tracking my digital footprint

Over the past 25 years of tracking my digital footprint, I’ve accumulated approximately 2.1 TB of personal data. This includes around 170 GB of documents (75,000 files, excluding emails), 1.6 TB of videos dating back to 2004 (11,000 clips), and 380 GB of photos taken since the 1990s (64,000 images, not counting my analogue archive of about 15,000 prints). This isn’t just a technical archive—it’s a living record of my experiences, creativity, and personal history. ...

April 19, 2025 · 1 min · 156 words · bjr

The Historical, Philosophical & Cultural Dimensions of Biometric Identity Verification

Biometric identity verification has deep historical, philosophical, and cultural roots that go beyond mere technology. From ancient philosophical inquiries into the nature of self to modern discussions on ethics and privacy, the concept of identity has been a subject of ongoing debate. Understanding these dimensions is crucial as biometrics become increasingly integrated into our daily lives, influencing societal norms, practices, and public perception. Contemporary perspectives on identity, influenced by thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, challenge fixed notions and emphasize its fluid and dynamic nature. As we navigate this evolving landscape, it’s essential to consider the ethical, legal, and social implications of biometric technologies, ensuring they align with our values and respect individual autonomy. ...

April 19, 2025 · 1 min · 123 words · bjr

The first Blockchain firewall

Fuse and Check Point are tackling one of blockchain’s most significant challenges: the constant threat of hacks and cyberattacks that have cost crypto platforms over $2.2 billion in 2024 alone, eroding trust and slowing adoption. Traditional security methods, such as smart contract audits and post-incident monitoring, haven’t been enough to stop increasingly sophisticated threats targeting wallets, smart contracts, and decentralised apps. To solve this, they’re building the first real-time, AI-powered blockchain firewall—a proactive security layer that continuously monitors network activity, identifies malicious transactions, and blocks them before they can cause damage. By leveraging Check Point’s decades of threat intelligence and prevention technology, this solution aims to set a new industry standard, protecting the entire Fuse blockchain and paving the way for safer, more scalable Web3 payments and applications. ...

April 19, 2025 · 1 min · 138 words · bjr

Quantum Showdown: China’s Zuchongzhi-3

China’s Zuchongzhi-3 quantum computer and Google’s Willow processor represent two contrasting approaches in the race for quantum supremacy. Both 105-qubit superconducting systems push computational boundaries but prioritize different technical milestones. Zuchongzhi-3, developed by Chinese researchers, demonstrates remarkable raw computational power. In a demanding random circuit sampling task, it processed one million samples using 83 qubits over 32 cycles in just a few hundred seconds—a feat that would take the world’s fastest classical supercomputer billions of years to replicate. This achievement highlights China’s rapid progress in scaling up quantum hardware and achieving unprecedented quantum speedup. ...

April 18, 2025 · 1 min · 169 words · bjr

Future of jobs 2015 - world economic forum

Technological change, geoeconomic fragmentation, economic uncertainty, demographic shifts and the green transition – individually and in combination – are among the major drivers expected to shape and transform the global labour market by 2030. On current trends over the 2025 to 2030 period job creation and destruction due to structural labour-market transformation will amount to 22% of today’s total jobs. This is expected to entail the creation of new jobs equivalent to 14% of today’s total employment, amounting to 170 million jobs ...

April 18, 2025 · 2 min · 290 words · bjr

Building the Future of AI: How Agent2Agent and MCP Are Unlocking Interoperability

As the agent ecosystem rapidly evolves, interoperability is emerging as the foundation for scalable, secure, and collaborative AI. Industry leaders—including Google, Anthropic, Cisco, and others—are actively building open standards like Agent2Agent (A2A), Model Context Protocol (MCP), and AGNTCY to ensure agents from different vendors and platforms can discover, communicate, and work together seamlessly We’re at a pivotal moment where these standards are becoming the essential building blocks for the “Internet of Agents,” much like HTTP and TCP/IP did for the web. This collaborative push for interoperability aims to break down silos, accelerate innovation, and create a robust, trustworthy AI ecosystem that benefits enterprises and developers alike ...

April 18, 2025 · 1 min · 149 words · bjr

OpenAI - a systemic risk to the tech industry?

Despite a $40 billion funding round, only $10 billion is secured, with the rest contingent on converting to a for-profit model. OpenAI is burning billions, potentially $14 billion in 2025 alone, due to high compute costs and infrastructure investments like the Stargate data center. SoftBank’s financial health is also at risk due to its significant investments in OpenAI, leading to potential asset sales. OpenAI’s high spending and increasing costs raise concerns about its long-term sustainability. ...

April 18, 2025 · 1 min · 90 words · bjr

A cult of ignorance

In 1980, Isaac Asimov penned a brief yet powerful opinion piece that feels strikingly relevant today. A visionary of technological futures, Asimov captured—with unsettling clarity—the mindset shaping our current era. Cult of ignorance

April 18, 2025 · 1 min · 33 words · bjr

the Cypherpunks mailing list

In the early 1990s, as the internet was beginning to shift from a government and academic experiment into a globally connected system, a quiet revolution was forming among a small but determined group of mathematicians, programmers, and digital activists. They saw what few others did: that the very architecture of this new digital realm could become either a tool of unprecedented freedom — or a mechanism for total surveillance and control. ...

April 18, 2025 · 4 min · 746 words · bjr

The Shift Left Data Manifesto

A core idea behind shifting Data Left is simple but often overlooked: data is code. Or more accurately—data is produced by code. It’s not just some downstream artifact that lives in tables and gets piped into dashboards and spreadsheets. Every record, event, or log starts somewhere—created, updated, or deleted by a line of code. And just like DevOps demonstrated, if you want to manage something well, you start at the point of creation. ...

March 27, 2025 · 1 min · 81 words · bjr