Matthew Gamble

Reflections

Sometimes I'm an Idiot

Apparently my brain hears what it wants to hear, and I rarely ask follow-up questions. This blog is usually pretty serious. AI taking over the world, governments regulating the internet, the...

ai

It's Not the Pricing, It's the Opacity

The New York Times reported this week that Maryland became the first US state to ban AI-driven price increases at grocery stores. The law takes effect in October. It prohibits grocery stores and...

ai

It's Not an AI Problem, It's an Access Problem

«"NEVER F**KING GUESS, and that's exactly what I did. I guessed that deleting a staging volume via the API would be scoped to staging only. I didn't verify. I didn't check if the volume ID was shared...

crtc

Click to Cancel Comes to Canada (And I Have Some Thanking to Do)

Back in November of 2025, I wrote a post called "Click to Cancel: Why Canada Needs to Catch Up" (https://mgamble.ca/p/click-to-cancel-why-canada-needs-to-catch-up). I griped about the 20 minutes I...

Hard Conversations

The Ice Cream Invitation Problem

Earlier this week I was at the mall with my friend "Dave" (not his real name), shoe shopping. The reason we were at the mall isn't important, but it sets the scene. We left the shoe store, Dave turned...

ai

Did I Just Talk to a Person?

Over the weekend I had to call a plumbing service. Tenant had a broken toilet, bad timing, the usual Saturday night special. Like most after-hours services, I didn't get connected to a plumber. I got...

ai

The AI Divide: A New Fault Line Opening Before We Finished Closing the Old One

Earlier this week I had the privilege of moderating a panel at Digital Access Day, the Canadian Internet Society's annual gathering of thoughtleaders working on the issues shaping our networks and our...

3d-printing

California's 3D Printing Bill Won't Stop Gun Violence, But It Will Create a New Class of Criminals

Earlier this year I wrote about "New York's attempt to mandate filtering software on 3D printers" (https://mgamble.ca/p/new-yorks-3d-printer-bill-wont-stop-ghost-guns-but-it-will-stop-you-from-fixing)...

net neutrality

Spain Just Proved Why ISPs Can't Be the Internet's Content Police

Earlier this year, I wrote about "Bill S-209" (https://mgamble.ca/p/bill-s-209-protecting-kids-at-the-cost-of-the-internet) and its deeply flawed premise: that we can protect kids from pornography by...

code

I Lost My Receiver Remote, So I Built a Smart IR Blaster with an ESP32

I lost the remote for my Yamaha RX-V385 receiver. Not temporarily misplaced it, not left it between couch cushions. Gone. Vanished into whatever dimension claims TV remotes, single socks, and 10mm...

code

Controlling My Office Light with Natural Language (A Weekend Tinkering Story)

Wtih today being a holiday (Good Friday) and a chance to finally start to tackle my "todo" list around the house I installed a new smart light in my office, an Artika Skyshade I picked up from Costco...

Security

Stop Weaponizing CVE Counts

I've watched many teams score vendors on raw CVE counts. Not on response times, not on disclosure transparency, not on architectural controls. On the number of CVEs. I've seen it first-hand, in the...

Reflections

Canada's "Machine" Problem: Bill C-22 and the Surveillance State We're Sleepwalking Into

Fiction has a funny way of becoming government policy. Recently I've been rewatching Person of Interest, the CBS drama that ran from 2011 to 2016. If you haven't seen it, the premise is this: a...

rant

McDonald's McNugget Sauce Ratio is a Mathematical Crime

Recently, I found myself sitting across from a 20-piece McNugget box, three dipping sauces, and a rising sense of injustice. Three sauces. For twenty nuggets. I'm a network engineer by trade, and even...

Reflections

EventStream: Building a Self-Hosted Calendar Aggregator with MCP Integration

I double booked myself again. A work meeting landed on top of a personal commitment because I forgot to cross-reference my Google Calendar before accepting the invite in Outlook. It's embarrassing...

Reflections

When the Cloud Gets Bombed: Rethinking Resilience After AWS Middle East

Over the weekend, something happened that most enterprise architects and business leaders probably never seriously modelled: drone strikes took out Amazon Web Services data centres in the Middle...

policy direction

California's New Age Verification Law: Making Kids Less Safe While Breaking Open Source

Earlier this month, "PC Gamer reported" (https://www.pcgamer.com/software/operating-systems/a-new-california-law-says-all-operating-systems-including-linux-need-to-have-some-form-of-age-verification-a...

Alignment

Defence in Debt: When Security Spending Doesn't Buy Security

There's a special kind of technical debt that doesn't show up in Jira. It doesn't sit in a backlog. It doesn't have a product owner. It doesn't even admit it exists. It lives in PowerPoint. I call it...

Hard Conversations

Stop Inspecting Everything: The Case Against Universal TLS Interception

For the past decade, I've watched enterprise security teams deploy TLS inspection appliances with the best of intentions. The pitch is always the same: we need visibility into encrypted traffic to...

amazon

They Used a Lost Puppy to Sell You a Surveillance Network

I was watching the American feed of the Super Bowl last night when Ring's latest ad came on. A family loses their dog. They upload a photo. Ring's network of neighbourhood cameras springs into action,...