So, the Huawei oversight report is out and it’s apparently terribly scary. If you’re interested in the content rather than the mood-music there’s a good key points summary here, and if you’re the kind of person who reads this blog, the report itself is here. The point I would like to make, though, is that…
Read More If we could only get the same oversight of Facebook we have of Huawei UKBack at the end of 2007, as we dived into the trough of the Great Recession or Great Financial Crisis or Second Great Depression or what you will, a crucial decision was taken. Verizon Wireless, then still a Vodafone division, chose LTE for its new mobile network, and put one of the most important women…
Read More Ten Years of 4G: Trump, Snowden, Huawei, and BrexitSo here’s the Parliamentary Select Committee on DCMS’s fake news report. Rather, its report on fake news. This bit has been doing the rounds: ‘Free Basics’ is a Facebook service that provides people in developing countries with mobile phone access to various services without data charges. This content includes news, employment, health, information and local…
Read More Now that’s what I call viralWell, here’s some of the stickiest, nastiest grease dripping out of the bottom of the Internet: Around 2009, Gryn moved to Prague to intern at a company called Elephant Orchestra, which specialized in selling ads on misspelled domain names such as facebok.com. Elephant Orchestra was so profitable that its founder, then about 26, produced a…
Read More Looking back down the S-curveI took these photos of Berlin’s forever-delayed airport terminal this summer. It’s just turned out a few days before the latest attempt to announce an opening date that the thing is still nowhere near ready after 2000 days of delay and twelve years of construction. Meanwhile, the executives bicker, the stakeholders wrestle for power, and…
Read More What if reality was more like software? Visit to a failed smart cityI’ve been thinking a lot about scaling and the economics of the cloud recently after reading this. Specifically, this quote: The costs for most SaaS products tend to find economies of scale early. If you are just selling software, distribution is essentially free, and you can support millions of users after the initial development. But…
Read More Scale and scalabilityIn case you wonder, there’s not been much activity around here due to a project over at the Pol. Think Project Lobster, but Eurocratic. Expect an uptick on the blog from now on. First of all, something that has struck me at work and by following Maciej Ceglowski‘s talks. We all remember the crack from…
Read More The menace of correlated hype cyclesSwinging off something I discussed in another place, the Wikipedia list of culture-bound syndromes is fascinatingly odd, although several of them seem to reduce to depression and several more to sexism. I wonder if different Wikipedias have different ones? But what interests me is this: what with globalisation an’ all, will these get smoothed out…
Read More Culture-bound syndromesOh Rugby League, must it always be so? The answer is always yes. The FFR XIII, the French governing body, had the great idea of streaming their match with Wales today on the web, presumably because TV wasn’t interested and there are plenty of weirdos who would get up for the England/Samoa and Australia/New Zealand…
Read More #rugbyleague tries streaming on the web. it doesn’t go wellOK, the net neutrality. Just to set down how I think about this. The fundamental issue here is the termination fee regime on the Internet, or rather the lack of one. So what is termination? When a phone call (remember them?) goes from network A to network B, network B charges network A for “terminating”…
Read More My correct views on net neutrality