The information landscape has changed a great deal over the past five years. Back in the 1990s, information exchange was mostly between academics and IT people. The majority of the information was accurate and typically scientific or technical in nature. The communication was polite and debates were just that, debates. It was an inclusive community, though in some cases you were required to stick to the topic at hand. Then came the social media platforms.
- With sources of information changing from technical to social, the reason for doing things changed to what we have now being mostly click bait articles to get views, likes and counts. What was inclusive and cordial has become divisive and just plain nasty. This has spawned a whole new industry, one unnecessary in the past -- the fact checker. These are organisations or individuals paid to provide "fact checks" on any range of subjects, but typically hot political narratives of the day. As I type this, I'm looking at a Confidential Third Party Fact Checker Agreement between Meta, aka Facebook, in Ireland and a fact checking service in Australia, being paid US$800 (28,000 baht) per Explanatory Article.
- I wonder how long the agreement lasts if the fact-checking articles don't line up with the current narrative expectations. Now consider that some of these fact checkers are 20 year olds sitting in a basement under their parent's house with very little real world experience, and nothing of the subject matter they are often checking. I've seen where Nobel laureates in their field have been fact checked "false" by such basement dwellers because the subject matter contradicts the political narrative of the moment.
- This is the quality that information provision has sunk to in the past few years. It is getting so bad that if something is fact checked, then the opposite of the fact check result is probably the correct answer. There are recent subject examples where the true facts came out later, but I never see any corrections to the original fact check. As I've pointed out in the past, always do your own research from multiple sources where possible. If not, the information you are seeing could be made up, garbage, lacking all context, cherry picked or just plain wrong.
- Then we have countries passing laws to control what information is allowed. Information should be free. It should also be open for analysis and criticism. Any law that proposes to control "harmful material" should be scrutinised carefully. The UK and Australia are proposing laws and the US has adopted some in different states. Personally, anything concerned with child exploitation should be shut down, unless it is discussion around the topic. I'm planning to watch the Sound Of Freedom movie this week.
- The United Nations' has proposed a new Global Digital Compact. Its stated aims are to ensure that digital technologies are used responsibly and for the benefit of all, while addressing the digital divide and fostering a safe and inclusive digital environment. The key aspects of the compact read well, including things like connectivity for all, digital protection, online human rights and AI regulation. But it gets scary. According to organisations like ICANN, the proposal will exclude technical experts as any kind of distinct voice in internet governance. Instead, the power will be held by governments, civil society organisations, the UN and other stakeholders. This kind of modern approach has not been working very well over the past few years.
- When people put controls on things, others actively work to bypass them. Enter Veilid, a new secure peer-to-peer network for applications. It's also open source so you can go over to veilid.org and do some reading around the framework. Pronounced Vey-lid, derived from Valid and Veiled Information, it is a decentralised peer-to-peer process via a multi-hop mesh routing system combining strong encryption with untraceability. For the curious it is written in Rust with some Dart and Python thrown in. Veilid can talk over UDP and TCP, and connections are authenticated, timestamped, strongly end-to-end encrypted, and digitally signed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering and impersonation. What this all means is that unlike say Tor, which the NSA cracked, this network does not have the same weaknesses, so it should be very secure.
- If you are lucky and own a Google Pixel phone, you can also install the GrapheneOS to protect your phone from snooping. There are excellent YouTube videos like the one from David Bombal to walk you through this. No, as far as I could discover with a brief search there are currently no stable versions for other brands. My next phone may be a Pixel.
- As you get older people you know or have heard of tend to pass away. The latest was computer graphics pioneer John Warnock who made it to 82. He invented hidden-line removal, co-invented Postscript and PDF, and was the author of the popular Illustrator product. His graphics advances helped make the Apple Macintosh successful and with Dr Chuck Geschke, who passed in 2021, founded Adobe.
James Hein is an IT professional with over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.
