Shellsharks Blogroll - BlogFlock

To protect the web, we need to renegotiate its value. - Werd I/O

2026-11-06T00:54:46.000Z

Link: Creating a New Internet Bargain to Preserve Fair Use and Protect the Commons, by Lisa Macpherson and Anna Tumadóttir in Tech Policy Press

This should be required reading for everyone in news, but also anyone who cares about a healthy knowledge commons:

Two of the most important organizations advocating for a healthy information economy, Public Knowledge and Creative Commons, have produced an important document that describes the threats and some potential solutions.

I particularly appreciated their definition of what they call defensive enclosure. In a world where their content is being scraped for someone else’s profit — and robots.txt files are being ignored at least 30% of the time, while almost nobody is using AI-specific exclusion standards — publishers are more likely to hide their content away. In turn, this has created its own ecosystem of tools, many of which have the potential to also be centralized and monopolistic.

As their article summarizes the problem:

“The blunt tools in use on either side of the AI developer/rights holder divide are serving to shrink the knowledge commons and erode its quality. This isn’t theoretical, AI-doomer prognosticating about some imagined AI future. The digital knowledge commons is contracting at an alarming rate, driven by the rise of AI model developers that have transformed openly shared content into a high-value industrial input and the defensive response of rights holders who are rapidly restricting access through legal, technical, and contractual means.”

This is not just a problem for us humans who would like to learn and build on each other’s work; AI model developers themselves rely on this information to train their future products. They, too, should be invested in solving the problem.

The challenge is that for newsrooms and other publishers, this enclosure is completely rational. The desire to not be intermediated from their communities is based on a need to serve them well and to achieve financial sustainability. To them, these blunt instruments are tools to ward off an existential threat. But, of course, that then has an adverse effect on the knowledge ecosystem as a whole: there’s an enclosure movement in progress, and the battle is really over who is building the fences.

So it’s interesting to read the angle these two organizations take here. They take the stance that training on content is fair use (which has been found in, for example, Bartz v. Anthropic). They also want to protect public-interest scraping, which would allow researchers and journalists (among others) to continue gathering information, and reject legislation that restricts bot activity without the public in mind. Instead, they favor a bigger swing: renegotiating the broad economic framework of the web itself to move the incentives away from enclosure.

They think solutions may involve some combination of public policy and innovation around data governance. The question is really: what does that mean in practice? How might we shift the web’s value exchange in order to promote open publishing? And — beyond the public good — whose interests are aligned with that?

Without a concrete answer, publishers will keep blocking, and AI vendors will keep strip-mining. That’s a path that will lead to a much more restricted information commons, to the detriment of all of us.

Gadget Review: Tozo NC9 Pro Bluetooth Headphones ★★★★⯪ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-11-05T12:34:17.000Z

The most interesting thing about these headphones isn't the headphones; it's their case.

The good folks at Tozo have sent me a pair of their new ear-blasters. They're a fairly standard pair of in-ear headphones. Sound quality is good, noise cancelling is excellent, battery life is fine. You know, all pretty standard. But what's actually a little bit special is the charging case.

As well providing charging to the cans, it has this cute little full-colour display!

Which is also a touchscreen!

Everyone knows that hardware manufacturers can't write decent apps - and Tozo are no different. But here you don't have to rely on the app, or anything on your phone. Tap the screen to wake, slide to unlock, fiddle about with the settings:

Or change what song is playing:

Or interact with a dozen different helpful functions:

Specs

You can read about the headphones on the official site but the headline features for me are:

14 hours playback with about 60 hours from the case.
LDAC if you crave bit-perfect audio.
Active Noise Cancelling with various different modes.
Multi-function touch buttons on each side.

The App

*sigh* OK, it isn't the worst headphone app I've used, but it isn't great. In its defence, you do not need to create an account in order to use most of the features.

The app isn't brilliantly translated, but you'll probably be able to figure it out.

You can play about with some basic settings in the app.

Both headphones support multi-tap, so you can change them to your preference. There are four different types of tap each ear can support.

It's also possible to change the noise cancellation. The functions are perhaps a little indistinguishable - but they do work.

There is, sadly, a bunch of bullshit in the app. As well as a shop, there's also this weird "Community" tab given pride of place in the middle of the shortcut bar.

Apparently you can earn points the more you post? Why? Who cares! You also get the now-ubiquitous AI tools, which you have to sign in to use, and some white noise to drown out the sounds of the world.

Ultimately, the app is usable. You can adjust the EQ to your preferences, check for firmware updates, and similar. But you'll play with it once or twice then forget it exists.

Audio Quality

I'm not an audiophile. I'm not going to pretend that you need virgin-rolled cables adorned with mystic crystals in order to hear the true sonic soundstage of The Spice Girls.

Everything sounds fine. The default profile was good enough for me. I pumped up the bass and it was nice and boomy. There was no noticeable sound leakage at moderate volumes. The "spatial mode" didn't sound particularly nice to me and introduced a fair bit of distortion.

The noise cancellation was pretty decent as well. It won't drown out a crying baby next to you on public transport.

It will do LDAC on both Android:

And Linux:

Sound quality on both was excellent.

Usability

Pretty good! The taps are quick to respond and, of course, you can whip out the case if you want to change the settings. The touchscreen is small but responds well.

Price

They're between £50 - £60 on Amazon right now, or about £40 direct from the manufacturer. That's bang on what I'd expect for normal headphones, but I think is decent value considering the little touch-screen it includes.

It's a pity that the app is so woeful. But once you've set up your favourite EQ settings, you'll never need to touch it again.

But if you want noise cancelling, snug fitting, easy to use headphones, these are hard to beat.

Many thanks to Tozo for supplying me with the review unit.

BAITED - Kev Quirk

2026-11-05T09:32:00.000Z

BAITED

Author: RR Haywood
Genre: Thriller
Released: 2026
Rating: ★★★★☆

Find Ollie Perkins.

There’s just one problem.

Mike isn’t allowed to ask anyone about him. He can’t say his name. He doesn’t know what he looks like. So Mike takes a job as a security guard at a highly secure data facility on the edge of town and waits.

Then things start happening.

Lies get told. A body turns up. Foreign agents begin circling. Mike realises he's being watched and that he's not the only one looking for Ollie Perkins.

The pressure soon mounts. Mike needs to find the target before more people die.

BAITED is the third Mike Humber novel. A very different kind of British crime twist-loaded, contemporary, darkly funny, unpredictable and built around an ex-detective who survives largely through instinct, guile and an increasingly questionable relationship with authority.

Learn more on Goodreads ➡

I'm growing to really enjoy the Mike Humber series. As Haywood develops the books, and Mike's character, we get more of an insight into the inner workings of his frankly, completely fucked mind.

I've read a number of Haywood's books at this point and he's quickly becoming one of my favourite authors. His British whit and the way he writes is a breath of fresh air - it's nice to read someone who gets British sarcasm, but also dark humour.

All the Mike Humber books end in a crescendo where seemingly unrelated threads come together in a really satisfying way. I'm yet to predict any of the endings too, which is makes the stories all the more enjoyable.

Cracking read.

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choice in the neue - James' Coffee Blog

2026-11-05T00:00:00.000Z

Seeking character(s) —
Choice of sans, neue, serif
Glowing lettering.

Dune Messiah - Joel's Log Files

2026-11-04T21:30:00.000Z

With Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming film that shall put an end to his Dune trilogy, I have been meaning to read Dune Messiah for quite a while. I was planning to read it with a friend but I was utterly forgotten and she read it without me—don’t worry we are good lol.

In any case, I ended up choosing this as my last read for October given its relatively short length and that the film is coming in a bit more than a month by now.

While I read the original Dune after watching the movie, this time I read the book first, and it has really managed to set my expectations quite high!

Dune Messiah takes place twelve years after the first book ended, Paul started a Jihad with the Fremen, and has become the ruler of the galaxy. He is not just an Emperor, but a God for pretty much every planet he has conquered, with a new religion under his name, even if he has lost control of his own quest. He continues regardless, since this is the best outcome his prescience can conceive.

After so many worlds, and billions upon billions of deaths, a resistance develops, old powers such as the Bene Geserit, the Spacing Guild and the Tleilaxu—a new group we hadn’t seen in the original novel—join forces to develop a plan to take down the Emperor once and for all.

This book explores Paul’s inner thoughts dealing with the results on following up with his destiny. Leaving a lot of the war and the barbaric actions as something that already happened, distant from the story as of now.

There are plots within plots, there is a clash between free will and prophecy, there are characters trying to take over, each one with their own agendas. But all of this happens in a rather small scale. At the same time, it feels like future of all the universe is being written on stone.

Honestly, most of the writing is rather difficult to follow, but the weight of each conversations and political move felt huge to me the whole time. Frank’s prose and dialogue style is rather ominous, and sometimes I can see why some consider it to be trying a little too much and feeling rather “edgy”. The truth is I couldn’t stop reading. My only limiting factor this time around was my commute, and the fact I was reading the book in physical format, so I couldn’t sneak a few more pages during work hours like I often do in other books…

Anyway. This book also jumps between different characters and their points of view and inner thoughts in a moment’s notice, sometimes it can be confusing to see whose thoughts we are reading, but it gets easier over time and it allows for a lot of development to happen without the need of repeating a scene from multiple angles, which some other novels may do. It fits Dune, at least.

The plot against Paul from multiple fronts is quite nerve-wracking though, the Bene Gesserit are back, and we also get to see more of the Guild and mentats as well. The Tleilaxu and their methods are a welcome addition to Herbert’s universe, as they are able to perform acts and develop technology that clashes with the ideals of other societies, especially the Fremen, making way for interesting conflicts as Paul has to juggle with it all.

I don’t want to say much more about this one, I am very curious on checking out the last book of the original trilogy of Dune. Paul is really an interesting character, and reading about how everyone celebrates him as a hero in the novels and in the real world, even when his life is pretty much a tragedy continues to boggle my mind, a train-wreck you can’t look away from.

If there are things to critique here, or at least warn about, I’d have to mention the incestuous undertones of some of the scenes regarding Alia (who is Paul’s sister and has become a Goddess for the Fremen and the galaxy at large too), and some weird writing for the female characters who kinda seem to exist to revolve around Paul and lack more development from there (Chani has a very important role and yet we barely see her own perspective on what’s going on?).

Other than that, I was amazed by this read. I didn’t think I’d be able to be enveloped so quickly on Dune’s universe all over again, especially after literally reading a whole space opera series and all the other books since I finished the original.

This review isn’t as grandiose and epic as the one I did for the original Dune, but I think it’s fair to say that this sequal novel is on the same level as the first, if not better!

This is day 65 of #100DaysToOffload

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Note published on November 4, 2026 at 5:08 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-04T17:08:51.000Z

Here’s a small sample of the letters from Democratic members of Congress I’ve covered since Trump took office. Most were ignored, but they laid the groundwork for what they need to do in January.

The House on the Borderland - Joel's Log Files

2026-11-04T16:30:00.000Z

This was my second book of the month of Octoer (even if I actually started it earlier than Left Hand of Darkness) and the spookiest of the three. It’s all about cosmic horror, existential dread, fear of the unknown and all of that mumbo jumbo that is often attributed to H.P. Lovecraft but well, it actually comes from here!

This is an earlier work by William Hope Hodgson, published in 1908 and doing a lot of heavy-lifting for the genre already! A novel that starts out with two rather unimportant characters who end up lost and find an old notebook after exploring the remains of some old building.

The ancient manuscript details the experiences of an old man—our protagonist and unreliable narrator—who lives in a house… on the borderland. The rest of the book is pretty much just the found text, with a couple of footnotes here and there from the characters reacting to it.

All we get is the perspective of this old man as he goes through plenty of supernatural experiences, involving impossible journeys across time and space, abnormal creatures that seek to surround and invade his home, physical phenomena altering the environment around him, encounters with dark and demonic beings in alternate dimensions, and bearing witness to cosmic events beyond comprehension, and quite a lot more.

The narrator is pretty much going insane as the story goes on, more unreliable and difficult to understand. The writing also decays over time, we start to get only fragments and glimpses at whatever may be going on, and all we can do is read what is there and imply the worst.

There are multiple events described here. I don’t think there’s anything truly terrifying about any of them, but the phsycological dread is present, the fear of the unknown is there. The descriptions of the events are rather well done, and those where survival is involved do have quite a bit of tension that builds up quite well.

I have to say that a lot of the events that are more like “visions”, while extremely interesting—and maybe even educational for the 1900s—can drag on for quite a while. Descriptions of planets and stars and cosmic events across incomprehensible amounts of time take a lot of… time, to be fleshed out in the writing. I guess that is kind of the point, and nothing compared to what the character goes through, at least.

One factor to consider is that I had to read most of this book in both English and Spanish. There were a lot of words I didn’t understand in English (mostly related to environment descriptions, and old English expressions) and some words I also didn’t get in my own language (mostly those about parts of old houses or furniture, or words not common in Mexico, since the translation is from Spain). I wish I had kept track of the words just to share examples, but I don’t have any at the moment.

This is another of those books that I can’t really say I enjoyed fully, but that have nonetheless expanded my horizons and brought something new to the table for my experience. I don’t know if I can go through more purely cosmic horror novels, but I have enjoyed it in smaller doses when it is present in other more general works of fiction (like The Expanse, Hothouse, Roadside Picnic and the like), and it’s neat to have see an early version of that. I should probably check some modern works in the genre though, we’ll see!

This is day 64 of #100DaysToOffload

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Published on Citation Needed: "Crypto and AI’s $250 million election goes sideways" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-04T14:14:11.000Z

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

Crypto and AI’s $250 million election goes sideways

The industries’ biggest bets lost almost across the board.

The Left Hand of Darkness - Joel's Log Files

2026-11-04T14:00:00.000Z

This is the first novel I read from Ursula K. Le Guin, and it did not dissapoint.

Published in 1969, it was one of the first works of fiction to meaningfully attempt to tackle society’s gender norms, showing us an alien world where the definition of male or female is not in the equation of how things work.

Gethen—also known as Winter—is a world stuck on an Ice Age, with a rather unique civilization. Our main protagonist is Genly Ai—a human embassador from “Terra” who wants Gethen to join a confederation of planets known as the Ekumen—to share knowledge and exchange ideas.

Unfortunately, the cultural difference proves a big challenge. The Gethenians are ambisexual and androgynous, which is a huge barrier for mutual understanding as this affects every layer of their culture. Genly is a rather flawed protagonist, unable to cope with this reality and constatly letting his preconceptions gain the better of him.

He is aided by Estraven, a Gethenian politician who seems to be the only person in the planet that can see the benefits of establishing a relationship with the Ekumen. However, there is still distrust and many things that he’ll have to deal with in order to help Ai on his missio, such as the political schemes from the nations in power, the conflicts between them, and of course, Ai’s unwillingness to trust him.

The novel is written in a very interesting style. It is more of a report or documentary from the embassador, with additional notes sharing Estraven’s journal and perspective, as well as short stories and tales from Gethenian folklore or scientific investigations that are sometimes unrelated to the main plot.

Everything kind of starts from the middle of things, we don’t get to learn much along our protagonist—we are mostly playing catch up as the plot moves forward. As such, the first half can be very confusing, full of terminology that we can’t quite grasp yet, sudden changes in perspective or switching to random information dumps. I had a rough time getting through some of it, but the chapters were short and I quickly learned to simply accept that I won’t know everything on a first read, and take what happens at face value.

The second half of the novel is much more focused, we get more of the lingo and the perspectives make more sense now that we are familiar with things. The story becomes much more personal and it’s easier to relate to it. The challenges our protagonist face and the way they ought to work together to move forward hooked me all the way to the end of the novel.

Gethen has a very interesting culture, and the queerness of it goes beyond the biology of the Gethenians. The psychology, the nations and how they have developed, the politics of it all, the cold, deadly climate. The world manages to feel grandiose and alive despite the short lenght of this work. I really enjoyed learning about the myths and legends of this place, as well as the perspectives from investigators that came before Ai to this planet.

Some of the concepts here seem to be common in Le Guin’s works, such as the ansible, an instant communication device which is how the planets that are part of the Ekumen stay in contact, or the balance between light and darkness.

Even though this work was pretty progressive for late 60s, it’s important to know it’s still a product of its time. It’s not a book about how society should be, I think it’s better to just see it as the different planet with some things in common and some things very different.

The main character has ideas that are misogynist or ignorant in nature. I think this can lead to some uncomfortable dialogue that is, nonetheless, how some people thought at the time (and even today).

In Gethen, sex is biologically defined and every Gethenian is referred to as he/him. There are similar aspects that aren’t quite what a modern audience would expect, so just be ready for that stuff. It was easy for me to shove aside since the story and main ideas are just great and well, it’s an alien world. Maybe the Gethenian language is like that, or it’s lost in translation, or it just doesn’t matter that much?

I was able to just take things as they are and enjoy the huge effort put into this nivel. Ursula had a background in anthropology and the way even the simplest things said so much was kinda awesome. It was definitely worth the read. It holds up well despite it all—as long as you give it time to cook!

This is day 63 of #100DaysToOffload

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Book Review: Practice by Rosalind Brown ★★★★☆ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-11-04T12:34:07.000Z

I have a simple rule - if I meet someone at a party and they say they've written a book, then I will immediately buy that book. It's a strategy which has worked out well; leading me to some truly interesting and delightful prose.

Rosalind Brown (a fellow UEA graduate) has written a stunning little book. Practice is an almost Proustian meander through a day-in-the-life of a young woman going through an essay crisis. Much like R. F. Kuang's "Katabasis", I'm rather glad the author found university to be a bewildering and, at times, upsetting experience as it provides rich fodder for this tale.

There is an inherent tragedy in studying English literature. The more you read, the more futile it becomes. Just like repeatedly saying a word aloud creates semantic satiation, so to does the repeated reading of sonnets drive away all their meaning. The closer you study a poem the further it slips from your grasp. The more introspective you become, the more you lose sight of what you really want out of life.

As Proverbs 26:11 suggests, some students are like a snake which is compelled to eat its own tail. The protagonist, Annabel, isn't a caricature but she sure is a trope that you've met in halls. She's a woe-is-me wretch who'd rather cultivate a "Heated Rivalry" style interior monologue rather than engage with those around her. So self-absorbed to that she doesn't realise that, not only do other people have feelings, other people are carrying the same burden she does. I suspect her essay research really should have widened to include the seminal "Male gays in the female gaze"!

It's a short novel, but pleasingly thorough. Although there aren't any major twists, I can't say I predicted how the story would evolve and conclude. The punctuation and sentence structure is charmingly idiosyncratic and, I think, perfectly fits the story.

A note on formatting. The ePub has hard page breaks. That means some "pages" contain little more than a paragraph. I suspect that's intentional as it gives a wonderfully staccato pace to the text. Our day is broken up into little moments which don't quite fit the strictures of a chapter, yet we experience the day as a cohesive whole.

An excellent book - but one to read after you've finished your homework.

Note published on November 4, 2026 at 12:28 AM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-04T00:28:56.000Z

got my coffee, got my snacks, ready to watch how crypto and AI’s $250 million campaign finance blitz turns out

flow, found - James' Coffee Blog

2026-11-04T00:00:00.000Z

Flow found in the falling
Amber aurora of Day.
Gentle crisp sounds calling
Memories created, lay.

Fields of colour hold light
In skies and on ground
Memories ever held tight
Created in the round.

Note published on November 3, 2026 at 10:29 PM UTC - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-03T22:29:42.000Z

it’s thoughtful to schedule Election Day during Discount Chocolate Week

Live concert, vacation, Ghibli films - W44 - Joel's Log Files

2026-11-03T20:45:00.000Z

I basically took a whole week off, thus my weeknotes are late as well. I was behind on my Monthly Summary and this had to wait for a little longer. Nothing too bad though.

This week was jam-packed with stuff, lots of updates on things that happened, stuff I bought, places I went to, and food I ate, from October 27 to November 2, 2026!

🛬 I flew on an airplane! It was my first trip in about five (maybe eight) years, and well, even though the trip was only about an hour long, it was still a pretty cool experience to have after such a long time. It is also the first trip I took by myself, given previous trips were with family or friends.
🚘 My trip was to Monterrey! One of the biggest cities in Mexico with over five million people. I think the one thing I realized as an adult compared to my childhood there is the amount of time you spend just stuck in traffic in big cities. Taking like an hour just to go to some place nearby is kind of a pain. Thankfully it’s not the only thing we did there.
🌮 Tried all sorts of food that’s common there and that I had missed lately. One of my favorites is the tostada siberiana, as well as gorditas, tacos de barbacoa, tortas and machaca con huevo. I also tried a coffee shop called Tim Horton which seems to be more popular than Starbucks here, interesting stuff!—there’s none where I live.
📚 There were a couple of book purchases this time around. On the digital realM—via Kobo store—I acquired the Star Wars Trilogy novelizations, Recursion by Blake Crouch, The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, and Making it So by Patrick Stewart. In the physical realm, I picked The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu from my sibling, as well as acquiring The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan and The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis from a local library in Monterrey.
🎲 Also bought a cool Rubik’s cube—if a little expensive—that is actually squishy! That’s the only reason I got it. It actually turns! although it’s an absolute pain to do so, just a nice trinket to have as a cubing enthusiast.
📻 The whole trip I stayed with family friends who I’ve known for decades (they are pretty much aunt and uncle to me). It was pretty cozy. My uncle showed me a whole collection of old coins from all over the country, all over the US, and all over the world. As well as some old tech gadgets and things around his home. I had seen a lot of this during my younger years, but I never really saw the appeal of it at the time. It was nice to find new appreciation for it all.
🎙️ One of the most interesting gadgets was a portable voice recorder, which used micro-cassettes and AA batteries! It still worked just fine and I managed to store my voice on it. My voice stored in physical format! Pretty cool stuff I have to say.
🎶 Went to my first concert! It was a live peformance of the album Eterno (Eternal), featuring Marco Barrientos, Marcos Witt and Marcos Vidal—three of the most influential singers of christian worship music in Spanish. It was all about the evolution of worship from old hymns, choruses, and contemporary songs. The music was amazing, hymns that are centuries old, songs that I’ve heard for decades, some I’ve never listened to before. All along classical instruments beautifully performed, and modern ones later too. It was a wonderful experience for me, I ran out of breath singing along!
👨‍✈️ On my flight back home, it looks like they had oversold tickets, and I was going to have to book another flight. I was already calling people to pick me up when support let me know that someone had canceled their seats, which means I was able to get back home as planned!
🛞 Some friends picked me up from the airport, and on our way back home one of the tires flattened. Unfortunately, the car jack also gave out and we had to wait for some help to come. Thankfully a taxi showed up which let us borrow their car jack and we managed to continue the ride without issue. Quite the way to get home!

A collage of pretty much all I mentioned, the concert, the flight, an old Motorola phone, snacks, food, screen caps, and more!

Watching

🐛🛩️ Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind - WOW WOW WOW. I watched this film on a whim, after hearing so much about it. All I knew is that it was often compared to Dune and NOTHING MORE. I am extremely happy that I went fully blind and ready to be amazed for this one because AMAZE ME IT DID. This movie has it all. Some extremely awesome sci-fi concepts, some fantastic artwork, an incredible soundtrack, a really captivating story, and a beautiful message as well. Give it a go please.

☁️🏰 Castle in the Sky - WOW WOW WOW. I had to keep going on my Ghibli journey and decided to check this. The only thing I knew about it was the name of the floating city is “Laputa”, which is a pretty bad word in Spanish. Other than that I was AMAZED BY THE WHOLE THING AGAIN. I was NOT expecting the direction this wonderful thing took. It really reminded me of Breath of The Wild (and definitely Tears of the Kingdom although I haven’t played it myself yet) and it was so wonderful. Watch Ghibli movies.

💀📓 Death Note - Episodes 7-31. I continued my journey through anime-land by returning and binge-watching some more Death Note. I got through pretty much the whole thing now. Only the last few chapters remain. I definitely feel how the later episodes got a little convoluted and messy compared to the first 25 or so. Nonetheless, I am here for the ride wherever it leads (I already know the manga but I still enjoy the drama that the voice acting and the soundtrack brings).

Reading

🌌🪱 Dune Messiah - Well this book was pretty much already complete last week, I simply went through the last few chapters in half an hour or so, and yeah, that was some crazy stuff that unfolded all of a sudden, ending in the only way it could end. I really enjoyed the build-up and the writing and dialogue, as weird and challenging as it was, it kind of just felt right, I don’t know, but good book!

Gaming

🏰🦇 Castlevania: Symphony of the Night - I gave this a pretty good run while waiting at the airport and played it on and off during my vacation. This game is fantastic so far! Although it definitely has some aspects that you simply have to accept as what they are for the time. I have gotten plenty of unlockables and power-ups and discovered plenty of cool places. I’ve met some interesting characters with kinda whacky dialogue (and voice acting) and managed to get the Bat power-up at last. There are many secrets in this castle!

🗡🎲️ Slice & Dice - There was this very unexpected and huge update to this game that added HUNDREDS of new characters, power-ups, enemies and mechanics. Basically mods made by the community that were added to the base game by the developer. This has been absolutely incredible to see and it makes an already huge roguelike even more chaotic and fun. I am looking forward to doing some more runs of this gem.

Around the Web

I pretty much went offline on my blog reading during all of the week. I could be looking for something to share today but I’d rather not pretend like I read any blogposts. I did watch some YouTube videos though so you can check these:

Gunnm - Battle Angel Alita - Motorball CGI 3D VFX Short 銃夢 - A CGI short film from the year 2000 featuring Alita doing some sick moves. Only three minutes of PS1-style FMV graphics!
Running Minecraft Until It Beats Itself - This was a wild video to watch and I really had fun seeing how everything happened on it. Billions of years of simulation, this is what the internet is all about!
They sold us a lie (and it’s still working) - Putting the blame on climate change on the people rather than corporations and lack of policies, evil stuff!
How are people reading so many books? - I was feeling self-conscious about how I feel happy to have read three books in a month when some people seem to read dozens, but I feel ok now.

This is day 62 of #100DaysToOffload

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Published on Citation Needed: "A crypto and AI money guide to election night" - Molly White's activity feed

2026-11-03T15:49:47.000Z

Published an issue of Citation Needed:

A crypto and AI money guide to election night

Where crypto and AI super PACs are spending, what their ads won’t talk about, and which races could embarrass them.

Just a little AI resistance, as a treat - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-11-03T12:34:31.000Z

At the recent EMFCamp, I bumped in to Professor Kate Devlin who was talking a little about the AI Resist List. I think one of the useful things we can do is loudly complain about shitty uses of AI. Here's an example.

As mentioned in a previous post, I'm contacting companies which send malformed calendar invites. One of the organisation I contacted was the British online supermarket Ocado. They don't have an easy way to contact their technical team, and no obvious paths to raise a bug report, so I filled in their usual customer service feedback form. I included a clear statement of the problem and a detailed technical analysis of why I thought it was a problem with their service.

After sending in my message, I received this back from "Lulu" at Ocado:

Thanks for getting in touch and sharing this feedback about our calendar files.

You're entirely right—having a technical glitch pop up when you're trying to organise your delivery is a real pain, so I've made sure to pass your feedback on to our technical and webshop team.

We really appreciate you taking the time to help us improve our service. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day

I mean, that's AI right? It starts with the classic tell of a sycophantic agreement.

Next up is the em-dash. Beloved by chatbots but almost unheard of in British English style guides.

Finally (and this is hard to quantify) it just doesn't feel like a customer service response. They're usually poorly spelled, have dodgy grammar, and ask a bunch of irrelevant questions. The message gave me no confidence that anyone had looked at the problem and I doubted it had been passed on to a technically competent human.

I immediately got a customer satisfaction survey. Usually I give top marks to humans because, even though Net Promoter Score is bullshit, I don't want customer service agents to suffer the indignity of a bad review. But in this survey I vented my spleen - giving crappy 1 ⭐ scores on every metric and complaining vociferously about how rude it is to use an AI to deal with a genuine complaint.

I was both surprised and delighted to receive this back a few days after my invective was sent:

I saw your survey comment about getting a robotic, AI-generated response previously, and I wanted to reach out personally to apologise. There is nothing more frustrating than pointing out a legitimate bug only to feel like you're talking to a brick wall. I promise you there is a real person typing this out!

Second, I wanted to send a massive thank you for the incredibly detailed diagnostic. It is rare to get feedback that tells us exactly what is broken and how to fix it.

I can assure you that this has been passed to our team to look into. Your feedback is going to make things much smoother for a lot of people, and we really appreciate you taking the extra time to help us get it right.

Thank you again, I do hope that this issue is resolved quickly. If there is anything else I can help with in the meantime, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Perhaps I'm being touchingly naïve, but that feels a lot more human, right? The grammar isn't perfect, the sentences are a bit more rambly, and it appears to have actually engaged with the contents of my message.

I get that having a million irate customer service messages is a hassle. Using AI to triage them probably makes business sense, summarising the verbose ones could be useful for customer service agents, and totting up general themes is almost certainly a sensible way to gather metrics without overloading the workforce.

But using an AI to reply to a human is just disrespectful. It says the organisation values their customer's time at less than their own.

It's OK to call out shitty AI responses and insist that a human engages with you.

The cryptography behind electronic voting (and why paper ballots are still essential) - Trail of Bits Blog

2026-11-03T12:00:00.000Z

As millions of Americans vote in today’s U.S. midterms, most will use paper ballots, which are protected by strict chain-of-custody protocols and, in some cases, statistical audits. You may wonder why we still use paper for our elections and voting systems when tasks like banking, tax filing, and document signing have moved away from paper-based legacy systems and become fully electronic. The short answer: security.

That may come as a surprise to some. After all, cryptography and other security advancements have enabled secure electronic systems for many applications. In fact, cryptography can be used to provide two essential safeguards in elections: keeping (1) individual votes secret while (2) making the final tally independently verifiable. This is exactly the approach of cryptographic protocols like Helios and ElectionGuard. However, Helios intentionally targets lower-risk and lower-coercion settings rather than high-stakes public elections. ElectionGuard, by contrast, is intended for public elections, but not as a replacement for a paper-based system; it is used as a cryptographic layer integrated with traditional voting infrastructure.

In this blog post, we’ll explain how cryptographic techniques can help protect ballot secrecy and prevent manipulation in electronic voting systems, and explore the limitations of these systems. Although cryptography can strengthen election verifiability and have other strong security properties, it cannot fully replace the security and trust of existing paper ballot systems in general elections.

The challenges of electronic voting

The National Academy of Sciences’ excellent 2018 report on election security concludes that electronic ballot return (also known as online voting or internet voting) should not be used in general elections, since “no known technology guarantees the secrecy, security, and verifiability of a marked ballot transmitted over the Internet.”

The difficulty of this problem makes sense when you consider the strong security guarantees any election system requires:

Voter privacy must be maintained, even if a voter has a financial incentive to disclose their vote to a third party.
Ballot integrity must be maintained. This becomes especially challenging in the electronic setting because, in general, the voter does not hold a cryptographic identity and cannot sign their ballot cryptographically. Oh, and the electronic voting client and server may be compromised anyway.
Voters shouldn’t be able to vote more than once, but this is hard to verify without associating votes with their voters. This becomes even more challenging electronically when, again, voters often lack a digital cryptographic identity.
Everyone should be able to trust (and ideally verify) that the election result correctly reflects the voters’ intent.

Paper-based voting systems must solve these problems, too. The first three requirements are typically met through standard physical security measures you see in paper ballot election locations: voters identify themselves to polling workers (preventing multiple votes from one person), are given a ballot without their name on it and a secure location to fill it in (protecting voter privacy), and personally hand their ballot to a polling worker and watch as their ballot is submitted for counting (ballot integrity). As with any security controls, there are threats that can compromise these protections; however, compromising them at a nationwide scale is extremely expensive, difficult, and noisy (i.e., detectable) to election observers, making these controls especially effective for large national elections. The final requirement is the most difficult to achieve for paper-based systems, and voters typically have to trust that election workers compute the final tallies honestly, and that chain-of-custody controls coupled with post-election audits would detect any attempt to compromise the election outcome. Cryptography can be used in conjunction with paper-based systems to help strengthen the trust in this final requirement, using what’s known as end-to-end verifiability, as we will explore later in the post.

Electronic systems introduce an existentially dangerous failure mode not present in modern, sensible paper-based systems: a supply-chain or 0-day vulnerability that can scale across many voting machines and jurisdictions could allow one person to single-handedly control and influence the outcome of an election (and, depending on the system and exact vulnerability, possibly while evading detection). In traditional paper-based systems, this risk is sharply constrained by independent physical records and physical security controls. It’s much more difficult for a single person to meaningfully change an election’s outcome while evading detection in this system.

Software security alone is not enough to secure electronic voting systems, though; the key design principle is not only to implement robust security controls but also to design your system so that all failures of those controls are detectable. This can’t be solved only using software whose correctness must be trusted. This property is known as software independence: changes in the election outcome caused by changes or errors (or vulnerabilities) in voting software must be detectable. In practice, this is typically achieved using evidence that can be verified independently of the voting software, such as a paper ballot audit trail.

Inside the design and cryptographic safeguards of electronic voting systems

Now that we’ve introduced the challenges of electronic voting, let’s explore how modern system designs aim to address them. We will focus our discussion on two electronic voting systems in particular: Helios and ElectionGuard. Helios is a complete voting protocol that targets low-stakes elections where coercion is not a concern. Famously, it is used by the International Association for Cryptologic Research to elect its board of directors. ElectionGuard aims to provide end-to-end verifiability on top of existing election infrastructure, and has been tested alongside systems based on paper ballots in College Park Maryland, Preston Idaho, and Fulton Wisconsin. Let’s look at how these systems use cryptography to provide voter privacy, ballot integrity, and end-to-end verifiability.

Protecting voter privacy

Encryption is a natural choice to preserve voter privacy and ensure that cast votes cannot be read by anyone else: by having the voting client encrypt ballots before they are returned, we protect them from being read in transit. But who controls the key we encrypt to? If we encrypt ballots to a public key controlled by the backend server, it could just decrypt each ballot when it is received, which would immediately reveal how users voted. (Even if the ballot is sent anonymously, the backend would still know how users at a particular voting station voted; it would just not be able to associate individual ballots with the corresponding voters.)

One way of solving this problem is to threshold-share the keypair used for encryption, and split the private key between $N$ trusted election officials. This means that a predetermined quorum $t+1\ \leq N$ of the trustees have to be involved in order to decrypt ciphertexts. Using a homomorphic encryption scheme offers further protection for individual encrypted ballots: it allows the backend to compute an encrypted tally from the encrypted votes and only decrypt the final result. As long as $N-t$ election officials are honest, this protects the confidentiality of cast votes from the voting client to the inclusion in the final tally¹.

${{E}_{K}({x}_{1}+\ \ldots \ +{x}_{N})\ ={E}_{K}({x}_{1})\ \oplus \ \ldots \ \oplus {E}_{K}({x}_{N})}_{}$

With homomorphic encryption, the server can compute the encryption of the sum of the individual votes ${x}_{i}$ as the sum of the encrypted votes ${E}_{K}({x}_{i})$.

Schemes like Helios and ElectionGuard use a version of exponential ElGamal to encrypt individual choices on the ballot². If the threshold-shared election key is $K\ =\ {g}^{k}$, the choice $x$ is encrypted as ${E}_{K}(x)\ =\ ({g}^{r},\ {K}^{r}{g}^{x})$, where $r$ is a random scalar. This scheme is additively homomorphic using pointwise multiplication of ciphertexts, as shown below.

${E}_{K}(x)\ \oplus {E}_{K}(y)\ {=}_{}({g}^{r}{\cdot g}^{s},{K}^{r}{g}^{x}\cdot {K}^{s}{g}^{y})\ =\ ({g}^{r+s},\ {K}^{r+s}{g}^{x+y})={E}_{K}(x+y)$

Exponential ElGamal is additively homomorphic if we define $\oplus$ as pointwise multiplication of ciphertexts.

Note that decryption yields ${g}^{x}$ rather than $x$, which is typically hard to invert. However, since $x$ is comparatively small in this case, we can use brute force (or tables) to recover the exponent.

As an example, if we use 0 to indicate No and 1 to indicate Yes, we can compute the number of Yes-votes by summing the individual encrypted votes as described above, and then decrypting the encrypted tally to reveal the result. However, if we don’t ensure that individual ciphertexts are well-formed, a compromised client could simply encrypt the value 1,000,000 to vote Yes a million times. To prevent this, clients must include a zero-knowledge proof ensuring that the encrypted ballot contains a permitted value (or a permitted combination of values).

Protecting against a compromised voting client

What if the voting client is hacked and alters the voters’ choices before they are encrypted, or drops the ballot completely? To protect against client compromise, the voter needs a way to ensure that the backend received their ballot, and that the choices recorded and encrypted by the software client correspond to how they actually voted.

This can be achieved in different ways. Helios and ElectionGuard use a mechanism known as Benaloh’s challenge method. The underlying idea is that when the ballot is encrypted, the voter obtains a commitment to the encrypted ballot and is then allowed to challenge and spoil their ballot. If they do, the ballot is opened and the voter can verify that their choices were recorded correctly and that the commitment corresponds to the encrypted ballot. The device has to reveal the commitment to the voter before learning whether or not the voter wants to challenge the encrypted ballot. Otherwise, it could present a correct commitment only when it is challenged. Moreover, it must be possible to obtain some external validation that the committed ciphertext actually encrypts the voter’s intended choices. Otherwise, the voting client can simply lie and present a plaintext that doesn’t match the commitment.

When the voter is satisfied that the voting client records their choices honestly, they record their choices one last time and cast their ballot, which is then published to a public bulletin board. The voter can use their commitment to check that their encrypted ballot is included in the published election record.

While this protocol provides a method to detect a compromised voting client that tampers with the voter’s choices or drops ballots, it still requires that a significant portion of voters exercise the mechanism in order to ensure that compromised clients are detected with high-enough probability³. Moreover, it does not protect against other types of compromise, like a voting client surreptitiously sending the voter’s plaintext ballot to a third-party server.

Additional issues must be solved in order for this method to be secure. One is the problem of voter authentication: how does the voting client ensure that the voter is eligible to vote, and how do we ensure that only one vote is cast? Additionally, there is the previously mentioned problem of coercion: how do we protect voters from being strong-armed into voting for a specific candidate or issue when voting stations may be spread out all over the world?

Authenticating voters is generally a difficult problem in countries (like the U.S.) that do not have a widely used national ID. However, there are options available for specific groups of voters. For example, some voting systems designed for overseas military voters use the Common Access Card to allow service members to identify themselves. Protecting voters against coercion typically requires that voters are able to vote without being supervised, which seems like a difficult problem to solve using cryptography.

Protecting against a compromised backend

What if the backend server is faulty or compromised by an attacker? With encryption, the backend aggregates the encrypted votes into an election record, computes the encrypted final tally over the encrypted votes, and then lets election officials decrypt the result. Encryption protects voter privacy, but it doesn’t stop the server from dropping, altering, or injecting votes into the election record. How could we allow voters to verify that this did not happen?

If the election record is public (and we can ensure that everyone shares a consistent view of it), voters can verify that their encrypted vote is included in the record using their commitment to their encrypted ballot, as described above. This provides a mechanism to detect a compromised server which attempts to drop or alter votes. Again, we need to rely on active participation from many voters to ensure that a compromise is detected, since a voter can only detect if their individual ballot has been dropped or tampered with.

ElectionGuard extends this idea to allow voters to detect a change in any of the ballots cast before theirs by chaining ballot commitments generated on the same device. Without chaining, the commitment is essentially computed as a hash of the voter’s encrypted ballot. With chaining, ballot commitments are chained as follows:

${c}_{1}=H({c}_{0}\ ,\ {B}_{1})$ ${c}_{2}=H({c}_{1}\ ,\ {B}_{2})$ ${c}_{3}=H({c}_{2\ },\ {B}_{3})$ $\vdots$

When ballot commitments are computed as a chain, the hash chain is published together with the election record. Here, ${B}_{i}$ is voter $i$’s encrypted ballot.

This means that any changes are propagated forward, allowing voters to detect tampering with earlier votes cast using the same voting client.

Detecting a compromised server that injects additional votes is more difficult and usually requires external data, like voter participation records, to solve. It is not enough to associate encrypted ballots with voter identities, since a malicious server could pad the election record with ballots corresponding to abstaining voters.

Once the election record is trusted, it is possible to use zero-knowledge proofs to verify that the final result is computed correctly from the published election record. Since anyone can compute the encrypted tally from the election record, we only need to prove that the final aggregate ciphertext was decrypted correctly.

What cryptography solves that paper ballots can’t do alone: end-to-end verifiability

Recall our fourth requirement for election systems, which we admitted was most difficult to achieve for paper-based systems: Everyone should be able to trust (and ideally verify) that the election result correctly reflects the voters’ intent.

This requirement is usually formalized in terms of end-to-end verifiability, which means that the following should be possible:

Each voter should be able to verify that their choices have been correctly recorded.
Anyone should be able to verify that the final tally is computed correctly from the election record.

Taken together, these two mechanisms allow voters to independently verify that their vote contributed to the election outcome, without relying on a particular piece of software or hardware (which may be hacked), or external observers (who may not be trustworthy). This property isn’t achievable in exclusively paper-based election systems without introducing some level of trust in humans/institutions overseeing the election. For example, without trusting anyone, how do you know what happens to your paper ballot after you and your vote both leave the voting location? The reason you won’t know this in an exclusively paper-based system is simple: in order to protect vote secrecy, when you submit your ballot to be counted with the other ballots, you intentionally break the link between your identity and your ballot.

Well, using cryptography, you can introduce a mechanism to verify that a cryptographic representation of your vote was included in the election record while still preserving voter privacy! This mechanism is exactly what was described above: encrypt the ballots and publish them to a public bulletin so that voters can privately check that their vote was both included and not tampered with. This allows you to enhance trust in existing paper-based election systems without compromising their security properties. This is the exact design choice behind ElectionGuard.

We won’t be replacing paper ballots any time soon

Helios and ElectionGuard both build on the ideas outlined above, but their use cases differ. Helios explicitly targets settings with low coercion risk and advises against use in high-stakes public elections. ElectionGuard, on the other hand, is built to provide end-to-end verifiability on top of an existing paper-based voting system. Neither protocol makes a general claim to solve the problem of electronic voting because neither achieves the security of status quo paper-based systems purely electronically.

There is widespread agreement among experts on election security that paper ballots are essential for protecting the security and integrity of general elections, and that likely will not change anytime soon. However, cryptographic techniques like the ones described in this post can still be used alongside paper ballots to improve trust in the election outcome by improving the result’s public verifiability and auditability.

If you’re using cryptography to build a new voting system, please reach out. We want to hear about it!

A higher threshold is not always better. Helios requiring all trustees to participate to decrypt the election result caused the IACR to have to rerun their 2025 election after it found that one of the trustees had inadvertently lost their share of the key. ↩︎
Helios and ElectionGuard differ slightly in how they implement encryption. Here, we describe the method used in Helios since it’s closer to standard ElGamal. ↩︎
As an example, if a compromised voting client tampers with 1000 votes, and voters challenge one encrypted vote in one hundred on average, the probability of the attack remaining undetected would be 0.991000 ≈ 4.3 ∙10-5. However, it is also important to consider what recourse a voter has if tampering is detected. This determines whether they are apt to raise concerns, or simply shrug their shoulders and try again. ↩︎

What there is to see - James' Coffee Blog

2026-11-03T00:00:00.000Z

A browning leaf fell from the tree with grace
“I had no idea leaves could be so tiny.”
A large yellow leaf fell into my embrace
“This is my dream – ever colourful and shiny.”

Stacks of leaves lie at the feet of their past
Layers of reds and yellows – veins of time
Ever maturing with life ever vast
From sunrise to evenfall – may Day shine.

Chatbot election answers are dominated by one right-wing dude and an army of AI slop. - Werd I/O

2026-11-02T21:01:38.000Z

Link: How an obscure website became a force in America’s election information machine, by Ian Duncan and Kevin Schaul in the Washington Post

There hasn’t been enough discussion about the proliferation of reference sites that are built not for humans but to influence chatbot answers. Take the Ballot Brief, which was designed to influence questions about the election:

“In tests by The Washington Post, ChatGPT cited the Ballot Brief in 22 percent of its answers to questions about the election. Microsoft’s Copilot cited it in 75 percent of answers. […] Anthropic’s Claude initially turned to established voter guides run by nonprofits — but started frequently linking to the Ballot Brief in The Post’s second round of tests.”

The Ballot Brief is, in itself, built using AI, with one guy — Ben Torres Ezrick — in control. Here in the US, 42% of adults use AI to ask questions, including about the election. That gives Torres Ezrick outsize influence on information people receive that may influence how they use their vote. Given that Torres Ezrick’s most recent position was Chief Marketing Officer at the far-right video streaming service Rumble, that should probably give us some pause.

And even without that potential rightward skew, the Ballot Brief consists of a bunch of content created at scale using AI with little oversight. So inevitably, there are mistakes:

“The Post identified numerous mistakes on the Ballot Brief. Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) was credited with supporting a bill that passed before he took office — an error that Copilot repeated in a response to The Post. Two Robert Garcias running in California were collapsed into one profile. And several House members were listed with incorrect committee jobs.”

The web has already been insufferable for years because of SEO; this has only gotten worse with the rise of AI-generated marketing content. Now it stands to become a battleground as various entrenched interests fight to have their perspectives represented in chatbot results.

Should newsrooms counteract this with their own set of open, validated information? Or is it an unwinnable arms race that is bound to be dominated by moneyed interests? I’m not sure. But the web is certainly no longer just a place for humans to publish and be heard.

Lorem Ipsum Dot Gov Dot UK - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-11-02T12:34:00.000Z

I love testing in production. The thrill of accidentally publishing some dummy data - or taking down an entire website - is similar to skydiving without a parachute. Exquisite excitement followed by heart-stopping terror.

Before going live with a new website or service, it's sensible to test how text looks on it. Most people don't test with readable text - it's too easy for management to start reading the content rather than looking at the layout. So the default is the Latin text "Lorem ipsum". Latin looks enough like English to get a feel for how text will render - but most people can't read it so they gloss over the words and look at the layout.

Say, it sure would be annoying if those dummy pages ever made their way to production, right?!?

One of the things that's fascinating about seeing testing data in a live environment is that you get a small peek behind the curtain of how a site was made. A tiny glimpse into the minds of the people who made it.

Who was Alice? Did she enjoy her time working on the London Councils' website?

Was she friends with Henry at Lambeth council? We may never know.

Some of the placeholders eventually become load-bearing. For reasons which remain inscrutable to those who follow, the Elders declared some pages must remain sacrosanct forever!

What would happen if that page were deleted? Would you dare risk it?

Sometimes finding a test page leads to a dead end. A stub of a page which should have been purged before go-live.

But other times it can lead us to a page hinting at something more. Deeper tests of long-forgotten functionality.

What did those plugins do? Aaaaaaaa indeed!

The purpose of this post isn't to point and laugh, it's to show that searching for dummy data is a good way to find interesting things. It might show you a style-guide, or lead to you to a forgotten and outdated plugin, or it might lead you to an entire pre-production environment.

Finally, this image was on one of the FCDO blog posts. I assume that means it is available under the Open Government Licence and, therefore, I can start T-Shirt production immediately!