Yesterday's column by John Naughton in the Observer revisited Nathan Myhrvold's 1997 prediction that when Moore's Law runs out — that is, when processors stop doubling in speed every 18 months through an unbroken string of fundamental breakthroughs — that programmers would have to return to the old disciplines of writing incredibly efficient code whose main consideration was the limits of the computer that runs on it.

Ever since academic Shoshana Zuboff coined the term "Surveillance Capitalism" in 2015, it's become a touchstone for the debate over commercial surveillance (we've cited it hundreds of times). This week, Zuboff published her (very thick) book on the subject, to excellent early notices; I haven't read it yet, but it's next on my list.

Last June, the Economist ran this chart: "Lies, Damned Lies, and Directives," which documents decades of flat-out lies about EU regulations that were published in the tabloid press (many invented by the UK's post-Brexit foreign minister and Trumpian hairclown Boris Johnson, whose press colleagues considered him most reckless confabulist on European matters in their ranks).

After the #trumpwon hashtag topped the Twitter trending charts — something Trump gleefully noted, saying it proved he'd won the initial debate with Hillary Clinton — @DustinGiebel's claim that the trend had originated in St Peterburg, Russia (along with an accompanying map, supposedly from Trendsmap) went viral, with more than 15,000 retweets. — Read the rest

In his Sunday Observer column, John Naughton makes an important point that's hammered home by the escape of the NSA/GCHQ Regin cyberweapon into the wild: spies who make war on the Internet can't be trusted with its security.

In January 2012, I reviewed a new book from Observer business/tech columnist John Naughton, called From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: Disruptive Innovation in the Age of the Internet. It's a great, fast read aimed at smart people who don't quite get the net — the kind of thing you'd want to slide under your boss's door to forestall more well-intentioned and frustrating questions about What Should Be Done about this Internet thing. — Read the rest

In the Observer, John Naughton unloads both barrels on the "academic publishing racket" in which giant multinational publishers get free, state-subsidized research to publish, use free, state-subsidized labor for peer-review, require assignments of the scholars' copyrights as a condition of publication, then charge astounding sums to the scientists and academics they are "serving" for the right to read the work they're all engaged in producing. — Read the rest

John Naughton's latest book, From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, What You Really Need to Know About the Internet, expands on his spectacular Observer feature article, "The internet: Everything you ever need to know, which I described as "a marvel of economy, the kind of primer you want to slide under your boss's door." — Read the rest

John Naughton's Association for Learning Technology keynote, "The elusive technological future," is a no-holds-barred, kick-ass talk about the systems, blindspots and biases that keep us from understanding where tech has been and where it's going. John's the Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University, and he's the author of the excellent From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, What You Really Need to Know About the Internet. — Read the rest

In this week's Observer, a heartfelt obituary from John Naughton for Michael S Hart, founder of the Gutenberg Project, and inventor of ebooks:

Those who knew him testify that Michael Hart was an extraordinary individual – idiosyncratic, original, humane, determined and generous to a fault.

With all the noise about superinjunctions, you might think that the recent spate of absurd, censorious "privacy" lawsuits spontaneously arose from the minds of football players, toxic dumpers, and evil viziers of the banking industry. But as Peter Preston writes in the Observer, the architects of these suits are the same lawyers who got rich embarassing England around the world with absurd, censorious libel lawsuits in the last decade, who are now chasing a new business-model as the old one fades away. — Read the rest

John Naughton's feature in today's Observer, "The internet: Everything you ever need to know," is a fantastic read and a marvel of economy, managing to pack nine very big ideas into 15 minutes' reading. This is the kind of primer you want to slide under your boss's door. — Read the rest

Connecticut Attorney-General Richard Blumenthal gave a speech to military vets in which he claimed that "I served in Vietnam." However, Blumenthal "obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970" and "landed a coveted spot in the Marine Reserve, which virtually guaranteed that he would not be sent to Vietnam. — Read the rest

Today in the Observer, business columnist John Naughton describes in exquisite detail the blinkered pig-ignorance of Business Secretary Peter Mandelson's plan to de-fund basic research in favor of "prioritising research that would contribute to Britain's future prosperity." That is, he's only going divert funding to those small, incremental technologies that have well-understood, overhyped revenue models, leaving out the visionary basic science that has historically accounted for the largest payouts for industry and government. — Read the rest

In today's Observer Business column, John Naughton discusses what a ripoff it is for ebook vendors to "sell" you books with abusive, multi-thousand word "license agreements," pretending that because you bought your book over the network, it wasn't a sale, and so you don't get to own it. — Read the rest

Happy Bloomsday! Here's a rare reading of James Joyce performing his own work; as John Naughton notes, "When I first heard it I was astonished to find that he had a broad Irish-country accent. I had always imagined him speaking as a 'Dub' — i.e. — Read the rest

John Naughton's talking sense about economics, news and the Web today in the Observer:

Things have got so bad that Rupert Murdoch has tasked a team with finding a way of charging for News Corp content. This is the "make the bastards pay" school of thought.

Today in his Observer column, John Naughton takes account of the thriving practice of cybersquatting domains for potential bank-mergers:

Even as the short-selling vultures began circling Lehman Brothers, HBOS, Merrill Lynch and co, a legion of entrepreneurs began betting on domain names for hastily merged financial institutions.

John Naughton's Observer column last Sunday lit into the music industry, chasing the statement by the head of the British Phonographic Institute (the UK's RIAA) that "For years, ISPs have built a business on other people's music." This is part of the music industry's blustering demands for ISPs to censor and monitor the Internet to protect the record companies' business-model (because protecting a couple of multinationals is more important than the free speech and privacy of every Internet user in the world). — Read the rest

Donna sez, "EFF has a new alert that lets you tell Congress to take a close look at WIPO's broadcast treaty before it slips under the wire and we get stuck with another WIPO-hatched debacle like the DMCA":

WIPO's "Treaty on the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations" is protection, all right: a protection racket for middlemen in the TV and Internet worlds.