“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men” is what Robert Burns wrote in a poem entitled “To a Mouse, On Turning Her up in Her Nest with the Plough”, November 1785.

The quote has been paraphrased and used, attributed and mis-attributed thousands and thousands of times, but its meaning is essentially still the same:

No matter how well we’ve planned or pre-planned, there is always something that will disrupt that plan

And so it was for me over the last couple of weeks.

In a how-the-sausage-is-made moment, how I write this and other writings is not a simple process of sitting in front of a computer opening Ulysses (my preferred app for writing), bashing away on the keyboard for fifteen minutes or so. Not at all.

It starts with me spending horrendous hours scanning news, reading articles, papers, and books. Filling my mind with millions of seemingly inconsequential details, anecdotes, thoughts, feelings, the reading usually prescribes some kind of idea of a topic to write about. Then comes the hard work. I generally try to read around the subject, getting as much as I can in a limited amount of time, parallel to all the other reading that is going on. Because the world doesn’t stand still and there is always new stuff to read. Once I’ve compiled some material, I try to work it into some kind of coherent article that is more of an opinion piece than an academic discussion. This sometimes works well and sometimes, er, less so. An article idea can have been born weeks ago, but stayed in an embryonic state until I get the urge to write something. Which doesn’t come as often as that. The article is then written, edited, and eventually posted, with the actual writing process taking a couple of hours or so. Think 3 to 4 hours.

That was essentially what I’d hoped to have done last week, but my body had other plans. I seem to have picked up a god awful cold (flu?) and have been suffering for about a week now. And yes, if you’re reading this, or more accurately, if I’m writing this, it is because I am feeling much better, and I am the current vainqueur in this war against the virus that is trying to kill me. I say current, as it has not completely surrendered yet, but just like the Battle of Little Bighorn, Custer (the virus) is surrounded and will ultimately lose, and die.

In fact, while I think of it —and this is just brain dumping as I write— I watched the two finals at Indian Wells this Sunday and thoroughly enjoyed them both. But a stand-out moment for me was the winner’s address to the public in the Women’s final. Mirra Andreeva decided to thank herself, her belief, her determination, her doubts, her fears, etc. “I’d like to thank me” is what she said. I think she’s right. It is not born of arrogance. It is born of thanking all of those that go to make a Master’s Champion, which is a big team, and herself!

So, I’ll forgive myself, and acknowledge that I was ill, and I couldn’t function at all for three days, and the rest of time was a fog and time passing by. And that not writing to a schedule is fine, and I can take a break when needed.

This week is probably going to be scrappy as I haven’t had the opportunity to do what I usually do (see above).

If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed that I’m not the biggest fan of online advertising, or more precisely, the current form of online advertising.

I am not the only one, and there are a number of people and organisations around the world working to reign in the abuses of the adtech world, that has become so toxic that people have died as direct consequences of their reckless business practices.

I’ve discussed what the problem is. TLDR; wonky moral compasses and incentives that are aligned to put people in danger to make a quick profit.

I’ve even discussed how. TLDR; mass surveillance technologies that track absolutely everything you do online. And I mean EVERYTHING. Hoarding of information that is both consensual and non-consensual to produce questionably reliant “profiles” and even more questionably predict behaviours.

I’ve discussed how we can go about doing something to prevent, setback, or otherwise disrupt the flow of this information. TLDR; install ad-blockers and use them liberally. File GDPR requests liberally, using the tools to largely automate that. And lobby for non-invasive and non-surveillance-tech-based advertising models that have been shown to perform about as well as the “profiled” ads do, but with little to no personal information leaked in exchange.

If you think I’m being over-dramatic, have a read of the third article in the reading list and then reach out to me. I’d be happy to discuss.

Reading

If you’re not familiar with the Streisand Effect, you’re going to love this. If you are, you can skip over this bit.

Sometime between 2002 and 2003, a California Coastal Records project was measuring the coastal erosion in a well healed area of the Californian coastline. Malibu was being photographed in detail to see how much the sea had encroached on the land and its data used to help identify properties that might need remedial action or evacuation to save the occupants from major loss or even loss of life.

Barbra Streisand, a resident in the area, objected to her house being identified in one of the publicly available photographs. So she set about correcting that, and I, unlike many, feel that she did this from a good place and not from the privileged arsehole perspective. In trying to rectify the breach of privacy, she instructed a lawyer to help her do something about this. Said lawyer proceeded to sue the photographer, a government contractor, for 50 million USD.

What that eventually did is rock the ears of many a newspaper and journalist, thus blowing the story into proportions beyond anyone’s control, ultimately bringing the private information to the masses in a spectacular own goal. More ordinary people knew the property than before the lawsuit, and thus the term was coined by a well-known online writer, Mike Masnic. You can read more here.

The top book on the reading list, is going through the same situation.

It’s like the tech dudes read a lot of stuff but don’t actually understand the message or learn from previous events, or in fact, history as a whole. And a case in point is the first link on the list today.

Meta stops ex-director from promoting critical memoir

I don’t know how many times we need to keep hearing Meta disgraceful record of playing fast and loose with human mental health before we conclude that it is a fundamentally immoral organisation akin to the tobacco companies of yesterday. If you work there, you should probably reconsider (if you can) your part in the machine and perhaps find a way out.

Their actions on this book will propel it to a bestseller in no time. Stupid, and immoral, are Meta.

Meta mocked for raising “Bob Dylan defense” of torrenting in AI copyright fight

In a follow-up to the article I wrote where it was shown that Meta wilfully torrented nearly 82 TB of data, including previously known pirated material, they have now pulled out a stupid defence ploy. OpenAI is just as bad, lobbying for free access to everything to train its mediocre models. That might backfire on them in the not too distant future.

Data Broker Brags About Having Highly Detailed Personal Information on Nearly All Internet Users

I’ve been on a roll criticising adtech lately and for good reason. I am not convinced that many have even an inkling of the amount and depth of data that is being collected and weaponised against us. We’ve built the Stasi’s wet dream, and we have absolutely no idea where it is going to lead us. TLDR; somewhere you would rather not be.

It’s time for the European Union to rethink personal social networking

I’m torn, really torn about what is happening on the Internet lately. On the one hand I see the need for a certain amount of sovereignty, on the other hand, I absolutely detest and react negatively to nationalistic tendencies. Nationalism —not to be confused with pride of one’s nation— is a destructive force, because it relies on deliberate strategies to denigrate others to appear better. It doesn’t work with me and I seem to have a very sensitive sensor and spot it a mile off. This discussion gives me a lot to think about.

I’ve a busy week, catching up on time lost and to make the days go even faster, I’m recording two podcasts this weeK. The first is with my friend Jean-François Nantel on the Innovation, Agilité & Excellence podcast, and the second with another friend, Michele Marius on the ICT Pulse Podcast.

I’ll let you know when they’re out.

Have a fantastic week.

I really did fall out of the habit of writing these things! I realised that I messed up the dates of the last post I made, suggesting that it was the previous week rather than the week it really was. Oops. I’ve corrected it now.

I guess it is a bit of a symptom of what I was discussing in that writing. How I felt a little tired and overwhelmed by events around the world. Sadly, things haven’t slowed down and, if anything, have become even more urgent and critical.

I order not to make this a weekly moan, I will endeavour to write a few positive things too, but I don’t think it is appropriate to ignore and shy away from the very real issues in the digital world.

That’s pretty much the structure that I wanted to explore today…

I mentioned Caribbean Digital Compass, a joint adventure I have embarked upon with Michele Marius from ICT Pulse. We soft launched a couple of articles over the last few days.

I’d be grateful if you’d have a read, share and subscribe to the newsletter. It will become a paid newsletter at some point, but for the moment it is going to stay free to read until we get the momentum going, so take advantage now of the free access and enjoy.

It’s more focused on businesses in the region that need reliable, factual and helpful analysis of the digital world, rather than these longer opinion pieces. We’re trying to keep them at about 800 to a 1000 words or so.

The first two articles cover Generative AI and the Auditing, and an analysis of 5G.

More to come!

https://caribbeandigitalcompass.com/

Geopolitics and the Internet

When Grateful Dead musician, John Perry Barlow, wrote what has become a universally recognised treatise for the Internet (A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace), he rather foolishly didn’t factor in that governments would eventually impose themselves upon the governance of a tool that became the plumbing for much of what we do in our lives today. The Global Digital Compact and the discussions leading up to that have shown a remarkable difference in attitude and attention to the Internet since his writing. Governments were largely hands-off until recently, now the strategic importance of the Internet has been laid bare in many ways.

The basic premise of the text was to say to the governments of the world, stay out of Internet business, this is the digital world, and it has nothing to do with the physical world. That turned out to be not only false, but highly immature, given the fact that more and more of physical life is being integrated with digital life, from online communications to filing government taxes and any number of private and public services.

This is such an issue, that we even have whole NGOs dedicated to bringing the Internet have-nots online and closing the “digital divide”. Locally, I see more and more businesses digitalising operations and providing public-facing interfaces mediated through digital tools and less and less through human interaction. To hell with those that don’t have smartphones seems to become the norm. Those, being the handicapped, the poor and many others that can’t or won’t have digital tools.

Which brings me to where we are today. At a crossroads is how I’d put it. A crossroads that could lead us to a better online existence, but more likely a crossroads that will lead us to a more fractured and divided Internet.

I’m particularly concerned about the currant administration in the United States of America that has spared no time dismantling important institutions, that, despite their expense, provide real value for money when you look at the results in their whole. Institutions like USAID that I have previously mentioned and worked for in the past, to things that should set off alarm bells around the world. This administration recently called on the U.S. Cyber Command to stand down, signalling to the world that they are now a soft target. Whether or not that is objectively true, the signal is significant. Coupled with its stance on reneging on aid for foreign countries, leaving a vacuum in the Caribbean that will almost certainly be filled by actors that might be less favourable to the region now that they have no competition or pushback, one has to consider whether the USA is now a rogue state or not. Not the kind of question I had on my bingo card for 2025!

But here’s the real issue when I think about the Internet. Many of the organisations that are responsible for the inner workings are located in the US. I’m seriously asking myself the question about their independence being maintained or how they might be affected going forward, if the current administration continues down this path of destruction. If I were part of the leadership, I’d be keeping a very close eye on what’s happening and starting to think about mitigation strategies to protect the Internet as we know it.

Again, I’m not trying to be melodramatic, simply facing up to what could be a very real possibility of a whole scale attack on the very inner institution of the Internet and what the repercussions could be.

Sorry. It was all doom and gloom in the end. 😵‍💫

I promise to find something positive to write next time.

Reading

A couple of articles that caught my attention this week.

Analysts Warn of AI Cooling with Microsoft Cancellation of AI Datacenter Leases

This may or may not be a turning point in the hype surrounding generative AI. Expenditure on datacenters, model training and deploying half-baked apps to users is starting to add up, with little return seen on that investment. The fact that every single prompt costs Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and any number of companies in this business should be a worry.

You’re getting it free or at less-than-cost because it is being subsidised.

That won’t last forever.

Inside the Taliban’s surveillance network monitoring millions

Is this what we can expect from our own democratic governments?

I think it is worth asking that question.

If I’m honest, I’m not completely resolved on where I stand on surveillance and legitimate access to private communications. Total secrecy for individuals or total openness for the police seem to me to be two extremes that I am not comfortable with.

I’m still working this out.

The impact on the African continent of Meta scrapping its fact-checking program

The collapse of fact-checking by Meta and other online platforms has real-world consequences.

People will die as a direct result of this handwashing. It is time for something to be done.

I’m sure it’ll be fine in the end. Have a lovely week.

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.