This week I made a rare public appearance – and broke my 100% postgraduate attendance rate (soz) – to participate in a webinar from the Future of Privacy Forum. Held on Safer Internet Day, the talk was on the importance of secure end-to-end encryption for children and young people. I was asked to participate on relatively short notice to discuss the Home Office IPA TCN to Apple, in that context.
Don’t forget your lighter
My love for my Kindle e-book reader has always been tempered by the discomfort of knowing that neither the device nor its contents are really mine.
Your remedial homework
Remember that book I wrote on how to integrate healthy foundational privacy practices into your work, regardless of the presence or absence of legislation, to protect your users from hostile actors in both the private sector and in government?
You know, that book I wrote which was the outcome of several years of unpaid conference speaking about defensive web development practices to deploy against authoritarians, which led me to get shouted at to shut up about politics?
Yeah. That book.
Taking the Internet back for God
Pages are turning, in history and lots more besides. Events are about to accelerate faster than any of us can imagine. I’ve been watching them from the top of a (very steep) hill, an ocean away. Thinking.
So I want to set out how I intend to respond to the changing world, or at least the one as of noon today US time.
The Haçienda Must Be Built
Yawright love? I’ll tell you what. As long as I’ve been cast as a character in a deranged conspiracy theory about the governance of the WordPress project, I might as well throw out a provocation that does cross my mind, from time to time, when I’m wandering the streets of the city that is my second home.
Love, privacy, and the politics of intellectual shame
In a week of nonsense, prior to an epoch of it, watch this talk that Meredith Whittaker gave last week, about what could happen if we put love and intimacy at the centre of our understanding of privacy. Read More
Your dystopian reads for dystopian times
As we prepare to enter unprecedented times, it is useful to remember three things.
One is that the dystopian futures ahead have already been imagined in fiction and in literature. So have the dystopian pasts which could have existed in history.
Running up that hill, with no problems
Right now I’m sitting in one of my happy places on the Strath campus, doing a bit of tidying and sorting admin as the spring term begins.
One of my professors reminds me that registration is open for next year’s intake, beginning in September, in a gently-nudging, “spread the word” sort of way.
I am very sparse with my praise, as you might have noticed, but there’s no hesitation here. I cannot recommend this course, and this university, highly enough.
You should come to Glasgow and do the course. It’s January, so you have plenty of time to start planning it now.
Another day of stochastic harassment for old time’s sake
Yesterday got…weird. My plans to spend a quiet lazy Saturday in the campus library, mind-mapping the structure for my MSc dissertation, were gone before I’d ever rolled out of bed.
In addition to having more pings than I could scroll through, my bleary eyes went straight to DMs from the friends that matter:
Oh god, what’s he done now, I wondered.
If an AI did cocaine, it would look like this
I‘ve ranted before about LinkedIn’s AI … erm … offerings, in which they take all of the accurate data which you have diligently input about yourself and your career, run it through some janky AI that someone’s dad made in the shed, and output a load of slop so inaccurate that you suspect it’s not your information at all.
Last week, my LinkedIn feed began to be populated with colourful cards and posts which contained AI-generated summaries of people’s year on LinkedIn, a bit like Spotify’s annual Rewind. The cards were a product demo from an AI company called Coauthor.studio, which claims to “helps busy professionals turn ideas into influential content.” Most of the people who were doing the cards seemed to be taking it very seriously.
I, however, am Glaswegian.
2024’s best reads and listens
This year’s list of my best reads and listens is a little bit different, and a whole lot shorter. That’s not to say the volume of my reading was any less than usual, in fact, it went way up (yes, that was apparently possible). But. A lot of that reading was very niche stuff focused on very niche client needs: interesting enough, but not exactly casual reading. And that was before, out of nowhere, I became a university student again.
Femmes de Paris
My sewing stash is a thing of wonder. (All sewing stashes are.) There are bits, bobs, buttons, bows, and books spanning all my life and all its travels: far more tiny items than I could ever count, much less use, and that’s how I like it. But there’s one item in there which shouldn’t be in there, and which truly amazed me. It snuck its way in by chance: I found it in a mystery bag of random mid-20th century paper patterns which I bought in a store clearance. You can see a photo above.