- Blog
- Profile
- Homepage
-
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
ZOMG! 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 response & rebuttal: https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war
-
The Wyoming GRANITE Act, America’s first-ever foreign censorship shield bill, has PASSED the Wyoming House of Representatives, 46-12! | Preston Byrne
If Wyoming pass such a law then the chances of it being replicated at a federal level are greatly 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!”
-
“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…
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 and other circumvention tools. See page 54 & 55 of the Children’s Wellbeing & Schools Bill: https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/64773/documents/7791
-
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
[*] just the one, before I learnt that patents are really evil [**] RIP
-
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:
-
Businesses may be caught by government proposals to restrict VPN use | Computer Weekly
The government’s announcement to limit the use of VPNs by under 16s is part of a wider proposal to restrict the use of social media by school-age children unveiled by the UK prime minister on Monday. However, it is unclear how the proposals will affect businesses, including small companies, that rely on VPNs to secure…
-
OFCOM update: so apparently the embargoed press-release email was circulated to one (more?) of their general discussion maillists, which I feel symbolic of their approach towards security
Highlights are as follows:
-
HEADSUP: Ofcom *tonight* to announce demand for apps, websites to deploy “hash matching” (i.e. client-side scanning, fuzzy matching) of uploaded images “to protect children”
privacy impact: logfiles of fuzzy-matching hash databases become long-term surveillance pipeline to retrospectively track whistleblower leak images, Snowden 2.0, etc; plus enabling censorship of arbitrary content. WATCH THIS SPACE; ETA 2230H LONDON.