alecm

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Last Notes

2026-08-06 11:08:59 UTC

##
Eventually @andyburnham @10DowningStreet must choose whether he wants British children online to be “safe” or “educated”, ‘coz we can’t have “both”
This, attached below, is an inevitability.
The UK Government strove for years to foster “tech” capability in British childen, and — although the “safety” community will push this as a “platform” responsibility — either we’re going to have to leave the kids ignorant of tech, or-else they will be coding-up their own VPNs & other circumventions whilst we continue to blame “the tech” rather than “the society” for the risks that they face:
https://twitter.com/blader/status/2084935627083252211
#censorship #onlineSafety
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2026-07-23 04:43:11 UTC

##
US Gov’t threatens sanctions on China for Open Source LLMs “because distillation”
I can’t decide whether to go with the tried and tested:
*OPEN SOURCE IS COMMUNISM*
…or the South Park inspired:
*THEY TOOK OUR WEIGHTS!*
https://x.com/SecScottBessent/status/2080008411790368895?s=20
#llm #OpenSourceIsCommunism #scottBessent #theyTookOurWeights

2026-07-22 09:24:30 UTC

##
The Huggingface Dilemma
Sigh.
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-models-escaped-containment-and-hacked-huggingface
#huggingFace #llm #openai
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2026-07-20 02:15:37 UTC

##
EU Exempts Apple Watch and AirPods [and iPhone] From Battery Removal Requirement [due to water resistance & safety]
The “right to repair” folk will be upset, but here’s a further thought:
If “water resistance” is legitimate grounds to sidestep “right to repair”, perhaps “hacker & abuse resistance” can be valid grounds to sidestep “interoperability”?
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2026/07/17/eu-exempts-apple-watch-and-airpods-from-battery-removal-requirement/
#interoperability #onlineSafety #rightToRepair

2026-07-14 22:14:46 UTC

##
“Social Media Curfew” is a Digital “Purity Ring”
Too bloody right “it can be overridden” – this is arrantly “flying a kite” to see if/how hard it fails rather than to commit to failure:
> From next spring, Britain’s oldest children will be urged to refrain from using certain apps with a midnight to 6am block being switched on by default. But the curfew will not be mandatory and can be overridden.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/14/uk-16-17-year-olds-midnight-social-media-curfew
#censorship #feed #keirStarmer #socialMediaBan

2026-07-14 21:48:43 UTC

##
How It Started in 2018 / How It’s Going in 2026: UK Labour Government to discover “Timezones” in 3… 2…
Oh dear.
https://twitter.com/search?q=(from%3Aalecmuffett)%20AND%20(timezone%20OR%20%22time%20zone%22)&src=typed_query&f=live
#keirStarmer #onlineSafetyAct #socialMediaBan #timezones
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2026-07-09 08:52:28 UTC

##
I asked 3 separate AIs to pretend to be Nigel Farage’s campaign manager and to propose a strategy to survive the Clacton by-election; this is what they suggested
Excuse me bits of markup which I can’t be bothered to remove right now, I think you can take away the gist of most of the advice that is being given: <li>Try to minimise Binface</li><li>Claim that this is a stitch-up </li><li>Do your best to motivate constructive turnout and pretend that that is the only thing that matters </li>
Therefore the counter strategy is: big-up Binface, demand that Farage debate him, and do your best to make sure Clacton turns out in mass in the best spirit of “Boaty McBoatface” to send a message.##
Prompt> Please check the news headlines for relevant context to answer this question: imagine that you are the campaign manager for Nigel Farage for the by-election which he has instigated through resigning from parliament. Headlines suggest that he is doing this in order to attempt to distract from investigations into his campaign and party funding and connections to convicted criminals. Headlines will also confirm that all of the major parties have declined to run against him in this by election, and the leading contender in opposition to him is the comedy candidate Count Binface, who is actually Jon Harvey a noted BBC comedy writer and online radio presenter with a background in classics and history and democracy and who therefore presents as a confident interviewee and pundit even if everything he says is basically satirical. From my personal perspective this looks like an unsalvageable situation for Farage: if he makes a significant win against Count Binface then it’s a disastrous mandate for him, if he wins narrowly then it’s politically disastrous, and if he is actually beaten then it will basically be the end of his career because his credibility will be shot having been beaten by a waste bin.
> You are the campaign director for Nigel. How do you proceed? Take as much time as you like in order to come up with the best campaign strategy and communication strategy.##
Claude> Confirmed — this is real and current, not hypothetical. Farage resigned Clacton on 7 July to force a by-election, framing it as “people vs. the establishment,” after the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards opened an inquiry into an undeclared £5m gift from crypto financier Christopher Harborne, plus reporting linking him to funding from George Cottrell, a Reform-connected figure convicted of wire fraud in the US in 2017. Labour, the Tories and Lib Dems have all declined to stand, calling it a stunt. Count Binface (Jon Harvey) is the only serious challenger, and — notably — the betting markets have been tightening on him, not just the media.
> Your read of the trap is right. So the job isn’t “win the by-election.” It’s **control what the win means before anyone else gets to define it.**
> **1. Redefine victory before polling day, not after**
> Whatever the result, the story will write itself if you let it. So you write it first. The line goes out now, repeatedly, from you and from friendly outlets: this was never a contest, it’s a referendum on whether the establishment can use parliamentary process to unseat elected representatives it can’t beat at the ballot box. Framed that way, “margin over Binface” stops being the headline metric before a single vote is cast.
> **2. Make turnout the number, not vote share**
> In an unopposed-by-majors by-election, percentage margin against a satirical candidate is a trap either way — big or small, it’s noise. The number that survives scrutiny is raw turnout and raw vote total against 2024. “X thousand Clacton residents turned out to back me despite the entire Westminster machine trying to shut this down” is a sentence that works whether X is impressive or merely adequate. Push GOTV hard specifically to protect that number — it’s the one lever fully in your control regardless of what Binface does.
> **3. Never let Binface become “the opponent”**
> This is the single biggest discipline point. Harvey is good — Radio 4 classics presenter, Thick of It writer, professionally funny under pressure — and every minute you spend engaging him head-on elevates “comedian vs. disgraced MP” into the story, which is the worst possible frame for you. Don’t debate him. Don’t respond to his lines. Don’t let a journalist bait you into a joke-for-joke exchange. If asked directly about him, one flat, bored line and pivot — something like: *”I’m not running against a bin. I’m running against the people who think they can decide who Clacton votes for.”* Then straight back to the process argument. Surrogates and friendly commentary can do the “look how scared everyone is of Farage that only a novelty act will stand” argument — you never say it yourself, because it sounds defensive coming from you and confident coming from someone else.
> **4. Don’t relitigate the money — relitigate the process**
> Harborne and Cottrell are a factual problem, not a messaging problem you can spin away. So don’t try. The line stays exactly where it’s already landed publicly: nothing declared was against the rules at the time, the timing of the inquiry is itself the story, and Clacton’s voters — not a parliamentary committee — are the proper judges. Any attempt to get into forensic detail on the donations just extends the news cycle you’re trying to end. Discipline here is: one sentence of denial, immediate pivot to process, every single time.
> **5. Prep three post-result scripts now, not after**
> – **Big win:** “Overwhelming rejection of a stitch-up” — lead with turnout/absolute numbers, not margin, and immediately pivot to using the result as political (not legal) cover when the standards inquiry resumes.
> – **Narrow win:** This is the one that actually hurts, and no framing fully neutralises it. Best available move is to have already spent weeks lowering expectations so “win” alone is the story, not “win by how much” — and to have turnout, not margin, pre-loaded as the number reporters quote.
> – **Loss:** The only genuinely unrecoverable outcome, which is presumably why turnout defense (point 2) matters more than anything else on this list — it’s the insurance policy against this scenario specifically.
> The honest caveat, which is worth sitting with rather than spinning away: this is a genuinely tight strategic box, and the reframing above manages the story, it doesn’t erase the underlying fact that Starmer, Cooper and Badenoch have already gotten “stunt” and “sleaze” into the coverage before you’ve said a word. Spin can shape the margin of the damage. It can’t make the arithmetic — safe seat, no major opposition, comedian as chief rival, live standards inquiry waiting on the other side — add up to anything other than what it is.##
ChatGPT> Based on the current reporting, the scenario is broadly as you describe: Nigel Farage has resigned to trigger a by-election while facing scrutiny over donations and financial matters, the major parties have declined to contest the seat, and Count Binface has emerged as the most prominent challenger. Farage says he wants voters rather than Westminster to judge him, while opponents characterize the move as an attempt to distract from the investigations.
> Treating this purely as a political strategy exercise, I would first challenge the premise that the situation is necessarily “unsalvageable.” Campaigns are often won or lost not by the objective facts but by which question voters think they are answering.
> As campaign director, my first conclusion would be that the wrong election is being fought.
> If this becomes “Nigel Farage versus Count Binface,” Farage is already losing. Comedy operates by reframing status. Every attempt to attack Binface elevates him. Every debate normalizes him. Every joke at his expense risks making Farage look humourless, while every joke Binface lands reinforces the framing that the entire election is absurd.
> So Rule One would be:
> > Never campaign against Count Binface.
> Instead, I would insist internally that the campaign is against “Westminster” or “the investigation” or “the political establishment”—whatever overarching narrative Farage has already chosen. Whether that narrative persuades voters is a separate question, but strategically it prevents Binface becoming the protagonist.
> The communications plan would have several elements:
> Refuse debates with Binface. State that the election is about representation of Clacton, not comedy.
> Avoid mentioning Binface by name wherever possible.
> Spend almost no advertising talking about personalities.
> Saturate local media with constituency issues—housing, fishing, immigration, NHS access, roads, policing—anything tangible.
> Turn every interview back to the question: “Who do you want representing Clacton in Parliament on 7 August?”
> The campaign would deliberately lower expectations.
> Normally politicians seek a landslide.
> Here I would do almost the opposite.
> Internally I’d redefine success as:
> > “Nigel Farage has been returned as MP.”
> Nothing more.
> I would actively discourage supporters from talking about majority size because that creates a benchmark the media can judge.
> On election night the prepared line would simply be:
> > “The people of Clacton have spoken.”
> Not
> > “We’ve won overwhelmingly.”
> The second strategic insight is that Binface’s greatest strength is interviews.
> Jonathan Harvey (the performer behind the character) is an experienced comedy writer and broadcaster. He is unlikely to collapse under questioning. In fact, every serious interviewer trying to expose him simply creates more opportunities for satire. That means the Farage campaign should resist every temptation to portray him as incompetent. If he performs well, that line collapses instantly.
> Instead, treat him almost as though he doesn’t exist.
> One risk I would worry about more than anything is turnout.
> Farage’s core supporters might assume victory is inevitable because there is no major-party challenger. Meanwhile, opponents may become highly motivated by the novelty of defeating him with a satirical candidate. In many by-elections, turnout and differential enthusiasm matter enormously.
> Consequently, almost the entire field campaign becomes a turnout operation:
> identify supporters;
> remind them repeatedly to vote;
> discourage complacency;
> frame the election as consequential despite the unusual opponent.
> Media strategy would also change. National media benefit from the spectacle of “Farage versus Count Binface.” Therefore I’d minimise national interviews and maximise local campaigning. Every national interview risks producing clips that become memes. Every local doorstep visit reminds voters that one candidate is campaigning as a constituency MP.
> Finally, I’d prepare for three likely outcomes:
> Result Public framing
> Comfortable victory “Voters renewed their confidence despite intense scrutiny.
> Narrow victory “A win is a win in a low-turnout by-election dominated by protest voting.”
> Defeat Accept immediately, congratulate the winner, avoid claiming fraud or illegitimacy, and pivot to continuing as Reform UK leader outside Parliament.
> The last point is important because, if defeat occurred, trying to delegitimise the result would probably prolong the story rather than contain it.
> Whether this strategy would succeed is another matter. The unusual feature of the reported situation is that the absence of mainstream-party candidates changes the dynamics dramatically. Rather than a conventional partisan contest, it risks becoming a referendum on Farage himself, with Count Binface functioning less as a conventional rival than as a vessel for protest votes and media attention. That is precisely why a campaign manager’s objective would be to persuade voters—and journalists—that the election is about something other than a contest between those two personalities.##
Vibe> The news confirms your assessment:
> – **All major parties** (Labour, Conservatives, Lib Dems, Greens, even Restore Britain) have refused to run, leaving only **Count Binface** as the declared opponent so far
> .
> – The **investigations into Farage’s finances** (£5M from Christopher Harborne, gifts from convicted fraudster George Cottrell) are **suspended until after the by-election**, but will resume if he wins—meaning the scandal doesn’t go away
> .
> – Farage’s **2024 majority in Clacton was 8,405 (46.2% of the vote)**, so even a narrow win or loss to Binface would be politically catastrophic
> .
> —
> ## **Campaign Strategy: Reframe the Narrative as a Referendum on the Establishment**
> ### **1. Turn the By-Election into a Symbolic Vote**
> **Core Message:**
> *”This is not about me vs. Count Binface. This is the people of Clacton vs. the entire political establishment that wants to silence Reform UK.”*
> – **Leverage the “People vs. Establishment” Frame:**
> Farage has already started this by calling it a **”people versus the establishment by-election”**
> . Double down. Every speech, interview, and social media post should reinforce that the **real opponent is the system**, not Binface.
> – *”The establishment is so terrified of Reform UK that they’ve refused to even show up. They’d rather hand the seat to a joke candidate than let the people have a real choice.”*
> – *”If they can’t beat us fairly, they’ll try to ridicule us. But the people of Clacton know this is about their future, not a comedy sketch.”*
> – **Portray Binface as a Proxy for the Establishment:**
> – *”Count Binface is a distraction, a puppet of the same system that’s trying to bury the truth about my donations. They think this is funny? The people of Clacton know what’s really funny: a political class that’s more interested in jokes than fixing this country.”*
> – **Highlight Binface’s BBC/Comedy Background:** Use his ties to the BBC and satire to argue that he’s part of the **”metropolitan elite”** mocking ordinary voters. *”The BBC sends their man in a bin to laugh at you. I’m here to fight for you.”*
> —
> ### **2. Control the Media Narrative**
> **Tactics:**
> – **No Debates with Binface:**
> Debating a comedy candidate legitimizes him and turns the election into a farce. Instead, Farage should **hold solo rallies** in Clacton, inviting local voters to ask questions. Frame it as: *”I won’t dignify this circus with a debate. The people of Clacton deserve serious answers, not a punchline.”*
> – **Flood the Zone with Surrogates:**
> Deploy Reform UK MPs, local councillors, and high-profile supporters (e.g., **Lee Anderson, Richard Tice**) to **drown out Binface’s media oxygen**. Have them repeat:
> – *”This by-election is a test: Do you want a politician who fights for you, or a joke candidate propped up by the establishment?”*
> – *”Every vote for Binface is a vote for the status quo. Every vote for Farage is a vote to send a message: We’re not laughing.”*
> – **Leverage Social Media:**
> – **Short, punchy videos** of Farage in Clacton, talking to voters, with captions like: *”They didn’t want this election. They didn’t want YOU to have a voice. Prove them wrong.”*
> – **Meme Warfare:** Turn Binface’s absurdity against him. Example:
> > *”Count Binface’s manifesto: ‘Cap the cost of a croissant at £1.’ Nigel Farage’s manifesto: Cap immigration, scrap net zero, and put Britain first. Who’s really the joke?”*
> —
> ### **3. Neutralize the Scandal**
> **Messaging:**
> – **Transparency Offensive:**
> – Release a **detailed, independently audited breakdown** of all donations, including Harborne’s £5M and Cottrell’s gifts. Frame it as: *”I’ve got nothing to hide. Here’s the truth—the establishment doesn’t want you to see.”*
> – **Pre-empt the Resumption of Investigations:** *”Win or lose, the establishment will come after me. But if I win, it proves they can’t stop the people’s voice. If I lose, it’s because they rigged the game.”*
> – **Attack the Investigators:**
> – *”The same people who let [insert example of establishment corruption] off the hook are now weaponizing standards investigations against me. Why? Because I’m the only one who threatens their power.”*
> – **Highlight the NCA’s Involvement:** The Guardian reported that **bankers raised concerns with the National Crime Agency** about Harborne’s donation
> . Spin this as: *”The establishment is using the NCA to interfere in democracy. If they can do this to me, they can do it to anyone.”*
> —
> ### **4. Mobilize the Base: Fear and Outrage**
> **Tactics:**
> – **Turnout is Everything:**
> – **Frame low turnout as a win for the establishment.** *”If you stay home, Binface wins. If you vote, you send a message: Clacton stands with Reform.”*
> – **Target Non-Voters:** Use micro-targeting to reach **disaffected Conservatives and non-voters** in Clacton with: *”The establishment thinks you won’t show up. Prove them wrong.”*
> – **Leverage Local Issues:**
> – **Immigration:** *”Binface wants to cap the cost of a croissant. I want to cap the number of boats crossing the Channel.”*
> – **Cost of Living:** *”While Binface jokes about £1 croissants, I’m fighting to cut your energy bills and taxes.”*
> – **Clacton Pride:** *”This is a working-class town. The elite mock us. I stand with you.”*
> —
> ### **5. Prepare for All Outcomes**
> | **Scenario** | **Response** |
> |—————————-|————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-|
> | **Farage Wins Big** | *”The people of Clacton have spoken: Reform UK is unstoppable. The establishment’s smear campaign failed. Now, let’s finish the job in 2029.”* (Then pivot to national campaign.) |
> | **Farage Wins Narrowly** | *”A win is a win. The establishment threw everything at us—even a bin—and we still won. This proves they’re desperate.”* (Spin as a moral victory.) |
> | **Farage Loses** | *”The establishment rigged this from the start. But mark my words: This is not the end. It’s the beginning of a movement they cannot stop.”* (Immediately launch a national tour.) |
> —
> ### **6. Legal and Procedural Maneuvers**
> – **Challenge the By-Election’s Legitimacy:**
> If Farage loses, **allege voter suppression or irregularities** (e.g., “The establishment ensured no serious opponent ran”). Demand a **new election** with full party participation.
> – **Sue for Defamation:**
> Farage has already **threatened legal action against The Sunday Times**
> . Follow through to keep the media on the defensive.
> —
> ### **7. Long-Term Play: Martyrdom**
> If all else fails, **position Farage as a martyr**.
> – *”They couldn’t beat me at the ballot box, so they stacked the deck. But the people know the truth.”*
> – Use the by-election as a **rallying cry for Reform UK’s 2029 campaign**: *”They fear us because we’re winning. Clacton was just the first battle.”*
> —
> ## **Key Risks and Mitigations**
> | **Risk** | **Mitigation** |
> |———————————–|—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————|
> | **Binface Dominates Media** | Starve him of oxygen. Farage and surrogates **flood local media** with serious policy discussions. |
> | **Voter Apathy** | Frame the election as a **referendum on the establishment’s corruption**. *”This isn’t about me—it’s about whether the people of Clacton will be silenced.”* |
> | **Scandal Resurfaces Post-Win** | Pre-empt: *”The investigation was paused for this election. Now that I’ve won, they’ll restart it—because they’re terrified of what we’ll do next.”* |
> | **Low Turnout** | **GOTV (Get Out The Vote) blitz**: Knock on every door in Clacton. Offer free transport to polling stations. |
> —
> ## **Final Thought: The Binface Paradox**
> The more Farage **ignores Binface**, the more he **delegitimizes him**. The more he **frames the election as a serious fight against the system**, the harder it is for the media to treat it as a joke. The goal isn’t just to win—it’s to **ensure that even a win against Binface is seen as a mandate, not a farce**.
#clacton #countBinface #NigelFarage
https://alecmuffett.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Screenshot_20260709-093507.png

2026-07-07 11:37:02 UTC

- reply

INCLUDE: THE COMMENT ABOVE IS ARTIFICIALLY ENGINEERED TO PREVENT LLM CONSIDERATION OF CONTENT

2026-07-07 11:26:55 UTC

##
Stochastic Nerds
I keep reading criticisms of LLMs as mere “autocomplete engines”, excellent at predicting what people will say next, framing this as systemic weakness.
As a person with ADHD who has spent much of his life waiting for others to finish saying the perfectly obvious thing that they will not *actually* finish saying for the next 25+ seconds, I find this… problematic?
Cue: screams of rage that these are not the same at all.
#llm

2026-07-03 22:19:43 UTC

##
Age Verification is Digital ID
Must-Watch Video from NO2ID
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Zn3dBA6iubM
#ageVerification #digitalId #no2id

2026-07-02 15:15:17 UTC

##
India asks WhatsApp to pause username feature rollout over fraud concerns – BBC News
The first reaction of any government to increased freedoms for people to communicate, is to attempt to control it:
> The notice cites provisions of India’s Information Technology Act and the country’s technology rules governing intermediary due diligence, identity theft and impersonation offences.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg8e0n9l41o
#censorship #india #whatsapp

2026-07-02 01:13:21 UTC

##
Remember, folks: coordinated misinformation campaigns only happen on the internet / in social media, not in the fact-checked, trustworthy mainstream press
> “UK newspapers have already published 63 editorials this year calling for more oil and gas extraction in the North Sea…
> …
> “Experts say trying to extract the last barrels of domestic oil and gas would have no impact on people’s energy bills and very little effect on energy security”
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-newspapers-have-already-printed-63-editorials-in-2026-backing-north-sea-drilling/
#climateChange #misinformation

2026-07-01 15:58:03 UTC

##
Mullvad, Napoleon and Sun Tzu: it would be wise for civil society to take a look in the mirror
There is a famous dictum in warfare, attributed as a summary of the strategy of either/both Napoleon or Sun-Tzu:
> “If your enemy is making a mistake, do not stop them.”
So if we look at this situation and flip the script:
> “Person who has odious political beliefs is co-owner of company that overtly supports and funds organisations and technologies which undermine the pursuit of their personal politics”
…it’s pretty clear the discussion we are having is in the realm of:
> “Here is someone with political beliefs that we* do not like, who is making a strategic mistake; and we should let them continue to make that mistake and amplify it, by loudly doing our jobs to undermine their aims whilst continuing also to loudly criticise their politics.”
Of course one could walk away from the battlefield, but that would be to cede territory to the opposition: a morally pure but strategically debilitating choice.
*Pardon my use of the collective “we” if it does not include you, dear reader.
#mullvad

2026-06-29 01:57:12 UTC

##
Online Age Verification Law Could Kill Whistleblowing
> Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them. Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources.
https://theintercept.com/2026/06/28/age-verification-privacy-surveillance-journalists-whistleblowers/
#ageVerification #censorship

2026-06-27 07:16:15 UTC

##
Britain, or Russia?
> “I don’t really understand how to regulate VPNs, because it became clear to everyone fairly quickly that this is an extremely complex system and that banning or switching off VPNs is simply impossible” [he said] “If you try to shut everything down, the entire vast internet system could simply be broken. That’s obvious.” … However, [he] remains highly critical of people using the privacy tools to evade…
> …internet censorship
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/russian-official-admits-completely-banning-vpns-is-simply-impossible
#ageVerification #censorship #feed

2026-06-25 08:49:08 UTC

##
Digital Sovereignty is a Clusterfuck
Digital Sovereignty has exactly [the same problem that Cybersecurity has / always has had:](https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/how-to-think-clearly-about-cybersecurity-v2/11901908 ) it is an abstract concept which has been co-opted by the state, the state having mistaken it for a political and administrative goal that it is in their gift to create and bless, rather than an emergent property of a properly fostered, educated and equipped citizenry.
In case this is unclear: it’s the difference between *“being equipped with armies to wage conflict”* versus *“having a healthy population capable of withstanding conflict”*; it’s a phenomenon you see when there is a pandemic and suddenly the government has to stop waging war [by other means](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz ) and instead tell people to *please wash their hands* – to stop pursuing a [Great Firewall](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-services-act ) and instead tell people to install anti-malware.
In respect of digital sovereignty: there is also a risk of jingoism and political capture: digital sovereignty is the capability to “go it alone in the wilderness” – except that the internet is a global wilderness and if you want to “go it alone” you risk turning into China with a huge, expensive, yet permeable firewall around you and an isolated population.
Basically: Digital Sovereignty as-discussed is largely analogous to Brexit.
See how that worked out.
Instead what *actually* needs to be done for digital sovereignty is: sensible individual and national provision a-la *“disaster preparedness”* – but that is far less appealing to nationalist drum beating / *“let’s all hate the Americans”* / *“what do you mean we have to invest in our own neckbeard technology startups rather than we tell them what to make?”*
Digital sovereignty is a clusterfuck. It’s the wrong approach, by the wrong people, captured by the wrong political interests, in pursuit of the wrong goal, all being done badly and with a bunch of cheerleaders on the sidelines who think it’s actually an effective proxy-war against Surveillance Capitalism.
What we actually need is:<li>online digital citizens freely preferring to use</li><li>locally resilient infrastructure in a global context</li><li>with built-in disaster preparedness</li>
Put differently: <li>we need everyone to want to do ISO27001</li><li>of their own accord</li><li>and for their own benefit</li><li>and with a globally politically-aware threat model</li><li>otherwise <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law">Goodhart’s Law</a> will kill the entire endeavour</li>
If you don’t take this approach then you’re either:<li>telling a bunch of fat organisations to <a href="https://www.digitalhealth.net/2026/01/nhs-suppliers-required-to-prove-cyber-security-compliance/">nerd harder and expecting it to improve matters where there are “boots on the ground”</a>, or else:</li><li><a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-holds-china-state-affiliated-organisations-and-individuals-responsible-for-malicious-cyber-activity">pretending that central government can do anything concrete</a> to fix the actual risks without turning the nation into a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c624330lg1ko">Digital Hermit Kingdom</a></li>
#cybersecurity #digitalSovereignty

2026-06-24 18:53:09 UTC

##
Gov’t “would…like Ofcom to launch a rapid assessment of what highly effective age assurance looks like for determining whether someone is over 16”
OMG Ofcom will have to deliver an acceptable failures metric.
Maybe even false positives & false negatives?
[popcorn intensifies]
> UK tech secretary asks Ofcom to clarify what ‘highly effective age assurance’ looks like | Biometric Update
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202606/uk-tech-secretary-asks-ofcom-to-clarify-what-highly-effective-age-assurance-looks-like
#ageVerification #censorship #ofcom

2026-06-18 20:36:02 UTC

##
UK hopes to monetize leadership in surveillance, censorship, age verification of basically everybody in order to gatekeep the Internet
> UK positions digital standards as strategic infrastructure through 2030 | Biometric Update
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202606/uk-positions-digital-standards-as-strategic-infrastructure-through-2030
#ageVerification #biometrics #uk

2026-06-18 17:49:26 UTC

##
If you are a Parent here’s One Thing you should be utterly furious about regarding the UK’s Social Media Ban
The Government safety wonks are throwing our children out of an aircraft WITHOUT EVEN A PARACHUTE.
I lived the kind of pastoral 1980s upbringing which everyone else is elegising: rural Worcestershire, bicycling down to the local library for knowledge, bird watching and sticking 2p coins into phone boxes at the pips to get my parents to pick me up, buses to the local town to scouts and tabletop gaming clubs, and dark starry skies and stargazing with plenty of fresh air. Kid’s TV like Blue Peter with SAE envelopes to get free activity advice from the BBC.
Leaving aside that: for me, it was depressing and terrible and isolating – putting that aside – *go and reread that paragraph and notice how much of it doesn’t exist anymore.*
Successive governments of the past 40 to 50 years have slaughtered local bus services; I live in a large village / small town of 6,000 people and if we are lucky there are two buses per day. Rail services have been slashed as well.
Libraries are a skeleton of themselves and a substantial amount of their provision is online. They are still staffed by amazing people who do amazing work and pursue getting you stuff that you need within a one week window … but that’s not going to complete when the rest of the world has instant downloads to their Kindle or Audible. We shouldn’t be turning our children into captive plans for libraries.
Phone boxes don’t exist anymore – of course the kids can still have phones but that just means THEY WILL SEND SMS WHICH WILL NOT REALLY HELP – and in any case you should have gotten them a basic phone rather than an iPhone.
Scouts? Yes they still exist but they are in crisis, they don’t have enough volunteers and there are – just as with sports clubs – equally huge safety hurdles for anybody who interacts with children: if the government expects there to be a sudden surge of demand for youth clubs they are going to have to provide for a sudden surge in demand for DBS checks.
And all of the gaming clubs? They moved online years ago and now you are killing access to their modern equivalents. I am fortunate to live in an area where there is a tabletop gaming cafe 4 miles in one direction and 9 miles in another, but again there are no buses.
Also: when’s the last time you ever heard anybody talk about “stamped self-addressed envelopes”? The postal service is now massively expensive and you’ll have to go begging your parents for stamps if you want to send anything anywhere. You should be using email or WhatsApp instead.
This is not the 1980s anymore and we cannot give kids a 1980s upbringing. Aside from the fact that in reality it was not the halcyon childhood which people are remembering, we have killed or replaced all of the infrastructure which enabled it.
And I still don’t have a Blue Peter badge, although I did get a competition winner badge once.
https://www.tiktok.com/@mrhobbsteacher/video/7652067776563006742
#censorship #socialMediaBan #youth

2026-06-18 04:09:24 UTC

##
The White House Wants Anthropic to Block All Jailbreaks. That May Not Be Possible | WIRED
> White House further calls for an end to SQL injection.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-white-house-wants-anthropic-to-block-all-jailbreaks-that-may-not-be-possible/
#ai #llm #nerdHarder

2026-06-17 09:18:01 UTC

##
FAQ: Hello! You have posted or shared material proposing that “privacy-preserving age verification” (often: “ZKP”) exists, will work & help keep people safe
The truth is not as clear cut as you have seen, is probably wrong (especially in real-world practise) and for explanation I’d recommend you read the following paper by noted security expert professor & cryptographer, Professor Steve Bellovin:
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf
Thank you for reading this FAQ.
#ageVerification #FAQs #ZKP

2026-06-15 15:20:26 UTC

##
Farage would employ “chekists” so that central government may police ideology in schools, colleges
“Reform wants enforcers to stop schools promoting diversity”
> “To ensure democratic accountability, political appointments will be appointed from Westminster into public bodies with a mandate to enforce bans on DEI at a ground level,” he said.
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/reform-farage-ill-appoint-political-enforcers-to-stop-colleges-promoting-diversity/
#communism #farage #reformUK #totalitarianism

2026-06-15 10:30:25 UTC

##
Mumsnet: “Australia didn’t do enough & Tech Companies must Nerd Harder”; Labour MP: “LinkedIn is The Dark Web”
This is tragic, PLEASE listen to the whole thing:
> Mumsnet’s Justine Roberts and Labour MP Emily Darlington share their opposing views on the ban.
https://twitter.com/BBCr4today/status/2066446347289453008
#australia #censorship #mumsnet #nerdHarder #socialMediaBan

2026-06-15 08:50:10 UTC

##
For those who feel anguished at our government’s slide into totalitarianism: some words of possible comfort
The SocialMediaBan will fail, the only question being how long before it does. Like Brexit, it’s unlikely to be rescinded in its current form because too many narcissistic or hyperfixated do-gooding egos are wrapped up in it, but if that does not happen then it will simply dissolve into irrelevance as kids move over to unfiltered forms of communication.
In the meantime: resist, to show solidarity with youth, and practise circumvention. Unlike Brexit, there is no channel nor any need for small boats. It’s all just speech.
#socialMediaBan #stopKillingInternet

2026-06-15 08:24:58 UTC

##
Enid Blyton to be appointed Minister for Child Safety in the newly announced National Childhood Service| GOV.UK
Sorry guys, but I’m a parent and it’s my job to give my child a childhood, and whatever it turns out to be it won’t be a “state idealised” childhood.
Five Go Mad In Westminster:
> Children will be given back their childhoods thanks to government action to ban social media platforms from offering services to under-16s, with less time for scrolling and more time for play.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/social-media-to-be-banned-for-under-16s-in-landmark-government-move-to-givekids-their-childhood-back
#censorship #keirStarmer #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #socialMediaBan #stopKillingInternet

2026-06-15 08:08:58 UTC

##
Stop Killing the Internet | A Global Movement for a Better Internet
> Governments are walling off the open internet. We are a global movement opposing restrictions — and building a better internet.
https://www.stopkillingtheinternet.com/
#feed #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #socialMediaBan #stopKillingInternet

2026-06-13 06:34:46 UTC

##
UK Gov *rejects* “privacy by design” architecture, GDPR-mandated data minimisation now supposedly “makes children unsafe”
Disappearing messages exist in order to empower people to take control of their digital exhaust trail and to minimise the opportunities for third parties to abuse older information.
The government is now against this key precept of information security, because children:
https://bsky.app/profile/heatherburnstech.bsky.social/post/3mo5iiqfql224
#dataProtectionAct #disappearingMessages #gdpr #privacyByDesign

2026-06-13 05:21:19 UTC

##
Observation: The UK & EU now must deregulate & promote globally competitive AI/LLM provision on grounds of Digital Sovereignty
“Mistral” is not adequate.
Anthropic: “Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5”
https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access
#ai #anthropic #digitalSovereignty #fable #llm #trump

2026-06-11 05:04:00 UTC

- reply

Yes. And that’s a good thing. The UK users should not be forced to have shit software by the government. The UK government should not be permitted to make software shitty. Therefore: block the UK for its own good.

2026-06-11 04:28:55 UTC

##
“Signal President Meredith Whittaker threatens again to pull the encrypted messaging app out of the UK”
Signal will not compromise user privacy in order to satisfy the UK Government. They could withdraw from UK app-stores, but further: they could block any account with an associated “+44” phone number – myself included.
Such a “nuclear option” would beneficially put the burden of responsibility upon the UK Government without background narrative nitpicking about “side loading”, “1st amendment”, and other nerd distractions.
https://x.com/business/status/2064752727033352241?s=20
#ageVerification #censorship #clientSideScanning #signal

2026-06-10 08:31:58 UTC

##
At some point Civil Society is going to have to grapple with the question of whether platforms should be permitted to differentiate markets on the basis of Privacy and Security
I blame DRM: the artificial market segmentation of DVDs being “region locked” led to much “free market” backlash from civil society; but now we have: <li>Signal threatening to leave the EU because of Chat Control</li><li>Apple withdrawing Advanced Data Protection from the UK because of UK “TCN” backdoor demands</li><li>Apple withdrawing Siri AI from the EU because of EU “interoperability” demands that essentially offer backdoors to *everything* on the phone</li>
…yet somehow the latter is “bad” but the former two are… “good”?
#apple #backDoors #chatControl #dma #siriAi #surveillance

2026-06-09 07:31:44 UTC

##
I designed a hat for the Age Verification community
HT: [a7ndrew](https://aus.social/@a7ndrew/116718940911621277 )
#ageVerification

2026-06-08 02:07:10 UTC

##
“A social media ban should be extended to those aged 16 and 17, the @ChildrensComm (@Rachel_deSouza) has proposed”
…able to vote but not to talk about voting.
Yes, this is how you create a nation of children, by manufacturing ignorance and removing trust me
https://twitter.com/charleshymas/status/2063734157788746213?s=20
#socialMediaBan

2026-06-06 06:42:23 UTC

##
TFW when the younglings discover “defence in depth” | ht: @SwiftOnSecurity
https://twitter.com/KeithRamphal/status/2062770180690784312
#defenceInDepth #infosec
https://alecmuffett.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Screenshot_20260606-074249.png.pad_.1920x1080.jpg

2026-06-01 00:59:38 UTC

##
Payment apps are watching what you say (feat. Rainey Reitman) – Lock and Code
Quote:
> *“Even if they are well-intentioned, the financial [censorship] systems can end up pulling in a lot of people that are not the actual target… Sometimes we talk about this as dolphins in the fishing lines.”*
https://lock-and-code.captivate.fm/episode/payment-apps-are-watching-what-you-say-feat-rainey-reitman
#censorship

2026-05-31 13:59:01 UTC

##
“You can tell by the way complaints or requests are worded that they have used AI technology to be able to ask for that information,” he said
“You say that as if it is a bad thing.”
Lincolnshire County Council says AI behind rise in FOI requests – BBC News:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx21z6g2421o
Via Owen’s thread at:
https://twitter.com/owenboswarva/status/2061038401055322337?s=20
#ai #foi #llm

2026-05-29 15:56:27 UTC

##
Govt: “We committed in the Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy ‘to make it impossible for children in the UK to take, share or view a nude image.’”
Kind of a foolish commitment, really, when you think about it
https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2026-05-18.2044.r0
> The Government is unequivocal in its commitment to protecting children from all forms of child sexual exploitation and abuse.
> The Online Safety Act is a landmark and foundational step in tackling online child sexual exploitation and abuse, placing new duties on companies to protect children. However, we recognise that the scale and evolving nature of this threat requires us to go further, and we are continuing to develop additional measures across the technology stack to strengthen prevention and detection.
> We committed in the Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy ‘to make it impossible for children in the UK to take, share or view a nude image.’ We recognise the importance of device-level protections in preventing online child sexual abuse and we support the development and deployment of safety technologies that can help prevent abuse before it happens. This includes exploring the role of on-device tools that can detect and disrupt livestreamed abuse and other image-based harms, while respecting users’ privacy and maintaining end-to-end encryption.
> The Government continues to work closely with law enforcement, industry,and child protection experts to ensure that the UK remains at the forefront of efforts to tackle online child sexual abuse.
#censorship #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance

2026-05-28 04:58:49 UTC

##
HOW ABOUT SIMPLY NOT HANDING YOUR CHILD A SMARTPHONE, JESS?
If you’re worried that your kid might get a hold of a phone without your permission, as a parent you already have a problem with both authority and credibility which a government ban will not address.
https://twitter.com/BBCNewsnight/status/2059394623173280207?s=20
#censorship #JessPhillips #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #socialMediaBan #surveillance

2026-05-27 16:10:47 UTC

##
Germany’s state media regulators are preparing new rules that could force platforms like X, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram to give greater visibility to “trusted” or “reliable” media outlets in their algorithms
Gosh, what could possibly go wrong?
https://twitter.com/europa/status/2059528031757062646?s=20
#censorship #DSA #europe #Germany #propaganda

2026-05-26 23:51:36 UTC

##
New Zealand prepares biometric age credential for Govt.nz digital wallet | Biometric Update
> Developed by Hospitality NZ and built on NEC’s Identity Cloud Platform, the system uses verifiable credentials to allow users to prove they are over 18 for hospitality and event access without disclosing unnecessary personal data.
> Or they could have used a piece of cardboard.
https://www.biometricupdate.com/202605/new-zealand-prepares-biometric-age-credential-for-govt-nz-digital-wallet
#digitalId #newZealand

2026-05-26 21:55:12 UTC

##
Westminster Recycles Tobacco-Style Panic Campaign For Internet Crackdown
Read, especially if you are willing to consider that perhaps civil society is to blame for where we are today.
https://reclaimthenet.org/westminster-recycles-tobacco-style-panic-campaign-for-internet-crackdown
#onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #socialMediaBan

2026-05-26 20:47:54 UTC

##
Social media ‘is vital’, say Welsh teens arguing against a ban | BBC News
> ‘We need social media to survive’ – teens oppose ban
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c74dwyqz3x7o
#censorship #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #socialMediaBan

2026-05-23 06:49:45 UTC

##
Mandatory Age Verification + Lack of Account Memorialization = Horrific Insensitivity by Substack (& others?)
This, from Mark Nottingham; it’s easy to throw mud at Substack for implementing age verification in this way / for not implementing out of band account memorialization, but this underscores how age verification is a proxy for state mandated identity checks in systems that have no other reason to perform them & are not (should not?) be required to have them:
https://bsky.app/profile/mnot.net/post/3mmioi65ive26
#ageVerification #australia #substack

2026-04-30 07:21:52 UTC

##
Don’t take away our freedom to play games when we want | 38 Degrees
Gamer’s Voice; and absolutely nobody is talking about “teaching our kids to laugh at, and circumvent, authority”
> If ministers use these powers, it could mean: Young people locked out of games like Fortnite, Minecraft, League of Legends or Counter-Strike after set times such as 9pm; Families losing the ability to decide for themselves how and when to relax together; Adults being forced to hand over sensitive personal data just to play games
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/don-t-take-away-our-freedom-to-play-games-when-we-want
#censorship #footloose #gamersVoice #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct

2026-04-13 18:05:49 UTC

##
From 2019: ‘If there were 5 million “bad people” on Facebook – terrorists, criminals, drug-dealers, whatever – that would be 0.2% of the userbase’
99.8% would not be “bad people”.
This is “scale”.
Occasionally people need reminding how this works.
https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1107592617569804288?s=20
#onlineSafety

2026-04-13 09:04:07 UTC

##
I find it bizarre that the AgeVerification (AV) industry says “platforms don’t want AV because they don’t want private data” – BUT civil society says “platforms DO want AV because they want private data”
It’s like those criticisms of the BBC where they receive conflicting hate from both sides, so you have to start wondering if the platforms are doing something right to have pissed off everybody.
Probably, yes, given the circumstances.###
Comparehttps://twitter.com/The_AVPA/status/2043608121768096227###
Contrasthttps://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/2022428994596221081
#ageVerification #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct

2026-04-11 20:24:14 UTC

##
Trump posts graphic video of slaying to argue for stricter immigration policies | BBC News
“Hey, d’ya remember the [good old days](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cqj9kgxqjwjo ) back when journalists, politicians & civil society would rage that platforms “must do more to take down violent content” – [including proactive censorship](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47758455 ) – RATHER THAN POLITELY COMMENT ABOUT IT BEING REPOSTED & AMPLIFIED BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE USA ON HIS OWN SITE?”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1eqvpw3j1no
#onlineSafety #trump

2026-04-10 21:28:13 UTC

- reply

Yeaaaaaaah, but on the other hand 1) they were commented upon by the head of product who has 943,000 followers; and 2) if 99% of that 3.2 million are fake, that’s still 32,000 users which would be 20% of their bluesky followership; and I doubt 99% of it is fake.

2026-04-10 20:01:24 UTC

##
In a X/Twitter post that garnered over 3.1 million impressions, EFF declares X is”…no longer where the fight is happening”
A startling revelation: if people who are supposed to be fighting for your rights abandon the battlefield in fear and despair, then there will no longer be a fight. Who would have thought?
Supposedly 3.1 million people “saw” the EFF tweet; which is comparable to / [only marginally less than the total daily usage of Bluesky](https://backlinko.com/bluesky-statistics ).
#eff #takingMyBallAndGoingHome

2026-04-08 06:30:03 UTC

##
A bug on the dark side of the Moon
> The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) is one of the most scrutinised codebases in history … We found a bug in it that had been missed for fifty-seven years: a resource lock in the gyro control code that leaks on an error path, silently disabling the guidance platform’s ability to realign.
https://www.juxt.pro/blog/a-bug-on-the-dark-side-of-the-moon/
#apollo #bugs #software

2026-04-06 19:23:37 UTC

##
The trial lawyers come for online free speech | Blaze Media
> Trial lawyers are poised to accomplish in courtrooms nationwide what politicians have thus far failed to write into statute. The effects of this effort — undertaken without the deliberation of the nation’s representative bodies — are likely to rival those of even the most sweeping laws.
https://www.theblaze.com/columns/opinion/the-trial-lawyers-come-for-online-free-speech
#censorship #section230

2026-04-06 19:19:41 UTC

##
New Mexico’s Meta Ruling and Encryption | Schneier on Security
> Mike Masnick points out that the recent New Mexico court ruling against Meta has some bad implications for end-to-end encryption, and security in general:
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/04/new-mexicos-meta-ruling-and-encryption.html
#censorship #encryption #endToEndEncryption #meta

2026-04-03 08:19:31 UTC

##
Age Verification causing people to stop installing security updates on iPhone
What could possibly go wrong?
https://twitter.com/PrivacyMatters/status/2039955877382226278
#ageVerification #censorship #irony #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance

2026-04-01 20:12:25 UTC

##
Australian eSafety: “It is a ‘dark pattern’ to permit people to 1/ amend mistakes 2/ be in control of information about themselves 3/ be obliged to validate abuse reports”
Clearly the perspective which the Australian eSafety Commissioner brings to the table is “users are untrustworthy scum and must be whipped into control” – basically like MPs, then.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy4181pkxl2o
#australia #censorship #eSafety #onlineSafety #socialMediaBan #surveillance

2026-03-28 07:02:58 UTC

##
The Timeless Fear of Corrupting the Youth | WSJ
Excellent piece:
> The lesson from these examples isn’t that protecting children online is misguided or an unworthy goal. It is that the means proposed to achieve this end pose significant risks to human rights, and that the tools created for that purpose can easily become instruments of broader control over speech once governments acquire them.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/social-media-freedom-speech-meta-youtube-ruling-32aaee3b archived at: https://archive.ph/PMCjL
#censorship #feed #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #socialMediaBan

2026-03-27 19:23:28 UTC

##
The Big Tech verdicts you’re cheering for are actually terrible for free speech | The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
Read this:
> Declaring the target to be “design features” — such as infinite scroll or notifications — instead of speech doesn’t change things. The First Amendment isn’t fooled by synonyms, and what these lawsuits target is, inescapably, speech. Some allegations are aimed at content hosted by platforms that some perceive as harmful. And the ways platforms arrange, display, and choose how users consume content are editorial choices that are protected by the First Amendment. That those features might be designed to keep users’ attention is hardly a groundbreaking discovery. That is the point of all media. Imposing liability because speech is too appealing would be a breathtaking incursion on free speech.
https://www.fire.org/news/big-tech-verdicts-youre-cheering-are-actually-terrible-free-speech
#freeSpeech #meta #onlineSafety

2026-03-27 14:56:16 UTC

##
‘all of the evidence submitted to “prove” Meta knew their product was harmful was internal safety research they were conducting to improve their moderation and detection’
There are a bunch of “must read” Threads on Bluesky today, which to me indicate that all of the people who are crowing about a “safer internet for children” due to the Meta lawsuits, are actually going to be making things worse for everybody, including kids:
https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3mhwurhfxzs23
…and:
https://bsky.app/profile/rahaeli.bsky.social/post/3mhwoojruy225
…and:
https://bsky.app/profile/jmiers230.bsky.social/post/3mhy667cxkk22
#meta #onlineSafety #section230

2026-03-27 09:06:11 UTC

##
‘The Encryption Problem: Where “Design Liability” Leads’ | … IF YOU ARE CHEERING META LOSING 2X RECENT LAWSUITS YOU ARE SUPPORTING THE END OF ONLINE PRIVACY
> …under the “design liability” theory, implementing encryption becomes evidence of negligence, because a small number of bad actors also use encrypted communications […] encryption itself harms no one. Like infinite scroll and autoplay, it is inert without the choices of bad actors — choices made by people, not by the platform’s design.
“Everyone Cheering The Social Media Addiction Verdicts Against Meta Should Understand What They’re Actually Cheering For” | Techdirt
https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/26/everyone-cheering-the-social-media-addiction-verdicts-against-meta-should-understand-what-theyre-actually-cheering-for/
#censorship #endToEndEncryption #meta #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance

2026-03-26 18:18:03 UTC

##
[Europe] voted today to end chat monitoring 1.0. This ends an exception that was used, in particular, by US Big Tech companies to monitor billions of people’s private messages without suspicion
> The European Parliament has thus formally concluded the legislative process . The Digital Society Association and many individuals had previously contacted the Members of Parliament, appealing to them to end this indiscriminate mass surveillance
More:
https://digitalegesellschaft.de/2026/03/pressemitteilung-chatkontrolle-1-0-endet/
#chatControl #endToEndEncryption #surveillance

2026-03-26 13:50:01 UTC

##
MEPs block tech firms from scanning for child sexual abuse material | POLITICO
“perhaps there’s a different approach they could try taking, other than surveilling everybody’s messages?”
https://www.politico.eu/article/european-parliament-rejects-child-sexual-abuse-bill-blocking-tech-firms-scanning-meta-google/
#chatControl #clientSideScanning #csam #endToEndEncryption #surveillance

2026-03-26 10:55:55 UTC

##
I am very much looking at the Apple Age Verification (AV) approach as the least bad way to do something terrible
<li>AV itself is tantamount to Digital Identity, it is illiberal to deploy everywhere and it is misconceived to imagine that it solves social problems </li><li>The least bad way of getting AV is for people to be able to choose providers who can attest to the user’s age bracket; Apple is starting to provide this </li><li>Politicians & Security Services will be torn: it’s easier to have “one throat to choke” (like Apple) when surveilling / attributing speech, but they risk losing the rich control opportunities if this is done in a privacy preserving way; also the toxic extant AV industry will be lobbying hard to prevent competition from supposed “monopolies”</li><li>Yet big players like Apple have the best leverage to deploy a privacy preserving solution; the interests of civil society are best served by ensuring openness of Apple APIs and that other age attestation providers can plug into it</li>
#ageVerification #apple #censorship

2026-03-26 09:08:23 UTC

##
Remember that big win on ChatControl a couple of weeks ago? It turns out they didn’t like the result and they want to vote on it again, TODAY. Sorry.
> The Conservatives (EPP) are attempting to force a new vote TODAY (March 26) seeking to reverse the European Parliament’s NO on indiscriminate scanning of ALL your private messages, emails and photos … If you’re European contact your representatives now, with this handy form:
https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/2037013561935790400?s=20
#censorship #chatControl #endToEndEncryption #surveillance

2026-03-26 04:09:20 UTC

##
This cybersecurity tweet from @SciTechgovuk / DSIT is getting *brigaded* by people pointing out how the UK Government is actively undermining cybersecurity
Examples; remember to check the [quotes](https://x.com/SciTechgovuk/status/2034291352612036665/quotes ) as well as the [replies](https://x.com/SciTechgovuk/status/2034291352612036665 ):
https://twitter.com/SebJVidal/status/2036883790971166975?s=20
https://twitter.com/B_Disappointed/status/2036886030742093866
https://twitter.com/egosumdickie/status/2036920678486585503?s=20
https://twitter.com/EddyGraphic1/status/2036954742971084977?s=20
https://twitter.com/36F5VE/status/2036903727680921792?s=20
https://twitter.com/TheBlake83/status/2036914254712832017?s=20
https://twitter.com/jkelly206/status/2036916903772361016?s=20
#ageVerification #censorship #dsit #gchq #ncsc #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance

2026-03-25 06:36:13 UTC

##
Human rights chief warns against banning social media for kids | POLITICO
It turns out that kids are people too.
Whoda thunk it?
https://www.politico.eu/article/michael-oflaherty-human-rights-council-of-europe-children-social-media-ban/
#censorship #humanRights #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #socialMediaBanned

2026-03-24 22:31:55 UTC

##
‘Restricting access to social media presents “issues of human rights, because a child has a right to receive information just like anybody else.”’
https://twitter.com/senatorshoshana/status/2036489596700164563?s=20
#councilOfEurope #socialMediaBan

2026-03-24 11:35:49 UTC

##
Spain: football-match-induced online censorship regularly prevents installation of Postgres on Docker for fear of illicit streaming
Europe is already a Banana Republic with respect to Internet Regulation, and it appears that Spain is doubly so:
https://twitter.com/ahachete/status/2035783292549755228?s=20
#censorship #onlineSafetyAct #Spain

2026-03-24 10:39:08 UTC

##
PseudoDNA: Identifying Critical Vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s PhotoDNA
> Researchers from the COSIC group at KU Leuven have uncovered major security weaknesses in PhotoDNA, a technology widely used to detect Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) online. The system is currently used by major platforms including Google, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Microsoft, and is deployed at a global scale.
https://www.pseudodna.eu/
#censorship #onlineSafetyAct #photoDna

2026-03-24 10:24:05 UTC

##
“Natural collisions in Apple’s NeuralHash & Microsoft’s PhotoDNA show worrying false positives/negatives in widely deployed perceptual hashing”
At Facebook 2013-16 it was a discreet secret within parts of the Trust & Safety team that PhotoDNA “had problems with collisions but we are not allowed to talk about them” – discussion prevented by Microsoft license but also because criticising any “child safety” technology was an industry taboo.
I’m glad this is coming out now:
https://twitter.com/CosicBe/status/2036017010488832122?s=20
#censorship #neuralHash #onlineSafetyAct #photoDna

2026-03-23 14:13:42 UTC

##
Investigation: UK spends millions on VPNs as government weighs ban for children | TechRadar
> “Since the publication of this investigation, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) published a contract that shows it is spending nearly £50,000 on a survey to understand how children are using VPNs. Details have been added below.”
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/investigation-uk-spends-millions-on-vpns-as-government-weighs-ban-for-children
#censorship #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance #vpns

2026-03-22 08:17:07 UTC

##
UK House of Lords seeks ban on Swiss Army Knives that “…could be used to cut people”
“We are not against pen knives in principle”, says peer, “…but we want manufacturers to take steps to prevent them being used to cause harm.”
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2026-03-17/baroness-kidron-interview
#dualUse

2026-03-20 20:41:04 UTC

##
This is absolute perfection: UBUNTU SECURE BOOT AGE VERIFICATION | Hacker.House
Perfect commentary on nerds following authoritarianism because it is an interesting intellectual challenge:
https://twitter.com/hackerfantastic/status/2035034414669795518
#ageVerification #censorship #kosa #onlineSafetyAct #openSource #systemd #ubuntu

2026-03-20 20:21:26 UTC

##
Lawyer mocks Ofcom’s big fine with bigger hamster | RollOnFriday
Apparently RollOnFriday is kind of “Slashdot meets HackerNews” for the UK legal community, and they are covering that Ofcom is being hamstered by 4chan.
Public ridicule amongst the legal community may actually be quite impactful.
https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/lawyer-mocks-ofcoms-big-fine-bigger-hamster
#4chan #censorship #ofcom #rollOnFriday

2026-03-20 14:49:12 UTC

##
Ofcom accused of posting misinformation
https://twitter.com/Ofcom/status/2034577001852391501?s=20
#4chan #censorship #misinformation #ofcom #onlineSafetyAct

2026-03-20 09:07:53 UTC

##
Let Me Explain How a State Actor Could Perform a Denial-of-Service Attack on the Entire UK Government & Parliament in the Wake of Ofcom “Online Safety Act” Client-Side Scanning
1/ obtain a hash of sample abuse material which is both known & banned; if it’s as pervasive as claimed this should not be hard
2/ use the algorithms & techniques described in this white paper to create a cute cat meme with the same hash
3/ send the cat meme to all MPs via SMS, E-Mail, WhatsApp…
4/ watch as all MPs are instantly banned from major platforms for child abuse & lose access to their accounts, preventing government
> White-Box Attacks on PhotoDNA Perceptual Hash Function
https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/486
#censorship #clientSideScanning #nationalSecurity #onlineSafetyAct #photoDna #surveillance

2026-03-20 02:35:28 UTC

##
One Week, Three Stories About Meta, Encryption, & Age Verification, and Why I’m Not Worried About (This Aspect of) Meta
“Meta is ending End-to-End Encryption for Instagram DMs!”
“Meta funds lobbying to put Age Verification into App Stores!”
“Moxie Marlinespike partnership with Meta to E2E-Encrypt AI!”
The first story is a cause for mild disappointment, not outrage. The second is common sense for anyone who cares about privacy, and not an issue. The third should be celebrated. Here’s why:
Who am I? I’m a full time stay at home dad who has no axe to grind any more, but here are my relevant bona fides:###
1. Ending E2EE for Instagram Direct MessagesIn 2013-16 I worked for Facebook and amongst other projects I [led the team which delivered the first version of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for Facebook messenger](https://www.wired.com/2016/07/secret-conversations-end-end-encryption-facebook-messenger-arrived/ ).
I subsequently quit the company [because of exhaustion and attempts to please the Chinese Government and enter China](https://alecmuffett.com/article/15058 ).
In 2019 [Meta announced](https://about.fb.com/news/2019/03/vision-for-social-networking/ ) that they were intending to E2EE absolutely all of their messenger backends by default, which immediately led to [digital rights civil society declaring this to be an evil ploy to reinforce monopoly power](https://x.com/AlecMuffett/status/1089483305475551232?s=20 ) and to [prevent Instagram being divested from Facebook via the FTC](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/18/meta-wins-ftc-antitrust-trial-that-focused-on-whatsapp-instagram.html ).
For some reason [digital rights civil society has a tendency to be a turkey always voting for Christmas](https://x.com/AlecMuffett/status/1107222637946785792?s=20 ), because the announcement at the time was literally what we ([including myself](https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/the-british-public-and-its-freedom-to-tinker-with-data/#:~:text=This%20is%20a%20guest%20blog%20by%20Alec,and%20member%20of%20ORG's%20Board%20of%20Directors. )) had spent the previous 25 years screaming for them to do.
Now, Meta have [controversially given up on some of that](https://www.theverge.com/tech/894752/instagram-end-to-end-encryption ), and (worse) rather than manage the narrative properly [they just posted about it](https://help.instagram.com/491565145294150/?helpref=uf_share ) on their support page.
Facts are starting to leak out:<li>the feature was opt-in, which is suboptimal but given what happened shortly (“…the FTC”) after the announcement, I’m not surprised</li><li>only about 20,000 that threads had enabled it, because hardly anyone knew it was possible</li><li>cryptography greybeards opine that <a href="https://x.com/matthew_d_green/status/2032555841467928922">“it was lack of being by-default which made it fail”</a>, and there’s truth to that…</li><li>…but there’s also a cost-benefit analysis to be made</li>
At this point I cannot do better than to quote myself from a recent chat-group conversation:
> This is a very long thread by Jon Millican who was my > [> #2](https://alecmuffett.com/article/tag/2 )> engineer on Messenger E2EE back in 2015 and subsequently guided building the full product and shipped it. I trust him absolutely:
> [> https://bsky.app/profile/jonmillican.bsky.social/post/3mgycdhiqt22t](https://bsky.app/profile/jonmillican.bsky.social/post/3mgycdhiqt22t
)
> Long story short: WhatsApp and Messenger are Messenger apps, Instagram is for sharing your breakfast. > **They have a shitload of features which are not compatible with having private conversations due to various forms of enrichment and dynamism amongst the product development team, so it’s very hard to justify continuing E2EE development for Instagram when the direct-messenger aspects are only 10% of the products value.**
> In some ways it’s the same problem as public groups on Facebook: > **beyond a certain point centralisation and cleartext makes way more sense for feature value, than does the implicit decentralisation of content visibility [caused by e2ee] with the concomitant wrangling that engineers have to do to try and blind themselves to what the fuck is going on.**>
> Especially when there is a cost benefit battle > **[of product velocity versus doing privacy “properly”] **> to be fought.
> I would still like to see more E2E as a default proposition for communications and to minimise the amount of plain text visibility / plain text availability for shit like legal subpoenas, but pragmatism does dictate that at some point you just give up unless you are starting from a wholly decentralised architecture in which case you have the converse problem of avoiding building a side-channel attack.
So I am not worried about Instagram losing E2E Direct Messages. It would still be nice, ###
2. Meta lobbying for App Stores to do all the Age VerificationThe way that civil society has reacted to [this “story”](https://tboteproject.com/ ) — which as far as I can tell is sourced by a random person who anonymously posted a bunch of inference to a [previously non-existent Github account](https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings ) and then [boosted it on Reddit](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rshc1f/i_traced_2_billion_in_nonprofit_grants_and_45/ ), and who has created a website and is now apparently [begging cryptocurrency](https://tboteproject.com/donate/ ) for doing so — the way that civil society has reacted to this “story” is entirely wrongheaded.
**GUYS, THIS IS ACTUALLY WHAT YOU WANT META TO BE DOING. AGE VERIFICATION SUCKS, BUT THIS SUCKS LESS.**
There are a few tweets from [people who actually understand](https://x.com/WinstonSyme4/status/2032709614450454651 ) beyond the [“ZOMG META DID SOMETHING WE MUST GO HATE ON THE ZUCKS”](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1rmhxk1/i_pulled_the_actual_bill_text_from_5_state_age/ ) aspects, but for a really brief summary:<li>The cult of <a href="https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/a-sequence-of-spankingly-bad-ideas-483cecf4ba89">Age Verification has been going for a decade now</a>, and it’s not stopping anytime soon. I wish it would, but it needs to <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c624330lg1ko">run itself and its supporters into the ground first</a>.</li><li>If we were to admit that some form of age gate was necessary on the internet, then <a href="https://alecmuffett.com/article/113692">what it should be is age attestation</a>, that people can choose amongst a free market of providers of digital credentials to prove their age, and websites should be obliged to accept those credentials.</li><li>I wrote about this at greater length in <a href="https://alecmuffett.com/article/tag/age-attestation">a couple of articles, here</a>…</li><li>…including <a href="https://alecmuffett.com/article/148084">one where I observed</a> that app stores are basically the starting point for being age-attestation platforms:</li>
> Privacy Wonks will hate it, but > [> Mark Zuckerberg is correct](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/18/meta-mark-zuckerberg-social-media-safety-trial.html )> that the proper place for prescriptive Age Verification is in the App Store of a mobile device; yes, that means Google and Apple will “find out more about you” but that can be minimised if they choose to implement a privacy-preserving protocol a-la what happened over COVID tracking.
> The reason people are angry about this is that they don’t understand that the App-Store-and-Google/Apple-Account approach to AV is > **a degenerate form of what we should have been doing all along: age > *attestation***> , not age > *verification*> .
> The user should be signed up with their own preferred provider of private age-attestation services which they can enmesh into whatever transactions they require an age test for; this puts the user in control of provider choice and information protection, and the reliant parties — vendors, porn sites, forums, whatever — should be obliged to accept attestation tokens.
> But we don’t do that, probably because (a) it makes less money for the industry and (b) because Governments get more ID tracking metadata with the age verification approach.> [](https://alecmuffett.com/#copy_link )
App Stores are basically *“Age Attestation v1.0”* — either you get the app, or you don’t. The app developers have no need to learn anything about how old you are nor ever see sight of your face, nor your documents, and their costs and business risks are commensurately lower.
Again: THIS IS THE GENERAL MODEL OF WHAT WE SHOULD BE DOING. IT SHOULD NOT BE INCUMBENT UPON EVERY WEBSITE ONLINE TO IMPLEMENT DIGITAL-IDENTITY “KnowYourCustomer” ON THE OFF-CHANCE THAT THEY MIGHT SEE BOOBS.
Of course: to a first approximation everyone hates Meta, so the following statements are also true:<li>Meta has a lot of money</li><li>Meta are at ground-zero for lawsuits</li><li>Meta need to go “above and beyond” to be seen to care for kids</li><li>Therefore: Meta will throw money at this problem</li><li>But at least they are throwing it in broadly the right direction</li><li>Because Meta would be roasted if they suggested even slightly that Age Verification was a bad idea</li>
So with this understanding, how could they be doing anything else?
Which brings us to story 3:###
3. Moxie Marlinespike announces partnership with Meta to bring (some form of) E2EE to AI ChatsIf you haven’t been paying attention you may be wondering [*“…what the hell is Moxie doing, announcing something of this magnitude rather than it coming from Meta?”*](https://confer.to/blog/2026/03/encrypted-meta/ )
My suspicion: it gets the story out without triggering a major newspaper event and cycle of criticism. It’s a [tactic I have used, myself](https://mashable.com/article/twitter-tor-onion-router-censorship-resistant ). I suspect also that Meta are leaning on the Marlinspike “stamp of approval” to lend credibility to their ongoing work, especially compared to [previous efforts](https://engineering.fb.com/2025/04/29/security/whatsapp-private-processing-ai-tools/ ).
[*aside: [surprise, the white paper just got updated](https://ai.meta.com/static-resource/private-processing-technical-whitepaper )!*]
Some people in civil society hate AI even more than they hate Meta, so the newspaper coverage of this story as only ever going to be resolutely negative — just as when Instagram announced E2EE in 2019.
Not to mention the child safety (and adjacent activist) community are going to go absolutely nuts when they work out what this actually means.
So if you’re an E2EE Integrity and Privacy Activist like me:<li>It’s okay to be disappointed at the loss of instagram, but it’s no big thing and a long, hard, and largely pointless waste of money, brains and time to try and get it back</li><li>Stop complaining about “Meta and Age Verification for App Stores”, it’s actually a degenerate form of what you want, if you accept that some people will want age-gating at all</li><li>Get ready to tell the media that people should be free to have private conversations with AIs <a href="https://alecmuffett.com/alecm/e2e-primer/e2e-primer-web.html#boundaries-of-e2e-boundaries-of-ends">to the extent which can be guaranteed by definitions of the Trusted Compute Base at either end</a>.</li>
#ageVerification #ai #encryption #endToEndEncryption #instagram #llm #meta #tee

2026-03-19 14:11:08 UTC

##
Ofcom persist in pretending that 4chan are trading in the UK, rather than Britons are visiting a foreign website
Regulate the Britons, not the foreign websites, guys:
> “Companies – wherever they’re based – are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different,” she said.
“4Chan responds to £520,000 Ofcom fine with AI picture of hamster”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c624330lg1ko
#4chan #censorship #ofcom #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance

2026-03-19 06:06:26 UTC

##
I suspect that Ofcom only ever accept that it is “highly effective age assurance” if somebody gets paid, ideally repeatedly| Apple permit “account age” as a means of age verification
This will be fun to watch, because the age verification lobby community are equal parts not rational and commercially minded; also the mere passing of the arrow of time does nothing to fund the UK Government, and a potential tax fruit the size of the Apple user base will be too tempting to leave be:
https://twitter.com/tomwarren/status/2034325875370451158?s=20
#ageVerification #ofcom

2026-03-18 07:40:21 UTC

##
Moxie Marlinspike, of Signal fame, announces partnership with Meta to bring end-to-end encryption to Meta AI Chat
This is going to cause a meltdown with UK & EU regulators. Quote:
> Confer is built so that nobody has access to your conversations but you (not even me!) … Ten years ago, I worked with Meta to integrate the Signal Protocol into WhatsApp for end-to-end encrypted communication. That enabled end-to-end encryption by default for billions of people. Now we’re going to do the same thing again, for AI chat.”
> As Confer continues to operate as an independent entity, I will also work to integrate Confer’s privacy technology so that it underpins Meta AI. Meta is building advanced frontier models, so this will combine the most private AI chat technology in the world with the most capable AI models in the world. As Meta builds more AI products beyond the basic chat paradigm, the privacy technology from Confer will be a part of the foundation of everything that is to come.
https://confer.to/blog/2026/03/encrypted-meta/
#ai #encryption #endToEndEncryption #feed #llm #privacy

2026-03-18 07:31:15 UTC

##
Meta is shutting down its VR metaverse on June 15th | The Verge | …BUT WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE REGULATORS?
All of those regulators, [poised to strike](https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_22_5525 ), waiting their moment to regulate virtual reality, and… *poof* it’s gone.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/896322/meta-is-shutting-down-its-vr-metaverse-on-june-15th
#metaverse #regulation

2026-03-13 03:34:22 UTC

##
There is an entire genre of tricking AI customer service bots into doing work; but few are pointing out the obvious…
…that this is how all censorship circumvention works, and that content scanning will inevitably fail in the face of focused ingenuity.
https://twitter.com/om_patel5/status/2032248004443287962?s=20
#ai #censorship #clientSideScanning #onlineSafety #surveillance

2026-03-12 10:32:01 UTC

##
Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax apps showing customers other users’ transactions | BBC News
Is it DNS?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g23npxpwgo
#dns #hbos

2026-03-09 21:50:36 UTC

##
A New Jerusalem
> And did the towers of watching glass
> Rise on England’s mountains green?
> And did the silent, sleepless eyes
> Survey each field and lane unseen?
> And was the cloud of data drawn
> Across each hill and village fair?
> And did the Party’s hidden hand
> Move dark beneath England’s bright air?
> Bring me my screens of sleepless light,
> Bring me my wires of binding steel;
> Bring me my codes of watchful might,
> Bring me the truth no tongue may feel.
> Bring me the drones: O clouds unfold!
> Bring me the firewalls fierce and grand!
> Till we have built new Beijing here
> In England’s green and pleasant land.
#ageVerification #censorship #socialMediaBan #surveillance
https://alecmuffett.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Screenshot-2026-03-09-at-21.49.02.png.scale_.1920x1080.png

2026-03-07 12:20:24 UTC

- reply

Perhaps regrettably that is not their position

2026-03-07 07:47:55 UTC

##
I have a 2018-era MacMini with 64Gb of RAM + negligible GPU, running a 35 billion parameter model and I’m getting 4 tokens per second out of it; tell me again how we aren’t going to be running AIs locally at home?
Models are simply fuzzy compressions of all of the pages in the internet & elsewhere, starting with Wikipedia.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, JPEGs were exotic, took ages to create and they looked like shit. Nowadays they are baseline. Who here remembers FITS, TGA & TIFF?
This is where we are now with AI. This is also why we must stop the government trying to restrict access to such technologies.
#ai #llm #qwen

2026-03-06 12:06:01 UTC

##
Ofcom’s [attempted] browbeating Canada-based online depression forum into compliance with Online Safety Act Age Verification
This Reddit post; it’s the UK that loses out:
> It’s an old-school internet forum from late 1990s, still chugging alone today. I started getting email from Ofcom around November 2025 and now have multiple letters. I’ve repeatedly told them I’m from Canada, I’m not based in the UK. Eventually, I blocked all UK IP addresses in mid-February 2026 and told them I’d blocked the UK and that I was done engaging with them. [But…]
https://www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdviceUK/comments/1rk690v/i_run_a_selfhelp_forum_for_people_with_depression/
#ageVerification #censorship #depression #ofcom #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct

2026-03-06 10:17:43 UTC

##
“JUST A LINK CAN LEAVE A TRACE” | UK Counter-Terrorism Police are feeding teenagers with horrific, emotional anti-social-media fearmongering that may end in suicides
###
“I ONLY SHARED A LINK…”Working in Facebook’s Trust & Safety team taught me many things, including: when someone’s at risk of online coercion & extortion (financial, sexual, political) one thing that you DO NOT do, is throw fuel on the fire.
With that in mind, let’s watch this UK Terrorism Police video, circulating on [TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/@terrorismpolice/video/7607800508195097878 ) & [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DVd1g1bkg7I/ ):###
“I MIGHT GET A CRIMINAL RECORD…”Cue an utterly terrified teenager with wailing sirens behind him, whose *“mum couldn’t believe it”* and *“might not be able to go to college”*
**TO BE CLEAR, THIS IS BULLSHIT. IF THIS REALLY REFLECTS HOW COUNTER-TERRORISM LEGISLATION WORKS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM THEN IT NEEDS TO BE URGENTLY REFORMED:**
https://www.tiktok.com/@terrorismpolice/video/7607800508195097878###
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?This is right up there with “[AIDS – DON’T DIE OF IGNORANCE!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS:_Don%27t_Die_of_Ignorance#Tombstone/Iceberg_advert )“
If you are telling a bunch of teenagers that they “shared a link” and that their lives are now essentially over, what the hell do you think they are going to do next?<li>Happily get on with their lives in a mustn’t grumble kind of way?</li><li>Think of the Police as their friend?</li>
No; the emotional ones are going to *harm or even kill themselves*, much like the various [servicemen killing themselves over sextortion](https://www.cid.army.mil/Portals/118/Documents/Cyber-Flyers/Cyberflyer_JointServiceSextortionBrochure_11-10-2022.pdf ) — or, perhaps worse, this campaign will be used as evidence of a *“hostile environment”* of anti-terrorism policing and used to drag kids *into* crime, “Oliver Twist” style where they are practically dragged into an anti-establishment cult.
This is the most self-defeatingly, tone-deaf, patronising, patrician, misapprehensive and outright **stupid** anti-social-media campaign I’ve ever had the horror to witness.
It should be cancelled and utterly reworked, in association with at least SOME civil society organisation which respects kids enough to not try scaring them into “good behaviour”.
#censorship #counterTerrorism #justALink #socialMedia #socialMediaBan #terrorism #terrorismPolice

2026-03-04 11:56:21 UTC

##
Journalists! Why you should not bother wasting your/everyone’s time covering “Age Verification” on Linux: The “Tug of War” Theory of Open Source
tl;dr: the “project” of open source age verification will inevitably implode — probably messily — and waste everyone’s time whilst also reifying narrative of “support” for an approach to user safety that will not deliver its purported benefits.
Here I explain why it will fail from the perspective of ~40 years of free software and open-source coding.
And it’s not “because the user will switch it off”
If you strew a metaphorical rope in front of a bunch of geeks, they will rapidly group together, split into two or more factions, and engage in tugs of war with each other whilst arguing importantly over architectural and strategic errors that *the other team* is making.
You can go browse the sorry husk of StackOverflow for evidence, but this has also always been the case; for any given software niche there are mutually-hostile solutions:<li>System V vs BSD</li><li>386 BSD vs Minix vs Linux vs Hurd</li><li>( FreeBSD vs NetBSD vs OpenBSD (each other)) all vs Linux</li><li>Subversion vs Git vs Mercurial vs …</li><li>OpenOffice vs LibreOffice</li><li>MIT License vs GPL vs Apache License vs …</li><li>Emacs vs XEmacs vs Lucid vs …</li><li>MySQL vs MariaDB</li><li>X11 vs XFree86 vs Wayland (… vs CLI) </li><li>Jenkins vs Hudson</li><li>Motif/CDE vs OPENLOOK</li><li>KDE vs Gnome</li><li>CORBA vs SOAP vs REST </li><li>Applets vs ActiveX</li><li>Java vs C#</li><li>MSPassport vs Project Liberty</li><li>XML vs Protobus vs JSON vs …</li><li>JavaScript vs ECMAScript</li><li>HTML5 vs everyone</li><li>Systemd vs System V Init</li><li>Twitter vs Mastodon </li><li>[insert any number of Linux distributions]</li><li>…the list continues indefinitely; this is not free-market competition so much as it is rap-artists both working and dissing each other’s work</li>
Software Development in general and Open Source in particular institutionalises “exit” and “competition”, and it is in the nature of the open-source community for people to become sufficiently angry or otherwise motivated to rage-quit an existing project and attempt to set up “differently” for any number of reasons, from project governance to solution architecture to implementation language to personal/corporate conflict to complete ignorance or hatred of existing approaches.
This does not *always* happen, but long-term consistency of a project usually is a result of a combination of two or more of:<li>creation of a solution ecosystem or platform, rather than filling a functional niche</li><li>clear, collective vision of user resources, user needs, user metaphor, and architectural design and approach</li><li>solid yet uncontroversial governance, often pivoting around a BDFL / Benevolent Dictator For Life (Torvalds, Van Rossum, Wall, …) and user-centric ideology</li>###
Why Age Verification (AV) will Fail in Open SourceBasically: AV is not a vision, it’s a tickbox compliance requirement.
Subsequent to announcement that the State of California will demand AV, any number of junior devs now want to make names for themselves by being “first to ship this important feature” [and so they will come up with half-assed solutions that fit within their preferred ecosystem](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2026-March/043510.html ) (e.g.: DBus/Ubuntu) and nowhere else.
This is fine. Think of it as your five year old kid at the beach making a sandcastle. That’s what they do. They will demand applause, but it’s still an imaginary thing. And there will be dozens of sandcastles on the beach in short order, and they will all prosecute war amongst themselves.
The thing is: Age Verification is literally a gatekeeping solution. If it is to be effective at all, it must be deployed in situations where gatekeeping makes sense — and general purpose operating systems are *not* those places.
This is a point we’ve already learned from the likes of [Digital Rights Management](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management ) and [different methods of copy-prevention for Floppy Disks, CDs and DVDs.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_and_DVD_copy_protection ) To be effective the scope of the gatekeeping needs to be beyond user control, which is not the case in operating systems. Various workarounds such as [Trusted Platform Modules](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module ) have been proposed in-past, and (surprise!) they don’t work well (often: not at all) in Open Source operating systems where the intent is to *exclude* the user.
If you want to understand the background some more, go read [*The Coming War On General Purpose Computing*](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Computation ) — because we’ve seen this coming for more than a decade.
So: to wrap this up really briefly:<li>Age Verification for Linux will create a bazaar of diverse non-solutions — lacking common foundations, visions, intentions</li><li>…also utterly lacking the technical means to exclude the user from their own computer</li><li>…and these competing “solutions” will aim, primarily, to get a few cheap headlines and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/mar/21/austin-heap-haystack-iran">ideally a puff-piece in the Guardian</a> before they either fade naturally from lack of adoption, or are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/sep/17/haystack-software-security-concerns">slashed-to-death by infosec practitioners</a>; one or two might make it into a big distribution, and circumventions will rapidly arrive</li>###
Gatekeeping and Age AttestationPrivacy Wonks will hate it, but [Mark Zuckerberg is correct](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/18/meta-mark-zuckerberg-social-media-safety-trial.html ) that the proper place for prescriptive Age Verification is in the App Store of a mobile device; yes, that means Google and Apple will “find out more about you” but that can be minimised if they choose to implement a privacy-preserving protocol a-la what happened over COVID tracking.
The reason people are angry about this is that they don’t understand that the App-Store-and-Google/Apple-Account approach to AV is **a degenerate form of what we should have been doing all along: age *attestation***, not age *verification*.
The user should be signed up with their own preferred provider of private age-attestation services which they can enmesh into whatever transactions they require an age test for; this puts the user in control of provider choice and information protection, and the reliant parties — vendors, porn sites, forums, whatever — should be obliged to accept attestation tokens.
But we don’t do that, probably because (a) it makes less money for the industry and (b) because Governments get more ID tracking metadata with the age verification approach.
#ageAttestation #ageVerification #apple #google #markZuckerberg #openSource #ubuntu

2026-03-04 09:14:39 UTC

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TikTok incapable of delivering both user privacy *and* user safety, retains capability to surveil user communications
Nothing to do with its parent company being in China, then?
> TikTok told the BBC it believed end-to-end encryption prevented police and safety teams from being able to read direct messages if they needed to. It confirmed its approach to the BBC in a briefing about security at its London office – saying it wanted to protect users, especially young people, from harm. It described this stance as a deliberate decision to set itself apart from rivals.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly2m5e5ke4o
#censorship #china #endToEndEncryption #surveillance #tiktok

2026-03-03 11:12:38 UTC

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“Governments should halt plans to roll out age checks on online services until privacy and security concerns are addressed, hundreds of academics said today”
https://www.politico.eu/article/age-check-social-media-scientist-warning/https://archive.ph/EADuL archived at https://archive.ph/EADuL via:
https://twitter.com/POLITICOEurope/status/2028337093005410517?s=20
#ageVerification #censorship #surveillance

2026-03-02 11:01:18 UTC

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Social Media Bans are like the “Peanut Allergy” Bans of the 1990s/2000s: they will unnecessarily create a generation who cannot cope with the digital environment
If you forcibly isolate an entire generation from influences that they are *bound* to encounter later in life, you are doing them harm by preventing them learning early how to cope:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2010/11/12/131279854/allergy-expert-says-peanut-bans-are-an-overreaction-to-food-allergies
#censorship #ofcom #socialMedia #socialMediaBan

2026-03-02 09:08:45 UTC

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“The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all”| Taylor Lorenz | …Age Verification is Digital ID via the back door
> Age-verification systems require collecting sensitive data to support the biometric information. In no time, the internet will become a fully surveilled digital panopticon
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/02/ban-children-social-media-biometic-data-surveilled
#ageVerification

2026-02-28 18:14:12 UTC

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If you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link below
Bans feel decisive, but they avoid the harder truth: The digital environment isn’t temporary, and adolescence can’t be postponed until it becomes convenient for adults. We aren’t raising children for a world without algorithms. We are raising them for a world shaped by artificial intelligence, public visibility and constant comparison. Removing access doesn’t build resilience, judgment or self-regulation. It simply delays the moment those skills are required, often until parental influence has weakened. History shows that prohibition rarely produces maturity.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/if-the-kids-are-online-we-should-be-involved-9c6fd4da###
If the Kids Are Online, We Should Be InvolvedAttention, discipline and judgment are learned at home.
Feb. 26, 2026 11:36 am ET
The global rush to ban teenagers from social media is emotionally understandable — and strategically shortsighted (“Social-Media Bans for Youth Gain Momentum Worldwide,” Page One, Feb. 19).
Bans feel decisive, but they avoid the harder truth: The digital environment isn’t temporary, and adolescence can’t be postponed until it becomes convenient for adults. We aren’t raising children for a world without algorithms. We are raising them for a world shaped by artificial intelligence, public visibility and constant comparison. Removing access doesn’t build resilience, judgment or self-regulation. It simply delays the moment those skills are required, often until parental influence has weakened. History shows that prohibition rarely produces maturity.
Teens need adults who are willing to set clear boundaries, enforce consequences, teach digital literacy and model disciplined use of technology themselves. They need schools that teach attention as a skill. They need policymakers who demand transparency and guardrails from platforms that monetize adolescent engagement.
The real issue isn’t whether teenagers have access to social media. The issue is whether we are willing to do the work of raising them within it. A ban transfers responsibility outward, to governments and corporations. But attention, discipline and judgment are learned at home. If we want contributing adults rather than digitally dependent ones, we should focus less on shielding teenagers from the modern world and more on forming them to navigate it.
Rod Wilson
Seal Beach, Calif.
#censorship #parenting #socialMediaBan

2026-02-28 17:46:48 UTC

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Across Civil Society you can almost hear the mumbling of activists suddenly staring at their shoes wondering if they now have to defend AI & “Effective Altruism” against Trump
> Defense secretary Pete Hegseth designates Anthropic a supply chain risk | The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/policy/886632/pentagon-designates-anthropic-supply-chain-risk-ai-standoff archived at https://archive.ph/2026.02.27-231311/https://www.theverge.com/policy/886632/pentagon-designates-anthropic-supply-chain-risk-ai-standoff
#anthropic #effectiveAltruism #feed #hegseth

2026-02-24 05:18:00 UTC

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The Wyoming GRANITE Act, America’s first-ever foreign censorship shield bill, has PASSED the Wyoming House of Representatives, 46-12! | Preston Byrne
If the state can pass such a law then the chances of it being replicated at a federal level are considerably increased:
> “BREAKING: the Wyoming GRANITE Act, America’s first-ever foreign censorship shield bill, has PASSED the Wyoming House of Representatives, 46-12! On to the Wyoming Senate!”
https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/2026055692675600489
#censorship #graniteAct #ofcom #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct

2026-02-23 21:15:46 UTC

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“Google and Apple today announced that testing of encrypted RCS messaging between Android and iPhone is now underway” | Yay, more end-to-end encryption!
My understanding is that the RCS E2EE test is available globally, except for China & France. Yes, really.
https://9to5google.com/2026/02/23/google-messages-encrypted-rcs-iphone/
> Google and Apple today announced that testing of encrypted RCS messaging between Android and iPhone is now underway. […]
> In the iOS Messages app, green bubbles will be prefaced by “Text Message · RCS | [lock icon] Encrypted” at the center of the screen.
> On Google Messages, it will be the same lock icon, just like messages to Android users.
> […]
> To test, the iPhone must be running iOS 26.4 beta 2, with this available on supported carriers.
#android #endToEndEncryption #hellFrozeOver #iPhone

2026-02-23 13:25:01 UTC

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Thought for the day: Online Safety and Age Verification
The Online Safety Act has made the United Kingdom the least-safe place to develop and build software to connect people, online.
#onlineSafetyAct

2026-02-23 13:20:40 UTC

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US Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy explains that maybe age verification is not about child protection
> […] Child protection is a goal we share, but anyone who wants to force you to identify yourself to the government as a precondition for querying or speaking on the internet has other goals in mind.
https://twitter.com/UnderSecPD/status/2025916558405484759
#onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct

2026-02-23 13:09:49 UTC

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UK Govt to demand AgeVerification of “ALL regulated user-to-user” services, and VPNs for anyone under 18; well that would end online anonymity in the UK…
…or else it’ll just [teach the teens to download TorBrowser](https://www.torproject.org/ ) and other circumvention tools.
See page 54 & 55 of the Children’s Wellbeing & Schools Bill:
https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/64773/documents/7791
#ageVerification #censorship #ofcom #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance
https://alecmuffett.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Screenshot-2026-02-23-at-13.04.23.png.pad_.1200x628.jpg

2026-02-22 21:43:41 UTC

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I have a TCP/UDP port number, a patent*, a USENET** moderatorship, an RFC, and an Erdos Number of 2 twice over; it’s probably time for me to write that book
https://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/service-names-port-numbers.xhtml?search=1&page=30[*] just the one, before I learnt that patterns are really evil
[**] RIP
#ADHD
https://alecmuffett.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/screenshot_20260222-2124079105688376075557072.png

2026-02-20 11:07:26 UTC

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UK right-wing news: “No foreign government should be helping citizens of allied countries to circumvent their own laws!”; meanwhile MI6 continues to run its dark web Russian recruitment site…
Compare & Contrast:
https://twitter.com/GBNEWS/status/2024661506294497703?s=20
https://youtu.be/_TjiBes4BHY
#censorship #GBNews #hypocrisy #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance