Posts

Big news for those rooting for the Fediverse - Wordpress.com now officially supports the WordPress ActivityPub plugin. This is a big deal because Wordpress.com is something like the 4th largest platform in the US, and WordPress the open source software is used by ~42% of websites. Official support means a...

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Some great resources articulating how to connect tech, human rights, and Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL/M&E):

• MERL Center
• MERL Tech
• MERL Github
• re: HCD in MERL
  

Who Can Use? lets you explore color combinations and how useable they are for people with different visual disabilities online. I love its simplicity, how it breaks down the category of “vision impairment” into the really rich array of needs and capacities that it actually corresponds to, and how it...

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The premise in this podcast that LLM data harvesting is going to trigger a mass exodus (a la Reddit) from allowing crawling or public APIs seems a bit silly to me - traditional search would have done it and is still central to discoverability (plus most major platforms are...

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UK NHS is relying on Palantir as an infrastructure provider for public health data with predicatble results. Reliance on surveillance tech cos for gov services infrastructure is becoming normalized globally. When we think about digital transformation of public services, this kind of issue has to be front of mind...

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It’s totally fascinating listening to Michael Warner talk about “counterpublics” and the alt-right in this interview from 2018. It’s a good reminder that the structures of resistance can always be weaponized, as well as a kind of incredible time capsule, knowing what has happened since.

Last week I had the honor of being in Lusaka to support the government of Zambia’s portion of the global second Summit for Democracy. The International Foundation for Electoral Systems and the Electoral Commission of Zambia co-hosted a day zero event on threats to electoral integrity and I talked about digital threats and how traditional electoral integrity frameworks aren’t serving us well.

My argument: the elections community needs to take a page from the cybersecurity community and think about the “attack surface” of elections - including not only voting systems and the like but the information environment and all the civil society and corporate components that combined make or break elections and whether they are trusted.

The talk was streamed and is up on YouTube.

A two great reads on gender, gaming, and emerging digital spaces, such as community-led VR: Social VR & Gender Exploration:An open survey of VR users who have explored gender identity and expression in social VR (pdf) and Exploring Identity Through Gameplay: The Intersections of Tabletop Role-Playing Games, Game...

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Two oldies but goodies: Why is ‘ping’ a thing gives us the etymological ties between submarines, the foundations of the internet, and today’s terrible business speak. The Saddening is a beautiful snapshot from the early days of the pandemic shutdown and what it did to us culturally.

Recently, several disinformation campaigns have been spotted using deepfake avatars. In February a pro-CCP campaign attributed to “Wolf Media” was reported by Graphika (pdf). In January similar, albeit somewhat more rudimentary, videos were circulating in support of the junta in Burkina Faso. And most recently a YouTube ‘news’...

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Everyone is so amped about the new generation of AI services and disinfo and repeating the mistakes of the last hypecycle. Remember people panicking about deepfakes when cheapfakes were the real problem? This time, we’re doomscrolling about OpenAI when videogame engines, low fidelity deepfakes as a service...

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Nieman Lab: Twitter and Meta charging for basic security features like verification and SMS 2FA represent a (very bad) trend driven by austerity. It’s worse than that: market pressure means more incentive to sell data and reduce overhead related to safety functions like content moderation. The macroeconomics...

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Video games are the amphibian in the ecosystem of disinformation, trolling, and the future of identity and resistence. This Wired piece casts a skeptical eye on what’s possible and might be coming for AI-generated game content, but I mentally did a find-replace of “videogame” with “journalism.”

The Los Angeles Review of Books regularly puts out fantastic essays that draw on the best of Queer Studies. Rani Neutill breaks down how the most popular band in the world is opening new lights of flight for gender and sexuality through her interviews with Gen X BTS stans.
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A few months ago I traveled to Kyiv to better understand the situation re: cybersecurity and the elections that will need to happen after the conflict ends. I recently spoke on Democracy! The Podcast to share a bit about what I learned, and why it matters for all of us.