Many thought provoking aspects to this essay, Reclaiming Sovereignty in the Digital Age, by Paris Marx.

You should just read its entirety. I wanted to dive into one topic, specifically. Early in his essay, he quotes a digital rights group:

Last month, the Global Digital Justice Forum, a group of civil society groups, published a letter about the ongoing negotiations over the United Nations’ Global Digital Compact. “It is eminently clear that the cyberlibertarian vision of yesteryears is at the root of the myriad problems confronting global digital governance today,” the group wrote. “Governments are needed in the digital space not only to tackle harm or abuse. They have a positive role to play in fulfilling a gamut of human rights for inclusive, equitable, and flourishing digital societies.”

Marx makes the argument that governments around the world are beginning to standup to tech industry with regulations. I agree that many are overdue. I think some may be unnecessary, in that you could simply apply existing laws to address some concerns, only in a different (digital) context. But there’s one place I think he’s thoroughly wrong.

The cyberlibertarian argument is that all communications must be encrypted to protect them from the governments they perceive as such a significant threat, and that means allowing the dregs of society to use them in criminal ways too; something the vast majority of the public would surely disagree with.

While I don’t think digital tools helping criminals is good, it is clear as day that encrypted communication must continue to be available. This is because fraud, phishing, and malware are rampant in our networked environment. Regular people should benefit from the protection that encryption provides from criminals. Will this lead to criminals also communicating via encrypted channels? Of course. Criminals conceal contraband in the voids of car bodies, we don’t outlaw car body work so police can see inside everyone’s car.

Since there is no backdoor only for “good guys” (and in his scenario, remember, Putin, Xi and Kim all count as “good guys”) we must live with the fact that police must use other tools at their disposal to break up criminal activity, as they have prior to the proliferation of public encryption.

We can’t make everyone less safe in order to make the police’s job a little bit easier. Furthermore, without encryption, we leave ourselves even more exposed to foreign disinformation campaigns, as hacking groups can more easily access our communications to allow their disinformation to appear more realistic and more targeted.

It appears the French police arrested Telegram founder on charges of enabling all sorts of illegal activities without breaking encryption because Telegram is not E2EE.

…authorities have long been able to get warrants to search people’s mail, wiretap their phones, or obtain their text messages. That’s the trade off we’ve collectively made, and one that the vast majority of people have never seen as a threat to their rights, freedoms, or liberty — because they’re not libertarians.

Technology is a step ahead, and there’s no putting that genie back in the bottle. If we outlawed encryption, criminals would still have it because open source is a thing that has already distributed that capability to anyone willing to figure it out. Criminals have all the incentive they need to continue to support themselves if they cannot use encryption available daily to the general public. In addition bad actors in governments would use the security weaknesses to do what they have always done, legal or not, and that’s curtail the freedoms of the marginalized.

While war and crime are far from eliminated, we must recognize that we live in the safest time in all of humanity. Many more horrible things happened prior to publicly-available encryption. But conversely, the world being digitally interconnected, opens us up to newer classes of crime that in many respects are easier than they ever have been. We must take personal measures to reduce that risk.

Let’s use our legislative resources towards most of the rest of Marx’s points, especially the part about curtailing surveillance capitalism from following us all over the world. Meanwhile, let’s encrypt as much personal communication as we can.

I saved this post to share with my non-designer friends as a succinct primer on presentations.

(start) from a standpoint of (…) empathy and perspective.

Stop overusing formatting!(…)The same goes for colors and fonts. Pick one, or maybe two.

Worth it to see the table formatting gif alone.

Design note for those who may not follow the WNBA: The New York Liberty team colors are black, white, pale green, and their uniforms have copper trim. The Statue of Liberty is clad in oxidized copper whose patina is that shade of pale green.

Switching from the NLCS to catch the 5 minute overtime starting now between NY & Minn. to decide the WNBA Finals.

Just found our Harris/Walz sign about fifteen feet into the woods across the street.

Repaired. Placed in a more visible position for our window. Trail cam loans accepted.

I am not apologizing for being up past midnight watching The Dave Matthews Band get inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Live.

Did my election worker training tonight. In short, they take election integrity very seriously.

Billionaires are why we can’t have nice things – a sensible climate policy, workers’ rights, a functional Supreme Court and legislatures that answer to the people, rather than deep-pocketed donors.

I have my quibbles with CD, but he’s got this one straight.

I have so many tabs opened after chewing through Maggie Appleton’s A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden I’ve been fascinated by ideas like these since I learned about Vannevar Bush’s information ideas in college. I really love blogs, I don’t think we need to dump one for another.

Just got my replacement Apple Card. They did a nice job with the minimal and paper-based packaging. To activate the new card, you just tap your phone on the package, and an AirPods-style modal appears. One tap to activate. The package then becomes the return envelope to recycle your old card.

In 1978, Soviet geologists stumbled upon a family of five in the taiga. They had been cut off from almost all human contact since fleeing religious persecution in 1936.

I don’t know why, but I am often drawn to, and fascinated by stories like these.

Cars really rile up my 15-week old puppy. If one passes the yard while I have her out, she gets so aggressive one might think her a 15-minute city urbanist!

I can’t find a word I disagree with in this piece, What if our nation is not built for Climate Change.

We should start now, buying people out of damaged areas on the condition they move to known-safer areas because we can’t as a nation subsidize people rebuilding in places that are risky to their lives, throws our tax money into the flood waters. Turn the newly bought risky land into public conservation lands to absorb the shock, and improve green space at the same time. I’m not saying it’ll be easy.

I’ve been enjoying Apple’s Sports app. The live activities implementation is superb. I wish it would allow me to set a start time reminder of games that do not include my designated favorite teams. Any game I can see on the schedule should allow me able to turn on a one-off reminder for (you can do this for Live Activities today). This is especially great for playoff games. I’d like to be able to set a one-off, per game, or for every game in a particular series.

P.S. I don’t think I use the ESPN app, or LiveSoccer any less than before. Ad-funded sports app are not good for quick score checks, as they really want you to hang out there.

I’m taking a call from a colleague who is generously sharing his input on the feature I’m designing. Halfway through, my 15-week old puppy walks across the room and begins to slowly 💩 in front of me. Helpless, there was nothing I could but watch with a dismayed face. 😔

TFW that design spec you’ve been working on for weeks finally gets presented to the full team and no one finds major flaws 😁 I continue to push us in a direction where devs are more collaborative in the design, so the specs are almost unneeded when the feature is “done”. But change can be slow.

The thing I didn’t consider is that many areas Milton will cross has a ton of debris that came down during Helene that they won’t be able to move in time. That stuff could all become projectiles.

How Regenerative Braking Works — if you’d like see how EVs can recharge themselves, this guy built a cool rig to show you how it works and talks about the science behind it.

This climate scientist wants you to know that while we may be near to some climate tipping points that are very bad (melting permafrost that releases a lot of greenhouse gases, a shutdown of a major Atlantic current), there are are also other looming tipping points that are climate positives, such as EV adoption, and superior economics of renewable energy compared to fossil fuels.

Danny MacAskill rides around the Adidas HQ — the title sounds boring only if you’ve never seen Danny ride, or don’t understand how cool Adidas’ HQ grounds are.

Sending out congratulations to Dave Winer for entering his thirtieth year of his blog, Scripting News. In honor of Dave and all his contributions to blogging, his creation of RSS and OPML, and of course podcasting, I am making a blog post without a title.

Does anyone have any experience with helping older adults transition from passwords to passkeys? (Apple devices in this situation)

1. MKBHD is splitting revenues from his app with the app’s content creators, 50/50. Yet he has a problem with Apple’s 30/70 split with developers?
2. I learned about how Bear Blog does analytics by watching a particular attribute of CSS to see if an actual human is visiting.
3. Meta Orion Glasses I have not listened to the interview or seen the keynote spoken so highly about in this post, but AR glasses to me are the next frontier. Looks like Meta may be on to something. P.S. I will never buy anything from Meta.
4. “Smart TVs from Samsung and LG take screenshots of what you are watching even when you are using them to display images from a connected laptop or video game console” via Dan Gillmor
5. The mayor of NYC has been indicted on allegations of bribery and illegal campaign contributions from foreign governments. When people tell you “all politicians are bad” they are wrong. When they tell you all political parties are bad, they are disingenuous. The Democratic Party will turn on Eric Adams. The GOP has just circled their wagons around their criminal candidate since 2016, illegal actions be damned.(Disclosure, I have never been a member of any political party)

For 3 & 4: Surveillance capitalism sucks and we need government to get involved. No one (or organization) should be able to follow you around and keep tabs on you. Not advertisers, not social networks, not household appliances, not personal vehicles, not ISPs.

I’d really like to do daily recaps of things like these I’ve come across and shared through out the day. But I never do because it’s too much effort to curate.

I just spent 5 minutes watching LinkedIn’s version of TikTok. Most of the content is not good. Save yourself.

I’ve played the drums for ~25 years, it took me until tonight to actually record at home for someone else’s track. Feels good. I would love to do more of this.

While I was picking up groceries, I saw a Sprinter van drive by me labeled “Andover Mobile Town Hall”—which was a thing I’ve never heard of before. Apparently it’s funded by a state grant.

Spitting rain, breezy, chilly. A positively English setting for my daughter’s soccer match this morning. (Plus I have the BBC Newcastle play by play in one year. Hopefully her team won’t be as rubbish as NUFC are playing so far)