Running up that hill, with no problems

14 January 2025
Musings

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.

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If an AI did cocaine, it would look like this

1 January 2025
Musings
Ellis

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.

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2024’s best reads and listens

26 December 2024
Reading lists, books, and imagination

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.

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Femmes de Paris

11 November 2024
Privacy

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.

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Periods, full stop.

8 November 2024
Privacy

Fear, uncertainty, and period trackers

For those who care about reproductive privacy, there is a long, difficult, systemic data justice fight ahead. That fight is not a digital solutionist one.

Despite that, cue the usual suspects saying “delete your period tracker app” or “use Tor” or “self-host your own open-source period tracker 🙂”.

The link above dispels the myth that period tracker apps are the start and end of safeguarding reproductive privacy. It will also remind you that those usual suspects, who seem to be viewing the imminent crisis as a great opportunity for open source, are neither prepared for the data justice fight, nor actually on your side.

That discernment, in turn, will help you to pick the team you want around you for the next few years. Because my god, you’re going to need one.

What will remain of us is books

29 October 2024
Reading lists, books, and imagination
Keith Haring graffiti art, exhibited in Glasgow 2024

My amazing and wonderful daughter recently started college. She’s doing a lot of political science. She’s also chugging a lot of coffee and writing a lot of political science essays the day of the deadline.

*sobs emotionally* that is definitely my kid *sob* #proudmum

Having safely delivered the Lisan al Gaib into adulthood, I decided it was time to do something which might not seem like a lot to you, but for me was quite momentous:

I decided that it was time to pass on some of the books I’ve been keeping on my shelves, for her, waiting until the time was right.

And now that’s done.

So here is what I passed on.

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Say their names.

14 October 2024
ex-oss

In recent days I have been asked for my thoughts on the Matt-ers which have unfolded in the WordPress community, which was my home for nine years.

For those not au fait, as it says on the part of my CV where I desperately try to pretend that any prospective employer is interested in it, which I can assure you they’re not:
Open Source Community Contributor and Volunteer
2011-2020
I was an enthusiastic contributor to several OSS project communities, helping
community members to understand privacy, accessibility, and various regulatory
changes impacting the field. I delivered 32 conference talks across eight countries,
trained thousands of professionals, was a local meetup organiser in two cities, was a co-organiser for four multi-day conferences, and I helped build the WordPress 4.9.6 privacy suite to ship privacy tools to 40% of the sites on the open web.

As some of you may recall, all this counted for was being on the receiving end of some of the worst behavior in the WordPress project.

The reason I am still here though, strong and better and smiling despite all of that, is because I was also on the receiving end of some of the best people in the project.

Some of them were, and always will be, the best friends I have ever had in my life. They know who they are. They are, as Elbow once sang, the stars that I navigate home by. They gave me that light.

It’s thanks to the light that I can share my thoughts on what, in my view, really Matt-ers here, and that is this: Read More

LI + AI = GIGO

19 September 2024
Privacy

Please enjoy this article in The Stack, in which two Glaswegians, including yours truly, sit in the late summer sun and have a natter about the news that LinkedIn has not only decided to train its AI on its users’ data and content, but has actively opted-in UK users without their knowledge or consent.

As the article notes, the active nonconsensual opt-in does not apply to people in the EU, EEA, and Switzerland. Why?

We’ll put it this way: 404 subsequently reported that LI is also doing the active nonconsensual opt-ins to users outside those regions, not just the UK.

You might think the reasoning here is obvious, meaning that it’s based in the EU corpus of data protection law, but I suspect it might well be something else.

You see, the more you try to use LinkedIn for the things you actually need it to do, the more of its nonsense it pushes at you. It’s how you find yourself discovering yet more layers of nonsense that reveal some quite worrying problems with the site’s architecture. Those problems may well render LI’s AI vision impossible in Europe. I’ll explain why.

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The master’s tools will never advocate for digital rights

10 September 2024
UK policy

DFF’s new leadership model – redistributing decisions and power

I rejoiced as I read about how the Digital Freedom Fund has revamped its leadership model. Wonder of wonders, a team of people whose mission is to support grassroots digital rights work realised that they cannot carry out that mission by mirroring the very power structures they work to fight. 

So, out went the traditional hierarchical ladder, where everyone feeds up the triangle to senior executives with more power. In comes a flat circular leadership model, where everyone works together to run the organisation. Out goes a system where accountability to management works one way, only, in an unequal relationship. In comes a system which ensures accountability by empowering staff to get the best out of each other, not the worst. Out goes one leadership voice who filters communication up to and down from the Board, whilst taking credit for all the work, and occasionally lying through their teeth about those staff too. In comes many people who are permitted to speak for their own accomplishments, and tell the unfiltered truth too.

Who knows, that just might start to catch on across the wider digital rights movement, as it begins to dawn on boards that the inequitable organisations they’re governing are no different than authoritarian states and big tech. Aside, of course, from the sub-living wage salaries.

One of these things is not like the other

10 September 2024
Policy
Parliament, 13 June 2022. It was actually a beautiful day but I'm loyal to the black and white aesthetic

There was a cracking episode of the Regulate.tech podcast published last week. If you weren’t aware of the podcast, it’s an insider’s view of how the tech policy sausage gets made, by someone who has made it on both sides of the table, that being Richard Allan (currently of the House of Lords, formerly of FB), ably assisted by Nicklas Lundblad of various works.

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