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…
Something is happening with the way in which we acquire and share knowledge, something that might explain the current issues that we are having with the spread of disinformation. The steady erosion of authority and expertise is a well-documented phenomenon, but what is interesting is what is replacing it. While Read more…
The first experience that most modern creators will have of copyright is through social media, and particularly through YouTube. In the early days of the network, YouTube had the reputation that it was mostly built on infringing content, users would upload video clips and sometimes entire shows without permission, and Read more…
These are interesting times for cryptocurrencies. One could argue that a currency that is now over 10 years old should have achieved further dissemination, this week we will see the number of mined coins at 18 million., signalling the slow and steady race towards 21 million coins, the maximum there Read more…