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Quelle Surprise: UK households could face VPN ‘ban’ after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill | Birmingham Live
As surely as day follows night, the online safety act which was ostensibly about protecting children has now become a matter of domestic compliance with surveillance and chilling of access to software: https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/uk-households-could-face-vpn-32152789
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Petition update: unsurprisingly the British government will not repeal the Online Safety Act
As previously explained, this is what happens when petitions are written by amateurs:
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“Darling, everything is an allegory for eternal surrender if you butter it properly” | Butter Me Immortal
On Bluesky, Kat Day posted a critique of the “male gaze” saying that Hollywood men with ripped physiques are represented for the benefit of other males. Okay. Then she also stated that “Women, in the main, would much rather see a man who looks like he’d make himself a stack of buttered toast and let
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“I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird” | …fun if slightly rambling video of abusing audio spectrograms to train/encode digital data in birdsong
The European Commission will be extending GDPR for avian data processors, shortly. Link to video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hCQCP-5g5bo&t=1019s
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Tom Lehrer buried a joke inside the NSA maths paper archive
The short thread is a must read for mathematicians, cryptographers, and other forms of NSA-adjacent nerd:
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All the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon when we’re poisoning pigeons in the park…
Alas. RIP Tom Lehrer. The voice of satire for several generations. Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97 | The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/27/arts/music/tom-lehrer-dead.html
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The “Repeal the Online Safety Act” – petition is now (Sunday) at 268,000 votes. Regrettably it will go nowhere because it was drafted by…
…it was drafted by somebody who does not understand the government’s YASS BUT THE CHILDREN thinking and how the press will toe that line, but it’s still an interesting minor protest. Aside: this is one of the problems of the hard left: they try to win wars in a single step, not battles. Repeal the
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Anyone who thinks that age verification & client side scanning will not be circumvented in open source / interoperable client software, is not paying attention…
One side of Government is pressing for anti-monopolistic “interoperable” messenger clients, whilst the other demands embedded censorship & surveillance. Meanwhile… … “over the top” superencryption technologies like OTR or PGP have been available for 30+ years, and (for example) video player apps contain entire filesystem network stacks in user space because software engineers love bloating
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Age verification has set up “child online safety” as a challenge to be broken, a problem to be evaded, rather than a goal to be pursued by all. Tone deaf approach by Govt, Industry, & safety activists has set back the cause by a generation
We described what would happen in 2016 and now it’s coming to fruition: Brits can get around Discord’s age verification thanks to Death Stranding’s photo mode, bypassing the measure introduced with the UK’s Online Safety Act. We tried it and it works—thanks, Kojima | PC Gamer https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/brits-can-get-around-discords-age-verification-thanks-to-death-strandings-photo-mode-bypassing-the-measure-introduced-with-the-uks-online-safety-act-we-tried-it-and-it-works-thanks-kojima/
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Bluesky’s UK age assurance sucks, here’s how to work around it | GitHub
“the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” People are crowdsourcing their own fixes to circumvent the harms of age verification. We told the Government and the child safety campaigners that this would happen… https://gist.github.com/mary-ext/6e27b24a83838202908808ad528b3318
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Breach of verification data and images at “Tea” app foreshadows impact of hacking vibe-coded “Age Verification” providers
more than 72,000 images were exposed, including 13,000 verification documents and several images of women at the platform. People over the internet assume that the app’s storage mechanism was “vibe-coded” but that’s just pun-intended for now. However, not setting authentication with the Firebase storage was not a professional move at all, especially with all the
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