Dr Laura James's writings

There's been a lot of AI in the air, and that is reflected in this collection; at least the bits connecting with other worlds (etiquette, nature, craft and Enlightenment values) get a little outside the bubble.  Kevin Beaumont describes how outsourcing IT to reduce costs means  "we've normalised ransomware": Because organisations are busy trying to automate everything and put IT at the heart of everything to reduce cost, the risk and the threat increases. When you combine cost pressures, capitalism, automation and a digital economy — there’s risks which have developed here. Many orgs are, essentially, in a race to the bottom when it comes to cost. Races to the bottom don’t end well. ... For example, the press has barely mentioned the Jaguar Land Rover incident after the first two days — save for when they admitted “some data” may be impacted. That became another news cycle. But… why? The primary impact here is the UK government may have to effective bail out the motor...

Last week was the second Festival of Commoning . It was great last year, and this year we were back in Stroud for a bigger event (albeit one that was a bit less interactive). This year was also dual track, which meant Decisions as to what sessions to go to...  What follows are my fairly rough and possibly inaccurate notes of what struck me as most interesting in the sessions I attended.   This time we didn't really talk about why we were all there - what commoning was all about. This meant that Saturday night's stand-up comedians were baffled, and the audience contributions probably left things even more unclear. "Not anarchists, but anarchist inclusive" is perhaps as good as it got. I'm minded to think it's great not to have too specific a definition, when there's some feeling of a movement starting or coalescing; but a complete absence of clarity wasn't helpful for some of the new folks. I had to look back at what I wrote last year : What is a common...

Those American candy gift shops, that one usually assumes are some sort of money laundering scheme, are in fact multilevel tax dodges .  Valerie Aurora writes about how to start an internet resiliency club. There's a nice map of Digital Public Infrastructure at  https://dpimap.org/ Thanks to Full Fact for drawing attention to how Google is making web content harder to trust: In a change buried in a little-known technical blog , Google has announced that it will abandon a key element of its tagging system for fact checks, effectively de-prioritising this content and making it harder for people to access reliable information. Stuart Schechter writes a powerful reflection :  Not everyone will miss Ross Anderson. Ross was not afraid to speak truths that made people uncomfortable. His ideas and arguments threatened the beliefs, status, power, ego, and bank balances of others — often those with power. His writings and talks undermined proponents of hardware attestation, ...

Taps microphone Is this thing on?  Some of these notes are well aged, like a cheese. A whole lot of life, and death, since last notes. MySociety propose reframing civic tech as pro-democracy tech. Ethan Zuckerman has many excellent thoughts on how the Signalgate story is forking reality. Rob Horning doesn't listen to podcasts . Neither do I, mostly.  Some interesting thoughts on parasocial relationships, conversation, etc.  Nick Hunn on the government push for net zero , in terms of how well smart metering has gone: I wonder how many UK householders know that part of their electricity bill is a payment to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem? ..... So far, the Smart Metering marketing campaign has spent about £500 million trying to persuade us to do something which is free.  If the UK is going to meet the Government’s decarbonisation targets for home energy, their next task is to persuade us all to sign up for something which will cost millions of home owners tens o...