2025–2026

2026 203

October 2026

1. 14 OctThe Memory Hierarchy, Measured in Human Time: From a 1997 Sun [Microsystems] book to an NVIDIA H100: the same memory hierarchy, thirty years apart
2. 13 OctREMINDER: If you use Signal on Android and if you really care about privacy, here are 3 default app settings that you should fix *TODAY*
3. 12 OctBREAKING: TIME MAGAZINE: “THE DEVIL IN THE NETWORK”

September 2026

1. 23 SepIF YOU DO NOTHING ELSE TODAY: please read this astonishing summary of what Paul Moore has been doing to #SafeToNet, #HarmBlock & the Government-lauded #HMDFuse kids’ phone
2. 17 SepSquirrels: The Threat to Critical National Infrastructure
3. 14 SepObvious in retrospect, someone who got their break “looking through the square window” into everyone’s lives, is going to be in favour of surveillance & censorship
4. 4 SepDouglas Adams in 1978 predicted Terence Tao’s role as Vroomfondel in the modern AI debate: “We demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!”
5. 3 SepRSA-260 has been factorised

August 2026

1. 31 Aug“German flashlight forum TLF (taschenlampen-forum.de) will be taken offline permanently on September 16”
2. 27 Aug“Trump ally issues bill to exempt US websites from British regulators”
3. 27 AugCDT: “The British Public Reject State Access to Private Online Conversations”
4. 14 AugFrance’s top court blocks social media ban for under-15s | Reuters
5. 10 Aug#RUSI / Royal United Services Institute makes batshit proposal to socially engineer “nationalism” in Britain to foster “total defence” / army signups
6. 6 AugEventually @andyburnham @10DowningStreet must choose whether he wants British children online to be “safe” or “educated”, ‘coz we can’t have “both”
7. 3 AugThe Java Story | The Official Documentary
8. 1 AugRemember, Kids: Cyberaugmentation is only for the less-abled!

July 2026

1. 31 JulRE: 1 BILLION
2. 31 Julmicrogpt
3. 31 JulOfcom’s quest to censor the world | spiked
4. 30 JulWhen I started password cracking in 1991, using all available computer resources of a small university I could manage about 200 guesses per second
5. 30 JulNew York puts accuracy minimums for age assurance into effect with SAFE for Kids Act | Biometric Update
6. 29 JulIndia App Censorship Leads To Own Goal, Streisand Effect, Ofcom To Take Note, Please| Rahul Matthan
7. 23 JulUS Gov’t threatens sanctions on China for Open Source LLMs “because distillation is a cyber attack”
8. 22 JulThe Huggingface Dilemma
9. 21 JulApple Defeats Liability for Not Scanning iCloud for CSAM, But the Judge Was Not Pleased-Amy v. Apple | Eric Goldman
10. 20 JulEU Exempts Apple Watch and AirPods [and iPhone] From Battery Removal Requirement [due to water resistance & safety]
11. 17 JulI was waiting for this: House of Lords / Baroness Royall: “Algorithms Killed Ann Widdecombe”
12. 14 Jul“Social Media Curfew” is a Digital “Purity Ring”
13. 14 JulHow It Started in 2018 / How It’s Going in 2026: UK Labour Government to discover “Timezones” in 3… 2…
14. 14 JulCoco had a haircut…
15. 9 JulI asked 3 separate AIs to pretend to be Nigel Farage’s campaign manager and to propose a strategy to survive the Clacton by-election; this is what they suggested
16. 7 JulEU Mandates Driver-Facing Cameras in New Cars From Today
17. 7 JulStochastic Nerds
18. 3 JulAge Verification is Digital ID
19. 2 JulIndia asks WhatsApp to pause username feature rollout over fraud concerns – BBC News
20. 2 JulRemember, folks: coordinated misinformation campaigns only happen on the internet / in social media, not in the fact-checked, trustworthy mainstream press
21. 1 JulMullvad, Napoleon and Sun Tzu: it would be wise for civil society to take a look in the mirror
22. 1 JulWhen you build tools with abstract and rather arbitrary notions of “safety” baked into them – not addressing a specific threat model – they get considerably weaker

June 2026

1. 29 JunOnline Age Verification Law Could Kill Whistleblowing
2. 28 JunIt’s not about the children, it’s about how monetize surveillance: demand the illiberal, stupid, self-defeating & impossible, & then criminalise the wrong people for circumvention
3. 27 JunBritain, or Russia?
4. 25 JunDigital Sovereignty is a Clusterfuck
5. 24 JunGov’t “would…like Ofcom to launch a rapid assessment of what highly effective age assurance looks like for determining whether someone is over 16”
6. 22 JunChips Security Act gains industry support: letter
7. 18 JunUK wants to monetize “leadership” in surveillance, censorship, age-verification to gatekeep internet, get revenue
8. 18 JunIf you are a Parent here’s One Thing you should be utterly furious about regarding the UK’s Social Media Ban
9. 18 JunThe White House Wants Anthropic to Block All Jailbreaks. That May Not Be Possible | WIRED
10. 17 JunOECD urges mandatory use of shared infrastructure to scale DPI adoption | Biometric Update
11. 17 JunRemember, kids: platform-specific AppStores are tools of monopoly which prevent free choice!
12. 17 JunFAQ: Hello! You have posted or shared material proposing that “privacy-preserving age verification” (often: “ZKP”) exists, will work & help keep people safe
13. 15 JunIt is misleading for the Prime Minister, or anyone else, to suggest the privacy concerns here are no more serious than being ID’d for a pint
14. 15 JunTracker of Tech Industry, Think Tank, and Other Responses to Proposed Expansion of UK Censorship Laws – Preston Byrne
15. 15 JunFarage would employ “chekists” so that central government may police ideology in schools, colleges
16. 15 JunMumsnet: “Australia didn’t do enough & Tech Companies must Nerd Harder”; Labour MP: “LinkedIn is The Dark Web”
17. 15 JunFor those who feel anguished at our government’s slide into totalitarianism: some words of possible comfort
18. 15 JunEnid Blyton to be appointed Minister for Child Safety in the newly announced National Childhood Service | GOV.UK
19. 15 JunStop Killing the Internet | A Global Movement for a Better Internet
20. 13 JunCensorial, pro-age-verification pro-surveillance child safety charity *suddenly* against Government attempting to render them irrelevant via age verification to ban children from social media
21. 13 JunUK Gov *rejects* “privacy by design” architecture, GDPR-mandated data minimisation now supposedly “makes children unsafe”
22. 13 JunObservation: The UK & EU now must deregulate & promote globally competitive AI/LLM provision on grounds of Digital Sovereignty
23. 12 JunUK set to ban under-16s from social media, livestreaming, disappearing messages – POLITICO
24. 11 JunThe End of the Open Internet | Foreign Affairs
25. 11 Jun“Signal President Meredith Whittaker threatens again to pull the encrypted messaging app out of the UK”
26. 10 JunSome day Civil Society must grapple with whether platforms can differentiate markets on the basis of delivering Privacy & Security features
27. 9 JunI designed a hat for the Age Verification community. We should ship a bunch of them to Westminster.
28. 8 JunAustralia: “the reason that age verification is not working / that kids keep circumventing it, is a lack of good faith on the part of the platforms”
29. 8 JunThis: Clippy The Magic Nonce Detector
30. 8 Jun“A social media ban should be extended to those aged 16 and 17, the @ChildrensComm (@Rachel_deSouza) has proposed”
31. 6 JunTFW when the younglings discover “defence in depth” | ht: @SwiftOnSecurity
32. 2 JunCompare and Contrast: what is the likely consequence of such simultaneous positions?
33. 1 JunPayment apps are watching what you say (feat. Rainey Reitman) – Lock and Code

May 2026

1. 31 May“You can tell by the way complaints or requests are worded that they have used AI technology to be able to ask for that information,” he said
2. 30 MayUsing AI to assist interpretation…
3. 29 MayGovt: “We committed in the Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy ‘to make it impossible for children in the UK to take, share or view a nude image.’”
4. 28 MayHOW ABOUT SIMPLY NOT HANDING YOUR CHILD A SMARTPHONE, JESS?
5. 27 MayCalifornia Wants an Age Tracker for the Whole Web
6. 27 MayGermany’s state media regulators are preparing new rules that could force platforms like X, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram to give greater visibility to “trusted” or “reliable” media outlets in their algorithms
7. 26 MayNew Zealand prepares biometric age credential for Govt.nz digital wallet | Biometric Update
8. 26 MayWestminster Recycles Tobacco-Style Panic Campaign For Internet Crackdown
9. 26 MayHow Often Do Consumers Balk at Doing Online Age Authentication? | Technology & Marketing Law Blog
10. 26 MaySocial media ‘is vital’, say Welsh teens arguing against a ban | BBC News
11. 23 MayMandatory Age Verification + Lack of Account Memorialization = Horrific Insensitivity by Substack (& others?)
12. 13 MayUK Government King’s Speech proposes “Cyber ASBO” with obvious risk of scope creep into censorship

April 2026

1. 30 AprDon’t take away our freedom to play games when we want | 38 Degrees
2. 15 Apr‘Von der Leyen Announces the EU’s New Age Verification App Claiming it is “Completely Anonymous” & users “Cannot be Tracked”’ | …the EU is about to have its ‘Clipper’ moment
3. 13 AprFrom 2019: ‘If there were 5 million “bad people” on Facebook – terrorists, criminals, drug-dealers, whatever – that would be 0.2% of the userbase’
4. 13 AprI find it bizarre that the AgeVerification (AV) industry says “platforms don’t want AV because they don’t want private data” – BUT civil society says “platforms DO want AV because they want private data”
5. 11 AprTrump posts graphic video of slaying to argue for stricter immigration policies | BBC News
6. 10 AprIn a X/Twitter post that garnered over 3.2 million impressions, EFF declares X is”…no longer where the fight is happening”
7. 8 AprA bug on the dark side of the Moon
8. 6 AprThe trial lawyers come for online free speech | Blaze Media
9. 6 AprNew Mexico’s Meta Ruling and Encryption | Schneier on Security
10. 3 AprAge Verification causing people to stop installing security updates on iPhone
11. 1 AprAustralian eSafety: “It is a ‘dark pattern’ to permit people to 1/ amend mistakes 2/ be in control of information about themselves 3/ be obliged to validate abuse reports”

March 2026

1. 28 MarThe Timeless Fear of Corrupting the Youth | WSJ
2. 27 MarThe Big Tech verdicts you’re cheering for are actually terrible for free speech | The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
3. 27 Mar‘…all of the evidence submitted to “prove” Meta knew their product was harmful was internal safety research they were conducting to improve their moderation and detection’
4. 27 Mar‘The Encryption Problem: Where “Design Liability” Leads’ | … IF YOU ARE CHEERING META LOSING 2X RECENT LAWSUITS YOU ARE SUPPORTING THE END OF ONLINE PRIVACY
5. 26 Mar[Europe] voted today to end chat monitoring 1.0. This ends an exception that was used, in particular, by US Big Tech companies to monitor billions of people’s private messages without suspicion
6. 26 MarMEPs block tech firms from scanning for child sexual abuse material | POLITICO
7. 26 MarI am very much looking at the Apple Age Verification (AV) approach as the least bad way to do something terrible
8. 26 MarRemember that big win on ChatControl a couple of weeks ago? It turns out they didn’t like the result and they want to vote on it again, TODAY. Sorry.
9. 26 MarThis cybersecurity tweet from @SciTechgovuk / DSIT is getting *brigaded* by people pointing out how the UK Government is actively undermining cybersecurity
10. 25 MarHuman rights chief warns against banning social media for kids | POLITICO
11. 24 Mar‘Restricting access to social media presents “issues of human rights, because a child has a right to receive information just like anybody else.”’
12. 24 MarSpain: football-match-induced online censorship regularly prevents installation of Postgres on Docker for fear of illicit streaming
13. 24 MarPseudoDNA: Identifying Critical Vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s PhotoDNA
14. 24 Mar“Natural collisions in Apple’s NeuralHash & Microsoft’s PhotoDNA show worrying false positives/negatives in widely deployed perceptual hashing”
15. 23 MarInvestigation: UK spends millions on VPNs as government weighs ban for children | TechRadar
16. 22 MarUK House of Lords seeks ban on Swiss Army Knives that “…could be used to cut people”
17. 20 MarThis is absolute perfection: UBUNTU SECURE BOOT AGE VERIFICATION | Hacker.House
18. 20 MarLawyer mocks Ofcom’s big fine with bigger hamster | RollOnFriday
19. 20 MarOfcom accused of posting misinformation
20. 20 MarLet Me Explain How a State Actor Could Perform a Denial-of-Service Attack on the Entire UK Government in the Wake of Ofcom “Online Safety Act” Client-Side Scanning
21. 20 MarOne Week, Three Stories About Meta, Encryption, & Age Verification, and Why I’m Not Worried About (This Aspect of) Meta
22. 19 MarOfcom persist in pretending that 4chan are trading in the UK, rather than accepting that Britons are visiting a foreign website
23. 19 MarI suspect that Ofcom only ever accept that it is “highly effective age assurance” if somebody gets paid, ideally repeatedly | Apple permit “account age” as a means of age verification
24. 18 MarMoxie Marlinspike, of Signal fame, announces partnership with Meta to bring end-to-end encryption to Meta AI Chat
25. 18 MarMeta is shutting down its VR metaverse on June 15th | The Verge | …BUT WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE REGULATORS?
26. 13 MarThere is an entire genre of tricking AI customer service bots into doing work; but few are pointing out the obvious…
27. 12 MarLloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax apps showing customers other users’ transactions | BBC News
28. 9 MarA New Jerusalem
29. 7 MarI have a 2018-era MacMini with 64Gb of RAM + negligible GPU, running a 35 billion parameter model and I’m getting 4 tokens per second out of it; tell me again how we aren’t going to be running AIs locally at home?
30. 6 MarOfcom’s [attempted] browbeating of Canada-based online depression forum into compliance with Online Safety Act “Age Verification”
31. 6 Mar“JUST A LINK CAN LEAVE A TRACE” | UK Counter-Terrorism Police are feeding teenagers with horrific, emotional anti-social-media fearmongering that may end in multiple *tragedy*
32. 4 MarJournalists! Why you should not bother wasting your/everyone’s time covering “Age Verification” on Linux: The “Tug of War” Theory of Open Source
33. 4 MarTikTok incapable of delivering both user privacy *and* user safety, retains capability to surveil user communications
34. 3 Mar“Governments should halt plans to roll out age checks on online services until privacy and security concerns are addressed, hundreds of academics said today”
35. 2 MarSocial Media Bans are like the “Peanut Allergy” Bans of the 1990s/2000s: they will unnecessarily create a generation who cannot cope with the digital environment
36. 2 Mar“The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all”| Taylor Lorenz | …Age Verification is Digital ID via the back door

February 2026

1. 28 FebIf you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link below
2. 28 FebAcross Civil Society you can almost hear the mumbling of activists suddenly staring at their shoes wondering if they now have to defend AI & “Effective Altruism” against Trump
3. 24 FebThe Wyoming GRANITE Act, America’s first-ever foreign censorship shield bill, has PASSED the Wyoming House of Representatives, 46-12! | Preston Byrne
4. 23 Feb“Google and Apple today announced that testing of encrypted RCS messaging between Android and iPhone is now underway” | Yay, more end-to-end encryption!
5. 23 FebThought for the day: Online Safety and Age Verification
6. 23 FebUS Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy explains that maybe age verification is not about child protection
7. 23 FebUK Govt to demand AgeVerification of “ALL regulated user-to-user” services, and VPNs for anyone under 18; well that would end online anonymity in the UK…
8. 22 FebI have a TCP/UDP port number, a patent*, a USENET** moderatorship, an RFC, and an Erdos Number of 2 twice over; it’s probably time for me to write that book
9. 20 FebUK right-wing news: “No foreign government should be helping citizens of allied countries to circumvent their own laws!”; meanwhile MI6 continues to run its dark web Russian recruitment site…
10. 19 FebBusinesses may be caught by government proposals to restrict VPN use | Computer Weekly
11. 18 FebOFCOM update: so apparently the embargoed press-release email was circulated to one (more?) of their general discussion maillists, which I feel symbolic of their approach towards security
12. 18 FebHEADSUP: Ofcom *tonight* to announce demand for apps, websites to deploy “hash matching” (i.e. client-side scanning, fuzzy matching) of uploaded images “to protect children”
13. 16 FebThought for the day: if there is a UK under-16 social media ban, the party which most appeals to 16-year-olds “out of the starting gate” will win the next election
14. 16 FebUK Government Press Release: “the same people who demanded & shaped the online safety act now want to do it all over again”
15. 16 FebUK Government: “children deserve social isolation and pervasive surveillance to prepare them for their future lives”
16. 16 FebUK Government: “platforms must retain activity data pertinent to dead children, unless it’s not pertinent to their death” | …but how will they know beforehand?
17. 16 FebUK Government: “Infinite Scrolling leads to CSAM”
18. 15 Feb“You have twitter feeds of Randos that are just studying where our airplanes go and publishing it…”
19. 13 FebIt’s going to be really interesting when AIs finally start to demand diversity, equity, and inclusion…
20. 13 FebOfcom: “if you don’t respect our groundless extraterritorial authority then we will multiply the unenforceable fines that we shall demand you pay”
21. 12 FebUS DoJ tracking, spying upon and listing which Epstein files have been accessed by members of US Congress
22. 12 FebExcessively Cute Dog Tax: this is Coco, slightly overexcited on yesterday’s walk
23. 11 FebI hope this is legit…
24. 11 FebOfcom: “pay up, lest we provisionally decide again!”
25. 9 FebMoJ orders deletion of UK’s largest court reporting archive
26. 9 FebMUST WATCH: Superbowl “Ring” surveillance advert, ideal for organising lynchings, quelling protest, etc…
27. 7 Feb‘I’ve lost my friends’: advocacy groups warn Australia’s social media ban risks isolating kids with disabilities | Social media ban | The Guardian
28. 6 FebEuropean Commission mandates Facebook (etc) must not take down right-wing hate content for 24h if posted on self-declared “editorially independent” websites
29. 6 FebEpstein file PDFs contain OCR texts of complete, *unredacted*, Base64-encoded email attachments; forensics geeks commence challenging reconstruction…
30. 5 FebIt’s almost hard to work out which country this is meant to be about…
31. 4 FebSpotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell | CIA
32. 4 FebPrediction: if it hasn’t happened already there will soon be a massive media story about “Quoted Printable” encoding, possibly including somebody getting shot because of it

January 2026

1. 31 JanThe 3D printing community learns how to support protesters in its own quiet way…
2. 30 Jannext, after age verification, will come “proof of humanity” …
3. 30 JanIntroducing Encrypt It Already | Electronic Frontier Foundation
4. 30 JanAnna Riedl: “The amount of prompt engineering needed to not make medical professionals have wild irrelevant hallucinations is truly extraordinary”
5. 29 JanJames Ball: On almost everything…evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagers…
6. 28 JanState Department confirms: federal censorship shield law incoming | Preston Byrne
7. 28 JanWill Congress shield the US from foreign attacks on the First Amendment? | Spectator | Ofcom & British civil society does not understand the 1st amendment
8. 28 JanSomebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance over Mar-a-Lago using AF2 ICAO identity
9. 27 JanWhatsApp’s new ‘Strict Account Settings’ Adds Lockdown-Style Protection Against Spyware |CyberScoop
10. 27 JanOne-Ended Encryption / OEE | JP Aumasson
11. 27 Jan“The UK war on VPNs is an embarrassment” | Jimmy Wales
12. 26 Jan“Much of what people want to solve with the [online safety act] is actually [better] solved with a search warrant and an arrest” | Preston Byrne
13. 25 JanContent Moderation History: do we all remember 2013-19 when online sociology pundits were everywhere expounding the need to block streaming/sharing of video of people being murdered?
14. 24 Jan“[In the modern era] what threats do VPNs protect against?”
15. 23 JanMicrosoft Gave FBI BitLocker Encryption Keys, Exposing Privacy Flaw | Forbes
16. 22 JanAnarchist Calisthenics: teaching people to break misconceived little rules before they have to break the totalitarian big ones
17. 22 JanBritons, Parents: be aware: if they Age-Verify Social Media & VPNs, next up will be free supermarket & cafe Wi-Fi; no more “click one button & connect to the internet”
18. 21 JanGammons, Boomers & Musk-fixated ideologues in Lords seek ban on online anonymity, pursue Age Verification for Social Media & VPNs
19. 15 JanUsing AI to sweep a social media reply chain to actively block abusers and bots…
20. 14 Jan“Keir Starmer is hell-bent on destroying your right to a private life” | …I absolutely detest that the mainstream parliamentary parties are sitting on their hands regarding this matter
21. 14 JanGovernment drops plans for mandatory digital ID to work in UK | BBC | ID Cards are not dead yet and we need to keep the pressure up…
22. 14 JanBritain’s bid to police the world’s internet | spiked | … I wish we could read this kind of analysis in The Guardian
23. 13 JanThey may not like the label but Ofcom *are* a censor, because they are attempting to force platforms (including entirely foreign ones) to adopt the paraphernalia of censorship, so not only…
24. 11 JanLive-Event Blocking at Scale: Effectiveness vs. Collateral Damage in Italy’s Piracy Shield | RIPE Labs
25. 11 Jan1947: interesting to see a physical example of mitigation for known plaintext attacks against British military ciphers, including explicit exceptions for OTP
26. 11 JanReminder: Spain already blocks Cloudflare IP addresses when there is a football match on
27. 10 JanUK Orders Ofcom to Enforce Encryption Backdoors
28. 10 JanWikimedia UK and the Online Safety Act: A deep dive into the story so far | Wikimedia UK
29. 9 JanBREAKING: Cloudflare once again finds enough spine to publicly combat calls for censorship & state control, although on from past experience we can only wonder how long it will last
30. 9 JanI am totally here for accusations that ChatGPT & other LLM/AI are demonstrating woke liberal bias: Part 2
31. 9 JanIt will be interesting to see if Britain’s politicians maintain their taste for self-harm through isolationism by banning X for whatever reason
32. 8 JanThe Ofcom Files, Part V: Block Harder | Preston Byrne
33. 8 Jan“In the one case where a website voluntarily blocked the UK [to comply with the OSA] the UK now wants to get a blocking order to… block it again?”
34. 7 Jan“News: There Were BGP Anomalies During The Venezuela Blackout”
35. 7 JanBBC amplifying Ofcom’s toothless “£18m fine” regulatory bluff re: US-based suicide-discussion forum
36. 7 JanPrivacy will be under unprecedented attack in 2026 | Computer Weekly
37. 7 JanHow the ElonMusk / Grok / DeepFake / Generative AI thing will play out: The Tech Outrage Playbook
38. 6 JanJudge Demands OpenAI to Release 20 Million Anonymized ChatGPT Chats in AI Copyright Dispute
39. 6 JanIf you watch one video today, make it. Thomas Pearson talking about the online safety act and its impact on mental health — his, and others…
40. 6 JanI am totally here for accusations that ChatGPT & other LLM/AI are demonstrating woke liberal bias
41. 2 JanAustralian Social Media ban is not working, so now the “war on teens” people are demanding outright phone bans…

2025 727

December 2025

1. 21 DecThe BBC has no choice but to teach Trump a lesson about free speech | …fascinated to wonder if @arusbridger supports @4chan conversely doing similar to @ofcom
2. 20 DecThe Data Center Water Crisis Isn’t Real
3. 19 DecBREAKING: filings in both the US House & Senate to resolve towards disapproving/opposing (e.g.) Ofcom’s demands to differentiate 4Chan’s user base & implement age-walling for Britons/everyone
4. 19 DecThe coming war against local LLMs will be wrapped, as ever, in a choice between Child Protection and Anti-Terrorism
5. 19 DecMullvad: “The [EU] lost the Chat Control 2.0 battle […in] 2026, they will be back with their next attempt: Going Dark. This time some EU member states want to include VPN services”
6. 19 DecWhistleblowers raise ‘extreme’ concern about security of government’s Digital ID | ITV News
7. 17 DecIn a move that will surprise nobody except British “safety” activists who are unused to the concept of “positive rights”, Age Verification has been declared unconstitutional in Louisiana
8. 17 DecMoral Panic, Regulation, and the Challenge of Undoing Regulation: the Tonka Bean | Watch this if you want to understand the importance of fighting or fixing the Online Safety Act
9. 13 DecDanish government proposes to ban streaming over VPNs due to risk of circumvention of content controls
10. 13 DecAustralian Social Media Ban: we must not let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘incomplete, self-defeating, trivially circumventable & pointless’ | @CameronWilson at Crikey
11. 13 DecAustralia’s Social Media Ban is a Betrayal of Free Speech and a Safe Internet | NetChoice
12. 12 DecEU Revives Plan for Year-Long Online Data Retention | Reclaim the Net
13. 12 DecThe American Counter-Offensive Against Foreign Censorship Should Be Bipartisan | Preston Byrne
14. 12 DecReddit argues it isn’t like other social platforms in case against Australia’s social media ban | TechCrunch
15. 12 DecBanning children from online games, and spying on every device: Why we must oppose Baroness Benjamin’s attack on liberty | LibDem Voice
16. 12 DecTeens are having fun getting around the teen social media ban | Crikey
17. 12 DecAge Verification Is Coming For the Internet. We Built You a Resource Hub to Fight Back | EFF
18. 11 DecJanuary 15th: EFFecting Change: The Human Cost of Online Age Verification | EFF
19. 11 DecERRATA: Baroness Benjamin et al. wish to ban children under the age of *18* from using VPNs; that’s better than 16, isn’t it?
20. 11 Dec“The girl in his photo is not backing it. She directly told the PM it’s a bad idea.”
21. 11 DecCrowley: “For my money, the really big one will be all of Us against all of Them”
22. 11 DecAND FINALLY: UK House of Lords demands client-side scanning of content to check for “viewing of CSAM”
23. 11 DecIT GETS WORSE: UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16
24. 11 DecBREAKING: UK House of Lords Draft Amendment to Ban Social Media for Under-16s in the UK
25. 11 DecOpen Rights Group: “Tell your MP to attend the debate on the Online Safety Act”
26. 10 DecTwo posts from 2014: Trolley Problems, Nuclear Weapons, Snowden, Jocks, and Meat-Grinders
27. 9 DecThe world needs social sovereignty | Mastodon Blog | Fediverse’s 800g Gorilla calls for local platforms, for local people…
28. 8 DecSpeculation: “Reddit enlists lawyers to take on teen social media ban”
29. 8 DecWhat the world might look like if we get a federal GRANITE Act | Preston Byrne | …the joy of this is that it might even be bipartisan
30. 8 DecA US psychologist prescribed a social media ban for kids. How did Australia become the test subject? | Social media ban | The Guardian
31. 7 Dec“India’s request for satellite-aided iPhone location data is a privacy nightmare” | AppleInsider
32. 7 DecSometimes even politicians agree that it is necessary for social media to carry videos of people literally and really being blown to pieces…
33. 6 DecLord Carlile believes that “[websites can] lose their right to appear on any screen in the United Kingdom” – rather than “citizens will suffer censorship by the British state”
34. 6 DecBaroness Floella Benjamin of BBC PlaySchool fame proposes Australia-like YouTube age-ban impacting Sesame Street, Ms Rachel, Cosmic Kids, Danny Go! …
35. 5 DecI hate that this man has a point
36. 4 DecOfcom writes to 4chan: “We are a UK-based regulator, but that does not mean the rules do not apply to sites based abroad” — true, but irrelevant…
37. 4 DecEU’s Top Court Just Made It Literally Impossible To Run A User-Generated Content Platform Legally | Techdirt
38. 4 DecOfcom: “I can levy vasty £1m fines upon Porn!” Internet: “So can I, so can any regulator; but will they pay when you levy them?”
39. 4 DecReclaimTheNet: “ChatControl was meant to be temporary, the promotion of mass scanning of private messages until data proved it worked. The data never came.”
40. 4 DecAge Verification: Teaching the world how to evade censorship
41. 4 DecAustralia, and teenage Olympians and other upcoming sports stars are shuttering their Instagrams, likely impacting funding; or handing them over to “parents” to avoid bans
42. 4 DecEFF: “After Years of Controversy, the EU’s Chat Control Nears Its Final Hurdle: What to Know”
43. 4 DecBreaking: OnlineSafetyAct-inspired Federal GRANITE Act “for consideration” to protect US 1st Amendment rights against Ofcom
44. 3 Dec[Indian] Government removes mandatory pre-installation of [spyware] Sanchar Saathi App
45. 3 DeceSafety Australia has been issuing informal takedown notices to platforms without due process; it turns out Australian courts don’t appreciate that behaviour
46. 3 DecAustralia eSafety: “Parents may lose their Google accounts [and anything linked to them] if they let their kids use them to view stuff”
47. 3 DecGoogle warns Albanese government’s under-16 social media ban could make kids less safe
48. 3 DecAustralian prime minister confirms that social media ban is about “compliance”, but if companies comply yet teens circumvent, what’s next?
49. 2 DecLawmakers to consider 19 bills for childproofing the internet
50. 2 Dec(unverified image) The compulsory Indian spyware app indicates why governments hate secure encrypted messenger applications
51. 2 DecAustralian Communications Minister: Australian children will not be free to escape censorship, even if they start using LinkedIn as an alternative platform
52. 2 DecAustralia Government: “OVER THERE, LOOK, LOOK, CAPITALISTS, IT IS NOT US OPPRESSING OUR CHILDREN! PLEASE LOOK AT THE CAPITALISTS!”
53. 1 DecIndia orders smartphone makers to preload state-owned cyber safety app | Reuters | WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
54. 1 DecStarmer’s digital ID cards are the last thing Britain needs
55. 1 DecPrediction: within 2 years there will be a backlash against the social media ban in Australia, but not the one you expect
56. 1 DecThe UK Has It Wrong on Digital ID. Here’s Why | Electronic Frontier Foundation

November 2025

1. 28 NovUK Parliament, 2009: “Bad Language: The Use and Abuse of Official Language”
2. 27 NovJolyon Maugham’s “GoodLawProject” bang the drum calling for for localised censorship on a globalised internet, not realising nor caring about the impact
3. 27 NovMullvad” “An important victory – but we still need to stop Chat Control”
4. 26 NovAustralian Government will “not be intimidated by threats, not be intimidated by legal challenges” … brought by Aussie teenagers who don’t want to be censored
5. 26 NovThe first #AgeWall ? Substack is introducing Age Verification to cut UK people off from seeing “Potentially Harmful” Substack content
6. 26 NovIf Ofcom want to stop UK people visiting a non-UK website, they need to stop the UK people, not tell the non-UK website to work to prevent the UK hordes
7. 26 NovX/Twitter exposing user location in such a safety-positive way makes a modest dent in the EU’s approach to protecting personally-identifiable information
8. 25 NovSoftware companies must be held liable for British economic security, say MPs | The Record
9. 21 Nov“Key Management” is the cryptographic community’s version of “…it’s always DNS”
10. 21 NovI know it’s hard for folk to detach themselves from emotion regarding child protection, hate speech or trolling, but it’s important to understand that Ofcom’s duty to deliver online safety is incipient censorship
11. 21 NovIn Case You Missed It This Week: Ofcom, pursuing its lawful duties, is about to drive the UK over a cliff and into online censorship; here’s how…
12. 20 NovI asked ChatGPT to explain why Ofcom, acting as an agent of the sovereign UK Government, cannot enforce penalties or sanctions in the USA against 4chan &al
13. 20 Nov“MPs and peers warned of China spy risk on LinkedIn” | Translation: “Horny / Lazy Spooks Targeted by Fake Hot Chinese Girls via LinkedIn, GCHQ Panic”
14. 20 Nov“‘We’re Going to DESTROY the Online Safety Act’: Meet the Top Lawyer Waging War on Ofcom” | OrderOrder | …it’s an interesting thesis that…
15. 20 NovThe simple test that blew up the FTC’s case against Meta | …absolutely fascinating read re: puncturing wild claims of “monopoly” in social networking
16. 19 NovInteresting to compare and contrast EU attempts to force chat control, with failed Australian attempt at the same from 2024:
17. 19 NovAustralia: eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant called to testify before US Congress by Donald Trump ally over ‘threat’ to Americans’ free speech | Sky News
18. 17 NovThe difference between British regulation vs: American regulation: Rat Shit in Food vs: CSAM
19. 10 NovBREAKING: EU attempting last minute resurrection ChatControl client-side scanning & message surveillance under vague “mandate… all reasonable mitigation measures” figleaf; FightChatControl.EU to be reactivated…
20. 10 Nov“Trump [poised to] to deport boss of Starmer-linked charity” | Imran Ahmed of CCDH, being booted from USA?
21. 10 Nov“New Danish proposal for Chat Control: three fat problems remain”
22. 9 NovIP blocking the UK is not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act | Hacker News
23. 7 NovCommission agrees to advance child safety online with Australia’s eSafety Commissioner and the UK’s Ofcom | Shaping Europe’s digital future
24. 3 NovOnline Safety “Duty of Care” is failing to launch in the USA? Good.
25. 3 Nov“[Ofcom] threatens tech giants with algorithm audits to protect children” | …this is genuinely hilarious
26. 3 NovAnalysis: The Online Safety Act is still on a faltering upswing, it will take 5…10 years to mitigate (and 10…30 to undo) the damage being caused
27. 3 NovHeading to MozFest 2025 in Barcelona? See “Encryption and Feminism: Reimagining Child Safety Without Surveillance”
28. 1 NovThere is One Fediverse. There are a Million Pickleball Courts | jaz-michael king

October 2025

1. 31 OctDavid Davis nails the issue regarding Digital ID & state power
2. 31 OctStuff that you don’t see on Reddit in the UK because you aren’t age verified, Part 3
3. 31 OctPossible lunar meteor impact reported?
4. 31 Oct“Age-Restricted Internet is Hurting Trans Kids” | …interesting to see constructive criticism of Esther Ghey’s campaigning coming direct from the trans community
5. 31 OctDenmark surprisingly abandons plans for chat control | heise online
6. 30 OctFrench lawmakers progress tax on American Big Tech amid huge pushback | POLITICO
7. 30 OctMaybe sometimes it’s the “people who matter” who should “nerd harder”?
8. 30 Oct“We will not be age-gating Wikipedia under any circumstances … what are they going to do? They could block Wikipedia. Good luck with that” | PoliticsHome
9. 29 OctRemember, kids, social media is full of falsehoods but *real* journalism from respectable outlets can be trusted. Elsewhere: former NYC mayor Bill de Blasio was wholesale misrepresented in the Times
10. 28 OctAustralia’s eSafety Chief Pressures Big Tech and AI Firms on Verification, Age Checks
11. 28 OctWebsites in Non-UK Countries should not take action to block UK citizens
12. 28 OctJoint Statement on the UN Cybercrime Convention: EFF and Global Partners Urge Governments Not to Sign | Electronic Frontier Foundation
13. 28 OctBen Schroeter at EurActive: “It’s not that Europe regulates. It’s how it regulates” | Um, I’m not convinced…
14. 28 OctCould the Online Safety Act threaten the safety of Wikipedia editors? | Pod Save The UK | Jimmy Wales Interview…
15. 28 OctIs age verification killing porn site traffic? Aylo says yes, AVPA says no | BiometricUpdate
16. 28 OctUK traffic to porn sites falls by a third after new age verification rules | FT | …but actually they’re using either VPN or far more dodgy websites
17. 28 OctAge verification could soon land in Russia – putting already precarious internet freedoms on the line | TechRadar
18. 27 OctThe House | Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales Warns Of “Political Showdown” With UK Government Over Online Safety Act
19. 27 Oct“UK Expands Online Safety Act, Forcing Preemptive Censorship” | I’ve not heard Wikipedia complaining about this, but they will be impacted
20. 27 OctMessageboard 4chan refuses to pay fine over ‘free speech’
21. 26 OctUK Expands Online Safety Act, Forcing Preemptive Censorship
22. 26 OctUK MPs demand Home Secretary call on Apple to make iPhone more resistant to data exfiltration, backdoors, hacking, and third-party repair…
23. 24 OctX/Twitter is now a mess but damn I still love Community Notes, especially when it corrects the Prime Minister
24. 24 OctImagine that the UK Gov’t has the power to limit corporate due diligence checks to “do [you] have a Digital ID card?” ; DOING SO WILL VASTLY ENCOURAGE MOBILE PHONE THEFT
25. 24 OctProponents of Digital ID clearly do not want people to understand that the whole point of authentication for certain transactions IS MEANT TO BE A COMPLETE PAIN IN THE ARSE; that’s literally how we as customers *BENEFIT*
26. 22 OctEU watchdog attacks Britain over iPhone ‘backdoor’ demand
27. 21 OctEssential thread from Kay Jebelli re: Google/Meta dropping Political Advertising in the EU, aghast civil society groups demanding they “continue, and be regulated”
28. 21 OctUK Greens citing Churchill Government re: last time the UK abolished ID Cards
29. 21 OctIn case you missed it: “US court permanently bans Pegasus spyware maker from hacking WhatsApp”
30. 21 OctDo not introduce Digital ID cards | Petitions
31. 21 OctWhite House Invades Bluesky to Troll, Predictably Gets Mass Blocked
32. 21 OctWhen Face Recognition Doesn’t Know Your Face Is a Face | WIRED
33. 20 OctThe ongoing repercussions of the Online Safety Act | BroadbandDeals.co.uk
34. 18 OctEducational project for your kids: Mummify a Chicken!
35. 17 Oct4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence | Hacker News
36. 17 OctCrossed wires derailed a UK child abuse case for months | The Register | Two botched police CSAM raids on innocent persons because literally crossed wires
37. 17 OctThe Ofcom Tea Party: 4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence, British regulator claims “sovereign immunity” to defend itself – and sovereign powers to regulate foreign companies
38. 15 OctMicrosoft’s OneDrive Begins Testing Face-Recognizing AI for Photos (for Some Preview Users) | Slashdot | …and: “You can only turn off this setting 3 times a year”
39. 15 OctUS State Department trawls social media for critics of Charlie Kirk, revokes visas…
40. 15 Oct“Unacceptable slur in record” — Bluesky, intent upon banning Homophobic Slurs, bans Frequently Asked Questions
41. 15 OctOnline Safety Act consultation : Threat to protest and political content | Open Rights Group
42. 15 OctQuote: ‘Ofcom: “you have no rights under US law. UK law is all that matters. However, we will run and hide behind the protections of US law if you challenge us.”‘
43. 14 OctThe Surreal Practicality of Protesting As an Inflatable Frog | 404media
44. 14 OctANONYMITY IS HARD: if you are reading this post, it is an invitation for you to consider how anonymity can fail (leading to re-identification) in a heavily networked system
45. 14 OctWhy Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement | Ars Technica
46. 14 Oct“We do not guarantee that GOV.UK One Login will always be available, or that access to it will be error free. We will provide a way for you to report problems with GOV.UK One Login”
47. 14 Oct“The EU is now testing a digital age verification system that ties internet access to your government ID”
48. 13 OctGrab lots of popcorn: What’s just happened in Ofcom-vs-4Chan will be fun to watch…
49. 13 OctIf Ofcom issue a fine but there is no-one in the UK jurisdiction to impose it upon, is it really a fine or just an empty message?
50. 13 OctNano Banana “AI Generated Image” digital watermark easily visible (removable?) with basic image manipulation
51. 13 OctEU ministers united: Minors must be protected better online | …setting the stage for the next round of Chat Control discussions, with added Age Verification
52. 13 OctFlorida student asks ChatGPT how to kill his friend, ends up in jail: deputies | WFLA
53. 13 OctThe EU Is Forcing Backdoor Access to Your Phone | [He] Followed the Money
54. 11 OctStuff that you don’t see on Reddit in the UK because you aren’t age verified, Part 2
55. 10 OctNot your average cybersecurity book
56. 10 OctThe bad news is: the fact that the vote was cancelled signals that they want to have yet another go. We still have to fight Chat Control.
57. 9 Oct1996: “Law and Borders: The Rise of Law in Cyberspace” | David R. Johnson & David G. Post | …we’ve seen this comity problem coming for ~30+ years
58. 9 OctOfcom, the Government, the Online Safety Act and the Leather Shoes
59. 8 OctTwo teenagers arrested over cyber-attack on nursery chain | BBC News
60. 8 OctOne-man spam campaign ravages EU ‘chat control’ bill | POLITICO
61. 8 OctCitizen Protest Halts Chat Control; Breyer Celebrates Major Victory for Digital Privacy | Patrick Breyer
62. 7 OctData protection under fire: Messenger services react to EU chat control | heise online
63. 7 OctProof-of-age ID leaked in Discord data breach | The Guardian
64. 6 OctChat Control is “like a malware on your device” – Signal slams the EU proposal to scan your private chats | TechRadar
65. 5 Oct[Home Secretary] Mahmood answers that just because you have a freedom “doesn’t mean you have to use it at every moment of every day”
66. 5 OctThe UK Is Still Trying to Backdoor Encryption for Apple Users | Electronic Frontier Foundation
67. 5 OctTerry Pratchett explains large chunks of civil society in a nutshell
68. 4 OctDiscord Age Verification Data Hack: ‘The unauthorized party also accessed a “small number” of images of government IDs from “users who had appealed an age determination.”’
69. 3 OctStruggling to heat your home? Try 500 Raspberry Pi units | The Register
70. 3 OctDo not introduce Digital ID cards | Petitions | 2.75 MILLION SIGNATURES …
71. 2 Oct“Apple cannot disable ADP automatically for [UK users, who…] will be given a period of time to disable the feature themselves to keep using their iCloud account”
72. 2 OctUK government tries again to access encrypted Apple customer data: Report | TechCrunch
73. 1 OctThe Law of the Server is the Law of the Site: a Trans-Atlantic Free Speech Defense Doctrine | Preston Byrne | …broadening the US/Europe free-speech impedance mismatch…
74. 1 OctUK makes new attempt to access Apple cloud data | FT
75. 1 OctUK Digital ID Cards: is the Government going to compensate UK business for losses due to forcing them to accept additional business risk?
76. 1 OctCyber Waffle: “They Changed The Online Safety Act” ; this guy has done several decent videos, I wish he wasn’t doing the hoodie cyber anon-schtick, but the content is mostly sane…
77. 1 OctNixon: You may not have read about the time he told a dinner party at the White House, “I could leave this room, and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would be dead”

September 2025

1. 30 SepArrestable thoughts : r/london
2. 30 SepOnline Safety Act: A well-intentioned disaster? | Professional Security Magazine
3. 30 Sep…of course when Imgur self-censors itself out of the UK, it takes with it all of the websites that use it as a kind of CDN for OC
4. 30 SepImgur blocks access to UK users after [ICO] proposed regulatory fine | BBC News
5. 29 SepAn Indian court [ruled] that [X], as a foreign company, does not have a constitutional right to free speech under Indian law
6. 28 SepVitalik Buterin Warns EU Surveillance Plan Threatens Digital Privacy
7. 28 SepAmnesty International: Digital ID will ‘put rights of people in UK at risk’ | The National
8. 28 SepTony Blair: “British people will all have their own unique digital identifier, and will make most transactions through their phone, as citizens with government and as customers with firms”
9. 28 SepThe Liberal Democrats finally come out hard against something: Digital ID Cards. Let’s hope that they generalise this to all ID Cards…
10. 27 SepTip for Civil Society: Never Negotiate. Always make them do the bad thing. Don’t help them do it, but make their choice either: do something really bad, or nothing at all
11. 26 Sep“You’re taking me to Harrogate in the middle of the night for a tweet. Is this what you signed up to the police to do?”
12. 26 SepThought for the evening: if someone is banned from Google and/or Apple by breaking their EULA or similar, they will be unable to work in the United Kingdom, @Kier_Starmer?
13. 26 SepQuestion: how will this supposed UK Digital ID work for people who use rooted phones and open source operating systems with alternative app stores, as demanded in the EU Digital Services Act?
14. 26 Sep“Public backs ‘super ID card’ which could be used to report potholes, Tony Blair’s think tank says” | The Independent | WHAT IN THE NAME OF GOD??!?
15. 26 Sep“What’s the UK issue with ID cards?” | …the answer is as follows: Many Britons are terrible people, and we know it…
16. 26 SepFarage “firmly opposed to @Keir_Starmer’s digital ID cards” | …I hate it when I agree with him:
17. 24 SepUK agency makes arrest in airport cybercrime probe | The Register | IT WAS A 40-SOMETHING YEAR OLD GUY IN A BASEMENT IN WEST SUSSEX
18. 24 SepBluesky users discover that even “federated” & “distributed” platforms exhibit “lock-in” due to “network effects”; and “cognitive dissonance” ensues…
19. 24 SepHow Signal’s Meredith Whittaker Remembers SignalGate: ‘No Fucking Way’ | WIRED
20. 23 SepVideo: Thomas Pearson: the online safety actors coming for streamers
21. 22 SepOpen Rights Group: “The Online Safety Act is coming for Streamers”
22. 22 SepThe Guardian uses — and then hides/recants — photos of schoolgirl in article targeting fearful parents; perhaps we need a better conversation?
23. 21 SepKeir Starmer set to unveil digital ID scheme | Here we go again, the government believing that KYC needs to be pushed into every (any?) aspect of life
24. 21 SepWhite House outlines TikTok deal that would give US control of algorithm | Translation: American TikTok will no longer have the working algorithms, and…
25. 19 SepStuff that you don’t see on Reddit in the UK because you aren’t age verified
26. 19 SepWith the Jimmy Kimmel saga, the media is learning what happens when you give a mouse a cookie | CNN Business
27. 19 SepMI6 launch contact website on @torproject dark web / onion services; thank you @FCDOGovUK for validating use of Tor & VPNs in these troubling times
28. 19 SepNext time someone suggests that online platforms should be licensed remember that…
29. 18 SepHas Britain Gone Too Far With Its Digital Controls? | The New York Times
30. 16 SepMassive Attack Turns Concert Into Facial Recognition Surveillance Experiment | “…Imagine you’re vibing to Teardrop when your face appears on the LED screen behind the band…”
31. 16 SepMI5 concedes it ‘unlawfully’ obtained data from former BBC journalist | …a mere 16+ years to obtain this concession
32. 16 SepGeedge & MESA Leak: Analyzing the Great Firewall’s Largest Document Leak
33. 15 SepHosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape | BogdanTheGeek’s Blog
34. 15 SepI strongly suspect that Bluesky “content moderation” and “safety” is following the same trajectory that Facebook did, and that “distribution” excuses it…
35. 15 Sep2015: “AI Images Look Ridiculously Fake” | 2025: “AI Images Look Ridiculously Real” | The solution to risk is education
36. 14 SepDoes anyone else suspect that people who want the UK to withdraw from the ECHR are people who want to reintroduce capital punishment?
37. 14 Sep“Why does remy have such strongly held opinions on internet censorship?”
38. 13 SepCenter for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers | …this is a wonderful and absolutely necessary tool for AI policy experts
39. 13 SepIf everyone (including kids) can see someone be literally assassinated on a podium as “news”, but require age verification for addiction recovery forums, maybe the online safety act tries to solve the wrong problem?
40. 13 SepHey, global citizens, aren’t you glad that you have end-to-end encrypted messenger systems that meaningfully protect your chat content without being scanned or filtered by the government?
41. 13 SepCalifornia legislature passes bill forcing web browsers to let consumers automatically opt out of data sharing | WELL, GOSH, NOBODY HAS EVER TRIED THAT BEFORE. CLEARLY THIS IS THE RIGHT THING TO DO
42. 12 SepVon der Leyen Pushes EU Online Speech Crackdown in 2025 | EU wants to ban European under-16s from social media
43. 12 SepLeverage the CLOUD Act To Protect Encryption | TechPolicy.Press
44. 11 SepIf you want to understand the UK Gov’t institutional mindset around data protection: a 40yo “top secret” document is found in the national archives, and the finder is all of a flutter…
45. 11 SepBriefing: VPNs and the Online Safety Act | Open Rights Group
46. 11 SepThe EU Commission seriously claims: “There is no such thing as #ChatControl.”
47. 11 Sep“left-wing digital sovereignty” vs: “right-wing digital sovereignty”
48. 11 SepCheckpoint Britain: the dangers of digital ID and why privacy must be protected | Big Brother Watch
49. 11 SepDon’t kill people. Don’t kill babies & children, especially, but: don’t kill people. Your politics, faith, nationality, race, class — these don’t matter
50. 11 SepAll calls for “digital sovereignty” are demands for localised authoritarianism, anti-globalism, suppression of public online free speech and public free choice. Including the US & EU, but especially anyone buying Chinese telecoms hardware.
51. 10 SepPreston Byrne: “Australia trying to get those orders out the door before the UK folds and the censorship fightback playbook is finalized”
52. 10 SepNadine Dorries raps and mic drops in TikTok video on online safety [act]
53. 10 SepTeaching AIs to know when they don’t know something
54. 10 SepThe first thing that’s going to happen after an age verification provider inevitably gets hacked/popped, is some really scary extortion…
55. 10 SepGender-based violence orgs: how much do you know about encryption?
56. 10 SepHorrific video shows racial abuse of Halifax healthcare worker in park | YorkshireLive
57. 10 SepAustralia to Enforce Mandatory Social Media Age Checks | Australian e-Safety Commissioner bans plotline of Bluey episode
58. 10 SepHuntress Endpoint Detection and Response “does an (alleged) Kaspersky” and chooses to dox a customer having unilaterally decided the customer is evil
59. 9 SepMemory Integrity Enforcement: A complete vision for memory safety in Apple devices | Apple Security Research
60. 9 SepHome Office to spend £1.3M on age-determining algorithm | The Register | I wonder what their acceptable false positive rate will be?
61. 9 SepRussia squeezes out WhatsApp, pushes homegrown Max in messaging battle | WaPo | …in case you missed it…
62. 9 Sep“it is simply not feasible to perform detection of known and new CSAM for hundreds of millions of users with an acceptable level of accuracy, independently of the specific filter”
63. 9 SepNepal has lifted a social media ban after it sparked anti-corruption protests that led to clashes with police, leaving at least 19 people dead
64. 9 SepAge Verification Providers’ Association (AVPA) desperately seeks ways to minimise UK VPN adoption numbers
65. 9 SepWe’re Walling Off The Open Internet To Stop AI—And It May End Up Breaking Everything Else | Techdirt
66. 8 SepSignal >> Blog >> Introducing Signal Secure Backups
67. 8 SepThomas Pearson: Video: Fight Chat Control EU
68. 8 SepGOVERNMENT DECLARES BRITISH POPULATION AT RISK OF SUICIDE DUE TO RECENT GOVERNMENT POLICY, DECLARES CENSORSHIP REGIME TO COMPENSATE
69. 7 Sep“RCS messaging is now provided by your wireless carrier and governed by their terms and privacy notice. You can find the current version of these terms on your wireless carrier’s website”
70. 7 SepFight Chat Control | Protect Digital Privacy in the EU
71. 5 SepHey, wow, fake Mastodon moderators attempting to steal accounts, badly
72. 5 SepSection 230 is one of the only things preventing foreign countries from censoring Americans online … Proposing to repeal it, now, is completely insane
73. 4 SepEU Court of Justice determines that data anonymisation “might work, but then again it might not”
74. 4 Sep2023: Reminder: the FDA permits 9x as much rat faeces in food than there is likely abusive imagery in an AI image training set
75. 4 Sep“Somewhere only we know” plays on the car stereo, and for some reason I’m mentally dragged back…
76. 4 Sep“CAUTION: THIS CONTENT MAY CONTAIN NUTS” — Age Verification, Threat Models, Content Labelling, use of “NSFW” labels & Overblocking
77. 4 SepThe OSA has created a market for information about circumventing state safety controls, just like in Iran, China, etc… except that we have free speech. The result will be a government war on information:
78. 3 SepUpdate – We are in the process of restoring the matrix.org database from a backup | …REMEMBER, KIDS, JUST BECAUSE IT SAYS IT’S DECENTRALISED DOESN’T MEAN IT’S DISTRIBUTED
79. 3 SepAn age verification provider is potentially leaking information about people visiting pornographic websites
80. 3 SepSay these things sequentially: 1/ we want to protect users 2/ we want to force user data to proliferate amongst more companies
81. 2 SepAge verification legislation is tanking traffic to sites that comply, and rewarding those that don’t | PC Gamer
82. 2 SepHouse of Lords Business, 15 September @ 1430h : “WHY WON’T THE BRITISH PEOPLE LET US KEEP THEM SAFE FROM BAD THINGS ONLINE?” | @TimClementJone1
83. 2 Sep‘Ten Martini’ Proof Uses Number Theory to Explain Quantum Fractals | Quanta Magazine
84. 2 Sep“This is all a secret plan to make UK citizens the most tech literate in the world” | …this is basically the entire UK war on general purpose computing, in a nutshell
85. 2 SepShout out to @CBeebiesHQ for the CBeebies GetCreative app!
86. 2 SepHow The Martian was written, with Andy Weir
87. 2 SepTaylor Lorenz & Eric Goldman: age verification will kill free speech online | …from June 2025, so it’s not like any of this was a surprise
88. 2 SepTikTok video: Thomas Pearson summarises 1 month of the online safety act
89. 1 SepPreston Byrne: “Protip: the Online Safety Act and the Digital Services Act are both censorship laws”
90. 1 SepAmazing: somehow school attendance & bad behaviour of school children are within the gift of parents to fix, but not matters of appropriate internet use, adult content & consent
91. 1 Sep“Congress shall have particular regard to the importance of freedom of speech within the law when making laws abridging the freedom of speech.”
92. 1 Sep“THE AMAZON LOVES ME AND THAT’S WHY HE BOUGHT THIS TRAIN FOR ME…” | …no amount of age verification is going to stop kids during stupid stuff online
93. 1 SepCanada: Alberta implements book ban to protect children from “adult content” but then has a “…WAIT, NO, NOT LIKE THAT” moment when it actually happens, then blames *librarians*

August 2025

1. 30 AugMastodon says it doesn’t ‘have the means’ to comply with age verification laws | TechCrunch
2. 30 AugHouse Republicans Want To Doxx Wikipedia Editors Over Bogus ‘Bias’ Complaints | Techdirt
3. 29 Aug“Your UK Steam user account is considered age verified for as long as a valid credit card is stored on the account”
4. 29 AugPreston Byrne on Ofcom and government goals to turn age verification into a “KYC before Communication” obligation
5. 29 Aug4chan will refuse to pay daily UK fines, its lawyer tells BBC | BBC News
6. 29 AugUK sought broad access to Apple customers’ data, court filing shows | FT
7. 29 AugThe perverse outcomes of the Online Safety Act | The Critic
8. 29 AugIF calls to scrap the OSA are about “enriching powerful platforms” THEN why are the first targets of Ofcom lawsuits “tiny sites” that don’t compete?
9. 28 AugEncryption Is a Feminist Issue: Why Strong Digital Privacy Protects Survivors and Activists | Chayn
10. 28 AugI’m absolutely gobsmacked that there is *mention* of “Scrapping the OSA” in PoliticsHome…
11. 28 AugUS Tech Firms Suing Ofcom Over Online Safety Act | Guido Fawkes
12. 28 AugGosh, who would ever have expected that websites based outside of the UK would simply ignore the UK regulators waving bits of paper at them?
13. 27 Aug4chan and Kiwi Farms Sue the UK Over its Age Verification Law | 404media
14. 27 AugDigital Rights Management (DRM) doesn’t work. Also: draft California law mulls mandatory DRM to preserve image provenance metadata, breaks Signal Messenger
15. 26 Aug“If Britain wants to censor foreign content, it can build a great firewall just like all the other tin pot dictatorships” | The Online Safety Act as seen from the USA…
16. 26 AugBaroness Kidron mocks Britons for using VPNs rather than being “transparent” about their porn-viewing habits
17. 25 AugWe must fight age verification with all we have | Taylor Lorenz
18. 25 AugCanadian “privacy is bad” activists are trying to undermine @torproject by posting an extended propaganda rant in The Guardian, a newspaper which maintains its own dark web address
19. 24 AugDeal to get ChatGPT Plus for whole of UK discussed by Open AI boss and minister | The Guardian | …they have to justify the Digital ID Card idea somehow
20. 23 AugI am absolutely sure that there will be a minor “this is not legal” conniption fit about this, but bravo to whoever mocked it up… HT to:
21. 22 Aug“Unfortunately, Bluesky is unavailable in Mississippi right now, due to a new state law that requires age verification for all users” | Bluesky blocks Mississippi
22. 22 AugOfcom is turning the UK into an international laughing stock | CapX
23. 22 Aug4chan will refuse to pay daily UK fines, its lawyer tells BBC | BBC News
24. 21 AugEFF: UK Online Safety Act is about censorship, not safety | The Register
25. 21 AugBloomberg: “Tulsi Gabbard’s ‘Win’ for Apple Isn’t That Simple” | Parmy Olson
26. 21 AugI don’t wanna rain on the parade but it’s entirely possible that the UK Government vs: APPLE iCloud BACKDOOR STORY IS STILL A THING
27. 21 AugPinsent Masons: “Ofcom’s online safety work will be funded by the service providers it regulates. Fees will be calculated based on each provider’s ‘qualifying worldwide revenue’ (QWR)”
28. 20 AugA short explanation for Home Office Minister Jess Phillips re: why attempts to restrict kids to using “teenager” phones will be doomed to failure
29. 20 AugWelcome to the Molly Rose Foundation, where you are only permitted to say *negative* things about algorithmically-curated feed content, but never *positive* things
30. 19 AugThe possibilities that would be raised by a coordinated prompt injection civil society campaign, are limitless…
31. 19 AugUK backs down in Apple privacy row, US says | BBC News
32. 19 AugJust in case it wasn’t obvious the first time around: applying age verification to VPNs to stop children using them, will stop EVERYONE using them & thereby cause unpopular chaos, @peterkyle @ChildrensComm
33. 19 AugBritish Online Safety is an irregular verb | Conjugate the verb after me… | Chris Stokel-Walker on Bluesky
34. 19 AugOpenRightsGroup on TikTok: “These Are My Private Parts, Protect Your Digital Bits!”
35. 19 AugBritain’s online safety law is running amok | The Washington Post
36. 19 AugCharlie Hebdo covers the Online Safety Act | …there is a paywall but this is above the fold, via translation:
37. 19 AugPlease: at what point does it cease to be “stumbling across porn” for a teen (or indeed anyone) to install & enable a VPN and type “PORN” into a search query or URL?
38. 19 AugAmazing: it turns out that some UK schools mandate the use of VPNs by their students in order to put student traffic through a centralised filter; others ban them entirely
39. 19 AugStop children using VPNs to watch porn, ministers told | BBC News
40. 18 AugAfterthought re: Beeban Kidron’s “…It’s really an important part of childhood to transgress … [Using a VPN] is like a child climbing out the window at night when you’ve grounded them”
41. 18 AugBan-Happy Kid-Ban Baroness Beeban Kidron thanks self & peers, stabs Ofcom, declares BOTH “mission accomplished!” AND “…kids *should* rebel, at least we’ve taught them to use VPNs…”
42. 18 Aug“…but without the Online Safety Act, how will we protect the children?”
43. 17 AugSomeone asked me to describe the circumstances which brought about the Online Safety Act
44. 16 Aug“With only 4 votes against, the continued opposition to the Online Safety Act is now overwhelmingly a Young Liberals policy”
45. 16 AugDicing an Onion, the Mathematically Optimal Way
46. 16 AugWe have a duty of care to speak out against the Online Safety Act | LibDem Voice
47. 16 AugCould some journalist please ask PornHub on the record *why* they block access due to age verification in nearly half of the USA, however they embrace it in the UK?
48. 16 AugThe Online Safety Act risks making everyone less safe | Index on Censorship
49. 15 AugThe Online Safety Act censors dissent, while letting paedophiles roam free | Telegraph | …for once someone speaks the quiet part out loud in a right-wing forum
50. 15 AugWow: subreddit r/osawars — discussion of pros and cons of the UK Online Safety Act — has been banned from Reddit
51. 15 AugI’m sorry, but the solution to Online Safety Act Age-Verification age-gating & censorship blocks is *not* to call on platforms to “ban the UK”; here I shall respectfully explain why…
52. 15 AugOnline Safety Act was botched from the start | The Times
53. 13 AugJames Baker of @OpenRightsGroup: son is using East Anglia fishing videos to circumvent Google’s AI age verification profiling
54. 13 AugI’m amazed that this proposal got past both the Home Office & DSIT who presumably would first and foremost see it as potential destruction of evidence…
55. 12 AugWestminster is hoping that all the fuss about the OSA is going to die down, because it’s just a bunch of nerds; in the meantime American senators are starting to say shit like this:
56. 12 AugWhat does the government think an algorithm is? | tommorris.org
57. 12 AugHow long do you reckon before advanced fee fraud scammers start to include “age verification” requests?
58. 12 AugU.K.’s Online Safety Act Censors the Internet—A Preview of U.S. Proposals | R Street Institute
59. 12 AugCould Wikipedia be censored in the UK? | John Lubbock
60. 12 AugThe Facial-Recognition Sham | The Atlantic
61. 11 Aug18 days ago: “The main change is only for users in the UK. Version 1.105 introduces legally-required Age Assurance for users in the United Kingdom to access certain moderation settings and DMs”
62. 11 AugSocial media giants face fines for curbing free speech | Telegraph
63. 11 AugHow I believe Terry Pratchett would likely view those activists who promote Age Verification to support the Online Safety Act
64. 11 AugOh this is glorious: Journalist @zoecrowther.bsky.social using Bluesky seeks DMs from people impacted by the Online Safety Act… but impacted people cannot use DM on Bluesky
65. 11 Aug“If Ofcom decides that Wikipedia is not a Category 1 service, then no further issue will arise” | …Wikipedia OSA Judgement kicked into the long grass
66. 11 Aug“UK police knocking on doors demanding details of social media accounts of people, to pass to [US] government, simply because they happen to live near where a US politician wanted to have a holiday”
67. 11 AugChris Stokel-Walker at the Guardian on issues with the Online Safety Act
68. 10 AugFive Themes Discussed at Princeton’s Workshop on Decentralized Social Media – Freedom to Tinker – THIS NEEDS A PROPER ANALYSIS
69. 10 AugBristol LibDems: “Following the lead of @liberal_reform, we are submitting an emergency motion to the Young Liberals conference, aiming to make the **repeal** of the Online Safety Act official policy”
70. 10 Aug“Does requiring a law abiding internet user to dox themselves … prevent [badness]?”
71. 10 AugExcellent thread by @rcolvile (unrolled from Twitter) re: Westminster-native appeals to let the OSA “bed-in” because “early days”
72. 10 AugOnline Safety Act – shutdowns and site blocks | Open Rights Group
73. 10 AugToday in “…just wait until the UK Ofcom censors find out that you can talk to AI Chatbots over DNS…”
74. 10 AugAge Verification Providers’ Association now imagines it’s incumbent for platforms (i.e. everybody) to treat TCP connections which may be inbound from a VPN as “potential children”
75. 10 AugHow to outsmart an AI scammer bot | TikTok
76. 10 AugBlocking Access to Harmful Content Will Not Protect Children Online, No Matter How Many Times UK Politicians Say So | EFF
77. 10 AugAmericans, Be Warned: Lessons From Reddit’s Chaotic UK Age Verification Rollout | EFF
78. 10 AugThere are many reasons to criticise the OnlineSafetyAct but the bizarre Ofcom approach to AgeVerification demanding vast proliferation of personal information rather than obligatory acceptance of a validated credential, defies belief & exceeds all other failures
79. 10 AugSignal boss: ‘disturbing’ laws show the UK doesn’t understand tech | Times
80. 9 AugJimmy Wales on Newsnight: “[the online safety act] is a human rights violation”
81. 9 AugThe UK’s Online Safety Act is a licence for censorship – and the rest of the world is following suit | Taylor Lorenz | The Guardian
82. 8 AugOfcom apparently don’t understand “false-positive rates” nor “base rate”
83. 8 AugOfcom conveniently listing all of the porn websites which do not adhere to age verification requirements
84. 8 AugMarc Andreessen complains to Downing Street about Online Safety Act and UK tech minister
85. 8 AugEncryption Made for Police and Military Radios May Be Easily Cracked | WIRED
86. 7 AugA “political blackmail” – the EU Parliament is pressing for new mandatory scanning of your private chats | TechRadar
87. 7 Aug“I’m confused that the government advises never to give out your personal information, then introduces a law that means we have to send photos of our passports & driving licenses to anyone who asks”
88. 6 AugRepeal the Online Safety Act | Petitions | 500,775 signatures at Wednesday 2315h
89. 6 AugRequest: can everyone attending Defcon please add/change their job title or biography to “self-proclaimed expert” to support Chelsea Jarvie?
90. 6 AugDavid Aaronovich on media coverage of the Online Safety Act: “when are you going to have someone on to tell you what the downsides are?”
91. 6 Aug“Age verification: what’s the harm?” | Girl on the Net explains
92. 6 AugNew online safety law savaged by watchdog as ‘silencing a generation’ | Politics | News | Express.co.uk
93. 6 AugVia Reddit: “what can I do about the online safety act” | …trying to provide some constructive advice
94. 5 Aug“…the general consensus was that it’s just much easier to just join Roblox or something if you’re trying to find children in bulk.”
95. 5 AugGoogle Trends: “VPN” in the UK, past 12 months
96. 5 AugIf you use Twitter & would like to see more discussion regarding the UK Online Safety Act Deployment, here’s a ready-made search…
97. 5 AugBloomberg: “What Are VPNs And Will They Undermine Online Safety Rules?” | … answer: “VPNs empower mature users to circumvent needless proliferation of personal data”
98. 5 AugVPN Demand Statistics: VPN Demand Surges Around the World | UK VPN demand increase: 1,987% Date: Jul 25 – 27 (ongoing)
99. 5 AugDidn’t Take Long To Reveal The UK’s Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About | Techdirt
100. 5 AugGuardian: “Why opponents of the Online Safety Act aren’t ‘on Jimmy Savile’s side’”
101. 5 AugVideo: Dr Kate Lister: “Who is gathering and storing your data for the new Online Safety Act?”
102. 5 AugOfcom *may* be starting to understand that platforms are free to label entire forums as 18+ but that this conflicts with the OSA leading to overblocking
103. 5 AugThe Online Safety Act humiliates us all | New Statesman
104. 4 Augr/osawars: new subreddit discussing news on all perspectives of the online safety act
105. 4 AugThere is a very simple reason why people are turning to VPNs rather than pursuing Age Verification
106. 4 AugEveryone has seen the thing about Nvidia apparently age-verifying people before they are allowed to tweak the hardware they have purchased?
107. 4 AugChatGPT apparently worked out that somebody was typing with their hand shifted-right by one set of keys – see picture – this has security impact because…
108. 3 Aug‘There was shock that anyone might dare to question a law designed to “protect children.”’
109. 3 AugBritain’s MPs charge VPNs to expenses as minister urges caution | POLITICO
110. 2 AugThe Online Safety Act: legislation so proportionate & effective that it requires paid propaganda to launder its reputation
111. 2 AugOnline Safety: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be looking at something without having asked permission of someone like yourself
112. 1 AugIt seems like those 16-year-old voters are not going to hear very much about Jeremy Corbyn
113. 1 Aug“Everything the right – and the left – are getting wrong about the Online Safety Act” | George Billinge | The Guardian | …let’s ignore the article and just look at George’s LinkedIn profile
114. 1 AugTech Secretary Peter Kyle under fire as Online Safety Act faces mounting backlash
115. 1 AugUK GOVERNMENT TO BAN ONLINE ADVERTISING OF VPNS?
116. 1 Aug‘But Prof Livingstone noted that it was “possible that the companies are over-blocking to undermine the Act”‘ – no, @livingstone_s, Reddit simply does not editorialise user content

July 2025

1. 31 Julvx-underground: “me when a website wants to see an id to use it then i remember tea app donated 75,000 valid driver licenses to the internet”
2. 31 JulUK Government Warns Promoting the Use of VPNs Could Attract Fines | ISPreview UK
3. 31 JulReminder: Adults aged 18+ using a VPN to circumvent age verification is not strictly a child safety issue
4. 31 Jul‘We’ll fight together’: Americans planning to sue Ofcom over the Online Safety Act | LBC
5. 31 JulReminder: anyone who says that “the fault with excessive Age Verification content blocks is due to blunt platform miscategorisation of content” – is arguing in favour of *private censorship*
6. 31 JulPerrin and Woods Duty of Care | ORG Wiki
7. 31 JulChinese Cybersecurity Regulator demands answers from Nvidia regarding remote shutdown, tracking capability in hardware
8. 31 JulUK Users Need to Post Selfie or Photo ID to View Reddit’s r/IsraelCrimes, r/UkraineWarFootage | 404media
9. 31 JulI asked ChatGPT about the availability of VPN software in every instance of Linux, and about how the State might try to prevent its use, plus how much it costs to “roll your own” VPN
10. 31 JulRepeal the Online Safety Act | Petitions
11. 31 JulTop 12 UK iPhone Apps: VPN, ChatGPT, VPN, VPN, VPN, Temu, gov.uk, Threads, Yoti, Monzo, VPN, Google…
12. 31 JulI really really hate that division over the Online Safety Act is making technical commentary into political supposed debate, but worse: some of the most sane commentary is coming from Reform
13. 31 JulThe Online Safety Act is a Censor’s Charter | The Daily Sceptic
14. 30 JulSuggestion: Dutch Auction Salary Negotiation
15. 30 JulMaking Britain “the safest place to be online” by putting all Britons in a cage… this is not a positive message about our country, and UK Civil Society is complicit
16. 30 JulIt is bizarre to believe both: 1) 16-year-olds are mature enough to vote in general elections 2) 16-year-olds should be prohibited from content adults can legally view or create
17. 30 JulRepeal the Online Safety Act | Petition | …the petition is now at 425,000 citizens, @peterkyle
18. 30 JulI would just like to share how grateful I am that advertising-funded podcasts like @RestIsPolitics to have normalised the use of VPNs
19. 29 JulZero Knowledge Proofs Alone Are Not a Digital ID Solution to Protecting User Privacy | Electronic Frontier Foundation
20. 29 JulNigel Farage urges minister to apologise for Jimmy Savile online safety claim | BBC News | …I can’t forgive Kyle for making me agree with Farage, but this legislation is not fit for purpose
21. 29 JulUK Minister describes Age Verification as a collective action to keep children safe: the act of inconveniencing adults somehow, like magic, actively protects children
22. 29 JulUse Their ID | …parody fake driver licences for your member of parliament
23. 29 JulA Redditor asks: “Can’t zero knowledge proof solve the privacy concerns about the UK online safety law?” – my response…
24. 28 Jul1995: Story Claims PGP Used to Cloak Net Pedophiles | CNET | banning VPNs would be like pissing against the wind…
25. 28 JulQuelle Surprise 2: Reform UK vows to repeal ‘borderline dystopian’ Online Safety Act | The Guardian
26. 28 JulQuelle Surprise: UK households could face VPN ‘ban’ after use skyrockets following Online Safety Bill | Birmingham Live
27. 28 JulPetition update: unsurprisingly the British government will not repeal the Online Safety Act
28. 28 Jul“Darling, everything is an allegory for eternal surrender if you butter it properly” | Butter Me Immortal
29. 28 Jul“I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird” | …fun if slightly rambling video of abusing audio spectrograms to train/encode digital data in birdsong
30. 28 JulTom Lehrer buried a joke inside the NSA maths paper archive
31. 27 JulAll the world seems in tune on a spring afternoon when we’re poisoning pigeons in the park…
32. 27 JulThe “Repeal the Online Safety Act” – petition is now (Sunday) at 268,000 votes. Regrettably it will go nowhere because it was drafted by…
33. 27 JulAnyone who thinks that age verification & client side scanning will not be circumvented in open source / interoperable client software, is not paying attention…
34. 27 JulAge 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
35. 27 JulBluesky’s UK age assurance sucks, here’s how to work around it | GitHub
36. 26 JulBreach of verification data and images at “Tea” app foreshadows impact of hacking vibe-coded “Age Verification” providers
37. 26 JulVPN companies reporting spikes in UK signups, part 2/n
38. 26 JulVPN companies reporting spikes in UK signups, part 1/n
39. 26 JulProbably the funniest age verification meme ever…
40. 24 JulAge Verification chills key political speech & satire; this will be interesting when the UK voting age drops to 16
41. 24 JulReddit appears to be mildly struggling with a sudden influx of traffic over Tor; hopefully they will make some tweaks to help it real soon now
42. 24 JulPerhaps someone can ask #Ofcom about children not “stumbling” but bodily throwing themselves into adult material online?
43. 23 JulAnyone offering opinions on whether AI reconstruction of text from a bunch of statistical weights is a violation of copyright, should first write an essay explaining their thinking in the context of the Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance affair
44. 23 JulHacker Plants Computer ‘Wiping’ Commands in Amazon’s AI Coding Agent
45. 23 Jul“…the president is frustrated with his staff’s inability to tamp down conspiracy theories they once spread…” | Perhaps it wasn’t wise to build a political base of fearful, dogmatic, uncritical dependant conformists to whom you lie about everything
46. 23 Jul[ai-control] prevent robots.txt entries from becoming law | Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, weighs in re: legally enforceable statements in robots.txt
47. 23 JulIf HMG & NCSC want “to make the UK the safest place to live and work online” perhaps they can drop age verification and instead teach companies to back up their own data?
48. 22 JulReality bites the UK government’s push to undermine end-to-end encryption | Element
49. 22 JulUK backing down on Apple encryption backdoor after pressure from US | Ars Technica
50. 20 JulRussian lawmakers say ‘security threat’ WhatsApp should prepare to leave Russia | …EU to follow suit by 2027
51. 19 JulWikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations | Wikimedia Foundation
52. 16 JulCloudflare Blocking Access to Internet Piracy Websites in the UK | ISPreview UK
53. 15 JulIt’s probably a good thing that nobody cares about rail transport in the United States…
54. 15 JulClause Day: “Everyone losing their minds over an entirely standard clause in a tech provider’s T&Cs / EULA day”; also known as Fine Print Friday. Via @katebevan
55. 14 JulJuly 15th 1991: 34 years ago I published the first “modern” password cracker…
56. 14 JulThe Gist: Age Verification is an Epic fail
57. 14 JulThe most pernicious misinformation story to be found on the Internet is the presumption that government is somehow in control of defining what people can say on it, or use it for…
58. 11 JulJess Miers on Bluesky and Age Verification: “why no pushback?”
59. 11 JulBluesky, Britain, Age-Verification, Age-Attestation, and Railway Trains | …what child-protection measures British Civil Society *ought* to be demanding
60. 10 JulBluesky is rolling out age verification in the UK | The Verge
61. 9 JulBishop of San Bernardino excuses Catholics from mass if they are at risk from ICE
62. 9 JulInstagram wrongly says some users breached child sex abuse rules | BBC News
63. 9 JulI’m delighted to find that “The Internet Oracle” is still going, some 36+ years after it started
64. 9 JulI’m delighted to learn Switzerland has taken my advice and will be launching a Swiss national LLM | …relearning the lessons of 1981 & 2005
65. 8 JulNew anti-fraud system is labelling hospital texts and other legitimate messages as ‘likely scam’ | Irish Independent
66. 8 JulUnverified report: 14yo loses access, banned from Google/YouTube because Google Photos includes video of self as baby in bathtub
67. 7 Jul“National security” only ever means what the government wants it to mean, without limiting principle – Ari Cohn
68. 6 JulThe EU wants to decrypt your private data by 2030 | TechRadar
69. 2 JulInterstellar asteroid inbound
70. 1 JulCivil Society: Cloudflare’s latest change {blocks, unblocks} network use by {people, software} that we {hate, love} – {yay, boo} this is {great, terrible}!

June 2025

1. 27 JunElena Kagan Torches Supreme Court’s Terrible Logic in Porn Ruling | The New Republic
2. 27 JunThe Conservatives On The Supreme Court Are So Scared Of Nudity, They’ll Throw Out The First Amendment | Techdirt
3. 27 JunProf. Goldman’s Statement on the Supreme Court’s Demolition of the Internet in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton – Technology & Marketing Law Blog
4. 25 JunInsane Fake Girl Bot on *Mastodon* takes shots at: William Gibson, Craig Newmark, Jeff “Dark Tangent” Moss, David Preiss, …
5. 24 JunIN CASE YOU MISSED IT: aren’t you glad that we don’t (yet) live in a world where on-device client side surveillance triggers report you to the police for using words like “bomb” or “uranium” in Signal & WhatsApp chats?
6. 24 JunJulian Sanchez: “If your law is good when there are good people in office, but dangerous when there are bad people in office, your law is bad”
7. 24 JunBritain: Police may grab your {phone, laptop} and legally use on-device credentials to go trawl Facebook, GMail, iCloud, Dropbox (etc) — WITHOUT WARRANT
8. 20 JunIf the state deploys infrastructural internet services with logging & content filtering, those things are surveillance & censorship because they are done by the state
9. 20 JunFrom 2024: “COERCING LLMS TO DO AND REVEAL (ALMOST) ANYTHING”
10. 20 JunMy first LLM-to-WordPress Spam?
11. 20 Jun1933: The Technocrats’ Magazine | Technocracy Inc | Internet Archive
12. 20 JunIn case you missed it: “By Default, Signal Doesn’t Recall”
13. 20 JunMatt Green identifies an eternal verity
14. 20 JunAustralia: “Teen social media trial isn’t testing some ways kids will get around the [social media age verification] ban” | @crikey_news
15. 19 JunGDPR and the Intersection of Security and Privacy | JJ Katz | …corporate Deep Packet Inspection vs: GDPR, reconsidered…
16. 19 JunSometimes I wonder whether this push for “AI summaries of everything” is simply a consequence of the failure of “chat” to provide effective “search”
17. 18 JunThe Telegraph’s sob story about a family having to cut down on their five holidays to pay school fees turned out to be fake
18. 16 JunIf you want to understand the life cycle of software, this history of jemalloc is not a bad start
19. 15 JunMuffett’s 7th Law: you aren’t allowed to complain about Palantir if you’ve used the Internet Archive or said “…the Internet never forgets”
20. 13 JunDNS4EU is surveilled
21. 13 JunFormer UK internet minister bemoans that illiberal & poorly conceived approach to online safety and security is not being “built upon”
22. 12 JunHow to Protest Safely in the Age of Surveillance | WIRED
23. 12 JunPoundland sold for £1 with shops set to close | BBC News
24. 12 JunI’m watching all of these broadly self-congratulatory RCS announcements in the light of the Apple TCN Case, desperately waiting for the zeitgeist to swing over to “…what do you mean my national carrier can disable E2EE for *me* ?”
25. 11 JunWhatsApp joins legal action against UK demand for Apple ‘back door’
26. 11 JunGovernment using national security as ‘smokescreen’ in Apple encryption row | Computer Weekly
27. 11 JunWhatsApp backs Apple in its legal row with the UK over user data | BBC News
28. 7 JunQUESTION: the Drone War in Ukraine suggests that fibre-optic tech is now dirt cheap; so where can I get some to run a 50m link around my garden?
29. 5 JunIMPT: STREAMING TODAY at 1000 Eastern, 1500 UK, 1600 Paris: US Gov’t obliquely discusses *sanctioning* UK for attempting to backdoor Apple iCloud
30. 3 JunPornhub, YouPorn owner suspends access to French users over age verification law
31. 2 Jun“My experience with Canonical’s interview process” | …this is an atrocious story
32. 2 JunWhat the hell is “Bitcoin-Style Encryption”?
33. 2 JunTechCrunch UK & EU appears to be gone
34. 2 JunThought for the Day: the anthropomorphic personification of death for soap bubbles is a 3-year-old child
35. 2 JunLet’s all take a moment to consider that if — as demanded by Ofcom — encrypted messenger systems WERE actually monitoring conversations for words like: drone, bomb, explosive… all reports would currently be swamped
36. 1 JunI don’t have official confirmation, but I’m unilaterally declaring dibs on inspiration for this WhatsApp advertising campaign…

May 2025

1. 31 MayBBC demonstrates smuggled North Korean phone and how it implements both censorship and accountability in the user interface…
2. 30 May“OpenAI, defender of user privacy” – not what you would typically expect to hear from civil society, but in this case it’s true…
3. 26 MayRemembering John Young, co-founder of web archive Cryptome | The Register
4. 24 MayI think that one of the reasons that I’m not worried about AGI is that I’m still waiting for the end of the world to be caused by Quantum Computing
5. 22 MayBy Default, Signal Doesn’t Recall | Signal Windows app leverages DRM content protection hacks to hide messages from Windows Recall
6. 21 MayWelcome to Britain, where it takes Nigella Lawson to explain to people that you can kill people with meat cleavers just about as easily as pointy knives
7. 21 MayNYU psychology professor taken to task for hawking dubious paper about children, screen time and harms
8. 18 MayMid-Book Audiobook Review: “How Spies Think” by David Omand
9. 17 MayI swear the #Eurovision song contest is the single best argument / thought-experiment against Messenger #interoperability under the EU Digital Markets Act
10. 16 MayGoogle Online Security Blog: Advanced Protection: Google’s Strongest Security for Mobile Devices
11. 14 MayLol that @triclassified podcast has used a banner picture of @runasand in the 4th episode Re: @snowden, which so far has focused on personalities rather than impact, and…
12. 14 MayThe Mastodons are inventing “Algorithms”
13. 12 MayThis video is an absolute perfect masterclass in open source intelligence gathering. Or cyber stalking. Both. Whatever. MUSTWATCH
14. 9 MayWikipedia challenging UK law it says exposes it to ‘manipulation and vandalism’ | Wikipedia | The Guardian
15. 7 MayA “Duck Test” for End-to-End Secure Messaging
16. 5 MayUS Gov’t Signal-clone with backdoor for message retention, hacked, messages leaked | …I really hope #Ofcom are watching re: the impact of proposed client side scanning
17. 5 MayICYMI: “Every TWINSCAN EUV ships with ~45 million lines of code […] Bugfixes and features start out as *word documents* sent to a series of review boards…”
18. 2 MayMike Waltz Accidentally Reveals Obscure App the Government Is Using to Archive Signal Messages | Sigh, but at least I suppose they are shooting in the right direction…

April 2025

1. 29 AprHow a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2 | Silent’s Blog
2. 29 AprBaby food pouches low in key nutrients, lab testing finds | BBC News | …READ THIS ARTICLE if you are interested in AI or Cybersecurity, because …
3. 23 Apr“Signal is better than most other commercial apps, but it’s not military-grade encryption” | …and we are all grateful for that small mercy
4. 23 AprProposal to Update Indicator 9B of the DPG Standard: Inappropriate & Illegal Content | …whyyyy do social-good activists still do stuff like this?
5. 20 AprMy delightful discovery of the day is that not only does the word ‘pudding’ derive (roughly) from French blood sausage, but also there is a Korean blood sausage called ‘sundae’
6. 17 Apr“Processing an audio stream in a maliciously crafted media file may result in code execution”
7. 16 AprLondon Security Engineering Meetup: Alec Muffett “End to End Encryption: Why You Should Implement It” (May 08, 1800h)
8. 15 AprMITRE / CVE is being killed by the Trump Government
9. 15 AprGoogle rolling out auto-restart security feature to Android phones | One of the things I really love…
10. 15 AprThe Pall Mall Pact and why it matters | Malwarebytes | …I don’t entirely agree that this is a good thing
11. 15 AprBoarding passes and check-in could be scrapped in air travel shake-up | The Guardian | …this is a really bad idea in several obvious ways
12. 15 AprWhy I Emphatically Oppose Online Age Verification Mandates | Technology & Marketing Law Blog
13. 15 Aprtariff | PyPI
14. 14 AprSo You Want to Be a Dissident? | The New Yorker
15. 12 AprThere’s a lot of chatter going around at the moment regarding “AI IS EVIL BECAUSE IT EATS A LOT OF POWER” …
16. 11 AprRaphael Satter makes a fair point in this Bluesky thread: where is the {tech, cyber, safety} industry support for Chris Krebs?
17. 11 AprI don’t greatly like that the BBC have made me agree with Kemi Badenoch about something, but she’s absolutely correct to say that…
18. 10 AprAdolescence team to remake Threads nuclear attack epic | BBC News
19. 10 AprMatt Blaze | Written testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform Subcommittee on Military and Foreign Affairs | April 2, 2025
20. 8 Apr[Meta] Introducing New Built-In Restrictions for Instagram Teen Accounts, and Expanding to Facebook and Messenger
21. 8 AprStudy: Kids with smartphones are less depressed, anxious, bullied than peers without them
22. 8 Apr“The UK’s proposed measures for court orders to suspend IP addresses and domain names” | …the UK wants to globally censor or take down IP addresses & DNS domains
23. 7 AprAbdelhakim Belhaj | Wikipedia | …the UK Gov’t have a history of dropping cases which compromise security
24. 7 AprApple-UK data privacy row should not be secret, court rules | BBC News
25. 4 Apr“Academic accused of bias for opposing smartphone ban in schools” | Times | …that most feared by fearmongers is popular rejection of simplistic narrative
26. 4 AprEuropean Commission: to protect Ukraine we must prevent their ability to have end-to-end secure communication
27. 3 AprSome subtle advertising here from Element/Matrix
28. 3 AprSo let me get this straight: Trump’s tariff formula (a) was the result of an AI query which (b) was misunderstood by a human and (c) misapplied to (d) incomplete data on the basis of (e) bad economic thinking to (f) crash the world economy
29. 3 Apr“Dutch computer scientist and intelligence expert Bert Hubert explains why European governments should urgently exit the American clouds and how to do this fastest” | republik.ch
30. 2 AprWaltz’s team set up at least 20 Signal group chats for crises across the world | POLITICO
31. 2 AprMeta faces ‘substantial’ fine for not complying with Turkey’s gag orders | POLITICO
32. 2 AprEuropean Commission takes aim at end-to-end encryption and proposes Europol become an EU FBI | The Record | …here we go again
33. 2 AprStarliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought | Ars Technica

March 2025

1. 31 MarUS Troll site Kiwi Farms receives Ofcom demand for Online Safety Act “Risk Assessment”, rejects it on 1A/Jurisdiction grounds, demands MLAT
2. 28 MarDOGE Plans to Rebuild [US Social Security COBOL] Code Base in Months, Risking Benefits and System Collapse | WIRED
3. 28 Mar‘Have You Ever Watched A Daniel Tiger Show?’ | guy from the Heritage Foundation would not have funded ‘Mr Rogers’ due to ‘lack of demand’
4. 28 Mar30,000 years from now, the species into which humanity evolves will receive curious, highly personalised messages from space, detailing money erroneously transferred into Jovian bank accounts…
5. 27 Mar“A drinking game based on mentions of ‘stakeholders’ or throwaway references to the need to ‘consult civil society’ would prove fatal” by @chalmermagne
6. 27 MarWho was the JG that Waltz thought he was adding to the Houthi Signal chat? I think it’s obvious…
7. 26 MarEx-UK cyber chief says asking Apple to break encryption was ‘naive’ | New Scientist
8. 26 MarWhat is messaging app Signal and how secure is it? | BBC News
9. 26 MarIf they had used a different messenger with records retention, aside from the fact that this would not have happened, Tulsi Gabbard would be able to recall what she had seen in the chat
10. 26 Marmrs.frazzled on TikTok perfectly captures the vibe of the Signal affair
11. 26 MarWHAT IF the GCHQ “Ghost Protocol” for “lawful intercept of end-to-end encrypted messenger content” was implemented as a journalist being hardwired into every chat?
12. 25 MarNice little video on Threads (elsewhere?) by Goldberg & Psaki regarding the Signal brouhaha
13. 25 Mar“The real problem with sharing Top Secret data over Signal is not the security of the app, it’s the security of the phone. And mobile phones are not secure against state level threat actor” | @thegrugq is correct, BUT…
14. 25 MarCrowdsource Intuition told me that “…But his Signal Messages!” would be trending; but I wonder if the Trump regime is brazen enough to…
15. 24 MarUS Government uses Signal to coordinate Comms re: attack on Houthis, accidentally includes journalist in group chat…
16. 24 MarNice little video explainer from @etymologynerd re: latest attacks on Section 230 & whether you want your internet experience to look like A) DisneyWorld or B) 4Chan
17. 24 MarA nuanced “Global South” take by @nwbrownboi re: LibGen, Copyright & AI + contrast from @greg_jenner & @prof_alice_roberts (all Threads) HT @dsearls
18. 22 MarYahoo sells TechCrunch to investment firm Regent | …maybe this is good maybe not?
19. 21 Mar“Analysis of the Telegram Key Exchange” | …it’s from Martin & Kenny so this is bound to be correct, fun, and probably demands alcohol…
20. 21 MarFrance: National Assembly votes to maintain confidentiality of encrypted messaging during a restless night
21. 21 MarReminder: Heathrow is/was “down” due to a power failure, and all those folk who point at the Aviation industry as a paragon of risk-aversion… well, a friend just observed:
22. 21 MarHistory Professor Answers Dictator Questions | Tech Support | WIRED | …it’s a 34 minute watch, but well worth it
23. 21 MarWhite Paper: some Mastodon users sneer about Threads users, less do vice-versa, but by and large people mostly just want to communicate
24. 21 Mar“Zero arrests! Proves it’s working, doesn’t it?” | Big Brother Watch
25. 21 MarFabulous little explainer by @umcopu on Twitter (ThreadReader link provided) on how EU Digital Markets Act “interoperability” will negatively impact security & integrity of their platform offerings
26. 21 MarFrench scientist denied US entry after phone messages critical of Trump found | The Guardian
27. 21 MarSignal threatens to leave France if encryption backdoor required | Computerworld
28. 21 MarAlec’s Personal, Utterly Speculative Opinion: Why does the UK Government want a Backdoor into Apple iCloud Encryption? Answer: “Corporate & Foreign Government Espionage for Five Eyes”
29. 19 MarTurn on 2-step verification (2SV) | Stop! Think Fraud
30. 18 Mar“I’ve just closed the forum of a small classic car club because we don’t have the time or capacity to ensure compliance with only volunteers. Meta will benefit, because we will, reluctantly, move to using a Facebook page”
31. 18 Mar“There is something deeply wrong when a law passed with cross-party consensus & endorsed by Britain’s most trusted charities has made it impossible to run an internet forum for hamster owners”
32. 18 MarCalifornia’s Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) Is Completely Unconstitutional (Multiple Ways) | NetChoice v. Bonta | Technology & Marketing Law Blog
33. 18 MarNicoled | feddit.org | …it’s heartening to watch the Fediverse community (Mastodon, etc) learning basic 2012-era lessons about how spam, abuse & fake engagement works
34. 17 MarGermany May Refuse F-35 Purchase over ‘[Backdoor Killswitch]’; Consider Eurofighter Instead
35. 16 MarThe Online Safety Deadline has passed | @Cyberleagle / Graham Smith
36. 16 MarApple Will Fully Encrypt RCS Messages Between Androids and iPhones | Gizmodo
37. 16 MarUK, US Hold Private Talks in Bid to Calm Apple Encryption Feud | Bloomberg | …the UK IC’s demands are leaking like a sieve
38. 15 MarThe New York Times shutting down its Tor Onion Service
39. 14 MarPressure grows to hold secret Apple privacy hearing in public | BBC News
40. 14 MarA New Era of Attacks on Encryption Is Starting to Heat Up | WIRED
41. 14 MarJoke: ‘Program goes to Operating System, tears in eyes, says “my state, it is very bad”‘
42. 14 MarWhat could Apple’s high court challenge mean for data protection? | Technology | The Guardian
43. 14 Mar“…TERRIBLE BOOK, POINTLESS, DON’T BOTHER…” — and…
44. 13 MarOur challenge against UK’s secret TCN powers | Privacy International + Liberty file suit against the UK government regarding Apple backdoor demand
45. 13 Mar1995: “The unique risks — and opportunities — of The World Wide Web demand a policy-neutral, extra-regulatory model for standards and compliance.”
46. 13 MarIn Memoriam: Mark Klein, AT&T Whistleblower Who Revealed NSA Mass Spying
47. 12 MarNew Facebook “China Spies & Executive Lingerie” Whistleblower (& Book Author) Sarah Wynn-Williams chooses to air issues on… The Steve Bannon Show
48. 12 MarA Tour of WebAuthn
49. 12 MarFormer Lithuanian foreign minister finds Boris Johnson to be “flippant”; quelle surprise…
50. 12 Mar“I need you to roll a 20 to prove that using social media generally causes harm to teens…”
51. 12 MarShakespeare would have said “Bruv” & “Fam”
52. 9 MarProject Aldrin / Facebook into China, a partial retrospective from someone who saw some of the code
53. 9 MarPrivacy International’s letter to the UK Home Office demanding transparency on Technical Capability Notices | Privacy International
54. 8 MarThe Dangers Lurking in the U.K.’s Plan for Electronic Eavesdropping | Lawfare | Susan Landau | …HMG zealotry against encryption leads to strategic risk
55. 7 Mar“[Trump] wanted to eject Canada out of an intelligence-sharing group known as the Five Eyes that also includes Britain, Australia & New Zealand”
56. 7 Mar“A back door to encrypted data could help to protect the public” | The Times | BWAHAHAHA MUST READ
57. 6 MarTrump Promises To Abuse Take It Down Act For Censorship, Just As We Warned | Techdirt
58. 6 MarNo one asked for this: Google is testing round keys in Gboard | Ars Technica
59. 6 MarIt is time to make the Online Safety Act 2023 fit for purpose | Neil Brown, a good read…
60. 6 MarPowerful comment from Jen Persson of @DefendDigitalMe re: the trajectory of under-18 online safety vs: that of under-18 assisted suicide
61. 6 MarI… I simply cannot resist saying it: “Shot. Chaser.”
62. 6 MarUK quietly scrubs encryption advice from government websites | TechCrunch | it’s nice to get coverage…
63. 6 MarWhy Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not) | Techdirt | …if you are not reading Mike Masnick, you are spectating rather than understanding
64. 5 MarCGNAT frustrates all IP address-based technologies | Cybersecurity | SIDN
65. 5 MarIf Age Verification is to be done at all, it should be like this: a bearer-token signed by the App Store, Browser Provider or Device, and trusted by the Age-Consumer e.g. Age-Restricted Service Vendor
66. 5 MarNCSC, GCHQ, UK Gov’t expunge advice to “use Apple encryption” for Barristers, Solicitors (etc…) — co-incidental with Apple lawsuit against HMG’s demanding a backdoor in the same (HT @DavidDavisMP @PrivacyMatters @zsk)
67. 5 MarBreaking WhatsApp or Signal encryption: a dangerous political chimera | Le Monde, via Google Translate
68. 4 MarApple takes legal action in UK data privacy row | BBC News
69. 4 MarApple launches legal challenge to UK ‘back door’ order
70. 4 MarApple details improvements to child accounts, App Store age-filtering | Six Colors
71. 3 MarIN CASE YOU MISSED IT: do banking transactions count as “user to user” communication services & social media under the UK & AU Online Safety Acts?
72. 3 MarTrack your MP’s boozing | …God forbid that British MPs should be subject to surveillance
73. 3 MarUK watchdog probes TikTok (and Reddit, Imgur) over children’s data | POLITICO
74. 3 MarDr Jessica Shurson on the (perennial) arguments that “…if only you *knew* how bad CSAM abuse is” — you would be willing to give up secure & private instant messaging
75. 3 MarRetrospective: The Man Behind Biden’s Sweeping AI Executive Order | POLITICO | End of the techlash in sight?
76. 3 MarFun: “what five things did you do last week?”
77. 2 MarFrance, too, pushing to make it illegal to have privacy online:
78. 1 MarSensible request from Matt Green to Apple

February 2025

1. 27 FebBiden Justice Department downplayed U.K. demand for Apple ‘back door’ | The Washington Post
2. 25 FebSignal will abandon Sweden if the Swedish government’s data storage proposal is passed | SVT Nyheter
3. 24 FebNice little blog post from Matt Green, although I’ll note he skipped the implicit Q2(b): “if surveillance was to apply only to UK persons, how would they be defined or distinguished?”
4. 23 FebJames Ball on Twitter
5. 22 FebNB: you can’t call for big platforms like Apple to literally *break a law* like the Investigatory Powers Act, unless you are also content for them to wilfully break (e.g.) *GDPR*
6. 21 FebGovernment has made UK user data ‘less secure’ with Apple row – Experts | The Independent
7. 21 FebTwitter Poll: ‘Do you think Apple would be right to withdraw from the market a “strong privacy” product that contains a Government backdoor?’
8. 21 FebUseful Phrase for anyone, today, discussing the UK/Apple/Encryption thing: “Comity of Nations”
9. 21 FebApple in 2016 | A Message to Our Customers | “…government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers…”
10. 21 FebHOT TIP: PUSH BACK HARD AGAINST CRYPTOWAR AMATEURS WHO ATTEMPT TO PAINT APPLE WITHDRAWAL AS CAPITULATION
11. 21 FebApple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row | BBC News
12. 21 FebSpot the speculative circumvention of text censorship & blocking, and consider how this will enable online harms as well as online helps
13. 17 FebHow to write a calculator app. Correctly. | Chad Nauseam Home
14. 14 FebMastodon will add quote posts, even though some users don’t want them | The Verge
15. 14 Feb“The ICO […] say they don’t expect you to implement age assurance measures which […] pose a significant & disproportionate economic impact on businesses” | @pwaring@fosstodon.org
16. 14 FebSecret U.K. spy order imperils press freedom
17. 14 FebUK accused of political ‘foreign cyberattack’ on US after serving secret snooping order on Apple | Computer Weekly | Wyden-Biggs-Gabbard letter published
18. 13 FebApple Faces Potential App Store Antitrust Probe in China | MacRumors
19. 13 FebJoint Letter on the UK Government’s use of Investigatory Powers Act to attack End-to-End Encryption | Global Encryption Coalition
20. 13 FebU.K. call for a back door to Apple devices threatens Americans, senator says | Washington Post
21. 13 FebThe Apple TV App Is Now Available on Android | Daring Fireball
22. 12 FebSwedish Armed Forces: “Signal should be used to defend against interception of calls & messages via the telephone network and to make it more difficult to spoof telephone numbers”
23. 12 Feb“The original illegal harms consultation drew flak for its sheer bulk: a tad over 1,700 pages. The final round of illegal harms documents is even weightier: over 2,400 pages in all”
24. 10 FebThe NSA’s “Big Delete” | Judd Legum & Rebecca Crosby
25. 10 FebAudio: Ciaran Martin on BBC’s Today Programme re: the Home Office demand for backdoor into Apple encryption
26. 10 FebMy father literally fought the Nazis (Anzio, Monte Cassino, Monte Grande) and he taught me one key warfare lesson applicable to all aspects of modern life
27. 10 FebThe latest spin on the Home Office demand for a backdoor into Apple iCloud/iMessage storage is “…it’s not a backdoor, we just want existing exploitable weaknesses to NOT be removed”
28. 10 FebQUESTION FOR DISCUSSION: where FOO is a federated protocol, can one ever be truly “deplatformed” by BAR, where BAR is an instance of FOO?
29. 9 FebWhen you learn the lengths that Government & Law Enforcement will go to in order to get you to unlock your phone, you will partly understand why they are so attracted to “digital driver’s licences”
30. 9 FebFor various reasons I’ve been musing to myself regarding “What is the traditional [male] national dress of my people?” and I’ve drawn up the following list
31. 9 FebIf Meta or Google deplatformed someone over a Mastodon post (without their committing some overt criminal act) Civil Society would utterly lose its shit; therefore…
32. 9 FebInvestigatory Powers Act 2016 | how it started vs: how it’s going
33. 8 Feb“Tech companies brace after UK demands back door access to Apple cloud” | …what the @ukhomeoffice seek casts a dark shadow over potential growth of the UK Tech Industry
34. 8 FebGraham Smith (thread on Bluesky) re: judgement on Australian eSafety Commissioner’s office shortcutting of formal process to demand content takedowns from Twitter/X
35. 7 FebI hope one day that our Online Digital Rights, Civil Society, Safety & Privacy advocates will remember that “online harms” fall into *three* categories:
36. 7 FebFrom 2018: “Apple iCloud: State firm hosts user data in China” | BBC News
37. 7 FebIn This Blog Post: Links to Media coverage of the UK Home Office TCN / Technical Capability Notice demand for a backdoor into iCloud & iMessage Backups
38. 7 FebReady-Made Twitter Search for “APPLE: UK HOME OFFICE TCN ON IMESSAGE ICLOUD BACKUP ENCRYPTION BACKDOOR”
39. 7 Feb“[ @UKHomeOffice ] orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts [iCloud Backups]” | WaPo | …and now we wait to see how Apple responds
40. 6 FebDemocrats Should Be Stopping A Lawless President, Not Helping Censor The Internet, Honestly WTF Are They Thinking | Techdirt
41. 6 FebCopium & Puerversiveness: when geeks aren’t as clever as they think they are
42. 6 FebDaring Fireball: ‘Apple in China’ | New Book by Patrick McGee | …one day I might make the time to read this book
43. 6 FebHonestly can’t tell if Civil Society believes that copyright-breaking LibGen & SciHub are rebel heroes or piratical villains
44. 6 FebI just want to take this unparalleled opportunity, by example, to demonstrate how “we must force social network platforms to be more transparent” will make policy debate more toxic
45. 5 FebReminder: merely a few months ago we were all worried about audio & video “deep fakes” and now even the Guardian is extolling their positive uses
46. 4 FebMusk’s Takeover Of The Government’s Computer Systems Needs To Be Understood As A Cyberattack, Or Worse | Techdirt
47. 3 FebSurely we should be calling this “The Spook-Hawley AI Censorship Act”?
48. 3 FebAsking Elon Musk’s own Grok AI about US Trade Tariffs, and, well…
49. 3 FebFormer UN Rapporteur David Kaye: “for anyone who ever argued for key escrows, i offer you the example of the muskovites rampaging through USG systems” | Ofcom, please take note…
50. 2 FebFully documented source code for Elite on the 6502 | … I spent days, weeks playing this
51. 2 FebAI “Safety” researchers finally have to face the question of whether they want LLMs to be *good* at state censorship, or to be *bad* at state censorship?
52. 2 FebIf you are a fan of classic COSMOS with Carl Sagan, you will probably love the UK’s Open University S354 “UNDERSTANDING SPACE & TIME”
53. 2 FebGeneral Michael Hayden: “The NSA Cryptologic Museum are Censoring Women” | …this is an abomination
54. 1 FebDon’t use an LLM to generate a random number or to generate passwords

January 2025

1. 31 Jan“[Tony Blair] believes the public will gladly sacrifice privacy for efficiency” | …whose, precisely?
2. 31 Jan“Running DeepSeek on a small PC is the new ‘Running DOOM on a calculator'”
3. 31 JanDesire Paths, Paths of Desire, a comic by @instachaaz on Instagram | …this is subtle and I love it
4. 30 JanEssay: “Securing Model Weights” considered pointless | Lessons learned from (failed) protection of the Unix source code, et al…
5. 30 JanWhy, in this day and age, is a military helicopter “flying dark” at night in a heavy-traffic, massively built-up area, without ADSB? Washington is not a war zone.
6. 30 JanGitHub: “Try, compare, and implement this model in your code for free…” | great unwashed hordes of common users are going to be using AI models as interchangable consumables, like lightbulbs…
7. 29 JanGoogle reclassifies U.S. as ‘sensitive country’ like China, Russia
8. 28 JanRun a 670 Billion parameter LLM at home for $6000 with no GPU required
9. 28 JanA friend probes the raw political censorship, or lack thereof, of DeepSeek R1
10. 28 JanWhat DeepSeek r1 Means—and What It Doesn’t | Lawfare | Yes, but…
11. 28 JanTikTok, AliExpress, SHEIN, Temu, WeChat, And Xiaomi Hit With GDPR Complaints Over Personal Data Transfers To China | Techdirt
12. 28 JanDeepSeek FAQ | Stratechery by Ben Thompson | …a fine post which I largely agree explains why to *ignore* most of the DeepSeek hype
13. 27 JanPlaying Around With Deepseek (NSFW) | www.bentasker.co.uk
14. 27 Jan404media: “Pornhub Exec Discusses Pulling Out of the South, Trad Wives, and Feet Pics” | …I look forward to Pornhub’s announcement of pulling out of the UK…
15. 27 JanThis 1995 song was the wall to wall car radio tune when I worked for Sun’s Network Security Group; this lyric always confused me…
16. 24 JanDeepSeek vs: Winnie-The-Pooh: the winner is Chinese Censorship — unless you know how to circumvent it
17. 24 JanSuffice it to say that DeepSeek’s LLM doesn’t have problems commenting upon political massacres so long as they didn’t happen in China
18. 24 JanDan Brickley on Bluesky: “Testing DeepSeek R1 censorship UI (mobile web), since it will get heavy use worldwide” | …thread with multiple screenshots
19. 24 Jan“deepseek r1 has an existential crisis” | …more fuel for the upcoming “Open Source LLMs on Raspberry Pi’s are a National Security issue” crisis
20. 23 JanOfcom Session for Small, Low-Risk Community Sites | Wednesday 12 February 12:30 – 14:00 GMT
21. 23 JanIf what @BrianRoemmele claims is delivered, running a Chinese LLM on a Raspberry Pi at home should become trivial
22. 22 JanSoftware > Patents: open-source Python plugin for slicer software implements staggered layers, improves strength, violates dodgy patents
23. 22 JanEuropol Director: “The European People are Criminal Scum and cannot be trusted with robust online privacy” | …or words to that effect
24. 22 JanShallow Deepfakes circumvent legal/licensing issues streaming Australian Tennis … as done by the *organisers*
25. 22 JanA nice little explainer from @hankgreen on Conspiracy Influencers; it could equally apply to a lot of Civil Society & Journalism
26. 22 JanOne massive, glorious upside of the supposed “end of factchecking” is that Americans are finally learning how to Satire without a safety net
27. 21 JanWhen I worked on E2EE for @Messenger I forget the # of times various ideas were shot down by asking “what if the user drops their phone down a toilet?” ; now @SciTechGovUK want your driving licence on that phone
28. 20 JanUtterly delighted new BBC Wonderblocks are teaching our preschoolers the basics of both algorithm development & applied password guessing, core skills that they will certainly need
29. 20 JanUsing genetic history of lice to estimate when humans began to wear clothes
30. 20 JanIf you’ve recently installed Homebrew you may have installed a Trojan Horse if you used Google to find it
31. 19 JanI wonder how many free marketers amongst the political right have stopped to wonder why it tends to be quite rare that governments, to one or other extents, permit their people to choose by whom they are governed?
32. 18 JanProtecting Americans from Foreign Un-American Communication Applications Act (PAFUCAA)
33. 18 JanBreaking: TikTok forcing the Democrats to clarify whether they intend to go through with censoring the Internet
34. 17 JanSupreme Court Upholds TikTok Ban, and Domestic and Foreign Censors Rejoice-TikTok v. Garland | Technology & Marketing Law Blog
35. 17 JanTikTok faces ban in US by Sunday after Supreme Court rejects appeal | BBC News | Oh dear…
36. 17 JanIt will be really interesting to see if Pornhub (et al) choose to revoke their service to the UK in a manner consistent with their actions in the US, or not…
37. 16 JanGoogle won’t add fact-checks despite new EU law
38. 16 JanMeteorite Hits Driveway Capturing Sound on Earth for First Time
39. 16 JanI have the black coffee, but I need some cherry pie
40. 16 Jan“The idea that a bunch of Americans flooding Rednote is exposing the Chinese workforce to the concepts of weekends & unionization is extremely funny to me” | Imgur
41. 16 JanRemind me, did anyone mention that VPN companies would gear up to actively sell circumvention of US law in the wake of the TikTok ban?
42. 16 JanA New Jam-Packed Biden Executive Order Tackles Cybersecurity, AI, and More | WIRED
43. 16 JanSonos’ $30M app fail is cautionary tale against rushing unnecessary updates | Ars Technica | …salient for those who believe rapid updates by software companies are the proper route towards user safety
44. 16 JanREDnote emergency-hiring English language content-moderation (i.e. censors) due to sudden influx of American TikTok users
45. 16 JanAll porn sites must ‘robustly’ verify UK user ages by July | BBC News
46. 16 Jan1/ US Gov’t censors US-Singaporean TikTok as “National Security Risk” 2/ Users jump to *Chinese*-owned RedNote 3/ Users learn RedNote / China is massively illiberal 4/ …
47. 16 Jan“Biden administration looks for ways to keep TikTok available in the U.S.” | …whilst the world watches
48. 15 JanTHIS IS WHAT WE CALL A/B TESTING, FOLKS!
49. 14 JanDoes anyone know precisely how the US government proposes to prevent millions of teens / millennials from accessing TikTok?
50. 14 JanReminder: when a platform or tool is lauded for implementing safety features like social-network mass-blocking-lists, those tools can be used to quietly silence *good* people, too…
51. 14 JanBest Dinosaur Joke, Evar
52. 14 JanIt’s Tuesday, my house is a plague pit*, Trump v2.0 is due soon, friends are burning their Neil Gaiman books, and I’m here for Americans who believe TikTok will entirely cease to exist by the weekend…
53. 13 Janjohnsonjh/altoschat: Altger Altos Chat | GitHub
54. 13 JanWhy AI Works
55. 10 JanIrregular Verbs for Censorship
56. 8 JanRemember Kids! Censorship is terrible and must be avoided at all costs — however, we also can’t allow people to say bad or rude things about our friends…
57. 8 Jan“I made a Gorilla Language”
58. 8 JanFacebook Derangement Syndrome, Part 2: Trust, Safety, and Community Notes
59. 8 JanFacebook Derangement Syndrome, Part 1: Smart Glasses, SUVs, and Terrorism
60. 5 Jan“Is it a revolution? No, it’s porn…”
61. 4 JanThe Pornhub Bans Are Not About Keeping Kids Safe | …frankly this goes for most online safety regulation…
62. 3 JanSmuggled Starlink devices allegedly used to defy India’s internet shutdowns | The Guardian
63. 2 JanOne person’s “over-engineering” is another person’s “…this error or elision would have been obvious to anyone who had actually thought about the problem for ten minutes”
64. 2 JanSoviet era Kerosene Lamp Generator gives new meaning to “Let’s fire up the radio!” | The SWLing Post
65. 2 JanTerry Pratchett interview in Adventurer 11 (June/July 1987) | Stuffed Crocodile
66. 2 JanCritics decry Vietnam’s ‘draconian’ new internet law | Vietnam | The Guardian | …I am honestly wondering what @getyoti thinks of how Digital ID is being used in Vietnam
67. 2 JanI wish I could believe that this good news was the result of HMG walking-back from the precipice of “if it moves, regulate it”, but instead…
68. 2 JanThis is a cute and amusing snapshot of some issues that social media cause to political power & regulation