michael veale

nice, my brand new fibre ISP in London, g.network, decided to start IPv4 only. very annoying for someone who runs a lot from home but i’m stuck with them as the fastest available infra

(here’s me ranting more on the topic: discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10..., and Seda Gürses talk ‘Becoming the Bouncer’ from 58 mins here www.youtube.com/live/BG3QG7Y...)

EFF made this dumb argument before with Google Privacy Sandbox.

No, microtargeting is not fine just because it’s confidential. Confidential manipulation is not okay. Confidentiality is not a get out jail free card. It’s a nice to have but we must not miss the point about what is at stake.

This is a stupid argument.

ZKPs aren’t bad because they’re not confidential enough.

Worry instead because people can ask you to prove anything, at any time, to provision or deny you access to services, while saying ‘privacy is solved’! Rules, not disclosure, are the risk.

Do better @eff.org.

written by a journalist called Chip Cutter which is a pretty bold name

Google for example regularly use the strategy of ‘we contractually ban X (eg fingerprinting, bid request storage) from our adtech partners and do more audits than anyone else’, and it typically works for them with regulators. Hence, interesting.

I understand v well (& have been to court over) the orchestrating role of adtech giants. Legally though, internet intermediaries are historically almost never considered ‘aware’ when they are just surrounded by illegality; that illegality has to be specific. Hence this is interesting.

I’m not defending Meta here ethically, I’m saying why the case is legally interesting. I understood developers do not just embed the tracker but code custom events (eg R_SELECT_LAST_PERIOD_DATE). Case implies Meta has a duty to monitor for contractual violations else it becomes liable for data usage

(it’s also very interesting because it’s trying to use laws for bugging and wiretapping etc but they’re specific CA laws I don’t know about so I can’t really speak to that)

This is an interesting case insofar as it appears to be making the embedded tracker liable for choices at least partly decided by the app developer (custom health trigger events despite certain prohibitions in the FB SDK contract, and app’s lack of suitable consent gathering pertaining to Meta).

training data

new blog idea: web 1.0 is going just great

looks like we’re heading to superintelligence through RAGs then, thankfully the web is still working well

Hybrid | CLP - Bureaucracy and Distrust: The Civil Service in the Constitution This lecture will be delivered by Dr Ben Yong, as part of the Current Legal Problems Lecture Series 2025-26

Announcing an upcoming event as part of our Current Legal Problems lecture series for 2025-26:

📢 Bureaucracy and Distrust: The Civil Service in the Constitution
🗣️ Dr Ben Yong @bymyong.bsky.social
📅 16 October 2025 | 6pm
🏛️ UCL Laws + online
🔗 Book now: tinyurl.com/yz5bnrey

fyi we at laws showed ucl how to do custom faculty usernames at @laws.ucl.ac.uk so ISD should know now!

glad that my faculty has both an account and a verified username @laws.ucl.ac.uk (:

succession trails off into endless corporate governance arcana… feels like two sharp seasons could have been excellent

Small states and minority languages are an example of where trust and safety functions, and CEOs, generally do not care, and regularly fail. A clear market failure where regulators do need to force large firms’ hands to do at least what they do freely in lucrative markets.

Congress has not appropriated the substantial funds this would require nor does this have the legally required approval of the Commission of Fine Arts (which must approve architectural changes to the White House among other properties).

The Kremlin's Most Devious Hacking Group Is Using Russian ISPs to Plant Spyware | WIRED The FSB cyberespionage group known as Turla seems to have used its control of Russia's network infrastructure to meddle with web traffic and trick diplomats into infecting their computers.

oh so that’s what happened to phorm

www.wired.com/story/russia...

Oh so that’s what happened to Phorm

It’s not in this article but UK investigatory powers law recently fairly quietly changed to allow UK intelligence agencies to train or adapt such models more easily using datasets they no longer need permissions for.

‘Britain’s most tattooed man’ claims he is unable to watch p*rn as 'new age check system mistakes his ink for a mask' | Need To Know Britain’s most tattooed man says new UK age checks block him from p*rn sites as facial recognition mistakes his tattoos for a mask, calling the tech discriminatory.

‘Britain’s most tattooed man’ claims he is unable to watch porn as ‘new age check system mistakes his ink for a mask’

https://needtoknow.co.uk/2025/07/30/britains-most-tattooed-man-claims-he-is-unable-to-watch-prn-as-new-age-check-system-mistakes-his-ink-for-a-mask/

Antitrust scholars have called thie *raising rivals' costs* in literature over the last 50 years or so en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising...

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry. Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto. It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

uk has 'category 1' but more things in the OSA apply to the tiny weeny players than they do in the DSA

The Online Safety Act assumes that all tech, social networks, etc, are run by big tech, raking in profit from illegal advertising. Community-run and funded networks/sites — real non-Big Tech alternatives — are left in the dirt. I have never seen OSA proponents consider their needs or their value.

Aldo Zilli Collaboration Cost - a Freedom of Information request to University of Warwick Please provide the total travel cost, consumables costs, and any honorarium or fee, paid to Aldo Zilli and the people travelling with him to film the following video A Venetian Delight with chef Aldo...

that's another FOI filed
www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/aldo...

Exeter, Galway, Queen’s, Birmingham, Warwick, Kent, and UKRI’s KTN…

If anyone wondered where the same obsession with ‘modernising’ the crest, speaking in abstract nouns, and questionable colour schemes for these originated:

video ‘a venentian delight with chef aldo zilli’ with picture of sardines, 335 views, subtitle on video ‘thank you to the university of warwick for bringing me here’.

i’m sure the trip was worth the 335 views none of which were just internal