Public Service Internet monthly newsletter (Sept 2023)

2 FBI agent's casually question Reality Winner outside her house

We live in incredible times with such possibilities that is clear. Although its easily dismissed the unthinkable awful end of apps, the breach of UK voters data and zoom’s new business model.

To quote Buckminster Fuller “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

You are seeing aspects of this with Meta threads supporting Mastodon’s verification. the whitehouse cracking down on data brokers and ABC in Australia closing down almost all of its twitter account.


Colbalt the hidden side of the energy revolution

Ian thinks: This documentary by German broadcaster DW is a real eye opener of the real inequality happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo and its effect across any potential energy revolution.

The really deep problems of Venture Capital

Ian thinks: This interview outlines not just the well known problems of taking capital from a VC but how deeply broken the whole ecosystem is. Nothing better said that the market place won’t solve everything, it may make it worst?

No one gets fired for buying Microsoft?

Ian thinks: Local first but when will companies and the C suite care enough to take it seriously? You might have thought the serious damage of ransomware and malware might be a factor for the future to mitigate such damage?

AI right down the middle

Ian thinks: Although I was sceptical of the talk, there were some good points made about the problem of markets. I especially the responsibilities, coordination and the public/society interest.

A race to the bottom where everyone loses

Ian thinks: I hadn’t heard the term Moloch but Liv makes it clear what the term is and give great examples of Moloch. Although Liv and Tristan brush over the thought this is the market and capitalism in effect.

The world is a mess lets fix it?

Ian thinks: Defcon 31 has showed there is a number of incredible revelations on hacking voting machine to the Cult of dead cow’s open-source, privacy peer-to-peer networked framework.

When are we going to finally listen to the minorities who know?

Ian thinks: This fine group of black women have been ringing the bell about the real problems of AI for such a long time. They refuse to be silenced and as we are starting to understand they were absolutely right.

The awful truth about facial recognition and black people

Ian thinks: Simple as this, facial recognition can’t tell black people apart. So why the heck are we still deploying it? Its a question I just can’t wrap my head around, If you don’t trust business insider read the actual paper here.

Reality asks whats in the public interest?

Ian thinks: This film ended up in a lot of small cinemas but the true story of Reality NSA whistle blower is portrayed exactly how the FBI recording captured. Its quite compelling and raises questions about the public interest and what happened next.


Find the archive here

Riding the Bitcoin bubble up and out?

Bitcoin market price over last 8 years

Bitcoin is something everyone is talking about right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if my parents asked me about it soon.

It was a while ago when I received some bitcoins from a friend via tipjar.  I added the tipjar link on my blog and every once in a while I received a very small amount of bitcoins as tips. The amounts were so small that I didn’t really take note till I needed to move the wallet.

That was when I noticed the amounts were adding up to less decimal places  in bitcoin and the value in British sterling was also starting to add up to a few coffees. After the move to blockchain.info (no matter what I thought about the founder), I decided to keep an eye on the figure but forgot about it. Wasn’t till about a week ago, when I decided to have a quick look at the amount it was worth and was pretty shocked.

The tips were adding up to something quite big and thats when I decided maybe I should convert some to sterling and ethereum. I have never put any money into bitcoin, its all been donated or paid to me in return for something, I treated it as a bit of a joke to be honest. But over the last few weeks it became very real as I transferred quite a bit out and still had some left over, just in-case the bitcoin bubble keeps growing. But i’m simply not motivated enough to track its progress and put money into it. Ethereum I’ve found interesting since I first saw the videos about it so I’ll keep an eye on that too.

Thanks to everyone who tipped my blog or paid into my wallet over the last 3 years,  I owe a great gratitude to all those people. I’ll keep writing… feel free to keep tipping.