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BREAKING: Cloudflare once again finds enough spine to publicly combat calls for censorship & state control, although on from past experience we can only wonder how long it will last
Quoting a long tweet from Matthew Prince, it’s hard to forget the last two times that Cloudflare fought censorship and then caved — but of course those being censored back then were bad guys which makes this situation totally different. Snark aside, this is REALLY important. You should read it, especially if you are interested
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It will be interesting to see if Britain’s politicians maintain their taste for self-harm through isolationism by banning X for whatever reason
The internet is speech and if you take the position that “bad speech is harm” rather than “bad speech demands good speech“, the only effective option is a kind of Digital Brexit where you block your citizens from participation in the bigger world. The UK Government will simply have to start censoring internet access for
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The Ofcom Files, Part V: Block Harder | Preston Byrne
First … As a so-called “independent regulator,” Ofcom is not supposed to reverse itself under political pressure. Here, it appears to have done so. Second, in the absence of any concrete evidence that my client has done anything wrong, and until this week Ofcom’s stated public position was that it had not, Ofcom has taken
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“In the one case where a website voluntarily blocked the UK [to comply with the OSA] the UK now wants to get a blocking order to… block it again?”
1/ the Online Safety Act’s network regulations are not about protecting children, they are about attempting to control the internet 2/ the controls being sought are directed at the wrong entities & would never have been effective anyway, for multiple reasons 3/ for those reasons, we are now in a realm of kafka-esque comedy:
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“News: There Were BGP Anomalies During The Venezuela Blackout”
Fascinating geek read for anybody who wants to monitor how nation states perhaps manipulate internet routing to their advantage: https://loworbitsecurity.com/radar/radar16/ And a more cautious take: https://blog.cloudflare.com/bgp-route-leak-venezuela/
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BBC amplifying Ofcom’s toothless “£18m fine” regulatory bluff re: US-based suicide-discussion forum
The website is in the USA which has constitutional free speech protections that will render meaningless any attempt to impose a “fine”. As such, headlines like the attached make Ofcom appear to be attempting to save face via performative regulatory posturing. It’s kind of tragic. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj4l8q2rdxyo
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Privacy will be under unprecedented attack in 2026 | Computer Weekly
Good summary of the challenges we face this year; disclosure: I am quoted regarding perceptual hashing / fuzzy matching: The UK and Europe are ramping up opposition to encryption and stepping up surveillance of private communications. Here is what to expect this year… https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366636751/Privacy-will-be-under-unprecedented-attack-in-2026
censorship chat control online safety online safety act perceptual hashing privacy security surveillanceFediverse reactions
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Judge Demands OpenAI to Release 20 Million Anonymized ChatGPT Chats in AI Copyright Dispute
OMG, this is going to be a disaster: OpenAI invoked a Second Circuit securities case that blocked SEC wiretap disclosures, but [Judge] Stein sharply distinguished it: ChatGPT logs involve voluntary user inputs and undisputed company ownership, unlike surreptitious recordings. “Users’ privacy would be protected by the company’s exhaustive de-identification,” Wang had ruled earlier. https://cybersecuritynews.com/openai-20-million-chatgpt-chats/ Thoughts:
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