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Britons, Parents: be aware: if they Age-Verify Social Media & VPNs, next up will be free supermarket & cafe Wi-Fi; no more “click one button & connect to the internet”
…instead you will be standing in Tesco, Morrison’s or Sainsbury’s, pulling faces at the camera or hunting for passwords whilst your screaming toddler is attacking the chocolate bars and running off into the crowd. “But if it saves a teenager from seeing depressing Instagram posts it’s a worthy price to pay” — no it’s not,…
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Gammons, Boomers & Musk-fixated ideologues in Lords seek ban on online anonymity, pursue Age Verification for Social Media & VPNs
It’s amazing how most of the illiberal stuff coming out of the House Of Lords nowadays comes from ostensible Liberal Democrats & their (ahem) peers: Online safety campaigner Baroness Kidron, another peer supporting the ban, said she worried the government’s consultation would become the “playground of the tech lobbyist”. “The government has shown it will…
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“Keir Starmer is hell-bent on destroying your right to a private life” | …I absolutely detest that the mainstream parliamentary parties are sitting on their hands regarding this matter
We shouldn’t have to be reading this written by somebody from Reform, published in the Telegraph. Where are the LibDems defending privacy? “Who could object to stopping these most heinous crimes? But make no mistake: this is “client-side scanning”. Messages will be analysed on your device, before encryption, meaning true end-to-end privacy evaporates. Every text,…
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Government drops plans for mandatory digital ID to work in UK | BBC | ID Cards are not dead yet and we need to keep the pressure up…
… however, this is pointing in the right direction: “The government has dropped plans requiring workers to sign up to its digital ID scheme in order to prove their right to work in the UK, the BBC understands. By 2029, right to work checks will be done digitally – for example by using biometric passports…
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Britain’s bid to police the world’s internet | spiked | … I wish we could read this kind of analysis in The Guardian
Even putting the principle of national sovereignty aside, Ofcom’s censoriousness is seriously poisoning relations with the US. Americans take their free speech seriously, and this isn’t the first time Ofcom has targeted US platforms. Think of 4chan and Kiwi Farms, two other dodgy websites that are legal in the US but fall foul of British…
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They may not like the label but Ofcom *are* a censor, because they are attempting to force platforms (including entirely foreign ones) to adopt the paraphernalia of censorship, so not only…
So not only are they working towards constraining the expression-speech of users, they are also compelling the code-speech of platforms:
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Live-Event Blocking at Scale: Effectiveness vs. Collateral Damage in Italy’s Piracy Shield | RIPE Labs
Italy’s Piracy Shield blocks IPs and domains within minutes, but measurements performed by researchers at the University of Twente and colleagues show broad collateral damage to legitimate services. We share the results of those measurements in the hopes of sparking a community discussion around the Piracy Shield initiative https://labs.ripe.net/author/antonio-prado/live-event-blocking-at-scale-effectiveness-vs-collateral-damage-in-italys-piracy-shield/
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1947: interesting to see a physical example of mitigation for known plaintext attacks against British military ciphers, including explicit exceptions for OTP
I wonder if the average consumer of the content understood the reason for the difference? WARNING: This is an unparaphrased version of a secret cypher or confidential code message, and the text must first be paraphrased if it is essential to communicate it to persons outside British or Allied Government Services. (*NOTE: Messages shown as…
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Reminder: Spain already blocks Cloudflare IP addresses when there is a football match on
It’s utterly bonkers and passibly corrupt, so whatever is happening in Italy is not too far off the same: See also: https://cybersecurityadvisors.network/2025/04/15/la-liga-blocking-of-cloudflare-ips-in-spain/ And: https://hayahora.futbol/ >User complains that TopDeck is not loading for them at all>Sends screenshot, I notice it’s in spanish>Ask if they are from Spain, they are>Google search “La Liga today”>There’s a game happening…
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UK Orders Ofcom to Enforce Encryption Backdoors
[Baroness Berger] also accused tech companies of lying when they say scanning encrypted messages isn’t possible. And maybe they are. But when your answer to that is “Well, we’ll just force them to comply by law,” you’re not solving the problem. You’re building a digital panopticon with the grace of a sledgehammer. https://reclaimthenet.org/uk-orders-ofcom-to-explore-encryption-backdoors
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Wikimedia UK and the Online Safety Act: A deep dive into the story so far | Wikimedia UK
With a decision on whether or not Wikipedia will be considered a category 1 service under the UK Online Safety Act 2023 expected in 2026, it seems like a timely moment to reflect on the journey to this point; including Wikimedia UK’s work to ensure that measures to improve online safety do not have detrimental…