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Shakespeare would have said “Bruv” & “Fam”
The kinship term, cousin – often familiarly abbreviated as coz or cuz – is very much broader in its Shakespearean use in than we find today […] we find it used for virtually any relative beyond the immediate family, both for blood relatives and relatives through marriage, and often as a term of affection between…
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Project Aldrin / Facebook into China, a partial retrospective from someone who saw some of the code
Interesting to see {Project Aldrin, Facebook’s attempted entry to China} get more public coverage; it’s a big chunk of the reason that I quit back in 2016, and as Meta spox say “was widely discussed at the time“. Even though the story is now being boosted to promote a book, the moral compromises at play…
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Privacy International’s letter to the UK Home Office demanding transparency on Technical Capability Notices | Privacy International
We believe the Government’s position of refusing to confirm or deny the existence of the Technical Capability Notice or acknowledge Apple’s appeal is untenable and violates principles of transparency and accountability. http://privacyinternational.org/advocacy/5535/privacy-internationals-letter-uk-home-office-demanding-transparency-technical
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The Dangers Lurking in the U.K.’s Plan for Electronic Eavesdropping | Lawfare | Susan Landau | …HMG zealotry against encryption leads to strategic risk
This article by former colleague Professor Susan Landau highlights the UK Government’s pervasive fear of user privacy and end to end encryption via something I was previously unaware: *breaking* from the rest of the “Five Eyes” re: mitigation of “Salt Typhoon”: Vulnerabilities in the telephone signaling systems allowed entry into the phone networks. As I also…
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“[Trump] wanted to eject Canada out of an intelligence-sharing group known as the Five Eyes that also includes Britain, Australia & New Zealand”
The other four are going to have serious opinions about this, not least because they have a single shared monarchy:
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“A back door to encrypted data could help to protect the public” | The Times | BWAHAHAHA MUST READ
Dominic Holden is a lawyer. He believes in The Law. He apparently doesn’t believe that backdoors into private data offer-up arbitrary power to the state, let alone destroy the entire value proposition of encryption to provide systemic privacy – because The Law won’t permit that, and of course *we* don’t live in a police state.…
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Trump Promises To Abuse Take It Down Act For Censorship, Just As We Warned | Techdirt
Quote: “The bill aims to address a legitimate problem — non-consensual intimate imagery — but does so with a censorship mechanism so obviously prone to abuse that the president couldn’t even wait until it passed to announce his plans to misuse it. And Congress laughed. Literally.” https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/06/trump-promises-to-abuse-take-it-down-act-for-censorship-just-as-we-warned/
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No one asked for this: Google is testing round keys in Gboard | Ars Technica
OMG IT LOOKS JUST LIKE AN ASR-33 TELETYPE https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/03/no-one-asked-for-this-google-is-testing-round-keys-in-gboard/
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It is time to make the Online Safety Act 2023 fit for purpose | Neil Brown, a good read…
[Neil is] concerned that, without rapid, targeted intervention at legislative level, the OSA will have a unwarranted and detrimental effect on the plurality of sites and services available to people in the UK, and impede and put at risk people running sites and services in the UK, for no material impact on the safety of…
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Powerful comment from Jen Persson of @DefendDigitalMe re: the trajectory of under-18 online safety vs: that of under-18 assisted suicide
Quote: “It appears we are moving towards becoming a country that would sooner let a doctor suggest assisted suicide to a 15 year old at 18 without informing their parents, than support 15 year olds’ agency to own a smartphone / access social media without parental consent and oversight.” I look eagerly but with little…
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I… I simply cannot resist saying it: “Shot. Chaser.”
They’re not exactly related, but there may just be a dash of karma bitters:
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UK quietly scrubs encryption advice from government websites | TechCrunch | it’s nice to get coverage…
The U.K. government appears to have quietly scrubbed encryption advice from government web pages, just weeks after demanding backdoor access to encrypted data stored on Apple’s cloud storage service, iCloud. The change was spotted by security expert Alec Muffet, who wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)…