2026-01-23 22:23:51
This is the future of which GCHQ wants for all global encryption:
“Microsoft confirmed to Forbes that it does provide BitLocker recovery keys if it receives a valid legal order. “While key recovery offers convenience, it also carries a risk of unwanted access, so Microsoft believes customers are in the best position to decide… how to manage their keys,” said Microsoft spokesperson Charles Chamberlayne.”
2026-01-22 21:33:58
Online Censorship, Age Verification & Social Media Bans are misconceived, illiberal, mass-harmful little rules that we must teach our teens to circumvent, so they have context, understanding & wherewithal to break big totalitarian ones they’ll eventually encounter. Of course they will need to learn & understand what the rules were trying to achieve as well – to understand intention as well as the failures of implementation – but that’s a given.
Great little video on TikTok, attached:
Like for instance: if you’re going to ban kids from social media then what are you going to give them to fill the void? Community social clubs? Investment in extra education? Social care? Therapeutic help and access to mentorship? Sports clubs?
Anything?
2026-01-22 15:57:12
…instead you will be standing in Tesco, Morrison’s or Sainsbury’s, pulling faces at the camera or hunting for passwords whilst your screaming toddler is attacking the chocolate bars and running off into the crowd.
“But if it saves a teenager from seeing depressing Instagram posts it’s a worthy price to pay” — no it’s not, especially when the damage is spread thinly over the whole British population.
2026-01-22 06:08:02
It’s amazing how most of the illiberal stuff coming out of the House Of Lords nowadays comes from ostensible Liberal Democrats & their (ahem) peers:
Online safety campaigner Baroness Kidron, another peer supporting the ban, said she worried the government’s consultation would become the “playground of the tech lobbyist”. “The government has shown it will only act under pressure, not principle,” she added.
2026-01-15 13:44:15
This will be a growth activity, especially with AI-integrated browsers and other user-empowerment tooling, so long as civil society and their pet regulators do not kill such technologies before they are born, because of dual-use arguments / permitting “excessively powerful” analysis of text:
I can speak from personal experience: having invented the modern password cracker and — in the early days at least — released a few high-speed cryptographic libraries, I have repeatedly heard people tell me that they wished they could have prevented me from doing that… although now more than 30 years later, we take these tools for granted, as part of the security landscape.
I had a discussion similar to this on Bluesky earlier today: Imagine that somebody embeds a locally-running LLM/AI into a web browser, so that it can read web pages for you and summarise them for you, perhaps translates them for you, or provides some sort of assistive mechanism for visual impairment. Using that web browser you visit the Facebook group which includes “dating reviews” of various named individuals and how they performed as a “date”. Then you tell your web browser to:
“Click through the pages of this Facebook group for me; aggregate all of the names and the sentiment and opinions which relate to them, and correlate and reduce the names to remove duplicates. Produce a CSV of all names and map the associated sentiment for each name, normalised in the range 1 to 3.”
Presto, you have star ratings of single men (or: women, nb, whatever) in New York; tell me that’s not going to terrify somebody?
Yep, they are going to be scared but it needs to happen.
2026-01-14 21:04:16
We shouldn’t have to be reading this written by somebody from Reform, published in the Telegraph. Where are the LibDems defending privacy?
“Who could object to stopping these most heinous crimes? But make no mistake: this is “client-side scanning”. Messages will be analysed on your device, before encryption, meaning true end-to-end privacy evaporates. Every text, photo, or voice note you send could be inspected in real time – not just flagged ones, but all of them.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/13/starmer-hell-bent-destroying-your-right-to-private-life/ archived at https://archive.ph/2026.01.14-084717/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/13/starmer-hell-bent-destroying-your-right-to-private-life/