It has been another week of tension on the island despite an accord being signed by several actors in the discussions. It wasn’t unanimous, meaning the conflict is not over. This will not be resolved until a much deeper discussion is had and a long-term plan is implemented. I’ll let you know how it goes.

There have been no Internet shutdowns so far, and I don’t expect that to happen in the current climate.

This week, I wanted to return to one of the subjects that really ticks me off on the Internet: advertising.

Again, for the record, I am not against advertising. I am against the advertising we have today on the Internet. It crossed a line several years ago and hasn’t been rained in yet. Is that about to change?

I hate online advertising. Or, if I’m being more accurate, I hate what online advertising has become.

It used to be useful. It used to let you know about new products and services without being egregious or overwhelming.

Then came that fateful first banner ad in October 1994 from none other than what became Wired Magazine. It was called HotWired then, back when the Internet was an accessory to a news or entertainment product that was still being printed on dead trees and shipped worldwide.

I was an avid Wired Magazine reader, finally finding a magazine that took the Internet seriously and provided some of the most thoughtful journalism around the Internet and tech-related events. I bought imports of the magazine from the US, as we had nothing comparable to that in the UK, where I lived at the time. Wired UK eventually came to our shores, but it was a pale imitation of the real thing, and, surprisingly for me, it didn’t share that many articles across publications.

Wired set up a digital offshoot of the magazine that ended up having more employees than the magazine proper. It was racking in 20 million dollars in revenue (peanuts compared to today’s standards, but enormous back then for an online business), and even started an online search engine called HotBot.

But the lure of advertising was too great to ignore, and it set in motion a race to the bottom that we haven’t finished yet. New regulations, particularly in the EU, might mean we don’t actually get to rock bottom, but we are pretty much there regardless.

As a side note, Wired magazine was also the online space where I first learnt about cookies and how they would transform the web into something useful. I’m still waiting. Push technology was another one, but that’s another discussion for another time.

It was inevitable that online advertising would become more and more invasive as the years rolled on, with new ad tech being developed at a frightening pace. Developments typically ran three times around the globe before regulation could get its shoes on. There is nothing sacred from advertisers these days: cookies, tracking pixels, cross-site cookies, third-party tracking cookies, GPS tracking, purchase history, browser history, and illicit screen captures of what you’re working on.

The problem is that together, this technology is not neutral, innocent, or safe for many people.

We’ve all heard the anecdote of the ‘grandfather to be’ being informed by a big chain store’s pharmacy before his daughter had the time to announce the news. The ending was happy in this instance, but imagine for a moment a much more sinister outcome, and there are plenty of examples of them, particularly suicide by vulnerable people being subjected to a barrage of unwanted algorithmically generated timelines.

I was reading an article about having a new, clean YouTube account that, within seven days of the users viewing a slightly right-wing video, the algorithm pushed the account deeper and deeper into the world of Neo-nazis, holocaust deniers, and the like. SEVEN. DAYS. Let that sink in.

But why is it this bad now?

It is all about incentives. Two organisations in the Internet space have shown that this makes a lot of money. A LOT OF MONEY. And clearly, money trumps everything else, even 43,000 lives in a genocide that took place in Myanmar, where Facebook are complicit in the promotion and propagation of hate speech and organisation discussions related to the operations carried out by the military.

The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a “determining role” in the Rohingya genocide. Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people. The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the platform “a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate”.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide#Criticism_and_controversies

Of the approximately one million civilians displaced and still stuck in abject conditions in Bangladesh, a few tens of thousands of children were hoping to get $1M to fund some limited and basic schooling —as asked for by aid agencies— and Zuckerberg told them to what amounts to “Fuck off”. They still haven’t fully acknowledged their part or made any reparations. Very much like colonialism, n’est pas? (Digital Colonialism is another subject I briefly discussed, and I would like to get into specifics and more details sometime).

It makes the old journalistic adage, “If it bleeds, it leads”, positively pedestrian in comparison.

Deep in this is an argument about platform neutrality, enshrined in US law and popularly known as Section 230. Section 230 essentially states that platforms cannot be held responsible for the content flowing through their dumb pipes. After all, it didn’t “produce” the content. It is a law that made sense when our timelines were something more akin to what I see when using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to check up on news articles, blogs and other media (even YouTube). But this is being called into question now, as it should be, because timelines are no longer chronological —without manipulation. They are all algorithmically generated now as “For You” tabs and are even starting to “generate” their own content using Generative AI. That last bit is important, as it, in my mind, unequivocally removes the protection from Section 230. I would argue that forcing unwanted and unasked-for content on a timeline does the same, i.e. if the timeline isn’t chronological (untouched), then it is curated, i.e. content. But that argument hasn’t been won as yet, despite several court cases currently being discussed.

I’ve seen arguments about IRL advertising, suggesting you can’t not see it or ask for it. Two things: 1) They don’t track your every move online or offline. 2)

Legislation has been enacted for many years in the EU, and it was recently strengthened with the Digital Services Act. Unlike the E-Commerce Directive, this act is a regulation and mandates states to implement it, thus harmonising regulation for its members.

Intermediaries (Facebook, ISPs, for example) and other intermediary services can be legally required to remove content should it be deemed more than just cached or conduit data (i.e. unaltered). Providers are exempt from liability:

the DSA establishes a broad liability exemption as long the providers are “in no way involved with the information transmitted.”

Source: https://digitalplanet.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/DD-Report_2-Christoph-Busch-11.30.22.pdf

In my view, these regulations don’t go far enough and only allow companies like Facebook et al. to continue their surveillance capitalism and profit on the attention economy to the loss of many, mostly those least able to afford such losses. At worst, they allow them to continue feeling genocides and driving the humanity out of the Internet.

In this world, truth is worthless, and lies are valuable.

I have discussed two separate topics: advertising and engagement content. The link, of course, is that the former is entirely responsible for the latter.

We can and should do something about it. I hinted about what to do a little earlier. 😉

I’ll save that for another time.

Reading

An article that popped up only today (Monday 21st October 2024) as I write this goes a long way to describing this feeling that I and many others are having.

More on the same subject from The Walrus.

One more for the road.

I have written this in a decidedly unalgorithmically-generated style from the deepest depths of my meatware. Have a great week.

You can find the podcast and other links here.

This podcast is recorded in French, but using something like a Whisper model, you can get a transcript and then translate it into English or another language reasonably quickly and easily.

Show notes and topics discussed:

French

• La dépendance au cloud pose des questions de résilience.
• Un mix entre solutions locales et cloud est nécessaire.
• L’intelligence artificielle est mal nommée et mal comprise.
• Intel doit s’adapter aux nouvelles réalités du marché.
• La spécialisation est essentielle dans l’industrie technologique.
• La gouvernance d’Internet est en évolution constante.
• Les libertés d’expression numériques varient d’un pays à l’autre.
• Les technologies doivent être évaluées pour leur impact sociétal.
• Les modèles d’affaires doivent évoluer avec la complexité technologique.

English

• Cloud dependence raises questions of resilience.
• A mix between local and cloud solutions is necessary.
• Artificial intelligence is misnamed and misunderstood.
• Intel must adapt to new market realities.
• Specialisation is essential in the technology industry.
• Internet governance is constantly evolving.
• Digital freedoms of expression vary from one country to another.
• Technologies must be evaluated for their societal impact.
• Business models must evolve with technological complexity.

My thanks, as always, to my friend Jean-François Nantel and to Éric L’Heureux for hosting this podcast.

It has been a challenging week and not one conducive to reflection or giving me time to think about what I want to write about here. But as this is an exercise in getting me to write regularly, as much as it is a space for me to think about tech and how it relates to our lives, particularly here in the Caribbean.

If you haven’t been following or don’t get to see news from the French West Indies, we’ve been having a week of unrest and violent protests on the Island after a number of peaceful protests seem to stir up a general malaise in the population, which seems to have been hijacked by a small group of well-organised individuals that set about looting, pillaging and burning shops, cars and just about anything that could be burnt. Roadblocks were set up to disrupt circulation, as is always the mode operator here when there is a protest, and several deaths were recorded.

As its relation to tech? I’ve been surprised. When things started to get out of hand overnight, I was very early in calling a curfew; note: I said “calling”, not “calling for”. I knew the authorities (the Prefecture) would instigate one, and as I write this, an overnight curfew is still in place (Edit: The curfew has been extended until the 21st). At the same time, I also said that the government would block TikTok, as it had shamefully done so during the unrest in New Caledonia. I was wrong. To my knowledge, TikTok was left to function normally and was instrumental in communicating the main revendications of the now popularised protests. I’m not sure why. 🤷‍♂️ The French government didn’t hesitate in New Caledonia, so why did they refrain in Martinique?

I’d like to believe it was because they got a lot of criticism from organisations like Access Now and other human rights organisations for denying access to these platforms. But I’m not convinced that is why, and I’d be fascinated to know the real reason. To be fair, I think it was absolutely on the cards at least at one point, but as things started to simmer down, it was perhaps deemed unnecessary. I still believe the French government will use this tool as it sees fit if things don’t improve. When you’ve done it once, the second time is always easier.

Negotiations for the main requests are due to restart tomorrow (Tuesday), so we have a little respite today, but I have a feeling that things will get a little tense again tonight. We’ll see.

It has also shown that governments are poor at understanding and interpreting platforms like TikTok and others, leaving them entirely flat-footed and with no meaningful response to today’s complex situations. Technology amplifies anything that it touches, and as technology gets further and further into our lives and society, it will amplify anything it touches, good or bad. This is not to exonerate technology as benevolently neutral and therefore devoid of blame. No. Humans make technology, and humans bring all their biases and shortcomings to it. Those amplified biases can be disastrous on a much bigger scale.

An example I gave last week in my rant, and probably many times before, is Facebook’s direct involvement in a genocide that took place in Myanmar. It is something that I wanted to write about a long time ago but I recently discovered this feature-length series about Facebook’s involvement. I urge you to read it.

I have another project dear to my heart that I just can’t seem to kick off yet. It’s about the Amiga computer. One day. One day.

France’s decision to intentionally block a platform shows us that no democratic government is above using draconian and rights-limiting powers to enforce its own policy, good or bad. Some are more willing than others, and each time it happens, it just emboldens others to try.

This begs the question about how it can be avoided and what we can do about it. Given that it is a highly complicated subject, as we can see from the EUs attempts at breaking open encryption in messaging (bad!), arguing one side or another only leads to whataboutisms and evermore polarised positioning.

I can only speak from a personal perspective, and my feeling is that basic privacy between individuals and small groups should be preserved and enshrined in law. Mass communications should be treated differently, in how monopolies are treated differently than smaller-sized businesses. This is because the incentives change with scale.

Distributed social media, like Mastodon may be part of the solution, as its moderation model (where instance holders can decide on what its users can and cannot do or say locally, all the while being subject to federation or not by the outside world) are built-in to the system. I say ‘like’ as I’m not entirely convinced that this is the perfect model either, but it is what we currently have at our disposal. Essentially, these are small local islands of “like-minded” users that can communicate locally and across the entire platform if they are connected and accepted (federated). If you, as an instance holder, can decide to federate or not, and crucially, you can choose to defederate if needed. It doesn’t require a little of the “who polices the police” in moderation policies and implementation. But as I’ve discussed previously, this is work already being done and is publicly available. Many of these operate a sort of small-scale multistakeholder bottom-up governance model, too.

So go and fire up your instance of Mastodon or another Activity Pub system and use the guides I’ve linked to as a starting point.

I recently asked on a region-wide forum if there were any known instances of Mastodon in the Caribbean. I haven’t heard of one yet, but they might be out there, so if you do know of one, let me know.

Reading

Speaking of tech speeding things up and making things easier, it should come as no surprise that the dark side of the web is also benefiting from the AI “revolution” (snarky quotes, btw). LLMs are supercharging Pig Butchering schemes.

As this Wired article outlines:

In addition to buying written scripts to use with potential victims or relying on templates for malicious websites, attackers have increasingly been leaning on generative AI platforms to create communication content in multiple languages and deepfake generators that can create photos or even video of nonexistent people to show victims and enhance verisimilitude.

Google’s 2.5 billion Gmail users are at severe risk of being hacked:

Sam Mitrovic, a Microsoft solutions consultant, has issued a warning after almost falling victim to what is described as a “super realistic AI scam call” capable of tricking even the most experienced of users.

On a subject that is dear to my heart —Internet governance— an unexpected decision by the U.K. government to cede authority of a small group of islands called the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius has caused consternation in the world of DNS. If you remember, Domain Name System (DNS), is one of those essential backbone services of the Internet that without, things would be much more frustrating, especially as we move into the IPv6 era.

The islands in question were given the ccLTD of .io (ccTLD = Country Code Top Level Domain, think .uk, .fr, .bb, and that money-spinner .ai). It turned out to be a money-spinner like the .ai domain, only many years earlier, and .io was the darling of the tech startup world. If you didn’t have a .io, you were nobody.

Just as an aside, .io evokes a computer processing idea of Input/Output, I/O for short.

As nerdy as it was, it was the domain to own for a while, and .io was given to the islands because they were the Indian Ocean territories of the U.K. A 2021 UN decision ruled that the U.K. has no sovereignty over the islands, and hence, the process to relinquish started and is now complete.

The question is, what will happen to that domain now that the Indian Ocean territories as an ISO country code will no longer exist? Not so fast! The ISO-3166 code may disappear, but no timetable has been set. This would also be independent of any decision by IANA (the ultimate decision-makers on the ccTLD) to retire the corresponding domain. They could easily decide to make an exception, as already done in the case of .su.

As for now, all .io domains will remain active, and renewals should happen without interruption of service.

Absolutely no LLMs were harmed during the writing of this piece. Have a great week.

I don’t know. I must have gotten up in a bad mood or something. This is to announce the colour of this issue 😉. These are a few thoughts and are certainly not fully thought out, but I thought I’d put them out there for discussion anyway. 🤷‍♂️

There’s something seriously wrong with Big Tech at the moment. From the proclamations of Mark Zuckerberg (the laughably pathetic Julius Caesar cosplayer) that he no longer should care what he says and does to something like half of the world’s population through his privacy-ignoring “social” media project to Eric Schmidt’s declaration that climate change is bad, but a parlour-game guess-the-next-word text generator will solve it, to Sam Altman’s insistence that his particular brand of LLM is going to “solve all physics”, not that he knows anything about physics of course, and who couldn’t ignore Elon Musk’s Ketamine-fueled descent into fascism and continual abject stupidity.

I could go on more, but it’s just too depressing to hear these people talk this way, with absolutely no responsibility and absolutely no pushback from the media or the business world. They’re held up as “geniuses” or “business gurus”, but they have collectively enabled vast wealth-extraction machines that they are the sole beneficiaries of, marketing poor-quality products and services in most cases.

I’ve been trying to understand why this is happening now and why it didn’t happen before in earlier periods of tech. I have no evidence, but I have experience and a bit of spidey-sense, for what it is worth.

I think it just boils down to the fact that previously tech was confined to silos of some areas and departments of business and a bit of exposure to the general public, where some services were made available, and a few things were made easier. That is no longer the case. Tech has butted up against the real hard stuff of the social makeup, empathy, perception, knowledge and the general humanity of the world. It is now confronted with that hard wall of governments and societies, with their inherent incomprehensible complexity. Throwing logic gates at that scale of the problem (if this, then that) just doesn’t work anymore. The fact is that exceptions are the rule, and the basics are the exception. Virtually everything we do in life is a massively complex set of operations that sometimes follows logic but mostly doesn’t. And Intel or ARM processors with a stack of OS and software piled on top of them are just not enough to work this stuff out. It can’t, and it most likely never will.

When the tech was being democratised and available to the public through sites like the Amazon bookseller of the time, it was simple. Books were listed on a webpage, and you could purchase one with a simple click, paying with your bank/credit card details. A few days later, the book (a physical thing) was shipped and in your hands. That was it. The only amazing thing about it at the time was that the catalogue was immense and bigger than any physical bookstore. Due to how databases work, you could easily and quickly add a new book for sale. This was used to continuously evolve the catalogue from the distributor’s and publisher’s lists of titles and the requests users made when searching for a book by title, author or ISBN. If the book wasn’t in the catalogue and appeared in the search history of the site frequently, a couple of clicks later, it would become available.

It ended up mostly killing bookshops. Niche shops exist, but the industry of buying and selling books has changed forever. Digital distribution didn’t help, of course, but it was the online sales methodology that killed bookstores.

But I digress.

Today, technology is immersed in virtually every aspect of our lives, but it is no longer a benevolent force for the most part when looking at the most popular platforms in use around the world. And I think this results from tech becoming more dehumanising, reducing us all to units of MAUs, ASPs, CSATs and other ultimately useless indicators (KPIs, if you will).

I also think that this will not last. And I think there will be some kind of reset, but I don’t know when or what that will look like. But if history is anything to go by, I don’t think it will be done through negotiations around a table of stakeholders calmly negotiating on what we all want for the best. There are too many stakeholders and too many diverging opinions that something will have to give. I don’t look forward to the future of tech as it intrudes on my/our personal space and encroaches on my/our private life, following me everywhere like a vile little stalker. Did you get a robot vacuum cleaner? Great, now that maker has floor plans of your home, as well as video and sound recordings (possibly) of the most private conversations. It has sold them to advertising companies with little to no scruples about what these other businesses will do with that data. They have also sold that data to the police so that when they come knocking on your door for that benign transgression of taking off a micro-second before the green light at the late-night deserted crossroads, they’ll know where to shoot first because you’ll likely be in the bedroom or the living that has been pre-identified by the crappy dust mover, replete with information on all the furniture in the room. (Think this isn’t feasible? Let’s talk.)

This will not end well.

I mentioned about the Social Web. A term I’m happy with using, but there has been some development in that area. A foundation has been set up, but unfortunately, it is cohabited by undesirable companies such as Meta. If you want to know what is happening, I’ll let you search and look for yourselves. Still, I am of the opinion that it is incredibly naive to believe that Meta has good intentions in their participation. I believe that they will do whatever they can to destroy Mastodon as it stands as a platform today (no advertising and no useless engagement algorithms) and the decentralised social media sphere for their own gain at the expense of the world at the slightest hint of danger to their surveillance operation. Their participation will be nothing more than an embrace, extend, and extinguish policy popularised by Microsoft a couple of decades ago.

Contrary to what you might think my position is, I do feel Meta should have a seat at the table, but it is clear to me that their inclusion should be restrained precisely because they are the single biggest player on the Internet. They wield too much power and power beyond anything that a small piss-pot association or foundation can have. As such, they absolutely will use it if they feel the slightest bit threatened. Anything they do or say should be scrutinised, and they should have absolutely no power to push through any decision unilaterally. One seat, one vote, and not an iota more.

Reading

Here is a quick list of the things that caught my attention this week:

Think your small Caribbean island is not a target for cybersecurity attacks? Think Again. The Barbados Revenue Authority had 230GB of data exfiltrated, and it was put up for sale on the Internet. Theories are being bandied around, but I don’t think it is helpful to discuss that here.

The Walrus has a good article expressing and discussing the way facial recognition technology is not fit for purpose. It opens with this line:

THE FIRST TIME Karl Ricanek was stopped by police for “driving while Black” was in the summer of 1995.

Another article from the same publication does a good job of expressing some of what I’m thinking about social networks in an article entitled, The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age.

I hope you had a great week, and I wish you an excellent week ahead.

Good morning. I hope you’re doing well. I’m writing this at the end of a busy week that hasn’t left me much time to think about a specific subject, so this will probably be both short and a little unstructured.

After a lull in activity, it seems the Atlantic is firing up for a busy end-of-season. To remind you, Hurricane season is from June to November, with a peak in early September and a spike in October. I’m looking forward to the end of this season.

Source: NOAA - 30th September 2024

One of the things that I have prioritised over the last few years is the importance of reading articles over short posts on Social Media. I’m not particularly active on Social Media; in fact, I only have three accounts, and only one of them is on a major platform. I have a “professional” account on LinkedIn, where I cross-post this article from time to time (I’ve automated it now, so it should be more frequent), and I have an account on Mastodon and one on Bluesky.

I tend to use these latter accounts for a little news and a little research. By curating a list of things I’m interested in, I avoid the usual traps of gamed social media that optimises for ‘engagement’ (i.e., advertising) over real connection. My timeline tends to contain research papers and news articles from major and minor publishers. The downside is that I have a never-ending mass of documents and articles to read, which is impossible to do in the time I have.

To give you an example, here’s a list of the articles and documents I set aside to read in the coming days and weeks:

CYBER-ACTIVISM WITHIN THE GLOBAL DIGITAL DIVIDE: A CASE STUDY OF PERU - This Master thesis is from 2014. I’m interested in how we used to think about these topics a decade ago, and I’m wondering if things have changed and, if so, how.

Towards a Digital Politics of Multiplicity: Social Media Networks and Global Justice Politics - A paper from 2021 to help me think about Social Media’s positive aspects. I’m a little net negative on social media. Having another perspective helps calibrate my thoughts.

THE CYBERSPACE MYTH AND POLITICAL COMMUNICATION, WITHIN THE LIMITS OF NETOCRACY - Another old-ish paper (2017) in Internet terms, but another one delving into the history of the Internet and the implications of its self-built myths.

The Politics of Cyberconflict - This is a long one, and I’m not sure I will get to read it all. But the title interested me, so I added it to the list. It’s another older paper from 2004, but again, it is helpful to understand how we thought of the Internet 10 to 20 years ago.

This is in addition to all the news articles and blog posts I’ve bookmarked for further reading:

‘We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros - The Guardian

An interesting analysis of fair use and generative models – Baldur Bjarnason

Hacker plants false memories in ChatGPT to steal user data in perpetuity - Ars Technica

Signal’s Meredith Whittaker: ‘I see AI as born out of surveillance’ - Financial Times

In other news concerning the Internet, the Web Foundation has announced that it has shut down. The foundation was the brainchild of none other than Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of hypertext and the web as we know it now. The foundation championed an inter-connected and decentralised web, only to have it steamrolled by the big social media companies with destructive business models. It is not the end for Tim. He’s going to concentrate on the Solid Protocol. I haven’t looked into it yet, so I don’t have an opinion. It’s on the list.

It’s probably a good point to remind you that, no, the free market didn’t innovate the Internet. It is entirely a project brought about by public funding, from the networks to the applications running on top.

Of note

I’ve started messing around with the site that hosts this text to try to customise it to my liking. I’ve made a couple of tweaks, and I hope I can do more in the future.

In order, I have modified the section divider in the text of these articles to show three stars (only on the website for the moment). I’ve always liked that look, but I couldn’t figure out how to modify the code to do that easily, so I gave up and prioritised other things. This weekend, I decided to make an effort and figured it out with some help from people on the forums. Thank you to them.

I renamed the Reading section “Working Library.” I like this term better because it better reflects what I’m doing with this list of books. The list is a bit of entertainment and a lot of learning, so it is more than a simple reading list.

The next big task is to improve the email newsletter template. It is rather rudimentary and utilitarian at the moment. That suits me fine, and I don’t expect to make it into one of those ghastly marketing “newsletters.” I just think it could do with a little spruce up here and there.

One thing that I should reiterate, if you didn’t know, is that both the website and the newsletter collect zero data on visitors. I have no idea if I’m writing into the void or not. I simply don’t know if the emails are being read or even if the site is being visited. Zero. The only way I can tell that the email is, in fact, being sent is the odd out-of-office message I get back from a subscriber.

I prefer to respect your privacy.

Hitting reply on the email will land in my inbox. Feel free to reach out.

Entering the last quarter of the year, thinking, “Where the hell did the year go?”. Have a great week.