dr corinne cath (ccs) is in London

2025 — never a dull moment

Another day, another outage — instead of rehashing why our reliance on a handful of big tech companies for our access to literately EvErYThINg is bad — I’m going to point you to the last three times I had to do that over the past 4 weeks, which led to a great convo with @dexdigi.bsky.social

🚨 Brussels, today 🚨Ursula! Stand up for Europe – not for Trump’s tech bros!

As the EU unveils its “Digital Omnibus” today, we're rolling out billboards calling on @vonderleyen.ec.europa.eu to stop bending to US and Big Tech pressure and enforce our digital laws #StandUpUrsula✊

a man in a suit and tie is smiling and says `` im a little worried '' while standing next to another man . ALT: a man in a suit and tie is smiling and says `` im a little worried '' while standing next to another man .

There is a lot happening in the closing speeches, this stands out:

Merz & Macron want to turn EU pensions into AI speculation fuel. 2008 taught us what happens when finance gambles on our futures, I experienced first hand graduating then.

Our retirement isn't tech's piggy bank. EU or otherwise

ha! he has a name and a story, its Aloys aka the cloud striker :p and he was born on the 19th of July, during the big Microsoft outage

EU Considers Cracking Down on Big Tech's Cloud Power Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Cloud risk being dragged into the scope of the European Union’s crackdown on Big Tech as antitrust watchdogs prepare to study t...

Some good news coming out alongside the summit, American cloud giants will be investigated under the digital markets act #dma

AND this is going to take ages, so what do we do now--to tackle the infrastructure power they hold now?

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

bsky.app/profile/cori...

@article19.bsky.social is in Berlin for two digital sovereignty summit events:

We're speaking at the main summit & participating in the cloud roundtable organized by KAS - @FOTI -@openmarkets.bsky.social

Are you also here too for sovereignty summit? Come say hallo- gutentag!

TODAY: ARTICLE 19’s Corinne Cath speaks about our shared digital future at the European Digital Sovereignty Summit.

Digital commons initiatives can only deliver if Europe breaks Big Tech’s stranglehold – and civil society will play a vital role.

digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/comm...

That title is 🔥🔥 can’t believe we had another outage, while we were talking! Such fun and excited to keep the conversation going

Creepy AI Crawlers Are Turning the Internet into a Haunted House | TechPolicy.Press The question is no longer whether AI crawlers are disrupting the internet, but what we can do about it, write Tanu I and Corinne Cath.

🕷️Creepy AI crawlers are haunting the internet🕷️

This Halloween, Tanu I and @ccs.bsky.social ocial explain how AI crawlers are ruining the internet for all of us.

Read this season’s real horror story in @techpolicypress.bsky.social

www.techpolicy.press/creepy-ai-cr...

www.thousandeyes.com/outages/

a woman says it 's only wednesday on a screen ALT: a woman says it 's only wednesday on a screen

www.techpolicy.press/amazon-cloud...

Just on Monday, we witnessed the effects of this problem with the AWS cloud, and now we're running into the same issue with Microsoft. This Microsoft outage has shown us that cloud monopolies pose a direct threat to democratic participation itself.

When people cannot access the information and transport they need to participate in elections because a single tech company's infrastructure fails, we've crossed a dangerous threshold.

n the Netherlands, its election day. Because of the #Microsoft outage, however, parts of the train system are down, leaving thousands of citizens unable to plan their travel, buy tickets, or determine whether they could return to their hometowns in time for polls to close.

📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms).

It’s also concerning. 1/

A "Big Free Library" shaped like the Internet Archive's logo, featuring two rows of books. The book prominently featured is "This is for Everyone" by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It takes up the entire top row and the middle section of the bottom row.

Happy Internet Archive Day!

Join us tonight—online or IRL—for The Web We’ve Built!
If you visit the Archive in person, grab a free copy of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's new book THIS IS FOR EVERYONE from our BIG Free Library!

🎟️ ➡️ blog.archive.org/2025/10/22/h...

#Wayback1T

How Sam Altman Tied Tech’s Biggest Players to OpenAI The CEO’s dealmaking blitz has convinced Silicon Valley’s giants to tether their fates to his company, essentially making it too big to fail

Playing off the egos of tech giants, Sam Altman’s dealmaking blitz has tied Silicon Valley’s massive fortunes to his own startup.

What Does a “Sovereign Cloud” Really Mean? | TechPolicy.Press Emily Osborne discusses approaches to building a "sovereign cloud" for Canada.

Canada is waking up to the risks of relying on US tech giants for digital infrastructure, writes Canadian SHIELD Institute researcher and Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project fellow Emily Osborne. As Canada pursues a sovereign cloud, clarity and control—not marketing—should guide the path to independence.

but then you outsource the problem to cloud clients, and don't tackle the consolidation of power in the cloud industry! its a necessary sure, but not a sufficient imho

Amazon Cloud Outage Reveals Democratic Deficit in Relying on Big Tech | TechPolicy.Press The AWS outage demonstrates the need for a fundamental shift in how we think about digital infrastructure, write Corinne Cath and Don Le.

Today's AWS outage, which affected a range of websites and applications—from Signal to Fortnite to key UK government services—reveals the dangers of relying on a handful of Big Tech firms, write Article 19's Corinne Cath and Don Le. These are not glitches; they are democratic failures, they say.

We need regulation and enforcement, but also something bigger: infrastructures built for community needs, not extractive profit.

Amazon Web Services outage hitting platforms around world ‘showing signs of recovery’ Problem that originated in US and affected Snapchat and Ring among others appears to be IT issue rather than cyber-attack, says expert

This is about power, not just tech. A handful of hyperscalers own the infrastructure we all depend on.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Amazon Web Services outage hitting platforms around world ‘showing signs of recovery’ Problem that originated in US and affected Snapchat and Ring among others appears to be IT issue rather than cyber-attack, says expert

If it goes down, so does much of the internet.
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Could not doom-scroll earlier today? Yeah, me neither bc of our dangerous reliance on hyperscaler clouds

#AWS us-east-1 outage took down #Signal and chunks of the internet. The culprit was too many critical operations crammed into a single AWS data center cluster in Northern Virginia.

‘Free speech for me, not for thee’: how Trump’s censorship blitz is splitting the right After Charlie Kirk’s killing, the US president has unleashed an assault on free speech. Some conservatives are questioning his razor sharp U-turn

‘Free speech for me, not for thee’: how Trump’s censorship blitz is splitting the right

What could be more obvious than the fact that, whatever intelligence a computer can muster, however it may be acquired, it must always and necessarily be absolutely alien to any and all authentic human concerns? The very asking of the question, "What does a judge (or a psychiatrist) know that we cannot tell a computer?" is a monstrous obscenity. That it has to be put into print at all, even for the purpose of exposing its morbidity, is a sign of the madness of our times. Computers can make judicial decisions, computers can make psychiatric judgments. They can flip coins in much more sophisticated ways than can the most patient human being. The point is that they ought not be given such tasks. They may even be able to arrive at "correct" decisions in some cases-but always and necessarily on bases no human being should be willing to accept. There have been many debates on "Computers and Mind." What I conclude here is that the relevant issues are neither technological nor even mathematical; they are ethical. They cannot be settled by asking questions beginning with "can." The limits of the applicability of computers are ultimately statable only in terms of oughts. What emerges as the most elementary insight is that, since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now to give computers tasks that demand wisdom.

There’s an enormous amount of stuff in this book I’d like to highlight, but start with:

“What emerges as the most elementary insight is that, since we do not now have any ways of making computers wise, we ought not now to give computers tasks that demand wisdom.”

What to Know About the Journalists Killed in Gaza

Another devastating day for journalists in Gaza, and human rights world wide, as we stand by and do too little too late

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/w...

"AI’s biggest climate consequences will come from how it is used. It could increase emissions by boosting fossil-fuel extraction"

Incredible coming from a Microsoft employee - a company that sells its machine learning to fossil fuel companies to boost extraction

stand.earth/insights/mic...