You gotta use Microsoft for this. You must use Microsoft for that. If you want an alternative to Microsoft then legions of corporate goons insist that nothing can be done without Microsoft. Their complacency and slavish conformity is dangerous for society, and today is the proof.

Yesterday's news: UK inquiry says many died of COVID-19 because of the failure to plan appropriately for large-scale civil emergencies. Today's news: nothing works because it all runs on Microsoft. You might hope that people will see the connection but they probably won't.

Whenever I feel sad, I cheer myself up by logging on to Twitter and muting one hundred people who are infinitely sadder than me.

Thanks and Goodbye: Commsrisk Ends Today - buff.ly/3WvITJL Commsrisk has published 3,442 articles about the risks faced by comms providers and their customers over the course of 17 years and 9 months. These are the last words.

A lying PR firm shared this bullshit today: "18% of consumers saying they’ve been targeted by an AI deepfake voice and 61% of UK consumers targeted by a robocall in the past 3 months, according to new data from Hiya  (under embargo)." Fuck their embargo. Blatant scaremongering.

Canadian journo clods (1) demand payment from social media sites when users share links to their work (2) complain that Meta saved money by having no links (3) do research that shows they scored a huge own goal. But they still draw the wrong conclusion about who is being an ass.

The goal of censorship is not word control. The goal of censorship is thought control. But nothing will ever stop people having bad ideas. Censorship only engineers a temporary and arbitrary preference for some bad ideas over other bad ideas. Censorship is itself a bad idea.

No, because I live in the UK. It is amazing how cheap and easy it is to eliminate major categories of spam by simply making them illegal. Perhaps somebody in the USA should try it for a change. The selfishness of US politicians is a root cause of the US spam and scam epidemic.

Re-education time for BBC fans. Huw Edwards never existed. They crowed that he was a national treasure. He epitomized the reasons to trust the BBC. He was well worth half a million of taxpayer's money each year! But soon they won't remember who he was. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

This doesn't justify the claim that businesses acted unlawfully by choosing not to advertise on X. They may choose where they advertise, for any reason they please. The alternative is to compel them to make a purchase. That would be the antithesis of free choice and free speech.

The new Labour government is pressuring social media to censor more content. But its MPs lack the discipline to choose their own words wisely. This illustrates why censorship always leads to double standards.

LLMs should be trained using the output of toxic partisans on social media. Then the toxic partisans who are wasting their lives by writing that crap can replace themselves with AI bots. And everybody who was influenced by it can realize they were behaving like robots too.

From my feed this morning. This upsets me, not because of the message, but because of the process by which it spread. Conformity is the friend of authoritarianism. It's easy for a mob to demand censorship when individuals attach no value to expressing their own thoughts.

Disney have sunk so low. It is despicable that Disney's lawyers are arguing that customers who sign up to the terms of the Disney+ streaming service have waived the right to sue Disney in court for a *wrongful death* caused by a theme park restaurant. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

In 2020, this activist demanded censorship of opinions he disliked. 3 days ago, he was arrested on 37 charges including: raping a child; conspiracy to kidnap a child; making and distributing child porn photos. Campaigning against 'hate' does not make someone fit to be a censor.

The first of the new Commsrisk weekly news bulletins is not weekly... because we were away for over a month. But that just makes it more important to read if you want to know what is really happening with comms risks in the US, China, India and France. commsrisk.com

FCC Comissioner Carr highlights how judges rationalize interference with free speech by claiming electorates would have voted differently if they had not been 'misled'. No objective facts can support a supposition like this; they do not belong in an impartial legal system.

Tugendhat shafted publicity for the Global Fraud Summit by issuing a controversial statement about military spending on social media just beforehand, knowing the press would ask him about war in Europe instead of fraud during his TV interviews on the morning of the Summit.

If you understand corruption, then you understand why some of the most corrupt people pretend to be fighting corruption. If you understand disinformation, then you understand why some of the most committed disseminators of disinformation pretend to be fighting disinformation.