Enemies everywhere
Lovers of liberty are surrounded by enemies. Paul Marks posted a video by tech and social commentary YouTuber Computing Forever explaining possible consequences of yesterday’s votes on articles 11 and...
View ArticleWhat do people think of Open Rights Group?
The White Paper expresses a clear desire for tech companies to “design in safety”. As the process of consultation now begins, we call on DCMS to “design in fundamental rights”. Freedom of expression is...
View ArticleSamizdata quote of the day
Canute’s point wasn’t that he could control the tides and waves. Rather, that fawning courtiers needed to learn the lesson of the limit to State competence. A thousand years later we’re still waiting...
View ArticleSamizdata quote of the day
To a great extent, the threat to free speech posed by iPlod will depend upon how its employees exercise their discretion and whether they’re politically neutral. Unfortunately, it will be staffed by...
View ArticleI seek a software or sporting metaphor to explain why a second referendum...
When discussing Brexit I am often asked, not always disingenuously, “What is so wrong with having another referendum? Is not another vote more democratic by definition? Now that we know more, isn’t a...
View ArticleSamizdata quote of the day
BBC should be abolished, not because of blatant bias but because the whole idea of a state broadcaster was a terrible idea on day 1 of the BBC’s existence. And in the internet age, it is now an...
View ArticlePutting names to the faces of a parcel of rogues
A month late, I found this video by “Change Britain”, a pressure group founded by leaders of the Vote Leave campaign: Brexit Betrayal montage: “2 minutes of broken promises!” The montage consists of...
View ArticleSamizdata quote of the day
In the internet age, for a political party to get their message out, talking to the Old Media is an option, not a necessity. – Perry de Havilland
View ArticleKatie Jones is the face of the future
“That LinkedIn connection could be a spy using a fake, AI-generated face”, warns Raphael Satter of the Associated Press in the Tampa Bay Times. LONDON — Katie Jones sure seemed plugged into the...
View ArticleWhy is Russia trying to influence other countries’ elections by means of...
“Nick Clegg denies misuse of Facebook influenced Brexit vote”, reports the Guardian. Umm, okay. A lot of people are saying “Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?”. Sir Nick Clegg, for those readers who...
View ArticleHow to hand in your resignation
I thought about putting this in The Great Realignment, but the link to politics is slight. This is more about fantasy fulfilment. Have you ever dreamed of telling a bad boss what you think of him? Have...
View ArticlePlanned obsolescence
Leaping from link to link like a young gazelle – part of the appeal of the internet is that it is the only place where I get to do the gazella arabica thing nowadays – I came across an interesting...
View ArticleStackoverflow and pronouns
Stackoverflow is a website so focused on getting good technical answers to good technical questions that thank-you notes are removed because they are noise. And yet somehow there is now a 17 point FAQ...
View ArticleMatt Ridley speaks with authority to Julia Hartley-Brewer
Yes, I’ve been watching and listening to this conversation, between climate anti-alarmist and all-round rational optimist Matt Ridley and broadcaster Julia Hartley-Brewer. If you like hearing things...
View ArticleThe lost chord, correction, TUC booklet
Seated one day at the organ I was weary and ill at ease And my fingers wandered idly Over the noisy keys I know not what I was playing Or what I was dreaming then; But I struck one chord of music Like...
View ArticleCrowd-funded cyber-policing
In what I like to describe as anarcho-capitalism in action, the pseudonymous Jim Browning is investigating, reverse-hacking, harassing and disrupting people engaging in tech-support fraud. His work is...
View ArticleAnother reason why the Internet is so useful
As it appears to be fashionable these days for those in some quarters to denounce modern technology such as social media (ironically, usually doing so via social media, or the internet), let’s take...
View ArticleName me one good thing about Brexit…
Start with this: Article 13: UK will not implement EU copyright law Universities and Science Minister Chris Skidmore has said that the UK will not implement the EU Copyright Directive after the country...
View ArticleWhat, if anything, should we be doing about Huawei?
There is a kerfuffle here in the UK over 5G. I can’t in all honesty say that I have the slightest idea what 5G is but I surmise that it is one better than 4G. The issue is around whether the Chinese...
View ArticleI just did a bit of copying and pasting
Of this: Born in New York City in 1945, Tesler eventually studied computer science at Stanford University before working in the school’s artificial intelligence research lab in the late 1960s. He moved...
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