Month: November 2023

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Cyber capacity and strategic advantage: resilience, influence, and control

Julia Carver is a DPhil candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford and Nuffield College. Her work explores cyber-foreign policymaking and strategic thinking in the current era of great power competition, particularly the relationship between digital infrastructure, capacity building, and strategic advantage. In 2021, she founded the Changing Character of War Centre’s Cyber Strategy and Information Operations Working Group, and she currently holds a stipendiary lectureship in Politics at Magdalen College (Oxford). Her research is jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and Nuffield College.

 

These people are the wannabe technocrats in training and waiting on the sides. In this event, we have the assumption that we need to push back our internet to before the #openweb took over the world and economic growth for the last 20 years. All they talk is about control locked down “national” intranets, ie what we had before the #openweb, a lossy circle we should not keep going round if we can help ourselves.

In all the sectors there is a split between open and closed. These events are the “common sense” of the closed.

Fear and control
Trust and open

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A draft to buy for a solar install on a narrow boat

YOU SHOULD GET TWO OF THESE AS THEY ARE VERY CHEAP https://www.bimblesolar.com/410w-canadian-solar-panel-great-size?tracking=590efad7b3ead

ONE OF THESE https://www.bimblesolar.com/batteries/12vbatts/12v-lithium-batteries/Archibald-12Vlifepo4-200Ah?tracking=590efad7b3ead

40A 12V-24V-48V MPPT charge Controller – EPever XTRA 4415N – 150VOC PV – LCD Meter – 48V Model
https://www.bimblesolar.com/40a-mppt-48v-epsolar?tracking=590efad7b3ead but it needs a cable or screen to set the lip04 setting

Think it’s this one, but need to check https://www.bimblesolar.com/mt75?tracking=590efad7b3ead

Then cables https://www.bimblesolar.com/extras/cable/pre-made-cables/mc4-cable-10m?tracking=590efad7b3ead

To join the two panels https://www.bimblesolar.com/STAUBLI-SPLITTER?tracking=590efad7b3ead

Then need cable from charge controller to batteries, 6mm should do this.

OK might be missing some small bit but this should work

 

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Why the Russian constitution matters: the dark arts of constitutional law

Professor Partlett’s forthcoming book challenges the conventional view that Russia’s Constitution is a sham. It will show instead that this constitution is a critical foundation of Russian authoritarianism today that carries important broader lessons for the world.

In the ruins of the Soviet Union, President Boris Yeltsin—with the full backing of the West—dabbled in the ‘dark arts’ of constitutional law by centralising vast constitutional power in the office of the president in the 1993 Russian Constitution. This presidential centralisation was justified as necessary to ensure stability while being limited by extensive constitutional rights guarantees. President Vladimir Putin has since disregarded these rights provisions and fully exploited this centralised authority to rebuild Russian authoritarianism.

The Russian experience helps us better understand the dark arts of constitutional law, an understudied practice in which written constitutions are used to build a centralised state. This practice is grounded on a long normative tradition—dating back to Thomas Hobbes—arguing that centralisation is the best way to overcome civil war and achieve the common good. This practice underpins the rise of authoritarian populism around the world today. It also is increasingly infiltrating established democracies, posing a critical internal threat to democratic governance.

William Partlett is an Associate Professor at Melbourne Law School. He writes and teaches in the field of public law.

It’s interestingly academic, look at paper power and how the west “missed” the Russian centralisation with Putin.

Brought in 1993 by Yeltsin (well more like his burocrats) and used later.

The Q&A reveals #mainstreaming and likely #dogma. This is a gathering of “our” technocrats talking about their “technocrats”. “Sadly” some of the west pushed this mess “we trust him”

Does the mess create the mess or the mess create the mess is an under text of the event is as far as the technicrats get.

The leading liberal, agency is to ask people in power to change.

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The mission of the NGI is to re-imagine and re-engineer the Internet

We ask that #NGI use “native” approaches and tools at future #openweb events

“The mission of the NGI is to re-imagine and re-engineer the Internet… Committed to open source (both hardware and software) and open data… Build an Internet of Trust, empowering end-users… the concept of the Digital Commons, which is particularly crucial for Europe, as it fosters equitable access to information… the transition to the future internet…”

We ask that #NGI use at future openweb events:

FOSS video streaming solution

Simple open tools for audiences chat, one to meany and one to one

A open to edit shared doc (for links and notes) for the online participants to use, for each session.

This is a basic path for people to people internet based on trust, for a European #openweb

“When it comes to important ideas that can help improve our society, there really are no boundaries. The challenge is to turn those opportunities into reality. Great ideas just come, but they are gone in a breeze as well. Let’s make good use of them.”

The quotes are from https://ngiforum2023.eu/ , https://www.ngi.eu/ and https://nlnet.nl/ lets together ask/help the #EU to be more openweb native.

———————-
The mission of the NGI is to re-imagine and re-engineer the Internet… Committed to open source (both hardware and software) and open data… Build an Internet of Trust, empowering end-users… the concept of the Digital Commons, which is particularly crucial for Europe, as it fosters equitable access to information… the transition to the future internet…

We ask that #NGI use at online events:

* FOSS video streaming solution
* Simple open tools for audiences chat, one to many and one to one
* A open to edit shared doc (for links and notes) for the online participants to use, for each session.

This is a basic path for people to people internet based on trust, for a European #openweb

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Know Your World: Climate Change & Human Health

Climate change is the biggest threat to human health. Medical issues from eco-anxiety and stress to heat exhaustion, infectious diseases and pollution related cancers and ultimately from starvation, drought, displacement and war threaten to overwhelm us as a species. A review of the top to toe medical matters arising from a host of climate change issues from an interested NHS doctor, lifestyle physician and climate campaigner Dr Maria Goddard.

Really good event

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Controlling the Capital: Political Dominance in the Urbanizing World

Authoritarianism is on the rise globally, with more than twice as many countries experiencing democratic decline as democratic enhancement in recent years. This has been occurring simultaneously with unprecedented rates of urbanization in many parts of the world, raising questions about the role of cities – often considered the focal points of democratic deepening – in this authoritarian turn. While most literature considers authoritarianism on the national scale, the chapters in this book train their gaze on capital cities, which as ‘containers’ of both capital and sovereignty are spaces in which authoritarian dominance is increasingly built, contested, maintained, and undone. Focusing on some of the world’s fastest urbanizing regions – Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia – the book explores the multiple ways in which authoritarian regimes have been attempting to build and sustain long-term dominance in capital cities in order to meet the challenge of urban political resistance.

The diverse selection of case studies presented here spans governing regimes that have recently tried to build urban dominance and spectacularly failed, as well as those that have managed to hold onto power by constantly evolving strategies for dominance that limit the potential for urban opposition to tip into regime overthrow. With chapters on Addis Ababa, Colombo, Dhaka, Harare, Kampala, and Lusaka, ‘Controlling the Capital’ offers the first cross-regional comparative study of the relationship between cities and political dominance. It contributes to debates on authoritarianism and authoritarian durability, urbanization, political contestation and resistance, the politics of development, and the prospects for democracy

‘Controlling the Capital’ is edied by Professor Tom Goodfellow and Dr David Jackman.

Some of these events are on the working practices of the academic rather than the subject itself. This is like this so far, a bit of the subject in the Q&A but not much.

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Trustworthiness as Reputation in International Cooperation-building

Intuitively, reputation matters in daily life. Thus, it is unsurprising that scholars and statesmen have long held that reputation must also matter in international relations (IR) since Pericles. Yet, while reputation, especially reputation for resolve in (international) conflict, has enjoyed renewed attention in the past decade or so, few in-depth studies of reputation in (international) cooperation exist, other than a few studies on reputation in alliance and treaty compliance. Professor Shiping Tang takes a first step toward a preliminary theory of reputation in cooperation-building and provides some preliminary evidence that reputation in international cooperation can form and have effect, drawing from a diverse literature, including reputation in conflict and cooperation, trust and trustworthiness in sociology and social theory, and trust and cooperation in international relations and other areas. Professor Tang’s contributions are three-fold: conceptual, theoretical and empirical. He then connects with trustworthiness as reputation with US-China relations.

Our western societies have been building from neo-liberalism, greed, fear and control for the last 40 years. How is it now possible to move back to “trust” in the west.

This is now an urgent question with the onrushing mess of #climatechaos

In Oxford you have the move from trust to control in the card readers on all the doors over the last 20 years.

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Cambridge Analytica, 5 years on

I think we face the usual problem of working on and implementing policy for yesterday’s issues.

* We are coming out of ten years of Blockchain mess

* Now we are into #AI mess, the is no intelligence in the current round, only artificial writing.

Let’s look at what actually matters

The original openweb had in this context #opendata is the issue we are talking about.

We then had 20 years of the #dotcons with #closeddata. Which you have talked about.

Coming out of this, we have an active openweb reboot happing with federation and opendata.

For example with #Mastodon, the #Fediverse, #bluesky and #Nosta which have grown from half a million to 10 to 15 million users over the last year. #WordPress building #ActivityPub support for a quarter of the internet and #Failbook‘s #threads.

You are seeing a different world back to #opendata, if you run a mastodon instance you will have a large part of the content of the Fediverse sitting in your database in plan text….

Take this into account with policy and regulation please

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Upton Lecture 2023: Fake News: Learning from Spinoza

Tonight a touch of philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_James_(philosopher)

I wonder what the is to learn from this, it’s my subject #openweb and the media.

Upton Lecture 2023: Fake News: Learning from Spinoza

Susan James is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. She has held faculty positions at the University of Connecticut and the University of Cambridge, and visiting positions at many other prestigious institutions.

Throughout her work, Professor James tries to bring the history of philosophy into conversation with its contemporary counterpart. Her historical studies aim to illuminate contemporary philosophical problems. In this lecture, Professor James will explore how the work of 17th century Dutch-born philosopher Baruch Spinoza can help us to examine questions of truth in our own time.

It was humanism, nice but with same answer on agency, ask people in power to change.

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Economics and National Security – The audience for this was the servants of power, good to understand what they are thinking

Going to this event to see what the #mainstreaming think about the upcoming political changes to economic is about.It was interesting, but the only agency was asking the servants of power to do make the needed change. This has been the same ansear for the last 5 seminars i have attended in Oxford. It is not agency at all. We have had 40 years of hardcore class war and the is no easy path out of this. The audience for this was the servants of power, good to understand what they are thinking.

Economics and National Security

There is a resurgence in interest in economic statecraft and economic security. This is against a backdrop in which, over the last thirty or so years, economics has been regarded as above and beyond national control and best left untouched by governments; and national security has been lionised for its performance and practice, rather than its impact. What are the connections between the economy and national security, and how might we begin to raise a new generation of security practitioners with the skills to operate in this re-emerging field?Dr Jason Shepherd is the Senior Director for Strategy at Thomson Reuters Special Services International. He joined Thomson Reuters in 2021 after a twenty-three-year career in the UK national security community, during which he contributed to interoperability both between the FVEY partners and the UK agencies and government departments.A graduate of Cambridge, his PhD in Molecular Genetics was awarded by the University of Edinburgh, but it was his experience of the Executive Master’s in Public Policy at LSE that convinced him of the importance of the economy and political institutions to national security. An influential member of the 2020 Integrated Review team, he continues to champion technical innovation and excellence in the pursuit of public good, and is a proponent of public-private partnership in security and intelligence. He is an advocate, and whenever possible practitioner, of systems thinking and systems engineering.