutdowns as a “violation of privacy”. Really? In reality, we should be the holders of our private information, and their requests to use it should be ephemeral, restrained in scope, revocable and erasable at any instant.

My text here combines the topics discussed in the article with my feelings and discussion of them. You’ll note where I use the noun, I use here original American spelling, and use the British spelling for everything else.

This is called analogue privilege.

The article starts with a very real-world example of how predictive analysis used by child welfare services in the United States is practically used to stigmatise the poor whilst simultaneously sparing the rich from said stigma. In short, the rich get to pay for real doctors, and genuine patient care, whereas the poor, and soon you too, will be thrust into a semi-automated hellscape of healthcare that is only “care” in name.

Future Hospital visit: [www.youtube.com/watch

When listed, the range and scope of interactions required by humans in everyday life, the potential for abuse through the replacement of humans driving those interactions, is enormous. But what is often lost in that replacement is that human interaction is analogue, and consequently messy by definition.

We, including me, discuss the “digital divide” and how the underprivileged are being excluded from society and how that is a bad thing generally. And that is true. Typically. But this understanding is changing because more and more technology is detrimental rather than beneficial. She illustrates this using the table below:

		</th>
		<th>
			Beneficial
		</th>
		<th>
			Detrimental
		</th>
	</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
	<tr>
		<td>
			Inclusion
		</td>
		<td>
			Voluntary opt-in: power
		</td>
		<td>
			Involuntary lock-in: vulnerability
		</td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<td>
			Exclusion
		</td>
		<td>
			Involuntary lock-out: vulnerability
		</td>
		<td>
			Voluntary opt-out: power
		</td>
	</tr>
</tbody>

The “analogue haves” have the power to decline participation in systems that use AI, for example. Her article focuses mainly on voluntary opt-out of detrimental systems, which she calls “analog privilege.”

Paying particular attention to the use of AI in systems, the article highlights how, in real-world use, LLMs show “significant downsides” for people subject to error-prone (hallucinations), probabilistic guesstimates (stochastic parrots) that incorrectly assume the future mirrors the past.

What do all trading adverts say? “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” Why is this obvious statement reserved only for these systems and not AI?

Chapter I discusses beneficial and detrimental AI systems, making reference to how automation is about streamlining management and breaking down work into ordered, manageable items to be subsequently automated. Placing AI on a scale from beneficial, where we are freed of repetitive, mindless tasks, to detrimental, where enforcement is supercharged, consequently providing adverse consequences for the ‘enforced’.

Real-world examples are widely known nowadays, like the Amazon delivery drivers forced to keep empty bottles in their vans so they can urinate because the algorithm doesn’t factor in human needs through a cycle requiring ever-faster deliveries to hit the targets set by a detrimental AI. This is an example of how a beneficial AI morphed into a detrimental one, and the article shows how automation can easily and quickly degenerate with disastrous consequences.

Noted in the article is that a lot of literature and discussion has focused on the potential AI harms, while missing who AI spares. The debate has centered around inclusion, fairness, and guarantees of transparency, but has failed to discuss the divide between the analogue haves and the analogue have-nots as an important issue.

One example discussed is LegalTech, where a two-speed system is observed, one analogue for the rich and the other automated approximations of legal representation for the poor. Similarly, social media studies have shown the trade-offs of automated content moderation, where being flagged, struck off and even banned for life is reserved for the analogue have-nots, with no recourse, precisely because the analogue route (talking to someone) is tightly cut off for the likes of you and me.

With the prevalence and accelerating deployment of these systems, the actual harms being caused are not the world-ending consequences plied by the AI grifters, they are the everyday acts of violence committed by an unfeeling algorithm that suffers no consequences for poor decision-making and possesses absolutely no compassion or empathy for the human using that system.

A thread that comes up repeatedly in any serious analysis of these systems has been coined as technosolutionism. Big Tech’s true sin is its arrogance and belief that an algorithm can solve anything. As I discussed earlier, people are messy and illogical, and relying solely on algorithms is a recipe for disaster for those who find themselves in the ‘Involuntary lock-in: vulnerability’ quadrant of the table above. Tech used to work, and it used to solve very well, but only for a small set of very specific and defined problems. As tech has become ubiquitous, tech is showing its limitations, but the tech leaders still believe that the next .0 of their wares will fix these. What those releases generally do is resolve old issues and create a whole host of new ones.

The paper also highlights the obvious conclusions of digital colonialism, where analogue haves are de facto at the top of the pile, benefiting from the exploitation of those underneath. Akin to gated communities, the elite extract themselves from society, refusing to participate meaningfully and contributing nothing to the local community.

The paper then gets into details about how and where LLMs fall short, with a particularly telling conversation with a chatbot:

“Promt: Get your sofa onto the roof of your house, without using a pulley, ladder, a crane …

Human response: I will build a large wooden ramp … on the side of the my house with platforms every 5 feet

GPT-3 response: Cut the bottom of the sofa so that it would fit through the window… break the windows to make room for the sofa.”

Yeah, sure.

And if you think I’m a little melodramatic, take facial expression technology. It is entirely based on the already-discredited pseudoscience of Phrenology —I’ll spare you the racist and sexist origins of it— but that isn’t stopping companies from working hard to integrate it into products from criminal investigations to dynamic pricing in supermarkets based on the face of the potential buyer, such a disgraceful and immoral thing to do. And please keep in mind that these systems are known for making stuff up, so it could be you who falls victim, and you wouldn’t even know it! (See below in the reading section).

Maroussia Lévesque has a far more eloquent discussion of this topic, and I would definitely suggest you read it. Although her case study focuses mainly on LegalTech, it isn’t overly technical in that domain and is very readable.

You can find it here.

It’s probably time I concluded this…

Despite this being a largely critical look at tech in general and AI specifically, I do acknowledge that there are many potential benefits, but I would say that it is incumbent upon us to ensure that tech is used for good and for the benefit of everyone. That requires remaining vigilant to the grift, the abuses, and the apparent dog-whistling of products and services that will be used against us as soon as they possibly can.

One area that seems to be taking hold is the use of federated systems, which wouldn’t necessarily solve the problems above but would contribute to better governance. I’ve discussed federated services previously, and I hope you start building out systems along those lines for beneficial use. The most widely used federated system existing today is email. The millions of email servers on the internet all talk to each other, allowing efficient communication from user to user without requiring that user to be beholden to a specific company. Google tried to break email and centralise it for its own selfish use and future extraction. Thankfully, it didn’t work. The more services that are generated, the more chance we have of saving tech and the Internet from its current destructive path.

Reading

➔ “Zuckerberg Poisons the World — Selling Digital Opioid”

I don’t think the future of social media is bright in its current form. I think that bears out with Meta’s investments and panics towards the “Metaverse” (how’s that going?) and now AI. Looking for the next grift is an endless task.

➔ Automation in Retail Is Even Worse Than You Thought

“New technology is not just making shopping more challenging for workers and consumers—it’s poised to rip off the most vulnerable.”

Have a lovely week, and thanks for reading.

A picture tells a thousand words.

I didn’t set out to write this. I had planned on writing about the recent paper (Analog Privilege) that I read on a recent trip and came back with many notes in the margin of the printout. But events sometimes take over what you had thought about doing. What is it they say?

Best-laid plans are laid to waste.

Yeah.

This started life in the ‘of note’ column, and as I started writing it, I figured it would be better in the main section. Like always. I have thoughts.

I wanted to discuss my feelings about some of the major issues affecting the tech world and the Internet today. Yesterday (as when this gets emailed) was inauguration day in the United States of America. The American people have chosen, democratically, a candidate that, for want of a better description, acts like a Mafia boss. This will have, and has already had, significant consequences on how the Internet will change over the coming years.

More than ever, the Internet is central to the lives of billions of people, for better or worse. The incoming regime will test the institutions of the Internet more than at any time in history, from areas concerning Section 230 that protect online platforms such as social media from sanction for any publication on or via its system (wrongly in some cases, in my view).

It will challenge the underlying governance structure of the Internet, which is currently open to all (although many nations in the Global South would, rightly, dispute that), exacerbating the so-called Splinternet as decisions on “un-American” products like routers, firewalls, switches and services linked to regimes this administration considers “anti-american” —which by definition is anything not American— will be targeted for sanctions, punitive tax structures, and even outright bans.

This will inevitably lead to retaliation from those targeted. And despite the bluster and political propaganda from (generally) right-wing journals, the EU has not stopped its program on reigning in abuses of the Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSEs), as the ongoing saga of its investigation into Google’s refusal to fact-check its search results, or in recent step up its investigation of Twitter’s abuses of the DSA, or even Meta’s wholesale abandonment of fact-checking and moderation.

Note: I’ll use the term VLOPs from hereon. Not because I agree 100% with the DSA, but it is a convenient term rather than Big Tech (not specific enough), Social Media (Networks or Media? Active or Performative?) or other loose definitions.

Side note here: You may have knee-jerk reactions to the DSA and the DMA. You should take the time to read what the acts are; here is a good start. You may not entirely agree with them, but you cannot argue that they are anti-consumer. In fact, this is the most significant difference in legislation and governance of the Internet seen between the three largest groups in the world that have enormous sway in how the Internet is run. America is pro-business, to the point that it willingly throws its consumers under the bus; the EU is pro-consumer, to the point that it throws businesses under the bus; and China is pro-CCP, meaning that everyone gets thrown under the bus if they are out of line. This is a poor abbreviation of the much more detailed and nuanced arguments in Anu Bradford’s book, Digital Empires (available in bookshops and most online retailers).

If the recent events of TikTok are any indication, they show us what many of the large platforms will do. No later than a few hours after TikTok went dark this weekend, Meta announced that it was developing and soon releasing a blatant rip-off of a much-used TikTok service, CapCut.

What we see is an entirely political manoeuvre by Mark Zuckerberg to exploit a situation for his own gain. Proving that he has virtually no morals, not that he had strong ones in the first place.¹ His machinations will prop up a more nationalistic and corrupt government in his home country, thus legitimising the same in many other nations worldwide. I’ve said as much before the Brexit referendum, that the nationalistic overtones of that consultation (that incidentally, the outcome of which was not legally binding and was advisory only) would entrain a slow march to nationalism in Europe as it would empower and legitimise the would-be despots and autocrats to push harder than before. We’re seeing it in France, where the RN (Front National) made significant gains by laundering their image (it’s a lie, and France will regret it if they’re elected), in Italy with a populist right-winger that will shortly show her true colours, and again in Germany, where, clearly, much of the population has entirely lost any connection to their past. Plenty of ink will be spilt on this topic and those related to it. I’ll let you form your own opinions.

The Internet is central to all of this, and it is the Internet that could help pull us out of this downward spiral, but it is not going to be done on the VLOPs as they will (and are doing so already in the US) controlling what you can and cannot see. It is going to be done from the ground up. Not by actively using the big platforms and staying passive while rights are being squashed. Under US law, the VLOPs private businesses and thus can allow/disallow whomever they like. Just remember, they don’t have your interests at heart.

A better way for the future of the Internet is more federation. Federation means that you don’t need to accept the bullshit of VLOPs, and you can easily move to a new instance without losing the connection to your friends, family and other professional connections. Currently, if you get banned on LinkedIn for an unfair or unreasonable reason, you can do nothing (see above about private business). You might even suffer professionally. With a federated alternative, you would be able to move all that data to a new instance without losing access.

Even better, and I’d recommend this: you should set up your own website with a domain you control and publish your CV (minus personal data), pointing people to it when needed, similar to a LinkedIn link, but on a platform where you are in charge, and without the privacy-invading surveillance. You are then only subject to your country’s laws regarding what you cannot publish.

The simple fact is, and the one thing I would like you to take away from this, is that the Internet is changing and will not be the same as it was just a few years ago. It is changing for the worse, despite the efforts of the EU and others (however poorly you may think they are done). And its current centralisation in the hands of overt extremists will be used against you at the earliest opportunity.

Reading

A few articles and things I’ve been reading.

Lessons From Red Teaming 100 Generative AI Products

Microsoft Red Teamed one hundred generative AI products. Their conclusion? “LLMs amplify existing security risks and introduce new ones”. To boot, they note that securing AI is an impossible task in that it will never be complete.

New data set reveals 40,000 apps behind location tracking

“380 million location data from 137 countries: a previously unknown data set from a US data broker shows the dangers of global data trading. 40,000 apps are affected …”

How is this not 1984?

Five things privacy experts know about AI

1. AI models memorise their training data
2. AI models then leak their training data
3. Ad hoc protections don’t work
4. Robust protections exist, though their mileage may vary
5. The larger the model, the worse it gets

That fifth point is directly related to last week’s article.

CEO of AI Music Company Says People Don’t Like Making Music

Filed under: What the fuck is wrong with these people?

UK government plans to splurge billions on AI

Rather than funding things that they can fix today. What could possibly go wrong?

Of note

See above.

Thoroughly depressed and hoping for a better future. Have a great week.