all politics is local
Insurrection is a value-neutral term
As we get ready for another election in the U.S., insurrection may became a left wing value again. That's fine.
Yours Truly
Day job is spent on digital safety and cyber security for the world's edge cases. Opinions are many, varied, subject to drift, and all his own. Moonlights as an author of perpetually unwritten books.
Wordpress
Moving shop soon
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. I think I migrate this blog as much, if not more, than I post anything on it. It’s been at a number of domains and across a few different kinds of platforms. It’s been
navel gazing
Hello friend
This was the "hello world" post that every new website always comes with. I've simply given it a mild edit to more reflect my snarky yet approachable and affable tone that you'll eventually come around to.
hezbollah
All the little bombs
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Remember that time when Israel set up a front company to build pagers, walkie-talkies and some solar equipment branded by official makers and turned batches of them into little improvised explosive devices to be shipped around
ai
The anthropomorphism trap
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. The generative AI industry seems to be aiming all its innovation at what it sees as its chief competitor: human beings. The companies working to make us redundant have some pretty sound business cases for it:
ai
The enshitification of NaNoWriMo
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. It’s time to either fork NaNoWrimo, or just put a fork in it. The National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has been an online event each November since 1999, spurring would-be and wannabe authors to bang
encryption
How journalists should talk about Telegram
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Tl;dr: Telegram is not an encrypted messaging app. Or it’s not especially encrypted in a way that it’s somehow a feature. If you read no further, then that’s the walk-away message from
ai
Beyond Provenance
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. I’m a slow blogger. Perhaps it’s one of the few aspects about this site to act as an indicator that the words here are in fact typed by human fingers. AI-powered sites are running
ai
Weaponised AI isn't killer robots, it's just humans killing on autopilot
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. “You should not be afraid of AI. You should be afraid of the people building it.” Jessica Matthews, founder of Uncharted Power Tl;dr: The incorporation of AI into weapons needs to be banned in a
adtech
Surveillance capitalism is also just regular old surveillance
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Tl;dr: Surveillance is a natural outcome of the internet as it was created. Surveillance capitalism isn’t an innovation, but a resource extraction industry, and states don’t need to make fancy tools to get
ai
Automattic for the people, not the AI
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Tl;dr: Automattic, the owner of of Tumblr and WordPress.com, is negotiating with Midjourney and OpenAI to sell them AI training data which would be scraped from platform users’ posts unless they opt out. It’
blogging
More notes on what's been stealing my attention across the interwebnets
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. I’m slowly working on another rambling blog post, this time about real-time bidding over your web browsing habits. It’s about how in spite of all the sophisticated spyware and NSA data harvesting tools we