net.wars columns, published every Friday since November 2, 2001 at (new address as of January 2023) the net.wars blog, on Saturdays on CIX (join! discuss!), at Cybersalon, and sometimes at other sites. If there's any column you'd like to republish/cross-post, just ask. net.wars also has a rarely used Pinboard for stories that come up between columns on the subject net.wars covers: computers, freedom, and privacy, aka the border wars between cyberspace and real life. We do not publish "guest posts", edit past posts to include suggested links, accept payment, even in kind, to include third-party links, or "share resources" offered by unsolicited email. We have no trackers on this website.

2023

• A surveillance state of mind (2023-12-22) - In which we try to answer the question, "Do computers favor authoritarianism?"
• Game of carrots (2023-12-15) - Epic Games wins its case claiming that Google illegally tied its Play Store and billing service, setting off a new era for American antitrust jurisprudence.
• Property is theft (2023-12-08) - When the contract between Warner Brothers Discovery and Sony ends because of a merger, Playstation owners find the libraries of films and TV shows they paid for disappear.
• The good fight (2023-12-01) - The Foundation for Information Policy Research surveys the tech world as it turns 25.
• Faking it (2023-11-24) - The removal of news headlines means news and ads look alike on exTwitter; AI brings new science fakery; and the UK's covid inquiry's module on decision making in government is profoundly depressing.
• New phone, who 'dis? (2023-11-17) - I buy a Fairphone and grumble about a decade's worth of tightening Google control over Android.
• The end of ownership (2023-11-10) - Chamberlain's garage door opener preempts customers' preferences by blocking third-party apps so it can show ads.
• The one hundred (2022-11-03) - The UK's covid inquiry module on government decision making shows women were ignored, just as the week's AI Safety Summit ignored civil society; the Morris worm turns 30; and a year of Twitter diaspora produces no consensus.
• Planned incompatibilty (2023-10-27) - Part pairing awards control of the devices they buy to their manufacturers.
• The documented life (2023-10-20) - I look at my medical file.
• The grown-ups (2023-10-13) - The UK wants to expand the use of highly flawed facial recognition technology to deter...shoplifting.
• The end of cool (2023-10-06) - At this year's We Robot, structural change seems more important that new technology.
• The two of us (2023-09-29) - Naomi Klein, grappling with the world's confusion of her with Naomi Wolf, studies the workings of social lmedia in her new book, Doppelganger.
• Surveillance machines on wheels (2023-09-22) - The Online Safety bill passes Parliament; Silicon Valley ignores the giant opportunity that is older people; and the Mozilla Foundation finds that cars are the most privacy-invasive products it has ever studied.
• Doom cyberfuture (2023-09-15) - At this year's Gikii, we realize that 1990s optimism was just a dangerous virus.
• Small data (2023-09-08) - For this year's Gikii, Cambridge professor Jon Crowcroft and I write a paper warning that large language models will collapse under their own weight. Upodate (2023-12-27): This prediction began coming true within months.
• Power cuts (2023-09-01) - Streaming services delete popular shows for tax reasons; Meta overrules its Oversight Board; 3D printers run amok when their Internet connections fail; and the fallout from Canada's link tax continues.
• Guardian the peace (2023-08-25) - UK police use "nudge" and other behavioral modification techniques in order to shape public behavior.
• Five seconds (2023-08-18) - exTwitter delays loading links to outside sites the new owner dislikes.
• The data grab (2023-08-11) - Flaws in "AI" surface in math, supermarket diet plans, and self-driving cars.
• Watching YouTube (2023-08-04) - Review of Alex Winter's documentary The YouTube Effect.
• The music and the myth (2023-07-28) - We remember Woodstock for a teenaged friend.
• The safe place (2023-07-21) - The UK's Online Safety bill threatens the unity of the Internet.
• Solidarity (2023-07-14) - SAG-AFTRA joins the Hollywood writers' strike.
• Watson goes to Wimbledon (2023-07-07) - The European Court of Justice undermines the basis of Meta's targeted advertising; a proposed Irish law may allow the Data Protection Commissioner the block criticism; the Camadian government continues to push the Online News Act; and IBM's Watson attempts to provide tennis commentary.
• The horns of a dilemma (2023-06-39) - As Meta launches Threads, server administrators across the Fediverse ponder whether to federate with it.
• Own goals (2023-06-23) - Voter ID blocks a sizable percentage of UK voters; France's CNIL fines Criteo £40 million for its inadequate approach to user consent; the FTC sues Amazon; and platform workers adopt ChatGPT.
• All change (2023-06-16) - Reddit implodes over its decision to charge for access to its API.
• Snowden at ten (2023-06-09) - Ten yars after Edward Snowden blew the whistle on US government surveillance, the pubhsback has had mixed results.
• Microsurveillance (2023-06-02) - Workplace monitoring keeps expanading.
• The arc of surveillance (2023-05-26) - At this year's Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, the emphasis turns to ensuring that both existing and incoming laws get enforced.
• Cryptocurrency winter (2023-05-19) - The EU, US, and UK governments look at central bank digital currencies while bitcoin remains a fad.
• Appropriate privacy (2023-05-12) - As British laws crack down on peaceful protesters, the government continues to push for "lawful access" to encrypted messaging.
• Strike two (2023-05-05) - Hollywood writers go on strike over working conditions, pay, and AI, and Fran Drescher becomes a hero.
• The privacy price of food insecurity (2023-04-28) - As consumers use every avenue to save money in the cost-of-living crisis, often they pay in privacy.
• Breaki ng badly (2023-04-21) - The Online Safety bill reaches the House of Lords and critics warn of the consequences if it becomes of law; Dominion Voting Systems settles its case against Fox News; Netflix mails its last rental DVD; and Michael Schumaker's family sued Die Aktuelle for using an AI chat bot to create an entirely fictitious interview with the former racing car driver, who has a brain injury.
• Ex libris (2023-04-14) - The US District Court of the Southern District of New York rules that the Internet Archive's controlled digital lending violates copyright law.
• Excluding the vote (2023-04-07) - England holds its first local elections with voter ID.
• Unclear and unpresent dangers (2023-03-31) - In the fallout from the release of ChatGPT, the Italian data protection commissioner orders the bot to stop processing Italians' data, and the leaders of AI projects and companies call for a six-month moratorium on development in case AI becomes conscious.
• Memex 2.0 (2023-03-24) - What I really want is a personalized chatbot trained on everuthing I've read and written.
• Performing intelligence (2023-03-17) - GPT-4 is released, and like manhy other "AI" systems, offers higher-quality deception.
• Gap year (2023-03-10) - Politicians obsess over the wrong Internet issues.
• Ghostwritten (2023-03-03) - UK government WhatsApp messages leak, in the public interest.
• A world of lawsuits (2023-02-24) - Two legal cases challenge platform liability.
• Esquivalience (2023-02-17) - A fake dictionary entry tries to become a real word (and should!).
• Inappt (2023-02-10) - The app-based delivery ecconomy reverts to the problems of what it replaced; journalists on a hair trigger report social media failures; the robot lawyer DoNotPay turns out to be a bust; and we yawn at ChatGPT.
• Disequilibrium (2023-02-03) - exTwitter is the first to announce it will charge for access to its API, potentially heralding a new era of decentralization.
• Recentralizing (2023-01-27) - As surveillance scales, Privacy Camp notes that any technologyh that coujld be used to help migrants is instead being used to surveil them and the Ada Lovelace Institute convenes a panel to consider AI ethics. NB: This entry marks them ove of net.wars from Moveable Type to WordPress.
• New music (2023-01-20) - AI "writes" a Nick Cave song and Wendy Grossman discovers modern recording techniques while making a new CD for release in 2024.
• The ad delusion (2023-01-13) - The European Data Protection Supervisor forces the Irish Data Protection Commissioner to fine Meta €390 million and rule that the company cannot claim users consent to receiving targeted ads ont eh basis of its terms and conditions.
• Resoluton (2023-01-06) - I finally, with recognition of how the world has chnaged, decommission my home email server.

2022

• Lost for words (2022-12-30) - A study finds that we will soon run out ofo high-quality text with which to continue training large language models
• An inherently adverse environment (2022-12-23) - MSG Entertainment shocks everyone by implementing a ban on lawyers involved in litigation against the company by matching their photos via facial recognition and sending security to remove them from its entertainment venues.
• A garden of snakes (2022-12-16) - Following the crash of FTX, US Senate hearings find "crypto" full of fraud.
• Unwiring (2022-12-09 - Home renovation leads to the excavation of generations of layered wires.
• Hearing loss (2022-12-02) - Smart speakers are popular with the public but failing to produce revenues for their manufacturers.
• Assume a spherical cow (2022-11-25) - Review of Erica Thompson's new book on finding the reality in the abstraction, Escape From MOdel Land.
• Being the product (2022-11-18) - A helpless user watches as Twitter morphs under its new management.
• Moving day (2022-11-11) - Elon Musk takes over Twitter.
• Meaningful access (2022-11-04) - Life gets harder and harder for the 6% of British people who lack Internet access.
• MAGICAL, Part 1 (2022-10-28) - In which we experience the incoming all-tracking, all-the-time airport of the future.
• The laws they left behind (2022-10-21) - The pandemic brought new laws that would never have been acceptable in ordinary times; Adam Wagner's new book Emergency State reviews the laws and the permenent changes they brought.
• Signaled (2022-10-14) - To many users' frustration, Signal seprates itself from SMS on Android phones; it had its reasons.
• Recycle (2022-10-07) - Bad ideas in Internet policy never die; in this case, the EU coinsiders making telcos happy by reviving "sending party pays".
• Regression (2022-09-30) - As streaming services splinter, piracy returns as the most user-friendly option for accessing content.
• Insert a human (2022-09-23) - At this year's We Robot, robots have become "sociotechnical systems".
• Coding ethics (2022-09-16) - In this year's We Robot workshop day, we're asked to design ethical robots. It's hard!
• The lost penguin (2022-09-09) - This year's Linux upgrade (22.04) still requires a nasty fight with Samba that ends with lowered security and only partial success.
• Good-enough (2022-09-02) - AI startups threaten voice actors' livelihoods.
• Zero day (2022-08-26) - The UK faces possible electrical outages over the winter; Google's automated content moderation goes after fathers posting images for their children's doctors; a Twitter user asks to borrow a child to test Tesla's full self-drive feature; an AI startup offers a service to "whiten" voices.
• Open connections (2022-08-19) - Suggestions for improving hybrid conferences.
• Nebraska story (2022-08-12) - Meta/Facebook turns over to police messages between a woman and her daughter who were organizing an abortion.
• Painting by numbers (2022-08-05) - The image generator Midjouney sparks a discussion of copyrights.
• On the Internet they always knew you were a dog (2022-07-29) - The copyright in Disney's first MIckey Mouse cartoon will expire in 2024; dynamic pricing sends Bruce Springsteen tickets through the roof; BMW proposes to charge £10 a month to turn on heated seats; tech companies are pushing - again - to do away with leap seconds; a chess-playing robot breaks a 7-year-old opponent's finger; and 30 years on, it's still hard to disguise your identity online.
• Parting gifts (2022-07-22) - Boris Johnson resigns, leaving behind disarray and a vastly strengthened central government.
• Online harms (2022-07-15) - The Online Safety bill reemerges filled with the potential for regulatory failure that is plaguing crypto crashes and Uber, which we now know paid academics to produce favorable reports.
• Orphan consciousness (2022-07-08) - At this year's Gikii, we speculate on the rights of a consciousness whose original owners are unknown.
• Negative externalities (2022-07-01) - The rising cost of capital dooms the "millennial lifestyle" of free trials.
• Creepiness at scale (2022-06-24) - Amazon's Alexa offers to speak in the voices of dead people sparks a discussion of mass appropriation by companies like Clearview AI.
• Level two (2022-06-17) - The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigates Tesla crashes; "auto-pilot" is great marketing but terrible for safety.
• Update needed (2922-06-10) - Veteran Internet governance watcher Kieren McCarthy writes a paper concluding that the venerable Internet instutions need reform.
• Nine meals from anarchy (2022-06-03) - As food prices begin to escalate, Kate Cooper's work on food security reminds that subsistence farming as in backyard vegetable plots is not really an answer.
• Well may the bogeyman come (2022-05-27) - This year's CPDP highlights much frustration with the lack of enforcement of GDPR...and speculates on whether new agreements between the US and EU can really avoid becoming Schrems III.
• Mona Lisa smile (2022-05-20) - Human rights groups protest as Zoom threatens to add emotion detection to its platform.
• False economy (2022-05-13) - Terra/Luna becomes the biggest crypto crash of the year so far. Update: But wait...there will be more to come.
• Heartbeat (2022-05-06) - The US Supreme Court issues the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade and obsoletes my story "Heartbeat", written for the Cybersalon book 22 Ideas About the Future.
• The abundance of countries (2022-04-29) - CJEU upholds the "upload filter" (Article 17 of the Copyright Directive) but requires safeguards; Elon Musk threatens to buy Twitter; a rewrite of the Cybercrime Treaty is due by 2024; and students turn to AI rephrasing for plagiarism assistance.
• The new cable (2022-04-22) - Competition comes for Netflix.
• The data of sport (2022-04-15) - Massive amounts of data are now collected about athletes in the name of improving performance; but the data flows to those who would exploit it, not those who would help athletes.
• The price of "free" (2022-04-08) - Amazon workers vote to unionize.
• Grounded (2022-04-01) - We watch the recent documentary "Downfall: The Case Against Boeing" while reading Jessie Singel's new book, There Are No Accidents.
• Dangerous corner (2022-03-25) - We uneasily watch as Ukraine, under horrrific attacks, accepts Clearview AI's offer to use its database of 10 billion images for facial recognition.
• There may be trouble ahead (2022-03-18) - A new paper finds it remarkably easy to turn its AI system to inventing dangerous neurotoxins. Why are the researchers surprised?
• The rhetoric meets the road (2022-03-11) - Much debate surrounds suggestions that cryptocurrencies could provide Russia with a way around the sanctions being enacted against it by the Western world in response to its invasion of Ukraine.
• Sovereign stack (2022-03-04) - Russia invades Ukraine, and Ukraine's minister for digital transofmration, Mykhailo Fedorov, asks ICANN to shut down Russia's country code domains. ICANN quickly refused - rightly.
• Irreparable harm (2022-02-25) - At the Winter Olympics 15-year-old Russian skater Kamila Valieva tests positive for a banned substance and is cleared to compete anyway, casting yet more shade on the anti-doping infrastructure.
• The search for intelligent life (2022-02-18) - In which we look for something of value in web3 and find old friend Danny O'Brien working at the Filecoin Foundation.
• Freedom fries (2022-02-11) - With over a thousand people a week dying of covid in the UK, prime minister Boris Johnson says all restrictions can go by March. Is this freedom?
• Consent spam (2022-02-04) - As the UK uses the annoyance of cookie banners to sell undermining data protection law, the Internet Advertising Bureau falls foul of GDPR.
• The user in charge (2022-01-28) - Law Commission proposals for regulating autonomous vehicles highlights how much they'll change the driver's authority.
• Power plays (2022-01-21) - In more catchups, Amazon UK and Visa end their game of chicken with a settlement; the FTC refiles its antitrust case against Facebook, with greater success; Google claims antitrust legislation is bad for America; and the Royal Society comes up with some nuanced recommendations for improving the online information environment.
• The visible computer (2022-01-14) - Difficulty of use mean computers really never have become invisible, like Xerox PARC director Marc Weiser once imagined.
• Resolutions (2022-01-07) - Catching up on the Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos verdict, Mozilla gets in trouble when people notice it accepts donations in cryptocurrencies; 12 years on, DuckDuckGo continues to be the little search engine that can; and tennis champion Novak Djokovic's refusal to get vaccinated against covid gets him thrown out of Australia.

2021

• That was the year that wasn't (2021-12-31) - 2021 grinds to a halt with much better tools for fighting covid and improving privacy and freedom, but seemingly little progress.
• Scale (2021-12-24) - Is web3 really a creature of venture capitalists' wet dreams rather than the decentralization many are hoping for?
• Dependencies at scale (2021-12-17) - Complexity built on top of rickety underpinnings is going to get us.
• "Crypto" (2021-12-10) - "Crypto" for decades has meant "cryptography", but do today's kids care when they use it to mean "cryptocurrencies"?
• Trust and antitrust (2021-12-03) - Amazon is far more powerful than most people realize.
• Lawful interception (2021-11-26) - A summary profile of NSO Group, which sells surveillance technology to governments.
• Digital god squabble (2021-11-19) - Amazon UK and Visa play chicken with consumers as the birdseed.
• Third wave (2021-11-12) - In which we try to understand what web3 is.
• The vanishing Post Office (Part II) (2021-11-05) - The local post office succumbs to attrition.
• Majority report (2021-10-29) - Jon Crowcroft's workshop on computational governance asks how to prwserve minority views in an automated world.
• It's about power (2021-10-22) - Britain's legislative proposals conflict with democracy - and with each other.
• The future is hybrid (2021-10-15) - While everyone talks longingly about meeting in person next year, remote attendees hope for hybrid events so they can still take part.
• The inside view (2021-10-08) - Whistleblower Frances Haugen blows the doors off Facebook.
• Plausible diversions (2021-10-01) - At We Robot's main conference, the focus shifts refreshingly from needing to understand how robots work to recognizing that they can be regulated by thinking more broadly about their context.
• Is the juice worth the squeeze? (2021-09-24) - At We Robot's workshop day, we find that robots work when you reconfigure the landscape to enable them.
• Learning events (2021-09-17) - At this year's gikii, speakers look at law through fiction, and "best paper" goes to a DeepFake presentation.
• Globalizing Britain (2021-09-10) - AKA "there may not always be an England"; Brexit takes hold amid democracy-destroying proposals.
• The trial (2021-09-03) - The trial for fraud of former Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, which begins this week, offers a rare chance to compare the evidence allowed in court to the comprehensive evidence already in the public record about the company and its failure to deliver.
• The threat we left behind (2021-08-27) - As the US leaves Afghanistan it leaves a comprehensive surveillance system behind for the next to take power.
• Outtakes (2021-08-20) - New Zealand shuts down becuase one known covid case means potentially hundreds of unknown ones; we should know by now that covid 2020-2021 is not flu 1918.
• Legacy (2021-08-13) - As we slowly forget what pre-pandemic "normal" was like, we consider the changes that may become permanent.
• Privacy-preserving mass surveillance (2021-08-06) - Apple confounds everyone by abruptly reversing its privacy pledges to announce it will begin scaning personal devices for child abuse imagery, while research finds that AI tools have been of no clinical use in the pandemic and Facebook invokes Cambridge Analytica as justification for blocking NYU researchers from studying political advertising on its platform.
• Immune response (2021-07-30) - Vaccination passports reappear, this time with worse privacy problems.
• Fragmentation as a service (2021-07-23) - A panel at the US Internet Governance Forum trios to find regulatory approaches that won't damage the Internet.
• When software eats the world (2021-07-16) - Bugs, disappearing links, and incomplete archives - and yet we insist on trusting computers.
• The border-industrial complex (2021-07-09) - A Security Flows workshop reveals the comprehensive dataveillance at national borders and its expansion from there.
• This land (2021-07-02) - A review of the fabulous NOMADLAND, a movie Woody Guthrie might have made.
• Them (2021-06-25) - Calling AI "it", while still vastly preferable to giving it gender, belies the many players involvedin creation.
• Libera me (2021-06-18) - An unexpected takeover of one of the biggest IRC networks leads to a mass migration that finds my favorite channel unexpectedly abandoned.
• The fragility of strangers (2021-06-11) - Across the world, someone makes an ordinary configuration change, and everywhere else gets Interent brownouts for about an hour.@@
• Data serfs (2021-06-04) - The UK government has another crack at impoudning our medical data for exploitation; see below, "care.data" from 2014.
• Judgments day (2021-05-28) - British campaigners win two cases against the UK government, one in the Court of Appeal over the exemption in the Data Protection Act (2018) that deprived incoming immigrants and asylum seekers of access to their data, and the other in the European Court of Human Rights striking down the UK's data interception regime.
• Ontology recapitulates phylogeny (2021-05-21) - Amazon turns on its Sidewalk mesh network connecting all its Internet of Things whether you like it or not.
• Decision not decision (2021-05-07) - Facebook's Oversight Board refuses to do Facebook's homework in the matter of Donald J. Trump, telling the company to clarify its own decision processes. Update (2021-11-01): The company later set the term of Trump's ban to two years, and responded to other aspects of the Board's recommendations.
• The tonsils of the Internet (2021-04-30)- The longrunning Google v. Oracle copyright case is finally decided while the US Congress conducts the next stage of antitrust hearings, this time into app stores. a former content analyst for Facebook unloads about their former job, and Amazon workers come down against unionizing - for now.
• Fast, free, and frictionless (2021-04-23) - At Sinon Aral Social Media Summit proposed solutions to platform problems include break-up, portability, interoperability, and programmability.
• Frenemies (2021-04-16) - Google and Apple block an update to the UK's contact tracing app because it breaks their privacy conditions; does Big Tech want to protect us against government intrusion or keep all the privacy invasion for themselves?
• Which science? (2021-04-09) - In this pandemic, new approaches such as AI have had little impact compared to the time-tested tools of public health.
• Medical apartheid (2021-04-02) - As Britain's vaccination rollout intensifies, vaccination passports reappear.
• Curating the curators (2021-03-26) - At the Platform Governance conference, discussions focus on the limitations of existing approaches to platform content moderation.
• Dystopian non-fiction (2021-03-19) - In the documentary CODED BIAS, Shalini Kantayya explores modern AI through the work of Joy Buolamwini and other distinguished critics. See this movie!
• Voter suppression in action (2021-03-12) - New Republican-backed laws throughout the US build on a long and sorry history.
• Covid's children (2021-03-05) - In a panel on children's rights, we meet campaigners who take the trouble to ask kids what they think.
• The convenience (2021-02-26) - The vital role of convenience that underlies so many decisions.
• Vaccine conoisseurs (2021-02-19) - Several stories update; Google agrees a deal with Rupert Murdoch to pay up Australia's link tax, the EU's ePrivacy legislation and decision on the adequacy of the UK's data protection (ie, compatibility with GDPR) loom, 3D-printed guns reemerge as a genuine possibility this time, and immunnity passports emerge just as everyone becomes a vaccine conoisseur.
• The spirit of Mother Jones (2021-02-12) - After 20 years of trying, union organizing finally begins to gain some tractizon in Silicon Valley.
• Dead cat tranmpoline (2021-02-05) - The subReddit Wall Street Bets exploit the Robin Hood trading app to send shares in the cratering mall retailer Gamestop careening wildly, at the expense of some hedge funds. Fun!
• Surveillance without borders (2021-01-28) - At this year's (virtual) Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, traditional notions of privacy come up against the hard realities of enforcement, and immigration technologies find their role in embedding surveillance into everyday life.
• In the balance (2021-01-21) - Australia decides to require platforms to pay license fees for web links, and Facebook dithers over banning Donald Trump's postings.
• One thousand (2021-01-14) - the (we think it is) thousandth net.wars finds many of the same issue discussed in the first still live.
• The most dangerous game (2021-01-07) - The rough draft of history: immediate reactions to watching the Capitol insurrection unfold in real time.

2020

• Build back (2020-12-31) - Widespread relief that 2020 is finally over and covid has vaccines is offset by the onrushing bad news of Brexit realities, surging covid case numbers, and privacy issues around surveillance and public health.
• Year out (2020-12-25)- in a year overwhelmed by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pandemic, few tech stories managed to break through, to the relief of companies seeking to profiteer. Update (2021-11-01): The surge was later identified as the Delta variant, and got much worse throughout the early part of 2021.
• Ghost hackers (2020-12-18) - the Workshop on the Economics of INformation Security updates us all on the real likes of modern hackers.
• Facebook in review (2020-12-11) - The news that 46 states, Guam, and Washington, DC, plus the Federal Trade Commission have launched two suits against Facebook for predatory behavior is a chance to review its past.
• Scraped (2020-12-04) - An argument on Twitter leads to a review of hiQ Labs v LinkedIn.
• Data protection in review (2020-11-27) - Thirty years of diverging approaches to privacy in the US (consumer protection, largely limited to health and personal finance) and the rest of the world (data protection).
• Open access in review (2020-11-20) - Thirty years of the growing open access movement, the other side of copyright.
• Copyright in review (2020-11-13) - Thirty years of fights over copyright.
• Crypto in review (2020-11-06) - To begin a series of lookbacks at the last 30 years of writing about computers, freedom, and privacy as the thousandth net.wars column approaches, we look at the history of efforts to ban or cripple strong cryptography.
• The reckoning (2020-10-30) - The US Department of Justice launches an antitrust case against Google for tying its browser that may hit Apple's revenues as well.
• The Amazing (2020-10-23) - An obit for magician, entertaining, and paranormal investigator James Randi.
• The rights stuff (2020-10-16) - The granting of a bill of rights to Lake Erie shows why rights for robots and AI is such a bad idea.
• Incoming (2020-10-09) - The US Commerce Committee issues its report on the antitrust hearings back in August.
Searching for context - Review of THE SOCIAL DILEMMA.
• The zero on the phone (2020-09-25) - At this year's We Robot, the emphasis is on stopping having robots and AI done *to* us.
• Systems thinking (2020-09-18) - We visit this year's Cybernetics Society conference.
• Autofail (2020-09-11) - Auto correction makes cameras useless in California's wildfires, Max Schrems wins again, and the Guardian experiments with an AI-written and heavily human-edited op-ed.
• The Internet as we know it (2020-09-04) - In which we realize, as we fret about existential threats to "the Internet", that mobile culture has already changed it.
• Through the mousehole (2020-08-28) - Two new books, The Rodchenkov Affair (Grigory Rodchenkov) and The Russian Affair (David Walsh), provide complementary views of the 2014-and-continuing Russian doping scandal.
• The end of choice (2020-08-21) - While the US Congress calls in the CEOs of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, the bigger threat taking shape is the embedding of invasive technologies in government infrastructure.
• Revenge of the browser wars (2020-08-14) - The Mozilla Foundation's announcement of cutbacks and restructuring awakens us all to the reality that Firefox's user base has dangerously shrunk.
• The big four (2020-08-07) - We review the US Congressional hearings with the CEOs of Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon.
• Driving while invisible (2020-07-31) - Notes from gikii.
• The invisible Internet (2020-07-24) - Imagining the future of Internet governance after attending US IGF.
• Flying blind (2020-07-17) - A Twitter hack that takes over a batch of verified accounts raises alarm more for what the attackers didn't do.
• Trading digital rights (2020-07-10) - As trade agreement negotiations proceed around the world, the UK is increasingly caught between larger conflicting powers, placing everyone's digital rights at risk.
• The transparent society (2020-07-03) - In which I participate in a LARP intended to discover how people really feel about privacy.
• Mysticism: curmudgeon (2020-06-26) - A new study from the Open Rights Group examines how UK political parties use data to target voters.
• The science (2020-06-19) - We trust science...until the government keeps changing what it says it is.
• Getting out the vote (2020-06-12) - Rebecca Mercuri leads a discussion of risk-limiting audits.
• Centralized stupidity (2020-06-05) - The UK government is frustratingly confusing about...everything while pulling all power to the center.
• Tweeted (2020-05-29) - Trump wigs out when two tweets are fact-checked and demands an end to S230.
• The pod exclusion (2020-05-22) - the Internet hits peak podcast as Spotify pays $100 million to acquire Joe Rogan.
• Quincunx (2020-05-15) - in which we experience this thing called "good news": Sidewalk Labs pulls out of Toronto, ICANN blocks ISOC's sale of .org, text publishers decide not to merge, the US Patent and Trademark Office declines to award patents to an AI, and SCOTUS allows open access to Georgia's legal code.
• Appified (2020-05-08) - contact tracing apps may save us all. Or not. Update (2020-12): As we all now know, the UK failed miserably at contact tracing, app or no app, and while Google/Apple's platform won the day almost everywhere, its benefits appear to have been marginal.
• A life in three lockdowns (2020-05-01) - Eva Pascoe yawns and says, "It's my third lockdown", and therein lies a tale.
• Viruswashing (2020-04-24) - as governments everywhere issue restrictions to control the pandemic, human rights may pay the price.
• Anywhere but here (2020-04-17) - as we adapt to the pandemic, the best leaders are elsewhere.
• Losers (2020-04-10) - A review of Michael Lewis's book LOSERS, which follows the losing candidates in the 1996 US presidential election, is astonishingly revealing about our present state.
• Uncontrolled digital unlending (2020-04-03) - we revisit the Internet Archive's Open Library, now renamed the "National Emergency Library", over the objections of many authors and publishers.
• The to-do list (2020-03-27) - Notes on what we need to remember when we again have normal choices.
• The beginning of the world as we don't know it (2020-03-20) - as the scale of the disaster begins to unfold, everyone is eager to think about the vast change we can effect when it ends. Update (2020-12): By November, the more applicable state of mind reminded me of Francois Truffaut in DAY FOR NIGHT, who said, "At the beginning, I hope to make a beautiful film. After the first problems, I just hope that we finish the film."
• Privacy matters (2020-03-13) - as country after country bows to the needs of epidemiology to adopt surveillance tactics that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks ago, privacy remains an important tool for public health.
• Transitive rage (2020-03-06) - new calls for backdoors in encryption are riding on recent investigations finding child abuse imagery proliferating online.
• The Virtuous patient (2020-02-27) - "I'm thinking about the coronavirus, which I fear is about to expose every bit of the class, race, and economic inequality of the US in the most catastrophic way." If a different country had dominated modern computing, would we see information security, like health, as impossible for the market to solve on its own? Update (2020-12): Oh, how I wish I'd been wrong.
• Obsession (2020-02-20) - For Leonardo da Vinci's 500th birthday, net.wars goes to a conference on the history of perpetual motion.
• Pushy algorithms (2020-02-13) - Britain's completed exit from the EU brings back normal politics in the form of age verification and the Online Harms white paper. Update (2020-12): But not for long...
• Mission creep (2020-02-05) - Review of the brilliant new play THE HAYSTACK, by Al Blyth, in its original production at the Hampstead Theater.
• Dirty networks (2020-01-31) - As the UK mulls whether to ban Huawei from its nascent 5G mobile network, the question arises: how can we build a trusted network out of untrusted components?
• The inevitability narrative (2020-01-24) - At CPDP, new invasive technologies such as pervasive facial recognition are overtaking us; don't we have a choice?
• Software inside (2020-01-17) - I try to grasp software-defined networks; hardware isn't "hard" any more.
• The forever bug (2020-01-10) - The Millennium Bug has returned because workarounds adopted in 1999 are now expiring.
• Chronocentric circles - Various efforts try to fix the problem that the Internet isn't "fun" any more.

2019

• Runaway (2019-12-27) - Cornell University researcher Vitaly Shmatikov scares a bunch of people with tales of machine "overlearing", an endemic problem.
• Humans in, bugs out (2019-12-20) - taking issue with the notion that AI is being held to an unreasonable standard.
• Becoming a science writer (2019-12-13) - a summary of advice given at various seminars for science PhDs seeking to move into journalism.
• The dot-org of our discontents - the Internet Society plans to sell the entire .org gTLD to a for-profit newcomer. Panic ensues.
• Open season (2019-11-29) - as the 2019 UK general election aproaches, papers emerge suggesting the UK's National Health Service could be a casualty.
• The choices of others (2019-11-22) - my neighbor gets an Amazon Ring doorbell and I get his surveillance.
• A short history of the future (2019-11-15) - we revisit Frances Cairncross's 1998 book, The Death of Distance.
• Burn rate (2019-11-08) - the rate at which some of the best-known technology companies burn through financial capital in order to squash competitors is only one type of capital society is burning through; add to it social, political, and infrastructure and fret about the future.
• Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition (2019-11-01) - "anonymous data" is dead; all data is eventually personal data,o.
• When we were (2019-10-25) - net.wars attends the 50th anniversary of the founding of CompuServe, where so much of what was later successful on the Internet was first invented.
• I never paid for it in my life (2019-10-18) - Jaron Lanier proposes we should be paid for our data ("data as labor"), and we disagree.
• The China syndrome (2019-10-11) - as China expands to build the Internet beyond its borders, it seeks to export its values alongside.
• Digital London (2019-10-04) - the Greater London Intelligence unit shows off its stuff.
• Balancing acts (2019-09-27) - courts rule both for and against the worldwide application of GDPR's "right to be forgotten.
• Jumping the shark (2019-09-20) - as the Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon orders its search results by profitability to the company (which Amazon denies), we understand less and less how businesses make their money. Increasingly, it's all about the data, and the product is a MacGuffin.
• Purposeful dystopianism (2019-09-13) - at the 2019 Gikii, does our Internet dystopia contain the flaw that will lead to its destruction?
• Traffic stop (2019-09-06) - Brexit will make the UK a "third country" for EU data protection purposes.
• The Fregoli delusion (2019-08-39) - Emily Chang's Brotopia and Roger McNamee's Zucked show the creation of the monoculture that dominates today's Internet.
• Antepenultimate (2019-08-23) - as new payment laws take force, online banking usability embraces greater security, at the expense of usability.
• The law of the camera (2019-08-16) - the deployment without debate of private cameras in public spaces, now with facial recognition removes them from public accountability.
• Collision course (2019-08-09) - we pause to consider 30 years of privacy loss and the threat of government abuse.
• Unfortunately recurring phenomena (2019-08-02) - over and over we read of sold-off Internet community resources, biased technology, demands for backdoored encryption. Can't we ever win one?
• Hypothetical risks (2018-07-26) - The Great Hack puts Facebook in its non-hypothetical place.
• The Internet that wasn't (2019-07-19) - be as nostalic as you want, but the Internet was never the happiest place on Earth
• Public access (2019-07-12) - it's not possible to distinguish the personal and political in the case of the Tweeter-in-chief, but a US court rules that as public official US president Donald Trump does ot have the right to block his critics. (NB: This article had to be renamed after I realized I had used its original title, "Open season", elsewhere. We apologize for the iconvenience.)
• Legal friction (2019-07-05) - the Internet Archive gets creative with copyright by invoking "controlled digital lending".
• Failure to cooperate (2019-06-28) - Lynn Nottage's play Sweat and Virginia Eubanks' Automating Inequality show different sides of the same exploitation coin.
• Party games (2019-06-21) - the UK's Conservative Party elects a leader for the few, not the many. Update (2019-12-24): As we now know, Boris Johnson won that contest, and then, a few months later, a general election.
• Matrices of numbers (2019-06-14) - net.wars visits the London Science Museum's Driverless exhibition of autonomous vehicles.
• The right to lie (2019-06-07 - the 2019 Privacy Law Scholars finds we sometimes need to lie even to those we trust.
• Moral machines (2019-05-31) - what could AI ethics boards be good for? Update (2020-01-01): I was afraid I was too dismissive and skeptical about this, but in a much better-grounded piece at The Intercept, Rodrigo Ochigame discusses the compromised nature of industry-led AI ethics boards, based on his experience participating in one such partnership on behalf of the MIT Media Lab, which he left after it was revealed that the lab's director, Joichi Ito, had accepted funding for both the lab and start-ups he was personally invested in, from Jeffrey Epstein.
• Name change (2019-05-24) - proposals to secure the domain name system by implementing DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) create controversy.
• Genomics snake oil (2019-05-17) - Andelka M. Phillips surveys the home DNA testing industry for Breaking the Frame.
• Slime trails (2019-05-10) - Uber and Boeing become regulatory failures, while Carl Miller suggests replacing "cookie" with "slime trail" would make us all less compliant.
• Reopening the source (2019-05-03) - we revisit last December's Opening the source to consider some responses.
• This house (2019-04-26) - in which we visit a home infested with Google smart speakers. Perhaps an exorcism?
• Math, monsters, and metaphors (2019-04-19) - at the 2019 We Robot, metaphors matter, and Abby Jacques seeks to terminate the trolley problem.
• The Algernon problem (2019-04-12) - We Robot opens by reframing the discussio of AI and robots; what are their makers distracting us from?
• The collaborative hand (2019-04-05) - we pay our once-a-decade visit to Shadow Robot, to find it now lives in an ecosystem of specialists.
• Doubt (2019-03-29) - it's not the stuff that's wrong that kills you, it's being unable to confidently identify what's true.
• Layer nine (2019-03-22) - as calls for regulating the Internet increase, we note that regulation is not the enemy.
• Schrodinger's Brexit (2019-03-15) - the clock ticks down to March 29, 2019, and as friends ask "what's it like over there now?" still no one knows if the UK will exit the European Union this month...or ever. Update (2019-12-24): The UK did not leave on March 29, 2019, nor on June 30, nor on October 31. January 31, 2020 looks like it will, however, be the day.
• Pivot (2019-03-08) - vast media excitement when Facebook announces it will shift to focusing on private messaging overlooks the pending unification of its three member databases.
• Systemic infection (2019-03-01) - new technologies enable new, enhanced workplace monitoring.
• Metropolis (2019-02-22) - at a Westminster Forum seminar on smart cities, questioners ask, "how we will know when we're in one?".
• Copywrong (2019-02-15) - the European Union's reformed Copyright Directive, thought all but dead a few weeks earlier, suddenly springs to life, complete with its worst clauses. Update: A couple of months later, the thing passed, widely hated provisions intact.
• Doing without (2019-02-08) - we review the journalist Kashmir Hill's noble month-long effort to excavate Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft from her life.
• Beyond data protection (2019-02-01) - at the 2019 CPDP, the nine-month-old GDPR is already obsolete.
• Reversal of fortune (2019-01-25) - the Internet continues to change away from its origins, failing to take our understanding with it.
Misforgotten (2019-01-18) - as the UK Parliamentary debates continue on the Brexit deal, the EU courts consider how far the right to be forgotten extends past national borders.
• Secret funhouse mirror room (2019-01-11) - an old friend dies, leaving behind an expensive storage room, contents unknown.
• Prognostalgia (2019-01-04) - not much of a year for technological excitement, was 2018. Update (2019-12-24): The malaise got more noticeable in 2019.

2018

• Opening the source (12/28/2018) - arguing with Michael Salmony about open access.
• Behind you! (12/21/2018) - before you install that crypto, ask yourself: what is your threat model?
• Entirely preventable (12/14/2018) - the Equifax breach was entirely preventable, says a Congressional committee...as are so many other things we're doing nothing to stop.
• Richard's universal robots (12/7/2018) - English eccentric Richard Greenhill's brainchild, Shadow Robot, collaborates on robots to assist elderly people.
• Digital rights management (11/30/2018) - Mark Zuckerberg's refusal to testify annoys governments, but their bill of principles doesn't represent rights for us.
• Phished (11/23/2018) - a visit to the Detecting and Preventing Mass-Marketing Scams project finds victims who blame themselves.
• Septet (11/16/2018) - a catchall catch-up on nic voting, who pays for internet blocks, and copyright.
• Escape from model land (11/09/2018) - a visit to the Challenging Radical Uncertainty in Science, Society and the Environment (CRUISSE) project finds them asking how to improve the process of making decisions when the problems are wicked and the prior art is nil.
• The brother proliferation (11/2/2018) - finding, in researching data brokers for Privacy International, that older software companies like Oracle and Adobe are transforming themselves into data hogs.
• The Rochdale hypothesis (10/26/2018) - a discussion of the future of the BBC and a public service Internet produces a proposal for local cooperatives.
• Not the new oil (10/19/2018) - a panel on data ethics to launch the Ada Lovelace Institute finds valuing data hard, understanding its effect on the distribution of power harder.
• Lost in transition (10/12/2018) - every day, in every way, little pieces of our rights and choices are being engineered out of automated systems.
• Once disgusted (10/5/2018) - the politics of disgust is a one-way trip to the loss of democracy.
• We know where you should live (9/28/2018) - John Hancock's move to "interactive" policies that rely on real-time data instead of actuarial tables.
• Facts are screwed (9/21/2018) - at this year's Gikii the fake news behind the fake news, the humanly incomprehensible reactions of robot hamsters, and sharing posts you agree with all lead to increased divisions.
• Hide by default (9/14/2018) - in discussions of the UK's plans for age verification on the web, Beeban Kidron has a new idea: the industry should adopt "hide by default". For children...but why not also the rest of us?
• Watching brief (9/7/2018) - Amazon's entry into live-streaming the US Open tennis shows its lack of experience.
• Ghosted (8/31/2018) - three months on, thousands of US media sites are still treating the General Data Protection Regulation as a reason to block European visitors.
• Cinema surveillant (8/24/2018) - a review of the Chinese film Dragonfly Eyes, compiled out of fragments from surveillance cameras.
• Redefinition (8/17/2018) - broadband and cable fight it out for US TV audiences, while 5G looms, still of uncertain business model and definition but expected to solve everyone's problems.
• Challenge...accepted (8/10/2018) - Joanna Geary asks Twitter: you are Lord High Ruler of the Internet. What do you do next?
• JAQing off (8/3/2018) - "just asking questions", the moderators' trigger phrase.
• Think horses, not zebras (7/27/2018) - AI, media, and marketing hype: a dangerous combination.
• Competing dangerously (7/20/2018) - the EU Commissioner for Competition, Margrethe Vestager, fines Google \A44.34 billion over its licensing terms for Android apps and services.
• Exporting the Second Amendment (7/13/2018) - a US court explicitly rules it legal to post online designs for 3D-printed guns, in the Defcad case, where the First Amendment meets the Second.
• This is us (7/6/2018) - as the European Parliament votes against fast-tracking copyright reform, proponents call objections "pro-Google" instead of what they are: the people's choice.
• Divergence (6/29/2018) - the US Supreme Court's finding in favor of American Express seems to make it even harder to bring antitrust actions inside the US against the big technology companies. Update:: The SCOTUS blog has a knowledgeable analysis of the case, which American Express won in a 5-4 decision.
• Humans (6/22/2018) - the inverse relationship between surveillance and trust. I have nothing to hide, so why are you looking at me?
• Old thinking (6/15/2018) - at the Personal Democracy Forum, Crypto Harlem founder Matt Mitchell argues that inside every amazing new piece of technology lurks something equally amazing - but horrible.
• Block that metaphor (6/8/2018) - at this year's Privacy Law Scholars, "dishonest anthropomorphism" is the new deceptive privacy practice.
• The three IPs (6/1/2018) - Europe gets GDPR, Ireland gets the right to consider legal abortion, and the Foundation for Information Policy Research gets a 20th birthday, where the BBC's Bill Thompson tells us investigatory powers, intellectual property, and Internet Protocol have us "bound in a crystal lattice".
• Who gets the kidney? (5/25/2018) - at We Robot, a research project asked how to optimize allocating kidneys, an exercise that proved no more life-like than the trolley problem from which it derives.
• Fool me once (5/18/2018) - how do you create trust in the Internet of Things, the Alliance for Internet of Things Innovation asks.
• The third penguin (5/11/2018) - review of (and tips for) installing Ubuntu 18.04.
• Data protection panic (5/4/2018) - three weeks before the entry into force of the General Data Protection Regulation, inboxes are filling with requests to resubscribe, and small organizations everywhere are panicking. Time to remove Google Analytics!
• Game of thrones (4/26/2011) - an investigation finds a "tsunami" of corruption at the lower levels of tennis, just as Richard Ings foresaw in 2005.
• Deception (4/19/2018) - at this year's We Robot, Madeline Elish's 2016 paper that predicted humans would become "moral crumple zones" in human-machine partnerships has already come true.
• Late, noisy, and wrong (4/12/2018) - at this year's We Robot, Bill Smart and Cindy Grimm explain why physics means sensors can't really tell the difference between Abraham Lincoln and a zebra fish.
• Leverage (4/5/2018) - it's not enough to "fix" Facebook, even if we could; we need to diminish its ability to leverage what it knows to surmise what it doesn't.
• Conventional wisdom (3/30/2018) - at Internet Law Works-in-Progress, Asaf Lubin suggests a Hague Convention to create private law treaties whose rules would provide guidance for the many Internet disputes where laws conflict.
• Aspirational intelligence (3/23/2018) - the quest to inject ethics into AI will fail unless we can separate the ownership of content (data) and the ownership of pipes (the algorithms and machine learning systems that work on them).
• Homeland insecurity (3/16/2018) - in life lived on the phone, moving the national border into quarterly checks in hospitals and schools is a vector for social control.
• Signaling intelligence (3/9/2018) - confusion reigns when ASI Data Science claims it can automatically detect 95% of Daesh propaganda videos with 99.995% accuracy.
• In sync (3/2/2018) - the "sync" portion of the music business wants to fix online copyright licensing so they can turn each beat, phrase, and bar into a licensable unit.
• Breaking the web (2/23/2018) - the EU's copyright reform, particularly Articles 11 (link tax) and 13 (upload filter) raise the question: have they learned nothing in 20 years?
• Data envy (2/16/2018) - the rise of physical tracking reaches the state of the web circa 2000.
• RIP John Perry Barlow (1947-2018) (2/9/2018) - 22 years later, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" still inspires some, baffles some, and infuriates others.
• Schr\F6dinger's citizen (2/2/2018) - at this year's Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, a panel asks whether nationality or geography should determine the rules of surveillance.
• Bodies in the clouds (1/26/2018) - at this year's Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, the increasing need to rewrite laws devised with the idea that cyberspace and the physical world are separate becomes apparent.
• Expressionism (1/19/2018) - at a Westminster eForum event on Internet regulation, everyone seems to want more of it for other people.
• Local heroes (1/12/2018) - a New Jersey community fights back when GPS carves a line of congestion through its heart.
• Dangerous corner (1/5/2018) - wildly exaggerated and foolishly dismissed, the Meltdown and Spectre Intel chip flaws kick off the New Year.

2017

• Ding! (12/29/2017) - 2017 and its less serious discontents.
• Hidden figures (12/22/2017) - the future for talking newspapers as local newspapers continue to shrink.
• Bitcoin for dummies (12/15/2017) - bitcoin soars and swoops, but remains an empty vessel.
• Pastures of plenty (12/8/2017) - we we see life, advertisers see empty space waiting to be filled.
• Unstacking the deck (12/1/2017) - why the consumer voice needs to be heard in standards bodies (a talk for a workshop studying standards development).
• Twister (11/24/2017) - at After the Digital Tornado digital pioneers ask what they did wrong back in 1997.
• Counterfactuals (11/17/2017) - Jaron Lanier visits Virtual Futures, and suggests that charging for email could have prevented today's "behavior modification empires".
• Regulatory disruption (11/10/2017) - Britain faces the prospect of Open Banking.
• Life forms (11/3/2017) - which is more alien, an AI or a cephalopod?
• The opposite of privilege (10/27/2017) - 20 years ago, mobile phones were "poser phones"; today, it's only the posers who can boast about not carrying them.
• Risk profile (10/20/2017) - why storing templates doesn't make biometrics hacker-proof.
• Cost basis (10/13/2017) - improve online safety, says the UK government, and get social media to pay for it.
• Send lawyers, guns, and money (10/6/2017) - after the Las Vegas shootings.
• Ubersicht (9/29/2017) - Uber meets Transport for London.
• Fakeout (9/22/2017) - solving fake news will require the same kind of multidisciplinary effort as cybersecurity.
Equifaction (9/15/2017) - reforming the Computer Misuse Act; the Equifax hack reminds us we are catching and prosecuting the wrong people.
• Going dark (9/8/2017) - as proprietary platforms take over, public discourse is losing transparency.
• Capture the flag (9/1/2017) - while we're fearing the dominance of the big tech companies, take another look at Amazon.
• The greatest show on earth (8/25/2017) - seeing the total eclipse in Nashville, TN.
• Cage match (8/18/2017) - robots visit the Science Museum.
• The lost generation (8/11/2017) - Jean M. Twenge frets that today's need to get out more.
• Imaginary creatures (8/4/2017) - "Real people don't need encryptiion," says UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd.
• Virgin passwords (7/28/2017) - everyone wants to have their own really bad ideas for what your password should be.
• The long arm of the law (7/21/2017) - courts continue to wrestle with the right to be forgotten.
• The harvest (7/14/2017) - the arms race of fake news.
• Finding harm (7/7/2017) - "Where's the harm?" a judge asks, while making a ruling that's obviously unfair to everyone but him.
• Who's the boss? (6/30/3017) - the EU fines Google \802.4 billion.
• Dead weight (6/23/2017) - the perverse incentives of the US healthcare system.
• The ghost in the machine (6/16/2017) - Patrick Ball explains the mismeasure of machine learning "accuracy".
• Foobar (6/9/2017) - British Airways' computer system falls over and turns Heathrow into chaos. Some later explanation of what caused the outage.
• The power of privacy (6/2/2017) - ten years on, Privacy Law Scholars finds increasingly power is the focus.
• Hate week (5/26/2017) - journalists find Facebook's patchwork guidelines for scrubbing hate speech.
• Policy questions for 2022 (5/19/2017) - my talk from OpenTech.
• Intervention (5/12/2017) - the under-recognized humans who clean the internet.
• Pre-existing conditions 5/7/2017) - as the US Congress makes its first of several attepts in 2017 to get rid of the Affordable Care Act.
• Underbanking (4/30/2017) - this year's Tomorrow's Transactions Forum asks how to make banks serve peoplle better.
• Who needs the internet? (4/23/2017) - Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner wants to know.
• Re-accommodating... (4/16/2017) - MIT's Moral Machine asks what ethics we would like self-driving cars to apply while live humans drag another, bleeding and injured, off a plane.
• Have robot, will legislate (4/7/2017) - this year's We Robot asks how to ensure fairness in robot systems.
• Child's play (3/31/2017) - the state of marketing to children.
• Trading places (3/24/2017) - the Transatlantic Consumer Dialog annual summit asks how to reinvent trade treaties to serve the public.
• Dangling metaphors (3/17/2017) - Pierre Leval and Jon Baumgarten debate fair use and Google Books.
• Fans with typewriters (3/10/2017) - veteran journalist Charles Arthur asks three technology journalists whether tech journalism has served the public.
• Unforced errors (3/3/2017) - in the world of converging telecoms and internet content companies, antitrust suits are waiting to happen.
• After the search (2/24/2017) - what to do after a border search impounds your devices.
• Unfit for private purpose (2/17/2017) - favors a privacy ratings labeling system for smart TVs and other Internet of Things devices.
• The anonymous hand (2/10/2017) - a discussion of anonymity at Loughborough University includes big data, drugs, and threat models.
• Privacy practice (2/3/2017) - at the 2017 Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, one question burned: had new US President Donald Trump just killed Privacy Shield?
• The price is right (1/27/2017) - reinventing transport in the era of big data risks social injustice.
• Reintermediation (1/20/2017) - the Net was supposed to bring distinermediation; instead, third parties are inserting themselves into even the most mundane transactions.
• The long tail of the bit bucket (1/13/2017) - the loss of access to an ancient email address sets off a trail of auditing sites and updating passwords.
• Your grandmother is smarter than you think (1/6/2017) - seriously, where do techies come off always talking about "my grandmother" as the archetypal clueless user?

2016

• Leap second (12/31/2016) - 2016 in review.
• Christmas comes but once a year (12/24/2016) - in which we find that the Investigatory Powers Act is passed while the European Court of Justice rules against the government on very similar provisions.
• Facts are scarred (12/17/2016) - skeptics have long grappled with what is suddenly being called "fake news".
• Retro (12/10/2016) - every day, in so many ways, progress is going backwards.
• Routers behaving badly (12/3/2016) - why, yes, my router was one of those affected by the 7547 bug, thanks for asking.
• Skunkworks (11/25/2016) - a look back at the first generation of the ground-breaking Government Digital Service.
• The illusion of sovereignty (11/18/2016) - at this year's UK Internet Governance Forum ponders the disconnect between the internet's inherently internal nature and today's localizing geopolitics.
• Copyright jam (11/11/2017) - a weekend meeting at the University of Leeds asks what would happen if normal people got to decide on copyright terms.
• The company you keep (11/4/2016) - would you trade access to your social media profile for lower rates on car insurance?
• Killer apps (10/28/2016) - as predicted, the first Internet of Things cyber attacks proved impossible to protect against.
• Joined-up thinking (10/21/2016) - proposing mandatory Security Impact Assessments for new legislation.
• Coffee pots with benefits (10/14/2016) - finding problems from the proposal made at this year's Gikii by OII's Philip Howard that Internet of Things devices should be required to identify the ultimate beneficiary of the data they collect.
• Smut (10/7/2016) - checking out proposed mechanisms for age verification, mandated in the Digital Economy bill.
• On the internet no one knows you're a... (9/30/2016) - why women should be visible on the internet.
• This sporting law (9/23/2016) - the recent Sports Law conference at Anglia Ruskin University asks whether sports can remain autonomous, as Pierre de Coubertin wanted.
• New masters (9/16/2016) - Games, art, AI, and strides towards intelligent games at the IGGI conference.
• Unlinked (9/09/2016) - a recent court case and the EU's draft copyright directive threaten the link. This again?
• Guardians (9/02/2016) - attempting to answer a friend who asked, "is my 12-year-old son OK online?"
• Return of the penguin (8/26/2016) - seven months after switching the desktop to Linux, a serious mistake forces a restart.
• The 0.06 percent (8/19/2016) - lamenting the continuing disappearance of comment boards off of news sites even though moderating them is a hellish job.
• Somebody else's problems (8/12/2016) - why the Internet of Things requires software manufacturers to accept product liability.
• Going for the Golem (8/05/2016) - the problem of sharing space with Pokemon Go and its coming succssors.
• Legislating the sea of holes (7/29/2016 - breaking down the Investigatory Powers bill.
• Judgment days (7/22/2016) - courts deliver sensible rulings in the Microsoft case regarding data stored in Ireland and in Tom Watson's and David Davis's action against the UK government regarding DRIPA.
• New tricks (7/15/2016) - investigative journalism finds new homes in cooperatively-run local start-up publications.
• Respawn (7/08/2016) - in the background of the post-EU referendum governmental musical chairs, Privacy Shield is approved to replace Safe Harbor, the Investigatory Powers bill marches on, and a new Digital Economy bill gets ready for action.
• Copyright exception gymnastics (7/1/2016) - the morning after the EU referendum, MEP Julia Reda tells the audience at CREATe's annual conference that national sovereignty is an illusion and asks why we keep patching a law whose fundamental principles no longer fit.
• Funny money (6/24/2016) - finding out what's really new about the blockchain.
• Staying in (6/17/2016) - arguing the case for Remain, a week before the referendum vote.
• Dinosaur bones (6/10/2016) - a series of privacy events remind why privacy really matters even if Europeans can sigh and say, "That couldn't happen here.".
• The rift (6/03/2016) - Oculus Rift as a metaphor for none so blind as will not see that users hate ads.
• Luddite engineers (5/26/2016)- updating the case against online voting, which is no more attractive when you sprinkle it with magic fairy dust like "blockchain" nad "open source software".
• Adventures in television, part 438 (5/19/2016) - my weirdest TV experience ever. Update (5/19/2016): I still have no idea what that was about.
• Pay pal (5/12/2016) - is the Dutch start-up Blendle's ease of payment the start of something big for publishers seeking profits? Update (2024-02-16): Apparently not. Sometime in the last few years, Blendle's UK offering quietly disappeared. The Dutch version persists, but the idea has clearly not overall found much traction elsewhere.
• The Knowledge (5/07/2016) - more adventures in mapping and navigation. Yeah, still prefer paper.
• Wild things (4/29/2016) - as the industry continues to define 5G, the real question they still can't answer: what do people want?
• The blockchain menu (4/22/2016) - this year's Tomorrow's Transactions Forum has my first Lego prototype of an Internet of Things implementation but like many other technologies on display, needs a clear problem to solve.
• Hit for six (4/15/2016) - Privacy Shield is rejected, General Data Protection Regulation passes, 5G is still searching for priorities, FBI's Apple crack inspires end-to-end encryption adoption, Phorm is finally really dead, SCO vs IBM is not, and Pastafarianism may or may not be a religion, depending where you live.
• Humans all the way down (4/08/2016) - the human-robot interface is this year's We Robot's emerging problem; in such systems, says Madeleine Elish, the humans will become "moral crumple zones".
• The lab and the world (4/01/2016) - "how the next generation thinks" isn't as different as some people seem to think.
• Murphy's internet (3/24/2016) - charting progress towards ICANN's independence from the US government. Update (10/21/2016): As we now know, the IANA transition went ahead as planned on October 1, safely before the presidential election.
• Bypass (3/17/2016) - Hillary Clinton's email server escapdes illustrate why security people need to listen to what their users need. Update (10/21/2016): The main point stands whether or not you believe that the security personnel's refusal to supply Clinton with a Blackberry was in fact the driving reason she used the server.
• Don't stand so close to me (3/10/2016) - at Internet Law Works-in-Progress, in response to proposals to use social media to provide alternate forms of credit scoring, Nizan Geslevich-Packin and Yafit Lev-Aretz propose the right to be unnetworked.
• The seven-percent solution (3/03/2016) - copyright is only a solved problem if you forget the purpose was to finance the work of artists and creators.
• Monster trucks (2/26/2016) - Oxford's autonomous vehicles group ponders the shape of problems to come.
• Poisoning the fruit tree (2/19/2016) - the FBI and Apple lock antlers over Sayed Rizwan Farook's encrypted iPhone because: math.
• Parcel of rogues (2/12/2016) - considering the unthinkable as the US presidential election grinds towards choosing a candidate: what would it be like if the person wielding the Investigatory Powers bill were Donald Trump?
• Marvin Minsky and his gizmo (2/05/2016) - Minsky's death on January 14 led me to republish this 1995 Guardian interview.
• The power of us (1/29/2016) - Gloria Steinem's memoir and the Guardian's short film "The Power of Privacy" suggest the need for responses to some standard questions about privacy.
• Penguin time (1/22/2016) - my future running Linux finally arrives.
• Tripartite (1/15/2016) - an ECJ decision does not grant employers unprecedented rights to snoop on employees' messaging, Google's Nest shows the future Internet of Bugs, and the bitcoin community discovers that community doesn't scale.
• The secret adversary (1/8/2016) - why the people drafting the Investigatory Powers bill should assume, like Jonathan Smith, that there is always an adversary waiting to attack.
• Hold the fireworks (1/1/2016) - reviewing 2015.

2015

• On the spectrum (12/25/2015) - Jill Soloway's TRANSPARENT TV series reminds that the human gender spectrum is analog, not digital.
• Sourdough (12/18/2015) - visiting Alaska in mid-winter.
• The collaborative society (12/11/2015) - privacy as a shared process rather than an individual right.
• The need to know (12/04/2015) - an interview with Antony Jay, co-creator of Yes, Minister. Update (10/21/2016): Antony Jay died in September 2016. This may have been his last interview.
• Doping authorities (11/27/2015) - new reports from WADA make plain that misaligned incentives will perforce deep anti-doping efforts.
• Just a very clever bacterium (11/20/2015) - at Cybersalon's discussion on robots and AI, it becomes plain how narrow the AI community's idea of "intelligence" is.
• Mob rule (11/13/2015) - how much the internet has not changed in the last 20 years.
• Extending the itemized phone bill (11/06/2015) - why Internet connection records are not like phone bills and why the powers it grants are much broader than the bill's drafters probably think.
• The magic kingdom (10/30/2016) - thoughts on the future today's kids are growing up with for the Safer Internet Forum.
• War of the worlds (10/23/2015) - as the Internet of Things takes shape, how will guests fare in friends' homes that treat them as interlopers?
• A different kind of disruption (10/16/2015) - Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2015 makes the case that new technology is reinforcing the same old social injustice.
• Unsafe harbor (10/09/2015) - the European Court of Justice rules Safe Harbor invalid.
• Not encyclopedic (10/2/2015) - Wikipedia and its principles: what is "encyclopedic"?
• Cheat mode (9/25/2015) - Volkswagen is caught cheating on its emissions tests the same week as the EU/US "Safe Harbor" data transfer workaround is ruled invalid, just as privacy advocates always said it was.
• Old school (9/18/2015) - In Athens, the Hybrid Cities conference tries to solve old problems with new technology.
• Coining it (9/11/2015) - Bitcoin approaches a technological crisis exposing a deeper crisis of community.
• The MacGyver complex (9/4/2015 - Sujeet Shenoi shows off his task force's ground-up forensic hardware efforts; software errors and the HIV clinic's exposure of patient email identities; DDoSing the Hugo awards.
• Running with the devil (8/28/2015) - The Digital Policy Alliance attempts to devise a functional but light-weight age verification system for the UK to meet expected government demands.
• Unreal humans (8/21/2015) - Part review of HUMANS; part response to Bill Thompson's demand for civil rights for androids.
• Why can't we just...? (8/14/2015) - Why is Word harder than Google Docs? Intuitive technology is the stuff you used first.
• The sharing economy (8/7/2015) - Google's continuing search for a second product; can this individualistic company adapt to a world where sharing is the norm?
• Girlish GUIs (7/31/2015) - Now and then: women in tech share their experiences from this year's Lean Out to 1995's Wired Women.
• Hubbub (7/26/2015) - The Copyright Hub launches a mechanism for paying to license copyrighted material online.
• Trifecta (7/19/2015) - The state of surveillance in the UK as MPs Tom Watson and David Davies win their case.
• Fight on (7/12/2015) - The legacy of the late Caspar Bowden as anti-encryption fervor erupts in government.
• Schhottische (7/5/2015) - Lessons from touring post-election Scotland, from the surveillance system stowed away in Glasgow's smart street lights to the relish with which its new MPs are descending on Westminster.
• The rich sardine (6/25/2015) - So much technology, so much waste.
• Indirect line (6/19/2015) - The Samaritans rethink how to support online outreach after last year's disliked Radar initiative.
• The reasonable woman (6/12/2015) - At Privacy Law Scholars, Victoria Schwartz ponders how the law looks different if we imagine its application to the reasonable woman.
• The end (6/5/2015) - At the Royal Society, machine learning is the end of programming, the end of today's computer processor architectures, the end of software...and the end of humans? Can we replace the Royal Society with a server farm?
• The weakest link (5/29/2015) - Lynn Coventry and Choice Architectures, trying to help people make better security choices using techniques familiar from healthcare.
• Home rule (5/22/2015) - Changes come to Russia and Britain holds an election.
• Theoretical maximum (5/15/2015) - The Royal Society considers what happens when our communications networks can't eat another byte.
• Mad technology (5/8/2015) - As MAD MEN nears the end, net.wars looks at the 1960s technological changes that fueled the ongoing (and still with us now) theme of numbers versus intuition in advertising.
• Hung voters (5/1/2015) - a week before the UK general election, so hung, not hung-over.
• When content wanted to be free (4/24/2015) - a German court rules Adblock Plus legal, and we echo Tim Hwang and Adi Kamdar to ask if we have passed "peak advertising".
• Multiplicity (5/17/2015) - tales from We Robot 2015.
• Revelations (4/10/2015) - why is it OK to have cheated at math?
• Fighting digital cholera (4/3/2015) - Open Addresses recreates the postcode address finder as open data.
• Five impossible things before breakfast (3/27/2015) - so many people want so many incompatible things in conflicting ways: surveillance, fences, municipal broadband...
• Agreeing the truth (3/20/2015) - this year's Tomorrow's Transactions Forum looks forward to monetary pluralism.
• Sanctuary (3/13/2015) - libraries grapple with data and the forces that want to exploit it.
• Mindset (3/6/2015) - borrowing from Beloit College, imagining the mindset of the Class of 2038.
• Barbershop quartet (2/27/2015) - meaningful consent, from the workshop at the University of Southampton.
• The gunpowder tea party (2/20/2015) - bad design, stupid security.
• The analog hole (2/13/2015) - and now the Internet comes for local opticians; is no one safe?
• Wheelwright (2/6/2015) - FCC chairman Tom Wheeler makes new network neutrality rules and everything says their side won.
• Not @Vodafone (1/30/2015) - Vodafone and Twitter fall out, and so do we.
• The color purple (1/23/2015) - yet more surveillance, in defiance of everything we know about real security.
• Speechified (1/16/2015) - bad acts, in this case the Charlie Hebdo murders, make bad speeches.
• Pause for thought (1/9/2015) - VATMOSS turns into VAT-mess, all in the name of harmony.
• Think good thoughts about a robot (1/2/2015) - Google creates unsolvable captchas to protect us all from blog spam, or postings. Update (5/5/2015): After a month or two, these unreadable captchas were replaced by more readable ones, and then by image selection grids.

2014

• The ugly, the bad, and the good: 2014 in review (12/26/2014) - privacy, mobile phones, hope.
• Losing it (12/19/2014) - the Sony hack takes personal data intrusion to new levels.
• Telescope (12/12/2014) - jurisdictional issues such as Microsoft vs Facebook grow in importance as every country thinks its reach should be global.
• Collaborators (12/5/2014) - thoughts after a discussion of CitizenFour.
• Roger Clarke explains it all for you (11/28/2014) - as the trip to Australia ends, privacy advocate Roger Clarke explains Australian policy in terms of "cultural cringe".
• The life of Bryan (11/21/2014) - in the second week of a three-week visit, Australia's laws seem as patchwork as its other immigrants.
• Half time (11/14/2014) - a visit to Australia begins in Adelaide, where its half-hour offset from most of the world triggers a revisit to proposals to drop leap seconds and redefine time.
• Private fears in public places (11/7/2014) - the Samaritans make a rare online misstep.
• Disclosure (10/31/2014) - HM Revenue and Customs considers open data.
• Ground truthiness (10/24/2014) - the 2014 Biometrics conference measures the gap between theory and reality.
• Uppity women (10/17/2014) - Ada Lovelace day.
• The tipping point (10/10/2014) - or, more accurately, the TTIP-ing point.
• Insecurity by the dozen (10/3/2014) - all the reasons that aren't technology, knowledge, or awareness why people are insecure.
• Fifth element (9/26/2014) - we're up to 5G at the "5G Huddle", but no one really knows what that is, yet.
• A mighty wind (9/19/2014) - Scotland votes to stay united. For now.
• Lying blackfoots, truthful whitefoots (9/12/2014) - Is the Internet a failure? Or, more precisely, can we ever have truly secure transactions over it?
• Sixteen tons (9/5/2014) - post-GIKII, is data collection the new "company store"?
• Shared space (8/29/2014) - the first VOX-POL conference attempts to pin down the difference the Internet makes in fostering extremism and violence.
• Last of the summer whine (8/22/2014) - UK prime minister David Cameron favors ratings for online music videos, and doctors making mistakes may be forced to "apologize".
• Robots without software (8/15/2014) - that will be us, once we reach "peak software".
• Duty of care (8/8/2014) - how far should service providers go in seeking out their users' crimes?
• Testing times (8/1/2014) - OKCupid tests its algorithm; Facebook manipulates its users. Big difference.
• Patch Friday (7/25/2014) - catch-ups on data retention, mass surveillance, plagiarism in tennis journalism, and a review of Mr Burns.
• Breaking away (7/18/2014) - two months to the Scottish referendum on independence.
• A DRIP in time... (7/11/2014) - the passage of the DRIP Act signals a new low in anti-democratic legislation passage.
• Errata (7/4/2014) - Google publicly struggles to implement the right to be forgotten, while Facebook experiments on its users and issues a spectacularly non-apology.
• There is no Theresa May (6/27/2014) - or rather, there *is* a Theresa May who says there is no surveillance society. Update (8/13/2014): Theresa May, then the Home Secretary, seems in retrospect to have been priming the pump for the DRIP Act, which was published a few weeks later and passed in less than a week by agreement among all the main parties.
• Twin cities (6/20/2014) - what kind of "smart city" do you want?
• Acts of succession (6/13/2014) - at Computers, Freedom, and Privacy amateur drones fly for fun and Persistent Surveillance's drones fight urban crime. Was the past worse?
• Medic alert (6/6/2014) - the Privacy Health Summit asks, as medical data expands to include categories never imagined by data protection laws such as HIPAA, will we have body scores the way today we have credit scores?
• Software is forever (5/30/2014) - Microsoft can declare XP dead all its wants, but the future lies in living with old software.
• Troika (5/23/2014) - a data breach comes to eBay, and we are all vulnerable.
• Memory hole (5/16/2014) - why the European Court of Justice decision in Google v. Spain is not the end of freedom of expression on the Internet.
• The cost of surveillance (5/9/2014) - arguments to counter "surveillance is worth it if it stops people being blown up". That's a big IF.
• Rumors at 11 (5/2/2014) - Twitter is dead. Or it's getting bigger. Maybe both.
• Courting favor (4/25/2014) - Aereo tries to convince the supreme Court that all those tiny antennas don't violate copyright laws, while the FCC rules for a fast-lane Internet.
• The PDP-10 who was God (4/18/2014) - through the magic of fantasy technology, on The Americans the spies are instructed to "bug the ARPAnet".
• Sea of holes (4/11/2014) - Heartbleed happens.
• Snark out (4/4/2014) - the end of Television without Pity.
• A money that understands us (3/28/2014) - why the clever comment I made at this year's Tomorrow's Transactions Forum (formerly the Digital Money Forum), that "We are moving from money we understand to money that understands us">, is appealing as a marketing slogan - but wrong.
• The gulf (3/21/2014) - the GEMS conference in Dubai shows the extent to which private (and even for-profit) education is spreading across the globe to help - or colonize - the world's 20 million who cannot read or write.
• Pygmalion (3/14/2014) - discussion of Spike Jonze's movie Her.
• Boiling the ocean (3/7/2014) - efforts to harden the Internet against pervasive passive surveillance get underway with the STRINT workshop. It may be some time, especially since HP's Martin Sadler predicts 100 million new hackers by 2020...
• Body mechanics (2/28/2014) - Cybersalon explores technological human enhancement. Want to hear the Internet?
• A problem shared (2/21/2014) - there's data sharing - and then there's care.data.
• Slip-sliding away (2/14/2014) - the UK Internet Governance Forum meeting fiddles while the real action is elsewhere and the chance to matter fades.
• Original sin (2/7/2014) - Alan Patrick mulls the dark site of open data. Someone has to.
• Voice of five generations (1/31/2014) - the open source community may not recognize themselves as inheritors of Pete Seeger's mantle - but they are.
• Starting Over (1/24/2014) - at Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, Mireille Hildebrandt asks the key question, "Would you rather have privacy or the right to privacy?"
• Nesting (1/17/2014) - Google buys Nest and sets up the anti-trust case of 2024.
• The enclosures (1/10/2014) - as moves to enclose the Internet grow in number, we must continue to build the public commons.
• Twenty-three skidoo (1/3/2014) - the FDA tells 23andMe to stop marketing its saliva test while taking multiple DNA tests shows little consistency in the results.

2013

• Replay (12/27/2013) - 2013 in review.
• Here there be midget porn (12/20/2013) - can censorship filters and smart living mix? Gus Hosein wants a better form of "smart".
• Copyright plays (12/13/2014) - why copyright should not become the Net's single point of failure.
• Running with scissors (12/6/2013) - redundant systems, always a good thing.
• The learning channel (11/29/2013) - lessons learned so far from six months of Snowden revelations.
• Schmidt happens (11/22/2013) - encrypt everyone, the in-sight end of censorship...what has Google chairman Eric Schmidt been smoking? (Also at ORGzine)
• Content is king (11/15/2013) - the end of the Google Books lawsuit and the leaked copyright provisions of the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty. (Also at ORGzine)
• Unified field (11/8/2013) - Internet or Splinternet? the threat of Balkanizing the Internet.(Also at ORGzine)
• The edge of writing (11/1/2013) - at the Future of Text event, Frode Hegland asks what text would look like if business hadn't won and tyrannized us all with Word.
• Surveillance by consent (10/25/2013) - the Surveillance Camera conference considers new codes of practice and demands better research into the basic question: does this stuff work? (Also at ORGzine_
• Bad people (10/18/2013) - in fantasy worlds presented at the Biometrics Conference, airports are magical, pubs and restaurants are safe from thieves, and the "bad people" are...well, somewhere that's else. (Also at ORGzine)
• In name only (10/11/2013) - Nominet considers banning "offensive" names. Seriously? (Also at ORGzine)
• Bread and circuses (10/4/2013) - the US government shuts down. Is this what the Founding Fathers had in mind?
• Fifteen (9/27/2013) - when Google was ten years old everyone loved it; now it's 15 and not so much, an outcome I failed to predict in 2009.
• The opposite of Zemblanity (9/20/2013) - Gikii speculates about past, present, future, and everything else.
• Hillside views (9/13/2013) - a first visit to Trust in Digital Life.
• Snooping as a service (9/6/2013) - trust model - broken. Bits - everywhere.
• As such (8/30/2013) - no, New Zealand didn't just invalidate software patents. Pity. (Also at ORGzine)
• First-world problems (8/23/2013) - the security services' reaction to Snowden shows it's time for cultural change. (Also at ORGzine
• A merger too far (8/16/2013) - US Airways marries American Airlines. Must they?
• The bully season (8/9/2013) - for a sector of the population that guides and governments are always trying to squelch, there's a lot of it about. (also here and at ORGzine)
• Sleeping with the enemy (8/2/2013) - government PR, feedback loops, and stomping on immigrants. (also here and ORGzine)
• Immoral panic (7/26/2013) - David Cameron, nationwide filtering, and other bad ideas. (also here and ORGzine)
• Automate and chill (7/19/2013) - is it really less of a privacy invasion if the things reading your email are machines instead of humans? (also here and ORGzine)
• Take back the Net (7/12/2013) - centralization, the key reason Internet surveillance works. (also here and here)
• Repealing the Internet (7/5/2013) - Vint Cerf, Roger Scantlebury, Peter Wilkinson, and Peter Kirstein mull over the tricks they had to play to get the Internet off the ground. (also here and here)
• Rounding errors (6/28/2013) - Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2013 considers drones, NSA surveillance programs, and Bitcoin. (also here and here)
• This does not apply to US citizens (6/21/2013) - getting Americans to think about human rights instead of US citizens' rights. (also here and here)
• Orphans in a storm (6/14/2013) - breaking down the UK's proposals for orphan works at ORGcon. (also here)
• PRISM break (6/7/2013) - privacy, usability, and mental models in the wake of the EE revelations about mobile data and the Snowden revelations about NSA and PRISM. (also here and here)
• Flow, sweet data, flow (5/31/13) - the battles over data protection reform get mean. (also here and here)
• Forcing functions (5/24/13) - why, sadly, we can't restrict the use of open data to just the people we like, in response to Bill Thompson at Opentech. (also here and here)
• Equality bytes - BT's entry into content provision raises questions about the UK and network neutrality. (also here and here)
• The brewing war on some shapes (5/10/13) - 3D printing hits the fan. (also here and here)
• Policy jam (5/3/2013) - Tea campers discuss open policy and digital engagement. (also here and here)
• Namesakes (4/26/2013) - the domain name wars revive. (also here and here)
• Not just another 14-year-old basement Tweeter (4/19/2013) - CISPA, terrorism, and fighting back. (also here)
• Cautiously apocalyptic (4/12/2013) - thoughts after We Robot 2013. (also here)
• Only forget (4/5/2013) - the right to be forgotten - or the right to object? (also here)
• The Price (3/29/13) - Evgeny Morozov speaks in London. (also here)
• Facts are scared (3/22/13) - Ofcom and the Open Data User Group fight over the Royal Mail's postcode database. (also here)
• Can money compete with free? (3/15/13) - at this year's Tomorrow's Transactions conference, the Web's business model threatens payments. (also here)
• Cyberwhere? (3/8/13) - in defense of the concept of cyberspace. (also here)
• Information wants to be freed (3/1/13) - prospective revisions to the UK's Freedom of Information Act threaten its progress. (also here)
• Merchants of chaos (2/22/13) - the publication of John Sweeney's new book, Church of Fear, provides a chance to look back at Scientology vs. the Net. (also here and here)
• Frictional arithmetic (2/15/13) - in digital payments, complexity is friction. (also here and here)
• Bug-a-boo (2/8/13) - Matt Blaze, Susan Landau, Steve Bellovin, and Sandy Clark have a novel idea: give the FBI hackers instead of legally mandated back doors. (also here and here)
• Pwned (2/1/13) - trouble at the New York Times. (also here and here)
• Lock box (1/25/13) - why does copyright law mean it's illegal for US consumers to unlock their phones? (also here and here)
• First-mover disadvantage (1/18/13) - Amazon.com inaugurates a service just like the one that got MP3.com sued into bankruptcy in 1999. (also here and here)
• Symbiosis (1/11/13) - French ISPs and the advertising arms race. (also here and here)
• The antitrust timewarp - Google is exonerated by the FTC, but the case is five years too late. (also here and here)

2012

• Apocalypse interrupted (12/28/12) - the world survives the Mayan calendar, and the Internet has so far survived WCIT. (also here)
• The personal connection (12/21/12) - online education reaches the parts other types can't. (also here)
• Defending Facebook (12/14/12) - Chris Palow explains to Defcon London what it's like to guard Facebook from attacks. (also here)
• The fifth estate (12/7/12) - Lord Justice Leveson calls the Internet uncivilized. Excuse me? (also here)
• Robot wars (11/30/12) - We say global existential risks; the tabloids say "killer robots!". Thoughts after a discussion on Voice of Russia. (also here)
• Democracy theater (11/23/12) - Facebook announces plans to dump its user voting structure for privacy policy changes. (also here). Update (1/26/13): Facebook backed down after protests and the user vote went against the company's plan. We'd expect them to try again.
• Grabbing at governance (11/16/12) - Thoughts before the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT), when the International Trade Union Congress steps into the fray. (also here and here)
• The billion-dollar spree (11/9/12) - the first trillion-dollar election in history winds to a close; where can we possibly go from here? (also here and here)
• Survival instincts (11/2/12) - New York's post-Hurricane Sandy digital divide. (also here and here)
• Lie to me (10/26/12) - the 2012 Parliament and Internet conference, where security advice clashes with those convinced that online anonymity must die. (also here and here)
• Finding the gorilla (10/19/12) - the 2012 Singularity Summit studies the brain. (also here and here)
• My identity, my self (10/12/12) - the UK government's real plans for identity service providers. (also here and at Privacy Surgeon)
• The doors of probability (10/5/12) - Mike Lynch, the former CEO of Autonomy, talks publicly about future plans. (also here and here). Update (1/26/13): this event took place a few weeks before Hewlett-Packard, which bought Autonomy in 2011 for $10 billion, took a write down of some $5.5 billion on that sale and alleged accounting improprieties.
• Don't take ballots from smiling strangers (9/28/12) - New York state makes a mess of electronic balloting. (also here and here)
• This is not (just) about Google (9/21/12) - studying Google's missteps with Do Not Track in Safari. (also here and here).Update: in 2013 Google went on to pay $17 million to 37 states as part of settling this same issue.
• What did you learn in school today? (9/14/12) - what does placing CCTV cameras in school toilets and changing rooms really teach kids? (also here and here)
• Robocops (9/7/12) - automated copyright enforcement kills legal streams. here and here)
• Remembering the moon (8/31/12) - R.I.P. Neil Armstrong and dreams of a future lived in space. (also here and here)
• Look and feel (8/24/12) - Apple vs Samsung, and copying in the software industry. (also here and here) Update (1/26/13): after this piece appeared, Philippe Kahn emailed to say that the precedential case of Borland vs Lotus would have supported Apple in this case.
• Bottom dwellers (8/17/12) - how much legal responsibility should Google bear for the ordering of its search results? (also here and here)
• Wiped out (8/10/12) - as journalist Matt Honan has just learned to his cost, the cloud is not a backup; repeat 100 times. (also here and here)
• Social advertising (8/3/12) - sponsored stories and paid links. (also here)
• Retcons and reversals (7/27/12) - Paul Chambers is acquitted on appeal; Britain accommodates the Olympics; a boy boards a plane without bypassing security or collecting $200; the Wall Street Journal claims the government had nothing to do with inventing the Internet. (also here and here)
• In the country of the free (7/20/12) - taking apart Elizabeth Wurtzel, who says in The Atlantic, that "Only people who do lousy work do it for free". (also here and here)
• The ninth circle of HOPE (7/13/12) - a writeup of the 2012 Hacking on Planet Earth. (also here and here)
• The license, the judge, and the wardrobe (7/6/12) - the Court of Justice of the Euroopean Union rules that used software can be sold on. (also here and here)
• Artificial scarcity (6/29/12) - tennis reporters battle to keep interview transcripts offline. (also here and here)
• The numbers game (6/22/12) - low-tech bank theft and that \A327 billion Detica claims cybercrime costs the UK every year. (also here and here)
• A license to print money (6/15/12) - the draft Communications Data Bill creates a heckuva a windfall for security vendors. (also here)
• Insecure at any speed (6/8/12) - bad enough that we choose bad passwords; so much worse that sites protect them badly. (also here)
• The pet rock manifesto (6/1/12) - is there some reason governments can't listen to experts about security? (also here)
• Camera obscura (5/25/12) - privacy, identity, and image at Digital Shoreditch. (also here and here)
• A thousand new millionaires (5/18/12) - Facebook goes public. (also here and here). Update (1/26/13): The market hadn't yet opened in Facebook stock when this piece was written. On the first day, famously, it dropped about 40 percent; as of this week the share price is hovering in the low 30s and anyone who bought the stock at the IPO price is still under water.
• Self-drive (5/11/12) - Google's self-driving car gets a license. (also here and here)
• A matter of degree (5/4/12) - economics and the modern university student. (also here and here)
• An interview with Lawrence Lessig (4/28/12) - money, corruption, and changing Congress. (also here)
• A really fancy hammer with a gun (4/24/12) - the first annual We Robot conference crosses law and robotics. (also here and here)
• A nation of suspects (4/20/12) - bad policies are like counterfeit money: they never quite go away and they ensnare the innocent. Yes, the Interception Modernisation Programme is back as the Communications Capabilities Development Programme. (also here and here)
• The people perimeter (4/13/12) - social media brings deperimeterization to Britain's civil servants. (also here
• I spy (4/6/12) - as wearable computing matures into Google Glass, who will control the information that reaches us? (also here
• The ghost of cash (3/30/12) - at this week's Digital Money Forum I lick banknotes to prove they're not spreading disease. (also here and here)
• The year of the future (3/23/12) - at NOminet's annual Internet policy conference everyone sees 2012 as a crossroads that might decide who runs the Internet. (also here and here) Update (1/27/13): I think it's clear now it wasn't.
• The end of the beginning (3/16/12) - is that a glimmer of reform to libel law and copyright? (also here and here)
• Private parts (3/9/12) - a Westminster eForum event studies the data protection reform package. (also here and here)
• Drive by wire (3/2/12) - the University of Nottingham's seminar on self-driving cars considers the benefits of automation. (also here and here)
• Copyright U (2/24/12) - universities are the canaries in the copyright mine, says Cornell's Tracy Mitrano. (also here)
• Foul play (2/17/12) - why is the Serious and Organised Crimes Agency like a hacker clan? (also here and here)
• Media cop (2/10/12) - the Leveson Inquiry gives the former NightJack ammunition to sue the Times for outing his identity. (also here)
• Beyond the soup kitchen (2/3/12) - this month's Tea Camp explores technology for the homeless. (also here and here)
• Principle failure (1/27/12) - Google consolidates its privacy policies. This can't be good, can it? (also here and here)
• Camping out (1/20/12) - this year's GovCamp recodes government. (also here and here)
• Pot pourri (1/13/12) - 2012 on a napkin. (also here and here)
• Only the paranoid (1/6/12) - Ramnit, the first Facebook worm. Time to cash out? (also here and here) Update (1/27/13): note that a later column ("Defending FAcebook") talks about Facebook's effort to defend itself and its users from such threats. Note also that Facebook's IPO ("A thousand new millionaires") was announced soon after this incident, and the company went public three months later, in April 2012, though I'm sure the IPO was already in the works when Ramnit happened.

2011

• Ignorance is no excuse (12/30/11) - adopt a politician and *make* them understand technology; no, you can't all take Tom Watson. (also here and here)
• Duck amuck (12/23/11) - an interview with Gabriel Weinberg, founder of the new(ish) search engine DuckDuckGo. (also here and here)
• Location, location, location (12/16/11) - this year's A Fine Balance focuses on location privacy and why it's so sensitive. (also here and here)
• Reversal of government fortunes (12/9/11) - all the people you wished would be hired by government to reinvent itself and its technology? Well, they're working for the UK's Government Digital Service. (also here and here)
• Debating the robocalypse (12/2/11) - I participate in a formal debate at Trinity College Dublin, "This house fears the rise of artificial intelligence". (also here and here)
• Paul Revere's printing press (11/25/11) - a Westminster eForum on cybersecurity produces the same tired ideas and agrees they aren't working. (also here and here)
• The write stuff (11/18/11) - the official tenth anniversary column covers my weekend at Ken Levine's Sitcom Room. (also here)
• The sentiment of crowds (11/11/11) - the Sentiment Analysis Symposium reveals that deriving trends from social media is all about the question. (also here and here)
• The identity layer (11/4/11) - the UK government ponders returning data to the people through Midata and managing identity for government services. (also here and here)
• Crypto: the revenge (10/28/11) - yes, PGP (or GPG) is easier to use than it was; no, it's still not easy enough. (also here and here)
• Printers on fire (10/21/11) - Columbia University's Ang Cui and Sal Stolfo use embedded software in printers and other devices to create holes in networks; the fire is just an entertaining sideshow. (also here and here)
• Think of the children (10/14/11) - do you want porn with that? Supersize me! (also here and here)
• In the club (10/7/11) - who would have thought the mobile Internet would change car ownership? (also here and here)
• Trust exercise (9/30/11) - a meeting at the Centre for Financial Innovation considers identity and its fundamental question: whom do we trust? (also here and here)
• Your grandmother's phone (9/23/11) - the second Senior Market Mobile considers assistive design that does not insult. (also here)
• The world at ten (9/16/11) - ten years on from 9/11, have "the terrorists" won? (also here)
• The final countdown (9/7/11) - in a last-minute reversal, copyright term extension is suddenly back on the EU's agenda. (also here) Update (1/27/13): five days later, on September 12, 2011, term extension passed the Council of the European Union and became law (PDF). Member states have two years to incorporate it into national law.
• White rabbits (9/2/11) - the first 44con is scary enough to make you go back to paper. (also here)
• Master of your domain (8/27/11) - new generic top-level domains, too late to make a difference. (also here)
• Back to school (8/19/11) - is a university education worth paying for? (also here)
• Phony concerns about human rights (8/12/11) - Britain's summer of riots tempts politicians to do their worst. (also here)
• Cheaters in Paradise (8/5/11) - why shouldn't kids cheat when they see that everyone else does? (also here)
• Name check (7/30/11) - Google demands real names for Google+. That is, names it recognizes as real. (also here)
Face to face (7/23/11) - facial recognition is certainly here, but does that mean we just have to accept it? (also here and here)
• Dirty digging (7/16/11) - the escalating phone hacking scandals and the culture of the press. (also here and here)
• The grey hour (7/9/11) - a workshop on online behavioral advertising asks: is this the last window to protect consumer privacy before it's a lost cause? (also here and here)
• Free speech, not data (7/1/11) - SCOTUS invokes the First Amendment to rule for data mining and against the state of Vermont. (also here and here)
• Bits of the realm (6/24/11) - So how cool are Bitcoins? (also here and here)
• If you build it... (6/20/11) - CFP: computers. (also here)
• The democracy divide (6/19/11) - CFP: freedom. (also here and here)
• Public private lives (6/18/11) - CFP: privacy. (also here and here)
• Untrusted systems (6/17/11) - The Health Privacy Summit: the record is not the patient. (also here and here)
• The creepiness factor (6/10/11) - Facial recognition comes to Facebook. (also here and here)
• A forgotten man and a bowl of Japanese goldfish (6/3/11) - The right to be forgotten: privacy, social networks, and free expression. (also here and here)
• Mixed media (5/27/11) - Technology, law, and open data: Big Tent UK and Opentech. (also here and here)
• The world we thought we lived in (5/20/11) - The Good Wife, TV's smartest technology show. (also here and here)
• Lay down the cookie (5/13/11) - New rules on the use of cookies confuse Web developers. (also here and here)
• Double exposure (5/6/11) - Wikileaks' cables expose US State Department copyright policy. (also here and here)
• Searching for reality (4/29/11) - A visit to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. (also here and here)
• Applesauce (4/22/11) - Is your iPhone spying on you? (also here and here)
• The open zone (4/15/11) - Somewhere between hobbyist kit and consumer appliance... (also here and here)
• Brought to ebook (4/8/11) - Is this finally the ebook moment? (also here and here)
• Equal access (4/1/11) - How much Web would a Web block block if a Web block could block Web? (also here and here)
• Return to the red page district (3/25/11) - Too little, too late; ICANN creates the .xxx top-level domain. (also here and here)
• Block party (3/18/11) - The IWF at 15. (also here and here)
• The ten-year count (3/11/11) - The census and government transparency. (also here and here)
• Tax returns (3/4/11) - State sales tax rules start shutting down Amazon affiliates programs. (also here and here)
• Wartime economy (2/25/11) - Is cybercrime really costing the UK \A327 billion annually? Supersize me! (also here and here)
• What is hyperbole? (2/18/11) - What IBM's Jeopardy champion and Eben Moglen's Freedom box have in common. (also here and here)
• Question, explore, discover...action! (2/11/11) - Have a sugar pill. (also here)
• Blackout (2/4/11) - The Internet was built to withstand a bomb outage...but not government action. (also here)
• Stuffed (1/28/11) - Archivsts, not hoarders. Please. (also here and here)
• Fogged (1/21/11) - The privacy of Phileas Fogg. (also here and here)
• Face time (1/14/11) - Is Facebook's online party peaking? (also here and here)
• Scanning the TSA (1/7/11) - EPIC studies the TSA. (also here and here)

2010

• Good, bad, ugly...the 2010 that was (12/31/10) - Recap. (also here)
• Random acts of security (12/24/10) - Getting through the TSA's shiny new toy, airport scanners. (also here)
• Sharing values (12/17/10) - The British Phonographic Industry opens fire on Google. (also here and here)
• Payback (12/10/10) - Michael Chertoff visits London and promotes cyberwar doctrine. (also here)
• Open diplomacy (12/3/10) - Wikileaks tells us what diplomats really think. (also here)
• Like, unlike (11/26/10) - Look up impetigo, tell all your Facebook friends. (also here)
• Power to the people (11/19/10) - William Heath reinvents the data store, and this time it's personal. (also here)
• Just between ourselves (11/12/10) - The Twitter joke trial: security gone mad. (also here)
• Suicidal economics (11/5/10) - Update on the Times paywall. (also here)
• Wanted: less Sir Humphrey, more shark (10/29/10) - Robert Halfon, MP, convenes a Parliamentary discussion on privacy and the so far timid role of the Information Commissioner. (also here)
• An affair to remember (10/22/10) - Are the crypto wars coming back? (also here)
• The elected dictatorship (10/15/10) - Heather Brooke's silent state. (also here)
• The zero effect (10/8/10) - Thoughts in the aftermath of Stuxnet. (also here)
• Duty of care (9/30/10) - The new discipline of Web science. (also here)
• Lost in a Haystack (9/23/10) - First rule of crypto: release the source for cryptanalysis. (also here)
• Science is vital (9/17/10) - Budget cuts to damage the future. (also here)
• Google, I want a divorce (9/10/10) - The Wal-Martization of what used to be a fine research tool (also here)
• Beyond the zipline (9/3/10) - Aaron Sorkin's screenplay for The Social Network. (also here)
• Trust the data, not the database (8/27/10) - Opting out of the NHS spine. (also here)
• Naming conventions (8/20/10) - Eric Schmidt, Google's court jester, suggests overcoming teen social media indiscretions by an automatic change of name at 21. (also here)
• Pirate flags (8/13/10) - Game-changing the intellectual property industries. (also here)
• Bride of Clipper (8/6/10) - Is Howard Schmidt bringing back Clipper chip thinking? (also here)
• Three-legged race (7/30/10) - Not enough change from the new coalition government: the DEA in practice. (also here)
• Information Commissioner, where is thy sting? (7/23/10) - All baying for Google's blood over the sniffed wi-fi data...except for Britain's ICO. (also here) Nominated, BT Security Journalism Awards, "Best Generic Security Feature of the Year".
• Music tax (7/16/10) - Keep music live. Help live musicians. (also here)
• The big button caper (7/9/10) - The senior mobile conference: who wants the mobile phone equivalent of support stockings? (also here)
• Pay per view (7/2/10) - The Times goes paywall. (also here)
• New money (6/25/10) - The hidden costs of electronic money. (also here)
• Things I learned at this year's CFP (6/18/10) - Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2010. (also here)
• Bonfire of the last government's vanities (6/11/10) - Undoing the Labour government's database state, starting with the ID card. (also here)
• Return to the hacker crackdown (6/4/10) - What hacking was when Gary McKinnon was arrested. (also here)
• Privacy theater (5/29/10) - What else can you say about Facebook's new privacy controls? (also here)
• Trial by innocence (5/22/10) - Andre Agassi's autobiography makes life harder for innocent athletes. (also here)
• Bait and switch (5/14/10) - Seriously, Facebook? (also here) Nominated, BT Information Security Journalism awards, "Best Privacy Feature of the Year".
• Wish list (5/7/10) - Watching Labour lose on election night. (also here)
• Child's play (4/30/10) - The Byron report spreads some sanity about kids online. (also here)
• Death, where is thy password? (4/23/10) - There is no death in the Web world. (also here)
• Data-mining the data miners (4/16/10) - The PrivacyOS conference. (also here)
• Letter box (4/9/10) - App iMean turns the iPad into a letterpad to help an autistic child communicate. (also here)
• Not bogus! (4/2/10) - Simon Singh defeats the British Chiropractic Association on appeal and launches Libel law reform. (also here)
• Sung heroines (3/26/10) - Happy Ada Lovelace Day. (also here)
• Digital exclusion: the bill (3/19/10) - The Digital Economy bill wends towards passage while Privacy International turns 20. (also here)
• The cost of money (3/12/10) - The future of cash at the Digital Money Forum. (also here)
• The surveillance chronicles (3/5/10) - Review of the movie Erasing David. (also here)
• The community delusion (2/26/10) - The contrasting online communities supporting Simon Singh and Richard Dawkins. (also here
• Death doth make hackers of us all (2/19/10) - Friends don't die leaving uncrackable passwords. (also here)
• Light year (2/12/10) - Political bloggers and the upcoming election (Westminster Skeptics). (also here)
• Getting run down on the infobahn (2/5/10) - Ebooks: challenge or opportunity? (also here)
• Game night (1/29/10) - Tom Watson, MP, leads the quest for UK government support for the games industry. (also here)
• Music night (1/22/10) - The state of the digital music business, c 2010. (also here)
• The once and future late-night king (1/15/10) - Conan's spat with NBC is part of the changing business of television. (also here)
• Car talk (1/9/10) - Who'd have thought mobile telephony would disrupt the automobile industry? (also here)
• Privacy victims (1/1/10) - Airport security and the crotch bomber. (also here) Nominated, BT Security Journalism Awards, "Best Information Security Story of the Year".

2009

• Second acts (12/25/09) - What a difference a decade makes in the tech world. (also here)
• Little black Facebook (12/19/09) - "The only logical business model is the value of consumers' data," said Australian privacy advocate Roger Clarke in 2004. (also here)
• One ring to rule them all (12/12/09) - European copyright disharmony. (also here)
• Which lie did I tell? (12/4/09) - Fun with security questions in the era of publicly accessible personal information. (also here)
• Women and children first (11/27/09) - Ireland and the Church; the history of abuse and exploitation. (also here)
• Thou shalt not steal (11/20/09) - "Politicians seem increasingly to view due and accountable legal process as an unnecessary waste of time and try to avoid it." (also here)
• Cookie cutters (11/13/09) - A "masterfully stupid piece of legislation". (also here)
• Wigging (11/6/09) - Tennis and drugs tests. (also here)
• Kill switch (10/30/09) - How to keep the Net hard to kill. (also here)
• The power of Twitter (10/23/09) - Targets good, bad and bogus. (also here)
• Unsocial media (10/16/09) - "No one under 30 will use email". (also here)
• Phantom tollbooths (10/9/09) - Google Books, postcodes, and unforeseen uses. (also here)
• Free thought (10/5/09) - The Evening Standard drops its cover price to zero. (also here)
• Dead technology (9/26/09) - Obsolescence and unrepairable sewing machines. (also here)
• Renewal (9/19/09) - Crete, conferencing and privacy. (also here)
• Public broadcasting (9/12/09) - The BBC wants to implement DRM and evade free-to-air. (also here)
• Nothing ventured, nothing lost (9/4/09) - Hermann Hauser, venture capitalist. (also here)
• Develop in haste, lose the election at leisure (8/30/09) - More on last week's anti-filesharing. (also here)
• This means law (8/22/09) - UK Govt looks into anti-filesharing measures. (also here)
• We love the NHS (8/16/09) - Even though it would never let Stephen Hawking live. Hang on a second.... (also here)
• The 5 percent solution (8/7/09) - Watchdog International's net filtering method. (also here)
• Unsustainability (8/6/09) - Defcon/Black Hat in Las Vegas. (also here)
• Security for the rest of us (7/24/09) - Usable security. (also here)
• Human factors (7/17/09) - Security fatigue. (also here)
• Public interest (7/10/09) - Journalistic ethics and voicemail hacking. (also here)
• What's in an assigned name? (7/3/09) - ICANN - no change since 1998? (also here)
• Pass the policy (6/28/09) - Michael Geist tracks down where copyright policy comes from. Big surprise! (also here)
• Star system (6/19/09) - The knock-on effects of the loss of traditional media. (also here)
• Futures (6/15/09) - Futurology. And ducts. (also here)
• Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2009 - Day Four (6/13/09) - "Use online tools to build offline institutions." (also here)
• Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2009 - Day Three (6/4/09) - "Information asymmetry is how repressive regimes operate." (also here)
• Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2009 - Day Two (6/3/09) - "Secrecy makes people stupid." (also here)
• Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 2009 - Day One (6/2/09) - How anonymous is anonymized data? (also here)
• Three blind governments (5/29/09) - DRM restricts blind people's access to information. (also here)
• InPhormed consent (5/23/09) - Phorm's hysterical response to anti-Phorm hysteria. (also here)
• Bogus (5/15/09) - The British Chiropractic Association v. Simon Singh. (also here)
• Automated systems all the way down (5/8/09) - Users see security as damage, and route around it. (also here)
• Twit crit (5/1/09) - Twitter: where the online party is this week. (also here)
• The way we were (4/24/09) - Roger Ebert's Film Festival. (also here)
• I think we're all pirates on this bus (4/17/09) - Pirate Bay and all who sail in her. (also here)
• Statebook of the art (4/10/09) - Databases and uncertain results. (also here)
• Copyright encounters of the third dimension (4/3/09) - 3-d printing and copyright issues. (also here)
• The view (3/27/09) - Google Street View, live in the UK. (also here)
• The untweetable Xeroxness of being (3/20/09) - On the Internet, no one knows you're a fictional Xerox machine. (also here)
• Threat model (3/13/09) - Phorm think it's all about them (it isn't). (also here)
• The camcorder conundrum (3/7/09) - What are the effects of file-sharing? (also here)
• Modern liberty (2/28/09) - The Modern Liberty Convention. (also here)
• Control freaks (2/20/09) - Facebook revises its TOS. (also here)
• The Gattaca in Gossip Girl (2/13/09) - The privacy-less society. (also here)
• Forty-five years (2/6/09) - EU: term extension in sound recordings. (also here)
• Looking backward (1/30/09) - Governments move slowly; technology moves fast. (also here)
• Will tweet for food (1/23/09) - What Twitter users want. (also here)
• Health watch (1/16/09) - Steve Jobs' health problems. (also here)
• All change (1/9/09) - Newspaper death watch. (also here)
• No rest for 2009 (1/2/09) - Digital rights issues for 2009. (also here)

2008

• Apologies not accepted (26/12/08) - Why should staff apologise for their management's mistakes? (also here)
• Backbone (12/19/08) - The British Chiropractic Association sues Simon Singh for libel. (also here)
• Watching the Net (12/12/08) - IWF vs. Wikipedia. (also here)
• Saving seeds (12/5/08) - The UK's DNA database violates the European Convention on Human Rights. (also here)
• Mother love (11/28/08) - The Lori Drew cyberbullying case. (also here)
• The art of the impossible (11/21/08) - From the Convergence (un)conference. (also here)
• The USB stick in the men's room (11/14/08) - Involving people in an experience to reduce piracy's impact. (also here)
• Reality TV (11/7/08) - Persuading people to watch live TV. (also here)
• Machine dreams (10/31/08) - Defining artificial intelligence. (also here)
• Living by numbers (10/24/08) - Mining your own personal data. (also here)
• Mind the gap (10/17/08) - "80 years is just about exactly the right length of time for a given culture to recreate its past mistakes". (also here)
• Data mining snake oil (10/10/08) - Dataveillance won't prevent terrorism. (also here)
• Deprave and corrupt (10/3/08) - The Darryn Walker case. (also here)
• Wimsey's whimsy (9/26/08) - GikIII asks quirky questions that illuminate serious issues. (also here)
• Going places (9/19/08) - Dopplr. (also here)
• Slow news (9/12/08) - How a 6-year-old news story knocked 75% off the price of United Airlines shares in under an hour. (also here)
• Return of the browser wars (9/5/08) - Google Chrome and software as a Net service. (also here)
• Bannedwidth (8/29/08) - "ISPs should be wary of signing onto the rightsholders' bandwagon when their concern is user demand for bandwidth". (also here)
• Intimate Exchanges (8/22/08) - Live performance is uncopiable, but DVDs would still be nice.... (also here)
• License to Kill (8/15/08) - Patent claims, free licences and model trains. (also here)
• Broadcast of the Rings (8/8/08) - "There's a certain irony in the International Olympic Committee's choice of YouTube as its broadcast platform for the Beijing Olympics". (also here)
• All paid up (8/1/08) - Amazon Checkout, Paypal and anti-fraud algorithms. (also here)
• Who? (7/25/08) - Un-anonymizing data can be surprisingly easy. (also here)
• Ninety-five (7/18/08) - The EC extends rights in sound recordings from 50 to 95 years. (also here)
• Voters for sale (7/11/08) - The DMA opposes the withdrawal of the edited electoral register. (also here)
• The new normal (7/4/08) - "'Our way of life' is a moving target". (also here)
• Mistakes were made (6/27/08) - How HMRC managed to lose 25 million households' personal data. (also here)
• Print rules (6/20/08) - Why electronic newsletters can't replace printed ones. (also here)
• Naked in plain sight (6/13/08) - How easy it is for moderately capable Windows users to leave themselves vulnerable. (also here)
• The Digital Revolution turns 15 (6/6/08) - The Internet is changing our world, and very few predictions of its effects have been anywhere near correct. (also here)
• Ten (5/30/08) - Happy 10th birthday, Foundation for Information Policy Research! (also here)
• The haystack conundrum (5/23/08) - The Home Office wants to create a giant database to store all UK comms. How will they identify the important stuff in it? (also here)
• Everything new is old again (5/16/08) - Why do we keep falling for sexy new technologies? (also here)
• Swings and roundabouts (5/10/08) - The Government wants us to love the ID card. (also here)
• Bet and sue (5/2/08) - Online gambling and the good name of tennis. (also here)
• The shape of the mushroom (4/25/08) - When the world's data outgrows its storage... (also here)
• Like a Virgin (4/18/08) - Will Virgin try to charge providers for faster streaming? (also here)
• My IP address, my self (4/11/08) - Has the EU become the world's data protection policeman? (also here)
• Million Dollar Baby (4/4/08) - James Randi and his Million Dollar Challenge. Get in quick, it ends in 2010! (also here)
• Leaving Las Vegas (3/28/08) - Technology and the gaming industry. (also here)
• Copywrongs (3/21/08) - Discussions about music copyright rarely include musicians. (also here)
• Uninformed consent (3/14/08) - Surveillance and secrecy. (also here)
• Techitics (3/7/08) - Can technology reform politics? (also here)
• Phormal ware (2/29/08) - Spyware or privacy-friendly advertising? (also here)
• Strikeout (2/22/08) - Filesharing isn't going away, and the latest proposals are badly thought-out and unfair. (also here)
• Greedbay? (2/16/08) - eBay's change to its rating system displeases some users. (also here)
• If you have ID cards, drink alcohol (2/8/08) - "ID cards, though the heavens fall!" (also here)
• Microhoo! (2/1/08) - Or should that be Yahsoft? (also here)
• Scientology: Xenu strikes again (1/25/08) - The DDOS attacks on Sceintology sites. (also here)
• Harmony, where is thy sting? (1/18/08) - The EU wants to harmonize the national laws that apply to online content. (also here)
• Beyond biology (1/11/08) - Cryonics and its possible consequences. (also here)
• If God had meant us to vote... (1/4/08) - Let the tallest man win! (also here)

2007

• 2007 by numbers (12/28/07) - Looking back.... (also here)
• Enter password (12/21/07) - By their typing pattern will you know them. Maybe. (also here)
• Nativity plays (12/14/07) - Is faith so fragile that without school nativity plays it will cease to exist? (also here)
• Data hogs (12/7/07) - That great sucking sound you hear is Facebook swallowing you whole. (also here)
• Spam today and spam tomorrow (11/30/07) - Unfortunately, always spam today. (also here)
• Road block (11/23/07) - Information wants to be free, but data wants to leak. (also here)
• Strike (11/16/07) - net.wars supports the Writer's Guild. (also here)
• Watching you watching me (11/9/07) - What is CCTV for? Somehow, that debate never happens. (also here)
• Amateur hour (11/2/07) - Amateur, shamateur, hey, it's all "user-generated content" these days. (also here)
• Tomorrow's world (10/26/07) - Party in today's virtual worlds like it's 1999. (also here
• Money talks (10/19/07) - eBay comes clean about how much it overpaid for Skype. (also here)
• The permission-based society (10/12/07 - The TSA proposes to require advance clearance for all travelers in, above, or through US airspace. (also here)
• Back to high skool (10/5/07) - Facebook's big mistake: listing friends instead of enemies. (also here)
• Anything worth having is worth cheating for (9/28/07) - Floyd Landis, Mariano Puerta, and kangaroo courts. (also here)
• The summer of lost hats (9/21/07) - Energy, virtual worlds, security, and nanotechnology. It was quite a summer. (also here)
• Nothing to hide, no one to trust (9/14/07) - Everybody into the DNA database! (also here)
• Was that private? (9/7/07) - Why leave it to large organizations to invade our privacy when we can do it so effectively ourselves? (here)
• Snouting for bandwidtch (8/31/07) - Can the Internet industry really afford file-sharing? (also here)
• Game gods (8/24/07) - Virtual worlds were created to set people free, but they are the most controlled and data-logged online services of all. (also here)
• Welcome to Singapore (8/17/07) - For the want of a tiny plug, the kingdom was lost... (also here)
• Wall of sheep (8/10/07) - Dateline ignores real criminals to go after Defcon. (also here)
• The house always wins (8/3/07) - No matter how much security we bring to the table, there are always new risks. (also here)
• There ain't no such thing as a free Benidorm (7/27/07) - Deforming cyberspace to suit physical laws that don't exist. (also here)
• The cookie monster (7/20/07) - Google puts a Bandaid on its cookies. (also here)
• Constitutional convention (7/13/07) - A written constitution for Britain? (also here)
• Born digital (7/6/07) - Microsoft helps preserve British national archives. (also here)
• In search of the very, very small (6/29/07) - Exploring nanotechnology in Basel. (also here)
• Many hidden returns (6/22/07) - Heard the one about Britain's e-voting electoral trials? (also here)
• Six degrees of defamation (6/15/07) - How many links away do you have to be before it's safe to mention Michael Geist and Wayne Crookes? (also here)
• Beating galahrose (6/8/07) - It's a fight to the death over there on eBay. (also here)
• Britney Spears has good news for you (6/1/07) - Thoughts on the Google Developer day. (also here)
• Bent copyright (5/25/07) - Uri Geller takes on the EFF. (also here)
• Home improvement (5/18/07) - Building a computer: just like Legos. (also here)
The Blair we left behind (5/11/07) - Blair brought more surveillance and chewed away at civil liberties. New Labour, eh? (also here)
• Cryptanalysis (5/4/07) - Did Whitfield Diffie's work inventing public key cryptography protect our privacy - or invade it? (also here)
• My so-called second life (4/27/07) - More than a toy, these virtual worlds. (also here)
• Green spies (4/20/07) - Is the green movement being hijacked to serve the interests of mass surveillance? (also here)
• Let's make rules (4/13/07) - A code of conduct for the blogosphere? Get a grip, people. (also here)
• What's in a 2.0? (4/6/07) - The Web with rounded corners. (also here)
• Re-emerging technology (3/30/07) - New tech at etech, just like old tech except with knitting. (also here)
• Double the networks, double the neutralities (3/23/07) - Why do we care so much about network neutrality on the Internet and so little about it on the wireless networks? (also here)
• Going non-linear (3/16/07) - The BBC and the future of media. (also here)
• Your cheating heart (3/9/07) - If people lie about their credentials for volunteer jobs as Wikipedia editors, cheating just ain't what it used to be. (also here)
• Fusion cuisine and the Chamber of Legislative Horrors (3/2/07) - Looking for the worst of privacy-invasive legislation. Start with the UK and "data fusion". (also here)
• Equal prizes (2/23/07) - Frances Allen becomes the first woman ever to win the Alan M. Turing Award, and Wimbledon declares - at last - equal prize money. (also here)
• Quick fix (2/16/07) - Upgrade Quicken or die. (also here>)
• Getting out the vote (2/9/07) - Not even paper audit trails can save electronic voting. (also here)
• One copyright does not fit all (2/2/07) - Photographers' legitimate complaints about Gowers. (also here)
• Vote early, vote often... (1/26/07) - Just when you thought electronic voting was dead. (also here)
• Spineless (1/19/07) - Replacing knowledge with information: the problems with the NHS data spine. (also here)
• iPhone, schmiPhone (1/12/07) - Saying first what the world now agrees: the iPhone is very pretty, but who could stand to be tied to AT&T Wireless? (also here)
• Stonewalling (1/5/07) - Joel Stein fights reader feedback. (also here)

2006

• Resolutions for 2007 (12/29/06) - WIBNI.... (Not on newswireless.net)
• Thinking time (12/23/06) - Proposals for Computers, Freedom and Privacy 2007. (also here)
• I hear dead people (12/15/06) - Dead musicians share their opinion. (also here)
• In praise of Gowers (12/8/06) - Hooray! Let's hope the Government takes good sense on board. (also here)
• A SWIFT kick (12/1/06) - "Hidden, systematic, massive, and long-term" leakage of personal financial data to the US. (also here)
• Hadrian's Firewall (11/24/06) - Content blocking to be used by all UK ISPs by the end of 2007. (also here)
• Waiting for Gowers (11/17/06) - The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property. (also here)
• ICANN dreams (11/10/06) - ICANN announces its three new board members. (also here)
• A fine and private place (11/3/06) - Which country to move to. (also here)
• Crossfire (10/27/06) - Freedom of speech does not mean condoning child abuse. (also here)
• Spam, spam, spam, and spam (10/20/06) - The Spamhaus court case. (also here)
• GoogTube (10/13/06) - Why Google bought YouTube. (also here)
• A different kind of poll tax (10/6/06) - A subtle way of controlling who votes. (also here)
• Doppelgangland (9/29/06) - Online impersonation. (also here)
• The last social mile (9/22/06) - Social entrepeneurism. (also here)
• Mobile key infrastructure (9/15/06) - Using mobile phones for authentication. (also here)
• Crossing the streams (9/8/06) - Streamed live tennis! (also here)
• The elephant in the dark (9/1/06) - Constructing common sense. (also here)
• Spamigation (8/25/06) - Litigation by webcrawler? (also here)
• Travel costs (8/18/06) - More thoughts on conspiracies and air travel restrictions. (also here)
• Any liquids discovered must be removed from the passenger (8/11/06) - Making air travel more unpleasant won't deter terrorists for long.... (also here)
• Hard times at the identity corral (8/4/06) - Amusing and unforeseen: the Government is having a hard time finding anyone willing to manufacture ID cards. (also here)
• Why I am standing for the ICANN board (7/28/06) - "Mr Kinnock, what do you say to people who accuse you of blatant electioneering?" "Vote for MEEE!" (also here)
• I blog, therefore I am (7/21/06) - Bloggers blog for many different reasons. (also here)
• Not too cheap to meter (7/14/06) - Bandwidth hogging could become ISPs' worst enemy. (also here)
• If it's Wimbledon it must be television (7/7/06) - Wimbledon's new video-on-demand service. (also here)
• Technical enough for government work (6/30/06) The future is sneaking up on us.... (also here)
• Survival of the piratest (6/23/06) - All the legal actions haven't even slowed down file-sharing. (also here)
• Security vs security, part II (6/16/06) - VoIP wiretapping - expensive, insecure and not likely to be much use. (also here)
• So long, and thanks for all the pink wishes (6/9/06) - The passing of a Usenet character. (also here)
• Boob job (6/2/06) - Livejournal bloggers turn their blogs off for a day in protest. (also here)
• Patent harmony (5/26/06) - European Community to ban software patents. (also here)
• Toll roads (5/19/06) - Will the telcos dominate the Internet? (also here)
• Map quest (5/12/06) - The future of GPS. (also here)
• Computers, Freedom, and Privacy XVI (5/5/06) - Conference zeitgeist. (also here)
• Who's afraid of the big, bad Google? (4/28/06) - Privacy concerns vs sheer usefulness. (also here)
• Adblogging (4/21/06) - Ads come to Livejournal. (also here)
• A question of balance (4/14/06) - The creators tend to be forgotten in the copyright business. (also here)
• Becoming virtual (4/7/06) - Dixons goes digital. (also here)
• Protect people, not data (3/31/06) - Finding the limits of the Information Commissioner's role. (also here)
• The IDs of March (3/24/06) - Ping-pong games...and the ID card wins. (also here)
• A fork in the code (3/17/06) - Which is harder, programming the code or reading the license? (also here)

In search of clarity (3/10/06) - Is it clarity they want - or software patents? (also here)

AOL's email tax (3/3/06) - Threat of AOL's introduction of fee-paid guaranteed email delivery probably exaggerated despite the EFF's fears. (also here)

Digital magazines: still not ready for prime time (2/24/06) - You'd think Business Week would know better. (also here)

Widows and orphans first (2/17/06) - Attributing copyrights. (also here)

Security versus security (2/10/06) - Which security demand is more important: wiretapping VOIP or securing the Internet?(also here)

Cubiclife (2/3/06) - Life in the office; unutterably anthropological. (also here)

The revenge of the Digital Rights Manifesto (1/27/06) - Discussing the responses to last week's column. (also here)

Digital Rights Manifesto (1/20/06) - the National Consumer Council has called for regulation of how DRM may be used. We present some handy suggestions for what that regulation should look like. (also here) Update (1/21/06): a lot of mail in response to this one. The most interesting one came from a games player who says that the copy protection embedded in some games renders his expensive debugging software inoperable. That's just nasty.

How to be annoying and stay out of jail (1/13/06) - a new US law may (or may not) mean that anonymously posting annoying content is a crime (also here)

A tempest in a Wikipedia (1/6/06) - Web contains inaccurate information; pictures at 11. (also here)

2005

• It's 2006: do you know where your data is? (12/30/05) - backups, the least-fixed problem in the computer industry. Even given the existence of things like Norton Ghost. (also here)
• Rumors of spam's death: greatly exaggerated (12/23/05) - the FTC says CAN-Spam is working. HA! (also here)
• Civil liberties got run over by a reindeer (12/16/05) - they finally passed data retention. But the fight continues... (also here)
• My TV (12/9/05) - Personal TV should be the killer app of IPTV. (also here)
• Pass the policy (12/2/05) - how about setting up a database to track policies as they are proposed around the world to keep track of policy laundering...and other ideas floated at the brainstorming launch of the Open Rights Group. (also here)
• Copyrighting data retention (11/25/05) - the new Open Rights Group discovers a rightsholder attempt to hijack the EU data retention directive. Final vote: December 13. Write your MEP. (also here)
• Governing the Internet (11/18/05) - WSIS ends, ICANN lives on, same time five years hence. (also here)
• Selling by the page (11/11/05) - unbundling the book. (also here)
• Fighting software patents (11/4/05) - Florian Mueller runs for EV50 European of the Year. (The Inquirer and Newswireless.net columns were different this week - the newswireless.net one is below.)
• Sony got root (11/4/05) - big Japanese companies that make consumer electronics and own studios can't be hackers. Can they, George?
• Does he take PINs with his chips? (10/28/05) - it's not enough to be disabled, you have to fight your bank, too. (here)
• Biometrics for babies (10/21/05) - can you really get a baby to give you a fingerprint? One for next year's Ig Nobel awards, we think. (also here)
• Dumber people can run Linux (10/14/05) - tried Ubuntu yet? (also here)
• Spot the terrorist (10/7/05) - find the terrorists in a haystack of data. (also here)
• The new Scopes Monkey trials (9/30/05) - what do Intelligent Design and the Flying Spaghetti Monster have in common? (also here)
• Life license (9/23/05) - watch out for counterfeit babies. (also here)
• Ecommerce talks (9/16/05) - eBay buys Skype, everybody's gotta have a VoIP. (also here)
• e-Ostriches (9/9/05) - yet another conference about fixing the Internet. (also here)
• Unconvergence (9/2/05) - who the hell invented the SCART plug, anyway? (also here)
• Patent pending (8/26/05) - the kind of patent the European Patent Office grants these days. (also here)
• For sale: conferencing system, slightly used (8/19/05) - the WELL is for sale by Salon. (also here)
• The big, black bin bag of data retention (8/12/05) - it's back, and this time it's European. (also here)
• Time bandits (8/5/05) - let no ITU delegation steal your precious leap seconds. (also here) For more on this, see the excellent Future of Leap Seconds Page.
• Fifteen years on the electronic frontier (7/29/05) - the EFF at fifteen: do we need one in the UK? (also here)
• Officially irrelevant (but we want the ID card anyway) (7/22/05) - British government in shockingly rational post-explosion moment (can it last?). (also here)
• Ten (7/15/05) - if you're a pioneering Internet business either you're ten or you've succumbed to the alternative. Let's party! (also here)
• Got root? (7/8/05) - the Internet keeps working despite the US's recent decision to retain control of ICANN, the next step in ten years of fighting over Internet governance. (also here)
• Through an animation, darkly (7/1/05) - it probably wasn't wise to check on the progress of the ID cards bill and the Grokster decision while watching Wimbledon. (also here)
• If you build it, they will come (6/24/05) - smut: Tom Lehrer loved it. (also here)
• Restaurant mathematics (6/17/05) - Martin Gardner on CD! (also here)
• A chip off the old Apple (6/10/05) - Intel, Motorola... innards don't matter any more. Note: This piece also ran in The Inquirer (at http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23879) but seems to have vanished entirely leaving no trace in the Wayback Machine.
• Breaking the kneecaps of email (6/3/05) - five and a half months after Verizon's inept email blocking policy was complained about...it's still going on. Just because I'm complaining loudly DOESN'T MEAN I'M A SPAMMER. (also here)
• Ybat yvir pelcgb (5/27/05) - dance on the grave of crypto regulation. While you can. (also here) Update (5/28/05): A reader points out a slight inaccuracy, in that in fact the online VAT filing service doesn't *require* you to use a digital certificate. You may either sign up for a user ID and password *or* use a digital certificate. I must say, this wasn't plain to me from looking at the site. In any event, the main point stands - that is, who offers digital certificates and on how limited a basis they are used.
• The Internet calls 911 (5/20/05) - well, it would if it could. (also here) Update (2/12/2017): It turned out, of course, that what ended in 2005 was only the First Crypto Wars. Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013 made plain that in the interim until the Second Crypto Wars started, around 2015, the security agencies worked to break what they could and weaken the rest.
• Bloggers don't lie (5/13/05) - no, really. Only journalists lie. (also here)
• The robot in your phone (5/6/05) - "I can help you with that! Transferring your call..." (also here)
• Tax the iPod! (4/29/05) - a tax on all your storage media! (also here)
• Microsoft dezhurnaya 2.0 (4/22/05) - you think Microsoft runs on software and high-tech computers? No. Behind that geeky exterior the company runs on a network of permatemp receptionists. Note:: I (unintentionally) misquoted Eileen Gunn, who actually said the receptionists were permatemps, not "permies"; the description she went on to give is correct, and quite clear about what she meant. (also here)
• Pass the e-port (4/15/05) - RFID chips in passports. It would be a good joke if it were April Fool's. But...they're serious. (also here)
• You own your own 20th anniversary (4/8/05) - the WELL turns 20, complete with parties, splinter parties, and faction parties. (also here) Reader complaints: I forgot to mention BIX, and I forgot to say that WELL stands for "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link".
• The 4 Conspiracy (4/1/05) - mind the date. (also here) Thanks to dj Walker-Morgan for the original idea and many of the technical details, and to Ian Ridpath for general advice. Update (2/12/2017): Leaving aside the question of whether or not this was a successful foray into comedy, soon afterwards I began to feel that running joke stories on April 1 is a mistake, as given the way things recycle endlessly on the Net there's a big risk that they'll become accepted as true. This year, we've seen that sort of thing really begin to bite with "fake news". I suppose you could argue that scrutinizing April 1 stories to spot the jokes is good training, but it doesn't seem to be.
• Abort, RetrID, Fail? (3/25/05) - last chance for the ID card before Parliament disbands for the election? Or will it still be Out There? (also here) By the way, did you know you can watch the deliberations live over the Web?
• Are you now, or have you ever been...a journalist? (3/18/05) - well, have you? (also here) A day after this ran, I found out about Canadian blogger Jeremy Wright's run-in with a US immigration officer who was apparently unable to believe that a) blogging could be a real job or b) anyone would go to the US to meet people they'd never spoken to. Where *does* the US immigration service find staff who don't know about email and IM?
• Divided by a common television (3/11/05) - The BBC: the open source movement of the TV world? (also here)
• Protection management, copy control (3/4/05) - the DVB goes to copy-protect high-definition digital television. (also here)
• Shooting phish in a barrel (2/25/05) - Phishing gets smarter; consumers stay the same. (also here)
• Seven dirty indecencies (2/18/05) - Inflatable boob fines hit the FCC. Or maybe that's Fine inflatables hit the FCC boobs. We're still juggling. (also here)
• You can click, but you can't hide (2/14/05) - Torrent sites continue to disappear right and left. The latest: Lokitorrent, which had sworn to fight back in the courts.(also here)
• Verizon, heal thyself (2/4/05) - Yo, Verizon, I'm not just a non-person to your email system, I'm also a shareholder. (also here)
• The year September finally ended (1/28/05) - Of course, it never really will. But a person can dream. (also here)
• .net wars (1/21/05) - Meanwhile, back at ICANN they're redelegating .net. (also here)
• Speed traps (1/14/05) - Why is a raven like a writing desk? Why is file-sharing like speeding? (also here)
• A case of the torrents (1/7/05) - And then the MPAA came for BitTorrent... (also here)

2004

• The 2005 wish list (12/31/04) - If only, if only.... (also here)
• Let us now praise famous Blunketts (12/24/04) - Farewell, Blunkett; yet ID cards are still with us. (also here)
• Skeptics 48, Marc Wootton 0 (12/17/04) - Trying to fool skeptics: a losing game. (also here)
• Papers, please (12/10/04) - Total surveillance draws closer. Even though Blunkett resigned five days later. (also here)
• Ubiq (12/3/04) - Does Japan lead the way to ubiquitous computing? aka, "Not the Lost in Translation tour". (also here)
• Every cloud has a Verizon lining (11/26/04) - Why *shouldn't* Philadelphia have its municipal wireless? (also here)
• Remote control (11/19/04) - TiVo turns to the dark side. (also here)
• Bushed (11/12/04) - Is it real or is it Diebold? Only their voting technologists know for sure. (also here)
• Chad's revenge (11/5/04). Chad wants PC salespeople to stop treating him like he's an idiot. Lose the Windows 98, pal. (also here)
• The unbearable Internet Explorerness of configuration - Oct 29, 2004. Why - why? - does equipment running Linux inside make its Web-based configurator only fully usable by Internet Explorer? Shurely shome mishtake. (also here)
• Securing flight - October 22, 2004. Ah, the madness of what Bruce Schneier calls "security theater". (also here)
• The empires strike back (10/15/04) - Decentralized sites, distributed law enforcement. (also here)
• Carbon-dating the Internet (10/8/04) - Jeez, the thing's inventors are still alive and no one can decide how old it is. (also here)
• The ideal home show (10/1/04) - Actually, I just want a house that lets my friends in when I'm not home. (also here)
• Security must be seen to be done (9/24/04) - What do Cat Stevens and John Gilmore have in common? (also here)
• Flight risk (9/17/04) - ah, US Airways, we knew it well. (also here)
• Fame and the Strange story of Susanna M (9/10/04) - How fame came to live with Susanna Clarke. (also here)
• The herd instinct (9/3/04) - cue CNBC's picture of stampeding bulls. (also here)
• Distrusted systems (8/27/04) - The EC, Microsoft, and antitrust. No, it's not Windows, it's ContentGuard. And this time, it's Time-Warner.
(also here)
• Somebody else's spam (8/20/04) - LINX joins the fray. (also here as "Spam-sensitive sunglasses")
• Morality plays (8/13/04) - Those whom the gods seek to destroy they first make Olympic athletes. (also here)
• Worst PR sites of 2004 (8/6/04) - Ooops. Object Marketing got left out by mistake. (also here)
• Your domain name dollars at work (7/30/04) - ICANN-watching. (also here)
• Incitement to piracy (7/23/04) - Copy meee... cooopppy meee.... (also here)
• PIN the signature on the chip (7/16/04) - No need to sign here. (also here)
• Leaks from the top (7/9/04) - Fans, Friends and file-sharing. (also here)
• Video daze (7/2/04) - Video editing - don't try this at home, folks! (also here)
• Old enough to drink (6/25/04) - DNS is 21 years old. (also here)
• Never mind who I am, who are *you*? (6/18/04) - Authentication needs to be a two-way process. Update (2/12/2017): This problem persists and has gotten worse. Imagine if banks had put in two-way, not just two-factor, authentication back when I wrote this. We would not have a phishing problem now. (also here)
• White hats, black hats, who's got the grey hat? (6/11/04) - Microsoft vs. Linux? Not really...more like "Five Guys Named Nick" (also here) Addendum (9/7/04): Microsoft's Nick McGrath (that would be the blue-flannel Nick) says about that "maybe our people" comment: "From the heart: our developers are the lifeblood of our company.")
• Think of the time you'll save (6/4/04) - Sometimes being a Luddite makes economic sense. (also here)
• The BBC's shagging marmots (5/28/04) - The BBC puts sex and violence online - its old wildlife documentaries, that is. (also here)
• Follow the database (5/21/04) - The draft ID card proposal is released. Comment while you can! (also here)
• Taxation with representation (5/14/04) - Encourage students to learn, not just consume. (also here)
• Buffetted by Google (5/7/04) - Financial punditry and the Google IPO. (also here)
• Can we? May we? Will we? (4/30/04) - The creator of the Internet Archive wants universal access to all of human knowledge. (also here)
• Scored: Who's watching the watchers (4/23/04) - From the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference 2004 (also here)
• Taking the stupidity out of "Stupid Patent Tricks" (4/16/04) - Time to revamp the patent system? (also here)
• Money makes the electrons go around (4/9/04) - So why *do* digital downloads cost as much as CDs? (also here)
• The message is the medium (4/2/04) - Dj, text home. (also here)
• A national database or 60,000 more policemen? (3/26/04) - Not that you're being *asked* which you'd prefer.... (also here)
• Ask not for whom the taxman tolls... (3/19/04) - The Inland Revenue turns its eye on non-resident tennis star Andre Agassi. (also here)
• A hundred lawyers at the bottom of a can of spam: a darn good start (3/12/04) - The big test for the CAN-SPAM legislation. (also here)
• Get thee behind me, Plaxo (3/5/04) - Just stop sending me those stupid messages. (also here) Update (2/7/05): A week or two ago Plaxo's new CEO, Ben Golub, called, saying he was interested in talking over with Plaxo's critics what could be done to make us less critical. In the course of the conversation, several ideas surfaced: 1) extend the company's privacy policy to its opt-out list, since one reason people keep getting annoyed is that they're reluctant to give their email addresses to a company that from their point of view is already violating their privacy; 2) (not a privacy issue per se, but an interesting feature idea) amending the software so that it can follow either the person whose details you have or that person's job - often what you're interested in is not the person but the role. It will be interesting to see if either of these ideas is adopted. Update 2 (5/1/05): Ben Golub tells me the service has now explicitly extended its privacy policy to those who sign up for the opt-out list, and has changed the defaults in the client software to discourage users from blanket-emailing their entire address book. Roger Clarke, whose concerns about social networking services of a variety of types were mentioned in this column, raised in his paper "Little Black Books" the question of what the business model of an outfit like Plaxo could be. Golub says the company makes its money from premium services, such as deduping and cleaning user address books, and also from commissions on products and offers relating to the information they already have - eg, you've entered someone's birthday into your contact book, and the service reminds you and offers you a link to send flowers. That kind of thing. Makes sense to me.
• eCrimes of the century (2/27/04) - Report from the eCrime 2004 congress. (also here)
• Broadcast quality, broadcast alienation (2/20/04) - Online ads promise to become even more intrusive and annoying. (also here)
• Everybody ought to have a Mouse (2/13/04) - Comcast casts its beady eye over Disney's charms. (also here)
• Identifying entitlement (2/6/04) - Finally: they admit it *is* a national ID card. It certainly quacks like one. (also here)
• The Deaning of America (1/30/04) - The Net as a political tool. (also here)
• Does he take electrons? (1/23/04) - The very difficult life of a blind Web surfer. (also here)
• The vanishing Post Office of Sandycombe Road, Kew (1/16/04) - If only the Royal Mail would get its act together.... (also here)
• The robot centurions (1/9/04) - Technology with a conscience? Or electronic snitches? (also here)
• The 2004 wish list (1/2/04) - What we *really* want for New Year's resolutions. (also here)

2003

• Only connect (12/26/03) - Comcast again: how to become a monopolist and lock down the Internet. (also here)
• Music roasting on an open fire (12/19/03) - Wal-Mart announces its own downloadable music store. (also here)
• Who's in charge of the Internet? (12/12/03) - The World Summit on the Information Society meets this week, achieving...what? (also here)
• Beware of geeks bearing gifts (12/5/03) - What Santa might bring if we're good little techies. (also here)
• Salute the flag (11/28/03) - The FCC allows broadcasters to insert a copy-blocking flag in HDD transmissions. (also here)
• This little light of mine (11/21/03) - Twinkle twinkle little LED. (also here)
• Cheaper by the exabyte (11/14/03) - The volume of information, on the Net and elsewhere, grows exponentially. (also here)
• Stealing bandwidth (11/7/03) - Free wireless broadband or a knotty moral problem? (also here)
• Two Martinas and one party-pooper (10/31/03) - Will the real Martina Navratilova please stand up? (also here)
• Yellow semen (10/24/03) - The glory motive treats athletic anti-doping programs as damage and routes around them. (also here)
• Who are you? (10/17/03) - ID cards. Blunkett still wants them. Blair sometimes wants them. Straw doesn't want them any more. We think. (also here)
• Eavesdropping (10/10/03) - From the Nielsen Norman User Experience event. (also here)
• Strangers on the Net (10/3/03) - Do you know who your computer's been talking to recently? (also here)
• Coming soon to a mobile phone near you (9/26/03) - Well, there's egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg, bacon and spam; egg, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, bacon, sausage and spam; spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon, and spam; spam, sausage, spam, spam, bacon, spam, tomato and spam. And then there's Direct Marketing. That's not got much spam in it. (also here)
• Deja-vu all over again (9/19/03) - Bad public policies never die. (also here)
• The mills of Xenu grind exceeding slow (9/12/03) - Scientology - still slugging it out with the 'Net, ten years on. In an early example of what Private Eye calls "malgorithms", an ad for the Church of Scientology accompanied its original appearance, an issue we quickly pointed out. (also here)
• Who killed Operation Ore? (9/5/03) - The problems of evidence in computer-related crimes. (also here)
• Six degrees of virus infection (8/29/03) - The Grand Convergence of spam and viruses looms.... (also here)
• It is preferable that the ears be exposed (8/22/03) - The hoops you have to jump through to get a US visa. (also here)
• Trivia pursuits (8/15/03) - Playing really stupid games on IRC. (also here)
• There will come soft sprinklers (8/8/03) - Visiting IBM's Smart House. (also here)
• Suspected terrorist (8/1/03) - Of course he's a terrorist, it says so on John Gilmore's button. (also here)
• Viral marketing is dead: tell all your friends (7/25/03) - There is no escape. (also here)
• The War on Some Files (7/18/03) - Electron-pushers; the new scourge of our youth! (also here)
• A highly organised minority (that can be safely ignored) (7/11/03) - Not only does Blunkett think you want an ID card; he thinks you'll pay \A340 for the privilege. Make that \A3100. (also here)
• Gosford Perl (7/4/03) - A descent into the Underworld brings wisdom and spam-filtering. (also here)
• Eat, drink, and enjoy your cheap DVDs, for tomorrow we tax (6/27/03) - VAT comes to the Net. (also here)
• The unbearable fan-friendliness that is tennis (6/20/03) - Disintermediate tennis now! (also here)
• The new Mrs Thing (6/13/03) - At last, your very own robotic household slave! Well, within limits.... (also here) (Addendum (2/7/05): In answer to a reader's query, no, I wasn't sent the Roomba as a PR freebie; I bought it. Also, after a few months it became clear that it really doesn't like long hair. The hair gets tangled in the rollers and the thing stops functioning every few minutes and hides in a corner emitting piteous beeps. But when it works, it's wonderful.)
• New math (6/6/03) - In 1984, 2+2=5. In 2003, approximately 6000=1. According to the British government, that is. (also here)
• Shotgun truce (5/30/03) - Microsoft gives AOL money; AOL gives Microsoft even more market penetration. Assume the position! (also here)
• Crossing the streams (5/23/03) - US media may be summarily deregulated. Murdoch licks his chops in anticipation. (also here)
• Better feuding through email (5/16/03) - "Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental." (also here)
• Data retainers unite! You have nothing to lose but your freedoms (5/9/03) - This may be your last chance to speak up... (also here)
• The big blue gap (5/2/03) - Bluetooth has conquered Europe, but not the USA. (also here)
• I ain't never seen no horses download it (4/25/03) - Will file-sharing destroy independent labels and artists? (also here)
• No deposit, no return (4/18/03) - The Legal Deposit Libraries Bill - how far should it go? (also here)
• By their numbers shall ye know them - not (4/11/03) - The ENUM proposals to migrate phone numbers onto the Internet. (also here)
• The land of the increasingly insecure (4/4/03) - Computers, Freedom & Privacy - 10 years on the frontlines. (also here)
• CFP special: US crime database doesn't have to be accurate. (4/2/03) - Life imitates Brazil. (also here)
• The museum-ready Internet (3/28/03) - How do you exhibit the Internet? The Tech Museum of Innovation is working on it.... (also here)
• What movie was that, anyway? (3/21/03) - The Conqueror, starring John Wayne, Susan Hayward and a blizzard of Nevada fallout? (also here)
• Disproportionate costs (3/14/03) - What are the costs of mismanaged Government IT projects? (also here)
• Surveillance by design (3/7/03) - Privacy - you don't know what you've got till it's gone. (also here)
• A snob's paradise (2/28/03) - Ignored by the bloggerati. (also here)
• Shoot the cryptographer (2/21/03) - What they don't want you to know... (also here)
• Don't mention the war (2/14/03) - A wish-list for aging techies. (also here)
• The alternative universe of stupid people (2/7/03) - Invading our reality with their pointless security measures! (also here)
• How to stop worrying and love data retention (1/31/03) - "I need to know everything! How else can I judge whether or not I need to know it?" (also here)
• The most dangerous hacks (1/24/03) - Hello Mitnick; goodbye Rosen. (also here)
• Of course, you know this means WAR (1/17/03) - Fight for your right to file-share! (also here)
• A resolution greatly to be wished (1/9/03) - A New Year wish-list. (also here)
• The view from afar (1/3/03) - Seeing cyberspace through others' eyes. (also here)

2002

• Defending your Net (12/27/02) - What is it we're really fighting to save? (also here)
• Let the Funk Brothers roll (12/20/02) - Session musicians; did the work, didn't get the royalties. (also here)
• Entitle that! (12/12/02) - UK identity cards "no threat to civil liberties". Ha. Ha. Ha. (also here)
• Doin' the DMCA rag (12/6/02) - Get creative with copyright law! (also here)
• How do you know it's me? (11/29/02) - Identity theft. (also here)
• Life in a double-wide (11/22/02) - The fun of dual monitors. (also here)
• The Poindexter-industrial complex (11/15/02) - The Homeland Security Act. Feel the fear. (also here)
• Reinvention of pens past (11/8/02) - The writing's already on the wall for the tablet PC. (also here)
• Out-of-print on demand (11/1/02) - In defence of us dead-tree collectors. (also here)
• Buy ten backhoes (10/25/02) - The attack on the root servers. (also here)
• Voters in, garbage out (10/18/02) - E-voting: why it's not a good idea. (also here)
• Playing God (10/11/02) - The convergence between games and movies. (also here)
• Freeing the Mouse (10/4/02) - More on the European Union Copyright Directive. Protest before it's too late! (also here)
• Satellite days (9/27/02) - A modest proposal - the tracked society. (also here)
• Weightlifting (9/20/02) - Travels with a laptop, a PDA, an MP3 player and such, plus all their associated batteries. (also here)
• Forbidden fruits (9/13/02) - Censorship on the Net, political and corporate. (also here)
• Pro-choice (9/6/02) - The gradual erosion of our privacy. (also here)
• The Undead (8/30/02) - Which medium is the perishable one? (also here)
• Stealing is stealing is stealing (8/23/02) - Hack Big Media! (also here)
• Remembrance of magazines past (8/16/02) - The death of print media? Not likely.... (also here)
• Sue...... this link (8/9/02) - Enforce this! (also here)
• By any other name the emperor would still be Monday (8/2/02) - Corporate rebranding and ICANN power struggles. (also here)
• Entitle this! (7/26/02) - The not-too-well-hidden costs of the "entitlement card". (also here)
• The me-ness of being (7/19/02) - Get your demented three-year-old here. My pictures. MY computer. MY NETWORK! (also here)
• Let them eat broadband (7/12/02) - Understanding (though not necessarily forgiving) BT. (also here)
• Disabling technologies (7/5/02) - Microsoft "gets security". In its own unique and much-loved way, no doubt. (also here)
• Get big fast, get small faster (6/28/02) - "I make an accounting error. You engage in creative accounting. They are WorldCom." (also here)
• Unwiring tennis (6/21/02) - Tennis journalists still in the pre-Information Age. (also here)
• Would you like spies with that? (6/14/02) - Privacy, retention, anti-circumvention and fun at NTK's Festival of Inappropriate Technology. (also here)
• The dataveillance society (6/7/02) - European Parliament decides to allow mass data retention. (also here)
• The tennis player that roared (5/31/02) - Steffi Graf vs Microsoft. Bizarrely, I'm in agreement with MS... Update: A German commenter on Usenet observed that the case got very little coverage in Germany, largely because MSN claimed copyright in all material uploaded to its servr and branded such content to look like it originated with MSN, which he felt explained why Graf filed the lawsuit. (Also here)
• The gap (5/24/2002) - Like the generation gap, only with memory chips. (also here)
• A marker pen, tape, and a taste for Celine Dion (5/17/2002) - Copy protection technology plumbs new depths of stupidity. (also here)
• A money of our own (5/10/02) - Psst! Want to run your own monetary system? (also here)
• Geeks and bitches (5/3/02) - "Geek": offensive, or badge of honor? (also here)
• Computers, Freedom, Privacy, Mk XII (4/26/02) - CFP 2002. (also here)
• Fifty more sets of buggers (4/19/02) Extra! State survey of US wiretappers introduced.
• EFF awards Pioneer prizes (4/19/02) Extra! Electronic Frontier Foundation awards!
• The third estate (4/19/02) - Balancing digital rights among creators, distributors, and consumers. (also here)
• DTI off its shopping trolley - (4/12/02) - DTI finally gets round to launching a consultation on the draft regulations to implement the EU ecommerce directive. Which was due to be fully implemented by January 17th. (also here)
• Dear Chairman Coble... (4/5/02) - Letter to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property. (also here)
• The death wish (3/29/02) - why AT&T Wireless seems to hate pre-pay. (also here)
Update: this was before AT&T Wireless was swallowed up by Cingular.
• Let a million censors bloom (3/22/02) - ICRA launches Internet rating scheme. (also here)
• Ten things I hate about Flash (3/15/02) - Designers: the curse of the Web. Readers' letters. (Column also here)
• You can't make money on the Internet (3/8/02) - Murdoch's president of operations says there's no valid business model. (also here)
• Navigating the ICANN way (3/1/02) - Proposed ICANN reforms: more money, more power, more staff. Can we say, "central point of failure"?
• European patent tricks (2/22/02) - European Commission announces its proposals for software patenting directive.
• Watching the Internet watchers (2/15/02) - Internet Watch Foundation goes into the censorship business.
• Big Brothers (2/8/02) - National ID cards: a courageous decision?
• The Sound of Money (2/1/02) - Ah, Napster, we hardly knew ye.
• Battle of the Titans (1/26/02) - AOL sues Microsoft.
• By any other name (1/18/02) - ICANN wranglings.
• Creative Accounting (1/11/02) - Sneaky accounting practices.
• Dumber people can run Windows (1/4/02) - Another leaked MS memo.

2001

• 2001 in review (12/28/01) - What the psychics didn't predict...
• Care in the community (12/21/01) - Online communities treated badly by their hosts.
• Remembrance of postings past (12/14/01) - The wonders of Usenet, now archived by Google.
• BT's Stupid Patent Tricks (12/7/01) - BT still suing Prodigy over their infringement of alleged hyperlink patent.
• Preserving our freedoms (12/1/01) - Bad US and UK legislation in the wake of the WTC terrorist attack.
• It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas... (11/23/01) - "the state of ecommerce: desperate, unresponsive, inaccessible, and badly trained."
• Net is the mother of re-invention (11/16/01) - P2P and the once and future decentralized Internet.
• Save the Cookie (11/9/01) - Banning cookies and other idiotic pieces of legislation.
• Digital rights and the new era of world terrorism (11/2/01) - Antiterrorism doesn't justify banning strong cryptography.

And...

The full text, online of the 1998 book - or buy net.wars (1998)

or From Anarchy to Power (2001)

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