Heather Burns

Well heatherburns.tech/2026/02/20/t...

I THINK OF YOU (DYING) | Family-Proof Your Family | Life360 YouTube video by Life360

I got this deranged ad on YouTube for a parental stalkerware app, and some days it really is disheartening that this is the normalised nexus of anxiety and surveillance that we're up against. Also the mother needs therapy and the daughter needs to grow a backbone.
www.youtube.com/watch?si=naZ...

Everything going on right now makes more sense if you realize everybody in power right now sees their job as making TV, social media, and short form video for a Nielsen demographic of one.

Three very old books on technology and law

Unexpected side quest resulting from @rcalo.bsky.social’s superb Law and Technology book: raiding the Strathclyde stacks for the 1960s-1980s origin texts. Not sure where I’m going with this, but it’s good fun.

Come on Ross, what could possibly go wrong with several plane loads full of drunken Scots being surrounded by ICEstapo enforcers who have daily quotas

Screenshot of amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill with a new clause beginning: "AI search services safety: offence (1) It is an offence for the provider of a generative AI search service to allow the creation, viewing, listening to, sharing, broadcasting or storing, using that service, of content— (a) that would be illegal content, as defined by section 59 of the Online Safety Act 2023 ('illegal content' etc), (b) that would be content that is harmful to children, as defined by section 60 of that Act ('content that is harmful to children'), if the user is a child," and with a definition "(2) For the purposes of this section, a generative AI search service means a deep or large language model able to generate text, images and other content based on the data on which they were trained and user prompts."

Baroness Kidron has tabled an amendment that would criminalise most, if not all, general-purpose LLMs bills.parliament.uk/publications...

The offence says "generative AI search service" but there's no search or service element in the definition – just models.

#CPBill #genAI #censorship #techpolicy

Sam Altman picked a hell of a day to basically urge the world to trust the morality and legal restraint of the Department of Defense

Empty offices and child ‘directors’: How to augment reality and avoid tax in the process We’ve got to the bottom of that giant banner on the M8 office block

Howling out loud at this masterclass in Glaswegian investigative journalism, which started with a weird banner and ended up with an office full of 11 year olds ratting on their boss’s tax avoidance scheme.

www.glasgowbell.co.uk/humanitarian...

Another source added: “A ban is the simplest way to achieve what we want. Everything else is asking social media companies to redesign the way the platforms work and be open and transparent about it, which seems more complicated.”

A government source said what now???

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

159 votes to Sir Oink-A-Lot

Let’s celebrate the real success here, which of course was the Loonies. 🐷

Not that I pointed that out as early as 2019, when the Tatler set decided they were going to be the “guardian angels making the internet a safer place for children” (as their promotional headline in The Times put it) and lobby for content laws that were ripe for fascist exploitation from day one.

Surgeon General Nominee Calls Contraception "Disrespect of Life" 2.26.26

A depressing part of my MPhil is monitoring the legal processes (including KOSA, derived from UK OSA, also age/id verification and “age appropriate” codes) which will be leveraged to ban all content and discussions of contraception, which MAGA views as abortion.
jessica.substack.com/p/casey-mean...

It me

Banning children from VPNs and social media will erode adults' privacy Legislation working its way through the UK parliament would ban children from using social media and virtual private networks – but the proposals would endanger online privacy and may not make childre...

Yours truly in @newscientist.com talking about the exact same things I was talking to journalists about five years ago #Sisyphus
www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

Honestly, how would anyone know the difference

oh this is fun

I have a page in my MPhil research on active proposals in the US to encourage more teenage pregnancies and also levy the death penalty onto teenage girls who have had abortions as a result of incest, and that it what it is like to be a teenager now

No. It really hasn’t.
bsky.app/profile/heat...

I knew someone who had been a forum admin there and she emerged looking like someone who’d just done several years of trench warfare

Policy Book on Information Resilience: Lessons from Ukraine | IMS Media leaders from Ukraine and Europe have developed ways to strengthen the information resilience of democracies.

The Policy Book on Information Resilience: Lessons and Recommendations from Ukraine 2022–2025 is a practical guide prepared by leading figures in Ukraine’s media industry who participated in IMS' MERIT Forum – funded by @danishmfa.bsky.social.

Download here: www.mediasupport.org/publication/...

Tennessee Canceled A Woman’s Sterilization to “Protect Her Sacred Fertility” 2.25.26

I usually hate Handmaid's Tale comparisons, but for this I'll make an exception: A Tennessee hospital canceled a woman’s sterilization procedure to “protect her sacred fertility”

jessica.substack.com/p/tennessee-...

Apropos of nothing I have fallen in love with worldofbooks.com. I am regularly buying four gently pre-loved books for £12-£17 with free shipping, in a shopping experience with no algorithmic anything or AI slop in the results, it’s kinda lovely

If you have any public Amazon wish lists, this is pretty urgent. I just checked my Amazon dot co dot UK lists and the deadline for UK is March 25, not February.

YouTube video by Springfield Tomacco THE SPRING IN SPRINGFIELD (WHOLE SONG)

Hey, you never know, a map might have the location of a ~house of burlesque~

youtu.be/GF63MLEApE4?...

Exclusive: US orders diplomats to fight data sovereignty initiatives An internal diplomatic cable said such efforts could interfere with AI-related services.

"President Donald Trump's administration has ordered U.S. diplomats to lobby against attempts to regulate U.S. tech companies' handling of foreigners' data, saying in an internal diplomatic cable seen by Reuters that such efforts could interfere with artificial intelligence-related services."

Sliding Towards Authoritarianism? During the first year of its second term in office, the Trump administration has embraced a wide range of authoritarian tactics, policies, and actions that undermine human rights protections.

Since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has embraced a wide range of authoritarian tactics, policies, and actions that undermine human rights.

Ahead of tonight’s State of the Union address, revisit HRW’s research documenting abuses🧵⤵️

For which we all owe you sincere thanks, even if you did make me scream out loud on a bus.

Couldn’t stick each week in my ears fast enough. Go for it.

Never made it that far!

YouTube video by Apple TV For All Mankind — Season 5 Official Trailer | Apple TV

I love how the two deepest imaginings of the techbro colonisation of Mars (FAM and S11 of the Revolutions Podcast) both lead to the French Revolution in space within years. You have time to binge both.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=zojw...