Tech Talks, Privacy Backdoors and DEI

I attended DDD Melbourne last weekend which was well worth the very reasonable price of entry. It has a pretty unique vibe for these sorts of conferences and there was certainly plenty of energy and had quite an engaging sense of community which is much nicer than some of the more corporate conferences I attend.

I'm starting to slowly make my way through this list of the 100 most watched tech videos of 2024. Ok, so I've only watched the first one, but it was a really great rundown on the history of Large Language Models without the usual hype.

Skype is dead, which is primarily notable because no one noticed. It's wild to think how ubiquitous it was just 10 years ago. I lived in London in the early 2010s and used Skype just about every day at the time for work and personal stuff.

The copyright side of the AI debate has gone a bit quiet of late as the major players have largely settled for large sums of money to avoid the copyright infringement issue being tested in the courts. Until now, but perhaps not in the fashion one might expect. Thomson Reuters has successfully won a case against legal AI startup Ross Intelligence for reproducing legal research by Thomson Reuters owned law firm Westlaw.

An while we're on AI, it's probably worth mentioning that it is making us dumber. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this research is that it was conducted by Microsoft who owns 49% of OpenAI. I also found this video about indirect prompt injection quite fascinating.

While the domain name makes me cringe a little, privacy.sexy is essentially a long list of shell scripts you can run to cover your tracks which I'm pretty into. Speaking of which, given big tech's cosying up to the Trump administration, I've been thinking a lot about my own data sovereignty lately. I'm pretty deep in the Apple ecosystem, but given their recent cosying up to the Trump administration, they've lost a lot of trust with me, most recently by attempting to scrap it's DEI initiatives, something that was stopped by their board. So I've been side eyeing Framework laptops. My M1 MBP has got quite a few years of life left in it, but it just could be the year of Desktop Linux for me when I next need a new laptop.

In Apple's defence, pulling the Advanced Data Protection (ADP) from iCloud in the UK due to the UK Government insisting on a backdoor is the right move. If there's a backdoor, it's not encrypted so you can't sell it as such.