#netwars — Public Fediverse posts

This week's net.wars, "The Arizona way of death", revisits a 1990s TV encounter with three immortals while reading Aleks Krotoski's new book, The Immortalists: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/05/15/the-arizona-way-of-death/ #NetWars #books #tescreal

This week's net.wars, "The soul in the machine", considers Richard Dawkins' expressed belief that his interactions with Anthropic's Claude show that the chatbot is conscious: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/05/08/the-soul-in-the-machine/ #NetWArs #AI

This week's net.wars, "The railway and the balloon", goes to We Robot 2026, where law, culture, and robotics try to find common ground: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/05/01/the-railway-and-the-balloon/ #NetWars #WeRobot #robots #AI #law

This week's net.wars, "Intimacy capitalism", goes to the We Robot 2026 workshop day, and finds new things to worry about: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/04/24/intimacy-capitalism/ #NetWars #WeRobot #AI #robots

This week's net.wars, "Long Island AI", calls the peak of AI mania: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/04/17/long-island-ai/ #NetWars #AI #StupidFinanceTricks

This week's net.wars, "Waste management", sees the planned obsolescence of early Kindles, Microsoft's "just for entertainment" Copilot, and AI-driven new cybersecurity threats: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/04/10/waste-management/ #NetWars #ai #environment

This week's net.wars, "The Silicon Valley chronicles", notes the likely pending deathe of Meta's Oversight Board and reviews the shift in Silicon Valley politics laid out in Jacob Silverman's book, Gilded Rage: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/04/03/the-silicon-valley-chronicles/
#NetWars

This week's net.wars, "Eating the web", watches Google, a creature of the open web, try to swallow the whole thing, and considers the potential far-reaching impact of this week's social media verdicts: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/03/27/eating-the-web/ #NetWars #SocialMedia

This week's net.wars, "Turn left at the robot", goes to the Human-Robot Interaction conference and finds that in robots versus kids the kids win every time: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/03/20/turn-left-at-the-robot/, #NetWars #robots

This week's net.wars, "Power games", finds the UK's digital ID proposals back in the news, along with alarming new amendments to the Online Safety Act: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/03/13/power-games/ #NetWars #UKPolitics #Censorship #Children #OnlineSafetyAct

This week's net.wars, "Bedroom eyes", finds Meta's smart glasses scooping up intimate scenes, finds a new paper says LLMs end online anonymity, and notes wartime Internet risks: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/03/06/bedroom-eyes/ #NetWars #AI #Privacy

This week's net.wars, "Saving no one", finds that 3D printing is enabling puzzle-making and ponders the mess of the Information Commissioner Office's fine against Reddit: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/02/27/saving-no-one/ #NetWars #OnlineSafetyAct

This week's net.wars, "Information wants to be surveiled," discovers surveillance pricing, in which the pythons of industry use everything they know about us to wring out every last drop of profit: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/02/20/information-wants-to-be-surveiled/ #NetWars #Surveillance #Retail

This week's net.wars, "Whooped", watches the recent Australian Open, where the powers that be disagreed about whether #tennis players could wear Whoop fitness tracker bands in competition: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/02/13/whooped/ #NetWars #data

This week's net.wars, "In search of the future Internet", goes to meetings building opposition to AI-withouth-public-consent: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/02/06/in-search-of-the-future-internet/ #NetWars #AI #polycrisis

This week's net.wars, "Universal service", plays Techdirt's One Billion Users Game and contemplates the potential loss of Freeview, the UK's public service broadcast TV system: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/01/30/universal-service/ #NetWars #TV #SocialMedia

This week's net.wars, "In search of causality", finds new research looking for a connection between teens' social media use and harm: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/01/23/in-search-of-causality/ #NetWars #SocialMedia #OnlineHarm

This week's net.wars, "Split", notes Keir Starmer's reversal on digital ID and ponders the row over Grok's clothing-removal capabilities and its collateral damage to the Royal Society: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/01/16/split/ #NetWars #AI #digitalID #science

In this week's net.wars, "Disconnexion", Grok's users bring it into disrepute, and the digital euro looms: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/01/09/disconnexion/ #NetWars #AI #grok #UKPolitics #crypto

This week's net.wars, "The owl who was God", contemplates the year and concludes AI may be too stupid to live much longer: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/01/02/the-ai-who-was-god/ #NetWars

This week's net.wars, "The censorship-industrial complex", ponders the Oscars' move to YouTube; watches Waymos freeze in San Francisco's power outage; and wonders why bar *those* five individuals and NGOs from the US: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/12/26/the-censorship-industrial-complex/. #NetWars #censorship #uspol

This week's net.wars, "Slop", marks iRobot's bankruptcy and sale; wonders why, if generative AI is so great it has to be forced on us; and deplores the CBP plan to demand an unrealistic amount of "high-value data" as part of the price of visiting the US: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/12/19/slop/ #NetWars #privacy #robots

This week's net.wars, "ID is football", sees the arrival of Australia's social media ban for under-16s and leads a panel on digital ID at #UKIGF: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/12/12/id-is-football/ #NetWars #privacy #digitalid #osa

This week's net.wars, "ID is football", sees the arrival of Australia's social media ban for under-16s and leads a panel on digital ID at #UKIGF: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/12/12/id-is-football/ #NetWars #privacy #digitalid #osa

This week's net.wars, "ID is football", sees the arrival of Australia's social media ban for under-16s and leads a panel on digital ID at #UKIGF: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/12/12/id-is-football/ #NetWars #privacy #digitalid #osa

This week's net.wars, "ID is football", sees the arrival of Australia's social media ban for under-16s and leads a panel on digital ID at #UKIGF: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/12/12/id-is-football/ #NetWars #privacy #digitalid #osa

This week's net.wars, "ID is football", sees the arrival of Australia's social media ban for under-16s and leads a panel on digital ID at #UKIGF: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/12/12/id-is-football/ #NetWars #privacy #digitalid #osa

This week's net.wars, "A fork in the road" is a trip through the UK's recent history of thinking about road pricing: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/12/05/a-road-not-taken/ #NetWars #privacy

This week's net.wars, "Mean time between failure", wonders whether the Internet is becoming more unreliable or whether it just seems like it after several giant infrastructure providers have recently seen small errors cause mass-scale disruption: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/11/21/mean-time-between-failure/ #NetWars

This week's net.wars, "Simplification", finds that a leaked draft indicates that the European Commission is seeking to weaken the legal regime that protects European digital rights, including data protection: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/11/14/simplification/ #NetWars #AI #EUPol #privacy

This week's net.wars, "The panopticon in your home", is disturbed by HMRC's use of passenger records to deny benefits, and ponders the word "robot" in connection with something that has to be remotely operated by a human: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/11/07/the-panopticon-in-your-home/ #NetWars #privacy #robots

This week's net.wars, "It's always DNS", considers the lesssons of Monday's Amazon AWS outage: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/10/24/its-always-dns/ #NetWars #UK

This week's net.wars, "The bottom drawer", finds Keir Starmer's ID card rhetoric weirdly archaic and worries he will not learn the right lessons for studying India's Aadhar: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/10/17/the-bottom-drawer/ #NetWars #privacy #DigitalID

This week's net.wars, "Software is still forever", laments the amount of ewaste about to be produced by the end of Windows 10, and notes new developments in age verification under the Online Safety Act: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/10/10/software-is-still-forever/
#NetWars #OnlineSafetyAct #EWaste

This week's net.wars, "Second sight", recounts the results of four months comparing the difference a cataract makes: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/07/04/second-sight/ #NetWars #cataracts

This week's net.wars, "Negative externalities", watches Texas police use license plate data to search for a woman they think might have self-managed an abortion; pushes back on a report that suggests a publicly funded NHS period-tracking app is a better idea; and notes the passage of the UK's new data bill weakening citizens' rights over their data: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/06/13/negative-externalities/ #NetWars #UKpolitics #Abortion #DataBill #Privacy

This week's net.wars, "Dangerous corner", goes to CPDP and finds that privacy issues have expanded to include the electrical grid and farming. "Simplify!" says the EU. For whose benefit? https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/05/23/dangerous-corner/ #NetWars #privacy #HumanRights #CPDP

Wendy Grossman's (@wendyg -- follow her) net.wars this week is excellent as usual:
https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/

Its trigger is the UK government's rather #stupid #demand that #Apple provide access to all of its users end-to-end #encrypted files. And it talks more generally about the problems with governments demanding back doors in encryption provided to the public, which is hugely counter-productive.

But maybe I just like it because it agrees with what I've said here a number of times:

Encryption is math.

There is no such thing as math that "the good guys" can do, but which "the bad guys" can't.

Anyone who tells you different [1] is lying.

Use strong encryption for everything, for the same reason you send your routine correspondence in envelopes rather than on the back of a postcard.

[1] Such as politicians who never got entry-level algebra telling you that encryption that only the government can break is possible, you just have to NERD HARDER.

#NetWars #BackDoor #encryption #NerdHarder #math #algebra #politician

This week's net.wars, "Isolate", signs the Global Encryption Coalition's letter opposing Britain's demand that Apple backdoor encryption on its cloud service worldwide, and imagines the worst possible timeline where it's coupled it with Ofcom's rules under the Online Safety Act: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/02/14/isolate/. #NetWars #Ofcom #Encryption #Apple #UKPolice

This week's net.wars, "Digital distrust", goes to the #UKIGF and connects AI governance to digital exclusion: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2024/11/08/digital-distrust/ #NetWars #DigitalExclusion #AI

This week's net.wars, "Digital distrust", goes to the #UKIGF and connects AI governance to digital exclusion: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2024/11/08/digital-distrust/ #NetWars #DigitalExclusion #AI

This week's net.wars, "Digital distrust", goes to the #UKIGF and connects AI governance to digital exclusion: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2024/11/08/digital-distrust/ #NetWars #DigitalExclusion #AI

This week's net.wars, "Digital distrust", goes to the #UKIGF and connects AI governance to digital exclusion: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2024/11/08/digital-distrust/ #NetWars #DigitalExclusion #AI

This week's net.wars, "Digital distrust", goes to the #UKIGF and connects AI governance to digital exclusion: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2024/11/08/digital-distrust/ #NetWars #DigitalExclusion #AI

This week's net.wars, "Borderlines" reviews the 2023 documentary Phantom Parrot as it begins screening in the UK, where "phantom parrot" is a mobile phone #surveillance program enabled by Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2024/03/15/borderlines/ #NetWars #PhantomParrot #documentaries #movies

This week's net.wars, "A surveillance state of mind", tries to answer a friend's question - are computers fundamentally anti-democratic?: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/12/22/a-surveillance-state-of-mind/ #NetWars #surveillance #privacy #democracy #malveillance

This week's net.wars, "The one hundred", yawns at the AI Safety Summit, remembers the Internet worm of 1988, and notes the anniversary of the hostile takeover of Twitter: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/11/03/the-one-hundred/ #birdsite #NetWars #AI #SocialMedi adiversity

This week's net.wars, "The one hundred", yawns at the AI Safety Summit, remembers the Internet worm of 1988, and notes the anniversary of the hostile takeover of Twitter: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/11/03/the-one-hundred/ #birdsite #NetWars #AI #SocialMedi adiversity

This week's net.wars, "The one hundred", yawns at the AI Safety Summit, remembers the Internet worm of 1988, and notes the anniversary of the hostile takeover of Twitter: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/11/03/the-one-hundred/ #birdsite #NetWars #AI #SocialMedi adiversity

This week's net.wars, "The one hundred", yawns at the AI Safety Summit, remembers the Internet worm of 1988, and notes the anniversary of the hostile takeover of Twitter: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/11/03/the-one-hundred/ #birdsite #NetWars #AI #SocialMedi adiversity