If you haven’t come across them already, I recommend highly Tim Snyder’s Yale class on Ukraine, all lectures available online.

Putin’s War: a long-form multi-media report by the NY Times on the decisions and circumstances of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine.

A Japanese ‘transformable lunar robot’ and a UAE lunar rover may be the first payload delivered to the moon by a private company, landing in April 2023. There’s a real sense of competition and a renewed prospect of ‘firsts’, as suggested here. It’s no longer ‘just’ nations entering the space race, commercial players (okay, often subsidised) are hoping to establish and dominate markets. And as with all such moonshots (sorry), many are looking for spillover opportunities and technologies.

There is some smart work here: tweaking Starlink to create a new global navigation system. It also offers an illustration of how you don’t need to break encryption to learn about a system or how it works–and how it may be exploited, for good or bad.

Further to Apple’s strengthening its encryption, Google is introducing end-to-end encryption for Gmail on the web.

Tim Berners-Lee on Web3. Web3, which includes blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs, is not the future of the internet: those technologies are ‘too slow, too expensive and too public. Personal data stores have to be fast, cheap and private.’

A recent paper on the role of the Data Protection Officer, a function mandated under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations, but one, according the authors, that’s not well understood. The paper highlights the long genesis of the role, from 1977–this is a role that’s seen as key and has matured, even as it remains nebulous: it’s contextual, with responsibilities dependent on the nature and size of the organsiation. The authors set out a series of scenarios the role is likely to encounter, from poor procurement to out-of-date software, to ignored advice, and subcontractor violation, amongst others, illustrating how such roles cross the technology, corporate and business domains.