Earlier this week I was in Brussels talking about Privacy at the European Parliament – which is nothing unusual, especially as today is Data Privacy Day and this week is often referred to as Privacy Week in Brussels. What did surprise me though was a change in behaviour I noticed with the official Twitter iOS […]

Well, I’ve now been added to another Twitter list (see Twitter: a numbers game for kudos and scamming for an introduction). At this moment I’m included in 116 lists – the vast majority of which are simple scams. The number goes up and down a bit. When I don’t follow the parent account, I’m removed […]

It’s a shame that Twitter has been reduced to a numbers game: “Oh, look how many followers I’ve got;” or “See, I have many more followers than followings.” At its best it’s just a variation of the age-old macho game of ‘my big red Porsche is bigger than your big red Porsche’. But at its […]

Recently I wrote an article about Amazon and other companies opening European Datacentres in an attempt to mitigate concerns over mass surveillance by the NSA and other intelligence agencies.  The general point is that because these companies are US owned, they are still vulnerable to US law irrespective of where they physically host and process […]

Am I sad or what? I see this wonderfully inspiring quote on Twitter: and I think, “That’s one choice.”

Though Twitter goes to great lengths to thwart fake bot accounts, spam bots are pervasive throughout the Twitter ecosystem. Whether it is a 6,000+ real and verified twitter followers (yeah, right!) for $5.00 over at Fiverr or a flat 6 month $49.99 subscription at Twitter Supremacy  — bots come in all flavors —  You can buy a set […]

February 1, 2015 “The British military,” the Independent reported yesterday, “is setting up a specialist force modelled on the Chindits, the commandos who gained renown through their daring missions behind enemy lines in Burma during the Second World War.” But this force is not simply designed to get behind ISIS lines and fight Orde Wingate’s […]

Over the last week I decided to start a new project mostly as a proof of concept but also down to curiosity as to how easy/difficult it would be – I decided to try to make myself a secure phone. Hardware-wise it was fairly simple, I have an old HTC Desire handset which has been […]

Why does someone who offers to get you 5000 Twitter followers for just $29 have just 135 followers himself? I wonder if I could interest him in a low-cost self-marketing course…

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