netwars

This week's net.wars, "Information wants to be surveiled," discovers surveillance pricing, in which the pythons of industry use everything they know about us to wring out every last drop of profit: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/02/20/information-wants-to-be-surveiled/ #NetWars #Surveillance #Retail

This week's net.wars, "Machine learning", chats about chatbots in education with a tiny unrepresentative sample of those dealing with them: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2025/08/08/machine-learning/ #NetWars #education #AI

This week's net.wars, "Turn left at the robot", goes to the Human-Robot Interaction conference and finds that in robots versus kids the kids win every time: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/03/20/turn-left-at-the-robot/, #NetWars #robots

This week's net.wars, "Intimacy capitalism", goes to the We Robot 2026 workshop day, and finds new things to worry about: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/04/24/intimacy-capitalism/ #NetWars #WeRobot #AI #robots

This week's net.wars, "Waste management", sees the planned obsolescence of early Kindles, Microsoft's "just for entertainment" Copilot, and AI-driven new cybersecurity threats: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/04/10/waste-management/ #NetWars #ai #environment

This week's net.wars, "Banned", mulls the UK's planned social media ban: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/06/19/banned/ #NetWars #OnlineSafetyAct #SocialMedia

This week's net.wars, "First, do no harm", visits the UK's latest attempt to centralize the nation's patient data into a single database: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/05/22/first-do-no-harm/ #NetWars #health #privacy

This week's net.wars, "The sovereignty paradox", goes to Computers, Privacy, and Data Proetction 2026 #cpdp and finds a lot of discussions of European values: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/05/29/the-sovereignty-paradox/ #privacy #NetWars

This week's net.wars, "Parting glances", bids farewell to Keir Starmer, the former human rights lawyer who presided over the Online Safety Act, age verification, restrictions on protest, and increased surveillance: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/06/26/parting-glances/, #NetWars #UKPolitics #privacy

This week's net.wars, "The Sutton effect", goes to the 25th Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, where researchers mull the costs of cybersecurity failures: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/06/05/the-sutton-effect/ #NetWars #security #economics

This week's net.wars, "International relations", sees the arrival of "Schrems III", when a SCOTUS decision puts most US independent agencies under control of the US president, and offers a brief recap of this week's talk for the @cambskeptics Cambridge Skeptics, itself a rerun of the April talk at @GreenwichSITP Greenwich Skeptics: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/07/03/international-relations/. #NetWars #Privacy #SCOTUS

This week's net.wars, "Opportunity costs", notes the prosecution of a GrapheneOS user who gave US border agents a "duress password", and watches protests against new data centers spread: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/08/07/opportunity-costs/ #NetWars

This week's net.wars, "How the other half scams", reads and reviews Soumya Goupta's new book probing India's scam economy, Bharat Bluff: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/07/17/how-the-other-half-scams/. #NetWars #books #privacy

This week's net.wars, "Delve", mulls the fact that when it comes to prose humans are struggling to tell AI-generators from humans: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/08/21/delve/. #NetWars #AI

This week's net.wars, "Change of plan" notes the abandonment of the world's largest data center-in-waiting, the tale of the Waymo and two 15-year-old boys, and the I-can't-believe-it's-still-alive 2003 case of SCO v. IBM: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/07/10/change-of-plan/ #NetWars

This week's net.wars, "Escaping the sandbox", sees France enact a social media ban, sees VPNs are next, and notes OpenAI's "rogue" AI and its attack on Hugging Face: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/07/24/escaping-the-sandbox/ #NetWars #privacy

This week's net.wars, "Feeding the Machine", mulls a Texas court's order to lock a foreign-owned .com domain worldwide and the resonance of the strange case of the New Zealand bookshop with Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/08/14/1386/ #NetWars #AI #OnlineSafety #censorship

This week's net.wars, "Journeys through online harms", sees X.AI file suit against Minnesota's law banning nudification technology while reading books by Geertrui Mierke De Ketelaere, Adele Zeynep Walton, and Beeban Kidron: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/07/31/journeys-through-online-harms/ #NetWars #books #OnlineSafetyAct

This week's net.wars, "Fault lines", ponders the Meta settlement that has it paying a proportionally modest amount and making cosmetic changes, and the proposed US GRANITE Act aimed at stopping Ofcom from enforcing the Online Safety Act beyond the UK's borders: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/08/28/fault-lines/ #NetWars #OnlineSafety #censorship

This week's net.wars, "Network lock-in", takes exception to a piece arguing that #enshittification isn't real and notes further extension of US leverage over Internet infrastructure: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2026/09/04/network-lock-in/ #NetWars