I've tried to take on the question of what it would take to make the internet public interest technology. This took me on a trip through transnational infrastructure, standards, governance, industrial policy, and a whole cast of creative thinkers and next-generation projects.
The fact that we can’t remove essential complexity with a software redesign doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do about it. What if the problem definition wasn’t outside of our purview? What if we could get the world to conform to the software, and not just the other way around?
Congress continues to push for censorship bills to "protect the kids" online rather than passing comprehensive privacy laws that would protect all users from predatory data gathering and sales that target us for advertising and abuse.
More than 500,000 books have been removed from the Internet Archive's lending library due to the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit, including more than 1,300 banned and challenged titles. 📚 Our patrons have shared powerful stories about how this loss has impacted them, and we need your help to make a change.
Sign our open letter to the publishers urging them to restore access to these books. 📖✍️ #LetReadersRead
We’re back! We’re pleased to be back on Mastodon, thanks to some help from our friends at @fediversity, a project sponsored by the @EUCommission Horizon programme.
We’ll continue to toot here with news about the work of the Court of Justice of the EU.
Si vous preferez vos toots en francais, veuillez suivre notre compte @Curia_fr
It was nearly two years ago that I wrote this article1 about the EU #ChatControl surveillance directive on behalf of the @cryptpad team.
Very little has changed since then. Experts in technology, law, and policy all agree that the proposal undermines basic European rights, that it will be abused by authoritarian member states, and that the proposed tech solutions cannot possibly do the job the supporting legislators have claimed.
Nevertheless, they have persisted, claiming the support of "expert testimony" that overwhelmingly consists of unsupported claims by lobbyists associated with law enforcement and defense contractors who stand to benefit financially from its implementation.
A vote is expected to take place on June 19th. These have been scheduled and delayed multiple times already, but this it feels like they might get away with it. There is a lot going on in the EU at the moment, and people are both distracted and tired from fighting this for so long.
I'll try to make resistance easier by collecting some suggested actions below, with links.