Writing
Recently: twenty-eight British charity, university and council web addresses that now advertise unlicensed casinos, and the month Apple Mail stopped working with Microsoft 365. Alongside that, longer-standing writing on AI, consciousness and design. Published in Towards AI, Medium and the British Psychological Society.
Series: Expired domain names and unlicensed casinos
Twenty-eight British web addresses that once belonged to charities, universities, councils and public bodies now advertise casinos holding no Gambling Commission licence. All three parts are published.
Medium · Part one · October 2026
An HIV research unit and an LGBT youth charity gave up web addresses they no longer needed. Both now advertise casinos that hold no licence in the UK. One sold at auction for £1,051, on a listing that advertised its inbound links from Wikipedia, JustGiving and two Scottish universities.
Read on Medium →Medium · Part two · October 2026
Twenty-eight British web addresses that used to belong to charities, universities, councils and public bodies now advertise casinos with no UK licence. At least seven separate operations are behind them, and the registry publishes the list that makes it possible.
The record All twenty-eight addresses, what each one was and whether it has been put right
Read on Medium →Medium · Part three · October 2026
Almost every organisation has specified who’s allowed to buy web addresses. Hardly any have written down what to check before letting one go. Here is the provision that closes the gap, free to copy.
The clause The Domain Release Clause in full, with why each paragraph is there
The check Check your own web estate: five minutes, no tools and no account
Read on Medium →Series: Apple, Microsoft and the end of EWS
Medium · Part one · August 2026
Apple’s retreat from the workplace, told through a single error code. macOS Mail and Calendar stop working with Microsoft 365 work accounts from 1 October 2026, while personal email and on-premises Exchange carry on unaffected.
Cited Michael Tsai, ‘The End of EWS in Mail and AppleScript in Outlook’
Read on Medium →Medium · Part two · September 2026
An update a month on. Apple has now committed to moving Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Notes and Reminders to Microsoft Graph, but in a future update to macOS 27 rather than in macOS 27 itself, which shipped on 14 September without it. Microsoft begins disabling Exchange Web Services on 1 October, so for most people in a Microsoft 365 tenant Mail stops working first and the fix arrives afterwards.
Read on Medium →Medium · Part three · October 2026
The part that is not about the deadline. What it is like to use new Outlook every day once the migration is done: more features than Apple Mail, and twelve of them on screen at once. Density is a tax on attention that no automated checker reports, and it falls hardest on the people with least to spare.
Credited Tim Hardwick, MacRumors
Read on Medium →Series: AI and the cost of scraping
Towards AI · Part one
A first-person account of how the AI industry externalises its infrastructure costs onto the independent communities it extracts value from. When large language models train on community-maintained archives, the communities bear the hosting costs and receive nothing in return.
Cited Chris Stokel-Walker, Fast Company
Read on Towards AI →Medium · Part two
A follow-up: what happens when a faceless bot army takes down a volunteer-run website, and you go looking for someone, anyone, to call.
Read on Medium →Medium · Part three
Nine out of ten visitors to the box-office database were bots. It came back smaller, and the site’s owner paid for the traffic, not the companies that sent it.
Read on Medium →Series: Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence
A three-part series published on Medium, with part two in Towards AI. Read across the AI and HCI research community. Part one has 223 claps.
Medium · Part one
The first part of the series. An examination of what consciousness does, functionally and evolutionarily, and why asking what it is for might be a better question than asking what it is.
Read on Medium →Towards AI · Part two
The second part of the series. Taking the functional account of consciousness from part one and asking what it would mean for an AI system to satisfy it, and what would need to be true of the system for the question to matter.
Read in Towards AI →Medium · Part three
The third and final part of the series. The case that the risk of AI systems that cannot model their own impact, systems that act without experiencing the consequences, is more concrete and more urgent than the risk of AI that is genuinely aware.
Read in Towards AI →Academic
British Psychological Society · PsychTalk
Published in the British Psychological Society student journal PsychTalk. Awarded 100 per cent by Dr Tom Dickens, editor of the journal Evolution. An account of consciousness grounded in evolutionary theory: what it is for, why it emerged, and what its distribution across species might tell us.
In the Press
Fast Company · August 2026
Reported by Chris Stokel-Walker for Fast Company. The story of how AI bots from Meta, Alibaba and others made tens of thousands of daily requests to the LGBT History Project, driving up hosting costs and threatening to take the archive offline, and what it reveals about the unsustainable cost AI companies are externalising onto the independent communities they extract value from.
Read on Fast Company →Free to use
The Domain Release Clause came out of an investigation into twenty-eight British charity, university and public sector web addresses that now advertise unlicensed casinos. It is the paragraph most domain policies leave out, covering what has to be checked before an organisation gives up a web address, and it is published under a Creative Commons licence so it can be pasted into your own policy.
The Domain Release Clause →Read more
All essays and articles are available on Medium. Member of the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) and the Royal Institute of Philosophy (TRIP).
@jharbourne on Medium →
