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Welcome to the Online Regulation Analogy Collection
Unrolled: Welcome to the Online Regulation Analogy Collection: speech as everything that it isn’t (and certainly not as the freedom that underpins all other freedoms). Prompted by the ever-lengthening list of analogies invoked to justify why a discretionary regulator should take control of what we say online. #OnlineHarms #OnlineSafetyBill Speech is not a protruding nail…
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Conversations with @bricksilk / David Anderson QC
A couple of threads: Hi David! I work with various civil society organisations re: end-to-end encryption, having formerly been an engineer at both FB & SunMicrosystems. I know that it's dangerous to argue by analogy in this space, but I would be interested to know your perspective on the following: In the USA alone, provision…
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A Wolf in Child-Protection’s Clothing: “This legislation should not be interpreted as prohibiting or weakening end-to-end encryption” — it’s amazing to see Governments framing future attacks upon end-to-end encryption, by simply denying that they are…
Take a look at the attached, and think about not the words that it says, but the outcomes of infrastructures which would be needed in order for them to be implemented: all images which are shared on social media, will need to be checked against registers of “prohibited content” and matches will have to be…
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So the Prime Minister’s phone number leaked; what could possibly go wrong? (recap thread)
The Prime Minister uses both WhatsApp & Signal, and presumably appreciates the benefits of end-to-end encrypted communication. Unless the UK moves towards a "one rule for politicians, another for everyone else"-approach, if Boris can have end-to-end encrypted crypto, so can we. In case you're not aware, the Prime Minister's excessively-old phone number just leaked, online,…
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This thread on @Fesshole, yet the @NSPCC & @ukhomeoffice are still attempting to frame the lack of end-to-end encryption as a “good” thing:
Even if the database was “encrypted data at rest”, the database administrator needs to be able to have query-access to the database content, so without encryption which restricts content access to the directly involved “participants”, the problem would persist.
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How Phone Scams Work, & How To Avoid Them
In case you’re not familiar with how phone and email scams work, Mark Rober – a former NASA engineer who now makes fun YouTube videos for a living – released this great little explainer which uses glitterbombs to get some payback, and also helps people understand the scams so they can stop them happening. It’s…
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Is it just me, or once you buy a #3DPrinter, you start to carry a vernier caliper with you everywhere you go? #Prusa
Analogue. No batteries required. 🙂
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Watch “I Made A Water Computer And It Actually Works” on YouTube – props to @MouldS @standupmaths
Ever since I watched a Tim Hunkin documentary when I was maybe-a-teenager, I decided that if I had an infinite amount of spare time — or even if I didn’t have to spend my time trying to stop people from hampering access to cryptography in myriad of ways — then I would love to spend time…
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There’s no way to put this sympathetically, but the most positive thing to reshape our increasingly cynical & toxic attitudes towards online communication in the past 25 years, has been the pandemic lockdown. Example:
This week I’ve written extensively about misguided attempts to mandate online accountability as a cure-all for abuse, and also regarding how hard it is to find positive stories being told about the network and about communication, because the Internet – being decentralised – has no advocates. But there are charming, positive stories about people leveraging…
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Republican Politics and the @OpenTechFund: how populist Trumpian ideology nearly killed internet freedoms in supposed pursuit of “advancing” them
There’s this fantastic article from NPR — which I whole-heartedly recommend — detailing the rise of Michael Pack as the Trump-partisan head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. If you would like some further background to the issues there is this piece from Vice in June 2020 which explores the issues which the NPR…