A little more from A User’s Guide. This is from Ballard’s 1971 essay about Ralph Nader. The important point, though, is that Nader is unloading a powerful sense of anxiety and guilt onto a huge range of commonplace activities. Sooner or later, I would guess, these will crystallize around one major subject, a simple formula…
Read More Politicizing your lunchSo 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Read More Now that’s what I call viralNote, 15th January 2019: A similar study to the one quoted here has been retracted after someone attempting to replicate the result found a bug in the authors’ code. This one has not, but it is probably worth bearing in mind. Retraction Watch coverage. So how might one of those CA campaigns work? Here are…
Read More Network structure, fake news, and why nice people don’t go NaziThe case of Google bullying the New America Foundation into sacking the Internet regulation team has gone a million miles around Twitter and the world by now, but I thought I’d share something from the vault, the TYReserve if you will. This POLITICO piece, with its attendant technical appendix, was always meant to be followed…
Read More TYRchive! on Google’s European lobbying blitzOne thing I’ve recently noticed knocking about the industry is what I’m beginning to call the “post-Internet” or maybe the “Afternet”. This is the conjunction of maybe three trends. The first of these is the way 5G is panning out over in mobile. To start with, pretty much everything in consumer and most things in…
Read More Preview: TYR @ OpenTech 2017Andrew Gordon’s The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command is pretty special. In essence, this is a deep history of a mentalité, a way of thinking and seeing, and it’s a history that spirals outwards from a very specific time and place and a very specific artefact. The time, the place: Windy…
Read More The place, the time, the artefact, the cultureSo, to summarise this post a bit, here are some insights: 1) The Curzon Foundation website has been up since February 2010. The various Curzon companies have existed for the same period of time, one succeeding the other as they successively failed to file accounts and got struck off. It looks very much like each…
Read More 10 insights on the Biryani ProjectOh 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 wellI have been reading the Leeds Teaching Hospitals report on Jimmy Savile. Obviously, it couldn’t really be any more grim, and you’ll have heard the latest shocking revelations via the mainstream media and Jamie Kenny. But what about really sick and perverted behaviour? Here’s some for you. A hugely important theme in the report is…
Read More Genuinely evilThis is only one of the reasons why squatting in other people’s netblocks is a bad idea. To understand the point, you’ve got to go back to the BT 21CN project, which was one of those “the Internet is just another service over our private network” ideas telcos tend to love. Although a lot of…
Read More daft IP addressing choices