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There is, as previously noted, a subgenre of current publishing dedicated to dissecting Silicon Valley’s hard turn to the right. In The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, San Francisco journalist Gil Durán argues that destabilizing democracy is not a by-product but the point. The book builds on Durán’s blog and podcast by the same name. Durán’s attention was drawn in 2021-2022 by four acrimonious, right wing-funded recall elections, first governor Gavin Newsom, then…

At The Overspill this week, veteran UK technology journalist Charles Arthur highlighted a blog posting at the venture capital firm A16Z by cyberethnographer and NYU adjunct professor Ruby Thelot claiming that “enshittification isn’t real”. Thelot’s main argument: “Simply put, more people use Instagram every year, they use it on average longer every day, year over year and, finally, their reported satisfaction has also grown over time, indicating no decrease in overall satisfaction, stated or…

As widely reported, Meta has settled a lawsuit brought against it by 52 American state and local attorneys general representing most states, the District of Columbia, and several territories The company will, Cecilia Kang and Eli Tan report at the New York Times, pay up to $17.1 billion or, as CNBC has it, $16.7 billion, to be split among the participating states. The higher settlement number includes more than $459 million for claims relating to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. At the…

Generative AI has turned into the kind of arms race we normally associate with doping in sports. By which I mean: the companies involved make a legal product and a bunch of people try to figure out when another bunch of people have used them. Meanwhile, LLMs and chatbots keep “improving” – by which most people mean that the early obvious markers of non-human prose have diminished. As in doping, every time you develop an accurate test, the companies release a new model that evades the known…

Following 1998, when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was established, many were concerned that it might become a force for censorship. Critics asked: would ICANN remain the neutral technical steward it was intended to be? Turns out, ICANN wasn’t the right vulnerability. The desire to force the Internet content to conform to “local ordinances” (as John Perry Barlow once called the US First Amendment) started before the Internet. In 1994, Robert and Carleen Thomas were…

Last week, many media reported that in January 2025 a US citizen named Sam Tunick, arriving at the international airport in Atlanta, was stopped for questioning and told to hand over his phone. It appears that he gave the border agent a “duress password” – an unlocking code that wiped the phone when the agent typed it in. This feature is included in his phone’s operating system, GrapheneOS. Now he’s being charged with a felony. At the Guardian, Timothy Pratt reports that without his knowledge,…

X.AI – the company was-trillionaireElon Musk built in 2025 by smashing together X (the former Twitter) and xAI, which he founded in 2023 – is suing the state of Minnesota, claiming that its new law banning access to nudification technology violates the First Amendment. X.AI, which SpaceX swallowed early this year, argues that it’s already stopping this sort of thing and that the law is overbroad and will block constitutionally protected speech. At Techdirt, Mike Masnick argues the law is…

This week, France became the first European country to pass a social media ban. Under-15s will be blocked from opening new accounts on social media from September, and banned entirely from January 2027. As the BBC notes, implementation will require everyone in France to prove they are over 15 to use social media. Other European countries may follow. At the New York Times, Mark Landler reports that similar laws are in progress in Canada, Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain. The EU is considering…

Years ago, when landlines were still common and Internet shopping was not, I got a phone call from a policeman, who said he was in Selfridges and did I know where my credit card was? Suppressing the triggered memories of It’s 10 PM. Do you know where your children are?, I said, yes, yes, I did. He pressed on. Was I sure? Because someone in Selfridges was trying to use it. Could I go look? Laziness and certainty led me to balk. I also puzzled over this unlikelihood: a policeman in central London…

It feels like the beginning of an inflection point that plans for a gigantic data center are being abandoned after years of litigation trying to block it. The story, as told by Etiido Uko at Tom’s Hardware, is that the last of several stakeholders has abandoned the Virginia Digital Gateway, which was going to be the world’s biggest data center. It died on a technicality: the public had not been properly notified before Prince William county’s Board of Supervisors ruled to rezone the site. The…

The US Supreme Court’s decision this week in Trump v. Slaughter, giving the US president the power to control supposed-to-be independent agencies set up and funded by Congress, may be as profound internationally as it is domestically. In his newsletter, the economist Paul Krugman calls the president’s new power “dictatorial”, and notes the Court’s exception for the Federal Reserve. Krugman highlights the importance to average citizens of the Federal Trade Commission, which oversees consumer…

So Britain will soon wave off yet another prime minister; they’ve been dropping like flies ever since the 2016 Brexit vote. At the Guardian, John Crace snarks that come Remembrance Sunday they’ll need more space around the Cenotaph for all the former prime ministers (nine, plus whoever’s next). I had hoped for two things from the Labour government elected in 2024: 1) an end to the Conservative psychodrama, and 2) that as a former human rights lawyer. Starmer would modulate the government’s…

Some policies are popular until people examine the details. This may be happening with social media bans like the one UK prime minister Keir Starmer announced this week. It will prohibit under-16s from using the main social media platforms or livestreaming, ban under-18s from using “romantic simulation” chatbots, and limit strangers’ ability to contact under-16s via direct messaging on gaming platforms. More detail will come in July; the government will also consider imposing a nightly curfew…

This week, a regional court in Munich issued what may be a landmark decision: it ruled that Google is liable for the content of its “AI Overviews”. The court was careful to distinguish between these, which Google’s algorithms generate, and search results, which link to content on third-party websites Google does not control. In other words, Google owns its own mistakes. The court awarded 80% of costs to the plaintiffs, two Munich-based publishers who claimed that the company spread damaging…

One of the enduring questions in cybersecurity is how much failures cost and who pays. Many companies see cybersecurity as a cost with no return; as in housekeeping only the failures are noticeable. Certainly, a data breach, bungled software update, or ransomware attack can ding a company’s share price in the short term – but a year later, often they seem to have fully recovered. Meanwhile, the company’s customers may have spent hours monitoring credit reports, replacing credit cards, and other…

The year since the 2025 Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection has made Europe more distinct as an entity. Two years ago, we were being chastised for paying insufficient attention to structural corporate power. At this conference last year, we were warned about “simplification”, since published as the Digital Omnibus that threatens to undo some aspects of data protection and other privacy rights. This year, we heard a lot about “European values”. Invoked as a metric: does “simplification”…

In the midst of the recent Labour leadership turbulence, on Wednesday May 13 Wes Streeting, who would resign from his position as the UK’s health minister a day later, published the Health bill. Among its provisions are the latest in a long line of attempts to centralize and exploit the data collected by the National Health Service. medConfidental provides a useful summary. Two main aims have kept reappearing over the years. One is to make the health service more efficient and streamline…

Sometime in the late 1990s, I was asked to be a token skeptic on a TV show featuring three people who claimed they were immortal. The production team didn’t take them very seriously. Probably no one did, but the three – all Americans – nonetheless managed a tour of the UK media. One producer mentioned salaciously that the trio had requested a hotel room with one large bed. The sanest part of the resulting discussion asked if they were leading a cult. Usually, my goal would have been to avoid…

One of the first things skeptics learn is to never assume that paranormal belief implies stupidity. Smart people believe questionable things all the time; intelligence is different from the ability to assess your own cognitive biases, especially when you are working outside your field of expertise. The astronomer Carl Sagan, one of 26 founders of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry hinted at this in saying that the more you want to believe something the more careful you have to be about…

Is AI more like a train or a hot air balloon? Veronica Paternolli and Ryan Calo asked at this year’s We Robot. Nineteenth-century hot air balloons were notoriously uncontrollable. The US legal system assigned strict liability: it was your fault if your balloon crashed in someone’s backyard, even if you did everything you could to prevent it. Railways were far more disruptive but also far more predictable, and therefore were liable only in cases of negligence. Which regime should apply to AI is…

Many non-human characteristics make AI attractive, Sue-Anne Teo said to open this year’s We Robot: endless patience, long and detailed memory, and sycophancy. I’m less certain about the last of those; lots of us react poorly to undisguised flattery. And yet: Stanford researchers agree with her that this is a thing. The AIs are certainly programmed to *try* to human-wash themselves: they use the perpendicular pronoun, “apologize” for errors, and type “you’re right”. And the Stanford folks’…

The peak of dot-com mania was identifiable even at the time: it was in January 2000, when AOL bought Time Warner for $183 billion. Peak podcast mania argiab;u came in 2020 when Spotify paid Joe Rogan $100 million (per rumor). It’s now time to call the peak of AI mania: Allbirds, which was loved a … Continue reading "Long Island AI" The post Long Island AI appeared first on net.wars.

By slide number as presented at Greenwich Skeptics, 2026-04-13: 3 – Ofcom, Adults’ Media Use and Attitudes Report, April 2, 2026. 4 – What is “AI”? Clockwise from top left: Eliza (1966), by Joseph Weizenbaum, which simulated a psychotherapist; a modern data center; Sidney Harris’s 1977 cartoon, “Then a miracle occurs”; protein folding by DeepMind’s … Continue reading "References for “What We Talk About When We Talk About AI”" The post References for “What We Talk About When We Talk About AI” ...

This week, Amazon announced it would cripple a bunch of older Kindle models. Users will be able to go on reading the books that are already stored on their devices, but they won’t be able to add anything new, whether it’s borrowed, bought, or downloaded. The switch will be toggled on May 20, and applies … Continue reading "Waste management" The post Waste management appeared first on net.wars.

We should have seen this coming. At Platformer, Casey Newton reports that Meta has discussed pulling funding for the Oversight Board after 2028 after already reducing it “significantly” this year. Who needs fripperies like independent governance after reporting billions of losses in its Reality Labs unit, the bit responsible for the seemingly now-abandoned metaverse, the … Continue reading "The Silicon Valley chronicles" The post The Silicon Valley chronicles appeared first on net.wars.

“Traffic to my blog has plummeted,” a friend said recently. Over decades, he’s built a thriving community, and his core users persist. But Google was crucial for bringing in new readers – and its introduction of AI and changes to its algorithm have punished small sites. This week, Sean Hollister reports at The Verge that … Continue reading "Eating the web" The post Eating the web appeared first on net.wars.

It’s easy to forget, now that so many computer interfaces seem to be getting more inscrutable, that in the early 1990s the shift from the command line to graphical interfaces and the desire to reach the wider mass market introduced a new focus on usability. In classics like Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, … Continue reading "Turn left at the robot" The post Turn left at the robot appeared first on net.wars.

On the eve of We Robot 2026, here are links to my summaries of every year since 2012, the inaugural conference, except 2014, which I missed for family reasons. There was no conference in 2024 in order to move the event back to its original April schedule (covid caused its move to September in 2020). … Continue reading "A short history of We Robot, 2026 edition" The post A short history of We Robot, 2026 edition appeared first on net.wars.