Sam

The digital disconnect: taking digital social policy seriously - Power to Change In our next essay, Rachel Coldicutt explores the urgent need for a community-centred approach to technology policy in the UK. From WhatsApp-powered communit ...

Anyway, it just so happens I wrote something about the need for digital social policy the other day www.powertochange.org.uk/evidence-and... better support for parents and children feels like a great place to start

Unreal disconnect between the kind of economy the UK thinks it has versus the kind of economy it actually has

See e.g. all the talk of fishing during the Brexit years, the denigration and ongoing destruction of the higher education sector, etc

OfS rebalances the free speech/harassment see-saw on antisemitism A probing exchange with OfS director Arif Ahmed exposes the legal and practical tensions at the heart of campus free speech guidance. Jim Dickinson looks at when happens when promises to Jewish studen...

'The impression is of a regulator telling each audience what it wants to hear by pointing at one end of the see-saw, rather than grappling with the hard edges of the case law in ways that may temper expectations rather than raise them.'
Very good piece on OfS & free speech wonkhe.com/blogs/ofs-re...

“hospital to community”

“Could” is doing a lot of work while DSIT are making user hostile decisions

bsky.app/profile/ntou...

bsky.app/profile/ntou...

On Friday my phone blew up with messages about BritCard.

I don’t think it’s a tech test. It’s a trust test.

2m+ signatures against already. If trust isn’t designed in from day one, BritCard risks repeating the same failures that killed past ID schemes.

My take medium.com/writing-by-i...

A warning message within the One Login app — stating that everything will be deleted from the app if the user logs out from one of their One Login accounts in order to log in in again with another one, breaking the government's own identity assurance principles.

GOV.UK One Login is a mess. Alongside reported security issues & missing features like delegation & support for business, it breaks the government’s identity assurance principles: it's impossible to switch easily between different One Login accounts. How did it ever pass a service assessment?

this is a broader point but something the extract below touches on is that smartphones have made "not being online" an active choice you have to make every minute of every day, and as it states it *is* a mental tax you have to pay, and I'm not sure we've reckoned with that at all

History shows that when democracies face crises, strengthening and reinvigorating democratic participation is essential to prevent democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarianism. This is not that.

tbh, if you've got any material size of investments in the UK and you haven't threatened the government that you will withdraw them unless you're given a subsidy, can you really look your shareholders in the eye and say you did your best?

Reboot your watch? Happened to me in an earlier update and a price was chewing battery until a reboot

Even now, Nick Clegg offers too little too late Earlier this year a former staffer of what was then Facebook, now Meta, wrote a gossipy tell-all memoir about her time in the office there. It was a huge hit – especially after the company’s chief glo...

Reviewed Nick Clegg’s book. Didn’t think much of it, except for:
“Nadine Dorries, while secretary of state for the department overseeing the internet, ‘once called me in high dudgeon, demanding to know why I hadn’t taken down tweets … I had to explain to her that Twitter was a different company’.”

put the link in a second tweet of the thread

From things I've seen recently, I think many people would benefit from reading this. It's short, and it's free.

👉 rdcu.be/dbFbB

someone should write that note. Freeman keeps complaining that all the investment goes into Cambridge, and he might care about Reform (or it's a gift for when he joins them)...

Have any of the local train groups put a list of those together for Vallance? Ignore dft and pitch it as a science innovation thing? But GY probably too far to commute

Maybe afterwards we will remember for the next century… but…

Tommy Robinson’s march was a drunken, coked-up mess He claimed the world was watching, but most of London barely noticed - and much of what was on view was appalling

“Bustling crowds wait for overwhelmingly non-white shop staff to serve up their alcohol, never wondering about who would turn up to scrub Westminster station clean of their urine at the end of the day.” www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-t...

That may be a perfect sentence?

It’s been 6 hours - there’s no fucking panic

What happened to those guys who went out to remove graffiti as a community service? Or were their high viz jackets just a political stunt?

2h ago 10.29 BS1 Police are not using live facial recognition in its policing of the 'Unite the Kingdom' demonstration which is beginning on London's south bank, reports the PA news agency. It said: • We're using a mobile CCTV van to help monitor the build up of crowds. Officers have been asked if it's using 'live facial recognition' - we can confirm it is not. The live facial recognition technology - which captures people's faces in real-time CCTV cameras - was used in the policing operation at the Notting Hill carnival.

Ah yes if black and brown people throw a party we need to scan their faces.

White supremacists organising a hate march do not need to worry about their privacy. The police have them covered.

This btw is also why everyone arguing for digital id in this country is either naive or dangerous.

An assassin writes Bella Ciao in the same breath as a Notices Your Bulge meme on his bullets. One of the government responses is a practicing Hindu asserting that the fundamentalist Christian victim will join him in a Norse pagan afterlife. Welcome to the epistemic collapse.

👀

ab even more powerful image now?

I was initially surprised that Rayner hadn’t sought more advice on her tax liability. And £40k is a lot of money. But @timleunig.bsky.social makes a good point here, especially as a court told her to set up the trust.

Goes to show quick takes can be bad ones.

open.substack.com/pub/timleuni...

the Institute?

Fixing HO problems needs justice experience, and a bunch of the intl messes are HO caused…