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An invitation to build our technology together … tech we trust for the web we want. Our motivation Digital technologies are undermining our privacy, permitting mass state surveillance, enabling censorship, undermining journalism, and spreading fake news. It feels forbidding, uncertain, unsafe – more problem than solution, and far from the original vision for the Internet and Web. And yet we’re optimistic that we can join together to fix it. The problem isn’t really the technologies we have to work with of course, but rather the way they’re crafted and who gets to do the crafting. ...

We could see it coming. Sort of. I wrote a post titled myChannel back in 2005, a time without smartphones, Facebook, Twitter and news aggregators like Flipboard. YouTube was 17 days off launching. Reviewing the tech landscape I concluded: … mass personalisation has become a ‘qualifying’ rather than ‘winning’ criteria. The advantages to the user include choice (of the most apt personalisation), collation, and access in their own time and filtering. …The user, the recipient of news and information, the listener, the viewer, the inter-actor, has been empowered to set the schedule. It’s what they want, when they want it and how they want it. They have one channel … and they own it. It is myChannel. ...

[caption id=“attachment_30414” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”] An aerial image of the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire. Photographer: GCHQ/Crown Copyright. CC BY-SA 2.0[/caption] Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say. Edward Snowden, 2015 (source ) I get asked now and then how to improve one’s personal privacy, digitally speaking. It’s unsurprising that such questions are directed my way given privacy is a core objective of the hi:project , and yet I seemed to have attracted more than the usual number of questions since my last post – Introducing Google Assistant, the Surveillance Interface . You might want to stop commercial entities intruding – it’s difficult to sum up in a sentence or two how egregious the state of commercial surveillance is today. You might want to help head off the realisation of a surveillance state if only because you’ve read somewhere that such things don’t end well. You might simply want to have less data about your movements and purchases and media habits and general proclivities out there because it’s not a case of if the corresponding databases are hacked but when. Importantly, I write this post the very week the UK has passed the most extreme surveillance law ever passed in a democracy. The so-called Snoopers’ Charter is disgusting, distressing and, in good part, stupid. ...

A new kind of interface has surfaced over the past five years – artificial intelligence (AI) based ‘personal assistants ’. Apple Siri started the ball rolling, swiftly followed by Google Now , Microsoft Cortana , Amazon Alexa , and half a dozen others. But it now has a new apogee, a new sector defining moment, a revolution dressed up as evolution. The only thing more alarming than its instrusive, opaque, and society-altering capabilities is the way in which tech pundits have ladled out the accolades, pundits whose worldview appears as limited as a magpie’s regard for shiny things. Google Now is now Google Assistant , and it comes integrated into Google’s first full-on (i.e. not just a reference design) mobile phone – the Pixel. ...

Prime Minister Teresa May has presented the conclusion that many experts (yes, the very same derided by Brexiteer Michael Gove) worked out some time ago. There is no such thing as a ‘soft’ Brexit. The very idea of a ‘soft’ Brexit may as well have been called ‘have-your-cake-and-eat-it’ Brexit, because very rarely if ever does one get such an opportunity, particularly when there are 27 others at the table. ...

Bitcoin is an experiment. That’s granted. The fact that it’s trusted and actually useful is nothing short of phenomenal. Last week for example, the trade volume amounted to US$229m. Nevertheless, Bitcoin has some fundamental constraints that keep it from going mainstream: it has a ballpark limit of 7 transactions per second, and having confidence that a transaction has ‘gone through’ – non-recourse transactions – takes roughly 20 to 60 minutes depending on the level of confidence you’re looking for. (The user experience sucks too, but that’s not for this post.) While 229 million dollars is no small chunk of change, Visa processes many thousands of transactions per second, peaking at tens of thousands, and will have processed around US$130 billion last week. State channel – more exciting than it sounds The crypto awesome sauce underpinning Bitcoin is known as the blockchain, perhaps the No.1 tech buzzword of recent times. It’s at the heart of the currency’s success – preventing users spending the same money twice – but is also the nub of its relatively slothful nature. It’s with a fair degree of excitement then that I’ve been tracking the progress of Lightning, a protocol first mooted to my knowledge in 2013. The jargon here is state channel – blockchain interactions that could occur on the blockchain but get conducted off-chain without impairing the trust parties have in the interaction. Lightning facilitates state channel to speed things up and attenuate the costs needed to prove transactions (and offers a little more spark in terms of brand appeal!) ...

Why do firms exist? Strangely, no-one appears to have asked this question until a 27 year-old economist did so in 1937. Ronald Coase published his answer in The Nature of the Firm, now considered a seminal text. He studied the circumstances that led entrepreneurs to hire people as employees instead of simply contracting jobs out to traders and came up with the answer we now simply refer to as transaction costs. People are hired when the various associated costs are lower than they would be otherwise. ...

The quickest glance at my posts and tweets will tell you two things: (1) we just voted on a multi-faceted complex issue with too little understanding further muddied by the lies pedalled by both sides , and (2) I believe everyone in the UK is better off by our remaining in the European Union. There’s a reason Margaret Thatcher concurred with Lord Attlee in describing referenda as “a device of dictators and demagogues” – the same reason the UK has representative parliamentary democracy and not direct democracy. (If only David Cameron had paid more attention in class.) Former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg describes the resultant mess as a “debilitating cocktail of hubris, incompetence and dishonesty ”. Yet putting the well-known shortcomings of direct democracy to one side for the moment, we must accept that just shy of 52% of voters went to the polling stations last month and put a cross against Leave. The majority has spoken, right? Neither Leave nor Remain is perfect, of course, yet to my mind the Leave argument is akin to trashing your car because the ride is a bit bumpy, so I find myself asking … which majority should we be thinking about? ...

On June 23rd 2016, 51.9% of UK voters opted to leave the European Union. I’m writing here to say: We made a mistake We should have another think about it, and The Liberal Democrats might hold the key and not realise it. _________ UPDATE: Approximately eight hours after my post here, Liberal Democrats pledge to keep Britain in the EU after next election . This is great news. We now just need to persuade the party that they need to run at it on a single-issue basis. By doing so, pro-EU voters can cast a clear vote without other policies clouding the matter, and there can then be no ambiguity in interpreting the vote. This could make the difference between winning and not, and winning by a massive margin. As I write in conclusion to this post, I’m sure the electorate would then thank them in the follow-on election. _________ Winston Churchill, considered one of the Founding Fathers of the EU , noted that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. It’s wonderful to live in a democracy, and I find it exciting and exasperating, fascinating and frustrating, to be part of the European union of democracies. A democracy cannot be perfect. The people can make mistakes — of course— and I believe we just made one. A really really big one. Whereas we might change our minds every five years with general elections, leaving the EU is the sort of thing that impacts for generations. ...

An email sent to all my friends and family. There’s no doubting Aristotle was a rare genius. Encyclopædia Britannica calls him the first genuine scientist. And it’s amazing that here I am in the 21st Century emailing you (and in fact just about everyone I know with an email address) about the insights of a man born exactly 2400 years ago. (That’s equivalent to someone doing the same for you or me in the 44th Century CE, and I think we can agree on the likelihood of that!) I read this article on Aristotelian rhetoric / persuasive powers in 2012 , and I was so enamoured that I wrote a short blog post on it at the time. In summary, Aristotle concluded that the three most powerful tools of persuasion are: Ethos – argument by character Logos – argument by logic Pathos – appealing to the emotions. ...