March 2024
Since I’m currently sailing joyously through the final revision of a second edition of Anything But Accidental (the subject line is a quote from that novel, by the way), this month I was going to say very little and simply include this link to an article about “enshittification”. Revisiting the link, I see that the Financial Times now wants me to subscribe, so it may not let you in either. If that’s the case, I’ll at least define enshittification very briefly by quoting the author, Cory Doctorow:
“It’s my theory explaining how the internet was colonised by platforms, why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, why it matters and what we can do about it. We’re all living through a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit. It’s frustrating. It’s demoralising. It’s even terrifying.”
The article pretty much sums up my feelings about tech at the moment, with the difference that the guy actually knows what he’s talking about. He even takes us back to the grand era of deregulation, when so many things seemed to start going wrong:
“Reagan and Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 1980s. But it’s awake, it’s back and it’s pissed off.”
And, unlike most of my ramblings, the article has a positive message!
Jumping forward to this week, you may have seen headlines such as “US and UK unveil sanctions against Chinese state-backed hackers over alleged ‘malicious’ attacks”. It was obligatory reading for me, of course, since hacking is central to the first Backdoor Angels novel. But right now, I’m reeling from my own close encounter with the issue.
A couple of days ago, we drove to Madrid. After a hot shower and a cold beer and just before crawling into bed, I checked emails. One of them said I needed to update some plug-ins on my website for security issues. I was tired, but I did it to pass the time. The following morning, I received a message from my website – apparently from myself! These quotes from the email give the general idea:
“We have hacked your website https://matthewkipwell.com and extracted your databases … We will systematically go through a series of steps of totally damaging your reputation … We are willing to refrain from destroying your site’s reputation for a small fee. The current fee is $3000 in bitcoins …”
In other words, I was being blackmailed! The perpetrators of the hack went on to explain how I could get hold of bitcoins and how to make the payment.
The good news is that I don’t have a database on my website, so the claim that they had been able to extract my “entire database and move the information to an offshore server” rang hollow. And then there was the question of my “reputation”. Without being blasé about the incident, I wonder if the “any publicity is good publicity” rule would apply here?
I’ll keep you posted.
Meanwhile, here’s a short article about the destruction of a Waymo “fully autonomous car” in San Francisco last month. I still think driverless cars are the future, but not everyone agrees, do they?
And finally, congrats to SpaceX on the third Starship test, which lasted longer and did more stuff than the previous test before things exploded. The pictures from the ship were great. And it’s the absolute opposite of normal “reality TV”, isn’t it? Instead of being really cheap, it’s incredibly expensive!
Until next month – as long as my reputation is still intact!