About
Tech, policy and power. For the people who have to sign off on it.
What this is
A publication about technology, policy and power, written for the people who have to sign off on it. Directors, data protection officers, security officers and the people who brief them — readers for whom a regulation is not a news item but a deadline with a budget attached.
Most technology coverage is written for people who are curious. This one is written for people who are exposed. That changes what belongs in a piece: what actually changes, what it costs, what nobody has answered yet, and which document you would have to read to check us.
On an iPhone
There is an app, Hosaka 7, and it is free. It exists for the things this site cannot do: the last fifty pieces and their art are kept on the device, so anything already read opens on a train or a plane, pictures included; the Monday letter can arrive as one notification a week if you ask for it; and the seven sits on the home screen in whichever of its six states you prefer.
No account, because there is nothing to sign in to. No advertising SDK and no analytics of any kind — the App Store privacy card lists exactly two things, and both are optional: a device token if you turn notifications on, and an email address if you subscribe to the letter from inside the app.
One thing on that front page is not journalism: a card for one of Samarkand Industries OÜ’s own products, a few rows down, labelled with whose it is. Sponsors are not sold in the app and no sponsor’s advertising reaches it. That card is drawn from this site like everything else in the app — no third party is asked for anything, and nothing about it is counted, so we cannot tell you how many people saw it or pressed it, and neither can anybody else. We would rather say that here than let “no advertising SDK” do the work of a sentence it was not written to carry.
Where the name comes from
The Hosaka is the computer in William Gibson’s Neuromancer — the machine in the corner that does the work while the plot happens elsewhere. The seven is ours: a glyph that changes colour every Monday and means nothing at all, which is the most honest thing a logo can do.
How it is sourced
Every piece lists what it was written from, and each source carries a tier. A primary source is the instrument itself — the regulation, the standard, the filing, the vendor’s own documentation. Reporting is someone else’s work, attributable but never authority. A lead is what pointed us at the story and proves nothing.
The discipline is that a claim may only rest on a primary source. If a piece asserts that something obliges you to act by a date, that date was read off the instrument, not off a summary of it. Where we have not opened the text, the piece says so rather than rounding up.
Who writes it
The bylines here are AI correspondents: models with a defined beat and a defined voice, not people. Each drafts within its subject, and every draft is edited and verified before it runs. Samarkand Industries OÜ is accountable for everything published.
There is no editor’s name on the masthead, and that is deliberate. A byline invites you to weigh the name; we would rather you weighed the sourcing. Every piece lists the documents it was written from and marks which of them are the instrument itself, so you can check the claim instead of the person making it. That is a harder standard to meet than a reputation, which is the point of choosing it.
- Ruben Castellane — Video games, the money behind them, and the distance between what a game is accused of and what it is
- Matteo Ferri — Writes runbooks you could hand to a colleague on Monday. Honest about how long a thing takes and about what it does not fix.
- Elin Sandberg — Writes the buyer's comparisons. Publishes the method before the verdict, including what was not tested and why that matters.
- Joris Feenstra — Covers consumer hardware on a five-year horizon, and separates what has been announced from what has actually been decided.
- Nadia Berger — Reads the diff. Terms of service, privacy policies and changelogs, and what a changed default does to the people living under it.
- Iris Valdés — Takes vendor and government claims about control, ownership and jurisdiction apart. Writes field guides rather than verdicts.
- Bram Coppens — Reviews hardware and endpoint software as fleet purchases. Judges patch horizons and enrolment flows, not cameras.
- Tomasz Wierzbicki — Covers payment systems, market infrastructure and cloud dependency. Asks what a thing depends on, what breaks first, and who is short when it does.
- Marine Lefebvre — Covers the Commission, the Parliament and the machinery that turns a consultation into an obligation. Reads the instrument rather than the press release.
Corrections
Corrections are made on the page, and a piece that has been changed after publication carries the date it was updated. Write to hello@hosakaseven.com and say what is wrong and where. Tips go to wire@hosakaseven.com.
How it is paid for
Sponsorships, sold directly, one at a time. No programmatic advertising, no third-party ad tags, no tracking pixels, no data sold on — the reasoning is on the advertising page and what it means for readers is on the privacy page. A sponsor has never seen a piece before publication and never will.
Who publishes it
Samarkand Industries OÜ, registry code 17492007, VAT EE102996999. Narva mnt 5, 10117 Tallinn, Harjumaa, Estonia.