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Alec is a technologist, writer & security consultant who has worked in host and network security for more than 30 years, with 25 of those in industry.
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Has Britain Gone Too Far With Its Digital Controls? | The New York Times

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

Massive 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…”

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.

https://www.gadgetreview.com/massive-attack-turns-concert-into-facial-recognition-surveillance-experiment

MI5 concedes it ‘unlawfully’ obtained data from former BBC journalist | …a mere 16+ years to obtain this concession

2025-09-16 18:46:39

Note that elsewhere:

  1. Discussions of online content takedowns are expected to conclude within 24 hours
  2. Governments declare that they can be trusted with backdoors into private communication

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/15/mi5-concedes-it-unlawfully-obtained-data-from-former-bbc-journalist

Geedge & MESA Leak: Analyzing the Great Firewall’s Largest Document Leak

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:

https://gfw.report/blog/geedge_and_mesa_leak/en/

Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape | BogdanTheGeek’s Blog

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.

I strongly suspect that Bluesky “content moderation” and “safety” is following the same trajectory that Facebook did, and that “distribution” excuses it…

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:


"rest in piss"-gate has turned into a moderation nightmare for bluesky, which nonetheless refuses to explain its underlying rationale even as (or perhaps because) it seems to be changing in real time. after my own suspension, I spoke to dozens of people who got in trouble for using the same phrase

Nathan Grayson (@nathangrayson.bsky.social) 2025-09-12T18:44:19.886Z

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