Once every couple of years (or months) you come across a topic you’ve never really been interested in, or perhaps haven’t even heard of. Or it’s a topic in the back of your head, that you’ve never been able to verbalize properly before. Suddenly it falls within scope and it is the only thing your mind is focused on for some time. After listening to The Ezra Klein Show with Chris Miller about his book Chip war, this has been the case for me.
Category: Books
Book review: How to lose the information war
Nina Jankowicz’s second book is focused on Central and Eastern Europe and, as the title implies, information warfare, directed by Russia.
Book review: Click here to kill everybody
For those who don’t know of Bruce Schneier, he’s one of the world’s most famous and prominent cybersecurity experts. If there’s one person you’d like to guide you and hold your hand while in need, Schneier is the one. This book is about basics of cybersecurity, not the technical aspects, but rather about security on the Internet and the Internet+, the interconnected world of the Internet of things.
Book review: Reset
The director of the famous Citizen Lab has written about the state of the (tech) world and solutions to the crisis of democracy and tech. If there’s one book to rule them all, this is the one.
Two sides of Cambridge Analytica
Chris Wylie is a self-taught computer guy with a nack for analyzing data, especially electoral data from Canada, England and the US. Brittany Kaiser is devoted to human rights and worked for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. Both end up working for the notorious Cambridge Analytica.
Ukraine: The Gates of Europe and Bloodlands
Despite my interest in history I’ve never read on the history of Ukraine. Through the years I’ve read some about the Czech Republic and the Soviet Union, but that’s basically all regarding what’s consideded Eastern Europe. Now I’ve read two books that cover Ukraine from different perspectives and times.
Book review: Computational propaganda
Oxford Internet Institute is a go-to-zone whenever I need some knowledge about cyberspace, cybersecurity, Internet research or many other topics. It’s a fascinating interdisciplinary institute, blending what is called social data science, data science with social science. The book comprises case studies of digital disinformation efforts (a main focus is certain types of bots) in nine countries, ranging from Canada and Poland to Russia and, naturally, Ukraine.
Book review: The perfect police state
This could well be a follow-up to Beijmo’s De kan inte stoppa oss. Instead of Syria as the main stage, the story and its focus are China. Writer Geoffrey Cain presents himself early as the journalist he is, when travelling Xinjiang in western China, though the main character in the narrative is Maysem, an Uighur who has escaped Xinjiang.
Russian cyberwar in the dark forest?
Russia has been turned into a dictatorship in two weeks. No journalists are allowed to mention the word “war” in combination with “Ukraine”, resulting in several journalists or news agencies shutting down their activity or agreeing to self-censorship. Many foreign journalists are thus going home for fear of their reporting being in conflict with these hard measures.
Book review: De kan inte stoppa oss
Mattias Beijmo is a Swedish public speaker, opinion writer and analyst focused on technology and its implications for privacy, democracy and society. In the book They can’t stop us, Beijmo tells us a story of the Arab spring mainly through the lens of two young Syrians, Bassel and Noura.