Loose links
Hermes Agent, and Hermes Agent. Both new to me, but look important because it’s open-source personal AI. Not clear yet on the difference.
Privacy Manifesto. Wrote it years ago. Does it need an update?
Reckoning with the Political Economy of AI: Avoiding Decoys in Pursuit of Accountability, by Janet Vertesi, danah boyd, Alex S Taylor, and Benjamin Shestakofsky. The abstract begins,
The Project of AI is a world-building endeavor, wherein those who fund and develop AI systems both operate through and seek to sustain networks of power and wealth. As they expand their access to resources and configure our sociotechnical conditions, they benefit from the ways in which a suite of decoys animate scholars, critics, policymakers, journalists, and the public into co-constructing industry-empowering AI futures. Regardless of who constructs or nurtures them, these decoys often create the illusion of accountability while both masking the emerging political economies that the Project of AI has set into motion, and also contributing to the network-making power that is at the heart of the Project’s extraction and exploitation.
Please do
Don Marti: Insulating people from fake consent. Hard to pick which great section to excerpt, so I’ll just give you the bottom lines:
Some folk privacy practices are ineffective or out of date, but coming up with some way to “get this annoying banner out of my face” is a solid basis to build on.
But sites aren’t going to abandon their existing investment in fake consent unless they have to. Whatever people come up with to implement MyTerms is going to have to block fake consent too. The tinyMyTerms demo implementation of MyTerms uses an standard ad blocker, something that people need anyway and that most people in the USA already have.
Doc’s call to action is at the bottom of that blog post so check it out.
Long Wave Goodbye
In radio, the longest waves go farthest along the ground. This is why the longwave band was so important in the early days of radio. France’s national station on 162 kHz and Germany’s on 153 kHz both covered all of Europe and beyond, for many decades. Both those are gone now. And soon the UK’s own giant, Radio 4 on 198 kHz, will also disappear.
But you can still listen to the last of it, if you like, on personal radios exposed on the Net. They’re called SDRs, for Software Defined Radios. Nearly all use the same KiwiSDR software, and work the same way. Go to https://rx.skywavelinux.com/, pick one of the markers, and listen around. (Some SDRs are better than others. Check out several.)
Here is one in Skipsea on England’s east coast, north of Hull:
http://vy2hf.proxy.kiwisdr.com:8073/
Enter 198 in LW (for longwave) or AM (which it is), and hear the last of the service. To get the best sound, you may have to adjust the width of the dial marker by pulling out the two green flanks of the central frequency on the radio’s dial.
I’ve also listened to Radio 4 on 198 over this SDR at night in Canada’s Prince Edward Island: http://vy2hf.proxy.kiwisdr.com:8073/
It’s fun to listen to that one at night for AM stations in the Northeast US and eastern Canada.
I was a devoted radio listener (and worked for a while on the station side) for most of my life. DXer too. But broadcasting is being eaten alive by podcasting on the talk side and streaming on the music side. What’s left is What’s On: the live stuff. Games. News. Church services. But not much else. It’s a death march. Wrote about that here: https://doc.searls.com/2025/05/05/the-offing-of-whats-on/
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