Recent content on Five Blockchains
The report of the European Parliament’s commission to investigate ECHELON was released in 2001. Despite showing that ECHELON merged US signal intelligence work with economic and industrial espionage, 9/11 overshadowed any potential for a political response. In 2013 Edward Snowden revealed the existence and functions of a new iteration of mass surveillance programs. He said at the time…
Much ink has been spilled on the negative externalities of optimizing for attention. Or whether they were externalities at all, given the politics of our tech oligarchs. The zone has definitely been flooded with shit, that’s for sure. The logical next step, it seems to me, is to optimize for the next big thing: loneliness. Why own just the mind if you can own the soul? Commercially it makes…
Actually maybe there is. You just need to compress the word a bit. In 2025 Claude Code and Opus replaced my IDE as a daily driver. I could do things I could not before and the results were often great. The writing was not only on the wall, it kinda tore the whole thing down. Software development as I knew it, as an intellectually stimulating and viable economic activity, would be over, soon.
Platforms1 like Spotify are market actors that are culturally and economically relevant in ways that other capitalistic actors are not. The case for Spotify specifically is authoritatively made in Liz Pelly’s “Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist”. Generally their lifecycle can be approximated through Cory Doctorow’s enshittification…
Nitro Enclaves are the AWS take on Trusted Computing Environments (or TPE). Running a workload inside such an enclave enables two things: The only possible interactions between host and workload take place over services exposed over the vsock interface. The workload can prove to external services that it’s indeed running inside a Nitro Enclave. The first point is relatively straightforward. Nitro…
Keeping communication secure is a complex goal. It is already tricky to execute for technical or mature organizations. This makes it usually very challenging for non-technical and smaller structures. However, there are smaller or non-technical organizations that have significant, sensitive data to protect, such as professional healthcare associations, small NGOs, etc. PGP is a household name for…
The discourse around “ChatControl” (and friends) is dominated by absolutes. Catastrophic scenarios of criminals “going dark” vs. the government’s all-seeing eye prying open your phones to fight through crimes. While catastrophizing has some attractive characteristics, the position that privacy is absolutely sacrosanct and trumps everything is not realistic. It would imply that private companies…
This is just another blog covering various themes in various depths. I mostly use it as additional context for conversations happening in independant streams. The name draws inspiration from the initial design of the German implementation of the digital (COVID-19) vaccine passport. An IBM-led group designed the system, bypassing regular tender processes through a “Dringlichkeitsvergabe” (or…
Charging an electrical vehicle (EV) takes more time than fuelling a traditional car with an internal combustion engine (ICE). The exact time it takes depends on various factors: Battery size (e.g. 74kWh) and the difference between the current (e.g. 10%) and the desired charge (e.g. 90%1) Type (AC2 or DC) and maximum output (e.g. 22kWh for AC or 300kWh for DC) of the charger Maximum charge accepted…