15 May, 2023 More Wrong Thinking on Generative AI Risks Civil society is in trouble if the musings of an anonymous philosopher on the LESSWRONG website, most likely by a national security official with access to a closed CISA meeting, reflects the current zeitgeist inside governments concerning generative AI. The...
1 May, 2023 Who’s a VLOP and who’s a VLOSER? Alibaba, Amazon, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter and Wikipedia are among the entities that have been designated "Very Large Online Platforms'' (VLOPs) by the European Commission. Google search and Bing have been designated Very Large Online Search Engines (VLOSErs). All will...
15 April, 2023 The AI Regulation Frenzy Technology panics now seem to go through fashion cycles. Last month it was Tiktok. The new trend in town is AI regulation. Would-be policy influencers are falling all over themselves to advance the idea that “We are hurtling forward in a way that...
There’s an assumption making the rounds that a privacy law is the real answer to the data governance problems posed by Tiktok and other social media. The logic is pretty simple: Banning TikTok won’t keep us safe. A privacy law will. This argument was articulated by Julia Angwin in a...
March 31, 2023 The Tiktok hearing backfires As expected, Congress tried to turn its cross-examination of Tiktok CEO Shou Chew into a public stoning. Committee members (helped along by Meta lobbying) came in with their minds made up, refused to listen to anything he said, and repeatedly interrupted him. The...
March 16, 2023 New Dutch semiconductor export controls, a global regime grows In a March 8 letter, the Dutch Ministry of Economic and Development Cooperation and Ministry of Foreign Affairs notified the elected Parliament of its plan to implement additional export control measures for advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment, consistent with...
The latest legislative atrocity to emerge from Washington comes from Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and John Thune (R-SD), who have rounded up 10 other senators on both sides of the aisle to introduce a law called Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology – the...
TikTok’s response to USG concerns about the imaginary threat to national security it poses was heard again at State of the Net 2023. It is hard to conceive of a more iron-clad technical solution than “Project Texas,” given the $1.5 billion that was sunk into it. Like the state it...
Scaling properties have shown time and again to be important to networked communication. Think of the introduction of switches in early telephone exchanges, improvements in time or code division multiplexing in wireless or optical networks, or packet switching on the Internet, all of which impacted the networks’ size, performance, and...
March 1, 2023 TikTok Ban would repeal free speech protections A House Committee is set to vote on their attempt to ban TikTok. The bill empowers the president to impose sanctions on any entity that operates a “connected software application” subject to the influence of China, but tries to skirt...
“In characteristically rigorous fashion, Mueller’s outstanding book punctures the alarmist myth of Internet fragmentation and helps us to understand what is really at stake as nations and other groups vie for power over the Internet.”
