Paul Oldham 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 💛 🇺🇦

Image: three figures in protective suits watch from behind a screen as a child approaches a door-like mechanical structure in which stands a man. Between them is an amorphous glowing shape. Caption: Scientists at the institute of halloween studies have succeeded in creating "The treak": a quantum state that is simultaneously trick and treat. It is stable for a millionth of a second before decaying into a half-hearted prank and a mediocre candy bar.

A halloween cartoon for @newscientist.com

It's done! #chatcontrol is officially of the table after the danish EU council presidency drops it for good. It's a small but important victory!

Thanks again to @chatcontrol for coordinating grassroots interventions, and everyone else, especially on the fediverse, for joining efforts to […]

If you want an example of poor web site design compare the old Met Office forecast page (shown in the link below) with the new one offered by a link the page.

The new one:
- displays *considerably* less data in the viewport so more scrolling (only 3 hours when viewing from a phone)
- has […]

[rape, paedophilia]

Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel talking about Virginia Giuffre and Prince Andrew. It's a compelling, if harrowing, watch and I did consider stopping at some points as it is upsetting and you will, I suspect, come away angry. I did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvXTM3pn-LA

A four-panel xkcd comic shows two stick figure characters: one standing and one sitting at a computer. Panel 1: The standing character points to a small box on the floor with a cord coming from it. Standing character: “What’s this?” Sitting character: “The cloud.” Panel 2: The standing character looks confused. Standing character: “Huh? I always thought ‘the cloud’ was a huge, amorphous network of servers somewhere.” Sitting character replies: “Yeah, but everyone buys server time from everyone else. In the end, they’re all getting it here.” Panel 3: The standing character asks: “How? You’re on a cable modem.” The sitting character responds: “There’s a lot of caching.” The standing character, now looking at the long cord stretched across the room, asks: “Should the cord be stretched across the room like this?” Sitting character answers: “Of course. It has to reach the server, and the server is over there.” Panel 4: The cord stretches across the floor between them. Standing character: “What if someone trips on it?” Sitting character: “Who would want to do that? It sounds unpleasant.” Standing character: “Uh. Sometimes people do stuff by accident.” Sitting character: “I don’t think I know anybody like that.” (alt text by ChatGPT)

#XKCD readers know what happened to #AWS ...

https://xkcd.com/908/

Half the frigging Interweb is down at the moment because of an #AWS outage. I'm seeing it on reddit and substack but BBC has a long list.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c5y8k7k6v1rt

In today's installment of #AIslop we have someone asking who is on a committee. I've already searched for this data, without success. A colleague announces they've found out who it is, attaching a screenshot from Google AI search.

When we finally get positive confirmation turns out that […]

I've been thinking about ad blockers. In theory web site owners shouldn't really care if we're using them. They can still say to their clients "we included your advert in N pages we served so pay us Y". That our blockers chose not to render them shouldn't matter.

I can only think that […]

Chapter end page from "The Invisible Library". It ends "The we can discuss matters --' And at that moment the alligators burst into the room."

How to end a chapter ... 😀

Well, that cheered me up. Bumped into elderly neighbour while both walking our dogs. Her TV wasn't connecting to her WiFi, did I know anyone who could help? Of course I did. Popped around when we both got back and either re-booting her repeater or entering the password correctly fixed it […]

A priest, a pastor, and a rabbit entered a blood donation clinic.

The nurse asked the rabbit: “What’s your blood type?”

The rabbit replied: “I'm probably a Type O.”

#DadJoke

Post on reddit /r/LegalAdviceUK: # Discord reached out to me on 20th September 2025 to confirm my personal data had been stolen. They lied about not saving my age-verification image. I had to verify my age for Discord a couple of months back. I did so using my Drivers Licence. Before I did this I double checked with Discord whether they would immediately delete this image after my identity was verified. I was linked to a page which states, "Discord do not permanently store personal identity documents or video selfies. Images are deleted directly after your age group is confirmed.” Well, Io and behold, my age-verification photo and my driver's licence are now part of 1.5 TB leak involving almost 2.2 million images which SHOULD have been "deleted directly after my age group was confirmed" months ago. My driver's licence has my full name, address and date of birth on it. If this information leaks in connection with my Discord ID then I am in trouble. For context, I am a woman. If this leaks then this WILL put me at risk from creeps on Discord. What are the next steps I should take? Go and see a solicitor? Go and speak to the Information Commissioner's Office? In terms of personal safety I can't move house because I'm fixed in a 5 year mortgage right now. I will likely be moving at the soonest opportunity though.

The Online Safety Act, the gift that keeps on giving.

#OSA

So revised score is now:

Bluesky (183 followers): 3 boosts, 2 likes

Facebook (204 followers): 19 shares, 7 reactions

Mastodon (87 followers): 76 boosts, 38 likes

So Facebook did have a bit of a late rally but Mastodon continues to surge ahead. As for Bluesky where I have twice the followers […]

Now we have the Online Safety Act keeping us "safe" and here's one way it's doing so.

Discord is doing age verification and one way is by uploading an image of your government ID when appealing an age determination.

And yes, of course that data has now been compromised by an “unauthorized […]

Earlier, from my councillor accounts, I posted about Digital ID. It's been interesting to see the engagement I've had:

Bluesky (183 followers): 2 boosts, 2 likes

Facebook (204 followers): 7 shares, 5 reactions

Mastodon (86 followers): 48 boosts, 23 likes

So a clear win for Mastodon on […]

Do not introduce Digital ID cards We demand that the UK Government immediately commits to not introducing a digital ID cards. There are reports that this is being looked at. » More details Sign this petition 2,612,799 signatures Show on a map 100,000

"My numbers are tanking, my Party is in open rebellion, I really need a good policy that the public can get behind me on....."

#KeirStarmer #Starmer #DigitalID #UKPOL #UKPOLITICS #Labour

Trimly beard young man wearing a beige string vest with sleeves down to mid bicep and cropped at mid six-pack. It seems to have a transparent plastic collar too ... which is hard to describe. He's also wearing tight black shorts ...

Amazon have this new thing "haul" which is beta and is clearly trying to compete with Temu. This is what they offered me today ...

Ok. They’ve pissed me off.

I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards:

1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.

Petition: Do not introduce Digital ID cards. Now approaching 1,000,000 signatures. Have you signed it yet?
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/730194

Defend VPNs from government bans!

Use a VPN? Worried they're going to get banned? There's petition you can sign as part of the Global VPN Day of Action

https://www.defendvpns.com/

"Enter characters 4, 9, and 20 of your password"

Oh FFS!

So I can't fill using the password manager. Instead I have to open it, find the entry, reveal the password, and then painfully count to the right characters.

Think it's time to move credit card company.

(2/2)

I've just had my credit card forceably moved from Sainsburys Bank to Nat West. Nat West asked me to select a four digit code and a twenty characters password.

All routine stuff so stored the password in my password manager (using a password it offered me so a random string of characters) and […]

Digital station sign says: "Please note, some lifts at Camden Road are currently out of service. Please speak to a member of staff if Formed of 5 coaches."

Are you formed of five coaches? If so then speak to staff ...

#trains

Blog: About a childhood of reading

I've just finished reading 'Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading' by Lucy Mangan. In it she details her life in books from the earliest days of being read to, then learning to read, and her progress through many of the classic children's stories that we've […]

I assumed the first one was phishing and down to their mailing list leaking but it turns out that the first was from Zarah Sultana's faction and the second from Jeremy Corbyn's.

So that partnership is going well then ...

2/2

So this was amusing. I have a sock puppet email address signed up to the Your Party mailing list, just to keep an eye on what they're doing.

At 11:11 I got an email with the subject of "Your Party membership is here - join now"

At 14:48 I got an email with the subject of "URGENT EMAIL TO ALL […]

Two dogs, both sandy brown and white, sit on a bench with me standing behind smiling. It's been snowing and there's still some snow on the ground and the bench. Jack is looking at the camera, Jessie is looking off in the distance.

Also in the batch was this photo of brother and sister Jack and Jessie, the golden retrieverX collies who took over the role of house dog from Jake.

Sadly they're no longer with us either but both had good lives.

#DogsOfMastodon

Black and white collie with one brown eye and one blue eye stands looking at the camera. It's snowing and there's snow covered bushes behind and big flakes still falling.

I was reminded of some very old photos I'd uploaded to Photobox and among them was this photo of our first pure #BorderCollie Jake. RIP my friend.

#DogsOfMastodon

Watching 'The Big Bang Theory" tonight and Sheldon said he'd bought a Microsoft Zune.

It didn't ring any bells at all so I looked it up and it was an unsuccessful rival to Apple's iPod from 2006-12 which looks like it wasn't widely sold outside America.

The Wikipedia page records that "On […]