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Heather Burns / @webdevlaw on the new #InvestigatoryPowersAct attempt to force backdoors and bugs into everything
~10 years ago I learned from someone who knows that GCHQ asked to be spliced into the bugs database for the Tor Project, to gain prior notice of exploitable bugs. They were politely declined. It seems that they now want to formalise this approach for everyone, by force of law: https://webdevlaw.uk/2023/11/08/investigatory-powers-act-amendment-kings-speech/
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Diary for Today
Not much to tell today: up early, 1.5x loads of laundry, messed-up putting out the bins so missed this fortnight’s pickup for rubbish – but we’re at less than 50% so it’s probably okay. Took the toddler out for swings and slides and exploring woodlands and running up and down and up and down and
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Reminder from 2021: “the World Bank has taken down its blog talking up the development and gender equality benefits of Afghanistan’s digital ID system”
It turns out that deploying Digital ID cards in a country which subsequently has a totalitarian crackdown, is a bad idea. A bit like what happened in the Netherlands in 1941, really. ID cards — and nowadays, Digital ID — is more about empowering third parties (like the state) to prevent people from doing things,
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Prediction: One day soon there will be a clickbait piece in the media about “Regulators Angry at Nazis in Free iPhone Games and SomethingMustBeDone™” #touchHLE #Censorship #ArtificialIntelligence
It’s inevitable and it will be hysterical, destructive, and pointless other than to whip up political outrage… unless we all make fun of it now so that the story can’t take hold. There’s this guy who’s building an open-source SEGA emulator for love and is distributing it for (basically) all major platforms including iPhone. The
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Diary for Today
It’s been a bit of a non-day, really, mostly from operating on about 4h sleep overall; woken by toddler around 02:30 and didn’t really recover from that. Still feeling washed-out and will turn-in soon. Daycare freed up the space to do household chores so I cleared and racked about 3.5x loads of laundry for the
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Mastodon seems to be a lot more fragile than USENET; the whole PubSub thing seems to assume better connectivity than old-style distribution permits
This blog has been offline from ActivityPub / Fediverse for a few days, due to a bug in the WordPress Supercache plugin regarding (not) honouring the HTTP Accept header. Back in the days of USENET, a node going offline for that length of time would not be a huge problem; the articles would be pushed
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Nice long-form Tweet from @rmhrisk re: the perennial FUD that {Libraries, The Internet, Search Engines, Social Networking, AI} will enable youth to access $BAD_IDEAS and cause them to {cause chaos, kill others, kill themselves, vote for change} …
What the fearmongers really desire is a firewall to keep our youth in ignorance — which makes them easier to manage, but is antithetical to “growing up.”
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Being a parent sometimes means…
Finding a crusty deposit on some toy and thinking: “I think that’s Weetabix. I hope that’s Weetabix.”
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The Eighteenth Century : Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive
So Jason Scott dropped this earlier today: 136,000 books from the 18th Century. ONE HUNDRED THIRTY SIX THOUSAND OF THEM. That would be a point of pride in any library. Making it readable from the Internet, browsable, and downloadable? A pipe dream. Anyway, here they are. https://mastodon.archive.org/@textfiles/111355884433387811 And I’ve gone to have a look at
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Diary for Today
Getting the blog back together has been the most “tech” fun that I’ve had in the past 6 months, even though (or possibly because) it’s been on the back burner to do so for literally 2 years. The impending EOL of the old server’s WordPress software stack made it essential to update, and in the