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Fun Stuff To Read: “How to Be a Better Reactionary: Time and Knowledge in Technology Regulation”
Calling somebody a reactionary usually isn’t very nice. This is especially true in academic circles, where most people fall somewhere on the left side of the political spectrum. Here, “reactionary” is a downright slur. It’s a dysphemism used to tar and feather your enemies. But in this little think piece, I want to argue that,
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As we approach Christmas one thing which gives me the greatest hope for mankind is that the war & empire-building that killed millions and marred European history of the past 500 years, is now reduced to witty sparring on social networks
…and I have to say, the Habsburgs are squarely on top of their meme game. …aaaaaaand:
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Criminals will start wearing extra prosthetic fingers to make surveillance footage look like it’s AI generated and thus inadmissible as evidence
I’m sure the NCA would agree that it’s obviously necessary to ban all silicone prosthetics immediately, and of course there would be absolutely no downsides to doing so.
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pun of the day
The thing about birds is that the dinosaurs we were left with were the sinful ones. The others all disappeared in the velocirapture. https://universeodon.com/@mathew/111511323167870701
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Jordan Taylor on X: “How do you create the sharpest thing in the world? And why would you do it? In this thread we take a voyage into true sharpness… https://t.co/Io2qsQt17t” / X
This is a wonderful read, irrespective of the website upon which the thread is hosted:
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“But we do forget that most people are good. By letting the narrative only ever reflect the presence of abusive actors, we enable people who want to pervert social media to their own political control.”
Over on Threads, George Scriban was writing about how features — in this case, search — may be misused by bad people towards bad ends: t’s absolutely understandable for people to want to see real-time search results in certain situations, such as for live events (anything from news, to entertainment, to sports). What Meta has
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Google Just Killed Warrants That Give Police Access To Location Data | …one more proof that encryption can and should be used to minimise or disable un-necessary platform access to data
Geofence Warrants — viz: “tell us the names of everybody using a cellphone near this location at this time” — require platforms to collect, protect, wrangle and manage data they don’t actually have a business purpose for. So Google put that data beyond their own ability to access it. I’m amazed that the online-safety-activists are
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After a while you have to wonder whether it’s worth complaining about MPs who attack online privacy and encryption from behind newspaper paywalls, or if it’s not just giving them more oxygen
For instance, this piece by Tom Tugendhat in the Telegraph; it repeats the same talking points which have failed in past and will continue to fail in future, so much so that one has to wonder if their exposition isn’t more a matter of religious faith than actual risk assessment. Privacy benefits everyone, and it’s
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“Could there be an internet where Tesco, Amazon, Netflix, BBC, airlines, banking etc work well but there are major changes elsewhere?” | child-safety activists ask for a read-only internet
In a sense this is one of the scariest things I’ve read, because it demands removing interactivity and freedom of the user’s voice from the internet; we would be permitted retail and other “consumer” services, and denied anything which might enable user-to-user communications on the grounds that it might harm children, or footballers, or similar.