net.wars

In 1997, when the Internet was young and many fields were still an unbroken green, the United States Institute of Peace convened a conference on virtual diplomacy. In my writeup for the Telegraph, I saw that organizer Bob Schmitt had convened two communities – computer and diplomacy – who were both wondering how they could get the other to collaborate but had no common ground.

On balance, the computer folks, who saw a potential market as well as a chance to do some good, were probably more eager than the diplomats, who favored caution and understood that in their discipline speed was often a bad idea. They were also less attracted than one might think to the notion of virtual meetings despite the travel it would save. Sometimes, one told me, it’s the random conversations around the water cooler that make plain what’s really happening. Why is Brazil mad? In a virtual meeting, it may be harder to find out that it’s not the negotiations but the fact that their soccer team lost last night.

I thought at the time that the conference would be the first of many to tackle these issues. But as it’s turned out, I’ve never been at an event anything like it…until now, nearly 30 years later. This week, a group of diplomats and human rights advocates met, similarly, to consider how the cyber world is changing diplomacy and international relations.

The timing is unexpectedly fortuitous. This week’s revelation that someone added Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat in which US cabinet officials discussed plans for an imminent military operation in Yemen shows the kinds of problems you get when you rely too much on computer mediation. In the usual setting, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), you can see exactly who’s there, and communications to anyone outside that room are entirely blocked. As a security clearance-carrying friend of mine said, if he’d made such a blunder he’d be in prison.

The Signal blunder was raised by almost every speaker. It highlights something diplomats think about a lot: who is or is not in the room. Today, as in 1997, behavioral cues are important; one diplomat estimated that meeting virtually costs you 50% to 60% of the communication you have when meeting face-to-face. There are benefits, too, of course, such as opening side channels to remote others who can advise on specific questions, or the ability to assemble a virtual team a small country could never afford to send in person.

These concerns have not changed since 1997. But it’s clear that today’s diplomats feel they have less choice about what new technology gets deployed and how than they did then, when the Internet’s most significant predecessor new technology was the global omnipresence of news network CNN, founded in 1980. Now, much of what control they had then is disappearing, both because human behavior overrides their careful, rulebound, friction-filled diplomatic channels and processes via shadow IT, but also because the biggest technology companies own so much of what we call “public” infrastructure.

Another key difference: many people don’t see the need for education to learn facts; it’s a particular problem for diplomats, who rely on historical data to show the world they aspire to build. And another: today a vastly wider array of actors, from private companies to individuals and groups of individuals, can create world events. And finally: in 1997 multinational companies were already challenging the hegemony of governments, but they were not yet richer and more powerful than countries.

Cue for a horror thought: what if Big Tech, which is increasingly interested in military markets, and whose products are increasingly embedded at the hearts of governments decide that peace is bad for business? Already they are allying with politicians to resist human rights principles, most notably privacy.

Which cues another 1997 memory: Nicholas Negroponte absurdly saying that the Internet would bring world peace by breaking down national borders. In 20 years, he said (that would be eight years ago) children would not know what nationalism is. Instead, on top of all today’s wars and internal conflicts, we’re getting virtual infrastructure attacks more powerful than bullets, and proactive agents fueled by large language models. And all fueled by the performative-outrage style of social media, which is becoming just how people speak, publicly and privately.

All this is more salient when you listen to diplomats and human rights activists as they are the ones who see up close the human lives lost. Meta’s name comes up most often, as in Myanmar and Ethiopia.

The mood was especially touchy because a couple of weeks ago a New Zealand diplomat was recalled after questioning US president Donald Trump’s understanding of history during a public panel in London – ironically in Chatham House under the Chatham House rule.

“You say the wrong thing on the wrong platform at the wrong time, and your career is gone,” one observed. Their people perimeter is gone, as it has been for so many of us for a decade or more. But more than most people, diplomats who don’t have trust have nothing. And so: “We’re in a time when a single message can up-end relationships.”

No surprise, then, that the last words reflected 1997’s conclusion: “Diplomacy is still a contact sport.”

Illustrations: Internet meme rewriting Wikipedia’s Alice and Bob page explaining man-in-the-middle attacks with the names Hegseth, Waltz, and Goldberg, referencing the Signal snafu.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

In early December, the Biden administration’s Department of Justice filed its desired remedies, having won its case that Google is a monopoly. Many foresaw a repeat of 2001, when the incoming Bush administration dropped the Clinton DoJ’s plan to break up Microsoft.

Maybe not this time. In its first filing, Trump’s DoJ still wants Google to divest itself of the Chrome browser and intends to bar it from releasing other browsers. The DoJ also wants to impose some restrictions on Android and Google’s AI investments.

At The Register, Thomas Claburn reports that Mozilla is objecting to the DoJ’s desire to bar Google from paying other companies to promote its search engine by default. Those payments, Mozilla president Mark Surman admits to Claburn, keep small independent browsers afloat.

Despite Mozilla’s market shrinkage and current user complaints, it and its fellow minority browsers remain important in keeping the web open and out of full corporate control. It’s definitely counter-productive if the court, in trying to rein in Google’s monopoly, takes away what viability these small players have left. They are us.

On the other hand, it’s certainly not healthy for those small independents to depend for their survival on the good will of companies like Google. The Trump administration’s defunding of – among so many things – scientific research is showing just how dangerous it can be.

Within the US itself, the government has announced cuts to indirect funding, which researchers tell me are crippling to universities; $800 million cut in grants to Johns Hopkins, $400 at Columbia University, and so many more.

But it doesn’t stop in the US or with the cuts to USAID, which have disrupted many types of projects around the world, some of them scientific or medical research. The Trump administration is using its threats to scientific funding across the world to control speech and impose its, um, values. This morning, numerous news sources report that Australian university researchers have been sent questionnaires they must fill out to justify their US-funded grants. Among the questions: their links to China and their compliance with Trump’s gender agenda.

To be fair, using grants and foreign aid to control speech is not a new thing for US administrations. For example, Republican presidents going back to Reagan have denied funding to international groups that advocated abortion rights or provided abortions, limiting what clinicians could say to pregnant patients. (I don’t know if there are Democratic comparables.)

Science is always political to some extent: think the for stating that the earth was not the center of the universe. Or take intelligence: in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould documented a century or more of research by white, male scientists finding that white, male scientists were the smartest things on the planet. Or say it inBig Tobacco and Big Oil, which spent decades covering up research showing that their products were poisoning us and our planet.

The Trump administration’s effort is, however, a vastly expanded attempt that appears to want to squash anything that disagrees with policy, and it shows the dangers of allowing any one nation to amass too much “soft power”. The consequences can come quickly and stay long. It reminds me of what happened in the UK in the immediate post-EU referendum period, when Britain-based researchers found themselves being dropped from cross-EU projects because they were “too risky”, and many left for jobs in other countries where they could do their work in peace.

The writer Prashant Vaze sometimes imagines a future in which India has become the world’s leading scientific and technical superpower. This imagined future seems more credible by the day.

It’s strange to read that the 35-year-old domestic robots pioneer, iRobot, may be dead in a year. It seemed like a sure thing; early robotics researchers say that people were begging for robot vacuum cleaners even in the 1960s, perhaps inspired by Rosie, The Jetsons‘ robot maid.

Many people may have forgotten (or not known) the excitement that attended the first Roombas in 2002. Owners gave them names, took them on vacation, and posted videos. It looked like the start of a huge wave.

I bought a Roomba in 2003, reviewing it so enthusiastically that an email complained that I should have said I had been given it by a PR person. For a few happy months it wandered around cleaning.

The Roomba now has many competitors, some highly sophisticated, run by apps, and able to map rooms, identify untouched areas, scrub stains, and clean in corners. Even so, domestic robots have not proliferated as imagined 20 – or 12 – years ago. I visit people’s houses, and while I sometimes encounter Alexas or Google Assistants, robot vacuums seem rare.

So much else of smart homes as imagined by companies like Microsoft and IBM remain dormant. It does seem like – perhaps a reflection on my social circle – the “smart home” is just a series of remote-control apps and outsourced services. Meh.

Illustrations: Rosie, the Jetsons‘ XB-500 robot maid, circa 1962.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

The riskiest system is the one you *think* you can trust. Say it in encryption: the least secure encryption is encryption that has unknown flaws. Because, in the belief that your communication or data is protected, you feel it’s safe to indulge in what in other contexts would be obviously risky behavior. Think of it like an unseen hole in a condom.

This has always been the most dangerous aspect of the UK government’s insistence that its technical capability notices remain secret. Whoever alerted the Washington Post to the notice Apple received a month ago commanding it to weaken its Advanced Data Protection performed an important public service. Now, Carly Page reports at TechCrunch based on a blog posting by security expert Alec Muffett, the UK government is recognizing that principle by quietly removing from its web pages advice to use that same encryption that was directed at people whose communications are at high risk – such as barristers and other legal professionals. Apple has since withdrawn ADP in the UK.

More important long-term, at the Financial Times, Tim Bradshaw and Lucy Fisher report that Apple has appealed the government’s order to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. This will be, as the FT notes, the first time government powers under the Investigatory Powers Act (2016) to compel the weakening of security features will be tested in court. A ruling that the order was unlawful could be an important milestone in the seemingly interminable fight over encryption.

I’ve long had the habit of doing minor corrections on Wikipedia – fixing typos, improving syntax – as I find them in the ordinary course of research. But recently I have had occasion to create a couple of new pages, with the gratefully-received assistance of a highly experienced Wikipedian. At one time, I’m sure this was a matter of typing a little text, garlanding it with a few bits of code, and garnishing it with the odd reference, but standards have been rising all along, and now if you want your newly-created page to stay up it needs a cited reference for every statement of fact and a minimum of one per sentence. My modest pages had ten to 20 references, some servicing multiple items. Embedding the page matters, too, so you need to link mentions to all those pages. Even then, some review editor may come along and delete the page if they think the subject is not notable enough or violates someone’s copyright. You can appeal, of course…and fix whatever they’ve said the problem is.

It should be easier!

All of this detailed work is done by volunteers, who discuss the decisions they make in full view on the talk page associated with every content page. Studying the more detailed talk pages is a great way to understand how the encyclopedia, and knowledge in general, is curated.

Granted, Wikipedia is not perfect. Its policy on primary sources can be frustrating, and errors in cited secondary sources can be difficult to correct. The culture can be hostile if you misstep. Its coverage is uneven, But, as Margaret Talbot reports at the New Yorker and Amy Bruckman writes in her 2022 book, Should You Believe Wikipedia?, all those issues are fully documented.

Early on, Wikipedia was often the butt of complaints from people angry that this free encyclopedia made by *amateurs* threatened the sustainability of Encyclopaedia Britannica (which has survived though much changed). Today, it’s under attack by Elon Musk and the Heritage Foundation, as Lila Shroff writes at The Atlantic. The biggest danger isn’t to Wikipedia’s funding; there’s no offer anyone can make that would lead to a sale. The bigger vulnerability is the safety of individual editors. Scold they may, but as a collective they do important work to ensure that facts continue to matter.

Firefox users are manifesting more and more unhappiness about the direction Mozilla is taking with Firefox. The open source browser’s historic importance is outsized compared to its worldwide market share, which as of February 2025 is 2.63%, according to Statcounter. A long tail of other browsers are based on it, such as LibreWolf, Waterfox, and the privacy-protecting Tor.

The latest complaint, as Liam Proven and Thomas Claburn write at The Register is that Mozilla has removed its commitment not to sell user data from Firefox’s terms and conditions and privacy policy. Mozilla responded that the company doesn’t sell user data “in the way that most people think about ‘selling data'” but needed to change the language because of jurisdictional variations in what the word “sell” means. Still, the promise is gone.

This follows Mozilla’s September 2024 decision, reported by Richard Speed at The Register, to turn on by default a “privacy-preserving feature” to track users that led the NGO noyb to file a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority. And a month ago, Mark Hachman reported at PC World that Mozilla is building access to third-party generative AI chatbots into Firefox, and there are reports that it’s adding “AI-powered tab grouping.

All of these are basically unwelcome, and of all organizations Mozilla should have been able to foresee that. Go away, AI.

Molly White is expertly covering the Trump administration’s proposed “US Crypto Reserve”. Remains only to add Rachel Maddow, who compared it to having a strategic reserve of Beanie Babies.

Illustrations:: Beanie baby pelican.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

The UK’s public consultation on creating a copyright exception for AI model training closed on Tuesday, and it was profoundly unsatisfying.

Many, many creators and rights holders (who are usually on opposing sides when it comes to contract negotiations) have opposed the government’s proposals. Every national newspaper ran the same Make It Fair front page opposing them; musicians released a silent album. In the Guardian, the peer and independent filmmaaker Beeban Kidron calls the consultation “fixed” in favor of the AI companies. Kidron’s resume includes directing Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004) and the meticulously researched 2013 study of teens online, InRealLife, and she goes on to call the government’s preferred option a “wholesale transfer of wealth from hugely successful sector that invests hundreds of millions in the UK to a tech industry that extracts profit that is not assured and will accrue largely to the US and indeed China.”

The consultation lists four options: leave the situation as it is; require AI companies to get licenses to use copyrighted work (like everyone else has to); allow AI companies to use copyrighted works however they want; and allow AI companies to use copyrighted works but grant rights holders the right to opt out.

I don’t like any of these options. I do believe that creators will figure out how to use AI tools to produce new and valuable work. I *also* believe that rights holders will go on doing their best to use AI to displace or impoverish creators. That is already happening in journalism and voice acting, and was a factor in the 2023 Hollywood writers’ strike. AI companies have already shown that won’t necessarily abide by arrangements that lack the force of law. The UK government acknowledged this in its consultation document, saying that “more than 50% of AI companies observe the longstanding Internet convention robots.txt.” So almost half of them *don’t*.

At Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow argued in February 2023 that copyright won’t solve the problems facing creators. His logic is simple: after 40 years of expanding copyright terms (from a maximum of 56 years in 1975 to “author’s life plus 70” now), creators are being paid *less* than they were then. Yes, I know Taylor Swift has broken records for tour revenues and famously took back control of her own work. but millions of others need, as Doctorow writes, structural market changes. Doctorow highlights what happened with sampling: the copyright maximalists won, and now musicians are required to sign away sampling rights to their labels, who pocket the resulting royalties.

For this sort of reason, the status quo, which the consultation calls “option 0”, seems likely to open the way to lots more court cases and conflicting decisions, but provide little benefit to anyone. A licensing regime (“option 1”) will likely go the way of sampling. If you think of AI companies as inevitably giant “pre-monopolized” outfits, like Vladen Joler at last year’s Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection conference, “Option 2” looks like simply making them richer and more powerful at the expense of everyone else in the world. But so does “option 3”, since that *also* gives AI companies the ability to use anything they want. Large rights holders will opt out and demand licensing fees, which they will keep, and small ones will struggle to exercise their rights.

As Kidron said, the government’s willingness to take chances with the country’s creators’ rights is odd, since intellectual property is a sector in which Britain really *is* a world leader. On the other hand, as Moody says, all of it together is an anthill compared to the technology sector.

None of these choices is a win for creators or the public. The government’s preferred option 3 seems unlikely to achieve its twin goals of making Britain a world leader in AI and mainlining AI into the veins of the nation, as the government put it last month.

China and the US both have complete technology stacks *and* gigantic piles of data. The UK is likely better able to matter in AI development than many countries – see for example DeepMind, which was founded here in 2010. On the other hand, also see DeepMind for the probable future: Google bought it in 2014, and now its technology and profits belong to that giant US company.

At Walled Culture, Glyn Moody argued last May that requiring the AI companies to pay copyright industries makes no sense; he regards using creative material for training purposes as “just a matter of analysis” that should not require permission. And, he says correctly, there aren’t enough such materials anyway. Instead, he and Mike Masnick at Techdirt propose that the generative AI companies should pay creators of all types – journalists, musicians, artists, filmmakers, book authors – to provide them with material they can use to train their models, and the material so created should be placed in the public domain. In turn it could become new building blocks the public can use to produce even more new material. As a model for supporting artists, patronage is old.

I like this effort to think differently a lot better than any of the government’s options.

Illustrations:: Tuesday’s papers, unprecedentedly united to oppose the government’s copyright plan.

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.

Yesterday, the Global Encryption Coalition published a joint letter calling on the UK to rescind its demand that Apple undermine (“backdoor”) the end-to-end encryption on its services. The Internet Society is taking signatures until February 20.

The background: on February 7, Joseph Menn reported at the Washington Post (followed by Dominic Preston at The Verge) that in January the office of the Home Secretary sent Apple a technical capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act (2018) ordering it to provide access to content that anyone anywhere in the world has uploaded to iCloud and encrypted with Apple’s Advanced Data Protection.

Technical capability notices are supposed to be secret. It’s a criminal offense to reveal that you’ve been sent one. Apple can’t even tell users that their data may be compromised. (This kind of thing is why people publish warrant canaries.) Menn notes that even if Apple withdraws ADP in the UK, British authorities will still demand access to encrypted data everywhere *else*. So it appears that if the Home Office doesn’t back down and Apple is unwilling to cripple its encryption, the company will either have to withdraw ADP across the world or exit the UK market entirely. At his Odds and Ends of History blog, James O’Malley calls the Uk’s demand stupid, counter-productive, and unworkable. At TechRadar, Chiara Castro asks who’s next, and quotes Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo: “unprecedented for a government in any democracy”.

When the UK first began demanding extraterritorial jurisdiction for its interception rules, most people wondered how the country thought it would be able to impose it. That was 11 years ago; it was one of the new powers codified in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act (2014) and kept in its replacement, the IPA in 2016.

Governments haven’t changed – they’ve been trying to undermine strong encryption in the hands of the masses since 1991, when Phil Zinmmermann launched PGP – but the technology has, as Graham Smith recounted at Ars Technica in 2017. Smartphones are everywhere. People store their whole lives on them for everything and giant technology companies encrypt both the device itself and the cloud backups. Government demands have changed to reflect that, from focusing on the individual with key escrow and key lengths to focusing on the technology provider with client-side scanning, encrypted messaging (see also the EU) and now cloud storage.

At one time, a government could install a secret wiretap by making a deal with a legacy telco. The Internet’s proliferation of communications providers changed that for a while. During the resulting panic the US passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (1994), which requires Internet service providers and telecommunications companies to install wiretap-ready equipment – originally for telephone calls, later broadband and VOIP traffic as well.

This is where the UK government’s refusal to learn from others’ mistakes is staggering. Just four months ago, the US discovered Salt Typhoon, a giant Chinese hack into its core telecommunications networks that was specifically facilitated by…by…CALEA. To repeat: there is no such thing as a magic hole that only “good guys” can use. If you undermine everyone’s privacy and security to facilitate law enforcement, you will get an insecure world where everyone is vulnerable. The hack has led US authorities to promote encrypted messaging.

Joseph Cox’s recent book, Dark Wire touches on this. It’s a worked example of what law enforcement internationally can do if given open access to all messages criminals send across a network when they think they are operating in complete safety. Yes, the results were impressive: hundreds of arrests, dozens of tons of drugs seized, masses if firearms impounded. But, Cox writes, all that success was merely a rounding error in global drug trade. Universal loss of privacy and security versus a rounding error: it’s the definition of “disproportionate”.

It remains to be seen what Apple decides to do and whether we can trust what the company tells us. At his blog, Alec Muffett is collecting ongoing coverage of events. The Future of Privacy Forum celebrated Safer Internet Day, February 11, with an infographic showing how encryption protects children and teens.

But set aside for a moment all the usual arguments about encryption, which really haven’t changed in over 30 years because mathematical reality hasn’t.

In the wider context, Britain risks making itself a technological backwater. First, there’s the backdoored encryption demand, which threatens every encrypted service. Second, there’s the impact of the onrushing Online Safety Act, which comes into force in March. Ofcom, the regulator charged with enforcing it, is issuing thousands of pages of guidance that make it plain that only large platforms will have the resources to comply. Small sites, whether businesses, volunteer-run Fediverse instances, blogs, established communities, or web boards, will struggle even if Ofcom starts to do a better job of helping them understand their legal obligations. Many will likely either shut down or exit the UK, leaving the British Internet poorer and more isolated as a result. Ofcom seems to see this as success.

It’s not hard to predict the outcome if these laws converge in the worst possible timeline: a second Brexit, this one online.

Illustrations: T-shirt (gift from Jen Persson).

Wendy M. Grossman is the 2013 winner of the Enigma Award. Her Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of earlier columns in this series. She is a contributing editor for the Plutopia News Network podcast. Follow on Mastodon or Bluesky.