This week's net.wars, "Small data", summarizes the talk I gave with Jon Crowcroft at this year's #gikii, arguing that large language models will ultimately prove to be a distraction: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/09/08/small-data/ #LLMs #AI #NetWars

New @plutopia - https://plutopia.io/amy-bruckman-online-communities/ - : Jon Lebowsky, Scoop Sweeney, and I chat at length with @asb: Amy Bruckman, whose book Should You Believe Wikipedia I reviewed here: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/08/22/review-should-you-believe-wikipedia/ #OnlineCommunities #NetWars #Books

In this week's net.wars, "Power cuts", streaming servcies delete shows people like, Meta's Oversight Board is overruled by Meta, and Canadians lose their news: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/09/01/power-cuts/ #NetWars #Meta #Platforms #Hollywood

This week's net.wars, "Guarding the peace", reviews the new report from the Scottish Institute for Policing Research on UK police and government use of commercial digital advertising, profiling, and marketing tools to shape public behavior: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/08/25/guarding-the-peace/ #NetWars #UKPolice #privacy

This week's net.wars, "Five seconds", is disturbed by reports that the X formerly known as Twitter (XFKAT) has delayed loading links to competitors and disliked news sites: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/08/18/five-seconds/ #NetWars #SocialMedia #birdsite

This week's net.wars, "The data grab" watches uneasily as many more players scrabble for new sources of data to feed their AI models...and existing models make trouble in the real world: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/08/11/the-data-grab/ #NetWars #AI #algorithms #OpenSource

This week's net.wars, "Watching YouTube", reviews Alex Winter's current film, The YouTube Effect, essentially a biography of #YouTube, which offers little conclusion, like the experts at last week's Cambridge #Disinformation Summit: ttps://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/08/04/watching-youtube/ #NetWars

This week's net.wars, "The music and the myth", answers a young friend's question. "What do you know about Woodstock?": https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/07/28/the-music-and-the-myth/ #NetWars #Film #Protest

This week's net.wars, "The safe place", realizes that the UK's oncoming online safety bill will fragment the Internet: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/07/21/the-safe-place/ #NetWars #OnlineSafetyBill #FreedomOfExpression #Censorship #privacy #ukigf

This week's net.wars, "Solidarity" watches Hollywood actors join the writers on strike...and wonders if legacy studios realize this strike could kill them: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/07/14/solidarity/ #NetWars #AI #Hollywood

In this week's net.wars, "Watson goes to Wimbledon", the CJEU rains all over Meta's our-way-or-get-lost approach to consent; Ireland seeks to squelch criticism of the Data Protection Commissioner's proceedings; Canada and California are the latest to try to charge Google and Meta for links to news; and IBM's Watson, last seen trying its hand as a medical diagnostician, turns tennis commentator. https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/07/07/watson-goes-to-wimbledon/ #NetWars #AI #LinkTax #DataProtection

This week's net.wars, "The horns of a dilemma", empathizes with #Mastodon administrators facing the existential question To Meta or not to Meta: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/06/30/the-horns-of-a-dilemma/ #NetWars #Fediverse #SocialMedia #Meta #NetLife

In this week's net.wars, "Own goals", voter ID deterred thousands, or maybe hundreds of thousands, people from voting in England's May local elections; CNIL fines Criteo a lot; the FTC sues Amazon; and the large language model version of "AI" eats itself: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/06/23/own-goals/ #NetWars #AI #Amazon #Google #privacy #adtech #LLMs #voterID

New! At the Plutopia podcast, @jonl, Scoop Sweeney, and I chat about AI and regulation with @j2bryson: https://plutopia.io/joanna-bryson-artificial-and-natural-intelligence/ #NetWars #Plutopia #AI #podcast

This week's net.wars, "All change", doesn't see a good outcome for Reddit, no matter what happens with this week's protests. "On the Internet, your home will always leave you." https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/06/16/all-change/ #NetWars #SocialMedia #Community #Reddit

This week's net.wars, "Snowden at ten", revisits post-Snowden efforts to harden the Internet against passive, pervasive monitoring: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/06/09/snowden-at-ten/ #NetWars #surveillance #privacy

This week's net.wars, "Microsurveillance", visits the world of workplace #surveillance and finds some pushback: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/06/02/microsurveillance/ #NetWars #privacy #workplace

This week's net.wars, "The arc of surveillance", goes to #cpdp2023 and finds activists counting the climate costs of structural surveillance: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/05/26/the-arc-of-surveillance/ #NetWars #surveillance #privacy #cpdp #ClimateJustice #ClimateChange

This week's net.wars, "Cryptocurrency winter" finds the central banks' efforts to create retail central bank digital currencies failing to find mass adoption everywhere they're tried: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/05/19/cryptocurrency-winter/ #NetWars #cryptocurrencies #CBDCs #DigitalPound

This week's net.wars, "Strike two", sees the Writers Guild of America refusing to become gig economy workers: https://netwars.pelicancrossing.net/2023/05/05/strike-two/ #NetWars #WGA #GigEconomy #AI