New year, new me

Nah, not really. Still miles behind and lots of tabs open to tell you about.

Fittingly 'Enshittification' has been dubbed Word of the Year in Australia by the Macquarie Dictionary. I've been a big fan of the word, coined by nerd royalty Cory Doctorow (who I once had the privilege to meet very briefly in London). You can see his own Defcon talks on the topic here and here as well as a good read on it here (which I may have linked to before). In a related post, here's why we can't have nice software (with bonus AI shitposting).

A fitting counter point to the enshittification of everything is W3C's Ethical Principals which are an excellent reminder of how the internet should and could be done.

In other enshittification news, it would see that more employers are forcing employees back to the office, and they're losing a lot of talent as we result. I'd be be immediately looking for a new job if my employer imposed such a regime.

Molly White has a good breakdown of Elon Musk's attacks on Wikipedia. As always, well documented and well reasoned - I could probably take a leaf our of White's book. Her piece on big publishers hating libraries is similarly worth a read. Much like Wikipedia the Internet Archive is such a hugely important resource. Please give them both as much money as you can spare. Here's Wired's write up of the case.

The CISA no less, have recommended that everyone start using end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal. No shit. It comes after the Salt Typhoon hack of major US communications carriers, but Chinese hackers have also managed to pop the US Treasury Department. A gentle reminder that encryption backdoors are a terrible idea and should never have even been suggested.

I wanted to say a massive shout out to Anthony "decryption" Agius for his many years of service writing the Sizzle. Lord knows these blog posts have borrowed heavily from everything he's written. I love where Cam Wilson is talking things already as he takes over the reigns. If you want one of the better takes on the Australian Tech scene, I highly recommend signing up for The Sizzle.

And finally, on a personal note, my Dad retired from wine making last year. Here's a nice write up of his time running a vineyard in the Otway hinterland.