Categories
technology

Engaging Ransomware

The perceived value of any particular information system, entity or artefact is directly proportional to the combined resources applied to protect it from unauthorised access. It is only as a function of the most simply-conceived models and idealised frameworks that such a dynamical system could ever remain static and unchanging. The reality is that complex […]

Categories
Philosophy

Can Robots possess Legal Rights?

Context: Experts Sign Open Letter Slamming Europe’s Proposal to Recognise Robots as Legal Persons Robots might be a bit of a stretch for asserting personhood although it does remain somewhat indistinct as to where and when awareness, experience or sentience arise in recognisably “living” things. We may (following, at a distance, something I once read […]

Categories
Philosophy

Facebook is Dangerous

Context: Facebook blocks Australian users from viewing or sharing news I have not used Facebook for years and it is not at all missed. It says a lot for just how rapidly and reflexively people come to depend on the integrated communications systems of “social networks” that the threat of removing access to algorithmically-shaped biases […]

Categories
technology

Ransomware Attacks On Hospitals: Acts of War?

Implicit and endemic grey-zone ambiguities mean that this might never be attributed to anything other than (yet) another heartlessly self-serving criminal enterprise that is leveraging the inflated value of hospitals and health data during a public health crisis. I expect there are some logical and legal hurdles in defining acts of war this way. Not […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology Philosophy

Laws are Tautologies

Circularly self-referential and self-propagating information-processing systems, laws seek certainty by cultivating and generating referential systems which possess no ultimate or external authority, beyond those axiomatic  assumptions upon which they are built. A certain necessity and importance of rectitude might be asserted from within any such hyper-inflating referential space but the ultimate authority that laws assert […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Countering Fake Brands

This issue of Fake Brands and commercial “knock-offs” represents interesting problem. These clearly exist on a spectrum that begins with the dodgy Rolex bought from a street vendor and ends with potentially life-threatening fake medicines. Most solutions appear to be retrospective, reactive and post facto attempts to influence behaviour or punish those purposefully profiting from […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Arms Race in Space: Governance of Technology or Technology of Governance?

I fear that the introduction of rules, prescriptive boundaries and frameworks will not inhibit the militarisation of this context so much as positively incentivise it, the culture and history of adversarial psychology being what it is.  A line must certainly be drawn in the sand, but it seems that most of these (kinds of) prohibitions […]

Categories
technology

Cyber Security and Governance: to Centralise or not to Centralise?

Cyber security is a fascinating and rapidly evolving problem-space. What possible solutions exist in regards to coordinated governance and oversight? If a centralised software and hardware development methodology iss used – compliance to formal standards could be assured but the (logically and materially inevitable) emergence of vulnerability and exploit would mean that this systemic coherence […]

Categories
Uncategorized

Missing Images on this Blog

If you find references to images which are missing, please comment on the post – I will tidy it up. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Categories
culture

Europe in Disarray

Negotiating the accelerating metamorphosis of systemic change is a problem of global salience which appears rather poorly catered for by the leviathan of legacy organisational and heuristic solutions.

Categories
Philosophy

On Ethics

The implicit inconsistency of sufficiently complex logical systems implies that ethical systems, abandoned by the metaphysical anchor of immanent divinity, must seek their own internal anchors and logical certainty.