Good evening chums and pals!
This has taken me a little while longer to put together, basically because I came back from MWC in Barcelona with a little gift: a delightfully productive cough which has got me feeling a little tired, as I’m (obviously) not sleeping all that well.
MWC itself was fun, and I’ll probably write about that another time. But meanwhile, on to the links.
1. How about compulsory ID to use the web?
I try not to venture into the world of politics too much -- stop laughing at the back there -- but if you live in the UK and want to do everyone a favour, please sign the petition that the Open Rights Group has created opposing ID checks for web access.
What's that, you say? You hadn't heard that the government had proposed you having to verify your ID to use the web?
That's because it's part of the Children Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which would give Ministers the power to restrict access to "internet services". Of course, it's being framed as "protecting the children", and if that isn't enough of a clue that the government is up to no good, then you haven't been paying attention. "Protecting the children" has become a key framing of the right used to remove rights from adults the world over.
The problem is that the bill is, as always, loosely worded. It allows the government to decide that any website shouldn't be accessed by children, and therefore that adults must verify their ID to access it.
Think the government won't move beyond porn to other sites? Oh, you sweet summer child, come over here, I have a bridge to sell you. Imagine that we have another Section 28 scenario, and the government decides that kids can't access material about being gay. You, as a parent, wouldn't even get the choice to allow your kids to do so. But also you would be forced to verify your ID as an adult to access it, with a third party because the market is the answer to everything with these loons.
Nice little database of gay people you have there. Be a shame if it fell into the wrong hands.
If you think that can't happen here (or anywhere) just look at how fast the world has turned from mildly bad to oppressively grim for trans people, and trans youth in particular. Or consider how the US government used all that "harmless" tracking of advertising data to work out your location. If they can do it, eventually, they will.
2. The one good use for crypto
404media (who I love, and you should subscribe to) wrote a story this week about how the payment details for an account linked to a protest group to the Swiss authorities, who promptly handed it to the FBI. Given Proton's reputation for privacy, this sounds bad.
And it is, although there's nothing that Proton could have done differently. As a Swiss company, they have to follow Swiss law, and while Switzerland (currently) has pretty deep privacy protection, if Proton receives a request that's legal there they have to ultimately comply with it.
The difference with Proton and similar services like Tuta is that the amount of data the company has access to is minimal. It can't access the content of your emails, it can't access your contacts, it can't access your files or your calendars. This means that if the authorities request that data, even with a proper warrant, they don't have it to hand over.
Credit card data, though, can't be hidden in the same way. And that is why most companies like Proton also accept payments in crypto, which is much more difficult to trace back than your name and credit card number. It's the one good use of crypto.
Tangentially related, I'm gradually moving to a privacy-focused stack of services. That's not because I have much to hide that any authorities would ever be interested in, but because normalising full end-to-end encryption is a good thing. Everyone should do it.
3. Anthropic isn’t going to save you (but that’s OK)
You might have noticed that Anthropic has been in the news a little lately. Yes, it’s been difficult to tell, there have been only tiny numbers of stories about it.
Those of us who spent the last 15 years eye-rolling while the American right attempted to claim that the government was interfering with businesses to get them to, say, censor right-wing voices on Twitter, will be eye-rolling even more now. The US government, having the kind of tantrum that could only come from a group of people infected by manosphere brain worms, has decided to punish Anthropic for not doing what it wanted (removing controls on using Claude for surveillance) by declaring it at “supply-chain risk”.
This sounds pretty innocuous, but it’s a long way from funny. There are legal levers available to Trump’s regime which have serious consequences. The most powerful is ICTS — the Information and Communications Technology and Services rules established under Trump's first term (Executive Order 13873) and expanded by Biden. It gives the Commerce Department broad authority to block or unwind transactions involving technology with a "foreign adversary nexus" that poses a supply-chain risk. It's been used against TikTok/ByteDance and was the mechanism proposed for forcing a sale.
Likewise, it’s difficult to see how Trump could apply this, given that Anthropic isn’t involved in a “foreign adversary nexus”. But even bringing a case would enough risk to the company to make potential partners and customers wary. And the Trump government has a history of using frivolous lawsuits to harass people who don’t do what it wants.
But Trump could also attempt a politically motivated reframing. The regime could claim that AI safety advocacy itself was a form of ideological capture worth punishing. If the current US administration frames AI safety guardrails as a form of censorship or left-wing ideological control, "your model won't do X" becomes evidence of being an unreliable supplier to government. That's a very different use of the supply-chain risk concept, but the legal architecture might support it.
4. The information grey goo
Sometimes I write something and completely forget I wrote it. I’m not sure whether this is age, or just the terrible memory I’ve always had coming back to haunt me.
But either way, I was pleasantly reminded about this piece recently. I think it holds up very well: the information grey goo of AI slop is here, and it’s already damaging our ability to communicate. It’s also very difficult for publishers, who have the choice of either doubling-down on human authors (expensive, risky) or going with the flow of AI and hoping it doesn’t lead to yet-more slop.
5. The office model of software
One of the reasons I like Information Architects (iA), the company that makes iA Writer, is the thoughtfulness of their approach to software. Occasionally, they will even write an essay. That may not be surprising given their business is (in part) about writing, but I appreciate their approach.
This time, their focus is office software, and particularly that old charmer, Microsoft Office. One passage should be enough to tickle your fancy:
Working in Office apps, we are trapped in an old world that ceased to exist decades ago. Like the office in Severance, the office embedded in Microsoft Office is fetishized: margins, borders, and page numbers are treated as signals of authority rather than remnants of a paper era.
Office, and the apps that ape it, force us to adapt to them rather than the other way around. And iA sees the current trend in Europe towards desiring digital sovereignty as a chance to break out of the chains of old paradigms:
If Europe wants to prepare for digital conflicts, it should not just swap vendors. It should leave obsolete work models behind. The smartest way to strengthen digital independence is not replacing bad software with wobbly clones. It is making work meaningful and enjoyable. Europe does not need a European Microsoft. Europe, and not just Europe, needs a post-Office model of writing, calculating, and presenting.
I love that people are thinking like this.
6. The Pikachu iPod
Via Om comes this absolute gem of a post by Molly Mary O’Brien about the cultural impact of the iPod, which made music portable and personal in a way which it hadn’t been before. What’s also fascinating is how it documents a trend amongst the young away from the hyper-connected world into the solitude of devices like the iPod, ones which are only about your personal taste.
7. Lounging around
The continued existence of The New Yorker is one of the things which gives me hope for humanity. I don’t know if there is such a thing as the perfect New Yorker article, but this piece on airport lounges must be pretty close to it. It’s the kind of non-fiction writing that once I would have aspired to.
8. Givf nudez!
From cultural to cultureless, not content with creating the perfect device for creep shots, Meta has been sending nudes captured by their spyglasses to its own workers for “review”. As has been pointed out a hundred times, Facebook was founded as “a tool for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of Harvard undergrads”, and I don’t have any reason to believe that the values of its founder have changed much since then.
9. The sweetest little editor
Markdown is meant to make your writing life easier, but with a few exceptions devoted editors for the format have got almost as complex as the products they are meant to replace. And that’s where MarkEdit comes in. It’s a lightweight, open source edit for the Mac which is also free. Recommended.
10. Everything you want and nothing you don’t
There’s been a spate of articles lately about people moving to Linux. This seems to happen every few years, but this time round does feel a little different. The imperatives have changed, thanks to the ever-invasive AI worming its way into every operating system, the obvious inanities of the Big Tech crowd, and — outside the US — a growing desire for tech sovereignty.
But one line that stuck out for me in Steve Bonifield’s article was his description of Linux as “everything I want, and nothing I don’t”. There is, as Steve notes, a huge learning curve. But if you’re willing to give it a go, you get a lot out of it.
I’m typing this on a Framework 13, running CachyOS. Cachy is based on Arch, and Arch is… well it’s not the most forgiving of Linuxen. But it suits me, because I retain more control ovet it. At the opposite end of the scale are immutable versions of the OS, which trade flexibility for reliability, security and ease of maintenance. A “normal” person could run something like Fedora Atomic and it would probably go wrong less often than macOS — and certainly less often than Windows.
Anyway, more on that another time. For now, that’s all, and I’m about to hit the Lemsip.