Things I write in English
There has been a great deal of talk about Palantir Technologies, which leads me to suspect that a crusade is either being prepared or is perhaps already underway. And crusades against multinational corporations are always easy: they are large, visible, impersonal targets, and therefore perfect for projecting onto them every kind of moral anxiety or political paranoia.
Writing science fiction often means confronting questions that, when pursued far enough, end up looking remarkably like problems in theoretical physics. And sometimes it even forces one to search for solutions credible enough not to make the entire narrative edifice collapse the moment it meets a reader with a passing familiarity with relativity.
One of the things I have been noticing with increasing clarity over the past few years, every time “digital security” comes up, is that a growing part of the problem is not actually being solved by companies at all: it is simply being redistributed onto end users.
Google’s decision to impose a KYC framework on developers is making a certain impression online. In practical terms, this means that Google is progressively requiring that anyone distributing Android apps — not only on the Google Play Store, but increasingly outside it as well — must be verifiably identified, with a legal name, address, real contact details, and in many cases official documents or corporate data.
On April 25th — Italy’s Liberation Day, commemorating the end of Fascism and Nazi occupation — the usual clash surrounding the so-called Jewish…
Today, purely by chance, I noticed that mastodon.social has blocked me. It’s quite interesting, because after looking around online I found, essentially, the supposed “reasons” for this action, and honestly I’ve been laughing about it all morning, precisely because the whole thing borders on the grotesque.