The Dystopia Report (Page 2)

"Whither Goaest thou, America, in they shiny car in the night?" — Jack Kerouac.

No predictions, only warnings

A short election night rant. I'm only putting it on semi-main. You've got to subscribe to see it and I make no promises of it being with the trouble.

Photo shows Janie Godley at Trump's golf courseholding a sign that reads "Trump is a Cunt."

The week's doomscrolling in review

Casting your ballot in bad times

There's been enough said about newspapers that are withholding editorial endorsements this election year, but when optimism isn't journalistically honest, how should an editorial section do its job?

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.

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

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.

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

The Forever Alone meme character sitting next to a computer with themselves in it.

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:

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

Various segments of news articles that describe the Telegram app as encrypted... wrongly.

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

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

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

abortion

A weekly roundup after skipping a week

This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Here are more things I saw, read, tooted, skeeted, clicked or blogged on from the last week or so… give or take, and possibly breif attempts at sarcasm or humour when describing them. Or not. Managing

democracy

Dogfooding the rules-based international order

This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Tl;dr: A long, rambling and not very “tech” related post this week, looking at the recent ICJ ruling about evidence of acts of genocide in Gaza, defending a rules-based international order in a world that

ai

It's another week, so another roundup

This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Three weeks running and still doing a Weekly Roundup! Is it remotely newsletter worthy as a format or in substance? Would anyone actually subscribe to this? Is the content even martingally monetisable? I’m especially dubious

ai

The great Twitter migration that maybe kind of wasn't

This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. What’s the stronger force, inertia or outrage? When Elon Musk took over Twitter and promptly set about demolishing it, there was a cacaphony of bleetings on the platform threatening a mass exodus. I can be

podcasts

Listen to the Risky.Biz podcast on 'Stuxnet, the Snowden leaks, and how Infosec has matured'

I’m making an effort in 2024 to broaden my media format intake. I’m more of a reader. Articles go at your own pace. You can read faster than people talk, skip the boring bits, skim, search for the interesting bits, etc. Youtube is worse than I remember old

gaza

Re: Another weekly roundup

Here is another tour of a few of the things I boosted, tooted skeeted or blogged on the different platforms I frequent. I seem to have left a number of blog posts in draft mode this week, so went on a publishing binge this afternoon of them. See is how

API

Three Bluesky API toys

This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. When I’m not on Mastodon I spend some time posting bad jokes and dodgy takes on Bluesky, which slipped out of being exclusively in a “staging” environment at some point. Both have been landing pads

mobile phones

SIM registration for mass surveillance

This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Namibia mandatory SIM card registration “eases & enables” indiscriminate mass surveillance of mobile communications in the country. This isn’t rare, it happens in about 160+ countries, but The Namibian website points out how it represents