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What does Riskopia do?

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Riskopia serves as the primary institution of Stephen Cobb, public-interest technologist and researcher. Stephen's work can be found on the Riskopia Substack  and a range of other media, linked on the left. Here is a recent example of Cobb's views on technology, a comment on the  Vastamo data breach , as described by Tanmoy Goswami, a fellow of the Reuters Institute of Journalism at Oxford University. Goswami noted that: "the therapy notes of 33,000 Finnish citizens were hacked and put on the dark web for ransom by a criminal and at least two people whose data was compromised ended their lives." Cobb commented that this illustrates a fundamental issue with the way humans currently develop and deploy technology: the failure to adequately address human weaknesses as constraining factors. For example, if you're thinking of using a networked information system to record sensitive information you need to address the fact that A) some people are too weak to resist abusi...

Welcome to Riskopia

Riskopia is a word that I created in my efforts to highlight the risks that humans face from the technology they create.  Those efforts sometimes involve interacting with organizations that want to know "what organization are you with?" When the answer "I'm independent" does not compute for such interactions, I say Riskopia. Before I explain why I think riskopia is a cool word, let me address this question: who owns riskopia? As far as I can tell, I'm the first person to use this word. Not long after it popped into my head I searched the internet to see if existed: nothing. No companies registered as Riskopia. No Riskopia domains. So I went about registering Riskopia as a domain and the name under which I do business. If you search the internet for riskopia I think you'll find this website tops the results. Riskopia: meaning and origin While studying risk management at university I encountered Ulrich Beck's writings on "risk society" which...