2026-03-13 11:34:22
…that this is how all censorship circumvention works, and that content scanning will inevitably fail in the face of focused ingenuity.
2026-03-12 18:32:01
Was it DNS?
2026-03-10 05:50:36
For the moment, sanity holds, but for how long?
And did the towers of watching glass
Rise on England’s mountains green?
And did the silent, sleepless eyes
Survey each field and lane unseen?And was the cloud of data drawn
Across each hill and village fair?
And did the Party’s hidden hand
Move dark beneath England’s bright air?Bring me my screens of sleepless light,
Bring me my wires of binding steel;
Bring me my codes of watchful might,
Bring me the truth no tongue may feel.Bring me the drones: O clouds unfold!
Bring me the firewalls fierce and grand!
Till we have built new Beijing here
In England’s green and pleasant land.
2026-03-07 15:47:55
Models are simply fuzzy compressions of all of the pages in the internet & elsewhere, starting with Wikipedia.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, JPEGs were exotic, took ages to create and they looked like shit. Nowadays they are baseline. Who here remembers* FITS, TGA & TIFF?
This is where we are now with AI. This is also why we must stop the government trying to restrict access to such technologies.
[*] …I’m sure that somebody here uses TIF on occasion, and will want to say so, but the point is: you’re not anywhere close to the mean, median or mode anymore.
2026-03-06 20:06:01
This Reddit post; it’s the UK that loses out:
“It’s an old-school internet forum from late 1990s, still chugging alone today. I started getting email from Ofcom around November 2025 and now have multiple letters. I’ve repeatedly told them I’m from Canada, I’m not based in the UK. Eventually, I blocked all UK IP addresses in mid-February 2026 and told them I’d blocked the UK and that I was done engaging with them. [But…]”
2026-03-06 18:17:43
Working in Facebook’s Trust & Safety team taught me many things, including: when someone’s at risk of online coercion & extortion (financial, sexual, political) one thing that you DO NOT do, is throw fuel on the fire.
With that in mind, let’s watch this UK Terrorism Police video, circulating on TikTok & Instagram:
Cue an utterly terrified teenager with wailing sirens behind him, whose “mum couldn’t believe it” and “might not be able to go to college”
TO BE CLEAR, THIS IS BULLSHIT. IF THIS REALLY REFLECTS HOW COUNTER-TERRORISM LEGISLATION WORKS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM THEN IT NEEDS TO BE URGENTLY REFORMED:
This is right up there with “AIDS – DON’T DIE OF IGNORANCE!” and with the Twitter Joke Trial.
If you are telling a bunch of teenagers that having “shared a link” their lives are now essentially over, what the hell do you think they are going to do next?
No; the emotional ones are going to harm or even kill themselves, much like the various servicemen killing themselves over sextortion — or, perhaps worse, this campaign will be used as evidence of a “hostile environment” of anti-terrorism policing and used to drag kids into crime, “Oliver Twist” style where they are practically dragged underground into an anti-establishment cult.
This is the most self-defeatingly, tone-deaf, patronising, patrician, misapprehensive and outright stupid anti-social-media campaign that I’ve ever had the horror to witness.
It should be cancelled and utterly reworked, in association with at least SOME civil society organisation which respects kids enough to not try scaring them into “good behaviour”.
They should apologise to the nation’s youth.