I had a very full week this week for a couple of reasons:

One, I was asked to take part in a jury to assist in the evaluation of a group of my students in an aural assessment to validate their degree with an organisation that affords a European-wide equivalence. It is such a rewarding thing to see your students grow and develop into adults ready to take the next stage of their lives and careers. I’ve taught this group for three years, and the change in some of the students is remarkable. They will graduate this week, and I will be at the ceremony with them as one of the first to congratulate them!

The second thing that happened, is that I signed a contract of employment with a local firm that I have been consulting with for a couple of months or so. We worked on special projects during the initial contract and mutually agreed to further that relationship. I’m going to be working three days a week with them from now on, giving me two days to pursue other work. I’m going to be concentrating on special projects, not getting involved in the day-to-day workload of their current IT outsourcing work. I’m there to bring analysis, guidance and direction to not only the company but to their clients too. I think one of the things I have seen in small businesses, is that Digital Transformation is very difficult to get started until you have a vision and someone that can execute, starting from the basics. And that’s the important part. Too many try or are scared of what’s required by biting off more than they can chew.

I recorded a new episode of the ICT Pulse Podcast this weekend, and one of the things I discussed there is the need to do the basic things and not get distracted by the new flashy stuff. It’s not sexy, but it works and businesses see progress when doing it this way.

I have an announcement to make!

I have self-nominated to serve on the ARIN Advisory Council. (That’s the only way you can be nominated). The election is later this year, and I have a bit of preparation to do to get ready.

I’ve been more and more interested in Internet Governance since 2019 (a little before but not as concentrated), and I feel that having had an entire career based on and working with the Internet, I can give something back. I was an ARIN 52 Fellow, and I have become more active in the discussions around governance at various levels. I think the time is right for me to add a little and help where I can.

Wish me luck. I’ll write more about it here and on the socials to formally announce, soon.

Reading

As always, I have been reading a lot, so here’s a summary of the things that have caught my attention…

I recently mentioned that France had crossed a line in Internet shutdowns by blocking access to TikTok in New Caledonia, well another development out of France has emerged.¹ This time, it is not the government but a private organisation run by a well-known sympathiser of the extreme right-wing political wing of French politics, Bolloré.² A French court, at the insistence of Canal+ (an Internet provider as well as a media empire), has ordered various public DNS systems in France to deliberately pollute DNS results to try to stem a wave of streaming sites that pirate content like live football matches. Seeing the opportunity, several ISPs jumped on the bandwagon, notably Orange, SFR, and even providers in overseas territories like Outre-Mer Télécom, to try to force this through. It worked, and now Google, Cloudflare and Cisco are compelled to break the fundamental operating contract by providing false results for a DNS query. OpenDNS complied, but not in the way that Canal+ et al. had wanted, and pulled their services from France.³

The Internet is nearing a turning point in its governance structure, or at least, if we let it, the governance structure will not resemble the one we have now. Despite its faults, the current bottom-up structure has worn well. The top-down proposals being snuck into the Global Digital Compact are worrying. Lack of transparency and the preference (of some) for multilateralism is just one aspect of a governance structure that is about to get seriously challenged. This article highlights some of this discussion.⁴

NETMundial+10 was not much better…⁵

FastCompany published an excellent article about the Internet as it used to be. To be exact, in 1994. Well worth your time.⁶

I’ll get back to a normal pace next week. Until then, have a great week.

I’m a little late with this blog for a couple of reasons, one being a massive hurricane passing south of the island on Monday. Whilst not directly affected by the storm, we had a lot of rain, wind, and a few other disturbances. Around 10,000 people were without power on Monday on the island, but they steadily got back connected during the day and after.

The storm, a category 4 hurricane, passed directly over Carriacou Island near Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. The videos and stories coming from it and the neighbouring islands are heartbreaking and difficult to accept.

Where does tech fit in all of this?

Of course, without tech, we wouldn’t have witness accounts of lived experiences available for the entire world. We wouldn’t have video evidence of the horrifying nature of a hurricane; however, I refuse to post a link here. Disaster porn is not something I feel I should promote. A quick search on Google’s video platform will lead you down a rabbit hole, where you can see for yourself all the destruction you wish, switch it off, have a coffee, and then move on with your day as indifferently as you usually do, doom scrolling and “liking” on Insta. Or, you can reach out to those in need and see what you can do to help. I know what the world needs now. TLDR; it’s not more “likes”.

But the true enemies and culprits are those willingly contributing to the destruction of the planet in the name of speculative claims of “productivity gains”, “solving cancer”, “going to Mars”, etc. The very same Google, Facebook, and now, shamefully, Apple are literally green-lighting projects that have the power to make the planet inhospitable.

Google’s green ambitions have been thrown out of the window in the name of a largely inaccurate bullshit generator, pushing its energy use to increase by 48% in one year!¹² Microsoft’s energy usage shot up similarly and has now been on the damage-control narrative since. Pledging 10$ billion in “renewable energies”, but looking at the details, much of it is moving numbers in Excel and offsets.³

I guess, ultimately, I’m arguing for a different type of tech —tech that is more respectful of not only the environment but also of us as humans. A tech that hasn’t been hijacked by a group of cynical extremists, racists, and liars. In the current state, tech is moving wealth away from the masses to themselves, contributing to the pollution and destruction of the planet, and un-ironically showing off to the world their riches and their apocalypse bunkers.

You, we, can do something about that, and we should start now. I’ll discuss that another time.

Reading

I continue to be impressed and enjoyed by the quality of the articles published by 404media. I think that many of us hope they are showing the way for small media to work in the face of tech companies’ constant and systematic destruction. This article about Facebook’s losing control of the content published on its site highlights the aforementioned AI problem.⁴ Not only that, they have doubled down on restricting access to researchers and even suing them in the case of a group based Brazil.⁵ 🤢

In a fit of research, I stumbled across a paper from 2019 entitled “The ‘online brain’: how the Internet may be changing our cognition.⁶

Overall, the available evidence indicates that the Internet can produce both acute and sustained alterations in each of these areas of cognition, which may be reflected in changes in the brain.

(Areas of cognition mentioned: a) attentional capacities, b) memory processes, and c) social cognition.)

I am coming to the conclusion that social media in its current state is a net negative for the world and that this experiment on humanity needs to be reeled in and supervised a little differently. It may not be obvious, but my conclusions are not necessarily for the reasons we hear in the press, i.e., that social media is damaging for kids, CSAM, etc. The real culprit is advertising and the malicious incentives generated by a complete free-for-all when it comes to the surveillance and sale of that information, coupled with the entitlement these companies believe they have over us. It has links to Internet Governance, innovation, racism, and Cyber Colonialism.

I’m formulating these arguments and will discuss them here and there over the coming months. Hopefully, if I can rally my brain around to concentrate on them, I can write a big piece on them.

Have a great week.

The end of the school year is always a busy time, finishing off the last of the lessons, fielding questions from students about the end-of-year exams, setting the exam questions, and marking exams and papers that have already been completed.

Whilst teaching is only part of my job, the end of term takes up a lot of space on the calendar, leaving me with little time to do other tasks. But it is such a rewarding profession at times that I can’t see myself giving up teaching now that I have become experienced at it over the last four years. Out of the three schools I teach in, two have already requested more hours from me. This is the dilemma, as I need to build consulting hours as a priority. With a little luck that might be about to change over the coming weeks.

If you’ve been following me, you’ll have noticed that I have become a little sour on Big Tech lately. I’d like to clarify that I am still an out-and-out tech enthusiast who sees technology as a tool that could be so useful for the human race over the coming decades and centuries. However, tech has become polluted by a class of people who are liars, grifters, thieves, and wealth extractors. They have utterly destroyed the reputation of tech for me and many others in the industry. Some of us still hold hope that this is a phase, and it too will pass. Hopefully, sooner rather than later.

Much of what is happening is, and corresponds, with the rise in the ultra-right wing and what is essentially fascism in the world. Those with the money, the connections, and the power are starting to show their cards. And they are outing themselves as dreadful human beings. There are too many to mention here, but a little digging and a little reading around the subject should clue you up fairly quickly. If you want to reach out, I’d be more than happy to discuss it.

Actually, whilst I think of it, after I posted a glib comment on Mastodon, I had an online discussion with the CEO of an education company that I tried to keep as civil as possible. However, the person attempted to bully me by suggesting he had over twenty years of experience in the field of AI (it doesn’t look like according to LinkedIn). He said that AI was just a replica of the human brain (neural networks based on those in the brain). I ignored this suggestion and simply mentioned that this could not be the case, as we still have no idea how the brain actually works; ergo, it is impossible to replicate what we don’t know. The discussion ended there. Not sure why. 🤷‍♂️

Reading

Anyway, as always, I have been reading a lot and thought I’d share here, too.

Let’s start with another example of how France has decided it wants to be an authoritarian state when it comes to the internet and the freedom of its citizens on the open web. After recently joining the list of shame of Internet shutdown states (the first time a Western democracy has done so), it has decided that it needs to interfere with the major DNS providers to block a couple of sports sites streaming live games.¹ Do they not learn? I mean, HADOPI worked out really great, huh?

Last week saw a lot of online discussion about the entitled scraping of online content to train LLMs without consent, attribution or remuneration. Apple, Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic have all been at it, but worse, they have been lying to the websites about “who” is accessing public sites. It’s technical, but it boils down to bots that “present themselves” to websites to indicate why and what they are accessing a site. Many people, like me, have implemented a robots.txt file that essentially politely tells bots to go away and that they can’t scrape. Ignoring this request is one thing; lying is another. This is not over yet, and many Big Tech companies are in for a rude awakening in the coming months.² (My sites are all under the Creative Commons licence allowing non-commercial reuse, and attribution. If anything were to be used commercially or reused without attribution, I would have cause to legal redress.)

SEO. Ah, that. OK, I’ll admit it. I’m not a fan of it. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that it is collective fraud. SEO should, in my opinion, be banned. It has led to the most awful of incentives on the Internet, second only to unregulated surveillance advertising (cancer on the Internet, in my opinion, but that’s for another day). Anyway, Google hasn’t been (surprise, surprise) particularly honest, even when you’ve been trying to play the game they invented. Shameful.³

Let’s end with an upbeat article that I really enjoyed. If you have anything to do with professional or high-level sports, you’ll know that the mind is such a critical factor that it can often be the difference between winning and losing. Professional athletes have been working with sports psychologists for years, but this article about a ballerina really articulates the utility and journey professionals traverse through their careers. Focus on the now. Cut out the mind talk by counting, breathing, and other tools. Really good article. ⁴

I’m still digging and reading a lot of articles about Internet Governance, as this is the focus for me over the coming years. I have an announcement to make shortly, but the time is not right yet.

Have a great week.

I’d mentioned previously that I had been travelling, specifically I was in Spain for 10 days or so. Sadly I haven’t been myself since coming back and probably caught a virus or something similar that has affected my health over the last few weeks. I won’t bore you with the details, but it did culminate in a bout of severe dizziness and nausea. I seem to have gotten over it now and hoping to get back up to full speed soon.

Last week was full with teaching. It is getting to the end of the school year for most of the organisations I work with, and as such we have an urgency to finish the programmed lessons and practicals before the end of year exams. I have very little time to anything for these weeks (including this week) a part from teach, plan, read and a few administrative tasks.

I’ll have a second rush shortly after that too, as I’ll need to mark the exams and read and assess the mémoires submitted in my Project Management course. I have 10 students there, with each providing a 30-page mémoire. A lot of reading to be done. 😱

I’m looking forward to building the consultancy side of my work, with more focus on getting clients over the coming months, as that is what is lacking in the development. I’m building a strategy to do that at the moment, based on what I’d done previously of course, but it takes time and effort that I don’t have fore the time being. My doctor said slow down a little and I should definitely take heed.

Reading

As we get closer to the Olympic Games in Paris this summer, we’re starting to see a number of reports about the state of cybersecurity (and other subjects like the egregious use of biometric identification systems), like this article that exposes a number of major shortcomings in the critical infrastructure of the games.¹

The next piece of writing I’ve wanted to share for a long time is about the use and abuse of the word “ecosystem”, particularly in the ICT sector. I co-wrote a report with USAID, where we studied the digital ecosystem of the Caribbean and we used the term to highlight a broad set of areas and how they interacted together, akin to an, er, ecosystem. You can read it here.² But the following article is more critical of the over use of the term.³

This recent news particularly annoyed me. As a longtime un-fan of Meta and its democracy-busting properties, this confirmed its intentions in being the most awful company on the internet. Research about the effects of Social Media is very important, but it seems that despite being a company that likes to know everything about you, it doesn’t like anyone outside knowing too much about them. The sooner the world is rid of Meta, the better as far as I’m concerned. There’s a place for Social Media, but the flavour of these types. From Mastodon: ⁴

One the same theme, Meta are liars. It is often best just to come out and say it as it is. Meta recently stated that the EU is preventing it from introducing AI tools to its user base in the economic region. Citing the ruling against it from the EU on GDPR grounds, it stated that it couldn’t work on AI tools in the EU. That is a lie. There is no other way of putting it. Liar, liar, pants on fire! It’s about consent dumbasses! ⁵

This last share, I’ll not summarise and let you read it for yourself. It’s not long. Enjoy.⁶

Thanks for reading. Have a great week.

Another week done with a flurry of activity more towards the end of the week than in the middle.

I’ve been working with a client, helping one of their clients implement some basic first steps in digital transformation. Conversely to others, when I talk about Digital Transformation, I’m being very specific in my definition. I’ve talked much about the uses and abuses of the term, and it seems that I am still swimming against the current. Anyway, back to what Digital Transformation really means for MSMEs.

The company deals with several bills and invoices and requires a more robust tracking and analysis system. The basic workflow is understood, but the tools currently used are a mix of manual, brain storage, and other shoestring systems. As part of the work, the end users documented the process from start to finish, taking into consideration as much as possible. My role involved re-documenting this workflow and translating it into a technical specification, then proposing a technical solution that met the customer requirements. I then set up a PoC and demonstrated it to the client, who approved it with a few modifications. This week was the setup of the system and putting it into the clients’ hands for testing before generalisation. As always in these types of projects, the act of setting it up for actual use (even as a test) provoked some discussions where the client thought of things that were initially forgotten and things that would be “nice to have”. I’ll work on some of that in the coming days and weeks.

However, what is startling is that when you start to work closely with an organisation, you see the enormous opportunity to help them digitalise the most basic of systems that are scrabbled together. This work can provide tangible benefits to the businesses for a minimal outlay.

Much of it can be done by purchasing specialised applications, but generally, those applications are too sophisticated and not adapted to the inner workings of MSMEs. I aim to get those businesses using tools specifically adapted to them with little to no outlay on extra software.

Reading

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last year or two, you’ve no doubt encountered a plethora of articles about generative AI (genAI) and how it is going to “change everything”. I don’t believe it. Development and capacity have considerably slowed over the last nine to twelve months, indicating that in its current form, these LLMs (Large Language Models) are nearing the end of their run. I also think we humans are getting much better at spotting their weaknesses. We are uncannily adept at this, having hundreds of thousands of years of development and practice structured in our brains. The following article I forgot to link to previously is a good primer on what is actually going on inside an LLM.¹

A much deeper look from Stephen Wolfram can be found online.²

If there is one computing platform that changed everything for me, it was the Commodore Amiga. I keep threatening to write a deep dive into the origins and outcomes of one of the most sophisticated computers the world had ever seen at the time. It is, unfortunately, no surprise to hear that the curse that has plagued the platform continues.³

When using the internet, most of us do not think about the infrastructure that allows us to stream music, communicate in real-time, etc. Only when that goes bad do we realise that infrastructure is essential. When a ship sank off the coast of Yemen, damaging undersea cables that affected millions of users of the Internet, it caused political disputes over access to the waters for the ships tasked with repairing the damage.⁴ I would recommend this issue of The Continent for an extensive article on life onboard the ships that fix the Internet for us, in what are surely very difficult circumstances.⁵

Lastly, this discussion about the ownership rights of genAI-generated code is a good example of the minefield upon us. Let’s not even start to contemplate what it means to cybersecurity!⁶

Have a great week.