2025-09-18 16:56:31
Yes. And the Tony Blair institute is a lot of the problem.
“There’s a big philosophical debate going on here,” said Ryan Wain, the executive director of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a London group started by the former prime minister that supports the government’s policies. “There’s a big question about what is freedom and what is safety.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/technology/britain-facial-recognition-digital-controls.html and https://archive.ph/55wVW
2025-09-16 19:26:56
…The audience split predictably along ideological lines. Privacy advocates called it a boundary violation disguised as art. Others viewed it as necessary shock therapy for our sleepwalking acceptance of facial recognition in everyday spaces. Both reactions prove the intervention achieved its disruptive goal.
And the state will revolt at anyone or anything exercising capabilities that it has arrogated to itself for many years. Expect blowback.
2025-09-16 18:46:39
Note that elsewhere:
2025-09-16 18:17:42
This has been kicking around for a few days now; still waiting for anything earth-shattering to come out of it, but worth watching:
2025-09-15 23:04:59
This is kind of the geek version of one of those “you can create an entire market garden in your backyard from newspaper and old soda cans” TikTok posts. Compute power is so cheap nowadays that it will never be erased from public accessibility, and society needs to adapt to technology rather than vice-versa.
Enjoy!
https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
HT Jim Finnis.
2025-09-15 19:36:24
In case you missed it: a bunch of people on Bluesky posted about the recent assassination / murder of a prominent right-wing American figure with a statement which in Latin* would be “requiescat in urina” — and then they had their posts blocked:
Truthfully: this sounds like the behaviour of a text classifier which — working from a small training set of postings made by challenging individuals — decided to go do a mass-takedown of offending content.
Colloquially: “a bot worked out that some words were ‘bad’ and took down everything containing them.”
Between this and the recent deployments of age verification in the USA and in the UK, I am wondering if Bluesky’s circumstances are so desperate to not run foul of Government attention / regulation / fines, that it’s taken to proactive and deep compliance in the knowledge that “the nerds will be okay, they can just run up another PDS or implement client haxx and thereby circumvent the controls.“
That’s not a healthy way to approach bad regulation.
[*] translated to confuse image text classifiers, just in case they’re still being zealous