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Louis Anslow: “The UK has banned choking porn, but [Lisa Nandy] culture secretary is [joking about] taking the day off to play a game that allows you hire a hooker, then kill her to get your money back”
Nandy: “I think [GTA6 is] something that we should be really proud of“. Possibly something to do with the tax revenue, no? Or perhaps not?
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The NHS provides the biggest clue that this House of Lords “Client-Side Scanning” White Paper is written by people who don’t understand tech
The scariest and most unrealistic briefing paper I’ve ever read is written from the perspective that NHS systems may be trivially upgraded to support the dreamware being proposed, as NHS systems are all modern, performant, homogeneous, well-administered and capable of delivering the authors’ goals with negligible “exemptions” or additional “administration”. “Errors” they care about are…
Fediverse reactions
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Evangelical Quango lobbies UK Parliament: White Paper demands all devices (even *RaspberryPi*) MUST include realtime scanning for Child Abuse Images and Streaming over/above all other goals
This document is so absolutely scary that I don’t even know where to begin, so here are some links and some quotes, and I’ll try to do more over the weekend if I can stomach it. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t being pushed hard in the House of Lords, having the ear of…
Fediverse reactions
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Researcher Lukasz Olejnik *breaks* European-Commision’s prescribed “anonymisation” of Google data, unmasks users
Politically obligated sharing of Google-scale data for “academic research” & “anti-monopolistic” purposes is a ridiculous, dangerous privacy nightmare, and Lukasz has proven it: Under the EU Commission’s scheme, search queries are to be handed in a way to make it impossible to identify individual searches … The Commission argues that this makes users “indistinguishable from…
Fediverse reactions
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Andy Greenberg: “AutoSploit Tool Makes Unskilled Hacking Easier Than Ever” — a headline which must have written *many* times in the past 30 years
Andy’s been around the block, but I go back further, so perhaps I selectively remember: …and a few others; so I* asked ChatGPT to help me fill out the list a bit: Tools that were going to kill the Internet (1985–2022) Anyway, back to Andy’s article: A tool called AutoSploit sews together existing hacking tools…
Fediverse reactions
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Owen Boswarva: “I am interested to see whether the UK Government manages to finalise this list of banned sites without taking another run at Wikipedia”
We should all be looking at the regulation of user-to-user communication, and whether the UK Government has the necessary combination of hubris and stupidity to attempt to apply regulation to Wikipedia. This reaction from Preston Byrne nails the issue:
Fediverse reactions
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Bobble Bardsley: “I’m getting very close to being willing to vote for any party who promises to stop banning vast swathes of the internet…”
The UK Government is systematically mismanaging the conditions necessary for the survival of democracy. It’s giving the vote to everyone aged 16+ whilst removing younger ones from social media that might offer wider political perspective, nannying them condescendingly whilst practically encouraging circumvention of the rule of (badly drafted) law, and Orwellian dystopia. What wins? Right…
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Zack Whittaker: “Reddit resisted giving users’ personal data to the U.S. government over critical ICE posts”
I’m pleased — at risk of jinxing it — that we are seeing gradual dissipation of the techlash perspective that “big tech” companies are inherently evil rather than capitalist & complicated; this will take a decade or so, but until then: Reddit disclosed this week that it resisted handing over personally identifiable information to U.S.…
Fediverse reactions
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Graham Smith: “Can the Online Safety Act be fixed?”
https://www.cyberleagle.com/2026/11/can-online-safety-act-be-fixed.html The current clamour for amendments begs the question whether legislation built … on defectively designed foundations can ever be fixed by drawing up a snagging list. If not, we may be destined to go through this exercise over and again: a regulatory boom and bust cycle veering between flexibility and prescription, delegation and legislative…
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Why “Lines of Code Created” should never be a work (or any other kind of success) metric
https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html In early 1982, the [Apple] Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that…
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: when your government attempts to anoint a preferred software solution to “protect children from harm”, this kind of omnishambles is likely to result
This is worth your time to read; by Paul Moore: HarmBlock+ World’s Safest Smartphone: Please Rotate Responsibly https://paul.reviews/harmblock-worlds-safest-smartphone-please-rotate-responsibly/