During my university years in Costa Rica, I used to be quite involved in student politics. You know, the usual stuff, marches, protesting, political parties, advocacy, but mostly sitting around talking about politics at the Law School’s cafeteria. I used to have quite a good collection of t-shirts, some with Read more…
So, I am a patient of what they are calling Long-Covid, I’m a long-hauler. If you follow some of my social media, this will not come as a surprise, but I haven’t been posting too much about my condition lately other than to provide a status check that I am Read more…
I’ll get to the Bitcoin bit soon, but first let me explain what prompted this idea. Thanks to a Twitter thread by Cory Doctorow (archived here), I’ve been listening to this great interview with Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis. In the video, Varoufakis explains the historic decoupling between stock markets and the Read more…
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…