Dr Laura James's writings

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...