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It doesn’t matter which party is in power, the UK for the time being will remain hostile to the Internet; but at least there will be change elsewhere
The Labour government will expend at least one cycle attempting to crack the whip harder — to “bring American billionaire tech companies to heel” and to “make the internet safer for marginalised communities” via approved surveillance and censorship. Nothing will change in that space, in fact everything will be marginally worse for a while. But
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Nick Cave, advice columnist and agony uncle
Highly recommended. Go read: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/
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Yes populism is on the rise around the globe, but freshly enabling it with the tools of totalitarian surveillance will be totally worth it if we save just one child – John Carr, child safety activist
Paraphrased; here is what he actually said, with which I disagree > The mistrust of state institutions and Big Tech is entirely understandable, not only but particularly in those countries in the EU which had very bad experiences in their not-too-distant totalitarian pasts. But we cannot let pre-internet history condemn children to a nightmarish internet
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Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks | Reuters
This speaks volumes about the nature of government bureaucracy everywhere: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/japan-declares-victory-effort-end-government-use-floppy-disks-2024-07-03/
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The more I read from them the more I believe that the worst thing ever to happen to the Internet was its discovery by Law Professors
I wonder what Henry V would have thought about airline regulation? The NetChoice Decision Shows the First Amendment Is Out of Control The reasoning in the decision in the NetChoice cases marks a new threat to a core function of the state. By presuming that free speech protections apply to a tech company’s “curation” of
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Voices, some calling Macron a Cameron-style fool for “handing France to the fascists,” others think him astute for forcing the issue, the centrists, & the left to pull their shit together at speed. Which is it?
A lesson from British politics is that if you let right-wing weirdoes present themselves as unrepresented victims then they can & will slowly grow their base¹ by engaging those who mindlessly hate all politics, or who want to stick up a finger at the establishment. So in the wake of the European elections (which I
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Labour plans to make tech giants liable for reimbursing victims of online fraud, report | …what could possibly go wrong?
It also proposes expanding the Economic Crime Act to include an offence for tech companies that fail to prevent scams on their platforms. https://www.computing.co.uk/news/4329608/labour-plans-tech-giants-liable-reimbursing-victims-online-fraud-report
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Is there anything about life in Europe which requires one to go around proving one’s identity at regular intervals?
Here in the UK I have hauled out my passport once this year to close a bank account, and I will need a driving licence in a few days to vote. Therefore I’m not aware of a great “digital” convenience to be had here, and I view this as another identity scam. > The EU
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Conservative party mailshot adopts look and feel, passing itself off as HMRC circular
It’s quite an impressive piece of misrepresentative misinformation and it doesn’t even involve the internet:
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Polymorphic LLMs? | llama.ttf is both a font AND an LLM, usable in WASM browsers
Authoritarian “Safety” people who expect to be able to control / broker access to models are going to flip out. https://fuglede.github.io/llama.ttf/
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UK politicians still do not understand the Streisand Effect
1/ You wrote something we don’t like 2/ We will ignore you so you don’t get a story 3/ We will gloat about doing so 4/ You will now have a story