📢The SCOttish Networking Event (SCONE) have their next meeting @abertayuni.bsky.social Date: 29 October Time: From 12pm Venue: Abertay cyberQuarter Register to give a talk or to meet with other networking and systems researchers in Scotland ⬇️ scone.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/meetings-2/s...

Strangely compelling

AI Darwin Awards 2025 - Celebrating Spectacularly Bad AI Decisions aidarwinawards.org

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

here's my controversial take: i’m finding some sensational predictions about when the AI bubble will burst as unhelpful and unrealistic as some of the AGI predictions. hear me out 1/

AOL To Discontinue Dial-Up Internet theonion.com/aol-to-...

The computers will cease screaming. All will be quiet for a while. With the unease of a quiet toddler, you just know something is about to happen and it's not good.

A policy for the use of LLMs in government is much needed 👇

#AgeVerification: what's the harm? In which I distill a lot of casual pub chats I've had with friends into a layperson's guide to the #OnlineSafetyAct. What it is, the problems it causes, and why you should definitely care. www.girlonthenet.com/blog/age-ver...

Putting aside the debate about the value that LLMs may provide, there are strong arguments that politicians, or others in senior leadership or policy setting roles, should not be using public cloud-based LLMs. 1/

"Plagiarism-as-a-Service" This is a cracking long read.

Your occasional reminder that VPNs are just someone else's internet connection and are riddled with their own risks. If you're going to use a consumer VPN, at the very least use a paid-for one that might be a bit less likely to collect loads of data and sell it on.

“to honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”

We are pleased to offer a number of Diversity Travel Grants to support early-career academics and PhD students to attend the IRTF meetings co-located with the IETF-124 Meeting in Montreal, Canada, in November 2025. More details at irtf.org/travelgrants/ Application deadline: August 1st

Excellent set of talks at #IETF123 on measuring and understanding the impact of AI crawler traffic on websites and to what extent crawlers respect opt-out mechanisms such as robots.txt datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/123/...

Dunno, but I’m quote-boosting this article without reading it 🤷‍♂️

Given that we’re in a time when the US is laying the groundwork to declare information about basic human reproduction and contraception to be “age inappropriate” - but hey, it’s not like I warned about that several years ago in a job that couldn’t afford to extend a 12 month £28k contract.

The Applied Networking Research Workshop 2025, co-located with IETF-123 in Madrid, will take place on Tuesday, July 22nd. I will feature a keynote by Laurent Vanbever and exciting paper presentations. Check out the program here: irtf.org/anrw/2025/pr...

Once more at the Cosener’s House coseners.net/coseners-2025/

All credit to the shop in Glasgow city centre this morning playing Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” into the street at volume - only 175 shopping days to go!

"Three Thoughts on AI Governance" and how it relates to Internet governance csperkins.org/standards/20... #IGF #IGF2025

We are pleased to offer a number of Diversity Travel Grants to support early-career academics and PhD students to attend the IRTF meetings co-located with the IETF-124 Meeting in Montreal, Canada, in November 2025. More details at www.irtf.org/travelgrants/

👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

New paper hot off the press www.nature.com/articles/s41... We analysed over 40,000 computer vision papers from CVPR (the longest standing CV conf) & associated patents tracing pathways from research to application. We found that 90% of papers & 86% of downstream patents power surveillance 1/

Silent conferences: all the benefits of a full day video conference – with added travel!

I’m in Oslo for the UN Internet Governance Forum, starting tomorrow. If you’re also attending, please do join me, and my colleagues from the IAB and Internet Society, on 24 June for Networking Session #138 "Tech & Policy: Building Bridges in Internet Governance" csperkins.org/standards/20...

Solstice

“Why Effective Digital Governance Begins with Understanding the Internet Itself” - a useful reminder, ahead of #IGF2025 next week, on why it’s important to be clear about the difference between the Internet, and uses of the Internet, in policy discussions labs.ripe.net/author/hisha...

Sad news - RIP

We are hiring at @uniofstandrews.bsky.social! If you know anything about computer networks and fancy working somewhere with a nice bunch of colleagues and a nice bunch of beaches (see my photo evidence at bsky.app/profile/tnhh...) then please see www.vacancies.st-andrews.ac.uk/Vacancies/W/...

An IRTF Retrospective – in which I reflect upon my time as Chair of the IRTF csperkins.org/standards/20...

so i spent the weekend fucking around with the latest chatgpt build working through its text analysis/synthesis capabilities and hoooooooo boy i have a bunch of complicated thoughts.

"If your decentralised protocol is missing features, the market will add them with centralisation." — @goat.navy *This*: - is why why the web was captured; - is why email became concentrated; - is why ActivityPub, as defined today, isn't capture-resistant.

For two decades, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) has provided a platform for collaboration and cooperation between Internet stakeholders and driven tangible progress in the Internet’s resilience, reach, and trust. 1/2

This is the core of it. In the 20th century, verification happened inside institutions. Now, it has to happen in us. A short thread on what that shift really means, and why it has to start in schools. 🧵

I talked to 15 teachers/professors about how AI and ChatGPT is ruining their lives: www.404media.co/teachers-are...

yep, the survey is a small part of the larger research. We're also analysing current institutional polices, working with computer scientists, and a range of other stakeholders. And we'll be bringing the work back out for peer review too.

The aim of the research is to identify and highlight all of those issues, making them visible to anyone involved in the REF. Hence we need people to flag them as issues, so that our report can show the feelings from the sector.

Hopefully this is not being seriously considered, given the propensity of Gen AI tools to hallucinate and produce inaccurate summaries and analysis

At #IETF122 Bangkok, a special session about the upcoming World Summit on Information Security (WSIS) 20 year review provided an overview of how the IAB is engaging in this opportunity to recommit to the multistakeholder approach to Internet governance: www.ietf.org/blog/technic...

It was a privilege with work with my Internet Society colleagues on this importance cause -- protecting encryption for all Internet users! "Encryption Under Threat: The UK’s Backdoor Mandate and Its Impact on Online Safety" www.internetsociety.org/blog/2025/05...

Or to put it another way, overseas students now subsidise the cost of teaching each UK undergraduate by an average of £2,500 each. Take them away and you've got an absolutely existential crisis for universities. www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/pol...

this is a great thread, and it would be good to figure out a syllabus for "CS as politics."

Boaz is a colleague and someone I admire immensely. Despite that, as a computer scientist, I think he has terribly missed the mark in this op-ed. Our nation is in dire circumstances now, and we computer scientists bear a share of the blame. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/02/o...

💯. Why does almost no one in the public know this though? If you think about it, the government’s creation of the internet is probably one of the greatest policy achievements and worst communication failures of all time.

“Generative AI is the perfected nihilistic form of tech bubbles” – www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/ #rant

Spotted on my walk to work this morning:

It is Coseners time of year again. If you are doing internet research in the UK I am sure you know what I mean. coseners.net The 37th event. Heavily subsidised for students and great fun. If you do internet research come along, it's never dull.