2025-12-21 21:04:16
“How pleasingly ironic it would be for the British Broadcasting Corporation to remind Americans what the First Amendment is all about.”
Via:
2025-12-21 02:22:32
For many people, AI (which is scary and bad) using water (which we need to live) is deeply “offensive,” Andy said — especially when they don’t realize that digital goods (like the internet) have long had a physical (and water) cost, Andy said.
But people who care about the environment — Andy himself identifies as an environmentalist — should also care about precision, because hyperbolic reporting can mislead activists about where the problems actually are and fuel nonsensical climate policies.
https://www.piratewires.com/p/andy-masley-ai-water-crisis-isnt-real
2025-12-20 02:37:48
Écoutez et répétez: it is not an obligation for websites wholly based in other countries to implement censorship on behalf of the British Government. The UK Government may one-sidedly impose ‘obligations’ as it likes, but that’s mere hot air:
“any attempt by foreign entities to censor or penalize constitutionally protected speech of United States persons shall be opposed.”
2025-12-19 18:27:54
“The Internet is for Porn” – not exactly, but free & easy exchange of Porn was a driving force behind the growth of: FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, web hosting, load balancers, application switches, streaming video, bulk file transfer sites, BitTorrent, CDNs, life blogging, micropayments… and so it will go with local LLMs.
No wonder so many people want to ban the technology, even though it’s basically a glorified zip file of the entire internet and everything in it.
Of course…
Of course the Chinese LLMs will not come uncensored but instead with censorship that their government appreciate, as opposed to censorship that our governments appreciate.
However, I strongly believe that we are moving to a world of local models running everywhere, just in the same way that RSA encryption was considered computationally too expensive to practically deploy on small end devices back in 1991, and now it and its successors run multiple times a millisecond on every device.
Not that people are going to be happy about this.
2025-12-19 17:00:41
https://x.com/mullvadnet/status/2001690546163593308?s=20
Quote; it’s essentially an adverb but it’s still informative:
The European Commission lost the Chat Control 2.0 battle over access to end-to-end encrypted data. By the summer 2026, they will be back with their next attempt: Going Dark. This time some EU member states want to include VPN services.
The Going Dark initiative, or ProtectEU as the Commission now calls it, wants to “enable law enforcement authorities to access encrypted data in a lawful manner”. This is a Chat Control 3.0 attempt.
The EU Commission and several member states are also looking for new rules on data retention. In a new ”Presidency outcome paper”, the member states discuss metadata retention: which websites you visit, and who is communicating with whom, when and how often. The ambition is “to have the broadest possible scope of application” and this time some member states also want the proposal to include VPN services.
Mullvad has spent the last three years opposing Chat Control 2.0 – even though the law would have affected our business positively.
We will continue to fight Going Dark with full force, regardless of whether VPNs are included or not. If VPNs are included, and if Going Dark becomes law, we will never spy on our customers no matter what.
2025-12-19 14:19:18
My understanding from friends is One Login is a glorified bastion host that reliant services & parties are obligated to blindly trust, making it a giant SPOF; that alone would be terrifying at national scale, but then: this:
“Whistleblowers have told ITV News that One Login is failing to meet the mandatory, minimum government cybersecurity standards, ‘Secure by Design’ and the ‘Cyber Assessment Framework’”