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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
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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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