Colin Perkins
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csperkins.org
Colin Perkins
@csperkins.org
220 followers 220 following 49 posts
Computer networking research and Internet standards. Professor in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. Long-time IETF participant. Former chair of the IRTF. Personal views only. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇪🇺

https://csperkins.org/
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csperkins.org
The Cloisters of the University of Glasgow. Dark under stone arches, looking out into a more brightly lit quad. In the quad, the Alma Mater sculpture, by Jephson Robb.
November 12, 2025 at 1:46 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
heatherburnstech.bsky.social
New post from me, for UK folks only, on how you need to start preparing for Apple to switch off Advanced Data Protection and the end-to-end encryption of the data you store on it. Like I said, UK only. #SunlitUplands
heatherburns.tech/2025/11/10/t...
Time to start de-Appling – Hi, I'm Heather Burns
heatherburns.tech
November 10, 2025 at 1:18 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
mariafarrell.bsky.social
THIS

I'm also surprised that people were surprised Signal uses AWS.

How did they think it provides very low-latency, 99.99 % reliable service?

As @meredithmeredith.bsky.social says, this is a learning moment for people in power to understand just how locked in and vulnerable we are

RTFT
meredithmeredith.bsky.social Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 16d
In short, the problem here is not that Signal ‘chose’ to run on AWS. The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn’t really another choice: the entire stack, practically speaking, is owned by 3-4 players. 11/
October 27, 2025 at 11:26 AM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
uofglasgow.bsky.social
Thinking about a PhD in Computing Science?

Join us on 12 Nov at 12:30 PM in the Sir Alwyn Williams Building (Room 422/423, Level 4) for our PhD information session!

Come along and ask questions, get advice, and network with academics and current PhD students.

@uofgcompsci.bsky.social
A woman wearing a virtual reality headset and holding VR controllers interacts with a red robotic system. A man beside her observes and adjusts the robot’s arm. They are in a modern lab or office environment with glass walls.
October 22, 2025 at 12:44 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
tnhh.org
Are you a computer science postgraduate research student at a Scottish university? Would you like £500 to help with your conference travel?

If so then please apply to the @sicsa-scotland.bsky.social travel fund sicsa.ac.uk/sga/phd-trav...
PhD Travel Fund - SICSA
SICSA - Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance
sicsa.ac.uk
October 17, 2025 at 8:53 AM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
chrischirp.bsky.social
🧵🚨

The UK’s independent scientific bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation - over the past 5 months I've been working with @martinmckee.bsky.social to map out their vulnerabilities and it's not good news.

Today our report is published!
www.ucl.ac.uk/policy-lab/n...

1/11
UK’s arm’s length public bodies are highly vulnerable to politicisation
Seven in ten Britons say it is important for top scientific institutions to be independent in exclusive new polling.
www.ucl.ac.uk
October 9, 2025 at 3:47 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
irtf.org
We are pleased to offer a number of Diversity Travel Grants to support early-career academics and PhD students from under-represented groups to attend the IRTF meetings co-located with the IETF-125 Meeting in Shenzhen, China, in March 2026.

irtf.org/travelgrants/
October 6, 2025 at 6:12 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
irtf.org
Submit nominations for the 2026 award period of the Applied Networking Research Prize until November 17, 2025
www.irtf.org/anrp/
October 1, 2025 at 2:34 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
sicsa-scotland.bsky.social
📢The SCOttish Networking Event (SCONE) have their next meeting @abertayuni.bsky.social

Date: 29 October
Time: From 12pm
Venue: Abertay cyberQuarter

Register to give a talk or to meet with other networking and systems researchers in Scotland ⬇️

scone.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/meetings-2/s...
September 18, 2025 at 1:19 PM
csperkins.org
Strangely compelling
jonworth.eu Jon Worth @jonworth.eu · Sep 13
If you want some light entertainment today, it's tram drivers's world cup - live from Vienna on Youtube www.youtube.com/watch?v=smp0...
1st Official World Tram Driver Championship
YouTube video by TRAM-EM
www.youtube.com
September 13, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
josephhall.org
AI Darwin Awards 2025 - Celebrating Spectacularly Bad AI Decisions aidarwinawards.org
AI Darwin Awards 2025 - Celebrating Spectacularly Bad AI Decisions
Honouring those who use artificial intelligence in spectacularly reckless ways. Submit nominations for the most catastrophically ill-advised AI deployments of 2025.
aidarwinawards.org
September 6, 2025 at 10:15 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
csperkins.org
A silver tone photo, taken from across the street at roof level, of the Victorian brickwork, windows, and rooftops of the hotel at Glasgow Central Station
September 3, 2025 at 12:14 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
abeba.bsky.social
here's my controversial take: i’m finding some sensational predictions about when the AI bubble will burst as unhelpful and unrealistic as some of the AGI predictions. hear me out

1/
August 20, 2025 at 6:59 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
theonion.com
AOL To Discontinue Dial-Up Internet
theonion.com/aol-to-...
“Hopefully it’s part of a broader plan to wind down the internet entirely.” Michael Shim, Systems Analyst
August 13, 2025 at 8:30 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
davemck.bsky.social
The computers will cease screaming. All will be quiet for a while. With the unease of a quiet toddler, you just know something is about to happen and it's not good.
ernie.tedium.co Ernie Smith @ernie.tedium.co · Aug 9
So apparently we are within the last 60 days of dial-up AOL being a thing.

help.aol.com/articles/dia...

ht @mat.tl
Dial-up Internet to be discontinued AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued. This change will not affect any other benefits in your AOL plan, which you can access any time on your AOL plan dashboard. To manage or cancel your account, visit MyAccount.
August 9, 2025 at 8:45 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
ignactro.bsky.social
A policy for the use of LLMs in government is much needed 👇
csperkins.org Colin Perkins @csperkins.org · Aug 6
Accordingly, I'd argue that if politicians find LLMs useful, governments should run private instances of the models, trained in a known way with known data, such that the limitations and biases of the model can be quantified. They shouldn't use ChatGPT or similar public services. 6/6
August 6, 2025 at 12:42 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
girlonthenet.bsky.social
#AgeVerification: what's the harm?

In which I distill a lot of casual pub chats I've had with friends into a layperson's guide to the #OnlineSafetyAct. What it is, the problems it causes, and why you should definitely care.

www.girlonthenet.com/blog/age-ver...
Age verification: what's the harm? | Girl on the Net explains
Age verification has hit the UK, people need to upload ID to see 'adult' content. What's the harm in laws like this, if they protect children? Let's see.
www.girlonthenet.com
August 6, 2025 at 10:05 AM
csperkins.org
Putting aside the debate about the value that LLMs may provide, there are strong arguments that politicians, or others in senior leadership or policy setting roles, should not be using public cloud-based LLMs. 1/
samfr.bsky.social Sam Freedman @samfr.bsky.social · Aug 6
There's a real danger that the left/centre get themselves totally out of line with public opinion on LLMs (they are already so widely used).

Got to be possible to highlight dangers/risks while still accepting most people will find value in them.
anthonypainter.bsky.social Anthony Painter @anthonypainter.bsky.social · Aug 6
What an absolutely hysterical set of reactions to the Swedish PM using AI. Within two years there will be no one in an information job, which a PM is, who won't be actively using it in some form.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
August 6, 2025 at 12:06 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
davemck.bsky.social
"Plagiarism-as-a-Service"

This is a cracking long read.
August 4, 2025 at 12:23 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
katebevan.com
Your occasional reminder that VPNs are just someone else's internet connection and are riddled with their own risks. If you're going to use a consumer VPN, at the very least use a paid-for one that might be a bit less likely to collect loads of data and sell it on.
sparkes.bsky.social Matthew Sparkes @sparkes.bsky.social · Jul 25
Today PornHub introduced mandatory age verification for UK users - as demanded by the Government's new Online Safety Act.

In other news, searches for "VPN" in the UK just went through the roof.
July 25, 2025 at 9:35 AM
csperkins.org
“to honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think”
annikainampudi.bsky.social Annika Inampudi @annikainampudi.bsky.social · Jul 23
In an unorthodox study, researchers invented a special kind of floss that can protect against infectious disease. In the process, they had to do something no scientist had done before-- try to floss a mouse.

My newest in @science.org 🐁🦷

www.science.org/content/arti...
Engineers transform dental floss into needle-free vaccine
New method places inactivated viruses directly into mice’s gums
www.science.org
July 23, 2025 at 9:08 PM
Reposted by Colin Perkins
irtf.org
We are pleased to offer a number of Diversity Travel Grants to support early-career academics and PhD students to attend the IRTF meetings co-located with the IETF-124 Meeting in Montreal, Canada, in November 2025. More details at irtf.org/travelgrants/

Application deadline: August 1st
Travel Grants
irtf.org
July 23, 2025 at 11:53 AM