Hi folks. As you have noticed, this newsletter has been rather dormant for a while.
There are several good reasons for this.
Chief among them is that I discovered I don't actually like sending newsletters on Substack. To be clear, the process of writing and sending newsletters to you all is very enjoyable. What I don't like is getting reams of granular data on what each of my 22 beloved subscribers does on my page. Like, I can see exactly how much of each article you are reading, what links you click on, all sorts of information that, frankly, makes me feel rather queasy.
While I'm sure this is very helpful to some businesses, it's not for me.
There are plenty of things to say about Substack profiting from hosting people on the far-right of the political spectrum too, though others have made these points more eloquently than me. Upon logging in to send this, I also discovered that the site is trying to be Twitter now?
So, I will be rebooting this site somewhere else. I am running a few experiments with Ghost and beehiiv. I will see what sticks.
Now that we've got that out of the way. What do I actually want to say?
But Why Did I Make You Click This?
Yes yes yes. I could have just continued not writing anything. But I want to continue writing, and I feel like I have something to say again.
I have observed at many points in my career, and complained about it on this newsletter, that journalists at big news organisations completely neglect the nuts and bolts of computer programming. They do so at their peril.
This stance is hard to defend. If you are doing things like analysing troves of emails, attempting to track an individual across multiple social networks, or even keep your own or your sources' data away from the public web, your goal is helped massively if you know how to use things like:
The command line
Virtual machines
Remote machines and ssh
Open source software and Git
Text editors and macros
And some of the easiest ways to explain these are through a couple of projects that I'm excited to show you.
So, that means this might transition to more of a portfolio page rather than a newsletter. I hope you'll forgive me.
One other big topic that comes up frequently alongside open-source investigations in journalism is the question of privacy and security. And it's apparent to me that there are some huge question marks about how to mask your activities online, especially outside of the U.S., where public awareness of the importance of such things is negligible, and as such most people have no idea what they're doing.
There are many lengthy guides that you can buy or illegally download if you want to learn how wealthy or famous individuals keep their identities hidden and their contacts secure. But few of these are aimed at journalists - and I haven't found any at all for people who aren't based in the U.S.
For journalists based in Asia, that task is not only more challenging, it’s more urgent too.
So, that's what to expect over the next few weeks. Hope you'll stay with me.