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I would just like to share how grateful I am that advertising-funded podcasts like @RestIsPolitics to have normalised the use of VPNs
Having Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell pitch for NordVPN in earnest and politically aware tones several times every week for the past couple of years, has made it very hard to demonise encrypted network communications. I applaud this. Speaking as an actual information security expert, I have always considered VPNs to be something of a…
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Zero Knowledge Proofs Alone Are Not a Digital ID Solution to Protecting User Privacy | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Nice to have corroboration: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/zero-knowledge-proofs-alone-are-not-digital-id-solution-protecting-user-privacy
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Nigel Farage urges minister to apologise for Jimmy Savile online safety claim | BBC News | …I can’t forgive Kyle for making me agree with Farage, but this legislation is not fit for purpose
Kyle refused to back down after Farage’s criticism, saying on social media: “If you want to overturn the Online Safety Act you are on the side of predators. It is as simple as that.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgery3eeqzxo
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UK Minister describes Age Verification as a collective action to keep children safe: the act of inconveniencing adults somehow, like magic, actively protects children
Minister Peter Kyle was on BBC Breakfast this morning, glossing over the VPN signup spike that accompanies the Online Safety Act; a key quote from the very end of the video: “Each time you use a verification service you are keeping children safe in our country and surely that is worth the hassle?” So we…
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Use Their ID | …parody fake driver licences for your member of parliament
What does this site do?This gives you an AI-generated mock driving licence for your MP based on public data. This is useful given the recent Online Safety Act would otherwise require you to send your ID to a foreign identity checking service, or send your internet traffic a dodgy foreign VPN. Here’s a third option!…
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A Redditor asks: “Can’t zero knowledge proof solve the privacy concerns about the UK online safety law?” – my response…
Hi. I love your question. For disclosure I have been working on digital civil liberties around encryption since 1991 and I have been working on age verification since 2016. The really short version of my answer is: it would only address the problematic issues from a technological perspective, but what we really have here is…
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1995: Story Claims PGP Used to Cloak Net Pedophiles | CNET | banning VPNs would be like pissing against the wind…
Sound familiar? According to the story, pedophiles and child pornographers are using PGP to contact each other and transact business. At an Interpol conference on crime against children in London yesterday, Detective Chief Inspector Bryan Dres (sic) of the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) said use of PGP among pornographers has greatly increased over the…
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Quelle Surprise 2: Reform UK vows to repeal ‘borderline dystopian’ Online Safety Act | The Guardian
What we don’t need is to have more stupidity thrown into the mix: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/28/reform-uk-vows-to-repeal-borderline-dystopian-online-safety-act
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Quelle Surprise: UK households could face VPN ‘ban’ after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill | Birmingham Live
As surely as day follows night, the online safety act which was ostensibly about protecting children has now become a matter of domestic compliance with surveillance and chilling of access to software: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/uk-households-could-face-vpn-32152789
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Petition update: unsurprisingly the British government will not repeal the Online Safety Act
As previously explained, this is what happens when petitions are written by amateurs:
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“Darling, everything is an allegory for eternal surrender if you butter it properly” | Butter Me Immortal
On Bluesky, Kat Day posted a critique of the “male gaze” saying that Hollywood men with ripped physiques are represented for the benefit of other males. Okay. Then she also stated that “Women, in the main, would much rather see a man who looks like he’d make himself a stack of buttered toast and let…
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“I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird” | …fun if slightly rambling video of abusing audio spectrograms to train/encode digital data in birdsong
The European Commission will be extending GDPR for avian data processors, shortly. Link to video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQCP-5g5bo&t=1019s