Can You Kick the Trolls Out Of Your Online Forum? U.S. Supreme Court to Decide

Should the governments of Texas and Florida decide whether and how online discussion sites can moderate their posts? Let’s say you have an online community about the town you live in, and someone starts posting off-topic messages about some other town…

AVFTCN 030 – Want to run an AI on your laptop? Just download one file…

5:42 am Mind = 🤯 Would you like to run a large language model (LLM) on your own local computer? So that all your data and requests stay local? Would you like your own private “ChatGPT”-like thing that you could ask questions of? I happened to be looking at my personal email the other afternoon […]

AVFTCN 029 – Sunday Smorgasbord: Humane AI Pin, LEOs, Livestreaming Wikipedia editing

5:03 am Greetings from basement isolation. The dog has been let out and I’m back here in the dark. Instead of a specific topic, I want to catch up on some updates to past newsletters. So today’s note is a collection of smaller updates of different flavors. I’ll call it a smorgasboard, which of course […]

AVFTCN 028 – Let’s Not Forget the Magic of the Internet

6:23 am It is so easy to get so used to how the Internet works*, that sometimes we forget to pause and just think about how amazing this technology can be. We just expect that it will work – and for the most part it does. I’m had some experiences this week… and plenty of […]

AVFTCN 027 – The Paywalling of the Web

5:03 am Is the future of the Web really one where so much of the content is behind a paywall or a registration screen? (some call it a “regwall”) Are we returning to the pre-Internet days where so much information was locked away in gated “walled gardens” of online activity such as CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, […]

AVFTCN 026 – Humane’s “AI Pin” gets closer to the Star Trek:TNG Communicator

5:09 am From 1987-1994, Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG) brought an updated version of the classic show to our TV sets. Through my later years in university and first years out on my own, I tuned in each week to see the latest saga of Captain Picard, Commander Riker, Data, Worf, Deanna Troi, Geordi […]

AVFTCN 025 – Mozilla, Mastodon and the Fediverse – and also Pebble

5:18 am When I climb up into the crow’s nest and look out at the horizon, one of the “lands of opportunity” I continually see is the world of “decentralized social media”, and in particular Mastodon and the other services that use the ActivityPub protocol and are broadly referred to as the “Fediverse”. For context, […]

AVFTCN 024 – A long walk-through of using WordPress’ “Jetpack AI Assistant”

4:06 am Jenna (our 16yo miniature poodle) didn’t get the memo about the time change. Can someone remind me why we do this again? I was going to write about Mozilla and their plans with Mozilla.social this morning… but in trying out WordPress as a platform for a combined newsletter and blog, well… there’s something […]

Slides for my ISC2 Security Congress session on “Demystifying Routing Security”

Today at the ISC2 Security Congress 2023 in Nashville, TN, I gave a well-received talk on “Demystifying the World of Routing Security”. Unfortunately, the mobile app for the event had (and still has) the wrong set of slides. Instead of mine, the attached deck was for a 2019 talk. So I told participants I would put the slides up on one of my sites. And here they are: Download 2023-ISC2-Security-Congress-RoutingSecurity-Final.pdf (12033.0K) As you will see, a great amount of the slides are about the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) initiative. Also, for people seeking info about how to…

Blue hat

Just a photo of my blue Rotary hat. (Testing something out with image uploads – this IS my test site after all. M)