On July 15, 2020, a remarkable hacking attack took place. The Twitter accounts of prominent public figures such as Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Kanye West, and Bill Gates, amongst many others, started to transmit a message stating that if a person deposited some Bitcoin to a wallet, it Read more…
By now you may have heard that there’s a new sheriff in town: K-pop fans, they’re are here to save the day! An army of online fans of Korean bands, particularly BTS, have been getting organised to lend their social media reach to tackle several problems. By now you may Read more…
It’s difficult to take anything coming out of Elon Musk’s Twitter account seriously, and I say this as a person who is quite fond of a bit of eccentricity online. Since the pandemic began, Musk has been trying to keep the attention of a bored world squarely on him. He Read more…
We have spent decades preparing for the end of the world. Well, more accurately, we have spent decades consuming media that tells us what the end of the world will look like. Aliens, zombies, killer robots, giant meteorites, a dying sun, catastrophic ice ages, an exploding moon, mutating neutrinos. We Read more…
One of the heroes of my youth was James Randi, also known as The Amazing Randi. In case you don’t know him, Randi is a magician and escapist that became famous later in his life as a professional skeptic and debunker. He came to prominence on TV when he helped Read more…
For many of us who are interested in network architecture and Internet Regulation, the question of decentralization always tends to come up. The Internet was designed as a decentralized network, this means, a system where there is no central decision-making point of how information is shared. A decentralized system tends Read more…
It’s now trite to point out that the Internet has brought about a pandemic in disinformation, as people tend to share anything they come across that confirms their biases. Social media has hacked our brains in ways we did not expect, and platforms that were designed to keep our attention Read more…
Two musicians have written a computer program that recorded in MIDI format every possible 8-note and 12-beat melody combination, resulting in 68.7 billion tunes. They claim that by doing this, they have managed to copyright every such musical combination with the stated purpose of pre-empting music copyright lawsuits in the Read more…
I’ve been hacked! Or to be more accurate, someone used a compromised email and password combination to login to my Spotify account. No harm done so far, my credit card details are not visible, and nothing seems amiss other than a very strange collection of “Recently Played” music. I have Read more…
A court in the Chinese city of Shenzen has decided that an article that was written by an artificial intelligence program has copyright protection. The article was written by Tencent’s Dreamwriter AI Writing Robot, an internal code at the Chinese tech giant that produces half a million articles per year Read more…