The future of identification technologies will involve delegating tasks to automated agents. Between the decentralised dream and the password asphyxiation, a third actor is emerging: the automatic intermediary. For years, we have spoken about the decentralising power of technologies, of a "disintermediated" digital future in which we can interact "peer to peer," point to point. However, the world appears to be moving in a direction opposed to the many good intentions and experiments aimed at decentralisation, transparency, and horizontality on the web.
📢 Last Day to Support Community Network initiatives around the world! The Internet Society is offering a chance for Community Networks to become the subject of a resourced Special Interest Group. It only takes a minute or two today to help our initiative be selected. Please take a moment today by voting for the Community Networks & Community Infrastructures SIG 🔗 Your support is appreciated and will amplify global attention to locally owned and operated digital infrastructures. Further information can be found in the application submission and our info page sponsored by Freifunk listing supporting groups around the world. 🔗 I urge you today to pass these details on to friends, colleagues and local network activists to secure this opportunity to give increased international attention to local initiatives for the next two years. Thank you for your support! image
✊🏾 Take action for Community Networks & Community Infrastructures! Act now for Community Network & Community Infrastructures to bridge the digital divide and support underrepresented communities. Help establish a special interest group. More info on how to proceed:
Vote Conspire on gitcoin! https://gitcoin.privote.live/rounds/0/0xa88a30674417f4f414a9bf561cec2988f98ccf5219fc177156f9f8179df7a408 Funding will enable ARM porting for an embedded “Conspire Box” system with captive portal capability: a WiFi hotspot will present the chat interface to on-site connecting clients. Security enhancements will include Tor hidden-service integration and security hardening, such as Address Sanitiser (ASAN), static analysis, and penetration testing. A toast to ephemeral #privacy and zero identity! 🥂
There is a widening consensus that research and innovation (R&I) funding in Europe is not working the way it is supposed to. The growing competition for R&I project grants overburdens the R&I system, generates bursts of activity leading to unsustainable results, and fuels the much-maligned growth of precarious labour. This trend needs to be turned around, and not by means of the usual patchwork but through a fundamental rethinking of the system for R&I funding. We believe that a very promising avenue for such a turnaround would be a shift from project-based funding to continuous funding for R&I networks. :cafuda:
Can Europe sustain the growth of AI data centres, or does the already overcrowded electrical grid risk being clogged even more? As the uptake of Artificial Intelligence (AI) increases in many sectors of the economy, all of that infrastructure has to be supported somehow: that is where data centres come in. The most advanced economies are rushing to scale up their digital infrastructure, yet industry laggard Europe is also behind in this aspect, compared to places like the US and China.
Your work is amazing, @pluja ! Mad love!
Introducing #Conspire: a web-based chat for bold discussions! ✨ Ephemeral ✨ Anonymous ✨ Synchronous ✨ Free 🔒 Privacy-focused service 📦 Fully static binary for on-premises use Give it a spin, and please do your best to break it: We're particularly interested in knowing about your experiences using #tor! 👂🏽 image
📢 Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Planet Dyne is back with the glow! A wild @Jaromil on Italian TV, the powerful but tiny neon shiny lsget, call for proposals, actions and MOAR, in Episode 07 of your favorite newsletter!
Data swirls around us, an unseen current—Europeans wade through six hours and forty minutes of it daily, pulled under by smartphones, transit cards, health records, the quiet hum of municipal servers. It slips through our fingers even as it shapes us. This captured flow is distilled into metrics, those peculiar alchemies that turn lived experience into numbers. But metrics are never innocent. They bend to the will of their architects: governments measuring compliance, corporations tracking engagement, researchers seeking patterns. What gets counted? What gets omitted? The metrics whisper their priorities. And we—unknowing, unasked—become their subjects.